Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  6

  In my time there lived a sad young man named Ricardo Ramírez who once loved most unfortunately in the city of Guadalajara. He happened to be a doctoral candidate in the patriotic but unremunerative department of folklore. Wishing at all hazards to avoid glimpsing his former sweetheart’s beautiful, treacherous face, he wrote his favorite aunt, who lived in Veracruz, and asked whether he could board with her awhile. Since his dissertation, in setting out to identify the “autonomous” and “universal” elements of Mexican legends, laid its snares conveniently wide, anywhere he cared to go would serve; all he required were stories, the stranger the better. Hence the bony night-wanderer who bites that lady who foolishly fell asleep with her window open, the murder-carcass whose wristbones sway toward and away from its neck-stump as it begs in the only way it can: Make me whole!, the flaming ghost of the young bride whose jealous mother-in-law burned her to death once upon a time, these and other macabre jewels Ricardo strung on wires of theory, and however he arranged them, they appeared as shiny as cars in the rain. A cocky sailor of archives, prone especially to planting his standard on the most ancient islands of colonial writing (which nowadays keep shrinking evermore within the rectangular oceans of silvery conservation paper), he knew what he sought, and found exactly that, the fascicles dwindling like melting ice-shards, verso words showing through, blots spreading and darkening, so that our hero could interpolate whatever he liked. If his method lacked rigor, so much the better for Ricardo and his easygoing professors. Even before Adela broke his heart, the grotesque, lurid and erotic had faithfully distracted him from counterpart aspects of his own half-lived life. Turning pages of worm-lace, the signatures splitting apart where there once had been a binding, he quarried legends from the reign of Carolus III (whose second seal used to get affixed for a fee of twelve reales), explicated a broken stone jaguar head, collected old cabinet cards of Maximilian in uniform and visited the Temple of the Moon, which turned out to be another dark old pyramid in the center of town, with a fence around it. Had Adela remained faithful, Ricardo might have dreamed out his life in his harmless, feeble fashion, turning dust into paper so that it could become dust again. It is not for me to say that he neglected her. But so she told the taxi driver who seduced her. As might have been expected, Ricardo now collected folktales about traitorous women.

  Although he could not go so far as to claim a uniquely Mexican provenance for that topic (since prior to Adela he had been jilted by a buxom exchange student from Madrid), Ricardo followed the line that the nation’s founding legend could only be the oft-told parable of La Malinche, the indigenous mistress of Cortés—because, you see, she interpreted for the conqueror with politic eloquence, embellishing his false promises and magnifying his threats, even assisting at the torture-interrogations of caciques who might have known the whereabouts of more crocodile-textured golden bracelets studded with silver flower-petaled knobs and spiral-bellied monkey figures (most such treasures, it turned out, had already been lost or melted down by the time Mexico fell); worst of all, Malinche betrayed all plots against the Spaniards, so that through her, all too many would-be liberators met destruction, while more forsook their hopes. Therefore, Ricardo hated Malinche! The records indicate that she kept house for Cortés, and bore him a son. He then married her off to a drunk. Upon meeting her Mayan relations, who had originally enslaved her, she proudly or desperately informed them that she would rather serve her husband and Cortés than anything else in the world. For that service she was rewarded about as well as any other Mexican—which Ricardo, of course, found exquisitely fitting; yes, he was bitter, although, being delicately handsome, with skin the color of creamy coffee, he might yet love and be loved again, and then why wouldn’t he think better of the world? As for Malinche, her emotions are lost to us. Once she died, her ghost became known as La Llorona, the longhaired one who weeps over her lost children. Ricardo grew polemical on this subject. (Do not blame him too much for his cruelty; his nights and days were death.) At that time Malinche had new defenders, the feminist syncretists, who argued that whatever harm she did her own kind was the fault of compulsion, that she was an instrument of progress—without her, the authorities might still be cutting people’s hearts out with obsidian knives, instead of working them to death in the silver mines—and, most importantly, that her docile or ambitious miscegenations helped found the modern Mexican race. To this, Ricardo asserted, in fiery counterparagraphs, that La Malinche was, in fact, evil to the bone, her suffering therefore justified, her very name a byword for the dirtiest whoredom. Just as certain young women in church know how to pray to good advantage, kneeling with their arms outstretched on the prie-dieu which seems to draw in their hourglass waists still narrower, so Malinche, at least in Ricardo’s opinion, made effective show of her submission, as a result of which, again in his opinion, she acquired culpability. Adela had been just that way. Whenever Ricardo took her on a holiday, she did just as he said—but then it became his fault when it rained. Eventually her whole life was his fault. Likewise, Malinche ruined Mexico.— While Ricardo was engrossed in excoriating the dead woman in such terms as gave him sadistic gratification, he received a reply from his aunt, welcoming his speedy arrival in Veracruz. Knowing somewhat of his field of inquiry, the old lady reminded him of what she was sure that he already knew, that in Veracruz could be heard any number of tales about La Llorona. So he fled to that city where almond trees come up out of the sidewalk and yellow-green coconuts cluster in the armpits of palms.

