Strange Pilgrims (20 page)

If he had spent the rest of his life in the attempt, Billy Sánchez could not have deciphered the enigmas of that world founded on a talent for miserliness. He never solved the mystery of the stairway light that went out before he reached his floor, and he never discovered how to turn it on again. He needed half a morning to learn that on the landing of each floor there was a little room with a toilet that one flushed by pulling a chain, and he already had decided to use it in the dark, when he discovered by accident that the light went on when the lock was bolted on the inside, so that no one would forget to turn it off again. The shower, which was at the end of the hall, and which he insisted on using twice a day as he did in his own country, one paid for separately, and in cash, and the hot water, controlled from the office, ran out in three minutes. Yet Billy Sánchez was thinking with sufficient clarity to realize that this way of doing things, so different from his own, was in any case better than being outdoors in January, and he felt so confused and alone
that he could not understand how he ever had lived without the help and protection of Nena Daconte.

When he went up to his room on Wednesday morning, he threw himself facedown on the bed with his coat on, thinking about the miraculous creature who was still bleeding two blocks away, and he soon fell into so natural a sleep that when he awoke his watch said five o’clock, but he could not tell whether it was afternoon or morning, or what day of the week it was, or what city, with windows lashed by wind and rain. He waited, awake in the bed, always thinking about Nena Daconte, until he confirmed that in fact day was breaking. Then he went to have breakfast in the same cafeteria as the day before, and there he learned it was Thursday. The lights in the hospital were on and it had stopped raining, and so he leaned against the trunk of a chestnut tree outside the main entrance, where doctors and nurses in white coats walked in and out, hoping he would see the Asian physician who had admitted Nena Daconte. He did not see him then, or that afternoon after lunch, when he had to end his vigil because he was freezing. At seven he had another café au lait and two hard-boiled eggs that he chose from the display counter himself after two days of eating the same thing in the same place. When he went back to the hotel to sleep, he found his car alone on one side of the street, with a parking ticket on the windshield, while all the others were parked on the opposite side. It was a difficult task for the porter at the Hotel Nicole to explain to him that on odd-numbered days one could park on the odd-numbered side of the street, and on even-numbered
days on the other side. Such rationalist stratagems proved incomprehensible to a purebred Sánchez de Ávila, who almost two years before had driven the mayor’s official car into a neighborhood movie theater and wreaked absolute havoc while the intrepid police stood by. He understood even less when the porter advised him to pay the fine but not to move his car at that hour, because he only would have to move it again at midnight. As he tossed and turned on the bed and could not sleep, he thought for the first time not only about Nena Daconte, but about his own grievous nights in the gay bars at the public market in Cartagena of the Caribbean. He remembered the taste of fried fish and coconut rice in the restaurants along the dock, where the schooners from Aruba moored. He remembered his house, the walls covered with heartsease, where it would be just seven o’clock the night before, and he saw his papa in silk pajamas reading the newspaper in the coolness of the terrace.

He remembered his mother—no one ever seemed to know where she was, regardless of the hour—his desirable, talkative mother, who wore a Sunday dress and a rose behind her ear when night fell, stifling with heat in the encumbrance of splendid fabric. One afternoon when he was seven years old, he had gone into her room without knocking and found her naked in bed with one of her casual lovers. That mishap, which they had never mentioned, established a complicitous relationship between them that proved more useful than love. But he was not conscious of that, or of so many other terrible things in his only child’s loneliness, until the night he found himself
tossing in the bed of a sad Parisian garret, with no one to tell his sorrows to, and in a fierce rage with himself because he could not bear his desire to cry.

