‘Fifty pesos,’ the grandmother said.
‘Boy, you’re asking a mint!’ he said. ‘I can eat for a whole month on that.’
‘Don’t be a tightwad,’ the grandmother said. ‘The airmail pays even better than being a priest.’
‘I’m the domestic mail,’ the man said. ‘The airmail man travels in a pickup truck.’
‘In any case, love is just as important as eating,’ the grandmother said.
‘But it doesn’t feed you.’
The grandmother realized that a man who lived from what other people were waiting for had more than enough time for bargaining.
‘How much have you got?’ she asked him.
The mailman dismounted, took some chewed-up bills from his pocket, and showed them to the grandmother. She snatched them up all together with a rapid hand just as if they had been a ball.
‘I’ll lower the price for you,’ she said, ‘but on one condition: that you spread the word all around.’
‘All the way to the other side of the world,’ the mailman said. ‘That’s what I’m for.’
Eréndira, who had been unable to blink, then took off her artificial eyelashes and moved to one side of the mat to make room for the chance boyfriend. As soon as he was in the shelter, the grandmother closed the entrance with an energetic tug on the sliding curtain.
It was an effective deal. Taken by the words of the mailman, men came from very far away to become acquainted with the newness of Eréndira. Behind the men came gambling tables and food stands, and behind them all came a photographer on a bicycle, who, across from the encampment, set up a camera with a mourning sleeve on a tripod and a backdrop of a lake with listless swans.
The grandmother, fanning herself on her throne, seemed alien to her own bazaar. The only thing that interested her was keeping order in the line of customers who were waiting their turn and checking the exact amount of money they paid in advance to go in to Eréndira. At first she had been so strict that she refused a good customer because he was five pesos short. But with the passage of months she was assimilating the lessons of reality and she ended up letting people in who completed their payment with religious medals, family relics, wedding rings, and anything her bite could prove was bona-fide gold even if it didn’t shine.
After a long stay in that first town, the grandmother had sufficient money to buy a donkey, and she went off into the desert in search of places more propitious for the payment of the debt. She traveled on a litter that had been improvised on top of the donkey and she was protected from the motionless sun by the half-spoked umbrella that Eréndira held over her head. Behind them walked four Indian bearers with the remnants of the encampment: the sleeping mats, the restored throne, the alabaster angel, and the trunks with the remains of the Amadíses. The photographer followed the caravan on his bicycle, but never catching up, as if he were going to a different festival.
Six months had passed since the fire when the grandmother was able to get a complete picture of the business.
‘If things go on like this,’ she told Eréndira, ‘you will have paid me the debt inside of eight years, seven months, and eleven days.’
She went back over her calculations with her eyes closed, fumbling with the seeds she was taking out of a cord pouch where she also kept the money, and she corrected herself:
‘All that, of course, not counting the pay and board of the Indians and other minor expenses.’
Eréndira, who was keeping in step with the donkey, bowed down by the heat and dust, did not reproach her grandmother for her figures, but she had to hold back her tears.
‘I’ve got ground glass in my bones,’ she said.
‘Try to sleep.’
‘Yes, Grandmother.’
She closed her eyes, took in a deep breath of scorching air, and went on walking in her sleep.
A small truck loaded with cages appeared, frightening goats in the dust of the horizon, and the clamor of the birds was like a splash of cool water for the Sunday torpor of San Miguel del Desierto. At the wheel was a corpulent Dutch farmer, his skin splintered by the outdoors, and with a squirrel-colored mustache he had inherited from some great-grandfather. His son Ulises, who was riding in the other seat, was a gilded adolescent with lonely maritime eyes and with the appearance of a furtive angel. The Dutchman noticed a tent in front of which all the soldiers of the local garrison were awaiting their turn. They were sitting on the ground, drinking out of the same bottle, which passed from mouth to mouth, and they had almond branches on their heads as if camouflaged for combat. The Dutchman asked in his language:
‘What the devil can they be selling there?’
