Tales from the Town of Widows

by James Canon

  The sky was covered with hundreds of stars.

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK, Luisa and Sandra Villegas joined Magnolia and Pilar in their adventure. They met in the abandoned school to change into their tight dresses and put on makeup.

  “We must not get pregnant,” Magnolia instructed her pupils. “Some men are quicker than others. You must keep looking at their faces, and when you see their eyes grow smaller and their mouths grow wide, that means they are close. Right then you have to push them off you.”

  “What if they’re too heavy?” asked Sandra.

  “Then you shouldn’t be on the bottom,” Magnolia replied.

  She suggested they go down the road in pairs, keeping their distance. She also gave them whistles, which they had to keep around their necks at all times. “Blow them only if you’re in danger.”

  In two weeks, Magnolia and Pilar persuaded eight other girls to join them, and she organized four teams of three each. They helped the new recruits with their outfits and makeup, and shared their experiences with them. They agreed to keep their business a secret from everyone in town, especially the priest, but also their mothers—the poor women didn’t need another reason to grieve. The girls also reserved the right to refuse any man for any reason. They demanded no money in exchange for their favors, but rather let the men compensate them however they chose. “That way we can protect our dignity,” said Pilar. Each girl picked a spot of her own and kept it free from bugs, weeds and other unwanted plants. A few of them even planted flowers around them and stored bread and sweets nearby in case their customers were hungry. And a month later, when the rainy season came, they helped each other build tents with bamboo sticks and large sheets of plastic.

  Meanwhile, at La Casa, Doña Emilia suffered a noticeable decrease in business. She asked her girls to make sure their clients were completely satisfied, to always thank them for coming, and to invite them back.

  “Remember, they’re traveling from far away,” she said. “The time they spend here with us must be worth it.”

  But the competition was fierce.

  Desperate, Doña Emilia made a few more trips to nearby towns. In Honda she was informed about a group of beautiful young girls from Mariquita, who walked up and down the roads, accepting all sorts of goods in return for the men’s ephemeral love: perfume, pieces of jewelry, clothing and appliances. Doña Emilia was told that most of them were pleased with just a box of chocolates, a bunch of red roses, or a handwritten love poem. By then, Magnolia and her team had built a makeshift tent village, which they kept moving to avoid being caught by el padre Rafael or the widows.

  The men referred to the tent town as “the magical whorehouse,” the one that sometimes was and sometimes wasn’t. Looking for the mysterious tents along the tortuous roads, behind the woods and between the arid hills only added to a man’s excitement. He’d search high and low—for hours, if he had to—but he always found it. And when he did, he soon disappeared between the arms and legs of a passionate woman, the moon shining down on their nude skin. Legs tightened, hips rocked, hearts sped up, sweat flowed, bodies lost control of breath, moans were set free, wails, screams—a man, a woman, a burst of fire under the sky.

  TO TRY TO regain their customers, Doña Emilia and her twelve girls agreed to lower their rates and create more incentives. Sunday through Thursday would be two customers for the price of one. On Fridays, early birds would pay only half the price. And on Saturdays they would introduce Emilia’s Fiesta: a three-hour party, which included food, drinks and the right to join all twelve girls, naked, in the red room—all for a fixed rate.

  Doña Emilia traveled to Fresno, where she printed flyers with La Casa’s weekly specials, and handed them out herself in the surrounding villages. The old lady had turned into a saleswoman, traveling every day from town to town, her portfolio under her arm and a paper bag full of flyers in her hand. She spent long nights sitting alone in the barroom of La Casa, smoking her thin cigarettes and drinking apple wine straight from the bottle, thinking up fresh ideas that could keep her business afloat. But there was nothing she could do. How, she thought, could she compete with a group of invisible lustful women, romantic ghosts willing to have sex in exchange for a little taste of affection? She cursed the Communist guerrillas for taking her customers away, and wept inconsolably for each of the men who had disappeared.

  Soon her lungs began to refuse the smoke of her cigarettes. She developed a nasty cough that could no longer be cured with the usual milk and horseradish sweetened with honey. She lost several pounds, and she got drunk with only a few sips of wine. And so the morning she heard the twelve girls packing their bags, she didn’t try to stop them. Instead she rose from her bed, splashed fresh water on her face and went to the kitchen to prepare their last meal together.

  A few hours later, when the twelve girls came out of their bedrooms with no makeup on, dressed in conservative outfits, and with their suitcases hanging from their shoulders, they found the old madam sitting in the dining room, her hands clasped together on top of the table. She was wearing a fancy gown of red silk that covered her body from the neck down. Her gray hair hung loose down her back, and there was something saintly about the expression of her face, something blissful and dreamy. The large dining table was covered with a white tablecloth and was beautifully set with cloth napkins, silver platters, casseroles and utensils and crystal glasses filled with wine. Spread over the table were baskets with corn bread, plates with fruit and cheese, a large bowl of steamy potato soup and oval dishes with roast turkey, white rice and red beans.

