Eva Luna Read online

  Once Consuelo succeeded in overcoming her initial fright, and understood that her employer’s slaughterhouse apron and graveyard smell were inconsequential details compared to the fact that he was a person who was easy to get along with, vulnerable, at times even sympathetic, she felt quite at ease in his house; next to the convent, it seemed like paradise. No one in this house rose at dawn to say the rosary in behalf of all humankind, nor did anyone have to kneel on a fistful of peas to atone with her own suffering for the sins of others. The Professor’s house did have one thing in common with the crumbling Convent of the Little Sisters of Charity: discreet ghosts also roamed here, perceived by everyone except Professor Jones, who for want of any scientific basis insisted on denying they were there. Although Consuelo was assigned the most onerous chores, she still found time for her daydreams, and here no one bothered her or interpreted her silences as wondrous gifts. She was strong, she never complained, and she obeyed without asking questions, as the nuns had taught her. Besides carrying out the garbage, washing and ironing the clothes, cleaning the water closets, and being responsible every day for seeing that the iceboxes had ice, which was transported on the backs of burros and packed in heavy salt, she helped Professor Jones prepare the large apothecary jars of his formula; she readied the corpses, removed the dust and nits from all their joints; she dressed them, combed their hair, and tinted their cheeks with rouge. The learned doctor was pleased with his servant. Until she had come, he had worked alone in absolute secrecy, but with time he became accustomed to Consuelo’s presence and allowed her to help him in his laboratory, for he sensed the trustworthiness of this silent woman. He was so sure of her always being there when he needed her that he would take off his jacket and hat and, without a backward glance, drop them for her to catch before they fell to the floor, and as she never failed he came to have a blind faith in her. She was a kind of extension of the inventor. Consuelo, therefore, became the only other person in possession of the miraculous formula, but she did not benefit in any way from that knowledge, since the thought of betraying her employer or making money from his secret never entered her mind. She detested handling the cadavers, and could not see the point in embalming them. If there was any reason to do so, she thought, nature would have foreseen it and would not allow the dead to putrefy. Nevertheless, toward the end of her life she found an explanation for the age-old desire of humans to preserve their dead when she discovered that having the bodies nearby makes them easier to remember.

  Many years went by without surprises for Consuelo. She did not notice the changes taking place around her, for she had substituted the cloister of Professor Jones’s house for that of the convent. They could have listened to news on the radio, but it was rarely turned on; her employer preferred the sound of the opera records he played on the latest Victrola. Nor were there newspapers in that house, only scientific journals, because the Professor was indifferent to events happening in the nation or the world. He was much more interested in abstract knowledge, the annals of history, or predictions concerning a hypothetical future, than the vulgar emergencies of the present. The house was a vast labyrinth of books. Volumes were stacked from floor to ceiling on every wall, dark, crackling, redolent of leather bindings, smooth to the touch, with their gold titles and translucent gilt-edged pages and delicate typography. All the works of universal learning were to be found on those shelves, arranged without apparent order—although the Professor remembered the exact location of each one. The works of Shakespeare rested alongside Das Kapital; the maxims of Confucius rubbed elbows with The Book of Sea Lions; ancient navigational maps lay beside Gothic novels and the poetry of India. Consuelo spent several hours a day dusting the books. When she finished the last bookcase, it was time to begin again with the first, but this was the best part of her duties. Gently, she picked up each one and wiped the dust from it as if caressing it; she leafed through its pages, sinking for a few minutes into its private world. She learned to recognize each one and to know its place on the shelves. She never dared ask to borrow them, so she smuggled them to her room, read them at night, and replaced them the following day.

