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Violeta [English Edition] Page 4


  “I got lucky, because I found your family, José Antonio, and you have treated me very well. To put it bluntly, I have nowhere to go. I’d like to die here, if you don’t mind.”

  “You’re not going to die, Josephine,” José Antonio muttered, his eyes teary, because in that moment he realized how important she’d become to him.

  * * *

  —

  When my father found out that the governess was going to wither away and die under his roof, his first instinct was to force her onto the next transatlantic ship leaving the port, to save me the trauma of seeing a woman I loved so dearly suffer. But, for the first time, José Antonio stood up to him.

  “If you kick her out, I’ll never forgive you, Dad,” he vowed, and then he persuaded our father of his Christian duty to try and save her by any means he had at his disposal, despite the doctor’s grim prognosis. “Violeta will be devastated if Miss Taylor dies, but she will understand. She’s old enough now. What she would never be able to accept is if her governess suddenly disappears. I’ll take responsibility for Miss Taylor, Dad; you don’t have to concern yourself,” he said.

  He kept his word.

  A team headed by the most celebrated surgeon of his generation operated on Miss Taylor at the Military Hospital, the best in the country at that time, which she accessed thanks to the British consul, with whom my father had a relationship through his export business. Unlike the public hospitals, as poor as their patients were, and the scarce private clinics, where patients paid dearly for mediocre attention, the Military Hospital could compete with the most prestigious clinics in the United States and Europe. It was reserved exclusively for members of the armed forces and diplomats, but exceptions were made for patients with the right connections. The building, modern and well equipped, had large gardens where the convalescent could stroll. And the hospital staff, headed by a colonel, ensured impeccable hygiene and first-rate medical attention.

  My mother and my brother accompanied Miss Taylor on her first consultation. A nurse in a uniform so stiffly starched it crunched with each step led them to meet the surgeon, a man of about seventy, bald, with a somber face and the arrogant manners of someone used to exercising authority. After examining her for a long while behind a partition that divided the room, he explained to José Antonio, completely ignoring the presence of the two women, that the tumor was most likely cancerous. They could try to reduce it with radiation, but removing it surgically was too great a risk.

  “If I were your daughter, doctor, would you attempt it?” Miss Taylor asked, as calm as ever.

  After a pause, which felt endless, the doctor nodded.

  “Then tell me when you can operate,” she said firmly.

  * * *

  —

  She was admitted two days later. Faithful to her motto that honesty was always the best policy, before leaving for the hospital she told me that she had an orange in her stomach and they had to take it out, but it wasn’t going to be easy. I begged her to let me go and hold her hand through the operation. I was seven years old and just as clingy as I’d been as a small child. For the first time since we’d met her, Miss Taylor cried. After she’d said goodbye to each of the servants, she hugged Torito and my aunts, whom she instructed to distribute her belongings, if necessary, among whoever might want something to remember her by, and she gave my mother a packet of sterling pounds tied up with a ribbon.

  “For your poor, ma’am.”

  She had saved up all her earnings so that she might one day return to Ireland and seek out her displaced siblings, one by one.

  She gifted me with her greatest treasure, the Encyclopædia Britannica, and assured me that she would do her best to return, but that she couldn’t promise it. I knew something terrible could happen in the hospital; I was familiar with the unwavering power of death, since I’d seen my grandmother in her coffin, her face like a wax mask resting against the folds of white satin, as well as the dogs and cats that died of old age or accidents, and birds of all kinds, goats, sheep, and pigs that Torito slaughtered for the soup pot.

  The last person Josephine Taylor saw before they wheeled her into the operating room was José Antonio, who stayed with her until the last minute. They had given her a powerful sedative and her friend’s image seemed shrouded in mist. She didn’t comprehend his encouraging words or his confession of love, but she felt a kiss on her lips and smiled.

  * * *

  —

  The operation lasted seven long hours, which José Antonio spent in the hospital waiting room drinking coffee from a thermos and pacing back and forth, recalling the card games, teatime in the garden, their excursions outside the city, the encyclopedia guessing game, the afternoons of piano ballads, and byzantine discussions of drawn-and-quartered grandfathers. He determined that those had been the happiest hours he’d spent in the entirety of his regulated existence, in which his path had been laid out since birth. He was convinced that Josephine was the only woman with whom he could escape from under his father’s tutelage and the web of complicity that trapped him. He had never made his own decisions, but simply did what was expected of him without a peep. He was the model son, and he was sick of it. Josephine challenged him, shook up his beliefs, and made him see his family and their social environment in a harsher light. Just as she’d made him dance the Charleston and taught him about the suffragettes, she pushed him to imagine a future different from the one that had been assigned to him, a future filled with risk and adventure.

  At twenty-six, my brother already had a reserved and prudent nature, something he detested. “I’m old ahead of my time,” he would mutter in disgust as he shaved in front of the mirror. He had been our father’s second-in-command for years, but he was uninterested in the suspect business dealings and struggled to keep afloat in a social environment full of people with whom he shared no interests or ideals.