‘A woman,’ his son answered quite naturally. ‘Her name is Eréndira.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Everybody in the desert knows,’ Ulises answered.
The Dutchman stopped at the small hotel in town and got out. Ulises stayed in the truck. With agile fingers he opened a briefcase that his father had left on the seat, took out a roll of bills, put several in his pocket, and left everything just the way it had been. That night, while his father was asleep, he climbed out the hotel window and went to stand in line in front of Eréndira’s tent.
The festivities were at their height. The drunken recruits were dancing by themselves so as not to waste the free music, and the photographer was taking night-time pictures with magnesium papers. As she watched over her business, the grandmother counted the bank notes in her lap, dividing them into equal piles and arranging them in a basket. There were only twelve soldiers at that time, but the evening line had grown with civilian customers. Ulises was the last one.
It was the turn of a soldier with a woeful appearance. The grandmother not only blocked his way but avoided contact with his money.
‘No, son,’ she told him. ‘You couldn’t go in for all the gold in the world. You bring bad luck.’
The soldier, who wasn’t from those parts, was puzzled.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You bring down the evil shadows,’ the grandmother said. ‘A person only has to look at your face.’
She waved him off with her hand, but without touching him, and made way for the next soldier.
‘Go right in, handsome,’ she told him good-naturedly, ‘but don’t take too long, your country needs you.’
The soldier went in but he came right out again because Eréndira wanted to talk to her grandmother. She hung the basket of money on her arm and went into the tent, which wasn’t very roomy, but which was neat and clean. In the back, on an army cot, Eréndira was unable to repress the trembling in her body, and she was in sorry shape, all dirty with soldier sweat.
‘Grandmother,’ she sobbed, ‘I’m dying.’
The grandmother felt her forehead and when she saw she had no fever, she tried to console her.
‘There are only ten soldiers left,’ she said.
Eréndira began to weep with the shrieks of a frightened animal. The grandmother realized then that she had gone beyond the limits of horror and, stroking her head, she helped her calm down.
‘The trouble is that you’re weak,’ she told her. ‘Come on, don’t cry any more, take a bath in sage water to get your blood back into shape.’
She left the tent when Eréndira was calmer and she gave the soldier waiting his money back. ‘That’s all for today,’ she told him. ‘Come back tomorrow and I’ll give you the first place in line.’ Then she shouted to those lined up:
‘That’s all, boys. Tomorrow morning at nine.’
Soldiers and civilians broke ranks with shouts of protest. The grandmother confronted them, in a good mood but brandishing the devastating crosier in earnest.
‘You’re an inconsiderate bunch of slobs!’ she shouted. ‘What do you think the girl is made of, iron? I’d like to see you in her place. You perverts! You shitty bums!’
The men answered her with even cruder insults, but she ended up controlling the revolt and stood guard with her staff until they took away the snack
tables and dismantled the gambling stands. She was about to go back into the tent when she saw Ulises, as large as life, all by himself in the dark and empty space where the line of men had been before. He had an unreal aura about him and he seemed to be visible in the shadows because of the very glow of his beauty.
‘You,’ the grandmother asked him. ‘What happened to your wings?’
‘The one who had wings was my grandfather,’ Ulises answered in his natural way, ‘but nobody believed it.’
The grandmother examined him again with fascination. ‘Well, I do,’ she said. ‘Put them on and come back tomorrow.’ She went into the tent and left Ulises burning where he stood.
Eréndira felt better after her bath. She had put on a short, lace-trimmed slip and she was drying her hair before going to bed, but she was still making an effort to hold back her tears. Her grandmother was asleep.
Behind Eréndira’s bed, very slowly, Ulises’ head appeared. She saw the anxious and diaphanous eyes, but before saying anything she rubbed her head with the towel in order to prove that it wasn’t an illusion. When Ulises blinked for the first time, Eréndira asked him in a very low voice:
‘Who are you?’
