The Dark Bride

by Laura Restrepo

  “Hush, Olga,” scolds Todos los Santos, “stop repeating things, you sound like an echo.”

  Sayonara led the burro by its halter, with Fideo draped across the small wooden pallet on the animal’s back like a sack. The sick woman, feeling uncomfortable and annoyed in her burning and ulcerated skin, was in a foul mood, and she attacked with such surliness any attempt to help her that on more than one occasion Sayonara had to threaten to abandon her for some passing Samaritan to deal with her excesses. But the threatening didn’t do any good. Fideo calmed down only when she slept, overcome by the numbness and swelling of her appendages, but she became herself once again with every bump along the way to shout to the heavens, with a pathos that to Sayonara seemed out of place:

  “Ay, don Enrique, take me with you!” she howled. “Have mercy on me and take me to where you are, because down here they’re all a bunch of bastards!”

  “Ungrateful woman,” responded Sayonara.

  “Anyone who thinks that on top of all this I have to be thankful can go fuck his mother! Thank you, God, for these bubas as big as chicken eggs? Thank you, Virgin Mary, for these stinking pustules? Who the hell do you want me to thank?”

  “At least that man who came by to offer you some water. You didn’t have to curse him; he was only trying to help.”

  “To help! The miscreant . . . he’s probably the brother, or the cousin, or at least the friend of the bastard who gave me this plague.”

  From a distance, before the first roofs appeared, Sayonara spied the eleven blue flames from the refinery’s smokestacks, rising against the drizzle above the tops of the tallest trees, and her eyes, recognizing her home, grew watery as she watched the slowly rising columns of thick smoke. Then she looked again.

  “What strange columns of smoke,” she commented.

  “What’s strange about them?” growled Fideo.

  “They rise strangely into the air.”

  It seemed as if they stopped midway up to expand toward the sides, swelling into fat clouds, puffing up oddly to create an additional cap on a sky that was already charged with electricity, thereby rarefying the air and somehow altering the look of the familiar, turning it into a simulation of its former self.

  “Things have changed down there, Fideo,” Sayonara warned her. “We are not returning to the same place we left.”

  “Things always change, don’t think you’re so clever.”

  In reality the signs of strangeness had been visible, sporadically, for a couple of hours now, since the travelers came across the first hut. At the edge of the road, just there, covered with sticks and pieces of plastic, with three sheets of tin for walls and a burlap bag as a front curtain, barely a yard high, so that a person fit inside only lying down. Next to the hut, sitting on a rock, waiting, was a very poor woman with her breasts exposed and her lips painted red. Fideo had a fever, and to protect her from the drizzling rain, which had soaked her and was making her shiver, Sayonara had the idea of asking the woman’s permission to let the invalid rest under the makeshift roof until the rain stopped.

  “Get out of here!” shouted the painted-mouthed woman, throwing a rock at them. “Clients are already scarce enough! Get out of here, you infected women, before you scare away the few clients left!”

  A little further along, the road emptied onto a highway, now asphalt, and Sayonara, Fideo, and the burro started walking along its edge, hugging the cliffs so that they wouldn’t be struck along a curve by one of the vehicles that nearly scraped them as they sped past, and so that they wouldn’t die under the wheels of the trucks filled with soldiers and weapons.

  “Pretty, this asphalt,” said Fideo, suddenly in a peaceful mood. “It shines very nicely.”

  “It reflects the lights from the cars, because it’s wet,” said Sayonara, but it would have been better if she had remained silent, because Fideo, irascible again, answered her with pedantry.

  And then, again, familiar places glistened with hints of unreality, when by the edge of the highway, one after another and at intervals, enormous advertising walls appeared, on which the company, through slogans, tried to motivate the workers, or the male population in general, to leave behind the risks of a roaming life and illicit love to form a family like all other law-abiding families. A man without a home, urged the wisdom in the signs, is like a saint without a robe, like a bird without a nest, like a nest without a bird, like a house without a roof, like a roof without a house, like a head without a hat or vice versa: all things abandoned, undesirable, or incomplete.

