That morning we walked together to the plaza. Riad Halabí was carrying the suitcase of new clothes he had packed for me; I walked in silence, my head high and my gaze defiant, so that no one would know how near I was to tears. It was a day like any other, and at that hour children were playing in the street and the old women of Agua Santa had brought their chairs out on the sidewalk and were sitting shucking corn into pans in their lap. The implacable eyes of the town followed us to the bus stop. No one waved goodbye to me, not even the lieutenant, who happened to pass by in his jeep but turned his head as if he had seen nothing, carrying out his part of the bargain.
“I don’t want to go,” I begged for the last time.
“Don’t make this harder for me, Eva.”
“Will you come see me in the city? Promise me you’ll come soon, and we can make love again.”
“Life is long, child, and filled with surprises—anything can happen.”
“Kiss me.”
“I can’t, everyone is looking. Get on the bus and don’t get off for any reason until you reach the capital. Once you’re there, get a taxi and go to the address I wrote down for you—it’s a boardinghouse for young ladies. The schoolteacher Inés called the woman in charge. You’ll be safe there.”
From the bus window, I saw him standing with his handkerchief over his mouth.
* * *
I traveled, in reverse, the same route I had taken years before asleep in Riad Halabí’s truck. Amazing scenery passed before my eyes, but I saw nothing; my gaze was turned inward where I was still blinded by the discovery of love. I knew intuitively that for the rest of my life every time I thought of Riad Halabí, my gratitude would be renewed—and, in fact, it has been so. Nevertheless, I spent those hours trying to shake off the languor of thoughts of love and achieve the clarity of mind needed to review the past and take stock of the possibilities that lay before me. Until that day I had followed other people’s orders, starved for affection, with no future beyond the next day and no fortune but my stories. It took a constant effort of imagination to fill in the parts of my past that were missing. Even my mother was an ephemeral shadow I had to sketch clearly in my mind each day if I was not to lose her in the labyrinths of memory. I recalled every word of the previous night, and realized that the man I had loved for five years as a father, and now desired as a lover, was lost to me. I looked at my hands roughened by domestic chores; I ran them over my face, feeling the shape of the bones; I buried my fingers in my hair and sighed, Enough! I repeated the word aloud: Enough, enough, enough! I took the paper with the name of the boardinghouse for young ladies from my pocketbook, wadded it up in my fist, and threw it out the window.
I arrived in the capital at a moment of turmoil. As I got off the bus with my suitcase, it was apparent that something alarming was happening: police were running down the street hugging the walls or zigzagging between the parked cars, and I could hear shots. When the bus driver asked what was going on, a policeman shouted for us to get away from there, someone was firing a rifle from the building on the corner. Passengers grabbed their bundles and ran in every direction. I started off in a daze, not knowing which way to go: I had recognized nothing about the city.
Outside the terminal, the atmosphere was heavy with tension; people were closing their doors and windows; shopkeepers were lowering the shutters of their storefronts; the streets were emptying. I looked for a taxi, wanting to get out of there as quickly as possible, but none stopped, and as no other transportation was available, I had to keep walking in the new shoes that were torturing my feet. I heard a roar like thunder and when I looked up saw a helicopter circling in the sky like a disoriented fly. People were rushing by on every side. I tried to find out what was happening, but no one knew for sure: a coup d’état, I heard someone say. Though I did not know what the words meant, I kept moving by instinct, aimlessly, the suitcase growing heavier by the minute. Half an hour later, I passed a modest-looking hotel and went in, calculating I had enough money to stay a short while. The next day I began to look for work.
