Of Love and Shadows (6 page)

The uncertainty destroyed Beatriz's nerves. Her friends recommended courses in yoga and Eastern meditation to soothe her constant agitation. While managing, with difficulty, to stand on her head, breathe through her navel, and focus her thoughts on Nirvana, she succeeded in forgetting her problems, but she could not remain in that position all day, and during the moments she did think of herself she was stunned by the irony of her fate. She had become the wife of a
desaparecido.
She had often said that no one disappeared in their country, and that such stories were anti-patriotic lies. When she saw the distraught women marching every Thursday in the plaza with portraits of their relatives pinned to their bosoms, she had said they were in the pay of Moscow. She never imagined she would find herself in the same situation as those wives and mothers searching for their loved ones. Legally, she was not a widow and would not be one for ten years, when the law would issue her a death certificate for her husband. She could not use the funds from Eusebio Beltrán's estate or get her hands on the slippery associates who made the stocks of his business enterprises vanish into thin air. She stayed in her mansion giving herself the airs of a duchess, but with no funds to maintain the lifestyle of a lady of high society. Beleaguered by bills, she was at the point of sprinkling the house with gasoline to burn it to the ground and collect the insurance when Irene cleverly thought of renting the ground floor.

“Now that so many families are leaving the country but can't take their parents and grandparents with them, I think we'd be doing them a favor by looking after them. Besides, it would bring in a little money,” Irene suggested.

And that is what they did. The ground floor was partitioned into smaller rooms; new baths were installed, and handrails in the hallways to give support to old age and security to unsteady legs; the steps were covered with a ramp for wheelchairs, and speakers with mood music positioned to assuage displeasure and alleviate depression, overlooking the possibility that it might fall on deaf ears.

Beatriz and her daughter settled into the upper floor with Rosa, who had been in their service from time immemorial. The mother decorated their home with her finest possessions, avoiding any touch of vulgarity, and began to live from the income provided by the patients of The Will of God Manor. If difficulties knocked too insistently at their door, she moved with supreme circumspection to sell a painting, a piece of silver, or one of the many jewels she had acquired in compensation for the gifts her husband bestowed on his lovers.

*  *  *

Irene regretted that her mother was distressed over such pedestrian problems. She was in favor of moving to more modest quarters in order to remodel the entire house and accommodate enough guests to cover all their expenses; but Beatriz would rather work herself to death and perform all manner of juggling acts than reveal her reduced circumstances. To leave the house would be publicly to acknowledge poverty. Mother and daughter differed greatly in their appreciation of life. As they did in their assessment of Eusebio Beltrán. Beatriz considered him to be a villain entirely capable of having committed fraud, bigamy, or whatever felony it was that had forced him to slink off with his tail between his legs, but when she voiced those opinions Irene turned on her like a tiger. She adored her father; she refused to believe he was dead or, even less, to accept that he had defects. His reasons for disappearing from the known world did not matter to her. Her affection for him was unconditional. She treasured the memory of an elegant man with a patrician profile and a formidable character combining admirable sentiments with wild passions that brought him to the brink of questionable dealings. Those aberrations may have horrified Beatriz, but they were what Irene remembered with greatest tenderness.

