The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [208]
But neither Colonel José Bernardo Murau nor Adalberto de Gumúcio was listening. The latter was rereading the papers that the baron had just translated for them, bringing them up close to the candelabrum lighting the dining-room table, from which their empty coffee cups had not yet been removed. Old Murau, swaying back and forth in his high-backed chair at the table as though he were still in his rocking chair in the little sitting room, appeared to have fallen asleep. But the baron knew that he was thinking about what his guest had read to the two of them.
“I’m going to see Estela,” the baron said, rising to his feet.
As he walked through the ramshackle manor house, plunged in shadow, to the bedroom where they had put the baroness to bed shortly before dinner, he calculated the impression that that sort of testament left with him by the Scottish adventurer had made on his friends. As he stumbled on a broken tile in the hallway onto which bedrooms on either side opened, he thought: “There will be more questions in Salvador. And each time I explain why I let him go, I’ll have the same feeling that I’m lying.” Why exactly had he let Galileo Gall go? Out of stupidity? Out of weariness? Out of disgust at everything that had happened? Out of sympathy? “I have a weak spot in my heart for odd specimens, for what’s abnormal,” he thought, remembering Gall and the nearsighted journalist.
From the doorway, in the feeble reddish glow of the night lamp on the bedside table, he saw Sebastiana’s profile. She was sitting at the foot of the bed, in an armchair with cushions, and though she had never been a cheerful, smiling woman, her expression now was so grave that the baron was alarmed. She had risen to her feet on seeing him enter the room.
“Has she gone on sleeping quietly?” the baron asked, raising the mosquito netting and bending over to look at his wife. Her eyes were closed and in the semidarkness her face, though very pale, looked serene. The sheets rose and fell gently with her breathing.
“Sleeping, yes, but not all that quietly,” Sebastiana said in a low voice, accompanying him to the door of the bedroom. She lowered her voice even more, and the baron noted the concern lurking deep in her black eyes. “She’s dreaming. She keeps talking in her sleep—always about the same thing.”
“Sebastiana doesn’t dare mention the words ‘burning down,’ ‘fire,’ ‘flames,’” the baron thought with a heavy heart. Would they become taboo, would he be obliged to give orders that any words that Estela might associate with the holocaust at Calumbi never be uttered in their home? He had taken her by the arm, trying to calm her, but could find nothing to say to her. He felt the maidservant’s smooth, warm skin beneath his fingers.
“My mistress cannot stay here,” she muttered. “Take her to Salvador. Doctors must see her, give her something, free her mind of those memories. She can’t go on suffering such anguish night and day.”
“I know, Sebastiana,” the baron assured her. “But it’s such a long, hard journey. It strikes me as too great a risk to expose her to more traveling in the state she’s in. Though I grant that it may be even more dangerous to keep her from getting medical treatment. We’ll see tomorrow. You must go get some rest now. You haven’t slept a wink either for several days now.”
“I’m going to spend the night here with my mistress,” Sebastian answered in a defiant tone of voice.
As he saw her settle herself in the armchair at Estela’s bedside, the thought ran through the baron’s mind that she was still a woman with a firm, beautiful, admirably preserved figure. “Just like Estela,” he said to himself. And in a wave of nostalgia he remembered that in the first years of their marriage