Santiago's Way Page 3

  The next day Felicitas returns to school. From eight o’clock until ten everything proceeds as normal. Now I am asking myself: what was I thinking? Did I imagine that Felicitas wasn’t going to find out? Or was it a form of suicide?

  Two minutes into the break somebody tells Felicitas the story of the hair-clip. I have just enough time to dip into the lunch Martha has brought me. I am in mid-chew when I see Felicitas and her group of friends heading my way. I have one shred of pride left. I could have fled and skulked behind the skirts of one of the teachers who adore Lilia, but I stand my ground.

  Felicitas does not ask me if I said it or not. She grabs me by my long hair. She dumps me on the soil and gravel of the playground. She drags me around the mesquite tree. She isn’t stupid: to drag me over to where the ball games are played would attract the attention of the teachers. I cling to the roots of my hair to reduce the pain. But having my hands on my hair means my chin gets scraped on the ground. After several circuits of the tree Felicitas kicks me in the ribs, between my jawbone and my neck, on my legs. She is making her point that she is not ready to relinquish her ranking in the pecking order. She would have gone a lot further if it had not been for Floripez.

  ‘Leave her alone,’ says the mountain of a girl. Felicitas is reluctant to let go of my hair. Floripez makes a fighting gesture and Felicitas releases me, spitting on my back as she goes.

  ‘You see?’ Floripez tells me from the furthest shadows of the photo. ‘That’s what you get for being a big-mouth.’

  8

  I peer into the darkness of a photograph taken eleven years later. In it I am covered in bruises, locked in the study of Vicente’s apartment. He has beaten me up as his way of encouraging me to reconsider my behaviour. He insists that a relationship exists between two people and so it’s impossible to end one unilaterally. He says he thought I was more intelligent than I actually am.

  My back hurts. He twisted my right arm to force me to my knees and bring tears of surrender to my eyes. Then came a couple of blows from his fist and I passed out. Santiago is furious. He races as if electrified along all the routes of my brain. He had made no allowances for violence in his Plan.

  ‘Red alert! This individual is a serious threat to us. Did you hear him say he would put a bullet into us?’ I don’t answer. I am hurting. I feel humiliated, degraded, in the deepest part of myself.

  ‘The idiot! You just end a romance and it’s over. Doesn’t he realize this isn’t a marriage? It’s just an experiment that has run its course.’

  ‘Stop jumping around!’ I beg him. ‘You’re giving me a migraine.’

  ‘The fool! Who does he think he is? We’ve got to work out a plan right away. Get up!’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here. We need to find a phone and talk to Luis, Javier, Alejandro and Enrique. To all your brothers. It’s a family emergency. He’s trying to kill us.’

  I smile dispiritedly at the inevitable photo. In it, my father, crushed by old age and disgust at life, sits at a chessboard and plays through the openings that made Capablanca a celebrity. It is six in the evening. I see my tall body pass beside him. I pick up a glass and open the fridge to get a drink of chilled water. My father glances at me, then returns to the board and plays Capablanca’s next move.

  ‘How did it go?’ he asks me, without taking his eyes off the book.

  ‘Fine.’ I hear the echo of my voice inside the glass between my mouth and the cold water.

  ‘You look really down these days. Anything happen?’

  The water I’ve just drunk seems to force its way out of my eyes. I rain tears and snot. I confess my love for my classmate Guillermo. I add that Guillermo does not love me.

  ‘What’s that?’ My father raises his stomach to facilitate a shout. ‘Call out the Macho Brigade!’

  Three of my brothers appear in the kitchen.

  ‘I want you to beat up this kid who doesn’t love my daughter.’

  ‘Why would he love her?’ answers Javier. ‘Look at her hair.’

  ‘She doesn’t wash,’ sneers Enrique.

  ‘She never tidies herself up, Dad,’ adds Alejandro in his nasal tones.

  ‘And she walks like a dyke,’ Enrique says, as the crowning insult.

  The photo dissolves in a cackling noise from my father, followed by a chorus of laughter from my brothers.

  I am at the end of my tether, and I collapse on the carpet of the study. I hear Santiago’s voice in the far distance. In a blue-toned dream I am climbing a stony peak. I scramble to the top and scan the valley below. On the far side of a ravine, on top of a crag of her own, I spy Mina. I want to descend to the foot of the mountain, cross the ravine and reach her. But the valley is suddenly flooded by the sea. Raging waters pound against my rocky peak and hers. Then phosphorescent foam traces on the water symbols, faces, routes to Mina that she illuminates with her moonlike eyes. I speak, but my voice is lost inside the spiral of my ear.

  A pounding at the door rouses me. Vicente is back. He rattles his key-chain and through the door asks me menacingly if I’ve thought things over. Santiago answers him. Vicente opens the door. He picks my body off the floor. He starts to kiss my neck.

  ‘Don’t you ever provoke me again,’ he says into my ear. ‘I don’t want to hurt you, understand? Look what I bought you.’ He shows me a pair of panties and a bra decorated with red sequins. ‘I want you to dance for me.’

  ‘Not today,’ I beg.

