Sleeping Dragons

by Magela Baudoin; Wendy Burk; M. J. Fièvre

  But he never did. Arami was always there ahead of her. Like María, she was one of the most popular girls in the cabaret, but unlike María, she wasn’t a singer. Arami was possessed of a furtive, feral nature. She had a baby bird imprisoned inside her, an anxious pair of wings in her bony, fragile chest. She liked to walk barefoot through the fields, embracing the wind. Sky, universe, lightning, misty rain. Arami left the house, lay down on a tall, icy table, and let him inject her, and then it was “Uncle” this and “Uncle” that, every time she opened her mouth. “Wise,” she called him, because he had wanted to found a new world, a new order. She bragged that he was going to fix her eyes, so he could leave his seed inside her even better. María felt a shiver pass through her body as she yanked down the hem of her uniform.

  It was you who was spiteful, Arami. And bad: quesú. You left me. You left me all alone.

  María looked up at the bright lights. “The manager is mine,” she thought to herself. She remembered one afternoon. “Panambi, let me have him. Fly away like a butterfly, Panambi,” her sister had begged her, because it wasn’t in Arami’s nature to fight. By then they had stopped going to the movies together: Arami had forgotten all about Pedro Infante, Agustín Lara, and even Jorge Negrete, who married María Félix. “De porá means you’re handsome,” Arami said.

  Handsome, Arami? Come on! You don’t see his huge, ugly hands, his head like a block of wood, his weak jaw and buck teeth, you don’t see that he’s married, that he doesn’t know how to love, that even his own son calls him “Uncle Fritz …”

  None of it mattered, as María well knew, because every night, with military precision, Fritz showed up at the cabaret and invited her sister to dance. He spun Arami around the floor, as if she were flying, just the tips of her shoes brushing the ground. María sang for him and he sang for Arami, whispering in her ear, “My darling…” Such a tall man, everyone could see him tilting his head down towards Arami’s neck, just so he could hear her say, “You’re handsome, de porá.” While he had told her, the night before he left, “Your flesh is more than a passing malady, Arami. You belong to me.”

  Marrriiia: it was the manager’s voice, in that horrible accent that drove her to fury… Where was it coming from? She hadn’t seen him anywhere. She always made sure that she was completely alone. María peeked her head out of the elevator: nothing. She put her ear to the intercom: nothing. For an instant she thought that the voice was coming from the shaft wall, but no… Marrriiia, she heard again: it was the walkie-talkie she had forgotten in the pocket of her uniform. She responded. He wasn’t calling her down to his office. “The bathroom in 205 is dirty,” he told her. As María started to push the cart out of the elevator, she looked at herself again. But this time the light had changed. Now it seemed to be the reddish, flickering bulb under which Arami screamed as she birthed a stillborn baby with dead blue eyes. “Añamenby, devil’s spawn,” the midwife said, and María once again saw the blood stains, the tall, icy table, and Arami’s exhausted, purple arms …“Cleaning is healing,” she told herself, and she scrubbed her sister’s skin with the same cloth she had used to wash the baby’s body. But it took María a very long time to heal; to smell like new again. To leave her body.

  Voi potá, Arami. Sky, universe, lightning, misty rain, she said to herself, over and over, huddled up in the corner of the elevator, her cart blocking the door and the walkie-talkie calling: Mariiia.

  OPENING NIGHT

  I

  LOOKING BACK AT WHAT happened, he realized that he could have done something to avoid it. He knew that Carmen had always appeared in his life as if perchance, a seemingly meaningless coincidence that ended up changing everything. And wasn’t it significant enough that the Teatro Colón had announced the premiere on that particular day: the very day when everything began to change for him? But he didn’t see it, not then.

