Sometime later, torrential rains came to quiet the fevers of the barrio and turned its narrow streets into rivers of mud. Nocturnal lightning flickered against the zinc roofs with fading discharges and Holy Week arrived, bringing with it a slow, sorrowful silence, in solidarity with the agonies of the crucified. Sayonara, who was once again fixated on the red Christ with the fanaticism of earlier days, tried to please him with flowers and candles and left him cigarettes and matches, plates of rice, glasses of rum, anything that would help to alleviate the bitter drink awaiting him.
The Maundy Thursday sky dawned, vaulted over with dark clouds, and the streetwalkers of La Catunga, following tradition, dressed in mourning, covered their faces with Spanish mantillas, and went barefoot, in a vow of humility. Olguita vulnerable without her steel braces, Tana stripped of her jewels, Claire drained of life, Yvonne voluptuous, AnalÃa sober for the moment, Delia Ramos peaceful of spirit, and Machuca abstaining from cursing; the Italians, La Costeña, the Indians with their herds of children, and others, all filed barefoot along the narrow streets of sin, in voluntary penitence, which was heightened by the rain.
They emerged from the Dancing Miramar, leaving behind the barbershop, the apothecary, the billiard halls, the cantinas, the statue of the headless man, and the municipal slaughterhouse. When they reached Ecce Homo, the pealing of the bells exploded into the air and the interior of the church overflowed with lilies, while the altar was set for the last supper and the saints were clothed in purple raiment. But they kept walking.
“They didn't enter the church?”
“The parish had forbidden them to enter unless they had publicly renounced their profession.”
“Did they really walk barefoot?”
“Barefoot and in a holy trance, without dodging mortifications or garbage heaps.”
The black pilgrimage of penitents arrived at its destination, the Patria Theater, around eleven that morning and the early show, exclusively for them, was
Jesus of Nazareth
with Spanish subtitles and in Technicolor, which according to Olga was almost the same as real life.
“A sacred ceremony in an unholy temple,” I comment.
“We
putas
were born to rub luck against the grain,” assents Todos los Santos.
From the moment that the Christ child trotted behind his sheep on the screen of the Patria Theater, before he got into his predicament, much before the terrible denouement, the women of La Catunga burst into tears. They gave free rein to a cascade of warm and comforting tears, salty and sweet like sea and river currents. They cried because they weren't able to withstand so much death and love. They cried for the man who would pardon them on the cross, for his father Joseph's troubles and his mother Mary's lacerations. And they cried for themselves, for their mothers who they hadn't seen for so long, for their fathers who they had never seen, for their own children and for the children they would never have, for their sorrows as lonely women, for all the men who had gone and those to come, for the sins they had committed and those they would commit, for the past and for the future.
They didn't stop crying until they heard the celluloid Mary Magdalene swear and swear again that she had seen Christ resplendent, his wounds healed and gloriously resuscitated, and then they left the Patria Theater feeling lightened, free of guilt and empty of tears, prepared to bear another year of life without complaint or protest. Until the next Maundy Thursday, with its rain and tears, would come to bring the world purifying alleviation in the form of streams and torrents of water.
On the way back home along the Calle del Comercio, a few steps removed from the others, Todos los Santos and Sayonara walked arm in arm, one old and the other young, one pale-skinned and the other dark, one the mother and the other the daughter: both threatening and haughty in their black dresses, not looking back or greeting anyone.
“Mother whore, daughter whore, who does the blanket cover more?” commented the pious as they watched the pair pass.
“If the girl were hers,” murmured others, “that procuress wouldn't have allowed her to work the street, she would have installed her in a convent school, in Bucaramanga or in Cúcuta.”
“A convent?” says Todos los Santos, terrified. “Why would I leave her in the hands of nuns? Who are those señoras to educate her better than I?”
