“There are some gypsy women at the door asking for food, ma’am, and since we’re all enjoying ourselves here we ought to show some compassion for the destitute,” said Irene to the landlady.
“It is well known that gypsy women are the wealthiest people in the world,” argued the landlady.
“They have varicose veins and children and they’re hungry,” replied Irene.
The landlady went into the kitchen with Irene.
“This meat is a bit past its prime, but it will do,” she said, setting aside the meat, some bread and a sheet of newspaper.
“But it’s bad for the liver!” protested Irene.
“So, you’re a doctor now! Just imagine the livers gypsies have! Eskimos eat rotten meat, and it’s good for them, sweetie.”
“Let me wrap it up for them,” said Irene, seeing the landlady’s irritation.
The woman left the kitchen grumbling. Irene sniffed the meat, looked at it closely and then, picking it up with the tips of her fingers, tossed it in the garbage bin. She opened the refrigerator and quickly took out another piece of meat, wrapped it up, and, leaving the kitchen, handed the package to Gabriela.
“Give this package to the gypsy women out in the street. You hear? Go on.”
Gabriela finished eating an alfajor cookie as though she were starving.
“Do you want to dance?” a boy asked Irene.
Gabriela turned around and studied the boy’s face. She thought of the photograph she’d seen in her mother’s wallet, but the only similarity she saw in the boy’s face and the one in the photo was youth. Straining to hear her mother’s reply, she took the package to the door where the gypsy women were waiting. The pregnant one took a deck of cards from a purse she wore beneath her fourth skirt and showed them to her, modulating her voice like a song.
“Would you like me to tell your fortune?” she said, laying the package on the ground. She smelled of wine. “I’ll tell you if you’re a good person or a bad person, if you’ll win the lottery, if you’ll receive toys as a gift: all for five pesos,” she said, laying some cards out on the ground. “I’ll tell you if you’ll have a car, if you’ll be a pilot or a doctor, if you’ll travel by ship or in an airplane, if you’ll have children, and if you’ll marry twice.”
Gabriela listened without answering.
The red-faced gypsy women looked toward the far end of the courtyard and, shrugging their shoulders, walked away.
“Ma’am, you forgot the package,” shouted Gabriela.
The pregnant gypsy retraced her steps and said:
“We want money. What’s in this package?” Without waiting for an answer, the gypsy opened the package and let the meat and bread fall to the sidewalk. She shrugged and declared: “We want money.”
That night as I was leaving the party I tripped over a sticky bundle, and my heels, which were pointy as pins, got smeared with raw meat.
On land I walked a lot. Now the water envelops me completely, and my legs look like seaweed or feathers when they move.
There were lots of people milling around. They didn’t talk: they looked at each other, sat down, walked away, and came back. Why were they all there? They were all very well dressed but in hues of green and brown, dark brown, Nile green. There were two or three young men. What a strange world! They gave me a salty drink; I drank reluctantly. I looked eagerly at what the world was offering up to me: arms that looked like branches, leaves that looked like hair, the color of faces varying according to the light shining on them. One of them, I don’t know if it was a man or a woman (nowadays women wear their hair like men, and men wears theirs like women), approached me. I didn’t care which it was. I always thought that as long as haircuts and hairstyles existed, I would know who I was speaking to, but this time it didn’t work. I spoke to someone who answered me: “You want to know my name? My name is Pablo.” And he sat down beside me on a sofa. “These parties bore me.” I replied: “I thought you were a woman. Don’t be offended.” “I’m not offended. To the contrary, I love being mistaken for a woman, but then they realize that I’m intelligent.” Emerging from my silence, I asked him: “Are you?” He replied: “You’ll see.” We talked. He took my hand. “You have to hold hands when you talk about intimate things. Spiritual communion is in the palm of one’s hands,” and, squeezing my hand between his, he said: “I believe in these things.” It was getting dark, and I closed my eyes. That was the moment when he kissed me, but his tender lips barely touched me, and I told him not to regret it. “I never regret anything,” I told him, “it’s so lovely to discover someone new.” “Where do you live? Where can I find you? I’m tired,” he told me and rested his curly head on my chest. “How sad parties are! Don’t you agree?” “I do agree, but it’s not so intolerable here since I met you.” “You’re right, forgive me.” I sensed the fading light. I looked around. What an unexpected encounter! Everyone had already left, and I was alone. The ship moved. Would I remember Pablo’s face? I looked at him intensely, which led me to ask him: “Why are you looking at me like that?” He thought for a while without speaking. “I feel like we met a century ago.” “It’s true, and I meet so few people like you, good people, so willing to be understanding.” I took out a ring and gave it to him. “You won’t forget me?” Water filled his mouth. He couldn’t answer. At his side, I felt myself dying, and then he went away forever with his eyes closed, and I was almost dead.
