Chapter One ONE My name is Eva, which means "life," according to a book of names my mother consulted. I was born in the back room of a shadowy house, and grew up amidst ancient furniture, books in Latin, and human mummies, but none of those things made me melancholy, because I came into the world with a breath of the jungle in my memory. My father, an Indian with yellow eyes, came from the place where the hundred rivers meet; he smelled of lush growing things and he never looked directly at the sky, because he had grown up beneath a canopy of trees, and light seemed indecent to him. Consuelo, my mother, spent her childhood in an enchanted region where for centuries adventurers have searched for the city of pure gold the conquistadors saw when they peered into the abyss of their own ambitions. She was marked forever by that landscape, and in some way she managed to pass that sign on to me. Missionaries took Consuelo in before she learned to walk; she appeared one day, a naked cub caked with mud and excrement, crawling across the footbridge from the dock like a tiny Jonah vomited up by some freshwater whale. When they bathed her, it was clear beyond a shadow of doubt that she was a girl, which must have caused no little consternation among them; but she was already there and it would not do to throw her into the river, so they draped her in a diaper to cover her shame, squeezed a few drops of lemon into her eyes to heal the infection that had prevented her from opening them, and baptized her with the first female name that came to mind. They then proceeded to bring her up, without fuss or effort to find out where she came from; they were sure that if Divine Providence had kept her alive until they found her, it would also watch over her physical and spiritual well-being, or, in the worst of cases, would bear her off to heaven along with the other innocents. Consuelo grew up without any fixed niche in the strict hierarchy of the Mission. She was not exactly a servant, but neither did she have the status of the Indian boys in the school, and when she asked which of the priests was her father, she was cuffed for her insolence. She told me that a Dutch sailor had set her adrift in a rowboat, but that was likely a story that she had invented to protect herself from the onslaught of my questions. I think the truth is that she knew nothing about her origins or how she had come to be where the missionaries found her. The Mission was a small oasis in the heart of an expanse of voluptuous vegetation writhing and twisting from the banks of the river to the feet of the monumental geologic towers that rose toward the firmament like one of God's mistakes. There time is bent and distances deceive the human eye, persuading the traveler to wander in circles. The humid, heavy air smells of flowers, herbs, man's sweat, and animal breath. The heat is oppressive, unalleviated by any breeze; the stones steam and blood boils in the veins. At dusk the sky is filled with phosphorescent mosquitoes whose bites produce endless nightmares, and the still night air carries the distinct cries of birds, the chattering of monkeys, and the distant roar of the waterfalls born high in the mountains to crash far below like the thunder of warfare. The modest mud-and-wattle Mission building, with its tower of woven stakes and a bell to toll for Mass, balanced, like all the huts, on piles driven into the mud of a river of opalescent waters whose banks evaporated in the reverberating light. The dwellings seemed to drift amid silent canoes, garbage, carcasses of dogs and rats, and inexplicable white blossoms. Consuelo was easy to distinguish even from a distance, her long red hair like a whip of fire against the eternal green of that landscape. Her playmates were young Indians with swollen bellies, an impudent parrot that recited an "Our Father" salted with curses, and a monkey chained to a table leg; from time to time she would let the monkey loose to look for a sweetheart in the jungle, but he always returned to the same spot to scratch his fleas. Even in those days Protestants were everywhere, distributing their Bibles, preaching against the Vatican, and hauling their pianos through heat and rain so their converts could celebrate salvation in public song. Such competition demanded the total dedication of the Catholic priests, and they paid little attention to Consuelo, who was growing up scorched by the sun, poorly nourished on yucca and fish, infested with parasites, bitten by mosquitoes, free as a bird. Aside from helping with domestic chores, attending religious services and a few classes in reading, arithmetic, and catechism, she had no obligations; she roamed outdoors, sniffing the flora and chasing the fauna, her mind filled with images, smells, colors, and myths borne on the river current. She was twelve when she met the man with the prospecting chickens, a weathered Portuguese who was dry and hard outside and bubbling with laughter inside. His birds pillaged the countryside, devouring anything that glittered, and after a certain amount of time their owner would slit open their craw and harvest his grains of gold--not enough to make him rich, but enough to nourish his dreams. One morning, El Portugués glimpsed a white-skinned girl with a blaze of hair, knee-deep in the swamp with her skirt tucked up around her legs, and thought he had suffered another of his periodic attacks of fever. His whistle of surprise would have set off a mule train. The sound reached the girl's ears; she looked up, their eyes met, and both smiled the same smile. After that day they met frequently: he, bedazzled, to gaze at her and she to learn to sing Portuguese songs. "Let's go harvest gold," El Portugués said one day. They set off into the jungle and soon were out of earshot of the Mission bell, deeper and deeper into the tangled growth along paths visible only to him. All day, crowing like roosters, they looked for the hens, catching them on the wing once they spied them through the dense foliage. She clamped them between her knees, and with one surgical slash he slit open the craw and stuck in his fingers to pull out the seeds of gold. If the hen survived, they stitched it up with needle and thread to continue to serve its owner; the others they put in a sack to sell in the village or use as bait. They burned the feathers because chicken feathers bring bad