The Dissertation, page 6
part #2 of Tinieblas Series
When, in February, 1917, she told him he had failed again—it was two months since he’d sworn out the affidavit—he drew up a new instrument (and had it duly notarized and filed with the Town Clerk), deeding the house to Rebeca in the event she bore a son. He brought the copy to her and slammed it down on the bureau where, eighteen years before, she’d left the note for Don Patricio, and said, “I give you one more month. One month and then the deal’s off and I’m leaving. While I still can. Before you squeeze me dry.”
Rebeca told Dr. Burlando not to come again until she sent for him, and she retired to her bedroom and let the rolls of woven bamboo fibers down over the windows and lay down on her bed to concentrate on the stock and the deed. She told her Chinese maid to bring her a plate of rice and beans each evening, and when the food remained untouched for three days to call Dr. Burlando. Then she beamed her mind on the deed and the stock until all the rest of life was but a vague penumbra.
The maid summoned Dr. Burlando on the night of 12th March, 1917. Rebeca was unconscious of his arrival. She lay tranced and naked in the darkened room, and Dr. Azael Burlando entered and undressed and climbed on board like a galley slave. Rebeca lay corpselike, thinking of shares and deed, aware of Dr. Burlando only as a half-sleeping neurasthenic might become aware of another patient20 pounding his head slowly and despairingly against the wall four or five rooms away along the clinic corridor. Then, at the moment of his discharge—perceived like yelpings muffled by a practiced hand as three attendants drag the madman to his bed to strap him in—Rebeca realized she was finally a whore. Not in the Tsinan brothel nor in the Manchu’s villa had she achieved true whoredom, first since she’d chosen neither and second since in one she’d been an artist of a sort and in the other a mere plaything. But now she’d put herself to rent exclusively for gain. Self-hatred flooded into her, and she conceived.
My grandmother Rebeca Fuertes stayed in her bed from March to November, 1917, rising only to perform natural functions. From the instant she conceived she suffered headaches, nausea, and weird cravings—customary symptoms of gestation, but in her case abnormally acute and prolonged until the hour she delivered. She was, as well, subject to seizures of hysteria and suicidal urges, fits of mania and depression, which she had never known, not even in the darkest hours of her life. She was obsessed by the vision of her own hand driving sometimes a knife, sometimes a pair of scissors, into her belly, and ordered her maid to collect every sharp instrument in the house and bury them under the flagstones of the patio. Through it all she stubbornly refused to be examined by a doctor, and when, during a week of violent nausea, which saw her unable to keep a grain of rice on her stomach, Dr. Burlando presumed to bring a Spanish surgeon—the Director of the Mituco Clinic and an extremely well-trained man—to her house, she howled them off with curses such as the Spaniard, who had served in Morocco against the Riff, had never heard, even from wounded legionnaires.
Dr. Burlando visited her each afternoon at five to feed her teaspoonfuls of blanc de blanc (he bought ten bottles at an absurd price from the cellar of the Hotel Colón in Ciudad Tinieblas) and slivers of foie gras truffé (he had to send to Boston for it) on Jacob’s biscuits (he got four tins from Kingston); to hear her whine for Vienna sausage and Munich bock (as if the British blockade were his fault); to bear her curses and complaints. She carped at his neglect when he came late, at his intrusion when he showed up early, at his machinelike lack of feeling when he was on time. On sunny days she groused about the heat, and when it stormed complained of chills and ague. She screeched her maid to tears and little Nicolas to terror. She cursed Burlando for making her pregnant and herself for letting him and God for having dreamed up pregnancy in the first place. Most of all she cursed her belly and the bastard child inside it, both of which grew prodigiously as though fed by her curses, and as Rebeca swelled, Burlando aged and wasted. His hair turned white, then fell. His flesh dissolved until his wrist and check bones seemed about to pierce the skin. He grew all bent and bowed, took up the use of a Malacca walking stick, and had to pause to rest a dozen times along the doddering two hundred meters from Rebeca’s house to the Café Progreso. There he no longer played at chess or dominoes, having so waned in skill and concentration that the rankest chump could drub him, nor took part in discussions, nor offered up new chapters to his autobiography, but huddled in a corner sipping medicinal infusions and when he spoke at all, spoke only of his child, the way it kicked under Rebeca’s nightgown, how full of life it was, a son for sure. The others would nod absently and when he’d left, sometimes before the strings of beads that hung across the doorway had swung behind him, would break into rude laughter, exclaiming that one could make a better bargain with the devil than with Rebeca Fuertes, referring to the doctor as “the old fool” or “the poor pubic hair.” Meanwhile Mituco bore the oddest weather in memory, unseasonable weeks of burning drought broken by thunderstorms and tempests grown more violent each succeeding month; earth tremors; a tidal wave which spared the island only because the bishop, having remarked the draining of the bay, ordered the effigy of San Roque carried to a seaward beach, the statue, its bearers, and the bishop (in full vestments, carrying his crook) arriving just before a bulwark of black water, which parted marvelously north and south and spent its force upon the mainland. The islanders, especially good matrons of the town, related these phenomena to Rebeca’s pregnancy, declaring her a witch and whispering it was the devil, not the doctor, who had sired whatever beast there was inside her and saying that as she had destroyed Don Patricio and was destroying Dr. Azael, so she would finish by destroying all Mituco.
