Strange Pilgrims

  "That's just what we needed," shouted Lazara, "to have him die here, poisoned by canned shrimp, and have to use the children's savings to bury him."

  In the end, what determined her behavior was the weight of her conjugal loyalty. She had to borrow three silver place settings and a crystal salad bowl from one neighbor, an electric coffeepot from another, and an embroidered tablecloth and a china coffee service from a third. She took down the old curtains and put up the new ones, used only on holidays, and removed the covers from the furniture. She spent an entire day scrubbing the floors, shaking out dust, shifting things around, until she achieved just the opposite of what would have benefited them most, which was to move their guest with the respectability of their poverty.

  On Thursday night, when he had caught his breath after climbing to the eighth floor, the President appeared at the door with his new old coat and melon-shaped hat from another time, and a single rose for Lazara. She was impressed by his virile good looks and his manners worthy of a prince, but beyond all that she saw what she had expected to see: a false and rapacious man. She thought him impertinent, because she had cooked with the windows open to keep the smell of shrimp from filling the house, and the first thing he did when he entered was to take a deep breath, as if in sudden ecstasy, and exclaim with eyes closed and arms spread wide, "Ah, the smell of our ocean!" She thought him stingier than ever for bringing her just one rose, stolen no doubt from the public gardens. She thought him insolent for the disdain with which he looked at the newspaper clippings of his presidential glories, and the pennants and flags of the campaign, which Homero had pinned with so much candor to the living room wall. She thought him hardhearted, because he did not even greet Barbara and Lazaro, who had made a gift for him, and in the course of the dinner he referred to two things he could not abide: dogs and children. She hated him. Nevertheless, her Caribbean sense of hospitality overcame her prejudices. She had put on the African gown she wore on special occasions, and her santeria beads and bracelets, and during the meal she did not make any unnecessary gestures or say a single superfluous word. She was more than irreproachable: She was perfect.

  The truth was that shrimp and rice was not one of the accomplishments of her kitchen, but she prepared it with the best will, and it turned out very well. The President took two helpings and showed no restraint in his praise, and he was delighted by the slices of fried ripe plantain and the avocado salad, although he did not share in their nostalgia. Lazara resigned herself to just listening until dessert, when for no apparent reason Homero became trapped in the dead-end street of the existence of God.

  "I do believe God exists," said the President, "but has nothing to do with human beings. He's involved in much bigger things."

  "I only believe in the stars," said Lazara, and she scrutinized the President's reaction. "What day were you born?"

  "The eleventh of March."

  "I knew it," said Lazara with a triumphant little start, and asked in a pleasant voice, "Don't you think two Pisces at the same table are too many?"

  The men were still discussing God when she went to the kitchen to prepare coffee. She had cleared the table, and longed with all her heart for the evening to end well. On her way back to the living room with the coffee, she was met with a passing remark of the President's, which astounded her.

  "Have no doubt, my dear friend: It would be the worst thing that could happen to our poor country if I were president."

  Homero saw Lazara in the doorway with the borrowed china cups and coffeepot and thought she was going to faint. The President also took notice. "Don't look at me like that, Senora," he said in an amiable tone. "I'm speaking from the heart." And then, turning to Homero, he concluded:

  "It's just as well I'm paying a high price for my foolishness."

  Lazara served the coffee and turned off the light above the table because its harsh illumination was not conducive to conversation, and the room was left in intimate shadow. For the first time she became interested in the guest, whose wit could not hide his sadness. Lazara's curiosity increased when he finished his coffee and turned the cup upside down in the saucer so the grounds could settle.

  The President told them he had chosen the island of Martinique for his exile because of his friendship with the poet Aime Cesaire, who at that time had just published his Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, and had helped him begin a new life. With what remained of his wife's inheritance, the President bought a house made of noble wood in the hills of Fort-de-France, with screens at the windows and a terrace overlooking the sea and filled with primitive flowers, where it was a pleasure to sleep with the sound of crickets and the molasses-and-rum breeze from the sugar mills. There he stayed with his wife, fourteen years older than he and an invalid since the birth of their only child, fortified against fate by his habitual rereading of the Latin classics, in Latin, and by the conviction that this was the final act of his life. For years he had to resist the temptation of all kinds of adventures proposed to him by his defeated partisans.

  "But I never opened another letter again," he said. "Never, once I discovered that even the most urgent were less urgent after a week, and that in two months one forgot about them and the person who wrote them."

  He looked at Lazara in the semi-darkness when she lit a cigarette, and took it from her with an avid movement of his fingers. After a long drag, he held the smoke in his throat. Startled, Lazara picked up the pack and the box of matches to light another, but he returned the burning cigarette to her. "You smoke with so much pleasure I could not resist," he said. Then he had to release the smoke because he began to cough.

  "I gave up the habit many years ago, but it never gave me up altogether," he said. "On occasion it has defeated me. Like now."

  The cough jolted him two more times. The pain returned. The President checked his small pocket watch and took his two evening pills. Then he peered into the bottom of his cup: nothing had changed, but this time he did not shudder.

  "Some of my old supporters have been presidents after me," he said.