It was a beneficial insomnia. He got out of bed on Friday wounded by the evil night he had spent, but determined to give definition to his life. He decided at last to break the lock on his suitcase and change his clothes, since all the keys were in Nena Daconte’s bag, along with most of their money and the address book where, perhaps, he might have found the number of someone they knew in Paris. At his usual cafeteria he realized that he had learned to say hello in French, and to ask for ham sandwiches and café au lait. He knew it never would be possible to order butter or any kind of eggs because he never would learn to pronounce the words, but butter was always served with the bread, and the hard-boiled eggs were displayed on the counter, where he could take them without having to ask for them. Moreover, by the third day, the waiters recognized him and helped when he tried to make himself understood. And so at lunch on Friday, as he was trying to set his head to rights, he ordered a veal fillet with fried potatoes and a bottle of wine. He felt so good then that he ordered another bottle, drank almost half of it, and crossed the street with the firm resolve to force his way into the hospital. He did not know where to find Nena Daconte, but the providential image of the Asian doctor was fixed in his mind, and he was sure he would find him. He did not go in through the main door but used the emergency entrance, which had seemed less well guarded to him, but he could not get past the corridor where Nena Daconte had waved good-bye.

A guard with a blood-spattered smock asked him something as he walked by, and he paid no attention. The man followed him, repeating the same question over and over in French, and at last grabbed him by the arm with so much force that he stopped him short. Billy Sánchez tried to shake him off with a chain-wielder’s trick, and then the guard shit on his mother in French, twisted his arm at the shoulder into a hammerlock, and without forgetting to shit a thousand times on his whore of a mother almost carried him to the door, raging with pain, and tossed him out into the middle of the street like a sack of potatoes.

That afternoon, aching with the punishment he had received, Billy Sánchez began to be an adult. He decided, as Nena Daconte would have done, to turn to his ambassador. The hotel porter, who despite his unsociable appearance was very helpful and very patient with languages, found the number and address of the embassy in the telephone book and wrote them down on a card. A very amiable woman answered the phone, and in no time Billy Sánchez recognized the diction of the Andes in her slow, colorless voice. He started by identifying himself, using his full name, certain the two great families would impress the woman, but the voice on the telephone did not change. He heard her recite her lesson by heart: His Excellency the Ambassador was not in his office at the moment and was not expected until the next day, but in any event he could be seen only by appointment, and then only under extraordinary circumstances. Billy Sánchez knew he would not find Nena Daconte by this route either, and he thanked the woman for the information
with as much amiability as she had used in giving it. Then he took a taxi and went to the embassy.

It was at 22 Rue des Champs-Élysées, in one of the quietest districts in Paris, but the only thing that impressed Billy Sánchez, as he himself told me in Cartagena de Indias many years later, was that for the first time since his arrival the sunshine was as bright as in the Caribbean, and the Eiffel Tower loomed over the city against a radiant sky. The functionary who received him in the name of the ambassador looked as if he had just recovered from a fatal disease, not only because of his black suit, oppressive collar, and mourning tie, but also because of his judicious gestures and hushed voice. He understood Billy Sánchez’s concern but reminded him, without losing any of his discretion, that they were in a civilized country whose strict norms were founded on the most ancient and learned criteria, in contrast to the barbaric Americas, where all one had to do to go into a hospital was bribe the porter. “No, dear boy,” he said. His only recourse was to submit to the rule of reason and wait until Tuesday.

“After all, there are only four days left,” he concluded. “In the meantime, go to the Louvre. It is worth seeing.”

When he went out, Billy Sánchez found himself on the Place de la Concorde without knowing what to do. He saw the Eiffel Tower above the rooftops, and it seemed so close that he tried to walk there along the quays. But he soon realized it was farther than it appeared and kept changing position as he looked for it. And so he began to think about Nena Daconte as he sat on a bench along the Seine. He watched the tugs pass under
the bridges, and to him they did not look like boats but itinerant houses, with red roofs and flower pots on the windowsills and clotheslines stretched across the deck. For a long while he watched a motionless fisherman, with a motionless rod and a motionless line in the current, and he tired of waiting for something to move, until it started growing dark and he decided to take a taxi back to the hotel. That was when he realized he did not know its name or address and had no idea where in Paris the hospital was located.

