The Dead Girls

by Jorge Ibargüengoitia

  A woman living in the adjoining house states that she frequently heard voices in the rear yard and the sound of clothes being washed, and, one time, several women singing “Cooey, Cooey, Little Dove.”

  A boy states that one afternoon he decided to jump over the wall—of what he thought was an unoccupied house—to gather some of the avocados that had fallen to the ground. As he straddled the wall, he saw two women who had beaten him to it, bending over the fruit.

  An employee of the electric light and power company states that every time he passed through Independence Street of an evening, it surprised him to see a light in the windows of the dining room—the only ones that gave on the street—inasmuch as he personally had shut off the current on the same day the authorities closed the building.

  The proprietor of the tortilla-dough mill on the corner states that the woman called the Skeleton came to his place daily for six kilos of dough and, sometimes, seven.

  A woman who lives across the street states that occasionally, while sweeping the sidewalk in front of her house, she would see three women with baskets walking in the direction of the market. She was aware that none of the three was señora Benavides, whom she knows well.

  The same witness remarks that it surprised her to see that a soldier frequently visited señora Benavides, who is known to be highly respectable and a member of the Society of the Perpetual Candle.

  Pedro Talavera, a clerk, states that on one occasion in the Barajas Brothers’ store he ran into the individual known as Ticho, who used to be the bouncer at the Casino del Danzón. He says that when he asked him, “What are you working at now, compadre?” he answered, “Feeding chickens,” and that he then hoisted an eighty-kilo sack to his shoulder and walked off. But, that before he reached the door, some beans fell out of the sack—which is not chicken feed.

  A traveling salesman says that he met three girls in the bus depot whom he remembered from the México Lindo. When he asked them where they were working now—with the idea of paying the place a visit—they answered that they had left the life and were working in a factory, but weren’t able to tell him what factory, which surprised him.

  (Others gave testimony from which it may be deduced that the Baladro employees did not begin to go out of the house until September, and then only occasionally, in groups of two or three. Nowhere is anything mentioned about the jukebox having been in operation, nor is any man known to have entered the Casino del Danzón as a customer during the period under consideration.)

  3

  The Skeleton states:

  Señora Arcángela did not recover during the first days we spent in Concepción after we came back. She lay in bed night and day staring at the ceiling, her room practically in total darkness. She was neither asleep nor awake. She wouldn’t talk to anybody or eat anything. She only drank the teas I made for her. Señora Serafina took charge of everything. She would give me the money and I went to market and accounted to her.

  Nearly two weeks must have gone by like that. Then, one morning as I was going downstairs to light the fire, I heard sounds in the kitchen. Señora Arcángela had come down before me and I found her roasting chili peppers on the brazier. She looked at me and said, “I’m hungry.”

  A complete change had taken place in her. She wanted to know how much was being spent and asked to see the accounts.

  “The money is being thrown down the drain,” she complained.

  She began cutting corners. One day she got annoyed at my buying cactus leaves. “With all the cactus that grows on the hill free why do you have to get it from the market where it costs money? Take three of the girls—they have nothing to do anyway—have them cut pailfuls of cactus leaves and bring them in.”

  She began to have it in for the girls because they weren’t working.

  “Look at them,” she said to me one time as she watched several washing clothes, “like chicks fresh out of the shell. All they do is open their beaks and wait for the food to be dropped in.”

  Every night she made entries in her notebook of what each girl ate.

  (Arcángela’s notebook is one of the ordinary kind that can be bought in any stationery store. Its contents are dated from June, 1962, to September, 1963. Arcángela writes in green ink in a childish but legible hand. The first pages contain the employees’ accounts by the week: in the first column, their names; in the next two, “credits”—what each girl earned in commissions in the cabaret and from the work in her room; the next four, “debits”—the amounts deducted for room, board, clothing, and advances in cash. In the last columns, the weekly balances appear which, if negative, bear interest at the rate of 3 percent per month. During the months they lived in the closed-down Casino del Danzón without income, the girls piled up an enormous debt. The total came to over half a million pesos. Arcángela kept exact accounts of what each employee owed her until the middle of September, when she lost hope of ever collecting.)

