Where could those eyes be that stared at me so persistently? What might they talk about? Could they have fallen into the sea, attracted by their own color? What if they were to come all of a sudden?
Little by little I get used to this life. I prefer to sleep: it’s what I do best, sometimes even too much. If a predator were to attack me while I slept, I wouldn’t be able to defend myself. Every day I commit the foolhardy act of sleeping deeply after lunch; of course I don’t know what time it is, because my watch has stopped and for the first time I have lost all notion of time. The sunlight reaches me indirectly through the trees. After losing the thread of time, if I can put it that way, it would be difficult to orient myself using that light. I don’t know whether it is fall, winter, spring, or summer. How could I without knowing where I am? I think the trees around me don’t lose their leaves. I don’t dare go deeper into the jungle; I might lose my provisions. This has become my home. The branches are my hangers. I miss soap and a mirror so much, scissors and a comb. I begin to worry about the question of sleep. It seems to me that I sleep almost all the time and I think it’s because of the intense perfume of the flowers. Their harmless aspect is deceptive: they form an arbor that on closer inspection is diabolical. In vain, I rip them up out of the soil; they grow back with even more force. I try to destroy them by burying them but I don’t have any digging tools. I try to use a short piece of wood but it is too difficult. Poor Robinson Crusoe, or rather, lucky Robinson Crusoe who knew how to handle the tasks imposed by solitude. I am helpless in a situation like this. In vain I try to destroy the flowers because they climb up into the trees and cut me off from the sky. I couldn’t destroy their scent in any case, since this place is like a locked room. Sometimes while falling asleep I’ve noticed a branch with two or three flowers; when I wake up I see that the same branch has nine more flowers. How long have I slept? I don’t know. I never know how long I sleep, but I suppose that I sleep the way I did when I had a normal life. How could so many flowers bloom in such a short time? I think these things will drive me mad. I observe the flower that is guilty of making me sleepy: it looks like a trumpet flower and it is sweet (I have tried it). The branches that emerge are weaving strange little baskets. I never observed a vine so closely. It curls around trunks and branches, making such a tight weave that sometimes it is impossible to pull it off. It is like a lining, like a cascade, like a snake. Thirsty for water, it comes looking for my eyes. Now I am afraid of sleeping. I have nightmares. I’ve been dreaming the same dream several nights in a row: the honeysuckle confuses me with a tree and starts weaving a net that takes me captive around my legs. I don’t think I’m in bad health. Quite the contrary, I think that I’m perfectly fine. Nevertheless, this state of sleepiness doesn’t seem normal to me. Sometimes I ask myself: Have I lost all sense of time? Am I sleeping more than is normal for a human being, or do I believe that I am sleeping more? Is it the perfume that makes me sleepy? At the hour that it is most intense, I begin to nod off, my eyes close, and I fall into a lethargy that frightens me when I wake up again. The progress the vine made up the tree served as my clock for several days. Like a weaver it tightened its grip around each branch. When I woke up I could calculate the time I had slept from its knots but right now it seems to be speeding up. Is it me, or time? Jumping from one idea to another without any order is one of my normal habits, but the truth is that I never had so much time or so much physical inactivity. I never believed that I would find myself in such a situation. Besides, abstinence always horrified me. Yesterday—was yesterday yesterday?—I drank several bottles of wine to relax, and after wandering drunk through the jungle I fell asleep, who knows for how long.
I dreamt that I was saying, Where are those eyes that stared at me so intensely? What would they drink? There are people who are hands; others, mouths; others, hair; others, a chest that you can lean on; others, a neck; others, eyes, just eyes. Like her. I tried to explain it to her while we were traveling on the plane but she couldn’t understand. She only understood with her eyes and asked, “What? What did you say?”
