I found her up and about and particularly spirited, renewed by a sudden burst of vanity: She had cloaked her old age and her ailments in a showy, bright-pink nylon nightgown, had mounted upon her withered bun a tall Spanish comb encrusted with gems, and wore on her feet a pair of slippers made of rabbit skin dyed a soft shade of pink.
“You look very elegant, Todos los Santos.”
“They are simply artifices to mask the weariness,” she clarified, and I began to question her about the famous painter while she, all pink and vaporous, visited one by one the cages of the strange zoo of small captive animals, unpleasant like all zoos, that she kept on the patio, in the garden, the corridor, and the kitchen of the house she shared with Fideo and Olga.
“That portrait? Who knows where it ended up?” she answered, as she tried to focus her dull pupils on a bizarre, awkward bird that was looking at her with round, pearly eyes like a pair of shell buttons. Missing a leg, the bird was clinging with the remaining one to the old woman’s finger, wings flapping painfully to keep its balance as she offered it a piece of plantain.
“What kind of bird is that, and who amputated its foot?”
“It is a chuachí and when they brought it to me, as a baby, it was already mutilated, the poor thing. His name is Felipe.”
She told me that in spite of her reputation as a diva, Mistinguett was in reality a fat and wicked woman with large breasts, and that the painter, in contrast, was a timid and desperately fragile man, who from that day on never again made “modern portraits” of the girls because he had been discredited for making them look ugly, with wild hair and terrified eyes, as if they had been run over by a train.
“Except for the pipatonas. He did paint them in the modern style, because it didn’t bother them,” Todos los Santos told me, now feeding rice to a friendly parrot that was walking up her arm and shoulder onto her head to peck at the stones shining in her comb.
“And what is this meddling parrot’s name?”
“He’s not a parrot, he’s a guacamayeta, and his name is Felipe.”
“Are they all named Felipe?”
“No, that monkey’s name is Niño.”
“And that cross between a fish and a pig?”
“He’s a zaíno and he’s still just a baby. His name is Niño and he’s my baby.”
“Niño!” she called out, and Niño trotted over, and several other un-classified specimens who must also have been named Niño grew restless and turned to look at her.
“I suppose that painter left La Catunga to look for another place where his paintings would be more appreciated…”
“No, he didn’t leave,” Todos los Santos corrected me impatiently. “I already told you he stayed with the pipatonas, letting them take care of him and painting them for free in the modern style, and at the same time, to earn a living, he painted a series of landscapes in a more conventional style. Those we did admire, and we would buy landscapes from him every now and then.”
As I was able to establish later on — only through hearsay, because I was never able to see any of his paintings—“the series of conventional landscapes” consisted of a few seascapes painted from descriptions he’d heard, several Paris street scenes — also improvised because just as he had never seen the ocean, he had never traveled to Paris either — and a few sunsets in fierce violets and dramatic oranges that turned out to be his greatest commercial success because they were widely admired by the putas of Tora, including Todos los Santos.
“That was art! That was inspiration!” she exclaimed excitedly, as she changed the water in the cage of a toucan with an enormous yellow beak. “He was short and had a pale complexion, but I have heard, although I wouldn’t know from experience, that he was the happy owner of a powerful and oversized sex organ, something like this toucan’s beak. His name was Enrique. Enrique Ladrón de Guevara y Vernantes, with more family names than a telephone directory, because he came from a distinguished family.”*
But his landowning and aristocratic blood didn’t save him from moral sorrows or physical calamities. On the contrary, he was chained to them by several generations of intermixing Guevara thieves with Vernantes ladies, and of Guevara ladies with Vernantes thieves, who chose to marry among themselves to maintain their properties undivided and their lineage pure. With the lamentable result, unacknowledged by the family even in the face of the evidence, that defects and degeneration were twisting and deforming them until they began to produce circus freaks, whose physical rarities were attributed to the pernicious effects of supposed contracted illnesses and never to hereditary defects. Among these latter was Enrique, with his height of scarcely four and a half feet that was further reduced by the curvature of his misshapen legs. And as if his forsaken body weren’t punishment enough, he was covered with, instead of hair, eyebrows, and beard, a fuzz like dried dandelion blossoms, more transparent than white, and only comparable in lack of pigmentation to his skin — a silk paper with a propensity for being damaged by the slightest accident — which was the insipid color of watery milk and tinged with bluish highlights from the underlying network of illustrious veins.
“So Enrique Ladrón de Guevara y Vernantes was an albino dwarf?” I said to Todos los Santos.
“For Mistinguett and the others at the Dancing Miramar he was an albino dwarf, as you say, and they disdainfully ridiculed his physical defects, but to the women at La Copa Rota, which was the lowliest cave of a café, he was always respectfully called don Enrique. But if you want to know so much, go ask Fideo; no one knew him like she did.”
Fideo, skinnier than can be imagined, lies dark and shriveled like a dried prune in the hammock that is her deathbed, regurgitating memories and struggling to stay alive, because although she has wanted to leave this world for some time, her fear of death binds her to life. Sober and lucid only now, on the eve of her great, definitive drunken spree, she pulls out a contraband drop of enthusiasm amidst the miseries of her agony and smiles when I mention don Enrique’s name.
“Ay, don Enrique!” she sighs, and catches her breath. “Ay, don Enrique…”
Fideo, the excruciatingly thin dancer at La Copa Rota, a drunk at the age of thirteen, fourteen at the most, and already filled with vices, initiated sometime earlier by force into the arts of hard love. “Dance, Fideo! Dance, skinny girl!” shout the barefoot tagüeros who frequent the place, sitting in the darkness on bundles of sorghum, oats, and rice, and she disrobes, takes a drink, and raises her arms, then half closes her eyes and undulates her wire-like waist, another drink and her dark body — almost a whisper, barely a shadow — turns golden in the reflection of candlelight while at her feet, which are encased in an old pair of white children’s shoes, it rains coins. While the others pretend not to notice, one of the tagüeros stands up drunkenly, raises Fideo in the air as if she were weightless, and takes her behind the curtain in the rear, toward the back rooms.
There was no place for a creature like Fideo in the red and black velvet rooms of the Dancing Miramar nor on the less pretentious stages in dance halls like Las Camelias, Tabarín, or Quinto Patio. They wouldn’t allow her in riffraff bars like Candilejas or El Cantinflas, or even in La Burraca, a late-night pool hall where schoolboys secretly went in search of old putas who would teach them how to love in exchange for a lemonade or a mogolla.
“Why?” I ask Todos los Santos. “Why did they refuse her entry everywhere? For being an alcoholic?”