Conde obeyed and, under a mountain of pills encapsulated in plastic, phials, syringes and tubes of cream, he saw an eight by twelve-inch cardboard box.
“Take it out and look inside,” she ordered.
Conde took the box out, rested it on the sideboard and lifted the lid. A sheet of stiff white paper filled the box. When Conde extracted the paper, he realized it was a sheet of photographic paper folded in half. Not looking at the elderly lady he unfolded the huge photo and beheld a woman in her twenties, as blonde as blonde could be, a supple, smiling beauty, saved from complete nudity by garlands of gorgeous lotus flowers draped over her pubes and the nipples of her prodigious breasts.
“You’re now looking at Elsa Contreras when she was Havana’s Lotus Flower,” she said, adding, “Look this way: you’re now looking at a half dead crone by the name of Carmen Arguelles.”
16 February
Dear love:
Since I last wrote I have hardly made any headway in my search for a truth I need so badly for my own sake but I keep finding other truths to torment me.
Several days ago I went to see the wretched nosey-parker journalist your friends almost took a hand off. I found an alcoholized human wreck, in a state of permanent fear that he can only throw off by swigging hard liquor. The man refused to tell me anything, but thanks to him I did track down that bolerista who once rowed with that woman, and we talked at length about what happened and, though she was a tart from the world of singers and cabaret girls, I would almost say she was genuine. As far as she was concerned, as she said at the outset, her problem with the deceased ended the day they had the row, because she realized she was on to a loser in that war when she knew who the powerful people backing her foe were. But she assured me she got satisfaction from the four things she did say to her hypocritical face about her role as the little innocent. She never went near her again and heard next to nothing about her until she found out about her death several weeks after it happened, on her return from the performances she gave in Mexico. We spoke at length and, when she felt like confiding more, she told me almost casually something I refuse to believe, that only you can deny or endorse. According to her, she backed off from that woman forever because, a few days after they rowed, you went to her house with the black chauffeur you employed towards the end, and told her to keep well away and not to speak to her ever again if she wanted to go on singing and eating. At that moment a friend of hers (as she described him) came out of her bedroom, heard your threats and started to protest, but the black chauffeur, without saying a word, took out a pistol, put it between his eyebrows and, almost immediately, brought the pistol down on his mouth and split his lips. Then, still according to her, you said she was lucky you had come on a peaceful footing, but that they might imagine what a second visit would be like if they decided to declare war or started to talk openly about the fact you’d paid them a visit… The singer burst into tears as soon as she’d finished telling that horrible story, and do you know what I told her? I said it was all lies, and left.
Nonetheless, that woman seemed so sincere I am compelled to ask you: did something like that happen? Please tell me it didn’t, and also please tell me that the disappearance of the poor chauffeur you used to conceal our secret wasn’t also the result of actions I’d rather not imagine. Tell me, did you declare war on him when he was foolish enough to blackmail you?
I assume one often pays a very high price to find out a truth. While looking for one that still eludes me, I have come up against something else I would have preferred not to know and it showed me how much I was struggling against the current where you’d put your life after you went crazy over that woman, the cause of my unhappiness…
22 February
Dear love:
I was so saddened by my exchange with the singer that I felt I had to speak to your daughter about it and everything else I’d been thinking over recent months. We hadn’t had a conversation of any significance for several weeks, only exchanges on everyday matters, because what with my obsession and increasingly depressed state of mind, and the new responsibilities she had taken on at work, there are days when we only see each other for a few moments, if at all, over breakfast or when she’s swallowing a couple of mouthfuls of something at night.
To my surprise, your daughter seemed delighted to hear the story. She said she wasn’t surprised, she wouldn’t expect any other attitude from you, because you were always selfish, thought only about yourself and used those around you for your own ends: your parents, for their name and prestige, your wife for her money, me for my fidelity… On the other hand, you treated her and her brother like strangers despite them being of your blood, as much your children as your others, who you also used to get favours from your parents-in- law with their money and influences. And she added, as if wanting to drive me mad, given I was already a total wreck, that she’d been wondering for some time, and my story was confirmation you had eliminated or ordered that woman be eliminated because of something she asked you for, something you didn’t want to give her or simply because her presence was inconvenient and didn’t fit with your new life; she knew too many things that you preferred to bury, next to her body… Your daughter only shut up when I slapped her… But she’d already spat her poison out.
If I’d once suspected she might feel spitefully towards you, I now realize how much she hates you because of the way you denied her everything that belonged to her. It was very unpleasant to face that terrible truth, and I felt guilty that I had been so weak and told her about where she really came from. But you must realize I did so hoping she’d feel proud and confident, although in the end, as you see, I only generated more resentment. A resentment that makes her feel happy, because she possesses one more proof of your real character and, with that proof, the certainty you were the one who ordered that woman be silenced forever.
Do you know what is most painful, most cruel about this terrible revelation? That I now understand that even when I always loved you and dared defy all conventions, even gave you two children, I too was afraid of you and perhaps that’s why I was never determined enough to rebel against the role and fate you moulded for me, while you broke every promise you’d made over the years… And even now, I dare write all this only because I know this letter will never reach your hands. In fact, I would never dare to have sent it for two reasons you are well aware of: fear and love. I prefer to think out of love. Out of a love able to forgive everything.
Your Nena
Here you have me now, a human mess, living in this shitty slum, and still thinking life has been generous. Very generous. I’ve been whiplashed, like everyone else, at times viciously, but I’ve seen and enjoyed what others could never dream of, even if they lived two hundred years and didn’t sleep a single night.
Look, when I celebrated my thirteenth birthday, I discovered something that would be my salvation: I had something special, and I told myself: I’m going to use this gift of nature to survive. Go on, take a second look at that photo, a good look… Can you feel it? That something’s in my face, my hair, in my firm tits, which were like two apples when I was twelve, and above all down here, between my legs. When I was thirteen, my father died: he fell from a building where he was cleaning windows, and as he didn’t belong to a union and we didn’t have money to hire a lawyer, we didn’t get a single peso in compensation. Not even funeral expenses. My mother, little sister and I lived in a tenement three blocks from here on Indio, and were left totally skint, were almost starving to death, really starving, had nothing to eat: that hunger forced me to stop being a young girl, like that, over night. When I went into the street, men stared at me and some said things, and I thought: If God’s given me this body, the biggest sin I could commit would be to let it die, and let my mum and my sister die… I started to lay the Spaniard who owned the room where we lived so he didn’t throw us out, and then it was the turn of the butcher, the owner of the corner store and the baker, and, as it seemed to work well, I went on to the tailor and the furrier. I really never saw or felt it was at all dirty or immoral, because when I did it I felt good: I liked giving men a good time, and thought it was wonderful when they gave me one too. So, as easy as pie and without guilty feelings or any shit like that, because as the wise man said, the one who seemed to know what he was talking about: the best thing about being a whore is that you work on your back in bed and in the worst scenario, if you don’t earn much, at least you get something hot in your belly…
By the age of fifteen I knew all there was to know about men, what they need and what you must do to soften them up, what they like and sometimes don’t dare ask for, and most important of all: I learned how to make them think they fuck better than anyone else and make them feel happy when they give you money and things for one little fuck… That’s why I told myself, right, you can get more than your food and clothing out of this, you could turn professional and earn real money if you could get to people who pay for a good night between the sheets without
