Eva Luna (11 page)

That was how Rolf Carlé found himself on the Norwegian ship that carried him to the other side of the world, far away from his nightmares. His mother traveled with him by train to the nearest port; she bought him a third-class ticket, wrapped the remaining money and his Uncle Rupert's address in a handkerchief, and sewed the handkerchief inside his trousers, instructing him not to remove them for any reason. She did all this without any sign of emotion and, when she said goodbye, gave him a quick kiss on the forehead, just as she did every morning when he left for school.

“How long shall I be far away, Mama?”

“I do not know, Rolf.”

“I shouldn't go. I'm the only man in the family now and I have to take care of you.”

“I will be fine. I will write you.”

“Katharina is sick, I can't leave her like this.”

“Your sister will not live much longer—we always knew it would be that way, there's no use in worrying about her. What is this? Are you crying? You're no son of mine, Rolf—you're too big to act like a little boy. Wipe your nose and get on board before people begin staring at us.”

“I don't feel good, Mama. I want to throw up.”

“I forbid you! Don't shame me. Go on now, up the gangway. Walk forward to the bow and stay there. Don't look back. Goodbye, Rolf.”

But the boy hid at the stern where he could see the dock, and so learned that his mother did not move until the ship
was out of sight. He never forgot that vision of her, dressed in black, with her felt hat and imitation-crocodile pocketbook, standing, like a solitary statue, facing the sea.

Rolf Carlé spent almost a month deep in the bowels of the ship among refugees, émigrés, and other impecunious passengers without—both from shyness and pride—exchanging so much as a word with any of them. He scanned the sea, however, with such determination that he plumbed the depths of his sadness and finally depleted it. He never again suffered the affliction that brought him to the brink of jumping overboard. Twelve days in the salt air restored his appetite and ended his bad dreams; his nausea passed and he was enchanted by the smiling dolphins that accompanied the ship for long stretches. By the time they reached the coast of South America, the color had returned to his cheeks. He examined himself in the tiny mirror of the bathroom he shared with the other passengers in steerage, and saw that his face was that of a man, not a tortured adolescent. He liked what he saw; he took a deep breath and, for the first time in a long while, he smiled.

When the ship docked, the passengers debarked down an open gangway. Feeling like a freebooter from an old adventure novel, his hair ruffled by a warm breeze and his eyes filled with wonderment, Rolf Carlé was one of the first to step ashore. An incredible sight was revealed in the morning light. He saw dwellings of all colors hanging from the hillsides around the port, twisting streets, lines of drying clothes, and an exuberant vegetation in every possible shade of green. The air was vibrant with sound—hawkers' cries, women singing, children's laughter, parrots' squawking—and steamy with sensuality and odors warm from the food stalls. Amid the hubbub of stevedores, sailors, and passen
gers, the bundles, suitcases, onlookers, and peddlers, waited his Uncle Rupert, his Aunt Burgel, and their daughters, two sturdy, red-cheeked girls Rolf immediately fell in love with. Rupert was a distant cousin of his mother, a carpenter by trade, a great beer drinker and dog lover. With his family he had come to these far reaches of the world fleeing the war. He had no taste for soldiering; it seemed stupid to him to be killed for a flag that in his estimation was nothing more than a piece of cloth tied to a pole. He had not the slightest patriotic inclination, and when he became certain that war was inevitable, he remembered some remote ancestors who had long ago embarked for America to found a colony, and he decided to follow in their footsteps. From the ship Rupert drove Rolf Carlé directly to a fairy-tale village preserved in a bubble where time had stopped and geography was illusory. Life went on there as it had in the nineteenth century in the Alps. For Rolf, it was like walking into a movie. He knew nothing of the rest of the country, and for months he believed there was little difference between the Caribbean and the shores of the Danube.

