3. Tonight the ten years prescribed as a condition of their father’s will are over, and the three daughters prepare for the outcome. They arrived punctually (at nightfall), though Julia came early to light a long candle at each corner of the coffin. They arrive and give one another light, rapid, purely ceremonial kisses on the cheek. Each one knows she doesn’t love the other two. No matter how Julia dissimulates with sweet gestures of affection. Genara disguises displeasure — real — as well as love — nonexistent. Only Augusta appears with a sour face and crosses her arms.
The sisters don’t speak to one another for a long time. Julia fusses over making certain the candles are lit. That they don’t go out in spite of being very long. Augusta looks at her nails and doesn’t say a word. Genara observes the ceiling of the garage as if it were the starry sky on a cold, clear winter night. Augusta, who knows her very well, murmurs quietly, “Tropics, we’re in the tropics, fool.”
Augusta doesn’t hide the fact that her sisters bore her. Though her father bored her even more. The severe daughter corrects herself immediately. Saying “bored me” is a cheap way to debase her father. The truth is, he enervated her, made her uncomfortable. It has always been Augusta’s opinion that their father was like flies. He had so many eyes he could see everything and wouldn’t let himself be flattened by a slap. She would like to believe that recollection is all that remains of her father. He took care not to be simply a pious memory. This annual ceremony keeps him alive. Above all because of the unsettling question — more like a threat — that at the end of ten years, something will happen. And it won’t be anything good, about that Augusta feels certain.
On the other hand, thinks the guileless Genara, after ten years the inheritance will be established. This doesn’t concern her. She knows that the condition, which suspends for only a certain period of time the execution of the will, does not stop the daughters from acquiring a right to the inheritance. She looks at Augusta and understands that the oldest sister can read her thoughts. She considers her naive. To think that today, tonight, their father is going to resolve the enigma of his will is not to know the man.
Augusta would like to say to her sisters:
“Papa is deceiving us. He always deceived us. Deceit is his profession. He’s like a smiling cardsharp.” (There’s a reason Genara always crossed herself when she saw her father.) (Genara avoids the piercing eyes of her older sister.) (Genara is superstitious.)
(Genara believes in the stars, lucky dates, black cats.) Augusta knows this and makes fun of her in secret. Their father also knows the power of superstition. He counts on it to keep the daughters unsettled year after year.
“Don’t be superstitious,” Augusta suddenly springs on Genara.
“What? What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s too bad,” Julia gently intervenes.
“What?” Genara repeats.
“I said that’s too bad. We ought to talk to one another. At least once a year.”
“Do you know why we don’t talk to one another?” Augusta interrupts inconsiderately.
Julia shakes her blond head.
“So Papa won’t catch us.”
Julia and Genara don’t understand Augusta, and Augusta doesn’t deign to clarify her words. She keeps her reasons to herself. The sisters exhaust her. They believe their father eventually will grow tired, and today, after a decade, he will free them of mourning so he himself can rest in peace.
This is a thought that, in a very different way, Julia and Genara share. Julia out of simple charity. That everything will conclude and everyone will be at peace. Be able to wear spring flower prints again. A pretty cream-colored dress with an asparagus print. A tailored dress with orchids on the lapel. Leave behind the mourning imposed by their father.
Julia believes more, much more, in the kindnesses of memory that her sisters, for different reasons, reject or malign. Julia selects the best moments from her recollection and puts them together in nosegays of happiness. Games, affections, roses. Her father’s arms lifting her high. Her father’s lap receiving the curled-up little girl. The father’s hands. .
“I was my father’s little bird.” The young woman smiles. “I was always at his side. In silence. I never contradicted him. I never was disrespectful. I never raised my voice to him.”
Julia curbs her recollections as if her sisters can hear what she is thinking. She imagines that each of them at these moments does one of two things: She remembers or eliminates memories. Genara struggles against the memory of their father. She even makes the mistake of humming some tune from her childhood, revealing in this way what she does not wish to show.
Their father would accuse her: “You’re a full-fledged lazy thing.”
No, she wasn’t lazy. She was indolent, which isn’t the same thing. It isn’t that she wouldn’t or couldn’t do things. She believed that in the end everything would work out, more or less, with no need for her to act. Perhaps she was a contented girl who, since she did not know how to lie, thought it better to be quiet. How could she call her father “daddy dear,” like that hypocrite Julia, if she didn’t believe it? No, she wasn’t lazy. She avoided contradicting her father or fulfilling his expectations with regard to the affection he deserved. Perhaps Genara was simply walled inside her own childhood, distrustful of growing up in a world determined by the will of her father. What was wrong with that?
Only Augusta has sealed off her memory, carrying in her head a ridiculous mnemonic: the numbers of her bank accounts. But it is she, unexpectedly, who breaks the round of their silences by placing a hand on the coffin.
“He spent his life putting us to the test. How good that this is over.”
The sisters look at her with disbelief, amazement, and grievance.
“It’s true,” wails Genara. “It’s true. He’s dead.”
“He died,” Julia insists without wanting to. “What a shame.”
“Died, yes,” Augusta concludes. She insists, “Do you remember? Do you remember that list of prohibitions he wrote out by hand and tacked at the entrance to the bathroom?”
“You don’t remember that,” Julia said with easy tolerance.
“I remember, and so do you, Julia,” Augusta continued with the air of a gardener who cuts the overgrown grass and can’t interrupt the work without changing the rhythm or destroying a bed of roses by mistake. “Don’t touch yourself, don’t look at yourself. Avoid mirrors. Get dressed in the dark. Bathe in your shift. Don’t touch yourself. Don’t look at yourself. Don’t look at a man. Don’t let anyone touch you. Don’t go out alone. Sit in the first row at the movies even if it makes you cross-eyed. Don’t let yourself be looked at. Put a fig leaf on the art prints at school. Better yet: Don’t go to school anymore. I’ll be your school. Come, Augusta, sit on my lap so I can teach you. Go on, Genara, let me dress and undress you while you close your eyes and imagine I’m the sweetheart I forbid you to have. Lie down, Julia, I’ll sing you to sleep. You girls don’t have a mother. I’ll be father and mother both, I’ll—”
“I’d say that a father can be a perverse mother.” Augusta twisted her lips.
Julia touched Augusta’s hand. “There were only good intentions.”
“Then why do I remember them as perversions?”
“Because the perverse one is you,” Genara dared to say, and Augusta slapped her, a heavy blow of square, metallic Caesarian rings.