I left my parents’ house and went to live with her in Chascomús, on the outskirts of the town. I didn’t like big cities, thinking that their growth causes our unhappiness. Filled with joy I sold all of my belongings—my car, my furniture—to be able to rent a tiny farm where I could live simply, enchanted by our impossible love. At an auction I bought some cows and the horses I would need to work the land.
At first I was happy. What did I care that I didn’t have indoor plumbing or electric light or a refrigerator or clean sheets! Love replaced all of that. Aurelia had bewitched me. What did I care that the soles of her feet were rough, that her hands were always red, and that her manners were not the finest: I was her slave!
She liked eating sugar. I would put sugar cubes in the palm of my hand, and she would eat them. She liked me to stroke her on the head, and so I would caress her for hours on end.
Sometimes I would look for her all day long without finding her anywhere. How could she find a hiding place on that tract of land, completely flat and treeless? She would come back barefoot, her hair so tangled that no comb could smooth it. I warned her that along the coast, not too far away, there were swamps full of crabs.
Sometimes I’d find her talking to the horses. She, who was so quiet, would speak incessantly with them. They loved her and would gather around her. Her favorite was named Azabache.
Some people called me a degenerate; others, but they are few, felt sorry for me. They sold me bad meat, and at the store tried to charge me twice for the same things, thinking me absentminded. Living in that hostile solitude was bad for me.
I married Aurelia so that they would sell me better-quality meat at the butcher shop; that is what my enemies said, but I can assure them that I did it to live respectably. Aurelia amused herself kissing the noses of the horses; she would braid her hair with the horses’ manes. These games expressed her youth and the tenderness of her heart. She was mine, in a way that the horrible, elegant woman with painted nails I had fallen in love with years before had never been.
One afternoon I found Aurelia speaking to a beggar about horses. I didn’t understand anything they were saying. I took Aurelia by the arm and dragged her home, not saying a word. That day she cooked unwillingly and broke the kitchen door by kicking it too hard. I locked her inside a room and told her I was punishing her for speaking to strangers. She didn’t seem to understand me, and slept until I let her out.
To keep her from straying too far from the house again I told her how people and animals had died by falling into the swamps and being devoured by the crabs. She didn’t listen to me. I took her by the arm and shouted in her ear. She stood up and left the house, head high, walking toward the coast.
“Where are you going?” I asked her.
She kept walking, not saying a word. I grabbed her dress, struggling with her until it tore. I knocked her down in my desperation. She stood up and resumed walking. I followed her. When we neared the river, I asked her not to go on because of the foul-smelling, muddy swamps. She kept walking. She followed a narrow path through the swamps. I went after her. Our feet sank into the mud and we heard the cries of countless birds. No trees could be seen, and reeds filled the horizon. We reached a place where the trail turned a corner; there we saw Azabache, the black horse, sunk in the swamp up to his belly. Aurelia stopped for a moment without showing surprise. Quickly, in a single leap, she jumped into the swamp and began to sink. While she struggled toward the horse I tried to reach her and save her. I lay down in the swamp, slithering along like a reptile. I took her by the arm and began to sink with her. I thought we were going to die. I looked into her eyes and saw that strange light that appears in the eyes of the dying; I saw the horse reflected in them. I let her arm go. Inching like a worm along the disgusting surface of the swamp, I waited until dawn (though it seemed endless to me) for Aurelia and Azabache to sink into the swamp.
THE VELVET DRESS
SWEATING, mopping our brows with handkerchiefs that we had moistened in the Recoleta fountain, we finally arrived at the house on Ayacucho Street, the one with a garden. How amusing!
We took the elevator to the fifth floor. I was in a foul mood because my dress was dirty and I hadn’t really wanted to go out. I had planned to spend the afternoon washing and ironing my bedspread. We rang the bell: the door opened and we—Casilda and I—stepped into the house with the package. Casilda is a dressmaker. We live in Burzaco and our trips to the capital make her ill, especially when we have to travel to the northern part of the city, so far away. Right away, Casilda asked the servant for a glass of water to take the aspirin she had brought in her purse. The aspirin fell to the floor, along with the glass and the purse. How amusing!
