Mimí’s success had made us financially secure. Now we lived across from a park where nursemaids wheeled their employers’ children and chauffeurs walked pedigreed dogs. Before we moved, we had given all the Calle República girls Mimí’s collections of stuffed animals and embroidered pillows, and had stored the figurines she had made from porcelana. I had made the mistake of teaching her that craft, and for months she spent her free time mixing dough and modeling knickknacks. But when the professional she had hired to decorate her new home saw the creations made from Universal Matter, he nearly suffered a heart attack. He begged Mimí to put them away somewhere, and not spoil the plan of his décor; Mimí agreed, because she was attracted to that pleasant, mature man with gray hair and dark eyes. They developed such a sincere friendship that she was convinced she had at last found the mate promised by her horoscope. Astrology never fails, Eva. It’s written in my chart that I’m going to find a great love in the second part of my life.
For a long time the decorator played a major role in our lives, changing them in significant ways. Through him we became acquainted with a culture we never knew existed. We learned to choose the right wines—until then we had thought you drank red wine at night and white during the day—to appreciate art, and take an interest in what was happening in the world. We devoted our Sundays to art galleries, museums, theater, film. It was with him I attended my first concert, and the impression was so overpowering I did not sleep for three nights; the music kept resounding inside me, and when finally I could sleep, I dreamed I was a blond wood stringed instrument with mother-of-pearl inlay and ivory pegs. For a long time I never missed a performance of the orchestra. I would sit in a box in the balcony, and when the director lifted his baton and the hall flooded with music, tears of happiness rolled down my cheeks. The decorator had done everything in white—modern furniture with an occasional antique accessory—so different from anything we had seen that for weeks we wandered around the rooms as if we were lost, terrified to move anything because we might forget its exact place, or to sit on an Oriental divan because we might flatten the feather cushions. But, as he had assured us from the beginning, good taste is an addiction, and we grew to like it and to scorn the trash we had once lived with. One day that delightful man announced he had been hired by a magazine in New York. He packed his suitcases and said goodbye to us with genuine regret, leaving Mimí in a stupor of dejection.
“Come out of it, Mimí,” I pleaded. “If he went away, that proves he wasn’t your predestined mate. The real one will come along soon.” The irrefutable logic of this argument afforded her some consolation.
As time passed, the perfect harmony of the décor suffered a few changes, but they merely made the house more livable. First it was the seascape. I had told Mimí how much the spinster and bachelor’s painting had meant to me, and she believed that my fascination must have its source in genetics; surely it had come from some oceangoing ancestor who had transferred to my blood his irrepressible longing for the sea. Since that corresponded to the legend of my Dutch grandfather, we explored the antique and secondhand shops until we found an oil painting of rocks, waves, gulls, and clouds, which we bought without a second’s hesitation and hung in a place of honor—with one stroke destroying the effect of the Japanese prints our friend had chosen with such care. Then, little by little, I acquired a family to display on the wall, antique daguerreotypes faded by time: an ambassador covered with medals; an explorer with great mustaches and a double-barreled gun; a grandfatherly type with wooden shoes and a meerschaum pipe, gazing toward the future with hauteur. Once I had my imposing family tree, we looked everywhere for a picture of Consuelo. I rejected everything I saw until at the end of one long day we came upon the picture of a delicate and smiling young girl in a garden of climbing roses, dressed in lace and protected by a parasol. She was beautiful enough to embody my image of my mother. In my childhood I had never seen Consuelo in anything but an apron and canvas shoes, performing everyday household chores, but I always knew in my heart that she was like the exquisite lady of the parasol, because that was what she became when we were alone in the maids’ quarters, and that is how I wanted to preserve her in my memory.
* * *
I spent those years attempting to make up for lost time. I took evening courses to get a bachelor’s degree that was never good for anything, but at the time I thought indispensable. During the day, I worked as a secretary in a factory that manufactured military uniforms, and at night I filled my notebooks with stories. Mimí had begged me to leave that unproductive job and dedicate myself to writing. Ever since she had seen a line of people outside a bookstore waiting to have their books signed by a thickly mustached Colombian writer on a triumphal tour, she had showered me with notebooks, pencils, and dictionaries. That’s a good career, Eva. You don’t have to get up too early and there’s no one to order you around. . . . She dreamed of seeing me devote my life to literature, but I needed to earn a living, and in that regard writing does not offer a very firm footing.