  Pacing that hospital waiting room, he imagined starting a new life somewhere else with Josephine; they could go to Ireland and set up a modest home in the town where she’d been born. She could give classes and he would work as a laborer. The fact that Josephine was five years his senior and had never showed the slightest romantic inclination toward him were minor details compared to the sharp focus of his determination. He imagined the avalanche of gossip when he announced their wedding, our family surely seeing it as a disgrace since they expected him to wed an upper-class Catholic girl from a well-known family, such as cousin Florencia. But none of that would matter to him and his bride as they sailed off to Europe. How do I know all this, Camilo? In part because I wheedled it out of my brother over the years, and in part because I can imagine it since I knew him so well.

  * * *

  —

  The orange in Miss Taylor’s stomach turned out to be benign, thanks to the celestial intervention of Father Quiroga, according to my aunts. The surgeon explained that the tumor had damaged her ovaries and they’d had to be removed. The patient would never be able to bear children, but since she was no longer young and still unmarried, that detail was of little importance. The operation had been a success, he assured us, but as was normal in these types of cases she had suffered massive blood loss, and was very weak. With rest and proper care, she’d slowly recover. My aunts Pía and Pilar took on the task of nursing her back to health, and I kept her constant company, as loyal as the two mastiffs, who never left her side.

  Miss Taylor had become a shadow of the glowing young woman who had arrived dressed as a flapper years before. Ravaged by months of enduring pain without complaint and the brutal operation, nothing remained of her curves except the dimples in her hands, and her skin had acquired a disquieting yellow tone. When she finally stood, after almost a month subsisting on chicken soup and healing herbs, boiled seasonal fruits with bee pollen, opium drops, and a disgusting drink of beets and brewer’s yeast for her anemia, we saw that her clothes hung from her frame and half of her hair ha
d fallen out. José Antonio thought she’d never been lovelier. He lurked around the sick woman’s room like a lost soul, waiting for our aunts to leave so that he could sit by her bedside and read poems to her in Spanish, which she only halfway understood through the haze of opium, eyelids heavy. I suggested that my brother read the encyclopedia to her instead, but he was lost in a dreamy fog of love.

  Her convalescence went on for several more months and during that time Miss Taylor continued my education from an armchair in the conservatory. The life of the house was concentrated there. My mother brought her sewing machine out; Torito used the space to repair rickety pieces of furniture; Aunt Pilar built a complicated contraption she’d invented to dry bottles; and Aunt Pía prepared tinctures, powders, capsules, and wafers from her vast repertoire of natural remedies. She had gotten ahold of some fruits of the mocatú palm, sent from the Amazon basin of Bolivia, which she crushed to extract an oil said to cure baldness. She shaved off poor Miss Taylor’s last four strands of hair and massaged her scalp twice a day with the miracle oil. Seven weeks later, she had sprouted a soft fuzz, and a short while after that she had begun to grow a lush dark mane. Aunt Pilar said, scornfully, that the governess had grown the coarse hair of the Altiplano Indians, thanks to those fruits, but she had to admit that it suited the woman better than her former strawlike strands.

  The days passed slowly and peacefully. Only José Antonio was impatient, waiting for the moment he could take Miss Taylor to the Versailles tearoom and declare his intentions. He never doubted that she would accept; his only reservations concerned their economic situation, because the idea of earning a living as a laborer in Ireland seemed increasingly less attractive, and his future wife would need the safety and support of a family. He’d worked alongside our father from age seventeen but he’d never received any salary, only sporadic compensation more like generous tips, and nothing that permitted him to build savings.

  Our father assured him that he’d receive a more than adequate portion of the earnings from the family business, but in practice the profits were instead reinvested in other enterprises. Arsenio Del Valle took out loans to finance one venture, which he would sell as soon as he could to fund another, repeating this cycle over and over, confident that the money would multiply in the invisible universe of banks, stocks, and bonds. José Antonio had warned his father against this approach, which he likened to a lab rat running tirelessly on a wheel, going nowhere. “At this rate you’ll never get out of debt,” he said, but our father maintained that no one got rich from a steady job or by investing prudently; according to him, the future belonged to the bold.

  Thanks to her long cONVAlescence and Aunt Pía’s therapeutic concoctions, Josephine Taylor had been restored to health and she was eager to get out of the house; she had spent too long inside the glass conservatory. She was very thin, but her coloring had improved, and her new short hair gave her the look of a half-plucked bird. For her very first outing she accompanied my mother, my aunts, and me to one of the Del Valle nieces’ bridal shower. The simple, inconspicuous card, inviting the women of the family to join them for a light afternoon snack, downplayed the extravagance of the event, as was proper in a country where ostentation was once considered terribly tacky. It hasn’t been that way for some time now, Camilo. These days everyone pretends to have more than they do and to be more than they are. The “light snack” turned out to be a scandalous spread of decadent pastries, silver pitchers of hot chocolate, ice cream, and sweet liqueurs served in Bohemian crystal glasses. All this was accompanied by a women’s string orchestra for entertainment along with a magician vomiting silk scarves and pulling bewildered pigeons from the ladies’ necklines.

