Time, poverty, and the strain of fending off disillusion destroyed María’s freshness. Her complexion grew drab, she was nothing but skin and bones, and for greater convenience she had cut her hair short like a prisoner’s, but she retained her elegant manners and her enthusiasm for each new encounter with a man; she never saw them as anonymous objects, only the reflection of herself in the arms of her imaginary lover. Confronted with reality, she was blind to the sordid urgency of her temporary partner, because to each one she gave herself with the same uncompromising love, anticipating, like a daring bride, the other’s desires. Her memory deteriorated with age, she sometimes spoke nonsense, and by the time she moved to the capital and set up shop in Calle República, she no longer remembered that once she had been the muse for verses improvised by sailors of all races, and she was puzzled when someone traveled from the port to the city just to verify whether the woman he had heard of someplace in Asia was still alive. When he found himself standing before that tiny grasshopper, that pile of pathetic bones, that little nobody, and when he saw the legend reduced to ashes, many a man turned and walked away, deeply saddened, but some remained out of pity. Those who did received an unexpected prize. When María closed her plastic curtain the atmosphere in the room immediately changed. Later, the stunned man would leave, carrying with him the image of a mythic girl, not the pitiful old whore he thought he had seen when he arrived.
María’s past was gradually fading—her only clear memory was a fear of trains and trunks—and had it not been for the persistence of the other whores, no one would ever have known her story. She lived in expectation of the moment that the curtain to her room would open and reveal a Greek sailor, or some other ghost born of her fancy, who would encircle her in the safe haven of his arms and rekindle the delight shared on the deck of a ship on the high seas. She sought that ancient illusion in every passing man, illuminated by an imagined love, holding back the shadows with fleeting embraces, with sparks that were consumed before they blazed, and when she grew weary of waiting in vain and felt that her soul was covered with scales, she decided that it would be better to leave this world. That was when, with the same delicacy and consideration she lent to all her actions, she picked up her jug of warm chocolate.
OUR SECRET
She let herself be caressed, drops of sweat in the small of her back, her body exuding the scent of burnt sugar, silent, as if she divined that a single sound could nudge its way into memory and destroy everything, reducing to dust this instant in which he was a person like any other, a casual lover she had met that morning, another man without a past attracted to her wheat-colored hair, her freckled skin, the jangle of her gypsy bracelets, just a man who had spoken to her in the street and begun to walk with her, aimlessly, commenting on the weather and the traffic, watching the crowd, with the slightly forced confidence of her countrymen in this foreign land, a man without sorrow or anger, without guilt, pure as ice, who merely wanted to spend the day with her, wandering through bookstores and parks, drinking coffee, celebrating the chance of having met, talking of old nostalgias, of how life had been when both were growing up in the same city, in the same barrio, when they were fourteen, you remember, winters of shoes soggy from frost, and paraffin stoves, summers of peach trees, there in the now forbidden country. Perhaps she was feeling a little lonely, or this seemed an opportunity to make love without complications, but, for whatever reason, at the end of the day, when they had run out of pretexts to walk any longer, she had taken his hand and led him to her house. She shared with other exiles a sordid apartment in a yellow building at the end of an alley filled with garbage cans. Her room was tiny: a mattress on the floor covered with a striped blanket, bookshelves improvised from boards stacked on two rows of bricks, books, posters, clothing on a chair, a suitcase in the corner. She had removed her clothes without preamble, with the attitude of a little girl eager to please. He tried to make love to her. He stroked her body patiently, slipping over her hills and valleys, discovering her secret routes, kneading her, soft clay upon the sheets, until she yielded, and opened to him. Then he retreated, mute, reserved. She gathered herself, and sought him, her head on his belly, her face hidden, as if constrained by modesty, as she fondled him, licked him, spurred him. He tried to lose himself; he closed his eyes and for a while let her do as she was doing, until he was defeated by sadness, or shame, and pushed her away. They lighted another cigarette. There was no complicity now; the urgent anticipation that had united them during the day was lost, and all that was left were two vulnerable people lying on a mattress, without memory, floating in the terrible vacuum of unspoken words. When they had met that morning they had had no extraordinary expectations, they had had no particular plan, only companionship, and a little pleasure, that was all, but at the hour of their coming together they had