Dropping their arrows, two canaries started fighting; their feathers flew around the room, and Antonio’s face grew dark with rage. Was he capable of killing them? Cleóbula had told me he was cruel. “He looks like someone who carries a knife in his belt,” she explained.
Antonio no longer allowed me to clean the aviary. During this time, he occupied a room that served as a storage space at the back of the house, leaving our marriage bed. On a cot, where my brother used to nap when he visited, Antonio spent his nights (without sleeping I suspect, since I would hear him pacing tirelessly on the flagstones until dawn). Sometimes he would shut himself up for hours at a time in that damned room.
One by one, the canaries let the little arrows fall from their beaks, perched on the back of a chair, and sang a soft song. Antonio sat up and, looking at Maria Callas, the one he had always called “the queen of disobedience,” said a word that meant nothing to me. The canaries began fluttering about.
Through the painted glass of the windowpanes I tried to observe his movements. Once I intentionally cut my hand with a knife so as to be able to knock on his door. When he opened it, a flock of canaries flapped out, returning to the aviary. Antonio healed my wound but, as if perhaps suspecting that this was a pretext to get his attention, treated me with coolness and suspicion. It was about that time that he went away for two weeks, in his truck, I don’t know where, and came back with a sack full of plants.
I looked at my stained skirt out of the corner of my eye. Birds are so tiny and so dirty. Exactly when had they soiled me? I looked at them with hatred: I like to be clean even in the darkness of a room.
Ruperto, ignorant of the bad impression his visits were making, came with the same frequency and always behaving the same way. Sometimes when I left the patio to avoid his glances, my husband would find some pretext to make me return, as if he actually enjoyed what gave him such displeasure. Ruperto’s glances now seemed obscene to me; they stripped me naked in the shadow of the arbor, forcing me to do unspeakable acts when a late-afternoon breeze caressed my cheeks. Antonio, on the other hand, never looked at me, or he pretended never to look at me, according to Cleóbula. One of my most burning desires was to have never met him, to have never married him and known his caresses, but rather to meet him anew, discovering him for the first time, giving myself to him. But who can recover what has already been lost?
I sat up; my legs hurt. I don’t like being still for such a long time. How I envy the birds their flight! But canaries make me sad. They look like they suffer in their obedience.
Antonio didn’t try to stop Ruperto’s visits: on the contrary, he encouraged them. During Carnival, he went to the extreme of asking him to spend the night when he stayed especially late one evening. We put him up in the storage room that Antonio was occupying at the time. That night, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, we slept together again, my husband and I, in our marriage bed. For a moment my life returned to its old pattern; or so I thought.
I glimpsed the famous doll in a corner, under the bedside table. I thought of picking it up. As if I had made some gesture, Antonio told me, “Don’t move.”
I remembered the day during carnival week when, as punishment for my sins, while straightening up the bedrooms, I discovered the burlap doll on top of Antonio’s closet: its large blue eyes of soft fabric even had two dark circles in the middle for pupils. Dressed as a gaucho it would have made a funny decoration in our bedroom. Laughing, I showed it to Antonio, who looked annoyed, pulling it out of my hands.
“It’s a memento from my childhood,” he told me. “I don’t like you touching my things.”
“What’s wrong with touching a doll you played with when you were a boy? I know boys who play with dolls—does it make you ashamed? Aren’t you a man by now?” I said.
“I don’t have to explain anything. Please shut up.”
In a foul mood, Antonio once again put the doll on top of the closet and didn’t speak to me for several days. But we embraced tightly as in happier days long past.
I touched my damp forehead with my hand. Had my curls come undone? Luckily there wasn’t a mirror in the room, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to resist the temptation to look at myself instead of looking at those stupid canaries.
Antonio frequently shut himself up in the back room, and I noticed that he would leave the door of the aviary open so that some of the birds could come to the window. Out of curiosity, one afternoon I spied on him by standing on a chair to look through the very high window (which of course I couldn’t look through when passing the courtyard).
