by Luis de Lión
And it didn’t matter one bit to her that the priest kept on ripping her—coming up with more and more curses from the pulpit—or even that he then actually showed up himself one day to tell her to get out of town. She didn’t budge. He could bring in the authorities for all she cared. She didn’t budge. From then on it was like there wasn’t any air anymore. And the authorities didn’t so much as go out there—except every once in a while, in the dark of night, when they were received by her with the same enthusiasm and the same tears with which she received everyone else. It didn’t matter one bit to her either that the women—old mothers, young mothers, grandmothers, and single women—would make a cross with their thumbs and forefingers when they saw her, would burn dried chile as an antidote, would mistreat her, would try to knock into her on the street. She didn’t budge. And because she was now on the outskirts of town she could open up even more freely to grandfathers, fathers, and sons; so that they could spend their last reserves, or change things up a little, or get some for the first time, or get some for the first time again. I remember it well. It was her best and last reign. And there she would hang on, like an invisible and tenacious stain, even if it was the most out-of-the-way place in town.
So, it turned out that finally the priest got tired of the whole thing; and for a while there the people thought that one random day on his way back into town, instead of going straight to the church, he, too, would keep going straight and buzz on out to that little thatched hut of damnation, sleep with her, cage the birds, and for one moment, would ascend for the first time to the heavens; and out of pure gratitude he’d take her to the church. After all, she was at the very peak, so to speak, at the very height of her powers. This was around the time that she started feeling like crying from pure joy. Anyway, it was delicious—downright tasty—to savor, time after time, the tearful rite with which she would receive the men; it made them dream—and feel that it was true—that they were actually on top of the real Virgen de Concepción—although it’s impossible to ever track down someone who will admit he’s talking about his own experience; it’s always “a friend of mine says that . . .” ¡Once a fucking Indian, always a fucking Indian!
And maybe it was that fantasy that did it. No doubt about it. A man like him couldn’t get together with any other woman who wasn’t the Virgen de Concepción. The fact is that when all of them least expected it—both the men and the women—she moved out of that damned thatched hut where every night she kept the company of not only men, but also of rats, cockroaches, crickets, scorpions, fleas, and that picture of Our Lord of San Felipe,* all old and blurry in its frame; and she moved into the house that was like the other church in town—the white house.
They say that it made all the people feel as if their bodies were covered in mold. I remember that it was more like now they all felt white and it was only him they saw as black, or at least, about to turn black. I also remember that he was not a young man anymore. He was up there in years, and at that age, for the few remaining years before they carried him on out to the cemetery—closed up in a little white box like the ones they use for kids—he should have been able to resist temptation, and distract himself by doing things that weren’t bad. But that’s not the way it happened.
I also remember that the morning she first came out of the door of the white house onto the street, the people got a real shock; the first woman who saw her ran with the news straight to the pila,* then to the little stores and to the butcher shop; and when she no longer had anyone else to tell it to, she fell mute for a time until the priest doused her in holy water, and said five Hail Marys and five Our Fathers over her.
And that’s when the fear started. Which was why those who ran into her around town would make their thumbs and forefingers into a little cross inside their pants pockets or hiding their hands under their shawls; and they would move over to the other side of the road, or even turn around and go back the other way; or they wouldn’t talk to her, pretending not to be paying attention to what she said, as though lost in thought. They were afraid that the blackness that had invaded him, his bed, and his house, would invade them, too; and, even though they still went through times of need, now no one came to his house; it wasn’t that they thought he wouldn’t give them anything anymore just because someone was there now to spend his money, eat his corn, and pick his flowers; it was just that his whiteness was now black.
They had no choice but to look down on him, as though he were a nobody.
I also remember that he married her.
That, one Sunday (which for him, was like all the other Sundays run together) he said to her:
—Vos, ¿have you still got the white dress you got married in?
She told him that she did.
When they came into the church, the mass was already well underway. And nobody was expecting them. Not the priest, not the people, not the church, not the saints. As for her, since the day the priest had called her out publicly for getting involved with a married man, she had not dared set foot in the church; as for him, since the day he had taken the Virgen de Concepción into his house—as if that were his only shame—he hadn’t come back to the church again either. That’s why, when the church bells rang for mass, they knew that the bells weren’t calling them, that it was more like the bells were telling them to stay away, or even to get out of town altogether. No, the bells hadn’t called them, but they came into the sanctuary anyway, hand in hand; and both of them shone with the whitest whiteness.
