That’s where I met Higinio Roque: he examined the depths of my eyes with a new ophthalmoscope. He looked like Raúl Ciro, but I didn’t like him.
How horrible it would be to be blind. I wouldn’t see the ship arrive or the seagulls or the storms.
RAÚL CIRO
Raúl Ciro! I never thought that I could like a person named Raúl. Black, brilliant eyes (they weren’t black, they were chocolate-colored), a nose neither handsome nor ugly, a mouth with thick lips, prominent cheekbones, teeth that deserved to be extremely white but were blackish instead. As soon as I heard his voice, I was lost. I never looked closely at his ears; I really just imagined them. I never knew his age. I never saw his bare feet; I always saw him thoroughly dressed. In a similar fashion, I could have fallen in love with a photograph, and it was a photograph I fell in love with and not with Raúl Ciro, of whom I am not fond and of whom I have never been fond. What bad luck it is for those in love who fall in love with a false image! The imagined Raúl Ciro was the polar opposite of the real one. Red eyelids, disfigured mouth, blotchy skin, hairy nose, greasy hair, the height of a dog sitting down; all these physical details belong to the real Raúl Ciro. Silky black eyelashes, sensual mouth, coppery skin, the nose of a young animal, lustrous hair, slenderness, all of these physical attributes belong to the imagined Raúl Ciro. Nevertheless, I think his voice remained the same in reality as in the imagination, a warm voice that was always saying something different behind each ordinary phrase—a voice fit for a perfect face and hands.
Women love with their eyes closed, men with their eyes open, which is why I could love Raúl Ciro and he could not love me despite my considerable and very apparent charms. Poor Raúl Ciro! Few women will have loved him or will love him. He is no longer young, and he wants to be. His face is filling up with incongruous wrinkles because he rejects them. And what can his dark mouth that looks like a kidney or a foam hair curler possibly say? Inside each person there is both hell and heaven. Hell is easier to see.
Did I fall asleep on the raft? Did I fall off the raft? I’ll never know. Please God, save me. I don’t know where I am.
There were people in a place, talking; you could not hear what they said. There was an intolerable din. Among the bursts of laughter you could hear a voice like a clarinet that dominated all the other voices, deep as tombs. I’ll never know what they were saying. Nor do I know if they were saying something or if the guttural sound of their voices was projecting some sort of announcement that everyone else in attendance understood. I dared to ask: “What language are they speaking?” The person I questioned looked me up and down; furious, I answered myself: “North Korean? Yiddish?” No one answered or protested. I left, my face wet and cold, in search of someplace silent. I threw myself on the floor like a used rag, aware that I was naked. A young man touched my breasts as he passed me. “Mermaid, go back to the sea,” was the only thing I understood. This brought about an orgasm that I never want to repeat.
Thank you, God, for having made my life possible, for allowing me to write up until the last orgasm, and to have written this novel in your honor.
CELIA OR CLELIA
Her name was Celia or Clelia. She was a hairdresser at the Naiad Beauty Salon. Among swarms of faces, hers stands out for its ugliness. What use was it to her to be young? Her eyes, with pupils like pinpricks, peered out from beneath greasy hair, her prominent jaw ended in a double chin, her mouth was a twisted violet or purple slash. None of the youthful features she possessed made her even mildly attractive. She would do my hair without speaking to me, with her eyes fixed on my head. I would ask her:
“Celia or Clelia, what’s wrong?”
She wouldn’t answer. It was me something was wrong with. One day I had a sty in one eye, another day a boil on the nape of my neck, another day a cold sore on my lip, until my hair started falling out and I decided to consult a dermatologist, but the ointments and remedies he gave me were useless. My baldness progressed, my boils multiplied, and don’t even get me started on the sties. Celia or Clelia would look at me sympathetically in the beauty shop mirror and, to console me, she would confide in me, her pinprick gaze fixed on the mirror, her frenzied, bitter voice trembling. Cooking was difficult for her, she told me: mayonnaise curdled on her, if she looked at the rice pudding the rice would separate from the milk, a cup of tea with milk underwent transformations under her gaze and became undrinkable. She couldn’t open the refrigerator: a simple glance at the desserts or the ice cream would cause them to go bad; the same thing happened with flowers, but in that case it wasn’t a matter of glances but, rather, of hands. The heat of her hands wilted everything they touched. In the mirror, I saw the tufts she yanked out as she combed my hair. Her eyes gleamed. Her hands moved like a harpist’s when she would lay the comb aside in order to place invisible golden bobby pins among my curls, which she had set with beer.
