December Breeze

PART ONE

I

For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing children for the sin of the parents, to the third and fourth generation."

Because the Bible, as her grandmother saw it, contained all the preconceptions that could make man ashamed of his origin, and not just his origin, but also his innate impulses, urges, instincts, call them what you may, turning a fleeting lifetime into a hell of guilt and remorse, frustration and aggression. Yet that same book also held the wisdom of the world it had helped to create ever since it was written, and so it was important to read the words carefully and reflect on its assertions, as arbitrary as they seemed, to fully understand the hows and whys of all human suffering. So whenever something happened to cause ripples in the murky though seemingly calm mass of lives that had formed the city’s elite for over a hundred and fifty years, her grandmother, sitting there in a rattan rocking chair, amid the din of the cicadas and the dense, drowsy air of two in the afternoon, would remind her of the biblical curse as she explained that whatever had happened—or more precisely, its origins—could be traced back a century, or several centuries, and that she, her grandmother, had been expecting this for as long as she could remember, ever since she had been capable of establishing a link between cause and effect.

This fatalism filled Lina with fear; not surprise—by the age of fourteen she was no longer shocked by the things her grandmother and aunts said—but a dark dread that tingled in her hands as she wondered for the thousandth time what misfortune she had already been condemned to by fate. Seeing her grandmother sitting across from her, tiny and fragile like a seven-year-old girl, her white hair pulled back and coiled into a modest bun at the nape of her neck, she felt as if she were listening to an age-old Cassandra; not animated or hysterical, in fact not even a real Cassandra since she wasn’t lamenting her own fate or that of others, but a sage whose prophecies would inevitably be fulfilled. Someone who carried the past in her memory, assimilating and understanding it in order to divine the present and even the future with a vague sadness, like a goddess who is benevolent but outside of creation, and therefore powerless to prevent the mistakes and suffering of mankind. For this reason, her grandmother—convinced that everything was preordained, that a secret force controls every step we take in life, forcing us to go one way instead of another—refused to intervene when Lina asked her to save Dora from marrying Benito Suárez, although in theory she could have done, because there was no one in the world Dora’s mother respected more than Lina’s grandmother.

Lina thought that a single phone call, or just a note, would be enough to coax Doña Eulalia del Valle out of her seclusion and make her walk the four blocks to where Lina and her grandmother lived. She also thought that once Doña Eulalia told her grandmother the lengthy litany of woes otherwise known as the ordeal of her life, that is to say, if she felt she had gained the sympathy of not only her daughter or maids but also someone she admired for her lineage and exemplary conduct—terms she always used to describe Lina’s grandmother—she would be willing to accept her advice. Even if that meant rejecting Dora’s union, her idea of ‘purification’, with a lunatic like Benito Suárez. But her grandmother had refused to pick up the phone, telling Lina: If it isn’t Benito Suárez, it’ll be someone else just like him, because it seems to me that your friend Dora is bound to be chosen by the kind of man who will take off his belt and beat her with it the first time he sleeps with her.

Many years later, in the autumn of her life, having heard similar stories here and there, having learned to listen and express herself without prejudice or anger, Lina would suddenly be reminded of Dora as she watched a woman walk past the terrace of Café Bonaparte, and she would wonder, smiling, if perhaps her grandmother had been right: right in saying that Dora was destined to get together with a man who would beat her when they slept together, first for the act itself, and then again for having done it with another man. But not back then. Back then, she’d just turned fourteen, and nobody, not even her grandmother, could convince her that Dora was being drawn by some dark force towards the man who would surely be the cause of her ruin, as inexplicably as a cat is driven by instinct to risk its life on the flimsy branches of a guava tree simply because a bird is fluttering about between the leaves, knowing all the while it will never catch the bird, and despite already having a belly full of lunch scraps.

At that time, the forces her grandmother spoke of—the correct name for which Lina would learn reading Freud, and not without some scepticism—sounded like one of those enemies that stalk mankind, like disease and madness, forces that need to be warded off in the name of dignity, in other words, in order to make it through life with a degree of decency, trying where possible to not inconvenience others, the way a newspaper should be left as we find it, more crumpled perhaps, but never with its pages torn or missing. And not out of consideration for others, since nobody gave it to us and nobody expects it back, but because it is always best to guard against carelessness, even though we know that in the long run we will inevitably lose and the newspaper will end up being thrown away. In other words, back then, in her own way, Lina already saw any form of surrender as unforgivable, no matter how often her grandmother alluded to the intervention of those mysterious forces, and especially if that surrender meant marrying a man like Benito Suárez.

