Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  He hesitated. But then he found that although he could not confide in his aunt, it came easy to describe the green-clad lady to this stranger, all the more readily since he disbelieved in her. Anything for folklore’s sake!

  My God, señor, do you mean to kill yourself? Please be careful; that’s La Llorona!

  Tolerantly Ricardo said: Please tell me what you know.

  The woman said: There’s a story . . .

  Yes, please do tell me.

  Señor, in that building she . . . I know a way in. When I need to go to the toilet.

  Oh, yes, he said. That way. Thank you; I see.

  But the most evil house is like a castle, she explained. Over there on Hidalgo and Callejón California, where she comes out.

  Now Ricardo began to feel quite happy and interested. Perhaps he might even get a chapter out of this.

  As soon as the old woman left him alone he approached the rectangular ancient building there on Avenida Nicolás Bravo, not the castle but the place whose railingstone had blackened with grime and mold, while the casements gaped blackly open, the ancient shutters being caught in a fossilized tremble; and he saw trees growing inside, while outside a serene cherubic face, doubly winged, remarked him blandly from above one arch; the other arches were missing. How old were those wooden doors? Rocks and boards blocked the doorway, and behind them a rotten railing from the head of a vast old bed. Ricardo peered in, and a moth brushed his cheek with the hem of its tiny skirt. The stench of mildew rushed out. He looked over his shoulder; nobody was in sight. So he pushed open a window, and a lizard-shaped patch of darkness greeted him. Locking his palms upon the windowsill, he leaped and pulled himself up into the ruin.

  The first thing he spied was considerably farther within: a dead dark doorway with a wooden grating over it. The floor was nicely tiled but almost impossible to distinguish. He decided to return with a flashlight.

  The place was more sad than eerie at first, but it offered him an intriguing strangeness, as if the scent of copal were half-hiding the vulgar odor of death. It was so quiet that he could almost hear the mold growing on the walls.

  His aunt was waiting up for him.— Chasing girls again? she roguishly inquired.

  8

  Adela used to say: I feel your desperation, and it scares me.— She was never happy, and her voice was flat. But, oh, those tender little lips of hers, he couldn’t get enough of them! They were like fresh new leaves. He remembered how he used to lie next to her at night and wait for her to touch him, because he no longer dared to touch her.

  9

  The next time he came to the ghost houses, on a hot Sunday afternoon beneath a crescent moon, there was an old woman selling flowers, with long white hair around her face and behind her the cheerful glow of the toy skulls she peddled to children. She reminded him of someone.

  Just as some of these abandoned houses’ shutters bore shards of faded paint, so his explorations contained older motive-markings which he could not read. Pulling himself up into another high-floored ruin, one wall of which had been broken open long ago, he encountered rubbish, the stench of excrement, scrap wood and darkness. Of course the city’s homeless fugitives would have grubbed away any jade beads lying here. A succulent, well rooted in the rotten wood, had grown out through the window and rose up higher than he could see. In another house, fig trees had nuzzled their way through the roof. Choking on dust and mildew, he began to feel a special secret warmth upon his forehead, as if a beautiful woman were lovingly urinating on him. It descended the back of his neck and enriched the backs of his hands. For a long time he could not understand what it was. Then his ears began to ring, and he remembered that he was febrile.

  Staggering out of there, he next investigated the so-called “castle” on Hidalgo and Callejón California. It was an archway full of sky.

  10

  In the morning the bright red shards of brick and the scraps of blue-grey tile gave the castle a mellow appearance in contradistinction to evening when the sky was so yellow and clean over its flat-toothed parapet. The walls were cheerfully graffiti’d in red and yellow, and broken casements leaned up against the partially bricked doorways. Standing on the street, Ricardo, moderately feverish, looked around him, and once again found himself safely alone, aside from the pregnant woman who was dancing to music on the street corner, clutching a small child who lay sleeping across her belly-bulge. Behind the wide curling railing of stone, an open room invited him, so he clambered in, and found lanky dark vines growing down from the high ceiling as at Cortés’s house. The ceiling was ribbed with what seemed to be narrow struts of iron. The wall bore faded patches of blue like the Tang Dynasty tombs. There was a yellow motor oil bottle and a foul smell. It would have felt perfect to close his eyes, but Ricardo proceeded into the next room, which was fresh with pure blue sky in its broken skylight, and floral frescoes on the wall, partially overpainted with graffiti. The deeper in he went, the better he forgot Adela and the more he longed to unite himself with the genius of this place. He entered the third room, and found the burned skeleton of a sofa grinning with all its springs. Beyond this lay a bathroom whose tub was full of ashes. Ricardo sank his arms into this, and immediately found a jade bead carved in the semblance of a grinning woman.

  In a niche at the far end of the room stood a toilet like a low altar. The wall behind it had been torn open, and from the wall of the adjacent alley, water trickled down into the toilet bowl, never filling it. He thought to himself: If she came into my arms . . .

