Tales from the Town of Widows

by James Canon

  “Stop talking like that, Vietnam!” his mother admonished him, her index finger in the air.

  The boy’s face turned red. He coughed, grunted and made every guttural sound he could think of. “It was normal yesterday,” he repeated.

  Visibly upset, his mother finished the coffee in one gulp, reared up and plodded into the kitchen.

  In the back of the house, in front of the mirror his father had pasted up on the wall many years ago, Vietnam gargled with salty water. “Testing, uno, dos, tres.” He gargled more. “Testing, uno, dos, tres.” But his voice remained impossibly high-pitched. Desperately, he pushed his index finger down his throat and moved it in circles until he vomited his breakfast and tears came to his eyes. He wiped the tears away with the heel of his hand, then went to get water to clean the mess he’d made. It was back there, as he fetched water from the laundry sink, that Vietnam felt a stream flowing down his legs. He forgot about the water and rushed to the toilet, his legs held together from the hips to the knees. He was so embarrassed to have wetted his pants that when he pulled them down he saw not urine, but blood, staining his trousers red, running down his inner thighs. He looked at his penis and noticed blood still gushing from it. He became frightened, not just because of the scarlet color of his blood but also because of his total inability to restrain the discharge. “I’m dying,” he wailed.

  “Vietnaaaaaaaaam!” shouted his mother from the kitchen. “Hurry up. You’re going to be late for the contest!”

  “I’m coming, Mamá,” he shrieked.

  “Stop talking like that, Vietnam! I’m warning you!”

  “Leave him alone,” his grandmother grumbled from her hammock.

  THEY SAY THAT when Trotsky Sánchez’s mother walked into her son’s room to wake him up, she found him weeping on the edge of his bed. He used one of his hands to cover his diminutive slanting eyes, and kept the other clenched on his chest, close to his heart.

  “What’s wrong, mi cielo?”

  “…!……!!……!!!” Trotsky gabbled.

  She came closer to his bed and stroked his hair. “You’re frightened about what might happen at the contest, aren’t you?” She sat next to him, embraced him and wiped away his tears with her impeccable white apron. “My heart tells me you’ll win, Trotsky, and a mother’s heart is never wrong.”

  The boy unclenched his hand and looked at it over his mother’s shoulder: what he was hiding was still there. He closed his hand tightly again and let out a shriek.

  “Everything’s okay, cariño. Mamá’s here.”

  But the boy had empowered his imagination to take him to a place where nothing was okay. Earlier that morning, before sunrise, Trotsky had awakened wanting to urinate. He pulled the chamber pot from under his bed and placed it on the mattress. He stood in front of it, still somnolent, and inserted his right hand into his pants, looking for his penis. His hand landed on his young pubic hair and quickly traveled the pubes, hunting for his member. It moved all over, his five fingers extended in every direction. He found his testicles, warm and shriveled, but not his penis. Annoyed, he lit a candle. His sleepy eyes and hand were now in search of the elusive penis, but they couldn’t find it. Trotsky became fully awake, almost alert. He pulled his trousers down to his knees, and with wide eyes and both hands he examined his pubic area thoroughly, splitting small sections of his pubic hair. His penis simply wasn’t there. In fact, there was no indication of any penis ever having been between his legs. In his state of confusion he even looked for it in sections of his body where ordinarily it wouldn’t be, like his navel, his armpits, and behind his ears. Trotsky opened his eyes wide and covered his mouth with both hands the way his mother did when someone mentioned guerrillas and paramilitary soldiers. He still felt the need to urinate, but how? Perhaps his penis had retreated beneath his skin like his testicles did sometimes, leaving the scrotum empty and wrinkled. He pulled up his pants and walked to the outhouse.

  There he stood in front of the latrine, not knowing what to do, until at length he squatted on his heels, hoping that his penis would pop up from under his pelvis. But his urine found a different way out of his body. It came out in a steady flow through his rectum, just as warm and yellow as always. Trotsky cried all the way back to his bedroom. He sat on the edge of his bed waiting to wake up from his nightmare. He even pinched his arm to make sure he was awake. Then he saw it: his penis! Trotsky saw his penis lying on the floor, next to a pair of beat-up black shoes he’d inherited from his late father. Perplexed, he bent over to get a better look at it: a flaccid outgrowth the size of a silkworm with a dark mole in the center. Somehow it had detached itself from his crotch while he was sleeping, and traveled from the bed to the floor.

