The Trail of Your Blood on the Snow

author of One Hundred Years of Solitude

At dusk, when they reached the border, Nena Daconte realized that the finger where she wore her wedding ring was still bleeding. The guardia civil, a woolen blanket thrown over his patent-leather tri-cornered hat, examined the passports by the light of a carbide lantern while making a great effort to keep from being knocked down by the force of the wind blowing out of the Pyrenees. Although both were diplomatic passports and in order, the guardia lifted his lantern to make sure that the photographs matched the faces.

Nena Daconte was practically a child, with the eyes of a happy bird and molasses-colored skin that radiated Caribbean sunshine in the gloomy January dusk, and she was bundled up to her neck in a coat of ermine pelts that couldn't have been bought with the combined annual salaries of that whole border garrison. Billy Sanchez de Avila, her husband and the driver of the car, was one year younger than she and almost as beautiful and was wearing a tartan sports coat and a baseball cap. Unlike his wife, he was tall and athletic, and he had the jutting jaw of a cowardly bully. But what most obviously revealed their status was the platinum-plated car whose engine breathed like a living beast and that was like no other ever seen on that frontier of poor people. The back seat was piled high with excessively new luggage and a mound of still-unopened gifts. There was also the tenor saxophone that had been the dominant passion in Nena Daconte's life before she succumbed to the contradictory charms of her loving, tough-guy beach boy.

When the guardia returned their stamped passports, Billy Sanchez asked him where they could find a pharmacy to tend to his wife's finger, and the guardia shouted into the wind that they should ask over in Hendaye, on the French side. But the guards in Hendaye were sitting around a table in their shirt sleeves, playing cards and (continued on page 94) Blood on the Snow (continued from page 90) eating bread dipped in mugs of wine, inside a warm, bright, glass-enclosed sentry box, and they had only to see the size and make of the car to wave them on into France. Billy Sanchez honked his horn several times without managing to make the guards understand that he needed to ask them something, finally provoking one of them to slide open a window and shout at them, with even more rage than the wind:

"Merde! Allez-y, espèce de con!"

Then Nena Daconte got out of the car, bundled up to her ears in ermine, and asked the guard in perfect French where there was a pharmacy. The guard answered matter-of-factly, with his mouth full of bread, that it was no affair of his, still less so in a storm like this, and he shut the window. But then his attention was caught by the girl sucking her wounded finger, wrapped in the sparkle of natural ermine, and he must have taken her for a magical apparition in that haunted night, because his attitude changed immediately. He explained that the nearest town was Biarritz, but in the middle of the winter and with this wolfish wind there might not be a pharmacy open until Bayonne, somewhat farther on.

"Is something wrong?" he asked.

"Nothing," smiled Nena Daconte, showing him the finger with the diamond ring, where, on the tip, the cut from the rose was barely perceptible. "It's just a prick."

It started snowing again before they reached Bayonne. Although it wasn't much later than seven o'clock, they found the streets deserted and the houses shut tight against the fury of the storm, and after circling through the town several times without finding a pharmacy, they decided to go on. Billy Sanchez was cheered by the decision. His insatiable passion for fine cars had been encouraged by a father with more than enough guilt and money to placate it, but he had never driven anything like this wedding-gift Bentley convertible. His intoxication at the wheel was so great that the farther he traveled, the less tired he felt. He was set on reaching Bordeaux that night, and there wasn't a gale so contrary or enough snow in the sky to stop him. Nena Daconte, on the other hand, was exhausted, above all by the last stretch of highway from Madrid, which had been a frieze of hail-lashed goats. After Bayonne, she wrapped a handkerchief around her ring finger as tightly as she could to stanch the flow of blood and fell fast asleep. Billy Sanchez didn't even notice until after midnight, when the snow had stopped and the wind had come to a sudden halt among the pine trees and the sky over the moors had filled with glacial stars. He'd passed by the slumbering lights of Bordeaux, pausing only to fill his tank at a gas station on the highway, because he still felt exuberant enough to drive all the way to Paris without taking a rest. He was so happy with his £25,000 toy that he didn't think to ask if the radiant creature sleeping beside him with the ring-finger bandage soaked in blood might be happy, too. Meanwhile, her adolescent dreams were, for the first time, interrupted by flashes of uncertainty.

