Their joy was so great at finally having been awarded their cards and the salary that qualified them as members of the working class, as part of the heroic union of
petroleros,
they didn't even realize that they didn't know what a
cuñero
was, much less a
cuñero
's helper.
“Look for skinny Emilia and ask for Abelino Robles, the gang leader. You just obey the orders he gives you, even if he tells you to put panties on a mermaid.”
They assured and reassured him that of course, he could count on them, and they sailed off filled with enthusiasm, and without understanding much about exactly where they were going or what they would be doing.
“Can you tell me who skinny Emilia is? Where I can find her?” Sacramento asked a nearby worker with a kind face.
“Did you hear that?” the worker said to the others around him. “This guy's dying to meet Emilia.”
“You don't want to fuck her because she'll rip your dick off,” someone shouted, laughing, as the group walked away.
Since skinny Emilia turned out not to be skinny or even a woman, but one of the drilling towers in Camp 26, Sacramento and Payanés reddened with embarrassment at their naiveté and decided that from then on they would do things on their own, opening their eyes wide and biting their tongues before asking anything. Emilia, the oldest and most venerated tower in the oil territoryâa 1912 Gardner Denverâstood solidly in the center of the camp like a ritual obelisk. Pachydermic and anachronistic but also imposing and all-powerful, Emilia was brutal in the merciless obsession with which she twisted her diamond bit to tear into the earth's heart, and famous not only for having worked day and night for decades without ever failing but also for her implacable temperament. It was said that if you handled her with intelligence and in full command of your five senses she treated you well, but the clumsy and the careless she made pay with their lives, as had already happened on two occasions, first with a pipe capper who she let fall fifty feet like a dove without wings, then, years later, a welder who she cut in two with the fulminating whip of a high-tension wire that suddenly broke without warning.
“Look at her carefully,” Abelino Robles, the veteran
cuñero,
advised them. “Not only does she spin furiously, but the smallest part of her weighs as much as a man. All it takes is for you to drop a wrench on your foot to put you out of commission permanently, not to mention putting a hand where it doesn't belong.”
“This Emilia; I've never seen such an incredible beast,” said Payanés, impressed, looking at her deeply and lovingly as if she were a pagan temple, delicately caressing the bluntness of her iron beams and unconsciously making a pledge of fidelity that would be honored without fail from that first encounter until the day death parted them.
“So, Payanés is dead?” I ask.
“Emilia is dead.”
The alliance between the two of them was sealed that very night, when Payanés was approached by a wandering peddler who professed some skill in the art of tattooing and offered him the painless inscription of the name of the woman he loved anywhere on his body.
“Put âEmilia' here, on my chest. And put a little drawing beside it.”
“How about a dagger or a swallow?”
“No, no daggers, and no swallows either.”
“What about a rose?”
“That's it, a rose; a rose with a thorn and a drop of blood.”
“The rose didn't turn out very well, it looked more like a carnation,” Sacramento would say later, when he saw the drawing engraved forever in blue and red ink on his friend's left pectoral. “The drop does look very realistic. But the âEmilia' . . . the âEmilia,' I don't know, Payanés, it seems risky. If they change your position you won't be able to take off your shirt even to take a bath.”
“They're not going to change my position,” asserted Payanés, before he fell asleep in his hammock. “I'm going to be the best
cuñero
in the whole country, you'll see.”
For three daysâthe three days of apprenticeshipâthe two young men carried out the humble task of being the
cuñero
's helpers, which consisted of clearing the mud off the platform as they watched, not missing a thing, Abelino Robles and another seasoned worker execute the job of
petrolero
with the precision of watchmakers and the mental concentration of lion tamers and with Emilia's monumental and furious gears seemingly calmed by their touch.
“Now it's your turn,” announced Abelino Robles at the beginning of the fourth day.
“Let's go!” shouted Payanés animatedly to Sacramento. “Let's put the panties on this mermaid.”
