The Dark Bride

by Laura Restrepo

  There is a piece of information that, while literary, seems like it could be verified with a historical or sociological examination of that period: the beginning of Fideo’s tenure at the Dancing Miramar, since it coincided with two more measurable and less allegorical worldly events—the outcome of the rice strike and the spread of syphilis to epidemic levels—and marked what could be called the end of innocence for La Catunga. And the loss of innocence brought with it the pain of seeing the familiar become strange and opened the door to loneliness, which translated into the skin of strangers seeming unfamiliar and covered with thorns. And it wrought misery, which came when people aspired for more, disdaining the dignity of poverty.

  Fideo’s entry at the Dancing Miramar was the symbolic event that marked the beginning of the dissolution of La Catunga as it had been known until then: a simple port, open without suspicion to the winds of crazy love, the transparent surface of a lake before it is stirred up by the wind.

  thirty-three

  At night all cats are brown, and that night all men were cats. With feline and furtive steps they traversed the extreme tension of the 26, all around them a night hermetic and strangely devoid of noise for the first time in seven years—the quiet, heavy machines like enormous animals dreaming in the mist—because the rebels had extinguished the power plant and blocked the valves in and out. With technology forcibly silenced, the human voice took possession of the camp, newborn and still testing its own strength in the form of anonymous shouting that at times ebbed and at times surged, and it was also possible to hear tremulous breathing and other slight noises produced by figures who were crouched in anticipation of something, who were moving toward somewhere, who were protecting themselves behind barricades of oil drums.

  “Despite my nervousness I was thinking about her,” Sacramento tells me, “and by saying that I’m not telling you anything new, because I have never been able to think about anything else. I cursed myself for not having sent her postcards again, since she enjoyed receiving them so much, but at the same time I forgave myself by reflecting that I hadn’t done it, not because I had forgotten or out of laziness, but because of my confusion about words; since I had confirmed what I suspected, that the girl and Sayonara were one and the same, I lost the sense of how I should write to her, especially in the ticklish area of how to address her: Adored fiancée? Señorita? Dear girl? My beloved? I got all tangled up in those meditations on grammar while the revolt in the camp was growing, and vigorously. Payanés, the gringo míster Brasco, and I went to find Emilia. I lit the way with a company-issued lantern in my hand, holding it far out from my body so it wouldn’t reveal too much in case someone decided to shoot at me. The other two men thought it would be prudent to put out the lantern because mistrust and confusion were alive and palpable in the darkness. I didn’t want to extinguish it because its greenish light calmed me, but they convinced me, so we continued on in the dark, sniffing our way uncertainly, until we found our tower.”

  “At first, spokesmen from management harangued over the loudspeakers, threatening reprisals against the striking workers and attacks from the troops,” I am told in a bar in Tora by don Honorio Laguna, an old welder who was also present the night preceding the strike. “But then somebody smashed the speakers and we didn’t hear anything else from the enemy, nor did we know the color that things were starting to take. We began to see groups organizing with tools and iron bars urging the seizure of flash points like the pumping stations, the warehouses, and the UCD plant. And there were others who were saying we should rig the machines, by which they meant remove some vital piece so they would explode when the scabs tried to start them up again. Or that we should cap the pipes, and some even proposed attacks against the golf club with all those foreigners inside.”

  “I had wild ideas that night,” Sacramento tells me, “and I let myself get carried away by the suggestion that we should arm ourselves so we could crush the skull of anyone who crossed our path. Because we were sure that under such crazy circumstances there was no Lino el Titi to step forward, or anyone else with authority to give us better orders.”

  “It’s well known that Sacramento had lost heart that night, having decided to join the participants of the last judgment. What I mean,” says Machuca, “is that he was already anticipating the personal catastrophe that was about to befall him. He must have sensed that the world was going to end for him, so it would be that much better if it just ended for everyone.”

  But he couldn’t make any headway down the road to annihilation because Payanés was obstinate and had a different plan in mind. He kept on repeating that they shouldn’t join the mob who were fucked anyway, that they weren’t going to destroy the machines that were their only guarantee of sustenance; instead they were going to defend skinny Emilia from anyone who tried to damage her.

  “He talked about that tower as if rather than a framework of steel it were a woman, exposed and solitary, in the midst of all that vandalism,” says Sacramento, “and I was bothered by his way of referring to something as if it had a soul.”

  “Look at her,” exhorted Payanés, “my Emilia, tame and quiet beneath the stars, and more loving than ever.”

  “I wanted to check, so I turned to look at the stars,” says Sacramento, “but the sky must have been stormy, because I could only make out five or six, nothing in comparison to what the nights of a petrolero are like, dotted with stars, as the song goes. So I told Payanés not to exaggerate, that it wasn’t the time for it.”

  “Sacramento and Payanés spent the night perched like monkeys in the tower, airing, through questions and accusations, the rivalry that had unsettled them and to which both of them avoided direct reference in order to mask the real issue,” says Machuca. “Every now and then they would throw stones down below against suspected threats, but they did so blindly in the pitch dark and without really intending to hit anyone. With them was Frank Brasco and later they were joined by old Pajabrava, who also climbed up to ensconce himself in the tower.”

