“If that’s what you like, then that’s what you should do.”
“No one pays to hear stories, Mimí, and I have to earn a living.”
“Maybe you’ll find someone who will pay you for them. There’s no hurry—as long as you stay with me, you won’t need anything.”
“I don’t want to be a burden to you. Riad Halabí always said that freedom begins with financial independence.”
“You’ll soon learn that I’m the one who’s a burden. I need you much more than you need me. I’m a very lonely woman.”
I stayed with Mimí that night, then another, and another, and so on for several years, and during that time I gradually worked my impossible love for Riad Halabí out of my heart. I became a woman, and for the first time steered my own course—not always with grace, to tell the truth, but it should be remembered it has always been my fortune to sail on stormy seas.
I had told myself so often it is a curse to be born a woman that I had some difficulty understanding Melesio’s struggle to become one. I could not see a single advantage, but he wanted it so much he was willing to go through hell to achieve it. Under the guidance of a physician who specialized in such metamorphoses, he swallowed enough hormones to turn an elephant into a migratory bird; he had hair removed by electric tweezer, silicone breast and buttock implants, and paraffin injections wherever it was considered necessary. The result is unsettling, to say the least. Naked, Mimí is an Amazon with splendid breasts and skin like a baby, whose torso culminates in masculine attributes that are atrophied but quite visible.
“I need one more operation, she told me. La Señora found out that they work miracles in Los Angeles. They can make me into a true woman, but it’s still experimental, and it costs a fortune!”
For Mimí, sex is the least vital part of her femininity. Other things attract her: clothes, perfumes, fabrics, jewelry, cosmetics. She loves the feel of her stockings when she crosses her legs, the barely perceptible whisper of lingerie, the swish of hair on her shoulders. At that time, she longed for a male companion to care for and serve—someone who would protect her and offer her lasting affection—but she had not found him. She lived suspended in an androgynous limbo. Some men had approached her thinking she was a transvestite, but she was not interested in ambiguous relationships; she thought of herself as a woman, and she was looking for virile men. They, however, did not dare be seen with her, even though they were fascinated by her beauty; they did not want to be tagged as homosexuals. There were those who seduced her to find out how she looked naked, and how she made love; they found it exciting to hold such a remarkable freak in their arms. When a lover entered her life, the whole house revolved around him; she became his slave, ready to indulge him in his most daring fantasies to atone for the unpardonable sin of not being a complete woman. On those occasions when she bent to a man’s will and became fanatically submissive, I tried to defend her from her own madness, to reason with her, to thwart that dangerous passion. But that only irritated her: You’re jealous, leave me alone. The men she chose were almost always the same: a tough, macho type, who for several weeks would exploit her, upset the equilibrium of the house, leave his mark on everything he touched, and cause such upheaval that I would fall into a foul mood and threaten to move out. Finally the sane part of Mimí would rebel; she would regain her self-control and throw the bastard out. Sometimes the breakup was violent; sometimes the man, his curiosity satisfied, simply tired of her and left; when that happened, she would take to her bed in a fit of depression. For a while, until she fell in love again, we would return to our normal routine. I would keep track of her hormones, sleeping pills, and vitamins, and she would oversee my education—English classes, driving lessons, books—and bring home stories from the street to offer them to me as a gift. Suffering, humiliation, fear, and illness had scarred her deeply, and shattered her dream of living in a fairy-tale world. She was not naïve—though she might play the ingénue—but there was a part of her that no sorrow, no violence had touched.
As for me, although I never lacked for men in my life, I was no luckier in love than Mimí. From time to time I succumbed to some passion that rocked me to my bones. When that happened, I did not wait for the man to make the overtures; I took the initiative, hoping each time to recapture the happiness I had known with Riad Halabí—but without success. Once or twice I was rebuffed by men who may have been disconcerted by my assertiveness, and who made a point of ridiculing me to their friends. But I felt free, and I never worried about getting pregnant.
“You should see a doctor,” Mimí insisted.
“Don’t worry about it, I’m perfectly healthy. Everything will be all right once I stop dreaming about Zulema.”
