The Dark Bride

twenty-one

Hired by the mayor, the gynecologist Antonio María Flórez had arrived in town with his wife, Albita Lucía, and their four children almost a year after the fiery riot that had reduced the clinic to rubble. When he saw the disastrous state of the facilities that were supposed to serve as his offices, instead of wasting time seeking official assistance or submitting bureaucratic claims, he set about the task of reconstructing the place brick by brick with his own hands to expedite his plans. He had decided to eliminate the coercive mechanism of the health card — which had already been abolished de facto by the riled-up women — and offer instead free, voluntary medical attention for the prostitutas. He had come to Tora to replace the previous charlatans in white lab coats, driven out of town by a ferocious collective vengeance, which one day took the form of a cruel joke and the following day became a threat or a serious hint, poisoning each minute of their lives until they were run off.

When he first arrived, Dr. Antonio María was the object of similar treatment. The girls, convinced that he too had come to make a fortune building up his business of disrespect and extortion, welcomed him the very first night by fouling the door to his house with the fetid corpse of a hanged cat, but that didn’t frighten him off, nor did the campaign of vicious rumors that spread through the pueblo, saying he was a faggot, a squealer, an atheist, and a pimp. They circulated odious lies, that his feet stank, that he used to beat his mother mercilessly, and that he was so miserly that his children were on the verge of starvation. But Dr. Antonio María, a good man who was unscathed by the slander, continued diligently with his modest work as an amateur carpenter and lent a deaf ear to all the foolish babble. He was so tidy in appearance and in character that no one seriously believed the rumors about his reeking feet; since he turned out to be an orphan, the one about hitting his mother was spoiled; he admitted his atheism with such pride that no one dared to reproach him for it; the generous aromas that emanated from his wife’s kitchen when she cooked made people doubt the deprivation of his children; and so forth. One after another the false accusations were eroded away without his even having to deny them.

But the anger of the women of La Catunga, goaded by the fresh memory of the disgrace they had suffered, refused to give up the sweetness of their revenge. The doctor had finished the basic construction stage and was beginning to install the windows in his clinic. One morning señora Albita Lucía was on her way to the main plaza, when from a high window the dirty contents of a chamber pot were emptied on her head. The affront was excessive even for the hardened patience of Dr. Antonio María, who would surely not have thought twice about it if it had fallen on him. But it was as if someone had punched him, this attack against the curly red hair of his wife, an abundantly freckled and vivacious woman with white, perfumed skin whom he adored as the sun of his days. So he made the instant, irrevocable decision to leave within twenty-four hours the town that had greeted them with such hostility.

They were going to leave on the noon train the following day. The doctor spent a night traumatized by the remaining bitterness of the undertaking that he would be abandoning before he even began it, and in the morning, while his family finished packing their recently unpacked trunks, he went to stand in the frame where the door to his clinic would have been installed, wearing his doctor’s coat and with his stethoscope around his neck.

“Spread the word that at eleven-thirty I will hold my first and last consultations,” he said to some passersby, and he didn’t have to wait more than a quarter of an hour for patients to begin to appear.

It was then that Antonio María Flórez saw what would make him decide not to leave and would cause him to stay in Tora for the next ten consecutive years, until he became almost on a par with Santa Catalina, a saintly benefactor of the barrio of La Catunga: some unmistakable red pustules soaked in infectious pus and a few small, soft tumors, with gummy elasticity, on the thighs of three of the five women he examined.

“It is treponema pallidum,” he declared. “This town is going to be consumed by syphilis.”

The weight of that diagnosis reduced the seriousness of the incident with the chamber pot and the other injuries in the doctor’s eyes, and it caused him to reflect on the fact that after all it is enough to speak words of forgiveness for it to be granted.

“I forgive you all,” he said loudly, and raised his arms to the sky as he hurried to his house along streets that the fierce midday sun had left without a single soul.

He convinced his wife of the need to unpack once again, he enrolled his children in the only lay school in the pueblo, and from then on he dedicated all of his time to helping and consoling the women infected with the illness, advising the healthy ones on how to avoid infection and combating venereal disease with the tenacity of a fanatic, like that which Savonarola would have launched against the carnal splendor of the Renaissance.

Soon he realized that the elimination of pressure and blackmail had resulted in the surprising consequence that more than half of the women refused to visit the gynecologist’s office.

“Why, Doctor,” I asked Antonio Maria Flórez, when I had the opportunity to meet him. “How do you explain the fact that so many wouldn’t come?”

