Eva Luna (9 page)

*  *  *

After dark we made the round of nearby restaurants, looking for something to eat. Sitting in an alley across from the back door of a cheap café, we shared a steaming pizza that Huberto had traded for a postcard of a smiling blonde with stupendous breasts. Then, climbing fences and violating private property, we twisted our way through a labyrinth of courtyards until we reached a parking garage. We slipped through a ventilation duct to avoid the far guard at the entrance, and scrambled down to the lowest level. There, in a dark corner between two columns, Huberto had improvised a nest of newspapers where he could go when nothing better pre
sented itself. We settled in for the night, lying side by side in the darkness, drowning in fumes of motor oil and carbon monoxide as thick as an ocean liner's exhaust. I made myself comfortable and offered him a story in payment for being so nice to me.

“All right,” he conceded, slightly baffled, because I believe that in all his life he had never heard anything remotely resembling a story.

“What shall it be about?”

“About bandits,” he said, to say something.

I took inspiration from several episodes I'd heard on the radio, some ballads I knew, and a few ingredients of my own invention, and began spinning a story of a damsel in love with an outlaw, a real jackal who resolved even minor disagreements with bullets, strewing the landscape with widows and orphans. The girl never lost hope of redeeming him through the strength of her love and the sweetness of her character, and while he went around perpetrating his evil deeds, she gathered in the very orphans created by the insatiable pistols of the evildoer. When he showed up at the house, it was like a gale from hell; he stomped in, kicking doors and emptying his pistols into the air. On her knees she would plead with him to repent of his cruel ways, but he mocked her with guffaws that shook the walls and curdled the blood. “How've you been, honey!” he would shout at the top of his lungs, while terrified youngsters ran to hide in the wardrobe. How are all the kids? and he would open the door and pull them out by the ear to see how tall they were. Aha! I see they're getting big, but don't you worry. Before you can say
boo!
I'll be off to town and I'll make some new orphans for your collection. And so the years went by and the number of mouths to be fed kept growing, until one day the sweetheart, weary
of such abuse, realized the futility of continuing to hope for the bandit's salvation and decided to stop being so good. She got a permanent, bought a red dress, and turned her house into a place for parties and good times where you could buy the most delicious ice cream and the best malted milks, play all kinds of games, and dance and sing. The children had a wonderful time waiting on the customers; poverty and misery were ended and the woman was so happy that she forgot all the unhappiness of the past. Things were going very well, but gossip reached the ears of the jackal and one night he appeared as usual, beating down doors and shooting holes in the ceiling and asking for the children. But he got a surprise. No one began to tremble in his presence, no one ran to hide in the wardrobe, and the girl did not throw herself at his feet to beg for mercy. They all just went about their business, some serving ice cream, one playing the drums, while the former sweetheart, in a fabulous turban decorated with tropical fruit, danced the mambo on a tabletop. So the bandit, furious and ashamed, slunk away with his pistols to look for a new sweetheart who
would
be afraid of him. And that was the end of the story.

Huberto Naranjo listened to the end.

“That's a stupid story. . . . But, all right, I would like to be your friend,” he said.

We roamed the city for a couple of days. Huberto taught me the advantages of street life and tricks of survival: always steer clear of a uniform because you're screwed for good if they get their hands on you; to rob somebody on a bus, stand in the back and when the doors open make your pinch and jump off; the best food is to be had mid-morning on the garbage heap at the Central Market and mid-afternoon in the garbage pails of hotels and restaurants. Following him in his
adventures, I knew for the first time the headiness of freedom, the combination of nervous excitement and deathly vertigo that since that time has haunted my dreams as clearly as if I were living it again. But by the third night of sleeping outdoors, tired and filthy, I suffered an attack of homesickness. First, grieving that I could not return to the scene of the crime, I thought of Elvira, and then of my mother; I missed the switch of red hair and I wanted to see my stuffed puma again. So I asked Huberto Naranjo to help me find my
madrina.

“Why? Aren't we doing all right? You're a stupid girl.”