Soon after I left Agua Santa and lived in the capital, I began looking for my madrina, because the last time I had heard anything about her she was not well. I found her living in an old section of the city in a room furnished by compassionate souls who had taken pity on her. She had few possessions, apart from her saints and the stuffed puma—miraculously intact in spite of time and the havoc of poverty. A person should always have an altar at home, she used to say. That way you only spend money for candles, not on priests. She had lost a few teeth—among them the gold one, sold out of necessity—and all that remained of her once-voluminous flesh was a memory; but she had not lost her habits of cleanliness, and still filled her water jug each night to bathe. Her mind was so cloudy that I understood it would be impossible to rescue her from the private mazes in which she was lost, and had to limit myself to frequent visits and to bringing her vitamins, cleaning her room, and providing her with treats and with rose water that kept her smelling as sweet as in former times. I tried to have her admitted for treatment, but no one would pay attention to her; she was not seriously ill, they said, and there were so many other priorities that medical services could not be wasted on cases like hers. Then one morning the family she was living with called me in alarm: my madrina had fallen into a deep depression and had not stopped crying for twelve days.
“Let’s go see her. I’ll go with you,” Mimí said.
We arrived just as she had reached the limits of her endurance and cut her throat with a razor. From the street we heard the scream that attracted the whole neighborhood. We ran inside and found her lying in a pool of blood spreading like a lake under the feet of the stuffed puma. She had slashed her throat from ear to ear, but she was still alive and paralyzed with fright. She had sliced the muscles of her jaws; her cheeks had contracted and she was grinning a horrifying, toothless smile. All the strength drained from my body and I had to lean against the wall to keep from falling, but Mimí knelt beside her and, using her mandarin fingernails, pressed the edges of the wound together and staunched the outpouring of my madrina’s lifeblood until an ambulance arrived. Those fingernails maintained their grip all the way to the hospital, as I trembled uncontrollably. Mimí is a surprising woman. The doctors rushed my madrina into the operating room and stitched her up like a sock, miraculously saving her life.
When I went to collect her belongings from the room where she had been living, I found an old pouch containing the long braid of my mother’s hair, as red and brilliant as the skin of a surucucú. It had lain forgotten all those years, having escaped being made into a wig. I took it and the puma with me. The attempted suicide at least had the effect of focusing attention on the sick woman, but as soon as she was discharged from emergency care, she was transferred to the Hospital for the Insane. After a month we were allowed to visit her.
“This is worse than Santa María,” Mimí declared. “We have to get her out of here.”
Tied to a ce
ment post in the center of a patio, surrounded by deranged women, my madrina no longer wept; she sat silent, motionless, her stitches stretching like a seam across her neck. She wanted her saints; she felt lost without them. Devils were chasing her, threatening to take away her baby, the monster with two heads. Mimí tried to cure her using positive energy waves, following the Maharishi’s manual, but my madrina was impervious to esoteric therapies. That was the beginning of her obsession with the Pope; she wanted to see him and ask for absolution of her sins, and to calm her I promised to take her to Rome, never dreaming that one day we would see the Holy Father in person dispensing his blessings in the tropics.
We took my madrina from the asylum, bathed her, combed her few remaining tufts of hair, dressed her in new clothes, and moved her with all her saints to a private clinic situated on the coast, amid palm trees, cool waterfalls, and huge cages of macaws. It was a nursing home for the rich, but they accepted her in spite of her appearance because Mimí was a friend of the director, an Argentine psychiatrist. She was given a pink room with a view of the ocean and piped-in music; it was very expensive, but it was more than worth the money because for the first time I could remember, my madrina seemed content. Mimí paid for the first month, but I knew it was my responsibility. That was when I found the job in the factory office.
“That’s not for you. You should study to be a writer,” Mimí insisted.
“You can’t study to be a writer.”
* * *
Just as Huberto Naranjo had abruptly re-entered my life, he vanished without explanation only hours later, leaving behind a trail of jungle, mud, and dust. I began to live on expectation, and during that long forbearance I relived many times the afternoon of our first lovemaking when, after drinking our coffee almost without speaking, and staring at each other with passionate resolution, we had walked hand in hand to a hotel and tumbled into bed; he confessed that he had never loved me like a sister and that in all those years he had never stopped thinking of me.
“Kiss me. I shouldn’t love anyone, but I can’t let you go now. . . . Kiss me again,” he whispered as he put his arms around me; afterward, trembling, covered with sweat, he lay with eyes like stone.
“Where do you live? How can I find you?”
“Don’t look for me. I’ll come back whenever I can.” And again, urgent and clumsy, he pulled me to him.
Days went by and I heard nothing from him; Mimí believed it was the consequence of my having surrendered on our first meeting. How many times have I told you? You have to make them beg. Men do everything they can to get you in bed, and then when they get their way they scorn you. Now he thinks you’re easy. You can just sit and wait—he won’t be back. But Huberto Naranjo did return; again he came up to me on the street, and again we went to the hotel and made love with the same urgency. After that meeting I had the premonition that he would always come back, although on each occasion he hinted it might be the last time. He had come into my life in a mist of secrecy, bringing with him something heroic, something terrible. That something challenged my imagination, and it may be why I resigned myself to loving him under such precarious circumstances.
“You don’t know anything about him. I’ll bet he’s married and has half a dozen kids,” Mimí fumed.
“Your mind has been poisoned by those programs of yours. Not everyone is like the villains in your television series.”
