Violeta, p.10
Violeta, page 10
That’s how the six Del Valle children were reunited for the first time since our father’s funeral. Ten years had passed and I hardly recognized the four of them, who’d now become fathers several times over, respected members of society, and conservative gentlemen of good economic standing. They remembered me as a little girl in pigtails peering out the window of a train, and now standing before them was a woman of twenty-one. Affection must be cultivated, Camilo; it has to be watered and tended like a plant, but we’d let ours dry up.
We found my mother unconscious, shrunken, all skin and bones. I thought we’d gotten there too late, that she’d died before I’d been able to tell her that I loved her, and I began to feel the stomach cramps that always plague me in my worst moments of anguish. My mother’s skin was a bluish color, her lips and fingers purple, as the asphyxia she’d been battling for years was finally getting the better of her. Her breathing was labored and irregular; she would go a few minutes without inhaling and just when we thought we’d lost her she’d gasp desperately for air. The aunts had moved her bed into the little sitting room, after removing the table and sofa, so that they could attend to her more easily.
When he heard what was happening, Fabian showed up with one of his sisters’ husbands, who was a doctor. It would’ve been impossible to move my mother; there were a few clinics in the area, but the closest hospital was in Sacramento. The doctor diagnosed her with advanced emphysema; there was nothing more to be done for her, he said, the patient had only a few days left to live. We all agreed that watching my mother suffer like that for days would be too terrible. As a last recourse, when Aunt Pía’s magic hands could do nothing to quell her sister’s agonizing pain, she called for Yaima to come.
Abel and Lucinda brought Yaima. She’d descended from a long line of medicine women who had passed down the gift of healing, clairvoyant dreams, and supernatural revelations, which she’d polished through practice and good intention. “Some use their power for bad. Others ask for money to heal, which kills the magic,” she said. She was the link between the earth and the spirit world, with great knowledge of plants and shamanic rituals, and she could banish negative energy and restore health. She ordered my brothers out of the house and, surrounded by only my aunts, Lucinda, Facunda, and me, she began the work of helping María Gracia transition to the Other Side, just as a child being born is aided in their passage to This Side.
The Rivas property had finally been connected to the electric grid three years prior, when we illegally ran a cable from the power lines. Now Yaima had us unplug the lamps and the radio; she lit candles, which she placed in a circle around the bed; and she filled the air with sage, to cleanse the energy in the room.
“The earth is our Mama. She gives us life, to her we pray,” she said.
With a black blindfold over her eyes she slowly ran her fingers over the patient to examine her.
“She can see the invisible with her hands,” Facunda said.
Then Yaima took off the blindfold, pulled some powders from her bag, mixed them with a bit of water, and fed the paste to my mother on a spoon. She was unable to swallow much, but some of the concoction made it into her mouth. Yaima picked up her drum, the same one she’d played in her hut the first time I’d met her, and began beating it rhythmically as she chanted in her language. Facunda explained that she was calling on the Celestial Father, Mother Earth, and the spirits of the dying woman’s ancestors to come and retrieve her.
The drum ritual lasted for hours, with a single interruption to relight the sage smudge, purify the air with smoke, and give the patient another dose of the medicinal preparation. At first, Aunts Pía and Pilar prayed their Christian prayers; Lucinda observed carefully, trying to remember every detail for her notebook; Facunda echoed Yaima’s words in the native language; and I, curled over with stomach cramps, held my mother’s hand. After a little while in that closed space filled with smoke, the sound of the drum and the presence of death began to make us feel dizzy and dazed. No one moved. Each drumbeat reverberated through my body, until I finally surrendered to the pain and went into a strange stupor.
I fell into a trance—there’s no other explanation for that flight of time and space. It’s impossible to describe the experience of dissolving into the black void of the universe, detached from the body, feelings, and memory, unbound by the umbilical cord that tethers us to reality. There was neither present nor past, and at the same time I was part of everything in existence. I can’t say it was a spiritual journey, because all notion of the soul also disappeared. I suppose it was something like dying, and that I will feel it again soon when I reach my final hour. I returned to consciousness as the hypnotic sound of the drum finally ceased.
