The Dead Girls

by Jorge Ibargüengoitia

  Years before, when Blanca thought up the show in which three women had to take part, she chose Evelia and Feliza as her co-performers. It appears that a relationship was established between the three that went beyond the show. Evelia and Feliza visited Blanca at Dr. Meneses’s sanatorium, helped Ladder get her into the car after Serafina signed the papers releasing Blanca from the San Pedro de las Corrientes Municipal Hospital, and were the ones who carried Blanca down from her room every morning, put her in the galvanized tub under the lemon tree, and carried her up again in the afternoons. They wanted to take part in Blanca’s treatment—it was Feliza who tried to revive her with Coca-Cola and Evelia who ran for the blanket.

  Hypothesis: One of the two, either Evelia or Feliza, removed the teeth from the corpse during a lapse when she was left alone with it, said nothing to anybody, and the other one discovered them in her friend’s possession three months later, considered the theft and the secrecy an act of treachery, and grabbed her by the hair.

  Another hypothesis: Blanca, feeling so very ill and knowing that Arcángela would pull her teeth out, preferred to give them away while she was still alive to her favorite—either Evelia or Feliza—and when the other discovered that she was not the favored one she was seized by a fit of jealousy, with the consequences that have been seen.

  It could have been like that.

  6

  It is necessary, now, to return to the moment when Arcángela and Serafina entered the cabaret and saw the bodies, the twisted railing, the gold teeth, and so forth, in a cloud of plaster dust, looked up and saw five, six, seven . . . up to thirteen women’s faces peering down from the balcony frame.

  At that moment, without any of the people concerned realizing it, the relationship between the proprietresses of the house and their employees underwent a radical change. Those staring down from the balcony were witnesses to the presence of two corpses below and, later, to the way in which they were disposed of. The Baladros run the house, are the leaders of this community, and consequently responsible for what happens in it.

  Apparently, everything becomes simplified. For example, now it is unnecessary to dig the grave in the middle of the night or try to be quiet so as not to awaken the girls. At six o’clock in the evening when Ticho returned from a job—carrying bags of cement—the Skeleton led him to the corner of the yard where Blanca was buried and ordered him to dig another pit a few meters away double the width of the first and one meter, eighty centimeters deep and not to worry about the noise made by the pick and crowbar against the hardpan and stones. Ticho obeyed and at twelve o’clock the same night Evelia and Feliza were buried.

  Captain Bedoya did not come to see Serafina that night because of duties on the post, nor the next night since it was the eve of the Independence Day parade and the troops were confined to quarters. On the evening of the sixteenth, the captain arrived at the house, mortified: Just as the parade turned into Avenue Juárez in Pedrones, his dapple-gray horse reared and he was nearly thrown. To make matters worse, his saber fell to the ground and a little boy picked it up and returned it to him, humiliating him even more. He felt that he had made a fool of himself before his men and hundreds of onlookers.

  As he walked, downcast, hands in pockets, toward Independence Street, the captain had said to himself, All I want to do is drink until I forget my shame.

  That was his mood when Serafina gave him the news that Evelia and Feliza had died and were buried in the backyard. (Serafina, who had never told Bedoya about what happened to Blanca, reproached herself when she heard him asking, in his ignorance, what it was that smelled dead.) Serafina opened the conversation by saying, “I am going to tell you something, because there shouldn’t be any secrets between us,” and so forth.

  When the news was broken, the captain commented, “That’s just fine! Now, all you need is for the rest of the thirteen to die so you can bury the whole crew in the yard.”

  Months later, during the trial, the captain explained that this remark was intended as a joke, but the judge did not believe him.

  On September 18, Serafina telephoned don Sirenio Pantoja to say that she “deeply regretted” having to tell him that her sister had changed her mind and decided not to sell him the girls as they had agreed. Don Sirenio says that from the tone of Serafina’s voice he could tell that there would have been no point in his offering to raise the price. He thought that either they had sold them to another customer or decided not to sell at all.

