“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 eve
r 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.
Every time I looked outside from the balcony, I realized that I would have been better off had I not come back. The street was more appealing than that house where life droned by so tediously—daily routines repeated at the same slow pace, days stuck to one another, all the same color, like time in a hospital bed. At night I gazed at the sky and imagined that I could make myself as wispy as smoke and slip between the bars of the locked gate. I pretended that when a moonbeam touched my back I sprouted wings like a bird’s, two huge feathered wings for flight. Sometimes I concentrated so hard on that idea that I flew above the rooftops. Don’t imagine such foolish things, little bird, only witches and airplanes fly at night. I did not learn anything more of Huberto Naranjo until much later, but I often thought of him, placing his dark face on all my fairy-tale princes. Although I was young, I knew about love intuitively, and wove it into my stories. I dreamed about love, it haunted me. I studied the photographs in the crime reports, trying to guess the dramas of passion and death in those newspaper pages. I was always hanging on to adults’ words, listening behind the door when the patrona talked on the telephone, pestering Elvira with questions. Run along, little bird, she would say. The radio was my source of inspiration. The one in the kitchen was on from morning till night, our only contact with the outside world, proclaiming the virtues of this land blessed by God with all manner of treasures, from its central position on the globe and the wisdom of its leaders to the swamp of petroleum on which it floated. It was the radio that taught me to sing boleros and other popular songs, to repeat the commercials, and to follow a beginning English class half an hour a day: This pencil is red, is this pencil blue? No, that pencil is not blue, that pencil is red. I knew the time for each program; I imitated the announcers’ voices. I followed all the dramas; I suffered indescribable torment with each of those creatures battered by fate, and was always surprised that in the end things worked out so well for the heroine, who for sixty installments had acted like a moron.
“I say that Montedónico is going to recognize her as his daughter. If he gives her his name, she can marry Rogelio de Salvatierra,” Elvira would sigh, one ear glued to the radio.
“She has her mother’s locket. That’s proof. Why doesn’t she tell everyone she’s Montedónico’s daughter and get it over with?”
“She couldn’t do that to the man who gave her life, little bird.”
“Why not? He left her locked up in an orphanage for eighteen years.”
“He’s just mean, little bird. They call people like him sadists.”
“Look, abuela, if she doesn’t change her ways, she’s going to have a hard time all her life.”
“Well, you needn’t worry, everything will work out fine. Can’t you see she’s a good girl?”
Elvira was right. The long-suffering always triumphed and the evil received their due. Montedónico was struck down by a fatal illness, pleading from his deathbed for forgiveness; his daughter cared for him until he died, and then, after inheriting his fortune, married Rogelio de Salvatierra, giving me in passing an abundance of material for my own stories—although only rarely did I respect the standard happy ending. Little bird, my abuela used to say, why don’t people in your stories ever get married? Often only a word or two would string together a rosary of images in my mind. Once I heard a delicious new word and flew to ask Elvira, Abuela, what is snow? From her explanation I gathered it was like frozen meringue. At that moment I became the heroine of stories about the North Pole; I was the abominable snow woman, hairy and ferocious, battling the scientists who were on my trail hoping to catch me and experiment on me in their laboratory. I did not find out what snow really was until the day a niece of the General celebrated her début; the event was so widely heralded on the radio that Elvira had no choice but to take me to see the spectacle—from a distance, of course. A thousand guests gathered that night at the city’s best hotel, transformed for the occasion into a wintertime replica of Cinderella’s castle. Workmen trimmed back philodendron and tropical ferns, decapitated palm trees, and in their place set Christmas trees from Alaska trimmed with angel hair and artificial icicles. For ice-skating they installed a rink of white plastic imitating polar ice. They painted frost on the windows and sprinkled so much synthetic snow everywhere that a week later snowflakes were still drifting into the operating room of the Military Hospital five hundred meters away. The machines imported from the North failed to freeze the water in the swimming pool; instead of ice, all they obtained was a kind of gelatinous vomit. They decided to settle for two swans, dyed pink, awkwardly trailing a banner between them bearing the name of the débutante in gilt letters. To give more panache to the party, they flew in two scions of European nobility and a film star. At midnight the honoree, swathed in sable, was lowered from the ceiling in a swing built in the shape of a sleigh, swaying four meters above the heads of the guests, half-swooning from heat and vertigo. Those of us on the fringes outside did not see this, but it was featured in all the magazines; no one seemed surprised by the miracle of a tropical capital hotel shivering in Arctic cold—much more unbelievable events had happened there. In all that spectacle, I had eyes for only one thing: some enormous tubs filled with natural snow that had been placed at the entrance to the festivities so the elegant guests could throw snowballs and build snowmen, as they had heard is done in lands of ice and snow. I pulled free from Elvira, slipped between the waiters and guards, and ran to take that treasure in my hands. At first I thought I had been burned, and screamed with fright, but I was so fascinated by the color of light trapped in the frozen, airy matter that I could not let go. A guard nearly caught me, but I stooped down and scooted between his legs, clutching the precious snow to my chest. When it melted away, trickling through my fingers like water, I felt deceived. Some time later, Elvira gave me a transparent hemisphere containing a miniature cabin and a pine tree; when you shook it, it set loose a blizzard of snowflakes. So you will have a winter of your own, little bird, she told me.