Rebeca Fuertes entered labor on the night of 12th November, 1917, exactly eight months after she conceived. Dr. Burlando happened to be in her house, restrained by a tremendous downpour. He had fed her the last of the pâté, had endured five hours of her petulant abuse, and, leaving her at last in a light sleep, had descended to the sala for a cup of manzanilla tea. At her first scream he dropped his cup, which shattered on the tiles. He dragged himself upstairs, his steps punctuated by staccato squealing. He found Rebeca lying as if pinned beneath her bulging belly, a tuft of her own hair in either fist. He shouted for the maid and ordered her, rain or no rain, to run to the clinic for the ambulance.
Rebeca shook her head. “Send for Señora Perfecta.”
“Look, woman,” said Dr. Azael Burlando. “I’ve stood your whims eight months, but now it’s finished. With luck you’ll die tonight and I’ll piss on your grave, but first you’ll bear my son.” He poked the maid with his stick. “I said run!”
Rebeca sat up screaming and raked her nails across the doctor’s check. Then she fainted.
Though small, the Mituco Company Clinic was the most modern medical facility in the Republic of Tinieblas. Rebeca was admitted there at 11:12 p.m., again in faint, having come to in the clinic’s Studebaker ambulance, mauled Dr. Burlando’s other check, and bitten the attendant’s forearm to the bone. The Spanish surgeon ordered her anesthetized and prepared for Caesarean delivery. Then he went to treat the wounded. He had bandaged the attendant’s arm and was swabbing Dr. Burlando’s face with alcohol when a squeak of horror from the duty nurse brought both men to Rebeca’s bedside. In the course of undressing and disinfecting Rebeca’s body the nurse had found the artwork of the Manchu’s Japanese tattooist, the reason for Rebeca’s stout refusal to let Dr. Burlando see her naked or to be examined by a physician. Tiny blue toads and lizards romped out of her armpits down along her flanks; two triple-file processions of green centipedes marched up her inner thighs; an orange caterpillar oozed out of her navel; and a red-and-yellow speckled snake twined round her spine and disappeared into the crevice of her buttocks. The nurse took these in stride, but was unable to contain her fright when the shaving of Rebeca’s pubis revealed a baseball-sized, purple tarantula. Dr. Burlando caught one glimpse of this over the surgeon’s shoulder, clapped both hands to his crotch, and fell twitching to the floor in obvious and massive apoplexy.
The Spaniard saw at once his case was fatal, did what he could to case Dr. Burlando’s final hour, then operated on Rebeca. The wisdom of this decision was soon vindicated, for there were two children, not one, both of them, though one month premature, too large-headed to have passed Rebeca’s pelvic bone. My father, León Fuertes,21 was extracted into this world by Caesarean section at midnight 12th November, 1917, his first wail chiming with the Administration Building clock and rattling with the death throes of his father. A sister followed him by some few seconds.
PART TWO
HIS EARLY LIFE (1917-1936)
5. The Flight from Mituco
IT IS TEMPTING to speculate how León Fuertes might have developed had he received his birthright: the twenty shares of Mituco Company stock and the income of their dividends; the Garza family mansion with its spacious rooms and seignorial appointments; access to the fine schools of Mituco Marítimo; and membership in a directing class. Tempting but idle. He was programmed genetically for excellence, and noblesse oblige serves just as well as poverty for a whetstone to ambition. More important, I think, than the fact of his disinheriting was the process by which it was accomplished. The town combined against him and his mother; he began his life not just unlegacied but outcast and reviled. This no doubt exacerbated the strange duality22 in his character: an intense yearning for respectability alternating with (linked to, balanced by) a total unconcern (if not contempt) for what others might think.
