The Dark Bride

by Laura Restrepo

“Will you stay with me tonight?” Sayonara interrupted him.

  “I can’t,” he replied, without even thinking about it. “I have to get back to camp today because I have to start work at dawn.”

  “When are you coming back to Tora?”

  “The last Friday of next month, God willing.”

  “Will you come see me?”

  “Okay. But you have to leave that whole day for me. You have to swear that for that one day there won’t be any other men.”

  “That’s how it went,” Olguita told me. “They were apart from the group and we couldn’t see them, because everyone’s privacy is respected, but also because they were hidden behind some patavacales, which abound there. Patavacal? The things you ask, all unimportant details. But I will tell you what you want to know; a patavacal is a tangle of prickly bushes that have a leaf in the shape of a cow’s hoof, which leaves a print in the shape of a heart. I was saying that they were away from the rest of us and hidden, but that wasn’t surprising, since it’s normal with couples in love. You look for a half-hidden flat spot, throw a blanket on the ground, and there, that’s it, you do your business. Then you go with your partner, or sometimes alone, to swim in the river and come out again as if nothing happened. I tell you that we didn’t see Payanés and Sayonara, but we knew what was going on between them, and I could read from Todos los Santos’s worried look that she was afraid the girl was going to get foolish with Sacramento’s friend and forget about the rest of the group. Later we saw them swimming naked, she slender and dark and he powerful and cinnamon-colored, both standing waist-deep in that water that wavered between lilac and mauve, and even with our view hindered by the distance, it was easy to read on their faces that they were in love. Dusk was falling, the hour when the birds’ singing ceases and the river’s breathing quiets, and as we learned later, it was then that they made their promise. The promise that was the most serious vow possible according to the laws of amor de café. They sealed a promise of fidelity for a single day each month, whenever he would come to visit from his camp. Payanés and Sayonara swore the fidelity of husband and wife for the last Friday of every month of the year, and it is well known that in these parts a promise is sacred.”

  “Agreed?” he asked, pressing against him the one who from now on, by sworn promise, would be a little more his than any other man’s, including Sacramento, and he felt his heart begin to beat again at the threshold of visions of the future: He saw the water light up again, the air shimmer with phosphorescence, and her hair burn gold like the crown worn by the Virgen de Guadalupe and formed by the day’s final rays as they escaped the night in the blue liquid of her hair.

  “Agreed.”

  “If someday you leave Tora . . . ,” he ventured.

  “I’m not leaving Tora.”

  “You never know where all this war could drive you. If you leave Tora, I mean, and you settle in any other corner, just wait for our date, then walk in a straight line until you reach the Magdalena and I will be waiting there by the shore.”

  “This river is very long,” she pointed out. “It crosses the whole country . . .”

  “You just look for the river, I’ll know where to look for you.”

  “Later,” Olguita continues, “as they were dressing and the rest of us moved the party back onto the champán for the return trip, came the part with the memento. In that too they acted according to custom, because amor de café doesn’t recognize commitments that don’t involve mementos. Other people sometimes call them amulets or tokens. And notice this detail, the male always wears it, never the female, unless the promise is constant and total, which also occurs. Otherwise no, because she has to continue working, you see? And no man likes to find a trace of the previous one.”

  With a small knife, Payanés cut a long wisp of her hair, braided it, wrapped it several times with hemp fibers, and tied it off, forming a necklace, and with childlike solemnity and the attitude of an altar boy he quickly blessed it, then kissed it and secured it around his neck.

  “Tell me your real name,” said Payanés.

  “You already know it, Sayonara.”

  “That’s just a nickname.”

  “I’ve already forgotten the real one.”

  “Come on, tell me. Just me.”

  “I can’t. If my father finds out the life I’ve chosen, he’ll come and kill me.”

  “All right, then.”

  It was already too late for Payanés to catch the truck back to the camp, so Sayonara accompanied him and waited for him to catch the train, which was much slower, at that fateful stop they call Armería del Ferrocarril, which is always swarming with diminutive angels of sorrow that remind one of flies.

