The Stories of Eva Luna (12 page)

The sailor, it turned out, was a brawler and a drunk. He spoke a lingo incomprehensible to either María or the local inhabitants, but he managed to communicate through grimaces and smiles. María was fully alert only when he showed up to practice with her the acrobatics he had learned in whorehouses from Singapore to Valparaíso; the rest of the time she lay numbed by a mortal lassitude. Bathed in tropical sweat, the woman invented love without her companion, venturing alone into hallucinatory lands with the audacity of one who does not know the risks. The Greek lacked sufficient intuition to appreciate that he had opened a floodgate, that he himself was but the instrument of revelation, or that he was incapable of valuing the gift this woman offered to him. He had by his side a creature caught in the limbo of an invulnerable innocence, a woman dedicated to exploring her own senses with all the playfulness of a cub, but he did not know how to follow her in her games. Before him, she had never known the diversion of pleasure; she had not even imagined it, although it had always been there in her blood like the germ of a raging fever. When she discovered that pleasure, she believed it was the blessing from heaven that the nuns in her school had promised good girls in the Beyond. She knew almost nothing of the world, and she was incapable of studying a map to learn her whereabouts on the planet, but when she saw the hibiscus and the parrots she was sure she was in Paradise, and she prepared to enjoy it. No one there knew her; she felt comfortable for the first time, far from her home, from the inescapable guardianship of her parents and brothers, free of social pressures and veils at mass, free finally to savor the torrent of emotions that originated on her skin and sank through every pore to her innermost grottoes, where she was tossed and tumbled in roaring cataracts that left her exhausted and happy.

After a time, however, María's lack of malice, her imperviousness to sin or humiliation, terrified the sailor. The periods between love-making grew longer, the man's absences more frequent, and a silence swelled between them. The Greek longed to escape from that moist, tumid, inflamed woman with the face of a child who called him incessantly, convinced that the widow he had seduced on the high seas had become a perverse spider who would devour him like a defenseless fly in the tumult of their bed. In vain he sought alleviation for his threatened virility by cavorting with prostitutes, fighting knife and fist with pimps, and betting on cockfights anything he had left from his sprees. When he found himself with empty pockets, he seized the excuse to disappear completely. For several weeks María waited patiently. On the radio, from time to time, she would hear that a French sailor who had deserted from a British ship, or a Dutchman who had fled a Portuguese vessel, had been stabbed to death in the rough barrios around the port; she listened impassively, because she was waiting for a Greek who had jumped ship from an Italian cruiser. When the heat in her bones and anxiety in her soul had become too much to bear, she went out to seek consolation with the first man who passed by. She took the man's hand, and asked him in the most genteel and educated way whether he would do her the favor of taking off his clothes for her. The stranger hesitated a moment, disoriented by this young woman who in no way resembled the neighborhood professionals but whose proposal, despite the unusual way it was phrased, was very clear. He reckoned that he could divert himself with her for ten minutes, and followed her, never suspecting that he would find himself submersed in the whirlpool of a sincere passion. Amazed and moved, he left some money on María's table and went to tell everyone he knew. Soon other men came, drawn by the gossip that there was a woman who was able, even if briefly, to sell the illusion of love. All her clients were satisfied. And so María became the most famous prostitute in the port; sailors tattooed her name on their arm and told her story on other seas, until the legend had circled the globe.

Time, poverty, and the strain of fending off disillusion destroyed María's freshness. Her complexion grew drab, she was nothing but skin and bones, and for greater convenience she had cut her hair short like a prisoner's, but she retained her elegant manners and her enthusiasm for each new encounter with a man; she never saw them as anonymous objects, only the reflection of herself in the arms of her imaginary lover. Confronted with reality, she was blind to the sordid urgency of her temporary partner, because to each one she gave herself with the same uncompromising love, anticipating, like a daring bride, the other's desires. Her memory deteriorated with age, she sometimes spoke nonsense, and by the time she moved to the capital and set up shop in Calle República, she no longer remembered that once she had been the muse for verses improvised by sailors of all races, and she was puzzled when someone traveled from the port to the city just to verify whether the woman he had heard of someplace in Asia was still alive. When he found himself standing before that tiny grasshopper, that pile of pathetic bones, that little nobody, and when he saw the legend reduced to ashes, many a man turned and walked away, deeply saddened, but some remained out of pity. Those who did received an unexpected prize. When María closed her plastic curtain the atmosphere in the room immediately changed. Later, the stunned man would leave, carrying with him the image of a mythic girl, not the pitiful old whore he thought he had seen when he arrived.

