Fernando Aramburu On 'The daughter of the Spanish woman'
I came to Mezquite looking for Visitación Salazar, the woman who buried my children and taught me to bury those of others.
I walked to the end of the world, or where I thought mine had ended.
I found her one morning in May next to a tower of niches
.
She was wearing red leggings, work boots, and a colorful scarf tied around her head.
A crown of wasps fluttered around him.
She had the appearance of a dark-haired Virgin lost in a garbage dump. In that parched lot, Visitación Salazar was
the only thing alive.
His dark-lipped mouth hid square white teeth.
She was a beautiful black woman, well disposed and plump.
From his arms, thick from so many gravestones, they hung
leather bags
to which the sun shone.
Instead of flesh and blood, it seemed made of oil and jet.
The sand smudged the light
and the wind pierced the ears;
a groan that came from the open cracks on the ground we stepped on.
More than a breeze, that air was a warning, a dense dustbin and alien like madness or pain.
This was the end of the world: that pile of dust made from the bones that we left on the road. At the entrance hung a sign painted with brush strokes: THE THIRD COUNTRY, a lawless cemetery where the dead that Visitación Salazar went to he buried in exchange for his will, and sometimes not even that.
Almost all those who rested there were born and died on the same date.
Their poor graves were inscribed with
scrawl
on fresh concrete: the rugged handwriting of those who will never rest in peace. Visitation didn't even turn to look at us.
Was talking on the phone
.
With his left hand he held the apparatus;
with the other, some plastic flowers that he sank into the freshly beaten mortar. "Yes, my queen, I can hear you!" Angustias, are you sure this woman will receive us?
Salveiro asked. I nodded. "I hear you, Mommy!
she continued, her way.
I tell you that there is a lack of vaults!
Ayyyyy!
The signal is losteeee ...!
he insisted, tragicomic. "This woman doesn't stop talking ..." he grumbled. "Shut up, Salveiro!"
Tell that man to wait!
cried the woman, heading, at last, toward us.
The dead are patient!
The dead are in no hurry! ”Another gust of wind scorched our skin.
The land of Mezquite was a pot covered with thistles and weeping, a place where it was not necessary to kneel to do penance.
The one that had brought us there
That was enough, this was El Tercer País, a border within another where the
eastern and western sierra
, good and evil, legend and reality, the living and the dead.
The plague and the rain came together
, like bad omens.
The cicadas stopped singing and a tumor of dust formed in the sky until it discharged drops of brown water.
Unlike the ills we once suffered, it shattered our memories and desires. The plague attacked the memory, confusing it first and pecking at it later.
It was contagious at high speed
and the older the patient was, the worse the effect.
The old men fell like flies.
Their bodies could not resist the drill of the first fevers.
At first they said that it was transmitted by water, then by birds, but no one was able to explain anything about the
forgetfulness epidemic
that transformed everyone into ghosts and filled the sky with zamuros.
It made us inept until we were covered with fear and oblivion.
We walked aimlessly, lost in a world of ice and fever. Men went out to the street to wait.
What?
I never knew.
We women did things to scare away despair: we gathered food, opened and closed windows,
we climbed onto rooftops and swept courtyards.
We stopped pushing and shouting like crazy to whom no one offered even water.
Life focused on us, on what until then we were able to retain or expel. My husband also contracted the disease, but it took me a while to realize it.
His character was confused with the first symptoms.
Salveiro spoke little, was reserved and was not curious.
beyond their own affairs.
When I first met him, he was working in his family's rubber factory, loosening nuts with a cross wrench or laying next to a hydraulic jack to fix some damage to the guts of a beat-up truck.
Every day I passed in front of the blackened premises
without paying attention to what was happening inside.
If I went in it was because I needed motor grease to loosen the locks on the house: a Three-in-One can, anything that served to lubricate the door knockers, but Salveiro offered to look at them.
They are not the bolts.
It is wood.
It's eaten by termites, that's why the doors don't close, see?
"He showed me a dust of shavings and sawdust. He returned that same week to check the roof and the rest of the house."
Went through it all
.
What if this beam has midge, if the table legs were badly cut or this chair was badly sawed.
He was going from one place to another with a shoe.
I sanded here and hammered there.
Everything he touched stopped creaking or grinding, as if he put things back together just by looking at them. "Angustias, and who is this?" "The rubber tapper's son, dad.
He's come to fix the sleepers and window frames, and after each visit we'd buy him a beer to thank for the inconvenience.
He would take a seat under the tamarind bush and allow himself to be questioned. "Why don't you give up mechanics and dedicate yourself to this?"
He is very good at
my father insisted, but Salveiro drank without answering.
Angustias did a technical degree in hairdressing.
Try one;
After receiving a carpenter's diploma, he would be able to run his own cabinetmaking workshop.-I just opened a
beauty salon
I interrupted to make myself notice.
