Violeta [English Edition] Page 2
For his own protection, my father bought a contraband Webley revolver, of proven efficacy in war, and began target practice in the service yard, terrorizing the hens. In reality he wasn’t as scared of the virus as of the desperation it would sow among the masses. In normal times there were already too many poor, beggars, and thieves in the city. If what had happened in other places was any indication of what we could expect, unemployment would rise, food would become scarce, panic would set in, and even honest people, who up to that point had merely protested outside Congress demanding jobs or justice, might turn to crime. It had happened before, when laid-off miners from the north, furious and starving, had invaded the city and spread typhus.
My father bought enough supplies to last the winter: bags of potatoes, flour, sugar, oil, rice and beans, nuts, strings of garlic, dried meats, and crates of fruits and vegetables for preserves. He sent four of his sons, the youngest of whom had just turned twelve, down south before the San Ignacio school suspended classes by government decree. Only José Antonio stayed on in the capital, because he was going to start university as soon as the world went back to normal. All travel had been suspended, but my brothers managed to take one of the last passenger trains to San Bartolomé, where Marko Kusanovic, the Croatian foreman, met them at the station armed with instructions to put them to work alongside the rugged local loggers. No coddling. This would keep them busy and healthy and keep things quieter at home.
My mother, her two sisters, and the maids were ordered to remain indoors and not leave for any reason. My mother, who’d had weak lungs ever since a bout of tuberculosis in childhood, was of a delicate constitution and could not risk exposing herself to the flu.
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The pandemic did not greatly alter the closed universe of our home. The front door, of carved mahogany, opened onto a wide, dark vestibule that led to two sitting rooms, the library, the formal dining room, the billiards room, and another room that was always locked. We called that room the office because it contained half a dozen metal cabinets filled with documents that no one had looked at since time immemorial. The second wing of the house was separated from the first by a courtyard paved in blue Portuguese tile with a Moorish fountain that had a broken water pump, and a profusion of potted camellias; these flowers gave their name to the property: Camellia House. Along three sides of the courtyard ran a long corridor we called the conservatory, lined with beveled-glass windows, that connected the rooms for daily use: casual dining room, game parlor, sewing room, bedrooms, and bathrooms. The conservatory was cool in summer, and was kept more or less warm in winter with coal braziers. The back part of the house was the realm of the servants and the animals: consisting of the kitchen, laundry sinks, cellars, garage, and a line of pathetic cubicles where the domestic employees slept. My mother had entered that back courtyard on very few occasions.
The property had once belonged to my paternal grandparents, and when they died it was the only significant thing their children inherited. Its value, divided in eleven parts, represented a very small amount for each child. My father, the only one with any vision, offered to buy out his siblings in small installments. At first they thought he was doing them a favor, since that old mansion had endless structural issues, as he explained to them. No one in their right mind would live there, but he needed the space for his sons and the other children, who would come later, as well as his mother-in-law, already advanced in age, and his wife’s two spinster sisters, who relied on his charity. Later, when he began to make late payments, proffering only a fraction of the promised amount, and then finally stopped paying altogether, the relationship with his siblings began to deteriorate. He truly never intended to swindle them. He was presented with investment opportunities that he had to seize, promising himself he would pay them back, with interest, but the years passed with one deferment after another, until he eventually forgot about the debt.
The house was truly a neglected ruin, but the lot took up half a block and had entrances from two streets. I wish I had a picture to show you, Camilo, because that’s where my life began and my first memories were made. The old house had lost its former luster from before the financial setbacks, when my grandfather still reigned over a clan of children and an army of servants who kept the house in impeccable condition. The gardeners cared for a paradise of flowers and fruit trees with a glass greenhouse that held orchids from other climes. There were four marble statues of mythological Greek figures, popular at the time among the families of noble lineage and sculpted by the same local artisans who carved their elaborate family crypts in the cemetery. The old gardeners no longer existed, and the new ones were a bunch of lazy bums, according to my father. “If we keep going at this rate, the weeds are going to overrun the house,” he would say, but he did nothing to rectify the problem. He considered nature something nice to admire from a distance, but it did not merit his attention, which was better reserved for more profitable activities. He was unconcerned by the progressive deterioration of the house because he planned to stay there only as long as necessary: The structure itself was worth nothing, but the lot was magnificent. He planned to sell it as soon as it had appreciated enough in value. His motto was a cliché: Buy low, sell high.
The upper class had begun moving to more-residential neighborhoods, far from the public offices, markets, and dusty plazas covered in pigeon poop. The trend was to demolish the old mansions like ours and construct office buildings or apartments for the middle class. The capital was and still is one of the most segregated cities in the world, and as the lower classes began to encroach onto those streets, which had been the city’s main thoroughfares since colonial times, my father would have to either move his family or risk being looked down upon by his friends and acquaintances. At my mother’s insistence, he modernized the house, adding electricity and installing toilets, as the home otherwise silently deteriorated all around us.