All the people had their heads bowed and at that very moment the priest was raising the host. Everyone started to murmur and the priest looked up and the host fell from his hands. There were some there that stood up right away, just waiting for the priest to give the order to kick them out. But the priest leaned over, picked up the host, and went on officiating mass. Maybe he hadn’t looked very carefully; maybe he didn’t think the couple would dare to come there. Those that had gotten up kneeled back down, although they were disgusted, confused, restless like everyone else. But those two—even though they saw the looks that were being directed at them, and the hate leaping from everyone’s eyes—they didn’t stop at the entrance to the church or even halfway up the church aisle; instead they kept right on going until they got to the railing of the main altar, where they knelt down. They were like two doves: faces white due to fear and clothes white due to the occasion. As the murmurs kept getting louder, the priest had to turn around again and look. First, he saw the tight, wrinkled, disgusted faces of the people looking at him like they would at a strict judge who had suddenly gone lax; he saw the immense nave of the church where the people expected they would never shipwreck, but their captain now suddenly seeming to tremble despite being anchored forever on solid ground; he saw beyond the church as though he were looking for God, not in the saints or in the host or in the wooden Christ that wasn’t looking at him, after all he had his head bent down from so much death; instead he saw the sky that was framed in the doorway of the church that seemed to stretch out like a tunnel; he saw into his soul because, for a moment, he shut his eyes to look inside himself; and, finally, he saw them. They looked pure to him, as though he carried all her sins and she held all his whiteness; and he smiled at them.
—We want to get married, Father.
—Yes—the priest said to them. —I can see that.
Behind them, the people had gotten up from thei
r seats and crowded around the couple. The priest’s voice sounded strange to them, as if it was coming out of one of the wooden saints, already rotted inside despite the fancy robes and vestments. And they thought that, even if he hadn’t ever gone out to the little cursed house on the outskirts of town to sleep with her, he had surely felt that temptation like any man. But—when he knelt down, prayed deeply, and even cried as though he himself wanted to cleanse that first stain, the one that belonged to him, and, very serenely, he turned back to the couple—the people saw on his face, for the very first time, the face of an angel: and they all became meek as if by a miracle.
And while the brief wedding ceremony proceeded, all those that had known her, those who knew what she tasted like, knew her heat, her whispers, and her tears, bowed their heads, their souls turning into pure waterfalls of boiling foam; and the women, as though to cleanse a stain that had bounced off onto them as well, began to sing:
Ave,
Ave,
Ave, María . . .
I remember that it was the longest mass the priest had ever said; see, for all the other masses, he would get there in a rush and always finish up quick; and he would only take a minute or so for the sermon, to preach: against the Protestants, of which there wasn’t a single one in the town; against the liberals and the Freemasons, who were something like the Protestants, but no one knew of even a single one that could serve as a model for their reprehension; and every once in a while he’d also preach against the Communists, which was, for the townspeople, like hearing someone talk about a distant Spain, lost in the sea, or about a rare book called the Popol Wuj; and finally, he’d preach against the Virgen de Concepción who was like the compilation of them all, according to the priest: Protestantism, Communism, Freemasonry, and liberalism; and then they all understood the whole thing perfectly well because she was familiar and close to them. This time, however, there was no purgatorial sermon.
And when the mass was over, everyone hurried out to the atrium to watch the newlyweds, who—like a couple of prisoners who had been sentenced to death but unexpectedly pardoned—took off for their house, happy but humble.
And from that day on, the black house turned white again in the language of all the people, who were only waiting for a miracle child to come along—a miracle child who would soon dirty the white house again with mud, with trash, and with his mischievousness; but in that case, even dirty, it would still seem white. And for a while there the people—who once again would greet him, would come around to his house again in search of charity—waited in vain to see her suddenly eating green hog plums, lemons, and as much other sour fruit as she could get her hands on; and when they didn’t see these telltale signs, they just kept watching her, and looking closely at her body to see if her face was getting pale, if her skin was getting splotchy, or if her belly, little by little, was filling out. But, contrary to what they expected, first one year and then another went by and the Virgen de Concepción’s body stayed the same.
And, the thing is, it was common knowledge ever since a good while back that, when she had known her first man and then soon had felt the pains of bearing a stillborn son, she had figured out the difference between the two sensations—in and out—and she had determined only to taste the first feeling and never again to give birth or death; and ever since that day she would bathe only once a month, but during that time of the month; and every day she would drink, as though it were her morning coffee, a concoction made of abortive herbs, such as myrtle leaves and chocón with white honey, first boiled, then cooled; and then, when she found out that if the virus that causes the mumps goes down into a person’s stomach, it causes sterility, she had let the virus go down to her stomach whenever she came in contact with it until she wound up vaccinated against spermatozoids.
—I’m an idiot if I ever let myself get pregnant with another kid—she would say—. I know that some of these guys want to knock me up, but so what.
But it shouldn’t be like that anymore. Now she wasn’t just shacked up, but married, and to a man who was well regarded in the community; and the women said that the miracle of her pregnancy had to materialize now; whereas the men insisted that even if every man on earth—even that super saintly husband of hers—took a turn on top of her, it still wouldn’t do any good.