After living together for two years, everything that Sayonara knew she had learned from her
madrina
. She echoed her
madrina
's expressions, had the same deep gaze, the identical habit of walking around barefoot, and of curing illnesses with infusions of parsley. She had even inherited the peculiar style of cleaning her teeth, scrubbing so hard that the brush barely lasted a month.
“Under my wing that girl was growing up beautiful and strong. In her steps I found my own footprint and in her mirror I could read the same traces of my youth.
“I taught her how to be a prostitute and not anything else because it was the trade that I knew, just as the shoemaker can't train a bricklaying apprentice nor should a viola player try to give piano lessons.
“I did what I did without doubting my conscience,” Todos los Santos assures me, “because I have always believed that a
puta
can have a life that is just as clean as any decent housewife, or as corrupted as any indecent housewife.”
They say that at some moment in their itinerant existence the men from all the camps in the world, from the oil wells of Infantas to the vast fuel deposits of Iraq, passed religiously through the streets of sin in La Catunga, as if coming to fulfill a promise, because it was the heart and sanctuary of the extensive oil labyrinth. In La Catunga the circle was completed; it was the obligatory point of return for their travels.
“As a boy I had lived invisibly in Tora, leading a humble existence, hauling people and packages with my cart,” says Sacramento. “Living that way it is difficult for anyone to notice you, especially the
majeres de café,
who were accustomed to rubbing elbows with engineers, contractors, trained personnel. That's why I left, thinking I would return with some distinction, which is the purpose of everyone who leaves.”
“With what they gave him for selling the cart, Sacramento bought a pair of walking shoes and started walking,” Todos los Santos tells me.
Where to? He didn't have to ask anyone; he took off walking by the compass of the wandering multitude, joining the great river of seekers of fortune until he arrived at the oil installations at El Centro, where he found a population drowning in a persistent downpour that lashed diagonally, soaking mankind to the bone and reminding them of their helplessness. He arrived at dawn and immediately, without shrinking back from the weather's sudden attacks, took his place in the queue under the deluge, in front of the recruiting office. After hours of waiting, with his skin wrinkled under his soaked clothing, he gathered the courage to exchange words with the man waiting behind him.
“Raindrops were falling from his hair too and running into his eyes, his mouth and his ears, as they were into mine. So I asked him: A lot of rain, isn't it? An insignificant question, just to find a subject, and he answered me: Yeah, except maybe for frogs in a pond. From there we could converse more seriously because his words and mine had already been intertwined, and he confessed that he had come from the city of Popayán to try out his luck. Popayán? Where in the hell is that? I asked him, again just for the pleasure of chatting, or the need to find an accomplice, because I already knew more or less where the city of Popayán was.”
“It's on the other side of the country,” he answered.
“That's not so bad, there are several here who come from the other side of the planet. I've seen Armenians, Canadians, Jews, Greeks . . .”
“Well, I still had to walk three months to get here.”
“ âOkay, Payanés'âI called him that because that's what they call people who are from Popayán, and I kept calling him Payanés through the many good days that we were close friends, and even afterwardâânow that you're here hold my place in line while I go take a leak,' I said eagerly and in confidence, like any timid guy who wants to hide his urgent condition. In truth I had decided to talk to him because I had to go badly and didn't want to lose my place in that line of men, winding long and nervous like a poisonous snake.”
At noon, the rain gave way to a brilliant sun that dried the clothes on their backs, then around three in the afternoon it was finally their turn to face the recruiter, a robust man with the neck and disposition of an ill-tempered young bull.
“Show me your palms!” he bellowed, and they obeyed instantly. “Those are the hands of a lady, aren't you ashamed? Get out of here, we don't need women!”
“Respect!” demanded Sacramento, but without much conviction, so the bull wouldn't charge him.
“Yeah, respect,” echoed Payanés, and from that first adversity they became accomplices for all the others to come.
“I'll kill that son of a bitch,” boasted Sacramento when the beast was no longer within earshot. “I'll choke him with my bare hands, then we'll see whether they're a lady's hands.”