  Contemplating his apathetic penis in his mind’s eye, Trotsky discovered he was afraid of it. If it had been able to remove itself, it might be capable of much more. It might crawl and twist like a worm; it might fly sightless, like a bat; it might even attack the boy, its master. After some time, and after convincing himself that his penis wasn’t qualified to perform such difficult tasks, Trotsky overcame his fears and picked it up from the floor. He held it tenderly in the palm of his hand, observing it from every possible angle. It didn’t appear to have been cut off; its base was perfectly sealed, and the top looked exactly as it had when Trotsky saw it last, its head covered with extra skin contracted into folds. Holding his loose penis in his palm made the boy feel deeply sad.

  He wept and wept until his mother entered his room.

  THEY SAY THAT the four boys met at the doorstep of Nurse Ramírez’ house sometime before eight. They’d rushed, separately and without telling anyone, to the infirmary, which was, in fact, the nurse’s living room, soberly decorated with her late husband’s medical school certificates and a large, cobwebby picture of the human skeletal frame, and which had a separate entrance also on the street. The nurse answered the infirmary’s door in her late husband’s pajamas. She was rather buxom and had a mass of shining black curls that clustered about her rotund face.

  “Shouldn’t you all be heading to the plaza?” she asked in a squeaky voice, visibly bothered by the boys’ early presence. They hid their faces without replying. “You’re just terrified of all those silly girls and their stupid competition, aren’t you? Go on! You’ll get over it.” The boys whined and didn’t move. Nurse Ramírez rolled her eyes at them and said, “All right, all right, damn it! Has anyone been shot?” They shook their heads. “Good, because I can’t stand the sight of blood. Come inside and wait until I get dressed.”

  Mariquita’s nurse was squeamish about blood, vomit, diarrhea, pus, rashes and other people’s genitalia—her own she found quite desirable. Needless to say, she wasn’t a good nurse. In fact, she was not a nurse at all. She was the widow of Dr. Ramírez, Mariquita’s only physician for over thirty years, and she’d half learned, from him, only the very basics of medicine—how to take a patient’s pulse and blood pressure, how to read a thermometer and use the stethoscope, and how to give injections. She refused to learn how to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Eight years before, after the guerrilla attack in which Mariquita’s men disappeared, the widow of Dr. Ramírez had been of no help. That day she tried to assist her neighbors and friends in treating their wounds, but she became nauseated after seeing so much blood and went home to grieve over her own losses. A few weeks later a serious epidemic of influenza arrived, killing seven children and three old women in the first week. That time, however, she treated several patients and succeeded in stopping the epidemic from spreading. The Pérez widow even claimed that “Nurse” Ramírez had saved her life. Since, every time someone was injured or fell ill, “Nurse” Ramírez was called in.

  While waiting for the fastidious nurse to come back, the boys pretended they weren’t in the infirmary waiting for the fastidious nurse to come back. Che bragged about his powerful, far-reaching ejaculation, “Be ready, guys, because I’ve been practicing for our next contest. I’m shooting farther each time.” The
comment echoed in Trotsky’s ears. He tried to remain calm, though he couldn’t help biting his nails. “That was a dumb competition,” he grumbled. “I’ll never do it again.” Meanwhile Hochiminh, in one of his late father’s shirts—which looked rather large on him—and with a huge book clutched firmly against his breasts, occupied himself by memorizing the names of bones from the skeleton’s picture: “Ster-num, il-i-um, sac-rum…” Vietnam, for his part, refused to talk. He wrote on a piece of paper, “I caught a severe throat infection and lost my voice,” and held the note up for his friends to see it.

