Despite Payanés’s forced words of comfort, Sacramento felt weaker and weaker, more diminished, while a microscopic but audacious enemy was growing and multiplying inside him, assuming the frightening shapes of rings, clubs, and bunches of grapes.
Twice a day apathetic nurses went by the beds of those they called convalescents, among whom — with who knows what criteria — Sacramento had been placed. They performed their duties on the run, without paying much attention to anyone or asking any questions, distributing the only available medicine: quinine for fevers, aspirin for pain, brown mixture for infections, and white mixture for unknown ills.
“Don’t get too excited about the medicine, it’s more toxic than the illness is,” Demetrio would say to Sacramento as he gave him his ration of quinine. “Look at these pills, they’re pink and round like women. And hurtful like women.”
Like a bad actor, Sacramento would perform the same brief, equivocal scene every morning. He would stand up on his trembling legs, splash water on his face, halfheartedly run a comb through his tangled hair, and announce that he was cured, that he wanted to be taken to skinny Emilia because he was ready to go back to work.
“Tell me where there’s oil,” he would rant, “and that’s where I’ll drill the hole.”
The next minute, exhausted by the futile exertion, he would collapse back onto his bed, surrendering to the fever, renouncing his existence in this world and withdrawing into his delirious passion for Sayonara. He would spend hours immobile with his eyes rolled back, searching for her, pleading and whispering incoherently into her ear, his whole body lifeless, feeling the sweat cooling on his skin and turning into a fine film of salt, telling him that everything was useless, that his dreams had already been shattered forever.
“I started to think that letting myself die from love was the only course, and that the sooner it happened the better.”
Resigned to the other side of hibernation, receptive now to the idea of nothingness, he noticed with annoyance how without his consent his body reinitiated the war against the parasite; how his army of white blood cells remobilized, infuriating once more the fevers and the deterioration, stirring up again the demands of life, which in spite of his wishes refused to surrender without attempting one last battle.
On his first free Friday, Payanés traveled to La Catunga but he was unable to get into the Dancing Miramar, which was overflowing with people, not to mention the line two blocks long formed by those waiting for the opportunity to enter. He settled for a few drinks in a third-rate bar in the company of a young thing called Molly Flan. He returned to the camp on Sunday night and the first thing he did was to run to the hospital to bring news of Sayonara to his bedridden friend.
“I didn’t get to see her, hermano, but I heard what they were saying about her. That she’s the most sought-after woman in Tora and that she’s not a woman but a panther.”
“Were you with her?”
“I told you I wasn’t, she was too much in demand. They say she only goes with gringos, engineers, and administrative personnel. They say she has no interest in lowly laborers.”
“Then it’s true that she exists…” Spikes of fever turned a black spot in front of Sacramento’s watery eyes into a cat, then a swamp, a woman, storm clouds, then a cat again.
“Tell me more,” he asked Payanés, who noted his friend’s hopeless thinness and the sickly color of his skin, wavering between yellow and green.
“I should go, Sacramento. I have to get some sleep before I go back to work tomorrow.”
“Tell me once more and then you can go.”
“What do you want me to tell you about?”
“The panther, tell me about the panther.”
“What panther?”
“That woman, Sayonara; didn’t you say she looks like a panther?”
“If I were you I would aim a little lower so you don’t get disappointed. I met a woman they call Molly Flan, you can’t imagine how bewitching her eyes are…”
“Hush, my head aches. Tell me about Sayonara.”
“Again?”
“One last time.”
“I already told you what they say about her, that she’s dark and inspires fear. She smells like incense and she hypnotizes when she dances, like a snake.”
The black spot in front of Sacramento’s eyes changed shapes again and turned into a hairy snake, and then a panther without eyes or a tail, and then into a shapeless oil spot with golden highlights, a rapturous spot shaped with a waist and long, elastic legs, two legs that twisted like ribbons around his throat, choking and asphyxiating him with thirst.
“Give me some water, hermano.”
“They say the camp’s water is polluted and spreads sickness.”
“Give me some water anyway. When are you going to see her again?”
“Who?”
“That woman…”
“Next Friday I’ll take you with me so you can see her yourself. You’ll be fine…”
“Don’t talk shit, Payanés; I’m going to die.”
“You’re too mean to die.”
“Listen carefully to what I am going to say. When are you going back down to La Catunga?”
“In about a month, I think.”
“Take this money to a kid they call the girl,” he said, and gave Payanés all the money from the only paycheck he had received. “She’s like my sister and she lives with her madrina, Todos los Santos. You tell her that Sacramento sent this to her so she’ll have money for food and can get away from the evil life. Then you look for Sayonara and say these words to her, just as I am saying them now: ‘Don’t worry, as soon as I get better I am going to marry you.’ ”
“You’re crazy, hermano. Are you turning into a savior of derailed women? What if they don’t want you to save them?”
“You just say what I told you; tell Sayonara that it’s a message from a man named Sacramento. That I know she’s suffering and as soon as I’m well I’m coming for her. Do you swear that you’ll do it?”
“I swear.”
Payanés left the convalescent pavilion deeply troubled after seeing his soul mate so lost. You’re screwed, hermano, he thought painfully, angrily, helplessly. Like the footsteps of a mammoth, the pounding of the drill bent on breaking the planet’s back echoed through the jungle, so no one heard him as he said out loud:
“They’re letting him die, the damned bastards.”
thirteen
“Llegaron los peludoooos!”
Friday nights in La Catunga the call to arms spread from woman to woman: Llegaron ya los peluuudoooos! And so began, in dark splendor, the romantic costumed opera, opulent and miserable.
On weekdays, under the bright sun, in baggy, faded bathrobes, with bouncing breasts unrestrained by bras and the unkempt look of housewives, the women of Tora — when they weren’t breast-feeding babies — followed a routine of indiscriminately servicing rubber harvesters, jungle hunters, riverboat men, or merchants in brief, monetary episodes in bed that meant no more to them than scrubbing pots or feeding the chickens.
“What did you think about in the meantime?” I ask Todos los Santos. “I mean, while you were with them…?”
“I added up my accounts. I thought about the money they were going to give me and calculated what I could buy with it, depending on the price of potatoes, plantains, rent. While the man did his thing, I figured out my expenses.”
But Friday was Friday, and its arrival was evident in the air from the sound of crying babies whose diapers no one had changed, the hordes of wandering chickens stealing crumbs, and the fluttering of women humming love songs as they washed their hair in basins and spread their silk stockings out to dry in the sun. Dusk fell on the barrio, gilding the poverty, and the streets and alleys glowed with electric lights like a Christmas tree. Tired of crying, the children fell asleep in corners while their mothers gave themselves up, fluttering like black butterflies, to the ritual of dance, flirtation, and drinks.