Neither of them had ever wondered what their friendship was based on. Maria dos Prazeres owed him some simple favors. He gave her helpful advice on managing her savings; he had taught her to recognize the true value of her relics, and how to keep them so that no one would discover they were stolen goods. But above all he was the one who showed her the road to a decent old age in the Gracia district, when they said in the brothel where she had spent her life that she was too old for modern tastes, and wanted to send her to a house for retired ladies of the night who taught boys how to make love for a fee of five pesetas. She had told the Count that her mother sold her in the port of Manaus when she was fourteen years old, and that the first mate of a Turkish ship used her without mercy during the Atlantic crossing, and then abandoned her, with no money, no language, and no name, in the light-filled swamp of the Paralelo. They were both conscious of having so little in common that they never felt more alone than when they were together, but neither one had dared to spoil the pleasures of habit. It took a national upheaval for them to realize, both at the same time, how much they had hated each other, and with how much tenderness, for so many years.
It was a sudden conflagration. The Count of Cardona was listening to the love duet from La Boheme, sung by Licia Albanese and Beniamino Gigli, when he happened to hear a news bulletin on the radio that Maria dos Prazeres was listening to in the kitchen. He tiptoed over and listened as well. General Francisco Franco, eternal dictator of Spain, had assumed responsibility for deciding the fate of three Basque separatists who had just been condemned to death. The Count breathed a sigh of relief.
"Then they'll be shot without fail," he said, "because the Caudillo is a just man."
Maria dos Prazeres stared at him with the burning eyes of a royal cobra and saw the passionless pupils behind gold-rimmed spectacles, the ravening teeth, the hybrid hands of an animal accustomed to dampness and dark. Saw him just as he was.
"Well, you'd better pray he doesn't," she said, "because if they shoot even one of them I'll poison your soup."
The Count was flabbergasted. "Why would you do that?"
"Because I'm a just whore, too."
The Count of Cardona never returned, and Maria dos Prazeres was certain that the final cycle of her life had come to an end. Until a little while before, in fact, she had felt indignant when anyone offered her a seat on the bus, or tried to help her across the street or take her arm to go up stairs, but she came not only to allow such things but even to desire them as a hateful necessity. That was when she ordered an anarchist's tombstone, with no name or dates, and began to sleep with the door unlocked so that Noi could get out with the news if she died in her sleep.
One Sunday, as she was coming home from the cemetery, she met the little girl from the apartment across the landing. She walked with her for several blocks, talking about everything with a grandmother's innocence while she watched her and Noi playing like old friends. On the Plaza del Diamante, just as she had planned, she offered to buy her ice cream. "Do you like dogs?" she asked.
"I love them," said the girl.
Then Maria dos Prazeres made the proposal that she had been preparing for so long. "If anything ever happens to me, I want you to take Noi," she said. "On the condition that you let him loose on Sundays and not think any more about it. He'll know what to do."
The girl was delighted. And Maria dos Prazeres returned home with the joy of having lived a dream that had ripened for years in her heart. But it was not because of the weariness of old age or the belated arrival of death that the dream was not realized. It was not even her decision. Life made it for her one icy November afternoon when a sudden storm broke as she was leaving the cemetery. She had written the names on the three tombstones and was walking down to the bus station when the downpour soaked her to the skin. She just had time to take shelter in a doorway of a deserted district that seemed to belong to another city, with dilapidated warehouses and dusty factories, and enormous trailer trucks that made the awful noise of the storm even more frightening. As she tried to warm the drenched dog with her body, Maria dos Prazeres saw the crowded buses pass by, she saw empty taxis pass by with their flags up, but no one paid attention to her distress signals. Then, when even a miracle seemed impossible, a sumptuous, almost noiseless car the color of dusky steel passed by along the flooded street, made a sudden stop at the corner, and came back in reverse to where she stood. The windows lowered as if by magic, and the driver offered her a lift.