  Consuelo did not know much about the upheavals, catastrophes, or the progress of her times, but she did learn in detail of the student unrest in the country because of what happened one day when Professor Jones was passing through the center of town and was almost killed by mounted guardias. It fell to her to place poultices on his bruises and feed him soup and beer from a baby bottle until his loosened teeth were firm again. The doctor had gone out to buy some supplies essential to his experiments, not remembering for a minute that it was Carnival, a licentious festival that each year left its residue of wounded and dead, although that year drunken quarrels passed unnoticed in the shock of other events that jolted the nation’s drowsy complacency. Professor Jones was just crossing the street when the riot broke out. In fact, the problems had begun two days earlier when the university students had elected a beauty queen in the nation’s first democratic vote. After the coronation, and the accompanying flowery speeches in which some speakers’ tongues had slipped and spoken of liberty and sovereignty, the young people had decided to march. Nothing like it had ever been seen; it was forty-eight hours before the police reacted, and they did so precisely at the moment Professor Jones was emerging from a pharmacy with his vials and powders. He saw the mounted police galloping toward him, machetes drawn, but he changed neither direction nor pace, as he was absorbed in thoughts of his chemical formulas and all that noise seemed in very bad taste. He regained consciousness on a stretcher on the way to the hospital for indigents and, holding his teeth in place to keep them from scattering in the street, managed to mumble some instructions to take him to his house. While he recovered, sunk in his pillows, the police arrested the young leaders of the uprising and threw them into a dungeon; they were not beaten, however, because among them were sons of the most prominent families. Their detention produced a wave of solidarity, and on the following day dozens of young men appeared at the jails and barracks to offer themselves as voluntary prisoners. They were locked up in order of arrival, but after a few days had to be released; there was not space enough in the cells for so many youths, and the clamor of their mothers had begun to disturb El Benefactor’s digestion.

  Months later, when Professor Jones’s teeth were again firm in his gums and he was recuperating from his psychological bruises, the students again rebelled, this time with the complicity of a few young officers. The Ministry of War crushed the insurrection in seven hours, and those who managed to save themselves left the country and remained in exile for seven years, until the death of the Leader of the Nation, who granted himself the luxury of dying peacefully in his bed and not, as his enemies had desired and the North American Ambassador had feared, hanging by his testicles from a lamppost in the plaza.

  Faced with the death of the aged caudillo and the end of that long dictatorship, Professor Jones was on the point of returning to Europe, convinced—like so many others—that the country would inexorably sink into chaos. For their part, the Ministers of State, terrified at the possibility of a popular uprising, held a hasty meeting in which someone proposed they call for the Professor, thinking that if the cadaver of El Cid lashed to his steed could lead the charge against the Moors, there was no reason why the embalmed President for Life could not continue to govern from his tyrant’s seat. The learned doctor appeared, accompanied by Consuelo, who carried his doctor’s black bag and impassively observed the red tile–roofed houses, the streetcars, the men in straw hats and two-toned shoes, the singular mixture of luxury and disorder of the Presidential Palace. During the months of El Benefactor’s long agony, security measures had been relaxed and in the hours following his death tremendous confusion reigned. No one stopped the visitor and his servant. They walked down long passageways and through salons, and finally entered the room where that powerful man—father of a hundred bastards, master of the lives and deaths of his subjects, a
nd owner of an incalculable fortune—lay in his nightshirt, wearing kid gloves and soaked in his own urine. Members of his retinue and a few concubines trembled outside the door while the Ministers argued among themselves whether to flee the country or remain to see if the mummy of El Benefactor could continue to direct the destinies of the nation. Professor Jones stopped before the cadaver, examining it with an entomologist’s fascination.

  “Is it true, Doctor, that you can preserve dead bodies?” asked a fat man with mustaches very like the dictator’s.

  “Mmm . . .”

  “Then I advise you not to do so, because now it is my turn to govern. I am his brother, from the same cradle and the same blood”—a threat underscored by the blunderbuss stuck in the sibling’s belt.

  At that moment the Minister of War appeared; he took the scientist by the arm and led him aside for a private word.

  “You’re not thinking of embalming the President—?”

  “Mmm . . .”

  “You’d be better off not to meddle in this, because now it’s my turn to command, and I hold the Army right in this fist.”

  Disquieted, the Professor, followed by Consuelo, departed. He was never to know why or by whom he had been summoned. As he left the Palace, he was muttering that he would never understand these tropical peoples and the best thing he could do would be to return to the beloved city of his birth, where the laws of logic and urbanity were in full sway—and which he should never have left.

  The Minister of War took charge of the government without knowing exactly what he should do; he had always been under the thumb of El Benefactor and did not remember having taken a single initiative in all his career. These were uncertain times. The people refused to believe that the President for Life was actually dead; they thought that the old man displayed on the bier fit for a pharaoh was a hoax, another of that sorcerer’s tricks to trap his critics. People locked themselves in their houses, afraid to stick a foot out the door, until the guardia broke down the doors, turned the occupants out by brute force, and lined them up to pay their last respects to the Supreme Leader, who was already beginning to stink in state among the virgin wax candles and lilies flown in from Florida. When they saw that various dignitaries of the Church in their finest ceremonial robes were presiding over the pomp of the funeral, the populace were finally assured that the tyrant’s immortality was only a myth, and came out to celebrate. The country awakened from its long siesta, and in a matter of hours the cloud of depression and fatigue that had weighed over it dissipated. People began to dream of a timid liberty. They shouted, danced, threw stones, broke windows, and even sacked some of the mansions of the favorites of the regime; and they burned the long black Packard in which El Benefactor always rode, its unmistakable klaxon spreading fear as he passed. Then the Minister of War rose above the confusion, installed himself in the Presidential Seat, gave instructions to deflate high spirits with gunfire, and at once addressed the people over the radio, announcing a new order. Little by little, calm was restored. The jails were emptied of political prisoners to leave space for those still arriving, and a more progressive government was set in motion that promised to bring the nation into the twentieth century—not a far-fetched idea, considering that it was already three decades behind. In that political desert the first parties began to emerge, a Parliament was organized, and there was a renaissance of ideas and projects.

