The Stories of Eva Luna

It is a prophetic moment; it is our entire existence, all we have lived and have yet to live, all times in one time, without beginning or end. From an indefinite distance I am looking at that picture, which includes me. I am spectator and protagonist. I am in shadow, veiled by the fog of a translucent curtain. I know I am myself, but I am also this person observing from outside.

Her mother was transformed into a round, rosy, moaning, opulent siren, an undulating sea anemone, all tentacles and suckers, all mouth and hands and legs and orifices, rolling and turning and cleaving to the large body of Bernal, who by contrast seemed rigid and clumsy, moving spasmodically like a piece of wood tossed by inexplicable high winds. Until that moment the girl had never seen a man naked, and she was taken aback by the essential differences. His masculinity seemed brutal to her, and it was a long time before she could overcome her terror and force herself to look.

[…] he told her how it had all been a terrible mistake […] and would she please take pity on him and forgive him, and maybe then he could come to his senses, because for what seemed a lifetime he had been consumed by a constant burning desire for her that fired his blood and poisoned his mind. She stared at him, speechless, not knowing what to answer. What wicked girl was he talking about? She had left her childhood far behind, and the pain of that first rejected love was locked in some sealed compartment of memory. She did not remember any particular Thursday in her past.

The midwife advised [Clarisa] that in all probability she would give birth to another abnormal child, but Clarisa mollified her with the argument that God maintains a certain equilibrium in the universe, and just as He creates some things twisted, He creates others straight; for every virtue there is a sin, for every joy an affliction, for every evil a good, and so on, for as the wheel of life turns through the centuries, everything evens out. The pendulum swings back and forth with inexorable precision, she said.

[Hortensia] was, in fact, turning into a subterranean creature. […] Had she a mirror, she would have been terrified by her appearance; as she could not see herself, however, she was not witness to her deterioration: she was unaware of the scales sprouting from her skin, or the silkworms that had spun a nest in her long, tangled hair […] Nor did she realize that her legs, once graceful and firm, were growing twisted as they adjusted to moving in that confined space, to crawling, nor that her toenails were thickening like an animal’s hooves, her bones changing into tubes of glass, her belly caving in, and a hump forming on her back. Only her hands, forever occupied with the psaltery, maintained their shape and size, although her fingers had forgotten the melodies they had once known and now extracted from the instrument the unvoiced sob trapped in her breast.

Every Sunday [Amadeo Peralta] sat at the head of a long table occupied by his sons and nephews, cronies and accomplices, and special guests such as politicians and generals whom he treated with a hearty cordiality tinged with sufficient arrogance to remind everyone who was master here. Behind his back, people whispered about his victims, about how many he had ruined or caused to disappear, about bribes to authorities; there was talk that he had made half his fortune from smuggling, but no one was disposed to seek the proof of his transgressions. It was also rumored that Peralta kept a woman prisoner in a cellar. That aspect of his black deeds was repeated with more conviction even than stories of his crooked dealings; in fact, many people knew about it, and with time it became an open secret.

The names of persons and living creatures demand respect, because when we speak them we touch their heart and become a part of their life force. This is how we blood kinsmen greet each other. I cannot understand the ease with which the white ones call each others’ names, with no fear; not only does it show a lack of respect, it can also lead to grave danger. I have noted that these persons speak unthinkingly, not realizing that to speak is to be. Word and gesture are man’s thought.

She let herself be caressed, drops of sweat in the small of her back, her body exuding the scent of burnt sugar, silent, as if she divined that a single sound could nudge its way into memory and destroy everything, reducing to dust this instant in which he was a person like any other […] just a man who had spoken to her in the street and begun to walk with her, aimlessly, commenting on the weather and traffic, watching the crowd, with the slightly forced confidence of her countrymen in this foreign land, a man without sorrow or anger, without guilt, pure as ice, who merely wanted to spend the day with her […] talking of old nostalgias, of how life had been when both were growing up in the same city, in the same barrio […] there in the now forbidden country.