luck and spread the pip. Tangle-haired, Consuelo returned at dusk, content and spattered with blood. As she climbed the ladder from the rowboat to the terraced riverbank, her nose bumped into four filthy sandals belonging to two friars from Extremadura who were waiting for her with crossed arms and fearsome expressions of repudiation. "It is time for you to go to the city," they said. Nothing was gained by begging. Nor was she allowed to take the monkey or the parrot, two companions judged inappropriate for the new life awaiting her. She made the trip along with five native girls, all tied by the ankle to prevent their jumping from the pirogue and disappearing into the river. As he bid her farewell, El Portugués took one long last look at Consuelo; he did not touch her, but as a remembrance he gave her a tooth-shaped gold nugget strung on a cord. She would wear it around her neck most of her life, until she met someone she would give it to as a gift of love. El Portugués saw her for the last time dressed in a stained cotton jumper, a straw hat pulled down to her ears, barefoot and dejected, waving goodbye with one hand. The journey began by canoe, down tributaries that wound through a landscape to derange the senses, then on mule-back over rugged mesas where the cold freezes night thoughts, and finally in a truck, across humid plains through groves of wild bananas and dwarf pineapple and down roads of sand and salt; but none of it surprised the girl, for any person who first opens her eyes in the most hallucinatory land on earth loses the ability to be amazed. On that long journey she wept all the tears stored in her soul, leaving none in reserve for later sorrows. Once her tears were exhausted, she closed her lips, resolving from that moment forward to open them only when it could not be avoided. Several days later, when they reached the capital, the priests took the terrified girls to the Convent of the Little Sisters of Charity, where a nun with a jailer's key opened an iron door and led them to a large shady patio with cloistered corridors on four sides; in the center, doves, thrushes, and hummingbirds were drinking from a fountain of colored tiles. Several young girls in gray uniforms sat in a circle; some were stitching mattresses with curved needles while others wove wicker baskets. The nun, hands hidden beneath the folds of her habit, recited something that sounded like "Through prayer and toil shall you atone for your sins. I have come not to heal those of you who are whole, but to minister unto those who are suffering and afflicted. The shepherd rejoices more when he finds the lost sheep than in all the ninety and nine. Word of God, praise be His Holy Name, amen." Consuelo did not understand the meaning of that peroration; she did not even listen to it, she was too exhausted and too assailed by claustrophobia. She had never before been inside a walled enclosure, and when she looked up and saw the sky reduced to a rectangle, she felt that she was suffocating. When they separated her from her traveling companions and took her to the office of the Mother Superior, she had no inkling that it was because of her light skin and eyes. The Little Sisters had not received anyone like her in many years, only girls of mixed blood from the barrios, or Indian girls dragged there bodily by the missionaries. "Who are your parents?" "I don't know." "When were you born?" "The year of the comet." Even at that age, Consuelo supplanted with poetic flourishes what she lacked in information. The moment she heard of the comet she decided to adopt it as the year of her birth. During her childhood, someone had told her how everyone had awaited the celestial prodigy with fear and trembling. It was supposed to blaze across the sky like a fiery dragon, and when it entered the earth's atmosphere its tail would envelop the planet in poisonous gases, and heat like molten lava would put an end to any form of life. Some people committed suicide to avoid being scorched to death; others preferred to anesthetize themselves with last-minute gluttony, drunkenness, and fornication. Even El Benefactor was impressed when he saw the sky turn green and he learned that under the comet's influence mulattos' hair had unkinked and the hair of Chinese had curled into ringlets, and he freed some political opponents who had been in prison so long they had forgotten what sunlight looked like--although a few had kept alive the germ of rebellion and were prepared to bequeath it to future generations. Consuelo was seduced by the idea of being born in the midst of all that fear, in spite of the rumor that babies born during that period were abominations and would remain so years after the comet had faded from sight as a ball of ice and stellar dust. "The first thing we must do is get rid of this Satan's tail," declared the Mother Superior, hefting in both hands the burnished copper coil hanging down the back of the new interne. She gave the order that those long locks be cut and the girl's head washed with a mixture of lye and Aureolina Onirem to kill the lice and tone down the insolent color; therewith, half the hair fell, and what was left was dulled to the color of clay--much more suitable to the climate and goals of a religious institution than the original, naturally incandescent mane. Consuelo spent three years in that place, chilled in body and soul, sullen and solitary, convinced that the pale sun in the patio was not the same as the one that scalded the jungle in the home she had left behind. No profane babel penetrated these walls, nor any of the national prosperity that had begun when someone dug a well and, instead of water, struck a heavy, fetid black substance that gushed out as if from a dinosaur's entrails. The nation was sitting on a sea of petroleum. The consequence stirred ever so slightly the somnolence of the dictatorship, because it raised the fortunes of the tyrant and his family so high that some trickled down to everyone else. There were signs of progress in the cities, and in the oil fields contact with the hearty foremen from the North rocked the old traditions; a breeze of modernity lifted the women's skirts, but in the Convent of the Little Sisters of Charity none of this mattered. Life began at 4 a.m. with the first prayers; the day progressed with unvarying routine, ending at six o'clock when the bells signaled the