The Dancing Miramar — doubly promiscuous? — was the unique and shared precinct for the rites of love and the rites of death, and not by choice but for lack of another alternative. Save for a few veterans, like Todos los Santos or Olguita, who were owners of houses with plots of land, the other women had only minuscule rooms in a jumble of precarious and collective buildings, with a common bath and kitchen. And those cubicles, which could scarcely hold a bed, certainly had no room for even a tenth of the huge crowd that generally appeared at funerals.
On the other hand, by decree of the parish priest, not even a dead prostitute, literally speaking, could enter the church, which provided an opportunity for La Negra Florecida, owner of the Dancing Miramar, who charged each girl ten pesos a night to dance in her establishment and snag clients, and a hundred and twenty for a funeral service, taking into account that the latter fee was paid only once. She made it available only during the day and as part of the deal she provided the tapers, the candelabras, black coffee in little cups for the ladies, rum in discreet quantities for the gentlemen, a sign at the entrance with a black emblem and the name of the deceased written in gothic letters, along with four dozen white, sweet-smelling flowers.
That afternoon, as they mourned Claire, those present witnessed the arrival of an imposing funeral wreath, the size of a truck wheel, into which at least two hundred roses of spectral whiteness had been intertwined and across which was a purple cloth ribbon with gold letters reading: MARIANO AZCÁRRAGA CABALLERO Y SEÑORA. The girls of La Catunga read the pompous name and were left breathless; fifteen months earlier Mariano Azcárraga Caballero, electoral baron of high caliber and kingpin of the reigning political party, had been elected senator. And “Señora”? Three months earlier there had been news of the existence of that wife, by way of the daily newspaper El Tiempo, which published a photograph of her on her wedding day with the same Mariano in whom Claire had deposited, until that day of irreparable sorrow and supreme anguish, all of her faith, her hope, and the better part of her charity.
“That’s what she got for not mistrusting power, which is always poisonous and treacherous and disdainful of people,” notes Fideo from the sidelines.
Dragging her trailing legs and bearing the wreath, Olguita approached Claire and placed it at her feet.
“Your Mariano wants you to know that he’s with you at the hour of your death,” she said quietly, rearranging a lock of limp, blond hair.
The Dancing Miramar no longer exists, but La Negra Florecida does and today she’s the mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother of a tribe of men and women who are university graduates. She is very ill from an intestinal infection that they call, as she told me, the seventeen types of fecal material, and when I asked her, most likely with a look of surprise on my face, to repeat the name of her illness, she told me that if I didn’t believe her she would show me the lab results, to which I quickly responded that that would not be necessary, that I had really come to ask her about something else.
“A hundred twenty pesos per dead person wasn’t much to charge,” she told me, “if you take into account that after the funeral I had to pay a rezandero to cleanse the place, because it would be contaminated after four or five hours of sheltering a tearful, moaning crowd. Around here there has always been a belief that after a funeral the walls are still in grief. If they aren’t cleaned no one will want to come back at night to fall in love, sing, and laugh.”
The Dancing Miramar: dual shelter of love and of death? No, an entire universe, and threefold, like the Trinity: birth, love, and death.
“I didn’t just take care of death,” La Negra Florecida told me, looking at me through her glasses, thick as the bottom of a bottle, as the seventeen types of fecal material ravaged her intestines. “I also handled births: I had set up a delivery room on the second floor, because there were many girls who ended up pregnant. When the time came I sent someone to fetch Cuatrocientos, who helped with the deliveries.”
On her way to Claire’s funeral, Todos los Santos stopped at her house to get Sayonara, but she couldn’t find the girl. She asked around the block if anyone had seen her, but no one had. Claire was buried at sunset in a field where cows were grazing, free of crosses or tombstones, removed from the village and at the edge of the Río Magdalena, a place they called the Other Cemetery. It was there, with no shelter other than a flight of herons and no monument other than a weeping willow, that suicide victims, masons, unbaptized babies, women who had had abortions, and prostitutas went to find eternal rest — all unredeemable sinners to whom the priests refused burial in the Cementerio Mayor. At least with the double stigma of prostitution and suicide, Claire’s unlucky star marked her for exile in death, just as it had in life.
“Claire wasn’t a sad woman,” says Todos los Santos in an elegiac tone, “she was sadness itself disguised as a woman. I have never known a more helpless soul in all the days of my life. However, it was she who brought to our attention that in the France of the Louis we, the courtesans, triumphed and we proudly let ourselves be called daughters of happiness.”
I always imagined this beautifully surreal scene: a group of women wrapped in black clothes yet immune to the suffocating and shadowless midday heat, standing in front of a fresh hole in the red dirt of Tora in the middle of a vast nothingness of high pastures. A couple dozen Cebu cattle with several herons perched on their backs watching with infantile curiosity and slowly forming a circle around the field’s unusual visitors.
Months later, when I myself had to attend a burial in the same place and under similar circumstances, I was able to verify that there in fact was a heat that was unbearable for me, tolerable for them, and the cattle also were there with their tick-removing herons, and the dead woman who yields docilely to the red earth. And yet, the foreshadowed image contained a double error that I will correct at once: There was shade after all, because the grave had been dug beneath the shelter of an enormous violet guayacán tree in full bloom, and the women weren’t standing, solemn but at the same time eager to leave that place, as is often the case with the mourners in the Jardines del Recuerdo, the Tierra del Apogeo, the Valle de la Paz, and the rest of the cemeteries in our cities; instead they were idle and lying down in a clearing with the patience of rocks, as placid as if they had come to stay, chatting among themselves openly about the deceased’s virtues, about her bad habits, about the illness that led her to the grave, about anything in general and in particular, and about the chicken stew that they were going to cook right there and consume with rum in complicity with the traveler to the next world and as a means of invoking her well-being.
As the stew was eaten and beautiful Claire was remembered, and afterward too, during the shoveling of dirt on the coffin, Todos los Santos looked from time to time toward the path leading to the pueblo with a presentiment of her adopted daughter Sayonara’s arrival, which nevertheless didn’t occur then or later, while they waited at home until after eleven that night without receiving word that she was at the Dancing Miramar, the neighborhood cafés, the home of one of her friends, the rocks at the river with the laundresses, the Arab’s shops, the Acandai waterfall, or other usual places; they grew so worried that toward midnight Todos los Santos, Olga, and Machuca went looking for her at the hospital, the police station, and finally the morgue, but all without result.