Eusebio Beltrán was the youngest of a family of wealthy planters, considered by his brothers to be hopelessly incorrigible because of his bent toward extravagance and his unrestrained
joie de vivre
, in contrast to the avarice and melancholy of his family. As soon as their parents died, the brothers divided the inheritance, gave Eusebio his share, and hoped they would never hear from him again. He sold his lands and went abroad, where in a few years he spent his last penny in princely diversions befitting his reputation as a ne'er-do-well. He returned to his native land through the mercy of the Consulate, in itself enough to discredit him forever in the eyes of any marriageable girl, but Beatriz Alcántara fell in love with his aristocratic bearing, his surname, and the aura that surrounded him. She was from a middle-class family, and from the time she was a little girl her one ambition had been to ascend the social ladder. Her capital consisted of her beauty, the artifice of her manners, and a few English and French phrases misused with such assurance that she gave the impression of being fluent in those languages. A veneer of culture served her well in social gatherings, and her skill in dressing and grooming earned her the reputation of being elegant. Eusebio Beltrán was for all practical purposes ruined; he had hit bottom in many aspects of his life but was confident that this was merely temporary, for he had the notion that people from good families always kept their heads above water. Besides, he was a liberal. The ideology of the liberals in those days could be summed up in a few words: help your friends, screw your enemies, and in all other cases be just. His friends did help him, and shortly he was playing golf in the most exclusive club and enjoying a season ticket at the Municipal Theater and a box at the Hippodrome. With the backing of his charm and his air of British nobility, he found associates in a variety of enterprises. He began to live opulently because it seemed to him foolish to live any other way, and he married Beatriz Alcántara because he had a weakness for beautiful women. The second time he invited her out, she asked him, without preamble, what his intentions were, saying she did not want to waste her time. She was twenty-five and did not intend to spend months in a pointless flirtation, since she was interested only in finding a husband. Her frankness greatly amused Eusebio, but when she refused to appear again in his company, he realized that she was serious. It took him one minute to yield to the impulse to propose matrimony, and a lifetime was not long enough to regret it. They had a daughter, Irene, who inherited the angelic bemusement of her paternal grandmother and the constant good humor of her father. While his daughter was growing up, Eusebio Beltrán had undertaken a number of business dealings, some profitable and others openly absurd. He was a man gifted with unlimited imagination, of which the prime example was his coconut-knocking machine. One day he had read in a magazine that picking this fruit by hand greatly increased its price. A native was chosen to climb the palm tree, pick the coconut, and descend. Climbing and descending consumed valuable time, and some pickers fell from the high branches, causing unforeseen expenses. Beltrán was determined to find a solution. He spent three days locked in his office, tormented by the problem of the coconuts, about which, to say the least, he had little firsthand knowledge, since in his travels he had avoided the tropics and in his home exotic foods were not eaten. But he learned. He studied the diameter and weight of the fruit, the climate and terrain suitable for its cultivation, the season for harvesting, the time for maturation, and other details. He devoted hours to drawing plans, and the result of all his sleeplessness was the invention of a machine capable of gathering a surprising number of coconuts per hour. Ignoring the mockery of family and friends, who knew as little as he about coconuts in their natural state, having only seen them adorning the turbans of mambo dancers or shredded over wedding cakes, he went to the Registry and patented a rampant tower outfitted with a retractable arm. Eusebio Beltrán had prophesied that one day his coconut-knocking machine would be useful, and time proved him right.

That was a trying period for Beatriz and her husband. Eusebio wanted to make a clean break and remove himself forever from his nagging wife, who was always harrying him with the same old tune, but she refused, with little reason other than the desire to torment him and to prevent his establishing a new relationship with one of her rivals. She argued that they needed to provide a stable home environment for Irene. Before causing my daughter any pain, she said, you will have to walk over my dead body. Her husband was at the point of doing just that, but tried instead to buy his freedom. On three occasions he offered Beatriz a large sum of money if she would allow him to leave in peace, and three times she accepted but at the last minute, when the lawyers had prepared the papers and all that was missing was the binding signature, she reneged. Their constant battles fortified her hatred. For this, and a thousand sentimental reasons, Irene did not weep for her father. She had no doubt that he had fled to free himself of his attachments, his debts, and his wife.

When Francisco Leal knocked at the door, Irene came to welcome him accompanied by Cleo, who was barking around her feet. She had prepared for the trip with a shawl over her shoulders, a kerchief over her head, and her tape recorder in her hands.

“Do you know where this saint lives?” he asked.

“In Los Riscos, an hour from here.”

They left the dog in the house, climbed on the motorcycle, and set out. It was a brilliant, warm, and cloudless morning.

