The Dark Bride

by Laura Restrepo

  “They know who they are, they know from the last strike, and they will come forward ready to do their part as soon as they see the first bulletin passing from hand to hand. The bulletin is the heart of the strike,” Lino el Titi informed Payanés, before he disappeared majestically, surrounded by his guards. “As long as the bulletin goes out, the strike will remain alive.”

  “Payanés urged me to identify myself to the troops as a North American functionary, so they would release me as was my right and I could spare myself a lot of anxiety,” Frank Brasco tells me, “but I wasn’t eager to do that. First out of anger at my people, who had given me up for dead, and then out of solidarity with the Colombians, because I felt closer to them and because their claims were based on reason and basic worker rights. So I covered my head with a straw hat and hid my mouth and nose under a handkerchief, as I saw others doing, and I left the camp pressed against and hidden by the mass of workers.”

  Then all at once what had been expected occurred: the burst of betrayal from the soldiers’ rifles and the workers’ response with bottles of sulfuric acid and phenol, with the tragic result—which could only be tallied three days later—of eleven dead workers and three burned soldiers. It’s a good thing don Honorio describes this to me, because Sacramento, who was lost in the unconsciousness of his immense sorrow, doesn’t remember it clearly; he didn’t even hear the shots, he says, because inside him the voices of desperation were shouting even louder.

  “We made history,” don Honorio assures me, and tears trickle down the furrows on the left side of his face.

  I have in my hands a copy of the sixth strike bulletin, printed in faded purple letters stiff from the rigor mortis that attacks paper over the years. This same piece of paper must have passed through Payanés’s hands fresh from the mimeograph machine, its ink still damp, and he must have given it to Sayonara, his accomplice, his beloved, his efficient and unconditional helper in the risky task of clandestine printing and distribution, at a moment that must have made them feel like protagonists not only in their own personal drama but also in the history of their nation, which for an instant sat them in its lap.

  “The cocktail of collective enthusiasm, solidarity, and fear was so explosive,” Frank Brasco tells me in Vermont, “that you could say that we were all in love with everyone, that we didn’t need to drink to get drunk and that we didn’t need physical contact to make love.”

  I understand his words: They allude to a communal eroticism that electrifies the air in certain exceptional moments, inviting people to believe that happiness is possible, that life is generous, that you can subdue loneliness and isolation, that one has in his own hands the ability to assure that today will be followed by a tomorrow, and that tomorrow by a day after tomorrow, in a dazzling succession of futures that we Colombians have never experienced. So, although they barely had time for kisses between events and to embrace between tasks, during those thundering days Payanés and Sayonara were given the privilege of living love in that splendid and fruitful place in which it moves beyond itself, casts itself upon the affairs of the world and becomes contagious. Never had they been so young, so beautiful, or so happy as then, nor had they ever been so convinced that they would love each ever forever and that they would never die.

  Machuca, distinguished woman of letters, master of graphic duties, lieutenant under Lino el Titi, and supervisor of underground operations, has kept this copy of the Boletín de Huelga number six safely stored for years among photographs, love letters, foreign money, magazine clippings, and other prized mementos.

  “This sheet of paper,” she tells me, “represents perhaps the most important thing we have done in our lives.”

  The chronicle of bulletin number six began with the arrival of the striking workers of Camp 26 in Tora, where they went into hiding because the strike had been declared illegal and therefore punishable. To camouflage himself among the crowds, given that he was being pursued by the law with orders for his capture, Lino el Titi, already consecrated and on the verge of becoming a legend, bleached his hair yellow and shaved his mustache, with the result that people who saw him pass would say: There goes Lino el Titi with yellow hair and no mustache. So he decided instead on a disguise consisting of a cap and dark glasses. There goes Lino el Titi with a cap and dark glasses, they said then.