“The majority out of fatalism, because they were convinced that no one dies before his time. They believed in those kinds of things, in deep-rooted, commonly held tenets, like fate is up to God, or when it’s someone’s turn it’s his turn. I arrived in Tora when the prostitutas were still queens and señoras of position, but that didn’t mean that deep down they didn’t have a strong awareness of living in sin. And since they took for granted that sin implies punishment, they saw venereal infection as a debt they didn’t have to get rid of, because in some way it was deserved. They dealt with the subject of infection like Russian roulette: They went to bed with this man or that one like someone who puts a revolver to his temple, and they pulled the trigger to see if they were spared or got a bullet. They couldn’t grasp the idea that God could forgive them. Once I heard Fandango say, when she found out that her best friend had contracted syphilis, that now it was time to pay for a whole life of being in disharmony with heaven.”

“It’s curious, Doctor, that women so easygoing about sex would be so panicked by a gynecologist,” I say to him.

“I find it fairly logical. To begin with, there is no one more full of mystery than a prostituta, and her state of health is one of the secrets she hides with greatest care because her livelihood depends on others believing that she’s healthy. But there’s something else that I don’t know how to classify, and which constitutes the main obstacle: The gynecologist has to do with her thinking about what she is doing, treating it rationally, and they can’t bear that. They work in prostitution as blindly as a man condemned to the firing squad who prefers to be blindfolded before he’s shot. Also, to practice it they make use of faculties that are beyond reason, as I suppose happens with witchcraft. It is something that happens to them down there, under their skirts, under the sheets, always far from their faces. The further from their faces and their brains, the better. Many of them hate being kissed, especially on the mouth or the breasts, while from the waist down they give the client license to act more or less as he pleases. When they fall in love with a man, they incorporate their whole beings into the sexual act, but generally they behave like split beings: From the waist up is the soul and from the waist down, business. You must understand that as a gynecologist, you are the eye that sees, the one who uncovers what is hidden, warns of the risks, removes the blindfold with regard to sicknesses. That’s why at first so many stayed away from me, because whether or not they wanted to, I forced them to integrate the two halves of their bodies through a process of reflection and acknowledgment that I’ve always felt was very painful for them. But it’s normal; you can be a bullfighter or a fire-eater if you accept death as fate, but as soon as you put prudence and common sense in the mix, you flee in terror. The same thing happens with them. I think that’s why for months my presence was much more uncomfortable for so many of them than that of the previous doctors, who simply swindled them, that is, they made a pact of blind complicity with the women. So great was their need to deceive themselves that they took pleasure in deceiving me, and for that sometimes it was enough for them to resort, a half hour before their appointment, to the old trick of bathing themselves by sitting on a washbasin, with warm water, lava soap, bicarbonate of soda, and a lot of lemon. With this procedure they cleaned the secretions and eliminated the odor, so that I would find everything in order and go on to the next. Why would they go to the trouble of deceiving me? You tell me, if the era of obligatory consultations and cards was over. I think they did it simply to avoid facing the truth. The women of La Catunga treated me very cordially, very affectionately, but they became nervous when they lay down on the examining table in my office. Petroleum had to grow scarce in the area and prostitution had to decline as a business before they would seek me out without apprehension, truly driven to heal themselves, to remove their bodies from the orbit of sickness, and to enroll it, so to speak, into the desired realm of health.”

Dr. Antonio María was convinced that this peculiar mental universe of the prostitutas of Tora was directly rooted in their Christian upbringing, because as he told me, among the Pipatón Indians a different attitude could be perceived. They sold their bodies to eat and to feed their children and that seemed to be sufficient justification for them, without getting so many knots in their heads.

“The pipatonas were my most assiduous patients,” he tells me, “taking into consideration, as far as I knew, that they were also seeing their own medicine men, relying on both my drugs and their traditional cures. What is certain is that among them the illness struck with much less virulence than among the rest.”

They had a clear and unfettered view of a profession that they entered and left according to their needs, and they didn’t make a great distinction between the man who paid them to possess them and the one who, outside of prostitution, possessed them without paying. They needed to survive and that was that. Good, for them, was to stay alive; and bad, to die; they didn’t have a sexual ethic any more complicated than that, or, more precisely, they didn’t adhere so much to an ethic as to a sort of biological determinism, according to which woman was woman, prostituta or not, and man was man, no matter who he was. It amused me to learn that for the Pipatón women the male body was comprised of head, arms, legs, trunk, and little trunk, and the female, of head, arms, legs, trunk, and for-the-little-trunk.

