by Selva Almada
Just before they crossed back from the Uruguayan side of the bridge, a jararaca viper almost two metres long appeared suddenly in the middle of the road. The creature was half-coiled on the tarmac, though as the bike got closer Eduardo thought he saw it rear up, ready to spring and attack. The thick body, pale brown with dark patches, and the pale speckled belly, glittered in the sun. He swerved instinctively to avoid running it over, and he and Andrea’s cousin were almost flung onto the scorching road. He’d always imagined dying that way, but what shook him was seeing the jararaca in their path after the first psychic had talked of the devil’s business. He took the encounter with the snake as a sign.
When I was little, my grandma and I also used to go to a healer, Old Man Rodríguez. He lived in a shack on the edge of town, near a poor neighbourhood called Tiro Federal.
It made me nervous, but at the same time I liked going to his house and didn’t mind having to traipse all the way across town, always with a sore head or stomach, because if my grandma was taking me it was because I had indigestion or worms. I found the Old Man a bit frightening. He was very thin, as if his own body were sucking at his flesh from the inside, and this made him stoop, his skin shrunken like a freshly washed shirt. I don’t remember his face, but I do remember he had long fingernails like a woman’s. Dirty and yellow, his emaciated claws would slide over my swollen belly, tracing the shape of a cross a few times while he murmured things I didn’t understand.
His very gauntness made him look holy.
The room where he saw people was small and dark, badly ventilated. The flames of the candles burning here and there, always in different places, showed only a fraction of the room, which was whitewashed to ward off the vermin. I never had a full sense of what that room was like or what furniture there was, and I never recognised the faces in the prints on the walls or clustered atop the little makeshift altar.
He lived alone and on what we gave him. Sometimes cash, sometimes yerba mate, sugar, spaghetti, sometimes a piece of meat.
As well as curing parasites and indigestion, Old Man Rodríguez knew the secret of burns, sprains, shingles and even pata de cabra, that disease which can eat away at a baby and boil it in its own stomach juices.
I don’t know where his powers came from. Whether he’d inherited them from his mother or whether he’d been born with them, like a blessing that every now and then became a curse. When his powers took a dark turn, the Old Man wouldn’t answer even if people beat down his door, even if hordes of children were crying outside and the mothers were begging to be let in. Inside, most likely flat out on his camp bed, the Old Man would sleep off his drinking binge, taking a break from his secrets and powers, his body unconscious after the battering from bad wine, his mind blank. On those days there was no point waiting in the sun for night to fall. We could only turn back, insides crawling with worms, stomachs like drums, heads muddled.
Rodríguez the healer died long ago, in a bed in San Roque hospital, where old people who are alone in the world, with no family and no money, end their days. He would have had a pauper’s funeral, his body placed in an unsanded, unvarnished coffin, badly made and with no bronze handles, because why bother if there were no mourners to lift it. A casket barely stronger than an apple crate. He can’t have weighed much, the poor guy. Without a prayer for his soul or a priestly blessing, since there’s no mercy for those who know the secret, those whose powers offend God. He’d have been buried in an out-of-the-way plot, right up against the wire fence separating the cemetery from the neighbouring fields, barbed wire to stop the cows getting through and nibbling the stems of the flowers that wilt in the vases on summer days. An out-of-the-way plot, where people are buried when they have no one.
I come to the Señora on the recommendation of some writer friends who consult her when they have to make important decisions. They trust her sound judgement and her tarot cards.
When I call to ask for an appointment, I explain that my request might seem unusual: I don’t want to see her on my own behalf, but on behalf of three women who are dead. She tells me it’s more common than I think, and we agree a day and time.
No one’s ever done a card reading for me before and I’m slightly nervous at the thought. I’m worried she hasn’t understood that it’s not me I want to find out about but María Luisa, Andrea and Sarita. I don’t want to know my future. I don’t want her to dredge up any festering trauma from my past.
