“Fideo never hurt don Enrique, as she did other men?” I ask Todos los Santos.
“She scratched him a few times, but nothing of much consequence. She wasn’t lacking in motives, because don Enrique was always chasing her around, trying to stick his equipment where it didn’t belong. Who knows where he learned so many strange things and dirty games, maybe in the palaces of the nobility, where he lived as a boy,” Todos los Santos tells me, and Fideo, from her hammock, lets out a lively Ay!
Without even trying, Fideo knew how to cultivate her own style, hormonal, hurtful, and crude, and she raised the bar slightly on what was permissible by disrobing and exhibiting her wounded soul and her malnourished body, by marking men’s faces for life, and by vomiting abundantly when she got carried away with the aguardiente. In a world of prostitution where the most daring acts were dance contests, Fideo was a scandal and an invitation into transgression, and Tora still remembers her as a skinny, ferocious girl with a hoarse voice who would climb up on the tables and shout:
“Bring me a man who loves me and a tiger to scratch my ass!”
One day don Enrique had confessed to the girls that he had been born a dwarf because his mother and father were first cousins, and that other horrors occurred in his family that no one wanted to talk about. Then they understood why their don Enrique, instead of living with his own people, so wealthy and elegant, had chosen to share miseries at La Copa Rota: because he himself was one of those horrors that wasn’t talked about by his family. But here he could forget about his shame and his ugliness, because he knew that they liked him just as he was, little and white-haired, wicked, kind, and playful.
As I am writing, I realize that La Copa Rota was the place destiny had also reserved for Sayonara—almost as thin as Fideo, almost as Indian as a pipatona, and as forsaken by God as either of the two. Then I think that a good part of the heart of this story lies in the journey she must have taken to elude that fate. Or perhaps not to elude it, because anecdotes aside, the Asian princess, the chosen one, la novia oscura, the universally loved, even and especially she—and therein the intensity of her passion—belongs to that incandescent center of the world that is and always will be La Copa Rota wherever it is found: indivisible nucleus, heart of hearts, living flesh, nut. Everything else on this earth is red velvet, circus lights, and sophistication. I thought of these ideas in the heat of my writing, but afterward, much later the same day, in the freshness of nightfall, when I watched a barren chicken named Felipe settle down to sleep on the pink rabbit skin–clad feet of a drowsy Todos los Santos in a corner of her kitchen, I realized that things gently explain themselves and that there is no need to ramble on.
twenty-seven
Everything seemed to indicate at the time of the rice strike, which would go on to mark a before and an after in the history of Tora and its people, that Sayonara was a girl of fragile love and momentary enthusiasms, incapable of settling her volatile heart for very long on any single soul. She had something about her then that was elusive, an incapacity for committing, a difficulty in seeing into the future or fixing her eyes on what was really in front of her.
Her refusal to open herself to others was especially evident in her relationships with men, close to her body and far from her interest, and this prompted frequent scolding from Todos los Santos, who reprimanded her inability to put her heart into the task of serving her clients.
“You are with them but you don’t seem to notice them,” the older woman would say to her. “You don’t listen to them, you don’t pamper them. You treat them like ghosts. I don’t know how long your bad habit of going around self-absorbed will last. It’s as if the rest of us are invisible.”
Once, señor Manrique, who never stopped flattering Sayonara with requests for her time and demonstrations of his senile love, had asked her to iron his dark-blue suit, and in a moment of carelessness she had burned it. Another time she inconsiderately dismissed an engineer from the Troco, who had waited an entire afternoon without moving an inch just for the opportunity to be with her, with the excuse that she was tired. She publicly berated a rich landowner, who suffered greatly because of his fondness for her, for robbing land from others at gunpoint. “Go home, don Tomasito, or I’ll tell your wife about you,” she once said, ridiculing a married man who had approached her surreptitiously.
