Eva Luna by Isabel Allende Page A

going to go see what he’s doing to Mama,” Rolf announced when he could no longer bear the knowledge that just across the hall a nightmare was being enacted that had existed in this house for as long as he could remember.
    â€œYou stay there,” Jochen replied. “I’ll go. I’m the oldest.”
    And, instead of huddling deeper under the covers as he had done all his life, he got out of bed, his mind a blank. With precise movements he pulled on his trousers, his jacket, and his wool cap, and laced up his heavy boots. Then he unlocked their door, crossed the hall, and tried to open the door to the living room, but the bolt was shot. With the same slow and deliberate motions he used when setting his traps or splitting wood, he drew back his leg and with one strong kick burst the metal bolt from the door. Rolf, barefoot and still in his pajamas, had followed his brother, and when the door flew open he saw his mother, totally naked, teetering in a pair of ridiculous red high-heeled boots. Enraged, Lukas Carlé roared at them to get out, but Jochen continued forward; he walked past the table, brushed aside the woman attempting to stop him, and approached his father with such purpose that the man took a hesitant step backward. Jochen’s fist struck his father’s chin with the strength of a hammer blow, slamming him onto the sideboard, which collapsed with a sound of splintering wood and shattering china. Rolf looked at the inert body on the floor, gulped, ran to his room, pulled a blanket from his bed, and brought it back to cover his mother’s nakedness.
    â€œGoodbye, Mama,” said Jochen from the front door, not daring to look at her.
    â€œGoodbye, Son,” she murmured, relieved that at least one of her sons would be safe.
    The next morning, Rolf rolled up the legs of his brother’s long trousers and wore them to take his father to the hospital, where a doctor reset his jaw. For weeks Carlé could not speak and had to be fed liquid through a straw. With the departure of her elder son, Frau Carlé sank into depression, and Rolf had to face his detested and feared father alone.
    Katharina had a face like a little squirrel and a soul innocent of memory. She was able to feed herself, ask when she needed to go to the bathroom, and run and hide under the table when her father arrived—but that was the extent of her capacity. Rolf used to look for little treasures to bring her: a beetle, a polished stone, a nut she opened carefully to extract the meat. She repaid him with absolute devotion. She waited for him all day, and when she heard his footsteps and saw his upside-down face peering between the table legs, she murmured like a sea gull. She spent hours beneath the huge table, protected by the rough wood, until her father left or fell asleep and someone rescued her. She became adjusted to life in her shelter, attuned to approaching or receding footsteps. Sometimes she did not want to come out even though there was no danger, and then her mother would pass her a bowl of food, and Rolf would get a coverlet and slip under the table with her to curl up for the night. Often when Lukas Carlé sat down to eat, his feet nudged his children—mute, motionless, hands tightly clasped—beneath the table, isolated in their refuge where sounds, odors, and alien presences were muffled by the illusion of being underwater. The brother and sister spent so much time there that Rolf Carlé never forgot themilky light beneath the tablecloth, and many years later, on the other side of the world, he awakened one morning weeping under the white mosquito netting where he slept with the woman he loved.

THREE
    O ne night at Christmas when I was six years old, my mother swallowed a chicken bone. The Professor, eternally absorbed in his insatiable thirst for knowledge, never observed that holiday—or any other—but the household servants always celebrated Christmas Eve. They set up a