Violeta [English Edition] Read online

  Within a week, the governess had integrated into the family much more intimately than her employer had expected, and the issue of her place in the social hierarchy, so important in this classist country, melted away. Miss Taylor was friendly and discreet, but not at all shy, and she gained the respect of everyone, including my brothers, who were now grown but still behaved like cannibals. Even the two mastiffs my father had acquired in the time of the pandemic to protect us from possible assailants, and which had now turned into spoiled lapdogs, obeyed her. Miss Taylor only had to point at the floor and give them an order in her language, without raising her voice, and they would jump from the sofas with their ears folded. The new governess quickly established routines and started the process of teaching me basic manners, after getting my parents’ approval on a plan of studies that included outdoor physical education, music lessons, science, and art.

  My father asked Miss Taylor how she had acquired so much knowledge at such a young age and she responded that that was what reference books were for. Above everything else, she touted the benefits of saying “please” and “thank you.” If I refused, and threw myself to the floor howling, she would stop my mother and her sisters with a mere gesture before they could rush over to console me. She let me kick and scream until I got tired, as she continued reading, knitting, or arranging flowers from the garden, unfazed. She was also wholly unmoved by my feigned epilepsy.

  “Unless she’s bleeding, we’re not going to interfere,” she declared, and they obeyed, intimidated by the woman and never daring to question her didactic methods.

  They supposed that, since she came from London, she must be well qualified.

  Miss Taylor deemed me too big to sleep curled up in a bassinet beside my mother, and asked for another bed to be placed in her own room. For the first two nights she pushed a dresser against the door so that I couldn’t escape, but I quickly resigned myself to my fate. She immediately taught me to dress and feed myself, through the method of leaving me half-naked until I learned to put on at least some of my clothes and sitting me in front of my plate, spoon in hand, waiting with the patience of a Trappist monk until I finally succumbed to hunger. The results were so dramatic that in a short while the monster that had grated on the nerves of the entire household had become a normal little girl who followed the governess everywhere she went, fascinated by the smell of her bergamot perfume and her chubby hands that fluttered in the air like pigeons. Just as my father had always maintained, I’d spent five years yearning for structure, and I finally received it. My mother and aunts took this as a criticism, but they had to admit that there had been a fundamental shift. The air had sweetened.

  * * *

  —

  Miss Taylor pounded at the piano with more enthusiasm than talent, and sang ballads with an anemic but well-tuned voice; her good ear allowed her to quickly acquire a watered-down but intelligible Spanish that even included some curse words she’d picked up from my brothers, which she sprinkled into her sentences without understanding their meaning. The insults didn’t sound as offensive with her accent, and since no one ever corrected her, she continued to use them. She couldn’t stomach rich food but she kept her British stiff upper lip when it came to the local cuisine, just as she did during the winter rainstorms, the summer’s dry, dusty heat, and the earthquakes that made the light fixtures dance and rearranged the chairs while everyone went about their business. What she couldn’t stand, however, was the slaughter of animals in the service yard, which she classified as a cruel and primitive custom. She thought it savage to eat a stew made with a bunny or hen that we’d known personally. When Torito slit the throat of a goat he’d been fattening up for three months for his boss’s birthday, Miss Taylor fell sick in bed with a fever. From then on Aunt Pilar decided to start buying meat from a butcher, even though she didn’t see any difference between killing the poor animal in the market or at home. I should clarify that it wasn’t the same goat that served as my wet nurse in infancy; that one died of old age several years later.

  The two green metal trunks that comprised Miss Taylor’s luggage contained textbooks and art history tomes, all in English; a microscope; a wooden box with everything needed for chemistry experiments; and twenty-one volumes of the most recent edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, published in 1911. She maintained that anything that didn’t appear in the encyclopedia didn’t exist. Her wardrobe contained two nice outfits, with their respective hats, one of which was the mustard-colored dress in which she’d stepped off the boat, and a coat with a fur collar made from some unidentifiable mammal; the rest was all skirts and plain blouses, which were covered in an apron all day. She took off and put on her clothes with the skill of a contortionist, in such a way that I never once saw her in her slip, much less naked, even though we shared a room.

  My mother made sure that I prayed in Spanish before I got into bed, because the English prayers could be blasphemous and who knew if they’d even be understood up in heaven. Miss Taylor belonged to the Church of England, and that made her exempt from coming to Catholic mass with the family and from praying the rosary with us. We never saw her read the Bible she kept on her nightstand, or heard her speak with any religious zeal. Twice a year she went to the Anglican service held in the home of a member of the British community, where she sang hymns and talked to the other foreigners she often met with to have tea and exchange books and magazines.