"I'm going quite a distance," said Maria dos Prazeres with sincerity. "But you would do me a great favor if you could take me part of the way."
"Tell me where you're going," he insisted.
"To Gracia," she said.
The door opened without his touching it.
"It's on my way," he said. "Get in."
The interior smelled of refrigerated medicine, and once she was inside, the rain became an unreal mishap, the city changed color, and she felt she was in a strange, happy world where everything was arranged ahead of time. The driver made his way through the disorder of the traffic with a fluidity that had a touch of magic. Maria dos Prazeres felt intimidated not only by her own misery but by that of the pitiful little dog asleep in her lap.
"This is an ocean liner," she said, because she felt she had to say something appropriate. "I've never seen anything like it, not even in my dreams."
"Really, the only thing wrong with it is that it doesn't belong to me," he said in an awkward Catalan, and after a pause he added in Castilian, "What I earn in a lifetime wouldn't be enough to buy it."
"I can imagine," she sighed.
Out of the corner of her eye she examined him in the green light of the dashboard, and she saw that he was little more than an adolescent, with short curly hair and the profile of a Roman bronze. She thought that he was not handsome but had a distinctive kind of charm, that his worn, cheap leather jacket was very becoming, and that his mother must feel very happy when she heard him walk in the door. Only his laborer's hands made it possible to believe that he was not the owner of the car.
They did not speak again for the rest of the trip, but Maria dos Prazeres also sensed that he examined her several times out of the corner of his eye, and once again she regretted still being alive at her age. She felt ugly and pitiful, with the housemaid's shawl she had thrown over her head when the rain began, and the deplorable autumn coat she had not thought to change because she was thinking about death.
When they reached the Gracia district it was beginning to clear, night had fallen, and the streetlights were on. Maria dos Prazeres told the driver to let her off at a nearby corner, but he insisted on taking her to her front door, and he not only did that but pulled up on the sidewalk so that she could get out of the car without getting wet. She released the dog, attempted to climb out with as much dignity as her body would allow, and when she turned to thank him she met a male stare that took her breath away. She endured it for a moment, not understanding very well who was waiting for what, or from whom, and then he asked in a determined voice: "Shall I come up?"
Maria dos Prazeres felt humiliated. "I am very grateful for your kindness in bringing me here," she said, "but I will not permit you to make fun of me."
"I have no reason to make fun of anybody," he said with absolute seriousness, in Castilian. "Least of all a woman like you."
Maria dos Prazeres had known many men like him, had saved many men bolder than he from suicide, but never in her long life had she been so afraid to make up her mind. She heard him repeat without the slightest change in his voice: "Shall I come up?"
She walked away without closing the car door, and answered in Castilian to be sure he understood. "Do whatever you want."
She walked into the lobby, dim in the oblique light from the street, and began to climb the first flight of stairs with trembling knees, choked by a fear she would have thought possible only at the moment of death. When she stopped outside the door on the second floor, shaking with desperation to f
ind her keys in her bag, she heard two car doors slam, one after the other, in the street. Noi, who had preceded her, tried to bark. "Be quiet," she ordered in an agonized whisper. Then she heard the first steps on the loose risers of the stairway and was afraid her heart would burst. In a fraction of a second she made a thorough reexamination of the premonitory dream that had changed her life for the past three years, and she saw the error of her interpretation.
"My God," she said to herself in astonishment. "So it wasn't death!"
At last she found the lock, listening to the measured footsteps in the dark, listening to the heightened breathing of someone who approached in the dark with as much astonishment as she felt, and then she knew it had been worth waiting so many years, worth so much suffering in the dark, if only to live that moment.
MAY 1979
Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen
THE FIRST THING Senora Prudencia Linero noticed when she reached the port of Naples was that it had the same smell as the port of Riohacha. She did not tell anyone, of course, since no one would have understood on that senile ocean liner filled to overflowing with Italians from Buenos Aires who were returning to their native land for the first time since the war, but in any case, at the age of seventy-two, and at a distance of eighteen days of heavy seas from her people and her home, she felt less alone, less frightened and remote.
