Santiago swayed with earthquakes and the political upheavals that would fracture the young Unidad Popular. In the air, an ominous fog thick with the smell of gunpowder and the rattle of pots, rich señoras banging a duet with their bracelets and jewels. Those blonde ladies shrieked for a coup d’état, a military turn to put an end to this Bolshevik scandal. Looking them over, the workers grabbed their bulges, offering sex, laughing their heads off, laughing with every tooth, with every free breath they happily breathed lining up for lunch in front of the UNCTAD. A few locas squeezing in line, pretended to lose their vouchers, digging in their boho bags, pulling out tissues and cosmetics, until they found their coupons with triumphant squeals, with lascivious glances, with quick groping fingers that slid down the sweaty bodies. Those proletariat muscles waiting in line for their trays at the people’s kitchen in that long-ago December 1972. They were all happy, chatting about Música Libre, el lolo Mauricio, his olive mouth and Romeo haircut. His bell-bottom jeans, so snug around his hips, suctioned to his little bouquet of illusions. All of the locas loved him and all were his secret lovers. I saw him. He said this to me. I bumped into him just yesterday. They rushed to invent stories about TV’s bachelor prince, saying he was one of ours, had a touch of lavender, one even swore she’d bring him to the New Year’s party. To the big spread promised by la Palma, that rough loca who ran a chicken stand in La Vega and who, trying to pass for chic, had invited all of Santiago to her end-of-year fiesta. She said she’d kill twenty turkeys so the locas would get stuffed and not leave bitching. Because she was happy with Allende and Unidad Popular, she said this New Year’s even the poor would eat turkey. And so the rumor ran, her party would be one to remember.
The whole world was invited: the poor locas, las locas from Recoleta, las locas feigning middle-class, las Blue Ballet locas, las locas from la Carlina, las locas working la calle de Huérfanos selling sex to the night, la Chumilou and her travesti gang, the stylish queens from Coppelia, and la Pilola Alessandri. They all met on the UNCTAD patio to plan the evening’s attire. The ruffled shirt, the Saint-Tropez belt, the striped pants, no, better yet, the wide-legged ones with pleats like a maxi, plus the clogs, and, on top of it all, a mink coat, sighed la Chumilou. You mean rabbit fur, pretty, because I don’t think you have a mink. And you, princess, what color’s yours? I don’t have one, said la Pilola Alessandri, but Mother has two. I’d have to see them. Which, the white or the black? Both, said la Chumilo, her voice a dare. The white one to bid goodbye to ‘72, which was a party for us broke maricones. And the black to ring in ‘73, which, with so much fucking pan banging, seems to be coming hard and heavy. La Pilola Alessandri, having offered her coats, couldn’t back out. So that night, the last of the year, she arrived at the UNCTAD in a taxi and, after kissing her hellos, unveiled her mother’s stolen furs, saying they were authentic, her father had bought them in la Casa Dior in Paris, and he’d kill her if anything happened to them. But the locas weren’t listening, wrapping themselves in the furs, voguing and catwalking to the bus stop, making a to-do over how they hadn’t eaten, not even a nibble, which, for that matter, neither had la Pilola who, in the drama of procuring her mother’s coats had missed the family banquet’s lobster and caviar, and, her stomach in a knot, was as starving and desperate as anyone to reach la Palma’s and her turkeys on their spit.
Crossing in front of the precinct, the rich queens hurried along not wanting any problems, but the pigs shouted something anyway. So la Chumilou stopped and slipping the mink off her shoulder, she took out her fan, and, batting it, said she was ready for the night. Afterwards, in the bus, she didn’t stop showing off, dragging the coat down the aisle, playing stewardess. Singing a dirty cuplé, turning the trip into stand-up with punch lines the others, inflamed by the summer night, shouted back. When they arrived, there wasn’t a scrap of turkey; a punchbowl of wine mixed with fruit and a smattering of gnawed canapés sprinkled the table. La Palma, apologizing continuously, ran from one side to the other because the stylish queens had arrived: the “it” girls, the sophisticates, the jet set disembarking the plane. Those blonde snobs who snubbed her in la calle de Huérfanos, the same locas who hated Allende and his Popular Front. Girls spilling over with pearls and tears because those bums had confiscated mommy’s country estate. La Astaburuaga, la Zañartu, and la Pilola Alessandri, such gossips, such vipers, so elegant in their mink coats. In minks like la Taylor, like la Dietrich, they arrived in Recoleta by bus, imagine. The neighborhood emptied out to catch a glimpse of them, of those ladies, shiny as movie stars, models out of Paula magazine. And the people who’d lived there forever were stunned, without words, as they watched the girls enter la Palma’s house for that coliza party she’d been talking about for months. Speechless, as the girls, enfurred in the summer heat, looked at the house with nausea, saying sideways: what chic decor, girl, pointing to the plaster candelabrum adorning the table, the shabby table with its plastic tablecloth and its chicken bones and crumbs. La Palma, not knowing where to put herself, spewed explanations, saying again how there’d been a mountain of food: twenty turkeys, crates of champagne, salads, desserts galore. But those common locas didn’t leave a thing, they were so starved, they’d eaten everything. They’d eaten as if a war were coming.
