After a few months, however, Duke and Eda no longer thought it necessary to speak their minds, because Blas seemed to be recovering his sanity. He had returned from his last business trip powered up like a freight train, determined to settle into what he called a “masterful” life, to be lived according to his own tastes and desires. This was the Blas they knew. He even got the girl to leave her job at the beach bar and convinced her to take on some translation jobs offered by Duke.
“Do it for me, babe,” he said.
“Who else would I be doing it for?” she answered, lying on the couch, looking ill.
In the same way, he put an end to the small things. He started with the kitchen and then swept through the entire apartment. One day he packed all the tassels, mirrors, and ornaments into a box, saying he was going to repaint the walls. The box later disappeared.
“Jesus, it’s all so … clinical,” Duke joked one night. Eda kicked him under the table. Pretending not to hear, Blas passed around the glasses of wine, but the girl jumped on Duke’s remark.
“I’ve never believed in minimalism,” she said, her face deathly pale. “Sadly, this goes beyond the decor. Blas has lost his spine, and I’m deeply confused.” This time nobody laughed.
But it shouldn’t have been a surprise. Blas had never liked ethnic flourishes, and the girl was apparently the only one unaware of it. Now her fire was dying, a little more every day, as she began to see Blas in a different light. To his credit, when Blas noticed certain changes in the girl, he made an effort to rein himself in. For example, the evenings still belonged to her. At the end of each day, they walked on the rivers of lava in Park Güell, between the columns shaped like trees. They always stopped by the glass and ceramic mosaics, which fascinated the girl, reminding her of the Amazon. Blas never rushed her, even though, compared to the tremolo of life and work in the city, he found himself profoundly bored by the lizard eyes, the orchids, the brightly colored birds. The girl stroked the colorful fragments, traced the mortar with her fingers, and remained bewitched and silent. Sometimes those moments precipitated a plunge into the abyss of a terrible migraine.
The girl’s silences—at first sporadic, but soon prolonged—irritated Blas. The magic was fading, and so was his admittedly limited patience. He found himself wanting to shake her, to get her to snap out of it; regretfully he remembered Eda’s many words of warning. But Blas only dared to vent his frustrations to Duke:
“Man, there’s nothing she wants anymore …”
The girl didn’t eat, sleep, or bathe anymore, and she didn’t want sex. The only thing she did do was smoke, her eyes like the polka dots on the white sheets of their bed.
“Jesus, not even her headaches are like a normal person’s,” was Eda’s remark, behind Blas’s back.
She experienced skull-splitting pains that left her lying in the darkened apartment, all day, all night, and into the next day. What was odd was that the pains were noisy.
“It’s like a hundred bees buzzing inside my head!” the girl sobbed to Blas. “They keep getting louder and louder, like insects swarming in the rainforest.”
Blas didn’t know whether he should believe her, offer her a joint, or simply ignore the outbursts. He couldn’t remember what the rainforest sounded like. Far from it: he wouldn’t have been able to identify a cicada if his life depended on it. How was he supposed to stay calm within her deafening storm?
“Wait and see, they won’t be able to find anything wrong with her,” Eda said. But Blas was too tired to respond, and Duke was silent.
At the hospital, the girl bawled ceaselessly. Blas would have preferred a tragic, fatal diagnosis, but the doctors prescribed sedatives and pronounced her strange condition to be all in her head, triggering another avalanche of doubts. This was Blas’s worst nightmare: standing in line at the pharmacy, begging for opiates.
“I should have smacked the crap out of you,” Eda said. “That would have saved you from this psycho.” Now that she had regained some of her influence, joyful tenderness had replaced her usual scolding. Duke, fired up with anger at Eda, sided with the girl.
But the girl did nothing to help her case, lost as she was in an inexhaustible flood of tears. One day she shaved her head in an attempt to root out the pain. Blas found himself repulsed by the sight of her tattooed skull.
“I’m not going to say I told you so.” This, naturally, from Eda.
“No, you’re much too classy,” Duke observed.
“Back off,” Blas said.
Duke felt the urge to hit him, to abort the impending birth of the past, but he didn’t have the guts. After all, Eda had already offered Blas their guest room.
