by María Ospina
Her Aunt Martica, Shirley’s mother, promised to pick Estefanía up on her way back from the prison where she was visiting her most pampered client, a businesswoman who had been caught storing supplies for processing cocaine in one of her warehouses. Martica was manicurist and masseuse to a long list of clients she’d built over years of hard work. She specialized in nails, firming and slimming massages, serums, and secrets. After countless massages and many years spent developing strong arms and a soft body to cushion the hands and feet of others, Martica had managed to ascend to the ranks of the triumphant middle class. She did so well that she was able to pay for Estefanía’s high school after her mother died, and had promised to help her pay for a trip to New York to study English now that she’d graduated. With Shirley there and her aunt’s offer, Estefanía nurtured the hope of going, at least for a while.
That afternoon, Martica was going to show Estefanía her new face. Her return to some kind of youth. The plastic surgeon who sent her clients to Martica for post-liposuction massage therapy had given her a new face for her birthday a few weeks earlier. Instead of the free facelift that she had originally been promised, Martica had received an even bigger gift as she slept peacefully under anesthesia. The doctor had sculpted her a slimmer face with a pointier nose, higher cheekbones, and a smoother jawline. A welcome face, but not the one she’d requested. After two weeks of recovery, Martica still had a few bandages wrapped around her head, but the swelling had gone down almost completely. She wanted Estefanía to be one of the first to see her, now that she was ready to reenter the world.
When she’d finished the magazine with her horoscope, Estefanía opened her grandfather’s copy of Don Quixote, which always sat right next to the accounting books on the shelf. She had decided to read it the week after she graduated high school, but skipping around, picking chapters at random. When she was little, her grandfather used to tell her what was happening in the chapter he was reading on those Saturdays she spent with him at the clinic. She opened to one titled “Concerning what befell Don Quixote on his way to Barcelona” and wanted to believe that it was another sign of her impending voyage to unknown lands. When the phone rang again, she figured it had to be the woman with the dolls letting her know that she couldn’t make it in. After all, she was about to close. But instead she was met with the deep, halting voice of a man with a strange accent asking for the Reyes Family Doll Clinic. He explained that he was calling from the United States. That he was employed by Saint Ignatius of Antioch Church in New York, and that he’d found the clinic’s information online after a friend from Colombia recommended it to him.
“I’m looking to buy figurine parts and antique dolls for our altar.”
Estefanía tried to adopt a secretarial tone. She explained that the clinic only repaired children’s dolls and stuffed animals. She could get him the number of one of the antique shops in the neighborhood, though.
“You see, what I’m really looking for is colonial saints, but that’s not all I’m interested in. I’m also looking to buy all sorts of antique dolls, as well as parts and pieces. Perhaps you could help us find some.”
He promised generous compensation. Estefanía told him she probably had a few things that would interest him. She had to look. She wrote down his email address so she could send him a list and photos of the items. Antonio Pesoa had an Argentinean accent and the voice of an ascetic hermit speaking for the first time in ages, from the confines of a small cave.
Before wondering whether the call might be a prank, Estefanía thought of the money the deal would bring in. Of the chance to finally get rid of the inheritance of limbs, eyes, and hair that her grandfather had left to her mother, and her mother had left to her and her brother. Juvenal had already been informed of the clinic’s impending closure, and Martica was trying to find him another job. Someone would buy the storefront sooner or later. And if she got her visa, she’d finally make the trip to New York. She’d go see Shirley and sign up for the English course she’d found in Queens. She’d learn the language. She’d stay in New York for good and eagerly await Martica’s visits twice a year. She would start to believe in horoscopes.
In the back of the shop, a teddy bear, a doll with a chewed nose, and a legless Barbie with red hair awaited Juvenal’s intervention. After a brief but intense struggle, Estefanía opened the door to the small storage area on the far side of the room for the first time since her mother’s death. The drawers of the dresser to her left were marked Porcelain Parts, Clothing, Face, Religious, and Shoes in her grandfather’s neat hand. On the other side of the room was an old counter piled with arms, legs, torsos, and shopping bags full of blond heads, as well as heads for teddy bears and stuffed dogs, hands, and plastic hips labeled flesh-colored, a euphemism for the shade of white that all the dolls coddled by the little girls of Bogotá were painted. Several rolls of fabric and one of synthetic fur gave off a smell of mothballs in one corner.
