Collected Stories (28 page)

Behind Eréndira’s bed, very slowly, Ulises’ head appeared. She saw the anxious and diaphanous eyes, but before saying anything she rubbed her head with the towel in order to prove that it wasn’t an illusion. When Ulises blinked for the first time, Eréndira asked him in a very low voice:

‘Who are you?’

Ulises showed himself down to his shoulders.
‘My name is Ulises,’ he said. He showed her the bills he had stolen and added:

‘I’ve got money.’

Eréndira put her hands on the bed, brought her face close to that of Ulises, and went on talking to him as if in a kindergarten game.

‘You were supposed to get in line,’ she told him.

‘I waited all night long,’ Ulises said.

‘Well, now you have to wait until tomorrow,’ Eréndira said. ‘I feel as
if someone had been beating me on the kidneys.’

At that instant the grandmother began to talk in her sleep.

‘It’s going on twenty years since it rained last,’ she said. ‘It was such a terrible storm that the rain was all mixed in with sea water, and the next morning the house was full of fish and snails and your grandfather Amadís, may he rest in peace, saw a glowing manta ray floating through
the air.’

Ulises hid behind the bed again. Eréndira showed an amused smile.

‘Take it easy,’ she told him. ‘She always acts kind of crazy when she’s asleep, but not even an earthquake can wake her up.’

Ulises reappeared. Eréndira looked at him with a smile that was naughty and even a little affectionate and took the soiled sheet off the mattress.

‘Come,’ she said. ‘Help me change the sheet.’

Then Ulises came from behind the bed and took one end of
the sheet. Since the sheet was much larger than the mattress, they had to fold it several times. With every fold Ulises drew closer to Eréndira.

‘I was going crazy wanting to see you,’ he suddenly said. ‘Everybody says you’re very pretty and they’re right.’

‘But I’m going to die,’ Eréndira said.

‘My mother says that people who die in
the desert don’t go to heaven but to the sea,’ Ulises said.

Eréndira put the dirty sheet aside and covered the mattress with another, which was clean and ironed.

‘I never saw the sea,’ she said.

‘It’s like the desert but with water,’ said Ulises.

‘Then you can’t walk on it.’

‘My father knew a man who could,’ Ulises said, ‘but that was a long time ago.’

Eréndira was fascinated but she wanted
to sleep.

‘If you come very early tomorrow you can be first in line,’ she said.

‘I’m leaving with my father at dawn,’ said Ulises.

‘Won’t you be coming back this way?’

‘Who can tell?’ Ulises said. ‘We just happened along now because we got lost on the road to the border.’

Eréndira looked thoughtfully at her sleeping grandmother.

‘All right,’ she decided. ‘Give me the money.’

Ulises gave
it to her. Eréndira lay down on the bed but he remained trembling where he was: at the decisive moment his determination had weakened. Eréndira took him by the hand to hurry him up and only then did she notice his tribulation. She was familiar with that fear.

‘Is it the first time?’ she asked him.

Ulises didn’t answer but he smiled in desolation. Eréndira became a different person.

‘Breathe
slowly,’ she told him. ‘That’s the way it always is the first time. Afterwards you won’t even notice.’

She laid him down beside her and while she was taking his clothes off she was calming him maternally.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Ulises.’

‘That’s a gringo name,’ Eréndira said.

‘No, a sailor name.’

Eréndira uncovered his chest, gave a few little orphan kisses, sniffed him.

‘It’s like you were
made of gold all over,’ she said, ‘but you smell of flowers.’

‘It must be the oranges,’ Ulises said.

Calmer now, he gave a smile of complicity.

‘We carry a lot of birds along to throw people off the track,’ he added, ‘but what we’re doing is smuggling a load of oranges across the border.’

‘Oranges aren’t contraband,’ Eréndira said.

‘These are,’ said Ulises. ‘Each one is worth fifty thousand
pesos.’

Eréndira laughed for the first time in a long while.

‘What I like about you,’ she said, ‘is the serious way you make up nonsense.’

She had become spontaneous and talkative again, as if Ulises’s innocence had changed not only her mood but her character. The grandmother, such a short distance away from misfortune, was still talking in her sleep.

‘Around those times, at the beginning
of March, they brought you home,’ she said. ‘You looked like a lizard wrapped in cotton. Amadís, your father, who was young and handsome, was so happy that afternoon that he sent for twenty carts loaded with flowers and arrived strewing them along the street until the whole village was gold with flowers like the sea.’