•

They had been married three days before, 6000 miles away, in Cartagena de Indias, to the astonishment of his parents and the dismay of hers, with the personal blessing of the archbishop primate. No one except themselves knew the real basis or beginning of that unforeseen love. It had begun three months before the wedding, one Sunday by the sea, when Billy Sanchez' gang stormed the women's dressing room at the Marbella bathing club. Nena Daconte was scarcely 18 and had just returned from the boarding school at Chattelaine in Saint Blaise, Switzerland, speaking four accentless languages and with a maestro's command of the tenor saxophone. She had undressed completely to put on her bathing suit when the panicky stampede and shouts of piratical plunder in the neighboring stalls began, but she didn't comprehend what was happening until the latch on her door burst into splinters and standing before her she saw the handsomest bandit imaginable. All he had on were the skimpiest fake-leopardskin briefs. His body was taut and indolent and bronzed from the sun. On his right arm, he wore a Roman gladiator's iron bracelet, around his fist was rolled a chain that served him as a deadly weapon and hanging from his neck was a saintless medallion that quivered silently with the pounding of his heart. They had been classmates in elementary school and together had smashed many piñatas at birthday parties, because both had come from the provincial class that had been arbitrarily running the city since colonial times, but they hadn't been face to face in so long that at first, they didn't recognize each other. Nena Daconte stood motionless, doing nothing to conceal her intense nakedness. Billy Sanchez then did what he had to do: He pulled down his leopard briefs to show her his considerable engorged beast. She looked at him unastonished and straight on.

"I've seen them bigger and harder," she said, overcoming her terror. "So think well about what you're going to do, because with me, you've got to do it better than a nigger."

In reality, not only was Nena Daconte a virgin but up until then, she'd never even seen a naked man. But the challenge worked. The only thing that occurred to Billy Sanchez to do was to punch the wall in rage with the chain wound around his fist, and he shattered the bones in his hand. She took him to the hospital in her car, helped him through his convalescence, and in the end, they learned to love each other the right way. They passed the difficult June afternoons on the inside terrace of the house where six generations of patriots in Nena Daconte's family had died, she playing the latest songs on her saxophone while he, with his hand in a cast, gaped at her in dazzled stupor from the hammock. The house had many full-length windows that opened out onto the cesspool that was the bay; it was one of the largest and oldest houses in the Manga district and, without doubt, the ugliest. But the terrace with checkered tiles where Nena Daconte played the saxophone was a refuge from the four-o'clock heat and opened onto a courtyard shaded by mango trees and banana groves, under which a grave with a stone that bore no name had stood longer than the house and the family's memory. Even those least sensitive to music thought that the sound of a saxophone was out of place in a house of such venerable ancestry. "It sounds like a foghorn," Nena Daconte's grandmother had said the first time she heard it. Her mother had pleaded in vain to get her to play it differently and not in the way she found most comfortable, with her skirt up to her thighs and her knees apart, with a sensuality that didn't seem essential to the music. "I don't care what instrument you play," she told her, "just so long as you play it with your legs together." But it was those ballads of ships bound for distant ports and the cruelty of love that helped Nena Daconte get through Billy Sanchez' bitter shell. Beneath the deplorable tough-guy reputation that he maintained by means of his two illustrious surnames, she discovered a frightened and gentle orphan. They came to know each other so well while the bones of his hand knitted that he was actually astonished at how smoothly love happened when she brought him to her virgin's bed one rainy afternoon when they'd been left alone in the house. Every day at that hour, for almost two weeks, they frolicked naked under the astounded eyes in the portraits of the gentlemen soldiers and insatiable grandmothers who had preceded them in the paradise of that (continued on page 128) Blood on the Snow (continued from page 94) historic bed. Even during pauses in their lovemaking, they'd stay there naked, with the windows open, breathing in the breeze of decaying ships in the harbor, its smell of shit, and, in the absence of the saxophone, hearing the everyday sounds in the courtyard, the single note of a toad under the banana trees, the dripping of water on the nameless tomb, the natural pace of life that they hadn't had time to notice before.

