THE COMPOSITION OF SALT
For my parents
SWEATING HAD NEVER made him as uncomfortable as crying did now. He couldn’t remember ever having felt gratitude for his beard before, the thick beard that caused him to chronically perspire and that now helped him to hide his quivering lip. All his life he had sweated profusely, his shirts soaked through, his hair indiscreetly damp, and in spite of this, he had never gone through so many tissues before. “Doctor, I cry all the time,” he explained, thinking to himself that if he could, he would go to that proverbial hospital in the sky and exchange his lack of self-restraint for any other malady. Something strange was happening to him. Why did growing old take him this way? There can’t be many men who dream of growing old; and fewer still who have longed for it ever since childhood, like he had. At six years of age, he knew that he wanted to be a grandfather, and now, when he finally was one, he was simply spoiling it all with his crying.
He held the memory clear in his mind. They had just gotten off the truck after reaching La Paz from the mine. The city held the power that comes after a snowstorm; the hills were a brighter red and the air was colder, more translucent. Even so, with the sun at its zenith, they got thirsty. His grandfather led him by the hand to the corner to buy a thayacha: his first taste of the traditional dessert made of frozen mashua tubers and sugar. He asked, what was that funny-looking thing. And the old man said briefly, “It’s mashua.” The big hand held his firmly, but without crushing. It was a warm, comforting hand, a man’s hand. The mashua was shaped like a root and was like ice cream. His grandfather let go of his hand to show him how to eat it and gave him a wink of encouragement. The thayacha made his hands cold.
“A little more sugar,” he said.
“That enough?” The white granules dissolved into the refreshing taste that filled his mouth. The sun burned down on his face.
“Delicious, isn’t it?” the old man said to him and he nodded, holding onto his hand as tight as he could. The memory of his grandfather overwhelmed him. “I’m acting like a girl,” he told himself every time it happened, gazing in the mirror and looking for some kind of bodily change. Women cry more on a monthly, a yearly basis, indeed all their lives.
“I’ll ask the doctor for hormones, let him give a shot of testosterone!” he said to his wife, who laughed.
He looked at his wife and was forced to abandon his physiological theories; she was a woman as strong as a noble beast and she didn’t cry—she had never cried—not even when their youngest son died. They were still young themselves when their little boy fell out the window. Jumping from bed to bed, he lost his balance, collided with the window and, helped along by gravity, by the laws of motion, by physics, he fell down several stories and smashed into the concrete. Even so, his beautiful body had not been damaged, and his sweet, untroubled face still held a hint of his final game, of his recent awakening as an angel. Crying wasn’t possible then, crying was like casting seaweed onto the surface of a frozen, salty ocean that would end up drowning all of them, one by one, and he wasn’t going to let that happen. Crying, he felt sure, was like letting his son sink into dark waters and anchoring him to a rock just so they could see him there, eyes open, down in the depths. Why should he be crying now?
“I like your eyes better like this, you have sailor’s eyes,” she said to cheer him up, “ocean eyes.”
“Fuck the ocean. We lost the ocean in the War of the Pacific!” he grumbled.
When he was a child, his mother had sometimes passed the night telling him stories about the Pacific Ocean, with its salt, with its chill, and with its secrets. Sometimes, she rocked him to sleep to the dark sound of that ocean, held in the spiral of a shell.
“I don’t care, you have ocean eyes.”
His wife wasn’t bothered by his crying or by his perennially red eyes. She even envied him; she too would have liked to learn to cry, but she couldn’t. She wasn’t made to let it all spill out. Together they had constructed in their hearts a medieval fortress of austerity and courage, not lacking in will, nor in love, nor in guilt, and least of all in sorrow. In this way they managed to make their way through life with intention, but never completely surrendering to joy. That’s how they were, a little sad, a little enigmatic, a little closed off from their ability to receive. And what he was least willing to receive was the fussing and hugging that people held out to him—without asking first, and with an exceedingly annoying familiarity—just because he was crying.
The doctor advised him not to worry.
“Crying is healthy.”
“Screw healthy, doctor,” he answered. “I’m too old to be healthy!”
