The Dark Bride

by Laura Restrepo

  Now fully awake, she confirmed contentedly that in the deepest recesses of her being, in the middle of the curve of her hip, there where so many men had foraged without leaving a trace, an untouched space grew warm and damp, anxious to receive, seeking a tenant like a magnet drawing metal.

  She rose without anyone having to beg her, contrary to her custom of lounging in bed until the fifth or sixth time her madrina called her to breakfast. And she had already crossed the patio, scattering the chickens, and had bathed using gourds filled with clear water from the cistern when she heard the first shout, “The chocolate is ready!” that on any other day would have found her lost in the mists of morning slumber.

  “Sayonara! Your breakfast is getting cold!”

  “No, thank you, madrina, not today.”

  “Come! The arepas are burning . . .”

  “Forget the arepas, madrina, not today.”

  “Did you feed the canaries?”

  “I’m coming.”

  “Didn’t I ask you to pour boiling water on the latrine? It reeks and it’s clogged.”

  “I’m coming, madrina,” she said, but she didn’t move. She kept brushing her long hair with slow strokes, letting the brush sleep in her hand and her mind soar with the memory of the joy that was to come, while she went about, without really noticing, the impossible task of matching the different rhythms of her own being.

  “There are mysteries in this life,” I hear Todos los Santos reflect, “so remote that the human mind can’t even begin to touch them. One of them is the magic of electricity, another is the composition of a rainbow, and another, more impenetrable still, is the Immaculate Conception. But none is as astounding as happiness. You,” she points at me, “you who have studied at a university, do me the favor of explaining that human vice of placing your entire joy in the hands of someone else. That’s what my girl Sayonara did with that petrolero who they called Payanés and about whom we knew so little. She gazed at him as if she were under a spell and clung to his love like a baby to his mother’s breast or a shipwreck victim to the plank that saved him, as if she really needed him to survive, and without thinking or consulting she gave him the blossoming branch of her hope. My girl who had everything, who never lacked a mother’s care, or the attentions of men who loved her, or physical beauty, or health, or food on the table, nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Why did she have to go looking for what she had never lost? Who can explain that mystery to me? Maybe you, who, as you say, studied at a university?”

  “I must be lovesick, because my body hurts from wanting him so much. If I don’t touch him, I’m going to die,” Sayonara confessed that morning to Olguita, saying it just like that, because the rare alchemy that makes your happiness rest in the hands of someone else was operating in her with an irrevocable simplicity.

  Around three, Todos los Santos came upon her adopted daughter cleaning her teeth with ashes, as she herself had taught her. Then she watched her squeeze some clothing and other objects into some boxes and put on the puffy yellow organza dress, braid her hair with silk ribbons, and dress up her sisters too. Ana in chrysanthemum pink, Susana in sky blue, Juana in celery green, and little Chuza in immaculate lily white. During the remainder of the afternoon Todos los Santos watched as Sayonara soared along on the breeze of her anxiety, looking at everything with the already absent eyes of someone who is not going to come back and scurrying all over the house as she moved various articles, without rhyme or reason, from here to there and from there to here. Todos los Santos didn’t ask any questions when she saw Sayonara drag a heavy clay pot from one end of the hallway to the other, nor when she decided to rescue a Chinese folding screen from a trash heap, not even when she freed the Nativity shepherds, forgotten since December, from their wrapping to place them, offhandedly, on a shelf with the other porcelain objects.

  “Christmas is over, to hell with the shepherds!” exclaimed an annoyed Todos los Santos, returning them to their box. “You’d better not get used to chewing anxiety,” she advised her adopted daughter, “which is a stubborn vice, like that of horses who chomp on air in the stable and then don’t want to eat anything else. You’re as skinny as you are because you feed on sheer nerves.”

  “My God, girl, what are you doing?” asked Olguita, upon seeing Sayonara in such a crazy state.

