Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,22
Rosario, and we did trek out into wild places, where, I came to believe, not even Amerigo Vespucci and Pedro de Mendoza had ventured. We brought specimens home with us to a laboratory Fräulein Hoffman had set up in the library. She anesthetized the frogs and lizards with something—chloral hydrate. If not quite dead, they at least seemed mercifully unconscious when she picked up a scalpel and made the first incision. ‘Do you know, Natalia, that after excision a lizard’s heart continues to beat, or appears to beat?’ Fräulein Hoffman showed me small white scars on her fingertips, where she had burned herself on the hearts of those poor dismembered amphibians.
“I called her a witch. She slapped my face. ‘Behave like a witch and you are one,’ I said. It was true. She bewitched everyone, even my father, who blushed like a boy when he saw her. We were happy, my governess and I, and then she met someone at the German Friendship Club in Buenos Aires. His name was Johannes Winkler. He came with us when we went on our rambles. When he was with us, Fräulein Hoffman would send me off alone to search for specimens. I couldn’t wait to show her what I’d found. I ran back with a leaf, a snail still chewing on it, and there was Herr Winkler kneeling on the ground, kissing my governess’s bare legs—she’d thrown her stockings on the grass—and she was standing with her head thrown back, her eyes closed in ecstasy. I ran away. I waited and returned and found them on the grass, in the open, carrying on. I knew what they were doing. I had seen bulls mounting cows. I had seen dogs copulating in the street. I ran at them, shouting, ‘Get up, get up!’ My governess pushed Herr Winkler off and scrambled to her feet. Her small breasts looked like apricots blanched in boiling water. Her pale hair was slipping out of its pins. I kicked her and hit her with my fists and screamed: ‘Adulteress! Slut! Whore!’ Words I’d heard the cook and maids using, gossiping among themselves, when they thought I wasn’t listening.”
She saw Herr Winkler naked; she saw everything and laughed, pointing, and said she was going to tell her parents, and Fräulein Hoffman would be dismissed, and no one would employ her as a governess. Fräulein Hoffman pleaded with her, begged on her knees, and finally Beatriz relented and said she would keep quiet if Fräulein Hoffman promised never to see Herr Winkler again. Fräulein Hoffman wept, her eyes and nose streamed, she made herself pitiable. A lady would not be so blatant in her sorrow, Beatriz had thought coldly. Her father had asked: What has happened to upset your governess, Beatriz? Nothing, she said. Fräulein Hoffman grew thinner and, if possible, paler. She lost interest in collecting specimens, and sometimes fell asleep while teaching Latin or reading Faust to her. Faust!
Fräulein Hoffman never saw her homeland again. She did not return to Swabia, as Beatriz had told the girls at the convent. No, Inga Hoffman contracted yellow fever and died, at age twenty-four. At the graveside, Beatriz’s father gave her a handful of dirt to throw on the coffin, and the dry rattle of small stones on the wood made her stomach rise into her throat. But her governess was not in the coffin; she was in heaven, with the angels. The God who created beetles and lizards and frogs must Himself be very mysterious and, well—radical. He would not condemn Fräulein Hoffman for loving Johannes Winkler. Still, Beatriz felt no remorse. In her mind, Fräulein Hoffman had betrayed her and deserved to be punished.
Beatriz refused to have another governess or to attend school. She occupied her time drawing beautiful women in sumptuous gowns. She read her way through her parents’ library of travelogues from the 1800s, tedious memoirs of Wilhelmine childhoods, the lives of the saints. At thirteen, she was browsing bookshops for more stimulating material: romance novels, adventure stories, practical guides on astronomy, beekeeping, and bookkeeping, which fascinated her. She taught herself double-entry bookkeeping and began helping in the office of her parents’ exporting and wholesale business. Numbers existed as inky symbols on a page and at the same time as actual commodities mined from the earth or grown in the soil or taken to a slaughterhouse and butchered, packed in tins, and shipped across the ocean to Europe. As these commodities increased in value on the open