been engulfed by melancholy. We’re tired, she smiled, seeking excuses for the desolation that had settled over them. In a last attempt to buy time, he took her face in his hands and kissed her eyelids. They lay down side by side, holding hands, and talked about their lives in this country where they had met by chance, a green and generous land in which, nevertheless, they would forever be foreigners. He thought of putting on his clothes and saying goodbye, before the tarantula of his nightmares poisoned the air, but she looked so young and defenseless, and he wanted to be her friend. Her friend, he thought, not her lover; her friend, to share quiet moments, without demands or commitments; her friend, someone to be with, to help ward off fear. He did not leave, or let go her hand. A warm, tender feeling, an enormous compassion for himself and for her, made his eyes sting. The curtain puffed out like a sail, and she got up to close the window, thinking that darkness would help them recapture their desire to be together, to make love. But darkness was not good; he needed the rectangle of light from the street, because without it he felt trapped again in the abyss of the timeless ninety centimeters of his cell, fermenting in his own excrement, delirious. Leave the curtain open, I want to look at you, he lied, because he did not dare confide his night terrors to her, the wracking thirst, the bandage pressing upon his head like a crown of nails, the visions of caverns, the assault of so many ghosts. He could not talk to her about that, because one thing leads to another, and he would end up saying things that had never been spoken. She returned to the mattress, stroked him absently, ran her fingers over the small lines, exploring them. Don’t worry, it’s nothing contagious, they’re just scars, he laughed, almost with a sob. The girl perceived his anguish and stopped, the gesture suspended, alert. At that moment he should have told her that this was not the beginning of a new love, not even of a passing affair; it was merely an instant of truce, a brief moment of innocence, and soon, when she fell asleep, he would go; he should have told her that there was no future for them, no secret gestures, that they would not stroll hand in hand through the streets again, nor share lovers’ games, but he could not speak, his voice was buried somewhere in his gut, like a claw. He knew he was sinking. He tried to cling to the reality that was slipping away from him, to anchor his mind on anything, on the jumble of clothing on the chair, on the books piled on the floor, on the poster of Chile on the wall, on the coolness of this Caribbean night, on the distant street noises; he tried to concentrate on this body that had been offered him, think only of the girl’s luxuriant hair, the caramel scent of her skin. He begged her voicelessly to help him save those seconds, while she observed him from the far edge of the bed, sitting cross-legged like a fakir, her pale breasts and the eye of her navel also observing him, registering his trembling, the chattering of his teeth, his moan. He thought he could hear the silence growing within him; he knew that he was coming apart, as he had so often before, and he gave up the struggle, releasing his last hold on the present, letting himself plunge down the endless precipice. He felt the crusted straps on his ankles and wrists, the brutal charge, the torn tendons, the insulting voices demanding names, the unforgettable screams of Ana, tortured beside him, and of the others, hanging
by their arms in the courtyard.
What’s the matter? For God’s sake, what wrong? Ana’s voice was asking from far away. No, Ana was still bogged in the quicksands to the south. He thought he could make out a naked girl, shaking him and calling his name, but he could not get free of the shadows with their snaking whips and rippling flags. Hunched over, he tried to control the nausea. He began to weep for Ana and for all the others. What is it, what’s the matter? Again the girl, calling him from somewhere. Nothing! Hold me! he begged, and she moved toward him timidly, and took him in her arms, lulled him like a baby, kissed his forehead, said, Go ahead, cry, cry all you want; she laid him flat on his back on the mattress and then, crucified, stretched out upon him.
For a thousand years they lay like that, together, until slowly the hallucinations faded and he returned to the room to find himself alive in spite of everything, breathing, pulsing, the girl’s weight on his body, her head resting on his chest, her arms and legs atop his: two frightened orphans. And at that moment, as if she knew everything, she said to him, Fear is stronger than desire, than love or hatred or guilt or rage, stronger than loyalty. Fear is all-consuming . . . , and he felt her tears rolling down his neck. Everything stopped: she had touched his most deeply hidden wound. He had a presentiment that she was not just a girl willing to make love for the sake of pity but that she knew the thing that crouched beyond the silence, beyond absolute solitude, beyond the sealed box where he had hidden from the Colonel and his own treachery, beyond the memory of Ana Díaz and the other betrayed compañeros being led in one by one with their eyes blindfolded. How could she know all that?
