“He was not to do anything in bad taste, the woman of the inn warned old Eguchi. He was not to put his finger into the mouth of the sleeping girl, or try anything else of that sort.”
Yasunari Kawabata,
House of the Sleeping Beauties1
For my ninetieth birthday I wanted to give myself a present: a night of mad love with an adolescent virgin. I remembered Rosa Cabarcas, the mistress of a house of ill repute, who would advise her best clients when she had anything new available. I never succumbed to that offer, nor to any of her many obscene temptations, but she never believed my motives were pure.
“Even morals are just a matter of time,” she’d say with a malignant smile. “You’ll see.”
She was somewhat younger than I, but I hadn’t heard from her in many years and for all I knew she could be dead. But after the first ring I recognized her voice on the telephone, and I put it to her right away: “Today I’m ready.”
“
Ay, my sad old man,” she sighed. “You disappear for twenty years and only return to ask for the impossible.” She quickly regained her form and offered me half a dozen delectable options, but yes, she admitted, they were all used. No, I insisted, it had to be a maiden, and it had to be for that same night.
“What are you trying to pull here?” she asked me with alarm.
“Nothing,” I replied, wounded where it hurt me the most. “I know very well what I can and can’t do.”
“Wise old men may know it all, but they don’t know everything,” she told me impassively. “The only Virgos left in the world are you who were born in August. Why didn’t you give me a little more time on this?”
“The inspiration didn’t hit me until now,” I told her.
“Well, just wait,” she said, always more pedantic than any man, and she asked me for two days to scope out the market. I replied, seriously, that in a negotiation like this one, at my age, each hour is like a year.
“In that case, it can’t be done,” she said with certainty. “No matter, though — that will just make it a more exciting challenge. What the hell, I’ll call you back in an hour.”
I don’t have to tell you, because you could see it yourself from miles away: I am ugly and timid, an anachronism. But by virtue of not wanting to become that way, I’d come to pretend I was just the opposite — until today, when I have resolved of my own free will to tell it like it is, even if it’s just to alleviate my conscience. I begin with that unusual call to Rosa Cabarcas, because in retrospect that was the beginning of a new life at an age when most mortals are already dead.
I live in a colonial house on the promenade of the Parque de San Nicolás, where I have passed all the days of my life with neither wife nor fortune, where my parents lived and died, and where I intend to die alone in the same bed where I was born, on a day I’d like to be as far-off and painless as possible. My father bought the house at a public auction at the end of the nineteenth century, rented out the ground floor to a consortium of Italians who ran stores there selling luxury items, and reserved this second floor for himself and one of the Italians’ daughters, Florina de Dios Cargamantos, a noted performer of Mozart, a polyglot, a Garibaldist, and the most beautiful and talented woman in the city: my mother.
The house is bright and spacious, with arches of stucco and floors checkered with Florentine mosaics, and four glass doors that open onto a balcony running the length of the house, where my mother sat out at night in March and sang arias of love with her Italian cousins. From there you can see the Parque de San Nicolás with the cathedral and the statue of Christopher Columbus, and farther in the distance the warehouses on the wharves along the river, and the vast horizon of the great Magdalena River twenty leagues from its mouth. The only disadvantage of the house is that as the day passes, the sun is always passing through a different window, so you have to close them all if you want to try to sleep through the siesta in total shade. When I was left alone in the house at the age of thirty-two, I moved into my parents’ bedroom, opened up a passageway into the library, and began auctioning off everything I didn’t need, which ended up being everything except the books and the player piano.
For forty years I served as the telegraph inflator for the
La Paz Daily, a job which consisted of reconstructing and completing in indigenous language the news of the world that we picked up from the air via shortwave radio or in Morse code. Today I survive fairly well off of my pension from that extinct position; I earn somewhat less from my job as a teacher of Spanish and Latin grammar, almost nothing from the Sunday column I have written uninterrupted for more than half a century, and absolutely nothing at all from the music and theater columns that they publish for me as a favor on the many occasions when a notable performer comes to town. I have never done anything other than write, but I have no particular calling or virtues as a narrator, I completely ignore the laws of dramatic composition, and if I have embarked in this enterprise it is only because I confide in the guiding light of everything I have read. In plain Spanish, I am a genealogical dead end without particular merit or brilliance, who would have nothing to leave to his survivors were it not for the memories of my great love which I’m preparing to relate as best I can.
