A Beautiful Young Woman

by Julián López

  Before I could tell her that the only kids my age around here were the ones in the building, and that I barely knew them and was embarrassed, she said something else. “Do you want to call Darío? In a little while, I’ll borrow Elvira’s telephone, and we’ll invite him over,” she proposed as she lit a cigarette, plumes of smoke still rising from another cigarette in the ashtray in the living room.

  I remembered my friend Santi, his evil glee and his clenched fists and his hunched shoulders. I remembered the warmth and candor with which he invited me to get to know him. A wave of sweet honesty hit me hard in the chest. Wounded, I returned to my bedroom.

  I put the furniture back in its place. Behind me my mother arrived with the brush and shovel, the cigarette in her mouth. “Go and watch your cartoons for a while so I can tidy up,” she said while squeezing her right eye shut to stop the smoke getting in. A cylinder of ash, like an extension on a spaceship, broke off suddenly and fell to the Martian surface of worn parquetry in my dominions.

  While I was watching television the doorbell rang again and I ran to open the door, while my mother yelled at me again to ask who it was first, and once again, the tips of Elvira’s slippers appeared in our doorway. “You have a phone call. It’s urgent.”

  I heard the rasp of the broom falling to the floor, and I saw my mother emerge from my bedroom, cigarette in hand.

  “I’m coming!” She ducked into the bathroom, tossing the cigarette into the toilet and, after flushing, left the apartment and shut the door.

  After a few moments I followed her, crossing the tiles in the hallway that separated our apartments, and very quietly entered Elvira’s house, standing on the cool, dark parquetry of the landing, which smelled like cellophane candy wrappers. When I edged a little farther in, I didn’t realize, but the white light coming from the kitchen reflected off the floor, illuminating one side of my face. Elvira’s eyes and the almost white eyes of Ñata caught a glimpse of my serious face. In silence, I tried to hear who my mother was talking to, what she was saying, what tone of voice she was using for this very urgent phone call. I was in full sight of my neighbor and her dog as they sat on the sofa, but my mother’s back was turned to me, and she hunched over with the phone in her left hand, pressed to her shoulder, covering the mouthpiece with her right hand so none of the information could escape. While I tried to strain all my senses to put together the jumble of words and sounds coming from my mother’s mouth, any little snippet of information, a terrible noise froze the four of us in our tracks. For a second the silence shattered into fragments.

  A gust of wind had slammed the door to our apartment shut, and standing there on the parquetry, I came to the realization that our keys were on the other side of the door. Elvira held on to Ñata, and their eyes lowered to the ground. My mother turned around, her face contorted with fury and with one hand over the mouthpiece to stifle her shouting, she looked at me deeply, as if terrified, and without making sound, just moving her lips and fixating on me with her brown pupils, she screamed, “What have you done?”

  Then she went back to her urgent phone call and explained that she couldn’t keep talking, she had to go. I stood there as if rooted to the spot by the seam of white light that touched my face. My mother hung up and leaned for a moment against the table where the telephone sat, her back still to me. Elvira put Ñata back down on the sofa and looked up at my mother.

  “I think your door closed on you,” she said timidly, but trying to help. “I’ll have to see if I have a copy of your key, otherwise we can try mine. One time I was locked out, and I managed to open the door with the key from downstairs. When keys are old like ours, they can open anything.”

  My mother turned around. Her face was ashen, and she pulled her hair back and held it at the nape of her neck. She approached me in complete silence, stopped by my side, and put her left arm around my shoulder, pulling me to her. It was a strange embrace, a sideways embrace: strong, sad, silent. I’m not sure if my mother ever embraced in this way again, as if that embrace was an urgent communication, loaded with pieces of information in fragments too diffuse for me to understand at my age that they formed part of a whole that I needed to put together.

  What have I done? I thought. How will we ever get back into our house?

  Elvira strode over until she was in front of us. “Why don’t you leave him with me for a while?” she proposed. I realized that my mother had begun to cry in silence because I caught sight of a single tear turned into a prism of light, falling before me as if in slow motion, a rainbow teardrop against the backdrop of a dark room.