I saw Antonio’s naked torso. Was it my husband or a statue? He accused Ruperto of being crazy, but he was perhaps even crazier himself. How much money had he spent on canaries, instead of buying me a washing machine!
One day I caught a glimpse of the doll lying on the bed. A swarm of birds surrounded it. The room had been turned into a kind of laboratory. A clay bowl held a bunch of leaves, stems, and dark pieces of bark; another, some little arrows made of thorns; another, a shiny brown liquid. It seemed to me as if I had seen those objects in my dreams. To express my anxiety I described the scene to Cleóbula, who said, “That’s what the Indians do: they use arrows dipped in curare.”
I didn’t ask her what curare was. I didn’t know whether she was telling me this out of scorn or wonder.
“They devote themselves to sorcery. Your husband is an Indian.” When she saw my surprise, she asked, “Didn’t you know that?”
I shook my head with irritation. My husband was my husband. I had never thought that he could belong to a race or a world different from my own.
“How do you know?” I asked with some vehemence.
“Haven’t you looked at his eyes, his protruding cheekbones? Haven’t you noticed how cunning he is? Mandarin—even Maria Callas—is more honest than him. His reserve, his way of not answering when you ask him something, his way of treating women: Isn’t it enough to show you he’s an Indian? My mother knows the whole story. They kidnapped him from a settlement when he was five years old. Perhaps that’s what you liked about him: his mystery that makes him different from other men.”
Antonio was perspiring and the sweat made his torso shine. He was so handsome and yet how he wasted his time! Had I married Juan Leston, the lawyer, or Roberto Cuentas, the bookseller, I would surely not have suffered so much. But—what sensible woman marries from self-interest? They say that there are men who train fleas—what good is that?
I lost my trust in Cleóbula. No doubt she was telling me that my husband was an Indian to upset me or to make me lose confidence in him; but one day, while looking through a history book that had illustrations of Indian camps, and Indians on horseback swinging boleadoras, I noticed a similarity in appearance between Antonio and those naked men adorned with feathers. At the same time I realized that what had attracted me to Antonio may have been the difference between him and my brothers and their friends, the bronze color of his skin, his slightly slanted eyes, and that air of cunning that Cleóbula had mentioned with perverse delight.
“And the show?” I asked.
Antonio did not answer me. He looked fixedly at the canaries, which had started fluttering again. Mandarin separated himself from his fellows and remained alone in the darkness, singing a song similar to that of a lark’s.
My solitude was increasing. I had nobody to talk to about my worries.
For Holy Week, for the second time, Antonio insisted that Ruperto stay as a guest in our house. It rained, as it usually does on Holy Week. We went to church with Cleóbula for the Stations of the Cross.
“How is the Indian?” Cleóbula asked me rudely.
“Who?”
“The Indian, your husband,” she answered. “In town everyone calls him that.”
“I like Indians, and even if my husband weren’t one, I would still like them,” I answered, trying not to interrupt my prayers.
Antonio stood as if in prayer. Had he ever prayed?
On our wedding day my mother had asked him to take communion; Antonio refused.
Meanwhile, Antonio’s friendship with Ruperto was becoming closer. A sort of camaraderie, from which I was in some way excluded, linked them in a way that seemed fine to me. At that time Antonio made a show of his powers. To amuse himself, he sent messages to Ruperto, to his house, via the canaries. People said they played truco in this way, since they once exchanged tarot cards. Were they making fun of me? I felt upset by the games of those two grown-up men and decided not to take them seriously. Did I need to admit that friendship was more important than love? Nothing had estranged Antonio and Ruperto; on the contrary, Antonio, quite unfairly, had become estranged from me. With my woman’s pride, I suffered. Ruperto kept on looking at me. The whole drama: Was it all just a farce? Did I miss the conjugal drama, that torture inflicted on me by the jealousy of a husband who had gone mad for days at a time?
We continued to love each other, in spite of everything.
In the circus Antonio could earn some money with his shows, so why not? Maria Callas nodded her head to one side, then to the other, and perched on the back of a chair.