This was a miscalculation. He had expected that old age would usher him into a state of serene invulnerability, not the opposite. Where did it come from, this newfound capacity to be overcome by anything, these bursts of rapture that made him sniffle, then sob? The worst part was the scientific optimism that knocked him against the ropes with the diagnosis that he didn’t have an illness, that the reason lay deep within him. It wasn’t anything like a brain injury or a birth defect, the doctor had explained; his tears weren’t flowing independent of his emotions. These tears weren’t meaningless, they didn’t come without cause.
“The problem,” he said, “is that I’m turning into a sissy.”
“A real problem,” his wife corrected him, “would be if you had that cat’s cry syndrome the doctor was talking about. Imagine if you couldn’t stop meowing instead of crying! I wouldn’t sleep a wink.” They both laughed.
But the problem persisted; everything moved him to tears. One afternoon he went to an event at his grandson’s school and as soon as he set foot in the classroom, he clearly identified the scent of his own childhood: the smell of those little desks! He had to squeeze his eyes shut to keep the tears from bursting out. He left the school, disgusted and furious with himself. Outside it was raining. The Latin verb plorare means “to cry”; crying shares the same etymology as rain—in Latin, pluvia—rain like a squall, like a downpour, like a storm that gusted him down the road, into shortcuts and alleys, keeping clear of the line of cars that, like paper streamers, unfurled downtown as twilight gathered in the city.
Walking helped him. He passed unaware from the asphalt to the old cobblestone streets, feeling his troubles drain from him incrementally with each stride, while he began to see before him the stalls of the old Indian women who called to him now, offering to read his fortune in coca leaves. The incense and myrrh made him drowsy, dizzy with the colors of purplish wool, shiny wrappers, and sweets: he was in the witches’ market. He could make out various herbs, along with dried llama fetuses and stone mortars and pestles. Charms, amulets, and medals danced in the wind. He remembered that Leucothoe had been buried alive by her father, who was enraged by her affair with Apollo. And that Apollo, to honor the dead princess, had transformed her into a luxuriant frankincense tree. “The Greeks were wise and horrible,” he murmured. Or, to be more accurate, they were horribly wise. He smiled.
A few steps ahead, a slate board, serving as a sign, held an answer to his uneasiness. The words were written in colored chalk, in a hand that seemed imprecise rather than childish: “Cures for spiritual fright, cleansing baths for joy,” he read, and he entered into a dark room of tall adobe walls, where an ancient woman with a curved spine gave him his prescription: a bath in the ocean, with his eyes open. He asked her sarcastically if perhaps she wasn’t aware that they lived in a landlocked country. To which she, with utmost composure, did not respond. He left, thinking about his grandson, his wife, the ocean. He was drenched and starting to feel cold. The night had draped, like an enormous sheet, over the city. Once again he was miserable. What could he do? Why was it suddenly so hard to breathe? What would he need to change to escape a breakdown? He grew ashamed of his thoughts and felt the urge to apologize, but his wife wasn’t with him and wouldn’t be home until late. In the end, she was the only thing that mattered …
That night,
in the darkened apartment, as he started a hot bath to avoid catching cold, he began to think he understood what the old woman had been trying to tell him. The size of the ocean didn’t matter, it just had to be salt water. So he ran to the kitchen with gusto, then returned and dumped a whole jar of coarse salt into the bathtub. His wife would scold him, he knew it, but that wasn’t important. Then he paused a few moments before turning on the water. He wasn’t entirely sure if it should be cold or hot, but decided on the latter. “Let’s say it’s the Caribbean,” he told himself, and the sight of the filling tub reassured him. It was as if reality had resolved into coherence. Standing naked by the tub, he stepped in quickly, yearning to weep underwater. He felt that he knew where it was all coming from, and he was ready to confront it. Then he immersed himself in the salty liquid of his ocean, with his eyes closed. He waited until he was ready to open his eyes, and then he did, but he didn’t see his son anywhere. Dismayed, he returned to the surface. He took a deep breath and, without conscious thought, immersed himself again, searching for an image, for some kind of meaning. But this time he curled up on his left side and stayed that way for a long time, holding his breath. The water was still warm when he began to be rocked by the faraway sound of the ocean, held in the spiral of a shell.
