Icera lived happily once again, until a rude person reminded her of her misfortune.
“How you’ve grown!” said a nasty neighbor.
To show that it wasn’t true, Icera tried hiding under the ferns in the yard, but three other neighbors discovered her right away and kept on talking about her abnormal height.
Icera ran to the toy store, her place of refuge. Her heart filled with bitterness, she stopped at the doorway. That day only dolls were exhibited in the shopwindow. The odious dolls, with the stiff smell of their hair and new clothes, gleamed behind the glass, among the reflections of admiring passersby who streamed along Florida Street. Some dolls were dressed for first communion, some as skiers, others as Little Red Riding Hood, others as schoolgirls; only one was dressed as a bride. The bride doll was a little different from the one dressed for first communion: she carried a small bouquet of orange blossoms in her hands and was enclosed in a light blue cardboard box, the kind that candies come in. Icera went into the toy store looking for Darío Cuerda. She asked the other employees where he was, since she couldn’t find him in his usual place.
“Mr. Darío Cuerda?” (Icera, usually so silent, was forgetting her shyness.) “Would you please call him?” she said to an employee she particularly feared.
“Here he is,” the cashier said, pointing to an old man who looked like Darío Cuerda disguised as an old man.
Darío Cuerda was so covered with wrinkles that Icera didn’t recognize him. Despite his blurry memory, however, he remembered her because of her height.
“Your mother used to come and look at the toys. She liked the bedroom sets and the little sewing machines so much!” Darío Cuerda said politely, coming forward with a maternal tenderness. He noticed that the little girl had whiskers and false teeth. “These modern young people,” he exclaimed, “the dentists treat them like adults.”
How wrinkled we all are! Darío Cuerda thought. Later on he imagined that it was all a dream, a consequence of his fatigue. So many old faces, so many new faces, so many chosen toys, so many sales receipts with carbon copies to write for impatient customers. So many children growing old and old people turning into children!
“I have to tell you a secret,” said Icera.
For Icera’s mouth to reach Darío Cuerda’s extremely long ear, the little girl had to climb up on the counter.
“I am Icera,” Icera whispered.
“Your name is Icera too? That’s normal. Children are named after their parents,” said the head of the doll department, thinking to himself, Old age obsesses me: even children look old to me. (In his mind he amused himself mispronouncing the words.)
“Mr. Cuerda, I would like you to give me the box of the bride doll,” Icera whispered, tickling him unbearably on the ear.
Icera had never spoken such a long, well-pronounced a sentence. In her view, that box would assure her future happiness. Getting it was a matter of life or death.
“Everything gets passed on,” Cuerda exclaimed, “especially predilections. There is practically no difference between this girl and her mother. This girl speaks better but looks like an old woman,” he added, addressing someone he thought was Icera’s grandmother, who looked like a ghost.
Icera thought that when she got into that box she would stop growing. But she also thought that she would achieve some sort of revenge against all the dolls in the world by taking away this box, lined with blue lacy paper, from the most important of them all. Darío Cuerda, straining from fatigue—it was no small job to take something from the display window—untied all the ribbons that held the doll in the box and gave it to Icera.
Just at that moment an unexpected photographer walked by, carrying the tools of his trade. When he saw a crowd of people gathered in the Colón Bazaar, he discovered that Icera, for whom he had been searching for some time, was in the toy store. The photographer asked permission to take her picture, while Icera settled comfortably into the box and Cuerda tied the ribbons over her. He knelt down on one knee, brandished his camera, then moved farther away, then moved closer again as if he were himself a doll. Perhaps the picture would be good publicity for the shop, Cuerda thought proudly. As he smiled, he forgot his wrinkles and those of the little girl, blinded by the flash that illuminated everything.
The photographer, who worked for a newspaper, began taking notes, consulting the old woman who accompanied Icera. This was just a formality, as he already knew the name, address, and age of the girl, her life and its miracles.
“When did your daughter turn forty?” he asked.
“Last month,” Icera’s mother responded.
Then Darío Cuerda realized that what was happening wasn’t the result of his fatigue. Thirty-five years had passed since Icera’s last visit to the Colón Bazaar. He thought, confusedly perhaps (because he was in fact extremely tired), that Icera had not grown more than four inches in all that time, destined as she was to sleep all of her future nights in that box, thus preventing her from growing in the past.
THE PERFECT CRIME
GILBERTA Pax wanted to live in peace. When I fell in love with her I believed quite the opposite; I offered her everything a man in my position can offer a woman to persuade her to come live with me, since circumstances didn’t allow us to marry. For one or two years we met in uncomfortable, expensive places. First in cars, then in cafés, then in seedy movie theaters, then in rather dirty hotels. Once, instead of asking again, I demanded that she come live with me and she replied, “I can’t.”
“Why not?” I cried. “Because of your husband?”
“Because of the cook,” she whispered, and she ran away.
The next day I angrily asked for an explanation. She went on at some length.
