Strange Pilgrims (5 page)

“Or poor,” said Homero.

Lázara examined the jewels again, but now with less attention because she too had been conquered. And so the next morning she put on her best clothes, adorned herself with the pieces that seemed most expensive, wore as many rings as she could on every finger, even her thumb, and all the bracelets that would fit on each arm, and went out to sell them. “Let’s see if anyone asks Lázara Davis for receipts,” she said as she left, strutting with laughter. She chose just the right jewelry store, one with more pretensions than prestige, where she knew they bought and sold without asking too many questions, and she walked in terrified but with a firm step.

A thin, pale salesman in evening dress made a theatrical bow as he kissed her hand and asked how he could help her. Because of the mirrors and intense lights the interior was brighter than the day, and the entire shop seemed made of diamonds. Lázara, almost without looking at the clerk for fear he would see through the farce, followed him to the rear of the store.

He invited her to sit at one of three Louis XV escritoires that served as individual counters, and over it he spread an immaculate cloth. Then he sat across from Lázara and waited.

“How may I help you?”

She removed the rings, the bracelets, the necklaces, the earrings, everything that she was wearing in plain view,
and began to place them on the escritoire in a chessboard pattern. All she wanted, she said, was to know their true value.

The jeweler put a glass up to his left eye and began to examine the pieces in clinical silence. After a long while, without interrupting his examination, he asked:

“Where are you from?”

Lázara had not anticipated that question.

“Ay, Señor,” she sighed, “very far away.”

“I can imagine,” he said.

He was silent again, while Lázara’s terrible golden eyes scrutinized him without mercy. The jeweler devoted special attention to the diamond tiara and set it apart from the other jewelry. Lázara sighed.

“You are a perfect Virgo,” she said.

The jeweler did not interrupt his examination.

“How do you know?”

“From the way you behave,” said Lázara.

He made no comment until he had finished, and he addressed her with the same circumspection he had used at the beginning.

“Where does all this come from?”

“It’s a legacy from my grandmother,” said Lázara in a tense voice. “She died last year in Paramaribo, at the age of ninety-seven.”

The jeweler looked into her eyes. “I’m very sorry,” he said. “But their only value is the weight of the gold.” He picked up the tiara with his fingertips and made it sparkle under the dazzling light.

“Except for this,” he said. “It is very old, Egyptian perhaps, and would be priceless if it were not for the poor
condition of the diamonds. In any case it has a certain historical value.”

But the stones in the other treasures, the amethysts, emeralds, rubies, opals—all of them, without exception—were fake. “No doubt the originals were good,” said the jeweler as he gathered up the pieces to return them to her. “But they have passed so often from one generation to another that the legitimate stones have been lost along the way and been replaced by bottle glass.” Lázara felt a green nausea, took a deep breath, and controlled her panic. The salesman consoled her:

“It often happens, Madame.”

“I know,” said Lázara, relieved. “That’s why I want to get rid of them.”

She felt then that she was beyond the farce, and became herself again. With no further delay she took the cuff links, the pocket watch, the tie clips, the decorations of gold and silver, and the rest of the President’s personal trinkets out of her handbag and placed them all on the table.

“This too?” asked the jeweler.

“All of it,” said Lázara.

She was paid in Swiss francs that were so new she was afraid her fingers would be stained with fresh ink. She accepted the bills without counting them, and the jeweler’s leave-taking at the door was as ceremonious as his greeting. As he held the glass door open for her, he stopped her for a moment.

“And one final thing, Madame,” he said. “I’m an Aquarius.”

Early that evening Homero and Lázara took the money
to the hotel. After further calculations, they found that a little more money was still needed. And so the President began removing and placing on the bed his wedding ring, his watch and chain, and the cuff links and tie clip he was wearing.

Lázara handed back the ring.

“Not this,” she said. “A keepsake like this can’t be sold.”

The President acknowledged what she said and put the ring back on his finger. Lázara also returned the watch and chain. “Not this either,” she said. The President did not agree, but she put him in his place.

“Who’d even try to sell a watch in Switzerland?”

“We already did,” said the President.

