Tales from the Town of Widows (7 page)

Doña Emilia traveled to Fresno, where she printed flyers with La
Casa’s weekly specials, and handed them out herself in the surrounding villages. The old lady had turned into a saleswoman, traveling every day from town to town, her portfolio under her arm and a paper bag full of flyers in her hand. She spent long nights sitting alone in the barroom of La Casa, smoking her thin cigarettes and drinking apple wine straight from the bottle, thinking up fresh ideas that could keep her business afloat. But there was nothing she could do. How, she thought, could she compete with a group of invisible lustful women, romantic ghosts willing to have sex in exchange for a little taste of affection? She cursed the Communist guerrillas for taking her customers away, and wept inconsolably for each of the men who had disappeared.

Soon her lungs began to refuse the smoke of her cigarettes. She developed a nasty cough that could no longer be cured with the usual milk and horseradish sweetened with honey. She lost several pounds, and she got drunk with only a few sips of wine. And so the morning she heard the twelve girls packing their bags, she didn’t try to stop them. Instead she rose from her bed, splashed fresh water on her face and went to the kitchen to prepare their last meal together.

A few hours later, when the twelve girls came out of their bedrooms with no makeup on, dressed in conservative outfits, and with their suitcases hanging from their shoulders, they found the old madam sitting in the dining room, her hands clasped together on top of the table. She was wearing a fancy gown of red silk that covered her body from the neck down. Her gray hair hung loose down her back, and there was something saintly about the expression of her face, something blissful and dreamy. The large dining table was covered with a white tablecloth and was beautifully set with cloth napkins, silver platters, casseroles and utensils and crystal glasses filled with wine. Spread over the table were baskets with corn bread, plates with fruit and cheese, a large bowl of steamy potato soup and oval dishes with roast turkey, white rice and red beans.

“Well, my dears,” Doña Emilia said. “The time has come to say farewell.” She looked down at her translucent hands, her eyes filling
with tears. Viviana was the first one to hug her, and then one by one the other eleven girls took their turns. They wiped the tears from the madam’s creased cheeks, kissed her small, trembling hands and stroked her hair. When the girls finally took their seats, Doña Emilia stood and raised her glass of wine. In a broken voice she proposed a toast.

“Here’s to you, my brave girls, my disciples, who for years bore your own crosses by putting up with the men of Mariquita: sometimes abusive, sometimes rude, but always splendid.

“Here’s to the men of Mariquita, our men, and to La Casa de Emilia, where they’ve been missed the most.”

All thirteen women sipped their wine, sat down and began eating in silence. When they finished, Viviana proposed they all put on their work clothes. And so they wore their brightest dresses and helped one another to apply their makeup. Doña Emilia invited the girls into the barroom, where she played festive music. They danced and drank throughout the night, sharing their most amusing anecdotes, telling jokes, making new toasts, laughing and crying and laughing some more.

The following day, when Doña Emilia woke up, she found herself alone in the room, surrounded by dirty glasses and empty wine bottles. She imagined the twelve girls walking down the road, the sunlight shining on their greasy faces, dreaming, perhaps, of that day when they too could be contented with a bunch of red roses or a handwritten poem in exchange for their love. Doña Emilia wished for that fate for each one of them and closed her eyes, hoping she would never have to open them again. She’d decided to close down La Casa and to live for as long as her remaining savings allowed.

The magical whorehouse, the one that sometimes was and sometimes wasn’t, one day disappeared forever and only love was to blame. The twelve young women found themselves in love, each one with a different man. Magnolia fell for a married barber named Valentín, a middle-aged, dark-skinned fellow who wore a stubborn hairpiece that moved all over his head. When he visited her tent, Magnolia talked
incessantly about wedding gowns made of silk and engagement rings shaped as hearts. She also insisted on reading to him, by the light of a candle, a love story. Valentín thought the girl a little insane and stopped coming. Night after night Magnolia waited for him. She refused all others and turned down their gifts. Under her tent she mostly cried. Sometimes she arranged her provisions and weeded and watered her plants. But mostly she read the same old stories to herself and cried.