The woman stopped looking at me. She was selling tickets at the box office. “You can come in to see the film, if you’d like. It’s a story about jealousy.” “I know jealousy so well,” I replied. “Who doesn’t? There’s plenty of jealously to go around for everyone.” Again silence. I was happy to think about someone at last: about Pablo. I held back tears so as not to cry in the ocean. Who can do it? You and I can. The tears ran freely, and I felt the same sensation taking over my soul. I think I kneeled, but I imagined it, and what I imagine becomes real, more real than reality.
The days race by. Sometimes I feel that life drags me off to other places like the water that surrounds me. I am not going to die. May my saint protect me, please God.
I am sitting in an unfamiliar garden. I’m asleep in a hammock, and I feel my memory abandoning me. I know beings that remember me, but I don’t remember any of them. There are young people playing the most difficult games, but they aren’t the ones I know, I saw them in important tournaments. My God, don’t abandon me. I played tennis, sometimes; I won difficult tournaments, but now I’m not fit to win anything. I am looking at a vanishing world, the world that abandons me, that holds me in its arms and that I cannot restrain. The taste of the water burned my mouth, my God, when the water saved me. I’m afraid of being lost in this immense ocean. I don’t know what to do so as not to die, so as not to fall apart, to lose my identity completely and forget everything else.
I walk on the ship’s deck. I catch a chill, eat, get dizzy, today and tomorrow. I will be happy until the day of my death.
TORCHELI
They called him Torcheli because he was twisted, one-eyed and crippled. Irene was afraid of him.
Irene advised Gabriela not to go to the zoo so often. Lots of men went there to look at the monkeys, men who looked like criminals, like Torcheli, thieves or perverts, for whom the sexual act required nothing more than a single condition: the perfect incongruity of the object of desire—a statue, an animal, a picture, or a child. Irene knew those men. She feared them, because they had shamed her when she was a child. She tried to scare Gabriela out of going to the zoo by telling her stories about animals that had escaped their cages. She told her that, at one time during her childhood, the merry-go-round had real animals rather than animals made of wood. One night, these real animals had usurped the strategic positions on the merry-go-round, upsetting the customary way of things for many years to come. The children’s mothers and the owner of the merry-go-round didn’t suspect a thing until a child became displeased with a lion, who bit her hand. After this, the zoo had to close its doors unt
il order could be reestablished. Far from being frightened by this story, Gabriela became even more captivated by the animals. She stopped eating her dessert so that she could give it to the tiger the next day. She imagined a perfected version of the story her mother had told her. The zoo’s architecture, its meandering paths, helped her imagination. The animals that used to occupy places on the merry-go-round were happy animals. The pavilions where they lived had little balconies where they could gaze at the stars at night. At any moment, they would return to the merry-go-round and bite and claw to pieces those sad wooden animals the children loved so much; they might eat the owner of the merry-go-round, and they would elect Gabriela to start it up and to choose the music: tangos, rumbas, marches, or boleros. Then Gabriela would be the only one to know the secret: Gabriela and the animals. Her picture would probably come out in the newspapers after a few years, when one of the lions, grown weary of an annoying little girl, would bite her, and Gabriela, seeing the crowd’s terror, would shout Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid to the animals, and she would spin around with them on the merry-go-round at the speed of an astronaut, to music and applause. No, she would never stop going to the zoo. She would never stop talking to the animals. She would never stop giving them a portion of her food. She had baptized some of the animals. Some came when she called them, others waved goodbye to her with their paws or wings, when they had wings. One of them bit her through the bars as she was giving him a cookie, and from that day forward she called him the Carnivorous Villain.
