Your lips and your breasts are a honeycomb of anguish
And your mature belly is a cluster of grapes hung
from the colossal arbor of death… Like a yellow dog,
autumns follow you and, wrapped in fluvial and astronomic
gods, you are eternity in a drop of horror.
Pablo de Rokha, Cosmogony
Like all Chileans, Crabby spoke in a singsong way, her voice vibrating in her nose. She laughed at everything, even celebrity deaths, and made cruel jokes. She drank red wine until she collapsed in snores, only to wake up barefoot because someone had stolen her shoes. She ate empanadas and sea urchin tongues in green sauce seasoned with fresh, extra-hot chili. Whenever the cops beat a “political agitator” to death, she turned a blind eye, pretending not to notice. Actually, she wasn’t Chilean but Lithuanian.
She landed in Valparaíso when she was two, pulled along by her mother, a fat redhead who spoke only Yiddish, and her father a tall (almost seven-foot), skinny fellow as light on his feet as a bird. His profession was the most pedestrian imaginable: callus remover. Using prayer, he made the calluses on people’s feet fall off. Since his name was Abraham and his wife’s name was Sarah, he dreamed—for too many years—of having a son he could name Isaac, which in Hebrew means “he laughs.” After anguished efforts, ten months of gestation, anemia, forceps, a cesarean, a strangling umbilical chord, Sarah finally gave birth to a daughter. Abraham stubbornly insisted on naming her Isaac, but very early in life, even before she began to walk, the girl would burst into an angry fit of wailing the instant she heard that persistent “Isaac.” Only a teaspoon of honey would calm her down.
Intelligent, she could read by the age of four. She rejected the Ladino translation of the Torah, so her first book was Paul Féval’s The Hunchback. She so adored the character Henri de Lagardère that she began to walk hunched over, her legs spread, the tips of her shoes pointing in opposite directions, and her arms bent at right angles. No one bothered to correct her posture. The only thing they did manage to do was nickname her “Crabby.” She tossed out “Isaac,” which would have destined her to suffering the world’s laughter, and instead identified with her nickname, accepting the idea of being an aggressive crab separated from others by a hard shell.
By the time she was eleven, she’d broken a dozen classmates’ noses, so no school would accept her. Between his murderous chanting away of calluses and his davening in the synagogue, Abraham had no time to worry over his daughter’s education. Crabby’s school was the street. She learned a series of professions, among others: re-selling cheap watches for three times their original price under the pretext that they were stolen, painting the hooves of the horses used by funeral parlors black, washing and combing the dogs of high-class prostitutes, and manufacturing “smuggled whiskey” out of tea, crude sugar, and drugstore alcohol. When she was thirteen, she lost her father and menstruated for the first time. She mounted his unvarnished wood coffin as if it were a horse and rode along, staining it red. Sarah, seconded by her instantaneous new husband, kicked her out of the house.
Crabby, her face transformed into a bitter mask, set out on a tour of Chile, a country as long, thin, and foreign as her father. She ended up in the north, in Iquique, a bone-dry port, where the workers in the nitrate and copper mines would come down from the mountains to spend their weekly salary without noticing the rotten dog stench that poured out of the fishmeal plants and infected the streets. Crabby began to work as a maid in the Spanish Club, an “Arabian-style” building designed by an architect whose only knowledge of Islam came from the illustrations in the expurgated nineteenth-century French translation of The Thousand and One Nights. Since her hunchback gait upset the members’ stomachs, the management dispatched her to the lavatories. After a year, she began to sprout a beard. Unwilling to obey the requests of the Aragonese manager, she refused to shave. When the requests were accompanied by grimaces of disgust and insults, Crabby presented her resignation in the form of a punch that sent the brash Aragonese rolling down the stairs. She also beat up two waiters who had the misguided idea of avenging the manager, who lay on the Churrigueresque tile floor howling in pain from some broken ribs. While working in the lavatory, she had made and saved money selling the honorable members cocaine cut with talcum powder. She used her capital to set up a shop for buying and selling gold. She also became the local dentist. After the drunken miners had spent all they’d earned in six months on a weekend orgy, they would line up outside her little shop insisting on selling her the gold crowns that adorned their teeth so that they could go on drinking.
Two years went by, two years of drought. Then, suddenly, the mountains awakened wearing clouds for hats. The sky turned black, thunder roared, lightning flashed, and a deluge commenced with raindrops the size of pigeon eggs. The tempest went on for three days without stopping. No one could go out because the drops were so forceful they punched holes in umbrellas. Locked away in her shop, in the semidarkness, with no more beer to drink, Crabby suddenly, and for the first time in her life, realized she was alone.
The skeleton of her solitude appeared before her: impersonal, heavy, and cold. And then she saw flesh gather around those bones, forming a body for which she felt not the slightest tenderness. It reacted to her disdain by tightening itself around her from her stomach to her throat to deliver her a dull, constant pain. It was like having her soul pierced by a nail, in the depths of a world transformed into jelly, where she was sentenced to drown for all eternity. “Who am I? Can someone tell me? How could they, since no one has ever seen me? It hurts, it hurts! I am a wound awaiting the gaze of another in order to heal. A frog who will never turn into a princess. A freak, who when she wants to give, only gives the gift of disgust. The world’s indifference is my punishment!” She clung to the wall, sliding left and right, absorbing the darkness of the place through every pore until she felt she was black, a shadow that wanted to cry like a dog in the absence of a body to master it.
The drops exploded noisily on the tin roof. Nevertheless, a scream, so high-pitched that it became a long needle, pierced the rain’s atrocious drumming. Only a completely feminine throat could howl like that. Crabby, not knowing why, felt herself the mother of that female under threat of death and, waving the iron bar she used to frighten off hostile drunks, ran out onto the street.
A mantle of gray mist hid the sky, forming thick folds. In the distance, a pale phantom began to take shape. It came toward her, running, a woman with extremely white skin, as white as flour, salt, marble, a shroud, or milk. It passed through the wall of water and fell into Crabby’s arms, shaking like a wounded albatross. It was as tall as her father, with powerful legs and buttocks and enormous breasts; she was very young, but her mad blinking revealed, beneath white eyelids, the pink irises of an old woman. The howling wind tangled her long white hair, baring a shoulder that had received a deep bite. Sniffing excitedly, foaming at the mouth, growling, three Asiatic monks wearing saffron robes ran toward them. The white woman hid behind Crabby’s back, using her as a shield.
Crabby whirled the iron bar. “Hold it right there, you fucking Chinamen! One more step, and I’ll smash your skulls.” The monks stopped for an instant, never taking their eyes off the marmoreal flesh the skinny body of her defender could not hide. Then they revealed the hands they’d been hiding in their sleeves. Thirty long fingernails, as sharp as knives, whistled menacingly. Crabby, unable to stop the attack, smacked her bar on the street: “May the devil swallow them!” With a colossal roar, the earth obeyed. A crack opened, and the mad creatures fell howling into the abyss. The enormous maw, now satisfied, closed. The rain stopped, the sun came out, ready to reign for another couple of years, and to celebrate the return of light, thousands of small parrots, forming a multicolored cloud, chorusing syllables Crabby interpreted as “Albina, Albina, Albina…”
The enormous woman, expressing her gratitude in infantile sobs, gave no sign of leaving. There seemed to be no other place in the world for her but Crabby’s arms and bosom. Crabby led her into the shop, sat her down in the armchair, and, with a tenderness never before seen in her, began to clean out the bite.
Albina (that’s what Crabby named her, obeying the parrots’ message) had lost her memory. Quite often she’d utter sentences in a strange language that sounded like “Om badzra puspe ah hum svaha or Byhams dan sñin rje btan.” At the beginning, Crabby had to bathe her, feed her, teach her to walk and use the bathroom. She learned quickly, and by the end of six months, she could speak Spanish and take care of her needs properly. Nevertheless, there was still an innocent look in her pink eyes that suggested she was seeing everything, absolutely everything, for the first time.
Crabby asked around, but no one recalled having seen any Asian ships docked in the port. Was it possible one could have entered the port at the start of the deluge, while the workers took refuge, and left just when the rain was letting up? Who knows? Crabby was destined never to unravel the mystery. The only trace of the past on her protégée was a tattoo emblazoned at the beginning of the deep crevice separating her buttocks: an asp held in place on the letter T by three nails.
During work hours, Crabby dressed her pearly friend as a nurse. By waving two silver paper fans, she could waft a breeze onto the sweaty miners. Stunned, their eyes fixed on the mountains bulging from the linen uniform, they allowed not only their gold crowns to be pulled but also their teeth along with them. A woman as pale as Albina had never been seen before in those regions where the sun turned even the toughest skin into leather in a few hours. At the end of the afternoon, Crabby would emit her mandrill shrieks and wave her iron bar around to expel the drunken gluttons who wanted to go on in the ecstasy produced by Albina’s protuberances. She would close the shop, scatter lice powder, and sit down in her awful armchair making an embittered face but half-shutting her eyelids so that no one could see the joy that flooded her eyes.
Then Albina would take off her uniform and, naked, prepare tasty dishes: meat, greens cut into the shape of flowers, treats in which the spicy, sour, bitter, and salty all mixed together without excluding the sweet. After stuffing herself, Crabby would belch, say she was very sleepy, and unroll the mattress. Meanwhile, the huge woman would go off to the tiny bathroom to pour out a long and thick stream that was probably as white as she was. “She pees milk, I’m sure!” Crabby would stretch out on her back, completely dressed to hide her ugliness, and with her arms spread would pretend to sleep. Albina, walking on tiptoe, would then stretch out next to her. Resting her head on Crabby’s almost flat chest, she would fall asleep instantly. Crabby would open her eyes and for hours listen to Albina’s snores, which were like long notes blasting from a trombone. When sleep finally overcame Crabby, she would open her mouth wide and give out hoarse wheezes that made the floor, walls, and roof shake. Albina would awaken, go down to the beach, and swim among the phosphorescent waves like a glowworm, then return to the dumpy shop, prepare breakfast, and awaken Crabby by kissing her feet. Crabby, red with pleasure, would open her eyes and shout, in feigned disgust, “Shit, another day!”
Months went by with the charm of a babbling brook. Crabby, lacking a God she could thank for her huge gift, hung a stuffed parrot over the lintel and placed seven candles at its claws. “Holy old bird, if everything that begins ends, make the end come as slowly as possible!” It may be that Crabby either chose the wrong God or that the parrot was deaf, but either way, almost immediately four policemen appeared proudly waving an arrest order. “Citizen, the director of the Spanish Club accuses you of armed aggression and of trafficking in cocaine. You must come with us, either peacefully or by force!”
“Three years have gone by since he fell down the stairs and broke his ribs! That Aragonese faggot wants to get his revenge at a distance. Albina, what will become of you? You can’t pull teeth. And my detainment may be long; with these cops, justice turns into a tortoise.”
“Don’t worry, Crabby,” said Albina. “I may not know how to use the pliers, but I do know how to use the scissors.” Then she asked the suffering miners, “Who’d like me to cut his hair?” Every one of them spit out the cotton swelling their cheeks to shout “Me!” in one voice.
Crabby’s detention lasted forty days. But, since no member of the Spanish Club would diminish his own glory by testifying—that is, admitting he’d used cocaine—and since the bones of the man from Aragón had healed long ago, they released Crabby, much to the relief of the police, who couldn’t stand seeing that fierce spider squatting, huffing, and puffing in the corner of her cell. Now it was Crabby’s turn to rub her eyes. Was this her gold exchange shop? The once somber facade was now painted a violent purple. The splintered wooden screen had been replaced by a curtain with metallic fringes, and a red lamp blinked in the window. A bolero rang out from a gramophone playing at full volume. Crabby, half-closing her eyes as if she were about to see a corpse, pushed the curtain aside. The place was packed with silent, unmoving men in a trance staring at a corner of the room. There, standing on top of a wooden barrel, was Albina, wearing only a G-string, exhibiting her enormous breasts, and shaking her hips to the rhythm of the song. From time to time, a miner would stand up and, moving like a sleepwalker, place a banknote in her elastic waistband. The only light in the room came from the parrot’s seven candles; Albina’s whiteness devoured the darkness.
Crabby prepared to let out some mandrill shrieks that would frighten even the lice out of the place, but one glance from Albina, whose pink pupils were shining intensely, stopped her dead. The giant stepped down from the barrel and walked through the crowd, which parted at her approach as if her white flesh were red-hot iron. When she reached Crabby, she fell to her knees and kissed her toenails. “The boss is back!” Everyone applauded. Crabby tried to smile and twisted her mouth into a bizarre grimace. “Friends, the show is over!” she said. “It will begin again the day after tomorrow, when we’ve organized things a bit better!” Without moving, the miners turned their questioning eyes toward Albina, who said, “Yes, move along now!” And they all obeyed without raising even the slightest disturbance.
The two women calculated that in their thirteen-by-twenty-foot space, more than a hundred men could fit if well packed in and standing. They would only be admitted if they agreed to move only their arms to drink glasses of the reddish mistela Crabby knew how to prepare so well. To make the drink, she would boil water with cinnamon and sugar until it was the color of bark, then toss in some grain alcohol. They also decided to sell skewers with pieces of roast meat, udders, hearts, kidney, snout, ears, and sausage. Crabby proudly painted a sign reading CLUB IDEAL and nailed it to the purple facade. They replaced the barrel with a triangular platform that fit into the corner better. To top off the new arrangement, they covered the G-string with silver spangles.
Their clients, crude miners with inexpressive eyes and stony faces, filled the place and stood stock-still, hypnotized by the white goddess. Crabby’s mistela was strong, and after a dozen glasses their knees gave out. They fell prostrate, sometimes foaming at the mouth, propped up by the legs of those who could still stand. Late at night, Crabby stopped distributing drinks and skewers, turned off the gramophone, and covered Albina with a black mantle as if she were a plaster saint. The miners left the establishment walking backward, bowing, and making the sign of the cross. The two partners, after fumigating the place, counted their money and hid it behind the parrot.
The days began to slip along with the delicacy of fine silk. The men really worshipped Albina. Not a one of them, no matter how drunk, ever showed any disrespect for their living Virgin. Understanding the deep ecstasy of the workers, whose sexual desire transformed into mystical adoration, Crabby began to serve them dressed as a priest. The two women worked from eight at night until six in the morning. They got up late, and then went out to stroll along the beach for hours so Albina could pick up agate stones. Sometimes, looking for red pebbles, they would wander among the rocks that took the place of forests on the arid hills. Crabby’s joy was immense, because even though she found nothing of interest in nature, she did see one thing in life: its incessant death. Albina, for whom any detail was a miracle, saw, through her clean gaze, a revelation of the world. Thanks to that innocent admiration, to that pleasure in living the instant as if it were the most beautiful of jewels, she felt for the first time the benevolence of the stars, admired the funereal beauty of toads, listened to the albacores proclaiming their love for the ocean in song, understood that the shadows of the flies formed letters in a sacred alphabet, and recognized that every stone gave off a different perfume. The fact is that Albina, with her little girl’s naiveté, saw the world backward as if she were hung upside-down. Listening to the chirping of a bird, she said, “In order of importance, first comes the song, then the bird. Because in reality the song was created so that the bird would exist and not the other way around.” Crabby, moved, answered her: “I’m going to give you a notebook where you will write down everything you think.” Then, using a twig to draw in the sand, she began to teach Albina to write.
In turn, Albina taught Crabby to kiss.
“Try to imagine I’m a man,” she said, making her voice hoarse.
“I can’t! You’re the least manly person I’ve ever known!”
“Make an effort, Crabby! Imagine I’m so strong that I can hold the whole world up in my arms, then let yourself fall, give in, stop giving, receive and receive and receive. Imagine that your mouth is death and that my mouth is life, and swallow without stopping.”
As Albina kissed her, Crabby locked herself away in her crab position, becoming a tense ball; she had goosebumps all over. She contracted even more until suddenly, with a cracking of bones, she completely relaxed, turning to water in Albina’s arms. Before kissing Crabby, Albina had drawn a beard and mustache on her face with mud. Crabby’s mind was dissolving. She was a piece of cork floating in a limitless ocean. When her friend released her, she collapsed onto the parched earth and remained there, stretched out staring at the cloudless sky, sensing it as not outside but inside her head. Then she felt ridiculous, returned to her crab position, and ran clumsily among the rocks. If she found a cactus, she would embrace it, knowing that no thorn could pierce her.
This happiness lasted until Drumfoot turned up. He was a city inspector specializing in taxes and fines. His nose ran constantly, and the sweat stain on the back of his khaki shirt took the shape of a cockroach. His left foot was twice as large as his right; it was a spongy mass that fit into no shoe, so he wore a sandal that contrasted strangely with the patent leather boot on his other foot. In his voice there was no room for sentiment, only pisco vapor: “Look here, my little friends, you’ve committed multiple infractions: you have no license, no sanitary facilities, no fire exit, you’ve violated the city’s moral code. You keep no books, have no fire insurance, pay no taxes, and do your business totally underground. I swear by my swollen foot that if you don’t make a deal with me, I’ll turn you in. The cops will close you down until we get the order to sink you forever!”
“And what’s the deal, Mister Inspector?” Crabby asked, her mouth bitter. If this degenerate informed the police they were lesbians, they would be put with the homosexuals that General Ibáñez ordered chained up, their feet weighed down, and tossed from a plane into the sea. Drumfoot smiled and put on the expression of a cynical child, stared at Albina’s breasts, and said, “I’ll come by every other day two hours before you open up so that Miss Whiteass here can deliver me her charms! I’m sure that after a while, she’ll thank me for my visits, because aside from my personal qualities, I’m blessed with a quantity in a certain area that makes it unnecessary to envy a donkey. Of course, the young lady will have to put some effort into these encounters because the visits will last until I tire of her. Then jail and ignominy will have a turn. My law may be sticky, but it is the law!”
“Look here, Mister Inspector, my friend is having her period. Today is Monday. If you come by on Friday, she will take care of you in the manner you deserve.” Drumfoot grinned, perking up his mustache tips, and jumped onto Albina, sticking his tongue into her mouth for a long time. Then he dried his lips on Crabby’s priestly soutane, made a half turn, and walked off humming a military song.
On Friday, Crabby received him, opening the door halfway. The mattress was unrolled in the center of the room. The gramophone played softly, and, on the triangular platform, Albina, naked, followed the music’s rhythm by shaking her pubis, covered by a dense thicket of white hairs.
Drumfoot, his face contorted with desire, began to undress. Before he could take off his trousers, Crabby handed him a glass of her hot mistela. The man swallowed it in one gulp. “Fun and games are over, Missus Ugly, and get the hell out of here before I kick you out with my fat foot! And you, milky ass, come down here, open that mouth wide so you can take it all in, come swallow your master!”
As that, he began to unbutton his fly. Without even getting to the third button he fell deeply asleep. Crabby approached him and pricked his normal foot with a pin. No reaction, he went on snoring. Suddenly, Albina knelt down next to the sleeping man, bit his shoulder with a strange squeal, swallowed the piece of meat she’d pulled off, then began blinking, as if she’d just awakened from a long nap. Crabby instantly erased that incident from her memory. “The pharmacist didn’t lie; five of his sleeping pills can make an elephant fall asleep! Get dressed, Albina, while I finish undressing this guy.”
They took the money they hid behind the parrot, burned the inspector’s clothing, locked the door, and left on a bicycle built for two. They headed north, along the narrow coastal road.
“Albina, there must be a place that isn’t infected by the smell of rot, a place where the miraculous can flourish. A clean town with a soul that corresponds to you, with no Drumfeet around to sully you! We’ll travel until we find it!”
Crabby pedaled in the forward seat. Albina, behind, moving her enormous legs automatically without holding onto the handlebars, was writing in her notebook: “I don’t know where I’m going, but I do know with whom I’m going. I don’t know where I am, but I do know that I’m here. I don’t know what I am, but I do know how I feel. I don’t know what I’m worth, but I do know not to compare myself to anyone else. I don’t know how to dodge punches, but I do know how to withstand them. I don’t know how to win, but I do know how to escape. I don’t know what the world is, but I do know that it’s mine. I don’t know what I want, but I do know that what I want wants me.”
In that manner, they reached the outskirts of Iquique. The fishmeal factories appeared, covered by a thick layer of café-con-leche-colored dust and vomiting thick smoke that slithered up through the chimneys and down to the ground, where they threw down roots and stuck. Rotten meat, acrid excrement, fermented guts—the stench passed through their pores, infected their blood, and tried to infect their souls. Crabby made Albina sit up front and pedaled behind her, sinking her nose into Albina’s wide back. The pestilence was like the mass of demons born from Crabby’s intestines, and the fragrance that emanated from Albina’s white skin, the redemption of the world. Barely breathing, they covered twelve more miles.
After a steep hill, the ocean appeared, sending its salty aroma toward the flank of the mountain, which, under that extended caress, responded with a thousand perfumes from its ocher earth. “Let’s stop to enjoy the pure air and to eat a bit. Just look, Albina, all I have to do is stroll among the rocks on the shore for the crabs to come to me.” Which was exactly the case; hundreds of crustaceans came out of the cracks and began to follow Crabby. It was easy to catch a couple, open them up, roast them on a red-hot stone, and devour them. All the while crabs never stopped rubbing against the legs of the woman they considered their Universal Mother.
A ray of lunar light passed through the keyhole and hit Drumfoot’s forehead. He awakened without realizing he was naked, and lifted the leg with his normal foot to scratch himself behind the ear. Then he went into the kitchen and lapped up the water in the washbasin. Since the door resisted his shoves, he pulled up some of the floorboards and used his hands to dig into the clayish soil and make a hole to get out. He howled at the waning moon and set out, bent over, sniffing the road. “Mmm… they stopped here and placed their feet right on this spot… mmm!… they peed here and… mmm!” He rolled around in Albina’s excrement, panting with pleasure.
Some soldiers on coastal patrol found him that way, naked and carrying out that fetid act. After giving him a good thrashing, paying no attention to his heartrending barks, they dragged him off to the police station. After two days, he got his mind back. The bite on his shoulder had healed, leaving a violet, half-moon-shaped scar. “Those witches will get what they deserve!” Drumfoot spent hours sharpening his knife.
The narrow road built by the Incas along the ridge seemed to float over the abyss. Far below, the waves, transformed into gigantic foamy lips, called to them, insidiously sucking. Luckily, the landscape flattened out little by little, and the path was swallowed up by the dunes on a beach. Albina stripped, ran over the hot sand, and plunged into the glacial water. Crabby followed her, fully dressed. They swam, frolicked, ate clams, and drank the little water they had left, knowing that if they didn’t find a town soon, thirst would swell their tongues.