  ‘I want you to dance like you did at Pedro’s party. When you feel like playing the whore, you’re going to do it just for me, got it?’

  He grabs my chin and hurts me. This is not the old Vicente. His eyes are wild. His soft voice has been replaced by a solemn echo that comes up from the caverns of his stomach.

  Santiago controls every word I say. ‘Please! You’re hurting me. I ache all over. Let me rest. I’ll dance for you tomorrow.’

  A slide: my first dance in public since the fiasco with Miss Cuquita. To overcome the complexes of childhood is a fundamental part of the Plan. From the time Santiago invaded my body I have practised belly-dancing. By myself, in front of the mirror I have jiggled my stomach in time to a variety of tunes and rhythms. I had not done it in front of anyone else until that day at Pedro’s party.

  Vicente lets go of me. Behind my back, he says, ‘You’re not leaving me. You and I were meant for each other.’

  9

  ‘Yes, I know that,’ says Santiago. ‘Here’s the photo. But we all say things sometimes without thinking.’

  Vicente and I had gone out a few times. We used to meet at the Wormwood Café and set out from there to places where we could get to know each other better. Previously, he had invited me back to his apartment, but I refused. This time it was me, spurred on by candle-light and Italian wine, who suggested we go to a motel. Neutral territory was Santiago’s thinking. Vicente agreed, somewhat hesitantly. He worried about the hygiene in such places. And somebody from his work might recognize his car. Besides, only women out for one-night stands frequented motels. Better if we went to his apartment. But Santiago insisted, while my breath, calculatedly uncertain, played around Vicente’s neck.

  We arrive at the motel. We enter, car and all. It is obvious from the photo that this relationship is doomed to failure. Passionate, ardent, with a streak of brutality, Vicente shows off his physical endowments to himself. He forgets about me. He is totally wrapped up in himself, checking out his body in the mirrors. He hasn’t the least interest in examining my curves and complexities. Maybe he thinks his massive dick is all any lover’s body needs. When he ejaculates, he jerks his body and hurts my neck.

  ‘Did you like it?’

  Santiago and I have differing opinions. I want to say that maybe next time we should show a better understanding of each other’s needs, but Santiago replies yes, arguing that, with a man like Vicente, it’s either say yes or lose him.

  I get up and grope uncertainly for a cigarette. Vicente follo
ws me. He stubs out my cigarette and starts his sexual torture. He never gets tired. He can ejaculate as often as he wants. I’ve only to brush against his arm for him to up-end me and on the floor, sofa, bed or tabletop pull down my panties. Vaseline becomes a primary requirement.

  That yes from Santiago, like so many other replies given to Vicente in the course of our relationship, was the prelude to an uncontrollable avalanche of demands. ‘If we want to stay with him you’d better learn from his seductive intellect, better experience life as a couple, better give, receive, cook and argue.’ Everything my father and brothers challenged me to do by their scornful laughter. If I had practised a difficult honesty, I might still be with Vicente. But there was something else behind Santiago’s appeasing dialogues, barricades he erected, as if he were handling a war situation, perhaps out of fear of unleashing a deluge of horrors: abandonment, loss, rejection, helplessness, nakedness and solitude. And behind them yawned the void, an emptiness that the late-night throbbings of my insomnia barely touched on.

  I felt like an impostor, especially when Vicente made comments like the one in the last transparency. I am cooking. I am wearing an apron and chopping vegetables for the salad. It is winter. The tomato sauce that is coming to the boil has a sprinkling of oregano on top. Vicente hugs me from behind.

  ‘Pedro says I was real lucky to find a girl like you. Kind. Intelligent. Generous. Most of all, genuine.’

  Right. Genuine was the keynote of the public persona Santiago fabricated for me, and I’m getting sick of it.

  10

  The void. I got to know it during my childhood, when I was seeking in vain for Mina. I am out in the darkness of the back patio after having been chastized. I can’t recall the reason for such a severe punishment, only my father’s anger and his carrying me under his arm out to the patio. I hear him threatening the rest of the family. He wags an accusing finger at my cowed mother. Watch out anybody who lets me back inside or brings me a glass of milk for my supper.

  Santiago pulls out another photo. He isn’t sure if it was taken on the same day. But it might explain my father’s rage. I take all the biscuits from the pantry. I grind them under my school shoes. I spread the crumbs like a carpet over the kitchen floor. I like the feel of walking on a crunchy surface. I trace pictures in it as if it were sand. Flour! I take that out as well and mix it with the biscuit crumbs. I add water and create three-dimensional figures.

  Santiago hates the bare-faced way I reveal the limits of his power by driving myself closer to the void, but I have learned to still his voice at such times. I even manage to leave him to himself, muttering his complaints endlessly, like a leak drip-dripping into a grotto. He loses something of himself when he does that. When he comes back he is drowsy and has a struggle recognizing things and giving them their right names.

  I ought to stop behaving the way I do, he says. He slinks off into a dark, damp cell. His memory goes numb there. His transparencies and photos get a foggy blur on them. People’s identities get confused.

  Still, for me, isolating him is a survival technique.

