“Name,” he barked. I tried to say it, but again the words stuck somewhere and I could not dislodge them.
“She’s Eva Luna, the girl the Turk brought back from one of his trips. She was just a kid then—don’t you remember I told you about it, Lieutenant?” said the sergeant.
“Shut up, numskull. I didn’t ask you.”
He walked toward me with menacing calm and circled around me, looking me up and down, smiling. He was a cheerful, handsome, dark-haired man who cut a wide swath among the girls of Agua Santa. He had been in town two years, blown in with new winds from the most recent elections when several officials, including some in the police, had been replaced by others from the party in power. I knew him; he often came to Riad Halabí’s and sometimes stayed to play dominoes.
“Why did you kill her? To rob her? They say the Turk’s woman is rich, and has a treasure buried in the patio. Answer me, whore! Where did you hide the jewels you stole from her?”
It took me an eternity to recall the pistol, Zulema’s rigid body, everything I had done before the arrival of the Indian. I finally understood the extent of my predicament, and that tied my tongue irrevocably; I did not even attempt to answer. The officer balled his fist, drew back his arm, and punched me. That is the last thing I remember. I awakened in the same room, tied to a chair and alone. They had stripped my dress from me. Worst of all was the thirst: oh, the pineapple juice, the water in the fountain . . . It was dark outside, and the room was lighted by a lamp hanging near the ceiling fan. I tried to move, but my body hurt all over, especially my legs, which were pocked with cigarette burns. Shortly afterward, the sergeant came back; he was not wearing his uniform blouse; his undershirt was sweaty, and he had a dark stubble of beard. He wiped the blood from my mouth and brushed my hair back from my face.
“It’ll go easier for you if you confess. Don’t think the lieutenant has finished with you, he’s just begun. . . . Do you know what he does sometimes to women?”
I tried to tell him with my eyes what had happened in Zulema’s room, but again reality vanished and I saw myself sitting on the floor with my head between my knees and a braid of red hair wrapped around my neck. Mama, I called silently.
“You’re more stubborn than a mule,” the sergeant said, with a sincere expression of pity.
He went to get water and held my head so I could drink; then he wet a handkerchief and carefully wiped the welts on my face and neck. His eyes met mine, and he smiled at me like a father.
“I want to help you, Eva. I don’t want you to be hurt anymore, but I’m not in command here. Tell me how you killed the Turk’s woman and where you hid what you stole, and I’ll fix it with the lieutenant to have you turned over immediately to a juvenile judge. Come on, tell me. . . . What’s the matter? Have you lost your voice? I’m going to give you more water, to see if you can come to your senses and we can understand each other.”
I gulped down three glasses, and the pleasure of the cool liquid flowing down my throat was so great that I smiled, too. Then the sergeant untied the ropes around my wrists, gave me back my dress, and patted my cheek.
“Poor kid . . . The lieutenant’ll be back in a couple of hours. He went to see the movie and drink a few beers. But he’ll be back, that’s sure. When he comes, I’m going to hit you so hard you’ll black out again, and maybe he’ll leave you alone till tomorrow. . . . You want some coffee?”
* * *
Word of what had happened reached Riad Halabí long before it was published in the newspapers. The message traveled to the capital from mouth to mouth along secret paths; it spread through streets, sleazy hotels, Arab shops, until it reached the only Arab restaurant in the country; there, in addition to typical dishes, Middle Eastern music, and a Turkish bath on the second floor, a local girl costumed as an odalisque improvised a peculiar dance of the seven veils. A waiter went to the table where Riad Halabí was enjoying an assortment of his country’s dishes, and gave him a message from one of the kitchen help, a man born of the same tribe as the Indian who had found me. That was how Riad Halabí learned the news on Saturday night. He drove like lightning to Agua Santa and managed to arrive the following morning, just in time to prevent the lieutenant from resuming his interrogation.
“I want the girl,” he demanded.
In the murky green room, again naked and bound to a chair, I heard my patrón’s voice but barely recognized it; for the first time it had the ring of authority.
“I can’t release a suspect, Turk—you understand my position,” said the lieutenant.
“How much?”
“All right. Let’s go to my office and discuss this in private.”
But everything had gone too far for me to avoid scandal. My photographs—full-face and profile, with a black patch across the eyes because I was still a minor—had already been dispatched to newspapers in the capital, and appeared in the police reports in the next editions beneath the bizarre caption “Dead at the Hands of Her Own Blood.” I stood accused of having murdered the woman who had rescued me from the gutter. I still have a newspaper clipping, yellowed and brittle as a dried petal, that recounts the story of this horrendous crime invented by the press; I have read it so many times that at various moments of my life I have been ready to believe it was true.
“Fix her up a little, we’re going to hand her over to the Turk,” the lieutenant ordered following his conversation with Riad Halabí.
The sergeant cleaned me up as well as he could, but did not want to put my dress back on me because it was stained with Zulema’s blood and my own. I was sweating so hard that he threw a water-soaked blanket around me to cover my nakedness and cool me at the same time. I straightened my hair a little but, even so, I looked terrible.