I did not dare explain the reasons, but I begged so much that finally he agreed to help me, after warning that I would regret it all the days of my life. He knew every corner of the city, and went anywhere he wanted by hitching rides on the steps and bumpers of buses. With my sketchy description and his knack for locating places, we found a hillside where shacks made out of scrap—cardboard boxes, bricks, old tires, sheets of zinc—rose one after the other. It looked like every other barrio, but I recognized it immediately by the garbage dumped in the barrancas. This was where the city garbage trucks disgorged their filth, and as we looked on the dumps from above they shimmered with the blue-green iridescence of flies.

“There's my
madrina
's house!” I shrieked when I spied the blue-stained boards. I had been there only once or twice, but since it was the closest thing I ever had to a home, I remembered it well.

The shack was closed but a neighbor woman shouted from across the street to wait; my
madrina
had gone down to market and would be right back. The time had come for us to say goodbye, and Huberto Naranjo, cheeks blazing, stuck
out his hand to shake mine. Instead, I threw my arms around his neck, but he pushed me away so hard I almost fell backward. I held on to his shirt, though, and gave him a kiss. I meant it for his mouth but it landed right in the center of his nose. Huberto trotted down the hill without looking back, and I sat down on the doorstep to sing a song.

It was not long before my
madrina
returned. I saw her climbing the hill along the crooked street, big and fat and decked out in a lemon-yellow dress; she had a package in her arms, and was sweating from the effort of the climb. I called to her and ran to meet her, but she did not even wait for me to explain what had happened; she had had a report from the
patrona
, who had told her of my disappearance and the unpardonable treatment she had received at my hands. My
madrina
lifted me off my feet and shoved me inside the shack. The contrast between the noonday light and the darkness inside left me blinded, and before my eyes could adjust, she walloped me so hard I flew across the room and landed on the ground. She beat me until the neighbors came. Then they used salt to cure me.

Four days later, I was marched back to my place of employment. The man with the strawberry nose patted me affectionately on the cheek, and took advantage of the others' inattention to tell me he was happy to see me; he had missed me, he said. The
doña
of the locket received me in the living room; seated in a chair, stern as a judge, she seemed to have shrunk to half her size. She looked like a little old rag doll dressed in mourning. Her bald head was not, as I expected, wrapped in bloodstained bandages; she sat there in the same towering curls and iron-hard waves, of a different color but intact. Dumbfounded, I searched my mind for a possible explanation of this incredible miracle, ignoring both
the
patrona
's harangue and my
madrina
's pinches. The only comprehensible part of the reprimand was that from that day on I was to work twice as hard: thus I would have no time to waste in the contemplation of art—and the garden gate would be kept locked to prevent a second escape.

“I will tame her,” the
patrona
assured my
madrina.

“It will take some good smacks, God knows,” my
madrina
replied.

“Keep your eyes lowered when I'm speaking to you, you naughty girl. The devil is in your eyes, but I'll not tolerate any insolence,” the
patrona
threatened. “Do you understand me?”

I stared at her, unblinking, then turned and, with my head very high, went to the kitchen where Elvira was waiting, eavesdropping behind the door.

“Ah, little bird . . . Come here and let me put something on those bruises. Are you sure nothing's broken?”

The
patrona
never mistreated me again, and as she never mentioned the vanished hair, I came to believe the whole thing was a nightmare that had filtered into the house through some crack or other. Neither did she stop me from gazing at the painting; she must have guessed that if I had to, I would sink my teeth in her to see it. That painting of the sea with its foaming waves and motionless gulls was essential to me; it was the reward for the day's labors, the door to freedom. At the time of the siesta, when the others lay down to rest, I repeated the same ritual, never asking permission or offering an explanation, ready to do whatever was necessary to defend that privilege. I would wash my face and hands, run a comb through my hair, straighten my dress, put on the shoes I wore to market, and go to the dining room. I placed a chair in front of this window on storyland, sat
down—back straight, knees together, hands in my lap, as I sat at Mass—and set out on my voyage. Sometimes I saw the
patrona
watching me from the open doorway, but she never said anything. She was afraid of me now.