hour of the Act of Contrition to cleanse the spirit and prepare for the eventuality of death, since night might be a journey of no return. Long silences, cloisters of waxed paving stones, the odor of incense and lilies, the whisper of prayers, the dark wooden benches, white unadorned walls. God's presence was absolute. In addition to the nuns and a pair of servants, only sixteen girls occupied the vast adobe-and-tile building, most of them orphaned or abandoned. They learned to wear shoes, eat with a fork, and master a few elementary domestic skills, so that later they could be employed in humble serving positions, for it was assumed that they were incapable of anything else. Consuelo's appearance set her apart from the others, and the nuns, sure that this was not accidental but a sign of benevolent divine will, spared no effort in cultivating her faith, in the hope she would decide to take her vows and serve the Church; all their efforts, however, came to naught before the girl's instinctive rejection. She made the attempt in good faith, but never succeeded in accepting the tyrannical god the nuns preached to her about; she preferred a more joyful, maternal, and compassionate god. "That is the Most Holy Virgin Mary," the nuns explained to her. "She is God?" "No, she is the Mother of God." "Yes, but who has the say in heaven, God or his Mama?" "Quiet, silly girl. Be quiet and pray. Ask the Lord to give you light," they counseled. Consuelo would sit in the chapel and stare at the altar dominated by a terrifyingly realistic Christ and try to recite the rosary, but soon she would be lost in endless adventures in which her memories of the jungle alternated with the figures of Sacred History, each with his bundle of passions, vengeance, martyrdom, and miracles. She soaked it in greedily, all of it: the ritual words of the Mass, the Sunday sermons, the pious readings, the night noises, the wind in the colonnades, the witless expressions of the saints and anchorites in the niches of the church. She learned to hold her tongue, and prudently suppressed the treasure of her prodigious flow of fables until I gave her the opportunity to unloose the torrent of words stored within her. Consuelo spent so much time in the chapel--motionless, hands clasped, placid as a cow chewing her cud--that the rumor spread through the convent that she was blessed with heavenly visions. The Mother Superior, however, a practical Catalan woman less inclined than the other nuns of the congregation to believe in miracles, realized that Consuelo was touched not by saintliness but by an incurable bent for daydreaming. As the girl did not, in addition, show any enthusiasm for stitching mattresses, making the hosts for Mass, or weaving baskets, she judged her training to be complete, and placed her in the house of a foreign doctor named Professor Jones. She herself led Consuelo by the hand to a somewhat run-down but still splendid French-style mansion on the outskirts of the city, sitting at the foot of a hill authorities have now designated as a National Park. Consuelo's first impression of the doctor was so intense that it was months before she lost her fear of him. He came into the large parlor wearing a butcher's apron and carrying a strange metallic instrument. He was so preoccupied in his project that he did not even say hello; he dispatched the nun with four incomprehensible sentences and, with a grunt, packed Consuelo off to the kitchen. She, on the other hand, studied him in detail; she had never seen such a threatening individual. But she also noticed that he was as handsome as a picture of Jesus, all gold, with the same blond beard as the Prince of Peace, and eyes of an impossible color. The only employer Consuelo was to have in her lifetime had spent years perfecting a system for preserving the dead, a secret he carried finally to the grave--to the relief of all mankind. He was also seeking a cure for cancer; he had observed that this illness is rare in areas where malaria is rife, and had deduced quite logically that he could palliate the malady by exposing its victims to the bite of the swamp mosquito. Following the same logic, he experimented with thumping the head of idiots, whether by birth or by vocation, because he had read in The Physician's Friend that a person had been transformed into a genius as the result of cerebral trauma. He was a dedicated anti-Socialist. He calculated that if the world's riches were equally distributed, each of the planet's inhabitants would receive less than thirty-five cents, and that therefore revolutions were ineffectual. Physically, he was healthy and strong; he suffered from unrelenting bad humor, and possessed the knowledge of a sage and the cunning of a sexton. His formula for embalming, like most great inventions, was of admirable simplicity. No nonsense about extracting the viscera, scooping out the cranium, plunging the body into Formol, and then stuffing it with pitch and tow, only to end up with something as wrinkled as a prune whose glass eyes stared at you with stupefaction. He merely drew the blood of the still-fresh cadaver and replaced it with a liquid that conserved the body as it had been in life. The skin, although pale and cold, did not decompose, the hair remained firmly rooted, and in some cases even the fingernails and toenails survived, and continued to grow. The only drawback, perhaps, was a certain penetratingly acrid odor, but after a while the family would grow accustomed to it. At that time, few patients voluntarily submitted to the bite of curative insects, or to blows on the head to increase intelligence, but news of Jones's prestige as an embalmer had crossed the oceans, and he was frequently visited by European scientists or North American businessmen avid to wrest his formula from him. They always left empty-handed. His most famous case--one that spread his fame around the globe--was that of a local lawyer well known in life for his liberal inclinations; El Benefactor had ordered him killed as he left a performance of the musical La Paloma in the Municipal Theater. The family carried the still-warm body containing more bullet holes than could be counted, but with the face intact, to Professor Jones. Although he considered the victim his ideological enemy--he himself was a supporter of authoritarian regimes and he distrusted democracy, which he considered