We went up a carpeted staircase (which smelled of mothballs), preceded by the servant, who showed us into the bedroom of Mrs. Cornelia Catalpina, whose very name was torture for me to remember. The bedroom was completely red, with white drapes and mirrors in golden frames. We waited for a century or two for a lady to come from the next room, where we could hear her singing scales and arguing with various voices. Her perfume entered; then, a few moments later, she herself entered with a different scent. She greeted us with a complaint: “How lucky you are to live outside Buenos Aires! At least there’s no soot there. There may be rabid dogs and garbage dumps . . . Look at my bedspread. Do you think it’s supposed to be gray? No. It’s white. Like a snowflake.” She took me by the chin and added, “You don’t have to worry about things like that. What a joy to be young! You’re eight, right?” Then, addressing Casilda, she added, “Why don’t you put a stone on her head so she won’t grow up? We’re young only as long as our children are.”
Everyone thought my friend Casilda was my mother. How amusing!
“Ma’am, do you want to try it on?” Casilda asked, opening the package, which was all pinned together. Then she said to me, “Get the pins from my purse.”
“Trying things on! It’s torture for me! If only someone could try on my dresses for me, how happy I would be! It’s so tiring.”
The lady undressed and Casilda tried to help her into the velvet dress.
“When are you supposed to leave on your trip, ma’am? “ she asked to distract her.
The lady couldn’t answer. The dress was stuck to her shoulders: something kept it from going past her neck. How amusing!
“Velvet is very sticky, ma’am, and it’s hot today. Let’s put on a little talcum powder.”
“Take it off, I’m suffocating,” the lady cried out. Casilda held the dress and the lady sat down in an armchair, about to faint.
“When is the trip supposed to be, ma’am?” Casilda asked again to distract her.
“I’m leaving any day now. Today, thanks to airplanes, you can leave whenever you feel like it. The dress will have to be ready. To think that it’s snowing there. Everything is white, clean, and shiny.”
“You’re going to Paris?”
“I’m also going to Italy.”
“Won’t you try on the dress again, ma’am? We’ll be finished in a moment.”
The lady nodded with a sigh.
“Raise both of your arms so we can first put on the two sleeves,” Casilda said, taking the dress and helping her put it on once again. For a few seconds Casilda tried unsuccessfully to pull the skirt of the dress down over the lady’s hips. I helped as best I could. She finally managed to put on the dress. For a few moments the lady rested in the armchair, exhausted; then she stood up to look at herself in the mirror. The dress was beautiful and complex! A dragon embroidered with black sequins was shining on the left side of the gown. Casilda knelt down, looking in the mirror, and adjusted the hem. Then she stood up and began putting pins in the folds of the gown, on the neck and sleeves. I touched the velvet: it was rough when you rubbed it one way and smooth when you rubbed it the other. The plush set my teeth on edge. The pins fell on the wood floor, and I picked them up religiously, one by one. How amusing!
“What a dress! I don’t think there�
��s such a beautiful pattern in all of Buenos Aires,” said Casilda, letting a pin drop from her lips. “Don’t you like it, ma’am?”
“Very much. Velvet is my favorite material. Fabric is like flowers: one has one’s favorites. I think that velvet is like spikenard.”
“Do you like spikenard? It’s so sad,” Casilda protested.
“Spikenard is my favorite flower, yet it’s harmful to me. When I smell it I get sick. Velvet sets my teeth on edge, gives me goose bumps, the same as linen gloves used to when I was a girl, and yet for me there’s no other fabric like it in the whole world. Feeling its softness with my hand attracts me even if it sometimes repels me. How can a woman be better dressed than in black velvet? She doesn’t need a lace collar, or a string of pearls; everything else is unnecessary. Velvet is sufficient by itself. It’s sumptuous and sober.”
When she had finished talking the lady was breathing with difficulty. The dragon also. Casilda took a newspaper from the table and fanned her, but the lady made her stop, saying that fresh air did her no good. How amusing!
