All the days were exactly the same except Thursday, whose approach I calculated on the kitchen calendar. All week I looked forward to the moment we would walk through the garden gate and set off to market. Elvira would help me put on my rubber-soled shoes and my clean dress, and comb my hair into a ponytail; then she would give me a centavo to buy a brilliantly colored round lollipop, almost impervious to the human tooth, that I could lick for hours without noticeably reducing its size. That treat lasted for six or seven nights of intense bliss and many giddy licks between difficult chores. The patrona always took the lead, clutching her handbag: keep your eyes peeled, pay attention, stay right beside me, the place is alive with pickpockets. She marched through the market briskly, looking, squeezing, bargaining: these prices are a scandal; jail is the only place for moneygrubbers like these. I walked behind the maid with a bag in each hand and my lollipop in my pocket. I used to watch people, trying to guess their lives and secrets, their virtues and adventures. I always returned home with shining eyes and a joyful heart. I would run to the kitchen, and while I helped Elvira put things away I besieged her with stories of enchanted carrots and peppers that turned into princes and princesses when they fell into the pot and jumped out of it with sprigs of parsley tangled in their crowns and broth streaming from their royal garments.
“Sh-h-h! The doña is coming. Grab the broom, little bird.”
During the siesta, the hour when quiet reigned in the house, I used to abandon my tasks and go to the dining room. A large painting in a gilded frame hung there, a window open onto a marine horizon: waves, rocks, hazy sky, and sea gulls. I would stand there with my hands behind my back, my eyes fixed on that irresistible seascape, lost in never-ending voyages and sirens and dolphins and manta rays that sometimes leapt from my mother’s fantasies and other times from Professor Jones’s books. Among the countless stories my mother had told me, I always preferred those in which the sea played some part; afterward I would dream of distant islands, vast underwater cities, oceanic highways for fish navigations. We must have a sailor ancestor, my mother said every time I asked for another of those stories, and thus was born the legend of the Dutch grandfather. In the presence of that painting, I recaptured those earlier emotions, either when I stood close enough to hear it speak or when I watched it while I was doing my household chores; each time I could smell a faint odor of sails, lye, and starch.
“What are you doing here!” the patrona would scold if she discovered me. “Don’t you have anything to do? We don’t keep that painting here for your sake.”
From what she said, I believed that paintings wear away, that the color seeps into the eyes of the person beholding them, until gradually they fade and vanish.
“No, child. Where did you get such a silly notion? They don’t wear away. Come here, give me a kiss on my nose and I’ll let you look at the sea. Give me another and I’ll give you a centavo. But don’t tell my sister, she doesn’t understand. Does my nose disgust you?” And the patrón and I would hide behind the ferns for that clandestine caress.
I had been told to sleep in a hammock in the kitchen, but after everybody was in bed I would steal in the servants’ room and slip into the bed shared by the maid and the cook, one sleeping with her head toward the top and the other with her head toward the foot. I would curl up beside Elvira and offer to tell her a story if she would let me stay.
“All right. Tell me the one about the man who lost his head over love.”
“I forgot that one, but I remember one about some animals.”
“There must have been a lot of sap in your mother’s womb to give you such a mind for telling stories, little bird.”
* * *
I remember very well, it was a rainy day; there was a strange odor of rotted melons and cat piss on the hot breath blowing from the street; the odor filled the house, so strong you could feel it on your fingertips. I was in the dining room on one of my sea voyages. I did not hear the patrona’s footsteps, and when I felt her claws on my neck, the surprise jerked me back from a great distance, leaving me petrified in the uncertainty of not knowing where I was.
“You here again? Go do your work! What do you think I pay you for?”
“I finished everything, doña . . .”
The patrona picked up a large vase from the sideboard and turned it upside down, dashing stinking water and wilted flowers to the floor.
“Clean it up!” she ordered.
