Mona and Other Tales (13 page)

1980

Alipio's Kingdom

TWILIGHT SPREADS its incomparable violet hues while Alipio, standing by the balcony railing, becomes almost indistinguishable from the last autumn leaves on the almond tree.

Alipio is motionless, looking at the sun as it descends at the customary slow pace of one who is going nowhere in particular.

The top branches of the almond tree light up briefly. Suddenly, all is calm.

The sky turns darker.

Alipio, who has been awaiting this for a while, rubs his eyes with his hands as if he were trying to clean an opaque glass with an oiled cloth. Alipio's hands are thin and white, and a bit clumsy. His face glows with the declining rays of light.

Alipio grins; night is close. The moment the last trace of day vanishes, he slowly raises his head to look at the sky.

The first stars have just come out. Venus, Alipio utters with a smile. His teeth are short and square, much like a rabbit's.

Gradually the sky becomes incandescent; in a short time, stars in phosphorescent outbursts suddenly appear. Alpha, Alipio says, and looks toward the west. Omega, he says, and now he tilts his head backward so he can look at the highest point in the sky. Ursa Major, he mutters, lifting his arms shoulder high. He's in ecstasy, motionless for a moment; then he turns slowly toward the north to watch an almost imperceptible constellation. That's the Pleiades, Alipio says. But the sky is already a luminous outburst and he does not know where to direct his gaze. On one side of the horizon the Andromeda constellation beams from afar, and Alipio's eyes are helplessly fixed on it; at the other extreme the dazzling white Castor and Pollux exchange knowing winks like inseparable friends. Almost crowning the sky, big Orion glows like a burning tree and only Sirius, the most brilliant star, can outshine it briefly. Alipio keeps turning his head really fast: that's the Global Accumulation of Omega and Centaurus, he says, raising his hands high up as if he wanted to dig his fingers into the constellation. There, the Southern Cross, and Arcturus, the yellowest and most mysterious nebula. He keeps naming the constellations, one by one, even the most insignificant stars that possibly disappeared billions of years ago. Finally he begins to jump up and down on the balcony as if trying to escape up into the sky, raising his hands, running from one side to the other, squealing with pleasure, laughing out loud. Up above, the stars now shine in their maximum opulence; constellations turn at full speed, die out, surge again, are extinguished forever. New stars come to occupy the few vacant spots; radiant comets cross the heavens swiftly or dissolve into a luminous rain over the ocean. Alipio has stopped dancing. In the midst of the translucent night, his body is now rigid. A small noise comes out of his body. Tonight Alipio seems happier than ever before: it's November, transparent and resonant. November, playing all its fanfares in the darkness; making the farthest comets perceptible, and even some in the process of forming. Alipio has spent the whole day running errands. But at dusk he hurries to his room and locks himself up. He would run no errands now for anybody, no matter how much money he was offered. And he stands, waiting for the night, his figure almost indistinguishable among the last autumn leaves on the almond tree. And at dawn, when the last constellation disappears in the wrenching white luminosity of day, Alipio jumps into bed and sleeps two or three hours. He has done this for years and plans to keep doing it. And in the month of November, when Alipio watches the skies, large tears well from his eyes. He jumps from one end of the balcony to the other, grabs the railing with his white fingers, softly touches the leaves of the almond tree. . . . His dearest friends are the luminous Dragon constellation—all of its seventeen sparkling bodies—and Capella, the Charioteer's she-goat. Alipio has not been able to study (the only field that interested him was Uranography, but then he would have needed to abandon real stars to look at their photographs in books). Alipio has no home other than a balcony where he can see all he wants of the heavens, right before his eyes, and that is enough for him. He feels blissfully happy; he stretches up a bit more, and his lizard neck becomes reddish. Alipio's kingdom is now fully on display. Even visible tonight are the faraway constellation of Hercules and the variable Agol, constantly changing color. Alipio feels a renewed joy that makes his throat quiver, reaches down to his chest, and bursts into countless stirrings in his belly. The gravitation of all these luminous creatures way up in the sky above overwhelms him. Suddenly, still looking up, Alipio becomes transfixed. A brilliant point of light spins around the stars, moves away from the constellations, rolls over the heavenly bodies, and lights up the moon. The great luminary keeps descending. Alipio remains ecstatic. An enormous glow, dizzyingly coming down, stops for a moment as if to gather force or take its bearings, and then advances fast toward the earth. All the constellations have disappeared. The moon shows only an