In the mid-nineteenth century, an illustrious South American who owned these fertile lands nestled in the mountains a short distance from the sea and not too far from civilization had dreamed of populating them with colonists of good stock. He went to Europe, chartered a ship, and spread the word among farmers impoverished by wars and plagues that a utopia was awaiting them on the other side of the Atlantic. There they would construct a perfect society in which peace and prosperity reigned, a society regulated by sound Christian principles, far from the vices, ambitions, and mysteries that had assailed humanity since the beginnings of civilization. Eighty families were selected on the basis of merit
and good intentions, among whom were representatives of various trades, a schoolmaster, a doctor, and a priest, along with their tools and instruments and a background of several centuries of tradition and learning. When they stepped onto that tropical soil, some were frightened, convinced that they would never get used to such a place, but their ideas changed as they ascended a path toward mountain peaks and found themselves in the promised paradise, a cool, mild region where they could cultivate the fruits and vegetables of both Europe and America. There they erected a replica of the villages of their homeland: wood-trimmed houses, Gothic-lettered signs, window boxes filled with flowers, and a small church where they hung the bronze bell they had carried with them on the ship. They closed the entrance to La Colonia and blocked the road, making it impossible to enter or leave, and for a hundred years they fulfilled the dream of the man who had brought them to that land, living in accord with the precepts of God. But the secret of such a utopia could not be hidden indefinitely, and when the press published the story it created a sensation. The government, little inclined to allow within its sovereign territory a foreign colony with its own laws and customs, forced them to open their doors and welcome national authorities, tourism, and commerce. Visitors found a village where no one spoke Spanish, where everyone was blond and blue-eyed, and where a significant proportion of the children had some defect resulting from inbreeding. A highway was constructed to link the village with the capital, making La Colonia a favorite site for outings; families with cars drove there to buy seasonal fruit, honey, sausage, home-baked bread, and embroidered linens. The colonists turned their homes into restaurants and inns for the visitors, and a few hostels accepted lovers,
which may not have precisely corresponded to the ideas of the community's founder, but times change and it was necessary to modernize. Rupert had arrived when the village was still closed but, after establishing his European blood and demonstrating his good will, had managed to be accepted. When communications were opened with the outside world, he was one of the first to understand the advantages of the new arrangement. He stopped building furniture, now that it was possible to buy better and more varied furnishings in the capital, and began producing cuckoo clocks and reproducing hand-painted antique toys to sell to the tourists. He also began breeding dogs, and set up a school for training them, an idea that had never occurred to anyone in the country; until then, animals had been born and bred haphazardly, without papers, clubs, shows, grooming, or special handling. But Rupert had quickly learned that German shepherds were the fashion in some quarters, and wealthy owners wanted dogs with the proper papers. Those who could afford them bought their animals, then left them for a while in Rupert's school. When the dogs graduated, they had been trained to walk on their hind feet, salute with a front paw, carry the master's newspaper or slippers in their mouth, and play dead when given a command in a foreign tongue.

Uncle Rupert was the owner of a sizable piece of land and a large, many-roomed house that he had converted into an inn; he had built and furnished it with his own hands in the light wood of the Heidelberg style, in spite of the fact that he had never set eyes on that city but had copied everything from a magazine. His wife raised strawberries and flowers and kept chickens that supplied eggs for the whole village. They made a good living from dog-breeding, cuckoo clocks, and tourists.

*  *  *

Rolf Carlé's life underwent a great change. He had finished school, and there was no place for further study in La Colonia; besides, his uncle had plans to teach him his own trades, hoping Rolf would help him and perhaps take over his business. He had high hopes of seeing one of his daughters married to Rolf, whom he had liked from the moment he saw him. He had always wanted a male heir, and Rolf was exactly the son he had dreamed of: strong, of high character, good with his hands, and red-haired like the men in his family. Rolf learned quickly to master the tools of the carpentry shop, to assemble the clocks, to harvest the strawberries, and to wait on the guests in the inn. His aunt and uncle, in turn, learned that he would do anything they wanted as long as he believed it was his own idea, and if they appealed to his emotions.

“What do you think we should do about that henhouse roof, Rolf?” Burgel would ask, with a sigh of helplessness.

“It needs some tar.”

“I'm afraid I'll lose all my hens when the rains begin.”

