The Dark Bride

by Laura Restrepo

  An hour later the doctor was sitting at his kitchen table in front of a plate of arroz atollado and lettuce salad served by his wife, Albita Lucía, for whom the turbulence dancing in his mind didn’t go unnoticed.

  “You’re coming from a place that you still haven’t been able to leave,” she said to him, and to cover up he asked her to pass the pepper, but he wasn’t able to prevent her from reading the images that moments before had been captured in his retinas.

  “Do you think that I wouldn’t have liked to be a puta?” she asked him, tilting her head of brassy curls in such a delightful manner that it immediately yanked him away from his journey through someone else’s woman and brought him back to the complacency of finding himself at home with his very own.

  “Really?” he inquired, intrigued and amused, letting out one of those laughs that exposed his rabbit’s teeth to the elements. “I never suspected that you would want to go to bed with a lot of men.”

  “I don’t want to. If I were a puta, I would call myself Precious and I would charge so much that no man could afford me.”

  The next day Dr. Antonio María left the clinic earlier than usual, asking Sayonara to be sure to lock the door securely when she left.

  “Adiós, child. I have to go now, because Precious is waiting for me at home,” he said in parting. He hurried away from the clinic and didn’t want to look back because he knew that Sayonara would be standing in the doorway, watching him leave, illuminated by the glow of loneliness that always surrounded her and that if he turned to look at her he would have been unable to resist the temptation to hug her tightly.

  “Be gone, sorrow!” Piruetas was heard to shout as he came down the middle of the street with little dance steps and clowning around, with a bottle of white rum in his hand and clinging to a pair of very drunk girls.

  “Be gone, sorrow,” they say Sayonara repeated as she locked the clinic door.

  twenty-six

  I am trying to concentrate on fragments of information about the famous rice strike that I have compiled from the press of the era, from files and from union documents, but my head is speeding off in ten different directions at the same time, as if trying to take in everything with one fell swoop. Writing this story has turned into an already lost race against time and faulty memory, twin brothers with long fingers that touch everything. Each day they appear and momentarily stir up before my eyes glimpses and reflections of situations, of moments, of words spoken or unspoken, of faces that I recognize as invaluable, loose pieces of the great puzzle of La Catunga, which overwhelm me with their little voices shouting for me to pay attention to them and ordering me to document them in writing or else they will be swept away by a broom and become lost among the debris. I cannot keep up with this attempt to imprison a world that goes by in flashes like a dream remembered upon waking, elusive in its vagueness and hallucinatory in its intensity.

  Just as it is with my own dreams, I alone have the opportunity to bring into focus this fragile and volatile kaleidoscope, made of insect’s wings; only for me does the keyhole exist, inviting me to spy, while on the other side of the door the disappearance continues little by little, and the only things that will endure are those that I am able to capture and to pierce with a pin to affix them to these pages.

  But the task is more devilish still, because I am also assaulted by the conviction that, contradictorily, the very act of inserting myself into a foreign and private story, of sniffing around what otherwise would have disintegrated, of clearing the dust from shelves where already little more than dust remains, accelerates the fall into oblivion, just as occurred in Fellini’s film Roma, where the camera, as it enters an ancient domus, hermetically sealed for centuries, catches a momentary glimpse of some frescoes that vanish instantaneously upon contact with the devastating external atmosphere. The same camera that perpetuates the image of the frescoes is what has destroyed them, as if they were real only as long as no one looked at them. I sense that like those frescoes, La Catunga is self-sufficient, can conserve itself in its own oblivion, and lives only when others ignore it.

  Yet, at the same time it doesn’t exist if I am not here to bear witness. And because of that I persevere, I meddle, I violate the story’s reserve. This morning, for example, I was awakened by the need to define an image that earlier had barely caught my attention, that of the painter who at some point had done the oil portrait of Mistinguett that provoked such displeasure in her. Had it been just an ordinary artist, or an unknown amateur, or was it possibly someone who had managed to endure in museums and reproductions? Did that painting still exist, the one in which Mistinguett said she looked like a chicken? Curiosity compelled me to get up at once and, without pausing for breakfast, drove me to Todos los Santos’s house.

