“Sometimes I think, Doc, that men don't love me,” was the surprising comment from out of nowhere that she made to Dr. Flórez on Wednesday evening, after they had seen the last patient and were preparing to close the office and leave for their respective homes.
“What do you mean, you who are so loved by all of them?”
“That doesn't mean anything, Doc. What I want is just one man who loves me, but really loves me. The way you love and protect your wife, you know?” she asked as she scrubbed her hands with disinfectant soap, erasing the day's chores.
Dr. Antonio MarÃa didn't answer her either yes or no, instead he simply stood behind her as she washed her hands with the honest movements of someone who is unaware of being watched. He looked at her as he had never allowed himself to do before, that is to say, with eyes that seek to possess that upon which they are resting, and with the painful tension of desire he studied those hands with their long fingers and almond-shaped nails, all the more amazing for someone like the doctor, whose own nails capped stubby fingers. Then, slowly, breath by breath, he noticed the soft line of her arm as it disappeared into her short sleeve, and then moved his eyes immediately to the sea-shell of her ear, which offered him the fascination of a small labyrinth of flesh, then on to the shining glory of her hair that refused to stay out of her face even though she had shaken her head, and it slid forward again, back over her shoulders, alive and untamed, to fall forward and mingle with the splashing water. And it should be said, because Dr. Antonio MarÃa himself acknowledges it today, that in that opportunity his eyes took minute notice of the arousing vibration of the girl's buttocks, caused by the energetic movements of her hands as she rinsed them.
An hour later the doctor was sitting at his kitchen table in front of a plate of
arroz atollado
and lettuce salad served by his wife, Albita LucÃa, for whom the turbulence dancing in his mind didn't go unnoticed.
“You're coming from a place that you still haven't been able to leave,” she said to him, and to cover up he asked her to pass the pepper, but he wasn't able to prevent her from reading the images that moments before had been captured in his retinas.
“Do you think that I wouldn't have liked to be a
puta
?” she asked him, tilting her head of brassy curls in such a delightful manner that it immediately yanked him away from his journey through someone else's woman and brought him back to the complacency of finding himself at home with his very own.
“Really?” he inquired, intrigued and amused, letting out one of those laughs that exposed his rabbit's teeth to the elements. “I never suspected that you would want to go to bed with a lot of men.”
“I don't want to. If I were a
puta,
I would call myself Precious and I would charge so much that no man could afford me.”
The next day Dr. Antonio MarÃa left the clinic earlier than usual, asking Sayonara to be sure to lock the door securely when she left.
“
Adiós,
child. I have to go now, because Precious is waiting for me at home,” he said in parting. He hurried away from the clinic and didn't want to look back because he knew that Sayonara would be standing in the doorway, watching him leave, illuminated by the glow of loneliness that always surrounded her and that if he turned to look at her he would have been unable to resist the temptation to hug her tightly.
“Be gone, sorrow!” Piruetas was heard to shout as he came down the middle of the street with little dance steps and clowning around, with a bottle of white rum in his hand and clinging to a pair of very drunk girls.
“Be gone, sorrow,” they say Sayonara repeated as she locked the clinic door.
I am trying to concentrate on fragments of information about the famous rice strike that I have compiled from the press of the era, from files and from union documents, but my head is speeding off in ten different directions at the same time, as if trying to take in everything with one fell swoop. Writing this story has turned into an already lost race against time and faulty memory, twin brothers with long fingers that touch everything. Each day they appear and momentarily stir up before my eyes glimpses and reflections of situations, of moments, of words spoken or unspoken, of faces that I recognize as invaluable, loose pieces of the great puzzle of La Catunga, which overwhelm me with their little voices shouting for me to pay attention to them and ordering me to document them in writing or else they will be swept away by a broom and become lost among the debris. I cannot keep up with this attempt to imprison a world that goes by in flashes like a dream remembered upon waking, elusive in its vagueness and hallucinatory in its intensity.
