Tales from the Town of Widows (14 page)

From a corner, sitting on his mat, Pacho, a short, pudgy young man with rosy cheeks, watched the two boys by the light of a Coleman lamp. “Look what we got here, guys,” the young man shouted so that everyone in the shelter could hear him. “Two fags kissing each other and praying to God.” He stood up, seized the lamp and strode toward the boys. “Kissing and praying—you know how fucking wrong that is?” he asked, in a tone that seemed much more like an answer than a question. He shook his head censoriously before adding, “It’s very fucking wrong.” Santiago and Pablo didn’t comprehend what the man was saying, but whatever it was, he’d made it sound as though they had committed a terrible sin. They leaned into each other, distressed. The man stood over them now, his torso enlarged and distorted by its
proximity. “That’s so sweet,” he said, imitating a woman’s voice. “Come on, I want to see the two of you kissing again.”

“Shut up, Pacho,” Cigarrillo grumbled from his mat, half asleep. “Leave those kids alone and let us sleep.”

But the men, who in the past few weeks had done nothing except work, were eager for any kind of entertainment. A few of them sat on their mats and made ready to watch the spectacle from a distance; others got up and gathered around the boys, calling for the show to begin immediately.

“Come on, mariquitas. We don’t have all night,” said a guy missing nearly all of his front teeth. He stroked Santiago’s bottom with his bare foot.

“I’m frightened, Pablo,” Santiago whispered in his friend’s ear. “Let’s kiss one more time so we all can go to sleep.” Pablo shook his head.

“Kiss him, kiss him,” the aroused spectators sang in unison.

“Please, Pablo, just one more kiss,” Santiago whispered again, his soft voice choked with panic, his heart pounding against his small, bony chest.

“Kiss him, kiss him—”

Santiago asked so insistently that Pablo felt he must do it. All right, he said with his head. The two boys held each other tightly. Santiago glanced at the men, from the one to the other, to indicate that he and Pablo were ready to please them, then gently kissed his friend’s trembling lips for just a moment, until the first kick separated their faces. The stirred men fell upon the two boys like hungry beasts, thrashing their slight bodies with furious fists, stomping them with enraged, crusty feet. Numbed by fear, the boys didn’t feel the heavy blows that came from every side. They hardly screamed, hardly cried, hardly saw or heard anything.

“Stop it now!” The sudden shriek came from the door. “Get out of the way! Move!” The voice was unmistakable. Carrying a lamp that was half her size, Doña Marina was pushing her tiny body through the
crowd. The men went back to their mats, laughing and whispering. Pablo and Santiago raised their beaten faces from their mats and began to cry. “Good Lord! What have you done to these poor kids?” Doña Marina laid the lamp on the earthen floor and stroked the boys’ heads with her little hands. “These kids just got here today,” she said to no one in particular. “They haven’t done anything to you. Why would you hurt them?” she shouted. “Why?”

“Because they’re faggots,” a voice replied from the back. “That’s why.” She looked toward the corner from which the voice had come, but there was no one to see: the men had blown out the light of their lamp, leaving most of the room in complete darkness. “You’re all going to pay for this,” she yelled into the darkness. “No breakfast for anyone tomorrow.” Doña Marina kindly helped the boys rise from their mats. She took them back to the farmhouse where she lived with the cooks and the maids. She disinfected their cuts gently and without making any comments or asking questions, but when she began dressing their wounds, she suddenly said, “I know you boys aren’t
that
, what that rascal said.” Her voice had an undernote of warning that the boys, still utterly distressed by the thrashing, couldn’t recognize. “I know you’re not. I just do.” She was quiet again, as if she were finished talking, although in her mind she was choosing her next round of words carefully. Only when she started applying cold compresses to their swollen faces did she continue, “If you were
that
, what the man said you were, I’d advise you first to keep it to yourselves, and second to be very careful around here. The countryside is rough. But since you’re not
that
, I won’t advise you nothing.” She gave them a conspiratorial smile and continued treating their wounds. When she finished she took them to the storage building where, she said, they would sleep from then on.

When she left, Pablo and Santiago hugged each other and wept quietly. One stroked the other’s broken nose with the tips of his fingers. The other kissed his friend’s swollen eyes time and time again.

