By the end of the week the government had regained control of the city and the General had left for a rest on his private island, basking in the Caribbean sun, confident that he held even his compatriots’ dreams in his fist. He expected to govern for the rest of his life; why else did he have the Man of the Gardenia on the alert for conspiracies in barracks and streets? Besides, he was satisfied that the spark of democracy had not lasted long enough to leave a permanent mark in people’s memories. The final outcome of that unparalleled free-for-all was a few dead and an undetermined number of prisoners and exiles. Once again the casinos and seraglios of Calle República opened for business, and the occupants returned to their habitual labors as if nothing had happened. The authorities continued to receive their cut and the new Minister held his post without mishap, after ordering the police not to bother anyone engaged in criminal activities but to devote themselves, as usual, to persecuting political enemies and hunting down madmen and beggars: shave their heads, douse them with disinfectant, and release them on the highways to disappear through natural means. The General was immutable before the storm of gossip, certain that accusations of abuse and corruption would merely solidify his prestige. He had taken as his own El Benefactor’s lesson, and believed that history hallows audacious leaders, and that the people consider honesty to be an undesirable trait in a real man, something befitting priests and women. He was convinced that learned men exist for the purpose of being honored with statues, and that it is nice to have two or three to exhibit in textbooks, but when it is a question of power, only the high-handed, feared caudillo comes out on top.
I wandered around for days after the Revolt of the Whores. I had no part in it because I was trying to keep my distance from any disturbances. In spite of the visible presence of my mother, at first I felt a vague burning in the pit of my stomach, and my mouth felt dry—sour and gritty—but I got used to it. I abandoned the habits of cleanliness my madrina and Elvira had drilled into me, and stopped going to the fountains and public water taps to bathe. I turned into a filthy urchin who rambled aimlessly by day, scavenging food, and by night took refuge in dark corners to wait out the curfew when the cars of the Security Force were all that were moving through the streets.
Then one evening about six I met Riad Halabí. He was walking down the street, and when he reached the corner where I was standing, he stopped and stared at me. I looked up and saw a heavy, middle-aged man with thick-lidded, sleepy eyes. I think he was wearing a light-colored suit and a necktie, but I always think of him in the impeccable batiste guayabera shirts that I would soon be ironing with such painstaking care.
“Psst, little girl,” he called in a hoarse voice.
It was then I noticed the disfiguration of his mouth, a deep cleft between upper lip and nose, and separated teeth that revealed the tip of his tongue. He produced a handkerchief and placed it over his mouth to hide the deformity, smiling at me with his olive eyes. I started to back away but suddenly was overcome by extreme fatigue, an irresistible longing to give up and go to sleep. My knees doubled under me and I sank to the sidewalk, gazing up at this stranger through a thick mist. He bent over, took my arms, lifted me to my feet, forced me to take one step, two, three, until I found myself sitting in a café before an enormous sandwich and a glass of milk. I took them in trembling hands, breathing the aroma of warm bread. As I chewed and swallowed, I felt the dull pain, the sharp pleasure, the fierce anxiety that I had known since only infrequently in the embrace of love. I gulped my food, but was unable to finish; again I felt dizzy, and this time the nausea was uncontrollable and I vomited. All around me people turned away in revulsion and the waiter began to shout insults, but the man silenced him with a banknote, and with his arm around my waist led me outside.
“Where do you live, hija? Do you have a family?”
I shook my head, ashamed. We walked to a nearby street where a broken-down pickup truck was waiting, loaded with boxes and sacks. He helped me in, covered me with his jacket, started the motor, and headed off toward the east.
We drove all night through a dark landscape where the only lights were the checkpoints of the guardia, the trucks rolling toward the oil fields, and the Palace of the Poor, which for thirty seconds materialized like a hallucination at one side of the road. Once it had been the summer home of El Benefactor. The most beautiful mulatto women in the Caribbean had danced there, but the very day the tyrant died, indigents began to take it over, timidly at first, and then in droves. They walked into the gardens and, since no one stopped them, continued to advance; they climbed broad stairways rimmed with bronze-studded carved columns; they wandered through sumptuous marble salons—white from Almería, rose from Valencia, and gray from Carrara—and arborescent, arabesque, and cipolin marble corridors; they invaded bathrooms of onyx, jade, and malachite; and finally they settled in with children, grandparents, chattel, and livestock. Invisible lines divided the commodious rooms, and each family staked out its place: hammocks were hung, rococo furniture was splintered to fuel cookstoves, children dismantled the chromium plumbing, adolescents made love among the garden statuary, and the elderly sowed tobacco in gilded bathtubs. Someone ordered the guardia to remove the interlopers, with firearms if necessary, but the officials became lost along the way. They could not evict the occupants because the palace and everything inside had become invisible to the human eye; it had entered another dimension where life continued without aggravation.
The sun had risen by the time we reached our destination: Agua Santa, one of those towns drowsing in the doldrums of the provinces, washed by rain, radiant in the incredible tropical light. The truck bumped down a main street lined with colonial houses, each with a small garden and chicken coop, and came to a stop before a whitewashed dwelling that was more solid and sturdy than the others. At that hour the main door was still closed and I did not realize it was a shop.