  I found her up and about and particularly spirited, renewed by a sudden burst of vanity: She had cloaked her old age and her ailments in a showy, bright-pink nylon nightgown, had mounted upon her withered bun a tall Spanish comb encrusted with gems, and wore on her feet a pair of slippers made of rabbit skin dyed a soft shade of pink.

  “You look very elegant, Todos los Santos.”

  “They are simply artifices to mask the weariness,” she clarified, and I began to question her about the famous painter while she, all pink and vaporous, visited one by one the cages of the strange zoo of small captive animals, unpleasant like all zoos, that she kept on the patio, in the garden, the corridor, and the kitchen of the house she shared with Fideo and Olga.

  “That portrait? Who knows where it ended up?” she answered, as she tried to focus her dull pupils on a bizarre, awkward bird that was looking at her with round, pearly eyes like a pair of shell buttons. Missing a leg, the bird was clinging with the remaining one to the old woman’s finger, wings flapping painfully to keep its balance as she offered it a piece of plantain.

  “What kind of bird is that, and who amputated its foot?”

  “It is a chuachí and when they brought it to me, as a baby, it was already mutilated, the poor thing. His name is Felipe.”

  She told me that in spite of her reputation as a diva, Mistinguett was in reality a fat and wicked woman with large breasts, and that the painter, in contrast, was a timid and desperately fragile man, who from that day on never again made “modern portraits” of the girls because he had been discredited for making them look ugly, with wild hair and terrified eyes, as if they had been run over by a train.

  “Except for the pipatonas. He did paint them in the modern style, because it didn’t bother them,” Todos los Santos told me, now feeding rice to a friendly parrot that was walking up her arm and shoulder onto her head to peck at the stones shining in her comb.

  “And what is this meddling parrot’s name?”

  “He’s not a parrot, he’s a guacamayeta, and his name is Felipe.”

  “Are they all named Felipe?”

  “No, that monkey’s name is Niño.”

  “And that cross between a fish and a pig?”

  “He’s a zaíno and he’s still just a baby. His name is Niño and he’s my baby.”

  “Niño!” she called out, and Niño trotted over, and several other un-classified specimens who must also have been named Niño grew restless and turned to look at her.

  “I suppose that painter left La Catunga to look for another place where his paintings would be more appreciated . . .”

  “No, he didn’t leave,” Todos los Santos corrected me impatiently. “I already told you he stayed with the pipatonas, letting them take care of him and painting them for free in the modern style, and at the same time, to earn a living, he painted a series of landscapes in a more conventional style. Those we did admire, and we would buy landscapes from him every now and then.”

  As I was able to establish later on—only through hearsay, because I was never able to see any of his paintings—“the series of conventional landscapes” consisted of a few seascapes painted from descriptions he’d heard, several Paris street scenes—also improvised beca
use just as he had never seen the ocean, he had never traveled to Paris either—and a few sunsets in fierce violets and dramatic oranges that turned out to be his greatest commercial success because they were widely admired by the putas of Tora, including Todos los Santos.

  “That was art! That was inspiration!” she exclaimed excitedly, as she changed the water in the cage of a toucan with an enormous yellow beak. “He was short and had a pale complexion, but I have heard, although I wouldn’t know from experience, that he was the happy owner of a powerful and oversized sex organ, something like this toucan’s beak. His name was Enrique. Enrique Ladrón de Guevara y Vernantes, with more family names than a telephone directory, because he came from a distinguished family.”*

