ERENDIRA WAS BATHING her
grandmother when the wind of her misfortune began to blow. The enormous
mansion of moon like concrete lost in the solitude of the desert trembled
down to its foundations with the first attack. But Erendira and her
grandmother were used to the risks of the wild nature there, and in the
bathroom decorated with a series of peacocks and childish mosaics of Roman
baths they scarcely paid any attention to the caliber of the wind.
The grandmother, naked and
huge in the marble tub, looked like a handsome white whale. The granddaughter
had just turned fourteen and was languid, soft-boned, and too meek for her
age. With a parsimony that had something like sacred rigor about it, she was
bathing her grandmother with water in which purifying herbs and aromatic
leaves had been boiled, the latter clinging to the succulent back, the
flowing metal-colored hair, and the powerful shoulders which were so
mercilessly tattooed as to put sailors to shame.
"Last night I dreamt I
was expecting a letter," the grandmother said.
Erendira, who never spoke
except when it was unavoidable, asked:
"What day was it in the
dream?"
"Thursday."
"Then it was a letter
with bad news," Erendira said, "but it will never arrive."
When she had finished
bathing her grandmother, she took her to her bedroom. The grandmother was so
fat that she could only walk by leaning on her granddaughter's shoulder or on
a staff that looked like a bishop's crosier, but even during her most
difficult efforts the power of an antiquated grandeur was evident. In the
bedroom, which had been furnished with an excessive and somewhat demented
taste, like the whole house, Erendira needed two more hours to get her
grandmother ready. She untangled her hair strand by strand, perfumed and
combed it, put an equatorially flowered dress on her, put talcum powder on
her face, bright red lipstick on her mouth, rouge on her cheeks, musk on her
eyelids, and mother-of-pearl polish on her nails, and when she had her decked
out like a larger than life-size doll, she led her to an artificial garden
with suffocating flowers that were like the ones on the dress, seated her in
a large chair that had the foundation and the pedigree of a throne, and left
her listening to elusive records on a phonograph that had a speaker like a
megaphone.
While the grandmother
floated through the swamps of the past, Erendira busied herself sweeping the
house, which was dark and motley, with bizarre furniture and statues of
invented Caesars, chandeliers of teardrops and alabaster angels, a gilded
piano, and numerous clocks of unthinkable sizes and shapes. There was a
cistern in the courtyard for the storage of water carried over many years
from distant springs on the backs of Indians, and hitched to a ring on the
cistern wall was a broken-down ostrich, the only feathered creature who could
survive the torment of that accursed climate. The house was far away from
everything, in the heart of the desert, next to a settlement with miserable
and burning streets where the goats committed suicide from desolation when
the wind of misfortune blew.
That incomprehensible refuge
had been built by the grandmother's husband, a legendary smuggler whose name
was Amadis, by whom she had a son whose name was also Amadis and who was
Erendira's father. No one knew either the origins or the motivations of that
family. The best known version in the language of the Indians was that Amadis
the father had rescued his beautiful wife from a house of prostitution in the
Antilles, where he had killed a man in a knife fight, and that he had
transplanted her forever in the impunity of the desert. When the Amadises
died, one of melancholy fevers and the other riddled with bullets in a fight
over a woman, the grandmother buried their bodies in the courtyard, sent away
the fourteen barefoot servant girls, and continued ruminating on her dreams
of grandeur in the shadows of the furtive house, thanks to the sacrifices of
the bastard granddaughter whom she had reared since birth.
Erendira needed six hours
just to set and wind the clocks. The day when her misfortune began she didn't
have to do that because the clocks had enough winding left to last until the
next morning, but on the other hand, she had to bathe and overdress her
grandmother, scrub the floors, cook lunch, and polish the crystalware. Around
eleven o'clock, when she was changing the water in the ostrich's bowl and
watering the desert weeds around the twin graves of the Amadises, she had to
fight off the anger of the wind, which had become unbearable, but she didn't
have the slightest feeling that it was the wind of her misfortune. At twelve
o'clock she was wiping the last champagne glasses when she caught the smell
of broth and had to perform the miracle of running to the kitchen without
leaving a disaster of Venetian glass in her wake.
She just managed to take the
pot off the stove as it was beginning to boil over. Then she put on a stew
she had already prepared and took advantage of a chance to sit down and rest
on a stool in the kitchen. She closed her eyes, opened them again with an
unfatigued expression, and began pouring the soup into the tureen. She was
working as she slept.
The grandmother had sat down
alone at the head of a banquet table with silver candlesticks set for twelve
people. She shook her little bell and Erendira arrived almost immediately
with the steaming tureen. As Erendira was serving the soup, her grandmother
noticed the somnambulist look and passed her hand in front of her eyes as if
wiping an invisible pane of glass. The girl didn't see the hand. The
grandmother followed her with her look and when Erendira turned to go back to
the kitchen, she shouted at her:
"Erendira!"
Having been awakened all of
a sudden, the girl dropped the tureen onto the rug.
"That's all right,
child," the grandmother said to her with assuring tenderness. "You
fell asleep while you were walking about again."
"My body has that
habit," Erendira said by way of an excuse.
Still hazy with sleep, she
picked up the tureen, and tried to clean the stain on the rug.
"Leave it," her
grandmother dissuaded her. "You can wash it this afternoon."
So in addition to her
regular afternoon chores, Erendira had to wash the dining room rug, and she
took advantage of her presence at the washtub to do Monday's laundry as well,
while the wind went around the house looking for a way in. She had so much to
do that night came upon her without her realizing it, and when she put the
dining room rug back in its place it was time to go to bed.
The grandmother had been
fooling around on the piano all afternoon, singing the songs of her times to
herself in a falsetto, and she had stains of musk and tears on her eyelids.
But when she lay down on her bed in her muslin nightgown, the bitterness of
fond memories returned.
"Take advantage of
tomorrow to wash the living room rug too," she told Erendira. "It
hasn't seen the sun since the days of all the noise."
"Yes,
Grandmother," the girl answered.
She picked up a feather fan
and began to fan the implacable matron, who recited the list of nighttime
orders to her as she sank into sleep.
"Iron all the clothes
before you go to bed so you can sleep with a clear conscience."
"Yes,
Grandmother."
"Check the clothes
closets carefully, because moths get hungrier on windy nights."
"Yes,
Grandmother."
"With the time you have
left, take the flowers out into the courtyard so they can get a breath of
air."
"Yes,
Grandmother."
"And feed the
ostrich."
She had fallen asleep but
she was still giving orders, for it was from her that the granddaughter had
inherited the ability to be alive still while sleeping. Erendira left the
room without making any noise and did the final chores of the night, still
replying to the sleeping grandmother's orders.
"Give the graves some
water."
"Yes,
Grandmother."
"And if the Amadises
arrive, tell them not to come in," the grandmother said, "because
Porfirio Galan's gang is waiting to kill them."
Erendira didn't answer her
any more because she knew that the grandmother was getting lost in her
delirium, but she didn't miss a single order. When she finished checking the
window bolts and put out the last lights, she took a candlestick from the
dining room and lighted her way to her bedroom as the pauses in the wind were
filled with the peaceful and enormous breathing of her sleeping grandmother.
Her room was also luxurious,
but not so much as her grandmother's, and it was piled high with the rag
dolls and wind-up animals of her recent childhood. Overcome by the barbarous
chores of the day, Erendira didn't have the strength to get undressed and she
put the candlestick on the night table and fell onto the bed. A short while
later the wind of her misfortune came into the bedroom like a pack of hounds
and knocked the candle over against the curtain.
***
At dawn, when the wind
finally stopped, a few thick and scattered drops of rain began to fall,
putting out the last embers and hardening the smoking ashes of the mansion.
The people in the village, Indians for the most part, tried to rescue the
remains of the disaster: the charred corpse of the ostrich, the frame of the
gilded piano, the torso of a statue. The grandmother was contemplating the
residue of her fortune with an impenetrable depression. Erendira, sitting
between the two graves of the Amadises, had stopped weeping. When the
grandmother was convinced that very few things remained intact among the
ruins, she looked at her granddaughter with sincere pity.
"My poor child,"
she sighed. "Life won't be long enough for you to pay me back for this
mishap."
She began to pay it back
that very day, beneath the noise of the rain, when she was taken to the
village storekeeper, a skinny and premature widower who was quite well known
in the desert for the good price he paid for virginity. As the grandmother
waited undauntedly, the widower examined Erendira with scientific austerity:
he considered the strength of her thighs, the size of her breasts, the
diameter of her hips. He didn't say a word until he had some calculation of
what she was worth.
"She's still quite
immature," he said then. "She has the teats of a bitch."
Then he had her get on a
scale to prove his decision with figures. Erendira weighed ninety pounds.
"She isn't worth more
than a hundred pesos," the widower said.
The grandmother was
scandalized.
"A hundred pesos for a
girl who's completely new! " she almost shouted. "No, sir, that
shows a great lack of respect for virtue on your part."
"I'll make it a hundred
and fifty," the widower said.
"This girl caused me
damages amounting to more than a million pesos," the grandmother said.
"At this rate she'll need two hundred years to pay me back."
"You're lucky that the
only good feature she has is her age," the widower said.
The storm threatened to
knock the house down, and there were so many leaks in the roof that it was
raining almost as much inside as out. The grandmother felt all alone in a
world of disaster.
"Just raise it to three
hundred," she said.
"Two hundred and
fifty."
Finally they agreed on two
hundred and twenty pesos in cash and some provisions. The grandmother then
signaled Erendira to go with the widower and he led her by the hand to the
back room as if he were taking her to school.
"I'll wait for you
here," the grandmother said.
"Yes,
Grandmother," said Erendira.