“You forget that you’re a working woman, not a spoiled girl, and you have an obligation to lend your services with courtesy and according to professional standards,” Todos los Santos said to her, perhaps without realizing that it was precisely that rude and inconsiderate way of offering them her beauty that fired men up and drove them to fall in love with her.
But as I have been told, it wasn’t an attitude toward men specifically but toward the world in general. Some have described her to me as egotistical, but egotism doesn’t fit with the tenacity with which she committed herself to her work on behalf of her sisters, not allowing herself to rest until she had rescued them one by one from abandonment. Which doesn’t mean that when she had them by her side once again, she stayed close to them and helped them with their daily affairs. Far from acting as a mother to Ana, Juana, Susana, and Chuza, from the very first day Sayonara left that role up to Todos los Santos, and what’s more, in their presence she became one more little girl—always the younger sister with the heartrending memory of her big brother?—and just like the others she fought over silly matters, she did bad things behind Todos los Santos’s back, she allied herself with one in opposition to the rest, she made them all cry equally.
Todos los Santos was not in agreement with this division of labor and always resented that Sayonara had left her with the hard work of administering authority over those creatures that were frequently unmanageable, especially in the first days, when they were recently arrived and, due to their touching timidity and defenselessness, irritated her with habits like hiding food under their beds, burying foreign objects in the patio, and, the most inconvenient of all, raising their skirts and defecating in any corner as if they were animals.
Sayonara was always closer to little Chuza than to the other sisters, and she would take the child with her to the washing rocks at the river, to the market, to the Patria theater, to visit friends, perhaps because the child’s muteness made her the ideal companion for an older sister who didn’t have ears for anything but her own internal voices. Little Chuza, in turn, worshiped Sayonara as one should only do with the saints in heaven. She wouldn’t lose sight of her for an instant; she would clown around and do somersaults to get Sayonara’s attention. Enraptured, she would watch her older sister as she brushed her hair, or dressed, even when she shouted in fits of anger, or sang with joy, or was quiet and absent. Little Chuza lived to idolize her sister, and lacking words, she would cover her mouth with both hands, trembling with admiration.
Those who knew her when she first came to La Catunga say that Sayonara was very personable as a young girl, but they complain of the evanescent disposition she later developed. Once, an epidemic of cholera spread through the region, and the air, reverberating with microbes, filtered threateningly through the windows. Alarmed, Todos los Santos temporarily shut down the business and closed her house to outsiders to prevent the contagion from reaching the children, whom she forbade to drink water that hadn’t been boiled or to eat raw fruit or vegetables, caramels, or any other food that wasn’t prepared at home. Despite the precautions, Susana showed signs of having contracted the illness, a fever so high it made her glisten in her bed and gave her a looseness of the bowels that wasn’t helped with the traditional extract of corona-de-Cristo, nor with Dr. Antonio María’s new pharmaceutical prescriptions. In an emergency operation, Tana took Ana, Juana, and Chuza to her house in order to move them away from the source of infection, and Todos los Santos stayed home with Olguita and Sayonara to watch over the sick child, who in addition to the previously mentioned maladies was racked by a series of vomiting spells that doubled her over, nearly pulling her heart through
her mouth, and made them fear dehydration. While the two older women wore themselves out in the kitchen with poultices and medicinal soups, they asked Sayonara to take a rag and clean the floor of the room, soiled with vomit, and when they returned they found her there, paralyzed, with the rag in her hand and looking at the smelly mess without having lifted a finger.
“What’s the matter with you, señoritinga-who-steps-so-delicately? Are you repulsed by your sister’s vomit?” Todos los Santos fumed. “Give me the rag, I’ll clean it up.”
“I’m not repulsed, madrina,” Sayonara answered without batting an eye and handing over the rag, “it’s just that I’m noticing a strange thing. Have you noticed that whenever someone vomits, they vomit carrots? Just like this, chopped into little pieces, even though they haven’t been eating them . . .”
