Of Love and Shadows (4 page)

A long time before, in a small village in Spain, amid steep, grapevine-covered hills, he had asked her hand in marriage. She replied that she was a Catholic, and intended to continue to be so, that she had nothing personal against Marx, but that she would not tolerate his portrait above the head of her bed, and that her children would be baptized in order to avoid the risk of dying outside the Church and ending up in Limbo. The Professor of Logic and Literature was a fervent Communist and an atheist, but he was not lacking in intuition, and he realized that nothing would change the opinion of that blushing and frail young girl with the visionary eyes, with whom he had fallen irrevocably in love, and therefore found it preferable to negotiate a pact. Their compromise was that they would be married in the Church, the only legal form of marriage in those days, that their children would receive the sacraments but would go to secular schools, that his accent would be heard in the choice of the boys' names and hers in the girls', and that they would be buried in a tomb without a cross but with a pragmatic epitaph of his composition. Hilda accepted, because that lean man with a pianist's hands and fire in his veins was the man she had always wanted to share her life. He fulfilled his part of the bargain with characteristically scrupulous honesty, but Hilda did not have the same rectitude. The day their first son was born, her husband was immersed in the war, and by the time he was able to come for a visit, the boy had been baptized Javier, like his grandfather. The mother was in a very delicate condition and it was not the moment to begin a quarrel, so Leal decided to give him the nickname of Vladimir, Lenin's first name. He was never successful; when he called the boy Vladimir, his wife asked him who the devil he was referring to and, besides, the child gazed at him with astonishment and never replied. Shortly before the next birth, Hilda awakened one morning recounting a dream: she would give birth to a boy and he was to be called José. They argued wildly for several weeks, until they reached a reasonable solution: José Ilyich. Then they tossed a coin to decide what name they would use and Hilda won; that was not her fault, but the fault of a fate that did not like the second name of the revolutionary leader. Years later when the last son was born, Professor Leal had lost some of his enthusiasm for the Soviets, so the child was spared being named Ulyanov. Hilda named him Francisco in honor of the Saint of Assisi, the poet of the poor and the animals. For this reason, and because he was the youngest and so like his father, she favored him with a special tenderness. The boy repaid his mother's absolute love with a perfect oedipal complex that lasted until his adolescence, when the tickling of his hormones led him to realize there were other women in this world.

That Saturday morning Francisco finished his tea, slung the bag containing his photographic equipment over his shoulder, and told his family goodbye.

“Button up tight, the wind on that motorcycle is deadly,” his mother said.

“Leave him alone, woman, he's not a boy anymore,” her husband protested, and all their sons smiled.

*  *  *

For the first months after Evangelina's birth, Digna lamented her misadventure and wondered if it was punishment from heaven for having gone to the hospital instead of staying in her own home. In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, the Bible clearly said, and so the Reverend had reminded her. But she came to understand how unfathomable are the designs of the Lord. That little blond infant with the pale eyes might have some part to play in her destiny. With the spiritual aid of the True Evangelical Church, she accepted her trial and prepared herself to love the baby girl, in spite of the fact that she was a difficult child. She often thought of the other baby, the one her child's spiritual godmother, her
comadre
Flores, had taken with her but by all rights belonged to Digna. Her husband consoled her, saying that the other baby seemed healthier and stronger and certainly would grow up better with the Flores family.

“The Floreses own some good land. I've even heard that they're going to buy a tractor. They're higher up in the world. They belong to the Farmers Union,” Hipólito had reasoned years ago, before adversity crushed the house of Flores.

After the births, the two women had attempted to claim their own babies, swearing that they had seen the infants born and from the color of the hair realized there had been an error; but the hospital director would hear nothing on the subject, and threatened to send them to jail for slandering his institution. The fathers suggested that the families simply trade babies and everyone would be happy, but the women did not want to do something illegal. They decided temporarily to keep the one each had in her arms, until the muddle could be cleared up by the authorities, but after a strike in the Office of Public Health and a fire in the Civil Registry, where the personnel was replaced and all the archives were destroyed, they lost any hope of obtaining justice. They decided to bring up one another's babies as if they were their own. Although they lived only a short distance apart, they had few occasions to meet, for they lived isolated lives. From the beginning they agreed to call each other
comadre
and to baptize the baby girls with the same name, so that if one day they reclaimed their legal surnames they would not have to get used to a new given name. They also told the girls the truth as soon as they were old enough to understand, because sooner or later they would find out anyway. Everyone in the region knew the story of the switched Evangelinas, and there would always be someone eager to repeat the gossip.

