Labels and Other Stories

by Louis de Bernières

  Mamacita sat on the edge of her bed and looked down at the speckled and loosened skin of her hands. She held them up to the ruthless light and marvelled at the way they had become transparent. One could almost see the bones and blood vessels. She tried to still the tremor that had been worsening for the last ten years, and thought back to the time when they had been strong and self-confident, easing infants from the womb as if they possessed a knowledge that she herself had never consciously acquired. There was barely a soul within a day’s walk that had come into this world without her firm hands cradling its head, and that included a fair number of the animals. It was true that for the most part it was only the women who bore the curse of agonising birth, but it did happen from time to time that a foal tried to come out the wrong way, and that was when Mamacita might be called.

  Mamacita had never been accused of sorcery or malice, even upon those few occasions when the child or the mother had died, and she was quite famous for some spectacular feats of life-saving, the most celebrated being the occasion when Don Balcazar had insisted that the child’s life be saved rather than the mother’s, so desperate was he for an heir. Mamacita had stood up to him, pronouncing that the child would be a mooncalf, and a curse to him for the rest of his life, and she had ordered his brothers to take him away so that she could save the life of his wife, who lay upon the bed delirious and begging for death. Mamacita sent everyone out of the room, and cut the infant to pieces inside the womb, taking the limbs out one by one, until she had assembled upon a towel the complete body of a devil with a horny head and a monkey’s tail. So horrified and repentant was Don Balcazar that he had crossed the sea to make a pilgrimage to the shrine at Santiago de Compostela, and after his return he had produced a family of six normal children. From Spain he had brought back a silver crucifix to present to Mamacita, and she had hung it above her bed, the only rich thing that she was ever to possess, and which now hangs in the side-chapel of the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows at Domiciano, with a yellowed and curled morsel of paper stuck on to the wall beside it, explaining its provenance and the story of the mooncalf.

  On this day Mamacita reflected wryly that in the dry seasons one longs for rain, and in the rainy seasons one thirsts for the brutal sun. Still, the advantage of so much dust was that one could draw in it, and she hoisted herself slowly to her feet so that she could go to the table. She bent down to check against the light that there was indeed enough dust, and made a pair of experimental lines just to make sure. Then, pursing her lips, she drew the details of the map that she had remembered upon awakening. On the other end of the table she set down a plate, a small cup and a steel tumbler.

  Struggling with the matches and the knobs, she lit two rings of her petrol cooker, and on one she toasted a tortilla that was half wheat flour and half maize flour, whilst on the other she set a diminutive saucepan in which shavings of panela and grounds of coffee would boil up to produce a redolent brew that would wake a dead horse. She reached into her cupboard and drew out a half-bottle of aniseed-flavoured aguardiente, which she poured into the steel tumbler. She knocked it back in one slug, experiencing all over again, as she had every day of her adult life, the delicious and startling assault of strong alcohol on an empty stomach. This was a morning ritual in every household, and was designed to kill intestinal parasites. Those that were not killed would be stunned and horrified, and such small revenges had their own satisfaction.

  Mamacita sliced a platano and fried the pieces in corn oil. She wrapped them in the warm tortilla, and masticated slowly and painfully with her toothless gums. There was something comforting about eating the same breakfast every morning, she reflected, and besides, when she went to see Don Agostin, he would undoubtedly give her some avocados to take away with her, and she would have the glorious obligation imposed upon her of eating all of them before they turned black and slushy. Her mouth watered at the thought.

  Mamacita sipped the sweet strong coffee. It was like tasting the distilled essence of one’s entire country: the tyrannical rain, the arrogant earth, the perverse savannahs, the obstinate jungles, the supercilious mountains, the playful rivers. She lit a cigar, and felt the sweet fumes fill up all the empty spaces in her skull.

  Her breakfast finished, she ventured out into the white light, her puro still clenched between her teeth, and squinted for a moment. She shuffled slowly past the chickens that pecked and squabbled in the dust, and entered the little shop where Conchita sold alcohol and machetes. Both women raised a hand in greeting and drawled, ‘Buen dia.’