“I have to go,” I mumbled, watching the expressive to and fro of her hands.
“Impossible. I haven’t finished,” she protested.
“I don’t feel well, miss.”
“But you can’t leave with your hair wet, one side hanging down and the other pinned up.”
Trying not to look at her eyes in the mirror or at her horrible face or at the incessant movement of her hands, I staggered to my feet in order to demonstrate to her that I felt ill; and it was true that I felt ill: my ears were buzzing, my mouth was dry, chills ran up and down my body. Celia or Clelia’s reddened hands brandished the hairnet that she wanted to put on my head, two bobby pins between her pressed lips glittered like monstrous teeth.
“Miss Clelia, I’ll come back tomorrow. I feel like I’m going to faint today.”
“You’re just indisposed,” she replied implacably. “Women’s concerns. Sit down. I’ll go get you a glass of water and an aspirin.”
She took me by the arm and forced me to sit. The smell of shampoo, nail polish, hair dye, and heated cosmetics made me nauseated as I looked one last time, involuntarily, at Celia or Clelia’s eyes. She disappeared behind a curtain in search of water and aspirin, and I took advantage of the chance to leave with my hair all wet, forgetting my perfumed comb that was so lovely! The one Remigio gave me.
I’m more comfortable faceup. Faceup I drown. Faceup I look at the sky. Faceup I pray. Faceup I think about my entire life. Faceup I am my own bed.
REMIGIO LUNA
Remigio Luna, a mischievous but precocious child, would talk to me at the seashore like a grown man.
“I’ll wait for you on the beach this afternoon. What time?”
How I would like to be at the seashore. Why can’t I be an amphibian? The same thing would happen to me when I was sick in bed: I wish I were in bed, I would exclaim in my mind.
“I don’t know,” I would answer him.
“I’ll wait for you anyway. Are you going to bring what you promised me?”
I had promised him a little boat. Remigio was thin and nervous. His eyes were green and a little bit sad. His thick hair fell over his eyes, his asymmetrical features. He was intelligent, sensitive. I could talk to him like an adult, and more cheerfully. He was eight years old; he sketched.
Love is like those Russian dolls that have other, similar dolls inside them that are not them, yet they are all one. Some men are happy because they have no family, others because they do. Remigio had no family. I was his family. One day he tried to rape me.
At the bottom of the ocean I want to discover the meaning of life before I die.
GILBERTA VALLE
Gilberta Valle was eighty years old plus two more that she wouldn’t admit to. With her pink face she looked like a black skimmer bird. Small and thin, she was surprisingly agile. She lived in a village where we used to go shopping and on excursions to the hairdresser during the summer season. One day, the hairdresser Graciano Puco gave her a permanent: she, who never went to the hairdresser, had it done on a whim and also rouged her cheeks and applied lipstick for the first time, which really caught t
he hairdresser’s attention.
“What a temptress you are, Miss Gilberta Valle!” exclaimed the hairdresser when he saw her with her hair curled. “Are you going to a party?”
“I’m going on a trip.”
Gilberta Valle had sold everything she owned in order to go. She went every day to the home of Leonarda Cianculli, the secondhand clothes dealer. Leonarda, dressed in black, looked like a nun. Her green eyes twinkled sweetly. I met her at the pharmacy. She was always pregnant. By means of letters and photographs that came and went through Bahía Blanca, she had put Gilberta Valle in touch with a retiree who wanted to marry. Gilberta had sold everything she owned. She had her hair permed at the hairdresser’s on the day of her departure.
When her hair was finished, she left in a hurry. It was a rainy day. The hairdresser wiped the steamy shop window with his hand and looked out to see where Gilberta Valle was going. He saw her go into the house across the street where the secondhand clothes dealer lived. She never came out again.
