Where the Bird Sings Best (36 page)

“That’s just what I want: to add pain to the pain of being alive. Destroying the good is what counts. In this shitty world, goodness is the worst violence.”

And giving a sudden roar, he leapt on top of the old woman, pulled off her underwear, spread her legs, pushed them back over her head, and penetrated her brutally, kissing that flaccid, wrinkled mouth with his entire soul. Barking euphorically, another two jumped onto Doña Pair, splitting her black glasses and sticking their tongues into her eye sockets to lick her cataract-covered pupils. Then with two sweeps of the knife that opened two red furrows in her flesh, they ripped off her skirt and penetrated her sex and her anus simultaneously. The three remaining raped Lola. The one who got her mouth shouted, “Do a good job sucking. If you bite me, I’ll slit your throat!”

The two old ladies, with that peace you see in gazelles hanging from the jaws of a lion, allowed themselves to be tortured without moving or screaming. The chief murderer buried his dagger in Carmelita’s neck. A spurt of blood left her, pushed by a long, intense wheeze that became fainter and fainter, but never finished, as if it were a serpent of air with an infinite tail. The men began shouting, because at the sight of the red blood, all six ejaculated at the same time. Following the example of the leader, they took out their knives and sank them into the body of the oldest woman. Amid insults, grunts, and coughing, they dismembered her, emptied out her guts, and decapitated her. Only when they shoved the plaster shitass in her vulva did the blind woman start screaming, as if she were seeing it. They threw themselves on top of her and cut her, too, to pieces.

Pale, huffing and puffing, soaked with blood, they opened their last bottles and emptied them in the pot of corn porridge. To make it look like a bowl of punch, they threw in the four ears they’d cut off and a bunch of fingers. They forced themselves to swallow more than their throats could take. Then belching and belching, they stared, with wide smiles, like little boys asking someone to complement them for something clever, at Lola, who sobbed, hugging Carmelita’s guitar. The surfeit of alcohol began to drown them. They piled up the body parts in the only sheet on the bed, made a package, and stepped out onto the patio. The chief walked over to the pit that led to the San Carlos canal, staggered, and threw the remains into the current below.

“Bye-bye, little friends. See you later.”

He smiled, thought for a second, looked toward the square piece of sky that crowned the rectangular chimney full of windows, where neighbors looked out with the indifference of nocturnal animals, and said, “Let’s not leave for later what we can do today! Anyone with guts should follow me!”

Jumping like a broken doll, he dove into the pit. One of his comrades shouted, laughing, “A perfect night for a swim!” And he too dove toward his death. Barking with desperate jubilation, the other four followed suit. The inhabitants of Manzana de Altos halfheartedly applauded each dive. Silence came, slipped under the white door, and filled up the bloody room like thick syrup. It seemed that all the calm of the Universe had concentrated there. Lola, without understanding why they’d left her alive, threaded a needle she found in a small sewing basket, mended her destroyed clothes, combed her hair, put the old lady’s guitar in its case covered with flowered cloth, and, holding it close, limping, made her way through the labyrinth of passages and short stairways, trying to find the exit. No one spoke to her. From time to time, a door would open and an index finger would point to where she should go. After an eternity, she found herself on the street, knowing that in a couple of months she’d have to have an abortion, that her ovaries would become infected, that after an almost mortal fever, they would have to be removed, and that never in her life would she have an orgasm. But nothing of that seemed terrible, because with the holy guitar she held in her hands, she would be able to capture thousands and thousands of angels in the form of songs.

What happened to Fanny in that damned year was very different. She had no talent for being a victim. Above all things, she admired executioners, considering them champions. When she turned sixteen, she considered herself a professional. The dwarf whore, Ruby of the Street, had nothing left to teach her. For a teacher she had her body. Her red hair hung down to her waist like a gush of blood; her legs, fleshy but long, marched along with the elegance of a giraffe; her thick lips looked like two sleeping piranhas; her fertile pubis produced hairs so hard they passed through whatever she was wearing like tiny flames. Each breast was so full it seemed to contain a baby, and her prominent ass—fat, jolly, aromatic, with its deep crevice—made all temples envious. Sculpted like that, she felt able to drag along any well-off man by the moustache. The only weakness she had left was her virginity.