Mimí collected porcelain boxes, stuffed animals, dolls, and pillows she embroidered in her spare time. Her kitchen looked like a showcase for kitchen gadgets, and she used them all; although she was a vegetarian and ate like a rabbit, she enjoyed cooking. She considered red meat a deadly poison, another of the many teachings of the Maharishi, whose portrait presided over the living room and whose philosophy guided her life. He was a smiling grandfather with watery eyes, a sage who received divine illumination through mathematics. His calculations had demonstrated that the universe—and, even more, its creatures—were ruled by the power of numbers, principles of cosmogonic knowledge known from Pythagoras to our day. He was the first, however, to apply the science of numbers to futurology. Once he had been invited by the government to consult on matters of state, and Mimí was among the throng waiting at the airport. Before she watched him disappear into an official limousine, she had been able to touch the hem of his robe.
“Man and woman, there’s no difference between them in this theory. They are models, on a reduced scale, of the universe, and therefore every occurrence on the astral plane is accompanied by manifestations at the human level, and each person experiences a relationship with a determined planetary order in accordance with the basic configuration associated with him or her from the day breath is drawn,” Mimí recited in a rush, without taking breath herself. “Do you understand?”
“Perfectly,” I assured her, and from that moment we have never had a problem, because when everything else fails, we communicate in the language of the stars.
NINE
The daughters of Burgel and Rupert became pregnant at the same time, suffered together the ills of gestation, grew as roly-poly as a pair of Renaissance nymphs, and, within a few days of each other, gave birth to their firstborn sons. The grandparents breathed a deep sigh of relief when they saw the babies had been born without visible defects, and they celebrated the event with a lavish double christening on which they spent a good part of their savings. The mothers could not, as they secretly may have wished, attribute their sons’ paternity to Rolf Carlé. The babies smelled of beeswax; and for more than a year the girls had been deprived of their frolics with Rolf—not for any lack of willingness on their part, but because the husbands had turned out to be much more vigilant than the girls had anticipated and gave them few opportunities to be alone. On each of Rolf’s sporadic visits to La Colonia, his aunt and uncle and the two young matrons had pampered him like a baby, while the two candlemakers had danced attendance but had never taken their eyes off him; amorous acrobatics, therefore, were shunted into the background owing to circumstances beyond the control of anyone. From time to time, even so, the three cousins managed to slip into the pine forest or some empty room in the inn and laugh together for a while, remembering the old days.
As the years went by, the two sisters had other children and settled into the role of wife, but they never lost the freshness that had captivated Rolf Carlé the first time he saw them. The elder was still merry and playful; she had the vocabulary of a sailor and could drink five steins of beer and still walk a straight line. The younger was as delicate and coy as ever, even though she had lost some of the apple-cheeked beauty of adolescence. Both still smelled
of cinnamon, clove, vanilla, and lemon, and just remembering that scent could set Rolf’s soul on fire—as had happened thousands of kilometers away, when he awakened in the night with the intuition that the girls were also dreaming of him.
Burgel and Rupert were growing old breeding their dogs and challenging the digestion of the tourists with their extraordinary culinary treats; they continued to fight over trifles and love each other wholeheartedly, and generally grew more charming with each new day. Living together through the years had obscured their differences, and they had grown so alike in body and soul that they looked like twins. To entertain the grandchildren, Burgel sometimes pasted on a wooly mustache and put on her husband’s clothes, while he donned a rag-stuffed brassière and a woman’s skirt—to the children’s happy confusion. They had relaxed the rules of the inn, and furtive couples now drove to La Colonia to spend a night at their hotel: Rolf’s aunt and uncle knew that love is good for keeping a fine polish on wood, and at their age they themselves did not have the old ardor—in spite of the huge portions of aphrodisiac stew they consumed. They welcomed the lovers with sympathy and without questions about their legal status; they gave them the best rooms and served them succulent breakfasts, grateful that those forbidden larks helped preserve the coffered ceilings and fine furniture.
