Eva Luna (31 page)

“My mother had freckles, too . . .” Rolf Carlé did not move, but neither did he take my hand. “Someone told me you've been in the mountains with the guerrillas.”

“I've been a lot of places.”

“Tell me . . .”

We sat on the floor, and he answered almost all my questions. He talked about his career, how, observing the world through a lens, it had taken him around the globe. We had such a good time the rest of the evening that we did not notice as the others began to leave. He was the last to go, and he left only because Aravena hauled him away. At the door he told me he would be away for a few days filming uprisings in Prague, where the Czechs were confronting invading tanks with rocks and stones. I wanted to kiss him goodbye, but he shook my hand with a little nod of the head that I found rather solemn.

Four days later, when Aravena called me to sign a contract, it was still raining; pails were placed around his luxurious office to catch the leaks. As he explained without preliminaries, the script did not even remotely fit the usual patterns; in fact, the whole thing was a jumble of bizarre characters and unrealistic anecdotes; it lacked true romance; the protagonists were neither good-looking nor rich; it was almost impossible to follow the train of events; the audience would be totally lost. In sum, it was a mess and no one with an ounce of sense would run the risk of producing it, but he was going to do it because he could not resist the temptation
to scandalize the country with such rubbish—and because Mimí had asked him to.

“Keep writing. Eva, I'm curious about how you're going to end such a mishmash,” he said as he showed me to the door.

*  *  *

The floods began on the third day of the rains, and on the fifth day the government decreed a state of emergency. Since no agency took the precaution of cleaning the drainage ditches or storm sewers, catastrophes caused by bad weather were common, but this storm surpassed imagination. The rain dragged shacks from the hillsides, overflowed the river that runs through the city, flooded houses, carried away cars, trees, and half the sports stadium. Cameramen from National Television climbed into rubber boats and filmed victims on the roofs of houses waiting patiently to be rescued by military helicopters. Although stunned and hungry, many sang, because it would have been pointless to aggravate misfortune by complaining. The rain ceased at the end of a week, the result of the same empirical solution used years before to combat the drought. Again the Bishop paraded the statue of the Nazarene, and a huge crowd followed with their umbrellas, praying and making vows, mocked by weather-bureau employees who had communicated with colleagues in Miami and found that, according to weather balloons and cloud measurements, the drenching rain would continue for nine more days. The sky, however, cleared only three hours after the Nazarene was returned to his altar in the Cathedral, wet as a dishrag despite the canopy that had been intended to protect him. Dye from his wig ran in dark rivulets down his face; the devout fell to their knees, cry
ing that the statue was sweating blood. This purported miracle added to the prestige of the Catholic Church and calmed some souls worried by the ideological inroads of Marxists and the arrival of the first groups of Mormons, ingenuous and energetic youths in short-sleeved shirts who went about knocking on doors and converting the unwary.

When the rain had stopped and an accounting was being taken of the losses in order to repair the damage and return to normal life, a coffin, modest but in perfect condition, was found floating near the plaza of the Father of the Nation. The heavy rain had washed it down from a hovel in the hills of the western part of the city along streets turned into rushing torrents and deposited it unharmed in the center of the city. When it was opened, an elderly woman was discovered, peacefully asleep. I saw her on the nine-o'clock news, called the station for further details, and grabbed Mimí and rushed to the shelter the Army had set up to house the flood victims. There we found large campaign tents crammed with families waiting for good weather. Many had lost even their identification papers, but there was no melancholy in those tents: the disaster offered a good excuse to rest and an opportunity to make new friends; tomorrow they would worry about how they were going to get along; it was useless to weep today over what the floods had carried off. There, too, we found Elvira in her nightgown, thin and irate, sitting on a bare mattress recounting to a circle of listeners how she had been saved from the flood in her strange ark. And that is how I got back my
abuela.
Even with the white hair and the map of wrinkles that had transformed her face, I had recognized her the moment I saw her on the screen, for her spirit had not been dulled during our long separation: she was the same woman who had accepted my stories in exchange for
fried bananas and the right to play funeral in her coffin. I pushed people aside, threw my arms around my
abuela
, and hugged her with the urgency stored during the long years she had been lost to me. Elvira made no fuss at all over me; she kissed me as if we had seen each other only yesterday and the changes in my appearance were nothing but a trick of her tired eyes.

