Santiago's Way Read online

  I approached him with the burning need that my body had learned to recognize that noon in the square. I made my advance little by little, because otherwise Cheese-Buns would let out a howl and run off in panic. Sometimes, when he ran, he left his basket behind, and I used to pick it up.

  One day I followed him street after street, until I finally found him hiding behind a tree. Once I was close to him I stood looking at him for a long time. I gave him back his basket and the merchandise he had abandoned. After several attempts I managed to stroke his face. Then I licked his neck. He laughed outrageously and dribbled uncontrollably. I showed him some photos from my brother Javier’s anatomy textbook. They depicted two adolescents with their lower bellies dissected, and one of them had its testicles showing in order to explain the reproductive process. With the two of us hidden inside an asbestos drainage pipe on some waste ground we dribbled as we touched each other.

  I taught him to stroke me gently, because at first he hurt me. Mina had been controlling the explosion of the suns but, inexplicably, she disappeared, leaving behind her a sickening dizziness followed by a sensation of flying through a blue void.

  Soon it became impossible to see Cheese-Buns any more. He had started crossing the pavement to the windows of my classroom. He didn’t care that the teacher and my classmates were present. He would let out a howl and pull out his penis. Then he would throw buns against the glass of the windows, trying to get me to come out of the school. The headmaster phoned somebody and they took Cheese-Buns away for good.

  5

  I have discovered that alcohol fumes can scare off Santiago like magic. When I get drunk I experience a rebirth of childlike love, the sort I felt for Cheese-Buns. I love fearlessly, recklessly, with the shameless need to take desire to the verge of the abyss, where the flesh can no longer go. Once my body has spilled itself out, all limp, Santiago cannot navigate through the diverted traffic routes and scrambled brain signals.

  With my inner landscape in flames and the telephone lines tangled, I have often experienced love for people I would abandon at dawn. Afterwards, Santiago would emerge, bursting with indignation, bustling out from his caves and claiming I was ruining myself with the tin-pan serenades of promiscuity, with unwelcome bodily fluids and the serious risk of infection.

  He assures me that avoiding the Seven Deadly Sins is the key to good health. Loss of health would mean disaster for me. The control of gluttony, envy, pride, lust, sloth, anger and greed is his greatest obsession.

  He knows how dangerous it would be for my body – our body – to push those sins to the limit. I tend to go overboard with gluttony, sloth and anger. The rest of them – lust now included – lie dormant, thanks to my natural indifference to material possessions, the decline in my physical allure and the absence of any exceptional intelligence that might tempt us to arrogance.

  Gluttony is my name for anything I put into myself via my mouth, from tobacco smoke through culinary delicacies to the inevitable wine. Sloth adheres to my body as firmly as any of my extremities. My blood pressure is low and any temperature above twenty-six degrees centigrade makes my eyes and shoulders droop and leaves my knees sagging.

  I control my anger the way an AA member controls the urge to drink. I have been doing it since the time I waged war – emotional, mental and physical – on Vicente, a boyfriend who refused to end our relationship.

  I was incapable of loving him. How could I have loved him, burdened with my baggage of frights and terrors? Back then I still had not understood that Santiago and I were not identical. I thought that rancorous bitterness was a part of my spiritual makeup.

  At that time, however, I had realized that I could not love by taking everything from Mina and nothing from Santiago. The ideal was to enjoy a dual-natured love like a grey-toned kiss shared in the last gleam of daylight, when day and night are meeting and, for a brief moment, there beams out a ray of subtle light that guards the secret of their balance. So I failed when I aimed to confine Santiago to his caves, hoping that I could love solely with the moist intensity that had guided my nose to the tunnel of Mina.

  Those failures taught me to understand things. Those various wounds. Those several jokes. I can still hear Santiago’s reproaches.