By the time Nena Daconte's parents returned, they'd progressed so far in love that there wasn't room in the world for anything else, and they started doing it at all hours and anywhere, trying to invent it all over again every time they did it. At first, they managed as well as they could in the sports cars Billy Sanchez' father bought him to assuage his own guilt. Later, when the cars became too easy, they would sneak by night into the deserted bathing stalls at Marbella, where fate had brought them face to face for the first lime, and, in disguise during the November carnival, they even went to rent rooms in the old slave quarters of Getsemani from the maternal madams who, until a few months before, had had to put up with Billy Sanchez and his gang of chainmen. Nena Daconte gave herself up to furtive love with the same frantic devotion she had previously squandered on the saxophone, so that her domesticated bandit ended up understanding what she'd meant when she told him that he had to do it better than a nigger. Billy Sanchez kept up with her, always and expertly, and with the same wild abandon. Once married, they consummated their marriage while the flight attendants slept, halfway across the Atlantic, shut up with great difficulty and dying more from laughter than from pleasure in the plane's toilet. Only they knew at that time, 24 hours after the wedding, that Nena Daconte had been pregnant for two months.

•

So, when they reached Madrid, they were a long way from feeling like a pair of satiated lovers, though they had enough constraint to comport themselves like true, virginal newlyweds. Both sets of parents had anticipated their every need. Before they disembarked, a flight attendant came up to the first-class cabin to bring Nena Daconte the ermine coat with shimmering black trim that was her parents' wedding gift. He brought Billy Sanchez a sheepskin jacket that was in fashion that winter and the unmarked keys to a surprise car that was waiting for him at the airport.

The entire diplomatic mission from their country received them in the VIP lounge. Not only were the ambassador and his wife lifelong friends of both their families but he had been the doctor who had presided over Nena Daconte's birth, and he was waiting for her with a bouquet of roses so radiant and fresh that even the dewdrops looked artificial. She greeted them both with insincere kisses, uncomfortable with her role as a newlywed because of her somewhat premature condition, and immediately took the roses. In reaching for them, she pricked her finger on a thorn but deflected attention from the mishap with charming resourcefulness.

"I did it on purpose," she said, "so that you'd all notice my ring."

As a matter of fact, the whole diplomatic mission had been admiring the splendor of the ring, calculating that it must have cost a fortune not so much for the quality of the diamonds as for its well-preserved antiquity. No one noticed that the finger was starting to bleed. Everybody's attention then turned to the new car. The ambassador had had the cleverness to have it brought to the airport and wrapped in cellophane and a huge golden bow. Billy Sanchez didn't appreciate this ingenuity. He was so anxious to see the car he tore off the wrapping in one swipe and stood there breathless. It was the Bentley convertible of that year, with genuine-leather upholstery. The sky resembled a mantle of ashes, the Guadarrama mountains sent down a cutting and icy wind and it was no time to be outdoors, but Billy Sanchez was oblivious to the cold. He kept the diplomatic mission courteously freezing in the open parking lot until he finished examining the car down to its last hidden detail. Then the ambassador got in beside him to guide him to the official residence, where lunch was waiting. Along the way, he pointed out many of the city's famous places, but Billy Sanchez seemed intent only on the magic of the car.

It was the first time he'd been out of the country. He'd gone through every private and public school, always repeating the same grade, until he was left floating in a limbo of apathy. The first sight of a city that wasn't his own, the blocks of ash-colored houses with their lights on in the middle of the day, the naked trees and the distance of the sea all increased a feeling of desolation that he fought to keep at a distance. It was a little while later that he fell, without realizing it, into the first trap of forgetfulness. A sudden and silent blizzard had come up, the first of the season, and when they left the ambassador's house after lunch to start on their way to France, they found the city covered with radiant snow. Billy Sanchez forgot about the car and, in front of everyone, shouting with joy and dumping handfuls of snow over his head, rolled in the middle of the street with his coat on.

•

Nena Daconte first noticed that her finger was bleeding when they left Madrid on an afternoon that had turned crystal-clear after the storm. She was startled because she'd accompanied on the saxophone the ambassador's wife, who liked to sing operatic arias in Italian after official lunches, and had barely noticed the discomfort in her ring finger. Later, while pointing out the quickest routes to the border for her husband, she unconsciously sucked on her finger whenever it bled, and it was only when they reached the Pyrenees that it occurred to her to look for a pharmacy. Then she was overcome by the lost sleep of the last few days, and when she woke up suddenly, with the nightmarish impression that the car was speeding through water, it took her a long time to remember the handkerchief wrapped around her finger. By the luminous clock on the dashboard, she saw that it was after three, made mental calculations and only then realized that they'd passed Bordeaux long before and also Angoulême and Poitiers and that they were now passing the flood-inundated Loire embankment. The brilliance of the moon filtered through the fog, and the silhouettes of castles among the pines were right out of ghost stories. Nena Daconte, who knew the region by heart, calculated that they were still about three hours from Paris, and Billy Sanchez continued undaunted behind the wheel.

