Lola, behind Doña Pair, made her way through the labyrinth of passageways, dodging from time to time a rat. The stench of wine came from every room, along with frying, rancid sweat, and excrement. If a ray of sunshine came in, it filled with dust, and its golden stain on the leaden ground was usurped by a mangy cat. No one bothered them. Carmelita lived in a room that opened onto the central patio. Her white door was framed with flowerpots filled with lilies and carnations. She’d glued a blazing heart of Jesus onto her windowpane. From within came an agreeable chirping of canaries mixed with the aroma of toasted flour.
Doña Pair opened the door, which was not locked, and without announcing herself, had Lola enter too. There, in that clean cubicle, with only a bed, a table, and a gas burner where a pot was warming, was a tiny old lady, almost a dwarf, wearing a chocolate-colored bathrobe and some high men’s boots. She had one incisor in her mouth, her eyes had lost almost all color and were a faded gray, on her head a net of fine white hairs did not hide her freckled baldness, and her hands looked like two small seas of wrinkles.
With the voice of a child, the mummy said, “Come on in, girls. I’ve got hot milk and corn porridge. Would you like some?”
She got off the bed where she’d been sitting and, caressing her guitar as if it were a spoiled cat, walked slowly toward the table, whistling like three canaries, and prepared two little plates of the sugary corn porridge. Meanwhile, the blind woman pulled out a roll of banknotes tied up with a pink thread and put it into a plaster figurine of a little man squatting down, who seemed to be defecating a peach pit.
“Thanks, Pair, for feeding my shitass there. God will give it back tripled. Oh, I see your little friend also brought her guitar! Let’s sing. After all, that’s why we came into this world.”
Lola began to play along with the old ladies, but after a few chords, she felt alone. Doña Pair and Carmelita strummed with such delicacy that almost imperceptible musical phrases arose from their instruments. She made a huge effort and managed to distinguish the beauty of the melody, a lullaby so tender, so saturated with maternal love that her eyelids became heavy, and she was about to fall asleep like a baby full of milk. She was distracted by something like a cool breeze making its way through the sunbaked grass of summer.
The old women, without moving their lips, their eyes fixed on the same infinity point, were singing. When Lola got used to that almost total absence of volume, she could listen to the words, verses as perfect as a pearl necklace, intense, revealing a sacred respect for life. Like clouds driven by the wind, the words sometimes changed rhythm and the song would acquire such force that its phrases seemed like rays of light. Then the immense calm would return, along with the oceanic sway of the rhymes. Lola began to suffer; those two ancients, luminous worms in the heart of a rotten apple, were creating an art that would not be transmitted for lack of witnesses. She did not deserve to be the only public for that marvel. That music was a national patrimony. All Chileans should know it. What a crime to allow such a heritage to be lost! Trying not to be noticed, she took a slip of paper out of her purse and tried to write down the music and the words that floated like a gold thread above the daily noise. Carmelita instantly stopped playing, as did the blind woman.
“That scratching of pencil over paper is so ugly! You’re offending the angels, my girl. If you wanted to write all they sing, there wouldn’t be enough forests to produce enough paper. You want to give others the songs you yourself don’t know how to receive. That’s laxity. You interrupted a holy rhythm. It may be that without wanting to you’ve provoked something terrible. Let’s pray that the Holy Spirit forgives the wound your pencil made in Him.”
The two old women made my aunt kneel and began to pray for her. Loud knocks shook the door.
“Open up, granny, your throat cutters are here.”
Six men, neither old nor young, in shirtsleeves, wearing muddy white sneakers and jeans whose right hand pocket was inflated by a knife, entered. They were smiling drunken smiles, and each one carried four bottles of pisco. Since there were no chairs, some sat on the edge of the bed and others on the table, their legs dangling.
“We were lucky, Doña Carmelita. We mugged a rich guy, and we’re celebrating. You’ll have to forgive us. We still have some pisco left, and we want to down it with a musical accompaniment. So, play. You know that nobody denies a poor man a song. And your friends can accompany you. To your health!”
The blind woman, used to dealing with drunken oafs, calmly adapted to the situation and, strumming her guitar, cackled out a jolly tune. The mummy accompanied her and invited Lola to throw off her stupor, whispering in her ear, “Don’t even think of putting up any resistance, girl. Sing without stopping until the wolves turn into groundhogs.”
Following the galloping rhythm of the three women, each bandit emptied a bottle of pisco with one swallow. The effect was instantaneous. Their gestures became soft. They sweated, and with swollen lips babbled incoherent phrases at the same time they made the floor shake with their heels. The jiggling went on for more than an hour. They demanded song after song, their favorite Chilean cuecas. Then, worn out, they drank half of the second bottle to get back into form. Then they demanded sailor songs, which they accompanied in their harsh voices. They went on drinking.
When they finished the other half, they began to get sad. The trio interpreted tonadas, songs from southern Chile, that talked about rain hanging from the sky like rags; about forests without owners, dying of sadness during the month of August; about swallows with clay masks. The third liter went down their throats like a funeral procession. Each swallow was a flaming coffin, and suddenly their sorrow burned off, and with their hearts turned into wounds, they began to laugh so hard it seemed they were vomiting. They rolled around on the floor, covering the tiles with spit and tears.
The most powerful took out his knife and sliced the air. They stopped laughing. Suddenly they found themselves there, crouching down, not knowing who they were or in what world they were sitting. Everything lost meaning. It was strange to be “that,” a body with head, trunk, arms, and legs. An infinitely empty instant. Ugly women playing at being scarabs and singing, far away, incomprehensible. Horrified at themselves, to be a man or a spider is equally odd. Someone made a voice that didn’t belong to him resound in order to mumble words he half understood: “Stop playing, ladies.”
The singers instantly obeyed. The satisfied killer farted. Then he smiled, compressing his lip and stretching his mouth in a grimace that seemed to split his face in two: “My fellow muggers, I think this ruin, Carmelita, has lived enough. God’s going to kill her soon, don’t you think?”
“We do!”
“Well then, why should we let that asshole have all the fun. Let’s kill her ourselves! Agreed?”
“Agreed!”
“And you, Grandma, do you agree too?”
The old lady, with her usual calm, answered, “If God decides that you are the one to finish me off, I agree.”
“Forget all that resignation, Grandma. Before I kill you, I’m going to rape you. What do you think of that?”
“I’d say I was sorry for you. I’m so ugly you’re going to suffer.”
“That’s just what I want: to add pain to the pain of being alive. Destroying the good is what counts. In this shitty world, goodness is the worst violence.”
And giving a sudden roar, he leapt on top of the old woman, pulled off her underwear, spread her legs, pushed them back over her head, and penetrated her brutally, kissing that flaccid, wrinkled mouth with his entire soul. Barking euphorically, another two jumped onto Doña Pair, splitting her black glasses and sticking their tongues into her eye sockets to lick her cataract-covered pupils. Then with two sweeps of the knife that opened two red furrows in her flesh, they ripped off her skirt and penetrated her sex and her anus simultaneously. The three remaining raped Lola. The one who got her mouth shouted, “Do a good job sucking. If you bite me, I’ll slit your throat!”