“Also,” Olguita tells me, “that good Sacramento sends Todos los Santos a voluntary monthly stipend, despite the fact, spiteful old woman, that she still hasn’t forgiven him. To think the only thing that getting married did for him was to acquire the obligation of maintaining the bride’s family in perpetuity. He ended up paying with interest for those seven coins he received that day when he delivered her to Todos los Santos for training!”
“Olguita also provides income,” Sacramento adds. “Just as you see her sitting there, the old girl is still an active professional who hasn’t lost her original clientele. Only those who die desert her, and not even them, because she visits them at the cemetery.”
Yesterday, which was Saturday, Olga and Todos los Santos were busy preparing lunch because Sacramento, Susana, Juana, Chuza, Machuca, and Tana were visiting.
“Here I come, don Enrique! Get ready, here I come!” shouted Fideo suddenly, when we weren’t paying her any attention because we were involved with the stuffed chicken and the onion salad, and when we ran to her side, we saw her make a final struggle to sit up in her hammock, call out once more to don Enrique, and die.
And yesterday the women decided that I had to say the final words of farewell at the burial, and this afternoon, a glass-weather Sunday, we dug the hole under the same guayacán tree and the same sky that shelters Claire. I saw many other graves in the middle of that meadow with the view of the river, barely marked with a wooden cross and maybe an epitaph: “Here lies Molly Flan,” “Finally at rest, Delia Ramos,” “N.N. new victim of the plague,” “La Costeña, love forever, your friends,” “María del Carmen Blanco alias La Fandango,” “Eternal glory for Chaparrita, heroine of the Rice Strike,” “Teresa Batista, tired of war,” “This is Melones, sister of Delia Ramos.”
When the moment arrived for me to speak, all the women looked at me as if I were the prima donna at a municipal theater performance. Then I placed a wreath of white roses in don Enrique’s name on the grave and said a few words that made some of those in attendance cry but disillusioned the rest, because just as they were beginning to be inspired, I had already finished. In matters of love, I said, everything is expectations and bets, some become shipwrecked, others somehow end up sailing smoothly, and in the midst of so much dreaming and foolishness one thing is certain: Fideo got closer than anyone to what is perhaps real love. She knew how to give it, she received it with open arms, and she kept it alive until the day of her death, and hopefully also from now on, amen.
forty-eight
The disaster that was spreading through the streets stopped at the doors of the houses and inside them reigned something similar to everyday tranquillity, to the continuous quiet of things. It is worth saying that despite everything, water was carried in the same buckets, the stove was lit with the same wood, the canaries still sang, and life clung to the tiniest ordinary things in its search for happiness.
“The events in La Catunga sound very appalling now that we’re telling them to you,” says Todos los Santos, “but at the time, just like now, they were part of our everyday routine and we didn’t really notice them. Ah! So-and-so was taken by the virus. Ah! They found a common grave with so many bodies. Ah! Lino el Titi’s son was tortured to repay his father’s union-related sins. That’s what we would say and what we still say, ah! all blessed day, but as one would say ah! I forgot to pick up the blue dress from the cleaners. The war is like that, more scandalous when you talk about it than when you are living it.”
“Because you tell it all at the same time, but you live it event by event,” clarified Olga.
A little war, blind and without name, like all of ours, came down the river and went through the streets; tranquillity took refuge in the patios of the houses and the great tribulation was borne inside everyone. The memory of Payanés and her hopes of being with him in the future was the lamp that warmed Sayonara’s vast loneliness. It was the cornerstone of her thoughts, which at every turn bumped into him in the heights and depths of hope and despair, in sparks of joy and moments of mourning. Olguita and Todos los Santos watched Sayonara dedicate her days to the ceremony of waiting, busying herself with the minimal rituals of all of those who in this world do nothing but wait, trembling with impatience: thinking, praying, and cultivating a hernia from so much effort.
“But what was she waiting for? What was it exactly that she was waiting for?”