White scars circled her wrists, too. For a timeless instant he stared at them, unmoving, until he understood everything, love, and saw her strapped to the electric grid, and then they could embrace, and weep, hungry for pacts and confidences, for forbidden words, for promises of tomorrow, shared, finally, the most hidden secret.

The tenor indicated to the musicians that they should continue playing the same waltz, because he realized that with the last note the captain would wake from his reverie and the memory of niña Eloisa would disappear forever. Deeply moved, the elderly customers of The Little Heidelberg sat motionless in their chairs until finally La Mexicana, her arrogance transformed into affection and tenderness, stood and walked quietly toward the trembling hands of El Capitán, to dance with him.

A week later Claveles ran into one of the volunteers in the market where she had gone to sell some of her grandfather’s sculptures, and again she listened to the same arguments: that an opportunity like this would not come a second time, that people adopt healthy offspring, not those with defects; that those people up North had noble sentiments, and she should think it over carefully, because for the rest of her life she would regret having denied her son such advantages and condemned him to a life of suffering and poverty.

“But why do they only want sick children?” Claveles asked.

“Because these gringos are near saints. Our organization is concerned only with the most distressing cases. It would be easy for us to place normal children, but we’re trying to help the ones who need most assistance.”

It was Riad Halabí who the following morning was at the head of the crowd that marched from the cemetery to the place where the boy had fallen. All the inhabitants of Agua Santa had spent that day hauling mangoes, which they threw through the windows until the house was filled from floor to ceiling. After a few weeks, the sun had fermented the fruit, which burst open, spilling a viscous juice and impregnating the walls with a golden blood, a sweetish pus, that transformed the dwelling into a fossil of prehistoric dimensions, an enormous beast in process of putrefaction, tormented by the infinite diligence of the larvae and mosquitoes of decomposition.

The next day the inhabitants of Agua Santa returned to their usual chores exalted by a magnificent complicity, by a secret kept by good neighbors, one they would guard with absolute zeal and pass down for many years as a legend of justice, until the death of the schoolteacher Inés freed us, and now I can tell the story.

Such lavish displays had afforded the Toros a degree of respectability, because by then the line that divided the social classes was vanishing; people were flocking into the country from every corner of the globe, drawn by the miasma of petroleum. Growth in the capital was uncontrolled, fortunes were made and lost in the blink of an eye, and it was no longer possible to ascertain the ancestry of every individual. Even so, the old families kept their distance from the Toros, despite the fact they themselves had descended from other immigrants whose only merit was to have reached these shores a half-century sooner.

There are all kinds of stories. Some are born with the telling; their substance is language, and before someone puts them into words they are but a hint of an emotion, a caprice of mind, an image, or an intangible recollection. […] And then there are secret stories that remain hidden in the shadows of the mind; they are like living organisms, they grow roots and tentacles, they become covered with excrescences and parasites, and with time are transformed into the matter of nightmares. To exorcise the demons of memory, it is sometimes necessary to tell them as a story.

Peace, governing, and power turned Céspedes into a composed and hard-working man. With the passing of time, memories of the civil war faded, and people began to address him as don Tadeo. He bought a hacienda on the far side of the mountains, dedicated himself to administering justice, and was elected mayor. If it had not been for the tireless ghost of Dulce Rosa Orellano, he might have achieved a measure of happiness, but all the women he met along his path, all the women he took in his arms in search of consolation, all the loves he pursued through the years—all had the face of the Queen of Carnival. To add to his torment, from time to time he heard her name in the verses of wandering poets, making it impossible to eradicate her from his heart.

He did not have to go far in search of Dulce Rosa, because he had always known he would find her in the house of her misfortune, and it was there he drove. By then, good highways had been built across the country, and distances seemed much shorter. The landscape had changed in twenty-five years, but as he turned the last corner of the hill, the Orellano villa appeared, just as he remembered seeing it before his band stormed the hill. There stood the solid walls of river rock he had destroyed with charges of dynamite; there were the dark wood beams he had set fire to; there the trees from which he had strung the bodies of the Senator’s men; there the patio where he had massacred the dogs.