You don’t know my house; it’s like a hotel. Five people live there with us; besides my husband, there’s my uncle, one of his sisters, and her two children. They want everything to be perfect, especially the food; but Tomás Mangorsino, the cook—he’s been with us for eight years—started to poke fun at us. Although each dish’s appearance was rather pleasing, each day his cooking got worse. If I forgot to cover my hair with a kerchief, it’d smell like grease. I would spend whole mornings pleading with him to cook as well as he did in his prime. Mangorsino would look at me with some compassion, but he’d never listen. One morning when I went to see him, wearing a pink bathrobe and a green plastic cap, the kind you would wear to a dance, he stared at me so insistently that I asked him, “What’s wrong, Mangorsino?”
“What’s wrong? This morning my lady is so beautiful that I hardly recognize her.”
That was when I thought of compromising my duty as a housewife by seducing him. As if he had guessed my intentions, he changed his behavior, but only toward me. He sent me meringue puffs, in shapes that suggested his love and in portions large enough for only one person. When he spoke to me, I could sense repressed tenderness in his voice.
“Make some noodles with a very light dough.”
“I’ll knead it very well,” he said, looking me in the eye.
Or else, “And my favorite empanada?”
“I’ll brown it. I know you’ll like it.”
“And what are you going to make for tea?”
“Meringue kisses.”
He said these things while devouring me with his wolf eyes.
I acceded to his demands, but things didn’t change much. He would send out a dish, forbidding me to eat from it as it was for the others, cheap ingredients and not so fresh. Then the servant would whisper to me while setting a plate on the table before me, “This is for my lady, whose digestion is a bit delicate.”
The situation prolonged itself horribly. While the rest of the family writhed with stomachaches, I ate delicious pastries that, had they not threatened my slim figure, would have delighted me.
“My husband wants to eat mushrooms (I hate them, even in pastry) and my children want turkey,” I told him one day.
He almost strangled me.
“They are very exp
ensive,” he answered.
Our relationship has become fraught with misunderstandings. When he sharpens the knives, he stares intently at my neck. I am afraid of him, why deny it? When he twists a dishrag, I know he is twisting my neck; when he slices meat, he is slicing me. At night I can’t sleep. I’m a slave to his fancies.
“Don’t worry,” I told Gilberta. “What market does he go to?”
“I have the address in my address book,” she told me, “1000 Junín Street. Do you plan to kill him?”
“No, something better than that,” I answered.
It was the middle of winter and I went to the country to gather mushrooms. I brought them home in a sack. I asked Gilberta for a photograph of Tomás Mangorsino.
“What do you want it for?” she asked.
“I have an idea,” I answered. She brought me the picture.
To carry out my plan, I needed to know Mangorsino’s habits. After finding out what time he went to the market, I stationed myself at a corner I knew he passed at seven every morning. A man walked by wearing an impeccable gray suit and a brown scarf. I consulted the photograph: it was Mangorsino.
“Mushrooms, very cheap mushrooms,” I cried, with a peddler’s voice, “very fresh.”
Mangorsino stopped, then stared at my gloves. I didn’t want to leave fingerprints, just in case.
“How much?”
“Five pesos,” I said, speaking like a foreigner.
“I’ll take them,” he said, handing me money from a bottomless pocket.
The next day, in the afternoon paper, I read the news. A whole family had died, poisoned by mushrooms bought on the street by the cook, Mangorsino. The only survivor was Mrs. Gilberta Pax.
I rushed to the house, where Gilberta was waiting for me. I didn’t tell her anything about what I had done. Such a complicated, subtle crime shouldn’t be confided to anyone, not even to the person you love most in the world, not even to your pillow.
She told me that her family felt indignant as they were dying and that they didn’t lose their senses: when they felt the first symptoms of the poison they ran, forks in hand, into the kitchen, forcing Mangorsino to eat the same poisonous mushrooms, thus causing the poor man’s death. My crime was a crime of passion and, what is more unusual, a perfect one.
THE MORTAL SIN
SYMBOLS of purity and mysticism are at times more of an aphrodisiac than pornographic pictures or stories. This is why—oh sacrilegious one!—in the days before your first communion, when you were promised a white dress decorated with lots of lace, linen gloves, and a little pearl rosary, you experienced perhaps the most impure period of your life. May God forgive me for that, because in a way I was your accomplice and your slave.
Holding a red mimosa blossom, which you would pick in the countryside on Sundays, and a missal bound in white (chalice stamped on the center of the first page and lists of sins written on other pages), it was then that you discovered the pleasure—I choose these words carefully—of love, so as not to call it by its technical name. You would not have been able to give it its technical name either: you wouldn’t even know where to place it in the list of sins you studied so diligently. Not even in the catechism was everything anticipated or clarified.
When people saw your innocent, melancholy face, nobody suspected that perversity, or even vice, had already caught you in its messy, sticky net.
When some girlfriend arrived to play with you, you would first tell, then show the secret link between the mimosa flower, the missal, and your sudden feeling of exhilaration. No friend understood it or tried to participate in it, but all of them pretended quite the opposite, to oblige you, sowing in you a panicked feeling of solitude (stronger than yourself) due to your knowing that your neighbor was deceiving you.
