Thus Were Their Faces Page 17

  When Leopoldina saw us come back, she said she was very tired, as if she had made the trip, and slept for the first time after twenty days of insomnia.

  “What a rogue,” Ludovica said. “She sleeps to show us her scorn.” As soon as they saw her waking up they asked her, “What did you dream about? You must tell us what you dreamed.”

  Leopoldina stammered a few words. Ludovica shook her by the arm.

  “If you don’t tell us your dream, Leonor will give you a shot,” she added, showing her the syringe.

  “I dreamt that a dog was writing my story: here it is,” Leopoldina said, showing several sheets of wrinkled, dirty paper. “Won’t you read them out loud, my dears, so that I can listen to them?”

  “Can’t you dream about more important things?” said Leonor indignantly, throwing the sheets on the ground. Then she brought a huge book that smelled of cat urine, with color plates, that the teacher had lent her. After carefully looking through it, she paused over several of the plates, which she showed Leopoldina, rubbing them with her index finger. “Automobiles,” she said, then, turning the page, “necklaces,” another page, “bracelets,” blowing on the pages, “jewels,” wetting her finger with a drop of spit, “clocks,” turning the pages with their fingers. “These are the things you have to dream about, not all that trash.”

  It was at that moment, Leopoldina, that I spoke to you, but you didn’t hear me, because you were sleeping again and something had changed from the time of your last dream to this one.

  “Do you remember my ancestors? If you see them in me—big-bellied, rude, hot-blooded, and trembling—you will remember the most sumptuous objects you ever saw: the medallion, gold-plated with a lock of hair inside, that you received as a wedding gift; the stones of your mother’s necklace, which your daughter-in-law stole; the box full of aquamarine pendants, the sewing machine, the clock, the carriage drawn by horses so old they were docile. It seems incredible, but all that existed once. Do you remember the dazzling shop in Tafí del Valle where you bought a clasp with a picture of a dog that resembled me, carved in a stone? I am the only one who can remind you of those, I who wrapped your breast to cure you of asthma.”

  “If you don’t sleep we’ll give you a shot,” threatened Ludovica.

  Terrified, Leopoldina went back to sleep. Rocking back and forth, the wicker chair made a strange noise.

  “I wonder if there are thieves,” said Leonor.

  “There’s no moon.”

  “It must be the spirits,” answered Leonor.

  “Did you know why I was crying? Because I felt the hot wind blowing from the Andes.”

  Neither Leonor nor Ludovica could hear it, because their voices echoed so. Desperate, or perhaps hopeful, they asked, “What did you dream? What did you dream?”

  But Leopoldina left without answering. She said to me, “Let’s go, Changuito—it’s time.”

  At that very moment a hot wind started blowing. In former days it had always made itself known to Christians in advance, with a very clear sky, a pale sun, its outline distinct, and a threatening noise like the sea (which I have never seen) in the distance. But this time it arrived like lightning, sweeping the patio, piling up leaves and branches in the hollows of the hills, beheading the animals against the rocks, destroying the harvest. A whirlwind swept Leopoldina and me into the air: I, her little dog Changuito, who wrote this story during my mistress’s next-to-last dream.

  THE WEDDING

  FOR A YOUNG woman of Roberta’s age to pay attention to me, to go out for walks with me, to confide in me, was a joy that none of my friends could share. She had control of me, and I loved her, not because she gave me candy or marbles or colored pencils but because she sometimes spoke to me as if I were big, sometimes as if both of us were six years old.

  The control Roberta had over me was mysterious: she said I guessed her every thought and desire. She was thirsty: I would bring her a glass of water she hadn’t asked for. She was hot: I fanned her or brought her a handkerchief moistened in cologne. She had a headache: I offered her an aspirin or a cup of coffee. She wanted a flower: I gave it to her. If she had given me an order—“Gabriela, jump out of the window,” or “Put your hand in the coals,” or “Run on the railroad tracks so the train will hit you”—I would have obeyed instantly.