And to think how much I used to love swimming! Now I just float on top of the water, my name, my face, my identity forgotten. Sometimes I lift a hand out of the water to look at it. How strange a hand is. Sometimes I peer out over my toes.
GABRIELA
I remember many children, but none so well as Gabriela. Pale, her face the color of her hair, she stood out because of the seriousness of her gaze.
The only advantage of being a child is that time is doubly wide, like upholstery fabric. Time, of which there is not enough for anything, was as infinite as a desert for Gabriela. Whenever she had a free moment, and these were plentiful, she would go to the zoo. She liked animals because they behaved in a natural way: if they were hungry they ate nonstop, if they were thirsty they drank until they were full, if they were in heat they made love desperately, if they were tired they slept at any hour of the day, if they were furious they bit or scratched or killed their enemy. It is true that they also died, and dying is ridiculous, but they were so meticulous, so precise. (Gabriela would never forget her paternal grandfather’s death, an apocryphal death.) Sometimes she would give the animals the cookies or chocolates she had been given. Sometimes she would put her hands through the bars to pet them. What could a jaguar, a wolf, a hyena, a tiger do to her? She was the animals’ champion. She always carried a little notebook with her in which, after looking a them for a long while, she would draw them, carefully recording each of their names beneath the drawings, marking her favorites with a star and those she liked least with an x. In her opinion, the ones she liked the least generally resembled certain people.
This was the list of quadrupeds and birds she had recorded in her notebook, copying out the names:
- Zebu: sacred bull of India. Bos Indicus. Gray: Mr. Arévalo
- Somali Sheep: black head, white body: my grandmother
- Squirrel Monkey: black crown: Doctor Ernesto
- Collared Peccary: Tunga
- Spectacled Bear: cigarette and pill seller
- Syrian Brown Bear: shopkeeper
- White Oystercatcher: long yellow-orange beak: Mrs. Arévalo
- Silver Pheasant: my teacher
- Lady Amherst Pheasant: Leonor, the dead woman
- Seriema: Gusano
- Speckled Tiger Heron: my mother’s dressmakers
- Great Horned Owl: Papero
- Paradise Crane: Verónica
If the animals had talked they probably would have uttered the same sentences as those people. Gabriela dreamed about those animals. Sometimes they saved her from grave dangers in an enormous ocean where she was drowning, or in a forest where other animals were chasing her, or in her house during a fire that would often haunt her dreams. She would wake up screaming and sitting up in bed. Sometimes, when her mother wasn’t there, she’d get up in the dark and go out to the courtyard, gripped by a puzzling anguish. Gabriela’s nocturnal anxieties worried Irene. At night, after what was almost always a frugal supper, she would make her cups of linden flower or chamomile tea to calm her nerves. But the linden and chamomile acted as stimulants in Gabriela’s body. She began to suffer from insomnia, and the insomnia caused her to twist and turn in her bed like a worm. When Irene returned home after having been out for the evening, invariably upon opening the door she would become alarmed, thinking that Gabriela had escaped. She was buried under a pile of clothing, the sheets were tousled, the pillow was on the floor. Irene would spend a few anguished minutes inspecting the room: she couldn’t get used to this daughter who waited for her with the sadness, perhaps, of children who sometimes wait for their parents when they don’t know where they’ve gone, thinking that they’ve lost them forever, that they’ve been abandoned to a strange, cruel world. Gabriela at night was a sensitive, fussy, anxious child; Gabriela during the day was a happy, carefree, curious, independent child. One would have said that they were not the same little girl. Looking at her, Irene noticed physical differences caused by the day and the night. Sometimes she felt like the mother of two little girls. Do the mothers of twins feel divided between two affections, like I do between nighttime Gabriela and daytime Gabriela? she asked herself. She didn’t know which one to like better: if the nighttime Gabriela who waited for her every night, awake—like a reproach under that pile of bedclothes—bothered her more, what reward was there in it for her to receive the hugs and tenderness she lavished upon her during those hours? The daytime Gabriela—on whom she spied surreptitiously, partially immersed in her life at school, her zoological research, her skill as an illustrator-decorator (she was a decorator of walls and trees), who exerted a fascination over her—didn’t belong to her. She was an aloof, rebellious, sometimes malicious child, who tried coldly and methodically to discover what Irene did when she went out. A gossipy girl, perhaps, who could bring unpleasantness upon her because her irrepressible passion for talking might lead her to betray her mother in the most involuntarily cruel manner possible. Children are like that, Irene often thought, for every small dose of happiness they give us, we have to swallow all the bitterness in the world. Men are like that too. That’s how the world is. That’s how Leandro probably is too. She would pray as she had in her childhood, and she would confuse Gabriela’s name with the Virgin’s and Jesus.
