Strange Pilgrims (11 page)

“The insurance company told me,” he said.

The director nodded, satisfied. “I don’t know how insurance companies manage to find out everything,” he said. He looked over the file lying on his ascetic’s desk, and concluded:

“The only certainty is the seriousness of her condition.”

He was prepared to authorize a visit with all the necessary precautions if Saturno the Magician would promise, for the good of his wife, to adhere without question to the rules of behavior that he would indicate. Above all
with reference to how he treated her, in order to avoid a recurrence of the fits of rage that were becoming more and more frequent and dangerous.

“How strange,” said Saturno. “She always was quicktempered, but had a lot of self-control.”

The doctor made a learned man’s gesture. “There are behaviors that remain latent for many years, and then one day they erupt,” he said. “All in all, it is fortunate she happened to come here, because we specialize in cases requiring a firm hand.” Then he warned him about María’s strange obsession with the telephone.

“Humor her,” he said.

“Don’t worry, Doctor,” Saturno said with a cheerful air. “That’s my specialty.”

The visiting room, a combination of prison cell and confessional, was the former locutory of the convent. Saturno’s entrance was not the explosion of joy they both might have expected. María stood in the middle of the room, next to a small table with two chairs and a vase empty of flowers. It was obvious she was ready to leave, with her lamentable strawberry-colored coat and a pair of disreputable shoes given to her out of charity. Herculina stood in a corner, almost invisible, her arms folded. María did not move when she saw her husband come in, and her face, still marked by the shattered window glass, showed no emotion. They exchanged routine kisses.

“How do you feel?” he asked her.

“Happy you’re here at last, baby,” she said. “This has been death.”

They did not have time to sit down. Drowning in tears, María told him about the miseries of the cloister, the
brutality of the matrons, the food not fit for dogs, the endless nights when terror kept her from closing her eyes.

“I don’t even know how many days I’ve been here, or how many months or years, all I know is that each one has been worse than the last,” and she sighed with all her soul. “I don’t think I’ll ever be the same.”

“That’s all over now,” he said, caressing the recent scars on her face with his fingertips. “I’ll come every Saturday. More often than that, if the director lets me. You’ll see, everything will turn out just fine.”

She fixed her terrified eyes on his. Saturno tried to use his performer’s charm. He told her, in the puerile tone of all great lies, a sweetened version of the doctor’s prognosis. “It means,” he concluded, “that you still need a few more days to make a complete recovery.” María understood the truth.

“For God’s sake, baby,” she said, stunned. “Don’t tell me you think I’m crazy too!”

“The things you think of!” he said, trying to laugh. “But it really will be much better for everybody if you stay here a while. Under better conditions, of course.”

“But I’ve already told you I only came to use the phone!” said María.

He did not know how to react to her dreadful obsession. He looked at Herculina. She took advantage of the opportunity to point at her wristwatch as a sign that it was time to end the visit. María intercepted the signal, glanced behind her, and saw Herculina tensing for an imminent attack. Then she clung to her husband’s neck, screaming like a real madwoman. He freed himself with as much love as he could muster, and left her to the
mercies of Herculina, who jumped her from behind. Without giving María time to react, she applied an armlock with her left hand, put her other iron arm around her throat, and shouted at Saturno the Magician:

“Leave!”

Saturno fled in terror.

But on the following Saturday, when he had recovered from the shock of the visit, he returned to the sanatorium with the cat, which he had dressed in an outfit identical to his: the red-and-yellow tights of the great Leotardo, a top hat, and a swirling cape that seemed made for flying. He drove the circus van into the courtyard of the cloister, and there he put on a prodigious show lasting almost three hours, which the inmates enjoyed from the balconies with discordant shouts and inopportune applause. They were all there except María, who not only refused to receive her husband but would not even watch him from the balconies. Saturno felt wounded to the quick.

“It is a typical reaction,” the director consoled him. “It will pass.”