  “It hurts here, señor apostle,” said Sacramento to Pajabrava, sinking his index finger in his left side below his nipple. “Here, look, right here, it burns like the devil. You who know so much, can you tell me why when I think about a certain girl my heart hurts like this?”

  “That’s why they put it in your chest,” Pajabrava told him. “As Yahweh revealed to Samuel, the heart is the organ of pain and of love, which are one and the same. They say that when you see it consumed by flames it’s a sign of divine fervor, and when it is pierced by an arrow it means that it’s repentant. If it is pierced by a knife it is enduring one of life’s extreme tests, if it is lanced with thorns it is bearing the torment of a human love, and if it is bleeding it has been abandoned.”

  “Well, then, mine must have fire, arrow, knife, thorns, and bleeding, all at the same time, because it hurts like hell,” said Sacramento, who forgets about piety when it comes to expressing the furors of his spirit.

  “After hours with that rope around my neck I suddenly found myself free and miraculously alive and that cheered me up,” Frank Brasco tells me, as the fire in his hearth warms the interior of his cabin in Vermont, “but I was struggling to understand the situation. The overall one, of course, which was chaotic, but also my own. The executives of the Troco, my compatriots, had abandoned me by refusing to negotiate for my life. So, one thing was clear and another unclear; it was clear that I had no allies and it was unclear who my real enemies were. The only one who proposed something concrete in the midst of that disorder was Payanés, who wanted us to defend Emilia, and it seemed right to me because I too felt affection for that great prehistoric hulk. In lieu of a better strategy, we entrenched ourselves with a good supply of projectiles to throw from the tower; that way we could prevent anyone from getting close enough to damage her and at the same time cover our backs. Night was in my favor, because it hid the fact that I was one of the gringos, whose heads the mob was demanding for being exploiters and imperialists. I
was a renegade gringo, cast off by the rest, of course, but the rebels didn’t know that, so that with the light of day things were going to get more complicated for me. But there was still time before that happened and I thought, as they say in Colombia, Morning will come and we’ll see.”

  Morning came and they saw. Outside the fence, surrounding the camp like a ring of steel, the army’s Fourteenth Brigade had taken up positions under the command of General Demetrio del Valle with all three hundred twenty of its men armed and wearing camouflaged uniforms.

  “That same night the news of the insurrection at Camp 26 reached La Catunga and it brought us out of the bars,” relates Machuca. “We heard about everything, the flying balls of rice, the kidnapping of Frank Brasco, the resurrection of the veteran Lino el Titi as union leader. Then we putas gathered and decided to head over there with food and provisions, in the spirit of solidarity and knowing that the striking workers must be starving. When we approached, well into the morning, we found that the troops had the camp surrounded. The boys were fenced in like the famous warriors of Masada and it turned out to be true that they were howling with hunger.”

  Then the professional women, nurturing and generous, elbowed their way up to the fence and showered the other side with bread, oranges, panela, plantains, bacon, and canned food, which the workers greeted like manna from heaven, since they’d had nothing in their stomachs after their breakfast the previous day, before the revolt erupted.

  “Tell her, Machuca,” urges Fideo. “Tell her about Payanés and the beans.”

  “The workers built fires, heating up the food in tins, and then ate heartily,” Machuca begins telling me, “while on the other side of the fence the troops, without food, watched them with faces like beaten dogs. So Payanés said: Do you want some?—offering part of his beans to an adolescent soldier who vacillated between accepting or not, between hunger and suspicion.”

  “Don’t touch that!” shouted the captain to the young soldier, who stiffened upon hearing the order. “It’s probably poisoned . . .”

  “How can you say that, hermano, do you think we’re inhuman monsters?” said Payanés indignantly. “Are you going to call me a murderer for feeling sorry for this boy who hasn’t had anything to eat? Think about it, hermano, the workers are people and so are the soldiers; there’s no need to tear each other apart . . .”

  “You are subversives from the guerrilla . . . ,” the captain tried to justify himself while the soldier hastily devoured the beans like a hungry child, because deep down that’s what he was.

  “They’re good, these beans,” he acknowledged. “If they’re poisoned, well, the poison suits them. To your health!” the boy shouted to the men inside the fence, and they, following Payanés’s example, shared their bread with the soldiers only a couple of hours before events would lead them to a cruel confrontation.

  The members of the battalion threatened to enter the camp, take it by force, and squash the rebels, but they hesitated. They put off the decision, as if giving themselves time, since they knew that once inside they wouldn’t be able to shoot because any stray bullet could ignite the wells and unleash hell. In the meantime the workers were reinforcing themselves. The strike committee was gathered in some secret corner; Lino el Titi resumed control and decreed that the strike must continue until victory or death. And this news, which spread like wildfire, caused the initial fear, confusion, and chaos to yield to greater fervor, worker unity, and a feverish determination to fight.

  “Victory or death?” said Brasco. “You people speak in hyperbole. I would propose victory, or a reasonable alternative.”

  “We made history,” says don Honorio Laguna, the old welder, and a few big tears of pride pour from his left eye, because the other one is false.

