“That's why Piruetas prances through life,” laughs Todos los Santos. “Just like that, sort of like a tight-assed Punch, as if holding a pepper suppository between his buttocks.”
“In addition, he sold condoms made from animal intestines,” Sacramento continues, “also patented by him and promoted as the modern solution against pregnancy and infection, but infamous among users for being uncomfortable, slippery, and of dubious efficacy.”
“Start suffering, men of tender heart: La Hermosa has returned!” proclaimed Piruetas in falsetto when he saw Sayonara passing, and faces unknown to her turned to stare at her.
“Go eat shit, you creature of ill omen,” she retorted, driving him away with her hand. “Last time you tossed a compliment at me you turned my life into shit, and I still haven't recovered.”
Although she hadn't noticed it, many eyes had seen her, had followed her step by step, had caught her scent from the very moment she set foot back in the pueblo, and now Piruetas's announcement spread from house to house: She had returned.
For the second time the child
puta
took the pueblo; Sayonara, the
puta
-wife; Amanda the bride dressed in white; the wife now without her husband and once again dressed for night; the beauty challenging the world as she did in those other times, those that people wanted to forget, come hell or high water.
“Maybe if she had come back with her hair covered up and her body hidden in the sad, sober novice's dress that she wore in Villa de la Virgen del Amparo,” speculates Machuca, “maybe.”
And as if her reappearance weren't enough, she had come dragging astride a burro the exemplary and resuscitated image of sin with all of its consequences: Fideo, covered with cankers, some hidden and one displayed in the place that most terrifies and offends others, the middle of her face. Sayonara hadn't finished telling Piruetas to go eat shit when she detected in the surrounding multitude the subtle, spasmodic, and frighteningly synchronized reflexes of cattle the instant before they stampede. In the midst of an unforeseen paralysis of air, a sudden, dark, collective choreography took shape into which she tried to integrate herself without knowing why, perhaps out of mere survival instinct.
“This is why I came back to the pueblo, to face my destiny,” Todos los Santos tells me that Sayonara was able to understand in a sparkle of final lucidity.
Seconds later she was imprisoned by a human barrier, forced into the front row just across from where a spontaneous band of wrathful citizens was sacrificing a thin man, of short stature, in a white, unbuttoned shirt, the tail of which hung outside his pants.
“So they didn't fall upon her?”
“Hush your mouth and knock on wood,” said Todos los Santos as she rapped on the table with her knuckles. “They got another Christian soul and not her, because as Fideo said the other day, Sayonara carried that black bird around on her shoulder, but she kept it pacified and fed it from her hand. But she didn't miss a single detail of the incident, and that man's passion and death were so embedded in her that for several days afterward she kept repeating, like an automaton, that he was small and skinny, that his shirt was hanging outside his pants, and before he expired he tried to say something no one understood. He was a
zapatero,
you know? What you would call a shoe repairer. A humble craftsman with an eccentric name, Elkin Alexis Alpamato, originally from RamiriquÃ, in Boyacá, who had lived in Tora for three and a half years. We all knew him because we took our shoes to him to repair. When a heel wore out, twisted, or broke open, there was no one like him to restore it with new leather and a reinforced metal tap. He alleged that high heels were one of the seven greatest inventions of civilization and that together with the silk stocking had been Eve's true sin in paradise, the real apple of damnation. âAlpamato,' we would say, âmake these heels ready to strike sparks on the pavement tonight,' and he would, because he liked to deliver.”
It took sixty seconds to kill him and they did it by kicking him, in the single, fulminating lashing out of an uncontrollable centipede, a swift and voracious assault by starved sparrows on a crust of bread. After the beating, he stood up in a last attempt at decency, leaned against a wall, tried to find his last voice, and then fell again, already dead, a poor bloody rag without guilt or redemption. Sayonara watched the killing without taking her eyes off the victim, as if seeing again something she had already seen, what she had always foreseen, as if she were a witness of something that was supposed to occur but didn't, as if it weren't that man but she herself who should have died that night, at that predetermined hour and in the desolation of that street corner.
