Of Love and Shadows (15 page)

“We should go back to the office,” Irene said finally.

“We should.”

Neither moved. Irene chewed on a few sprigs of grass, savoring their sap. She turned to look at Francisco and he felt himself sinking into her hazy eyes. Without thinking, he drew her to him and sought her lips. In truth it was scarcely a kiss, more the suggestion of a long-awaited and inevitable meeting, but one they would always remember. Years later, they would still be able to evoke perfectly the moist, glowing contact of their lips, the aroma of the fresh grass, the storm in their spirits. When Francisco opened his eyes, Irene was standing silhouetted against the sky, her arms crossed over her breast. Both were breathing quickly, afire, suspended in their own space, in their own time. Francisco sat unmoving, shaken by a new and all-enveloping emotion for this woman now bound to him. He heard something like a quiet sob, and understood the struggle that had been unleashed in Irene's heart: love, loyalty, doubt. He was torn between his desire to touch her and his fear of exerting pressure on her. After a long silence, Irene turned and walked slowly to Francisco and knelt by his side. He put his arm around her waist and breathed the perfume of her blouse, the slight, underlying hint of her body.

“Gustavo has waited for me all his life. I am going to marry him.”

“I don't believe it,” whispered Francisco.

The tension slowly eased. She clasped Francisco's dark head in her hands and looked into his eyes. They smiled, comforted, joyful, trembling, certain that they would never settle for a brief adventure, because they were born to share life in its totality and to undertake together the audacity of loving each other forever.

The afternoon was waning and the green cathedral of the park was somber. It was time to leave. They flew down the Hill like a gust of wind. The shadowy vision of the cadavers would never be erased from their souls, but at that moment they were happy.

The ardor of the kiss stayed with them for days; it filled their nights with delicate ghosts, leaving its memory on their skins like a brand. They found themselves walking on air, laughing for no apparent cause, waking in the midst of a dream. They would touch their lips with their fingertips and trace the shape of the other's mouth. Irene thought about Gustavo in the light of new truths. She suspected that, like any officer, he was involved in the exercise of power, a secret life he had never shared with her. Two different beings existed in the familiar, athletic body. For the first time, she was afraid of him and wished he would never return.

*  *  *

Javier hanged himself on Thursday. That afternoon he had gone out to look for work as he did every day, but he never came home. Soon after he left, long before it was time to be worried, his wife had a presentiment of disaster. By nightfall, she was sitting in the doorway with her eyes focused on the street. When the fear of tragedy became unbearable, she went to the telephone and called her in-laws, everyone she knew, but learned nothing of her husband's whereabouts. Peering into the shadows for an eternity, evoking Javier in her thoughts, she was surprised by the curfew. The darkest hours passed, and then came Friday's dawn. The children were still asleep when the police patrol car braked to a stop before the house. Javier Leal had been found hanging from a tree in the park. He had never spoken of suicide; he had told no one goodbye; he left no notes of farewell; nonetheless, she knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that he had killed himself, and finally she understood his obsessive toying with the cord.

It was Francisco who collected the body and took charge of the funeral arrangements. As he completed the laborious bureaucratic details of death, he carried with him the vision of Javier lying beneath the ice-cold light of the fluorescent lamps of the Medical Institute. He tried to analyze the reasons for his brother's brutal death, and to adjust to the idea that his lifetime companion, the unconditional friend, the protector, was no longer of this world. He remembered his father's lesson: work as a source of pride. Idleness was foreign to the family. In the Leal household, holidays and even vacations were spent in some worthwhile undertaking. The family had had its difficult moments, but they had never dreamed of accepting charity, even from those they had previously helped. When Javier saw the last door close before him, all that was left was to accept help from his father and brothers; he chose instead to leave without a word. Francisco thought back in distant memories to the time when his oldest brother had been a youth as just as his father and as sentimental as his mother. The three Leal boys had grown up united, three against the world, three of the same clan, respected in the schoolyard because each was protected by the others and any offense was immediately redressed. José, the second son, was the heaviest and strongest, but Javier was the most feared because of his courage and his skill with his fists. He had spent a stormy adolescence until he fell in love with the first girl to capture his attention. He married her, and was faithful to her until the night he died. He did honor to his name: Leal, loyal—loyal to his wife, to his family, to his friends. He loved his work as a biologist; he had intended to devote himself to a life of teaching, but circumstances had led him to a laboratory job in industry where in a few years' time he had earned a high position; his sense of responsibility was joined to a fertile imagination that placed him in the vanguard of the most daring scientific projects. None of this was of any value, however, when the rolls of persons blacklisted by the military Junta were drawn up. His activities in the union were a stigma, in the eyes of the new authorities. First they watched him, then they hounded him; finally, they fired him. Without a job and without hope of finding another, he began to decline. Pale and wan, he shambled through nights of insomnia and days of humiliation. He had pounded at many doors, suffered long hours in waiting rooms, answered advertisements in newspapers and, at the end of the road, found crushing hopelessness. Without a job, he gradually lost his identity. He would have accepted any offer, however mean the pay, because he desperately needed to feel useful. As a man without employment, he was an outsider, anonymous, ignored by all because he was no longer productive, and that was the measure of a man in the world he lived in. During recent months, he had abandoned his dreams, renounced his goals, considered himself a pariah. His children could not understand his constant bad humor and unremittent melancholy; they looked for jobs washing cars, carrying shopping bags from the market, performing any task to bring home a little money. The day his youngest son put on the kitchen table the few coins he had earned walking rich men's dogs, Javier cringed like a cornered animal. Since that moment, he never looked anyone in the eyes; he sank into total despair. He often lacked the will to dress and spent a large part of the day in bed. His hands trembled after he began to drink secretly, feeling even more guilty for draining much-needed money from his family. On Saturdays he made an effort to be clean and neat when he showed up at his parents' home, in order not to distress his family further, but he couldn't erase the desolation from his face. His relations with his wife disintegrated; in such circumstances love grows weary. He needed consolation but, at the same time, reacted with fury at the slightest gleam of pity. At first, his wife could not believe that there were no jobs available, but later, when she learned of the thousands out of work, she stopped complaining and doubled her hours at work. The fatigue of those months eroded the youth and beauty that she treasured among her remaining possessions, but she had no time to mourn them; she was too busy feeding her children and caring for her husband. She could do nothing to prevent Javier's retreat into solitude. Apathy enveloped him like a cloak, obliterating any notion of the present, sapping his strength, and stripping him of his courage. He moved like a shadow. He ceased to feel he was a man as he watched his home collapsing about him and the light of love dying in his wife's eyes. At some moment that his family was too close to perceive, his will snapped. He lost his desire to live, and decided to seek his death.