  Aunt Bertha had prepared his favorite dish: chicken with green sauce.— You look unwell, she said.

  That’s Adela’s fault.

  So I’ve heard. That stinking little puta! I’ve been praying for you.

  Thank you, aunt. And how’s your health?

  Oh, the same. I know some fine girls your age. Would you like me to introduce you?

  Never mind, aunt. I’m busy with my research.

  I know a young girl who’s quite interested in La Llorona. An extremely pretty young girl, although her blondeness does come out of a bottle. Her mama says she’s never had a boyfriend, which is practically a miracle, Ricardo; nowadays you wouldn’t believe the sluts in this neighborhood. There are exceptions, thank the saints! The one I’m talking about keeps her skirt clean. I think you’d like her, because she watches paranormal episodes on the television. And she lives right around the corner.

  Thank you, aunt. Maybe when I feel better. I think I’ll lie down now.

  Of course you’ve had a very long trip. How many hours was it?

  Well, fourteen, more or less. Thank you for dinner, aunt.

  You’re sure you won’t have any more? No? Then you must be unwell! I’ll pray for you. By the way, do you remember that bruja I go to, Doña Esperanza? She always asks after you. I informed her about Adela, of course, and she said she was going to do something about her. She promised me that within a month, or six months at the most, that bitch’s womb is going to dry up.

  Thank you, aunt. I’ll see you in the morning.

  At dawn, anxious to escape his dear aunt’s ministrations, the young man took a bus to the river, and from there a taxi to the root-wrapped arches of the Casa de Cortés, where everything was the same tan, the open chamber half strangled by roots which flowed across the floor like a great lady’s dress. For some reason this reminded him of traitorous Adela, and he ground his fingernails into his palms. Ricardo had last come here while his mother was still alive. He had half forgotten the place, and found himself now strangely impressed by the long drapings of that crepe dress of roots which flowed down the broken walls from the green-leafed sky, white light shining in between them like unearthly pleats. In one coral-studded corner hung shards of pale blue plaster which the taxi driver said was only twelve years old and the tour guide proudly asserted to be original. There was folklore for you! Through this narrow-bricked arch, Malinche must have passed with her lord. Ricardo touched it. He g
azed up into a great tree-branch. Slowly he wandered through Cortés’s roofless house, passing the arch whose curve was outlined with many narrow bricks stood on end. He approached another corner which was grown with roots as flat and wide as the abandoned clothes of pollos* crushed into the dirt. The shade of these ceiba trees refreshed him, but the slow strangulation which their roots were accomplishing horrified him.

  Strange to say, although he had always thrived in this climate, the humidity now wearied Ricardo, and before noon he decided to return to Aunt Bertha’s to lie down. He caught a taxi to the bus. Perhaps he was getting ill. Gazing dully out the bus window, he saw from behind a narrow-waisted woman with a white ribbon in her long black hair, walking down the road, her skirt darkly slit just above the ankle. In spite of his rage against women, he felt desire. Resolutely he closed his eyes, only to be afflicted by an afterimage of roots and flagstones both the color of the reddish dirt.

