The Dark Bride

by Laura Restrepo

  dedication

  TO SANTIAGO,

  FOR HIS HELP AND HIS LOVE.

  I am as dark—but lovely,

  O daughters of Jerusalem,

  As the tents of Kedar,

  as the curtains of Salma.

  SONG OF SONGS

  But who would know the way

  to enter her heart?

  SAINT-JOHN PERSE

  contents

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Laura Restrepo

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  one

  Then slowly the night would open and the miracle unfold. Far off in the distance, against the immense, silky darkness, strings of colored lights would appear in La Catunga, the barrio of las mujeres, the women. Men, freshly bathed and splashed with cologne, would pile into trucks on payday and come down the mountain from the oil fields to the city of Tora, drawn like moths to a flame by those twinkling electric lights that held the greatest promise of earthly bliss.

  “To see the lights of La Catunga from a distance? That was heaven, hermano,” recalls Sacramento, who has suffered a great deal because of his memories. “For that, just for that, we would break our backs working in the cruel jungle, the four hundred workers of Campo 26. Thinking of that sweetness, we withstood the rigors of Tropical Oil.”

  Day after day they waded through swamps and malarial dampness, until finally the moment arrived, at the far reaches of hope, when they would glimpse the lights of La Catunga, that barrio baptized by las mujeres in honor of Santa Catalina—la Santacata, the loving Catica, the compassionate Catunga—in accordance with their devotion to her, whether for her chastity, her martyrdom, her beauty, or her royal status as a princess.

  “She had enormous castles and inheritances,” relates the elderly Todos los Santos of her princess and patron saint, “herds of elephants and three rooms overflowing with jewels that had been given to her by her father the king, who was proud to have a daughter more beautiful and pure than sunlight itself.”

  On foot and hatless, almost reverently but snorting like calves and jingling the coins in their pockets—that is how on each payday the men entered those narrow, brightly lit streets they had dreamed of in their barracks, Mondays with hangovers, Tuesdays with the longing of orphans, Wednesdays with the fever of lonely males, and Thursdays with the ardor of the lovelorn.

  “Llegaron los peludoooos! Here come the shaggy men!” Sacramento says in falsetto to imitate a woman’s shout. “They called us the shaggy men because an oil worker was proud of arriving in La Catunga looking tough, tan, hairy and bearded. But clean and smelling fine, wearing leather boots and a white shirt, with a good gold watch, necklace, and ring to show off his salary. And always, as if it were a medal, his company ID visible on his lapel. The ID that identified you as an obrero petrolero, an oil worker. That, hermano, was our badge of honor.”

  “Llegaron los peludoooos!” laughs Todos los Santos, showing the teeth she no longer has. “It’s true, that was the war cry. Tough and shaggy, that’s how we liked them, and when we saw them arriving we also shouted: Ya llegó el billete! Here comes the money!”

  Back then Tora was distinguished in the great vastness of the outside world as the city of the three p’s: putas, plata, and petróleo, that is, whores, money, and oil. Petróleo, plata, and putas. Four p’s really, if we remember that it was a paradise in the middle of a land besieged by hunger. The lords and ladies of this empire? The petroleros and the prostitutas.

  “We didn’t call them putas or rameras or other offensive names,” remembers Sacramento. “We just called them las mujeres, because for us there were no others. In the oil world, amor de café was the only recognized form of love.”

  “Understand that Tora was founded by prostitutas according to our own law, way before the wives and fiancées arrived to impose their rights of exclusivity,” Todos los Santos tells me, regal and handsome despite her advanced age, as she finishes a glass of mistela with the manners of a countess and smokes a fat, odoriferous cigar of the traditional brand Cigalia, with gestures worthy of the equerry of that same countess.

  “Have a little smoke, reina,” she offers me, reaching out the hand holding the cigar a little toward where I am not sitting, and I realize that she can’t see very well.

  “How could you think of that, doña, can’t you see I’m choking?” I say, and she laughs; she seems to think I’ve said something funny.

  “The ones who hold back are the most vice-ridden.” She laughs and covers her mouth with her hand, like a little girl. “If you won’t smoke, then have a mistela. It’s refreshing and pleasant. Please don’t refuse me.”

  In its early days word spread to the four winds that La Catunga was the optimal marketplace for love because of the abundance of money and availability of healthy males, so beauties all over the world packed their beads and baubles and came here to try their luck.

  “Extraordinary beauties came here, improving upon what was already here,” says Todos los Santos dotingly, then coquettishly begging forgiveness for the lack of modesty. “There were some real ladies, all so very elegant and pious. The candleholders in the sanctuary of the Sagrado Corazón never had an empty slot. One didn’t go around brusquely or soil her mouth with foul words, or display poor manners as occurred later, two women fighting over a man and things of the sort. None of that. Vulgarity had no place among us.”