  ‘It’s not right for you to go down the street hugging people. And you shouldn’t be kissing the boys from the basketball team. You have to restrain yourself. Otherwise nobody’s going to love you. Look at that nice boy from your school. He prefers a quiet girl: one who smiles demurely and doesn’t cackle with laughter; one who doesn’t lift her legs when she gets a fit of the giggles. Look at her sort of shoes, patent leather with gold laces, and then at your horrible football boots that used to belong to your brother Alejandro.’

  Thanks to Santiago, lord and master of my mind, whose sceptre is my fear of rejection, I got the message.

  From that day on the warm, soft breezes of Mina were excluded from my body. Santiago explained the Plan to me: ‘If you like a man, you must give him only homoeopathic doses of love.’

  That’s what I did. The boy I had loved in vain in primary school, Guillermo, I saw again in high school. My eyes were now full of mystery. I had been initiated into the wisdom of never showing emotion. The Plan worked. This time Guillermo fell for me, heavily. But there was nothing I could do to help him. My breast was hermetically sealed.

  I’m not going to claim that all men fell victim to Santiago’s Plan. But some certainly did. As seductions got more complicated, my hermetic mystery didn’t prove sufficient. We were in desperate need of a more mature public persona, so Santiago came up with the idea of creating an almost perfect replica of Mina: sincere, warm and genuine.

  Winning these battles of non-love brings us to the photo of my twenty-third year when I embarked on a love-war and unleashed a long-repressed anger that cost me half my emotional and physical health, which I sometimes take care of and sometimes listlessly neglect.

  6

  My hair has always been long and thick. I am tall. My face is rather odd, half-way towards a Picasso portrait. My breasts never developed. They are like a doll’s: small, round, with the nipple so pink as to be nearly invisible. My hips are broad but not disgustingly so. Still, I have to watch my carbohydrate intake so that they don’t get out of hand. I walk with my shoulders hunched. Before Santiago invaded me, I grew so quickly that I wanted to hide my body. After his Plan was instituted, I struggled in vain to straighten my spine into a tall, spindly column worthy of a supermodel. Santiago and I soon found ourselves bored with easy prey. We wanted a challenge, and Vicente roused an instant attraction in us. Of athletic build, with round, yellow eyes, he was possessed by an extremely seductive Santiago. His IQ was far above average and he had the haughty pride that is justifiable only in those who believe they have found out the truth about life.

  At supper he drank only one glass of wine. He didn’t smoke at all. He didn’t eat fat and was a fanatical bodybuilder. I ought to have had misgivings about his ambitions, for anyone who strives to live and show strength beyond his natural limits must be thinking of himself as Nietzsche’s Superman, that wild caricature of the Antichrist.

  In my opinion, forgiveness is the noblest of all Christian teachings, but Superman, a being from an alien planet, is incapable of it. Instead of turning the other cheek and bringing violence to an end, he is a living fury who ends up enjoying the power of his role as the sole hero of Metropolis.

  Vicente’s vanity, like the Superman’s, had the saving grace of keeping him away from far worse addictions. Anybody who wants to live beyond his natural term merits all my distrust. Predators and consumers that we are, the best we can do for the planet is to die early in the hope of minimizing its decline. That’s what I know now, but at twenty-three years of age I still regarded humanity with a certain ingenuousness.

  In the first of Santiago’s photos taken of that encounter, Vicente is playing chess, a game of suspect sanity that combines cool logic with the fervour of a crusade. The poo
r fool who plays it as a means to an end never knows when it becomes an end in itself. But I have to admit admiration for the men who renounce the search for industrial, cultural, political or social power to misuse their warlike instincts across a tiny board on a cafe table.

  Vicente was an excellent chess player. According to Plan Santiago, I was required to demonstrate an intelligence that bordered on the anti-feminine but without stepping over the line. With my mouth half-open and my eyes wide with astonishment, I was to act as if profoundly impressed by the clever things men said to me.

