Doctor Angel Sánchez is still alone, his only company the image of Ester Lucero, who visits him in his room at the hour of the siesta, setting his soul aflame in a never-ending bacchanal. His prestige as a medical man continues to grow throughout the region, because he is often heard to speak with the stars in aboriginal tongues.
SIMPLE MARÍA
Simple María believed in love. That was what made her a living legend. All her neighbors came to her funeral, even the police and the blind man from the kiosk who almost never abandoned his business. Calle República was vacated and, as a sign of mourning, black ribbons hung from balconies and the red lights turned off in the houses. Every person has his or her story, and in this barrio they were almost always sad, stories of poverty and accumulated injustice, of every form of violence, of children dead before term and lovers who had run away, but María’s story was different; it had a glow of elegance that gave wing to the imagination. She had been able to ply her trade independently, discreetly looking after her own affairs without hindrance. She never had the least curiosity about alcohol or drugs; she was not even interested in the five-peso consolations sold by the neighborhood fortunetellers and seers. She seemed beyond the torment of hope, protected by the armor of her invented love. She was a small, inoffensive woman, short, with refined features and manner, but if some pimp tried to enlist her he found himself facing a rabid beast, all claws and fangs, ready to return blow for blow, even if it meant her life. They learned to leave her alone. While the other women spent half their lives hiding bruises under thick layers of cheap makeup, María grew old with respect, with something of the air of a queen in rags. She was not aware of the renown of her name, nor of the legend that had been created around her. She was an old prostitute with the soul of a girl.
In her memories a murderous trunk and a dark-skinned man who smelled of the sea figured prominently: one by one, her friends uncovered scraps of information about her life and pieced them together patiently, filling in the blank spaces with fantasy, until they had reconstructed a past for her. She was not, it goes without saying, like the other women in that place. She had come from a distant world where skin is fair and Spanish is spoken with hard consonants and echoes of Spain. María was born to be a great lady; this was what the other women deduced from her aristocratic manner of speaking and her unique behavior, and, if any doubt remained, it was dissipated at her death. She died with her dignity intact. She suffered no recognizable illness; she was not frightened, nor did she breathe through her ears as ordinary people do when they are dying; she merely announced that she could no longer bear the tedium of living, put on her best dress, painted her lips bright red, and opened the plastic curtains that gave access to her room, so that everyone could be with her.
“My time has come to die” was her only comment.
She lay back in her bed, supported by three pillows whose cases had been starched for the occasion, and drank the contents of a large jug of thick chocolate at one swallow. The other women laughed at her, but when four hours later they were unable to wake her they realized that her decision was categorical and they ran to spread the word through the barrio. Some people came only out of curiosity, but most were truly distressed and stayed to be near her. Her friends brewed coffee to offer the visitors, because it seemed in bad taste to serve liquor; they did not want the wake to be confused with a celebration. About six in the evening, María shuddered, opened her eyes, looked around without seeing the faces, and immediately gave up the ghost. That was all. Someone suggested that she might have swallowed poison with the chocolate, in which case they would all be guilty for not having taken her to the hospital in time, but no one paid much attention to such slanderous remarks.
“If María decided to leave this world, she was within her rights, because she had no children or parents to look after” was the judgment of the madam of the house.
María’s friends did not want to see her in a funeral parlor, because the tranquil premeditation of her death was a solemn occurrence for Calle República and it was only right that her last hours before being lowered into the ground should be spent in the place where she had lived and not like some stranger whom no one cares to mourn. There were various opinions about whether holding a wake in the house would bring bad luck to the soul of the departed or to those of the clients, and whether just in case, they should break a mirror and lay the pieces around the coffin or bring holy water from the chapel of the Seminario to sprinkle in the corners. No one worked that night; there was no music and no laughter, but neither were there tears. They set the casket on a table in the lounge; the neighbors all lent chairs, and that was where the visitors made themselves comfortable and drank coffee and talked in low voices. In the center lay María, her head resting on a satin cushion, her hands crossed, and the photo of the dead child upon her bosom. During the course of the night her skin changed color until it was as dark as the chocolate she had drunk.
