I no longer knew how to cry—I knew nothing at all. I went on looking at the stars, with death in my heart. The boat had come to a sudden stop. We could hear the straining of the winches, the chains, the ladders that were being made ready to help the Central American director of the Compagnie Transatlantique climb aboard.
I was lying down as the captain paced through his cabin with long steps. Daylight was just beginning to illuminate our drama.
“My name is Luis,” cried a man more than six feet tall in a tender, tropical voice. “I’ve come to take you to your husband as quickly as possible. The president of Guatemala and I, with the help of the Compagnie Transatlantique, are offering you this plane trip, which will allow you to rejoin your wounded husband.”
He was a fair-skinned man, still young despite his white hair. He had a laugh that one who was in pain could recognize as that of a kindred spirit. As I was trying to stand up and thank him, I fell into his arms. The captain’s cough reminded me that I had to be more of a brave-little-soldier-on-a-battlefield-where-the-enemy’s-blows-must-be-born-with-dignity.
“Thank you, monsieur; I am greatly touched by your company’s kindness,” I told him. “I am glad to have your help. When are we leaving?”
“The boat is waiting for us. We can be in port within an hour.”
The captain had pushed all his control buttons, and the entire staff was quietly coming into the cabin.
“One of the directors of the Transatlantique is on board,” said the captain sternly. “He will grant us the pleasure of showing him our ship. I place him in your hands, messieurs.”
The crew took charge of the visitor. The two nurses, who had no patients except the man in third class, were wearing what amounted to evening gowns. Now, for once, it was their turn to act the part of lovely passengers pampered by the crew—those holiday Don Juans.
I lay down again. The captain paced the cabin as if nothing were wrong. In the distance we heard langorous, intoxicating music, songs, life. I fell asleep, I don’t know for how long. I woke up to the eyes of my captain, who gently took my hand.
“Sleep, sleep,” he said. “I’ll come and wake you at dinnertime. There are no seats available on the plane. Luis will be our guest until Puerto Barrios. This evening, in the great dining hall, we will have our final dinner. We’ll even have some passengers from Panama: a group of young women, members of an athletic team. The evening will be a merry one for our guests. You and I—we will command our hearts to wait and sleep. Sorrow is full of mystery. Would you like to be my companion for this dinner?”
I could not refuse such an offer from a man who had shared my pain so deeply and yet would not show me his own.
He kissed my hand. A nurse fetched a bag of ice for my head, the doctor gave me some shots, and a chambermaid laid out an evening gown for me, with flowers embroidered on a fabric as white as hope.
It was hot that evening. The sailors wanted no woman but me at the large table where we customarily sat. They had made a throne for me out of fresh flowers, white flowers they had bought in Panama and had managed to preserve despite the heat. At my place, they had put a simple little inscription: “A fairy.” How best to accept this extraordinary gift? How could I help but feel like a flower, even if flowers are sometimes bruised by the night?
Our eyes were radiant, and we were bathed in admiration by those who gave speeches. Oh, how our guest was pampered that evening! Our first mate, the most lovable conversationalist on the Pacific Ocean, asked him questions. Little by little, Luis told us the whole story of his life. He confessed himself to us, to these sailors, who were trying hard to assuage the sadness that the white flowers bedecking this throne had made me feel. Don Luis was crazy about all of us, drunk with the message he was bearing, drunk with his role, drunk with the protection he could give me.
“You see, my captain,” he said with all the arrogance of an emperor, “I myself am married, married, married. I have three daughters. One day, I wanted to have my wife and children brought to El Salvador. I waited for the passengers to disembark. My wife was not among them. And yet, the day before, I had received a telegram saying that she was a passenger on that ship. She couldn’t possibly have evaporated—when I left her in Paris she weighed more than four hundred pounds! It wouldn’t be easy for her to run away. I waited a few more minutes, perplexed, and then I was summoned to the place where the animals were being unloaded. There I said hello to my wife, along with several cows and a horse. Two of my daughters helped her into the passengers’ waiting room. She had grown even fatter in the two years since I had last seen her. She spoke in a very sweet voice. At the hotel the door had to be removed so that she could enter the room. And she has stayed there ever since, in that room, and will for a long time to come, no doubt. She can’t even turn over or sit down. That, monsieur, is my wife. Eh oui!”
