Of Love and Shadows Page 10

  * * *

  Hilda entered the dining room carrying a steaming platter in her hands, and was greeted by a chorus of exclamations.

  “Mondongo!” breathed Francisco unhesitatingly, for he would recognize that aroma of tomato and bay leaf at the very bottom of the sea.

  “I hate mondongo! It tastes like an old towel!” groaned one of the children.

  Francisco broke off a piece of bread, dipped it in the flavorful gravy, and took a bite, while his mother, assisted by her daughter-in-law, served the plates. Only Francisco’s older brother Javier seemed indifferent to the excitement. He sat silent and removed, toying with a cord. Recently, the only thing that gave him any pleasure was tying knots, knots of all kinds: sailor’s, fisherman’s, and cowboy’s knots; knots for halters, fishing lines, and stirrups; knots to hold hooks, keys, and guy wires; knots he tied and untied with incomprehensible compulsiveness. At first his children had watched with fascination, but subsequently they learned to imitate him, and lost interest in the cord. They were used to seeing their father absorbed in his mania, a peaceable vice that harmed no one. The only dissent came from his wife, who complained of the roughness of his hands calloused by the accursed rope that lay coiled next to their bed every night like a domesticated snake.

  “I don’t like mondongo!” the child repeated.

  “Then have some sardines,” his grandmother suggested.

  “No! They have eyes!”

  The priest struck the table with his fist, rattling the dishes. No one moved.

  “That’s enough! Eat what you’re served,” José exclaimed. “Do you know how many people have nothing to eat all day but a cup of tea and a piece of bread? Where I live, children are fainting from hunger in the schoolroom!”

  Hilda touched his arm in supplication, implying that if he began talking about the people going hungry in his parish, he risked ruining the family dinner, along with his father’s liver. José lowered his head, confused by his own anger. Years of experience had not quelled his fits of rage, or his obsession to see all people treated as equals. Irene broke the tension by toasting the mondongo, and everyone joined in, celebrating the aroma, the texture and taste, and, especially, its proletarian origins.

  “What a shame Neruda didn’t write an ode to mondongo,” observed Francisco.

  “But he did write one to conger chowder. Do you want to hear it?” his father offered enthusiastically. He was silenced by a chorus of boos.

  Professor Leal was no longer offended by their teasing. His sons had grown up listening to him recite poetry from memory and read the classics aloud, although only the youngest had been infected with his enthusiasm for literature. Francisco was by temperament less exuberant, however, and preferred to indulge his tastes in disciplined reading and in secretly writing poetry, leaving to his father the privilege of declaiming whenever the mood seized him. Sons and grandsons no longer listened. Only Hilda, occasionally in the intimacy of nightfall, asked him to recite. On those occasions, she put aside her knitting and gave him her complete attention; as she pondered the many years of love she had shared with this man, her face was as full of wonder as it had been at their first meeting.

  When the Civil War broke out in Spain, they had been young and in love. In spite of Professor Leal’s belief that war was obscene, he set off with the Republicans for the battlefront. His wife tied up a bundle of clothing, closed the door of her house without a backward glance, and traveled from village to village, following his movements. They wanted to be together at the hour they were surprised by victory, defeat, or death. Two autumns later, their first son was born in an improvised shelter amid the ruins of a convent. His father did not hold him in his arms until three weeks afterward. In December of the same year, for Christmas, a bomb destroyed the place where Hilda and the baby were temporarily housed. She heard the deafening roar that preceded the catastrophe, and as the roof collapsed, crushing her, she managed to tighten her hold on the baby in her arms and bend over like a closed book; with that act she had saved her baby’s life. They rescued the child unharmed, but Hilda suffered a serious skull fracture and a broken arm. For some time Leal lost track of them, but after searching everywhere he found her in a field hospital where she lay without even knowing her name, her memory erased, void of past or future, and with her child suckling at her breast. When the war was over, Professor Leal decided that they must try to reach France. He was refused permission to remove the injured woman from the refuge where she was recuperating, and he had to steal her away by night. He laid her on two large planks mounted on four wheels, placed the baby in her good arm, secured them with a blanket, and dragged them along the roads of sorrow leading to exile. He crossed the frontier with a wife who did not recognize him and whose only sign of reason was singing to her infant. He went without money, he had no friend, he limped because of a bullet wound in his thigh, but he never faltered in his effort to save his loved ones. His only personal belonging was an old slide rule, inherited from his father, that he had used in reconstructing buildings and plotting trenches in the battlefield. On the other side of the border, French police awaited the endless caravan of the defeated. They took the men aside and placed them under arrest. Professor Leal fought like a wild man, trying to explain his predicament; and he had to be dragged forcibly to the detention area.