  Infected with rebellious passion and led by Machuca, the prostitutas of La Catunga went on strike with legs crossed in solidarity with the petroleros and stayed out of the café. They traded dangly earrings and diadems for red rags that they tied around their heads and took to the streets, along with the general populace, to participate in the manifestations that arose on every street corner and to join protests and massive acts of resistance in support of the list of demands. And, out of an extra sense of civic concern, they demanded an aqueduct and sewers in the neighborhoods of Tora, which were burning with thirst and drought. Repression sharpened its nails and selected its victims. The arrested, nearing a hundred in number, were kept under the rays of the sun and the chill of the moon on the baseball field, which had been converted into a temporary prison. And during a brutal siege, General Valle’s men beat Chaparrita to death and left Caracoles paralyzed on one side of her body, for the simple crime of having hidden several strikers under their beds.

  To prevent solidarity with Lino el Titi and the rest of the members of the strike committee, the army issued, on behalf of the oil company, the written order that the townspeople not “shelter in their homes persons who are not members of their family, or persons of dubious or bad conduct who would compromise the good name of the family.” Despite this mandate, Machuca, for years the soul mate and mistress of Lino el Titi, hid him for a week in her big oak armoire, among plush robes and feather boas and facing a window that was open to the street twenty-four hours a day so that anyone who passed by could see and not suspect a thing. Acting as if she were taking clothes out of the armoire to dress herself, once a day she gave Titi a plate of food and received from him a full basin and pages of writing scrawled by the light of a lantern that were to orient the strike activity with precise instructions and general politics. In the darkness of night, Machuca would rescue him from the armoire and hide him in her bed, beneath her large, matronly body. She would whisper news to him and transmit messages from the other members of the committee, and with delicate movements that barely altered the sheets, she made love to him until he was exhausted. To the song of the blackbirds she put him away again in the big oak wardrobe, where Lino el Titi, in the company of extra-large bras and baby-doll nightgowns, and pressed between inexplicable winter coats impregnated with camphor, spent the day ruminating, sleeping, and writing instructions, recommendations, and sermons as heated as he himself must have been closed up in that hiding place without ventilation.

  “Under those conditions he wrote strike bulletin number six,” Machuca tells me. “He did it in his usual style, so instinctively in tune with the general feeling that he began by saying, ‘The people and I think that . . .’ or ‘The people and I feel that . . .’ Confidently he spoke of ‘a voice that vibrates and does not tremble,’ of ‘a life for humans and not for animals,’ or of other ardent notions in that tenor. I don’t remember clearly anymore. Then he slid the sheet through the gap between the armoire’s doors and I hid it between my breasts to take it to Payanés, as I had done with the five previous bulletins, but this time on the way from my house to Adela Lightfoot’s, where the mimeograph machine was hidden, I was detained, and although they didn’t find Lino’s paper, they did prevent me from delivering it.”

  The barrio leaders were already waiting to pass it along to their block coordinators, and so were the neighbor women who would distribute it under plantains and heads of cabbage in market baskets, and the children who would post themselves on the street corners to look out for the enemy. The mimeograph machine had been oiled and filled with ink and was ready to chew through the stacks of paper, Payanés was impatient to begin the work, Sayonara peer
ed out from the doorway to see if Machuca was approaching, as did the band of horn blowers and timbal drummers who offered themselves as volunteers to cover the noise of the printing with the blasts of their music. All of Tora tense, awaiting their bulletin to prove that the strike was still alive, that in spite of all the repression the leaders hadn’t given up, that in spite of the difficulties victory was within reach. But Machuca, detained at the baseball field, never arrived.

  “Give me a pencil, beautiful,” Payanés said to Sayonara. “I’m going to write this blessed bulletin myself.”

  “How could you think of such a thing! How do you know what instructions to give out?”

  “You’ll see.”

  A few hours later the sheets were being passed from hand to hand, raising the strike to its highest peak and rekindling the energy of the townspeople, who still remember with emotion that its content was reduced to three words, or more precisely to a single word repeated three times: Rebeldia! Rebeldia! Rebeldia!

