The Stories of Eva Luna Read online

  Praise for The Stories of Eva Luna

  “Allende is a real talent, an amazingly prolific one. In her stories there are palpable life and death risks, the risks of passionate love, the risks of passionate belief, of convictions and honor.”

  —Leigh Allison Wilson, The Washington Post

  “Instantly seductive, richly sensual, and unabashedly romantic.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “The fabulous scale of narrative, the characters as darkly pungent as coffee tinged with blood, charge her stories with a physicality and power that will leave the readers checking for bruises on their thighs.”

  —Sarah Sheard, The Toronto Star

  “The stories are like opulent parables . . . I, for one, sense I will be going back to this book again and again just to be with them.”

  —Gillian Steward, The Calgary Herald

  “An extraordinary fictional potion.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Full of grace and passion . . . love and revenge . . . enchanting. . . . One could go one reading her stories forever.”

  —Orlando Sentinel

  “Isabel Allende always revives one’s faith in the intoxicating power of sheer old-fashioned storytelling.”

  —The San Diego Union

  “What is most admirable about this collection is Allende’s ability to portray a world in which the ordinary and the miraculous, the natural and the supernatural, the political and the particular not only co-exist but actually affect one another.”

  —Jane Urquhart, Quill & Quire

  “They [these stories] partake of the literary and psychic disjunction of a whole generation of Chilean and Latin American exiles.”

  —Alexander Coleman, Latin American Literature and Arts

  “[Allende] gives us a full-flavored taste of life in Latin America. . . . Her themes touch on the universal experience.”

  —Vince Aleccia, Southern Oregon Currents

  “Allende is a skilled storyteller who works like a miniaturist. She captures whole lives with the briefest of lines. In her world, the scales of destiny achieve a rough balance.”

  —Barbara Holliday, Detroit Free Press

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  For William Gordon, for times shared

  “The King ordered the Grand Vizier to bring him a virgin every night, and when the night was over, he ordered her to be killed. And thus it had happened for three years, and in all the city there was no damsel left to withstand the assaults of this rider. But the vizier had a daughter of great beauty, named Scheherazade . . . and she was very eloquent, and pleased all who heard her.”

  —A Thousand and One Tales of the Arabian Nights

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Two Words

  Wicked Girl

  Clarisa

  Toad’s Mouth

  The Gold of Tomás Vargas

  If You Touched My Heart

  Gift for a Sweetheart

  Tosca

  Walimai

  Ester Lucero

  Simple María

  Our Secret

  The Little Heidelberg

  The Judge’s Wife

  The Road North

  The Schoolteacher’s Guest

  The Proper Respect

  Interminable Life

  A Discreet Miracle

  Revenge

  Letters of Betrayed Love

  Phantom Palace

  And of Clay Are We Created

  The Japanese Lover Excerpt

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  You untied your sash, kicked off your sandals, tossed your full skirt into the corner—it was cotton, if I remember—and loosened the clasp that held your hair in a ponytail. You were shivering, and laughing. We were too close to see one another, each absorbed in our urgent rite, enveloped in our shared warmth and scent. You opened to me, my hands on your twisting waist, your hands impatient. You pressed against me, you explored me, you scaled me, you fastened me with your invincible legs, you said a thousand times, come, your lips on mine. In the final instant we glimpsed absolute solitude, each lost in a blazing chasm, but soon we returned from the far side of that fire to find ourselves embraced amid a riot of pillows beneath white mosquito netting. I brushed your hair back to look into your eyes. Sometimes you sat beside me, your legs pulled up to your chin and your silk shawl over one shoulder in the silence of the night that had barely begun. That is how I remember you, in stillness.

  You think in words; for you, language is an inexhaustible thread you weave as if life were created as you tell it. I think in the frozen images of a photograph. Not an image on a plate, but one traced by a fine pen, a small and perfect memory with the soft volumes and warm colors of a Renaissance painting, like an intention captured on grainy paper or cloth. It is a prophetic moment; it is our entire existence, all we have lived and have yet to live, all times in one time, without beginning or end. From an indefinite distance I am looking at that picture, which includes me. I am spectator and protagonist. I am in shadow, veiled by the fog of a translucent curtain. I know I am myself, but I am also this person observing from outside. I know what the man on the rumpled bed is feeling, in a room with dark beams arching toward a cathedral ceiling, a scene that resembles a fragment from some ancient ceremony. I am there with you but also here, alone, in a different frame of consciousness. In the painting, the couple is resting after making love; their skin gleams moistly. The man’s eyes are closed; one hand is on his chest and the other on her thigh, in intimate complicity. That vision is recurrent and immutable; nothing changes: always the same peaceful smile on the man’s face, always the woman’s languor, the same folds in the sheets, the same dark corners of the room, always the lamplight strikes her breasts and cheekbones at the same angle, and always the silk shawl and the dark hair fall with the same delicacy.

