“Why?” I ask Todos los Santos. “Why did they refuse her entry everywhere? For being an alcoholic?”
“Partially for being an alcoholic, because in the better bars it wasn't proper for a woman to get drunk. From the first day they taught us how to pretend by drinking rum diluted with three parts of mint tea instead of straight rum. But the main reason she wasn't allowed in wasn't that, but due to a bad habit that Fideo had.”
“And what was that habit?”
“She would cut men's faces, or scratch them with her fingernails. Fideo had had a devilish temperament since she was a little girl, and at the first sign of displeasure with her clients she would leave them scarred. They would complain to the owners of the bar, and when there were several victims, they would throw her out into the street.”
For weeks Fideo would wander around looking for a new client, and when she found one, she would completely forget the lesson she had just learned; at the least provocation the claw would emerge and she would scratch again. And she kept going downhill from there, knocking on doors that were further and further away until she found refuge on the bottom rung, according to Tora's peculiar and rigid hierarchy: La Copa Rota, a grain store with a straw roof and a hard-packed dirt floor that during the day sold feed and at night became a bordello, with an open drum in a corner for a toilet and illuminated by gas lamps because it had no electricity. It was on the edge of a horse path a half hour from the pueblo, in the shadow of the thick jungle where you could already begin to feel the threat of tigers and the green breath of the vast humid expanse. A dozen
pipatonas,
recruited from a neighboring village, took care of the shabbiest clientele in Tora, a migrating barefooted population comprised of hunters, wood gatherers,
tagüeros
, and other poor jungle scavengers, who returned from their outings exhausted, malaria-ridden, and full of worms to seek comfort between the first pair of legs that welcomed them.
Where else would don Enrique and Fideo have met each other? Unacceptable specimens of their respective universes, each in his own painful way. Where else, if not in this exact spot, this last resort, situated on the margin of all human vanity, would their destinies meet, the violated and drunken adolescent and the dwarf artist and aristocrat? Only at La Copa Rota, of course, according to the centrifugal laws of marginalization; in that attempt at a bordello where the Pipatón Indian women worked as prostitutes without red lightbulbs, or green ones, or yellow, let alone white ones, assuming the electric wires had reached that far; having given up the nakedness without surprises, with which they had moved freely about the jungle, to drape themselves with tight outfits made of cheap fabrics that made them look heavy and shapeless like barrels, and wearing crooked high-heeled shoes that bruised their toes; adorned with fake gold rings and earrings, these women, for whom pure gold had beenâso they sayâfamiliar and noble like water and corn.
“Did Fideo like the paintings he made of her?” I ask Todos los Santos.
“Yes, she liked them, and they made her laugh. Don Enrique told her jokes while he painted her and was very clownish. He used to put a lit match near his ass when he was going to fart and a flame would come out.”
Don Enrique distinguished himself with vast experience in matters pertaining to sex, which in comparison made the other clients of La Copa Rota appear innocent and illiterate. Because they arrived tired and starved for women, they would do their thing and then immediately fall asleep on top of the bags of grain, or they would leave and not come back, or they would come back when the women had already given up on them. But don Enrique rented one of the rooms at the back of the brothel on a permanent basis and became a member of the household, eating breakfast on the patio with the regulars and never seeming to be in a rush to do anything. In the mornings he would play dominoes or dice with Fideo, making her laugh with jokes about ladies who pee and gentlemen who poop. And in the afternoons he would paint. He painted her over and over again: lying down, standing, or sitting; dressed, undressed, or half-dressed; with red bows or perfumed flowers in her hair; taking her siesta or eating a mango or playing with the cat, as if his only happiness in life were painting her. And they toasted with little glasses of
aguardiente,
the strong licorice-flavored liquor. One for the model, another for the painter, two for the model, two for the painter, because they both drank shamelessly and in the same quantities.
When Fideo wasn't there, or was in a bad mood or didn't want to model, then don Enrique would be content to paint some drunk lying on a table or the boy behind the bar, who knew how to dress up like a fairy, a gypsy, and a beauty queen, but most of all he painted the
pipatonas,
staring off into space while waiting for clients, nursing their babies, or weaving straw baskets as they sat on the dirt floor waiting for clients.
