‘We are family,’ says our mother after the prolonged silence of dinner.
‘We are family,’ we all respond as if it were a mantra.
The sticky, bitter smell of our father’s illness begins to float in the atmosphere, and its punctilious pain, fainter than in other periods, attacks me on my left side. I look at all my siblings, each showing their pain in their own way. Our mother has her eyes closed and barely moves her lips. The servants clear the plates with a fear difficult to hide: on their faces we see the disgust they feel for us. Sara gives silent orders, points with her hand, raises her eyebrows, tilts her head. Lovely, of course.
The night, like every year, is the same colour. A cold, thick sound slips in through the half-open windows and outside the sugar-cane fields fade. When I turned off the main highway and drove up to my father’s hacienda everything froze into the same instant, as still as a fishbowl. It doesn’t seem as if a year has passed since the last Communion. The image of the house is a blurred photo with the same opaque colours, the same aged wood, the same dust-covered furniture. And Sara, with her porcelain skin, remains intact, as if the years could not wear down her humanity.
Our mother opens her eyes as she rings the little bell she carries in her hand. The servants withdraw from the room. Sara closes the doors as soon as they leave and remains in the semi-darkness, with her hands behind her back and chin held high. She has barely looked at me all evening, but on her chest she is wearing the necklace I gave her as a child and that makes me feel calm.
My siblings stand up and begin to undress. I do the same, reluctantly, without taking my eyes off Sara. Mateo, Jacobo, Tomás and Susana can barely hide the devastations of the illness; their famished bodies, their pronounced bones and withered breasts reveal the good condition of the infection that survives within us keeping our father’s memory alive. Once more I’m struck by the foggy memories of those times so distant now, when the illness that kept our father in bed for so many years, coughing and cursing, did not make him lose the authority in his impetuous voice and the sudden pounding of his hands on the table, again and again, when he gave an order.
The wound in my side begins to palpitate and fester beneath the dressing. It hurts, it hurts a lot. For a moment I feel frightened at the thought that the wound is rejuvenating and that all my efforts have been in vain. I think of how many times I’ve promised myself I wouldn’t return, how many times I’ve sworn to never again set foot in this house, not attend this Communion, renounce this surname. But I hope this will be the last time I see them and finally Sara and I will be able to be free.
Mother begins to walk around the table, repeating the movements of the ritual. Behind her goes Sara. She carries a punchbowl filled with water and has her eyes fixed on the bottom of it. Each of my siblings shows a part of the illness to Mother. Mateo begins to pull out clumps of hair, which his scalp sheds as if they were wool, then he drops them into Mother’s hands and she sniffs them before depositing them into a glass in the middle of the table. Immediately afterwards, Mother washes her hands in Sara’s bowl. Jacobo exposes the enormous wound that crosses his chest, as if it had been opened by a hot and dull knife, and a greasy liquid oozes from it. Mother passes a finger over it, collects that slime and puts it in the glass. She washes her hands.
As she continues her tour of my siblings’ wounds, I feel mine awaken from a long lethargy and pierce me from inside with desperation. I take a breath, clench my teeth and think: All this is worth it for Sara, only for her; soon the illness will leave my body, very soon. Then I remember those afternoons we ran through the crops, played together naked and swam in the river. Father told Mother to keep an eye on us, that we shouldn’t spend so much time together, but she said we were just children, and we always managed to take our clothes off and touch each other.
Susana squeezes her haggard breasts and, after a smothered moan, out comes a liquid as thick as honey. Then, Tomás takes off the face mask he always wears, opens his foul, purplish mouth and pulls out a tooth, which, as it comes out, leaves a fine thread of putrid blood. I feel I might vomit. I’ve never been able to get used to this smell, the one that took over everything when the curse began to float over our lands. It arrived just like that, all of a sudden, gave no respite. Father made a pact and did not fulfil it and now he had to pay the consequences. First, as if it were an atrocious warning, it rained for entire days. Then, the cattle fell ill and died vomiting blood and birds began to crash into the windows, desperately, leaving blotches of their guts on the glass, while the dogs fled with their heads bowed down. They were strange days, everyone forgot about us. And Sara and I, the youngest in the family, hid to give encouragement to each other.
When Mother arrives at my side she does not look me in the eye. I feel afraid. For a moment I think we’ve been discovered. Then I take off the dressing and she and my siblings choke back a cry. Her hands fly to her mouth, while her head shakes back and forth. Sara opens her eyes as wide as they’ll go. My wound looks much smaller than it did a year ago and, of course, they don’t like that. I’ve broken the promise, letting my inheritance die. Luckily, since the beginning, the illness did not find in my body the same comfort it found in those of my siblings. It has barely been able to sustain itself, so with a bit of effort and some healing rituals it has gradually all but disappeared. It’s not my fault my body has resisted, just as it’s not Sara’s for never having contracted the illness. I remember those days wrapped in constant cold, when she took on with some culpability the fact of not perpetuating that infection in her body, as if it had been a sign, a cruel irony.