  Every time I think of you, that is how I see you, how I see us, frozen for all time on that canvas, immune to the fading of memory. I spend immeasurable moments imagining myself in that scene, until I feel I am entering the space of the photograph and am no longer the man who observes but the man lying beside the woman. Then the quiet symmetry of the picture is broken and I hear voices very close to my ear.

  “Tell me a story,” I say to you.

  “What about?”

  “Tell me a story you have never told anyone before. Make it up for me.”

  Rolf Carlé

  TWO WORDS

  She went by the name of Belisa Crepusculario, not because she had been baptized with that name or given it by her mother, but because she herself had searched until she found the poetry of “beauty” and “twilight” and cloaked herself in it. She made her living selling words. She journeyed through the country from the high cold mountains to the burning coasts, stopping at fairs and in markets where she set up four poles covered by a canvas awning under which she took refuge from the sun and rain to minister to her customers. She did not have to peddle her merchandise because from having wandered far and near, everyone knew who she was. Some people waited for her from one year to the next, and when she appeared in the village with her bundle beneath her arm, they would form a line in front of her stal
l. Her prices were fair. For five centavos she delivered verses from memory; for seven she improved the quality of dreams; for nine she wrote love letters; for twelve she invented insults for irreconcilable enemies. She also sold stories, not fantasies but long, true stories she recited at one telling, never skipping a word. This is how she carried news from one town to another. People paid her to add a line or two: our son was born; so-and-so died; our children got married; the crops burned in the field. Wherever she went a small crowd gathered around to listen as she began to speak, and that was how they learned about each others’ doings, about distant relatives, about what was going on in the civil war. To anyone who paid her fifty centavos in trade, she gave the gift of a secret word to drive away melancholy. It was not the same word for everyone, naturally, because that would have been collective deceit. Each person received his or her own word, with the assurance that no one else would use it that way in this universe or the Beyond.

  Belisa Crepusculario had been born into a family so poor they did not even have names to give their children. She came into the world and grew up in an inhospitable land where some years the rains became avalanches of water that bore everything away before them and others when not a drop fell from the sky and the sun swelled to fill the horizon and the world became a desert. Until she was twelve, Belisa had no occupation or virtue other than having withstood hunger and the exhaustion of centuries. During one interminable drought, it fell to her to bury four younger brothers and sisters; when she realized that her turn was next, she decided to set out across the plains in the direction of the sea, in hopes that she might trick death along the way. The land was eroded, split with deep cracks, strewn with rocks, fossils of trees and thorny bushes, and skeletons of animals bleached by the sun. From time to time she ran into families who, like her, were heading south, following the mirage of water. Some had begun the march carrying their belongings on their back or in small carts, but they could barely move their own bones, and after a while they had to abandon their possessions. They dragged themselves along painfully, their skin turned to lizard hide and their eyes burned by the reverberating glare. Belisa greeted them with a wave as she passed, but she did not stop, because she had no strength to waste in acts of compassion. Many people fell by the wayside, but she was so stubborn that she survived to cross through that hell and at long last reach the first trickles of water, fine, almost invisible threads that fed spindly vegetation and farther down widened into small streams and marshes.

  Belisa Crepusculario saved her life and in the process accidentally discovered writing. In a village near the coast, the wind blew a page of newspaper at her feet. She picked up the brittle yellow paper and stood a long while looking at it, unable to determine its purpose, until curiosity overcame her shyness. She walked over to a man who was washing his horse in the muddy pool where she had quenched her thirst.

  “What is this?” she asked.

  “The sports page of the newspaper,” the man replied, concealing his surprise at her ignorance.

  The answer astounded the girl, but she did not want to seem rude, so she merely inquired about the significance of the fly tracks scattered across the page.

  “Those are words, child. Here it says that Fulgencio Barba knocked out El Negro Tiznao in the third round.”

  That was the day Belisa Crepusculario found out that words make their way in the world without a master, and that anyone with a little cleverness can appropriate them and do business with them. She made a quick assessment of her situation and concluded that aside from becoming a prostitute or working as a servant in the kitchens of the rich there were few occupations she was qualified for. It seemed to her that selling words would be an honorable alternative. From that moment on, she worked at that profession, and was never tempted by any other. At the beginning, she offered her merchandise unaware that words could be written outside of newspapers. When she learned otherwise, she calculated the infinite possibilities of her trade and with her savings paid a priest twenty pesos to teach her to read and write; with her three remaining coins she bought a dictionary. She poured over it from A to Z and then threw it into the sea, because it was not her intention to defraud her customers with packaged words.