  We all lived on the outskirts of the city of Córdoba. Arminda López was my next-door neighbor and Roberta Carma lived across the street. Arminda López and Roberta Carma loved each other like cousins, which they were, but at times they addressed each other rather harshly: that happened especially when they were talking about clothes, underwear, hairstyles, or boyfriends. They never thought about their jobs. Half a block from our houses was the Lovely Waves beauty salon. Once a month Roberta took me there. While they bleached her hair with peroxide and ammonia, I played with the stylist’s gloves, spray bottle, combs, hairpins, a hair dryer that looked like a warrior’s helmet, and an old wig the hairdresser was especially kind to let me play with. That wig pleased me more than anything in the world, more than the walks to Ongamira or the Sugarloaf, more than fruit pastries or the bluish horse that crossed the vacant lot when it was wandering around the block, without reins or saddle, distracting me from my school studies.

  Arminda Lopez’s engagement distracted me more than the beauty parlor or the strolls. During those days I got bad grades, the worst of my whole life.

  Roberta took me by trolley to the Oriental Café. There we had hot chocolate with vanilla wafers and a young man came up to talk to her. On the way back in the trolley Roberta told me that Arminda was luckier than she was because at twenty women either had to fall in love or throw themselves in the river.

  “Which river?” I asked, disturbed by these confidences.

  “You don’t understand. How could you? You’re still very young.”

  “When I marry, I’m going to have a beautiful hairpiece,” Arminda said. “My hair will catch every eye.”

  Roberta laughed and protested, “How old-fashioned. Nobody wears hairpieces anymore.”

  “You’re wrong. They’re in fashion again,” Arminda answered. “You’ll see: everybody will look at me.”

  The preparations for the wedding were long and painstaking. The gown was sumptuous. A piece of fine lace from her maternal grandmother adorned her dress, while a piece of lace from the paternal grandmother (so as not to make her jealous) adorned her veil. The dressmaker had Arminda try on the dress five times. Kneeling, her mouth full of pins, the dressmaker adjusted the hem or added pleats to the dress. Holding her father’s arm, Arminda crossed the patio of her house five times, entering her bedroom and stopping in front of a mirror to see how the pleated dress looked when she moved. Her hair was perhaps what most worried Arminda. She had dreamed about it all her life. She had an enormous hairpiece made with a lock of hair she had had cut off when she was fifteen. A delicate golden net with little pearls held it together; the hairdresser showed it off in his shop. According to her father, her hairpiece looked like a wig.

  On the morning of her wedding, the second of January, the thermometer reached 105. It was so hot that we didn’t have to wet our hair before combing it or rinse our faces with water to remove the dirt. Exhausted, Roberta and I were on the patio. It was getting dark. The sky, a leaden gray color, frightened us. The storm turned out to be only a lot of lightning and millions of bugs. A huge spider was sitting in the vine on the patio: to me, it seemed to be looking at us. I fetched a broomstick to kill it, but something stopped me. Roberta cried out, “It represents hope! A French lady once told me that a spider in the evening means hope.”

  “If it means hope, let’s keep it in a little box,” I said.

  Moving like a sleepwalker because she was tired (and virtuous), Roberta went to her room to look for a box.

  “Be careful. They’re poisonous,” she said.

  “And if it bites me?”

  “Spiders are like people: they bite to defend themselves. If you don’t do any
thing to them, they won’t do anything to you.”

  I opened a little box in front of the spider, and with a single hop it jumped inside. Afterwards I closed the top, making air holes in it with a pin.

  “What are you going to do with it?” Roberta asked.

  “Keep it.”

  “Don’t lose it,” Roberta answered.

  From then on, I walked around with the box in my pocket. The next morning we went to the beauty salon. It was Sunday. They were selling tablecloths and flowers on the street. Those joyful colors seemed to celebrate the nearness of the wedding. We had to wait for the hairdresser, who was at mass, while Roberta sat under the dryer.

  “You look like a warrior,” I shouted.

  She didn’t hear me and kept on reading her missal. Suddenly, I felt like playing with Arminda’s hairpiece, sitting there beside me. I took off the hairpins that held the locks together beneath the beautiful hairnet. Roberta seemed to be looking at me, but she must have been distracted and was just staring fixedly into space.

  “Shall I put the spider inside?” I asked, showing her the hairpiece.

  No doubt the noise of the hair dryer prevented her from hearing my voice. She didn’t answer me, but nodded as if in agreement. I opened the box, turning it upside down onto the hairpiece, and the spider fell inside. Then I rearranged the hair, quickly putting back the fine netting and the pins so no one would catch me by surprise. I must have done it with skill, because the hairdresser didn’t notice anything unusual in his work of art, as he himself termed the bridal adornment.

  “All of this will be a secret between us,” Roberta said, as we left the beauty shop, twisting my arm till I cried out. I couldn’t recall what secret she had told me that day. So I answered the way adults talk, “I’ll be silent as the grave.”

  Roberta wore a fringed yellow dress, and I wore a white starched dress with plumes and a lace insert. In the church, I didn’t stare at the bride because Roberta told me you didn’t have to stare at her. The bride was very pretty with a white veil full of orange blossoms. She was so pale she looked like an angel. Then she fell down, senseless. From afar, she looked like a curtain that had dropped. Many people rushed up to help her, fanning her, going to the chancel for water, patting her face. For a moment they thought she had died; the next moment they thought she was alive. They carried her to her house, cold as marble. They didn’t want to undress her or take off her hairpiece before putting her in the coffin. Shy, uncomfortable, ashamed, during the two days of the wake I accused myself of killing her.

  “How did you kill her, you nasty kid?” asked a distant relative of Arminda’s, who drank coffee incessantly.

  “With a spider,” I answered.

  My parents conferred, worried that they needed to call a doctor. Nobody ever believed me. Roberta hated me. I think I disgusted her and she never went out with me again.

  VOICE ON THE TELEPHONE

  NO, DON’T invite me to your nephews’ house. Children’s parties depress me. That probably seems silly to you. Yesterday you got mad because I didn’t want to light your cigarette. Everything is connected. So I’m crazy? Maybe. Since I can’t ever see you, I’m going to have to explain things on the phone. What things? The story of the matches. I hate the phone. Yes. I know you love it, but I would have preferred to tell you everything in the car, or on the way out of the movie theater, or in a coffee shop. I have to return to my childhood.

  “Fernando, if you play with matches, you’ll burn the house down,” my mother would tell me, or something like, “The whole house is going to be reduced to a little pile of ashes,” or maybe, “We will all fly away like fireworks.”

  Does that seem normal to you? That’s what I think too, but it made me want to touch matches even more, to caress them, to try lighting them, to live for them. The same thing happened with you and erasers? But they didn’t forbid you to touch them. Erasers don’t burn. You ate them? That’s different. The memories of when I was four tremble as if lit by fire. As I told you already, the house where I spent my childhood was huge: it had five bedrooms, two entrance halls, two living rooms with ceilings painted with clouds and little angels. You think I lived like a king? No, you’re wrong. There were always fights among the servants. They were divided into two groups: the supporters of my mother and the followers of Nicolás Simonetti. Who was he? Nicolás Simonetti was the cook: I was crazy about him. He threatened me, in jest, with a huge shiny knife, and gave me little slices of meat and lettuce to play with, and caramels I spilled on the marble floor. He contributed as much as my mother did to awakening my passion for matches, lighting them so I could blow them out. Due to my mother’s supporters, who were tireless, the food was never ready, or tasty, or cooked properly. There was always a hand that intercepted the plates and let them cool, that added talcum powder to the noodles, that dusted the eggs with ashes. All of this culminated in the appearance of a tremendously long hair in the rice pudding.

  “That is Juanita’s hair,” my father said.

  “No,” said my aunt, “I don’t want to ‘get her hair in my milk’—to me it tastes like Luisa’s.”

  My mother, who was very proud, stood up from the table in the middle of the meal and, grasping the hair between her fingertips, carried it to the kitchen. My mother was annoyed by the face of the cook, who was entranced, seeing it not as a hair but as a strand of black thread. I don’t know what sarcastic or wounding phrase made Nicolás Simonetti take off his apron, wrap it up in the shape of a ball as if to throw it away, and announce that he was leaving the household. I followed him to the bathroom where he got dressed and undressed each day. This time, he who paid me so much attention dressed without even looking at me. He combed his hair with a bit of grease he had left on his hands. I never saw hands that so resembled combs. Then, with dignity, he gathered up the molds, enormous knives, and spatulas in the kitchen, put them in the briefcase he always carried, and went toward the door with his hat on. To make him look at me I gave him a kick in the shins; he put his hand, smelling of lard, on my head, saying, “Goodbye, kid. Now many people will be able to appreciate Nicolás’s food. They’ll lick their lips.”

  You think that’s funny? I’ll keep on with my list: there were two studies. Why so many? I ask myself the same thing—nobody wrote. Eight hallways, three bathrooms (one with two sinks). Why two? Perhaps they washed with four hands. Two stoves (one inexpensive, the other electric), two rooms for washing and ironing (my father said one was so the clothes could get wrinkled), a pantry, a vestibule by the dining room, five servants’ bedrooms, a room for the trunks. Did we travel a lot? No. Those trunks were used for many different things. Another room was for chests of drawers; another, for odds and ends, was where the dog slept and where my hobbyhorse sat on a tricycle. Does that house still exist? It exists in my memory. The objects are like milestones showing you how far you’ve gone: the house had so many of them that my memory is full of numbers. I could say what year I ate my first apple or bit the dog’s ear, or when I peed in the candy dish. You think I’m a pig! I preferred the rugs, chandeliers, and glass cabinets in that house to my toys. For my birthday my mother organized a party. She invited twenty boys and twenty girls so they would bring me presents. My mother had foresight. You’re right, she was a sweetheart! For the party, the servants took out the rugs, and my mother replaced the objects in the glass cabinets with little cardboard horses filled with surprises, and little plastic cars, rattles, cornets, and piccolos for the boys, and bracelets, rings, change purses, and little hearts for the girls. In the middle of the dining table they put a cake with four candles, sandwiches, and chocolate milk. Some children (not all of them with presents) arrived with their nursemaids, others with their mothers, others with an aunt or a grandmother. The mothers, aunts, or grandmothers sat down to chat. Standing in the corner, blowing on a cornet that made no sound, I listened to them.

  “How pretty you are today, Boquita,” my mother said to the mother of one of my girlfriends. “Did you come fro
m the country?”

  “It’s the season of the year when you want to get a little tan and end up looking like a monster,” Boquita answered.

  I thought she was referring to fire rather than to the sun. Did I like her? Who? Boquita? No. She was horrible, with a tiny mouth, no lips, but my mother said that you should never compliment the pretty ones for their beauty, but instead the ugly ones because that was good manners; she said beauty was of the soul and not of the face; that Boquita was a fright, but “had a certain something.” Besides, my mother didn’t lie: she always managed to utter the words in an equivocal way, as if her tongue were stuck, and that’s how she said, “How pretty you are, Boquita,” which could also be taken as a compliment due to her friend’s strong personality. They spoke of politics, of hats and clothes, of economic problems, of people who hadn’t come to the party: I assure you I’m repeating the exact words I heard them say. After the balloons were passed out, after the puppet show (in which Little Red Riding Hood terrified me as much as the wolf did the grandmother, in which the Beauty seemed as horrible as the Beast), after blowing out the candles on my birthday cake, I followed my mother into the most private room in the house, where she shut herself in with her friends, surrounded by embroidered pillows. I managed to hide behind an armchair, trampling on a lady’s hat, squatting down, leaning against a wall so as not to lose balance. I’m clumsy, you know. The ladies were laughing so hard that I could hardly understand what they were saying. They spoke of bodices, and one of them unbuttoned her blouse to the waist to show the one she wore. It was as translucent as a Christmas stocking; I thought it must have some toy inside and yearned to stick my hand in. They spoke of sizes: it turned out to be a game. They took turns standing up. Elvira, who looked like a huge baby, mysteriously took a tape measure out of her purse.