Strange Pilgrims

  A handsome, kindhearted porter hoisted the trunk on his shoulder and took charge of her. He led her to the metal grillwork elevator that had been improvised in the stairwell, and with alarming determination began to sing a Puccini aria at the top of his voice. It was a venerable building, with a different hotel on each of its nine renovated floors. All at once, in a kind of hallucination, Senora Prudencia Linero felt that she was in a chicken cage rising slowly through the center of an echoing marble staircase, catching glimpses of people in their houses with their most intimate misgivings, with their torn underwear and acidic belches. On the third floor the elevator jolted to a halt, and then the porter stopped singing, opened the sliding rhomboids of the door, and with a gallant bow indicated to Senora Prudencia Linero that she was in her house.

  In the foyer she saw a languid adolescent behind a wooden counter with insets of colored glass and shade plants in copper pots. She liked him at once because he had the same angelic ringlets as her youngest grandson. She liked the name of the hotel, with its letters engraved on a bronze plaque, she liked the odor of carbolic acid, she liked the hanging ferns, the silence, the golden fleurs-de-lis on the wallpaper. Then she stepped out of the elevator, and her heart sank. A group of English tourists wearing shorts and beach sandals were dozing in a long row of easy chairs. There were seventeen of them, seated in symmetrical order, as if they were only one man repeated many times in a hall of mirrors. Senora Prudencia Linero took them in at a single glance without distinguishing one from the other, and all she could see was the long row of pink knees that looked like slabs of pork hanging from hooks in a butcher shop. She did not take another step toward the counter, but retreated in consternation into the elevator.

  "Let's go to another floor," she said.

  "This is the only one that has a dining room, Signora," said the porter.

  "It doesn't matter," she said.

  The porter made a gesture of consent, closed the elevator, and sang the remaining portion of the song until they came to the hotel on the fifth floor. Everything seemed less rigorous here, the owner was a springlike matron who spoke fluent Spanish, and no one was taking a siesta in the easy chairs in the foyer. There was in fact no dining room, but the hotel had arranged with a nearby restaurant to serve the guests at a reduced price. And so Senora Prudencia Linero decided yes, she would stay for one night, persuaded as much by the owner's eloquence and amiability as by her relief that not a single Englishman with pink knees was sleeping in the foyer.

  At three in the afternoon the blinds in her room were closed, and the half-shadow preserved the cool silence of a hidden grove, and it was a good place to cry. As soon as she was alone, Senora Prudencia Linero bolted both locks, and for the first time since the morning she urinated, in a thin, hesitant stream that allowed her to recover the identity she had lost during the journey. Then she removed her sandals and the cord around her waist, and lay down on her left side on the double bed that was too wide and too lonely for her alone, and released the other flood of long-overdue tears.

  Not only was this the first time she had left Riohacha, but it was one of the few times she had left her house after her children married and moved away, and she was alone with two barefoot Indian women to care for the soulless body of her husband. Half her life had been spent in the bedroom facing the ruins of the only man she ever loved, who for almost thirty years had been in a coma, lying on a goatskin mattress in the bed of their youthful lovemaking.

  During the previous October, the invalid had opened his eyes in a sudden flash of lucidity, recognized his family, and asked them to send for a photographer. They brought in the old man from the park with the enormous bellows and black-sleeve camera and the magnesium plate for taking pictures in the home. The sick man himself arranged the photographs. "One for Prudencia, for the love and happiness she gave me in life," he said. This was taken with the first magnesium flash. "Now another two for my darling daughters, Prudencita and Natalia," he said. These were taken. "Another two for my sons, whose affection and good judgment make them examples to the family," he said. And so on until the photographer ran out of paper and had to go home for a new supply. At four o'clock, when the magnesium smoke and the tumultuous crowd of relatives, friends, and acquaintances who flocked to receive their copies of the portrait made the air in the bedroom unbreathable, the invalid began to lose consciousness in his bed, and he waved good-bye to everyone as if he were erasing himself from the world at the railing of a ship.