“Neither of them ever threw anything away.”
With the first arm Estefanía lifted from the pile of amputated surplus, a large eye fell out and rolled across the red tiles toward a corner of the little room. When she bent down to grab it, she noticed the green and black stripes of its irises. The glass had cracked a little bit, but only in the back, so the fissure wouldn’t show when it was set in a doll’s head again. Estefanía recognized the old technique of painting on glass. They didn’t make them like that anymore. These days, eyes weren’t three-dimensional or removable, they were just drawn onto the plastic, depriving the dolls of the freedom of peripheral vision and the ability to look nervously this way or that to meet or evade the gaze of their owners. Children are spoiled by the eyes they do today, she thought. They promised the security of a gaze always there waiting for them and taught them to expect they would always be special. That’s why she was never going to have kids. Even that eye of yesteryear might bring her good money in New York. She stuck it in her pocket on her way to see what the dresser held.
In a drawer marked Antiques she found three dolls wrapped in tissue paper, which she removed carefully. There was a gypsum doll the length of her forearm, with black hair, a round face, a mouth pursed in the shape of an o, pale pink cheeks, and flawless skin, bundled up in a shawl and matching dress. She looked like a stout woman from a town in the Andes ready to set up a stand in the market square, but the tag hanging from her wrist read Germany, 1870. The next one she unwrapped was naked. Its pubic area was made of rough canvas, its public areas of the finest porcelain. A pair of legs that turned into porcelain at the knee and ended in black high heels hung loosely from its soft torso, in danger of coming unstitched. The doll’s arms were in good shape, with the exception of a crack in the palm of one hand and half a finger that had broken off. Its lips were pursed on the verge of a pout, and a few teeth could be seen in the space between them. It had blue eyes and long lashes, and dark hair painted on to just below the ears, as was the style. France, 1918. Despite her flagrant nudity and the anonymity of decades spent in a dark drawer, there was nothing sinister about her. She seemed headstrong but also polite. From a small box Estefanía removed an androgynous baby in lace swaddling that even encircled its head, forming a kind of crown. The head was the only notable part of the body. Bisque porcelain, read the tag written in her grandfather’s hand. Sheathed in lace, the doll’s face was dominated by two enormous gray eyes, shiny and open wide, surrounded by long lashes that heralded a future of intense grief. Vienna, 1901. It begged to be taken out for a stroll by a nanny, around a city from a different era. It could certainly play the baby Jesus in a Manhattan church at Christmastime.
Other items from her grandfather’s collection of antique remains appeared in the list Estefanía sent to the strange Argentinean who had called that morning.
• Black infant in bisque porcelain, crack in one leg and small hole in one heel. Rubber intact. Missing head. Chubby. Tag reads France, 1926.
• Assorted parts: one pair of eyes, painted wood with inlai
d glass irises and pupils. Four pairs of glass eyes in different colors. Single eye, lightly scratched on the back. One pair of porcelain arms attached to cloth. One pair of medium wooden feet. One pair of plaster feet (5 cm long).
• Other: miniature perfume bottle in blue glass; embroidered knit socks for a large doll; small ivory fan with floral design; white leather gloves with black embroidery; small metal mirror; leather-bound doll’s diary, can be opened; porcelain lapdog with brown fur and an open mouth that reveals a painted tongue inside.
“Come take a look, sweetheart, and tell me what you think.”
From inside the storage room Estefanía heard Martica’s voice and went out to meet her.
“Gorgeous!”
“Sometimes I think this royal face doesn’t go too well with the body I’ve got.”
“You look great, Aunt Martica.”
“The swelling still needs to go down a bit more before I look like one of those fancy dolls you said someone left here.”
As she climbed into Martica’s car, Estefanía noticed something in her pants pocket digging into her leg. It was the glass eye she’d forgotten to leave in the pile of old figurines when she ran out to see the other doll in her life.