Twelve bowlers floated out of a creek followed by top hats, pith helmets, military caps, pork pie hats, Panama hats, and a huge variety of hats with upturned brims. The tide was carrying them to the shore like an armada of fragile little boats. The intrigued women climbed the rocky wall. On a narrow beach, a small man—he had no visible deformity, so he couldn’t be called a dwarf—surrounded by empty hatboxes was staring out to sea. As they watched he burst into high-pitched laughter, ran toward the high waves, and let himself be carried away, beginning to drown in those convulsing waters.
Albina dove in. Swimming vigorously, she reached the desperate man, knocked him cold with a punch to the jaw, and floated him to the beach. Crabby shouted in a rage, “Why did you bother to risk your life? You should have let him carry out his destiny! He may be small, but he is a man, and one less man in the world is a good thing!” The drowned man opened his eyes, and with an amiable smile said to Crabby, “Madam, perhaps my destiny was to be saved by your friend here, or, even better, perhaps I’m here so that your destiny can be carried out. The plans of mystery contain multiple paths. But I see you have eaten clams! Allow me to translate what these scattered shells mean.” And the little man examined the remains.
“The white lady, who has fled from a temple—I don’t know if she transmits a blessing or a curse. She’s something less or something more than human. With regard to you, Madam Anger, it seems you hate men because you see them as identical to your father, a thin, tall, dead man who was a callus remover by profession. Since I am the opposite of him, a pudgy, living, short man, a hatmaker by profession, you may accept me as a partner without a second thought.”
“As a partner? You’re raving mad!”
“Wait a second, let me go on interrogating my clams. A dangerous enemy is chasing you. One of you dances, and the other manages her. You’re looking for a tranquil place to set yourselves up. Now I appear. About a mile from here, in a ravine near the Camarones River—not much of a river, true, but more than welcome in these sandy territories—is my town, Camiña. A little-known place because the highway is far away from it and you can only get there on foot or by mule. About forty years ago, miners loaded with silver from the Chanabaya mine came to town. My father sold them all kinds of hats, because they wanted to look elegant for the prostitutes working in the saloons. But the silver veins gave out, the miners went off to other regions, and the whores followed them. I inherited an enormous shop filled with bowlers, wide-brimmed, narrow-brimmed, and pork-pie hats opening their felt jaws hungry for heads. Those mute complaints drove me to despair. With no other profession than this useless hat-making business and forced by my stature to have no wife, sick with boredom, I decided to bury myself in the sea along with my little felt brothers. But as you two may see, I have a different destiny. Come with me, I’ll give you everything I have, a magnificent shop in the center of town! There you can set up, as the clam shells tell me, the café-temple you want!”
Hiding a smile under her severe face, Crabby looked over at Albina, certain she’d burst into a crystalline laugh of approval. The little man was offering them exactly what they had been seeking but had no hope of ever finding, convinced they could only locate it in an unreachable future. But perhaps because the day ended so brusquely, devoured in one bite by the full moon, Albina tensed her muscles to the point that her white skin turned garnet red, showed her teeth, as if all of them were canines, and stuck out a hard, black tongue. Leaping like a wild beast, she snatched the hatmaker, wrapped him in a rib-smashing embrace, pulled off his clothes, rubbed her body with his as if the poor man were a sponge, and bit him on the left shoulder, pulling off a piece of flesh she swallowed with delight. Squealing with a sensual pleasure that filled her stomach with waves, she sat down, foaming at the mouth, and recited for hours incomprehensible words: “Bhavan abhavan iti yah prajanate… sa sarvabhavesu na jatu sañjate.…” Crabby, always wearing her severe mask, swallowing her astonishment (she considered that with regard to Albina’s unsoundable mysteries it was just better to let them pass, perhaps like divine serpents), picked up the hatmaker’s torn clothing, took needle and thread out of her pocket, and with the precision of a sailor sewed everything back together. The hatmaker, almost stiff, sometimes emitted small barks or wiggled his backside as if wagging an invisible tail. Soon the sun came up. No sooner did the first ray of light caress her face than Albina, even though she hadn’t slept, seemed to awaken from a deep sleep. Pale once again, she made a small cry of sympathy and went to the hatmaker, who was still in a faint, and licked his shoulder. The wound closed in a few seconds and became a violet half-moon.
While Albina recovered from her attack by breathing in the sea air and waving her arms like a giant albatross, Crabby dressed their new friend. When she put on his trousers, she surprised herself examining with pleasure that short, large-headed pink penis arising humbly from a clenched scrotum grooved with wrinkles ordered like an ancient labyrinth. It enraged her to admire that sublime and grotesque appendage. She smacked him on the back, and barely had he blinked when she said incisively, “Seeing is believing, John Doe. If your worship says we three are knotted into the same destiny, let’s not make a habit of rejection, and let’s accept that Camiña awaits us. But before we take the first step along that fatal path, please be so kind as to tell us your name—that is, if you have one. I for one don’t go beyond my nickname. Crabby, at your service. My friend, in accord with her pigmentation, is named Albina.”
“Madam Crabby, Miss Albina, for many years now I’ve been called Hat Maker. Even so, I must confess—overwhelmed by shame, since it is a ridiculous injustice—that I was baptized Amado, because my last name, perhaps of Italian origin, is Dellarosa. So I am ‘beloved by the woman who is a rose!’ How’s that for a lie?” And the little man began to weep. Crabby spit violently toward the parched hills so that she wouldn’t feel the knot in her throat.
In that dried-out valley, where the earth was a hard shell covered by a pattern of angular cracks, Amado Dellarosa guided them for hours along a steep path that went forward, backward, twisted left, then after a very long curve, went right, straightened out and again went forward, repeating the same movements again and again, hundreds of times. Crabby shook her head trying to banish an impertinent thought: this capricious path was a labyrinth that resembled in every detail the wrinkles on the little man’s scrotum. Albina, perhaps affected by rays of the sun drilling into her skull, began to repeat obsessively a single sentence: “Seek in the root the future flower.” Finally they entered a grand plateau surrounded by mountains: Camiña.
The town consisted of an extensive circle of wooden houses built around a plaza where grew four enormous cypresses whose trunks were studded with woody eyes, making them look like a nest of ghosts. No living person or animal was visible. No breeze shook the spiny branches, no curtain waved, no fly buzzed. Everything looked clean, dry, immobile, and silent.
“Dear friends, don’t think my town is a cemetery. After twelve o’clock noon it’s so hot that all inhabitants, along with their pets, retreat to the penumbra of home and take a seven-hour siesta. For their part, the wild animals dig tunnels under the desert plain so they can let the heat pass while in narrow but cool grottoes. Believe me, King Sol hits so hard in these parts that the mosquitoes die in midair. Later in the afternoon, when the temperature becomes agreeable, the businesses still functioning—barbershop, billiard hall, grocery store, herb shop—open their doors while the townspeople stroll the ring-street, men in one direction and women in the other, doing nothing else but staring at one another and saying hello. Nothing extraordinary ever happens here. When the Chanabaya mine closed down and the miners left, the Lady, along with her whores, went off after them. By some miracle, she forgot us. For a long time now, no one has died in Camiña. Old folks, when they’re informed they have to give up and yield their spot to someone new, go to live in the abandoned mine tunnels, a charnel house that goes on for miles toward the very entrails of the earth. We know they’re still alive because from time to time they form a chorus and sing old love songs. It seems—though no one has proven it, as we’re all scared to death of even going near the mine—that they eat the red clay that covers the walls. As for us, we’ve learned to survive by keeping bees from the pampa. It’s a rare species, peaceful up to a point. If you approach them on tiptoe, fine, but if someone approaches planting his entire foot on the ground, they sting him without pity and he falls into a coma, transformed into a mass of rashes. For lack of flowers, these worker bees suck the juice of sea algae and make a delicious, salty honey. As you can see, the roofs of all the houses are covered with hives. Pinco, the deaf-mute, transports our product to Arica on burros. The tourists just love it, and the money we get from sales allows us to survive. We are bored, yes, but in a certain way we secretly enjoy the fact that we have at our disposal an apparently infinite amount of time. You must understand that lacking any end changes your mentality. The urgency to do things disappears; idleness, once a sin, has become a virtue. The present moment stops causing trouble and offers us its unconcerned calm. Hope, because it’s unnecessary, is expelled from our souls along with fear. Since we all have the security of living, the only thing we long for is to sleep and find the opium that is pleasant dreams. Solitary pleasure is preferred rather than bothersome coitus. Seduction, lacking a mortal anguish to exacerbate it, becomes an obstacle. A long robe, wide and black, accompanied by a handkerchief worn on the head, makes all women identical. It makes no difference whether you marry this one or that one, and that’s only done when a pregnancy is needed to fill the vacancy left by an old person. Do you see why I tossed my hats into the sea and wanted to make the waves my grave? Living without death is not living. But here I am going on and on, while the hat shop awaits us.”
No one peered out to see them arrive, despite the fact that their footsteps, no matter how hard they worked to make them weightless, resounded on the whitish asphalt, turning it into a drum. Suddenly, a voluminous bee, its body a brilliant scarlet, flew over to trace a halo around Crabby’s head. The hatmaker whispered, “Make not the slightest gesture. It’s a warrior-spy. It can sting without losing its stinger, and its poison is deadly.” Crabby, stiff despite the heat, thought she would sweat ten thousand gallons of cold water. And her terror increased when the animal slowly flew toward Albina. Smiling, Albina shook her hips, opened her mouth, and stuck out her tongue. The bee landed on that moist appendage and began to drink her saliva. Gorged, it used its stinger to draw a tiny cross on Albina’s white throat and then drew another on Crabby’s forehead. Then it flew off like a flame to its hive. From all the roofs arose a general buzzing, rather like rain falling from the earth to the sky. “Well,” said the little man, “both of you were accepted! Hallelujah! I don’t have to tell you how many smugglers and bandits have been killed by those guardians! Without their permission, no outsider enters our town.”
Crabby swallowed her rage. Without warning her, this squirt had dared—a second time—to place the life of her friend at risk. Her own mattered nothing to her, but Albina’s? Shit! To say man is to say calamity! Nevertheless, the bitter saliva in her mouth became sweet syrup when the miserable pygmy raised the metal gate and, with the face of an angel, the eyes of a dove, and the gestures of a gift-giver, showed them the spacious place, where more than two hundred idiots could be packed in. “Thank you, Don Amado!” The now-likable little man stood before her on tiptoe and offered her his forehead. Crabby wrinkled her nose in disgust for an instant, and then, suddenly, as if a stretched elastic band had broken within her heart, she smiled for the first time at a man. Enveloped in a cloud of tenderness, she bent over, and planted a kiss between his eyebrows. Bursting into diaphanous laughter, Albina took off her clothes, and with her marmoreal skin shining like a star in the half-light, began to dance in order to bless the new café-temple.
On a khaki motorcycle, Drumfoot traced the road that rose toward the north. A blood infused with hatred accumulated in his erect penis. In his right fist vibrated a knife, also infused with hatred. The two extremes were guiding him; one wanted pleasure, the other death. While the mountain wind had swept away all tracks from that dirt path, a third extreme, his nose, with its abnormally developed sense of smell, picked up traces of the effluvia emanating from the white woman. It was a vaginal scent, unctuous, biting, bittersweet, greenish, as fragrant as the ivy flowers that open at dawn. Mmm! Suddenly an intolerable stench expelled him from his olfactory paradise. Blood poured from his nostrils. Barking his complaints, he passed by the fishmeal factories. He began to cough, lost control, and, making a leap, twisting like a beast, he fell on all fours, clinging to the edge of the pavement while his motorcycle smashed to pieces on the rocks a hundred yards below.
He left behind the sticky smoke infecting those territories and reached the beach. Vomiting, he ran to dive into the frigid ocean. When the salt water had extirpated even the tiniest particle of stench, he shook his body vigorously, surrounding it for a few seconds with a cloud of golden drops. He growled with satisfaction; there, abandoned at the outset of a narrow path, stood the bicycle built for two! He sniffed it over from end to end, from the handlebars to the tires. He licked the seat that had sunk itself between Albina’s buttocks, and then, overwhelmed by an enraptured hatred, his lower jaw tremulously revealing his canines, he ran along the path, his knees bent, using his hands as feet by leaning on his fists. Soon, so many curves, advances, twists, and switchbacks exasperated him. He located a point in the north, his goal, and left the path to get to it in a straight line. When it was already nightfall, after many hours of trotting, he realized with angry shock that he’d reached his starting point. There was the bicycle, now covered by a sheet of crabs.
It only took three or four hours for them to finish setting up their hall. All they had to do was empty it. They eliminated chairs, counters, hat blocks, irons, shapers, a fitter, pieces of felt, teatina straw, palm fibers, and sacks filled with hat liners. They stored all that in the basement and dragged up a barrel that had once held wine. This they placed in the center of the empty hall as a pedestal for Albina. As Crabby always said, “Less is more.” In that temple, any object, no matter how small, would dull the splendor of the white priestess. Amado grinned at her like a fool and agreed: “That is certainly the case, miss. A single, tiny cloud in the midday blue can darken the entire sky.” In the back room, they set up the electric cooker to heat Crabby’s mistela and laid out a huge bottle of grain alcohol, clay pots, clumps of cinnamon bark, a box of sugar—and that was that. They added a large mattress for the two women and a small one for their partner. He turned out to be an excellent sign painter, and they hung up a crafty poster reading DANCE OF CREATION. With no more advertising, they got ready to open the doors of the café-temple as soon as the sun set.
In that monotonous town, the slightest change resounded like a bomb exploding. Once siesta was over, the townspeople began their afternoon stroll on the sidewalk ring, the men signing to one another with glances to take notice of the poster while the women pretended to notice nothing.
Amado lent them an old gramophone, which had only one record—Gregorian chants. The flutelike, slow, monastic voices, escaping the testicles to echo in the head, could not inspire lascivious movements in Albina’s exuberant body. Even so, she clambered up onto the barrel and waited for the chanting to filter through the pores of her skin. No use. Those castrato throats could never submerge her in a sensual trance. Exasperated, she gave a whistle, long and shrill. In response came the rattling of hundreds of wings from the mountains. Soon a flock of parrots as small as sparrows invaded the hall. The hoarse tone of their chatter suggested they were all male. They clung to the ceiling, covering it with a green carpet, and began to imitate the Gregorian chant. Their voices, fused with those of the pious monks, caused the enormous woman’s flesh an intense chill that plunged her into the most dense and mysterious zones of her soul.
Seeing her move, the little man began to shake. He pushed down an erection with both hands and fell on his knees, red, tense, swollen, boiling, ashamed. Before he fainted, he managed to exclaim, “Forgive me, Madame Crabby!” Hearing herself “madamed” like that, Crabby also blushed. No man had ever treated her with such respect. She shook her head, sucked at her mustache, tossed a glass of water into his face, and gave him a friendly kick. “Come on, man, wake up! Our customers will be arriving soon.” Shocked, Amado muttered, “This is impossible! This woman can’t appear naked! She’ll cause heart attacks!” Albina, still dancing, stuck half her body out of the window facing the patio, squeezed her lips together, and sucked in air to make a grinding noise. A swarm of red bees came and covered her from head to foot. The deadly guardians!
When the sun dipped below the sea like a sinking ship, when the shadow of the mountains had barely painted the flatland black, a mob of silent men headed for the new establishment. It was the start of a rite that would be repeated week after week. These followers entered and packed themselves in around the barrel, getting closer and closer to one another, reducing edges and movements in order to take up a minimum of space. Finally they formed a compact mass of more than six hundred bodies. Not even a needle could thread its way through them. Crabby had to sell her mistela right at the entrance, pouring half a liter directly into each of their mouths. The sudden effect of the alcohol together with the hum of the parrots harmonizing with the Benedictine chant, to say nothing of the vestal’s body undulating under the buzzing mantle of killer insects, was enough to project them into another dimension, a place alien to space and time. There the individual became nothing in the magma of collective flesh and the lofty woman, a magnetic summit, everything.
Little by little, after detaching themselves one at a time, the bees began to fly around her. Thus appeared her hair, her white forehead, her nose all atremble, her mouth with its obscene lips, her neck, which smelled of incense. In the moment when the bees revealed her breasts, a cavernous sigh arose from the drunken mass, a mixture of satisfied visual desire and the pain of frustrated tactile desire. When her navel appeared, everything seemed to stop, as if the bees wanted to prolong the wait. Suddenly, in a buzzing explosion, the insects hiding the rest of her body also took flight in order to spin around with the deafening swarm.
Very slowly, as if it weighed a ton, the living sculpture raised her right heel until she touched it to her forehead. There appeared a great mouth, covered with dew and as red as the guardian bees. A dense saliva fell from the virile lips. Albina allowed her gluttonous winged servants to suck up the nectar from her sex and then, satiated, return to their hives. The knees of many oglers gave way, but held in place by the tightly packed mass they did not fall; they floated in the lake of flesh, showing only the whites of their eyes, like unconscious pelicans. At first light, the parrots stopped imitating the chanting and fell asleep. Amado stopped winding the gramophone, and with dictatorial gestures Crabby expelled the stupefied customers onto the curved sidewalk, where the women, wrapped in their black costumes, awaited them. The men, shot through with happiness, fell into their arms, weeping bitterly. The women had to carry them home like infants. Swallowing the couples, the doors of the houses, one after another, closed with tremendous bangs; shortly after they could not contain the frenetic squeaking of all the beds.
The two women, the beauty naked and the hunchback dressed, slept in each other’s arms from dawn to dusk, finally at peace. Crabby thought she could hope for nothing better; they’d found the impossible clean town where miracles could come to life, without thuggish and pestilential Drum Feet, with reverent men and discreet women. (After all was said and done, it was they who enjoyed the involuntary increases Albina aroused in their consorts’ private regions.) Also, the hatmaker had turned out to be a man of exquisite delicacy. When Albina slowly writhed like a serpent, giving off waves of angelic perfume and bestial heat that paralyzed the spectators, Amado had made a superhuman effort to overcome the stiffness that also invaded him and turned his head toward Crabby in order to gaze at her with a kind fool’s great big eyes and whisper, “I don’t want it to be for her; I want it to be for you, my lady!” Crabby didn’t understand very well, or rather didn’t want to understand what he meant to say to her. Nevertheless, she got goose bumps, and her mouth twisted into a smile that was not a grimace. She noted, with a sweet emotion she did not consider her own, that under the impact of the little man’s gaze the whiskers of her mustache were beginning to fall out.
The absence of death made everyone sleep a deep siesta. Muscles relaxed, hoping without hope to forestall the anguishing final cut. The lucky organism, full of confidence, allowed itself to be carried along by the current of sleep and entered a dense void. From Albina’s every pore flowed trickles of different perfumes, transforming her into a bulb in an aromatic forest. Crabby, herself all nose, became intoxicated from being up against that prodigious skin. From time to time, an outside tremor awakened her for a few seconds. Gradually, she realized that the hatmaker, purring like a cat, was sleeping pressed against her back. To herself she said, “Beat it, you impudent dwarf! What are you doing here, embedded between my shoulder blades like a tumor, when you know that the frontiers of our mattress are forbidden territory to you? An infraction worthy of punishment!” Even so, instead of inflicting the well-deserved kicks that would have returned the invader to his proper place, she curved her back and jammed her buttocks against the hatmaker’s belly. To ignore her own gesture, Crabby quickly went back to sleep.
One Tuesday, a free day, when in the suffocating orange afternoon sky the disk of the full moon was already visible, Crabby was awakened by desperate whining. Two surprises awaited her: first, Albina was not in the bed, and second the naked Amado looked more like a dog than a man, covered with fur, his mouth transformed into a muzzle filled with sharp teeth. Shaken by chills, as if two contradictory tasks were engaged within his in a bloody battle, he tried to speak, mixing words and spittle with his long, harsh tongue.
“Aouu! Oooo! My… mistress… heart… good wound… more than horizon… more than ocean… more than sky… the pain of a thousand daggers… heartbeats are your name… mother of my breath… Love!… Bloove!… Deathlove!… Barklove!… Aouu! Oooo!… Flower in my brains!… Gaze that burns us!… I breathe you in, I pant you, what pleasure, you on earth, you in the air, aroma, urine, sweaty hair, sweet mouth, lick your shadow, black shroud, roll around, die at your feet, whole, yours, yours, yours!… But the other one… Aouu! Oooh! The other one! Ay!… Pack of dogs, radiant, bite, violet moon, slave, fragrance, scalpel, ass, delight, voracious lasso, turbid whirlwind, absorb, demand, shock, corrodes, phallus, testicles, arrows, red-hot, gallop, fly, sink between your legs, lick and lick, silver vulva… Aouu! Ooooh!… Pack… Dog against dog… insatiable tunnel… fornicate… fornicate… Messenger of the bad moon… A thousand red lips!… I’m leaving! I don’t want to!… Tie me up, mistress!”
Drumfoot furiously shook his dirt-covered fur. He sniffed the bicycle’s seats, bent over the one that smelled of Albina, and with rapid movements of his narrow hips, his tail wagging like an insane metronome, he rubbed his red appendage until he flooded the leather with his acidic semen. He then licked up the sticky matter to quench his thirst. He tried to think. Despite trotting in a straight line, he’d returned innumerable times to his point of departure. So? What he had to do was to follow the twisty road without ever leaving it. Son of a bitch! To calm his rage and accept the order imposed on him, he carried on, urinating as much as he could. He had to possess her, to sever her jugular vein, to sink his muzzle into her anus and devour her body, beginning with her guts!
Crabby chained up the hatmaker-dog. When night became dense, the eyes of the half-animal glowed like hot coals. From his muzzle, green foam began to drip. His penis swelled at its base, looking like an electric bulb. It became harder and harder for him to speak; each word was followed by a bark.
Madame Crabby had observed that Albina, despite her startling form, ate practically nothing, only a few grains of rice per day. In truth, she fed on the flesh she tore off her fascinated spectators. Every night, she bit at least seven—on the shoulder, at the base of the neck, or on the soft part of the arm. Barely any blood flowed from the wounds, and they healed quickly, turning into violet half-moons. The priestess’s teeth injected a canine virus that remained dormant for most of the month, waiting to come alive on the nights of the full moon, when it would invade arteries and veins. She and her enchanted victims were in two places at once. As humans, they seemed to attend the ceremony of the dance, hypnotized by Albina’s lascivious movements, the buzz of the bees, the hybrid chanting of the monks and the parrots, but they were nothing more than a tangle of empty forms, a mirage. Outside, in the hills, transformed into quadrupeds, they chased after a white bitch that from time to time howled in heat, and stopped to allow herself to be penetrated. Twenty, forty, a hundred males possessed her while they stretched their muzzles skyward trying to lick the moon. Insatiable, she extracted their semen again and again, until she saw them fall around her like sacks filled with soft bones. Now, on Tuesday, the day off, no one needed to be in two places at once. For that reason, Albina was not in the bed. The vixen was swallowing phalluses out in the mountains. Aouu! Oooo!