vulgar and too much like Socialism--Jones devoted himself to the task of preserving the body. The results were so spectacular that the family seated the dead man, dressed in his best suit and holding a pen in his right hand, in the library, and for several decades protected him from moths and dust as a reminder of the brutality of the dictator, who did not dare intervene; it is one thing to engage in battle with the living, but quite another matter to quarrel with the dead. Once Consuelo succeeded in overcoming her initial fright, and understood that her employer's slaughterhouse apron and graveyard smell were inconsequential details compared to the fact that he was a person who was easy to get along with, vulnerable, at times even sympathetic, she felt quite at ease in his house; next to the convent, it seemed like paradise. No one in this house rose at dawn to say the rosary in behalf of all humankind, nor did anyone have to kneel on a fistful of peas to atone with her own suffering for the sins of others. The Professor's house did have one thing in common with the crumbling Convent of the Little Sisters of Charity: discreet ghosts also roamed here, perceived by everyone except Professor Jones, who for want of any scientific basis insisted on denying they were there. Although Consuelo was assigned the most onerous chores, she still found time for her daydreams, and here no one bothered her or interpreted her silences as wondrous gifts. She was strong, she never complained, and she obeyed without asking questions, as the nuns had taught her. Besides carrying out the garbage, washing and ironing the clothes, cleaning the water closets, and being responsible every day for seeing that the iceboxes had ice, which was transported on the backs of burros and packed in heavy salt, she helped Professor Jones prepare the large apothecary jars of his formula; she readied the corpses, removed the dust and nits from all their joints; she dressed them, combed their hair, and tinted their cheeks with rouge. The learned doctor was pleased with his servant. Until she had come, he had worked alone in absolute secrecy, but with time he became accustomed to Consuelo's presence and allowed her to help him in his laboratory, for he sensed the trustworthiness of this silent woman. He was so sure of her always being there when he needed her that he would take off his jacket and hat and, without a backward glance, drop them for her to catch before they fell to the floor, and as she never failed he came to have a blind faith in her. She was a kind of extension of the inventor. Consuelo, therefore, became the only other person in possession of the miraculous formula, but she did not benefit in any way from that knowledge, since the thought of betraying her employer or making money from his secret never entered her mind. She detested handling the cadavers, and could not see the point in embalming them. If there was any reason to do so, she thought, nature would have foreseen it and would not allow the dead to putrefy. Nevertheless, toward the end of her life she found an explanation for the age-old desire of humans to preserve their dead when she discovered that having the bodies nearby makes them easier to remember. Many years went by without surprises for Consuelo. She did not notice the changes taking place around her, for she had substituted the cloister of Professor Jones's house for that of the convent. They could have listened to news on the radio, but it was rarely turned on; her employer preferred the sound of the opera records he played on the latest Victrola. Nor were there newspapers in that house, only scientific journals, because the Professor was indifferent to events happening in the nation or the world. He was much more interested in abstract knowledge, the annals of history, or predictions concerning a hypothetical future, than the vulgar emergencies of the present. The house was a vast labyrinth of books. Volumes were stacked from floor to ceiling on every wall, dark, crackling, redolent of leather bindings, smooth to the touch, with their gold titles and translucent gilt-edged pages and delicate typography. All the works of universal learning were to be found on those shelves, arranged without apparent order--although the Professor remembered the exact location of each one. The works of Shakespeare rested alongside Das Kapital ; the maxims of Confucius rubbed elbows with The Book of Sea Lions ; ancient navigational maps lay beside Gothic novels and the poetry of India. Consuelo spent several hours a day dusting the books. When she finished the last bookcase, it was time to begin again with the first, but this was the best part of her duties. Gently, she picked up each one and wiped the dust from it as if caressing it; she leafed through its pages, sinking for a few minutes into its private world. She learned to recognize each one and to know its place on the shelves. She never dared ask to borrow them, so she smuggled them to her room, read them at night, and replaced them the following day. Consuelo did not know much about the upheavals, catastrophes, or the progress of her times, but she did learn in detail of the student unrest in the country because of what happened one day when Professor Jones was passing through the center of town and was almost killed by mounted guardias . It fell to her to place poultices on his bruises and feed him soup and beer from a baby bottle until his loosened teeth were firm again. The doctor had gone out to buy some supplies essential to his experiments, not remembering for a minute that it was Carnival, a licentious festival that each year left its residue of wounded and dead, although that year drunken quarrels passed unnoticed in the shock of other events that jolted the nation's drowsy complacency. Professor Jones was just crossing the street when the riot broke out. In fact, the problems had begun two days earlier when the university students had elected a beauty queen in the nation's first democratic vote. After the coronation, and the accompanying flowery speeches in which some speakers' tongues had slipped and spoken of liberty and sovereignty, the young people had decided to march. Nothing like it had ever been seen; it was forty-eight hours before the police reacted, and they did so precisely at the moment Professor Jones was emerging from a pharmacy with his vials