THE RED RIBBON
NATALIA ARRIVED AT the bar late, but we cut her some slack, because she brought a story with her. This time my sister didn’t even apologize for being late; she knew an hour or two wasn’t all that much to us. After all, we’re the press and, at the local bar, waiting is never a problem. She sat down and started talking (a very rare occurrence, since she usually sits quietly and listens to Gabriel, whose intelligence overshadows everything and everyone else). I like the timbre of her voice. I don’t know what it is about her soft and indifferent tone that soothes me. But this time her voice was not serene; she had just left the paper and still throbbed with the urgency of midnight ink. “A man’s been arrested,” she blurted out. Natalia appeared anxious, so we asked her if the man was innocent. She responded with something of an apology: “I don’t know,” she said, and she took Gabriel’s hand in hers.
She shared what she knew for a fact: Rebecca had been crowned Carnival Queen, and now Rebecca was dead. Natalia had been given photographs of both the murder scene and the parade. We were thus able to mentally reconstruct that cheap carnival, haphazardly erected in the sand and trash on the outskirts of the city. Rebecca had not enjoyed her fifteen minutes of fame, having been killed before the festivities. As Natalia told us the story of her fleeting reign, we imagined an indigenous community living in unspeakable poverty, a community that, just like the girl, was inexorably headed toward extinction. Gabriel kissed Natalia on the forehead, a second before my sister let go of his hand and said, not without a touch of drama: “No one could have imagined what destiny had in store for the Queen, least of all the people who crowned her.”
That day had been so bright: a hair-loose-and-smooth and easy-laughter kind of day. The red carnation tied to the waistband of her short shorts accentuated Rebecca’s wide hips. She was fourteen, but she had stopped being a child long ago. It was possible she hadn’t experienced childhood at all, born straight into adulthood, I thought, while Natalia reported what the experts had told her, that the girl had come from a concupiscent culture. We tried to figure out what the experts meant by “concupiscent” and we translated it like this: an Amazonian people—hunters, nomads, weavers—for whom carnal virtues are cardinal virtues. This was still very abstract. We imagined maternal breasts, female songs, young girls initiated into the pleasures of the flesh. In their world, Natalia said, time and space are part of the oral tradition; lust and pleasure are not seen as sinful but as natural, vital. For a few seconds, her explanation took us to Paradise, and then to Hell, because when that indigenous reality collides with city life, freedom becomes a yoke dragging women into the world’s oldest meat grinder. Poverty grinds it all up: at an unimaginably young age, Indian girls surrender their bodies to urban fantasies for next to nothing. “How much exactly?” I asked. Natalia answered without poetry: “Two pesos.”
Her weary voice made me think of snow, of my skin aching in the cold, of ice melting into water. Of La Paz. Unlike Rebecca, I’d outgrown my childhood only late in life, when I followed my sister to La Paz to go to college. It is true that I wasn’t precisely a child then, but I was from a small town. My adolescence was a sheltered one, and I endured it like a disease. Seventeen is a bit late for a city girl, but not for a country girl who’s both too insulated and too eager to jump.
I can’t say that I spread my wings like a dove ready for flight. I knew even then that the wind wouldn’t carry me; the effort would have to be all mine. Prudence was not one of my virtues, particularly in those days, when I refused to compromise my glorious freedom by planning ahead. My flight was to be a fierce, aerodynamic, choppy one: a violent leap into the unknown, storming the city, grasping at all those things I was dying to see and experience. Yes, I’ve got my demons, but there is no one to blame for what happened except me. And even though Natalia often reproaches herself for taking me to the city, the truth is that the decision was mine, and mine alone. The only thing I still resent her for is saving me when I wanted to die. She scraped some snow from the roof of a car and put it on my cheeks to try to keep me conscious, both the snow and her voice becoming more and more disembodied: “What’s wrong, baby? What have they done to you? What am I going to tell Mom and Dad?” And my own voice: “Nothing. Promise me.”