“She had to witness such a horrifying scene the very day she came home,” Machuca tells me, “as if the city itself had decided to bring her up to date on the new times that had settled in around here.”
“What had the
zapatero
done?” I ask. “Why did they kill him? Who killed him?”
“Regular people; don't think they were murderers or professional evil-doers. Small-business men on Calle Caliente, enraged by the evictions.”
Never before and never again were the four sources of power in such agreement, nor did they act in such synchronization. Public health measures were preached from the pulpit, the Tropical Oil Company performed marriage counseling, the Fourth Brigade decided who should be pillars of morality, and the mayor, who was the representative for Tora in the National Conservative Directorate and the fellow party member of Senator Mariano Azcárraga Caballero, the ingrate who drove beautiful Claire to her grave, was the individual who singled out those who deserved scorn and punishment for breaking ethical, hygienic, labor, and public order laws.
One of the central aims of this four-party strategy was the leveling of the red-light district, because they wanted to build on that land barrios of family housing in the image and likeness of the Barrio Staff, but in a squashed, Creole, and proletarian version. They professed to want to do away with the
puterÃo
and the red-light districts. But what it really boiled down to was that everything that had to do with poverty looked red to them, as if the poor barrio and the red-light district were one and the same. After one of their evictions, on the day Sayonara returned, the victims descended on the plaza, pushing in front of them anything they could, movable or immovable.
“But why the shoe repairman? What had he done?”
“Nothing. He hadn't done anything.”
He only tried to calm the crowd to prevent them from vandalizing, but the level of discontent had grown so acute that it was his unfortunate fate to become the scapegoat and receive their wrath.
“Of course, Sayonara would have given a different explanation for the events,” Olga informs me. “If you had asked Sayonara, she would have told you that the shoe repairman, without knowing it, had swapped his fate for hers.”
After the crime, for a few eternal minutes, the city was submerged in a rare lethargic silence and absence, as if everyone had run inside their houses or their own hearts to hide from the horror, and it was during this span of otherworldly stillness that Sayonara walked down Calle Caliente and entered La Catunga, feeling foreign inside her own body, looking at this planet with the eyes of a stranger and trembling with apprehension as great or greater than that first time, so many years ago. Then she saw Sacramento again, the boy, sitting on his cart with his curly eyelashes and his strawlike hair, warning her that anyone who entered that place could never leave.
She looked for Todos los Santos's house and found nothing but rubble. She went back, looked again, but she found nothing, and then she asked, Olga assures me, whether she might be dead after all, and whether the episode with the
zapatero
had been one of those pitiful lies that the dead tell themselves to palliate the irreversibility of their situation.
Moving forward with some difficulty due to her high heels and the tube skirt, without light from lantern or moon, Sayonara persevered, balancing herself among the mounds of rubble and thinking she glimpsed here and there traces of her past: This bit of dust was oranges from breakfast, that brick is from the afternoon you told me, those dirt clods were coins in my pocket, that pile of clay . . .
“Aspirina's collar!” she suddenly shouted, because there was Aspirina's collar with each and every one of the fake diamonds, glittering and real in the middle of that pile of nothing and inviting Sayonara to restore her faith in her own existence.
She didn't find much else to celebrate, no patio, no window, no sky on the other side of the window, no mirror next to the cistern, no canaries in their cages, no pigsty or stand of plantain trees, no grain store on the corner, no Dancing Miramar with its dancing contests and red velvet decor. What to believe, the collar, which was there, or all the rest, which wasn't?
“And my mother, Matildita Monteverde? And my
madrina
, Todos los Santos?” she asked out loud in the darkness.
“About your mother, I don't know anything,” a human voice answered her, coming from she didn't know where. “About your
madrina,
I can give you a message. After the eviction came the demolition, and Todos los Santos went to Olga's house to live.”
“So they didn't knock down Olga's house?”
