No one interrupted me, and I spent almost all day writing, so absorbed I forgot even to eat. At four that afternoon I saw a cup of chocolate before my eyes.
“Here, I brought you something warm.”
I looked up at Mimí, tall and slim, wrapped in a blue kimono, and needed a few moments to recognize her; I had been deep in the jungle catching up with a little redhaired girl. I followed my own rhythm, ignoring the recommendations I had received: scripts are organized into two columns; each episode has twenty-five scenes; be careful, because scene changes are very expensive and the actors get confused if the speeches are too long; every key sentence must be repeated three times, and keep the plot simple; begin from the premise that your audience is composed of morons. A stack of pages grew on the table, spattered with notes, corrections, hieroglyphics, and coffee stains: but as soon as I had begun dusting off memories and weaving destinies, I saw that I did not know where I was going, or what the resolution would be—if there was one. I suspected that I would reach the end only at my own death, and was fascinated by the idea that I was another character in the story, and that I had the power to determine my fate, or invent a life for myself. The plot became more complicated, the characters more and more rebellious. I was working—if work is what that celebration can be called—many hours a day, from dawn till late at night. I forgot everything; I ate when Mimí fed me and went to sleep because she led me to bed. But even in dreams I was still deep in my new universe, hand in hand with my characters to keep them from escaping their faint outlines and returning to the nebula of stories that remained to be told.
After three weeks, Mimí thought it was time to reap some practical results from that delirium before I disappeared, swallowed up by my own words. She succeeded in getting an interview with the Director of National Television, to interest him in the story. She feared for my mental health if I continued to work without hope of seeing the product on the screen. When the day came, she dressed in white—according to her horoscope, the best color for that day—fastened a chain around her neck with a medallion of the Maharishi nesting deep in her cleavage, and dragged me off to the appointment. I felt peaceful and calm, as always when I was with her, secure in the aura of that mythological being.
Aravena received us in his office of plastic and glass, seated behind an imposing desk that could not disguise his gourmand’s belly. I was disappointed when I saw that obese man with the cowlike eyes and the half-smoked cigar, so unlike the energetic man I had pictured when I read his articles. Inattentive, because the dullest part of his job was the unavoidable circus of theater people, Aravena acknowledged our presence, barely glancing toward us, his eyes focused on a window overlooking neighboring rooftops and the clouds of a gathering storm. He asked me how close I was to finishing the script; he glanced at the folder I handed him, picked it up in a dead-white paw, and murmured that he would read it when he had time. I reached out and took back my manuscript, but Mimí grabbed it from me and handed it to him once again, this time forcing him to look at her. She fluttered her eyelashes with deadly precision, moistened her bright red lips, and invited him to dinner the following Saturday—only a few friends, an intimate gathering, she said in the irresistible purr she had cultivated to disguise the tenor voice she had been born with. Aravena was enmeshed in a visible fog, a lascivious aroma, a silken spiderweb. He sat mesmerized, folder in hand, totally nonplussed. I doubt whether he had ever received such a sexually loaded invitation. Cigar ash fell to the table, unnoticed.
“Did you have to ask him to our house?” I complained after we left.
“I’m going to get that script of yours accepted if it’s the last thing I do in my life.”
“You’re not planning to seduce him . . .”
“How do you think things get done in this business?”
* * *
Saturday dawned. It was raining, and rain continued throughout the day and evening, while Mimí hurried around preparing an austere dinner based on brown rice, which had been considered elegant ever since the macrobioticians and vegetarians had instilled fear and trembling in humankind with their dietary theories. Your fat man is going to die of hunger, I muttered, dicing carrots, but she was unmoved, primarily concerned with arranging flowers, lighting incense, selecting music, and plumping silk cushions—because it had also become fashionable to take off one’s shoes and sit on the floor. She had invited eight guests, all theater people except Aravena, who brought the copper-haired man we always saw with his camera on the barricades of some remote revolution—what was his name? I shook his hand with the vague sensation of having met him before.
After dinner Aravena took me aside and confessed his fascination with Mimí. He had not been able to stop thinking about her; her absence was like a painful burn.
“She is the absolute female. We all have something of the androgyne about us, something male, something female, but she’s stripped herself of any vestige of masculinity and built herself those splendid curves. She’s totally woman, adorable,” he said, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief.