  The Plan was getting progressively more difficult. I had to achieve financial and social independence, to pursue projects that had nothing to do with marriage and to develop athletic abilities, at least in aerobics. But one quality Santiago insisted I acquire was beyond me: enthusiasm. By that term I also mean optimism, joie de vivre, faith, hope and serenity.

  Sooner or later any lover capable of playing several games of simultaneous chess was bound to see through the farcical surface of my humanity. I have already mentioned that, as a cerebral weakling with regard to logic and method, I managed early on to imitate the lives of my siblings, that of Lilia in particular, but I could not pull it off after I reached the age of thirteen. Anyone can copy, but forgery is an art. Up to thirteen I could fake certain qualities, talents and signs of intelligence, but then Lilia sped off in directions I simply did not comprehend. Like Darwin, I could not find the missing link, the thing that suddenly catapulted her into womanhood, into being a professional worker, a lover, a wife, a mother.

  The photos that relate to my life after fourteen – that’s to say, after my suicide attempt and the invasion by Santiago – are a series of variations based on the Plan.

  First photograph. With some university texts under my arm, I arrive at the Wormwood Café where chess is played. I encounter the feline eyes of Vicente. They look at me without looking at me. I have a coffee and smoke a cigarette. I open the most baffling book I have ever laid eyes on, Integral Applied Equations. It was part of Santiago’s Plan to have me enrolled in the School of Engineering. I peer at the book. I stroke it. The integrals have symbols that look like snakes rearing their heads. At the back of my brain arises a question: will the day ever dawn when I understand all this? I check my watch. I am waiting for a good-natured friend who is going to explain to me the meaning of the snakes. When I am totally lost in incomprehension, Vicente speaks to me:

  ‘Integrals?’

  The seduction gets under way. Vicente already has two engineering degrees. He is single, thirty-one years old. He is an independent consultant to refrigeration companies. The last thing I want to tell him is that I’ve no idea what integrals are about, let alone all that mess of geometry, algebra and differentials. Instead, I tell him that I, too, play chess. Santiago unleashes a vigorous attack with a panache almost worthy of Capablanca. We don’t beat Vicente but we impress him.

  Second photograph. Vicente invites me to his apartment. I can’t accept it. Not if we are playing love-chess. It would be like accepting Queen’s Gambit and holding on to the poisoned pawn.

  Third photograph. I go back to the Wormwood Café. Vicente winks at me. He is showing off. He flaunts himself as he checkmates his opponent. While I wait for him to finish playing for the day, he recommends me to others as an opponent. A long-haired man with glasses challenges me. I whip him. Vicente is so proud. He invites me out to dinner.

  Sitting opposite me, he asks me questions. I give him half-answers. I retain a halo of mystery.

  In the septum lucidum there is a series of photos and blurred transparencies that covers the progress of the romance: playing tennis, movies, Chinese food, Greek food, Italian food, jokes, raucous laughs (including those forbidden by Santiago), holding hands, excellent wine and a kiss.

  My father has been dead for five years when I move in with Vicente. My mother raises an appalling fuss, but her own indiscretions undermine her protests. She wants me to follow Lilia’s shining example and make something of my life.

  ‘You should be glad I’m still alive,’ I tell her.

  7

  This photo of Vicente has another stuck to it. It refers to the Case of Felicitas. They are together in the album, because they are connected by squabbling, the desire for power and its defeat.

  Felicitas was in primary school with me. We did the fifth year together. She was not very bright, but she had a charisma that I didn’t have and that I was later supposed to practise as part of Plan Santiago.