The political situation had stabilized after the government suppressed an attempted coup and controlled the military’s chronic tendency toward subversion. Oil flowed from the earth in an endless torrent, and prosperity lulled consciences and postponed all difficulties to a hypothetical tomorrow.
Rolf Carlé, meanwhile, had become a roving celebrity. He had filmed several documentaries that won him renown outside the country. He had crossed all the continents, and by now spoke four languages. Señor Aravena, who after the fall of the dictatorship had been promoted to the directorship of the national television network, and who was an advocate of dynamic and bold programming, always sent Rolf to the source for the news. He considered Rolf the best cameraman on his team—and secretly Rolf agreed with him. The news services slant the news, Aravena used to say. It’s best to witness events with our own eyes. So Carlé filmed catastrophes, wars, kidnappings, trials, coronations, summit meetings, and other events that kept him far from his own country. At times—when he found himself knee-deep in a Vietnam quagmire, or trapped for days in a desert trench, half-dead of thirst, his camera over his shoulder and death at his back—he would remember La Colonia and smile. For him, that storybook village nestled in an obscure mountain range in South America was a safe haven; he was always at peace there. He returned when he felt weighed down by the world’s atrocities, to lie beneath the trees and stare at the sky, roll on the ground with his nieces and nephews and the dogs, sit at night in the kitchen while his aunt fussed among the pots and his uncle adjusted the mechanism of a clock. There he gave free rein to his ego, dazzling the family with his adventures. Only with them did he indulge his inclination toward pedantry, because he knew in his heart that he was forgiven beforehand.
The nature of his job had kept him from marrying, and his Aunt Burgel scolded him more insistently with each visit. Now he did not fall in love as easily as he had at twenty, and he had begun to resign himself to the idea of loneliness; he knew it would be difficult for him to find the ideal woman—although he never asked himself whether, in the unlikely event this perfect creature appeared in his life, he would meet her requirements. He had one or two affairs that ended in frustration, a few loyal women friends in different cities who welcomed him with affection when he happened to pass through, and enough conquests to nourish his self-esteem. But he had grown tired of transitory relationships, and now with the first kiss began saying goodbye. He had developed into a sinewy man with taut skin and muscles; his eyes were alert, surrounded by fine lines, and he was tanned and freckled. His experiences at the scene of so many violent events had not hardened him: he was still vulnerable to the emotions of his adolescence. He was moved by tenderness and pursued from time to time by the old nightmares, intermixed, it is true, with happy dreams of rosy thighs and rollicking puppies. He was tenacious, restless, untiring. He smiled often, and his smile was so sincere that he won friends everywhere he went. When he was behind his camera, he forgot about himself, interested only in capturing the image, whatever the risk.
* * *
One September afternoon I ran into Huberto Naranjo on a street corner. He was watching, at a distance, a factory for military uniforms located farther down the block. He had come to the capital for weapons and boots—how can a man exist without boots in the mountains?—and, while in town, to persuade his superiors to change their strategy, because the Army was decimating the guerrilla forces. His beard had been trimmed and his hair cut, and he was wearing city clothes and carrying a small briefcase. He bore no resemblance to the posters offering a reward for the capture of a heavily bearded man in a black beret who stared defiantly at passersby from every wall. The most elemental precaution demanded that even if he came face to face with his own mother, he would walk straight ahead as if he had not seen her. But I took him by surprise, perhaps at a moment his defenses were down. He told me later that when he saw me crossing the street he recognized me immediately by my eyes, although there was little else to identify the girl he had left with La Señora, years ago, to care for as if she were his sister. He grabbed my arm as I passed him. I turned, startled, and he whispered my name. I tried to remember where I had seen him before, but made no connection between that man who looked like a public official—despite his weather-beaten skin—and the teenager with the brilliantined pompadour, the cowboy boots, and the metal-studded belt who had been my girlhood hero and the protagonist of my first amorous fantasies.
Then he committed his second mistake. “I’m Huberto Naranjo . . .”