Amado pulled his chain taut with a snap. He held in a snort, hid his fangs, and muttered, “Can’t stand it… any more! Entire body… full semen! Sorry… mistress! Must… go! Please… follow me! You try… calm the hetaera!”
After climbing a rocky hillside, the zigzag path entered a high, hard plain. A hostile, sterile zone, home to snakes and playful spiders. For lack of flies they ate one another, producing with their triturating apparatuses a crackling sound like high-pitched giggles. It was there, far off, that the pack ran. Crabby huddled against a rock in order to spy without being seen. The granite, which still retained the intense heat of the day, covered her skin with blisters, but she withstood it all without moving. The white bitch stopped, raised her hind parts, lifted her tail, and offered herself to her pursuers. Pushing one another aside frenetically, they lustfully licked both holes. Then they possessed her amid a chorus of howls. Crabby poked her head out. That insatiable beast could not be her modest Albina! And yet, the chubby animal next to her proved that a human being could transform into a dog.
Crabby’s eyes filled with tears. The being who had once been her admirer running like an unfettered stallion to bite open a path through the ardent group and sank himself, giving nervous shakes, into the bitch’s posterior, and she felt as if a steel hand had torn her heart apart. Holding back her sobs, her sorrow, her jealousy, and her rage, she began to move forward, making huge leaps, overcoming the gravitational force of the plain. But as she freed herself from weight, time slowed down. With each step she rose thirty feet but at such a slow speed that it took her hours to reach the orgy. She was passed as rapidly as a spark by a filthy, stinking monstrosity bent low to the ground, leaving behind a plume of dust. One of its paws was swollen, and its back hair matted into the shape of a cockroach. Giving intense growls that advanced along the ground like a burning powder trail, it threw itself on the mass of dogs. The general stupor allowed it to reach the prey it so greedily desired, and it sank its fangs into her white back. She shook her body, making her aggressor fly back and forth like a fetid fan, but he would not open his jaws, intent on breaking her spine. The other dogs, insane now, began to cover him with bites. Howling with pain, he had to release his grip, but so powerful was his fury that he could fight all the others alone. Snapping implacably, he made the group scatter. The terrified canine mass fled, leaving behind a bloody trail the arid soil fruitfully absorbed. At the head of the pack ran the white bitch, with the flesh on her back open like a rose. Crabby made herself a shadow of the rock. There was no doubting it now: the butchering monster was Drumfoot. She regretted not having her iron bar to smash his skull. The danger was imminent, and while she could try to save her own skin by blending in with the ugliness of the landscape, which was not difficult given her own vile being, she could only pray. But to whom should she pray? To the old, bearded God who was hardly useful, even for removing ordinary calluses? She implored the only thing that, aside from Albina, had kept her alive: beer. “Oh, divine drink, just as you shooed sadness away from me, make that demon disappear. First save my girlfriend, then save my dwarf, and then, if you’ve got a gram of pity left, save me!” But beer seemed stone-deaf.
Three dogs, the most broken-down of the pack, were running with difficulty. Drumfoot caught up to them exactly where the plain ended and the foothills began sinking toward the plateau of Camiña. There he tore open their necks. Their corpses went rolling down the hillside and smashed against the first houses. For the other dogs, stiff with terror, the zigzag path turned to glue. Their aggressor, confident he would eliminate them and get the female, dashed after them with every bit of speed his three healthy paws and the fourth swollen one could provide. But he had to stop in his tracks and run for the hills, because a swarm of red bees suddenly blocked the way. Giving a snort of relief, the chubby dog left his neighbors, who with their tails between their legs were entering their houses. Surrounded by a halo of the guardians, he sought out Crabby so that they could return to town protected. On the peak of the highest mountain, the rapacious enemy howled at the moon, but a sole black cloud, pushed by a current of mountain air, came to hide her. Drumfoot trotted toward the desert, his head hanging, intent on waiting there, eating spiders, until the silver orb, full once again, offered him the damn bitch. Below, before Crabby’s sad eyes, Amado Dellarosa recovered his human form. Three men lay nearby, their necks spewing blood.
“The Lady has returned,” whispered the little man. “All the barking attracted her attention and she remembered us. How could we have stopped it? There she is now, the same as before, weaving her cloth among the four cypresses.”
Crabby could see, in the center of the plaza, under the thick foliage of the conifers, a dark shape that well might have been an old lady covered with capes and veils or an enormous black spider. Like a seagull hunting sardines, the day fell out of the sky to devour every shadow, except those of the cypresses, which became the dark heart of the light.
Crabby and Amado found Albina stretched out on her mattress, moaning as if emerging from a nightmare. The sheets were stained with blood, and at the center of her back was a deep cleft with jagged edges that revealed the bones of her spinal column. Crabby filled a clay pot with alcohol, ready to empty it into the wound, but as her friend wiped her eyes and gave a sensual stretch, the wound closed up like a suspicious oyster.
“Poor girl, does the bite hurt?”
“Bite? What bite?” answered Albina, smiling naively.
“The one that made you stain the sheets with blood!” grumbled Crabby.
“Blood? What blood?”
In the bed, the red had vanished. No sign of the bite remained. Crabby and Amado swallowed hard. Had it all been a dream? They ran to the door and sighed, first with relief and then with horror. There, among the four cypresses, was the Lady, weaving her cloth, and led by firemen carrying burning torches and the town band playing a solemn funeral march, a cortege passed by carrying on burros decorated with black plumes the three whose throats had been cut. Behind them, a group of bandaged-up men marched with difficulty.
Amado, huddled in a corner, biting his nails, observed the two women. Crabby, spellbound as usual, but with a sigh of concern, watched her naked friend charmingly sweep away the excrement of the parrots, who had made a home of the ceiling. Carefree and whistling a merry tune, Albina seemed not to remember her nocturnal escapade. In the face of such a false calm, the little man scrambled to the top of the barrel and began to screech, “Enough! Let’s stop playing the fool! The problem is serious! You, Albina, must know that you turn into a lusty bitch and that you infect the men of the town with your bites! You, Lady Crabby, must stop this! If you don’t, with every full moon the Lady will fill her belly with murdered dog-men! It will enhance her appetite, and she’ll end up devouring everyone!”
When Crabby told her, in full detail, what she’d seen the previous night out on the plain, Albina burst into tears. “Dear friend, dear heart of mine, I owe you my life. I know you’d never slander me, but understand that you may trick yourself and lie without intending to. Our reason is like a solid boat sailing on the infinite ocean of dreams and madness. Don’t believe your dark part, look at me as you used to look at me. I am a woman and not a lusty bitch. I do not eat human flesh, and no man can turn into a quadruped. You love me, you cannot invent such horrors. It’s this hypocritical dwarf who’s got you hypnotized. He wants to separate us, so pay no attention. Let’s get on our bicycle built for two and get out of here. There has to be a place where there are no men!”
Amado became desperate as he watched Crabby weaken in the face of her friend’s tears and whisper warm “forgive me’s” as she rocked her in her arms like a gigantic sobbing baby. Without realizing or desiring it, Albina was one being at night and another by day. And now, Amado had to present irrefutable proof to keep all the men in town from being infected. No words could convince Crabby; he would need material evidence. But where would he find it during the daylight hours? “I hope this works!” he shouted, and shut doors and windows and blocked all the cracks light peeked through. Amid the protests of the parrots, he hung a round mirror from the ceiling and focused a flashlight on it. Once he’d achieved the lunar effect, he used all the power of his will to unleash the virus; it worked. His mouth turned into a muzzle, fur covered his skin, and his arms turned into dog legs. In a mix of barks and human words, he said, with difficulty, “Do you see, Albina? A human being can turn into a dog. You and the moon are the cause.”
Crabby turned off the flashlight with a kick and ran to open doors and windows. The light enabled Amado to recover his human form. Convinced, Albina became depressed. “I thought I was what I am, but in reality I’m still what I was. And that which I was, well, I don’t know what it is. Perhaps some day I will know. Then I’ll be what I shall be, but I’ll stop being what I am now. And ceasing to be what I am now horrifies and terrifies me. Help me, please, you two!”
Crabby hugged her friend, covering her huge breasts with tears and snot. “I don’t want you to change! We were fine just the way we were! Now that we know everything, we can tie you up, with your permission, on nights of full moon. We’ll chain you, gag you, blindfold you, seal your ears with balls of wax, and close down the hall! And every one of those he-men in heat who come around to sniff and bark, well, we’ll run them off with my iron bar! You do not have to know what you were or be ashamed of it! Your past is of no importance! The cat is not his tail!”
Amado cleared his throat politely, interrupting the embrace. “Ahem, well then, ladies. A tail wandering around is certainly not a cat, but if it’s attached to the animal’s backside and you step on it, you’ll see that the tail is very much the cat. Since this problem falls under my area of expertise, allow me to give you some advice. If we consider that the transformation from lady to dog is not a curse but an illness, we can try to cure it. In nature, every venom is born alongside its antidote. Lady Coughard, the witch doctor, can help us. It’s true that at the age of a hundred and forty-three she lives with the other old folks in the abandoned mine, but she’s not above peeking out when people bring her pink smelts. Since she eats clay all the time, that little treat drives her wild.”
Fearing that they’d be attacked by Drumfoot, they let Pinco, the deaf-mute mule driver, feel up Albina’s body for an hour as payment for hiding them among his mules and bringing them to the beach. Tucked away next to the coastal rocks, they spent several hours trying to hook half a dozen fish. The regular silvery smelts, with their tapered bodies and complete lack of intelligence, came in schools to devour the bits of bread at the bottom of the creel-trap, and the fishermen dumped them back into the sea like shiny vomit. The pink ones on the other hand were very scarce. They always swam alone, so nervous that they could eat the bait and flee before the door of the trap closed.
Amado, Crabby, and Pinco—who was helping them, not because he was an obliging soul but so that he could lay his greedy hands on Albina’s buttocks, using the jolt of the waves as a pretext—all lost hope, got out of the water soaked to the skin, and moved into the sun. Albina, sighing compassionately, began to dive. A pink smelt, with its lynx eyes, swam to look at her, or rather to adore her. She opened her mouth wide, and the little fish swam in, curling up on her tongue as if it were a nest. Just like that, in under an hour, she caught the six needed to seduce Lady Coughard.
Opposite a precipice on the steep hill, the abandoned mine opened like the mouth of a gigantic mummy; instead of a shriek, a cloud of orange dust floated out from it. The wasteland’s heat caused whirlwinds swirling around the feathers of dead seagulls, as sharp as razors. Carrying the smelts, still alive in a flask filled with salt water, they stood shouting for a good while outside the dark maw but got no response. The whining chant of a hundred or so old folks made the tongues of dust tremble. Finally, opening her way through the copper-colored columns, came the witch doctor, followed by an armadillo. Seeing the appetizing offering, she spit out a ball of clay, which the animal began to lick greedily. She seized the flask with her claw-like fingers and, possessed by spasms, swallowed the fish whole along with the salt water. She fell seated on the burning soil, but her parchment-like skin suffered not at all. She patted her swollen belly, belched, and began to laugh as if she were drunk.
“Many, many thanks, little girls and even littler boy! Those pink smelts restore my taste for life after so many years of eating dirt. Before I was an empty thing, I didn’t exist, but now at least I have a full stomach digesting with pleasure. Soon I’m going to put out a good, soft shit and not expel gravel, so that it cancels my sterility and makes me create. Create what? A fetid nest for larvae. Hallelujah, shitters of the world! We have a purpose; we are the mothers of worms! Do you need something from me?”
Crabby, disgusted by the old crone, put her protective arm around Albina and whispered into her ear, “Don’t despair, darling. We’ll never age like that. Luckily, just opposite our café-temple, we have the Lady. When our flesh begins to sag, the two of us we will tangle ourselves up in her web.” Amado explained the problem of Albina and the dog-men to the witch, which caused her to have an immodest orgasm. Then she answered, in sentences so broken that they sounded like a rooster crowing.
“Stop worrying. Problems are only disguised solutions. A long time ago, before the Incas, there lived in these wastelands the Paracas. Among the many divinities they worshipped was a bitch-goddess—an animal with twelve teats who gave white and black milk at the same time. No one knew when they sucked which teat would give food and which would give poison. Her followers immunized themselves against the dark liquid by eating a flower called shigrapishcu, the solitary product of a cactus that only blossomed once every hundred years. Sometimes the remedy was worse than the sickness. For every two people who ate the shigrapishcu, one would die! Do you see what you’re exposing yourself to, milky girl? To be cured you have to want to be cured, then know you can be cured, and finally accept the changes that health brings. Don’t fool yourself. If you manage to find the flower and eat it without dying, you will never be the same. And by changing yourself, the others and the world will change. Your new eyes might make enemies or victims of friends. Everything is possible. On the other hand, if you decide to do nothing, you will end up raped and beheaded like all the other dogs. What do you say? I see you dithering. You’ll never be able to make a decision! It would be better if you killed yourself by jumping off a mountain right now!”
The armadillo climbed up the old woman’s body as if it were a dead tree and arranged itself on her bald head like a hat. The two women and the little man stood still, waiting for the image to dissolve like a bad dream. The old woman’s hoarse breathing turned into a toothless guffaw, and a parade of naked nightmare figures all covered with clay began to emerge from the mine. Some dragged themselves along, others limped, most danced with grotesque gestures, all marching down toward Camiña. Lady Coughard stood up, took hold of the armadillo and ordered it, “Roll up, Quirquincho!” The animal wrapped itself up in its shell of bony plates and turned into a ball. With great skill, the witch tossed it at Albina, hitting her right in the forehead. Caught off guard, Albina stepped back, her face covered in blood, and almost fell into the precipice, managing to hang onto a dried-out bush at the cliff’s edge. “Don’t help her, assholes!” thundered the witch, paralyzing Crabby and Amado with a strange gesture. Then she crawled to the edge of the abyss and said to Albina, “Big coward! Dreamer! When are you going to stop clinging onto what you aren’t? Eternity without change is a poisoned gift! The Holy Lady has recovered her memory and is now calling us! Obey her as we do! Let go of this world!” Grabbing the armadillo by the tail, she used it as a hammer to beat Albina’s fingers. “Take that and that! I told you to let go, you freak!” Roaring with rage, Albina swung her body, kicked her legs, and did a flip to land on her feet in front of the witch. Lady Coughard looked at her mockingly.
“Now do you see you aren’t a coward, girl? And you aren’t a sheep either. Don’t let yourself be beaten; you know how to fight and to win. You deserve my help!” With another wave of her hand, she lifted the paralysis freezing Crabby and Amado. “Listen to me, all of you. Thanks to the mining companies whose slag has turned these lands into a hostile desert, there is only one sacred cactus left alive. According to my calculations, it will flower in four days. You only have that short amount of time to find it, because when the shigrapishcu opens, it only lives for ten seconds. Then it disintegrates in a luminous explosion, giving off a perfume that is so penetrating it makes anyone who breathes it insane. If you don’t get there on time, you’ll have to wait a century for another. The plant is small, no more than four inches tall, but because it’s lived for thousands of years, its roots stretch under the dry crust hundreds of miles in diameter. The only way to reach it is to find one of those long roots, uncover it and follow it like an electric line. I’ll give you Quirquincho. If you walk in a spiral pattern, he will find one using his powerful sense of smell.”
The long, reddish conga line made up of the old people moved off down the mountain, zigzagging along the narrow path. “Neither the brain, nor the heart—your skin will tell you the way!” shouted the witch doctor, and ran limping toward the clay-covered mass of bodies and let herself be swallowed up by it. Albina, filled with a strange power, furrowed her brow: “I understand. I must not seek the cure thinking only about myself. I have to think about the others. If the evil comes from within me, when I eliminate it within my soul, they will stop being dogs. And I will become what I must become. I’ll seek the shigrapishcu! Come on, Quirquincho!”
“And what about me?” thought Crabby. “Does she think I’m going to let her go by herself? Her fate is mine, and that’s that!” Four days to find the solitary cactus in that immense, blazing hot wasteland that unfolded like the skin of a dead iguana, a hell into which even the red bees would refuse to accompany them, depriving themselves of the sweet, aromatic sweat of the woman who’d dominated them. The repugnant Drumfoot also awaited them there, intent on tearing them to pieces. Finding the cactus seemed an impossible task, suicidal. Nevertheless, Crabby, without her usual snorts of indignation, trotted after Albina. When they reached the plain, Crabby took the lead and walked forward with her arms spread, her chest thrust forward, and her chin out, as if with that stance she could protect her friend from monsters and demons. Feeling abandoned, the hatmaker started to return to town, but after a few steps he made a half-turn and shouted to his partners, “Hey, ladies, wait a minute. Let me get some barrels of water and three burros to carry them!”
Albina, entering the desert, didn’t even turn her head. But Crabby stopped. She dried the perspiration on her face with a clumsy gesture to hide her intense blush. Her heart began to beat more rapidly when Amado announced his decision to follow them. “Wait, Albina, our partner is right. Without water we’ll die in a single day in this oven. Here, in the shade of a rock, we’ll wait until he gets back with the water.” As soon as her friend sat down next to her, she shouted in a rude tone that hid an intense sweetness: “Hurry up, Mister Dellarosa, and don’t waste any time! We’ll give you half an hour to get back with the water and the burros. But we won’t wait a second longer! And while you’re at it, please bring along my iron bar.” Shouting his fervent obedience, Amado started running toward Camiña, trailing an angular tail of dust.
All things come along following my footsteps, barking desperately…
and I am a walking dead man.
Pablo de Rokha, “Winter Steel”
With all the speed his short legs could muster, Amado passed through Camiña’s western entrance. He was winded by his efforts, but his shortness of breath became even shorter when he saw old men and women tossed all over the street like clay dolls. The maddened bees flew from one O-shaped mouth to another, drinking saliva that stank of swamp. The townsfolk added their nervousness to that of the bees; the spectacle of all those cadavers—their grandparents of mythical immortality—made them feel like towers obliterated by a lightning bolt. Those dried-out bones, a parched ocean, transformed the circular town into a ship manned by a crew sentenced to death. And it would be impossible to rent burros from Pinco! Loaded with three or four corpses each, the animals paraded in single file toward a bonfire blazing in the cemetery. The stringy flesh and sun-cured skin of the dead sent toward the sky a thick black smoke that seemed to dissolve into flocks of buzzards. The birds swooped down to dig among the ashes, only to fly up again carrying in their claws porous bones that exploded like firecrackers.
The café-temple, left empty, with its doors and windows shut, was invaded by beams of light. In fleeing from their prison, the parrots had pecked through the roof. Perhaps as a kind of protest, they had emptied their bowels before flying away, and a carpet of coppery-green scarabs enjoyed the sinister banquet left for them. Amado, his nostrils sealed with thumb and index finger, filled a big bottle with water, grabbed Crabby’s iron bar along with three gold nuggets his father had left him as an inheritance, and, thus loaded, went back out to the street, thinking he’d never return. A group of women chased after him, throwing shoes: “You brought those women here, you damned dwarf, and they brought in death. It’s all your fault! Just look at what you’ve made of our husbands!” As he fled, Amado saw individuals growling in dark corners, squatting down, leaning on their knuckles, using their arms as forelegs. Their naked torsos had patches of fur, and their jawbones, grown huge, stretched out their lips. The hatmaker realized that he, too, was experiencing the same mutation—mouth turning into muzzle, skin sprouting fur, ears going pointy. He felt a tail jutting out of the base of his spine. The malady no longer needed the discretion of night to manifest itself; it now dared reveal itself by day. Soon those men would be dogs through and through.
With difficulty, since the iron bar weighed as much as the water, he climbed the steep path. The women, barefoot now and afraid to walk on a desert floor covered with sharp stones, stopped following him. But almost immediately, a pack of men galloped after him, their shouts turning to barks. He tried to speed up, but when he reached the plain, the pack was upon him. Thinking they were going to eat him, the little man tried to wave the iron bar around, but he lacked the strength even to lift it high. Fleetingly, he thought of Crabby with fervent admiration; she waved that heavy weapon around as if it were as light as a feather. Paying him no attention, the monsters ran into the disappearing horizon, jets of excited foam flying from their mouths. Near the vanishing point, tiny now, they began to dig holes with their paw-hands where they could bury themselves to escape the heat, waiting for the cool wind of night.
Amado sighed with relief and looked for his partners among the rocks, but they were gone. Damn! He wasn’t that late, perhaps fifteen minutes, but no more! He expected that Albina, a haughty and distant demigod, might behave like that and take off if he was late, but it was unforgivable that Crabby, a woman in whom he’d deposited the immense wealth of his hopes, wouldn’t allow him a few minutes extra. She knew that the implacable mountain whirlwinds erased all footprints and that even walking a few steps into that infinite desert meant being lost forever! Something told him that his devotion had found an echo in Crabby, that an invisible golden link united their hearts, that their deep friendship could not end in capricious abandonment. He was certain that some place, his lady had left a signal for him. Indefatigable, he searched from peak to peak, until he found, under an arrow scratched in the granite with a chunk of salt, two words: CAMARONES RIVER. He gave a shout of joy.
In those infernal bowels—where the dust seemed to flood the horizon and pour from the pale sky, and skin clung to the skeleton, avoiding contact with the burning stones—half an hour seemed half a century. Barely had the thirty minutes passed when Albina allowed the rage that each one of her desiccated cells was feeling to express itself: “That cowardly tadpole will never come back. You need guts to walk into this cooking pot! If you want to turn into grilled meat, you can wait for him, but, really, I’m shocked at all your weakness for that weevil. I don’t understand what you see in him!” Blushing, Crabby repressed the image of the charming mushroom rising up out of the labyrinth of wrinkles and quickly retorted, “What do I see in him? He’s a dumb dwarf, that’s all! Give me a minute to pee, and I’ll be right with you!”
Hidden behind a camel-shaped rock, she forced her bladder to produce a weak drizzle and tried desperately to come up with an idea. With the last drop, which moistened the backs of a handful of playful spiders rolling around in the yellow mud, she found the solution. Smiling, while the hot wind, like an immense hand, caressed her skin and made her feel like a woman, she picked up a chunk of salt and wrote on the camel’s hump, right under an arrow pointing north, CAMARONES RIVER. A whistle from her impatient friend plucked her out of her reverie: “Here I am, Albina! Peeing gave me time to think. Just look at the armadillo; his snout always points north. Know why? Amado told us that near Camiña ran the Camarones River. If the cactus sent its roots out so many miles, it was because it needed water. At least one of them must have reached the river. Instead of searching randomly, let’s look for the root along the banks of the river. Quirquincho will help us dig it up. Shall we be on our way?” Albina took a deep breath, as if the air had suddenly cooled off. She smiled: “I knew I could count on you! You’ve got more balls than that pygmy! Come on, my love!”