At that age I was not interested in politics, but Elvira filled my head with subversive ideas to offset the beliefs of our employers.
“Everything in this country is crooked, little bird. Too many yellow-haired gringos, I say. One of these days they’ll carry the whole country off with them, and we’ll find ourselves plunk in the middle of the ocean—that’s what I say.”
The doña of the locket was of exactly the opposite opinion.
“How unfortunate that we were discovered by Christopher Columbus and not an Englishman. It takes determined people of sturdy stock to build roads through the forests, sow crops on the plains, and industrialize the nation. Wasn’t that what they did in the United States? And look where that country is today!”
She agreed with the General when he opened the border to anyone wanting to flee the misery of postwar Europe. Immigrants arrived by the hundreds, bringing wives, children, grandparents, and distant cousins; with their many tongues, national dishes, legends, holidays, and nostalgias. Our exuberant geography swallowed them up in one gulp. A few Asians were also allowed to enter and, once in the country, multiplied with astounding rapidity. Twenty years later, someone pointed out that on every street corner there was a restaurant decorated with wrathful demons, paper lanterns, and a pagoda roof. Once the newspaper reported the story of a Chinese waiter who left the customers unattended in the dining room, climbed the stairs to the office, and with a kitchen cleaver cut off the head and hands of his employer because he had not
shown the proper respect for a religious tradition when he placed the image of a dragon beside that of a tiger. During the investigation of the case, it was discovered that both protagonists of the tragedy were illegal immigrants. Asian passports were used a hundred times over; since the immigration officers could barely determine the sex of an Oriental, they certainly were not able from a passport photograph to tell them apart. Foreigners came with the intention of making their fortune and returning home but, instead, they stayed. Their descendants forgot their mother tongue, conquered by the aroma of coffee and the happy nature, the spell, of a people who still did not know envy. Very few set out to cultivate the homesteads granted by the government, because there were too few roads, schools, and hospitals, and too many diseases, mosquitoes, and poisonous snakes. The interior was the territory of outlaws, smugglers, and soldiers. Immigrants stayed in the cities, working diligently and saving every centavo, ridiculed by the native-born, who thought extravagance and generosity were the greatest virtues any decent person could have.
“I don’t believe in machines. This business of copying the gringos’ ways is bad for the soul,” Elvira maintained, scandalized by the excesses of the newly rich, who were trying to live life as they had seen it in the movies.
Since they lived on their respective retirement pensions, the elderly brother and sister had no access to easy money; as a result, there was no money squandered in that house, although they were aware of how the practice was spreading around them. Every citizen thought he had to own an executive-model automobile, until soon it became almost impossible to drive through the choked streets. Petroleum was traded for telephones in the shapes of cannons, seashells, and odalisques; so much plastic was imported that highways inevitably became bordered by indestructible garbage; eggs for the nation’s breakfasts arrived daily by plane, producing enormous omelets on the burning asphalt of the landing strip when a crate was cracked open.