The Wrong Blood by De Lope Manuel

Author:De Lope, Manuel
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2010-09-14T04:00:00+00:00

“I, too, was a man in love,” the doctor said in the course of the meal, and then he went on to recount to the lawyer the story bruited about by the old gardeners of Hondarribia, that is, the one about the clump of hydrangeas—of hortensias—and the woman of that name to whom those flowers were dedicated, and about the doctor’s ephemeral romantic relationship with her. But had the doctor continued to expatiate upon his emotional life, amid the knives and the forks and the succession of dishes, his young companion would have thought, “This man is an idiot,” and that was obviously not the doctor’s goal, if indeed he had one other than the goal of acting like a proper host in that hotel restaurant. He prided himself on controlling his thoughts. With age, his desire to explore memory and acquire the discipline of knowledge had taken on dramatic aspects, like a theater production whose director reveals only the seductive and advantageously lit sequence of events going on downstage and leaves the shadowy nightmares of the backstage area for themes never to be expressed. Isabel had spent her honeymoon in that same hotel and eaten lunch, with everyday banality, in that same dining room. The carpets and upholstery had surely been changed since then, and the waiters weren’t the same, because otherwise they would have looked as mummified and crippled as the doctor himself. There had been no change in the lamps that hung from the ceiling, the ones called “spiders,” with tear-shaped crystals and bronze arms and hundreds of pieces of many-faceted glass, which was at that moment mingling the rainy grayness reflected from outside with the brilliant sparkle of the wall lights. The arrangement of tables and chairs was different. Back in those days, great hotels had become the cathedrals of the haut monde, performing the function that cathedrals had provided in centuries gone by, centers of pilgrimage and enjoyment and boredom where visitors were served by canons or maîtres d’hôtel. And if a new cloudburst pelted the windows of the dining room with rainwater, Doctor Castro’s thoughts would become even sadder, although they were already sad and guilty about what concerned him. He would have liked to tell the story as though he’d found it written down in pencil, in some impulsive, passionate, immediate form, like the outpourings in war diaries and in letters from prison, and—why not?—in diaries written by women, subject to every sort of distress and disinclined to take the trouble, in times of shortages, to find pen and ink, which, however, Captain Herráiz had not lacked when he wrote his two letters, the first from San Sebastián, and the second when he was on his way to the front. And had those letters never been received, perhaps a school notebook would have turned up, written in pencil, with a record of the distress suffered by the addressee in wartime, but the letters arrived, the first because it had been deposited in a

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