Eva Luna (4 page)

I was brought up on the theory that all vices issue from idleness, an idea implanted by the Little Sisters of Charity and cultivated by the learned doctor with his despotic discipline. I had no conventional toys, although the truth was that everything in the house served me in my games. During the day, there was no time for rest; idle hands were considered a source of shame. Beside my mother I scrubbed the wood floors, hung clothes out to dry, chopped vegetables, and at the time of siesta tried to knit and embroider—but I do not remember those tasks as being oppressive. It was like playing house. The Professor's sinister experiments did not disturb me either; my mother explained that the head-thumping and the mosquito-bite treatments—fortunately, infrequent—were not indications of her employer's cruelty, but the most
rigorous scientific therapy. With her confident manner of handling the embalmed bodies like relatives down on their luck, my mother nipped in the bud any blossoming of fear, and never allowed the other servants to frighten me with their macabre ideas. I think she must have tried to keep me away from the laboratory. In fact, I almost never saw the mummies; I simply knew they were there on the other side of the door. Those poor people are very fragile, Eva, she used to tell me. I don't want you to go into that room. Just a little push and you might break one of their bones, and then the Professor would be very angry. For my peace of mind she gave a name to each body and invented a past for every one, transforming them into friendly spirits like elves and fairies.

We did not often leave the house. One of the rare occasions we did was to watch a procession during the drought, an occasion when even atheists were prepared to pray, because it was a community event more than an act of faith. I remember hearing people say that not a drop of rain had fallen in the country for three years; the earth had split open in thirsty cracks, all the vegetation had died; animals had perished with their muzzles buried in the dust; and, in exchange for water, people who lived in the plains trudged to the coast to sell themselves into slavery. In view of this national disaster, the Bishop had decided to carry the image of the Nazarene through the streets and implore the Almighty to bring an end to this punishment, and as it was the last hope, all of us came—rich and poor, young and old, believers and agnostics. Professor Jones sputtered with rage when he learned of it—Barbarians! Indians! Black savages!—but he could not prevent his servants from dressing in their best clothes and going off to see the procession. The multitudes, with the Nazarene in the lead, set out from the Cathedral
but did not get even as far as the Public Utility Company before they were overtaken by a violent cloudburst. Forty-eight hours later, the city had become a lake; storm sewers were clogged, roads inundated, residences flooded. In the country, houses were carried off by the downpour, and in one town on the coast it rained fish. A miracle, a miracle! the Bishop clamored. And we joined in the chorus, unaware that the procession had been organized after a meteorologist had forecast typhoons and torrential rains throughout the Caribbean—as Jones proclaimed from his wheelchair: Superstitious, ignorant, illiterate fools! the poor man howled. But no one listened. That miracle accomplished what neither the Mission priests nor the Little Sisters of Charity had been able to achieve: my mother accepted God, because now she visualized him seated on his celestial throne gently mocking mankind, and to her this god was very different from the awesome patriarch of religious books. Perhaps one manifestation of his sense of humor was to keep us in a state of confusion, never revealing his plans and proposals to us. But every time we remembered the miracle of the rain, we would die laughing.

The world was bounded by the iron railings of the garden. Within them, time was ruled by caprice; in half an hour I could make six trips around the globe, and a moonbeam in the patio would fill my thoughts for a week. Light and shadow created fundamental changes in the nature of objects: books, quiet during the day, opened by night so their characters could come out and wander through the rooms and live their adventures; the mummies, so humble and discreet when the morning sunlight poured through the windows, at twilight became stones lurking in the shadows, and in the blackness grew to the size of giants. Space expanded
and contracted according to my will: the cubby beneath the stairs contained an entire planetary system, but the sky seen through the attic skylight was nothing more than a pale circle of glass. One word from me and
abracadabra!
reality was transformed.

I grew up free and secure in that mansion at the foot of the hill. I had no contact with any other children, nor was I accustomed to strangers, except a man in a black suit and hat, a Protestant with a Bible beneath his arm who reduced Professor Jones's last years to ashes. I feared him much more than I did the Professor.

