My eyes filled with tears and I turned away so as not to betray my emotion. Maybe that sudden movement made her gaze fall on me. Now, alone in my room, I think that perhaps she did not see me, but merely looked at me with the empty eyes of the indifferent—at the time, though, carried away by my own enthusiasm, I thought she really could see me and, worse still, had discovered my secret. I turned even paler, I trembled and, unable to contain my unease a moment longer, sprang to my feet, my brow beaded with sweat. This time, there could be no doubt: she had seen me fully and completely, right down to the very core I was trying so hard to hide. (Why? What was this guilt I carried within me and that already singled me out as quite different from the others?) I saw a smile appear on her lips—and it was a smile that was, at once, gentle, meaningful, and dominating. My father continued to play—this time a selection from The Gypsy Princess. She came over to me and murmured my name:
“André!”
Moments before, I had turned away in order to avoid her eyes, but now I slowly turned back to face her, as if her voice had torn me from some deep distraction.
“André,” she said again, sensing that I was pretending, “what’s wrong? Are you feeling all right?”
I was clearly not all right, for I was extremely pale and dripping with sweat.
“It’s nothing!” I cried in a tone that attempted to sound surprised. “Nothing.” But my face must have given the lie to those words.
“Nothing?”
And her eyes gazed into mine with the glare of a sudden, golden light.
“Nothing,” I said again, but my face said otherwise. The effort was too much for me, and my eyes filled with tears. There could be no deceiving her now. Her face darkened suddenly and, taking my hands in hers in a tender, intimate gesture, she blurted out, like someone in a hurry to confide a secret:
“Tonight, before I leave the house, I will come to your room. We have much to talk about . . .”
At those words, a tremor of love ran through me. I squeezed her hand harder still, as if afraid she might break the promise she had just made. She smiled, at the same time looking across at the piano.
“Be sure to come,” I said, adding more softly and with my eyes fixed on hers: “I will wait up all night for you.”
She let go of my hand and patted me on the cheek, and that intimate gesture, a clear indication that she still thought of me as a child, plunged me once more into the somber mood I had been in ever since her arrival. But now was not the time to respond, because my father had just finished playing and had turned to look at us.
“How well you still play, Valdo!” she said. “And how that music takes me back to a time I will never forget.”
Her tone of voice was so calculated, so intentional, that I could not help but tremble—whether what she said was true or not, what strange resources of mischief and pretense that woman had, how easily she could create the perfect atmosphere for a lie with a mere gesture, a look, an insignificant word! My father was clearly happy, for he stood up, took her in his arms and kissed her:
“What an excellent memory you have, Nina.”
She was looking at me over his shoulder, as if seeking my approval for her words. And again, for some reason, I felt suddenly, unexpectedly ashamed.
15th – Unable to sleep, I got up, feeling in the dark for this notebook. The room was not entirely in darkness, however, because a shaft of moonlight was shining in through the window onto the foot of the bed. I found the chest of drawers and was just about to open one of the drawers, when I heard raised voices. I froze, trying to work out what was happening. The voices were not far off, but with the door closed, it was impossible to know precisely where they were coming from. If I opened the door, I might be seen, and then my efforts to find out more would be in vain. I remained standing for a few moments longer, then, realizing that the voices were not so very close and that those engaged in the argument would not, therefore, notice me, I finally opened the door and went out into the hallway, which, fortunately, was pitch-black. I could tell at once that the voices were coming from my father’s room, although the other person involved was not Nina, but my uncle Demétrio. Disappointed, I was about to go back to my room, when I distinctly heard Nina’s name. So, although she was not there herself, they were talking about her. This immediately revived my interest and, tiptoeing along like a stealthy criminal, taking advantage of the still darker shadows in the corners, I crept toward the one visible line of light. Once there, I had no compunction in pressing my ear to the door. I heard my uncle’s cold, measured tones:
“You are completely and utterly insane.”
And my father’s higher-pitched, less assured voice:
“Why? What do you imagine . . .”
My Uncle Demétrio must have been pacing up and down, because his voice came and went in volume:
“You’re forgetting what happened before, Valdo, but fortunately I have a very good memory.”
“What is the point in dredging up such things?” my father said. “Nina is here again, and where I go, she goes. I have no reason to doubt . . .”
My uncle’s voice exploded, as if he had just heard the most heinous of insults:
“What about the Baron?”
My father mumbled some confused response, doubtless something about not caring a fig for the Baron—and the voices moved over to the window. I did not need to hear any more, that was quite enough. They had been having the same discussion over supper and felt I knew quite enough about the matter. It was the Baron’s birthday; and, as they did every year, my father and my uncle would have to attend a reception at the Baron’s house. This time, however, they were arguing over whether or not Nina should go too; my father wanted to take her with him, and my uncle, doubtless fearing gossip about past events, was opposed to this. I don’t know who won the argument, because I returned to my room. How little I cared about that family bickering! For a moment, standing in the dark, it occurred to me how very removed I felt from everything and how the people I lived with were like strangers to me. The only thing that united us was the roof over our heads. At the far end of the hallway, my other uncle, Timóteo, was sleeping, the uncle I never saw and about whom no one spoke. What did I care about him, either? I had other, quite different reasons for staying awake so late. I was vainly trying to piece together the sequence of events that continued to obsess me—events that had happened long ago and which surrounded my birth like an impenetrable fog. Despite all my efforts, the only figure I could glimpse in the midst of all that mist, was the person I now know as my mother.
