Halley’s Comet

For Miguel Ordoqui

You can never tell
what will become of you.
FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA
The House of Bernarda Alba

 

VERY LATE ONE NIGHT in the summer of 1891 (that’s right, 1891), when Pepe El Romano runs away with Adela’s virginity, though leaving her behind, everything seems to have come to a most tragic end for Bernarda Alba’s five daughters: Adela, Pepe’s lover, hangs from a noose fastened to the ceiling of her maiden room; Angustias keeps intact her forty years of chastity; and the rest of the sisters, Magdalena, Amelia, and Martirio, are also condemned to spinsterhood or the convent.

But things did not really turn out that way. And if García Lorca left their story unfinished and unclear, we forgive him. Being wilder than his own characters—and with good reason—he followed Pepe El Romano, “that giant, or centaur perhaps, who huffs like a lion.” A few weeks later, though (but that is another story), poor Federico perished at the hands of that splendid trickster, who, after swindling him out of everything he had and, alas, without even satisfying him first (cruelest of men), slit his throat.

And it happened that while Bernarda Alba was making the arrangements for her daughter’s funeral with implacable austerity, the other four sisters, aided by their maid, La Poncia, took Adela down, and by their slapping, shouting, and recriminations brought her back to life or simply out of her fainting spell.

Bernarda Alba’s voice was already demanding that the five women open the door when together they decided that a life on the run was a thousand times preferable to living under the fearsome old woman’s iron hand. With La Poncia’s help, the five sisters jumped out the window and over the garden wall and the corral fence, and when they were already out in the open (and, it must be said, under a splendidly Lorcan moon), the feeling of freedom they enjoyed for the first time made their reciprocal resentments momentarily vanish. The five sisters embraced one another, crying joyously, and swore they were going to leave not only their home and the town but Andalusia and all of Spain as well. After a short stretch La Poncia caught up with them. In spite of her anger, and with a joy that had less to do with the sisters’ happiness than with Bernarda Alba’s fall from power, she handed them all the house jewels, her own savings, and even the dowry reserved for Angustias’s marriage. They pleaded with her to accompany them. She insisted, however, that her place was not on the other side of the ocean but next to the room of Bernarda Alba, whose raging screams “would lull her better”—those were her words—“than the very sound of the ocean.”

And they left.

While Federico was expiring, unsatisfied, they were crossing infinite fields of sunflowers, sometimes singing the verses of the dying poet. They left Córdoba and Seville, went through the Sierra Morena, and as soon as they reached Cádiz, bought tickets to Havana, where they arrived a month later, still euphoric and feeling rejuvenated.

They rented a house on Obispo Street near the ocean and, overconfident perhaps, expected future lovers to appear. But with the exception of Adela, the sisters seemed to have no luck with men. Angustias stayed day and night on display behind the wrought-iron window without any success. Magdalena, lanky and thirtyish, would take walks around El Prado Boulevard, but she managed only to have a Dragon Corps lieutenant trample her with his horse and then insult her for obstructing traffic. Amelia, with her stooping back, was only an object of derision and of an occasional stone hurled at her by some young black hoodlum from the Manglar district. Even worse, several youths from the Spanish Volunteer Corp, accusing her of witchcraft and of having offended the king’s soldiers, attempted one evening to throw her into the moat at La Fuerza Castle. And Martirio, maybe in hopes that some of Adela’s charms would rub off on her, followed her sister’s every move, and Adela’s belly grew and grew, just like the number of her lovers.

Even though her sisters knew about Adela’s very successful amorous adventures in Havana, and resented them, scandal and public condemnation did not erupt until the baby was born. Twenty-five redoubtable men (including six blacks, one Chinese, and four mulattoes) claimed paternity, arguing that the baby boy must have been born premature. The four sisters, who saw Pepe El Romano’s image clearly in the face of the newborn, could not bear Adela’s disgrace—or rather, Adela’s triumph. They declared her wicked and abandoned her. At the same time, they deemed such a dissolute mother unworthy to raise a child and took the baby away from her, though not until they had had him christened José de Alba in the cathedral. Adela wept deeply, but there were twenty-five beaux to console her.

