Conversation in the Cathedral (75 page)

The first days after that fight he’d felt a vague unrest, a quiet nostalgia. Love, Zavalita? Then you’d never been in love with Aída, he thinks. Or had that worm in the guts you felt years ago been love? He thinks: never with Ana then, Zavalita. He started going out with Carlitos and Milton and Solórzano and Norwin again: one night he joked with them about his affair with Ana and made up the story that they were going to bed together. Then one day, before going to the paper, he got off the bus at the stop by the Palace of Justice and made an appearance at the hospital. Without premeditation, he thinks, as if by chance. They made up in the entranceway, among people who were coming and going, without even touching hands, talking in secret, looking into each other’s eyes. I was wrong Anita, I was the one who was wrong, Santiago, you don’t know how upset I’ve Anita, and I cried every Santiago. They met again at nightfall in a Chinese café with drunks and a sawdust-covered tile floor, and they talked for hours without letting go of their hands over the untouched cups of coffee. But you should have told her before, Santiago, how was she to know that you weren’t getting along with your family, and he told her again, the university, the group,
La
Crónica,
the tight cordiality with his parents and his brother and sister. Everything except about Aída, Zavalita, except about Ambrosio, about the Muse. Why had you told her your life story? From then on they saw each other almost every day and they’d made love a week or a month after, one night, at a shack-up house in the Margaritas development. There was her body, so thin you could count the bones of her back, her frightened eyes, her shame and your confusion when you discovered she was a virgin. He’ll never take you here again Anita, he loved you Anita. From then on they made love at the boardinghouse in Barranco, once a week on the
afternoon
that Doña Lucía went visiting. There that anxious frightened love on Wednesdays, Ana’s weeping remorse every time she remade the bed, Zavalita.

Don Fermín was putting in an occasional appearance at the office again and Santiago lunched with them on Sundays. Señora Zoila had allowed Popeye and Teté to announce their engagement and Santiago promised to come to the party. It was Saturday, his day off at
La
Crónica,
Ana was on duty. He sent his most presentable suit out to be cleaned, he shined his own shoes, put on a clean shirt, and at eight-thirty a taxi took him to Miraflores. A sound of voices and music poured over the garden wall and came into the street, maids in shawls were looking into the inside of the house from neighboring balconies. Cars were parked on both sides of the street, some on the sidewalk, and you went ahead hugging the wall, avoiding the door, suddenly undecided, lacking the urge to ring the bell or to leave. Through the garage gate he saw a corner of the garden: a small table with a white cloth, a butler standing guard, couples chatting around the pool. But the main body of guests were in the living room and the dining room and through the window shades one could make out their figures. The music and talking was coming from inside. He recognized the face of that aunt, this cousin, and faces that looked ghostly. Suddenly Uncle Clodomiro appeared and went to sit in the rocker in the garden, alone. There he was, hands and knees together, looking at the girls in high heels, the boys with neckties who were starting to come up to the table with the white cloth. They passed in front of him and he smiled at them eagerly. What were you doing there, Uncle Clodomiro, why did you come where nobody knew you, where those who did know you didn’t like you? To show that in spite of the snubs they gave you that you were a member of the family, that you had a family? he thinks. He thinks: in spite of everything, did the family matter to you, did you love the family that didn’t love you? Or was solitude even worse than humiliation, uncle? He had already decided not to go in, but he didn’t leave. A car stopped by the door and he saw two girls get out, holding onto their coiffures and waiting for the one driving to park and come along. You knew him, he thinks: Tony, the same little dancing brush on his forehead, the same parrot laugh. The three of them went into the house laughing and there the absurd impression that they were laughing at you, Zavalita. There those sudden savage desires to see Ana. From the store on the corner he explained to Teté by phone that he couldn’t get away from
La
Crónica:
he’d come by tomorrow and give my brother-in-law a hug for me. Oh, you’re always such a wet blanket, Superbrain, how could you pull a stunt like that on them. He called Ana, went to see her, and they talked for a while at the entrance to La Maison de Santé.

