TWENTY-FOUR
Would you believe me if I told you that more than one prisoner came out of her cell at night to kiss and dance with her jailers in some club, and that was part of the horror? Would you believe Tomasa and I did it, that sometimes, like a couple of Cinderellas, we went happily into Oliver to toss back one Chivas Regal after another, and that we also went to that mansion with adobe walls and high ceilings on a plot of land in Malloco?
Flaco took me out in his brand-new Volvo and — I almost forgot! — he took me first to Calle General Holley. There were many fine boutiques on that street back then. He gave me a lot of gifts. I had looked down on those clothes, those mirrors, those boutiques designed to flatter the skin and eyes. They didn’t mesh with the steely spirit our struggle demanded. But now I wanted to look pretty, I wanted to feel like a woman who could drive those fool men crazy. In Privilege, I chose, without doubting for a second, a pair of black pants with a matching velvet jacket and a leopard print Lycra shirt that hugged my body (the original, the saleswoman told me, was Versace). We bought a pair of dark glasses. From there we went to Mingo and found a pair of boots made of soft, shiny leather. I was delighted. I felt like a little girl getting presents from Santa Claus. Never in my years as a clandestine fighter would I have worn clothes like that. All that austerity of ours, I’m telling you, I threw it out the window. Was I turning into a whore? Me? The timid girl who’d been educated by nuns? I trembled when I felt the sensuality of those fabrics. And later, looking at the way the stockings evened out my skin, leaving only the essential geometry of my legs. The stockings made me into a Cézanne painting, I thought then. And in the Lycra shirt I looked at my breasts in the mirror as if they were my very being. I thought: if my soul existed, it would be in my breasts.
It was Flaco, as I said, who took me to Oliver. Great Dane was at a table in the back. I’d caught a glimpse of him at Central once, wearing workout clothes. Tomasa thought he was the best looking. Though, as I’ve already said she thought Flaco was more attractive, maybe, for that elegance that was so unique to him. Great Dane was with a young woman with intense, light blue eyes and brand-name clothes who smiled at him like a Siamese cat, caressing his three-day-old beard and his long, blond hair. He signaled to Flaco and left, his kitten draped over him and, enormous as he was, moving nimbly between the pub’s tightly arranged tables. He noticed me and right there, at that moment, I realized that Flaco was looking at me anxiously, and that my leopard print shirt was driving him crazy. His eyes flickered every so often to exactly where you would imagine. And it pleased me to please him and it made me move and laugh with much more grace than I actually have. I think I’m pretty ordinary, but not that night, no. That night I shone.
As we were leaving Oliver, Flaco wanted to buy a bottle of Chivas for the road. The waiter told him no. Flaco, annoyed, got up from the table and went to talk to someone. Two minutes later, a man who introduced himself very solicitously as “the manager” saw us to the door. We had with us as a gift from the house, a recently opened bottle of Chivas that we drank in the car, with no glass or ice, straight from the mouth of the bottle. We took small sips, and my tongue lapped up every drop of the golden liquor in fascination.
The first time he brought me to a dance club — it had three floors and was all the rage, on Calle Recoleta, I think — I let myself go as I had never done before. Dancing slowly to fast songs in the middle of the dance floor, taking advantage of the darkness and the closeness, I put a hand into his pocket and then lowered his zipper a little, and I slid a hand in and took hold of him right there, still dancing. “That killed me,” he would tell me later. And that swollen, thick, and firm thing was my doing, and I liked that he wanted me, and I liked him because I liked that he wanted me so much and that he was looking at me with his big eyes, tense and shining. That thing of his wanted me. And he wanted me like that, with that tremendous and always strange thing that rose up, curving at the end, for me. I was capable of making that happen. So, of course, was any other woman. That’s how men are, I know that. But at that moment it was me, and that hard thing with taut and demanding and soft skin was for me and no one else. And it was him and it wasn’t him, and it was mine and it wasn’t mine.
And later, in his Volvo, I was as I was not and he was as he was not, and I liked the feeling of being someone else and of Flaco being someone else, with those great blue eyes that shone on me and that slight smile, happy and tense at the same time, another who was him, another who was me, impassioned, with an urgent need to envelop inside me that intimate and secret Flaco that was now emerging into the light with a clumsiness that amused and gratified me and made me wait and tremble. And when he was lying on his back and I was above him, given over, and I felt him as I moved on top of him, it was agonizing that he was there and also that he wouldn’t go on being there or that he hadn’t been there before, always, and the air became thin and then living meant always wanting more air that would always be lacking.
TWENTY-FIVE
Flaco paid my cover charge. Several bills. “Some expensive place,” I thought. They gave him a key that he put in his pocket. He handed me a mask that was Zorro-style, only red, and a top hat. That made him laugh a lot. “Put all your hair up under the hat,” he told me, laughing. “I like you better with short hair,” he told me. And he kissed the nape of my neck. He wore the same disguise as I did.
Tomasa was with a friend of Flaco’s, Mauricio. He was a big man, with a blunt nose and small eyes, bald, with a big belly, a shiny, black leather jacket, and gray jeans held up by a thick belt with a buckle shaped like a horseshoe. I never really found out where he worked. We were in an old landowner’s house that had been made into a dance club, and there was darkness and champagne and, well, young boys dancing with macho men and women and girly men and manly girls embracing manly men and womanly women, and uppers and poppers, yes, and the white stuff, of course, just a few lines, and lights flashing on for a second and off again, fragmenting the bodies, music at full blast.
The men I can see around me are vigorous, self-assured, warm, and masculine; but, I don’t know why, they are also vulnerable. They prefer tight jeans, boots and black leather vests with sleeveless shirts, or nothing, underneath. A lot of them have their hair short or shaved, or long, very long, and there are masks and caps and hats. Are they truck drivers, military men, traffickers, dancers, motorcycle riders, pimps, artists? What are they playing at with such aplomb, such tenderness? The myth of the macho falls like a shadow over them. It lets them invent a role on that stage we all occupy. Because that party — I notice right away in my body that as I walk is already dancing — is happening, if it is happening, in a time that will be brief, an open and shut of the eyes, and in a space that is closed, metaphorical, dreamlike, and fleeting.
I can tell you whatever I want. Like with everything that happened in that club in Malloco. I can be someone else. That was the fascinating thing. Because there, I discovered I was not who I thought I was. Flaco Artaza took me there, as I told you. He took me, soaring in his silver Volvo with its new-car smell. Why? Why did he need to go, and with me? And can you see me there, amazed, at the black marble bar that was frankly louche, with all its liquor bottles shining and lit up in front of me, drinking a pisco sour with Flaco, who smiles as I laugh for no reason, Flaco, who is transfixed by my perfume, transfixed by my breasts that press against the Triumph bra — which we bought together, of course — and overflow, and that I look at from above? At that moment I like them so much I want to take them in my hands and caress them gently as if they were two turtledoves, two baby rabbits, two newborn fawns.