Just as it is with my own dreams, I alone have the opportunity to bring into focus this fragile and volatile kaleidoscope, made of insect's wings; only for me does the keyhole exist, inviting me to spy, while on the other side of the door the disappearance continues little by little, and the only things that will endure are those that I am able to capture and to pierce with a pin to affix them to these pages.
But the task is more devilish still, because I am also assaulted by the conviction that, contradictorily, the very act of inserting myself into a foreign and private story, of sniffing around what otherwise would have disintegrated, of clearing the dust from shelves where already little more than dust remains, accelerates the fall into oblivion, just as occurred in Fellini's film
Roma,
where the camera, as it enters an ancient
domus
, hermetically sealed for centuries, catches a momentary glimpse of some frescoes that vanish instantaneously upon contact with the devastating external atmosphere. The same camera that perpetuates the image of the frescoes is what has destroyed them, as if they were real only as long as no one looked at them. I sense that like those frescoes, La Catunga is self-sufficient, can conserve itself in its own oblivion, and lives only when others ignore it.
Yet, at the same time it doesn't exist if I am not here to bear witness. And because of that I persevere, I meddle, I violate the story's reserve. This morning, for example, I was awakened by the need to define an image that earlier had barely caught my attention, that of the painter who at some point had done the oil portrait of Mistinguett that provoked such displeasure in her. Had it been just an ordinary artist, or an unknown amateur, or was it possibly someone who had managed to endure in museums and reproductions? Did that painting still exist, the one in which Mistinguett said she looked like a chicken? Curiosity compelled me to get up at once and, without pausing for breakfast, drove me to Todos los Santos's house.
I found her up and about and particularly spirited, renewed by a sudden burst of vanity: She had cloaked her old age and her ailments in a showy, bright-pink nylon nightgown, had mounted upon her withered bun a tall Spanish comb encrusted with gems, and wore on her feet a pair of slippers made of rabbit skin dyed a soft shade of pink.
“You look very elegant, Todos los Santos.”
“They are simply artifices to mask the weariness,” she clarified, and I began to question her about the famous painter while she, all pink and vaporous, visited one by one the cages of the strange zoo of small captive animals, unpleasant like all zoos, that she kept on the patio, in the garden, the corridor, and the kitchen of the house she shared with Fideo and Olga.
“That portrait? Who knows where it ended up?” she answered, as she tried to focus her dull pupils on a bizarre, awkward bird that was looking at her with round, pearly eyes like a pair of shell buttons. Missing a leg, the bird was clinging with the remaining one to the old woman's finger, wings flapping painfully to keep its balance as she offered it a piece of plantain.
“What kind of bird is that, and who amputated its foot?”
“It is a
chuachÃ
and when they brought it to me, as a baby, it was already mutilated, the poor thing. His name is Felipe.”
She told me that in spite of her reputation as a diva, Mistinguett was in reality a fat and wicked woman with large breasts, and that the painter, in contrast, was a timid and desperately fragile man, who from that day on never again made “modern portraits” of the girls because he had been discredited for making them look ugly, with wild hair and terrified eyes, as if they had been run over by a train.
“Except for the
pipatonas
. He did paint them in the modern style, because it didn't bother them,” Todos los Santos told me, now feeding rice to a friendly parrot that was walking up her arm and shoulder onto her head to peck at the stones shining in her comb.
“And what is this meddling parrot's name?”
“He's not a parrot, he's a
guacamayeta
, and his name is Felipe.”
“Are they all named Felipe?”
“No, that monkey's name is Niño.”
“And that cross between a fish and a pig?”
“He's a
zaÃno
and he's still just a baby. His name is Niño and he's my baby.”
“Niño!” she called out, and Niño trotted over, and several other un-classified specimens who must also have been named Niño grew restless and turned to look at her.
“I suppose that painter left La Catunga to look for another place where his paintings would be more appreciated . . .”
“No, he didn't leave,” Todos los Santos corrected me impatiently. “I already told you he stayed with the
pipatonas,
letting them take care of him and painting them for free in the modern style, and at the same time, to earn a living, he painted a series of landscapes in a more conventional style. Those we did admire, and we would buy landscapes from him every now and then.”
