Covered by a blaze of paralyzed dragons — gold, scarlet, and black — La Desdichada half-closed her eyes, lowering her eyelids a fraction of a centimeter. I looked at Bernardo. He wasn’t looking at her, now that she was dressed again.
Bernardo
What I like best about this poor forsaken place where we live is the patio. Every neighborhood in the capital has a place to wash clothes, but our own house has a fountain. You leave behind the noises of Tacuba Street, go past a tobacco and soft-drink stand, and enter a narrow alleyway, damp and shady, and then the world bursts into sunlight and geraniums, and in the center of the patio is the fountain. The noise remains very far away. A liquid silence imposes itself.
I don’t know why, but the women of our house all choose to wash their clothes somewhere else, in other washing places, in the public fountains perhaps, or in the canals that are the last remnants of the lake city that was Mexico. Now the waters are drying up little by little, condemning us to death by dust. There is a constant come-and-go of laundry baskets, piled high with dirty clothes and clean clothes, which the strongest but least agile women clutch tightly, and the most atavistic carry proudly on their heads.
The large circles of woven straw, the clothes colored indigo, white, and brown: it is easy to bump against a woman holding a basket on her head so she can’t really turn to look, knock over the basket, excuse yourself, extract a blouse, a shirt, whatever, pardon me, pardon me …
I loved the patio of our student home so much, its soothing mediation between the noise of the street and the isolation of the apartment. I loved it as years later I would love the supreme palace: the Alhambra, a palace of water where the water, naturally, has disguised itself as tile. Back then, I hadn’t yet been in the Alhambra, but in my fond memories our poor patio possesses the same charms. Except that in the Alhambra there is not a single fountain that dries up from one day to the next, revealing at its bottom sluggish gray tadpoles looking up for the first time at the people who gaze into the fountain and see them there, doomed, without water.
Toño
He asked me why she was missing a finger. I told him I didn’t know. He wouldn’t let the subject drop, as if I were responsible for La Desdichada’s being maimed, through some carelessness of mine in carrying her home, Christ, he just stopped short of accusing me of mutilating her on purpose.
— Be more careful with her, please.
Bernardo
The toads that have taken over the beautiful fountain in the patio won’t be without water for long. A big storm is approaching. When you go up the stone stairs to our apartment, you look out over the low, flat roofs toward the mountains, which, in the summer light, seem to move closer. The giants of the valley of Mexico — volcanoes of basalt and fire — are accompanied in this season by a watery retinue. It’s as if they had awakened from the long sleep of the highlands, as though from a parched and crystalline dream, demanding a drink. The giants are thirsty and they make their own rain. The clouds that all through the sunlit morning have been accumulating, white and spongy, suddenly stop moving, their grave grayness become turbulent. Each afternoon, the summer sky swells with storm, punctual, abundant, fleeting, and attacks the accumulated light of the dying day and the morning that succeeds it.
It rains the whole afternoon. Falling from the apartment to the patio. Why doesn’t the fountain fill with water? Why do the dry, wrinkled toads, under the stone moldings of the old colonial fountain, look at me with such anguish?
Toño
Today these are ghostly spaces: deserts born of our haste. I resolve not to forget them. Bernardo will know what I mean if I say that the city’s vacant lots were once our pleasure palaces. To forget them is to forget what we had: a little happiness, one time, when we were young and deserved it and didn’t know what to do with it.
He laughs at me; he says that mine is the poetry of the lower depths. Fine: but someone should recall the aroma, poetic or not, of the Waikiki on the Paseo de la Reforma, near the Caballito, the nightclub of our youth. Inside, the Waikiki was the color of smoke, although outside it looked more like a cancerous palm tree, or a sickly stretch of sand turning gray in the rain. Never has a place of entertainment looked gloomier, more forbidding. Even its neon signs were repellent, square, you remember? Everything about them established a precise hierarchy of attractions: the singer (male or female) at the head of the marquee, then the band, then a pair of dancers, finally the magician, the clown, the dogs. It was like a list of political candidates, or a menu for an embassy dinner, or even a death notice: here lies a singer, a band, two ballroom dancers, a magician …
The women were like the place, like the color of smoke inside the cabaret. They were the reason we went there. The closed society denied us love. We believed that, having left our fiancées at home, those maidens whom we couldn’t seduce physically without ruining them for marriage, we could come to the capital to study law and meet — as in the novels of Balzac or Octave Feuillet — an experienced lover, rich, married, who would introduce us to the ranks of the wealthy and powerful, in exchange for our virile services. Hélas, as Rastignac would say, the Mexican Revolution did not extend to sexual liberty. The city was so small then that everybody knew everybody else; groups of friends were exclusive, and if within one of the groups some member made love to another, not even the crumbs of that banquet reached us.
We thought of our provincial fiancées, preserved like apricots, maintained in a state of purity behind the iron grilles on their windows, barely within the range of a serenade, and we wondered if our identity as provincials only put us in an even more sordid position in the capitaclass="underline" either we got ourselves a virginal fiancée or we went to dance with the tarts of the Guay. They were almost all small, powdered, with the blackest eyes and the cheapest perfume, flat-chested, without hips, with skinny legs and shapeless asses. They had thick lips and limp hair, sometimes bullied into place with clips; they wore short skirts, mesh stockings, kiss-me-quicks smeared on their cheeks like question marks, their every other tooth was gold, their every other pore was marked with smallpox; their heels tapped the dance floor, the tapping of their heels resounded as they went out to dance and returned to their tables, and between those heelbeats you heard the sound of their feet dragging, in the slow steps of the danzón.
What were we looking for, if these cheap hetaeras were so ugly? Only sex, which wasn’t so great either?
We were looking for a dance. That’s what they knew: not how to dress, or speak, not even how to make love. Those jokers of the Guay knew how to dance the slow danzón. That was their trick: to do the danzón, that ceremony of slowness. They say the best dancers of the danzón can dance in a space the size of a postage stamp. Second prize goes to the couple who can dance in a space the size of a single tile. Two bodies glued together, their movement almost imperceptible. Clothed bodies, flesh palpitating but almost still, the reflection of a dream as much as of a dance.
Who would have thought that those beaten-down girls possessed the genius of the danzón, responding as they did to the flute and the violin, the piano and the maraca?
Those hot little tamales from the venereal barrios of a city where nobody even used toilet paper or sanitary napkins — a city of dirty handkerchiefs before Kleenex and Kotex, just think, Bernardo, this city where the poor clean themselves with corn husks — what poor, biting poetry would their tragically restrained feelings produce? Because something else came from their world of rural misery, transferred from the destroyed haciendas to the city, the fear of making noise, of bothering the rich and being punished by them.