by Lily Pond
The first time the river flooded the gardens that Lucas had been knitting throughout the town plaza, it pulled up a congregation of plants at the root. It had taken the gardener almost four years to build his vegetable empire. Lucas had just pruned the cedar trees and the rubber trees, curing them of parasites and other tropical diseases that afflicted them. The buckets of resin filled with mud; the currents undid the tourniquets straightening trunks the winds had left crooked. But he had known this was bound to happen sooner or later. He had known it ever since he started scouting the river banks in search of resins and noticed that the river bed was artificial: it had been detoured deliberately to comply with the expanding needs of the municipality. “Things have their lives and their deaths and follow their course on earth. That cannot be changed by the hands of man,” Nana had said to him when he told her about his discovery. And the words uttered by the old healer were providential, because weeks later the river took it upon itself to recover its original course and flooded the town. The biggest loss was not the town gardens. Due to the unfortunate whim of the Humacao, more than two hundred people died, almost all of them from Patagonia. Among them, Nana.
It was an affair of destiny. After work, and after distilling two gallons of Tabonuco resin in the back rooms of Nana’s little house, he went to fetch the whore shit from the huts. One of the girls, honey-gold like the substance he had just distilled from the heart of the trees, opened the door, her eyes, and Lucas’ heart. She was new, he hadn’t seen her before, but that afternoon she offered herself to him for twenty dollars, and he left thirty on the dressing table made of pine slabs, next to the little mattress where they made love until dawn. The rattling of the rain could be heard in the distance while he penetrated her softly during the first round of caresses and she opened silently to let him come in between her legs. Lucas spent time on top of her, moving like the willows in the cemetery. He noticed that at first the girl was only doing her job, but little by little the hinges in between her legs started to moisten, smelling like a newly cut cedar tree. Then Lucas moved more hastily until she arched her little back in a thrust, he stuck his ribcage to her chest and released in a languid and sad sigh, while her vulva throbbed around him inside her. Three, four times she dissolved under him. When she was exhausted and had forgotten herself, and while the heavy rain threatened to dissolve the roof slats at the Conde Rojo and the river roared and dragged away in its roaring course half of the inhabitants of Patagonia, Lucas Poubart penetrated the woman for the fifth time. With the first push he felt that his stomach was filling with all the juices his body had been capable of producing in the years he had existed on the face of the earth. And he emptied himself completely into that little golden woman, while she covered her face with her hair, trying to keep him from seeing the face of death in the midst of the disaster that was their passion.
Fate saved them both. They had passed the river’s swelling in the highest of the huts that made up the brothel. But the rest of Patagonia was pure desolation. It was located on a steep slope, close to the river. The waters of the Humacao had reached the plaza and, what was worse, trapped Nana in her bedroom, where her neighbors found her, dead. When Lucas arrived, he found the neighbors untangling Nana’s corpse from the sheets that had tied her to the pillars of the bed. With one deep scream he dissolved in tears, embracing his grandmother’s dead body.
It was close to noon when Lucas finally came out of his stupefaction, let go of Nana’s body over the kitchen counter, and went out on the street to help the rest of the people. With water up to his waist, he saw people trapped amid the debris, boards, branches, and mattresses from houses that had been destroyed by the current. Thinking of Nana and what he had learned from her, he began disentangling the dead, saving those who were still alive, taking the mud from out of their noses and massaging their submerged lungs. He gave artificial respiration, warmed body parts, embraced orphans and widows. He took them to higher ground, out of danger, and by nighttime he collapsed from exhaustion on one of the benches in the shelter that the municipality had opened for victims of the disaster. He slept there without moving all night.
When Lucas awoke, he found that the river had receded to its original level. He went back to his house to make arrangements for Nana’s burial. He didn’t call a funeral home, but rather, went to the little room for distilling sap and cleared a place on his work table for Nana’s already stiff corpse. From the flooded workshop, he rescued a can that, miraculously, had not been taken by the swelling of the river. Inside the can was a heavy ointment with a pungent smell. He opened the can, rubbed the balm on his hands, took Nana’s clothes off, and with that cataplasm massaged her swollen and grey body. It took hours: face, jaw, neck, ears, hair, and then lowering his fingers and pressing against the shoulders, against the strong arms of that woman who had raised him since childhood. He took her fingers, so similar to his own, he filled them with the distilled ointment, he moistened them with his own silent tears. He smeared her chest, being careful to apply less solution on the dark aureoles. He lowered his hands, pushing hard on her belly and then her legs. He opened Nana’s legs, caressed her grey pubis, and tenderly filled the cracks with sap—expert, connoisseur and humble in his duty of returning the smoothness and the moisture to his grandmother’s dead body. He put it under a warm light, and waited three hours. Later, he wrapped her with a dress he had bought for her days before and went to the patio to finish making a coffin of polished mahogany, lightly stained a reddish brown that matched Nana’s skin perfectly.