III
The girl would have liked to hurt Blas, even if only physically—something like a stab, a scratch in the eye, or a bite—as if leaving him with a visible, festering wound would somehow assuage her sense of shame and defeat.
“You bastard, you’re leaving me now that I’m ugly!” was the only thing that occurred to her to say. Blas would later try to forget her sobs, the way one tries to forget the discomfort of a venereal disease.
“Fine, go back to Ms. Perfect,” she spit out. “You’ll grow old with Eda, but you’ll never want to fuck her! Especially not with that other moron always hanging around like her pimp!”
Blas was already leaving when the girl screamed again, hurling one glass ashtray after another against the door.
“Traitor!” she groaned with the fury of all the waters—hurricanes and storms and tropical rivers—until she was left dry and barren, with another migraine.
Duke would later maintain that he was the one who had rescued the girl from her silence. Blas knew him well enough not to question him, while Eda retorted that Duke wasn’t the type to rescue his own mother. And yet, they both knew that Duke had gone to see the girl.
It was mid-afternoon, when sunlight still filtered through the blinds, and the sound of the doorbell had forced the girl to open her eyes. Struggling up from the couch, she set her bare feet on the floor and cut one of her soles on the scattered shards of glass. Hopping around on the other foot, she went to open the door and found herself face to face with Duke, who had dropped by to pay her for her translations.
“It’s you. What do you want?”
Duke described to Blas and Eda how he closed the door behind him, then carefully swept the broken glass to the wall with the tip of his shoe.
“What a sight,” Duke said. “Aren’t those the crystal ashtrays that Eda gave you guys? Oy! They cost her a fortune.”
The girl didn’t answer. She sat still for a while, looking around for her sandals.
“What have you done to yourself? Let me help you.” Duke went to the medicine cabinet and cleaned off her foot, but the cut was deep.
“Let’s go to the hospital. I’ll take you.”
The girl got angry. “Over my dead body,” she said.
She was no longer bald. She was beautiful, Duke told them, and Blas’s face contorted into a grimace, not a smile. Her thick black hair had grown back enough to cover her tattoos and hide the deep scratch marks on her scalp.
“Are you still in pain?” Duke asked, touching her temple.
The girl, staring at the closed blinds, said that it didn’t matter anyway. But then she admitted that the noise was still there, that she could feel her veins bulging and bursting inside her skull, and that she imagined all kinds of horrors during her sleepless nights. She also said that maybe Eda was right, that maybe she was crazy. Duke felt remorseful and promised the girl he would help her. She just closed her eyes, letting her body sway back and forth. Finally, he said goodbye.
When Blas returned to the apartment in Horta Guinardó, he found it trashed. He also found a transcontinental plane ticket on his credit card statement. He knew the girl wasn’t crossing the ocean in order to return to her village or to be with her son. He knew she would rather have died than risk being seen by her child in that state. And he was right; Duke’s report confirmed it. Disoriented
though she was, the girl knew that she didn’t want her son to remember her as a madwoman, groaning in pain. The only thing she did want was to throw herself into the river.
What happened next became part of the myth that Blas and Duke would grow to revere, just as Eda would grow to despise it. The girl had climbed onto a barge and made her way down the river, drunk as a skunk, until the boatmen dumped her insensible body on a steep bank, where she was taken in by an old man.
“I guess there’s a God for the nutcases,” Eda said.
As the girl explained in her letter to Duke, she only opened her eyes because she was overpowered by the tobacco smoke on her face. The old man grabbed her neck with strong hands, lifting her up as if she were weightless. Blas remembered a pair of knotty hands, an incomprehensible language, the taste of a bitter and nauseating drink. The girl, suspended in the cosmos of the jungle.
“This part you won’t believe,” Duke said, his face twisting with disgust, or perhaps with remorse. “The old man cut into her scalp and pulled out hundreds of larvae and fat, wriggling worms. She said just like that, the buzzing disappeared.”
Eda paled. Duke, who believed he knew her well, saw that she recognized her defeat. And Blas knew that when the girl’s pain disappeared into the old man’s yellow eyes, whatever love they had shared had vanished with it. Then he felt pathetic, drinking coffee with Duke and Eda.
MENGELE IN LOVE
And if you like I can inject
something that we both suspect
will make your body a perfect
glass ornament.