I learned about María’s story during the long hours we were sitting around her coffin. Her fellow workers told me that she had been born around the time of the Great War, in a southern province where the trees lose their leaves in the middle of the year and the cold seeps into your bones. She was the daughter of a proud family of Spanish emigrés. When they went through her room they had found some brittle, yellow papers in a biscuit tin; among them were a birth certificate and some photographs and letters. Her father had owned a hacienda and, according to a newspaper clipping stained with time, before she was married her mother had been a pianist. When María was twelve, she had been struck by a freight train as she was absentmindedly crossing the railroad track. She was picked up from between the rails, seemingly unharmed; she had only a few scratches and she had lost her hat. It was soon clear, nevertheless, that the impact had transported the girl into a state of innocence from which she would never return. She forgot even the most rudimentary schooling from before the accident; she could barely remember her piano lessons or how to use her embroidery needle, and when anyone spoke to her it was as if she were not there. In contrast, what she never forgot was the civility that she retained intact until her dying day.
After being struck by the locomotive, María was incapable of reasoning; she was inattentive and devoid of animosity. She was, in fact, well equipped to be happy, but happiness was not to be her fate. When she was sixteen her parents, eager to transfer to another the burden of their somewhat retarded daughter, decided to marry her off before her beauty faded. They chose for the purpose a Doctor Guevara, a retiring man little suited for marriage, but one who owed them money and could not refuse when they suggested the union. That same year the wedding was celebrated in private, as befitted a lunatic bride and a groom many decades her senior.
María came to the marriage bed with the mind of a babe, although her body had matured and was that of a woman. The train had obliterated her natural curiosity but had not destroyed the impatience of her senses. All she knew was what she had observed of the animals on her parents’ hacienda; she knew that cold water is good for separating dogs who are unable to disengage after coupling, and that the rooster fluffs his feathers and crows when he wants to cover a hen, but she had not found any useful purpose for those facts. On her wedding night she watched a trembling old man walk toward her, his flannel bathrobe flapping, with something unanticipated below his navel. Surprise brought on a state of constipation she was too inhibited to discuss, and when she began to swell up like a balloon she drank a whole bottle of Agua de la Margarita, an anti-scrofula tonic that in large quantities served as a purge, and then spent twenty-two days seated on a chamber pot, so undone that she nearly lost several vital organs. Not even that ordeal, however, had the effect of deflating her. Soon she could not button her clothing and, in due time, she gave birth to a blond baby boy. After a month in bed drinking chicken broth and two liters of milk a day, she arose stronger and more lucid than she had ever been in her life. She seemed cured of her perennial somna
mbulism, and even had the spunk to buy herself some elegant clothes. She was not, however, to have the opportunity to show off her new wardrobe, because her doctor husband suffered a sudden stroke and died in the dining room, soupspoon in hand. María resigned herself to wearing mourning and veiled hats, feeling as if she were buried in a tomb of cloth. She spent two years in black, knitting vests for the poor, playing with her lap dogs and her son, whom she dressed as a little girl with long curls—as evidenced in one of the photographs found in the biscuit tin, where he is seen sitting on a bearskin rug beneath a supernatural beam of light.
For the widow, time had frozen in an eternal instant; the air of her room seemed unchanged, still heavy with her husband’s musty odor. She continued to live in the same house, looked after by faithful servants and closely watched by her parents and brothers, who took turns visiting her daily in order to supervise her expenses and make even the most minor decisions for her. The seasons rolled by; the leaves fell from the trees in the garden and the hummingbirds of summer appeared once again with no change in her routine. At times she wondered about the reasons for her black clothing, because she had completely forgotten the decrepit husband who once or twice had feebly embraced her between the linen sheets, then, full of remorse for his lust, had thrown himself at the feet of the Madonna and lashed himself with a horsewhip. From time to time she opened her armoire to shake out her beautiful dresses; she could not resist the temptation to remove her inky clothing and secretly try on the jewel-embroidered gowns, the fur stoles, the satin slippers, the kid gloves. She regarded herself in the three leaves of the mirror and greeted a woman dressed for a ball, a woman in whom she found it very difficult to recognize herself.