  * * *

  One August morning several years later, Belisa Crepusculario was sitting in her tent in the middle of a plaza, surrounded by the uproar of market day, selling legal arguments to an old man who had been trying for sixteen years to get his pension. Suddenly she heard yelling and thudding hoofbeats. She looked up from her writing and saw, first, a cloud of dust, and then a band of horsemen come galloping into the plaza. They were the Colonel’s men, sent under orders of El Mulato, a giant known throughout the land for the speed of his knife and his loyalty to his chief. Both the Colonel and El Mulato had spent their lives fighting in the civil war, and their names were ineradicably linked to devastation and calamity. The rebels swept into town like a stampeding herd, wrapped in noise, bathed in sweat, and leaving a hurricane of fear in their trail. Chickens took wing, dogs ran for their lives, women and children scurried out of sight, until the only living soul left in the market was Belisa Crepusculario. She had never seen El Mulato and was surprised to see him walking toward her.

  “I’m looking for you,” he shouted, pointing his coiled whip at her; even before the words were out, two men rushed her—knocking over her canopy and shattering her inkwell—bound her hand and foot, and threw her like a sea bag across the rump of El Mulato’s mount. Then they thundered off toward the hills.

  Hours later, just as Belisa Crepusculario was near death, her heart ground to sand by the pounding of the horse, they stopped, and four strong hands set her down. She tried to stand on her feet and hold her head high, but her strength failed her and she slumped to the ground, sinking into a confused dream. She awakened several hours later to the murmur of night in the camp, but before she had time to sort out the sounds, she opened her eyes and found herself staring into the impatient glare of El Mulato, kneeling beside her.

  “Well, woman, at last you’ve come to,” he said. To speed her to her senses, he tipped his canteen and offered her a sip of liquor laced with gunpowder.

  She demanded to know the reason for such rough treatment, and El Mulato explained that the Colonel needed her services. He allowed her to splash water on her face, and then led her to the far end of the camp where the most feared man in all the land was lazing in a hammock strung between two trees. She could not see his face, because he lay in the deceptive shadow of the leaves and the indelible shadow of all his years as a bandit, but she imagined from the way his gigantic aide addressed him with such humility that he must have a very menacing expression. She was surprised by the Colonel’s voice, as soft and well-modulated as a professor’s.

  “Are you the woman who sells words?” he asked.

  “At your service,” she stammered, peering into the dark and trying to see him better.

  The Colonel stood up, and turned straight toward her. She saw dark skin and the eyes of a ferocious puma, and she knew immediately that she was standing before the loneliest man in the world.

  “I want to be President,” he announced.

  The Colonel was weary of riding across that godforsaken land, waging useless wars and suffering defeats that no subterfuge could transform into victories. For years he had been sleeping in the open air, bitten by mosquitoes, eating iguanas and snake soup, but those minor inconveniences were not why he wanted to change his destiny. What truly troubled him was the terror he saw in people’s eyes. He longed to ride into a town beneath a triumphal arch with bright flags and flowers everywhere; he wanted to be cheered, and be given newly laid eggs and freshly baked bread. Men fled at the sight of him, children trembled, and women miscarried from fright; he had had enough, and so he had decided to become President. El Mulato had suggested that they ride to the capital, gallop up to the Palace, and take over the government, the way they had taken so m
any other things without anyone’s permission. The Colonel, however, did not want to be just another tyrant; there had been enough of those before him and, besides, if he did that, he would never win people’s hearts. It was his aspiration to win the popular vote in the December elections.

  “To do that, I have to talk like a candidate. Can you sell me the words for a speech?” the Colonel asked Belisa Crepusculario.

  She had accepted many assignments, but none like this. She did not dare refuse, fearing that El Mulato would shoot her between the eyes, or worse still, that the Colonel would burst into tears. There was more to it than that, however; she felt the urge to help him because she felt a throbbing warmth beneath her skin, a powerful desire to touch that man, to fondle him, to clasp him in her arms.

  All night and a good part of the following day, Belisa Crepusculario searched her repertory for words adequate for a presidential speech, closely watched by El Mulato, who could not take his eyes from her firm wanderer’s legs and virginal breasts. She discarded harsh, cold words, words that were too flowery, words worn from abuse, words that offered improbable promises, untruthful and confusing words, until all she had left were words sure to touch the minds of men and women’s intuition. Calling upon the knowledge she had purchased from the priest for twenty pesos, she wrote the speech on a sheet of paper and then signaled El Mulato to untie the rope that bound her ankles to a tree. He led her once more to the Colonel, and again she felt the throbbing anxiety that had seized her when she first saw him. She handed him the paper and waited while he looked at it, holding it gingerly between thumbs and fingertips.

  “What the shit does this say,” he asked finally.

  “Don’t you know how to read?”

  “War’s what I know,” he replied.

  She read the speech aloud. She read it three times, so her client could engrave it on his memory. When she finished, she saw the emotion in the faces of the soldiers who had gathered round to listen, and saw that the Colonel’s eyes glittered with enthusiasm, convinced that with those words the presidential chair would be his.