  “It was then that he saw them, and in that instant he felt the full weight of his pain,” Machuca tells me.

  “Who saw? Who did he see?”

  “Sacramento. He saw those two.”

  On that dawn of historical repercussions, Sacramento was floating in an air magnetized by Sayonara, as if sealed in a cave of solitary bliss. He turned to look toward the place where a cluster of women were causing a commotion by passing food over the fence. Among them he recognized the girl, although she was already a woman, dressed for combat in an oriental blouse with its tight row of cloth buttons covering her heart. She still had the same bearing of an undomesticated animal he had noticed the first day he had seen her, and her shiny hair was gathered at the crown of her head in a ponytail that fell wildly down her back.

  “First I saw her, then I recognized her and then I suddenly realized what she was doing . . .”

  Sayonara was extending her delicate fingers with their almond-shaped nails through the holes in the wire fence to touch the thick hand of a worker who was none other than Payanés: separated by the fence and the presence of the armed forces but joined together by a shared look, dissolved in the sweetness of their encounter, hypnotized and dormant in the timeless moment of their contact. Their index fingers sought each other with pleasure and confidence, unaware that the mere touch would bring rebirth and give new impulse to their story, unaware that salvation would be won if the connection was made—fingers inter-twined—or disaster if not.

  “Sparks, mi reina,” sighs Olguita. “Between his index finger and hers sparks and stars emanated to illuminate the sky.”

  “I only had to see how they looked at each other to know everything,” Sacramento tells me. “I felt a sharp pain in my gut and a great desire to fall dead; then came a nausea, like a sour mouthful, the quiet taste of death. What was life for them was death for me, and every time I tell it I kill myself again as if I am reliving it. The world was paralyzed for me and it became night in the middle of the day, as if the images had fled and all that remained around me was a nothingness frozen in black and white, while I burned over hot coals. Jealousy? No, it was jealousy that had burned me earlier, but now it was worse, because as I told you it was pure death, but a wrenching one, not a gentle one. With the passing of the hours my panic dimmed and I faded away to ashes, and the only thing that remained alive in me was the memory of unbearable pain. I was there but I no longer had bones, or flesh, or eyes, or hair: I was a mass of dazed pain that walked without knowing where.”

  Sacramento didn’t notice when the troops violently pulled the prostitutas away from the fence as the women tried to hang on to the wire with hands like hooks. Nor does he remember the many hours of being blocked off without communication from outside, which prevented them from receiving food and forced them to eat iguanas, chigüiros, cats, and other domesticated animals; nor did he know when Lino el Titi, demonstrating the power of his old charisma and newly recovered leadership, said that any worker who damaged a machine would pay with his life.

  “Faced with this last measure, Caranchas and the men from maintenance confronted him with his error, warning him that he would have to settle accounts if the company brought in scabs and reactivated production, thus thwarting the strike,” don Honorio informs me. “But Lino el Titi, being a petrolero, the son of a petrolero, and now the father of three petrolero sons, could not tolerate the idea of damaging a means of production which, he believed, would give substance to the families of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren tomorrow. He was a straight man, Lino el Titi, incapable of comprehending that others played crookedly.”

  Besieged by hunger and the psychological war being waged by General del Valle, who kept airplanes flying low over the camp, and resolved to continue the strike clandestinely in Tora, the workers, through their strike committee, agreed to abandon the installations without committing industrial sabotage in exchange for the troop’s agreement to allow them to leave peacefully, without aggression, firings, or reprisals. Despite his great anguish, Sacramento does remember the exodus of men passing in single file through a double cordon of defiant troops, the unbearable tenseness, the sensation of expecting a shot in the neck at any moment, the certainty that one of t
he soldiers aiming at them would shoot and unleash a massacre.

  That was when Lino el Titi, surrounded by the strike committee and a group of bodyguards, appeared out of nowhere and approached Sacramento, distinguishing him as someone in the leader’s full confidence.

  “You know Machuca, right?” he asked Sacramento. “When you get to Tora look for her and tell her to dig out the mimeograph machine, oil it, and fill it with ink, because the strike bulletin is going to circulate again. You will be in charge of it. The committee members will send you the content, we’ll figure out how, and you will be responsible for seeing that a thousand copies are printed daily. Machuca knows how to type, how to use the mimeograph machine, and how to do things quietly. Is this your friend?” he asked, referring to Payanés.

  “That’s Payanés,” responded Sacramento, spitting out the word “Payanés” as if he were saying “Judas,” but Lino el Titi didn’t notice the subtlety.

  “Well, then, you, Payanés, you’ll be in charge of distribution, which must be handled in secret,” he ordered. “You’ll give the bulletins to the neighborhood leaders and they will give them to the block coordinators, so that they can be circulated to everyone. That way at least eight or ten people should read each copy. Is that understood?”

  “Sí, señor,” said Payanés, puffed up with pride, barely able to believe that he had been honored with such a responsibility. “Yes, sir, don’t worry, we will do everything exactly as you say, but I have one question, señor: Who are the neighborhood leaders and the block coordinators?”