The Dark Bride

by Laura Restrepo

  “And did he say it?”

  “No, he didn’t say it. He left just like that, without saying another word.”

  thirty-six

  The girls were already beginning to feel sleepy, hugging their stuffed animals and convinced they had known happiness that night at the fair, but Sayonara didn’t want to go back to the house to ruminate in the darkness of her room on the hollow echoes of that “I’m going” that had left her bleeding inside.

  She just stood there, incapable of letting go of the already extinguished light from the bulbs, as if hypnotized by the persistent singsong of the long gone musicians and with the same expression of confusion as a child who invites another to play with her new toys and suddenly finds them faded and broken. As if holding in the folds of her skirt tops without strings, dolls without arms, and kites that don’t fly, she couldn’t shake her astonishment at seeing her spells and charms inexplicably useless and disdained.

  The fury of a woman scorned or the authentic desire to die? Both, together and intertwined. Her pride wounded and crushed to her roots, with a pain in her chest as if from broken ribs, Sayonara obeyed the first stirring of her feet, which wanted to take her to foolishly and blindly finish off the night of her despair at the Dancing Miramar, where there would be no lack of men in love with her to keep her occupied while she left behind this twisted and bitter-tasting day. Already on her way, though, she was assaulted by a doubt that made her stop short. What if she ran into Payanés in the middle of Calle Caliente, forgetting about the past in the arms of Molly?

  “The mere thought made her burn with fury,” Olguita tells me. “A dangerous thing. When a prostituta burns with jealousy and allows herself to get swept away by her temper, it seals her fate. Believe what I’m telling you; we’ve seen it happen a thousand times.”

  Payanés unburdening himself to Molly: reason enough to go and kill her, the muy puta Molly Flan. There’s no reason that vengeance has to be only Fideo’s privilege, and how sweet it would be to kill Molly, but what for, after all, if it wouldn’t do any good anyway; the best revenge would be to go to Popayán and tear out that wife’s eyes, although thinking about it again, what did that poor woman have to do with it, there on the other side of the world breaking her back to raise a few kids while her husband is over here running around having fun with a couple of lost women and a vallenato trio. The only worthwhile thing would be to go for that bastard’s jugular, to tear him apart with your teeth, scratch his face until he was marked forever, give him a good kick in the balls, and shout in his face the four cardinal insults: bastard, liar, traitor, murderer of my dreams.

  It was a vulgar but rhythmic bolero, easy to sing, in reality sung so often that it was already part of the folklore of La Catunga and of other red-light districts around the planet. From then on everything would be foreseeable: poetry of degradation; cold, hard anecdote; a script of misery that other women have already written. Drunk, Sayonara would threaten to throw herself under the wheels of the train, then she would reject that dramatically excessive exit and opt for singing rancheras with a wounded howl while hanging from the neck of some other drunk.

  The following night she wouldn’t even appear at the Dancing Miramar because everyone would already know that that stage no longer belonged to her, that the most sought after puta in Tora had dropped in category and was no longer at the level of the select clientele, of the nights of champagne or the décor of mirrors and velvet, and keeping a stiff upper lip, she would have to make do with joining the cast of a cheaper bar.

  “Every girl in this profession knows there will always be a cheaper bar,” Machuca tells me, “and another and another still as you move further from the center, the hill barely inclined so the fall isn’t too noticeable. And she consoles herself by thinking there are many years and many steps that she can roll down before she hits the bottom, to what is rightfully called the bottom of the bottom.”

  “That night Sayonara tempted fate,” Todos los Santos tells me, disturbed by the memory. “She walked a long while on the edge of her decisions and was a step away from taking the nefarious one, the one without recourse, the one waiting for her with its door open. The all too familiar door that awaits every woman of the profession at the end of the alley. But no. Not her. She hadn’t been born to be a tango lyric. I knew it from the first day I saw her, when she was still a flea-ridden child: This one will be saved by her pride. Do you remember I told you that, the morning we met, when you first started coming around here asking questions?”

  “No more yellow dresses,” declared Sayonara, as if canceling with one fell swoop the vestiges of her childhood. “To hell with hair ribbons.”

  She tore off the puffy sleeves and the lacy collar, ripped off the frilly layers of tulle that covered the ample skirt, and released both braids, closing her eyes to feel the caress of her newly freed mane, which glided down her back like tumbling water. An absurd amount of hair for so small and sad a woman. Just like her mother’s and the only inheritance that remained from her. With the sheen of astrakhan fur and blue foxtails, the mass of hair invaded the night, billowing, and when the breezes grew stronger it undulated, long and free, silky and magnificent, like a river in the wind.

  As if taken by the hand of a guardian angel, the winged creature that by means of theatrics and distractions dissuades its protected souls from heeding the call of the abyss, Sayonara refrained from going to Calle Caliente and headed back toward the Magdalena. When she reached the river’s edge, she allowed herself the luxury of doing what any woman without a prostituta’s courage would do under similar circumstances: she burst into tears.

