Tales from the Town of Widows (19 page)

With his eyes fixed on the ceiling, relieved that it only had been a bad dream, Hochiminh thanked God for the roosters. However, as the rest of his body began to rouse, he felt an intense pain in his nipples. He brought his hands to his chest instinctively and became horrified. His hands didn’t land flat on the skin of his chest, as they generally did; this time, he thought, they arched over two large mounds that had appeared overnight, like boils. Hochiminh jumped out of his bed and quickly lit the candle that was on the night table. He lowered his head until his double chin touched his cleavage, tilting it slightly from left to right and vice versa with his eyes wide open. The proximity of the view caused him to imagine that his breasts looked larger than they were, and he wept quietly. How was he going to explain these to his mother and sisters? And what about the contest? Up on the platform he’d be nothing but an object of ridicule. This couldn’t be happening to him. He, who had been an altar boy. He, who recited a Hail Mary and a Lord’s Prayer every night before going to bed. He, who was a good student, an obedient son, a good brother to his two sisters, and a good grandson to—well, on a few occasions he’d stolen silver coins from his grandmother’s purse, right in front of her exhausted, half-blind eyes, while she said rosary after rosary. This had to be a divine punishment. After saying a few prayers with fervent devotion, Hochiminh put on his late father’s bathrobe and threw a large towel behind his neck, making sure the ends covered his breasts. He grabbed the candle, opened the door of his bedroom slightly, just enough to see that there was no one in the corridor, and hurried to the outhouse.

Outside, the boy undressed in front of a full-length mirror and gave free rein to his imagination. He saw two fleshy protuberances, each with a large nipple at the end, stare back at him. He cupped his hands under them, feeling their weight. They were as heavy as oranges. He squeezed them hard, trying to deflate them, but the excessive pressure made them hurt and the sharp new pain seemed to insist that they were a part of his body; two self-contained organs that, quite possibly, were there to perform some specific functions. Perhaps, a more pragmatic Hochiminh reckoned, they’d shrink if he soaked them in cold water, like his penis did. He ran across the patio, naked, to the large barrel they used to collect rainwater, and went into the water, immersing his pudgy body from the neck down. A few minutes later he came out, shivering. His nipples had become stiff, and the pain in his chest had stopped, numbed by the cold water. But his breasts remained large and firm—or so he believed.

T
HAT SAME MORNING
, they say, Vietnam Calderón didn’t get up until his mother tickled his heels. The boy was redundant with laziness, slackness, tardiness and other words ending in
ess
that amounted to nothing good for his character. In the outhouse he found, as usual, the washing basin and towel his mother left for him every morning. He scrubbed his armpits and between his legs, cursing at her for making him wash daily; then went to his room and put on clean clothes his mother had chosen for him. A few minutes later he sat at the dining table in front of a stale piece of corn bread and a cup of hot chocolate. His mother sat beside him, holding a cup of coffee and repeating, one last time, her “useful tips” on how to win the competition.

“Listen to me, Vietnam,” she began, a hint of irritation in her voice. “When you’re up on the platform, don’t pick your nose or rub your crotch, like you
always
do.” The boy nodded his head mechanically. He looked rather tense, but his mother decided he was just not keen on the contest or her tips. After all, he wasn’t too keen on anything in particular. Everything he did was marked with such indifference that
the teacher Cleotilde had said he’d make a good politician.

“…And please, Vietnam, for once in your life wear a smile on your face. Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, Mamá,” he finally replied in the falsetto voice of a little girl. He cleared his throat and said it again, “Yes, Mamá.” It sounded just as delicate.

The widow took a sip of coffee before asking, “What’s the matter with your voice?”

“I don’t know. It was—” He stopped, cleared his throat again and tried one more time. “It was normal last night.”

“You sound like a girl, for Christ’s sake!”

“Leave him alone,” said Liboria, Vietnam’s grandmother. “Boys’ voices start breaking when they turn fifteen.” Old Liboria lay stretched in a hammock slung from beams across the dining area. She was always in the hammock, aging slowly while suspended in the air, like a good sausage in a butcher’s shop.

Vietnam drank his hot chocolate in sips, letting every mouthful burn his throat. “It was normal yesterday,” he repeated, soprano-like.

“Stop talking like that, Vietnam!” his mother admonished him, her index finger in the air.