Estefanía spent the next week waiting for the woman to reclaim her dolls. A few orders came in, which she received with great efficiency and which kept Juvenal busy for a while: a teddy bear that vomited fill from a tear in its shoulder, three bland little dolls who had ended up in a child’s beauty parlor and couldn’t pull off their new punk hairstyles, and one of those dolls that pee, which needed a new torso because its owner had poured drain solvent down the tube that ran from its mouth to its groin. But the date of the tea had come and gone, and the elegant dolls remained behind the counter. Inclined to tragic thoughts, Estefanía imagined their owner in a casket, seized by a rigor mortis of longing.
On Friday, she decided to call the number the woman had left on the receipt. A housekeeper informed her that Doña Cecilia would be traveling for an unspecified period. When Estefanía explained that the clinic would be closing soon, for good, and asked what she should do with the dolls, the woman disclosed that her employer had been in a nursing home since the weekend before, that her son had returned from abroad to take her there. The housekeeper offered to ask about the dolls and promised to have an answer for her the following week.
Estefanía looked through the glass counter at the dolls’ faces, all wrapped in plastic, and knew she needed to save them. They didn’t deserve to be in that chipped display case for one moment longer.
Estefanía:
Your message has given us immense pleasure. We wish to purchase all the items you offer. Though some of the objects you mention do not fall under the rubric of religion, they will suffice just the same. We can offer you three hundred dollars for the lot. Should you be interested, we would need to determine a means of shipping the items to New York. I’ll look into different parcel delivery services this week and follow up with you. I wish I could travel to Bogotá to pick them up, but that is a fantasy. I await your reply. Antonio Pesoa
Dear Estefanía:
I forgot to ask you in my last email if by any chance you have a ventriloquist’s dummy among the items available for purchase. Please say you do! Let me know as soon as you can.
A.
Having called the number left by Doña Cecilia for two weeks with no response, Estefanía decided it was time to find asylum for the exiled dolls. She’d searched for the woman’s address so she could bring them to her home, but it wasn’t listed in the phone book. Maybe she had told her the story of each one in so much detail because she was leaving them to her. Maybe she cried out for them in the drugged stupor of afternoons in the psychiatric ward and everyone thought the names were yet another symptom of her malady.
After another two weeks of waiting and several failed calls, Estefanía accepted the dolls as her irrefutable inheritance. That night she dreamed of the six of them adorning a gilded colonial altar. In each section of the altar was a doll wearing a starched saint’s gown and tunic, with a rosary dangling from hands recently repaired by Juvenal. Antonio entered, dressed all in black with a woolen cap covering his bald head. He seemed to be floating, as if he was being pulled by a string from his belly. He knelt at the first pew. Estefanía stepped inside the church and tried to approach the altar, but a furious priest threw her out in unintelligible English. Antonio said nothing; he just looked at her, deeply moved. Estefanía stood in the doorway, sobbing next to a leper reeking of urine who begged for alms, and realized she was in the Church of Saint Frances in downtown Bogotá, where her grandfather used to take her when she was a little girl.
Dear Estefanía:
It would be wonderful if you sent everything with your aunt next week. It would have to be packed well so none of the little pieces break, given how delicate they are already. The loose eyes! Yes, we want them, absolutely. And we’re just thrilled about the other dolls. We could pay you four hundred dollars for them, if that figure seems fair to you. They must be strange treasures, indeed. But of course, things worth treasuring tend to be strange. They’re the ferment that escapes the mold.
I like your idea of decorating an altar with these alluring dolls.
Make sure they shine according to their essence.
I’m dying to get my hands on a ventriloquist’s dummy from the colonial period. They’re very hard to find. I want to propose a kind of religious-didactic performance to the other priests, between a ventriloquist (dressed up as a saint or a virgin) and his doll (which could play the role of angel or a soul, or something like that).
I can pick up the delivery and pay your aunt directly, as you mentioned. My phone number, so she can call me when she gets to New York, is (212) 945-3850.
Please write back and tell me more.
Warmly, A.