“Yes, but not the watch. We sold the gold.”

“This is gold too,” said the President.

“Yes,” said Lázara. “You may get by without surgery, but you have to know what time it is.”

She would not take his gold-rimmed eyeglasses either, although he had another pair with tortoiseshell frames. She hefted the pieces in her hand, and put an end to all his doubts.

“Besides,” she said, “this will be enough.”

Before she left she took down his damp clothes, without consulting him, to dry and iron them at home. They rode on the motor scooter, Homero driving and Lázara sitting behind him, her arms around his waist. The streetlights had just turned on in the mauve twilight. The wind had blown away the last leaves, and the trees looked like plucked fossils. A tow truck drove along the Rhône, its radio playing at full volume and leaving a stream of music
along the streets. Georges Brassens was singing:
Mon amour tiens bien la barre, le temps va passer par là, et le temps est un barbare dans le genre d’Attila; par là où son cheval passe l’amour ne repousse pas
. Homero and Lázara rode in silence, intoxicated by the song and the remembered scent of hyacinth. After a while, she seemed to awaken from a long sleep.

“Damn it,” she said.

“What?”

“The poor old man,” said Lázara. “What a shitty life!”

O
N THE
following Friday, the seventh of October, the President underwent five hours of surgery that, for the moment, left matters as obscure as they had been before. In the strictest sense, the only consolation was knowing he was alive. After ten days he was moved to a room with other patients, and Homero and Lázara could visit him. He was another man: disoriented and emaciated, his sparse hair fell out at a touch of the pillow. All that was left of his former presence was the fluid grace of his hands. His first attempt at walking with two orthopedic canes was heartbreaking. Lázara stayed and slept at his bedside to save him the expense of a private nurse. One of the other patients in the room spent the first night screaming with his terror of dying. Those endless nights did away with Lázara’s last reservations.

Four months after his arrival in Geneva, he was discharged from the hospital. Homero, a meticulous administrator of the President’s scant funds, paid the hospital bill and took him home in his ambulance with
other employees who helped carry him to the eighth floor. They put him in the bedroom of the children he never really acknowledged, and little by little he returned to reality. He devoted himself to his rehabilitative exercises with military rigor, and walked again with just his cane. But even in his good clothes from the old days, he was far from being the same man in either appearance or behavior. Fearing the winter that promised to be very severe, and which in fact turned out to be the harshest of the century, he decided, against the advice of his doctors, who wanted to keep him under observation for a while longer, to return home on a ship leaving Marseilles on December 13. At the last minute he did not have enough money for his passage, and without telling her husband Lázara tried to make up the difference with one more scraping from her children’s savings, but there too she found less than she expected. Then Homero confessed that without telling her he had used it to finish paying the hospital bill.

“Well,” Lázara said in resignation. “Let’s say he’s our oldest son.”

On December 11 they put him on the train to Marseilles in a heavy snowstorm, and it was not until they came home that they found a farewell letter on the children’s night table, where he also left his wedding ring for Bárbara, along with his dead wife’s wedding band, which he had never tried to sell, and the watch and chain for Lázaro. Since it was a Sunday, some Caribbean neighbors who had learned the secret came to the Cornavin Station with a harp band from Veracruz. The President was gasping for breath in his raffish overcoat and a long multicolored
scarf that had belonged to Lázara, but even so he stood in the open area of the last car and waved goodbye with his hat in the lashing wind. The train was beginning to accelerate when Homero realized he still had his cane. He ran to the end of the platform and threw it hard enough for the President to catch, but it fell under the wheels and was destroyed. It was a moment of horror. The last thing Lázara saw was the President’s trembling hand stretching to grasp the cane and never reaching it, and the conductor who managed to grab the snow-covered old man by his scarf and save him in midair. Lázara ran in utter terror to her husband, trying to laugh behind her tears.

“My God,” she shouted, “nothing can kill that man.”

