The House of the Spirits (32 page)

He still took his brother's frivolous activities as a personal affront, for he could not accept the fact that Nicolás could waste his time and energy on balloon rides and the slaughter of chickens when there was so much work to be done in the Misericordia District. But he no longer tried to drag him to the hospital to make him look at suffering up close, hoping against hope that the pain of others might move his bird-of-passage heart, and he had stopped inviting him to the Socialist meetings at Pedro Tercero García's house, on the last street of the working-class district, where they all gathered every Thursday under the eye of the police. Nicolás made fun of his social concerns, arguing that only a fool with the calling of an apostle would go out into the world seeking misery and ugliness with the stump of a candle. Now Jaime's brother stood before him, staring at him with the guilty, pleading look he had used so many times to enlist his affection.

“Amanda's pregnant,” Nicolás said without preamble.

He had to repeat himself, because Jaime did not move, remaining as unresponsive as ever, without the slightest gesture to show that he had heard his brother's words. But inside his frustration was choking him. Silently, he called Amanda's name, clutching the sweet echo of the word in order not to lose control. So fierce was his need to hold on to his illusions that he had managed to convince himself that the love between Amanda and his brother was completely juvenile and limited to innocent strolls on which they walked hand in hand, to discussions over a bottle of absinthe, and to the few fleeting kisses he had glimpsed over the years.

He had refused to admit the painful truth that was now confronting him.

“Don't tell me about it. It's no business of mine,” he replied as soon as he was able to speak.

Nicolás collapsed onto the end of the bed, burying his face in his hands.

“Please, you've got to help her!” he begged.

Jaime closed his eyes and inhaled with difficulty, forcing himself to contain the wild feelings that made him want to kill his brother, to run and marry Amanda himself, to weep in impotence and disappointment. He had an image of her in his mind, the same image that appeared to him whenever he was racked by feelings of love. He saw her entering and leaving the house like a gust of fresh air, leading her little brother by the hand. He heard her laughter on the terrace and smelled the sweet, subtle aroma of her skin and hair when she walked past him in the midday sun. He saw her as he imagined her in all the idle hours he spent dreaming of her. Above all, he thought of her at the precise moment when she entered his bedroom and they were alone together in the intimacy of his refuge. She entered without knocking, while he was reading in bed, filling his burrow with the flutter of her long hair and her undulating arms. She touched his books without the slightest sign of reverence, and even dared to take them from their sacred shelves; she blew the dust off their covers without the least respect and tossed them onto the bed, chatting all the while as he trembled with desire and surprise, unable to extract from his whole encyclopedic vocabulary a single word to hold her there, until she finally took leave of him with a kiss on the cheek that continued to burn: a single, terrible kiss on which he built a labyrinth of dreams where the two of them were a prince and princess hopelessly in love.

“You know about medicine, Jaime,” Nicolás pleaded. “You've got to do something.”

“I'm only a student. I have a long way to go before I'm a doctor. I don't know anything about all that. And I've seen a lot of women die because some ignoramus got his hands on them.”

“She trusts you. She says you're the only one who can help her,” Nicolás replied.

Jaime grabbed his brother by the lapels and lifted him off the floor, shaking him like a puppet and hurling every insult he could think of at him, until his own sobs obliged him to set him down. Nicolás whimpered in relief. He knew his brother, and his intuition told him that, as always, he had decided to accept the role of protector.

“Thank you, Jaime!”

Jaime gave him a listless slap on the back and pushed him out of his room. He turned his key in the lock and lay face down on his cot, shaken by the hoarse, terrible moans with which men weep for love.