  XIII

  Martial Law

  1

  Every year on the twenty-fourth of September, one of the girls, María del Carmen Régulez, visited her mother, whose name was Mercedes.

  Every year, two evenings before that date, María del Carmen would ask Serafina for permission to be absent from work on the night of the twenty-fourth, and Arcángela for money either out of her account or, if the balance was low, as an advance. María del Carmen states that she had never had any problems on that score before. She had always gotten permission from Serafina and the money from Arcángela. On the twenty-third, María del Carmen would go to the market where she would buy a bunch of flowers—gladiolas, preferably—which were always withered by the time they reached her mother’s outstretched arms, a length of dress goods, a shawl, or a pair of shoes. The trip started at dawn the following day because María del Carmen had to change buses three times to reach the rancho where her family lived. She would get off the third bus at a point halfway up a bleak hill and walk along a barely distinguishable footpath until she came to a pitahaya tree. The houses and the cactus patch of the settlement could be seen from there.

  The dogs would forget María del Carmen from one year to the next and every year her mother and sisters-in-law would come out of the kitchen to quiet them; every year, on finding themselves together again, the women would cry; every year they would go into the kitchen, sit around the brazier, and talk—someone had died, a baby had been born, the crops had been lost. The men would return from the fields in midafternoon, the family would sit down at the table, María del Carmen helped wait on them. Only her mother knew about her daughter’s profession—she was the one who had sold her. The rest of the family thought she was a servant. At night they would drink orange-leaf tea spiked with alcohol and get drunk. The next day at dawn, María del Carmen started back to the whorehouse.

  On September 22 of that year, María del Carmen asked Serafina for permission to go to the rancho and, for the first time, it was refused.

  “My sister has decided,” she told her, “that nobody can go out except the girls the Skeleton takes with her to bring the food from the market.”

  She did not explain the reason for this prohibition, nor did she tell her how long it would last. María del Carmen did not dare ask questions on either point because like all the Baladros’ employees she was afraid of them. She did, however, tell the other women that Serafina had forbidden her to go to the rancho and that only the girls who went to market with the Skeleton—they were always the same two—could leave the house. These conversations repeated over and over again in the lethargic atmosphere of the inactive brothel, made the eleven women, denied the privilege of going out, feel as though they were prisoners and, what is more significant, united.

  2

  Rosa X and Marta X were the two girls who went out with the Skeleton to buy the food.

  Rosa’s name appears in the San Pedro de las Corrientes Antivenereal Disease Register, successively, as Margarita Rosa, Rosa de las Nieves, and Maria del Rosal. At the whorehouse she was called just Rosa. She had a reputation for being meek and servile. When the whorehouse opened in the evening—those who worked with her say—she was always the first girl down from her room to pass inspection by the madam—either Serafina or Arcángela, she worked for them both. If any fault was found—flaking nail polish or a hair bow that did not go with the color of her dress—Rosa would return to her room without grumbling—something no other girl did—and try to correct it. In the closed-down whoreh
ouse, it was known that Rosa could be counted on to do the hardest and most disagreeable or unnecessary jobs, such as cleaning the caked surfaces of greasy pots or carrying the heaviest basket from the market.

  She also had the reputation of being two-faced and an informer. This reputation had its basis in two incidents. On one occasion, a drunken customer took his wrist-watch off and left it on the table, and one of the women who had been sitting with him picked it up and hid it away. Rosa was the only person who saw her do this. Arcángela intervened and before the evening was over compelled the girl to return the watch and slapped a fine on her that took her months to pay off. On another occasion, Carmelo X, a waiter in the Molino Street house, worked out a system for cheating Serafina which consisted of giving out tokens for fictitious drinks to various of the girls who were in with him; they handed in the tokens to Serafina, collected their commissions and split with Carmelo. This lasted until he made the mistake of inviting Rosa into his organization. The next day he was fired.

