Eva Luna (30 page)

The Colonel leapt to his feet, his face fiery red. Two wait
ers rushed toward him, and people at neighboring tables turned to stare. He sat down stiffly, breathing rapidly, apparently composing his thoughts.

“I don't know what kind of woman you are,” he said finally. His voice was icy. I could hear how angry he was. “Under normal circumstances, I would accept your challenge and we would immediately go somewhere private. But I've decided to go about this in a different way. I won't beg you. I am sure
you
will come to
me
, and if you are lucky my proposition will still stand. Call me when you want to see me,” Rodríguez said curtly, handing me a card bearing the national coat of arms and beneath it his name printed in italic.

It was early when I got home. Mimí thought I was absolutely insane. The Colonel was a powerful man and could create all kinds of problems for us. Couldn't I have been more courteous? The next day, I resigned my job at the factory, collected my things, and left, hoping to escape from the man who represented everything that for so many years Huberto Naranjo had been risking his life to change.

*  *  *

“All's well that ends well” was Mimí's comment when she found that a spin of the wheel of fortune had set me on the road she considered I should always have been on. “Now you can write in earnest.”

She was sitting at the dining-room table with her cards fanned out before her, where she could read that my destiny was to tell stories and everything else was wasted energy—something I myself had suspected the first time I read
A Thousand and One Nights.
Mimí maintained that each of us is born with a talent, and that happiness or misfortune depends on discovering what that talent is and whether there
is a demand for it in the world, because there are remarkable skills that go unappreciated, like that of a friend of hers who could hold his breath underwater for three minutes, a gift that was of absolutely no use to him. She herself was happy, because she had found hers. She was starring in a telenovela as the evil Alejandra, the rival of Belinda, a blind girl who in the last episodes would recover her sight—predictably, in such dramas—and marry the hero. Her scripts were scattered about the house and I was helping her memorize her lines. I had to play all the other parts: (
Luis Alfredo presses his eyes to keep from crying, because men do not cry.
) Trust your feelings. . . . Let me pay for the operation on your eyes, my darling. (
Belinda trembles, she fears she will lose this man she loves.
) I want to believe you love me . . . but there is another woman in your life, Luis Alfredo. (
He looks into those beautiful, sightless eyes.
) Alejandra means nothing to me; she is only interested in the fortune of the Martínez de la Roca, but she won't get it. No one will ever separate us, my dearest Belinda. (
He kisses her, and she surrenders to that sublime embrace, suggesting to the audience that something may .
.
.
or may not .
.
.
happen. Camera pans to show Alejandra spying on them from the doorway, her face disfigured by jealousy. Cut to Studio B.
)

“You have to take these programs on faith. You have to believe in them, period,” said Mimí, between two of Alejandra's speeches. “If you start analyzing them, you ruin them.”

She argued that anyone can dream up dramas like Belinda's and Luis Alfredo's, but I better than anyone, since I had spent years listening to them in kitchens, believing they were true, and feeling betrayed when I learned that reality was not like the stories on the radio. Mimí outlined the undeniable advantages of working for television, where there was room
for every absurdity and where every character, however extravagant, had a chance to win the hearts of an unsuspecting public—a privilege rarely accorded a book. That evening she came home carrying a dozen little cakes and a heavy, beautifully wrapped package. It was a typewriter. So you can get to work, she said. We spent part of the night sitting on the bed drinking wine, eating cookies, and discussing the ideal plot—a tangle of passions, divorces, bastards, ingénues and villains, wealthy and destitute, that would ensnare the viewers from the first word and keep them glued to the screen through two hundred emotional episodes. We were tipsy and covered with sugar by the time we went to bed, and I dreamed of blind girls and jealous men.

