3

That same evening you read those yellow papers written in mustard-colored ink, some of them with holes where a careless ash had fallen, others heavily fly-specked. General Llorente’s French doesn’t have the merits his wife attributed to it. You tell yourself you can make considerable improvements in the style, can tighten up his rambling account of past events: his childhood on a hacienda in Oaxaca, his military studies in France, his friendship with the duc de Morny and the intimates of Napoleon III, his return to Mexico on the staff of Maximilian, the imperial ceremonies and gatherings, the battles, the defeat in 1867, his exile in France. Nothing that hasn’t been described before. As you undress you think of the old lady’s distorted notions, the value she attributes to these memoirs. You smile as you get into bed, thinking of the four thousand pesos.

You sleep soundly until a flood of light wakes you up at six in the morning: that glass roof doesn’t have any curtain. You bury your head under the pillow and try to go back to sleep. Ten minutes later you give it up and walk into the bathroom, where you find all your things neatly arranged on a table and your few clothes hanging in the wardrobe. Just as you finish shaving the early morning silence is broken by that painful, desperate yowling.

You try to find out where it’s coming from: you open the door to the hallway, but you can’t hear anything from there: those cries are coming from up above, from the skylight. You jump up on the chair, from the chair onto the desk, and by supporting yourself on the bookshelf you can reach the skylight. You open one of the windows and pull yourself up to look out at that side garden, that square of yew trees and brambles where five, six, seven cats—you can’t count them, can’t hold yourself up there for more than a second—are all twined together, all writhing in flames and giving off a dense smoke that reeks of burnt fur. As you get down again you wonder if you really saw it: perhaps you only imagined it from those dreadful cries that continue, grow less, and finally stop.

You put on your shirt, brush off your shoes with a piece of paper, and listen to the sound of a bell that seems to run through the passageways of the house until it arrives at your door. You look out into the hallway. Aura is walking along it with a bell in her hand. She turns her head to look at you and tells you that breakfast is ready. You try to detain her but she goes down the spiral staircase, still ringing that black-painted bell as if she were trying to wake up a whole asylum, a whole boarding-school.

You follow her in your shirt-sleeves, but when you reach the downstairs hallway you can’t find her. The door of the old lady’s bedroom opens behind you and you see a hand that reaches out from behind the partly-opened door, sets a chamberpot in the hallway and disappears again, closing the door.

In the dining room your breakfast is already on the table, but this time only one place has been set. You eat quickly, return to the hallway, and knock at Señora Consuelo’s door. Her sharp, weak voice tells you to come in. Nothing has changed: the perpetual shadows, the glow of the votive lights and the silver objects.

“Good morning, Señor Montero. Did you sleep well?”

“Yes. I read till quite late.”

The old lady waves her hand as if in a gesture of dismissal. “No, no, no. Don’t give me your opinion. Work on those pages and when you’ve finished I’ll give you the others.”

“Very well. Señora, would I be able to go into the garden?”

“What garden, Señor Montero?”

“The one that’s outside my room.”

“This house doesn’t have any garden. We lost our garden when they built up all around us.”

“I think I could work better outdoors.”

“This house has only got that dark patio where you came in. My niece is growing some shade plants there. But that’s all.”

“It’s all right, Señora.”

“I’d like to rest during the day. But come to see me tonight.”

“Very well, Señora.”

You spend all morning working on the papers, copying out the passages you intend to keep, rewriting the ones you think are especially bad, smoking one cigarette after another and reflecting that you ought to space your work so that the job lasts as long as possible. If you can manage to save at least twelve thousand pesos, you can spend a year on nothing but your own work, which you’ve postponed and almost forgotten. Your great, inclusive work on the Spanish discoveries and conquests in the New World. A work that sums up all the scattered chronicles, makes them intelligible, and discovers the resemblances among all the undertakings and adventures of Spain’s Golden Age, and all the human prototypes and major accomplishments of the Renaissance. You end up by putting aside the General’s tedious pages and starting to compile the dates and summaries of your own work. Time passes and you don’t look at your watch until you hear the bell again. Then you put on your coat and go down to the dining room.

