VAQUITA
“SOMEDAY,” SAID THE MINISTER OF HEALTH to her deputy assistant, “you must fly me to one of those resort towns on the edge of the lake. Set me up in a striped tent. Send in kids who need booster shots. The mayor and I will split a bottle of cold Spanish wine; then we will blow up the last storehouse of canned milk …”
The minister paused. Caroline, the deputy, was looking tired. “Lina, what godforsaken place am I visiting tomorrow?” the minister asked.
“Campo del Norte,” came the answer. “Water adequate, sewage okay, no cholera, frequent dysentery …”
Señora Marta Perera de Lefkowitz, minister of health, listened and memorized. Her chin was slightly raised, her eyelids half lowered over pale eyes. This was the pose that the newspapers caricatured most often. Pro-government papers did it more or less lovingly — in their cartoons the minister resembled an inquisitive cow. Opposition newspapers accentuated the lines under Señora Perera’s eyes and adorned her mouth with a cigarette, and never omitted the famous spray of diamonds on her lapel.
“There has been some unrest,” Caroline went on.
Señora Perera dragged on a cigarette — the fourth of her daily five. She usually smoked it at this late-afternoon hour, in Caroline’s soothing presence. The ministerial office was large and white, with beautifully carved walls. Gray oblongs indicated the recent presence of paintings. The draperies looked like a collection of ribbons.
“What kind of unrest?” the señora asked.
“A family was exiled.”
“For which foolishness?”
The deputy consulted her notes. “They gave information to an Australian writing an exposé of smuggling in Latin America.”
“Horrifying. Soon someone will suggest that New York launders our money. Please continue.”
“Otherwise, the usual. Undernourishment. Malnourishment. Crop failures. Over-fecundity.”
Señora Perera let her eyelids drop all the way. Lactation had controlled fertility for centuries, had kept population numbers steady. In a single generation the formula industry had changed everything; now there was a new baby in every wretched family every year. She opened her eyes. “Television?”
“No. A few radios. Seventy kilometers away there’s a town with a movie house.”
Golden dreams. “The infirmary — what does it need?”
Again a shuffling of papers. “Needles, gloves, dehydration kits, tetanus vaccines, cigarettes—”
A trumpet of gunfire interrupted the list.
The minister and her deputy exchanged a glance and stopped talking for a minute. The gunshots were not repeated.
“They will deport me soon,” Señora Perera remarked.
“You could leave of your own accord,” Caroline said softly.
“That idea stinks of cow shit,” Señora Perera said, but she said it in Polish. Caroline waited. “I’m not finished meddling,” the señora added, in an inaudible conflation of the languages. “They’ll boot me to Miami,” she continued in an ordinary tone, now using only Spanish. “The rest of the government is already there, except for Perez, who I think is dead. They’ll want my flat, too. Will you rescue Gidalya?” Gidalya was the minister’s parrot. “And while you’re at it, Lina, rescue this department. They’ll ask you to run the health services, whichever putz they call minister. They’ll appreciate that only you can do it — you with principles, but no politics. So do it.”
“Take my bird, take my desk, take my job …” Caroline sighed.
“Then that’s settled.”
They went on to talk of departmental matters — the medical students’ rebellion in the western city; the girl born with no hands who had been found in a squatters’ camp, worshipped as a saint. Then they rose.
Caroline said, “Tomorrow morning Luis will call for you at five.”
“Luis? Where is Diego?”
“Diego has defected.”
“The scamp. But Luis, that garlic breath — spare me.”
“An escort is customary,” Caroline reminded her.
“This escort may bring handcuffs.”
The two women kissed formally; all at once they embraced. Then they left the cool, almost-empty ministry by different exits. Caroline ran down to the rear door; her little car was parked in back. Señora Perera took the grand staircase that curved into the tiled reception hall. Her footsteps echoed. The guard tugged at the massive oak door until it opened. He pushed back the iron gate. He bowed. “Good evening, Señora Ministra.”
She waited at the bus stop — a small, elderly woman with dyed red hair. She wore one of the dark, straight-skirted suits that, whatever the year, passed for last season’s fashion. The diamonds glinted on its lapel.
Her bus riding was considered an affectation. In fact it was an indulgence. In the back of an official limousine she felt like a corpse. But on the bus she became again a young medical student in Prague, her hair in a single red braid. Sixty years ago she had taken trams everywhere — to cafés; to the apartment of her lover; to her Czech tutor, who became a second lover. In her own room she kept a sweet songbird. At the opera she wept at Smetana. She wrote to her parents in Kraków whenever she needed money. All that was before the Nazis, before the war, before the partisans; before the year hiding out in a peasant’s barn, her only company a cow; before liberation, DP camp, and the ship that had sailed west to the New World.
Anyone who cared could learn her history. At least once a year somebody interviewed her on radio or television. But the citizens were interested mainly in her life with the cow. “Those months in the barn — what did you think about?” She was always asked that question. “Everything,” she sometimes said. “Nothing,” she said, sometimes. “Breast-feeding,” she barked, unsmiling, during the failed campaign against the formula companies. They called her La Vaca—The Cow.
The bus today was late but not yet very late, considering that a revolution was again in progress. So many revolutions had erupted since she arrived in this plateau of a capital, her mother gasping at her side. The Coffee War first, then the Colonels’ Revolt, then the … Here was the bus, half full. She grasped its doorpost and, grunting, hauled herself aboard. The driver, his eyes on the diamonds, waved her on; no need to show her pass.
The air swam with heat. All the windows were closed against stray bullets. Señora Perera pushed her own window open. The other passengers made no protest. And so, on the ride home, the minister, leaning on her hand, was free to smell the diesel odor of the center of the city, the eucalyptus of the park, the fetidness of the river, the thick citrus stink of the remains of that day’s open market, and finally the hibiscus scent of the low hills. No gunshots disturbed the journey. She closed the window before getting off the bus and nodded at the five people who were left.
In the apartment, Gidalya was sulking. New visitors always wondered at a pet so uncolorful — Gidalya was mostly brown. “I was attracted by his clever rabbinic stare,” she’d explain. Gidalya had not mastered even the usual dirty words; he merely squawked, expressing a feeble rage. “Hola,” Señora Perera said to him now. He gave her a resentful look. She opened his cage, but he remained on his perch, picking at his breast feathers.
She toasted two pieces of bread and sliced some papaya and poured a glass of wine and put everything on a tray. She took the tray out onto the patio and, eating and smoking, watched the curfewed city below. She could see a bit of the river, with its Second Empire bridge and ornamental stanchions. Half a mile north was the plaza, where the cathedral of white volcanic stone was whitened further by flood lamps; this pale light fizzed through the leafy surround. Bells rang faintly. Ten o’clock.