  ‘I want a pencil and a piece of paper,’ said Mamacita. ‘I want a good pencil, and the paper should also be good.’

  ‘I will give you a piece of paper,’ said Conchita, ‘but such a pencil will cost from two to ten pesos, depending upon how much of it is left. I have a good one here’ – she produced a pencil from a drawer – ‘and with careful sharpening it will last a long time. Who knows? Perhaps a year. The cost is four pesos.’

  Mamacita inspected the pencil suspiciously. It was important to appear knowledgeable even if one was not. She turned it over in her fingers and said, ‘I will give you an avocado from Don Agostin’s finca. I don’t have it yet, but I will have it later.’

  Conchita sighed. She had tried for years to consolidate a habit of cash-for-goods amongst her customers, but the village had only been well connected to the outside world for a few years, and the old habits had not been easy to change. Still, an avocado was not such a bad idea, so she said, ‘OK, an avocado, but a big one.’

  ‘A very big one,’ agreed Mamacita, chewing the end of her puro, ‘but don’t forget to give me the paper.’

  Conchita reached under her table for a spiral-bound notebook of the type used in schools, and carefully tore out one sheet, which she handed to the old midwife, who took it reverentially between thumb and forefinger. ‘Paper,’ she said, in the same tone of voice as one says ‘thunder’ when it is about to rain.

  Back in her little dwelling, Mamacita carefully transcribed on to the paper the map that she had drawn on to the dust of the table. It was very difficult. If one pressed hard, the fingers went into a clench that was hard to control, but on the other hand, if one pressed lightly, then the lines were faint and wobbly and did not go in the right direction, and neither did they stop at the right place. ‘Hijo’e puta,’ she swore to herself, revelling in the delightful luxury of using in solitude an obscenity which never in her life had passed her lips in public.

  Mamacita scrutinised her completed work with some dissatisfaction, and felt the bitterness of ill-education mingle with the bitter taste of tobacco on her tongue. Her eyes were not in any case as good as they had been, and, when she peered hard, the lines faded and duplicated themselves, wandering about like ants and slipping away like snakes. ‘It will have to do,’ she told herself, ‘and Don Agostin can always improve it if he wishes, with God’s help.’

  She put her chart into her mochila, and hung it from one shoulder. It was made of heavy white linen by the Indians in the foothills, and had a pretty double-stripe around its top, in natural shades of maroon and green. She went out once more into the white light, and made her way towards the beginning of the long track that led down to Don Agostin’s hacienda. On one side was the reedy swamp where small caimans lazed and grunted, only their snouts and their arched eye sockets above the level of the water, and on the other side was the field with the fallen trees where one of Don Agostin’s mares was cavorting about with her foal. Mamacita laid her mochila on the grass, muttered a charm against coral snakes, and sat down on it, forgetting that this would crumple the map. She was waiting for Don Agostin’s tractor driver, who passed this way several times a day, toing-and-froing between the different halves of the farm.

  Mamacita arrived at Don Agostin’s feeling like a queen. The tractor was a venerable but lovingly tended bright red Massey Ferguson, a very large one, and today it had had the bucket mounted on the front so that it could be used for earth-moving. Mamacita
had been installed in the bucket, and then raised high in the air, so that she became lady of all she surveyed. It was perilous, no doubt, and once or twice she had experienced tricky moments involving low-hanging branches, but it had been marvellous to be able to see the world at speed from such a novel angle, and she had also contrived to pick some lemons, a large grapefruit and two avocados. It was not stealing, she reasoned, because Don Agostin would not have minded. Besides, the cooling effect of the air as it passed her by made her feel just a little irresponsible on such an otherwise oppressive day.

  It was difficult to maintain dignity as Mamacita was lowered to the ground in a series of jerks, but she clung grimly to the side of the bucket and continued to puff at her cigar with every affectation of nonchalance. The vaqueros who were saddling up their ponies and mules at the tack-house gave her an ironic cheer as she stepped to the earth, and she beamed at them shyly but brightly, so that for one evanescent moment they caught a glimpse of Mamacita as she had been when young, when her father had become accustomed every night to having to chase away the boys who came to sing rancheros outside her window.