  Then the trickling sound became a giggle, and the woman in green appeared, as he had hoped that she would, this perfect woman for him to love, as slender and radiant as when she had stood at Cortés’s right hand. Although she must have been someone from the south, the blue direction, realm of vegetable matter, her lips were cochineal-red like an Aztec prostitute’s teeth. His sudden lust resembled the brass band whose roarings and blarings prevent anyone within two blocks of the zócalo from sleeping before dawn.

  She regarded him with much the same unwinking interest as does a lizard the shiny brown beetle which gambols in reach of its jaws; and Ricardo, precisely because he blamed women for his failures, was susceptible under such circumstances as these to even the most impersonal feminine attention. As he approached her, she began to lick her dark lips. Her unwholesome breath played coolly over his face. Unable to control his desire, he thrust the jade bead into her mouth, and at once she became a dead object, with her eyes closed and her mouth an ovoid cave of darkness, her breasts hard and yellow, and a great clay headdress on her forehead, with many vines or serpents rising out of it. Her earrings were the size of cartwheels, and the knurled stone collar around her neck could have moored the largest ship.

  Jade beads began to spew from her vulva. He filled up his pockets, then fled.

  11

  You’ve grown lucky, said his Aunt Bertha in satisfaction. Which girl gave you those, or is it a secret?

  It’s no secret, aunt. I’ve met La Llorona.

  Child, that’s very dangerous.

  Tell me, aunt. How can I get a woman to love me?— And because he asked her this with desperate sincerity, he felt no embarrassment.

  My boy, how could a woman not love you? I see girls turning their eyes on you when you go down the street, and you reject them all; you deny that it happened—

  What do they want to do?

  To take care of you, my child! To cook for you and comfort you in their arms.

  But I’m not just a child! Maybe you see them that way because that’s how you see me. But I’m not, I’m not!

  12

  Before she left him absolutely, Adela, who was herself as grave and lovely as Doña Marina, still used to make love with him on unexpected occasions, and whenever this happened Ricardo would whisper: I’m so grateful, in an ever more feeble and passive voice, and Adela, riding on top of him, would stop and raise h
er eyebrows. Ricardo said: You can do anything you want to me, even cut me into pieces; what I want for you to do is to cut me into pieces!— Then Adela grew angry and disgusted. But this was truly what the young man wished for; that way he escaped the lonely agony of being the one she no longer cared for. Everything was up to her now; that was best; he would accept anything.

  After she left him, of course, he rejected everything, despising her; he became as active as a rat.

  13

  The next time he pulled himself into the “castle,” early on a cloud-pearled morning, just as the cars began to honk, encouraging the birds to further exertions according to their various aptitudes and interests, while men mopped the café-alleys, and the sweetly sulphurous sea-smell of Veracruz illumined him with fever or happiness, she was absent, so Ricardo returned to the ghost house on Avenida Nicolás Bravo, and beyond the dark, wooden-gratinged doorway found a heap of broken clay heads, whose thick clay lips the dead potter had rolled on around their oval mouths. Suddenly the impulse to count them overcame him, he could not have said why; but before he had half finished he felt the icy prickle of creepiness between his shoulderblades, and when he turned around, there was La Llorona, paler than he remembered, close enough to touch, with her long hair scarcely darker than her green lips. At once he thrilled into glorious desperation and asked her: Do you love me?

  Of course. And after you, the next one and the next.

  In his confusion he could not determine whether she was the one who would help him, and cut him into little pieces, or the one who should be weeping with remorse for helping the wicked Cortés. Presently she opened her arms. On fire with fever, he knelt down before her on those shards of clay, and slowly, slowly in the mildewed darkness her cold fingers began to play with his hair. He expected to be devoured like the men before him—all the more so, since he had run away with her jade. But once they had satisfied each other three times she sent him silently away, and when he descended back into the sunlight this very young man who thought to have hardened himself against women longed to worship all the girls in red high-heeled boots whom he passed on the way home to his Aunt Bertha’s house. And that night when he lay down to rest he remembered what until now he had not even perceived seeing on that bus ride from Guadalajara: a young woman, her ripe buttocks practically bursting out of her shorts, walking slowly down the side of the jungle road, half-smiling in the drizzle, gazing for an eyeblink at him. At this recollection he masturbated furiously.

  14

  In contradistinction to the chronicles of her time, legend made out Malinche to be a promiscuous slut; and some said, Ricardo maliciously among them, that for this very cause Cortés married her off to Juan Xaramillo de Salvatierra; but now that Ricardo could no longer hate women, excepting of course Adela, whom he proposed to stop remembering if only she could be buried deep, instinctual passion enthralled him, for La Llorona, being immortal, was still fresher than the fringed arches of banana leaves: never satisfied, therefore everloving. The myriads whom she had devoured, their own preciousness extracted and then disregarded, rotted for very joy, a doom which Ricardo yearned to endure. Only the earth prevented him from pressing his groin against hers—for he was not yet dead, belonging but incompletely to her. Sometimes when he lay awake at his aunt’s house, he whispered to himself: Why won’t she cut me into pieces?