The back room was a kind of
shed with four brick columns, a roof of rotted palm leaves, and an adobe wall
three feet high, through which outdoor disturbances got into the building.
Placed on top of the adobe wall were pots with cacti and other plants of
aridity. Hanging between two columns and flapping like the free sail of a
drifting sloop was a faded hammock. Over the whistle of the storm and the
lash of the water one could hear distant shouts, the howling of far-off
animals, the cries of a shipwreck.
When Erendira and the
widower went into the shed they had to hold on so as not to be knocked down
by a gust of rain which left them soaked. Their voices could not be heard but
their movements became clear in the roar of the squall. At the widower's
first attempt, Erendira shouted something inaudible and tried to get away.
The widower answered her without any voice, twisted her arm by the wrist, and
dragged her to the hammock. She fought him off with a scratch on the face and
shouted in silence again, but he replied with a solemn slap which lifted her
off the ground and suspended her in the air for an instant with her long
Medusa hair floating in space. He grabbed her about the waist before she
touched ground again, flung her into the hammock with a brutal heave, and
held her down with his knees. Erendira then succumbed to terror, lost
consciousness, and remained as if fascinated by the moonbeams from a fish
that was floating through the storm air, while the widower undressed her,
tearing off her clothes with a methodical clawing, as if he were pulling up
grass, scattering them with great tugs of color that waved like streamers and
went off with the wind.
When there was no other man
left in the village who could pay anything for Erendira's love, her
grandmother put her on a truck to go where the smugglers were. They made the
trip on the back of the truck in the open, among sacks of rice and buckets of
lard and what had been left by the fire: the headboard of the viceregal bed,
a warrior angel, the scorched throne, and other pieces of useless junk. In a
trunk with two crosses painted in broad strokes they carried the bones of the
Amadises.
The grandmother protected
herself from the sun with a tattered umbrella and it was hard for her to
breathe because of the torment of sweat and dust, but even in that unhappy
state she kept control of her dignity. Behind the pile of cans and sacks of
rice Erendira paid for the trip and the cartage by making love for twenty
pesos a turn with the truck's loader. At first her system of defense was the
same as she had used against the widower's attack, but the loader's approach
was different, slow and wise, and he ended up taming her with tenderness. So
when they reached the first town after a deadly journey, Erendira and the
loader were relaxing from good love behind the parapet of cargo. The driver
shouted to the grandmother:
"Here's where the world
begins."
The grandmother observed
with disbelief the miserable and solitary streets of a town somewhat larger
but just as sad as the one they had abandoned.
"It doesn't look like
it to me," she said.
"It's mission
country," the driver said.
"I'm not interested in
charity, I'm interested in smugglers," said the grandmother.
Listening to the dialogue
from behind the load, Erendira dug into a sack of rice with her finger.
Suddenly she found a string, pulled on it, and drew out a necklace of genuine
pearls. She looked at it amazed, holding it between her fingers like a dead
snake, while the driver answered her grandmother:
"Don't be daydreaming,
ma'am. There's no such thing as smugglers."
"Of course not,"
the grandmother said. "I've got your word for it."
"Try to find one and
you'll see," the driver bantered. "Everybody talks about them, but
no one's ever seen one."
The loader realized that
Erendira had pulled out the necklace and hastened to take it away from her
and stick it back into the sack of rice. The grandmother, who had decided to
stay in spite of the poverty of the town, then called to her granddaughter to
help her out of the truck. Erendira said good-bye to the loader with a kiss
that was hurried but spontaneous and true.
The grandmother waited, sitting
on her throne in the middle of the street, until they finished unloading the
goods. The last item was the trunk with the remains of the Amadises.
"This thing weighs as
much as a dead man," said the driver, laughing.
"There are two of
them," the grandmother said, "so treat them with the proper
respect."
"I bet they're marble
statues." The driver laughed again.
He put the trunk with bones
down carelessly among the singed furniture and held out his open hand to the
grandmother.
"Fifty pesos," he
said.
"Your slave has already
paid on the right-hand side."
The driver looked at his
helper with surprise and the latter made an affirmative sign. The driver then
went back to the cab, where a woman in mourning was riding, in her arms a
baby who was crying from the heat. The loader, quite sure of himself, told
the grandmother:
"Erendira is coming
with me, if it's all right by you. My intentions are honorable."
The girl intervened,
surprised:
"I didn't say
anything!"
"The idea was all
mine," the loader said.
The grandmother looked him
up and down, now, to make him feel small but trying to measure the true size
of his guts.
"It's all right by
me," she told him, "provided you pay me what I lost because of her
carelessness. It's eight hundred seventy-two thousand three hundred fifteen
pesos, less the four hundred and twenty which she's already paid me, making
it eight hundred seventy-one thousand eight hundred ninety-five."
The truck started up.
"Believe me, I'd give
you that pile of money if I had it," the loader said seriously.
"The girl is worth it."
The grandmother was pleased
with the boy's decision.
"Well, then, come back
when you have it, son," she answered in a sympathetic tone. "But
you'd better go now, because if we figure out accounts again you'll end up
owing me ten pesos."
The loader jumped onto the
back of the truck and it went off. From there he waved good-bye to Erendira,
but she was still so surprised that she didn't answer him.
In the same vacant lot where
the truck had left them, Erendira and her grandmother improvised a shelter to
live in from sheets of zinc and the remains of Oriental rugs. They laid two
mats on the ground and slept as well as they had in the mansion until the sun
opened holes in the ceiling and burned their faces.
Just the opposite of what
normally happened, it was the grandmother who busied herself that morning
fixing up Erendira. She made up her face in the style of sepulchral beauty
that had been the vogue in her youth and touched her up with artificial
fingernails and an organdy bow that looked like a butterfly on her head.
"You look awful,"
she admitted, "but it's better that way: men are quite stupid when it
comes to female matters."
Long before they saw them
they both recognized the sound of two mules walking on the flint of the desert.
At a command from her grandmother, Erendira lay down on the mat the way an
amateur actress might have done at the moment when the curtain was about to
go up. Leaning on her bishop's crosier, the grandmother went out of the
shelter and sat down on the throne to wait for the mules to pass.
The mailman was coming. He
was only twenty years old, but his work had aged him, and he was wearing a
khaki uniform, leggings, a pith helmet, and had a military pistol on his
cartridge belt. He was riding a good mule and leading by the halter another,
more timeworn one, on whom the canvas mailbags were piled.
As he passed by the
grandmother he saluted her and kept on going, but she signaled him to look
inside the shelter. The man stopped and saw Erendira lying on the mat in her
posthumous make-up and wearing a purple-trimmed dress.
"Do you like it?"
the grandmother asked.
The mailman hadn't
understood until then what the proposition was.
"It doesn't look bad to
someone who's been on a diet," he said, smiling.
"Fifty pesos," the
grandmother said.
"Boy, you're asking a
mint!" he said. "I can eat for a whole month on that."
"Don't be a
tightwad," the grandmother said. "The air mail pays even better
than being a priest."
"I'm the domestic
mail," the man said. "The airmail man travels in a pickup
truck."
"In any case, love is
just as important as eating," the grandmother said.
"But it doesn't feed
you."
The grandmother realized
that a man who lived from what other people were waiting for had more than
enough time for bargaining.
"How much have you
got?" she asked him.
The mailman dismounted, took
some chewed-up bills from his pocket, and showed them to the grandmother. She
snatched them up all together with a rapid hand just as if they had been a
ball.
"I'll lower the price for
you," she said, "but on one condition: that you spread the word all
around."
"All the way to the
other side of the world," the mailman said. "That's what I'm
for."
Erendira, who had been
unable to blink, then took off her artificial eyelashes and moved to one side
of the mat to make room for the chance boyfriend. As soon as he was in the
shelter, the grandmother closed the entrance with an energetic tug on the
sliding curtain.
It was an effective deal.
Taken by the words of the mailman, men came from very far away to become
acquainted with the newness of Erendira. Behind the men came gambling tables
and food stands, and behind them all came a photographer on a bicycle, who,
across from the encampment, set up a camera with a mourning sleeve on a
tripod and a backdrop of a lake with listless swans.
The grandmother, fanning
herself on her throne, seemed alien to her own bazaar. The only thing that
interested her was keeping order in the line of customers who were waiting
their turn and checking the exact amount of money they paid in advance to go
in to Erendira. At first she had been so strict that she refused a good
customer because he was five pesos short. But with the passage of months she
was assimilating the lessons of reality and she ended up letting people in
who completed their payment with religious medals, family relics, wedding
rings, and anything her bite could prove was bona-fide gold even if it didn't
shine.
After a long stay in that
first town, the grandmother had sufficient money to buy a donkey, and she
went off into the desert in search of places more propitious for the payment
of the debt. She traveled on a litter that had been improvised on top of the
donkey and she was protected from the motionless sun by the half-spoked
umbrella that Erendira held over her head. Behind them walked four Indian
bearers with the remnants of the encampment: the sleeping mats, the restored
throne, the alabaster angel, and the trunks with the remains of the Amadises.
The photographer followed the caravan on his bicycle, but never catching up,
as if he were going to a different festival.
Six months had passed since
the fire when the grandmother was able to get a complete picture of the
business.
"If things go on like
this," she told Erendira, "you will have paid me the debt inside of
eight years, seven months, and eleven days."
She went back over her
calculations with her eyes closed, fumbling with the seeds she was taking out
of a cord pouch where she also kept the money, and she corrected herself:
"All that, of course, not counting the pay and board of the Indians and
other minor expenses."
Erendira, who was keeping in
step with the donkey, bowed down by the heat and dust, did not reproach her
grandmother for her figures, but she had to hold back her tears.
