Violeta, p.15
Violeta, page 15
Julián moved his home base to Miami, but I refused to abandon my job with Rustic Homes and Seagull Air, my brother, my friends, my house, and my lifestyle in Sacramento, to go live in a hotel like a tourist in a city where I didn’t know anyone. If we’d gone, the kids and I would’ve been all alone, since Julián spent more time in the air than on land. We visited him regularly, and during those trips he lavished us with attention and gifts, until another mission forced him to once again say goodbye or we had one of our legendary fights, followed by an indecent reconciliation. On one occasion, when I asked Juan Martín what he wanted for his birthday, he whispered in my ear, “For you to leave Dad for good.” He’d have to ask me several more times.
13
The 1960 earthquake caught me off guard. I was with both of my children at Santa Clara—the Rivas farm was still my refuge, my favorite place for summer vacation and relaxation, far from Julián, who never joined us on those trips. Of the old inhabitants the only ones left were Aunt Pilar, Torito, and Facunda. The Rivases had died a few years prior and we missed them terribly. On their own initiative, the inhabitants of Nahuel installed a bronze plaque in their honor at the train station. You should go see it, Camilo, it must still be there, although there are no more trains; everyone travels by bus now.
The farm belonged to Teresa, the only heir because her brother, Roberto, ceded his inheritance, but since she couldn’t maintain it, I covered the expenses. We rented both of the fields to the Moreau family, who had planted vineyards; there was only one cow left, the horses and mules had been replaced by bicycles and a truck, and the pigsty was reduced to a single pig, which Torito cared for like a daughter, since her piglets were his only source of income. We still had chickens, dogs, and cats. Facunda had a modern gas stove and two brick ovens to make her cakes and empanadas, which she sold in Nahuel and other nearby towns.
I never met the husband Facunda claimed to have. In fact, since no one had ever seen him, we thought she’d made him up. Her two daughters lived with their grandparents while she worked until they were old enough to go off on their own. One of them, Narcisa, had three babies in five years, each so different that it was obvious they didn’t share the same father. “That girl turned out with loose legs,” Facunda sighed as she described the parade of men who filed through the girl’s life.
When Uncle Bruno died and the house was left mostly empty, Facunda brought Narcisa and the babies to live there, so she could raise her daughter’s kids just as her parents had raised hers. Torito stood in for the fathers that those children didn’t have, even though he was old enough to be their grandfather. He must’ve been around fifty-five, but his age was only noticeable in the teeth he’d lost and his hunched way of walking. He continued taking his long trips to “get acquainted” and by that point I think he must’ve had a detailed map of the province and beyond etched in his memory.
Facunda mourned the loss of Uncle Bruno as if she were his mother, and I grieved for him like a daughter. The man had adopted me in heart and soul as soon as I arrived at the farm in the time of our Exile, and he showed me unconditional love, just as Torito had. Every Saturday, Facunda took flowers to his grave beside Aunt Pía’s, and that’s where I’d like you to bury me, Camilo. I don’t want to be burned up and have my ashes thrown around everywhere. I’d prefer to let my bones fertilize the soil. Did you know that these days you can bury a body in a biodegradable coffin or wrapped in a blanket? I like that idea; I bet it’s cheap.
Aunt Pilar was broken by Uncle Bruno’s death. She said they’d become like twin brother and sister, but I prefer to think they were lovers. When I tried to get the full story out of Facunda and Torito, they responded with evasive comments that confirmed my suspicions. Cheers to them. Aunt Pilar seemed older than her seventy-seven years, she walked with a cane because her knees hurt, and she was no longer interested in people, animals, or the land. That woman, who had once been so vivacious and optimistic, turned inward. She spent hours in silence, with her hands idle, staring off into space. More than once I caught her talking to Uncle Bruno. When I suggested that we install a phone at Santa Clara, she responded, with great conviction, that if the apparatus couldn’t communicate with the dead, it was of no damn use to her.