  But while he remained alive with her in that mildewed old house on Avenida Nicolás Bravo, he was happier than he had ever been; rightly or wrongly he believed that because he had become conscious of love and of himself (grand certainties for which we should excuse him), he pleased her more than at least some of her other victims. Sometimes he vomited and frequently he felt dizzy, but whatever disease possessed him declined to devour him just then. So happily addicted to her green vulva, and therefore, as he would have said, in love with her, he daily strode ever handsomer and bolder to his aunt, who remarked that life was finally bestowing on him what he deserved; you may be sure that she had done everything required to forget that this sweetheart was La Llorona, to whom some Veracruzanos attribute a ghastly horse’s head, and whose kiss all say is fatal. Indeed, one day he entered her foul old house only to find some previously unsuspected other lover lying on his side with his head hidden behind his elbows while vultures minced through the puddle of vomit and blood and cadaveric fluid around his torso. La Llorona squatted over him, carefully inserting a jade bead between his teeth.

  Although he said nothing, Ricardo felt jealous. Why wouldn’t she consummate their marriage? For some days afterward they met in the “castle,” until the authorities had removed his rival’s corpse. He began to understand that were she to spare him, she must feed on others in the meantime. They altered the time of their rendezvous to dusk, because it was easier for her to lure in others by day. Thinking about her, he pined away every afternoon and sometimes began weeping; then as evening drew near he would rise up out of bed and look happier. His aunt began to wonder whether he might be bewitched, perhaps even by Adela, who must have turned away the bruja’s spell, but since he was not wasting away, and since, moreover, he had become kinder and more patient, even listening to her long stories about his mother, Aunt Bertha continued to hope that all was well. In truth he found it heavenly to give himself to La Llorona. Unlike Adela, she never turned away from his need. The next time that sweet fever redescended from the ceiling of his aunt’s house to whistle in his ears like a harbor wind, warming his forehead and the backs of his hands, he found himself thinking: I’m doing it all for her, so that I can be her and she can be me; I’ll heal her and make her happy.— But what this meant was obscure even to him, and he sank deeper and deeper into his bed, listening to a single mosquito. His aunt beseeched him to eat more; he was studying too hard, she said, reminding him, as she frequently did, of the ominous career of his great-uncle’s great-great-grandfather Don Roberto, who while preparing his illustrated dictionary of trabucos, percussion guns, blunderbusses and other weapons of the conquistadors had strained his mind so perilously in the mildewed reading room of those selfsame Archives of the Ayuntamiento de Veracruz (in particular, he grew fixated on the question of why some words remain untouched, others become outlined in dark brown, and the rest vanish away) that he commenced to be haunted by a gaunt brown manuscript demon whom only the thrice-uttered name of Saint Santiago would keep at bay, until finally not even this availed, and the poor man was found dead one night with his face resembling a royal seal poxed by worms; but at this juncture, kissing her sweet old hand and thanking her for her consideration, her nephew now hurried out to drink an unaccustomed cocktail at the zócalo, watching the double rows of dark green soldiers flipping their scarlet drums, clashing their drumsticks and blowing their trumpets, while passersby lifted up their children; then came the Mexican national anthem as a half-dozen of Veracruz’s bravest carried the long limp flag to bed, while Ricardo sat playing with the engagement ring in his pocket.

  15

  La Llorona stood with her hands on her hips, turning her pale face toward him, while in a puddle of dark fluid her latest lover lay glossy and swollen like a roasted chicken, ants all over him, a great leaf on his face, his knees drawn partway in, his fists closed like a baby’s. She began to laugh.— And seeing this, you hope to marry me?

  Come what may, he replied.

  Drawing near, she breathed her cool foul breath on his face, and he bowed his head.

  She inquired: Do you imagine that you don’t deserve to live?

  After you devour me, will you remember me?

  Not at all. Neither will you.

  Do you remember anything at all?

  I was born at Painalla. Before that I blossomed and fell, blossomed and fell.

  Please, Malintzin,* let’s make a child!

  No one ever asked me for a baby before!

  Will you?

  Why don’t you ask a woman?

  What are you?

  A
goddess.

  I did, but she—

  Very well, then we’ll marry.

  That very day she came home with him, to be introduced to Aunt Bertha, who thought her marvelous, although it did seem peculiar that she declined to live with them. Ricardo and La Llorona had agreed to keep their marriage secret, to avoid explanations. Of course Aunt Bertha noticed that she was wearing a ring, and the instant that the girl’s belly began to swell, that too she perceived, with the sort of hungry titillation which so often breaks out like mold in such circumstances. The next time the ghost lady visited them, Aunt Bertha said: I may be mistaken, my dear, but is there something you haven’t told me yet?

  Oh, you’re not at all mistaken about that, replied La Llorona, who was standing at the kitchen counter, grinding corn in a lava metate.

  Well, then, darling, if it’s not too delicate a subject, have you and my nephew made any plans?

  That depends on him.

  If you’d like, I can speak with him, because he shouldn’t leave you unprovided for.

  Don’t trouble yourself, aunt. I’ve provided for myself for a good while now.