After two years of solitude, the sound of the blood racing through her body became unbearable. On Sundays, at the door of the church, she would hang back to watch the men pass, attracted by the harsh sound of their voices, their fresh-shaved cheeks, and the smell of tobacco. Furtively, she would lift her veil and smile. It was not long before her father and brothers noticed this behavior and, convinced that American soil had corrupted the decency even of widows, they decided in a family council to send María to live with an aunt and uncle in Spain; there, doubtless, protected by the solid traditions and power of the Church, she would be safe from frivolous temptations. And so began the voyage that was to change the destiny of simple María.
Her mother and father saw her off on a transatlantic steamer, accompanied by her son, a servant, and her lap dogs. Her mountains of baggage included, in addition to her bedroom furniture and her piano, a cow that traveled in the hold to provide fresh milk for the baby. Among her many suitcases and hatboxes she had also brought an enormous brass-trimmed and studded trunk containing the ball gowns she had rescued from mothballs. The family did not believe that in her aunt and uncle’s house María would have any opportunity to wear them, but they had not wanted to gainsay her. The first three days, she did not lift her head from her berth, overcome by seasickness, but then she became accustomed to the pitching of the ship and managed to get out of bed. She called her servant to help her unpack her clothes for the long crossing.
María’s life was marked by sudden misfortunes, like the train that had claimed her mind and flung her back into an irreversible childhood. She was arranging her dresses in the stateroom closet when her son peered into the opened trunk. At that moment the ship lurched and the heavy metal-edged lid slammed shut, breaking the child’s neck. It took three strong sailors to tear the mother away from the accursed trunk and a dose of laudanum strong enough to fell an athlete to prevent her from tearing out her hair and clawing her face raw. She howled for hours, and then fell into a crepuscular coma, rocking from side to side as she had done in the days when she earned the reputation of being an idiot. The ship’s captain announced the unfortunate news over the loudspeaker, read a brief prayer for the dead, and then ordered the small corpse to be wrapped in a flag and slipped over the side, because they were in mid-ocean and there was no way to preserve the body until they reached the next port.
Several days after the tragedy, María emerged with unsteady step to take the air on the deck for the first time. It was a warm night, and an unsettling odor of seaweed, shellfish, and sunken ships rose from the ocean, entered her nostrils, and raced through her veins with the effect of an earthquake. She found herself staring at the horizon, her mind a blank and her skin tingling from her heels to the base of her neck, when she heard an insistent whistle; she half-turned and beheld two decks below a dark shadow in the moonlight, signaling to her. She descended the ladder in a trance, walked to the dark-skinned man who had beckoned to her, submissively allowed him to remove her black veils and voluminous clothing, and followed him behind a large coil of rope. Battered by an impact not unlike that of the train, she learned in less than three minutes the difference between an aged husband stifled by the fear of God and an insatiable Greek sailor afire from the craving born of several weeks of oceanic chastity. Dazed, María discovered her own potential; she dried her tears, and asked for more. They spent a good part of the night getting to know one another, and parted only when they heard the ship’s emergency horn, a terrible blast for “man overboard” that transmuted the silence of the fish. Thinking that the inconsolable mother had thrown herself into the sea, the servant had spread the alarm, and all the crew, with the exception of the Greek sailor, were searching for her.