  “I don’t know if he’ll come for me, Aunt Olga. Maybe he doesn’t remember . . .” was how she responded, and she kept on with her endless running about, sheer purposelessness that calmed her anxiety and mitigated the back and forth of an uncertainty that said yes when coming and no when going. Is he aware of the date? Will he be able to come? Will he want to? And the inclement seesawing in her chest, pounding her ribs, coming and going and saying yes, no, yes.

  “Sayonara! There is a client at the door and he wants to know if you . . .”

  “Not today, madrina, tell him I can’t today.”

  “But it is don Anselmo . . .”

  “I can’t.”

  “Not Anselmo Navas, not him. It’s the generous don Anselmo Fuentes!”

  “Tell him tomorrow.”

  “He says it has to be today, because tomorrow he’s leaving for Valledupar . . .”

  “Well, then tell him to have a nice trip, and that as far as I’m concerned he might as well leave today,” and the whole time she was caught up in that useless motion, unable to control the trembling in her hands that prevented her from getting a grasp on reality.

  “I already told you, madrina, I’m not available for anyone today. Another day, with pleasure. Not today.”

  She mopped the patio tiles, then swept the kitchen and once again mopped the already clean patio, her energies fixed on erasing the day once and for all, on throwing out the hours that stretched out before her like dead cows and which separated her from the only thing that interested her and gave her a reason for existing: the awaited, definitive hour, the hour of their reunion.

  Will he come? Will he not come? No one saw Sayonara approach the river’s edge, only herons sweeping through the air without disturbing it. The water breathed tamely like an animal in a stable and in the sky the afternoon died a natural death, without bloody reds or sudden bursts of orange, only a luminous mauve that faded into a series of increasingly tired grays. No one was coming.

  Unaware of their oldest sister’s anguish, the other girls entertained themselves by striking palm fronds to the cadence of a children’s rhyme: I looked for paper and pencil, tibi-dí, to write a letter to the wolf, tobo-dó, and the wolf answered me, tibi-dí, with a howl of love; first Juana with Ana and Susana with Chuza, then they changed partners, in an amusing synchronization of hands, arms, and voices.

  That man approaching step by step, his silhouette dressed in white, could it be him? Or not? It was.

  But it wasn’t his customary gaze, it was as if he had been expecting to embrace a solitary woman and not crash into that image that unfurled into five, she and her sisters, she and her quadruple reflection, from oldest to youngest, and, as if that weren’t enough, with luggage and paraphernalia scattered around the gathered family.

  “Where are you moving to?” asked Payanés from a distance, and Sayonara could only respond with a slight gasp that seemed almost like a hiccup, but that had a cataclysmic impact within her, causing a momentary paralysis of the principal organs and a brusque rush of blood to the upper half of her body, leaving the lower half limp as a rag.

  “I have waited for you, hour after hour, for thirty days and thirty nights,” Payanés said to her when they found themselves face to face, but more than an affirmation, his words were a reproach.

  “And I for you.”

  “What about your sisters?” he asked.

  “I brought them with me,” she stuttered, stating the obvious.

  “But why?” insisted the petrolero, who was anticipating the delights of his appointment for love.

  Sayonara was stunned by that question she hadn’t expected and whose response seemed so clear, so beyon
d words, that she had no idea how to answer it. Why had she brought them? Why hadn’t she come alone, as it should have been, to the only anxiously awaited meeting of her entire life? She, the beautiful whore, the seductress, the favorite disciple, why was she behaving with the dull-wittedness of a novice? She looked at her sisters beside her, as lonely as she herself and equally ignorant of their own loneliness, and her heart shrank at the armadillo-like timidity in those four pairs of eyes that almost didn’t dare rest on what they were looking at and that gave up on everything beforehand, because they knew nothing in this world could ever belong to them. And yet they were waiting for something, who knew what, so nice and extraordinary, that the future was about to give them on this unique day.

  “I brought them with me because I am myself and my sisters,” she said finally, as if wanting to cry without being able to, as if wanting to avoid weeping but failing.

