When she had finished bathing her grandmother, she took her to her bedroom. The grandmother was so fat that she could only walk by leaning on her granddaughter’s shoulder or on a staff that looked like a bishop’s crosier, but even during her most difficult efforts the power of an antiquated grandeur was evident. In the bedroom, which had been furnished with an excessive and somewhat demented taste, like the whole house, Eréndira needed two more hours to get her grandmother ready. She untangled her hair strand by strand, perfumed and combed it, put an equatorially flowered dress on her, put talcum powder on her face, bright red lipstick on her mouth, rouge on her cheeks, musk on her eyelids, and mother-of-pearl polish on her nails, and when she had her decked out like a larger than life-size doll, she led her to an artificial garden with suffocating flowers that were like the ones on the dress, seated her in a large chair that had the foundation and the pedigree of a throne, and left her listening to elusive records on a phonograph that had a speaker like a megaphone.
While the grandmother floated through the swamps of the past, Eréndira busied herself sweeping the house, which was dark and motley, with bizarre furniture and statues of invented Caesars, chandeliers of teardrops and alabaster angels, a gilded piano, and numerous clocks of unthinkable sizes and shapes. There was a cistern in the courtyard for the storage of water carried over many years from distant springs on the backs of Indians, and hitched to a ring on the cistern wall was a broken-down ostrich, the only feathered creature who could survive the torment of that accursed climate. The house was far away from everything, in the heart of the desert, next to a settlement with miserable and burning streets where the goats committed suicide from desolation when the wind of misfortune blew.
That incomprehensible refuge had been built by the grandmother’s husband, a legendary smuggler whose name was Amadís, by whom she had a son whose name was also Amadís and who was Eréndira’s father. No one knew either the origins or the motivations of that family. The best known version in the language of the Indians was that Amadís the father had rescued his beautiful wife from a house of prostitution in the Antilles, where he had killed a man in a knife fight, and that he had transplanted her forever in the impunity of the desert. When the Amadíses died, one of melancholy fevers and the other riddled with bullets in a fight over a woman, the grandmother buried their bodies in the courtyard, sent away the fourteen barefoot servant girls, and continued ruminating on her dreams of grandeur in the shadows of the furtive house, thanks to the sacrifices of the bastard granddaughter whom she had reared since birth.
Eréndira needed six hours just to set and wind the clocks. The day when her misfortune began she didn’t have to do that because the clocks had enough winding left to last until the next morning, but on the other hand, she had to bathe and overdress her grandmother, scrub the floors, cook lunch, and polish the crystalware. Around eleven o’clock, when she was changing the water in the ostrich’s bowl and watering the desert weeds around the twin graves of the Amadíses, she had to fight off the anger of the wind, which had become unbearable, but she didn’t have the slightest feeling that it was the wind of her misfortune. At twelve o’clock she was wiping the last champagne glasses when she caught the smell of broth and had to perform the miracle of running to the kitchen without leaving a disaster of Venetian glass in her wake.
She just managed to take the pot off the stove as it was beginning to boil over. Then she put on a stew she had already prepared and took advantage of a chance to sit down and rest on a stool in the kitchen. She closed her eyes, opened them again with an unfatigued expression, and began pouring the soup into the tureen. She was working as she slept.
The grandmother had sat down alone at the head of a banquet table with silver candlesticks set for twelve people. She shook her little bell and Eréndira arrived almost immediately with the steaming tureen. As Eréndira was serving the soup, her grandmother noticed the somnambulist look and passed her hand in front of her eyes as if wiping an invisible pane of glass. The girl didn’t see the hand. The grandmother followed her with her look and when Eréndira turned to go back to the kitchen, she shouted at her:
‘Eréndira!’
Having been awakened all of a sudden, the girl dropped the tureen onto the rug.
‘That’s all right, child,’ grandmother said to her with assuring tenderness. ‘You fell asleep while you were walking about again.’
