Lately I’ve felt discouraged. There’s so much competition, so much poverty. Everyone knows that! The life of a butcher is less tedious than ours. At night, I didn’t feel like going out for a walk, to roam around certain blocks and acquaint myself with some particular neighborhood of Buenos Aires or a certain house; I felt utterly bored. In the northern part of the city, I liked Palermo because of its fountains and lakes, places where you can drink and wash the nails of your several fingers; in the southern part of the city, I liked Constitution, no doubt because there I met my comrades on the escalator while going up and down, down and up, pursuing our vocation. I sat in the squares, eating oranges or bread, or, when I was lucky, salami or cream cheese. Sometimes the passersby would look at me as if they noticed something strange about me. I don’t wear a beard to my navel, or go around with my toenails showing, or have gold teeth or enormous birthmarks between my eyebrows. The other day I asked one of them, “Do I have two noses?” forgetting my responsibility, my age, my situation. Perhaps my blue flannel pants are loud, with a zipper instead of buttons in the crotch. Everything you do to avoid attracting attention to yourself ends up attracting it. What can you do? If I slide along like a worm, everybody notices how I walk. If I dress badly, the color of trees or walls or dirt, everyone looks at my clothing. If I try not to raise my voice, God help me, everybody strains to hear me. Eating ice cream is impossible for me. The girls stare and nudge one another with their elbows. Sometimes it’s not pleasant to be nice to women; I have to hear silly things all day long. Luckily, I can no longer hear out of one ear. I turned deaf at sixteen. They punctured my eardrum with a splinter. I lived with my family in Punta Chica, in a house built on pilings. One night, when I had put catfish in their beds as a joke, my father, who is always in a foul mood, and my brothers, who are grouchy, plucked up their courage and held me down on the floor. While the others held me, one of them stuck the splinter in my ear. After that, of course, so that I wouldn’t talk, they stuffed me in a sack and threw me into the river. The neighbors saved me. It seemed strange to me. Later I found out that they did it to make me talk. People are so curious! Everybody hates me, except for women; nevertheless, Miss Rómula, who lives by the store, summoned me one day because I had killed a cat with a blow to the head near the door of her room. “You scoundrel,” she said, “can’t you do such things somewhere else?”
How could a few drops of blood on the floor bother her? They can be wiped up in a couple of seconds. She never forgave me. She’s lazy, that’s what she is. When they hired me at the Firpo Pharmacy, people started staring at me like I was a guy who attracts attention. “Sluggard,” they called me when I ran, “Express Train” when I walked slowly, “Pigpen” when I had bathed, “Palmolive” when I hadn’t. But what most infuriated me was when they called me “Pizza,” unfairly, because they saw me one day, while I was making deliveries on my bicycle, eating a piece of Easter cake that Susana Plombis put in my pocket for a snack.
It was then that I got familiar with the interiors of many houses. None of them made such an impression on me as Aníbal Celino’s, probably because I entered through the front door. In the other houses I had to go in through the kitchen. I still have some spoons, some silver saltshakers, which I took from the drawers while the servants were looking for money to pay the bill, things that were of no use to me. Aníbal Celino’s house was no less than a palace. The first time they sent me there with a package from the Firpo Pharmacy, the service entrance looked like the front door and I searched for the other one, thinking that it was the service entrance because it was so dirty. I’m well acquainted with today’s houses. A very luxurious house is a dirty house. The door was closed but it opened when I banged the door knocker, a bronze lion’s face biting a bronze ring. I stepped inside and couldn’t see anyone. I stepped out again and there in the garden I noticed the unkempt wigs of some palm trees. What trees! Even a dog wouldn’t like them. I went back in: the door opened by itself. There was still no one there. I bumped straight into a marble staircase with a balustrade as shiny as the lion on the door knocker. Then a few steps later I entered an enormous room full of glass cabinets; it looked like a store or a church. All around me I saw statues, candy dishes, miniatures, necklaces, fans, reliquaries, dolls. I saw a candy dish, gold colored with turquoise inlay, and absentmindedly picked it up and put it in my pocket. Next I picked up a little figurine that was glittering on a table and dropped it into my other pocket. (My pockets have double bottoms, in case of need. Rosaura Pansi is in charge of lining them. I give her lots of presents and the poor thing is so grateful it’s embarrassing.) As I left the living room I heard a little noise on the staircase, maybe a mouse. My heart stopped, for I saw a very young girl, sitting on the bottom step, watching me with a mischievous expression. She made me laugh.