Dr. Antonio María, who wasn’t about to sit around waiting for a frenzy of cankers and eruptions to sprout up around him, took on the task of visiting house to house to pull the negligent and stubborn out of hiding. Among these latter was Sayonara, who on the day of the uprising, while doing everything possible to make the flames lick the mustaches of the impostors, had sworn on the holy cross of Christ that she would never again let a doctor, fake or documented, put his hands on her, even if tuberculosis had her spitting blood or leprosy reduced her to stumps. So, when she happened to see through the partially open window that Dr. Antonio María was knocking on her door in the mourning tie he wore every day in honor of the marshal Antonio José de Sucre, murdered more than a century earlier, with his leather bag filled with implements, medicinal herbs, and bottles, and with his face shaded by the wide hat he wore to protect himself from the sun, she slipped out through the patio, and if she didn’t jump onto the roof to fly away, it was only because Todos los Santos’s hand managed to grab her by the ankle and hold on to her tenaciously.

“Come down from there, girl, it’s for your own good.”

“I’m not coming down and I’m not letting that man touch me.”

“Bring me a rope!” ordered Todos los Santos. “This savage is going to let herself be examined if I have to tie her to the bed!”

“I tell you that I don’t want to go near that man, madrina, because he has evil intentions. Don’t you see the shamelessness in his smile?”

When I met Antonio María Flórez, I thought Sayonara hadn’t been wrong to suspect his smile: It was true that in the middle of that austere face and neat profile were a set of rabbit’s teeth more appropriate for a magician or a tango singer than for a gynecologist.

“You are wrong,” insisted Todos los Santos to her adopted daughter, still holding her by the ankle. “His big-toothed smile makes him human. If it weren’t for that he would be as dry and tight as a cigarette.”

When the unruly Sayonara finally stood face to face with the doctor and was able to confirm for herself that his circumspect bearing, his professional demeanor, and the affable gray slate of his eyes counterbalanced the playful air of his outsized teeth, she changed her mind about defying him and agreed to lie down without underclothes and with her legs open and bent. But the doctor had barely brushed her thigh with his hand before he felt her jump, her nerves on edge, tensed to the point of bursting like the strings of a guitar. He tried to chat with her to relax her, to make her think about something else so she would lower her guard and allow him to examine her, but the girl was trembling from head to toe, electric and wild like a filly.

“We can’t do it like this,” the doctor said.

“Then let’s not do it,” she replied, standing up and covering her legs with her skirt.

“Come here,” said Dr. Antonio María, who had understood that the exam couldn’t be conducted during this first visit, and he changed tactics to calm her. She approached him and he put one end of his stethoscope in her ears as he placed the other on the left side of her chest.

“What is that echo?” asked Sayonara, pulling out the stethoscope and taking a step backward.

“The beating of your heart.”

Then she drew near again, let the doctor replace the earpieces, and stood there, self-absorbed and perplexed, for a long time, glimpsing the pulse of life that came and went, recurrent and obstinate, through secret arroyos, flowing through the soft labyrinth of purple walls and resonating vigorously in her internal cavities.

“The beating of my heart!” she sighed, and from that moment on she would never forget Dr. Antonio María, the first person in the world to invite her to hear the deep rhythm of her own soul.

A week hadn’t gone by when the doctor, about to leave his office after a long day of work, found Sayonara perched on the front steps of the clinic, waiting for him.

“You, here?” he asked, happy that she had finally decided to allow him to examine her.

“I’m not here for that, Doctor, I’ve come to see if you would let me listen with that thing again…”

They went inside; without anyone telling her, she lay down on the examination table and the doctor placed the stethoscope on her heart. Again she was awed, listening to how the tumult of her insides seemed to come from the very depths of the universe.

“Tell me, Doc,” she said after a while, looking at him with a heart-melting seriousness and innocence. “Tell me, Doc, does one have two hearts?”

“No, only one, here in your chest. Give me your hand and listen to mine,” he said, putting her hand on his own chest. “Tock, tock, tock… it beats like a clock, just like yours.”

“Then you recognize your heart because it beats, right?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“And does it beat more when you fall in love?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“But are you sure, Doc, that a person only has one heart?”

“Why do you ask me?”

“Well, because the other day I met a man from Campo 26, they call him Payanés, and I felt like I had two hearts inside my body, one in my chest, just like yours, and another here, down below,” and the girl took the doctor’s hand and placed it on her groin. “Do you feel how it beats? This is my other heart.”