Tales from the Town of Widows (32 page)

“Here, do your business in here.” She grabbed the bucket, already reeking with Gordon’s urine from the night before, lifted a corner of the net and handed it to him.

He took the bucket in one hand and turned around on his knees and breathed deeply. A loud, prolonged splash filled the room.

“It’s getting dark in here,” he said, setting the bucket at the lower end of the mattress, within the netted area. “What time is it?”

Rosalba hadn’t been asked that question in ladders. “It’s almost the end of the working day.” She noticed Gordon was going through his bag, looking for something. He took out a pair of boxer shorts and swiftly slipped into them. He was having a lucid moment, she thought, but before night fell he’d be burning with fever again.

Still on his knees, Gordon began to scrutinize each corner of the spacious room. “What makes this building a church?” he suddenly said. “There isn’t one thing in here that makes me think of God.”

Rosalba also looked around the room and smiled, obviously pleased with the emptiness of the view. “We call it the church out of habit,” she said, “because that’s what it once was. Just like we used to call God God and heaven heaven.”

“What do you call God now?”

“We don’t call it anything. It’s just an empty word, like this church.”

“And heaven?”

“Also empty. Without God there’s no heaven, or hell. Life’s better that way.”

Gordon gazed curiously at her. “Do you worship anything?”

“Nature. We’ve learned to fully appreciate the beauty and benefits of our land, our plants and animals.”

Gordon sat on the mattress with his back against the wall. He was too tired to pursue a discussion about belief. “Where did she go?” he said.

“Who?” Rosalba reached for the lamp.

“The girl who was here before.”

“Julia? I expect she went back to work.” She lit the lamp and set it on the upside-down crate next to him.

The nearness of the light reduced Gordon’s visibility beyond the
net but let him see clearly everything within. He noticed several holes in the fabric. “She can’t talk, can’t she?”

“No.”

“What’s her real name? I mean,
his
real name?”

Rosalba stared at the reporter through the meshed fabric, as though she wanted to see or learn something personal and unique about him. So he knows about Julia, she thought. He might be a different kind of gringo after all: a curious one, who’s willing to experiment with new things, new sensations. All gringos can’t be narrow-minded, materialistic and full of themselves.

“Julio,” Rosalba emphatically said. “His name’s Julio something. I don’t remember his middle name. We’ve been calling him Julia for so long that I—”

“How long?”

“Hmmm.” She shrugged. “I lost track of it. All I know is that it all started on the day the men disappeared.”

“The men, right. How did they disappear?”

“Guerrillas.”

“Did the guerrillas kill them all?”

“They might as well have.”

“They took them away, didn’t they?”

“It’s too long a story to tell,” she said, making an effort to look weary and uninterested.

She was playing hard to get; Gordon was sure of it. Two could play that game. “Don’t worry, then,” he said. “Maybe some other time.” He let his body slide down the wall until his back was flat on the mattress and his body partially covered by the thin blue sheet. Soon afterward, the bell announced the end of the working day; five thunderous and reverberating strokes that, from inside the empty church, sounded more like the beginning of the end of the world.

While the echo of the last chime was still resounding in their ears, Rosalba shouted, “Do you really want to hear how our men disappeared?”

“Only if you feel like telling,” he shouted back, a cunning smile on his face.

She straightened her spine against the chair’s back, shifting her matronly extra weight. She looked up at the white ceiling as though for inspiration, then began the telling of her story:

“The day the men disappeared started as a typical Sunday morning in Mariquita….”

E
LOÍSA
, N
URSE
R
AMÍREZ
and her spouse Erlinda Calderón stopped by after dinner. They had on ponchos of sacking that old Lucrecia, the community’s seamstress, had tailored for every villager to wear on chilly evenings. Eloísa kissed her Ticuticú and handed her a plate with her dinner and an extra poncho.

“How’s the Míster doing?” the nurse asked. She held a small earthen container in her hands.

“He was quite alert for a good part of the afternoon,” Rosalba said. “I even told him a story, and he loved it. But he’s delirious again.”

