Dr. Antonio María was convinced that this peculiar mental universe of the prostitutas of Tora was directly rooted in their Christian upbringing, because as he told me, among the Pipatón Indians a different attitude could be perceived. They sold their bodies to eat and to feed their children and that seemed to be sufficient justification for them, without getting so many knots in their heads.
“The pipatonas were my most assiduous patients,” he tells me, “taking into consideration, as far as I knew, that they were also seeing their own medicine men, relying on both my drugs and their traditional cures. What is certain is that among them the illness struck with much less virulence than among the rest.”
They had a clear and unfettered view of a profession that they entered and left according to their needs, and they didn’t make a great distinction between the man who paid them to possess them and the one who, outside of prostitution, possessed them without paying. They needed to survive and that was that. Good, for them, was to stay alive; and bad, to die; they didn’t have a sexual ethic any more complicated than that, or, more precisely, they didn’t adhere so much to an ethic as to a sort of biological determinism, according to which woman was woman, prostituta or not, and man was man, no matter who he was. It amused me to learn that for the Pipatón women the male body was comprised of head, arms, legs, trunk, and little trunk, and the female, of head, arms, legs, trunk, and for-the-little-trunk.
Dr. Antonio María, who wasn’t about to sit around waiting for a frenzy of cankers and eruptions to sprout up around him, took on the task of visiting house to house to pull the negligent and stubborn out of hiding. Among these latter was Sayonara, who on the day of the uprising, while doing everything possible to make the flames lick the mustaches of the impostors, had sworn on the holy cross of Christ that she would never again let a doctor, fake or documented, put his hands on her, even if tuberculosis had her spitting blood or leprosy reduced her to stumps. So, when she happened to see through the partially open window that Dr. Antonio María was knocking on her door in the mourning tie he wore every day in honor of the marshal Antonio José de Sucre, murdered more than a century earlier, with his leather bag filled with implements, medicinal herbs, and bottles, and with his face shaded by the wide hat he wore to protect himself from the sun, she slipped out through the patio, and if she didn’t jump onto the roof to fly away, it was only because Todos los Santos’s hand managed to grab her by the ankle and hold on to her tenaciously.
“Come down from there, girl, it’s for your own good.”
“I’m not coming down and I’m not letting that man touch me.”
“Bring me a rope!” ordered Todos los Santos. “This savage is going to let herself be examined if I have to tie her to the bed!”
“I tell you that I don’t want to go near that man, madrina, because he has evil intentions. Don’t you see the shamelessness in his smile?”
When I met Antonio María Flórez, I thought Sayonara hadn’t been wrong to suspect his smile: It was true that in the middle of that austere face and neat profile were a set of rabbit’s teeth more appropriate for a magician or a tango singer than for a gynecologist.
“You are wrong,” insisted Todos los Santos to her adopted daughter, still holding her by the ankle. “His big-toothed smile makes him human. If it weren’t for that he would be as dry and tight as a cigarette.”
When the unruly Sayonara finally stood face to face with the doctor and was able to confirm for herself that his circumspect bearing, his professional demeanor, and the affable gray slate of his eyes counterbalanced the playful air of his outsized teeth, she changed her mind about defying him and agreed to lie down without underclothes and with her legs open and bent. But the doctor had barely brushed her thigh with his hand before he felt her jump, her nerves on edge, tensed to the point of bursting like the strings of a guitar. He tried to chat with her to relax her, to make her think about something else so she would lower her guard and allow him to examine her, but the girl was trembling from head to toe, electric and wild like a filly.
“We can’t do it like this,” the doctor said.
“Then let’s not do it,” she replied, standing up and covering her legs with her skirt.
“Come here,” said Dr. Antonio María, who had understood that the exam couldn’t be conducted during this first visit, and he changed tactics to calm her. She approached him and he put one end of his stethoscope in her ears as he placed the other on the left side of her chest.
“What is that echo?” asked Sayonara, pulling out the stethoscope and taking a step backward.
“The beating of your heart.”
Then she drew near again, let the doctor replace the earpieces, and stood there, self-absorbed and perplexed, for a long time, glimpsing the pulse of life that came and went, recurrent and obstinate, through secret arroyos, flowing through the soft labyrinth of purple walls and resonating vigorously in her internal cavities.
“The beating of my heart!” she sighed, and from that moment on she would never forget Dr. Antonio María, the first person in the world to invite her to hear the deep rhythm of her own soul.
A week hadn’t gone by when the doctor, about to leave his office after a long day of work, found Sayonara perched on the front steps of the clinic, waiting for him.