“It is a sacred dance—you will dance it only for the man you love most in your life,” Riad Halabí told me.
* * *
Zulema was perfectly amoral, like a babe at the breast; all her energy had been diverted or suppressed. She did not involve herself in life, but was preoccupied only with personal satisfactions. She was afraid of everything: of being abandoned by her husband, of having children with a harelip, of losing her beauty, of her headaches muddling her brain, of growing old. I am sure that in her heart she loathed Riad Halabí, but neither could she leave him; she chose to put up with him rather than work to support herself. Intimacy with him repelled her, but at the same time she was consciously seductive as a means to hold him, terrified that he might find pleasure with another woman. As for Riad, he loved her with the same humble and mournful ardor of their first meeting, and went to her often. I learned to read his expressions, and when I glimpsed that certain smoldering spark, I would go out for a stroll or go tend the store, while they closed themselves in their room. Afterward Zulema would soap herself furiously, rub her body with alcohol, and give herself vinegar douches. It took me a while to connect that rubber apparatus and nozzle with my patrona’s sterility. Zulema had been educated to serve and please a man, but her husband asked nothing of her and, probably for that very reason, she fell into the habit of doing nothing at all, and eventually became a kind of enormous toy. My stories did not make her happy; they merely filled her head with romantic ideas, and led her to dream of impossible escapades and borrowed heroes, distancing her totally from reality. Her only enthusiasms were gold and jewels. When her husband traveled to the capital, he spent a good part of his earnings to buy her jewelry, which she kept buried in a box in the patio. Obsessed with the fear that someone would steal it, she changed the place almost every week; often she could not remember where she had buried it, and would spend hours searching, until I learned all the possible hiding places and observed that she used them always in the same sequence. It was a local belief that jewels should not be kept buried too long: mushrooms would destroy even precious metals and after a while phosphorescent vapors would rise from the earth and attract thieves to the treasure trove. That was why Zulema occasionally sunned her ornaments during the siesta. She would leave me there to guard them, puzzled by her passion for a concealed treasure she never had an opportunity to show off: she did not receive visitors, she did not travel with Riad Halabí or parade through the streets of Agua Santa, but limited herself to fantasizing a return to her country when everyone would be crazed with envy of her opulence, thus justifying the years lost in such a remote region of the world.
In her own way Zulema was good to me; she treated me like a lapdog. We were not friends, but Riad Halabí would get nervous if we were alone for very long; and if he surprised us talking in low voices, he looked for reasons to interrupt us, as if he feared our complicity. When her husband was away on a trip, Zulema forgot her headaches and seemed almost happy. She would call me to her room and ask me to rub her body with milk and cucumber slices to lighten her skin. She would lie on her back on the bed, naked except for earrings and bracelets, eyes closed, her blue hair spread across the sheet. Seeing her like that, I was always reminded of a great pale fish abandoned to its fate on the beach. The heat could be overpowering, and some days her skin burned beneath my hands like a stone in the sun.
“Oil my body, and later, when it gets cooler, I will color my hair,” Zulema ordered in her newly acquired Spanish.
She could not bear body hair; to her it was a sign of bestiality tolerable only in men, who were half animal anyway. She screamed as I pulled hers, using a mixture of hot sugar and lemon, leaving only a small dark triangle on her pubis. She was offended by her own odor and washed and perfumed herself obsessively. She demanded that I tell her love stories, to describe the protagonist, the length of his legs, the strength of his hands, the muscles of his chest. She would question me on the amorous details: whether he did this or that, how many times, what he whispered in bed. Her sensuality was like a disease. I tried to weave into my stories an occasional hero who was less handsome, one with a physical defect, maybe a scar on his face near the mouth, but that put her in a bad mood; she would threaten to throw me out in the street, and immediately sink into sullen melancholy.
As the months went by, I felt more secure; I got over my homesickness and did not mention my trial period, hoping that Riad Halabí had forgotten it. In a way my patrones were my family. I grew accustomed to the heat, to iguanas sunning themselves like prehistoric monsters, to Arabic food, to the long hours of the afternoon, to the sameness of the days. I liked that forgotten village joined to the world by a single telephone line and a curving road, surrounded by vegetation so thick that once when a truck ran off the road before the eyes of several witnesses, they could not find it in the barranca because it had been swallowed up by ferns and philodendron. Everyone knew each other by name, and no one had any secrets. The Pearl of the Orient was a meeting place where people came to chat, to conduct business, to meet lovers. No one asked about Zulema; she was merely a foreign ghost hidden in the back rooms, whose scorn for the town was returned in equal measure. On the other hand, Riad Halabí was greatly esteemed, and he had been forgiven for never eating or drinking with his neighbors, as demanded by the rituals of friendship. Despite the doubts of the priest, who objected to his Muslim faith, he was godfather to a number of children named after him, a judge in disputes, an arbiter and counselor in moments of crisis. I moved in the shadow of his prestige, happy to belong to his house, and I planned to stay on in that large white dwelling with the cooling perfume of flower petals in every room and shady trees in the patio. Gradually I stopped missing Huberto Naranjo and Elvira; I developed a tolerable image of my madrina, and suppressed bad memories so I could remember my past as happy. My mother also found her place in the shadows of the rooms and often appeared at night like a breath beside my bed. I was content, at peace. I grew a little; my face began to change, and when I looked in the mirror I no longer saw an insecure waif. I was beginning to look the way I look now.
