English synopsis

Synopsis
© Dr Geoffrey Kantaris, University of Cambridge, UK

 
Ch. 1

 
Felipe Montero, reading in a café, comes across a newspaper advertisement asking for a young qualified historian with knowledge of French. The job sound like it is made for him, but he assumes someone else will have answered the ad already. The next day, he sees the ad again, this time offering an increased sum of money. He makes his way through the choked city center, along old colonial streets where all the numbers have been changed. He knocks at the door of the house, and enters, leaving the traffic behind him, and is plunged into total darkness. A voice guides him up the stairs in the dark. He comes across a very old lady (Consuelo) lying in bed, who tells him his job will be to complete her ex-husband’s memoirs (General Llorente). One of the conditions of the job is that he must reside in the house. He hesitates, upon which Consuelo calls her niece, Aura, a young woman whose beauty encapsulates Felipe. While staring into Aura’s eyes, he accepts the job.

 
Ch. 2
Felipe follows Aura to the room he has been assigned. It is light and airy, even at dusk, compared with the dank darkness below. After a short rest, he descends for dinner, but finds that he cannot keep the door of his room open to light the way. He overhears the sound of screeching cats. Aura seats him at a table, illuminated by candlelight, and informs him that señora Consuelo is feeling weak, and will not be dining with them. They eat kidneys in onion sauce, and drink a heavy wine. Felipe tries not to stare at Aura, but every time he takes his gaze away from her, he finds he cannot remember her features. He remembers that he will need his documents from the place where he was staying, but Aura convinces him that the servant can fetch them — Felipe gives her the key, touching her hand sensually. Aura leaves hurriedly, and Felipe goes to see Consuelo, who does not appear to see him enter, and is kneeling in prayer in front of a wall filled with devotional objects. When she finishes, she asks him to open a trunk and take out some papers. This is the first installment of the General’s memoirs.  
Ch. 3

Felipe starts to read the General’s memoirs. He feels the style is not as good as señora Consuelo claims, and can easily be improved. Next morning, after shaving, he hears a plaintive, painful and shrill meowing. He climbs up to the skylight and sees a ball of cats wrapped in fire and smoke in what he assumes to be the garden. Aura comes to tell him breakfast is ready; he goes down and eats alone. He spends all morning working on the papers, thinking of the money he will be able to save which will enable him to write his own great historical work on the discovery and conquest of the New World. He descends for lunch, this time with both Aura and Consuelo. He notices that Aura seems to act mechanically, and in synchronism with Consuelo. Once they have left, he fantasizes that Aura is trapped in the house, and that he will be able to save her from the old lady’s tyranny. He sneaks into Aura’s room, where the only decoration is a black Christ. Later, he decides not to descend for dinner in the hope that Aura will notice and will come to him. He goes to bed and dreams for the first time in many years. It is a nightmare of a scrawny hand and hollowed eyes ringing a bell and warning him to leave. He is woken by young hands and lips caressing his face and hair: it is Aura. They make love in the pitch dark, and she murmurs to him: “You are my betrothed”. The next morning, Consuelo gives Felipe the next installment of papers. These confirm that Consuelo married Llorente when she was 15, and that now she must be 109. The papers also mention that Consuelo had green eyes, always wore a green taffeta dress, and that she developed an interest in torturing cats.

 
Ch. 4
Felipe suspects Aura has been brought to live in the house in order to keep Consuelo’s illusions of youth alive. He decides to go down and see Aura in the kitchen, and finds her skinning a goat, and she does not seem to recognize him. He goes to see Consuelo, and finds her making strange movements in the air, as if she were also skinning an imaginary goat. Horrified, he returns to his room, and tries to close the door, but there is no lock. He falls into a kind of sleep, in which he sees a crawling old woman, her apron bloodied, advancing towards him; her bleeding toothless gums pressing up against his face. He is awoken by Aura’s knock calling him to dinner. He has a headache, and has difficulty focusing on the clock. Downstairs, there is only one place set for dinner, and there is a rag doll, filled with sand, under the napkin. He fingers the doll as he eats cold kidneys, mechanically. He remembers that Aura has invited him to her room, but it is too soon to go, so he descends to the patio where, by the light of a match, he is able to identify various plants mentioned in pre-Conquest chronicles, and used in witchcraft. He returns to Aura’s room, to find her encircled by a strangely diffuse light which seems to confuse rather than separate objects. She is no longer the “niña Aura” of yesterday, but seems older, he guesses 40 years old. She initiates a sexual game, beneath the black Christ, in which she washes his feet (like Mary Magdalene) and breaks a communion wafer between her thighs to share with Felipe. She then offers herself to him as if crucified on the bed. As they make love, she asks him to swear that he will always love her, even when she is old and has white hair, is no longer beautiful, even if she dies. He swears. When he wakes up, he sees Aura standing at the end of the bed, and going over to sit on the floor at feet of someone whom he manages to make out is Consuelo. He wonders if she was there all along. They both smile at him, and move in exactly the same way, as they get up to leave.  
Ch. 5
Felipe awakes with the feeling that he has somehow engendered his own double in the events of the night before. He ponders the fact that Aura and Consuelo always move and act in exactly the same way when they are together. He tries to cling on to reality by naming the brands of the various products in his bathroom, but it is as if he is trying to repress something. When Aura comes to call him to breakfast, she is wearing a veil which prevents him from seeing her face. He tells her they should run away together. She is hesitant, but tells Felipe that Consuelo will be going out all day, and that they can meet up again in her aunt’s room that evening. After breakfast, when Consuelo has apparently gone out, Felipe enters her room and opens the trunk with the rest of the General’s memoirs and some photographs. Taking them upstairs, he reads that Consuelo had claimed to have found a way to bring back her fading youth. In the photographs, Consuelo looks exactly like Aura now. General Llorente is much older than she, but the more Felipe looks at the General, covering his white hair, the more he sees himself in the picture. Feeling dizzy, he lies on the bed and touches his face, fearing that it is being peeled off like a mask. He decides not to consult his watch again, since it measures the wrong sort of time, and knows nothing of the speeding clock of mortality. He wakes up in the dark and goes downstairs to find Aura in Consuelo’s room, where she had said she would be. He goes into the room, in the pitch dark, and finds her lying on the bed. She tells him not to touch her. Felipe cannot resist, and grabs her violently, ripping her clothes off, and kissing her all over. Suddenly the moonlight, filtering in through a large crack in the wall made by mice, illuminates Aura’s/Consuelo’s old body. Felipe/Llorente has returned.