TWO MORNINGS AFTER her tea with Policarpo Madera, Rebeca received magnificent arrangement of chrysanthemums and dahlias, an inlaid rosewood box of native candies, and a letter, which esteemed her in salutation, kissed her feet in envoi, and begged her company in between. The sender was Dr. Azael Burlando16 who possessed the largest private bloc of Mituco Company shares and the most controversial reputation on the island.
Dr. Burlando, who was then in his early forties, was like Rebeca a native of Mituco de Tierra Firme. Like her he was a bastard. Like her he had left home on his tenth birthday. Thirty years later—in other words, about two years before Rebeca’s return—he appeared on the island with a wife whom he kept veiled, engaged the very suite in which Rebeca was now installed, and gave out that he would buy Mituco shares at any reasonable value. His first client was young Balbino Olmos, who was engrossed in dissipating a considerable inheritance. An offer of ten shares at five hundred inchadosl7 the share was accepted without haggling. Dr. Burlando inspected the certificates, unlocked an ironwood coffer that stood beside his bed, removed one of seven casaba-sized bags, and weighed out the price in gold nuggets. By the month’s end he had acquired one hundred shares, the maximum allowed a single owner under the statutes of the company.
As a shareholder, Dr. Burlando was now entitled to reside on the island. He bought—still with gold nuggets—a roomy if inelegant house from the heirs of Don Augusto Roble, repaired it, saw to the furnishings himself, and moved in with his wife and his coffer. The woman, who had never stepped outside the Guest House, never stepped outside her new home. Nor did anyone except Dr. Burlando and the servants ever enter it. He frequented the Café Progreso, standing his round of drinks, playing chess and dominoes, participating in political discussion, and partaking of the unshelled shrimp and crayfish which the manager set out in saucers on the bar each afternoon at six. He attended shareholders’ meetings. He subscribed an aisle seat at the theater and went to every show. But he accepted no invitations nor offered any of his own.
Dr. Burlando seemed rather fat to some men, to other men quite skinny. Acquaintances would sometimes be surprised to find him taller than he’d appeared at their last meeting. Sometimes he looked caucasian, sometimes negroid, sometimes mestizo. Or two friends, observing him from the café bar, looking across their drinks to where he sat immobile at the chessboard, watching now as his hand flashed like a lizard’s tongue to snatch a piece, would disagree as to his size or shape or color. Similarly, there was no getting his past straight. The doctor storied freely and amusingly about his thirty years of absence from Mituco, but the stories varied. He was doctor of medicine from Leipzig, or of philosophy from Coimbra, or of canon law from Rome. He had panned his gold from rivers in the Yukon, amassed it in South Africa purveying guns and bullets to the Boers, traded for it in Makassar and Celebes, along whose coasts he’d piloted a brig, or mined it in the sertão of Brazil. And since each tale was nuggeted with detail, each sounded true while it was being told, yet when they were compared none sounded truer than the others. Mituco was disturbed by the good doctor, angered and fascinated. Men craved his company and resented his tricks. And by the time of his meeting with Rebeca—that is, by June, 1914—the common view was that he was not doctor of anything and that he’d got his gold by selling his soul to the devil.