“That’s typical of dengue fever,” the nurse declared. She walked over to Gordon, relieved to see he was now wearing shorts. She felt his forehead and checked his body for rashes, which, she explained, were also typical of the disease. Had he vomited? No? Very good! Had he complained of headaches? Well, that was common. Muscle pain? Sure, that was also common. Nurse Ramírez poured into a cup some of the formula she had prepared—an infusion of chrysanthemum and honeysuckle flowers, marijuana and mint leaves, and burdock and anise seeds—and forced the thick mixture down Gordon’s throat. “I’ll tend to him tomorrow,” she volunteered.

“Good,” Rosalba said. “I’ll make sure he gets plenty of juices, maybe even a good soup from the Morales’s kitchen. And I’ll stop by after dinner to tell him another story.” She put out the light of the lamp and sang, “Good night, Míster Esmís.” Soon they were gone.

A
FTER HEARING THE
first story, Gordon told Rosalba that he’d like to write a book about New Mariquita. And so every evening after that and for eleven consecutive suns, Rosalba made it her duty to tell Gordon a story about her town of widows, and Gordon made it his to listen to it and tape it and, when feeling strong enough, take notes. Rosalba’s privileged memory covered the better part of Mariquita’s history since long before the men disappeared, but her stories were to some extent unreliable; a singular combination of her own experiences coupled with several different versions and—this was the unreliable part—assumptions she had put together in the absence of facts. Fortunately for Gordon, it was easy to tell when Rosalba was speculating by her passionless tone and lack of details, but also because Rosalba—who otherwise was a confident storyteller—would stumble over the words or look the other way as she told them. Every time Gordon was seized by doubt, he would discreetly pencil in a question mark next to the suspicious line, or cue himself on the tape if he was recording it. He’d check her version against that of Julia—his special friend—when he had the opportunity.

Rosalba’s telling was interrupted many times each night. Councilwoman Ubaldina, for instance, often stopped by to examine and evaluate Gordon’s improvement. Aroused women of different ages also came around every evening after dinner, hoping to catch a glimpse of the semi-naked man, bringing presents of flowers, mangoes, oranges, bananas, hearty soups or blood sausages and puddings—the mere appearance of which nauseated Gordon. He himself interrupted Rosalba often to repeat a word he didn’t know or hadn’t caught, to ask her specific questions about the story, to clarify a confusing anecdote or have her repeat a section of the story that he liked. It was not unusual for Rosalba to jump from one story to another, or to wander from the point and begin endless discussions about herself. On those occasions, the reporter had to resort to his journalist’s subtle ways to lead her
back to the subject matter: “That’s most interesting, Señora Rosalba, but you were saying that…”

And so it was in this way that Gordon learned about how Mariquita’s men disappeared and Julio got to be Julia, but also about the crisis that followed the men’s withdrawal from the village: the prolonged dry spell and the cutting off of electricity, the shortage of food and water, the epidemic of influenza that killed ten people, and the gradual departure of nearly half the adult population and their children. He learned from Rosalba about the passing military commission that had designated her as the town’s new magistrate; and about the brothel madam’s persistent attempts to keep her business afloat in a town of widows and spinsters. He learned about the mysterious schoolmistress who refused to teach history, and about how Santiago Marín became the town’s Other Widow. About the hypocritical priest who first developed a procreation scheme and later killed the town’s only four boys. About the widow who found a fortune under her bed just as the town’s economy was slowly reverting to a bartering system. About the day time stopped, and the sun time became female, and about how a cow named Perestroika saved the magistrate’s plan of economic, political and social restructuring that turned a rotten, meager town into a prosperous and self-sufficient community.

I
N THE SAME
way Rosalba made it her duty to tell the reporter a story every evening, Julia Morales made it hers to create, together with Gordon, one more story for him to write about: theirs. Every night after the village had gone to sleep, Julia scurried along the desolate streets toward the church. The first few nights she contented herself with running the tips of her delicate fingers all over Gordon’s body in the absolute darkness of the room, while he slept under the narcotic effect of the nurse’s concoction. But as the man’s health began to improve, the girl demanded more from his hands and fingers, from his hips and tongue and lips. And when they kissed and made love, she sucked him
in, breathed in the air he breathed out, and filled herself full of him night after night after night.

