Labels and Other Stories

by Louis de Bernières

  But on subsequent nights I was awoken by him heaving and gasping beside me, moaning endearments, quivering with passion, and generally doing all those things on his own that my parents always did together when they thought that we were not around. It was at that time that I took to slinging a hammock outside under the silk-cotton tree, just to get a night’s rest, and it was from that time that people began to notice his perpetual expression of sublime contentment and refer to him as ‘the angel’. As for myself, I doubted his sanity, but I was his brother, and so I accepted him as he was, as a brother should, and I even envied him his nights of ecstasy, since I had never had any such myself, even with a phantom.

  Manolito only had to see the corpse once to know that he had not waited and loved in vain. The materiality of ‘my woman’ seemed to him to vindicate what he had always known but had never been able to prove even to himself.

  But you should not get the wrong idea and start thinking that he transferred his sexual attentions to a dead body, because that is not what happened at all. He visited the body because it had once been the habitation of ‘my woman’; he visited it because it made solid the stuff of dreams, as though the dream in itself was too ephemeral, too filmy, too evanescent to take hold of when he was not dreaming it. And at night his passion increased until the whole neighbourhood was awakened by the cries of his blissful consummations, and people began to protest to my parents about the ferocious animal noises, so that my brother had to move out and build himself a hut on the edge of the cemetery.

  Perhaps you will understand my brother’s obsession when I tell you that it was indeed a very perfect corpse. The eyes were closed, but Manolito knew that the eyes were violet. There was a perfection of symmetry in those features. The long black hair, parted in the middle, flowed down either side of her cheeks, reminding me of the way a stream flows when seen from a high mountain, in the gentle curves of nature. The fact that her eyes were closed accentuated her appearance of preternatural peace and tranquillity, of the utmost repose, as though she were alive and in contemplation of something supremely happy. Her eyebrows had obviously never been plucked in vanity, and yet they arched like rainbows that spring from the nothingness of the empty sky. At the upper tip they tapered so finely that one could not say precisely where they finished, and at the bridge of the nose they were full and dark, reminding me of the silky fur of a fine black cat.

  Her nose was straight, with the skin stretched so finely upon it that it had the quality that one perceives when looking through the body of a candle held up against a bright light. Her cheeks were a little shrunken in death, which served to lend an extra curve to the formation of her cheekbones. Manolito told me that in reality her cheeks are quite full and that you cannot discern the line of the cheekbones at all, but in her tomb it gave her the appearance of noble blood and gentle education.

  Perhaps it was her mouth that made a prisoner of my brother. It was the mouth of an innocent, and yet of one who knew all the carnality of a sensual woman in the prime of desire. The lips were closed, and yet they seemed to be at the point of opening, as though tempting one to a kiss. There was amusement playing about those lips, betrayed by the two tiny laughter lines at either end. It was the kind of amusement of one who knows a harmless secret; it made one want to say, ‘OK, what’s up? What are you hiding behind your back? Is it a present, or are you going to put a spider down my shirt when you think I am not looking?’ It was a very sweet smile.

  Because of that ineffable face I can remember next to nothing about the rest of the corpse. The face had a way of fixing your gaze in the expectation of being able to discern some subtle change of mood or the passing of a thought. I think that she had a ring with a large lilac stone on one hand, and I remember that the line of her body seemed as graceful and liquid as the flow of her hair upon her shoulders. All I can say is that she was so lovable that not only I, but also everyone in the village, thought of Manolito’s passion as understandable.

  But if you want to see her now you will be disappointed. She lives only in the memory of those who are now old, such as myself, because the fact is that the mountain swallowed her up.

  We all believed that the mountain was dead, and in fact it was during the generation of my great-great-grandfather that the people stopped giving gifts to the mountain in order to calm its irascibility. It seemed that it was a god who had no longer any appetite for sacrifice or for activity, and even when it finally came back to life it did so with such gentleness that none of us felt terror or fell upon our knees to plead with the illogical Christian God or with the orishas. Of course, Don Jose was rushing about in a frenzy. He was shouting, ‘Behold, I am against thee, O destroying mountain, saith the Lord, which destroyest all the earth; and I will stretch out my hand upon thee, and roll thee down from the rocks, and will make thee a burned mountain. And they shall not take of thee a stone for a corner, nor a stone for foundations, but thou shalt be desolate for ever …’ Don Jose was very pleased that the cemetery was being consumed, because he disapproved of the intercession of Don Salvador and Nuestra Señora de la Hermosura. In fact, he once wrote in paint on Our Lady’s tomb, ‘Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.’ Don Jose disapproved of female beauty, and he knew all the most depressing bits of the Bible by heart. But the rest of us just stood and watched from a safe distance, without any sense of mortal danger, until suddenly I remembered Manolito. The lava was flowing not down towards the village, but towards the cemetery.

  I confess that I did not run and arrive half dead with breathlessness and apprehension. I strolled over, knowing that Manolito had more sense than to lie in his hammock with molten rock lapping at the doorposts. I went just to check that he had made good his escape, and found him watching the spectacle safely to one side and fanning his face with his sombrero. ‘Ay, brother,’ he said. ‘It is all going to one side, and our dead are safe. It is quite something, is it not?’