That summer Teresa and Miss Taylor arrived with several trunks and a caged parrot to stay for a while and get some fresh air, they said. The truth was that Teresa had been placed in solitary confinement for her actions in support of the Communist Party, and eighteen months locked in a cell had wrecked her health. She was skinny and gray, with a consumptive cough and dizzy spells that left her disoriented. We went to meet them at the station and Torito had to carry her off the train because the long trip had completely drained her. They’d refused to let me fly them down on one of Seagull Air’s seaplanes, as I’d offered.
That night, after the welcome feast Facunda prepared for them, Miss Taylor confessed through tears that Teresa was slowly dying. She had advanced lung cancer.
For my son, the weeks we spent each year at Santa Clara were paradise. He seemed miraculously cured of his allergies and asthma and spent his days outside with Torito, who taught him how to drive the truck and take care of the piglets. We’d lose him for hours to his books, lying on the floor of the Birdcage, which was still standing with its sign on the door prohibiting entrance to persons of both sexes. “Leave me here at Santa Clara, Mom,” Juan Martín begged me every year, and I silently filled in the rest of the sentence, “far away from my dad.” In adolescence Juan Martín gave up trying to please Julián, and the uneasy admiration he’d had for him in childhood transformed into dread. He was scared of his father.
Nieves, on the other hand, hated the farm. On one occasion she complained to Julián that Aunt Pilar was a mean old lady and Torito was a big retard, which elicited a guffaw from her father. I tried to send her to her room for being so disrespectful, but her father stopped me, saying the girl was right: Pilar was a witch and Torito was an idiot. But despite her impertinence and cynicism, my daughter had many admirable qualities. When I think of her now, I see a bird with colorful feathers and a raspy voice, happy, graceful, ready to take flight and leave everything behind, untethered.
Her mettle was proven the day of the earthquake, the strongest that had ever been registered. It lasted ten minutes, destroyed two provinces, caused tsunamis that reached all the way to Hawaii, stranded a fishing boat in the main square of Sacramento, and left thousands of victims. It was a tragedy, even in this country, where we’re used to shaking ground and raging seas. The old house at Santa Clara wobbled for a good while before it collapsed, allowing enough time to escape with the parrot’s cage through a dense cloud of dust, as beams and chunks of wall thundered down all around us and the guts of the planet let out a tremendous roar.
A huge crack opened up in the ground, swallowing several chickens, as the dogs howled. We couldn’t stand, everything was spinning, the world was turned upside down. The quake continued for what seemed like an eternity, and just when we thought it was finally over a strong aftershock followed. And then we heard the boom and saw the flames. The gas stove had exploded and the house was on fire.
In the midst of that chaos, smoke, and terror, Nieves realized that Teresa wasn’t with us. We didn’t notice the girl running toward the flaming house; if we had seen her we would have stopped her. I don’t know exactly how things happened, just that a few minutes later we heard her calling for Torito. We couldn’t figure out where her cries were coming from; no one imagined she could’ve gone into the burning house. Suddenly we saw my daughter emerge from the smoke and dust, struggling to drag Teresa along by her clothes. Torito was the first to reach them. He lifted Teresa’s inert body with one arm and Nieves with the other, and he used his gigantic force, multiplied by adrenaline, to move them safely away from the fire. Nieves was ten years old.
That day and night, which we spent outside, shivering with cold and fear, I got the true measure of my daughter’s character. She’d inherited it from her father; she had his same heroic nature. She didn’t remember exactly how she’d done it and answered our questions with a shrug of her shoulders, not giving it much importance. All we could determine was that she’d crawled through the ruins, dodging flaming obstacles, crossed what remained of the living room to the wicker chair where she’d seen Teresa moments before the earthquake. Teresa had been asphyxiated by smoke, unconscious. Nieves managed to crawl back through that hellscape dragging a weight much greater than her own, on hands and knees because, as she said, she could breathe better along the floor. Teresa’s lungs, weakened by the cancer, could not survive the smoke inhalation and she died a few hours later in the arms of her life partner, Miss Taylor.