  My mother nudged me away gently with her flat stomach and Elvira pulled me toward her with her hand.

  “I don’t know what to do,” sobbed my mother discreetly.

  “Go on, leave him with me for a while. I’ll show him what I’m cooking for tomorrow.”

  My mother withdrew silently, and Elvira took me into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and showed me half a leg of ham.

  “I went all the way to Torgelón, and I bought half because a whole one would be too much. I shared the other half with another lady who also wanted some. To bring it back I had to hire a car service. You can’t imagine how much it weighs. I’m going to slice it using the machine, and then I’ll put it on the platter, in little rolls, some with a black olive and others with a little maraschino cherry. You know, I don’t like bittersweet things, but that’s how they do it. And if anyone else doesn’t like it, they can just take it out because it’s all held together with a toothpick. We’ll have that for the appetizer, along with olivier salad.

  I stopped to look at a little packet of paper sitting next to the ham.

  “You want to have a look at this?” Elvira took out the packet, put it on the table, then took out two spoons from the drawer and opened it. Inside the gray wrapping paper was a little jar of dulce de leche.

  The first spoonful filled me with a surprising joy. I was about to ask Elvira why my mother was crying, but that would be like pushing the spoonfuls of happiness we were sharing up to the precipice of a cliff.

  “Come here, Ñatita, come here.” Elvira used a silly voice to call the dog. I heard the dog’s claws and its first steps on the parquetry, and then she appeared around the corner with a look on her face like Mr. Magoo and wagged her tired tail. Elvira dipped her spoon into the dulce de leche and offered it to the dog. Then it seemed like Ñata smiled and came over and licked at the spoon energetically until nothing was left. I watched her from behind, her haunches almost bare, her tail hanging like a dead rat, but her tongue as fierce as a gladiator among a pile of corpses.

  I left my spoon to one side and told Elvira I wanted to watch TV. I went to the living room, which was still as dark as night, sat down on the sofa, and fell asleep.

  —

  “Helloooooo, who’s speaking?” I was woken by the ringing of the telephone and the excessively inquisitive tone of the voice answering, with its exaggeratedly elongated vowels. Ñata sat waiting underneath a chair, a rest stop in her journey around the living room, her blind eyes resting upon me with the perfect silence of a cotton picker waiting to be paid once the boss has blown his whistle. Without my realizing I had taken her place on the sofa—and I’m not sure whether it was because she was good or well-mannered or just toothless—she waited with resignation for the occupation to be over.

  Again the call was for my mother, who arrived and made clear signals for Elvira to say that she was not there. Her eyes were red, and her face was still ashen. Elvira picked up the phone again and twice denied my mother was there. In the course of her third denial the communication dropped out. The other person had hung up. They looked at each other.

  “How did you get back inside?” I asked. Elvira switched on one of the lamps covered in cotton tulle, and the room turned pink. The phone rang again, and this time it was my mother who ran to answer it, saying, “I won’t go, I won’t go.”

  There was a moment of great vitality when the color rushed
back to my mother’s face and Ñata’s whole body tensed, from the tip of her tail through to her head, and her ears shot up straight like two pointy cones, as if she were an English setter that had just caught the scent of a fallen duck, and not an animal of pedigree undone by too much human attention.

  I suppose Swiss cotton tulle is a good choice to use a more vibrant palette of colors, because the light from the lamp definitely chased away the shadows for a few moments. My mother hung up, and Elvira looked at her.

  “Who was it?” The telephone rang again as she asked the question, and Elvira said to leave it, that they would get tired of calling.

  My mother turned to me and suggested we go home and continue the preparations for Christmas Eve, which was the next day. I had never seen her so enthused by Christmas, and I was excited to think that at last the baby Jesus would find in our home a nice place to bring his cow, his donkey, his young mother, his abusive father, his star of Bethlehem, his bizarre Wise Men, and his manger full of straw so that he could get started on the most scandalous vaudeville show in Western history.