On the day of my ninetieth birthday I had woken up, as always, at five o’clock in the morning. It being Friday, my only obligation was to write the signed column that they publish every Sunday in the
La Paz Daily. The side effects of waking up had been the perfect thing to put me in a bad mood: my bones had begun aching at dawn, my ass hurt, and there were thunderous storms after three months of drought. I bathed while the coffee brewed, I drank a huge mug of it sweetened with honey and accompanied with two cassava-flour pancakes, and I put on my linen overalls.
The theme of that day’s column was, of course, my ninetieth birthday. I have always thought of age as a leak in the roof that indicates the amount of life that you have left. Ever since I was very young I heard it said that when a person dies, the lice that live on his scalp escape in terror, running across the pillow to avoid bringing shame to his family. This made such an impression on me that I allowed them to shave my head practically bald before I went to school, and I wash the few scant wisps I have left with something called Grateful Dog Soap. Which means, I would say now, that as a small child my sense of social modesty was better formed than my sense of death.
Months before, I had predetermined that my birthday column would not be a common lament for days gone by, but rather the opposite: a glorification of old age. I began by asking myself when I became conscious of being old, and I believe it was only very shortly before that day. At forty-two, I had gone to see the doctor about a backache that made it hard to breathe. He said it was nothing major, just a natural pain for a man of my age.
“In that case,” I told him, “what’s unnatural is my age.”
The doctor flashed me a smile of pity. “I see that you’re a philosopher,” he said.
It was the first time that I thought of my age in terms of “getting old,” but I soon forgot about it. I became accustomed to waking up every day with a distinct pain that changed location and form as the years passed. Sometimes it felt like death clawing at me, and the very next day it would fade away. Around that time I heard that the first sign of old age is that you begin to look like your father. I must be condemned to eternal youth, I thought at the time, because my equine profile couldn’t possibly look anything like the crude Caribbean my father had been, nor like my mother the imperial Roman. The truth is that the first changes are so small you hardly notice them, and you continue seeing yourself from within the way you always have, but others begin to notice them from outside.
In my fifth decade I had already begun to imagine what old age was when I noticed the first holes appearing in my memory. I roamed around the house looking for my spectacles before discovering that I was already wearing them, or I dropped them in the watering can, or I put on my reading glasses without taking off my regular ones. One day I ate breakfast twice because I forgot about the first time, and I learned to recognize my friends’ alarm when they didn’t dare let me know I was telling them the same story I had told them the week before. From then on I had in my memory a list of faces I knew and another list with the name of each one, but in the time it took to greet someone I couldn’t manage to make to make the two lists coincide.
My sexual age didn’t bother me at all, because my performance didn’t depend so much on myself as on the women, and they know the how to get what they want when they want it. Today I laugh at the eighty-year-old boys who go to the doctor frightened by those little momentary scares without knowing that at ninety it’s even worse, but it doesn’t matter: they’re just the risks of being alive. On the other hand, it’s a triumph of life that old people lose their memory for the things that aren’t essential but rarely for what truly matters to us. Cicero illustrated it with this line:
No old man forgets where he hid his treasure.With these reflections, and various others, I had just finished a first draft of the column when the August sun burst out from in between the mail boat (which had been delayed a week because of the drought) and the almond trees in the park and bellowed at me through the doorway. Here come those ninety years, I thought. I will never know why, nor do I ever expect to find out, but it was under the spell of that destructive invocation that I decided to call Rosa Cabarcas to help me celebrate my birthday with an evening in libertine style. My body had for years maintained an air of sacred peace, dedicated as I was to the erratic rereading of my classics and to my private programs of cultured music, but my desire that day was so compelling that it seemed like a message from God. After the phone call, I could not continue writing. I hung up my hammock in a corner of the library that the sun never reaches in the morning and lay down, my chest heavy with the anxiety of waiting.