edge that soon dissolves in the light. Only the enormous glow is visible. Alipio lifts his hands over his head, grabs the railing, and jumps. He lands on the pavement and, terrified, starts running. The luminary resembles a gigantic red-hot spider in a boiling rage; the flying sparks kill the night birds and seed the clouds, provoking hail showers and ungodly thunder. It stops again as if looking for direction. Alipio keeps running. The luminary is already getting close. The plumes of the palm trees get scorched. The telephone poles and the television antennas become tall but crumbling towers of ashes. Alipio runs toward the ocean intending to jump into the waves: his hands reach the water. He howls: the water is boiling hot; the fish, leaping uselessly, are falling back into the sea. The light keeps descending toward him. Alipio trembles and yells uncontrollably. He runs from the beach and seeks refuge under a bridge, digging his hands into the ground, trying to disappear. The light continues on its way down and discovers him. In the deserted city, it seems nobody will be there to witness the catastrophe. Alipio's ears perceive a sort of hum, which soon intensifies a thousand times, and then it's like a horrifying scream that is not really a scream because it could not come from any familiar creature. For an instant Alipio looks at the approaching fire: it's like hell itself, an overpowering eagerness whose dimensions he could never have imagined. It's not one star; it's millions of them devouring one another, reducing themselves to minute, self-consuming particles. Alipio, yelling at the top of his voice, runs toward the fields. The luminary keeps after him, while the trees go up in a blaze and vanish. A group of cows retreats in terror to the far hills. Alipio goes after them. The enraged animals repeatedly try to gore him, kick him, run him over. The light keeps descending and the heat becomes unbearable; loud squeals keep coming from the shrubs, which crazily uproot themselves, flying up and bursting over Alipio's head. The birds, as if pulled by invisible strings, bump into the light's edge, turning to ashes. Alipio starts running to the thicket, where the taller bushes are wresting themselves from the earth. He holds on tight to the tottering thicker trunks, which, after some wavering, rise with the wind, turning also into ashes. Alipio throws himself on the now bare ground and tries to grasp the earth. He feels vulnerable, and the great luminary quickly discovers his defenseless condition. The sounds coming out of his throat resemble the heavy grunting of an aroused bull or of some ravenous beast suddenly coming upon a cornucopia of fresh food. Alipio begins to lift himself up from the ground. He floats about. The tumultuous luminary seems to reach its crest. Alipio passes out. . . . The first splendors of dawn settle upon the trees. The top leaves of the almond tree shine like polished metal. Little by little Alipio begins to stir, moving not yet consciously. He opens his eyes. He finds himself in the middle of the field, lying in a viscous puddle that bathes his arms, his legs, and has splattered up to his eyes. He tries to sit up. A strange pain runs all through his body. He looks around and notices the sticky goo surrounding him. He wets his fingers in the thick substance and brings them to his nose. Immediately, shaking his hands, he stands up and starts walking. It's semen, he mutters. Angry and saddened, he keeps walking through the bare fields, leaving a wet trail behind.

Twilight spreads its intolerable violet hues while Alipio, standing by the balcony railing, becomes almost indistinguishable from the last autumn leaves on the almond tree. He has been motionless for a while, looking without seeing the people going to and fro on the sidewalk. Precisely at the moment the sun disappears, Alipio, with a quick jump, goes into his room and lies down, covering himself up completely. It's seven o'clock and Alipio, wide-eyed, stares at the ceiling. It's eight, and Alipio, who is perspiring profusely, still has not decided whether to open the window. It's nine, and Alipio thinks it must be almost dawn. It's midnight. The sky is bright with all its characteristic standards. The stars of the first magnitude speed by like the sails of a gigantic windmill. Ursa Major moves in the northern sky and touches David's chariot; the Centaur's tail joins the Southern Cross; the shy Pleiades, all tremulous, advances toward Hercules. At that moment, Capella enters in conjunction with the Charioteer, and the Seven Sisters twinkle next to Orion, which is expanding. Stars in the zodiacal constellations invade the sky and fuse with the cluster of the Pleiades. The variable stars, insignificant comets, and gleams from galaxies that no longer exist dazzle the earth. The sweet constellation of the Unicorn appears for a moment, its white stars barely discernible in the distance. Castor and Pollux, the inseparable ones, are very close. Alpha approaches Canis Minor. Andromeda's great nebula shines bright, transparent and resonant on this beautiful November evening. Alipio's tears surge warmly, run along the sides of his nose, wetting his pillow.