Each morning I set out filled with hope, and in the evening returned exhausted. I read the notices in the newspaper and went to all the places advertising for help, but soon learned that unless I was prepared to be a topless dancer or to work as a bar girl, the only available jobs were for servants, and I had had enough of that. More than once I was on the verge of calling Riad Halabí in desperation, but I refrained. Finally the owner of the hotel, who always sat at the door and had watched my comings and goings, guessed what my problem was and offered to help. He explained that it was very difficult to find work without a letter of recommendation, especially in these days of political upheaval, and he gave me the card of a woman friend of his. As I neared the address, I recognized the neighborhood of the Calle República and my first impulse was to turn around and go back, but then I thought better of it, concluding I had nothing to lose by asking. I never found the building I was looking for, however, because before I got there I was caught up in a street disturbance. A crowd of young people ran by, sweeping me along with them to a small plaza in front of the Church of the Seminarians. Students were brandishing their fists and yelling and shouting slogans, and I was in the middle of it all, without any notion of what was going on. One boy was screaming that the government had sold out to imperialism and betrayed the people; two others were climbing the façade of the church to hang a flag there, while the crowd chanted, No pasarán, no pasarán! Then soldiers came and fought their way through with clubs and gunfire. I started to run, looking for a place where I could wait until both the tumult in the plaza and the rhythm of my breathing died down. I saw that the side door of the church was half-open, and I ran straight to it and slipped inside. I could still hear the noise outside, but it was muted, as if happening in some distant time. I sat down in the nearest pew, suddenly weak from the accumulated exhaustion of the last days. I put my feet on the kneeler and rested my head on the back of the pew. Little by little I began to feel calm; it was peaceful in that dark refuge, surrounded by columns and immutable saints, cloaked in silence and coolness. I thought of Riad Halabí and wished I were beside him as I had been evenings in the last few years, the two of us together in the patio at sunset. I shivered at the memory of love, but immediately shut the thought away. After a while I noticed that the echoes from the street had faded and the light filtering through the stained-glass windows had dimmed. It must be getting late, I thought, and looked around. In a nearby pew I saw a woman so beautiful that for a moment I thought she was a divine apparition. She looked toward me and gave a friendly wave of her hand.
“Did you get caught in that mob, too?” the magnificent stranger asked in a subterranean voice as she came and sat beside me. “The whole city’s in an uproar. They say the students have dug in at the university and troops have been called out. This country’s in a real mess, and our democracy won’t last much longer at this rate.”
I stared at her, struck by her beauty, studying the sleek, whippet-like bone structure, the long slim hands, the dramatic eyes, the classic line of nose and chin. I had the impression that I had known her before—or, at least, dreamed of her. She stared at me, too, with a quizzical smile on her red lips.
“I’ve seen you somewhere . . .”
“I was thinking the same thing.”
“Aren’t you the girl who used to tell the stories? . . . Eva Luna?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you recognize me? It’s me, Melesio.”
“It can’t be. . . . What have you done?”
“Do you know what reincarnation is? It’s like being born again. Just say I’m reincarnated.”
I touched her bare arms, her ivory bracelets, a lock of her hair, still with the feeling I was looking at someone from my own imagination. Melesio, Melesio! And all the good memories of the person I had known from the time I lived with La Señora came rushing back. I saw mascara-staine
d tears rolling slowly down her perfect face. I threw my arms around her and hugged her, timidly at first, and then with unrestrained joy. Melesio. Eva. Oh, Melesio!
“Don’t call me Melesio—my name’s Mimí now.”
“I like it, it suits you.”
“How we’ve changed! No, don’t look at me like that. I’m not gay, I’m a transsexual.”
“A what?”
“I was born a man, but by mistake, and now I’m a woman.”
“How did you do that?”
“The hard way. I always knew that I wasn’t like everyone else, but it was while I was in prison that I decided to undo what nature had done to me. It seems a miracle we met . . . and in a church! I haven’t been in a church for twenty years.” Mimí laughed, drying the last of her tears.