*  *  *

I awakened early. It was a soft and slightly rainy Wednesday, not very different from others in my life, but I treasure that Wednesday as a special day, one that belonged only to me. Ever since the schoolteacher Inés had taught me the alphabet, I had written almost every night, but I felt that today was different, something that could change my life. I poured a cup of black coffee and sat down at the typewriter. I took a clean white piece of paper—like a sheet freshly ironed for making love—and rolled it into the carriage. Then I felt something odd, like a pleasant tickling in my bones, a breeze blowing through the network of veins beneath my skin. I believed that that page had been waiting for me for more than twenty years, that I had lived only for that instant, and I hoped that from that moment my only task would be to capture the stories floating in the thin air, to make them mine. I wrote my name, and immediately the words began to flow, one thing linked to another and another. Characters stepped from the
shadows where they had been hidden for years into the light of that Wednesday, each with a face, a voice, passions, and obsessions. I could see an order to the stories stored in my genetic memory since before my birth, and the many others I had been writing for years in my notebooks. I began to remember events that had happened long ago; I recalled the tales my mother told me when we were living among the Professor's idiots, cancer patients, and mummies; a snakebitten Indian appeared, and a tyrant with hands devoured by leprosy; I rescued an old maid who had been scalped as if by a spinning machine, a dignitary in a bishop's plush chair, an Arab with a generous heart, and the many other men and women whose lives were in my hands to dispose of at will. Little by little, the past was transformed into the present, and the future was also mine; the dead came alive with an illusion of eternity; those who had been separated were reunited, and all that had been lost in oblivion regained precise dimensions.

No one interrupted me, and I spent almost all day writing, so absorbed I forgot even to eat. At four that afternoon I saw a cup of chocolate before my eyes.

“Here, I brought you something warm.”

I looked up at Mimí, tall and slim, wrapped in a blue kimono, and needed a few moments to recognize her; I had been deep in the jungle catching up with a little redhaired girl. I followed my own rhythm, ignoring the recommendations I had received: scripts are organized into two columns; each episode has twenty-five scenes; be careful, because scene changes are very expensive and the actors get confused if the speeches are too long; every key sentence must be repeated three times, and keep the plot simple; begin from the premise that your audience is composed of morons. A stack
of pages grew on the table, spattered with notes, corrections, hieroglyphics, and coffee stains: but as soon as I had begun dusting off memories and weaving destinies, I saw that I did not know where I was going, or what the resolution would be—if there was one. I suspected that I would reach the end only at my own death, and was fascinated by the idea that I was another character in the story, and that I had the power to determine my fate, or invent a life for myself. The plot became more complicated, the characters more and more rebellious. I was working—if work is what that celebration can be called—many hours a day, from dawn till late at night. I forgot everything; I ate when Mimí fed me and went to sleep because she led me to bed. But even in dreams I was still deep in my new universe, hand in hand with my characters to keep them from escaping their faint outlines and returning to the nebula of stories that remained to be told.

After three weeks, Mimí thought it was time to reap some practical results from that delirium before I disappeared, swallowed up by my own words. She succeeded in getting an interview with the Director of National Television, to interest him in the story. She feared for my mental health if I continued to work without hope of seeing the product on the screen. When the day came, she dressed in white—according to her horoscope, the best color for that day—fastened a chain around her neck with a medallion of the Maharishi nesting deep in her cleavage, and dragged me off to the appointment. I felt peaceful and calm, as always when I was with her, secure in the aura of that mythological being.

Aravena received us in his office of plastic and glass, seated behind an imposing desk that could not disguise his gourmand's belly. I was disappointed when I saw that obese
man with the cowlike eyes and the half-smoked cigar, so unlike the energetic man I had pictured when I read his articles. Inattentive, because the dullest part of his job was the unavoidable circus of theater people, Aravena acknowledged our presence, barely glancing toward us, his eyes focused on a window overlooking neighboring rooftops and the clouds of a gathering storm. He asked me how close I was to finishing the script; he glanced at the folder I handed him, picked it up in a dead-white paw, and murmured that he would read it when he had time. I reached out and took back my manuscript, but Mimí grabbed it from me and handed it to him once again, this time forcing him to look at her. She fluttered her eyelashes with deadly precision, moistened her bright red lips, and invited him to dinner the following Saturday—only a few friends, an intimate gathering, she said in the irresistible purr she had cultivated to disguise the tenor voice she had been born with. Aravena was enmeshed in a visible fog, a lascivious aroma, a silken spiderweb. He sat mesmerized, folder in hand, totally nonplussed. I doubt whether he had ever received such a sexually loaded invitation. Cigar ash fell to the table, unnoticed.

