Julia stopped Augusta’s hand and looked incredulously at the signs of authority that adorned her sister’s long, curved fingers.
“What, haven’t you ever worn rings?” the oldest sister said haughtily.
Julia bowed her head artfully. “The one I wanted Papa denied me. He forbade the three of us. But you know that.”
Genara bit a finger and thought of everything she and perhaps Augusta and certainly Julia had not done in their lives out of fear of their father while their father was alive. And now, now that he had been dead for ten years. .
“. . why don’t we have the courage to do everything he prohibited while he was alive?”
“Out of respect,” Julia said sweetly, though with a lost, disoriented look, as if she had been left hanging on the last word said before this one.
“Out of greed,” Augusta stated brusquely. “Because we don’t want to lose the inheritance. Be honest with the devil. Because we’re afraid to disobey him even though he’s dead.”
“Because you’re afraid of him,” Julia said almost inaudibly, “the way you were when he was alive?”
“Papa and his damn time periods. All of you wait. I’m coming. You’ll find out. Have faith, have faith, have faith!”
Augusta’s voice was lost in its own echo. Julia and Genara knew that echo. It was what Augusta emitted in order not to cry or shout. The two sisters approached to embrace her, caressing her head with its short, bristly, masculine hair. Genara, without meaning to, pulled off one of Augusta’s earrings.
“Oh! You’re always so clumsy.”
Julia and Genara withdrew their hands from Augusta’s head as if they had profaned an authority that competed only with that of the father. She was the oldest sister, though her authority always remained beneath that of their father, feeding a sense of inferiority in her that only increased her throbbing pride.
“Don’t deceive yourselves,” Augusta said to her sisters. “Don’t forget his disdainful, pitying, triumphant face. ‘Don’t upset yourself, my girl. Don’t deceive yourself. Don’t lower your eyes when I come in. Without us you aren’t. .’ ”
“What is she saying?” said Julia.
“What are you saying?” asked Genara.
“Nothing.” Augusta blew her nose with the cambric handkerchief she always had tucked in the long sleeve of her dress.
That “nothing” was the most certain reflection of the belief Augusta had been cultivating since their father had disappeared and she suddenly realized that now authority fell to the oldest sister. She felt overwhelmed by the suspicion that the fact of his death made the authority fall to her and was the inheritance that Augusta at one time rejected and longed for in a conflict with no way out that only her sisters, if they understood it, would dare to resolve for her. But Augusta not only did not want to explain to Julia and Genara what she herself could not really understand, she also wanted to admit that she, Augusta, felt uncomfortable with their father’s moral inheritance.
“Do you remember Mama?” Julia interrupted Augusta’s clouded thoughts in a melancholy way.
“Yes and no.”
“What do you mean?”
“That it wasn’t necessary to invent her. She was there. We came out of her and never really stopped living in her belly.”
“How awful. Not even when she died?”
Genara listened with languid patience to this exchange between Augusta and Julia. Rocking back and forth on her heels, she valued being the patient sister, the one who counted up the longest times. She knew her sisters did not recognize that virtue — or any others — in her. They did not offend her, Julia with her goodness, Augusta with her arrogance. They simply ignored her. Julia because she was good, so good she could not admit comparable goodness in another sister. It was enough for Genara to know this to also know that Julia, despite her sweetness, was condemned to the flames of a hell where simulation is not admitted. Julia was good because it suited her, because she wanted to go to heaven, when in reality, good people are the largest population in hell. Being good may deceive God but not the devil.
Did Genara engage in this mental construct in order to acquit Augusta of an unhappy fate? She glanced at the oldest sister, and behind the hard facade, she guessed at a weakness disguised by the abrupt way Augusta had of distancing herself from emotion. Which was why it surprised and moved Genara when her sister emitted the echo of a sob. What do we expect of the unexpected? Are these actions sincere or calculated? Genara reflected: Augusta didn’t allow herself to be carried away because of emotion or love for their father but because of absence of faith. Have faith, have faith. It was the chorus of a single voice. If Julia’s modesty was pure hypocrisy, then Augusta’s bitter will was a weak comedy put on to defy the father and, paradoxically, refuse to assume the authority that was hers as firstborn. An excuse. An evasion. Telling the father that at least one of his daughters was rebellious, obstinate, and wicked. As if the father didn’t know how to see through filial farces and humiliate Augusta with the punishment of pity.
That is why Genara is languid and patient. That is why she persists in dressing in an old-fashioned way, with her hair rolled high like a dark tower and makeup typical of Joan Crawford in the 1940s. Mouth very wide and very red. Eyes very open. Brows somewhat skeptical. And an expression very etcetera, as their father would say. She would say “imposed,” because it was true. Genara felt like a caricature of another time and knew it was because her fiction had become her reality. Joan Crawford in the 1940s. Mildred Pierce. Despite the modesty of its owner, her black silk one-piece dress turned out to be provocative, striking. Genara wanted to provoke only sorrow and consolation.
It’s true: In the annual reunions, there was a latent desire for consolation. Let the three, so different among themselves, remember that in the end, they were sisters. Perhaps they were brought together, with dissimilar masks, by the unconfessed pride of being daughters of a man so original and so involved in their origins, their powerful and eternal father. They were proud. The proof was in their reluctance to offer consolation to one another. That was why Genara was patient. In the depths of her soul, she believed that at some point mercy would flower, the three would embrace — as in that fleeting instant when Augusta, so unlike herself, made an echo of her sorrow.
“Save us from all responsibility,” murmured Genara.
“What did you say?” Augusta was tense.
“Nothing, sister. It just occurred to me that since he isn’t with us, in reality we can do whatever we want.”
“You know very well why we can’t do what we want.”
“Why?”
“You know very well. It’s in the will. It’s our duty.”
“It’s greed.”
“Or risk.” Julia intervened for the first time. “Do you realize our lives would be at risk if we disobey? I mean, we don’t know the cost of disobedience—”
“That doesn’t matter anymore,” Genara interrupted. “We’ve done our duty for nine years.”
“That’s why it would be foolish to avoid it now without knowing what would have happened if—”
Augusta interrupted in a tone comparable to Julia’s: “Don’t be stupid. We’ve done what we had to do. Let’s not speculate on what would have happened if we had disobeyed Papa.”
“We still can disobey him,” Genara said slyly.
“Be quiet,” Augusta continued. “It no longer makes sense, since we did obey him. We’ve come to the point he asked us to reach.”
“And if we disobey him?” Genara insisted with childish perversity. “Just once?”
Julia did not hide her horror. She did not have to say anything to indicate the fear caused in her by the idea of having done their duty for nine years of obedience only to stop at the finish line, violate the promise, and be left forever without knowing the truth. She would have liked to scratch Genara, knock down her soaring hairdo of a film noir diva. Since that didn’t correspond to her personality — a personality constructed so meticulously — Julia cried instead, her head leaning against the coffin. Mercy was safer than the passivity of the modest Genara or the authoritarian hardness of the proud Augusta, both pale imitations of their father. Perhaps similar to what their mother was in life. She didn’t know. She hadn’t known Mama.