by Pablo Medina
Eulalia’s house, which was known as La Sabrosona, had once been the handsomest in the marsh, but the place hadn’t been painted in decades. Termites had gotten into the wooden siding and carpenter ants had bored into the crossbeams. Vines twirled around the railings of the front porch, and the roof sagged over the entry like a half-closed eyelid. Elena said to her father that it looked like elves lived there. Fermín José responded that the only elf was Eulalia and she was completely crazy, but he’d seen her heal people so sick they were on the verge of death.
They were standing before the front door, which was fully open, when they heard a voice calling out from the inside: “Fermincito, ay, Fermincito. You’re the one who’s crazy.”
Eulalia got up from a rocker in the middle of the cavernous living room and waddled over to where the three of them stood. She threw her arms around Fermín José, saying, “Fermincito el loco, Fermincito el loco.” He was a foot taller than his cousin and had to bend over in order to kiss her on the temple. It was one of the few times Elena saw him show any affection toward anyone.
Cándida let out a sigh and allowed herself to be led into the living room, where the three women waited for Fermín José to unload the provisions. Eulalia asked for one of the bottles of firewater, uncorked it, and took a long swig, her rubbery lips wrapping around the bottle’s mouth like a child’s around a pacifier. She cackled and spoke in a language none of them had heard before:
“Elle es sufragia d’melancholia pusilanimis, contra naturam, contra humanitam. Elle es menester cart spiritus mundi in saecula saeculorum forever. Je ne sais pas the origen, potomuchto, suis soy humaine, campana bell tin-tin ablutions. The valuation es excepcional, yén-ye-re Holofernes, caught in blood, cold blood, sang froid. Bontemps ago, Oggún comence dominer notre vie, notre réveiller, notre dormir. Le cache de penser interdit, le cache de penser abolié crece to become plasta cerebral, comme la merde de les vaques. Oggún y Ochún no mix et impliqué la muerte de uno de los dos. Solo sé que no sé nada. La mort es peripatetique, comme un oiseau de plummes negres, un cuervo chantajero, a blackmailing crow, crown town, frown. Gavariú pravdu. La guerre est la mortification de notre chair. Gavariú pravdu, todo verdad, todo ilusión.”
Dumbfounded by her babble, Fermín José opened a bottle of firewater and took a drink, thus violating a rule he had imposed on himself never to partake of his own product. The drink enabled him to begin to unravel some of Eulalia’s ramblings. He passed the bottle to Elena, who handed it to Cándida without drinking any of it. Cándida took a sip but was so revolted by the taste that she gagged. Her face turned red and her eyes bulged. She began to sweat profusely and then vomited the only food she’d had that day, boiled yuca and dried beef.
“Drink more,” Eulalia said. “Drink more. It is stallion urine, meao de semental cuadralbo. It will liberate you. You’ll want to shit on your mother-in-law’s tomb and have sex with ten men at once and lick the asshole of a cane cutter.”
Eulalia laughed and slapped her thigh repeatedly, as if she were beating a drum, a skinny drum that had lost all its tensile strength but gained the ability to accompany the truth, her truth, which wasn’t always taut.
Fermín José was stupefied, thinking the cure was worse than the disease. Elena, who had never been with a man, let alone ten, was intrigued. Cándida sat back and closed her eyes, her breath heavy, her face pale and clammy. The light of dusk had all but disappeared, leaving only gloom behind, and Eulalia lit a kerosene lamp that stood on the floor by her rocker. She walked over to where Cándida was sitting, soundly asleep, and looked down at her.
“Fermincito,” she said. “Your drink is magic. Her soul is revived and growing again. I got to clean the vomit. I got to wash her face with cologne. Tomorrow she wakes up refreshed, just like her old self, dense but alive.”