  He was always a little strange; or it might be closer to the truth to say that he was singular. At the end of the day, he was just a man who worked at a cleaners, someone who was a bit bewildered by life, even a bit slow, perhaps because his parents were already getting on in years when they brought him into the world. He was passionate about music, which was nothing special, really, when you consider the repetitive, timeworn nature of putting clothes in the machines and taking them out, adding detergent, folding and ironing. Over the course of the workday, with its mechanical, mindless rounds of wash, dry, and steam, music is one more customary element. A classic palliative of the profession.

  Not really that strange, either, that the music he loved best was opera—there’s something for everyone—or that he liked to turn the volume all the way up. You can’t go to the cleaners in Buenos Aires without noticing the speakers dominating the space above the washers and dryers. What was singular was that he found the hum and the heat of the machines to be soothing; they helped him to think. Not to ponder or to philosophize—he hated mental circumlocutions that he couldn’t understand. What he liked, plain and simple, was to let his imagination loose. During the long pauses while the machines whirled through spin cycle and permanent press, he acted out the operas as he listened to them, creating ovations, moving the principals from overture to recitative to aria to chorus, on the exquisitely modeled set of a toy theater, an exact replica of the Théâtre National de l’Opéra Comique in Paris that he had inherited at the death of his father.

  For him the toy theater was not an object of sentimental value; it was a plaything. His father, once an electrician for the best theaters in Buenos Aires, had found it in a storeroom, forgotten and coated with dust, and taken it home. There, it acquired the sacred quality of a holy relic: because the state of his father’s nerves precluded him from touching anything fragile, he laid his hands on it for the first time after coming home from the cemetery to the mournful, empty apartment. It was a detailed model of the Parisian set for the opening night of Carmen. As his father told the story, the premiere had been a complete fiasco, and Bizet’s death from a heart attack three months later was the tragic result.

  He opened the cleaners daily at ten o’clock, but he got there much earlier. Always at eight o’clock, with enough time to check the machines, tidy the shop, and even prepare the pickup bags lined up on the shelves below the counter. A little before nine o’clock, he was free to do what he loved best: to play, as earnestly as a child. He took the toy theater down from its shelf, set it on a square table at the back of the shop, behind the machines, and selected the music for the opera he had in mind that day. After carefully placing the principals on the proscenium, he gave himself over to the pleasure of moving them in turn through their roles as the opera slowly progressed.

  Because the theater was only designed to represent Carmen, he also spent hours fabricating tiny costumed figures for other favorite operas, punching out the paperboard silhouettes, penciling the graceful folds of their attire, and finally applying careful dabs of paint. These were no crudely sketched paper dolls: each figure dazzled with bright precision, down to the last detail. That was his tribute to his mother, also deceased, who had been a seamstress. He had learned from her that the essence of every role is in the costume, the second skin that suspends our disbelief. For his mother had costumed so many bodies behind the scenes. Bodies now nameless in his recollections, bodies he had never even thought to glance at, except one: a woman’s body, voluptuous and nearly naked, a body his mother had fitted countless times and whose transformations he witnessed on opening night: unfurling, ascending in an urgent, passionate voice, enthroned by floodlights and exalted by majestic garments. That body, her body, destined to become Carmen, Bizet’s crown jewel.

  He was no longer a child with chubby cheeks, or at least they were well hidden behind the vigorous beard that suited him well. He understood things better now, and found himself able to cope with loneliness, for his parents remained present in every one of his thoughts. In fact, he almost felt they were still beside him. That “almost,” it should be said, sometimes weighed hea
vy on him, especially when he found himself daydreaming about her. More than forty years had gone by and he still shivered when he thought about her laughter, her skirts swirling around her rosy skin as she took on the substance of each role she had to play. Living as he did surrounded by clothes, he considered them to be much more than soiled fabric, and he paid more attention to them than his job required, because clothes are what frame and channel our destiny. Clothes give meaning to the bodies they cover. That’s what he believed, knowing all the while what his own clothes—gray, inscrutable, nondescript—said about him.

