But, well, excuse me for keeping on with this—
You see, said the lovely woman (whose greatest drawback, in Aunt Bertha’s opinion, was the fact that she sometimes smelled a trifle unclean), when we discuss this subject, your nephew always says that he’s not sure how long he’ll live.
My God, Malintzin! What do you mean? And if Ricardo’s unwell, which is not news to me, wouldn’t that be all the more reason to unite yourselves, in case there are any children?
But just then Ricardo emerged from his room, looking more joyous than ever. He had lately been making great progress with his dissertation, which seemed to be more brilliant and clear than before, as if someone had been rewriting the manuscript for him. Later that very night, after he posted a letter to Adela, asking her forgiveness and wishing her all good things, he was sitting in the back yard waiting for La Llorona to descend into him when he first thought to hear his pen scratching against the paper; and peering through the keyhole into his room, he seemed to see many green leaves blossoming and he smelled a perfume as of vanilla and copal. Of late he had showed still more gratitude to his aunt. And the more he deferred to and relied on her, the more his hard heart melted away. Everyone exclaimed over him, especially the unmarried girls at church. As for La Llorona, she did not seem to be a bit jealous.
On the following night the young couple strolled hand in hand all the way to the lower reaches of the white-limed palms in the zócalo, where children played hide and seek around the wide-bellied plinth, booths of cheap necklaces shone as if they were precious, an angry boy kicked a soccer ball all by himself, and a man in a red shirt and cap slowly swept old paper cups and tortilla scraps into his dustpan.
Now you must decide, said La Llorona. You can raise our child alone, or I can take him away, or I can kill you.
Will you come home tonight?
No, darling, I’m hungry.
He went home and considered what to do. His aunt pinched him laughingly and said: Another quarrel? You’re the man. Just force her to live with you. It’s high time for the priest!
He said: Aunt, should a baby stay with his mother or his father?
Well, both, of course, but if it must be one, then the mother.
Thank you, he said. That’s right, of course.
So La Llorona kept little Manuel, who was quite fetching except for the fact that his face resembled a death’s-head. The loving couple must now go their separate ways, unless Ricardo were to be devoured. And he wanted to be, but as to that, La Llorona told him: No, I won’t eat you, because you won’t surrender yourself to women, and, besides, you’re the father of my child.
In the third room of the old house on Avenida Nicolás Bravo, behind the sofa’s burned skeleton, La Llorona stood beside him, gesturing with all her delicate fingers, the tropical light of Veracruz gilding her naked shoulders and her eye-whites brighter than sea-waves, her hair lusher than sea-foam as she turned toward him, gesturing at the light of the farthest room without looking at it, and he suddenly realized with a thrill of joy that he was naked, ready to give himself to be devoured; he was taller yet somehow smaller, open to her without shame and therefore without hatred, not ever again; how grateful he felt to belong to her! Manuel sat on the toilet, playing with a man’s thighbone, while La Llorona disrobed and opened her legs to Ricardo for the last time. How he loved her! He would have done anything to keep her, anything!
I’ll walk you out, she said, kissing his forehead, which burned and stung with fever. Manuel sat alone watching them as they dressed. He was seven days old.
In the harbor of battleships and other steel fishes of the Mexican Armada, a pelican nearly as tall as Aunt Bertha swallowed fish and worked the red-orange leather hinge below its throat. Ricardo could not bear to watch the shimmering and waving of the water very long; it made him queasy. His fever was a nice tickly feeling, as if his thighs were being massaged by a thousand cockroaches. Of course he felt on the verge of tears.
Ricardo, listen to me, said La Llorona. Adela left you because she would not love you. I’m leaving you to keep you alive.
Please eat me; please drink my blood; I don’t want to start over anymore—
Do you love me?
I—
You’re just like me, silly! You’d love anybody!
When I die will I see you again?
The dead see nothing.
Are you dead?
No, darling. Not me. That’s why you’ll never see me again.