  Unfortunately at that moment there was a kind of belching and gulping noise, and a new fissure opened in the rocks above the cemetery. With consternation in our faces we watched the magma squeeze like dung out of its imprisonment, curving and solidifying, hissing and steaming, and we both had the same thought.

  ‘I will rescue Don Salvador,’ I said, ‘and you must rescue Nuestra Señora.’ I ran to the tomb and slid the stone away in a desperate burst of strength, and I carried the saint away in my arms with time to spare even to go back and fetch one of the hands that had dropped off and the lower half of the left leg as well. I was very pleased and was congratulating myself when I saw that Manolito was still struggling with the slab of the tomb of his beloved. I was about to rush and help him when I saw that I could never make it there before I was consumed in the advancing furnace of golden flame. All I could do was shout above the rumbling of the entrails of the earth, and watch my brother perish.

  Manolito did not run. The slab gave way at last, and I saw him size up his chances at the last second. He did what I would have done under the circumstances: he stepped inside the tomb and drew the slab after him, hoping that the lava would pass him by and that he would be protected by the stone sepulchre. If he cried out, I could not hear it above the groans and cracks of the rocks.

  I have often thought about the poetic manner of his death. He died in the arms of the woman he had always loved, attempting to save her. He died before age had diminished him, and he died in a fire as incandescent and overwhelming as his own passion. If he had cried out in that inferno I would like to imagine that it would have been the same kind of cry that he used to make at night in the embrace of his woman.

  We made him a saint, we have many songs about him now, and around here we refer to a lover as a ‘manolito’ or a ‘manolita’, much as in Costa Rica they refer to youngsters as ‘romanticos’. I go often to show the young people the place where my brother and his beloved embrace so deep beneath the rock, and I never fail to say that if they want to know the way that her hair
fell down about her face, they have only to look at the beautiful curves that the lava made as it flowed and set above the cemetery where our ancestors slept.

  THE COMPLETE CONTINENT

  I never knew precisely why Mama let herself get inveigled into it, but I have my suspicions. I suspect that it was because my mother was so pious when she was young, and she took Father Alfonsin’s pronunciamentos to be the very voice of God Himself. Father Alfonsin was a dried-up old bird of a man who knew of life only through what he heard in the confessional, and it was widely believed that he held strong views about contraception and about the absolute duty of all women to spread their legs at their husbands’ whim. About the practicalities of this and the pitfalls he cared nothing, and I remember the scandal about poor Teresa Montera. The doctor told her that if she had another child it would kill her, and she went to Father Alfonsin to ask dispensation to use contraception. This latter told her that she had an absolute obligation to increase the number of God’s faithful on earth, and that God would care for her in childbirth. He quoted that bit from the Bible about Onan spilling his seed on the ground, which everyone knows is irrelevant, and he made her feel such a sinner for asking about it that she came away thinking that she was dirt and weeping into her serape. Even her husband was angry, and swore that he would rather pay for it in hell than see his Teresa dying in parturition. The couple introduced a moratorium, except on those days when fertility was improbable, but that still did not stop her from becoming pregnant for the fifth time.

  There is a joke amongst Father Alfonsin’s flock, which is: ‘What do you call someone who practises the Catholic rhythm method of contraception?’ And the answer is: ‘A parent.’ Well, it came true for Teresa and she refused to abort it when she found out that she was expecting. Needless to say, she died as predicted, and the baby died as well, so that the number of God’s faithful on earth was not increased one jot; in fact, since the child was dead before it had time to be baptised (and went straight to limbo, one presumes) the number of the faithful was actually diminished by one. The husband Rafael took a potshot at Father Alfonsin with a hunting rifle, shouting that he had murdered Teresa, but he missed and someone took the gun away from him until he calmed down. In the end Rafael took up with some protestant evangelicals and joined them in railing against the Pope every Saturday in the plaza. When he got sick of them he gave up religion completely and joined the National Secular League so that he could stick their flysheets up on the walls of Father Alfonsin’s house after dark. They even had it guarded all night by a little group of vigilantes, but they never caught him doing it even though everyone knew that it was him.

  My father was an extreme patriot. He not only passionately praised and adored his own country, but he felt the same way about all the other countries in Latin America. When they had wars and border disputes he would cry and wring his hands as though it were a rift within his own family, and during the Malvinas War he supported Argentina even though he knew next to nothing about the rights and wrongs of it. Everyone else was saying ‘Who cares? Those Argentines are all crazy bastards’, but my father actually sent money to Galtieri to support the war effort. We could not afford it, and I have no doubt that the money ended up in some general’s private bank account in Switzerland or in Rio de Janeiro.