“Ay, mi reina, the same thing she had always been waiting for, for the month to end and for the last Friday to arrive . . .”
“She went to the clinic every day to care for Fideo, who was improving little by little with the injections of penicillin mixed with benzoin that Dr. Antonio María gave her,” says Olga, “and the rest of the time, Sayonara waited. And she plucked daisy petals, which is classic in these cases, since the daisy is recognized as the most convenient flower, because it only knows how to say yes or no, he loves me or he loves me not, that’s all, so that if it is not to be, then let it be no for once and for all, so I can just die and get it over with, without further delay, because a person in love can’t bear anything in between.”
“And she constantly questioned me,” adds Machuca. “I had become her informant and adviser and she interrogated me as if her joy depended on the words that I would have the grace to speak. ‘He’s going to come,’ I assured her. ‘He’s going to come, you’ll see.’ ”
“How do you know, doña Machuca? Why are you so sure?”
“I’ve already told you, because he’s been seen looking for you lately. And since you are so eager to see him, why don’t you go and look for him? You know where to find him . . .”
“Don’t even think about it, doña Machuca. I could never do that. Why don’t you just tell me about Emilia again?”
“ ‘Ay, niña! Don’t you ever get tired of it?’ I asked her,” says Machuca, “and I would repeat the news of how they shut down Campo 26. How the old workers and the strikers were discriminated against with the argument that their experience wasn’t worth anything now because the company valued personnel who had studied in technical institutes, and as part of the modernization process they were getting rid of obsolete machinery. How they had sold skinny Emilia for junk and several people had heard Payanés say that anything they did to Emilia they were doing to him, that if Emilia was no longer there, then he didn’t have a commitment to the Tropical Oil Company anymore, or any reason to stay on at the Campo.”
They also heard him say that he was going to look for better oil regions in Catatumbo, or around Tibú, where they had begun to recruit, or if not there, then in Cusiana, where they were laying pipe, or in Yopal and Orocué, in the far reaches of the Llano, the western plain; that maybe he went to look for work in Saldaña, where they were drilling, or in Tauramena, in the Casanare jungle, where a contracting company was looking for welders and pipe fitters.
“They say that Payanés is going around saying that he is willing to go anywhere that the voice of the pipe calls him, and that if it’s necessary he’ll follow its trail all the way to Saudi Arabia. They say that before he leaves he will come looking for you.”
“Then I will go with him,” Sayonara swore to Machuca.
“And what are you going to do when hunger strikes you?” Todos los Santos wanted to know.
“I can mount a show of exotic dances and he can sell tickets at the entrance, or I can sell outside a movie theater the empanadas de pipián that you taught me how to make. I can do housework as I learned in Villa de la Virgen del Amparo, like ironing shirts and polishing parquet floors, or I could work as a hairdresser. Maybe I would become a puta again, you never know . . .”
“And you would go off again like that, with one hand in front of you and the other behind you, without knowing if you would find a roof to shelter you at night?”
“I would go like that, madrina, because you know that life in this pueblo is no bed of roses, and because I don’t need any more protection than his loving chest.”
“Ay, V
irgen santa! An umbrella in a hurricane would protect you more than his loving chest. And the remaining matter of that wife of his in Popayán, have you solved that?”
“That will be dealt with, madrina, along the way.”
“Along the way, along the way! The way to sorrow is where you’ll be heading again . . .”
“What are you saying, Todos los Santos?!” says Olga indignantly. “As if there were any ways in this life that didn’t lead to sorrow. But it’s still worth the trouble of following them; no, child, don’t be discouraged.”
One by one the slowest hours of the century filtered past and Sayonara was barely surviving her own hopefulness, always besieged by the certainty that something—or everything—was in play; that something—or everything—could be won or lost. Until the last Friday of that last month of the year dawned, brushing lightly against first the smokestacks at the refinery, then the tops of the highest trees, next the roofs of the houses, and finally the naked backs of the sleeping women, to find Sayonara already bathed and dressed and finished with breakfast, kneeling before the Christ with the blond beard.