Turning wide-eyed toward him, with the sun on her gorgeous shoulders, she gave him a little golden turtle with three golden bells hanging from it, to help him when he married, and for his aunt a lovely golden bracelet studded and beaded, sun-rayed and devil-pricked, and for his as yet unknown wife a necklace of little golden eagle-horsemen who extruded their forked golden tongues, and a pendant of three golden bells with feathers and jade beads.
She gave him a magic leaf and told him to make a tea out of it and drink it. Then life would go differently for him. His emotions writhed like the dying fingers of a severed hand. She kissed him coolly on the cheek; then they parted. In a way he was relieved; he no longer had to fear that in his company she might slay some decent person.
Then, blindly solitary, he crept back to Aunt Bertha’s, and when his hostess saw his face she knew at once what had happened (more or less). Pale and despondent, the many-times rejected young man lay down, struggling to hate La Llorona, but no hatred came to him. Next he tried to imagine how he must live, since he could not die. If the purpose of life was indeed erotic or romantic satisfaction, perhaps his aunt could save him; didn’t she know any number of likely young girls? But why shouldn’t he rush back to Avenida Nicolás Bravo, for instance tonight, and open his veins before La Llorona? So he set out. But when his former sweetheart appeared before him, she was nothing if not furious and monstrous.— Where had she come from, by the way? Was it from under the rotten floor? Where did she actually keep herself? This he had never asked himself, or her. Well, too late now! Warning him in icy tones not to try her further (behind her he spied gruesome Manuel, already half-grown, with blood running down his lips), she then approached him, breathed on him with her foul breath until he trembled, slapped his face once, then closed the interview as follows: If I choose, I can infect any part of you with necrosis, and even so you will not die without my permission. How would you like to drag out the years half-rotten? Now go, Ricardo, and never come back.
I never trusted her, said his Aunt Bertha. What you need is a girl whose purpose in life is love. There’s someone I’m already thinking of . . . But tell me this. What’s become of your child?
She took him away—
Horrible, horrible woman! Ricardo, you need to relax. Drink with me.
So he did. His fever still troubled him, and a foul smell haunted his nostrils.
Aunt, this bracelet is for you.
From her? It’s not real, is it? Oh, Ricardo, close the shutters! How beautiful!
Returning to the municipal archives, he sought even now to cling to her by means of discovering facts. For the said Viceroy incited the orders in this writing and . . . in his mouth . . . and then wormtracks. At once he seemed to see his hateful son. By the hand of a man who newly and with certain foundation . . . burned both corpses, with many prayers, after which the said Lord Bishop . . . jade, which to these idolators is considered more precious than gold. The aforesaid mestiza, who is said to be a familiar of the Devil . . . exorcism, all of which was reported to His Majesty, may God guard him many years and continue to concede to him such a title, and then tiny waterstained islands of ink. We simply sign this in our city of Veracruz, Ciudad de la Vera Cruz y Puerto, some signatures resembling geometrical shapes, others like string figures, crossing lines and squares. Ecstasy on his face, although his belly had been utterly devoured. The ledger’s back flap fell open like the wing of a dead bird, folded inward and tied s
hut with crosses of rawhide. Within he found a tiny oval of apple-green jade, and on the back of a yellow sheet reading Certificación que acredita a notice in a feminine hand: Ricardo, since you persist in disobeying me, I now afflict you with gangrene.
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After the amputation of his left foot, Ricardo found time to become acquainted with all his aunt’s neighbors. Across the street there lived an old widower who was very lonely. He touched the old man with the magic leaf, and at once the man rose up full of hope again that he might find some woman who would love him, and although he had not left his bed for many years he managed to get downstairs and even came into the street; stretched out his hand to a passing housewife, then fell down dead with a smile on his face. So this was a good thing that Ricardo had done.
His fever now seemed to become an ovoid jade bead, polished very smooth and inserted into his skull, where it ached deliciously and hilariously. He longed to die; oh, how he loved La Llorona! He prepared to become spiteful and hateful as usual. What an evil example woman sets! Consider for instance the way that a woman casts her smile toward a man, even when she keeps her knees together . . .
