The nightclub was their answer. The music of the bolero allowed those women, rescued from the fields and exploited again in the city, to express their most intimate feelings, vulgar but concealed; only when dancing were these enslaved bodies given the luxury of immobile movement: these women had the scandalous elegance of the servant who dares to sit down, that is, who asks to be noticed.
Bah, let’s go to the Waikiki, I said to Bernardo, let’s go sleep with a couple of whores, what else is there to do? If you want, you can pretend you spent the night with Marguerite Gauthier or Delphine de Nucingen, but let’s go steal what we need for La Desdichada’s dowry. We can’t have her dressed in a robe all day. It’s indecent. What will our friends say?
Toño and Bernardo
— How would you prefer to die?
Bernardo
My mother was a widow of the revolution. Popular iconography is full of images of the woman warrior who accompanied the fighters into battle. You can see them riding on the trains, or around the campfires. But the widows who didn’t leave their homes were another matter. Like my mother: serious and resigned women, dressed in black ever since they received the fateful message: Your husband, madam, fell with honor on the field of Torreón or La Bufa or Santa Rosa. Perhaps that is what it means to be the widow of a hero. But you might think it would be different to be the widow of the victim of a political murder. Really? Aren’t all fallen soldiers the victims of a political crime? And isn’t every death a murder? It took us a long time to accept the notion that the dead person was not murdered, before we ascribed the death to the will of God.
My father died with Carranza. That is, when the First Chief of the Revolution was murdered in Tlaxcalantongo, my father, who was his friend, was killed in one of the many acts of revenge against the supporters of the president. An undeclared war that took place not on the fields of military honor but in the back rooms of political terror. My mother remained loyal. She laid out my father’s uniform on his bed. His tunic with rows of silver buttons. His kepi with two stars. His riding pants and his heavy belt with its empty holster. His boots at the foot of the bed. This was her perpetual domestic Te Deum.
There she passed the hours, in the orange-colored light of votive lamps, brushing the dust from his uniform, polishing his boots. As if the glory and the requiem of one faded battle would stay with her forever. As if this ceremony of mourning and love guaranteed that her husband (my father) would someday return.
I think of all this because, between us, Toño and I have gotten together a wardrobe for La Desdichada, and we’ve spread it out on display on the four-poster bed. A white linen blouse (from the washerwomen of the patio) and a short black satin skirt (from the tarts of the Waikiki). Black stockings (courtesy of a little trifle named Miss Nothing-at-All, says Toño, laughing). But, for some reason, we couldn’t get shoes. And Toño maintains that La Desdichada doesn’t really need underwear. This made me doubt his Don Juanesque tale. Perhaps he didn’t get as far as I thought with the Waikiki girl. I, on the other hand, only aver that if we intend to treat La Desdichada with respect, we musn’t deprive her of panties and bra, at the least.
— So where are we going to get them from, man? I’ve done my part. You haven’t exactly put yourself out.
She is sitting at the table, wrapped in the Chinese robe from my faggot uncle. She doesn’t move her eyes, of course — she has her gaze fixed, fixed on Toño.
To escape that annoying look, I quickly take her by the arm, pick her up, and say to Toño that we have to put some makeup on her, dress her, make her comfortable, poor Desdichada! to see her always so distant and solitary — I force a laugh — a little attention wouldn’t hurt her, or a little fresh air.
I open the window overlooking the patio, leaving the dummy in Toño’s arms. There is no respite from the sound of the frogs croaking. The storm builds over the mountains. I am oppressed by the small noises of my city, which seem all the more piercing in the lull before the storm. Today the knife sharpeners sound sinister to my ears, the used-clothes venders even worse.
I turn back, and for a moment can’t find La Desdichada: I don’t see her where I left her, where she should be, where I had set her at the table. A cry escapes me: “What have you done with her?” Toño appears alone, parting the beads of the bath curtain. He has a long scratch on his face.
— Nothing. I cut myself. She’s coming right away.
Bernardo and Toño
Why were we afraid?
Why were we afraid to invent a life for her? The least a writer can do is give a person a destiny. It wouldn’t have cost us anything; we wouldn’t have had to account to anyone. Were we incapable of giving La Desdichada her destiny? Why? Did we really feel she was so dispossessed? Was it impossible to imagine her country, her family, her past? What was stopping us?
We can make her a housekeeper. She’ll keep the apartment clean. Run our errands. We would have more time to read and write, to see friends. Or we can make her a prostitute. That would help pay our household expenses. We’d have more time to read and write. To see friends and feel like big shots. We laugh. Do you think anyone would be interested in her as a whore? It would challenge the imagination, Bernardo. Like fucking a Siren: how?
We laughed.
A mother?
What did you say?
She could be a mother. Neither servant nor whore. Mother, give her a child, let her devote herself to taking care of her child.
How?
We laughed even harder.
Toño
Today was La Desdichada’s dinner party. The dummy was still dressed in the Chinese robe from my uncle the fruit. Nothing suited her better, Bernardo and I decided; not only that, but it was her name on the invitations, so, like a high-class courtesan or an eccentric Englishwoman in her castle, she could entertain in her dressing gown: Cast aside convention!
La Desdichada is receiving. From eight to eleven. Punctuality required. She is never late, we inform our friends: British punctuality, eh? And we sat down to wait for them, one on each side of her, I on her left, Bernardo on her right.
It occurred to me that a party would clear away the little cloud in our relations that I noted yesterday, when I cut myself shaving while she was watching me, sitting on the toilet, her legs crossed. Seated there, totally insouciant, one knee over the other. What a flirt! The toilet was just the most convenient place to sit her down to watch me shave. She made me a little nervous, that’s all.
I didn’t explain this to Bernardo. I know him too well, and maybe I shouldn’t have taken the mannequin into the bathroom with me. I’m sorry, really, and would like to ask his pardon without giving any explanation. I can’t; he wouldn’t understand, he likes to verbalize everything, starting with his feelings. The fact is that when he turned his back to the window and looked for us, without finding us, I took a quick look into the living room and saw him looking at nothing. I thought for a moment that we only see what we desire. I had a fleeting sense of terror.
I wanted to clear away the misunderstanding with a little joke, and he was agreeable. That’s another thing we had in common: the taste for a type of humor that, although we didn’t know it at the time, was in vogue in Europe and was associated with the games of Dada. Of course, Mexican Surrealism didn’t need the European imprimatur; we are Surrealists by vocation, by birth, as all the jokes we have inflicted on Christianity prove, confounding the sacrifices of blood and host, disguising whores as virgins, constantly moving between the stable and the brothel, creation and calendar, myth and history, the past and the future, the circle and the line, the mask and the face, the crown of thorns and the crown of feathers, the mother and the virgin, death and laughter: for five centuries, Bernardo and I tell ourselves with stern humor, we’ve been playing charades with the most exquisite corpse of all, Our Lord Jesus Christ, with our vessels of bloodstained glass, why shouldn’t we do the same with the poor cadaver of wood, La Desdichada? Why should we be afraid?