Finally Mother looks me in the eye. I don’t know how, but I am able to hold her gaze. Some seconds go past and dilate in the silence and, suddenly, she strikes me. The slap resounds throughout the room. Sara closes her eyes. I stand with my cheek turned. Only for Sara, I do it only for her.
‘What have I done to deserve this, what have I done?’ says Mother between sobs. ‘What is your father going to think?’
I remain silent. My siblings look at me over their shoulders. Their bodies disgust me, but I’m more disgusted by the fact that we have accepted the order to sustain father’s illness, to keep it alive in our bodies in exchange for continuing to flaunt the family wealth. Mother sticks her finger into my wound and begins to scratch. It feels as if she’s sunk a red-hot iron into me. I resist. I search for solace in Sara’s eyes, but she ignores me. Mother deposits the little she can get from my wound in the glass and washes her hands.
Then, in silence, we continue with the next phase of the ritual. I notice my siblings’ nervousness. Mother looks at me out of the corner of her eye, without even trying to hide how ashamed she feels. Sara’s eyes shine with confusion, which she cannot hide either.
Mother lights the glass on fire and a magenta-coloured flame flashes up before us. The French windows open wide and gusts of wind, heavy with a humidity that seems eternal, blows in through them: ricochets off the walls, knocks down paintings, breaks glasses. It is much stronger than on other occasions and that can only mean one thing: Father is furious.
Clouds of dry leaves blow in through the open windows and swirl around the table, like furious crows, while the flame sustains itself in the middle of the circle. Mother holds up her hands and says:
‘I guard your lineage. Your lineage guards your lands.’
Then she begins to pronounce words in that secret language from distant worlds, the codes to the pact, the codes to the ritual. Those words hide a power beyond our understanding, something that has taken over our whole existence with the implacable patience of a terminal illness.
Sara is in a corner of the room. She squeezes her eyes shut, seems frightened. I watch her, fascinated by her beauty. But it is one of those moments when I don’t seem to recognize the Sara with whom, when the skies turned strange, I used to hide in the stables, in the attic, under the tables and the beds. The Sara I fell in love with.
‘Our destiny. Our pain. Our passion. My blood is your blood,’ says Mother.
Then we all respond, one at a time:
‘My blood is your blood.’
The words hurt my throat. Then Mother says:
‘Your blood is my blood.’
We repeat the phrase. The atmosphere hardens. My ears buzz. The back of my skull begins to palpitate, as if my head has filled up with hot water.
‘Our blood and our bodies belong to you,’ continues Mother, followed by the echoes of my siblings, which resound like an invocation. I look at Sara, who still has her eyes closed. I just want to steal one moment of her gaze, which will tell me I’m doing the right thing, that soon we’ll go away from here. My siblings hold hands and I prepare to leap into the void, my only hope of escape.
‘Uoy ot gnoleb seidob ruo dna doolb ruo.’
The silence arrives like a bomb of air that fills the whole room. For a moment the screams of my mother and siblings emerge from their mouths like slipstreams of colours that float up to the ceilings, soundlessly, all swallowed by whatever has come out of that fissure I have just opened. Finally Sara looks at me, dismayed. I see fear in her eyes and that worries me.
Then the windows smash. The walls crack. The floors open like wounds. And the sound returns, invades my ears and then all is chaos: something in the immutable logic of this home has broken. The house begins to collapse. The curtains go up in flames and the faces of my siblings and mother fill with pustules. I run to embrace Sara, but she, in the midst of the confusion, runs away down the hallways of the house. All around me is an inferno swallowing up the walls on which are written the histories of my lineage.
Something is trying to escape the wound. A blaze flares up in my side and a trail of smoke floats before my eyes: the illness has abandoned me. I feel that part of my existence has been torn out. I turn my head to see the only thing I don’t want to see: the bodies of my family roasting in an implacable fire. In their screams I recognize my father’s voice, and that fills me with panic.
I run through the house, calling Sara, desperately. The smoke fills my lungs, robbing me of breath. I find her in a corner, coughing.
‘Let’s go,’ I say.
‘What did you do?’
‘Let’s go.’
A piece of the ceiling falls behind us. I turn and at the end of the hallway I see an enormous ball of fire bearing down on us. Hand in hand we run out of the house. Outside, even the thistles are in flames. Without even thinking we run into the blackness of the night. I feel dizzy, I want to throw up. Sara keeps up with me, but a familiar cough has seized her. We cross the garden and I see her weaken, her breathing damp and laboured, as if her lungs were full of mildew. But she wants to carry on anyway, like the strong woman she has always been. In the sound of her cough I sense something that worries me, an idea I insistently ignore. She falls to the ground. I help her to stand up and see a small blister at the corner of her mouth. I recoil, startled, but I go back and approach to help her up from the ground. She covers her mouth as she coughs and when I clutch her hands, a smear of coagulated blood floods over our fingers. We look at each other, like a pair of injured animals. I avoid her eyes, overwhelmed, and stand watching our house engulfed in flames.
The fire climbs full of arrogance.