“The police arrived at eleven. I don’t know, as I said, whether someone had seen a youngster climbing over the fence. It is just as likely that some neighbor had seen the light or the smoke from the bonfire I had made, or had noticed me moving back and forth there inside with my flashlight. In any event the police had arrived, and I must confess I was glad to see them. If I had had to spend the entire night there, when all the noises outside gradually fade away and you have the impression the whole city is sound asleep, I think I might have gone mad, what with the rats and the cats scurrying around, the wind howling, and the sounds that my imagination could easily lay to ghosts prowling about. So when the police arrived I was awake, huddled on top of the cookstove quaking with fear.
“I can’t describe the scene at home when they brought me back. Grandpa Pancho, poor thing, had tears in his eyes and kept asking me why I’d done such an insane thing. Grandma Elena scolded me and hugged me, both at the same time, hysterically. As for Aunt Teresa, my great-aunt really, who spent most of her time at wakes and in the sacristy, she kept screaming that they ought to send me straight off to the boarding school on the Avenida Montes de Oca. The family deliberations must have gone on far into the night, for I could hear them arguing downstairs in the parlor. The next morning I found out that Grandma Elena had finally sided with Aunt Teresa, more than anything, I think today, because she thought I might repeat my scandalous exploit at any moment; and then too, she knew I was very fond of Sister Teodolina. I refused, of course, to say one word about the entire matter, and locked myself in my room. But at heart the idea of leaving that house did not displease me: I supposed that in this way my father would be even more keenly aware of my vengeance.
“I don’t know whether it was my entering the school, my friendship with Sister Teodolina, or the crisis I was going through, or all of these things together, but in any event I threw myself into religion with the same passion with which I swam or rode horseback: as though I were gambling my life. From that moment till I was fifteen. It was a sort of madness …” akin to the wild ardor with which she swam in the sea on stormy nights, as though she were swimming furiously in a great religious night, engulfed in dark shadows, fascinated by the great tempest raging within.
Father Antonio is there: he speaks of Christ’s Passion and fervently describes the suffering, the humiliation, and the bloody sacrifice of the Cross. Father Antonio is tall and bears an odd resemblance to her father. Alejandra weeps, silently at first and then her sobs grow violent and finally convulsive. She flees. The nuns run fearfully after her. She sees Sister Teodolina before her, consoling her, and then Father Antonio approaches and also tries to console her. The floor begins to move, as though she were on a boat. It heaves in waves like the sea, the room gets bigger and bigger, and then everything begins to turn round and round: slowly at first and then at dizzying speed. She is drenched with sweat. Father Antonio approaches, his hand is gigantic now, it draws closer to her cheek like a warm, loathsome bat. Then she collapses, felled by a great electrical discharge.
“What’s the matter, Alejandra?” Martín cried, hurrying to her side.
She had fallen to the floor and was lying there rigid, not breathing, her face turning purple, and then suddenly she went into convulsions.
“Alejandra! Alejandra!”
But she did not hear him, did not feel his arms: she groaned and bit her lips.
Then finally, like a storm at sea that dies down little by little, her moans came farther and farther apart, grew softer and softer and more and more plaintive, her convulsions gradually ceased, and finally she lay there limply, as though dead. Martín picked her up in his arms then, carried her to her room, and laid her down on the bed. After an hour or more she opened her eyes and looked about her, as though drunk. Then she sat up, passed her hands across her face as though trying to erase the traces of something and remained silent for a long time. She looked utterly exhausted.
Then she got up, looked about for some pills, and took them.
Martín watched her in consternation.
“Don’t make such a face. If you’re going to be a friend of mine you’ll have to get used to all this. It’s nothing serious.”
She searched about for a cigarette on the little night table and began to smoke. For a long time she rested quietly, saying nothing. Finally she asked:
“What was I talking about?”
Martín reminded her.
“I lose my memory, you know.”
She sat smoking pensively, and then said:
“Let’s go outdoors. I’d like to get a breath of air.”
They leaned out over the balustrade of the terrace.
“So I was telling you about running away that time.”
She dragged on her cigarette in silence.