TWO

E
ight years before I was born—on the same day El Benefactor died in his bed like any innocent grandfather—in a village in the north of Austria, a boy named Rolf came into the world. He was the last son of Lukas Carlé, the most feared of all the upper-school masters. Corporal punishment was a part of schooling; spare the rod and spoil the child was sustained by both popular wisdom and pedagogical theory, and so no parent in his right mind would have protested its application. But when Carlé broke a boy's hands, the school administration forbade him to use the ferule, because it was clear that once he began he lost all self-control in a frenzy of lust. To get even, the students would follow his son Jochen and, if they could catch him, beat him up. The boy grew up fleeing bands of boys, denying his surname, hiding as if he were the hangman's son.

Lukas Carlé had imposed in his home the same rule of fear he maintained at school. His marriage was one of convenience: romantic love had no place in his plans; he considered romance barely tolerable in opera or novels, and totally inappropriate in everyday life. He and his wife had been married without any chance to get to know one another, and from her wedding night on she despised him. To Lukas Carlé, his wife was an inferior being, closer to animal than to man, God's only intelligent creation. Although in theory a woman was a creature deserving of compassion, in prac
tice his wife drove him out of his mind. When he arrived in that village after long weeks of wandering—he had been uprooted from his birthplace by the First World War—he was about twenty-five years old; he had a teaching diploma and money enough to survive for one week. First he looked for work, and then a wife. He had chosen her because he liked the sudden gleam of terror he saw in her eyes, and he approved of her broad hips, which he considered necessary for begetting male offspring and for doing heavy housework. He was also influenced in his decision by two hectares of land, a half-dozen head of cattle, and a small income the girl had inherited from her father; all of which he immediately claimed as legitimate wealth.

Lukas Carlé liked women's shoes with very high heels, and best of all he liked red patent leather. When he traveled to the city, he paid a prostitute to strut around naked, clad only in that uncomfortable footwear, while he, fully dressed, wearing even his overcoat and hat, and ensconced in an armchair like a feted dignitary, tingled with indescribable pleasure at the sight of her buttocks—as ample as possible, white, with dimples—jiggling with every step. He did not touch her, of course. He never touched such women, because he was fanatic about hygiene. Since he did not have the means to indulge in such luxuries as often as he would like, he bought some gay high-heeled French ankle-high boots and hid them in the most inaccessible part of the wardrobe. From time to time he locked his children in their room, turned up the record player to full volume, and summoned his wife. She had learned to gauge her husband's changes of mood and could anticipate—even before he himself knew—when he was feeling the urge to humiliate her. She would begin to tremble
with dread, and dishes would fall from her hands and shatter on the floor.

Carlé did not tolerate any noise in his house—I have enough to put up with from my students, he would say. His children learned not to cry or laugh in his presence, to steal about like shadows and talk in whispers, and they developed such skill for passing unnoticed that sometimes their mother thought she could see through them, and was terrified that they might become transparent. The schoolmaster was convinced that he had been dealt a bad hand by the laws of genetics. His children were a total failure. Jochen was slow and clumsy, the worst possible student; he dozed in class, wet his bed, and was not suited for any of the plans his father had made for him. About Katharina, better not even to speak. The girl was an imbecile. Of one thing he was sure: there were no congenital flaws in his bloodline, so it was not he who was responsible for that poor sickly spawn. In fact, how could he be sure she was really his daughter? He would not put his neck on the block for anyone's fidelity, least of all his own wife's. Fortunately Katharina had been born with a heart defect and the doctor had predicted that she would not live very long. Much better that way.