Angustias, Magdalena, Amelia, and Martirio wanted to move to some remote town near the sea. After many inquiries, they finally chose Cárdenas.

This town (now called a city) was minuscule, provincial, and totally boring: very different from old Obispo Street, which had always been full of singing vendors, carriages, smells, women, horses, and men. All of this had made them despair and had forced them to go out often wearing their best clothes, their finest jewelry, and the best cologne. But in Cárdenas nothing of the sort was ever needed. One could not even hear the women talking in the neighborhood, and as for the men, they were always far away, fishing or working the land.

“Being born a woman is the worst curse of all,” said Angustias out loud once they were fully installed in their new home.

And right then the four sisters silently promised to renounce every vestige of femininity.

And they succeeded.

Dark curtains covered their windows. They dressed in black and, according to the fashion of their old homeland, covered their heads with gray bonnets that they would not take off even on the hottest days of summer, which in this land seems never-ending. Having abandoned all aspirations for their bodies, they gave in to the stupor of the sweltering heat and to tropical excesses, losing in the process what little was left of their figures. All of them became devoted, with bovine fervor, to raising their nephew.

Naturally, Adela’s name was never mentioned in that household, not even by mistake. José (or Pepe, his nickname) was for them, and for all he knew, the nephew they had brought from Spain after the death of his mother in childbirth. The story was no less credible than any other, and because of its pathos, everyone, including the sisters, ended up believing it.

In time they also forgot not only Adela’s story—eighteen years had gone by since their arrival on the island—but Adela herself. As for the rest of their former lives, little by little the new calamities they had to face together created new memories for them, or new nightmares: Cuba’s War of Independence, which discriminated against them; the big food shortage of 1897; and the birth of the republic, which, instead of marking the end of the hostilities, seemed to bring about incessant rebellions. As if all this weren’t enough, some insolent rabble—human trash, they called them—had installed themselves everywhere. The sisters got to be known as the “Spanish nuns,” and for some reason this trash wished they would participate in its noisy and grotesque pandemonium.

So the Alba sisters walled themselves up even more in their chastity, as well as in their approaching old age, devoting their lives to the care of their nephew, who had turned into a shy, handsome youth with curly hair (like his father’s). He did not leave the house except to sell in the streets the waxed-paper flowers or the knits his aunts had concocted.

Although the four sisters were the object of envy for some, the irreproachable, monastic life they led earned them a sort of distant admiration all over Cárdenas. The “Spanish nuns” became the most respected women in town, to the point that someone who wished to praise a woman for her morals usually said that she was “almost as chaste as one of the Alba sisters.” The parish priest (they always went to church with their nephew) mentioned them as “paragons of Christian perseverance and morality.” Their good fame reached its peak when the priest praised them in his Easter Sunday sermon. It is true that Angustias sometimes assisted the old priest and, accompanied by her three sisters, dusted the altar and swept and washed the church floor with such discipline that it seemed the spirit of Bernarda Alba was supervising her. But it must be recognized that they did these chores not out of obligation or hypocrisy, but out of true devotion.

The four sisters interrupted their monotonous lives only for their Sunday outings to the shore. Dressed in black to their ankles, in their best finery, including black parasols, they would visit the rather desolate Cárdenas seashore. There in the sand, between the water and the rock formations, they would stay sometimes for over an hour like strange, gigantic crows mesmerized by the ceaseless churning of the ocean. Before dusk they would start for home, enveloped in the violet light that seems unique to the region. They looked as if they were returning from a fiesta. José would wait for them sitting on the porch with the proceeds from the day’s sales, which were more substantial because it was Sunday. As they walked into the house, they would glance with a certain discreet pride at the small plaque that they had placed by their door some years before: VILLA ALBA, FLOWERS AND HANDMADE KNITS.

There was every indication that those women’s lives, increasingly more devout and silent by the day, produced an almost unhealthful piety, so that their every move was dictated by church bells.