Before León Fuertes had spent eight hours in this world, all Mituco knew the details of his coming into it, down to the last hair on the eighth leg of the tarantula inscribed on his mother’s mons and the synchronizing of his father’s death with his first cry. As I have noted, gossips had long suspected Rebeca of malevolent powers and intentions. By the morning of 13th November, 1917, many mituqueños were ready to accept (and none was willing to dispute in public) the thesis of Señorita Zoreida Bocanegra (who had preserved her virginity23 for Don Patricio Garza during the twenty years he lived in Paris, only to discover that neither he nor anyone else wanted it) that Rebeca Fuertes was a witch, that she had bewitched first Don Patricio then Dr. Azael Burlando, that she had engendered little León and his sister in connection with Beelzebub, and that she had murdered Dr. Burlando by enchantment.
That diabolical agencies were operating on Mituco became even plainer at Dr. Burlando’s wake, which was attended by a great number of mituqueños, despite the fact that few of them had cared much for him in his life and none had ever spoken to his widow. A tempest such as had not struck the island since the shipwreck of Javier Cortada or been associated with it since 1610 raged all that night, and at the stroke of midnight wind burst the shutters and blew out all the candles in the house. When, after much confusion, light was restored, mourners discovered the image of the horned god blazoned on the coffin and a large crucifix hanging inverted in its niche beside the sala door. Then, at dawn, when the pallbearers (five of them directors of the Mituco Company, the sixth Don Pedro Caoba, who claimed the right by virtue of having lost more games at chess to Dr. Burlando than any other habitué of the Café Progreso) tried to lift the coffin, they could not budge it. It took twelve men to lug it from the bier out to the glass-walled, horse-drawn hearse. Then one man stumbled, another lost his grip, and the coffin fell and splintered on the ground. There was no corpse; the casket was filled with rocks. The obvious conclusion was that Dr. Azael Burlando had, in fact, a contract with the devil, and that it covered his body as well as his soul.
Despite these strange events and the great volume of accusatory gossip they engendered, no official action was taken against Rebeca for a time. A small mob collected about the clinic on the evening of 14th November and set up quite a noise of shouting for Rebeca to leave the island, but though the constable on duty at the door made no move to disperse them, they were finally shoo’d off by the Spanish surgeon. When Rebeca went home on the 16th, she found the façade of the mansion scarred with obscene slogans and warnings to get out or else, and heard from her maid and little Nicolas, both badly frighted, of shots fired in the night and shouts of “Burn the witch-bitch!” When she reported these depredations to the chief of police, he joined her in deploring them, adding, however, that given his small force and the general mood of the community, he could not guarantee that they would not recur. It was not until the 18th, after Rebeca had presented herself at the offices of the Mituco Company and requested that twenty shares of stock and the deed to the mansion be made over to her, that Mituco acted officially. That afternoon Licentiate Jacobo Mangle, the Public Prosecutor (and also Counsel General to the Mituco Company) filed charges against Rebeca Fuertes for the crime of witchcraft, citing a statute drafted in the 17th Century by the Holy Inquisition.
Crime was so rare in Mituco Marítimo that the island had no jail. A small room on the top floor of the Administration Building was fitted hurriedly with bars, and Rebeca was confined there incomunicada, for the statute specified that an accused witch be permitted contact only with her confessor, while Rebeca felt she had enough to bear without suffering the intrusions of a priest.24 Fatigued as she was, solitude was solace. Her great distress was that León was kept from her. Rebeca had, at the moment she emerged from anesthesia, conceived an almost superhuman love for her second son. This was a new emotion for her, since the love for my uncle Nicolas which Dr. Burlando had supposed he’d noticed wasn’t love at all, but rather a clever counterfeit which Rebeca, appalled that her first-born meant no more to her than any other infant, had crafted in hope that Nicolas might take it for bona fide and so be spared the resentment of a loveless childhood. As for her daughter, Rebeca was hard put not to hate her outright, for the little girl seemed proof that Dr. Burlando had unfairly won his bargain, getting two children when he only paid for one. But (perhaps in compensation for the hatred she had felt for him while he was in her womb) Rebeca’s love for León was spontaneous and true, and from the moment she was shut away she screamed so stridently for him that Licentiate Mangle, who had offices below her cell and, with the din, was quite unable to prepare his case, after a day or two relented and had León brought. León Fuertes was, thus, nursed in prison—albeit a clean one with walls of wood, not stone—a circumstance in which he took rather more pride than shame during his later life.