I felt confident when I went to Old Man Rodríguez because I was going there to be cured, but the gypsies terrified me because they could see the future. Every now and then they stopped in our town, on the same area of waste ground used by circuses and funfairs. They put up a big tent under the eucalyptus trees that surrounded the field, almost on the tarmac road known as Tráfico Pesado – for heavy vehicles – which joins Avenida Urquiza and then Avenida 131, to Villaguay. They made a living buying and selling cars. By the tent, along the roadside, they parked a line of cars and trucks, which displayed their chrome paintwork, gleaming in the sun, to everyone who passed.
In the weeks and even months they camped there, you’d often come across the women out shopping or walking around the town. Always in pairs or threes, sometimes with small children in tow, wearing those flowing gauze skirts and with scarves partly covering their very long, loose or plaited hair, their arms a mass of golden bracelets, their ears heavy with those golden hoops, and their feet clad in high-heeled shoes. No one trusted them: when they went into the grocer’s and other shops, an employee always watched them closely because everyone said their fingers were lightning quick. People said they stole children, too, that they snatched them away and sold them in the next town where they camped. They seemed to find all this suspicion entertaining. Whenever they walked past anyone, they’d shout out an offer to read their palm. That was what I found so terrifying, that they might grab my hand just like that, turn it over and read everything my palm could tell them, right down to the day of my death.
Once I saw something that made me look at these women differently. I’d been out running errands, I must have been around ten, and some way off I saw a gypsy couple. You didn’t often see the men in the street like that. It seemed they’d come out of a shop and were arguing on the pavement. He was waving his arms around, and as I got closer I heard him yelling. I kept at a safe distance, pretending to look in a shop window, because I was scared to walk too close to them. Out of the corner of my eye, I went on observing the scene. The man, a young guy, was talking very loudly, in a language I didn’t understand. She was listening to him, head bowed. At one point he shoved her in the shoulder. The woman’s body was thrown slightly off balance, but she didn’t fall. He turned and marched off with long, determined strides. Instead of following him, and I think he was expecting her to follow him, the woman sat down on the kerb and stayed there for who knows how long. I watched him vanish into the distance and grew tired of waiting for her to get up and leave. I screwed up my courage and walked straight past, behind her. She was hunched over, staring at her knees, and using a twig to draw in the loose dirt that had gathered by the roadside.
The Señora is a slim woman, with long, black hair and a blunt fringe. She wears miniskirts, and her lips and fingernails are painted red. She has tattoos. She must be around my mother’s age, but she looks like a young girl. As we go up the two flights of stairs, we talk about our mutual acquaintances. In her studio, she waves me towards a very comfortable chair, with wooden armrests and soft upholstery. She opens the windows slightly. The studio is built on the flat roof and has rectangular windows running all along two walls, and glass doors on the third through which cacti in pots can be seen dotted here and there on the brick-red tiles. She sits in a similar chair to mine, though hers looks more like a throne: a fair bit larger and made of wicker. A coffee table stands between us. There’s nothing on top but a green cloth folded in two.
I repeat what I told her over the
phone and reveal a little more: in two of the cases the relatives consulted psychics, but pretty much nothing came of those experiences. Maybe it was too soon, and maybe now it’s too late, I venture.
It’s never too late. But I think everything in the next world is tangled up together, like a ball of wool. You have to be patient and keep tugging at the end, a little at a time. Do you know the story of the Bone Woman?
I shake my head.