  In February—the Skeleton continues—señora Arcángela said that she could not go on supporting so many idle bitches and decided to sell eleven of the girls to don Sirenio Pantoja, who ran businesses in Jaloste and had said to her some time ago that he would take any girls she couldn’t use off her hands. To tell the truth, the señora unloaded the worst of the lot on don Sirenio—the homeliest and the most unmanageable ones. We were much happier after they were gone. They say don Sirenio paid the señora eleven thousand pesos for them.

  4

  Licenciado Rendón, representing the Baladro sisters, instituted the following legal actions: three consecutive suits against public officials to establish that the closing of the México Lindo was unconstitutional, unfair, and inapplicable. He lost them all because the presiding judge found that they were inapplicable. Licenciado Rendón then requested the court to set the amount of the fine his clients would have to pay to reopen the México Lindo. The court deliberated so long with respect to the fine that this story will be over before its decision is announced.

  Seeing that time was going by fruitlessly, licenciado Rendón applied for a license on behalf of his clients to open another business under a different name. The application was rejected on the grounds that payment by the applicants of the fine on the México Lindo was still pending. That is to say, they could not open a new business because they had not paid the fine and they could not pay the fine because they were not told how much it was. The judge would accept no bond or deposit. Finally, licenciado Rendón prepared a letter directly to the governor signed by the Baladros. Studded with courteous formalities, it requested that he grant them permission to open a nightclub “in any city of the state your honor should see fit to designate.” This document made the slow transit from office to office until, finally, it came back to licenciado Rendón several months later with a handwritten notation in the margin: “Deny all requests from the signatories.” This appeared over the signature of the governor’s private secretary, licenciado Isidoro Sanabria—the man who danced with Ladder.

  The legal steps taken by the Baladros in Plan de Abajo were more effective. In March, 1963, the restriction on the Molino Street house was lifted and it was sold to a leather-goods merchant who turned it into a workshop. Captain Bedoya was able to convince the sisters that the proceeds from this transaction should be invested in a farm.

  5

  My name is Radomiro Reyna Razo. I am a native of Concepción. I am the person who sold Los Pirules farm to the Baladro sisters, and I would like to point out that when I signed the deed I had no idea who they were or what line of business they were in and I certainly never imagined what they were going to do on the property I sold them.

  What happened was this: I had to pay back a loan and did not have the money, so I decided to sell off part of my properties. I made this intention known to a number of people and, one day, Captain Bedoya, whom I knew by sight, came over to me in the bar of the Gómez Hotel and said to me, “How much commission will you pay if I get you a buyer for that land you are interested in selling?”<
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  I made him an offer, he accepted, and two days later the señoras Baladro arrived at my house in a taxi.

  Nobody would ever have taken them for procuresses. On the contrary, they looked so respectable that I invited them into my living room and introduced them to my wife. They were dressed in black. The older one, who had the greater authority, wore a shawl, as if she were going to spend the rest of the afternoon in church. She kept an eye on her sister as if she were a maiden. When the younger one crossed her leg, the older one said, “Serafina, cover yourself.” And the other one tugged on her skirt until she got it down over her knee.

  They made such a good impression on my wife that she served them vermouth and cookies, which they accepted. They drank in a very refined way and did not get drunk or use foul language. Then, I offered to drive them out to the property and my wife came along. Who would ever have believed that we were riding, my wife and I, in the same car with two procuresses?

  The day we signed the deed, they arrived at the notary’s office carrying a brown paper bag with grease stains on it out of which they took fifty thousand pesos in five-hundred-peso bills that they handed over to me. Captain Bedoya was present but he made a sign to me not to pay him his commission in front of the señoras. We went outside on some pretext and I gave him the money.