Natalia went on with her story. Rebecca had gotten picked up by a taxi driver who asked her if she wanted to go for a ride. Another girl, Angelica, the last person to see Rebecca alive, reported all this. The two of them wanted to go together, but Angelica was very pregnant, and the taxi driver refused to let her in. “Pregnant?” someone (I don’t remember who) asked, as if they couldn’t believe it. Instinctively, I looked away. Natalia confirmed: Yes, the taxi driver didn’t want her in his car, even though he’d been with her days before. He was a regular at the Pampas. “And what was he like?” someone asked. “Fat,” Natalia said. Well, more potbellied than fat. Old. Tall. Angelica had been precise: Like a grandfather. White, just like the taxi. Almost sweet. He probably paid more than two pesos because the girls fought each other a little to climb into his cab, and besides that he always bought them an ice cream. But that afternoon—or should we call it evening?—it was about seven o’clock and the sky was still light when he chose the Queen because she was the prettiest. Rebecca was more than pretty. You could see it in the picture that Natalia showed us. The girl was hot and pink and juicy like the heart of a watermelon. “A hundred-degree fever,” Gabriel said.
Gabriel avoided me, the way you cross the street when you don’t want to say hello to someone you know has already seen you. He watched my hands out of the corner of his eye, responded to whatever I said with complete silence, and no one noticed, except for Natalia and me. When I was a child, he saw me as a spoiled brat who provoked both irritation and tenderness. I was about four, maybe five, when Gabriel started taking Natalia out. They weren’t exactly a couple yet, but it was so natural to see them together, just like now. Gabriel would come by in the evenings, firing off his sarcastic jokes with the precision of a slingshot. Natalia would grab my hands away from my face: “Stop picking your nose, you pig!” But I couldn’t resist, and I pushed my finger all the way up my nostril. I was on a mission to taste that forbidden fruit, and my sister was on a mission to catch me doing it. Gabriel had no idea, for Natalia would never have told on me; but how could I know that back then? He was unaware of many things, including the power of language. He came to our house during the siesta, while I played on the veranda floor, wrapped up in myself. “Hey there, snot-nose,” he said. Seeing his eyes on the tip of my finger, I burst into tears. Natalia couldn’t contain herself. “You’re so, so mean,” I shouted. Gabriel didn’t understand and my sister doubled over with laughter: “He’s just teasing you, s
illy; don’t take it literally.”
Someone asked again about Rebecca, wanting to take a psychological approach. Natalia held back and allowed us to theorize. How to describe her without flattening her out? Joyful and extroverted, we supposed, because she wouldn’t have been crowned Queen otherwise. But we also agreed that there are different ways of being joyful. One person might possess a bodily joy, an electric, aggressive temperament destined to be worn down by life and the passage of time. Others possess a more rational, almost routine joy: that quality, more decisive than destiny, that we vaguely call optimism. We agreed that Rebecca’s joy must have been a little intransigent; that is to say, it persisted in spite of everything, in spite of the horrors in her life. In which case it must also have been illogical; and then, who knows, Rebecca’s extroversion may have been a mask, a defense mechanism. It seemed more appropriate for a girl of her age to be timid, quietly cheerful, sensitive to the unexpected. For her, just about anything would have been unexpected: a new dress, a table with a tablecloth, hot water, going to school, receiving a gift without having to give herself in return. We ran out of words.
Natalia said that nobody noticed Rebecca was missing until the police found her by the side of the road, in the underbrush. No one was looking for her because Rebecca, her grandmother said, was like a cat: she disappeared for a while, but she always returned. Rebecca liked going places, Angelica said; she liked to get lost. “Who doesn’t like to get lost?” I thought, hugging myself in the freezing air conditioning. That’s why she carried a little tin of Hercules superglue in her handbag, ready for long distances. When they identified her body in the morgue, Rebecca no longer looked like a queen: she’d lost her short shorts and her red carnation, and her long straight hair was a tangled mat. Her body had been covered with a jute bag, probably a potato sack. Her grandmother passed her hands all over Rebecca’s body, without tears, as if performing a ritual. She understood that death requires no explanations, even as the sergeant did his duty, arriving at a hypothesis of strangulation (he could not say for certain whether the girl had been raped). Angelica told Natalia that her friend’s body was smeared with superglue, the same kind she carried in her purse, so much of it that you could hardly make out her tattoos, the heart, the lizard, the star. “The flesh is sorrowful,” I whispered. Mallarme’s poem was so true.
Sleeping Dragons Page 4