The drilling pipe, which needed to penetrate the earth to a depth of three thousand feet, would grow longer as the
cuñeros,
from a low platform, screwed on more and more lengths of fifty-foot pipe. In order to do this, Sacramento would have to grip the new piece of pipe, which was hanging vertically through the center of the tower, with a precision wrench known as the scorpion, while Payanés capped the string of buried pipes with a 130-pound steel crown fitted with special bolts. Each time the bit wore out they had to remove the fitted pipes and disassemble them, reversing the fitting process.
“You're going to work as a team and each of you is going to depend on the other,” the veteran fitter advised them. “Sacramento, if you slip with the scorpion, the pipe will sever your friend's hands; Payanés, if you don't fit the band well, the pipes will slide and the scorpion will spin around, kick Sacramento, and mess him up.”
From the beginning Payanés showed natural ability, and even a certain happiness and ease of execution, and he proudly displayed on his naked torso, bathed in sweat, the throbbing
petrolero
's rose, with its sharp thorn and drop of blood. Meanwhile, Sacramento seemed afraid and uncertain, gripped with nervous tension, as if counting every minute of every hour remaining before their shift ended without accident.
“Don't worry,
hermano,
I won't let you down,” he shouted to Payanés above the deafening racket every now and then, as if to assure himself that what he was saying was true.
After eight hours of uninterrupted exertion, the whistle blew and the pair abandoned skinny Emilia to head for the barracks, arm in arm, exhausted, muddy from head to toe, and as giddy as a couple of boys who had just won a soccer match.
For only three weeks Sacramento was able to enjoy this occupational happiness, which for him meant, above all else, the possibility of getting closer to Sayonara. The illness, which had already infected him with its germ and dogged his steps, then fell upon him with all of its fury. The first manifestation was a dull, nagging pain, which made him dizzy and which he attributed to the eight hours a day that he spent focused on the bit.
“My thoughts were growing more and more confused and my love for Sayonara more tormented, and I blamed it on the noise of the machinery. But even when I had moved away from the drilling equipment, its roar pursued me; I heard it all night and its vibration rattled me to the bone.
“Later I lost my appetite and even when I'd had nothing to eat I vomited yellow, watery bile, for which I also found a justification, this time in the hardened balls of cold rice with lard that were passed around at lunchtime; they were so compact and inedible that we would use them as soccer balls.”
Then he was overtaken by a waxy paleness and a pain in his temples, and a rising fever made its appearance. Sacramento, incapable of working and declared contagious by the medical staff, was moved to the camp's neat white hospital, where he came to share space and destinies with other lucky souls who were cured in fifteen or twenty days, and also with others less fortunate who were being consumed by mountain leprosy, malaria, intestinal infection, or tuberculosis and who represented nothing more to the company than financial loss.
Forgotten in that antiseptic corner of industrial paradise, Sacramento defended himself from the invading parasite with all of his available energy, and the ferocity of the internal combat began to produce extremely high fevers, combined with shivering and a trembling of his bones, which creaked in self-defense.
“I'm turning black,
hermano,
” he said to a nurse called Demetrio.
“It's the melancholic fluids that are spreading through your body,” explained Demetrio, who knew nothing of diplomacy when it came time to explain to his patients the symptoms of their illnesses.
“The black fluids, you mean?”
“Yes. They flow, little by little, blackening the liver, the spleen, the brain, the red blood cells. Well, just about everything; they turn everything black.”
“
Hermano,
I'm burning alive,” Sacramento complained to his friend Payanés, who came to visit whenever he could. “I'm burning with fever and with love and I'm roasting over a low fire. Don't I look black to you?”
“Black, no; just a little yellow. But it'll go away. Sooner or later everybody gets over it.”
Despite Payanés's forced words of comfort, Sacramento felt weaker and weaker, more diminished, while a microscopic but audacious enemy was growing and multiplying inside him, assuming the frightening shapes of rings, clubs, and bunches of grapes.