He even painted the owner's cat several times and Fideo decided that those were his best paintings. He also enjoyed watching the women dance, holding one another close, and other things that they did but didn't talk about afterward out of shame. Fideo and the
pipatonas
brought him the news, massaged his legs, forever aching, with petroleum pomade and electric liniment, and forgave him for everything because he was an artist, and artists had the right to invent crazy things and to be different from everyone else. They liked to smooth his hair with their horsetail brushes and they called him Angel Hair, convinced that his exceptional hair and his strange body contained happy omens and were a symbol of something good, because without a doubt God had exerted himself to the maximum to produce such a unique and comical creature.
“You're so blond, don Enrique!” Fideo would praise him when she was in a loving mood, and she would caress his pale down. “I'd like to have a child as blond as you.”
“Fideo never hurt don Enrique, as she did other men?” I ask Todos los Santos.
“She scratched him a few times, but nothing of much consequence. She wasn't lacking in motives, because don Enrique was always chasing her around, trying to stick his equipment where it didn't belong. Who knows where he learned so many strange things and dirty games, maybe in the palaces of the nobility, where he lived as a boy,” Todos los Santos tells me, and Fideo, from her hammock, lets out a lively Ay!
Without even trying, Fideo knew how to cultivate her own style, hormonal, hurtful, and crude, and she raised the bar slightly on what was permissible by disrobing and exhibiting her wounded soul and her malnourished body, by marking men's faces for life, and by vomiting abundantly when she got carried away with the
aguardiente
. In a world of prostitution where the most daring acts were dance contests, Fideo was a scandal and an invitation into transgression, and Tora still remembers her as a skinny, ferocious girl with a hoarse voice who would climb up on the tables and shout:
“Bring me a man who loves me and a tiger to scratch my ass!”
One day don Enrique had confessed to the girls that he had been born a dwarf because his mother and father were first cousins, and that other horrors occurred in his family that no one wanted to talk about. Then they understood why their don Enrique, instead of living with his own people, so wealthy and elegant, had chosen to share miseries at La Copa Rota: because he himself was one of those horrors that wasn't talked about by his family. But here he could forget about his shame and his ugliness, because he knew that they liked him just as he was, little and white-haired, wicked, kind, and playful.
As I am writing, I realize that La Copa Rota was the place destiny had also reserved for Sayonaraâalmost as thin as Fideo, almost as Indian as a
pipatona
, and as forsaken by God as either of the two. Then I think that a good part of the heart of this story lies in the journey she must have taken to elude that fate. Or perhaps not to elude it, because anecdotes aside, the Asian princess, the chosen one,
la novia oscura
, the universally loved, even and especially sheâand therein the intensity of her passionâbelongs to that incandescent center of the world that is and always will be La Copa Rota wherever it is found: indivisible nucleus, heart of hearts, living flesh, nut. Everything else on this earth is red velvet, circus lights, and sophistication. I thought of these ideas in the heat of my writing, but afterward, much later the same day, in the freshness of nightfall, when I watched a barren chicken named Felipe settle down to sleep on the pink rabbit skinâclad feet of a drowsy Todos los Santos in a corner of her kitchen, I realized that things gently explain themselves and that there is no need to ramble on.
Everything seemed to indicate at the time of the rice strike, which would go on to mark a before and an after in the history of Tora and its people, that Sayonara was a girl of fragile love and momentary enthusiasms, incapable of settling her volatile heart for very long on any single soul. She had something about her then that was elusive, an incapacity for committing, a difficulty in seeing into the future or fixing her eyes on what was really in front of her.
Her refusal to open herself to others was especially evident in her relationships with men, close to her body and far from her interest, and this prompted frequent scolding from Todos los Santos, who reprimanded her inability to put her heart into the task of serving her clients.
“You are with them but you don't seem to notice them,” the older woman would say to her. “You don't listen to them, you don't pamper them. You treat them like ghosts. I don't know how long your bad habit of going around self-absorbed will last. It's as if the rest of us are invisible.”