Four days after the burial, which was the most beautiful of all the burials celebrated in Patagonia, he went to what was left of the whores’ huts to look for the golden woman. He didn’t find her. Nobody could tell him for certain where she was. Dona Luba, one of the oldest whores in the neighborhood, told him the rumors that her father had come down all the way from Yabucoa to take her away. “That damned man was the first one to disgrace her. Aurelia herself told me when she had just arrived in the barrio. When she heard he had found her, she took advantage of the chaos of the flood and ran away. She must be hiding somewhere. If you see her before I do, tell her to leave the Conde Rojo and come work for me. If I see her first, I’ll tell her you’re looking for her.”
While he waited for news about Aurelia, Lucas concentrated on repairing the gardens in the plaza. One day they called him to the mayor’s office. There they told him that they required his services, but for a different occupation than reviving plants in the plaza. There were still bodies floating in the river that the current had dragged to the outskirts of town, bodies that nobody wanted to go pick up and that were fostering disease. “They are the corpses of whores. Nobody wants to touch them. We fear the worst: epidemics, plagues, pollution. We can’t take the risk of having those bodies dragged by the current to neighboring towns. A scandal like that would soil the good name of the mayor.” Lucas accepted the task. He asked for transport to scout the river banks, on the condition that they raise his salary and grant him total independence in selecting the plants and trees to be seeded in the town plaza.
That was how Lucas, the municipal gardener, became the retriever of drowned whores’ corpses. Much to his surprise, dead prostitutes kept showing up in the river waters long after he had removed all those that had drowned during the flood. Once in a while he was called in by the municipality to go pick up stray corpses. “Another whore drowned by the flood,” the policemen who called Lucas to work said with muffled laughter. He got used to the custom after the first months and would go out on his own, patrolling the river banks to save the officials a call and avoid interruptions to his routine as a gardener, to which he returned after the first round of rescues.
It was always the same story with the recovered corpses. First he would jump in the river, swimming, to disentangle the bodies from the plants that stopped drowned whores from floating downstream. He would disentangle their hair to see if he could identify them. When he got to them, some already had their lips
pitted by the fishes, or their eyelids populated by crustaceans, and their insides inhabited by little shrimp and water fleas. It was hard to identify them, if it wasn’t for the little chain on the left ankle that revealed their profession. Those that were disfigured he carried softly, as if they were asleep, and deposited at the morgue. With those whose death was fresher, he would become attached without knowing why. Then, he would take them home. He would prepare some sort of oil for them with a pleasant essence to take from their faces the rictus of surprise at finding themselves drowned, the nightmarish fear on their faces and in their muscles. He would expertly caress their flesh, smooth their faces with his hands, thinking about how nobody was going to claim them, how they would be thrown in the garbage dump, cremated, without a single good-bye caress. The whole town had touched these bodies and now wanted nothing to do with them. “Nobody wants to touch you,” Lucas would tell their nether parts, “nobody wants to touch you, and nobody would know how to do it better than me.” He didn’t do much for them, he knew. But when he delivered one of those new bodies that had provoked his affection to the morgue, he took pride in how beautiful they looked, with their skin smooth and oiled, smelling of fresh mint plants. Before taking them on his municipal vehicle again, he would unfasten the infamous little gold chain from their ankle, and he would keep it in the pocket of his pants. Maybe that way they would be treated better.
One day Lucas was walking along the banks of the Humacao, not thinking about anything in particular. It had been so long since he had looked for resins or rescued any corpses. It was always the planting of gardens and spreading resins on roofs, tables, and chairs in rich people’s houses. He stopped against a caimito tree to look at the veins of the trunk and to caress them softly. It was then that he noticed a pile of clothing that jutted out from the high grass on the other side of the water. His vision sharpened; it looked like a corpse. Cheerfully he took off his shirt, jumped into the river, and waded calmly through the shallow water. Approaching the pile, he saw small hands with girlish fingers that showed a hint of amber on the wrinkled, grey skin. This was a recent death, no more than a few hours, a night and its dawn in the water. Barefoot, with fingernails painted red, totally relaxed; and on the left ankle the infamous little chain. The flesh was visible through the blouse, letting Lucas see dark brown nipples that he thought he recognized. Carrying the corpse, he reached the other shore and began disentangling debris to see the dead woman’s face. But as soon as he took her out of the water and into the sunlight, placing one of his broad hands on her drowned face, his skin felt the shock. It was her, finally her, Aurelia. He had found her.
