Eva Luna (2 page)

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Consuelo spent so much time in the chapel—motionless, hands clasped, placid as a cow chewing her cud—that the rumor spread through the convent that she was blessed with heavenly visions. The Mother Superior, however, a practical Catalan woman less inclined than the other nuns of the congregation to believe in miracles, realized that Consuelo was touched not by saintliness but by an incurable bent for daydreaming. As the girl did not, in addition, show any enthusiasm for stitching mattresses, making the hosts for Mass, or weaving baskets, she judged her training to be complete, and placed her in the house of a foreign doctor named Professor Jones. She herself led Consuelo by the hand to a somewhat run-down but still splendid French-style mansion on the outskirts of the city, sitting at the foot of a hill authorities have now designated as a National Park. Consuelo's first impression of the doctor was so intense that it was months before she lost her fear of him. He came into the large par
lor wearing a butcher's apron and carrying a strange metallic instrument. He was so preoccupied in his project that he did not even say hello; he dispatched the nun with four incomprehensible sentences and, with a grunt, packed Consuelo off to the kitchen. She, on the other hand, studied him in detail; she had never seen such a threatening individual. But she also noticed that he was as handsome as a picture of Jesus, all gold, with the same blond beard as the Prince of Peace, and eyes of an impossible color.

The only employer Consuelo was to have in her lifetime had spent years perfecting a system for preserving the dead, a secret he carried finally to the grave—to the relief of all mankind. He was also seeking a cure for cancer; he had observed that this illness is rare in areas where malaria is rife, and had deduced quite logically that he could palliate the malady by exposing its victims to the bite of the swamp mosquito. Following the same logic, he experimented with thumping the head of idiots, whether by birth or by vocation, because he had read in
The Physician's Friend
that a person had been transformed into a genius as the result of cerebral trauma. He was a dedicated anti-Socialist. He calculated that if the world's riches were equally distributed, each of the planet's inhabitants would receive less than thirty-five cents, and that therefore revolutions were ineffectual. Physically, he was healthy and strong; he suffered from unrelenting bad humor, and possessed the knowledge of a sage and the cunning of a sexton. His formula for embalming, like most great inventions, was of admirable simplicity. No nonsense about extracting the viscera, scooping out the cranium, plunging the body into Formol, and then stuffing it with pitch and tow, only to end up with something as wrinkled as a prune whose glass eyes stared at you with stupe
faction. He merely drew the blood of the still-fresh cadaver and replaced it with a liquid that conserved the body as it had been in life. The skin, although pale and cold, did not decompose, the hair remained firmly rooted, and in some cases even the fingernails and toenails survived, and continued to grow. The only drawback, perhaps, was a certain penetratingly acrid odor, but after a while the family would grow accustomed to it. At that time, few patients voluntarily submitted to the bite of curative insects, or to blows on the head to increase intelligence, but news of Jones's prestige as an embalmer had crossed the oceans, and he was frequently visited by European scientists or North American businessmen avid to wrest his formula from him. They always left empty-handed. His most famous case—one that spread his fame around the globe—was that of a local lawyer well known in life for his liberal inclinations; El Benefactor had ordered him killed as he left a performance of the musical
La Paloma
in the Municipal Theater. The family carried the still-warm body containing more bullet holes than could be counted, but with the face intact, to Professor Jones. Although he considered the victim his ideological enemy—he himself was a supporter of authoritarian regimes and he distrusted democracy, which he considered vulgar and too much like Socialism—Jones devoted himself to the task of preserving the body. The results were so spectacular that the family seated the dead man, dressed in his best suit and holding a pen in his right hand, in the library, and for several decades protected him from moths and dust as a reminder of the brutality of the dictator, who did not dare intervene; it is one thing to engage in battle with the living, but quite another matter to quarrel with the dead.

Once Consuelo succeeded in overcoming her initial
fright, and understood that her employer's slaughterhouse apron and graveyard smell were inconsequential details compared to the fact that he was a person who was easy to get along with, vulnerable, at times even sympathetic, she felt quite at ease in his house; next to the convent, it seemed like paradise. No one in this house rose at dawn to say the rosary in behalf of all humankind, nor did anyone have to kneel on a fistful of peas to atone with her own suffering for the sins of others. The Professor's house did have one thing in common with the crumbling Convent of the Little Sisters of Charity: discreet ghosts also roamed here, perceived by everyone except Professor Jones, who for want of any scientific basis insisted on denying they were there. Although Consuelo was assigned the most onerous chores, she still found time for her daydreams, and here no one bothered her or interpreted her silences as wondrous gifts. She was strong, she never complained, and she obeyed without asking questions, as the nuns had taught her. Besides carrying out the garbage, washing and ironing the clothes, cleaning the water closets, and being responsible every day for seeing that the iceboxes had ice, which was transported on the backs of burros and packed in heavy salt, she helped Professor Jones prepare the large apothecary jars of his formula; she readied the corpses, removed the dust and nits from all their joints; she dressed them, combed their hair, and tinted their cheeks with rouge. The learned doctor was pleased with his servant. Until she had come, he had worked alone in absolute secrecy, but with time he became accustomed to Consuelo's presence and allowed her to help him in his laboratory, for he sensed the trustworthiness of this silent woman. He was so sure of her always being there when he needed her that he would take off his jacket and hat and, without a backward glance, drop
them for her to catch before they fell to the floor, and as she never failed he came to have a blind faith in her. She was a kind of extension of the inventor. Consuelo, therefore, became the only other person in possession of the miraculous formula, but she did not benefit in any way from that knowledge, since the thought of betraying her employer or making money from his secret never entered her mind. She detested handling the cadavers, and could not see the point in embalming them. If there was any reason to do so, she thought, nature would have foreseen it and would not allow the dead to putrefy. Nevertheless, toward the end of her life she found an explanation for the age-old desire of humans to preserve their dead when she discovered that having the bodies nearby makes them easier to remember.

