“You see? She is a
bruja,
” laugh the others.
“Bruja rebruja, puta reputa.”
For Olguita there were no unknown men, because she only had to look them in the eyes to know them, whether they were cross-eyed, one-eyed, or blind or were hiding some trick of love behind their silky eyelashes, or whether the most beautiful, unfaithful blue sparkled in their pupils; all she had to do was speak to them affectionately to know them.
For others, like Tana and Machuca, all men were passed over because they had never found the man who would live on in their dreams. Others more unfortunate still, like beautiful Claire, found him only to lose him later.
“There is no worse torment than that of a whore in love,” brays Fideo with a midnight voice. “Others come, always others, while the one she waits for keeps her waiting.”
Speaking of Mary Magdalene from biblical times, Saramago mentions the deep wound that is “the open door through which others enter and my beloved does not.” Among the prostitutes of Tora, it was the pain and festering of that wound that threw them, at three o'clock in the morning and at a corner called ArmerÃa del Ferrocarril, under the old train cars passing noisily and leaving behind traces of rust, and at times of blood.
Todos los Santos believes that Sayonara didn't suffer the rigors of that wound through which happiness escaped and death entered. She assures me that hers was another pain, which even she herself didn't recognize as pain, and which didn't push her toward death but unleashed in her a ferocious appetite for life. She had an itch in her soul, Todos los Santos tries to explain to me. Sayonara, to whom they all returned, whom no man abandoned or stopped loving, she who knew how to love many, to be happy with many, to find herself in many, she,
la bienamada,
the well loved, nevertheless had a misfortune: her incapacity to surrender herself to the blessing of a single love.
She loved good men who loved her well, and yet others came to erase those footprints and open new paths in her heart. Any of them would have been enough for her to have approached peacefulness, but she preferred to fill herself with open spaces that became yearnings for new loves: noble gentlemen, faithful in their ways, who deposited their fervor in her and who nevertheless in her eyes were nothing more than moments, honest but fleeting, of a longer and much more complicated journey.
“Do you think, as a mother, that it was possible for a man to make your adopted daughter love him?” I ask Todos los Santos, and expect the worst, because I know how irascible she gets when I force her to speculate. Yet she surprises me with her doubt.
“I have often asked myself that very same thing.”
A while after Sayonara's arrival in La Catunga, during the period of training and apprenticeship, when she was still the girl and not yet Sayonara, Todos los Santos was worried about not being able to find a crack from which to look inside her tortoise's heart, always hidden and withdrawn into its shell. Was there anything or anyone in the world that could stir her up? A memory that could awaken her longing? Some unconfessable desire that she wanted to ask of the Sacred Heart? Had her many past hungers convinced her that the only worthwhile pleasure was a plate of rice with lentils?
“I was afraid that being so dry of emotions, my adopted daughter wouldn't be able to manage very well as a lover. Because to go to bed without love you have to know how to love, and those who think otherwise don't understand anything,” the old woman tells me. Coiled around her shoulders is a silver fox, very dead and very forties, that she has rescued from the trunk where she keeps her memories among mothballs. “To sweeten her insides I began to give her a cup of hot milk with five teaspoons of honey daily. Then, seeing her act so strangely, I thought I had gone a little too far with the honey. But a few years later I realized that the error had been just the opposite, too little honey. Until I came to believe that eight or nine spoonfuls was the minimum dose to make her character well tempered.”
“And today, have you reached a conclusion?”
“Maybe Sayonara loved too much, or maybe she couldn't love. I still don't know.”
“It's the same thing that happens to all of us,” says Machuca. “We professional women divide ourselves into a hundred loves and we don't know how to content ourselves with the joys of one single love.”
In the capital, I dedicated myself to inquiring what happened to the life and paintings of don Enrique Ladrón de Guevara y Vernantes. I learned that during the first two years of his life in Tora, his family was unaware of his whereaboutsâor preferred to ignore that they wereâand gave him up for lost, or at least well hidden. Until the day that a friend of the family who was passing through the oil city on business brought back news of him.
