‘It was three thousand pesos,’ he said, ‘and a fourth of the treasure.’
‘O, forgive me, it’s my old brain. It’s not what it was.’
‘An understandable error,’ he said drily. He left the room and returned a few minutes later with a sheaf of five-hundred-peso notes, which he handed to the old lady. She had never had so much money in her life, and she counted it shamelessly before rolling it up and stuffing it carefully into the bottom of her mochila. ‘Another thing,’ she said, ‘whilst I am here. I have heard that you have a good crop of avocados.’
‘Of course,’ said the patron, ‘you shall have some.’ He called through to the cook, ‘Emma, bring through some avocados, would you? Nice big ones with no blemishes.’
Mamacita was returned to the village by the same means that she had arrived and went promptly to pay Conchita for the pencil. Conchita took the avocado and prodded its apex appreciatively. ‘Just a few hours and it will be perfect. Thank you, Abuela.’
‘I can sell you back the pencil now,’ said Mamacita. ‘I don’t think I’ll need it again, and if I do, I can always come back and buy it again. I will sell it back to you for three pesos and another bit of paper, and then you can sell the pencil again for four pesos.’
‘You old fox,’ exclaimed Conchita admiringly.
What came of all this? Don Agostin and his foreman made several exasperating expeditions into the foothills, greatly perplexed to find hundreds of rocks that might look like a jaguar or a man. Stupefied and baffled by the heat, disorientated by insects, startled by armadillos, lacerated by thorns, they blundered from one incandescent rock to another, futilely stabbing with a pick at the unyielding baked pale earth of each location that seemed propitious.
They found numerous goat tracks, many a stream, a fair quota of burned bushes and a large number of horse skeletons, besides the skeletons of cattle, donkeys, mules, pumas and the gruesome mummified cadaver of a ginger-haired human being clad entirely in the leather garments of an old-fashioned hunter. In view of this evidential prodigality, Don Agostin felt just as incapable of blaming Mamacita for misleading him as he felt of ever finding the treasure. He eventually developed the intention of trying a few more times, but somehow never quite got round to it.
As for the old midwife, she had little immediate use for such a large sum of money, and she sealed it into a small clay pot, which she buried in her backyard at a depth of two handspans. On her spare piece of paper she indicated its whereabouts by means of another wobbly and indecipherable map, which she placed in the same termite-proofed drawer as her contract with Don Agostin, before going to sell the pencil back to Conchita for the agreed three pesos.
After Mamacita’s death, her nephews found the contract, and wondered what she might have done with the money, but they could make neither head nor tail of the scrap of paper covered with shaky lines and arcane blobs, so one of them who had been caught short used it in the outhouse and then dropped it into the cesspit.
One morning, not long after the funeral, Conchita awoke, having dreamed that there was buried treasure in the place where Mamacita used to live, and she took a lift on the tractor down to the hacienda, to try to sell the notion to an obdurately sceptical Don Agostin.
OUR LADY OF BEAUTY
The sepulchre was situated in the communal graveyard of Santa Madre de Jesus in the province of Santander. This graveyard was, on account of its location upon the side of the volcano, almost unique in that everybody was buried upright and above ground, enclosed by four slabs glued poorly together by a pinkish mortar ground from tufa and mixed with lime and water. Often this mortar would crack, and crumble away, so that by the light of a match or a taper the local children could peer into the darkness of the tombs and wonder at what they saw. Inside, draped with spiders’ webs and often with snakes coiled around them, they would behold the mummified ancestors of the village; they would discern wisps of gossamer-like hair sprouting thinly from yellow scalps so shrunken that through the rents one could see white bone. There were shrivelled lips drawn back in the parody of smiles and snarls, and one could wobble the teeth in their sockets by poking at them with a stick.