Albina, knowing that she wasn’t what she seemed and fearing what she really was, must have felt as if her ass were between two chairs, in two places at once; something like a shoe nail piercing her foot embittered her soul. For her part, Crabby had to admit that her own heart was behaving like a capricious pendulum, going back and forth between two extremes, a dwarf and a giant, so completely opposite to each other that it was impossible to fuse the two into one. Those twin currents of love, sweet bonds, tied her hands, keeping her from choosing. She had no choice but to yield to whatever came along, to accept with modesty whatever the banquet provided her, even if it were crumbs. To enter the fire, to navigate the conflict like a blind mariner, to transform herself into a docile sail and accept the orders of the wind without protest, recognizing that there was no single form of affection, that in both cases her love was total but different, that one love did not exclude the other. “What I’d like, with all my soul, is to divide, like an amoeba, and be two! But only two? Who knows? Perhaps with time, other beings will come along, which would force me to be four and then eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on to infinity.”
She swallowed a big mouthful of acrid air and savored it like a glutton. For the first time she felt what it was to love life; it was as if an atomic bomb had exploded in her chest, emitting rays that reached the ends of the cosmos, the remote past and the distant future. Under her feet infinity and eternity crossed paths. She’d finally entered the present! Suddenly she sensed all the good smells, the severe honey taste of salt, the dense plummy savor of the rocks, the musk of geraniums wafting like a trail of mosquitoes, the drizzle of incense falling from the invisible stars, the myrrh and the amber exploding in immense birds with each pulse of the sun, and, above all, the ineffable aroma of her own body, dying and being born anew with pleasure every second. She could no longer tolerate her position as a crustacean, so she sent to the devil her wounded-little-girl-shielded-by-a-false-hump act, tore off her mental straitjacket as an ugly person, straightened up, and with intense sobs of joy, began after the dazzling Albina with vigorous steps.
The water bottle weighed forty pounds and Crabby’s iron bar added another forty, and the heat fell on him like a bird of prey weighing tons. It was an impossible cross to bear, being loaded down so heavily while walking over this corrosive surface, an immense tongue dried out by centuries of drought that with tremendous thirst slurped up the slightest moist particle, always ready to suck flesh dry until it turned into a piece of jerky. In spite of his suffering, Amado continued his march northward, cursing the shortness of his legs. Very often, he collapsed in agony on the vampire plain, his whole body transformed into a wound. Still, his desire to curl up in Crabby’s shadow, a mysterious stain that was also an extension of his body, a stem that fixed him to reality, tied strings to him that, in a possible future, would hoist him up as if he were a marionette, pulling him toward his happy destiny: to enter the womb of that woman and transform her into a lover, generous mother of his soul who could then give birth to a normal-sized Amado. The delirium of sunstroke deposited him opposite a Spanish caravel. He rubbed his eyes. No, he was not dreaming! The ship, about eighty feet long and twenty-five feet wide, had three masts, all of them transformed into crosses where three Saint Peters were nailed up like Christs. On the bow a name was inscribed: SANTA MARÍA. It was an exact copy of Columbus’s ship in reinforced concrete.
Amado climbed up to the deck on a rope ladder. Instead of sailors, he found scattered on the lower central part, on the poop deck, and on the prow, tall sculptures of Saint Peter at work. One Saint Peter guided the wheel below the bridge. Since he couldn’t see where the ship was going from that vantage point, another Saint Peter, a pilot, placed on the bridge, seemed to shout orders at him. In a small cabin near the prow, fifty Saint Peters slept on cots. In the forward hold, Saint Peter cooks were feeding plaster pigs, cows, goats, and chickens left over cement vegetables. One Saint Peter was milking, another cutting slices of ham, another gathering eggs. And way down in the hold, over the keel, there were barrels, boxes, and packages—also made of cement—to imitate the ballast that gives ships stability. There were Saint Peters everywhere tying knots, climbing lines, eating iron crabs and porcelain fish, sewing brass shirts, playing mute guitars, cleaning, scanning the horizon. In the main cabin, opposite a standard emblazoned with CHURCH OF SAINT PETER, PATRON OF FISHERMEN, there was an altar. On top stood, instead of candelabra, seven wooden barrels filled with real water. The inscription on them read, “Pilgrim crossing the mortal desert of life, you have been able to reach this temple, so know that Saint Peter protects you. Satisfy your thirst, but with just the water you need, because others may also visit this holy refuge. Humbly recognize that you do not walk alone through the world; Saint Peter accompanies you, attached to your heart. Believe in your destiny because it is ours as well. We sail together in search of a new world.” Without touching his water bottle, Amado opened his mouth below the wooden spigot of one barrel and drank until he was replenished. His physical well-being made him feel guilty. In a few hours, night would fall, and Drumfoot and the other dog-men would follow his partners’ trail. The only thing he could do in this anguishing situation was pray. He prayed until his eyelids were lead. He pushed a Saint Peter out of his cot, climbed in praying, felt a chill followed by a stretching of his body, and fell asleep like just another plaster figure.
The angry rays of the dying sun fell at a sharper and sharper angle, bouncing like stones skipping over the surface of a lake. They produced trembling mirages that seemed to fill the desert with water. Soon a black explosion submerged the zone in silence. The cold of the mountain wind silenced the impertinent giggles of the rebellious spiders.
The crunch of the saline crust broken by tired footsteps awakened the hatmaker. Hopping about awkwardly as he put on his trousers, he walked to the poop deck and saw two dots that little by little turned into two rats, then into two sea turtles, then into two hungry beasts, then into two tenebrous bandits, and finally—praise to God!—into what they really were: Albina and his beloved Crabby! Amado sobbed with joy. Crabby did as well, but she knew how to cover up her tears by letting herself drop onto the ground of stinking nitrate and yelling obscenities: “You fucking dumbbell, by the hemorrhoids Mary got from pushing so hard to bring on the virgin birth, stop staring at us with those stupid frog eyes, move those tiny legs of yours, and bring us water! We’re as dry as a nun’s cunt!” Panting, Albina collapsed next to her friend, her tongue as dry and cracked as the desert floor. Carrying the water bottle on his head, Amado jumped off the bridge onto the sand and ran to the women, making a superhuman effort to keep his balance. Crabby, her stomach swollen as if she were pregnant, insisted that the first to drink go to Albina, who swallowed at least a gallon. Then a good squirt was sent toward Quirquincho, who emerged from Crabby’s protective belly, surprised by the unexpected rain, and lapped it up. Finally, while Crabby was drinking, the little man whispered into her ear, “Too bad what you gave birth to wasn’t my son!” Recovering her old personality, she elbowed him sharply, seemingly offended. But that sweet, manly voice, like a fertilizer, went from her ears to the interior of her chest and was enough to make her bosoms grow. Her nipples, of a dark coffee shade, perked up, hard and sensitive, and turned pink.
“Please, ladies, make an effort and accompany me onto the caravel. The temple of Saint Peter offers us a welcome refuge.”
They pulled the cardboard blankets off the saints and stretched out on the hard cots, trying to protect themselves from the cold. Albina, sulking because the pygmy was present, covered her head under the false blanket and fell fast asleep. Crabby allowed Amado to stretch out next to her, with a Saint Peter of course separating them. Then she explained, “What a disillusionment, my friend! We went to get more and came back with less. You know what it’s like to hike over this murderous surface with millions of spiders giggling away and the dart-like assault of the sun’s rays. When we passed by the ship loaded with water and shade, Albina, thinking that wanting and daring meant power, made a grimace of disdain and refused to stop. After a few hours, our mouths were salty wounds and our lungs burning trees. The harsh body of the armadillo that I carried next to my belly weighed as much as an elephant. Half dead, we climbed a ridge that crossed the path, and from above we could see the Camarones River we’d been seeking so hard.
The meager stream was covered by a ragged multitude; men, children, and women, protected from the sun with umbrellas, were using wood-framed sifters to wash the sand carried by the sulfurous water in search of copper nuggets. A radio antenna on the roof of a cargo truck carried a flag with the emblem of the Chuquicamata mine. Police, armed with cattle prods and rifles, guarded those worn-out workers as if they were criminals or slaves. Among them strolled a skeletal dark man wearing English-style jodhpurs and a military cap with a neck protector, with a short whip hanging from his wrist, a revolver in his belt, hair dyed a urine color, face covered with pale makeup, and high-pitched voice spewing orders and insults in a U.S. accent.
“Given the description you’ve made, madam, that man can only be the gringo Echmit, a combination of Mapuche Indian, Spaniard, and monkey who wants only to look like his bosses. He’s such a sycophant and so eager to ascend the ladder of the dollar that, according to those in the know, he satisfies the needs of Mister Nilly, the director general, so fond of anal pleasures. That promiscuous and false Yankee has made a fortune exploiting the miners with his taverns that only accept tokens issued by the mine, his syphilitic whores, and his unhealthy barracks, where he packs the workers in like cattle! I’d been told that this usurious clown had been picking up the bits of metal carried by the river, but I never suspected he did it with the complicity of the army. Those brutes shoot first and ask questions later. They’re terrified of bandits. And, my lady, what did you two do then?”
“Oh, Amado (make no mistake here, I’m referring to your name and not to any feelings), what could we do? Just walk in and ask permission to let an armadillo sniff around the riverbank looking for a mysterious root? First, they would have taken us for lunatics, and second, suspecting who knows what kind of business we might be involved in, they would have tortured or simply murdered us. We decided to retreat, take refuge in the caravel, and find another way to locate the root early tomorrow.”
“Oh, as if all that weren’t bad enough! There’s a full moon tonight!”
As soon as she saw that Albina was no longer in her cot and the hatmaker was following her with great difficulty, Crabby ran toward the deck like a whirlwind. There the naked giant was shaking her hips, arousing the dog-men who were racing around the ship without daring to board it out of fear of so many Saint Peters. Her white skin was already covered with fur, and her hard spine forced her to kneel to keep it horizontal. Her long, dripping tongue hung between two rows of sharpened fangs, and a tail was growing above her shaking buttocks.
“Amado, help me tie her up! She’s still more human than animal, so she won’t bite us. Some of those rope belts on the Saint Peters would do the trick.”
They tied her to the mainmast. When the moon reached its zenith, Albina transformed completely into a dog. In heat, she whined to call the excited beasts. Realizing the sailors were nothing more than plaster dummies, the dog-men jumped higher and higher, leaning their forelegs on the hull but unable to reach the deck. Crabby and Amado had pulled up the rope ladder and sealed all the hatches.
An intoxicating perfume from the white bitch’s sex wafted toward the males. They jumped and jumped like bits of meat on a red-hot grill, and their barks became deafening. Even threatening them with her iron bar, Crabby could not get them to leave. Their bestial desire left no room for fear; to sink themselves into the female they would sacrifice their bones without a second thought. Crabby looked over at the little man: “There’s a lot of them! They’re insane! Soon they’re going to discover that they can climb up on one another’s back! Before they possess their goddess, they’ll tear us to pieces!”
Amado embraced her and buried his face into her navel, because that’s as high as he could reach. “My lady, it will be an honor and a moment of glory to die with you!” Crabby just stood still, incapable of moving; the idea that someone would think it an honor and a glory to die with her, preferring her to all the beautiful women in the world, suddenly revealed to her that despite her apparent ugliness, she could have the right to be the object of someone’s attention. She had spent so many years on the margin, seeing everything and everyone from a distance, buying friendship from Albina with her loyalty and services, believing herself a dark planet orbiting around a blazing star, and suddenly here was evidence of love like this, coming from someone who was perhaps insane, depraved, or a maniac, proving to her that she actually existed. Despite the imminent danger, she wanted to laugh, to weep, to live, to be devoured instantly, to have the proof that in fact this little man (much more a man than men of normal size) would sacrifice himself at her side for her sake.
The bitch sniffed around, lifting her red-hot rear. The irregular rhythm of three hard paws and one soft pierced the night—Drumfoot was approaching. The human dogs, trying to become ants, fled, almost crawling on their bellies. Four or five stragglers lost chunks of flesh; the bites of the mangy Drumfoot were implacable. Howling pitifully and trailing red droplets, the victims reached the rest of the terrified pack. The aggressor scratched the ground with his forepaws, shook off the cockroach-shaped drop of sweat that formed on his back, raced toward the caravel, and made a mad leap, out of eagerness to rape and rend, to land on the bridge. There he received a blow from Crabby’s iron bar, right on his skull. The pestilential animal fell stiff next to the female he hated and desired so much. Albina, made wild by the scent of blood, tore herself free of the Saint Peter belt with her teeth, snapped at the fat paw of the unconscious Drumfoot, threatened her partner with another, and squirted a flood of urine toward the face of the hatmaker. Then she gave a majestic leap and fell running into the sand toward the humiliated dogs and, once surrounded by them, offered them her posterior. The dogs, their pride recovered and panting with eagerness, began to possess her.
As she watched that frenzy of hips, Crabby fell as if expelled from a good dream toward a repulsive reality; in a single instant she felt all her bones, which to her seemed empty. The only marrow that circulated through them was an unbearable solitude. Amado began to writhe and twist. He too was turning into a dog. “No, friend, not you! Don’t leave me! If you abandon me too, I’ll die!” Hairy and on all fours, his muzzle jutting, the little man shook his head as if he wanted to rid himself of his long ears. “I… don’t want to… I… am for… you… my… mistress… But… bitch… called me… Go… fornicate… must… I go.” “No, goddamn it, you aren’t going! You’ll stay here at my side! You still have some human parts: your eyes, your hands, your member! Let love give you the will to stay! Orient your desire toward me. I, too, am a female!” Crabby removed her clothes, squatted down, rested her forehead on the floor, and turned her back to him. The dog part of Amado wanted to mount her immediately, but the human part held him back. “Mistress… do… not sacrifice yourself… I return at dawn.” “But it’s no sacrifice. I want you all for myself! Make me finally know love!”
Restraining his bestial instincts, Amado sniffed greedily between her buttocks, clenched his jaws to keep himself from licking, and introduced, with great respect, only the tip of his member. In that position, he rubbed the lips for a long time, patiently waiting for them to be covered with an abundant dew. He went in a bit more and pushed against the hymen, slowly increasing the pressure until, softened by growing desire, she opened like the petals of a flower. “Enter me completely! Your degraded form does not disgust me. I’ve seen your eye. Through them, I’ve seen your soul; that’s what I want!” Crabby said in a new, melodious voice. Amado, forgetting his animal part and concentrating on the little he retained that was still human, advanced through that sacred intimacy inch by inch. As pleasure overwhelmed him, a pleasure she shared, sighing deeply, his canine features began to disappear. In the instant when her vagina, trembling like a newborn dove, embraced his entire phallus, he became completely human again. Their two bodies, falling from skin to soul, revolved until they were more or less face-to-face. Then Crabby lowered her head and stretched her neck downward so he could kiss her. When their tongues united and a powerful, paradisiac rhythm began, the desert became a sea, and the cement ship began to sail with silky, invisible sails until it crossed the horizon and vanished in the stars.
When the moon disappeared and dawn suddenly rose, accompanied by the murderous heat, Albina, her nether parts covered with semen, chased by a cloud of mosquitoes, screamed for her friend as if she were drunk. The caravel’s rope ladder was still pulled up and all the hatches sealed. Crabby was curled up snoring in the arms of Amado, who slept wearing a smile larger than his mouth. Drumfoot, still knocked out, continued to wear his dog muzzle even though he’d recovered his human form.
“My love, where are you? The flies are trying to devour me! For pity’s sake, throw down the ladder!”
As soon as Albina’s booming voice awakened her, Crabby was crushed by a ton of guilt. Nervous, she sheathed her lover in his trousers, erased his smile with a kiss, and led him by the hand to the railing on the deck. “Now, my little beauty, you will tell her nothing. Let’s avoid jealousy during this search, which needs the lowest number of obstacles imaginable. Promise?”
“I will promise on the condition that you reveal to me your real name. I think it’s irreverent to call you by a crustaceous nickname.”
Crabby felt a painful shiver. She recalled that her father had baptized her with the odiously masculine name Isaac. Mmm, but what if we cut of the “ac” part, leaving only the “Isa” part? And suppose we added beauty? Her face tomato red, she thought things over before yanking on Amado’s hand so he’d help her to throw the rope ladder over the side.
“You have an Italian last name, Dellarosa, and you might be surprised to learn that my first name has the same origins: Isabella.”
“Oh, Isabella! Just saying your real name gives me an erection!”
“Quiet, you dope. Albina’s got superfine hearing!”
Seeing Drumfoot with his hairy hide covered by a blackish coagulation and his soft foot emblazed with a violet moon, Albina began to cry: “All that stuff is like a dream. This is what I am, a form inhabited by alien content. I live on the surface of myself, like the foam that crowns a wave before it breaks. When I try to get inside myself, to go toward the lucid center, I turn into a dark magma, into nothing. Even though you tell me I turn into a bitch, I think I don’t really undergo a transformation but instead disappear to make room for something that is in no way me. But the sad part is that the thing I am not is more me than my emptiness. Crabby, darling, give me a whack on the head with your iron bar. Get me out of this world of ambiguity; end my illusory existence!”
“Be patient, Albina. Just let us find that millennial cactus. If you’re sick, its flower will cure you.”
“Pathetic optimism! We can’t approach the river, and if by chance the armadillo were to encounter a root, how would we dig up mile after mile of it? To protect themselves from the heat, those roots have to extend two or three yards under that saline crust, which is as hard as stone. And we don’t even have a shovel!”
“Madam,” the hatmaker interrupted, “with all due respect, I’m sorry to contradict what you’ve said. We can get to the banks of the Camarones River, and we’ll have not only shovels but also pickaxes. No matter how hidden that root may be, we’ll unearth it without moving a single finger. But first, help me deposit this poor half-man in a cot, out of the rays of the sun, and then let me explain my plan.”
The false gringo whistled. The workers stopped dead, believing that if they made the slightest gesture a gigantic fist would descend from heaven to smash their skulls. The soldiers, aiming their rifles, formed a khaki-colored fan around the bleached blond, who smacked his English boots with his short whip and nodded his head while his eyes peered out of his false eyelashes: “Holy Uncle Sam! What is this?”
Three humble but fanatical penitents, one very tall, the other medium sized, and the third tiny, wearing soutanes and hoods, were carrying a plaster saint on whose head stood an armadillo anxiously sniffing toward the stench of the river.
“For the sake of the sacred beard of Saint Peter, Heaven’s doorman, who, despite our sins, awaits us, do not shoot!” exclaimed the little man. “In dreams, this patron saint told us, ‘Go to the Camarones River, seek out Mister Echmit and inform him that he is my chosen one. I am going to elevate him; from copper, which is the blood of the earth, he will ascend to gold, which is the light of the soul. He must allow my representative, Quirquincho, to guide him, following a root, until he reaches the sacred cactus that grows above the treasure that the Inca Atahualpa had buried to protect it from Spanish greed. Various tons of statues and equipment all made of gold.’”
The word gold sent greedy chills down the false gringo’s spine.
“Is what you say true, dwarf?”
“The three of us had the same dream at the same time, and when we woke up, this armadillo coming from who knows where, but with all certainty, from paradise, was stationed on the head of Saint Peter. Would you give him permission to search, sir?”
“Of course, let him search! But if he fails, you trio of nuts, no one will save you from a beating!”
Quirquincho sniffed along the banks of the river. He soon set about digging at a bend. Amado sank his hands into the muddy sand the animal was digging out with his forepaws, triumphantly extracted three nuggets of gold (the ones his father bequeathed him), and shouted at the top of his lungs, “A miracle! Our Holy Patron keeps his promise, offering us the golden metal. But these little bits are nothing more than the appetizer. Saint Peter wants you, Mister Echmit, to build in his honor a temple not in the shape of a caravel but in the form of the largest transatlantic liner if you let the little animal find the root that will lead us to the immense treasure that awaits you.”
The not-even-slightly gringo seemed to transform into a monkey, caressing and licking the nuggets.
“Of course I promise! Yes, yes, with the gold of the Inca I’ll build his temple—naturally! I’ll dedicate all the tons of gold to that holy mission! But where is the root? Find it right away, you bastard Quirquincho!”
The animal, after digging a couple feet, quickly found the end of the underground root. It was a hard, vitreous material, covered with transparent little hairs that moved like worms. Greed made the descendant of Mapuche Indians forget his English accent: “Let’s go, you lazy bastards. Stop looking for those stinking bits of copper. Leave those sifts behind, grab pickaxes, shovels, hoes, forks, spoons, whatever there is, and start digging, or I’ll kick your asses in.”
Men, children, women, soldiers, and even the phony gringo set out, digging for miles. Behind them, carrying their plaster saint wearing his armadillo hat, no one realizing that two were women, came the penitents, comfortably seated on the roof of the truck. The root apparently hated straight lines; it extended serpent-like in a labyrinth of curves, figure eights, and spirals. When night suddenly fell, after having advanced ten thousand yards, everyone fell asleep snoring, worn out. Crabby and Amado tied Albina to the Saint Peter with her sad consent. The truck was sufficiently high to keep the dogs from jumping onto the roof. They soon arrived, made silver by the moon, insidiously slipping along, and there they stayed the entire night, their eyes fixed on the prisoner, brilliant drops dripping like pearls out of their penises.
He awakened with his eyes fixed on a skylight. A few clouds in a strict straight row slowly passed through his field of vision like seagulls with rickets. To him, it seemed that the gray line was immobile and that it was the cement caravel that moved toward the port of all hopes. He thought he felt a flesh heart beating in each of the plaster Saint Peters. The night had a perfume identical to the white bitch. The night, with its promise of moisture, was Albina’s sex. He made a long howl toward the moon, mixing it with an even longer sob. His dog side, plus his human side, plus his love all combined now in a braid that arose from his bosom and faded into infinity. He left the cabin, first on four legs, then on two, and began to dance on the deck, inviting the plaster sailors to join him.
His enlarged foot, his soft foot, his disgusting foot had completely deflated. With a violet half-moon on its instep, the once monstrous foot was now warm, vibrant, agile, collaborating as an equal with the healthy foot. He was no longer Drumfoot! But who was he? He stopped dancing, scratched the back of his neck, made three small barks, and, squatting on his haunches, began to think. This withdrawal into himself in search of his true identity produced a feeling of melancholy, of anguish, of disgust. He heard no voice and perceived only absence. He found himself without a homeland, with no roof over his head, amputated from any world; he was in a void, a nothingness, a barren land, without a central ego that might assure him of the authenticity of his person. The mask of “Drumfoot” was lost, the illusion of his presence dissolved! He spit out phlegm trying again to be the common policeman as happy as a dog without fleas. A shiver of contempt ran through his body.