María's past was gradually fading—her only clear memory was a fear of trains and trunks—and had it not been for the persistence of the other whores, no one would ever have known her story. She lived in expectation of the moment that the curtain to her room would open and reveal a Greek sailor, or some other ghost born of her fancy, who would encircle her in the safe haven of his arms and rekindle the delight shared on the deck of a ship on the high seas. She sought that ancient illusion in every passing man, illuminated by an imagined love, holding back the shadows with fleeting embraces, with sparks that were consumed before they blazed, and when she grew weary of waiting in vain and felt that her soul was covered with scales, she decided that it would be better to leave this world. That was when, with the same delicacy and consideration she lent to all her actions, she picked up her jug of warm chocolate.

OUR SECRET

S
he let herself be caressed, drops of sweat in the small of her back, her body exuding the scent of burnt sugar, silent, as if she divined that a single sound could nudge its way into memory and destroy everything, reducing to dust this instant in which he was a person like any other, a casual lover she had met that morning, another man without a past attracted to her wheat-colored hair, her freckled skin, the jangle of her gypsy bracelets, just a man who had spoken to her in the street and begun to walk with her, aimlessly, commenting on the weather and the traffic, watching the crowd, with the slightly forced confidence of her countrymen in this foreign land, a man without sorrow or anger, without guilt, pure as ice, who merely wanted to spend the day with her, wandering through bookstores and parks, drinking coffee, celebrating the chance of having met, talking of old nostalgias, of how life had been when both were growing up in the same city, in the same barrio, when they were fourteen, you remember, winters of shoes soggy from frost, and paraffin stoves, summers of peach trees, there in the now forbidden country. Perhaps she was feeling a little lonely, or this seemed an opportunity to make love without complications, but, for whatever reason, at the end of the day, when they had run out of pretexts to walk any longer, she had taken his hand and led him to her house. She shared with other exiles a sordid apartment in a yellow building at the end of an alley filled with garbage cans. Her room was tiny: a mattress on the floor covered with a striped blanket, bookshelves improvised from boards stacked on two rows of bricks, books, posters, clothing on a chair, a suitcase in the corner. She had removed her clothes without preamble, with the attitude of a little girl eager to please. He tried to make love to her. He stroked her body patiently, slipping over her hills and valleys, discovering her secret routes, kneading her, soft clay upon the sheets, until she yielded, and opened to him. Then he retreated, mute, reserved. She gathered herself, and sought him, her head on his belly, her face hidden, as if constrained by modesty, as she fondled him, licked him, spurred him. He tried to lose himself; he closed his eyes and for a while let her do as she was doing, until he was defeated by sadness, or shame, and pushed her away. They lighted another cigarette. There was no complicity now; the urgent anticipation that had united them during the day was lost, and all that was left were two vulnerable people lying on a mattress, without memory, floating in the terrible vacuum of unspoken words. When they had met that morning they had had no extraordinary expectations, they had had no particular plan, only companionship, and a little pleasure, that was all, but at the hour of their coming together they had been engulfed by melancholy. We're tired, she smiled, seeking excuses for the desolation that had settled over them. In a last attempt to buy time, he took her face in his hands and kissed her eyelids. They lay down side by side, holding hands, and talked about their lives in this country where they had met by chance, a green and generous land in which, nevertheless, they would forever be foreigners. He thought of putting on his clothes and saying goodbye, before the tarantula of his nightmares poisoned the air, but she looked so young and defenseless, and he wanted to be her friend. Her friend, he thought, not her lover; her friend, to share quiet moments, without demands or commitments; her friend, someone to be with, to help ward off fear. He did not leave, or let go her hand. A warm, tender feeling, an enormous compassion for himself and for her, made his eyes sting. The curtain puffed out like a sail, and she got up to close the window, thinking that darkness would help them recapture their desire to be together, to make love. But darkness was not good; he needed the rectangle of light from the street, because without it he felt trapped again in the abyss of the timeless ninety centimeters of his cell, fermenting in his own excrement, delirious. Leave the curtain open, I want to look at you, he lied, because he did not dare confide his night terrors to her, the wracking thirst, the bandage pressing upon his head like a crown of nails, the visions of caverns, the assault of so many ghosts. He could not talk to her about that, because one thing leads to another, and he would end up saying things that had never been spoken. She returned to the mattress, stroked him absently, ran her fingers over the small lines, exploring them. Don't worry, it's nothing contagious, they're just scars, he laughed, almost with a sob. The girl perceived his anguish and stopped, the gesture suspended, alert. At that moment he should have told her that this was not the beginning of a new love, not even of a passing affair; it was merely an instant of truce, a brief moment of innocence, and soon, when she fell asleep, he would go; he should have told her that there was no future for them, no secret gestures, that they would not stroll hand in hand through the streets again, nor share lovers' games, but he could not speak, his voice was buried somewhere in his gut, like a claw. He knew he was sinking. He tried to cling to the reality that was slipping away from him, to anchor his mind on anything, on the jumble of clothing on the chair, on the books piled on the floor, on the poster of Chile on the wall, on the coolness of this Caribbean night, on the distant street noises; he tried to concentrate on this body that had been offered him, think only of the girl's luxuriant hair, the caramel scent of her skin. He begged her voicelessly to help him save those seconds, while she observed him from the far edge of the bed, sitting cross-legged like a fakir, her pale breasts and the eye of her navel also observing him, registering his trembling, the chattering of his teeth, his moan. He thought he could hear the silence growing within him; he knew that he was coming apart, as he had so often before, and he gave up the struggle, releasing his last hold on the present, letting himself plunge down the endless precipice. He felt the crusted straps on his ankles and wrists, the brutal charge, the torn tendons, the insulting voices demanding names, the unforgettable screams of Ana, tortured beside him, and of the others, hanging by their arms in the courtyard.

