The Stories of Eva Luna

by Isabel Allende

  “You will not be forced to do it much longer, Uncle. When I marry I shall take charge of my estate.”

  “When she marries, the child says? Tell me, Sister, does she have a suitor, then?”

  “What a thing to say, señor Torres! We look after our girls very closely. It’s just a manner of speaking. How the girl goes on!”

  Analía Torres rose, smoothed the pleats of her uniform, made a rather mocking curtsy, and left the room. The Mother Superior served her visitor another cup of chocolate, commenting that the only explanation for such discourteous behavior was that the girl had had so little contact with members of her family.

  “She is the only student who never goes home for vacation, and the only one who has never received a Christmas present,” the nun added curtly.

  “I am not one for pampering a child, but I assure you I hold my niece in the highest esteem, and I have looked after her interests like a father. But you are right, my niece needs more affection; women are sentimental creatures.”

  A month later the uncle again presented himself at the school. On this occasion he did not ask to see his niece but merely notified the Mother Superior that his own son wished to enter into correspondence with Analía and asked her to see that the letters were delivered, with the hope that a friendship with her cousin would strengthen family ties.

  The letters began to arrive with regularity: plain white paper and black ink, rounded characters, and a large, firm hand. Some letters spoke of life in the country, of seasons and animals; others of poets now dead, and of their ruminations. Sometimes the envelope included a book, or a sketch featuring the same firm hand as the calligraphy. Analía intended not to read them, faithful to the idea that some danger lurked behind anything connected with her uncle, but amid the boredom of school the letters represented her only opportunity for escape. She hid in the attic, not to invent improbable tales but to read and reread her cousin’s notes until she knew by heart the slant of the letters and texture of the paper. At first she did not reply, but as time went by she could not help herself. The contents of the correspondence grew more and more subtle in order to escape the censorship of the Mother Superior, who opened all mail. An intimacy developed between the correspondents, and soon they devised a secret code in which they began to speak of love.

  Analía Torres did not remember ever having seen the cousin who signed himself Luis, because when she had lived in her uncle’s house the youth had been in the capital attending school. She was sure he must be an ugly man, perhaps sickly or humpbacked, because it seemed impossible that so fine a sensibility and such a clear mind should be combined with a handsome appearance. She tried to sketch in her mind an image of her cousin: plump, like his father, his face scarred by smallpox, lame, and partly bald: the more defects she added the more she was inclined to love him. Radiance of spirit was all that really mattered; that was the only thing that survived the passage of time without deteriorating, the only thing that continued to grow with the years. The beauty of the dashing heroes of her stories was no virtue at all and might even become the source of frivolity, Analía concluded, although she could not help being slightly uneasy in regard to this reasoning. She wondered how much deformity she would be capable of accepting.

  The correspondence between Analía and Luis Torres lasted two years, at the end of which the girl had a hatbox filled with letters and a heart lost beyond recall. If the idea had passed through her mind that the relationship might have been planned by her uncle to ensure that the estate she had inherited from her father would pass into the hands of Luis, she immediately rejected it, ashamed of such ignoble thoughts. On her eighteenth birthday, the Mother Superior called her to the refectory to tell her a visitor was waiting to see her. Analía Torres guessed who it was and for a moment had the impulse to run and hide in the garret of the forgotten saints, terrified by the eventuality of finally coming face to face with the man she had so long imagined. When she entered the drawing room and stood before him, it took her several minutes to overcome her disillusion.

  Luis Torres was not the malformed dwarf she had constructed in her dreams and learned to love. He was a well-built man with a pleasant face: regular features, a still boyish mouth, a dark, well-trimmed beard, and light eyes fringed with long eyelashes but empty of expression. He looked a little like the saints in the chapel—rather too pretty and slightly foolish. Analía recovered from her shock and decided that if in her heart she had accepted a hunchback, she could love even more this elegant young man who kissed her on one cheek, leaving a lingering scent of lavender water.