T
WELVE SUNS LATER
, Nurse Ramírez informed the councilwomen that Gordon had fully recovered from his illness. She made the announcement over breakfast in the Morales’s communal kitchen.

“Well, then, I’d better go escort him up to the thicket right now,” Ubaldina said. “I want to make sure he leaves once and for all.” She put down the arepa she was eating and stood up.

“I have a proposal to make,” Rosalba said suddenly. She looked at Ubaldina and pointed to the wooden bench, prompting her to sit down again. The other three women turned inquisitive eyes to Rosalba. “As we all know, Míster Esmís is the first real man we’ve seen in many ladders.” Rosalba thrust her head forward and lowered her voice to avoid being heard by the people in the table next to theirs. “Naturally, some of our finest women have shown interest in him. I propose that we take advantage of his being here to get two or three women pregnant. I’m sure Míster Esmís wouldn’t mind doing us a favor after all we’ve done for him.” Ubaldina looked as though she was ready to object, and so Rosalba went on whispering reasons why the council should consider her proposal. “Our population is getting old; with every ladder that goes by, another woman in our community loses her ability to bear children. In about forty ladders, our youngest girls will be menopausal, and all of us will be dead, and there will be no one to continue what we started.” Once again Ubaldina attempted to express her disapproval, but Rosalba wasn’t finished. “Besides, can you imagine how beautiful Míster Esmís’s children would be, with his golden hair and blue eyes? With his tiny nose and white complexion? Especially with his white complexion. They’d be absolutely gorgeous!”

The nurse and Cecilia looked at the color of their own limbs and stomachs and awkwardly folded their arms, covering a small part of
their brown nakedness with more of the same. Cleotilde remained still. She’d been in her skin for too long to suddenly be ashamed of it. But Ubaldina, the darkest, most Indian-looking of all five, seemed to be insulted by Rosalba’s comment. “I feel very fortunate to look the way I do,” she said in a dignified matter, her chin raised just enough to show her impressive cheekbones in all their grandeur. “I think of it as a blessing from the gods, and I strongly believe that our future generations should look like us: black-haired and brown-eyed, with a beak like ours, and their skin should be dark so that it can endure the harshest sun, and thick so that it will last much longer.”

Now it was Rosalba who felt discriminated against, her pale skin and green eyes excluded from Ubaldina’s prototype of Mariquita’s people of the future. “I only mentioned Míster Esmís because I happen to think he’s a handsome man, but if you don’t agree, that’s fine with me. I still think someone here must bear a male child or two if we want our community to survive.”

“I say we should try our luck again with our two men,” Ubaldina said. She was referring to the one occasion, two ladders back, when Santiago Marín and Julio Morales had been persuaded to make an effort to impregnate a woman of their choice. Santiago picked Magnolia Morales, while Julio, as though returning the favor, chose Amparo Marín, Santiago’s youngest sister. The two women were instructed by their own mothers to treat the men gently, because Santiago and Julio would only respond to tenderness and love. The encounters took place on the first waxing moon of the ladder, when the women’s probabilities of becoming pregnant were at their best. Magnolia and Amparo did everything they could and knew to excite their respective men, but neither their grace and kindness first, nor their sensuality and lechery later, aroused any response.

Rosalba gave an affected laugh. “You do that. Try your luck again with those two.” She pushed the plate with her untouched breakfast away from her. At that precise moment, Julia Morales came up to their table with a fresh pot of coffee, offering refills.

“The Míster has to go today,” old Cleotilde emphatically said. Julia’s hand, the one holding the pot of coffee, began trembling, but the councilwomen were so absorbed in their discussion that they didn’t even notice the girl’s presence. “But we should wait until after breakfast, when the women are at work, or his departure will end in uproar.”

Nurse Ramírez and Ubaldina indicated with their heads that they were in accord with Cleotilde. Cecilia remained still, neutral. “Let it be on your heads then,” Rosalba said, throwing her hands in the air. As for Julia, she quickly disappeared through the kitchen door.