“I would torture myself for days, analyzing my feelings, my reactions. After what had happened to me with Father Antonio I began a whole series of mortifications of the flesh: I knelt for hours on broken glass, I let burning wax from candles fall on my hands, I even cut my arm with a razor blade. And when Sister Teodolina, in tears, tried to get me to tell her why I had cut myself, I refused to explain. To tell the truth I didn’t know myself, and it seems to me I still don’t know. But Sister Teodolina told me I shouldn’t do those things, that such excesses were displeasing to God, that such behavior was proof of enormous satanic pride. As though I hadn’t known that all along! But all that was stronger, more incontrovertible than any logical argument. You can see where all that madness got me.”
She remained lost in thought.
“How curious,” she said after a time. “I try to remember what that year was like as it went by, and all I remember is separate, juxtaposed episodes. Does the same thing happen to you? Right now I can feel the passage of time, as though it were coursing through my veins, along with my blood, beating along with my pulse. But when I try to remember the past I don’t feel the same thing. I see separate scenes, as fixed and frozen as photographs.”
Her memory is made up of fragments of existence, ecstatic and eternal: time in fact does not flow between these fragments, and events that happened at very different times are related or connected to one another by strange sympathies and antipathies. Or at times they may rise to the surface of consciousness linked by absurd but powerful associations: a song, a joke, a common hatred. The thread that unites things for her now, that causes them to emerge one after another is a certain fierce search for something absolute, a certain perplexity, one that joins together words such as father, God, beach, sin, purity, sea, death.
“I see myself one summer day and hear Grandma Elena saying: ‘Alejandra has to go to the country, she must get out of here, she must be outdoors in the fresh air.’ Curious: I remember that at that moment Granny had a silver thimble on her finger.”
She laughed.
“Why are you laughing?” Martín said, intrigued.
“It’s not anything really, nothing of any importance. They sent me to the country to stay with the Carrascos, old ladies who were distant relations of Grandma Elena’s. I don’t know if I told you that she wasn’t an Olmos; her name was Lafitte. She was a very kind woman and married my grandfather Patricio, Don Pancho’s son. Someday I’ll tell you a bit about Grandfather Patricio, who’s dead now. Anyway, as I was saying, the Carrascos were second cousins of Grandma Elena’s. They were hidebound old maids who’d never changed; even their names were ridiculously old-fashioned: Ermelinda and Rosalinda. They were saints, and to tell the truth they mattered as little to me as a marble slab or a sewing table; I didn’t even hear them when they spoke. They were so innocent they’d have died of fright if they’d been able to read a single one of my thoughts. So I liked going to their country place: I had all the freedom I wanted and could gallop my little mare to the beach, because the old ladies’ estate went down to the ocean, a little to the south of Miramar. What’s more, I was eager to be by myself, to swim, to have a good run with the mare, to feel myself alone in the face
of the immensity of nature, far from the crowded beaches where all the filthy people I hated so were piled one atop the other. I hadn’t seen Marcos Molina for a year and meeting up with him again was an intriguing prospect too. It had been such an important year! I wanted to share my new ideas with him, tell him about a marvelous plan I had, inspire in him the same ardent faith I possessed. My entire body was bursting with vitality; even though I’d always run half wild, that summer my energy was boundless, though I now sought entirely different outlets for it. I put Marcos through a lot that summer. He was fifteen, a year older than I was. He was a good sort, and very athletic. In fact I think he’ll make an excellent family man some day and he’s sure to end up president of a chapter of Acción Católica. You mustn’t get the idea he was a sissy; he was, rather, the sort people call a ‘nice boy,’ the kind of wishy-washy Catholic who believed every word he’d ever heard in catechism class; decent, rather naive, quiet. Imagine this now: the moment I arrive in the country I get my hands on him and begin to try to convince him we should go to China or the Amazon as soon as we’ve turned eighteen. As missionaries, see? That first day we rode far out along the beach, toward the south, on horseback. Other times we rode bicycles or walked for hours. And with long, fervent speeches, I tried to get him to understand the grandeur of an act such as I was proposing. I told him about Father Damien and his work with the lepers in Polynesia, I told him stories of missionaries in China and Africa, and nuns massacred by Indians in Matto Grosso. To me, the greatest joy I could possibly conceive of was to die a martyr’s death. I imagined the savages grabbing us, stripping me naked and tying me to a tree, aproaching with a sharp stone knife amid wild howls and dances, slitting my breast, and ripping out my bloody heart.”