  NURSE RAMÍREZ COULDN’T bring herself to examine the boys. She called them into her office one at a time and listened to their symptoms. What she heard was so terrifying that she immediately locked them in the waiting room. In her mind there was no doubt that she was faced with some mysterious, ghastly epidemic. She grew apprehensive, her hands began shaking involuntarily, and she felt a compulsive desire to wash herself. She took off her clothes, put them in a bag and sealed it, then gave herself a sponge bath, scrubbing her entire body several times. She got dressed again, feeling a little calmer, and took out of a drawer an old medical reference book, a relic that had been handed down from generation to generation in her husband’s family. She wanted to look up the disease, but where to start? It occurred to her that someone else should get involved.

  WHEN THE MAGISTRATE arrived and learned the bad news, she wanted to see the boys, but the nurse wouldn’t let her. Rosalba insisted.

  “But you didn’t examine them. How do you know they’re not lying?”

  “Lying? Would you lie about something like that, Magistrate? If you had only seen their faces. They looked terrified. Hochiminh was covering his breasts with a large book, poor thing. And Vietnam couldn’t even talk. How disgraceful!”

  “Ramírez, I must see the boys,” Rosalba requested firmly.

  “Magistrate, you go inside that room, and you’ll have to stay in it with those infected boys for forty days,” Nurse Ramírez returned, in a harsh tone that to the magistrate’s autocratically trained ears invited confrontation. But the circumstances were so dire that even Rosalba recognized that they called for serenity and compliance. She gave the nurse her word that she wouldn’t see the boys but demanded the key to the room where they were kept. That way she could feel as though she were in control of the situation. She hid it in her bosom, then went to get the police sergeant, Ubaldina viuda de Restrepo.

  The sergeant wasn’t given specific details about the boys’ medical condition—discretion wasn’t among her attributes. She was sent to look for the other three men of Mariquita (Julio Morales, Santiago Marín and el padre Rafael), and to bring them to the infirmary for a full medical examination.

  THE SERGEANT FOUND Julio Morales—Julia, as he was better known—among the crowd of women waiting for the contest to begin. He was, as usual, dressed as a girl, her black hair arrayed with colorful flowers. “The magistrate wants to see you immediately,” the sergeant whispered in the girl’s ear. Julia gestured to her to go ahead; she’d follow her. Which she did with her back perfectly straight, her hips swinging side to side rhythmically, and each of her bare feet landing exactly in front of the other with every step—a bewitching gait that put the ungainly sergeant, with her linen pants, plaid shirt and worn leather boots, to shame.

  Santiago Marín, the Other Widow, was found in his backyard, working on his small but flourishing garden, where he grew the best tomatoes in town. Ever since the night he sent his lover Pablo on his last, nonreturn trip, Santiago had grown introspective and quiet. He hadn’t turned mute like Julia; he just didn’t talk unless he had something meaningful to say. Today, after listening to the sergeant, Santiago put on a clean shirt, let his long hair down and left for the infirmary, escorted by Ubaldina.

  El padre Rafael was the last man brought to the infirmary. The sergeant had found the priest eating breakfast at Cafetería d’Villegas, and after she informed him about “something terrible” scourging Mariquita, he begged for a few minutes with the Lord. Ubaldina walked him to the back entrance of the church. They didn’t want to be seen by the crowd gathered in the plaza—the women, by now, were getting impatient with both the boys’ tardiness and the fiery sun’s promptness. The sergeant waited outside the church, whistling old songs and stroking the butt of the old revolver she carried in her waistband. Four songs later el padre came out, and together they walked toward the infirmary.

