“Forgive me,
mija,
” he said to Amanda with a trembling voice, as if he were dangerously close to breaking into tears, “but I can't do anything else for you all. I have a wife who would get angry, I have other children and a lot of obligations, I have another life now . . . you must understand . . . ”
“Don't worry, señor
padre
. I want you to know that life, thank heaven, has treated us well and that we are leaving here grateful for these gifts, which are very pretty.”
Sayonara never again went looking for her father, perhaps because she had already obtained from him the blessing she thought was so necessary to move forward with her life. The elephant . . .
“I can understand that someone would want the Holy Pope's blessing,” Fideo interrupts me as I am writing the previous paragraph, “but, what the hell good is a blessing from a man like Monteverde, so loutish and coarse?”
“You only have one father . . . ,” I tell her.
“That's a lie,” she replies. “You only have one mother; the father can be any old son of a bitch.”
Continuing: to move forward with her life. The elephant still exists, although its tusks are chipped. It sits on a corner cabinet in Olga's house, and I am looking at it now. Meanwhile, Fideo is looking at me.
“Don't think it's one of a kind,” she says. “A lot of people around here like to decorate their houses with elephants just like that one. You also see a lot of clowns. And ballerinas. A lot of porcelain ballerinas. But nothing beats the elephant as decorative material.”
Fideo is right. Over the years, I have seen elephants like this one in the living rooms of many homes, and I wonder how it could happen that, among the infinite variety of objects with no precise use that exist throughout the whole country, there is one in particular that manages to stand above the others. It makes one think of a certain suspicious repetition, a certain persistence of a model that is imposed for some unknown reason, despite its gratuitousness. In other countries an example of these kinds of insistent objects, almost fetishes because of their ubiquitousness, might be plaster gnomes planted among the flowers in the garden. Here in Colombia, the elephant beats the gnome by a wide margin.
First, because it is seen in greater numbers, and second, because plaster gnomes come in different versionsâwith white beards, with black beards, with red caps, without caps, with a lantern in their hand, without a lanternâwhile the porcelain elephant is always the same in its gray sleekness, its soft breast like a matron's, with a black, diminutive eye on each side of its face, the invariably chipped tusks, the partially open mouth revealing a pink, fleshy interior, the powerful foreleg bent and delicately balanced on a white ball of dubious interpretation, which could be a faded globe or a large balloon. Or maybe an elephant egg?
I hold the pachyderm in my hands for a while and then return it to the shelf. How strange paternal love can be, I think, and how strange the means chosen to express it.
A serene silence lulls the house. For a couple hours now Todos los Santos has been sleeping calmly in her rocking chair, without wetting herself.
“Are you gone?” she asks me, opening wide her blind eyes and trying to look at me with her fingertips.
“No, Todos los Santos, I haven't gone. I'm here, beside you.”
“Ah! Since you were so quiet, I thought you had already gone. Come closer and give me your hand, that way when you're quiet I won't lose you.”
At a certain distance from Todos los Santos's house there flows a gully of stinking, black waters. When the wind blows in this direction, the smell reaches here. The gully carries along decomposed organic material, broken toys, used sanitary napkins, syringes, bottle caps, cotton balls that may have been used to cleanse infections, the remains of a mattress, pieces of blue plastic, yesterday's paper: life, that is, in the intimacy of its residues and its dirtiness. But the water that runs through that gully sounds the same, stone by stone, as the water that flows clean along other estuaries.
“The lesson that can be derived there,” deduces Todos los Santos, “is that there is no bad that is not good nor good that isn't also bad.”
The lesson isn't clear to me, but I take advantage of the favorable climate to ask her about related matters.
“Explain to me, if I am not boring you, Todos los Santos, when
prostitución
is a sin and when it isn't.”
“There is a lot of rationalizing out there on the subject, but the consensus is that it is always a sin.”
“But an absolved sin when the woman suffers in bed,” clarifies Olguita, “and a condemned sin when she enjoys it, in which case she will surely go to hell when she dies, because she has not paid, like everyone else, her debts to the beyond.”
