Kiss of the Spider Woman Read online

  —What did you say about your old lady?

  —Nothing, Valentin, you’re still asleep. So did you finally get a good rest?

  —Yes, I feel a lot better, too.

  —No dizziness?

  —No . . . And I slept like a log. Even sitting up like this, I swear it’s fine, no dizziness at all.

  —Very good! . . . How about getting on your feet a little, to see how it feels.

  —No, because you’ll start laughing.

  —At what?

  —Something you’d notice.

  —What would I notice?

  —Something on any healthy man, that’s all, especially when he first wakes up . . . and has a little energy in the morning.

  —A hard-on, well that’s healthy . . .

  —So look the other way, will you? You make me feel self-conscious . . .

  —Okay, I’ll close my eyes.

  —Thanks to that good food of yours, or I never would’ve gotten better.

  —Well? You dizzy at all?

  —No . . . not a bit. My legs are a little weak, but no dizziness.

  —Very good . . .

  —You can look now. I’m going to stay in bed awhile.

  —I’ll boil some water for a cup of tea.

  —No, just reheat the coffee they left us.

  —You have to be joking; I dumped that stuff when I went to the john. If you expect to get well you’ll have to stick to what’s good for you.

  —No, listen, I can’t keep using up all your tea, and everything else besides. I won’t allow it, I’m fine now.

  —You just be quiet.

  —No, honestly . . .

  —Honestly nothing. My mom has started bringing stuff again, so it’s no problem.

  —But it disturbs me.

  —You have to learn to accept from people too, you know. And anyhow, why be so complicated?

  —Okay, then.

  —If you want to, you can go out to the john now while I’m making the tea. But stay in bed until I call the guard to open up first. That way you don’t get chilled.

  —Thanks.

  —And when you come back, if you want I can go on with the zombies . . . Dying to know what happens?

  —Yes, but I should try to study a little, and see if I can get back into the grind again, now that I feel better.

  —Think so? That’s not pushing yourself a bit too hard?

  —We’ll see . . .

  —What a fanatic.

  —How come so many sighs?

  —It’s no use, Molina, the page just keeps swimming in front of me.

  —I told you so.

  —Fine, it doesn’t hurt to try.

  —Dizzy now?

  —No, only when I read, that’s all; I just can’t focus.

  —You know what? It’s probably a case of just being a little weak in the morning, nothing except tea for breakfast, refusing to eat any of that bread and ham I suggested.

  —Think so?

  —I know so. After lunch, you take a little nap and you’ll see that then you can study.

  —I feel so lazy, you wouldn’t believe it. I have this urge to just lie around in bed some more.

  —But you shouldn’t, because they say it’s important to try and strengthen yourself by walking around a little bit or at least sitting up, because lying in bed eventually makes you weak.

  —What about the film? Give me a break . . .

  —Know what I better do? Put the potatoes on to boil, because they take a year.

  —What are you making?

  —We have some ham, and I’ll open up a tin of olive oil, so we can have a couple of boiled potatoes, with just a drop of oil and salt, together with the ham: nothing could be healthier.

  —The film was up to where the black housekeeper’s about to tell the protagonist the whole story about the zombie wife, about the living dead woman.

  —You’re really into it, aren’t you? Admit it.

  —It’s entertaining.

  —Oh sure. Baloney. It’s more than entertaining, it’s superb. Tell the truth.

  —Come on, what happens?