  It just happened that when my older sister was born there was a craze for naming one’s children after a country, and so it seemed only natural that she should end up being called Colombia Carmelita. She was the one who grew up with the morbid terror of butterflies. She was black-haired and very pretty, with a laugh that would have shaken our windows if it were not for the fact that we only had shutters. We brothers used to torment her by catching morpho butterflies and dangling them under her nose, and she used to run about with her hands over her face, shrieking and crashing into the furniture. I feel sorry about all that now, but it seemed very amusing at the time. Papa took her to the doctor about it once, but he came up with some stupid theory that the cause was anal repression or something, and Papa told the doctor that he needed a psychiatrist for saying such an idiotic thing. In any case Colombia was hardly anally repressed, if my memory serves me well about all the tricks that she used to get up to.

  Mama was only fourteen when she married Papa, and she went along with all this childbirth business because she thought that was what it was all about, until circumstances forced her to develop a mind of her own and start thinking for herself. When I arrived it seemed amusing to both of them to call me Peru so that I would match nicely with Colombia being called Colombia. Colombia says that when I arrived she was very jealous, and asked Mama to throw me away. When Mama said that you cannot do that to babies, she asked her to put me back. Eventually Colombia got used to me and treated me like an animated doll. She used to carry me around and take my nappies off so that her little friends could pull my penis and watch me peeing, but she stopped doing that to me when Argentina came along and snatched her attention. Argentina was the one who ran away with the gringo and went to live in California.

  It seemed logical to fill in the space between Peru and Colombia by calling the next child ‘Ecuador’, especially as he was a boy. Ecuador looked like my grandfather, and he eventually confounded everybody by becoming a spiritual healer, though he never could heal anybody in his own family. I went along to one of his sessions once, and found the experience very disconcerting. He was mumbling away in a language that sounded like the gobblings of a turkey, and blowing smoke over people’s bodies. In the end he got into a fight with one of his patients’ husbands, and lost an eye. After that he gave it up as too risky a profession, and he took to touring the country with a suitcase, selling mechanical toys for a company in the capital.

  The next one was named Bolivia, but she died of diphtheria before anyone could save her, and consequently the next girl who was born was called Bolivia Segunda. She was the boring one who sat around all day doing nothing, but she was quite pretty, and so she married a rich farmer and just carried on sitting around doing nothing. He thought that she was the ideal wife, because she could not even be bothered to argue.

  With five children, or six if you count Bolivia, a change began to come over my mother. It was obvious that she had had a surfeit of childbirth, and her spirit grew restless. She was only twenty-two years old, and yet she had bags under her eyes, her belly was distorted and flaccid, and her breasts were evidently drooping from so much suckling.

  The first symptom of her change was a prolonged lapsing into silence. I remember that she spoke hardly at all for months on end, she rarely went out, and when she served meals she would thump the dishes down in front of us so that the food slopped over the table. My father would remonstrate with her, but she would glare at him defiantly, eat her own meal without enjoyment and then go and sit on the porch with a book. She mostly read romances and the Bible, but then she discovered Mario Vargas Llosa, and I suppose his books served to open up the world for her. She began to have political and social opinions, and argued with my father’s point of view even in front of guests. He would say, as if by way of excuse, ‘I have an intellectual wife.’ He used to say that quite proudly, but when the guests were gone he would become patronising and tell her that her inexperience and her youth made her naive. She would scowl in disgust, and there would be yet more lengthy silences.

  After Chile took two years to arrive, my father began to suspect that my mother was barricading her womb with contraceptives, and he called in Father Alfonsin to deliver her a lecture. They were under the big ceiba tree, sitting at the table, and I crept up behind the tree to overhear them. I did not understand much of what was said, being so young, but I remember the priest raising his voice querulously and coming up with all that ‘These-matters-are-in-the-hands-of-God’ stuff, and my mother was disputing with him and crying at the same time, saying things like, ‘I am being treated like a brood animal, I have no life of my own.’ Father Alfonsin was also lecturing my father, telling him of his husbandly duty to
moderate his bodily passions for the good of his soul, but the general drift of his opinion was that if it was God’s will that my mother should suffer so many children, then that was what she must reconcile herself to.

  There followed a period when it seems to me in retrospect that every child was the product of rape. We children used to huddle together in our two beds, listening in terror as my mother shrieked and my father overturned the furniture. There were terrible thuds and crashes, and in the morning my mother’s face would be covered in bruises and that of my father in scratches. They would remain grimly polite to each other, but during moments when she thought that she was alone my mother would weep into her skirts. More and more frequently my father would arrive home very late, crazy with drink and an unaccountable bitterness, and the fights would resume once more. The children of this period were Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil and Venezuela, and I believe to this day that the only reason that mother did not leave was that she loved us desperately despite all the suffering that we brought and the ravages that bearing us wrought upon her body.

  It was then that Gerard entered into the life of the family. He was an engineer who came from France, and he was a very talented man in many ways. He arrived at exactly the time as the economic crisis was beginning to bring the country to its knees. I seem to remember that the only conversation one ever overheard was about ‘the economic crisis’; this crisis has never ended, and even though I was so young at the time I heard so much about it that I eventually grew to understand what it was all about, and I even understood in the end what ‘two thousand per cent inflation’ meant. From my father’s point of view it meant that there was no chance of ever getting spare parts for the farm machinery, as the peso lost all its value against foreign currencies.