  After the signing, when they and the captain had left, the notary, who knew who they were, told me what kind of women I had been dealing with. But, it was too late, the papers were already signed, I had the money in my hand, and I really needed it.

  6

  Eulalia Baladro de Pinto states:

  Teófilo had just lost everything we had in the world for the third time. When my sisters’ letter arrived, the licenciados were attaching the living room furniture. The letter said:

  Dear Eulalia,

  Since the business that has been giving us our livelihood for so many years is getting more and more troublesome all the time to operate, we have decided to go in for farming. We would like Teófilo, who knows so much about farms, to manage ours for us . . . (etc.)

  The letter was written by Arcángela but signed by the two of them. Teófilo and I saw a ray of hope in this and the next day we packed our things and went to Concepción. (She states that they stopped at the Gómez Hotel on her sisters’ instructions. She claims that in the seven months that followed, during which they had frequent dealings with them, neither she nor her husband had any idea that they were both living in the Casino del Danzón. In the afternoon of the same day they arrived they went in Ladder’s car with the two sisters to see the farm.)

  “I want you to plant flowers on this piece of ground,” Arcángela said to Teófilo, “to put on Humberto’s grave on the Day of the Dead.”

  It was the beginning of the rainy season and the corn was sprouting—Eulalia says—but the place seemed very desolate to me. (She describes the farmhouse, the ruined barn, the shed falling to pieces, and the depression that gripped her when, as she looked around, she realized there was not another inhabited house as far as the eye could see.)

  Teófilo drew up a plan—Eulalia explains—of what had to be done on the farm to make it productive and estimated what it would cost. The plan sounded good to my sisters but they considered the price very high. They gave my husband less than half the money he needed, and in dribs and drabs. He was able to fix up the house with that amount but not to connect the water or electricity. He managed to repair the barn, but there was no money to buy cows and he could plant corn but not alfalfa. And, in place of essentials, they gave us something we did not need: One morning, my sisters arrived at the farm with a long package wrapped in newspapers. Arcángela put it on the kitchen table and told Teófilo to open it. It was a rifle.

  “I brought it for you,” she said to Teófilo, “to use on anybody who tries to steal our cows.”

  There weren’t any cows ever, then or later.

  7

  On July 14, the Baladro sisters made a picnic on Los Pirules farm. They invited a priest to bless the land just purchased and to baptize it with its new name—formerly, it was called El Pitayo. The list of guests who attended the picnic reflects the change in the Baladro fortunes. Instead of local congressmen, mayors, labor leaders, and bank managers, those present were Captain Bedoya, a subaltern of his by the name of Brave Nicolás, Ladder, Ticho, and Teófilo Pinto. Fifteen girls were also there. While they were waiting for the priest to arrive, the men and women formed teams and got up a soccer game with a ball Ladder had in the trunk of his car.

  After the priest had gone—to officiate at a christening—the guests opened bottles and toasted the occasion. The food was served late—red mole prepared by the Skeleton, the rice by Eulalia—Ladder played the guitar and the girls sang. It did not rain.

  Three days later, Blanca died.

  X

  The Story of Blanca

  (Blanca X: b. Ticomán, 1936—d. Concepción, 1963)

  1

  The sand in Ticomán is white and soft and your feet sink into it as you walk. The beach is wide. A stony creek flows by it into the sea. As far back as memory goes, the natives have dug wells in the bed of this creek during the dry season. The Ticomán people are inlanders and ignore the sea. The men work corn patches on the slopes of the hill, the women feed the pigs in the corrals. Nobody knows how to swim, nobody would venture into the sea, nobody expects anything from it. All that they make use of from the sea is the driftwood. They wait for the branches to be swept into the sea by the creek during the rainy season and for the waves to cast them up on the beach.

  Two white cliffs can be seen in the distance in this neglected part of the ocean and, beyond, ships that pass without ever stopping at Ticomán.