Like many common views, this was correct in drift but formulated inexactly. All the claimed doctorates were self-conferred, yet there was no question but that Burlando qualified for a doctorate in imposture. Just as he was unwilling to confine himself to one physical aspect, he refused to make do with one personality or profession, and from the age of ten had buffeted about the world inventing Burlandos as the pleasure struck him—this partly from a heightened sensitivity to the possibilities of life and partly from a taste for mocking the rest of mankind, who set such store by unity. And if each of his several lived ended in failure, it was not because he lacked ability or boldness but because he would lose interest in an identity once he had mastered it and would destroy it so that onlookers might see it for the fabrication that it was and realize what fools they’d been for believing in it. Thus Reverendo Padre Azael Burlando, S.J., whose gravity and erudition, casuistry and talent for intrigue commended him to the Bishop of Salamanca and gained him a secretaryship, whose beaked nose, humped back and withered leg seemed excellent (if superfluous) guarantees of his chastity, seduced the bishop’s niece in the cathedral during Good Friday mass, was discovered, and narrowly escaped the fate of Peter Abelard. Thus Azael Burlando, M.D., who had impressed the senior surgeons of Melbourne General Hospital not only with his skill in lopping limbs and excavating entrails but with his dedication to the healing art, began one morning following an amputation to saw away at the patient’s good leg, gleefully quipping to his horrified assistants, the nurses, the gallery of students gaping down in anguish (“Let’s take this one for symmetry; I’ve never done a left leg and can use the practice; for two he gets a discount on the fee …”), until he was dragged, still chattering, out of the operating theater. Thus Burlando El Magnífico, Tamer of Wild Beasts, whose steamer trunks were plastered with bright posters of him romping tigerback and prying at a lion’s jaws, who proved his disdain for death and danger by leaping from the promenade deck of the Titanic into an icy sea to save a lady’s lap dog, who, on the night of terror, as the first boats were weighed away, stood calmly at the high-side rail puffing a cheroot and keeping time with an index finger to the forlorn, brave playing of the ship’s orchestra, emerged two hours later from the fur wrap and silken veils of a demimondaine (she was never found), shameless beneath the gunwale of a lifeboat. Dr. Burlando even failed as an actor—on the face of it the perfect profession for him—simply because he would not stick to a role even for a short run and mocked his public with happy Hamlets and limpwristed Don Juans. As for his gold, the seven casaba-sized sacks of nuggets, the doctor had in fact traded his status in the next world for it. The transaction18 was not a sale, however, but an enlistment, while the enlister was not the devil, who, as commonly conceived, does not exist.
Dr. Burlando did no more to dispel the rumors of fake doctorates and dealings with the devil than he did to stabilize his physical appearance or suppress the contradictions in his autobiographical yarns. Puzzling his neighbors was the great pleasure of his life. When Rebeca reappeared, he resolved to make her his mistress; what better way to mock and shock Mituco? Rebeca la fatal kept by a parvenu! Rebeca, as we know, was fishing for a rich protector, so in effect they were made for each other. But since both were canny bargainers and altogether free of romantic illusions, they did not come so easily to terms.
The courtship of my paternal grandparents, like the mobile phase of Europe’s Totentanz, began with Sarajevo and ended with the Battle of the Marne. On 28th June, 1914, Dr. Azael Burlando paid Rebeca Fuertes a state visit. He paraded his best clothes and offered her his heart. (His hand, alas, was unavailable; he had the misfortune to be married.) Rebeca feigned high outrage, spurned his offer, and riddled his vanity with scorn. There followed diplomatic fencing, mutual mobilization, his declaration that he meant to have her whether she willed or no, and her demand that he restore her the lost paradise of Don Patricio’s mansion. He pressed his advances; she withdrew. The town took sides, some hoping a comeuppance for Rebeca, some longing to see the doctor put in his place, most more or less convinced that he was strong enough to force capitulation. The crisis came on 5th September, when Dr. Burlando bribed a passkey from the Guest House manager and non-interference from the staff and reached Rebeca’s bed. The subsequent engagement, joined after weeks of vigorous maneuver and pressed at closest quarter, exhausted both to stalemate. Forcible rape was the one sexual experience Rebeca had so far not encountered, and Dr. Burlando’s ever-changing aspect made him the most intriguing of all her lovers. Rebeca, for her part, commanded charms such as the doctor had never believed possible. After a night made two weeks long by the heavy curtains of Rebeca’s bedroom, the following equilibrium was reached: Dr. Burlando agreed to buy Don Patricio’s house and keep Rebeca there, but refused to give her any stock or title to the building; Rebeca agreed to receive Dr. Burlando three nights a week, but refused to let him see her naked or to have his child. Then they settled down to bombard each other with demands for what each had refused, neither one able to advance, neither one willing to retreat, both in their hearts as interested in inflicting damage as in securing gains. In other words (lack of anointed vows notwithstanding), they found themselves in the trenches of marriage.19
“If you want a son so badly,” Rebeca might say as they lay in the oleaginous, postcoital stifle of a dry season night; “if you must have a son,” smiling felinely with her voice, since her face was obscured by the darkness in which she habitually received the doctor; “if your vanity demands a reproduction of yourself, please try your wife. There are sufficient bastards in this world already.”