I woke up far from the provisions, thinking that I wouldn’t ever be able to find them again. I scolded myself harshly. I argued with myself. I found my way back, guided no doubt by divine grace, back to the place of my salvation: my food. What an irony of fate! Depending on food when I was one of those men who boasted of being able to fast for twenty days, who used to laugh at hunger strikes! Now, for a date or a repulsive cashew I would sell my soul. No doubt all men are the same and they would all react in the same way. I don’t move, am enclosed as if in a prison cell. I never imagined that a cell and a jungle could be so alike, that society and solitude could have so much in common. Inside my ear a million voices are arguing, getting angry at one another, devoting themselves to destroying me. Tra ra ra ra, I am sick of this.
My God, may I never forget those eyes. May their irises live in my heart as if it were of earth and the irises were plants.
Those contradictory voices (the voices that I hear in my ears) are devoted to destroying me.
Love one another. Never before was it so hard for me to follow that precept. Though one shouldn’t scorn solitude. One day the world will be so densely populated that my present lair will no longer be isolated. Thinking about transformations makes me dizzy. With my eyes closed I think about all those crazy things, which isn’t prudent of me: the vine takes advantage of my distraction and wraps around my left leg, weaving a fine net around each toe. The baby toe makes me laugh. How skillfully it wraps around it. To say nothing of the big toe that looks like a vessel to sprinkle holy water. The vine does its job in various ways; for the smaller toes it uses a stitch that looks like the slats of modern wicker chairs, for bigger surfaces it uses a strange mixture of arabesques that imitate plastic car seats. I pull the web off my food with some difficulty. I remember a vine at my house called wallflower, with little clawed feet that stuck onto the walls. I remember as a boy pulling off some of the leaves that were like kittens that didn’t want to let go of their prey. This vine doesn’t have little feet like that wallflower. It is the better for it. It tirelessly goes around weaving knot after knot. Poor trees, poor plants that fall victim to its claws! Lucky the tree that is barely sensitive.* I recited that to someone (I no longer love) to impress her. The line has stayed with me. I’m not so sure about that “barely sensitive” stuff. At night I think I hear the trees complaining, hugging, rejecting one another or sighing, kneeling before other members of the family or before those who have succumbed to the vine. I entered this vegetal realm in complete ignorance. The only tree I knew, besides the willow, was the tipa tree. Once Mama told me while we were crossing San Martín Square, “What beautiful tipas!” At that moment two horrible tipas walked by.
“Why are you laughing?” Mama protested, looking at the foliage of the tipa trees, adding, “Now one can’t even admire the trees?”
“What trees?” I asked.
“The tipas, silly. Don’t know what tipas are?”
“Oh, the tipa trees,” I answered with the due surprise, “I thought you were talking about those ladies.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying. You should go to the jungle to chat with the monkeys.”
Poor Mama, she must be regretting that insult now. Sometimes I’m kept awake by that memory, unable to avoid it. I look at the tipas in the dark. They had yellow flowers; they made Mama’s dress look even bluer. And will I always have the gray face I had in Buenos Aires?
What are those eyes looking at?
A doughlike face—that’s what the seamstress who came to sew for my sisters at our house said about me, always thinking I was twelve years old even though I had just turned twenty. What a drag to be twenty! I don’t miss my house at all, but a mirror is all the company I have now—for better or for worse—and there I had a mirror that was as round as the moon. I have fallen asleep this time more deeply than ever, more than the day I got drunk; it’s clear that I can’t be sure if I
’m mistaken.
Where are those eyes? Could I be forgetting them? I can’t remember the shape of the corners of those eyes.
Sometimes you fall asleep for five minutes and it seems like you’ve slept the whole night. Last night I fell asleep, waking up at the break of dawn. Could I have only slept for five minutes? I have proof that that’s not the case: the vine had time to wrap itself around my left leg and to reach my thigh: it has my thigh! And as if that weren’t enough, now it’s started on my left arm. This time I pulled it loose with great difficulty, with less force than before, calling it stupid, like one of my girlfriends says about me in jest. I have resolved to change my location. I lift up my provisions and leave, searching for a place without vines; but I can’t find one, and the walking exhausts me. Sometimes I think that years have gone by, that I am old, but if that were the case I wouldn’t have any provisions left. Now I have stopped in a place that may be worse, but I don’t have the strength to go back to where I was. This whole jungle is a huge vine. Why should I worry? I should only worry about things that have solutions. The perfume will still intoxicate me, making me sleepy. The vine will go on twisting. Now I usually wake up to find another web around my arm or my leg. Yesterday it reached my neck. I was quite upset. It’s not that I was afraid, not even when it wove itself around my tongue. I remember that when I was dreaming, I shouted, imprudently opening my mouth. It’s weird. I never thought that a vine could find its way so easily into my mouth.