16th – She came, although I was no longer expecting her and was lying on the bed, staring into the dark, my mind crisscrossed by all kinds of crazy, confused ideas. (For example, what if she wasn’t my mother, and we had met somewhere else and in different circumstances? Or what if there were no one else in the house, just her and me?) It was then—I don’t know the time exactly—that I heard the door open and, looking around, saw a figure framed in the doorway. I couldn’t see who it was, but my heart began beating wildly—it could only be her. Before she even spoke a word, the smell of her favorite perfume wafted over to me as if through a window flung open onto a courtyard full of flowers. She still did not move, doubtless wondering whether she should come in or not, whether I would already be asleep, and she would be disturbing me—meanwhile, I, in my impatience, could feel her calm, pulsating presence in the tiniest details, from the silk of her dress, so different from Aunt Ana’s dresses, to the curve of her breasts. Everything I had imagined earlier, the retreats, the obstacles, all seemed to fall away, and there we were hovering above the world, as if in a chosen land, far from all human interference.
“Mama!” I cried, and that word seemed to me insubstantial and meaningless.
“Ah, you’re still awake,” she said, while I heard the rustle of silk and felt her moving toward me, her perfume pushing through the air ahead of her, growing stronger.
“You said you’d come and see me, so
I’ve been waiting.”
She sat down beside me and took my hands in hers—I felt the weight of that body touching mine, the caress of silk on my skin, the warmth of her breasts. How long did I remain like that, my feverish hands in hers, while our shining eyes sought each other in the darkness?
“You mean you’ve been waiting for me all this time?” she said, her lips almost touching my cheek. “You poor thing! If I’d known . . .”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I knew you had to go to the Baron’s house first.”
Her voice quavered:
“The Baron’s house? Who told you I was going to his house?”
The answer took a while to emerge from my lips:
“I was in the hallway, listening, outside my father’s bedroom.”
She let go of my hands:
“Oh, so you listen in on other people’s conversations, do you?” she said sternly.
I wanted to explain that it had happened accidentally, because I had heard them mention her name. But what was the point? How could she possibly know what was going on in my head? I said nothing and, for a second, an awkward silence reigned. And yet she was so close I could almost hear her heart beating. I have to confess that, even though I was sixteen then, this was the first time I had been so close to a woman. Everything I knew about women I had gleaned either from books or from what I sensed in the silences of my elders. And often—when I went into town with Betty or with my Uncle Demétrio in his buggy—I would follow with wandering, dreaming eyes the young women I saw in the street. But that was as far as it went, and I could not but think with a certain dread of the time when my uncle, seeing me glancing furtively at some female passersby, had rather gravely announced: “So you’ve already got an eye for the ladies, have you? One of these days, you’ll have to get to know them at rather closer quarters . . .” Beside me now was the woman I had been physically closest to so far, since I could not consider Aunt Ana or Betty as proper women, but merely dull, familiar, domestic beings with whom I lived. Yes, there she was, intoxicatingly close, the mother who was a stranger to me, and who, in my eyes, was so thrillingly real and possessed of all the heady fascination of the female sex. That is what I was thinking while she remained silent. Then suddenly, with a sigh, she returned to the subject of the Baron:
“No, I didn’t go to the Baron’s house,” she said.
“Why not?” I asked for no other reason than to fend off another weighty silence. A single, long sob shook her body, and she buried her face in her hands. I felt alarmed that a simple question could arouse such feeling and I sat on the edge of the bed, my legs dangling, trying to think of some way to console her. She removed her hands from her face—in the gloom, I could make out her pale features and burning eyes—and she again clasped my hands, only this time her fingers were wet with tears.
“My poor child . . . If you knew how I have been treated . . . the injustices I have endured!”
