“Where did you steal those?” Elvira whispered, frightened. “Didn’t I teach you to do right, little bird?”
“I didn’t steal them, abuela. Out in the jungle there is a city of pure gold. The cobblestones of the streets are gold, the roof tiles are all of gold, the carts in the marketplace are gold, and all the benches in the plaza—even people’s teeth are gold! And there children play with colored stones like these.”
“I’m not going to sell them, Eva, I’m going to wear them. That operation is barbaric! First they cut off everything and then they take a piece of your intestine and construct a vagina.”
“And Aravena?”
“He likes me the way I am.”
Elvira and I breathed a dual sigh of relief. I had always hated the idea of that operation, the result seemed nothing more than a mockery of nature—and to Elvira, the idea of mutilating her archangel was a sacrilege.
Very early Sunday morning, when we were all still asleep, the doorbell rang. Elvira got up, grumbling, and opened the door to an unshaven man with a knapsack over one arm, a black machine on his shoulder, and teeth gleaming in a face blackened from dirt, sun, and fatigue. She did not recognize Rolf Carlé. Mimí and I, in our nightgowns, were not far behind. We did not even have to ask: Carlé’s smile was eloquent. He had come to take me away until things had calmed down; he was sure the escape would unleash a maelstrom of unpredictable consequences. He was afraid someone in Agua Santa might have seen me and identified me as the girl who years before had worked in The Pearl of the Orient.
“I told you we should have kept our hands clean of this business!” Mimí wailed, unrecognizable without her makeup.
I dressed and packed a small suitcase. Aravena’s car was waiting outside; he had lent it to Rolf when he went to his house at dawn to deliver several rolls of film, along with the most astounding news of recent years. El Negro had driven the car to our house and then taken Rolf’s jeep, his mission to dispose of it so no one could follow its owner’s trail. The Director of National Television was not used to getting up early, and when Rolf told him why he was there, he thought he must be dreaming. To clear the cobwebs from his head, Aravena had drunk half a glass of whisky and lighted his first cigar of the day; then he sat down to ponder what to do with what had been placed in his hands. Carlé, however, did not have time to wait, and asked for the keys to his car: his job was not finished. Aravena handed him the keys with Mimí’s words: Keep your hands clean, son. I’m already in it up to my neck, Rolf had replied.
“Do you know how to drive, Eva?”
“I took a course, but I haven’t had much practice.”
“I can’t keep my eyes open. There’s no traffic at this hour; drive slowly and take the highway to Los Altos, toward the mountains.”
Rather nervous, I got behind the wheel of that red leather–upholstered yacht, turned the key with unsteady fingers, started the motor, and lurched away from the curb. In a few minutes my friend was asleep, and did not wake until I shook him two hours later to ask which road to take at an intersection. And that is how we arrived at La Colonia on Sunday.
* * *
Burgel and Rupert welcomed us with their characteristic noisy and unrestrained affection and immediately prepared a bath for their nephew, who, in spite of his nap in the car, wore the ravaged expression of an earthquake survivor. Rolf Carlé was reviving in a nirvana of warm water when his two cousins arrived, breathless, overcome with curiosity to see the first woman he had ever brought there. The three of us met in the kitchen, and for a good half-minute stood studying, measuring, and sizing one another up, at first with natural suspicion and then with good will: on the one side, two opulent, blonde, apple-cheeked hausfraus in the embroidered felt skirts, starched blouses, and lace aprons they wore to impress the tourists; on the other, myself, considerably less engaging. The cousins were just as I had pictured them from Rolf’s description, although ten years older; I was enchanted to think that in his eyes they lived in an eternal adolescence. They must have understood at a glance that they were in the presence of a real rival, and shocked that I was so different from them—no doubt they would have been flattered if Rolf had chosen a replica of themselves—but since both were good-natured, they conquered their jealousy and welcomed me like a sister. They ran off to look for their children, then introduced me to their husbands—hulking, genial, and smelling of scented candles. Then they went to help their mother prepare a meal. A little later, sitting at the table surrounded by that wholesome tribe, with a German shepherd pup at my feet and the taste of ham hock and mashed sweet potatoes in my mouth, I felt so remote from Santa María, Huberto Naranjo, and the Universal Matter grenades that when someone turned on the television to watch the news and we saw a military officer recounting details of the escape of nine guerrilla fighters, I had to make an effort to comprehend what he was saying.