  He liked to make guesses about other people’s lives based on what they wore. A black girl got on the bus and sat down, gazing out the window. She wore her hair in a bun wrapped with purple cloth. Long beaded earrings, no makeup. Her neck was bare, unless you counted her prominent collarbone as an embellishment. Her purple caftan had long embroidered sleeves and lilac trim around the collar. The hood of the dress, thrown back, revealed her skin and the hint of an elegant, muscular back. She wore leather flats and white pantyhose, clinging to the thick contours of ankles accustomed to work. She must be a dancer, he said to himself, and when he watched her willowy descent from the bus, he knew he had guessed right.

  There was nothing too exciting about his life, this man who spent his days working at the cleaners, who was a bit slow, who loved music, and whose unexceptional existence resembled nothing so much as a moth’s, emerging at dusk with tiny, brown, battered wings. That’s how he felt about himself every night at eight o’clock when he locked up, turned right and walked three blocks along Tucumán, crossed the street, walked through the center of the plaza, then onto the sidewalk, and arrived at the grand entrance of his father’s opera house: that is, the Teatro Colón. So many times, as a child and adolescent, he had come with his parents to this house of floodlights and thick cables, always watching from behind the scenes, never out in front in a seat of his own. He wasn’t upset about what he had missed, he only unfolded the memories that he had. The brilliantly illuminated chandelier was not part of his memories, nor was the sight of the curtains drawing back to reveal the stage. Yes, that’s what occupied his mind during the scant two minutes it took for him to cross the street and leave the Teatro Colón behind, on the way to his apartment.

  II

  One afternoon a woman walked into the cleaners. She wore a maid’s uniform; she had short hair and beautiful hands. She placed on the counter a large oval box, lined with black satin, a box that would set a singular chain of events in motion. He opened it carefully and unfolded a full-dress tailcoat, heavy with the scent of naphthalene. The woman asked him for a receipt itemizing the six articles inside the box, including a top hat, stained along the band and smelling of mildew. He considered the job carefully, estimating both the cost and the likelihood that his efforts might not succeed. “I’ll see what we can do. Leave it with me, I’ll call you,” he said, like his father had taught him, and the maid shrugged, not seeming to care. It was the most interesting job that had come his way in years. He couldn’t recall anything quite like it. He had restored evening dresses thick with embroidery and fine lace, had worked on organza, silk shantung, chiffon, linen… Every now and again a lackluster tuxedo, but never—never in life!—a tailcoat like this.

  He waited until he was alone to examine it. First he held up the black coat, checking for missing buttons and looking for signs of mildew. He sighed with relief when he saw that although the white silk pocket handkerchief would need to be bleached, the tails themselves, lined with white satin, were spotless. The flat-front trousers perfectly matched the coat, with a dark satin stripe running down the outside of each leg. Then there was the moiré silk waistcoat, once pearl gray but now yellowing along the seams. The white dress shirt, of fine cotton, had French cuffs and a high collar. He thought that with heavy starch, the collar and shirt front would come out as good as new. Last but not least, from a tiny plastic bag he retrieved the bow tie, in better condition than the waistcoat. It was perfect. As he looked over the ensemble, he felt that he was experiencing an epiphany.

  That night he brought the box home with him, wanting to start right away. He walked three blocks down Tucumán, crossed the street, walked through the plaza. At these hours he enjoyed the plaza more, empty as it was of the stray dogs that terrorized it every morning. No barking now, no honking horns, just human shadows coming and going, slower than they did in the daytime, as if they were paperboard silhouettes, ready to be painted. Lights shone on all four sides of the opera house. A show was going on; he saw the posters. He arrived at the grand entrance, circled around to the marquee on the right side of the building, and read the letters slowly: “Car… men.” An exceptional coincidence. He thought of the gypsy, the jealous lover, and the toreador from his theater. Still, he didn’t linger long in front of the marquee. He didn’t know that the sigh that escaped his lips signified something more than resignation: it was the unresolved yearning of his heart, unexpectedly sparked and just as quickly destined to be extinguished. A cleaner’s life is too narrow and pale to nurture that kind of fluttering.

