Eva Luna Read Online Free PDF

and sound ever since. I have no marks on my skin, only a few cigarette burns, and I expect tobe free of wrinkles in my old age because the effect of sheep’s tallow is everlasting.
    My mother was a silent person, able to camouflage herself against the furniture or to disappear in the design of a rug. She never made the slightest commotion; it was almost as if she were not there. In the privacy of the room we shared, however, she was transformed. When she talked about the past, or told her stories, the room filled with light; the walls dissolved to reveal incredible landscapes, palaces crowded with unimaginable objects, faraway countries that she invented or borrowed from the Professor’s library. She placed at my feet the treasures of the Orient, the moon, and beyond. She reduced me to the size of an ant so I could experience the universe from that smallness; she gave me wings to see it from the heavens; she gave me the tail of a fish so I would know the depths of the sea. When she was telling a story, her characters peopled my world, and some of them became so familiar that still today, so many years later, I can describe the clothing they wore and the tone of their voice. She maintained intact her memories of her childhood in the Mission; she retained all the anecdotes she had heard and those she had learned in her readings. She manufactured the substance of her own dreams, and from those materials constructed a world for me. Words are free, she used to say, and she appropriated them; they were all hers. She sowed in my mind the idea that reality is not only what we see on the surface; it has a magical dimension as well and, if we so desire, it is legitimate to enhance it and color it to make our journey through life less trying. The characters she summoned to the enchanted world of her stories are the only clear memories I have of my first years; the rest existed in a kind of mist where the household servants, the aged Professor prostrate in hisbicycle-wheeled armchair, and the string of patients and cadavers he attended in spite of his infirmity, all blended together. Children annoyed Professor Jones, but he was usually lost in his own thoughts, and when he ran into me in some corner of the house, he scarcely saw me. I was a little afraid of him because I did not know whether the old man had fabricated the mummies or whether they had engendered him; they all seemed to belong to the same parchment-skinned family. His presence had no effect on me because we lived in different worlds. I roamed through the kitchen, the patios, the servants’ quarters, the garden, and when I followed my mother to the other parts of the house, I moved very quietly so the Professor would think I was a prolongation of her shadow. The house had so many different smells that I could go around with my eyes closed and guess where I was: aromas of food, clothing, coal, medicines, books, and dankness fused with the characters from the stories, enriching those years.
    I was brought up on the theory that all vices issue from idleness, an idea implanted by the Little Sisters of Charity and cultivated by the learned doctor with his despotic discipline. I had no conventional toys, although the truth was that everything in the house served me in my games. During the day, there was no time for rest; idle hands were considered a source of shame. Beside my mother I scrubbed the wood floors, hung clothes out to dry, chopped vegetables, and at the time of siesta tried to knit and embroider—but I do not remember those tasks as being oppressive. It was like playing house. The Professor’s sinister experiments did not disturb me either; my mother explained that the head-thumping and the mosquito-bite treatments—fortunately, infrequent—were not indications of her employer’s cruelty, but the mostrigorous scientific therapy. With her confident manner of handling the embalmed bodies like relatives down on their luck, my mother nipped