I had been a spoiled child, raised by a mother with multiple gentlemen callers, dead of consumption at the age of fifty, and a formal father who never made mistakes. He woke up dead in his widower’s bed on the day the Treaty of Neerlandia was signed, which put an end to the War of a Thousand Days and to the other civil wars of the previous century. Peace changed the city in a way that was unforeseen and unwished-for. A crowd of free women enriched the old cantinas of the Calle Ancha beyond belief, which then became known as the Camellón Abello — Sin Street — and is now called the Paseo Colón, Columbus Boulevard, in this, the city of my soul, so widely appreciated by both locals and foreigners for the good-naturedness of its people and the purity of its light.
I have never slept with a woman without paying, and those few who weren’t professionals I still managed to convince, either by reason or by force, to accept the cash — even if they only threw it in the garbage. At the age of twenty, I began to keep a record of the name, age, and location of each, along with a brief account of the circumstances and the style. By age fifty, there were five hundred and forty women, each of whom I had been with for at least one night. I interrupted the list when my body no longer let me keep up that pace and I could keep track of the bills without paper. I have my own code of ethics. I never participated in group orgies or in public conspiracies, nor did I share secrets or tell others about a single adventure of the body or the soul, because ever since I was a child I have realized that none of them go unpunished.
The only strange relationship I ever had was one I maintained for years with the faithful Damiana. She was almost a girl, Indian-like, strong and wild; she spoke with short, definitive words; she would walk around barefoot so as not to disturb me while I wrote. I remember that I was reading
The Andalusian Lozana in the hallway hammock, and I happened to see her bending over the sink, wearing a skirt so short that it exposed the backs of her succulent knees. Spurred on by an irresistible fever, I took hold of her from behind, pulled her
mutandas down to her knees, and sodomized her like a beast.
“
Ay, señor!” she said with a mournful moan. “That was made for things to come out of, not go into.” A deep tremor wracked her body, but she stayed rigid. Humiliated by having humiliated her, I wanted to pay her double what I paid the most expensive ones at the time, but she wouldn’t accept a penny, and I had to augment her salary based on a rate of one ride per month, always while she was washing my clothes and always from behind.
One time it occurred to me that those kinds of stories would be a good foundation for an account of the miseries of my misspent life, and the title fell down to me from heaven:
Memories of My Melancholy Whores. My public life, on the other hand, was uninteresting: an orphaned bachelor with no future, a mediocre journalist, a four-time finalist in the Cartagena de Indias Literary Festival, and a favorite of caricaturists because of my exemplary ugliness — which is to say, a lost life which had gotten off to a bad start on the afternoon when my mother took me by the hand at age nineteen to see if she could get the
La Paz Daily to publish a chronicle of school life I had written for my Spanish Rhetoric and Composition class. It was published on Sunday with an encouraging foreword by the editor. Years later, when I found out that my mother had paid for the publication of that column and the seven that followed it, it was already too late to be embarrassed about it since my weekly column was now running under its own steam, and I was already a telegraph inflator and a music critic as well.
As soon as I graduated from college, with honors, I began teaching Spanish and Latin at three public high schools at the same time. I was a bad teacher with no training. My heart wasn’t in it, and I had no pity for those poor children who attended school as the only means of escape from their parents’ tyranny. All I could do for them was to keep them fearful of my wooden ruler long enough for them to at least arrive at my favorite poem:
All this, Fabio, ay dolor!
All you see here — the fields of solitude, the gloomy hill — this was once famed Italy. It was only later, as an old man, that I would happen to learn of the nickname that my students called me behind my back: Professor Gloomy Hill.
This is all life gave me, and I did nothing to get more out of it. I ate lunch alone between classes, and at six in the evening I arrived at the newspaper offices to hunt down all the signals coming to us from space. At eleven P.M., when we put the paper to bed, my real life began. I slept in Chinatown two or three times a week, and with such varied company that I was twice awarded Client of the Year. After dinner at the nearby Café Roma, I would choose a brothel at random and enter discreetly through the back door. I did it by choice at first, but it ended up becoming part of my job thanks to the loose tongues of all the political bigshots who told state secrets to their one-night lovers without realizing that they were being heard by a political columnist through the paper-thin walls. That was also, of course, how I found out that my inconsolable celibacy was supposedly attributable to a nocturnal pederasty that I satisfied with the orphan children of the dirty streets. I have had the good fortune to forget that, since, among other good reasons, I also found out what good things were being said of me, and I took them for what they were worth.
