“Never. Juan stays with us,” Jesús Dionisio Picero replied, without even glancing at Claveles, who was weeping in a corner, her head covered with her shawl.
“What are we going to do, Grandfather?” she asked as they left.
“Why, bring him up.”
“How?”
“With patience, the way you train fighting cocks, or build Calvarios in bottles. It’s a thing of eye, time, and heart.”
And that was what they did. Ignoring the fact that the baby could not hear them, they spoke to him constantly, sang to him, and placed him beside a radio turned to full volume. The great-grandfather would take the baby’s hand and press it firmly to his chest, so the boy would feel the vibration of his voice when he spoke; he made him make sounds and then celebrated his grunts with exaggerated reactions. As soon as the boy could sit up, Jesús Dionisio installed him in a box by his side; he gave him sticks, nuts, bones, bits of cloth, and small stones to play with, and as soon as the child learned not to put it in his mouth, he would hand him a ball of clay to model. Each time she got work, Claveles went into town, leaving her son with Jesús Dionisio. Wherever the old man went, the baby followed like a shadow; they were rarely apart. A camaraderie developed between the two that obliterated the vast difference in ages and the obstacle of silence. By watching his great-grandfather’s gestures and expressions, Juan learned to decipher his intentions, with such good results that by the time he had learned to walk he could read his great-grandfather’s thoughts. For his part, Jesús Dionisio looked after Juan like a mother. While his hands were occupied in their painstaking work, he instinctively followed the boy’s footsteps, attentive to any danger, but he intervened only in extreme cases. He did not run to console him when he fell, or help him out of difficult situations; he trained him to look out for himself. At an age when other boys were still staggering around like puppies, Juan Picero could dress, wash, and eat by himself, feed the chickens, and go to the well for water; he knew how to carve the most elementary parts of the saints, mix colors, and prepare the bottles for the Calvarios.
“We’ll have to send the boy to school so he doesn’t end up ignorant like me,” said Jesús Dionisio Picero as the boy’s seventh birthday approached.
Claveles made some inquiries, but she was told that her son could not attend a normal class, because no teacher was prepared to venture into the abyss of solitude in which he had settled.
“It doesn’t matter, Grandfather; he can earn a living carving saints, like you.”
“Carving won’t put food on the table.”
“Not everyone can go to school, Grandfather.”
“Juan can’t talk, but he’s not stupid. He’s bright. He can get away from here; life in the country is too hard for him.”
Claveles was convinced that her grandfather had lost his reason, or that his love for the boy was blinding him to his limitations. She bought a primer and tried to pass on her meager knowledge, but she could not make her son understand that those squiggles represented sounds, and she finally lost patience.
It was at that juncture that señora Dermoth’s volunteers appeared. They were young men from the city who were traveling through the most remote regions of the country on behalf of a humanitarian project aimed at helping the poor. They explained how in some places too many children are born and their parents cannot feed them, while in others there are couples who have no children. Their organization was intent on alleviating that imbalance. They showed the Piceros a map of North America and color brochures containing photographs of dark-skinned children with blond parents, in luxurious surroundings of blazing fireplaces, huge, woolly dogs, pine trees decorated with silvery frost and Christmas ornaments. After making a rapid inventory of the Piceros’ poverty, they told them all about señora Dermoth’s charitable mission: locating the most neglected and afflicted children and then placing them for adoption by wealthy families, to rescue them from a life of misery. Unlike similar institutions, this good lady was interested only in children with birth defects or those handicapped through accident or illness. Up North there were couples—good Catholics, it went without saying—waiting to adopt these children. And they had the resources to take care of them. There in the North there were clinics and schools where they worked miracles for deaf-mutes; for example, they taught them to lip-read and talk, and then they sent them to special schools where they received a thorough education, and some went on to the university and graduated as lawyers or doctors. The organization had aided many children; the Piceros had only to look at the photographs. See how happy they look, how healthy; see all those toys, and the expensive houses. The volunteers could not promise anything, but they would do everything they could to arrange for one of those couples to take Juan and give him all the opportunities his mother could not provide for him.
“You never give up your children, no matter what,” said Jesús Dionisio Picero, clasping the boy’s head to his chest so he would not see the visitors’ faces and understand the subject of their conversation.
“Don’t be selfish now, Grandfather; think of what’s best for the boy. Don’t you see that he would have everything up there? You don’t have the money to pay for his treatment; you can’t send him to school. What will become of him? The poor kid doesn’t even have a father.”
“But he has a mother and a great-grandfather!” was the old man’s rejoinder.
The visitors departed, leaving señora Dermoth’s brochures on the table. In the days that followed, Claveles often found herself looking at them and comparing those large, well-decorated homes with her own bare boards, straw roof, and tamped-down dirt floor; those pleasant, well-dressed parents with herself, dog-weary and barefoot; those children surrounded by toys and her own playing with clay dirt.
A week later Claveles ran into one of the volunteers in the market where she had gone to sell some of her grandfather’s sculptures, and again she listened to the same arguments: that an opportunity like this would not come a second time, that people adopt healthy offspring, not those with defects; that those people up North had noble sentiments, and she should think it over carefully, because for the rest of her life she would regret having denied her son such advantages and condemned him to a life of suffering and poverty.