  “This is where my friend Claire said good-bye forever,” she tried to tell him through the window at the last minute, but the train had already started to move.

  sixteen

  “Se sentaban con recato,” don Alonso Olmeda told me last night—a veteran of the Troco who frequented La Catunga in Sayonara’s time and knew and respected the mujeres de la vida.

  They sat with modesty, don Alonso had said of the prostitutas of those days, and his delicate observation took me by surprise, it hit me like a peculiar clue for deciphering that world, one with which this book should be in harmony and which forced me to rethink things I had written earlier. For example, “her flesh overflowed the low neckline of the blue satinette dress.” But they sat con recato. A curious and archaic word, recato. I heard my grandmother use it often and then after she was gone, gradually less and less, as if it alluded to an extinct virtue. Recato: a magical term when it refers, as from don Alonso’s mouth, to a puta. From the Latin recaptare—to hide what is visible—it seems to refer to a secret world that avoids exhibition and which is, significantly, contrasted with the Latin prostituere, to debase, put before the eyes, expose.

  “How did they dress, don Alonso?”

  “With the elegance of poor ladies who wanted to look beautiful.”

  “No cleavage or bright-colored fabrics?”

  “Cleavage, yes, and bright-colored, showy dresses too, but nothing that would call attention with vulgarity. The famous striptease, now obligatory in any brothel, would never have occurred to anyone at the Dancing Miramar and the other cafés in La Catunga. Instead we enjoyed dance contests and there were prizes and celebrations for the couple who performed the best tango, rumba, or cumbia. It was another world and things gave off different colors, and prostitution, forgive me for expressing a personal opinion, wasn’t disgraceful for the woman who practiced it or for the man who paid for it.”

  “Even though there was payment?”

  “The petrolero worked hard and earned his money. The prostituta worked hard and ended up with the petrolero’s money. They say that love for money is a sin, but I say that it’s nothing more than the law of economy, because bread doesn’t fall from the sky for anyone. And don’t believe what they tell you, that amor de café is pleasure and not love. When some fellow worker was smitten by a particular woman, the rest of us managed to stay away from her and not interfere.”

  “Were you always successful?”

  “No, not always. There were a few crooked girls who made their men suffer until they drove them to their deaths. No one confronted them for it because they were within their rights, and anyone who fell in love with a woman from that world was at the mercy of his own good luck. But in general, love between couples was respected and there were numerous cases of sworn and upheld fidelity, by choice of the couple and not because of any other circumstance. I can tell you the names of petroleros who had children in common agreement with prostitutes, without the women leaving the profession. It was a simple world because it wasn’t hypocritical. It wasn’t hypocritical but that doesn’t mean that it was heartless. It may sound ridiculous to you, but there was a certain feeling of chastity in all of that. A certain kind of chastity, you know, and a certain elegance. To understand it you had to have seen them, so proudly gathering their skirt
s when they danced a pasodoble.”

  “Were you in love with any of them, don Alonso?”

  “It’s a story that wouldn’t be honorable to confess because I am the widower of a good and noble woman. Out of respect for the dead. But I will tell you one thing, many of us were in love with prostitutas, and with the passing of the years and a look back in time, now that we’re closer to death, we have to recognize that they were the great passion of our lives.”

  seventeen

  As a young boy, Sacramento wanted to be a saint. No one knows how long and dark the nights of a lonely, sleepless boy can be under the high, resonant ceilings of a monastery, his heart knotting and twisting as he begs forgiveness from God the Father, who sees everything because he’s a great swollen eye, a voyeuristic, furious, and triangular eye that would blink with benevolence only toward those who become a model of chastity, humility, and sacrifice. No one can measure the depths of loneliness of a boy who wants to be a saint.

  Especially when the mercy that this child pursues is not only for his sins but for the sins of the whole world, and above all for the shame of his mother, whose fruit is this very child, conceived by her in sin. At the charity school for orphans and abandoned children that the Franciscan fathers presided over in Tora, where Sacramento attended his first years of elementary school—the only studies he would complete in his life—the majority of the students dreamed of becoming petroleros when they grew up. One wanted to be a butcher like his father and grandfather and another spoke of training to become a fighter pilot. But Sacramento had decided to reach sainthood. I was told this by Father Nataniel, who was one of his teachers and spiritual mentors.