  But later, sitting at his mother’s sewing table, under the light of the same lamp that his father had installed for her years ago, with the theme from Carmen reverberating privately in his eardrums, he made the extraordinary vow to return. Only this time he wouldn’t hang back in the shadows. And his parents, wherever they were now, would be proud of him. They wouldn’t feel sad anymore about his occasional loneliness. He made the decision almost in defiance of himself, moved by the memory of the thousands of times he had been paralyzed by fear: that she would be there, would reject him, and that the inertia that until now had protected him would prove fatal. It was better to not let suffering in; his parents had this made clear, and he had done their bidding, without entirely letting go of the illusions brought to life by the question “What if … ?”

  Truthfully, though, he wasn’t thinking in terms of future possibilities. What occupied his mind was a single instant, the moment of their encounter. He’d see her again. He would be waiting for her when the show ended, holding out a single red carnation and, perhaps—could he even conceive of such a perhaps?—he would kiss her as passionately as she had that day, pressing him backwards into the heavy rows of costumes, gracing him with the first and only kiss of his life. Good God, how his mother had raged at her when she found them together. Bad words had poured out of her mouth and he had listened from the safety of the dressing room next door, helpless to stop her. Wails. Sobs. A slammed door. And the word “pity” like a stinging blow, following him all the way home to his dull and silent room.

  III

  Time went by quickly, and so did his work restoring the tailcoat. So absorbing was the task that he lost interest in playing with the toy theater, which sat on its shelf, carelessly pushed back. To the rhythm of his favorite arias, his thoughts were flurries of possible outcomes and words. He wrote them down in his black spiral notepad and then made revisions, like his father had taught him. He had crossed out the word “Hello,” and then many others. At last he decided on silence. “Let her be the first to speak.” He would give her a moment to recognize him, standing there by himself, mature and stylish with his impeccable beard. All by himself, without anyone else to support him: as an adult. Seeing himself as an adult gave him an exciting sense of his own strength, which augmented every time he tried on part of the suit. The moiré waistcoat fitted him perfectly, and the trouser hems just brushed his shoes. As he put on the coat, a marvelous transformation overtook him; even the tone of his voice changed.

  Opening night was only one day away—not even a day, just a matter of hours!—and he hadn’t experienced a single moment of remorse. His parents had always encouraged him to spend money on himself. Without hesitation, he paid a small fortune for the best orchestra seat available, then splurged on new socks and black dress shoes. It comforted him to do his parents’ bidding, one last time. He had everything. Everything but the red carnati
on, which he planned to pick up from the florist’s stall on the corner of Tucumán, on the way to the opera house. He had paid for it in advance, after crossing the plaza that morning, just to be sure. He closed up for lunch, something he never did, and walked to his father’s favorite barbershop, where they cut his hair and trimmed his beard the way his mother had liked best. Then he went back to the shop, where he planned to leisurely iron the suit. He didn’t eat, because he wasn’t hungry.

  Carmen played loudly on the speakers all afternoon. He sang along as he pressed each article of his elegant suit. First he pressed all the white pieces, and then the dark ones. He spritzed them with a bit of cologne, like his mother used to do, and carefully laid them one by one on the counter to air out. He closed his eyes and listened for a moment to the peaceful sound of the machines, moving in sync with his heartbeat, which pulsed in his chest, his throat, and even his knees, with a fervor he had never felt before. He wasn’t a moth anymore. He would go to the opera with butterfly wings. Even a cleaner can be a king if he truly wishes. The meaning of his father’s saying opened to him, like a flower that only blooms in the sunlight. At eleven o’clock, when touched by a ray of light, it reveals itself. He could be a king, he could be anything he wished. It was hard waiting to get dressed. If it had been up to him, he would have changed at three o’clock, right after coming back from the barbershop. He longed to do it now, to walk the streets of the city until showtime. But he didn’t want to be all sweaty when he arrived at the opera house. No. It was a bad idea.