“But why do they want only sick children?” Claveles asked.
“Because these gringos are near saints. Our organization is concerned only with the most distressing cases. It would be easy for us to place normal children, but we’re trying to help the ones who most need assistance.”
Claveles Picero kept seeing the volunteers. They showed up whenever her grandfather was out of the house. Toward the end of November they showed her a picture of a middle-aged couple standing before the door of a white house set in the middle of a park, and told her that señora Dermoth had found the ideal parents for her son. They pointed out to her on the map the precise spot the couple lived; they explained that there was snow in the winter and that children built big dolls from the snow and ice-skated and skied, and that in the autumn the woods looked like gold and in the summertime you could swim in the lake. The couple was so thrilled at the possibility of adopting the young lad that they had already bought him a bicycle. They also showed her the picture of the bicycle. And all this did not even take into account the fact they were offering two hundred and fifty dollars to Claveles; she could live for a year on that money, until she married again and had healthy children. It would be madness to miss this opportunity.
Two days later, when Jesús Dionisio had gone to clean the church, Claveles Picero dressed her son in his best pants, put his saint’s medal around his neck, and explained in the sign language his great-grandfather had invented for him that they would not see each other for a long time, maybe never, but it was all for his good; he was going to a place where he would have plenty to eat every day, and presents on his birthday. She took him to the location the volunteers had indicated, signed
a paper transferring custody of Juan to señora Dermoth, and quickly ran away so her son would not see her tears and begin crying, too.
When Jesús Dionisio Picero learned what she had done he was struck speechless and breathless; he flailed about wildly, destroying everything in reach, including the saints in bottles, and then set upon Claveles, punching her with a strength unexpected in someone as old and mild-mannered as he. When he could speak, he accused her of being just like her mother, a woman capable of giving away her own son, something not even beasts in the wild do, and he called on the ghost of Amparo Medina to wreak vengeance on her depraved granddaughter. In the following months he refused to speak a word to Claveles; he opened his mouth only to eat and to mutter curses all the while his hands were busy with his carving tools. Grandfather and granddaughter grew used to living in stony silence, each absorbed in his or her own tasks. She cooked and set his plate on the table; he ate with eyes fixed on the food. Together they tended the garden and animals, each going through the motions of the daily routine in perfect coordination with the other, but never touching. On local fair days, Claveles collected the bottles and wooden saints, took them to market to sell, returned with provisions, and put any remaining coins in a tin can. On Sundays they went to church, separately, like strangers.
They might have spent the rest of their lives without speaking if sometime in mid-February señora Dermoth’s name had not been in the news. The grandfather heard about it on the radio, while Claveles was washing clothes in the patio: first the announcer’s commentary and then a personal confirmation by the Department of Welfare. With his heart in his mouth, Jesús Dionisio ran to the door and shouted for Claveles. She turned, and when she saw his distorted face she ran to catch him, thinking he was dying.
“They’ve killed him,” the old man moaned, dropping to his knees. “Oh, God, I know they’ve killed him!”
“Killed who, Grandfather?”
“Juan,” and through his sobs he repeated the words of the Secretary of Welfare: a criminal organization headed by a señora Dermoth had been discovered selling Indian children. They chose children who were ill or from very poor families, with the promise that they would be put up for adoption. They kept the children for a while to fatten them, and when they were in better shape took them to a secret clinic where they performed operations on them. Dozens of innocents had been sacrificed like living organ banks, their eyes, kidneys, liver, and other body parts removed and sent to be used as transplants in the North. He added that in one of these fattening houses they had found twenty-eight youngsters waiting their turn. The police had intervened, and the government was continuing its investigations in order to exterminate such an abominable trafficking.
Thus had begun the long journey of Claveles and Jesús Dionisio Picero to the capital to talk with the Secretary of Welfare. They wanted to ask him, with all due deference, whether their boy was among the children rescued, and whether possibly they could have him back. There was very little left of the money they had been given, but they would work like slaves for this señora Dermoth however long it took to pay her back the last cent of her two hundred and fifty dollars.
THE SCHOOLTEACHER’S GUEST
The schoolteacher Inés entered The Pearl of the Orient, deserted at this hour, walked to the counter where Riad Halabí was rolling up a bolt of bright-flowered cloth, and announced to him that she had just cut off the head of a guest in her boardinghouse. The merchant took out his white handkerchief and clapped it to his mouth.
“What did you say, Inès?”
“Exactly what you heard, Turk.”
“Is he dead?”
“Of course.”
“And now what are you going to do?”
“That’s what I came to ask you,” she replied, tucking back a stray lock of hair.
“I think I’d better close the store,” sighed Riad Halabí.