  “Listen to that, the Troco is insisting on officiating over wholesale marriage,” said Sayonara, and she hadn’t finished speaking before they spied in the undergrowth, just beneath one of the walls, another hut similar to the previous one but a little more solid and decorated all around with a colorful synthetic garland. This time the owner was a young fat woman, squeezed into a pair of tight slacks, and as they hurried on so as not to hinder her, Sayonara and Fideo saw a driver and his helper climb down from a sixteen-wheel Pegasus that stopped in front. Next, they saw the driver and the fat woman enter the hut and could discern, through the cracks between the sticks, what they were doing in there while the helper waited his turn outside, trimming his fingernails with a nail clipper.

  “The other woman handles the pedestrians and this one, the motorized clients,” noted Fideo.

  Mingling in the sad air, odd bits of Victrola music came floating through the rain, making Sayonara quicken her pace and preventing her from stopping until she reached the lookout point from which one can view the fair, serpentine Magdalena, whose waters at that instant were being drowned by the last rays of the sun. She could contemplate the city of Tora in its entirety, motionless against the great current but over-flowing on the other three sides as if it had decided to grow against all human reasoning and against the will of God. On the far side of the river the downpour was stronger and the view into the distance merged into washed grays, as if another country lay in that direction.

  She crossed the Lavanderas bridge just as, one here and another there, the colored lights in La Catunga were turned on, licked by the rain and very diminished in number, but still blue, red, green, and festive, like Christmas Eve.

  “There aren’t as many lights now,” Sayonara said to Fideo.

  “Why shouldn’t there be, if the putas have taken to the mountains and work in huts. Slow down, girl, you’re pounding me! Ay, don Enrique! Tell this merciless girl to slow down, she’s finishing me off!” shouted Fideo, bouncing around like a sack of corn because Sayonara could no longer withstand the frenetic beating of her heart, which was running wildly toward the encounter, and following her heart, she had begun running also, right down the mountain.

  Before they reached the first streets, the rain had already stopped, and Sayonara, hiding behind a wall, removed her soaked clothes and put on her combat attire, complete with earrings and high heels, and she wanted to put Fideo in a clean flowered cotton robe.

  “So you’ll arrive looking pretty,” she said, but Fideo, more offended than if she had been slapped, retorted something about how pretty did she think a sack of pus could be. But, finally, she let Sayonara brush her hair, dry her face, and fit the robe around her, and despite the torment in her groin she sat astride the burro, very erect and composed as a matter of pride.

  Then they went, before anything else, to look for Dr. Antonio María at his clinic. They found him standing in the doorway, aged and with his rabbit’s teeth even more pronounced than before because his cheeks had become hollow.

  “This pueblo has been defeated by morality and its Siamese twin, shame,” the doctor told them, after giving them a cursory greeting, happy to see them but too distressed to express it, and he went on, burning and uncontrollable, with his discourse. “They consider syphilis an obscene illness and they call its propagation and that of other venereal diseases the plague, without differentiating. Any serious illness of the body is the plague and is impure and censurable, whether
it’s smallpox, Chagas disease, skin infections, yaws, leishmania, blue bloater, or even common wounds or serious-looking injuries. The generalized philosophy is that any sick man is a victim, that all putas are sick, and that any sick woman is a puta. The prostitutas, and in no instance the men who go to bed with them, are the source of infection, the origin of evil. The current credo is that the sick women must be exterminated and the putas must be eradicated, and according to what I’ve heard, some fifty prostitutas, or suspected prostitutas, have been locked up at Altos del Obispo in a detention camp with barbed wire and military guards. Others have moved to the cemetery to work double shifts, offering their love at night on the graves and earning a few extra centavos during the day as hired mourners. Meanwhile, the community of the healthy holds firm to its crusade and boasts of its inflexible conduct, because they take for granted a correlation between the plague and moral degradation. No one, especially not the prostitutas themselves, wants to know anything about the scientific explanations or methods of prevention, because it is more dramatic and seductive, more useful for the self-pity they’ve always clung to, to believe that the illness is an expression of divine anger because God is an advocate of monogamy.”