I never had any good friends, and the only ones that came close are in New York — by which I mean that they’re dead, because I think that’s where souls are sent as punishment for not accepting the truth of their past lives. Since my retirement I’ve had little to do, aside from bringing my column to the newspaper office every Friday afternoon and certain other somewhat valid obligations: concerts at the Fine Arts Theater, painting exhibitions at the Art Center (of which I’m a founding member), the occasional civic conference at the Society of Public Works, and big events like the Fábregas Company’s residence at the Apollo Theater. Ever since I was a boy I’ve gone to the outdoor cinemas, where you could be surprised by a lunar eclipse one minute or a sudden, pneumonia-inducing downpour the next. But I was interested less in the films than in the little nightingales who would sleep with you for the price of a movie ticket, or would give it away for free, or on credit. Then again, cinema is not really my favorite medium. The obscene cult of Shirley Temple was, for me, the straw that broke the camel’s back.
My only travels were the four trips I made to the Literary Festival in Cartagena de Indias before I turned thirty, and one bad night in a motorboat as the guest of Sacramento Montiel for the opening of one of his brothels in Santa Marta. As far as my home life, I am a light eater and easy to please. When Damiana became old she stopped coming to cook for me, and my only regular meal since then has been a potato omelet at the Café Roma after the newspaper office closes.
So on the evening of my ninetieth birthday I hadn’t eaten lunch and I couldn’t concentrate on my reading as I waited for word from Rosa Cabarcas. The cicadas were annoying the hell out of me with their chirping in the two-o’clock heat, and as the sun passed from one open window to the next I was forced to change the position of my hammock three times. My birthday always seems to fall on the hottest day of the year, and I have learned to tolerate it in the past, but that day it was just too much to bear. At four, I tried to calm myself down with Johann Sebastian Bach’s six suites for solo cello, the definitive versions by Pablo Casals. I regard them as the crowning achievement in all of music, but instead of calming me down as usual, they left me in a state of the severest prostration. I fell asleep to the second one, which strikes me as a bit lazy, and in a dream I reimagined the plaintive sound of the cello as that of a departing ship. At almost that instant the telephone woke me up, and the rusty voice of Rosa Cabarcas brought me back to life.
“You’re in luck,” she told me. “I found a little spring chicken even better than what you had in mind, but there’s just one issue: she’s barely fourteen years old.”
“I don’t mind changing diapers,” I said jokingly, not understanding what she was getting at.
“She’s not for you,” she said, “Who’s going to serve my three years in jail?”
No one was going to serve them, of course — least of all her. She would choose her latest crop of girls from among the minors who shopped in her store, and then initiate them and exploit them until they moved on to the even-worse life of graduate whores at the storied brothel run by Black Eufemia. She had never paid a fine, because her patio was a paradise for the local authorities, from the governor down to the lowliest alderman, and she must have had the power to flout the law whenever she wished and get away with it. So ultimately, her scruples must have served only to gain an advantage: more punishable means more expensive. The extra difficulty was solved by two extra pesos for her services, and we agreed that at ten P.M. I would be at her house with five pesos in cash, to be paid in advance — and not a minute early, because the girl had to feed her younger brothers and put them to sleep, and help her mother to bed too, because she was crippled with rheumatism.
I had four hours left. As they passed, my heart began to fill me with an acidic foam that made it difficult for me to breathe. I made a sterile effort to trick time into passing faster by focusing on each stage of the process of getting dressed — nothing new; as Damiana says, I get dressed with all the ritual of a bishop. I cut myself with the razor, had to wait for the water in the shower to cool because the sun had heated the water in the pipes, and then I started sweating again from the simple act of drying myself with the towel. I tried to dress myself in a manner befitting the stroke of luck I’d had that evening: a white linen suit, a blue-striped shirt with a stiff collar, a Chinese silk tie, ankle-high boots polished with white zinc, and a gold pocket watch with the chain fastened to the buttonhole of my lapel. Finally I rolled up my pant legs so no one would notice I had gotten a little bit shorter.