The lights on land had been visible since daybreak. The passengers got up earlier than usual, wearing new clothes, their hearts heavy with the uncertainties of putting ashore, so that the last Sunday on board seemed to be the only genuine one of the entire voyage. Senora Prudencia Linero was one of the very few who attended Mass. In contrast to the clothes she had worn before, when she walked around the ship dressed in partial mourning, today she had on a tunic of coarse brown burlap tied with the cord of Saint Francis, and rough leather sandals that did not resemble a pilgrim's only because they were too new. It was an advance payment: She had promised God that she would wear the full-length habit for the rest of her life if He blessed her with a trip to Rome to see the Supreme Pontiff, and she already considered the blessing granted. When Mass was over she lit a candle to the Holy Spirit in gratitude for the infusion of courage that had allowed her to endure the Caribbean storms, and she said a prayer for each of her nine children and fourteen grandchildren who at that very moment were dreaming about her on a windy night in Riohacha.
When she went up on deck after breakfast, life on the ship had changed. Luggage was piled in the ballroom, along with all kinds of tourist trinkets the Italians had bought at the magic markets of the Antilles, and on the saloon bar there was a macaque from Pernambuco in a wrought-iron cage. It was a brilliant morning in early August. One of those exemplary postwar summer Sundays when the light was like a daily revelation, and the enormous ship inched along, with an invalid's labored breathing, through a transparent stillwater. The gloomy fortress of the Dukes of Anjou was just beginning to loom on the horizon, but the passengers who had come on deck thought they recognized familiar places, and they pointed at them without quite seeing them, shouting with joy in their southern dialects. To her surprise, Senora Prudencia Linero, who had made so many dear old friends on board, who had watched children while their parents danced, and even sewn a button on the first officer's tunic, found them all distant and changed. The social spirit and human warmth that permitted her to survive her first homesickness in the stifling heat of the tropics had disappeared. The eternal loves of the high seas ended when the port came into view. Senora Prudencia Linero, who was not familiar with the voluble nature of Italians, thought the problem lay not in the hearts of others but in her own, since she was the only one going in a crowd that was returning. Every voyage must be like this, she thought, suffering for the first time in her life the sharp pain of being a foreigner, while she leaned on the railing and contemplated the vestiges of so many extinct worlds in the depths of the water. All at once a very beautiful girl standing beside her startled her with a scream of horror.
"Mamma mia," she cried, pointing down. "Look over there."
It was a drowned man. Senora Prudencia Linero saw him drifting faceup, a mature, bald man of rare natural distinction, with open, joyful eyes the color of the sky at dawn. He wore full evening dress with a brocade vest, patent-leather shoes, and a fresh gardenia in his lapel. In his right hand he held a little square package wrapped in gift paper, and his pale iron fingers clutched at the bow, which was all he had found to hold on to at the moment of his death.
"He must have fallen from a wedding party," said one of the ship's officers. "It happens pretty often in these waters during the summer."
It was a momentary vision, because just then they were entering the bay, and other, less mournful subjects distracted the attention of the passengers. But Senora Prudencia Linero continued to think about the drowned man, the poor drowned man, whose long-tailed jacket rippled in their wake.
As soon as the ship sailed into the harbor, a decrepit tugboat came out to meet it and lead it by the nose through the wreckage of countless military craft destroyed during the war. The water was turning into oil as the ship made its way past the rusting wrecks, and the heat became even fiercer than in Riohacha at two in the afternoon. On the other side of the narrow channel, the city, brilliant in the eleven-o'clock sun, came into view with all its chimerical palaces and ancient, painted hovels crowded together on the hills. Just then an unbearable stench rose from the disturbed bottom, which Senora Prudencia Linero recognized from the courtyard of her house as the foul breath of rotting crabs.
