The Dark Bride

by Laura Restrepo

  “I heard something,” said Sayonara. “Señor Manrique told me. He said that the floors of some houses are covered with wool, like sheep.”

  “That really is strange!” shouted Susana. “That must be one of Sayonara’s lies.”

  “It’s true,” confirmed Todos los Santos. “They are houses with rugs.”

  “What crazy people!”

  “And what are those people doing over there, madrina?” inquired Juana, tugging on Todos los Santos’s skirt.

  “They are playing a game called tennis.”

  “But they’re not children . . . adults play too?”

  “Yes,” said Susana, showing off. “And the one who catches the ball in his hand wins.”

  “No, the one who throws it the furthest with the racket wins,” corrected Todos los Santos. “The racket is that squashed basket they have in their hands.”

  “And inside there, in Barrio Staff,” Ana wanted to know, “do people also die?”

  “Yes, they do. Death is the only thing that strikes them whenever it wants.”

  twenty-four

  A ball of rice. The critical events that occurred next originated with a soggy, cold ball of rice cooked in vegetable oil, one of those balls without salt or God’s mercy that the management of the Troco distributed among the workers at lunchtime, and which they, not wanting to subject themselves to the displeasure of sinking their teeth into, preferred to kick around in the soccer matches they improvised in the building that served as their dining hall.

  That morning, sheets of indecisive rain undulated across the sky, evaporating upon contact with the scorched earth, and the men of Campo 26 worked reluctantly amid dense clouds of heat. Delaying his appointment with death, Sacramento had decided to test the stamina of his weakened legs in the open air after having been released from the hospital. His unexpected recovery from an affliction lying somewhere between malaria, amebic cysts, and yearning for eternity was not so much due to the brown mixture, the white mixture, or the poisonous, pink quinine, as to the life-giving power of a dream and the palpable effects of the object that provoked it: the trinket of hair that Payanés had given him. Because as Olguita explained to me, nothing protects you with such loyalty nor transmits such vigor as an amulet made from the hair of the one you love, and the inverse is also true: An array of ills can be unleashed by a single hair from the head of someone who hates you.

  “You don’t have to be very sharp to realize the power of hair,” she told me one day. “You only have to see how it continues to grow after death. As if that weren’t enough, it’s the only part of the human body that doesn’t feel pain or decompose.”

  “Does it protect you even if the tuft hanging from your neck hasn’t been cut for you but for someone else, and its owner doesn’t even know that you are the one wearing it?” I ask her.

  “One would suspect that under those conditions it would protect you less, but it would still protect you. Anyway, it worked for Sacramento, and he isn’t the only one to have been saved by hair.”

  “Are you a living being or a suffering spirit?” a disconcerted Payanés asked his friend, who an instant earlier he had given up for nearly dead, as he saw Sacramento appear on skinny Emilia’s platform with the uncertain step of Lazarus, who arose and walked, still shaken by a tremor from beyond.

  “I’m still not sure,” answered the resuscitated man.

  “Are you well?”

  “I am, which is saying a lot.”

  “It’s a miracle! Without warning you’ve come back to life . . .”

  “I wouldn’t go that far, but at least the will to live has come back.”

  “It’s incredible, I’d even swear that you’ve grown,” said Payanés to hide his churning feelings, and he confessed to himself that he had been prepared for his best and only friend’s death but not to see him alive again. “Before, I was a couple of inches taller than you, and now you must be taller than I am.”

  “They say the fever either kills or stretches,” replied Sacramento, and he sat down off to the side to watch, worn out by the exertion of breathing among the healthy again and stunned at the velocity and precision with which Payanés and his new work partner fit and coupled the pipes. Pajabrava had replaced Sacramento and was a man with a persistent gaze and the air of an apostle who had the habit of locking his eyes on others until he managed to plant the seed of fear within them. Years of experience around the globe had made him a petrolero trashumante, as they call those who follow the pipeline on its journey from the jungles of Catatumbo to the deserts of Syria, going off, coming back, and going off again. Sacramento tells me that they called the man Pajabrava—slang for “avid masturbator”—because he never missed an opportunity to preach against the practice of masturbation, which was so useful in regions of lonely men. During his discourse, Pajabrava penetrated his listener with his discomforting drill-like gaze while he overwhelmed him with quotes from diverse masters of Eastern thought, until forcing him to admit that onanistic practices were responsible for man’s perdition and his flagging will.