"I've got ground glass
in my bones," she said.
"Try to sleep."
"Yes,
Grandmother."
She closed her eyes, took in
a deep breath of scorching air, and went on walking in her sleep.
***
A small truck loaded with
cages appeared, frightening goats in the dust of the horizon, and the clamor
of the birds was like a splash of cool water for the Sunday torpor of San
Miguel del Desierto. At the wheel was a corpulent Dutch farmer, his skin
splintered by the outdoors, and with a squirrel-colored mustache he had
inherited from some great-grandfather. His son Ulises, who was riding in the
other seat, was a gilded adolescent with lonely maritime eyes and with the
appearance of a furtive angel. The Dutchman noticed a tent in front of which
all the soldiers of the local garrison were awaiting their turn. They were
sitting on the ground, drinking out of the same bottle, which passed from
mouth to mouth, and they had almond branches on their heads as if camouflaged
for combat. The Dutchman asked in his language:
"What the devil can
they be selling there?"
"A woman," his son
answered quite naturally. "Her name is Erendira."
"How do you know?"
"Everybody in the
desert knows," Ulises answered. The Dutchman stopped at the small hotel
in town and got out. Ulises stayed in the truck. With agile fingers he opened
a briefcase that his father had left on the seat, took out a roll of bills,
put several in his pocket, and left everything just the way it had been. That
night, while his father was asleep, he climbed out the hotel window and went
to stand in line in front of Erendira's tent.
The festivities were at
their height. The drunken recruits were dancing by themselves so as not to
waste the free music, and the photographer was taking nighttime pictures with
magnesium papers. As she watched over her business, the grandmother counted
the bank notes in her lap, dividing them into equal piles and arranging them
in a basket. There were only twelve soldiers at that time, but the evening
line had grown with civilian customers. Ulises was the last one.
It was the turn of a soldier
with a woeful appearance. The grandmother not only blocked his way but
avoided contact with his money.
"No, son," she
told him. "You couldn't go in for all the gold in the world. You bring
bad luck."
The soldier, who wasn't from
those parts, was puzzled.
"What do you
mean?"
"You bring down the
evil shadows," the grandmother said. "A person only has to look at
your face."
She waved him off with her
hand, but without touching him, and made way for the next soldier.
"Go right in, handsome,"
she told him good-naturedly, "but don't take too long, your country
needs you."
The soldier went in but he
came right out again because Erendira wanted to talk to her grandmother. She
hung the basket of money on her arm and went into the tent, which wasn't very
roomy, but which was neat and clean. In the back, on an army cot, Erendira
was unable to repress the trembling in her body, and she was in sorry shape,
all dirty with soldier sweat.
"Grandmother," she
sobbed, "I'm dying."
The grandmother felt her
forehead and when she saw she had no fever, she tried to console her.
"There are only ten
soldiers left," she said.
Erendira began to weep with
the shrieks of a frightened animal. The grandmother realized then that she
had gone beyond the limits of horror and, stroking her head, she helped her
calm down.
"The trouble is that
you're weak," she told her. "Come on, don't cry any more, take a
bath in sage water to get your blood back into shape."
She left the tent when
Erendira was calmer and she gave the soldier waiting his money back.
"That's all for today," she told him. "Come back tomorrow and
I'll give you the first place in line." Then she shouted to those lined
up:
"That's all, boys.
Tomorrow morning at nine."
Soldiers and civilians broke
ranks with shouts of protest. The grandmother confronted them, in a good mood
but brandishing the devastating crosier in earnest.
"You're an
inconsiderate bunch of slobs!" she shouted. "What do you think the
girl is made of, iron? I'd like to see you in her place. You perverts! You
shitty bums!"
The men answered her with
even cruder insults, but she ended up controlling the revolt and stood guard
with her staff until they took away the snack tables and dismantled the
gambling stands. She was about to go back into the tent when she saw Ulises,
as large as life, all by himself in the dark and empty space where the line
of men had been before. He had an unreal aura about him and he seemed to be
visible in the shadows because of the very glow of his beauty.
"You," the grandmother
asked him. "What happened to your wings?"
"The one who had wings
was my grandfather," Ulises answered in his natural way, "but
nobody believed it."
The grandmother examined him
again with fascination. "Well, I do," she said. "Put them on
and come back tomorrow." She went into the tent and left Ulises burning
where he stood.
Erendira felt better after
her bath. She had put on a short, lace-trimmed slip and she was drying her
hair before going to bed, but she was still making an effort to hold back her
tears. Her grandmother was asleep.
Behind Erendira's bed, very
slowly, Ulises' head appeared. She saw the anxious and diaphanous eyes, but
before saying anything she rubbed her head with the towel in order to prove
that it wasn't an illusion. When Ulises blinked for the first time, Erendira
asked him in a very low voice:
"Who are you?"
Ulises showed himself down
to his shoulders. "My name is Ulises," he said. He showed her the
bills he had stolen and added:
"I've got money."
Erendira put her hands on
the bed, brought her face close to that of Ulises, and went on talking to him
as if in a kindergarten game.
"You were supposed to
get in line," she told him.
"I waited all night
long," Ulises said.
"Well, now you have to
wait until tomorrow," Erendira said. "I feel as if someone had been
beating me on the kidneys."
At that instant the
grandmother began to talk in her sleep.
"It's going on twenty
years since it rained last," she said. "It was such a terrible
storm that the rain was all mixed in with sea water, and the next morning the
house was full of fish and snails and your grandfather Amadis, may he rest in
peace, saw a glowing manta ray floating through the air."
Ulises hid behind the bed
again. Erendira showed an amused smile.
"Take it easy,"
she told him. "She always acts kind of crazy when she's asleep, but not
even an earthquake can wake her up."
Ulises reappeared. Erendira
looked at him with a smile that was naughty and even a little affectionate
and took the soiled sheet off the mattress.
"Come," she said.
"Help me change the sheet."
Then Ulises came from behind
the bed and took one end of the sheet. Since the sheet was much larger than
the mattress, they had to fold it several times. With every fold Ulises drew
closer to Erendira.
"I was going crazy wanting
to see you," he suddenly said. "Everybody says you're very pretty
and they're right."
"But I'm going to
die," Erendira said.
"My mother says that
people who die in the desert don't go to heaven but to the sea," Ulises
said.
Erendira put the dirty sheet
aside and covered the mattress with another, which was clean and ironed.
"I never saw the
sea," she said.
"It's like the desert
but with water," said Ulises.
"Then you can't walk on
it."
"My father knew a man
who could," Ulises said, "but that was a long time ago."
Erendira was fascinated but
she wanted to sleep.
"If you come very early
tomorrow you can be first in line," she said.
"I'm leaving with my
father at dawn," said Ulises.
"Won't you be coming
back this way?"
"Who can tell?"
Ulises said. "We just happened along now because we got lost on the road
to the border."
Erendira looked thoughtfully
at her sleeping grandmother.
"All right," she
decided. "Give me the money."
Ulises gave it to her.
Erendira lay down on the bed but he remained trembling where he was: at the
decisive moment his determination had weakened. Erendira took him by the hand
to hurry him up and only then did she notice his tribulation. She was
familiar with that fear.
"Is it the first
time?" she asked him.
Ulises didn't answer but he
smiled in desolation. Erendira became a different person.
"Breathe slowly,"
she told him. "That's the way it always is the first time. Afterwards
you won't even notice."
She laid him down beside her
and while she was taking his clothes off she was calming him maternally.
"What's your
name?"
"Ulises."
"That's a gringo
name," Erendira said.
"No, a sailor
name."
Erendira uncovered his
chest, gave a few little orphan kisses, sniffed him.
"It's like you were
made of gold all over," she said, "but you smell of flowers."
"It must be the
oranges," Ulises said.
Calmer now, he gave a smile
of complicity.
"We carry a lot of
birds along to throw people off the track," he added, "but what
we're doing is smuggling a load of oranges across the border."
"Oranges aren't contraband,"
Erendira said.
"These are," said
Ulises. "Each one is worth fifty thousand pesos."
Erendira laughed for the
first time in a long while.
"What I like about
you," she said, "is the serious way you make up nonsense."
She had become spontaneous
and talkative again, as if Ulises' innocence had changed not only her mood
but her character. The grandmother, such a short distance away from
misfortune, was still talking in her sleep.
"Around those times, at
the beginning of March, they brought you home," she said. "You
looked like a lizard wrapped in cotton. Amadis, your father, who was young
and handsome, was so happy that afternoon that he sent for twenty carts
loaded with flowers and arrived strewing them along the street until the
whole village was gold with flowers like the sea."
She ranted on with great
shouts and with a stubborn passion for several hours. But Ulises couldn't
hear her because Erendira had loved him so much and so truthfully that she
loved him again for half price while her grandmother was raving and kept on
loving him for nothing until dawn.
A group of missionaries
holding up their crucifixes stood shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the
desert. A wind as fierce as the wind of misfortune shook their burlap habits
and their rough beards and they were barely able to stand on their feet.
Behind them was the mission, a colonial pile of stone with a tiny belfry on
top of the harsh whitewashed walls.
The youngest missionary, who
was in charge of the group, pointed to a natural crack in the glazed clay
ground.
"You shall not pass
beyond this line!" he shouted.
The four Indian bearers
carrying the grandmother in a litter made of boards stopped when they heard
the shout. Even though she was uncomfortable sitting on the planks of the
litter and her spirit was dulled by the dust and sweat of the desert, the
grandmother maintained her haughtiness intact. Erendira was on foot. Behind
the litter came a file of eight Indians carrying the baggage and at the very
end the photographer on his bicycle.
"The desert doesn't
belong to anyone," the grandmother said.