They slept together inside a coffee sack.

E
L PADRE
R
AFAEL
and his followers had stopped reciting the rosary and joined the rest of the crowd in relentless gossiping. Now and then they glanced over their shoulders at Santiago, wondering when the full impact of the tragedy would hit him and what his reaction would be. Nurse Ramirez warned the entire group not to get near the ill man, then pulled el padre Rafael and the magistrate aside to talk to them.

“Whatever illness Pablo has, it might be contagious,” the nurse began in a small voice, shooting the magistrate a warning glance. Mariquita’s children, she argued, hadn’t been vaccinated against anything in over six years. They would not survive an epidemic. She recommended locking Pablo up in Francisca’s burned-out shack until he died—which from the man’s looks should be soon—then incinerating his body. The magistrate and the priest seemed appalled by the nurse’s advice.

“We can’t leave one of our own to die like that—isolated, in a dump, surrounded by…rats and creatures,” the magistrate said, her agitated voice rising above a whisper.

“I agree,” el padre Rafael interposed. “Pablo Jaramillo must die like a Christian and get a Christian burial.”

“The future of our village is uncertain as it is,” the buxom nurse retorted. “I only know our children is all we have. If we lose them—” She didn’t finish her sentence. Instead she put a fatalistic look on her face, a face with a large witch’s nose and sad fish eyes. “Just think about it,” she added.

They thought about it, together and for less than a minute, and concluded that they had no alternative: Mariquita’s future must come first. “But who’s going to take Pablo to Francisca’s old house?” the magistrate asked. El padre shrugged and the nurse shrugged and the magistrate, shrugging, asked yet another question: “Wouldn’t that person have to be quarantined?”

At that precise moment Santiago rose, a candle in his hand, and began walking slowly across the street, toward Pablo. Pablo lay curled up on his side, his face turned to the door of his mother’s house as though waiting for it to open. Santiago stood next to him, contemplating by the light of the candle the little there was to contemplate, struggling to recognize his old friend. Perhaps this was an error. Perhaps the Jeep driver had mistakenly driven into the wrong town, the wrong street. It had to be an error. Pablo was such a handsome man: tall, dark, well built, with thick, black hair…

“Santiago? Is it you?” Pablo said, somehow sensing his friend’s presence.

Santiago nodded mechanically as Pablo turned himself languidly onto his back. With great difficulty Pablo drew his left arm from under the towel in which he was wrapped, uncovering the upper part of his body, and stretched it out to touch Santiago, but Santiago was a little too far away, and Pablo’s arm fell limply to the ground with a graceless plop. “The rings,” he mumbled.

Santiago looked at Pablo’s skeletal hand wiggling like a worm in the dirt. Two solid gold bands clung to his ring finger. “What about them?”

“Take one,” Pablo said in a whisper. “I promised you a ring. Remember?”

I
T WAS
J
UNE
of 1984. Pablo and Santiago had just turned fifteen. They’d left Yarima to work, on Doña Marina’s recommendation, at Don Maximiliano’s country house, located about three hours away on foot from Mariquita. The wealthy landowner had had it built on a mesa five years ago, and it was a monument to his poor taste and lack of imagination. Casa Perdomo was a wide, graceless box with interconnecting rooms and few windows, as if purposely designed to prevent light from invading its dwellers’ privacy. It had taken Don Maximiliano
several months to convince his wife to leave the city and move into it. To compensate for its ugliness, Doña Caridad had stuffed the house with furniture of remarkable quality, turning each room into a jumble of fancy tables and chairs and cabinets and beds, all of which largely contributed to a permanent state of confusion.

Following Doña Marina’s indirect advice, Pablo and Santiago had introduced themselves as first cousins. They were soon entrusted with the house’s maintenance—painting and repainting the walls, fixing broken doors, replenishing the stoves with firewood, keeping up the plumbing system, stocking the storage room. There was always something to do. The two young men shared a small windowless bedroom in the back of the house, next to the maid’s room, furnished with two trunks for their few clothes, two folding beds and a lamp. At the end of the work day, Pablo and Santiago had only to enter that room and close the door to experience a mighty sense of calmness, safeness and intimacy. The room’s absolute quiet, its refreshing lack of adornment, the lamplight casting shadows that swayed on the white walls—it all created an isolated world where everything seemed possible for the two young men, even their secret love and growing desire. Inside that bedroom, massaging each other’s feet, calves and knees was no longer part of a childish game, but an essential part of their life together; kissing was no longer a reward but a desirable way of reminding one another, without words, of their most intimate feelings. Inside that bedroom there was no husband or wife, only two young men, each in love with the other.