and powders. He saw the mounted police galloping toward him, machetes drawn, but he changed neither direction nor pace, as he was absorbed in thoughts of his chemical formulas and all that noise seemed in very bad taste. He regained consciousness on a stretcher on the way to the hospital for indigents and, holding his teeth in place to keep them from scattering in the street, managed to mumble some instructions to take him to his house. While he recovered, sunk in his pillows, the police arrested the young leaders of the uprising and threw them into a dungeon; they were not beaten, however, because among them were sons of the most prominent families. Their detention produced a wave of solidarity, and on the following day dozens of young men appeared at the jails and barracks to offer themselves as voluntary prisoners. They were locked up in order of arrival, but after a few days had to be released; there was not space enough in the cells for so many youths, and the clamor of their mothers had begun to disturb El Benefactor's digestion. Months later, when Professor Jones's teeth were again firm in his gums and he was recuperating from his psychological bruises, the students again rebelled, this time with the complicity of a few young officers. The Ministry of War crushed the insurrection in seven hours, and those who managed to save themselves left the country and remained in exile for seven years, until the death of the Leader of the Nation, who granted himself the luxury of dying peacefully in his bed and not, as his enemies had desired and the North American Ambassador had feared, hanging by his testicles from a lamppost in the plaza. Faced with the death of the aged caudillo and the end of that long dictatorship, Professor Jones was on the point of returning to Europe, convinced--like so many others--that the country would inexorably sink into chaos. For their part, the Ministers of State, terrified at the possibility of a popular uprising, held a hasty meeting in which someone proposed they call for the Professor, thinking that if the cadaver of El Cid lashed to his steed could lead the charge against the Moors, there was no reason why the embalmed President for Life could not continue to govern from his tyrant's seat. The learned doctor appeared, accompanied by Consuelo, who carried his doctor's black bag and impassively observed the red tile-roofed houses, the streetcars, the men in straw hats and two-toned shoes, the singular mixture of luxury and disorder of the Presidential Palace. During the months of El Benefactor's long agony, security measures had been relaxed and in the hours following his death tremendous confusion reigned. No one stopped the visitor and his servant. They walked down long passageways and through salons, and finally entered the room where that powerful man--father of a hundred bastards, master of the lives and deaths of his subjects, and owner of an incalculable fortune--lay in his nightshirt, wearing kid gloves and soaked in his own urine. Members of his retinue and a few concubines trembled outside the door while the Ministers argued among themselves whether to flee the country or remain to see if the mummy of El Benefactor could continue to direct the destinies of the nation. Professor Jones stopped before the cadaver, examining it with an entomologist's fascination. "Is it true, Doctor, that you can preserve dead bodies?" asked a fat man with mustaches very like the dictator's. "Mmm..." "Then I advise you not to do so, because now it is my turn to govern. I am his brother, from the same cradle and the same blood"--a threat underscored by the blunderbuss stuck in the sibling's belt. At that moment the Minister of War appeared; he took the scientist by the arm and led him aside for a private word. "You're not thinking of embalming the President--?" "Mmm..." "You'd be better off not to meddle in this, because now it's my turn to command, and I hold the Army right in this fist." Disquieted, the Professor, followed by Consuelo, departed. He was never to know why or by whom he had been summoned. As he left the Palace, he was muttering that he would never understand these tropical peoples and the best thing he could do would be to return to the beloved city of his birth, where the laws of logic and urbanity were in full sway--and which he should never have left. The Minister of War took charge of the government without knowing exactly what he should do; he had always been under the thumb of El Benefactor and did not remember having taken a single initiative in all his career. These were uncertain times. The people refused to believe that the President for Life was actually dead; they thought that the old man displayed on the bier fit for a pharaoh was a hoax, another of that sorcerer's tricks to trap his critics. People locked themselves in their houses, afraid to stick a foot out the door, until the guardia broke down the doors, turned the occupants out by brute force, and lined them up to pay their last respects to the Supreme Leader, who was already beginning to stink in state among the virgin wax candles and lilies flown in from Florida. When they saw that various dignitaries of the Church in their finest ceremonial robes were presiding over the pomp of the funeral, the populace were finally assured that the tyrant's immortality was only a myth, and came out to celebrate. The country awakened from its long siesta, and in a matter of hours the cloud of depression and fatigue that had weighed over it dissipated. People began to dream of a timid liberty. They shouted, danced, threw stones, broke windows, and even sacked some of the mansions of the favorites of the regime; and they burned the long black Packard in which El Benefactor always rode, its unmistakable klaxon spreading fear as he passed. Then the Minister of War rose above the confusion, installed himself in the Presidential Seat, gave instructions to deflate high spirits with gunfire, and at once addressed the people over the radio, announcing a new order. Little by little, calm was restored. The jails were emptied of political prisoners to leave space for those still arriving, and a more progressive government was set in motion that promised to bring the nation into the twentieth century--not a far-fetched idea, considering that it was already three decades behind. In that political desert the first parties