"It belongs to
God," the missionary said, "and you are violating his sacred laws
with your filthy business."
The grandmother then
recognized the missionary's peninsular usage and diction and avoided a
head-on confrontation so as not to break her head against his intransigence.
She went back to being herself.
"I don't understand
your mysteries, son."
The missionary pointed at
Erendira.
"That child is
underage."
"But she's my
granddaughter."
"So much the
worse," the missionary replied. "Put her under our care willingly
or we'll have to seek recourse in other ways."
The grandmother had not
expected them to go so far.
"All right, if that's
how it is." She surrendered in fear. "But sooner or later I'll pass,
you'll see."
Three days after the
encounter with the missionaries, the grandmother and Erendira were sleeping
in a village near the mission when a group of stealthy, mute bodies, creeping
along like an infantry patrol, slipped into the tent. They were six Indian
novices, strong and young, their rough cloth habits seeming to glow in the
moonlight. Without making a sound they cloaked Erendira in a mosquito
netting, picked her up without waking her, and carried her off wrapper-like a
large, fragile fish caught in a lunar net.
There were no means left
untried by the grandmother in an attempt to rescue her granddaughter from the
protection of the missionaries. Only when they had all failed, from the most
direct to the most devious, did she turn to the civil authority, which was
vested in a military man. She found him in the courtyard of his home, his
chest bare, shooting with an army rifle at a dark and solitary cloud in the
burning sky. He was trying to perforate it to bring on rain, and his shots
were furious and useless, but he did take the necessary time out to listen to
the grandmother.
"I can't do
anything," he explained to her when he had heard her out. "The
priesties, according to the concordat, have the right to keep the girl until
she comes of age. Or until she gets married."
"Then why do they have
you here as mayor?" the grandmother asked.
"To make it rain,"
was the mayor's answer.
Then, seeing that the cloud
had moved out of range, he interrupted his official duties and gave his full
attention to the grandmother.
"What you need is
someone with a lot of weight who will vouch for you," he told her.
"Someone who can swear to your moral standing and your good behavior in
a signed letter. Do you know Senator Onesimo Sanchez?"
Sitting under the naked sun
on a stool that was too narrow for her astral buttocks, the grandmother
answered with a solemn rage:
"I'm just a poor woman
all alone in the vastness of the desert."
The mayor, his right eye
twisted from the heat, looked at her with pity.
"Then don't waste your
time, ma'am," he said. "You'll rot in hell."
She didn't rot, of course.
She set up her tent across from the mission and sat down to think, like a
solitary warrior besieging a fortified city. The wandering photographer, who
knew her quite well, loaded his gear onto the carrier of his bicycle and was
ready to leave all alone when he saw her in the full sun with her eyes fixed
on the mission.
"Let's see who gets
tired first," the grandmother said, "they or I."
"They've been here for
three hundred years and they can still take it," the photographer said.
"I'm leaving."
Only then did the
grandmother notice the loaded bicycle.
"Where are you
going?"
"Wherever the wind
takes me," the photographer said, and he left. "It's a big
world."
The grandmother sighed.
"Not as big as you
think, you ingrate."
But she didn't move her head
in spite of her anger so as not to lose sight of the mission. She didn't move
it for many, many days of mineral heat, for many, many nights of wild winds,
for all the time she was meditating and no one came out of the mission. The
Indians built a lean-to of palm leaves beside the tent and hung their
hammocks there, but the grandmother stood watch until very late, nodding on
her throne and chewing the uncooked grain in her pouch with the invincible
laziness of a resting ox.
One night a convoy of slow
covered trucks passed very close to her and the only lights they carried were
wreaths of colored bulbs which gave them the ghostly size of sleep-walking
altars. The grandmother recognized them at once because they were just like
the trucks of the Amadises. The last truck in the convoy slowed, stopped, and
a man got out of the cab to adjust something in back. He looked like a
replica of the Amadises, wearing a hat with a turned-up brim, high boots, two
crossed cartridge belts across his chest, an army rifle, and two pistols.
Overcome by an irresistible temptation, the grandmother called to the man.
"Don't you know who I
am?" she asked him.
The man lighted her
pitilessly with a flashlight. For an instant he studied the face worn out by
vigil, the eyes dim from fatigue, the withered hair of the woman who, even at
her age, in her sorry state, and with that crude light on her face, could
have said that she had been the most beautiful woman in the world. When he
examined her enough to be sure that he had never seen her before, he turned
out the light.
"The only thing I know
for sure is that you're not the Virgin of Perpetual Help."
"Quite the
contrary," the grandmother said with a very sweet voice. "I'm the Lady."
The man put his hand to his
pistol out of pure instinct.
"What lady?"
"Big Amadis's."
"Then you're not of
this world," he said, tense. "What is it you want?"
"For you to help me
rescue my granddaughter, Big Amadis's granddaughter, the daughter of our son
Amadis, held captive in that mission."
The man overcame his fear.
"You knocked on the
wrong door," he said. "If you think we're about to get mixed up in
God's affairs, you're not the one you say you are, you never knew the
Amadises, and you haven't got the whoriest notion of what smuggling's all
about."
Early that morning the
grandmother slept less than before. She lay awake pondering things, wrapped
in a wool blanket while the early hour got her memory all mixed up and the
repressed raving struggled to get out even though she was awake, and she had
to tighten her heart with her hand so as not to be suffocated by the memory
of a house by the sea with great red flowers where she had been happy. She
remained that way until the mission bell rang and the first lights went on in
the windows and the desert became saturated with the smell of the hot bread
of matins. Only then did she abandon her fatigue, tricked by the illusion
that Erendira had got up and was looking for a way to escape and come back to
her.
Erendira, however, had not
lost a single night's sleep since they had taken her to the mission. They had
cut her hair with pruning shears until her head was like a brush, they put a
hermit's rough cassock on her and gave her a bucket of whitewash and a broom
so that she could whitewash the stairs every time someone went up or down. It
was mule work because there was an incessant coming and going of muddied
missionaries and novice carriers, but Erendira felt as if every day were
Sunday after the fearsome galley that had been her bed. Besides, she wasn't
the only one worn out at night, because that mission was dedicated to
fighting not against the devil but against the desert. Erendira had seen the
Indian novices bulldogging cows in the barn in order to milk them, jumping up
and down on planks for days on end in order to press cheese, helping a goat
through a difficult birth. She had seen them sweat like tanned stevedores
hauling water from the cistern, watering by hand a bold garden that other
novices cultivated with hoes in order to plant vegetables in the flintstone
of the desert. She had seen the earthly inferno of the ovens for baking bread
and the rooms for ironing clothes. She had seen a nun chase a pig through the
courtyard, slide along holding the runaway animal by the ears, and roll in a
mud puddle without letting go until two novices in leather aprons helped her
get it under control and one of them cut its throat with a butcher knife as
they all became covered with blood and mire. In the isolation ward of the
infirmary she had seen tubercular nuns in their nightgown shrouds, waiting
for God's last command as they embroidered bridal sheets on the terraces
while the men preached in the desert. Erendira was living in her shadows and
discovering other forms of beauty and horror that she had never imagined in
the narrow world of her bed, but neither the coarsest nor the most persuasive
of the novices had managed to get her to say a word since they had taken her
to the mission. One morning, while she was preparing the whitewash in her
bucket, she heard string music that was like a light even more diaphanous
than the light of the desert. Captivated by the miracle, she peeped into an
immense and empty salon with bare walls and large windows through which the
dazzling June light poured in and remained still, and in the center of the
room she saw a very beautiful nun whom she had never seen before playing an
Easter oratorio on the clavichord. Erendira listened to the music without
blinking, her heart hanging by a thread, until the lunch bell rang. After
eating, while she whitewashed the stairs with her reed brush, she waited
until all the novices had finished going up and coming down, and she was
alone, with no one to hear her, and then she spoke for the first time since
she had entered the mission.
"I'm happy," she
said.
So that put an end to the
hopes the grandmother had that Erendira would run away to rejoin her, but she
maintained her granite siege without having made any decision until
Pentecost. During that time the missionaries were combing the desert in
search of pregnant concubines in order to get them married. They traveled all
the way to the most remote settlements in a broken-down truck with four
well-armed soldiers and a chest of cheap cloth. The most difficult part of
that Indian hunt was to convince the women, who defended themselves against
divine grace with the truthful argument that men, sleeping in their hammocks
with legs spread, felt they had the right to demand much heavier work from
legitimate wives than from concubines. It was necessary to seduce them with
trickery, dissolving the will of God in the syrup of their own language so
that it would seem less harsh to them, but even the most crafty of them ended
up being convinced by a pair of flashy earrings. The men, on the other hand,
once the women's acceptance had been obtained, were routed out of their
hammocks with rifle butts, bound, and hauled away in the back of the truck to
be married by force.
For several days the
grandmother saw the little truck loaded with pregnant Indian women heading
for the mission, but she failed to recognize her opportunity. She recognized
it on Pentecost Sunday itself, when she heard the rockets and the ringing of
the bells and saw the miserable and merry crowd that was going to the
festival, and she saw that among the crowds there were pregnant women with
the veil and crown of a bride holding the arms of their casual mates, whom
they would legitimize in the collective wedding.
Among the last in the
procession a boy passed, innocent of heart, with gourd-cut Indian hair and
dressed in rags, carrying an Easter candle with a silk bow in his hand. The
grandmother called him over.
"Tell me something,
son," she asked with her smoothest voice. "What part do you have in
this affair?"
The boy felt intimidated by
the candle and it was hard for him to close his mouth because of his donkey
teeth.
"The priests are going
to give me my first communion," he said.
"How much did they pay
you?"