I knew what she was referring to, and on hearing those simple words, the fog of facts again began to circle about me. And yet, however hard I tried, I could not find the right words or provide her with the consolation she needed. How I hated all those things from long ago! To me they represented my absence, a time before I existed—and ironically enough, it was precisely those past events that dominated everything that happened in the house! What troubled me even more at that moment, more than that intense feeling of revulsion, was the darkness, her presence, her hands in mine. In other circumstances, I might have been able to find my way to some appropriately consoling gesture, but I was too paralyzed to do anything but bear anxious witness to her sobbing. Eventually, she calmed down, and only a few sobs still shook her body. Finally, she stopped crying altogether and, in the dark, I could feel only her hands letting go of mine and beginning a terrible, unexpected caress. At that very moment, her soft, tender hands were touching my shoulders, the back of my neck, my hair, my earlobes, almost my lips. It may be that she meant nothing by this caress, that these were simply mechanical gestures, perhaps those of an affectionate mother—after all, what did I know about what mothers did and did not do!—but the fact is I could not contain my feelings, and a shudder ran down into the very depths of my being, and I was filled by a spasmodic, agonizing feeling of pleasure and annihilation. However often I kept repeating “she’s my mother and I should not be having these feelings,” however hard I tried to convince myself that this was how all mothers behaved toward their sons, I could escape neither her intoxicating perfume nor the sheer force of her female presence; and my tumultuous sixteen-year-old self could not help but be aroused by those simple feminine gestures. Everything I imagined to be female attributes—the physical warmth, the soft, alluring touch, the smell of flesh and accumulated secrets—was there beside me, and in vain I invoked the mother who had been a stranger to me for sixteen years, in vain I repeated her name respectfully and responsibly, tenderly and reverently—I was lost and blind, and in the depths of my shaken, confused self all those feelings were being slowly annihilated. Her fingers came and went and just as I was struggling hard not to be entirely submerged, she drew me to her and pressed my head to her breast.
“Here, close to my heart,” she said, “I want you to promise me something.”
I knew what that promise would involve, but what did I care? What possible act of betrayal could compare with the mere fact of her presence?
“Yes, anything, I’ll promise anything,” I cried.
She pressed my head still closer to her bosom, and I felt her breath on my cheek:
“Promise that you will never take sides against your mother. Promise me that—whatever the situation, whatever the circumstances.”
In a low, breathless voice, I promised, but all that existed in me at that moment was an intense awareness of the body on which my head was resting, and more than her body, her breasts rising and falling with each calm, clear breath, and whose curve lay almost within reach of my dry lips.
“Then nothing will ever separate us!” she said.
And, eyes closed, I repeated:
“Nothing!
With that word, she squeezed me so tightly, so passionately, that I was afraid I might fall and take her with me. It was as if she wanted to pluck something out from deep inside me, something as fundamental as my breath. (A note in the margin in a different handwriting: Only long afterward did I understand the passion in that gesture: it was like an act of witchcraft aimed not at my body, but at my soul. Poor Nina. Even then, she was pure instinct: in her efforts to make others submit—an impulse that was, to her, life itself—she crossed frontiers and headed straight for forbidden territory.) I don’t know what happened next, but utter darkness filled my mind, and, swept along by an irresistible force, I raised my head and kissed her between her breasts—no, I didn’t kiss her, I almost bit her, a furious, wild, mortal bite, such as can only be given by an adolescent suddenly wounded by the discovery of love. She accepted my kiss and did not draw back, as if it were merely a more than usually ardent homage from a son. However, when that kiss appeared to last longer than most simple manifestations of filial affection—ah, she would be thinking, the gaucherie, the extravagance and excess of a closed, timid heart!—she raised my head, saying:
“We’re agreed then, André. That is the promise I wanted you to make. After all this time, it’s as if they had finally given me back my son.”
Those were certainly not the words I was expecting to hear, and my disappointment was reflected in my silence. There was something I could not fathom: Had she understood the meaning of my kiss? Or had it all been in my imagination? Was she just playing a role, or would she actually accept the passion springing into life inside me? Now there was a distance between us, and we seemed to have said everything we needed to say, as happens with lovers when they have taken stock of the situation. Perhaps I would never solve that mystery; perhaps she would never know my secret. I saw her get to her feet and stand motionless before me. At least that was clear:
it was the moment to say goodbye, for the chaste farewell kiss, while my whole helpless, tormented being shuffled off into a zone of utter desolation. She still did not leave, though: she was waiting, as if the last word had not yet been spoken.
“I still haven’t had a proper look at you,” she said in a voice that was surprisingly uncertain in one accustomed to certainty. “Turn on the lamp, I want to see you in the light.”
I rather reluctantly did as she asked. I did not need light in order to feel her presence, so what did it matter if she couldn’t see my face? Brightness flooded the room, and rather than her being able to see me, because I was almost covered by the bedclothes, I saw her, whole and smiling and magnificent. More than that, I understood then why she had wanted to see me. Despite the slightly troubled look in her eyes, she seemed to be offering herself to me, and I understood then that she knew everything, and that we were both setting off along a path that was no longer the path of innocence.
17th – I cannot close this diary without finishing my account of what happened last night. She was standing there, motionless, and I was gazing at her admiringly, almost enraptured. I had never seen such a beautiful woman, she was not just the sum total of every perfect feature—her beauty was a combination of everything about her, her hair, her eyes, her skin, down to the smallest vibration of her being. Even though she had not gone to the Baron’s house, she had nevertheless dressed for the party, an artifice that only added to her fabulous beauty. (Written in the margin in a different handwriting: I have no hesitation in describing that dress, it’s engraved on my memory and I know I will remember it always. I would go further: whenever I try to relive those early years of my adolescence, I find something chaotic and troubling, but what stands out, clear and elegant, is that strange ball gown—a masterpiece of frivolousness and style, of the fascinating, intimate nothingness that makes up the external appearance of a woman.
Chronicle of the Murdered House Page 23
