The Dead Girls

by Jorge Ibargüengoitia

  They were very grateful when I made the offer. Serafina rested her hand on my leg. I was sure that she would have given herself to me right then, but I was in no mood. Arcángela dabbed at her tears and left the dining room. A moment later I heard her in the patio shouting, “Tell Ladder never mind.”

  Later, I found out that it wasn’t that they couldn’t find Ladder, but that he wanted a thousand pesos for the job.

  After a while, Arcángela came back with some folded bills, which she handed me, saying, “Toward the gasoline.”

  It was five hundred pesos, which I put in my pocket. At least I had enough spirit to set a condition. “I’ll take the deceased wherever you say,” I told them, “but I’m not touching her.”

  When they finally brought the soup in, I wasn’t hungry anymore.

  2

  He states that his name is Simón Corona González, he is forty-two years of age, married, Mexican, residing in Tuxpana Falls; that he is a baker by trade, cannot read or write, but signs his name; that he is a Catholic, is not a habitual drinker of alcoholic beverages, and does not smoke marijuana or use other drugs or narcotics. Questioned as to whether he was making this statement voluntarily, he answered affirmatively.

  He states that he met Serafina Baladro in 1952 in Pedrones in a house she was running on Molino Street; that the same day he met her he became her lover and that they lived together for two years, after which he left her to return to Tuxpana Falls; that in 1957, at the request of the same Serafina Baladro, he went back to her and they lived together again for one year, after which he left her a second time and returned to Tuxpana Falls again.

  He also states the following: In the year 1960, I ran into Serafina by accident in the city of Pajares and she wanted me to drive her to her sister Arcángela’s house in San Pedro de las Corrientes. When we arrived there, Arcángela said to me, “Drive your car into the patio,” and I did. They brought me into the dining room and gave me a bottle of tequila to drink. Later on, both sisters came in and said to me, “As soon as it gets dark, go along the highway and dump the body of a girl who died into the gully.” So, we drove on the Mezcala highway in my car until we came to a curve where Arcángela said, “Stop here,” and I did. I did not watch while they were putting the deceased into the car, but I had to help get her out. She had gotten stiff and they weren’t able to pull her out of the trunk between Arcángela, Serafina, and a girl by the name of Elvira who came along with us. While we were carrying the body toward the edge of the gully, the sack that was covering it fell off and I got a good look at her face: She had sharp features and her eyes were very big and wide open. According to what I heard, her name was Ernestina, Helda, or Elena. When we returned to San Pedro de las Corrientes, as Arcángela was getting out of the car in front of her house, she said to me, “If I ever find out that you have spilled what happened tonight to anybody, I’ll look for you and I’ll find you no matter where you are hiding.” Afterward, Serafina and I went to Pedrones. We stayed together there for another six months and then I left her for the third time and returned to Tuxpana Falls.

  III

  An Old Love

  1

  Juana Cornejo, known as the Skeleton, related the following with respect to the relations between Simón Corona and Serafina Baladro:

  Of all the señores she had, don Simón was the most polite. He always called me “señora Juana” and he would call the girls “señorita.” He never asked for anything without saying “if it isn’t too much trouble,” and whenever he left the room it was always “with your permission.”

  He was always up early and would come into the kitchen when I was still busy lighting the fire.

  “Good morning, señora Juana.”

  Sometimes he would leave and be gone for a long time, but when he came back to the house, the first thing I would hear the following day was don Simón saying good morning to me.

  He would tell me about Tuxpana Falls while I was fixing breakfast. For him it was a great thing to go walking along the banks of Stony River there of an afternoon, holding hands with a girl.

  They say that don Simón spent his mornings sitting on a bench in the square listening to music and his afternoons playing dominoes in a bar. He came back to the house every night, but never went into the cabaret. He would go straight to the señora’s room and we never saw him again until the next day.

  Sometimes, he would be very thoughtful and sit looking at his plate of chilaquiles instead of eating them and then he would say to me, “I live with one foot in the stirrup all the time.”

  He would leave his breakfast half finished, and instead of walking to the square, he would go out to the yard and sit under the guava tree. After a while the señora would go out and ask him what was wrong. He must have been telling her that he was tired of the life he was leading in Pedrones and that he wanted to go back to Tuxpana Falls and she must have told him, all right, to go ahead and go. Then, she would come into the kitchen for breakfast, holding back her tears.

  These were not like the quarrels they had on account of jealousy, but just difficulties that came up every now and then when don Simón got the urge to leave. He went away three times for a long while and came back twice, but he wanted to leave a lot of other times and couldn’t.

  One day he got his things together and went through the house saying goodbye to everybody. “I’m leaving on the five-thirty bus,” he said to us.

  That was before don Simón owned a car.

  He was in the middle of his goodbyes when there came a knock on the door. I opened and it was Captain Laguna with another soldier. They asked for don Simón.

  I knew they were no friends of his, so I told them, “Oh, he left quite a while ago.”