She’s an old, old woman and she lives deep in her lair of lairs. A wild old woman who clucks like a hen, sings like a bird and makes noises that are more animal than human. Her task is gathering bones. She collects and looks after everything that’s in danger of being lost. Her hut is full of all kinds of animal bones, but wolf bones are her favourite. She’ll cover miles and miles, scale mountains, wade through streams, burn the soles of her feet on desert sands to find them. Back in her hut, with her armful of bones, she pieces together the skeleton. When the final bit is in place and the figure of the wolf stands splendid before her, the Bone Woman sits by the fire and decides which song she’s going to sing. Once she’s decided, she raises her arms above the skeleton and begins. And as she sings, bone after bone is covered with flesh, and the flesh with skin and the skin with fur. She sings on and the creature comes to life, takes its first breaths, pricks up its tail, opens its eyes, leaps up and bounds from the hut. At some point in its headlong rush, whether from the speed, from the splashing water as it crosses a stream, or the moonbeams piercing one flank, the wolf turns into a woman who runs, free and unfettered, into the horizon, her laughter filling the air.
Maybe this is your mission: to gather the bones of these girls, piece them together, give them a voice and then let them run, free and unfettered, wherever they have to go.
4
When I was little, my mother told me the same anecdote several times. It was from when she’d just married my father. They married very young, at sixteen and eighteen, because my mum was pregnant – a pregnancy she lost at six months. They hadn’t been dating long, so they didn’t know each other all that well. Soon after moving in together, while they were eating lunch, they had an argument, some silly teenage spat that ended up getting heated. My father raised one hand as if to slap her. And my mother, not messing around, plunged a fork into his other hand, which was resting on the table. My father never tried to play the big man again.
Every time she told me the story, I found myself wondering which of those forks – and I loved that cutlery set with acrylic yellow handles they’d been given as a wedding gift – had tasted my father’s flesh.
I don’t remember a specific conversation about violence against women, or any particular warnings from my mother on the subject. But the topic was always there. It was there when we talked about Marta, the neighbour whose husband used to beat her, and who in turn knocked her own kids about, especially Ale, a little boy who only ever drew spiders. Sometimes we lay in the grass to look at the sky, and if we saw those long, thin, lumpy clouds, bunched together, like waves, he’d say: Look, my dad’s been ploughing the sky. His dad was a farmer. Ale died in a motorbike accident when he was sixteen.
It was there when we talked about Bety, the lady from the corner shop who hanged herself in her garden shed. The whole neighbourhood said her husband used to hit her, and that he knew how to do it so you never saw the marks. No one reported it. After her death, word got around that he’d killed her and covered it up, making it look like a suicide. It was possible. It was also possible that she’d hanged herself, sick of the life she was leading.
And it was there when we talked about the wife of López the butcher. Her daughters went to my school. She reported him for rape. For some time, as well as beating her up, he’d been sexually abusing her. I was twelve years old, and this news made a big impression on me. How could her husband have raped her? Rapists were always unknown men who grabbed hold of a woman and dragged her off to some patch of wasteland, or who broke into her house by forcing a door. From a very young age, we girls were told not to speak to strangers, and to watch out for the Satyr. The Satyr, in those early childhood years, was a figure as magical as the child-snatching Solapa or the Sack Man. It was the Satyr who could rape you if you went out alone at the wrong time or strayed into desolate places. Who could appear out of nowhere and carry you off to some building site. They never told us you could be raped by your husband, your dad, your brother, your cousin, your neighbour, your granddad, your teacher. A man you trusted completely.
And it was there when Cachito García would disturb the whole neighbourhood’s siestas by yelling at his girlfriend. Cachito was a petty thief and he was dating the eldest daughter of our neighbours the Bonnots. Don Bonnot worked building roads and was away from home most of the year. His wife and numerous female offspring, all very pretty girls, lived by themselves. Cachito, a jealous guy, was forever having a go at his girlfriend because she wore make-up or tight clothes or he saw her talking to another guy. One time he went a bit further. The Bonnot house was a wooden prefab and Cachito sprinkled the sides with kerosene and threatened to set it alight. The neighbours stopped him before everything went up in flames.
Alongside these situations sat other, more minor examples. My friend’s mum, who never wore make-up because her husband wouldn’t let her. My mother’s colleague, who handed her whole salary over to her husband each month to take care of. The woman who couldn’t see her family because her husband looked down on them. The woman who wasn’t allowed to wear high heels because they were for whores.