Melesio had been arrested during the Revolt of the Whores, that memorable riot he himself had incited with his unfortunate letter to the Minister of the Interior complaining about police extortion. When they raided the cabaret where he worked, they hadn’t given him time to put on his street clothes but had hauled him down to headquarters still in his fake-pearl-and-diamond bikini, pink ostrich tail, blond wig, and platform sandals. His appearance produced a storm of jeers and insults. He was brutally beaten and put into a cell for forty hours with the most hardened prisoners. Then he was referred to a psychiatrist who was trying out an experimental cure for homosexuality based on what he called “emetic persuasion.” For six days and nights Melesio had been subjected to a series of drugs that left him only half alive, all the while being shown pictures of male athletes, dancers, and models; the doctor claimed his treatment would ensure a conditioned reflex of revulsion toward the male sex. On the sixth day, Melesio, normally a peaceful person, exploded; he leaped on the doctor, began to tear and bite at him like a hyena, and had they not stopped him would have strangled the doctor with his bare hands. The diagnosis was that he had developed a revulsion for the psychiatrist himself, and he was pronounced incurable and sentenced to Santa María, a prison for criminals without hope of probation and for political prisoners who had survived their interrogations. Santa María, built during the dictatorship of El Benefactor and modernized with new fences and cells in the time of the General, had a capacity of three hundred occupants, but more than fifteen hundred men were crammed together there. Melesio was transported in a military airplane to a ghost town that had prospered in times of gold fever but had declined with the oil boom. From there, bound like an animal, he was taken first by truck and then by motor launch to the hell where he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life. One look and he grasped the hopelessness of his situation. The meter-and-a-half-high wall was topped by iron bars; from behind the bars prisoners stared toward the unchanging green of the jungle and the yellow water of the river. Libertad, libertad, the prisoners chanted at the sight of Lieutenant Rodríguez, who had accompanied the new batch of prisoners to carry out his quarterly inspection. The heavy metal gate swung open and they drove to the innermost circle, where they were greeted by howls and jeers. Melesio was taken directly to the building for homosexuals; there guards auctioned him off to inmates with the greatest seniority. All things considered, he was fortunate, because he was assigned to The Harem, where fifty privileged inmates had a building to themselves and were organized for self-protection.
“I had never heard of the Maharishi then, and had no spiritual guidance,” said Mimí, trembling from those memories; she took a card from her purse and showed me a picture of a bearded man in a prophet’s robes, surrounded with symbols of the zodiac. “The only thing that saved me from going mad was knowing that La Señora would not abandon me. You remember her, of course. She’s a loyal friend, and she never rested until she rescued me. She spent months greasing the palms of judges and using her contacts in the government. She even went to the General in person to get me out of there.”
When he left Santa María a year later, Melesio was less than a shadow of the person he once was. Because of hunger, and bouts with malaria, he had lost twenty kilos; a rectal infection forced him to walk stooped over like an old man; and exposure to violence had burst the dam of his emotions: he shifted from tears to hysterical laughter without transition. The day he was freed he did not believe what was happening; he thought it was a trick, that he would be shot in the back “while attempting to escape,” but he resigned himself to his fate, too weak to protest. He was taken back across the river in a launch and then by automobile to the ghost town. He was pushed out of the car—End of the road, faggot—and fell on his knees in the amber dust; he crouched there awaiting the shot that would kill him, but nothing happened. He heard the car driving away, looked up, and saw La Señora, who at first had not recognized him. A chartered plane was waiting, and he was flown directly to a clinic in the capital. For a year, by illegally shipping prostitutes overseas, La Señora had been gathering funds to put at Melesio’s disposal.
“It’s thanks to her that I’m alive,” Mimí told me. “She had to leave the country. If it weren’t for my own mamma, I’d get a passport under my new name and go live with her.”