The two had known each other so long that neither could remember the exact number of years, although both recalled every detail of the day their friendship had begun. At the time, Halabí had been one of those salesmen who wander the byways offering their wares, a commercial pilgrim without compass or fixed course, an Arab immigrant with a false Turkish passport, lonely, weary, with a palate split like a rabbit’s and a subsequent longing to sit in the shadows. She had been a still-young woman with firm hips and proud shoulders, the town’s only schoolteacher, and the mother of a twelve-year-old son born of a fleeting love affair. The boy was the center of the schoolteacher’s life; she cared for him with unwavering devotion but, barely masking her inclination to indulge him, applied to him the same norms of discipline she demanded of the other schoolchildren. She did not want anyone to be able to say she had brought him up badly; at the same time, she hoped to negate the father’s legacy of waywardness and instead form her son to be of clear mind and generous heart. The very evening on which Riad Halabí had driven into Agua Santa from one side of town, from the other a group of boys had carried in the body of schoolteacher Inés’s son on an improvised stretcher. He had walked onto someone’s property to pick up a fallen mango, and the owner, an outsider whom no one really knew, had fired a blast from his rifle meaning to scare the boy away but drilling a black hole in the middle of his forehead through which his life rapidly escaped. At that moment, the salesman had discovered his vocation for leadership and, without knowing how, had found himself at the center of things, consoling the mother, organizing the funeral as if he were a member of the family, and calming the people to prevent them from tearing the perpetrator limb from limb. Meanwhile, the murderer, realizing that his life would be worth very little if he remained there, had fled, meaning never to return.
It was Riad Halabí who the following morning was at the head of the crowd that marched from the cemetery to the place where the boy had fallen. All the inhabitants of Agua Santa had spent that day hauling mangoes, which they threw through the windows until the house was filled from floor to ceiling. After a few weeks, the sun had fermented the fruit, which burst open, spilling a viscous juice and impregnating the walls with a golden blood, a sweetish pus, that transformed the dwelling into a fossil of prehistoric dimensions, an enormous beast in process of putrefaction, tormented by the infinite diligence of the larvae and mosquitoes of decomposition.
The death of the boy, the role Riad Halabí had played during those days, and the welcome he had received in Agua Santa, had determined the course of his life. He forgot his nomadic ancestry and remained in the village. There he opened a business, The Pearl of the Orient. He married, was widowed, married a second time, and continued his trade, while his reputation for being a just man steadily increased. Inés, in turn, educated several generations of children with the tenacious affection she would have bestowed upon her son, until her energies were spent; then she stepped aside for teachers who arrived from the city with new primers, and retired. After leaving the schoolroom, she felt as if she had aged suddenly, as if time were accelerating; the days passed so quickly that she could not remember where the hours had gone.
“I go around in a daze, Turk. I’m dying and don’t even know it,” she commented.
“You’re as healthy as you ever were, Inés,” replied Riad Halabí. “The problem is that you’re bored. You should not be idle.” And he suggested she add a few rooms to her house and take in guests: “We don’t have a hotel in this town.”
“We don’t have tourists, either,” she added.
“A clean bed and warm breakfast are a blessing for travelers.”
And so they had been, primarily for the truckdrivers for National Petroleum, who stayed the night in her boardinghouse when the fatigue and tedium of the road had filled their head with hallucinations.
The schoolteacher Inés was the most respected matron in all Agua Santa. She had taught the town’s children for several decades, which granted her the authority to intervene in all their lives and take them by the ear when sh
e felt it necessary. Girls brought their boyfriends for her approval, husbands and wives came to her with their marital disagreements; she was counselor, arbiter, and judge in all the town’s problems. Her authority, in fact, was mightier than that of the priest, the doctor, or the police. No one stopped her from the exercise of that power. On one occasion she had stalked into the jail, passed the Lieutenant without speaking, snatched the keys from a nail on the wall, and removed from a cell one of her students who had been jailed after a drunken spree. The officer had tried to stand in her way, but she had shoved him aside and marched the boy outside by the back of his collar. Once in the street, she had given him a couple of smacks and assured him that the next time this happened she would lower his pants and give him a spanking he would never forget. The day that Inés came to tell Riad Halabí she had killed one of her clients, he did not doubt for a moment that she was serious, because he knew her too well. He took her arm and walked with her the two blocks that separated The Pearl of the Orient from her house. It was one of the grandest buildings in town, adobe and wood, with a wide veranda where hammocks were hung during the hottest siestas, and ceiling fans in every room. At that hour the house seemed to be empty; only one guest sat in the parlor drinking beer, mesmerized by the television.
“Where is he?” whispered the Arab merchant.
“In one of the back rooms,” Inés replied, not even lowering her voice.
She led him to the row of rooms she rented—all joined by an arcade with purple morning-glories climbing the columns and pots of ferns hanging from the beams—bordering a patio planted with medlar and banana trees. Inés opened the last door and Riad Halabí entered a room in deep shadow. The shutters were closed, and it was a moment before he saw on the bed the corpse of an inoffensive-looking old man, a decrepit stranger swimming in the puddle of his own death, his trousers stained with excrement, his head hanging by a strip of ashen flesh, and wearing a terrible expression of distress, as if apologizing for all the disturbance and blood, and for the uncommon bother of having allowed himself to be murdered. Riad Halabí sat down on the room’s only chair, his eyes on the floor, trying to control the lurch of his stomach. Inés remained standing, arms across her chest, calculating that it would take her two days to wash up the stains and at least two more to rid the room of its odor of feces and fear.