  His death was not the relief for the widow that everyone had hoped for. On the contrary, she was so grief-stricken that her children gathered to ask what they could do to comfort her, and she replied that all she wanted was to go to Rome to meet the Pope.

  "I'll go alone and wear the habit of Saint Francis," she informed them. "I've made a vow."

  The only gratification remaining from those years of vigil was the pleasure of crying. On the ship, when she had to share her cabin with two Clarissine sisters who went ashore at Marseilles, she would linger in the bathroom to cry unseen. As a result the hotel room in Naples was the only suitable place she had found since leaving Riohacha where she could cry to her heart's content. And she would have cried until the following day, when the train left for Rome, if the owner had not knocked at her door at seven to say that if she did not go to the restaurant soon she would have nothing to eat.

  The porter accompanied her. A cool breeze had begun to blow in from the sea, and there were still some bathers on the beach under the pale seven-o'clock sun. Senora Prudencia Linero followed the porter along a difficult terrain of steep, narrow streets that were just beginning to wake from their Sunday siesta, and then found herself in a shaded arbor where the tables were covered with red-checkered cloths and jars served as vases for paper flowers. At that early hour her only fellow diners were the waiters and waitresses and a very poor priest eating bread and onions at a back table. When she went in she felt everyone's eyes on her brown habit, but this did not affect her, for she knew that ridicule was part of her penance. The waitress, on the other hand, roused a spark of pity in her, because she was blonde and beautiful and spoke as if she were singing, and Senora Prudencia Linero thought that things must be very bad in Italy after the war if a girl like her had to wait on tables in a restaurant. But she felt at ease in the flowering arbor, and the aroma of stew with bay leaf from the kitchen awakened the hunger that had been deferred by the anxieties of the day. For the first time in a long while she had no desire to cry.

  And yet she could not eat as she wished, in part because it was difficult to communicate with the blonde waitress, even though she was kind and patient, and in part because some little songbirds, the kind kept in cages in the houses of Riohacha, were the only meat available. The priest who was eating in the corner, and later acted as interpreter, tried to make her understand that the emergencies of war had not ended in Europe, and the fact that at least there were little woodland birds to eat ought to be viewed as a miracle. But she pushed them away.

  "For me," she said, "it would be like eating one of my children."

  And so she had to settle for some vermicelli soup, a plate of squash boiled with a few shreds of rancid bacon, and a piece of bread as hard as marble. While she was eating, the priest approached her table to ask in the name of charity that she buy him a cup of coffee, and he sat down with her. He was from Yugoslavia but had been a missionary in Bolivia, and spoke an awkward, expressive Spanish. To Senora Prudencia Linero he seemed an ordinary man with no vestige of God's indulgence, and she observed that he had disgraceful hands with broken, dirty nails, and an onion breath so persistent it seemed more like a character trait. But he was in the service of God, after all, and it was a pleasure as well, when she was so far from home, to meet someone she could talk to.

  They conversed at their leisure, oblivious to the heavy barnyard noise that began to surround them as more people sat at the other tables. Senora Prudencia Linero already had a definitive opinion of Italy: She did n
ot like it. And not because the men were somewhat improper, which was saying a great deal, or because they ate songbirds, which was going too far, but because they were in the wicked habit of leaving drowned men to drift in the water.

  The priest, who had ordered a grappa at her expense along with the coffee, tried to make her see the superficiality of her opinion. For during the war they had established a very efficient service for rescuing, identifying, and burying in holy ground the many drowning victims found floating in the Bay of Naples.

  "Centuries ago," the priest concluded, "the Italians learned that there is only one life, and they try to live it the best they can. This has made them calculating and talkative, but it has also cured them of cruelty."

  "They didn't even stop the ship," she said.

  "What they do is radio the port authorities," said the priest. "By now they've picked him up and buried him in the name of God."