  I’d estimate there were about fifty women in those rooms, counting all of our female relatives and friends of the bride. Miss Taylor felt like a chicken in the wrong coop, underdressed, unconnected, and foreign. When a three-tiered cake was wheeled in to a chorus of exclamations and applause, she took the opportunity to escape to the garden. There she encountered another guest who’d fled outdoors just as she had.

  Teresa Rivas was one of the few women who dared to sport the wide-legged pants and men’s vests that had been recently introduced by a French designer, paired with a starched white shirt and tie. She was smoking a pipe with a bone mouthpiece and bowl carved in the shape of a wolf’s head. In the dim afternoon light, Josephine first mistook her for a man, which was exactly the effect the woman had been aiming for.

  They sat and talked on a bench nestled between the trimmed hedges and patches of flowers, enveloped in the scent of spikenards and tobacco. Teresa learned that Josephine had been in the country for several years and that her only acquaintances were the family she worked for and the members of the British community, whom she saw at the Anglican service. Miss Taylor talked about her home country with its working class and several layers of middle class, and about life in the provinces, about miners, farmworkers, and fishermen.

  When Josephine finally heard me calling to her in the garden, she realized that the party had been over for some time and it was getting dark. The women hurriedly said their goodbyes. I overheard Teresa tell Miss Taylor where to find her, handing over a card with her name and work address on it.

  “I am going to get you out of your cave, Jo, and show you some of the world,” she said.

  Josephine liked the nickname that this strange woman had given her, and she agreed to accept the offer; perhaps this would be her first friend in this foreign land where she’d begun to put down roots.

  * * *

  —

  Back at home, I voiced what everyone was thinking: The time had come for us to adopt the modern fashions, with calf-length skirts, patterned fabric, and low-cut sleeveless blouses. The aunts always wore black dresses down to their ankles, like nuns, and my mother wouldn’t have thought it necessary to modernize her wardrobe either, since she now managed to avoid social life almost entirely; her husband had tired of begging her to go places with him. Miss Taylor had attended the Del Valle bridal shower in the old mustard dress, after taking it in by several inches. My mother sent the driver to pick up some of the women’s magazines that came over from Buenos Aires so we could gather ideas. The only thing Miss Taylor was interested in was Teresa Rivas’s style. She bought several yards of gabardine and tweed, despite the fact that the climate wasn’t suited to those thick fabrics, and with the help of some patterns she began sewing discreetly.

  “I look like a street urchin,” she murmured when she saw herself in the mirror wearing the completed outfit.

  She was right. With her five-foot, hundred-pound frame, and her short, untidy hair, the pants, vest, and blazer made her look like a little boy wearing a men’s three-piece suit. I was the first person who saw her in the new clothing, in the privacy of our bedroom.

  “My parents aren’t going to like those clothes at all,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  That Sunday, Miss Taylor took me on an outing to the Plaza de Armas, where Teresa Rivas was waiting for us. She hooked her arm through Miss Taylor’s without making any comment on her clothes, and we strolled toward the ice-cream shop run by a Galician family. The two women were absorbed in conversation, and I perked my ears up to catch some of what they were saying.

  “Shameless dykes!” a gentleman with a hat and cane commented loudly as he passed.

  “And proud of it, sir!” Teresa answered with an insolent cackle while Miss Taylor blushed in embarrassment.

  After the ice cream, Teresa drove us to her house, which was quite different from what we had imagined.

  Miss Taylor had been of the notion that Teresa, because of her rebellious attitude and her natural elegance, was a member of the upper class; thinking perhaps she was one of those heiresses who could buck convention because she had money and a good name behind her. Miss Taylor was still unable to tell the difference among our social classes, partly because
she’d had contact only with my family and the servants in the house.

  That fairy tale that all humans are equal before the law and in the eyes of God is a lie, Camilo. I hope you don’t buy into it. Neither the law nor God treats everyone the same. That is especially obvious in this country. A mere glance, based on any slight inflection, the way a fork is held at the table, or the ease in dealing with a person of inferior standing, is enough to instantly identify where a person falls in the intricate social hierarchy. This is a skill that few foreigners ever master. Excuse me if I harp on this topic, Camilo. I know you can’t stand the whole class system, so exclusionary and cruel, but I have to mention it to help you understand Josephine Taylor.

  Teresa lived in the attic apartment of a big old house on a poor-looking block of a dusty street. The first floor was occupied by a shoe repair shop, and on the second floor seamstresses sewed nurses’ uniforms and white lab coats for doctors. The attic was reached by a dark hallway and stairwell, the wooden steps worn from use and carved up by the patient work of termites.

  We found ourselves in a wide room with a low ceiling and two grimy windows that barely let in any light, a divan used as a bed, furniture that looked to have been salvaged from the dump, and a stately wardrobe with mirrored doors, the lone vestige of a past splendor. A hurricane-like disorder reigned, with clothes strewn about and piles of newspapers and magazines tied with string; I deduced that no one had cleaned the place in months.