Twice a day apathetic nurses went by the beds of those they called convalescents, among whomâwith who knows what criteriaâSacramento had been placed. They performed their duties on the run, without paying much attention to anyone or asking any questions, distributing the only available medicine: quinine for fevers, aspirin for pain, brown mixture for infections, and white mixture for unknown ills.
“Don't get too excited about the medicine, it's more toxic than the illness is,” Demetrio would say to Sacramento as he gave him his ration of quinine. “Look at these pills, they're pink and round like women. And hurtful like women.”
Like a bad actor, Sacramento would perform the same brief, equivocal scene every morning. He would stand up on his trembling legs, splash water on his face, halfheartedly run a comb through his tangled hair, and announce that he was cured, that he wanted to be taken to skinny Emilia because he was ready to go back to work.
“Tell me where there's oil,” he would rant, “and that's where I'll drill the hole.”
The next minute, exhausted by the futile exertion, he would collapse back onto his bed, surrendering to the fever, renouncing his existence in this world and withdrawing into his delirious passion for Sayonara. He would spend hours immobile with his eyes rolled back, searching for her, pleading and whispering incoherently into her ear, his whole body lifeless, feeling the sweat cooling on his skin and turning into a fine film of salt, telling him that everything was useless, that his dreams had already been shattered forever.
“I started to think that letting myself die from love was the only course, and that the sooner it happened the better.”
Resigned to the other side of hibernation, receptive now to the idea of nothingness, he noticed with annoyance how without his consent his body reinitiated the war against the parasite; how his army of white blood cells remobilized, infuriating once more the fevers and the deterioration, stirring up again the demands of life, which in spite of his wishes refused to surrender without attempting one last battle.
On his first free Friday, Payanés traveled to La Catunga but he was unable to get into the Dancing Miramar, which was overflowing with people, not to mention the line two blocks long formed by those waiting for the opportunity to enter. He settled for a few drinks in a third-rate bar in the company of a young thing called Molly Flan. He returned to the camp on Sunday night and the first thing he did was to run to the hospital to bring news of Sayonara to his bedridden friend.
“I didn't get to see her,
hermano,
but I heard what they were saying about her. That she's the most sought-after woman in Tora and that she's not a woman but a panther.”
“Were you with her?”
“I told you I wasn't, she was too much in demand. They say she only goes with gringos, engineers, and administrative personnel. They say she has no interest in lowly laborers.”
“Then it's true that she exists . . .” Spikes of fever turned a black spot in front of Sacramento's watery eyes into a cat, then a swamp, a woman, storm clouds, then a cat again.
“Tell me more,” he asked Payanés, who noted his friend's hopeless thinness and the sickly color of his skin, wavering between yellow and green.
“I should go, Sacramento. I have to get some sleep before I go back to work tomorrow.”
“Tell me once more and then you can go.”
“What do you want me to tell you about?”
“The panther, tell me about the panther.”
“What panther?”
“That woman, Sayonara; didn't you say she looks like a panther?”
“If I were you I would aim a little lower so you don't get disappointed. I met a woman they call Molly Flan, you can't imagine how bewitching her eyes are . . .”
“Hush, my head aches. Tell me about Sayonara.”
“Again?”
“One last time.”
“I already told you what they say about her, that she's dark and inspires fear. She smells like incense and she hypnotizes when she dances, like a snake.”
The black spot in front of Sacramento's eyes changed shapes again and turned into a hairy snake, and then a panther without eyes or a tail, and then into a shapeless oil spot with golden highlights, a rapturous spot shaped with a waist and long, elastic legs, two legs that twisted like ribbons around his throat, choking and asphyxiating him with thirst.
“Give me some water,
hermano
.”
“They say the camp's water is polluted and spreads sickness.”
“Give me some water anyway. When are you going to see her again?”