Collected Stories (27 page)

‘Here’s where the world begins.’

The grandmother observed with disbelief the miserable and solitary streets of a town somewhat larger but just as sad as the one they had abandoned.

‘It doesn’t look like it to me,’ she said.

‘It’s mission country,’ the driver said.

‘I’m not interested in charity, I’m interested in smugglers,’
said the grandmother.

Listening to the dialogue from behind the load, Eréndira dug into a sack of rice with her finger. Suddenly she found a string, pulled on it, and drew out a necklace of genuine pearls. She looked at it amazed, holding it between her fingers like a dead snake, while the driver answered her grandmother.

‘Don’t be daydreaming, ma’am. There’s no such thing as smugglers.’

‘Of
course not,’ the grandmother said. ‘I’ve got your word for it.’

‘Try to find one and you’ll see,’ the driver bantered. ‘Everybody talks about them, but no one’s ever seen one.’

The loader realized that Eréndira had pulled out the necklace and hastened to take it away from her and stick it back into the sack of rice. The grandmother, who had decided to stay in spite of the poverty of the town,
then called to her granddaughter to help her out of the truck. Eréndira said good-bye to the loader with a kiss that was hurried but spontaneous and true.

The grandmother waited, sitting on her throne in the middle of the street, until they finished unloading the goods. The last item was the trunk with the remains of the Amadíses.

‘This thing weighs as much as a dead man,’ said the driver, laughing.

‘There are two of them,’ the grandmother said, ‘so treat them with the proper respect.’

‘I bet they’re marble statues.’ The driver laughed again.

He put the trunk with bones down carelessly among the singed furniture and held out his open hand to the grandmother.

‘Fifty pesos,’ he said.

‘Your slave has already paid on the right-hand side.’

The driver looked at his helper with surprise and
the latter made an affirmative sign. The driver then went back to the cab, where a woman in mourning was riding, in her arms a baby who was crying from the heat. The loader, quite sure of himself, told the grandmother:

‘Eréndira is coming with me, if it’s all right by you. My intentions are honorable.’

The girl intervened, surprised:

‘I didn’t say anything!’

‘The idea was all mine,’ the loader
said.

The grandmother looked him up and down, not to make
him feel small but trying to measure the true size of his guts.

‘It’s all right by me,’ she told him, ‘provided you pay me what I lost because of her carelessness. It’s eight hundred seventy-two thousand three hundred fifteen pesos, less the four hundred and twenty which she’s already paid me, making it eight hundred seventy-one thousand
eight hundred ninety-five.’

The truck started up.

‘Believe me, I’d give you that pile of money if I had it,’ the loader said seriously. ‘The girl is worth it.’

The grandmother was pleased with the boy’s decision.

‘Well, then, come back when you have it, son,’ she answered in a sympathetic tone. ‘But you’d better go now, because if we figure out accounts again you’ll end up owing me ten pesos.’

The loader jumped onto the back of the truck and it went off. From there he waved good-bye to Eréndira, but she was still so surprised that she didn’t answer him.

In the same vacant lot where the truck had left them, Eréndira and her grandmother improvised a shelter to live in from sheets of zinc and the remains of Oriental rugs. They laid two mats on the ground and slept as well as they had
in the mansion until the sun opened holes in the ceiling and burned their faces.

Just the opposite of what normally happened, it was the grandmother who busied herself that morning fixing up Eréndira. She made up her face in the style of sepulchral beauty that had been the vogue in her youth and touched her up with artificial fingernails and an organdy bow that looked like a butterfly on her
head.

‘You look awful,’ she admitted, ‘but it’s better that way: men are quite stupid when it comes to female matters.’

Long before they saw them they both recognized the sound of two mules walking on the flint of the desert. At a command from her grandmother, Eréndira lay down on the mat the way an amateur actress might have done at the moment when the
curtain was about to go up. Leaning on
her bishop’s crosier, the grandmother went out of the shelter and sat down on the throne to wait for the mules to pass.