Sometimes one could see a cloth around the jaw, knotted at the top of the head to prevent the mouth from falling open, and some of the corpses had coins in the eyes for the payment of the boatman who ferries souls across the last waters. Occasionally, for a reason unknown, the corpse’s head would have turned so that when one peeped through the chinks one’s heart would leap to the throat with the horror of discovering that the cadaver was staring back as though it had been waiting there for years for a glimpse of the light in living eyes. There was one child in the pueblo who, having seen this, was pursued relentlessly by nightmares until one night she ran shrieking from her father’s house and was lost in the maw of a jaguar. Her grave is out on the edge of the cemetery, and is so small that one can lift off the lid and see the pathetic pile of scored bones held together with the leather thongs of ligament and cartilage. Sometimes her father lifts it off himself to place orchids and blossoms of bougainvillea within, and he raises the skull in his hands and talks to it, kissing the lips and tenderly arranging what is left of the long dark hair. In this way he overcomes the tragedy of separation and accustoms himself to death.
We are a village accustomed to death. Every generation has borne witness to a new devastation. In my grandfather’s time there was the plague of cholera that swept away all of his relatives, and the village was so cruelly emptied that he had to marry somebody from another place. In my father’s time there was the violence; one band of political guerrillas after another came through, raping, robbing and murdering, starting and continuing vendettas that flare up all over again to this very day. In my village no one votes in elections any more because of the memory of what outrages ensue from political idealism; when the communists tried to start a foco here we gave them away to the army, and then we got rid of the army by telling them that there were more communists towards San Isidro. We don’t want any politics any more, and, if we voted, it would be a vote to be left alone.
In my own time we had the whooping cough that carried away one half of the children here and left so many empty cradles and broken hearts, and there was the avalanche when the south escarpment of the volcano broke away and flattened the end of the village where the brothel was. They say it was a judgement of God upon a house of infamy, but it carried away a good many fine men and women in addition to the revellers, not all of whom were very bad in any case. I might add that many of the whores survived, and that one of the dead was the priest, who had gone there to preach against the immoralities. It is because of the illogicality of God that around here we still worship the orishas, whom we can at least understand.
Above all, it is our cemetery that accustoms us to death. We grow up with our dead still visible amongst us, and one of them in particular. His name is Don Salvador, and he came here as a missionary about one hundred and fifty years ago. He lived here for forty years amongst us and had many fine children by various women; they say he was still a fine seducer even in his seventies, and when he died we made him a saint. It was not only out of gratitude that he had saved us from the damnation of the hell of the heathens, but also because he taught us so many things. He instructed us in writing and reading, he taught us Spanish, he taught us how to build bridges supported upon columns, and he taught us the art of making love. Before he came it was forbidden to make love in any position except with the man on top, but he instructed the local women in the use of the tongue and in the possibilities for different positions. He taught that if God had proscribed these positions He would have constructed our bodies in such a way that they would have been impossible to perform, and very soon the old ways were abandoned. It is because of him that I am called Salvador.
The principal reason why we made him a saint was that he was so fertile. We remember not only his many children and his bull’s appetite for love, but we have been told by our grandpa
rents that wherever he passed the flowers burst into bloom, the crops burgeoned, the trees grew heavy with fruit, and women and animals grew heavy with the unborn.
So when he died they never sealed up his tomb, but only placed the slab in front of it, in a groove that was chiselled out of the rock. The path to his resting place is worn smooth by those who have crawled to it on hands and knees to beg for children. One would slide the stone away and kiss his feet and his hands, begging his intercession with Our Lady of Conception. A garland of flowers would be always upon his head, and, despite the temptation to steal parts of him as holy relics, I have to say that nobody ever did, and he is still intact to this day. As a man there are things to which ordinarily I would not admit, but such is my devotion to Don Salvador that I state that it was he who cured me of my impotence with my wife, and I know many others for whom he has done the same, whose names I will not tell you in case it brings them shame.