Eventually, the twelve girls concluded that God had given them two eyes to better look at men, two ears to better hear what men might want to say, two arms to embrace them and two legs to wrap around them, but only one heart to give. Men, on the other hand, loved with their testicles, and God had given them two.

And so one night the men couldn’t find the magical whorehouse. They looked for the tents along the tortuous roads, behind the woods and between the arid hills. They searched high and low for weeks but never found them. The women had gone back to Mariquita, back to their spinsterhood and their sad nightly meetings filled with memories, back to fantasizing about that glorious day when the town’s bachelors would be returned to them.

T
HEY RUINED MY
business for nothing! Doña Emilia said to herself. Suddenly she heard, in the distance, a street vendor shouting her goods in a rather delicate voice: “Guayabas! Naranjas! Mandarinas!” Then she saw her, a young girl walking gracefully while balancing a large basket on her head. The old woman carefully observed everything about the girl, who looked no more than twelve: her pink dress, her black hair in braids, her long arms and small waist, and had the odd feeling that she’d known her for a long time. The girl also noticed the old woman. She smiled and gently waved. Doña Emilia smiled back. She was just about to ask the girl to join her at the bench when a gust of wind blew the girl’s basket out of balance. Guavas, oranges and
tangerines scattered over the ground. The girl knelt down and quietly began to gather them and put them in the basket. Doña Emilia wanted to help, but when she tried to rise from the bench she couldn’t feel her legs.

And then there came a stronger gust of wind, and the mango, the one the color of sunset, dropped to the ground, right next to the girl. Doña Emilia saw the girl smile, saw her take the mango in her hands and put it in the basket, saw her stride down the road with the basket on her head and slowly vanish into the wind.

Feeling jubilant, Doña Emilia leaned back against the bench and fixed her eyes on the sky, only this time she couldn’t see that it was blue.

José L. Mendoza, 32
Lieutenant-colonel, Colombian National Army

One thing I’ve learned in the army is that the less contact you have with your victim, the easier it is to kill him. I once let a man talk to me for too long before I shot him, and I still regret it. We had received a call from the police station of a small village in the mountains. They were being attacked by guerrillas and needed reinforcements. The roads were terrible, so we couldn’t get there until the following morning, and by that time the rebels, we thought, were gone with whatever was worth anything. I was walking around the town counting dead bodies, unaware that at that moment, a guerrilla in a tree was aiming his Galil at the back of my neck with the clear intention of blowing my head off. One of my officers spotted him and shot him in the arm before the guerrilla could do anything. He was a brown-skinned, small-eyed Indian guy. We herded him and three more rebels we captured into a drainage pit.

When we gained control of the village, I asked the Indian to come out of the pit—I didn’t want to shoot him in front of the other three. He knew what I was about to do, and so he claimed that he was too weak from all the blood he’d lost. I should just let him die in the pit. I shouted to him to come out, and he begged me not to shoot him. He said that his mother had had a stroke and that his two younger sisters had been seriously burned in some fire and that they were alive but they couldn’t move their legs and that their faces were completely disfigured and that they were counting on him to support them and that he was a good man who had been forced into becoming a fighter and that if I could find it within myself to pardon him he’d quit the guerrillas and join the national army…. It
was like he’d memorized the whole speech. And I don’t know why, but I kept listening to his damn story and staring at his eyes, which had grown larger with fear. I let him talk and talk until he got tired and stopped. Then I knelt down in front of him, placed the tip of my revolver on his forehead, and told the other men in the pit that he had tried to kill me from behind and that it wasn’t manly. “This is how you kill a man,” I said, and shot him. At the sound of the blast, my eyes, involuntarily, closed. When I opened them, the Indian’s body was still standing in the pit, but his head was gone from the nose up. His hair, his brains, his small eyes…they simply weren’t there anymore. His mouth was, though, the muscles around his lips quivering as if they were trying to articulate something else he’d forgotten to tell me.

