Why do I compare her to a flamingo? She was not pink. Her extremities were not long. Her tints, however, were reddish, for the hair on her head and her pubis shone like a bird’s plumage. And if the body is our carnal plumage, hers was as pale as an early dawn, as wounded as a precipitate night. Lucha Zapata’s pale skin was pecked from head to toe. Red wounds glistened on her arms and legs, especially on her wrists and ankles.
She opened her eyes and looked at me looking at her.
I knew, and she told me without words, that her wounds were caused by no one but herself.
Why, in spite of everything, do I compare her to what she was not: a flamingo lost in a distant Mayan lagoon? Because of the fright in her. Not a common, ordinary fear but a vocation for solitude that withdraws from contact, including the visual contact of another person’s gaze, too often guilty of unhealthy curiosity and offensive prejudice.
Lucha Zapata looked at me and did not see evil in my eyes.
She simply extended her hand to take mine and said Dress me, Savior, pick me up and take me back to my house. My things are there. My medicines. Hurry. It’s urgent.
What was I to do, compassionate readers, except satisfy the desires of this helpless woman who from now on-my head and heart told me so, even my respiration, the involuntary panting with which I picked up the defeated body wrapped in a sarape-would be my responsibility? I carried her down to Calle de Praga, hailed a taxi, and repeated the address she had just given to me with a sigh: “Cerrada de Chimalpopoca beside the Metro in Colonia de los Doctores.”
I became accustomed to having two addresses. One on Calle de Praga, where punctually every month I received the check that allowed me to live without determining who sent it to me or asking at the bank for the name of a person who undoubtedly did not wish to be known or have the bank reveal his or her identity. The other on Cerrada de Chimalpopoca: the modest, bare little house of my friend Lucha Zapata. An old entrance, a courtyard with dead flowers, in the rear an unfurnished retreat with mats on the floor, a Japanese eating table, a pillow or two, and a rod where half a dozen skirts and trousers were hanging. Behind the improvised closet a tiny bathroom with a tub and shower. A variety of pharmaceutical products. I recognized some names but didn’t know most of them. The towels were very old.
“Stay. Don’t leave me.”
How could I abandon her, I who longed to be responsible for someone since I couldn’t be responsible for unknown relatives (who had been, in my opinion, humiliatingly, generously, shamefully responsible for me), or occasional though respected teachers (Filopáter, Sanginés), or transitory friends (Errol Esparza), or healers who were both generous and aloof (Elvira Ríos), much less jailers as odious as María Egipciaca? What remained? Jericó’s friendship, firm and constant since the days of secondary school. But Jericó wasn’t here.
And now this fragile woman, inert in bed one day and the next as vibrant as an unattached electrical cable. At first in the little house in Colonia de los Doctores (symbol of a lost city, generous and ordered in the name of medical science, with one-story buildings and discreet façades, and an occasional gray residence built of stone) Lucha Zapata lived with me regaining her strength. I was afraid that when she recovered her stamina she would undertake adventures like the battle in the airport, for which I did not feel qualified. But for the moment, delicate and sweet, sometimes shaping unassuming movements, lying on the mat with a blue pillow under her head, Lucha Zapata told me, recalling our encounter, that if she went to the airport, exposing herself to danger, it was because aviation teaches us to be fatalistic, which gives me a reason for living in spite of the fatality all around us.
I talked to her, sharing the gourd of yerba maté Lucha always had in her hand and expounding on the openings or bases she constantly supplied, ideas about the fated as opposed to the voluntary, the free, and the virtuous, a distinction that pleased her a great deal, and she would ask me to explain: What I want can be good or bad, I told her, but it expresses my will. Does that mean that whether it’s good or evil, what I do is free? How do I make my freedom not only free but virtuous? Freedom for evil? Or is evil not free precisely because it is evil?
“Don’t get all excited,” Lucha said with a laugh. “Whatever you do, things are going to happen with or without you.”
“And so?”
“Don’t get all excited. Let life happen, Savior.”
That’s how she spoke to me, with affection and a dose of simplification that could not demolish my theoretical constructions but solidified them even more. I mean to say, reader, that Lucha’s “common sense” was necessary for my “theoretical sense” and both of them joined, perhaps, in an “esthetic sense” that was nothing other than the art of living: how one lives, why, and to what end. Big questions. Small realities. She, with a certain mystery, confronted my abstractions and I, with fewer shadows, confronted her mysteries.
Because I had no doubt that in Lucha Zapata was a mystery she did not guard zealously. She did not guard it: she canceled it. It was not possible to penetrate, in conversation with Lucha, the veil of a past revealed, perhaps, in the scars on her graceful, long-suffering body, but never in reminiscence. Lucha did not refer to her past. And I asked myself whether this wasn’t the most eloquent way to unveil it. I mean: Because of everything she did not say, I could imagine whatever I wanted and create a biography of Lucha Zapata for my own use. A piece of foolishness that, in view of the silent curtains of her nakedness, revealed her to my complete pleasure.
I believe she guessed my strategy because in the afternoons, seeing me deep in thought, she would say: “With women you never know.”
You never know… I was young and understood that youth consists of choosing what was at hand or deferring it in favor of the future. This reflection made no sense for Lucha for the simple reason that when she erased the past from her life she also eliminated the future and installed herself, as if on her mat, in an eternal present. I knew this was how she lived now: letting herself be carried along by the minute hand of life, by everything occurring in the present moment, though with references to the immediate past (the incident on the airfield, her relationship with me, so important she gave me the undeserved and somewhat absurd name of “Savior,” “Salvador”), and timid incursions into the future (“What do you want to eat, my Savior?”).
When we were lying on the mat at dawn, I liked to ask her half-captious questions to see if I could make her fall into remembering or looking ahead. What other airports have you assaulted, Lucha? Toluca, Querétaro, Guanajuato, Aguascalientes? The airport of the sun, Savior, she would reply. Didn’t you ever have a job, Lucha? I’m at leisure. I don’t need to work. Don’t you feel somehow excluded from society? I can invade society before society invades me. Do you feel an internal conflict, Lucha? I have a quarrel with the world. What do you reproach society for? I don’t want to be a perpetual debtor. That’s what you are in society. An eternal debtor.
My affection for Lucha Zapata, which by this time should be evident to the least clever reader, did not make me blind. She did everything I didn’t like. She was, let us say, a poly-drug user. Tobacco, heroin, cocaine, alcohol. When I met her she had well-stocked hiding places, so it wasn’t necessary to go out to buy anything. How had she obtained this treasure? The nugatory pact regarding the past kept me from asking what she wasn’t going to tell me. On the other hand, I came to appreciate deeply her domestic simplicity, her physical helplessness, and the mystery of her spiritual complexity.
In this way two years passed…
Part Two. Miguel Aparecido