In the enormous house where you lived (from the windows of which you could see several churches, a store, the river full of ships, sometimes processions of streetcars or carriages in the square, and the English clock), the top floor was devoted to purity and slavery: to the children and the servants. (You were of the opinion that slavery also existed on the other floors and that purity was absent from all of them.)
You heard someone say in a sermon, “The greater the luxury, the greater the corruption.” You wanted to walk barefoot, like the baby Jesus; to sleep in a bed surrounded by animals; to eat bread crumbs, which you would find on the ground, like the birds, but you were granted none of these pleasures. To console you for not walking barefoot, they dressed you in an iridescent taffeta gown, in shoes of gilded leather; to console you for not sleeping in a bed of straw, they took you to the Colón Theater, the largest in the world; to console you for not eating crumbs off the ground, they gave you a fancy box of silvery lace paper, full of candies that barely fit in your mouth.
That winter the ladies, with their headgear of feathers and furs, only ventured a few times to the top floor of the house, where its incontestable superiority (or so you thought) would appeal to them in the summer, when they wore light clothes and carried binoculars, looking for a flat roof where they could watch airplanes, an eclipse, or perhaps just Venus rising. Then they would pat your head as they passed by, exclaiming in a falsetto voice, “What lovely hair! Oh, what lovely hair!”
Next to the playroom, which was also the children’s study, was the men’s bathroom, a bathroom you never saw except from afar, through the half-open door. The chief servant, Chango, the one granted the most responsibility in the house, who had nicknamed you “Doll,” would linger there much longer than the others, something you noticed as you often crossed the hall to go to the ironing room, which you found pleasant. From there, you not only could see the shameful entrance, you could hear the plumbing run past the countless bedrooms and living rooms in the house, rooms where there were glass cabinets, a small altar with images of the Virgin, and sunset glowing on the ceiling.
In the elevator, when the nursemaid brought you up to the playroom, you often saw Chango entering the forbidden room with a sly expression on his face and a cigarette in his lips. More often, however, you would see him alone, distracted, baffled, in different places around the house. He would be standing up, leaning for long periods on the edge of a table, whether a fancy or plain one (any table, that is, except the marble table in the kitchen or the wrought-iron table decorated with bronze irises in the courtyard). “What’s the matter with Chango, why doesn’t he come?” Shrill voices could be heard, calling him. He would linger before leaving the table behind. Afterwards, when he did come, they of course couldn’t remember why they had been calling him.
You would spy on him, but he also ended up spying on you: something you discovered the day the mimosa flower disappeared from your desk and you later saw it adorning the buttonhole of Chango’s lustring jacket.
The ladies of the house rarely left you alone, but when there were parties or deaths (such similar occasions) they would have Chango take care of you. Parties and deaths served to strengthen this custom, apparently preferred by your parents. “Chango is serious; Chango is good. He’s better than a governess,” they would say in chorus. “Of course, he plays with her,” they would add. But I know of one person with the mouth of a viper, the kind that’s never lacking, who said, “A man is a man, but these people don’t care at all, so long as they can save a little money.” “How unfair!” the raucous aunts would mutter. “The little girl’s parents are generous, so generous they pay Chango as if he were a governess.”
Someone died, I can’t remember who. An intense smell of flowers rose up through the elevator shaft, exhausting and poisoning the air. Death, with its countless ostentatious demonstrations, filled the lower floors, moved up and down with the elevators, with crosses, coffins, wreaths, palm fronds, and music stands. Upstairs, under Chango’s vigilance, you ate chocolates that he gave you; you played with the blackboard, the store, the train, and the dollhouse. Swift as the dream of a lightning bolt, your mother visited you and asked Chango whether it would be good to invite a little girl o
ver to play with you. Chango answered that it was better not to, because two girls would make a racket. A purple color passed over his cheeks. Your mother kissed you and departed; she smiled, showing her beautiful teeth, momentarily happy to see you acting so sensibly in Chango’s company.
That day Chango’s features were even more indistinct than usual: we wouldn’t have recognized him in the street, neither you nor I, although you described him to me so many times. You spied him out of the corner of your eye—he usually stood erect but was curved over like a parenthesis. He walked closer to the edge of the table and stared at you. From time to time he watched the movements of the elevator—he could see the cables pass by like snakes inside the black metal cage. You were playing, feeling submissive yet uneasy. You could foresee that something unusual had happened or was going to happen in the house. Like a dog, you could smell the awful scent of flowers. The door was open: it was so tall that its opening was the size of three doors of a modern building. But that wouldn’t make your escape any easier; besides, you had no intention of escaping. Mice or frogs don’t flee the snake that desires them; larger animals don’t flee either. Chango, dragging his feet, finally moved away from the table; he leaned over the railing on the stairs and looked down. A woman’s voice, shrill and cold, echoed from the basement, “Is Doll behaving properly?”
Thus Were Their Faces Page 25