There was no going back. He’d set his course and cut his ties; his ship was sailing on the high seas. There was no port that could protect him from the incomprehensible waves. There he was, exposed to the ocean’s tempests or calm immensity where his internal gaze would wander unendingly. He barked hoarsely. He tried to cling to the memory of his mother, but not even that gave him a solid point. The blurry features of his progenitor fused with those of his grandmother, which were sharper.
The old woman ate everything. More than a woman, she was a brutal male. Her husband, Aniceto González, alias The Sausage, was a corrupt soldier, a rapacious army man who specialized in massacring smugglers and extracting sacks of cocaine like a veterinarian castrating cats. He was drowned in the cesspool behind a cheap bar, buried in five hundred gallons of fecal matter. Drumfoot’s grandmother Pancha failed at being a whore because she was so skinny and ugly, so she became a bandit instead. The experiences of The Sausage, who never stopped telling her about the techniques used by the smugglers he chased to cross the border between Bolivia and Chile, was like a Bible for her. She brought in myriad kilos of drugs. The drug traffickers treated her like a beast of burden and gave her just enough to pay the rent, put clothes on her back, and food in her mouth. What she had she shared with Minina, who would later be Drumfoot’s mother, one of seven children, educated by beating and always with a frightened expression on her face. The Sausage had sex with Doña Pancha only on Saturday and after swallowing a bottle and a half of whiskey. She was three months pregnant when The Sausage was drowned. She gave birth to a mongoloid child.
It was Minina who took charge of the baby. Morning, afternoon, and night she walked around with the half-monkey strapped to her fragile body, making her look like a hunchback. Time, indifferent, went on passing, and the episodes of home life repeated themselves like a chain of filthy pearls on a phony necklace. When the child was fifteen (they never named or baptized him), he began to have huge erections. Doña Pancha, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, ordered Minina to squat over the mongoloid every morning, when his erections were largest, to give him daily satisfaction. And Minina very soon became pregnant.
She gave birth to a baby with a deformed foot: Drumfoot. Both she and the child’s grandmother screamed with horror when they saw how misshapen he was. Another monster—he and his father were the Devil’s sons. Before even feeding him for the first time, they threw the baby into a ditch near the beach. The mongoloid escaped and retrieved him. Holding the almost suffocated baby in his arms, he ran through the town howling. A group of neighbors armed with pistols and shotguns followed him home. When Doña Pancha, machete in hand, came out to challenge them, they disarmed her and kicked her around. Then they promised they’d slit her throat if she didn’t look after her boys. And so he grew up, grudgingly fed, wearing rags, sleeping next to the mongoloid, disdained by everyone. Drumfoot! Drumfoot!
One day, the mongoloid spat a flood of blood into his mother’s face and died. Drumfoot, who now had nothing to tie him to those two witches, begged asylum at the military outpost and became a soldier like his grandfather.
These were all the memories he had; the others had leaked out of him as if he were a ship with a hole in it, flowing out into the ocean of oblivion. They were no longer his remembrances. Behind him spread a white stain. He jumped off the caravel into the sand, dug a hole, filled it in, and drew a cross on it. Drumfoot: buried forever! What did he have left? In his infinite desert wandered an eternal love.
She was awakened by some prolonged, soft barks, as delicate as the fluttering of the wings of a sugar swallow. Albina arose from her dream still in the form of a temple. She saw herself composed of many levels, with towers of white stone and walls covered with carved reliefs depicting groups of men and women making love in complicated positions. The temple emerged from the center of a swampy lake covered with large, fragrant lotus flowers. Above her central entry there was a monumental silver T on which a copper asp lay dying, held in place by three golden nails. The incredulous reptile was muttering an incomprehensible poem that mixed with the melody of the canine chorus:
Mkhan dan slob dpon dpan po rnams
Mikhan po gser gyi mehod rten hdra
Dpan po hgyur mcd rib o hdra
Slob dpon dri med sel sgon hdra
Amid the mists of her stupor, she saw a group of dogs dressed in monks’ saffron robes, all chanting those words, which became a cloud of sweet and sinuous arrows. Something like a mouth opened in the center of her chest, and she could understand each word of the exotic poem:
The process of reception has three phases:
The Monk, who is like a golden urn,
The Witness, who is like a mountain of granite,
The Teacher, who is like a crystal sphere.
She was surprised to find herself thinking, “There is no defect in the splendor of a golden urn; there is no defect in the peak of a solid mountain; there is no defect in the transparency of an immaculate crystal sphere.” She was recovering her memory!
She was facing the possibility of change. A tremor ran through her body, and the metamorphosis began immediately. Now transformed into a white bitch, without dangerous words in her head, invaded by intense and delightful sensations, she freed herself from the bonds that kept her a prisoner. Cautiously, so she would not awaken the snoring people, she came down from the roof of the truck and, followed at a respectful distance by the pack in heat, approached a handsome barker.
The first thing she sniffed was the sweat stain he had on his back. The old cockroach had transformed into a sun broadcasting its moist rays to his four extremities, none of which were swollen. They were all beautiful in their elegant slenderness. She sniffed his anus and sex. No aggressively fetid odors came from those parts, only sweet fragrances that entered her nasal passages like a river of honey.
In turn, the male put his snout under her tail and licked the posterior lips with a soft, flexible tongue dripping with amorous saliva. She did the same with his red extremity. Then they looked at each other. The murderer had turned into an angel. The whiteness of his fur was not a change in pigmentation; that hair, now almost transparent, was full of a light that arose from his palpitating heart.
He did not try to possess her. He stood there, staring straight into her pink irises without blinking. The other dogs approached and surrounded them, panting. Slowly but surely, the bitch and the dog transformed into Albina and the person who had been Drumfoot, now a handsome man. He fell to his knees before her. The first word he spoke was “pardon,” and then he wept. Albina, without understanding what she was doing, joined her fingers together, moved them over the head of her gentleman to trace a seven-pointed star, and, emerging from her final moments of sleep, allowed words dictated by another being to come to her mouth: “The Monk is a golden urn because he knows how to empty himself. The splendor of the always-invisible truth is love. Nevertheless, you persist in trying to keep the treasure. You will have to learn to be a Witness, like the peak of an unmovable mountain that sees the seasons pass without imprisoning the clouds, the wind that slips along its flanks, or the light of the stars. If I am the moon, you are the hunter who shoots his arrows without reaching it. You can only capture the miraculous bird by renouncing its capture.”
He realized that she did not know what his name was. Just like his father, he had never been named. The only name he’d ever had was the infamous “Drumfoot.” “My goddess, give me a name,” he implored.
She did not have to think it over, and replied immediately, “From now on your name will be Lohan, servant of the sublime light. You will never take revenge. You will never get involved in conflict; you will go on seeking me because you still haven’t found me.”
Albina returned to the top of the truck, tied herself up with the ropes, forgot what she’d said and done during that hour, and fell asleep. Lohan whistled, calling the dogs. They all rubbed against his legs. He patted them, one after another, and then went off with them to take refuge from the cold night among some rocks.
With the first ray of sunlight, a boiling scream tinged the entire landscape red: an eager Echmit leapt out of the truck’s cabin and fired three shots into the air to wake up the crew. “Get to work, you lazy bastards! You’ll eat your breakfast digging, you’ll shit and piss digging, you’ll move forward with no excuses. And if you fall in a faint, you’ll end up in the stomach of the vultures, because we’re not losing any time picking you up! We’ve got enough food and water for two more days, taking into account having to go forward and back. So you’ll either find Atahualpa’s treasure today or go back empty-handed and with your asses kicked in!” He ran his comb through his yellow mop of hair and smiled through knifelike teeth at the monkish trio. “Come on now, you penitents! Pray to your patron saint and see if that filthy Quirquincho can show us the way!”
At first, the earth was soft, and since the root twisted along underground close to the surface, they advanced at the rate of two miles per hour. But as they approached nine miles of progress, they found themselves facing a gigantic wall. It was a branch of the mountain chain sculpted by currents of nocturnal air that descended like thirsty vipers toward the Pacific. Among crests that seemed to slice open the sky, narrow canyons wove, each one in a different direction. They counted no fewer than a hundred. Echmit felt anguish. With a threatening grin, he emptied a canteen on the armadillo’s back: “Damn you, critter. Show us the way!” The animal rolled around in the mud created by the water that ran off its shell, and then, transformed into a copper-colored statue, he froze, staring into the ditch. The accursed root, instead of moving forward, plunged straight down. An understandable move, because where the mountain began, the sand ended. It was there the empire of solid stone began. These were granite pinnacles; not even the impact of wind over millions of years had worn them away.
They dug a hole almost fifteen feet deep, but the root went deeper. They dug fifteen more feet—the same thing. In all probability, the vegetable worm had passed under the base of the mountains, miles from the surface, in order to continue its march to water. Echmit, sheltered by the shade of his flowered umbrella, stamped the ground, raising a cloud of dust that took the shape of a buzzard. Fury and despair mixed in his cries: “Moderfoker, son ofebich, pisof chit, fucked-up root, I could kick God’s ass! We’ve lost the fucking path! So now what? Are we going to go back with our freaking tails between our legs? Never! If that motherfucker Saint Peter wants me to build him a luxury yacht, he should move his shitty ass and tell us which of these canyons to take! Did you hear me, you asshole pilgrims? Your moment of truth has arrived! But before that happens, all these useless, flea-bitten copper sifters are going back. Okay? Officers, you stay with me and aim your rifles at the skulls of these monks. If they don’t give me a credible answer, shoot them instantly! Let’s see now, you three. Tell me, which is the path that takes us to the treasure?”
Despite the overwhelming heat, Amado, Crabby, and Albina felt their flesh turn to ice. Behind his eternal smile, the plaster saint had no tongue to tell them which road to take. Should they ask for help? The ragged workers were marching back to the river, picks and shovels on their shoulders. The soldiers, their rifles against their cheeks, their fingers on the triggers, were getting ready to fire. Echmit was opening his mouth to hurl out the order. Time had transformed into a snail and was moving in a straight line toward the final shot! What anguished Crabby most was having to choose between dying in the long arms of the giant or in the short arms of the dwarf. Not wanting to betray anyone, she crossed her arms and hugged herself. It was at that instant when Albina let her soutane fall and revealed herself naked! The snail turned into a greyhound. Everything happened so quickly it seemed all to occur at the same time.
The soldiers gaped, their rifles dropped, and their penises rose. Echmit, indifferent to feminine beauty (accustomed as he was to being buggered by the phallus of Mr. Nilly, the American director), shouted “A Mata Hari!” He pulled out his revolver, ready to shoot off those two promontories on Albina’s chest, which to him seemed obscene soccer balls. But a white dog came out of nowhere and bit off his gun hand. Other dark, filthy dogs sank their fangs in the soldiers’ throats. Not one was left standing. Their expressions like those of surprised monkeys, they slowly turned white amid pools of blood that the gluttonous sand quickly swallowed. Echmit, with the typical stubbornness of an overseer, pulled out a second revolver and tried to shoot with his left hand. The dog bit off that one as well. Waving his stumps, dripping with blood, he staggered toward Albina. The dogs stopped him and, in the twinkling of an eye, devoured him. All that remained was a lock of his phony blond hair.
Time recovered its normal rhythm. It had all taken less than a minute. In the thunderous silence of those remote places, amid the jolly twirling of tails wagged by the dogs—panting, their tongues lolling, still dripping blood—Crabby held up Amado, as if she were his mother, crying and vomiting at the same time, and Albina, as fearless as an executioner who’d spent centuries decapitating a thousand soldiers a day, had not the slightest idea what they should do. Frighten away the dogs with stones? Dangerous. The same impulse that had turned them into allies could also turn them into hot-blooded rapists. Better to pat them on the back, accept their company, and return. Return? Like this? Empty handed? Without the magic remedy, which meant continuing to spread the canine virus? Never! Carry on? But in which direction? Each one of those hundred canyons could be the trail. And if they did find the right trail—an impossibility—how would they go on digging without picks and shovels, without workers? The three of them stared anxiously at the armadillo. As its only response, the animal rolled itself up into a ball. Wiping his mouth on his sleeve, Amado went to Lohan, whose eyes were fixed on his goddess, and fell on his knees. Humbly, he whispered, “Supernatural Madam Albina, though I know you do not love me, I dare to ask that you listen to me…”
The grand vestal restrained her impulse to kick him to the other side of the world and stared at him with devotion disguised as disgust. What a surprise! She saw he was as humble as the dog! Something in both had changed. Lohan, who had been a ferocious beast—crude, filthy, misshapen—now seemed an angel, with luminous white fur and eyes full of love. The dwarf as well, lacking malice, his flesh racked with resignation, gave off such emotional warmth that even his shadow became transparent. Those two, facedown, along with a transfigured Crabby, her trunk straightened, her feet parallel, her face that of a little girl, and with the pack of dogs, calm, innocently digesting the phony gringo as if tearing the throats out of a bunch of policemen and eating a human being were a good joke, showed her that the world was no longer the same. She felt as if an immense and warm tongue were licking her from head to toe. The dust, the rocks, the peaks, the living things were now her friends. She wanted to hear what Amado had to say, considering that his words came not from him but from a throat hidden in the center of Heaven. “Have no fear, little man, speak.”
“Lady, things cannot get any worse. We’ve hit bottom, so now everything has to go well. If you took off your clothes, it was for a purpose. When the mind finds no answer, the body may provide one.”
Albina immediately recalled the words of Lady Coughard: “Neither the brain, nor the heart—your skin will tell you the way!” She understood the message: the intellect, working with concepts formed by past experiences, could not foresee the future. And the heart was not able to show the way either; the dark residue of uncontrollable feelings clung to the arrow of intuition and diverted it from its target. “Better to stop the flow of words until my mind feels like a black concavity, better to let blood dissolve my feelings until each heartbeat seems the ringing of a crystal bell. I will emerge translucent from my bones and from my flesh in order to spread myself over my entire skin!”
She went from canyon to canyon, stopping at all the entrances. From each one surged aggressive currents of dry air that ran raspingly over her, from her thighs to her bosom and finally to her nipples, which they wounded with grains of sand as sharp as tiny daggers. There was no possibility of life there, not even for the jolly spiders. But, indefatigable, withstanding the pain, she made her way past those harsh dry places one by one. Soon all her pores became thirsty mouths. From one gorge, the narrowest, came a current loaded with moisture. Albina’s skin, returning from a distant purgatory, had the sensation of opening like a rose to absorb the morning dew. “This is the path! Animals, roots, and clouds can only pass through here.”
No sooner had Albina spoken those words than the canine horde, led by its white chief, dashed for the gorge. A vigorous and severe “Halt!” stopped them at the threshold of the rocky crack. Albina’s marmoreal hands seemed to vanish into the dawn of the white dog’s clean fur. The white color united the woman and the beast into one block. The dog’s eyes, suffering the painful pleasure of unsatisfied desire, filled with salty tears. The voice of his goddess turned them into honey.
“Lohan, even though you are the sublimation of the coarse Drumfoot, you have yet to find yourself. You must learn to be a Witness, never to involve yourself in a conflict. The mountain does not intervene in the changes to the landscape, nor does it travel with the migrating birds; impassive, it awaits the end of time to find itself there where it doesn’t exist. When you achieve that, I shall call you Master. When you no longer retain anything, all will be yours. And all being yours, no one will be able to take anything from you. You will no longer fear losing me. Show that you can transform your desire into a state of imperturbable peace and calmly await my return. Hdod chags sbyin pa chen por bsgyur… mñam par gnas pa zi bahi nan.…”
When those strange words stopped echoing, the svelte dog barked and gathered his group in a patch of shade. In the blazing blackness, his pupils shone like distant stars.
Barely had Albina placed a foot on the path when a thousand vipers raised their heads to bite her. But their aggression instantly transformed into tenderness. They slithered to her calves, ascended her legs, and fastened themselves there like a collection of multicolored rings. “Careful, Isabella!” shouted the dwarf, making Crabby jump back with him.
Albina remained motionless for a long time. In fragmentary fashion, chunks of memories made their way past the dams in her mind and settled like the remains of a shipwreck in her awareness. Images mixed together with the voices of eunuchs reciting incomprehensible sounds that, little by little, became clear concepts. “Gnad la baskor la gcun la hbor,” or “fence in your heart and force it to obey.” They carried her up mountains and through valleys on a palanquin. They decapitated two hundred geese and gave her a bath in blood. “Sa khrag dmar la dbal mo dbab.” “Invoke the scaly god and offer him the illusion of your flesh.” She was a perplexing woman dressed as a saint but made up like a prostitute. The priests injected cobra venom into her using double-tipped silver batons. “You will be an immune goddess; in your ferocious acts there will be no compassion.” She looked back at her friend Crabby and the dwarf with intense sadness. She realized they belonged to the mortal race. According to the eunuchs she was more powerful than death. She would have to accept seeing all the beings she loved in her endless life grow old and die. She shook her head so insistently that she turned it into an empty pendulum. “Enough! I don’t want my brain to be penetrated by even one more memory, memories that are not mine, poisoned memories that come from far away, perhaps from another universe! You two, take my hands. Don’t release them, not even for a second. As long as you’re in contact with me, the snakes will not bite you.”
Not only did they have to move forward together—the serpents glided around their feet like a thick stream—but they also had to abstain from making quick movements or from speaking loudly. If they stopped whispering and spoke normally, avalanches of stones would fall. If the fabric on their sleeves was to rub against the rest of their soutanes, entire sheets of petrified dirt would fall from the walls of the gorge. “You’re going to have to take off all your clothes and walk barefoot,” Albina ordered. Isabella suddenly turned back into Crabby. Her old complexes returned. Despite the sugary gaze of her dwarf, she began to slowly peel off her clothing as if each item weighed a ton. She wasn’t sobbing but spilling out two waterfalls of tears from her eyes. Amado did the same. Now naked, they approached their strapping guide like two recently spanked children.
Albina stared at them with surprise. Her relationship with Crabby, who felt so much physical shame, had always been based on exchanged gazes, from soul to soul, leaving in the mist the flesh in which their eyes were planted. But now, with no defenses, stood a being without the silhouette of the crustacean she felt herself to be, a beautiful female, with firm breasts, small nipples pointing to heaven, narrow waist, hips with soft curves, well-formed and well-muscled thighs. Her spinal column, flooded by the energy of love, had stretched, giving her the grace of a flamenco dancer. The little man, as well, made sensitive by the same love that overwhelmed his friend, approached beauty. Albina was ashamed. Her friends had always been this way. It was she who had stained them with that ugliness that darkened her mind. When she lost her memory and forgot herself, she had also forgotten the qualities of the world. Now everything was going to change; at the end of that gorge the cactus and its miraculous flower awaited her.
They moved forward slowly, shadowed by the high canyon walls that required silence. Whenever even the smallest word came into their minds, a stone would fall. Their heads empty of thought and their hands joined, seemingly forever, they reached an immense granite barrier. The gorge was a dead end! Disillusioned, Isabella and Amado went back to being Crabby and the suicidal little man. The journey was a failure. There, face to face with that immense negation, negation by compact, cruel, impenetrable matter, leaving not the smallest crevice for the passage of the spirit, they’d lost all hope of achieving freedom.
With no possibility of reaching the peak, they had to return to the same old thing: the Lady would reign in the center of Camiña, sending the dry corpses of those she drained to the cemetery; the men would carry on as prisoners in their animal forms; Albina, in her useless attempt to gild her soul, attracted by flesh, would be less and less a goddess and more and more a dog; the plague would spread throughout the world. How much better it would have been if Drumfoot had murdered them in time! That disgusting being, after all, was the instrument of God, not the Devil! It would be better to start running along the path so the snakes would grant them a well-deserved ending! That’s what they did. Another disappointment: the serpents, detecting the perfume of Albina’s sweat, fled to take refuge in the rocky crevices. Crabby and the hatmaker exchanged concerned glances, both as painfully naked as Adam and Eve when they were expelled from paradise. Could there be a good God to cover them with a tender and protective skin?
Albina did not let herself be beaten by the obstacle. Out of her memory, emerging as if from a sticky magma, arose the image of herself, pulling off the top of a cadaver’s cranium so she could devour the brain. The eunuchs, prostrate around her, sang, “Dehi phy bgegs kyi bar chod las… bgegs la glud pham gto ru bya. When the obstructing demons appear and cause trouble… use the beneficent ritual and give them the tribute they demand.” She began to caress the granite wall as if it were the chest of a beloved being. She caressed and caressed again, placing in her hands the complete intensity of her affection; she was prepared to caress for hours, until the stone became sensitive skin. The sweat of her palms made a stain that grew bigger and bigger. Without meaning to, Albina produced her self-portrait, with her legs crossed, her fingers joined, meditating. Between her image’s thighs there was a small concave space. There she sank her fingers in and pushed at the bottom; a block in the wall receded and slid to one side, revealing a door carved in the shape of a serpent’s head. They entered through the open mouth. After wedging the block (it was better not to risk being locked inside that inhospitable grotto), they walked along a gallery whose walls were covered with reliefs resembling serpent scales. This led them to an immense well formed by the mountains.
Above, at an altitude of some six thousand feet, was a circular blue mark from which the light fell, bouncing off the polished walls. There, the air was pure, fragrant, full of moisture. On the floor of fertile soil, all sorts of tropical plants and trees grew, a thick jungle crowned by the thunderous singing of parrots. No sooner had they rested their desiccated feet on the delightful moss, than hundreds of parrots came to hover around Albina. The green of their feathers became white. Finally, they looked like a strident cloud. Amado, to open a path, shooed away the noisy birds by throwing punches at the air. The birds fled to land on a tree weighed down by enormous red apples. Little by little, their feathers turned bright red.
Crabby applauded: “I’ve never seen anything like it. They change color like chameleons!” Amado, concerned, as usual, with precision, corrected her: “They all change color except one. Look at that silvery parrot. He stays the same, reflecting the light like a mirror.” The bird in question, as if he realized they were talking about him, flew off with his flock, leading them to a stone platform with water-filled cracks and a central hole. His feathers remained silvery, but those of the others became blue. They were screeching their heads off, when a powerful stream of water flew thirty feet into the air.
Amid the myriad boiling droplets appeared a rainbow. Instantly, the parrots, except the stubbornly silver one, divided into seven groups, each one a different color. They glided around the geyser until it stopped gushing a few minutes later. Then they landed on the branches of the exuberant vegetation, instantly turning green. Other green parrots, these the size of human beings, marched forward menacingly out of the thick ferns carrying copper-tipped lances. Under helmets shaped like bony beaks, their dark faces glittered. With dexterous gestures, they backed our trio up until their heels were on the edge of the rocky mouth.