The mailman was coming. He was only twenty years old, but his work had aged him, and he was wearing a khaki uniform, leggings, a pith helmet, and had a military pistol on his cartridge belt. He was riding a good mule and leading by the halter another, more timeworn one, on whom
the canvas mailbags were piled.

As he passed by the grandmother he saluted her and kept on going, but she signaled him to look inside the shelter. The man stopped and saw Eréndira lying on the mat in her posthumous make-up and wearing a purple-trimmed dress.

‘Do you like it?’ the grandmother asked.

The mailman hadn’t understood until then what the proposition was.

‘It doesn’t look bad to someone
who’s been on a diet,’ he said, smiling.

‘Fifty pesos,’ the grandmother said.

‘Boy, you’re asking a mint!’ he said. ‘I can eat for a whole month on that.’

‘Don’t be a tightwad,’ the grandmother said. ‘The airmail pays even better than being a priest.’

‘I’m the domestic mail,’ the man said. ‘The airmail man travels in a pickup truck.’

‘In any case, love is just as important as eating,’ the
grandmother said.

‘But it doesn’t feed you.’

The grandmother realized that a man who lived from what other people were waiting for had more than enough time for bargaining.

‘How much have you got?’ she asked him.

The mailman dismounted, took some chewed-up bills from his pocket, and showed them to the grandmother. She snatched them up all together with a rapid hand just as if they had been
a ball.

‘I’ll lower the price for you,’ she said, ‘but on one condition:
that you spread the word all around.’

‘All the way to the other side of the world,’ the mailman said. ‘That’s what I’m for.’

Eréndira, who had been unable to blink, then took off her artificial eyelashes and moved to one side of the mat to make room for the chance boyfriend. As soon as he was in the shelter, the grandmother
closed the entrance with an energetic tug on the sliding curtain.

It was an effective deal. Taken by the words of the mailman, men came from very far away to become acquainted with the newness of Eréndira. Behind the men came gambling tables and food stands, and behind them all came a photographer on a bicycle, who, across from the encampment, set up a camera with a mourning sleeve on a tripod
and a backdrop of a lake with listless swans.

The grandmother, fanning herself on her throne, seemed alien to her own bazaar. The only thing that interested her was keeping order in the line of customers who were waiting their turn and checking the exact amount of money they paid in advance to go in to Eréndira. At first she had been so strict that she refused a good customer because he was five
pesos short. But with the passage of months she was assimilating the lessons of reality and she ended up letting people in who completed their payment with religious medals, family relics, wedding rings, and anything her bite could prove was bona-fide gold even if it didn’t shine.

After a long stay in that first town, the grandmother had sufficient money to buy a donkey, and she went off into
the desert in search of places more propitious for the payment of the debt. She traveled on a litter that had been improvised on top of the donkey and she was protected from the motionless sun by the half-spoked umbrella that Eréndira held over her head. Behind them walked four Indian bearers with the remnants of the encampment: the sleeping mats, the restored throne, the alabaster angel, and the
trunks with the remains of the Amadíses. The photographer followed the caravan on his bicycle, but never catching up, as if he were going to a
different festival.

Six months had passed since the fire when the grandmother was able to get a complete picture of the business.

‘If things go on like this,’ she told Eréndira, ‘you will have paid me the debt inside of eight years, seven months, and
eleven days.’

She went back over her calculations with her eyes closed, fumbling with the seeds she was taking out of a cord pouch where she also kept the money, and she corrected herself:

‘All that, of course, not counting the pay and board of the Indians and other minor expenses.’

Eréndira, who was keeping in step with the donkey, bowed down by the heat and dust, did not reproach her grandmother
for her figures, but she had to hold back her tears.

‘I’ve got ground glass in my bones,’ she said.

‘Try to sleep.’

‘Yes, Grandmother.’

She closed her eyes, took in a deep breath of scorching air, and went on walking in her sleep.