began to emerge, a Parliament was organized, and there was a renaissance of ideas and projects. The day they buried the lawyer, his most cherished mummy, Professor Jones was so enraged he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. At the urging of the authorities, who did not want to be burdened with the visible dead of the previous regime, the family of the celebrated martyr of tyranny provided him with a grandiose funeral, in spite of the widespread impression, created by his still-excellent state of preservation, that they were burying him alive. Jones left no stone unturned in trying to prevent his work of art from ending up in a mausoleum, but to no avail. He stood with outstretched arms at the gates of the cemetery, trying to block the passage of the black hearse transporting the silver-riveted mahogany coffin, but the coachman drove straight ahead, and if the doctor had not stepped aside he would have been flattened without a moment's hesitation. As the niche was sealed, the embalmer was felled by apoplexy, half his body rigid, the other half trembling convulsively. With that burial, the most conclusive evidence that the Professor's formula could thwart the process of decomposition for an indefinite period disappeared forever behind a marble tombstone. Those were the only major events of the years Consuelo served in the house of Professor Jones. For her, the difference between dictatorship and democracy was occasionally being able to attend a Carlos Gardel movie--formerly forbidden to women--and, following her employer's attack of apoplexy, having to care for the invalid as if he were a baby. Their routine was monotonously unvarying, until the July day the gardener was bitten by a viper. He was a tall, strong Indian, smooth-featured but with a secretive, taciturn expression. Consuelo had never exchanged more than ten words with him, in spite of the fact that he helped her with the cadavers, the cancer patients, and the idiots. He would pick up a patient as if he were a feather pillow, sling him over his shoulder, and lope up the stairs to the laboratory without a trace of curiosity. "A surucucú just bit the gardener," Consuelo announced to Professor Jones. "As soon as he dies, bring him to me," the scientist enunciated through twisted lips, immediately preparing to create an indigenous mummy posed as if pruning the Malabar plums, and then install him as a garden ornament. By this time the Professor was quite elderly and was beginning to have artistic delusions; he dreamed of representing all the trades, thus forming his personal museum of human statues. For the first time in her entire silent existence, Consuelo disobeyed an order and took the initiative. With the help of the cook, she dragged the Indian to his room in the back patio and laid him on his straw pallet; she was determined to save him, because it seemed shameful to think of him transfigured into an ornament to satisfy her employer's whim--and also because once or twice she had felt an indescribable nervousness as she watched the man's large, dark, strong hands tending the plants with such singular delicacy. She cleaned his wound with soap and water, made two deep cuts with the knife used for cutting up chicken, and slowly and patiently sucked out the poisoned blood, spitting it into a receptacle. Between every mouthful she rinsed her mouth with vinegar, so she herself would not die. Then she wrapped him in turpentine-soaked cloths, purged him with herbal teas, applied spiderwebs to the wound, and allowed the cook to light candles to the saints--although she herself had little faith in that recourse. When the victim began to pass blood in his urine, she spirited the Sándalo Sol from the Professor's cabinet, a heretofore infallible remedy for discharges of the urinary tract; but in spite of her painstaking care, the leg began to turn gangrenous and the man, lucid, silent, not once complaining, began to die. However, Consuelo became aware that notwithstanding pain, fear of death, and shortness of breath, the gardener responded with ardent enthusiasm when she rubbed his body or soothed him with poultices. That unexpected erection so moved her mature virgin's heart that when he held her arm and gazed at her entreatingly, she realized that the moment had come for her to justify the name Consuelo and console this man in his misfortune. Furthermore, she reflected that in all her thirty-some years of existence she had never known pleasure, and had not sought it, believing that it was something reserved for actors in the movies. She resolved to give herself pleasure, for once, and at the same time offer herself to the victim in the hope that he would pass contented to the other world. I knew my mother so well that I can imagine the ceremony that followed, although she never told me the details. She had no false modesty, and always answered my questions forthrightly, but at any mention of her Indian, she would abruptly fall silent, adrift in pleasant memories. She removed her cotton outer garment, her linen petticoat and underpants, and pulled the pins from the hair she wore in the large bun required by her employer. The long strands fell loose over her body, and, thus robed in her finest attribute, gently, with infinite care, she straddled the dying man, trying not to exacerbate his agony. She did not know exactly what to do next, because she had absolutely no experience in such tasks, but what she lacked in knowledge she made up for in instinct and good will. The muscles beneath the man's dark skin tensed, and she had the sensation of galloping upon a great, majestic animal. Whispering newly invented words, and drying his sweat with a cloth, she eased herself to the exact position, and then moved cautiously, like a young wife accustomed to making love to an elderly husband. Soon he tumbled her over and embraced her with the urgency dictated by the proximity of death; even the shadows in the corners were transformed by their brief joy. And that is how I was conceived, on my father's deathbed. But, contrary to the hopes of Professor Jones and the French scientists at the serpentarium, all of whom wanted his body for their experiments, the gardener did not die. Against all logic he began to improve; his temperature went down, his breathing became normal, and he asked for food. Consuelo realized that without intending it she had