“That's good, little bird,” Elvira would say approvingly. “You have to fight back. No one tries anything with mad dogs, but tame dogs they kick. Life's a dogfight.”

It was the best advice I ever received. Elvira used to roast lemons in the coals, then quarter and boil them, and give me a drink of the mixture to make me more courageous.

*  *  *

For several years I worked in the house of that elderly bachelor and spinster, and during that time many things happened to change the country. Elvira used to tell me about them. After a brief interval of republican freedom, we once again had a dictator. He was a military man so harmless in appearance that no one imagined the extent of his greed. The most powerful man in the government was not the General, however, but the Chief of Political Police, the Man of the Gardenia. He had many affectations, among them slicked-down hair and manicured fingernails, impeccable white linen suits—always with a flower in the buttonhole—and French cologne. No one could ever accuse him of being common—and he was not the homosexual his many enemies accused him of being. He personally directed the torture of prisoners, elegant and courteous as ever. It was during his time that the penal colony of Santa María was reopened, a hellhole on an island in the middle of a crocodile- and piranha-infested river at the edge of the jungle, where political prisoners and criminals, equals in misfortune, perished from hunger, beatings, and tropical diseases. Not a breath of any of this was
reported on the radio or published in the newspapers, but Elvira found out through rumors on her days off, and often talked about them. I loved Elvira very much; I called her grandmother;
abuela
, I would say. They'll never part us, little bird, she promised, but I was not so sure; I already sensed that my life would be one long series of farewells. Like me, Elvira had started working when she was a little girl, and through the long years weariness had seeped into her bones and chilled her soul. The burden of work and grinding poverty had killed her desire to go on, and she had begun her dialogue with death. At night she slept in her coffin, partly to become accustomed to it, to lose her fear of it, and partly to irritate the
patrona
, who never got used to the idea of a coffin in her house. The maid could not bear the sight of my
abuela
lying in her mortuary bed in the room they shared, and one day simply went away, without advising even the
patrón
, who was left waiting for her at the hour of the siesta. Before she left, she chalked crosses on all the doors in the house, the meaning of which no one ever deciphered, but for the same reason never dared erase. Elvira treated me as if she were my true
abuela.
It was with her that I learned to barter words for goods, and I have been blessed with good fortune, for I have always been able to find someone willing to accept such a transaction.

I did not change much during those years; I remained rather small and thin, but with defiant eyes that nettled the
patrona.
My body developed slowly, but inside something was raging out of control, like an unseen river. While I felt I was a woman, the windowpane reflected the blurred image of a little girl. Even though I did not grow much, it was still enough that the
patrón
began to pay more attention to me. I must teach you to read, child, he used to say, but he never
found time to do it. Now he not only asked for kisses on his nose; he began giving me a few centavos to help him bathe and sponge his body. Afterward he would lie on the bed while I dried him, powdered him, and put his underwear on him as if he were a baby. Sometimes he sat for hours soaking in the bathtub and playing naval battles with me; other times he went for days without even looking in my direction, occupied with his bets, or in a stupor, his nose the color of eggplant. Elvira warned me with explicit clarity that men have a monster as ugly as a yucca root between their legs, and tiny babies come out of it and get into women's bellies and grow there. I was never to touch those parts for any reason, because the sleeping beast would raise its horrible head and leap at me—with catastrophic results. But I did not believe her; it sounded like just another of her outlandish tales. All the
patrón
had was a fat, sad little worm that never so much as stirred, and nothing like a baby ever came from it, at least when I was around. It looked a little like his fleshy nose, and that was when I discovered—and later in life proved—the close relationship between a man's nose and his penis. One look at a man's face and I know how he will look naked. Long noses and short, narrow and broad, haughty and humble, greedy noses, snooping noses, bold and indifferent noses good for nothing but blowing—noses of all kinds. With age, almost all of them thicken, grow limp and bulbous, and lose the arrogance of upstanding penises.