“We’re home,” the man said.
SIX
Riad Halabí was one of those persons who are undone by their own compassion. He loved others so much that he tried to spare them the unpleasantness of his cleft lip: he always carried a handkerchief in his hand to conceal it; he never ate or drank in public; he rarely smiled; and he tried always to stand either with his back to the light or in the shadow, to hide his defect. He lived his whole life without realizing the sympathy he evoked, or the love he sowed in my heart. He had come to this country when he was fifteen, alone, without money or friends, carrying a tourist visa stamped on a false Turkish passport his father had bought from a dishonest consul in the Near East. His mission was to make his fortune and send money to his family, and although he did not accomplish the former, he never failed in the latter. He educated his brothers, provided a dowry for each of his sisters, and bought an olive grove for his parents, a mark of prestige in the land of refugees where he had grown up. He spoke Spanish with all the native idioms but with the undeniable accent of the desert; from the desert, too, came his sense of hospitality and passion for water. During his first years as an immigrant, he lived on bread, bananas, and coffee. He slept on the floor of a textile factory owned by a compatriot; in exchange for a roof over his head, he was expected to clean the building, carry the bundles and bales of thread and cotton, and tend to the mousetraps; the part of the day not devoted to these responsibilities was spent in various other chores. Soon he realized that more substantial earnings were to be had, and chose to dedicate himself to commerce. He peddled underclothes and watches in offices; in the homes of the middle class he tempted maids with cosmetics and cheap necklaces; he dispensed maps and pencils in schools; in the barracks he sold photos of naked film stars and religious prints of Saint Gabriel, patron saint of soldiers and recruits. The competition was fierce and the possibilities for advancement almost nil; for him, the only virtue in being a salesman was his pleasure in bargaining, which he did not use to drive a hard bargain but as an excuse for exchanging ideas with his customers and making friends. He
was honest and unambitious; he lacked all the attributes for success in that trade, at least in the capital. For these reasons, his countrymen advised him to take his merchandise to the small towns of the interior where people were more ingenuous. Riad Halabí set off with the same trepidation his ancestors had felt as they began a long trek across the desert. At first he traveled by bus, until he was able to buy a motorcycle on credit and strap on a large box behind the seat. Astride that machine he traveled burro paths and sheer mountainsides with the endurance of the tribesmen from whom he was descended. Later he acquired an ancient but rugged automobile, and finally a truck. There was no place he could not go in that vehicle. He climbed the peaks of the Andes over indescribable roads, offering his wares in hamlets where the air was so clear that you could see angels at dusk; he knocked on every door up and down the coast, sweltering in the hot breath of the siesta, feverish in the humidity, stopping from time to time to give assistance to iguanas whose feet were stuck in the melted asphalt; he crossed dunes, navigating without a compass across a sea of sands shifting in the wind, never looking back, so that the seduction of oblivion would not turn his blood to chocolate. At last he came to a region that had been prosperous in bygone years; dugouts laden with aromatic cacao beans had floated down its rivers, but now it was a place ruined by oil fever, left to be devoured by the jungle and man’s indolence. Enamored of that geography, he traveled the countryside with wondering eyes and grateful heart, recalling his own dry and harsh land where an antlike tenacity was required to cultivate an orange, in contrast to this place prodigal in fruit and flowers, a paradise protected from all evil. There, even for someone as disinclined toward profit as he, he found it easy to sell any trinket, but he had a soft heart and could not make himself rich at the expense of the ignorance of others. He was taken with the people, lords in their poverty and abandonment. Wherever he went he was received as a friend, just as his grandfather had welcomed strangers to his tent in the belief that a guest is sacred. In each country hovel, he was offered a glass of lemonade, a black and aromatic coffee, a chair where he could rest in the shade. These were happy, generous, and plain-speaking people whose word had the force of a contract. He would open his suitcase and display his merchandise on the hard dirt floor. His hosts would examine those goods of dubious utility with a courteous smile, and buy something not to offend him; but many had no way to pay because only rarely did they have money in hand. They were, in fact, suspicious of the paper money that today was worth something and tomorrow might be withdrawn from circulation, according to the whim of the current leader, printed paper that could vanish if you turned your back—as had happened with the collection for Aid to Lepers, devoured by a goat that ambled into the treasurer’s office. They preferred coins, which at least weighed in the pocket, rang on the counter, and shone as real money should. The oldest among them still hid their savings in clay jugs and kerosene tins buried in the patio, for they had never heard of a bank. Very few lost any sleep over financial matters and most bartered for goods. Riad Halabí adjusted to these conditions and renounced the paternal edict to amass a fortune.