And that’s how it was: the miracle of her pregnancy never materialized; but another one did, a more impossible one, one that the people never could have imagined: he had put out the Virgen de Concepción’s fire, without sleeping with her.
The one who found out that he didn’t sleep with his woman was a guy who had his doubts about how the nights between him and her might be; so one evening, while they were eating supper in the kitchen, he had pulled the latchstring that comes through the hole in their front gate; and, under the cover of the evening shadows, he had settled down to wait for them to go to the bedroom; and he had seen what happened after they put the lights out by putting his ears to the door and his eyes to the keyhole. The women believed him, but not the men. So they had to try and verify his story, lining up in shifts for hours and hours for thirty days to see for themselves and confirm what they had heard: that he would sleep like a little angel in his bed and she like a wooden virgin in hers; that before going to sleep, each would say his or her own prayers, tuck his or her own self into his or her own covers, and say goodnight; that the lights would go out; and then all that could be heard was the silence, or the snores of one or the other—and other things, like breaking wind.
I remember that then the men who still had had their doubts were convinced at last; and that one guy, who had thought that the deal must be that he was not a man, but less than a man, became convinced that, in fact, it was neither of these, but that maybe he was a saint; and all of them—the young men, the adult men, the grandfathers—bit their tongues to keep from committing sacrilege. I also remember that only then did many jealous husbands realize that their judgments and suspicions had been wrong: apparently nothing had been going on behind those walls when their women used to go to the white house to ask for some favor, be it money, corn, or flowers.
But what I remember most is that—long before they got married, and before anybody knew what was really going on, or not, in the bedroom—she, before turning out the light, would get completely naked, give him that look, call out to him, ask him for favors, like: now it’s your turn to shut off the light, or look, it hurts me here, or scratch me there, or man, I’m just not sleepy at all, or I’m cold, why don’t you come over here and lie down by me; but that through it all he wouldn’t pay her any attention, or even look at her; so she would bite her tongue clean through, she would beat on her own breasts until they hurt, she would start to cry and dream dangerous dreams; and that when they got married, she was ecstatic because she thought that maybe it had just been that they were only living together and that’s why he had never done anything with her; and that on their wedding night she got herself all fixed up as if it was the first night of her life, but—since he didn’t try to sleep with her that night or the next night or ever, before or after their wedding—she must have figured it was better to pretend she was happy and leave it at that.
To hell with it all . . .
Juan Díaz, Pedro García, Daniel Machán, Luis Sacontó, Pedro Chonay, Miguel Sicán, Rafael Baeza, José Tajtaj, Benigno Julián, José León de León, Chico Boomboom, Cruz Castell
anos, Patricio Musín, Pedro Toribio, Santos Ventura, Francisco Aquino, Celestino Vivar, Chayo Pérez, Oscar Chilío, Emilio Aguilar, Juan González, Nicolás Chajón, etc., etc.; street by street, house by house: those who were married, single, widowed, and old, mature, barely old enough; by name, by last name, sometimes by nickname when she couldn’t remember their last names; like for example with Chico, who they called Boomboom not because that was his last name, but because he made the fireworks and ceremonial bombs in the town and when the bombs exploded in the sky they would go Boom . . . boom; or like Oscar who they called Chilío but nobody knew why, or like for example some other so and so. But the interminable list started looking terminable after all. She had gotten out of bed like that, naked, wrapped only in the cover of her hot womanly skin, she had turned on the light, she had rummaged through boxes, drawers, and corners in search of a pencil and paper, and then she had gone over to the little table covered with the whiter-than-white cloth that sat in front of the saints, she had pulled up a chair, sat down, and, with the sacred images as witnesses, she had begun to scribble down the names of all of the men in the town. ¿Who was missing from the list? She went back through it, house by house, street by street. No one. Everyone had put his pencil in her vagina. They had all left their semitransparent ink, their armies of Indian spermatozoids on her mountain.
To hell with it . . .
It’s impossible to raise the dead; to raise the dead young men, the dead old men, the generations of men who came before her time, those who had never ascended, like pure flesh-and-bone angels, to her black heaven—not blue—that opens onto another heaven—no, this one isn’t blue either, more gelatinous—as deep as a spiral snail shell—where God licks and pulls on his member like a dog. It’s also impossible to speed up all of the births of the potential men who don’t yet know anything about the world, still closed up in the bellies of their mamas; or even to hurry up the growth and maturity of those boys playing right now in the streets with their spinning tops, with their marbles, with their little soccer balls made of rags; the boys who play cluelessly, who still piss in their pants; who don’t even know how to wipe their own snot, don’t even know who she is when they see her go by, or know what she has inside, what she has between her legs hidden behind a triangle cloth, what dreams she dreams.