“Your sister is dying on us and you sit there philosophizing,” barked Todos los Santos.
Susana’s illness turned out not to be cholera but a bout of food poisoning due to overly sterile conditions and a lack of street germs, and today, so many years after the danger has passed, Todos los Santos laughs as she describes to me Sayonara’s impertinence.
“But I assure you at that moment we were not amused,” she clarifies. “We almost killed her for going around, like she always did, contemplating her navel while the rest of us were breaking our backs to keep the world from crashing down on top of us.”
Did some secret call pierce her armor to resonate within young Sayonara? Did she demonstrate attachment to anything? An object, a photograph, anything, maybe a stuffed animal?
“With gifts Sayonara was like a little child,” Todos los Santos tells me, “before they were even unwrapped she had already forgotten about them. She never demanded anything for herself, not even her share of the money she earned. She gave it to me without counting it and I distributed it in this manner: a quarter for household urgencies, another quarter for basic needs, a little for our enjoyment, and the rest I would deposit in a savings account in her name. When I asked her to look, even just out of curiosity, at how much she had put away, foreseeing the day she might have to touch that money, she would reply yawning: Ay, madrina, don’t talk to me about numbers, they get all mixed up in my head and give me a headache.”
She never gave up her somnambulant passion for going out at night in her sleeping gown to contemplate the immensity of the sky.
“I don’t know how many times she made me expose myself to the cool night air to repeat the story of the music of the spheres,” sighs Todos los Santos. “She had learned it by heart exactly as I had told it to her the first time, and if I changed a detail she would call my attention to it immediately and make me start all over again from the beginning, until I had recited it perfectly.”
I also inquire about Sayonara’s fascination with poetry. I want to know if it perhaps opened some route to her most intimate thoughts.
“When she was little she led me to believe that she would be a devoted reader,” confesses Machuca, “and I had the hope of finding in her a great companion in the love of literature. But it didn’t turn out that way. And not because she didn’t read, the problem was that she always wanted to read the same things. That’s wrong, read: She was always asking to be read to, because what she really loved was to listen. But as I told you, always the same, like a scratched record. She would come and ask me to tell her, over and over, the stories of Ophelia’s drowning, the guillotining of Marie Antoinette, Joan of Arc burning at the stake, the shooting of Policarpa Salavarrieta. Always suffering heroines with tragic endings. She never tired of that. But, oh, when I would try to convince her to let me tell her about something new! Or if I invited her to read Shakespeare on her own, or Tirso de Molina or any of a number of sublime authors out there, forgotten by young people today. She only wanted to hear the same stories, over and over again.”
There were two dates that were awaited by Sayonara with joy and anxiety. The first was Tuesday, the day the mail arrived at the post office, when she would go to claim her postcards from Sacramento without fail, even during the periods when they didn’t arrive with any regularity. The second, the last Friday of every month.
“The very day she made the promise to Payanés,” Olguita tells me, with as much fervor as if she were telling her own story, “Sayonara hung on her door an illustrated calendar with galloping horses, a gift from the foundry Mora Hermanos, on which she circled the last Friday of each month. And that is saying a lot when you take into account that she never wore a watch nor had any interest in whether it was Monday, Thursday, or Saturday, and I don’t think she ever even learned the names of the months of the year in order. There are people who are aware of every second, but Sayonara wasn’t one of them.”
She seemed constantly shaken by an internal agitation, as if squeezed into a pair of pajamas made of nettles and spurred on by some rush to get who knows where. But at the same time she showed an appalling disdain for the time of day. For her, days undulated eternally and without urgencies—at least concrete, exterior urgencies—and she was always surprised when darkness fell, as if she hadn’t been expecting it.
“What? It’s already night?” she would ask, and she would protest when Todos los Santos would wake her in the morning. “What is it, madrina? Is it morning already?”