Once, señor Manrique, who never stopped flattering Sayonara with requests for her time and demonstrations of his senile love, had asked her to iron his dark-blue suit, and in a moment of carelessness she had burned it. Another time she inconsiderately dismissed an engineer from the Troco, who had waited an entire afternoon without moving an inch just for the opportunity to be with her, with the excuse that she was tired. She publicly berated a rich landowner, who suffered greatly because of his fondness for her, for robbing land from others at gunpoint. “Go home, don Tomasito, or I'll tell your wife about you,” she once said, ridiculing a married man who had approached her surreptitiously.
“You forget that you're a working woman, not a spoiled girl, and you have an obligation to lend your services with courtesy and according to professional standards,” Todos los Santos said to her, perhaps without realizing that it was precisely that rude and inconsiderate way of offering them her beauty that fired men up and drove them to fall in love with her.
But as I have been told, it wasn't an attitude toward men specifically but toward the world in general. Some have described her to me as egotistical, but egotism doesn't fit with the tenacity with which she committed herself to her work on behalf of her sisters, not allowing herself to rest until she had rescued them one by one from abandonment. Which doesn't mean that when she had them by her side once again, she stayed close to them and helped them with their daily affairs. Far from acting as a mother to Ana, Juana, Susana, and Chuza, from the very first day Sayonara left that role up to Todos los Santos, and what's more, in their presence she became one more little girlâalways the younger sister with the heartrending memory of her big brother?âand just like the others she fought over silly matters, she did bad things behind Todos los Santos's back, she allied herself with one in opposition to the rest, she made them all cry equally.
Todos los Santos was not in agreement with this division of labor and always resented that Sayonara had left her with the hard work of administering authority over those creatures that were frequently unmanageable, especially in the first days, when they were recently arrived and, due to their touching timidity and defenselessness, irritated her with habits like hiding food under their beds, burying foreign objects in the patio, and, the most inconvenient of all, raising their skirts and defecating in any corner as if they were animals.
Sayonara was always closer to little Chuza than to the other sisters, and she would take the child with her to the washing rocks at the river, to the market, to the Patria theater, to visit friends, perhaps because the child's muteness made her the ideal companion for an older sister who didn't have ears for anything but her own internal voices. Little Chuza, in turn, worshiped Sayonara as one should only do with the saints in heaven. She wouldn't lose sight of her for an instant; she would clown around and do somersaults to get Sayonara's attention. Enraptured, she would watch her older sister as she brushed her hair, or dressed, even when she shouted in fits of anger, or sang with joy, or was quiet and absent. Little Chuza lived to idolize her sister, and lacking words, she would cover her mouth with both hands, trembling with admiration.
Those who knew her when she first came to La Catunga say that Sayonara was very personable as a young girl, but they complain of the evanescent disposition she later developed. Once, an epidemic of cholera spread through the region, and the air, reverberating with microbes, filtered threateningly through the windows. Alarmed, Todos los Santos temporarily shut down the business and closed her house to outsiders to prevent the contagion from reaching the children, whom she forbade to drink water that hadn't been boiled or to eat raw fruit or vegetables, caramels, or any other food that wasn't prepared at home. Despite the precautions, Susana showed signs of having contracted the illness, a fever so high it made her glisten in her bed and gave her a looseness of the bowels that wasn't helped with the traditional extract of
corona-de-Cristo,
nor with Dr. Antonio MarÃa's new pharmaceutical prescriptions. In an emergency operation, Tana took Ana, Juana, and Chuza to her house in order to move them away from the source of infection, and Todos los Santos stayed home with Olguita and Sayonara to watch over the sick child, who in addition to the previously mentioned maladies was racked by a series of vomiting spells that doubled her over, nearly pulling her heart through her mouth, and made them fear dehydration. While the two older women wore themselves out in the kitchen with poultices and medicinal soups, they asked Sayonara to take a rag and clean the floor of the room, soiled with vomit, and when they returned they found her there, paralyzed, with the rag in her hand and looking at the smelly mess without having lifted a finger.