  “Well, my dears,” Doña Emilia said. “The time has come to say farewell.” She looked down at her translucent hands, her eyes filling with tears. Viviana was the first one to hug her, and then one by one the other eleven girls took their turns. They wiped the tears from the madam’s creased cheeks, kissed her small, trembling hands and stroked her hair. When the girls finally took their seats, Doña Emilia stood and raised her glass of wine. In a broken voice she proposed a toast.

  “Here’s to you, my brave girls, my disciples, who for years bore your own crosses by putting up with the men of Mariquita: sometimes abusive, sometimes rude, but always splendid.

  “Here’s to the men of Mariquita, our men, and to La Casa de Emilia, where they’ve been missed the most.”

  All thirteen women sipped their wine, sat down and began eating in silence. When they finished, Viviana proposed they all put on their work clothes. And so they wore their brightest dresses and helped one another to apply their makeup. Doña Emilia invited the girls into the barroom, where she played festive music. They danced and drank throughout the night, sharing their most amusing anecdotes, telling jokes, making new toasts, laughing and crying and laughing some more.

  The following day, when Doña Emilia woke up, she found herself alone in the room, surrounded by dirty glasses and empty wine bottles. She imagined the twelve girls walking down the road, the sunlight shining on their greasy faces, dreaming, perhaps, of that day when they too could be contented with a bunch of red roses or a handwritten poem in exchange for their love. Doña Emilia wished for that fate for each one of them and closed her eyes, hoping she would never have to open them again. She’d decided to close down La Casa and to live for as long as her remaining savings allowed.

  The magical whorehouse, the one that sometimes was and sometimes wasn’t, one day disappeared forever and only love was to blame. The twelve young women found themselves in love, each one with a different man. Magnolia fell for a married barber named Valentín, a middle-aged, dark-skinned fellow who wore a stubborn hairpiece that moved all over his head. When he visited her tent, Magnolia talked incessantly about wedding gowns made of silk and engagement rings shaped as hearts. She also insisted on reading to him, by the light of a candle, a love story. Valentín thought the girl a little insane and stopped coming. Night after night Magnolia waited for him. She refused all others and turned down their gifts. Under her tent she mostly cried. Sometime
s she arranged her provisions and weeded and watered her plants. But mostly she read the same old stories to herself and cried.

  Eventually, the twelve girls concluded that God had given them two eyes to better look at men, two ears to better hear what men might want to say, two arms to embrace them and two legs to wrap around them, but only one heart to give. Men, on the other hand, loved with their testicles, and God had given them two.

  And so one night the men couldn’t find the magical whorehouse. They looked for the tents along the tortuous roads, behind the woods and between the arid hills. They searched high and low for weeks but never found them. The women had gone back to Mariquita, back to their spinsterhood and their sad nightly meetings filled with memories, back to fantasizing about that glorious day when the town’s bachelors would be returned to them.

  THEY RUINED MY business for nothing! Doña Emilia said to herself. Suddenly she heard, in the distance, a street vendor shouting her goods in a rather delicate voice: “Guayabas! Naranjas! Mandarinas!” Then she saw her, a young girl walking gracefully while balancing a large basket on her head. The old woman carefully observed everything about the girl, who looked no more than twelve: her pink dress, her black hair in braids, her long arms and small waist, and had the odd feeling that she’d known her for a long time. The girl also noticed the old woman. She smiled and gently waved. Doña Emilia smiled back. She was just about to ask the girl to join her at the bench when a gust of wind blew the girl’s basket out of balance. Guavas, oranges and tangerines scattered over the ground. The girl knelt down and quietly began to gather them and put them in the basket. Doña Emilia wanted to help, but when she tried to rise from the bench she couldn’t feel her legs.

  And then there came a stronger gust of wind, and the mango, the one the color of sunset, dropped to the ground, right next to the girl. Doña Emilia saw the girl smile, saw her take the mango in her hands and put it in the basket, saw her stride down the road with the basket on her head and slowly vanish into the wind.

  Feeling jubilant, Doña Emilia leaned back against the bench and fixed her eyes on the sky, only this time she couldn’t see that it was blue.

  José L. Mendoza, 32

  Lieutenant-colonel, Colombian National Army

  One thing I’ve learned in the army is that the less contact you have with your victim, the easier it is to kill him. I once let a man talk to me for too long before I shot him, and I still regret it. We had received a call from the police station of a small village in the mountains. They were being attacked by guerrillas and needed reinforcements. The roads were terrible, so we couldn’t get there until the following morning, and by that time the rebels, we thought, were gone with whatever was worth anything. I was walking around the town counting dead bodies, unaware that at that moment, a guerrilla in a tree was aiming his Galil at the back of my neck with the clear intention of blowing my head off. One of my officers spotted him and shot him in the arm before the guerrilla could do anything. He was a brown-skinned, small-eyed Indian guy. We herded him and three more rebels we captured into a drainage pit.