  “You’re so fast at your work, hermano,” said Sacramento to Payanés, who glistened shirtless, bathed in mist and sweat, exhibiting the bleeding rose on his chest as if it were a medal, and who was so synchronized with skinny Emilia’s bold metallic vibration that it almost seemed like a male coupling with a powerful and ferocious female. “You’re ten times quicker than when we started.”

  “You see, now they call me Cuña a Mil, because I can fit a thousand bands an hour. I told you I was going to become the best cuñero in the country.”

  “Because you gave up the filthy habit of playing with yourself,” Pajabrava started off with another sermon. “That’s where your energy comes from. If you go back to messing around, you’ll be no good for this work and all the good rhythm you’ve developed will go to hell. A worker who masturbates is worth less than a burned match. That’s why we’re the shit we are, look around you, a poor yellow crushed army of unredeemed jerk-offs.”

  “Jerking is the opium of the people,” declared Payanés, parodying words that had been repeated around the camp lately.

  “Jerkers of the world unite!” added an amused Sacramento, feeling once again like a member of the human race.

  “Make fun of me, I don’t care,” responded Pajabrava. “But I’m warning you, each drop of semen that you waste is an ounce of vital force escaping from your body.”

  “You’re right, we shouldn’t waste precious semen. Let’s go demand that the company provide each worker with a little jar so he can collect it properly.”

  “Good idea, compañero,” said Montecristo, one of the other members of the team. “And they should put some barrels in the middle of the camp so all the men can empty their jars into them, and then they should consider the possibility of digging a huge lake to hold the barrels containing the entire nation’s life force.”

  “And there would be a bonus for the worker who makes the largest individual contribution,” said Macho Cansado, pantomiming a spasmodic ejaculation.

  “The era of white gold has begun!” shouted Payanés, inspired by the band that had risen up against Pajabrava, whom no one had dared to stand up to until now because of his experience and seniority or perhaps out of guilt for the venal pleasures of lonely nights, or out of fear of being petrified by his cold, stiff gaze, like that of the walking dead.

  But the unstable and heated spirit in the camp wasn’t coming just from the evil eye that Pajabrava was propagating with his insistent morality. Some other undetermined discomfort was hanging over the men, like pepper in the air, an insect invasion, or excessive humidity, something that electrified the surroundings, an uneasiness among men who didn’t know quite what they were doing there, as if suddenly their own pants were too big or too tight, as if what until yesterday was sufficient and good is today too little, too late, obsolete. A generalized nervousness was lurking around the 26 that restless morning, making the men talkative, susceptible, prone to joking
, and unfocused.

  Sacramento approached Payanés with a need for intimacy, for exchanging secret words that concerned only the two of them, or more precisely, that single secret word that belonged to them both and which they painfully shared on the margin of the contagious banter of the others, and it was none other than her name.

  The act of including Sacramento as a character in this book forced me to ask myself how to come to understand and appreciate him in his unenviable role as a tropical Werther, so obsessive and unreal in his love that he belongs to another epoch, melodramatic and excessive when seen from the perspective of a new century which has walled itself up in its panicked fear of being ridiculous and has branded as ridiculous whatever is not imminently practical. How to get closer to Sacramento, to his grating custom of loving until death and his tendency to live dying. How not to diminish or disdain him for being excessive or out of place, and at the same time how to trust the honesty of his love, tenacious but self-sufficient, radical but suspect in its disinterestedness of the subject of that love. The theatrical purity of his idolatry moved me, but I couldn’t escape the presentiment that the object of his fervor was a creature he himself had invented, which wasn’t the girl or the puta either, but a nonexistent third woman halfway between the two.