The Perdomos’ only daughter, Señorita Lucía, had recently arrived from New York, where she was attending college. She came every June and stayed until the end of August. This time, however, she hadn’t traveled alone: a twenty-seven-year-old man named William had come along to ask for her hand in marriage. William was neither ill-featured nor handsome but somewhere in between: tall and pink, with a small nose and green eyes. His face, conspicuously covered with freckles, at first bore a haughty expression, but after noticing the genuine affection
and hospitality of his hosts, it revealed an air of innocence and modesty that made a lasting good impression on the Perdomos. William wore nothing but khaki trousers and heavily starched light-colored shirts. He spoke atrocious Spanish in a voice almost imperceptible, as though to prevent listeners from noticing his poor pronunciation. Doña Caridad thought this quite charming and took every opportunity to make conversation with him. He stayed for only five days, long enough for mosquitoes and other insects to scar his foreign skin and scalp. The night before he left, William made his engagement to Señorita Lucía official by putting a golden ring on one of her long fingers during a formal dinner.

Once her fiancé was gone, Señorita Lucía became demanding. “Pablo, bring my breakfast to the porch.” “Santiago, brush my hair.” “Pablo, get my sunglasses.” “Santiago, massage my feet.” She was rather unattractive: lanky, with dark shadows under sleepy brown eyes and thin lips that disappeared every time she smiled. And though she was barely twenty-three, her teeth already had lost their original color and now looked as though partially covered with rust; the result, Doña Caridad used to say, “of that nasty smoking habit that you must quit before your fiancé finds out.” The girl’s eyebrows were the subject of criticism and mockery: she had plucked all the hair from them and replaced it with two fine tattooed lines that she made thicker, darker, or longer—but always uneven—every morning using eyebrow pencils. The Perdomos’ only daughter also had a personality unsuited to the countryside: she was gentle and sensitive, with refined manners, perhaps too refined for rural life. The summer heat was “abominable,” mosquitoes “insufferable,” local running water “filthy,” and so on. She wore high heels, makeup, and jewelry every day and sat out on the porch smoking, browsing through bridal magazines and reading love stories.

“Was that story about death, Señorita Lucía?” Santiago asked her one day, after the girl had put her book down.

She smiled. “No, silly. It was about love.” She was lying stretched in
a hammock, alternating the reading with short puffs of a thin cigarette dangling from her slender hand. Santiago stood beside her, fanning away the mosquitoes and gnats that buzzed around her.

“But you looked like you were in pain.”

“Love can make you feel pain sometimes.”

Santiago thought about this for a moment. It wasn’t love that had caused him and Pablo pain; it was hate, the unjustified hate that the coffee pickers felt toward them, and which—despite Doña Marina’s opportune intercessions—had cost them more than one beating and continuous verbal abuse. Perhaps he should tell Señorita Lucía that he and Pablo were not first cousins, but two boys in love. She would certainly understand. She seemed like a woman who understood things. Besides, she was getting married, which made her an expert on matters of love. But Santiago had promised Pablo he wouldn’t tell anyone.

“What’s the story about?” he asked.

Señorita Lucía let the cigarette smoke dribble out the side of her mouth, making a sound like a gentle breeze. “It’s about a man who goes to war.” She paused briefly to think. “No, it’s rather about the girl the man is in love with…forget about it, Santiago. It’s too complicated.”

“Please, Señorita Lucía. I want to know.”

She looked at him curiously. Unlike his cousin Pablo, Santiago looked delicate, almost effeminate. His voice hadn’t broken yet, and there was no sign to indicate that an Adam’s apple would ever protrude from the front of his neck. He was slender, smooth-faced, and he clearly had a great feeling for love stories and dramas. She stubbed out what remained of the cigarette in an ashtray.