  With her arrival my existence was notably improved. The first years of my life had been a tug of war; I was constantly trying to impose my will and, since I always got my way, I didn’t feel safe or protected. My father had always said I was stronger than the adults around me and so I didn’t have anyone to lean on. The governess could not completely tame my rebelliousness, but she taught me the basic societal norms of acceptable behavior and managed to break me of my obsession with bodily functions and illness, which were popular topics of conversation in our country. Men talk about politics and business; women talk about their ailments and their servants. Every morning when my mother woke up, she took inventory of her aches and pains, writing them down in a notebook where she also kept a list of past and present medications, and she often entertained herself by flipping through those pages with more nostalgia than she felt for our family photo albums. I was on the same path as my mother; from so much pretending to be sick I had become an expert in a variety of afflictions, but thanks to Miss Taylor, who paid them no mind, they all cleared up on their own.

  At first I did my schoolwork and piano exercises just to please her, but later out of a simple joy for learning. As soon as I could write legibly, Miss Taylor had me start keeping a diary in a beautiful leather notebook with a tiny lock, a custom I’ve maintained almost all my life. As soon as I could read fluently, I commandeered the Encyclopædia Britannica. Miss Taylor made up a game in which we memorized the definition of uncommon words and tested each other. Soon José Antonio, who was about to turn twenty-three without the vaguest intention of leaving the comfort of the family home, also joined in the game.

  * * *

  —

  My brother José Antonio had studied law, not out of interest, but because at that time there were very few acceptable professions for men of our class. Law had seemed better than the other two options: medicine or engineering. José Antonio worked with my father, assisting him in his business dealings. Arsenio Del Valle introduced him as his favorite son, his right-hand man, and my brother repaid our father’s favor by remaining constantly at his beck and call, even if he wasn’t always in agreement with the man’s decisions, which he often found reckless. More than once my brother warned him that he was taking on too much debt but, according to my father, big business was done on credit and no entrepreneur with any commercial vision invested his own money if he could use someone else’s. José Antonio, who had seen the creative bookkeeping for those businesses, thought that there must be a limit, that you could only pull a cord so tight before it would
break, but my father assured him that he had everything under control.

  “One day you’re going to run this empire that I’m building, but if you don’t wise up and learn to take risks, you won’t be able to handle it. And, by the way, I’ve noticed you seem distracted, son. You spend too much time with the women of the house; they’re going to make you foolish and weak,” he told him.

  The encyclopedia was one of the interests that José Antonio shared with Miss Taylor and me. My brother was the only one in the family who treated the governess like a friend and called her by her first name; for everyone else she would always be Miss Taylor. On lazy afternoons, my brother would chat with her about the history of our country; the forests in the south, where one day he’d take her to see the family’s sawmill; the political news, which he was greatly concerned with ever since a colonel had presented himself as the only candidate for the presidential elections, obtaining one hundred percent of the votes, logically, and running the government like a military regiment. He had to admit that the man’s popularity was justified when it came to the public works and institutional reforms he’d undertaken, but José Antonio talked to Miss Taylor about the danger to democracy posed by an authoritarian military leader of the kind that had plagued Latin America since the wars for independence.

  “Democracy is vulgar. You’d be better off with an absolute monarchy,” she joked, but in reality she was proud to have an Irish grandfather who had been executed in 1846 for defending the rights of workers and demanding universal suffrage for all men, even if they weren’t landowners, as the king had decreed.

  Josephine had told José Antonio, thinking I wasn’t listening, that her grandfather had been accused of affiliation with the Chartist movement and of treason to the Crown, for which he’d been hung and quartered.

  “A few years earlier and they’d have slit him open, pulled out his guts and castrated him, then strung him up, still alive, and cut him into pieces, before a crowd of thousands of cheering spectators,” she explained dryly.

  “And you call us primitive for killing chickens!” José Antonio exclaimed, horrified.

  These grisly tales filled my nightmares. She also told my brother about the English suffragettes, who fought for the women’s vote, risking prison and public humiliation, going on hunger strikes, which authorities put an end to by force-feeding them through a tube down their throats, in their rectums, or in their vaginas.

  “They endured terrible tortures like true heroines. They’ve managed to secure a partial right to vote but continue fighting to obtain the same rights as men.”

  José Antonio was convinced that this would never happen in our country, but he had never stepped outside of his conservative bubble. He had no idea of the strength brewing in that very moment among the middle class.

  Miss Taylor carefully avoided such topics around the rest of the family; she didn’t want them to send her packing back to England.

  “She has a delicate gut,” my aunt Pía declared when Miss Taylor was stricken with diarrhea the day after her arrival.

  It was a common affliction for foreigners, who got sick from their first sip of water, but since they almost all survived no one worried much about it. The governess, however, never really adapted to our bacteria, and spent two years struggling with a distressed digestive system, medicated by Aunt Pía with infusions of fennel and chamomile and powders that the family doctor doled out to her. I think it was all too rich for her, the desserts of dulce de leche, the pork chops with hot sauce, the corn cakes, the cups of hot chocolate with cream at five o’clock every afternoon, among other foods that it would’ve been bad manners for her to refuse. She stoically endured stomach cramps, vomiting, and diarrhea without ever saying a word.