When the ceremony was over, Yaima, as exhausted as the other women, accepted the mate that Facunda offered her, and then she sank down into a corner to rest. The smoke started to dissipate, and I saw that my mother was in a deep sleep, free from her torturous asphyxia. For the rest of the night her breathing was imperceptible and effortless; on a few occasions I placed a mirror under her nose to check that she was still alive. At four o’clock in the morning Yaima beat the drum three times and announced that María Gracia had gone to see the Father. I was lying on the bed beside my mother, holding her hand tightly, but her transition had been so gentle that I hadn’t even realized she’d passed away.
The six Del Valle children took my mother’s coffin by train to the capital, to place her beside her husband in the family crypt. For months, I was unable to mourn her loss. I thought about her often with a hard lump in my chest, going over the years she had been in my life and blaming her for the perpetual despondency, for not having loved me enough and for having done so little to connect with me. I was angry over the opportunities we missed to be mother and daughter.
One afternoon at the office, busy with some orders, I felt the air suddenly chill, and when I looked up to check if the window was open, I saw my mother standing beside the door, wearing her traveling coat and carrying her purse in her hand, as if she were waiting for a train at the station. I didn’t move or breathe so as not to scare her away.
“Mom, Mom, don’t go,” I silently begged, but an instant later she had disappeared.
I began to cry uncontrollably, the torrent of tears purging me from within until there was nothing left of the bitterness and blame and bad memories. Ever since then, the spirit of my mother has trod lightly around me.
9
Proper mourning for the death of my mother, along with the outbreak of the Second World War, delayed my marriage.
Fabian’s profession was not highly valued since agriculture was stuck in the previous century. On most farms owned by European immigrants they imported machinery from the United States, but small farmers like Bruno Rivas still plowed using mules or borrowed oxen. The cattle they owned were like our Clotilde and Leonor, patient, good-natured cows, but without any delusions of grandeur.
In that province, veterinarians worked like door-to-door salesmen, visiting farms to vaccinate and tend to sick or injured animals; no one got rich doing it. Fabian didn’t do the work for the money, animals were his calling. I was used to a simple existence and we had enough for a certain level of comfort, especially with the help of the Schmidt-Engler clan, now resigned to our inevitable marriage. Fabian’s father gave him several acres, just as he had done for his other children, and José Antonio offered to build one of our rustic homes, which I designed with future children in mind.
The news of the Second World War in Europe was alarming but distant. Despite U.S. pressure on us to declare war on the Axis powers, our country remained neutral out of self-preservation; we were very vulnerable to invasion by sea and would never be able to defend ourselves in the case of attack by the fearsome German submarines. There were also the many German and Italian communities to consider, and even a vocal Nazi party, whose members marched down the streets waving flags and proudly bearing swastikas on their armbands. There were no Japanese, as far as I remember.
The Schmidt-Englers, like all the Germans in the region, were sympathetic to the Axis powers, but avoided making enemies of Allied supporters. Fabian stayed silent; conflict was not his forte. I didn’t understand the details or reasons for the war, and it didn’t matter to me who won, despite the fact that my brother and the Rivases had tried to indoctrinate me against Hitler and Fascism. The worst atrocities of the concentration camps and systematic genocide would remain unknown to us until the end of the war, when photos were published and movies about the horrors released.
José Antonio and the Rivases followed the movements of the troops, which they marked with pins on a map of Europe, and it was obvious that the Germans were devouring the continent one bite at a time. In 1941 Japan bombed an American base at Pearl Harbor and President Roosevelt declared war against the Axis powers. U.S. intervention was the only hope of stopping the Germans.