A small truck loaded with cages appeared, frightening goats in the dust of the horizon, and the clamor of the birds was like a splash of cool water for the Sunday
torpor of San Miguel del Desierto. At the wheel was a corpulent Dutch farmer, his skin splintered by the outdoors, and with a squirrel-colored mustache he had inherited from some great-grandfather. His son Ulises, who was riding in the other seat, was a gilded adolescent with lonely maritime eyes and with the appearance of a furtive angel. The Dutchman noticed a tent in front of which all the soldiers
of the local garrison were awaiting their turn. They were sitting on the ground, drinking out of the same bottle, which passed from mouth to mouth, and they had almond branches on their heads as if camouflaged for combat. The Dutchman asked in his language:

‘What the devil can they be selling there?’

‘A woman,’ his son answered quite naturally. ‘Her name is Eréndira.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Everybody
in the desert knows,’ Ulises answered.

The Dutchman stopped at the small hotel in town and got out. Ulises stayed in the truck. With agile fingers he opened a briefcase that his father had left on the seat, took out a roll of bills, put several in his pocket, and left everything just the way it had been. That night, while his father was asleep, he climbed out the hotel window and went to stand
in line in front of Eréndira’s tent.

The festivities were at their height. The drunken recruits were dancing by themselves so as not to waste the free music, and the photographer was taking night-time pictures with magnesium papers. As she watched over her business, the grandmother counted the bank notes in her lap, dividing them into equal piles and arranging them in a basket. There were only
twelve soldiers at that time, but the evening line had grown with civilian customers. Ulises was the last one.

It was the turn of a soldier with a woeful appearance. The grandmother not only blocked his way but avoided contact with his money.

‘No, son,’ she told him. ‘You couldn’t go in for all the gold in the world. You bring bad luck.’

The soldier, who wasn’t from those parts, was puzzled.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You bring down the evil shadows,’ the grandmother said. ‘A person only has to look at your face.’

She waved him off with her hand, but without touching him, and made way for the next soldier.

‘Go right in, handsome,’ she told him good-naturedly, ‘but don’t take too long, your country needs you.’

The soldier went in but he came right out again because Eréndira wanted to
talk to her grandmother. She hung the basket of money on her arm and went into the tent, which wasn’t very roomy, but which was neat and clean. In the back, on an army cot, Eréndira was unable to repress the trembling in her body, and she was in sorry shape, all dirty with soldier sweat.

‘Grandmother,’ she sobbed, ‘I’m dying.’

The grandmother felt her forehead and when she saw she had no fever,
she tried to console her.

‘There are only ten soldiers left,’ she said.

Eréndira began to weep with the shrieks of a frightened animal. The grandmother realized then that she had gone beyond the limits of horror and, stroking her head, she helped her calm down.

‘The trouble is that you’re weak,’ she told her. ‘Come on, don’t cry any more, take a bath in sage water to get your blood back into
shape.’

She left the tent when Eréndira was calmer and she gave the soldier waiting his money back. ‘That’s all for today,’ she told him. ‘Come back tomorrow and I’ll give you the first place in line.’ Then she shouted to those lined up:

‘That’s all, boys. Tomorrow morning at nine.’

Soldiers and civilians broke ranks with shouts of protest. The grandmother confronted them, in a good mood but
brandishing the devastating crosier in earnest.

‘You’re an inconsiderate bunch of slobs!’ she shouted. ‘What do you think the girl is made of, iron? I’d like to see you in her place. You perverts! You shitty bums!’

The men answered her with even cruder insults, but she ended up controlling the revolt and stood guard with her staff until they took away the snack tables and dismantled the gambling
stands. She was about to go back into the tent when she saw Ulises, as large as life, all by himself in the dark and empty space where the line of men had been before. He had an unreal aura about him and he seemed to be visible in the shadows because of the very glow of his beauty.

‘You,’ the grandmother asked him. ‘What happened to your wings?’

‘The one who had wings was my grandfather,’ Ulises
answered in his natural way, ‘but nobody believed it.’

The grandmother examined him again with fascination. ‘Well, I do,’ she said. ‘Put them on and come back tomorrow.’ She went into the tent and left Ulises burning where he stood.

Eréndira felt better after her bath. She had put on a short, lace-trimmed slip and she was drying her hair before going to bed, but she was still making an effort
to hold back her tears. Her grandmother was asleep.