  The discussion changed both their moods. Senora Prudencia Linero had finished eating, and only then did she realize that all the tables were occupied. At the ones close by, almost naked tourists sat eating in silence, among them a few couples who kissed and did not eat. At the tables in the rear, near the bar, neighborhood people played at dice and drank a colorless wine. Senora Prudencia Linero understood that she had only one reason for being in that unsavory country.

  "Do you think it will be very difficult to see the Pope?" she asked.

  The priest replied that nothing was easier in the summer. The Pope was on vacation in Castel Gandolfo, and on Wednesday afternoons he held a public audience for pilgrims from all over the world. The entrance fee was very cheap: twenty lire.

  "And how much does he charge to hear a person's confession?" she asked.

  "The Holy Father does not hear confessions," said the priest, somewhat scandalized, "except for those of kings, of course."

  "I don't see why he would refuse that favor to a poor woman who's come so far," she said.

  "And some kings, even though they're kings, have died waiting," said the priest. "But tell me: Yours must be an awful sin if you made such a journey all alone just to confess to the Holy Father."

  Senora Prudencia Linero thought for a moment, and the priest saw her smile for the first time.

  "Mother of God!" she said. "I'd be satisfied just to see him." And she added, with a sigh that seemed to come from her soul: "It's been my lifelong dream!"

  The truth was that she still felt frightened and sad, and all she wanted was to leave the restaurant, as well as Italy, without delay. The priest must have thought he had gotten all he could from the deluded woman, and so he wished her good luck and went to another table to ask in the name of charity that they buy him a cup of coffee.

  When she walked out of the restaurant, Senora Prudencia Linero found a changed city. She was surprised by the sunlight at nine o'clock, and frightened by the raucous throng that had invaded the streets to find relief in the evening breeze. The backfiring of so many crazed Vespas made life impossible. Driven by bare-chested men whose beautiful women sat behind them, hugging them around the waist, they moved in fits and starts, weaving in and out among hanging pigs and tables covered with melons.

  It was a carnival atmosphere, but it seemed a catastrophe to Senora Prudencia Linero. She lost her way, and all at once found herself in an infelicitous street where taciturn women sat in the doorways of identical houses whose blinking red lights made her shiver with terror. A well-dressed man wearing a heavy gold ring and a diamond in his tie followed her for several blocks saying something in Italian, and then in English and French. When he received no reply, he showed her a postcard from a pack he took out of his pocket, and one glance was all she needed to feel that she was walking through hell.

  She fled in utter terror, and at the end of the street she found the twilight sea again and the same stink of rotting shellfish as in the port of Riohacha, and her heart returned to its rightful place. She recognized the painted hotels along the deserted beach, the funereal taxis, the diamond of the first star in the immense sky. At the far end of the bay, solitary and enormous at the pier, its lights blazing on every deck, she recognized the ship on which she had sailed, and realized it no longer had anything to do with her life. She turned left at the corner but could not go on because of a crowd being held back by a squad of carabinieri. A row of ambulances waited with open doors outside her hotel building.

  Standing on tiptoe and peering over the shoulders of the onlookers, Senora Prudencia Linero saw the English tourists again. They were being carried out on stretchers, one by one, and all of them were motionless and dignified and still seemed like one man repeated many times in the more formal clothing they had put on for supper: flannel trousers, diagonally striped ties, and dark jackets with the Trinity College coat of arms embroidered on the breast pocket. As they were brought out, the neighbors watching from their balconies, and the people held back on the street, counted them in chorus as if they were in a stadium. There were seventeen. They were put in the ambulances two by two and driven away to the wail of war sirens.

  Dazed by so many stupefying events, Senora Prudencia Linero rode up in the elevator packed with guests from the other hotels who spoke in hermetic languages. They got off at every floor except the third, which was open and lit, but no one was at the counter or in the easy chairs in the foyer where she had seen the pink knees of the seventeen sleeping Englishmen. The owner on the fifth floor commented on the disaster with uncontrolled excitement.

  "They're all dead," she told Senora Prudencia Linero in Spanish. "They were poisoned by the oyster soup at supper. Just imagine, oysters in August!"