The sea disappeared, the fogbound rocks, the red tresses woven through my nostalgia, the dining-room furniture—all I saw were those flowers on the tiles, growing, writhing, taking on a life of their own, and that woman with her tower of curls and locketed throat. A monumental “No!” swelled inside me, choking me; I heard it burst forth in a scream that came from my toes, and watched it explode against the patrona’s powdered face. When she slapped me I felt no pain, because long before she touched me I felt only rage, an urge to leap upon her, drag her to the floor, claw her face, grab her hair, and pull with all my might. But the bun yielded, the curls crumbled, the topknot came loose, and that entire mass of brittle hair lay in my hands like a dying fox. Horrified, I realized that I had snatched the doña bald-headed. I bolted from the room, ran through the house and the garden, and rushed into the street without any sense of where I was going. After a few minutes the warm summer rain had soaked me through, and fear and wetness brought me to a halt. The shaggy trophy was still in my hands; I flung it to the edge of the sidewalk, where it was carried off with other debris in the drainage ditch. I stood for several minutes observing the shipwrecked curls swirling sadly away, and once they were out of sight I began to walk aimlessly, convinced I had come to the end of my road, sure there was no place I could hide after the crime I had just committed. I left familiar streets, passed the site of the Thursday market, continued through the residential zone of houses shuttered for the siesta, and walked on and on like a sleepwalker. The rain had stopped and the late afternoon sun was evaporating moisture from the wet asphalt, swathing the world in a sticky veil. People, traffic, noise—a lot of noise: construction sites with gigantic, roaring yellow machines, ringing steel, screeching brakes, horns, the cries of street vendors. A vague odor of swamp and fried food drifted from the cafés, and I remembered that I usually had something to eat at this hour. I was hungry, but I had no money, and in my flight I had left behind the remnants of my weekly lollipop. I reckoned that I had been walking in circles for several hours. I was awestruck. In those days the city was not the hopeless disaster it is now, but it was already growing—shapelessly, like a malignant tumor, assailed by lunatic architecture in an unholy mixture of styles: Italian marble palaces, Texas ranch houses, Tudor mansions, steel skyscrapers, residences in the form of ships, mausoleums, Japanese teahouses, Swiss chalets, and wedding cakes with plaster icing. I was in shock.
Toward evening, I came to a plaza bordered with ceibas, solemn trees that had stood guard over that place since the War of Independence; in the center was a bronze equestrian statue of the Father of the Nation, a flag in one hand and reins in the other, humiliated by the irreverence of pigeon shit and the disillusion of history. In one corner of the square, surrounded by curious onlookers, I saw a white-clad campesino in a straw sombrero and sandals. I walked closer to watch. He was reciting in a singsong voice, and for a few coins, in response to the individual client, he would change his theme but continue to improvise verses without pause or hesitation. Under my breath I tried imitating him, and discovered how much easier it is to remember stories when you rhyme—the story dances to its own music. I stood listening until the man picked up his coins and went away. For a while I amused myself by searching for words that sounded the same: what a good way to remember; now I would be able to tell Elvira the same story twice. The minute I thought of Elvira, I could almost smell the odor of fried onion; I felt a cold chill down my back as I realized the truth of my predicament. Again I saw my patrona’s curls ripplin
g down the drainage ditch like a dead cat, and the prophecies my madrina had so often repeated rang in my ears: Bad, bad girl. You’ll end up in jail, that’s how it begins. You don’t mind, and then you act smart—and you end up behind bars. Listen to what I’m telling you, that’s how it’s going to be. I sat down on the edge of a fountain to look at the goldfish and at the water lilies drooping from the heat.
“What’s the matter?” It was a dark-eyed boy wearing khaki pants and a shirt much too large for him.
“I’m going to be arrested.”
“How old are you?”
“Nine, more or less.”
“Then you have no right to be in jail. You’re a minor.”
“But I scalped my patrona.”
“How?”
“With one jerk.”
He sat down beside me, watching me out of the corner of his eye and digging the dirt from beneath his fingernails with a penknife.
“My name is Huberto Naranjo. What’s yours?”
“Eva Luna. Would you be my friend?”
“I don’t hang around with women.” But he stayed, and until it got late we were showing each other our scars, sharing secrets, getting to know each other, and beginning a long relationship that would lead us along the paths of friendship and love.
From the moment he could look after himself, Huberto Naranjo had lived in the street, first shining shoes and selling newspapers and then scratching a living through hustling and petty thievery. He had a natural gift for conning the gullible, and I was given immediate proof of his talent there at the plaza fountain. He began a spiel to catch the attention of passersby, and soon had gathered a small crowd of clerks, old men, poets, and a few guardia stationed there to be sure that everyone walking past the equestrian statue showed the proper respect. His challenge was to see who could grab a fish from the fountain; it meant plunging your upper body into the water, rooting around among the aquatic plants, and blindly feeling along the slimy bottom. Huberto had cut the tail of one fish, and the poor creature could only swim in a circle like a top or lie motionless beneath a lily pad, where Huberto knew to fish him out with one swoop. As he triumphantly hoisted his catch, the losers paid up—with both shirt-sleeves and dignity considerably dampened. Another way of earning a few coins consisted of betting on finding the pea beneath one shell of the three he moved rapidly across a piece of cloth unfolded on the ground. He could slip off a stroller’s watch in less than two seconds, and in the same amount of time make it vanish in thin air. Some years later, dressed like a cross between a cowboy and a Mexican charro, he would sell everything from stolen screwdrivers to shirts bought in factory closeouts. At sixteen he would be the leader of a street gang, feared and respected; he would own several carts selling roasted peanuts, sausages, and sugarcane juice; he would be the hero of the whores in the red-light district, and the nightmare of the guardia, until other concerns took him off to the mountains. But that came much later. When I first met him, he was still a boy, but if I had observed him more carefully I might have seen a sign of the man he would become; even then he had ready fists and fire in his heart. If you want to get ahead, you have to be macho, Huberto Naranjo used to say. It was his crutch, based on male attributes that were no different from those of other boys, but that he put to the test, measuring his penis with a ruler or demonstrating how far he could urinate. I learned that much later, when he himself scoffed at such standards—after someone told him that size is not irrefutable proof of virility. Nevertheless, his ideas about manhood were deeply rooted from childhood, and the things that happened to him later, all the battles and passions, all the encounters and arguments, all the rebellions and defeats, were not enough to change his mind.