“She’s sterile,” the doctor would reply, puffing his cheroot violently, then holding the dim beacon of its tip over her belly in empty hope of glimpsing her bare flesh. “Sterile,” not adding that her sterility was well-contrived by him, that it was Rebeca’s son he wanted, partly because she was the first furrow he’d deemed worthy of his precious seed, partly because she steadfastly refused to cultivate it.
“If,” the doctor might say of a wet-season morning as they sat beneath the streaming gables of the porch, he in his undershorts and slippers stirring coffee, Rebeca in her lobstered kimono sipping tea; “if you truly crave the right to live here”—nonshareholding Rebeca stayed on Mituco as the doctor’s ward—“and if you can’t buy stock because your fabulous late husband’s fabulous Strasbourg mine and all your fabulous wealth—observe the twin significance that word may bear—is now in German hands, then why not simply marry one of the moist-eyed, wag-tailed tongue-droopers who’re always sniffing after you? I won’t stand in your way. I’ve had you, which is all I ever wanted, especially as you’re not woman enough to breed—though a suspicious man might wonder at the love you show that little Mongol of your maid’s. I can find you a husband at my café by lunchtime. Just say the word.”
“My dear Dr. Burlando,” Rebeca would reply, “you will never comprehend it, I know, but I have too much shame to offer myself to a decent man now that I’ve been soiled by you,” not mentioning that it was shares from Dr. Burlando that she wanted, first because he refused to give her any but also and importantly because she did not care to take another man until she had driven the doctor gaga as she had all her other lovers.
Rebeca did not have the dreamless sleep she’d hoped for. She lay awake brooding about Mituco Company shares, or when she did sleep, dreamed about them, clouds of certificates fluttering like albino bats across her mind. The doctor lost rather than gained in notoriety. Mituco was not mocked or shocked for long, since quite soon after he took up with Rebeca he began to age markedly and, stranger still, varied ever less in his appearance, while the townspeople grew ever less disturbed and puzzled by him, concluding that he was no different than so many men of middle years who, trying to keep a younger woman, become incapable of controlling her. Men laughed behind his back and whispered that Rebeca must be leading him a terrible dance. He even became something of a figure for pity, another victim of Rebeca la fatal. This mutual frustration led, finally, to a realignment of positions, Dr. Burlando declared that he would give no less than twenty shares to any child of his Rebeca bore, Rebeca, naturally, to hold the shares in trust. He even signed an affidavit to this effect and had it notarized before the Comptroller of the Compañía de Progreso Infinito—an event which caused the town to suppose Rebeca already pregnant and notably redeemed the doctor’s reputation. Rebeca, for her part, set about to conceive.
First she tried to conceive some respect for Dr. Burlando, and with it the desire to give him heirs. Failing of this, she searched for some maternal yearnings, but the creative urge in her had been turned away from breeding and aimed at art. Then she went over to Mituco de Tierra Firme and consulted Señora Perfecta, a midwife and a witch, but Señora Perfecta refused to sell her a fertility charm, having read in Rebeca’s face (and confirmed the reading by inspection of her coffee grounds) that all her offspring would either be cripples or come to violent ends. Meanwhile Dr. Burlando toiled away like a field hand, night after night, glazed in sweat and rage, trying to trowel a child into her stony womb.
