Eva Luna (25 page)

“A what?”

“I was born a man, but by mistake, and now I'm a woman.”

“How did you do that?”

“The hard way. I always knew that I wasn't like everyone else, but it was while I was in prison that I decided to undo what nature had done to me. It seems a miracle we met . . . and in a church! I haven't been in a church for twenty years.” Mimí laughed, drying the last of her tears.

Melesio had been arrested during the Revolt of the Whores, that memorable riot he himself had incited with his unfortunate letter to the Minister of the Interior complaining about police extortion. When they raided the cabaret where he worked, they hadn't given him time to put on his street clothes but had hauled him down to headquarters still in his fake-pearl-and-diamond bikini, pink ostrich tail, blond wig, and platform sandals. His appearance produced a storm of jeers and insults. He was brutally beaten and put into a cell for forty hours with the most hardened prisoners. Then he was referred to a psychiatrist who was trying out an experimental cure for homosexuality based on what he called “emetic persuasion.” For six days and nights Melesio had been subjected to a series of drugs that left him only half alive, all the while being shown pictures of male athletes, dancers, and models; the doctor claimed his treatment would ensure a conditioned reflex of revulsion toward the male sex. On the sixth day, Melesio, normally a peaceful person, exploded; he leaped on the doctor, began to tear and bite at him like a hyena, and had they not stopped him would have strangled the doctor with his bare hands. The diagnosis was that he had developed a revulsion for the psychiatrist himself, and he was pronounced incurable and sentenced to Santa María, a prison for criminals without hope of probation and for political prisoners who had survived their interrogations. Santa María, built during the dictatorship of El Benefactor and modernized with new fences and cells in the
time of the General, had a capacity of three hundred occupants, but more than fifteen hundred men were crammed together there. Melesio was transported in a military airplane to a ghost town that had prospered in times of gold fever but had declined with the oil boom. From there, bound like an animal, he was taken first by truck and then by motor launch to the hell where he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life. One look and he grasped the hopelessness of his situation. The meter-and-a-half-high wall was topped by iron bars; from behind the bars prisoners stared toward the unchanging green of the jungle and the yellow water of the river.
Libertad, libertad
, the prisoners chanted at the sight of Lieutenant Rodríguez, who had accompanied the new batch of prisoners to carry out his quarterly inspection. The heavy metal gate swung open and they drove to the innermost circle, where they were greeted by howls and jeers. Melesio was taken directly to the building for homosexuals; there guards auctioned him off to inmates with the greatest seniority. All things considered, he was fortunate, because he was assigned to The Harem, where fifty privileged inmates had a building to themselves and were organized for self-protection.

“I had never heard of the Maharishi then, and had no spiritual guidance,” said Mimí, trembling from those memories; she took a card from her purse and showed me a picture of a bearded man in a prophet's robes, surrounded with symbols of the zodiac. “The only thing that saved me from going mad was knowing that La Señora would not abandon me. You remember her, of course. She's a loyal friend, and she never rested until she rescued me. She spent months greasing the palms of judges and using her contacts in the government. She even went to the General in person to get me out of there.”

When he left Santa María a year later, Melesio was less than a shadow of the person he once was. Because of hunger, and bouts with malaria, he had lost twenty kilos; a rectal infection forced him to walk stooped over like an old man; and exposure to violence had burst the dam of his emotions: he shifted from tears to hysterical laughter without transition. The day he was freed he did not believe what was happening; he thought it was a trick, that he would be shot in the back “while attempting to escape,” but he resigned himself to his fate, too weak to protest. He was taken back across the river in a launch and then by automobile to the ghost town. He was pushed out of the car—End of the road, faggot—and fell on his knees in the amber dust; he crouched there awaiting the shot that would kill him, but nothing happened. He heard the car driving away, looked up, and saw La Señora, who at first had not recognized him. A chartered plane was waiting, and he was flown directly to a clinic in the capital. For a year, by illegally shipping prostitutes overseas, La Señora had been gathering funds to put at Melesio's disposal.