  The patio is full of rubble. A single mango tree grows in the middle. From it dangles a tomato crate. Higher up, several planks form a sort of floor. It is the tree-house. I have never before been out in the patio in the dark, sentenced to spend the night there. Tonight there is no moon. I am clinging to the house wall, close to the only light that emerges from the kitchen window. At the far end of the patio is stretched a washing-line with bed-sheets drying on it. Near the fence grow a few shrivelled sugar-canes.

  All my siblings have spent nights out on the patio. I remember the distress of finding myself in bed, ready to fall asleep, and listening to one of them, the one whose turn it was to be punished, sobbing at my parents’ bedroom window and begging to be allowed back inside.

  Terror seizes me. The tomato crate, which during the day serves as an elevator up to the tree-house, is now a small coffin squeaking in the breeze. The canes are naked ghosts, desperate to wrap themselves in the bed-sheets. I am alone. Fear pulses in my temples and resonates in my veins.

  My mind seeks refuge in my handwriting exercises, my teacher, my school, my mother’s smile. With expert skill, the shadows penetrate and annul these memories. I escape to some pleasant transparencies, but they quickly slide away into the canes, into the sheets suspended on the washing-line, into the creaking little coffin. I call out. My voice is lost in the clatter of dishes and the chatter of my family inside the kitchen.

  Abruptly, without knowing exactly how, I blot out all my memories. My emptied-out eyes look behind me as I swim underwater in my interior caves. Then comes the void. No memories, no objects there. Nothing. I have returned to the blue abyss and I fall into it. I float there, bodiless, eyeless, without language.

  It is a flight into pounding silence. I integrate myself perfectly into the void. Santiago with his image-forming camera is not invited here, so there is no way for him to tell a story about it.

  ‘I’m here, lost in undecipherable space,’ I call out to nobody.

  Santiago is a creature of the three basic colours and the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. What is the colour of fear? There is no answer to that in the universe of the spectrum. The hour at which clouds of a colour alien to life pervade us is never registered.

  Vicente is furious. He cannot track me down when my eyes turn towards the abyss. ‘What happened? Tell me where it all went wrong!’

  I am lying recumbent on the sofa. I raise my shoulders, but my glance reveals nothing. We spend days that way. He makes love to me, but I soar away, distant from all feeling. But I can’t shake Santiago off this time. He composes phrases, supplies letters of the alphabet, frames a response.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I say, quoting Santiago.

  Vicente jumps up abruptly. ‘Forgive me for hitting you.’

  ‘We don’t hold grudges,’ Santiago whispers in my ear. ‘We forgive him everything. The matter is over, purely and simply. We have to get on with our life.’

  ‘It’s over and done with.’ Again I echo Santiago. Vicente swings around, like a cat pivoting on top of a wall.

  ‘You provoked me. Now you’re playing the innocent. What would you have done in my place?’

  ‘Me?’ I answer, rising from the blue abyss. ‘I would have respected your decision to leave.’

  ‘Me leave? Where would I go?’

  11

  I am travelling by train across Europe. Vicente appears in a distant photo that is crammed with rage. That day had more to it than I’ve said. He agreed to let me go. While I was packing my suitcase I was planning what I’d say to my mother.

  ‘You were right. You and Lilia were both right.’

  With a triumphant smile my mother welcomes me back home. I unpack in the same old untidy bedroom. I hang up my clothes in the wardrobe.

  The memory of Vicente tears at me. He begs, like a starving child, for one last night of love. I refuse. I do so because I should have done so in the beginning. The way he keeps on insisting drives me to tell him that sex with him was torture. He saves up his bitterness for the right moment.

  ‘So you never felt anything,’ he says, as I head for the door.

  I nod my head affirmatively. ‘Exactly.’

  If Santiago is right about anything, it’s that I’ve no idea how to manage the world of egos and words. When he hears my reply he buries himself in one of his many grottoes. Why do I never find the right thing to say?

  Vicente jumps me and tries to pull off my clothes. I push him away. He tries again, and I grab a lamp to smash against his head. He blocks my blow with his forearm. With the flats of my hands I slap out at him. Some slaps hit him full on, others just graze him. He lowers his head and jams it against my stomach. Then he lifts me up and hurls me like a sack on to the bed. Between moans, howls and yells of pain, he manages to tie my hands with a stocking. He spends a few minutes delivering kicks to my body before he succeeds in holding me dow
n and fastening my legs with the sleeves of his shirt.

  So there I am. Stretched on the bed, bound hand and foot. Vicente’s eyes are wild and his lips are a bright purple. He removes his trousers.

  ‘Control yourself,’ the cowardly voice of Santiago tells me, but I have gone far beyond his control and reached the centre of my being. I rip away the veil that masks my anger. I feel a discharge of sulphur that races down my spinal column and crackles in the end of every nerve. Vicente and I are breathing hard in each other’s faces. There is something terrified in his stare. His pupils dilate. His eyes scrunch up and release a warm tear. He sits on the edge of the bed, and he covers his face with his hands. He speaks to me. He says things I don’t register because Santiago the photographer is reeling from the toxic vapours I’ve released.