  Mamacita crossed the flagstones shaded by bougainvillea and tapped on the frame of the door. Through the fine green mesh that let in the air without also admitting the insects, and which served the place of glass in that tropical inferno, she could see Don Agostin himself, hunched over his papers at the dining table. Beyond him she could glimpse the cook in the kitchen, apparently skinning an iguana.

  At the sound of her knock, Don Agostin called ‘Enter’ without even looking up, which struck Mamacita as a little marvellous, because she had herself tried not looking up when somebody knocked at her door, but had always looked up nonetheless, as if by reflex. Perhaps only those born to importance were capable of such coolness in the face of a knock.

  Mamacita entered, and Don Agostin stood up to greet her. In his youth he had been a rakehell and an unmitigated dog, but at the age of forty-five he had become gallant and urbane, and so he seized her right hand and kissed it, not once but twice. ‘Abuela,’ he exclaimed, ‘what a pleasure this is.’ He waved her to a chair with an elegant sweep of his arm, and called out to the kitchen, ‘Emma, a jug of guarapo for my guest.’ He turned to Mamacita, and wiped his forehead with the tail of his shirt. ‘Another infernal day,’ he observed.

  Mamacita pointed to the fan that was rotating slowly and half-heartedly above them. ‘This is very nice,’ she said drily, ‘but it would be nicer if we could all have them. It is the heat that makes us behave badly.’

  ‘We become ill-natured, do we not?’ agreed Don Agostin. ‘However, I have finally bullied and bribed the State Governor into electrifying the village, and soon we will have every sort of convenience, including refrigeration.’

  ‘You are a good patron,’ said Mamacita, ‘everyone agrees.’

  ‘Very kind, very kind,’ replied Don Agostin, ‘but all the same I am frequently reminded of my shortcomings.’

  ‘At least you look after all your little bastards,’ said Mamacita bluntly. ‘There is many a patron who doesn’t.’

  Don Agostin flushed, but remained dignified. ‘Now what can I do for you? As you know, Abuela, nothing is too trivial or too great when matters concern she who delivered me into this world.’

  Mamacita came straight to the point. ‘I have come to sell you a dream,’ she said.

  ‘A dream,’ repeated Don Agostin.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I have dreamed something, and you are the only person I can think of who can take advantage of it, since you have a Land Rover.’

  Don Agostin was curious. He had been to a fine school in Cali and could have been a café intellectual anywhere in the world were it not for his duty to the family farm – he could cite instances from philosophy, and quote Neruda with the best of them – but he had learned to listen with more than half an ear to these dogged campesinos. He had become familiar with their syncretistic religion, their fantastical beliefs and quirky rituals, and could not in all honesty deny that sometimes they knew things in a manner that could not in the ordinary run of things be called knowledge. Had he not witnessed his own cattle cured of an inexplicable epilepsy by an itinerant mountebank who kissed them on the mouth and muttered secrets in their ears? It seemed that in different parts of the world there were entirely different laws of nature. You could not apply scientific principles in this place, any more than you could cure a European cow by kissing it.

  ‘What is the nature of this dream?’ he enquired. ‘Naturally one must inspect the goods before purchase.’

  ‘I dreamed of gold,’ she said. ‘I know exactly where it is.’

  ‘Don’t you want it for yourself, Abuela? Why don’t you go and find it?’

  Mamacita gestured loosely towards the foothills. ‘It’s over there. I think that one would need a Land Rover, or even mules. It’s too far for me, I’m an old woman, and I don’t have the means. That’s why I thought I would sell the dream to you.’

  ‘Is it a huaca, by any chance?’ asked Don Agostin, referring to the huge urns in which the Indians used to bury their dead.

  ‘I can’t say,’ said Mamacita, ‘all I know is that I saw the exact spot, with a golden light above it. Like an angel.’

  ‘It’s funny,’ mused the patron, ‘but I have always thought of angelic light as being more silver than gold. One has such funny ideas.’