  THE BOYS’ MOTHERS were also sent for. They needed to be notified about the boys’ medical condition and the ordained quarantine. The four widows demanded to see their children, threatening to kick down the door of the room in which they were kept if the magistrate didn’t let them in. While Nurse Ramírez and the sergeant occupied themselves with the potential multiple detentions, Rosalba decided it was time to confront the crowd of women at the plaza. They’d become so rowdy and unrestrained that their uproar could be heard from every corner of Mariquita. It was hardly ten in the morning, and the sun was already flaming. Rosalba went along dreary streets carpeted with thousands of leaves the wind had snatched from the mango trees earlier that morning. There was not a soul in sight. The contest had paralyzed the village’s activities, which on a regular Sunday morning weren’t many anyway: a few street vendors and a handful of God-fearing widows who attended the early services. Rosalba wondered how the women gathered at the plaza would react to the news. They’d grown resilient after enduring so many adversities over the years, but this really was the end of their hopes. If Nurse Ramírez was right about the boys’ disease, the women would never be with a man again. Or bear boys. Or girls. Or anything else. After today, they’d have to decide whether they wanted to rot in this wretched village waiting for male relatives or suitors that might never come back, or boldly cross those intimidating mountains clustered around them and find not a village, but a large city where guerrillas couldn’t kidnap every man at once, where there were enough healthy men to impregnate them, and electricity and running water and cars and telephones. Maybe even one of those electric machines that made cold air and blew it on you. Rosalba would give anything to sit next to one of those right now.

  But what would these poor peasants do in a large city with no land for sowing? They’d end up working as domestics or prostitutes, the only professions for which countrywomen seemed to be qualified when they moved to the city. What would those provincial women do among so many sophisticated ladies and cultured gentlemen? People would laugh at them, at their ragged clothes and bare feet. They’d make fun of their plump, corn-fed bodies, their coarseness, their legs covered in mosquito bites. And if the plain women were to say that they’d come all the way from Mariquita, the sophisticated ladies would ask, “Mari what?” and roar with laughter.

  No. These poor, simple women would never leave Mariquita. They’d stay right here, immersed in this routine where even the musty air they breathed smelled the same day after day after day; where everyone knew their names and their weaknesses; where no one was rich or sophisticated—merely less poor, less unrefined—and it didn’t matter anyway because in the end they were all marked for doom. Yes. They’d stay here, in purgatory. Because that’s what Mariquita really was. Purgatory. Only no one had realized it yet. No one but the magistrate.

  “I have dire news,” Rosalba said to the crowd, looking unusually composed. “The boys,” she added, watching the women’s puzzled expressions, which in a second or two would turn into suffering. She proceeded to explain in great detail what had occurred to each boy, or rather what the nurse had told her. She told the women about breasts that mysteriously appeared and penises that shrank or left without so much as a warning. For an instant she considered taking advantage of the improvised gathering to ask the women to sweep the streets and alleyways. The many leaves made it unsafe for people to walk. But when her announcement was greeted by hysterical shrieks, Rosalba realized asking the women to sweep leaves might not be the most sensible thing to do.

  Brokenhe
arted, Magnolia propped herself against a robust tree and wept. Not far from her, Luisa buried her face in Sandra’s bosom. Elvira and Cuba nursed their mutual sorrows on each other’s shoulders. Other women hid their faces behind their hands and wept through their fingers. What now? The four boys had been the only hope for all of them. From now on they wouldn’t have any expectations. They’d sit and watch days run into weeks into months into years…. And then one day, after a lifetime of loneliness, they would die; bitter old maids who never knew what it felt like to have a man other than the priest panting around their necks, his bristly face brushing against their breasts or between their legs.

  “What has befallen me?” Magnolia Morales cried, kicking and hitting the blameless tree with her fists. “What a disgrace! What a terrible misery! I’ll never be happy.” But with her sobs came a certain relief: for the very first time in her life Magnolia confronted her biggest preoccupation. She tenderly stroked the scabrous surface of the tree as though it were her man bidding her a sad farewell. And she cried some more.

  At that moment Nurse Ramírez arrived from the infirmary. Her face was shiny and sweaty and her eyes sunken. She was followed by el padre Rafael, Julia and Santiago. Santiago carried a large book between his hands. The nurse stood on the platform next to the magistrate and announced that she had examined the three men. But in reality, since they hadn’t complained of any symptoms, she’d merely asked them to undress and, from a certain distance, verified that everything was what it should be and where it should be. “None of them is missing anything. They’re complete and intact,” she announced to the crowd, under the obvious impression that she was the bearer of good tidings. But her tidings didn’t bring any relief to the women’s grieving. They’d never thought of Julio and Santiago as men—neither had Julio and Santiago—and as for el padre Rafael, that was all in the past; a nasty, shameful past of which no woman wanted to be reminded.