“That's right, opposite sides of the very same coin. And let the devil throw it into the air to see which you end up with.”
“Did Correcaminos's father ever forgive her? Or Delia Ramos's mother?”
“Not them or anyone,” shouted Fideo. “You can go from there to here, but from here to there all the doors are locked.”
“All,” adds Olga, “except those of your memories.”
I have convinced Todos los Santos to get up and take a walk, and as we stroll, with me supporting her arm, the river turns red and the herons fly just above its surface, brushing the burning water with their wings. The momentary freshness of a breeze off the mountain abruptly ceases and the heat seizes the opportunity to fall upon us and crush us.
“The river blushed, didn't it?” asks Todos los Santos. “That's why it got hot, because the river turned red.”
“And out of pleasure?” I continue. “Has anyone joined the profession because she liked it?”
Todos los Santos laughs in that peculiar manner of
las mujeres
when they are really amused, throwing their heads back and striking their thighs with the palms of their hands.
“It is a profession that has its compensations,” she says, “that cannot be denied. Sometimes you sing and sometimes you cry, as with everything, but I will tell you one thing, a girl in this life has more opportunities for happiness than, let's say, a dentist. Or a locksmith, for example.”
“Oh God, yes,” assures Olguita, laughing, as she walks behind us.
Any worthwhile life is woven with white ceremonies and black ceremonies, in an inevitable chain where some justify the others. Although the easy encounter with señor Manrique floated by, inoffensive, among Sayonara's days, the following Tuesday Todos los Santos was forced to introduce her disciple to the murky ceremonies of a shameful routine. Every Tuesday by law, week after week, the prostitutes of La Catunga had to appear at dawn in the center of town, on Calle del Comercio, and stand in line in front of the antivenereal dispensary to have their health cards renewed.
“Only on that day,” Todos los Santos tells me, “were they disrespectful and treated us like
putas
.”
“Why do we need a card,
madrina
?” asked Sayonara, running behind the older woman, unable to match her steps.
“So the government will let us work. They require it of anyone in La Catunga who wears a skirt, even the nuns. They don't cure the sick women, they just charge them double to say they're healthy.”
“But why,
madrina
?”
“The government officials pocket the fifty centavos that each of us pays for the validation.”
“Well, if they're going to steal from us, why do we go?”
“So they'll let us live in peace.”
“What happens if we don't have a card?”
“They kick our asses right into jail.”
They found the others waiting in line beneath the rising sun, messy and gray, as if they had swallowed ashes. The collective disgust cut off any attempt at conversation and Sayonara knew instinctively that it was better not to continue asking questions, because putting words to grave matters only makes them graver. There was Yvonne, perched on a pair of red spiked heels; Claire, mortally beautiful; AnalÃa, stealing sips of vodka from a poorly camouflaged bottle; the
pipatonas
suckling their babies; Olga with her legs in the armor plating of her orthopedic devices. Leaning against a wall, all identical in the eyes of the corrupt officials, with no preferred lightbulb status or nationality or fee differential, no color of skin better than any other. On Tuesdays the dignity of any of them was worth fifty centavos, not one more or one less.
“The infected women's cards were marked with crosses, one or several depending on the severity, and some women's had so many they looked like cemeteries,” said Todos los Santos. “One cross meant thin blood; two, rotten blood; three, swollen flesh; four, irremediable situation.”
“Off with the underwear!”
Men with white lab coats were giving orders and Sayonara was seized with a sudden anxiety attack and a growing foreboding of frozen forceps in her crotch. A strong whiff of cleaning fluids made her nauseous.
“It smells like a circus,
madrina
.”
“It is a circus, and we're the clowns.”
“Through here for genital inspection,” indicated a doctor of dubious qualifications, so coarse in appearance and with a lab coat so stained that he looked more like a mechanic than a doctor.
Obeying orders like a frightened animal, the girl lay down on the examining table and began to tremble.
“Hold on, girl,” encouraged Todos los Santos. “Think of Santa Cata, who withstood the cogged wheel without complaint.”