  * * *

  From the day she was married, Analía detested Luis Torres. When he crushed her between the embroidered sheets of a too-soft bed, she knew that she had fallen in love with a ghost and that she could never transfer her imaginary passion to the reality of marriage. She fought these sentiments with determination, first putting them out of her mind as immoral and then, when it became impossible to ignore them any longer, trying to delve into the depths of her own soul and pull them out by the roots. Luis was an agreeable man, at times even entertaining. He did not harass her with outrageous demands nor try to modify her bent toward solitude and silence. She herself admitted that with a little good will on her part she could find a certain happiness in their relationship, at least as much as she would have known in a nun’s habit. She had no precise reasons for the strange repulsion she felt toward the man she had loved for two years before meeting. Neither could she put her emotions into words, and even had she been able to do so she would have had no one to tell them to. She felt tricked by her inability to reconcile the image of the epistolary suitor with that of her flesh-and-blood husband. Luis never mentioned the letters, and if she raised the subject he would close her lips with a quick kiss and some flippant observation about romantic love’s being unsuited to married life, in which trust, respect, shared interests, and the good of the family were much more important than adolescent love letters. There was no true intimacy between them. During the day each carried out his or her own duties, and at night they met among the feather pillows, where Analía—accustomed to her convent school cot—felt she was suffocating. Sometimes they hurriedly embraced: she motionless and tense, he with the attitude of one who is satisfying bodily demands in lieu of any other recourse. Luis would immediately fall asleep; she lay staring into the darkness, with an unvoiced protest in her throat. Analía tried various schemes to overcome the revulsion she felt for her husband, from the exercise of fixing in her memory every detail about her husband, with the aim of loving him out of sheer determination, to that of emptying her mind of all thoughts and transporting herself to a dimension where he could not reach her. She prayed this was merely a temporary repugnance, but the months went by and instead of the longed-for relief her animosity grew to loathing. One night she dreamed of being caressed by a repulsive man with black ink-stained fingers.

  The Torreses lived on the property Analía’s father had acquired when the region was still a half-savage territory belonging to soldiers and bandits. Now it was close to a main highway and a short distance from a prosperous town that was the seat of annual agricultural and cattle fairs. Legally, Luis was the administrator of the hacienda, but in reality it was Analía’s uncle Eugenio who fulfilled that function, since Luis was bored by the details of country life. After the midday meal, when father and son installed themselves in the library to drink cognac and play dominoes, Analía would hear her uncle making decisions about investments, herds, crops, and harvests. On the rare occasions when she dared interrupt to offer an opinion, the two men listened with professed attention, assuring her they would keep her suggestions in mind, but then did as they pleased. At such times Analía would gallop through the pastures to the foot of the mountain, wishing she had been a man.

  The birth of a son did not in any way improve Analía’s feelings for her husband. During the months of her pregnancy, her withdrawn nature became more pr
onounced, but Luis was patient with her, attributing it to her condition, and anyway, he had other matters to occupy him. After the baby was born, she moved into a separate room furnished with nothing but a hard narrow cot. When their son was a year old, however, and Analía still locked the door of her room and avoided any occasion that meant being alone with him, Luis decided it was time to demand more considerate treatment; he warned his wife that she had better change her attitude before he shot the lock off her door. She had never seen him so outraged. She obeyed without comment. Through the next seven years the tension between them intensified to such a degree that they found they were secret enemies but, being well-mannered, in the presence of others they treated each other with exaggerated courtesy. Only the boy suspected the dimension of his parents’ hostility, and at midnight would often wake up crying because he had wet the bed. Analía enclosed herself in a shell of silence and felt as if she was drying up inside. Luis, in contrast, became more expansive and irresponsible; he abandoned himself to his many appetites, he drank too much, and for days he disappeared on unmentionable escapades. When he no longer tried to disguise his dissipation, Analía found good reason for distancing herself even more from him. Luis lost all interest in running the hacienda, and his wife took his place, happy with this new arrangement. On Sundays her uncle Eugenio would sit after dinner discussing decisions with her, while Luis sank into a long siesta from which he revived at nightfall, bathed in sweat, his stomach churning, but ready for renewed revelry with his friends.

