Collected Stories (26 page)

It’s a pity that Blacamán the Bad can’t repeat
this story so that people will see that there’s nothing invented in it. The last time anyone saw him in this world he’d lost even the studs of his former splendor, and his soul was a shambles and his bones in disorder from the rigors of the desert, but he still had enough jingle bells left to reappear that Sunday on the docks
of Santa María del Darién with his eternal sepulchral trunk, except
that this time he wasn’t trying to sell any antidotes, but was asking in a voice cracking with emotion for the marines to shoot him in a public spectacle so that he could demonstrate on his own flesh the life-restoring properties of this supernatural creature, ladies and gentlemen, and even though you have more than enough right not to believe me after suffering so long from my evil tricks as a deceiver
and falsifier, I swear on the bones of my mother that this proof today is nothing from the other world, merely the humble truth, and in case you have any doubts left, notice that I’m not laughing now the way I used to, but holding back a desire to cry. How convincing he must have been, unbuttoning his shirt, his eyes drowning with tears, and giving himself mule kicks on his heart to indicate
the best place for death, and yet the marines didn’t dare shoot, out of fear that the Sunday crowd would discover their loss of prestige. Someone who may not have forgotten the blacamanipulations of past times managed, no one knew how, to get and bring him in a can enough
barbasco
roots to bring to the surface all the corvinas in the Caribbean, and he opened it with great desire, as if he really
was going to eat them, and, indeed, he did eat them, ladies and gentlemen, but please don’t be moved or pray for the repose of my soul, because this death is nothing but a visit. That time he was so honest that he didn’t break into operatic death rattles, but got off the table like a crab, looked on the ground for the most worthy place to lie down after some hesitation, and from there he looked
at me as he would have at a mother and exhaled his last breath in his own arms, still holding back his manly tears all twisted up by the tetanus of eternity. That was the only time, of course, that my science failed me. I put him in that trunk of premonitory size where there was room for him laid out. I had a requiem mass sung for him which cost me fifty four-peso doubloons, because the officiant
was dressed in gold and there were also three seated bishops. I had the mausoleum of an emperor built for him on a hill exposed to the best seaside weather, with a chapel just for him and an
iron plaque on which there was written in Gothic capitals
HERE LIES BLACAMÁN THE DEAD, BADLY CALLED THE BAD, DECEIVER OF MARINES AND VICTIM OF SCIENCE
, and when those honors were sufficient for me to do justice
to his virtues, I began to get my revenge for his infamy, and then I revived him inside the armored tomb and left him there rolling about in horror. That was long before the fire ants devoured Santa María del Darién, but the mausoleum is still intact on the hill in the shadow of the dragons that climb up to sleep in the Atlantic winds, and every time I pass through here I bring him an automobile
load of roses and my heart pains with pity for his virtues, but then I put my ear to the plaque to hear him weeping in the ruins of the crumbling trunk and if by chance he has died again, I bring him back to life once more, for the beauty of the punishment is that he will keep on living in his tomb as long as I’m alive, that is, forever.

Eréndira was bathing her grandmother when the wind of her misfortune began to blow. The enormous mansion of moonlike concrete lost in the solitude of the desert trembled down to its foundations with the first attack. But Eréndira and her grandmother were used to the risks of the wild nature there, and in the bathroom
decorated with a series of peacocks and childish mosaics of Roman baths they scarcely paid any attention to the caliber of the wind.

The grandmother, naked and huge in the marble tub, looked like a handsome white whale. The granddaughter had just turned fourteen and was languid, soft-boned, and too meek for her age. With a parsimony that had something like sacred rigor about it, she was bathing
her grandmother with water in which purifying herbs and aromatic leaves had been boiled, the latter clinging to the succulent back, the flowing metal-colored hair, and the powerful shoulders which were so mercilessly tattooed as to put sailors to shame.

‘Last night I dreamt I was expecting a letter,’ the grandmother said.

Eréndira, who never spoke except when it was unavoidable, asked:

‘What
day was it in the dream?’

‘Thursday.’

‘Then it was a letter with bad news,’ Eréndira said, ‘but it will never arrive.’

When she had finished bathing her grandmother, she took her to her bedroom. The grandmother was so fat that she
could only walk by leaning on her granddaughter’s shoulder or on a staff that looked like a bishop’s crosier, but even during her most difficult efforts the power
of an antiquated grandeur was evident. In the bedroom, which had been furnished with an excessive and somewhat demented taste, like the whole house, Eréndira needed two more hours to get her grandmother ready. She untangled her hair strand by strand, perfumed and combed it, put an equatorially flowered dress on her, put talcum powder on her face, bright red lipstick on her mouth, rouge on her cheeks,
musk on her eyelids, and mother-of-pearl polish on her nails, and when she had her decked out like a larger than life-size doll, she led her to an artificial garden with suffocating flowers that were like the ones on the dress, seated her in a large chair that had the foundation and the pedigree of a throne, and left her listening to elusive records on a phonograph that had a speaker like a megaphone.