I heard the cries of some street vendors outside. What were they selling? Fruit, maybe ice cream? The whistle of the knife sharpener and the ringing bell of the ice-cream vendor also went up and down the street. I didn’t run to the window to see them, as I had on other occasions. I couldn’t tear myself away from watching the fittings of the dress with the sequin dragon. The lady stood up again and, staggering slightly, walked over to the mirror. The sequin dragon also staggered. The dress was now nearly perfect, except for an almost imperceptible tuck under the arms. Casilda took up the pins once more, plunging them perilously into the wrinkles that bulged out of the unearthly fabric.
“When you grow up,” the lady told me, “you’d like to have a velvet dress, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” I answered, feeling the velvet of the dress strangling my neck with its gloved hands. How amusing!
“Now help me take it off,” the lady said.
Casilda tried to help her to take it off, holding the hem in both hands. She pulled on it unsuccessfully for a few seconds, then put it back on the way it was before.
“I’ll have to sleep in it,” the lady said, standing before the mirror, looking at her pale face, the dragon trembling with each beat of her heart. “Velvet is wonderful but it’s very heavy,” she said, wiping her brow. “It’s a prison. How to escape it? They should make dresses of fabric as immaterial as air, light, or water.”
“I recommended raw silk to you,” Casilda protested.
The lady fell to the floor, the dragon writhing. Casilda leaned over the body until the dragon lay still. I again caressed the velvet, which seemed like a live animal. Casilda said sadly, “She’s dead. And I had so much trouble making this dress! It cost me so very much!”
How amusing!
LEOPOLDINA’S DREAMS
EVER SINCE Leopoldina was born, all the women in the Yapurra family have been given names that start with L, and I, since I am so tiny, am called Changuito.
Ludovica and Leonor, who are the youngest ones, waited by the stream for a miracle every evening at dusk. We would go to the spring called Agua de la Salvia. We would leave the water jars by the spring, sitting down on a rock and waiting for nightfall, our eyes wide open. Our conversations were always about the same topic.
“Juan Mamanis must be in Catamarca,” Ludovica would say.
“Oh, what a pretty bicycle he had! Every year he visits the Virgin of the Valley.”
“Would you vow to go on foot, like Javiera?”
“I have tender feet.”
“If only we had a Virgin like that one!”
“Then Juan Mamanis wouldn’t go to Catamarca.”
“I’m not concerned about that. The Virgin is what worries me.”
I could never sit still; they knew my habits. “Changuito, leave that alone,” Ludovica would say to me, “spiders are poisonous,” or “Changuito, don’t do that. Don’t pee in the spring.”
Someone, perhaps the witch doctor, had told them that at a certain hour a light shone on the hollow amidst the stones and that a shadow appeared by the bank of the stream.
“One day we’ll find her,” Leonor would say. “She must look like the Virgin of the Valley.”
“It might be a ghost,” Ludovica would answer. “I don’t have any illusions,” she would say, sinking her feet in the stream and in the process sprinkling water on my eyes and ears. I was trembling. “What will you do, Changuito, when snow falls, when all the trees and the ground are white? You won’t go away from the edge of the fireplace, will you? Even warm water makes you shiver like a star.”
“If we discover a new Virgin we’ll be in the papers. This is what they’ll say, ‘Two girls in Chaquibil witnessed the apparition of a new Virgin. The highest authorities will be present at the tribute to them.’ They’ll build an illuminated grotto for the statue and later on there’ll be a basilica. I can imagine the Virgin of Chaquibil very clearly: dark, with a scarlet gown, glasses, and a blue mantle hemmed in gold.”
“I would be happy if she had a skirt like ours on and a kerchief in her hair, as long as she gave us presents.”
“Virgins don’t give presents or dress the way we do.”
“You think you’re always right.”
“When I’m right, I do.”
“When agreeing with you, one can’t even say ‘This is what I think,’ ” Leonor commented, stroking me on the head.
Suddenly night fell, smelling of mint and rain.
Ludovica and Leonor filled the water jars, drank some water, and went home. On the way they stopped to speak with an old man who was carrying a sack. They spoke about the long-awaited miracle. They said that at night they heard the apparition calling them. The old man replied, “It must be the fox singing. Why look for miracles away from home, when you have Leopoldina, who works miracles in her dreams?”
