For the moment, in his fevered delirium, he’s not with us.
Eleonor, the minister’s wife, attends him. At first sight it’s a scene of neutral devotion, a wife fully engaged in her husband’s vocation.
But there’s more. Eleonor cares for the patient with a secret hope: she wants to catch the sickness of this man whose name she doesn’t know.
Eleonor doesn’t want to live.
Over in Matasánchez there’s also only one person who doesn’t know about the insult Shears dared to throw at Nepomuceno: Magdalena, a pretty young woman from Puebla.
Her story, in brief: just before her sixth birthday her mother died. Her father, the son of Spaniards, left her with her aunt and returned to the land of his ancestors, or so he said.
The aunt took in Magdalena partly out of duty to her (deceased) sister, but also for the money. In exchange for looking after and educating (or providing for blah blah blah) the girl she receives a monthly stipend, which is a godsend because she has twelve children and always needs more than her husband provides. That’s how things were, and how they would have stayed until Magdalena became an old maid, if not for a lawyer named Gutierrez. He came from the north, had a lot of land, and money too, or so folks said. He was the most prominent lawyer in Matasánchez, and he came to Puebla to wrap up some business for a gringo client. Gutierrez heard about the beautiful orphan girl, her faraway father, her aunt’s money problems, the girl’s good breeding, and he knew without asking that she would be a virgin.
Magdalena was a sure thing for Gutierrez, an unsullied woman for him and him alone, with no mother, no attachments, no one to come asking for a handout. Since she was young he could mold her as he liked. The ideal wife. She would give him children, and he would finally settle down.
He showed up and made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. He didn’t ask her aunt for a dowry; in fact he offered them a lump sum payment as a gesture of good faith and promised three more payments over the course of the next ten years. He wanted it to be clear that, once his offer was accepted, Magdalena would be his to the full extent of the law. She would become his exclusive property. There would be no visits, requests, or other nuisances. No favors, no exchanges. He would invite her relations to the wedding, but after the day of the ceremony that would be it. No interference in his life. His only condition for the purchase of the girl was that they leave them in peace.
The aunt (and her family) would lose the monthly stipend from Spain, but they weren’t killing the golden goose. Despite the fact the three lump sums amounted to slightly less that the total of the stipend for the same period, there would be no associated costs. Plus, what if Magdalena’s father stopped sending the stipend? It had been ages since he’d written or sent a gift. What if he died and left her unprovided for? Sooner or later, the girl would become another mouth to feed. And she was useless as a maid.
“No,” the aunt thought, “given such an opportunity, we should accept immediately. If nothing else, for the girl’s welfare; my brother-in-law will be indebted to us. It’s a good match, and we’ll relieve ourselves of this burden.” She didn’t have to think twice. She accepted the money, signed the contract, and wrote to inform the girl’s father. She wisely omitted telling him about the payment to leave the Spaniard wondering if she’d had to marry the girl off quickly for an unspeakable reason. The matter was settled once and for all, no strings attached.
So Magdalena left with this lawyer from the north, Gutierrez. But she didn’t go alone. She couldn’t be alone with him until they were married. Her aunt had no desire to go to Matasánchez, her world was limited to Puebla — she’d never been to Veracruz, Mexico City, or Havana, why would she go to Matasánchez? — but she accepted the lawyer’s invitation to send a chaperone and sent the girl’s godmother instead — a woman her own age who was also past her prime but looked years younger because she hadn’t given birth twelve times or married an idiot and suffered from poverty and the misfortune of not hearing from her brother for years, despite the fact he was in Bruneville.
It had been ten years already.
Gutierrez celebrated the wedding with a party to show off his pretty bride, and the cream of Matasánchez society showed up to see her. At the end of the evening he took his new wife home in a horse-drawn cart. On the short trip he kept telling her, “Take a good look at Matasánchez, Magdalena, because you’ll never see it again.”
She heard these words but she didn’t get it. It took some time before she realized Gutierrez was never going to let her set foot out of the house again. “You have to lock up a woman, there’s no shortage of cuckolds in the world, and there’s no such thing as a female who can keep her legs closed.”
The wedding night terrified the poor girl. She had no idea what men did to women or what part women were supposed to play. She wasn’t old enough for what seemed to her to be repulsive, cruel gymnastics. But she didn’t call it gymnastics — the poor girl had never even been to the circus — she had no idea what to call this bouncing exercise in which he used her as a trampoline. Gutierrez, on the other hand, who was twelve years older than her (and had gotten around), had his first lover at seventeen.
And that’s how it was for four years, until the lawyer got bored and found somewhere else to wet his dick.
“Stupid girl, you’re all dried up.” How could he fail to realize he might have been the problem, after so many years of whoring without producing a single bastard child? Although, of course, there’s Blas, but who knows whether or not he’s his. “I’m not going to use you any more, you bag of bones; you can’t have children. I should never have married you. We’ll see if you ever bear fruit.”
Gutierrez never stopped to think that when he began to use her, she still hadn’t begun to menstruate.
Due to the shock of what he did to her, Magdalena’s body took longer to mature. When she got her first period four months after he had rejected her, Magdalena thought she was bleeding for two reasons: because Gutierrez had ruptured her insides by doing what he had done to her so many times, and because he had stopped doing it. She felt guilty for the second reason.
“I’m bleeding and it’s my fault, my own grievous fault.”
It was a while before she understood what the accusation of a barren womb meant. Josefina, the old cook, who was kind to her out of pity, explained.
Magdalena was full of resentment when she realized that’s why he had begun to hit her. He began to embellish his farcical trampoline routine by hitting her afterwards. For any reason at all, or for no reason, because the table wasn’t ready when he arrived (“Magdalena, lazy, lazy!”), or because he didn’t like the soup, or because he’d had a problem at work, although Magdalena had nothing to do with it, or because she became more beautiful each day, or because she laughed easily and had fun with the servants, the needlework, the housekeeping, and the cooking.
She might as well have lived on the moon, yet even his blows couldn’t dampen her innate joy. Who knows where it came from.
The day Shears insults Nepomuceno, Magdalena doesn’t know a thing. And even if she heard the news it wouldn’t matter, because she has no idea who Nepomuceno is.
(Wagging tongues say the lawyer Gutierrez had a fling with Magdalena’s godmother. They say he gave her a son, which was a miracle, a barren land yielding a flower; she called him Blas, a pompous old name, which suits a bastard to a T.)