“You’re too hard on them,” chastised Olga, who felt congratulatory because of Sayonara’s return and offered mantecadas and pandeyucas, because for them there was no better way to express affection than by showering others with an abundance of food. “Married women also scrub the floor and put salt in the soup and suffer disillusions, just like us…”
“Hush, Olguita!” said Todos los Santos to silence her, “you shouldn’t make any concessions whatsoever. Like I said, the wives gobbling cake and wine, and the putas? The putas, who feel out of style and cornered, have had to invent a whole repertoire of tricks in bed just to survive.
“To be sought after, professional women found it indispensable to know how to juggle, fence, and display other exquisite talents difficult to even imagine before, and now lost is the girl who isn’t able to perform agilely and without fuss such feats as the double bowl, the golden shower, the dead dog, the angel’s leap, the big suck, the dyke dip, the garage door, the drop of milk, and any number of exotic acts invented by mankind, even reaching the extreme of shaving pubic hair to guarantee the clients, ever more demanding and coarse, that they were free from lice.
“Machuca? Since she can’t hear us, Machuca decided to paint her nipples purple…”
forty-six
“He was a Mexican telegraph operator, and he called Sayonara mi guadalupana because he compared her to the Virgen de Guadalupe, also Mexican and with hair as long and beautiful as the Virgen del Carmen’s and Sayonara’s own,” Todos los Santos tells me of a man named Renato Leduc, who was brought to Tora by life’s winding road. “That’s what he called her, mi guadalupana, and since he also wrote her verses, the day he decided to return to his country because of her indifference he left her a farewell poem that I still have. I will show it to you if and when I find it, because it was such a long time ago. .. It was before the rice strike, during the golden era of the Dancing Miramar.
After digging through boxes, sacks, and drawers, Todos los Santos presents me with the following poem, typewritten and signed by the telegraph operator Renato Leduc:
Jovian pain of losing
adored things. Pain that oft
costs your life,
and oft costs naught.
I once told you: I love you,
as I had never said before
nor ever will again so true.
I said it to you in desperation
because I knew that very soon
another would say it too.
I said it in desperation,
but I have nothing to regret.
I loved you so, I loved you
because in your eyes so fair
was a piece of infinity;
because of your chestnut hair,
because of your mouth
barbarously naked
I loved you, I loved you so.. .
But so many people loved you
at once,
that I told myself: it is implausible
to plead
— if so many people love her—
things she does not need.
I thought of killing myself
then,
but I didn’t, because
I asked myself, why?
Lost in pain and grief
I let my beard grow
because that limpid love so brief
from it derived such merriment,
since virgins have always found
— or so they say — in beards much amusement.
Jovian pain of losing.. .
Apart from being a poet, there is little I am able to find out in Tora about the author, who defined himself as a bureaucrat of the lowest level. I know that when he arrived here he lodged at the Casa de Huéspedes, belonging to Conchita la Tapatía, a fellow Mexican, and that during the many nights in which they shared reminiscences of their motherland over glasses of Vat 69, he told her that he had trained for his profession at the Escuela Nacional de Telégrafos in Mexico City, which occupied an old building on Calle Donceles, next to the women’s insane asylum, and that he had started working before he turned thirteen — before he even had hair on his balls, he said — to help support his widowed mother. That before he arrived in Tora he had passed through Paris, where the puticas in the Latin Quarter taught him how to speak French; that he was fiercely anticlerical and aluciferado, a term he himself used, meaning “possessed by the devil”; “a man who had lived a great deal,” as Todos los Santos said; a man who was stuck on Sayonara from the first time he saw her through the window of the telegraph office in Tora, who became her most assiduous and starry-eyed client, and who weekly left in her hands nearly the entirety of his scant weekly salary.
“You can’t offer your heart to a woman like that,” admonished his Colombian best friend, a giant of a man named Valentín.
“For a woman like that, I have nothing but heart,” Renato replied.
“Love me,” Leduc begged Sayonara.
“I can’t love you. I look at you and I don’t see you.”
“You have an empty pot where other women hold their feelings,” the telegraph poet told her, and she realized that he was right, in part.
Then, enamored and in pain, he quit his job, packed a trunk with all of his books and his two changes of clothes, wrote the final poem, titled it “Romance of the Lost,” sent it to the addressee in an envelope, and returned to his Mexico, where he was heard to say that he had left Colombia to flee the indifference of a distant lover bent on remaining a puta.
forty-seven
The day after her return to Tora, Sayonara shook off her exhaustion by sleeping until the middle of the morning, and when she arose she found her madrina, Machuca, and Olga whispering suspiciously in the kitchen.
“Are you going to tell me what you are up to?” she asked them. “Since last night you’ve been plotting something behind my back and it’s time for you to tell me what it is.”
“We’re going to tell you, we already decided that. It’s bad news. About your sister Ana.”