She sat up. As she groped for the switch, her slender arm was silhouetted against the pale haze of the window. She turned on the light and, one by one, removed her metal bracelets, dropping them noiselessly on the mattress. Her hair was half covering her face when she held out her hands to him. White scars circled her wrists, too. For a timeless instant he stared at them, unmoving, until he understood everything, love, and saw her strapped to the electric grid, and then they could embrace, and weep, hungry for pacts and confidences, for forbidden words, for promises of tomorrow, shared, finally, the most hidden secret.
THE LITTLE HEIDELBERG
El Capitán and the woman niña Eloísa had danced together so many years that they had achieved perfection. Each could sense the other’s next movement, divine the exact instant of the next turn, interpret the most subtle hand pressure or deviation of a foot. They had not missed a step once in forty years; they moved with the precision of a couple used to making love and sleeping in a close embrace. This was what made it so difficult to believe that they had never exchanged a single word.
The Little Heidelberg is a tavern a certain distance from the capital and located on a hill surrounded by banana groves; there, besides good music and invigorating air, they offer a unique aphrodisiac stew made heady with a combination of spices, too heavy for the fiery climate of the region but in perfect harmony with the traditions that activate the proprietor don Rupert. Before the oil crisis, when there was still an illusion of plenty and fruits were imported from other latitudes, the specialty of the house had been apple strudel, but now that nothing is left from the petroleum but a mountain of indestructible refuse and a memory of better times, they make the strudel with guavas and with mangoes. The tables, arranged in a large circle that leaves an open space in the middle for dancing, are covered with green-and-white-checked cloths, and the walls display bucolic scenes of country life in the Alps: shepherdesses with golden braids, strapping youths, and immaculate bovines. The musicians—dressed in lederhosen, woolen knee socks, Tyrolean suspenders, and felt hats that with the sweat of years have lost their dash and from a distance resemble greenish wigs—sit on a platform crowned by a stuffed eagle that according to don Rupert sprouts new feathers from time to time. One plays the accordion, another the saxophone, and the third, through some feat of agility involving all his extremities, simultaneously manipulates bass drum, snares, and top hat. The accordion player is a master of his instrument, and he also sings in a warm tenor voice that vaguely suggests Andalusia. Despite his foolish Swiss publican’s garb, he is the favorite of the female faithful, and several of these señoras secretly nurture the fantasy of being trapped with him in some mortal adventure—a landslide, say, or bombing—in which they would happily draw their last breath folded in the strong arms capable of tearing such heartrending sobs from the accordion. The fact that the median age of these ladies is nearly seventy does not diminish the sensuality stirred by the tenor; it merely adds the gentle breath of death to their enchantment. The orchestra begins playing shortly after sunset and ends at midnight, except on Saturdays and Sundays, when the place is filled with tourists and the trio must keep playing until near dawn when the last customer leaves. They play only polkas, mazurkas, waltzes, and European folk dances, as if instead of being firmly established in the Caribbean, The Little Heidelberg were located on the shores of the Rhine.
Doña Burgel, don Rupert’s wife, reigns in the kitchen, a formidable matron whom few know because she spends her days amid stewpots and mounds of vegetables; lost in the task of preparing foreign dishes with local ingredients. It was she who invented the strudel with tropical fruits, and the aphrodisiac stew capable of restoring dash to the most disheartened. The landlords’ two daughters wait on the tables, a pair of sturdy women smelling of cinnamon, clove, vanilla, and lemon, along with a few local girls, all with rosy cheeks. The clientele is composed of European emigrés who reached these shores escaping poverty or some war or other, businessmen, farmers, and tradesmen, a pleasant and uncomplicated group of people who may not always have been so but who with the passing of time have eased into the benevolent courtesy of healthy old people. The men wear bow ties and jackets, but as the exertion of the dancing and abundance of beer warms their souls, they shed superfluous garments and end up in their shirt sleeves. The women wear bright colors in antiquated styles, as if their dresses have been rescued from bridal trunks brought with them from their homeland. From time to time a gang of aggressive teenagers stops by; their presence is preceded by the thundering roar of motorcycles and the rattle of boots, keys, and chains, and they come with the sole purpose of making fun of the old people, but the event never goes any further than a skirmish, because the drummer and the saxophonist are prepared to roll up their sleeves and restore order.