discovered an antidote for poisonous snakebites, and continued to administer it with tenderness and enthusiasm as often as requested, until the patient was once again on his feet. Soon afterward, the Indian came to tell her goodbye; she made no attempt to detain him. They held hands for a minute or two, kissed each other with a certain sadness, and then she removed her gold nugget, its cord worn thin from wear, and hung it around the neck of her only lover as a remembrance of their shared cantering. He went away grateful, and almost well. My mother says he left smiling. Consuelo displayed no emotion. She continued to work as she always had, ignoring the nausea, the heaviness in her legs, and the colored spots that clouded her vision, never mentioning the extraordinary medicament she had employed to save the dying man. She did not tell it even when her belly began to swell, nor when Professor Jones called her in to give her a purgative, believing that she was bloated as the result of a digestive disorder; nor did she tell it when, in her appointed time, she gave birth. She bore the pain for thirteen hours, continuing with her chores, and when she could stand it no longer she went to her room, prepared to live that moment, the most important in her life, to the fullest. She brushed her hair, hastily braided it, and tied it with a new ribbon. She removed her clothing, washed herself from head to foot, then placed a clean sheet on the floor and squatted on it in a position she had seen in a book on Eskimo customs. Bathed in sweat, with a rag in her mouth to choke back her moans, she strained to bring into the world the stubborn creature still clinging inside her. She was no longer young, and it was not an easy task, but scrubbing floors on her hands and knees, carrying loads up steep stairs, and washing clothes till midnight had given her firm muscles, and finally the baby began to emerge. First she saw two minuscule feet kicking feebly as if attempting the first steps of an arduous journey. She took a deep breath and, with a last moan, felt something tearing in the center of her body as an alien mass slipped from between her thighs. She was shaken to her soul with relief. There I lay, tangled in a bluish cord, which she carefully removed from around my neck to allow me to breathe. At that moment the door opened; the cook had noticed her absence, guessed what was happening, and had come to help. She found my mother naked, with me on her belly, still joined to her by a pulsing cord. "Bad luck, it's a girl," said the impromptu midwife after she had tied and cut the umbilical cord and was holding me in her arms. "But she came feet first, and that's a sign of good luck," my mother smiled as soon as she could speak. "She seems strong, and she has good lungs. If you want, I can be the godmother." "I hadn't planned to christen her," Consuelo replied, but when she saw the other woman cross herself, scandalized, she did not want to offend her. "All right, a little holy water never hurt anyone, and--who knows?--it might even do some good. Her name will be Eva, so she will love life." "And her last name?" "None. Her father's name isn't important." "Everybody needs a last name. Only a dog can run around with one name." "Her father belonged to the Luna tribe, the Children of the Moon. Let it be Luna, then. Eva Luna. Give her to me, please, godmother. I want to see if she's whole." Sitting in the pool of my birth, her bones as weak as cotton wool, dripping with sweat, Consuelo examined my body for any ominous sign transmitted by the venom and, discovering no abnormality, breathed a deep sigh of relief. I do not have fangs, or reptilian scales--at least no visible ones. The somewhat unusual circumstances of my conception had, instead, only positive consequences: these were unfailing good health and the rebelliousness that, although somewhat slow to evidence itself, in the end saved me from the life of humiliations to which I was undoubtedly destined. From my father I inherited stamina; he must have been very strong to fight off the serpent's venom for so many days and to give pleasure to a woman when he was so near death. Everything else I owe to my mother. When I was four, I had one of those diseases that leave little pockmarks all over the body, but she healed me, tying my hands to keep me from scratching myself, coating my body with sheep's tallow, and shielding me from natural light for one hundred and eighty days. During that period, she also brewed squash blossoms to rid me of parasites, and fern root to flush out the tapeworm. I have been healthy and sound ever since. I have no marks on my skin, only a few cigarette burns, and I expect to be free of wrinkles in my old age because the effect of sheep's tallow is everlasting. My mother was a silent person, able to camouflage herself against the furniture or to disappear in the design of a rug. She never made the slightest commotion; it was almost as if she were not there. In the privacy of the room we shared, however, she was transformed. When she talked about the past, or told her stories, the room filled with light; the walls dissolved to reveal incredible landscapes, palaces crowded with unimaginable objects, faraway countries that she invented or borrowed from the Professor's library. She placed at my feet the treasures of the Orient, the moon, and beyond. She reduced me to the size of an ant so I could experience the universe from that smallness; she gave me wings to see it from the heavens; she gave me the tail of a fish so I would know the depths of the sea. When she was telling a story, her characters peopled my world, and some of them became so familiar that still today, so many years later, I can describe the clothing they wore and the tone of their voice. She maintained intact her memories of her childhood in the Mission; she retained all the anecdotes she had heard and those she had learned in her readings. She manufactured the substance of her own dreams, and from those materials constructed a world for me. Words are free, she used to say, and she appropriated them; they were all hers. She sowed in my mind the idea that reality is not only what we see on the surface; it has a magical dimension as well and, if we so desire, it is legitimate to enhance it and color it to make our journey through life less trying. The characters she summoned to the enchanted