But it never passed. After attempting many times to see María again, Saturno did all he could to have her accept a letter from him, but to no avail. She returned it four times, unopened and with no comments. Saturno gave up but continued leaving a supply of cigarettes at the porter’s office without ever finding out if they reached María, until at last reality defeated him.

No one heard any more about him except that he married again and returned to his own country. Before leaving Barcelona he gave the half-starved cat to a casual
girlfriend, who also promised to take cigarettes to María. But she disappeared too. Rosa Regás remembered seeing her in the Corte Inglés department store about twelve years ago, with the shaved head and orange robes of some Oriental sect, and very pregnant. She told Rosa she had taken cigarettes to María as often as she could, and settled some unforeseen emergencies for her, until one day she found only the ruins of the hospital, which had been demolished like a bad memory of those wretched times. María seemed very lucid on her last visit, a little overweight, and content with the peace of the cloister. That was the day she also brought María the cat, because she had spent all the money that Saturno had given her for its food.

APRIL
1978

W
E REACHED
Arezzo a little before noon, and spent more than two hours looking for the Renaissance castle that the Venezuelan writer Miguel Otero Silva had bought in that idyllic corner of the Tuscan countryside. It was a burning, bustling Sunday in early August, and it was not easy to find anyone who knew anything in the streets teeming with tourists. After many useless attempts, we went back to the car and left the city by a road lined with cypresses but without any signs, and an old woman tending geese told us with precision where the castle was located. Before saying good-bye she asked us if we planned to sleep there, and we replied that we were going only for lunch, which was our original intention.

“That’s just as well,” she said, “because the house is haunted.”

My wife and I, who do not believe in midday phantoms,
laughed at her credulity. But our two sons, nine and seven years old, were overjoyed at the idea of meeting a ghost in the flesh.

Miguel Otero Silva, who was a splendid host and a refined gourmet as well as a good writer, had an unforgettable lunch waiting for us. Because we arrived late, we did not have time to see the inside of the castle before sitting down at the table, but there was nothing frightening about its external appearance, and any uneasiness was dissipated by our view of the entire city from the flower-covered terrace where we ate lunch. It was difficult to believe that so many men of lasting genius had been born on that hill crowded with houses with barely enough room for ninety thousand people. Miguel Otero Silva, however, said with his Caribbean humor that none of them was the most renowned native of Arezzo.

“The greatest of all,” he declared, “was Ludovico.”

Just like that, with no family names: Ludovico, the great patron of the arts and of war, who had built this castle of his affliction, and about whom Miguel spoke all during lunch. He told us of Ludovico’s immense power, his troubled love, his dreadful death. He told us how it was that in a moment of heart’s madness he stabbed his lady in the bed where they had just made love, turned his ferocious fighting dogs on himself, and was torn to pieces. He assured us, in all seriousness, that after midnight the ghost of Ludovico walked the dark of the house trying to find peace in his purgatory of love.

The castle really was immense and gloomy. But in the light of day, with a full stomach and a contented heart,
Miguel’s tale seemed only another of the many diversions with which he entertained his guests. After our siesta we walked without foreboding through the eighty-two rooms that had undergone all kinds of alterations by a succession of owners. Miguel had renovated the entire first floor and built a modern bedroom with marble floors, a sauna, and exercise equipment, as well as the terrace covered with brilliant flowers where we had eaten lunch. The second story, the one most used over the centuries, consisted of characterless rooms with furnishings from different periods which had been abandoned to their fate. But on the top floor we saw a room, preserved intact, that time had forgotten to visit—the bedchamber of Ludovico.

The moment was magical. There stood the bed, its curtains embroidered in gold thread, the bedspread and its prodigies of passementerie still stiff with the dried blood of his sacrificed lover. There was the fireplace with its icy ashes and its last log turned to stone, the armoire with its weapons primed, and, in a gold frame, the oil portrait of the pensive knight, painted by some Florentine master who did not have the good fortune to survive his time. What affected me most, however, was the unexplainable scent of fresh strawberries that hung over the entire bedroom.

