The Dark Bride

by Laura Restrepo

  “I don’t think you’ll like it . . .”

  “Tomasa? Herminia? Eduviges? Come on, don’t be afraid, tell me, any name will do; it doesn’t matter if it’s ugly.”

  “My name was Amanda.”

  “Amanda!” Sacramento was shocked. “But that’s a name for a puta too . . .”

  “To you it would seem like a name for a puta even if my name were Santa Teresa de Jesús, hermanito.”

  “Hush, don’t tell me anything else. Everything I discover about you is a new dagger that I have to carry around stuck into my body.”

  “If we’re going to go on like this, you’ll be more wounded than the Virgen Dolorosa, who had to bear seven daggers, all in her heart.”

  “Her name is Sayonara, understand?” exploded Todos los Santos, coming out of her room, where she had sought refuge, “and you are nobody to come around and take away her name.”

  “No, madrina, my name isn’t Sayonara. I have a name just like everybody else, the one my mother and father gave me when I was baptized, and today I am going to quit being a puta for the good of my sisters and because I want to go back to using my real name. Even if it hurts, madrina, my name is Amanda Monteverde.”

  “Amanda Monteverde,” repeated Todos los Santos, as if surrendering, and in the instant that she spoke those two words an abyss opened between her and her adopted daughter.

  “It’s not bad blood, Olga. Or at least it’s not all bad blood. There’s something wrong here, something outside of the law, and it’s going to have an ugly backlash,” said Todos los Santos when Olguita pointed out that it took deep bitterness not to congratulate a daughter on the day of her wedding. “But if marriages for love are bad enough themselves, what can we expect from one contracted out of disenchantment? That Sacramento is going to pay for this, the meddling nincompoop.”

  “Can’t you forgive the desire for happiness of a boy who has never had anything in his life, not a mother, or a roof, or affection, or even a name that isn’t an offense?”

  “Sacramento himself is the one who is going to suffer on account of this bad idea, you’ll see. And he’s going to make us all suffer, because with this marriage he is opening a door that leads to who knows where.”

  “Stop being so proud, Todos los Santos. The problem is that you raised Sayonara to be a puta and you can’t bear the fact that she’s decided to be something else.”

  “Something is wrong, Olga; I know it even if I can’t put my finger on it.”

  What dress was the bride going to wear for the improvised ceremony? The yellow organza number, speculated those who were betting on the matter, but they didn’t know she had torn it apart and sworn on the shreds that she was no longer a child. So?

  “So it was her combat attire, what else?” Olga says to me. “Gold earrings, tight black tube skirt, and pure silk blouse: like a Chinese princess. Or, rather, Japanese.”

  As was to be expected, the priest didn’t approve of the outfit: Being the first time in years that he had let a lost woman enter the church, he wanted the ceremony to be instructive, so he sent for a lace veil, long and white, and he asked her to cover herself with it. And so, as they still tell the story in Tora, the very beautiful Sayonara, from that day on better known as Amanda, was married: dressed as a puta underneath and in white on the outside.

  Very beautiful, yes, but it was a somewhat literary and unreal beauty, like a classic heroine. Her sisters, friends, and coworkers in La Catunga preferred not to enter Ecce Homo, as it had long since been declared off-limits to them, and they waited for the bridal couple outside the church’s front door with their hearts flooded with ambivalent emotions, somewhere between hopefulness and disenchantment. Todos los Santos, with her eyes sunk deep in mourning-black sockets, was wearing a baseball cap to hide her recently inflicted baldness. Tana was visibly and deeply moved and glittered with jewelry. The girls in organza, of course, as with any big occasion. And Olga in dark glasses to hide her emotions and the swelling caused by her tears. Machuca was absent because even bound and gagged she couldn’t be dragged to the church.

  “Life is a failure,” sighed Tana, who was prone to speak in tango lyrics.

  “It can only be lived,” Todos los Santos corrected her. “There are no successes or failures; it can only be lived.”

  “Sayonara is leaving us,” said Tana, who never learned, starting to weep again.