‘My body has that habit,’ Eréndira said by way of an excuse.
Still hazy with sleep, she picked up the tureen, and tried to clean the stain on the rug.
‘Leave it,’ her grandmother dissuaded her. ‘You can wash it this afternoon.’
So in addition to her regular afternoon chores, Eréndira had to wash the dining room rug, and she took advantage of her presence at the washtub to do Monday’s laundry as well, while the wind went around the house looking for a way in. She had so much to do that night came upon her without her realizing it, and when she put the dining room rug back in its place it was time to go to bed.
The grandmother had been fooling around on the piano all afternoon, singing the songs of her times to herself in a falsetto, and she had stains of musk and tears on her eyelids. But when she lay down on her bed in her muslin nightgown, the bitterness of fond memories returned.
‘Take advantage of tomorrow to wash the living room rug too,’ she told Eréndira. ‘It hasn’t seen the sun since the days of all the noise.’
‘Yes, Grandmother,’ the girl answered.
She picked up a feather fan and began to fan the implacable matron, who recited the list of night-time orders to her as she sank into sleep.
‘Iron all the clothes before you go to bed so you can sleep with a clear conscience.’
‘Yes, Grandmother.’
‘Check the clothes closets carefully, because moths get hungrier on windy nights.’
‘Yes, Grandmother.’
‘With the time you have left, take the flowers out into the courtyard so they can get a breath of air.’
‘Yes, Grandmother.’
‘And feed the ostrich.’
She had fallen asleep but she was still giving orders, for it was from her that the granddaughter had inherited the ability to be alive still while sleeping. Eréndira left the room without making any noise and did the final chores of the night, still replying to the sleeping grandmother’s orders.
‘Give the graves some water.’
‘Yes, Grandmother.’
‘And if the Amadíses arrive, tell them not to come in,’ the grandmother said, ‘because Porfirio Galán’s gang is waiting to kill them.’
Eréndira didn’t answer her any more because she knew that the grandmother was getting lost in her delirium, but she didn’t miss a single order. When she finished checking the window bolts and put out the last lights, she took a candlestick from the dining room and lighted her way to her bedroom as the pauses in the wind were filled with the peaceful and enormous breathing of her sleeping grandmother.
Her room was also luxurious, but not so much as her grandmother’s, and it was piled high with the rag dolls and wind-up animals of her recent childhood. Overcome by the barbarous chores of the day, Eréndira didn’t have the strength to get undressed and she put the candlestick on the night table and fell onto the bed. A short while later the wind of her misfortune came into the bedroom like a pack of hounds and knocked the candle over against the curtain.
At dawn, when the wind finally stopped, a few thick and scattered drops of rain began to fall, putting out the last embers and hardening the smoking ashes of the mansion. The people in the village, Indians for the most part, tried to rescue the remains of the disaster: the charred corpse of the ostrich, the frame of the gilded piano, the torso of a statue. The grandmother was contemplating the residue of her fortune with an impenetrable depression. Eréndira, sitting between the two graves of the Amadíses, had stopped weeping. When the grandmother was convinced that very few things remained intact among the ruins, sh
e looked at her granddaughter with sincere pity.
‘My poor child,’ she sighed. ‘Life won’t be long enough for you to pay me back for this mishap.’
She began to pay it back that very day, beneath the noise of the rain, when she was taken to the village storekeeper, a skinny and premature widower who was quite well known in the desert for the good price he paid for virginity. As the grandmother waited undauntedly, the widower examined Eréndira with scientific austerity: he considered the strength of her thighs, the size of her breasts, the diameter of her hips. He didn’t say a word until he had some calculation of what she was worth.
‘She’s still quite immature,’ he said then. ‘She has the teats of a bitch.’
Then he had her get on a scale to prove his decision with figures. Eréndira weighed ninety pounds.
‘She isn’t worth more than a hundred pesos,’ the widower said.
The grandmother was scandalized.