  All the way back to Veracruz, Adela haunted him. How could he make that she-devil weep with remorse? Someday she would come groveling to him, and he would say: Malinche. No doubt he ought to apply to the university for a travel grant; it would profit his dissertation to visit that house in Coyoacán where Malinche once lived with Cortés, in company with the three daughters of the murdered Moctezuma; there she gave birth to the conqueror’s son Martín just before the arrival of his Spanish wife, who soon died in that house with black bruises around her throat. Had Cortés done that, or someone else? Ricardo would have liked to see Malinche’s face on the night the wife appeared! That way he could imagine Adela’s expression in that same situation. Better yet, if he could drink in Malinche’s pain on that afternoon when, somewhere near Orizaba, Cortés married her off to Juan Xaramillo de Salvatierra, who as I have said was intoxicated while uttering his vows, then history would finally serve his purpose! His headache was getting worse. He longed to kill Adela, but only if he wouldn’t get caught. He could not decide whether his forehead was hot or cold.

  Before they had returned to Veracruz, Malinche was delivered of her new husband’s offspring, a daughter named María, who at age sixteen would be kidnapped and forcibly married by the Viceroy’s nephew. Cortés had long since carried away Martín to Spain, to legitimize him at court. No one knows whether Malinche died of plague, or heartbreak, or whether Juan Xaramillo had her put out of the way, in order to get himself a fresher wife. In any case, Malinche, the so-called Mexican Eve, whom the Tlaxcalans identified with a jade-skirted volcano goddess; and who also apparently incarnated or represented Malinalxochitl, Wild Grass Flower, the woman who founded the city of Malinalco and became a deity, was now charged with being Adela as well; and Ricardo most definitely had business with that female; he would recall her to punishment, just as a domineering little boy pulls his mother back by her pink apronstring.

  When he had implored Adela to have hope for them both and to believe that they could live together, she paused, then evenly informed him that she was considering and reconsidering; and when he inquired how long it might take her to reconsider, she informed him that she had no idea and therefore declined to discuss the matter, a proceeding which, she easily admitted, might not be entirely fair, but she happened to be annoyed by other worries, such as how to pay for her car. Ricardo proposed to hope and assume that he and Adela would love each other always, to which she indifferently assented, after which, since she said no more, he began to feel ever more anxious and sick; and the longer she avoided the subject, the more hurt he became. Adela presently explained that of course she loved him; the reasons for her coolness had nothing to do with love.— How true! he bitterly thought. Nothing to do with love!— It was not until she left him three months later that he began to hate her.

  Aunt Bertha was in her room snoring. Ricardo opened one of his Veracruzan books of legends. In the engraving, a pair of Spaniards scourged an Indian tied to a post. Closing his tired eyes, he seemed to see the narrow-waisted woman walking down the road again, but this time she was dressed in dark green. What had she actually been wearing? It had not been green. Her long hair was as black as the zócalo’s palm trees at night, when the white bell tower rises and narrows into the purple sky. What made her memory so alluring? When he closed his eyes, seeking to remember Adela, he could see her turning toward him, commencing her half-smile, but then she faded away.

  Ignoring his headache, he sat in the back yard beneath a palm tree, footnoting various known correspondences between Malinche and the Woman-Serpent called Cihuacoatal, whose naked, decapitated, cast down and violated stone semblance appears in many ancient tableaux; she is the original one who weeps for her children by night, and La Llorona may well be the same entity, renamed by the people in order to gain toleration from the Church. So he drew his analogies tight, and began to hope that the university would award him high honors. But presently, although he strove to fight it off by means of rage, he began to feel still more unwell, his desires and other feelings now insinuating themselves like those new tree-arms slowly cracking apart the threshold of the Casa de Cortés. The pressure at his temples and in the small of his back felt ambiguous; he could not decide whether a woman’s fingers were massaging him, pushing the flesh inward, or whether he might simply be bloating. Fluid would soon burst out of his skin, or else the bone would fall away beneath the woman’s fingers; either way, it might not be so unpleasant because he felt warm and almost still, as if he were riding that single wide breaker on the wide sea, that wave a trifle redder and greener than ultramarine, toward that hill called the Indian’s Headdress where there used to be many palms; a man bought it and cut some of them down when his mother was still alive; and Ricardo stared bewildered along the avenida of body shops, automobile glass, yellow walls, laundromats, strip malls, trucks and bricks and gratings, sunshine, concrete, and the shaded military zone; while in his eyes the blood vessels glowed as brightly as the doorway of that pharmacy with ever so many colored packages on the shelves.