“You can’t go through life like a bedouin. We’ll have to get your name in the Bureau of Records,” my patrón said one day.
Riad Halabí provided me with some essential baggage for my travels through life. Two gifts were of special importance: writing, and proof of existence. I had no papers to prove my presence in this world: no one had registered my birth; I had never been inside a school—it was as if I had never been born. But he spoke with a friend in the city, paid the necessary bribe, and obtained a certificate on which, through an official error, I am recorded as three years younger than I really am.
* * *
Kamal, the second son of one of Riad Halabí’s uncles, came to live in the house a year and a half after I arrived. His entrance into The Pearl of the Orient was so discreet that no one saw the fatal omens or suspected he would have the effect of a hurricane in our lives. He was twenty-five years old, small and thin, with fine fingers and long eyelashes; he seemed unsure of himself, and greeted people ceremoniously by placing one hand over his heart and bowing his head, a gesture that Riad immediately adopted and then was impishly imitated by all the children of Agua Santa. Kamal was a man accustomed to misery. Escaping from the Israelis, his family had fled their village after the war, leaving behind all their earthly possessions: the small orchard they had inherited from their ancestors, their burro, and a handful of domestic animals. Kamal had grown up in a camp for Palestine refugees, and his destiny may have been to become a guerrilla fighter against the Jews, but he was not cut out for the hazards of battle, and neither did he share his father’s and brothers’ indignation at having lost a past to which he felt no ties. He was drawn more to Western customs; he longed to go to a Western country and begin a new life where no one knew him and where he owed no one respect. He spent his childhood peddling items on the black market, and his adolescence seducing the widow
s in the camp, until one day his father, weary of beating him and hiding him from enemies, remembered Riad Halabí, the nephew located in a remote South American country whose name he could not recall. He did not ask Kamal’s opinion; he simply took him by the arm and dragged him to the port; there he was hired as a cabin boy on a merchant vessel, with the injunction that he not return until he had made his fortune. So it was that this youth, like so many immigrants, came to the same steamy coast where five years earlier Rolf Carlé had disembarked from a Norwegian ship. From there he traveled by bus to Agua Santa and into the arms of his kinsman, who welcomed him with effusive hospitality.
The Pearl of the Orient was closed for three days and the house of Riad Halabí thrown open for an unforgettable fiesta attended by all the townspeople. While Zulema stayed in her room, suffering one or more of her countless afflictions, the patrón and I, assisted by the schoolteacher Inés and other neighbor women, cooked so much food that it looked like a wedding feast in the courts of Baghdad. On large tables covered with snowy cloths we placed huge platters of saffron rice, piñon nuts, raisins and pistachios, peppers and curry, and around them some fifty trays of Arabic and American dishes, some salty, some hot, some sweet and sour, along with meats, fish brought on ice from the coast, and every imaginable grain with its sauces and condiments. There was one table only for desserts, evenly divided between Oriental sweets and native Latin recipes. I served enormous pitchers of rum with fruit, which, like good Muslims, the two cousins did not taste, but which the others drank until they rolled happily beneath the tables, and those still standing danced in honor of the new arrival. Kamal was introduced to each guest, and to each he had to tell the story of his life in Arabic. No one understood a word of his account, but everyone commented that he seemed a pleasant young man—which, in fact, he was. He may have had a kind of feminine fragility, but there was something hirsute, dark, and ambiguous in his nature that disturbed all the women. When he walked into a room, his aura was felt in the farthest corner; when he sat in the doorway of the shop to enjoy the cool evening air, the whole street felt his magnetism; he enveloped everyone in a kind of spell. He could barely make himself understood by gestures and exclamations, but all of us listened with fascination, following the rhythm of his voice and the harsh melody of his words.
“Now I can travel in peace, knowing that a man of my own family is here to look after the women and the house and the store,” said Riad Halabí, clapping his cousin on the back.
Many things changed with the advent of that visitor. I was not as close to the patrón; he did not call me to tell him my stories or comment on the news; he put aside the jokes and reading aloud; the domino games became a man’s affair. From the first week, he began going alone with Kamal to the traveling movie theater, because his cousin was not used to female company. Except for a few women doctors from the Red Cross and the evangelical missionaries who visited the refugee camps—almost all dry as sticks—the only time the youth had seen a woman over fifteen with her face uncovered in the street was when he first left the camp where he had grown up. On that occasion he had made a difficult trip one Saturday by truck to the capital; there he and his companions had driven to the North American colony, where gringas were washing their cars in the street, dressed only in shorts and scoop-neck T-shirts, a spectacle that attracted hordes of males from remote towns of the region. The men rented chairs and umbrellas and settled down to watch. The area was alive with street vendors but the women were not even aware of the commotion, totally oblivious to the heavy breathing, sweating, trembling, and erections they provoked. For those young women transplanted from a different civilization, the men swathed in tunics, with dark skin and beards of prophets, were simply an optical illusion, an existential error, a delirium brought on by the heat. When Kamal was around, Riad Halabí was curt and authoritarian with Zulema and me, but when we were alone he made amends with little gifts, and was once again the affectionate friend of old. He assigned to me the task of teaching Spanish to the new cousin, a none too simple task since Kamal was humiliated if I told him the meaning of a word or pointed out an error of pronunciation; nevertheless, he quickly learned a kind of slang, and soon could help in the shop.