While in Europe men were killing each other, reducing ancient cities to rubble and ashes, leaving millions of widows, orphans, and refugees in their wake, Fabian was occupied with artificial insemination. Of animals, of course, not people. He didn’t come up with the idea—it was something that had been done for many years with sheep and pigs—but he had the notion to try it with cattle. Though I’ll spare you the details, it’s enough to say that the procedure seems terribly disrespectful to the cows. I don’t want to even think about how he obtained the bulls’ crucial contribution. Before Fabian became successful with his experiments, reproduction occurred according to the laws of nature, a combination of instinct and luck. The bull mounted his girlfriend and, in general, a calf resulted. The best bulls were rented out; the farmer had to transport them, provide a stable, and watch them closely, because they tended to have bad personalities. That explained why the cows often put up a fight.
Fabian researched a way of preserving the semen of pure-bred animals for several days, which allowed him to inseminate hundreds of cows across many miles without having to transport the bull, as long as he hurried. Now the semen is kept for years and travels around the world, so a newborn calf in Paraguay might descend from a long-dead bull in Texas, but back then that would’ve sounded like science fiction.
Fabian had the support of his father, the only person who immediately understood the advantages of the project, thanks to the army of cows at his dairy farm. They set up a laboratory in an old warehouse, where he developed the technique and the necessary implements. Over the months and years to come he would live his life obsessed with insemination, which to me seemed pornographic, dreaming of its many possibilities: racehorses, pedigreed dogs and cats, exotic beasts at the zoo, or animals in danger of extinction. I admit that I often teased him about his work, though he remained dedicated as ever and unaffected by my sarcasm. The only thing he asked of me was not to ridicule him in front of other people.
I stopped laughing when I saw how his procedure could benefit my father-in-law and other farmers. For many years Fabian was the best-known vet in the country; he was interviewed by the press, gave conferences, wrote books, traveled to tutor farmworkers, and improved the cattle stock of several Latin American countries. His biggest problem, as he often explained, was finding a way to preserve the semen for long periods of time, something he finally achieved in the sixties, I think. Fabian’s prestige didn’t translate to money; without his father’s financial help he wouldn’t have even been able to continue his research.
Despite the demands of his work, which left him little time for other things, Fabian continued to ask me, with his German tenacity, to marry him. What were we waiting for? I was twenty-two and had spent two years in Sacramento out of the nest, as he said. But the notion of being out of the nest was a joke; I lived and worked with my brother, who guarded me like a warden, and Sacramento was a sleepy city of prudish, intolerant, gossipy people. I’d had more intellectual stimulation on the Rivas farm than I did in the provincial capital.
My former governess and Teresa Rivas were lovers at a time when homosexuality was a privilege reserved for aristocrats and artists, the former because they practiced it with discretion, like one of my distant relatives whose name I won’t mention, and the latter because they flaunted social norms and religious precepts. There were few openly gay figures: a journalist, a world-famous poetess, a few actors and writers, but there were many more living in secret. Because of machismo, it was more tolerated among women than men.
At first, Miss Taylor and Teresa Rivas lived, poor as mice, in Teresa’s attic apartment, but Miss Taylor soon got work as an English teacher at a girls’ school, where she’d work for twenty years without anyone ever questioning her private life. To the eyes of the world she was a spinster, asexual as an amoeba. She didn’t earn much, but she also gave private lessons, and that permitted her to rent a little house in a middle-class neighborhood, where they could finally set up the piano. As soon as he was able to, José Antonio began helping them out, since Miss Taylor’s salary was barely enough to fund her modest lifestyle.
Teresa Rivas quit her job at the telephone company to devote herself full-time to the feminist cause. She worked with organizations that furthered the rights of women: the vote; custody of children, which before had been exclusive to the father; ability to earn their own wages and labor protection; defense against violence—basically she worked toward many fundamental changes to the law that we take for granted today. She also promoted the right to abortion and divorce, which the Catholic Church condemned in the most incendiary of terms. At that time hell still existed. Teresa said that until men gave birth and put up with husbands, as women do, they should not have an opinion about—let alone decide on—abortion and divorce. She didn’t believe that men had the right to an opinion, much less to pass laws on the female body, since they’d never know the exhaustion of gestation, the pain of labor, and the eternal bondage of motherhood.