“Leave it to me, Aunt, it won't take any time at all to fix it.” And for the next three days the youth would be stirring a kettle of hot tar, doing a balancing act on the roof, and explaining his theories on waterproofing to anyone passing by, before the admiring gaze of his cousins and the veiled smile of his aunt.

Rolf was determined to learn the language of the country and was not satisfied until he found someone to teach him in a methodical way. He was gifted with a good ear for music, and that talent was evident when he played the church organ, entertained visitors with his accordion, and
absorbed Spanish—with a good supply of forbidden words that he used only rarely, but treasured as part of his culture. In his free moments, he read, and in less than a year had consumed all the books in the village, which he borrowed, then returned with obsessive punctuality. He had a good memory and he stored information—almost always useless and impossible to dispute—to impress his family and neighbors. Without a moment's hesitation he could state the population of Mauritania, or the width of the English Channel in nautical miles, usually because he remembered, but occasionally invented by him on the spot, and spoken with such arrogance that no one dared question him. He learned several Latin phrases to spice his conversation and, even though he did not always use them correctly, earned a solid reputation in that small community. He had inherited his mother's courteous and somewhat old-fashioned manners, which helped him capture everyone's heart, particularly the ladies', who had little exposure to finesse in that rather rough society. He was particularly attentive to his Aunt Burgel, not out of affectation but because he was truly fond of her. She had a way of dispelling his despair with such simplicity that afterward he would ask himself why he had not thought of the solution. Whenever he fell into the vice of nostalgia or tortured himself thinking about the evils of mankind, she restored him with her magnificent desserts and steady stream of little jokes. She was the first person, apart from Katharina, to hug him without needing a reason or permission. Each morning she greeted him with resounding kisses, and before he fell asleep she came in to tuck him in—affection his mother had been too shy to bestow. At first, Rolf himself seemed timid; he blushed easily and spoke in a low voice. In fact, he was vain and even at an age to see himself as the
center of the universe. He was much quicker than most of the people around him and he knew it, but he was intelligent enough to affect a certain modesty.

Every Sunday morning, people from the city drove out for the show in his Uncle Rupert's school for dogs. Rolf would lead them to a large courtyard with tracks and jumps where the dogs performed their feats amid enthusiastic applause. Sunday was the day the dogs were sold, and the youth always watched them go with a heavy heart, because nothing was more dear to him than those animals he had cared for since birth. He would throw himself down on the bitches' matting and let the pups nuzzle him and chew his ears and fall asleep in his arms. He knew each one by name and spoke with them as if they were equals. Rolf had a hunger for love, but as he had never been coddled or babied he felt free to demonstrate affection only with the pups; it took much longer to learn to accept human contact—first Burgel's and then that of others. His memories of Katharina formed a secret source of tenderness, and sometimes, thinking of her in the darkness of his room, he hid his head beneath the sheet and wept.

He never spoke of his past, for fear of evoking sympathy and also because he had not yet come to grips with it in his mind. The unhappy years with his father were a broken mirror in his memory. He prided himself on his coldness and pragmatism, two qualities he considered particularly manly, but in truth he was an incorrigible dreamer. He was disarmed by the slightest gesture of sympathy and outraged by injustice, and he suffered the ingenuous idealism of youth that never withstands confrontation with reality. His childhood of privation and terror had given him the ability to sense intuitively the dark side of situations and people, with a clairvoyance that flared before him like a powder
flash, but his pretense of rationalism kept him from giving credence to those mysterious warnings or following his impulses. He denied his emotions, but at any unguarded moment was demolished by them. He also refused to respond to the demands of his senses, and tried to control the part of his nature inclined toward voluptuousness and pleasure. He understood from the beginning that La Colonia was a naïve dreamworld he had stumbled into by accident, and believed that life was filled with harshness that would require strong armor if he was to survive. Nevertheless, those who knew him could see that his shell was nothing but smoke and that it would dissipate in the slightest breeze. Rolf went through life with his emotions bared, tripping over his pride, falling, and struggling to his feet again.