  Analía taught her son the rudiments of writing and arithmetic and tried to direct him toward a taste for books. When the boy was seven, Luis decided it was time for a more formal education, away from his mother’s babying; he tried to send him to school in the capital, to see if he would grow up a little sooner, but Analía opposed him with such ferocity that he had to accept a less drastic solution. The boy was sent to school in the nearby town, where he stayed from Monday to Friday; on Saturday mornings a car was sent to bring him home for the weekend. After the first week Analía anxiously observed her son, searching for excuses to keep him with her, but she could find none. The child seemed happy; he talked about his teacher and his schoolmates with genuine enthusiasm, as if he had always known them. He stopped wetting his bed. Three months later he came home with his first report card and a brief letter from the teacher congratulating him on his good performance. As Analía read the note, she trembled, and smiled for the first time in many days. Elated, she hugged her son, asking a thousand questions about his school: what were the dormitories like, what did he have to eat, was it cold at night, how many friends did he have, what was his teacher like? She seemed much more relaxed and did not again raise the question of removing him from the school. As the months went by, the boy continued to bring home good marks, which Analía hoarded like treasures and repaid with jars of marmalade and fruit for the entire class. She tried not to think about the fact that this compromise would suffice only for his elementary education and that within a few years she could not avoid sending him to school in the city, where she could see him only during vacations.

  One night in town Luis Torres, who had drunk too much, began pirouetting another man’s mount to demonstrate his horsemanship to a group of his drinking companions. The horse threw him and with one kick crushed his testicles. Nine days later, Torres, screaming with pain, died in the city clinic where he had been taken with the hope of curing his infection. Beside him was his wife, guiltily weeping for the love she could never give him and for relief that now she would not have to keep praying for him to die. Before taking the coffin back to the country to bury her husband in his own soil, Analía bought a white dress and packed it in the bottom of her suitcase. She arrived home wearing mourning, her face covered by a widow’s veil so that no one could see the expression in her eyes; she wore the same attire to the funeral, holding the hand of her son, who was also in black. After the service her uncle Eugenio, who was in very good health despite seventy well-lived years, proposed to his daughter-in-law that she relinquish her lands and go to live in the capital on her income; there the boy could complete his education and she could forget the sorrows of the past.

  “Because it did not escape me, Analía, that my poor Luis and you were never happy together,” he said.

  “You’re right, Uncle. Luis deceived me from the beginning.”

  “For God’s sake, child, he was always very discreet and respectful with you. Luis was a good husband. All men have their little adventures, but they are meaningless.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I’m referring to an unforgivable deception.”

  “I don’t want to know anything about it. In any case, I think that you and the boy would be much better off in the capital. You will want for nothing. I will look after the hacienda. I’m an old man but I still have my strength: to this day I can throw a steer.”

  “I shall stay here. My son will stay with me, because I need his help around the place. Recently I’ve been doing more in the fields than in the house. The only difference will be that now I shall make my own decisions, without consulting anyone. At last the land is mine alone. So I will tell you goodbye, Uncle Eugenio.”

  Analía spent a few weeks organizing her new life. She began by burning the sheets she had shared with her husband and moving her narrow cot into the main bedroom. Then she examined the accounts of the hacienda in great detail, and as soon as she had an exact idea of her wealth she looked for an overseer who would carry out her orders without question. When she felt that everything was nicely under control, she removed the white dress from her suitcase, ironed it meticulously, put it on, and, thus attired, was driven to her son’s school, carrying an old hatbox beneath her arm.

  Analía Torres waited in the patio for the five o’clock bell to announce the end of the last class of the day; immediately a flood of boys rushed out to play. Among them was her son, who stopped short when he saw her, because this was the first time his mother had visited the school.