“Imagine, little bird, all that sleeping in the box so that when death came for me I'd be ready, and then what came for me was life. I'm never going to lie down in a coffin again, not even when it's time to take me to the cemetery. I want to be buried standing up, like a tree.”

We took Elvira home. In the taxi, all through the ride, Elvira was studying Mimí. She had never seen anyone like her; the nearest thing she could think of was a life-size doll. Later she felt her all over with her wise old cook's hands and commented that she had skin whiter and smoother than an onion and breasts as firm as green grapefruit, and she smelled like an almond-and-spice torte from the Swiss pastry shop. When she put on her eyeglasses to see her better, she was convinced beyond any doubt that Mimí was not a creature of this world. She's an archangel, she concluded. Mimí liked Elvira from the first moment, because besides me and her
mamma
—whose love had never faltered—Mimí had no family of her own; all her relatives had turned their back when they saw Melesio in a woman's body. She needed an
abuela
, too. Elvira accepted our hospitality because the flood had carried off all her material belongings except the coffin, to which Mimí had no objections although it did not harmonize with the décor. But Elvira did not want it. The coffin had saved her life once, and she was not prepared to run that risk a second time.

Rolf Carlé called me when he returned from Prague a few days later. He came looking for me in a jeep that had seen far better days, and we set off in the direction of the coast. By midmorning we found a beach with translucent water and rosy sands, very different from the sea of crashing waves on which I had so often sailed in the dining room of the spinster and the bachelor. We splashed around in the water and lay in the sun until we were hungry; then we dressed and went in search of a place that sold fried fish. We spent the afternoon sitting looking at the sea, drinking white wine and telling each other our life stories. I told him about my childhood as a servant in other people's homes, about how Elvira had been saved from the waters, about Riad Halabí, and many other things, but from the strong habit of secrecy I did not mention Huberto Naranjo. Rolf Carlé, in turn, told me about being hungry during the war, about the flight of his brother Jochen, about his father being hanged in the woods, and about the prison camp.

“It's strange,” he said. “This is the first time I've put those things into words.”

“Why?”

“I don't know, they seemed secret. They're the darkest part of my past,” he said, and then in silence stared toward the sea with a different expression in his gray eyes.

“What happened to Katharina?”

“She died a sad death, alone in a hospital.”

“All right, she died, but not the way you say. Let's find a happy ending for her. It was Sunday, the first sunny day of the season. Katharina felt very good when she woke up, and the nurse put her in a canvas chair on the terrace, her legs wrapped in a blanket. Your sister sat looking at the birds beginning to build nests beneath the eaves, the budding tree
branches. She was warm and safe, the way she was when she slept in your arms beneath the kitchen table—in fact, she was dreaming of you at that very moment. She had no real memory, but her instinct retained intact the warmth you gave her, and every time she felt happy, she whispered your name. She was doing just that—happily saying your name—when, without her knowing, her spirit drifted away. Your mother arrived a little later to visit her, as she did every Sunday, and found her motionless, but smiling. She closed her eyes, kissed her forehead, and bought a bride's coffin, where she lay wrapped in the white mantle.”

“And my mother, do you have something good for her, too?” asked Rolf Carlé in an unsteady voice.

“Yes. She returned home from the cemetery and found that the neighbors had put flowers in all the vases so she wouldn't feel alone. Monday was baking day and she took off her best dress, put on her apron, and began to mix dough. She felt happy, because all her children were happy now—Jochen had found a good woman and started a family somewhere, Rolf was making his life in America, and now Katharina, freed of the bonds of the flesh, could at last fly.”