“What is Enrique doing in Tora?” asked a maternal uncle, Alfonso Vernantes. “How does he support himself?”
“He paints,” answered the friend. “I saw several of his paintings. Your nephew Enrique paints women who reek of syphilis.”
They went to look for him, found him, pulled him kicking and screaming from Fideo, and committed him to an insane asylum, according to some versions, and according to another, they sent him out of the country, all with the greatest stealth to avoid scandal or gossip. When I returned to Tora, I told this to Todos los Santos, who already knew.
When they took him out of La Copa Rota, did don Enrique kick with his short, arthritic legs, did he beg with his sharp dwarf's voice, did he order with the haughty voice of the wealthy that he be left in peace, and was it all useless? Perhaps. I will never know for certain how that scene happened, that tearing away, because when I ask Fideo, the only eyewitness, she becomes catatonic and I realize that I will only injure her further if I continue throwing memories in her face.
“It wasn't easy for Enrique to live among those people who are so different from us,” says his sister, MarÃa Amalia, an elderly lady, intelligent and kind, with whom I chatted one afternoon as we had tea. “Or to live in that miserable place he chose. In one of his letters to my mother he confesses it, he says that every day away from home requires of him struggle and determination.”
“Did your mother know where he was?” I ask.
“Of course, she always knew, but she never let anyone else know. They took Enrique out of there after my mother's death, because they wouldn't have dared to while she was still alive.”
“Why didn't your mother ask him to come back, if he himself had confessed that it wasn't easy for him to live there?”
“Because my mother, who adored him, was well aware that for Enrique it would be even harder to make a place for himself in our family. Do you know what it means to be a dwarf among such proud people? If you ask me what the best thing my brother found in that other world was, I would say that it was invisibility. There he felt invisible, without witnesses to his deformity. That is priceless.”
After the committing of don Enriqueâor his deportation, whichever it wasâAlfonso Vernantes, the maternal uncle, personally traveled to Tora with the inquisitorial task of gathering up every last painting, to destroy the evidence of the passage of his family name through a world of infamy. If the painting was a seascape, sunset, or Paris scene, he paid little for it. He offered a better price if women appeared, if they were naked it rose higher, and when he had gathered five or six he would burn them on a pyre. In Tora they still tell stories of those strange negotiations, like the one about a small drawing of two girls embracing on a bed, for which don Alfonso paid a fortune.
Nothing makes you more vulnerable than having the task of guarding a secret that is already public knowledgeâas all secrets tend to beâor easier prey for whoever decides to take advantage of that weakness. Only a few days passed before Piruetas smelled the opportunity of a lifetime and joined forces with a photographer friend who dabbled in painting, to begin producing a series of obscene paintings that they signed with don Enrique's name and presented to don Alfonso as if they were original works by his nephew.
For a few weeks don Alfonso fell blindly into the trap. He saw in Piruetas and his photographer friend two irreplaceable accomplices for his delicate mission, because they were astute and discreet and because they could do what was forbidden to him: circulate among the lower echelons, scouring dangerous bars and prostitutes' hovels in search of incriminating evidence. During that time, Piruetas and his accomplice lived the high life at the expense of the Ladrón de Guevara y Vernantes's scruples, until don Alfonso discovered he was being duped. In his haste to swindle, Piruetas grew so bold that he began to produce paintings that were more and more ordinary and slipshod, to which was added a dispute with the photographer friend over money matters that caused a rupture between them. So, from then on Piruetas assumed the artistic labor himself and without assistance from anyone: he, who had never held a pencil in his hand, not to mention a brush.
“This can't be Enrique's,” don Alfonso finally said one day, suspicious. “It's too awful.”
“It's modern painting, don Alfonso, and you just don't understand it,” replied the pseudo-painter in defense of his scrawling.
