“Isn't this princess Santa Catalina, our protectress?” asked the girl excitedly.
“Don't get off track. This is a book of poems, not prayers. Don't confuse the earth with the sky, just keep on reciting.”
“I can't,
madrina,
it's too beautiful.”
“Nonsense. Give it to me,” said the veteran, and she began reading about the king's great anger at the theft.
“You must be punished,” brayed the sovereign. “Go back to the sky and what you have stolen you must now return.”
“The princess grows sad over her sweet flower of light,” Rubén DarÃo went on, “but then, smiling, good Jesus appears.”
“From my fields I offered her that rose,” clarified Jesus. “They are flowers for the girls who think of me in their dreams.”
“I think this good Jesus is the same one who lives in our bedroom,” said the girl. “He gave me a rose too the other day.”
“Hush, you're mixing things up and making me lose the rhythm. Religion in excess makes good nuns and miserable
putas,
” warned Todos los Santos.
“The princess is beautiful, because now she has the brooch in which verse, pearl, feather, and flower shine, along with the star,” rhymed Rubén DarÃo. The girl was suddenly overwhelmed by a sighing that was foreign to her temperament and she moved away to cry. It was then that Todos los Santos discovered in her disciple an inclination for poetry and a fascination with sad stars that alarmed her and seemed to her a dangerous symptom in a promising apprentice of the most merciless profession known to man.
“It's not a game, child,” she said. “Prostitutes, like boxers, cannot allow themselves a weakness or they'll get knocked out. Life is one thing and poetry is another; don't confuse shit with face cream.”
When it became necessary to hasten the training of the girl's voice, the two women went to stand at the edge of the brand-new Libertadores highway, where ravaging progress entered Tora, and to subject themselves to the ultimate test of infernal noise that rose up to the heavens from the river of vehicles.
“Sailors kiss and then leave!” shouted the girl to the roar of the passing trucks that in their stampede almost tore off her clothing and left reduced to wind the already volatile sailors' love.
After such a din, when the girl returned home she appreciated being back amid the imperceptible sounds of silence, never before noticed: the faint song of the hummingbird, the whistle of light as it passes through the lock of a door, the buzzing of neighbors on the other side of the wall, the brushing of bare feet against the patio tiles. She had managed to break the tyranny of noise and in recompense was given the calming gift of intimacy, which allows one to pray in secret, to hum boleros, recite sonnets, and whisper phrases in someone's ear with the purr of a stuffed toy tiger.
“That's better,” said Todos los Santos. “Now you have the tone and you are ready to acquire the timbre. Your voice should sound like the great bell of the Ecce Homo. Listen to it. Look at it. The bell tower was built on top of the first derrick in Tora's oil field. Listen to it now as it calls to Ãngelus, and tomorrow also when it rings the morning prayers. Listen to it always because that is how your voice should sound, deep and tranquil, just like the great bell in your pueblo.”
“But,
madrina,
” objected the girl, “this isn't my pueblo.”
“But it will be, as soon as your voice sounds like its great bell.”
Also arduous was the challenge imposed upon them by the girl's chronic skinniness, which was like that of a malnourished cat, because the more she ate the thinner she looked for her size, with hollow cheeks, scanty bust, and inordinately long extremities. Todos los Santos maintained that all of the food the girl ate went to her hair, which, at the expense of the rest of her body, grew robust and out of control, and if she were to cut it she would gain the pounds it had snatched from her.
“It's alive,” said Olguita, enthralled, as she combed it into braids. “And I think it bites.”
They knew that cutting it would be a hideous crime, so they decided instead to force its owner to consume a double ration of soup, bread, and fruit, one for her and the other for her hair, which in all honesty was the only party that benefited from the overeating and ended up becoming a cascade of dark, murmuring waters.