“I have a package from the Firpo Pharmacy,” I told her.
“What a shame!” she answered. “Then you are not the Lord.”
“So I’m not a gentleman? What am I, then? I’ve brought a bottle of rubbing alcohol, milk of magnesia, and rice powder,” I said, reading the bill.
“This isn’t the service entrance. Go out”—she said, taking the bill from me and looking at it—“around the corner. There they will receive you.”
I wanted to strangle the girl; she was as white and smooth as the porcelain angel I once saw in a display case in a store for religious artifacts.
“Aren’t all the doors the same?”
“All of them,” she replied, “except the door to heaven.”
“So why don’t you accept the package and pay for it?”
“Because I don’t have money to pay any bills; I only have money to give away or to lose.”
“To give to whom?”
“To give to anybody who’s not a member of my family or one of my friends.”
“And how do you lose it?”
“Lose it? In a thousand different ways.”
She took a change purse full of silver coins out of the pocket of her smock and lined up the coins in a row along the step.
“You lose coins when you play with them to read a fortune,” she said, “throw them into fountains, or wherever. What matters is that they disappear. What good are coins?”
She seemed a little less repulsive to me and I said to her, “Goodbye, Kitty.”
“ ‘My name is Aurora,” she answered with a bossy tone.
“Is it my fault that you have the eyes of a cat? Are you angry?”
She didn’t answer me and ran skipping up the staircase.
For some time I didn’t see Aurora again, no matter how often I went to her house to make deliveries.
When they fired me from the Firpo Pharmacy, I met Penknife and Lathe. We understood one another, though I can’t say we were brothers, given the fight I once had with my own brothers—we understood one another as if we were inseparable friends. That is to say, many times we couldn’t look one another in the eye without bursting out laughing, even when surrounded by people. The truth is that everything was a game. One day, as we walked down Canning Street, I told them about Aníbal Celino’s house and Aurora, and recounted all the objects I had seen there. It was a real inventory! None of the valuable things in that palace had escaped my notice. Penknife looked at me, discouraged. “What a lot of junk! What could we do with it?” he said.
But Lathe’s eyes lit up. Sharper than Penknife, he whispered with that voice of his that sounded like a whistle in the dark, “We’ll pay a visit this week.”
We each had eight ice-cream cones and then went to the zoo to look at the monkeys. The sun was burning hot. We stopped to listen to the music of a merry-go-round, because Lathe likes all kinds of music. That’s not surprising: his father played the concertina. Though it seemed as if his mind was wandering, he was really planning the break-in.
For several days, as was our custom, we walked around the neighborhood where the house was situated. One whole day I sat on what remained of an old wall in a vacant lot,
watching people going in and out. Fortunately there wasn’t a guard or anything at the corner. The only danger, perhaps, was the silence of that area. It was so hot that I had to take off my shirt, though no one said anything to me, maybe because sweating disgusts people.
The night we had been waiting for finally arrived. I entered the house first because I was familiar with it and am the least nervous. Penknife and Lathe stayed outside in the bushes holding an empty sack with which to carry the stolen objects. I was supposed to give them the all clear to come in by hissing like an owl. That night we ate like pigs, drinking red wine and then finishing with brandy. The party cost us a bundle.