  A French postman found the makeshift wagon on the road. He approached it suspiciously after hearing a baby’s cry; he pulled back the blanket, and saw a young woman with a bandaged head, one arm in a sling, and the other cradling an infant crying from the cold. He took the pair to his house and, with his wife, began the difficult task of caring for them. Through an organization of English Quakers dedicated to charitable works and to helping the refugees, he located Leal on a beach enclosed by high wire fences, where the men passed the day in idleness, eyes scanning the horizon, and where they slept at night buried in the sand, waiting for better times. Leal was nearly mad with anxiety, frantic about Hilda and his son. When he heard from the postman’s lips that they were safe, he bowed his head and, for the first time in his adult life, wept and wept. The Frenchman waited, looking out to sea, unable to find a word or gesture to offer in consolation. As he said goodbye to Leal, the postman noticed that he was trembling; he removed his overcoat and, flushing, handed it to Leal. Thus began a friendship that was to last half a century. He helped the Spaniard obtain a passport, resolve his legal situation, and win his release from the refugee camp. Meanwhile his wife tended to Hilda’s every need. The Frenchwoman was a practical person, and she combated Hilda’s amnesia with a method of her own invention. Since she knew no Spanish, she used a dictionary to identify objects and emotions, going over them one by one. Sitting at Hilda’s side for hours, this extraordinary woman patiently worked through the dictionary from A to Z, repeating each word until comprehension gleamed in the sick woman’s eyes. Little by little, Hilda recovered her memory. The first face she glimpsed through the mist was that of her husband, then she remembered the name of their son, and finally, in a dizzying torrent, the events of the past came flooding to her mind—beauty, courage, love, laughter. Perhaps in that instant Hilda made up her mind to be selective in her memories, to lighten the ballast in the new journey they were undertaking, knowing intuitively that she must devote all her strength toward building their destiny as emigrants. It was better to erase the pain of nostalgia, homeland, family, and friends left behind, never to speak of them again. She seemed to have forgotten her stone house, and in the years that followed, it was pointless for her husband even to mention it. Hilda gave the impression of having suppressed that memory completely, along with many other recollections. Yet she had never been more lucid in assessing the present and planning the future, and faced her new life with assurance and enthusiasm.

  On the day that the Leals set sail for the other side of the globe, the postman and his wife, in their best Sunday clothes, came to the dock to tell them goodbye. Their
small figures were the last thing the Leals saw as the ship set out to open sea. Until the coast of Europe vanished in the distance, all the voyagers stood at the rail singing songs of the Spanish Republic in voices hoarse from weeping; all, that is, except Hilda, standing confidently in the bow, the baby in her arms, gazing toward the future.

  The Leals wandered the lonely roads of exile; they adjusted to poverty; they looked for work, made friends, and settled into their life on the other side of the world, overcoming the initial paralysis of the uprooted. They found a new strength born of suffering and necessity. To sustain them in their difficulties, they counted on a love that withstood all tests, a love greater than most people possessed. Forty years later, they still maintained their correspondence with the French postman and his wife, because each of the four was blessed with a generous heart and a clear mind.