  “I can’t imagine her, now that she’s grown up,” Sacramento said to Payanés, interrupting him in his work. “Please tell me what she’s like.”

  “Well, she’s like the rest of them, what do you want me to say? She has her little arms, her little legs, her little tits . . .” Payanés was avoiding the answer and at the same time evoking for himself the complete anatomy of that adolescent gone astray, from the smell of smoke and lavender lingering in her hair to her toenails, painted red like geranium blossoms.

  Now I suspect that if Payanés, so formed from the clay of this world, could remember Sayonara in all her light and her smell, it was because he had seen her with the eyes of ordinary love, while Sacramento, on the other hand, adored her through eyes filled with ecstasy; he carried her embedded in the violet pores of his liver, which is the organ of melancholy, and that’s why he sighed with hope by day and desperation by night.

  Pajabrava climbed up to the tower’s platform to perform the duties of capper and permitted Sacramento to reassume his own, but Sacramento functioned with such a lack of conviction and such inability that the rhythm of the work dropped.

  “Payanés,” Sacramento resumed the conversation, trapped in the spiderweb of his obstinacy, while he struggled to hold the pipe with the wrench. “Payanés, tell me if it’s true that she smells like lavender.”

  “What?”

  “Her, Sayonara, does she smell like lavender?”

  “How should I know? I don’t even know what lavender smells like.”

  “But you said the other day that she smelled like lavender . . .”

  “Well, then, yes,” he was forced to admit. “She smells a little like it. Why don’t you be quiet now and put your head to what you’re doing, you’re going to slice off my fingers with this shit.”

  “Are you sure? I would say she smells more like smoke. If someone asked me, I would say that Sayonara smells like smoke. And like the mountain.”

  “Quiet, asshole, you’re going to mutilate me!”

  “This amulet that you gave me smells like the mountain, you know? Just like her hair. When I was a boy I used to get close to her to smell it without her knowing it and becoming afraid, because I thought that what people said must be true, that before she had come to Tora she had hidden in the mountains. They said that since the adults were killed by La Violencia, many children like her ended up as orphans, wandering around and living in caves. Then I thanked God that I didn’t have parents, that way no one could kill them and I wouldn’t have to live in the mountains.”

  “Damn it, Sacramento! Think about what you’re doing. We haven’t gotten anywhere in two hours, and Abelino Robles is going to be furious.”

  “I asked her if she had seen tigers when she lived in the mountains and she said yes, and she wanted us to pretend that we were brother and sister hunting tigers and we would hang their teeth around our necks. But I didn’t want to play; I only wanted to think about her when she was an orphan, living in the mountains, terrorized by tigers.”

  “Fucking son of a bitch! You’re about to crush me! Your fucking mother! That’s it, it’s over. I can’t work like this anymore. Tell Abelino Robles that you’re still weak and that he should move you over to cleaning pipes.”

  Payanés was secretive about his love for Sayonara, focused as he was on the occupational hazards of his job, and I think that unlike Sacramento, who needed to talk constantly of his passion to assure himself that it still existed, Payanés was content to be quiet, sure that on the other side of the jungle the girl he desired was gently grasping, between her thumb and index fingers, the other end of that invisible thread of joy and anxiousness that he held between his teeth. Sacramento was a man molded by doubts, and Payanés, by reality.

  “Today, I’ll excuse your performance, boy,” Abelino Robles, the gang leader, warned Sacramento. “But if you fail tomorrow too, you’ll be a gardener, planting gladiolas with the other useless men.”

  Did anyone notice Sacramento’s virginal paleness when by order of his superior he had to surrender the precision wrenches, abandon the platform, enter the area they disdainfully called la olla, the pot, where the dug-up pipes were stored, take a brush in his hands, and begin to scrub them with gasoline until they were free of mud and grease? Faced with that demotion to scrubber, anyone else would have burned with humiliation, anyone but Sacramento, who at that moment felt that planting gladiolas was the same as polishing Abelino Robles’s shoes; kneeling down to scrub pipes was the same as being an oil magnate and shitting out the world’s heart. He was pale, yes, and had dark circles under his eyes, but the anguish that was gnawing away at him was caused by something else.