The boy’s face turned red. He coughed, grunted and made every guttural sound he could think of. “It was normal yesterday,” he repeated.

Visibly upset, his mother finished the coffee in one gulp, reared up and plodded into the kitchen.

In the back of the house, in front of the mirror his father had pasted up on the wall many years ago, Vietnam gargled with salty water. “Testing, uno, dos, tres.” He gargled more. “Testing, uno, dos, tres.” But his voice remained impossibly high-pitched. Desperately, he pushed his index finger down his throat and moved it in circles until he vomited his breakfast and tears came to his eyes. He wiped the tears away with the heel of his hand, then went to get water to clean the mess he’d made. It was back there, as he fetched water from the laundry sink,
that Vietnam felt a stream flowing down his legs. He forgot about the water and rushed to the toilet, his legs held together from the hips to the knees. He was so embarrassed to have wetted his pants that when he pulled them down he saw not urine, but blood, staining his trousers red, running down his inner thighs. He looked at his penis and noticed blood still gushing from it. He became frightened, not just because of the scarlet color of his blood but also because of his total inability to restrain the discharge. “I’m dying,” he wailed.

“Vietnaaaaaaaaam!” shouted his mother from the kitchen. “Hurry up. You’re going to be late for the contest!”

“I’m coming, Mamá,” he shrieked.

“Stop talking like that, Vietnam! I’m warning you!”

“Leave him alone,” his grandmother grumbled from her hammock.

T
HEY SAY THAT
when Trotsky Sánchez’s mother walked into her son’s room to wake him up, she found him weeping on the edge of his bed. He used one of his hands to cover his diminutive slanting eyes, and kept the other clenched on his chest, close to his heart.

“What’s wrong, mi cielo?”

“…!……!!……!!!” Trotsky gabbled.

She came closer to his bed and stroked his hair. “You’re frightened about what might happen at the contest, aren’t you?” She sat next to him, embraced him and wiped away his tears with her impeccable white apron. “My heart tells me you’ll win, Trotsky, and a mother’s heart is never wrong.”

The boy unclenched his hand and looked at it over his mother’s shoulder: what he was hiding was still there. He closed his hand tightly again and let out a shriek.

“Everything’s okay, cariño. Mamá’s here.”

But the boy had empowered his imagination to take him to a place where nothing was okay. Earlier that morning, before sunrise, Trotsky had awakened wanting to urinate. He pulled the chamber pot from
under his bed and placed it on the mattress. He stood in front of it, still somnolent, and inserted his right hand into his pants, looking for his penis. His hand landed on his young pubic hair and quickly traveled the pubes, hunting for his member. It moved all over, his five fingers extended in every direction. He found his testicles, warm and shriveled, but not his penis. Annoyed, he lit a candle. His sleepy eyes and hand were now in search of the elusive penis, but they couldn’t find it. Trotsky became fully awake, almost alert. He pulled his trousers down to his knees, and with wide eyes and both hands he examined his pubic area thoroughly, splitting small sections of his pubic hair. His penis simply wasn’t there. In fact, there was no indication of any penis ever having been between his legs. In his state of confusion he even looked for it in sections of his body where ordinarily it wouldn’t be, like his navel, his armpits, and behind his ears. Trotsky opened his eyes wide and covered his mouth with both hands the way his mother did when someone mentioned guerrillas and paramilitary soldiers. He still felt the need to urinate, but how? Perhaps his penis had retreated beneath his skin like his testicles did sometimes, leaving the scrotum empty and wrinkled. He pulled up his pants and walked to the outhouse.

There he stood in front of the latrine, not knowing what to do, until at length he squatted on his heels, hoping that his penis would pop up from under his pelvis. But his urine found a different way out of his body. It came out in a steady flow through his rectum, just as warm and yellow as always. Trotsky cried all the way back to his bedroom. He sat on the edge of his bed waiting to wake up from his nightmare. He even pinched his arm to make sure he was awake. Then he saw it: his penis! Trotsky saw his penis lying on the floor, next to a pair of beat-up black shoes he’d inherited from his late father. Perplexed, he bent over to get a better look at it: a flaccid outgrowth the size of a silkworm with a dark mole in the center. Somehow it had detached itself from his crotch while he was sleeping, and traveled from the bed to the floor.