  The day they buried the lawyer, his most cherished mummy, Professor Jones was so enraged he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. At the urging of the authorities, who did not want to be burdened with the visible dead of the previous regime, the family of the celebrated martyr of tyranny provided him with a grandiose funeral, in spite of the widespread impression, created by his still-excellent state of preservation, that they were burying him alive. Jones left no stone unturned in trying to prevent his work of art from ending up in a mausoleum, but to no avail. He stood with outstretched arms at the gates of the cemetery, trying to block the passage of the black hearse transporting the silver-riveted mahogany coffin, but the coachman drove straight ahead, and if the doctor had not stepped aside he would have been flattened without a moment’s hesitation. As the niche was sealed, the embalmer was felled by apoplexy, half his body rigid, the other half trembling convulsively. With that burial, the most conclusive evidence that the Professor’s formula could thwart the process of decomposition for an indefinite period disappeared forever behind a marble tombstone.

  * * *

  Those were the only major events of the years Consuelo served in the house of Professor Jones. For her, the difference between dictatorship and democracy was occasionally being able to attend a Carlos Gardel movie—formerly forbidden to women—and, following her employer’s attack of apoplexy, having to care for the invalid as if he were a baby. Their routine was monotonously unvarying, until the July day the gardener was bitten by a viper. He was a tall, strong Indian, smooth-featured but with a secretive, taciturn expression. Consuelo had never exchanged more than ten words with him, in spite of the fact that he helped her with the cadavers, the cancer patients, and the idiots. He would pick up a patient as if he were a feather pillow, sling him over his shoulder, and lope up the stairs to the laboratory without a trace of curiosity.

  “A surucucú just bit the gardener,” Consuelo announced to Professor Jones.

  “As soon as he dies, bring him to me,” the scientist enunciated through twisted lips, immediately preparing to create an indigenous mummy posed as if pruning the Malabar plums, and then install him as a garden ornament. By this time the Professor was quite elderly and was beginning to have artistic delusions; he dreamed of representing all the trades, thus forming his personal museum of human statues.

  For the first time in her entire silent existence, Consuelo disobeyed an order and took the initiative. With the help of the cook, she dragged the Indian to his room in the back patio and laid him on his straw pallet; she was determined to save him, because it seemed shameful to think of him transfigured into an ornament to satisfy her employer’s whim—and also because once or twice she had felt an indescribable nervousness as she watched the man’s large, dark, strong hands tending the plants with such singular delicacy. She cleaned his wound with soap and water, made two deep cuts with the knife used for cutting up chicken, and slowly and patiently sucked out the poisoned blood, spitting it into a receptacle. Between every mouthful she rinsed her mouth with vinegar, so she herself would not die. Then she wrapped him in turpentine-soaked cloths, purged him with herbal teas, applied spiderwebs to the wound, and allowed the cook to light candles to the saints—although she herself had little faith in that recourse. When the victim began to pass blood in his urine, she spirited the Sándalo Sol from the Professor’s cabinet, a heretofore infallible remedy for discharges of the urinary tract; but in spite of her painstaking care, the leg began to turn gangrenous and the man, lucid, silent, not once complaining, began to die. However, Consuelo became aware that notwithstanding pain, fear of death, and shortness of breath, the gardener responded with ardent enthusiasm when she rubbed his body or soothed him with poultices. That unexpected erection so moved her mature virgin’s heart that when he held her arm and gazed at her entreatingly, she realized that the moment had come for her to justify the name Consuelo and console this man in his misfortune. Furthermore, she reflected that in all her thirty-some years of existence she had never known pleasure, and had not sought it, believing that it was something reserved for actors in the movies. She resolved to give herself pleasure, for once, and at the same time offer herself to the victim in the hope that he would pass contented to the other world.