"You're a savage," she told him. "You've been driving over eleven hours without anything to eat."

He was still floating along in his intoxication with the new car. Although he had slept little and poorly on the plane, he felt wide-awake and with more than enough energy to reach Paris by dawn.

"The lunch at the embassy is still holding me," he said. And he added, with no logic whatsoever, "After all, they're just coming out of the movies in Cartagena. It must be around ten o'clock."

Nevertheless, Nena Daconte was afraid that he'd fall asleep at the wheel. She opened a box from among all the gifts they'd received in Madrid and tried to put a piece of sugared orange into his mouth, but he drew away.

"Men don't eat candy," he said.

A little before Orléans, the fog vanished and a large moon lighted the snowy, plowed fields, but the driving became difficult as the road filled with huge trucks carrying vegetables and wine casks to (continued on page 248) Blood on the Snow (continued from page 128) Paris. Nena Daconte would have liked to help her husband behind the wheel, but she didn't even dare hint at it, because he'd told her the very first time they went out together that there was no greater humiliation for a man than to let himself be driven by his woman. Her head was clear after almost five hours of good sleep, and besides, she was happy that they hadn't stayed in one of the French provincial hotels familiar to her from childhood trips with her parents. "There's no countryside more beautiful in the world," she'd say, "but you can die of thirst before you'll find anyone to give you a free glass of water." At the last moment, she had packed a bar of soap and roll of toilet paper in her hand luggage, because she was convinced that in French hotels there was never any soap and the toilet paper consisted of last week's newspapers cut up into small squares and hung on a hook. The only thing she regretted at that moment was having wasted a whole night without making love. Her husband's reply was immediate.

"Just now I was thinking about how wild it would be to screw in the snow," he said. "Right here, if you want to."

Nena Daconte gave it some serious thought. By the side of the road, the snow had a soft, warm look; but as they got closer to Paris, the traffic was heavier and there were clusters of lighted factories and a lot of workers on bicycles. If it hadn't been winter, they would be in broad daylight by now.

"It'll be better to wait until we get to Paris now," Nena Daconte said. "Nice and warm and in a bed with clean sheets, the way married people should."

"It's the first time you've failed me," he said.

"Of course," she replied. "It's the first time we've been married."

A little before dawn, they washed their faces and urinated at a roadside café, having coffee and hot croissants at the counter where the truck drivers were drinking red wine for breakfast. In the bathroom, Nena Daconte noticed bloodstains on her blouse and skirt, but she didn't try to wash them off. She threw the blood-soaked handkerchief into the wastebasket, switched her wedding ring to her left hand and washed the wounded finger with soap and water. The prick was almost invisible. However, as soon as they got back into the car, it began to bleed again, so Nena Daconte hung her arm out of the window, convinced that the glacial air from the plowed fields had cauterizing virtues. It didn't work, but she wasn't alarmed. "If someone wants to find us, it'll be easy," she said winsomely. "All they'll have to do is follow the trail of my blood in the snow." Then she thought about what she'd said, and her face brightened in the dawn light.

"Imagine," she said. "A trail of blood in the snow from Madrid to Paris. Don't you think that would make a pretty song?"

She didn't have a chance to think about it again. In the suburbs of Paris, her finger was an uncontrollable fountain, and she was sure she felt her soul pouring out of the wound. She'd tried to halt the flow with the roll of toilet paper she carried in her handbag, but no sooner did she bandage the finger than she had to throw the bloody strips of paper out the window. The clothes she was wearing, her coat and the car seats were slowly becoming saturated. Billy Sanchez was seriously scared and insisted on looking for a pharmacy, but she knew by then that it was no matter for pharmacists.

"We're almost at the Orléans Gate," she said. "Go straight ahead to the Avenue du General Leclerc, which is the wide street with lots of trees, and then I'll keep telling you what to do."

It was the worst stretch of the whole trip. The Avenue du General Leclerc was an infernal knot of small cars and motorbikes and enormous trucks trying to reach the downtown markets. Billy Sanchez grew nervous amid the useless uproar of horns and shouted chainman insults at several drivers and even wanted to get out and fight one of them, but Nena Daconte managed to convince him that although the French were the rudest people in the world, they never hit each other. It was one more proof of her good judgment, because at that moment, Nena Daconte was making a great effort not to lose consciousness.