In addition to Don Salvador’s continued presence amongst us in his tomb, we carry him upon a litter around our fields twice a year when we do our planting. We sing hymns and songs, and we throw jugs of water on the ground, and it must be said that despite all the disasters we have suffered in the past, our crops, our animals and our women have never failed us, except for the time when the new priest forbade us to perform the ceremony, saying that it was a pagan sacrilege. Nowadays nobody pays any attention to the new priest, and not just because of this.
Don Jose always contradicted the teaching of Don Salvador. He has even told us that Don Salvador must have been an impostor and an Antichrist. Don Jose wants us to be ashamed of our bodies and to go back to the practice of making love furtively in only one position, he wants us to stop using herbs to avoid unwanted pregnancies, and he wants to frighten us with stories about infernos of fire when we are dead. But we remember the teachings of Don Salvador which have been passed down to us, and we argue with Don Jose, saying that we have been told about God being a God of Love. When we pass Don Jose in the street we say, ‘Be joyful in the Lord,’ and his face just grows more sorrowful. We do not like to see a man so lonely, but that is the price of his perversity.
It happened one evening that there was an earthquake. It was not a serious one, even though it seemed terrifying at the time. There was a distant rumble like thunder, and everything started to shake and sway. In my hut the tin mug slid off the shelf and fell on to my wife, and the bell in the porch of the church began to ring on its own. Some of the animals panicked, and there was a bull that escaped from his corral and ended up entangled in the creepers at the edge of the forest. Everybody ran into the street, and most of us could not keep our balance, so we all fell over. Old Aldonaldo remained in his hammock smoking a puro and laughing at us, and he seemed to be the only stationary object in a world that had become as restless as the sea. He was calling out, ‘Ay, ay, ay,’ and enjoying every minute of it.
As it was the dry season, a great cloud of dust was shaken up, and we all got covered from head to toe in white dust. We were all coughing and falling about when Don Jose ran out of his house crying out, ‘Repent, repent, the Kingdom of God is at hand. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea, for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.’ No one was more disappointed than Don Jose to discover afterwards that there had been no damage to speak of.
In fact, the only damage was to the cemetery, where the slabs in the front of the tombs had in most cases fallen away. In some of them the bodies had fallen out forwards and were splayed upon the ground like withered drunkards or like the casualties of a battle, but in most of them the dead were still upright.
We wandered about the cemetery awestruck. The corpses seemed to be leaning casually against the sides of their habitations, and despite their mummification, their yellowness, the transparency of their skin and the whiteness of their bones, they seemed extraordinarily full of life, all except the recent corpses, which reeked horribly and dripped with a foul slime whose colour and odour comes back to me in bad dreams. We put the slabs back on those ones first, partly because of the offence to relatives, partly because of the stink, and partly because the vultures were showing an interest. Afterwards they perched forlornly on top of the graves, reminding me of how I felt when I could not crack a Brazil nut as a child.
Seeing the corpses brought the village back to its history. There were people there that had been all but forgotten, but now the living were wandering amongst them, recognising shreds of clothing, characteristic missing teeth, seeing the machete cuts of old murders, the broken bones of accidents. We were saying, ‘Ay, that is Alfonso who lived by the river, who got bitten by the mad dog and who was in love with Rosalita,’ and, ‘Ay, ay, there is Mahoma, who arrived from nowhere with his strange religion and took four wives, and there is the holy book written in squiggles that he carried about with him and that he read from the back to the front,’ and, ‘Look, this is Saba who was so beautiful that two men killed themselves out of love for her, and then she took up with Rafael who had only one arm.’ It made many old folk happy to see their old friends again.
But one man was more strangely affected. In the oldest part of the cemetery a grave had opened, the identity of whose occupant nobody could fathom, and who was a miracle. She had her eyes closed and she was very beautiful. People nowadays when they tell this story always say that she was in a perfect state and that she was as fresh as the day before she died. They will tell you that her lips were as moist as if she had just eaten a mango, and that she smelled of flowers and of vanilla, but that is not exactly how I remember it. I recall that her lips were dry, as they are when one wakes on a hot morning, and that she smelled of a house that has been shut up and never cleaned for years. People will tell you that her limbs were supple and full, whereas I recall them having the stiffness of an old lady. Otherwise, what they will tell you is mostly true.