  But Payanés wasn’t a man to go around acquiring family responsibilities in the name of love. The last Friday of every month, that’s what they had agreed on from the beginning and he was willing to stick with that to the end. But nothing more. Don’t ask him for a permanent home or a quiet heart, because he couldn’t give them; only an arm for working, another to embrace, and a road in front of him, as they often say in this land of the rootless.

  “But didn’t you yourself tell me, Todos los Santos,” I ask, “or were they Olguita’s suppositions, that Payanés longed for his own house when he entered the patio of your house? Didn’t he see in you a mother and in Sayonara’s sisters, his own sisters?”

  “It’s possible. And that in Sayonara he had found the memory of a first love, that too might have been. But for someone like him, it’s one thing to carry the weight of longing for a family and something altogether different to carry the weight of a family,” she clarifies. “When they come to Tora, all men are fleeing from commitment and they become enthralled with speculation, which ties them down much less.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Sayonara asked her beloved.

  “Since we failed in the strike I’ve been in a devil of a mood, thinking and rethinking about where we went wrong. I can’t concentrate on anything else.”

  “I thought that tonight you and I could swear our commitment to love each other forever . . . ,” Sayonara ventured, aware that she had never before said anything that so challenged both the risk of pretentiousness and the sense of the ridiculous.

  Payanés, who looked at her with blank eyes as if she were speaking German, must have thought that the pompous yellow organza dress the girl was wearing was a most appropriate costume for such a stilted discourse. The words “commitment” and “forever” had meaning for him if they were associated with something eternal, such as the metallic solidity of skinny Emilia, but not with the unprotected candor with which this girl had come to give him her life and to dump her sisters on him as part of the package.

  “Well, if it can’t be forever, then it will be never,” Sayonara lashed out angrily and capriciously at a silent Payanés, because she didn’t know how to accept anyone’s disagreement.

  “You have to realize that for being a puta, Sayonara had strange ideas,” offers Machuca. “And an undesirable temperament, of course, because there aren’t many clients willing to put up with fits and demands.”

  “That’s true,” adds Olga, “for a puta, Sayonara was a pain in the neck. Besides, it’s not fair to imagine in Payanés a hardheadedness that didn’t exist. He is a good man, you have to say that, and he was truly in love. It must also be true that the breaking of the strike had damaged his spirits and weakened his convictions, because the same thing happened to all of us. After that fiasco, even the air was poisoned.”

  “Commitments forever are fine for boleros and soap operas,” interrupts Todos los Santos, “but they had no place in La Catunga. My foolish girl liked to go around repeating foreign ideas and fancy phrases she learned from other places. Imagine,” she said, scandalized, “talking about forever in this troubled land where we don’t even know what’s going to happen in the next few hours . . .”

  “Precisely because of that,” says Olga. “Because of that, precisely.”

  “Only moth eggs are forever,” adds Fideo, who it seems woke up today in the delirious phase of her illness.

  “You should know that in Popayán . . . ,” began Payanés, but Sayonara rushed to interrupt him to talk about something else, anything else that would make noise, because she knew that what he was about to say to her would break her heart.

  “In Popayán . . . ,” insisted Payanés, determined to confess but impeded by difficulties, as if each syllable were a huge rock that he had to carry on his shoulder, and Sayonara saw that an unburdening was coming at her from which she wouldn’t be able to protect herself, and in that instant of painful revelation, before the words reached her ears, she also understood why Payanés never spoke about his yesterdays, as if he had just floated in on a pink cloud. And she knew then what everyone except she had suspected; what her madrina had guessed a long time ago and why she had kept saying: “Don’t ask him any questions. Go to see him on Fridays and charge him hard cold cash for your love, but don’t get involved with him or ask him any questions. Hope stays alive as long as you don’t ask, because answers destroy it.”

  “In Popayán I left children, and a wife too. Not the wife I would like to have, but the one I have . . .” Payanés squatted at the river’s edge, conflicted and sort of dazed from the exertion of having spoken the truth, and he started throwing flat stones in the water to make them skip across the still surface. The Río Magdalena, which had once ignited its waters to receive them, a bonfire that consumed but didn’t burn, now passed in front of them tame and bored, an apathetic witness of their fateful encounter, without showing off laundresses, or turtles, or old musicians, or anything like herds of pigs coming down to calm their thirst.