  “And we have to make some lunch. With so much drama we haven’t had anything to eat,” said my mother in a tone that showed nothing would sway her intentions. “How would you like some sausages?” Once again she offered the same meal that I would happily eat for every lunch and every dinner for the rest of my life.

  “Wait,” said Elvira. “Why don’t you leave him with me this afternoon? The Titans of the Ring will be at the Riestra Club, and they let me in for free. We’ll just take the 44 bus and spend the afternoon there, I’m friends with the girls in the co-op, and we can have a hot dog there.” Then she looked at me and said, “What do you think, shall we go?”

  The idea of seeing the Titans seemed very strange to me, but taking a bus with Elvira and spending the afternoon far away from our apartment filled me with enthusiasm. I just smiled and my mother accepted, with relief.

  “Come on then, let me comb that bird’s nest and change your T-shirt.”

  —

  A short while later Elvira held me by the hand as we waited at the bus stop. I think she was more nervous than I was because she didn’t look at me, but held on tight with a sweaty hand while scanning the horizon for the red and blue 44 bus. She would shift her weight from foot to foot and look out intently, as if she could make the bus materialize through her urgency. She didn’t seem calm in the street, as if it were a space where anything could happen, and only the arrival of the hulking twenty-seater would mean we were on our way to friendly territory.

  I had never been to the Riestra Club, I had never been to Pompeii, I had never seen the wrestler known as the Mummy, and I had never been out alone with the world’s biggest fan of Swiss cotton tulle.

  Elvira reminded me of Santi’s mom and his sister, and she also made me remember the slap, his mother’s shove, the dress covered in orange dust, the shock felt by that woman at the sound of the slap landing on her daughter’s cheek. I thought I might come across my friend again, sitting on the bench of wooden slats, in the middle of a bluish mist like I’d never seen anywhere else, waiting for me without knowing it in the botanical gardens, ready for me to tell him all about my trip to see the Titans, like a rascal whose chest trouble settles down with the fresh air of friendship.

  During the journey Elvira still wouldn’t look at me. We traveled along on a bench for two people—I called dibs on the window seat, and from the aisle seat she strained to keep her eyes on the road, her hands gripping her purse like a pulpit. Eventually, to calm her down, I asked her to sing me a song, and then she left her sentry post, looking at me with a kind face, and sang one of my favorite tangos to me in a low voice, looking me right in the eyes, one that she always sang and that I knew by heart: “Leave me alone, I don’t want you to kiss me, because of you I am suffering the most painful torture; leave me alone, I don’t want you to touch me, those hands hurt me, they hurt me, and they burn me.”

  I hated myself for being so good: Elvira’s soft voice drifted into ever more lurid warbles that attracted the attention of the other travelers, and she, giving in to her songstress’s spirit, never once took her eyes off mine or bothered to lower her voice, rising each time a passenger turned their head to watch. I tried to remain attentive as long as I could, then at one point I turned around quickly to see if something outside the window could be my salvation. But Elvira, a giant squid entrancing her prey, gently tugged at my hands and brought me back to her intimate tango. I hated myself so much for being so submissive and so easily giving in to embarrassment that the only thing I was thankful for was that this scene had not transpired in the botanical gardens, in front of my friend Santi.

  —

  Entering the atmosphere of the Riestra was an event in itself. Even outside, before you passed through the doors, you could feel how the air was heavy with the expectation of momentous events, and Elvira began scanning the horizon again for something familiar that would provide her some comfort. She had put on a lot of makeup, and it wasn’t Sweet Honesty she was exuding—thank God it wasn’t—but her perfume smelled a lot like Siete Brujas.

  As soon as we entered the club we began to receive greetings, but Elvira seemed to be in a hurry and didn’t want to stop. What I remember clearly is that, despite a feeling of the county fair in the room, there was something solid in the atmosphere, something palpable that drew you in. A province in the air, an invisible nation, very much alive, noisy and bloody. When we reached the secretary’s office, “the girls,” as Elvira called them, all stood up straightaway and greeted her, moving toward us like bunny rabbits from a cartoon.