As far as I can ascertain, Rebeca Fuertes was the last person to be tried for witchcraft in the Western world. Because of the great interest in the case, the process was conducted not in the courtroom of the Alcaldía (which, since Mituco Marítimo saw mainly civil actions, was quite small) but in the Municipal Theater, the venue of Rebeca’s initiation to both art and love. Subscribers to the regular dramatic season were allowed to buy their customary places at a mark-up; other seats sold briskly; and when the court convened at 9 A.M. on 1st December, 1917, the house was packed. Care was exercised, however, to preserve the solemnity of the proceedings. A backdrop originally painted for the third act of Man and Superman, and which the artist, eschewing Shaw’s stage directions, had amply strewn with hungry tongues of flame, hung from the second lift. Dr. Emilio Cedra, the Magistrate of Mituco (and Chairman of the Board of the Mituco Company), presided from a dais draped in black velvet, and there were costly tables of mahogany for Licentiate Mangle and Dr. Everardo Palo de Bamboa (a Director of the Mituco Company), appointed by the court for the defense. There was an elevated witness stand and a sumptuously carved enclosure for the seven jurymen (who were all Directors of the Mituco Company and whose foreman was Don Arnulfo Bocanegra, Señorita Zoreida’s brother). The Bishop of Mituco was present as amicus curiae and was seated beside Dr. Cedra on a ceremonial throne brought over from the Church of San Roque. Spotlights illuminated the central dais, the prosecution and defense tables, the witness stand, and the jury box, while from above the stage, red and amber lights played on the backdrop. Spectators were forbidden to enter while the trial was in session, and the refreshments on sale in the outer lobby were limited to nonalcoholic beverages.
The charges against Rebeca Fuertes25 were substantially those gossiped up by Zoreida Bocanegra. They were read off by the clerk as soon as the jury had been impaneled. Rebeca smiled calmly throughout this reading. She had chosen, over her counsel’s mild protest, to wear a dress of yellow silk brocade, a relic of the Chinese wardrobe she had brought to Mituco three years before, and her refusal to wear mourning had the effect of confirming all present in the prejudices they had carried with them into the theater: the vocal many were more than ever certain of her guilt; the silent few were convinced that she was being tried unjustly. All were forced to admire her composure, but it was evident that childbirth and imprisonment had wreaked a toll. Her face was haggard, her complexion ashen. And though none present realized it, she achieved serenity only by blacking out events about her and casting her mind across the plaza up to the room where her maid minded little León. She had ceased, in fact, to think about herself at all and existed only as a mother.
The case for the prosecution consumed three days. Licentiate Jacobo Mangle established that Don Patricio Garza had been known both in Mituco and in Europe for his great culture and mature judgment and that nonetheless he had taken the defendant, then an unwashed urchin, into his home and lavished luxuries upon her. Don Patricio’s former valet testified that he had on numerous occasions observed the defendant whispering to her Peruvian mare, and the Bishop of Mituco was then called upon to read into the record and clarify in layman’s terms a great volume of material from the science of demonology, explaining how witches operate with the aid of familiar spirits who take the form of animals. Mangle then summoned a cloud of witnesses to testify how Don Patricio had doted on Rebeca, exceeding the boundaries of good taste and stretching the limits of imagination in preparing entertainments for her fifteenth birthday. He established that Don Patricio’s suicide was a direct result of Rebeca’s desertion. He then called Señorita Zoreida Bocanegra, who describes herself as Don Patricio’s childhood playmate, sometime fiancée, and lifelong friend, and who stated under oath and in the strongest terms that the only explanation for Don Patricio’s comportment vis-à-vis the defendant was that he had been bewitched. Through all this testimony Rebeca’s counsel sat gazing up at the fresco of nymphs and cupids which adorned the theater ceiling and made no move to cross-examine.