  Aside from being servile and two-faced, Rosa had no other virtues. Her complexion was sallow and she suffered from a permanent cold—the Skeleton said that every time she blew her nose it sounded like a bugle call—and wore an expression of martyrdom. Any man who approached her was either very drunk or unable to see clearly in the dim light of the cabaret. Those who knew her say that her favorite topic of conversation at the tables was her bad luck—“life gave me a raw deal” being one of her frequent remarks. Not many customers ventured to go up to Rosa’s room and even fewer did so a second time.

  The Baladros put up with Rosa for ten and a half years, partly because of her servility and partly because she was an informer, but mainly because they were unable to get rid of her. First, they passed her from one to the other, then, they tried several times to sell her, but after seeing her, any potential purchaser would back out. Finally, the Baladros gave up and used her to get rid of troublesome or insolvent customers.

  Rosa’s earnings were meager and she piled up the biggest debt that appears in Arcángela’s book over the ten years—45,400 pesos. It is possible that Arcángela, with the illogicalness characteristic of greed, nourished the illusion that Rosa might suddenly become attractive and one day begin to pay off all the money she owed the family.

  3

  It was Rosa’s misfortune that she walked through the hall between the rooms at an hour when she should not have.

  On learning from María del Carmen that nobody was going to be allowed out except the two who accompanied the Skeleton, one of the girls, Aurora Bautista, decided to escape from the whorehouse.

  She mentioned the idea to three of the other girls and they agreed to go along with her. They met several times in the room of one of them to make plans. It was decided that the break should be made at night, between eleven o’clock, when everybody was asleep, and midnight, when the last bus to Pedrones left. As far as getting out of the house was concerned, it was impossible to use the same route as the Baladros because the key to the dining room would be needed and it hung in Serafina’s bosom; to climb over one of the walls meant landing in a strange yard amidst unfriendly dogs; the only solution, then, was to use a ladder to reach the roof of the Casino and to jump across to the roof of señora Benavides’s house, from where they could easily get down to the street level and leave through the front gate, which was bolted on the inside. The house had a ladder that was kept in the shed where Ticho slept. Ticho was known for sleeping like the dead.

  On the afternoon the four women were deciding to make their escape from the whorehouse by means of the ladder, they heard a noise in the hall as though somebody might be eavesdropping, and fell silent. Luz María, whose room it was, got up and cautiously opened the door. Nobody was directly outside it, but Rosa was several meters away walking down the hall toward her . . .

  For a while, the women weighed the possibility that Rosa had overheard, but reached the conclusion that it was unlikely. However, to be on the safe side, it was decided not to delay and to make the move that same night.

  One can imagine their baggage—the string bags, the cartons tied up with rope, and so forth; each made a selection of her prized possessions—the orange-colored evening dress, the patent-leather slippers—taking into consideration the jump that had to be made and the possibility that it might be necessary to run through the streets. They say that they scraped together enough among the four of them to cover the fare to Pedrones plus forty-five pesos extra, which they planned to use to keep on traveling as far away as possible in any direction from Concepción.

  At night, when everything was quiet, the women, barefooted, met in the hall, went downstairs, and across the patio. One of them, Luz María, confesses that she picked up a round stone so big she had to carry it in both arms to drop on Ticho’s head in case he woke up. They went into the shed, which had no door. Ticho did not wake up, but the women, feeling around in the dark, realized that the ladder was not there.

  They came out of the shed dismayed and met in the kitchen in the dark, where they held a whispered conference and reached the conclusion that Rosa had squealed on them. They became infuriated.

  The subsequent scene must have been as follows: A woman is asleep in a large bed in a dark room; the door opens silently—the Baladros had all bolts removed from the rooms after the whorehouse was closed so that the girls could not lock themselves in; silhouettes cross the threshold against the penumbra; the door closes.