  "Sayago," said Homero.

  "Sayago and others," he said. "All of us usurping an honor we did not deserve with an office we did not know how to fill. Some pursue only power, but most are looking for even less: a job."

  Lazara became angry.

  "Do you know what they say about you?" she asked.

  Homero intervened in alarm:

  "They're lies."

  "They're lies and they're not lies," said the President with celestial calm. "When it has to do with a president, the worst ignominies may be both true and false at the same time."

  He had lived in Martinique all the days of his exile, his only contact with the outside world the few news items in the official paper. He had supported himself teaching classes in Spanish and Latin at an official lycee, and with the translations that Aime Cesaire commissioned from time to time. The heat in August was unbearable, and he would stay in the hammock until noon, reading to the hum of the fan in his bedroom. Even at the hottest times of the day his wife tended to the birds she raised in freedom outdoors, protecting herself from the sun with a broad-brimmed straw hat adorned with artificial fruit and organdy flowers. But when the temperature fell, it was good to sit in the cool air on the terrace, he with his eyes fixed on the ocean until it grew dark, and she in her wicker rocking chair, wearing the torn hat, and rings with bright stones on every finger, watching the ships of the world pass by. "That one's bound for Puerto Santo," she would say. "That one almost can't move, it's so loaded down with bananas from Puerto Santo," she would say. For it did not seem possible to her that any ship could pass by that was not from their country. He pretended not to hear, although in the long run she managed to forget better than he because she lost her memory. They would sit this way until the clamorous twilights came to an end and they had to take refuge in the house, defeated by the mosquitoes. During one of those many Augusts, as he was reading the paper on the terrace, the President gave a start of surpris
e.

  "I'll be damned," he said. "I've died in Estoril!"

  His wife, adrift in her drowsiness, was horrified by the news. The article consisted of six lines on the fifth page of the newspaper printed just around the corner, in which his occasional translations were published and whose manager came to visit him from time to time. And now it said that he had died in Estoril de Lisboa, the resort and refuge of European decadence, where he had never been and which was, perhaps, the only place in the world where he would not have wanted to die. His wife did die, in fact, a year later, tormented by the last memory left to her: the recollection of her only child, who had taken part in the overthrow of his father and was later shot by his own accomplices.

  The President sighed. "That's how we are, and nothing can save us," he said. "A continent conceived by the scum of the earth without a moment of love: the children of abductions, rapes, violations, infamous dealings, deceptions, the union of enemies with enemies." He faced Lazara's African eyes, which scrutinized him without pity, and tried to win her over with the eloquence of an old master.

  "Mixing the races means mixing tears with spilled blood. What can one expect from such a potion?"

  Lazara fixed him to his place with the silence of death. But she gained control of herself a little before midnight and said goodbye to him with a formal kiss. The President refused to allow Homero to accompany him to the hotel, although he could not stop him from helping him find a taxi. When Homero came back, his wife was raging with fury.

  "That's one president in the world who really deserved to be overthrown," she said. "What a son of a bitch."

  Despite Homero's efforts to calm her, they spent a terrible, sleepless night. Lazara admitted that he was one of the best-looking men she had ever seen, with a devastating seductive power and a stud's virility. "Just as he is now, old and fucked up, he must still be a tiger in bed," she said. But she thought he had squandered these gifts of God in the service of pretense. She could not bear his boasts that he had been his country's worst president. Or his ascetic airs, when, she was convinced, he owned half the sugar plantations in Martinique. Or the hypocrisy of his contempt for power, when it was obvious he would give anything to return to the presidency long enough to make his enemies bite the dust.

  "And all of that," she concluded, "just to have us worshipping at his feet."

  "What good would that do him?" asked Homero.

  "None at all," she said. "But the fact is that being seductive is an addiction that can never be satisfied."

  Her rage was so great that Homero could not bear to be with her in bed, and he spent the rest of the night wrapped in a blanket on the sofa in the living room. Lazara also got up in the middle of the night, naked from head to toe--her habitual state when she slept or was at home--and talked to herself in a monologue on only one theme. In a single stroke she erased from human memory all traces of the hateful supper. At daybreak she returned what she had borrowed, replaced the new curtains with the old, and put the furniture back where it belonged so that the house was as poor and decent as it had been until the night before. Then she tore down the press clippings, the portraits, the banners and flags from the abominable campaign, and threw them all in the trash with a final shout.

  "You can go to hell!"

  A WEEK after the dinner, Homero found the President waiting for him as he left the hospital, with the request that he accompany him to his hotel. They climbed three flights of steep stairs to a garret that had a single skylight looking out on an ashen sky; clothes were drying on a line stretched across the room. There was also a double bed that took up half the space, a hard chair, a washstand and a portable bidet, and a poor man's armoire with a clouded mirror. The President noted Homer's reaction.

  "This is the burrow I lived in when I was a student," he said as if in apology. "I made the reservation from Fort-de-France."