"Five pesos."
The grandmother took a roll
of bills from her pouch and the boy looked at them with surprise.
"I'm going to give you
twenty," the grandmother said. "Not for you to make your first
communion, but for you to get married."
"Who to?"
"My
granddaughter."
So Erendira was married in
the courtyard of the mission in her hermit's cassock and a silk shawl that
the novices gave her, and without even knowing the name of the groom her
grandmother had bought for her. With uncertain hope she withstood the torment
of kneeling on the saltpeter ground, the goat-hair stink of the two hundred
pregnant brides, the punishment of the Epistle of Saint Paul hammered out in
Latin under the motionless and burning sun, because the missionaries had
found no way to oppose the wile of that unforeseen marriage, but had given
her a promise as a last attempt to keep her in the mission. Nevertheless,
after the ceremony in the presence of the apostolic prefect, the military
mayor who shot at the clouds, her recent husband, and her impassive
grandmother, Erendira found herself once more under the spell that had
dominated her since birth. When they asked her what her free, true, and
definitive will was, she didn't even give a sigh of hesitation.
"I want to leave,"
she said. And she clarified things by pointing at her husband. "But not
with him, with my grandmother."
***
Ulises had wasted a whole
afternoon trying to steal an orange from his father's grove, because the
older man wouldn't take his eyes off him while they were pruning the sick
trees, and his mother kept watch from the house. So he gave up his plan, for
that day at least, and grudgingly helped his father until they had pruned the
last orange trees.
The extensive grove was
quiet and hidden, and the wooden house with a tin roof had copper grating
over the windows and a large porch set on pilings, with primitive plants
bearing intense flowers. Ulises' mother was on the porch sitting back in a
Viennese rocking chair with smoked leaves on her temples to relieve her
headache, and her full-blooded-Indian look followed her son like a beam of
invisible light to the most remote corners of the orange grove. She was quite
beautiful, much younger than her husband, and not only did she still wear the
garb of her tribe, but she knew the most ancient secrets of her blood.
When Ulises returned to the
house with the pruning tools, his mother asked him for her four o'clock
medicine, which was on a nearby table. As soon as he touched them, the glass
and the bottle changed color. Then, out of pure play, he touched a glass
pitcher that was on the table beside some tumblers and the pitcher also
turned blue. His mother observed him while she was taking her medicine and
when she was sure that it was not a delirium of her pain, she asked him in
the Guajiro Indian language:
"How long has that been
happening to you?"
Ever since we came back from
the desert," Ulises said, also in Guajiro. "It only happens with
glass things." In order to demonstrate, one after the other he touched
the glasses that were on the table and they all turned different colors.
"Those things happen
only because of love," his mother said. "Who is it?"
Ulises didn't answer. His
father, who couldn't understand the Guajiro language, was passing by the
porch at that moment with a cluster of oranges.
"What are you two
talking about?" he asked Ulises in Dutch.
"Nothing special,"
Ulises answered.
Ulises' mother didn't know
any Dutch. When her husband went into the house, she asked her son in
Guajiro:
"What did he say?"
"Nothing special,"
Ulises answered.
He lost sight of his father
when he went into the house, but he saw him again through a window of the
office. The mother waited until she was alone with Ulises and then repeated:
"Tell me who it
is."
"It's nobody,"
Ulises said.
He answered without paying
attention because he was hanging on his father's movements in the office. He
had seen him put the oranges on top of the safe when he worked out the
combination. But while he was keeping an eye on his father, his mother was
keeping an eye on him.
"You haven't eaten any
bread for a long time," she observed.
"I don't like it."
The mother's face suddenly
took on an unaccustomed liveliness. "That's a lie," she said.
"It's because you're love-sick and people who are lovesick can't eat
bread." Her voice, like her eyes, had passed from entreaty to threat.
"It would be better if
you told me who it was," she said, "or I'll make you take some
purifying baths."
In the office the Dutchman
opened the safe, put the oranges inside, and closed the armored door. Ulises
moved away from the window then and answered his mother impatiently.
"I already told you
there wasn't anyone," he said. "If you don't believe me, ask
Papa."
The Dutchman appeared in the
office doorway lighting his sailor's pipe and carrying his threadbare Bible
under his arm. His wife asked him in Spanish:
"Who did you meet in
the desert?"
"Nobody," her
husband answered, a little in the clouds. "If you don't believe me, ask
Ulises."
He sat down at the end of
the hall and sucked on his pipe until the tobacco was used up. Then he opened
the Bible at random and recited spot passages for almost two hours in flowing
and ringing Dutch.
At midnight Ulises was still
thinking with such intensity that he couldn't sleep. He rolled about in his
hammock for another hour, trying to overcome the pain of memories until the
very pain gave him the strength he needed to make a decision. Then he put on
his cowboy pants, his plaid shirt, and his riding boots, jumped through the
window, and fled from the house in the truck loaded with birds. As he went
through the groves he picked the three ripe oranges he had been unable to
steal that afternoon.
He traveled across the
desert for the rest of the night and at dawn he asked in towns and villages
about the whereabouts of Erendira, but no one could tell him. Finally they
informed him that she was traveling in the electoral campaign retinue of
Senator Onesimo Sanchez and that on that day he was probably in Nueva
Castilla. He didn't find him there but in the next town and Erendira was no
longer with him, for the grandmother had managed to get the senator to vouch
for her morality in a letter written in his own hand, and with it she was
going about opening the most tightly barred doors in the desert. On the third
day he came across the domestic mailman and the latter told him what direction
to follow.
"They're heading toward
the sea," he said, "and you'd better hurry because the goddamned
old woman plans to cross over to the island of Aruba."
Following that direction,
after half a day's journey Ulises spotted the broad, stained tent that the
grandmother had bought from a bankrupt circus. The wandering photographer had
come back to her, convinced that the world was really not as large as he had
thought, and he had set up his idyllic backdrops near the tent. A band of
brass-blowers was captivating Erendira's clientele with a taciturn waltz.
Ulises waited for his turn
to go in, and the first thing that caught his attention was the order and
cleanliness of the inside of the tent. The grandmother's bed had recovered
its viceregal splendor, the statue of the angel was in its place beside the
funerary trunk of the Amadises, and in addition, there was a pewter bathtub
with lion's feet. Lying on her new canopied bed, Erendira was naked and
placid, irradiating a childlike glow under the light that filtered through
the tent. She was sleeping with her eyes open. Ulises stopped beside her, the
oranges in his hand, and he noticed that she was looking at him without
seeing him. Then he passed his hand over her eyes and called her by the name
he had invented when he wanted to think about her:
"Aridnere."
Erendira woke up. She felt
naked in front of Ulises, let out a squeak, and covered herself with the
sheet up to her neck.
"Don't look at
me," she said. "I'm horrible."
"You're the color of an
orange all over," Ulises said. He raised the fruits to her eyes so that
she could compare. "Look."
Erendira uncovered her eyes
and saw that indeed the oranges did have her color.
"I don't want you to
stay now," she said.
"I only came to show
you this," Ulises said. "Look here."
He broke open an orange with
his nails, split it in two with his hands, and showed Erendira what was
inside: stuck in the heart of the fruit was a genuine diamond.
"These are the oranges
we take across the border," he said.
"But they're living
oranges!" Erendira exclaimed.
"Of course."
Ulises smiled. "My father grows them."
Erendira couldn't believe
it. She uncovered her face, took the diamond in her fingers and contemplated
it with surprise.
"With three like these
we can take a trip around the world," Ulises said.
Erendira gave him back the
diamond with a look of disappointment. Ulises went on:
"Besides, I've got a
pickup truck," he said. "And besides that ... Look!"
From underneath his shirt he
took an ancient pistol.
"I can't leave for ten
years," Erendira said.
"You'll leave,"
Ulises said. "Tonight, when the white whale falls asleep, I'll be
outside there calling like an owl."
He made such a true
imitation of the call of an owl that Erendira's eyes smiled for the first
time.
"It's my grandmother,"
she said.
"The owl?"
"The whale."
They both laughed at the
mistake, but Erendira picked up the thread again.
"No one can leave for
anywhere without her grandmother's permission."
"There's no reason to
say anything."
"She'll find out in any
case," Erendira said. "She can dream things."
"When she starts to
dream that you're leaving we'll already be across the border. We'll cross
over like smugglers," Ulises said.
Grasping the pistol with the
confidence of a movie gunfighter, he imitated the sounds of the shots to
excite Erendira with his audacity. She didn't say yes or no, but her eyes
gave a sigh and she sent Ulises away with a kiss. Ulises, touched, whispered:
"Tomorrow we'll be
watching the ships go by."
That night, a little after
seven o'clock, Erendira was combing her grandmother's hair when the wind of
her misfortune blew again. In the shelter of the tent were the Indian bearers
and the leader of the brass band, waiting to be paid. The grandmother
finished counting out the bills on a chest she had within reach, and after
consulting a ledger she paid the oldest of the Indians.
"Here you are,"
she told him. "Twenty pesos for the week, less eight for meals, less
three for water, less fifty cents on account for the new shirts, that's eight
fifty. Count it."
The oldest Indian counted
the money and they all withdrew with a bow.
"Thank you, white
lady."
Next came the leader of the
band. The grandmother consulted her ledger and turned to the photographer,
who was trying to repair the bellows of his camera with wads of gutta-percha.
"What's it going to
be?" she asked him. "Will you or won't you pay a quarter of the
cost of the music?"
The photographer didn't even
raise his head to answer.
"Music doesn't come out
in pictures."
"But it makes people
want to have their pictures taken," the grandmother answered.
"On the contrary,"
said the photographer. "It reminds them of the dead and then they come
out in the picture with their eyes closed."