On Saturdays, about nine, when all present have enjoyed their servings of the aphrodisiac stew and abandoned themselves to the pleasure of the dance, La Mexicana arrives and sits alone. She is a provocative fiftyish woman with the body of a galleon—proud bow, rounded keel, ample stern, and face like a carved figurehead—who displays a mature but still firm décolletage and a flower over one ear. She is not, of course, the only woman dressed like a flamenco dancer, but on her it looks more natural than on ladies with white hair and resigned waistlines who do not even speak proper Spanish. La Mexicana dancing the polka is a ship adrift on a storm-tossed sea, but to the rhythm of the waltz she seems to breast calm waters. This is how El Capitán sometimes espies her in his dreams, and awakens with the nearly forgotten restiveness of adolescence. They say that this captain sailed with a Nordic line whose name no one could decipher. He was an expert on old ships and sea lanes, but all that knowledge lay buried in the depths of his mind, with no possible application in a land where the sea is a placid aquarium of green, crystalline waters unsuited to the intrepid vessels of the North Sea. El Capitán is a leafless tree, a tall, lean man with straight back and still firm neck muscles, a relic clothed in a gold-buttoned jacket and the tragic aura of retired sailors. No one has ever heard a word of Spanish from his lips, nor any other recognizable language. Thirty years ago don Rupert argued that El Capitán must be Finnish because of the icy color of his eyes and the unremitting justice of his gaze; as no one could contradict him everyone came to accept his opinion. Anyway, language is secondary at The Little Heidelberg, for no one come
s there to talk.
A few of the standard rules of conduct have been modified for the comfort and convenience of all. Anyone can go onto the dance floor alone, or invite someone from another table; if they wish to, the women can take the initiative and ask the men. This is a fair solution for unaccompanied widows. No one asks La Mexicana to dance because it is understood that she considers it offensive; the men must wait, trembling with anticipation, until she makes the request. She deposits her cigarette in the ashtray, uncrosses the daunting columns of her legs, tugs at her bodice, marches toward the chosen one, and stops before him without a glance. She changes partners with every dance, but always reserves at least four numbers for El Capitán. He places a firm helmsman’s hand at her waist and pilots her about the floor without allowing his years to curtail his inspiration.
The oldest client of The Little Heidelberg, one who in half a century has never missed a Saturday, is niña Eloísa, a tiny lady, meek and gentle, with rice-paper skin and a corona of baby-fine hair. She has earned a living for so many years making bonbons in her kitchen that she is permeated with the scent of chocolate, and always smells of birthday parties. Despite her age, she has retained some of her girlish mannerisms and she still has the strength to spend the entire evening whirling around the dance floor without disturbing a curl of her topknot or skipping a heartbeat. She came to this country at the turn of the century from a village in the south of Russia, accompanied by her mother, who was then a raving beauty. They lived together for years, making their chocolates, completely indifferent to the rigors of the climate, the century, or loneliness, without husbands, family, or major alarms, their sole diversion The Little Heidelberg every weekend. When her mother died, niña Eloísa came alone. Don Rupert always received her at the door with great deference and showed her to her table as the orchestra welcomed her with the first chords of her favorite waltz. At some tables, mugs of beer were raised to greet her, because she was the oldest person there and undoubtedly the most beloved. She was shy; she had never dared invite a man to dance, but in all those years she had never needed to do so; everyone considered it a privilege to take her hand, place his arm—delicately, so as not to break a crystal bone—about her waist, and lead her to the dance floor. She was a graceful dancer and, besides, she had that sweet fragrance that recalled to any who smelled it his happiest childhood memories.