“Some comfort you are,
madrina
.”
The man with the stained lab coat performed the examination in view of all the others, with total disinterest, a cigarette in his mouth and without interrupting a conversation about the legitimacy of the elections, which he was carrying on with a tall, ungainly colleague who didn't look like a doctor either, or even a mechanic, but rather a giraffe from a zoo.
When he finished with the girl, the man moved over to a desk, signed and stamped a card of pink pasteboard, threw the fifty centavos in a drawer, and without washing his hands shouted:
“Next!”
Todos los Santos tried to climb onto the high table without losing her composure, but she got tangled in her skirts, suffered a sudden coughing attack, the leg that was supposed to rise wouldn't respond, the upper part of her body managed some success and reached the table but the other half failed and hung there, heavy and grotesque, while, completely humiliated, she begged the doctor's pardon for her lack of agility, explaining that in her youth she had been slender.
“Hurry up,” said the man. “I'm not going to wait all morning.”
“Can't you see the señora needs help?” said Sayonara, and her fear yielded to her fury.
“Up, señora, and open your legs.”
“She is not climbing up or opening her legs, you shitty bastard,” Sayonara spat out as she grabbed Todos los Santos by the arm, struggling to pull her out to the street.
“Don't be a rebel,
hija,
you'll leave me without a card,” protested the
madrina,
who still hadn't picked up her purse or finished rearranging her hair, stockings, and skirt.
“Let her insult me, doña,” said the doctor so loudly that the others outside could hear. “Next time the little brat is going to have to suck me off before I'll do her the favor of renewing her card.”
“Why don't you suck this,” shouted a woman from Cali who had been eating a mango; she threw the pit and hit him in the eye, letting out a hearty laugh that alerted the others and made them laugh too, first a little, then more, beginning as the chatter of schoolgirls, then becoming the harassment of mutinous
putas
, hurling insults, trash, and rocks at the dispensary doctors who, without knowing how, managed to lock the door and barricade themselves against the revolt that was mounting outside.
“Down with the pimping government!”
“Down!”
From the corner and a little apart from the rest, looking at all of this with the burned-out eyes of someone who has seen it before, Todos los Santos registered the novelty only as highlighted in insignificant details: the touch of color that the commotion brought out on Claire's translucent cheeks, the agility with which Yvonne ran on her red stilts, the wounded-deer urgency with which the group of
pipatonas
and their children fled, abandoning the uprising at the onset. But more than anything she noticed the metamorphosis that her adopted daughter underwent, having seized the first line of fire, hair on end like a wild beast, vociferous, and later scampering across the roofs with a diabolical agility to reach the skylight and attack from above.
“I watched her,” she tells me, “and said to myself: Maybe it's better for me to never find out what this child's past is, or what mix of blood brought about such vigor and fury.”
“Bastards, bloodsuckers!”
Delia Ramos, consumed with rage, incited battle with Walkyrian shouts, and a woman from the Pacific coast whom they called La Costeña harangued from the top of a wall.
“
Putas hijueputas!
Son-of-a-bitch whores!” answered masculine voices from behind the barricades. “Syphilis spreaders!”
“This is for all of our friends who were raped and abused in this dump!” trumpeted the vodka-soaked voice of AnalÃa, and a bottle crashed against the window of the dispensary, shattering the glass.
“Filthy gonorrhea-infected whores!” responded the barricaded men.
“Death to corrupt officials!”
“Down with the pimping government!”
“Death!”
A flying orange buzzed through the broken window and stamped itself, yellow and juicy, on a cabinet, knocking over all the flasks, and then the roof fell in with a clatter of glass.
“They're burning us alive!” howled the besieged men, as a rain of burning paper and rags descended upon them, which Sayonara, angel of fire, young cat on a hot tin roof, was tossing onto their heads and which fell onto the spilled alcohol, spreading the fire. From her street corner Todos los Santos saw the smoke that was beginning to rise wispy and pale and noticed that it was becoming blacker and thicker, like the clouds that precede storms. She also saw the first flames peering out, seeking something to cling to, like long, mobile, hungry tongues, and she watched the heat smash, one by one, the rest of the windows in a frenzy of invisible punches reverberating through the air.