Spinning all night, queer cumbias splashed the first sunrise of ‘73. When everyone cut loose with fresh bottles of pisco and carafes of wine the rich locas sent for, class nuances were lost among the toasts, hugs, and caprices unfolding beneath the patio’s balloons and streamers. Slum alliances and lowly seductions, ass pinches and handshakes from the neighborhood workers who’d come to gawk at the shiny pompadour girls, friends of the hostess. Digs and jabs and fresh allusions to the absent feast sizzling into laughter. In the quiet between songs, la Pilola shouted, they stole your turkeys, girl! And la Palma fell back to explaining, exhibiting the cemetery of bones discarded in the middle of the table. At first, there were the hostess’ tomato-red blushes and apologies when a cumbia ended and the rich girls would shout, ration out that turkey, girl, but, later, the alcohol and the tipsiness turned her shame into a party game. The locas collected bones and stacked them neatly on the table into an enormous pyramid, a common grave they illumined with candles. Nobody knew where some messy loca found a tiny Chilean flag to stick at the apex of the sinister sculpture. Then la Pilola Alessandri got upset, and said with indignation that it showed a lack of respect for the army who had given so much for the nation. That the country was a rabble-rousing disgrace under Unidad Popular who had everyone dying of hunger. That the common locas didn’t know a thing about politics and didn’t have any respect, not even for the flag. And that she, for one, couldn’t stay a minute longer, so they should give her her minks because she was going home. What minks, girl? replied la Chumilou, fanning herself. We common locas wouldn’t know what one looked like. And in this heat? In full summer? You’d have to be very stupid to wear a pretty fur. So then the posh queens realized it had been awhile since anyone had seen either of the fine furs. They called for the hostess who, drunk, was still collecting bones to add to her monument to hunger. They looked in every corner, stripped all the beds, asked the neighbors, but no one remembered seeing minks flying above Recoleta’s tin roofs. When la Pilola couldn’t take any more, she threatened to call her uncle, the comandante, if her mother’s coats didn’t appear. But all of las locas looked at her skeptically, knowing she’d never do so for fear her honorable family would catch her red-handed. La Astaburuaga, la Zañartu, and a few other arrivistes, in solidarity, left indignantly vowing never to set foot in that plebian place again. And while they waited in the street for a taxi to whisk them from that dust bowl, the music came back on full blast in la Palma’s shack, the pelvises went back to grinding, and “Mambo N° 8” announced the start of the drag show. Then, just as suddenly, the music cut out again and everyone shouted in unison: They stole your mink, girl. Ration out that mink.
The first sunrise of ‘73 was a faded chiffon draped over the open mouths of the colizas sleeping sprawled across la Palma’s house. Cigarette ashes everywhere, below the trellis, trampled garlands. Soft groaning and strings of words came from the disheveled beds. Glasses, half-full, swayed with the rhythm of lovemaking, quiet giggling recalled the stolen minks. And that gap of light entering through the windows, that light floating like smoke through the wide-open door. As if the house were a skull illuminated from outside. As if las locas slept soundly in a five-skull hotel. As if the bone house erected in the center of the table were an altar to the coming future, an omen, the New Year horoscope winking black tears in the wax of the candles, at the point of snuffing out, the point of extinguishing the last spark lighting up the little paper flag crowning the shrine.
Since then, the years have fallen like trees in the demolition of a forest, burying the national party. The coup d’état came and its snowstorm of bullets made las locas stampede from the UNCTAD’s flowery patios, never to dance there again. They looked for other spots, gathering in the shopping malls recently inaugurated by the dictatorship. The parties continued, more private, quieter, with fewer guests, the rule abiders subdued by the crypt of the curfew. Some of the clubs stayed open because the military regime never repressed the gay scene like in Argentina or Brazil. Maybe well-off homosexuality was never a subversive enough problem to upset their tidy morality. Maybe there were too many locas on the right supporting the regime. Perhaps the odor of dead bodies was quieted by the French perfume of the maricas from fancy neighborhoods. Regardless, the mortuary stench of the dictatorship was outdone by AIDS, which made its debut in the ‘80s.
The only thing left of that abridged emancipation is the UNCTAD, that big cement elephant which for many years housed the military. Then democracy went about reclaiming its plazas and patios from which the sculptures donated by Unidad Popular artists had been removed. Also its enormous auditoriums and conference rooms, where today they hold forums and seminars on queers, AIDS, utopias, and tolerance.