Mariquita, February 11, 1995

C
LEOTILDE
G
UARNIZO WAS A
sixty-seven-year-old spinster. She had short gray hair, a smooth mustache and white bristles on her chin. Thick spectacles rested on her round nose, which looked like an upside-down question mark, giving her face an enigmatic air. There was something masculine about her mannerisms: the way she sat with her legs wide apart, her fierce stomping gait and the way her right hand clenched instinctively when she felt threatened, as though ready to knock someone or something to the ground. Her countenance was completed by a frown that seldom relaxed. In short, she was the image of severity gone gray.

Cleotilde had been on an aimless journey when the bus by which she was traveling broke down. Night was beginning to fall, and Cleotilde was afraid. She hired a country boy to take her, by mule, to the closest village. She would spend the night there and resume her journey at dawn.

The boy dropped her and her suitcase at Mariquita’s plaza and left. The village was especially quiet that night, and in the absence of light looked like a ghost town. Cleotilde’s legs began to shake. Aimlessly
and with great effort, she walked a few blocks until she saw a gleam of light in a small window. She hurried up to the house and knocked on the open door. Soon a young girl wrapped in a black shawl came into sight, a candle in her hand. The girl couldn’t have been older than ten, maybe eleven.

“Come on in,” she said in a sweet voice. She walked ahead, with the candle lighting a long, narrow hall. “My name’s Virgelina Saavedra, and this is my grandmother, Lucrecia viuda de Saavedra.” The girl pointed at a pale, old woman sitting on a rocking chair.

“I’m Señorita Cleotilde Guarnizo. At your service,” she said, and then, addressing Lucrecia, added, “and I’m looking for a warm place to spend the night.”

“You can stay here if you like,” Lucrecia replied indifferently. “We have a spare hammock and a blanket somewhere.”

Cleotilde hated hammocks. She couldn’t understand how anybody could sleep while hanging in the air like sloths. Of course she wouldn’t say that to them. They seemed like friendly country people. “I really appreciate it,” she said.

Lucrecia motioned to her to sit. There was only one chair available, which made it easier and less awkward for Cleotilde. She set down her suitcase and sat and looked around, half smiling at the walls. The room was dark and stuffy, scarcely furnished, with a pile of cooking firewood sitting in one corner and two black scrawny cats lying in another. Cleotilde hated cats even more than she hated hammocks, and couldn’t help wondering whether the ones in sight were alive or dead. They might as well be a part of the house’s indigent furniture.

“Fidel and Castro,” Lucrecia said suddenly. She appeared to be scrutinizing Cleotilde’s face and body for some sign of wealth. She might ask Cleotilde for a donation before she left the next day. Lucrecia had already bartered, for food, most of her seamstress’s equipment.

“I beg your pardon?” Cleotilde returned. She felt as though Lucrecia were scrutinizing her face and body for some sign of wealth. She truly hoped Lucrecia wasn’t expecting her to pay for putting her up for
a night. Cleotilde had barely enough cash in her purse to pay for the bus ticket that would take her far away from this decayed village.

“I said Fidel and Castro. Those are the names of the cats.”

“Oh,” Cleotilde returned. “Interesting names for a couple of cats. Are they alive?”

“Uh-huh,” Lucrecia uttered. She paused, as to indicate a change of subject, then added, “As you can see, we’re very poor.”

“Oh, aren’t we all?” Cleotilde interposed. “This war has left us all in financial straits.” She wondered if Lucrecia knew the word
straits
. “You can’t even tell who’s worst, the guerrillas, the paramilitaries, or the government…. With the situation the way it is, tell me, who’s going to employ an old woman like myself?”

“Nobody,” Lucrecia replied, looking a little frustrated that Cleotilde’s speech had ruled out any possibility of her making a few pesos that night. “We have nothing to offer you but coffee. You want a cup of coffee?” she said.

Cleotilde thanked her, saying that it was too late for coffee, that she asked for nothing but a place to sleep and a candle. “I like to read before going to sleep, don’t you?”

“I don’t read or write,” the woman stated resolutely, as though she were proud of it.

“Sweet Lord! I can’t imagine not being able to read.” Then, addressing Virgelina, who was trimming the wick of a fresh candle with her teeth, she asked, “Do you read?”

The girl shook her head.

“Little girl,” Cleotilde said, raising her index finger in the air. “You ought to know that education is a tool for success.”