Amado and Isabella exchanged tender glances, clasped hands, and waited with resignation for the fatal thrusts that would pitch them into the boiling hole. They’d known love, so now they could die. But Albina, her face red, whistled loudly. The human parrots, impressed by her bravery, stood still. Just then, ferocious barking silenced the forest’s thick murmuring, and the dogs charged in. They still had clusters of snakes hanging off their paws, but, intent on defending their goddess, they did not worry about the venom invading their bodies. Lohan made a prodigious leap over the heads of the warriors and landed next to Albina. He growled, ordering the other dogs to attack the enemy. They were just about to do so, when a hoarse, solemn voice shouted, “Stop right where you are!”
Coming toward them, they saw a ten-foot-tall idol. Above its golden helmet spread a fan of long green plumes. Its tunic, covered with small shields and ribbons, made it look like a demented reptile. It wielded a scepter shaped like a reptile’s tail, with rattles made of bone on the end. Its face was covered by a wooden mask carved in the shape of a rattlesnake’s head, but with a horned snout.
Trembling, Amado whispered, “I’ve seen costumes like this in an archaeological text; they are Inca warriors. I seem to recall that those magicians had fabulous powers. But above all, do not look at his scepter, because he uses it to hypnotize.” The living idol raised an arm with majestic slowness. From his horn came a thunderous voice: “The stone fell on the clay pot. Poor clay pot! The clay pot fell on the stone. Poor clay pot! If the battle has already been lost, why enter it? It’s possible your dogs could kill my warriors, but that won’t save them from punishment. First of all, they’ve been bitten by my snakes; in half an hour the poison will end their lives. Second…” He slammed his sandal down on a hollow log, and the echo of a drumbeat flooded the jungle. A chorus of tremendous growls and howls arose. “Hear that? Those are our gorillas. More than a hundred of those powerful beasts, should I give the order, will fall on you and bite you to pieces. Third, my eyes can shoot deadly rays.”
He looked toward an outcropping on the steep circular wall. A peak rocked back and forth until it fell on top of a tree, from which fled flocks of parrots, from green to dark brown.
“Have I made myself clear? You’re done for! You may choose to die like cowards, transformed into monkey food, or you can die honorably by throwing yourselves in that rocky mouth so the boiling water can strip you of your invading flesh. We, warriors of Lord Atahualpa, cannot tolerate the sullying of our sacred forest by the accursed race.”
Without letting go of each other’s hands, Amado and Crabby leaned over to look toward the bottom of the hole. A thick rope of water churned among red-hot stones, sending up clouds of vapor. They kissed, crossing their tongues, with the anxious desire to exchange souls. They prepared to jump. A stern Albina stopped them: “Stop! No one has to sacrifice himself! I remember that I was once seated on a throne. Old people singing like children covered me with floral decorations and sang, ‘Glory to you, divine mother, because you fight to the end, unconcerned about winning, because before overcoming innumerable demons, you overcome yourself.’ The gods decide who wins, we decide to fight. Attack, my dogs!”
The pack leapt at the ferocious warriors, who dropped their lances, their false wings, and their parrot helmets, and fled to hide in the thickets. Half were women. “Stop, you sacrilegious demons,” the idol thundered. “I’m going to summon my gorillas!” Again, he stamped on the hollow log. The howls and growls made the leaves tremble. Serene, Albina pointed toward the place where those terrifying threats came from: “Attack!” The dogs ran as quickly as their venom-swollen feet could carry them. They returned shortly thereafter chasing a hundred very small monkeys with huge snouts that, drunk with terror, emitted earsplitting shrieks. The illusion of the gorillas now dissipated, Amado and Crabby burst into laughter. Albina patted Lohan and, pointing her finger at the idol, shouted for the third time, “Attack!” The faithful animal charged at the witch doctor, intent on being fulminated by his eyes’ rays, but the idol began to run, losing in the process all his majesty. In his terrified flight, the branches knocked off his plumes, his helmet fell off, he lost his tunic, his high sandals, and his scepter, and finally, transformed into a white-haired and flabby Indian, he fell flat on his face. Lohan, with no desire to bite such a coward, proudly limited himself to sniffing his backside. The other dogs, less sober, urinated on him, one at a time. The old man begged, “For pity’s sake, don’t eat me! I know a plant that neutralizes the venom.”
He crawled to a bush, pulled off its reddish leaves, and offered them to the crippled animals. They chewed them and immediately felt better. Meanwhile, Albina examined the rock dislodged by the witch doctor. She, too, laughed out loud. “You tricky Indian! By stepping on that vine, you activated the mechanism that made the peak fall! Don’t be afraid. We’re not here to steal Atahualpa’s treasure. What we’re looking for is a cactus called shigrapishcu. It’s absolutely important we find it.”
The old man, leaping up with the agility of a child and emitting high pitched cackles, expressed his joy: “Well, well, what a coincidence! Only I know where it grows. And I won’t lead you there unless you get me what I ask for! But before that, so my people don’t lose respect for me, follow along as if you were hypnotized.”
The pudgy geezer gathered up the various parts of his costume, disguised himself again, and with voice amplified by the horn, bellowed triumphantly, “My children! The outsiders have been overcome by my magic! I’m leading them to the temple to transform their war cries into songs of peace!”
Men, women, and children, dark-skinned, with straight black hair, oblique eyes, curved noses, large teeth stained green, surrounded by monkeys, parrots, herons, hares, llamas, alpacas, all jumping, flying around in circles, blending their cries, songs, bleats, giggles—all celebrated the end of the conflict. All except the silvery parrot, who flapped his wings and shouted, “Lie, lie, lie, you old shit.” The witch doctor, in a voice full of tenderness, responded, “Blessed be you, indiscreet parrot, you are the necessary evil!” The laughter and singing continued.
On the rocky wall they’d carved out the entrance to the sanctuary—a monumental labor, with columns representing immense heads with narrow foreheads, flattened noses, and long-lobed ears. The inside was a spacious grotto where they could rest while the tribe went on with its celebrations. Lohan and the pack settled down next to Albina. Isabella and Amado sat down very close together in a discreet corner. The old man, relieved to be stripping off his impressive disguise, ordered them to hear his story.
“Listen carefully to what I’m going to tell you, so that you’ll understand why I’m asking you to do this thing. We are descendants of the group that centuries ago accompanied our supreme sovereign Atahualpa to this place. When the Spaniards arrived with their vile thirst for gold, my ancestors happily gave them all the golden metal in the realm. Nevertheless, the real treasure, which those foul-smelling savages would have been incapable of appreciating, was not given to them. In ancient times, there appeared here, no one knew how, a yellow man and a woman with skin and hair as white as the summer clouds. He, Manco-Capac, was badly wounded; she, Mama-Oello, an exuberant woman, had her face covered by a mask made of a substance similar to ivory. Manco-Capac soon died. Mama-Oello made us cut up his body to feed it to the vultures. Then she said, ‘Because this is the end of the road, it should become the beginning. Here we shall build the first temple.’ That admirable woman taught us, first of all, a language that with its double meanings opened vast space in our limited thinking. Then she showed us how to concentrate our mental forces and make huge blocks of stone fly through the air. That way, we founded cities on the tops of the highest mountains. We also learned to cultivate cereals, to weave ponchos with alpaca wool, to use fire, to work metals, to govern ourselves with just laws. She explained how the world was. She was our mother. She never took off the mask. She lived much longer than her students. Centuries passed. The empire created thanks to her teachings spread all over the continent, but Mama-Oello stopped leaving the temple, which was her sanctuary. She was no longer interested in life and only wanted to sleep. One of our priests, unable to restrain his curiosity, took advantage of Mama-Oello’s deep sleep and removed her mask. He couldn’t see her face because her white and still exuberant body exploded in a puff of dust. He did declare, with religious terror, that the mask was the true being and that Mama-Oello’s body was only a vehicle with no autonomous life. For generations, that living face was passed down from one high priest to another, and thanks to a system of lighting flashes, it answered all their questions.
“The day our master Atahualpa came to power a comet crossed the sky. Mama-Oello, the mask, foretold the end of the empire. When the Spaniards arrived, they found a faithful subject who passed himself off as our monarch. When those rapacious vultures feasted their vile souls on the splendor of gold and murdered the false Atahualpa, the real one, carrying under his mantle the only treasure the Incas would not give up, fled to the desert accompanied by a group of warriors. The mask told them which path to take to reach this paradise. Fearful the invaders would find this hiding place, he threw Mama-Oello into the hole from which the geyser spurted. No sooner had his goddess disappeared than he was overcome by a sadness that ended his life. In a secret place, four faithful warriors, who would later kill themselves, built a tomb. Only the medicine witch doctors, from whom I descend, know where the mummy of the supreme Inca lies. Over time, a powerful cactus grew in his cranium. Refusing to absorb moisture from the geyser, it spread its roots to the far reaches of the desert, less in search of water than as an affirmation that these lands belong to the Incan Empire. What I need before I reveal to you the exact location of the royal tomb is for one of you to go down into hell and recover the sacred mask for my tribe. The centuries we’ve lived here in this generous jungle, eating fruit and dreaming, have weakened us. We are brave in the dream world and cowards when reality attacks us. But the Holy Mother will once again give us the strength we need to exit this sweet prison and overcome the outside world. Do not think that by torturing me you will get me to reveal the location. I’ve lived enough. I can die with no regrets. Either you rescue Mama-Oello or you never get the cactus.”
Lohan arched his back, bared his sharp fangs, and began to growl. Albina patted his flanks with her open hand: “Calm down, my friend! I hurt you when I took you away from the contemplation of the Monk and had you come along to help us. If you go on intervening in my conflicts, you will never become a Master. In any case, it’s useless to bite him. This time the old man is not just putting on a show. And if I want to breathe in the perfume of the healing flower, which is due to open tomorrow, I must recover that precious mask.”
Albina made a supreme effort, transformed her awareness into a harpoon, and shot it into the recesses of her mind. It caught a memory. The eunuchs had left her naked on a snowy mountain peak. She was forced to remain motionless for seven days and seven nights, withstanding the attack of the frozen elements. They sang to her, “Iha srin bskod la bzen hdebs pa… Icog gahi hgyur skad gcon la dran.” Then they left her there, sentenced to overcome the cold or die. “To force gods and monsters to carry out orders, tame them with the howling of a joyful and melodious note.” She was able to overcome the cold. That same note would also overcome heat. It was not a matter of heating snow or of freezing boiling water but of making herself immune to extreme temperatures. They taught her to strengthen her throat by imitating the song of a nightingale for months. Now, howling as she went down to the geyser’s inferno, she managed to get her body to acquire the chill of a bar of ice. She could walk over the igneous blocks and her feet suffered no burns. She received a call: “You are the one for whom I have been waiting, the only person worthy of rescuing me. I am submerged in this lava pit.” She sank her hands into the magma, felt around for a short time, which to her seemed eternal, and pulled out the mask, to which not a single incandescent particle could stick.
When she emerged, tossed high in the air by the steaming jet, the natives fell to their knees. The ivory face was identical to Albina’s! Amid tremors and exclamations of ecstasy, they raised their arms toward the woman who stared down at them, floating erect on the tip of the powerful tentacle of water. “Mama-Oello, Mama-Oello!”
The geyser suddenly stopped flowing, and Albina stood on the rock. The Incas thronged to kiss her feet. Tupacumaru—that was the name of the witch doctor—scattered them by ringing the bells on his scepter. Later, in the sanctuary, no longer burdened by his costume, hugging the mask against his chest, he bowed before Albina.
“Sacred woman, mother of us all, sent by the gods, I beg forgiveness thousands and thousands of times! I’ve committed the crime of not having faith. I took you for an intruder, an invader surrounded by demons. I subjected you to trials thinking you’d fail. I was sure that the burning hot stones would incinerate you. I demanded you search for Mama-Oello without realizing that you are Mama-Oello. Please, do not destroy me or my tribe. Do not burn up the jungle that keeps us alive. Do not eliminate its innocent little animals. Have mercy on us! Night has fallen suddenly, and its black mantle keeps me from finding the cavern where the shigrapishcu grows. Tomorrow, at first light, I’ll lead you to it. But you will have to enter alone. The implacable Lady nests in the tunnel that leads to the grave of our master Atahualpa. She devours all who dare enter the prohibited space. She uses her irresistible charm as a weapon. She talks and talks, and finally the victim begs her to concede him the favor of becoming her food. You, Mama-Oello, if you’re aided by your powerful magic, will manage to ignore her fascinating discourse and see the flower bloom!”
At daybreak, the feathers on the black parrots began to take on a pink tinge. The silvery parrot opened an eye and muttered, “Damnation, the same nightmare!” Tupacumaru, following a path eight inches wide, craftily carved into the wall so no one would see it, guided his guests toward the secret grotto. Crabby and Amado marched along, trembling. In order not to fall, they had to move sideways, their backs glued to the granite wall, their heels encrusted onto the narrow walkway, and their toes jutting into the abyss. Albina, with the certainty of a sleepwalker, serenely followed the witch doctor in his long ascent. The armadillo, who since reaching the jungle had dedicated himself to voraciously devouring all sorts of butterflies, followed them, keeping a respectful distance.
The mouth of the cave was narrow and gave off a fetid stink. The old man, with slow, controlled gestures to avoid losing his balance, hung a bag on Albina’s chest. “Here is your mask, Mama-Oello. It is your immortal conscience. It will help you, if you know how to accept its painful aid, to overcome the Lady.” Albina, encumbered by her impressive body, had to struggle to get in. She crawled forward, scraping her knees and elbows, and pressed hard against the walls, barely able to breathe. Little by little, the tunnel widened, the roof became covered by stalactites and the floor by skeletons wrapped in long strings of slime. Holding back her nausea, Albina stopped and waited for her eyes to get used to the penumbra.
Outside, Crabby was desperate. Her friend was going to deal with the murderous shadow, and there she was, purring like a cat in heat, in the arms of Amado. What if Albina lost the battle? After all those years of intimacy, where she’d taken Albina as a child who couldn’t even control her bowels, a child she’d had to teach how to speak, word by word, the woman with whom she’d learned what a caress was, the heat of the indispensible human presence in good and bad times, yes, after all that blessed company, was she going to let her die alone? True, she had no means to help her, but at least she would be her faithful witness who would keep the image of her death in memory. “As long as you remember them, the dead are still alive. They feed on our experiences, share our dreams, go on developing, existing. I’m going after her!”
“Don’t go, my love! Don’t abandon me!” said Amado. “My mother died giving birth to me. My father, thinking himself a murderer, submerged himself in his world of hats and only spoke with them. He never said a word to me. If you follow Albina and are devoured as well, I’ll be left all alone, much more alone than I was before I met you, because my island, where there was no one, will be filled by your unbearable absence.”
Crabby sealed the little man’s mouth with a desperate kiss. “Don’t say another word, Amado. Loyalty in this situation is for me more important than love.”
When the hatmaker saw the woman he adored enter the tunnel, he tried to leap into the abyss. Tupacumaru stopped him. “Don’t commit the same crime I did. Have faith. If you jump, you’ll be depriving her of your prayers. Those prayers can tip the balance in her favor. Stop despising yourself. The gods hear everything, even the echo of an ant’s footsteps on a green stem. All it takes is a drop to make the glass overflow; a small prayer is enough to create a miracle.”
Amado plastered himself to the wall and began to repeat, like a madman, “Help her, God!” The old man coughed. Ashamed, the little man immediately made his prayer plural: “Help them, God!”
Crabby passed through the zone filled with skeletons and reached a vault covered by a vaguely luminous moss. Hidden behind a bend, she observed her friend. Immediately she had goose bumps, and her hair stood on end. The white woman, who looked gray in the dim light, was rocking back and forth with a hypnotic rhythm as she listened to the lugubrious, thick, sickeningly sweet, and invasive voice that came from a dark shape three times larger than she. An ambiguous form that could be that of an old lady, a spider, a bitch with long teats, or even the concretion of her own shadow. A scent of rotten flowers wounded her nasal passages. Crabby fell down into a seating position, trembling from head to foot. “The Lady who thunders in the center of Camiña is less terrorizing, because since we know we all feel the same way about her, we console one another by sharing her. But this is Albina’s special Lady. Dear! How white she is, and how black her shadow!” She couldn’t go on thinking; the incessant voice of the terrifying silhouette, like a slow poison, began to dull her brain.
“My darling, my beauty, my tender one, my pale banquet, accept the fact that you can’t escape me. If you hurry, you’ll reach me. If you go slowly, I’ll reach you. If you walk calmly, I’ll be at your side. If you start spinning, I’ll dance with you. I’m at the ready in each of your seconds; I am the mother who never stops giving birth to you. Those who fear me cling to things without realizing that all things are mine. I make destruction into a process of extreme beauty. I wait until life manifests itself, until it reaches its maximum expression, and only then do I begin to destroy it with the same love used to create it. What immeasurable joy! If there is no end, there is no beginning. That is why I appear as a pregnant bitch. I am the black heart of impermanence. No matter what you do, you are my prey, and at all times my arrow is aimed at you. To obtain eternity you must give me what has always been mine. If you do not return it to me, you will be left clinging to mere matter. Sacrifice the last of your mirages, that eye which desires and thinks it sees all. Allow yourself to be granted the pure gaze of the dead, two disconnected sockets through which only the Supreme Being looks, then your instants will become eternal, everything will become a mirror, and you will see yourself in every face, in every form; you will find no difference between matter and dreams. You will finally understand that I am not yours but that I am you! Come on, go ahead, offer me your soul once and for all, enter my jaws! Dissolve within me so you can finally be!”
Crabby, seeing Albina move forward slowly, her eyes fixed, stretching her arms toward the repugnant shadow as if she were begging to be devoured, rubbed her eyelids, which seemed to be made of lead. What could she do to stop the sacrifice? Awaken her friend? How? All she could do was to be an impotent witness to the horrific banquet! She felt her entire body liquefying, turning into tears, and pouring out her eyes. A raspy tongue licked her ankles. The faithful Quirquincho had come to console her in this painful moment. Despite his hard, rough shell, Crabby began to pet him as if he were a cat. The animal rolled himself up into a ball. Without even thinking about it, she threw it toward Albina’s feet, which it rolled up to and hit. Albina regained consciousness, shook her head, and realized she was barely a yard away from the Lady. “Step back, my love, run away, run away!” shouted Crabby. But Albina, instead of avoiding the catastrophe, dug into her bag, pulled out the mask, put it on, crossed her arms, and let herself be swallowed. The great black egg surrounded her, humming with pleasure. Another fragment of shadow emptied the armadillo’s shell of flesh in a second, revealing his delicate skeleton.
Something like an iron hand inside Amado’s throat tore at his vocal chords. There, on the edge of the abyss, balancing himself on the narrow cornice, he stopped thinking about saving himself and understood, with immense anguish, that someone had died inside the cavern. Considering the possibility that it might be Isabella, it was as if a horse had kicked his chest ten times; he doubled over in despair and began to fall. With animal precision, Tupacumaru’s fingers caught him by the hair and again plastered him to the wall. “My son, you do not have the strength to oppose destiny. That which is inevitable is divine. The only way to conquer the law is by obeying it. Just as you accept the gift, accept the loss. What was lent you, give back with gratitude.” “Enough, you tricky witch doctor, you are like the parrots; the color of your feathers is always false, as are your words! Let me go or I’ll jump into the abyss and take you with me!” The old man instantly released him. Amado shouted a heartrending “Isabella!” and entered the tunnel on his knees, not caring that the sharp edges cut them.
Crabby, her entire body soaked with tears, embraced the little man. Despite his joy at finding the woman he adored alive, he almost fainted when he saw the remains of Quirquincho. “Close your eyes, sweetheart. There stands the Lady, digesting our friend in her dark belly. Albina has lost the battle. I don’t even want to imagine her beautiful, white, divine, marvelous body shredded by those black fangs. No! I do not want to keep in my memory the image of her transformed into a pile of bones held together by strings of saliva! Amado, I am paralyzed. Take me by the ankles and drag me out of this damned inferno!”
His muscles turned into a soft jelly by terror, the hatmaker began to drag his Isabella. Suddenly within the black egg shone a phosphorescent nucleus. Shaken by waves, the shadow stretched its tentacles like a tarantula with a thousand legs and let out a groan like an earthquake. The light increased, the walls shook, and stalactites began to fall. Crabby and Amado hid in an indentation in the wall. The Lady exploded into thousands of fragments. Standing among them, as straight as the sword of justice, was Albina, with her mask emitting blinding rays. She shouted out her triumph, and the last black traces dissolved. Not a bit of shadow remained in the vault.
“Leave here, my friends. I have no need of witnesses. What’s left for me to do requires solitude. Return to the sanctuary with Tupacumaru and wait for me there. If the night passes and at dawn I haven’t returned, don’t think I’m dead. I’ll probably just be lost in other dimensions of time.”
Albina had been dizzied by the voice of the Lady, as if by a potent sedative, her will lost in the depths of an infinite tunnel, with a dark molasses filling her chest. That bitch-goddess was right, she thought; it was absolutely necessary for her to suck from those twelve bosoms the black milk of eternal peace. She had to become a little girl, had to enter the womb. But the prickly ball wounded a foot. Blessed Quirquincho! Thanks to him, Albina had emerged from her stupor! The dark aura that wanted to envelop her was not a good mother but the most malignant of solvents. Each one of her cells had wanted to leave for a different location. Out of her vagina, like a violent waterfall, cascaded the desire to create; her heart was cutting its ties to wrinkle up like a dried piece of fruit; her words flew away in maddened throngs; a mechanical, empty echo repeated incessantly, “Who am I?” She had to recover her unity. The mask had summoned her: “Bring me to your face!” This she did. Like a living animal, the mask fixed itself to her skin, sank its edges around her eyes and mouth, and sprouted roots that penetrated every pore, invading her right down to the soles of her feet. Then she stopped being the body and was the ivory face. She opened her arms and penetrated into the dark belly.
The Lady was a coldness that paralyzed everything, and Albina, who derived her power to exist from the shining point that ceaselessly vomited universes, became its antagonist, a heroic partner of perennial agony. That empty rigidity, binding horizons, rendering them immobile, had transformed into life by the triumphal song of matter creating light. The blaze of the stars came to her ivory face. In its glow were congregated galaxies. There were not only the totality of the stars but also the totality of all awareness. Then the Lady, liberated from her immobility, exploded into innumerable fragments that her now eternal soul erased.
She had little time left. The flower of shigrapishcu was about to open. She entered the funerary chamber. Lying in a gold coffin was Atahualpa’s mummy. Stretched out like a spindle, it was wrapped in cotton bandages in which shone geometric figures embroidered with silk threads. His fine hands, crossed over his chest, clutched a silver fan. His face, uncovered, maintained a noble expression, despite the fact that in his forehead there was a crack from which emerged a short vegetable phallus crowned with thorns.