The only thing left of that party is a photo, washed-out cardboard in which the faraway coliza faces are exposed to the gaze of the present. The photo isn’t good, but the sexual militancy that defined the group assaults you. Framed in the distance, their mouths are extinguished laughs, echoes of gestures frozen by the flash of a final toast. Retorts, sayings, smiles, and sneers, jokes hanging from their lips about to fall, irony about to drop in the venom of their kisses. The photo isn’t good, it’s blurry, but the joke of being out of focus dispels forever the stability of memory. The photo is blurry, perhaps because of the ruined tulle of AIDS, veiling the double disappearance of almost all of las locas. The shadow is a delicate cellophane bandage lassoing the waist of la Pilola Alessandri, who is propping her queen-ass-hip up on the right side of the table. She purchased the epidemic in Nueva York and was the first to wear it, an exclusive brand name, the trendiest way for gays to die. The latest funeral fashion that slimmed you like no diet could. Leaving you thin and pale as a model from Vogue, as slender and chic as the sigh of an orchid. AIDS cinched her body and she died so gaunt, so gathered, so slender and beautiful in the aristocratic economy of tight-fisted death.
The photo isn’t good, you can’t tell if it’s black and white or if the color’s fled to a tropical paradise. You can’t see the blushes on las locas or on the plastic mantel’s droopy roses: they were washed out in the rain and the floods, while the photo hung from a nail in la Palma’s shack. It’s difficult to decipher its chromatics, to imagine the colors in the shirts dampened by cold winter frosts. Just a halo of humid yellow livens up the photo. Just these wet tracks burning across the paper, buckets of rain in the sepia stain across la Palma’s chest. Piercing her, pinning her like an insect in the butterfly garden of working-class AIDS. It stung her in Brazil, after she’d sold the chicken stand in La Vega, saying she couldn’t take the soldiers anymore, she was going to shimmy on the sands of Ipanema. Why else is one a loca, if not to live in a carnival and samba through one’s days? Besides with the dollar at 39 pesos, the carioca piñata was close enough to hit. She’d give her life to be queen for a night. And so she left, proclaiming in the airport, imitating the rich girls: you are what you spend.
And AIDS was generous with la Palma, who went, frankly, on a walkabout, rolling around with every hungry lost soul who asked her for sex. You could almost say she was served it on a platter passed down the horny streets of Copacabana until everyone was sated. La Palma slurped up the Kaposi serum to the very last drop, stuffing herself on her own death without a second thought. Burning with fever, she returned to the sand, sharing her infectious confetti with the slackers, panhandlers, and lepers she met in the palm shade of her Black Orpheus. The virus, drunk on samba and orgies, swelling her face like a clear balloon, like a condom inflated by the huffing and puffing of her compassionate anus. Her philanthropic anus setting off tambourines and kettledrums in the ardor of her AIDS-filled diarrhea. As if it were a party, a samba school for dying in sequins lost in the tomb of the favelas, in free-floating African perfume, wetting the pavement jet black on Atlántida, on la calle de Rio, always willing to sin and settle up in flesh for the pleasures of her delirium.
La Palma came home and died happy in unbearable agony. She bade her farewells while listening to the music of Ney Matogrosso, murmuring her saudades before parting. We’ll see each other at another party, she said sadly, looking at the photo nailed to the boards of her misery. And before closing her eyes, she could see herself so young, almost a blushing virgin raising her glass and a handful of bones that summer of ‘73. She looked so beautiful in the mirror of the photo, wrapped in la Pilola’s white mink, she looked so chic in the pearly halo of its fur, making the bony hand of Death stay while she looked at herself. She made Death wait, as she held onto one more minute of life, one more minute of reveling in her enfurred narcissus. Then she closed her eyelids and she let go and floated in the silk of memory.
