He returned to the island on Friday, August 16, on the two o'clock ferry. She was wearing a plaid shirt, jeans, simple low-heeled shoes and no socks, a satin parasol and, as her only luggage, a beach briefcase. In the taxi line at the dock she went straight to an old model eaten away by saltpeter. The driver greeted her with a greeting from an old acquaintance and took her stumbling through the destitute town, with houses made of bahareque and palm roofs, and streets of white sand facing a burning sea. She had to prance to avoid the fearless pigs and the naked children, who mocked her with bullfighter's passes. At the end of the town she headed down an avenue of royal palm trees, where the beaches and tourist hotels were, between the open sea and an inland lagoon populated by blue herons. She finally stopped at the oldest and most unworthy hotel.
The concierge was waiting for her with the keys to the only room on the second floor that overlooked the lagoon. He went up the stairs in four strides and entered the poor room with a strong smell of insecticide and almost completely occupied with the enormous double bed. He took out of his briefcase a kid's toiletry bag and an intense book that he placed on the nightstand with a page marked by the ivory paper knife. He pulled out a pink silk nightgown and put it under the pillow. He took out a silk scarf with equatorial bird prints, a short-sleeved white shirt, and some well-worn tennis shoes, and took them to the bathroom with the toiletry bag.
Before getting ready, she took off her Scottish shirt, her wedding ring, and the man's watch she wore on her right arm, and did quick ablutions on her face to wash off the dust of the trip and chase away the sleepiness of her nap. When she finished drying herself she weighed in her mirror her round and proud breasts despite her two births, and already on the eve of old age. She stretched her cheeks back with the edges of her hands to see herself as she had been when she was young, and she saw her own mask with the Chinese eyes, the flattened nose, the intense lips. She overlooked the first hopeless wrinkles on her neck and showed off her perfect, well-brushed teeth after lunch on the ferry. She rubbed the knob of the deodorant into her freshly shaved armpits and put on the crisp cotton shirt with the initials AMB hand-embroidered on her pocket. She untangled her shoulder-length Indian hair with the brush and tied the bird scarf into a ponytail. To finish, she softened her lips with simple Vaseline lipstick, moistened her index fingers on her tongue to smooth her linear eyebrows, dabbed her bitter perfume behind each ear, and finally faced the mirror with her autumn mother face. Her skin, without a trace of cosmetics, defended itself with its original color, and her topaz eyes were ageless in the dark Portuguese eyelids. She ground herself thoroughly, judged herself mercilessly, and found herself almost as good as she felt. Only when she put on the ring and the watch did she realize how late she was: it was six to five. But she allowed herself a minute of nostalgia to contemplate the herons that hovered motionless in the burning steam of the lagoon. The black clouds on the sea side advised him to take his umbrella.
The taxi was waiting for her under the banana trees at the entrance. She walked down the avenue of palm trees to a clearing by the hotels where there was a popular open-air market, and stopped at a flower stand. A large black woman who was taking a nap in a beach chair woke up with a start, recognized the woman in the back seat of the car and gave her, between laughter and chatter, the bouquet of gladioli that she had ordered for her since the morning. A few blocks later the taxi turned onto a barely passable path that went up a ledge of sharp stones. Through the air thinned by the heat one could see the pleasure yachts lined up in the tourism dock, the ferry leaving, the remote profile of the city in the haze of the horizon, the open Caribbean.
At the top of the hill was the sad cemetery of the poor. He effortlessly pushed the rusty gate, and entered with the bouquet of flowers into the path of mounds swallowed by the undergrowth, with rubble of coffins and remains of bones charred by the sun. The graves looked the same in the deserted cemetery with a ceiba tree with large branches in the center. The sharp stones hurt even through the heated rubber soles, and the harsh sun filtered through the satin of the parasol. An iguana emerged from the bushes, stopped dead in front of her, looked at her for a moment, and stampeded away.
She had finished cleaning three graves, and was exhausted and drenched in sweat when she recognized the yellowish marble tombstone with the mother's name and the date of her death, twenty-nine years earlier. She used to give him the news from her house, she had informed her with confidential information to help her decide if she was getting married, and a few days later she thought she received her response from her in a dream that seemed unequivocal and unequivocal to her. sage. Something similar had happened to him when his son was between life and death for two weeks due to a traffic accident, only the answer did not come to him in dreams, but through a casual conversation with a woman who approached him in the market without any reason. She was not superstitious, but she was rationally certain that her perfect identification with her mother continued after her death. So she asked him the questions of the year, she put the flowers on the grave, and she left convinced that she would receive the answers the day she least expected them.