They waited until Sunday. Jaime agreed to see them in the clinic of the Misericordia District, where he was taking his training as a doctor. He had the key because he was always the last to leave, so he could get in with ease, but he felt like a thief because he would not be able to explain his presence there at such a time. For the previous three days, he had done nothing but study every step of the operation he was about to perform. He could repeat each word of the book in perfect order, but that did not bolster his confidence. He was shaking like a leaf. He tried not to think of all the women he had seen in the emergency room, those he had helped to save in this very examining room, and those who had died in these very beds, white as sheets, with a river of blood flowing between their legs and his science powerless to stop their life from running out of that open faucet. He had seen this drama close up, but until this moment he had never had to face the moral conflict of helping a desperate woman. Much less Amanda. He turned on the lights, donned the white tunic of his profession, and prepared his instruments, repeating aloud every detail he had memorized. He prayed for some monumental disaster to occur, some cataclysm that would shake the planet to its core, so that he would not have to do what he was about to do. But nothing happened until the appointed hour.

Meanwhile Nicolás had gone to fetch Amanda in old Covadonga, which still ran, though it barely sputtered along on its remaining nuts and bolts, lost in a black cloud of burning oil. She was waiting for him seated in her chair, holding Miguel's hand, the two of them deep in a mutual complicity from which, as always, Nicolás felt excluded. Amanda looked pale and emaciated after all the ups and downs of the last uncertain weeks, but she was calmer than Nicolás, who was practically incoherent and could not keep still, trying to cheer her with a false hilarity and pointless jokes. He had brought her an old ring with garnets and diamonds that he had taken from his mother's room, knowing full well that she would never miss it and that, even if she saw it on Amanda's hand, she would never recognize it because Clara could not keep track of things like that. Amanda gently returned it.

“You see, Nicolás?” she said, unsmiling. “You're still a child.”

When it came time to leave, little Miguel put on a poncho and held tight to his sister's hand. Nicolás had to use all his charm and then brute strength to deposit him with the owner of the house, who in the past few days had been completely won over by the supposed cousin of her tenant and had, much against her will, agreed to look after the child for the evening.

They drove in silence, each lost in his own fear. To Nicolás, Amanda's hostility was like a pestilence that had descended between them. In the past few days she had begun to dwell on the idea of death, which she feared less than the pain and humiliation she would have to face that night. He steered Covadonga through an unfamiliar section of the city, down dark back streets in which garbage was piled against the walls of factories, in a forest of smokestacks that shut out the sky. Stray dogs sniffed at the grime, and beggars wrapped in newspaper slept in the doorways. He was startled that this should be the scene of his brother's daily activities.

*  *  *

Jaime was waiting for them in front of the clinic. His white smock and his own anxiety made him look much older than he was. He led them through a labyrinth of icy corridors to the room he had prepared, doing his best to distract Amanda from the ugliness of the place. He did not want her to notice the bins full of yellowed towels waiting to be washed on Monday, the graffiti on the walls, the loose tiles, and the rusty pipes that dripped continuously. Amanda stopped with a look of horror when they came to the door of the operating room: she had seen the instruments and the gynecological table. What until then had been an abstraction, a mere flirtation with the possibility of death, suddenly materialized before her. Nicolás was pale, but Jaime took them both by the arm and led them through the door.

“Don't look, Amanda!” he told her. “I'm going to put you to sleep.”

He had never administered anesthesia or performed a surgical operation. As a student, his work was confined to administrative tasks, record-keeping, and providing assistance in treatment, suturing, and other minor tasks. He was even more afraid than Amanda, but to make her think this was all routine, he adopted the relaxed, pompous air he had seen doctors use. To spare her the embarrassment of undressing before him and to spare himself the pain of seeing her in the nude, he helped her lie down fully dressed on the operating table. While he washed his hands and showed Nicolás how to wash his too, he tried to distract her with the anecdote about the Spanish ghost that had appeared to Clara during one of the Friday-evening sessions, bringing word of a treasure buried in the foundations of the house; and he told her about his family: a collection of eccentric lunatics for several generations, whom even ghosts made fun of. But Amanda was not listening. She was as white as a sheet, and her teeth were chattering.

“What are these straps for?” she asked. “I don't want to be tied down.”

“I'm not going to tie you down. Nicolás is going to give you the ether. Breathe normally, don't get frightened, and when you wake up it will be all over,” Jaime told her, his eyes smiling above his mask.