The photo isn’t good, snapped in a hurry to catch the mess of locas circling the table, almost all of them cloudy from striking a pose too quickly in their crazy desire for transcendence. It looks like the last supper of coliza apostles, where the only thing in focus is the pyramid of bones in the center of the table. It looks like a Biblical fresco, a watercolor of Maundy Thursday in which you can practically smell the wine carafe la Chumilou is holding like a Chilean holy chalice. She’s put herself in the center, assuming the place of Christ minus the halo. Standing on tippy-toe in the twenty centimeters of her high heels, la Chumilou, flaunting her travesti glam. La Pilola’s black mink just slipping down the whiteness of her shoulders, an animal embrace warming her fragile heart, the delicate sigh of the local virgin. All tucked in like a rosebud cupped by the sepals of the mink. Something of a film-still in the way she’s offering her cheek to receive a kiss. Just a kiss, la Chumilou seems to say to the camera snatching her features. Just a kiss of flash to hail her with shine, to leave her dazzled by the lightening of her own reflection. It’s a lying mirror, the alter-image of a real proletariat diva burdened with obtaining the kilo of bread and tomatoes for her family’s breakfast. Ready to fight every sodomite hooker on the corner, ready to defend her turf. La Chumilou was fierce, the other travestis said. La Chumilou was ready to knife someone who might steal a client. And she was the favorite, the most sought-after, the singular comfort of bored husbands who got hard on the smell of horny maricón. So the AIDS stinger chose her as the bait for its miracle fishing. Because she sucked off everyone, because she was always hungry, insatiable for fucking under a moon made of money. A sweet tooth, she didn’t notice there were no condoms left in her purse. There were so many bills, so much money, so many dollars that gringo paid her. So much make up, electric razors, and depilatory wax. So many dresses and new shoes, she could toss last season’s pumps. So much bread, eggs, and pasta to bring home. There were so many dreams squeezed into that wad of dollars. So many little brothers with open mouths that haunted her night after night. So many decayed molars in the mouth of her mother, who had no money for the dentist, and who waited for la Chumi in an insomniac dawn wracked with pain. There were so many debts, so many school fees, so much to pay for, because she wasn’t indulgent, the other colas said. La Chumilou made do with little, hardly any American clothing, a cheap blouse, a skirt, a tatty scrap of clothing her mother touched up, sewing on a bit of lace here, a bit of sparkle, dressing up la Chumi’s work uniform. Telling her to be careful, not to have sex with just anyone, not to forget to wear the condoms she bought herself, suffering the shame of asking for them at the pharmacy around the corner. But that night there wasn’t one condom left, and the impatient gringo, ready to mount her, was offering a green fan of dollars. So la Chumi closed her eyes and, stretching out her hand, caught hold of the wad of bills. Her luck couldn’t be so bad that just this once, just this one time in many, many years of selling live flesh, the shadow would hit her. And that’s how la Chumi, without wanting it, crossed the tapestry-lined arcade of the plague, sinking slowly in the viscous waters, claiming a one-way ticket on its sinister boat. An inevitable kidnapping, she said. Besides, I’ve lived a lot, my twenty-five years have been long ones, death comes to me, and I take it like a vacation. Just bury me dressed as a woman. In my work clothes, my silver pumps, and black wig. In my lucky red satin dress. No jewels, diamonds, or emeralds, I leave them to my mama so she can fix her teeth. The farm and the houses on the coast are for my little brothers, who deserve a real future. And to las colas travestis, I leave the fifty-room mansion the Sheikh gave me. So they can start a retirement home for the elders. I don’t want anyone to grieve, no weeping, none of those floral wreaths drunkenly bought at the last minute in some flower shop. Even worse, those cheap evergreen wreaths that never dry out as if one were never done dying. At the most, put a bowing orchid on my chest, sprinkled with rainwater, and buy some big electric altar candles. Let there be candles. Many candles. Hundreds of candles on the floor, on all sides, descending the stairs, sparkling on la calle San Camilo, on la calle Maipú, la calle Vivaceta, and on La Sota de Talca. As many candles as in a blackout, as many as the disappeared. Many little flames splashing wet light on the poorest part of the city. Sequins of fire on our rainy streets. So many, like pearls slipped from a necklace, thousands of candles like coins from a broken piggy bank. So many candles like stars pulled out of cleavage. So many, like sparks from a crown to illuminate my absence. I need that warm glow to look as if I’ve just fallen asleep. Still a bit rosy after the bat kiss of death. Almost unreal in the flickering halo of candles, almost sublime submerged below crystal. I want them to say: la Chumi looks like she’s sleeping, like sleeping beauty, a virgin serene and intact, scars erased by the miracle of death. No trace of the sickness, no hematomas, no pustules, no bags under my eyes. I want a no makeup look, although they’ll have to do my whole face. Like la Ingrid Bergman in Anastasia, like la Betty Davis in Jezebel, just a sleeping kid really, waiting for something to happen. And here’s hoping I die before daybreak, maybe when we’re returning to the palace after dancing all night. No masses, no priests, no boring sermons. No poor little cola, forgive him Father for entering your holy kingdom. No crying, no fainting, no dramatic goodbyes. Let me go satisfied, generously, nothing outstanding. I don’t need their sad speeches or the kisses love denied me . . . I don’t even need their love. Look at me as I go, I am crossing the foam. Look at me for the last time, enviously, because I’m not coming back. Luckily, I’m not coming back. I feel silk drenched in death covering my eyes, and, in my final moment, I was happy. Don’t take anything from me now, because I never had anything. And even that I lost.
La Chumilou died the same day democracy arrived, her humble funeral procession intersected with the crowds celebrating the triumph of the NO vote on la Alameda. It was difficult to cut through that mass of painted kids waving the NO flag with its little rainbow, shouting, chanting ecstatically, hugging las locas who accompanied la Chumi’s funeral procession. And for a moment, mourning was mistaken for happiness, sadness for carnival. As if death paused its carriage to dance the last cueca. As if you could still hear, if faint, la Chumi’s voice as she learned of the victory. Give my regards to democracy. And it seemed democracy returned her regards in the hundreds of shirtless kids who climbed the hearse, hopping onto its roof, hanging from its windows, shaking cans of spray paint and scrawling the vehicle with graffiti, Goodbye Tyranny. Hasta nunca Pinochet. Death to the Jackal. Like that, in front of the horrified eyes of la Chumi’s mother, the hearse became an allegory flanked by a rebellious second-line which accompanied the funeral for several blocks. After which the funeral procession continued its mournful march, its pachyderm’s trot through the deserted streets to the cemetery. Among the floral wreaths, someone hung a banner of the rainbow victorious. A white banner shot across with colors that accompanied la Chumi to her winter garden.
