The Dark Bride

by Laura Restrepo

  However, I think we have discovered a more or less effective way, if not of curing this small catastrophe, of at least anticipating it. Todos los Santos, taciturn and withdrawn, has begun every now and then to break the long silences that overwhelm our conversations with an explosive cascade of words which are sometimes scolding, sometimes advice or warning, but are most often simply nostalgic digression. The content varies, but the form, always torrential, alerts us, because her urinary incontinence, by some curious anatomical symbiosis, is usually preceded by verbal incontinence. In these circumstances she mentioned for the first time the episode that she refers to as the elephant. When the thing with the elephant happened . . . and she’s off and running.

  “Seen from above, all human life seems like a tangle of whims, becauses and for-no-reasons, and only by intense scrutiny and through searching for its meaning over the long term do you begin to find a pattern. Even those who are most caught up in the foolishness are clear about their motives for doing what they do, and there is no chance occurrence that isn’t, in and of itself, a known result,” she began saying a little while ago, as the rest of us rushed to place a basin under her skirts. “Forget about the basin and grab your notebook so you can write,” she ordered me, “because today I feel the need to talk.”

  “Keep talking,” I say, “keep talking, I’m recording it in my memory. What were you saying about motives?”

  “At night, we old people go to bed not to sleep, but to brood and ponder, and this morning, almost as the alarm began to ring, I realized clearly why Sayonara had married. She was trying to recover her name.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “The name that you carry is the sign of the life you have lived, and if you want to change your life, you must begin by changing your name. Sayonara had to go back to being Amanda to be able to make her visit . . .”

  “What visit? To whom?”

  “To her father, who was still alive, and even today the news of his demise hasn’t reached us here. You cannot go before your father saying that you have buried the family name that he has conferred on you and that you also changed your baptismal name for another that sounded prettier. That is in poor taste. Amanda must have imagined, speculating about the eventuality, that when she saw her father again and he asked her: ‘What have you done with your life, daughter?’ she would be able to look him in the eyes and say to him, without lying too much: ‘I got married, Father; I am a married woman who has fulfilled her duty to take care of her sisters and teach them by good example.’ However, being Sayonara, she would have cast her eyes on the ground, ashamed, silent, in such a way that her father would become suspicious.”

  “Around here few adversities are as feared as parental rage,” interposes Sacramento, “and much is done to prevent it. Or to pacify it, if it has already been unleashed.”

  “So how did Sayonara know where to look for her father?” I ask them.

  “She had been making inquiries for some time,” replies Sacramento, “and she knew exactly where he was.”

  Her source of information was a gentleman named Alfredo Molano, a wanderer by profession and very up-to-date on news about rambling and ramblers, who was known to have brought the news that Abelardo Monteverde, her father, was working as a merchant selling a variety of goods in the town of Sasaima, that he was still married to the same white woman, had educated her children, who were now grown, and was raising the new brood of little ones that they had had together. With that information in hand, Amanda took it into her head to go and find him.

  “So what did that man do for you, apart from abandoning you, for you to be going to thank him?” Sacramento said to try to dissuade her.

  “He gave me my being,” she answered, just like that; five dry, withering words that may not have meant much, but that didn’t offer any room for argument.

  “He is going to leave Sasaima,” she said. “I have a feeling, if I don’t go now to look for him, I won’t find him.”

  “All the more reason. I don’t know what your hurry is to go digging up sorrows.”

  Nothing could be done. Sayonara was burning with an urgency that didn’t allow delays, an itch that made her stand up when she sat down; it woke her up if she lay down, tightened her throat and suffocated her appetite.

  “She understood it as a mandate,” Olguita tells me, “or a mission she had to accomplish. She thought she should go to look for her father, as if her fate were demanding it.”

  “Shoo, Felipe!” Todos los Santos drives away one of the Felipes, in this particular instance a quadruped with black fur, similar to a small pig, who is trying to eat her slipper.

