After Florencia’s funeral I walked down Avenida Mérida to Paco’s Cantina to toast the passing of the whore who took my virginity more than forty years before. It was early evening and the sun had nearly completed its daily journey and the light that remained glistened on the wet cobblestones like a thousand tear-filled eyes weeping for one who never knew love. The air was warm and had a deep musky character that reminded me of Florencia. The woman never wore perfume. Her scent was natural and possessed the same aphrodisiac qualities as a first rain after a long dry winter.
The last time I saw her she was heavy and soft, but still retained the sexual magic that is organic in certain women of the coast. I remember lying at her side after completing our transaction, inhaling her pungent taste as I caught my breath. I admired her languid state as I dressed. “You smell like the rain,” I said.
“I smell like the town,” she corrected me. Then she reached across the bed, pulled out a Faro, and masked her scent in a cloud of burnt tobacco.
The cantina was empty. Paco stood on a stepladder at the far end of the counter fiddling with a blue fan that had quit oscillating. I took a seat at the center of the bar and stared ahead at the altar, a dozen postcards taped around a painted statue of the Virgen de Guadalupe surrounded with blinking Christmas lights. Paco had told me once the postcards were from no one. He’d said he put them up because they reminded him of friends who had escaped the quagmire of our village. And in more than a few drunken stupors, those colorful scenes became my own invented memories born of repressed desires: a sunset from Veracruz, the Alamo in Texas, the Angel of Independence in Mexico City, a beach scene from Brazil, an alligator from Florida.
The cantina looked abandoned. Folding metal chairs were set randomly about. The bright green walls echoed with emptiness. A dog slept under the pool table. A streetlight cast a narrow triangle of light on the floor by the entrance.
“Ignacio.” Paco wiped his hands with a rag and approached me across the bar. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“I’ve never seen this place so empty.”
“They’re still at Florencia’s funeral.”
Without my asking, he reached below the counter and poured two shot glasses of Herradura.
He shook his head and raised his glass. “A loss.” His hand trembled slightly, spilling the tequila down his thumb. His eyes looked small, tired, and the wrinkles on his face and neck seemed deeper than I remembered.
“No doubt.” I raised my own glass and took a short sip.
Paco drained his own. He grimaced, forced a smile and slapped me on the shoulder. “So how are you?”
“In mourning, no?”
“Ah,” he acknowledged my sentiment, refilled his glass and topped off my own.
But I was only attempting to escape from routine. In old age, life had become a series of actions executed in order of habit. I had left my home, my wife, and come to see Paco and remember Florencia for the simple reason that I was bored. But as I stood across the bar from Paco, I wondered if this moment was any different than sitting at home with my wife. Lately, nothing that entertained or inspired seemed to happen. All people my age had left were memories.
Several months before during a busy evening in the cantina, I had mentioned something to this effect to Paco.
He had studied my face with concern and said, “But you have a beautiful family.”
I’d dismissed him with a wave of my hand. “They’re all grown.” And then we’d shared a long stretch of silence as we remembered my daughter who had passed many years before.
“I just feel as if something is lacking,” I’d said. “Is this what old age is about?”
“You, my dear friend, are blind to the most fantastic treasure in life.”
“Paco, por favor. You are so abstract.”
He had laughed and poured drinks for the customers. When he returned, he smiled at me and said. “I have no family. I have nothing.”
* * *
“Another?” Paco offered, holding up the bottle of Herradura and bringing me back to the present.
I nodded and watched him pour. But before we had a chance to toast, Artémio Solis walked in with some of the men from City Hall. We shook hands. Paco smiled across the bar. It seemed his anxiety was suddenly appeased by the presence of people. He poured tequila. We drank.
“I don’t know,” Paco said. “This whole business of Florencia has me very emotional.” He pulled out two earthenware bowls with salted peanuts and placed them on the counter.
“She was like our grandmother,” Artémio said with political authority. But he had never been with her the way a man is with a woman. Everyone knew the story of how his wife had nearly beaten him to death with a frying pan. Florencia had found him in the gutter that night. She’d set his broken nose, cleaned him and nursed him until he could go home a few days later.
I held up my glass. “To Florencia, pues.”
People began to trickle in: José Ortega, Lalo Sandovál, Cristóbal Pío and a few others. They were all men, all in their fifties and sixties, faithful to their mothers, married to women with decent reputations; men mindful of preserving the chastity of their daughters, yet all lovers of Florencia.
“To Florencia,” Cristóbal shouted, holding up a shot glass.
“The greatest whore that ever lived,” José cried.
“Que viva Florencia!”