I looked at my friend, so dear, so familiar, the features designed with pencils and lipsticks, the rounded hips and breasts, the sleek torso, innocent of maternity or pleasure, each line of her body won with unyielding tenacity. Only I know the true nature of that fictional woman painfully created to satisfy the dreams of others, but never to live her own. I have seen her without makeup, exhausted and sad; I have been beside her through depression, illness, insomnia, and fatigue; I love with all my heart the fragile and ambiguous human being behind the feathers and glitter. I asked myself whether this man with the thick lips and swollen hands would know how to penetrate the surface and discover the companion, the mother, the sister, that Mimí truly is. From the other end of the room she was conscious of the stare of her new admirer. I had the impulse to stop her, to protect her, but I refrained.
“Come on, Eva. Tell our friend a story,” said Mimí, dropping down beside Aravena.
“What would you like?”
“Something racy, don’t you think?” she said suggestively.
I sat down with my legs folded like an Indian, closed my eyes, and let my mind wander through the dunes of a white desert, as I always do when I invent a story. Soon against those sands I saw a woman in a yellow taffeta petticoat, faint brushstrokes of the cold lands my mother had appropriated from Professor Jones’s magazines, and the games La Señora had created for the General’s revelries. I began my story. Mimí says I have a special voice for storytelling, a voice that, although mine, also seems to belong to someone else, as if it issued from the earth to rise through my body. I felt the room fading away, effaced by the new horizons I convoked. The guests grew still.
Times were hard in the south. Not in the south of this country, but the south of the world, where seasons are reversed and winter does not occur at Christmastime as it does in civilized nations, but in the middle of the year, as in barbaric lands . . .
When I finished, Rolf Carlé was the only one who did not applaud.
Later he confessed to me that he was a long time returning from that austral pampa where I had left two lovers with a bag of gold coins, and when he did, he was determined to turn my story into a film before the ghosts of that pair of picaros absorbed his dreams. I wondered why Rolf Carlé seemed so familiar; it was more than having seen him on television. I looked into my past, trying to think where I might have met him, but I was sure I had not known him—or anyone like him. I wanted to touch him. I moved closer and ran my finger down the back of his hand.
“My mother had freckles, too . . .” Rolf Carlé did not move, but neither did he take my hand. “Someone told me you’ve been in the mountains with the guerrillas.”
“I’ve been a lot of places.”
“Tell me . . .”
We sat on the floor, and he answered almost all my questions. He talked about his career, how, observing the wor
ld through a lens, it had taken him around the globe. We had such a good time the rest of the evening that we did not notice as the others began to leave. He was the last to go, and he left only because Aravena hauled him away. At the door he told me he would be away for a few days filming uprisings in Prague, where the Czechs were confronting invading tanks with rocks and stones. I wanted to kiss him goodbye, but he shook my hand with a little nod of the head that I found rather solemn.
Four days later, when Aravena called me to sign a contract, it was still raining; pails were placed around his luxurious office to catch the leaks. As he explained without preliminaries, the script did not even remotely fit the usual patterns; in fact, the whole thing was a jumble of bizarre characters and unrealistic anecdotes; it lacked true romance; the protagonists were neither good-looking nor rich; it was almost impossible to follow the train of events; the audience would be totally lost. In sum, it was a mess and no one with an ounce of sense would run the risk of producing it, but he was going to do it because he could not resist the temptation to scandalize the country with such rubbish—and because Mimí had asked him to.
“Keep writing. Eva, I’m curious about how you’re going to end such a mishmash,” he said as he showed me to the door.
* * *
The floods began on the third day of the rains, and on the fifth day the government decreed a state of emergency. Since no agency took the precaution of cleaning the drainage ditches or storm sewers, catastrophes caused by bad weather were common, but this storm surpassed imagination. The rain dragged shacks from the hillsides, overflowed the river that runs through the city, flooded houses, carried away cars, trees, and half the sports stadium. Cameramen from National Television climbed into rubber boats and filmed victims on the roofs of houses waiting patiently to be rescued by military helicopters. Although stunned and hungry, many sang, because it would have been pointless to aggravate misfortune by complaining. The rain ceased at the end of a week, the result of the same empirical solution used years before to combat the drought. Again the Bishop paraded the statue of the Nazarene, and a huge crowd followed with their umbrellas, praying and making vows, mocked by weather-bureau employees who had communicated with colleagues in Miami and found that, according to weather balloons and cloud measurements, the drenching rain would continue for nine more days. The sky, however, cleared only three hours after the Nazarene was returned to his altar in the Cathedral, wet as a dishrag despite the canopy that had been intended to protect him. Dye from his wig ran in dark rivulets down his face; the devout fell to their knees, crying that the statue was sweating blood. This purported miracle added to the prestige of the Catholic Church and calmed some souls worried by the ideological inroads of Marxists and the arrival of the first groups of Mormons, ingenuous and energetic youths in short-sleeved shirts who went about knocking on doors and converting the unwary.