Evangelina Flores was a typical dark-haired, solidly built country girl, with bright eyes, broad hips, opulent breasts, and heavy, well-turned legs. She was strong and happy by temperament. To the Ranquileos fell a weepy, moonstruck, frail, and difficult child. She received special treatment from Hipólito, out of respect and admiration for the rosy skin and light hair so rare in his family. When he was in the house, he kept an eagle eye on the boys; he wanted no liberties taken with that girl who was not of their own blood. Once or twice, he surprised Pradelio by tickling her, fondling her under cover of play, nuzzling and kissing her, and to rid him once and for all of any desire to paw her, Hipólito gave him a couple of licks that knocked him halfway to the next life, because before God and man, Evangelina was the same as his own sister. Hipólito was home only a few months, however, and the rest of the year his orders could not be enforced.

From the day he had run off with a circus at the age of thirteen, Hipólito Ranquileo had followed that life and had never been interested in any other. His wife and his children bade him goodbye as the good weather began and the patched tents flowered. He went from town to town, traversing the land, showing off his artistry in the bone-crushing circuits of the carnivals of the poor. He had performed many different jobs beneath the big top. First, he was a trapeze artist and juggler, but over the years lost his equilibrium and dexterity. Then, during a brief incursion, he cracked the whip over a few miserable wild animals that stirred his pity and ruined his nerves. Finally he resigned himself to playing the clown. His life, just like that of any farmer, was ruled by the state of the rains and the light of the sun. Fortune did not smile on second-rate circuses in the cold, damp months, and he hibernated by his hearth, but with the awakening of spring he waved goodbye to his loved ones and set off without a qualm, leaving his wife in charge of the children and the work in the fields. She directed those activities better than he, since several generations of experience flowed in her veins. The only time that he had gone to town with the money from the harvest to buy clothing and provisions for the year, he got drunk and was robbed of it all. For months there was no sugar on the Ranquileo table, and no one had new shoes; this was the source of his confidence in relegating the business affairs to his wife. She also preferred it that way. From the beginning of her married life, the responsibility for the family and farm chores had fallen on her shoulders. It was normal to see her bent over the trough or following the plow in the furrow, surrounded by a swarm of children of various ages clinging to her skirts. When Pradelio grew up, she had thought he might help her with the hard work, but at fifteen her son was the tallest and most strapping youth ever seen in those parts, and it had seemed natural to everyone that after serving his time in the military he would join the police.

When the first rains began to fall, Digna Ranquileo moved her chair to the little gallery and settled herself there to keep an eye on the bend of the road. Her hands never rested, occupied with weaving a basket of wicker or altering the children's clothes, but her watchful eyes wandered from time to time to glance down the lane. Soon, any day now, the tiny figure of Hipólito would appear carrying his cardboard suitcase. There he was, the same as in her longing, finally materializing, nearer and nearer, with steps that had grown slower with the years, but always tender and joking. Digna's heart gave a leap, as it had the first time she saw him in the ticket window of a traveling circus many years ago, wearing a threadbare green-and-gold uniform and with a zealot's expression in his dark eyes, hustling the crowd to step right this way, don't miss the show. In those days he had a pleasant face, before it had been plastered over with the mask of a clown. His wife was never able to welcome him naturally. An adolescent passion squeezed her chest and she wanted to run to him and throw her arms around his neck to hide her tears, but months of separation had aggravated her shyness and she greeted him with restraint, eyes lowered, blushing. Her man was there, he had returned, everything would be different for a time, because he took great pains to make up for his absence. In the following months, she would invoke the charitable spirits in her Bible to prolong the rain and immobilize the calendar in a winter without end.