When he saw me, Riad Halabí bellowed: “What have you done to my girl!”
“Don’t make such a fuss, Turk, or it will be the worse for her,” the lieutenant warned. “Remember, I’m doing you a favor. My duty is to keep her here until this thing is cleared up. What makes you so sure she didn’t kill your wife?”
“You know Zulema was crazy—she killed herself!”
“I don’t know anything. It hasn’t been proved. Take the girl, but don’t push me—I can still change my mind.”
Riad Halabí encircled me with his arms and we walked slowly to the door. When we stepped across the threshold and looked into the street, we saw all the neighbors and some Indians who had stayed behind in Agua Santa standing quietly and watching from across the plaza. As we emerged from the building and walked toward the truck, the chief of the tribe began to stamp the ground with his feet in a strange dance that produced a sound like a muted drum.
“Get the hell out of here before I shoot the lot of you!” ordered the enraged lieutenant.
The schoolteacher Inés could contain herself no longer and, calling upon the authority conferred by so many years of being obeyed in the classroom, she marched forward, looked him straight in the eye, and spit at his feet. Heaven will punish you, cur, she said loud enough for everyone to hear. The sergeant took one step backward, fearing the worst, but the lieutenant merely smiled scornfully, and did not reply. No one else moved until Riad Halabí had helped me into the cab of the truck and started the motor; then the Indians faded toward the road of the jungle and the townspeople of Agua Santa began to disperse, mouthing curses against the police. That’s what happens when you bring in outsiders, my patrón muttered furiously in the truck. None of those brutes were born here. If they had been, they wouldn’t think they were such big shots.
We were home. The doors and windows were open, but the smell of fear still lingered in the air. The house had been sacked—it was the guards, said the neighbors; it was the Indians, said the guards. It looked like a battlefield: the radio and television were gone; half the dishes were broken; the storerooms were turned upside down—merchandise scattered, all the sacks of grain, flour, coffee
, and sugar slit open. Riad Halabí, his arm still around my waist, hurried by the debris of that typhoon without pausing to measure the damage, and led me to the bed where the day before his wife had lain.
“Just look what those dogs did to you,” he said, pulling up the covers.
And then the words came; they spilled from my lips, an uncontainable outpouring, one after the other: A huge nose pointing at me, unseeing, and she whiter than ever before, licking and sucking, the crickets in the garden and the heat of the night, all of us sweating, they sweating, I sweating, I didn’t tell you so we could forget, he went away, anyway, he evaporated like a mirage, she climbed on him and swallowed him up, weep, Zulema, for a love that is lost, slim and strong, that dark nose poking into her, not me, no, only her, I thought she would start eating again and ask me for stories and sun her gold, that’s why I didn’t tell you, señor Riad, one bullet and her mouth was split like yours, Zulema, all blood, her hair blood, her nightgown blood, the house soaked in blood and the crickets with that deafening shrill, she climbed on him and swallowed him up, he ran away, all of us sweating, the Indians know what happened and the lieutenant knows, too, tell him not to touch me, not to beat me, I swear, I didn’t hear the pistol shot, it went off in her mouth and blasted away her palate, I didn’t kill her, I dressed her so you wouldn’t see her like that, I washed her, the coffee is still in the cup, I didn’t kill her, she did it herself, tell them to let me go, tell them I didn’t do it, didn’t do it, didn’t do it . . .
“I know that, child—be quiet now, please,” and Riad Halabí cradled me in his arms and wept with sorrow and compassion.
The schoolteacher Inés and my patrón put ice packs on my bruises and then dyed my best dress black for the cemetery. The next day I was still feverish and my face was swollen, but my teacher insisted that I dress in mourning from head to foot, with dark stockings, and a veil over my head, as was the custom, to attend Zulema’s funeral, which had already been delayed beyond the legal twenty-four hours because no one had been found to perform the autopsy. You must meet the gossip head on, said my teacher. The priest did not attend, so it would be crystal clear it was a suicide, and not a crime as the guards were gossiping. Out of respect to the Turk, and to annoy the lieutenant, all of Agua Santa filed by the grave, and each person embraced me and gave me condolences as if in fact I were actually Zulema’s daughter and not the one suspected of having murdered her.
After two days I felt better and was able to help Riad Halabí clean the house and shop. Life began again; we never spoke of what had happened, and never mentioned Zulema’s or Kamal’s name, but both were visible in the shadows of the garden, the corners of the room, the semi-darkness of the kitchen: he naked, with burning eyes, and she unblemished, plump and white, free of stains of blood or semen, as if alive of natural death.
* * *
In spite of all the schoolteacher’s precautions, the gossip rose and spread like yeast, and the same people who three months before were ready to swear that I was innocent began to whisper because Riad Halabí and I were living beneath the same roof without being joined by any discernible family tie. By the time the gossip drifted through the windows into the house, it had reached alarming proportions: the Turk and that little bitch are lovers; they killed the cousin Kamal, threw his remains into the river for the current and piranhas to dispose of, and that’s why the poor wife lost her reason—and then they killed her too, so they could be alone in the house; and now they spend day and night in an orgy of sex and Muslim heresies; poor man, it isn’t his fault, that she-devil has cast her spell on him.