I have a reputation as a miser because no one can believe that I could be so poor living where I live, and the truth is that on a night like that one I seemed very superficially like a man of means. From the little savings chest I kept under my bed I took two pesos to rent a room, four for the madam, three for the girl and five extra to spend on my dinner and other incidentals — that is, the fourteen pesos I get from the newspaper for a month’s worth of Sunday columns. I hid them in a secret pocket in my waistband and spritzed myself with a little Agua de Florida cologne from Lanman & Kemp-Barclay & Co. Then I felt a pang of panic and at the first stroke of eight I blindly stumbled down the dark stairway, sweating with fear, and went out into the night, radiant from my vespers.
I felt refreshed. Groups of single men were arguing about soccer in the median of the Paseo Colón, in between the rows of parked taxis. A brass band played a languid waltz beneath the poplar grove flowering with
matarratones, the mousekiller plant. One of the poor little whores who solemnly hunt for clients on the Calle Notarios asked me for a cigarette as usual, and I answered her as I always do: “I quit smoking thirty-three years, two months, and seventeen days ago.” As I passed by the Golden Wire, I looked at my reflection in the illuminated windows and I didn’t look the way I felt; I looked older and not as well dressed.
A little before ten I got in a taxi and asked the driver to take me to Universal Cemetery, so as not to let on where I was really going. He looked at me with amusement in the rearview mirror and said, “Don’t scare me like that, wise guy. I hope to God I’m in as good shape as you at your age.” At the cemetery we got out of the cab together because he needed to get some change at La Tumba, a destitute cantina where old drunkards gather in the wee hours to cry over all the people they know who have died. When we had settled the fare, the driver told me earnestly, “Watch out, sir. Rosa Cabarcas’ house isn’t what it used to be.” I couldn’t manage a response other than to thank him, fully convinced that there’s no secret in the world that remains unknown to the taxi drivers of the Paseo Colón.
I entered a poor neighborhood that had little in common with the one I had known there years before. There were the same wide streets of hot sand, the same houses with their doors open, walls made of unscrubbed planks, roofs of bitter palm and gravel patios. But the people there had lost their peaceability. In most of the houses there were parties every Friday, whose drums and cymbals echoed in your bowels as you passed by. For fifty centavos you could enter whichever party you wanted, or you could dance for free on the bricks outside. As I walked by I was anxious that the earth would swallow me up, wool suit and all, but no one paid me any mind except for a squalid mulatto who sat dozing by the gate of a nearby house.
“
Adiós, professor!” he yelled emphatically. “Have a good lay!”
What could I do but thank him? I had to stop three times to catch my breath before I reached the top of the last hill. From there I could see an enormous copper moon rising on the horizon, and an unforeseen urgency in my gut made me fear where I was going for a moment, but the feeling passed. At the end of the street, where the neighborhood gave way to a forest of fruit trees, I entered the house of Rosa Cabarcas.
She seemed different. She had been the most discreet madam and, at the same time, the best known; a woman of great size who we called the Fire Chief, as much for her corpulence as for the efficiency with which she put out her clients’ fires. But solitude had made her smaller, had wrinkled her skin and sharpened her voice so ingeniously that she seemed like an elderly child. All that remained from before were her perfect teeth, one of which she’d had capped with gold purely for vanity’s sake. She wore black mourning clothes for her dead husband of fifty years, and she augmented it with a sort of black biretta to mark the death of her only child. All of her that was left alive were her cruel, diaphanous eyes, and from them I could tell that her inner nature had not changed.
The store had a dim spotlight on the ceiling and almost nothing for sale on the shelves, which didn’t even give the impression of being a front for a legitimate business, one that everyone knew but no one recognized. Rosa Carbarcas was settling up with a client when I entered on tiptoe. I don’t know if she really failed to recognize me or if she just pretended not to, to keep up appearances. I sat down on the bench to wait until she had completed the transaction and tried to reconstruct in my mind what it had been like. At least twice before, when we were still young and fit, she had surprised me. I think she read my thoughts, because she turned toward me and scrutinized me with an alarming intensity.