—KLAUS & KINSKI
THE MANAGER KISSED her. It was the first time in all those years, an awkward brushing of lips that unfolded calmly, slowly. Stunned, yet unresisting, María let it happen, giving in to the man’s primitive, impenetrable impulse. She squeezed her eyes closed, as if trying to shut out the light; she couldn’t believe that they were in his office, and not in one of the guest bathrooms. When she opened her eyes again, he was looking at her. Feeling herself shrink under his sharp, cold gaze, she hurried away to the changing rooms. A little later, adjusting her uniform, she asked herself if she should still keep calling him “sir.” But she already knew the answer. It would have made her so happy to call him “my darling,” to whisper a love song into his ear, to hold him in her arms, but …“What if he fires me?” she thought, as the gentle chime of the elevator broke into her daydream.
Arami, a five-star hotel has its charms, believe me. If you were here I’d show you around, without the manager finding out, I’d show you everything. I know how much you’d love it, all of it: the thick carpeting—“imperial,” they say it’s called; the floor-toceiling mirrors, not like that cracked, spotty thing we used to have in our bedroom; the vanilla merengues, in big glass bowls, that anyone can take for free; all the little twinkling lights, even though it’s nowhere near Christmas; and the elevator, oh, if you could only see the elevator, Arami, you never stepped into anything like it, girl …
María, whose job it was to clean the guest rooms floor by floor, believed that the elevator was the greatest of the hotel’s many charms. She had her reasons: pushing that heavy cart, piled high with towels, spray bottles, and rags, was hard work. Dear God, she could feel every one of her 66 years. It was hard work; but no, she thought, what did she have to complain about? After all, the hotel was full of beautiful things, and she had lived through so much ugliness; and her job was fine, even on the days when the manager made her cry, although sometimes, like today, the days were… Never mind. Better not to think about it.
In the beginning, back when she had just started at the hotel, María used to call the elevator to go down a floor and think about how elegant the buttons were: flat, not round, and shiny steel, not plastic. She hated round elevator buttons like the ones in her apartment building; some joker was always trying to set them on fire with a lighter, and over time the surface got dark and dirty. If she could only clean them… That’s right, like she did at the hotel, with all of those sprays and chemicals parceled out by the manager, who was tall, had light brown hair, and was always in a rush, who spoke Spanish with a hard Teutonic edge that made it difficult for her to understand him, no matter how closely she listened.
But it’s not just the hotel that you’d like, Arami; and if you could only see him with your own eyes, you would know exactly what I mean. You’d be reminded of him, sister. It’s impossible to see him and not remember. He talks just like Fritz, I swear it, just like when you were teaching him, back home in the village.
And this was true: in another time, another country, Arami had taught another man a few words of Guaraní, as if he were blind. With dramatic gestures, she brought his large, white, heavy hands to her lips: “Voi potá means I love you,” she told him. He pushed her onto the metal table, tied down her arms, held her head hard underneath the light, and then bent his face close, so close to hers that their eyelashes brushed together.
María sighed, thinking about the buttons: if she could only clean them… Cleaning was a way to erase the filth from her existence. “Cleaning is healing!” She had been told this many times by her sister Arami, her twin. They were identical except for Arami’s eyes, one green and one blue, like a quesú cat: “Quesú means bad,” said Arami. Maybe that’s why María had come to adore, of all things, the smell of bleach. As she liked to say, you can bleach away anything, even blood—anything, that is, except love. Sweat stains disappear from clothes; the fluids of another body melt away from your skin… This she had learned when she was still a girl. A woman’s body can smell like new again. Memories can be bleached away in a basin of soapy water. You just immerse yourself like a dirty shirt, then scrub hard all over, and that does the trick. If you could only gargle with bleach. One time, back home in the village, María drank a glassful of bleach because a man—that man—didn’t love her, had never loved her. But she survived. She woke up in the hospital with her esophagus badly burned. “Spiteful girl,” was the first thing she heard when she opened her eyes. It was Arami’s voice: “Spiteful!”
There was no need for that, Arami. All I wanted was to get out of your way. Don’t forget, this was long before he left the village. Before all of those angry people arrived, asking questions, taking photos, and filming. Those people came from far away, Arami, but you never saw them, because you left us the very same night that he told you goodbye.