Maybe the photo from la Palma’s party is the only vestige of that era of social utopia, when las locas felt the palpitations of their future emancipation. Weaving through the crowds, they took part in the euphoria. Those on the right, as much as those on Allende’s left, beat saucepans, stepping into view from their place of public anonymity with timid assertions, whispers which would become the speeches of the “minor” story in the struggle for legalization.
Of the group in the photo, almost no one is still alive. The pallid yellow of the paper is a faded sun, deathly skin illuminates the daguerreotype. All the faces look flecked with purulent drizzle. The dirtiness of the flies painted beauty marks on cheeks later painted with tumors. All the smiles chirping from the balcony are handkerchiefs waving goodbye from an invisible prow. Before the millennial boat docked in 2000, before the legalization of Chilean “homosexuality,” before the gay militancy of the ‘90s, before that masculine à la mode was enforced like a Salvation Army uniform, before democracy’s neoliberalism sanctioned gay marriage. Long before these privileges, the photo of las locas from that New Year’s glints like something shiny in a sunken world. When the obscene crystal of their laughter was still subversive, scrambling gender expectations. In the faded image, you can measure the vast distance, years of dictatorship virulently straightening out their gestures. You can see the metamorphosis of queerness at the turn of the century; the death of la loca covered in AIDS sores, but her final blow coming from the imported gay standard, so trendy, so penetrating in its salesmanship: the new macho gay. The photo bids goodbye to the century of radiant plumage, to las locas still not straightened out, still folkloric in their illicit glamour. They look like an archaic frieze before the invasion of the gay Patrón. Where the native territory still hadn’t received the contagion of the plague like a re-colonization through bodily fluids. The photo shows a smiling merry-go-round, a dance of laughing sparrows so young, just teenagers with their dislocated way of putting the world back together. A new tribe defining their rites. Other deliriums baroquely enriching the discourse of Latin American queerness. Back then, the Chilean maricada weaved the future, daydreaming about their emancipation, arms linked with other social causes. The “homosexual man” or “mister gay,” a construction of narcissistic prowess, didn’t fit the undernourished reflection of las locas. Those bodies, those muscles, those biceps arriving in foreign magazines, were a First World Olympus, pure gym class, a bodybuilding regime in ecstasy over its own reflection. A neo-blond conquest catching fire with the social climbing jet set, las locas Malinches, the princesses who copied New York style and brought it to this backyard of the world. Along with that walking cast of Superman, in the aseptic packaging of his white skin, so hygienic, reeking with capitalist charm. Very different from the lackluster skin tones of the local geography. Inside that Apollo, under his smooth marble, came the immune deficiency syndrome, a traveler, a tourist who planned to just pass through Chile, and the sweet wine of our blood made him stay.
Surely, the common finale la Palma, la Pilola Alessandri, and la Chumilou shared, proved AIDS was a propagandist free of class prejudice. A lethal generosity stretching out its hand, doling out its secret supply. As if to say: There’s enough for everybody, don’t crowd. It won’t run out, don’t worry. There’s plenty of passion and agony to come, until they find a cure.
Maybe the little stories and the epics never run parallel, minor destinies continue to be regulated by the politics of a market always stalking any fugitive. And on this ultra-controlled map of Modernism, they detect fissures and repair them with the same cement, the same mixture of corpses and dreams lying beneath the scaffolding of the neoliberal pyramid. Maybe the last light in the eyes of la Palma, la Pilola Alessandri, and la Chumilou was desire. Or rather three desires still searching for the minks lost at that party. Because nobody ever found out where la Pilola’s chic furs landed. They vanished into the summer night air like a stolen dream keeps constructing its story beyond nostalgia. Especially during the seropositive winter of las locas, when the white cotton of the epidemic turned their feet to ice.
La Regine of Aluminios El Mono
Who knew the plague was a firefly drifting through Santiago’s suburban slums, a dangerous star replacing the numb alley lights. The dying half-light barely enough to see the squalor of rags, cardboard, and fruit peels around which worked the high heels of la Regine. La loca stumbled half-drunk, half-nauseous from the AZT that cost a fortune. And that’s getting it contraband, half-price under the counter. Sacred AZT, the gasoline to keep the party on the fourth floor kicking a little longer. La Regine’s palace was always in full swing, lit by the living red of the neon sign for Aluminios El Mono. As if it were a movie from the ‘50s, where the window’s always flooding with light flashing between kisses, painting each caress with its florescence. Or rather, slapping a price tag on every touch with its capitalist propaganda. And although the tenement house quaked during earthquakes, and its piss-sprayed walls suffered from wear, la Regine lived the rest of her stigma, “Como si fuera esta noche la última vez.” As if at any moment the ‘50s movie would end with a wave from the girl in the window. And only the neon of Aluminios El Mono would be left shimmering on-screen to tell her story.