“Why do you think my mother has never agreed to come here to live?”

“I don't know . . . maybe she didn't want to leave her country.”

“She's old and alone—she would be much better off in La Colonia with my aunt and uncle.”

“Not everyone is destined to emigrate, Rolf. She has found peace, cultivating her garden and her memories.”

ELEVEN

T
he damage caused by the floods was so massive that for a week other news stories were overshadowed, and if it had not been for Rolf Carlé the massacre in one of the Army Operations Centers would have passed almost unnoticed, drowned in the turbid waters of the deluge and the duplicity of those in power. A group of political prisoners had rebelled and, after overpowering their guards and seizing their weapons, had entrenched themselves in one area of the compound. The
comandante
, a dauntless man given to hasty decisions, did not request instructions; he simply gave the order to pulverize the rioters, and his words were taken literally. His men attacked the prisoners with weapons of war, killing an undetermined number; no wounded remained because the survivors were rounded up in a courtyard and summarily executed. Once the guards recovered from their bloody frenzy and counted the bodies, they realized that it would be difficult to explain their action to the public, and that the press would not easily be diverted with a claim that they were dealing with an unsubstantiated rumor. The detonations of the mortars had killed birds in their flight, and dead birds had rained down for several kilometers around—an oddity impossible to justify, since few were prepared to accept a new miracle from the Nazarene. There was also the problem of the pervasive stench that rose from the common graves and fouled the air. As a first measure, no reporter was
allowed in, and an attempt was made to cloak the zone in a mantle of solitude and silence. The government had no alternative but to back the
comandante
's actions, but the President was furious and fumed in the privacy of his Cabinet, We can't interfere with the forces of order, but incidents like these jeopardize our democracy. Then the government spokesman improvised the story that the subversives had quarreled among themselves and killed each other, and they repeated this fabrication so often that they ended up believing it themselves. Rolf Carlé, however, knew too much about the situation to accept the official version and, without waiting for Aravena to assign him, pushed on ahead of everyone else. He obtained part of the truth from his friends in the mountains, and the rest he verified with the same guards who had exterminated the prisoners: they needed only a couple of beers to talk, because by then they were haunted by bad consciences. Three days later, by the time the odor of the corpses was dissipating and the last rotting birds had been swept away, Rolf Carlé had irrefutable proof of what had happened, and was ready to challenge the censors. Aravena warned him not to have any illusions: not a word of this could appear on television. Rolf had his first argument with his mentor; he accused him of cowardice and collusion, but Aravena was not to be swayed. Then Rolf spoke with a couple of deputies from the opposition party and showed them his films and photographs, so they could see for themselves the methods the government was using to combat the guerrillas, as well as the inhuman conditions in which the detainees were being held. That material was then exhibited in the Parliament, where politicians denounced the slaughter and demanded that the tombs be opened and the guilty parties be brought to justice. As the President was assuring the
country that he was ready to push the investigation to its ultimate consequences, even if it meant resigning his office, a crew of new recruits was blacktopping a hastily constructed playing field and planting a double row of trees to cover the graves; files disappeared through cracks in the judicial process; and the directors of all the media were summoned by the Minister of the Interior and warned of the consequences of defaming the armed forces. Rolf Carlé continued to insist with a stubbornness that finally triumphed over Aravena's prudence and the evasions of the deputies, who at least approved a tepid reprimand of the
comandante
and a decree ordering that political prisoners should be treated in accord with the Constitution: they had a right to public trials and to serve their sentences in jails, not in special centers to which no civilian authority had access. As a result, nine guerrillas held in Fort El Tucán were transferred to the penal colony on Santa María—a measure that meant the same brutal conditions for them, but permitted the government to quash the scandal, which sank into the swamp of collective indifference.

That same week Elvira announced she had seen a ghost in the patio, but no one paid any attention to her. Mimí was in love, and I only half listened, absorbed in the turbulent passions of my script. The typewriter clicked all day, leaving me without energy for routine matters.

