Also arduous was the challenge imposed upon them by the girl’s chronic skinniness, which was like that of a malnourished cat, because the more she ate the thinner she looked for her size, with hollow cheeks, scanty bust, and inordinately long extremities. Todos los Santos maintained that all of the food the girl ate went to her hair, which, at the expense of the rest of her body, grew robust and out of control, and if she were to cut it she would gain the pounds it had snatched from her.
“It’s alive,” said Olguita, enthralled, as she combed it into braids. “And I think it bites.”
They knew that cutting it would be a hideous crime, so they decided instead to force its owner to consume a double ration of soup, bread, and fruit, one for her and the other for her hair, which in all honesty was the only party that benefited from the overeating and ended up becoming a cascade of dark, murmuring waters.
“Since God limited you to such poverty of flesh, you have no other choice but to study dance,” recommended Todos los Santos, resolved to find a way out by another means, and she revealed the secrets of a certain dance that wasn’t performed with footsteps, wiggling, or shaking hips but with undulation, absences, and stillness. She told the girl that Salomé had managed to bewitch John the Baptist because she knew the magic of moving without movement.
The girl embraced those words, never needing to have them repeated, and surprised her teacher with the engrossed naturalness with which she let herself sway with a deep, measured rhythm that wasn’t cumbia or merengue, but the ebb and flow of her own blood along the clandestine paths of her body.
“I enjoyed watching her dance,” Todos los Santos tells me. “And at the same time it terrified me, because I understood then that we were losing her. Only when she danced did she give herself license to visit the land of her own memories and to escape into the enormity of the vault that was inside her. She danced and I knew she was swimming in distant waters, as if visiting other worlds, perhaps worse, or perhaps better.”
Perhaps worse or perhaps better, but never shared. From the beginning it was obvious that the young girl was no friend of commentary or gossip, even less so if it were about her, and that she maintained the hermeticism of a statue about her past, which made one think of the painful or guilt-ridden reasons that caused her to hide it. When they asked her where were you born, what is your name, how old are you, she slipped away with nonanswers into a silent void of memories, or sometimes just the opposite, she would overflow with words, filling the house with mindless chatter that was even more concealing than her muteness.
“Were you born yesterday?” asked Todos los Santos. “Spit out your past, child, or it will rot inside you.”
That negation of memory made her the pure vibration of a present that burned in front of your eyes the instant that it was contemplated, like a scene illuminated by the flash of a camera. Although at times things escaped from her, now and then she would carelessly reveal little fragments.
“Do you like my new skirt?” asked Tana.
“Cecilia had one just like it,” she said. “Except yellow, not green.”
So they quickly asked her who Cecilia was, perhaps your mother, or an aunt, maybe a friend of your mother’s? Can you answer us, for the love of God, who was Cecilia?
“What Cecilia?” was her reply, surprised at all the insistence, as if she had never uttered such a name.
One day an old client and lover of Todos los Santos asked for a date to say good-bye; tired of going daily to the offices of the Troco to collect a perpetually delayed payment for an accident, he had decided to leave for Antioquia to help his son start a coffee farm. It was an evocative and nostalgic occasion and Todos los Santos was busy exquisitely attending to her friend while the girl, wearing her oversized blouse, devoted herself to pestering Aspirina, Tana’s dog, tying red ribbons around her ears, not paying any attention to the visit, or at least so it seemed, and without interrupting. Until at the end, when the gentleman was about to leave, she caught up with him at the door and stopped him.
“If somewhere you run across a woman from Guayaquil that they call La Calzones,” she ventured, “tell her that her niece asked you to tell her that she’s doing fine.”
Just like that, like a cannon shot, Todos los Santos learned that her student was happy in La Catunga and that in some part of the country she had an aunt with a vulgar nickname, by which she deduced that the girl’s vocation came to her by family tradition.
“That explains something,” I tell her, “but not much. Really it explains almost nothing.”
“That’s right.”
Not even during the hardest stages of training did the student give signs of defeat or weakening; she didn’t complain, she didn’t express pleasure or sadness, heat or cold, nor did she soften even one millimeter the military discipline she had imposed upon herself, as if responding to a sense of duty that was greater than she herself. Only once did she refuse to obey, when Todos los Santos asked her to clean the pigsty that was fairly buzzing with a horrendous stench at the rear of the house.
“I decided to became a puta so I wouldn’t have to clean up caca ever again,” grumbled the girl.
“Well, you made a mistake. You should know that here you will earn more from washing a gringo’s laundry than from going to bed with a man. In order to survive, a woman of the profession must also apply herself as seamstress, cook, fortune-teller, and nurse, and she must not be repelled by any task that life imposes on her, no matter how humbling or difficult it may be. So go back and get the bucket and brush and make that patio clean as a whistle.”
One night of supernatural clarity, Todos los Santos awoke in the middle of a coughing fit and, between gasps, asked for a glass of water. The girl didn’t respond because she wasn’t on her mattress but instead was sitting at the front door in her nightshirt and barefoot, framed in the moonlight and absorbed in the slow amazement descending from the highest abysses. Her perplexity was so deep, so vibrant that, touched, the madrina scoured the cellars of her memory looking for an explanation that had been with her a long time ago, before years and years of struggling and scratching for her daily bread had taught her to live without explanations.
“Up there in the sky, the seven planets spin and sing around the Earth,” she said, pulling up a stool to sit beside the girl in the brilliant darkness. “The Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, and the Sun. Each one has a corresponding musical note, a metal from the chart of elements, and a day of the week. The moon that robs you of your sleep is made of solid silver, whistles songs in the key of C, and reigns over Mondays. The great buzzing produced by the universe is what wise men call the music of the spheres, and the primary voice in this excellent concert is our Earth’s.”
“If that’s true, why can’t I hear it?”
“You do hear it, you were listening to it just now when I found you.”
“What is our Earth singing?”
“A song of the wind, made with your breath and mine and that of all men and women, alive, dead, and yet to be born.”
“We’d better go back inside, madrina, or all that tremendous wind will catch you and you’ll start coughing again.”
three
I ask what had happened in Sacramento’s life during all this time and they tell me that in the afternoons, after five o’clock, he would visit the girl and play with her.
“Play?” I ask. “Wasn’t he a little old to be playing?”
“But he was just a boy…”