It is also essential to take account of their nephew’s behavior. Solitary, shy, conservatively attired (that is, asphyxiating in those black suits), he had no social contact with the outside world other than what was strictly necessary for selling the merchandise that provided the family income. He was eighteen years old, and nobody had yet seen him with a girlfriend, or with any friend. He did not seem to need any more love than the distant, maternal love offered by his aunts. And this shared love was also enough to fulfill the lives of the four women. Certainly none of them still thought of—the words are La Poncia’s—what it was “to feel a lizard between her breasts.” Much less of having once felt—the words are Martirio’s—“a sudden sort of blaze inside.”

It is true that you can never tell what will become of you, but in Cárdenas everything pointed to a peaceful end for the Alba sisters, or at least one very far removed from exaltation or scandal.

Something quite unexpected and unique would have to happen to extricate those lives from the ecstasy of their own renunciation. That is precisely what happened. An extraordinary event occurred during that spring of 1910. Halley’s comet visited the earth.

We are not going to enumerate the hair-raising catastrophes that the press claimed would take place on the planet with the arrival of the comet. It is all well documented in the libraries. Suffice it to say that the most popular writer of the moment (today justly forgotten), Señor García Markos, obviously also considered himself an astronomer and had authored such books as Astrology for the Ladies and What the Señoritas Should Know about the Stars, not to mention Love in the Times of the Red Vomit. He also published a series of articles that within weeks had spread all over the world, and in them he proposed with a fair amount of scientific verbosity that as the comet’s tail entered the earth’s atmosphere, this would become contaminated (and “rarefied”) by a deadly gas that would bring to an end life as we know it because, and we quote, “the combining of atmospheric oxygen with the hydrogen in the comet’s tail will inevitably cause immediate asphyxiation.” This preposterous bit of information (preposterous now, forty years after its publication) was taken very seriously, perhaps for its being so uniquely dramatic. On the other hand, as a hypothesis it was not easy to disprove: the comet, according to García Markos, was getting closer to the earth each time around. And who was to know? That very year could be the end. This pseudoscientific writer also insisted that the end of the world would bring plagues of centaurs, griffins, igneous fish, outlandish viscous birds, phosphorescent whales, and other “monsters from outer space,” which, as a result of the collision, would fall on this planet accompanied by an aerolite shower. And all of that was also taken at face value by most people. Let us remember that those times (like any other) were backward and there was little to distinguish stupidity from innocence, and lack of restraint from imaginativeness.

The Cárdenas parish priest welcomed with fanatic fervor the apocalyptic predictions of Señor García Markos and all his followers. In an inspired and fatalistic sermon, the priest openly foretold the end of the world: a classic finale, just as the Bible had announced, with the earth enveloped in flames. Naturally, this end was being brought about by the continuous chain of excesses and impious acts committed throughout history by the human race, which had made the divine wrath overflow at last. The end was not only imminent but well deserved. This, however, did not prevent many of the citizens of Cárdenas (or surely, of other locations) from devoting themselves to the construction of underground shelters in which to peremptorily seek protection until the ominous comet had moved out of our orbit. But it is also true that some of the people in Cárdenas, instead of taking precautions against the disaster, brought it on themselves in advance by committing suicide. The municipality has preserved desperate letters from mothers who, rather than wait to face the universal conflagration, chose to go ahead of it, together with all their progeny.

The priest, of course, condemned the suicides as well as the construction of shelters to escape the end. Both, he declared in another sermon, were acts of sheer arrogance, pagan and even illegal, since their intention was to elude divine justice.

On their way home from this sermon, Angustias, Martirio, Magdalena, and Amelia met their nephew in the garden, where he had just built a refuge big enough for fifty persons.

“Close that hole right away,” said Angustias slowly but implacably.

Over their nephew’s protests, the four sisters replaced the soil. When the job was finished, Martirio began to replant all the vegetation that Pepe had pulled out.

“Sister,” reproved Magdalena, “don’t you understand that all of this is already useless?”

Martirio, who was holding up some young gardenias, began to whimper.

“Let’s go inside,” commanded Angustias, pushing her sisters. “Come on. Don’t you see you’re making a scene? What will the neighbors say?”

“And don’t you realize that this doesn’t matter either, anymore?” answered Martirio, drying her tears.