The whole Barrio Mapocho knew and loved la Regine’s walk when purse in hand, she wiggled between the stalls at La Vega Central. Just across the sweaty street, sweaty as the chests of the dockers yelling at her: Regine, I’m horny. Regine, tonight’s the night. Salve Regina, squeezing the fruit in her little snail hand, laughing and chatting to the women with tits big as melons saying: You’re so skinny, Regine. What diet are you on? Where’s your ass? Here take these oranges to make some juice and rest. Don’t work so hard, the men will still be there, they won’t die out. But la Regine knew it wasn’t from dieting and it wasn’t the men; she was the one dying with every giggle, with every joke she catcalled back, flirtily biting an apricot. She was the one fading, like the color of the cherries hanging from her ears. She was the one drifting away with the scent of sweet cinnamon mingled with the oregano on the pizza her man liked.
That’s her, la Regine, queen of seafood stalls and fish made iridescent by her travesti siren charm. What can I get for you, princess? The men asked, hands full of scales. Wouldn’t you like this red conger? Look how juicy. You don’t want a few shellfish, good for a hangover? Or a few pink barnacles for the little monkey from Aluminios El Mono? You could hear music coming from the fourth floor until daybreak. It was Palmenia Pizarro with her cruel little waltz, that famous, “En vano quieres matar mi orgullo. No has visto ni verás llanto en mis ojos,” whispered la Regine hooked to her military man, singing to him softly, whispering the song in his ears, tan from his buzzcut, mark of his low rank, but they said he had a big bayonet. “Y dicen que le hace pero no le hace, tan chiquitito y quiere casarse” to la loca because she shines you like a trophy. Not even his mother had his underpants so white. Bleaching, scrubbing, she got the smell of feet out of the kid, who now looked pretty and fresh when the military gave him leave. When he’d go out for ice cream with la Regine in the suffocating La Vega afternoon.
He was the only one who kept visiting her after the dictatorship fell. The only skinny buzzcut la Regine claimed as an official lover, after having gone through the troop’s entire roster. Through rows of conscripts who entered her anus at a lively march. And left lightly brushed by the stricken flag of AIDS.
Truckloads of men unloaded their boiling gunpowder in the palace of Aluminios El Mono. Night after night, there was spillage for all; casserole à la asshole at daybreak for the horny troops. At all hours, at midnight, at dawn, when the curfew was a glass bell over the city, when a shout would break the bell to smithereens and bullets would rain down on the residents. When that same shout splattered the crystal with blood. The red from the fourth floor was the only lighthouse for the patrols tired of beating people to repression’s drumbeat. So the lieutenant in charge sent a buzzcut to la Regine’s to ask if they might pay a visit, if the kids could come and rest a bit, that they’d bring a bottle of pisco, she shouldn’t go to any trouble. But la Regine took the trouble. Making a soup from scratch, a wake-the-dead, as they called the hot broths she made for the soldiers. With plenty of onion and garlic, to make their cocks stand up. After which, they’d each march to a room with a loca. Everybody except Sergio, that Southern buzzcut, black as seaweed. But he’d play hard to get, saying he was tired, he wanted to sleep, that he’d rather stay in the stairwell, cold as shit, teeth chattering against teeth, before he’d buttfuck a maricón.
He was the only one who didn’t drink pisco, he smoked and smoked with fury, chewing the smoke, filling the whole place with smoke to blot out the erotica lining la Regine’s sofas. As if he didn’t want to see, as if he wanted to veil the Sistine Chapel of Sodomy with smoke. As if he wanted to avoid the temptation of pink asses swallowing bayonets. Because Sergio never wanted to be in the military, he hated the army and was there because he had to be. Maybe that’s why he said again and again that he was tired, wouldn’t they please fuck off, these locas grabbing him, asking, But why are you sad? What happened? Would a blow job help? They wouldn’t leave him be, waggling their asses, following him everywhere; until la Regine shouted for them to leave him alone. If he didn’t want it, he didn’t want it. Forget about him. There’s a bevy of buzzcuts to take your pleasure with, stop bothering that poor kid. I’m not so poor, replied Sergio looking at her squarely. I have a conscience. And what’s that, pretty boy? La Regine, hands on her hips, with her Chinese dressing robe open revealing a flat nipple. I have feelings. But this is the house of feelings, corazón. You don’t understand. And what is it I’d need to understand, huh? The things going on. What things? As I see it, everything’s fine. I’m fine as hell. You don’t find me pretty? La Regine kneaded her shaved nipple. I’m talking about other things. What things, come, tell me. Sergio’s voice choked and he couldn’t respond, dodging la Regine’s piercing look. Tell me then, what are you afraid of? What happened to you? Tell me, I’m as silent as a tomb.