I grew up hearing grown women discussing situations like these in whispers, as if they were embarrassed by the poor woman’s plight, or as if they too were afraid of the man who hit her.
My mother discussed these stories loudly, indignantly, and it was always her fellow gossiper who signalled for her to lower her voice, or who gestured at us children, murmuring in the usual code: Careful, there’s laundry hanging up... as if saying those things were like saying dirty words, or worse, as if they were a source of unimaginable shame.
Mirta, Sarita Mundín’s sister, suspects that Dady Olivero used to hit her. Sarita never told her outright, but she was scared of him. In private, the two of them used to call Olivero the Randy Pig. Towards the end, whenever she knew he was coming over, Sarita would fill the house with her friends, guys and girls her age, so she didn’t have to be alone with him. Olivero would hang around for a bit, hiding his annoyance, drink a few mates and then leave in a huff.
The last day she spent with her sister, as if Sarita knew it was the last and wanted to teach her something that would stay with her, they had a conversation that Mirta will never forget.
Her sister told her: Don’t let anyone push you around. You have to make people respect you. Never let a guy lay a finger on you. If they hit you once, they’ll hit you forever.
Sarita was pregnant when she got married at fifteen. Mirta was following in her footsteps, single and expecting a baby at fourteen. Soon after Germán was born, Sarita’s husband started demanding she bring in some cash. Sarita turned to prostitution. She was picked up by Olivero, who would be first her customer, then her lover and protector, and the last person she was ever seen with.
From hustling by the roadside, she went on to build up a client list among the local branch of the Radical party. She and her friend Miriam García were party activists, two pretty young girls who soon caught the eye of the elderly men, distinguished members of society with the hypocrisy to match. Perhaps because of her fresh, girlish appearance, she was a hit with the old guys. But although things were going pretty well with the Radicals, and she had Olivero’s protection, too, there was one customer Sarita didn’t stop visiting. Another elderly, single man who lived in Oncativo, a city forty miles from Villa María, and who, according to Miriam García, helped her out with money.
José Bertoni, a bachelor uncle of my mother’s, also had a woman, La Chola, who
visited him at home. José owned a dumper truck and transported sand and stones short distances from a nearby quarry. He lived in a very nice house that he’d built himself. My cousin and I always went there to play because he had a huge garden with swings and because he let us do whatever we liked. Some afternoons, we’d see La Chola turn up with three or four kids around our age. She went inside with my uncle and we carried on playing. We knew that on no account were we to go inside or call them while they were in there. After a while they came out and had some mate, and La Chola fixed us a snack.
One of her children was a girl not much older than me. I don’t remember her name, but I do remember she was pretty and turned into a little woman overnight, with large breasts and wide hips that stretched the child’s dresses she still wore. And that on one of those afternoons she was the one who went inside with José Bertoni, while La Chola stayed on the patio drinking mate and we carried on playing as if nothing was going on.
Visiting a single man who slips you some cash in return is a kind of prostitution that’s normalised in provincial towns. Like the maid who meets her employer’s husband out of hours to add a few pesos to her salary. I saw it with girls in my family, when I was little. In the night, from the street, you hear a car horn. She’s been waiting, she grabs her purse and hurries out. No one asks any questions.
After Sarita’s disappearance, Olivero went on visiting the family. He took them cash, and packets of meat from his processing plant. Although the mother suspected he’d been mixed up in what happened, that he’d done something to her daughter, she accepted the gifts, swallowing her fury and pride. They were so poor that sometimes they had nothing to eat. Mirta was pregnant and they were raising Sarita’s son. The mouths needed feeding somehow.
It was Mirta who put a stop to Olivero’s charity visits. That last conversation with her sister was what gave her the courage to call time, on the afternoon when the Randy Pig showed up with the packets of meat and asked her to step into Sarita’s shoes.