Ulises showed himself down to his shoulders. ‘My name is Ulises,’ he said. He showed her the bills he had stolen and added:
‘I’ve got money.’
Eréndira put her hands on the bed, brought her face close to that of Ulises, and went on talking to him as if in a kindergarten game.
‘You were supposed to get in line,’ she told him.
‘I waited all night long,’ Ulises said.
‘Well, now you have to wait until tomorrow,’ Eréndira said. ‘I feel as if someone had been beating me on the kidneys.’
At that instant the grandmother began to talk in her sleep.
‘It’s going on twenty years since it rained last,’ she said. ‘It was such a terrible storm that the rain was all mixed in with sea water, and the next morning the house was full of fish and snails and your grandfather Amadís, may he rest in peace, saw a glowing manta ray floating through the air.’
Ulises hid behind the bed again. Eréndira showed an amused smile.
‘Take it easy,’ she told him. ‘She always acts kind of crazy when she’s asleep, but not even an earthquake can wake her up.’
Ulises reappeared. Eréndira looked at him with a smile that was naughty and even a little affectionate and took the soiled sheet off the mattress.
‘Come,’ she said. ‘Help me change the sheet.’
Then Ulises came from behind the bed and took one end of the sheet. Since the sheet was much larger than the mattress, they had to fold it several times. With every fold Ulises drew closer to Eréndira.
‘I was going crazy wanting to see you,’ he suddenly said. ‘Everybody says you’re very pretty and they’re right.’
‘But I’m going to die,’ Eréndira said.
‘My mother says that people who die in the desert don’t go to heaven but to the sea,’ Ulises said.
Eréndira put the dirty sheet aside and covered the mattress with another, which was clean and ironed.
‘I never saw the sea,’ she said.
‘It’s like the desert but with water,’ said Ulises.
‘Then you can’t walk on it.’
‘My father knew a man who could,’ Ulises said, ‘but that was a long time ago.’
Eréndira was fascinated but she wanted to sleep.
‘If you come very early tomorrow you can be first in line,’ she said.
‘I’m leaving with my father at dawn,’ said Ulises.
‘Won’t you be coming back this way?’
‘Who can tell?’ Ulises said. ‘We just happened along now because we got lost on the road to the border.’
Eréndira looked thoughtfully at her sleeping grandmother.
‘All right,’ she decided. ‘Give me the money.’
Ulises gave it to her. Eréndira lay down on the bed but he remained trembling where he was: at the decisive moment his determination had weakened. Eréndira took him by the hand to hurry him up and only then did she notice his tribulation. She was familiar with that fear.
‘Is it the first time?’ she asked him.
Ulises didn’t answer but he smiled in desolation. Eréndira became a different person.
‘Breathe slowly,’ she told him. ‘That’s the way it always is the first time. Afterwards you won’t even notice.’
She laid him down beside her and while she was taking his clothes off she was calming him maternally.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Ulises.’
‘That’s a gringo name,’ Eréndira said.
‘No, a sailor name.’
Eréndira uncovered his chest, gave a few little orphan kisses, sniffed him.
‘It’s like you were made of gold all over,’ she said, ‘but you smell of flowers.’
‘It must be the oranges,’ Ulises said.
Calmer now, he gave a smile of complicity.
‘We carry a lot of birds along to throw people off the track,’ he added, ‘but what we’re doing is smuggling a load of oranges across the border.’
‘Oranges aren’t contraband,’ Eréndira said.
‘These are,’ said Ulises. ‘Each one is worth fifty thousand pesos.’
Eréndira laughed for the first time in a long while.
‘What I like about you,’ she said, ‘is the serious way you make up nonsense.’
She had become spontaneous and talkative again, as if Ulises’s innocence had changed not only her mood but her character. The grandmother, such a short distance away from misfortune, was still talking in her sleep.