La Señora had not left by choice, but had fled following the scandal that erupted with the discovery of twenty-five dead girls on a ship bound for Curaçao. I remembered having heard about it on Riad Halabí’s radio a couple of years before, but never dreamed that there was any connection with the large-hipped woman whose home Huberto Naranjo had taken me to. The dead were Dominican and Trinidadian women being smuggled in a sealed compartment that contained air for only twelve hours. Because of a bureaucratic foul-up, the women were locked in the hold of the cargo vessel for two days. The women La Señora enlisted were paid in dollars as they embarked, and promised a good job. That part of the transaction was her responsibility, and she carried it out in good faith. When they reached their destination, however, their documents were confiscated and they were placed in squalid brothels where they found themselves trapped in a web of threats and debts. La Señora was accused of having masterminded this modern Caribbean slave traffic, and barely escaped imprisonment; again powerful friends helped her and, provided with false documents, she slipped away just in time. For a year or two, she had lived on her income, trying not to attract attention, but such a creative mind needed an outlet, and she had ended up establishing a business in sadomasochistic paraphernalia—with such success that orders poured in from all corners of the globe for her male chastity belts, seven-tailed whips, dog collars for humans, and other instruments of degradation.
“It’s getting dark, we’d better go,” said Mimí. “Where do you live?”
“For now, in a hotel. I’ve only been here a few days. I’ve lived all these years in Agua Santa, a town you never heard of.”
“Come and stay with me, I’m by myself.”
“I think I should try to make my own way.”
“Loneliness isn’t good for anyone. Let’s go to my house, and once things calm down you can decide what’s best for you,” said Mimí as with the help of a mirror from her purse she touched up her makeup, which had suffered from the ordeals of the day.
* * *
Mimí’s apartment was near Calle República, within sight of the yellow and red lights. What had once been two hundred meters dedicated to modest vices had become a labyrinth of plastic and neon, a center of hotels, bars, cafés, and brothels of every kind. This was also the neighborhood of the Opera House, the best French restaurant in the city, the Seminary, and a number of residences, for in the capital, as in the rest of the nation, everything was jumbled together willy-nilly. Imposing manors sat next to shanties, and every time the nouveaux riches tried to build an exclusive development, by the end of the year they found themselves ringed by the hovels of the nouveau poor. This topographic democracy extended to other aspects of national life, to the degree that it was sometimes difficult to determine the difference between a Cabinet Minister and his chauffeur: both seemed of the same social b
ackground, wore similar suits, and they treated each other with a familiarity that could be taken as bad manners but actually was based on a strong sense of individual dignity.
“I like this country,” Riad Halabí had once said, sitting in the kitchen of the schoolteacher Inés. “Rich and poor, black and white, a single class, a single people. Everyone thinks he’s king of the mountain, free of social ranks and rules—no one better than anyone else either by birth or money. That’s not how it is where I come from. In my country there are many castes and many codes. A man dies right where he is born.”
“Don’t be deceived by appearances, Riad,” the schoolteacher replied. “This country has as many layers as phyllo dough.”
“Yes, but a man can climb or fall, be a millionaire, President, or beggar. It depends on his effort, his luck . . . or the will of Allah.”
“Have you ever seen a rich Indian? Or a black general or banker?”
The schoolteacher was right, but no one would admit that race had any bearing on the matter; in fact, they boasted of being a uniformly brown people. Immigrants from all parts of the planet were accepted as equals, without prejudice, and after a few generations not even the Chinese could swear they were pure Asian. Only the oligarchy, entrenched from long before the Independence, could be identified by type and skin color; even among them, however, the subject was never mentioned—it would have been an unpardonable breach of manners in a society supposedly proud of its mixed blood. But even allowing for a history of colonization, political bosses, and tyrants, it was the promised land, as Riad Halabí said it was.
“Money, beauty, and talent open doors in this country,” Mimí explained.
“I don’t have either of the first two, but I think I have a God-given talent for telling stories . . .” Actually, I doubted whether there was any practical application for my talent; until then it had served only to add a little color to life, and to allow me to escape to other worlds when reality became too difficult to bear. Storytelling seemed an art that had been passed by in the advances of radio, television, and movies: everything transmitted by airwaves or projected onto a screen was true, I thought, while my tales were almost always a string of lies, and not even I knew where they came from.
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