Just getting through the Lion de Belfort circle took more than an hour. The cafés and stores were lit up as if it was the middle of the night, but it was a typical Paris Tuesday in January, funereal and dirty, with a tenacious drizzle that never succeeded in becoming anything so concrete as snow. But the Avenue Denfert-Rochereau was less congested, and after a few blocks, Nena Daconte told her husband to turn right and park in front of the emergency entrance of an enormous and somber hospital.

She had to be helped out of the car, but she didn't lose her calm or lucidity. While waiting for the doctor on duty, she lay on the wheeled stretcher and answered the nurse's routine questions about her identity and medical history. Billy Sanchez carried her purse and squeezed her left hand, where she was now wearing her wedding ring. It felt limp and cold, and her lips had lost their color. He stayed by her side with her hand in his until the doctor on duty arrived and made a quick examination of the wounded ring finger. He was a very young man with dark skin the color of ancient copper and a shaved head. Nena Daconte ignored him and gave her husband a vivacious smile.

"Don't be scared," she told him with invincible humor. "The worst that can happen is that this cannibal will cut off my hand and eat it."

The doctor finished his examination and then surprised them with correct Castilian Spanish in a strange Asian accent.

"No, children," he said. "This cannibal would rather starve to death than cut off such a pretty hand."

They were embarrassed, but the doctor put them at ease with a friendly gesture. Then he ordered the stretcher to be moved, and Billy Sanchez wanted to go with it, holding his wife's hand. The doctor held him back by the arm.

"Not you," he told him. "She's going to intensive care."

Nena Daconte smiled at her husband again and continued waving to him until the stretcher was lost at the end of the corridor. The doctor stayed behind, studying the data that the nurse had written on a clipboard. Billy Sanchez addressed him.

"Doctor," he told him, "she's pregnant."

"How long?"

"Two months."

The doctor didn't give it the importance that Billy Sanchez expected. "You did right to tell me," he said and went after the stretcher. Billy Sanchez remained standing in the gloomy waiting room that reeked of the sweat of sick people. He stood there not knowing what to do, gazing down the empty corridor where they had taken Nena Daconte, and then he sat down on a wooden bench among other waiting people. He didn't know how long he stayed there, but when he decided to leave the hospital, it was night again and still drizzling, and he went out still not having any idea what to do with himself, overwhelmed by the weight of the world.

•

Nena Daconte was admitted at 9:30 A.M., Tuesday, January seventh, as I was able to ascertain years later from the hospital records. That first night, Billy Sanchez slept in his car, parked in front of the emergency entrance, and very early the following day he had six boiled eggs and two cups of coffee in the closest cafeteria, as he hadn't eaten a full meal since Madrid. Then he went back to the emergency room to see Nena Daconte, where they got him to understand that he should go to the main entrance. There they finally found an Asturian hospital worker who helped him make himself understood to the desk clerk, who verified that Nena Daconte had, indeed, been admitted to the hospital but that she was allowed visitors only on Tuesdays from nine to four. That is to say, six days from then. He wanted to see the doctor who spoke Spanish, whom he described as a Negro with a shaved head, but no one could figure out whom he meant from such a description.

Reassured by the news that Nena Daconte had been officially admitted, he went back to where he'd left the car, and a traffic policeman made him park two blocks up ahead, on a very narrow street and on the odd-numbered side. On the opposite side, there was a renovated building with a sign: Hotel Nicole. It had only one star and one cramped lobby, where there were only a sofa and an old upright piano, but the manager, in his high-pitched voice, could make himself understood to guests in any language on condition that they had money to pay. Billy Sanchez installed himself, along with 11 suitcases and nine boxed gifts, in the only vacant room, a triangular garret on the ninth floor, where one arrived out of breath via a spiral staircase that smelled of boiled cauliflower. The walls were lined with drab drapes, and all that came in through the only window was the murky light from the interior courtyard. A double bed, a huge wardrobe, a plain chair, a portable bidet and a washstand with a bowl and pitcher so filled the room that the only way to fit in was to lie down on the bed. Everything was not only old but shabby, but it was also clean and had the healthy scent of recent disinfectant.