  It occurred at the hour in which the silver phosphorescence of the yarumos glistened, those beautiful trees of the moon, but she wasn’t in the mood to notice the landscape. As Ana, Juana, Susana, and Chuza closed their eyes, tiny sleeping bundles curled up in tulle and sheltered from the sky beneath some bush, Sayonara gave in, without suppressing hiccups or sobs, to an uncontrollable, inconsolable, magdalenic weeping, as she had never allowed herself before nor would allow afterward, surprised at the salty taste of her tears and by their burning nature, like that of holy water, reddening her cheeks as they coursed down them. She let them fall, drop by drop, without thinking of anything more specific than her own sorrow. In all the sorrows of yesterday and today molded into one, without name or face, one big, soft sorrow like a breast that feeds and consoles, old familiar sorrow, so bitter but when all is said and done so much her own.

  “She cried all night, she, the inconsolable one, until the weeping calmed her. There’s a reason people say,” Todos los Santos explains to me, “that it is good to cry out sorrows. It means that you rid yourself of pain through your eyes in its true consistency, which is water. Why do you think tears are salty? Because they are sorrowful water. That’s why.”

  A girl’s tears that fell into the river, which also performed its role, forgiving, baptizing. To understand better: The Magdalena sucked up the suffering and bristled with compassion. So, against a background of moonlight on the yarumos, the girl’s silhouette became cleaner and lighter as the waters clouded, grew sad, flowed more hesitatingly. Until finally, on the verge of dehydration, Sayonara decided that it was enough. I am myself and my tears, she was able to recognize for the first time since she was born, and she stopped crying.

  Over the nocturnal fields wandered large and imprecise beasts that exhaled warm breaths, and the waters of the river became polished and compact: a mass of darkness that invited one to walk upon it. From where did such an enormous flow of living waters come? From where so much liquid running through its bed? Rain, sap, milk, blood, snow, sweat, and tears, the Magdalena was fed by the effluvia of nature and the moods of men.

  Although the night prevented her from seeing the dead bodies carried along by the current, Sayonara felt them pass, inoffensive in their slow, white transit. They flowed past one by one, embraced as a couple, or sometimes in a chain, holding hands, transformed into foam, porous m
aterial that floated, peaceful, pale, finally impregnated with moonlight after having spilled onto the shore, so long ago now, all the uneasiness and pain in their blood. Sayonara, the girl of good-byes, placed her feet in the water to be near them and contained her panic as they brushed her ankles in passing, got tangled in her legs with the viscosity of algae, and sent her messages in their peculiar language, which was a gurgle of organic substance disintegrating in shadows. Later, when the moon hid and the sky was bursting with stars, she didn’t want to leave the river or remove her feet from the water because she knew that the silent pilgrimage also carried with it her loved ones, her burned mother, sweet Claire, her beloved brother, flowing down the Magdalena purified at last and converted into gentle memories, after so many years of suffering and making her suffer, stalking her like ghosts.

  “That’s why they don’t let themselves be buried,” Sayonara finally understood. “That’s why they look for the river, because underground, alone and quiet, they die, while in the current they travel, they can look at the sky all they want and visit the living . . .”

  She also knew: I am myself and my dead, and she felt less alone, as if the millions of steps between herself and them had evaporated.

  Todos los Santos tells me that only at dawn the next day, a Saturday and the day of the fiesta of San Onofre, did Sayonara return to the house with the four girls and their belongings, and that as soon as she saw her adopted daughter enter, with the shredded dress, her hair wild and her eyes ravaged from all the crying, she realized that it was true: Something serious had happened to her. Something serious and definitive.

  “I didn’t dare ask her,” the old woman says to me, “because she had already lost the habit of answering me. I would say things to her a dozen times without receiving an answer, as if she were deaf by her own will, or as if answering would exhaust her tongue.”

  She took Juana and Ana aside and interrogated them in a severe tone, commanding them to tell her whether someone, or something, had hurt her, but the two girls swore that no, they hadn’t seen any attack or accident.

  “I served her breakfast, waiting for the words to come on their own, but they didn’t come. I saw her bitten by lost love and marked by loneliness, everything in her weariness and injury like in a draft mule. Then I decided to ask her, committing all my understanding to interpreting her response, and I was surprised that her voice came easily, without my having to beg, and sweet again, as it had sounded once when she was a child:

  “ ‘Life hurts a little, madre.’ ”

  Todos los Santos felt that Sayonara was serene—wounded and mistreated, but serene, and like Moses, saved from the water: the victor over her own phantoms. That is how the madrina knew that during the night her adopted daughter had been doing the same thing that snakes do, when they rub against rough rocks to slip out of their old skin and exhibit a new one.

  “Finally,” Todos los Santos says to me, and a minuscule brilliance lights up her blind eyes, “when I thought that nothing would change, Sayonara left behind the slippery and self-absorbed skin of her adolescence.”

  thirty-seven

  “I put her in that life, and it’s only right that I separate her from it” was the credo that Sacramento imposed on himself as a mandate, and he was a faithful crusader, willing to do anything to see his cause triumph. Now, in addition, he had a powerful ally in his quest to save the woman he adored, because the Tropical Oil Company had made the profitable, corporate decision to redeem all the prostitutas in the area.