  From a velvet bag he removed and displayed on the bed the last remnants of his wealth: several gold bracelets adorned with a variety of precious stones, a three-strand pearl necklace, and two others of gold and precious stones; three gold chains with saints' medals; a pair of gold and emerald earrings, another of gold and diamonds, and a third of gold and rubies; two reliquaries and a locket; eleven rings with all kinds of precious settings; and a diamond tiara worthy of a queen. From a case he took out three pairs of silver cuff links and two of gold, all with matching tie clips, and a pocket watch plated in white gold. Then he removed his six decorations from a shoe box: two of gold, one of silver, and the rest of no value.

  "It's all I have left in life," he said.

  He had no alternative but to sell it all to meet his medical expenses, and he asked Homero to please do that for him with the greatest discretion. But Homero did not feel he could oblige if he did not have the proper receipts.

  The President explained that they were his wife's jewels, a legacy from a grandmother who had lived in colonial times and had inherited a packet of shares in Colombian gold mines. The watch, the cuff links, and tie clips were his. The decorations, of course, had not belonged to anyone before him.

  "I don't believe anybody has receipts for these kinds of things," he said.

  Homero was adamant.

  "In that case," the President reflected, "there's nothing I can do but take care of it myself."

  He began to gather up the jewelry with calculated calm. "I beg you to forgive me, my dear Homero, but there is no poverty worse than that of an impoverished president," he said. "Even surviving seems contemptible." At that moment Homero saw him with his heart and laid down his weapons.

  Lazara came home late that night. From the door she saw the jewels glittering on the table under the mercurial light, and it was as if she had seen a scorpion in her bed.

  "Don't be an idiot, baby," she said, frightened. "Why are those things here?"

  Homero's explanation disturbed her even more. She sat down to examine the pieces, one by one, with all the care of a goldsmith. At a certain point she sighed and said, "They must be worth a fortune." At last she sat looking at Homero and could find no way out of her dilemma.

  "Damn it," she said. "How can we know if everything that man says is true?"

  "Why shouldn't it be?" said Homero. "I've just seen that he washes his own clothes and dries them on a line in his room, just like we do."

  "Because he's cheap," said Lazara.

  "Or poor," said Homero.

  Lazara examined the jewels again, but now with less attention because she too had been conquered. And so the next morning she put on her best clothes, adorned herself with the pieces that seemed most expensive, wore as many rings as she could on every finger, even her thumb, and all the bracelets that would fit on each arm, and went out to sell them. "Let's see if anyone asks Lazara Davis for receipts," she said as she left, strutting with laughter. She chose just the right jewelry store, one with more pretensions than prestige, where she knew they bought and sold without asking too many questions, and she walked in terrified but with a firm step.

  A thin, pale salesman in evening dress made a theatrical bow as he kissed her hand and asked how he could help her. Because of the mirrors and intense lights the interior was brighter than the day, and the entire shop seemed made of diamonds. Lazara, almost without looking at the clerk for fear he would see through the farce, followed him to the rear of the store.

  He invited her to sit at one of three Louis XV escritoires that served as individual counters, and over it he spread an immaculate cloth. Then he sat across from Lazara and waited.

  "How may I help you?"

  She removed the rings, the bracelets, the necklaces, the earrings, everything that she was wearing in plain view, and began to place them on the escritoire in a chessboard pattern. All she wanted, she said, was to know their true value.

  The jeweler put a glass up to his left eye and began to examine the pieces in clinical silence. After a long while, without interrupting his examination, he asked:

  "Where are you from?" r />
  Lazara had not anticipated that question.

  "Ay, Senor," she sighed, "very far away."

  "I can imagine," he said.

  He was silent again, while Lazara's terrible golden eyes scrutinized him without mercy. The jeweler devoted special attention to the diamond tiara and set it apart from the other jewelry. Lazara sighed.

  "You are a perfect Virgo," she said.

  The jeweler did not interrupt his examination.

  "How do you know?"

  "From the way you behave," said Lazara.

  He made no comment until he had finished, and he addressed her with the same circumspection he had used at the beginning.

  "Where does all this come from?"

  "It's a legacy from my grandmother," said Lazara in a tense voice. "She died last year in Paramaribo, at the age of ninety-seven."

  The jeweler looked into her eyes. "I'm very sorry," he said. "But their only value is the weight of the gold." He picked up the tiara with his fingertips and made it sparkle under the dazzling light.

  "Except for this," he said. "It is very old, Egyptian perhaps, and would be priceless if it were not for the poor condition of the diamonds. In any case it has a certain historical value."

  But the stones in the other treasures, the amethysts, emeralds, rubies, opals--all of them, without exception--were fake. "No doubt the originals were good," said the jeweler as he gathered up the pieces to return them to her. "But they have passed so often from one generation to another that the legitimate stones have been lost along the way and been replaced by bottle glass." Lazara felt a green nausea, took a deep breath, and controlled her panic. The salesman consoled her:

  "It often happens, Madame."

  "I know," said Lazara, relieved. "That's why I want to get rid of them."

  She felt then that she was beyond the farce, and became herself again. With no further delay she took the cuff links, the pocket watch, the tie clips, the decorations of gold and silver, and the rest of the President's personal trinkets out of her handbag and placed them all on the table.