It had just begun, in an unforeseen, unpremeditated manner, this violent jolt that would forever mark the lives of everyone involved in this story, and that from that time on would come to be known as the rice strike.
twenty-five
For a while now, Sayonara had taken to visiting Dr. Antonio María Flórez’s office almost daily, not for a genital exam — something she never agreed to, despite the doctor’s insistence — but to help him with his duties. She demonstrated skill as a nurse and had a particular passion for sicknesses, which led her to insert her finger in every wound, to volunteer to give injections and remove sutures, to examine any rash, swelling, or suppuration she laid her eyes on, and to ask with insatiable curiosity about symptoms, remedies, and medicines.
“Sometimes I think, Doc, that men don’t love me,” was the surprising comment from out of nowhere that she made to Dr. Flórez on Wednesday evening, after they had seen the last patient and were preparing to close the office and leave for their respective homes.
“What do you mean, you who are so loved by all of them?”
“That doesn’t mean anything, Doc. What I want is just one man who loves me, but really loves me. The way you love and protect your wife, you know?” she asked as she scrubbed her hands with disinfectant soap, erasing the day’s chores.
Dr. Antonio María didn’t answer her either yes or no, instead he simply stood behind her as she washed her hands with the honest movements of someone who is unaware of being watched. He looked at her as he had never allowed himself to do before, that is to say, with eyes that seek to possess that upon which they are resting, and with the painful tension of desire he studied those hands with their long fingers and almond-shaped nails, all the more amazing for someone like the doctor, whose own nails capped stubby fingers. Then, slowly, breath by breath, he noticed the soft line of her arm as it disappeared into her short sleeve, and then moved his eyes immediately to the sea-shell of her ear, which offered him the fascination of a small labyrinth of flesh, then on to the shining glory of her hair that refused to stay out of her face even though she had shaken her head, and it slid forward again, back over her shoulders, alive and untamed, to fall forward and mingle with the splashing water. And it should be said, because Dr. Antonio María himself acknowledges it today, that in that opportunity his eyes took minute notice of the arousing vibration of the girl’s buttocks, caused by the energetic movements of her hands as she rinsed them.
An hour later the doctor was sitting at his kitchen table in front of a plate of arroz atollado and lettuce salad served by his wife, Albita Lucía, for whom the turbulence dancing in his mind didn’t go unnoticed.
“You’re coming from a place that you still haven’t been able to leave,” she said to him, and to cover up he asked her to pass the pepper, but he wasn’t able to prevent her from reading the images that moments before had been captured in his retinas.
“Do you think that I wouldn’t have liked to be a puta?” she asked him, tilting her head of brassy curls in such a delightful manner that it immediately yanked him away from his journey through someone else’s woman and brought him back to the complacency of finding himself at home with his very own.
“Really?” he inquired, intrigued and amused, letting out one of those laughs that exposed his rabbit’s teeth to the elements. “I never suspected that you would want to go to bed with a lot of men.”
“I don’t want to. If I were a puta, I would call myself Precious and I would charge so much that no man could afford me.”
The next day Dr. Antonio María left the clinic earlier than usual, asking Sayonara to be sure to lock the door securely when she left.
“Adiós, child. I have to go now, because Precious is waiting for me at home,” he said in parting. He hurried away from the clinic and didn’t want to look back because he knew that Sayonara would be standing in the doorway, watching him leave, illuminated by the glow of loneliness that always surrounded her and that if he turned to look at her he would have been unable to resist the temptation to hug her tightly.
“Be gone, sorrow!” Piruetas was heard to shout as he came down the middle of the street with little dance steps and clowning around, with a bottle of white rum in his hand and clinging to a pair of very drunk girls.
“Be gone, sorrow,” they say Sayonara repeated as she locked the clinic door.
twenty-six
I am trying to concentrate on fragments of information about the famous rice strike that I have compiled from the press of the era, from files and from union documents, but my head is speeding off in ten different directions at the same time, as if trying to take in everything with one fell swoop. Writing this story has turned into an already lost race against time and faulty memory, twin brothers with long fingers that touch everything. Each day they appear and momentarily stir up before my eyes glimpses and reflections of situations, of moments, of words spoken or unspoken, of faces that I recognize as invaluable, loose pieces of the great puzzle of La Catunga, which overwhelm me with their little voices shouting for me to pay attention to them and ordering me to document them in writing or else they will be swept away by a broom and become lost among the debris. I cannot keep up with this attempt to imprison a world that goes by in flashes like a dream remembered upon waking, elusive in its vagueness and hallucinatory in its intensity.
Just as it is with my own dreams, I alone have the opportunity to bring into focus this fragile and volatile kaleidoscope, made of insect’s wings; only for me does the keyhole exist, inviting me to spy, while on the other side of the door the disappearance continues little by little, and the only things that will endure are those that I am able to capture and to pierce with a pin to affix them to these pages.
But the task is more devilish still, because I am also assaulted by the conviction that, contradictorily, the very act of inserting myself into a foreign and private story, of sniffing around what otherwise would have disintegrated, of clearing the dust from shelves where already little more than dust remains, accelerates the fall into oblivion, just as occurred in Fellini’s film Roma, where the camera, as it enters an ancient domus, hermetically sealed for centuries, catches a momentary glimpse of some frescoes that vanish instantaneously upon contact with the devastating external atmosphere. The same camera that perpetuates the image of the frescoes is what has destroyed them, as if they were real only as long as no one looked at them. I sense that like those frescoes, La Catunga is self-sufficient, can conserve itself in its own oblivion, and lives only when others ignore it.
Yet, at the same time it doesn’t exist if I am not here to bear witness. And because of that I persevere, I meddle, I violate the story’s reserve. This morning, for example, I was awakened by the need to define an image that earlier had barely caught my attention, that of the painter who at some point had done the oil portrait of Mistinguett that provoked such displeasure in her. Had it been just an ordinary artist, or an unknown amateur, or was it possibly someone who had managed to endure in museums and reproductions? Did that painting still exist, the one in which Mistinguett said she looked like a chicken? Curiosity compelled me to get up at once and, without pausing for breakfast, drove me to Todos los Santos’s house.