She was like a model, with Asiatic cheekbones, a large, fleshy mouth, long legs, and a spring to her step as she walked. From the back, or from a distance, you saw a tall figure and long curly hair. Only when she came near did you see her pallor, the cloud over her large eyes, the bruises on her beautiful legs, now too thin, and the black gaps of lost teeth. She went from one end of the barrio to another like a great disoriented bird beating against walls, not knowing how to get out. She lurched along with the stride of a model, still straight-backed, taller than anyone in the barrio, her curls and mannerist neck above figures hunched in councils cooking up schemes or hunched in doorways where the flame of a cigarette lighter heated a square of aluminum foil on which a shot of heroin was turning liquid and smoky. Sometimes she stopped and stood motionless, her body silhouetted against a building, watery eyes gleaming through dirty hair, a drunken, demented smile on her ruined mouth, a cigarette held in her long fingers and smoke seeping from her lips in a photographic pose.
She began sleeping in the entryways of shops and closed bars, where the indigent set up their burrows of rags and cardboard. In winter she wore a tattered jacket of fake fur over the usual T-shirt and light miniskirt. On cold mornings her white face had a violet hue. Her hair was thinning, and her eyes had lost their color. She begged for cigarettes; she would take one in her hand, slowly put it between her lips, and wait for someone to give her a light as well.
Once she asked the barrio drunk for a smoke. He shrugged, grunted, walked on, but that night, when she was shivering in her fake-fur jacket in a doorway on Calle San Marcos, a shadow stopped before her, it was the drunk offering her a cigarette, holding it delicately in his thick, grubby fingers as if it were the stem of a flower. The woman brushed the hair from her face and put the cigarette between lips purple with cold, and the drunk, whom no one had ever seen smoke, lit it, his living-dead face visible in the brief flare.
People in the barrio soon knew what had happened: he had bought the cigarettes and lighter at the same small shop where they stocked his cartons of white wine, and where the next day, contrary to his custom, he bought some custard and chocolate-filled doughnuts. The druggies lived on that kind of food; mixed in with their syringes and scorched sheets of foil were always candy wrappings and empty custard containers.
He began to carry things every night to the doorway where she took shelter, sometimes not waking her in her shivering delirium. He would cover her with his jacket, older than the one she wore, and one night he was seen dragging a filthy, torn comforter down Calle Pelayo, which he must have found in a trash barrel. He began to move with diligence, concentration, like Crusoe on his island preparing a hut or cave in which to spend the winter. During the day he was never far from her, although he didn’t approach her or make himself too visible, watching from a corner where he could duck behind a building. Indifferent to the people passing him, who gave him a wide berth because of his smell, he was focused on the tall, young, skinny woman who walked with a long stride past people and cars or huddled pale in arcades or doorways late at night after no one was left in the dark streets except the most persistent dead, those who at three or four in the morning were still waiting for something.
She probably spoke to him first, asking him imperiously to bring her cigarettes again, or yogurt or doughnuts from the shop where he went when no one else was there and wordlessly laid money on the counter. He always paid and was never seen to beg. The shop owner’s story was that the drunk was the firstborn of a wealthy family in the north, that a tyrannical father threw him out, disinherited him, yet took care to see that his son had what he needed to survive, enough food and clothing to keep him from dying of cold in the streets.
No one will ever know the true story, just as no one knew his name, unless he told the woman with whom little by little he began to share nightly encampments in the most sheltered nooks of the barrio. No one ever saw them walking together, but they must have kept each other warm during the icy nights of that winter. He wrapped her up and protected her, stayed awake to be sure she was covered, constructed her bed of cardboard and newspapers with an expert hand, and then cocooned her in rags and garments scavenged from the trash. You would see a flickering glow in the dark expanse of Vazquez de Mella Plaza: the drunk had started a fire where the tall, skinny woman warmed herself like a sphinx, smoking the cigarettes he brought her and lighted with a quick gesture every time she put one to her lips, and eating the yogurt or custard he bought for her at the same time he bought his cartons of wine.