*  *  *

They rode across the entire city, through the shaded streets of the exclusive neighborhoods with their lush trees and lordly mansions, the gray, noisy middle-class zone, and the wide cordons of misery. As they flew along, Francisco Leal thought about Irene, whom he could feel pressed against his back. The first time he had seen her, eleven months before that fateful spring, he thought she had escaped from a tale about pirates and princesses; to him she seemed a marvel that no one else could perceive. At that time he had been looking for work outside his profession. His private consulting room was always empty, producing large expenses and no earnings. He had also been suspended from his appointment at the University when the School of Psychology was closed for being a hotbed of pernicious ideas. He had spent months applying at every school, hospital, and industry, with no result except growing discouragement, until he was convinced that his years of study and his foreign doctorate would be of no use in the new society. It was not that suddenly all human wants had been resolved and the country peopled with happy citizens but, rather, that the rich did not suffer from problems of basic existence and the others, even though they might need him desperately, could not pay for the luxury of psychological therapy. They gritted their teeth and endured in silence.

The life of Francisco Leal, bright with good omens in adolescence, seemed, as he completed his second decade, a failure in the eyes of any impartial observer, and even more in his own. For a while, he drew consolation and strength from his clandestine practice, but soon it became essential for him to contribute to the family income. Stringency in the Leal household was rapidly becoming poverty. He managed to keep his emotions under control until it was clear that all doors were closed to him; then one night his serenity deserted him and he broke down in the kitchen as his mother was preparing dinner. Seeing him in that state, she dried her hands on her apron, removed the stew from the stove, and put her arms around him as she had when he was a boy.

“Psychology isn't the only thing in the world, son. Wipe your nose and look for something else,” she said.

Until then it had not occurred to Francisco to change careers, but Hilda's words signaled a new direction. He put his self-pity aside and reviewed his skills, hoping to find something productive but at the same time agreeable. He decided on photography, in which he was minimally skilled. Years before, he had bought a Japanese camera with all the accessories and he thought the moment had come to dust it off and put it to use. He placed a few prints in a portfolio, scoured the telephone book for places to apply, and so found himself at the door of a women's magazine.

The editorial offices occupied the top floor of an old-fashioned building with the name of the founder of the publishing firm chiseled in the portico in gilded letters. During the so-called boom in culture, when there had been an attempt to involve everyone in the fiesta of knowledge and the vice of information and more pages of print were sold than loaves of bread, the owners had decided to redecorate the building to be in tune with the delirious enthusiasm rocking the country. They had begun on the ground floor, carpeting it wall-to-wall, adding exquisite woodwork, replacing the shabby furnishings with glass-and-aluminum desks, removing windows to open up skylights, closing stairwells to provide niches in which to embed safes, locating electronic eyes that opened and closed doors by magic. The diagram of the edifice was turning into a labyrinth when suddenly the rules of the game were changed. The redecorating never reached the fifth floor, which had kept its furnishings of uncertain color, prehistoric typewriters, archival filing cabinets, and disconsolate stains on the ceiling. These modest appointments had little relation to the luxury weekly magazine edited there. From its covers smiled scantily clad beauty queens, and across its slick pages spilled a rainbow of colors and daring feminist articles. Because of the censorship of recent years, however, black patches now covered naked breasts and euphemisms designated forbidden concepts like abortion, ass, and freedom.

Francisco Leal knew the magazine because he had once bought a copy for his mother. The only name he remembered was that of Irene Beltrán, a journalist who wrote with some audacity, a rare commodity in those times. For that reason, when he reached the reception desk he asked to speak with her. He was led into a spacious room lighted by a large window from which one could see in the distance the imposing bulk of the Hill, somber guardian of the city. He saw four desks with as many clacking typewriters and, to the rear, a clothes rack filled with richly colored gowns. A coiffeur dressed in white was combing out a girl's hair while another girl awaited her turn, sitting as motionless as an idol, sunk in the contemplation of her own beauty. They signaled to Irene Beltrán, and the moment he saw her across the room he was attracted by her expression and by the amazing hair falling over her shoulders. She waved him over with a flirtatious smile, the last sign he needed to conclude that this girl would be capable of robbing him even of his thoughts, for he had imagined her, exactly as she was, in his boyhood books and adolescent dreams. As he drew nearer, his confidence evaporated, and he stopped before her, embarrassed, unable to tear his eyes from hers, made even more dramatic by makeup. Finally he found his voice and introduced himself.