Considering the relative lack of success of his first two children, Lukas Carlé was not overjoyed when he learned of his wife's third pregnancy, but when a large rosy boy was born, with wide-open gray eyes and strong hands, he felt greatly cheered. Maybe this was the son and heir he had always desired: a true Carlé. He would have to keep the child's mother from spoiling him; nothing so dangerous as a woman for corrupting a fine male seedling. Don't dress him in wool; he needs to get used to the cold so he will be strong. Leave him in the dark; that way he will never be afraid of it. Don't
pick him up; it doesn't matter if he cries till he turns purple, it's good for his lungs. Those were his orders, but behind his back the mother wrapped her son warmly, gave him double rations of milk, cuddled him, and sang him cradle songs. This regimen of adding and removing clothing, of striking and cosseting him without apparent logic, of closing him in a dark wardrobe and then consoling him with kisses would have driven most children to madness. But Rolf Carlé was fortunate: he was not only born with the mental fortitude to bear what would have broken most others, but the Second World War erupted and his father enlisted in the Army, thus freeing him from his father's presence. The war was the happiest time of his childhood.

While in South America embalmed bodies were accumulating in the house of Professor Jones and a copulation inspired by a serpent's bite engendered a little girl whose mother would call her Eva so she would love life, also in Europe reality took on abnormal dimensions. The war sank the world into confusion and fear. By the time the little girl was walking, clinging to her mother's skirts, peace was being signed on the other side of the Atlantic on a continent in ruins. Meanwhile, on this side of the ocean, few lost any sleep over that distant violence. They were sufficiently occupied with violence of their own.

*  *  *

As he grew up, Rolf Carlé proved to be observant, proud, and tenacious, with a certain inclination toward romanticism that he looked on as a sign of weakness. In that age of glorification of war, he and his friends played at bloodshed in the trenches and shooting planes from the sky; but secretly he was moved by the buds of each spring, the flowers of sum
mer, the gold of autumn, and the melancholy whiteness of winter. In each of the seasons, he walked through the woods collecting leaves and insects to study under his magnifying glass. He tore pages from his notebooks and wrote poems, which he then hid in the hollows of tree trunks or beneath stones with the inadmissible hope that someone might find them. He never spoke of this to anyone.

He was ten years old the afternoon they took him to bury the dead. He was happy that day, because his brother Jochen had trapped a hare and the house was filled with the aroma of the meat, marinated in vinegar and rosemary, stewing over a slow fire. He had not smelled that smell in a very long time, and his mouth was watering with such anticipated pleasure that only his strict upbringing prevented him from lifting the lid and sticking a spoon in the pot. It was also baking day. He loved seeing his mother bent over the enormous kitchen table, elbow-deep in dough, moving to the measured rhythm of making bread. She kneaded the ingredients, formed long rolls of dough, divided them, and from each piece produced a round loaf. Before, in times of plenty, she had put aside a bit of the dough, added milk, eggs, and cinnamon, and made buns that she stored in a tin—one for each child for each day of the week. Now the flour was mixed with bran, and the result was dark and harsh, like bread made of sawdust.

The day had begun with a commotion in the street—movement of the occupation troops, shouted orders—but no one was overly startled; their fear had been exhausted in the rout of defeat, and they had little left to expend in premonitions of bad omens. Following the armistice, the Russians had moved into the village. Rumors of brutality preceded the soldiers of the Red Army, and the terrified populace awaited a bloodbath. They are beasts, people said; they slash open the
bellies of pregnant women and throw the fetuses to the dogs; they run their bayonets through old people; they stick dynamite up men's asses and blow them to bits; they rape, burn, destroy. However, none of that happened. Searching for an explanation, the mayor concluded that they were indeed fortunate; the soldiers who occupied their town had not come from the most war-ravaged part of the Soviet Union, and therefore they had less stored-up bitterness and unfulfilled revenge. They had rumbled into town, heavy vehicles pulling all their matériel, under the command of a young officer with Asian features; they had requisitioned all the food, stowed everything they could find of value in their knapsacks, and had shot six prominent members of the community accused of collaborating. The soldiers set up camp on the edge of the village and stayed to themselves. That day, however, they had rounded up all the townspeople, mustering them over loudspeakers and going into houses to roust out the hesitant. Frau Carlé wrapped a jacket around Katharina's shoulders and hurried outside before the soldiers could come in and commandeer the hare and the week's bread. With her three children, Jochen, Katharina, and Rolf, she went to the public square. The village had survived those war years in better shape than most, in spite of the bomb that had fallen on the school one Sunday night, converting it to rubble and scattering splinters of desks and blackboards far and wide. Part of the medieval cobblestones were missing, because various troops had used the stones to construct barricades. The enemy had appropriated the clock in the mayor's office, the church organ, and the last wine harvest, the only local treasures. Buildings were all in need of paint, and here and there some were bullet-pocked, but the village had not lost the charm acquired over centuries of existence.