Contemplating his apathetic penis in his mind’s eye, Trotsky discovered he was afraid of it. If it had been able to remove itself, it might
be capable of much more. It might crawl and twist like a worm; it might fly sightless, like a bat; it might even attack the boy, its master. After some time, and after convincing himself that his penis wasn’t qualified to perform such difficult tasks, Trotsky overcame his fears and picked it up from the floor. He held it tenderly in the palm of his hand, observing it from every possible angle. It didn’t appear to have been cut off; its base was perfectly sealed, and the top looked exactly as it had when Trotsky saw it last, its head covered with extra skin contracted into folds. Holding his loose penis in his palm made the boy feel deeply sad.

He wept and wept until his mother entered his room.

T
HEY SAY THAT
the four boys met at the doorstep of Nurse Ramírez’ house sometime before eight. They’d rushed, separately and without telling anyone, to the infirmary, which was, in fact, the nurse’s living room, soberly decorated with her late husband’s medical school certificates and a large, cobwebby picture of the human skeletal frame, and which had a separate entrance also on the street. The nurse answered the infirmary’s door in her late husband’s pajamas. She was rather buxom and had a mass of shining black curls that clustered about her rotund face.

“Shouldn’t you all be heading to the plaza?” she asked in a squeaky voice, visibly bothered by the boys’ early presence. They hid their faces without replying. “You’re just terrified of all those silly girls and their stupid competition, aren’t you? Go on! You’ll get over it.” The boys whined and didn’t move. Nurse Ramírez rolled her eyes at them and said, “All right, all right, damn it! Has anyone been shot?” They shook their heads. “Good, because I can’t stand the sight of blood. Come inside and wait until I get dressed.”

Mariquita’s nurse was squeamish about blood, vomit, diarrhea, pus, rashes and other people’s genitalia—her own she found quite desirable. Needless to say, she wasn’t a good nurse. In fact, she was not a nurse at all. She was the widow of Dr. Ramírez, Mariquita’s only physician for over thirty years, and she’d half learned, from him, only the very basics
of medicine—how to take a patient’s pulse and blood pressure, how to read a thermometer and use the stethoscope, and how to give injections. She refused to learn how to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Eight years before, after the guerrilla attack in which Mariquita’s men disappeared, the widow of Dr. Ramírez had been of no help. That day she tried to assist her neighbors and friends in treating their wounds, but she became nauseated after seeing so much blood and went home to grieve over her own losses. A few weeks later a serious epidemic of influenza arrived, killing seven children and three old women in the first week. That time, however, she treated several patients and succeeded in stopping the epidemic from spreading. The Pérez widow even claimed that “Nurse” Ramírez had saved her life. Since, every time someone was injured or fell ill, “Nurse” Ramírez was called in.

While waiting for the fastidious nurse to come back, the boys pretended they weren’t in the infirmary waiting for the fastidious nurse to come back. Che bragged about his powerful, far-reaching ejaculation, “Be ready, guys, because I’ve been practicing for our next contest. I’m shooting farther each time.” The comment echoed in Trotsky’s ears. He tried to remain calm, though he couldn’t help biting his nails. “That was a dumb competition,” he grumbled. “I’ll never do it again.” Meanwhile Hochiminh, in one of his late father’s shirts—which looked rather large on him—and with a huge book clutched firmly against his breasts, occupied himself by memorizing the names of bones from the skeleton’s picture: “Ster-num, il-i-um, sac-rum…” Vietnam, for his part, refused to talk. He wrote on a piece of paper, “I caught a severe throat infection and lost my voice,” and held the note up for his friends to see it.

N
URSE
R
AMÍREZ COULDN
’
T
bring herself to examine the boys. She called them into her office one at a time and listened to their symptoms. What she heard was so terrifying that she immediately locked them in the waiting room. In her mind there was no doubt that she was faced with some mysterious, ghastly epidemic. She grew apprehensive, her hands began shaking involuntarily, and she felt a compulsive de
sire to wash herself. She took off her clothes, put them in a bag and sealed it, then gave herself a sponge bath, scrubbing her entire body several times. She got dressed again, feeling a little calmer, and took out of a drawer an old medical reference book, a relic that had been handed down from generation to generation in her husband’s family. She wanted to look up the disease, but where to start? It occurred to her that someone else should get involved.