Of Love and Shadows Page 5

  She was equally prudent in references to her husband. She preferred to accuse him of having left for parts unknown in the company of some low woman rather than to express doubts of a different nature. She suspected, in fact, that his absence was not due to an amorous adventure but that the government had carelessly eliminated him or was by mistake detaining him and he was rotting in some prison, as had been rumored in so many cases in recent years. She was not the only one to harbor those black thoughts. At first, her friends observed her with distrust, and whispered behind her back that Eusebio Beltrán had fallen into the hands of the police, in which event he had undoubtedly been concealing some offense: he might be a Communist mingling with decent people, as others had been known to do. Beatriz did not like to remember the threatening and sneering calls, the anonymous messages slipped beneath the door, or the unforgettable night garbage had been dumped on her bed. No one was in the house that night, because Rosa, too, had gone out. When Beatriz and her daughter returned from the theater, everything was in order, although they were surprised that the dog was not barking. Irene went looking for the dog, calling her in every room as Beatriz followed, turning on the lights. Stupefied, they stopped before the mounds of refuse covering the bed, empty tin cans, decomposing peelings, paper smeared with excrement. They found Cleo locked in an armoire, seemingly dead, and there she lay for fifteen hours until she recovered from the soporific. Beatriz sank into a chair, staring at the litter and muck on her bed, unable to comprehend the meaning of such provocation. She could not imagine who would have carried bags of filth to her house, picked the lock of the door, drugged the dog, and defiled everything. This happened before the days of the retirement home on the ground floor, and except for Rosa and the gardener there were no other servants.

  “Don’t tell anyone about this, darling. It’s an insult, we are disgraced,” Beatriz wept.

  “Don’t think about it, Mother. Can’t you see it’s the work of a maniac? Don’t let it worry you.”

  But Beatriz Alcántara knew that in some way this outrage was connected with her husband, and once again she damned him. She remembered every detail of the evening Eusebio Beltrán had deserted her. In those days he was obsessed with his project of raising sheep for Muslims and with the philanthropic butcher shop that led to his ruin. They had been married for more than twenty years, and Beatriz’s patience had run out. She could no longer bear his indifference, his many infidelities, his scandalous manner of squandering money on silver sports planes, racehorses, erotic sculpture, expensive restaurants, gaming tables, and extravagant gifts for other women. As he entered his middle years, her husband had not settled down; on the contrary, his defects became more marked, and his adventurous impulses increased along with the gray hairs at his temple and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. He risked his capital in foolish ventures, he disappeared for weeks on exotic voyages—from following a Norwegian ecologist to the ends of the continent to embarking on a solitary ocean-crossing on a raft blown by unpredictable winds. His charm captivated everyone but his wife. In one of their horrendous arguments, she lost all control and assaulted him with a broadside of insults and recriminations. Eusebio Beltrán was a genteel man who despised any form of violence. He held up his hand in sign of a truce and with a smile announced that he was going out for cigarettes. He left the house quietly, and nothing was heard from him again.

  “He ran away from his debts,” Beatriz speculated, finding unconvincing the argument that he had become infatuated with another woman.

  He left no trace. Nor was his body found. In the years that followed, she adapted to her new state, outdoing herself to feign a normal life before her friends. Silent and solitary, she prowled through hospitals, detention centers, and consulates, inquiring about her husband. She approached friends in the upper echelons of the government and initiated secret investigations through a detective agency, but no one could locate him. Finally, weary of wandering through so many offices, she decided to go to the Vicariate. Since any connection with the Vicar’s office was frowned on in her social milieu, she did not dare mention it, even to Irene. That branch of the Archbishopric was considered to be a den of Marxist priests and dangerous laymen dedicated to helping enemies of the regime. It was the only organization that openly defied the government, directed by a Cardinal who placed the invincible power of the Church at the service of the persecuted, never stopping to inquire about their political hue. Until the day when she needed help, Beatriz had haughtily proclaimed that the authorities ought to wipe that institution from the face of the earth and jail the Cardinal and his rebel sycophants. Her visit was in vain, however, because not even in the Vicariate could she find news of her missing husband. He seemed to have been swept away on a wind of oblivion.

  The uncertainty destroyed Beatriz’s nerves. Her friends recommended courses in yoga and Eastern meditation to soothe her constant agitation. While managing, with difficulty, to stand on her head, breathe through her navel, and focus her thoughts on Nirvana, she succeeded in forgetting her problems, but she could not remain in that position all day, and during the moments she did think of herself she was stunned by the irony of her fate. She had become the wife of a desaparecido. She had often said that no one disappeared in their country, and that such stories were anti-patriotic lies. When she saw the distraught women marching every Thursday in the plaza with portraits of their relatives pinned to their bosoms, she had said they were in the pay of Moscow. She never imagined she would find herself in the same situation as those wives and mothers searching for their loved ones. Legally, she was not a widow and would not be one for ten years, when the law would issue her a death certificate for her husband. She could not use the funds from Eusebio Beltrán’s estate or get her hands on the slippery associates who made the stocks of his business enterprises vanish into thin air. She stayed in her mansion giving herself the airs of a duchess, but with no funds to maintain the lifestyle of a lady of high society. Beleaguered by bills, she was at the point of sprinkling the house with gasoline to burn it to the ground and collect the insurance when Irene cleverly thought of renting the ground floor.

