◊

 

 

Carlos knows the polite way to interact with dignified old women, housekeepers, mothers, sisters, chambermaids, and the pious nuns of the Order of Saint Clare, but he knows nothing about how to interact with whores who are really little girls more than they are whores. Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t move at first. He hangs back, pressing against the door—We’ll let you two get to know each other better, his father said before shutting it—while the Polish girl sits on the edge of the bed and waits. She doesn’t seem to know what comes next any better than he does. She knows how to deal with Galician peasants, twelve siblings sleeping in a single bed, parents who will sell you for twenty kopeks, the rough crewmen of the Carpathia, but she knows nothing about customers who are really little boys more than they are customers. And maybe that’s why she is more frightened than she has ever been before, even more than when that drunken sailor tried to drag her to his cabin one dark Atlantic night on the crossing.

Carlos speaks only Spanish, and the Polish girl speaks only Polish. For the first fifteen minutes, though, neither of them says a word. They just look around the room—the velvet drapes, the bars on the windows, the canopy bed she’s clinging to—as if the other person weren’t there. Then Carlos attempts to muster a few words of greeting. He says, Good evening, and the Polish girl doesn’t respond. My name is Carlos, what’s yours? And silence. Tomorrow’s my thirteenth birthday. He keeps trying out longer and longer sentences, slowly drawing nearer and sitting down beside her.

He doesn’t want to look into her eyes, but eventually he can’t control his curiosity any longer and gives in. He expects to find in those eyes some trace of rage or pain, the mark of premature old age left by suffering, but instead he finds something else: the startled blue gaze of a girl faintly distressed by a broken porcelain figurine or a lost doll. It is then that he realizes that he’ll never do anything with her. That his birthday gift will be to disobey his father for once in his life. He wants to tell the girl that. He does tell her. He says: Don’t be afraid, because we’re not going to do it. We’ll sleep beside each other tonight, but we won’t even touch. Tomorrow I’ll still be a virgin and you’ll still cost four hundred dollars.

She looks at him, unconvinced. She doesn’t trust him, of course, because she can’t understand the meaning of his words. Or perhaps because, in not understanding them, she is able to identify something deeper that lurks beneath them, between them, despite them—a terrible message Carlos himself knows nothing about.

She is wearing a buttoned summer top, a long blue skirt, pink shoes. They have arranged her hair into two thick blond braids that snake down to her bust, which won’t offer much to look at for another couple of years. Out of the corner of his eye, Carlos can see, under the flounces and gauzy swaths of muslin, her tiny chest rapidly swelling and sinking like a frightened bird’s. He wants to tell her again not to be afraid, that she can trust him, but at that moment he stops. He sees her small hand slowly reach out and then clumsily touch his body in a trembling, hesitating movement. The gesture has something of a received instruction about it, of an order mechanically obeyed, as if she were administering an unpleasant-tasting medicine or completing paperwork. In his memory, the touch of those white fingers recalls something else. Perhaps the sensation of going back to the jungle. The exotic birds and monkeys he was unable to shoot, his father’s disappointment, the ride home. And associated with that memory are so many others: the little volumes of poetry hidden under his mattress, his mother’s sighs, the indecent drawings with their edges ragged from endless handling, his father’s words just before he had him climb into the coach. Being a man brings with it a great number of obligations and responsibilities. His father with a hand on his shoulder and smiling at him for the first time in a long time. His father waiting for him in the hall, maybe reading a newspaper, maybe flirting with one of the girls; her sitting on his knees and him explaining to her patiently, still smiling, that he’s a married man, that he’s here only for his son, that he’s so proud because his son is finally going to become a man.

And then he looks at her. At the girl who quivers and obeys. She has as little desire to be there as he has and yet there she is, uncomplaining. It isn’t her birthday and she won’t be earning four hundred dollars, but all the same she is participating in this long chain of overseers, mademoiselles, sailors, and human traffickers. A puppet who first moves her hand and later will open her legs, just because Señor Rodríguez has pulled the right strings.

He feels a cold sweat. An electric jolt runs down his back, partly because of those thoughts and partly because, almost without his willing it, his hand has begun to slide down her hip. The hand no longer seems to belong to his body. The girl bites her lip. Her tense little body remains motionless, and she stifles a yelp. Carlos closes his eyes. We’ll sleep beside each other tonight, but we won’t even touch, he says. Tomorrow I’ll still be a virgin and you’ll still cost four hundred dollars, he repeats, but still she doesn’t believe his words. Gradually he, too, has stopped believing them, because suddenly, behind his closed eyelids, he is imagining the girl leaving the room with her braids still intact, the madam laughing at the gift of four hundred dollars, his father icily shaking his head—he’s realized; he always knew—and then the lashes on his back with the leather strap and his mother’s prayers and the doctor prescribing spoonfuls of castor oil and summers in the mountains.