Stupefied by panic, he went into the first café he came to, asked for a cognac, and tried to put his thoughts in order. While he was thinking he saw himself repeated over and over and from many different angles in the numerous mirrors on the walls, saw that he was frightened and alone, and for the first time since the day of his birth he thought about the reality of death. But with the second glass of cognac he felt better, and had the providential idea of returning to the embassy. He looked in his pocket for the card with its address, and discovered that the name and street number of the hotel were printed on the other side. He was so shaken by the experience that he did not leave his room again for the entire weekend except to eat and move the car from one side of the street to the other. For three days the same filthy rain that had been falling the morning they had arrived continued to fall. Billy Sánchez, who had never read an entire book, wished he had one to fend off his boredom as he lay on the bed, but the only books he found in his wife’s suitcases were in languages other than Spanish. And so he kept waiting for Tuesday, contemplating
the peacocks repeated across the wallpaper and always thinking about Nena Daconte. On Monday he straightened the room, wondering what she would say if she found it in that state, and only then did he discover that the mink coat was stained with dried blood. He spent the afternoon washing it with the perfumed soap he found in her overnight bag, until he succeeded in restoring it to what it had been when it was carried onto the airplane in Madrid.

Tuesday dawned overcast and icy, but without the rain. Billy Sánchez was up at six and waited at the hospital entrance with a throng of relatives bringing gifts and bouquets of flowers to the patients. He went in with the crowd, carrying the mink coat over his arm, asking no questions and with no idea where Nena Daconte could be, but sustained by the certainty that he would meet the Asian doctor. He walked through a very large interior courtyard, with flowers and wild birds, and on each side were the wards: women to the right and men to the left. Following the other visitors, he entered the women’s ward. He saw a long line of female patients in hospital gowns sitting on their beds, illuminated by the great light of the windows, and he even thought it was all much more cheerful than one could imagine from the outside. He reached the end of the corridor and then walked back, until he was certain that none of the patients was Nena Daconte. Then he walked around the exterior gallery again, peering through the windows at the men’s ward, until he thought he recognized the doctor he was looking for.

And in fact he had. The doctor was examining a patient
with some other doctors and several nurses. Billy Sánchez went into the ward, moved one of the nurses away from the group, and stood facing the Asian doctor, who was bent over the patient. He spoke to him. The doctor raised his sorrowful eyes, thought a moment, then recognized him.

“But where the hell have you been?” he asked.

Billy Sánchez was perplexed.

“In the hotel,” he said. “Right here, around the corner.”

Then he found out. Nena Daconte had bled to death at ten minutes past seven on the evening of Thursday, January 9, after sixty hours of failed efforts by the most qualified specialists in France. She had been lucid and serene to the end, instructing them to look for her husband at the Plaza-Athénée, where she and Billy Sánchez had a reservation, and giving them the necessary information for reaching her parents. The embassy had been informed by an urgent cable from the Foreign Office on Friday, when Nena Daconte’s parents were already flying to Paris. The ambassador himself took care of the formalities for the embalming and the funeral, and stayed in touch with the police prefecture in Paris during the efforts to locate Billy Sánchez. An emergency bulletin with his description was broadcast from Friday night to Sunday afternoon over radio and television, and during those forty hours he was the most wanted man in France. His photograph, found in Nena Daconte’s handbag, was displayed everywhere. Three Bentley convertibles of the same model had been located, but none of them was his.

Nena Daconte’s parents had arrived at noon on Saturday and sat with the body in the hospital chapel, hoping
until the last minute that Billy Sánchez would be found. His parents also had been informed and were ready to fly to Paris, but in the end they did not because of some confusion in the telegrams. The funeral took place on Sunday at two in the afternoon, only two hundred meters from the sordid hotel room where Billy Sánchez lay in agonies of loneliness for the love of Nena Daconte. The functionary who had received him at the embassy told me years later that he himself received the telegram from the Foreign Office an hour after Billy Sánchez left his office, and went to look for him in the discreet bars along the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. He confessed to me that he had not paid much attention to Billy Sánchez when he saw him, because he never imagined that the boy from the coast, dazzled by the novelty of Paris and wearing such an unbecoming shearling coat, could have so illustrious an origin in his favor.