  Sacramento himself still keeps alive the memory of the morning they sent him to the sacristy to collect the prayer book that the rector had left behind. He was about to complete the errand when he suddenly found himself alone in the deserted chapel, panic-stricken by the looks of so many saints scrutinizing him from their high, deep niches, shrouded in the quiet violet light filtering through the stained-glass windows.

  “The saints were wooden and stared at me,” he tells me, “from glass eyes that cast real gazes. The one that terrified me most was Saint Judas Tadeo, with his sharp ax gripped tightly in his right hand, the patron saint of criminals because he is the only one with a weapon. You understand that with all of the violence flourishing in those days, Saint Judas Tadeo was highly revered and favored with votive candles and offerings, but I suspected that he looked harshly at me, as if reproaching me, threatening me with his decapitating ax, and I attributed to him the ability, with those blue glass balls he had in his sockets, of being able to see deep inside me and observe that I was failing in my commitment to sacrifice and suffering.”

  Lent arrived rainy and charged with remorse, and every boy was supposed to choose, according to the dictates of his own conscience, the sacrifices he was willing to make, step by step along a stairway to heaven that began with privations like giving up the milk candies that were served for dessert or getting up to pray an hour earlier than was mandatory, and that ascended through fasts and vigils to reach self-inflicted injuries to the flesh, such as walking barefoot over the pebbles on the patio or tying the rough jute rope worn by the Franciscans around one’s waist under his shirt. In the hands of the penitent orphans of Tora lay the power of enduring suffering in exchange for cleansing humanity of the stains of sin, and no one knows how much a charge like that weighs and overwhelms when it falls on the shoulders of a young boy.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Sacramento’s friend Dudi Abdala, who was a Turk and an atheist, said to him. “Go ahead and eat your milk candies, don’t you see that if you don’t the rector will eat them all himself?”

  But Sacramento, determined to become a saint at any price, genuflected and ignored the temptation.

  “If you’re not going to eat them, at least give them to me,” implored Dudi Abdala, who besides being Turkish and an atheist was a glutton. “It’s all the same to God . . .”

  “Because of you mankind is going to get screwed up,” Sacramento reproached him, and left the candy on the tray.

  At the entrance to the chapel the Franciscan brothers had placed a jar with garbanzo beans and they hung a little cloth bag around each boy’s neck, in which he could place one garbanzo for each sacrifice he inflicted upon himself. The garbanzos were the irrefutable and tangible proof of the degree of goodness achieved, and the boys who suffered most would proudly display the heaviest bags.

  “I struggled a great deal to be the best of all of them,” Sacramento tells me. “I injured my feet on the pebbles and I wore the jute rope, because I knew that I, being the son of a sinner, had to do twice as much as the others to achieve the same result. But I was hiding an unconfessable sin, falseness and pride, because I allowed the devil to push my hand and place unearned garbanzos in my bag so that it would look especially bulky. The full terror of this fell on me that morning as I stood alone in the chapel, when Saint Judas let me know that he was aware of my lies, and from then on he tormented my nights, never letting me sleep. Hour after hour until dawn I could hear the rasping of his ax against the sharpening stone, and I expected that at any moment he would appear to chop off my head with a single blow. In those days I used to cry a lot, mostly over my mother, because I loved her, although I had never seen her again after she left me. The priests told me not to waste my suffering on her because she would never have God’s forgiveness, she was already condemned and there was nothing I could do about it.”

