For Germán Arciniegas:
The keys to the big, heavy door, the one that led out into the world—those keys were always held by an old nun we called Sor Doorkeeper. But during mass she left them with Sor Teofilita, since she sat just outside the chapel, closer to the door, and could open it for the milkman, the only one who came at that hour. Sor Teofilita would place the keys behind her on the chair, where she rarely sat. She typically had her face between her hands, praying and praying all the time.
We called the milkman El Tuerto, One-Eye. Sor Teofilita told me that he was called this because one eye was always closed. I asked her why they didn’t wake up that eye, and she told me that he had been born with it that way. When One-Eye arrived, he’d come to the door, which had at its center what looked like a tiny house that spun if it was pushed. This was the turnstile, and everything we ate came through it. As he passed the milk through the turnstile, One-Eye always said, “Ma’am, it’s warm, like it was just milked from the udder.”
One day I told Sor Teofilita that when I was very small in Guateque, out in the world, I’d once seen a cow. She told me that she had seen cows only in the nativity scenes we made, with the Baby Jesus, son of Mary. When I went to the kitchen with the censer for Bolita to light, or to get the pot with the priest’s breakfast, I had to pass in front of the door with the tiny, spinning house. That day I heard something knocking lightly from behind the turnstile. I went closer, frightened, and asked who it was. No one answered, and the turnstile began to spin very slowly, but there was nothing inside, no food. I called out again, asking who it was, and a voice said, “The milk.”
“We already have it,” I said.
“But I’m the one who brought the milk. In the office, where there are some rags you call curtains, behind them, I made a hole. Go there, and you can see me.”
There was indeed a hole there; someone had scratched the white paint off the windows from the outside. The truth is One-Eye frightened me, but my desire to see him was greater than my fear, and I told him through the turnstile to wait. I saw the hole the moment I raised the curtain. It was at the bottom, in a corner. I looked through the hole and found his eye. Yes: we were eye to eye, quite literally, and I liked his eye very much. It was pretty, black at its center, round and very bright. The white was whiter than those I’d seen at the convent. There was another thing I liked: his eye knew how to laugh, and it laughed all the time.
I’d often look at my own eyes in the mirror, and I could never laugh with my eyes the way he did with his. When I didn’t see his eye anymore, just the wall, and I heard his footsteps, I waited awhile, but he didn’t come back. There was no milk delivered on Sunday, but on Monday I heard the scratching again, and the little house began to turn, and the voice again asked me to go to the hole. He waited for me every day, and our two eyes were so happy to see each other that we felt bad whenever we had to separate.
One day he said: “I’m your boyfriend.”
He repeated that word many times. Boyfriend. As soon as I saw Sor Teofilita, I asked what it meant. She laughed and asked who’d taught me that word.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I heard it somewhere and just remembered it.”
I saw in her face that she didn’t believe me, and I don’t know how, but I remembered that Miss Carmelita, the fat woman who lived in the courtyard full of roses, had told us that her boyfriend left her because she’d gained so much weight. I told Sor Teofilita this, and she laughed and patted me on the cheek.
Our eyes had been meeting for a while, and one day I told him through the turnstile that I wanted him to show me his sleeping eye. His eye immediately disappeared, and he never called on me again and never again showed me his good eye.
I thought about him for a long time, sometimes all day, even during mass, but not just about him—also about that eye of his that had become such a good friend. One day I stopped thinking about it and started thinking about the world. I’d begun to forget my childhood memories of the world with Mrs. María, and I thought many times of asking the Virgin Mary to help me, to take away that illness she’d given me, to tell her that I suffered thinking all day of One-Eye and of the world. I even offered to say novenas for her, and I did, with great devotion.