Angustias seemed to hesitate for a moment but quickly recovered, saying, “Perhaps our last actions will be the ones that will count the most.”

And the four sisters went inside.

It was already late afternoon.

The ominous evening of April 11, 1910, was approaching. The encounter between Halley’s comet and the earth, and therefore the end of the world, was expected in the early hours, shortly past midnight.

It must be pointed out that, in spite of the priest’s fervent and constant sermons, some in Cárdenas still refused to heed him. Even though they were convinced that the end would come that night, those people did not devote themselves to repentance and prayer, but just the opposite. For their last hours on earth, they decided to have a ball. Early that afternoon groups of drunken youths began roaming the streets. Besides causing quite a ruckus, unheard of in that town, they sang bawdy songs and used shameless language. These people were joined by some women who until then had led more or less conventional lives. Sometimes this din even interfered with the litany of prayers headed by Angustias and echoed by her sisters.

In the middle of all the noise they heard a carriage stop in front of the house and, a few seconds later, someone knock at their door.

“Don’t open the door!” Angustias shouted, without letting go of her rosary beads.

But the knocking became more insistent, so the four sisters, escorted by José de Alba, decided to go and see.

They opened the door with extreme caution, and there, in front of them, was Adela. She was wearing a magnificent evening gown of green taffeta adorned with red lace; white gloves; a red mantilla over her head; and a splendid pair of suede ankle-length boots. In her hands she carried a beautiful fan of peacock feathers and a sequined purse, both of which she hurled into the corridor so that she could embrace her sisters. But they stepped back in horror. Adela, unflappable, entered the house swaying her hips and gesturing to the coachman to bring down her luggage, a monumental trunk full of excellent wines, Baccarat glasses, a gramophone, and an oil painting that was an oversize portrait of Pepe El Romano.

“It seems that I am the only Christian in this family,” she said as she came into the sitting room. “I am not forgetting you at this critical moment. And besides, I have forgiven you.”

“But we haven’t,” Angustias countered.

“Well, my dear, then I don’t know what your religion is,” retorted Adela, taking off her shoes, “if even at a moment like this you are incapable of forgiving your own sister.”

As she glanced at the rosary Angustias still held in her fingers, it seemed to her a strange object, almost a nuisance.

“My dear sisters,” said Adela, full of emotion and taking advantage of the confusion her last words had caused, “I have come because this is the last night. Don’t you see? The only night left in this world! And just as we escaped together from that other world of ours, which we hated, I would also like for us to abandon this one together. Our lives have been so different here, but never, not even for a day, have I forgotten you!”

If she intended to say more, the fact is, she couldn’t. Her head sank into the red tulle tufts of her skirt, and she broke down, sobbing.

Martirio came to her first and, kneeling, embraced her legs. Quickly Amelia and Magdalena joined her, crying as well.

Finally Angustias took her hand and, pointing to José de Alba, spoke to Adela. “Here is your son. You don’t have much time to explain to him who you are.”

“That will not be necessary,” said Adela. “He is already a man and can understand it all.”

“A man, already a man,” José de Alba gleefully told himself, and could not keep his cheeks from turning red.

“A man,” repeated Adela, “and a very handsome one, like his father.”

After asking the coachman to take care of the horses, she walked to the large trunk and began to unpack. She placed the glasses and a few bottles of wine on the table, took out the oversize portrait of Pepe El Romano, and, before anyone could raise an objection, hung the splendid canvas (it had been done by Landaluze) on the sitting room wall.

At the sight of his image, the Alba sisters were suddenly transformed.

“Yes,” Adela continued, lovingly looking at the portrait and then at her son, “he has his father’s good looks, though he’s more handsome. And to think that I have come to know you precisely now, just as the world is coming to an end. A corkscrew! I need a corkscrew!”

“What did you say?” Angustias asked, surprised at the sudden shift in Adela’s train of thought.

“Yes, dear, a corkscrew. Or are we just going to sit here waiting for the end of the world without even a glass of wine?”

Angustias began to object. But Martirio was already there with the corkscrew.

“Where did you get that?” Magdalena asked in amazement. “We have never used it in this house.”

“You haven’t used it because you never cook. But how do you think we open a bottle of wine vinegar?”