  But his landowning and aristocratic blood didn’t save him from moral sorrows or physical calamities. On the contrary, he was chained to them by several generations of intermixing Guevara thieves with Vernantes ladies, and of Guevara ladies with Vernantes thieves, who chose to marry among themselves to maintain their properties undivided and their lineage pure. With the lamentable result, unacknowledged by the family even in the face of the evidence, that defects and degeneration were twisting and deforming them until they began to produce circus freaks, whose physical rarities were attributed to the pernicious effects of supposed contracted illnesses and never to hereditary defects. Among these latter was Enrique, with his height of scarcely four and a half feet that was further reduced by the curvature of his misshapen legs. And as if his forsaken body weren’t punishment enough, he was covered with, instead of hair, eyebrows, and beard, a fuzz like dried dandelion blossoms, more transparent than white, and only comparable in lack of pigmentation to his skin—a silk paper with a propensity for being damaged by the slightest accident—which was the insipid color of watery milk and tinged with bluish highlights from the underlying network of illustrious veins.

  “So Enrique Ladrón de Guevara y Vernantes was an albino dwarf?” I said to Todos los Santos.

  “For Mistinguett and the others at the Dancing Miramar he was an albino dwarf, as you say, and they disdainfully ridiculed his physical defects, but to the women at La Copa Rota, which was the lowliest cave of a café, he was always respectfully called don Enrique. But if you want to know so much, go ask Fideo; no one knew him like she did.”

  Fideo, skinnier than can be imagined, lies dark and shriveled like a dried prune in the hammock that is her deathbed, regurgitating memories and struggling to stay alive, because although she has wanted to leave this world for some time, her fear of death binds her to life. Sober and lucid only now, on the eve of her great, definitive drunken spree, she pulls out a contraband drop of enthusiasm amidst the miseries of her agony and smiles when I mention don Enrique’s name.

  “Ay, don Enrique!” she sighs, and catches her breath. “Ay, don Enrique . . .”

  Fideo, the excruciatingly thin dancer at La Copa Rota, a drunk at the age of thirteen, fourteen at the most, and already filled with vices, initiated sometime earlier by force into the arts of hard love. “Dance, Fideo! Dance, skinny girl!” shout the barefoot tagüeros who frequent the place, sitting in the darkness on bundles of sorghum, oats, and rice, and she disrobes, takes a drink, and raises her arms, then half closes her eyes and undulates her wire-like waist, another drink and her dark body—almost a whisper, barely a shadow—turns golden in the reflection of candlelight while at her feet, which are encased in an old pair of white children’s shoes, it rains coins. While the others pretend not to notice, one of the tagüeros stands up drunkenly, raises Fideo in the air as if she were weightless, and takes her behind the curtain in the rear, toward the back rooms.

  There was no place for a creature like Fideo in the red and black velvet rooms of the Dancing Miramar nor on the less pretentious stages in dance halls like Las Camelias, Tabarín, or Quinto Patio. They wouldn’t allow her in riffraff bars like Candilejas or El Cantinflas, or even in La Burraca, a late-night pool hall where schoolboys secretly went in search of old putas who would teach them how to love in exchange for a lemonade or a mogolla.

  “Why?” I ask Todos los Santos. “Why did they refuse her entry everywhere? For being an alcoholic?”

  “Partially for being an alcoholic, because in the better bars it wasn’t proper for a woman to get drunk. From the first day they taught us how to pretend by drinking rum diluted with three parts of mint tea instead of straight rum. But the main reason she wasn’t allowed in wasn’t that, but due to a bad habit that Fideo had.”

  “And what was that habit?”

  “She would cut men’s faces, or scratch them with her fingernails. Fideo had had a devilish temperament since she was a little girl, and at the first sign of displeasure with her clients she would leave them scarred. They would complain to the owners of the bar, and when there were several victims, they would throw her out into the street.”