This slender, agile, elegant man, married to a monster who couldn’t pass through doorways, moved us deeply. Each of the sailors in turn told his story, as sad a story as possible. They were all trying to demonstrate that people sometimes have sorrows that are even harder to bear than the death of a loved one.
ONCE IN PUERTO BARRIOS, I thought I was dreaming. I was back in my native country, the country of volcanoes and beloved songs. The president of the Republic had sent a car escorted by two motorcyclists from his official retinue to accompany me on the road so that I would be able to travel more quickly. But I refused to go at such hellish speed. I wanted to stop and drink coconut milk at a little farm where the natives were breaking coconuts open with their teeth and drinking the milk straight from the shell. I took a fresh coconut away in my arms, to drink the milk in the comfortable presidential car. We couldn’t leave the windows open because our mouths filled with dust; even with the windows closed we could see nothing but a yellow cloud. I was choking.
We arrived, Don Luis and I, at the military hospital. A little white-haired old woman, very stooped, thin, and sweet, wrapped her arms around me as hard as she could and burst into tears. I hadn’t had time to see her face or recognize her: she was my mother.
Our embrace lasted a long time. I was used to so many shocks by now that I thought her sobs were announcing Tonio’s death. But no. She led me slowly to a room where a doctor wearing a major’s uniform was waiting for me.
“Madame, welcome to the hospital of Guatemala. Your husband has been hospitalized here. He is in room seventy-seven. Come. The danger, the great danger, has been averted, I believe: I mean the danger of death. However, he is very sick. He has many wounds. If you will authorize it, this evening we will amputate his hand, perhaps up to the elbow. It is necessary. I know you are a very courageous woman; I am sure you will share my opinion. A living man with a single arm is preferable to a corpse with two.”
I went into the room, which was threadbare but clean. A nurse was watching over the patient. I could hardly recognize Tonio’s head, it was so swollen. It was, without exaggeration, the size of five heads. The doctor assured me that they had done all that was necessary and everything had been put back in place. There were devices to realign his jaws in his mouth; his lips were nothing more than mucus membranes dangling above his chin. One eye was almost on his forehead; the other hung down toward the mouth, swollen and purple. He could hardly be seen beneath the cotton and bandages soaked in disinfectants of all colors. Bottles, strung along a complicated system of wires, continuously distilled drops into his wrists, elbows, head, and ears. I had never seen anything like it in my life. And this man was my husband! From time to time he opened a single eye; the other one was completely immobilized by the compresses. Whenever light touched him, something happened in his brain that was impossible to understand: he would start to howl. I sensed that he was battling to save this precious matter that destiny plays at molding, wounding, breaking, transforming. Deep inside his human consciousness—if he still had one—a terrible struggle was going on. Soon I could feel all his wounds within my own being. Sitting next to his bed, on a st
raight-backed chair, I watched that eye, which sometimes flickered over my clothing or my face. Several weeks went by like this.
I began to feed him, as if he were a baby being given his first spoonful of milk, his first bit of bread dipped in honey. The swelling in his head began to go down. He was very thin. Day by day, he lost more weight. Under the effects of morphine, he often told stories that were so complicated I wondered if I wasn’t the one who was sick.
Eventually the doctor authorized me to take him home since there was nothing left but a wound on his hand that would not heal. That hand didn’t seem to want to be part of his arm. That was our biggest worry.
The day he left the hospital, our friends thought they would cheer us up by waiting for us at the Palace de Guatemala Hotel with a marimba, a champagne cocktail party, and a hundred waiters. My husband told me, “I’m just going to walk straight through that crowd. Put me to bed in the hotel tonight and put me on a plane for New York tomorrow. I’ll have an operation on my face to arrange my teeth and put my eye back in its place, since you can’t live with a monster who has one eye on his cheek and the other on his forehead. Don’t be upset, everything will be fine.”