“You haven’t aged,” she sighed sadly.
I wanted to flatter her: “You have, but for the better.”
“Seriously,” she said, “you’ve gotten back a bit of your old self.”
“That’s because I don’t let my old self get old,” I said slyly.
She brightened. “Last time I saw you, you were drunk as a skunk,” she said. “Are you behaving yourself?”
I escaped by means of a tangent: “The only thing different about me since the last time you saw me is that sometimes my ass hurts.”
Her diagnosis was immediate: “Lack of use.”
“I only use it for what God made it for,” I told her, “but it’s hurt for a long time, and always when there’s a full moon.”
Rosa searched carefully in her sewing kit and produced a small tin of green ointment that smelled like liniment of arnica. “Tell the girl to rub it in with her finger, like this,” she said, moving her index finger with brazen eloquence.
I replied that, thank God, I was still capable of defending myself without Guajira folk remedies.
She laughed. “
Ay, sir, pardon
me!” And she went to her room.
The girl had been there since ten, she told me; she was pretty, clean, and well cared-for, but she was scared to death because one of her friends had who went off with a stevedore from Gayra had bled to death in two hours. “But really,” Rosa admitted, “that’s understandable, because the men from Gayra are famous for that sort of thing.” She resumed her story: “The poor thing, on top of it all she has to work all day sewing on buttons in a factory.”
That didn’t seem like such a bad job to me.
“That’s what you men think,” she replied, “but it’s worse than crushing rocks.”
She confessed that she had given the girl a potion of bromide with valerian and that now she was asleep. I was afraid that this show of compassion was another trap to increase the price, but she said, “No, you have my word, and my word is good — with fixed rules: each thing paid for separately, in cash and in advance.” And that’s how it was.
I followed her out behind the patio, moved by how withered her skin looked, and how she walked with those swollen legs inside her rough cotton stockings. The full moon was approaching the center of the sky, and the whole world appeared to be submerged in green water. Near the store was a palm-thatched awning for the public administrators’ parties, with many leather stools and some hammocks hung from the forked poles that were set up to support the branches of the fruit trees. In the backyard, where this orchard began, there were six bedrooms made of untrowelled adobe, with burlap screens in the windows to keep out the mosquitoes. The only occupied one was dimly lit, and on the radio Toña La Negra sang a song of love gone wrong. Rosa Cabarcas drew in a breath. “The bolero is life,” she said.
I agreed, but until today I haven’t dared to say so in writing.
She pushed the door open, entered, and a moment later reappeared. “She’s still sleeping,” she said. “You’d do well to let her rest as long as her body needs. Your night is longer than hers.”
I was confused. “What do you think I should do?”
“It’s up to you,” she said with out-of-place calmness. “You’re a wise man.” She turned around and left me alone, terrified.
There was no way out. I entered the room with my heart in chaos, and I saw the sleeping girl on the enormous rented bed, naked and defenseless as the day she was born. She lay on her side, her face to the door, lit from above by an intense light that spared no detail. I sat down to contemplate her from the edge of the bed, all five senses enchanted. She was cool and brown. She had been subjected to a regimen of hygiene and beauty that included even her incipient, downy pubic hair. Her hair had been curled, and she had clear nail polish on her fingers and toes, but her molasses-colored skin looked rough and maltreated. Her recently formed breasts still looked like a boy’s, but they seemed about to burst into bloom, urged on by some secret energy. The largest thing about her body were here big feet, made for walking secretly with long, sensitive toes, like fingers. Despite the presence of a fan, she was soaked in a phosphorescent sweat, and the heat was becoming unbearable as the night advanced. It was impossible to imagine her real face, painted over as it was with wide strokes of multicolor, a thick layer of rice powder with two patches of rouge on her cheeks, false eyelashes, eyebrows and eyelids smoky with lampblack, lips coated with a chocolate lip gloss. But neither cloth nor razor could manage to disguise her character: haughty nose, opposing eyebrows, intense lips.
Like a tender bull, I thought.