The morning smelled of brine and rotting vegetation. Cándida had come out of her condition and prepared coffee country style, using a cloth funnel and letting the boiling water drip over the coarse grounds. She sweetened it with molasses and gave a tin cup to Elena. Fermín José went out to the chicken coop and came back with some eggs, which he fried and served with boiled plantains and lard crackers. Before leaving the kitchen to prepare for the trip home, he said, “I learned two things in this house: to fry eggs and to make firewater.”
Elena was left alone in the kitchen, and as she ate, she noticed a print nailed to the wall across from her. She stopped eating and got closer. It depicted a group of young women surrounding a blond girl, a princess apparently, being painted by an artist with long black hair and a red cross sewn on his doublet. In the right-hand corner a small boy was kicking a dog. One of the young women, standing behind the blond girl, looked surprisingly like Elena herself. She was startled and felt the flame of recognition in her heart. Someone had painted her image a long time ago, before she was born. She brought her hand to her cheek and slid it to her lips as if to prove to herself that she was the person she was, there in Eulalia’s kitchen eating eggs, and not someone depicted in an old painting.
Elena heard Eulalia’s voice behind her. “Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez. Tu sois belle et sois triste. Ochin krasnaya dievushka. Ti-lín, ti-lín. Pantoun pan elenicus. Do you like the painting? It is yours, sobrinita.”
Little niece, Elena thought. Why was she calling her that?
Eulalia walked over to the wall in her duck-like way and Elena noticed she was barefoot. Her feet were thick and gnarled like tree roots and her yellow toenails curled inward. From her emanated a smell of dried fish and tamarind. She pulled down the print, rolled it up, and tied it with string.
“Don Diego, he was a good friend of my father’s. He would come to the house once a week and have me sit on his lap. He liked to tickle me. There was always something hard between his legs. Ay! He was a sodomite and traveled with three monkeys.”
Eulalia cackled and stuck out her tongue, which had a hairy mole on the tip.
Sitting on the bouncy mule on the trip back, Elena thought about the print, the ladies-in-waiting, the boy kicking the dog, and the young woman who looked so much like her. She did not know what a sodomite was. The word sounded final and irreversible and biblical, and she decided not to ask her parents for its definition. Eulalia used words that had no meaning but sounded as if they did.
When they arrived in Piedra Negra a group of twenty veterans was waiting on the front porch. They’d come to buy their daily allotment of firewater, and finding no one in the house, they stayed put. Fermín José had enough bottles in reserve to satisfy the group’s thirst, but there were increasing numbers of men crowding the plaza. Fearing another run the next day, he set to work immediately, firing up the alembic still he’d set up in the back room by the kitchen. Fermín José gave Elena the seemingly easy job of extracting the juice from the sugarcane by pushing the stalks through the rollers of a small electric mill. The juice was first collected in wooden buckets and set aside to ferment before it was distilled through the alembic. It was a far from perfect operation and the firewater produced had a mealy consistency and a rancid aftertaste that he deadened with wormwood and almond oil. What it lacked in refinement was more than offset by its low cost and its remarkable power to turn the strongest of men into mental slugs. As a result, Fermín José had a steady clientele comprised originally of unemployed cane cutters and, more recently, of wounded war veterans who congregated around the plaza.
The job he gave Elena was not as easy or as safe as it might seem. The steel rollers were grooved and fit tightly on each other, made especially that way so that the cane went in round and juicy on one side and came out flat and dry on the other. It was an old mill without any of the modern safety features, and the only way to turn it off was by pulling the electric cord from the wall socket. At first Elena heeded Fermín José’s warning to let go of the stalk as soon as it was firmly trapped by the rollers, but as the afternoon wore on, she began to think of Las Meninas and of poems she might write about the painting and diverted
her attention for a moment, holding on to the cane stalk a few seconds too long. Her left hand was trapped along with the stalk and passed through to the ring finger before Fermín José, hearing her screams, pulled the plug and stopped the machine. The cane juice ran pink that day, but that did not deter him from selling the resulting liquor, calling it virgin firewater and charging twice the usual price. Elena healed from the accident in a few months, and she was left with only the thumb and half of her index and middle fingers of her left hand. From then on the townspeople referred to her as La Manquita.