Now he did turn to begging. He never said anything, just held out his hand, looked at you, made the gesture of putting a cigarette to his mouth. He begged for money and tobacco and seemed to become more aware of other people, no longer in the solitude of his desert island. He didn’t share the woman’s tobacco or heroin, and there probably was nothing sexual between them, but he did pass her his liters of white wine, which she poured into her wide, fleshy mouth, her eyes gleaming.
You would see them in the shadows like two animals deep in their den, two untouchables who had regressed to the savagery or innocence of an irreparable damnation, so remote from those of us passing by in our overcoats and normalcy, on the way to our new house and warm, stable life. They truly did live in a different world, in one of caves and hollows in the rock where primitive man and castaways found shelter.
After weeks or months, the woman disappeared, and we would have forgotten her fleeting existence had the drunk not stayed in the barrio, subdued and sedentary, again withdrawn into a seamless self-absorption, apparently not seeking in the haunts of the living dead the figure of the tall woman who looked like a model from a distance. But we did not pay that much attention to him, so accustomed were we to his presence, just as we did not follow closely what happened every day in the barrio, our neglect including the man, the woman, and the boy who now went to school by himself, who came out every afternoon with his snack, tugging at the leash of the ungovernable dog that no longer was a puppy.
They too moved away, habitual one day and the next gone forever, and the man on the balcony saw that the apartment across from him was empty again, and witnessed the arrival of other tenants, months or years later, it didn’t matter, because for him life was a slow endurance with little modification. Months or years later, we met a former neighbor who was still living in the barrio. We talked about the days that suddenly had become distant, fading into the sweetness of the past, and the neighbor asked if we remembered the drunk who was always wandering the streets. He told us that the man turned up dead one morning in the Vazquez de Mella Plaza, purple with cold, his beard and eyelashes white with frost, rigid and wrapped in rags like those polar explorers who get lost and go mad in deserts of ice.
scheherazade
I WAS SO NERVOUS as we walked through those gilded salons that my knees were knocking, and I wished I still held the hand of my mother, who was just in front of me, very serious, quiet, like everyone in the group. She was dressed in black for my father and brother, and all the others wore dark suits, very stiff, very formal, some with uniforms and medals, all just as nervous and upset as I although they hid it. The only thing you could hear were footsteps on the marble floor, as if we were walking down the nave of a cathedral, and I beside my mother, as almost always in my life, moved and afraid, with a lump in my throat, looking at her profile because she never turned toward me, so straight, taller and stronger than I was, and proud of being the widow and mother of heroes. My mother would have given me a severe and mocking look if I tried to take her hand as I did when I was little and she took me to a protest march and I held her hand so hard that my fingers hurt because I feared the crowd would get wild and my mother and my father would be separated from me, feared that the guardias would charge, or that the people running away — and the horses we heard whinnying and pawing the ground, ready for their riders to spur them to attack — would crush me. Some soldiers, maybe they were ushers, guided us through the corridors, kept going ahead of us to open the doors, some of which were very tall and gilded, and others as plain as office doors, and every time we went by one my heart squeezed and I thought, now we’re going to see him, and when I’m so close that I can shake his hand I hope I don’t faint or burst into tears like a silly girl. My mother says I have the reactions of a child, although I wasn’t one, far from it, I would be twenty-five in January, and this was December 21, 1949, Stalin’s birthday, and we were going to have the chance to offer him congratulations in the name of our Party and all Spanish workers, with more solemnity than usual because it was his seventieth birthday and there would be a huge party for all Communists and workers around the world. The salon where they took us was large and filled with people, although no voices were raised, only a little for the speeches, and not much even then. I believe we were all equally moved, overwhelmed, I don’t know whether that’s the word, since often I’m going to say something and then after I’ve begun to speak realize I’m saying it in Russian and can’t find the words in Spanish. Chandeliers were switched on, but they didn’t give much light, or maybe there was smoke, or the sky was dark outside even though it was daytime, I remember, and everything was a little foggy. I couldn’t get close to Stalin and didn’t shake his hand, either because my mother motioned to me not to get on line or because someone pushed me back and I ended up in a different group. After all, I was nobody, I’d been allowed to come with our delegation because I begged my mother to take me along; when I had children and grandchildren I wanted to be able to tell them that once in my life I saw Stalin with my own eyes, and really close.