  “What did Amanda expect from her father?” I want to know.

  “We all yearn for paternal approval,” responds Todos los Santos. “Even the worst sinners are afraid of living without it. Why? Because it’s human nature, and also her nature, Sayonara’s. She needed to know that her father didn’t condemn her for what she had done. If you ask me, I would say that was precisely why she stopped doing it.”

  “What did Amanda expect from her father?” Sacramento echoes my question. “That’s exactly what her father wanted to know, as soon as he saw her.”

  About to board a bus, because just at that moment he was hurrying to depart for Venezuela, don Abelardo Monteverde rubbed his eyes incredulously when he recognized his daughter Amanda—a ghost the past had vomited up without asking permission or giving warning—standing on a corner of the market plaza in Sasaima, her hair and the dark blue suit that she wore then, like a novice’s, soaking wet, and hidden behind her, also very wet and biting their nails with shyness and fear, were the three younger sisters, in organza and crinolines. Wiping from his forehead the copious sweat caused by such an unforeseen and embarrassing situation, don Abelardo didn’t ask what had happened to Ana, he didn’t know which was which, he didn’t inquire where they had come from, how they had survived in the intervening years, or even where they were going. Nor did he ask if they were hungry, or why their clothes were wet, and he never learned that they had traveled two days by bus, enduring stops and searches from first the army, then the guerrilleros, and then seven and a half hours by foot, along rugged paths and in the rain, to find him.

  “You’ve found me at a bad moment, daughter,” he said to Amanda, addressing her because she was the eldest. “I don’t have any cash in my pocket and I’m about to leave on a trip. What do you need?”

  “I only want your blessing, señor padre, for me and for my sisters.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Sí, señor padre, that’s all.”

  “Well, that being the case, there’s no problem,” said don Abelardo Monteverde, with his shirt open across a chest that was sparsely covered with hair and an enormous belly hanging over his tightly cinched waist, and he raised a fat right hand to bestow his blessing upon them.

  “May God protect you,” he said four times, ceremoniously, touchingly, while being rushed by the bus driver who kept honking his horn to hurry the passengers because darkness was rapidly approaching.

  Don Abelardo, his boot already resting on the bus’s running board, hesitated for a moment, holding back from his lips the hasta lueguito he had ready to end the surprise visit by these daughters, so remote now in his memory and his affections.

  “Wait a second, I’ll pay you for the delay,” he said to the driver, and then he signaled for the girls to wait for him where they were standing. He crossed the market plaza in huge strides, took out a ring of keys, opened a door, and went into a house that must have been where he lived, or was perhaps his warehouse.

  Several minutes later he returned with a porcelain elephant under his left arm and a length of cloth in his right hand.

  “Take this, mija,” he said to Amanda, handing her the elephant and the cloth and looking at her for an instant with a foolish expression that, forcing things a bit, could have been interpreted as tenderness. “Accept this from me, so you don’t go away empty-handed.”


  Then he gave each one a kiss on the forehead: the clumsy and rough kiss of a man who never kisses. But a kiss nonetheless, the pathetic, shaky, and guilty gesture of someone who might have wished for things to be different and was seeking forgiveness.

  “Forgive me, mija,” he said to Amanda with a trembling voice, as if he were dangerously close to breaking into tears, “but I can’t do anything else for you all. I have a wife who would get angry, I have other children and a lot of obligations, I have another life now . . . you must understand . . . ”

  “Don’t worry, señor padre. I want you to know that life, thank heaven, has treated us well and that we are leaving here grateful for these gifts, which are very pretty.”

  Sayonara never again went looking for her father, perhaps because she had already obtained from him the blessing she thought was so necessary to move forward with her life. The elephant . . .

  “I can understand that someone would want the Holy Pope’s blessing,” Fideo interrupts me as I am writing the previous paragraph, “but, what the hell good is a blessing from a man like Monteverde, so loutish and coarse?”