Fermín José had been in the distilling business for a long time and his daughter’s accident did not deter him at all. On the contrary. In time he had perfected the art of making firewater to a degree previously unknown in Piedra Negra. Besides the cane cutters and the disabled war veterans, his clients included peasants who had left the mountains when the war broke out and settled in shacks on the edges of the marsh. The firewater had a repellent effect on mosquitoes and other insects and otherwise made life bearable by the stagnant waters and unhealthy miasma. A minor French writer who passed through the town on the way to join the rebels likened Piedra Negran firewater to absinthe, both in taste and effect, a statement that made the town fathers so proud they reproduced it on a billboard at the town’s entrance. The reality was quite different. The town’s firewater smelled like horse sweat and tasted, one imagines, just like it. Reputed to cause hangovers of cataclysmic proportions, the liquor left the drinkers stranded in a zombielike state that lasted for days. Elena tried it once, when her father left her in charge of the still so he could make a chess move. She filled a glass to the brim and drank the firewater quickly, in a single gulp. The liquor had not been named in vain. First, she thought her esophagus had caught on fire; then it seemed as if there were a cat trying to claw its way out of her stomach. Finally her eyesight blurred and an electric current shot through her brain, making her see visions of dancing dogs and singing snakes and huge galleons entering a pre-Columbian harbor. When the effects subsided, she lay on the floor against the wall like a rag doll with Cantaclaro the rooster perched on her knee, crowing loudly as if dawn had returned at midday. Elena promised herself she’d never drink alcohol again, a vow she kept until the day of her death.
Among the men who came to buy firewater regularly, there appeared a young fellow by the name of Pedro Garcés, recently returned from the front with one and a half legs. His nerves had been compromised and he suffered severe pains up and down his ruined limb that only firewater alleviated. Pedrito, for that is what they called him to distinguish him from his father, was barely twenty-one years old, and his ragged poverty had entered his soul. Many confused it for purity of spirit, but Pedrito was no Saint Francis. He lied and cheated with impunity, he said little and thought less, and when he wasn’t at the smithy helping his father, whom they called Pedro el Cruel for the way he treated his son, he spent his time in the plaza, seated on one of the benches alongside the other veterans, watching the passersby and, in the late afternoon, after he’d drunk enough firewater to settle his nerves and dull his pain, playing Spanish tute in the bodega owned by Jacobo el Polaco. Pedrito’s one evident quality was that he was a superior card player, and for that reason other players tolerated him, despite his character failings, his repulsive flatulence, and his sick-dog attitude.
The first time Elena noticed him it had rained heavily. Pedrito bought two bottles of firewater and lingered outside the front porch veranda looking like a nearly drowned bird. A wave of pity came over her and she asked him if he was hungry. Pedrito, who never let his timidity stand in the way of a handout, nodded yes. Elena went inside and came out with a plate of cornmeal and okra. The okra was slimy and bitter tasting, but he forced it down quickly and smiled afterward. When he was done, Elena took the plate and came out with an additional bottle of firewater. “For your friends,” she told him. He thanked her quietly and put the extra bottle under his arm.
Pedrito shared the liquor with his fellow veterans and told them how La Manquita had taken a liking to him and he was going to take advantage of that as far as he could. “Who knows,” he said in his drunkenness, “maybe she needs a good fuck.” His friends laughed and said he probably couldn’t get it up, so not to even bother. Pedrito felt challenged. He unbuttoned his pants and pulled out his penis, and when his friends saw its majestic proportions, they stopped laughing. Pedrito tugged at it and the thing awakened. He tugged a few more times and the penis shot out a thick gob of semen that landed on a bush five feet away and stuck there, slowly dripping from branch to branch. No one said anything. He wiped his hand on the park bench, buttoned up his fly, and went across to the steps of the abandoned church, where he sat by himself and drank the rest of his liquor.