Mission accomplished: he had repeated that trip for twenty-eight consecutive years every August 16 at the same time, in the same room of the same hotel, with the same taxi and the same florist under the fiery sun of the same indigent cemetery, to place a bouquet of fresh gladioli on his mother's grave. From that moment on she had nothing to do until nine in the morning the next day, when the return ferry left.
Her name was Ana Magdalena Bach, she was fifty-two years old and twenty-three years old after a good marriage with a man who loved her, and whom she married without finishing her studies in literature, still a virgin and without previous courtships. Her father was a music teacher who was still director of the Provincial Conservatory at the age of eighty-two, and her mother had been a famous Montesori primary school teacher who, despite her merits, did not want to be anything. more until her last breath.
Ana Magdalena inherited from her the slenderness of yellow eyes, the virtue of few words and the intelligence to hide the temper of her character. She had expressed her desire to be buried on the island three days before she died. Ana Magdalena wanted to accompany her from her first trip, but no one thought it was wise, because she herself did not believe that she could survive her anguish. On her first anniversary, however, her father took her to the island to put the marble headstone they owed on her grave. He was scared by the journey in a canoe with an outboard motor that took almost four hours without a moment of clear sea. She admired the golden flour beaches at the very edge of the virgin forest, the thunderous commotion of the birds and the ghostly flight of the herons in the backwater of the interior lagoon. But she was depressed by the misery of the village, where they had to sleep outdoors in a hammock hung between two coconut trees, and the number of black fishermen with their arms mutilated by the premature explosion of dynamite blocks. Above all, however, she understood her mother's will as she saw the splendor of the world from the top of the cemetery. It was then that he made it his duty to bring her a bouquet of flowers every year as long as she was alive.
August was the hottest month of the year and the season of heavy downpours, but she understood it as an obligation of her private life that she had to fulfill without fail and always alone. It was the only condition she imposed on her man before they married, and he had the intelligence to admit that it was something beyond her power.
So Ana Magdalena had seen the glass cliffs of the tourist hotels grow year after year, she had gone from Indian canoes to motor boats, and from these to the ferry, and she believed she had reasons to feel like the oldest native. of the village.
That afternoon, when she returned to the hotel, she lay down on the bed wearing nothing but her lace panties and resumed reading the book she had started during the trip. He was Bram Stoker's original Dracula. She was always a good reader. She had read rigorously what she liked most, which were short novels of any genre, such as Lazarillo de Tormes, The Old Man and the Sea, The Stranger. In recent years, on the verge of fifty, she had immersed herself deeply in supernatural novels.
She had been fascinated by Dracula from the beginning, but that afternoon she succumbed to the continuous thunder of the fan hanging from the ceiling, and fell asleep with the book on her chest. She woke up two hours later in the darkness, sweating profusely, in a bad mood and deaf with hunger.
It was no exception in his routine for years. The hotel bar was open until ten at night, and several times he had gone down to eat something before going to sleep. He noticed that there were more customers than usual at that hour, and the waiter did not seem the same as before. He ordered, not to be mistaken, a ham and cheese sandwich with toasted bread, and coffee with milk. As they took him away she realized that she was surrounded by the same older clients from when the hotel was the only one, or with limited resources, like her. A mulatto girl sang fashionable boleros, and Agustín Romero himself, now old and blind, accompanied her well and with love on the same baby grand piano at her inaugural party.
She finished quickly, overwhelmed by the humiliation of eating alone, but she felt good about the music, which was soft and tender, and the girl could sing. When she came to, there were only three couples left at scattered tables, and right in front of her, a different man she had not seen enter. He dressed in white linen, like in her father's time, with metallic hair and a pointed musketeer's mustache. He had a bottle of brandy and a half-filled glass on the table, and he seemed to be alone in the world.