Sweating, obviously apprehensive, the prison warden stated that a group of terrorists in helicopters had attacked the facility, armed with bazookas and machine guns, while inside the compound prisoners had incapacitated their guards with grenades. With a pointer he illustrated the layout of the building and described the movements of those implicated in the breakout, from the instant they fled their cells until they disappeared into the jungle. He had no explanation of how the weapons might have come into their hands, somehow getting past the metal detectors; it had happened as if by magic; the grenades simply bloomed in their hands. Saturday, at five in the afternoon, as the detainees were being returned to their cells from the prison latrines, they suddenly brandished these explosives before the guards and threatened to blow up the entire compound if the guards did not surrender. According to the warden—pale from lack of sleep and with a two-day growth of beard—the guards on duty in that sector had resisted courageously, but finally had no alternative but to hand over their weapons. These servants of the nation—at present confined in the Military Hospital under orders not to receive visitors, much less reporters—had suffered minor wounds and had been locked in cells to prevent their sounding the alarm. While this was happening, the detainees’ accomplices had provoked a riot among the prisoners in the yard as squadrons of subversives on the outside cut the electric power lines, blew up the landing strip five kilometers from the prison, blocked the highway to motor vehicles, and stole the patrol launches. They threw mountaineering lines and grapples over the walls, then dropped the rope ladders by which the detainees made their escape, concluded the warden, trembling pointer in hand. He was replaced by an announcer with a pompous voice who affirmed that the escape was obviously the work of international Communists; the peace of the continent lay in the balance; the authorities would not rest until the guilty were apprehended and their accomplices revealed. The newscast ended with a brief announcement: General Tolomeo Rodríguez had been named Commander in Chief of the armed forces.
Between swallows of beer, Uncle Rupert commented that all those guerrillas should be shipped off to Siberia to see how they liked it there; you never heard of anyone scaling the Berlin Wall to the Communist side, it was always to escape from the Reds. And look what they had made out of Cuba! They don’t even have toilet paper there. And don’t give me that crap about health and education and sports, he grumbled, that’s no good at all when a man needs to wipe his ass. A wink from Rolf Carlé warned me it would be best to refrain from comment. Burgel switched channels to watch the nightly episode of the telenovela, having lived in suspense since the previous night when the evil Alejandra stood spying from behind a half-open door, watching Belinda and Luis Alfredo, who were wrapped in a passionate embrace. That’s how I like it, now they’re showing the kisses up close. They used to cheat. The lovers looked at each other, took each other’s hands, and just as they were getting to the good part, they showed us a picture of the moon. I wonder how many moons we had to put up with when we were dying to see what followed. Look at that! Belinda is moving her eyes. I don’t think she’s
blind at all. . . . I was tempted to tell her the convolutions of the story I had rehearsed so many times with Mimí, but I did not; it would have destroyed her illusions. The two cousins and their husbands were hanging on every word, and their children were asleep in big armchairs; dusk was falling, gentle and cool. Rolf took my arm and led me outside.
We walked through the twisting streets of that unbelievable town clinging to a tropical mountainside, a relic from another century, with its spotless houses, lush gardens, shopwindows filled with cuckoo clocks, and its minuscule cemetery with graves in perfectly symmetrical rows—everything gleaming and absurd. We paused at the curve of the highest street to observe the dome of the sky and the lights of La Colonia stretching down the slopes of the mountain like an enormous tapestry. When the sidewalk ended and there was no sound from our footsteps, I had the feeling I was in a world so new that sound had not yet been created. For the first time, I was hearing real silence. Until that moment there had always been noise in my life: often barely perceptible, like the whispers of Zulema’s and Kamal’s ghosts or the murmur of the jungle at dawn; other times thunderous, like the radios in the kitchens of my childhood. I was as elated as when I was making love, or spinning my stories, and I wanted to capture that mute space and guard it forever as a treasure. I inhaled the smell of the pines and surrendered myself to this new delight. When Rolf Carlé spoke, the spell evaporated, and I was left with the same frustration I had felt as a child when a handful of snow turned to water in my hands. But he was telling me what had happened at Santa María, some of which he had filmed, and the rest learned from El Negro.