“It's thanks to her that I'm alive,” Mimí told me. “She had to leave the country. If it weren't for my own
mamma
, I'd get a passport under my new name and go live with her.”

La Señora had not left by choice, but had fled following the scandal that erupted with the discovery of twenty-five dead girls on a ship bound for Curaçao. I remembered having heard about it on Riad Halabí's radio a couple of years before, but never dreamed that there was any connection with the large-hipped woman whose home Huberto Naranjo had taken me to. The dead were Dominican and Trinidadian women being smuggled in a sealed compartment that contained air for only twelve hours. Because of a bureaucratic foul-up, the women were locked in the hold of the cargo ves
sel for two days. The women La Señora enlisted were paid in dollars as they embarked, and promised a good job. That part of the transaction was her responsibility, and she carried it out in good faith. When they reached their destination, however, their documents were confiscated and they were placed in squalid brothels where they found themselves trapped in a web of threats and debts. La Señora was accused of having masterminded this modern Caribbean slave traffic, and barely escaped imprisonment; again powerful friends helped her and, provided with false documents, she slipped away just in time. For a year or two, she had lived on her income, trying not to attract attention, but such a creative mind needed an outlet, and she had ended up establishing a business in sadomasochistic paraphernalia—with such success that orders poured in from all corners of the globe for her male chastity belts, seven-tailed whips, dog collars for humans, and other instruments of degradation.

“It's getting dark, we'd better go,” said Mimí. “Where do you live?”

“For now, in a hotel. I've only been here a few days. I've lived all these years in Agua Santa, a town you never heard of.”

“Come and stay with me, I'm by myself.”

“I think I should try to make my own way.”

“Loneliness isn't good for anyone. Let's go to my house, and once things calm down you can decide what's best for you,” said Mimí as with the help of a mirror from her purse she touched up her makeup, which had suffered from the ordeals of the day.

*  *  *

Mimí's apartment was near Calle República, within sight of
the yellow and red lights. What had once been two hundred meters dedicated to modest vices had become a labyrinth of plastic and neon, a center of hotels, bars, cafés, and brothels of every kind. This was also the neighborhood of the Opera House, the best French restaurant in the city, the Seminary, and a number of residences, for in the capital, as in the rest of the nation, everything was jumbled together willy-nilly. Imposing manors sat next to shanties, and every time the nouveaux riches tried to build an exclusive development, by the end of the year they found themselves ringed by the hovels of the nouveau poor. This topographic democracy extended to other aspects of national life, to the degree that it was sometimes difficult to determine the difference between a Cabinet Minister and his chauffeur: both seemed of the same social background, wore similar suits, and they treated each other with a familiarity that could be taken as bad manners but actually was based on a strong sense of individual dignity.

“I like this country,” Riad Halabí had once said, sitting in the kitchen of the schoolteacher Inés. “Rich and poor, black and white, a single class, a single people. Everyone thinks he's king of the mountain, free of social ranks and rules—no one better than anyone else either by birth or money. That's not how it is where I come from. In my country there are many castes and many codes. A man dies right where he is born.”

“Don't be deceived by appearances, Riad,” the schoolteacher replied. “This country has as many layers as phyllo dough.”

“Yes, but a man can climb or fall, be a millionaire, President, or beggar. It depends on his effort, his luck . . . or the will of Allah.”

“Have you ever seen a rich Indian? Or a black general or banker?”

The schoolteacher was right, but no one would admit that race had any bearing on the matter; in fact, they boasted of being a uniformly brown people. Immigrants from all parts of the planet were accepted as equals, without prejudice, and after a few generations not even the Chinese could swear they were pure Asian. Only the oligarchy, entrenched from long before the Independence, could be identified by type and skin color; even among them, however, the subject was never mentioned—it would have been an unpardonable breach of manners in a society supposedly proud of its mixed blood. But even allowing for a history of colonization, political bosses, and tyrants, it was the promised land, as Riad Halabí said it was.