Because Lina knew him. She had met him on a Saturday during Carnival in unusual circumstances, although that adjective, which Lina deliberately used so as not to be accused of exaggeration when she later told her grandmother the tale, by no means described the dramatic way Benito Suárez had first appeared, bursting onto the scene to become a permanent fixture in her life. From that day on, as Dora’s closest friend, Lina was in no doubt that Benito Suárez would cross her path again, always causing the same drama and occasionally provoking the same icy rage she’d felt when she’d seen him pulling up that day on the corner in his Studebaker, jumping out and chasing Dora, who was running blindly towards Lina’s front door, having fled the car with her face all bloody. It took Lina a long time to understand the full extent of what happened, the fact that simply witnessing the scene had changed her, or more precisely, it had set in motion the process that was to change her irrevocably. This was something that only struck her years later, as she realised that she could still recall the tiniest details of that Saturday during Carnival when she first saw Benito Suárez: the blue Studebaker screeching to a halt on the corner as she watched from the dining-room window, stunned, sitting at the mahogany table big enough for twelve and littered with her notebooks and the roll of tracing paper she had just cut in order to draw a map of Colombia’s rivers and mountains; then next to it, the rubber, the bottle of ink and the little heap of sand she was planning to stick on where the mountain peaks opened up into volcanoes. She would always remember the pen flying out of her hands and staining the polished tabletop, Dora running crazed, stumbling, Benito Suárez catching up with her in the garden and once more hitting her across the face, which was now bloodied beyond recognition, and then the two of them, Dora and her, running towards the front door, Dora from the garden while she, Lina, dashed up the hallway and flung the door open, suddenly striking Benito Suárez with one of the porch chairs, not to stop him from coming in—he’d already made it into the hall with a face so determined there seemed no way of beating him back—but to stall him. Yes. The shock of seeing her, a thirteen-year-old girl who had just broken a Louis XVI chair over his back, hissing, Watch out, the dog’s coming for you! The shock and the impact, maybe the pain: that was enough to slow him down. Lina would recall the short seconds in which she managed to grab Dora by the hand, drag her down the hallway to the dining room and slip behind the sideboard where she used to hide when her grandmother came after her, clutching that dreaded bottle of Milk of Magnesia. Gasping for breath, suddenly soaked in sweat, with Dora’s face resting in her lap and sticky blood staining her blue jeans, she whispered into Dora’s ear: Stop crying . . . he’ll kill us both.

Because Benito Suárez did want to kill them, at least that’s what he was shouting as he crashed around the deserted house, kicking the furniture and calling her, Lina, a little fucking bitch. She’d heard him shout it from the dining room as he sent her notebooks flying onto the floor with a swipe of his hand; she heard his panting breath, with an inflection in his voice that was devoid of any human quality and resembled the groaning of an animal, furiously trying to make sounds that almost morphed into sentences. Perhaps it was that rage-choked voice, not her realization that the setters were barking madly in the backyard, which had made Lina think of the dog: the mongrel had no name and never barked, but its silence held the same capacity for hate, the same murderous impulse as the man who was kicking the sideboard she was hiding behind, her hand over Dora’s mouth to keep her from crying out. The dog came into her head, not impulsively, like when she’d bashed Benito Suárez over the back with the chair, but with a sudden, calculated coldness that would later shock her; that is, later on, when she told her grandmother how she’d crept down the hallway as soon as she could no longer hear the aggressive spluttering of insults, made her way to the tree where the dog was tied up, grabbed him by the loop of his collar and went looking for Benito Suárez until she found him in the hallway next to the overturned chair. She was surprised, even more surprised when her grandmother told her: I, for one, can certainly imagine you setting that wretched dog on Benito Suárez.

