“I’m not sick,” Mayta stuttered. “Tell me about the kid before I go.”
“You are sick,” Adelaida insisted, trying to look him in the eye. “Are you cured, maybe?”
“It isn’t a sickness, Adelaida,” I stammered. I could feel that my palms were sweaty, and I was even thirstier.
“In your case, it is,” she said, and Matya thought something had reawakened all her resentment of before. It was his fault: What were you doing there, why didn’t you leave? “In others, it’s degenerate, but that kind of vice has nothing to do with you. I know all about it, I talked to that doctor about it. He said it could be cured, and you didn’t want to try shock treatments. I offered to get a loan from the bank for the therapy, but you said no, no, no. Now that it’s all over, tell me the truth. Why didn’t you want to go through with it? Were you scared?”
“Shock treatment is useless for these things,” I said, muttering. “Let’s not talk about it. Could I please have a glass of water?”
Wasn’t it possible that marrying you was his “therapy,” ma’am? Couldn’t he have married her, thinking that living with a young, attractive woman would “cure” him?
“That’s what he wanted me to believe, when we finally got around to talking,” Adelaida says softly, pushing back her hair. “A lie, of course. If he had wanted to be cured, he would have tried. He married me to cover up. Above all, in front of his revolutionary buddies. I was the screen for his filthy activities.”
“If you don’t want to, you don’t have to answer this question. Did you two have a normal sex life?”
She doesn’t seem to be uncomfortable. Because there are so many dead and it’s impossible to bury them, the rebel commanders order them doused with anything flammable and burned. The rotting bodies scattered through the city must not be the cause of infection. The air is so thick and polluted that you can scarcely breathe. Adelaida uncrosses her legs, makes herself comfortable, and scrutinizes me. Otherwise, there is a clamor. An armored car has taken up a position in front of the barbed wire. There are more guards. Things must have gotten worse. It looks as if they’re getting ready for something.
As if she had read my mind, Adelaida says softly, “If they are attacked, we’ll be the first to be fired on.” The crackling of the bonfires of corpses doesn’t silence the irrepressible, maddened voices of the relatives and friends who try to stop the burning, who demand Christian burial for the victims. Swathed in smoke, stench, fear, and despair, some try to wrench the bodies away from the revolutionaries. From a monastery, church, or convent there comes a funeral procession. It advances, ghostlike, the people chanting prayers and imprecations amid the dying and the ruin that is Cuzco.
“I had no idea what normal or abnormal relations were,” she says, pushing back her hair in her ritual gesture. “I couldn’t make any comparisons. In those days, you didn’t discuss those things with your girlfriends. So I thought they were normal.”
But they weren’t. They lived together and from time to time they made love. Which meant that on certain nights they hugged and kissed, finished rapidly, and went to sleep. Something superficial, routine, hygienic, something that — as she realized later — was incomplete, far short of her needs and desires. It isn’t that she didn’t like Mayta’s politeness — he always turned out the light beforehand. But she had the feeling that he was in a hurry, on edge, thinking about something else even as he caressed her. Was his mind somewhere else? Yes, as he asked himself at what moment this desire that had aroused his body by means of fantasies and memories would begin to fade, to sink, to plunge him into that well of anguish from which he would try to extricate himself by stammering stupid explanations that Adelaida, luckily, seemed to believe. His thoughts were on other nights or dawns, when his desire did not fade and even seemed to get sharper if his hands and mouth were kept busy, not with Adelaida, but with one of those little fags that, after great hesitation, he dared to seek out in Porvenir or Callao. In fact, they made love only a few times, and at first Adelaida didn’t know how to ask him not to finish so quickly. Later, when she was surer of herself, she did ask him. She begged him, implored him not to withdraw from her, exhausted, exactly when she had begun to feel a stirring, a vertigo. Most often, she didn’t even feel that, because Mayta would suddenly seem to be sorry for what he was doing. And she was such a sucker that, until that night, she had tortured herself wondering: Is it my fault? Am I frigid? Can’t I get him excited?
“May I have another glass of water?” Mayta said. “Then I’m on my way, Adelaida.”
She got up, and when she returned to the small living room, she brought, with the water, a handful of photographs. She handed them over without saying a word. The newborn child, the child a few months old in diapers, in Juan Zárate’s arms; at a birthday party, next to a cake with two candles; in short pants and in shoes, at attention, staring at the photographer. I examined them again and again, examining himself at the same time that he studied the features, the positions, the gestures, the clothes of his child, whom he had never seen and whom he would never see in the future. Would he remember these pictures tomorrow in Jauja? Would I remember them, would they go with me, would they give me courage on the march in the cold uplands, in the jungle, during attacks, while I wait in ambush? What did he feel as he looked at them? Would he feel, when he remembered them, that the struggle, the sacrifices, the murders were things he’d do for his sake? Right now, did he feel tenderness, remorse, anguish, love? No, just curiosity, and gratitude toward Adelaida for having shown him the photographs. Was this the reason that brought him to this house before he left for Jauja? Or, more than meeting his son, could it have been to find out if Adelaida was still resentful for that thing which doubtless was the agony of her existence?
“I don’t know,” says Adelaida. “If that’s why he came, he went away knowing that, despite the many years that had gone by, I hadn’t forgiven him for ruining my life.”
“But even though you knew, you stayed with him for quite a while. You even became pregnant.”
“Inertia,” she whispers. “Being pregnant gave me the strength to end the whole farce.”
She had suspected it for weeks, because her period had never been so late. The day she received the positive test results, she began to cry with excitement. Almost immediately, however, she was overcome with the thought that someday her son or daughter would know what she knew. Over the previous weeks, they had had several arguments about shock treatments.
“It wasn’t because I was afraid,” he said in a low voice as he looked at her. “It was because I didn’t want to be cured, Adelaida.”
So, in that last conversation, you two spoke about the unmentionable. Yes, and even Mayta had been much more frank than he’d been when they were living together. The procession kept picking up people from the streets it passed along, horrifying, somnambulistic men and women, children and old people stunned because they saw sons, brothers, grandchildren with their bones splintered, crushed by falling rubble, and burned in the hygienic fires. This chanting and tearful serpent squeezing through the ruinous, narrow streets of Cuzco seemed to console and reconcile the survivors. Suddenly, in the area that had been the Plaza del Rey, fighters and their supporters waving rifles and red flags tried to raise the spirit of the people and to keep them from becoming demoralized by starting a demonstration. There was an avalanche of shouts, stones, shots, and a terrified howling.
“If I didn’t know it was against your principles, I’d ask you to have an abortion,” said Mayta, as if he had prepared the statement. “There are plenty of good reasons. The life I lead, that we lead. Is it possible to bring up a child in the midst of that kind of life? What I do requires total dedication. I just can’t hang that around my neck. Anyway, if it isn’t against your principles. If it is, we’ll just have to do our best.”