A few days later she had called
La
Crónica
with a hesitant voice: she had some bad news for you, Santiago. He waited for her at a Chinese café and saw her coming all huddled up in a coat over her uniform, her face long: they were moving to Ica, love. Her father had been named director of a school system there, maybe she could get a job at the Workers’ Hospital there. It hadn’t seemed so serious to you, Zavalita, and you had consoled her: you’d go see her every week, she could come here too, Ica was so close by.

*

The first day he went to work as a driver for Morales Transportation, before leaving for Tingo María Ambrosio had taken Amalia and Amalita Hortensia for a little drive through the bumpy streets of Pucallpa in the dented little blue truck that was all patched up, with mudguards and bumpers tied on with ropes so they wouldn’t say good-bye at some pothole.

“Compared to the cars I’ve driven here it was something to weep over,” Ambrosio says. “And still, the months I drove The Jungle Flash were happy ones, son.”

The Jungle Flash had been fitted out with wooden benches and there was room for twelve passengers if they squeezed together. The lazy life of the first weeks had been replaced by an active routine from then on: Amalia would feed him, put his lunch in the glove compartment of the vehicle and Ambrosio, wearing a T-shirt, a visor cap, ragged pants and rubber-soled sandals, would leave for Tingo María at eight in the
morning
. Since he’d been traveling, Amalia had picked up on religion again after so many years, pushed a little by Doña Lupe, who had given her some holy pictures for the walls and had dragged her off to Sunday mass. If there wasn’t any flooding and the vehicle didn’t break down, Ambrosio would get to Tingo María at six in the afternoon; he would sleep on a mattress under the counter at Morales Transportation, and the next day he would leave for Pucallpa at eight o’clock. But that schedule had rarely been kept, he was always getting stuck on the road and there were trips that took all day. The engine was tired, Amalia, it kept stopping to get its strength back. He would arrive home covered with dirt from head to toe and weary unto death. He would flop down on the bed and, while she got him his dinner, he, smoking, using one arm as a pillow, peaceful, exhausted, would tell her about his wiles in fixing the motor, the
passengers
he’d carried, and the bills he was going to give to Don Hilario. And what he enjoyed most, Amalia, his bets with Pantaleón. Thanks to those bets the trips were less boring, even though the passengers were pissing with fright. Pantaleón drove The Highway Superman, a bus that belonged to Pucallpa Transport, the rival company of Morales
Transportation
. They left at the same time and they raced, not just to win the ten soles of the wager, but, most of all, to get ahead and pick up passengers who were going from one village to the next, traveling between farms along the way.

“Those passengers who don’t buy any tickets,” he’d told Amalia, “the ones who aren’t customers of Morales Transportation but of Ambrosio Pardo Transportation.”

“What if Don Hilario finds out about it someday?” Amalia had asked him.

“Bosses know how things are,” Pantaleón had explained to him, Amalia. “And they play dumb because they get their revenge by paying us starvation wages. A thief robbing from a thief will never run on a reef, brother, you know all about it.”

In Tingo María Pantaleón had gotten himself a widow who didn’t know he had a wife and three children in Pucallpa, but sometimes he didn’t go to the widow’s but ate with Ambrosio in a cheap restaurant called La Luz del Día, and sometimes afterward to a brothel with
skeletons
who charged three soles. Ambrosio went with him out of friendship, he couldn’t understand why Pantaleón liked those women, he wouldn’t have got mixed up with them even if they’d paid him. Really, Ambrosio? Really, Amalia: squat, fat-bellied, ugly. Besides, he was so tired when he got there that even if he wanted to cheat on you, his body wouldn’t respond, Amalia.

During the early days Amalia had been very serious in spying on Limbo Coffins. Nothing had changed since the funeral parlor changed hands. Don Hilario never went to the place; the same employee as before was still there, a boy with a sickly-looking face who spent the day sitting on the porch looking stupidly at the buzzards who were sunning
themselves
on the roofs of the hospital and the morgue. The single room of the funeral parlor was filled with coffins, most of them small and white. They were rough, rustic, only an occasional one planed down and waxed. During the first week one coffin had been sold. A barefoot man without a jacket but with a black tie and a remorseful face went into Limbo Coffins and came out a short time later carrying a little box on his shoulder. He passed by Amalia and she crossed herself. The second week there hadn’t been a sale; the third week a couple, one for a child and one for an adult. It didn’t seem like much of a business, Amalia. Ambrosio had begun to grow uneasy.