‘A hundred pesos for a girl who’s completely new!’ she almost shouted. ‘No, sir, that shows a great lack of respect for virtue on your part.’
‘I’ll make it a hundred and fifty,’ the widower said.
‘This girl caused me damages amounting to more than a million pesos,’ the grandmother said. ‘At this rate she’ll need two hundred years to pay me back.’
‘You’re lucky that the only good feature she has is her age,’ the widower said.
The storm threatened to knock the house down, and there were so many leaks in the roof that it was raining almost as much inside as out. The grandmother felt all alone in a world of disaster.
‘Just raise it to three hundred,’ she said.
‘Two hundred and fifty.’
Finally they agreed on two hundred and twenty pesos in cash and some provisions. The grandmother then signaled Eréndira to go with the widower and he led her by the hand to the back room as if he were taking her to school.
‘I’ll wait for you here,’ the grandmother said.
‘Yes, Grandmother,’ said Eréndira.
The back room was a kind of shed with four brick columns, a roof of rotted palm leaves, and an adobe wall three feet high, through which outdoor disturbances got into the building. Placed on top of the adobe wall were pots with cacti and other plants of aridity. Hanging between two columns and flapping like the free sail of a drifting sloop was a faded hammock. Over the whistle of the storm and the lash of the water one could hear distant shouts, the howling of far-off animals, the cries of a shipwreck.
When Eréndira and the widower went into the shed they had to hold on so as not to be knocked down by a gust of rain which left them soaked. Their voices could not be heard but their movements became clear in the roar of the squall. At the widower’s first attempt, Eréndira shouted something inaudible and tried to get away. The widower answered her without any voice, twisted her arm by the wrist, and dragged her to the hammock. She fought him off with a scratch on the face and shouted in silence again, but he replied with a solemn slap which lifted her off the ground and suspended her in the air for an instant with her long Medusa hair floating in space. He grabbed her about the waist before she touched ground again, flung her into the hammock with a brutal heave, and held her down with his knees. Eréndira then succumbed to terror, lost consciousness, and remained as if fascinated by the moonbeams from a fish that was floating through the storm air, while the widower undressed her, tearing off her clothes with a methodical clawing, as if he were pulling up grass, scattering them with great tugs of color that waved like streamers and went off with the wind.
When there was no other man left in the village who could pay anything for Eréndira’s love, her grandmother put her on a truck to go where the smugglers were. They made the trip on the back of the truck in the open, among sacks of rice and buckets of lard and what had been left by the fire: the headboard of the viceregal bed, a warrior angel, the scorched throne, and other pieces of useless junk. In a trunk with two crosses painted in broad strokes they carried the bones of the Amadíses.
The grandmother protected herself from the sun with a tattered umbrella and it was hard for her to breathe because of the torment of sweat and dust, but even in that unhappy state she kept control of her dignity. Behind the pile of cans and sacks of rice Eréndira paid for the trip and the cartage by making love for twenty pesos a turn with the truck’s loader. At first her system of defense was the same as she had used against the widower’s attack, but the loader’s approach was different, slow and wise, and he ended up taming her with tenderness. So when they reached the first town after a deadly journey, Eréndira and the loader were relaxing from good love behind the parapet of cargo. The driver shouted to the grandmother:
‘Here’s where the world begins.’
The grandmother observed with disbelief the miserable and solitary streets of a town somewhat larger but just as sad as the one they had abandoned.
‘It doesn’t look like it to me,’ she said.
‘It’s mission country,’ the driver said.
‘I’m not interested in charity, I’m interested in smugglers,’ said the grandmother.
Listening to the dialogue from behind the load, Eréndira dug into a sack of rice with her finger. Suddenly she found a string, pulled on it, and drew out a necklace of genuine pearls. She looked at it amazed, holding it between her fingers like a dead snake, while the driver answered her grandmother.
‘Don’t be daydreaming, ma’am. There’s no such thing as smugglers.’