While the grandmother floated through the swamps of the past, Eréndira busied herself sweeping the house, which was dark and motley, with bizarre furniture and statues of invented Caesars, chandeliers of teardrops and alabaster angels, a gilded piano, and numerous clocks of unthinkable sizes and shapes. There was a cistern in the courtyard for the storage of water carried over many years from
distant springs on the backs of Indians, and hitched to a ring on the cistern wall was a broken-down ostrich, the only feathered creature who could survive the torment of that accursed climate. The house was far away from everything, in the heart of the desert, next to a settlement with miserable and burning streets where the goats committed suicide from desolation when the wind of misfortune blew.

That incomprehensible refuge had been built by the grandmother’s husband, a legendary smuggler whose name was Amadís, by whom she had a son whose name was also Amadís and who was Eréndira’s father. No one knew either the origins or the motivations of that family. The best known version in the language of the Indians was that Amadís the
father had rescued his beautiful wife from a house of prostitution
in the Antilles, where he had killed a man in a knife fight, and that he had transplanted her forever in the impunity of the desert. When the Amadíses died, one of melancholy fevers and the other riddled with bullets in a fight over a woman, the grandmother buried their bodies in the courtyard, sent away the fourteen barefoot servant girls, and continued ruminating on her dreams of grandeur
in the shadows of the furtive house, thanks to the sacrifices of the bastard granddaughter whom she had reared since birth.

Eréndira needed six hours just to set and wind the clocks. The day when her misfortune began she didn’t have to do that because the clocks had enough winding left to last until the next morning, but on the other hand, she had to bathe and overdress her grandmother, scrub
the floors, cook lunch, and polish the crystalware. Around eleven o’clock, when she was changing the water in the ostrich’s bowl and watering the desert weeds around the twin graves of the Amadíses, she had to fight off the anger of the wind, which had become unbearable, but she didn’t have the slightest feeling that it was the wind of her misfortune. At twelve o’clock she was wiping the last champagne
glasses when she caught the smell of broth and had to perform the miracle of running to the kitchen without leaving a disaster of Venetian glass in her wake.

She just managed to take the pot off the stove as it was beginning to boil over. Then she put on a stew she had already prepared and took advantage of a chance to sit down and rest on a stool in the kitchen. She closed her eyes, opened them
again with an unfatigued expression, and began pouring the soup into the tureen. She was working as she slept.

The grandmother had sat down alone at the head of a banquet table with silver candlesticks set for twelve people. She shook her little bell and Eréndira arrived almost immediately with the steaming tureen. As Eréndira was serving the soup, her grandmother noticed the somnambulist look
and passed her hand in front of her eyes as if wiping an invisible pane of glass. The girl didn’t see the hand. The grandmother
followed her with her look and when Eréndira turned to go back to the kitchen, she shouted at her:

‘Eréndira!’

Having been awakened all of a sudden, the girl dropped the tureen onto the rug.

‘That’s all right, child,’ grandmother said to her with assuring tenderness.
‘You fell asleep while you were walking about again.’

‘My body has that habit,’ Eréndira said by way of an excuse.

Still hazy with sleep, she picked up the tureen, and tried to clean the stain on the rug.

‘Leave it,’ her grandmother dissuaded her. ‘You can wash it this afternoon.’

So in addition to her regular afternoon chores, Eréndira had to wash the dining room rug, and she took advantage
of her presence at the washtub to do Monday’s laundry as well, while the wind went around the house looking for a way in. She had so much to do that night came upon her without her realizing it, and when she put the dining room rug back in its place it was time to go to bed.

The grandmother had been fooling around on the piano all afternoon, singing the songs of her times to herself in a falsetto,
and she had stains of musk and tears on her eyelids. But when she lay down on her bed in her muslin nightgown, the bitterness of fond memories returned.

‘Take advantage of tomorrow to wash the living room rug too,’ she told Eréndira. ‘It hasn’t seen the sun since the days of all the noise.’

‘Yes, Grandmother,’ the girl answered.

She picked up a feather fan and began to fan the implacable matron,
who recited the list of night-time orders to her as she sank into sleep.

‘Iron all the clothes before you go to bed so you can sleep with a clear conscience.’

‘Yes, Grandmother.’

‘Check the clothes closets carefully, because moths get hungrier on windy nights.’

‘Yes, Grandmother.’

‘With the time you have left, take the flowers out into the courtyard so they can get a breath of air.’

‘Yes,
Grandmother.’

‘And feed the ostrich.’

She had fallen asleep but she was still giving orders, for it was from her that the granddaughter had inherited the ability to be alive still while sleeping. Eréndira left the room without making any noise and did the final chores of the night, still replying to the sleeping grandmother’s orders.

‘Give the graves some water.’

‘Yes, Grandmother.’

‘And
if the Amadíses arrive, tell them not to come in,’ the grandmother said, ‘because Porfirio Galán’s gang is waiting to kill them.’

Eréndira didn’t answer her any more because she knew that the grandmother was getting lost in her delirium, but she didn’t miss a single order. When she finished checking the window bolts and put out the last lights, she took a candlestick from the dining room and
lighted her way to her bedroom as the pauses in the wind were filled with the peaceful and enormous breathing of her sleeping grandmother.