Saturday afternoon the warden and half the guards were at the brothel in Agua Santa, just as Mimí had said they would be, so drunk that when they heard the explosions at the airport they thought it was New Year’s and did not even put on their pants. While Rolf Carlé was approaching the island in a dugout, his camera equipment concealed under a layer of palm leaves, Comandante Rogelio and his men in their stolen uniforms were nearing the main gate from the river in a launch commandeered from guards at the dock, sirens blaring like the finale of a circus act. In the absence of their superiors, no one had stopped the party of men, because they looked like high-ranking officers. At that moment the only meal of the day was being distributed to the guerrillas in their cells, through a hole in the metal doors. One of the prisoners began to complain of terrible stomach pains—I’m dying, help, I’ve been poisoned—and from their cells his compañeros immediately joined in the uproar: Murderers! Murderers! They’re killing us! Two guards went in to calm the stricken man, and found him waiting with a grenade in each hand and such fierce determination in his eyes that they did not dare breathe. Comandante Rogelio had freed his compañeros and their accomplices in the kitchen without firing a single shot, without violence and without haste, and in the same commandeered launch transported them to the opposite bank, where they plunged into the jungle, led by the Indians. Rolf had filmed everything with a telephoto lens and then drifted downriver to where El Negro was waiting. Before the military had time to organize a roadblock or begin the manhunt, the two men were roaring at top speed toward the capital.
“I’m happy they succeeded, but I don’t know what good the film is going to do them if everything’s censored.”
“We’ll run it,” he said.
“You know what kind of democracy this is, Rolf. They use the excuse they’re fighting Communism, but there’s really no more freedom than we had in the General’s time.”
“If they censor this news, the way they did with the slaughter in the Operations Center, we’re going to tell the real story in the next telenovela.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your drama is scheduled to air as soon as that pap about the blind girl and the millionaire is over. You have to write the guerrilla struggle and the attack on Santa María into your script. I have a suitcase full of film on the guerrillas. There’s a lot of it you can use.”
“You’ll never get away with it . . .”
“An election is coming up in three weeks. The next President will want to give the impression of liberalism and will go easy on censorship. Anyway, we can always claim that it’s only fiction, and since the telenovela is much more popular than the newscast, the whole country will know what happened at Santa María.”
“What about me? The police will ask how I knew about it.”
“They won’t lay a finger on you—that would be the same as admitting that what you’ve written is true,” Rolf Carlé replied. “And, speaking of stories,” he said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about your story of the girl who sold a past to a weary warrior . . .”
“Are you still mulling that over? I can see you’re a man of slow reactions.”