Billions of solitary suns rush about the boundless heavens.

1968

Halley's Comet

For Miguel Ordoqui

You can never tell
what will become of you.
FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA
The House of Bernarda Alba

 

VERY LATE ONE NIGHT in the summer of 1891 (that's right, 1891), when Pepe El Romano runs away with Adela's virginity, though leaving her behind, everything seems to have come to a most tragic end for Bernarda Alba's five daughters: Adela, Pepe's lover, hangs from a noose fastened to the ceiling of her maiden room; Angustias keeps intact her forty years of chastity; and the rest of the sisters, Magdalena, Amelia, and Martirio, are also condemned to spinsterhood or the convent.

But things did not really turn out that way. And if García Lorca left their story unfinished and unclear, we forgive him. Being wilder than his own characters—and with good reason—he followed Pepe El Romano, “that giant, or centaur perhaps, who huffs like a lion.” A few weeks later, though (but that is another story), poor Federico perished at the hands of that splendid trickster, who, after swindling him out of everything he had and, alas, without even satisfying him first (cruelest of men), slit his throat.

And it happened that while Bernarda Alba was making the arrangements for her daughter's funeral with implacable austerity, the other four sisters, aided by their maid, La Poncia, took Adela down, and by their slapping, shouting, and recriminations brought her back to life or simply out of her fainting spell.

Bernarda Alba's voice was already demanding that the five women open the door when together they decided that a life on the run was a thousand times preferable to living under the fearsome old woman's iron hand. With La Poncia's help, the five sisters jumped out the window and over the garden wall and the corral fence, and when they were already out in the open (and, it must be said, under a splendidly Lorcan moon), the feeling of freedom they enjoyed for the first time made their reciprocal resentments momentarily vanish. The five sisters embraced one another, crying joyously, and swore they were going to leave not only their home and the town but Andalusia and all of Spain as well. After a short stretch La Poncia caught up with them. In spite of her anger, and with a joy that had less to do with the sisters' happiness than with Bernarda Alba's fall from power, she handed them all the house jewels, her own savings, and even the dowry reserved for Angustias's marriage. They pleaded with her to accompany them. She insisted, however, that her place was not on the other side of the ocean but next to the room of Bernarda Alba, whose raging screams “would lull her better”—those were her words—“than the very sound of the ocean.”

And they left.

While Federico was expiring, unsatisfied, they were crossing infinite fields of sunflowers, sometimes singing the verses of the dying poet. They left Córdoba and Seville, went through the Sierra Morena, and as soon as they reached Cádiz, bought tickets to Havana, where they arrived a month later, still euphoric and feeling rejuvenated.

They rented a house on Obispo Street near the ocean and, overconfident perhaps, expected future lovers to appear. But with the exception of Adela, the sisters seemed to have no luck with men. Angustias stayed day and night on display behind the wrought-iron window without any success. Magdalena, lanky and thirtyish, would take walks around El Prado Boulevard, but she managed only to have a Dragon Corps lieutenant trample her with his horse and then insult her for obstructing traffic. Amelia, with her stooping back, was only an object of derision and of an occasional stone hurled at her by some young black hoodlum from the Manglar district. Even worse, several youths from the Spanish Volunteer Corp, accusing her of witchcraft and of having offended the king's soldiers, attempted one evening to throw her into the moat at La Fuerza Castle. And Martirio, maybe in hopes that some of Adela's charms would rub off on her, followed her sister's every move, and Adela's belly grew and grew, just like the number of her lovers.