In contrast, the return of their father was a minor event for the children. One day when they came home from school or from work in the fields, they would find him sitting in a wicker chair beside the door, his
maté
in hand, blending into the drab autumn landscape as if he had never been away from those fields, from that house, from those vines with their clusters of grapes drying on the pruned vines, from the dogs stretched out on the patio. The children would note their mother's worried and impatient eyes, her briskness as she waited on her husband, her apprehension as she watched over those meetings to fend off any impertinence. Honor your father, the Old Testament said; the father is the pillar of the family. And that was why they were forbidden to call him Bosco the Clown, or to talk about his work; don't ask questions, wait till he feels like telling you. When they were little—when Hipólito was shot from a cannon from one end of the tent to the other, landing in a net amid the reverberation of gunpowder and flashing an uneasy smile—and once they had survived their fright, the children could feel proud of him, because there he soared like a hawk. Later, though, Digna did not allow them to go to the circus to see their father declining in pitiful pirouettes. She preferred them to hold that airy image in their memories and not to be embarrassed by the grotesque trappings of an old clown, beaten and humbled, exaggeratedly breaking wind, piping in a falsetto voice, guffawing without any reason. Whenever a circus passed through Los Riscos trailing a moth-eaten bear and summoning residents over loudspeakers to witness the grandiose international spectacle acclaimed by audiences everywhere, she refused to take the children because of the clowns—all alike, and all like Hipólito. Nevertheless, in the privacy of their home, he put on his costume and painted his face, not to caper about in an undignified manner or tell vulgar jokes, but to delight them with his stories of the weird and the shocking: the bearded woman; the gorilla man, so strong he could pull a truck by a wire held in his teeth; the fire-eater who could swallow a blazing torch but not snuff a candle with his fingers; the albino lady dwarf who rode on the hindquarters of a galloping she-goat; the trapeze artist who fell headlong from the highest tent pole and splattered the respectable public with his brains.

“A man's brain looks just like calves' brains,” Hipólito explained as he ended the tragic anecdote.

Sitting in a circle around their father, his children never tired of hearing the same tales over and over again. Before the wondering eyes of his family, who listened to his words suspended in time, Hipólito Ranquileo recovered all the dignity lost in the tawdry shows in which he was the target of ridicule.

Some winter nights, when the children were asleep, Digna pulled out the cardboard suitcase hidden beneath the bed, and by candlelight mended her husband's professional costume; she reinforced the gigantic red buttons, darned rips and tears here and sewed on strategic patches there; with beeswax she shined the enormous yellow shoes, and in secret knit the striped stockings of his clown's garb. In these actions she displayed the same absorbed tenderness as in their brief amorous comings together. The silence of the night magnified every sound, the rain drummed on the roof tiles, and the breathing of the children in the neighboring beds was so clear that the mother could divine their dreams. Wife and husband embraced beneath the blankets, subduing sighs, enveloped in the warmth of their discreet and loving conspiracy. Unlike other country people, they had married for love, and in love engendered their children. That is why even in the hardest of times, in drought, earthquake, flood, or when the kettle was empty, they never lamented the arrival of another child. Children are like flowers and bread, they said, a blessing from God.

Hipólito Ranquileo took advantage of his days at home to put up fences, gather firewood, repair tools, and patch the roof when the rain slackened. With the savings from his circus tours, the sale of honey and pigs, and their strict economies, the family survived. In the good years they never lacked for food, but even in the best of times money was scarce. Nothing was thrown away or wasted. The youngest wore clothing handed down from the oldest, and continued to wear it until the fatigued threads would tolerate no further mending and the patches themselves sloughed off like dried scabs. Sweaters were raveled to the last thread, the wool washed and reknit. The father fashioned espadrilles for the family, and the mother's knitting needles and sewing machine rarely lay idle. They did not feel poor, like other farmers, because they owned the land they had inherited from a grandfather; they had animals and farm tools. Once, in the past, they had received the credits awarded to all farmers, and for a while believed in prosperity, but then things returned to the old rhythm. They lived on the periphery of the mirage of progress that affected the rest of the country.