Nieves had second-degree burns on her back and legs and her hair was singed, but her face was unharmed and she had no emotional trauma. The earthquake that made history was to her just a curious incident she could tell her father about. The highway was blocked and the railroads were twisted, making it impossible to reach the nearest hospital, so we took her to see Yaima that very day.
The thatched huts had been razed to the ground as if a terrible wind had blown through and the air was thick with straw and dust, but no one in the indigenous community had been injured; the people were calmly gathering their scant belongings and herding the terrified sheep and horses. Mother Earth and the Great Serpent who in-habits the volcanoes had become angry with the men and women, but the Primordial Spirit would restore order. It had to be invoked. Yaima put off her preparations for the ceremony to treat Nieves with a brief ritual and some miraculous unguents.
After Teresa’s death, Miss Taylor bid us farewell and returned to Ireland, where she hadn’t set foot in nearly four decades. She hoped to find her brothers and sisters who had been dispersed in childhood, but she gave up after only one week. That country was no longer her home, and we were the only family she had left, as she told José Antonio via telegram. My brother responded with a single sentence: “Wait there, I’m coming to get you.”
He brought her back on a transatlantic ship that took twenty-nine days from port to port, enough time to convince her that she’d made a mistake in systematically rejecting him, but that there was still time to remedy the situation, and he presented her with the garnet-and-diamond ring he’d saved since forever. She told him she was too old and sad to marry, but she accepted the ring and put it in her purse.
José Antonio was a very private man and he would never have given me the details of that trip, but I found out from Miss Taylor that they’d agreed to have a “white marriage.” When she saw from my expression that I was unfamiliar with the term, she explained that it was a platonic bond, like a good friendship. And yet, their plan to leave the union unconsummated was abandoned by the time they’d reached Panama. José Antonio was fifty-seven and she, sixty-two. They lived together for over twenty years, the happiest time of my brother’s life.
Torito and Facunda took care of Aunt Pilar at Santa Clara for the last two years of her life. She slowly shut down one day at a time without any visible ailment, simply losing interest in the human and the divine alike. She’d prayed thousands of rosaries and novenas over her lifetime, but just when she could use the support of her faith the most, she stopped believing in God and heaven. “All I want is to close my eyes and stop existing, to dissolve into the void, like the fog at dawn,” she wrote in a farewell letter that she gave to Facunda. It has been many years since then, Camilo, but the memory of my aunts still makes me cry; those women were my fairy godmothers throughout my entire childhood.
Miss Taylor had inherited the Santa Clara farm from Teresa and decided it wasn’t worth selling, even though she received a good offer from the Moreaus, who after evicting several indigenous families from their homes had gradually swallowed up the surrounding lands to expand their property. José Antonio replaced the burned-down house with the best Rustic Homes had to offer, and I continued to cover the expenses, which were minimal. Torito had been there the better part of his life, it was his world, and he couldn’t live anywhere else. I always made sure to spend a few weeks on the farm each year, no matter what I had going on in my life; and so I was able to remain rooted to that land.
The people in the area divided their lives into before and after the quake. They lost almost all their belongings and it took years to replace them, but no one ever considered moving away from the volcano and the geological fault line we sat atop. The fishing boat stayed in the middle of the main square in Sacramento as a reminder of humanity’s impermanence and the uncertainty of the world. Thirty years later, covered in a patina of rust and corroded by time, it was photographed for a magazine as a historical monument.
José Antonio coined a phrase that I found too cynical to repeat, “When there’s catastrophe, we buy property.” But the reality was that we’d never had more demand for our prefabricated homes, since entire towns and cities had to be rebuilt from the ground up, and there was more land than ever available to construct our planned communities.