Considering it dangerous to give it to a man—it might create sentimental ties—she decided to use a chair as a lover. She flipped it over, greased up one of its legs, and squatting over it, absorbed the wooden column as she finished eating an empanada. Now she was ready.

To move the world she would need a fulcrum point. A strange intuition—so strange that despite the fact that she obeyed it, she herself found it insane—ordered her to look for that point in the outskirts of the city, along the highway to Valparaíso. She walked for six miles, until she found a dingy gas station with blind hens squabbling about on the cement floor, covered with black grease. The attendant, a wide, undefined man with a tonsure-shaped bald spot and hands full of fingers as large as bananas, fell to his knees, splashed around in the oily gelatin, kissed her feet, and ran to light a candle at the statue of the Virgin Mary, who reigned in a niche protected by green, fly-specked satin curtains, when he saw Fanny and heard her say, “Unless you object, sir, I’ll be your lover for a short time. The only thing I ask for is a dish of food, a bed, that you bathe before sleeping with me, and that you let me dispense the gasoline. I don’t need a salary.”

Did Fanny put her trust in the will of Destiny or did she force it to act as she wished? Impossible to explain. If it was absurd to sink into a cloaca in order to reach the heights of society, perhaps for that reason, because reality is not logical, it worked out for her: after three weeks of patient waiting, the luxurious car of a government minister stopped there. My aunt observed the man, the son of people from Cataluña: in his fifties, a chest like the prow of a ship, teeth like a horse, and the short legs of a thieving conqueror. She saw in his dry skin the melancholy absence of pleasure and in his irritated nostrils cocaine substituted for love. When the driver, a dark-skinned man proud of his uniform with cap and gloves, gave her a tip, she exhaled deeply into his face, a breeze hot enough to make him drunk: “Pick me up tonight, as soon as you’re free. I feel like dancing.”

He obeyed her order. As soon as night began to fall, the automobile arrived, flashed its lights, and blew its horn three times. Fanny, wearing her impeccable white dress, her red high heels, her mane of hair exalted by brilliantine, gave a farewell pat to the garage attendant’s sex, sat down next to the chauffeur, plastered her lips to his mouth, and absorbed his entire tongue. The dark-skinned chauffeur, shocked, thought her vigorous sucking would pull it out by the roots, but in a fit of manliness, desire ate away at his brain like an acid; he relaxed and, almost choking, yielded his rough appendage. For this woman he would sacrifice even the ability to speak. She released him and told him to get going, and as they approached Santiago, she bent over between the shift lever and his legs and worked so hard that Ceferino went off the road, tardily slammed on the brakes, and found himself ejaculating with a dying cow under his wheels.

That’s how Fanny began her ascent. She never lied to anyone. She warned each man that she was a short-term gift. From Ceferino she went on to the doorman at the Ministry, from the doorman to the messenger, from him to an assistant to the subsecretary, from there to the secretary, then to the chief bodyguard, then to the principal councilor, and finally she was received by Don Manuel Garrázabal, the minister. All that in under fourteen weeks.

The frowning official looked at her above the photo of his wife, a vain devotee, and a pair of children, tyrants growing up to be cynics. He coughed, lit a cigarette, and offered it to Fanny. My aunt uncrossed her legs, pulled her skirt up (she wore no panties), and introduced the cigarette into her small sex with its pink lips. That way, with her thighs spread, she showed that she knew how to smoke through there, exhaling spirals of smoke. Meanwhile, as if that circus act were the most natural thing in the world, she proposed an amorous relationship to the functionary in exchange for a spacious house where she could carry on her business, that is, a luxury bordello.

The man went crazy. With febrile enthusiasm, he fell on his knees between those alabaster legs and kissed her sex so hastily that he swallowed the cigarette. After half a dozen rapid, nervous assaults, he agreed to everything—but only if she swore absolute fidelity to him. Fanny, who said her name was Princess Rahula and showed, as proof of her blue blood, the black beauty mark she had on her forehead, accepted the killer imposed on her as a guard dog, so that at night, with his pistol in his belt, he would sleep under her bed.