  “Now that so many families are leaving the country but can’t take their parents and grandparents with them, I think we’d be doing them a favor by looking after them. Besides, it would bring in a little money,” Irene suggested.

  And that is what they did. The ground floor was partitioned into smaller rooms; new baths were installed, and handrails in the hallways to give support to old age and security to unsteady legs; the steps were covered with a ramp for wheelchairs, and speakers with mood music positioned to assuage displeasure and alleviate depression, overlooking the possibility that it might fall on deaf ears.

  Beatriz and her daughter settled into the upper floor with Rosa, who had been in their service from time immemorial. The mother decorated their home with her finest possessions, avoiding any touch of vulgarity, and began to live from the income provided by the patients of The Will of God Manor. If difficulties knocked too insistently at their door, she moved with supreme circumspection to sell a painting, a piece of silver, or one of the many jewels she had acquired in compensation for the gifts her husband bestowed on his lovers.

  * * *

  Irene regretted that her mother was distressed over such pedestrian problems. She was in favor of moving to more modest quarters in order to remodel the entire house and accommodate enough guests to cover all their expenses; but Beatriz would rather work herself to death and perform all manner of juggling acts than reveal her reduced circumstances. To leave the house would be publicly to acknowledge poverty. Mother and daughter differed greatly in their appreciation of life. As they did in their assessment of Eusebio Beltrán. Beatriz considered him to be a villain entirely capable of having committed fraud, bigamy, or whatever felony it was that had forced him to slink off with his tail between his legs, but when she voiced those opinions Irene turned on her like a tiger. She adored her
father; she refused to believe he was dead or, even less, to accept that he had defects. His reasons for disappearing from the known world did not matter to her. Her affection for him was unconditional. She treasured the memory of an elegant man with a patrician profile and a formidable character combining admirable sentiments with wild passions that brought him to the brink of questionable dealings. Those aberrations may have horrified Beatriz, but they were what Irene remembered with greatest tenderness.

  Eusebio Beltrán was the youngest of a family of wealthy planters, considered by his brothers to be hopelessly incorrigible because of his bent toward extravagance and his unrestrained joie de vivre, in contrast to the avarice and melancholy of his family. As soon as their parents died, the brothers divided the inheritance, gave Eusebio his share, and hoped they would never hear from him again. He sold his lands and went abroad, where in a few years he spent his last penny in princely diversions befitting his reputation as a ne’er-do-well. He returned to his native land through the mercy of the Consulate, in itself enough to discredit him forever in the eyes of any marriageable girl, but Beatriz Alcántara fell in love with his aristocratic bearing, his surname, and the aura that surrounded him. She was from a middle-class family, and from the time she was a little girl her one ambition had been to ascend the social ladder. Her capital consisted of her beauty, the artifice of her manners, and a few English and French phrases misused with such assurance that she gave the impression of being fluent in those languages. A veneer of culture served her well in social gatherings, and her skill in dressing and grooming earned her the reputation of being elegant. Eusebio Beltrán was for all practical purposes ruined; he had hit bottom in many aspects of his life but was confident that this was merely temporary, for he had the notion that people from good families always kept their heads above water. Besides, he was a liberal. The ideology of the liberals in those days could be summed up in a few words: help your friends, screw your enemies, and in all other cases be just. His friends did help him, and shortly he was playing golf in the most exclusive club and enjoying a season ticket at the Municipal Theater and a box at the Hippodrome. With the backing of his charm and his air of British nobility, he found associates in a variety of enterprises. He began to live opulently because it seemed to him foolish to live any other way, and he married Beatriz Alcántara because he had a weakness for beautiful women. The second time he invited her out, she asked him, without preamble, what his intentions were, saying she did not want to waste her time. She was twenty-five and did not intend to spend months in a pointless flirtation, since she was interested only in finding a husband. Her frankness greatly amused Eusebio, but when she refused to appear again in his company, he realized that she was serious. It took him one minute to yield to the impulse to propose matrimony, and a lifetime was not long enough to regret it. They had a daughter, Irene, who inherited the angelic bemusement of her paternal grandmother and the constant good humor of her father. While his daughter was growing up, Eusebio Beltrán had undertaken a number of business dealings, some profitable and others openly absurd. He was a man gifted with unlimited imagination, of which the prime example was his coconut-knocking machine. One day he had read in a magazine that picking this fruit by hand greatly increased its price. A native was chosen to climb the palm tree, pick the coconut, and descend. Climbing and descending consumed valuable time, and some pickers fell from the high branches, causing unforeseen expenses. Beltrán was determined to find a solution. He spent three days locked in his office, tormented by the problem of the coconuts, about which, to say the least, he had little firsthand knowledge, since in his travels he had avoided the tropics and in his home exotic foods were not eaten. But he learned. He studied the diameter and weight of the fruit, the climate and terrain suitable for its cultivation, the season for harvesting, the time for maturation, and other details. He devoted hours to drawing plans, and the result of all his sleeplessness was the invention of a machine capable of gathering a surprising number of coconuts per hour. Ignoring the mockery of family and friends, who knew as little as he about coconuts in their natural state, having only seen them adorning the turbans of mambo dancers or shredded over wedding cakes, he went to the Registry and patented a rampant tower outfitted with a retractable arm. Eusebio Beltrán had prophesied that one day his coconut-knocking machine would be useful, and time proved him right.