* * *
After dark we made the round of nearby restaurants, looking for something to eat. Sitting in an alley across from the back door of a cheap café, we shared a steaming pizza that Huberto had traded for a postcard of a smiling blonde with stupendous breasts. Then, climbing fences and violating private property, we twisted our way through a labyrinth of courtyards until we reached a parking garage. We slipped through a ventilation duct to avoid the far guard at the entrance, and scrambled down to the lowest level. There, in a dark corner between two columns, Huberto had improvised a nest of newspapers where he could go when nothing better presented itself. We settled in for the night, lying side by side in the darkness, drowning in fumes of motor oil and carbon monoxide as thick as an ocean liner’s exhaust. I made myself comfortable and offered him a story in payment for being so nice to me.
“All right,” he conceded, slightly baffled, because I believe that in all his life he had never heard anything remotely resembling a story.
“What shall it be about?”
“About bandits,” he said, to say something.
I took inspiration from several episodes I’d heard on the radio, some ballads I knew, and a few ingredients of my own invention, and began spinning a story of a damsel in love with an outlaw, a real jackal who resolved even minor disagreements with bullets, strewing the landscape with widows and orphans. The girl never lost hope of redeeming him through the strength of her love and the sweetness of her character, and while he went around perpetrating his evil deeds, she gathered in the very orphans created by the insatiable pistols of the evildoer. When he showed up at the house, it was like a gale from hell; he stomped in, kicking doors and emptying his pistols into the air. On her knees she would plead with him to repent of his cruel ways, but he mocked her with guffaws that shook the walls and curdled the blood. “How’ve you been, honey!” he would shout at the top of his lungs, while terrified youngsters ran to hide in the wardrobe. How are all the kids? and he would open the door and pull them out by the ear to see how tall they were. Aha! I see they’re getting big, but don’t you worry. Before you can say boo! I’ll be off to town and I’ll make some new orphans for your collection. And so the years went by and the number of mouths to be fed kept growing, until one day the sweetheart, weary of such abuse, realized the futility of continuing to hope for the bandit’s salvation and decided to stop being so good. She got a permanent, bought a red dress, and turned her house into a place for parties and good times where you could buy the most delicious ice cream and the best malted milks, play all kinds of games, and dance and sing. The children had a wonderful time waiting on the customers; poverty and misery were ended and the woman was so happy that she forgot all the unhappiness of the past. Things were going very well, but gossip reached the ears of the jackal and one night he appeared as usual, beating down doors and shooting holes in the ceiling and asking for the children. But he got a surprise. No one began to tremble in his presence, no one ran to hide in the wardrobe, and the girl did not throw herself at his feet to beg for mercy. They all just went about their business, some serving ice cream, one playing the drums, while the former sweetheart, in a fabulous turban decorated with tropical fruit, danced the mambo on a tabletop. So the bandit, furious and ashamed, slunk away with his pistols to look for a new sweetheart who would be afraid of him. And that was the end of the story.
Huberto Naranjo listened to the end.
“That’s a stupid story. . . . But, all right, I would like to be your friend,” he said.
We roamed the city for a couple of days. Huberto taught me the advantages of street life and tricks of survival: always steer clear of a uniform because you’re screwed for good if they get their hands on you; to rob somebody on a bus, stand in the back and when the doors open make your pinch and jump off; the best food is to be had mid-morning on the garbage heap at the Central Market and mid-afternoon in the garbage pails of hotels and restaurants. Following him in his adventures, I knew for the first time the headiness of freedom, the combination of nervous excitement and deathly vertigo that since that time has haunted my dreams as clearly as if I were living it again. But by the third night of sleeping outdoors, tired and filthy, I suffered an attack of homesickne
ss. First, grieving that I could not return to the scene of the crime, I thought of Elvira, and then of my mother; I missed the switch of red hair and I wanted to see my stuffed puma again. So I asked Huberto Naranjo to help me find my madrina.
“Why? Aren’t we doing all right? You’re a stupid girl.”
I did not dare explain the reasons, but I begged so much that finally he agreed to help me, after warning that I would regret it all the days of my life. He knew every corner of the city, and went anywhere he wanted by hitching rides on the steps and bumpers of buses. With my sketchy description and his knack for locating places, we found a hillside where shacks made out of scrap—cardboard boxes, bricks, old tires, sheets of zinc—rose one after the other. It looked like every other barrio, but I recognized it immediately by the garbage dumped in the barrancas. This was where the city garbage trucks disgorged their filth, and as we looked on the dumps from above they shimmered with the blue-green iridescence of flies.