  It must have been Divine Providence that kept those men from entering the house, because if they had they would have found don Simón around the first turn in the hall. They did not go in, but they didn’t believe me, either, because they stood on the corner waiting for him. When I told don Simón that the federales had come looking for him and were waiting outside, he didn’t dare step out on the street for months, let alone go back to Tuxpana Falls.

  That time he was lucky, but other times it was not so good for him. The soldiers caught him once in San Pedro de las Corrientes and again in Muerdago. They brought him back to Pedrones and locked him up in the guardhouse, where they gave him a very bad time making him clean up the filth. It went on that way until señora Serafina got him out through Colonel Zárate, who was a friend of hers. Don Simón came back looking as though he had seen the devil, ate a great pile of tortillas, and didn’t say a word for a long time about living with one foot in the stirrup.

  I asked him one day what it was he had on his conscience that the soldiers should be so hot on his trail. He explained to me that he was a deserter, that he had joined the cavalry as a young fellow, but couldn’t take the hard life. So, he lived one step ahead of the law for twenty years, because he quit three months before his time was up.

  2

  Regarding her relations with Simón Corona, Serafina Baladro said:

  When Simón came to the house on Molino Street for the first time, he was not very civilized. I saw him standing by himself at the bar, not talking to anybody. And that big fellow, I thought to myself, I wonder what’s on his mind. To get him over his shyness, I pulled him out on the dance floor, but he couldn’t dance a step. I am a very good dancer, though, so I showed him and he picked it up little by little.

  “How about buying me a drink?” I said to him after a while.

  The yokel had to admit that all he had on him was fifteen pesos.

  “You can thank the Lord,” I told him, “that the owner took a liking to you.”

  He never realized that it was me that the house belonged to. It was the same story as with other men—I looked so young and pretty that they couldn’t imagine I was the madam.

  “Hand over the fifteen pesos,” I said to him, “and the rest is on me.”

  T
o be honest, I must confess that I really went for him. We sat down at one of the tables and he told me he came from Tuxpana Falls and was a baker.

  “You must have crumbs in your belly button,” I said to him. “I want you to be sure and wash thoroughly before you get into bed with me.”

  I took him to my bathroom, which was like nothing he had ever seen before. As I watched him standing there, naked, twisting the faucets, I felt the blood rush down to the pit of my stomach. Simón was a big dumb brute, but very sweet.

  I trained him. If he is anything at all today, he owes it to me. When I first knew him, it was like he’d just come down out of the hills.

  Our life together had its ups and downs from the start. We were happy most of the time, but every once in a while I could feel that my business was coming between us. For instance, it would make him jealous if I looked after the customers, talking to them or sitting down at the tables with them. It bothered him that I went to bed at two or three in the morning. “That’s my work,” I would tell him. “If I don’t do it, what in the hell do you think we are going to live on?”

  And he didn’t like the idea that I was supporting him.

  “If you don’t want to be supported, then work,” I would say to him. “Doing nothing is not compulsory.”

  I suggested that he take charge of the beer and soda bottles or of giving out the tokens to the girls. He could at least have checked up on the cabaret every once in a while to see if a customer didn’t need a drink, or whatever.

  “I’m not a pimp,” he would answer. “I’m a baker.”

  The truth is, during the years he lived with me he didn’t have to lift a finger to earn a peso.

  Of the three periods Simón and I were together, the last one was the best. He reproached me less and I was really crazy about him. I felt so happy that I began to have a yearning to see the ocean.

  “Take me to Acapulco,” I said to him.

  He had the car fixed up, I took fifteen hundred pesos out of the cash box, and off we went.

  I should have figured, from the time we got on the road, that something bad was in store for me. It was very hot. I was wearing black and didn’t know which of my clothes to take off next. I was anxious to get my first sight of the ocean, and was expecting to see it every time we went around a hill, but all there would ever be was another hill. And wasn’t it just my luck that the moment I dropped off for a few minutes was right when the sea came into view and when I woke up there we were in the town! We stopped at a little hotel that had a sapodilla tree in the front patio. The room cost thirty pesos. I hardly closed the door before I had my clothes off and flopped on the bed. A minute later Simón was climbing on top of me.

  “Leave me alone,” I said to him, “can’t you see I’m dying of the heat?”

  Simón got up without saying a word, combed his hair, put on a clean shirt, and went out.

  I regretted what I said the minute the words were out of my mouth. I began wondering if he might not leave me for another woman in this strange place; I had always heard that Acapulco was filled with temptations. A long while passed before I dared go out and look for him. I was afraid I was never going to see him again.

  But that’s not what happened. I found him three blocks away sitting on a bench just like when he listened to the music in the square in Pedrones. I was so happy to find him that I cried in his arms. After some supper we went dancing at La Quebrada.

  The first thing we did the next morning was to buy swimming suits and go to the beach. I didn’t dare go into the water, but just sat under one of those thatched umbrellas with a glass of beer in front of me watching Simón get tossed around by the waves. While I was there a boy sold me tickets for a cruise around the bay on a boat with a band. We had something to eat and then went to the docks to look for the boat, which we finally found. There was a bar aboard and we drank and danced. When the sun began to set we stood there watching as it sank into the sea. At that moment, I felt as though this was the happiest day of my whole life and I said to Simón, “Do you love me?”