The bandleader intervened.
"What makes them close
their eyes isn't the music," he said. "It's the lightning you make
taking pictures at night."
"It's the music,"
the photographer insisted.
The grandmother put an end
to the dispute. "Don't be a cheapskate," she said to the
photographer. "Look how well things have been going for Senator Onesimo
Sanchez and it's thanks to the musicians he has along." Then, in a harsh
tone, she concluded:
"So pay what you ought
to or go follow your fortune by yourself. It's not right for that poor child
to carry the whole burden of expenses."
"I'll follow my fortune
by myself," the photographer said. "After all, an artist is what I
am."
The grandmother shrugged her
shoulders and took care of the musician. She handed him a bundle of bills
that matched the figure written in her ledger.
"Two hundred and
fifty-four numbers," she told him "At fifty cents apiece,
plus thirty-two on Sundays and holidays at sixty cents apiece, that's one
hundred fifty-six twenty."
The musician wouldn't accept
the money.
"It's one hundred
eighty-two forty," he said. "Waltzes cost more."
"Why is that?"
"Because they're
sadder," the musician said.
The grandmother made him
take the money.
"Well, this week you'll
play us two happy numbers for each waltz I owe you for and we'll be
even."
The musician didn't
understand the grandmother's logic, but he accepted the figures while he
unraveled the tangle. At that moment the fearsome wind threatened to uproot
the tent, and in the silence that it left in its wake, outside, clear and
gloomy, the call of an owl was heard.
Erendira didn't know what to
do to disguise her upset. She closed the chest with the money and hid it
under the bed, but the grandmother recognized the fear in her hand when she
gave her the key. "Don't be frightened," she told her. "There
are always owls on windy nights." Still she didn't seem so convinced
when she saw the photographer go out with the camera on his back.
"Wait till tomorrow if
you'd like," she told him. "Death is on the loose tonight."
The photographer had also
noticed the call of the owl, but he didn't change his intentions.
"Stay, son," the
grandmother insisted. "Even if it's just because of the liking I have
for you."
"But I won't pay for
the music," the photographer said.
"Oh, no," the
grandmother said. "Not that."
"You see?" the
photographer said. "You've got no love for anybody."
The grandmother grew pale
with rage.
"Then beat it!"
she said. "You lowlife!"
She felt so outraged that
she was still venting her rage on him while Erendira helped her go to bed.
"Son of an evil mother," she muttered. "What does that bastard
know about anyone else's heart?" Erendira paid no attention to her,
because the owl was calling her with tenacious insistence during the pauses
in the wind and she was tormented by uncertainty. The grandmother finally
went to bed with the same ritual that had been de rigueur in the ancient
mansion, and while her granddaughter fanned her she overcame her anger and
once more breathed her sterile breath.
"You have to get up
early," she said then, "so you can boil the infusion for my bath
before the people get here."
"Yes,
Grandmother."
"With the time you have
left, wash the Indians' dirty laundry and that way we'll have something else
to take off their pay next week."
"Yes,
Grandmother," Erendira said.
"And sleep slowly so
that you won't get tired, because tomorrow is Thursday, the longest day of
the week."
"Yes,
Grandmother."
"And feed the
ostrich."
"Yes,
Grandmother," Erendira said.
She left the fan at the head
of the bed and lighted two altar candles in front of the chest with their
dead. The grandmother, asleep now, was lagging behind with her orders.
"Don't forget to light
the candles for the Amadises."
"Yes,
Grandmother."
Erendira knew then that she
wouldn't wake up, because she had begun to rave. She heard the wind barking
about the tent, but she didn't recognize it as the wind of her misfortune
that time either. She looked out into the night until the owl called again
and her instinct for freedom in the end prevailed over her grandmother's
spell.
She hadn't taken five steps
outside the tent when she came across the photographer, who was lashing his
equipment to the carrier of his bicycle. His accomplice's smile calmed her
down.
"I don't know
anything," the photographer said, "I haven't seen anything, and I
won't pay for the music."
He took his leave with a
blessing for all. Then Erendira ran toward the desert, having decided once
and for all, and she was swallowed up in the shadows of the wind where the
owl was calling.
That time the grandmother
went to the civil authorities at once. The commandant of the local detachment
leaped out of his hammock at six in the morning when she put the senator's
letter before his eyes. Ulises' father was waiting at the door.
"How in hell do you
expect me to know what it says!" the commandant shouted. "I can't
read."
"It's a letter of
recommendation from Senator Onesimo Sanchez," the grandmother said.
Without further questions,
the commandant took down a rifle he had near his hammock and began to shout
orders to his men. Five minutes later they were all in a military truck
flying toward the border against a contrary wind that had erased all trace of
the fugitives. The commandant rode in the front seat beside the driver. In
back were the Dutchman and the grandmother, with an armed policeman on each
running board.
Close to town they stopped a
convoy of trucks covered with waterproof canvases. Several men who were
riding concealed in the rear raised the canvas and aimed at the small vehicle
with machine guns and army rifles. The commandant asked the driver of the first
truck how far back they had passed a farm truck loaded with birds.
The driver started up before
he answered.
"We're not stool
pigeons," he said indignantly, "we're smugglers."
The commandant saw the sooty
barrels of the machine guns pass close to his eyes and he raised his arms and
smiled.
"At least," he
shouted at them, "you could have the decency not to go around in broad
daylight."
The last truck had a sign on
its rear bumper: I THINK OF YOU, ERENDIRA.
The wind became drier as
they headed north and the sun was fiercer than the wind. It was hard to
breathe because of the heat and dust inside the closed-in truck.
The grandmother was the
first to spot the photographer: he was pedaling along in the same direction
in which they were flying, with no protection against the sun except for a
handkerchief tied around his head.
"There he is." She
pointed. "He was their accomplice, the lowlife."
The commandant ordered one
of the policemen on the running board to take charge of the photographer.
"Grab him and wait for
us here," he said. "We'll be right back."
The policeman jumped off the
running board and shouted twice for the photographer to halt. The
photographer didn't hear him because of the wind blowing in the opposite
direction. When the truck went on, the grandmother made an enigmatic gesture
to him, but he confused it with a greeting, smiled, and waved. He didn't hear
the shot. He flipped into the air and fell dead on top of his bicycle, his
head blown apart by a rifle bullet, and he never knew where it came from.
Before noon they began to
see feathers. They were passing by in the wind and they were feathers from
young birds. The Dutchman recognized them because they were from his birds,
plucked out by the wind. The driver changed direction, pushed the gas pedal
to the floor, and in half an hour they could make out the pickup truck on the
horizon.
When Ulises saw the military
vehicle appear in the rearview mirror, he made an effort to increase the
distance between them, but the motor couldn't do any better. They had
traveled with no sleep and were done in from fatigue and thirst. Erendira,
who was dozing on Ulises' shoulder, woke up in fright. She saw the truck that
was about to overtake them and with innocent determination she took the
pistol from the glove compartment.
"It's no good,"
Ulises said. "It used to belong to Sir Francis Drake."
She pounded it several times
and threw it out the window. The military patrol passed the broken- down
truck loaded with birds plucked by the wind, turned sharply, and cut it off.
***
It was around that time that
I came to know them, their moment of greatest splendor, but I wouldn't look
into the details of their lives until many years later when Rafael Escalona,
in a song, revealed the terrible ending of the drama and I thought it would
be good to tell the tale. I was traveling about selling encyclopedias and
medical books in the province of Riohacha. Alvaro Cepeda Samudio, who was
also traveling in the region, selling beer-cooling equipment, took me through
the desert towns in his truck with the intention of talking to me about
something and we talked so much about nothing and drank so much beer that
without knowing when or where we crossed the entire desert and reached the
border. There was the tent of wandering love under hanging canvas signs:
ERENDIRA IS BEST; LEAVE AND COME BACK -- ERENDIRA WAITS FOR YOU; THERE'S NO
LIFE WITHOUT ERENDIRA. The endless wavy line composed of men of diverse races
and ranks looked like a snake with human vertebrae dozing through vacant lots
and squares, through gaudy bazaars and noisy marketplaces, coming out of the
streets of that city, which was noisy with passing merchants. Every street
was a public gambling den, every house a saloon, every doorway a refuge for
fugitives. The many undecipherable songs and the shouted offerings of wares
formed a single roar of panic in the hallucinating heat.
Among the throng of men
without a country and sharpers was Blacaman the Good, up on a table and
asking for a real serpent in order to test an antidote of his invention on
his own flesh. There was the woman who had been changed into a spider for
having disobeyed her parents, who would let herself be touched for fifty
cents so that people would see there was no trick, and she would answer
questions of those who might care to ask about her misfortune. There was an
envoy from the eternal life who announced the imminent coming of the fearsome
astral bat, whose burning brimstone breath would overturn the order of nature
and bring the mysteries of the sea to the surface.
The one restful backwater
was the red-light district, reached only by the embers of the urban din.
Women from the four quadrants of the nautical rose yawned with boredom in the
abandoned cabarets. They had slept their siestas sitting up, unawakened by people
who wanted them, and they were still waiting for the astral bat under the
fans that spun on the ceilings. Suddenly one of them got up and went to a
balcony with pots of pansies that overlooked the street. Down there the row
of Erendira's suitors was passing.
"Come on," the
woman shouted at them. "What's that one got that we don't have?"
"A letter from a
senator," someone shouted.
Attracted by the shouts and
the laughter, other women came out onto the balcony.
"The line's been like
that for days," one of them said. "Just imagine, fifty pesos
apiece."
The one who had come out
first made a decision:
"Well, I'm going to go
find out what jewel that seven month baby has got."
