The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [83]
“What a nice surprise your daughter gave you, Uncle Agustín. You didn’t expect your little girl to come back to life and pay you a visit. It’s a happy time, isn’t it, Uncle Agustín?”
She kisses him again on the forehead and just as abruptly forgets about him. She sits next to Urania on the edge of the bed. She takes her by the arm, looks at her, examines her, overwhelms her again with exclamations and questions:
“You look so good, girl. We’re the same age, right? And you look ten years younger. It’s not fair! It must be because you never married and had children. Nothing like a husband and kids to ruin your looks. What a figure, what skin! You look like a kid, Urania!”
She begins to recognize in her cousin’s voice the nuances, the accents, the music of the little girl she played with so often in the courtyards of Santo Domingo Academy, and to whom she so often had to explain geometry and trigonometry.
“A whole lifetime of not seeing each other, Lucindita, of not knowing anything about each other,” she exclaims at last.
“It’s your fault, you ungrateful thing.” Her cousin lectures her with affection, but now her eyes blaze with the question, the questions, that uncles, aunts, and cousins must have asked one another so often in the early years, after the sudden departure of Uranita Cabral, at the end of May 1961, for the distant town of Adrian, Michigan, where Siena Heights Preparatory School and College had been established by the same order of Dominican nuns that administered Santo Domingo Academy in Ciudad Trujillo. “I never understood it, Uranita. You and I were such good friends besides being cousins, we were so close. What happened to make you suddenly turn away from us? From your papa, your aunts and uncles, your cousins. Even from me. I wrote twenty or thirty letters and not a word from you. For years I sent you postcards, birthday cards, and so did Manolita and my mama. What did we ever do to you? What made you so angry that for thirty-five years you never wrote, never even set foot in your own country?”
“The foolishness of youth, Lucindita.” Urania laughs and takes her hand. “But now, as you can see, I’m over it, and here I am.”
“Are you sure you’re not a ghost?” Her cousin pulls back to look at her, and shakes her head in disbelief. “Why come like this, not letting anybody know? We would have met you at the airport.”
“I wanted to surprise you,” Urania lies. “It was a last-minute decision. An impulse. I threw a couple of things in a suitcase and caught a plane.”
“In the family, we were sure you’d never come back again.” Lucinda becomes serious. “Uncle Agustín too. I have to tell you, he suffered a lot. Because you didn’t want to talk to him, wouldn’t answer him on the phone. He was desperate, he used to cry about it to my mama. He never got over your treating him like that. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m telling you this, I don’t want to interfere in your life, Urania. It’s because we were always so close. Tell me about yourself. You live in New York, right? I know things are going well for you. We’ve followed your career, you’re a legend in the family. You work in a very important office, don’t you?”
“Well, there are bigger law firms than ours.”
“It doesn’t surprise me that you’ve been so successful in the United States,” Lucinda exclaims, and Urania detects an acid note in her cousin’s voice. “Everybody saw it coming from the time you were a little girl, you were so intelligent and studious. Mother Superior said so, and Sister Helen Claire, Sister Francis, Sister Susana, and especially Sister Mary, you were always her pet: Uranita Cabral, an Einstein