“Why do you defend her,” they shouted at him as they watched him bleeding on the ground, “when she's just going to turn out to be a
puta
.”
“That's work, stupid bastards. We were just playing!” he shouted in a voice broken with tears that even to him sounded lamentably infantile, and to try to turn around this sorry ending, he summoned up strength from his crushed pride and rushed at them again.
“He was lucky that the second time they knocked him down with a single blow and ran off.”
Sacramento and the girl spent hours and hours on Todos los Santos's patio, busy stretching the last sunny days of their childhood, playing that they were already grown up and inventing and acting out episodes and dramas with dialogues, never-ending like life itself. You could say that they were growing up as they played being grown up, like when they decided to pretend to be brother and sister who were leaving home to travel around the world in search of fame and fortune, but first they had to have breakfast, let's pretend that this is bread and that's milk, bread, no, I was eating eggs for breakfast, now we have to pack the suitcases, you're the woman and you have to take care of that, no, you're the man, you take care of it and I'll sharpen our swords, let's pretend that these are your clothes, these are mine and this box is the trunk where we keep them, but before we go we have to give hay to our horses. These railings are our horses! Okay, but let's pretend that yours is sick with a tumor and we have to heal him with this bandage, and so on, and from one preparatory step to another the shadows of night were falling on the patio. Todos los Santos served them real bread and real glasses of milk, the game was over and the two adventurous siblings hadn't even crossed the threshold of their house.
Todos los Santos started to notice that some of her clothes were missing, first stockings, then handkerchiefs embroidered with her initials, then a short-sleeved blouse, then some other article.
“In which trunk have the traveling brother and sister put my silk stockings?” she grew tired of asking, and as they swore that they hadn't seen her stockings, pillowcases and hand towels began to disappear.
One morning, as she was cleaning the kitchen, Todos los Santos perceived a strong, rancid odor whose origin she couldn't pinpoint no matter how diligently she rummaged through boxes looking for rotten food and moved furniture to see if it was coming from dead mice. The following day the odor was even more intense and the
madrina
stood up on a stool to clean off the top shelves, from which she took down a reeking basket filled with dirty rags. Rags that weren't rags; they were her lost stockings, her blouses, her pillowcases, and her handkerchiefs, twisted into knots, wadded up and stained with dried blood.
“Girl, come here!”
“What happened now,
madrina
?”
“What is this?”
“Who knows?”
“This is the clothing that I was missing.”
“How nice that you found it.”
“Who stuffed it up there all dirty?”
“You probably did and you just don't remember,” said the girl as she scurried away.
“Girl, come here!”
“Yes,
madrina
?”
“Tell me why this clothing is stained with blood.”
“Because of a cut I have on my arm that bleeds a lot.”
“Show it to me.”
“It's already healed now,
madrina
. It was here, on my knee.”
“Wasn't it on your arm?”
“One on my knee and another on my arm.”
“But you don't have any scabs or scars . . .”
“It was a pretty small cut.”
“Then why did it bleed so much . . .?”
“It was very deep, I think.”
“Could it have been a bullet wound?”
“More likely from a knife, a very sharp one . . .”
“Did you get it in the war? Or was it the police?”
Then the girl covered her face and moved away to cry and Todos los Santos, after closing the kitchen door to be alone with her, sat the girl on her lap and began to repeat the same complicated saga about the pollination of flowers that she herself had heard from the nuns dozens of years earlier and under similar circumstances, with the protagonist of a bee who buzzed around a rose to accomplish an incomprehensible and loving mission, in the midst of a great anatomical mixing of stamens, corollas, and pistils, until by some miracle of God, who is merciful, finally, at the end of all this dancing, a beautiful peach was born.
“God's baby or the bee's?” asked the girl.
“The bee and the flower's baby. Something like that is happening to you. Now do you understand? That's why you shouldn't feel ashamed about your blood or hide it in a basket as you have done, even though they tell you it stains and poisons. What you have to do is collect it every month in some little cloths that I will give you and show you how to wash with warm water so they won't smell bad, and you shouldn't worry because it's something natural that happens to all women. Do you understand?”
“Yes,
madrina,
” said the girl, starting to cry again, but this time with more momentum.
“Then why are you crying?”
“It hurts,
madrina,
every time the blood comes out. My insides burn. Do you think I'm injured inside? Do you think the bee you were talking about got inside me and stung me there, inside? That's what it feels like,
madrina,
like a wasp sting.”
“It's a wound that opens in all women once a month and that never heals because it's a wound of love. But you'll see, when you start going with men, how much happiness the red roses inside you will bring you every time they appear, because it will be the signal that you aren't pregnant. I can already see you, like the others, counting the days that your blood is late in staining your clothes.”
“Does it happen to men too?”
“No. It is God's will that it only happens to women. That's why we love more, too, because our insides hurt.”
“Like Jesus' heart?”
“Yes. Just like that.”
Then the girl stopped crying, wiped her nose on her sleeve, and went back out to the patio to resume playing brother and sister, who were now facing the problem of not having any blankets for the tremendously cold nights they would encounter on their long journey, and from that day forward the sister adventurer could look for fame and fortune without panicking at the onset of her menstrual cycle, which was no longer a sin that had to be hidden on the top shelf, and she learned how to use white cloths that she washed later in warm water, scrubbed with a pumice stone and hung to dry in the sun, knowing that if she ever had a daughter, she would calm her by patiently explaining the mystery of how the blood that appears in her underwear, which is the bee's blood, makes it possible for fruit to be born from a flower.
“Do you remember the treasure chest?” Todos los Santos asks Sacramento.
