“I understand, señor.”
“Suffice it to say that I don’t aspire to so much. But be that as it may, and you know better than I, a woman never forgets her first man and all those who pass through her bed afterward she compares to him…”
“Of course, señor, of course,” she said condescendingly. “Of course.”
We all have our vanities and cling to our illusions, thought Todos los Santos, and she stood there watching Manrique walk down the street toward the Plaza del Desacabezado, innocent of all suspicion and puffed up in his circumspect blue suit, carrying with him, as always, his gold fountain pen in the left breast pocket of his jacket.
six
Today I am visiting Todos los Santos in her bedroom because she is feeling ill and has been in bed since the day before yesterday. It’s strange to find her like this, giving in to old age, propped up among the pillows on her bed and covered to the tip of her nose with a blanket despite the fact that the heat is killing the rest of us. It’s the first time I have seen her with her hair uncombed, devoid of her earrings, with no appetite for her Cigalias and mistelas.
“I’m tired of going around driving away shadows,” she tells me when I ask her why she hasn’t gotten out of bed. Then she takes my hand, places it over her tired eyes, and assures me that it makes her feel better, that it is very cool.
“Did many women take up the profession out of hunger?” I ask after a long conversation about everything and nothing. She remains pensive.
“No, not many, just the opposite, very few.”
She is quiet for a while and seems to have forgotten about me, but later she continues with the subject.
“Mostly the indias. I saw pipatonas become putas out of physical hunger, and the proof was that once they had enough money for food, they left and went back to their people. As for the rest of us, we couldn’t go back, because for our families it was as if we were dead. With the Indians things were different; maybe it’s because the missionaries never really fully explained sin to them. Or because their sins were different from ours, who knows? But it wasn’t the same. Nor were their reasons and ours the same for getting into this life. If we had been motivated only by hunger, we would have done what they did, earn a little money, then leave, spend the money, and come back, then leave again, and keep the wheel turning that way. But our motives are more lasting.” Todos los Santos lets out a harsh laugh, devoid of happiness. “They are so lasting that they endure our whole lives, because for us, once we become a puta there’s no way back. It’s like becoming a nun. A woman with this life dies being a woman of this life, although she no longer even remembers what the thing that hangs between a man’s legs is called.”
“What are those lasting motives you’re talking about?”
“Take Correcaminos, for example,” she answers, resorting to a quirk I have learned to expect from them — they speak of others when they don’t want to speak about themselves. “It happened to Correcaminos, as it did with so many others, who in twenty-four hours go from being virgins to being putas. She was a decent, illiterate girl from a poor family who one day lost her virginity, became pregnant, and was transformed into the dishonor of her family. You are no longer my daughter, she heard her very Catholic father say, and the next minute she saw herself alone in the street without hope for pardon or return, with a baby in her belly and no roof over her head. Everything that had been hers suddenly wasn’t anymore: father, mother, siblings, barrio, friends, bread on the table, morning sun, afternoon rain.”
“Can you imagine that?” said Olga indignantly, listening to us as she chopped parsley to add to a compress for Fideo, who lay in a hammock due to her chronic illness. “Everything was taken from her and her child with only six words: You are no longer my daughter. Like a damning curse. To hear that, as if he had said ‘abracadabra,’ and to have everything disappear, absolutely everything, forever and ever. As if by a spell.”
“To be so evil to her, her own father!”
“Delia Ramos was raped by her stepfather and when her mother found out, she burned with such jealousy that she punished Delia, throwing her out of the house,” shouted Fideo from her hammock, who by now had ascertained that we were talking about misfortune.
“Of course, when we asked Delia Ramos if it was true, she denied it. She never wanted to confess to anyone. The old man didn’t even remember what he had done and Delia, in contrast, martyred herself with guilt and regret. I knew about it because her sister told me, a girl named Melones who was also in the business, not here in Tora but in San Vicente Chucurí, and was crushed to death in an accident involving two buses on the Libertadores highway,” interrupted Olguita, who is fond of going into detail. “Do you remember that horrendous accident? They made Delia Ramos go identify the body and she came back telling that she knew it was her sister because of a burn mark she had on her upper thigh ever since hot depilatory wax spilled on it.”
The three interrupt each other, remembering the misadventures of Melones, and meanwhile I think to myself that between being cast out of her home and reaching La Catunga, Delia Ramos and Correcaminos, whose name literally meant “road traveler,” must not have gone down too many roads. All they had to do was take a step, because La Catunga is around the corner from any street, and the difference between calling oneself Rosalba or Anita and nicknaming oneself Puta is a single word.
“When others refuse to offer a hand, mother prostitution receives you with open arms,” says Olguita, “although afterward she swallows you alive and she makes us all pay for it.”
“Opposite sides of the same coin,” I think out loud, “virgin and puta. Honor and shame.”
“That’s right, opposite sides of the very same coin. And let the devil throw it into the air to see which you end up with.”
“Did Correcaminos’s father ever forgive her? Or Delia Ramos’s mother?”
“Not them or anyone,” shouted Fideo. “You can go from there to here, but from here to there all the doors are locked.”
“All,” adds Olga, “except those of your memories.”
I have convinced Todos los Santos to get up and take a walk, and as we stroll, with me supporting her arm, the river turns red and the herons fly just above its surface, brushing the burning water with their wings. The momentary freshness of a breeze off the mountain abruptly ceases and the heat seizes the opportunity to fall upon us and crush us.
“The river blushed, didn’t it?” asks Todos los Santos. “That’s why it got hot, because the river turned red.”
“And out of pleasure?” I continue. “Has anyone joined the profession because she liked it?”
Todos los Santos laughs in that peculiar manner of las mujeres when they are really amused, throwing their heads back and striking their thighs with the palms of their hands.
“It is a profession that has its compensations,” she says, “that cannot be denied. Sometimes you sing and sometimes you cry, as with everything, but I will tell you one thing, a girl in this life has more opportunities for happiness than, let’s say, a dentist. Or a locksmith, for example.”
“Oh God, yes,” assures Olguita, laughing, as she walks behind us.
seven