Collected Stories (29 page)

‘I’m happy,’ she said.

So that put an end to the hopes the grandmother
had that Eréndira would run away to rejoin her, but she maintained her granite siege without having made any decision until Pentecost. During that time the missionaries were combing the desert in search of pregnant concubines in order to get them married. They traveled all the way to the most remote settlements in a broken-down truck with four well-armed soldiers and a chest of cheap cloth.
The most difficult part of that Indian hunt was to convince the women, who defended themselves against divine grace with the truthful argument that men, sleeping in their hammocks with legs spread, felt they had the right to demand much heavier work from legitimate wives than from concubines. It was necessary to seduce them with trickery, dissolving the will of God in the syrup of their own language
so that it would seem less harsh to them, but even the most crafty of them ended up being convinced by a pair of flashy earrings. The men, on the other hand, once the women’s acceptance had been obtained, were routed out of their hammocks with rifle butts, bound, and hauled away in the back of the truck to be married by force.

For several days the grandmother saw the little truck loaded with
pregnant Indian women heading for the mission, but she failed to recognize her opportunity. She recognized it on Pentecost Sunday itself, when she heard the rockets and the ringing of the bells and saw the miserable and merry crowd
that was going to the festival, and she saw that among the crowds there were pregnant women with the veil and crown of a bride holding the arms of their casual mates,
whom they would legitimize in the collective wedding.

Among the last in the procession a boy passed, innocent of heart, with gourd-cut Indian hair and dressed in rags, carrying an Easter candle with a silk bow in his hand. The grandmother called him over.

‘Tell me something, son,’ she asked with her smoothest voice. ‘What part do you have in this affair?’

The boy felt intimidated by the candle
and it was hard for him to close his mouth because of his donkey teeth.

‘The priests are going to give me my first communion,’ he said.

‘How much did they pay you?’

‘Five pesos.’

The grandmother took a roll of bills from her pouch and the boy looked at them with surprise.

‘I’m going to give you twenty,’ the grandmother said. ‘Not for you to make your first communion, but for you to get married.’

‘Who to?’

‘My granddaughter.’

So Eréndira was married in the courtyard of the mission in her hermit’s cassock and a silk shawl that the novices gave her, and without even knowing the name of the groom her grandmother had bought for her. With uncertain hope she withstood the torment of kneeling on the saltpeter ground, the goat-hair stink of the two hundred pregnant brides, the punishment of
the Epistle of Saint Paul hammered out in Latin under the motionless and burning sun, because the missionaries had found no way to oppose the wile of that unforeseen marriage, but had given her a promise as a last attempt to keep her in the mission. Nevertheless, after the ceremony in the presence of the apostolic prefect, the military mayor who shot at the clouds, her recent husband, and her impassive
grandmother, Eréndira found herself once more under the
spell that had dominated her since birth. When they asked her what her free, true, and definitive will was, she didn’t even give a sigh of hesitation.

‘I want to leave,’ she said. And she clarified things by pointing at her husband. ‘But not with him, with my grandmother.’

Ulises had wasted a whole afternoon trying to steal an orange from
his father’s grove, because the older man wouldn’t take his eyes off him while they were pruning the sick trees, and his mother kept watch from the house. So he gave up his plan, for that day at least, and grudgingly helped his father until they had pruned the last orange trees.

The extensive grove was quiet and hidden, and the wooden house with a tin roof had copper grating over the windows
and a large porch set on pilings, with primitive plants bearing intense flowers. Ulises’ mother was on the porch sitting back in a Viennese rocking chair with smoked leaves on her temples to relieve her headache, and her full-blooded-Indian look followed her son like a beam of invisible light to the most remote corners of the orange grove. She was quite beautiful, much younger than her husband, and
not only did she still wear the garb of her tribe, but she knew the most ancient secrets of her blood.

When Ulises returned to the house with the pruning tools, his mother asked him for her four o’clock medicine, which was on a nearby table. As soon as he touched them, the glass and the bottle changed color. Then, out of pure play, he touched a glass pitcher that was on the table beside some
tumblers and the pitcher also turned blue. His mother observed him while she was taking her medicine and when she was sure that it was not a delirium of her pain, she asked him in the Guajiro Indian language:

‘How long has that been happening to you?’