“No. The improvements haven't reached that far yet. This part here is not called La Catunga anymore but La Constancia, and they say that soon it's going to be a respectable barrio.”
Sayonara expressed her thanks for the information and moved away from this second stage of her past, which the bulldozers would soon be leveling, just as the first, that of her childhood, had been devoured by flames, and just as the third, that of her marriage, had already started to haunt her from the quiet side of her memories.
Olguita's patio smelled of everything, the good and the bad, of aromatic herbs growing in pots, of enticing food browning in the oven, of the urine of domesticated animals, of the stench of the gully that ran nearby with its black waters tumbling over rocks. Todos los Santos was dipping a quadruped afflicted with mange in benzyl benzoate when she saw Sayonara approach, and the days of waiting had been so many and so long that she didn't know whether it was really her or merely the incarnation of her memory. She couldn't greet the girl, or manifest her great joy or ask anything, because she understood that her adopted daughter, who looked pale and undone, didn't want warm welcomes or answers, she only wanted to tell about the horror of the lynching once and again and again, as if freezing the scene in words could prevent it from happening.
“Is it true that sometimes someone else dies for you?” was her very first sentence as she entered. “I have the sensation,
madrina,
that a
zapatero
has just succumbed to a death that was meant for me.”
“As much as Olga and I argued with her, we couldn't rid her mind of that fanaticism,” Todos los Santos tells me. “She swore that she had seen the ray of death descend from heaven straight toward her and then veer away at the last second to strike Alpamato.”
Without listening to explanations, Sayonara went into the bedroom and walked straight up to the Master, the young, tormented Jesus Christ with his exposed heart who knew, like her, what it was like to offer a neighbor your entrails; the same Christ who had filled the days of her youth with terror and with solace, the one who during so many hours of her work, as she lay in bed, had illuminated with burning lamps the minimal truth of a lonely and naked girl, rendering her invulnerable by bathing her in his red-black glow.
“Señor
mÃo
Jesucristo,” she implored, kneeling before the painting, “patron saint of the broken, take the soul of your servant Alpamato, now that you have thrown his body to the wild beasts. If it is true that he died instead of me, following your holy example, thank him for me. Tell him that the day will come when I too will have to accept the death of another and that I hope to do so then with as much generosity as he has just done for me.”
“What is happening in this pueblo,
madrina
?” she asked as she went out to the patio.
“Strange things. Boys kill cats and skin them, some people leave their homes and no one ever hears from them again. I'm telling you, things are happening. The other morning, in the middle of Calle Caliente, doña Magola's peacock turned up stabbed to death.”
“A peacock stabbed to death? Who would want to stab a peacock to death?”
“I don't know, maybe the same person who skins cats. And the girls?” was the only thing Todos los Santos was able to inquire. She didn't even want to ask about Sacramento, because she blamed him for the misfortunes of the family and all of Tora.
“The girls are fine, back in Virgen del Amparo. Sacramento is taking better care of them than if he were their father. I came alone,
madrina,
” Sayonara announced, “and I don't plan to go back to him.”
“You do everything backward,” said her
madrina
reproachfully. “You stop being married just now, when wives are going around puffed up with pride and
putas
have to hide to avoid animosity. Give me that papaya, how much is that
guanábana
?âthat's what the ladies say when they go to the market, like that, pointing at the fruit with their stiff fingers so that you'll notice the brilliance of the band of gold on their hand,” she said. “And they buy inexpensive meat at the commissary with a card that certifies them as the legitimate spouse of a company worker. You'll see them, they devote their entire afternoon to a foreign pastime they call a canasta tea, which consists of playing cards and swallowing little cakes and sweets.”
“You're too hard on them,” chastised Olga, who felt congratulatory because of Sayonara's return and offered
mantecadas
and
pandeyucas
, because for them there was no better way to express affection than by showering others with an abundance of food. “Married women also scrub the floor and put salt in the soup and suffer disillusions, just like us . . .”