Many years went by without surprises for Consuelo. She did not notice the changes taking place around her, for she had substituted the cloister of Professor Jones's house for that of the convent. They could have listened to news on the radio, but it was rarely turned on; her employer preferred the sound of the opera records he played on the latest Victrola. Nor were there newspapers in that house, only scientific journals, because the Professor was indifferent to events happening in the nation or the world. He was much more interested in abstract knowledge, the annals of history, or predictions concerning a hypothetical future, than the vulgar emergencies of the present. The house was a vast labyrinth of books. Volumes were stacked from floor to ceiling on every wall, dark, crackling, redolent of leather bindings, smooth to the touch, with their gold titles and translucent gilt-edged pages and delicate typography. All the works of universal learning were to be found on those shelves, arranged without apparent order—although the Professor
remembered the exact location of each one. The works of Shakespeare rested alongside
Das Kapital
; the maxims of Confucius rubbed elbows with
The Book of Sea Lions
; ancient navigational maps lay beside Gothic novels and the poetry of India. Consuelo spent several hours a day dusting the books. When she finished the last bookcase, it was time to begin again with the first, but this was the best part of her duties. Gently, she picked up each one and wiped the dust from it as if caressing it; she leafed through its pages, sinking for a few minutes into its private world. She learned to recognize each one and to know its place on the shelves. She never dared ask to borrow them, so she smuggled them to her room, read them at night, and replaced them the following day.

Consuelo did not know much about the upheavals, catastrophes, or the progress of her times, but she did learn in detail of the student unrest in the country because of what happened one day when Professor Jones was passing through the center of town and was almost killed by mounted
guardias.
It fell to her to place poultices on his bruises and feed him soup and beer from a baby bottle until his loosened teeth were firm again. The doctor had gone out to buy some supplies essential to his experiments, not remembering for a minute that it was Carnival, a licentious festival that each year left its residue of wounded and dead, although that year drunken quarrels passed unnoticed in the shock of other events that jolted the nation's drowsy complacency. Professor Jones was just crossing the street when the riot broke out. In fact, the problems had begun two days earlier when the university students had elected a beauty queen in the nation's first democratic vote. After the coronation, and the accompanying flowery speeches in which some
speakers' tongues had slipped and spoken of liberty and sovereignty, the young people had decided to march. Nothing like it had ever been seen; it was forty-eight hours before the police reacted, and they did so precisely at the moment Professor Jones was emerging from a pharmacy with his vials and powders. He saw the mounted police galloping toward him, machetes drawn, but he changed neither direction nor pace, as he was absorbed in thoughts of his chemical formulas and all that noise seemed in very bad taste. He regained consciousness on a stretcher on the way to the hospital for indigents and, holding his teeth in place to keep them from scattering in the street, managed to mumble some instructions to take him to his house. While he recovered, sunk in his pillows, the police arrested the young leaders of the uprising and threw them into a dungeon; they were not beaten, however, because among them were sons of the most prominent families. Their detention produced a wave of solidarity, and on the following day dozens of young men appeared at the jails and barracks to offer themselves as voluntary prisoners. They were locked up in order of arrival, but after a few days had to be released; there was not space enough in the cells for so many youths, and the clamor of their mothers had begun to disturb El Benefactor's digestion.

Months later, when Professor Jones's teeth were again firm in his gums and he was recuperating from his psychological bruises, the students again rebelled, this time with the complicity of a few young officers. The Ministry of War crushed the insurrection in seven hours, and those who managed to save themselves left the country and remained in exile for seven years, until the death of the Leader of the Nation, who granted himself the luxury of dying peacefully in his bed and not, as his enemies had desired and the North
American Ambassador had feared, hanging by his testicles from a lamppost in the plaza.

Faced with the death of the aged caudillo and the end of that long dictatorship, Professor Jones was on the point of returning to Europe, convinced—like so many others—that the country would inexorably sink into chaos. For their part, the Ministers of State, terrified at the possibility of a popular uprising, held a hasty meeting in which someone proposed they call for the Professor, thinking that if the cadaver of El Cid lashed to his steed could lead the charge against the Moors, there was no reason why the embalmed President for Life could not continue to govern from his tyrant's seat. The learned doctor appeared, accompanied by Consuelo, who carried his doctor's black bag and impassively observed the red tile–roofed houses, the streetcars, the men in straw hats and two-toned shoes, the singular mixture of luxury and disorder of the Presidential Palace. During the months of El Benefactor's long agony, security measures had been relaxed and in the hours following his death tremendous confusion reigned. No one stopped the visitor and his servant. They walked down long passageways and through salons, and finally entered the room where that powerful man—father of a hundred bastards, master of the lives and deaths of his subjects, and owner of an incalculable fortune—lay in his nightshirt, wearing kid gloves and soaked in his own urine. Members of his retinue and a few concubines trembled outside the door while the Ministers argued among themselves whether to flee the country or remain to see if the mummy of El Benefactor could continue to direct the destinies of the nation. Professor Jones stopped before the cadaver, examining it with an entomologist's fascination.

“Is it true, Doctor, that you can preserve dead bodies?” asked a fat man with mustaches very like the dictator's.

“Mmm . . .”

“Then I advise you not to do so, because now it is my turn to govern. I am his brother, from the same cradle and the same blood”—a threat underscored by the blunderbuss stuck in the sibling's belt.

At that moment the Minister of War appeared; he took the scientist by the arm and led him aside for a private word.

“You're not thinking of embalming the President—?”

“Mmm . . .”

“You'd be better off not to meddle in this, because now it's my turn to command, and I hold the Army right in this fist.”