  “Sayonara was stunned by the bluntness of the blow,” Olguita tells me, “and she couldn’t find a way to digest the bitter cake. And she felt ridiculous in her braids and ribbons, her highbrow words, her doll’s dress, and her packed belongings. But of course, since after a while Payanés was still absorbed with his stones and gave no sign of communication, she began to pace around him, trying to move closer but without daring to.”

  The fine thread that bound them had been broken and she couldn’t find a way to mend it, although she was now willing to forgive in exchange for very little, and if that wasn’t possible, then in exchange for next to nothing, anything, just so that he would allow her to approach the clean smell of his white shirt, or lean her head against his big chest, or trail her index finger along the open petals of the rose tattoo, or to imagine the security of his muscles beneath the cloth of his trousers.

  “What are you doing?” she finally dared to ask, but Payanés didn’t even turn to look at her.

  “Bread and cheese.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. That’s what we call this way of making stones dance across the smooth water back at home, ‘making bread and cheese,’ ” he said with the insipid voice of disenchantment, and watching roll across the ground, like decapitated dwarfs, all the treasured desires of those lonely nights in the petrolero camp.

  “Ay, amor mío, let me close my eyes and rest against you even for an instant, because life is so heavy and I can’t bear it anymore,” Sayonara wanted to implore, but she knew she wouldn’t receive a response and any plea would sink to the bottom of a sea of strangeness.

  “Shall we go?” she murmured hopelessly, knowing that her quarter hour of happiness had already passed.

  “Go where?”

  “Anywhere . . .”

  “So where are we going to go, with all these girls and all this stuff? Look, Sayonara, or whatever your name is, you can’t demand anything from me . . .”

  “But I’m not demanding anything.” She wanted to retract her words and erase the traces of her unfounded illusion, but it turned out that she and the fo
ur girls, all five dressed in colorful organza as if they were wrapped in gift paper, with their three bags and two boxes, weren’t a demand but a supplication, an unconditional and mute offering to someone who would love and protect them.

  Meanwhile, in the patio of her house, Todos los Santos, who was feeding auyama to a captive tapir, sensed the disaster that was about to occur; she smelled it in a fetid gust that rose from the river.

  “Ay! my innocent girl,” she lamented out loud, though she was only heard by a guacamaya, a few parakeets, and the tapir, “how many times have I told you that a puta’s love isn’t love for life but only for hours. How many times do I have to tell you that the unattainable girl smells like roses and one who gives herself away smells like filth. Get hold of yourself and endure the lash—we’ll see if you learn next time.”

  What came next was the awkward ending of a ridiculous scene. Walking along without destination or conviction, lugging the boxes, they decided to stop at a parody of a fair unloaded from a cart and anchored to the foot of the train station, illuminated by anemic lightbulbs and animated unsuccessfully by the monotonous melodies of three musicians with a propensity for yawning. It was an ephemeral monument to artificial happiness: a suitable mausoleum in which to give a third-rate burial to a love story with such a calamitous ending.

  The girls won trinkets throwing darts at a cardboard clown, bought gummy caramels that got stuck in their hair, took off their shoes, and got their frilly organza dresses dirty. Payanés, who didn’t know whether to think of them as treasures or monsters, as always occurs with the children of others, made an effort to behave himself and treated them to a double order of tutti-frutti popsicles and roasted corn with lard and salt. He bought each one a stuffed animal, and after a while, barely opening his mouth and looking somewhere else, he said good-bye with a laconic “I’m going.” And Sayonara, who understood that it was a farewell without reprieve, watched him depart through the underbrush that closed around him in shadows, feeling the dizziness of a slight death sicken her heart. But, in spite of everything, she didn’t lose the illusion that at the last minute he would turn his head and at least say to her, “I’ll see you. A month from today, by the river, I’ll see you.”