“Pervert. Who do you think you are? A person can’t trust anybody anymore,” I told it.
I’m amused when I think about how my friends will laugh at this anecdote. They won’t believe me. They won’t believe my lack of laziness either. Lately I have tried weaving knots like the vine does around the branches: it’s a very difficult experiment but an interesting one. Who can compete with a vine? I am so busy that I forget those eyes staring at me; understandably I have forgotten to drink and eat. Human gender, oh so changeable! I, suddenly female, wrap the pen in my green fronds, like the pens that prisoners wrap with silk and wool thread.
*“Dichoso el árbol que es apenas sensitivo,” a famous line from Rubén Darío’s poem “Lo fatal.”
LIVIO ROCA
HE WAS tall, dark, and quiet. I never saw him laugh or hurry for any reason whatsoever. His chestnut eyes never looked at anything straight on. He wore a kerchief tied around his neck and always had a cigarette in his mouth. He was ageless. His name was Livio Roca, but he was called Dumbo because he pretended to be deaf. He was lazy, but in his periods of leisure (he didn’t think of inactivity as laziness) he fixed watches that he never returned to their owners. Whenever I could, I’d escape to visit Livio Roca. I met him during summer vacation, one day in January at Cacharí. I was nine years old. He was always the poorest member of the family, the most unhappy, according to his relatives. He lived in a house that resembled a railroad car. He loved Clemencia—she was perhaps his only consolation and the main subject of gossip in the town. Her velvet nose, cold ears, curved neck, short, soft hair, and obedience were all reasons to love her. I understood him. At night, when he unsaddled her, he would delay saying goodbye to her, as if the heat of her sweaty body gave him life, taking it away from him when he left. He let her drink deeply, prolonging the farewell, even when she wasn’t thirsty. He hesitated before bringing her into his shack to sleep at night, under cover, in the winter. He hesitated because he feared what would later in fact happen: people said he was crazy, completely crazy. Tonga was the first to say it. Tonga, with his embittered expression and needlelike eyes, dared criticize him and Clemencia. Neither could ever forgive him. I loved Clemencia in my own way, too.
Grandma Indalecia Roca’s silk bathrobe was kept in a room full of trunks. The robe was a sort of relic that lay at the feet of a Virgin, painted green, with a broken foot. From time to time, Tonga and the other members of the family, or some visitor, would place unlucky flowers or little bouquets of herbs that smelled like mint, or sweet bright-colored drinks, at her feet. There were times when a crooked, multicolored candle would tremble, its flame dying at the feet of the Virgin; for this reason, the robe was adorned with drops of wax the size of buttons. Time eliminated these rituals little by little: the ceremonies happened more and more infrequently. Perhaps for this reason, Livio dared to use the bathrobe to make a hat for Clemencia. (I helped him do that.) I think that’s what caused the misunderstanding with the rest of the family. Tonga called him a degenerate, and one of the brothers-in-law, a bricklayer, called him a drunkard. Livio put up with these insults without defending himself. Only some days later did the insults start bothering him.