* * *
The Presidential elections took place in orderly fashion and with good feeling, as if the exercise of democratic rights was of long standing and not the fairly recent miracle it was. The opposition candidate won, as Aravena, whose political acumen had sharpened rather than diminished with age, had predicted. Shortly afterward, Alejandra died in an automobile accident and Belinda recovered her sight and was married—enveloped in clouds of white tulle and crowned with rhinestones and wax orange blossoms—to her suitor Martínez de la Roca. The country breathed a deep sigh of relief; it had been a severe test of patience to endure the misfortunes of those three day after day for nearly a year. The National Television, however, gave their patient viewers no respite, but immediately premiered my drama, which in a fit of sentimentality I had called Bolero, as homage to the songs that had nurtured my girlhood hours and served as a basis for so many of my stories. The public was thrown off balance in the first episode, and never recovered from their daze during the episodes that followed. I doubt that anyone understood that eccentric story, habituated as they were to jealousy, scorn, ambition, or at least virginity, but none of these appeared on their screens; and they went off to bed every night with their heads spinning from clashes of snakebitten Indians, embalmers in wheelchairs, teachers hanged by their students, Ministers of State defecating in bishop’s plush chairs, and other atrocities that would not bear logical analysis and that defied all laws of the commercial television romance. In spite of the confusion it produced, Bolero caught on, and within a short time some husbands were coming home from work in time to watch the day’s episode. The government warned señor Aravena, entrenched in his post by reason of prestige—and the guile befitting an old fox—that it was his duty to uphold standards of morality, good conduct, and patriotism. As a result, I had to omit several of La Señora’s bawdy activities, and to muddy the origins of the Revolt of the Whores, but everything else survived nearly intact. Mimí had an important role, playing herself so successfully that she became the most popular actress in the company. The uncertainty about her sex added to her fame; anyone seeing her found it difficult to believe that she had once been a man, or, even more, that she was still masculine in some details of her anatomy. There were those who attributed her triumph to her love affair with the National Television’s director, but as neither of them made the slightest effort to deny the rumor, the gossip died a natural death.
I was writing a new episode each day, totally immersed in the world I was creating with the all-encompassing power of words, transformed into a multifaceted being, reproduced to infinity, seeing my own reflection in multiple mirrors, living countless lives, speaking with many voices. The characters became so real that they invaded the house, all together, without respect for the chronology of the story, the living with the dead and each in every phase of his or her life, so that while Consuelo-the-child was prying open the beaks of chickens, a naked Consuelo-the-woman was letting down her hair to console a dying man; Huberto Naranjo wandered about the living room in short pants, conning the gullible with tailless fish, then suddenly materialized on the second floor with the mud of war on his comandante’s boots; my madrina went sashaying through the h
ouse, swinging her hips as she had in her best years, and met herself, toothless and with a seam across her throat, praying on the terrace before a hair from the Pope’s head. Their presence in the house upset Elvira’s routine; she spent much of her time arguing with them and cleaning up the chaos of hurricane they left in passing. Oh, little bird, get these lunatics out of my kitchen, I’m weary of chasing after them with my broom, she complained; but when she saw them at night, fulfilling their roles on the television screen, she would sigh with pride. In the end, she considered them all members of her family.
* * *
Twelve days before we began to shoot the episodes involving the guerrillas, I received a communication from the Ministry of Defense. I had no idea why I was being summoned to the office rather than picked up by agents of the Political Police in one of their unmistakable black automobiles, but I said nothing to Mimí or my abuela, not wanting to frighten them. Nor could I warn Rolf, who was in Paris filming the first negotiations on the Vietnam peace. I had been expecting this bad news ever since months before I had shaped the grenades of Universal Matter, and I was actually relieved to confront it once and for all and be rid of the vague uneasiness that kept prickling my skin like a rash. I put the cover on my typewriter, straightened my papers, and dressed, about as happy as someone trying on her shroud. I twisted my hair into a bun at my neck and left the house, waving a hand in farewell to the spirits I left behind. I reached the Ministry, went up the double staircase of marble, walked through the bronze doors protected by guards in plumed caps, and showed my documents to a doorkeeper. A soldier led me down a carpeted hallway and through a door embossed with the national seal; I found myself in a room adorned with rich drapery and crystal chandeliers. In a stained-glass window Christopher Columbus was immortalized with one foot on the coast of America and the other still in his dory. Then, behind a mahogany desk, I saw General Tolomeo Rodríguez. His commanding figure was outlined against the exotic flora of the New World and the boot of the conquistador. I recognized him immediately by the sudden vertigo that stopped me short, even before I could distinguish his feline eyes, expressive hands, and perfect teeth. He rose, greeted me with his slightly ostentatious courtesy, and offered me a seat in one of the armchairs. He took a chair beside me and asked his secretary to bring coffee.
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