The Tale of the Rose (22 page)

“But I’ll go with you.”

“No. We left each other, remember?”

“Yes,” I said. “I remember. I’ll take you to the plane. Let me go right now and call to get you a seat on tomorrow’s flight.”

It was simple, indeed. I wondered if a man really does have a heart and, if so, where it might be located. I had just saved Tonio from death, and he was reminding me that I was no longer his companion. I called on Don Luis to rescue me, and he took care of reserving a seat on the plane and arranging all the practical details.

My body somehow managed to remain upright until three in the morning, when I took my husband, feeble as a skeleton rattling in the wind but guided by the call of a mysterious force, to the airport.

I went home with a fever whose cause the doctors could not determine. It was my turn to go into the hospital, suffering from a strange infection and a mysterious fever. My darling mother brought me back to life, health, and faith. We didn’t speak of our womanly miseries; we simply helped each other. Finally one day I left the clinic, and my family took me back to the house where I was born.

The telephone calls from New York to Guatemala came every day. My husband was worried about me and asked my mother to put me as quickly as possible on a boat or a plane bound for Paris, where he was preparing to go. The embassies sent me tender messages, flowers, and gifts from Tonio. But I wanted to see my city again and spend more time there wandering around and finding my childhood friends, my rosebushes growing at the foot of the volcanoes.

“O
RANGES, MANGOES
, tamales, pupusas . . .” The cries followed me through the little stations the train passed through on the way to Armenia San Salvador.

At my station, the heat had not diminished. I saw children, crowds of children, all standing in rows to greet me, singing the national anthem. The girls were lined up facing the boys; the schoolmistress faced the headmaster. Both were waving batons like orchestra conductors, directing the small childish voices that were singing in honor of their compatriot, their elder sister who had gone through a thousand hardships since leaving Paris to come back to them.

The mayor of my village, Don Alfredo, dressed all in white, was still young, with the placid youth of a small, tranquil town. Many things had changed since I left. The girls had grown up; they were mothers or even widows now, some had divorced. The rich were poor and the poor were rich; the old marketplace no longer existed; the trees had all grown larger, and orange trees now lent their beauty to the streets. Armenia’s park had been invaded by bamboo and tamales, and I walked slowly through it, after a month in bed in a Guatemalan clinic, with the line of little boys on my right and the girls on my left. I walked through the sunlight of the tropics, seeing myself as an Alice in Wonderland risen from the depths of a sea dried up by a wicked god—and in that strange way delivered into the tenderness of these children’s voices, singing of the joy of life as they walked barefoot over cobblestones burning hot from the sun.

I thought that once I was home I would have a chance to lie down on the cool tiles of our colonial house in the shade of the
madre cacao
or of my favorite mango tree. But my arrival wasn’t quite as I had imagined. There was yet another orchestra, three marimbas, the doors of the house were thrown wide open to the whole town, and everyone wanted to shake my hand.

My sisters decided, without consulting me, that my casual attire was out of keeping with such honors. My suitcases and trunks were opened on the spot, and they forced me to put on the most elegant of my ball gowns, at three in the afternoon. One of my sisters put my shoes on, another brushed my hair, the third put it up. My mother gave me a large fan, for in San Salvador everyone is always sweating. I was home.

The only friends whose hands I was happy to shake were the town’s three beggars, who hadn’t changed at all: el Viejo de la Colbason, el Mudo Nana Raca, and Latilla Refugio. I laughed when I saw that they were all still beggars and asked my mother to take them inside the house. I knew they were my true fellow soldiers in the war of life. El Viejo de la Colbason came to sit next to me, still in pain from the thrashings that are given out to flies, dogs, and beggars.

The house was filled with flowers and palm fronds that formed triumphal arches as if a queen had arrived from abroad. I knew I couldn’t play the hostess to all these hearts in search of a friendly queen: I felt myself to be the queen only of great unhappiness. What right did I have to complain? What right did I have to confess to my misery? Little by little I fell silent; little by little I forced my feelings back down into oblivion.

T
HAT EVENING A PROCESSION
of the Isalco Indians who worked on my mother’s property filed past me. Each one left me a leaf, a fruit, a bird, an object. It was very beautiful, sad, and moving. I loved all these rituals. But I couldn’t play along anymore . . .

The
atamialada,
the feast of tamales, began. El Viejo de la Colbason alone was close to me. From time to time he rubbed his hair against my dress. He was sad that he couldn’t shine my shoes, for he gave the best shoeshine in the village. He told me, “We have a fourth beggar here, but she is of a rarer species than ours. She doesn’t like to talk the way we do, she doesn’t like to eat the way we do. She doesn’t live the same way we do. And the others claim she is mad. They call her the village madwoman. She assured me that she would come to see you on her own.”