He made the leaf into tea and drank it. After that he was never sick for the rest of his life. Moreover, he suddenly loved women—all of them. Not long after that, he completed his dissertation, for which he received highest honors, and a publishing contract with a feminist press.
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After Ricardo’s aunt died, he finally discovered his vocation as artistic director of the provincial folklore troupe, where numbers of ambitious yet unwary young women depended on pleasing him. They waited at auditions as silently as handmade Indian dresses hang within their wheeled, roof-topped stands, ready to be sold and animated, their indigo stripes darker than the night. Ricardo rarely took advantage, for he loved them. No one seemed to mind his prosthetic foot, in part because long ago, when he sold that golden turtle with three golden bells, he had become his own master. Even the doctor didn’t take all his money. Before he knew it, he had regained the fatuous self-love which is our birthright. A certain pretty, chubby dancer from one of the Tuxtlas, I forget which, put on more weight, and after a notice in the newspaper which unfavorably singled her out (for by then the poor girl had grown outright obese), Ricardo, first consulting with the producer, made up his mind to fire her, a doom from which she saved herself by seducing him and declaring pregnancy. She was, as I have said, quite a big girl, with thighs like watermelons, and moreover extremely needy, loyal and weepy—an ideal combination for Ricardo, whose true love-type was thus revealed to be what are so unfairly referred to as “smothering women.” Riding the craze for self-consciously syncretic dance which now infected Veracruz, Ricardo’s troupe, who daringly and defiantly called themselves “The Malinchistas,” performed Totonaco dances reenvisioned as fandangos, put on a well-regarded play about the Emperor Maximilian, and even turned supernatural tales into ballets. In all these enterprises, I am happy to say, Ricardo’s new wife, María Guadalupe, proved helpful, not least in calming his nerves, for he tended to worry on opening night; and sometimes the producer talked down to him, asserting that he, Ricardo, had no understanding about money, a misapprehension which María Guadalupe corrected as often as needed, since the producer was terrified of her. She loved nothing better than to take Ricardo into her arms and roll on top of him. Sometimes she would fit her lips over his lips and blow in hot moist breaths until he grew intoxicated. Even La Llorona had never taken him so far. He felt ecstatic to love this woman who was literally so much greater than himself. Moreover, on account of her expert dependence and insecurity, Ricardo learned to apologize for his wife, and even to take the blame for her lapses, a practice which rendered him, in time, tolerant and even warm. Thanks to her and the children, Ricardo lived a happier life than any of his early acquaintances could have predicted, among them, of course, the hated Adela, who attended several of the troupe’s performances and once wrote him a postcard, which he thought best not to answer. By the time that María Guadalupe had grown as vastly squarish as the Convento de los Betlehemitas, Ricardo choreographed the great masterpiece of his career. It was a wordless performance entitled “Salvation.”
The curtain rose on a maze whose high-walled pasteboard corridors turned always at right angles, their destination the wall at stage rear. And the dance, if one can call it that, was performed by a dozen young men in white hats and white suits, wandering blindly toward that blind wall. From time to time a tall skeleton, all black and white except for his red eyes, popped out of a niche or ambushed a man who turned a corner. To tell the truth, he looked not unlike Ricardo and La Llorona’s son Manuel. Whomever he touched fell motionless. And this was all that happened. A man would meet death and die, or he would wander toward the blind wall. If his corridor ended without the skeleton having found him, he turned back and took another turning, because what else could there be for him to do? His only prize was the dreary delay and return for more seeking of nothing. And all the young men got killed one by one. Just as a taxista lacking business might slowly lower himself in the driver’s seat until only his half-open eyes appear above the gasketed sill of the driver’s-side window, so Death sometimes sank nearly all the way behind a partition, so that only the audience could see the hateful shining of his skull, while the victim strayed toward him. Finally only one man remained. He wandered helpless from corner to corridor to wall and back again, and presently, Death, having devoured the others, came in search of him. And so he was nearly at the blind wall, and Death was two turnings behind him, already stretching his bony arm, when suddenly a door opened in the blind wall, and out came a lovely death’s-head woman in a jade-green skirt. The young man flew delightedly into her arms, and she enfolded him just in time to spare him from her rival.