  The exchange of salary for love opened the door to immoderation and irrationality: desire, which burns, also consumes wealth and doesn’t leave anything in return, except renewed desires. And neither the company, nor progress, nor order could find a way to derive benefit from that vicious circle, or at least that was the explanation of the problem according to the enveloping syllogism of don Horacio Laguna, with whom I am having a conversation at the old-fashioned café El Diamante.

  “Capitalism can’t grow healthily like that,” he tells me, “and that’s why the gringos who managed the company declared themselves the enemies of promiscuity, at least of ours, the Colombians’.”

  Although they offered houses, education for their children, health subsidies, and even access to a commissary where they sold meat below the prices in the plaza, the majority of the workers refused to jump through that hoop, as a matter of principle and due to ancestral fondness for the vice of sweet love. But not Sacramento, who saw the new policy as his key to the future.

  While brigades of Franciscans of uncertain Mediterranean accent, wrapped in rough brown robes, looking as if they had escaped the Middle Ages, landed in Tora to minister courses in premarital preparations, other brigades, also wearing hoods, except over their faces, ran through the streets harassing the populace and punishing a posteriori its “friendship with the strike’s bandits.” One afternoon when Sayonara was returning from the port of Madre de Dios, where she had traveled for three days to entertain outside clients, she suddenly had a bad feeling that made her hasten her steps. She reached the house gasping to find an opaque look of sterile fury on the faces of Todos los Santos and Susana, who sat immobile on the sidewalk next to the front door, displaying the humiliating desolation of their recently shaved heads. Together with seven other women from La Catunga, they had been forcefully and cruelly sheared, with ugly scratches on their skulls and loose strands of hair here and there that had escaped the ravages of the shears.

  “They told us they were shaving us so we would learn. They didn’t do anything to Juana and Chuza because they weren’t here when the hooded men invaded,” Susana told her, and Sayonara couldn’t speak a word because a knot of indignation choked her.

  “And Ana?” she was finally able to ask, not having seen her sister.

  “She still has all her hair, but she’s not here. Yesterday she went away with some soldiers that wanted to see her dance.”

  “My poor sister! This life surrounded by putas has thrown her to the dogs!” wailed Sayonara, out of her mind and throwing herself upon Todos los Santos in attack, but the others pulled her away, reminding her that you don’t touch your mother even with a rose petal, so she started smashing her knuckles against the walls and kicking the doors. “My poor sister, broken and raped, all because of me and this life of putas where I brought her. The bastards took her away!”

  “They didn’t take her away; she went of her own free will.”

  “Lies! How can you say that, madrina, on top of everything else and as if it were nothing?!”

  “Just yesterday we went to find her at the temporary camp that del Valle set up in Loma de Tigres, because we had been told they were keeping her there. We organized more than twenty to go demand her return, her and four other girls from the barrio, but when Ana came out herself, and we all heard her words, she told us she wanted to stay. It did no good to beg her, or threaten her, or reason with her. She said she didn’t want to come back, and she didn’t.”

  A painful and prolonged sound escaped from Sayonara’s mouth, more the howl of an animal than a human cry. The loss of Payanés had carried her toward a high, severe pain, you might even say almost elegant if you take into account that the absence of love creates an intensity comparable only to that of its presence. The sadness that invaded her now had, however, a muddy and base nature, and it was nothing like the lofty penitence of golden needles of the earlier one. But added together, the one sublime and the other despicable, they pushed her to the limit of her own hope, where she discovered that something had died in her, which made her think vaguely of a punishment from God which must be accepted. It was then that Sacramento appeared with the plans for the future workers’ barrio in his hand and the signed promise of a house in his pocket. He proposed marriage in a church, offered to take her and her sisters out of La Catunga and to give them a more dignified and secure life, and Sayonara, without thinking twice, said yes.

  “I would say she didn’t even think once,” muses Olga,
“but it was to be expected, because it is well known that Sayonara’s fate is guided by a racing star with a capricious course.”

  “Are you going to live in a house that comes from the same people who vilify you?” Todos los Santos asked her, indignant and incredulous, as her hand, operating on its own, went over her stripped skull as if taking stock of the damage.

  “Even if it were the devil himself, as long as I can get out of here,” replied Sayonara. And just then an insipid, misty rain began falling from the sky, but not completely covering the sun, and a faint rainbow was cast across the river, like the flimsiest of bridges.

  “San Isidro, patron of celestial phenomena,” Olga tells me she prayed at that moment, “protect this child from the attack of her whims, which drive her from place to place without her being able to master them . . . ?”

  “My girl was sick from hoping too much,” Todos los Santos explains to me, demonstrating a tolerance today that it seems she didn’t at the time. “I kept telling her that you can’t expect so many things, because life isn’t one of the Magi who will come bearing gifts.”

  “What was your name before you came to Tora?” Sacramento asked his bride-to-be later. “That’s what I want to call you, your real name, the regular one, and that’s the one I have to give the priest who is going to marry us.”