As I was listening to this story, I heard the cries of a woman being mercilessly beaten. I pushed my way through my entourage and ran toward the place the cries were coming from. It was my bedroom. Lying in the bed (which had been carefully made up for me several days before) was a woman who appeared to be about thirty, her hair spilling across the precious embroidery of the lace sheets and pillows. Some servants were trying to tear an embroidered linen nightgown off her. She was being whipped like a dog, and she covered her head but wouldn’t move.

It was the village madwoman. Since she wanted to see me alone, she had simply crawled into my bed. Gathering up the last of my strength, I shouted and tried to stop the brutes who were beating her. In vain. My mother told me that the woman was dangerous, that the day before she had put out another woman’s eyes and had managed to escape from prison nevertheless. I finally pushed them all outside and stayed there alone with my pure and beautiful madwoman, who, in one movement, stood up and opened her arms to me. I thought that embrace was going to be the last minute of my life. Gently, she caressed my cheeks, my arms, my legs. She dressed me in the white linen nightgown she had taken and opened the door with dignity to leave.

I stayed in my bed, lost to the world.

O
NE MORNING
a consul arrived to tell me I had to go back to Paris; my husband was demanding my presence.

Once again I walked past my concierge on place Vauban. After all that had happened, I could hardly walk. I was finally home. Tonio was still very thin, very calm, very quiet.

Boris, the butler, laughed his Russian laugh, the same animal laugh that had welcomed me home so many times. The apartment was the same, nothing had changed. Our lives may have been in danger, but our furniture had remained at peace, and the loveliness of this place, as clear and blue as the sky, had been spared. A family dinner reunited me with my husband in silent tenderness. There was a parade of visitors: friends, relatives, my mother-in-law. What did they want from me? I could give them no more of myself. I had come to the end of my string of miseries.

One afternoon, when I came home from my hairdresser’s where I had stayed longer than usual, I found the house empty again: everything had been taken away. There was nothing left but some crumpled newspapers floating on the breeze that came in through the open windows. I thought I was dreaming. Where was our furniture? Where were our things? I remember a film by Chaplin called
The Circus,
I think, where you saw only the traces of those who had passed through over the course of the story. I wrung my hands; I tried to understand. I had no idea what to do.

I went down to see the concierge but didn’t dare ask her a thing. I went outside to get some air. Maybe there I would begin to understand. Maybe I would find someone to explain it to me. My husband stood in front of me on the sidewalk, like a statue. He took me by the arm and announced, “Yes, I’ve dismissed all the servants. It was too expensive—I don’t have the money to pay the rent.”

“But where will we live?”

“I’m taking you to a hotel. I’ve reserved two rooms.”

Once again, life in a hotel. This time it would be the Lutétia.

T
HE
H
ÔTEL
L
UTÈTIA
was the Left Bank refuge of people from the Right Bank, a place of exchange between one side of the Seine and the other. Our marriage, built on the sands of Africa, foundered on the smooth pavement of Paris. Everything there was flat, gray, and sad. To disguise and embellish this melancholy, we needed tears, champagne, lies, and infidelities.

So we took two rooms at the hotel: one for Monsieur, the other for Madame. It was like something out of the English novels then in vogue.

“Do you really want two rooms?”

“Yes, it will be more comfortable,” Tonio told me. “I work at night, and that would keep you awake. I know you.”

“All right, as you wish.”

At the front desk I asked for two rooms, but not on the same floor.

“You’re overreacting.”

“No, no. That way you’ll bother me less when you come in late.”

“Very well, but you will regret it.”

“Oh, I’ve already regretted it. For a minute, just one minute. A single minute. It was when I went home to place Vauban for the last time and all our furniture, all our things were gone. You hadn’t said a single word to warn me. Oh yes! That was the moment when I had regrets, I want you to know that. But you too, I think you’ll regret it one day, too.”

“It’s a simple matter of saving money.”

“Saving money? But at a hotel we’ll pay twice what our rent on place Vauban was, not counting meals.
Enfin,
your accounting methods are mysterious—you must have learned them in the sky. Maybe it is a better bargain, after all. Maybe this way it will be easier for us to separate. There’s the savings, I understand. You want to leave me quietly and discreetly. You’re so very kind: thank you.”

We were shown to our rooms. One was on the sixth floor, the other on the eighth. He gave a melancholy thank-you and muttered, “But who’ll give me my shirts, my handkerchiefs?”

“I’ll go up to your room when you’re there, and you’ll have clean shirts and ties.”

“You’re very kind,” he echoed. “You know I broke everything in my body. My gallbladder is damaged and it’s impossible to operate—the crash in Guatemala left everything in my body all mixed up. My heart is touching my stomach, and I always feel as though I’m about to vomit.”

“Instead you vomit up your life, you vomit everything. What will be left when you’re done?”