After some arguments about what time would be best to infiltrate Aníbal Celino’s house, consulting our watches every fifteen minutes, we finally walked down Canning Street and stopped in front of the garden of the house, as if we were lost. All of a sudden Penknife and Lathe jumped over the garden fence and hid behind the bushes. I took refuge in the darkness of the entrance to the house, with the picklock in my hand. The shiny face of the lion biting on the ring distracted me from my task for a moment; the door suddenly opened. I jumped back and hid in the plants, but the door remained open. For an endless moment a clock struck the hour with a variety of chimes: quarter past, then half past. I waited for something to happen, scratching my ankle on some damn branch. Nothing happened; silence succeeded silence, sealing my eyes with sleep, while ants climbed up my legs to my navel. I waited another fifteen minutes and then warily approached the door, which still stood open. I entered the house and turned on the flashlight. I spun the little circle of light around me and then pointed it toward the staircase: there sitting on one of the steps was Aurora. I think it was the first time in my life that I was frightened: she looked like a real dwarf, wearing a long nightgown, her hair gathered on top of her head. As if she were waiting for me, she came up to me and whispered in my ear. “You are the Lord. I have been waiting for you a long time.”
I began trembling and whispered, “Who are you waiting for?”
As if she had not heard me, she waved one of her legs the way a cat does when cleaning its face, then replied, “Clotilde Ifrán is waiting for me.”
“Who is Clotilde Ifrán? Where is she?”
“She’s in heaven. She’s a seer who read my palm. When she died she lay in a beautiful bed in her shop. She sold corsets. She made girdles and brassieres for ladies and her room had drawers full of pink and blue ribbons, elastic and snaps, buttons and lace. When I visited her house with Mommy and we had to wait, she let me play with everything. Sometimes, when I wasn’t at school, and Mommy was off at the theater or God knows where, she would leave me at Clotilde Ifrán’s house, for her to take care of me. That’s when I really started having fun. She didn’t just give me candies or let me play with her needles and scissors and ribbons; she also read my palm or my future in her cards. One day, lying on her bed, pale as a ghost, she said to me, ‘The Lord will come get me, and then He will come for you: after that we’ll be together in heaven.’ ‘And will we have as much fun there as we do here?’ I asked her. ‘Much more,’ she answered, ‘because the Lord is very good.’ ‘And when will He come to get me?’ ‘I don’t know when or how, but I’ll read the cards to find out,’ she answered. The next day, huge black horses took her to Chacarita in a coach covered with black decorations and flowers. I never saw her again, not even in my dreams. You are the Lord she spoke to me about, one for whom there are no closed doors. You wanted to test my loyalty, didn’t you, when you came here with that package from the Firpo Pharmacy? You are the Lord, because you have a beard.”
“I must be, since you say so.”
“A Lord, to whom we must give everything we have.”
“We’ll take beautiful, shiny things, right?”
“We’ll put everything in a picnic basket. Wait for me.”
Aurora returned with the basket. We went into the living room. Aurora climbed onto a chair and retrieved a little key from the top of a cabinet. She opened the glass cabinet and started taking out objects to show me. When the basket was full, she closed the cabinet with the key.
“That’s it,” Aurora said.
When Aurora raised her voice I told her, afraid, “Be careful. Don’t make any noise.”
“Mommy takes sleeping pills and not even thunder could wake up Daddy. Do you want me to read the cards? I’ll do for you what Clotilde Ifrán did for me. Do you want me to?”
She hopped back up the stairs and retrieved a deck of cards, then sat down on a step.
“This is how Clotilde Ifrán read the cards.”
Aurora shuffled the cards; then she dealt them in a row, one by one, on three of the stairs. The movement of her hands back and forth made me dizzy. (I was afraid of falling asleep: that’s the danger of my calm nature.) I proposed going to the living room, thinking about the objects I had left there, but she didn’t listen to me. With her bossy tone, she began to relate the meaning of the cards.
“This king of spades, with a very serious face, is your enemy. He’s waiting for you outside; they’re going to kill you. This jack of spades is also waiting for you. Can’t you hear the noise in the street? Can’t you hear the steps of someone approaching? It’s hard to hide at night. At night every sound can be heard and the moonlight is like the light of your conscience. And the plants. Do you think plants can help you? They’re our enemies, sometimes, when the police arrive with their weapons drawn. That’s why Clotilde Ifrán wanted to take me with her. There are so many dangers.”
I wanted to leave, but a strange weariness, as if I had just eaten a large meal, held me back. What would Lathe, the leader, think? Like a drunkard, I went to the door and half opened it. Someone fired; I fell to the floor like a corpse, losing consciousness.