‘Around those times, at the beginning of March, they brought you home,’ she said. ‘You looked like a lizard wrapped in cotton. Amadís, your father, who was young and handsome, was so happy that afternoon that he sent for twenty carts loaded with flowers and arrived strewing them along the street until the whole village was gold with flowers like the sea.’
She ranted on with great shouts and with a stubborn passion for several hours. But Ulises couldn’t hear her because Eréndira had loved him so much and so truthfully that she loved him again for half price while her grandmother was raving and kept on loving him for nothing until dawn.
A group of missionaries holding up their crucifixes stood shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the desert. A wind as fierce as the wind of misfortune shook their burlap habits and their rough beards and they were barely able to stand on their feet. Behind them was the mission, a colonial pile of stone with a tiny belfry on top of the harsh whitewashed walls.
The youngest missionary, who was in charge of the group, pointed to a natural crack in the glazed clay ground.
‘You shall not pass beyond this line!’ he shouted.
The four Indian bearers carrying the grandmother in a litter made of boards stopped when they heard the shout. Even though she was uncomfortable sitting on the planks of the litter and her spirit was dulled by the dust and sweat of the desert, the grandmother maintained her haughtiness intact. Eréndira was on foot. Behind the litter came a file of eight Indians carrying the baggage and at the very end the photographer on his bicycle.
‘The desert doesn’t belong to anyone,’ the grandmother said.
‘It belongs to God,’ the missionary said, ‘and you are violating his sacred laws with your filthy business.’
The grandmother then recognized the missionary’s peninsular usage and diction and avoided a head-on confrontation so as not to break her head against his intransigence. She went back to being herself.
‘I don’t understand your mysteries, son.’
The missionary pointed at Eréndira.
‘That child is underage.’
‘But she’s my granddaughter.’
‘So much the worse,’ the missionary replied. ‘Put her under our care willingly or we’ll have to seek recourse in other ways.’
The grandmothe
r had not expected them to go so far.
‘All right, if that’s how it is.’ She surrendered in fear. ‘But sooner or later I’ll pass, you’ll see.’
Three days after the encounter with the missionaries, the grandmother and Eréndira were sleeping in a village near the mission when a group of stealthy, mute bodies, creeping along like an infantry patrol, slipped into the tent. They were six Indian novices, strong and young, their rough cloth habits seeming to glow in the moonlight. Without making a sound they cloaked Eréndira in a mosquito netting, picked her up without waking her, and carried her off wrapped like a large, fragile fish caught in a lunar net.
There were no means left untried by the grandmother in an attempt to rescue her granddaughter from the protection of the missionaries. Only when they had all failed, from the most direct to the most devious, did she turn to the civil authority, which was vested in a military man. She found him in the courtyard of his home, his chest bare, shooting with an army rifle at a dark and solitary cloud in the burning sky. He was trying to perforate it to bring on rain, and his shots were furious and useless, but he did take the necessary time out to listen to the grandmother.
‘I can’t do anything,’ he explained to her when he had heard her out. ‘The priests, according to the concordat, have the right to keep the girl until she comes of age. Or until she gets married.’
‘Then why do they have you here as mayor?’ the grandmother asked.
‘To make it rain,’ was the mayor’s answer.
Then, seeing that the cloud had moved out of range, he interrupted his official duties and gave his full attention to the grandmother.
‘What you need is someone with a lot of weight who will vouch for you,’ he told her. ‘Someone who can swear to your moral standing and your good behavior in a signed letter. Do you know Senator Onésimo Sánchez?’
Sitting under the naked sun on a stool that was too narrow for her astral buttocks, the grandmother answered with a solemn rage:
‘I’m just a poor woman all alone in the vastness of the desert.’
The mayor, his right eye twisted from the heat, looked at her with pity.
‘Then don’t waste your time, ma’am,’ he said. ‘You’ll rot in hell.’