At eleven I went to the bathroom to begin my morning routine. Her clothes lay on a chair. They were the clothes of a poor girl, but they were folded with the neatness of the wealthy: an etamine suit with butterflies printed on it, yellow panties made of
malapodán, and some rope sandals. On top of the clothes were a secondhand bracelet and a fine little chain with a medallion of the Virgin. On the shelf above the sink, a small case with lipstick, rouge, a key, and some loose change — all so cheap and degraded from use that I couldn’t imagine anyone as poor as she was.
I undressed and placed my clothes on the rack as carefully as I could, so as not to damage the silk shirt or wrinkle the freshly ironed linen. I urinated in the toilet, sitting down the way Florina de Dios taught me as a child so as not to get any on the rim of the bowl, and it was still — all modesty aside — an immediate and continuous stream, as from a wild colt. Before leaving I caught sight of myself in the mirror. The horse that looked out at me from the other side was not dead but lugubrious, and it had a double chin like a pope, bloated eyelids, and a weedy mane that had once been my musician’s head of long, flowing hair.
“Shit,” I said. “What can I do if you don’t want me?”
Trying not to wake her, I sat down nude on the bed, my eyes already accustomed to the tricks of the red light, and scanned her inch by inch. I slid the tip of my index finger along the sweaty nape of her neck, and her whole body shuddered from within like a harp being plucked. She turned toward me with a grunt and enveloped me in the climate of her acidic breath. I squeezed her nose between my thumb and forefinger and she shook, moved her head away and turned her back to me without waking up. An unforeseen temptation made me try to separate her legs with my knee. On the first two attempts, she resisted with her tense thighs. I sang into her ear:
“Delgadina’s bed is ringed with angels.” She relaxed a bit. A hot current entered into my veins, and my slow animal, dormant until then, awoke from its long sleep.
“Delgadina, my love,” I begged anxiously.
“Delgadina.”She moaned lugubriously, escaped from my thighs, turned her back to me, and curled up like a snail in its shell. The potion of valerian must have been as effective on me as it was on her, because nothing happened — not to her, not to anyone. But I didn’t mind. I asked myself what good it would do to wake her up, humiliated and sad as I felt, and as cold as a perch.
Brightly, ineluctably, the bells struck midnight, marking the beginning of August 29th, the day of the martyrdom of St. John the Baptist. Someone cried loudly in the street and no one noticed. I prayed for him, in case he needed it, and also for myself, in thanksgiving for the blessings I had received: [
No se engañe nadie, no, pensando que ha de durar lo que espera más que duró lo que vió.] The girl wailed in her sleep, and I prayed for her too: So everything must happen this way. Afterward I turned off the radio and the light and went to sleep.
When I awoke at dawn I didn’t remember where I was. The girl was still sleeping with her back to me in a fetal position. I had the indefinite sensation of having felt her get up during the night and having heard the bathtub draining, but it could have just as easily been a dream. This was something new for me. I had ignored seduction’s sly entreaties. I had always chosen my one-night girlfriends at random, based more on their prices than on their charms, and we would make love without love, half-dressed more often than not, and always in the dark so I could imagine us better. That night I discovered the unlikely pleasure of contemplating a sleeping woman without the urgency of desire or the shackles of chastity.
I got up at five, anxious because my Sunday column had to be on the editor’s desk by noon. In the bathroom I did my business with certainty, still full of the passion brought on by the full moon, and when I pulled the chain to flush down the water I felt my past rancor escaping through the drain. When I returned to the bedroom, fully dressed and feeling fresh, the girl was sleeping face-up in the conciliatory light of dawn, shot through with beams across her bed, her arms spread open in the form of a cross, the absolute owner of her virginity.
May God keep her, I said. All the money I had left, hers and mine, I placed on her pillow, and I said goodbye to her forever with a kiss on her forehead. The house, like all brothels at dawn, was the closest thing to paradise. I left through the orchard gate so I wouldn’t meet anyone on my way out. Out on the street beneath the blazing sun, I began to feel the weight of my ninety years and to count, minute by minute, all the minutes of all the nights that remained before I would die.
This is my translation of 