“There's a soul in pain wandering around this house, little bird,” Elvira insisted.

“Where?”

“It keeps looking over the back wall. It's the spirit of a man. We ought to take precautions, I say. Tomorrow early I'll go buy a liquid that will protect us against wandering spirits.”

“Is it something you take?”

“No, child, where do you get such ideas? It's to wash down the house. It has to be painted on all the walls and floors—everywhere.”

“That sounds like a lot of work. Can't you buy a spray?”

“Of course not, child! Those modern contraptions don't work with dead spirits.”

“But I didn't see anything,
abuela.
”

“Well, I did. It's dressed like a person, and black as San Martín de Porres, but it isn't human. When I see it I get goose bumps all over, little bird. It must be someone who's lost and looking for his way. Maybe it hasn't finished dying.”

“Maybe not,
abuela.
”

We were not being haunted by an errant ectoplasm, however, as we learned that same day when El Negro finally rang the doorbell. Elvira was so terrified when she saw him that she fell flat on the floor. He had been sent by Comandante Rogelio and had loitered about in the street, not daring to ask for me for fear of attracting attention.

“Do you remember me? We met when you went to live with La Señora. I was working in that bar on Calle República,” he said. “The first time I saw you, you were just a kid.”

I was uneasy. Naranjo had never used an intermediary, and these were not times to trust anyone—but I followed El Negro to a gas station on the outskirts of the city. Comandante Rogelio was waiting for me, hiding in a storeroom for tires. My eyes took several seconds to adjust to the darkness before I saw the man I had loved so deeply but now seemed such a stranger. It had been some weeks since we had seen each other, and I had not had a chance to tell him about the changes in my life. After we kissed, there among the gasoline drums and old crankcase oil, Huberto told me he needed a plan of the factory, and asked me to get it for him. The guer
rillas intended to disguise several men as Army officers, walk into Santa María, rescue their comrades—and, in passing, deliver a mortal blow to the government and an unforgettable embarrassment to the Army. The fact that I was not working there any longer and had no access to the building was a major setback. Then I made the mistake of telling Huberto about my dinner with Colonel Tolomeo Rodríguez. I could tell he was furious because he began asking entirely reasonable questions but with a mocking smile that I knew well. We agreed to meet at the zoo the following Sunday.

That night, after admiring herself in the current episode of her telenovela in the company of Elvira, for whom seeing Mimí in two places at the same time was further proof of her celestial nature, Mimí came to my room to tell me good night, as she always did, and found me drawing lines on a sheet of paper. She wanted to know what I was doing.

“Don't
you
get mixed up in it!” she exclaimed, terrified when she heard the plan.

“I have to do it, Mimí. We can't continue to ignore what's going on in our own country.”

“Yes, we can. We've done it up till now, and because we have, we're doing fine. Besides, no one in this country cares about those things; your guerrillas don't have the slightest chance. Remember where we started, Eva! I was cursed by being born a woman in a man's body, I've been persecuted for being homosexual. I've been raped, tortured, put in prison, but look where I am now—all on my own effort. And you? All you've ever done is work, work, work. You were born a bastard with blood of every color in your veins, you never had a family, no one sent you to school or had you vaccinated or gave you vitamins. But we've come out on top. And you want to throw it all away?”