When, in February, 1917, she told him he had failed again—it was two months since he’d sworn out the affidavit—he drew up a new instrument (and had it duly notarized and filed with the Town Clerk), deeding the house to Rebeca in the event she bore a son. He brought the copy to her and slammed it down on the bureau where, eighteen years before, she’d left the note for Don Patricio, and said, “I give you one more month. One month and then the deal’s off and I’m leaving. While I still can. Before you squeeze me dry.”
Rebeca told Dr. Burlando not to come again until she sent for him, and she retired to her bedroom and let the rolls of woven bamboo fibers down over the windows and lay down on her bed to concentrate on the stock and the deed. She told her Chinese maid to bring her a plate of rice and beans each evening, and when the food remained untouched for three days to call Dr. Burlando. Then she beamed her mind on the deed and the stock until all the rest of life was but a vague penumbra.
The maid summoned Dr. Burlando on the night of 12th March, 1917. Rebeca was unconscious of his arrival. She lay tranced and naked in the darkened room, and Dr. Azael Burlando entered and undressed and climbed on board like a galley slave. Rebeca lay corpselike, thinking of shares and deed, aware of Dr. Burlando only as a half-sleeping neurasthenic might become aware of another patient20 pounding his head slowly and despairingly against the wall four or five rooms away along the clinic corridor. Then, at the moment of his discharge—perceived like yelpings muffled by a practiced hand as three attendants drag the madman to his bed to strap him in—Rebeca realized she was finally a whore. Not in the Tsinan brothel nor in the Manchu’s villa had she achieved true whoredom, first since she’d chosen neither and second since in one she’d been an artist of a sort and in the other a mere plaything. But now she’d put herself to rent exclusively for gain. Self-hatred flooded into her, and she conceived.
My grandmother Rebeca Fuertes stayed in her bed from March to November, 1917, rising only to perform natural functions. From the instant she conceived she suffered headaches, nausea, and weird cravings—customary symptoms of gestation, but in her case abnormally acute and prolonged until the hour she delivered. She was, as well, subject to seizures of hysteria and suicidal urges, fits of mania and depression, which she had never known, not even in the darkest hours of her life. She was obsessed by the vision of her own hand driving sometimes a knife, sometimes a pair of scissors, into her belly, and ordered her maid to collect every sharp instrument in the house and bury them under the flagstones of the patio. Through it all she stubbornly refused to be examined by a doctor, and when, during a week of violent nausea, which saw her unable to keep a grain of rice on her stomach, Dr. Burlando presumed to bring a Spanish surgeon—the Director of the Mituco Clinic and an extremely well-trained man—to her house, she howled them off with curses such as the Spaniard, who had served in Morocco against the Riff, had never heard, even from wounded legionnaires.
Dr. Burlando visited her each afternoon at five to feed her teaspoonfuls of blanc de blanc (he bought ten bottles at an absurd price from the cellar of the Hotel Colón in Ciudad Tinieblas) and slivers of foie gras truffé (he had to send to Boston for it) on Jacob’s biscuits (he got four tins from Kingston); to hear her whine for Vienna sausage and Munich bock (as if the British blockade were his fault); to bear her curses and complaints. She carped at his neglect when he came late, at his intrusion when he showed up early, at his machinelike lack of feeling when he was on time. On sunny days she groused about the heat, and when it stormed complained of chills and ague. She screeched her maid to tears and little Nicolas to terror. She cursed Burlando for making her pregnant and herself for letting him and God for having dreamed up pregnancy in the first place. Most of all she cursed her belly and the bastard child inside it, both of which grew prodigiously as though fed by her curses, and as Rebeca swelled, Burlando aged and wasted. His hair turned white, then fell. His flesh dissolved until his wrist and check bones seemed about to pierce the skin. He grew all bent and bowed, took up the use of a Malacca walking stick, and had to pause to rest a dozen times along the doddering two hundred meters from Rebeca’s house to the Café Progreso. There he no longer played at chess or dominoes, having so waned in skill and concentration that the rankest chump could drub him, nor took part in discussions, nor offered up new chapters to his autobiography, but huddled in a corner sipping medicinal infusions and when he spoke at all, spoke only of his child, the way it kicked under Rebeca’s nightgown, how full of life it was, a son for sure. The others would nod absently and when he’d left, sometimes before the strings of beads that hung across the doorway had swung behind him, would break into rude laughter, exclaiming that one could make a better bargain with the devil than with Rebeca Fuertes, referring to the doctor as “the old fool” or “the poor pubic hair.” Meanwhile Mituco bore the oddest weather in memory, unseasonable weeks of burning drought broken by thunderstorms and tempests grown more violent each succeeding month; earth tremors; a tidal wave which spared the island only because the bishop, having remarked the draining of the bay, ordered the effigy of San Roque carried to a seaward beach, the statue, its bearers, and the bishop (in full vestments, carrying his crook) arriving just before a bulwark of black water, which parted marvelously north and south and spent its force upon the mainland. The islanders, especially good matrons of the town, related these phenomena to Rebeca’s pregnancy, declaring her a witch and whispering it was the devil, not the doctor, who had sired whatever beast there was inside her and saying that as she had destroyed Don Patricio and was destroying Dr. Azael, so she would finish by destroying all Mituco.