“But I’ll go with you.”
“No. We left each other, remember?”
“Yes,” I said. “I remember. I’ll take you to the plane. Let me go right now and call to get you a seat on tomorrow’s flight.”
It was simple, indeed. I wondered if a man really does have a heart and, if so, where it might be located. I had just saved Tonio from death, and he was reminding me that I was no longer his companion. I called on Don Luis to rescue me, and he took care of reserving a seat on the plane and arranging all the practical details.
My body somehow managed to remain upright until three in the morning, when I took my husband, feeble as a skeleton rattling in the wind but guided by the call of a mysterious force, to the airport.
I went home with a fever whose cause the doctors could not determine. It was my turn to go into the hospital, suffering from a strange infection and a mysterious fever. My darling mother brought me back to life, health, and faith. We didn’t speak of our womanly miseries; we simply helped each other. Finally one day I left the clinic, and my family took me back to the house where I was born.
The telephone calls from New York to Guatemala came every day. My husband was worried about me and asked my mother to put me as quickly as possible on a boat or a plane bound for Paris, where he was preparing to go. The embassies sent me tender messages, flowers, and gifts from Tonio. But I wanted to see my city again and spend more time there wandering around and finding my childhood friends, my rosebushes growing at the foot of the volcanoes.
“ORANGES, MANGOES, tamales, pupusas . . .” The cries followed me through the little stations the train passed through on the way to Armenia San Salvador.
At my station, the heat had not diminished. I saw children, crowds of children, all standing in rows to greet me, singing the national anthem. The girls were lined up facing the boys; the schoolmistress faced the headmaster. Both were waving batons like orchestra conductors, directing the small childish voices that were singing in honor of their compatriot, their elder sister who had gone through a thousand hardships since leaving Paris to come back to them.
The mayor of my village, Don Alfredo, dressed all in white, was still young, with the placid youth of a small, tranquil town. Many things had changed since I left. The girls had grown up; they were mothers or even widows now, some had divorced. The rich were poor and the poor were rich; the old marketplace no longer existed; the trees had all grown larger, and orange trees now lent their beauty to the streets. Armenia’s park had been invaded by bamboo and tamales, and I walked slowly through it, after a month in bed in a Guatemalan clinic, with the line of little boys on my right and the girls on my left. I walked through the sunlight of the tropics, seeing myself as an Alice in Wonderland risen from the depths of a sea dried up by a wicked god—and in that strange way delivered into the tenderness of these children’s voices, singing of the joy of life as they walked barefoot over cobblestones burning hot from the sun.
I thought that once I was home I would have a chance to lie down on the cool tiles of our colonial house in the shade of the madre cacao or of my favorite mango tree. But my arrival wasn’t quite as I had imagined. There was yet another orchestra, three marimbas, the doors of the house were thrown wide open to the whole town, and everyone wanted to shake my hand.
My sisters decided, without consulting me, that my casual attire was out of keeping with such honors. My suitcases and trunks were opened on the spot, and they forced me to put on the most elegant of my ball gowns, at three in the afternoon. One of my sisters put my shoes on, another brushed my hair, the third put it up. My mother gave me a large fan, for in San Salvador everyone is always sweating. I was home.
The only friends whose hands I was happy to shake were the town’s three beggars, who hadn’t changed at all: el Viejo de la Colbason, el Mudo Nana Raca, and Latilla Refugio. I laughed when I saw that they were all still beggars and asked my mother to take them inside the house. I knew they were my true fellow soldiers in the war of life. El Viejo de la Colbason came to sit next to me, still in pain from the thrashings that are given out to flies, dogs, and beggars.
The house was filled with flowers and palm fronds that formed triumphal arches as if a queen had arrived from abroad. I knew I couldn’t play the hostess to all these hearts in search of a friendly queen: I felt myself to be the queen only of great unhappiness. What right did I have to complain? What right did I have to confess to my misery? Little by little I fell silent; little by little I forced my feelings back down into oblivion.