One morning, as if he were announcing that a house was burning down, Antonio entered my room and said to me, “Ruperto is dying. They called me to come over. I am going to see him.”
I waited for Antonio until noon, distracted by the housework. When he returned I was washing my hair.
“Let’s go,” he told me. “Ruperto is in the courtyard. I saved him.”
“How? Was it a joke?”
“No, not at all. I saved him by means of artificial respiration.”
Hurriedly, without understanding anything, I put up my hair, got dressed, and went out to the yard. Ruperto, motionless, was standing by the door, looking at the flagstones of the courtyard without seeing them. Antonio pulled up a chair so that Ruperto could sit down.
Antonio didn’t look at me; he stared at the roof, seemingly holding his breath. Suddenly Mandarin flew by Antonio and stuck one of the arrows in his arm. I applauded: I thought that’s what I should do to make Antonio happy. And yet, it was a silly show. Why didn’t he use his gift to cure Ruperto?
That fatal day, when Ruperto sat down, he covered his face with his hands.
How much he had changed! I looked at his cold, inert face, his dark hands.
When would they leave me alone? I had to put the curlers in my hair while it was wet. I asked Ruperto, trying to hide my annoyance, “What’s happened?”
A long silence lengthened in the sun, heightening the song of the birds. Ruperto finally answered, “I dreamed that the canaries were pecking at my arms, my neck, my chest; that I couldn’t close my eyelids to protect my eyes. I dreamed that my legs and arms were as heavy as bags of sand. My hands couldn’t scare off the monstrous beaks that were pecking at my pupils. I slept without sleeping as if I had taken some drug. When I awoke from that dream, which was no dream at all, I saw darkness; however, I could hear the birds sing and the normal sounds of morning. With a great effort I called my sister, who came over. With a voice that was not my own, I told her, ‘You must call Antonio to come save me!’ ‘From what?’ my sister asked. I couldn’t utter another word. My sister went running out, and came back with Antonio half an hour later. Half an hour that seemed like an eternity to me! Slowly, as Antonio moved my arms back and forth, I regained my strength but not my sight.”
“I’m going to make a confession to you,” Antonio whispered, slowly adding, “but without words.”
Favorita followed Mandarin and stuck an arrow in Antonio’s neck, then Maria Callas flew over his chest, and quickly stuck in another little arrow. Antonio’s eyes, staring at the roof, changed color, so to speak. Was Antonio an Indian? Do Indians have blue eyes? In some ways his eyes resembled Ruperto’s.
“What’s the meaning of all of this?” I mumbled.
“What’s he doing?” Ruperto said, since he saw nothing.
Antonio didn’t answer. As still as a statue, he received the seemingly harmless arrows that the canaries were piercing into him. I went up to the bed and shook him.
“Answer me,” I said. “Answer me! What’s the meaning of all of this?”
He didn’t say anything. Crying, I embraced him, throwing myself on him; losing all shame, I kissed him on the mouth, as only a movie star would do. A swarm of canaries fluttered about my head.
That morning Antonio looked at Ruperto with horror. Now I understood that Antonio was guilty twice over: so that no one could discover his crime, he had said to me and to the whole world, “Ruperto has gone crazy. He believes he is blind, but he sees as well as the rest of us.”
Just as light had left Ruperto’s eyes, so love left our house. You could say that those glances were a necessary part of our love. Gatherings in the courtyard lacked life. Antonio fell into a dark sorrow. He explained to me, “A friend’s madness is worse than death. Ruperto can see, but he believes he’s blind.” I thought with indignation, perhaps with jealousy that friendship was more important than love in a man’s life.
When I stopped kissing Antonio and drew my face away from his, I noticed that the canaries were about to peck at his eyes. I covered his face with my face and hair, which was thick as a blanket. I ordered Ruperto to close the door and windows so the room would become completely dark, hoping the canaries would fall asleep. My legs hurt. How long was I in that position? I don’t know. Then I gradually understood Antonio’s confession. It was a confession that bound me to him in a frenzy, in a frenzy of misfortune. I understood the pain he had needed to withstand in order to sacrifice—in such an ingenious way, with those tiny doses of curare and with those winged monsters that obeyed his whimsical commands as if they were orderlies—the eyes of Ruperto, his friend, and his own, so that they both, poor things, would never be able to look at me again.