  “Could you give us a glass of water, Doc?” Sayonara timidly interrupted his sermon, and only then did Dr. Antonio María notice the travelers’ absolute exhaustion and Fideo’s deplorable state of health.

  “Excuse me, please!” he begged, truly ashamed. “Come in, come in, inside you will find a bed and food for both of you.”

  “How are Precious and the children?” Sayonara asked, smiling, and the doctor, who at first didn’t know who Precious was, quickly remembering his wife’s words, laughed and answered that they were healthy and had moved to the back part of the clinic to live, out of fear of those who came to harangue at the house while the doctor was away, working.

  “So, Doc,” asked Sayonara, “are they getting rid of the putas in Tora?”

  “There are more than before, only more wretched. The men who marry don’t stop . . .”

  “La Copa Rota was a palace compared to what we saw today,” interrupted Fideo.

  “Those who marry don’t stop seeing them because of it, and the prostitutas are also sought out by the new arrivals, the multitudes who are being displaced by the violence in the countryside.”

  “Well, Doc, I have to be going before it gets too late, because I’ve brought my madrina some arequipe en totumo and she won’t eat sweets after nine, because she says it causes insomnia,” said Sayonara as she prepared to depart. “I leave my sick friend in good hands. I’ll come back around eleven to take the night shift.”

  “No, not tonight. Rest today and tomorrow, and I’ll wait for you on Wednesday, if you want. Precious and I will take care of Fideo. She’ll be with two others, Niña de Cádiz and Gold Teeth, who are staying here until they get better—”

  “Until they get better or die,” Fideo interrupted again.

  “Who are here until they get better, so she won’t be alone. What about the burro, are you taking it with you?”

  “The burro belongs to Fideo.”

  “Then leave it, it will be a help in carrying water. Wait, girl,” the doctor said at the last minute, taking her by the arm, “let me look at you. It won’t take more than five minutes. Don’t be irresponsible or obstinate; look how, morality aside, the infection is spreading, and if the illness is treated in time it’s better than if—”

  “No chance, Doc,” Sayonara cut him off sharply, “there’s no need for you to examine my body, or to put your mirrors and fingers inside me. I know how to look at my own body and I assure you that my chocho is as fresh as a rose.”

  A HARD DICK DOESN’T BELIEVE IN GOD, the subversives had written in large, irregular letters on the facade of the Ecce Homo, and Sayonara crossed the central plaza with suspicion, sniffing this and that unfamiliar item like someone returning to a place he has never been. She saw more police walking around; more boys wearing dark glasses; fewer couples dancing in the cafés; more trash in the street; people quieter, more elegant, better dressed; others more tattered and hungry; many without a roof or work, standing around on street corners with their children, with nothing to do except wait.

  As she passed in front of the Descabezado, Sayonara felt the pinch of a bad memory, or a premonition, or maybe it was the cloying, perverted smell emanating from the municipal slaughterhouse. A few seconds later she ran right into the person she least wanted to see, that scoundrel Piruetas, who was moving through the crowd with nervous little jumps in his white shoes, with a portable display case hanging around his neck, on which were displayed a variety of concoctions and herbs for an improved love life, and the infamous Pomada de la Condesa to restore virginity, a very solicited gift in those times of counterreform.

  “The more prohibitions, the greater the proliferation of pornographic businesses, and who better than Piruetas to squeeze the juice from that fruit. When the vein of falsified paintings ran out,” Sacramento tells me, “he dedicated himself to the sale of a stimulant that beat all the others in Tora, which he invented, produced, and promoted himself: pepper suppositories.”

  “That’s why Piruetas prances through life,” laughs Todos los Santos. “Just like that, sort of like a tight-assed Punch, as if holding a pepper suppository between his buttocks.”