But long before what she would come to call the first skirmish (there would be so many others that Lina would get used to seeing that man as a natural yet almost innocuous enemy because she could predict his reactions and, for some reason, had a strange soft spot for him), Lina had already started to get the measure of Benito Suárez. She’d closely followed his tumultuous relationship with Dora, being her confidante from the moment she started at La Enseñanza, when Dora, perhaps driven by a precocious maternal instinct, had taken her under her wing: for a whole year, she’d protected Lina like a mother hen—religiously saving her a window seat on the school bus, or sitting her on her lap. Then things started to change, because while Lina moved up to the first, second and third grades of elementary school, Dora kept repeating fourth grade, and that was where they found themselves—Lina aged eight and Dora aged eleven—when their relationship was inverted once and for all, and Lina realized that if she wanted to get her friend out of that predicament, she’d have to whisper the answers to her during tests, write her essays, explain division to her again and again, and phone her to make sure she’d done her homework. But she managed, in the end, with cheating and sheer tenacity, to drag her up to the seventh grade, when all her hard work went up in smoke because Dora got expelled from La Enseñanza for picking up a lollipop a boy had thrown to her from the school wall.

Lina had always thought Dora was too quiet: she didn’t play at breaktime or take part in the pranks that Lina, Catalina and her friends meticulously planned, trying to cause a disturbance that would wind the nuns up and break the monotony of the lessons. In fact, Dora had never joined in anything that required movement or physical activity: she was a very calm child, almost plantlike, with the indolent appearance of an organism engrossed in something that was happening inside itself, pulsating in its own cells. She was fed so many vitamins as a child that by the age of nine she started maturing, and at fourteen—when they expelled her from the school for the lollipop incident—she was fully developed and had that languid air about her, that sway in her step which impelled the boys from Biffi to clamber up the school wall crowned with a veritable thicket of broken bottle glass, leaving the concrete strewn with the skin from their knees and the sweat of their longing, just so they could watch her for a minute during breaktime. She was not beautiful like Catalina, and she lacked Beatriz’s refinement. She was not exactly graceful or seductive to look at. No. There was something more distant, more profound about her: the kind of thing that stimulated the first molecule to reproduce or the first organism to fertilize itself, that throbbed at the bottom of the ocean before any form of life appeared on land and then, throbbing, sucked in, absorbed and created other beings, expelled them from itself; as life in its rawest form, then later, as the primitive female; not necessarily the human female but any female capable of luring the rowdy and fractious male into her cave and momentarily calming his aggression, not only to make him perform the act that might be his raison d’être as part of nature, but also to remind him that there exists a more intense and perhaps more ancient pleasure than the pleasure of killing.

Dora seemed unaware of this, although she may well have suspected it: she always felt the eyes of men on her, and even as a child she realized it was impossible for her to go out into the garden alone without some passing beggar or tramp being unable to resist the urge to frantically unbutton his fly and start touching himself in front of her. Lina, however, got the feeling that from the moment Dora was born—or, as her grandmother had insisted on putting it—from the moment she began to exist, she had been marked by the same sign that determined her dog Ofelia’s behaviour, or rather, the behaviour of the male dogs that lustfully circled around her. Ofelia was encircled, not followed: she did not need to walk around or make the slightest movement to keep them close to her, in a state of desperate anticipation. There was nothing special about the bitch’s appearance: in looks at least, she was no different from the other setters that had been born and raised in their house, all of whom were named after the heroines in Shakespeare’s stories, which her grandmother had read to her so often at bedtime. Ofelia was merely a sleepy creature with curly cinnamon-coloured fur, who loathed the sun and spent the whole day lazing on the cool tiles in the hallway. But when she came into season, a greedy glint appeared in her eyes and, suddenly alert, she would stand proud in front of the impassioned Brutuses and Macbeths who barked plaintively, baying for her attention, ignoring all the other bitches on heat—invariably brought into season by Ofelia—and losing all the refinement of setters imported from England, dogs whose pedigree equalled that of someone of Bourbon descent, her grandmother explained, not without some pride. Considering how unwaveringly faithful Ofelia was, always choosing the same mate, all the energy she spent chasing, then spinning around and yapping, might have been considered a waste were it not for the fact that once her choice was made, the setters eagerly turned their attention to the other females, every single one of whom (even the ones that could barely stand) became the objects of their urges and attentions. In other words, Ofelia seemed destined by nature to carry within her the incentive, motivation or lure that compels living beings to reproduce, regardless of their will, and of course, regardless of any form of knowledge.

