Saint’s Day

It was her saint’s day, and it was a day like any other. A waltz flowed in waves from the house next door; it wasn’t the radio, it must have been someone practicing the piano, following the notes of a tune sprinkled with indecisions. And every day it was that same waltz, never learned, that peeked through the shutters and filtered in through the walls of the neighboring house. That music reached back to the day of her birth and played every year on her saint’s day, always devoid of gifts. A month ago she had been invited to Fulgencia’s birthday party, and there were enough presents to fill a toy store window. Celinita wore new booties but longed for her bare feet and the days when they ran around like two doves on flower-patterned tiles—two doves afraid of slipping on the waxed floors.

Many visitors, cousins, and older women sat watching the little girls playing, as if in a theater, but Fulgencia preferred to play only with Celinita, without toys, because she alone was crowned by the wilted halo of poverty, because she knew how to climb trees better than anybody, and because she lived in an old, unpainted house with green plants on the roof. The adults had conspired that day to make the girls cry if they didn’t play with enough enthusiasm or if they felt ashamed.

Fulgencia had imagined a different sort of party: playing in El Tigre as if the mud were snow, sculpting cupcakes with sprinkles, or making fish of dirt. Only on the Tigre Delta could this dream come true, there at the Wisteria Estate, named for the cascades of purple wisteria flowers raining down on the docks. She had been born on that estate. The house had bathrooms painted with landscapes and enormous wood-paneled bathtubs that looked like confessionals, where spiders stowed away at night. Seen through small windows of iridescent glass, water the color of an elephant from the delta looked sea-green. Often the tides held the house captive, and neither teachers nor visitors arrived on those long, sheltered days when the only figures that came to life were in her colored-pencil drawings. Shiny blue cowbirds with their mouths open wide as if playing toad-in-the-hole swam in the waters that flooded the garden. They had gone to Wisteria together just once. Usually it was the tides, sometimes the distance that made them both dread and cherish those visits to El Tigre in the winter months.

Fulgencia was the only daughter, and for that reason her parents were killing her with incessant reminders that she be careful, all of which, transformed into involuntary penitence, awakened in her perverse acts of revenge. One day she hid behind a boat that never moved from its place on the grass, bumping against a bamboo plant. She packed provisions in her pockets, lumps of sugar and Iris brand cookies. Her mother, her nanny, and the gardener all looked for her outside and in the house. Her mother cried, looking at the brown waters of the Tigre: “Where is my daughter! Where is my daughter!” Hiding behind the boat, Fulgencia heard everything. Her mother knelt in the grass wailing, imagining her daughter dead, floating among the fruits in the canals with weeds tangled in her hair. She saw her snatched by one of those traveling boatmen who passed through on Sundays; she saw her kidnapped, in a park drinking canal water and dying of typhus, with no thermometers or doctors to come to her aid.

Fulgencia gripped the boat’s oars, accomplices to her laughter that gradually faded away. She no longer dared to come back to life before the amazed eyes of her mother. Night fell with the sound of boats against the water, with the sound of crickets and oars against the water. A melancholy stench of mud, soggy plants, and fish emerged: it was the smell of the dark, resonant with catfish, perhaps, or the toads that emerged at the hour of mosquito nets. She knew that at this hour her mother was fantasizing about a distant stroll she had once taken in Venice. It was the time she talked to visitors about San Giorgio, the Ca’d’Oro, and Santa Maria dell’Orto. But Venice was sinking in the night, devoured by the black waters of the Tigre. Fulgencia cried so much she was sure she was lost or even dead; she drowned in her tears until the gardener found her amid the bamboo branches. Celinita had tried in vain to re-create the same episode in her house. Nobody looked for her. The house where she lived was too small for her to hide anywhere, and she had too many brothers and sisters for them to realize she was missing.

But now she was seven years old and didn’t want to hide, yet she was lost in her own house. No one saw her, no one was looking for her. Fulgencia had forgotten to send someone over to ask her to come play. It was Saint Cecilia’s Day, and Saint Celina must have been some unknown saint who wasn’t in the prayer books or on the calendar. Her mother was mending a plaid apron when her daughter’s name floated through the halls from the entranceway. Celinita breathed a sigh of relief—they had come to ask her to play with Fulgencia.

Celinita took off running. Fulgencia’s house was half a block away. As soon as she arrived she announced, “Today is my birthday,” and Fulgencia, climbing the stairs to get to the playroom, responded: “Let’s go to the basement, no one’s there. Is it your birthday or your saint’s day? Because if it’s your saint’s day, it doesn’t count.” Celinita didn’t know, and so she conceded to missing her birthday and accepted the loneliness of her saint’s day.

They went down to the basement: windows faced mysterious landscapes of elevator cables, trellises, feather dusters and broken bottles, trunks filled with huge hoop skirts and giant curtains. Shielded from the sky, a dark vegetation of old candelabras, woven wires, and sacks of firewood grew, like in El Tigre’s abandoned greenhouses. Between the folds of the curtains they found a doll without eyes, a doll divinely new by dint of being old, smudged by blows and discolorations, and they took turns holding her in their arms.

After the light was turned off, a firmament dark as a blackboard shrouded the basement. Two pupils shone: they belonged to the blind doll and flew around the room in search of her eyes. Fulgencia recognized her favorite doll, the one whose hair fell out from constant washing and styling, the sleepwalker of the nights when she took the elevator down to the basement and looked out the empty windows. . . .