Rebeca Fuertes entered labor on the night of 12th November, 1917, exactly eight months after she conceived. Dr. Burlando happened to be in her house, restrained by a tremendous downpour. He had fed her the last of the pâté, had endured five hours of her petulant abuse, and, leaving her at last in a light sleep, had descended to the sala for a cup of manzanilla tea. At her first scream he dropped his cup, which shattered on the tiles. He dragged himself upstairs, his steps punctuated by staccato squealing. He found Rebeca lying as if pinned beneath her bulging belly, a tuft of her own hair in either fist. He shouted for the maid and ordered her, rain or no rain, to run to the clinic for the ambulance.
Rebeca shook her head. “Send for Señora Perfecta.”
“Look, woman,” said Dr. Azael Burlando. “I’ve stood your whims eight months, but now it’s finished. With luck you’ll die tonight and I’ll piss on your grave, but first you’ll bear my son.” He poked the maid with his stick. “I said run!”
Rebeca sat up screaming and raked her nails across the doctor’s check. Then she fainted.
Though small, the Mituco Company Clinic was the most modern medical facility in the Republic of Tinieblas. Rebeca was admitted there at 11:12 p.m., again in faint, having come to in the clinic’s Studebaker ambulance, mauled Dr. Burlando’s other check, and bitten the attendant’s forearm to the bone. The Spanish surgeon ordered her anesthetized and prepared for Caesarean delivery. Then he went to treat the wounded. He had bandaged the attendant’s arm and was swabbing Dr. Burlando’s face with alcohol when a squeak of horror from the duty nurse brought both men to Rebeca’s bedside. In the course of undressing and disinfecting Rebeca’s body the nurse had found the artwork of the Manchu’s Japanese tattooist, the reason for Rebeca’s stout refusal to let Dr. Burlando see her naked or to be examined by a physician. Tiny blue toads and lizards romped out of her armpits down along her flanks; two triple-file processions of green centipedes marched up her inner thighs; an orange caterpillar oozed out of her navel; and a red-and-yellow speckled snake twined round her spine and disappeared into the crevice of her buttocks. The nurse took these in stride, but was unable to contain her fright when the shaving of Rebeca’s pubis revealed a baseball-sized, purple tarantula. Dr. Burlando caught one glimpse of this over the surgeon’s shoulder, clapped both hands to his crotch, and fell twitching to the floor in obvious and massive apoplexy.
The Spaniard saw at once his case was fatal, did what he could to case Dr. Burlando’s final hour, then operated on Rebeca. The wisdom of this decision was soon vindicated, for there were two children, not one, both of them, though one month premature, too large-headed to have passed Rebeca’s pelvic bone. My father, León Fuertes,21 was extracted into this world by Caesarean section at midnight 12th November, 1917, his first wail chiming with the Administration Building clock and rattling with the death throes of his father. A sister followed him by some few seconds.