Observing Dora, one might have said that a similar ignorance prevented her from realizing how little she had in common with most women. It came naturally to Dora to feel desired, and she would have been dumbfounded if someone had bothered to explain to her that the main reason the boys from Biffi College climbed up the school wall and risked skinning their hands on the broken glass was to see her. For Dora this was the natural order of things, like the tramps who unzipped their fly as soon as they saw her alone in her garden; moreover, it must have tied in exactly with what her mother had told her about male nature being essentially corrupt and intent on plunging women into wretchedness. But until the age of fourteen she was only allowed to travel between home and school, so she never had the chance to meet any of the individuals who were determined to offend her modesty. And, Lina would later say to herself, she had never managed to pinpoint the origin of her bewilderment, which kept her in a daze at her desk while a nun wrote on the board and she listened to the maddening hum of the bees. Sitting always by the classroom window, she would get distracted looking at the school yard with its motionless trees outlined by a strip of metallic sky; her eyes seemed to cloud over, her gaze lost in images that perhaps were not even images but something that vaguely signified waiting and, in a way, confusion. Her behaviour, however, left nothing to be desired: she sat up straight, carefully copied down the scribbles written on the blackboard by the nun on duty, stood up silently when the bell rang and lined up with the other students in an orderly manner. In an orderly manner, she entered the refectory and ate, went to the chapel and prayed: orderly and absent. She was not there, and one might wonder if she had ever really been anywhere. She seemed to live differently from everyone else, existing inside herself and listening, not to a voice—only occasionally did it seem that some clear sound reached her—but to a murmur that perhaps predated human language, where every new noise was an extension of the one that came before it, and the passing of an airplane in the sky was followed by a sudden breeze rustling through the trees, a flurry of rainfall or simply something more inaudible, more indistinct, like the crackle of a seed pod bursting in the heat or the falling of a leaf scorched by the sun.

Lina’s grandmother explained to her that Dora could have carried on like that, hidden, undiscovered, in a limbo of sensations that she probably lacked the words to describe, until her mother managed to marry her off—or rather, until the ceremony took place and she could finally hand over her daughter and her terror to a man, like a grenade with the pin pulled, thrown into the hands of another with relief. Dora might have remained in this state, had the nuns been less dull-witted and were it not for Doña Eulalia: distressed by the presence of her quiet, nebulous daughter, who was quiet and nebulous enough for her mother to imagine that her chastity could be safeguarded long-term even away from her watchful eye, she decided to send her off to work in a kindergarten run by a relative, perhaps repeating to herself, despite her reservations, that in the end, idleness is the mother of all vices.

And it wasn’t strange that she should think this, because Doña Eulalia came from a family where no one had worked for five hundred years, if work was to be understood as making a living by using one’s hands to sow, gather or handle any tool designed to transform one thing into another. She and all her ancestors believed they belonged to a special category of people who, in their own right and by divine command, were responsible for ensuring the rule of order, leading by example in times of peace, or using swords and cannons in the event of unrest. They remembered very clearly that they had come from Spain not as explorers, not even as warriors: by the time of the Conquest, their extensive use of weapons had earned them certain privileges in the Court and they could turn up to govern the chaotic overseas provinces, or disdainfully send their seconds-in-command and bastard sons to do the job for them. Yes, it was as inquisitors and judges that they disembarked in the coast’s major cities, where their sons acquired or were awarded the lands worked by slaves, and their grandchildren, during the ill-fated days of Independence, were forced to flee to Curaçao and stay there until better winds came, allowing them to return to their devastated plantations after cautiously changing their surnames. But even then, they did not work. Not because they lacked the strength: though gaunt and prone to meditation, almost to mysticism, they were still capable of commanding obedience in men, and over two or three generations they managed to keep their bloodline intact. The problem was that the world was changing and they could not adapt to anything that meant evolution or change, to any situation that upset the values that had long served them as a point of reference, a mirror in which they found and reinforced their identity. One of those values instinctively distanced them from work, which they found demeaning at the best of times, but which, in those merciless lands plagued by sun, torrential rain and vermin, seemed to eat away at men until they had been drained of any form of intelligence or dignity. And so as not to betray their principles, they gave in: little by little, from fathers to sons, they started preparing to surrender without ever waging a war. When the changes that were taking hold of the country’s economy forced them to compete with businessmen, politicians and smugglers, they silently resigned; silently and proudly, that is to say, with no outward sign of missing their big, abandoned houses or the plantations they had been selling off, plot by plot. They retained the memories, not nostalgia, and it seemed these memories were enough for them to walk tall while the world only they could see vanished to dust, crumbled at their feet: they were men of distinction. At least that was what Doña Eulalia del Valle believed, and what Lina had heard her say more than a thousand times. And so, it was impossible to imagine her sending her daughter to work in a kindergarten to earn a few extra pesos, even though she was practically verging on poverty, because Doña Eulalia, out of principle and tradition, thought being poverty-stricken was preferable to any kind of work.