  “You only have one father . . . ,” I tell her.

  “That’s a lie,” she replies. “You only have one mother; the father can be any old son of a bitch.”

  Continuing: to move forward with her life. The elephant still exists, although its tusks are chipped. It sits on a corner cabinet in Olga’s house, and I am looking at it now. Meanwhile, Fideo is looking at me.

  “Don’t think it’s one of a kind,” she says. “A lot of people around here like to decorate their houses with elephants just like that one. You also see a lot of clowns. And ballerinas. A lot of porcelain ballerinas. But nothing beats the elephant as decorative material.”

  Fideo is right. Over the years, I have seen elephants like this one in the living rooms of many homes, and I wonder how it could happen that, among the infinite variety of objects with no precise use that exist throughout the whole country, there is one in particular that manages to stand above the others. It makes one think of a certain suspicious repetition, a certain persistence of a model that is imposed for some unknown reason, despite its gratuitousness. In other countries an example of these kinds of insistent objects, almost fetishes because of their ubiquitousness, might be plaster gnomes planted among the flowers in the garden. Here in Colombia, the elephant beats the gnome by a wide margin.

  First, because it is seen in greater numbers, and second, because plaster gnomes come in different versions—with white beards, with black beards, with red caps, without caps, with a lantern in their hand, without a lantern—while the porcelain elephant is always the same in its gray sleekness, its soft breast like a matron’s, with a black, diminutive eye on each side of its face, the invariably chipped tusks, the partially open mouth revealing a pink, fleshy interior, the powerful foreleg bent and delicately balanced on a white ball of dubious interpretation, which could be a faded globe or a large balloon. Or maybe an elephant egg?

  I hold the pachyderm in my hands for a while and then return it to the shelf. How strange paternal love can be, I think, and how strange the means chosen to express it.

  A serene silence lulls the house. For a couple hours now Todos los Santos has been sleeping calmly in her rocking chair, without wetting herself.

  “Are you gone?” she asks me, opening wide her blind eyes and trying to look at me with her fingertips.

  “No, Todos los Santos, I haven’t gone. I’m here, beside you.”

  “Ah! Since you were so quiet, I thought you had already gone. Come closer and give me your hand, that way when you’re quiet I won’t lose you.”

  forty-one

  At a certain distance from Todos los Santos’s house there flows a gully of stinking, black waters. When the wind blows in this direction, the smell reaches here. The gully carries along decomposed organic material, broken toys, used sanitary napkins, syringes, bottle caps, cotton balls that may have been used to cleanse infections, the remains of a mattress, pieces of blue plastic, yesterday’s paper: life, that is, in the intimacy of its residues and its dirtiness. But the water that runs through that gully sounds the same, stone by stone, as the water that flows clean along other estuaries.

  “The lesson that can be derived there,” deduces Todos los Santos, “is that there is no bad that is not good nor good that isn’t also bad.”

  The lesson isn’t clear to me, but I take advantage of the favorable climate to ask her about related matters.

  “Explain to me, if I am not boring you, Todos los Santos, when prostitución is a sin and when it isn’t.”

  “There is a lot of rationalizing out there on the subject, but the consensus is that it is always a sin.”

  “But an absolved sin when the woman suffers in bed,” clarifies Olguita, “and a condemned sin when she enjoys it, in which case she will surely go to hell when she dies, because she has not paid, like everyone else, her debts to the beyond.”

  “If I could ask the genie in the bottle for a wish,” rants Fideo deliriously, “it would be for enormous tits that I could jerk a man off with.”

  “What a stupid way to waste a wish. Everyone has his own wishes! Before going to bed, Sayonara would stand before the Sagrado Corazón and ask him for a strange blessing,” remembers Todos los Santos. “She would stand there and repeat out loud, every day, the same phrase: Jesus, may you keep murderers from killing tonight, so the people in the world can sleep without fear.”