  The families are large. When the adult males get drunk they talk about going elsewhere to work. When the male children grow up, they leave. The females remain, but not all of them.

  One can imagine Blanca as a little girl doing what the other children of her age in Ticomán did: walking along the beach with a dog, gathering driftwood at the edge of the sea, drawing water from the well—until an old woman who wore a shawl took to sitting in a rush chair and looking out to sea. She saw the child pass by carrying an armful of driftwood.

  The story now moves from the beach to the annual fair in Ocampo. Many devout people come to this fair to keep their vows to the Virgin of Ocampo. Some carry heavy beams on their backs from the hermitage, where the spring of miraculous water is; others walk barefoot over a stretch of cactus leaves; women crawl on their knees across the atrium of the church, which has a pumice-stone floor one hundred meters wide. The object is to arrive bleeding before the holy image; only in this way can one be sure of forgiveness or that the miracle one has prayed for will be granted.

  Many attend this fair not out of religious motives but for its commercial activity. A great variety of things are bought and sold: incense, Easter tapers, silver votive offerings, horses, fighting cocks, a team of oxen, a woman.

  At the 1950 Ocampo fair, Jovita X, the old woman who sat in the rush-bottom chair looking out to sea in the afternoons, sold a fourteen-year-old girl named Blanca to Arcángela and Serafina Baladro for three hundred pesos.

  According to the Skeleton, who was a witness to the transaction, it took place in one of the sheds in Ocampo in which the pilgrims are put up. The Baladros inspected the child thoroughly before closing the deal and found no defect other than discolored teeth—everybody’s teeth are discolored in Ticomán because of the water they drink from the wells in the creek bed—which became a bargaining point. Señora Jovita was asking four hundred pesos.

  Something else took place that day which, as the Skeleton recalled many years later, had all the earmarks of a bad omen. What happened was this: A pair of sisters came to the same eating place where the Baladros had their meals while they were in Ocampo. They were with their father, who was fulfilling a vow. Serafina, on the lookout for girls for the Molino Street house, noticed that these two were pretty and, taking
advantage of a moment when their father was not there, she struck up a conversation with them. She told them that she owned a shoe store in Pedrones and needed salesgirls. She offered them room and board and two hundred pesos a month. The prospect of going to live in Pedrones apparently appealed to the girls and they promised to give Serafina an answer the next day—that is to say, the day the Baladros bought Blanca. After having closed the deal and paid for her, they took her to the restaurant. The four of them—the Skeleton was the fourth—were on the second course, the rice, when the man who was keeping the vow arrived accompanied this time not by his two daughters but by two policemen who hauled Serafina off. She was held in the municipal jail for twenty-four hours on the charge of attempted corruption of minors. Arcángela had to pay two hundred and fifty pesos to get her out. The omen, the Skeleton explains, was that Blanca’s first day with them ended in the first night Serafina spent in a jail.

  2

  Blanca’s character:

  Even though she was separated from her family under false pretenses, sold for a price, and initiated into prostitution at the age of fourteen, everything seems to indicate that she was happy.

  It is not known what señora Jovita might have promised Blanca—or what she promised the mother and the mother promised Blanca—that induced her to accompany her for four hundred kilometers, the distance between Ticomán and Ocampo. Most likely, however, the promise was not kept. Nevertheless, when the deception was out in the open and the Baladros were inspecting Blanca amidst the cots in the pilgrims’ shed, she showed no signs of surprise or embarrassment, the Skeleton says admiringly, and accompanied the Baladros without a word when señora Jovita told her to “go along with the señoras,” nor was her appetite affected when the policemen took Serafina, she being the only one who ate the dessert. Several days later at the México Lindo when Arcángela was explaining what her duties would be—the moment, according to the Skeleton, when many begin to cry—she said impassively, “Whatever you say, señora.” In all Blanca’s years as a prostitute, the Skeleton recalls many compliments for her, but not a single word of complaint.