“If I could ask the genie in the bottle for a wish,” rants Fideo deliriously, “it would be for enormous tits that I could jerk a man off with.”
“What a stupid way to waste a wish. Everyone has his own wishes! Before going to bed, Sayonara would stand before the Sagrado Corazón and ask him for a strange blessing,” remembers Todos los Santos. “She would stand there and repeat out loud, every day, the same phrase: Jesus, may you keep murderers from killing tonight, so the people in the world can sleep without fear.”
We were talking on the patio and drinking lemonade, we in our rockers, the Felipes in their cages, and Fideo shaking in her penultimate death throes, all drowsy from the heat and the smell of vinegar filtering through the air today somnambulantly, impregnating the still hours of the afternoon.
“Let's go back to the parable of black waters and clear waters,” I ask Todos los Santos.
“Ridiculous!” she replies. “The only thing that matters is we are splashing around in our shit in this town because neither the authorities nor the oil company have been capable of constructing a sewer system.”
One of Amanda's obligations in Villa de la Virgen del Amparo, according to the agreement stipulated from the beginning with her
patrona
, señora Leonor de Andrade, was to accompany her every evening to six o'clock mass. While the cathedral's interior was the kingdom of overbearing colonial saints floating in incense smoke and the stink of withered lilies, outside in the square, a boisterous, pagan court of merchants, which in biblical times would have been driven away with lashes of a whip, had set up camp. There were lepers who hung around the temple awaiting the eventual miracle of their healing and who in the meantime extorted the consciences of the worshipers by exhibiting the horror of their wounds and mutilations; and there were lottery ticket sellers with their sheets of winning tickets pouncing on the devout multitudes, knowing that those who pray the most also bet the most.
It was there, in the midst of the anguished, afflicted throng that assaulted her as she left mass every afternoon, where one day Amanda discovered Fideo among a scruffy group of low-class
prostitutas
who were waiting to be taken to a male penal colony in the jungles of Guaviare, where they would lend their sexual services, according to the generalized practice that upon becoming too old or sick to work in the urban centers,
putas
were recruited by
chulos
to serve prisoners, border guards, brigades of rubber harvesters, liberal
guerrilleros
, advance squads of
tagüeros
, and others exposed to the harshest desolation and isolation known to man.
“Will you give me some money to buy a drink, girl?” Fideo asked Sayonara, taking her by the arm, recognizing her as she passed by.
“What are you doing here?”
“Life goes on. Give me some money for a drink, I said.”
“A drink! You should be asking for medicine, Fideo. I can tell just by looking at you that you're very sick.”
“I may be sick, but you're half dead. Look at that nun's costume they make you wear.”
Amanda convinced her to come to her
patrona
's house at noon the following day, to accept the charity of a good bowl of soup, and Fideo accepted the invitation for the rest of the week and the following one as well, because the
chulo
who was coordinating the
putas
' trip to Guaviare kept looking for reasons to delay it and to keep squeezing them: The women had to give him additional money for land travel, an extra sum for river travel, a portion for the dentist who was going to go ahead and extract rotten teeth so that they wouldn't complain of toothaches once it was already too late.
So, in the company of tramps, street urchins, and begging monks, and between spoonfuls of corn chowder or potato soup, Fideo and Sayonara exchanged information about their respective troubles.
“Tell me about don Enrique,” Sayonara asked. “Was he really a dwarf?”
“A dwarf with a big
pipÃ
and an even bigger heart.”
“You have to go back to Tora, Fideo, to have Dr. Antonio MarÃa treat you, before the sickness in your blood kills you.”
“Don't feel sorry for me, look at yourself. My problem is just malignant syphilis, but your illness is mental, which is more injurious and less pardonable. Go back to your
madrina
, you have a place there. Or are you happy playing the part of the dubious wife who deserves the punishment of a slow death?”
“Each of us has to deal with her own calvary,” responded Sayonara, to justify her resolute decision to stay where she was.