  In the light of day it was possible to put aside temptation and advance without stumbling along the path of chastity, but night was the realm of Lucifer. After nine o’clock, after the final rattle of the electric generator, sin spread through the dormitories and plunged through the darkness into the boys’ hearts, and that was when the color pictures emerged from their hiding places in the complicit glow of candlelight. They were pages from calendars, clippings from magazines, or postcards with women in bathing suits, in towels, in shorts, in underwear, that revealed unsuspected glimpses of nudity, the vertiginous secrets of the flesh, the strange wonders that the feminine sex hide under their clothes. The boys stared at them in amazement, and even God, who saw everything because He was everywhere, looked at those pictures surprised at the audacity of His own creation, incapable of preventing His eyes from gazing upon the softness of those thighs and those necks, the roundness of those knees and shoulders, the miracle of those breasts and buttocks, beside which the pleasure of milk candies and the torment of the pebbles on the patio were minor passions. The pictures showed beautiful light-skinned girls with pink nipples and beautiful dark-skinned women with purple nipples; there were timid ones who covered their chests with crossed arms and brazen ones who showed their underwear because they were sitting immodestly; blondes with equally blond pubic hair; dancers covered with feathers and tulle; beauties in garters, black silk stockings, and high heels.

  In order not to be discovered, the orphans passed the pictures from hand to hand, barely gazing at them before hastily hiding them under the mattress. Then each one would retreat into the cave of his sheets to invoke, now alone and at ease, that mysterious happiness he had just glimpsed. Erotic activity was unleashed throughout the dormitory, and for several minutes the bunk beds shook with the frenzy of their actions. Little by little the scene dissolved into sighs and silence, and overcome by exhaustion, the eye of God closed and before ten o’clock the boys had already escaped—redeemed sinners—to the guilt-free land of their dreams, hand in hand with those beauties with red lips, black hair, and warm thighs of milk and honey. All the boys except Sacramento, who didn’t dream about kisses from beautiful women but rather the rasping of Saint Judas Tadeo’s ax of justice.

  “Every now and then Brother Eligio, the one in charge of discipline in the dormitories, would enter without warning. He would tear the colored photographs from our hands and rip them to pieces, say that those women were putas and that we were going to roas
t in the fires of hell. Putas, just like my mother, I shuddered, and I would gush with tears of anger against Brother Eligio, who insulted them like that, and against my companions too and above all against myself, for desiring women like my mother so.”

  “Strange boy, that Sacramento,” says Father Nataniel. “Obedient and pious, but he never learned how to tie his shoes.”

  I ask him what he is insinuating by that and as he replies he peels with a knife one of the sweet pears that he grows in the orchard of the presbytery in Puentepiedra, Cundinamarca, where he spends the long hours of his retirement.

  “Nothing, simply what I am saying, that as much as I tried to teach him how to tie his shoes and in spite of the patience I invested in the endeavor, he couldn’t pick it up and always went around with his shoes untied.”

  Days later, when I return to Tora and see Sacramento again, the first thing I do is look at his feet. Father Nataniel is right; Sacramento still walks around with his shoelaces untied.

  “I didn’t believe the priests at the school when they assured me that there was no salvation for my mother,” he says to me. “I was convinced that if I got to be a saint, I could get God to forgive her and take her to His kingdom after she died, for all eternity. Whatever the cost, I was personally going to get God to forgive her, of that I was sure; what wasn’t so clear was whether I myself could forgive her.”

  eighteen

  Payanés traveled four and a half hours along the petrolero route to the end of the tracks, which stopped at Infantas, and from there he had to walk another two hours along with the rest of the lagging workers who were returning to Camp 26, splashing into undesirable swamps through a jungle as black and dense as the belly of a mountain. The whole way he daydreamed about the girl without a name to whom he had sworn his love every last Friday of the month; difficult, contradictory dreams that got out of control and ended up with evocations of Sacramento, who appeared to claim her and accuse him of betrayal. Either you die, or regret will kill me, Payanés said to him in his head, and this too: I propose a deal, Sacramento, brother, if you live she’s yours, but if you die you leave her for me. And a little later he would rave about another deal that seemed less cruel: If she leaves her life behind and marries you, I won’t see her again. But if she keeps on doing her thing, you will have to admit that I have as much right to go after her as you do. That’s how he thought he would balance accounts with his sick friend, and he tried to pick up the thread of his memories again, thinking only of her, stretching the fingers of his memory as far as possible to get her back, but Sacramento, relentless, would reappear to prevent it.