“Keep your knees together when you’re sitting down,” Zulema commanded me, I think with Kamal in mind, “and button up all your buttons.”
The cousin’s sorcery spread through the house and The Pearl of the Orient, spilled through the town, and was carried even farther on the wind. Girls came to the shop from morning to night on the most transparent errands. They ripened before Kamal like wild fruit, swelling beneath their short skirts and tight blouses, so perfumed that after they left, their scent permeated the room. They came in groups of two or three, laughing and whispering; they leaned on the counter so that their breasts were exposed and their bottoms, atop dark legs, invitingly elevated. They waited for him in the street; they invited him to their homes for the afternoon; they initiated him into the dances of the Caribbean.
I felt an unrelenting restlessness. It was the first time I had ever experienced jealousy, and that emotion clung to my skin day and night like a dark stain, a contamination I could not shed; it became so unbearable that when finally I rid myself of it, I was freed forever of the desire to possess another person or the temptation ever to belong to anyone. From the instant I saw Kamal I was deranged; my nerves were raw, chafed by the supreme pleasure of loving him and the unendurable ache of loving him in vain. I followed him everywhere, like a shadow; I waited on him; I made him the hero of my solitary fantasies. But he ignored me completely. I became conscious of myself; I studied myself in the mirror; I touched my body; I tried different hairstyles during the silence of the siesta; I applied a touch of rouge to my cheeks and lips, careful that no one should notice. Kamal walked by without seeing me. He was the protagonist of all my love stories. Now I was not content with the final kiss of the novels I had read to Zulema, and I began to live tempestuous nights with him in my imagination. I was fifteen years old and a virgin, but if the cord with seven knots my madrina invented had measured intentions as well, I would not have passed the test.
* * *
All our lives changed when Riad Halabí went away for the first time and left Zulema, Kamal, and me alone. The patrona’s indisposition vanished as if by a miracle, and she awakened from a lethargy of almost forty years. She got up early and prepared breakfast; she put on her best clothes; she adorned herself in all her jewels; she fastened half her hair at her neck and let the rest fall loose about her shoulders. She had never looked so beautiful. At first Kamal eluded her; when he was with her, he kept his eyes lowered and scarcely spoke; he spent the entire day in the shop, and at night went out to roam through the town. Soon, however, it was impossible to escape the power of the woman, the sultry scent, the heat of her tread as she passed by, the bewitchment of her voice. The atmosphere was heavy with secret urgencies, with omens, with summonses. I sensed that something of great magnitude was happening from which I was excluded, a private war between those two, a titanic battle of wills. Kamal beat a constant retreat, digging his trenches, defended by centuries of taboos, by respect for the laws of hospitality and the bonds of blood that joined him to Riad Halabí. Zulema, avid as a carnivorous flower, fluttered her fragrant petals to lure him to her trap. That lazy and docile woman, who had lived her life lying on a bed with cold cloths pressed to her forehead, was transformed into a stupendous female, a pale spider tirelessly spinning her web. I wanted to be invisible.
Zulema, sitting in the shade of the patio painting her toenails, her massive legs exposed to mid-thigh. Zulema smoking, the tip of her tongue playing with the mouthpiece of the cigarette holder, lips shimmering. Zulema, bending forward, her dress slipping to reveal a plump shoulder that captured the sunlight in its impossible whiteness. Zulema, eating a piece of ripe fruit, the yellow juice splashing one breast. Zulema, toying with her blue hair, covering part of her face, and gazing at Kamal wit
h the eyes of a houri.
The cousin resisted heroically for seventy-two hours. The tension was building to an excruciating level, and I feared the air would explode like lightning, reducing us all to cinders. On the third day, Kamal worked from early morning, not showing his face in the house, performing meaningless tasks in The Pearl of the Orient to pass the time. Zulema called him to eat, but he said he was not hungry, and spent another hour counting the till. He waited to close the shop until the town had gone to bed and the sky was black, and when he calculated that the evening drama had begun on the radio, he stole into the kitchen to look for leftovers from our meal. But for the first time in many months Zulema was prepared to miss an episode. To throw him off the track, she left the radio turned on in her room, and the door ajar; then she stationed herself in the semi-darkness of the corridor. She had put on an embroidered tunic; beneath it she was naked, and when she raised her arm, milky flesh glowed to her waist. She had spent the afternoon removing body hair, brushing her hair, rubbing herself with creams, perfecting her makeup; her body was perfumed with patchouli and her breath freshened with licorice; she was barefoot and jewelless, ready for love. I saw everything, because she had not sent me to my room; she had forgotten I existed. For Zulema, all that mattered was Kamal and the battle she was about to win.