“Well, if that’s the requirement, then call her Magdalena.”
“Don’t even mention that renegade, first she sinned, then she spent the rest of her life crying with regret.”
“Then what about Manón or Naná, who made history in Paris?” suggested Machuca, her mouth watering.
“Paris and Tora can’t be mentioned on the same day.”
“Why not Margarita, then?”
“Margaritas also cry too much. And they fall in love with money, and die spitting blood. I tell you, names of flowers bring bad luck.”
“Well, Flor Estéves, who was my aunt on my father’s side,” offered Delia Ramos, “was said to have found heaven in a sailor’s love.”
“Sailors kiss, then they leave,” Todos los Santos recited the only line of poetry her memory had retained.
“Rosa la Rosse always sounded so sweet to me…,” sighed Olguita. “I would have loved to have been called that. But I got tangled up in this profession without realizing it and when I opened my eyes I was already a consecrated puta and they just kept calling me Olguita, like when I was good. They say that God doesn’t forgive those who work under the names they were baptized with. They say it sullies the holy name and takes it in vain.”
“God has gotten so old and he still hasn’t stopped inventing sins.”
“It doesn’t do me any good to give you ideas, if you don’t pay any damn attention,” said Machuca testily, but she tried again anyway. “Call her Filomena, who was the winner in a tournament of beautiful breasts.”
“Maybe that Filomena had hers very much in order,” interjected Delia Ramos, “but on this child they’re barely showing, and you can tell that as an adult they’ll sprout scant and pointed, like a Turkish slipper.”
“I heard about an incredibly extraordinary puta who was called Cándida…,” mused Olguita.
“Don’t even think about it,” said Machuca. “That Cándida deserves a place among the gods of Olympus for bearing eternal torture chained to a bed, like Prometheus to his rock. Cándida is a myth of sublime flight and this poor little girl of ours is nothing more than a vile mortal.”
“You read so many books and invent so many beautiful things,” said Tana to Machuca, “and just look at the sad name you’ve got.”
“I use it because that’s what a poet I once loved called me,” said the latter in self-defense, then became lost in the shadows of days gone by.
They got tangled up in meditations without reaching a satisfactory solution and instead ended up postponing other urgent decisions, like fixing the fee and selecting the corresponding color of lightbulb in accordance with the standing hierarchies and conventions in La Catunga. The girl was as copper-colored and Indian-looking as the pipatonas, and according to that she should have been accorded a minimal remuneration, but Todos los Santos aspired to the highest destiny for her student and she wouldn’t resign herself to condemn the girl to a lowly white lightbulb.
“It can’t be,” she lamented. “With those beautiful almond eyes she’s got, like a Japanese princess’s!”
“That’s it.” From the haze of her mistelas Delia Ramos saw the light. “Japanese! Let her be the only Japanese girl in this red-light district, and that way she can charge an exclusive fee.”
“Such nonsense! The Japanese are yellow like chickens…”
“It doesn’t matter, nobody around here would know the difference because they’ve never seen one.”
“Besides, coloring can be lightened with rice powders…”
“But she doesn’t speak Japanese.”
“And you think, mother, that these French women of ours speak French? If they ever knew it, they forgot it a long time ago. And nobody complains; after all, the profession has a universal language.”
Olguita suggested the name Kimono, the only word she knew in Japanese, and Delia Ramos came up with another possibility:
“I say that it would be best to call her Tokyo.”
“What’s that?”
“A big city in Japan.”
“It won’t do, it’ll scare off the gringo clientele.”
“Despite everything, Tokyo sounds very good to me.”
“In that case Kyoto would be better.”
“Why not Sayonara?”
“Kimono or Sayonara,” declared Todos los Santos. “Either of the two would work.”
“Sayonara is more beautiful, it means good-bye.”
“Good-bye forever?” sighed Delia Ramos tragically, already drunk.
“It just means good-bye.”
“Let the girl choose.”
Without even thinking about it, the girl chose Sayonara and from then on she clung to that word, which she had never heard before, as if in it she had finally found the stamp of her identity.
“Then let it be Sayonara. Sayonara. You will no longer be the girl, but Sayonara,” they approved unanimously, and there descended over them, leaving their hair gray, that drizzle of soot that falls from the ceiling every time a childhood ends before its time.
“Four months,” said Delia Ramos between hiccups. “Only four months and she would have been an adult.”
“It’s all the same,” said Todos los Santos, “four months more or less. Which of us didn’t start too early? Childhood doesn’t exist, it’s a luxury invented by the rich.”
Today, despite her eyes being bathed in clouds, Todos los Santos tells me she can see with perfect clarity that upon adopting that name with the flavor of good-bye, Sayonara unknowingly — or perhaps she did know it — sealed her own fate and that of all of La Catunga.
On one thing Todos los Santos, Olguita, Delia Ramos, Tana, and Machuca did agree that night, which was to select señor Manrique as the girl’s first client, the one who would initiate her in the profession prior to her social and official presentation at the Dancing Miramar. He was a soft, kind man of some fifty years, all reverence and old-fashioned courtesies, one of those who breaks bread with his hands so he won’t have to plunge a knife into it. He worked as the quartermaster general of the commissary at the Troco, where he earned a good living, and visited the chicas of La Catunga every night to have eventual and insignificant sex with them, dispersed among dozens of games of dominoes, imperative, long, and impassioned.
“What do you think, girl? After all, you are the interested party…”
“I don’t care.”
Señor Manrique would have been accepted unanimously if a bilious blonde named Potra Zaina hadn’t planted a tempting worry at the last moment:
“Let her first time at love be with Piruetas, he really knows how to dance and make a woman feel alive.”
None of them, not even Todos los Santos, was immune to the difficult charms of Piruetas, who came in and out of their lives with a dancer’s agile moves. Unpredictable, incomprehensible, slick, he made them all suffer with his snubs; from all of them he obtained benefits of bed and kitchen in exchange for gazes from his lying eyes; they all loved him without charging him a peso so that he, in return, would teach them tango steps and the latest pirouettes in the dancing salons of Pereira and the capital.
“Hey, Piruetas!” they would shout competitively at him when they saw him pass, a figure of ambiguous temperament, malevolent hat, and patent-leather shoes. “Slay me with those eyes! Come, love, show me a new number, one of the ones only you know.”
“Prostitutas, like bullfighters, try to ease sorrows with superstitions,” Todos los Santos assures me. “One of their many beliefs says that the man who breaks a woman in marks her life from then on. That’s why the selection of the first client was a delicate matter and why a melancholy man would be rejected, for example, or a glutton or a sick man. All the pains, of the body and the soul, are transmitted through the sheets.”