  “Show me your classroom. I want to meet your teacher,” she said.

  At the door Analía motioned that the boy was to leave, that this was a private matter, and walked in alone. She found herself in a large, high-ceilinged room with maps and biology charts on the walls. There was the same close, sweaty odor she remembered from her own childhood, but now it did not bother her; to the contrary, she breathed it in with delight. Following the school day, the desks were untidy, there were papers scattered on the floor, and uncapped inkwells. Columns of numbers had not been erased from the blackboard. And at the front of the room, at a desk on a raised platform, sat the teacher. He looked up, surprised, but did not rise, because his crutches were too far away to be reached without scraping his chair across the floor. Analía walked down the aisle between two rows of desks and stopped before him.

  “I am Torres’s mother,” she said, because she could think of nothing better.

  “Good afternoon, señora. I must take this opportunity to thank you for all the preserves and fruit you have sent us.”

  “You can forget that. I did not come to exchange courtesies,” said Analía, placing the hatbox on the desk. “I have come to settle accounts.”

  “What is this?”

  She opened the box and turned out the love letters she had guarded for years. For a long moment he studied the pile of envelopes.

  “You owe me eleven years of my life,” Analía said.

  “H-how did you know that I wrote them,” he stammered, when he was again able to speak.

  “On my wedding day I discovered that my husband could not have written them, and when my son brought home his first report card I recognized the handwriting. And now that I see you, I am absolutely sure, because it is you I have seen in my dreams since I was sixteen years old. Why did you do it?”

  “Luis Torres was my friend, and when he asked me to write a letter to his cousin, I could see no harm in it. And it wa
s no different with the second and third letters; afterward, when you replied, it was too late to turn back. Those were the best two years of my life, the only time I have ever looked forward to anything. I looked forward to the mail.”

  “Ahhh.”

  “Can you forgive me?”

  “That depends on you,” said Analía, handing him his crutches.

  The schoolmaster put on his jacket and stood up. They walked out into the bustle of the patio, where a late sun was still shining.

  PHANTOM PALACE

  When five centuries earlier the bold renegades from Spain with their bone-weary horses and armor candescent beneath an American sun stepped upon the shores of Quinaroa, Indians had been living and dying in that same place for several thousand years. The conquistadors announced with heralds and banners the “discovery” of a new land, declared it a possession of a remote emperor, set in place the first cross, and named the place San Jerónimo, a name unpronounceable to the natives. The Indians observed these arrogant ceremonies with some amazement, but the news had already reached them of the bearded warriors who advanced across the world with their thunder of iron and powder; they had heard that wherever these men went they sowed sorrow and that no known people had been capable of opposing them: all armies had succumbed before that handful of centaurs. These Indians were an ancient tribe, so poor that not even the most befeathered chieftain had bothered to exact taxes from them, and so meek that they had never been recruited for war. They had lived in peace since the dawn of time and were not eager to change their habits because of some crude strangers. Soon, nevertheless, they comprehended the magnitude of the enemy and they understood the futility of attempting to ignore them; their presence was overpowering, like a heavy stone bound to every back. In the years that followed, the Indians who had not died in slavery or as a result of the different tortures improvised to entrench the new gods, or as victims of unknown illnesses, scattered deep into the jungle and gradually lost even the name of their people. Always in hiding, like shadows among the foliage, they survived for centuries, speaking in whispers and mobilizing by night. They came to be so skillful in the art of dissimulation that history did not record them, and today there is no evidence of their passage through time. Books do not mention them, but the campesinos who live in the region say they have heard them in the forest, and every time the belly of a young unmarried woman begins to grow round and they cannot point to the seducer, they attribute the baby to the spirit of a lustful Indian. People of that place are proud of carrying a few drops of the blood of those invisible beings mingled with the torrential flow from English pirates, Spanish soldiers, African slaves, adventurers in search of El Dorado, and, later, whatever immigrant stumbled onto these shores with his pack on his back and his head filled with dreams.