As I was able to establish later onâonly through hearsay, because I was never able to see any of his paintingsâ“the series of conventional landscapes” consisted of a few seascapes painted from descriptions he'd heard, several Paris street scenesâalso improvised because just as he had never seen the ocean, he had never traveled to Paris eitherâand a few sunsets in fierce violets and dramatic oranges that turned out to be his greatest commercial success because they were widely admired by the
putas
of Tora, including Todos los Santos.
“That was art! That was inspiration!” she exclaimed excitedly, as she changed the water in the cage of a toucan with an enormous yellow beak. “He was short and had a pale complexion, but I have heard, although I wouldn't know from experience, that he was the happy owner of a powerful and oversized sex organ, something like this toucan's beak. His name was Enrique. Enrique Ladrón de Guevara y Vernantes, with more family names than a telephone directory, because he came from a distinguished family.”
*
But his landowning and aristocratic blood didn't save him from moral sorrows or physical calamities. On the contrary, he was chained to them by several generations of intermixing Guevara thieves with Vernantes ladies, and of Guevara ladies with Vernantes thieves, who chose to marry among themselves to maintain their properties undivided and their lineage pure. With the lamentable result, unacknowledged by the family even in the face of the evidence, that defects and degeneration were twisting and deforming them until they began to produce circus freaks, whose physical rarities were attributed to the pernicious effects of supposed contracted illnesses and never to hereditary defects. Among these latter was Enrique, with his height of scarcely four and a half feet that was further reduced by the curvature of his misshapen legs. And as if his forsaken body weren't punishment enough, he was covered with, instead of hair, eyebrows, and beard, a fuzz like dried dandelion blossoms, more transparent than white, and only comparable in lack of pigmentation to his skinâa silk paper with a propensity for being damaged by the slightest accidentâwhich was the insipid color of watery milk and tinged with bluish highlights from the underlying network of illustrious veins.
“So Enrique Ladrón de Guevara y Vernantes was an albino dwarf?” I said to Todos los Santos.
“For Mistinguett and the others at the Dancing Miramar he was an albino dwarf, as you say, and they disdainfully ridiculed his physical defects, but to the women at La Copa Rota, which was the lowliest cave of a café, he was always respectfully called don Enrique. But if you want to know so much, go ask Fideo; no one knew him like she did.”
Fideo, skinnier than can be imagined, lies dark and shriveled like a dried prune in the hammock that is her deathbed, regurgitating memories and struggling to stay alive, because although she has wanted to leave this world for some time, her fear of death binds her to life. Sober and lucid only now, on the eve of her great, definitive drunken spree, she pulls out a contraband drop of enthusiasm amidst the miseries of her agony and smiles when I mention don Enrique's name.
“Ay, don Enrique!” she sighs, and catches her breath. “Ay, don Enrique . . .”
Fideo, the excruciatingly thin dancer at La Copa Rota, a drunk at the age of thirteen, fourteen at the most, and already filled with vices, initiated sometime earlier by force into the arts of hard love. “Dance, Fideo! Dance, skinny girl!” shout the barefoot
tagüeros
who frequent the place, sitting in the darkness on bundles of sorghum, oats, and rice, and she disrobes, takes a drink, and raises her arms, then half closes her eyes and undulates her wire-like waist, another drink and her dark bodyâalmost a whisper, barely a shadowâturns golden in the reflection of candlelight while at her feet, which are encased in an old pair of white children's shoes, it rains coins. While the others pretend not to notice, one of the
tagüeros
stands up drunkenly, raises Fideo in the air as if she were weightless, and takes her behind the curtain in the rear, toward the back rooms.
There was no place for a creature like Fideo in the red and black velvet rooms of the Dancing Miramar nor on the less pretentious stages in dance halls like Las Camelias, TabarÃn, or Quinto Patio. They wouldn't allow her in riffraff bars like Candilejas or El Cantinflas, or even in La Burraca, a late-night pool hall where schoolboys secretly went in search of old
putas
who would teach them how to love in exchange for a lemonade or a
mogolla
.