“Women around here don’t need no education,” Lucrecia said bitterly. “Besides, the school’s been closed for over two years.”

“Two years? How dreadful!”

Virgelina handed Cleotilde the candle and an empty Coca-Cola bottle to serve as a holder. “The magistrate promised us the school will reopen soon,” the girl said softly. “As soon as a teacher gets hired.”

“A teacher?” Cleotilde said, getting up from her seat. “Isn’t that a coincidence? I’m a licensed teacher.”

“Well, if you’re interested, then you should stop by the magistrate’s office tomorrow,” Lucrecia suggested. “She’s been interviewing candidates all week.”

“You don’t happen to know what the salary is, do you? Not that it matters much, for I’m a single woman without any financial obligations. Of course I’d have to rent a room and buy food, but how much can one spend on food in a small village like this. Really? That much for a pork chop? Well, I don’t like meat, anyway. It’s bad for you. It causes arthritis. Do you really? I have the remedy for that: crush a live scorpion and put it in a bottle with rubbing alcohol for a month. Then rub the alcohol on your joints every night before going to bed. It’s a real godsend. An Indian told me about it. An Indian woman, of course, because men don’t understand a woman’s pain. They don’t understand a woman’s anything. No, I’m not married. Every man I ever met was a pig. Maybe the men of this village are different…. What do you mean, no men? Only the priest? Really? Communist guerrillas, eh? Well, that’s wonderful! Terrible, but wonderful. I’d heard about towns of widows, but I’d never been to one. Uh-huh, the war, always the war. Men keep waging wars, and we keep suffering the consequences. At least you didn’t have to flee and leave everything behind like I’ve seen people do…. So tell me about your magistrate. Is she friendly? Is that right? Well, nobody’s perfect. Yes, I might apply for the job. Just for the sake of it, because I’m not sure that I want to stay in this village. All right, since you insist so much, I’ll have some coffee. Just half a cup. Thank you.”

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING
Cleotilde was up at five as usual; she rose at the same time every day no matter where she slept or how late she went to sleep. She got dressed in the semidarkness of the living room, where Virgelina had slung a hammock for her the night before. She put on a black pants suit and black running shoes and, carrying an
ancient leather case with her credentials, went out into the dawn mist. Cleotilde imagined there would be other candidates, and she wanted to be the first one interviewed that morning. She was confident that she would get the job. In her long career as a teacher, there wasn’t one position she’d applied for that she hadn’t gotten. But before accepting the job, she needed to convince herself that Mariquita was a peaceful place where she could spend the rest of her days, a place where she’d feel safe and, as she was fond of saying, close to heaven.

For a moment her case felt heavier than usual. Then she thought, Who am I trying to fool? The contents of the case hadn’t changed in years; she had. She was old now, old and frail. It didn’t matter how straight her back looked when she walked, or how authoritative her voice sounded when she scolded misbehaving children—she was just a frail old lady terrified of many things. Terrified most of all of the night: of its murkiness in which dire things happened; of its prolonged silence that was nothing but the absence of the sounds she wanted to hear; of the crying ghosts she saw and heard in every corner; and of the horrible dream that kept coming back, torturing her night after night: a dream of men and blood and red velvet curtains.

T
HE SUN BEGAN
to shine on everything: the terra-cotta tiles that roofed most of the houses, the puddles of rainwater in the unpaved streets, the long black hair of a small group of young women carrying large baskets of dirty laundry on their heads, singing and laughing as they strode by. They looked curiously at Cleotilde. The only travelers who stopped in Mariquita these days were fortune-tellers, doctors without degrees, fugitives, displaced families and those who had lost their way. On occasion a caravan of merchants arrived, their mules loaded with goods the villagers couldn’t afford or no longer had use for—perfume, Coca-Cola, razors—but also others that were indispensable—coal, candles, kerosene, bleach for the magistrate and supplies of hosts and wine for the priest.

“Good morning, señora,” one of the women called.