  —Okay, okay, but wait . . . This thing’s not lighting, . . . there, I got it. So, now, where were we? Right, the housekeeper is on the way home with the girl and starts telling her the whole story. It turns out the husband had been happy enough with his first wife, but at the same time tormented by the fact that he was guarding a terrible secret, because when he was a kid he had witnessed a really ghoulish crime. It turns out his own father was an unscrupulous type of guy, but a real monstrosity, and he came to the island to get himself rich and started off by treating his peons like dirt. But the peons on the plantations began to organize a rebellion, so his father got together with the local witch doctor, who always held his ceremonies and voodoo stuff out on the farthest plantation of them all, and one night the witch doctor called a meeting of all the leaders from the rebel peons, supposedly in order to put his blessing upon them. But in fact it was actually an ambush; they went and massacred all of them right on the spot, with arrows dipped in a special poison made by the witch doctor himself. And from there they dragged the bodies off to hide them way out in the jungle, because a few hours later they opened their eyes and became living dead. And the witch doctor ordered them to stand up, and little by little the bodies started getting up, all of them, with their eyes wide open—you’ve seen how whenever Negro eyes are like that, really big—but these ones had their eyes rolled up, all completely white, and the witch doctor ordered them to pick up machetes and get themselves in line and walk out to the banana groves. And once he got them there he gave them orders to start working at cutting down bunches of bananas all night long, and the kid’s father felt fiendish ecstatic about the whole thing and put up some little huts, like cabanas, made with a lot of old dried cane stalks so during the day they could hide the living dead inside the huts, all of them stuffed together on the floor like a pile of garbage, but every night they ordered them out to work at cutting down bananas, and that’s how the kid’s father managed to accumulate his vast fortune. And the son witnessed all of that but was still a young kid at the time. But eventually he grew up and married a tall blond co-ed he met away at college in the United States, and brought her back to the island, same as a few years later he did with the other girl, the one he married later on, the brunette . . . the leading lady. Anyhow, the first wife, she made him happy, in the beginning, and when the old man died the kid decided he had to call it quits with the witch doctor, so he sends for him to come to the main residence, but meantime he himself heads off to the farthest-away plantation, where they kept the zombies at, he goes and surrounds the zombie huts, and nails stakes across all the doorways, and pours turpentine all over the place and sets fire to the bunches of zombies caught inside, and burns them to a crisp which was the only way to make the poor black living dead stop suffering. But while all that’s going on, the witch doctor, who’s arrived at the main residence to wait for him, with the first wife there, the witch doctor gets a message about what’s happening—the jungle tom-toms bring it to him, because they work like a telegraph system. So then the witch doctor decides to threaten the wife, saying he’s going to waylay her husband on the road somewhere and kill him. So the tall blonde, poor thing, she gets absolutely desperate, and promises him anything—money, her jewels—just so he’ll go away and let her husband alone. Then the witch doctor tells her, yes, there is a way he might be willing to spare her husband’s life, and his eyes roam all over her from top to bottom, as if undressing her. And he shows her a poisoned dagger, putting it down on the table, and tells her if she ever gives him away, I mean the witch doctor, he’ll use that knife on her husband. And at this point the husband arrives back at the house and through the open window he spots the two of them there with her already half undressed, and then the wife tells him she’s leaving him and running away with the witch doctor, and the husband goes crazy blind with infuriation, and spots the dagger there and sinks
it into his wife in an outburst of pure insanity. Then the witch doctor tells him no one could possibly have seen what just happened, and being as he was the only witness to the wife’s murder, if the kid lets him just go on with his voodoo and stuff, he’ll lie to the police and claim that the two of them showed up just as somebody was finishing off his wife, some fanatic from somewhere out of the jungle, anybody, just trying to rob the place. So that’s the story that the kindly old housekeeper tells the girl, who’s now completely terrified, but anyway at least she’s been saved from getting herself killed back there in that old abandoned house by a couple of zombies, I mean that giant black guy and then the creepy blond. the nurses on the dayshift, joking and smiling with nice patients who obey directions and eat and sleep but when they recover they leave for good

  —a dog’s cortex, a mule’s, a horse’s cortex, a monkey’s, a primate’s cortex, a chick’s from suburbia hanging out at the movies when she’s supposed to be in church And that’s how the first wife got turned into a zombie.

  —Right. And now comes the part that really thrilled me, because the girl and the kindly housekeeper made it back to the main house, safe and sound for the time being, but—

  —And the witch doctor? What does he look like? You never said.

  —Ah, well I forgot to tell you, but actually you never get to see him, because when the old housekeeper is busy telling the girl how all that stuff happened, you see like a spiral of smoke, which means you’re moving backwards in time and you actually get to see everything she’s talking about pass before you but with the housekeeper’s voice in the background, a deep voice but sweet, and very trembly.

  —And the housekeeper, how did she get to know all that?

  —Well, the girl asks her that very same question: but how do you know about it, Mammy? And the housekeeper with her head lowered, she confesses: her husband was the witch doctor. But through all that part you never once got to look at the witch doctor’s face.

  —the learned executioner’s cortex, factory girl heads roll, zombie heads, impassive gaze of the learned executioner down upon the poor innocent cortex of a chick from suburbia, of a fag from suburbia What was it you were about to tell me, about a part that knocked you out or something?

  —Yes, because once the girl and the housekeeper get back to the main residence, you switch back to seeing the other house again, the one that’s abandoned, and the black zombie guy standing like a sentinel in the doorway, and a shadow slowly making its way through the jungle foliage, and creeping right up to the zombie guy, there at the door. And the zombie guy steps aside and lets the shadow go in right past him. And the shadow, whoever’s entering the house, keeps going, into the bedroom and over to where the poor blonde is still lying in bed. And the poor thing is just lying there unable to move, with her eyes so gigantically open, without looking at anything though, and a white hand, which isn’t the husband’s because it’s not shaking at all, the hand begins to undress her. And the poor dead woman, she’s right there without the slightest possibility of defending herself or doing anything. the youngest and prettiest nurse, all alone in a huge pavilion with the young patient, if he hurls himself upon her the poor novitiate could never escape him

  —Go on. the poor rolling head of the fag from suburbia, nothing more to be done now, now it won’t attach anymore to the body, when it’s dead you must simply shut the eyes in the head, and caress the little narrow forehead, kiss the forehead, the little narrow forehead encasing the brains of that poor chick from suburbia, and who gave the order to have her guillotined? the learned executioner obeys an order which comes from no one knows where