He arrived home safe and sound, according to his long telegram of thanks. Nothing more was heard from him for over a year. At last they received a six-page handwritten letter in which it was impossible to recognize him. The pain had returned, as intense and punctual as before, but he had resolved to ignore it and live life as it came. The poet Aimé Césaire had given him another cane, with mother-of-pearl inlay, but he had decided not to use it. For six months he had been eating meat and all kinds of shellfish, and could drink up to twenty cups a day of the bitterest coffee. But he had stopped reading the bottom of the cup, because the predictions never came true. On the day he turned seventy-five, he drank a few glasses of exquisite Martinique rum, which agreed with him, and began to smoke again. He did not feel better, of course, but neither did he feel worse. Nevertheless, the
real reason for the letter was to tell them that he felt tempted to return to his country as the leader of a reform movement—a just cause for the honor of the nation—even if he gained only the poor glory of not dying of old age in his bed. In that sense, the letter ended, his trip to Geneva had been providential.

JUNE
1979

I
SAW
Margarito Duarte after twenty-two years on one of the narrow secret streets in Trastevere, and at first I had trouble recognizing him, because he spoke halting Spanish and had the appearance of an old Roman. His hair was white and thin, and there was nothing left of the Andean intellectual’s solemn manner and funereal clothes with which he had first come to Rome, but in the course of our conversation I began, little by little, to recover him from the treachery of his years and see him again as he had been: secretive, unpredictable, and as tenacious as a stonecutter. Before the second cup of coffee in one of our bars from the old days, I dared to ask the question that was gnawing inside me.

“What happened with the Saint?”

“The Saint is there,” he answered. “Waiting.”

Only the tenor Rafael Ribero Silva and I could understand the enormous human weight of his reply. We knew
his drama so well that for years I thought Margarito Duarte was the character in search of an author that we novelists wait for all our lives, and if I never allowed him to find me it was because the end of his story seemed unimaginable.

He had come to Rome during that radiant spring when Pius XII suffered from an attack of hiccups that neither the good nor the evil arts of physicians and wizards could cure. It was his first time away from Tolima, his village high in the Colombian Andes—a fact that was obvious even in the way he slept. He presented himself one morning at our consulate carrying the polished pine box the shape and size of a cello case, and he explained the surprising reason for his trip to the consul, who then telephoned his countryman, the tenor Rafael Riberto Silva, asking that he find him a room at the
pensione
where we both lived. That is how I met him.

Margarito Duarte had not gone beyond primary school, but his vocation for letters had permitted him a broader education through the impassioned reading of everything in print he could lay his hands on. At the age of eighteen, when he was village clerk, he married a beautiful girl who died not long afterward when she gave birth to their first child, a daughter. Even more beautiful than her mother, she died of an essential fever at the age of seven. But the real story of Margarito Duarte began six months before his arrival in Rome, when the construction of a dam required that the cemetery in his village be moved. Margarito, like all the other residents of the region, disinterred the bones of his dead to carry them to the new cemetery. His wife was dust. But in the grave next to hers, the girl
was still intact after eleven years. In fact, when they pried the lid off the coffin, they could smell the scent of the fresh-cut roses with which she had been buried. Most astonishing of all, however, was that her body had no weight.

Hundreds of curiosity-seekers, attracted by the resounding news of the miracle, poured into the village. There was no doubt about it: The incorruptibility of the body was an unequivocal sign of sainthood, and even the bishop of the diocese agreed that such a prodigy should be submitted to the judgment of the Vatican. And therefore they took up a public collection so that Margarito Duarte could travel to Rome to do battle for the cause that no longer was his alone or limited to the narrow confines of his village, but had become a national issue.

As he told us his story in the
pensione
in the quiet Parioli district, Margarito Duarte removed the padlock and raised the lid of the beautiful trunk. That was how the tenor Ribero Silva and I participated in the miracle. She did not resemble the kind of withered mummy seen in so many museums of the world, but a little girl dressed as a bride who was still sleeping after a long stay underground. Her skin was smooth and warm, and her open eyes were clear and created the unbearable impression that they were looking at us from death. The satin and artificial orange blossoms of her crown had not withstood the rigors of time as well as her skin, but the roses that had been placed in her hands were still alive. And it was in fact true that the weight of the pine case did not change when we removed the body.