But she was dead. Lucas wanted to cry—he couldn’t. Eight months had passed since the terrible flood. The only thing left of that woman was his memory of a touch: awakening; feverish; new to him. He felt relieved, seeing himself freed from the spectre of that smoothness that set itself to his skin and left him nothing to do but long for Aurelia. He thought that now he would go back to being the same man, the man who would have never abandoned Nana on a rainy night, the one who could graft trees and make himself desirable to the other prostitutes. Maybe he could even find a good woman to live with in his grandmother’s little house, and he would become the man Nana had raised, redeeming her thus from a useless death. Then he deposited Aurelia in the bed of the pickup and drove toward the town.
He took her home and undressed her. He took off the pieces of cotton blouse, the red panties and the broken skirt. He took off the little gold chain, which he threw in with the others in a pewter cup he had bought for that purpose. He took out the combs and began by untangling the dense mat of hair that he had held in his fingers the whole night of the flood. As soon as he buried the comb in her hair, little bugs started coming out, which he killed with the tips of his fingers: river spiders, fleas, larvae of insects that had gotten caught. He combed her hair softly and with a smile on his face, continuing until the hair was completely smooth. He washed it with soap and showered it with rose water. He sat in a rocking chair next to the fresh and humid corpse of the golden girl while her hair dried. Then, still smiling, he walked to his resin workshop and took out the can he had used almost a year ago to prepare Nana for her tomb. There was enough solution inside to cover the body, small as a bird, that lay on the table. He had never used it on another—instinctively he had kept what was left, maybe for this woman.
He began the ritual of smearing his hands with the solution. He started at her feet, toe by toe, ankles freed of chains, rigid legs, all of her oiled by the resin which, having aged, gave off a subtle smell of woods of all sorts and condensed flowers, a vegetable smell from which none of its original components could be distinguished; smelling a little like shit, a little like blood. Pressuring attentively, he relaxed all the dead woman’s muscles until he felt that the friction and something else returned warmth to her skin. With that sensation of strange temperatures between his fingers he continued his way up Aurelia’s body. He spent forty-five minutes massaging her strong, caramel thighs, whose tawny hairs reflected the light of the workshop. And there again he felt the strange heat that returned, from the inside out, to the girl’s body. Lucas saw how from the inside of her thighs emanated delicate droplets of water, a sweat that didn’t smell human, but rather like river banks. He continued the massage, putting his hands under the girl’s legs, pressing her buttocks, which also lit up under his resinous fingers. He felt a pounding of hot blood between his legs; he looked at his erection, aching from the desire of rubbing completely against her on the workshop table.
Lucas shook his head, paused to see how from the waist down, his little drowned whore had recovered some color and emanated vegetable smells from the pores that expelled water. He smeared his hands again, this time placing them precisely on the dead woman’s face. He made circles on her forehead with his fingers, on the cheekbones, the eyelids that he opened and closed, to let her rest from his fingers’ pressure. The lips, the jaw, the spine, and the nape, he put back in their place. The shoulders and collarbones relaxed under the pressure of the gardener’s fingers. He put her on her side to apply resin to her back up to the buttocks, already hot, that perspired onto the wood of his worktable, against the palms of his hands, against the desires which grew despite his concentration. He turned her over again to apply resin to her adolescent breasts. The resin’s heat made them release the river water that they had sucked in while she drifted. Her nipples, hard and dark, took on magical colors, and Lucas could stand it no more. He took off his clothes, put a little bit of resin on his pelvis, on his pubis, and on his penis. As he opened the drowned woman’s legs he felt the stinging heat of that viscous unguent, felt himself burn. With his fingers he loosened her vulva, and right there, on the workshop table of grafts and woods, he penetrated sweet Aurelia, Aurelia of ambers and resins, his beloved little whore, to be able at last, at last to fill her with heat. Death was simply a turn of fate. His hands could not scare it away. But his dick and his resin, that burning heat that came back, wrapped in vegetable consistencies—that was present, the product of his hands and his longing, the insistent memories fastened tightly to his fingers, to his skin.
He came inside her, contracting all his back muscles, he emptied into her like a milky placenta between her legs, screaming into her ear that he loved her, that he loved her as she was and forever. He fell asleep on the corpse and dreamt that the golden girl enveloped him in her arms and gave him small kisses of love.
When he awoke, Lucas went to the cup full of chains, took hers out, and put it on her ankle again. He put the body under a warm light, went to town, and came back with two big blocks of ice, a knife, and brass buckets of the kind he used to collect resins. He used the opportunity to tell the municipality to find someone else to rescue drowned whores. Then he went back to his gardens, to his walk in search of resin, and to his excursions (less and less frequent) to the prostitutes’ huts in Patagonia. Three times a week he would lock himself up in the workshop of the maternal h
ousehold with a can full of unguents and a bottle of rose water, and would not come out until dawn, smiling and covered all over with sticky sweat.
VI. From the Inside
“What can and will happen in darkness.”
Miss Keller Returns to Her Senses