How will they get me back onto the ship? Will they see me? Will they hear me? What will Leandro say? Am I in love? It’s the only thing I think about, but I’m inhabited now by infinite people who disturb my memory. I’m living off other memories. Which one am I? Sometimes I can’t find myself.
ROSINA DÍAZ
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Rosina Díaz was a good person. It was enough to see her face or to remember her wickedness for her to come to me on tiptoe, dressed in her usual attire, and breathe something into my ear: a malevolent secret. Nevertheless, she was so generous when pursuing whatever ends she’d set her mind to, rolling her dark, slanted eyes, that we would sometimes exclaim: “You’re a saint, you’re a saint.” She was capable of being a saint in order to get what she wanted. Three curls shone on her mischievous little girl’s forehead; her indistinct features were sweet. She was my schoolmate, and at the age of eight she explained to me the mysteries of birth and love, both of which caused me so much suffering.
NORBERTO DESCOTO
Norberto, I have to think of the word “scrotum” to remember his last name. Doctor Descoto, director of the Private Eye Clinic, was tall and very thin, always hunched over as if passing through doorframes that were t
oo low. In profile, his intent rabbit face was not as kind as it was head-on. When my grandmother had to have cataract surgery, she checked in to that clinic, and it was through that sad circumstance that I met Doctor Descoto. I associate his face with the countless patients wearing blue sunglasses who I saw filing through those rooms when I went to visit my grandmother, bringing the jars of candies and other sweets that my mother made for her. Doctor Norberto Descoto was everywhere, watching over his domain. In the main entrance hall, paintings, which all appeared to depict eye operations or blind people being led by children, angels, or dogs, charmed me. A little yellow statuette in the form of a blindfolded woman holding her hands out in front of her as if touching the air frightened me. One day I pulled a flower from the bunch of daffodils my mother was bringing as a gift for my grandmother and stealthily placed it between the little statue’s fingers, thinking that I had committed an act of great daring, given Doctor Norberto Descoto’s severe rabbit’s profile, his eagle eyes with which he ceaselessly inspected the order of the house and the composure of his visitors. There, in those rooms, I discovered that the blind are seers, something that Doctor Descoto never knew. How did I discover it? I won’t go into it now so as not to veer too far from my description. When he was talking, Doctor Descoto had the habit of caressing his chin and making a rotating motion with his shoulders, buttoning and unbuttoning his jacket. His quiet voice seemed to emit only secrets, even, or especially, when he talked about food. One day, Doctor Descoto was speaking so seriously to my mother that I thought my grandmother was about to go blind or that she was on the verge of death. When I moved closer, I heard that he was telling her about an osso buco and a mackerel prepared with white wine. I didn’t know what osso buco or mackerel were, but I guessed that my grandmother’s health wasn’t hanging in the balance, and the mention of the white wine suggested that they were discussing culinary experiences. The gossips said that Doctor Descoto had two girlfriends, that he saw one on Saturdays and Sundays who was poor and blond, and another, who was a millionairess and brunette, whom he saw on Thursdays. I never saw them, but I know that they both wore glasses. Even worse gossips said that he masturbated, and that he had the two girlfriends to conceal his vices. Doctor Descoto was always busy running from one room to another, caressing his chin in front of every door. On one occasion he told my mother that he had also endured an eye operation, in that very clinic, and for that reason the statue of Saint Lucia in the entrance hall always had fresh flowers and a lit candle.
The Promise Page 8