THE BASEMENT
THIS BASEMENT, which is extremely cold in winter, is an Eden in the summer. Some people sit by the front door upstairs for some cool air on the hottest days in January, dirtying the floor below. No window lets in the light or the horrible heat of the day. I have a large mirror, a couch or cot given me by a client who was a millionaire, and four mattresses I have acquired over the years from other girls. In the morning I fill pails (lent to me by the doorman of the next building) with water to wash my face and hands. I’m very clean. I have a hanger for my clothes behind a drape, and a mantel for the candlesticks. There is no electricity or water. My bedside table is a chair, and my chair is a velvet pillow. One of my clients, the youngest one, brought bits of old curtains from his grandmother’s house, and I use them to decorate the walls, along with pictures I cut from magazines. The lady upstairs feeds me lunch; for breakfast I have candy or whatever I can stuff in my pockets. I have to live with mice, and at first it seemed to me that was the only defect of this basement, where I don’t have to pay rent. Now I have noticed that these animals are not so terrible; they are quite discreet. When all’s said and done they’re preferable to flies, so abundant in the fanciest houses in Buenos Aires, in the places where they used to give me leftovers when I was eleven. While the clients are here the mice keep out of sight: they know the difference between one kind of silence and another. As soon as I am alone they come out in a ruckus. They skitter by, stopping for a moment to look at me out of a corner of their eyes, as if they guessed what I think of them. Sometimes they eat a bit of cheese or bread from the floor. They’re not afraid of me, nor I of them. The worst part is that I can’t store any food because they eat everything before I have a chance to touch anything myself. There are evil-minded people who are pleased with this and call me Fermina, the Mouse Lady. I don’t like humoring these name-callers, which is why I refuse to ask for any mousetraps. One mouse, the oldest, is named Charlie Chaplin, another is Gregory Peck, another Marlon Brando, another Duilio Marzio; the playful one is named Daniel Gélin, another is Yul Brynner; one female is Gina Lollobrigida and another is Sophia Loren. It is strange how these little animals have taken possession of a basement where they must have lived b
efore I arrived. Even the damp spots on the wall have taken the form of mice; they are dark and rather long, with two little ears and a long pointed tail. When nobody is watching, I gather food for them in one of the saucers I was given by the man who lives in the house across the way. I don’t want the mice to leave me. If some neighbor comes and wants to exterminate them, I’ll make a fuss he’ll never forget as long as he lives. They’ve announced that this house will be torn down, but I won’t leave here until I die. Up above they’re packing trunks and baskets and constantly taping up packages. There are moving vans by the front door, but I walk by them as if I don’t see them. I never begged for a cent from those people. They spy on me all day long and believe I am with clients because I talk to myself to annoy them. Since they’re angry with me, they lock me in; since I’m angry with them, I don’t ask them to open the door. For the last two days the mice have been acting very strangely: one brought me a ring, another a bracelet, and a third, the smartest one, brought me a necklace. At first I couldn’t believe it, and nobody else will believe it. I’m happy. What does it matter if it’s all a dream? I’m thirsty: I drink my own sweat. I’m hungry: I chew on my fingers and hair. The police won’t come looking for me. They won’t ask me for a health certificate or a certificate of good conduct. The ceiling is falling apart, bits of straw are floating down: it must be the beginning of the demolition. I hear cries, none of them calling my name. The mice are afraid. Poor things! They don’t know, don’t understand how the world is. They don’t know the joy of revenge. Since learning to look at myself in a little mirror, I have never looked so beautiful.
THE PHOTOGRAPHS
I ARRIVED with my presents. I greeted Adriana. She was sitting in the middle of the patio in a wicker chair, surrounded by the guests. She was wearing a very full, white organdy skirt over a starched petticoat (the lace hem peeking out slightly whenever she moved), and had a metal clasp with white flowers in her hair, leather orthopedic boots, and a pink fan in her hand. That vocation for misfortune that I had discovered in her long before the accident was not evident in her face.
Thus Were Their Faces Page 13