  —And when the girl gets back to the main residence she finds out the husband’s already there, too, and he’s incredibly upset. When he first sees her he throws his arms around her, he’s so relieved she’s safe, but then his rage comes right back and he forbids her ever to go out without his permission. And they sit down to supper. Naturally there’s no alcohol around on the table, not even a drop of wine. And the husband, you see how incredibly nervous he is, and how he’s trying to pretend not to be, and she asks him how the harvests are going, and he answers, going very well, but at that point he suddenly explodes, flings down his napkin and leaves the table in a huff, going off to his study where that cabinet is, locking the door behind him, and starts guzzling away again like a complete maniac. And her, before she goes to bed, she calls in to him, because she can see the light on under the door, but him, he just mumbles, leave me alone. The girl runs into her bedroom and changes her clothes, puts on a nightie or, no, it’s a bathrobe, so she can go take a shower because the heat is so unbearable, and she steps into the shower, but without noticing how she’s left all the doors open, and next thing you know, you start to hear these heavy footsteps, of some man somewhere in the house. She comes running back into the bedroom, soaking wet, to shut her door, but then stays glued to the door and hears someone out there unlocking another door and entering the room where her husband is still probably sulking. She bolts the bedroom door shut and locks all the windows. Well, finally she gets to sleep somehow, but then the next morning when she wakes up he’s nowhere to be found, and she throws herself out of bed all frantic and asks one of the servants where her husband went, and the servant says he left not speaking a word to anyone, but heading off in the direction of that farthest-away plantation. And the girl remembers that that’s exactly the place where the witch doctor has some kind of hideout. She summons the majordomo and asks him for his help; he’s the only person that she feels she can trust. He says how his own last hope had been her arrival there on the island, because maybe his master would finally be happy for a change; but now even that’s gone. Then the girl asks him whether any doctor there on the island ever paid her husband a visit, and the majordomo answers yes, but the master always refuses to follow any instructions, so now there was only one more alternative. And he looks at the girl right in the eye. And she realizes, the majordomo is hinting about actually going to see the witch doctor who’s on the island, and she answers, never. But the majordomo explains how the only thing really needed in a case like this is simply for someone to plant the suggestion deep in her husband’s mind and fortify his willpower, that’s all, and anyway he only came up with the idea because it seemed to be the last resort, and of course, it was up to her to decide. And the majordomo claims that her husband insulted him again that very morning as he was leaving the house, and says he’s not about to put up with that type of thing any longer, because as a matter of fact her husband is nothing less than a total monster, and she ought to leave him flat and look for someone who was more of a man and might actually deserve her, and now the girl begins to think the majordomo is looking a little too strange for comfort, because his eyes are drilling right into her eyes. The girl, totally confused, runs out to look for her husband, frightened now that something has really happened to him and that he really needs her. But the old housekeeper absolutely refuses to accompany her, saying it’s just too dangerous, above all for the girl herself, because she’s a white woman. So the girl winds up with no alternative but to ask the majordomo if he’ll go with her, in spite of the weirdo way their last conversation was going. So the majordomo agrees to come along; he harnesses the cart with the fastest pair of horses, loads a shotgun and off they ride. The kindly old housekeeper, busy out in the garden cutting the morning’s bunch of fresh flowers, she sees them drive off like that and shudders from head to foot, and then screams, but like a crazy person, so the girl would hear and not go, but the girl doesn’t hear a thing at that point because the ocean waves are pounding against the shore like deafening rolls of thunder. The girl begs him not to drive so fast, the horses seem like they’re running wild, but the majordomo pays no attention. The only thing he bothers to shout is that she’ll find out soon enough what a miserable wretch her husband is. They don’t exchange another word, the girl scared to death at each bend in the road, because the carriage sometimes careens around the curves
on one wheel, and the horses seem to obey the majordomo in the eeriest way. Eventually they reach someplace in the thick of the jungle, and the majordomo tells her he has to go over into that hut over there a minute, to ask something from somebody, and he gets down from the cart. And some time goes by, and he doesn’t come back and doesn’t come back. And the girl begins to get scared of staying by herself, when what’s even worse, the drums start beating, and they sound incredibly close by. The girl gets down from the buggy and goes over to the hut, afraid somehow that the majordomo has been attacked. And she calls out, but no one answers. She reaches the hut and discovers it’s deserted, it’s a place where nobody seems to have been for years, because the plants have all totally overrun the place. Then the girl begins to hear singing, voodoo chants, but since at this point she’s more afraid to be by herself, she begins to walk toward where the voices are coming from. But I’ll tell you the rest next time.

  —Cut it out.

  —What do you mean? I’m just hungry, you know? And somebody’s got to make lunch, so long as you don’t want to poison yourself again with that stuff they serve us . . . Anyway, the potatoes are almost done.

  —But if there’s not much left to go, let’s finish it now.

  —No, there’s still a lot more left.

  —Morning . . .

  —How are you? Sleep well?

  —Mmm, unbelievably well.

  —You did too much reading though. And since that candle is mine, I’ll decide when to put it out next time.

  —It’s just that I can’t believe I’m actually able to read again.

  —Yes, okay, it’s fine to read in the afternoon and all that; you could read and that was great . . . in the afternoon. But after the lights went out, first thing, you go and overdo it for two more hours with that tiny candle.

  —Okay, but I’m a big boy now, right? So let me tend to my own affairs.

  —But at night we could have just gone on with the zombies, right? Which I know you liked, don’t tell me you didn’t.