  But if the workers counted on discontent to unite the masses, the company knew how to use contentment to divide them, and it began to offer promotions, bonuses, and privileges for those who returned to work ignoring the union authority. “A free house for the worker who starts a family,” promised one of the flyers circulating around Tora to encourage modernization, moralization, and the return to normalcy, which ultimately landed in Sacramento’s hands, good, tormented Sacramento, who from the moment he saw another man with the woman he loved had been writhing in an agony of jealousy and rancorous suffering, keeping himself on the margin of the collective exaltation. I don’t dare ask him when or how he made the decision to present himself at the personnel office to put himself on the list of candidates for subsidized housing, because I know it’s a subject that hasn’t healed and still festers in his conscience, in the memory of Tora and in the disgust of Todos los Santos, who still recriminates every time she remembers the incident.

  “As a result of the virulence of the strike,” don Honorio Laguna explains to me, “the company management had begun to reconsider its position. They realized that to have rootless men piled up in barracks with a hammock and a single change of clothes as their only belongings and with a puta as their only love, or in other words with everything to gain and nothing to lose, was to be confronted by bitter enemies that were impossible to manage. On the other hand, a man with a house, a wife, and children, which sizable burden the company helped him to support, would think twice before risking his job to join the fight. At least that’s what the Tropical Oil Company decided: that it was time to modernize its structure to better control the untamed personnel that it kept caged up in the petrolero camps.”

  “Sacramento knew that only by setting up a home far from La Catunga would he be able to separate Sayonara from prostitution,” Machuca tells me. “That’s why he ran to sign up on the list. And also to get back at Payanés: An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, you betrayed me in matters of love, so I will betray you in matters of work. It was clear that he did it for her and only for her, but that wasn’t a valid excuse for the others.”

  Because it turned out that with the help of scabs and through sentimental weakness of the workers in not damaging the equipment to make it unusable, the company was able to partially resume operations in Campo 26, giving the coup de grâce to a workers’ movement that it had already weakened through violence.

  “We workers hadn’t counted on the eighty survivors of the killing spree at Orito, who had arrived in Tora two weeks before the strike, looking for a petrolero’s salary,” says don Honorio; “or the forty-some families made homeless by the flooding of the Río Samaná; or the group of recent arrivals from Urumita, Guajira, who offered themselves for work; or the one hundred sixty Pipatón Indians recently expelled from their ancestral lands by the Troco itself in its project to expand operations; the displaced from who knew where, the one hundred twenty-seven from somewhere else, the thousands of unemployed who proved to be more than willing to accept any job without imposing conditions.”

  “Not to mention the Sacramentos who betrayed us out of anger,” comes the poison-filled voice of Todos los Santos.

  “Don’t judge, Todos los Santos,” responds Olga, and for the first time since I have met her I detect harshness in her voice. “No man knows another’s thirst.”

  “One thing has to be cleared up,” announces Machuca, “which is that Sacramento was never a rat. He didn’t sneak in to work behind the strikers’ backs to help break them and benefit from the situation. That never even occurred to him. His only error was to put his name on the list to receive a house, but given the circumstances, that was an error people considered criminal.”

  The strike bulletin, which appeared every day come hell or high water, had become the visible testimony of the fact that the strikers didn’t give in and continued the struggle in hiding. Dodging threats, beatings, and arrest, they managed to circulate fourteen bulletins, but when the fifteenth was in the process of being created, General Valle and his men descended upon Adela Lightfoot’s house, arresting her and the band of musicians, seizing the mimeograph machine, and destroying pots and pans, utensils, and papers—saying it was “guerrillero material” they had found inside. They didn’t lay a hand on Sayonara or Payanés because the two managed to escape across the roof and then later to hide in separate locations. That day, for the first time since the strike had been declared, people kept waiting for the bulletin and interpreted it as a clear signal that things were going badly.