The days of summer are long and unhurried in Tuscany, and the horizon stays in its place until nine at night. When we finished walking through the castle it was after five, but Miguel insisted on taking us to see the frescoes by Piero della Francesca in the Church of San Francesco.

Then we lingered over coffee beneath the arbors on the square, and when we came back for our suitcases we found a meal waiting for us. And so we stayed for supper.

While we ate under a mauve sky with a single star, the boys took flashlights from the kitchen and set out to explore the darkness on the upper floors. From the table we could hear the gallop of wild horses on the stairs, the lamenting doors, the joyous shouts calling for Ludovico in the gloomy rooms. They were the ones who had the wicked idea of sleeping there. A delighted Miguel Otero Silva supported them, and we did not have the social courage to tell them no.

Contrary to what I had feared, we slept very well, my wife and I in a first-floor bedroom and the children in one adjoining ours. Both rooms had been modernized and there was nothing gloomy about them. As I waited for sleep I counted the twelve insomniac strokes of the pendulum clock in the drawing room, and I remembered the fearsome warning of the woman tending geese. But we were so tired that we soon fell into a dense, unbroken slumber, and I woke after seven to a splendid sun shining through the climbing vines at the window. Beside me my wife sailed the calm sea of the innocent. “What foolishness,” I said to myself, “to still believe in ghosts in this day and age.” Only then was I shaken by the scent of fresh strawberries, and I saw the fireplace with its cold ashes and its final log turned to stone, and the portrait of the melancholy knight in the gold frame looking at us over a distance of three centuries. For we were not in the first-floor bedroom where we had fallen asleep the night
before, but in the bedchamber of Ludovico, under the canopy and the dusty curtains and the sheets soaked with still-warm blood of his accursed bed.

OCTOBER
1980

T
HE MAN FROM
the undertaking establishment was so punctual that Maria dos Prazeres was still in her bathrobe, with her hair in curlers, and she just had time to put a red rose behind her ear to keep from looking as unattractive as she felt. She regretted her appearance even more when she opened the door and saw that he was not a mournful notary, as she supposed all death’s merchants must be, but a timid young man wearing a checked jacket and a tie with birds in different colors. He had no overcoat, despite the unpredictable Barcelona spring and its oblique, wind-driven rain, which almost always made it less tolerable than the winter. Maria dos Prazeres, who had received so many men regardless of the hour, felt a rare embarrassment. She had just turned seventy-six and was convinced she would die before Christmas, but even so she was about to close the door and ask the funeral salesman to wait a moment while she dressed to receive
him in the manner he deserved. Then it occurred to her that he would freeze on the dark landing, and she asked him in.

“Please excuse my awful appearance,” she said, “but I’ve lived in Catalonia for over fifty years, and this is the first time anyone has ever come to an appointment on time.”

She spoke perfect Catalan, with a somewhat archaic purity, although one could hear the music of her forgotten Portuguese. Despite her age and the metal curlers, she was still a slender, spirited mulatta, with wiry hair and pitiless yellow eyes, who had lost her compassion for men a long time ago. The salesman, half blinded by the light in the street, made no comment but wiped the soles of his shoes on the jute mat and kissed her hand with a bow.

“You’re like the men in my day,” said Maria dos Prazeres with a laugh sharp as hail. “Sit down.”

Although he was new at the job, he knew enough about it not to expect this kind of festive welcome at eight o’clock in the morning, least of all from a merciless old lady who at first glance seemed a madwoman escaped from the Americas. And so he remained only a step away from the door, not knowing what to say, while Maria dos Prazeres pushed back the heavy plush drapes at the windows. The thin April light just reached the corners of the meticulous room, which looked more like an antique dealer’s show window than a parlor. The objects in it were meant for daily use—there were not too many or too few—and each one seemed placed in its natural space with such sureness of taste that it would have been difficult
to find a better-served house even in a city as old and secret as Barcelona.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I’ve come to the wrong door.”