I suppose it is possible that two centuries of death might have turned a dark woman white, but it seemed to us that she was a white lady because her skin was white like the flesh of a cassava, she had restrained lips, and her hair, although it was black, was very long and straight. Also she was tall, so she could not have been an Indian woman. She was clothed in a kind of textile that we had never seen before; it was very finely woven, and although it was now a yellow colour and crumbled to the touch, it had obviously been very rich. About her waist she wore a red sash, and on her feet were black slippers embroidered in gold wire.
We accepted her mysterious presence and her lunar beauty as a miracle, but without too much excitement, since this is, as everyone knows, a land where anything is possible and everything has happened at one time or another. We made her a saint, like Don Salvador, and we made a groove at the front of her tomb so that the door could be slid aside, with the idea that our women could pray to her for their beauty and for that of their daughters, that it might last for ever. We called her Nuestra Señora de la Hermosura, and it seemed reasonable to include her in our history as the favourite wife of Don Salvador.
But my brother Manolito was never the same man again. I was with him when he first saw her, and I remember vividly how strange his reaction was. He was a dark man, but he turned pale. He caught his breath, and he told me later that truly his heart ceased to beat for a second or two, so greatly did it leap in his chest. He looked at me with a wild expression, and then made a kind of expansive gesture, as though he were showing me into a richly appointed apartment. ‘Fijate,’ he said, inviting me to look, as though I had not already seen.
‘She is very beautiful,’ I said, but he looked at me again as though I were stupid.
‘She is exquisite,’ he replied; it was the first time I had ever heard him use a word as poetic as ‘exquisita’, and I laughed at him.
‘Don’t fall in love with a corpse,’ I said, ‘she will be very boring in bed.’
Manolito seemed to take the comment seriously. He put his hands together, as in an attitude of pr
ayer, and said, ‘She is lovely beyond the dreams of flesh. One could love her in the spirit and be satisfied.’
‘You are loco,’ I replied.
From that day forward Manolito used to go and visit her every evening and sit with the women who were praying to her for everlasting beauty. Like them he kissed her feet and arranged flowers in her hair, and he would linger on after they had gone, until I would have to come and fetch him away to eat his supper. I would find him sitting before her in the sunset, the red gold of the sky lending the glow of life to the woman’s face, and often I would sit awhile and fall with him under the enchantment of that celestial face.
I will describe to you shortly the impression made by that face, but firstly I must tell you why she was so special to Manolito.
I cannot remember a time when he had not held in his mind the image of the lady he always referred to as ‘my woman’. It must have started when he was about twelve years old. We shared a bed in those days, and we would lie there before going to sleep, listening to the crickets and the owls, and the coughing of the jaguar, and often he would talk about ‘my woman’, describing her to me. He told me how she walked with him after he was asleep, holding his hand, teasing him, play-fighting with him in the fields, kissing him on the cheek before he woke up or went on to another dream. For him, ‘my woman’ took on a reality so powerful that he never took a great interest in any other, not even in Raimunda, who could not get him to marry her even though she went to bed with him and got pregnant on purpose. Naturally I laughed at him and called him a dreamer, but he was sincere in his belief, and one day he told me that he had made love with ‘my woman’ for the first time, and that it had been the most beautiful experience imaginable. ‘I promised to love her faithfully for ever,’ he told me. ‘From now on there will be no one else.’ Naturally, I said that I had heard nothing and seen nothing during the night, and he showed me a bite on his arm that he claimed she had put there in sport. I said, ‘You bit yourself, brother,’ and he went to great lengths to prove to me that the imprint in his arm was beyond the reach of his mouth, and anyway the imprint was different from that made by his own teeth. In the end I gave in, just to keep him quiet.
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