“Did you have to ask him to our house?” I complained after we left.

“I'm going to get that script of yours accepted if it's the last thing I do in my life.”

“You're not planning to seduce him . . .”

“How do you think things get done in this business?”

*  *  *

Saturday dawned. It was raining, and rain continued throughout the day and evening, while Mimí hurried around preparing an austere dinner based on brown rice, which had been
considered elegant ever since the macrobioticians and vegetarians had instilled fear and trembling in humankind with their dietary theories. Your fat man is going to die of hunger, I muttered, dicing carrots, but she was unmoved, primarily concerned with arranging flowers, lighting incense, selecting music, and plumping silk cushions—because it had also become fashionable to take off one's shoes and sit on the floor. She had invited eight guests, all theater people except Aravena, who brought the copper-haired man we always saw with his camera on the barricades of some remote revolution—what was his name? I shook his hand with the vague sensation of having met him before.

After dinner Aravena took me aside and confessed his fascination with Mimí. He had not been able to stop thinking about her; her absence was like a painful burn.

“She is the absolute female. We all have something of the androgyne about us, something male, something female, but she's stripped herself of any vestige of masculinity and built herself those splendid curves. She's totally
woman
, adorable,” he said, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief.

I looked at my friend, so dear, so familiar, the features designed with pencils and lipsticks, the rounded hips and breasts, the sleek torso, innocent of maternity or pleasure, each line of her body won with unyielding tenacity. Only I know the true nature of that fictional woman painfully created to satisfy the dreams of others, but never to live her own. I have seen her without makeup, exhausted and sad; I have been beside her through depression, illness, insomnia, and fatigue; I love with all my heart the fragile and ambiguous human being behind the feathers and glitter. I asked myself whether this man with the thick lips and swollen hands would know how to penetrate the surface and discover the
companion, the mother, the sister, that Mimí truly is. From the other end of the room she was conscious of the stare of her new admirer. I had the impulse to stop her, to protect her, but I refrained.

“Come on, Eva. Tell our friend a story,” said Mimí, dropping down beside Aravena.

“What would you like?”

“Something racy, don't you think?” she said suggestively.

I sat down with my legs folded like an Indian, closed my eyes, and let my mind wander through the dunes of a white desert, as I always do when I invent a story. Soon against those sands I saw a woman in a yellow taffeta petticoat, faint brushstrokes of the cold lands my mother had appropriated from Professor Jones's magazines, and the games La Señora had created for the General's revelries. I began my story. Mimí says I have a special voice for storytelling, a voice that, although mine, also seems to belong to someone else, as if it issued from the earth to rise through my body. I felt the room fading away, effaced by the new horizons I convoked. The guests grew still.

Times were hard in the south. Not in the south of this country, but the south of the world, where seasons are reversed and winter does not occur at Christmastime as it does in civilized nations, but in the middle of the year, as in barbaric lands .
. .

When I finished, Rolf Carlé was the only one who did not applaud.

Later he confessed to me that he was a long time returning from that austral pampa where I had left two lovers with a bag of gold coins, and when he did, he was determined to turn my story into a film before the ghosts of that pair of picaros absorbed his dreams. I wondered why Rolf Carlé seemed
so familiar; it was more than having seen him on television. I looked into my past, trying to think where I might have met him, but I was sure I had not known him—or anyone like him. I wanted to touch him. I moved closer and ran my finger down the back of his hand.