Nicolás brought the anesthesia mask over to Amanda. The last thing she saw before slipping into darkness was Jaime looking at her with such love in his eyes that she thought she must be dreaming. Nicolás removed her clothes and strapped her to the table, aware that this was even worse than rape, while his brother waited with gloved hands, trying not to see in her the woman of his dreams but only a body like so many others that crossed this table every day with screams of pain. He began to work slowly and carefully, telling himself again exactly what he had to do, mumbling the words he had learned by heart as the sweat poured down onto his eyes. He was keenly aware of the girl's breathing, the color of her skin, the rhythm of her heart, so that he could signal to his brother to increase the ether every time she moaned, praying that no complications would arise as he probed deeply into her most secret parts, never for a moment ceasing to curse his brother in his thoughts. For if this child had been his instead of Nicolás's, it would have been born healthy and intact, instead of exiting in bits and pieces in this sewer of a clinic. He would have cradled it and protected it instead of extracting it from its nest with a scoop. Twenty-five minutes later he was finished. He ordered Nicolás to help him with her until the effects of the ether had worn off, but when he looked up, he saw that his brother was slumped against the wall, retching violently.

“Idiot!” Jaime roared. “Go to the bathroom, and when you've finished puking up your guilt wait for me outside, because we still have a long way to go!”

Nicolás staggered out, and Jaime took off his mask and gloves and proceeded to loosen Amanda's straps, gently slip on her clothes, hide the bloody traces of his work, and remove the instruments of torture from her sight. Then he lifted her in his arms, treasuring this moment in which he could clasp her to his chest, and carried her to a bed he had already made up with clean sheets, which was more than the women who usually came for help received. He covered her and sat down beside her. For the first time in his life he was able to observe her at his leisure. She was smaller and sweeter than she looked when she was running around in her fortune-teller's costume and her armfuls of bracelets; and as he had imagined, the bones in her slender body were barely hinted at between the tiny hills and smooth alleys of her femininity. Without her scandalous mane of hair and her sphinx eyes, she looked fifteen. To Jaime, her vulnerability was more seductive than anything that had attracted him before. He felt twice as large, twice as heavy, and a thousand times stronger, but he knew he was defeated from the start because of the tenderness he felt and his desire to protect her. He cursed his invincible sentimentality and tried to see her as his brother's lover, a woman on whom he had just performed an abortion, but he immediately realized how impossible that was and surrendered to the pleasure and suffering of loving her. He stroked her transparent hands, her slender fingers, the shells of her ears, and ran his hands over her neck, listening to the imperceptible sound of the life inside her veins. He moved his mouth close to her lips and eagerly inhaled the scent of anesthesia, but he was not bold enough to touch them.

Amanda slowly emerged from sleep. First she felt cold and then she was seized by a fit of retching. Jaime comforted her by speaking to her in the same secret language he reserved for animals and for the smallest children in the hospital, until she gradually relaxed. She began to cry and he continued to caress her. They remained silent as she wavered between sleep, nausea, anxiety, and the pain that was beginning to grip her womb, and he fervently wished that this night would never end.

“Do you think I'll be able to have children?” she finally asked.

“I suppose so,” he replied. “But try to find them a responsible father.”

They both smiled with relief. Amanda searched Jaime's dark face, which was leaning over her, for signs of some resemblance to Nicolás, but found none. For the first time in her nomadic existence she felt protected and safe. She gave a sigh of contentment and forgot all about the sordid surroundings, the peeling walls, the cold metal cupboards, the dreadful instruments, the smell of disinfectant, and even that raucous pain that had settled inside her.

“Please lie down next to me and hold me,” she said.

He lay down timidly on the narrow bed, wrapping his arms around her. He concentrated on being as still as he could so as not to disturb her and not to fall. He had the awkward tenderness of someone who has never been loved and is forced to improvise. Amanda closed her eyes and smiled. They lay there breathing together in utter calm, like brother and sister, until day began to break and the light from the window became stronger than the light of the lamp. Then Jaime helped her to her feet, put her coat around her shoulders, and led her by the arm to the waiting room, where Nicolás had spent the night sleeping in a chair.