  That was a trying period for Beatriz and her husband. Eusebio wanted to make a clean break and remove himself forever from his nagging wife, who was always harrying him with the same old tune, but she refused, with little reason other than the desire to torment him and to prevent his establishing a new relationship with one of her rivals. She argued that they needed to provide a stable home environment for Irene. Before causing my daughter any pain, she said, you will have to walk over my dead body. Her husband was at the point of doing just that, but tried instead to buy his freedom. On three occasions he offered Beatriz a large sum of money if she would allow him to leave in peace, and three times she accepted but at the last minute, when the lawyers had prepared the papers and all that was missing was the binding signature, she reneged. Their constant battles fortified her hatred. For this, and a thousand sentimental reasons, Irene did not weep for her father. She had no doubt that he had fled to free himself of his attachments, his debts, and his wife.

  When Francisco Leal knocked at the door, Irene came to welcome him accompanied by Cleo, who was barking around her feet. She had prepared for the trip with a shawl over her shoulders, a kerchief over her head, and her tape recorder in her hands.

  “Do you know where this saint lives?” he asked.

  “In Los Riscos, an hour from here.”

  They left the dog in the house, climbed on the motorcycle, and set out. It was a brilliant, warm, and cloudless morning.

  * * *

  They rode across the entire city, through the shaded streets of the exclusive neighborhoods with their lush trees and lordly mansions, the gray, noisy middle-class zone, and the wide cordons of misery. As they flew along, Francisco Leal thought about Irene, whom he could feel pressed against his back. The first time he had seen her, eleven months before that fateful spring, he thought she had escaped from a tale about pirates and princesses; to him she seemed a marvel that no one else could perceive. At that time he had been looking for work outside his profession. His private consulting room was always empty, producing large expenses and no earnings. He had also been suspended from his appointment at the University when the School of Psychology was closed for being a hotbed of pernicious ideas. He had spent months applying at every school, hospital, and industry, with no result except growing discouragement, until he was convinced that his years of study and his foreign doctorate would be of no use in the new society. It was not that suddenly all human wants had been resolved and the country peopled with happy citizens but, rather, that the rich did not suffer from problems of basic existence and the others, even though they might need him desperately, could not pay for the luxury of psychological therapy. They gritted their teeth and endured in silence.

  The life of Francisco Leal, bright with good omens in adolescence, seemed, as he completed his second decade, a failure in the eyes of any impartial observer, and even more in his own. For a while, he drew consolation and strength from his clandestine practice, but soon it became essential for him to contribute to the family income. Stringency in the Leal household was rapidly becoming poverty. He managed to keep his emotions under control until it was clear that all doors were closed to him; then one night his serenity deserted him and he broke down in the kitchen as his mother was preparing dinner. Seeing him in that state, she dried her hands on her apron, removed the stew from the stove, and put her arms around him as she had when he was a boy.

  “Psychology isn’t the only thing in the world, son. Wipe your nose and look for something else,” she said.

  Until then it had not occurred to Francisco to change careers, but Hilda’
s words signaled a new direction. He put his self-pity aside and reviewed his skills, hoping to find something productive but at the same time agreeable. He decided on photography, in which he was minimally skilled. Years before, he had bought a Japanese camera with all the accessories and he thought the moment had come to dust it off and put it to use. He placed a few prints in a portfolio, scoured the telephone book for places to apply, and so found himself at the door of a women’s magazine.

  The editorial offices occupied the top floor of an old-fashioned building with the name of the founder of the publishing firm chiseled in the portico in gilded letters. During the so-called boom in culture, when there had been an attempt to involve everyone in the fiesta of knowledge and the vice of information and more pages of print were sold than loaves of bread, the owners had decided to redecorate the building to be in tune with the delirious enthusiasm rocking the country. They had begun on the ground floor, carpeting it wall-to-wall, adding exquisite woodwork, replacing the shabby furnishings with glass-and-aluminum desks, removing windows to open up skylights, closing stairwells to provide niches in which to embed safes, locating electronic eyes that opened and closed doors by magic. The diagram of the edifice was turning into a labyrinth when suddenly the rules of the game were changed. The redecorating never reached the fifth floor, which had kept its furnishings of uncertain color, prehistoric typewriters, archival filing cabinets, and disconsolate stains on the ceiling. These modest appointments had little relation to the luxury weekly magazine edited there. From its covers smiled scantily clad beauty queens, and across its slick pages spilled a rainbow of colors and daring feminist articles. Because of the censorship of recent years, however, black patches now covered naked breasts and euphemisms designated forbidden concepts like abortion, ass, and freedom.