“Since God limited you to such poverty of flesh, you have no other choice but to study dance,” recommended Todos los Santos, resolved to find a way out by another means, and she revealed the secrets of a certain dance that wasn't performed with footsteps, wiggling, or shaking hips but with undulation, absences, and stillness. She told the girl that Salomé had managed to bewitch John the Baptist because she knew the magic of moving without movement.
The girl embraced those words, never needing to have them repeated, and surprised her teacher with the engrossed naturalness with which she let herself sway with a deep, measured rhythm that wasn't
cumbia
or merengue, but the ebb and flow of her own blood along the clandestine paths of her body.
“I enjoyed watching her dance,” Todos los Santos tells me. “And at the same time it terrified me, because I understood then that we were losing her. Only when she danced did she give herself license to visit the land of her own memories and to escape into the enormity of the vault that was inside her. She danced and I knew she was swimming in distant waters, as if visiting other worlds, perhaps worse, or perhaps better.”
Perhaps worse or perhaps better, but never shared. From the beginning it was obvious that the young girl was no friend of commentary or gossip, even less so if it were about her, and that she maintained the hermeticism of a statue about her past, which made one think of the painful or guilt-ridden reasons that caused her to hide it. When they asked her where were you born, what is your name, how old are you, she slipped away with nonanswers into a silent void of memories, or sometimes just the opposite, she would overflow with words, filling the house with mindless chatter that was even more concealing than her muteness.
“Were you born yesterday?” asked Todos los Santos. “Spit out your past, child, or it will rot inside you.”
That negation of memory made her the pure vibration of a present that burned in front of your eyes the instant that it was contemplated, like a scene illuminated by the flash of a camera. Although at times things escaped from her, now and then she would carelessly reveal little fragments.
“Do you like my new skirt?” asked Tana.
“Cecilia had one just like it,” she said. “Except yellow, not green.”
So they quickly asked her who Cecilia was, perhaps your mother, or an aunt, maybe a friend of your mother's? Can you answer us, for the love of God, who was Cecilia?
“What Cecilia?” was her reply, surprised at all the insistence, as if she had never uttered such a name.
One day an old client and lover of Todos los Santos asked for a date to say good-bye; tired of going daily to the offices of the Troco to collect a perpetually delayed payment for an accident, he had decided to leave for Antioquia to help his son start a coffee farm. It was an evocative and nostalgic occasion and Todos los Santos was busy exquisitely attending to her friend while the girl, wearing her oversized blouse, devoted herself to pestering Aspirina, Tana's dog, tying red ribbons around her ears, not paying any attention to the visit, or at least so it seemed, and without interrupting. Until at the end, when the gentleman was about to leave, she caught up with him at the door and stopped him.
“If somewhere you run across a woman from Guayaquil that they call La Calzones,” she ventured, “tell her that her niece asked you to tell her that she's doing fine.”
Just like that, like a cannon shot, Todos los Santos learned that her student was happy in La Catunga and that in some part of the country she had an aunt with a vulgar nickname, by which she deduced that the girl's vocation came to her by family tradition.
“That explains something,” I tell her, “but not much. Really it explains almost nothing.”
“That's right.”
Not even during the hardest stages of training did the student give signs of defeat or weakening; she didn't complain, she didn't express pleasure or sadness, heat or cold, nor did she soften even one millimeter the military discipline she had imposed upon herself, as if responding to a sense of duty that was greater than she herself. Only once did she refuse to obey, when Todos los Santos asked her to clean the pigsty that was fairly buzzing with a horrendous stench at the rear of the house.
“I decided to became a
puta
so I wouldn't have to clean up
caca
ever again,” grumbled the girl.
“Well, you made a mistake. You should know that here you will earn more from washing a gringo's laundry than from going to bed with a man. In order to survive, a woman of the profession must also apply herself as seamstress, cook, fortune-teller, and nurse, and she must not be repelled by any task that life imposes on her, no matter how humbling or difficult it may be. So go back and get the bucket and brush and make that patio clean as a whistle.”
