Strange Pilgrims (13 page)

“My God,” she said to herself in terror, “it’s as if everything were dying with me!”

She had known this kind of disquiet only when she was a very little girl in Manaus, at the moment before dawn, when the innumerable sounds of night stopped all at once, the waters paused, time hesitated, and the Amazon jungle sank into an abysmal silence that was like the silence of death. In the midst of that irresistible tension, on the last Friday of April, as always, the Count of Cardona came to her house for supper.

The visit had turned into a ritual. The punctual Count would arrive between seven and nine at night with a bottle of local champagne, wrapped in the afternoon paper to make it less noticeable, and a box of filled truffles. Maria dos Prazeres prepared cannelloni au gratin and a young chicken au jus—the favorite dishes from the halcyon days of fine old Catalonian families—and a bowl filled with fruits of the season. While she cooked, the Count listened to selections from historic performances of Italian operas on the phonograph, taking slow sips from a glass of port that lasted until the records were over.

After the unhurried supper and conversation, they made sedentary love from memory, which left both of them with a taste of disaster. Before he left, always restless at the approach of midnight, the Count put twenty-five pesetas under the ashtray in the bedroom. That was Maria dos Prazeres’s price when he first met her in a
transient hotel on the Paralelo, and it was all that the rust of time had left intact.

Neither of them had ever wondered what their friendship was based on. Maria dos Prazeres owed him some simple favors. He gave her helpful advice on managing her savings; he had taught her to recognize the true value of her relics, and how to keep them so that no one would discover they were stolen goods. But above all he was the one who showed her the road to a decent old age in the Gracia district, when they said in the brothel where she had spent her life that she was too old for modern tastes, and wanted to send her to a house for retired ladies of the night who taught boys how to make love for a fee of five pesetas. She had told the Count that her mother sold her in the port of Manaus when she was fourteen years old, and that the first mate of a Turkish ship used her without mercy during the Atlantic crossing, and then abandoned her, with no money, no language, and no name, in the light-filled swamp of the Paralelo. They were both conscious of having so little in common that they never felt more alone than when they were together, but neither one had dared to spoil the pleasures of habit. It took a national upheaval for them to realize, both at the same time, how much they had hated each other, and with how much tenderness, for so many years.

It was a sudden conflagration. The Count of Cardona was listening to the love duet from
La Bohème
, sung by Licia Albanese and Beniamino Gigli, when he happened to hear a news bulletin on the radio that Maria dos Prazeres was listening to in the kitchen. He tiptoed over and
listened as well. General Francisco Franco, eternal dictator of Spain, had assumed responsibility for deciding the fate of three Basque separatists who had just been condemned to death. The Count breathed a sigh of relief.

“Then they’ll be shot without fail,” he said, “because the Caudillo is a just man.”

Maria dos Prazeres stared at him with the burning eyes of a royal cobra and saw the passionless pupils behind gold-rimmed spectacles, the ravening teeth, the hybrid hands of an animal accustomed to dampness and dark. Saw him just as he was.

“Well, you’d better pray he doesn’t,” she said, “because if they shoot even one of them I’ll poison your soup.”

The Count was flabbergasted. “Why would you do that?”

“Because I’m a just whore, too.”

The Count of Cardona never returned, and Maria dos Prazeres was certain that the final cycle of her life had come to an end. Until a little while before, in fact, she had felt indignant when anyone offered her a seat on the bus, or tried to help her across the street or take her arm to go up stairs, but she came not only to allow such things but even to desire them as a hateful necessity. That was when she ordered an anarchist’s tombstone, with no name or dates, and began to sleep with the door unlocked so that Noi could get out with the news if she died in her sleep.

One Sunday, as she was coming home from the cemetery, she met the little girl from the apartment across the
landing. She walked with her for several blocks, talking about everything with a grandmother’s innocence while she watched her and Noi playing like old friends. On the Plaza del Diamante, just as she had planned, she offered to buy her ice cream. “Do you like dogs?” she asked.

“I love them,” said the girl.