  Miss Taylor grew silently weaker until the family stepped in, alarmed by her weight loss and her ashy coloring. After examining her, the doctor prescribed a diet of rice and chicken broth and a half glass of port with drops of opium tincture twice a day. In private, he told my parents that the patient had a tumor the size of an orange in her stomach. There were local surgeons as good as the top doctors in Europe, he said, but he thought it was too late for an operation and that the most humane thing would be to send her back to her family. She had only a few months left to live.

  José Antonio was assigned the difficult task of telling her, divulging only part of the truth, but she immediately guessed the rest.

  “How inconvenient,” said Miss Taylor, without losing her composure.

  José Antonio informed her that our father would make the necessary arrangements for her to travel to London first-class.

  “You want to get rid of me?”

  “My God! No one wants to get rid of you, Josephine! We only want you to be with your family, dear, taken care of…I will explain the situation to them.”

  “I’m afraid you lot are the closest thing I have to a family,” she replied, and then she proceeded to tell him what no one had ever bothered to ask.

  * * *

  —

  It was true that Josephine Taylor had descended from an Irish grandfather who had been executed for angering the British Crown, but when she’d told my brother the story, she had omitted the fact that the justice warrior’s son, her father, was an abusive alcoholic. Her mother, abandoned to poverty with several children, had died young. The smaller children were scattered among distant family members; the oldest, at age eleven, was sent to work in the coal mines; and she, at nine years old, went to live in an orphanage run by nuns, where she earned her keep doing washing, the institution’s main source of income, and waited for some kind soul to adopt her. She detailed the Herculean task of soaping, thrashing, and brushing all those clothes, the immense pots of boiling water, then the endless rinsing, starching, and ironing.

  At twelve years old, when she had not yet been adopted, she was placed as an indentured servant in the house of a British military officer, who, when she became a teenager, granted himself the right to systematically rape her. The first time it happened he’d burst into the small cell beside the kitchen where she slept, covered her mouth, and climbed onto her without any warning. From then on a routine was established, always the same, which Josephine grew to know and fear. The officer would wait until his wife was out, a frequent occurrence since she was always busy with charity work and social calls, and, with a gesture, he would let the girl know what was to come. Josephine obeyed, terrified, without ever imagining it possible to refuse or escape. The man would take her into the coach house, where he beat her with a riding crop, careful not to leave visible marks, and submitted her to perverse practices, which she survived by surrendering her body to the nightmare and closing her mind to the possibility of mercy. “This will eventually be over, this will end soon,” she silently chanted.

  Finally, after several months, the wife began to notice that her servant behaved like a beaten dog, scurrying into the shadows and trembling when her husband arrived home. In the years they’d been married she’d noticed many signs of perversion in him, but had preferred to ignore them with the theory that what is not named does not exist. As long as they kept up appearances, there was no need to scratch below the surface. Everyone had secrets, the woman told herself. But she realized that the other servants whispered behind her back, and a neighbor asked if her husband had taken to whipping the horses, because they heard blows and whimpers coming from the coach house. That’s when she understood that she had to get to the bottom of what was happening under her roof before other people found out. She managed to catch her husband, whip in hand, and Josephine, half-naked, bound, and gagged.

  The woman didn’t put Josephine out on the street, as often occurred in such cases, but sent her to London to serve as companion to her mother, making her vow not to utter a word about her husband’s conduct. Scandal had to be avoided at all costs.

  * * *

  —

  Her new boss turned out to b
e a still-vigorous widow who had traveled the world extensively and aimed to continue doing so, for which she required a companion. She was haughty and tyrannical, but she had a knack for teaching and set out to convert Josephine into a polite young lady, since she did not wish to keep company with an Irish orphan who had the manners of a washerwoman. The widow’s first task was to eradicate the girl’s accent, which was torture to the ears, and to teach her how to speak like an upper-class lady of London; the next step was converting her to the Church of England.

  “All papists are ignorant and superstitious; that’s why they’re poor and they reproduce like rabbits,” the lady declared.

  She achieved her objective without any difficulty because Josephine saw little difference between one religion and the other; and in any event she preferred to keep her distance from God, who had treated her so badly since the day she was born. She learned to conduct herself with impeccable manners in public, and to maintain strict control over her emotions and posture. The lady granted her access to her library and guided her reading, instilling in her a weakness for the Encyclopædia Britannica, and took her to places she’d never dreamed of seeing, from New York to Cairo. The woman eventually had a stroke and died soon after, leaving a small amount of money to Josephine, which she was able to live on for many months. When she saw an ad in the newspaper offering employment as a governess in South America, she applied.