‘Of course not,’ the grandmother said. ‘I’ve got your word for it.’
‘Try to find one and you’ll see,’ the driver bantered. ‘Everybody talks about them, but no one’s ever seen one.’
The loader realized that Eréndira had pulled out the necklace and hastened to take it away from her and stick it back into the sack of rice. The grandmother, who had decided to stay in spite of the poverty of the town, then called to her granddaughter to help her out of the truck. Eréndira said good-bye to the loader with a kiss that was hurried but spontaneous and true.
The grandmother waited, sitting on her throne in the middle of the street, until they finished unloading the goods. The last item was the trunk with the remains of the Amadíses.
‘This thing weighs as much as a dead man,’ said the driver, laughing.
‘There are two of them,’ the grandmother said, ‘so treat them with the proper respect.’
‘I bet they’re marble statues.’ The driver laughed again.
He put the trunk with bones down carelessly among the singed furniture and held out his open hand to the grandmother.
‘Fifty pesos,’ he said.
‘Your slave has already paid on the right-hand side.’
The driver looked at his helper with surprise and the latter made an affirmative sign. The driver then went back to the cab, where a woman in mourning was riding, in her arms a baby who was crying from the heat. The loader, quite sure of himself, told the grandmother:
‘Eréndira is coming with me, if it’s all right by you. My intentions are honorable.’
The girl intervened, surprised:
‘I didn’t say anything!’
‘The idea was all mine,’ the loader said.
The grandmother looked him up and down, not to make him feel small but trying to measure the true size of his guts.
‘It’s all right by me,’ she told him, ‘provided you pay me what I lost because of her carelessness. It’s eight hundred seventy-two thousand three hundred fifteen pesos, less the four hundred and twenty which she’s already paid me, making it eight hundred seventy-one thousand eight hundred ninety-five.’
The truck started up.
‘Believe me, I’d give you that pile of money if I had it,’ the loader said seriously. ‘The girl is worth it.’
The grandmother was pleased with the boy’s decision.
‘Well, then, come back when you have it, son,’ she answered in a sympathetic tone. ‘But you’d better go now, becaus
e if we figure out accounts again you’ll end up owing me ten pesos.’
The loader jumped onto the back of the truck and it went off. From there he waved good-bye to Eréndira, but she was still so surprised that she didn’t answer him.
In the same vacant lot where the truck had left them, Eréndira and her grandmother improvised a shelter to live in from sheets of zinc and the remains of Oriental rugs. They laid two mats on the ground and slept as well as they had in the mansion until the sun opened holes in the ceiling and burned their faces.
Just the opposite of what normally happened, it was the grandmother who busied herself that morning fixing up Eréndira. She made up her face in the style of sepulchral beauty that had been the vogue in her youth and touched her up with artificial fingernails and an organdy bow that looked like a butterfly on her head.
‘You look awful,’ she admitted, ‘but it’s better that way: men are quite stupid when it comes to female matters.’
Long before they saw them they both recognized the sound of two mules walking on the flint of the desert. At a command from her grandmother, Eréndira lay down on the mat the way an amateur actress might have done at the moment when the curtain was about to go up. Leaning on her bishop’s crosier, the grandmother went out of the shelter and sat down on the throne to wait for the mules to pass.
The mailman was coming. He was only twenty years old, but his work had aged him, and he was wearing a khaki uniform, leggings, a pith helmet, and had a military pistol on his cartridge belt. He was riding a good mule and leading by the halter another, more timeworn one, on whom the canvas mailbags were piled.
As he passed by the grandmother he saluted her and kept on going, but she signaled him to look inside the shelter. The man stopped and saw Eréndira lying on the mat in her posthumous make-up and wearing a purple-trimmed dress.
‘Do you like it?’ the grandmother asked.
The mailman hadn’t understood until then what the proposition was.
‘It doesn’t look bad to someone who’s been on a diet,’ he said, smiling.