So, that decision had to be linked to Dora’s personality. That daughter of dubious descent, her bloodline tainted by centuries of debauchery, by the distant sensuality of dances, drums and strong scents, had nothing of her mother’s pale, ascetic, indistinct figure, and yet Doña Eulalia had projected herself onto the child as soon as she turned nine years old and began to blossom, to unfurl like a plant with its roots so firmly anchored in the soil that it could weather any storm. At first, horrified, she tried to stifle, contain or destroy the scandalous thing that seeped out of every pore of Dora’s skin, but when she did not succeed—because despite the girdles and bandages her daughter’s breasts were protruding, her hips were filling out and her hair was growing so abundantly that it snapped the ribbons of her braids and ponytails—she tried, fascinated, to make Dora belong to her: like a vine she crept over her body, tried to breathe with her lungs, to see through her eyes, to beat to the rhythm of her heart; she scrutinized her brain with the same obstinate determination with which she rifled through her drawers and read the pages of her books and notepads; she forced her to think out loud, to reveal her secrets and desires. And in the end, she possessed her before any man could, paving the way for all men to possess her.

Benito Suárez’s blue Studebaker was yet to make an appearance, but already Lina had detected Doña Eulalia’s desire to have total control over her daughter, a desire so fierce that her face would crumple at the slightest suspicion of deceit or concealment: Dora was forbidden to play outside the boundaries of their garden, which was surrounded by a six-foot-high stone wall with sharp, spiky shrubs growing along it, and the mere presence of Lina’s cousins and friends would prompt Doña Eulalia to pop up out of nowhere like the genie from Aladdin’s lamp, her expression alert, pupils dilated, and, unceremoniously violating the most basic rules of hospitality, she would order Dora back inside the house to sit for hours in a chair as punishment. All this, Lina already knew, but what made her reflect on Doña Eulalia’s intentions for the first time was her discovery, one Christmas, that Dora had received a bicycle she was allowed to ride as long as she didn’t leave the 150-foot stretch of pavement outside their house. Being restricted to that small area diminished the enjoyment of having the bicycle: she could not race around the streets, go flying down hills at full speed, experience the tiredness in her muscles from riding every day and the reward of the sweat, the messy hair and the breeze in her face. That gift and the restrictions that went with it, Lina’s grandmother would tell her one afternoon, represented the contradiction that troubled Doña Eulalia, who was determined to turn Dora into a girl like any other while at the same time doing her best to prevent this from happening. Because it was taken for granted in that crazy society that no well-bred girl would be reckless enough to endanger the membrane she needed to keep intact if she wanted to marry well, and parental vigilance usually sufficed to protect that membrane, so no one imagined that riding a bike through the streets of the El Prado neighbourhood could pose a risk to their daughters’ maidenhoods; if they did, no one would have been foolish enough to give them a bicycle in the first place.

So, from that Christmas on, Lina began to watch Doña Eulalia del Valle with curiosity, establishing a somewhat hazy connection between her presence on the veranda—where, eagle-eyed, she could survey all 150 feet of pavement—and the way she got inside Dora’s head, constantly violating her privacy. Lina listened, mouth agape, to the conversations that played out in front of her whenever they returned from the country club or a party and Doña Eulalia interrogated Dora, mining her for details of not only what she had seen, but also what she had thought or felt when she saw it. There was something of the inquisitor in her attitude, and something impudent and hungry in her insistent questioning, constantly corralling Dora back and forth like a bird of prey circling in the sky. Faced with her mother’s probing, Dora adopted a tactic similar to the one which allowed her to evade the nuns’ control at school: she did not argue at all, did not protest against anything. Her resistance, Lina would later understand, lay in the scandalous silence of her submissiveness.