So Ricardo became famous. The children all married and never came back. He outlived María Guadalupe, who was buried in her necklace of golden eagle-horsemen; then he retired and wedded an old widow not entirely unlike Aunt Bertha. I have seen the two of them at the zócalo, among the old couples slowly dancing hand to hand or arm to neck. Some of the women who are merely middle-aged whirl about in shining silver-white satin skirts, while the more ancient ones, like the aforesaid Juanita Ramírez, show themselves in faded floral dresses and pink slacks. She and Ricardo looked sweet together. He was wearing a white suit and a white hat. His prosthesis did not hinder him. Turtling his grey head, he gripped her wrists, staring down at her knees through his dark sunglasses. He swayed, bewildered, and gently Juanita held him up. One morning I introduced myself and mentioned my curiosity about La Llorona.— Young man, he replied, I don’t know anything about that.
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Now I will tell you what I was doing there. Not long after the birth of our second child, my wife announced that she had never loved me. I am American, and she was a Mexican national who married me, so she now explained, solely to gain citizenship. Although she had opened her mind, as she put it, to the possibility that I might become worthy of her efforts, I remained crass. My punishment dawned. Carmen and her lawyer calculated that alimony and child support for the three-person household which she now intended to found would keep her in sufficient style, as indeed it proved. I signed every paper without amendment. I gave away the house, and everything in it but my clothes. The last time we ever saw each other was in court. When the judge dismissed us, I walked outside with her and said: Carmen, I want your advice.
If it doesn’t take too long, she said.
Well, it’s like this. From what you say, you know me better than I know myself. I certainly didn’t know you as well as I thought—
No recriminations, please. What do you want?
Since you know me, and since I’m feeling lost, please tell me: What kind of woman should I look for? Who do you think could love me?
None of my friends can stand you, and that’s the truth. They never could. I deserve a medal for putting up with you for so long. I ca
n tell you what’s most hateful about you. There are actually seven things. First—
Sorry to interrupt you, Carmen, but since you’re in a hurry, could you just tell me who—
Look, she said. No woman could tolerate you. Your soul is utterly diseased. A prostitute might pretend to like you until your money runs out, but I’ve just made sure you’ll never have much of that. Your only hope is to find a saint or a vampire. Now remember: Don’t contact us in any way. You lost your visitation rights for a reason. The children are trying to forget you. That’s it. Goodbye.
Thanking her for this suggestion, I travelled to Veracruz, because she once lived there.
I was too timid to seek out La Llorona for my bride, but I did once visit the house on Avenida Nicolás Bravo. Within lay a dead man, perhaps homeless. Sometimes when forgotten corpses mummify, and their arms are outspread (perhaps because the dying men flung them open when their hearts drank in those nourishing bullets, or perhaps because the executioners crucified them), their tendons come to resemble the roots and woody creepers which clothe the arches of Cortés’s old house near Veracruz; to enter one of those archways is almost to shelter in a mummy’s armpit, and to discover any such hard hollow carcass is to be reminded of a ceiba tree. The mouth was open, with a jade bead inside.
Then I went to worship at the Climax’s titanic effigy of a naked blonde between whose legs any one of us may lean. The girls were nice; they took my money. None of them gave me a fever. I ate at Tacos “Mary”; I took in freight trains and dusty flat roofs with laundry hanging from them. Seeking to lose myself, I traversed the rolling hills of reddish grass and green palms. Wide orange-grassed canyons impelled me through the jungle, into thickets of prickly pear. Hoping to see heaven, I gazed upward and found the flash of white on an eagle’s wingtip.
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Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) Page 38