“I’m listening.”
“There were about fifteen people sleeping there with me while outside the threat continued, because the company and the government, which had broken the strike by force, were merciless and continued to pursue the guilty.”
In one of the rooms, on mattresses laid out on the floor, slept Sacramento, Frank Brasco, and the other men, and the women were scattered around the rest of the house: Sayonara, Todos los Santos, Machuca, Analía, and a few others. Brasco tells me that despite the tension and the overpopulation, there was harmony in the sleeping house, and that the warmth of close bodies staved off any danger. Every now and then a cough, a somnambulant sigh, a creaking of floorboards gave testimony to the affinity of the human flock when it finds itself gathered, pacified, protected by a roof and a door that isolate it from the rest of the world. In his sleeplessness, Brasco happily realized how much it pleased him to feel like a member of a clan, linked by unspoken affections to those who lay next to him on this side of the wall, inside the protecting and hermetic circle that is a family and a home.
“The only feeling of well-being that can compare with the one I felt that night in the midst of so much company,” he tells me, “is this cozy solitude in which I now live.”
Early the next morning, before four o’clock, he had to leave overland for Bogotá, where he would take an airplane back to his homeland, so he got up while it was still dark, among the clamor of crickets and other nocturnal animals he couldn’t identify, and he began to urinate, trying not to make any noise that would disturb the others. But Sayonara was already up and she approached him, barefoot, with sleep tangled in her hair and her body wrapped in a sheet to protect her from the cool dawn air.
“That’s right, better urinate now, míster,” she ordered him, laughing. “That way you won’t spray us from the air.”
“I will never forget you,” he promised her.
“You’re never going to forget me? Listen to the things that occur to this gringo! Don’t speak useless words, míster Brasco. Memories melt, like snowflakes.”
eleven
One elusive morning, bathed in the perplexing light of an eclipse, beautiful Claire, the ethereal traveler, left this world into which she had perhaps never finished arriving. Her passing through Tora was sad and fleeting, like the shadow of someone who is present without really being there and who is not aware of the laws of gravity. Her death, however, fell upon La Catunga with the full weight of the calamity. It took everyone by surprise, leaving the barrio suspended between horror and shock and bringing to the fore how little we natives know of the foreigners who live among us. It doesn’t matter that ten years, or twenty, pass: The outsider is still a stranger — in good measure suspicious — who has just arrived. Of Claire one could think, in accordance with her pale beauty and the fleeting lines of her character, that she rose in body and soul to heaven in the ecstasy of an assumption, like the Virgin Mary. But it wasn’t thus; hers was an earthly and brutal death.
“One foul day Claire threw herself into the path of the train,” Todos los Santos tells me. “Don’t be alarmed, it was a common means of death among the prostitutas of Tora. Many of them killed themselves by the train out of despair, or loneliness, or indifference. Sometimes simply out of weariness or pure drunkenness. Never before three in the morning or after five, and all at the same spot: the corner they call Armería del Ferrocarril, in the poorer part of the barrio Hueso Blanco.”
Now there’s a gas station located there, and a car repair shop and a stand that sells newspapers, snacks, and drinks, just like on any other corner on the planet. But Todos los Santos assures me that if you watch carefully, you can see people still making the sign of the cross as they pass that corner, because they know they are stepping on unholy ground: the site of immolation.
According to tradition, Claire’s remains were gathered up in a cart and taken to the place where she had lived, located in the miserable Calle de los Veinte Cuartos — the Street of Twenty Rooms. Todos los Santos was summoned to the deceased’s room, one of the twenty that was squeezed along that alley saturated with the smell of excrement and rancid fruit. She was to carry out the compassionate act of arranging the cadaver’s parts as lifelike as possible inside the coffin, officiate over the ceremony of closing the eyelids, and, to the degree it was possible, cross the arms over the chest, wrap the body in a shroud, and cover the head with a veil of silk lace.
“My heart shriveled when I entered that place,” she tells me. “Claire was one of those who earned the most from her work; she saved what she earned and had become a rich woman. If she didn’t live like a queen it was because she didn’t want to, and because she always believed that she was here temporarily.”
Despite having lodged Claire for a dozen years, the little room was still a poor and transient-looking place, with scarcely any furnishings. Not a single animal, not a single plant, nothing incompatible with the desolate impersonality of a boardinghouse, nothing that couldn’t be packed up from one moment to the next, nothing that would involve delays when it was time to leave.
“Afterward, tying up loose ends, we came to a realization. Not even the train’s passing could cure Claire of the broken promise that was always strangling her, like a hand pressing on her throat,” Todos los Santos recalls. “During the ten years Claire had lived in Colombia she agonized under false hope; now we know for certain that there was no other motive that pushed her toward her end.”
From time to time throughout those ten years of anxiety and waiting they would hear her sigh for a certain Mariano, who, however, had never been seen in Tora. They all suspected that Claire languished in a distracted haze because she had given her heart to this Mariano. Rumors of him arrived, but he never did. His letters, staggered, also arrived, inside fine envelopes of Kimberly paper with Claire’s name and address handwritten in sepia ink and beautiful nineteenth-century script; and the rumor circulated through the pueblo that he sent his lover funds in the form of money orders.
“Yes, there were money orders, but they weren’t from him to her, it was the reverse,” clarifies Fideo, as she travels in her hammock as if on a riverboat.
“How’s that?”
“Just as it sounds. It was Claire who sent money to Mariano in the capital to support his electoral campaigns, because he was a politician.”
According to the news that Mistinguett had spread around, with who knows what basis, Claire left her native France and came to America in the footsteps of this man, who had promised to marry her one spring night on the Pont des Arts. But clearly it was not her who he finally married, as the women of La Catunga would learn on the day of Claire’s funeral.
The beautiful French woman was mourned, like so many fellow prostitutas who had died before her, in the red hall of the Dancing Miramar, surrounded like a bride by carnations and tapers; the face — miraculously spared by the impact and still beautiful — was enveloped in the silk lace veil; definitive was the paleness of her death and delicate the shadow cast by her eyelashes on her cheeks of soft Sevres porcelain, like that depicted on the postcard sent by Sacramento.
Except for Sayonara, who wasn’t anywhere to be found, all of La Catunga was there, accompanying in grief someone who had died by her own hand and far from her homeland. The main hall of the Miramar — with its rows of mirrors, its Venetian chandeliers, its red and black velvet upholstery — in the semidarkness of midnight glistened dreamlike and splendid like a salon at Versailles, but beneath the indiscreet intrusion of the sun, it had more the look of a real funeral parlor: sad, faded, dusty, and airless.