Ludovica and Leonor asked themselves if that was true.
In the kitchen, sitting on a high-backed wicker chair, Leopoldina was smoking. She was so old that she looked like a scribble; you couldn’t see her eyes or her mouth. She smelled like earth, grass, dry leaves: not like a person. She announced storms and good weather like a barometer; even before I did, she could smell the mountain lion coming down from the hills to eat the young goats or twist the necks of the colts. Despite not having left the house for thirty years she knew, as birds know, where there were ripe nuts, figs, and peaches, in what valley, beside which stream. Even the crispin bird, with its sad song, shy as a fox, came down one day to eat bread crumbs dipped in milk out of her hands, surely believing that she was a bush.
Leopoldina dreamed, sitting in the wicker chair. Sometimes, when she awoke, she would find the objects that had appeared in her dreams on her lap or next to the leg of the chair. However, her dreams were so modest, so poor—dreams of thorns, of stones, of branches, of feathers—that no one was surprised by the miracle.
“What did you dream about, Leopoldina?” Leonor asked, that night, when she came in.
“I dreamed that I was walking along a dry stream bed, picking up round pebbles. Here’s one of them,” Leopoldina said, with her flute-like voice.
“And how did you get the pebble?”
“Just by looking at it,” she answered.
Leonor and Ludovica no longer waited for night to come beside the spring, as they had on other afternoons, in hopes of witnessing a miracle. They went home, with hurried steps.
“What did you dream about, Leopoldina?” asked Ludovica.
“About the feathers of a ringdove, falling to earth. Here’s one of them,” Leopoldina added, showing her a little feather.
“Tell me, Leopoldina, why don’t you dream of other things?” asked Ludovica, impatiently.
“Honey, what do you want me to dream of?”
“Of precious stones, of rings, of necklaces, of bracelets. Of something that’s good for something. Of automobiles.”
“Honey, I don’t know.�
��
“What don’t you know?”
“What those things are. I’m about a hundred and twenty and I’ve always been very poor.”
“It’s time to get rich. You can bring wealth to this household.”
The next several days Leonor and Ludovica sat next to Leopoldina, watching her sleep. Every little while they would wake her up.
“What were you dreaming?” they would ask. “What were you dreaming?”
Sometimes she answered that she had dreamt of feathers, sometimes of pebbles, and sometimes of grass, branches, or frogs. Ludovica and Leonor protested, sometimes bitterly, other times tenderly, trying to move her, but Leopoldina didn’t own her dreams: the two of them disturbed her so much that she couldn’t sleep. They decided to give her a stew that would be hard to digest.
“A heavy stomach makes you sleepy,” said Ludovica, preparing a dark fritter that smelled wonderful.
Leopoldina ate, but wasn’t sleepy.
“We’ll give you some wine,” said Ludovica. “Warm wine.”
Leopoldina drank it, but didn’t fall asleep.
Leonor, who was clever, went to the folk healer for some soporific herbs. The healer lived in a very remote place. We had to cross the swamp, and one of the mules sank in. The herbs Leonor got from her were just as useless as everything else. For several days Ludovica and Leonor discussed where they should go looking for a doctor: whether to Tafí del Valle or Amaicha.
“If we go to Amaicha we can bring home grapes,” Leonor said to Leopoldina, to console her. “But it’s not grape season.”
“And if we go to Tafí del Valle, we can buy cheese at the cheese factory at Churqui,” said Ludovica.
“Why don’t you take Changuito, to get him out of the house?” Leopoldina answered, as if she didn’t like cheese or grapes.
We went to Tafí del Valle. We rode slowly on horseback across the swamp where the mule had died. In town we came to the hospital and Leonor went to find the doctor. We waited for her on the terrace. While Leonor was speaking with the doctor, we had time to take a walk around town. When we returned, Leonor was waiting for us at the hospital entrance, a package in her hand. The package contained some medicine and a syringe set for giving shots. Leonor knew how to give shots: a nurse she had known had taught her the art of sticking the needle in an orange or an apple. We spent the night at Tafí del Valle and the next morning very early set out on our way home.
Thus Were Their Faces Page 16