A lifetime wouldn't have been long enough for Billy Sanchez to decipher that world founded on a genius for stinginess. He never did solve the mystery of the light on the stairs that always went out before he got to his floor, nor did he figure out a way to turn it on again. It took him half a morning to discover that on every floor's landing there was a tiny room with a pull-chain toilet, and he'd already decided to use it in darkness when he discovered by chance that the light went on when the bolt was drawn on the inside, so that no one could forgetfully leave it on. The shower, which was at the end of the hall and which he was determined to use twice a day, as in his own country, cost extra and had to be paid for on the spot, and the hot water, controlled by the desk clerk, went off after three minutes. Nevertheless, Billy Sanchez was clearheaded enough to understand that this strange order of things was better than being outdoors in January, and besides, he felt so lonely and confused that he couldn't understand how he'd ever been able to live a day without the help of Nena Daconte. As soon as he went up to his room on Wednesday morning, he flung himself face down on the bed with his coat on, thinking about the wondrous creature still bleeding down the street, and he fell into such a deep sleep that when he awoke his watch said five o'clock, but he couldn't tell if it was five in the afternoon or in the morning, or what day of the week it was, or what city's windowpanes were so lashed by wind and rain. He lay awake on the bed, waiting and thinking constantly about Nena Daconte, until he was able to see that it was really dawn. Then he went to have breakfast at the same cafeteria as the day before and there established that it was Thursday. The lights were on in the hospital, and it had stopped raining, so he leaned against the trunk of a chestnut tree across from the main entrance, where doctors and nurses dressed in white came and went, with the hope of spotting the Asian doctor who had admitted Nena Daconte. He didn't see him then, nor did he that afternoon after lunch, when he had to abandon his vigil because he was freezing. At seven o'clock, he had another cup of coffee and ate two hard-boiled eggs that he was able to pick from the case himself now that he'd been eating in the same place for 48 hours. When he returned to the hotel to lie down, he found his car alone on one side of the street and all the others on the opposite side, and there was a parking ticket on the windshield. The desk clerk at the Hotel Nicole had a difficult time explaining to him that on odd days you parked on the odd-numbered side and the next day on the other side. So many logical contrivances were incomprehensible to a Sanchez de Avila of the purest stock, who, scarcely two years before, had driven the mayor's official car into a neighborhood movie theater, causing murderous ruin in full view of the complacent police. He understood even less when the hotel clerk advised him to pay the fine but not to move the car right then, because he'd only have to move it again at midnight. As night approached dawn, he found himself for the first time not thinking only of Nena Daconte but tossing on his bed unable to sleep, thinking about his own shameful nights in the gay bars in the public market at Cartagena del Caribe. He remembered the taste of fried fish and shredded coconut in eateries along the dock where the schooners from Aruba tied up. He remembered his house, its pansy-printed wallpaper, where right now it was only seven o'clock last night, and he saw his father, in silk pajamas, reading the newspaper in the coolness of the terrace. He remembered his elusive mother, his tantalizing and chatty mother, wearing a rose behind her ear after sunset, stifling in the heat from the burden of her splendid breasts. One afternoon, when he was seven years old, he had suddenly gone into her room and surprised her naked on the bed with one of her casual lovers. That mishap, of which they had never spoken, established a relationship between them more useful than love. Yet he hadn't been aware of that, or of other terrible results of his solitary boyhood, until that night when he found himself tossing on a bed in a sad Paris garret with no one to tell his troubles to, furious with himself because he was unable to withstand the urge to weep.

•

It was a profitable bout of insomnia. On Friday, he got up worn out by the bad night but resolved to give his life some meaning. He decided to break the lock on his suitcase in order to finally change his clothes, because the keys were in Nena Daconte's purse, along with most of the money and the little telephone book where he might have found the number of someone they knew in Paris. In the usual cafeteria, he realized that he'd learned how to say hello in French as well as to ask for ham sandwiches and café au lait. He also understood that it would never be possible for him to order butter or eggs done in any particular way, because he'd never learn to say the words, but that they always served butter with the bread, and the hard-boiled eggs displayed in the case could be taken without being asked for. Besides, after three days, the cafeteria people had come to know him and help him make himself understood. So that on Friday at lunch, while he tried to organize his thoughts, he ordered a veal cutlet with fried potatoes and a bottle of wine. Afterward, he felt so much better that he ordered another bottle, drank half of it and crossed the street firmly resolved to find his way into the hospital. He didn't know where to find Nena Daconte, but fixed in his mind was the providential image of the Asian doctor, and he felt sure he could find him. He didn't go to he main entrance but through the emergency one, which seemed less protected, but he didn't get any farther than the corridor where Nena Daconte had waved goodbye. Am orderly in a blood-spattered robe asked him something as he passed, and he didn't answer. The orderly followed him, still repeating the same question in French, and finally grabbed him by the arm with such forcefulness as to stop him short. Billy Sanchez tried to break away with a chainman's trick, and then the orderly shat on his mother in French, twisted his arm behind his back in a master lock and, without ceasing to shit on his whore of a mother a thousand times, practically carried him, writhing in pain, to the door and threw him out into the middle of the street like a sack of potatoes.