As if Doña Eulalia were aware of this—as if she’d suddenly realized that even by shutting her daughter away inside her house, not allowing her to have a single thought or desire that was truly her own, she would still never be able to dominate Dora completely because biologically a part of Dora would always elude her—she tried to confront the demon hidden inside that submissiveness using the only instrument at her disposal: words. It was a method that Lina later described as obsessive and demented brainwashing and one which left her dumbfounded, even though she knew it existed and was one of the worst burdens of humanity, which is what her grandmother told her as soon as she started school. Her grandmother explained everything the nuns would also tell her, advising her to pay as much attention to their delusions as one would to the hooting of owls: there would be the dead and the risen, hell and purgatory, much lamenting and the sound of chains being dragged by tormented souls. And she, Lina, was not to believe any of it. Because it was called indoctrination, and in all doctrine, there were more lies than truth.

What puzzled Lina when she listened to Doña Eulalia del Valle’s rhetoric was not so much the style of the sermon but the aim of her preaching. Because Doña Eulalia must have had some aim in mind when, every day, she made Dora sit across from her, and spoke to her about men, using the foulest language as she compared their sperm to excrement and their genitals to the filthy phallus of the donkeys that could still be seen in the streets of El Prado in those days; not to mention the lustful slobbering, the fetid breath, the seeds of sexual promiscuity they were said to sow. The things that Doña Eulalia said had such a scatological quality, and there was such perversion in what was left unsaid or insinuated; never again would Lina encounter such depravity—not even when she walked by the shop windows in Rue Pigalle, nor in the blue movies that she would often watch years later. Thinking about it, she would even come to the conclusion that those ineffable Swedish and Dutch directors would be well advised to turn to the fantasies of the most virtuous of Latin American women if they wanted to reach new heights of obscenity in their work. But that would be later.

Lina couldn’t have been more than ten years old when she heard Doña Eulalia’s extraordinary monologue for the first time; she’d often seen her giving her daughter a lecture, but as soon as Lina came into the house, she would fall silent. That afternoon, Lina’s curiosity was combined with the good fortune of finding the service door open, allowing her to sneak into the yard without anyone noticing and tiptoe towards the end of the terrace where Doña Eulalia usually liked to corner Dora. There she was, spouting forth with a kind of rabid glee about the tricks used by virtuous women to avoid temptation: everything from picturing the man they desired defecating on the toilet, to popping a mothball inside their knickers. Since Lina did not know the meaning of most of the words she overheard, she had to write them down in her sketchbook. But even later, when she consulted a dictionary at home, she still couldn’t understand why Dora had to be lectured in that way. Her grandmother explained that Doña Eulalia was deliberately pursuing the same objective that she, Lina, had been unwittingly seeking when she found the roosters mounting the hens and furiously shooed them out of the yard, believing that they were pecking at their throats out of sheer aggression until the day when Berenice, the cook, shouted at her and told her to stop messing with them because nothing made the hens happier. Ashamed of this comparison and remembering that the roosters had not changed their ways despite her stubborn attempts, Lina simply said, It never did any good anyway, to which her grandmother replied with a smile, I reckon what you heard today won’t do any good either.

And so Lina suspected very early on, but without clearly understanding all the implications of the matter, that a threat hovered over whatever it was that chance had bestowed on Dora, placing her at a disadvantage when in fact, based on the hidden logic of her grandmother’s assertions, that same essence could have been her asset and her centre of equilibrium, contributing to her happiness and, in turn, the happiness of the man or men who came into her life—albeit only if she had been born in another space and time, but above all, if her mother had been someone other than Doña Eulalia del Valle. However, not even Doña Eulalia del Valle could claim full responsibility for the fact that Dora viewed her sexuality as such an abominable flaw that it justified or even merited the beating she received from Benito Suárez the first time they made love, in the back of his blue Studebaker, opposite the site where construction was soon to begin on the towering statue of the Sacred Heart, which would watch over the city from the highest point of its only hill.