My maternal grandmother sat all day in the conservatory, in a high-backed armchair, so lost to her memories that she hadn’t uttered a single word in six years. My aunts Pía and Pilar, several years older than my mother, also lived with us. The first was a sweet lady, knowledgeable in the healing properties of plants, gifted with a talent for curing through the laying on of hands. At twenty-three she had been engaged to marry a second cousin, whom she’d been in love with since age fifteen, but she never got to wear her wedding dress because her fiancé died suddenly two months before the wedding. The family refused an autopsy and the cause of death was attributed to a congenital heart defect. Pía considered herself a widow who’d lost her only love, dressed religiously in mourning clothes from then on, and never accepted any other candidates for marriage.
Aunt Pilar was pretty, like all the women in her family, but she did her best to hide her looks and she mocked the virtues and adornments of femininity. A few brave men had tried to court her in her youth, but she’d managed to frighten them away. She lamented not having been born a half century later, when she could have fulfilled her dream of being the first woman to climb Mt. Everest. The day the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and the Englishman Edmund Hillary achieved the feat in 1953, Pilar cried in frustration. She was tall, strong, and agile, with the authoritarian temperament of a colonel; she managed the household and saw to repairs, which were endless. She had a talent for mechanics, invented her own domestic appliances, and came up with ingenious ways to solve problems, which is why everyone said that God had made a mistake when he chose her gender. No one was surprised to see her straddled atop the house, directing the replacement of roof tiles after a quake, or helping to slaughter hens and turkeys for the Christmas celebration without a hint of disgust.
The quarantine imposed by the influenza didn’t change much for our family. In normal times, the maids, cook, and washing woman were off only three afternoons per month; the driver and the gardeners had more freedom, because the men were not considered part of the staff. The exception was Apolon
io Toro, a gigantic adolescent who had come knocking at the Del Valles’ a few years prior asking for something to eat, and had stayed. They supposed he was an orphan, but no one had bothered to verify this. Torito rarely went out, because he was afraid he would be bullied, as had happened on many occasions; his almost beastly appearance combined with his childlike innocence elicited cruelty from others. He was tasked with hauling firewood and coal, sanding and waxing the parquet floors, and other hard physical chores that did not require critical thinking.
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My mother was not particularly social, and went out as little as possible. She accompanied her husband to Del Valle family gatherings, so many that you could fill up the entire calendar with all the anniversaries, baptisms, weddings, and funerals, but she did so grudgingly, because the noise gave her headaches. She would use her ill health or another pregnancy as an excuse to stay in bed or escape to a tuberculosis sanatorium in the mountains, where her bronchitis would clear up and she’d have a chance to rest. If the weather was nice, she liked to go for rides in the flamboyant automobile that her husband had purchased as soon as they’d come into fashion, a Ford Model T, which reached the suicidal speed of thirty miles an hour.
“One day I’m going to take you flying in my very own airplane,” my father promised her, although it was the last thing she would have chosen as a mode of transport.
Aeronautics, which was considered a vagary of adventurers and playboys, fascinated my father. He believed that in the future those mosquitos made of wood and cloth would be readily accessible to anyone who could afford them, like automobiles, and he would be among the first to invest in them. He had thought it all out. He would buy planes secondhand in the United States, have them disassembled and brought into the country as parts, to avoid tariffs, and then after careful reassembly he would sell them for a fortune. By a strange twist of fate, I would end up fulfilling a form of his dream many years later.
The driver took my mother shopping at the Turkish market or to meet one of her sisters-in-law at the Versailles tearoom, where they would fill her in on the family gossip, but almost none of that had been possible in recent months, first due to the weight of her belly and later because of the quarantine orders. The winter days were short and they passed quickly over games of cards with my aunts Pía and Pilar, or sewing, knitting, and praying the rosary in penance with Torito and the servants. She had the rooms of her absent sons closed up, as well as the two sitting rooms and the formal dining room. Only her husband and her oldest son used the library, where Torito kept the fire lit so that the damp wouldn’t creep into the books. In the rest of the rooms and in the conservatory they set up coal braziers topped with pots of boiling water containing eucalyptus leaves to cleanse the lungs and dispel the ghost of influenza.
My father and my brother José Antonio did not adhere to the quarantine or respect the curfew, my father because he was one of the business tycoons considered indispensable to the proper functioning of the economy and my brother because he went everywhere our father went. They had a permit to circulate, something granted to certain industrialists, businessmen, politicians, and healthcare workers. Father and son went to the office, met with colleagues and clients, and dined at the Union Club, which remained open; closing it would’ve been like shuttering the cathedral itself, although the quality of service declined as the waiters began dying off. On the streets they safeguarded themselves using felt masks sewn by my aunts, and they rubbed themselves down with alcohol before getting into bed. They knew that no one was immune to the flu, but they hoped that with these measures, along with the cleansing eucalyptus, they could keep the virus from entering our home.