P.S. Thank you for sharing your dream with me. In my version, were my dreams to shimmer, I would attack the priest, tie him to the column, and force him to perform hara-kiri, then I’d take you to see the newly canonized dolls and the ventriloquist playing a soul in purgatory. But don’t take me seriously. I haven’t slept in days.
A fine rain misted the city on the September morning when Estefanía took Doña Cecilia’s dolls out of the counter display and carried them over to one of the long surgical tables. Juvenal was working at the other one, sewing a new pair of ears onto an enormous Saint Bernard. One by one, the dolls allowed themselves to be laid flat. Their naked bodies revealed their new precarity. Estefanía walked over to the storage room, opened the drawer marked Clothing, and pulled out a bundle of dresses wrapped in tissue paper. Leonor looked pretty in a blue satin dress with a petticoat. The lace tunic worked for little Beatrice. The pleated dress with short sleeves was good on Ingrid, topped off with a simple white coat. And so on. She found something to cover each of them, so they wouldn’t have to travel in just their inner majesty. Antonio would need to find them more suitable dresses for the altar. She pulled a few small rosaries made of orange and rosewood from the drawer of religious objects and put one on the arm of each doll. She packaged them one by one in bubble wrap and laid them in the boxes she’d gotten for their journey. Then she dusted off the dolls in the storage room and the body parts she’d promised Antonio, resting each one on a bed of foam scraps and paper shreds.
The sun was just rising in Bogotá when Estefanía went to the airport with Martica. Martica made the trip to New York when the big department stores had their sales. She traveled light and came back with two suitcases full of clothing her clients in Bogotá had ordered, which she sold to them with a commission that covered her expenses and padded her savings account. She used to stay with her sister, the one who worked at a factory in New Jersey assembling tiny pieces of airplane motors, but ever since Shirley moved to New York, Martica has been staying in her daughter’s apartment.
The two boxes with the dolls and other objects for Antonio were selected for inspection by the antinar
cotics unit as Martica waited in the long line to check in at the airport. One police officer had a young dog that wagged its tail furiously as it searched the boxes for cocaine. The officers urged it on, trying to get it to find the valuable powder, but the dog showed no interest. Confirming one last time that the shipment contained no illicit substances, one of the police officers took out the Arabian doll, unwrapped it, licked his index finger, ran it along the doll’s leg, and returned it to his mouth. When he didn’t taste the alkaloid he expected to find diluted in its skin, he gave the final order to close the boxes. A few days later, Martica called Estefanía to say that she’d delivered the boxes to Antonio and had the money in hand.
“All he said was thank you, ma’am, and added that I have a lovely niece. He also said he wants to meet you, sweetheart.”
Crowned, victorious one:
(That’s the etymology of your name, did you know?) I received the beauties you sent, despite the mishaps. If I were an airport police officer, I would have confiscated them all without the help of any dog and made a run for it. You can rest easy, your grandfather’s treasures will be venerated here. The doll that moves her head to say yes and no arrived with an injured hand. Could she be the one the dog sniffed? Perhaps the gesture rattled her humors.
I thought about her yesterday, and also about you, and about matters of the flesh, because I almost took a little old lady’s finger off at the gym. I was using one of those weight machines; she stuck her hand in, and I smashed her finger. We had to call an ambulance. It was absolutely pulverized. She’d stuck it right between the weights. There was blood everywhere, which wasn’t entirely a bad thing because it snapped all those people staring at themselves in the mirror back to reality a bit. The ambulance arrived forty minutes later and no one got out so I went to see what was going on, and the girl behind the wheel was busy putting on lipstick. Anyway, the eternal mysteries of athletic life. Good Lord. The old lady was quite stoic, thank goodness. But who puts their hand right where weights are going up and down? I told her I was sorry and that I’ll never go back there. And to think, I’d managed to drag myself to the gym for a couple of weeks straight. I blame it all on one of those guys who sells exercise equipment on television. This one has a disgusting blob of resin that he claims is pure fat, and he calls it “Mr. Fat” and goes on and on about how it lives inside you. Have you seen him? I was so disgusted that I paid for a year-long gym membership in advance. But I can’t go back after the incident with the old lady. I’d rather be here, in my cave, caring for my injured doll.