"Me too," another
said. "It'll be better than sitting here warming our chairs for free."
On the way others joined
them and when they got to Erendira's tent they made up a rowdy procession.
They went in without any announcement, used pillows to chase away the man
they found spending himself as best he could for his money, and they picked up
Erendira's bed and carried it out into the street like a litter.
"This is an
outrage!" the grandmother shouted. "You pack of traitors, you
bandits!" And then, turning to the men in line: "And you, you
sissies, where do you keep your balls, letting this attack against a poor
defenseless child go on? Damned fags!"
She kept on shouting as far
as her voice would carry, distributing whacks with her crosier against all
who came within reach, but her rage was inaudible amongst the shouts and
mocking whistles of the crowd.
Erendira couldn't escape the
ridicule because she was prevented by the dog chain that the grandmother used
to hitch her to a slat of the bed ever since she had tried to run away. But
they didn't harm her. They exhibited her on the canopied altar along the
noisiest streets like the allegorical passage of the enchained penitent and
finally they set her down like a catafalque in the center of the main square.
Erendira was all coiled up, her face hidden, but not weeping, and she stayed
that way under the terrible sun in the square, biting with shame and rage at
the dog chain of her evil destiny until someone was charitable enough to
cover her with a shirt.
That was the only time I saw
them, but I found out that they had stayed in that border town under the
protection of the public forces until the grandmother's chests were bursting
and then they left the desert and headed toward the sea. Never had such
opulence been seen gathered together in that realm of poor people. It was a
procession of ox-drawn carts on which cheap replicas of the paraphernalia
lost in the disaster of the mansion were piled, not just the imperial busts
and rare clocks, but also a secondhand piano and a Victrola with a crank and
the records of nostalgia. A team of Indians took care of the cargo and a band
of musicians announced their triumphal arrival in the villages.
The grandmother traveled on
a litter with paper wreaths, chomping on the grains in her pouch, in the
shadow of a church canopy. Her monumental size had increased, because under
her blouse she was wearing a vest of sailcloth in which she kept the gold
bars the way one keeps cartridges in a bandoleer. Erendira was beside her,
dressed in gaudy fabrics and with trinkets hanging, but with the dog chain
still on her ankle.
"You've got no reason
to complain," her grandmother had said to her when they left the border
town. "You've got the clothes of a queen, a luxurious bed, a musical
band of your own, and fourteen Indians at your service. Don't you think
that's splendid?"
"Yes,
Grandmother."
"When you no longer
have me," the grandmother went on, "you won't be left to the mercy
of men because you'll have your own home in an important city. You'll be free
and happy."
It was a new and unforeseen
vision of the future. On the other hand, she no longer spoke about the
original debt, whose details had become twisted and whose installments had
grown as the costs of the business became more complicated. Still Erendira
didn't let slip any sigh that would have given a person a glimpse of her
thoughts. She submitted in silence to the torture of the bed in the saltpeter
pits, in the torpor of the lakeside towns, in the lunar craters of the talcum
mines, while her grandmother sang the vision of the future to her as if she
were reading cards. One afternoon, as they came out of an oppressive canyon,
they noticed a wind of ancient laurels and they caught snatches of Jamaica
conversations and felt an urge to live and a knot in their hearts. They had
reached the sea.
"There it is," the
grandmother said, breathing in the glassy light of the Caribbean after half a
lifetime of exile. "Don't you like it?"
"Yes,
Grandmother."
They pitched the tent there.
The grandmother spent the night talking without dreaming and sometimes she
mixed up her nostalgia with clairvoyance of the future. She slept later than
usual and awoke relaxed by the sound of the sea. Nevertheless, when Erendira
was bathing her she again made predictions of the future and it was such a
feverish clairvoyance that it seemed like the delirium of a vigil.
"You'll be a noble
lady," she told her. "A lady of quality, venerated by those under
your protection and favored and honored by the highest authorities. Ships'
captains will send you postcards from every port in the world."
Erendira wasn't listening to
her. The warm water perfumed with oregano was pouring into the bathtub
through a tube fed from outside. Erendira picked it up in a gourd,
impenetrable, not even breathing, and poured it over her grandmother with one
hand while she soaped her with the other.
"The prestige of your
house will fly from mouth to mouth from the string of the Antilles to the
realm of Holland," the grandmother was saying. "And it will be more
important than the presidential palace, because the affairs of government will
be discussed there and the fate of the nation will be decided."
Suddenly the water in the
tube stopped. Erendira left the tent to find out what was going on and saw
the Indian in charge of pouring water into the tube chopping wood by the
kitchen.
"It ran out," the
Indian said. "We have to cool more water."
Erendira went to the stove,
where there was another large pot with aromatic herbs boiling. She wrapped
her hands in a cloth and saw that she could lift the pot without the help of
the Indian.
"You can go," she
told him. "I'll pour the water."
She waited until the Indian
had left the kitchen. Then she took the boiling pot off the stove, lifted it
with great effort to the height of the tube, and was about to pour the deadly
water into the conduit to the bathtub when the grandmother shouted from
inside the tent:
"Erendira!"
It was as if she had seen.
The granddaughter, frightened by the shout, repented at the last minute.
"Coming,
Grandmother," she said. "I'm cooling off the water."
That night she lay thinking
until quite late while her grandmother sang in her sleep, wearing the golden
vest. Erendira looked at her from her bed with intense eyes that in the
shadows resembled those of a cat. Then she went to bed like a person who had
drowned, her arms on her breast and her eyes open, and she called with all
the strength of her inner voice:
"Ulises!"
Ulises woke up suddenly in
the house on the orange plantation. He had heard Erendira's voice so clearly
that he was looking for her in the shadows of the room. After an instant of
reflection, he made a bundle of his clothing and shoes and left the bedroom.
He had crossed the porch when his father's voice surprised him:
"Where are you
going?"
Ulises saw him blue in the
moonlight.
"Into the world,"
he answered.
"This time I won't stop
you," the Dutchman said. "But I warn you of one thing: wherever you
go your father's curse will follow you."
"So be it," said
Ulises.
Surprised and even a little
proud of his son's resolution, the Dutchman followed him through the orange
grove with a look that slowly began to smile. His wife was behind him with
her beautiful Indian woman's way of standing. The Dutchman spoke when Ulises
closed the gate.
"He'll be back,"
he said, "beaten down by life, sooner than you think."
"You're so
stupid," she sighed. "He'll never come back."
On that occasion Ulises
didn't have to ask anyone where Erendira was. He crossed the desert hiding in
passing trucks, stealing to eat and sleep and stealing many times for the
pure pleasure of the risk until he found the tent in another seaside town
which the glass buildings gave the look of an illuminated city and where
resounded the nocturnal farewells of ships weighing anchor for the island of
Aruba. Erendira was asleep chained to the slat and in the same position of a
drowned person on the beach from which she had called him. Ulises stood
looking at her for a long time without waking her up, but he looked at her
with such intensity that Erendira awoke. Then they kissed in the darkness,
caressed each other slowly, got undressed wearily, with a silent tenderness
and a hidden happiness that was more than ever like love.
At the other end of the tent
the sleeping grandmother gave a monumental turn and began to rant.
"That was during the
time the Greek ship arrived," she said. "It was a crew of madmen
who made the women happy and didn't pay them with money but with sponges,
living sponges that later on walked about the houses moaning like patients in
a hospital and making the children cry so that they could drink the tears."
She made a subterranean
movement and sat up in bed.
"That was when he
arrived, my God," she shouted, "stronger, taller, and much more of
a man than Amadis."
Ulises, who until then had
not paid any attention to the raving, tried to hide when he saw the grandmother
sitting up in bed. Erendira calmed him.
"Take it easy,"
she told him. "Every time she gets to that part she sits up in bed, but
she doesn't wake up."
Ulises leaned on her
shoulder.
"I was singing with the
sailors that night and I thought it was an earthquake," the grandmother
went on. "They all must have thought the same thing because they ran
away shouting, dying with laughter, and only he remained under the starsong
canopy. I remember as if it had been yesterday that I was singing the song
that everyone was singing those days. Even the parrots in the courtyard sang
it."
Flat as a mat, as one can
sing only in dreams, she sang the lines of her bitterness:
Lord, oh, Lord, give me back
the innocence I had so I can feel his love all over again from the start.
Only then did Ulises become
interested in the grandmother's nostalgia.
"There he was,"
she was saying, "with a macaw on his shoulder and a cannibal-killing
blunderbuss, the way Guatarral arrived in the Guianas, and I felt his breath
of death when he stood opposite me and said: 'I've been around the world a
thousand times and seen women of every nation, so I can tell you on good
authority that you are the haughtiest and the most obliging, the most
beautiful woman on earth.'"
She lay down again and sobbed
on her pillow. Ulises and Erendira remained silent for a long time, rocked in
the shadows by the sleeping old woman's great breathing. Suddenly Erendira,
without the slightest quiver in her voice, asked:
"Would you dare to kill
her?"
Taken by surprise, Ulises
didn't know what to answer.
"Who knows," he
said. "Would you dare?"
"I can't,"
Erendira said. "She's my grandmother."
Then Ulises looked once more
at the enormous sleeping body as if measuring its quantity of life and
decided:
"For you I'd be capable
of anything."
***
Ulises bought a pound of rat
poison, mixed it with whipped cream and raspberry jam, and poured that fatal
cream into a piece of pastry from which he had removed the original filling.
Then he put some thickened cream on top, smoothing it with a spoon until
there was no trace of his sinister maneuver, and he completed the trick with
seventy-two little pink candles.
The grandmother sat up on
her throne waving her threatening crosier when she saw him come into the tent
with the birthday cake.
"You brazen
devil!" she shouted. "How dare you set foot in this place?"