Legally, Luis was the administrator of the hacienda, but in reality it was Analía’s uncle Eugenio who fulfilled that function, since Luis was bored by the details of country life. After the midday meal, when father and son installed themselves in the library to drink cognac and play dominoes, Analía would hear her uncle making decisions about investments, herds, crops, and harvests. On the rare occasions when she dared interrupt to offer an opinion, the two men listened with professed attention, assuring her they would keep her suggestions in mind, but then did as they pleased. At such times Analía would gallop through the pastures to the foot of the mountain, wishing she had been a man.

When five centuries earlier the bold renegades from Spain with their bone-weary horses and heavy armor candescent beneath an American sun stepped upon the shores of Quinaroa, Indians had been living and dying in that same place for several thousand years. The conquistadors announced with heralds and banners the “discovery” of a new land, declared it a possession of a remote emperor, set in place the first cross, and named the place San Jerónimo, a name unpronounceable to the natives. […] In the years that followed, the Indians who had not died in slavery or as a result of the different tortures improvised to entrench the new gods, or as victims of unknown illnesses, scattered deep into the jungle and gradually lost even the name of their own people.

Events took a sudden turn when a black man digging a well along the coast drove his pick deep into the ground and a stream of petroleum spurted over his face. Toward the end of the Great War there was a widely held notion that ours was a prosperous country, when in truth most of the inhabitants still squished mud between their toes. The fact was that the gold flowed only into the coffers of El Benefactor and his retinue, but there was hope that someday a little would spill over for the people. Two decades passed under this democratic totalitarianism, as the President for Life called his government, during which any hint of subversion would have been crushed in the name of his greater glory.

The remainder of the mansion was left unguarded, in the possession of the incorporeal Indians who had divided the rooms with invisible lines and taken up residence there like mischievous spirits. They had survived the passage of history, adapting to changes when they were inevitable, and when necessary taking refuge in a dimension of their own. In the Palace they at last found refuge; there they noiselessly made love, gave birth without celebration, and died without tears. They learned so thoroughly all the twists and turns of that marble maze that they were able to exist comfortably in the same space with the guards and servants, never so much as brushing against them, as if they existed in a different time.

[Marcia] was dazzled by the landscape. She endured the humid heat and the mosquitoes as if she did not feel them, absorbed by a nature that seemed to welcome her in its embrace. She had the impression that she had been there before, perhaps in dreams or another life, that she belonged there, that until that moment she had been a stranger in the world, and that her instinct had dictated every step she had taken, including that of leaving her husband’s house to follow a trembling old man, for the sole purpose of leading her here. Even before she saw the Summer Palace, she knew that it would be her last home. When the edifice finally rose out of the foliage, encircled by palm trees and shimmering in the sun, Marcia breathed a deep sigh of relief, like a shipwrecked sailor when he sees home port.

I believe that the lens of the camera had a strange effect on [Rolf]; it was as if it transported him to a different time from which he could watch events without actually participating in them. When I knew him better, I came to realize that this fictive distance seemed to protect him from his own emotions.

That night, imperceptibly, the unyielding floodgates that had contained Rolf Carlé’s past for so many years began to open, and the torrent of all that had lain hidden in the deepest and most secret layers of memory poured out, leaving before it the obstacles that had blocked his consciousness for so long. He could not tell it all to Acuzena; she perhaps did not know there was a world beyond the sea or time previous to her own; she was not capable of imagining Europe in the years of the war.

Then [the President] asked to be taken to see Acuzena, the little girl the whole world had seen. He waved to her with a limp statesman’s hand, and microphones recorded his emotional voice and paternal tone as he told her that her courage had served as an example to the nation. Rolf Carlé interrupted to ask for a pump, and the President assured him that he personally would attend to the matter.