That sacrifice was worthwhile. She created a decent bordello, which had a sublime success. Her ideas were original. Instead of demanding a mansion in a well-to-do neighborhood, which would end up generating scandals among its sanctimonious neighbors, she asked for all the little houses along a passage off seedy Bulnes Street, always full of atrocious whores. The men who ventured into that territory came out with their lapels destroyed by the avid tugging of the women trying to seduce them, all ugly, drunk, and falling apart. Politicians, important businessmen, famous men, aristocrats. To each one she offered a complete apartment supplied with a salon, bar, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and a garage from which they could enter the house. That way, no busybody could see the client get out of his car, and discretion was absolute.

My aunt had her ideas about masculine sexuality: a man who hires a whore is not, deep inside, looking for sex, but tenderness. More than a woman, he wants a confessor. She scoured all of Santiago looking for twenty expert women between the ages of fifty and fifty-five. She chose, if not the most beautiful—after all, so many years of prostitution, alcohol, abortions, and pimps took their toll—then at least the most dignified. She gave them severe looking outfits, hairdos like ladies, and discreet makeup. She taught them how to speak delicately and to erase lasciviousness from their faces, to exchange it for the expression of tender mothers.

“Sexually speaking, you know everything but about maternal caresses, you know nothing. Learn to touch the clients as if they were your own sons. At the beginning, during initial contact, if you arouse their antipathies (they perhaps hold deep anger against the author of their days because of a bad birth or a lack of milk and care or who knows what, some wish left unfulfilled), it doesn’t matter. Go to them so they can reject you. Let them love those enemy hands, and let them begin to massage. The first thing you must respect are defenses. And as if you were all Virgin Marys, caress them inch by inch, right down to the heart, with extreme delicacy and total attention, dissolving the tiniest contractions, one muscle after the other, giving firm support to each area, so that the client never gets the impression that any part is overlooked, no matter how small. To massage in that style, you should breathe regularly, with absolute calm; you must revere; be an empty receptacle, with nothing to request, nothing to impose, a simple refuge, not an invader, an infinite and eternal company, discreet, ready to become invisible at the slightest movement of rejection. If you give in with love, it is God who will touch the other through you. If you don’t give your hands to God, they can’t really touch. If the mother is not divine, she is not a mother.”

Prepared in that way, those women knew how to use sweet voices; to bathe the politicians, singing them lullabies; to powder them with talcum; to take them in their arms; to squeeze an ear between their breasts and hold them there for hours, submerged in the rhythm of the heart; at the end, when they were stretched out on their backs in bed, with no defense, to caress their sex in such a vigorous fashion, from scrotum to glans, that they would emerge from their mental stupor transformed into dragons. They possessed those old ladies, who on all fours, made obscene squeals, spoke phrases of a diabolical lasciviousness, and led the men to an indecent pleasure bordering on madness. Then they would accept the lash that the temptress would pull out from under the pillow when she sensed they were reaching an orgasm. They would spurt the final discharge under a rain of blows.

Afterwards, they would pay considerable amounts of cash. Fanny’s success was so great that the clients had to sign up two months ahead of time to get a date. When it was a matter of a party involving several men, Fanny would offer the rear apartment, which was three times larger than the others, decorated in French style. Gorged with champagne, cocaine, and women, they would demand the eccentricity of the house, as a challenge, in order to prove who was more macho. My aunt brought three nandus, Argentine ostriches, to the patio. The gentlemen, standing on top of a hassock, laughing their heads off and making obscene faces, would possess the birds.

Princess Rahula had to live in a setting worthy of her rank. She had her rooms decorated in maharaja style, with shiny curtains, columns being born from thick lotus flowers, immense cushions, Buddhas, Ganeshas, Shivas, offerings of rice pudding, candles instead of electric lights, and incense that stank of patchouli. She would wear a turban; a long, sleeveless vest; baggy trousers; and slippers whose toes pointed up—all of it in velvet, cloth-of-gold, and transparent silk. Besides, the Minister, as payment for her absolute fidelity, covered her with jewels. Fanny was taking discreet steps in order to be introduced to the president of the republic, when suddenly her periods stopped. To give birth at seventeen did not trouble her a great deal. Her protector tripled her salary, because her breasts that promised milk and her protruding belly made her even more attractive.