  He lay down. When he woke up, his face was covered with mosquitoes. He crushed the creatures and sat up with a groan. Then he summarized his six conclusions about the Malinche Dance. This would punish Adela. His hateful memories of her resembled arches standing all alone in a plain of hot mud and dust.

  Aunt Bertha was making tortillas. He thanked her. Presently it was night, and he could lie down again.

  When he awoke, with his dream still alive in his mind, like a fresh-plucked flower in a vase, he was astonished at how happy he felt. He would have wished to describe his feelings to his aunt, but, like so many young men, he imagined that opening his heart to an old woman who had known him as a child might be humiliating. So he kept to himself. In his notebook he wrote: Malinche—syncretism. Imperialism of the vampire. Treachery of the feminine.

  His aunt had another girl for him, a pious virgin whose skirts were so clean they squeaked, so he fled to the municipal archives, sailing over pages of writing which were as shallow and wide-spaced as sea-waves. By the time he reached the fourth signature seal, his forehead began to ache. Excellent Señor: In cavilda celebration on the twenty-third of the present month, being present in the office of the Lord Governor, in which you were pleased to approve for the third and fourth deputies of this . . . innumerable unfortunate wretches who . . . my task will be to go within five or six months to distribute salt, the smell of dust and mildew strengthening, until he began to cough. When would he cease to hate Adela? The figure of a veiled woman hath oftimes been seen, and that long tall dress of greenish-grey tree-roots with its train of dusty tendrils, what did it mean? Her dress is green, like unto a serpent’s hue. More syncretism, so it seemed. This serpent-woman sounded quite repulsive. If she turned out to be an old avatar of Malinche’s, that would serve Adela right. Ricardo wondered whether his aunt knew this legend, which seemed to have blotted a century and more of narrow, wavering shards of yellow-brown paper in which dark chocolate script seemed immersed just below the surface. The said four thousand pes
os within the date of this writing . . . Before me the aforesaid witness and scribe deposited the following . . . jade in his mouth. Since the swearings and reasons in this writing are the most efficacious and certain, I record the place, in hopes of saving others from being devoured by that she-demon who . . . This tribunal which God hath opened for our benefit . . . the helmsman Miguel Minjárez, whose corpse hath been proven as the nucleus of this latest plague, for three green serpents issued from his mouth when he was burned. The ill-omened residence in which these young men are invariably discovered . . . Oferta de 4,000. Pesos hecha por Don José Gil de Partearroyo para libertarse de cargos cobcejiles . . . jade . . . to punish the English pirates . . . a mulata clad in green.

  7

  Insinuating his fingers between the ancient pages which were melting together, Ricardo found loose brittle sheets, their edges all rough, their clotted old mucilage shining like wax; and on the second of these, above a signature which resembled two sliced apples separated by a violin, was a crude map of the so-called cursed house and its environs. Ricardo recognized Avenida Nicolás Bravo. Returning the old ledger, he went out for ice cream, watched girls, returned to Aunt Bertha’s, then, being informed that the pious virgin and her mother had been invited for supper, rushed down by the zócalo, wishing murder to Adela; so there sat our slender young man with his elbows on his wide-apart knees, reading legends about La Llorona on the steps outside the doorway of the cybercafé where the crucifix guarded the dusty computer and the digital print of Jesus curled on the wall. Skipping supper, for which he would surely do penance (he loved his aunt), he set out for Avenida Nicolás Bravo, just in case it might be ghostly, and then, not knowing what else to do, he sat down in the playground, watching a little girl in a rainbow dress toddling very cautiously to her father who pretended to be a monster. The child screamed, then giggled. Remembering that he had begged Adela to have a child with him, Ricardo felt sick with grief and rage. Just then an old mestiza beggar humbled herself before his feet. For pity he gave her a hundred pesos. Studying him like some shrewd procuress, she asked: Señor, are you looking for someone?