Even though her sisters knew about Adela's very successful amorous adventures in Havana, and resented them, scandal and public condemnation did not erupt until the baby was born. Twenty-five redoubtable men (including six blacks, one Chinese, and four mulattoes) claimed paternity, arguing that the baby boy must have been born premature. The four sisters, who saw Pepe El Romano's image clearly in the face of the newborn, could not bear Adela's disgrace—or rather, Adela's triumph. They declared her wicked and abandoned her. At the same time, they deemed such a dissolute mother unworthy to raise a child and took the baby away from her, though not until they had had him christened José de Alba in the cathedral. Adela wept deeply, but there were twenty-five beaux to console her.

Angustias, Magdalena, Amelia, and Martirio wanted to move to some remote town near the sea. After many inquiries, they finally chose Cárdenas.

This town (now called a city) was minuscule, provincial, and totally boring: very different from old Obispo Street, which had always been full of singing vendors, carriages, smells, women, horses, and men. All of this had made them despair and had forced them to go out often wearing their best clothes, their finest jewelry, and the best cologne. But in Cárdenas nothing of the sort was ever needed. One could not even hear the women talking in the neighborhood, and as for the men, they were always far away, fishing or working the land.

“Being born a woman is the worst curse of all,” said Angustias out loud once they were fully installed in their new home.

And right then the four sisters silently promised to renounce every vestige of femininity.

And they succeeded.

Dark curtains covered their windows. They dressed in black and, according to the fashion of their old homeland, covered their heads with gray bonnets that they would not take off even on the hottest days of summer, which in this land seems never-ending. Having abandoned all aspirations for their bodies, they gave in to the stupor of the sweltering heat and to tropical excesses, losing in the process what little was left of their figures. All of them became devoted, with bovine fervor, to raising their nephew.

Naturally, Adela's name was never mentioned in that household, not even by mistake. José (or Pepe, his nickname) was for them, and for all he knew, the nephew they had brought from Spain after the death of his mother in childbirth. The story was no less credible than any other, and because of its pathos, everyone, including the sisters, ended up believing it.

In time they also forgot not only Adela's story—eighteen years had gone by since their arrival on the island—but Adela herself. As for the rest of their former lives, little by little the new calamities they had to face together created new memories for them, or new nightmares: Cuba's War of Independence, which discriminated against them; the big food shortage of 1897; and the birth of the republic, which, instead of marking the end of the hostilities, seemed to bring about incessant rebellions. As if all this weren't enough, some insolent rabble—
human trash,
they called them—had installed themselves everywhere. The sisters got to be known as the “Spanish nuns,” and for some reason this
trash
wished they would participate in its noisy and grotesque pandemonium.

So the Alba sisters walled themselves up even more in their chastity, as well as in their approaching old age, devoting their lives to the care of their nephew, who had turned into a shy, handsome youth with curly hair (like his father's). He did not leave the house except to sell in the streets the waxed-paper flowers or the knits his aunts had concocted.

Although the four sisters were the object of envy for some, the irreproachable, monastic life they led earned them a sort of distant admiration all over Cárdenas. The “Spanish nuns” became the most respected women in town, to the point that someone who wished to praise a woman for her morals usually said that she was “almost as chaste as one of the Alba sisters.” The parish priest (they always went to church with their nephew) mentioned them as “paragons of Christian perseverance and morality.” Their good fame reached its peak when the priest praised them in his Easter Sunday sermon. It is true that Angustias sometimes assisted the old priest and, accompanied by her three sisters, dusted the altar and swept and washed the church floor with such discipline that it seemed the spirit of Bernarda Alba was supervising her. But it must be recognized that they did these chores not out of obligation or hypocrisy, but out of true devotion.

The four sisters interrupted their monotonous lives only for their Sunday outings to the shore. Dressed in black to their ankles, in their best finery, including black parasols, they would visit the rather desolate Cárdenas seashore. There in the sand, between the water and the rock formations, they would stay sometimes for over an hour like strange, gigantic crows mesmerized by the ceaseless churning of the ocean. Before dusk they would start for home, enveloped in the violet light that seems unique to the region. They looked as if they were returning from a fiesta. José would wait for them sitting on the porch with the proceeds from the day's sales, which were more substantial because it was Sunday. As they walked into the house, they would glance with a certain discreet pride at the small plaque that they had placed by their door some years before: VILLA ALBA, FLOWERS AND HANDMADE KNITS.

