The Discreet Hero (36 page)

Alone in the living room, he watched the local news on television and listened to news reports on the radio. Miguel appeared on the screen, looking serious, his hair uncombed, in handcuffs, dressed in a tracksuit and basketball sneakers; and then Mabel, without cuffs, looking in fear at the bursts of light from the cameras. In his heart Felícito was grateful that Gertrudis had taken refuge in her bedroom and wasn’t beside him, watching the news programs that morbidly emphasized that his mistress, named Mabel, whom he’d set up in a house in the Castilla district, had deceived him with his own son and conspired to commit extortion, sending the famous spider letters and setting fire to Narihualá Transport.

He saw and heard it all with a sinking heart and perspiring hands, feeling the warning signs of another attack of vertigo like the one that had made him pass out at Adelaida’s, yet at the same time he had the curious sensation that this was very distant and strange and had nothing to do with him. He didn’t even feel involved when his own image appeared on the screen while the announcer spoke of his dear Mabel (calling her his “paramour”), his son Miguel, and his transport company. It was as if he’d been separated from himself; the Felícito Yanaqué of the television images and radio news was someone else who had usurped his name and face.

After he was already in bed, unable to sleep, he heard Gertrudis’s footsteps in the adjoining bedroom. He looked at the clock: almost one. As far as he could recall, his wife never stayed up so late. He couldn’t sleep, he was awake all night, sometimes thinking, but most of the time his mind was a blank, attentive to his heartbeat. At breakfast, Gertrudis continued her silence; all she had was a cup of tea. Not long afterward, Josefita, called by Felícito, came to report what was happening at the office, to receive instructions, and to take down the letters he dictated. She brought a message from Tiburcio, who was in Tumbes. When he heard the news, he’d called the house several times but no one answered. He drove the bus on that route, and as soon as he reached Piura he would come straight to see his parents. Felícito’s secretary seemed so disturbed by the news that he almost didn’t recognize her; she avoided looking him in the eye, and the only comment she made was how annoying the reporters were, they’d driven her crazy the night before at the office, and now they’d surrounded her when she came to the house and wouldn’t let her near the door for a long time, though she shouted at them that she had nothing to say, didn’t know anything, was only Señor Yanaqué’s secretary. They asked the most impertinent questions, but of course she hadn’t said a word. When Josefita left, Felícito saw through the window how she was assaulted again by the men and women with tape recorders and cameras crowded on the sidewalks of Calle Arequipa.

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 growl: “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.

“I’ve been paying for my faults all these years, Felícito,” he heard Gertrudis say, almost without moving her full lips or taking her eyes off him for a second, though she didn’t appear to see him and spoke as if he weren’t there. “Bearing my cross in silence. Knowing very well that the sins one commits have to be paid for. Not only in the next life, in this one too. I’ve accepted it. I’ve repented for myself and for the Boss Lady. I’ve paid for myself and my mama. I don’t feel the rancor toward her that I did when I was young. I keep paying and hope that with so much suffering, Our Lord Jesus Christ will forgive so many sins.”

Felícito wanted her to be quiet right now and leave. But he didn’t have the strength to stand and walk out of the room. His legs were trembling. “I wish I were that buzzing fly and not me,” he thought.

“You helped me pay for them, Felícito,” his wife continued, lowering her voice a little. “And I’m grateful. That’s why I never said anything. That’s why I never made a jealous scene or asked questions that might have bothered you. That’s why I never let on that I knew you’d fallen in love with another woman, that you had a mistress who wasn’t old and ugly like me, but young and pretty. That’s why I never complained about Mabel and never blamed you. Because Mabel also helped me pay for my sins.”

She fell silent, waiting for the trucker to say something, but since he didn’t open his mouth, she added: “I never thought we’d have this conversation either, Felícito. You wanted it, not me.”

Again she paused for a long time and murmured, making the sign of the cross in the air with her gnarled fingers. “Now this thing Miguel did to you is the penance you have to pay for yourself. And for me too.”

After her last words, Gertrudis stood with an agility Felícito didn’t remember her possessing and shuffled out of the room. He remained seated in the television room, not hearing the noises, the voices, the horns, the bustle of Calle Arequipa, or the mototaxi engines, sunk in a dense lethargy, a despair and sadness that didn’t let him think and deprived him of even the energy needed to get to his feet. He wanted to, he wanted to leave this house even though as soon as he walked outside the reporters would be all over him with their relentless questions, each one stupider than the last, he wanted to go to the Eguiguren Seawalk and sit down to watch the brown-and-gray river water, watch the clouds in the sky, breathe in the warm afternoon, listen to the birds calling. But he didn’t try to move because his legs weren’t going to obey him, or vertigo would knock him to the carpet. It horrified him to think that his father, from the next life, might have heard the conversation he’d just had with his wife.

He didn’t know how long he was in that state of viscous somnolence, feeling time pass, ashamed and sorry for himself, Gertrudis, Mabel, Miguel, everybody. From time to time, like a ray of clear light, his father’s face would appear in his mind, and that fleeting image would relieve him for an instant. “If you’d been alive and found out about all this, you’d have died again,” he thought.

Suddenly he realized that Tiburcio had come into the room without his having noticed. He was kneeling beside him, holding his arms, looking at him in fright.

“I’m fine, don’t worry,” he reassured his son. “I just dozed off for a minute.”

“Do you want me to call a doctor?” He was in the blue coveralls and cap that were the company’s drivers’ uniform; on the visor was written “Narihualá Transport.” In one hand he held the untanned leather gloves he wore to drive the buses. “You look very pale, Father.”

“Did you just get back from Tumbes?” he replied. “A good trip?”

“Almost full and a lot of cargo,” Tiburcio said. His face still looked frightened, and he was studying Felícito, as if trying to pull out a secret. He clearly would have liked to ask endless questions but didn’t dare. Felícito pitied him too.