Accepting her grandmother’s relentless fatalism would have meant admitting that the origin of Dora’s submissiveness to the belt that flogged her back—when, still naked, she felt Benito Suárez’s acidic semen trickling out from between her thighs—could not logically be solely attributed to Doña Eulalia del Valle’s influence, as that would be as inadequate as saying it rains because the sky is cloudy. She would have to remind herself of the biblical curse and go much further back in time, to that ill-fated day when the man who was to become Doña Eulalia’s father—a man from Santa Marta with an evasive air about him, and the afflicted look of someone who, if he wasn’t locked up in a monastery, was born or raised to lock himself away in one—appeared in the city and, kicking up the sand of the streets beneath his horse’s hooves, made his way to the house of the Álvarez de la Vega family, where the first thing he saw when he dismounted was a girl with blonde hair playing in the yard with her doll. Because that encounter between the man who from so much fasting and self-flagellation had totally lost the power of his loins at the age of thirty, and the girl, who was newly formed but still in the fairytale haze of childhood, was not the root cause of that submissiveness, because the root cause dated back to the time when men discovered that exploiting women was the first step to exploiting each other. Rather, it was the most recent cause that her grandmother could pinpoint: the story of the twelve-year-old girl given to the man who asked for her hand in marriage the very afternoon they met, the same girl who, astonished, was to find herself dressed up in white six months later, as if still playing make-believe, leaving the church of San Nicolás on the arm of a stranger she had probably never spoken to before. A man whose great-uncle had been the Inquisitor General of Cartagena, the descendant of Spanish royalty on his mother’s side and heir to a less pompous title, but a title all the same, who would that very night violate the tacit agreement to wait three years before demanding his marital rights from the girl. Finding himself disarmed by the inexplicable, diabolical desire that stiffened his flaccid crotch for the first and last time, he damaged the girl’s vagina, causing her to haemorrhage, and he had to accept the services of the first healer his maid could find at that time of night—some poor veterinarian who crudely stitched up the wound while the girl’s shock, which turned to horror, was expressed in screams that could be heard in every neighbouring house, causing echoes that insulted the fifteen families forming the coastal aristocracy of the day, thus destroying his honour for good and ensuring his ruin in the process.

Not immediately, but eventually. The dowry from the Álvarez de la Vega family and his personal fortune kept him afloat for several years, fifteen to be precise: enough time for him to squander the inheritance while sitting in front of the orange trees in his garden all day long, imposing a tomb-like silence on his surroundings and staring intently at those trees until, after so much time there gazing motionless, his sight began to suffer: the trunks blurred in his pupils, the branches disappeared from his retinas, the leaves dissolved into fog, and then one morning he finally realized he had gone blind.

Because he didn’t want to see, Lina’s grandmother told her. It wasn’t his shame he was avoiding, because he believed he’d already paid for that over the years, cutting himself off and spending his fortune without lifting a finger, though truth be told he would never have lifted a finger to preserve it. His daughter had been conceived the night when, without any explanation or justification to himself, he had betrayed, trampled over and shattered the commandments in whose name he had flagellated himself since his youth. Because from the moment he set eyes on the girl playing with her doll, to the morning when he left the church of San Nicolás with her on his arm—yes, all that time—he believed his only interest was in marrying the heiress of the Álvarez de la Vega family and protecting her virginity while he waited for three years to pass until, as per tradition, he could impregnate her, knowing for sure that the child would be his. So, the explanation for his blindness was most likely connected to the new golden-haired figure who was suddenly wandering among the orange trees, giving off the unsettling scent of a fifteen-year-old girl. By allowing his eyes to cloud over, her grandmother concluded, he succeeded in killing two birds with one stone. He would no longer have to see his daughter (a likely source of temptation and an inevitable reminder of his shameful act) or endure the pain of witnessing her naturally heading for the depths he himself had tried to escape through flagellation; in this way, he could slow down that inexorable progression, because his daughter, Doña Eulalia del Valle, would have to become his guide.

Lina’s grandmother chalked this error of judgement up to the fact that he had spent fifteen years staring at the orange trees in his garden, because only a man who was sick from the fear of his own body could imagine that Doña Eulalia would be destined for any kind of lust—even the kind that was theoretically likely to happen between the sheets of a marital bed. Doña Eulalia had been brought up by her mother, a girl who was raped by her husband on her wedding night, stitched up by a veterinarian, and impregnated with a child that would drag her womb and ovaries out of her belly with it nine months later, taking her from childhood to her twilight years with no transition. During the three years that she stayed in bed, lurching from one illness to another, oscillating between hot flashes and tremors of delirium, Doña Eulalia del Valle’s mother learned to hate men. Coldly. Lucidly. And with the same lucidity and coldness, she passed on this hatred to her daughter.