  “It’s true that the rice strike achieved almost none of its demands and that it ended in failure,” recognizes don Honorio Laguna, as he drinks the last sip of his coffee, “but it was a valiant, dignified failure, and that’s fairly close to a victory. Well, one thing concrete was achieved, and that was that at the 26 they never gave us balls of rice for lunch again,” he adds in closing and laughs at his own joke.

  thirty-four

  During the strike, Frank Brasco, having completely forgotten, you could say, about his identity as a North American engineer and a high-ranking employee of the company in conflict, installed himself among the people of Tora. He tacitly declared his feelings toward the striking workers and supported them in practical ways by lending his services as a nurse to dozens of wounded men, a skill he had learned in his youth through a stint with the International Red Cross; and in legal and formal ways that couldn’t be classified as anything other than humanitarian aid. In addition, in his few free moments he would take Sayonara to eat snow cones at Isaías’s bar, the only way of giving her a tangible and comparative explanation of the nature of snow.

  The company, of course, censured him by demanding his resignation, which he submitted at once together with a long public letter. Unfortunately I have not been able to find a copy of it because not even he himself kept one. In it, according to what I’ve heard, he offered a shrewd analysis of the imperialist enclave and its effects on the local populace.

  But his compatriots did not forgive him, nor was he able to free himself from the sensation of belonging to a nation that mistreated and abused others. Neither worker nor boss, neither North American nor Colombian, neither a man of the tropics nor a man of the poles, he was driven by a chronic restlessness and an implacable unwillingness to align himself with his own people. And perhaps it was that inability to find himself on one side or the other that drove him to take final refuge in the winters of his native Vermont, making the decision, after his retirement, to watch from there the days of his old age pass and never to leave it again.

  “Maybe because being in this snow is enough like not being anywhere,” he says to me. “In the Colombian green I found passion and the difficulty of living, while the winter white of Vermont offers me the benefits of rest. It covers me like a sheet and lets me remember in peace.”

  thirty-five

  After the strike, Tora, as short on water and choked with the stench of open sewage ditches as always, remained submerged in the nostal
gia of what it could have been but wasn’t. Drowned in the painful immobility of its failure and the renewed proof of its impotence, the city saw itself additionally divided into two jealous and resentful halves: the families and friends of the striking workers who remained faithful to the bitter end on one side, and on the other, people aligned with those who wavered and allowed themselves to be tempted by the company’s lures, offers, and enticements. The workers who weren’t fired, among them Sacramento and Payanés, returned to work under conditions that were equal to or worse than before. Those who had fallen were honored with speeches and floral offerings. Three-fourths of those arrested and detained at the baseball field were freed and the other fourth were tried by a war tribunal and condemned to long sentences at the island prison of Gorgona.

  After escaping from Adela Lightfoot’s house on the day it was invaded, Sayonara took refuge among a group of women who were scrubbing clothes at the public washing facility and so managed to go unnoticed, but she lost track of Payanés. When she returned to Todos los Santos’s house, she received the information that he too was safe, and after another week she learned that he had returned to work at Camp 26.

  “I’ll wait for him here, then,” they say she announced, and she prepared to allow time to run its course and to temper the agony of uncertainty. “I’m sure my days of joy are behind me,” she said. “Will remembering hurt less each day, or more?”

  Until finally, after a stretch of anonymous Mondays and the dissipation of lost Thursdays, as if born out of the intensity of the waiting, the last Friday of the month arrived in La Catunga and Sayonara was aware of it, even before waking, in the smiling wind that entered her window dragging along chirps and small shivers, as if it blew from a country of birds. She took refuge in the light cave of her sheets to dream about the man who had promised to return, and she drew him toward her with the obstinacy of her thoughts and the pulsating of her feminine parts, stretching the minutes of her awakening to allow the tickle that had begun to stir her eyelids to descend along her neck and bubble across her breasts, small and tight like a nut when they were exposed, but now, with the nearness of her beloved, spongy and welcoming and replete with promise.