“Yes, madrina,” said the girl, starting to cry again, but this time with more momentum.
“Then why are you crying?”
“It hurts, madrina, every time the blood comes out. My insides burn. Do you think I’m injured inside? Do you think the bee you were talking about got inside me and stung me there, inside? That’s what it feels like, madrina, like a wasp sting.”
“It’s a wound that opens in all women once a month and that never heals because it’s a wound of love. But you’ll see, when you start going with men, how much happiness the red roses inside you will bring you every time they appear, because it will be the signal that you aren’t pregnant. I can already see you, like the others, counting the days that your blood is late in staining your clothes.”
“Does it happen to men too?”
“No. It is God’s will that it only happens to women. That’s why we love more, too, because our insides hurt.”
“Like Jesus’ heart?”
“Yes. Just like that.”
Then the girl stopped crying, wiped her nose on her sleeve, and went back out to the patio to resume playing brother and sister, who were now facing the problem of not having any blankets for the tremendously cold nights they would encounter on their long journey, and from that day forward the sister adventurer could look for fame and fortune without panicking at the onset of her menstrual cycle, which was no longer a sin that had to be hidden on the top shelf, and she learned how to use white cloths that she washed later in warm water, scrubbed with a pumice stone and hung to dry in the sun, knowing that if she ever had a daughter, she would calm her by patiently explaining the mystery of how the blood that appears in her underwear, which is the bee’s blood, makes it possible for fruit to be born from a flower.
“Do you remember the treasure chest?” Todos los Santos asks Sacramento.
Frequently the two children would entertain themselves with a cookie box that they called the treasure chest. It contained a delightful collection of items such as broken necklaces, buttons, loose stones, old brooches, and fairy-tale earrings, and it made the children’s eyes shine with sparkles of emerald green, ruby red, French pink, depending on the color of the beads they were looking at.
“How wonderful!” exclaimed the girl, completely absorbed, and she would begin to tell Sacramento lies, as big as a house, that he would pretend to believe.
“She made up that the box contained the jewels that Santa Catalina had been given by her father the king, and she made me promise that I would defend them with my life, property, and honor against anyone who tried to steal them.”
Sacramento swore on his knees, she tapped him on the shoulder a couple times with a sword that was really a stick and named him Knight of the Order of the Holy Diamond. He was ashamed that the older kids would see him playing like that and he wouldn’t let her name him a knight unless there were no witnesses; after all, he was already a man who worked and supported himself and he found that game — like so many things of hers — shamefully simple. Poor Sacramento, he never suspected that that title would be, by a long shot, the most honorable that he would ever have bestowed upon him in his life.
“To have been named Knight of the Order of the Holy Diamond by her…,” he says to me, “I think when I die that will be the best memory I leave behind.”
four
I’ve been told that a miracle prevented the infidels from sawing in half, with a cogged wheel, Santa Catalina virgin and martyr, and that they had to limit themselves to decapitating her and were unable to stem the flow of milk that ran from her wounds instead of blood, nor the curative aroma exhaled by her bones for the benefit of the sick who happened to be nearby. I’ve also been told that the anniversary of this horrifying episode is the date favored by the mujeres of La Catunga for being initiated into their professional life, their baptism by fire, as they themselves call it. I have noticed that prostitution promotes tendencies and fixations similar to those that in other instances I have observed in sicarios from communes in Medellín, truck drivers who have to pass through regions of violencia, the bazuco dealers on Calle del Cartucho in Bogotá, mafiosos, judges, witnesses, bullfighters, guerrillas, antiguerrilla commandos, and so many other Colombians who risk their lives on a routine basis. To begin with, they all wear one or several medals featuring the Virgen del Carmen, whom they familiarly call La Mechudita because of her thinness, her wit, and her characteristic long hair, and whom they venerate as the patron saint of difficult professions.
Like the others, the mujeres of La Catunga know that those who fully embrace their profession risk their skin; unlike others, the mujeres know that they also risk their souls. Hence the meticulous, manic way in which they perform self-imposed purifying rituals, hence the importance that they bestow upon a saint like Catalina; they, who in some dark way also become martyrs, yield to tragedy and accept the notion of life as a sacrifice.
Four months remained before the celebration of the fiestas of Santa Cata, just enough time to round out the girl’s education in love. But, as I had heard said so many times in Tora, man proposes and hunger imposes. Todos los Santos’s savings, which were diminishing, wouldn’t last until the date she had set for the girl’s initiation into the profession. So Todos los Santos decided to force her hand and release the artist into the game while she was still a little wet behind the ears, short on training, unpredictable in conduct, and psychologically immature.
“You don’t make a man fall in love with you through gymnastics in bed or tricks in the bedroom,” was her first strictly professional lesson. “Leave that to those who don’t have other skills. What you should do is spoil him and console him as only his mother ever has.”
One midnight in La Catunga, with the song of the cicadas particularly intense, a council of advisers was assembled at Todos los Santos’s house. Over mistelas, Pielroja cigarettes, and sweet pastelitos de gloria they argued without reaching agreement on any of the details of the mise-enscène. The greatest polemic centered around the choosing of the girl’s nombre de guerra, which in this case would also have to serve as her Christian name, because she swore she didn’t remember having been baptized.
“At least tell us what they called you before you came here,” said Tana the Argentine, a veritable rattle of bracelets and necklaces, given to her by her lover, an engineer for the company.
“They didn’t call me anything,” she lied, or perhaps she was confessing true abandonment.
What she did tell them was that she would like to be called La Calzones, the underwear girl, in homage to her aunt, for whom she seemed to profess some admiration or affection.
“Over my dead body!” shouted Todos los Santos. “I have never heard a name so coarse and devoid of style.”
“But if that name brings the girl good memories,” Olguita dared to venture, her nature made velvety by the polio that had withered her legs.
“Good memories don’t exist. All memories are sad,” Todos los Santos said, ending the discussion.
“Let’s call her María, Manuela, or Tránsito, for God’s sake, they were all important women and heroines in novels,” proposed Machuca, the blasphemer, who was a high school graduate with a diploma, and a devoted reader.
“What does that have to do with anything? None of them had to offer up their asses.”