One night of supernatural clarity, Todos los Santos awoke in the middle of a coughing fit and, between gasps, asked for a glass of water. The girl didn't respond because she wasn't on her mattress but instead was sitting at the front door in her nightshirt and barefoot, framed in the moonlight and absorbed in the slow amazement descending from the highest abysses. Her perplexity was so deep, so vibrant that, touched, the
madrina
scoured the cellars of her memory looking for an explanation that had been with her a long time ago, before years and years of struggling and scratching for her daily bread had taught her to live without explanations.
“Up there in the sky, the seven planets spin and sing around the Earth,” she said, pulling up a stool to sit beside the girl in the brilliant darkness. “The Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, and the Sun. Each one has a corresponding musical note, a metal from the chart of elements, and a day of the week. The moon that robs you of your sleep is made of solid silver, whistles songs in the key of C, and reigns over Mondays. The great buzzing produced by the universe is what wise men call the music of the spheres, and the primary voice in this excellent concert is our Earth's.”
“If that's true, why can't I hear it?”
“You do hear it, you were listening to it just now when I found you.”
“What is our Earth singing?”
“A song of the wind, made with your breath and mine and that of all men and women, alive, dead, and yet to be born.”
“We'd better go back inside,
madrina,
or all that tremendous wind will catch you and you'll start coughing again.”
I ask what had happened in Sacramento's life during all this time and they tell me that in the afternoons, after five o'clock, he would visit the girl and play with her.
“Play?” I ask. “Wasn't he a little old to be playing?”
“But he was just a boy . . .”
“You told me that by then he had been given his
cédula de ciudadania
. He must have been at least eighteen.”
“Yes, he had his
cédula,
but that doesn't mean anything. He got it four or five years early from some crooked politicians who falsify
cédulas
to get minors or nonexistent or dead people to vote for them in the elections.”
Sacramento and the girl played barefoot with the other children in the dusty alleys of the barrio of the
putas
. London Bridge, hot potato, jump rope. But those traditional, organized games weren't their favorites; more than anything else they liked to play war. The girl was famous on the streets for being a rough-and-tumble scoundrel. There was no one more expert than she at executing flying kicks, spitting at a greater distance, throwing bone-crushing punches, knocking the wind out of someone with a fist to the solar plexus. Other handy diversions of hers were urinating in jars, tormenting the enemy by putting chili powder in their eyes, and playing violent games of red rover.
“The heart of the pineapple is winding and winding, is winding and winding, all the children are falling and falling,” sings Sacramento, and he's remembering and remembering. “It was called the heart of the pineapple and it was a rough game that left everyone injured. And me? The heart of the pineapple crushed my soul.”
The heart of the pineapple was winding, the speeding chain of children holding hands, pressing tighter and twisting until it formed a human knot, a true pineapple heart that squeezed and asphyxiated and finally ended up with a pile of crushed children on the ground. One day several older boys from another neighborhood joined the game and the pineapple, devilish and frenetic, began to twist ankles and knock heads, and more than one kid came out bruised from the crush. But the older ones weren't there to play, they only incited the jumble and took advantage of the confusion to touch the girl, knocking her to the ground and grabbing her hair to steal kisses and to lift her skirt. She defended herself with sharp jabs and dolphin kicks and had already managed to get them off of her and to quickly escape, when Sacramento learned of the offense and a surge of wounded dignity electrified his heart.
“At that moment I felt that the pain stabbing me was the strongest I could ever know. Boy, was I wrong. It was a child's pain compared to those that were to come.”
“Over the years, Sacramento grew and filled out,” tells Todos los Santos, “but at the time he was just a skinny boy, a head shorter than the girl, with wiry hair and sweet little eyes that inspired laughter and compassion. Without taking time to realize that the others were greater in number and size, he rushed at them, avenger and executor of justice, and he managed, of course, to be beaten to a pulp and left half broken.”