He couldn’t remember his childhood except how unhappy he had been. He had scabies for nine months and conjunctivitis for nine more, according to what he told me while we were sewing the hat. Perhaps all of that contributed to his losing faith in any kind of happiness, never to regain it. At the age of eighteen, when he met his cousin Malvina and became engaged to her, he may have had a foreboding of disaster at the moment he gave her the engagement ring. Instead of being happy, he was sad. They had grown up together— from the moment he decided to marry her, he knew the union would not be a happy one. Malvina’s friends, who were numerous, spent their time embroidering sheets and tablecloths and nightgowns with her initials on them for her, but they never used those things, embroidered with such love. Malvina died two days after the wedding. They dressed her as a bride and put her in the coffin with a bouquet of orange blossoms. Poor Livio couldn’t look at her, but in the darkness of his hands, where he hid his eyes the night they held the wake for her, he offered her his faithfulness in the form of a gold ring. He never spoke to any other woman, not even to my cousins, who are so ugly; when he went to the movies he didn’t look at the actresses. Many times people tried to find a girlfriend for him. They would bring prospects over in the afternoon and sit them down on the wicker chair: one was blond and wore glasses, and they called her the English girl; another was dark with braids, and a flirt; another, the most serious of them all, was a giant with a pinhead. It was hopeless. That’s why he loved Clemencia with all his heart, because women didn’t matter to him. But one night, one of those inevitable uncles, a mocking smile on his lips, decided to punish him for the sacrilege he had committed with his grandmother’s robe, and shot Clemencia. Together with Clemencia’s neighing, we could hear the murderer’s loud laughter.
THE DOLL
EVERYBODY says, I am such and such, I am so-and-so, except for me, who would prefer not to be who I am. I’m a soothsayer. At times I suspect that I don’t merely see the future but that I cause it. I began my apprenticeship in Las Ortigas. I have an office in La Magdalena. Clouds of dust, the police, and my clients all pester me.
According to the doctors’ official reports, my identity papers declare that I am twenty-nine years old. My mother died the day I was born, that much they all agree on. They also told me something I will never forget: that someone found me one January night in the pastures by Las Ortigas. Throughout my life, the reports they have given me about my birth have varied widely. I have no reason to believe in some of them more than others. Nevertheless, I prefer to imagine being born in those pastures, next to a lagoon surrounded by willows, rather than at the door of the shed where corn and wool were stored under a corrugated iron roof. The lagoon has many birds and a bottom of white sand; the willows cast trembling shadows that resemble flocks of sheep or horses that look like Eriberto Soto. The shed is full of cats and sheepskins. At night the cats wail and jump up on the scales. There are fleas, lots of fleas, and red ants.
In one version of my birth, my mother was Polish, wore a new dress and a pair of black patent-leather shoes; in another, she was Italian, wore a threadbare dress, and carried a bundle of firewood; in another, she was just a schoolgirl who carried a notebook and two books (one geography and the other history) under her arm; in another, she was a filthy gypsy who carried tarot cards and gold coins in the pocket of her red skirt
. There was even someone who gave me a fake photograph of my mother. For a time this image excited my filial feelings. I put the photograph at the head of my bed and for days on end directed my prayers to it. Later I found out the photograph was of a movie star and that someone had cut it from an old magazine to make me happy or to torment me. I still preserve it along with a bouquet of dried flowers.
Throughout my childhood, which felt very long to me, people used to tell me the story of my birth to entertain me. Miss Domicia enlivened her story by drawing cups and houses in a graph-paper notebook. When she took off her glasses to clean them with a white handkerchief, she would always speak to me of a lagoon where there were many willows and where birds filled the morning. My eyelids, the door to sleep, would close. Miss Domicia was methodical. For the two years I lived with her, before our fight that I will describe later on, she would enter and leave my room at the same time every day. She would tell me the same story in the very same words. On her belt, she carried a bunch of keys, which fascinated me. Her dark hair was dry, straight, and long; she always wore it braided, coiled around either side of her head. Miss Domicia was a sort of head maid, resented by the other servants. During her tenure, the house was fresh, clean, orderly, or so Mr. Ildefonso, who was a little afraid of her, assured her. The sets of sheets edged with hemstitches according to her instructions were never mixed with the napkins and embroidered tablecloths, as they had been in other periods. The bedspreads were not torn or stained with coffee or rust. Miss Domicia was the guardian angel of the cupboards, of the pantry. With a ringing of keys, she would open the huge doors of the cabinets where soap, jam, wine, dried fruit, tea, coffee, cookies, and sweets were kept, along with those that held white clothes with lace and embroidery, edged with hems.
Thus Were Their Faces Page 27