‘Ever since we came back from the desert,’ Ulises said, also in Guajiro. ‘It only happens with glass things.’

In order to demonstrate, one after
the other he touched the
glasses that were on the table and they all turned different colors.

‘Those things happen only because of love,’ his mother said. ‘Who is it?’

Ulises didn’t answer. His father, who couldn’t understand the Guajiro language, was passing by the porch at that moment with a cluster of oranges.

‘What are you two talking about?’ he asked Ulises in Dutch.

‘Nothing special,’
Ulises answered.

Ulises’ mother didn’t know any Dutch. When her husband went into the house, she asked her son in Guajiro:

‘What did he say?’

‘Nothing special,’ Ulises answered.

He lost sight of his father when he went into the house, but he saw him again through a window of the office. The mother waited until she was alone with Ulises and then repeated:

‘Tell me who it is.’

‘It’s nobody,’
Ulises said.

He answered without paying attention because he was hanging on his father’s movements in the office. He had seen him put the oranges on top of the safe when he worked out the combination. But while he was keeping an eye on his father, his mother was keeping an eye on him.

‘You haven’t eaten any bread for a long time,’ she observed.

‘I don’t like it.’

The mother’s face suddenly
took on an unaccustomed liveliness. ‘That’s a lie,’ she said. ‘It’s because you’re lovesick and people who are lovesick can’t eat bread.’ Her voice, like her eyes, had passed from entreaty to threat.

‘It would be better if you told me who it was,’ she said, ‘or I’ll make you take some purifying baths.’

In the office the Dutchman opened the safe, put the oranges inside, and closed the armored
door. Ulises moved away from the window then and answered his mother impatiently.

‘I already told you there wasn’t anyone,’ he said. ‘If you don’t believe me, ask Papa.’

The Dutchman appeared in the office doorway lighting his
sailor’s pipe and carrying his threadbare Bible under his arm. His wife asked him in Spanish:

‘Who did you meet in the desert?’

‘Nobody,’ her husband answered, a little
in the clouds. ‘If you don’t believe me, ask Ulises.’

He sat down at the end of the hall and sucked on his pipe until the tobacco was used up. Then he opened the Bible at random and recited spot passages for almost two hours in flowing and ringing Dutch.

At midnight Ulises was still thinking with such intensity that he couldn’t sleep. He rolled about in his hammock for another hour, trying to
overcome the pain of memories until the very pain gave him the strength he needed to make a decision. Then he put on his cowboy pants, his plaid shirt, and his riding boots, jumped through the window, and fled from the house in the truck loaded with birds. As he went through the groves he picked the three ripe oranges he had been unable to steal that afternoon.

He traveled across the desert for
the rest of the night and at dawn he asked in towns and villages about the whereabouts of Eréndira, but no one could tell him. Finally they informed him that she was traveling in the electoral campaign retinue of Senator Onésimo Sánchez and that on that day he was probably in Nueva Castilla. He didn’t find him there but in the next town and Eréndira was no longer with him, for the grandmother had
managed to get the senator to vouch for her morality in a letter written in his own hand, and with it she was going about opening the most tightly barred doors in the desert. On the third day he came across the domestic mailman and the latter told him what direction to follow.

‘They’re heading toward the sea,’ he said, ‘and you’d better hurry because the goddamned old woman plans to cross over
to the island of Aruba.’

Following that direction, after half a day’s journey Ulises spotted the broad, stained tent that the grandmother had bought from a bankrupt circus. The wandering photographer had come back to her, convinced that the world was really not
as large as he had thought, and he had set up his idyllic backdrops near the tent. A band of brass-blowers was captivating Eréndira’s
clientele with a taciturn waltz.

Ulises waited for his turn to go in, and the first thing that caught his attention was the order and cleanliness of the inside of the tent. The grandmother’s bed had recovered its viceregal splendor, the statue of the angel was in its place beside the funerary trunk of the Amadíses, and in addition, there was a pewter bathtub with lion’s feet. Lying on her new
canopied bed, Eréndira was naked and placid, irradiating a childlike glow under the light that filtered through the tent. She was sleeping with her eyes open. Ulises stopped beside her, the oranges in his hand, and he noticed that she was looking at him without seeing him. Then he passed his hand over her eyes and called her by the name he had invented when he wanted to think about her:

‘Arídnere.’