She ranted on with great shouts and with a stubborn passion for several hours.
But Ulises couldn’t hear her because Eréndira had loved him so much and so truthfully that she loved him again for half price while her grandmother was raving and kept on loving him for nothing until dawn.

A group of missionaries holding up their crucifixes stood shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the desert. A wind as
fierce as the wind of misfortune shook their burlap habits and their rough
beards and they were barely able to stand on their feet. Behind them was the mission, a colonial pile of stone with a tiny belfry on top of the harsh whitewashed walls.

The youngest missionary, who was in charge of the group, pointed to a natural crack in the glazed clay ground.

‘You shall not pass beyond this line!’ he shouted.

The four Indian bearers carrying the grandmother in a litter made
of boards stopped when they heard the shout. Even though she was uncomfortable sitting on the planks of the litter and her spirit was dulled by the dust and sweat of the desert, the grandmother maintained her haughtiness intact. Eréndira was on foot. Behind the litter came a file of eight Indians carrying the baggage and at the very end the photographer on his bicycle.

‘The desert doesn’t belong
to anyone,’ the grandmother said.

‘It belongs to God,’ the missionary said, ‘and you are violating his sacred laws with your filthy business.’

The grandmother then recognized the missionary’s peninsular usage and diction and avoided a head-on confrontation so as not to break her head against his intransigence. She went back to being herself.

‘I don’t understand your mysteries, son.’

The missionary
pointed at Eréndira.

‘That child is underage.’

‘But she’s my granddaughter.’

‘So much the worse,’ the missionary replied. ‘Put her under our care willingly or we’ll have to seek recourse in other ways.’

The grandmother had not expected them to go so far.

‘All right, if that’s how it is.’ She surrendered in fear. ‘But sooner or later I’ll pass, you’ll see.’

Three days after the encounter
with the missionaries, the grandmother and Eréndira were sleeping in a village near the mission when a group of stealthy, mute bodies, creeping along like an infantry patrol, slipped into the tent. They were six Indian novices, strong and young, their rough cloth habits
seeming to glow in the moonlight. Without making a sound they cloaked Eréndira in a mosquito netting, picked her up without waking
her, and carried her off wrapped like a large, fragile fish caught in a lunar net.

There were no means left untried by the grandmother in an attempt to rescue her granddaughter from the protection of the missionaries. Only when they had all failed, from the most direct to the most devious, did she turn to the civil authority, which was vested in a military man. She found him in the courtyard
of his home, his chest bare, shooting with an army rifle at a dark and solitary cloud in the burning sky. He was trying to perforate it to bring on rain, and his shots were furious and useless, but he did take the necessary time out to listen to the grandmother.

‘I can’t do anything,’ he explained to her when he had heard her out. ‘The priests, according to the concordat, have the right to keep
the girl until she comes of age. Or until she gets married.’

‘Then why do they have you here as mayor?’ the grandmother asked.

‘To make it rain,’ was the mayor’s answer.

Then, seeing that the cloud had moved out of range, he interrupted his official duties and gave his full attention to the grandmother.

‘What you need is someone with a lot of weight who will vouch for you,’ he told her. ‘Someone
who can swear to your moral standing and your good behavior in a signed letter. Do you know Senator Onésimo Sánchez?’

Sitting under the naked sun on a stool that was too narrow for her astral buttocks, the grandmother answered with a solemn rage:

‘I’m just a poor woman all alone in the vastness of the desert.’

The mayor, his right eye twisted from the heat, looked at her with pity.

‘Then don’t
waste your time, ma’am,’ he said. ‘You’ll rot in hell.’

She didn’t rot, of course. She set up her tent across from the mission and sat down to think, like a solitary warrior besieging a fortified city. The wandering photographer, who knew her quite well, loaded his gear onto the carrier of his bicycle and was ready to leave all alone when he saw her in the full sun with her eyes fixed on the
mission.

‘Let’s see who gets tired first,’ the grandmother said, ‘they or I.’

‘They’ve been here for three hundred years and they can still take it,’ the photographer said. ‘I’m leaving.’

Only then did the grandmother notice the loaded bicycle.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Wherever the wind takes me,’ the photographer said, and he left. ‘It’s a big world.’

The grandmother sighed.

‘Not as big
as you think, you ingrate.’

But she didn’t move her head in spite of her anger so as not to lose sight of the mission. She didn’t move it for many, many days of mineral heat, for many, many nights of wild winds, for all the time she was meditating and no one came out of the mission. The Indians built a lean-to of palm leaves beside the tent and hung their hammocks there, but the grandmother stood
watch until very late, nodding on her throne and chewing the uncooked grain in her pouch with the invincible laziness of a resting ox.