ICERA
WHEN ICERA saw the set of doll furniture in the window of that enormous toy store at the Colón Bazaar, she wanted it badly. She didn’t want it for her dolls (she didn’t have any) but for herself, because she wanted to sleep in the tiny wooden bed, the frame of which was decorated with garlands and baskets of flowers, and to look at herself in the mirror of the wardrobe, which had tiny drawers and a door that locked. She wanted to sit in the little chair with a woven cane seat and a turned back, and face the dressing table, where there was an extra bar of soap, as well as a comb to tame her rebellious hair.
The head of the doll department, Darío Cuerda, took a liking to the girl.
“She’s so ugly,” he would say, by way of explaining his interest in her to the other employees.
Icera considered the dolls as rivals; she wouldn’t accept them even as presents: she only wanted to occupy their places. Because she was stubborn, she stuck firmly to her ideas. This peculiarity of character, more than her height (she was much shorter than average), called attention to her. The girl always went with her mother to look at toys but not to buy them, since they were very poor. The head of the doll department, Darío Cuerda, let Icera lie down in the little bed, look at herself in the little mirror of the wardrobe, and sit in the chair, before the dressing table, to comb her hair, just the way the lady across the street from her house did.
Nobody gave Icera any toys, but for Christmas Darío Cuerda gave her a dress, a little hat, gloves, and doll shoes, all of which had been damaged and so could only be sold at a discount. Icera, mad with joy, went out wearing her new clothes. She still has them.
The little girl caused Cuerda some difficulties with her visits, because if he allowed her to choose a present she always chose the most expensive one.
“Mr. Cuerda is always so generous,” the other employees at the store would say to the regular customers.
His reputation for generosity cost him a fair amount of money. The girl liked practical toys: sewing and washing machines, a grand piano, a sewing kit with all the tools, and a trunk with a trousseau, all of which cost a fortune. Darío Cuerda gave her a guitar
and a rake; after that, since there were not many cheap toys, he chose to give her soaps, hangers, and little combs, things that made the girl happy because they were of some use.
“Children grow up,” Icera’s mother would say, sincere yet unhappy. “What mother isn’t secretly sorry to see her daughter grow, even though she’d like her to grow taller and stronger than the other girls!” Icera’s mother was like all mothers, only a bit poorer and a bit more devoted. “Some day, this little dress will no longer fit you,” she would say, showing her the little doll dress. “What a shame! I once was little too, and look at me now.”
Icera would look at her mother, who was inconsolably tall. Children grew up—this was true. Few things in the world were so true. Ferdinando wore long pants, Próspera couldn’t find shoes her size, Marina didn’t climb trees because, given her height (she resembled a giraffe), they were too short for her. A tiny worry gnawed for many days at Icera’s heart, but she decided that if she repeated the words “I won’t grow up, I won’t grow up” over and over to herself, she would halt her apparent growth. Besides, if she wore the doll dress, gloves, and hat every day, she would necessarily continue being the same size. Her faith worked a miracle—Icera didn’t grow.
Then she fell ill, and for a month she couldn’t get dressed. When she got up she had grown four inches. She felt a great loss, as if that increase had diminished her. And in fact it had. She was no longer allowed to stand on the table; she no longer had her baths in the washtub; they no longer gave her wine in her mother’s thimble; the grapes she was given and the purple verbena flowers she gathered in the countryside no longer took up as much space in the palm of her hand. The dress, gloves, and shoes no longer fit her. The hat perched on top of her head. Anyone could imagine the girl’s displeasure: just think how annoyed you feel when you get fat, when your feet or face swell, when the fingers of your gloves become wrinkled like raw sausages. But by looking hard enough she found solutions for these problems: the dress became a blouse; the gloves could be made into mittens; by cutting off the heels the shoes could be used as slippers.
Thus Were Their Faces Page 24