  ‘There might be silver,’ said the old woman. She rummaged in her mochila and produced the rumpled piece of paper. ‘I drew a map, and I am prepared to sell it to you.’

  ‘And how much are you asking?’

  ‘I am asking two thousand pesos, and a share of the find.’ She looked at him resolutely, the cigar, now extinguished, still protruding soggily from the corner of her mouth.

  The patron whistled. ‘Two thousand? That’s enough to pay a vaquero for ten weeks. And what share do you want?’

  Mamacita raised all ten fingers, and then folded back seven of them. ‘I want three out of ten, because three is the number of the trinity, and lucky. Also, three is made by the adding of the first two numbers, and therefore it is a very perfect number.’

  Don Agostin was pricked by curiosity, and also by a feeling of obligation. How many times had his mother insisted that he would not have survived his birth if Mamacita had not greased her arm with lard and reached in and turned him? Two thousand pesos was not too much money to help such an old lady for a time, and indeed, perhaps he should settle one hundred pesos a week upon her in any case. The good that one does in this world lives beyond the grave. ‘I will give you three thousand pesos, and a fourth of the share,’ he said, willing himself not to regret it the moment that it was said.

  ‘It is too much,’ said the ancient midwife, her mouth working, and her rheumy eyes flicking from side to side.

  ‘I insist,’ he said.

  ‘Who am I to contradict the patron?’ she asked rhetorically. ‘I accept, but not willingly.’

  ‘Your reluctance shows great graciousness,’ he said.

  ‘I want it notified,’ she remarked suddenly. ‘I want it done before a magistrate.’

  ‘I am a magistrate,’ said Don Agustin, mildly offended that she appeared not to take his word. In fact, Mamacita had recently become impressed by this business of bits of paper, and it appealed to her to have an official one.

  ‘Forgive me, I forgot, Don patron, but I would like a piece of paper all the same.’

  Don Agostin removed a notepad from beneath his heap of paperwork and wrote in a beautiful cursive script: ‘I, Don Agostin Leonaldo Jesus de Santayana, certify that on this day I have purchased from ….’ Here he stopped and said, ‘Forgive me in my turn, but what is your real name? I cannot write “Mamacita” on an official document.’

  ‘It’s Liliana,’ she said, ‘Liliana Morales. But Mamacita is better.’

  The patron continued to write ‘… Liliana Morales, spinster and midwife of this village, the right to a map indicating a place of treasure, reve
aled in a dream, for the sum of three thousand pesos and a fourth of the gross sale value of the aforementioned treasure, should it be found. Witnessed by God and by the aforementioned Liliana Morales.’ He dated it, signed it with an exuberant elaboration of curlicues, and passed it over to her, saying, ‘Keep this in a place where you can powder it with insecticide, or the termites will eat it, and we will have no agreement. Now, perhaps you would permit me to see the map?’

  Mamacita passed it over, and Don Agostin scrutinised it. He felt both amused and cheated, for it was no more than a web of errant scribbles. ‘I think you should explain this,’ he said.

  Mamacita leaned over and jabbed at the paper with a trembling forefinger. ‘This is a stream,’ she said, ‘and this is a goat track, and that is a rock that looks like a man, and this is a bush that is dead and has been burned, and this is a black rock that looks like a jaguar, and here you will find the skeleton of a horse, and this is where the sun rises, and at this place between all these things, you will find the treasure.’

  The patron noted all of this, naming the features on the map. ‘Perhaps you could give me an indication of distances,’ he said.

  Mamacita ran her forefinger over the scribbles, reciting, ‘This is ten paces, this is five minutes’ walk for a grown man, this is the same as from here to the waterfall, and this is about the length of a lemon tree’s shadow an hour before sunset.’

  ‘That seems very clear,’ said Don Agostin with an irony that he knew she would not perceive. He scratched his head with the pencil.

  Mamacita rose and offered him her hand, which he kissed again, this time less gallantly than before, as he was beginning to suspect that he had somehow been nudged into making a fool of himself. Mamacita reminded him, ‘Don’t forget the four thousand pesos.’