  “In addition, he sold condoms made from animal intestines,” Sacramento continues, “also patented by him and promoted as the modern solution against pregnancy and infection, but infamous among users for being uncomfortable, slippery, and of dubious efficacy.”

  “Start suffering, men of tender heart: La Hermosa has returned!” proclaimed Piruetas in falsetto when he saw Sayonara passing, and faces unknown to her turned to stare at her.

  “Go eat shit, you creature of ill omen,” she retorted, driving him away with her hand. “Last time you tossed a compliment at me you turned my life into shit, and I still haven’t recovered.”

  Although she hadn’t noticed it, many eyes had seen her, had followed her step by step, had caught her scent from the very moment she set foot back in the pueblo, and now Piruetas’s announcement spread from house to house: She had returned.

  For the second time the child puta took the pueblo; Sayonara, the puta-wife; Amanda the bride dressed in white; the wife now without her husband and once again dressed for night; the beauty challenging the world as she did in those other times, those that people wanted to forget, come hell or high water.

  “Maybe if she had come back with her hair covered up and her body hidden in the sad, sober novice’s dress that she wore in Villa de la Virgen del Amparo,” speculates Machuca, “maybe.”

  And as if her reappearance weren’t enough, she had come dragging astride a burro the exemplary and resuscitated image of sin with all of its consequences: Fideo, covered with cankers, some hidden and one displayed in the place that most terrifies and offends others, the middle of her face. Sayonara hadn’t finished telling Piruetas to go eat shit when she detected in the surrounding multitude the subtle, spasmodic, and frighteningly synchronized reflexes of cattle the instant before they stampede. In the midst of an unforeseen paralysis of air, a sudden, dark, collective choreography took shape into which she tried to integrate herself without knowing why, perhaps out of mere survival instinct.

  “This is why I came back to the pueblo, to face my destiny,” Todos los Santos tells me that Sayonara was able to understand in a sparkle of final lucidity.

  Seconds later she was imprisoned by a human barrier, forced into the front row just across from where a spontaneous band of wrathful citizens was sacrificing a thin man, of short stature, in a white, unbuttoned shirt, the tail of which hung outside his pants.

  “So they didn’t fall upon her?”

  “Hush your mouth and knock on wood,” said Todos los Santos as she rapped on the table with her knuckles. “They got another Christian soul and not her, because as Fideo said the other day, Sayonara carried that blac
k bird around on her shoulder, but she kept it pacified and fed it from her hand. But she didn’t miss a single detail of the incident, and that man’s passion and death were so embedded in her that for several days afterward she kept repeating, like an automaton, that he was small and skinny, that his shirt was hanging outside his pants, and before he expired he tried to say something no one understood. He was a zapatero, you know? What you would call a shoe repairer. A humble craftsman with an eccentric name, Elkin Alexis Alpamato, originally from Ramiriquí, in Boyacá, who had lived in Tora for three and a half years. We all knew him because we took our shoes to him to repair. When a heel wore out, twisted, or broke open, there was no one like him to restore it with new leather and a reinforced metal tap. He alleged that high heels were one of the seven greatest inventions of civilization and that together with the silk stocking had been Eve’s true sin in paradise, the real apple of damnation. ‘Alpamato,’ we would say, ‘make these heels ready to strike sparks on the pavement tonight,’ and he would, because he liked to deliver.”

  It took sixty seconds to kill him and they did it by kicking him, in the single, fulminating lashing out of an uncontrollable centipede, a swift and voracious assault by starved sparrows on a crust of bread. After the beating, he stood up in a last attempt at decency, leaned against a wall, tried to find his last voice, and then fell again, already dead, a poor bloody rag without guilt or redemption. Sayonara watched the killing without taking her eyes off the victim, as if seeing again something she had already seen, what she had always foreseen, as if she were a witness of something that was supposed to occur but didn’t, as if it weren’t that man but she herself who should have died that night, at that predetermined hour and in the desolation of that street corner.

  “She had to witness such a horrifying scene the very day she came home,” Machuca tells me, “as if the city itself had decided to bring her up to date on the new times that had settled in around here.”