But none of that will occur—the hand moving up her torso while she can only tremble; that hand, his hand, touching one of her breasts for the first time. It will not occur, because his father always gets what he wants and this time will be no different. If being a man means he has to crush the Polish girl’s body under the weight of his own, he’ll do it, he’ll press himself against her, that girl who looks like she still plays with dolls, holds afternoon tea parties, and practices embroidery. And it shouldn’t arouse him, but it does, and he shouldn’t start kissing her or undressing her, but he already has. The girl begins to breathe more heavily, trying not to urinate out of pure terror, and closes her eyes too because she finally believes him, because wordlessly she has understood his movements better than he has, understood the intentions of this terrible boy who is pushing on top of her, still wearing his trousers.

He knows hardly anything about women’s bodies. He has a vague idea of the subject that becomes suddenly quite clear and painful, like the revelation experienced by a traveler who thought he knew the desert merely from studying it on a map.

And so he feels himself burning against her body, which now feels as cold and remote as a sacrificial stone. He smells new odors that are somehow familiar. A salty taste he seems to recall from somewhere, as if it came to him in a long dream. As he tears at the bodice and yanks up her skirt, he thinks of the elderly housemaid, Gertrudis, and how patiently she dressed and undressed his sisters. When he feels the pure whiteness of the girl’s skin, which tastes like the sacramental host; when he hears the incomprehensible plaints of the suffering girl, praying, perhaps dying, in Polish, he thinks of his mother. When he lets all of the weight of his body sink into her, he doesn’t think about anything.

Then, later, everything he has been doing suddenly pains him. He feels like crying. But the dampness on his cheeks is nothing compared to that other, more awful dampness, hot like a wound, underground like a disease, that he feels surrounding his sex. He hears the girl scream and then sees blood, a small smear of blood where his father told him it would be. Blood glistening on the jungle foliage. Red and black spattering the white sheets. He feels as if the rest of his body were the blade of a knife that only today, this very night, has been unsheathed.

He has no idea if this is what love looks like. Whether he is killing this girl who is screaming, writhing weakly beneath his body. He is killing her, maybe, but it doesn’t matter. His father paid four hundred dollars for it not to matter.

It all lasts exactly as long as a nightmare does.

And when it is over he begins to cry, and then she cries with him and, stranger still, hugs him. She’s not dead, Carlos thinks happily, faintly surprised. She isn’t dead, and she doesn’t hate him. She wraps her arms around him as if he were at once her parents, her siblings, the country she will never see again, the language she will never again hear spoken, the merchant captain who looked after her and kept his word for a whole month. She embraces him as if they were two children who have played and fought and now want to play again.

And suddenly she starts to speak. She murmurs mysterious phrases that he hears and patiently tries to understand. They sound like questions, perhaps, and in the pauses he answers them with others. He asks her if she is thirteen. He asks her if what they’ve just done was what everyone on the other side of the door expected of them. If her father told her that becoming a woman brought with it a great number of obligations and responsibilities just before he left her at the door. And she answers, in her way, and then falls silent.

The candles have burned out. In the darkness their bodies are still intertwined. Carlos has slowly started to caress her. His hand runs along her silky hair, her milky skin, and she softens and is soothed in the warmth of that contact. They are still crying, but quietly now, without bitterness, and the girl is repeating only a single phrase, like a litany, as if the night had become trapped in place and could not sail forward.

Chcę iść do domu.

When she speaks, her moist lips brush against his ear.

Chcę iść do domu.

And Carlos thinks of those words as he falls asleep and even afterward, minutes or hours later, when he wakes up and discovers that the Polish girl has disappeared and finds his father waiting in the hall to tell him he’s finally become a real man.

Che is do domo.

He tries to etch those words into his memory that day, and then for the rest of his life, as he conceives mad plans in which he and the Polish girl are together, against all odds—

Cheis to tomo

—but little by little those plans lose momentum, are put off, abandoned, and finally they die, because in the end she is no longer in the brothel, nobody knows where he can find her, and even if someone knew it wouldn’t make a difference, of course, because it’s one thing to rebel by reading a few poems and something else entirely to ditch it all for a girl who isn’t really a girl anymore—for a whore who probably doesn’t even cost a dollar by then, for a foreigner whose last words he has slowly resigned himself to forgetting, the indecipherable sounds becoming jumbled and blurry in his memory, as does the adolescent hope that their incantation might signify something beautiful, that Cheis torromo might mean “I forgive you,” that Cheis mortoro means “I love you,” that Cheistor moro means “I’ll never forget you either, not ever.”