María joined her lover behind the coils of rope every night until the ship sailed near Caribbean shores, where the sweet perfume of flowers and fruit borne on the breeze was a final assault on her senses. She accepted her lover’s proposition that they leave the ship where the ghost of her dead child wandered and where they were the target of so many spying eyes; she stuffed the expense money for the voyage into her petticoats and said goodbye to a respectable past. They lowered a lifeboat and disappeared at dawn, leaving behind the servant, the dogs, the cow, and the murderous trunk. The man rowed with his burly sailor’s arms toward a stupendous port that rose before their eyes in the dawn light like a vision from another world: huts, palm trees, and brightly colored birds. The two fugitives settled in to stay for as long as their reserves lasted.
The sailor, it turned out, was a brawler and a drunk. He spoke a lingo incomprehensible to either María or the local inhabitants, but he managed to communicate through grimaces and smiles. María was fully alert only when he showed up to practice with her the acrobatics he had learned in whorehouses from Singapore to Valparaíso; the rest of the time she lay numbed by a mortal lassitude. Bathed in tropical sweat, the woman invented love without her companion, venturing alone into hallucinatory lands with the audacity of one who does not know the risks. The Greek lacked sufficient intuition to appreciate that he had opened a floodgate, that he himself was but the instrument of revelation, or that he was incapable of valuing the gift this woman offered to him. He had by his side a creature caught in the limbo of an invulnerable innocence, a woman dedicated to exploring her own senses with all the playfulness of a cub, but he did not know how to follow her in her games. Before him, she had never known the diversion of pleasure; she had not even imagined it, although it had always been there in her blood like the germ of a raging fever. When she discovered that pleasure, she believed it was the blessing from heaven that the nuns in her school had promised good girls in the Beyond. She knew almost nothing of the world, and she was incapable of studying a map to learn her whereabouts on the planet, but when she saw the hibiscus and the parrots she was sure she was in Paradise, and she prepared to enjoy it. No one there knew her; she felt comfortable for the first time, far from her home, from the inescapable guardianship of her parents and brothers, free of social pressures and veils at mass, free finally to savor the torrent of emotions that originated on her skin and sank through every pore to her innermost grottoes, where she was tossed and tumbled in roaring cataracts that left her exhausted and happy.
After a time, however, Marí
a’s lack of malice, her imperviousness to sin or humiliation, terrified the sailor. The periods between love-making grew longer, the man’s absences more frequent, and a silence swelled between them. The Greek longed to escape from that moist, tumid, inflamed woman with the face of a child who called him incessantly, convinced that the widow he had seduced on the high seas had become a perverse spider who would devour him like a defenseless fly in the tumult of their bed. In vain he sought alleviation for his threatened virility by cavorting with prostitutes, fighting knife and fist with pimps, and betting on cockfights anything he had left from his sprees. When he found himself with empty pockets, he seized the excuse to disappear completely. For several weeks María waited patiently. On the radio, from time to time, she would hear that a French sailor who had deserted from a British ship, or a Dutchman who had fled a Portuguese vessel, had been stabbed to death in the rough barrios around the port; she listened impassively, because she was waiting for a Greek who had jumped ship from an Italian cruiser. When the heat in her bones and anxiety in her soul had become too much to bear, she went out to seek consolation with the first man who passed by. She took the man’s hand, and asked him in the most genteel and educated way whether he would do her the favor of taking off his clothes for her. The stranger hesitated a moment, disoriented by this young woman who in no way resembled the neighborhood professionals but whose proposal, despite the unusual way it was phrased, was very clear. He reckoned that he could divert himself with her for ten minutes, and followed her, never suspecting that he would find himself submersed in the whirlpool of a sincere passion. Amazed and moved, he left some money on María’s table and went to tell everyone he knew. Soon other men came, drawn by the gossip that there was a woman who was able, even if briefly, to sell the illusion of love. All her clients were satisfied. And so María became the most famous prostitute in the port; sailors tattooed her name on their arm and told her story on other seas, until the legend had circled the globe.