Back when I was born, ladies like María Gracia shut themselves away to hide their pregnant bellies from the eyes of the world, and they did not nurse their infants, which was considered vulgar. It was common to hire a wet nurse, some poor woman who had to rip the breast from her own child’s mouth and rent it to another more fortunate babe, but my father would not allow any stranger into our home. They might bring in the influenza and infect us all. They solved the problem of my nourishment with the milk of a goat that they brought to live in the back courtyard.
From my birth until five years old, I was left in the exclusive care of my aunts Pía and Pilar, who spoiled me to the point of almost completely ruining my character. My father contributed as well, because I was the only girl in a pack of sons. At the age when other kids learned to read, I was still unable to use silverware, having always been spoon-fed, and I slept curled up inside a bassinet beside my mother’s bed.
One day my father dared to scold me for shattering my doll’s porcelain head against the wall.
“Spoiled brat! I’m going to give you a good spanking!”
Never before had he raised his voice to me. I threw myself facedown onto the floor, panting like I was possessed, one of my usual tricks, and for the first time he lost his infinite patience, picked me up by the arms, and shook me so hard that, if my aunts hadn’t stepped in, he might’ve broken my neck. The shock put an instant end to my tantrum.
“What this child needs is an English governess,” my father decreed, furious.
And that’s how Miss Taylor came into the family. My father found her through the commercial agent that managed some of his business interests in London, who simply put an ad in the Times. The two men communicated via telegram and letters that took several weeks to arrive at their destination and several more to return with a response. Despite the obstacles imposed by the distance and the language, since the agent didn’t speak Spanish and my father’s English vocabulary was limited to exchange rates and exportation documentation, they managed to hire the ideal person to fill the role, a woman of proven experience and respectability.
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Four months later, my parents and my brother José Antonio took me, dressed in my Sunday best with a blue velvet coat, straw hat, and patent-leather boots, to meet the Englishwoman at the port. We had to wait for all the passengers to disembark down the gangplank, greet whoever had showed up to welcome them, photograph themselves in huge groups, and sort out their complicated luggage, before the dock finally cleared and we made out a lone figure with a lost look on her face. That’s when my parents saw that the governess was nothing at all like they had pictured based on a correspondence plagued with linguistic misunderstandings. In reality, the only personal detail my father had asked in one of his telegrams before hiring her was if she happened to like dogs. She had responded that she preferred them to humans.
Due to one of my family’s many deep-rooted prejudices, they had expected a matronly, old-fashioned woman with a sharp nose and bad teeth, like some of the ladies from the British community they were vaguely acquainted with or had seen in the society section of the paper. Miss Josephine Taylor was a young twentysomething woman, short in stature and slightly curvy, without being fat, and she wore a loose mustard-colored dress with a drop waist, a felt hat shaped like a chamber pot, and slingback heels that buckled around the ankle. Her round, light-blue eyes were painted with black kohl, which set off her startled expression. She had strawlike blond hair, and that skin as transparent as rice paper that girls from cold countries sometimes have, which over time becomes spotted and mercilessly wrinkled. José Antonio was able to communicate with her using the basic English he had acquired through an intensive course but had never gotten a chance to put into practice.
My mother was enchanted with Miss Taylor from her first glimpse of the woman, fresh as an apple, but her husband considered himself swindled, because his sole objective for bringing her from so far away was to impose discipline and good manners and to lay the foundation of an acceptable education. He had decreed that I would be homeschooled to protect me from harmful ideas, vulgar customs, and the illnesses that decimated the young population at that time. The pandemic had taken some victims among our more distant relativ
es but everyone within our immediate family had gone unscathed. Nevertheless, there was a fear that it could return with renewed fury and sow death among children, who had not been immunized by the first wave of the virus like the surviving adults had. Five years on, the country had not yet fully recovered from the tragedy caused by the flu; the impact on public health and the economy was so devastating that, while in other parts of the world the Roaring Twenties were in full swing, in our country people still lived guardedly. My father feared for my health, never suspecting that my fainting fits, convulsions, and explosive vomiting were the result of my extraordinary talent for theatrics. He took it for granted that the trendy flapper he met at the port couldn’t possibly be up to the task of taming his daughter’s wild temperament. But that foreign woman would surprise him in more ways than one, down to the fact that she wasn’t actually English.
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Before her arrival, no one was clear on the precise position that Miss Taylor would occupy in the domestic order. She didn’t fit into the same category as the maids, but she definitely wasn’t a member of the family. My father said that we should treat her with courtesy and distance, that she should eat her meals with me in the conservatory or in the pantry but not in the dining room. He assigned her to the bedroom that had been previously occupied by my grandmother, who had died sitting on her chamber pot a few months earlier. Torito moved the old lady’s worn, heavy furniture down into the basement, and it was replaced with other less gloomy pieces, to keep the governess from getting depressed since, according to Aunt Pilar, she’d have enough to worry about between me and adapting to a barbaric land at the end of the world. Pilar chose an understated striped wallpaper and faded pink curtains, which she thought appropriate for an old maid, but as soon as she laid eyes on Miss Taylor, she understood that she had been mistaken.