Come here, said Sergio, pulling her toward the window, to the windowsill red with neon from Aluminios El Mono. Santiago had gone missing in a sea of asphalt. In the distance, the sparkle of fires declared an end to the night’s protest. Explosions, gunshots, and barking broke the lead weight air. You don’t see that? asked Sergio pointing with his eyes toward a horizon sleepless from the drum roll of shooting. Sounds pretty, said la Regine sadly, we could dance to it. But I’m not wearing heels, and I only dance in heels. Wait a sec, I’ll be right back. And she disappeared the same moment a bomb cut the power, and everything went black. In the house, las locas shouted Viva Chile, tying themselves into horny knots with the men, protectors of the patria. Everything’s ok, everything’s ok, shouted the lieutenant, petting the smooth back of a young loca. The terrorists, my lieutenant, won’t let us fu . . . , excuse me, live in peace.
When the laughing died down, Sergio went back to looking at the city, more impenetrable now in the swamp of the blackout. The window had lost its glowing frame, and the extinguished neon left only the skeleton of the logo’s monkey imprinted on the tragic sky. The howl of an ambulance made him jump at the same moment he saw a yellow light traveling down the hallway. A candle making a halo around the made-up face of la Regine wearing black thigh-highs and spike heels. Now we dance, she whispered in his ear, sticking the tip of her tongue into its waxy wrinkles. Sergio let her lick to drown out the drums of gunpowder, let her suck to stop the screams of women grabbing for their men as he pushed them to the vans with the butt of his gun. And he let la Regine push at him with her hot saliva to not hear the moaning of the ripping nylon on the nightshirts of the women he separated from their families. Now, the tip of her tongue moved across his temple and her hand found his virile flesh. He removed her hand brusquely, but he let la Regine’s tongue tickle his cheek. Because it was like the tongue of a dog that cleans the night’s wounds, its abyss of corpses, still alive, licking the hands stiff from the gun. That warm tongue was a wet towel lullabying the tense muscles of the chin. A domestic animal massaging his marble cheekbone, where a single tear slithered. Only one drop falling from his cramped heart. A single bead that clouded his vision and wound slowly down his face until it met her tongue which swallowed it. As if la Regine had drunk his shame, without talking, without saying a word, without even making a sound, her gossipy tongue kept tracing Sergio’s sad face. Like a paintbrush she drew his mouth torn by bitterness. His mouth tight, he let her paint with her bird of saliva. That salty paintbrush kissing his eyes and his forehead. And when he was calm, la Regine peeled herself from Sergio’s body with a damp look, avoiding his eyes, which in the dark continued to shine. That’s enough, she said to him after a moment, making space between them. Now we talk.
Nobody knew what Sergio said to la Regine that night, but nobody came to interrupt them. Patrols kept arriving to relax in the palace of Aluminios El Mono until dawn, which found them all naked, tied up in cum soaked sheets, each wrapped around una loca. The pale morning light entered through the curtains evaporating the petals of the orgy. Cigarette butts and half-drunk glasses everywhere. Everywhere fragments of bodies poking out of the sodomite mess. An arm wrapped around a stomach, a leg disappearing over the abyss of the bedside. A brown torso with the scribble of a loca spilling across the chest. Some glutes peeking out from the sheets’ drapery and dripping with the troop’s proletarian serum. An open hand that had dropped a noisemaker to grab something and, empty and lifeless, retained the gesture. Pairs of legs braided together, rubbing the sandpaper of their hair in a dirty mambo. Body parts and cadavers glued to the fuzzy canvas of sheets. Cadavers with painted mouths wrapped around their executioners. Still panting, still stretching out a hand to catch the deflated cannon in the ejaculated war. Still alive, incomplete, floating beyond the window floating into the city’s tubercular haze which dawned on the brown smoke of the protest.
They were the party’s dead, bags of skin wrung out by the spasms of climax. Limbs in repose that jolted to life at the sun’s first rays worriedly asking the time. Searching for their uniforms, camouflage shirts and pants mixed up with spike heels and panties, a gun crowned with a blonde wig. They came to their senses, cleaning out the helmets used as ashtrays. Here and there and to the window, the crude cotton underpants the motherland supplied. They fought to find their own, identifying them by the color of the pubes. There was a redhead from the north, a Mapuche from Arucanía, an albino with reddish eyes who never found his sunglasses, and ran through the rooms shaking his limp and enormous baton. In the shuffle the sergeant asked about Sergio. They said he was sleeping in the truck. In the truck? Yes, downstairs, in the truck, answered la Regine opening her legs so a skinny and inexperienced kid could pull out. But Sergio and you . . . ? Sergio and I are friends, that’s all. You aren’t going to stay for breakfast? And la Regine went into the kitchen to boil water, leaving the sergeant with his question hanging.