The tragedy fell upon the Leals like a thunderbolt. Hilda and the Professor aged overnight, and their house was filled with silence. Even the boisterous birds on the patio seemed to grow still. In spite of the strict condemnation of suicide by the Catholic Church, José officiated at the mass for the peace of his brother's soul. For the second time in his life, the Professor stepped inside a temple; the first time had been for his marriage, and on that occasion he was filled with joy. This was different. He remained standing throughout the ceremony, arms crossed and lips pressed in a thin line, drunk with suffering. His wife surrendered herself to her prayers, accepting the death of her son as one more trial from fate.

Irene, greatly distressed, attended the funeral services, still unable to grasp the cause for such misery. She sat silently beside Francisco, weighed down by the sorrow of this family she had come to love as her own. She had always known them to be jovial, exultant, smiling. She had not realized they were enduring a private sorrow with dignity. Perhaps because of his Spanish ancestry, Professor Leal was able to express every passion except the one that clawed at his soul. Men weep only for love, he often said. In contrast, Hilda's eyes moistened at gentler emotions—tenderness, laughter, nostalgia—but suffering hardened her like steel. She shed few tears at the funeral of her oldest son.

They buried Javier in a small plot of land they acquired at the last minute. The rites were improvised, confused, because until that day they had not given thought to the rituals of death. Like all those who love life, they had felt they were immortal.

“We will not return to Spain, wife,” Professor Leal proclaimed when the last shovelfuls of earth fell upon the coffin. For the first time in forty years, he recognized that he belonged to this soil.

The widow of Javier Leal went directly from the funeral to her apartment; she packed her sparse belongings in cardboard boxes, took her children by the hand, and bade the Leals goodbye. She was going back south, back to the province where she had been born; life was gentler there and she could count on her brothers' support. She did not want her children to grow up in the shadow of their absent father. The Leals saw their daughter-in-law and children off; stunned, they accompanied them to the station and watched them climb aboard the train and ride out of sight. They could not believe that in so few days they had also lost the children they had helped to raise. They placed little value on material objects; their hope for the future lay in their family. They had never thought they would grow old so far from their loved ones.

Professor Leal returned from the station and, without removing his jacket or his black tie, sat down in a chair beneath the cherry tree in the patio, his eyes vacant. In his hands he held the slide rule that he had saved from the wreckage of war and brought with him to America. He kept it always beside him on the bedside table, and allowed his children to play with it only as a reward. He had taught the three boys how to slide the pieces and match the correct numbers, and had refused to replace it when it was surpassed by electronic advances. It was a telescoping tube of brass with tiny numbers along the edges, the work of artisans of the last century. Professor Leal sat for many hours beneath the tree, staring at the brick walls he and his sons had built to house Javier and his family. That night Francisco led him almost forcibly to bed, but he could not force him to eat. The next day was the same. On the third day, Hilda dried her tears, gathered strength from the reserves in her innermost being, and prepared to fight once again for her own.

“The trouble with your father is that he doesn't believe in the soul, Francisco. That's why he feels he's lost Javier,” she said.

From the kitchen window they could see the Professor sitting in his chair, turning his slide rule over and over. With a sigh, Hilda set his untouched lunch in the icebox; she carried a second chair to the patio and sat down with him beneath the cherry tree, her hands lying idle in her lap—the first time since time immemorial that they were not occupied with knitting or sewing—and remained there for hours without moving. At dusk Francisco begged them to eat something, but received no answer. With difficulty he led them to their bedroom and put them to bed; they lay in silence, eyes wide open, desolate, like two mindless invalids. He kissed their foreheads, turned out the light, and wished with all his heart for a deep sleep to obliterate their anguish. When he got up the next morning, he found them sitting in the same positions beneath the tree, their clothes wrinkled: unwashed, unfed, mute. He had to use all his self-control, remember all his training, not to go out and shake them. Patiently, he sat down to watch them reach the depths of their sorrow.

At midafternoon, Professor Leal raised his eyes and looked at Hilda. “What's the matter with you, woman?” he asked in a voice husky from four days of silence.

“The same thing that's the matter with you.”

The Professor understood. He knew Hilda well enough to know that she would sit and waste away at the same rate that he did; loving him without ceasing for so many years, she would not allow him to leave her behind.

“Very well,” he said; he rose to his feet with difficulty and held out his hand.

Slowly they walked into the house, each supporting the other. Francisco warmed the soup, and life returned to its routine.

*  *  *

Isolated from the Leals' grief, Irene Beltrán borrowed her mother's automobile and set out alone for Los Riscos, determined to find Evangelina on her own. She had promised Digna that she would help her in her search, and she did not want to give the impression that she had spoken lightly. Her first stop was the Ranquileo home.

“Don't keep looking,
señorita.
The earth has swallowed her up,” the mother said, with the resignation of one who has endured many afflictions.