II

If Darwin was not mistaken and a process of natural selection did in fact exist, it seemed only right to conclude that the men currently living had descended from those whose violence or cruelty—now defects, then virtues—had allowed them to conveniently massacre their rivals, passing on a gene pool that was capable of sowing the healthiest distrust in women: that these men should stone birds, pull the wings off flies or dismember the bodies of lizards was in keeping with tendencies once encouraged by natural selection, tendencies that modern society had not succeeded in inhibiting, continuing as it did to tolerate the dominance of the fittest, and accepting randomness and injustice to be part and parcel of everyday life. However, men could be tamed; in other words, they could be taught to be less aggressive with the help of religion or ideology, or even—and this option, albeit utopian, seemed preferable to Lina’s grandmother—by simply demonstrating that solidarity is justified insofar as we all started from the same point and are bound to come stumbling over the same finishing line; they could be turned—at least some of them—into the kinds of harmless dreamers who fall in love, write books, compose music or discover penicillin. But not hated; hating them made no sense. There is no point despising the puma that kills a cow, or the cat that attacks a mouse. One must try to understand the animal, try to get inside the skin of the puma or the cat and co-exist with it, as far as possible, in a certain time and space: it is only to be destroyed if it tries to destroy us first.

Since her grandmother believed that hatred ruled out understanding, and understanding was the sine qua non of harmony, it was easy to explain why Doña Eulalia del Valle had always seemed so unhinged, so compelled to turn rabidly against men ever since she was a child, or at least ever since she realized that men existed, because the only man Doña Eulalia had known in her childhood was her father, who spent all day gazing intently at the orange trees in the garden. Only later, perhaps when she belatedly took first communion and started going to early morning mass with her mother, she discovered that men not only dressed differently, but they also strolled down the street, carried bags or pushed carts around, instead of cutting themselves off from the world in a garden of orange trees. And at the same time, Doña Eulalia’s mother started to warn her, that is, to verbally transform, with affirmations and anecdotes, the climate of hatred that she inevitably endured in a house where her parents never exchanged a word, slept in separate beds and never had guests, where nothing even remotely resembling the masculine principle existed. Because when Doña Eulalia del Valle’s mother finally got up—after three years in bed oscillating between hot flashes that soaked her body in sweat and sudden chills that made her shiver and tremble, her face pale as chalk, with that same bewildered expression she had at age twelve and would keep until the moment she died—she slowly hobbled through the rooms of her house, leaning on a maid’s arm for support and, without uttering a single word, simply raised her hand and pointed at the pictures she wanted taken down immediately, those oil paintings in which nine generations of her husband’s ancestors stood proudly amid the sombre finery of the Spanish court, all men, all haughty and marked, centuries earlier, by the decision to shroud themselves in a cloak of abstinence.

Distributed on muleback among Doña Eulalia’s relatives, those paintings—some bearing the signatures of great masters—spent several years gathering dust in abandoned colonial houses before ending up in churches, where some pious paintbrush made the insolent faces sadder and transformed the mournful clothing into habits, replacing hats and daggers with halos and scapulars to personify those European saints the people of the coastal town were hard-pressed to believe in. That day, not content with getting rid of the vestiges of a past that had influenced or determined her husband’s vile behaviour, Doña Eulalia del Valle’s mother continued, like a vengeful poltergeist, to condemn books, statues and chinaware until finally, at the peak of her silent rage, she made her way down the four steps leading to the yard, called out to the gardener and, an hour before firing him, ordered him to chop the heads off all the male animals that lived there, not even sparing the exquisite parrots or the shy canaries from the massacre. Never again would any man set foot in her house: her father was already dead, and she had no brothers. She took to keeping watch over her maids and frantically sewing blouses and skirts for the orphans of the Buen Pastor women’s prison, instilling her daughter with a very particular respect for the Virgin, barely mentioning Saint Joseph and merely giving Jesus Christ a supporting role; the rosary she and her maids prayed at six in the evening as they kneeled before a statue of the Virgin skipped over the Our Fathers—as the old priest discovered, much to his horror, when Doña