  “She was never completely here.”

  Finally the bridal couple emerged, their union blessed, but no one threw rice, there were no bells ringing or firecrackers exploding. Instead, in the middle of that dull, colorless afternoon, Piruetas suddenly appeared, wearing a queer’s little cap, a bright-red handkerchief around his neck, and a tropical shirt featuring blue palm trees on an orange background, and as Sayonara was removing the veil to return it to the priest, he caressed her with his eyes from head to toe with the slimy, lubricious gaze of a randy old man.

  “Even if the puta wears white, she’s still a puta!” Piruetas shouted, and kept on walking, leaving everyone stunned and disgusted in the cold wake of his shadow.

  “We’re leaving Tora,” said a pale Sacramento, and trembling with rage over the affront, he tore up the contract for subsidized housing and threw the pieces into the air. And right there, outside the church door, he made the impromptu decision to leave and communicated it to his wife and the sparse crowd.

  “To go where?” asked Sayonara.

  “Where nobody knows you or can throw your past in our faces.”

  “What about the house, Sacramento? The house they were going to give us?”

  “The only house waiting for us here is shame.”

  “To their wives, who demand a lot, men give little. And to us putas, who ask for nothing, they give us nothing,” grumbles Fideo from her hammock sickbed, waking and immediately falling asleep again.

  thirty-eight

  For a few days now Todos los Santos, who has begun the move toward the great dazzling hereafter, smoking-cigar and all, with foxtails around her neck and pink fur slippers, has begun calling not only her numerous and varied animals Felipe, but also the people around her.

  “Come here, you, Felipe,” she orders me, “and listen to what I am going to tell you about my girl Sayonara’s wanderings: When taking the balance of how we have lived, measuring the sum of our days honestly, the rest of us always opt to remain, clinging to the crumbs of our survival; while she was the only one who could really leave, without fear, without a guaranteed return, in the full glory of her blossoming and vigorous life. And in a horrendous display of egotism, and hardness toward others too.”

  I ask Todos los Santos how many times, honoring her own name, Sayonara said good-bye.

  “You can’t just count the times she left,” she replies, “but also the times she wanted to leave, which were innumerable.”

  thirty-nine

  “Ay, Payanés, when did you become my nightmare . . . ?” Everything about Sayonara was turning into pain: the pain of Payanés, whom she loved and didn’t have, the pain of Sacramento, whom she loved and didn’t love, and the pain of being herself.

  “Remember when they pretended to be the traveling brother and sister, and it brought such happiness to the days of Sacramento’s and Sayonara’s childhood?” Olguita asks me. “Well, it became their reality. After the wedding they had no choice but to pack their belongings and start traveling, this time for real but also to escape, like they did when they were children, to that country without memories, which is the land of nevermore.”

  The continuous passing of migrating birds was their only guide during those months of flight stitched together in one postponement after another of any arrival, heading south amidst hardships that found them each day farther away, following the brown heron and the spoonbilled duck, the paco-paco, the white heron and the ruffled grouse, and so many other creatures that fled through the air and whose names they never knew. They became inhabitants of the road and they followed the whims of its turns and cutb
acks without stopping to rest, one behind the other and the other behind one as if they were still following each other on make-believe horses around Todos los Santos’s patio, fed by the urge to leave and without reaching a decision to stay anywhere. And so, aboard that escape train, their days unraveled.

  Rescued by Sacramento’s love through the bonds of marriage did Sayonara, the young whore from Tora, become Amanda, the one who was to be loved, Amanda, the radionovela star? Did she embody the miracle of the outlaw who becomes good through a little affection, the flower rescued from the dirt, the protagonist of the nightmare that became a dream and the dream that became reality?

  “Useless words!” exclaims Todos los Santos indignantly. “Can anyone call days that were filled with bewilderment happy? Days that drove my child Sayonara, the same girl who was always dreaming of love, to seek joy trailing behind a man, and if that weren’t error enough, behind a man she didn’t love? I would also have to say: days of hardship, separated only by the arid string of good-byes and the passing one by one of countless hours of anguish.”

