At lunch, Gertrudis sat at the table with him and Armida, but again she didn’t taste a mouthful or say a word. Her eyes were like glowing embers, and she kept her hands clasped. What was going on in her stupefied mind? It occurred to him that she was asleep, that the news about Miguel had turned her into a sleepwalker.
“How awful, Felícito, what’s happening to you both,” a crestfallen Armida apologized once again. “If I’d known about this, I never would have dropped in on you so unexpectedly. But as I told you yesterday, I had nowhere else to go. I’m in a very difficult situation and need to hide. I’ll explain it all whenever you like. I know you have other, more important things on your mind now. At least believe me when I say I won’t stay much longer.”
“Yes, you can tell me all about it, but not now,” he agreed. “When this storm dies down a little. What bad luck, Armida, to come to hide here, where all the reporters in Piura have congregated on account of this scandal. Those cameras and tape recorders make me feel like a prisoner in my own house.”
Gertrudis’s sister nodded with an understanding half smile.
“I’ve already gone through that and know what it means,” he heard her say. He didn’t understand what she was referring to but didn’t ask her to explain.
Finally, at dusk, after a good amount of brooding, Felícito decided the moment had come. He asked Gertrudis to come into the television room. “You and I have to talk alone,” he said. Armida withdrew immediately to her bedroom. Gertrudis docilely followed her husband into the next room. Now she was in an armchair facing him in the semidarkness, unmoving, shapeless, silent. She looked at him but didn’t seem to see him.
“I didn’t think the time would ever come when we’d talk about what we’re going to talk about now,” Felícito began, very quietly. He noticed in surprise that his voice was trembling.
Gertrudis didn’t move. She wore the colorless dress that resembled a cross between a robe and a tunic, and looked at him as if he weren’t there, her eyes flashing with a tranquil fire in her plump-cheeked face with its large but inexpressive mouth. Her hands were on her lap, tightly clasped, as if she were suffering from a terrible stomachache.
“I suspected something from the beginning,” the trucker continued, making an effort to control the nervousness that had taken possession of him, “but I didn’t say anything so as not to embarrass you. I would’ve carried it to the grave if this thing that happened hadn’t happened.”
He took a breath, sighing deeply. His wife hadn’t moved a millimeter and hadn’t blinked even once. She seemed petrified. An invisible fly began to buzz somewhere in the room, flying into the ceiling and walls. Saturnina was watering the garden and he could hear the spatter of water on the plants from the watering can.
“I mean,” he continued, stressing each syllable, “that you and your mother deceived me. That time, in El Algarrobo. Now, it doesn’t matter anymore. A lot of years have gone by, and I promise you that today it doesn’t matter if I discover that you and the Boss Lady told me a fairy tale. The only thing I need to die easy is for you to confirm it, Gertrudis.”
He stopped speaking and waited. She remained in the same posture, unyielding, but Felícito noticed that one of the bedroom slippers his wife was wearing had moved slightly to the side. There was some life there, at least. After a while, Gertrudis parted her lips and uttered a phrase that resembled a growclass="underline" “To confirm what, Felícito?”
“That Miguel isn’t and never was my son,” he said, raising his voice a little. “That you were pregnant by some other man when you and the Boss Lady came to talk to me one morning in El Algarrobo and made me believe I was the father. After denouncing me to the police to force me to marry you.”
When he finished he felt troubled and upset, as if he’d eaten something indigestible or drunk a glass of overly fermented chicha.
“I thought you were the father,” said Gertrudis, with absolute serenity. She spoke without getting angry, reluctantly, as she always spoke about everything except religious matters. And after a long pause, she added in the same neutral, disinterested manner: “My mama and I had no intention to deceive you. I was sure then that you were the father of the baby I had in my belly.”
“And when did you realize he wasn’t mine?” Felícito asked with an energy that was becoming rage.
“Only when Miguelito was born,” Gertrudis acknowledged, without her voice changing in the least. “When I saw how white he was, with those light eyes and that dark blond hair. He couldn’t be the son of a Chulucanas cholo like you.”
She fell silent and continued looking into her husband’s eyes with the same impassivity. Gertrudis seemed to be talking to him from under water, Felícito thought, or from inside an urn of thick glass. He felt as if something insurmountable and invisible divided them, even though she was only a meter away.
“A real son of a whore, it isn’t surprising you did what you did to me,” he muttered. “And did you find out then who Miguel’s real father was?”
His wife sighed and shrugged with a gesture that might have been lack of interest or weariness. She shook her head two or three times as she raised her shoulders.
“So how many men at El Algarrobo did you go to bed with, hey waddya think?” Felícito felt a lump in his throat and wanted this to be over immediately.
“All the ones my mama brought to my bed,” Gertrudis growled, slowly and concisely. And sighing again with an air of infinite fatigue, she clarified: “A lot. Not all of them from the boardinghouse. Sometimes guys from the street too.”
“The Boss Lady brought them all to you?” It was hard for him to speak, and his head was buzzing.
Gertrudis remained motionless, indistinct, a silhouette with no edges, her hands clasped. She looked at him with an absent, luminous, tranquil fixity that troubled Felícito more and more.
“She picked them and charged them, I didn’t,” his wife added with a slight change in the color of her voice. Now she seemed not only to inform but to defy him too. “Who was Miguel’s father? I don’t know. Some white guy, one of those gringos who came through El Algarrobo. Maybe one of the Yugoslavs who came to work on the Chira River irrigation. They came to Piura on weekends to get drunk and stayed at the boardinghouse.”
Felícito regretted their conversation. Had he made a mistake by bringing up the subject that had followed him like a shadow all his life? Now it was there, between them, and he didn’t know how to get rid of it. He felt it as a tremendous obstacle, an intruder who’d never leave this house again.
“How many did the Boss Lady bring to your bed?” he bellowed. He was sure at any moment he’d faint again or vomit. “All of Piura?”
“I didn’t count them,” said Gertrudis, calmly, making a deprecatory face. “But, since you’re interested in knowing, I’ll say it again: a lot. I took care of myself the best I could. I didn’t know much about it, back then. The douches I had every day helped, I thought, that’s what my mama told me. Something happened with Miguel. Maybe I got careless. I wanted to have an abortion with a midwife in the neighborhood who was part witch. They called her Mariposa, maybe you knew her. But the Boss Lady wouldn’t let me. She came up with the idea of getting married. I didn’t want to marry you either, Felícito. I always knew I’d never be happy with you. It was my mama who forced me to.”
The trucker didn’t know what to say. He sat motionless across from his wife, thinking. What a ridiculous situation, sitting there facing each other, paralyzed, silenced by a past so ugly it suddenly revived dishonor, shame, pain, and sorrow, bitter truths that added to the misfortune they were already suffering because of his false son and Mabel.