In truth she had other motives she didn't confess: In the painful process of renouncing her own existence, Amanda was little by little carving out a peaceful place where she could begin to understand Sacramento. Being decent turned out to be a more arduous, inclement proposition than being a mere
puta
, but she was determined to conquer it, and Sacramento was responding to her progress with better treatment and less ambivalence, and, as always, with his gentle dedication to the girls, Susana, Juana, and Chuza, whom he provided with an education, familial affection, and a kind life.
Hidden in the blue dress of the wayward novice, Sayonara's body was letting itself be domesticated and locked in its cage, her name crouched behind the name Amanda, and her eyes took refuge deep within their sockets, while her whole being and all of her desire wandered miles from there, searching for a trace of Payanés along the waters of the Magdalena.
Amanda received, whether she wanted to or not, free daily lessons in proper comportment and decency from her
patrona,
distinguished mistress in such matters, and if as Todos los Santos's disciple she had learned how to be a person, as doña Leonor's employee she had earned the opportunity to learn how to be no one. If before she was encouraged to be beautiful, friendly, and trusted, now revealed to her were the secrets of invisibility, humility, insubstantial presence, and the faintness of a shadow.
Doña Leonor's two unmarried daughters, Nena and Márgara, lived with her and it didn't take Amanda long to understand that in the eyes of their mother the two did not enjoy the same moral approval. Nena measured up, but Márgara failed to: for receiving telephone calls at all hours; for maintaining relations with men from classes beneath her own; for not properly understanding that “honor is more fragile than glass” and that “it is not enough to be, one must seem”; for wearing tight and improper-colored dresses; and, what seemed to most unnerve her mother, for not controlling her scandalous laughter, while her sister Nena, from a young age, knew only too well that it was preferable to barely smile.
Amanda learned the Ten Commandments so that she could put them into practice, and Sacramento breathed a sigh of relief, resuscitating little by little his battered honor and allowing himself to look others in the eyes again, and the unmentionable past became evanescent, and even, for moments, forgettable.
Amanda also learned to look back with new eyes. She had always heard her friends and fellow workers in La Catunga called
mujeres,
or at worst
putas
, but not in an offensive way; now she knew that they were also shameless adulterers, hussies,
busconas
, loose women,
pelanduscas
,
fufurufas
, and
pelafustanas
. If as a
puta
she knew that sex could be boring, now, as a decent woman, she had heard that it was also filthy. And she could see herself in a distant mirror once when she heard doña Leonor say:
“I found a little Indian woman for the necessary duties; I hope she doesn't turn out to be a thief . . .”
Everything went well as long as Sacramento didn't get angry, which occurred at increasingly less frequent intervals, but from time to time the incubus would begin to growl at him again and to show its claws, especially on those nights when he failed in his attempts to make love to his wife.
“How do you expect me to behave like a man if you destroy my manhood with your conduct? For the others you would dress up, wear perfume, you would wear high heels, and now that you live with me you don't even brush your hair . . .” He would blame her and open up again, like a wound in his memory, the fascination with that woman she had been before he had forced her to become someone else.
“Damned if I do, damned if I don't,” Amanda weakly protested. “It would be best if I just died, or maybe I have already died and I just haven't realized it yet.”
Nevertheless, life was bearable thanks to the softer tone it had been assuming, in which being awake was very similar to a slow, grayish dream. Until Leonor de Andrade's youngest offspring came home on vacation. He had long eyelashes, studied law in the capital, and his name was Rodrigo; and Amanda made the imprudent mistake of mentioning him to Sacramento.
“That boy Rodrigo makes me laugh,” she told her husband. “He knows how to pull coins out of his ears.”
“When jealousy is unleashed it is important to tie it up again quickly, with rope, a gag, and a straitjacket, so it doesn't cause too much damage,” pontificates Todos los Santos. “But when he thought that that boy Rodrigo had taken notice of his wife, Sacramento gave free rein to his feelings of jealousy and let them run wild and wreak havoc, like stallions from hell.”