Then Maria dos Prazeres made the proposal that she had been preparing for so long. “If anything ever happens to me, I want you to take Noi,” she said. “On the condition that you let him loose on Sundays and not think any more about it. He’ll know what to do.”

The girl was delighted. And Maria dos Prazeres returned home with the joy of having lived a dream that had ripened for years in her heart. But it was not because of the weariness of old age or the belated arrival of death that the dream was not realized. It was not even her decision. Life made it for her one icy November afternoon when a sudden storm broke as she was leaving the cemetery. She had written the names on the three tombstones and was walking down to the bus station when the downpour soaked her to the skin. She just had time to take shelter in a doorway of a deserted district that seemed to belong to another city, with dilapidated warehouses and dusty factories, and enormous trailer trucks that made the awful noise of the storm even more frightening. As she tried to warm the drenched dog with her body, Maria dos Prazeres saw the crowded buses pass by, she saw empty taxis pass by with their flags up, but no one paid attention to her distress signals. Then, when even a miracle seemed impossible, a sumptuous, almost noiseless
car the color of dusky steel passed by along the flooded street, made a sudden stop at the corner, and came back in reverse to where she stood. The windows lowered as if by magic, and the driver offered her a lift.

“I’m going quite a distance,” said Maria dos Prazeres with sincerity. “But you would do me a great favor if you could take me part of the way.”

“Tell me where you’re going,” he insisted.

“To Gracia,” she said.

The door opened without his touching it.

“It’s on my way,” he said. “Get in.”

The interior smelled of refrigerated medicine, and once she was inside, the rain became an unreal mishap, the city changed color, and she felt she was in a strange, happy world where everything was arranged ahead of time. The driver made his way through the disorder of the traffic with a fluidity that had a touch of magic. Maria dos Prazeres felt intimidated not only by her own misery but by that of the pitiful little dog asleep in her lap.

“This is an ocean liner,” she said, because she felt she had to say something appropriate. “I’ve never seen anything like it, not even in my dreams.”

“Really, the only thing wrong with it is that it doesn’t belong to me,” he said in an awkward Catalan, and after a pause he added in Castilian, “What I earn in a lifetime wouldn’t be enough to buy it.”

“I can imagine,” she sighed.

Out of the corner of her eye she examined him in the
green light of the dashboard, and she saw that he was little more than an adolescent, with short curly hair and the profile of a Roman bronze. She thought that he was not handsome but had a distinctive kind of charm, that his worn, cheap leather jacket was very becoming, and that his mother must feel very happy when she heard him walk in the door. Only his laborer’s hands made it possible to believe that he was not the owner of the car.

They did not speak again for the rest of the trip, but Maria dos Prazeres also sensed that he examined her several times out of the corner of his eye, and once again she regretted still being alive at her age. She felt ugly and pitiful, with the housemaid’s shawl she had thrown over her head when the rain began, and the deplorable autumn coat she had not thought to change because she was thinking about death.

When they reached the Gracia district it was beginning to clear, night had fallen, and the streetlights were on. Maria dos Prazeres told the driver to let her off at a nearby corner, but he insisted on taking her to her front door, and he not only did that but pulled up on the sidewalk so that she could get out of the car without getting wet. She released the dog, attempted to climb out with as much dignity as her body would allow, and when she turned to thank him she met a male stare that took her breath away. She endured it for a moment, not understanding very well who was waiting for what, or from whom, and then he asked in a determined voice: “Shall I come up?”

Maria dos Prazeres felt humiliated. “I am very grateful for your kindness in bringing me here,” she said, “but I will not permit you to make fun of me.”

“I have no reason to make fun of anybody,” he said with absolute seriousness, in Castilian. “Least of all a woman like you.”

Maria dos Prazeres had known many men like him, had saved many men bolder than he from suicide, but never in her long life had she been so afraid to make up her mind. She heard him repeat without the slightest change in his voice: “Shall I come up?”

She walked away without closing the car door, and answered in Castilian to be sure he understood. “Do whatever you want.”