What's the matter? For God's sake, what wrong? Ana's voice was asking from far away. No, Ana was still bogged in the quicksands to the south. He thought he could make out a naked girl, shaking him and calling his name, but he could not get free of the shadows with their snaking whips and rippling flags. Hunched over, he tried to control the nausea. He began to weep for Ana and for all the others. What is it, what's the matter? Again the girl, calling him from somewhere. Nothing! Hold me! he begged, and she moved toward him timidly, and took him in her arms, lulled him like a baby, kissed his forehead, said, Go ahead, cry, cry all you want; she laid him flat on his back on the mattress and then, crucified, stretched out upon him.

For a thousand years they lay like that, together, until slowly the hallucinations faded and he returned to the room to find himself alive in spite of everything, breathing, pulsing, the girl's weight on his body, her head resting on his chest, her arms and legs atop his: two frightened orphans. And at that moment, as if she knew everything, she said to him, Fear is stronger than desire, than love or hatred or guilt or rage, stronger than loyalty. Fear is all-consuming . . . , and he felt her tears rolling down his neck. Everything stopped: she had touched his most deeply hidden wound. He had a presentiment that she was not just a girl willing to make love for the sake of pity but that she knew the thing that crouched beyond the silence, beyond absolute solitude, beyond the sealed box where he had hidden from the Colonel and his own treachery, beyond the memory of Ana Díaz and the other betrayed
compañeros
being led in one by one with their eyes blindfolded. How could she know all that?

She sat up. As she groped for the switch, her slender arm was silhouetted against the pale haze of the window. She turned on the light and, one by one, removed her metal bracelets, dropping them noiselessly on the mattress. Her hair was half covering her face when she held out her hands to him. White scars circled her wrists, too. For a timeless instant he stared at them, unmoving, until he understood everything, love, and saw her strapped to the electric grid, and then they could embrace, and weep, hungry for pacts and confidences, for forbidden words, for promises of tomorrow, shared, finally, the most hidden secret.