Ulises hid behind his angel
face.
"I've come to ask your
forgiveness," he said, "on this day, your birthday."
Disarmed by his lie, which
had hit its mark, the grandmother had the table set as if for a wedding
feast. She sat Ulises down on her right while Erendira served them, and after
blowing out the candles with one devastating gust, she cut the cake into two
equal parts. She served Ulises.
"A man who knows how to
get himself forgiven has earned half of heaven," she said. "I give
you the first piece, which is the piece of happiness."
"I don't like sweet
things," he said. "You take it."
The grandmother offered
Erendira a piece of cake. She took it into the kitchen and threw it in the
garbage.
The grandmother ate the rest
all by herself. She put whole pieces into her mouth and swallowed them
without chewing, moaning with delight and looking at Ulises from the limbo of
her pleasure. When there was no more on her plate she also ate what Ulises
had turned down. While she was chewing the last bit, with her fingers she
picked up the crumbs from the tablecloth and put them into her mouth.
She had eaten enough arsenic
to exterminate a whole generation of rats. And yet she played the piano and sang
until midnight, went to bed happy, and was able to have a normal sleep. The
only thing new was a rocklike scratch in her breathing.
Erendira and Ulises kept
watch over her from the other bed, and they were only waiting for her death
rattle. But the voice was as alive as ever when she began to rave.
"I went crazy, my God,
I went crazy!" she shouted. "I put two bars on the bedroom door so
he couldn't get in; I put the dresser and table against the door and the
chairs on the table, and all he had to do was give a little knock with his
ring for the defenses to fall apart, the chairs to fall off the table by
themselves, the table and dresser to separate by themselves, the bars to move
out of their slots by themselves."
Erendira and Ulises looked
at her with growing surprise as the delirium became more profound and
dramatic and the voice more intimate.
"I felt I was going to
die, soaked in the sweat of fear, begging inside for the door to open without
opening, for him to enter without entering, for him never to go away but
never to come back either so I wouldn't have to kill him!"
She went on repeating her
drama for several hours, even the most intimate details, as if she had lived
it again in her dream. A little before dawn she rolled over in bed with a
movement of seismic accommodation and the voice broke with the imminence of
sobs.
"I warned him and he
laughed," she shouted. "I warned him again and he laughed again,
until he opened his eyes in terror, saying, 'Agh, queen! Agh, queen!' and his
voice wasn't coming out of his mouth but through the cut the knife had made
in his throat."
Ulises, terrified at the
grandmother's fearful evocation, grabbed Erendira's hand.
"Murdering old
woman!" he exclaimed.
Erendira didn't pay any
attention to him because at that instant dawn began to break. The clocks
struck five.
"Go!" Erendira
said. "She's going to wake up now."
"She's got more life in
her than an elephant," Ulises exclaimed. "It can't be!"
Erendira cut him with a
knifing look.
"The whole
trouble," she said, "is that you're no good at all for killing
anybody."
Ulises was so affected by
the crudeness of the reproach that he left the tent. Erendira kept on looking
at the sleeping grandmother with her secret hate, with the rage of her
frustration, as the sun rose and the bird air awakened. Then the grandmother
opened her eyes and looked at her with a placid smile.
"God be with you,
child."
The only noticeable change
was a beginning of disorder in the daily routine. It was Wednesday, but the
grandmother wanted to put on a Sunday dress, decided that Erendira would
receive no customers before eleven o'-clock, and asked her to paint her nails
garnet and give her a pontifical coiffure.
"I never had so much of
an urge to have my picture taken," she exclaimed.
Erendira began to comb her
grandmother's hair, but as she drew the comb through the tangles a clump of
hair remained between the teeth. She showed it to her grandmother in alarm.
The grandmother examined it, pulled on another clump with her fingers, and
another bush of hair was left in her hand. She threw it on the ground, tried
again and pulled out a larger lock. Then she began to pull her hair with both
hands, dying with laughter, throwing the handfuls into the air with an
incomprehensible jubilation until her head looked like a peeled coconut.
Erendira had no more news of
Ulises until two weeks later when she caught the call of the owl outside the
tent. The grandmother had begun to play the piano and was so absorbed in her
nostalgia that she was unaware of reality. She had a wig of radiant feathers
on her head.
Erendira answered the call
and only then did she notice the wick that came out of the piano and went on
through the underbrush and was lost in the darkness. She ran to where Ulises
was, hid next to him among the bushes, and with tight hearts they both
watched the little blue flame that crept along the wick, crossed the dark
space, and went into the tent.
"Cover your ears,"
Ulises said.
They both did, without any
need, for there was no explosion. The tent lighted up inside with a radiant
glow, burst in silence, and disappeared in a whirlwind of wet powder. When
Erendira dared enter, thinking that her grandmother was dead, she found her
with her wig singed and her night shirt in tatters, but more alive than ever,
trying to put out the fire with a blanket.
Ulises slipped away under
the protection of the shouts of the Indians, who didn't know what to do,
confused by the grandmother's contradictory orders. When they finally managed
to conquer the flames and get rid of the smoke, they were looking at a
shipwreck.
"It's like the work of
the evil one," the grandmother said. "Pianos don't explode just
like that."
She made all kinds of
conjectures to establish the causes of the new disaster, but Erendira's
evasions and her impassive attitude ended up confusing her. She couldn't find
the slightest crack in her granddaughter's behavior, nor did she consider the
existence of Ulises. She was awake until dawn, threading suppositions
together and calculating the loss. She slept little and poorly. On the
following morning, when Erendira took the vest with the gold bars off her
grandmother, she found fire blisters on her shoulders and raw flesh on her
breast. "I had good reason to be turning over in my sleep," she
said as Erendira put egg whites on the burns. "And besides, I had a
strange dream." She made an effort at concentration to evoke the image
until it was as clear in her memory as in the dream.
"It was a peacock in a
white hammock," she said.
Erendira was surprised but
she immediately assumed her everyday expression once more.
"It's a good
sign," she lied, "Peacocks in dreams are animals with long
lives."
"May God hear
you," the grandmother said, "because we're back where we started.
We have to begin all over again."
Erendira didn't change her
expression. She went out of the tent with the plate of compresses and left
her grandmother with her torso soaked in egg white and her skull daubed with
mustard. She was putting more egg whites into the plate under the palm
shelter that served as a kitchen when she saw Ulises' eyes appear behind the
stove as she had seen them the first time behind her bed. She wasn't
startled, but told him in a weary voice:
"The only thing you've
managed to do is increase my debt."
Ulises' eyes clouded over
with anxiety. He was motionless, looking at Erendira in silence, watching her
crack the eggs with a fixed expression of absolute disdain, as if he didn't
exist. After a moment the eyes moved, looked over the things in the kitchen,
the hanging pots, the strings of annatto, the carving knife. Ulises stood-up,
still not saying anything, went in under the shelter, and took down the
knife.
Erendira didn't look at him
again, but when Ulises left the shelter she told him in a very low voice:
"Be careful, because
she's already had a warning of death. She dreamed about a peacock in a white
hammock."
The grandmother saw Ulises
come in with the knife, and making a supreme effort, she stood up without the
aid of her staff and raised her arms.
"Boy!" she
shouted. "Have you gone mad?"
Ulises jumped on her and
plunged the knife into her naked breast. The grandmother moaned, fell on him,
and tried to strangle him with her powerful bear arms.
"Son of a bitch,"
she growled. "I discovered too late that you have the face of a traitor
angel."
She was unable to say
anything more because Ulises managed to free the knife and stab her a second
time in the side. The grandmother let out a hidden moan and hugged her
attacker with more strength. Ulises gave her a third stab, without pity, and
a spurt of blood, released by high pressure, sprinkled his face: it was oily
blood, shiny and green, just like mint honey.
Erendira appeared at the
entrance with the plate in her hand and watched the struggle with criminal
impassivity.
Huge, monolithic, roaring
with pain and rage, the grandmother grasped Ulises' body. Her arms, her legs,
even her hairless skull were green with blood. Her enormous
bellows-breathing, upset by the first rattles of death, filled the whole
area. Ulises managed to free his arm with the weapon once more, opened a cut
in her belly, and an explosion of blood soaked him in green from head to toe.
The grandmother tried to reach the open air which she needed in order to live
now and fell face down. Ulises got away from the lifeless arms and without
pausing a moment gave the vast fallen body a final thrust.
Erendira then put the plate
on a table and leaned over her grandmother, scrutinizing her without touching
her. When she was convinced that she was dead her face suddenly acquired all the
maturity of an older person which her twenty years of misfortune had not
given her. With quick and precise movements she grabbed the gold vest and
left the tent.
Ulises remained sitting by
the corpse, exhausted by the fight, and the more he tried to clean his face
the more it was daubed with that green and living matter that seemed to be
flowing from his fingers. Only when he saw Erendira go out with the gold vest
did he become aware of his state.
He shouted to her but got no
answer. He dragged himself to the entrance to the tent and he saw Erendira
starting to run along the shore away from the city. Then he made a last
effort to chase her, calling her with painful shouts that were no longer
those of a lover but of a son, yet he was overcome by the terrible drain of
having killed a woman without anybody's help. The grandmother's Indians
caught up to him lying face down on the beach, weeping from solitude and
fear.
Erendira had not heard him.
She was running into the wind, swifter than a deer, and no voice of this
world could stop her. Without turning her head she ran past the salt-peter
pits, the talcum craters, the torpor of the shacks, until the natural science
of the sea ended and the desert began, but she still kept on running with the
gold vest beyond the arid winds and the never-ending sunsets and she was
never heard of again nor was the slightest trace of her misfortune ever
found.
(1972)
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