Three old ladies, as old as Gilberta Valle, who spent the day knitting, making sweets and chatting, intrigued by Gilberta Valle’s disappearance, solved the mystery.
The secondhand clothes dealer, Leonarda Cianculli, and her husband began to seem suspicious. The couple had only lived a short while in that village, and they were poor as rats. Leonarda’s husband bought damaged cigarettes, personally extracted his own teeth, ate meat and polenta twice a week, drank maté from an earthenware mug, never took his wife to the movies, and when she was ill he took her to a veterinarian.
Suddenly, the husband changed his habits. He ate meat every day, went to the dentist, the cinema, sipped maté from a gourd through a silver straw, bought packs of cigarettes every day, made soap, called a gynecologist. The three old ladies-turned-detectives, one of them pallid and the other two flushed, wondered where this wealth came from. They became friends with Leonarda in order to worm the truth out of her; they invited her to one of their houses, they offered her drinks, which she accepted until she was tipsy. Among other topics, Leonarda spoke of an excellent soap that she made for washing her body and her clothes, and, through giggles, she told about how she had invented the supposed fiancé, had handwritten the letters herself, furnished the photographs, robbed and killed Gilberta Valle with a hatchet. Then she told them how she had cut her into little pieces, which (mixed into the potash) were used (except the bones, which she buried) to make the soap.
The three detectives turned into the Three Fates, snipping the thread of Leonarda’s life, since she died of unhappiness when she was arrested, a bar of soap in hand.
Will anyone think of me?
Where is my raft? I lost it.
MAURICIO CAIREL
Mauricio Cairel was languid and lively by turns; I didn’t like his dreamy, elongated face. Many people are capable of admiring him, but people are crazy. “He’s a great artist,” they say of anyone who has an antiques shop or very long hair or black teeth and purple fingernails. He repulses me. He makes spiders out of iron and glass that he steals or buys from cemeteries. I had café con leche with him one afternoon in La Perla del Once Café.
ANI VLIS
I met Ani Vlis in a mirror upon surreptitiously entering a room in the house where she lived with her family. Small, thin, nicknamed Teru-teru, she was hideous, but sometimes in the mirror a flicker of beauty would gleam in her eyes or in her straight hair, in the incongruous shape of her jaw, in the studied tilt of her head. To see her as more beautiful, I would always look at her in any mirror there was in a room, if there was one, or reflected in the glass of windowpanes or paintings, and never directly, as I felt great affection for her, and, in my opinion, she didn’t deserve to be so ugly.
At the age of seven an acute neurosis marked her for the rest of her life. No one could determine the origin of this neurosis, and the family came up with endless hypotheses in attempting to discover the cause of the affliction. Her parents were well-to-do and had showered her with toys as a child. In the display cabinet, two Scottish dolls, one with a drum, the other with a bagpipe, a gypsy woman with a tambourine, a chef with a toque and a skillet, a doll dressed for first communion, with rosary and prayer book, and a set of tiny furniture brought some measure of cheer to her life and amazed the guests, who would exclaim: “There’s no one as happy as little Ani, who has so many toys.” But Ani knew, ever since they had taken her appendix out, that each gift was a promise of a future torment. She remembered with horror those three consecutive days leading up to her surgery, when they had piled her room high with gifts. Why, if it wasn’t her birthday or Christmas or the New Year or Easter or the day of her first communion, did they give her so many gifts? She grew more and more uneasy with the appearance of each new toy. The three nights arrived, promising something atrocious. Finally, one cold morning, without breakfast, they dressed her in thick, white woolen tights, took her from her home in a shabby taxi, and carried her to an operating room in a sanatorium. There was some discussion; then they tied her down, put a mask on her, and anesthetized her with chloroform. She didn’t know where she was when she woke up. Ever since that day, poor Ani thought that all gifts were bribes, tricks, the promise of something horrible. She didn’t want them and would cry when she saw them.
“I want to be poor, Mama,” she would say to her mother.
But what was poverty? Poverty for her was to be free, to go barefoot, to not be operated on, to climb trees, to eat unripe fruit, to play in the mud and with fire, to not have a nanny or knitted gloves on her hands. Her mother replied:
“You don’t know what it means to be poor.”
