Any worthwhile life is woven with white ceremonies and black ceremonies, in an inevitable chain where some justify the others. Although the easy encounter with señor Manrique floated by, inoffensive, among Sayonara’s days, the following Tuesday Todos los Santos was forced to introduce her disciple to the murky ceremonies of a shameful routine. Every Tuesday by law, week after week, the prostitutes of La Catunga had to appear at dawn in the center of town, on Calle del Comercio, and stand in line in front of the antivenereal dispensary to have their health cards renewed.
“Only on that day,” Todos los Santos tells me, “were they disrespectful and treated us like putas.”
“Why do we need a card, madrina?” asked Sayonara, running behind the older woman, unable to match her steps.
“So the government will let us work. They require it of anyone in La Catunga who wears a skirt, even the nuns. They don’t cure the sick women, they just charge them double to say they’re healthy.”
“But why, madrina?”
“The government officials pocket the fifty centavos that each of us pays for the validation.”
“Well, if they’re going to steal from us, why do we go?”
“So they’ll let us live in peace.”
“What happens if we don’t have a card?”
“They kick our asses right into jail.”
They found the others waiting in line beneath the rising sun, messy and gray, as if they had swallowed ashes. The collective disgust cut off any attempt at conversation and Sayonara knew instinctively that it was better not to continue asking questions, because putting words to grave matters only makes them graver. There was Yvonne, perched on a pair of red spiked heels; Claire, mortally beautiful; Analía, stealing sips of vodka from a poorly camouflaged bottle; the pipatonas suckling their babies; Olga with her legs in the armor plating of her orthopedic devices. Leaning against a wall, all identical in the eyes of the corrupt officials, with no preferred lightbulb status or nationality or fee differential, no color of skin better than any other. On Tuesdays the dignity of any of them was worth fifty centavos, not one more or one less.
“The infected women’s cards were marked with crosses, one or several depending on the severity, and some women’s had so many they looked like cemeteries,” said Todos los Santos. “One cross meant thin blood; two, rotten blood; three, swollen flesh; four, irremediable situation.”
“Off with the underwear!”
Men with white lab coats were giving orders and Sayonara was seized with a sudden anxiety attack and a growing foreboding of frozen forceps in her crotch. A strong whiff of cleaning fluids made her nauseous.
“It smells like a circus, madrina.”
“It is a circus, and we’re the clowns.”
“Through here for genital inspection,” indicated a doctor of dubious qualifications, so coarse in appearance and with a lab coat so stained that he looked more like a mechanic than a doctor.
Obeying orders like a frightened animal, the girl lay down on the examining table and began to tremble.
“Hold on, girl,” encouraged Todos los Santos. “Think of Santa Cata, who withstood the cogged wheel without complaint.”
“Some comfort you are, madrina.”
The man with the stained lab coat performed the examination in view of all the others, with total disinterest, a cigarette in his mouth and without interrupting a conversation about the legitimacy of the elections, which he was carrying on with a tall, ungainly colleague who didn’t look like a doctor either, or even a mechanic, but rather a giraffe from a zoo.
When he finished with the girl, the man moved over to a desk, signed and stamped a card of pink pasteboard, threw the fifty centavos in a drawer, and without washing his hands shouted:
“Next!”
Todos los Santos tried to climb onto the high table without losing her composure, but she got tangled in her skirts, suffered a sudden coughing attack, the leg that was supposed to rise wouldn’t respond, the upper part of her body managed some success and reached the table but the other half failed and hung there, heavy and grotesque, while, completely humiliated, she begged the doctor’s pardon for her lack of agility, explaining that in her youth she had been slender.
“Hurry up,” said the man. “I’m not going to wait all morning.”
“Can’t you see the señora needs help?” said Sayonara, and her fear yielded to her fury.
“Up, señora, and open your legs.”
“She is not climbing up or opening her legs, you shitty bastard,” Sayonara spat out as she grabbed Todos los Santos by the arm, struggling to pull her out to the street.
“Don’t be a rebel, hija, you’ll leave me without a card,” protested the madrina, who still hadn’t picked up her purse or finished rearranging her hair, stockings, and skirt.
“Let her insult me, doña,” said the doctor so loudly that the others outside could hear. “Next time the little brat is going to have to suck me off before I’ll do her the favor of renewing her card.”
“Why don’t you suck this,” shouted a woman from Cali who had been eating a mango; she threw the pit and hit him in the eye, letting out a hearty laugh that alerted the others and made them laugh too, first a little, then more, beginning as the chatter of schoolgirls, then becoming the harassment of mutinous putas, hurling insults, trash, and rocks at the dispensary doctors who, without knowing how, managed to lock the door and barricade themselves against the revolt that was mounting outside.
“Down with the pimping government!”
“Down!”
From the corner and a little apart from the rest, looking at all of this with the burned-out eyes of someone who has seen it before, Todos los Santos registered the novelty only as highlighted in insignificant details: the touch of color that the commotion brought out on Claire’s translucent cheeks, the agility with which Yvonne ran on her red stilts, the wounded-deer urgency with which the group of pipatonas and their children fled, abandoning the uprising at the onset. But more than anything she noticed the metamorphosis that her adopted daughter underwent, having seized the first line of fire, hair on end like a wild beast, vociferous, and later scampering across the roofs with a diabolical agility to reach the skylight and attack from above.
“I watched her,” she tells me, “and said to myself: Maybe it’s better for me to never find out what this child’s past is, or what mix of blood brought about such vigor and fury.”
“Bastards, bloodsuckers!”
Delia Ramos, consumed with rage, incited battle with Walkyrian shouts, and a woman from the Pacific coast whom they called La Costeña harangued from the top of a wall.
“Putas hijueputas! Son-of-a-bitch whores!” answered masculine voices from behind the barricades. “Syphilis spreaders!”
“This is for all of our friends who were raped and abused in this dump!” trumpeted the vodka-soaked voice of Analía, and a bottle crashed against the window of the dispensary, shattering the glass.
“Filthy gonorrhea-infected whores!” responded the barricaded men.
“Death to corrupt officials!”
“Down with the pimping government!”
“Death!”
A flying orange buzzed through the broken window and stamped itself, yellow and juicy, on a cabinet, knocking over all the flasks, and then the roof fell in with a clatter of glass.
“They’re burning us alive!” howled the besieged men, as a rain of burning paper and rags descended upon them, which Sayonara, angel of fire, young cat on a hot tin roof, was tossing onto their heads and which fell onto the spilled alcohol, spreading the fire. From her street corner Todos los Santos saw the smoke that was beginning to rise wispy and pale and noticed that it was becoming blacker and thicker, like the clouds that precede storms. She also saw the first flames peering out, seeking something to cling to, like long, mobile, hungry tongues, and she watched the heat smash, one by one, the rest of the windows in a frenzy of invisible punches reverberating through the air.