  We are both the same height. She wears her hair in long braids and she has gleaming black eyes. Her complexion is white, although she has Indian features. Every thirty seconds she spits and grabs her skirt to her crotch as if she wants to pee. Her laugh is ear-splitting. Maybe that’s where I picked up my own unappealing cackle. She is a great friend of Cleotilde, the only girl in the class who feels comfortable with fractions and logical problems. Felicitas is also a first-rate volleyball player. She curses a lot and threatens to beat up members of the opposing team. We are all scared of her anger. Miss Graciela, the teacher, adores her. She asks her to clean the blackboard and make a list of the girls who talk when they shouldn’t. She is fair to her friends. She protects them. She was the only one who was suspicious of me when, two years earlier, Cheese-Buns used to peer through the windows. The others all believed he had fallen for my pale complexion and empty eyes without any sort of provocation. But Felicitas tackled me about it in the bathroom.

  ‘You were seen with him in the drainage-pipe,’ she said. I kept on washing my hands as if she were a ghost. ‘I’m talking to you,’ she insisted, and hit me on the back. I looked at her, pleading and afraid. She lowered her eyelids as if dropping a curtain of complicity: she was never going to reveal my secret. I shook the water off my hands and left the bathroom. For two years she did not re-enter my life.

  In this photo it is break time between classes, and I am not alone. I have Martha with me, a timid creature who follows me all over the playground. She used to attend a convent school, but after her father went bankrupt she ended up in our neighbourhood school. She still carries traces of her middle-class background. She brings to school some excellent lunches of fruit juices and baked ham. She invites me to share them. Removing ourselves from the general hubbub and the ball games, we eat together in the shade of the playground’s only mesquite tree. I tell her stories, ones that, as I admitted earlier, I stole from my siblings. I show her sketches I pilfered from my brother Luis. I tell her I am brilliant at chess and maths. This lie leads to a major problem. Martha is not only hopeless at maths but, because she still dresses and behaves in a middle-class way, nobody but me ever speaks to her.

  I circumvent my mathematical ineptitude with help from Floripez, a gentle-spirited mountain of a girl who makes supernatural efforts to understand the world of numbers. Floripez receives help from Cleotilde, who will help only her and Felicitas. Floripez then tutors me, and in my turn, in exchange for company and delicious sandwiches, I explain things to Martha.

  I should have accepted my lowly position in this chain with proper humility. But no. One day Felicitas is sick. Her group of friends is standing around chatting about a horror film. There are nine or ten of them, all with characters like Felicitas’s but with less of the bully. I ask them about Felicitas. They ignore me, except one.

  ‘She’s sick,’ she answers.

  ‘Sick?’ I say. ‘I bet she is. You should have seen us two yesterday, tangling outside Doha Delia’s shop.’ I now have their full attention.

  ‘You two had a fight?’

  ‘Too right we did,’ I say. ‘Well, you know me. I don’t like to fight, but if you come looking for one, you’ll get one.’ I got the expression from a movie. ‘I don’t know why she picked on me,’ I continue. ‘I didn’t want to fight, but a gal’s gotta do what a gal’s gotta do.’ I spit. The girls are all ears. They stand back and give me room to tell the rest of my story. I describe in gory detail my fictitious fight with Felicit
as. ‘I forced her to run away.’ The group stares at me, astounded. ‘Yes, I did,’ I assure them. ‘It happened outside the shop. She’s so jealous of me. I was buying this hair-clip.’ I show them a clip I had looted from my mother’s knick-knack box in her jewellery drawer and smuggled out between my schoolbooks. ‘Felicitas called me a bad name.’

  ‘What name?’ one of them asks.

  ‘Slut.’ It is the first time in my life the word has passed my lips.

  They all hush, comprehending the gravity of the situation. That afternoon I enjoy heroic status. I tell Martha how I routed Felicitas. I also tell my sister Lilia. She is horrified. Then she says that if I don’t clip her toenails for her she’ll tell Dad. I clip her nails, basking in her admiration. Lilia, like Cleotilde, does not need physical courage. Her understanding saves her. Now in the sixth year of school, she is consulted, like a great oracle, on all things logical – but even she regards me with awe.

  You might think I’d learn a lesson from all this but, as the next photo shows, I had no grasp of power struggles.