One night a convoy of slow covered trucks passed very close to her and the only lights they carried were wreaths of colored bulbs which gave them the ghostly size of sleepwalking altars. The grandmother recognized them at once because they were just like the trucks
of the Amadíses. The last truck in the convoy slowed, stopped, and a man got out of the cab to adjust something in back. He looked like a replica of the Amadíses, wearing a hat with a turned-up brim, high boots, two crossed cartridge belts across his chest, an army rifle, and two pistols. Overcome by an irresistible temptation, the grandmother called to the man.

‘Don’t you know who I am?’ she
asked him.

The man lighted her pitilessly with a flashlight. For an instant he studied the face worn out by vigil, the eyes dim from fatigue, the withered hair of the woman who, even at her age, in her sorry state, and with that crude light on her face, could have said that she had been the most beautiful woman in the world. When he examined her enough to be sure that he had never seen her before,
he turned out the light.

‘The only thing I know for sure is that you’re not the Virgin of Perpetual Help.’

‘Quite the contrary,’ the grandmother said with a very sweet voice. ‘I’m the Lady.’

The man put his hand to his pistol out of pure instinct.

‘What lady?’

‘Big Amadís’s.’

‘Then you’re not of this world,’ he said, tense. ‘What is it you want?’

‘For you to help me rescue my granddaughter,
Big Amadís’s granddaughter, the daughter of our son Amadís, held captive in that mission.’

The man overcame his fear.

‘You knocked on the wrong door,’ he said. ‘If you think we’re about to get mixed up in God’s affairs, you’re not the one you say you are, you never knew the Amadíses, and you haven’t got the whoriest notion of what smuggling’s all about.’

Early that morning the grandmother slept
less than before. She lay awake pondering things, wrapped in a wool blanket while the early hour got her memory all mixed up and the repressed raving struggled to get out even though she was awake, and she had to tighten her heart with her hand so as not to be suffocated by the memory of a house by the sea with great red flowers where she had been happy. She remained that way until the mission
bell rang and the first lights went on in the windows and the desert became saturated with the smell of the hot bread of matins. Only then did she abandon her fatigue, tricked by the illusion that Eréndira had got up and was looking for a way to escape and come back to her.

Eréndira, however, had not lost a single night’s sleep since they had taken her to the mission. They had cut her hair with
pruning shears until her head was like a brush, they put a hermit’s rough cassock on her and gave her a bucket of whitewash and a broom so that she could whitewash the stairs every time someone went up or down. It was mule work because there was an incessant coming and going of muddied missionaries and novice carriers, but Eréndira felt as if every day were Sunday after the fearsome galley that
had been her bed. Besides, she wasn’t the only one worn out at night, because that mission was dedicated to fighting not against the devil but against the desert. Eréndira had seen the Indian novices bulldogging cows in the barn in order to milk them, jumping up and down on planks for days on end in order to press cheese, helping a goat through a difficult birth. She had seen them sweat like tanned
stevedores hauling water from the cistern, watering by hand a bold garden that other novices cultivated with hoes in order to plant vegetables in the flintstone of the desert. She had seen the earthly inferno of the ovens for baking bread and the rooms for ironing clothes. She had seen a nun chase a pig through the courtyard, slide along holding the runaway animal by the ears, and roll in a mud
puddle without letting go until two novices in leather aprons helped her get it under control and one of them cut its throat with a butcher knife as they all became covered with blood and mire. In the isolation ward of the infirmary she had seen tubercular nuns in their nightgown shrouds, waiting for God’s last command as they embroidered bridal sheets on the terraces while the men preached in the
desert. Eréndira was living in her shadows and discovering other forms of beauty and horror that she had never imagined in the narrow world of her bed, but neither the coarsest nor the most persuasive of the novices had managed to get her to say a word since they had taken her to the mission. One morning, while she was preparing the whitewash in her bucket, she heard string music that was like a
light even more diaphanous than the light of the desert. Captivated by the miracle, she peeped into an
immense and empty salon with bare walls and large windows through which the dazzling June light poured in and remained still, and in the center of the room she saw a very beautiful nun whom she had never seen before playing an Easter oratorio on the clavichord. Eréndira listened to the music
without blinking, her heart hanging by a thread, until the lunch bell rang. After eating, while she whitewashed the stairs with her reed brush, she waited until all the novices had finished going up and coming down, and she was alone, with no one to hear her, and then she spoke for the first time since she had entered the mission.