And she also saw, with the stupor of one contemplating someone else who has been reborn, her adopted daughter standing at the edge of the great fire, watching it, spellbound and ecstatic, captivated by the spectacle of its growing force and without retreating from her attacks or perceiving the heat building up in the iron skylight frames across which she was effortlessly balanced, as if suspended from the sky by invisible threads.
There was something irrational and challenging in the way that girl ignored the danger, and Todos los Santos suddenly understood that her adopted daughter couldn't, or, worse still, didn't want to separate herself from the fascination that wouldn't take much longer to envelop her in its burning arms.
“Down with the pimping government!” howled the women, feverish before the excitement of the fire.
“Down!”
“Out of Tora with the bloodsuckers!”
“Out!”
Asphyxiated by the smoke, their eyes reddened and teary, and their arms raised high, like freed puppets, the besieged doctors exited in surrender at the very moment that men in olive green appeared, jogging down the street, holding their weapons.
“Their reinforcements are coming!” Someone sounded the alarm and the rebels shot off in every direction, leaving the scene empty in a matter of seconds.
“Here come the cops!”
“Death to corrupt officials!”
“Death to the police who protect them!”
“Death to all the sons of bitches who exploit the women of Tora!”
Todos los Santos, the only woman who remained in the plaza, without vacillation crossed the tense silence of thistles and porcupines that electrified the air to approach the dispensary as far as permitted by the fury of the blaze, which was now escaping through doors and windows, and she didn't know whether it was because of dizziness from the heat or hallucination from the gases, but as she looked up in the air she saw Sayonara advance serenely, like Christ on top of the waves, along a narrow open path among the flames, a vertiginous ballerina on the verge of disaster. And she swears to me that she saw too how the gusts of smoke delicately stroked her hair and how the fire approached, tame, to kiss her clothing and lick her feet.
As she contemplated this nerve, this display of irresponsibility on the part of the insolent child, Todos los Santos became greatly annoyed and was about to shout angrily for the girl to climb down from there that very instant and to cease her strange behavior, but just as she was about to open her mouth she heard her instincts give her a countermand.
“Suddenly I realized that her own foolishness was what would save her,” she tells me, “and that if I called out to her I would startle her and once she awakened the fire would swallow her up, because her only protection lay in her dazed state of mind. You see, if I shouted, it would break the spell, the skylight would suddenly collapse, and she would fall into the center of the burning embers. Then I looked at her calmly, without reproach, as if approving her shadowy passage over that hell, and I told her with the softest voice in my throat, in just this tone, without insulting, without haste, I told her quietly, lovingly: âLet's go, child, it's late and we should be getting back to the house.' I don't know how, but she heard me; somehow she descended from the roof as effortlessly as she had climbed up and the next instant was at my side, standing on the ground, urging me to run so the troops wouldn't grab us.”
“Run,
madrina
! Give me your hand and run! Don't you see they're almost on top of us?” she shouted, just like that, as if it had all been a children's game and death didn't exist, soldiers didn't kill, sadness didn't strike or fire burn.”
There was no time to run; down the street that emptied into the plaza came the crush of jogging boots hammering the dust, but when they arrived with their weapons at the ready, the only traces of the rebels' passage were Yvonne's abandoned red shoes and four or five fake doctors, stunned and banged up, who didn't know whether to open their mouths to curse their luck or to thank God who had saved them. Sayonara and Todos los Santos? They found a hiding place in the house of friends who had opened their doors to them.
“A French investigator who came around in those years made inquiries and threw out some figures that reflected that the
prostitutas
of Tora paid more to the state in health control and fines than the Tropical Oil Company did in royalties,” Machuca tells me. Meanwhile, the girls struggled to ward off syphilis and gonorrhea with prayers and cloths dampened with warm water, and the crosses kept cropping up on
carnés
and in cemeteries.