The twins were born half an hour apart, and they always argued in their slum dialect about who was older, who younger. I had chosen one, the skinniest, the least merciful. I don’t even remember her name.
It would have frightened me, as I told my wife one night, fifteen years later, to consider what remained in me of the twins, or of my twin.
Or suddenly I ran out of momentum, out of love for the situation and its problems, out of the unquestionable joy I derived from being at the very center of that perfect misery that seemed, astonishingly, to have been invented for me and by me.
A time when everybody could be happy by simply deciding to be, and those who hadn’t decided could, even in spite of themselves, achieve another kind of happiness, more complex and veiled, more profound and conscious.
The newspaper where I worked was on Plaza Libertad, and life surrounded the plaza with its bars and shops, its feeble and provincial but unfailing frenzy. You could hear it from press time at dawn until my return at eight at night; and there was always evidence that it had been buzzing during my absence, jubilant and tenacious, over and underneath the noise made by men and machines. Perhaps life vibrated there for everybody, and everybody could hear it and smile at it.
As for me, I had promised myself at least one surprise a day, and the pact was carried out with as much precision as the fortnightly arrival of my salary as proofreader. This was during the last war.
So the appearance of the Twin, the sole twin for the rest of my life, didn’t excite me then as much as it would today. I first saw her at three in the morning, at the Metro Restaurant, engaged in an argument with the most senior waiter.
“No,” she said, laughing, “I could never eat soup, not since I was little and no matter how much they beat me. I want potato salad with cold cuts.”
“It’s got to be vegetable soup. It’s nourishing,” Castro insisted. “You’re too skinny, and with the life you lead…”
I’d taken a seat at the nearest table even though the dining room was empty, and I waited for the dialogue to end before asking Castro for a glass of caña, hoping that María Esther wouldn’t show up as promised, that no friend of mine would show up, that nobody from the newspaper would think of sitting down at my table to talk about whether or not Roosevelt’s speech was delaying the gringos’ entry into the war. I fiddled with the freshly printed pages of the newspaper as I analyzed the surprise they would grant me at the beginning or the end of my day.
I looked at the woman’s long thick hair, brunette, pulled back and loosely tied at the nape of her neck, framing a pale, childish face with a straight, very short, nose, and a large, sloppily painted mouth, which pierced the hungry hollows of her cheeks with every laugh.
I looked at her dirty hands, long and skinny, the humiliation of her summer dress, not made for her, opaque and sagging from too many washings, too broad for her small chest, with armholes too large for her skinny little-girl arms.
“My sister’s paying. Don’t you believe me? She’s on her way. My sister always has money.”
“Okay, if you eat your soup,” Castro said, angrily.
He came over and slapped his napkin down on my rattan table, a little older than usual, more serious and more tired. I ordered caña in a loud voice and told him, without looking at the girl, that if the sister didn’t come, I’d pay.
“If the sister doesn’t come,” Castro said, “I’ll pay. Don’t add to it. I’m already tired enough of this story. It’s already sad and dirty enough without you getting involved. Believe me.”
Castro was born in Granada, and he didn’t need to wear those ridiculously tight black pants, nor his white hair greasy and plastered down over one temple to prove it. He must have died of a liver ailment, of low blood pressure, of Wilson’s disease, or simply, of Spain.
At that time, when that night occurred, all the immigrants from Spain who hadn’t become owners of shops or bars preferred to die of Spain. I’m talking about those who were in the city long before the civil war. Those recently arrived, according to the statistics, turned out to be immortal, though Spain hurts them a bit as well.
“Do me a favor and don’t complicate things. Leave her alone, she’s a pathetic creature. Fifteen years old, at most, and working as a prostitute, without knowing how, instead of playing with her dolls.”
“Caña, ice and soda,” I said.
I turned to look at the girl and smiled at her. She responded to all smiles, whether they came from men or things, from difficulties or short memories.
“I’m not a client, Castro. If she’s hungry, I can pay for her meal tonight. Anyway she’s too young, too skinny. I don’t like them like that.”
The truth is I’d started to like them like that. Not the lanky undernourished girl, not her small and innocent face, not even the guileless and defiant way she smoked cheap cigarettes from a crumpled pack. But she – I could imagine with great detail the exciting parting of her scrawny thighs over the chair’s wicker, her scant fuzz dangling – she and her difference from the night streets, the guiles of prostitution, the techniques and haggling in forlorn furnished rooms.
I didn’t lie in order to stop Castro from separating me from her, from my daily surprise; I lied to prevent him from distorting it by talking out loud about the FAI, about poor Blum, and about the incontrovertible filth of the world the three of us belonged to. I lied out of fear that they’d turn her for me into a woman, a person, a symptom of something or other.
She had her back to the open window and at the end of that summer night the wind made the scraps of paper and the dirt in the plaza swirl between the wheels of the large white buses, which had just arrived or were about to leave.
Before I took my glass and my newspaper to her table I was inventing for her, erroneously, a past and a future; I imagined the details of her body’s thinness, the traces of recent and ancient weariness, my need to help her.
And even though all of this turned out to be true, even though I confirmed with superstition, pride, and fear – like when you bet on a number and the number turns up, and you feel like you’ve just established a precarious relationship with luck, a stuttering code for giving and receiving orders – that everything I had been sensing while watching her and the air of enchantment, failure, and injustice that surrounded her, while watching the thick edges that joined her to and separated her from the world, most noticeably at her temples, at the nape of her neck, and in her decidedly sunken shoulders; while I looked at her purposeless smile that she was showing me without realizing that it was, for starters, the most mine of the surprises that life was affording me; even though all of that turned out to be true in a servile and possibly excessive way, I never before heard assertions like the ones I was hearing from the second Twin, recently made up and sleepy, at four in the morning, in a slow and practical voice, as she persisted in moralizing, accepting and performing her pedagogical duties, under the restrained fury of Castro’s head, as he kept bringing us caña until the first disappearance of night in the hollow of the plaza.