That afternoon, pained by the lesson, Billy Sanchez began to grow up. He decided, as Nena Daconte would have done, to seek out his ambassador. The hotel clerk, who, in spite of his morose demeanor, was very accommodating and also very patient with languages, found the number and address of the embassy in the phone book and wrote them down on a card. A very pleasant-sounding woman answered, in whose slow, deliberate and lusterless voice Billy Sanchez immediately recognized the diction of the Andes. He began by announcing himself by his full name, confident of impressing the woman with his two surnames, but there was no change in the voice on the telephone. He heard her repeat by rote the information that his excellency the ambassador wasn't in his office at the moment, that they didn't expect him until the following day and that in any case he couldn't see him without an appointment and then only in special cases. Billy Sanchez understood then that he wouldn't get to Nena Daconte by that route, either, and he thanked her for her information in the same pleasant manner that she had given it. Then he took a taxi to the embassy.

It was number 22 on the Champs Ely-sées, in one of the most attractive sections of Paris, but the only thing that impressed Billy Sanchez, as he told me himself in Cartagena de Indias many years later, was that for the first time since his arrival the sun was as bright as in the Caribbean and that the Eiffel Tower stood out above the city in a radiant sky. The official who received him in the ambassador's place looked as if he had barely recovered from some mortal illness, not just because of his black-woolen suit, tight collar and mournful necktie but also because of his retiring manner and the meekness of his voice. He understood Billy Sanchez' anxiety, but he reminded him, without losing his diffidence, that they were in a civilized country whose strict norms were founded on very ancient and wise criteria, unlike the barbarous Americans, where all you have to do is bribe the man at the desk in order to get into hospitals. "No, my dear young man," he told him. There was no way out but to submit to the rule of reason and wait until Tuesday.

"After all, it's only four days," he concluded. "In the meantime, go to the Louvre. It's worth the trouble."

When he left, Billy Sanchez found himself adrift on the Place de la Concorde. He saw the Eiffel Tower over the rooftops, and it seemed so near that he set out to find it by walking along the quays. But soon he realized that it was much farther away than it looked and that it kept shifting its position as he advanced. So he sat down on a bench on the bank of the Seine and started to think about Nena Daconte. Under the bridge passed tugboats that didn't look like boats but like runaway houses, with red roofs and flowerpots on the window sills and clothes hung out to dry on lines across the deck. For a long time, he contemplated a motionless fisherman with his motionless pole and a motionless line in the current, till he grew tired of waiting for something to move and it began to get dark, whereupon he decided to take a taxi back to his hotel. Only then did he realize that he didn't know its name and address, nor did he have the slightest idea what part of Paris the hospital was in.

Panicked, he went into the first café he found, asked for a cognac and tried to get his thoughts in order. While he pondered, he saw himself repeated many times and from different angles in the many mirrors lining the walls, and he found himself looking scared and solitary, and for the first time since his birth, he thought about the reality of death. But with the second drink he felt better and had the providential idea of returning to the embassy. He looked for the card in his pocket to find the name of the street and discovered that on the back was printed the name and address of the hotel. He was so shaken by the experience that over the weekend, he didn't leave his room except to eat and to change his car to the correct side of the street. For three days, the same dirty drizzle as on the morning of their arrival fell. Billy Sanchez, who had never read a book through, would have liked one to escape the tedium of lying on the bed, but the only books he found in his wife's bags were in languages other than Spanish. So he went on waiting for Tuesday, contemplating the peacocks repeated on the wallpaper and not ceasing for a single instant to think about Nena Daconte. On Monday, he tidied up the room a little, thinking about what she would say if she found it in such a state, and only then did he discover that the ermine coat was stained with dried blood. He spent the afternoon washing it with the perfumed soap that he found in her luggage, until he succeeded in returning it to the state it had been in when it arrived on the plane in Madrid.