  Life is inclined to encourage with promises and to dazzle with magic tricks, but no, it didn’t grant a miracle or the life of a radionovela, because from the very day of the wedding the mask of mirrors was removed to uncover something resembling a face. Forcing Sayonara to embark on an uncertain journey, made of confused love and shattered dreams, which left her no other choice but to dull herself with exhaustion on the long marches so that she wouldn’t have to recognize that she couldn’t recognize herself. Or that she could only find half of herself in the skin of that new woman who wanted to be called Amanda, while her other half missed having a place in this world. And it wasn’t that Amanda didn’t do everything possible, that she didn’t struggle to pull Sayonara from the tangle that confused her steps. The same obstinate determination that Sayonara had invested in becoming a prostitute, Amanda now dedicated to the task of turning herself into a lady, because her life was, today as yesterday, one long, courageous search for existence, and if one door closed, she found the strength to go through another, even if it opened at the totally opposite end of the hallway.

  “No one can invoke the hackneyed ‘it has been written’ in the name of my girl, that credo of fatalists of every sort,” says Todos los Santos, “because she liked to do whatever she wanted.”

  For Amanda there were no writings that dictated her fate, holy or profane. But to reach past her own star and to transform herself was a difficult task in which Sayonara wouldn’t help her because she refused to step aside, obstinately holding on to existence and fueled by the ferocious torrent of a will to live and a longing for death that had been awakened in her on that afternoon of love by the river. Nothing could dissuade her, not Payanés with the meager surrender of his affections, nor Sacramento with his excessively vehement demands for devotion, nor even Amanda herself in her rush to find roads less steep.

  “Where does the soul of a woman go who loves one man and marries another?” Olga wonders out loud. “In my opinion it is divided in two, and both become lost in the waters of confusion.”

  “There weren’t two, but three women in her,” argues Todos los Santos, “Amanda, Sayonara, and she herself. Sayonara loved Payanés; Amanda married Sacramento; and she loved only herself.”

  “Sayonara complained that no man loved her well,” Dr. Antonio María Flórez once told me, “but it was really the other way around, as I saw it. She could never bring herself to fully love anyone. That girl reminds me of a paradoxical poem by the master Pedro Salinas. ‘Why the rush to make yourself possible, if you know that you are what will never be?’ ”

  Todos los Santos asks me to read her what I am writing and I do.

  “Too many words,” she protests. “The life of a puta will always be identical to the life of any other puta, even if it is the life of a woman with showy plumage, like Sayonara. In matters of men, we mujeres of the profession can only choose three categories. Only three because no others have been invented. Those we call the tormentor, the lottery, and the client, the latter of which is the most advisable and the one I recommend, because he pays you and goes away, letting you get on with your life; you can keep on playing if-I-have-seen-you-before-I-don’t-remember. The other two stripes, the lottery and the tormentor, are both pure trouble and sorrow.”

  “The lottery is the shining knight who finally comes to you,” says Olguita. “He’s the lover every woman waits for, convinced that one day he will come to take you away and marry you and sweeten your life with conveniences, eternal love, flattery, and gifts. With Sacramento, Sayonara got her lottery, or at least that’s what she thought.”

  “Lottery, grand prize or golden cage, which are its other names,” says Todos los Santos, “because it strangles with the finest noose, made of love, and presses against your neck like a pearl choker, or like the amulet of braided hair that Sacramento once tied around his neck and still wears. Did Amanda choose to compromise in marrying him? That’s her business. We all warned her not to do it but she, of her own free will, locked herself in that tower and threw the key into the moat.”