She would stuff herself with candy at odd hours and then not eat a bite of lunch. She would go shouting into the street when the whole barrio was taking a siesta and would fall asleep in the middle of parties. She wouldn’t accept dates or commitments with precise schedules, and if she accepted them she wouldn’t honor them. She was like the fishermen on the river, Olguita tells me, who lie in the shade to wait for the rising tide to fill their nets with fish. Sayonara was waiting too, standing at the edge of life. But what was it that she awaited so anxiously? Great advents, I suspect, but I can’t be sure, perhaps because for her too they were never manifested as anything precise.
It is only clear to me that her waiting was not patient, not placid or resigned, and if she didn’t know tomorrow’s date, it was because what she yearned for wasn’t coming tomorrow or the day after or even next week, but it forced her to wait, to allow time to pass and the wind to blow. Meanwhile, she was inwardly tense and anxious, and the fact that her desires had no name of their own, far from mitigating them, made them overwhelming. What was inside the impenetrable mind of that child, pushed by the world into an adult existence? For long periods there were lagoons of water so still they seemed frozen, and every now and then intense high tides appeared that didn’t correspond with the vagueness of the moons unleashing them.
I think I can imagine Sayonara well as a young girl, when she arrived in La Catunga, bony and with scraggly hair like a hungry cat already determined to become a puta. I find decipherable the adolescent who discovers her own beauty in the mirror and starts to make use of the fascination she exercises over others. I am not surprised by the girl who has burning eyes because she saw her mother burn. I know about the strength of her character when it was put to the test; about her cleverness in measuring strengths, diving in at first to pull back later; about her incendiary irreverence. However, I must admit that I am perplexed by the young woman who emerges later; though more admired, she is more self-absorbed, allowing herself to be looked at without seeing anyone, as available to men as she is oblivious to them, and holding herself in the circular path of her own time frame, without building solid bridges to the world around her. Was she preparing herself, perhaps, and storing energies?
Every now and then I ask myself to what degree Sayonara’s spirit and sensibility weren’t blinded by her crushing past. How could she cry for her brother without bleeding to death? How could she remember her mother without turning to ash? How could she love without rekindling the horror? There are sights that can destroy you, and the worst death is rarely your own. In this country marked by violence, we have learned that one of two things can happen to a child who witnesses the atrocious death of family members: Eithe
r he is carbonized or he becomes illuminated. If he is carbonized he is reduced to half a person, but if he is illuminated he can become a person and a half. In Sayonara, the approximation of one of those two opposing destinies was beginning to present itself, but it still wasn’t clear which.
twenty-eight
“We’ve already told you about míster Brasco, remember? He was a friend of ours who was fond of Sayonara and liked to talk to her about snow and the cold storms of his land, because he was a foreigner from far away. We called him Tell-me-why because of his habit of going around asking things, and we also called him the Hanged Man, because of what happened to him during the rice strike.”
A very tall blond man with white skin, long as a gust of wind and uncommonly thin. Míster Frank Brasco knew what it was like to have a thick rope around his neck, everything in him bracing for death, counting the minutes and confused by the possibility, unforeseeable a year earlier, of ending his days hanged in a country that he wouldn’t have even been able to locate with any precision on a map. And all because the men of Camp 26 got bored with having to swallow their pride crammed up in nasty balls of cold rice.
“What’s going on?” Payanés tried to raise his voice over the shouting as he entered the dining hall, beginning to feel carried along by the wave of a collective anxiousness that he had been unaware of until now. “Who can tell me what’s going on?” he insisted, in the middle of the melee of rice balls whizzing overhead to end up splattered on the wall.
If he had been more experienced, he might have guessed that the redoubled blood flow, the ants’ nest of expectations vibrating in the air, and the sparkle in the men’s eyes were the announcement of the arrival of the great rebellion, which returned cyclically to involve Tora in its fury, like summer in other hemispheres.
“What’s going on?” asked Sacramento in his quieter, convalescent tone.
The Dark Bride Page 21