“Money, beauty, and talent open doors in this country,” Mimí explained.

“I don't have either of the first two, but I think I have a God-given talent for telling stories . . .” Actually, I doubted whether there was any practical application for my talent; until then it had served only to add a little color to life, and to allow me to escape to other worlds when reality became too difficult to bear. Storytelling seemed an art that had been passed by in the advances of radio, television, and movies: everything transmitted by airwaves or projected onto a screen was true, I thought, while my tales were almost always a string of lies, and not even I knew where they came from.

“If that's what you like, then that's what you should do.”

“No one pays to hear stories, Mimí, and I have to earn a living.”

“Maybe you'll find someone who will pay you for them. There's no hurry—as long as you stay with me, you won't need anything.”

“I don't want to be a burden to you. Riad Halabí always said that freedom begins with financial independence.”

“You'll soon learn that I'm the one who's a burden. I need you much more than you need me. I'm a very lonely woman.”

I stayed with Mimí that night, then another, and another, and so on for several years, and during that time I gradually worked my impossible love for Riad Halabí out of my heart. I became a woman, and for the first time steered my own course—not always with grace, to tell the truth, but it should be remembered it has always been my fortune to sail on stormy seas.

I had told myself so often it is a curse to be born a woman that I had some difficulty understanding Melesio's struggle to become one. I could not see a single advantage, but he wanted it so much he was willing to go through hell to achieve it. Under the guidance of a physician who specialized in such metamorphoses, he swallowed enough hormones to turn an elephant into a migratory bird; he had hair removed by electric tweezer, silicone breast and buttock implants, and paraffin injections wherever it was considered necessary. The result is unsettling, to say the least. Naked, Mimí is an Amazon with splendid breasts and skin like a baby, whose torso culminates in masculine attributes that are atrophied but quite visible.

“I need one more operation, she told me. La Señora found out that they work miracles in Los Angeles. They can make me into a true woman, but it's still experimental, and it costs a fortune!”

For Mimí, sex is the least vital part of her femininity. Other things attract her: clothes, perfumes, fabrics, jewelry, cosmetics. She loves the feel of her stockings when she crosses her legs, the barely perceptible whisper of lingerie,
the swish of hair on her shoulders. At that time, she longed for a male companion to care for and serve—someone who would protect her and offer her lasting affection—but she had not found him. She lived suspended in an androgynous limbo. Some men had approached her thinking she was a transvestite, but she was not interested in ambiguous relationships; she thought of herself as a woman, and she was looking for virile men. They, however, did not dare be seen with her, even though they were fascinated by her beauty; they did not want to be tagged as homosexuals. There were those who seduced her to find out how she looked naked, and how she made love; they found it exciting to hold such a remarkable freak in their arms. When a lover entered her life, the whole house revolved around him; she became his slave, ready to indulge him in his most daring fantasies to atone for the unpardonable sin of not being a complete woman. On those occasions when she bent to a man's will and became fanatically submissive, I tried to defend her from her own madness, to reason with her, to thwart that dangerous passion. But that only irritated her: You're jealous, leave me alone. The men she chose were almost always the same: a tough, macho type, who for several weeks would exploit her, upset the equilibrium of the house, leave his mark on everything he touched, and cause such upheaval that I would fall into a foul mood and threaten to move out. Finally the sane part of Mimí would rebel; she would regain her self-control and throw the bastard out. Sometimes the breakup was violent; sometimes the man, his curiosity satisfied, simply tired of her and left; when that happened, she would take to her bed in a fit of depression. For a while, until she fell in love again, we would return to our normal routine. I would keep track of her hormones, sleeping pills, and vitamins, and she
would oversee my education—English classes, driving lessons, books—and bring home stories from the street to offer them to me as a gift. Suffering, humiliation, fear, and illness had scarred her deeply, and shattered her dream of living in a fairy-tale world. She was not naïve—though she might play the ingénue—but there was a part of her that no sorrow, no violence had touched.