Slowly, the cantina filled with men and memories of the great whore, and I thought of my own time with her so many years before when Calixto Hurtado’s father took us to see her so we could become men. It was Calixto’s fourteenth birthday so he went first. I was the youngest. I was last.
She was not beautiful, but her skin was smooth, dark brown and silky with sweat. She was kind and easy with me. “I know I’m not much to look at,” she’d said. “Just close your eyes and relax. Think of something nice.”
She climbed over my trembling body. I shut my eyes and concentrated on the sound of the rain and the leak from the roof dripping on an aluminum pot and the rhythmic squeak of the mattress. To this day I still cannot remember my thoughts, but when I opened my eyes and saw her dark face, her animal grin and her black tender eyes looking down at me, I sensed I was becoming someone else. Then my loins caught fire and I was a man. Florencia smiled, gave me a kiss on the forehead and disappeared into the bathroom.
I did not see her again until after my second child was born and my wife would not allow me in bed because she’d said she needed to conserve all her love for the baby, which had been born with its eyes open and refused to nurse.
By that time Florencia had grown heavy and old. She did not straddle young boys anymore. Her work habit was to just lay naked on the bed, smoking and drinking while customers came and went. Sometimes we talked before, sometimes after, sometimes we said nothing.
* * *
The conversation in the cantina evolved from mourning to celebration.
“What I remember about her,” Lalo said, his speech slipping under the influence of fermented agave, “is how kind she was. Did you know she bought a dozen bicycles for the orphanage in Santacruz?”
“I heard she started a scholarship for women at the university,” someone said.
“She never refused shelter to anyone,” Cristóbal said. “Not even to a stray dog.”
“I heard she advised the Governor on matters of importance to the district,” Artémio added.
Paco went around the room refilling empty glasses and murmuring to himself, “She was a great woman. . . a great woman.”
Sometime near midnight, a young man nobody recognized entered the cantina and elbowed his way to the counter. He had mild features and was dressed in a dark linen suit and a straw fedora. His eyes traveled over the faces in the cantina as if he were searching for something lost. The murmur of conversation slowly ceased. Then, without so much as clearing his throat, he declared, “My name is Hipólito Castro, son of Florencia Martínez.”
A low, anxious murmur began to spread like an electric current. Everyone added and subtracted years to the time they had shared with Florencia. Cristóbal Pío even put down his drink and used all his fingers to measure time.
Everyone looked perplexed, guarded, betrayed.
“He’s too young,” Lalo sighed with relief.
“I never even knew she was pregnant,” José whispered.
I glanced at Paco. He reached across the bar holding a drink for the young man, his hand as steady as the lighthouse of Miramar. The tequila didn’t even ripple.
Hipólito took the glass and studied the crowd. Silence fell over the cantina. Then he turned and held his glass in the air. “To Florencia!” he cried and drank it down in a single swallow.
The crowd roared. Someone whistled. In the back someone yelled, “Que viva Florencia!” Joy was reestablished.
Cristóbal pushed his way to the front of the bar and ordered a round for everyone. “Behind every great man there’s a great woman.”
“The lover of Presidents!” Artémio sang.
José waved both hands. “A savior!”
“A saint if there ever was one,” Lalo added.
Cristóbal raised his glass. “The greatest whore!”
Hipólito leaned back, resting an elbow on the counter. He appeared to be measuring the crowd. He had another drink. Then he put the empty glass down on the bar. “Caballeros, did any of you actually love Florencia?”
The joyous atmosphere fell like the breath of a dying man. A silence so absolute blended with the stench of old tequila and sweat. All we could hear was the radio of the taco vendor across the street crackling between bits of music. Guilt and shame circulated through the veins of the drunken mourners. Memories faded. Heads turned to the tile floor, and up at the brown spots in the ceiling where the rain had leaked. Eyes avoided eyes.
For the first time I realized there was nothing in their faces save hypocrisy and emptiness. Even in my own heart, all I found was an uncertain sadness for an old acquaintance. Nothing more. Without love there would be nothing to tie her memory to our hearts. In time she would be forgotten.
Then my gaze fell on Paco. He stood frozen, staring wide-eyed at Hipólito. His eyes welled up, reflecting the Christmas lights blinking around the altar of the Virgen like a halo.
He walked slowly from behind the bar and hugged Hipólito for the first time. The scene overwhelmed me with memories of my own children and the fleeting years of youth, of fatherhood. All the joy and pain that life carries with it seemed to pass like a river on its way to the ocean. And in the end we are only left with the most precious treasure: memories.
I did not waste any more time. I left Paco’s Cantina and headed home to embrace my wife and talk of our children who were grown now, one married, two in the North, and the youngest girl who would have been fifteen this month.