Alejandra fell silent, relit her cigarette, and went on:
“Marcos was Catholic, but he heard me out each time without a word. And then one day he finally confessed to me that the sacrifices of missionaries who died and suffered martyrdom for the faith were undoubtedly admirable, but that he didn’t feel capable of following their example. It seemed to him, moreover, that one could serve God in a more modest way, by being a good person and not harming anybody. These words made me boil.
“ ‘You’re a coward!’ I shouted at him in fury.
“This scene, with slight variations, was repeated two or three times.
“He was mortified, humiliated. Whipping up my mare, I broke into a hard gallop and rode away, in a rage and full of scorn for that poor devil. But the next day I returned to the charge, more or less in the same vein. Even today I don’t understand why I was so stubborn, for Marcos awakened no sort of feelings of admiration in me. But one thing is certain: I was obsessed and gave him no rest.
“ ‘Alejandra,’ he said to me good-naturedly, putting one of his big paws on my shoulder, ‘stop preaching now and let’s go for a swim.’
“ ‘No! Wait a minute!’ I cried, as though he were trying to go back on a promise he’d made. And I began harping on the same subject all over again.
“Sometimes I talked to him of marriage.
“ ‘I’m never going to get married,’ I explained to him. ‘Or if I do marry, I’ll never have children.’
“He looked at me dumbfounded the first time I announced this to him.
“ ‘Do you know how you get babies?’ I asked.
“ ‘More or less,’ he answered, blushing.
“ ‘Well, if you know, you understand that it’s a filthy business.’
“I said these words to him firmly, almost angrily, as if it were one more argument in favor of my theory regarding missions and self-sacrifice.
“ ‘I’ll go but I have to have somebody to go with me, do you understand? I have to get married to someone, because otherwise they’ll get the police to search for me and I won’t be able to leave the country. That’s why I thought of marrying you. Look: I’m fourteen now and you’re fifteen. When I’m eighteen I’ll have finished school and we’ll get the permission of the juvenile court judge and get married. That way nobody can stop us from getting married. And if worse comes to worst, we’ll run away and then they’ll have to agree. And then we’ll go to China or the Amazon. How about it? But it’s understood: the only reason we get married is to be able to get out of the country without any fuss—not to have children, as I’ve already explained to you. We won’t ever have children. We’ll live together always, we’ll visit countries full of savages together, but we won’t ever touch each other. Isn’t that a marvelous idea?’
“He looked at me in stupefaction.
“ ‘We mustn’t flee from danger,’ I went on. ‘We must confront it and overcome it. I have temptations, naturally, but I’m strong and able to get the better of them. Can you imagine how nice it would be to live together for years and years, to sleep in the same bed, and maybe even see each other naked and rise above the temptation to touch each other and kiss each other?’
“Marcos looked at me in utter amazement.
“ ‘Everything you’re saying seems to me to be sheer madness,’ he said. ‘Besides, isn’t it God’s command that a husband and wife have children?’
“ ‘I’ll never have children, I tell you!” I cried. ‘And I warn you that you’ll never touch me, that nobody, nobody will ever touch me!’
“I felt a sudden explosion of hatred and began to strip naked.
“ ‘You’ll see now!’ I shouted, as though challenging him.
“I had read that the Chinese keep their women’s feet from growing by placing them in iron molds and that the Syrians, I think it is, deform their children’s heads by binding them tightly with bands of cloth. So when my breasts began to grow I cut a long strip from a sheet, a good three yards long: I wrapped it round and round my chest several times, cinching it cruelly tight. But my breasts kept on growing just the same, like those plants that spring up in the cracks of stones and finally split them apart. So once I’d taken off my blouse, my skirt, and my panties, I began to unwind the long strip of cloth. Marcos was horrified and couldn’t take his eyes off my body. He had the look of a bird fascinated by a serpent.