  That night at the table, the Professor was euphoric. The presence of Irene Beltrán stirred his eloquence. The girl listened to his speech on solidarity with the fascination of a child at a puppet show; his exalted orations were light-years away from her world. As he extolled the superior qualities of humankind—ignoring thousands of years of history demonstrating the contrary, and convinced that one generation is all that is necessary to create a superior conscience and a better society if the essential conditions are fulfilled—Irene, entranced, let her food grow cold on her plate. The Professor argued that power is perverse, and that it always falls into the hands of the dregs of humanity, because in the scramble only the most violent and bloodthirsty triumph. It therefore becomes necessary to combat any form of government, and to allow men their freedom under an egalitarian system.

  “Governments are intrinsically corrupt, and must be eliminated. They guarantee the freedom of the rich, based on property, and they enslave the rest in misery,” he pontificated before an astounded Irene.

  “For someone who fled one dictatorship and lives in another, hatred of authority can be a serious handicap,” mused José, slightly bored after years of having listened to the same flaming oratory.

  Over the years, his sons had stopped taking Professor Leal seriously, and worried only about preventing him from committing some truly rash act. In their childhood they had often had to help him, but as soon as they became adults, they had left him to his speeches and had never again run the printing press in the kitchen or set foot in a political meeting. Following the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, even their father abandoned the Party, nearly crushed by disillusion. For days he had suffered from an alarming depression, but soon his confidence in the destiny of humankind rekindled his spirit, helping him overcome his disenchantment and cope with the doubts that were tormenting him. Without renouncing his ideals of justice and equality, he came to the conclusion that man’s first right is that of freedom; he removed the portraits of Lenin and Marx from the living room and installed one of Mikhail Bakunin. From today on, he announced, I am an anarchist. None of his sons knew what that meant, and for a while they believed it was a religious sect, or perhaps a group of lunatics. That ideology, out of style and blown away by the winds of the postwar era, left them unconcerned. They accused their father of being the only anarchist in the country, and they may have been right. After the military coup, to protect him from his own excesses, Francisco removed an essential part from the printing press. This was necessary if they were to prevent him from going to any lengths to print his opinions and distribute them throughout the city, as he had always done. Later, José was able to convince his father that it would be best to get rid of the useless relic, and he took the machine to his barrio where, once repaired, cleaned, and oiled, it was used to print assignments for the school during the day and bulletins of solidarity by night. Happily, this precaution saved Professor Leal when the political police raided the neighborhood, house by house. It would have been difficult to explain the presence of a printing press in their kitchen. The sons tried to reason with their father, explaining that his solitary and pointless actions brought more harm than good to the cause of democracy; but with the least relaxation of their attention, he returned to the danger, driven by his burning ideals.

  “Be careful, Papa,” they begged when they learned of the slogans attacking the military Junta he had thrown from the balconies of the Post Office Building.

  “I’m too old to go around with my tail tucked between my legs,” the Professor replied impassively.

  “If anything happens to you, I will stick my head in the oven and die of asphyxiation,” Hilda warned him, without raising her voice or lowering her soup spoon. Her husband suspected she would do exactly as she said, and was motivated to be a little more cautious—but never cautious enough.

  As for Hilda, she used a unique method to resist the dictatorship. Her opposition was concentrated specifically against the General, who, according to her, was possessed by Satan and was the very incarnation of evil. She thought it possible to defeat him through systematic prayer and faith in her cause. Toward this goal, she attended mystic evening sessions twice a week. There she met with a constantly growing group of pious souls who were steadfast in their intent to put an end to the tyranny. It was a national movement, a chain of prayer. On the appointed day, at the same hour, the faithful gathered in every city in the land, in isolated towns, in villages bypassed by progress, in prisons, and even on ships on the high seas, to concentrate a tremendous spiritual effort. Energy thus channeled would result in the deafening collapse of the General and his followers. José disagreed with that dangerous and theologically unsound madness, but Francisco did not discount the possibility that this most original system might have positive results; after all, the power of suggestion works marvels, and if the General learned of the formidable weapon directed toward his elimination, he might suffer a heart attack and pass on to a worse life. Francisco compared his mother’s activity to the strange events in the house of the Ranquileos, and concluded that in times of repression inventive solutions emerge to combat the toughest problems.