  She handed her the key to her room, and paid no further attention to her as she said to the other guests in her own dialect, "Since there's no dining room here, everyone who goes to sleep wakes up alive!" With another knot of tears in her throat, Senora Prudencia Linero bolted the locks in her room. After that she pushed the little writing table and the easy chair and her trunk against the door to form an impassable barricade against the horror of a country where so many things happened at the same time. Then she put on her widow's nightgown, lay down in the bed on her back, and said seventeen Rosaries for the eternal rest of the souls of the seventeen poisoned Englishmen.

  APRIL 1980

  Tramontana

  I SAW HIM only once at Boccacio, the popular Barcelona club, a few hours before his miserable death. It was two in the morning and he was being pursued by a gang of young Swedes attempting to take him away with them to finish the party in Cadaques. There were eleven Swedes, and it was difficult to tell one from another because all of them, men and women, looked the same: beautiful, with narrow hips and long golden hair. He could not have been older than twenty. His head was covered with blue-black curls, and he had the smooth, sallow skin of Caribbeans whose mothers had trained them to walk in the shade, and Arab eyes that were enough to drive the Swedish girls mad, and perhaps a few of the boys as well. They had seated him on the bar, like a ventriloquist's dummy, and were serenading him with popular songs to the accompaniment of their clapping hands as they tried to persuade him to go with them.

  In terror he attempted to explain his reasons. Someone intervened, shouting that they ought to leave him alone, and one of the Swedes, weak with laughter, confronted him.

  "He's ours," he yelled. "We found him in the garbage can."

  I had come in just a short while before with a group of friends, after attending David Oistrakh's final concert in the Palau de la Musica, and my skin crawled at the skepticism of the Swedes. For the boy's reasons were sacred. He had lived in Cadaques, where he had been hired to sing Antillean songs in a fashionable bar, until the previous summer, when the tramontana defeated him. He managed to escape on the second day, resolved never to return, with or without the tramontana, and certain that if he ever went back, death would be waiting for him. It was a Caribbean certainty that could not be understood by a band of Scandinavian rationalists aflame with summer and the hard Cat
alan wines of those days, which sowed wild ideas in the heart.

  I understood him better than anyone. Cadaques was one of the most beautiful towns along the Costa Brava, and one of the best preserved. This was due in part to the fact that its narrow access highway twisted at the edge of a bottomless abyss, and one needed a very steady soul to drive more than fifty kilometers an hour. The older houses were white and low, in the traditional style of Mediterranean fishing villages. The new ones had been built by famous architects who respected the original harmony. In summer, when the heat seemed to come from African deserts on the other side of the street, Cadaques turned into a hellish Babel, where for three months tourists from every corner of Europe vied with the natives, and with the foreigners who had been lucky enough to buy a house at a low price when that was still possible, for control of paradise. But in spring and fall, the seasons when Cadaques seemed most attractive, no one could escape the terrifying thought of the tramontana, a harsh, tenacious land wind that carries in it the seeds of madness, according to the natives and certain writers who have learned their lesson.

  Until the tramontana crossed our lives some fifteen years ago, I was one of the town's most faithful visitors. One Sunday at siesta time, with the unexplainable presentiment that something was about to happen, I sensed the wind before it arrived. My spirits plummeted, I felt sad for no reason, and I had the impression that my children, who were then both under ten years old, were following me around the house with hostile stares. Not long afterward the porter came in with a toolbox and some marine lines to secure the doors and windows, and he was not surprised at my dejection.

  "It's the tramontana," he said. "It'll be here in less than an hour."

  He was a very old man, a former seaman who still had the waterproof jacket of his trade, the cap and pipe, and a skin scorched by the salts of the world. In his free hours he would play bowls in the square with veterans of several lost wars, and drink aperitifs with tourists in the taverns along the beach, for with his artilleryman's Catalan he had the virtue of making himself understood in any language. He prided himself on knowing all the ports of the planet, but no inland city. "Not even Paris, France, as famous as it is," he would say. For he had no faith in any vehicle that did not sail.