Her room was also luxurious, but not so much as her grandmother’s, and it was piled high with the rag dolls and wind-up animals of her recent childhood. Overcome by the barbarous chores of the day, Eréndira didn’t have the strength to get undressed and she
put the candlestick on the night table and fell onto the bed. A short while later the wind of her misfortune came into the bedroom like a pack of hounds and knocked the candle over against the curtain.

At dawn, when the wind finally stopped, a few thick and scattered drops of rain began to fall, putting out the last embers and hardening the smoking ashes of the mansion. The people in the village,
Indians for the most part, tried to rescue the remains of the disaster: the charred corpse of the ostrich,
the frame of the gilded piano, the torso of a statue. The grandmother was contemplating the residue of her fortune with an impenetrable depression. Eréndira, sitting between the two graves of the Amadíses, had stopped weeping. When the grandmother was convinced that very few things remained
intact among the ruins, she looked at her granddaughter with sincere pity.

‘My poor child,’ she sighed. ‘Life won’t be long enough for you to pay me back for this mishap.’

She began to pay it back that very day, beneath the noise of the rain, when she was taken to the village storekeeper, a skinny and premature widower who was quite well known in the desert for the good price he paid for virginity.
As the grandmother waited undauntedly, the widower examined Eréndira with scientific austerity: he considered the strength of her thighs, the size of her breasts, the diameter of her hips. He didn’t say a word until he had some calculation of what she was worth.

‘She’s still quite immature,’ he said then. ‘She has the teats of a bitch.’

Then he had her get on a scale to prove his decision with
figures. Eréndira weighed ninety pounds.

‘She isn’t worth more than a hundred pesos,’ the widower said.

The grandmother was scandalized.

‘A hundred pesos for a girl who’s completely new!’ she almost shouted. ‘No, sir, that shows a great lack of respect for virtue on your part.’

‘I’ll make it a hundred and fifty,’ the widower said.

‘This girl caused me damages amounting to more than a million
pesos,’ the grandmother said. ‘At this rate she’ll need two hundred years to pay me back.’

‘You’re lucky that the only good feature she has is her age,’ the widower said.

The storm threatened to knock the house down, and there were so many leaks in the roof that it was raining almost as much inside as out. The grandmother felt all alone in a world
of disaster.

‘Just raise it to three hundred,’
she said.

‘Two hundred and fifty.’

Finally they agreed on two hundred and twenty pesos in cash and some provisions. The grandmother then signaled Eréndira to go with the widower and he led her by the hand to the back room as if he were taking her to school.

‘I’ll wait for you here,’ the grandmother said.

‘Yes, Grandmother,’ said Eréndira.

The back room was a kind of shed with four brick columns,
a roof of rotted palm leaves, and an adobe wall three feet high, through which outdoor disturbances got into the building. Placed on top of the adobe wall were pots with cacti and other plants of aridity. Hanging between two columns and flapping like the free sail of a drifting sloop was a faded hammock. Over the whistle of the storm and the lash of the water one could hear distant shouts,
the howling of far-off animals, the cries of a shipwreck.

When Eréndira and the widower went into the shed they had to hold on so as not to be knocked down by a gust of rain which left them soaked. Their voices could not be heard but their movements became clear in the roar of the squall. At the widower’s first attempt, Eréndira shouted something inaudible and tried to get away. The widower answered
her without any voice, twisted her arm by the wrist, and dragged her to the hammock. She fought him off with a scratch on the face and shouted in silence again, but he replied with a solemn slap which lifted her off the ground and suspended her in the air for an instant with her long Medusa hair floating in space. He grabbed her about the waist before she touched ground again, flung her into
the hammock with a brutal heave, and held her down with his knees. Eréndira then succumbed to terror, lost consciousness, and remained as if fascinated by the moonbeams from a fish that was floating through the storm air, while the widower undressed her, tearing off her clothes with a methodical clawing, as if he were pulling up grass, scattering them with great tugs of color that waved like
streamers and went off with the wind.

When there was no other man left in the village who could pay anything for Eréndira’s love, her grandmother put her on a truck to go where the smugglers were. They made the trip on the back of the truck in the open, among sacks of rice and buckets of lard and what had been left by the fire: the headboard of the viceregal bed, a warrior angel, the scorched
throne, and other pieces of useless junk. In a trunk with two crosses painted in broad strokes they carried the bones of the Amadíses.

The grandmother protected herself from the sun with a tattered umbrella and it was hard for her to breathe because of the torment of sweat and dust, but even in that unhappy state she kept control of her dignity. Behind the pile of cans and sacks of rice Eréndira
paid for the trip and the cartage by making love for twenty pesos a turn with the truck’s loader. At first her system of defense was the same as she had used against the widower’s attack, but the loader’s approach was different, slow and wise, and he ended up taming her with tenderness. So when they reached the first town after a deadly journey, Eréndira and the loader were relaxing from good
love behind the parapet of cargo. The driver shouted to the grandmother: