“You, here?” he asked, happy that she had finally decided to allow him to examine her.
“I’m not here for that, Doctor, I’ve come to see if you would let me listen with that thing again…”
They went inside; without anyone telling her, she lay down on the examination table and the doctor placed the stethoscope on her heart. Again she was awed, listening to how the tumult of her insides seemed to come from the very depths of the universe.
“Tell me, Doc,” she said after a while, looking at him with a heart-melting seriousness and innocence. “Tell me, Doc, does one have two hearts?”
“No, only one, here in your chest. Give me your hand and listen to mine,” he said, putting her hand on his own chest. “Tock, tock, tock… it beats like a clock, just like yours.”
“Then you recognize your heart because it beats, right?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“And does it beat more when you fall in love?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“But are you sure, Doc, that a person only has one heart?”
“Why do you ask me?”
“Well, because the other day I met a man from Campo 26, they call him Payanés, and I felt like I had two hearts inside my body, one in my chest, just like yours, and another here, down below,” and the girl took the doctor’s hand and placed it on her groin. “Do you feel how it beats? This is my other heart.”
twenty-two
Olguita’s soft presence peers into life through a discreet window, always from the side. If there was anyone who wasn’t born to be a puta, it is she, the beatific Olguita, with her clear soul and a body atrophied by polio. Yet she knew how to prosper admirably in the exercise of the profession and had the gift of keeping, as persistent and stable clientele, a select group of lonely men who in the impeccable linen sheets of her bed found a trustworthy woman and an attentive listener; a woman who thickened the best candil with brandy on her wood stove and who with a delicate gardener’s hand maintained an aroma of mint and basil, of chamomile and marjoram, on her patio that made one trust that the future would bring kind things.
Among the men who without realizing it found in Olga’s arms the reason for their existence was a certain Evaristo Baños, a welder for the Troco, who was nicknamed Nostalgia by his fellow workers. He used to arrive on Fridays without detours, skipping the usual stops in the bars, and if he found her busy with someone else he would sit and wait on the steps outside her door without complaint, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. Once inside and free of his clothes, he officiated, with the luxury of repetition, over the same ceremony as always, which consisted of removing from his billfold a wad of family photos — mother, wife, and children, distant in time and space — to drop them one by one on the bed with his faith focused on them and repeating names and ages as if pronouncing an incantation against loss.
“And who is this little one?” Olguita would ask him, though she already knew it all by heart because they had gone over and over the same litany together. “Has the eldest finished school yet? How many months pregnant was your wife here? This spotted dog is called Capitán, right? And isn’t this black dog Azabache?”
And so it went from Friday to Friday until one astoundingly hot Wednesday word came from the petrolero camp by way of Nayib, the street vendor. Stuck down in a well, installing a valve, Nostalgia had torn off his ring finger. Nayib himself had taken on the task of spreading the news from house to house, boasting of having been partially involved in the drama, because it was from his peddler’s satchel that the eighteen-karat-gold ring that caused the accident had come — it had gotten hooked on a bolt just at the moment that Nostalgia, a robust man from Santander, was pulling downward with his full body weight.
“There’s been an accident!” came the voice of alarm, and Nostalgia was lifted out by two fellow workers who took him to the hospital, caked with mud and with a frozen look on his face, less from pain than from confusion. His pupils were focused on a right hand that didn’t seem to be his because it weighed less than the other and because it was wrapped in a towel soaked with blood.
“That’s why the company has prohibited the use of metal rings or chains, loose shirttails outside of pants, or any other whim that lends itself to this kind of accident,” said Demetrio the nurse, as he removed the towel, looking at the useless space where the absent finger used to be. He was surprised by the surgical cleanness of the cut and he sewed the stump with coarse stitches, as if he were mending a burlap sack. “That’s why there is a rule that workers must wear shoes and not sandals, which leave the feet unprotected. But they don’t follow the rules, so they have to face the consequences.”
A massive female assembly congregated the next day at Olguita’s house, and while they awaited the arrival of the mutilated man, they busied themselves by speculating on the fate of the ring finger.
“I say they should throw it to the dogs.”
“They say the ring wouldn’t come off the finger…”
“The ring should be given back to Nayib; Nayib should reimburse Nostalgia his money and the finger should be thrown in the river.”
“To be eaten by the catfish that we will eat later? What a disgusting idea. It should be buried in some corner of the cemetery; it would fit inside a cigarette box.”
“We could also preserve it in formaldehyde, as a memento…,” suggested Olga, who was sentimental and given to making the sign of the cross over things that had to do with blood.
“Bury it in your garden and plant a chamomile bush on top of it, so that it will grow really poisonous and deadly,” proposed Sayonara, who always came up with ferocious initiatives.
“The things you say, girl!”
At that moment the women parted to create an alley of honor so that the mute Nostalgia could pass. He was coming to Olguita in search of an explanation and consolation, already aware that he had lost not only a finger and part of his hand but also the possibility of continuing with his career as a welder. The company had given him a bonus and a month’s leave for the damages suffered, but it was public knowledge that at the Troco the injured stayed on to run errands, to do gardening, or for other tasks for low wages and even lower dignity.
“What do you think happened to the ring?” asked Nostalgia, who hadn’t thought of asking about the finger’s whereabouts. “I bought it to give to my woman someday; she’s been complaining for sixteen years that we haven’t gotten married. It must still be in the well, I guess… where would the ring be? Does anyone know?”
“Forget about the ring, Nostalgia,” ordered Todos los Santos. “With your accident it has been proven once more that these barbaric lands only tolerate single men and that around here marriage brings calamity.”
Neither the finger nor the ring ever appeared, and in time Nostalgia, who became a messenger for the Troco offices, forgot about them and his welder’s dreams, and although for the rest of his life he kept on showing the photographs of his wife, his children, and his dogs to anyone who would let him, he never went back to find them. But that doesn’t mean he turned into a pitiful man; he maintained the custom of coming down to Tora every week or two to receive from Olga, as a sort of consolation prize, a tender embrace between freshly ironed linen sheets.
twenty-three
“Dress nicely and brush your hair, I am going to take you to see the other world,” Todos los Santos announced one day to Sayonara and her four sisters, Ana, Susana, Juana, and little Chuza.