Poor Ani would protest:
“I do know what it means to be poor.”
“You wouldn’t have any toys.”
“Even better.”
“Or shoes.”
“I like to go barefoot,” Ani would grumble.
LIVIO ROCA
He was tall, dark, and quiet. I never saw him laugh or hurry for any reason. His brown eyes never looked straight ahead. He wore a neckerchief tied around his throat and carried a cigarette between his lips. He was ageless. His name was Livio Roca, but people called him Deafellini because he pretended to be deaf. He was a loafer, but in his idle moments (he felt that doing nothing was not loafing) he repaired watches that he never returned to their owners. Whenever I could I’d escape and go visit Livio Roca. I met him on vacation, one day in January, when we went to spend the summer in Cachari. I was nine years old. He was always the poorest in his family, the most unfortunate, his relatives would say. He lived in a house that was like a railroad car. He loved Clemencia, perhaps his only consolation and also the talk of the town. The velvety nose, the cold ears, the curved neck, the short, soft fur, her obedience, all were reasons to love her. I understood him. At night, when he would unsaddle her, he would take his time saying goodbye to her, as if the heat coming off her sweaty body gave him life and took it away when he parted from her. He would give her water to drink in order to postpone the farewell, even if she wasn’t thirsty. He dawdled leading her into the lean-to, so she could sleep there at night, beneath a roof, in the wintertime. He dawdled because he feared what happened next: people said he was mad, stark-raving mad. Tonga was the first to say it. Tonga, with her bitter face and pinprick eyes, dared to criticize him and Clemencia. He never forgave her for it, nor did she forgive him. I also loved Clemencia, in my own way.
In the attic was grandmother Indalecia Roca’s silk robe. It was a sort of artifact that lay at the feet of a virgin painted green, with a broken foot. From time to time, Tonga and some other members of the family, or one guest or another, would add tacky flowers or little bundles of herbs that smelled of mint or sweet and brightly colored drinks. There were times when the moribund flame of a colorful spiral altar candle flickered at the virgin’s feet, and drops of melted wax as large as buttons fell on the silk robe, adorning it more than sullying it. Time was erasing these rituals: the ceremonies gradually grew less frequent. Pe
rhaps for this reason he dared to use the robe to make a hat for Clemencia (I helped him make it). I think that was the origin of his rift from the rest of the family. Tonga treated him like a pervert, and one of his brothers-in-law, who was a bricklayer, treated him like a drunk. He put up with the insults without defending himself. The insults didn’t offend him at first, but after a few days they did.
He remembered nothing about his childhood except misery. According to what he told me while we were sewing the hat, he had scabies for nine months, conjunctivitis for another nine months. Perhaps all this contributed to his loss of confidence in any type of happiness for the rest of his life. At eighteen years old, after he began to court his cousin Malvina, he may have sensed disaster the moment he gave her the engagement ring. Instead of feeling happy, he was sad. They had grown up together: from the moment he decided to marry her he knew that their union would not prosper. Malvina’s friends, who were numerous, spent their time embroidering initials onto sheets, tablecloths, nightshirts, but none of that lovingly embroidered cloth was ever used. Malvina died two days before the wedding. They dressed her as a bride and put her in the coffin with a bouquet of orange blossoms. Poor Livio couldn’t look at her, but inside the darkness of his hands, in which he hid his eyes on the night of her wake, he offered her his fidelity with a gold ring. He never spoke to another woman, not even his cousins, who are ugly; he didn’t look at actresses in magazines. They tried many times to find him a girlfriend. They would bring them over in the afternoons and sit them down in the little wicker chair: one was blond and wore glasses and people called her the little English girl; another was brunette with braided hair, and flirtatious; another, the most serious of them all, was a giantess, with a pinhead. It was no use. This was why he loved Clemencia so dearly, because women didn’t count for him. But one night, one of those uncles who are always hanging around, a sneering laugh on his lips, wanted to punish him for the sacrilege he had committed with the grandmother’s robe, and so he shot and killed Clemencia. The murderer’s laughter could be heard mingling with Clemencia’s whinnies.
The Promise Page 9