“I know what I’m saying. I was raised to be a man. I went to a boys’ school, I played with boys and tried to keep up with them at the soccer stadium and in bars. I know much more on this subject than you do. I don’t know about other places in the world, but here there’s no such thing as a man you can trust.”
Huberto’s visits did not follow any predictable pattern; he might be absent for a week or two, or several months. He did not call or write; he never sent messages, but suddenly, when I least expected, he would intercept me somewhere on a street—as if, hidden in the shadow, he knew all my comings and goings. He always looked different: sometimes it was a mustache, sometimes a beard, or his hair might be combed differently, as if he were in disguise. That worried me, but it also attracted me; I felt as if I had several lovers at the same time. I dreamed of a place where we could be together; I wanted to cook his meals, wash his clothes, sleep with him every night, and stroll through the streets hand in hand, like man and wife. I knew that he was starved for love, for tenderness, for justice, for happiness—for everything. He would crush me in his arms as if trying to satisfy the appetites of centuries, murmuring my name, and suddenly his eyes would fill with tears. We talked about the past, about being children together, but we never referred to the present or the future. Sometimes we were together less than an hour; he seemed to be on the run. He would embrace me with anguish and rush away. If there was more time, I would fondle him, explore his body, count his small scars, his identifying marks, observe that he was thinner, that his hands were more calloused, his skin rougher. What is this?—it looks like a wound. No, it’s nothing, come. At each parting I was left with a bitter taste in my mouth, a mixture of passion, depression, and something akin to pity. In order not to upset him, I sometimes feigned a satisfaction I was far from experiencing. My need to make him love me and stay with me was so great that I had decided to follow Mimí’s advice and not practice any of the tricks I had learned from La Señora’s books, or teach him Riad Halabí’s knowing caresses. I never spoke of my fantasies, or indicated the precise chords Riad had struck, because I sensed he would hound me with questions—Where? Who with? When did you do it? Despite all the boasting about women I had heard when he was a teenager—or maybe because of that very reputation—he was almost prudish with me. I respect you, he told me. You’re not like the others. What others? I asked, and he would smile, ironic and remote. I consciously did not tell him of my adolescent passion for Kamal, my futile love for Riad, or my brief affairs with other lovers. When he asked how I had lost my virginity, I answered, Why should you care about my virginity when you can’t offer me yours? Huberto’s reaction was so violent that I passed over the incomparable night with Riad Halabí and invented the story that I had been raped by the police in Agua Santa when they arrested me for Zulema’s death. We had an absurd argument, and finally he apologized: I’m a brute, forgive me, it’s not your fault, Eva. Those bastards will have me to pay, I swear. They’ll pay for what they did to you.
“When things calm down, it will go much better,” I argued in conversations with Mimí.
“If you’re not happy now, you never will be. I don’t understand why you go on seeing someone that strange.”
For a long while, my relationship with Huberto Naranjo affected my everyday life. I was desperate, wild, possessed by a compulsion to enslave him, never to let him leave my side. I slept badly; I had horrible nightmares; I was almost out of my mind. I was unable to concentrate on my work or my stories, and to find some relief I sneaked tranquilizers from the medicine cabinet and took them on the sly. But as time passed the phantom of Huberto Naranjo began to recede, to be less consuming; it dwindled to a more comfortable size and I began to live for other things, not just desiring him. My life still revolved around his visits, because I loved him. I felt like the protagonist of a tragedy or the heroine of a novel, but I was able to live a normal life and do my writing at night. I recalled the vow I had made after loving Kamal: never again to suffer the unbearable hell of jealousy, and I clung to it with sullen and obstinate determination. I would not allow myself even to speculate that he looked for other women when we were apart, or to worry that he was a gangster, as Mimí insisted. I wanted to think there was some higher reason for his behavior, a world of adventure that I could not enter, a world of men governed by unalterable laws. Huberto Naranjo was loyal to a cause that to him was more important than our love. I would have to understand and accept that. I cultivated a romantic love for that man who was becoming increasingly leaner, stronger, more silent; but I stop
ped making plans for the future.
The day two policemen were killed near the factory where I worked, my suspicions were confirmed that Huberto’s secret had something to do with the guerrilla movement. The policemen had been gunned down by machine-gun fire from a moving car. The street immediately filled with people, patrol cars, and ambulances; the whole area was taken over. Inside the factory they shut down the machines, lined up the operators in the courtyards, searched the building from top to bottom, and finally released us on orders to go directly home because the entire city was in a state of emergency. I walked to the bus stop, where Huberto Naranjo was waiting for me. It had been almost two months since I had seen him, and I had difficulty recognizing him; he seemed to have aged overnight. This time I felt no pleasure at all in his arms. I did not even try to pretend; my thoughts were elsewhere. Later when we were sitting on the bed, naked on the rough sheets, I had the feeling that each day we were drifting farther apart, and I grieved for the two of us.
Eva Luna Page 24