“Today is the day, Señor Jesús,” she prayed, “and I have come to ask you for something: Either you make that man love me, or you give me the courage to forget him. One of the two. All-powerful Señor, you who take everything and give everything, allow us to love one another until the end of our days, which isn’t much to ask, since the lives of humans are short. I won’t demand a commitment from him, or marriage or any other word, just true and clear proof. Send me a signal: If Payanés can’t offer me great love, then don’t let him appear today at the river. If it is otherwise, then give him swift feet, Señor, so he will arrive quickly.”
“Careful, girl,” Todos los Santos told her, listening to Sayonara’s prayer from the doorway, “don’t ask for supernatural announcements, they are almost always deceiving. Understand this, girl, you were born to be a nun or a puta, because no man exists who can put out that fire of longing inside you, or calm such a jumble of hopes.”
“Don’t teach me to resign myself, madrina, because I don’t want to learn. It’s already too late in life for me to accept defeat. I want to die peacefully knowing that I loved and was loved, and I assure you that it is not going to be a lack of faith that interferes with my efforts. Señor Jesús,” she began to pray again, “help me to prove those wrong who believe that this is a valley of tears, amen.”
They took stools, umbrellas, and cold drinks and sat at the edge of the Magdalena to wait, in respectful silence, as befits great occurrences. Sayonara was wearing her tight skirt and silk blouse, but she had traded her spike heels for some sandals, in case things turned out well and she needed to walk a long distance.
“Do you think you can make it all the way to Saudi Arabia in this suffocating heat?” one of the women joked, and they all laughed nervously.
Toward ten that morning they saw a group of people walking toward them and Sayonara’s heart stopped, but they turned out to be pilgrims on their way to the sanctuary of Las Lajas.
“Have you come across anyone?” Todos los Santos asked them.
“Because of the stifling heat today, everything is very quiet,” they responded.
Between that hour and eleven-thirty, the women didn’t notice anything worthy of mention, and later they saw moving down river, at more or less regular intervals and for a period that stretched until noon, a pair of men fishing from a chalupa, a few fur merchants, and a champán rushing in an injured woman. Nothing more. Except for Sayonara, all of the women withdrew to eat lunch and came back down later with a plate of food that she wouldn’t even taste. The afternoon heat put them to sleep at their watch posts, all but Sayonara, who remained painfully alert. Five o’clock came without event and discouragement began to invade the women, except for Sayonara, who ran to brush her hair and rinse her face with cool water.
Toward six-thirty a serene apocalypse of fires began to softly descend, one of those sunsets in Tora that, as Olga says, are so beautiful they hurt; one just like that other one with pink hues that Sacramento sent on one of his postcards of hopeless love; or copied from that bloody sky that convinced beautiful Claire of the sweetness of death; or like the ones that don Enrique painted to please his clientele, adorned with birds in flight and a glimmering horizon: a sunset just like those that Todos los Santos is able to contemplate in spite of not being able to open those other heavy eyelids that have been born under her eyelids.
“Here he comes!” Olguita suddenly shouted, and everyone stood up in unison, as if they had heard the national anthem. “Here he comes! He looks strong and handsome, all dressed in white!”
But she hadn’t finished her announcement when his image vanished, like an inopportune cloud in the middle of the rays of the sunset.
“In white, yes, like a phantom,” grumbled Todos los Santos, trying to lower the volume on the scene. “Don’t embellish or exaggerate, Olga, you only saw his ghost. To me, Payanés is slippery, one of those who goes through life without underwear on under his trousers. You notice that he doesn’t even have a name, Payanés, the man from Popayán, because his presence is nothing more than a gust of freedom. Which is what this girl has always pursued deep down,” she said, but Sayonara, in agony, wasn’t listening to her, “but she disguises her impulse and tries to make an appearance of refuge, of a loving chest, of protection, of paternal love, of anything: This girl only loves her own flight.”