The people congregated in the square, circled by enemy soldiers; the Soviet commandant, in his tattered uniform, worn-out boots, and several days' growth of beard, walked past the group, closely observing each one. No one looked him in the eye; they stood with heads lowered, shoulders bowed, expectant; only Katharina fixed her meek eyes on the officer, and stuck a finger in her nose.

“Is she retarded?” asked the officer, pointing to the girl.

“She was born that way,” Frau Carlé replied.

“Then she doesn't have to go. Leave her here.”

“She can't stay here by herself, please. . . . Let me take her with us.”

“As you like.”

Under a pale spring sun they stood and waited for more than two hours, at gunpoint, the elderly leaning on the strongest, the children asleep on the ground, the youngest in their parents' arms, until finally the order was given, and they set off, following behind the commandant's jeep, under the watchful eye of soldiers who tried to hurry the slow-moving line headed by the mayor and the school principal, the only authorities surviving from the catastrophe of the last years. They walked in silence, uneasy, turning to look back at the roofs of their houses still visible among the hills, asking each other where they were being taken—until it became obvious that they were being led in the direction of the prison camp, and their hearts closed like fists.

Rolf knew the way, because he had often walked there when he went with Jochen to hunt snakes, trap foxes, or gather wood. Sometimes the brothers had sat beneath the trees, looking in the direction of the barbed-wire fence hidden by foliage; they were so far away they could not see clearly, and had to be satisfied with listening to the sirens
and sniffing the air. When the wind was blowing, a peculiar odor drifted into their houses, but no one seemed to notice; certainly it was never mentioned. This was the first time that Rolf Carlé, or any of the other villagers, had passed through the metal gates; they were immediately struck by the eroded soil stripped of vegetation, arid as a desert of sterile dust, far different from the soft, green-growing fields of the season. The column filed along a long path, crossed through various barriers of rolled barbed wire, walked beneath guard towers and emplacements that had only recently housed machine guns, and finally reached a large open area. On one side were windowless sheds, on the other a brick building with large chimneys, and, at the rear, latrines and a gallows. Spring had halted at the gates of the prison: here everything was gray, shrouded in the fog of an eternal winter. The villagers came to a stop before the barracks; they huddled together, touching each other for courage, oppressed by that stillness, that immense silence, that sky turned to ash. The commandant gave an order and the soldiers herded them like cattle in the direction of the main building. And then everyone could see. There were dozens of them piled on the ground, one on top of another, a tangled, dismembered mass, a mountain of pale firewood. At first they could not believe they were human bodies, they looked like the marionettes of some macabre theater, but the Russians poked the villagers with their weapons, prodded them with their rifle butts, and they had to move closer, to smell, to look, to allow those bony, eyeless faces to be burned into their memories. Each of them heard the thudding of his own heart, and no one spoke, because there was nothing to say. For long moments they stood motionless, until the commandant picked up a shovel and handed it to the mayor. The soldiers distributed other tools.

“Begin digging,” said the officer without raising his voice, almost in a whisper.

They sent Katharina and other small children to sit beneath the gallows while the rest worked. Rolf stayed with Jochen. The ground was hard; his hands and fingernails were grimy from the flinty soil, but he did not stop; stooped over, his hair fallen over his face, he was shaken by a shame he would never forget, a shame that like a relentless nightmare would pursue him throughout his lifetime. He never looked up, not once. All he heard around him was the sound of metal striking rock, harsh breathing, the sobs of some women.