I held out my hand, the only thing that occurred to me at the moment, and we both grinned. We stood on that corner, amazed, staring at one another; we had more than seven years to tell each other about, but did not know where to begin. I felt a languid warmth in my knees, and my heart was pounding; a long-forgotten passion suddenly swept over me. I had thought I would love him forever, and in thirty seconds I was in love again. Huberto Naranjo had not been with a woman for a long time. Later I learned that for him the most difficult part of being in the mountains was lack of affection and sex. When he came to the city, he headed for the nearest whorehouse and for a few moments, always too brief, sank into the annihilation of an urgent, raging, and ultimately melancholy sensuality that barely relieved his stored-up hunger without providing any happiness. When he could allow himself the luxury of thinking about himself, he was overwhelmed with a desire to hold a girl in his arms who belonged to him, someone he could possess totally, someone who would wait for him, want only him, be faithful to him. Ignoring all the rules he himself imposed on his guerrillas, he invited me to have a cup of coffee.
I arrived home very late that day, walking on air.
“What happened to you?” asked Mimí, who knew me as well as she knew herself and could guess my moods even from a distance. “Your eyes are brighter than I’ve ever seen them.”
“I’m in love.”
“Again?”
“This time it’s serious. I’ve been waiting for this man for years.”
“I see. A meeting of twin souls. Who is he?”
“I can’t tell you, it’s a secret.”
“What do you mean, you can’t tell me!” She took my shoulders and shook me, visibly upset. “You’ve just met this man and he’s already coming between us?”
“All right, don’t be angry. It’s Huberto Naranjo, but you must never mention his name.”
“Naranjo? The one from Calle República? What’s all the mystery?”
“I don’t know. He told me that even a word could cost him his life.”
“I always knew he would end up in trouble. I knew Huberto Naranjo when he was just a kid. I r
ead his palm and saw his fate in the cards. He’s not for you. Listen to what I’m telling you. That one was born to be a bandit or a tycoon—he must be mixed up in smuggling or drugs, or some other dirty business.”
“I forbid you to talk about him like that!”
By the time I ran into Huberto Naranjo, we were living near the Country Club in the best neighborhood in the city, where we had found a small, older house within our means. Mimí’s fame was greater than she had ever dreamed of and she had become so beautiful she was almost unreal. The determination that had driven her to change her sex was now dedicated to mastering good manners and acting. She shed all excesses that might be considered vulgar and began to set fashion with her couturier clothes and light-and-shadow maquillage; she improved her vocabulary—saving a few expletives for emergencies—and spent two years studying acting in an actors’ workshop and grace in a charm school for beauty queens, where she learned to cross her legs as she got into an automobile, eat an artichoke without smearing her lipstick, and descend a stairway trailing an invisible mink stole. She did not try to hide her sex change, but neither did she speak of it. The sensationalist press exploited that air of mystery, fanning the flames of scandal and slander. Her life had changed dramatically. Now when she walked down the street, people turned to stare at her; schoolgirls crowded around her for her autograph; she had contracts for telenovelas and stage performances in which she demonstrated a talent that had not been seen since 1917 when El Benefactor had brought Sarah Bernhardt from Paris, ancient, an amputee, but still magnificent. Mimí’s appearance on the stage ensured a full house; people poured in from the provinces to see this mythological creature who was said to have a woman’s breasts and man’s phallus. She was invited to fashion shows, to serve as juror in beauty pageants, to attend charity events. She made her triumphal entry into high society at the Carnival Ball, when the first families added to her cachet by inviting her to the Country Club. On that night Mimí stunned the guests by appearing dressed as a man, wearing an elaborate, fake-emerald-encrusted costume as the king of Thailand, with me on her arm as queen. There were some who remembered having applauded her years before in a sordid cabaret for homosexuals but, rather than damaging her prestige, that merely heightened interest. Mimí knew she would never be accepted among the families of the oligarchy who were, for the moment, seeking her out; she was nothing more than an exotic curiosity to ornament their parties, but entrée to that atmosphere fascinated her, and to justify herself she claimed it was useful to her career as an actress. In this country, she told me whenever I made fun of her fancies, good contacts are all that matter.