In a way it was true that we had made our peace with life. We had been so poor that at first we hadn't known the value of money, and it had poured through our fingers like sand, but now we were earning enough for a few luxuries. We felt rich. I had received an advance for my script that seemed outrageous to me, and it lay very heavy in my purse. Mimí felt she was living the best years of her life. She had found the perfect balance for her many-colored pills, and felt so comfortable in her body that she might have been born with it. Nothing remained of her former timidity, and she could even joke about things that once had been a source of embarrassment. Besides her role as Alejandra in the television series, she was rehearsing the part of the Caballero de Eón, an eighteenth-century transvestite secret agent who spent his life in woman's clothing serving the kings of France, and was discovered only when, at the age of eighty-two, his corpse was being readied for burial. Mimí had every qualification for the role, and our most famous playwright had written the play especially for her. She was even happier because she believed she had finally found the man her horoscope had predicted, the man who would be beside her in her mature years. Ever since she had met Aravena, her youthful dreams had been reborn. She had never had such a relationship: he asked nothing of her, he lavished gifts and flattery upon her, he took her to all the fashionable places for everyone to admire, and coddled her the way an art collector cares for his works of art. For the first time in my life, everything is going well. Please, Eva, Mimí pleaded, don't go looking for trouble. But I countered with the teachings I had heard so often from Huberto Naranjo, arguing that we lived on the fringes of society and were condemned for all time to struggle for every crumb, and even if we broke the chains that had bound
us from the day of our conception, we would still be captive behind the walls of a greater prison; it was not a question of changing our personal situation, but that of society as a whole. Mimí heard my speech to the end, and when she spoke it was in her man's voice and with a decisiveness that contrasted strangely with her curls and the salmon-colored lace on the sleeves of her negligee.

“Everything you've said is unbelievably naïve. In the unlikely event that your Naranjo wins his revolution, I'm sure in a very short time he would be acting with the arrogance of every man who attains power.”

“That isn't true. He's different. He's thinking of the people, not himself.”

“That's how it is now, because it doesn't cost him anything. He's on the run, hiding in the jungle, but it would be a different story if he came to power. Look, Eva, men like Naranjo can't ever change. They may modify the rules, but they always operate on the same principle: authority, competitiveness, greed, repression—it's always the same.”

“But if he can't change things, who can?”

“You and I, for example. What has to change in this world are attitudes. But we're a long way from that, and since you've made up your mind and I can't let you do this alone, I'll go with you to the zoo. What that imbecile needs isn't a plan of the uniform factory, but of Santa María.”

The last time Comandante Rogelio had seen Mimí, her name had been Melesio; she had looked like a normal man and was teaching Italian in a language institute. Even though Mimí frequently appeared on television and in the pages of the most popular magazines, he did not recognize her. He lived in a different dimension, light-years away from such frivolity: crushing snakes in the jungle, hefting firearms. I had
often spoken of my friend, but nothing had prepared him for the woman in the red dress near the monkey cages; her beauty stunned him, obliterating his prejudices. No, this wasn't a queer in drag, this was a truly Olympian female who would steal the breath of a fire-eating dragon.

It was impossible for Mimí to pass unnoticed, but we tried to blend into the crowd, strolling among throngs of children with parents in tow and tossing corn to the pigeons like any family on a Sunday outing. On Comandante Rogelio's first attempt to quote theory, however, Mimí pulled him up short with one of those barrages reserved for extreme situations. She told him very explicitly to stow his speeches, because she was not as innocent as I was; that she was agreeing to help him this one time in order to be rid of him as quickly as possible, and it was her fondest hope that he would catch a bullet and land in hell so she wouldn't be bothered with any more of his shit; but she was not going to put up with him trying to sell her his Cuban ideas—he could put them he knew where; she had enough problems without taking on someone's revolution. What was he thinking of? She didn't give a fart for Marxism or any of his crew of bearded rebels; all she wanted was to live in peace, and she hoped to God he understood that, because if not, she'd explain it a different way. Then she stretched out her legs on a concrete bench and took eye pencil in hand to draw him a map on the cover of her checkbook.

*  *  *

The nine guerrilla fighters who had been transferred from Fort El Tucán were assigned in Santa María to a cell block for incorrigible prisoners. They had been detained seven months earlier, but had emerged from all interrogations
without having talked and with an unswerving determination to return to the mountains to continue the fight. The debate in Parliament had made them front-page news, and elevated them to the status of heroes in the eyes of the university students, who papered the city with their posters.

“Put a news blackout on all their activities,” ordered the President, counting on the public's forgetfulness.