Eréndira woke up. She felt naked in front of Ulises, let out a squeak, and covered herself with the sheet up to her neck.

‘Don’t look at me,’ she said. ‘I’m horrible.’

‘You’re the color of an orange all over,’ Ulises said. He raised the fruits to her eyes so that she could compare. ‘Look.’

Eréndira uncovered her eyes and saw that indeed the oranges did have her color.

‘I don’t want you to
stay now,’ she said.

‘I only came to show you this,’ Ulises said. ‘Look here.’

He broke open an orange with his nails, split it in two with his hands, and showed Eréndira what was inside: stuck in the heart of the fruit was a genuine diamond.

‘These are the oranges we take across the border,’ he said.

‘But they’re living oranges!’ Eréndira exclaimed.

‘Of course.’ Ulises smiled. ‘My father
grows them.’

Eréndira couldn’t believe it. She uncovered her face, took the diamond in her fingers and contemplated it with surprise.

‘With three like these we can take a trip around the world,’ Ulises said.

Eréndira gave him back the diamond with a look of disappointment. Ulises went on:

‘Besides, I’ve got a pickup truck,’ he said. ‘And besides that … Look!’

From underneath his shirt he
took an ancient pistol.

‘I can’t leave for ten years,’ Eréndira said.

‘You’ll leave,’ Ulises said. ‘Tonight, when the white whale falls asleep, I’ll be outside there calling like an owl.’

He made such a true imitation of the call of an owl that Eréndira’s eyes smiled for the first time.

‘It’s my grandmother,’ she said.

‘The owl?’

‘The whale.’

They both laughed at the mistake, but Eréndira
picked up the thread again.

‘No one can leave for anywhere without my grandmother’s permission.’

‘There’s no reason to say anything.’

‘She’ll find out in any case,’ Eréndira said. ‘She can dream things.’

‘When she starts to dream that you’re leaving we’ll already be across the border. We’ll cross over like smugglers,’ Ulises said.

Grasping the pistol with the confidence of a movie gun-fighter,
he imitated the sounds of the shots to excite Eréndira with his audacity. She didn’t say yes or no, but her eyes gave a sigh and she sent Ulises away with a kiss. Ulises, touched, whispered:

‘Tomorrow we’ll be watching the ships go by.’

That night, a little after seven o’clock, Eréndira was combing her grandmother’s hair when the wind of her misfortune blew again. In the shelter of the tent
were the Indian bearers and the leader of the brass band, waiting to be paid. The grandmother finished counting out the bills on a chest she had within reach, and after consulting a ledger she paid the oldest of the Indians.

‘Here you are,’ she told him. ‘Twenty pesos for the week,
less eight for meals, less three for water, less fifty cents on account for the new shirts, that’s eight fifty.
Count it.’

The oldest Indian counted the money and they all withdrew with a bow.

‘Thank you, white lady.’

Next came the leader of the band. The grandmother consulted her ledger and turned to the photographer, who was trying to repair the bellows of his camera with wads of gutta-percha.

‘What’s it going to be?’ she asked him. ‘Will you or won’t you pay a quarter of the cost of the music?’

The photographer didn’t even raise his head to answer.

‘Music doesn’t come out in pictures.’

‘But it makes people want to have their pictures taken,’ the grandmother answered.

‘On the contrary,’ said the photographer. ‘It reminds them of the dead and then they come out in the picture with their eyes closed.’

The bandleader intervened.

‘What makes them close their eyes isn’t the music,’ he
said. ‘It’s the lightning you make taking pictures at night.’

‘It’s the music,’ the photographer insisted.

The grandmother put an end to the dispute. ‘Don’t be a cheapskate,’ she said to the photographer. ‘Look how well things have been going for Senator Onésimo Sánchez and it’s thanks to the musicians he has along.’ Then, in a harsh tone, she concluded: