Strange Pilgrims (14 page)

“He must have fallen from a wedding party,” said
one of the ship’s officers. “It happens pretty often in these waters during the summer.”

It was a momentary vision, because just then they were entering the bay, and other, less mournful subjects distracted the attention of the passengers. But Señora Prudencia Linero continued to think about the drowned man, the poor drowned man, whose long-tailed jacket rippled in their wake.

As soon as the ship sailed into the harbor, a decrepit tugboat came out to meet it and lead it by the nose through the wreckage of countless military craft destroyed during the war. The water was turning into oil as the ship made its way past the rusting wrecks, and the heat became even fiercer than in Riohacha at two in the afternoon. On the other side of the narrow channel, the city, brilliant in the eleven-o’clock sun, came into view with all its chimerical palaces and ancient, painted hovels crowded together on the hills. Just then an unbearable stench rose from the disturbed bottom, which Señora Prudencia Linero recognized from the courtyard of her house as the foul breath of rotting crabs.

While this maneuver took place, the passengers, with great displays of joy, recognized their relatives in the tumultuous crowd on the pier. Most of them were autumnal matrons with dazzling bosoms who suffocated in their mourning clothes and had the most beautiful and numerous children in the world, and small, diligent husbands, the immortal kind who read the newspaper after their wives and dress like stern notaries despite the heat.

In the midst of that carnival confusion, a very old man
wearing a beggar’s overcoat and an inconsolable expression pulled a profusion of tiny chicks from his pockets with both hands. In an instant they covered the entire pier, crazed and cheeping, and it was only because they were magic that many survived and kept running after being stepped on by the crowd that was oblivious to the miracle. The wizard had placed his hat upside down on the ground, but nobody at the railing tossed him even one charitable coin.

Fascinated by the wondrous spectacle that seemed to be presented in her honor, for only she appreciated it, Señora Prudencia Linero was not aware of the exact moment when the gangplank was lowered and a human avalanche invaded the ship with the howling momentum of a pirate attack. Dazed by the wild jubilation and the rancid-onion smell of so many families in summer, shoved by the gangs of porters who came to blows over the baggage, she felt threatened by the same inglorious death that menaced the little chicks on the pier. That was when she sat down on her wooden trunk with its painted tin corners and remained there undaunted, intoning a vicious circle of prayers against temptation and danger in the lands of infidels. The first officer found her when the cataclysm had passed and she was the only one left in the abandoned ballroom.

“Nobody’s supposed to be here now,” the officer told her with a certain amiability. “Can I help you with something?”

“I have to wait for the consul,” she said.

That was true. Two days before she sailed, her oldest son had sent a telegram to his friend the consul in Naples,
asking him to meet his mother at the port and help her through the procedures for continuing on to Rome. He had told him the name of the ship and the time of its arrival, and that he would recognize her because she would be wearing the habit of Saint Francis when she came ashore. She was so uncompromising about these arrangements that the first officer allowed her to wait a little longer, although soon it would be time for the crew’s lunch, and they had already put the chairs on the tables and were washing down the decks with buckets of water. They had to move her trunk several times in order not to wet it, but she changed places without changing expression, without interrupting her prayers, until they took her out of the recreation rooms and left her sitting in the full sun among the lifeboats. That was where the first officer found her again a little before two, drowning in sweat inside her penitent’s garb, saying the Rosary with no expectations because she was terrified and sad and it was all she could do not to cry.

“It’s useless for you to keep praying,” said the officer, without his former amiability. “Even God goes on vacation in August.”

He explained that at this time of year half of Italy was at the beach, above all on Sundays. In all likelihood the consul was not on vacation, given the nature of his responsibilities, but it was certain he would not open the office until Monday. The only reasonable thing was to go to a hotel, get a good night’s sleep, and telephone the consulate the next day; no doubt the number was in the phone book. Señora Prudencia Linero had no choice but to accept his judgment, and the officer helped her through the
procedures for immigration and customs and changing money, and put her in a taxi, with vague instructions that she be taken to a decent hotel.

The decrepit taxi, with its traces of a funeral carriage, lurched down the deserted streets. For a moment Señora Prudencia Linero thought she and the driver were the only living creatures in a city of ghosts that hung from clotheslines in the middle of the street, but she also thought that a man who talked so much, and with so much passion, could not have time to harm a poor solitary woman who had risked the dangers of the ocean to see the Pope.

At the end of the labyrinth of streets she saw the sea again. The taxi continued to lurch along a burning, deserted beach where there were numerous small hotels painted in bright colors. It did not stop at any of these but drove straight to the least gaudy one, which was situated in a public garden with large palm trees and green benches. The driver placed the trunk on the shaded sidewalk, and when he saw Señora Prudencia Linero’s uncertainty, he assured her that this was the most decent hotel in Naples.

A handsome, kindhearted porter hoisted the trunk on his shoulder and took charge of her. He led her to the metal grillwork elevator that had been improvised in the stairwell, and with alarming determination began to sing a Puccini aria at the top of his voice. It was a venerable building, with a different hotel on each of its nine renovated floors. All at once, in a kind of hallucination, Señora Prudencia Linero felt that she was in a chicken cage rising slowly through the center of an echoing marble staircase,
catching glimpses of people in their houses with their most intimate misgivings, with their torn underwear and acidic belches. On the third floor the elevator jolted to a halt, and then the porter stopped singing, opened the sliding rhomboids of the door, and with a gallant bow indicated to Señora Prudencia Linero that she was in her house.

In the foyer she saw a languid adolescent behind a wooden counter with insets of colored glass and shade plants in copper pots. She liked him at once because he had the same angelic ringlets as her youngest grandson. She liked the name of the hotel, with its letters engraved on a bronze plaque, she liked the odor of carbolic acid, she liked the hanging ferns, the silence, the golden fleurs-de-lis on the wallpaper. Then she stepped out of the elevator, and her heart sank. A group of English tourists wearing shorts and beach sandals were dozing in a long row of easy chairs. There were seventeen of them, seated in symmetrical order, as if they were only one man repeated many times in a hall of mirrors. Señora Prudencia Linero took them in at a single glance without distinguishing one from the other, and all she could see was the long row of pink knees that looked like slabs of pork hanging from hooks in a butcher shop. She did not take another step toward the counter, but retreated in consternation into the elevator.

“Let’s go to another floor,” she said.

“This is the only one that has a dining room, Signora,” said the porter.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.

The porter made a gesture of consent, closed the elevator,
and sang the remaining portion of the song until they came to the hotel on the fifth floor. Everything seemed less rigorous here, the owner was a springlike matron who spoke fluent Spanish, and no one was taking a siesta in the easy chairs in the foyer. There was in fact no dining room, but the hotel had arranged with a nearby restaurant to serve the guests at a reduced price. And so Señora Prudencia Linero decided yes, she would stay for one night, persuaded as much by the owner’s eloquence and amiability as by her relief that not a single Englishman with pink knees was sleeping in the foyer.

At three in the afternoon the blinds in her room were closed, and the half-shadow preserved the cool silence of a hidden grove, and it was a good place to cry. As soon as she was alone, Señora Prudencia Linero bolted both locks, and for the first time since the morning she urinated, in a thin, hesitant stream that allowed her to recover the identity she had lost during the journey. Then she removed her sandals and the cord around her waist, and lay down on her left side on the double bed that was too wide and too lonely for her alone, and released the other flood of long-overdue tears.

Not only was this the first time she had left Riohacha, but it was one of the few times she had left her house after her children married and moved away, and she was alone with two barefoot Indian women to care for the soulless body of her husband. Half her life had been spent in the bedroom facing the ruins of the only man she ever loved, who for almost thirty years had been in a coma, lying on a goatskin mattress in the bed of their youthful lovemaking.

During the previous October, the invalid had opened his eyes in a sudden flash of lucidity, recognized his family, and asked them to send for a photographer. They brought in the old man from the park with the enormous bellows and black-sleeve camera and the magnesium plate for taking pictures in the home. The sick man himself arranged the photographs. “One for Prudencia, for the love and happiness she gave me in life,” he said. This was taken with the first magnesium flash. “Now another two for my darling daughters, Prudencita and Natalia,” he said. These were taken. “Another two for my sons, whose affection and good judgment make them examples to the family,” he said. And so on until the photographer ran out of paper and had to go home for a new supply. At four o’clock, when the magnesium smoke and the tumultuous crowd of relatives, friends, and acquaintances who flocked to receive their copies of the portrait made the air in the bedroom unbreathable, the invalid began to lose consciousness in his bed, and he waved good-bye to everyone as if he were erasing himself from the world at the railing of a ship.

His death was not the relief for the widow that everyone had hoped for. On the contrary, she was so grief-stricken that her children gathered to ask what they could do to comfort her, and she replied that all she wanted was to go to Rome to meet the Pope.

“I’ll go alone and wear the habit of Saint Francis,” she informed them. “I’ve made a vow.”

The only gratification remaining from those years of vigil was the pleasure of crying. On the ship, when she had to share her cabin with two Clarissine sisters who
went ashore at Marseilles, she would linger in the bathroom to cry unseen. As a result the hotel room in Naples was the only suitable place she had found since leaving Riohacha where she could cry to her heart’s content. And she would have cried until the following day, when the train left for Rome, if the owner had not knocked at her door at seven to say that if she did not go to the restaurant soon she would have nothing to eat.

The porter accompanied her. A cool breeze had begun to blow in from the sea, and there were still some bathers on the beach under the pale seven-o’clock sun. Señora Prudencia Linero followed the porter along a difficult terrain of steep, narrow streets that were just beginning to wake from their Sunday siesta, and then found herself in a shaded arbor where the tables were covered with red-checkered cloths and jars served as vases for paper flowers. At that early hour her only fellow diners were the waiters and waitresses and a very poor priest eating bread and onions at a back table. When she went in she felt everyone’s eyes on her brown habit, but this did not affect her, for she knew that ridicule was part of her penance. The waitress, on the other hand, roused a spark of pity in her, because she was blonde and beautiful and spoke as if she were singing, and Señora Prudencia Linero thought that things must be very bad in Italy after the war if a girl like her had to wait on tables in a restaurant. But she felt at ease in the flowering arbor, and the aroma of stew with bay leaf from the kitchen awakened the hunger that had been deferred by the anxieties of the day. For the first time in a long while she had no desire to cry.

And yet she could not eat as she wished, in part because
it was difficult to communicate with the blonde waitress, even though she was kind and patient, and in part because some little songbirds, the kind kept in cages in the houses of Riohacha, were the only meat available. The priest who was eating in the corner, and later acted as interpreter, tried to make her understand that the emergencies of war had not ended in Europe, and the fact that at least there were little woodland birds to eat ought to be viewed as a miracle. But she pushed them away.

“For me,” she said, “it would be like eating one of my children.”

And so she had to settle for some vermicelli soup, a plate of squash boiled with a few shreds of rancid bacon, and a piece of bread as hard as marble. While she was eating, the priest approached her table to ask in the name of charity that she buy him a cup of coffee, and he sat down with her. He was from Yugoslavia but had been a missionary in Bolivia, and spoke an awkward, expressive Spanish. To Señora Prudencia Linero he seemed an ordinary man with no vestige of God’s indulgence, and she observed that he had disgraceful hands with broken, dirty nails, and an onion breath so persistent it seemed more like a character trait. But he was in the service of God, after all, and it was a pleasure as well, when she was so far from home, to meet someone she could talk to.

They conversed at their leisure, oblivious to the heavy barnyard noise that began to surround them as more people sat at the other tables. Señora Prudencia Linero already had a definitive opinion of Italy: She did not like it. And not because the men were somewhat improper, which was saying a great deal, or because they ate songbirds,
which was going too far, but because they were in the wicked habit of leaving drowned men to drift in the water.