by Luis de Lión
Then the people tried to unpile themselves, longing to say something to each other, but they had to stay huddled together and they still couldn’t speak. Because then it was no longer the wind or the coyotes or the dogs that were making the noise. It was the people themselves. Suddenly they heard their own teeth, chattering so hard that sparks were flying, heating up their mouths; they felt as though their bones were breaking and their very skin was sucking in like it wanted to turn inside out to find some sun that might be on the inside of their bodies. The women shoved the kids up under their skirts, as if they were trying to put them back up in the place they had originally come out of; meanwhile the men unpiled themselves for a moment and, dancing around and waving their arms for warmth, they looked for wood to stoke the fires. But it didn’t matter. It didn’t do any good. So, not knowing what to do, frozen right down to their very thoughts, they huddled back up with their women and kids to try to warm themselves and their families—with blankets, with corn husks, with burlap sacks, with their bodies, with whatever was at hand. From the other side of the walls, outside the fences, the trees groaned, shriveling up, wrapping themselves in their branches, in their leaves, wanting to sink down into the ground to wrap themselves up in their roots; and the dogs, desperate, clawed through adobe walls into the thatched huts or bunched together in knots. But it passed. It, too, went away. Everyone heard, felt how it finally got up, hoisted its burlap sacks of ice onto its back and went off in the direction where the wind had gone, the direction from which the coyote howls had come.
Then a deafening silence fell over the village like a mute owl, stunned and sad—a silence so thick that no one dared to speak a single word, to take a single step, even to breathe. It was as if all noises had bunched up together and rolled over to give shape to the silence that demanded more silence. One man, the fiercest in town, the one with the biggest balls—no one else would have dared to do it—got so desperate that he fired a shot into the air. Everyone exhaled. But it only got worse. Because after the sound of the shot had died away, everything seemed like it was before life, before even the world came to be. Like in the time of nothing. A seed breaking open was a bomb, a cricket singing was a machine gun. The only thing that kept life going, that offered any assurance that there was life at all was the ticktock of the clocks on the saints’ altars. But the clocks started to run slow, with an idleness of age, of rust, of death. And when the hour hands and the minute hands lined up, the ticktock fell silent. Then the fear in the very skin of the foreboding became an animal that began to scratch like a dog, at the doorways of their hearts.
It was barely audible. Just barely. It was as if Señora Honoria, the witch who had died all alone in her bed in the last house in town, had gathered up her old, rotten bones, gotten up, packed up all her knick knacks, and in the face of the town’s disdain—no love lost there—had decided to go off somewhere else.
tra-ca . . . tra-ca . . . tra-ca . . .
The cart was coming. Yes. From over there where the wind had first appeared, where the howls had gone off to, where the cold, the silence had come from, it came. ¿Or could it be Señora Pancha who at this time of the day would take her baskets of fruit down to catch the bus that came by Calle Rial at one o’clock? But Señora Pancha, the town traveler, didn’t live down by the cemetery. Nor did anyone else. Nobody. Not even memories. Only those people who were now nothing but grass shoots and wild flowers, fat worms and ants.
TRA-CA . . . TRA-CA . . . TRA-CA . . .
The cart covered the two blocks that separated the cemetery and the town and stopped.
And then the dance began . . .
Making the hinges on her arms creak, and the ones on her knees and her hips; spitting out the white saliva of her cackle; she started to dance to the beat of the marimba that was her ribcage.
The dance could be heard all across the town. The marimba was as loud as it was at the big annual festival. Except that this one was happily sad. And the people didn’t go out in the street to see it, to have a good time; instead they gathered up even their most hidden thoughts and sank further into themselves, hoping that the party would soon be over, that it wouldn’t go on anymore.
High above, nailed to the great blue tin roof of the sky, the stars trembled, unable to get together and take heart from one another’s company.
Below, the young kids, with puzzled looks on their faces, didn’t understand what was going on, why their papas cuddled them even closer, held them tighter in their arms, covered them more with their bodies, why they plugged their own ears and their children’s with anything they could find.
A bit later the dance stopped and the cart started moving again . . .
TRA-CA . . . TRA-CA . . . TRA ¡CAS! (the cart ran into a rock), TRACA-CA . . .TRA ¡CAS! (again).
The cart stopped at the front gate of the first house. Then, after peering inside through the black suns of her eyes, the woman pushing the cart began to dance again.
And she did it again and again, the same thing at all of the front gates of all the houses.