“My dear sisters! I cannot believe this!” interrupted Adela, filling the glasses with an excellent red wine. “The world is coming to an end and you argue about a corkscrew. Take your glasses of wine and let’s go to the garden to watch the comet.”

“It won’t appear until midnight,” said Amelia.

“Obviously you are behind the times,” answered Adela. “At midnight is when the world ends, but the comet can be seen after sunset. Haven’t you read the newspapers from Havana?”

“We never read that sort of thing,” Angustias protested.

“Your loss,” said Adela, “and it is too late to remedy that.”

With that, she reached for her son, who was watching her enthralled, and led him by the hand into the garden.

It was a splendid evening, an exceptional tropical night, the kind that can be particularly enjoyed in Cuba. A pale luminosity seemed to come from the land and from the sea. Each tree seemed to be contained in its own halo. In that small town still innocent of electricity, the sky was illuminated as if by some rare candlelight. All the constellations, and even the most remote stars, were sending out a signal, a message that was perhaps complex, perhaps simple, but now already impossible to decipher. The May Cross (though it was April) could be clearly seen; the Seven Sisters were unmistakable; and reddish Orion, distant but familiar, was twinkling. A spring moon rose over the ocean, leaving a track of light that dissolved in the waters. Only a body like a celestial serpent interrupted the harmony of the sky. Halley’s comet was making its appearance in the peacefully scintillating immensity of the astral canopy. Then, in a clear but remote voice, Adela began to sing:

Girls and women in this town,
Don’t keep your shutters down.
The reaper of roses is near,
Seeking a bloom for his ear.

 

And suddenly, as if a powerful impulse held back for many years had been let loose, her sisters joined in the chorus:

The reaper of roses is near,
Seeking a bloom for his ear.

 

They kept singing, and Adela, who had had the foresight to bring with her a bottle of wine, refilled their glasses.

Girls and women in this town,
Don’t keep your shutters down.
Let’s get married by the sea,
By the sea, by the sea.

 

Once more the glasses were emptied. Then Adela started to speak.

“Yes,” she said, pointing toward the comet, “that ball of fire that is crossing the skies, and that in a few hours will annihilate us, is the ball of fire that all of you”—and unsteadily she now pointed to her four sisters—“all of you have between your thighs, and because you did not put it out at the appropriate time, it now flares up, seeking its just revenge.” They started to protest, but Adela kept talking and served them more wine. “That ball of fire is like the embers Bernarda Alba would have stuck into Librada’s daughter to punish her for having behaved like a woman. Sisters of mine! That ball of fire is you, who did not want to quench the fire of desire, as I did, and now you are going to burn for all eternity. Yes, it is a punishment. Not for what we did, but for what we did not do. And you still have time! You still have time!” Adela stood shouting in the middle of the garden, her voice mingling with the songs that the drunks waiting for the end were singing in the street. “You still have time, not to save your lives, but to gain admission to heaven. And how do you get to heaven?” she asked, already inebriated, standing by the gardenias. “With hate or with love? Through abstinence or through pleasure? With sincerity or with hypocrisy?” She tripped, but José de Alba, who had been transformed into the sheer image of Pepe El Romano, kept her from falling, and she, in gratitude, kissed him on the lips. “Two hours! We have only two hours left!” she shouted, looking at her handsome silver watch, a gift from a Dutch beau. “Let’s go inside the house and pass our last minutes in loving communion.”

The six figures staggered into the sitting room. The tropical heat made them, with Adela’s help, abandon most of their clothes. Bonnets, gloves, overcoats, skirts, even petticoats vanished. Adela herself helped her son part with his bowler hat, his necktie, his shirt. She led him—both of them half-dressed—to Pepe El Romano’s portrait and proposed a general toast. They all raised their glasses.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen here,” Angustias said without a hint of protest, leaning on her nephew’s arm to steady herself.

“Wait a second,” Adela said, and, walking to her trunk, she took the gramophone out and placed it on the center table. The whole house immediately vibrated with the voice of Raquel Meller singing a popular ditty.