  After scrubbing for a while he couldn’t contain himself any longer; he left the pot and climbed back up to the platform where Payanés and a new partner were sweating in the throes of pipe fitting.

  “Tell me, Payanés, why did you have the amulet tied around your neck?”

  “Ay, Jesús, give me patience! Where do you think I should have tied it? Around my balls?”

  “Don’t get like that, just tell me. You could have put it in your pocket, for example. Why didn’t you just put it in your pocket? If a man doesn’t love another man’s woman, he has no reason to tie her hair around his neck.”

  Startled, Payanés’s hand narrowly escaped being crushed between the pipes. He choked on his words and his guilt, not knowing how to respond, and he used the excuse of the racket produced by the chain as it passed through the winch to say that he couldn’t hear what Sacramento had said. Then he was saved by the howling of the whistle indicating the rotation of shifts, and the seven men in the team hurried down the tower to head toward the dining hall. Payanés, to escape the awkward situation, went off on a tangent and started teasing Pajabrava.

  “Tell me, master, do you think that nuns masturbate?”

  “It is well known that during the cold nights in her cell, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz . . . ,” began Pajabrava’s torrent of words, and his response could still be heard when they reached the dining hall to find that, in the midst of general chaos, balls of rice were buzzing through the air and landing on the large portrait of Mr. L. P. Maier, the general manager of the Tropical, who presided over the room from his fixed position high up on the front wall, and from which spot, despite the rain of projectiles peppering his image, he greeted the workers with a broad smile: bland, American, and Protestant.

  It had just begun, in an unforeseen, unpremeditated manner, this violent jolt that would forever mark the lives of everyone involved in this story, and that from that time on would come to be known as the rice strike.

  twenty-five

  For a while now, Sayonara had taken to visiting Dr. Antonio Mar
ía Flórez’s office almost daily, not for a genital exam—something she never agreed to, despite the doctor’s insistence—but to help him with his duties. She demonstrated skill as a nurse and had a particular passion for sicknesses, which led her to insert her finger in every wound, to volunteer to give injections and remove sutures, to examine any rash, swelling, or suppuration she laid her eyes on, and to ask with insatiable curiosity about symptoms, remedies, and medicines.

  “Sometimes I think, Doc, that men don’t love me,” was the surprising comment from out of nowhere that she made to Dr. Flórez on Wednesday evening, after they had seen the last patient and were preparing to close the office and leave for their respective homes.

  “What do you mean, you who are so loved by all of them?”

  “That doesn’t mean anything, Doc. What I want is just one man who loves me, but really loves me. The way you love and protect your wife, you know?” she asked as she scrubbed her hands with disinfectant soap, erasing the day’s chores.

  Dr. Antonio María didn’t answer her either yes or no, instead he simply stood behind her as she washed her hands with the honest movements of someone who is unaware of being watched. He looked at her as he had never allowed himself to do before, that is to say, with eyes that seek to possess that upon which they are resting, and with the painful tension of desire he studied those hands with their long fingers and almond-shaped nails, all the more amazing for someone like the doctor, whose own nails capped stubby fingers. Then, slowly, breath by breath, he noticed the soft line of her arm as it disappeared into her short sleeve, and then moved his eyes immediately to the sea-shell of her ear, which offered him the fascination of a small labyrinth of flesh, then on to the shining glory of her hair that refused to stay out of her face even though she had shaken her head, and it slid forward again, back over her shoulders, alive and untamed, to fall forward and mingle with the splashing water. And it should be said, because Dr. Antonio María himself acknowledges it today, that in that opportunity his eyes took minute notice of the arousing vibration of the girl’s buttocks, caused by the energetic movements of her hands as she rinsed them.