  He told me he did and so I proposed selling the business and getting out of prostitution, giving him enough money to open a bakery, and going to live in Tuxpana Falls together, which was where he liked best to be.

  It made him very happy when I said that.

  After we got off the boat, we went walking through the streets holding hands like newlyweds. As soon as we were back in the hotel room I took off my dress and said to Simón, “Now I do want you on top of me.”

  When he was on top of me I felt like I never had with anybody else and that the love between Simón and me was forever. That is why I told him the story of my life.

  I told him everything, even that I had fixed it with Colonel Zárate to send soldiers after him to lock him up in the guardhouse and give him a hard time whenever he left me.

  I was hardly through saying this before I could see his face get serious. So, I explained to him: “I did what I am telling you because I love you so much.”

  He didn’t answer, but just got out of bed and, with his back to me, began dressing.

  “You’re angry at me, aren’t you?” I asked.

  “Let’s go and have something to eat,” he answered without looking at me.

  I put on my clothes in a hurry, saying to myself, Now you put your foot in it!

  We went out and walked along in silence. All at once, Simón stopped and said to me, “I’m going over to that store across the street to buy a bottle of rum. Now, pay attention to what I tell you. You wait for me right here on this spot where you are standing and don’t move because if you do, I might not find you when I get back from the store.”

  I wanted to please him, so I told him I would wait wherever he said. I saw him cross the street and go into the store. I waited there just as he told me to. Quite a while passed and I began to get worried. Could he have dropped dead in there while he was buying the bottle? I didn’t dare cross the street to go to the store to see. What if he gets here the minute I’ve gone and doesn’t find me? That will make him even angrier. But, when I saw that they were beginning to pull down the metal shutters of the shops, I couldn’t stand it any longer and went over to the store. Simón was not there, but I noticed that there was another door to the side street. It was then I realized that the love I had thought eternal only a little while before was already over.

  When I got back to the hotel, they told me that Simón had “left in the car.” He didn’t even have the decency to pay the bill.

  That is what I got for being honest with a man who didn’t deserve it.

  IV

  Enter Bedoya

  1

  In describing her general health and state of mind during the months following her separation from Simón Corona in Acapulco, Serafina Baladro mentions headaches, a morbid predilection for sitting alone in the darkened dining room eating canned sardines and bread, not wanting to talk to anybody, a total lack of interest in the business, and a feeling of disgust for men. She was continent for the first time in her life, for forty-seven days, she neglected her appearance—she did not fix her braid for nearly a month—and she says that just the thought of a man putting his paws on her turned her stomach. Toward the end of this period, she had an emotional—but platonic—involvement with one of her girls by the name of Altagracia, whom she subsequently fired.

  She suffered from insomnia. The final hours of the night and the early hours of the morning were spent with her eyes wide open, in imaginary conversations with Simón Corona during which she reproached him for his ingratitude, proved to him how everything she had done was for his good, and drew up lists for him of the favors he owed her. Lying there in the darkness, she says that she did not dare take her arm out from under the sheets for fear that she would feel a cold hand on it.

  On the last of these sleepless nights she realized that Simón was not going to come back to her and she made up her mind that if he was not to be hers, neither would he be anybody else’s
. That is to say, she decided that she was going to comb the earth until she found and killed him. She imagined herself, pistol in hand, shooting, and Simón Corona in a corner with holes in his shirt, his face twisted in pain. After dwelling on this image for a time, she fell into a deep sleep.

  She made her first trip to Tuxpana Falls, the town she loathed, the following week. In her patent leather purse she carried a .25 caliber pistol, in which she had no confidence, and a pair of scissors in case it failed.

  She walked around the town, which looked horrible to her, asking for Simón Corona, but could not locate him. However, she did meet up with two women who had lived with him. Simón had left one of them to go with Serafina, left Serafina to go with the other, and the other to go back to Serafina.

  Those three women, who had hated one another for two years, two of them knowing each other by sight and the three only by vague references to one another, met in a restaurant and hit it off famously, joined by the common bond of one man’s perfidy.

  “I bear him such a grudge,” Serafina said, “that I can’t rest until I find him so I can do something to him that will really hurt.”

  Since the other women offered no objections nor indicated any reservations with respect to infamy, the three made a pact in accordance with which the two who lived in Tuxpana Falls agreed to notify Serafina by wire the moment Simón Corona showed up in town. Serafina, on her part, agreed to pay five hundred pesos to either for reliable information as to his whereabouts. The understanding having been reached, they toasted liberally in a Mexican brandy. It was the first time three drunken women had ever been seen alone in a Tuxpana Falls restaurant.

  The pact was fated never to be consummated. After leaving Serafina in Acapulco, Simón Corona worked in a bakery in Mezcala for three months. When he finally returned to Tuxpana Falls, his two former mistresses kept their end of the bargain, each sending a telegram to Serafina in Pedrones. However, around that time Serafina completely lost interest in the search. Neither of the women received the five hundred pesos from her and two years and nine months went by before she took the revenge related earlier.