  Since there were women from so many different places, tariffs were established based upon how exotic and distant a woman’s nationality was, or how sonorous her name and unusual her customs. Those who charged the most were the French: Yvonne, big and beautiful, the languid Claire, pale as the moon, and Mistinguett, who before coming to contend with the petroleros was a favorite of the painters in Montmartre.

  “She always dreamed of returning to her country, that Mistinguett; she said that there she was paid just for allowing herself to be painted in the nude. There was also a painter who came here and used her as a model in a painting, but he was a modern painter, a lover of bright colors and foolish lines. She
didn’t approve the portrait and scolded him: ‘That’s not me, it looks like a chicken. I should have charged you more for wasting my time. Where do you see feathers on me, fool? Go and paint chickens and see if they turn out like women.’ She said all that and then to add insult to injury she told him that he painted unholy messes and had reawakened her anxiousness to leave the country, because in France painters truly knew their trade.”

  In the strict classification by nation, after the French came the Italians, ill-tempered but professional in their work, and as the scale descended came the girls from surrounding countries such as Brazil, Venezuela, or Peru, then came the colombianas from the various regions in general, and on the bottom rung the native Pipatón Indians, who were at a disadvantage because of racial prejudices and because they were the most abundant.

  Men of varying talent and diverse plumage made the trip to this utopian place to taste a mouthful of olive flesh, or blond, or mulata—of every kind and in willing abundance, without reproach or commitment, in a harmonious blend of guaracha, tango, and milonga music. There’s nothing like the vice of sweet love to kill longings and loneliness with tender kisses at the edge of a river, between sips of champagne or rum, with words whispered in one’s ears perhaps in Italian, or maybe Portuguese, nearly always in baby talk.

  “They were sincere words, don’t think that we let out an ‘I love you’ if we didn’t intend for it to mean something. For every man there was a pretty phrase, ‘handsome daddy,’ ‘my little piece of caramel,’ ‘light of my eyes,’ and other flattering words like that. But ‘I love you’ was only used for the enamorado that each woman had, the one for whom her heart remained faithful.”

  So as not to generate misunderstandings with the business of the international tariffs and so that the male clientele would know exactly what to go by, the custom of hanging a lightbulb of a different color in each house was established: green for the blond French women; red for the Italians, so temperamental; blue for all the women from neighboring countries; yellow for the colombianas; and common, ordinary white—vulgar Philips bulbs—for the pipatonas, who only aspired to a crust of bread to feed their brood of children. At least that’s how it was until the startling Sayonara made her appearance. Startling? Made of shadow and wonder, her name charged with good-byes.

  Sayonara, the aloof goddess with oblique eyes, more revered than even the legendary Yvonne and Mistinguett, and the only one in the history of the barrio whose window glowed with a violet-colored bulb.

  “The violet light, that was the key,” affirms Todos los Santos. “It was a new color, unnatural, never before imagined. Because green lights are seen in stoplights, in lightning bugs, and reds and blues are at the circus, in bars, in shooting stars, on Christmas trees. But violet? Violet is a mystical color. A violet light in the dark of night produces anxiety and motivates uncertainty. And to think that we owe it to Machuca, may God protect her despite the barbarities she says about Him; it was Machuca, the blasphemer, who obtained that violet lightbulb, so one of a kind. She stole it from a traveling carousel that had stopped in town at the time.”

  Sacramento, the cart man, was the first to see Sayonara arrive in Tora.

  “Sayonara, no; the girl that would become Sayonara and that later would stop being Sayonara to become another woman,” emphasizes Sacramento, and I begin to understand that I have entered into a world of performances where each person approaches or retreats from his own character.

  The river floated along in a lethargy of idle crocodiles, and the champán, the raft, that brought travelers and hustlers, tagüeros and caucheros—gatherers of ivory palm wood and rubber—lively men and those dying of hunger from every port along the Magdalena, was taking longer than usual to arrive. Sacramento was waiting for a client who might solicit his service of human-powered transport for cargo or passengers, and as he waited he grew drowsy watching the spirals of brown water, frothy with oil, twisting and untwisting as they glided lazily by. He says he didn’t know when, light as a memory, she climbed into his cart with her two cardboard boxes and her battered suitcase, because he was startled from his nap by her voice ordering him:

  “Take me to the best bar in town.”

  He looked at her through still foggy eyes and he couldn’t see her face, which was covered by a tangle of wild, dirty hair. But he did see her beat-up luggage and the poplin dress that left uncovered some skinny and dark extremities. This girl isn’t even thirteen, nor does she have a peso to pay for the ride, he thought, as he yawned and took a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe away the sleep that was still hanging from his eyelashes.