It was not necessary to organize couples. Angustias started dancing with Pepe, Magdalena danced with Amelia, and Martirio led Adela, who, getting rid of her blouse, confessed that she had never grown accustomed to the tropical heat.

“I did not snitch on you to Mother because of love for Pepe El Romano,” Martirio said, as if someone had asked her. “I did it because of you.”

“I suspected that,” Adela answered. And the two women embraced.

Because the drunken clamor in the street was now deafening (there was only an hour and three minutes left before the end of the world), they decided to close the windows, draw the curtains, and play the gramophone as loud as possible. As they danced around, someone turned off the lights. And the whole house was illuminated only by the stars, the moon, and Halley’s comet.

When Raquel Meller sang “Fumando espero” (Smoking While I Wait for You)—and according to their calculations, there were only forty-five minutes until the end of the world—Adela opened the door and signaled the coachman to come in. A handsome freed slave from the Santa María district, he was overjoyed at the invitation. Wasting no time, he happily shed his livery and leather boots.

Before the gramophone needed rewinding again, both José de Alba and the coachman were embracing the five—by now scantily dressed—women one by one. The glasses were filled again, and all of them, practically naked, devoted themselves to making love under the enormous portrait of Pepe El Romano.

“We’re not going to wait for the world to end inside these four walls,” said Adela. “Let’s go out.”

The five Alba sisters, without a stitch on, were soon out in the street, accompanied by José, still in his drawers, and the coachman, who had only his spurs on.

As long as the sky keeps turning (and we trust it will never stop), no one will hear the kind of screaming that was heard in the streets of Cárdenas that night. The coachman—cued, it is fair to say, by Adela—possessed the five women one after the other, followed immediately by José de Alba, who made a masterly debut. Finally, many bumpkins (as Angustias called them) joined the cavalcade, repeatedly mounting all the women, who evidently were not ready to stop yet. Only Martirio occasionally took advantage of the confusion to escape from the arms of some ruffian and go for Adela’s breasts. A bit later the two sisters (and now there were only fifteen minutes left before the end of the world) went inside the house and came back right away carrying Pepe El Romano’s portrait.

“Now we can go on,” said Adela, as she placed the painting facing the stars.

There were only five minutes now before Halley’s comet reached its central position in the skies.

And so it did. And then it continued on its trajectory. And it disappeared over the horizon. And the sun rose. And by noon, when the Alba sisters woke up, they were amazed to see themselves, not in hell or in paradise, but in the middle of the main street in Cárdenas, totally in the buff and still embracing several farm laborers, and a coachman, also buck naked. José de Alba, who seemed as youthful as ever despite his many sexual encounters, emerged once more from the sweaty bodies. The only thing that had disappeared in the confusion was the portrait of Pepe El Romano, though nobody had noticed.

“Well, well, so the world didn’t end,” said Adela, half-asleep. Stretching, she convinced her sisters that the best thing to do was to return home.

The procession back was led by Angustias, whose fiftyeight-year-old bare body was in the sunlight for the first time; next came Magdalena, arm in arm with the coachman; behind them, Amelia, with someone who said that he was an unemployed carpenter; and at the rear of the retinue, the tight trilogy of Martirio, Adela, and José. In this order they walked through their garden, perfumed as usual by the gardenias, and went inside the house.

But before going in, Adela pulled out the plaque by the door that read VILLA ALBA, FLOWERS AND HANDMADE KNITS, and that same afternoon she replaced it with a more colorful, shining one that said HALLEY’S COMET.

Halley’s Comet became one of the most famous and prestigious brothels in all Cárdenas, as well as in the whole province. Experts in these matters declare that it could have competed with those in the capital, Havana, and even with those in Barcelona and Paris. For many years it was splendidly serviced by its founders, the Alba sisters, well educated and generous matrons like none you can find at present (1950). They knew how to blend love and love of money, pleasure and wisdom, tenderness and lust. But here we must fall silent, because as Knights of the Order of the New Galaxy and as astronomers decorated by the Municipality of Jagüey Grande, we are sworn not to disclose any more details about these ladies’ lives. We can only bear witness and, with ample experience in such matters, state that none of them died a virgin.

Miami Beach, January 1986