I began buying gold with my savings, because inflation in our country was soaring; the currency was so greatly devalued that Julián had the idea to buy chips from a local casino and take them to Las Vegas where they had identical ones he could exchange for dollars. He pulled this stunt a couple of times right under the Mafia’s nose, but the third time he got scared—the risk of ending up stitched with bullets and tossed into the Mojave Desert was greater than the thrill of danger. In the meantime, the value of my gold increased, legally, in the darkness of the bank vault. The only one who knew I was on the road to becoming rich was my brother, who had the other key to my safe-deposit box.
Fabian Schmidt-Engler showed up one Sunday at José Antonio’s house to consult with him as a lawyer on a confidential matter, he said. My brother, who’d always pitied the man for the misfortune of having married me, welcomed him in. A large agricultural community of German immigrants had settled in the area and they needed the services of a discreet lawyer, Fabian explained.
We’d heard disturbing rumors about Colonia Esperanza. People said it was under the command of a fugitive war criminal, that mysterious things happened there, and that it was like a prison, surrounded by barbed wire, no one allowed in or out. Fabian discounted the hearsay. He told my brother that he knew the colony’s director and had been to the property several times as a vet. The immigrants lived peacefully, and worked hard, but they sometimes had trouble with the nosy local authorities.
José Antonio thought that the whole thing sounded suspicious and he politely turned the job down with the excuse that he was too busy with the construction company. As they were saying goodbye, my brother casually asked if he’d given any more thought to the subject of annulment.
“There’s nothing to think about,” Fabian responded.
Nevertheless, a few years later, my husband showed up at the Rustic Homes office to sell me the annulment because he needed money to finance a lab. Someone had discovered a way to freeze semen for an indefinite period of time, and that opened up incalculable possibilities in the world of animal and human genetics. José Antonio negotiated the price, drew up a contract, gave Fabian half the money up front, and deposited the rest after a judge had signed the annulment. A portion of my gold coins went to that cause. Just when I’d least expected it, I was suddenly a single woman.
PART THREE
ABSENCE
(1960–1983)
14
Looking back, I realize that I lost Nieves well before I thought I did. My daughter was fourteen when Julián decided that instead of our annual trip to Santa Clara she’d spend her vacation time with him, just the two of them, like a father-daughter honeymoon. Julián had lost all hope of turning Juan Martín into “a man,” which is to say a man like him. His son was an awkward and idealistic teenager who seemed more interested in reading Albert Camus and Franz Kafka than the Playboy magazines his father brought him from Miami. Juan Martín spent his time discussing Marxism and imperialism with a handful of similarly tormented boys instead of making out with one of his sister’s friends in a dark corner.
Over the following years, Julián took Nieves on trips and taught her to drive a car and copilot an airplane. When he caught her smoking and drinking the dregs of cocktail glasses, he began to supply her with menthol cigarettes and instructed her in the art of drinking in moderation, something he himself rarely practiced. Very soon Nieves was dressing in provocative clothing and wearing makeup like a model to go out with her father to nightclubs and casinos, where they placed bets at the tables without anyone suspecting her age; their big joke was that people thought she was Julián’s latest conquest. The burns she’d suffered at age ten had left only faint scars, thanks, I suppose, to Yaima’s treatment. Her beauty, according to Julián, stopped traffic. By eighteen she was singing for tips at hotels and casinos. Julián delighted in showing off his daughter at a prudent distance, but he ran off any young suitor who came near her.
“I’m never going to get a boyfriend if you keep this up, Dad,” Nieves would complain.
“At your age, the last thing you need is a boyfriend. That’ll happen over my dead body,” he responded. He was as jealous as a lover.
In the meantime, I lived here in our country with Juan Martín, who was studying philosophy and history. In his father’s eyes this was a waste of time, completely pointless. Since his university was in the capital, I rented an apartment that we shared, but we seldom saw each other; I had one foot in Sacramento and flew regularly to the United States to see Nieves. My son spent long periods of time alone.