The next day Pedrito was at Elena’s door at nine in the morning, but Elena had already left for school, and so he waited through the morning doldrums and the searing heat of the early afternoon until she returned. She asked him what he was doing there, the batch of liquor wouldn’t be ready until five, and he said, “I was waiting for you.”
“Me?” she said, and gave a quick, nervous laugh.
He stared at her with his large eyes the color of the sea where it deepens. He was a lowly drunk with one and a half legs, but he was lighter skinned than she. That might not have counted for much anywhere else, but in Piedra Negra skin color trumped everything. Besides, she too was a cripple. They called her La Manquita, didn’t they? Elena went inside and came back with a bottle of firewater and gave it to Pedrito.
“What time do you leave for school in the morning?” he asked.
“Seven thirty,” she said.
“I will be here then.”
Pedrito kept his promise the following morning and on subsequent ones, dressed in a clean shirt and pants he had stolen from his father. He disguised his limp as well as his wooden leg would allow and walked with Elena to school, a habit that allowed him to tell her about his experiences in the mountains and how it was that a flying piece of metal from an exploding mine had cut off his foot above the ankle. The fellow next to him was not so lucky. They had to gather him up with a shovel. Elena was both horrified and excited by his stories, and as the days passed he told her many things about the war—how it was like a dream that changes without reason in the blink of an eye.
“One moment things are peaceful. The hillsides are filled with light. The birds are singing, the breeze moves the tree branches back and forth, and the world smells fresh and new like a baby, like paradise. Then, without warning, the earth explodes next to you. Bullets whizz by. They don’t sound like they do in the movies. They drill the air, slice it open, and when they hit flesh they make a dull thump like a hard punch. The wounded scream and clutch the ground, but if a man is hit by a fifty-caliber bullet, he drops like a sack of flesh. Not a moan comes out of him. Like a big papaya splitting open and the insides spilling out. It can drive you crazy to hear that sound. You want to hide but there’s nowhere to hide. All around are the things that can kill you—bullets, cannons, shrapnel. Falling branches will kill you. Wood splinters from trees hit by shells will fly out in all directions. They can kill you. Concussion grenades will kill you or make you deaf. Men on your side will become confused and fire at you. They call that friendly fire. It will kill you just as well as the unfriendly sort. If you’re a coward, the only thing you can do is curl up into a ball, mess your pants, and wait for death. Death liberates you from everything—the bullets, the fire, the shrapnel, the smoke. Death liberates you from itself. No one dies twice.”
Elena loved this talk of war. She wanted to be in it, surrounded by the death and the carnage. She’d seen the neighbor slaughter and butcher a pig in his backyard. There was nothing to it. Entrails have a clean, fulsome quality to them, and flesh glistens like a red jewel. Those morning walks with Pedrito became the highlight of her day, and by the time she got to school, her armpits were damp and she was trembling with desire. She began to feel more than just pity f
or Pedrito, poor lame Pedrito with the blue eyes and war-torn spirit.
“I have seen,” Pedrito told Elena, “a man’s head fall to the grass next to me with a smile on his lips. And you know why he was smiling, Elena?”
He didn’t wait for her to ask.
“Because he didn’t have to die again.”
Pedrito abandoned his shyness once and for all and took a hold of Elena’s hand as they walked. His unusual method of seduction was working and he began to embellish his descriptions.
“I saw a burst of gunfire tear open my best friend. You know what he did?”
Elena held her breath.
“He bent over and calmly started picking up his guts and draping them over his shoulders like a necklace; then he turned back and walked to the rear. I gave him twenty paces. He went twenty-five before dropping. Our captain said, ‘That’s a courageous man.’ I thought, ‘That’s a liberated man,’ but I didn’t say it. You don’t dare ever to speak over your commanding officer. In the midst of battle he can pull out his pistol and shoot you.”