The piano began Debussy's Clair de luna in a good arrangement for bolero, and the mulatto girl sang it with love. Moved, Ana Magdalena ordered a gin with ice and soda, the only alcohol she allowed herself from time to time, and she coped well. She had learned to enjoy it alone with her husband, a cheerful social drinker who treated her with the courtesy and complicity of a secret lover.
The world changed from the first sip. She felt good, mischievous, happy, capable of anything, and embellished by the sacred mixture of music and alcohol. She thought the man at the table across from her hadn't looked at her, but when she looked at him a second time after the first sip of gin, she caught him looking at her. He blushed. She, on the other hand, held his gaze while he looked at the fob watch, put it away impatiently, looked towards the door, poured another glass, dazed, because he was already aware that she was looking at him mercilessly. He then looked straight at her. She smiled at him without reservation, and he greeted her with a slight nod. Then she got up, went to her table and attacked him with a man's thrust.
–Can I buy you a drink?
The man cracked.
"It would be an honor," he said.
"It would be enough for me if it were a pleasure," she said.
She had not finished when she was already sitting at the table, and she poured a drink into his glass, and another for herself. She did it with such skill, and such good style, that he failed to take the bottle from her to prevent her from helping herself. Cheers, she said. He got into the mood, and they both downed the glass in one go. He choked, coughed with shocks all over his body and was bathed in tears. He took out the spotless handkerchief with a mist of lavender water, and looked at her through her tears. They both remained silent for a long time until he wiped himself with his handkerchief and regained her voice. She dared to ask a question:
–Are you sure no one will come?
"No," he said without any logic. It was a business matter, but it won't happen anymore.
She asked with an expression of calculated disbelief: Business? He answered her like a man so that she wouldn't believe him: I'm not here for anything anymore. And she, with a vulgarity that was not hers, but well calculated, finished it off:
–It will be at your house.
He continued to herd it with his fine touch. She played at guessing his age, and was wrong by one year too many: forty-six. He tried to find out his country of origin by accent, but he didn't get it right in three attempts. She tried to guess her profession, but he was quick to tell her that he was a civil engineer, and she suspected it was a ruse to keep him from getting to the truth.
They talked about the audacity of turning a sacred piece by Debussy into a bolero, but he had not realized it. Without a doubt, he realized that she knew about music and he had not gone beyond the blue Danube. She told him that she was reading Dracula. He had only read it as a child in a children's version, and he was still impressed with the idea of the count landing in London transformed into a dog. On her second sip she felt that the brandy had met the gin somewhere in her heart, and she had to concentrate to keep from losing her mind. The music ended at eleven, and they were just waiting for them to leave to close.
At that time she already knew him as if she had lived with him forever. She knew that he was neat, impeccable in dress, with mute hands aggravated by the natural polish on his nails. He realized that he was inhibited by the big yellow eyes that she did not take away from his, and that he was a good and cowardly man. She felt she had enough control to take the step that had not even occurred to her in her dreams in her entire life, and she took it without mysteries:
-We climb?
He said with ambiguous humility:
–I don't live here.
But she didn't even wait for him to finish saying it. She stood up, barely shook her head to control the alcohol, and her radiant eyes shone.
–I'll go up first while you pay, he told him. Second floor, number 203, to the right of the stairs. Don't touch, just push.
She went up to the room dragged by a sweet restlessness that she had not felt since her last night as a virgin. She turned on the ceiling fan, but not the light; She undressed in the dark without stopping, and she left the trail of clothes on the floor from the door to the bathroom. When she turned on the dresser lamp she had to close her eyes and take a deep breath with an effort to regulate her breathing and control the trembling of her hands. She washed herself hastily: her sex, her armpits, her toes macerated by the rubber of her shoes, because, despite the terrible sweats of the afternoon, she had not thought to bathe until bedtime. Without time to brush her teeth, she put a pinch of toothpaste on her tongue and returned to the room, barely illuminated by the oblique light of the dressing table.
He did not wait for his guest to push the door, but opened it from the inside when he felt him arrive. He was scared: Oh, my mother! But she didn't give him any more time in the dark. She took off his jacket with energetic paws, took off his tie, his shirt, and threw everything on the floor over her shoulder. As she did so, the air was filled with a strong smell of lavender water. He tried to help her at first, but she stopped him with her boldness and her authority. When she had him naked to her waist, she sat him on the bed and knelt to take off his shoes and stockings. At the same time he undid the buckle of her belt so that all she had to do was pull his pants off, without either of them worrying about the trail of keys and the handful of bills and coins that fell into the pocket. floor. Finally, she helped him pull his boxers down her legs, and she realized that he was not as well served as her husband, that he was the only one she knew, but he was serene and uplifted.