“You're not going to choke anybody, much less that giant,” said Payanés, taking his new friend over to join a group of fellow rejects as they headed out to look for work as road laborers, to wield shovels until their hands were covered with calluses and they could return to the recruiting officer stronger and better prepared.
They penetrated the dense, hungry jungles of Carare through a tunnel they barely managed to open with slashes of their machetes and that snapped shut behind them like the jaws of a beast. They walked in the dark, feeling their way and withstanding scratches, roars, venom, and harassment from slimy fauna and hairy flora whose existence Sacramento had never dreamed of even in his worst nightmares, and that Payanés pointed out and classified according to their place in the animal, mineral, or vegetable kingdom.
“This is a
sarrapial,
those giant burning flowers are called
cámbulos,
those shouts you hear are from white-faced
maicero
monkeys, this must be the footprint of a
momano,
half ape and half human, who walks upright through the jungle, wary and nearly hairless, hiding from people because he's shy and ashamed of his nakedness.”
Sacramento tore off a leaf and it turned out to be an insect, he was about to grab a stick but it was a snake, he heard the beautiful song of a bird and it too turned out to be a snake: a singing ophidian.
“I'm never going to learn,” he said, disheartened. “Nothing here is what it seems and everything acquires the gift of transforming itself into its opposite. The only certain thing is the hungriness with which the jungle looks at you; let down your defenses for a second and you'll get swallowed up.”
Eight days later, green, weak, and moldy from the humidity and lack of sun, their stomachs out of sorts from drinking amoebic broth and chewing
corozo
seeds, they found themselves on an old
camino real
opened by the conquistador Jiménez de Quesada along the RÃo Opón, upon which the Troco wanted to build a road to Campo Escondido and so was recruiting fresh blood for the work of leveling and moving earth.
They arrived around midnight and were greeted by the miracle of the river transformed into a bed of placid stars, which at the edge came away from the water and took off in flight.
“Those floating lights you see are female lightning bugs calling their mates,” said Payanés.
“Such tireless vegetation, so many creatures giving off light, so many males trying to copulate,” said Sacramento. “Nature is a very loving thing,
hermano
.”
They removed their shoes and lay down among the rest of the men, beneath the immense sky and with their heads firmly resting on their shoes, which are the most cherished possession in the life of a foot traveler. Despite their precaution, they went to sleep with four and awoke with three: Payanés's two and only the right shoe belonging to Sacramento, who sat in a gully hugging his widowed shoe and began to cry. He cried from exhaustion and because he was an orphan and because of the desolation of his abandoned foot, which was condemned to the sharp edges of the rocks and to the itching from the ticks and chiggers that embedded themselves in the plants, where they lay their crops of eggs.
“Monday, Wednesday, and Friday you get the complete pair,” Payanés said consolingly, handing him a tin can of hot coffee. “Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday I'll have it. Two Sundays a month for you, two Sundays for me.”
“Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday,” corrected Sacramento, “the first son of a bitch who lets down his guard tonight will have to limp around, because I'm going to steal a left shoe.”
“Why would they have only stolen one?”
“It must have been some damned one-legged thief.”
“It won't be hard to recognize him then.”
“What if the thief has all of his legs, and if someone else had stolen only one of his shoes too?”
“Then that means that a cycle has begun that not even God can end.”
Sacramento and Payanés racked their brains trying to imagine what luck could befall two men with three shoes, when toward them came an old man, ill-humored and mumbling curses.
“I'm getting out of here,” he said, chewing his words, as Sacramento studied the sturdy pair of raised-heel boots with leather straps the old man was wearing. “If you want my place you can have it. I'd rather die of hunger in my homeland than leave my bones buried in these shitty swamps. They're plagued with bugs, look, there goes one, and there's another. They say they bite, the filthy creatures. I'm getting out of here, yessir, before a fucking bug eats me.”