Everything about that cactus was vigorous: the taut, shiny skin producing a crystalline rustling; the spines with transparent points dripping milky sap; and the roots, hundreds of them, like long emeralds, piercing the nape of the mummy’s neck to perforate the bottom of the coffin, avidly growing downward to the rocky soil, where they stubbornly forced their way in. A long, clenched, red bud swelled and deflated on the spiny crown of the plant as if it were breathing. There was the flower, ready after a wait of one hundred years to open for only ten seconds and spray a perfume of delirious sweetness, capable of disintegrating the mind of the wisest person.
“Bravo, my divine girl! You are about to achieve the thing for which you were created!” exclaimed a high-pitched voice that punctuated the sentence with a string of giggles like feline howls. Lady Coughard floated toward her, semi-transparent, her head adorned with Quirquincho, also transformed into ghostlike material. “You have overcome your Lady, and now you walk between the two worlds—the real world and the magic world. That’s why you can see and hear us. All the witches of the continent, all of us knew that sooner or later you would come here to recover your true identity. When the flower opens and you breathe in its perfume, memories will come to you like a flood after a dike collapses. It’s important that at that moment you do not stop to review the life you’ve had buried in oblivion. Immediately cut off the flower, because it lasts practically no time at all and then becomes water. A water so pure that it resembles your soul. Next to the coffin, you will see a malachite pitcher. As soon as the petals spread, breathe in a single mouthful of its maddening perfume, then cut it off, and quickly seal it up in that vessel. When it dissolves, it will become medicine. A single drop eliminates the canine virus. To keep your surprising memories from distracting you at that crucial moment, I’ve been given the mission to tell you all that you will soon remember.
“You were created on the highest plateau in the world, a corner of the Himalaya Mountains. Your real name is An-Bina, which in your birth language means ‘Born for a Second Time.’ The parrots sent to celebrate your arrival sang ‘An-Bina,’ but the good woman who protected you, dazzled by the color of your skin, heard ‘Albina’ and called you by that name. You must know that your mother, the mysterious Mama-Oello, arrived in a metal bird from a distant star. It seems that she wasn’t trying to reach our Earth, that she drifted from the true route because of some malign imperfection. She disembarked on the highest point on our planet, a place where the hidden fortress of the eunuch monks stood.
“Those monks were very feared in the villages near the Himalayan peak. They would slide down the snowy slopes on their bronze boards and steal little boys they later deprived of their testicles. Using the smoke from certain herbs, they made them into obedient monks. The only one who boasted the privilege of carrying any weight between his legs was the Tashi-Lama, a descendant of himself through thousands of reincarnations. According to legend, the equilibrium of the roof of the world rested on his shoulders. It was said he was the child of a bitch possessed by Muktus, the demon-god who does not distinguish between good and evil.
“The monks carried Mama-Oello, who was almost dying, not from cold but from her sadness at having definitively lost her place of origin, to this highest of priests. The first thing he did, this man who always locked himself away in the darkness of his immense library, was to bite her on the shoulder. That infected her with the canine virus. For centuries he had not allowed women, nor even female animals, into the fortress. The arrival of this enormous, manly woman, as white as the eternal snows, covered by a luminous mask, caused a deep crisis. The five hundred monks who populated the monastery howled their sorrows toward heaven; never before had they felt the absence of their testicles. That divine female made them into mutilated beings. The Tashi-Lama, rutting like a wild beast, abandoned his voluntary seclusion and crawled through the halls, sniffing the tracks of Mama-Oello. Thanks to electrical charges that ran from the mask to the tips of her toes, she always kept him at a distance.
“When her superior spirit closed the wound left by the loss of her native paradise, she no longer accepted the cruel situation of being the only true intelligence amid this flock of monks who were more animal than human. She decided to escape from this gloomy prison where they were keeping her. It wasn’t hard. She waited for them to use the log carved into the shape of a dog’s head to beat the great bell, the order to sleep. The fortress, when the buzz of prayers had ceased, sank into silence. Now she concentrated on the root the mask was plunging into the center of her forehead, and then made a leap and landed sixty miles away. It was a small town whose buildings all had stone walls. She was afraid she’d cause a riot if she awakened the villagers. But she saw in the distance a fire burning on a high peak. She made another galactic leap and appeared near a man covered with rags who, surrounded by enormous, ravenous vultures, was cutting a corpse into pieces.
“Unable to dig graves in the rocky soil, this pariah fed human remains to the carnivorous birds. His work was held in such contempt that he had to carry it out in the bowels of the night. When she came near, the man, seemingly indifferent, went on cutting the body into small pieces and tossing them to the enormous birds. While the animals swallowed and squawked with pleasure, he looked at her with slanted eyes filled with an infinite peace: ‘Woman, if you’ve come close and observed my labor without fainting, it’s because you have a deep awareness of death and impermanence. Perhaps because of my horrid activity you think I’m a contemptible being. Nevertheless, my spirit is at the same level as your beauty. Possessing nothing more than a machete and a worn-out tunic, I am not inhibited by greed. I live here, far from worldly glory and possessions, devoid of pride, unafraid of old age, not desiring a long life. Slicing these bodies and watching them disappear into the guts of the birds, I sense that the supreme truth has no body, that purity resembles a cloudless sky.’ Mama-Oello stretched out among the vultures like one more corpse. The man caressed her with the edge of his machete. Then he brought his nasal passages close to her fine, pale sex. The fragrance emanating from that magnetic center made him perceive as well the stench that came from the throats of the birds. ‘Venerated goddess, in the same way you appeared out of thin air, return whence you came, but take me along with you,’ he implored. ‘I no longer love this world, where scarce beauty emerges like a weak flower in a swamp of rot. If you don’t make me your slave, I’ll throw myself off this peak so that the vultures will come to clean the garbage of my flesh.’
“Mama-Oello felt herself seduced by the man, as isolated from the world as she was herself. She decided to embark on a new life with him, but knowing that the Tashi-Lama and his eunuchs would never stop searching for her, she asked him to wait until the next night. She then went back to the fortress and, using the powers the mask gave her, made her own double. Thus it was that you appeared, An-Bina, identical to Mama-Oello, but without her mask. And in losing the mask you lost a great part of your memory, your intelligence, and your powers. Despite your impressive height and stature, you behaved like a little girl.
“Her task completed, Mama-Oello again encountered the gravedigger, who was none other than the man we knew as Manco-Capac. She explained that his human body was not prepared for those voyages, that when he passed through intraspace he ran the risk of dying. He insisted on accompanying her: ‘I don’t care. The body is an ephemeral illusion. In other dimensions, the soul acquires more subtle, eternal existences.’
“Mama-Oello had to live in places far from sea level, and the altitude of the Peruvian plateau was right for her. She took the man in her arms and made the longest leap she’d ever made, and they reached a place called Cuzco. Unfortunately, the extreme pressure of intraspace broke eight of Manco-Capac’s ribs. Your creator understood that the good man who adored her would not last long. And that was so. Very soon she watched him abandon the material world with a smile on his face: ‘I’m not leaving you, my goddess. I draw nearer, I abandon with gratitude the illusion my person has been, because I’m going to know the true nature of your infinite soul. Finally, I will be an eternal part of you.’
“Mama-Oello dedicated her energy to the foundation of the Incan Empire. She saw the emperors and their subjects die one after another, and little by little the bitterness of meager human life soaked him to the skin. Her own life lasted at least thirty thousand years. Of what use was this body that would never be inseminated? She locked herself away in a sanctuary and transformed her thoughts into fireflies. Her vital energy, consumed by those images she projected, abandoned her bones. She was more and more the mask and less and less the flesh. Finally she metamorphosed into a dreaming cloud. The ivory face fell in her dream without dreams. Transformed into a mute relic, it reached the hands of our master Atahualpa and arrived at this hidden paradise. A short time ago (relatively speaking), the same comet that announced the invasion of the white barbarians recurred. Its astral influence awakened Mama-Oello. Time for the reconquest had come! But to carry out her new cycle, she needed a body, her body, yours. So An-Bina sent you the order to come looking for her.
“You must realize that you have no personality of your own, that you are a reproduction, a tulkú. You were not born from a womb but from a mind. This is why you possess neither thoughts nor feelings nor desires nor complete needs. Always fragmentary, you cannot achieve unity without the mask.
“When Mama-Oello left you in her place in the Himalaya fortress and the monks saw you appear with your bare face, identical to the mask, they worshipped you. But at the same time, they were dismayed and sorry for you because, since you lacked all human experience, you reacted like an idiot, and they found themselves having to initiate you. They thought that by inoculating you with larger and larger doses, they could make you immune to poisons. They made you memorize the sacred texts of two thousand sutras. They thought it necessary for you to devour the brain of each Tashi-Lama who died. And each living Tashi-Lama thought it necessary to make you into a sacred prostitute. At the center of a circle of eunuchs seated on their haunches, rubbing with their mudra fingers the scar that took the place of their testicles, the Lama, transformed into a dog, possessed you, hoping to fertilize you with his semen so that you would give birth to the longed-for executioner god who would cleanse the planet of all infidels. But your powerful ovaries disintegrated the semen. Those ceremonies went on for centuries, until you felt the call of your mistress. Since you did not know how to use intraspace, you had to flee sliding over the snow on one of their sleds. When the eunuchs realized you were gone, they sent three powerful monks after you. All of them were champions at tunko, a martial art that uses fingernails as knives. Using your charms, you managed to seduce a series of hotel managers, drivers, mayors, soldiers, ship captains, and sailors until you reached Iquique. Thanks to their gold coins, the monks could follow you in swifter vessels and reached port before you did. When you disembarked, they tried to take you prisoner. You defended yourself but were struck on the skull. To your deficiencies at tunko was added a total loss of memory. Thanks to our gods, that good woman named Crabby came to your aid.”
Albina felt each root of the mask like a long wound in her flesh. No, it wasn’t possible! She could not be an imaginary entity produced by a brain. She was real, in body and soul, and the thing sticking to her face was a parasite from some hell. She seized the ivory face and tried to pull it off. She felt on her forehead and cheeks a pain similar to the burning of acid. Lady Coughard meowed with joy and, kissing the armadillo, began to disappear: “Quirquincho and I have fulfilled our obligation. Now we’re leaving. Goodbye, you stupid tulkú. Stop trying to maintain the illusion. Accept once and for all that you are an empty vehicle and nothing more. The driver has arrived. Obey its orders. But watch out, the flower is beginning to open! Don’t get sidetracked in a useless struggle, and seize it before it explodes!”
When the witch and the animal vanished, the bud stretched and began to unfold. It was strange that such a small cactus could produce such an enormous flower. It opened its petals until they formed a red ring that almost filled the entire space. The corolla gave off a perfume with the strength of a corrosive acid; it entered through the nose and mouth and wiped away the ego from the brain with the strength of the sea tossing a dead sardine onto the beach. Half lost in the deluge of memories, Albina made a supreme effort, threw herself onto the flower, and began trying to bend it. The flower’s energy was so great that the whole thing slipped out of her hands again and again, opening like a rebellious umbrella. After nine seconds, she managed to pull it off the cactus. She had one second left to lock it away in the malachite pitcher. With a thunderous splat it turned into a thick, amber-colored syrup. As the flower became an elixir, Albina dissolved in Mama-Oello.
They were waiting for her on the stone platform around the geyser. They had dry branches prepared as torches for when the night fell on them with its usual abruptness. They were afraid Albina would not return. No one could face the Lady without being devoured—except a god or goddess. So when they heard the confident footsteps of the woman and saw her shine more and more like a moon as the darkness increased, they fell to their knees. Attracted by the glow of the mask, the forest animals—reptiles, insects, mammals, and birds—approached. The Inca warriors, along with their wives and children, intoned a monotonous chant and danced with devotion. The dogs ran to lick her feet. Lohan, strangely timid, sat on his haunches and made a long, light howl, a sigh somewhere between relief and pain. He sensed in the soul of his beloved a definitive transformation that situated her as far from him as a star. Tupacumaru, wearing his ceremonial costume, lit the fires. Crabby and the dwarf wept for joy in each other’s arms. Albina had triumphed; in that beautiful green pitcher she was carrying the cure that would free them from the terrible virus!
With a hollow reed the witch doctor found for her, she sipped a drop of the floral syrup, and a liberating shiver passed through her body. In a deep voice she proclaimed, “The bitch is no more! And with her gone, the tyranny of the Tashi-Lamas is gone as well. I am myself again! I promise you that the sun of the Incas will shine again! This forest will no longer be a hiding place. We shall bring it out to the world. We will make it grow through valleys and over mountains. We shall transform the desert into the lung of the world, we shall conquer the conquistadors, we shall teach them to be, to love, to create, and to live!”
Tupacumaru raised his scepter and traced in the air the form of a horizontal number eight. The green parrots became golden, and the tribe burst into an enthusiastic cheering. Then they fell to their knees again in adoration of their incarnate goddess. Mama-Oello deposited a drop of the elixir into the mouth of each dog, and they all became men again, their faces radiant. They looked at one another. Then they were ashamed, because they were naked. The Inca women, pointing to their pale penises amid the jubilation, lent them loincloths. They also brought out clay vessels filled with a liquor made from fermented cherimoyas, and a general drunkenness overtook the crowd. The children, also drunk, leapt over the fires. Each time the geyser spouted, they intoned hymns accompanied by reed flutes and drums made of hollow logs.
“Isabella, my little darling, my beauty, my former Crabby, don’t look at me with those eyes flooded with tears,” Albina told her friend. “Thanks to you, I’m finally what I always was. Stop thinking I am the same Albina whose savior you were, whose mother you were, and finally whose faithful friend you were. Do not believe that an inhuman mask is stealing your Albina from you. To the contrary, it is offering her to you for the first time. Albina was only the projection of my soul. She came to this world with a single, precise purpose, and now that she has achieved it, she has disappeared. Now I, Mama-Oello, am here, with all my power recovered. My task begins now; before anything else, I must restore to Camiña the peace I took from it. Then I shall teach the poor how to fertilize their desert land. I will not stop until the entire continent is a garden. I want you to know that my gratitude toward you has no limits! If you do not reject my metamorphosis, come to my arms!”
Crabby ran to the white giant, and with her forehead resting on her chest, burst into long, hoarse sobs. Tupacumaru handed her a huge pineapple full of tasty liquor. Laughing out loud and shaking her head as if she were tossing away an enormous head louse, Crabby drank off half and poured the other half down the throat of her little man. The impact was instantaneous. They fell down, clinging to each other and sliding toward the geyser. The jet of hot water shot them high through the air without their realizing it and then tossed them into the branches of a leafy myrtle, where they slept as if they were a single animal.
Mama-Oello summoned Lohan, and the dog approached his beloved, humbly dragging his white belly over the rock and whimpering pitifully. She took hold of his forepaws, and as she knelt, she raised him so they could look each other in the eye.
“You are the one who suffers most, my worthy lover. As a human you were Drumfoot, a disgusting bud from which was born, like a golden rose, a sublime being, the magnificent and noble animal you now are. When I transformed into a bitch, everything in you was delight—your fur tangling its fragrant locks with mine, the caress of your teeth firmly stretching out the skin on my neck, your vigorous member penetrating me with such an intense passion that you turned my ovaries into flowing springs. Yes, you were able to awaken in me, one who felt so insensitive to the charm of males, a bestial love whose memory, even now, fills the blood circulating in my veins with a sweet warmth. Nevertheless, you will have to accept that you have lost your four-legged female. What was for you a welcome change was for me a sickness that almost destroyed my soul. As a man, you were inferior even to a dog, but metamorphosing into an animal elevated you to the heights of the sublime gift. My case was just the opposite. I descended along a slippery path until I turned into a beast. There were moments when the only interest that guided me was being possessed by as many dogs as possible. Luckily, you came to stop my fall. Noble animal, as noble as Crabby, as noble as Amado Dellarosa, who offered us a place in the world when we were pariahs, you have been my salvation! I know you don’t want to return to your human form because you fear becoming Drumfoot again, and second, because you would be a man without a woman, since Albina, the one you desired even more than your own life, has disappeared. I, Mama-Oello, belong to a race beyond human reach. Just imagine, over the course of an enormous number of generations I shall see all the inhabitants of the planet die, again and again. Yes, my beloved Lohan, for the time being you will go on being a beautiful white dog. When I am sure I can console you, I’ll give you the magic potion. Be patient.”
They all celebrated until late at night. Then, dulled by the powerful liquor, they fell into happy dreams. Mama-Oello, who did not need sleep, awaited sunrise. The pink and yellow parrots, carrying at the center of their flock, like a cold eye, the silvery parrot, flew off, screeching euphorically, toward the skies. They returned in a gloomy state, their feathers tinted with a khaki color identical to that of the soldiers’ uniforms. The mirror parrot was not among them. Mama-Oello sighed deeply: “It is on the road back where the greatest dangers lurk.”
You come from the shore of the greatest anguish
your face shattered by eternity and songs…
I know that all the ships that emigrate will anchor
in your heart.
Pablo de Rokha, Cosmogony
With the heat of the sudden dawn came problems. Lohan could smell the acrid odor of the armpits of about fifty soldiers wafting from the gorges. Tupacumaru put Amado, because of his small stature, into a narrow gallery he had to crawl through to reach a spy hole cut into the granite wall in such a way no one would notice it. He saw a formation of soldiers carrying lances with long bamboo shafts. Behind them, in a crescent formation, trucks with huge, wide tires designed for driving on the desert sand. Leading them, his bleach-blond hair blowing in the wind, his eyes pouring tears, and two strings of snot hanging from his nose, was Mr. Nilly, the Yankee administrator of the copper mine, in person. He—the one who spent months dressed as a woman, hidden in his luxurious air-conditioned chalet, directing his overseers with a flood of telephone calls—stood there, roaring like an angry lioness, and wielding, with difficulty, a heavy revolver.
“For a couple of lousy dollars, the copper sifters at the Camarones River must have told him what happened. That gringo wouldn’t have listened to reason; a pack of dogs ate up his lover and slaughtered his soldiers. He’s wounded in his heart and in his pride. As soon as we peek out he’ll order us turned into pincushions. With heavy trucks bringing in water and food galore, he can wait for us as long as he likes. How can we get out of here?”
Tupacumaru played a sinuous melody on his reed flute, and a cloud of parrots immediately surrounded him and tinted their feathers sky blue. “Wait until midday and then follow us,” the witch doctor said to his guests. When the moment came, the old man, led by his parrots, entered the exit tunnel, guiding Mama-Oello, Lohan, Amado, Isabella, and the men of Camiña. They pushed aside the huge rock that served as a door. The parrots then shot off and just as quickly landed on the path infested with serpents. Each bird captured a snake and took flight again. Camouflaged by the blinding blue sky at that shadowless time of day, they glided over the heads of the soldiers. Following the furious shrieks of Mr. Nilly, the soldiers charged at the group to spear them with their lances. The parrots dropped their deadly rain. Total collapse! A khaki-colored stream flooded the trucks. The gringo, the only person wearing sunglasses, raised his face and began to insult the sky. A snake fell right into his mouth and slid into his stomach. He gagged, sounding like a squawking vulture, but managed to spit out the serpent. Then he too began to run. They had to get to the hospital at Chuquicamata so they could be injected with an antidote. The trucks disappeared at top speed along the meandering mountain road.
The entire tribe left the jungle and came to say farewell. They dipped their toes in the burning sand as if it were the strangest substance in the world. It was the first time they had been allowed to see a place outside of the jungle. For them, the earth had always been fertile, amorous, and maternal. They had no knowledge of its sterile, cruel, and murderous identity. Even though those saline lands of washed-out ocher, devoid of trees or birds, without the perfume of a single flower, were right before their eyes, they could not believe it. The real world had granite borders, produced jets of water, and was filled with a forest rich in fruit and loving animals. Men, women, and children began to laugh until they fell down with stomach cramps. The landscape was playing a trick on them. On that bald horizon would have to grow—very quickly—enormous walls. Out of that ugly Earth grew palms, monkey puzzle trees, cypresses, larches, yellowwoods, carob trees, tamarugos, pepper trees, boldos, ferns, fragrant grasses, violets, and so many other flowers. How could a landscape call itself a landscape without butterflies or bees or birds or other animals? What kind of joke was this, a place where hot tongues of water were not jetting to the sky? Tupacumaru, who was in the habit of disguising himself and leaving, mounted on a guanaco to visit the bars in the mining town, let out a few guffaws, then ordered the Incas to rub noses with their guests to say farewell, and had them return to their native paradise. Once they were alone, he gave a worried look toward the white goddess.
“Don’t you worry, my good old man, when the right moment comes, I will return. By then I will have made a reality out of your tribe’s dreams. The jungle will flow out to the desert like a green river and flood it completely. I promise you that.”
“Oh, miraculous woman, I do believe you! And because I believe you, I’m going to ask that as soon as you get to town you send me a set of false teeth. I look old, but it’s only on the outside. Inside, I’ve been lit up by a little lady down at the bar in Calama. If you’re long in coming back (a hundred of my years are a day for you), it’s only proper that one of my future offspring awaits you.”
The jolly spiders again covered the sandy ground with a sonorous carpet. Even though they carried lots of water, their throats dried out immediately after they drank. The heat turned the sandals lent by the Incas into ovens. The soles of their feet turned into wounds. They’d left the mountains behind, and except for the long furrow they’d opened following the root, there was nothing to use as a guide in that infinite desert. A dry, cracked skin, devoid of soul, of grayish ocher, like the immense vomit of some god. Inexpressive under her mask, holding the malachite pitcher close to her chest as if it were a second heart, the former Albina marched along with the gait of a queen. Whimpering, limping, his tongue hanging out, Lohan followed her. He would not allow, under any circumstances and despite tortuous efforts, for a single inch to separate him from the heels of his mistress. Orderly and patient, the men of Camiña escorted them. Much further back were Amado and… Who was that? It’s true that the profound and inflamed gaze of the little man transformed her into Isabella, obliging her to wear the habit of beauty, but (a big but) that well-proportioned little woman with the sinuous walk and the face of a good little girl, with breasts and buttocks and lips and the entire panoply of womanhood, seemed only a costume—in the way that a wedding dress is a costume, yes, but still just an appearance a swan concealing an ugly duckling. Forced to turn her eyes toward herself for lack of any reference points in that flat landscape, she could see that deep within she was still Crabby, that solitary freak who had become the mother of an idiot Venus. She realized she was walking around with a dagger in her heart, a dagger that stabbed continuously. Oh, how the disappearance of Albina pained her! That masked priestess, wise among the wise, bore no relation to her friend. What use was a miserable human being to a demigoddess? If they lived in two different times, one ephemeral (Crabby’s), the other eternal (hers), how could they walk side by side, have the same goal? Impossible! Her back went from straight to hunched again, and, without stopping, she burst into silent sobs. Her tears irrigated many feet of sand, and in each spot hit by a drop, a yellow flower sprouted. The dwarf thought he was witnessing a miracle; his beloved was leaving behind her a path of gold! He was just about to fall to his knees when a silvery fly that quickly turned into a parrot appeared and flew around the group three times. Then it disappeared again into the horizon line. Mama-Oello, overcome by a disturbing foreboding, hid the precious pitcher under the cape given to her by Tupacumaru to cover her nakedness. Again, the silvery fly appeared, followed this time by a horde of opaque fleas. Behind the parrot, moving with incredible speed, making huge jumps, came ten huge hares, each carrying a man who looked like a bandit. To cross the desert, these smugglers bred a race of rabbits the size of horses. On the biggest one, a dark gray hare with a white belly and a black face, was a saddle encrusted with tiny, star-shaped mirrors and in the saddle a monumental fat man, bearded and long-haired, who stopped in front of the fugitives. The bird, with its wings refracting sunbeams, an urchin of light, perched on the bandit’s shoulder and screeched, “She’s got it! She’s got it under her cape!” The other riders, waving machine guns, surrounded the group. The fat man, huffing like a whale, led his enormous hare to the masked woman.
