After the amputation of his left foot, Ricardo found time to become acquainted with all his aunt’s neighbors. Across the street there lived an old widower who was very lonely. He touched the old man with the magic leaf, and at once the man rose up full of hope again that he might find some woman who would love him, and although he had not left his bed for many years he managed to get downstairs and even came into the street; stretched out his hand to a passing housewife, then fell down dead with a smile on his face. So this was a good thing that Ricardo had done.
His fever now seemed to become an ovoid jade bead, polished very smooth and inserted into his skull, where it ached deliciously and hilariously. He longed to die; oh, how he loved La Llorona! He prepared to become spiteful and hateful as usual. What an evil example woman sets! Consider for instance the way that a woman casts her smile toward a man, even when she keeps her knees together…
He made the leaf into tea and drank it. After that he was never sick for the rest of his life. Moreover, he suddenly loved women — all of them. Not long after that, he completed his dissertation, for which he received highest honors, and a publishing contract with a feminist press.
After Ricardo’s aunt died, he finally discovered his vocation as artistic director of the provincial folklore troupe, where numbers of ambitious yet unwary young women depended on pleasing him. They waited at auditions as silently as handmade Indian dresses hang within their wheeled, roof-topped stands, ready to be sold and animated, their indigo stripes darker than the night. Ricardo rarely took advantage, for he loved them. No one seemed to mind his prosthetic foot, in part because long ago, when he sold that golden turtle with three golden bells, he had become his own master. Even the doctor didn’t take all his money. Before he knew it, he had regained the fatuous self-love which is our birthright. A certain pretty, chubby dancer from one of the Tuxtlas, I forget which, put on more weight, and after a notice in the newspaper which unfavorably singled her out (for by then the poor girl had grown outright obese), Ricardo, first consulting with the producer, made up his mind to fire her, a doom from which she saved herself by seducing him and declaring pregnancy. She was, as I have said, quite a big girl, with thighs like watermelons, and moreover extremely needy, loyal and weepy — an ideal combination for Ricardo, whose true love-type was thus revealed to be what are so unfairly referred to as “smothering women.” Riding the craze for self-consciously syncretic dance which now infected Veracruz, Ricardo’s troupe, who daringly and defiantly called themselves “The Malinchistas,” performed Totonaco dances reenvisioned as fandangos, put on a well-regarded play about the Emperor Maximilian, and even turned supernatural tales into ballets. In all these enterprises, I am happy to say, Ricardo’s new wife, María Guadalupe, proved helpful, not least in calming his nerves, for he tended to worry on opening night; and sometimes the producer talked down to him, asserting that he, Ricardo, had no understanding about money, a misapprehension which María Guadalupe corrected as often as needed, since the producer was terrified of her. She loved nothing better than to take Ricardo into her arms and roll on top of him. Sometimes she would fit her lips over his lips and blow in hot moist breaths until he grew intoxicated. Even La Llorona had never taken him so far. He felt ecstatic to love this woman who was literally so much greater than himself. Moreover, on account of her expert dependence and insecurity, Ricardo learned to apologize for his wife, and even to take the blame for her lapses, a practice which rendered him, in time, tolerant and even warm. Thanks to her and the children, Ricardo lived a happier life than any of his early acquaintances could have predicted, among them, of course, the hated Adela, who attended several of the troupe’s performances and once wrote him a postcard, which he thought best not to answer. By the time that María Guadalupe had grown as vastly squarish as the Convento de los Betlehemitas, Ricardo choreographed the great masterpiece of his career. It was a wordless performance entitled “Salvation.”
The curtain rose on a maze whose high-walled pasteboard corridors turned always at right angles, their destination the wall at stage rear. And the dance, if one can call it that, was performed by a dozen young men in white hats and white suits, wandering blindly toward that blind wall. From time to time a tall skeleton, all black and white except for his red eyes, popped out of a niche or ambushed a man who turned a corner. To tell the truth, he looked not unlike Ricardo and La Llorona’s son Manuel. Whomever he touched fell motionless. And this was all that happened. A man would meet death and die, or he would wander toward the blind wall. If his corridor ended without the skeleton having found him, he turned back and took another turning, because what else could there be for him to do? His only prize was the dreary delay and return for more seeking of nothing. And all the young men got killed one by one. Just as a taxista lacking business might slowly lower himself in the driver’s seat until only his half-open eyes appear above the gasketed sill of the driver’s-side window, so Death sometimes sank nearly all the way behind a partition, so that only the audience could see the hateful shining of his skull, while the victim strayed toward him. Finally only one man remained. He wandered helpless from corner to corridor to wall and back again, and presently, Death, having devoured the others, came in search of him. And so he was nearly at the blind wall, and Death was two turnings behind him, already stretching his bony arm, when suddenly a door opened in the blind wall, and out came a lovely death’s-head woman in a jade-green skirt. The young man flew delightedly into her arms, and she enfolded him just in time to spare him from her rival.
So Ricardo became famous. The children all married and never came back. He outlived María Guadalupe, who was buried in her necklace of golden eagle-horsemen; then he retired and wedded an old widow not entirely unlike Aunt Bertha. I have seen the two of them at the zócalo, among the old couples slowly dancing hand to hand or arm to neck. Some of the women who are merely middle-aged whirl about in shining silver-white satin skirts, while the more ancient ones, like the aforesaid Juanita Ramírez, show themselves in faded floral dresses and pink slacks. She and Ricardo looked sweet together. He was wearing a white suit and a white hat. His prosthesis did not hinder him. Turtling his grey head, he gripped her wrists, staring down at her knees through his dark sunglasses. He swayed, bewildered, and gently Juanita held him up. One morning I introduced myself and mentioned my curiosity about La Llorona. — Young man, he replied, I don’t know anything about that.
Now I will tell you what I was doing there. Not long after the birth of our second child, my wife announced that she had never loved me. I am American, and she was a Mexican national who married me, so she now explained, solely to gain citizenship. Although she had opened her mind, as she put it, to the possibility that I might become worthy of her efforts, I remained crass. My punishment dawned. Carmen and her lawyer calculated that alimony and child support for the three-person household which she now intended to found would keep her in sufficient style, as indeed it proved. I signed every paper without amendment. I gave away the house, and everything in it but my clothes. The last time we ever saw each other was in court. When the judge dismissed us, I walked outside with her and said: Carmen, I want your advice.