After a month Amalia had grown careless in her vigilance. She wasn’t going to spend her life in the cabin door with Amalita Hortensia in her arms, especially since coffins were carried away so rarely. She’d made friends with Doña Lupe, they would spend hours chatting, they ate lunch and dinner together, took strolls around the square, along the Calle Comercio, by the docks. On the hottest days they went down to the river to swim in their nightgowns and then had shaved ice at Wong’s Ice Cream Parlor. Ambrosio relaxed on Sundays: he slept all morning and after lunch he would go out with Pantaleón to watch the soccer games in the stadium on the road to Yarinacocha. At night they would leave Amalita Hortensia with Señora Lupe and go to the movies. People on the street already knew them and said hello. Doña Lupe came and went in the cabin as if she owned it; once she’d caught Ambrosio naked, having a bucket bath in the backyard, and Amalia had died laughing. They also went to Doña Lupe’s whenever they wanted to, they loaned each other things. When he came to Pucallpa, Doña Lupe’s husband would come out and sit by the street with them at night to get some air. He was an old man who only opened his mouth to talk about his little farm and his debts to the Land Bank.

“I think I’m happy now,” Amalia had told Ambrosio one day. “I’ve already gotten used to it here. And you don’t seem as grumpy as you were at the start.”

“You can see that you’re used to it,” Ambrosio had answered. “You go around barefoot and with your umbrella, you’re already a jungle girl. Yes, I’m happy too.”

“Happy because I don’t think about Lima very much anymore,” Amalia had said. “I almost never dream about the mistress anymore, I almost never think about the police.”

“When you first got here, I thought how can she live with him,” Doña Lupe had said one day. “Now I can tell you that you were lucky to get him. All the women in the neighborhood would like to have him for a husband, black as he is.”

Amalia had laughed: it was true, he was behaving very well with her, much better than in Lima, and he even showed his affection for Amalita Hortensia. His spirits had become very merry of late and she hadn’t had a fight with him since they’d been in Pucallpa.

“Happy, but only to a point,” Ambrosio says. “What wasn’t working out was the money question, son.”

Ambrosio had thought that thanks to the extras he was getting
without
Don Hilario’s knowing it, they’d get through the month. But no, in the first place, there weren’t many passengers, and in the second place, Don Hilario had come up with the idea that the cost of repairs should be split between the company and the driver. Don Hilario had gone crazy, Amalia, if he accepted that he’d be left without any pay. They’d argued and it was left at Ambrosio’s paying ten percent of the repair bills. But Don Hilario had deducted fifteen the second month and when the spare tire was stolen, he’d wanted Ambrosio to pay for a new one. But that’s awful, Don Hilario, how could he think of such a thing. Don Hilario had looked at him steadily: you better not complain, there was a lot that could be told about him, wasn’t he picking up a few soles behind his back? Ambrosio hadn’t known what to say, but Don Hilario had shaken his hand: friends again. They’d begun to get through the month with loans and advances that Don Hilario himself made
grudgingly
. Pantaleón, seeing that they were having trouble, had advised them to stop paying rent and come live in the settlement and build a cabin next to mine.

“No, Amalia,” Ambrosio had said. “I don’t want you to be alone when I’m on the road, with all the bums there are in the settlement. Besides, you couldn’t keep an eye on Limbo Coffins from there.”

“T
HE WISDOM OF WOMEN
,” Carlitos said. “If Ana had thought about it, it wouldn’t have turned out so well for her. But she didn’t think about it, women never premeditate these things. They let themselves be guided by instinct and it never lets them down, Zavalita.”

Was it that benign, intermittent feeling of uneasiness that reappeared when Ana moved to Ica, Zavalita, that soft restlessness that would surprise you on buses as you figured out how many days left till Sunday? He had to change the luncheon dates at his parents’ to Saturday. On Sunday he would leave very early in a group taxi that came by to pick him up at the boardinghouse. He would sleep the whole trip, he stayed with Ana until nightfall, and he would come back. Those weekly trips were bankrupting him, he thinks, Carlitos always paid for the beers at the Negro-Negro now. Was that love, Zavalita?