“Señorita,” Cleotilde corrected her, but she spoke too softly, and the woman didn’t hear her. Nonetheless, Cleotilde decided that the women of Mariquita were diligent and friendly. She turned left at the next corner and in the distance made out a boy and a girl holding a howling dog. She decided to greet them, her prospective students. Being from a small village, they would be shy and insecure; therefore, she decided, she’d be gentle with them. When she was close enough, she lowered her spectacles and noticed that they were barefoot and wore ragged clothes. She also noticed, to her horror, that the girl was holding the dog’s mouth shut while the boy forced a stick into its bottom.

“What are you doing?” Cleotilde cried out. She slapped the boy on his back. The boy released the dog and kicked Cleotilde in the leg. “You crazy old woman!” he yelled. Then he ran away with the girl, laughing heartily. The dog ran away also, the stick still hanging from its bottom. Cleotilde was furious. She sat on the sidewalk to check her leg. Just a little red spot. Hopefully it wouldn’t turn blue. She didn’t bruise easily; not for an old lady anyway.

She picked up her leather case and limped two blocks down, shooing away the many stray cats and dogs that surrounded her, begging for food. At the next corner she turned right and was met by a group of half-naked children gathered beside a mango tree, chatting. Cleotilde thought they looked more civilized than the others. She would talk to them. “Good morning, boys and girls!” she chirped. “How are you all doing today?”

The children began laughing and whispering to each other.

“Isn’t this a beautiful morning?” Cleotilde looked up at the sky, smiling with pleasure. The morning was indeed beautiful. “What’s your name, son?” she said, pointing at a gangling boy who was scratching his armpit.

The boy quickly looked at his friends, as though for approval, and then, grinning, said, “My name is Vietnam Calderón, but they call me El Diablo.” Making a monstrous face at Cleotilde, he said, “Boooooo!” All his friends laughed.

“Now, that’s not polite, son,” Cleotilde said calmly. In different circumstances she would have grabbed the boy by his ear, smacked him in the face, made him kneel down and apologize to her. Then she would have made him write, one hundred times, “I must respect my elders.” But she had just arrived in Mariquita and didn’t know the boys or their mothers. She stared at him long enough to remember his freckled face if she ever saw him again.

“I am Señorita Cleotilde Guarnizo,” she said sternly, “and I might be your next teacher!”

“We don’t want no teacher!” a little girl yelled from the back.

“Go away,” a boy echoed. Soon they were all shouting in unison, “Go away! Go away!”

Ah! If only I had a ruler, Cleotilde thought.

“Go away! Go away!”

She threw them a disapproving look, then turned around and began walking in the direction of the plaza. She hadn’t gone more than a few steps when a pebble hit the back of her neck. Her right hand clenched, and she turned to the children sharply, a flush of anger brightening her cheeks. The children stood defiantly, each holding a slingshot with the elastic strip drawn all the way back, ready to fling pebbles at the old woman.

“You little wretches!” she yelled, shielding herself with her case. This safety measure was perfectly timed because, without delay, a rain of pebbles flew at her, hitting her mostly on her legs but also on the tips of her fingers that showed on both sides of the case. “You scoundrels!” she screamed. “You rabble!” The children ran away, laughing and congratulating one another on their aim.

Cleotilde trembled with rage. If she stayed in this village—which she seriously doubted she would after this incident—the first thing she’d do as their teacher would be to punish them for such an affront to her dignity. She was imagining this punishment when five middle-aged women dressed in black appeared from around a corner, their heads slightly tilted and their hands joined before their chests. As they walked,
the women sang, with great passion, a local version of the Hallelujah song. They must be the mothers of some of those little rascals, Cleotilde thought, giving them a withering look. She kept walking along the unpaved street until the wicked chanting of the children and the singing of their indifferent mothers were but an echo in the distance.

C
LEOTILDE WAS THE
first and only candidate to show up for an interview that day. She sat very still in the waiting room of the magistrate’s office, the leather case resting on her lap. Her hands were shaking. She folded them on the case and decided to disregard the episode with the children and concentrate on the interview. But she couldn’t concentrate because Cecilia Guaraya, the magistrate’s secretary, was repeatedly hitting and cursing a rusty typewriter whose ribbon kept slipping out of place. “Damn you, you son of a rat! You load of pig’s shit!” Cecilia shouted.