From the top of the town to the bottom, from the cemetery to Calle Rial, one by one, not leaving out a single house. She covered the whole town. Right down to the last little nook.
But she didn’t come back across town as was her custom. They could hear how she pushed through one last door, the front gate of someone who lived in the town. No one ever found out whose it was. But they all thought that it must have been the house of a dying person, maybe one who didn’t know that death was coming so soon. Surely she wanted to take a down payment in the way of a soul and wheel it off in her cart. But who knows. Because the tracatraca couldn’t be heard anymore.
So . . . if you marked up the white outer wall of the house with a pencil, a chunk of charcoal, a rock, it was like your own shadow would follow behind, erasing it right then and there.
So . . . if you opened the gate—no, you wouldn’t have to ask permission, or knock, or call out; it was simply a matter of pulling the string connected to the latch and going right in as if it were your own house—you would have to get your eyes good and ready to look at the garden, its beautiful deadly whiteness.
So . . . if you went into the special room that houses the altar and the saints—this is one of the two rooms that together made up the single structure at the back of the garden, a plastered and whitewashed adobe house with a tile roof, the building that you would come to after climbing four steps and crossing a short, cool, covered walkway—everything else in the place, except your soul, was as white and immaculate as the garden and the exterior of the house: on one table, which had a white cloth and an eternal candle on it, sat a picture depicting a Christ of the Resurrection, another depicting an entombed Christ; and, occupying the most prominent space, that is, the center, another picture depicting Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception—the Virgen de Concepción—and, below these, one more, depicting souls that angels were lifting by the arms as they flew toward a cloud-filled sky.
So . . . if you went from this room to his room—this was the other small room, without windows, closed up, almost like an egg, with only one door that connected to the room with the saints—except for you, everything here, too: the bed, the sheets, the pillow, everything was as white and immaculate as if it were another altar, another garden, another outer wall along the street, o
r of the house itself.
So . . . if, from there, you walked ten paces to the left—and it was exactly ten paces; I know, because I counted them many times—and you went into the little thatched hut that stored the corn . . . no, at this point it wouldn’t surprise you that you wouldn’t find a single kernel of yellow, black, or red corn among the corn piled up there.
So . . . if you went from that corn storage shed to the kitchen—another ten paces; I’m not mistaken: I counted them, too—the only thing that didn’t match the whiteness of the pewter dishes, which didn’t have a single dent, was—no, it wasn’t the ash: the lightest gray—nor the soot: black, of course, but so thin that it was hardly there—no, it was the solitude, the absence of something—something that was nameless . . . but its color was dark.
And finally, if you went out of the house—and you’d be half-blind by now—your eyes could still look back in and see, just make out a figure standing in the shadow of the front gate, white like his hair, like the whites of his eyes, like his smile, like his suit—only a shirt and pants—this white figure, with a paintbrush and a bucket of whitewash in his hand, who was just going back in after having erased the marks you had made on the outer wall before you had gone into his house.
And only then would you understand: if you were a kid, you should leave your toy cars made of wood, your stick and wheel, your ball made of rags, your marbles there at the front gate before even going in; you should clean off the dust in the summer, or the mud in the winter before setting foot inside the house; you should tie your mischievous little hands together with an invisible rope. Or come with your mama*—or your mother, whatever you call her—so that she could tell you:—No, don’t do that. ¿Can’t you see that the gentleman might get mad? In here everything is clean, and you’re gonna dirty it all up. Even though he would look at you and look at your mama and say:—Don’t worry about it, Señora; he can do whatever he wants. Boys will be boys. And he would say it and you knew you really would have been able to do whatever you wanted. You could leave the floor strewn with banana peels, hog plum seeds, trash, and shit; you could put your dirty hands on the white sheets and leave marks on them. But your mother—or your mama—would understand that, no, you could do whatever you wanted but that you shouldn’t; because the moment you left he would grab the broom to sweep up the trash, the dust, the shit that you had left and he would take off the sheets you had dirtied and get right to washing them that very minute.
But you would also understand that when you were grown-up and you were in need of something you could come and ask for it—if he was still alive—like your mama did—or your mother—to ask him to lend you a couple of pounds of white corn with the promise to pay it back to him when you harvested your crop; and, even if you didn’t keep that promise, you could still come back and ask him again, after both of you had conveniently forgotten about the previous time.
Or if you went to him in the name of the church, or of one of your deceased relatives, to ask that he give you some flowers, you knew that you’d come home with some alms as well.