  We were talking on the patio and drinking lemonade, we in our rockers, the Felipes in their cages, and Fideo shaking in her penultimate death throes, all drowsy from the heat and the smell of vinegar filtering through the air today somnambulantly, impregnating the still hours of the afternoon.

  “Let’s go back to the parable of black waters and clear waters,” I ask Todos los Santos.

  “Ridiculous!” she replies. “The only thing that matters is we are splashing around in our shit in this town because neither the authorities nor the oil company have been capable of constructing a sewer system.”

  forty-two

  One of Amanda’s obligations in Villa de la Virgen del Amparo, according to the agreement stipulated from the beginning with her patrona, señora Leonor de Andrade, was to accompany her every evening to six o’clock mass. While the cathedral’s interior was the kingdom of overbearing colonial saints floating in incense smoke and the stink of withered lilies, outside in the square, a boisterous, pagan court of merchants, which in biblical times would have been driven away with lashes of a whip, had set up camp. There were lepers who hung around the temple awaiting the eventual miracle of their healing and who in the meantime extorted the consciences of the worshipers by exhibiting the horror of their wounds and mutilations; and there were lottery ticket sellers with their sheets of winning tickets pouncing on the devout multitudes, knowing that those who pray the most also bet the most.

  It was there, in the midst of the anguished, afflicted throng that assaulted her as she left mass every afternoon, where one day Amanda discovered Fideo among a scruffy group of low-class prostitutas who were waiting to be taken to a male penal colony in the jungles of Guaviare, where they would lend their sexual services, according to the generalized practice that upon becoming too old or sick to work in the urban centers, putas were recruited by chulos to serve prisoners, border guards, brigades of rubber harvesters, liberal guerrilleros, advance squads of tagüeros, and others exposed to the harshest desolation and isolation known to man.

  “Will you give me some money to buy a drink, girl?” Fideo asked Sayonara, taking her by the arm, recognizing her as she passed by.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Life goes on. Give me some money for a drink, I said.”

  “A drink! You should be asking for medicine, Fideo. I can tell just by looking at you that you’re very sick.”

  “I may be sick, but you’re half dead. Look at that nun’s costume they make you wear.”

&nb
sp; Amanda convinced her to come to her patrona’s house at noon the following day, to accept the charity of a good bowl of soup, and Fideo accepted the invitation for the rest of the week and the following one as well, because the chulo who was coordinating the putas’ trip to Guaviare kept looking for reasons to delay it and to keep squeezing them: The women had to give him additional money for land travel, an extra sum for river travel, a portion for the dentist who was going to go ahead and extract rotten teeth so that they wouldn’t complain of toothaches once it was already too late.

  So, in the company of tramps, street urchins, and begging monks, and between spoonfuls of corn chowder or potato soup, Fideo and Sayonara exchanged information about their respective troubles.

  “Tell me about don Enrique,” Sayonara asked. “Was he really a dwarf?”

  “A dwarf with a big pipí and an even bigger heart.”

  “You have to go back to Tora, Fideo, to have Dr. Antonio María treat you, before the sickness in your blood kills you.”

  “Don’t feel sorry for me, look at yourself. My problem is just malignant syphilis, but your illness is mental, which is more injurious and less pardonable. Go back to your madrina, you have a place there. Or are you happy playing the part of the dubious wife who deserves the punishment of a slow death?”

  “Each of us has to deal with her own calvary,” responded Sayonara, to justify her resolute decision to stay where she was.

  In truth she had other motives she didn’t confess: In the painful process of renouncing her own existence, Amanda was little by little carving out a peaceful place where she could begin to understand Sacramento. Being decent turned out to be a more arduous, inclement proposition than being a mere puta, but she was determined to conquer it, and Sacramento was responding to her progress with better treatment and less ambivalence, and, as always, with his gentle dedication to the girls, Susana, Juana, and Chuza, whom he provided with an education, familial affection, and a kind life.