There was every indication that those women's lives, increasingly more devout and silent by the day, produced an almost unhealthful piety, so that their every move was dictated by church bells.

It is also essential to take account of their nephew's behavior. Solitary, shy, conservatively attired (that is, asphyxiating in those black suits), he had no social contact with the outside world other than what was strictly necessary for selling the merchandise that provided the family income. He was eighteen years old, and nobody had yet seen him with a girlfriend, or with any friend. He did not seem to need any more love than the distant, maternal love offered by his aunts. And this shared love was also enough to fulfill the lives of the four women. Certainly none of them still thought of—the words are La Poncia's—what it was “to feel a lizard between her breasts.” Much less of having once felt—the words are Martirio's—“a sudden sort of blaze inside.”

It is true that you can never tell what will become of you, but in Cárdenas everything pointed to a peaceful end for the Alba sisters, or at least one very far removed from exaltation or scandal.

Something quite unexpected and unique would have to happen to extricate those lives from the ecstasy of their own renunciation. That is precisely what happened. An extraordinary event occurred during that spring of 1910. Halley's comet visited the earth.

We are not going to enumerate the hair-raising catastrophes that the press claimed would take place on the planet with the arrival of the comet. It is all well documented in the libraries. Suffice it to say that the most popular writer of the moment (today justly forgotten), Señor García Markos, obviously also considered himself an astronomer and had authored such books as
Astrology for the Ladies
and
What the Señoritas
Should Know about the Stars,
not to mention
Love in the Times
of the Red Vomit.
He also published a series of articles that within weeks had spread all over the world, and in them he proposed with a fair amount of scientific verbosity that as the comet's tail entered the earth's atmosphere, this would become contaminated (and “rarefied”) by a deadly gas that would bring to an end life as we know it because, and we quote, “the combining of atmospheric oxygen with the hydrogen in the comet's tail will inevitably cause immediate asphyxiation.” This preposterous bit of information (preposterous now, forty years after its publication) was taken very seriously, perhaps for its being so uniquely dramatic. On the other hand, as a hypothesis it was not easy to disprove: the comet, according to García Markos, was getting closer to the earth each time around. And who was to know? That very year could be the end. This pseudoscientific writer also insisted that the end of the world would bring plagues of centaurs, griffins, igneous fish, outlandish viscous birds, phosphorescent whales, and other “monsters from outer space,” which, as a result of the collision, would fall on this planet accompanied by an aerolite shower. And all of that was also taken at face value by most people. Let us remember that those times (like any other) were backward and there was little to distinguish stupidity from innocence, and lack of restraint from imaginativeness.

The Cárdenas parish priest welcomed with fanatic fervor the apocalyptic predictions of Señor García Markos and all his followers. In an inspired and fatalistic sermon, the priest openly foretold the end of the world: a classic finale, just as the Bible had announced, with the earth enveloped in flames. Naturally, this end was being brought about by the continuous chain of excesses and impious acts committed throughout history by the human race, which had made the divine wrath overflow at last. The end was not only imminent but well deserved. This, however, did not prevent many of the citizens of Cárdenas (or surely, of other locations) from devoting themselves to the construction of underground shelters in which to peremptorily seek protection until the ominous comet had moved out of our orbit. But it is also true that some of the people in Cárdenas, instead of taking precautions against the disaster, brought it on themselves in advance by committing suicide. The municipality has preserved desperate letters from mothers who, rather than wait to face the universal conflagration, chose to go ahead of it, together with all their progeny.

The priest, of course, condemned the suicides as well as the construction of shelters to escape the end. Both, he declared in another sermon, were acts of sheer arrogance, pagan and even illegal, since their intention was to elude divine justice.

On their way home from this sermon, Angustias, Martirio, Magdalena, and Amelia met their nephew in the garden, where he had just built a refuge big enough for fifty persons.