THAT EVENING A PROCESSION of the Isalco Indians who worked on my mother’s property filed past me. Each one left me a leaf, a fruit, a bird, an object. It was very beautiful, sad, and moving. I loved all these rituals. But I couldn’t play along anymore . . .
The atamialada, the feast of tamales, began. El Viejo de la Colbason alone was close to me. From time to time he rubbed his hair against my dress. He was sad that he couldn’t shine my shoes, for he gave the best shoeshine in the village. He told me, “We have a fourth beggar here, but she is of a rarer species than ours. She doesn’t like to talk the way we do, she doesn’t like to eat the way we do. She doesn’t live the same way we do. And the others claim she is mad. They call her the village madwoman. She assured me that she would come to see you on her own.”
As I was listening to this story, I heard the cries of a woman being mercilessly beaten. I pushed my way through my entourage and ran toward the place the cries were coming from. It was my bedroom. Lying in the bed (which had been carefully made up for me several days before) was a woman who appeared to be about thirty, her hair spilling across the precious embroidery of the lace sheets and pillows. Some servants were trying to tear an embroidered linen nightgown off her. She was being whipped like a dog, and she covered her head but wouldn’t move.
It was the village madwoman. Since she wanted to see me alone, she had simply crawled into my bed. Gathering up the last of my strength, I shouted and tried to stop the brutes who were beating her. In vain. My mother told me that the woman was dangerous, that the day before she had put out another woman’s eyes and had managed to escape from prison nevertheless. I finally pushed them all outside and stayed there alone with my pure and beautiful madwoman, who, in one movement, stood up and opened her arms to me. I thought that embrace was going to be the last minute of my life. Gently, she caressed my cheeks, my arms, my legs. She dressed me in the white linen nightgown she had taken and opened the door with dignity to leave.
I stayed in my bed, lost to the world.
ONE MORNING a consul arrived to tell me I had to go back to Paris; my husband was demanding my presence.
Once again I walked past my concierge on place Vauban. After all that had happened, I could hardly walk. I was finally home. Tonio was still very thin, very calm, very quie
t.
Boris, the butler, laughed his Russian laugh, the same animal laugh that had welcomed me home so many times. The apartment was the same, nothing had changed. Our lives may have been in danger, but our furniture had remained at peace, and the loveliness of this place, as clear and blue as the sky, had been spared. A family dinner reunited me with my husband in silent tenderness. There was a parade of visitors: friends, relatives, my mother-in-law. What did they want from me? I could give them no more of myself. I had come to the end of my string of miseries.
One afternoon, when I came home from my hairdresser’s where I had stayed longer than usual, I found the house empty again: everything had been taken away. There was nothing left but some crumpled newspapers floating on the breeze that came in through the open windows. I thought I was dreaming. Where was our furniture? Where were our things? I remember a film by Chaplin called The Circus, I think, where you saw only the traces of those who had passed through over the course of the story. I wrung my hands; I tried to understand. I had no idea what to do.
I went down to see the concierge but didn’t dare ask her a thing. I went outside to get some air. Maybe there I would begin to understand. Maybe I would find someone to explain it to me. My husband stood in front of me on the sidewalk, like a statue. He took me by the arm and announced, “Yes, I’ve dismissed all the servants. It was too expensive—I don’t have the money to pay the rent.”
“But where will we live?”
“I’m taking you to a hotel. I’ve reserved two rooms.”
Once again, life in a hotel. This time it would be the Lutétia.
19
THE HÔTEL LUTÈTIA was the Left Bank refuge of people from the Right Bank, a place of exchange between one side of the Seine and the other. Our marriage, built on the sands of Africa, foundered on the smooth pavement of Paris. Everything there was flat, gray, and sad. To disguise and embellish this melancholy, we needed tears, champagne, lies, and infidelities.
The Tale of the Rose Page 16