  “Look who I brought along, look at these eyelashes,” she said, shaking my hand at them, the hand she had never once let go. “All eyes he is, girls, the love of my life.”

  Elvira strutted about in front of a gaggle of women who looked very much like her, who surrounded me with cackles and lewd winks straight out of the old movies. I can’t remember how many times I had to acquiesce to those ladies, each time they asked for more and more, and they seemed so happy when I slowly flitted my eyelashes for them. I was at ease and held court like a sovereign draped in ermines in the middle of a winter of lush trees festooned with tiny twinkling Siberias. I surveyed my dominions, more in command than ever before and with an ecstatic and satisfied harem, the likes of which I would never experience again.

  In the midst of so much excitement I realized that Elvira’s hand had unwittingly released mine, and I saw the fabric of her dress and the stockings on her legs and her heels slipping away among the women toward the door while she asked the rest of them to look after me, promising to come back straightaway. The girls let out another round of cackles and comments that I couldn’t understand, and I began to feel like the character El Mudo from that old Carlos Gardel film, standing on the balcony of a hotel, the skyscrapers of New York in the background, surrounded by the loose beauty and the hair with undyed roots of Peggy, Betty, Julie, and Mary.

  “Are you thirsty, honey? Do you want something to drink?” asked one of the girls, and conferred upon me the excitement of a new certainty: I was a honey with the thirst of a legionary in the desert.

  A little overwhelmed, but nonetheless unable to let go completely of the sophisticated character that, until that point, I had portrayed so well on the stage, I asked shyly for a Delifrú tomato juice.

  Right away I was taught a lesson that I’m not sure I was able to comprehend all at once. The only response I received was the dismissal from those who until now had adored me. New York turned its back on the famous Morocho del Abasto, and the secretaries returned to the normality of existing for purposes far more bureaucratic than mine. Something had happened, I realized, just as I heard, “A what? Here we drink yerba mate, or Komari and soda. Do you want a glass, honey?”

  Elvira came back after a while with her hair flattened and a noticeable nervousness. Where’s the love of my life, she called out, as she entered the secretaries’ office, an
d the girls smiled.

  “Come with me and I’ll take you to the dressing room, then you can meet all the guys.” She took me by the hand, we crossed the hallway, the bocce court, the tiled courtyard with the ring where the Titans would meet, and then off to the side we arrived at a narrow room divided by metal lockers, a window high on the wall and some lamps sitting on a long bench in front of a mirror.

  It was difficult to move around in this space, and although there was no door and it was wide open, I knew immediately that we were entering a private space, and that we were allowed in only because Elvira was a friend of the organizers. I didn’t want to go in, I didn’t want to be there at all. I had never been interested in the Titans and their wrestling matches, and I was scared of those big men in leotards who were putting make up on each other that dripped slowly off the edge of their faces, in the furrows of their wrinkles. They patted my head like so many Saturns wiping their scythes clean on my hair after slicing off the testicles of their father. They put their faces too close to mine, contorting them with false sympathy, and they all sounded like that old actor Pepe Marrone when they called me cheeee, drawing out the sound of the e. Elvira was excited, and she introduced me to each one of them as they got ready. I didn’t know what to say or how to look, or how to act like a little boy finally living a long-held dream.

  There was no way these scenes of apparent happiness could compare with those fierce settings where the light was blue and misty, where little boys pull down their pants to show their crusts of eczema, where little girls who are too sure of themselves are burnt at the stake with humiliation by witches.

  And my mother couldn’t be farther away from this gymnasium, rippling through the surrounding air like an underwater current that comes from the depths of some extraordinary ocean. All of the characters here were determined to make me happy, and they raised their voices to spur each other on in the face of my dismay and my resounding failure to etch a smile on my face. Neither the tenderness I felt at my first solo adventure with Elvira, nor her clear intention to offer me something exclusive, nor even those florid old ladies whom I offended by asking for the bitter cocktail of my sophistication could sway me.