It is two blocks away. Do you want to come and cut yourself and so I tell you the requirements to enroll in the courses? He appeared the next morning.
He was dressed in clean pants and a freshly pressed shirt.
Her lustrous, well-scented skin was a far cry from those always grimy arms of
oil and grease
.
After scrubbing his hair with shampoo and cream, I led him to the chair, covered his shoulders with a cape, and cut with my best scissors.
The locks fell damp to the ground. Salveiro did not
carpenter course
, but he kept coming home three times a week to bring this or repair that.-Angustias, daughter,
that man looks like a log
"But if you like it ..." my father whispered in my ear before smiling for the only photo we took, at the gates of the court where we got married. My husband was a good man.
Was
gifted for the frolic.
He knew how to graze me with the same patience with which he sawed wood.
He didn't speak, but I didn't care.
And that was the problem: I could not imagine that their silences had something to do with the indolence that was already roaming the streets, a cloud of boredom that completely buried the city. My mother baptized me Angustias.
More than a name
chose a claw.
For her, the world had always passed in silence.
So when someone calls me, "Angustias!" I think of her destiny as a voiceless woman.
I resemble his deafness and anxiety.
I know how to endure.
I am prepared for misfortune.
I speak their language until they were born
Higinio and Salustio
I hadn't considered leaving the city, but things went wrong.
The children had arrived in the world seven months and with a sick heart.
Together they did not complete two kilos on the hospital scale.
His small, wrinkled hands were barely shaking.
They had purple fingernails and tight eyes.
Life had borrowed them on the way to death. For three months I waited in front of an incubator,
fearing the worst.
Although no one guaranteed that their hearts would resist, the doctors decided to operate on them.
They survived, while the city continued to crumble under the earthy rain that covered the sidewalks.
I didn't want my children to grow up in that ghost valley from which everyone was leaving. ”“ Let's go! ”Salveiro looked at me, bitten by the snake of discouragement, and continued to rummage through
pieces of a blender
"I want to go," I insisted. "Do you think it's that easy?"
He put down the screwdriver.
Preparing a trip takes time.-You can stay if you want.
I'm leaving. We sold the furniture, the bedding and the tools, also the mirrors, chairs, and hairdryers.
I only kept a small hair clipper, which I kept in my pocket and still have today.
The money gave us for part of the passage.
We left the capital with the children tied on our backs and embarked on a journey of more than
eight hundred kilometers, half by bus and the other on foot
.
We reached our destination after crossing eight states in the eastern highlands, in addition to the three that separated us from Mezquite, a border town named after a bush that is used to make charcoal.
some coins, three tangerines and a backpack with a change of clothes
, two bottles and the envelopes of evaporated milk that we prepared in a stream.
On the Interstate, a highway that crossed the central mountain range, the column of walkers advanced.
That's what they called those of us who escaped from the plague. We settled down as best we could and any gully would do for us to wash and cook.
Before resuming the march, I held my hair so as not to disturb the children with the rubbing of the strands.
M
and I promised not to cut it until we reached our destination
, wherever it was.
Salveiro walked behind me, slapping the mosquitoes away and picking up pieces of wood that he kept in his pockets.
With each passing day I felt like I was leaving him a little further behind.
I was convinced that if I turned around, I would see him collapsed on the road like a tree eaten by termites.
Many nights I imagined waking up alone, in the middle of nowhere, with
two children in tow
.
She dreamed that she was walking on all fours, turned into a lioness capable of deciphering in the wind the place where gazelles are fleeing. The tents erected by the military on the border could be seen from far away.
The tumult of people who came looking for food and medicine could be seen even a kilometer away
.
Those who had money managed to get out by bus, the rest did so on foot and carrying what little they could carry.
Refrigerators, lamps and pots that someone else collected to exchange for food were left on the roads.When we reached the first checkpoint before the bridge, a soldier stopped us to inspect the documents.
He was young and thin, and he wore
his head badly shaved, covered by shears
left by those who do not know how to use the machine.-Where are they going?
-He went first to Salveiro.-To the eastern sierra ... -My husband seemed more absent than usual.-
We are in the eastern sierra
Citizen. ”“ You mean Westerner, ”I interrupted.
We have family there.
We're going to meet our children. '' The corporal looked at me disbelievingly.
I gave him my ID and Salveiro his.
I also showed the birth certificates, but he barely read them.
All his attention was focused on the twins
.
He looked at them curiously.
First to Salustio, who was in my husband's arms, and then to Higinio, who was sleeping with his head on my shoulder. He was interested in their ages.
I explained that they were born early and that is why they seemed smaller.
He nodded and went through the papers one last time.
His wife had just given birth to a girl
, also premature, she explained while writing down our names in a notebook. "What's her name?"
-I asked. -Who? -Your daughter ...- She still has no name. She entered the sentry box and came back with a pass to cross the border. -Go with God.
-And he handed us the paper. So Salveiro, the children and I walked away.
God never decided to accompany us.
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