One of his trips took him to Agua Santa. When he drove into the town there was not a soul in the streets and at first he thought it was abandoned; but then he came upon a crowd gathered in front of the post office. That was the memorable morning when the son of the schoolteacher Inés had died of a gunshot wound to the head. The murderer was the owner of a house surrounded by steep hillsides where mangoes thrived without the hand of man. The children used to pick up the fallen fruit, in spite of the threats of the owner, an outsider who had inherited the small hacienda and still had not shed the avarice of some city men. The trees were so heavy with fruit that the branches broke beneath the weight, but it was pointless to try to sell the mangoes. Who would buy them? There was no reason to pay for something that the good earth gave away. That day the son of the schoolteacher Inés, like all his schoolmates, took the long way to school to pick a mango. The bullet entered his forehead and exited through the back of his neck before he had time to realize what the spark and thunder that exploded in his face might be.
Riad Halabí stopped his truck in Agua Santa moments after the children had carried in the body on a makeshift stretcher and set it down before the post-office door. The whole town came to look. The mother stared at her son, still not comprehending what had happened, while four uniformed men held back the townspeople from taking justice into their own hands; they fulfilled that duty with little enthusiasm, however, because they knew the law and were aware that the homicide would go unpunished. Riad Halabí joined the crowd with the presentiment that this place would play a role in his destiny; he had come to the end of his pilgrimage. As soon as he heard the details of what had happened, he took charge without a moment’s hesitation. No one seemed surprised by his behavior; it was as if they had been waiting for him. He opened a path through the crowd, picked up the child’s body in his arms, and carried it to the schoolteacher’s house, where he improvised a bier on the dining-room table. Then he brewed and served coffee, producing no little surprise among the mourners, who had never seen a man busying himself in the kitchen. He sat through the wake with the mother, and his firm and discreet presence led many to believe he was a distant relative. The next morning, he organized the burial and helped lower the coffin into the grave with such sincere anguish that señorita Inés wished that the stranger were the father of her son. When they had tamped down the earth over the grave, Riad Halabí turned toward the people assembled there and, covering his mouth with his handkerchief, proposed a plan for channeling their collective anger. Straight from the cemetery, each of them went to pick mangoes; they filled sacks, baskets, bags, and wheelbarrows, and then converged upon the property of the murderer, who when he saw them approaching had the impulse to fire and frighten them off, but thought better of it and ran and hid among the reeds by the riverbank. The crowd advanced in silence, surrounded the house, broke windows and doors, and emptied their load inside. Then they went back for more. All day they hauled mangoes, until there were none left on the trees and the house was filled to the rooftop. The juicy fruit burst open, soaking the walls and running across the floor like sweet blood. At nightfall, when the harvesters had returned home, the criminal crept from the water and jumped into his car and escaped, never to return. In the days that followed, the sun beat down on the house, converting it into an enormous saucepan in which the mangoes slowly simmered; the building took on an ocher color; it grew soggy and weak, and burst open and rotted, impregnating the town for years with the odor of marmalade.
From that day, Riad Halabí considered himself a native of Agua Santa; he was accepted as such, and there he built his home and his shop. Like many rural dwellings, his was square, with rooms arranged around a patio filled with tall, leafy vegetation to provide shade—palms, ferns, and a few fruit trees. This patio was the heart of the house; it afforded passage from one room to another, and there life unfolded. In its center Riad Halabí constructed a large and serene Arabian fountain that soothed the spirit with the incomparable music of water over stones. Around the edge of this interior garden he installed a tile trough with clear flowing water, and in every room he placed a pottery bowl filled with moist flower petals whose perfume made the suffocating heat more bearable. The dwelling had many doors, like the houses of the wealthy, and with time it grew in order to make space for new storerooms. The shop occupied the three large front rooms; the living quarters, kitchen, and bathroom were in the rear. Little by little, Riad Halabí’s business became the most prosperous in the region. Anything could be bought there: food, fertilizer, disinfectants, cloth, medicines; if something was not in stock, the Turk was charged with fetching it on his next trip. He called the shop The Pearl of the Orient, in honor of Zulema, his wife.
* * *
Agua Santa was a modest village, with adobe, wood, and reed houses lining the roadway; machetes defended it against a wild vegetation that would
engulf it in an instant’s inattention. The country’s waves of immigrants had not washed as far as this backwater, nor had the uproar of modern life; people were affable, their pleasures simple, and if it had not been for the proximity of the penal colony on Santa María, Agua Santa would have been a hamlet like any other in that region. The presence of the guardia and the whorehouse, however, gave it a touch of cosmopolitanism. For six days of the week, life went along without incident, but on Saturday they changed the guard at the prison and the off-duty sentries came to town to amuse themselves, altering the routine of the villagers, who tried to ignore them, pretending that the racket they raised came from a sabbat of monkeys in the treetops, but nonetheless taking the precaution of bolting their doors and locking up their daughters. The Indians also came to town on Saturday, to beg a banana, a swig of alcohol, or bread. They came in single file, ragged, followed by a pack of dwarf dogs, the children naked, the old worn by time, the women pregnant—all with a faint expression of mockery in their eyes. The priest kept a coin from the tithe box for each of them, and Riad Halabí gave each a cigarette or a piece of candy.