Long after the end of the dictatorship, the lieutenant and the troop would come to understand the platonic love between Sergio and la Regine. When the cramps and cold fevers of colitis gave them a positive vantage on the epidemic. By then, Madame Regine was already under the earth, planted like a fruit tree, she received the respects of the entire neighborhood of La Vega on the silver day of her funeral. That day all of the stalls were empty, and a snowfall of petals fell from the fourth floor when the dockers carried down the coffin. La Regine was so heavy, the poor thing swelled up, and we had to solder the box so it wouldn’t drip, said the grandmas. But the dirty teardrops fell all the same and remained on the stairs and street a long time after. Purple stains that the people circled with candles as if they were dark miracles. Nothing else was discovered of Sergio, he was with her until her last day, when la Regine asked they leave the two of them alone for an hour. Outside, las locas, plastered against the door, tried to listen, but nada. Not a sigh, not a peep. Not even the creaking of the cot. Until several months after the burial, when a loca cleaning found the dry condom with Sergio’s semen, and she went to bury it at la Regine’s grave.
The Death of Madonna
She was the first one struck by the mystery in San Camilo. Around here, almost all the travestis are infected, but the clients come anyway, it seems they like it more, that’s why they want it without a condom.
She called herself Madonna, she used to have another name. But when she saw the gringa on TV she fell in love, went half-crazy imitating her, copying her gestures, her smile, her way of moving. La Madonna had a Mapuche face, she was from Temuco, that’s why we teased her, we called her Madonna Peñi, Madonna Curilagüe, Madonna Pitrufquén. But she didn’t get mad, perhaps that’s why she dyed her hair blonde, blonde almost white. But the mystery had already weakened her hair. The peroxide burned her roots, and her brush filled up with hair. Her hair fell out in locks. We said she looked like a mangy dog, but she never wore a wig. Not even the gorgeous platinum one we gave her for Easter, which cost us a fortune, all of the travestis scraping our coins together for months, peso by peso, to buy it downtown. Just so la linda could go back to work and pull out of her depression. But, proud, she thanked us with tears in her eyes, and, holding the wig to her heart, said stars couldn’t accept such gifts.
Before the mystery, she had the most beautiful hair, the bitch, she washed it every day and would sit in the doorway brushing it dry. We’d say to her: Get inside girl, the patrol’s coming, but she didn’t care. She was never afraid of the pigs. She’d be cocky whenever they’d stop her, shouting that she was an artist and not a murderer like them. So they gave it to her hard, beating her until she was crumpled on the pavement, and la loca didn’t shut up, she kept shouting at them until their van was out of sight. They’d leave her soft as pounded quince, bruises covering her back, her sides, her face. Giant welts she couldn’t cover with makeup. But she’d laugh. They hit me because they love me, she’d say with those pearly whites which later fell out one by one. After that, she didn’t want to laugh anymore, she gave herself to drink, she’d drink everything until she was sprawled out drunk. It was hard to watch.
Without hair, without teeth, she wasn’t the same Madonna who’d make us all laugh when the clients didn’t come. We’d spend nights in the doorway, cold as shit, telling jokes. And she’d imitate la Madonna in her sliver of a skirt, really an oversized turtleneck. A ribbed turtleneck, made of wool and lamé, the kind sold in secondhand shops with American clothes. She’d hike it up with a belt into a chic miniskirt. She was so creative, la loca, she could make a dress from a rag. When she got silicone put in she switched to V-necks. The clients went crazy whenever she’d put her tits on a car’s windshield. And she sounded just like the real Madonna saying: Mister, lovmi plis.
She knew all of the songs without having any idea what they said. Repeating the English phrases like a parrot, adding her own illiterate charm. And she didn’t really need to know what the blonde’s shrieking meant. Her cherry mouth modulated the tuyú, the miplís, the rimernber lovmi, just fine. Closing your eyes, she was Madonna, and you didn’t need much imagination to see her as an almost perfect Mapuche copy. Thousands of clippings of the star wallpapered her room. A thousand Madonna body parts constellated la loca’s heavens. A whole world of newspaper pages and glossy papers covered the cracks, papering over the mold with Monroe winks and kisses, over the fingers with blood wiped on the wall, the marks of that violent rouge covered with snippets of the singer’s jet-set entourage. Like that, a thousand Madonnas orbiting the fly-clouded light yellowing the room, endless reiterations of the same image, in all shapes, in all sizes, at all ages; the star continually reincarnated in the velvet fanaticism of the coliza gaze. Until the end, when she couldn’t get up, when AIDS had laid her out on the mattress reeking of bed. The only thing she asked for as she made her goodbyes was to listen to a Madonna cassette and for us to put a photo of the star on her chest.