Frequently the two children would entertain themselves with a cookie box that they called the treasure chest. It contained a delightful collection of items such as broken necklaces, buttons, loose stones, old brooches, and fairy-tale earrings, and it made the children's eyes shine with sparkles of emerald green, ruby red, French pink, depending on the color of the beads they were looking at.
“How wonderful!” exclaimed the girl, completely absorbed, and she would begin to tell Sacramento lies, as big as a house, that he would pretend to believe.
“She made up that the box contained the jewels that Santa Catalina had been given by her father the king, and she made me promise that I would defend them with my life, property, and honor against anyone who tried to steal them.”
Sacramento swore on his knees, she tapped him on the shoulder a couple times with a sword that was really a stick and named him Knight of the Order of the Holy Diamond. He was ashamed that the older kids would see him playing like that and he wouldn't let her name him a knight unless there were no witnesses; after all, he was already a man who worked and supported himself and he found that gameâlike so many things of hersâshamefully simple. Poor Sacramento, he never suspected that that title would be, by a long shot, the most honorable that he would ever have bestowed upon him in his life.
“To have been named Knight of the Order of the Holy Diamond by her . . . ,” he says to me, “I think when I die that will be the best memory I leave behind.”
I've been told that a miracle prevented the infidels from sawing in half, with a cogged wheel, Santa Catalina virgin and martyr, and that they had to limit themselves to decapitating her and were unable to stem the flow of milk that ran from her wounds instead of blood, nor the curative aroma exhaled by her bones for the benefit of the sick who happened to be nearby. I've also been told that the anniversary of this horrifying episode is the date favored by the
mujeres
of La Catunga for being initiated into their professional life, their baptism by fire, as they themselves call it. I have noticed that prostitution promotes tendencies and fixations similar to those that in other instances I have observed in
sicarios
from communes in MedellÃn, truck drivers who have to pass through regions of
violencia,
the
bazuco
dealers on Calle del Cartucho in Bogotá, mafiosos, judges, witnesses, bullfighters, guerrillas, antiguerrilla commandos, and so many other Colombians who risk their lives on a routine basis. To begin with, they all wear one or several medals featuring the Virgen del Carmen, whom they familiarly call La Mechudita because of her thinness, her wit, and her characteristic long hair, and whom they venerate as the patron saint of difficult professions.
Like the others, the
mujeres
of La Catunga know that those who fully embrace their profession risk their skin; unlike others, the
mujeres
know that they also risk their souls. Hence the meticulous, manic way in which they perform self-imposed purifying rituals, hence the importance that they bestow upon a saint like Catalina; they, who in some dark way also become martyrs, yield to tragedy and accept the notion of life as a sacrifice.
Four months remained before the celebration of the fiestas of Santa Cata, just enough time to round out the girl's education in love. But, as I had heard said so many times in Tora, man proposes and hunger imposes. Todos los Santos's savings, which were diminishing, wouldn't last until the date she had set for the girl's initiation into the profession. So Todos los Santos decided to force her hand and release the artist into the game while she was still a little wet behind the ears, short on training, unpredictable in conduct, and psychologically immature.
“You don't make a man fall in love with you through gymnastics in bed or tricks in the bedroom,” was her first strictly professional lesson. “Leave that to those who don't have other skills. What you should do is spoil him and console him as only his mother ever has.”
One midnight in La Catunga, with the song of the cicadas particularly intense, a council of advisers was assembled at Todos los Santos's house. Over
mistelas,
Pielroja cigarettes, and sweet
pastelitos de gloria
they argued without reaching agreement on any of the details of the mise-enscène. The greatest polemic centered around the choosing of the girl's
nombre de guerra
, which in this case would also have to serve as her Christian name, because she swore she didn't remember having been baptized.
“At least tell us what they called you before you came here,” said Tana the Argentine, a veritable rattle of bracelets and necklaces, given to her by her lover, an engineer for the company.
“They didn't call me anything,” she lied, or perhaps she was confessing true abandonment.
What she did tell them was that she would like to be called La Calzones, the underwear girl, in homage to her aunt, for whom she seemed to profess some admiration or affection.
“Over my dead body!” shouted Todos los Santos. “I have never heard a name so coarse and devoid of style.”
“But if that name brings the girl good memories,” Olguita dared to venture, her nature made velvety by the polio that had withered her legs.
“Good memories don't exist. All memories are sad,” Todos los Santos said, ending the discussion.
“Let's call her MarÃa, Manuela, or Tránsito, for God's sake, they were all important women and heroines in novels,” proposed Machuca, the blasphemer, who was a high school graduate with a diploma, and a devoted reader.
“What does that have to do with anything? None of them had to offer up their asses.”
“Well, if that's the requirement, then call her Magdalena.”
“Don't even mention that renegade, first she sinned, then she spent the rest of her life crying with regret.”
“Then what about Manón or Naná, who made history in Paris?” suggested Machuca, her mouth watering.
“Paris and Tora can't be mentioned on the same day.”
“Why not Margarita, then?”
“Margaritas also cry too much. And they fall in love with money, and die spitting blood. I tell you, names of flowers bring bad luck.”
“Well, Flor Estéves, who was my aunt on my father's side,” offered Delia Ramos, “was said to have found heaven in a sailor's love.”
“Sailors kiss, then they leave,” Todos los Santos recited the only line of poetry her memory had retained.
“Rosa la Rosse always sounded so sweet to me . . . ,” sighed Olguita. “I would have loved to have been called that. But I got tangled up in this profession without realizing it and when I opened my eyes I was already a consecrated
puta
and they just kept calling me Olguita, like when I was good. They say that God doesn't forgive those who work under the names they were baptized with. They say it sullies the holy name and takes it in vain.”