She ran her hands over the elevator buttons, thinking how much she liked them. Anything smooth is beautiful! Long straight hair, the scent of recently ironed cloth, the surface of a freshly made bed, the floor of the elevator … It was marble, shiny and perfect, much easier to roll the cart across than the hospital linoleum. María had worked in a hospital once. There, the elevators weren’t modernized: no music, no emergency intercom system, no lights. Well, not like the lights in the elevator of a five-star hotel, which to María’s eyes were as bright as stage lights, and held no lingering, rusty odor of blood. Besides, this elevator was so wide that she could fit the whole cart in without being squeezed off to the side; there was plenty of room for her to look at herself in the full-length mirrors. María looked up and let the stage lights bathe her face. She knew something about the stage—about singing, really. She liked to sing in the shower, and in the elevator. Well, as for actual singing, only in the shower. In the elevator, she just moved her lips to the words. Otherwise, someone might hear her. And María’s job mattered to her. It mattered to her even more than the manager, who she liked so much, and yet, didn’t know how to talk to.
One day, the man that Arami called “Uncle Fritz” appeared in their village. Later, after his sudden departure, people told stories: he liked to inject people in the eyes; he used to boil children alive; his backyard was a shallow graveyard. She didn’t know why they talked about him that way. She only knew that he had heavy hands, was a doctor, and knew how to leave his perfect seed inside her. Arami whispered in his ear “Rojaijo,” which meant much more than “I love you,�
� because he had chosen her over María. It must have been because of her eyes; like a bad cat’s, they had a touch of the devil about them. “Arami, my little blue sky,” he sang to her, his Teutonic accent taking on the cadence of a bolero. Their parents had named her Arami because of her bicolor eyes, which he gazed at again and again, as if obsessed….
Even now, María knew she was beautiful. “Filly” they had called her, ever since she had reached puberty: a dark brown filly with black eyes. Standing up straight, she preened in front of the mirror, cinching her waist with her hands and twisting her hips as if she were still a young girl. The manager had had his eye on her from her first day on the job. She thought about the kiss. Old Nazi, dirty old man. “Nazi,” she said out loud in the melancholy candor of her ignorance, as if the word were a fragment retrieved from a remote corner of her memory, under a humid, mosquito-heavy sky saturated with the smell of rotten fruit. The manager liked to check her rooms after she finished up. In the bathroom: Dirty, dirty, he told her. But nothing was dirty. He just wanted an excuse to come in and look at her and push her up against the marble countertop and empty himself into her body… María knew it was just a ruse, that her bathrooms were impeccably clean, but that little edge in his voice… Nobody was going to teach her how to clean. Nobody. It was an insult, but she put up with it because her job mattered to her. It mattered to her, because it hadn’t been easy to get this job in the first place, after so many years of being illegal. It mattered to her, even now, when at last she had her papers and she didn’t need to put up with anything anymore; she still put up with it—like Arami might have done?—in spite of her fury at the way the manager sometimes pronounced her name. Marrriiia, he called her, with a gargled, strangled “r,” and she didn’t know if he was making fun of her, or if it was something else.
If you could only hear him, Arami, you’d know what to say to me.
Her fury stemmed from the fact that “María” was her chosen, artistic name. During her years at the cabaret she had changed it from Panambi, the name she was born with. Yes, she was once a showgirl: a real showgirl, she reminded herself with a touch of aging panache, not because she had ever feared sex, but because she had considered herself an artist. Since when do whores need to know how to sing? And the fact is she did know how to sing and had been, in her day, as beautiful as María Félix. The same beauty mark, the same eyebrows, she thought, bending her face so close to the mirror that she almost brushed her reflection. The beauty mark didn’t look the same on wrinkled skin. María moved her face away from the mirror and tugged at the deep lines on her cheeks. She called herself “María” as in María Félix or Mary Magdalene, not as in the Virgin Mary. Merciful God, the cart was so heavy. In the light of the elevator, she could see herself as she used to appear after singing, in a low-cut gown instead of a uniform, her breasts pushed proudly forward so that anyone could see her heart beating. So that he would see the rapid flutter of her pulse and take her out on the dance floor.
Sleeping Dragons Page 6