He left him no initiative. She fell upon him to the core of her soul and devoured him for herself and without thinking about him, until they were both exhausted in a broth of sweat. She remained on top of her, fighting alone against the first doubts of her consciousness under the hot jet and the suffocating noise of the fan, until she realized that he was not breathing well, open in a cross under the weight of the body of her. She then dismounted and lay face up next to her. He remained motionless until she could ask with her first breath:
-Because I?
"He seemed very manly to me," she said.
"Coming from a woman like you," he said, "it's an honor."
"Ah," she joked. Wasn't it a pleasure?
He did not answer and they both lay listening to the noises of the night. The room was calming in the darkness of the lagoon. There was a fluttering sound nearby.
He asked: What is that? She told him about the habits of the herons at night. After a long hour of banal whispers, she began to explore with her fingers, very slowly, from his chest to his lower abdomen.
She then explored him by feeling her feet along his legs, and found that all of him was covered with a soft, curly hair that reminded her of grass in April. She then began to provoke him with tender kisses on his ears and neck, and they kissed for the first time on his lips.
Then he revealed himself to her as an exquisite lover who slowly raised her to the highest degree of boiling. She was surprised that such primal hands were capable of such tenderness. But when he tried to induce her into the conventional missionary mode, she resisted, fearful that she would ruin her first-time prodigy. However, he imposed himself firmly on her, handled her to her liking and her way, and made her happy.
It had struck two when she was awakened by a clap of thunder that shook the abutments of the house, and the wind forced the latch of the window. She hurried to close it, and in the instantaneous noon of another lightning bolt she saw the stormy lagoon, and through the rain she saw the immense moon on the horizon and the blue herons flapping airlessly in the storm.
On the way back to the bed, his feet got tangled in both of their clothes. She left hers on the floor to pick it up later, and hung his jacket on the chair, hung his shirt and tie on top of it, folded his pants carefully so as not to wrinkle the line, and placed the keys, the knife, and the knife on top of it. money that had fallen out of his pockets. The air in the room was cooled by the storm, so she put on the pink nightgown of such pure silk that it made her skin crawl. The man, asleep on his side and with his legs drawn up, seemed to him like an enormous orphan, and he could not resist a rush of compassion. He lay down behind him, hugged him around the waist, and the ammoniacal vapor from his sweat-soaked body reached his soul. He let out a harsh wheeze and began to snore. She barely fell asleep, and woke up in the emptiness of the electric fan when the light went out and the room was left in the green phosphorescence of the lagoon. He then snored with a continuous whistle. She started typing on her back with her fingertips out of simple prank. He stopped snoring with an abrupt start and her exhausted animality began to revive. She left him for a moment and yanked off her nightshirt. But when she returned to him, her tricks were useless, because she realized that she was pretending to be asleep so as not to risk it a third time. So he moved away from her to the other side of the bed, she put her shirt back on and fell sound asleep with her back to the world.
Her natural schedule woke her up at dawn. She lay rambling for a moment with her eyes closed, not daring to admit the throb of pain in her temples or the bad taste of copper in her mouth, out of anxiety that something unknown awaited her in real life. From the noise of the fan she realized that the light had returned and the bedroom was already visible through the dawn of the lagoon.
Suddenly, like the ray of death, she was struck by the brutal awareness that she had fornicated and slept for the first time in her life with a man who was not hers. She turned to look at him scared over her shoulder, and she was gone. She wasn't in the bathroom either. She turned on the general lights and saw that his clothes were gone, and instead hers, which she had thrown on the floor, were folded and placed almost lovingly on the chair. Until then she had not realized that she knew nothing about him, not even her name, and the only thing that remained of her crazy night was a faint smell of lavender in the air purified by the storm. . Only when she took the book from the nightstand to put it in her briefcase did she realize that he had left a twenty dollar bill between her pages of horror.
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(c) Gabriel García Márquez, 1999 / Heirs of Gabriel García Márquez 2014