“I don’t believe any of that horseshit people are saying, Turk, but when the river roars, stones must be rolling. I’ll have to reopen the investigation—we can’t leave it like this,” the lieutenant threatened.
“How much do you want now?”
“Come by my office and we’ll talk about it.”
Then Riad Halabí realized that there would be no end to the blackmail, and that the situation had reached a point of no return. Nothing could ever be the same again; people would make our lives impossible. The time had come to go our separate ways. That night, sitting beside the Arab fountain in his impeccable white batiste guayabera shirt, he told me just that, choosing his words with care. It was a bright night and I could see his large sad eyes, two moist black olives, and I thought of the good things I had shared with that man: the card games and dominoes, the evenings reading my primers, the movies, the hours in the kitchen cooking. I realized that I loved him deeply, that I owed him everything. A gentle warmth stole through my legs, constricted my chest, made my eyes sting. I got up and walked behind the chair where he was sitting; for the first time in all the time we had lived in the same house, I dared touch him. I laid my hands on his shoulders and rested my chin on his head. For a moment impossible to calculate, he did not move; perhaps he sensed what was going to happen, and wanted it, because he took out the handkerchief he used in moments of intimacy and covered his mouth. No, not with the handkerchief, I said. I grabbed it and threw it to the ground; then I walked around the chair and sat on his lap, putting my arms around his neck, very close, and stared at him unblinking. He smelled of clean maleness, of freshly ironed shirts, of lavender. I kissed his smooth-shaven cheek, his forehead, his dark, strong hands. Ayayay, my child, sighed Riad Halabí, and I felt his warm breath on my neck, beneath my blouse. My skin prickled with pleasure, and my nipples hardened. I was aware that I had never been so close to anyone before, and that it had been centuries since anyone had caressed me. I took Riad Halabí’s face in my hands and slowly drew him toward me until I was kissing his lips, a long kiss, learning the strange form of his mouth as fire rippled through my bones and sent shivers through my belly and thighs. Perhaps for an instant he struggled against his own desires, but immediately surrendered, to follow my lead and explore me in turn, until the tension was unbearable, and we drew apart to breathe.
“No one has ever kissed me on the mouth,” he whispered.
“Or me.” And I took his hand to lead him to the bedroom.
“Wait, child. I don’t want to get you in trouble . . .”
“I haven’t had a period since Zulema died. It was the shock, the schoolteacher says.” I blushed. “She thinks I will never have children.”
We stayed together that whole night. Riad Halabí had spent a lifetime inventing ways to approach a woman while that handkerchief covered his mouth. He was a loving and delicate man, eager to please and to be accepted, and he had devised innumerable ways to make love without using his lips. His hands, and all the rest of his solid body, had been refined into a single sensitive instrument tuned to giving pleasure to a woman who wanted to be fulfilled. That encounter was so momentous for each of us that it might have become a solemn ceremony; instead, it was smiling and joyful. Together we entered a private place where time did not exist; we spent delectable hours in absolute intimacy with no thought for anything but ourselves, freely giving and taking, two uninhibited and playful friends. Riad Halabí was wise and tender, and that night he gave me such pleasure that many years and more than one man would pass through my life before I again felt so complete. He taught me the multiple possibilities of my womanhood, so I would never compromise for less. I gratefully received the splendid gift of my own sensuality; I came to know my body; I learned that I had been born for that enjoyment—and I could not imagine life without Riad Halabí.
“Let me stay with you,” I begged at dawn.
“My child, I am much too old for you. When you are thirty, I will be a helpless old man.”
“That doesn’t matter. Let’s use the time we have to be together.”
“We could never live down the scandal. I’ve lived my life, but yours is still ahead of you. You must leave this town, change your name, get an education, forget everything that’s happened to us. I will always help you—you’re dearer than a daughter to me.”
“I don’t want to go, I want to stay with you. Don’t pay any attention to what people say.”
“You must obey me, I know what I’m doing. Can’t you see that I know the world better than you? They would hound us until we were both mad. We can’t live locked up here—that wouldn’t be fair to you, you’re just a child.” And after a long pause, Riad Halabí added: “There is one thing I’ve wanted to ask you for days. Do you know where Zulema hid her jewels?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Don’t tell me. They’re yours now, but leave them where they are because you don’t need them yet. I’ll give you money to live in the capital, enough to go to school and learn to make your living. That way you won’t have to be dependent on anyone, not even me. You won’t want for anything, my child. Zulema’s jewels will be waiting for you, they will be your dowry when you marry.”
“I won’t marry anyone, only you—please don’t make me go.”
“I’m doing it because I love you very much. One day you will understand, Eva.”
“I’ll never understand! Never!”
“Sh-h-h . . . let’s not talk about that now. Come here, we still have a few hours.”