  When we gained control of the village, I asked the Indian to come out of the pit—I didn’t want to shoot him in front of the other three. He knew what I was about to do, and so he claimed that he was too weak from all the blood he’d lost. I should just let him die in the pit. I shouted to him to come out, and he begged me not to shoot him. He said that his mother had had a stroke and that his two younger sisters had been seriously burned in some fire and that they were alive but they couldn’t move their legs and that their faces were completely disfigured and that they were counting on him to support them and that he was a good man who had been forced into becoming a fighter and that if I could find it within myself to pardon him he’d quit the guerrillas and join the national army…. It was like he’d memorized the whole speech. And I don’t know why, but I kept listening to his damn story and staring at his eyes, which had grown larger with fear. I let him talk and talk until he got tired and stopped. Then I knelt down in front of him, placed the tip of my revolver on his forehead, and told the other men in the pit that he had tried to kill me from behind and that it wasn’t manly. “This is how you kill a man,” I said, and shot him. At the sound of the blast, my eyes, involuntarily, closed. When I opened them, the Indian’s body was still standing in the pit, but his head was gone from the nose up. His hair, his brains, his small eyes…they simply weren’t there anymore. His mouth was, though, the muscles around his lips quivering as if they were trying to articulate something else he’d forgotten to tell me.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Teacher Who Refused to Teach History

  Mariquita, February 11, 1995

  CLEOTILDE GUARNIZO WAS A sixty-seven-year-old spinster. She had short gray hair, a smooth mustache and white bristles on her chin. Thick spectacles rested on her round nose, which looked like an upside-down question mark, giving her face an enigmatic air. There was something masculine about her mannerisms: the way she sat with her legs wide apart, her fierce stomping gait and the way her right hand clenched instinctively when she felt threatened, as though ready to knock someone or something to the ground. Her countenance was completed by a frown that seldom relaxed. In short, she was the image of severity gone gray.

  Cleotilde had been on an aimless journey when the bus by which she was traveling broke down. Night was beginning to fall, and Cleotilde was afraid. She hired a country boy to take her, by mule, to the closest village. She would spend the night there and resume her journey at dawn.

  The boy dropped her and her suitcase at Mariquita’s plaza and left. The village was especially quiet that night, and in the absence of light looked like a ghost town. Cleotilde’s legs began to shake. Aimlessly and with great effort, she walked a few blocks until she saw a gleam of light in a small window. She hurried up to the house and knocked on the open door. Soon a young girl wrapped in a black shawl came into sight, a candle in her hand. The girl couldn’t have been older than ten, maybe eleven.

  “Come on in,” she said in a sweet voice. She walked ahead, with the candle lighting a long, narrow hall. “My name’s Virgelina Saavedra, and this is my grandmother, Lucrecia viuda de Saavedra.” The girl pointed at a pale, old woman sitting on a rocking chair.

  “I’m Señorita Cleotilde Guarnizo. At your service,” she said, and then, addressing Lucrecia, added, “and I’m looking for a warm place to spend the night.”

  “You can stay here if you like,” Lucrecia replied indifferently. “We have a spare hammock and a blanket somewhere.”

  Cleotilde hated hammocks. She couldn’t understand how anybody could sleep while hanging in the air like sloths. Of course she wouldn’t say that to them. They seemed like friendly country people. “I really appreciate it,” she said.

  Lucrecia motioned to her to sit. There was only one chair available, which made it easier and less awkward for Cleotilde. She set down her suitcase and sat and looked around, half smiling at the walls. The room was dark and stuffy, scarcely furnished, with a pile of cooking firewood sitting in one corner and two black scrawny cats lying in another. Cleotilde hated cats even more than she hated hammocks, and couldn’t help wondering whether the ones in sight were alive or dead. They might as well be a part of the house’s indigent furniture.

  “Fidel and Castro,” Lucrecia said suddenly. She appeared to be scrutinizing Cleotilde’s face and body for some sign of wealth. She might ask Cleotilde for a donation before she left the next day. Lucrecia had already bartered, for food, most of her seamstress’s equipment.

  “I beg your pardon?” Cleotilde returned. She felt as though Lucrecia were scrutinizing her face and body for some sign of wealth. She truly hoped Lucrecia wasn’t expecting her to pay for putting her up for a night. Cleotilde had barely enough cash in her purse to pay for the bus ticket that would take her far away from this decayed village.

  “I said Fidel and Castro. Those are the names of the cats.”

  “Oh,” Cleotilde returned
. “Interesting names for a couple of cats. Are they alive?”

  “Uh-huh,” Lucrecia uttered. She paused, as to indicate a change of subject, then added, “As you can see, we’re very poor.”

  “Oh, aren’t we all?” Cleotilde interposed. “This war has left us all in financial straits.” She wondered if Lucrecia knew the word straits. “You can’t even tell who’s worst, the guerrillas, the paramilitaries, or the government…. With the situation the way it is, tell me, who’s going to employ an old woman like myself?”

  “Nobody,” Lucrecia replied, looking a little frustrated that Cleotilde’s speech had ruled out any possibility of her making a few pesos that night. “We have nothing to offer you but coffee. You want a cup of coffee?” she said.

  Cleotilde thanked her, saying that it was too late for coffee, that she asked for nothing but a place to sleep and a candle. “I like to read before going to sleep, don’t you?”