While this maneuver took place, the passengers, with great displays of joy, recognized their relatives in the tumultuous crowd on the pier. Most of them were autumnal matrons with dazzling bosoms who suffocated in their mourning clothes and had the most beautiful and numerous children in the world, and small, diligent husbands, the immortal kind who read the newspaper after their wives and dress like stern notaries despite the heat.
In the midst of that carnival confusion, a very old man wearing a beggar's overcoat and an inconsolable expression pulled a profusion of tiny chicks from his pockets with both hands. In an instant they covered the entire pier, crazed and cheeping, and it was only because they were magic that many survived and kept running after being stepped on by the crowd that was oblivious to the miracle. The wizard had placed his hat upside down on the ground, but nobody at the railing tossed him even one charitable coin.
Fascinated by the wondrous spectacle that seemed to be presented in her honor, for only she appreciated it, Senora Prudencia Linero was not aware of the exact moment when the gangplank was lowered and a human avalanche invaded the ship with the howling momentum of a pirate attack. Dazed by the wild jubilation and the rancid-onion smell of so many families in summer, shoved by the gangs of porters who came to blows over the baggage, she felt threatened by the same inglorious death that menaced the little chicks on the pier. That was when she sat down on her wooden trunk with its painted tin corners and remained there undaunted, intoning a vicious circle of prayers against temptation and danger in the lands of infidels. The first officer found her when the cataclysm had passed and she was the only one left in the abandoned ballroom.
"Nobody's supposed to be here now," the officer told her with a certain amiability. "Can I help you with something?"
"I have to wait for the consul," she said.
That was true. Two days before she sailed, her oldest son had sent a telegram to his friend the consul in Naples, asking him to meet his mother at the port and help her through the procedures for continuing on to Rome. He had told him the name of the ship and the time of its arrival, and that he would recognize her because she would be wearing the habit of Saint Francis when she came ashore. She was so uncompromising about these arrangements that the first officer allowed her to wait a little longer, although soon it would be time for the crew's lunch, and they had already put the chairs on the tables and were washing down the decks with buckets of water. They had
to move her trunk several times in order not to wet it, but she changed places without changing expression, without interrupting her prayers, until they took her out of the recreation rooms and left her sitting in the full sun among the lifeboats. That was where the first officer found her again a little before two, drowning in sweat inside her penitent's garb, saying the Rosary with no expectations because she was terrified and sad and it was all she could do not to cry.
"It's useless for you to keep praying," said the officer, without his former amiability. "Even God goes on vacation in August."
He explained that at this time of year half of Italy was at the beach, above all on Sundays. In all likelihood the consul was not on vacation, given the nature of his responsibilities, but it was certain he would not open the office until Monday. The only reasonable thing was to go to a hotel, get a good night's sleep, and telephone the consulate the next day; no doubt the number was in the phone book. Senora Prudencia Linero had no choice but to accept his judgment, and the officer helped her through the procedures for immigration and customs and changing money, and put her in a taxi, with vague instructions that she be taken to a decent hotel.
The decrepit taxi, with its traces of a funeral carriage, lurched down the deserted streets. For a moment Senora Prudencia Linero thought she and the driver were the only living creatures in a city of ghosts that hung from clotheslines in the middle of the street, but she also thought that a man who talked so much, and with so much passion, could not have time to harm a poor solitary woman who had risked the dangers of the ocean to see the Pope.
At the end of the labyrinth of streets she saw the sea again. The taxi continued to lurch along a burning, deserted beach where there were numerous small hotels painted in bright colors. It did not stop at any of these but drove straight to the least gaudy one, which was situated in a public garden with large palm trees and green benches. The driver placed the trunk on the shaded sidewalk, and when he saw Senora Prudencia Linero's uncertainty, he assured her that this was the most decent hotel in Naples.