  It is not known if Rosa woke up when the others turned on the light, when they pulled the covers back, or when they began to beat her. Nor is it known if the beating took place in the dark or with the light on. Nor if Rosa was struck dumb with fear, if the attackers prevented her from crying out, or if she shouted at the top of her lungs without anybody hearing.

  “They gave her the shoe treatment,” says the Skeleton in describing this revenge.

  Rosa’s wounds were produced by the high heels of the shoes with which the girls beat her.

  The following day, when all the women were having breakfast in the kitchen and Rosa did not appear, the Skeleton went up to her room to see if anything was wrong with her. She heard a groan as she approached the door of her room. Rosa was in bed, semiconscious, a blanket over her. There were no marks on her face, but her body, particularly the buttocks, was covered with black-and-blue welts and wounds which later became infected and developed into running sores because of lack of attention.

  4

  Rosa did not know, or did not want to say, who attacked her. The Baladros had made up their minds to punish this “disorderly conduct” severely, but did not know to whom to attribute it—which indicates that Rosa had not divulged the escape plan and that the ladder was missing from its usual place only by chance—and could think of no way of finding out who the culprits were.

  The woman who served the madams their dinner that afternoon asserts that Captain Bedoya was the one who advised them how to figure out who had been involved.

  The woman saw him walking around the yard, his head down, stooping every little while to pick up a stone, weighing it in his hand, and making a pile of those that were spherical and neither very light nor very heavy. Then he went around examining the floors of the house until he found one that seemed most appropriate for the purpose he had in mind. It was a small patio next to the kitchen which was part of the original construction and paved with broken stone embedded in concrete.

  The Baladros called the women together in this place and Arcángela said to them, “Who beat up Rosa?”

  There was no answer.

  Arcángela ordered the women to kneel on the irregular surface and when they had obeyed, the captain, who was present from the beginning, ordered them to hold their arms stretched out at their sides, shoulder-high, palms up. When they were all in that position, the captain and the Skeleton took stones from the pile he had gotten together and put one in each hand.

  When a woman dropped a stone Arcángela struck her with a stick. (This was the
first instance of corporal punishment in the history of the Casino del Danzón.) This stick and several others had been cut off the cazaguate bush by the captain that same afternoon. They say that the guilty ones confessed in less than fifteen minutes, upon which punishment of the others was suspended.

  The Skeleton brought Aurora Bautista, Luz María, María del Carmen, and Socorro into the Baghdad Salon where they were subjected to another punishment, also devised by the captain. It consisted of each in turn beating the other three until all four were so bruised that they were unable to move for days after.

  Over the twenty-three years that Captain Bedoya served in the army there is no record of his having administered or ordered the administration of any corporal punishment nor does any soldier who served with or under him recall his ever having been involved in any act of cruelty. When questioned during the trial with respect to his participation in the “penitence” and the blows the women gave one another, the captain admitted having thought up both practices and explained: “I felt that those women were guilty of an act of insubordination and that they had to be found out and punished as an example to the others.”

  “Are you satisfied that the way you acted on those occasions was proper?” the judge asked him.

  “Yes, sir.”

  5

  Instead of things settling down after the “lesson,” another act of insubordination occurred.

  Marta Henríquez Dorantes, the other woman who was allowed to leave the house to go to market with the Skeleton, was in the laundry shed wringing out clothes when she realized that several of her companions had entered and were standing around her, in silence, doing nothing that would explain why they were there.

  She barely had time to become aware of their presence before they jumped her. Being four, they overcame her easily. They threw her to the floor, gagged her, and tied her arms and legs together with the wet clothes she had been washing, stood her up, and tried to kill her in a strange manner. There was an old outhouse in a corner of the yard that had been in disuse for many years. The women dragged Marta to this building, removed the boards covering the hole, and tried to stuff her into it. (The description of this deed leads to the conclusion that the attackers intended to bury their victim alive.) Her fatness saved her. Marta is a very broadly-built woman, and no matter how hard they tried, her assailants were unable to push her through the opening. They were engaged in the attempt when the Skeleton arrived.