Aura is already seated. This time Señora Llorente is at the head of the table, wrapped in her shawl and nightgown and coif, hunching over her plate. But the fourth place has also been set. You note it in passing. It doesn’t bother you any more. If the price of your future creative liberty is to put up with all the manias of this old woman, you can pay it easily. As you watch her eating her soup you try to figure out her age. There’s a time after which it’s impossible to detect the passing of the years, and Señora Consuelo crossed that frontier a long time ago. The General hasn’t mentioned her in what you’ve already read of the memoirs. But if the General was 42 at the time of the French invasion, and died in 1901, forty years later, he must have died at the age of 82. He must have married the Señora after the defeat at Querétaro and his exile. But she would only have been a girl at that time …

The dates escape you because now the Señora is talking in that thin, sharp voice of hers, that bird-like chirping. She’s talking to Aura and you listen to her as you eat, hearing her long list of complaints, pains, suspected illnesses, more complaints about the cost of medicines, the dampness of the house and so forth. You’d like to break in on this domestic conversation to ask about the servant who went for your things yesterday, the servant you’ve never even glimpsed and who never waits on table. You’re going to ask about him but you’re suddenly surprised to realize that up to this moment Aura hasn’t said a word and is eating with a sort of mechanical fatality, as if she were waiting for some outside impulse before picking up her knife and fork, cutting a piece of liver—yes, it’s liver again, apparently the favorite dish in this house—and carrying it to her mouth. You glance quickly from the aunt to the niece, but at that moment the Señora becomes motionless, and at the same moment Aura puts her knife on her plate and also becomes motionless, and you remember that the Señora put down her knife only a fraction of a second earlier.

There are several minutes of silence: you finish eating while they sit there rigid as statues, watching you. At last the Señora says, “I’m very tired. I ought not to eat at the table. Come, Aura, help me to my room.”

The Señora tries to hold your attention: she looks directly at you so that you’ll keep looking at her, although what she’s saying is aimed at Aura. You have to make an effort in order to evade that look, which once again is wide, clear, and yellowish, free of the veils and wrinkles that usually obscure it. Then you look at Aura, who is staring fixedly at nothing and silently moving her lips. She gets up with a motion like those you associate with dreaming, takes the arm of the bent old lady, and slowly helps her from the dining room.

Alone now, you help yourself to the coffee that has been there since the beginning of the meal, the cold coffee you sip as you wrinkle your brow and ask yourself if the Señora doesn’t have some secret power over her niece: if the girl, your beautiful Aura in her green dress, isn’t kept in this dark old house against her will. But it would be so easy for her to escape while the Señora was asleep in her shadowy room. You tell yourself that her hold over the girl must be terrible. And you consider the way out that occurs to your imagination: perhaps Aura is waiting for you to release her from the chains in which the perverse, insane old lady, for some unknown reason, has bound her. You remember Aura as she was a few moments ago, spiritless, hypnotized by her terror, incapable of speaking in front of the tyrant, moving her lips in silence as if she were silently begging you to set her free; so enslaved that she imitated every gesture of the Señora, as if she were permitted to do only what the Señora did.

You rebel against this tyranny. You walk toward the other door, the one at the foot of the staircase, the one next to the old lady’s room: that’s where Aura must live, because there’s no other room in the house. You push the door open and go in. This room is dark also, with whitewashed walls, and the only decoration is an enormous black Christ. At the left there’s a door that must lead into the widow’s bedroom. You go up to it on tiptoe, put your hands against it, then decide not to open it: you should talk with Aura alone.

And if Aura wants your help she’ll come to your room. You go up there for a while, forgetting the yellowed manuscripts and your own notebooks, thinking only about the beauty of your Aura. And the more you think about her, the more you make her yours, not only because of her beauty and your desire, but also because you want to set her free: you’ve found a moral basis for your desire, and you feel innocent and self-satisfied. When you hear the bell again you don’t go down to supper because you can’t bear another scene like the one at the middle of the day. Perhaps Aura will realize it, and come up to look for you after supper.

You force yourself to go on working on the papers. When you’re bored with them you undress slowly, get into bed, and fall asleep at once, and for the first time in years you dream, dream of only one thing, of a fleshless hand that comes toward you with a bell, screaming that you should go away, everyone should go away; and when that face with its empty eye-sockets comes close to yours, you wake up with a muffled cry, sweating, and feel those gentle hands caressing your face, those lips murmuring in a low voice, consoling you and asking you for affection. You reach out your hands to find that other body, that naked body with a key dangling from its neck, and when you recognize the key you recognize the woman who is lying over you, kissing you, kissing your whole body. You can’t see her in the black of the starless night, but you can smell the fragrance of the patio plants in her hair, can feel her smooth, eager body in your arms; you kiss her again and don’t ask her to speak.