world of her stories are the only clear memories I have of my first years; the rest existed in a kind of mist where the household servants, the aged Professor prostrate in his bicycle-wheeled armchair, and the string of patients and cadavers he attended in spite of his infirmity, all blended together. Children annoyed Professor Jones, but he was usually lost in his own thoughts, and when he ran into me in some corner of the house, he scarcely saw me. I was a little afraid of him because I did not know whether the old man had fabricated the mummies or whether they had engendered him; they all seemed to belong to the same parchment-skinned family. His presence had no effect on me because we lived in different worlds. I roamed through the kitchen, the patios, the servants' quarters, the garden, and when I followed my mother to the other parts of the house, I moved very quietly so the Professor would think I was a prolongation of her shadow. The house had so many different smells that I could go around with my eyes closed and guess where I was: aromas of food, clothing, coal, medicines, books, and dankness fused with the characters from the stories, enriching those years. I was brought up on the theory that all vices issue from idleness, an idea implanted by the Little Sisters of Charity and cultivated by the learned doctor with his despotic discipline. I had no conventional toys, although the truth was that everything in the house served me in my games. During the day, there was no time for rest; idle hands were considered a source of shame. Beside my mother I scrubbed the wood floors, hung clothes out to dry, chopped vegetables, and at the time of siesta tried to knit and embroider--but I do not remember those tasks as being oppressive. It was like playing house. The Professor's sinister experiments did not disturb me either; my mother explained that the head-thumping and the mosquito-bite treatments--fortunately, infrequent--were not indications of her employer's cruelty, but the most rigorous scientific therapy. With her confident manner of handling the embalmed bodies like relatives down on their luck, my mother nipped in the bud any blossoming of fear, and never allowed the other servants to frighten me with their macabre ideas. I think she must have tried to keep me away from the laboratory. In fact, I almost never saw the mummies; I simply knew they were there on the other side of the door. Those poor people are very fragile, Eva, she used to tell me. I don't want you to go into that room. Just a little push and you might break one of their bones, and then the Professor would be very angry. For my peace of mind she gave a name to each body and invented a past for every one, transforming them into friendly spirits like elves and fairies. We did not often leave the house. One of the rare occasions we did was to watch a procession during the drought, an occasion when even atheists were prepared to pray, because it was a community event more than an act of faith. I remember hearing people say that not a drop of rain had fallen in the country for three years; the earth had split open in thirsty cracks, all the vegetation had died; animals had perished with their muzzles buried in the dust; and, in exchange for water, people who lived in the plains trudged to the coast to sell themselves into slavery. In view of this national disaster, the Bishop had decided to carry the image of the Nazarene through the streets and implore the Almighty to bring an end to this punishment, and as it was the last hope, all of us came--rich and poor, young and old, believers and agnostics. Professor Jones sputtered with rage when he learned of it--Barbarians! Indians! Black savages!--but he could not prevent his servants from dressing in their best clothes and going off to see the procession. The multitudes, with the Nazarene in the lead, set out from the Cathedral but did not get even as far as the Public Utility Company before they were overtaken by a violent cloudburst. Forty-eight hours later, the city had become a lake; storm sewers were clogged, roads inundated, residences flooded. In the country, houses were carried off by the downpour, and in one town on the coast it rained fish. A miracle, a miracle! the Bishop clamored. And we joined in the chorus, unaware that the procession had been organized after a meteorologist had forecast typhoons and torrential rains throughout the Caribbean--as Jones proclaimed from his wheelchair: Superstitious, ignorant, illiterate fools! the poor man howled. But no one listened. That miracle accomplished what neither the Mission priests nor the Little Sisters of Charity had been able to achieve: my mother accepted God, because now she visualized him seated on his celestial throne gently mocking mankind, and to her this god was very different from the awesome patriarch of religious books. Perhaps one manifestation of his sense of humor was to keep us in a state of confusion, never revealing his plans and proposals to us. But every time we remembered the miracle of the rain, we would die laughing. The world was bounded by the iron railings of the garden. Within them, time was ruled by caprice; in half an hour I could make six trips around the globe, and a moonbeam in the patio would fill my thoughts for a week. Light and shadow created fundamental changes in the nature of objects: books, quiet during the day, opened by night so their characters could come out and wander through the rooms and live their adventures; the mummies, so humble and discreet when the morning sunlight poured through the windows, at twilight became stones lurking in the shadows, and in the blackness grew to the size of giants. Space expanded and contracted according to my will: the cubby beneath the stairs contained an entire planetary system, but the sky seen through the attic skylight was nothing more than a pale circle of glass. One word from me and abracadabra! reality was transformed. I grew up free and secure in that mansion at the foot of the hill. I had no contact with any other children, nor was I accustomed to strangers, except a man in a black suit and hat, a Protestant with a Bible beneath his arm who reduced Professor Jones's last years to ashes. I feared him much more than I did the Professor. Excerpted from Eva Luna: A Novel by Isabel Allende All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