  “Forget your prayers, Hilda, and devote yourself to voodoo—it has a more scientific basis,” joked Professor Leal.

  Her family teased her so unmercifully that Hilda began going to her meetings in tennis shoes and slacks, hiding her prayer book under her sweater. She told them she was going out to jog in the park, and continued serenely in her laborious task of toppling authority with a rosary.

  At the Leals’ table, Irene clung to her host’s every word, fascinated by the sonorous Spanish accent that many years in America had not softened. As she witnessed his passionate gestures, his shining eyes, the fervor of his convictions, she felt she had been transported into the last century, to a dark cellar where anarchists were preparing a rudimentary bomb to place in the way of a royal carriage. Meanwhile, Francisco and José were discussing the case of the raped, mute child, while Hilda and her daughter-in-law occupied themselves with the meal and the children. Javier ate very little, and took no part in the conversation. He had been out of work for more than a year, and those months had changed him; he had become a somber prisoner of his own anguish. The family had become accustomed to his long silences, to the stubble of beard, to his eyes empty of curiosity; they had stopped harrying him with signs of sympathy and concern that he, in turn, rejected. Only Hilda persisted in her solicitude, every so often asking, What are you thinking, son?

  Finally, Francisco was able to interrupt his father’s monologue to tell the family about the scene at Los Riscos when Evangelina had shaken the officer like a feather duster. Hilda’s opinion was that to do something like that you had to have God’s protection—or the Devil’s, but Professor Leal maintained that the girl was merely the abnormal product of a society gone mad: poverty, the concept of sin, repressed sexual desire, and isolation had provoked her sickness. Irene laughed, convinced that the only one who had correctly diagnosed the case was Mamita Encarnación, and that the most practical solution would be to find a mate for the girl and let them
loose in the bushes like rabbits. José agreed, and when the children began to ask about rabbits, Hilda turned everyone’s attention to dessert, the first apricots of the season, boasting that no country in the world grew such savory fruit. This was the only form of nationalism the Leals tolerated, and the Professor lost no time in making that fact clear.

  “People must live in a united world where all man’s races, tongues, customs, and dreams are one. Nationalism is an insult to reason. It doesn’t benefit people in any way. It merely serves as an excuse for committing the most outrageous abuses.”

  “But what does that have to do with these apricots?” asked Irene, completely lost by the direction of the conversation.

  Everyone laughed. Any subject could lead to an ideological manifesto, but fortunately the Leals had not lost their ability to laugh at themselves. After dessert, they enjoyed an aromatic coffee Irene had brought. At the end of the meal, she reminded Francisco of the hog-butchering to be held at the Ranquileos’ the following day. She told them all goodbye, leaving in her wake a good humor that enveloped everyone except the taciturn Javier, so sunk in his depression and knots that he had not even noticed her existence.

  “Marry her, Francisco.”

  “She already has a fiancé, Mama.”

  “I’m sure you’re much better,” Hilda replied, incapable of objective judgments where her sons were concerned.

  * * *

  When he and Captain Gustavo Morante met, Francisco was already so much in love with Irene that he scarcely tried to conceal his dislike. In those days not even he recognized his intense feelings as love, and when he thought of Irene it was in terms of pure friendship. From their first meeting, he and Morante politely detested each other—one feeling the intellectual’s scorn for the military, the other the reverse sentiment. The officer acknowledged Francisco with a brief nod, not offering his hand, and Francisco noted the haughty tone that immediately established distance between them but mellowed when he spoke to his fiancée. There was no other woman for the Captain. Long ago, he had marked her for his companion, investing her with every virtue. To his mind, his brief affairs, the adventures of a day—inevitable during the long periods of separation when his profession kept him away from home—had no meaning. No other relationship left a residue in his spirit, or a recollection in his flesh. He had loved Irene forever, even when they were children playing in their grandparents’ house, awakening together to the first restiveness of puberty. Francisco Leal trembled when he thought of the games the children had played.