•

Tuesday dawned overcast and frigid, but the drizzle was gone, and Billy Sanchez had been up since six and was waiting at the door of the hospital in a crowd of patients' relatives loaded down with gifts and bouquets of flowers. He went in carried along by the throng, the ermine coat over his arm, not asking anybody anything and with no idea where Nena Daconte might be but sustained by the certainty that he would be able to find the Asian doctor. He passed through a very large inner courtyard full of flowers and caged birds that was bordered by the patients' wards: women on the right and men on the left. Following the visitors, he went into the women's ward. He saw a long row of patients sitting on beds in hospital gowns, illuminated by the broad light from the windows, and he even thought that it was all much nicer than anyone might imagine from the outside. He reached the end of the line, and then he went back down it again until he was convinced that none of the patients was Nena Daconte. Then he passed along the outside corridor again, looking through windows into the male wards until he thought he recognized the doctor he was looking for.

Indeed, it was he. He was with some other doctors and several nurses, examining a patient. Billy Sanchez went into the ward, pushed one of the nurses in the group aside and stood in front of the Asian doctor, who was leaning over the patient. He spoke to him. The doctor raised his mournful eyes and, after a moment of thought, recognized him.

"Where the Devil have you been?" he asked.

Billy Sanchez was perplexed.

"In the hotel," he said. "Here, around the corner."

Then he found out. Nena Daconte had died from loss of blood at 7:10 A.M. on Thursday, January ninth, after hours of futile efforts by the most qualified specialists in France. Until the last second, she'd been lucid and serene, giving them instructions for her husband at the Hotel Plaza-Athénée, where they'd reserved a room, and supplying them with the necessary information so they'd be able to contact her parents. The embassy was informed on Friday of her passing via an urgent cable from the foreign ministry while Nena Daconte's parents were already flying to Paris. The ambassador took charge of the funeral arrangements and the embalming and kept in contact with the Paris prefecture of police concerning the whereabouts of Billy Sanchez. An urgent bulletin with his description had been transmitted from Friday night to Sunday afternoon on radio and television, and during those 40 hours, he was the most-searched-for man in France. His picture, found in Nena Daconte's purse, had been displayed everywhere. Three Bentley convertibles of the same year had been found, but none was his.

Nena Daconte's parents had arrived Saturday at noon, and they sat with the body in the hospital chapel, hoping until the last moment to find Billy Sanchez. His parents had also been informed and were prepared to fly to Paris but held off in the end due to some mix-up in telegrams. The funeral service took place on Sunday at two in the afternoon, only 500 feet from the seedy hotel where Billy Sanchez had been agonizing in solitude for the love of Nena Daconte. The official who'd spoken to him at the embassy told me years later that he himself had received the cable from the foreign ministry only an hour after Billy Sanchez had left and had gone searching for him in the select cocktail lounges of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. He confessed to me that he hadn't paid much attention to him when he had received him, because he never imagined that a hick from the coast, so rattled by the spectacle of Paris and so rustically dressed in a sheepskin coat, could boast such illustrious forebears. That very same Sunday night, as he was fighting the urge to weep, Nena Daconte's parents called off the search and took away the embalmed body in a metal-lined coffin. Those who had a chance to see the corpse insisted for years that they had never seen a more beautiful woman, dead or alive. So that by the time Billy Sanchez finally entered the hospital on Tuesday morning, the burial in the drab mausoleum of La Manga was over, just a few yards from the house where they had deciphered the first keys to happiness. The Asian doctor who told Billy Sanchez of the tragedy wanted to give him some tranquilizers there in the hospital waiting room, but he refused them. He left without saying goodbye, having nothing to say thank you for, thinking that the only thing he urgently needed was to find someone he could chain-whip the ass off of so as to rid himself of his grief. When he left the hospital, he didn't even notice that snow was falling from the sky, a snow with no trails of blood, with soft bright flakes that looked like tiny dove feathers, and that the streets of Paris were festive because it was the first big snow in ten years.

"They had been married three days before, to the astonishment of his parents, the dismay of hers."

"They consummated their marriage while the attendants slept, halfway across the Atlantic."

"They only thing she regretted was having wasted a whole night without making love."