The Virgen de Concepción was a whore.
I never met her. But I remember her.
For example, I remember that her body was full of birds, such that when a man would throw himself onto her, before ascending to the heavens, his hands would have to turn into cages so that none of the birds would escape. I also remember that, in spite of the enthusiasm with which she received the men, if they gave her money, she took it; but she didn’t demand they pay her because the main thing was to see the world through the eyes between her legs. And that, what’s more, she was tireless—she never quit; yet she didn’t lose that face of a thirteen-year-old, or, that is to say, her face as it was when someone first noticed that she looked like the image of the Virgen de Concepción* there in the church from which she got her nickname: she had the same hair, the same face, the same eyes, the same eyelashes, the same eyebrows, the same nose, the same mouth, and she was even the same size; the only difference was that she was dark, that she had tits, that she was flesh and bone—and, what’s more, that she was a whore.
I never met her. But I remember her.
I remember her wedding night . . .
Lying there on the bed—nervous, anxious, full of doubt—she felt her man pull up her slip just to her belly; he took something out of the opening in his underwear, put it in that door surrounded by black wires that she had in the middle of her body and began to give it to her. But suddenly he pulled it out and said:
—¿What have you got there between your legs, vos*? It’s as if it were the entrance to hell.
I remember that she took it as an insult. She was fifteen years old and this was her first real taste of life. So those words felt like rape to her ears—ears that were still as innocent as a bird’s.
But she didn’t cry this time, not like she would later when a man would climb on top of her body. Then her eyes would tear up every time.
—Of course it’s from pure happiness—the men would say.
But time is shit. Because it makes some eggs hatch and others rot. And it takes a person up on its back as if it were a horse and only afterward does he even realize that his hat fell off and got left behind in the road. Time is shit when a person realizes that it doesn’t come just to fuck around. And this is what finally made her understand that what she had between her legs really was the entrance to hell, even if her husband would later proposition her at any moment of the day—no matter where they were—like he wanted it every bit as much as he had before they got married.
—Angel . . .
—No, man. ¿Can’t you see that somebody might come along here?
—¿And what does that matter to you, vos?
Because as time passed, her body kept filling up with more and more birds. And those birds were hungry. And he had to feed them. So he wasted away to pure skin and bones from a real good case of tuberculosis. And he died.
I remember that’s when her whoring started. But it was an honorable whoring, right there under the gaze of her parents, to whose house—there in the middle of town, right in front of the church—she had to return after her husband’s death; and she didn’t whore around with anyone from the town either, but with someone from somewhere else, who would come around every night mounted on a proud horse. I also remember that, just when all the people thought she wouldn’t be waking up in her parents’ house much longer, she herself told him not to come back any more, and so it was over for him; but it kept on commencing for her.
But it didn’t happen that fast.
—Gotta be careful with her. I tell you, there’s a shadow on that woman—mothers would say to their sons.
But finally a guy from right there in town tried his luck, and for a while things went well, navigating the space between the townspeople’s doubts and the guy’s unadulterated joy; until she told him, too, that it was over.
—¡Shitty whore!—he said to his friends hanging out on the corner—. She’s as hot as the summer, but she’ll never love any one man.
But it turned out she didn’t have a shadow on her after all. Because that guy lived right up until his death. Everyone was waiting to see what might happen; that was also true. Because he had promised to marry her. But one by one they started circling the hou
se. Sometimes they would call her with surreptitious whistles; other times they’d bang on the front gate right out in the street. She already knew what they wanted, and before her folks could make it to the door, she would go out.
—¿What’d they want?
—An errand, Tata.*
Yeah, well it was, after all, an errand to her, not just a romp in the hay.
If she hadn’t started messing with a married man she would have gone on living there with her folks, who knew perfectly well what was going on, but who couldn’t do a damned thing about it. She was their daughter after all. But, one Sunday, the stench of the priest’s rosary of curses wafted from the pulpit to the street; and from the street it made its way straight into her folks’ ears.
—You’re gonna have to leave. We don’t want the salt you’ve got on you to fall on us as well.
The demand was that she be kicked out of the town altogether. But she simply moved to another little thatched hut down the road where, alone, she could act more freely. But the priest didn’t give up so easily, and, little by little, he kept driving her farther out of town, from thatched hut to thatched hut, from street to street, until she ended up in the last little thatched hut on the last street. And from there she didn’t budge.