  “And the tormentor,” continues Olga, “is the man who makes you suffer because he makes you fall in love with him but he won’t commit, or he commits only partially, like Payanés, who was just like the thorny rose he had had tattooed over his heart: a rose of pain and a compass rose, pointing in all directions. Payanés, like any self-respecting petrolero, gave you two gifts, the open road and the pain of freedom. And, if there’s anything a woman of the profession knows about, it’s freedom, but she also knows how much it rends the heart. A lover who promises you affection the last Friday of every month and complies religiously is something worth celebrating. As long as you don’t resent that in addition to the comforting Friday, God has created three others, plus four Mondays, four Tuesdays, four Wednesdays, and a lot of et ceteras for a grand total of three hundred sixty-five days in a year during which you have to deal with the ups and downs of your lonely heart.”

  Torn between Sacramento and Payanés, her greatest prize and her greatest punishment, what happened, asked Olga, to Amanda’s broken heart? Was it destroyed by her inability to choose? What is most likely, perhaps most certain, is that she harbored the suspicion that well-being, if it existed at all, must be hidden somewhere between those two extremes.

  Sacramento, Sayonara, and her three remaining sisters formed a rickety caravan that moved forward along the paths of displacement, and Sacramento, who had always put his love into what aroused the most suspicion in him, now turned the corner on his old torment and learned to doubt to the point of agony that which he truly loved. And at the same time, to finish tangling the skein, he insisted in distancing Amanda from Tora to save her from the assault of memories, without suspecting that memories, with their light feet, would arrive before them anywhere they went.

  Behind the couple, like the colorful and fluttering tail of a kite, ran the three girls, Susana, Juana, and little Chuza, now going through periods of hunger, now filling up on pineapples or mangoes gathered from the fields they crossed, now desperately longing for their sister Ana, their mother, Todos los Santos, and their many aunts, only to forget them completely moments later, so attached to the idea of pursuing their fate beneath the immense sky, as yesterday they had been to taking shelter beneath a safe, familiar roof.

  Nine days after embarking upon that crossing with neither shipwreck nor guiding star, they entered the misty forests in the mountains of Amansagatos, famous because no one has been able to determine whether the rain there is perpetual as it falls or rises, since it never reaches the ground before it is already ascending again, and evaporating. Once there they stopped near a stand of cedar, guayacán, amargoso, and other trees that thrive in humid environments, where Sacramento, on the recommendation of an acquaintance, obtained temporary work at a sawmill. On his first day of work, Amanda was stirred by a desire to properly fulfill her obligations as a new wife, and after the disgusting chore
of plucking a chicken, she then inexpertly stewed it and ran downhill through sheets of rain and dense vegetation to take lunch to her husband, since she had heard that it is necessary for an honest woman to feed her husband well and without fail, because he provides protection and sustenance. When she appeared, as if on a stage in a theater, in the intense light that fell from above onto the cut clearing, Sacramento, upon seeing how beautiful she was and knowing that she was his, felt a sudden jolt of happiness flooding him inside, and a kind of foam like the head of a beer swelled his masculine pride.

  “But I wasn’t the only one who turned to look at her,” he remembers uneasily, because in order for him to feel humiliated, his woman didn’t need to cast her eyes on another man, it was enough for another man to cast his eyes on her.

  What caused the bitter taste was Amanda’s arrival, with all her radiant youth enveloped in white light, the lunch pot held in one hand, her soaked dress licking her body, and her wild tresses dripping wet, and all of the workers spread throughout the clearing stopped what they were doing, axes frozen, to pierce her with their eyes, like pins in a tailor’s pincushion.

  “It was always the same,” Sacramento tells me in an anxious tone, as if begging me to understand him. “As soon as she would appear, no matter where it was and even though they didn’t know her, men would begin to act strangely. They would straighten their backs, wipe their sweaty hands on their shirts, cough to bring attention to themselves. I don’t know how else to describe it, but it was strange. As if they were communicating in code or in some secret male language the fact that she was there. That she, the beauty, was there bewitching them, even though she wasn’t doing a thing, making them anxious, leaving their desire and memories scorched.”

  Sacramento grabbed her forcefully by the wrist, almost hurting her, and pulled her aside, shaken.

  “How dare you come here like that, with your clothes wet, don’t you see that you’re leading them on, half naked like this?”