Eva Luna by Isabel Allende Page B

he would lie on the bed while I dried him, powdered him, and put his underwear on him as if he were a baby. Sometimes he sat for hours soaking in the bathtub and playing naval battles with me; other times he went for days without even looking in my direction, occupied with his bets, or in a stupor, his nose the color of eggplant. Elvira warned me with explicit clarity that men have a monster as ugly as a yucca root between their legs, and tiny babies come out of it and get into women’s bellies and grow there. I was never to touch those parts for any reason, because the sleeping beast would raise its horrible head and leap at me—with catastrophic results. But I did not believe her; it sounded like just another of her outlandish tales. All the patrón had was a fat, sad little worm that never so much as stirred, and nothing like a baby ever came from it, at least when I was around. It looked a little like his fleshy nose, and that was when I discovered—and later in life proved—the close relationship between a man’s nose and his penis. One look at a man’s face and I know how he will look naked. Long noses and short, narrow and broad, haughty and humble, greedy noses, snooping noses, bold and indifferent noses good for nothing but blowing—noses of all kinds. With age, almost all of them thicken, grow limp and bulbous, and lose the arrogance of upstanding penises.
    Every time I looked outside from the balcony, I realized that I would have been better off had I not come back. The street was more appealing than that house where life droned by so tediously—daily routines repeated at the same slow pace, days stuck to one another, all the same color, like time in a hospital bed. At night I gazed at the sky and imaginedthat I could make myself as wispy as smoke and slip between the bars of the locked gate. I pretended that when a moonbeam touched my back I sprouted wings like a bird’s, two huge feathered wings for flight. Sometimes I concentrated so hard on that idea that I flew above the rooftops. Don’t imagine such foolish things, little bird, only witches and airplanes fly at night. I did not learn anything more of Huberto Naranjo until much later, but I often thought of him, placing his dark face on all my fairy-tale princes. Although I was young, I knew about love intuitively, and wove it into my stories. I dreamed about love, it haunted me. I studied the photographs in the crime reports, trying to guess the dramas of passion and death in those newspaper pages. I was always hanging on to adults’ words, listening behind the door when the patrona talked on the telephone, pestering Elvira with questions. Run along, little bird, she would say. The radio was my source of inspiration. The one in the kitchen was on from morning till night, our only contact with the outside world, proclaiming the virtues of this land blessed by God with all manner of treasures, from its central position on the globe and the wisdom of its leaders to the swamp of petroleum on which it floated. It was the radio that taught me to sing boleros and other popular songs, to repeat the commercials, and to follow a beginning English class half an hour a day: This pencil is red, is this pencil blue? No, that pencil is not blue, that pencil is red. I knew the time for each program; I imitated the announcers’ voices. I followed all the dramas; I suffered indescribable torment with each of those creatures battered by fate, and was always surprised that in the end things worked out so well for the heroine, who for sixty installments had acted like a moron.
    â€œI say that Montedónico is going to recognize her as hisdaughter. If he gives her his name, she can marry Rogelio de Salvatierra,” Elvira would sigh, one ear glued to the radio.
    â€œShe has her mother’s locket. That’s proof. Why doesn’t she tell everyone she’s Montedónico’s daughter and get it over