  For weeks Fideo would wander around looking for a new client, and when she found one, she would completely forget the lesson she had just learned; at the least provocation the claw would emerge and she would scratch again. And she kept going downhill from there, knocking on doors that were further and further away until she found refuge on the bottom rung, according to Tora’s peculiar and rigid hierarchy: La Copa Rota, a grain store with a straw roof and a hard-packed dirt floor that during the day sold feed and at night became a bordello, with an open drum in a corner for a toilet and illuminated by gas lamps because it had no electricity. It was on the edge of a horse path a half hour from the pueblo, in the shadow of the thick jungle where you could already begin to feel the threat of tigers and the green breath of the vast humid expanse. A dozen pipatonas, recruited from a neighboring village, took care of the shabbiest clientele in Tora, a migrating barefooted population comprised of hunters, wood gatherers, tagüeros, and other poor jungle scavengers, who returned from their outings exhausted, malaria-ridden, and full of worms to seek comfort between the first pair of legs that welcomed them.

  Where else would don Enrique and Fideo have met each other? Unacceptable specimens of their respective universes, each in his own painful way. Where else, if not in this exact spot, this last resort, situated on the margin of all human vanity, would their destinies meet, the violated and drunken adolescent and the dwarf artist and aristocrat? Only at La Copa Rota, of course, according to the centrifugal laws of marginalization; in that attempt at a bordello where the Pipatón Indian women worked as prostitutes without red lightbulbs, or green ones, or yellow, let alone white ones, assuming the electric wires had reached that far; having given up the nakedness without surprises, with which they had moved freely about the jungle, to drape themselves with tight outfits made of cheap fabrics that made them look heavy and shapeless like barrels, and wearing crooked high-heeled shoes that bruised their toes; adorned with fake gold rings and earrings, these women, for whom pure gold had been—so they say—familiar and noble like water and corn.

  “Did Fideo like the paintings he made of her?” I ask Todos los Santos.

  “Yes, she liked them, and they made her laugh. Don Enrique told her jokes while he painted her and was very clownish. He used to put a lit match near his ass when he was going to fart and a flame would come out.”

  Don Enrique distinguished himself with vast experience in matters pertaining to sex, which in comparison made the other clients of La Copa Rota appear innocent and illiterate. Because they arrived tired and starved for women, they would do their thing and then immediately fall asleep on top of the bags of grain, or they would leave and not come back, or they would come back when the women had already given up on them. But don Enrique rented one of the rooms at the back of the brothel on a permanent basis and became a member of the household, eating breakfast on the patio with the regulars and never seeming to be in a rush to do anything. In the mornings he would play dominoes or dice with Fideo, making her laugh with jokes about ladies who pee and gentlemen who poop. And in the afternoons he would paint. He painted her over and over again: lying do
wn, standing, or sitting; dressed, undressed, or half-dressed; with red bows or perfumed flowers in her hair; taking her siesta or eating a mango or playing with the cat, as if his only happiness in life were painting her. And they toasted with little glasses of aguardiente, the strong licorice-flavored liquor. One for the model, another for the painter, two for the model, two for the painter, because they both drank shamelessly and in the same quantities.

  When Fideo wasn’t there, or was in a bad mood or didn’t want to model, then don Enrique would be content to paint some drunk lying on a table or the boy behind the bar, who knew how to dress up like a fairy, a gypsy, and a beauty queen, but most of all he painted the pipatonas, staring off into space while waiting for clients, nursing their babies, or weaving straw baskets as they sat on the dirt floor waiting for clients.

  He even painted the owner’s cat several times and Fideo decided that those were his best paintings. He also enjoyed watching the women dance, holding one another close, and other things that they did but didn’t talk about afterward out of shame. Fideo and the pipatonas brought him the news, massaged his legs, forever aching, with petroleum pomade and electric liniment, and forgave him for everything because he was an artist, and artists had the right to invent crazy things and to be different from everyone else. They liked to smooth his hair with their horsetail brushes and they called him Angel Hair, convinced that his exceptional hair and his strange body contained happy omens and were a symbol of something good, because without a doubt God had exerted himself to the maximum to produce such a unique and comical creature.

  “You’re so blond, don Enrique!” Fideo would praise him when she was in a loving mood, and she would caress his pale down. “I’d like to have a child as blond as you.”