She glanced constantly toward the attic. Nothing had changed. Only she had. She did not understand very well what the change consisted of. Perhaps it was the announcement that would become fact only if she cautiously climbed the stairs to the attic, taking care that no one saw her her father, her mother, Aunt María de la O, Zampaya, the Indian maids. She wouldn’t have to knock at the door, because Orlando would leave it ajar. Orlando was waiting for her. Orlando was handsome, strange, ambiguous in the moonlight. But perhaps Orlando was ugly, common, lying by daylight. Laura’s entire body cried out to be near Orlando’s body-for him, for her, for the unexpected romantic encounter at the hacienda ball, but also for Santiago, because loving Orlando was the indirect but sanctioned way of loving her brother. Could Orlando’s insinuations be true? If they were lies, could she love Orlando for himself, without the specter of Santiago? Or might she come to hate both Orlando and Santiago? Hate Santiago because of Orlando? She had the chilling suspicion that it might all be a huge farce, a huge lie orchestrated by the young seducer. Laura did not need the diabolical admonitions of the priest Elzevir Almonte to shun all sexual pleasure or ease; she only needed to look at herself naked in the mirror when she was seven years old, and to see there none of the horrors the priest proclaimed, in order not to fall into the temptations that seemed, thanks to an early and radical intuition, useless if not shared with a loved one.
Love for everyone in the family, including Santiago, was happy, warm, and chaste. Now, for the first time, a man excited her in another way. Was this man real or was he a lie? Would he satisfy her, or was Laura risking sexual initiation with a man who wasn’t worth her while, who wasn’t for her, who was only a phantom, an extension of her brother, a deceiver, handsome, attractive, tempting, lying in ambush, diabolical, right at hand, comfortable, waiting for her in her own house, under her parents’ roof?
Zampaya had supplied the key to the mystery, perhaps, without knowing it, when he drove the three of them-Laura, Elizabeth, and Mrs. Garc a-Dupont-back to Xalapa on the night of the ball.
“Did your ladyships see the fig tree at the entrance to the cage?” asked the black man.
“What cage?” replied Mrs. Garc a-Dupont. “It’s the most elegant hacienda in the district, you ignoramus. The ball of the year.”
“The best balls take place in the street, ma’am, begging your pardon.”
“That’s your opinion,” sighed the lady.
“You didn’t get cold waiting outside, now, did you, Zampaya?” asked the solicitous Laura.
“No, child. I stood there looking at the fig tree. I remembered the story of Santo Felipe de Jesus. He was a proud, spoiled boy, like some of those I saw tonight. He was living in a house with a barren fig tree. His nanny would say, The day little Felipe becomes a saint, the fig tree will flower.”
“Why are you going on like this about the saints, darky?” The lady tried to cut him off. “San Felipe went to the Orient to convert the Japanese, who vilely crucified him. Now he is a saint, don’t you know that?”
“It’s what his nanny would say, begging your pardon, ma’am. The day Felipe was killed, the fig tree flowered.”
“Well, this one is barren.” Elizabeth laughed roguishly.
“Santiago’s strength was that he never needed anyone,” Orlando had told Laura on the San Cayetano terrace. “That’s why we were always at his feet.”
A month later, they say Armon a Aznar’s body was found in the attic. They say it was found when the bank employee came to deliver her monthly check before Zampaya left her daily food tray at the door. She’d been dead for less than two days. There was still no stench.
“Everything is hidden and lies in wait for us.” Laura repeated her Aunt Hilda’s mysterious and habitual phrase. She said it to her Chinese doll, Li Po, comfortable among the pillows. And she herself, Laura D az, decided to save the memory of her first ball, imagining herself svelte and transparent, so transparent that her gown was her body, there was nothing under the dress, and Laura whirled, floated in a waltz of liquid elegance, until she, thankful, was covered by the veil of sleep.
5.
Xalapa: 1920
“YOU WERE WRONG, ORLANDO. Not here. Find another way for us to meet. Use your imagination. Don’t mock my family or make me hate myself.”
Laura resumed family life, which had been injured by the death of her grandfather and by her father’s broken health. As for the death of Mrs. Aznar and being seduced by Orlando, Laura expelled both not from memory but from recollection; she never referred to either of them again, never mentioned them to anyone, never mentioned them to herself. She was not to recollect them, no matter how hard her memory may have worked to retain them, forever, under lock and key, in the vault of the past from which nothing was to be removed. To add “Orlando Ximénez” and “Armon a Aznar” to the sorrows and difficulties of her home life would have been unendurable, and likewise the unhealthy contagion with which Orlando infected her memory of Santiago, which Laura did indeed want to preserve pure and explicit. She could not forgive him for having damaged that part of Santiago’s life she still kept in her soul.
Does Santiago also live in my father’s soul? wondered the girl, staring at Fernando D az’s stricken face.
It was impossible to know. The accountant-banker’s diplegia was advancing at a wicked pace, rapid and regular. First he lost the use of his legs, soon the rest of his body, and later his ability to speak. Laura had no room in her heart for anything but intense pity for him-confined, finally, to a wheelchair, wearing a bib, fed as if he were a baby by the devoted María de la O, staring at the world with indecipherable eyes that did not signal whether he was listening, thinking, or communicating, except for a desperate blinking and an equally desperate effort not to blink by keeping his eyes open, alert, inquisitive, beyond a person’s normal endurance, as if one day, should he close his eyes, he would not be able to open them ever again. His gaze filled with glass and water, while his eyebrows developed remarkable movement, giving their unusual new positions an expressiveness that made Laura fearful. Like two arches supporting all that was left of his personality, her father’s eyebrows did not rise in surprise but arched even more, as if both questioning and communicating.
Aunt María de la O did her best to attend to the invalid while Leticia attended to the household. But it was Leticia who learned, slowly but surely, to read her husband’s eyes, to hold his hand and communicate with him.
“He wants you to put his tiepin in his tie, María de la O.”
“He wants us to take him for an outing to Los Berros.”
“He’s in the mood for rice and beans.”
Was her mother telling the truth or was she creating a simulacrum of communication and, therefore, of life? Mar a de la O would do the painful chores for Leticia; she took charge of cleaning the invalid with warm towels and oatmeal soap, dressed him every morning in a suit, vest, starched collar, tie, dark socks, and low boots, as if the head of the household were going to the office, and undressed him at night to put him, with the help of Zampaya, in bed at nine.
The only thing Laura knew to do was to take her father’s hand and read him the French and English novels he adored, learning those languages in a kind of homage to her broken father. Fernando D az’s physical collapse was swiftly apparent on his features. He aged, but he kept control over his feelings, and Laura saw him weep only once: when she read him the emotional death scene of the boy Little Father Time, in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, who commits suicide when he hears his parents say they can’t feed so many mouths. That weeping, nevertheless, cheered Laura. Her father understood her. Her father was listening and feeling, behind the opaque veil of his sickness.