“Dear lady, allow me to introduce myself. Chucho de la Santa Cruz. Profession: honest cocaine trafficker. We appear to be bad people, but in fact we’re good heads of families and true believers. True enough, we need these mops of hair and these cartridge belts to put the fear of God into the mob of federal agents and soldiers of all kinds who hunt us down. Nevertheless, despite being good at fighting, our favorite weapon, thanks to these hares, is running away. Let your friends know that if they behave themselves, we won’t cut off their ears or shoot them full of holes. Why should they worry? All they’ve got are the rags on their backs. On the other hand, you, mistress of my soul, assuming this good parrot hasn’t lied to us, carry a pitcher filled with the shigrapishcu syrup. It is such a precious elixir because, according to legend, a single drop, poured into a kilo of cocaine, produces a jelly more powerful than the philosopher’s stone so sought after by alchemists. Ingesting just a gram gives one’s hands, for a period of eight hours, the power to turn base matter into gold. Do you realize, madam, that if this is true, we can turn whole mountains into that precious material? Well, enough chatter—hand over the famous flask, and don’t make me resort to violence.”
“I understand your interest, Don Chucho, but I must inform you that the syrup you so desire is, before anything else, a medicine that cures a very special sickness. These men have been cured, but their wives are still infected. We have to get to Camiña and dole out a part of the fluid to them and another part to the infected men wandering the streets of Iquique. So, I will never hand over the flask. And I warn you that I have powers that protect me from bullets.”
With no expression on his face that might forecast it, the obese man fired his machine gun at the insolent woman’s body. The holes in her cape only gave off smoke. Mama-Oello, immune, reacted with sweetness: “Now do you see?”
The silvery bird whispered some words into the ear of the man on the hare. He smiled, spurred his mount forward, and had it leap toward Crabby. He picked her up, kicked Amado in the chin, and put a knife to Crabby’s throat: “Give me the pitcher right now, or I’ll slit your little friend’s throat.”
The dwarf rubbed his chin and, shouting “Traitor!” tried to throw himself on the thug and his feathered accomplice. A blast of bullets raised a crest of sand at his toes and stopped him in his tracks. The parrot guffawed. A bitter smile passed over Crabby’s face: “Albina would have given her life for me, but this pretentious sorceress won’t lift a finger to save me. Aspiring to be the sacred leader of the poor, she’ll go her way immersed in her delusions of grandeur no matter who falls by the wayside.” The blood did not pour from her throat, but from a more intimate place. As Mama-Oello, not hesitating for an instant, held out the pitcher to the bandit, there appeared and expanded a menstrual stain on the flank of the hare. The drug dealer took hold of the syrup he so desired with one hand and threw Crabby off his mount with the other, shouting “Dirty slut!” Then he used his neckerchief to wipe off the feminine plasma. His followers gave him a plastic bag filled with white powder. With the long, sharp nail on his pinky, he cut a hole into it and let a drop of syrup fall in. A dark stain immediately appeared. It grew until the cocaine acquired a greenish tinge and turned into a jelly. Greedily salivating, the fat man took the tiny spoon that hung from the gold chain around his neck and separated a tremulous piece.
“Careful, Don Chucho,” Mama-Oello warned him. “Legends aren’t reality! You are going to ingest a powerful drug with unknown effects that might plunge you into Hell.” The cocaine dealer did not think it necessary to respond. He swallowed the jelly. The effect was instantaneous. His boots split open, revealing two black paws. Then his clothing flew into the air like a shooting star made of rags. Pitch-black fur covered his body, and on his chest appeared two breasts that, judging by the drops oozing out of the nipples, were filled with milk, also black. As soon as the bitch had taken shape—a dog even larger than the hare, its eyes bloodshot with murderous hatred, its muzzle bristling with voracious fangs, its tail wagging so powerfully that it raised enormous clouds of dust into the air—it leapt, howling abominably, on the gang. Even though the hares could leap thirty feet, the dog caught them and tore them to pieces. As the dark beast lapped up their blood with pleasure, Mama-Oello, with great difficulty, held back Lohan, who wanted to give up his life by joining in an unequal combat, and gathered her terrified friends.
“You can cure a sickness by attacking it with the agent that produces it. The shigrapishcu can overcome the virus because it contains it in its syrup. That’s why the thief turned into a bitch, one of the Lady’s incarnations. It would be impossible to flee it because it would catch us in an instant. We have to distract it until the effect passes. What should we do?”
“I know what to do!” screeched the parrot. And taking advantage of the fact that the black bitch was distracted by tearing apart skeletons, it flew at the dog, and with its shining beak, sharp as a sword, made a horizontal cut on the beast’s forehead and pierced its two eyes. The huge animal, roaring with pain, began to run around in larger and larger circles. The parrot guffawed again. “I am the necessary evil, the necessary evil!” And it flew off back to the secret jungle. Moving in wider and wider circles, the atrocious animal drifted away, little by little, until it looked like a flea slipping over the circular horizon line. Crabby, grateful, picked up the malachite pitcher whose stopper had luckily not fallen out, and with profound respect handed it to the woman who, even if she no longer knew her, was still her friend.
Peace lasted only a short moment; it was interrupted by an artillery shell that exploded a few feet away from them. Calculating that it was unlikely that a second shell would fall in exactly the same spot, they all jumped into the deep crater left by the explosion. The gringo Nilly had returned to the attack, this time on top of a small tank, followed by twenty trucks packed with soldiers, two hundred in all. How’s that for a great love? Mixed with a bloody desire for revenge and executed with the arrogance of someone who has granted himself the right to carry out a sentence without a trial, that beautiful sentiment turned into something disgusting. Mama-Oello was forced to counterattack. She had a goal in life, to heal the infected; Mr. Nilly had a goal in death, to make human hamburger. A second shell exploded, very close. Blood began to flow from some of the men’s ears. The priestess sighed deeply. Once again she would have to feed the Lady. She emerged from the shell hole and began to trace an octagon in the sand, repeating over and over in a hoarse voice a slow invocation, “Gtsan mahi sa alas ma hidal dan!” When she finished, she asked all those she was protecting to enter that magical symbol. Then, summoning Ye-Srid, the goddess of the elements, she sang in that same strange, virile voice, “Hbyun ba dus kyi Iha mo brnan!” Then she filled her cheeks and blew again and again until a whirlwind formed around them. It gained intensity until it became a tornado, a ferocious, grayish spiral that, as it absorbed and pulverized chunks of earth, seemed to reach the sky. Then she who made the invocation, howling a terrible curse—“Min dan mtshan ma nos kyis zin!” or “Hurl them from the peak of existence into the infernal abyss!”—launched the storm toward the military convoy. The monstrous column swallowed the tank and the twenty trucks as if they were feathers.
Seeing the vehicles and their occupants smashed to pieces, Mama-Oello felt a great sense of apprehension in addition to her sorrow. It had been centuries since she’d spoken those incantations. Now, despite all her efforts, she would not be able to control a horror like the tornado. “Be careful!” she exclaimed. “Soon it will come upon us!” With no hope—where could they take refuge on that bald plain?—and relying on Lohan’s animal instincts, they ran after him. Little by little, they saw the masts, the deck, and finally the entire vessel—the caravel of Saint Peter! “It’s made of reinforced concrete. It will withstand the wind!” As if the soldiers had aroused in it an appetite for human flesh, the tornado headed toward them in a straight line. Giving them barely enough time to climb aboard and scramble into the hold, the insane force blew away the masts with their rigid sails and all the saints standing on the deck. The hurricane burst the glass in the portholes, transforming it into daggers and causing them to cower among the false cement barrels. They felt the structure shake, as if it were suffering the violence of an earthquake, heard a creaking, like the sound of an ancient tree uprooted by a gigantic hand, and began bouncing between a ceiling that became a floor and a floor that became a ceiling. Holding on tight to the Saint Peters solidly screwed to the floor, they survived the shaking. After a violent collision that echoed like the report of a cannon, the nightmare came to an end. The raging wind calmed, and, immersed in the darkness and the silence, they felt they were out of danger. They could not leave, because the torrential rain that thirsty land had been waiting on for over three centuries had begun to fall.
They realized that the hurricane had carried the Santa María, which weighed many tons, many miles away from the place where it had been anchored. They found themselves on top of one of the hills surrounding Camiña. From there, they could see the town and the desert around it, which was no longer a desert. Thanks to the millions of gallons of water it had swallowed, the soil, forgetting its sterility, was covered by a carpet of multicolored flowers. The mountain range in the distance, also flower-covered, was at times red, at others yellow, violet, green, blue.… Clouds of butterflies fluttered around, drunk on nectar. Wild rabbits romped about, wrestling each other sensuously. The air, free of dust, purred in their ears, transformed into a cool caress. Mama-Oello observed the formidable change with joy; the horror she’d unleashed had attracted water-laden clouds, which had created a miraculous flood that in turn brought a life-generating mud.
“What does it matter that it will only last a short time! The aridity, which in all likelihood will come later, must itself have a memory. It must know that the past is a form of the future, that what was shall be, and that what is has already been. A drought with hope is not the same as a drought without hope. In the first, every second is venerated because it brings the anxiously desired rain closer. In the second, each instant is hated because it pushes the generating liquid away.”
The Camiña men slowly descended the zigzagging path, making their way through enormous lavender bushes, as if they were going to a wake or a baptism, or to both at the same time. They were happy but also ashamed to return home; the shigrapishcu had killed the virus, but it hadn’t erased their memories. They remembered everything. They’d been dogs; they’d taken in the intense world of smells, known brutal desire and the delirium of mortal danger. Would it be possible for them once again to accustom themselves to the monotonous happiness of Camiña and the overwhelming simplicity of their wives? The town had also suffered an essential transformation. Before, its slow tempo came from the absence of death, but now that the Lady had returned, it was no longer possible to accept the invariability of their days. Because life was so short, it was better to live it with intensity. Dressed as usual in their long dark costumes, the women ran smiling toward the foot of the mountain to receive the men with open arms. But would they desire them again as men and not as dogs? Would it be the same to feel rising between their legs a pale phallus instead of a bright red appendage? Would the men experience the same olfactory fulfillment sniffing their vulvas and anuses? With their human noses, so inferior to those of dogs, they found even the intense aroma of the floral carpet almost devoid of scent. They felt a heavy void in their tongues, their ears, and their noses. Was being cured really such a great thing? They began to smile. Yes, it was a great thing! Now they found themselves thinking. Not only did they feel, but they were also able to feel what they were feeling. A luminous region of their souls showed them the limits within which they were living. And nothing in the world could be better than that realization. They felt themselves to be clay vessels carrying a jewel. Forgetting Mama-Oello, they fell into their wives’ arms. The sobs of happiness kept the men from kissing them. They had to interrupt that caress because the fangs of the women began to grow. Their mouths threatened to turn into muzzles.
Need makes gods. The excluded one was again included; the green pitcher once again became their only hope. On their knees, they made their way to the masked woman as if she were the miraculous Virgin of Andacollo. They all put out their tongues to receive a drop of the syrup as if it were the consecrated Host. The cure was instantaneous. The women, remembering the anxieties of their canine vaginas, dragged their husbands home. A concert of slamming doors immersed the street in solitude. The clerical buzzing of the bees, who for the first time sucked in sweet juices, was drowned out by the vehemently accelerating creaking of bedsprings.
Soon it would be midday. Even with the earth turned into a garden and the air into perfume, the heat became torrid. The brilliant colors of the hillsides began to fade, and a gray mantle covered the slopes with sadness. Once the mosquitoes began to catch fire in mid-flight, the creaking bedsprings, the cries of pleasure, and the groan of mattresses all stopped. A deep silence rendered audible the scratching of wild animals digging cool holes out on the plain. The six-hour siesta seemed to sink Camiña in death.
Amado opened the doors of the hat shop, and even though the floor, visible due to the holes in the roof, was clean of parrot excrement and the frightened scarabs had fled, the place exuded the air of a ghost town. When he realized he could not accept the place as his own, when he saw it narrow, ugly, devoid of soul, the little man understood that his gaze had changed. Before, the dark den had been his refuge. Not finding in himself any beauty, as it is not one’s own gaze that supplies it but the gaze of another, he was unable to recognize the beauty of the world. Now that he had a reverent companion he could sink his roots into her; Isabella was his home, his country, the tower from which he could observe the world. The circular street seemed like a tight collar capable of strangling them. “Let’s get out of here, Isabella. By saving Camiña, we lost it! We have to find another kind of life. Albina’s striptease act no longer makes any sense.” A knot formed in Isabella’s throat. The cruel moment of separation had come. It was logical, given the circumstances, that her white, supremely white, flour-white, salt-white, marble-white, shroud-white, milk-white friend would want to cast her pink eyes on another reality. Mama-Oello did not need her protection, and much less her iron bar. She was wise, strong, and perhaps even immortal. There was no way that disgusting room could go on being her temple. But the idea of saying goodbye to her friend broke her heart. She patted Lohan’s head, and he, feeling exactly what she was feeling, just stood there with his tail between his legs, trying uselessly to wag it. She made a small gesture in the direction of the woman who had been her only friend and smiled at Amado: “Are you coming with me, hatmaker? I’m going back to Iquique to open a bar where I can buy and sell gold.” Amado grabbed the iron bar: “I’ll follow you with the greatest pleasure, but on one condition—that I be the one to scare off the drunks!”
Just then they saw Pinco, the deaf-mute, leading off to the cemetery the corpse of an old man, made-up and dressed as if he were alive, and mounted on a mule with a board behind his back holding him upright. Mama-Oello, who hadn’t said a word since they climbed off the caravel, muttered, “They have their dead buried at siesta time, saying they went to take a walk. They refuse to accept the Lady, and they’re right not to. She had forgotten them, and it was I who made her come back. It’s my obligation to leave things just as they were before our arrival. That carnivorous shadow lies in wait right in the plaza, among the cypresses, ready to devour everything. I beat her once, but I could only do it because she was mine. Now victory will be more difficult, if not impossible. Since the Lady now belongs to all, her power is infinitely multiplied. Don’t leave yet, please! Wait for me! I have a debt with you three as well. If I finish the fight without losing my life, I’ll be back to pay it off.”
As she slowly advanced toward the plaza, each footstep felt like a knife wound. The circular town, bathed in light and heat, was a wedding ring around the dark finger that rose among the four trees. For the first time in her many centuries of existence, Mama-Oello knew what it was to have bitterness in her mouth; it was a dense taste that rose from her intestines to punish her tongue. When she was close to the Lady, she tried to penetrate her innumerable tentacles, intent on destroying her skull. A melancholy voice stopped her: “My blackness cannot extinguish the splendor of your mask. Are you a goddess? Do you want to introduce your immortality into this pure shadow that I am? Have you decided to kill death, to dissolve me finally from life? Is your love so great?”
Mama-Oello realized that she was not feeling fear but pity. She would have preferred pain to understanding the immense sorrow and humble devotion of that cosmic executioner. She was an infinite absence accompanying each drop of life, a generous placenta attached to the moment, offering to ungrateful Creation a final annihilation that gave meaning to its road; she was at once the immense Lady of the universe and the small Lady of dust. More than a murderess, she was a midwife, aiding with her detested scythe the continuous transformation of forms into other forms. She, the horrible one, made flow the river of life, the current of mirages. She, hated, the devout protector of the heart of silence, a void that turns to smoke the supposed density of matter, the supposed individuality of perception, the supposed purity of emotions, the supposed reality of desires, the supposed need for action. “Do you realize that if you eliminate me, you may become the worst enemy of life? Instead of fighting against me, become my ally. You know very well that you are not your bones, your viscera, or your flesh. None of that lasts. What remains then of you? Who are you? You are neither more nor less than everything that fits into an instant. Time is barely a point, and you do not travel in it as if in a boat. By yourself you are the boat, seemingly without a crew. Behind there is nothing; ahead there is nothing. You simply drift along. Even so, I accompany you. I am your crew, but it’s you who creates me. If the boat founders, I fade away. If I disappear, that which is alive dissolves with me. Come.”
Instead of entering the Lady, Mama-Oello opened her heart so that the Lady would enter her. The shadow filled her. In that total darkness, all words fluttered about, burning until they fell apart in ash. Feelings stretched like bridges that only led to nothingness. The desires to create, multiply, and stay—they hardened, becoming stones that ground together and became sand, sand that got finer and finer until it, too, was shadow. Then the parade began, memory emptying itself in a flood of tar that washed away every known thing—people, animals, plants, landscapes, the constant product of Mama-Oello’s senses—and buried them in the insatiable belly. But the mask resisted. Its light became more and more intense. The Lady groaned movingly. “I cannot deal with you. You have no structure. You are much more than your modest form. You live outside yourself like a goddess. I must obey you. Is this my end and the beginning of eternity? Has your own work corrupted you? Do you want to take my place? Could you be the new Lady, an empty crown in a paralyzed realm?”
“Sister, that is not my desire. The world must go on turning. I only want one thing. You were able to forget this town before, and I want you to leave again and not return. There is no general truth without a lie that gives it meaning. Camiña will allow you to get on with your sacred mission. Obey!”
And it is thus that for a second time the Lady left Camiña. Back in the hat shop, Mama-Oello joined the hands of Isabella and Amado. “You do not have to lower yourselves working in a sordid bar. Rub the jelly the thief made into your palms. Like that. Good, now touch any object.” They placed their hands on a mold for making hats. The wood took on a yellow tint, began to shine, and little by little turned into gold. The little man shouted and jumped for joy. But Isabella bent over, spread her toes, and, immersed in an irrepressible sadness, became Crabby. “Why get rich?” Mama-Oello smiled enigmatically and rubbed her back: “Wait a bit. Soon you will be happy.” She opened the pitcher and deposited a drop of elixir on Lohan’s muzzle. The animal began to tremble, threw itself to the floor, howled in protest, looked at Mama-Oello with sad eyes, and began to turn into a man. Shaking its head in desperate negation, it said, “I beg of you. Let me die as a dog!” Now completely human, he leaned his forehead against a wall, crying. He was naked. His body was beautiful, and the foot that had been swollen was still deflated. “I fell in love with you when you were human because I felt you were within reach, but now, how can I aspire to the favors of a goddess? Albina is dead, and I, too, want to die. Without her, my life has no meaning.”
“Calm down, Lohan. I gave you the antidote to reward your noble transformation, not to punish you. I do not want you or Isabella or even Amado to suffer for your lost friend.” Mama-Oello sat down with her legs crossed, brought her hands together, interlacing her fingers in a complex way, and with a stentorian voice recited orders destined to pass through the wall of reality: “Ñid la ñid rol mnon par dag! Sbyor sgrol rol pa ñams su blan!” From every pore on her skin poured out a thick fog that consolidated until it took on a human shape. Lohan, Crabby, and Amado saw appear next to Mama-Oello none other than Albina. Yes, their pretty white giantess, with white hair, pink pupils, showy breasts, wide hips, a sensual face, and the marvelous expression of a dumb child! The freshly created woman, timid, sulking, urinating uncontrollably, ran to take refuge in Isabella’s arms.
“I have created a tulkú for you. She has all the traits of a human being except the power to reproduce. Don’t think this is the same Albina you knew before. It’s a new one. Like the other, her memory will not be very clear at first. She does not know how to speak or control her bowels. You will have to teach her everything. You already did it, Isabella, when you were Crabby. You, Lohan, when you were Drumfoot, desired her in a bad way. Now you can show her the sublime quality of your love. And you, Amado, by impregnating your good woman, will share your children with the sterile couple. You will make gold in moderation, and after healing all those men I infected in Iquique, you will travel the world, helping those who deserve it when your heart requests it. Now I can leave. I will take with me a portion of the medicine to make the Himalayan monks into human beings and not castrated dogs. I will have to dictate new sutras to them, correct their mistaken image of their gods, stop the kidnapping of children, and dethrone the Tashi-Lama. Then I shall return. Incas and Quechuas will be the seeds for a new humanity. Perhaps by then you all will have been swallowed by the shadow. Your children or grandchildren will come to see me. After many years, Albina will understand her true nature and accept her own dissolution, the way a mirage dissolves when the sun sets.”
Mama-Oello gave a great leap. Around her the air opened like a mirror shattering. She entered the root of space through that immaterial window and disappeared. Amado took Isabella by the hand, she took Albina by the hand, and Albina took Lohan by the hand. Escorted by a crown of red bees, they began their return journey to Iquique. Crabby pushed Isabella aside for a fleeting moment and exclaimed, “Shit, let’s buy the Spanish Club from the Aragonese guy!”
Alejandro Jodorowsky was born to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants in Tocopilla, Chile, a setting vividly rendered in his novel Where the Bird Sings Best (Restless Books, 2015) and his book and film The Dance of Reality. Internationally renowned as a filmmaker for The Holy Mountain, El Topo, and Santa Sangre and for his starring role in Jodorowsky’s Dune, Jodorowsky’s other work includes comics, plays, books on Psychomagic and Tarot, and the novel The Son of Black Thursday (Restless Books, 2017).
Alfred MacAdam is professor of Latin American literature at Barnard College-Columbia University. He has translated works by Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Carlos Onetti, José Donoso, and Jorge Volpi, among others. He recently published an essay on the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa included in The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography.
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Copyright © 2002, 2016 Alejandro Jodorowsky
Translation copyright © 2016 Alfred MacAdam
Illustrations © 2002 François Boucq, courtesy of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Ediciones Siruela
Originally published as Albina y los hombres-perro,
Ediciones Siruela, 2002
Digital edition published by Restless Books, 2016
Electronic ISBN: 978-1-63206-069-3
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-63206-054-9
Cover design by Rodrigo Corral
Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted without the prior written permission of the publisher
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