These ideas were so radical that Teresa would regularly be thrown in jail for publishing her beliefs, creating public disturbances, inciting strikes, trespassing on Congress, and, on one occasion, assaulting the president of the nation during a public appearance. The papers said that a deranged feminist had thrown a ripe tomato at the president at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for a powdered milk factory. Teresa alleged that it was a U.S. conspiracy to replace the miracle of breast milk with prepackaged garbage. She sat in jail for four months, until José Antonio finally managed to get her out.
It was the highlight of our year when these two women came to visit. They brought news of the capital and progressive ideas from the rest of the world, which produced in us a mixture of horror and admiration. I guess at some point José Antonio accepted the fact that Miss Taylor was never going to marry him, but I doubt he ever understood the real reason. At the time, none of us suspected anything more than an extraordinary friendship between the women.
The sustained efforts of Teresa Rivas and other women like her gradually changed our laws and customs. We move at a turtle’s pace, but over my long life I can attest to how far we’ve come. I think that Teresa and Miss Taylor would be proud of what they’d achieved, and they’d continue the fight for what has yet to be done. No one gives you anything in life, Teresa would say, you have to take it by force, and as soon as you get careless they’ll take it back.
I never discussed these issues with my mother and my aunts, or with Fabian, much less his family. Behind my boyfriend’s back I read the books and magazines that Teresa gave me and talked about them only with Lucinda and Abel, who were almost as radical as their daughter. I felt a mute rebelliousness, a repressed rage, when I thought about marrying, having children, becoming a housewife, and living a banal life in my husband’s shadow.
“Don’t get married if you’re not sure you can spend the rest of your life with Fabian,” Miss Taylor said to me.
“He’s waited so long for me. If I don’t get married soon, I’ll have to break off this eternal engagement.”
“That’s preferable to getting married if you’re not sure, Violeta.”
“I’m about to turn twenty-five. I’m more than old enough to get married and have kids. Fabian is a nice man and he loves me a lot. He’ll make a very good husband.”
“And what about you? Will you make a good wife? Think about it, Violeta. I don’t believe you’re in love. You’ve always been so headstrong, you should listen to your instincts.”
Miss Taylor’s doubts echoed my own, but I was engaged to Fabian, we were already a couple in everyone’s eyes, and I could see no valid reason for standing up a good man like him. I had the notion that without him I’d be condemned to a life of spinsterhood. I didn’t have any talents or abilities that might mark a path different from the one a woman was expected to follow. Instead of motivating me to take my destiny into my own hands, that rebelliousness that Miss Taylor had mentioned felt like a burden. I wanted to be like her and Teresa, but the price was too high. I didn’t dare to trade security for freedom.
Fabian and I were married in 1945. It had been an almost-five-year engagement, supposedly platonic, but by then I’d long since lost my virginity, unknowingly, in one of our entanglements. I discovered it later that night when I realized my underwear was stained with blood even though I wasn’t menstruating, but I kept quiet, saying nothing to Fabian. Don’t ask me why, Camilo. Our skirmishes continued as always: We would get each other all riled up, half-undressed, feeling guilty, uncomfortable, and fearful, only for him to finish in shame and leave me frustrated. Once I moved to Sacramento, he stayed in a hotel when he came to visit and we could’ve easily met there if he would’ve allowed it. In the bed of a nice hotel room we could’ve made love using condoms, which any man could get hold of. They wouldn’t sell them to women. We would’ve had to be very discreet, because if José Antonio had suspected anything he would’ve killed me, as he threatened more than once. It was my duty to protect his and the family’s honor, he would say, but when I asked him what his honor had to do with my virginity he got angry.