“But that is love,” Olguita, the cripple, defended her, pounding her withered, steel-clad legs against her stool. “To run off using someone else’s feet!”
“It’s him,” said Sayonara, now without the shadow of worry, shrouded in an old dignity and a new security, as if she had just deciphered some serious riddle or the key to something profound, and they knew the hour of the myth had come: the puta and the petrolero.
It is true that in a strict sense she was no longer a prostituta and he was no longer a petrolero, but maybe one day they would be again—he a prostituto and she a petrolera, as a favorite poet of Machuca’s named Rafael Pombo would have said—but if that didn’t happen it wasn’t a waste, because the sworn truth was that the women saw them depart, with the eyes that God put in their heads, together up along the Magdalena, one behind the other and the other behind the one, and both following the trail of life, or, better still, the force that pulls life from outburst to outburst without letting us know where it is carrying us, he dressed in white, with the rose incarnate wounding his chest and his profile facing forward, and she with her hair in the wind, gazing backward, clinging to what she is leaving behind and with the aura of death’s beloved child reverberating around her more now, but it had surrounded her as long as they had known her. United at last, the puta and the petrolero, joined as one in the warm rapture of an embrace, while before them stretched the road to an uncertain future, like any worthwhile future.
“That is how we watched them depart in the scent of a legend and along the edge of the river, while we cried bittersweet tears and wished them ‘God be with you’ with waves of our handkerchiefs,” reports Olga, letting out a round, translucent sigh.
“Mirages,” replies Todos Los Santos. “You were just seeing mirages, nothing more than reflections of desire. But me—blind as I am, I have my ways—I saw my girl leave by herself, her only company her solitude, searching for whatever it was that was plaguing her.”
“As an old, experienced woman, I know these things,” continues Olga, “and I assure you that Sayonara left with Payanés and that she has been happy with him. And unhappy too, of course, but you can’t take that away from her, the troubles of love aren’t troubles. She has been happy for all of us because we deserve it, after so much activity and struggle.”
“Me? I still write postcards to her, because I had confirmation that she appreciated receiving them,” Sacramento tells me. “With everything else, including the marriage, I wasn’t able to do anything except bother her, but my postcards cheered her up, as
she told me herself. Since I don’t know where to send them, I keep them here, in this shoe box, so I can give them to her the day she returns.”
“Because she is going to return,” Todos los Santos assures me, wrapped in her silver fox, as she caresses a Felipe with soft fur sleeping in a ball in her lap. “My girl will come back sooner or later, because the turns in her road always pass by my house.”
acknowledgments
This book would not exist without the interest that has been invested in it, day to day, by Thomas Colchie, my adviser and literary agent; his wife, Elaine; and María Candelaria Posada, my old university classmate and, through entire lives of closeness, my editor today. I thank them and also Jaime González, Samuel Jaramillo, and Bernardo Rengifo, dear friends who read, reread, commented on, and added their bits to the manuscript.
For their kindness and thorough, factual knowledge, I thank Juan María Rendón, Alberto Merlano, and Marco Tulio Restrepo, directors of Ecopetrol, the firm that financed a portion of the research for this novel.
I thank also Rafael Gómez and Carlos Eduardo Correa S.J., who will know how valuable their generous and intelligent advice was when they read these pages, and Antonio María Flórez, the Spanish doctor who told me of his conversations with prostitutes in the health clinic of a Colombian pueblo in tierra caliente. Álvaro Mutis, for a certain sentence among those that appear here and from whom I heard it. Leo Matiz for the rights to the evocative photograph that appears on the cover. Sofía Urrutia, who made me aware of “La maison Tellier,” the story by Maupassant that was key in finding the tone for this novel. Graciela Nieto, who will be surprised when she encounters, from the mouth of one of the characters of this fiction, an anecdote from real life that she related to me. María Rosalba Ojeda, my right hand for domestic matters and other urgencies. And as always and for so many reasons, my son, Pedro, my sister, Carmen, and my mother, Helena.
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