When you free yourself, exhausted, from her embrace, you hear her first whisper: “You’re my husband.” You agree. She tells you it’s daybreak, then leaves you, saying that she’ll wait for you that night in her room. You agree again, and then fall asleep, relieved, unburdened, emptied of desire, still feeling the touch of Aura’s body, her trembling, her surrender.

It’s hard for you to wake up. There are several knocks on the door, and at last you get out of bed, groaning and still half-asleep. Aura, on the other side of the door, tells you not to open it: she says that Señora Consuelo wants to talk with you, is waiting for you in her room.

Ten minutes later you enter the widow’s sanctuary. She’s propped up against the pillows, motionless, her eyes hidden by those drooping, wrinkled, dead-white lids; you notice the puffy wrinkles under her eyes, the utter weariness of her skin.

Without opening her eyes she asks you, “Did you bring the key to the trunk?”

“Yes, I think so … Yes, here it is.”

“You can read the second part. It’s in the same place. It’s tied with a blue ribbon.”

You go over to the trunk, this time with a certain disgust: the rats are swarming around it, peering at you with their glittering eyes from the cracks in the rotted floorboards, galloping toward the holes in the rotted walls. You open the trunk and take out the second batch of papers, then return to the foot of the bed. Señora Consuelo is petting her white rabbit. A sort of croaking laugh emerges from her buttoned-up throat, and she asks you, “Do you like animals?”

“No, not especially. Perhaps because I’ve never had any.”

“They’re good friends. Good companions. Above all when you’re old and lonely.”

“Yes, they must be.”

“They’re always themselves, Señor Montero. They don’t have any pretensions.”

“What did you say his name is?”

“The rabbit? She’s Saga. She’s very intelligent. She follows her instincts. She’s natural and free.”

“I thought it was a male rabbit.”

“Oh? Then you still can’t tell the difference.”

“Well, the important thing is that you don’t feel all alone.”

“They want us to be alone, Señor Montero, because they tell us that solitude is the only way to achieve saintliness. They forget that in solitude the temptation is even greater.”

“I don’t understand, Señora.”

“Ah, it’s better that you don’t. Get back to work now, please.”

You turn your back on her, walk to the door, leave her room. In the hallway you clench your teeth. Why don’t you have courage enough to tell her that you love the girl? Why don’t you go back and tell her, once and for all, that you’re planning to take Aura away with you when you finish the job? You approach the door again and start pushing it open, still uncertain, and through the crack you see Señora Consuelo standing up, erect, transformed, with a military tunic in her arms: a blue tunic with gold buttons, red epaulettes, bright medals with crowned eagles—a tunic the old lady bites ferociously, kisses tenderly, drapes over her shoulders as she performs a few teetering dance steps. You close the door.

“She was fifteen years old when I met her,” you read in the second part of the memoirs. “Elle avait quinze ans lorsque je l’ai connue et, si j’ose le dire, ce sont ses yeux verts qui ont fait ma perdition.” Consuelo’s green eyes, Consuelo who was only fifteen in 1867, when General Llorente married her and took her with him into exile in Paris. “Ma jeune poupée,” he wrote in a moment of inspiration, “ma jeune poupée aux yeux verts; je t’ai comblée d’amour.” He described the house they lived in, the outings, the dances, the carriages, the world of the Second Empire, but all in a dull enough way. “J’ai même supporté ta haine des chats, moi qu’aimais tellement les jolies bêtes…” One day he found her torturing a cat: she had it clasped between her legs, with her crinoline skirt pulled up, and he didn’t know how to attract her attention because it seemed to him that “tu faisais ca d’une façon si innocent, par pur enfantillage,” and in fact it excited him so much that if you can believe what he wrote, he made love to her that night with extraordinary passion, “parce que tu m’avais dit que torturer les chats était ta manière a toi de rendre notre amour favorable, par un sacrifice symbolique…” You’ve figured it up: Señora Consuelo must be 109. Her husband died fifty-nine years ago. “Tu sais si bien t’habiller, ma douce Consuelo, toujours drappé dans de velours verts, verts comme tes yeux. Je pense que tu seras toujours belle, même dans cent ans…” Always dressed in green. Always beautiful, even after a hundred years. “Tu es si fière de ta beauté; que ne ferais-tu pas pour rester toujours jeune?”