The second Twin – she was born, as I said, a few minutes before her sister – was a dubious replica of the other: shorter and wider, blondr and more composed, full of self-confidence, wise and protective, almost with breasts and hips. I was ten years older than them and I was watching them grow up, listening to their babbling as they tried to learn to use words and old assertions, as they tried to create the vulgarities and clichés they needed to populate, give shape and walls, to the unprecedented, worn, dirty world of impressions they were continually constructing, inevitably, for as long as they acted and agreed to breathe.
“Because no advice does any good with this one, and sometimes I’ve considered letting her work things out on her own,” the second Twin said in response to the other’s embarrassed, mocking smile. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you that there are nights she works harder than me, she has more luck, or they understand just by looking at her, and all the same, with my three to her five, I end up with thirty pesos in my purse and she’s got nothing. And she’s taller, skinner but prettier. And she knows that ever since we struck out on our own we have to work but we also have to charge.”
“I work,” the real Twin said, defiant and cross, and then smiled at me like a little boy, asking for support. “We both agreed to work, and I work, and you just said I sometimes work more than you.”
“You see?” the second Twin said to me with resignation and pity. “Just like I said. Work and charge. Because the gentleman knows that you don’t live off your work but off what you charge for your work. It’s a business deal, you exchange one thing for another, and if someone did it for free, it really would be immoral.”
“It’s not my fault.”
“The same thing happened to me, but only a couple of times, and only at first. But all I had to do was charge up front, and if I didn’t get the ten pesos, nothing doing. Even at the door, I’d turn around and leave.”
“It’s not my fault. I work, and more than you, because they either bore me or disgust me so I don’t stick around blabbing for hours when they sit me down at a café table. Sometimes I start laughing and can’t stop; but I don’t chit-chat. It’s not my fault if they say ‘later,’ if they look at me as if I were the one trying to rip them off. And if later I get all worked up while they’re getting dressed, they’re the ones who laugh. I can’t blame anybody, and I laugh, too. Is that my fault?”
Every day, for a moment of variable duration, the city goes backwards one hundred years, and the huddled air of a village descends upon it, it lets itself be strewn with faded colors. Behind all the noise can be perceived the echoes of the trees’ leanings, of mooing and henhouses, of stones trodden with heavy steps during the siesta. On that day, that moment arrived at dawn and froze the view of the plaza behind the real Twin while I watched her sister’s mouth in motion, the round and serene face that explained to us, patient and certain, how the world works, how we are condemned to being.
We, her sister and I, had already learned that the tough and wise law is the law of money, the law of honorable deals, and that whoever doesn’t pay for what he takes, demeans; we’d started to listen to a sermon about the importance of dignity, about the duty to never compromise, about the unforeseeable consequences of an isolated act of concession and tolerance, when a face with a hat appeared and stopped a few meters from the window. The second Twin paused and smiled at the semidarkness of the plaza.
“I don’t know if I’ll get back in time to take the last bus,” she said. “Maybe I’ll take a taxi, maybe tomorrow.”
So I was left alone with the real Twin, and she kept talking to me, giving me the same smiles she would use to beg everyone else not to make fun of her, of her love for Josesito, of her hatred for her stepfather, of how nice and fun it was for her to put on makeup and walk through the streets of the city center in high heels.
At that time, I remember, I didn’t think about God, either as a possibility or as a challenge; I didn’t know whom to thank for the daily surprise that kept getting drunk and laughing night after night until the last #141 entered the station and turned off its lights.
And at that moment, for the first time, we understood, the real Twin and I, that she couldn’t return home, that we could have our last drink only at the politicians’ club upstairs from Tupí Nambá, because a minor can’t spend the night at a real hotel. We had our drink and went to sleep in a dirty rented room, in a huge room with ceilings of plaster relief, which imposed a kind of personal solitude, which rendered us defenseless and exposed, which proclaimed every attempt at confession and intimacy with prolonged porous echoes.
She was skinny and fat, like the photographs of malnourished indigenous children. I stroked her head until I sensed that she had fallen asleep, I heard her talk about Josesito, a neighbor, who was fifteen years old and loved her more than he loved his own mother. I insisted on shutting myself off from the world she represented, sleepy and stuttering, without purpose or pride.
A world, a skinny but tenacious migratory flow, a recurring story of old potato farmers and horse trainers who came from everywhere to the Capital. First to odd jobs and prostitution; later: we’ll see. The Twin was in the first stage, she was naked, undernourished, and unused in the large bed with golden bars in the huge room of the ancient boarding house. She was asleep and drunk, contemplating her dreams with knitted brows, with drops of saliva at the corners of her large, thick lips. And before it was day and the Majorcan came to throw us out, she had time to wake up three times and throw her arms around me, shouting, “The cops, they’re coming to get me. The cops.”
I lifted her, half asleep, into my own wakefulness, struggling against the tide, against the flabby swelling of the absurd.
Three times a night, every night, pursued like insects through filth, shadows, the sordid ruckus of cheap rooms at the port, where they never asked for ID, she shouting “the cops” or mumbling tender words to an unknown Josesito, repeatedly killing my hopes, my need for sleep, until pity leads to resolve, almost unknown in endless insomnia, to cover her mouth, her face, the past, and the nevermore with the thickest pillow I would be able to find.
1973