But even don Alfonso, who because of disgust and ethics barely looked at his nephew's paintings, even don Alfonso himself, they tell me, in spite of being blinded by propriety, saw enough to realize the difference and drive off the impostor.
“Where can don Enrique be?” I ask Todos los Santos. “Still locked up in his asylum, or off in some remote corner of the world?”
“He died some years ago from syphilis, as do all those who have known true love.”
“Strange,” I say. “No matter what his sister says, I think he found his chance for happiness at La Copa Rota.”
“Happiness, no,” she contradicts me, she who refuses to let a hollow phrase pass without filling it with cruel realism. “Let's say that at La Copa Rota he set down his fate, and that if he wasn't happy, at least he found his light.”
“They say that some men take refuge in bordellos seeking the same thing that monks do in monasteries.”
“Is that from some book?”
“Probably.”
“No wonder. Books are filled with shit like that.”
“These women don't understand how things are,” Olguita tells me later, when we are alone. “They think they do but they don't. Trust me when I tell you that Sayonara did know how to love, and that she loved Payanés from the very beginning and to the point of delirium.”
“Then why did she do things the way she did?”
“Because the paths of the heart are not straight, but snaking and twisting, and they let us see where they begin but not where they end. But that's getting tangled up in conclusions of a story that begins plain and simple: Payanés was the first unknown man that Sayonara was able to get to know. In him she found bread for her hunger and water for her thirst.”
“He has the sweetest skin I have ever known,” Olguita swears she heard Sayonara say. “But not sweet like sugar, sweet like an old pain. The sun keeps it brown from the waist up, but it is reduced in color on the rest of his body. What I miss most is his chest, his big chest with the rose tattoo, soft and bulky but only a little, just enough to be strong like the chest of a man and kind like the chest of a woman. Deep within his eyes nests a sadness, a sort of helplessness in that mixed yellow color, a yellow burning with green: the eyes of a stray animal. His hair, which is also of a double color, sometimes seems black as night and sometimes shines with silver threads.”
“That's called gray hair.”
“Well, he has gray hair then.”
“Why would he have gray hair, when he's so young?”
“He has suffered, you see.”
“Some women focus on the look in a man's eyes,” Olguita tells me. “Others like men with an elegant style. There are those who complain if men are knock-kneed or flat-assed, or have tangled eyebrows or stooped shoulders. Many girls want to see them in leather shoes or boots and turn their noses up at cloth shoes, because they are a sure sign of poverty. Any woman appreciates a powerful male member and most prefer a sweetly drawn smile with healthy teeth. Once I heard that you shouldn't sleep with men with only one ear, because if you get pregnant most likely you'll give birth to a deaf child. And so on. But Sayonara fell in love with a chest, and she said that in Payanés's chest she had found her happiness and her reason for living.”
Like gusts of air in an empty house, the breaths of many strange men blew on her neck. Her life was tangled up in that sleepy haze of foreign bodies that passed through her bed, one after another, in the procession of their indifference. Her bedroom was conquered territory, the camp of any army, and her white sheet was the flag of her purchased love. Her naked body accepted with indolence the rubbing of skins that were odorless, or that smelled of distant places, and on which neither her touch nor her eyes wanted to linger. Until suddenly, without warning, came the contact with the skin that somehow awakened her, giving her the touch that her fingertips, alert at last, demanded, and in the skin of that stranger she felt the exact temperature that reminded her of happiness.
“My man tastes like moss, like a manger, like the Christ Child,” announced Sayonara. “He tastes like Christmas.”
“Hush, girl, that's sinful talk!”
“He smells delicious, like a forest perfume with a good smell, and he also smells like a horse. I like that about him, that he has a strong horse smell. The smell of horse sweat, which is the same as the smell of desire.”
“Girl, such things you say!”
“Do you know what a
petrolero
smells like after ten hours of forced labor under this strong sun?” Todos los Santos asks me. “No, you can't imagine. He smells like pure race,
mi reina
. He smells like the whole human race.”