  “Wake up, man, I’m in a hurry.”

  “Haughty little girl.”

  Sacramento stood up, walked to the river, making a show of not being in a hurry, drew a little muddy water in a can, dampened his head and T-shirt, took a mouthful, and spat it out.

  “The world’s all fucked up,” he sputtered. “The water tastes like gasoline.”

  “What is the best bar in this town?” she insisted.

  “The most famous one is the Dancing Miramar. Who are you looking for there?”

  “I’m going there to look for work.”

  Intrigued and finally awake, Sacramento inspected the bony, tangled creature who had climbed into his cart without warning or permission.

  “Do you know who works there?” he asked her. “Bad women. Very bad women.”

  “I know that.”

  “I mean very, very bad. The worst. Are you sure you want to go there?”

  “I’m sure,” she said with a certainty that left no room for doubt. “I’m going to be a puta.”

  Sacramento didn’t know what to say, so he simply diverted his gaze to a portion of the slow journey of a log with reptilian wrinkles that was being carried along by the river’s current.

  “You’re too skinny,” he said finally. “You won’t have much luck in the business. Besides, you need manners, a little elegance, and you look like a hick from the mountains.”

  “Take me there now, I can’t waste time arguing with you.”

  Sacramento doesn’t know why he ended up obeying; he tells me that perhaps he was stirred by the freshness of the fruity lips and healthy teeth that he thought he saw beneath the tangles.

  “To think that I was the one who took her to La Catunga,” he says to me. “You can’t count the number of sleepless nights that regret has robbed me of.”

  “You took her because she asked you to,” I tell him.

  “For years I thought I could have dissuaded her that first day when she was still such a young girl and so newly arrived. Now I’m sure I couldn’t have.”

  “Everything was already written.” Todos los Santos exhales smoke from her Cigalia. “Eager creatures like her bargain with the future and shape it to their fancy.”

  Weaving among the crowd, dodging tables and chairs, Sacramento the cart man pulled his old wooden wagon through the smell of oil reheated a hundred times emanating from stands crowded along the malecón that were selling greasy, delicious catfish stew and fried fish. The girl weighed so little that in an instant they were passing the main entrance to the Tropical Oil Company’s facilities, where several guards armed with rifles were busy feeding their pet iguana.

  “What does it eat?” asked Sacramento as he walked by.

  “Flies,” answered one of the men, without lifting his head to look.

  Floating among cloying organic vapors, Sacramento took a shortcut through the municipal slaughter yard.

  “Get me out of here quick; I don’t like this smell of guts,” protested the girl.

  “Do you think I am your horse that you can just guide anywhere you want?”

  “Get up, horse!” she said, laughing.

  Then they crossed diagonally across the Plaza del Descabezado, so named because enthroned in its center was the decapitated statue of some important person whose identity was long forgotten by the townspeople, and that had turned green from stray dogs urinating on it e
ach time they passed.

  “Why doesn’t he have a head?” she wanted to know.

  “It was knocked off years ago, during a labor strike.”

  “The man’s, or the statue’s?”

  “Who knows?”

  They crossed themselves as they passed the church of Santo Ecce Homo and ended up on Calle de la Campana, better known as Calle Caliente, then Sacramento announced, with chauvinistic pride, their arrival in La Catunga.

  “The most prestigious zona de tolerancia on the planet,” he said.

  The girl climbed out of the cart, straightened her poplin dress, which was wrinkled like wrapping paper, and raised her nose into the air, trying to sniff the winds that the future had reserved for her.

  “This is it?” she asked, although she already knew.

  In the vertical heat of midday, winding through the dust, a neighborhood lined by dirt alleyways made narrower on each side by blossoming scarlet cayenos and irregular dwellings made of packed dirt topped with tin roofs, each one with a door open to the street, revealing a minimal interior without mystery or secret and featuring an armoire, a slowly turning fan, a pitcher and washbasin, and a tidily made bed. Outside were mingled stray animals, little boys who wanted to be petroleros when they grew up, little girls who dreamed of becoming teachers, women in slippers shouting to one another as they swept their doorways or sat in rocking chairs in the shade, fanning themselves with the lid of a pot.

  A poor barrio, like any other. Except for the colored lightbulbs, now extinguished and invisible, that hung from the facades as the only sign of the difference, the great, unfathomable difference. As soon as the girl tried to take a step forward, the brutal current that struck violently at her legs made her realize, once and for all, that La Catunga was enclosed within an imaginary cordon that burned like the lash of a whip.

  “Once inside you will never leave,” she heard Sacramento’s voice warning, and for an instant her resolved heart knew doubt.

  “Where is the Dancing Miramar?” she asked in glassy syllables that tried to hide her twinges of panic.