When the rain had stopped and an accounting was being taken of the losses in order to repair the damage and return to normal life, a coffin, modest but in perfect condition, was found floating near the plaza of the Father of the Nation. The heavy rain had washed it down from a hovel in the hills of the western part of the city along streets turned into rushing torrents and deposited it unharmed in the center of the city. When it was opened, an elderly woman was discovered, peacefully asleep. I saw her on the nine-o’clock news, called the station for further details, and grabbed Mimí and rushed to the shelter the Army had set up to house the flood victims. There we found large campaign tents crammed with families waiting for good weather. Many had lost even their identification papers, but there was no melancholy in those tents: the disaster offered a good excuse to rest and an opportunity to make new friends; tomorrow they would worry about how they were going to get along; it was useless to weep today over what the floods had carried off. There, too, we found Elvira in her nightgown, thin and irate, sitting on a bare mattress recounting to a circle of listeners how she had been saved from the flood in her strange ark. And that is how I got back my abuela. Even with the white hair and the map of wrinkles that had transformed her face, I had recognized her the moment I saw her on the screen, for her spirit had not been dulled during our long separation: she was the same woman who had accepted my stories in exchange for fried bananas and the right to play funeral in her coffin. I pushed people aside, threw my arms around my abuela, and hugged her with the urgency stored during the long years she had been lost to me. Elvira made no fuss at all over me; she kissed me as if we had seen each other only yesterday and the changes in my appearance were nothing but a trick of her tired eyes.
“Imagine, little bird, all that sleeping in the box so that when death came for me I’d be ready, and then what came for me was life. I’m never going to lie down in a coffin again, not even when it’s time to take me to the cemetery. I want to be buried standing up, like a tree.”
We took Elvira home. In the taxi, all through the ride, Elvira was studying Mimí. She had never seen anyone like her; the nearest thing she could think of was a life-size doll. Later she felt her all over with her wise old cook’s hands and commented that she had skin whiter and smoother than an onion and breasts as firm as green grapefruit, and she smelled like an almond-and-spice torte from the Swiss pastry shop. When she put on her eyeglasses to see her better, she was convinced beyond any doubt that Mimí was not a creature of this world. She’s an archangel, she concluded. Mimí liked Elvira from the first moment, because besides me and her mamma—whose love had never faltered—Mimí had no family of her own; all her relatives had turned their back when they saw Melesio in a woman’s body. She needed an abuela, too. Elvira accepted our hospitality because the flood had carried off all her material belongings except the coffin, to which Mimí had no objections although it did not harmonize with the décor. But Elvira did not want it. The coffin had saved her life once, and she was not prepared to run that risk a second time.
Rolf Carlé called me when he returned from Prague a few days later. He came looking for me in a jeep that had seen far better days, and we set off in the direction of the coast. By midmorning we found a beach with translucent water and rosy sands, very different from the sea of crashing waves on which I had so often sailed in the dining room of the spinster and the bachelor. We splashed around in the water and lay in the sun until we were hungry; then we dressed and went in search of a place that sold fried fish. We spent the afternoon sitting looking at the sea, drinking white wine and telling each other our life stories. I told him about my childhood as a servant in other people’s homes, about how Elvira had been saved from the waters, about Riad Halabí, and many other things, but from the strong habit of secrecy I did not mention Huberto Naranjo. Rolf Carlé, in turn, told me about being hungry during the war, about the flight of his brother Jochen, about his father being hanged in the woods, and about the prison camp.
“It’s strange,” he said. “This is the first time I’ve put those things into words.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, they seemed secret. They’re the darkest part of my past,” he said, and then in silence stared toward the sea with a different expression in his gray eyes.
“What happened to Katharina?”
“She died a sad death, alone in a hospital.”
“All right, she died, but not the way you say. Let’s find a happy ending for her. It was Sunday, the first sunny day of the season. Katharina felt very good when she woke up, and the nurse put her in a canvas chair on the terrace, her legs wrapped in a blanket. Your sister sat looking at the birds beginning to build nests beneath the eaves, the budding tree branches. She was warm and safe, the way she was when she slept in your arms beneath the kitchen table—in fact, she was dreaming of you at that very moment. She had no real memory, but her instinct retained intact the warmth you gave her, and every time she felt happy, she whispered your name. She was doing just that—happily saying your name—when, without her knowing, her spirit drifted away. Y
our mother arrived a little later to visit her, as she did every Sunday, and found her motionless, but smiling. She closed her eyes, kissed her forehead, and bought a bride’s coffin, where she lay wrapped in the white mantle.”