She walked into the lobby, dim in the oblique light from the street, and began to climb the first flight of stairs with trembling knees, choked by a fear she would have thought possible only at the moment of death. When she stopped outside the door on the second floor, shaking with desperation to find her keys in her bag, she heard two car doors slam, one after the other, in the street. Noi, who had preceded her, tried to bark. “Be quiet,” she ordered in an agonized whisper. Then she heard the first steps on the loose risers of the stairway and was afraid her heart would burst. In a fraction of a second she made a thorough reexamination of the premonitory dream that had changed her life for the past three years, and she saw the error of her interpretation.

“My God,” she said to herself in astonishment. “So it wasn’t death!”

At last she found the lock, listening to the measured footsteps in the dark, listening to the heightened breathing of someone who approached in the dark with as much astonishment as she felt, and then she knew it had been worth waiting so many years, worth so much suffering in the dark, if only to live that moment.

MAY
1979

T
HE FIRST THING
Señora Prudencia Linero noticed when she reached the port of Naples was that it had the same smell as the port of Riohacha. She did not tell anyone, of course, since no one would have understood on that senile ocean liner filled to overflowing with Italians from Buenos Aires who were returning to their native land for the first time since the war, but in any case, at the age of seventy-two, and at a distance of eighteen days of heavy seas from her people and her home, she felt less alone, less frightened and remote.

The lights on land had been visible since daybreak. The passengers got up earlier than usual, wearing new clothes, their hearts heavy with the uncertainties of putting ashore, so that the last Sunday on board seemed to be the only genuine one of the entire voyage. Señora Prudencia
Linero was one of the very few who attended Mass. In contrast to the clothes she had worn before, when she walked around the ship dressed in partial mourning, today she had on a tunic of coarse brown burlap tied with the cord of Saint Francis, and rough leather sandals that did not resemble a pilgrim’s only because they were too new. It was an advance payment: She had promised God that she would wear the full-length habit for the rest of her life if He blessed her with a trip to Rome to see the Supreme Pontiff, and she already considered the blessing granted. When Mass was over she lit a candle to the Holy Spirit in gratitude for the infusion of courage that had allowed her to endure the Caribbean storms, and she said a prayer for each of her nine children and fourteen grandchildren who at that very moment were dreaming about her on a windy night in Riohacha.

When she went up on deck after breakfast, life on the ship had changed. Luggage was piled in the ballroom, along with all kinds of tourist trinkets the Italians had bought at the magic markets of the Antilles, and on the saloon bar there was a macaque from Pernambuco in a wrought-iron cage. It was a brilliant morning in early August. One of those exemplary postwar summer Sundays when the light was like a daily revelation, and the enormous ship inched along, with an invalid’s labored breathing, through a transparent stillwater. The gloomy fortress of the Dukes of Anjou was just beginning to loom on the horizon, but the passengers who had come on deck thought they recognized familiar places, and they pointed at them without quite seeing them, shouting with joy in their southern dialects. To her surprise, Señora
Prudencia Linero, who had made so many dear old friends on board, who had watched children while their parents danced, and even sewn a button on the first officer’s tunic, found them all distant and changed. The social spirit and human warmth that permitted her to survive her first homesickness in the stifling heat of the tropics had disappeared. The eternal loves of the high seas ended when the port came into view. Señora Prudencia Linero, who was not familiar with the voluble nature of Italians, thought the problem lay not in the hearts of others but in her own, since she was the only one going in a crowd that was returning. Every voyage must be like this, she thought, suffering for the first time in her life the sharp pain of being a foreigner, while she leaned on the railing and contemplated the vestiges of so many extinct worlds in the depths of the water. All at once a very beautiful girl standing beside her startled her with a scream of horror.

“
Mamma mia
,” she cried, pointing down. “Look over there.”

It was a drowned man. Señora Prudencia Linero saw him drifting faceup, a mature, bald man of rare natural distinction, with open, joyful eyes the color of the sky at dawn. He wore full evening dress with a brocade vest, patent-leather shoes, and a fresh gardenia in his lapel. In his right hand he held a little square package wrapped in gift paper, and his pale iron fingers clutched at the bow, which was all he had found to hold on to at the moment of his death.