“She was a little anal, that Sandrita, look at the state she had you in,” Mateo suggested.
“Not anal, disciplined. And she was right, if I remained so flighty, I was going to get us both killed. You had to learn how to move, Mateo, and it wasn’t easy. You spent your time trying not to get caught in the web of deceit that you had to weave around you.”
Finally alone and shuttered in her room, she decided to get Aurelia out of her head for a while, that beast Aurelia, that is, her fiery nom de guerre, that brave warrior who did nothing but screw up and ignore all the warnings. So she decided to think about the land that Papaíto had left her, beautiful San Jacinto, and she closed her eyes to summon giant purple flowers that appeared on the artichokes if they were not harvested on time, of the manna grass that sprouted on the hills and had to be cared for like an open eye so that it doesn’t dry, the adobe bread oven that Papaíto had built behind the kitchen. She thought for a long time about that oven and the breads that came out of it, which generally ended up, according to Papaíto, soused. And who knows what he meant by that word, because he used it when the breads came out not fully cooked, but also when they were overcooked, when they stuck to one another and when the dough collapsed. What do you think, Papaíto? And he always responded: A disaster, soused again — which must have meant any of these categories: uncooked, burned, stuck together, or deflated. The truth was, they had never mastered the secrets of the adobe oven.
“If you’re talking about good bread, we never quite got there, Mateo. But the faint aroma escaping from that oven on cold mornings was always gratifying. Come to think of it, I suspect that it wasn’t really the bread that interested Papaíto but that aroma. And the slow, milky air that flooded the fields of San Jacinto at night. Did it come down from the hills, or was it more likely the hot breath of the cattle mingling with the freezing air?” Alone in her bedroom of the apartment on Deán Funes, Lorenza continued to dwell on these memories: Papaíto lighting the coal stove, removing bits of iron and blowing on them with the bellows; Mamaíta, who stirred the hot chocolate, wearing a poncho over her nightgown; the old copper water tank, which began to rattle as soon as the water got hot; her sister Guadalupe and herself still under the blankets, testing the harshness of the cold that awaited them outside with the tips of their noses; the times when they would lay down a foundation of bricks to add another bedroom to the house, or crawl about on all fours weeding the garden.
“And they were also the years of the literary boom. In San Jacinto, we devoured novels by Carpentier, Vargas Llosa, Juan Rulfo, and Carlos Fuentes. Cortázar’s short stories and Gabo’s Autumn of the Patriarch. We had barely finished reading one when they would be already coming out with another, a new prodigy.”
Lorenza also thought about, or should have thought about, the ass they kept, woolly and purplish like the hairy leaves of the espeletia and the flowers of the sietecueros that flourished up above, in the icy air of the páramo. Papaíto had christened the ass the Philanthropist because he was affectionate and spoiled and followed them around everywhere, even sneaking into the house if they left the doors open. He was fascinated with animals, Papaíto was. Lorenza had never met such an animal lover. And it had been that way since he was a child; all you had to do was look at the pictures from that time to prove it. When he wasn’t hugging a goose, he was riding a dog or a horse, not a regular riding horse but a scrawny one, picked at by cattle tyrants, from the breeds used to frighten foxes.
That night on Deán Funes, Lorenza couldn’t stop thinking about those days, especially about the purebred Aberdeen Angus cattle that her father had imported from the United States and put out to graze in the fields of San Jacinto, in hopes of going into the beef business. They were tiny and squarish, looking more like bovine ponies, with dreamy eyelashes and resplendent black hair. Needless to say, in no time at all, they were no different than the Philanthropist, eating sugar cubes from human hands. Papaíto, who knew each of them by name and spent hours brushing their hair, was of course incapable of sending them off to the slaughterhouse when the time came, so the only thing that perished was his beef business, and the Aberdeen all lived to an old age after a long life as unproductive as it was peaceful.
She thought and thought, about these and other things, until she fell asleep when it was almost dawn, perhaps dreaming about Papaíto, because during that early time in Buenos Aires she dreamed about him a lot, maybe because his death was so recent, or because she refused to accept it. In one of those dreams he was working on a jigsaw puzzle, something that in real life they often did together at night in San Jacinto by the fire. But the jigsaw puzzle of the dream, whose subject was a blue lake, was so big that it fell off the table.
“It was difficult to piece together, Mateo, rather impossible since the whole of the picture was blue, only blue, different hues of blue, the water blue and the sky also blue, so that in my dream, Papaíto was very still, perhaps flabbergasted, looking first at the nascent puzzle and then at the pieces piled on the side, without even trying to put a piece in place because they were all the same, all of them blue, any of them could have fit anywhere in that realm that was blue from beginning to end.”
So she was now the inheritor of San Jacinto? That’s what it looked like. The papers that certified this were on her night table. And yet she awoke thinking that if Papaíto wasn’t there with his soused breads, his overindulged ass and cattle, then she wasn’t quite sure what it was that she had inherited. A bit of fog, nothing more, another lost piece of blue in the middle of the jigsaw puzzle.
19
“FORTUNATELY, I DIDN’T inherit my father’s legs,” Mateo said, and asked his mother if it was true that Ramón was bowlegged. But he didn’t let her reply. Tired of walking and suddenly irritated that he didn’t know where they were going, he hailed a taxi. Once they got in, he opened the window and then claimed it was cold.
“Roll up the window,” Lorenza proposed, but he ignored her. “Roll it up just a little bit then.”
“Ramón never said goodbye to me before he left, right, Lolé? I don’t remember him saying goodbye. The last time I saw him was on the lake in Bariloche. There were red mountains all around. The mountains reflected on the lake seemed real, and the ones that were real were so far away that they seemed fake. Ramón was there with us and then he was lost, lost like the Turk in the fog,” Mateo said. And Lorenza thought, but did not say aloud, that the scene he was describing was not so much from memory but from a photograph, the last one she had taken with Ramón, on the shores of Lago Nahuel Huapi. “Or maybe what I remember is only from a picture,” Mateo realized on his own. “But I am definitely sure that he never said goodbye. It was only much later that I began to suspect that he was not coming back. With you it was different. I think that when I was little I would cry sometimes when you went to work or traveled. I remember I hated your hair dryer and I used to hide it from you, because if you dried your hair, it meant you would be going out for the night. But the next day you would be there when I woke up. But I didn’t miss Ramón at first. Maybe I didn’t even realize he was missing for years, or I realized it for a moment and forgot it just as quickly, until one day I discovered how much I had needed him without even realizing it. If he had said goodbye, everything would have been much clearer. I would like to know, Lolé, why do you think he was imprisoned?”