“Who?”
“That woman . . .”
“Next Friday I'll take you with me so you can see her yourself. You'll be fine . . .”
“Don't talk shit, Payanés; I'm going to die.”
“You're too mean to die.”
“Listen carefully to what I am going to say. When are you going back down to La Catunga?”
“In about a month, I think.”
“Take this money to a kid they call the girl,” he said, and gave Payanés all the money from the only paycheck he had received. “She's like my sister and she lives with her
madrina
, Todos los Santos. You tell her that Sacramento sent this to her so she'll have money for food and can get away from the evil life. Then you look for Sayonara and say these words to her, just as I am saying them now: âDon't worry, as soon as I get better I am going to marry you.' ”
“You're crazy,
hermano
. Are you turning into a savior of derailed women? What if they don't want you to save them?”
“You just say what I told you; tell Sayonara that it's a message from a man named Sacramento. That I know she's suffering and as soon as I'm well I'm coming for her. Do you swear that you'll do it?”
“I swear.”
Payanés left the convalescent pavilion deeply troubled after seeing his soul mate so lost. You're screwed,
hermano,
he thought painfully, angrily, helplessly. Like the footsteps of a mammoth, the pounding of the drill bent on breaking the planet's back echoed through the jungle, so no one heard him as he said out loud:
“They're letting him die, the damned bastards.”
“Llegaron los peludoooos!”
Friday nights in La Catunga the call to arms spread from woman to woman:
Llegaron ya los peluuudoooos!
And so began, in dark splendor, the romantic costumed opera, opulent and miserable.
On weekdays, under the bright sun, in baggy, faded bathrobes, with bouncing breasts unrestrained by bras and the unkempt look of housewives, the women of Toraâwhen they weren't breast-feeding babiesâfollowed a routine of indiscriminately servicing rubber harvesters, jungle hunters, riverboat men, or merchants in brief, monetary episodes in bed that meant no more to them than scrubbing pots or feeding the chickens.
“What did you think about in the meantime?” I ask Todos los Santos. “I mean, while you were with them . . . ?”
“I added up my accounts. I thought about the money they were going to give me and calculated what I could buy with it, depending on the price of potatoes, plantains, rent. While the man did his thing, I figured out my expenses.”
But Friday was Friday, and its arrival was evident in the air from the sound of crying babies whose diapers no one had changed, the hordes of wandering chickens stealing crumbs, and the fluttering of women humming love songs as they washed their hair in basins and spread their silk stockings out to dry in the sun. Dusk fell on the barrio, gilding the poverty, and the streets and alleys glowed with electric lights like a Christmas tree. Tired of crying, the children fell asleep in corners while their mothers gave themselves up, fluttering like black butterflies, to the ritual of dance, flirtation, and drinks.
Around seven the women would begin to arrive at the Dancing Miramar in groups of twos and threes, a few unaccompanied. All unrecognizable, vastly different from the way they appeared every day, their bodies transformed by a riot of color and anxious to escape their costumes of blue polyester, emerald green sateen, sunflower-hued rayon; neck and ears glittering with tricks of costume jewelry and fake diamonds; Elizabeth Arden lips bright red like the ace of hearts. Painted, dramatic, dolled up like transvestitesâan eager, coquettish swarm of cats not yet fully tame. Or foxes, fully conscious of being
putas
, like a bullfighter is conscious of his being only when he steps into the ring, or a priest as he offers communion at the altar.
From that moment on life would be interwoven with the illusions of alcohol and darkness that magically lengthened eyelashes, sweetened the most unforgiving folds of skin, and poisoned the night with the smell of sewers and orange blossoms. The Victrolas would play tangos that made even the cat purr, and inside the Dancing Miramar, floating in smoke like a spaceship, love sprouted among the tiles and the ammonia in the back room.
Fragments of moonlight, like bits of broken glass, would collect in the corners among cigarette butts and empty bottles, and at the end of the spree, along with dawn, sadness would descend over the couples that lay naked on the beds and would clothe them with the caress of an angel.
At eight o'clock on another last Friday of the month, somewhere between stupefied and amazed, Payanés found himself seated at a table in the Dancing Miramar. This is what heaven must be like, he thought. It must be just exactly like this. Never in his life had he seen such an abundance of luxury and splendor. The red and black velvet, the semidarkness, the smoke that dazzled his eyes, the clinking of glasses, the delirium of women in brightly colored dresses, the smell of expensive perfume, the huge orchestra blasting the music of Pérez Prado. And above all, the satisfaction produced by the knowledge that in his pocket he had the money to pay for it all; he, Payanés, who had earned it fair and square. So this is the
petrolero
's compensation, he thought finally. He sat Molly Flan on his lap and ordered a bottle of whiskey.
On a platform, higher than everything in the room, unaware of everyone else, and protected by the cage of light cast upon her by a spotlight, danced Sayonara, her furious mane cascading down her back. She was wearing the silk blouse fastened with a tight row of buttons that passed over her heart and ascended to her neck, and the narrow skirt the color of mourning with the slit up the side, through which her dark leg showed: the tip of her foot, the shin, the calf, the knee.
“Is that her?” Payanés asked Molly Flan.
“That's her. What does she have, anyway, that the rest of us don't?”
“She's skinny, but pretty,” said Payanés, as if to himself.
“She's pretty, but skinny,” corrected Molly Flan.
Lost in her own world, as if floating in her dreams, Sayonara undulated in the stream of light. In the middle of the noise and the pressing crowd, the space she occupied seemed set apart like a sanctuary, inaccessible and inviolable, steeped in the air of another world like a lunar landscape.
“No one can find a way to penetrate that woman's solitude,” said Payanés, thinking out loud.
Should I approach the platform and shout congratulations to her, that it's her lucky day because my friend Sacramento sends her the good news that he's going to marry her? He downed a burning shot of whiskey and decided not to say a word to her. That way I'll save Sacramento from looking like a fool, he thoughtâat the same time, and more importantly, I'll save myself from the same fate. He would take the envelope with the money to the girl, but he would play dumb about the message to this woman.
“Would it be breaking a promise to only half fulfill it?” he asked Molly, speaking loudly to make himself heard over the deafening silence that was created around the girl on the platform.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
I have often asked myself the same question that Molly Flan askedâwhat did Sayonara have that the others didn't? What was it, really, that transformed her at a certain moment in the history of La Catunga into a sort of cipher of that tight universe of oil workers, prostitutes, and love for pay? According to what several people told me, the answer could be traced to her defiant nature. They say that she had a peculiar ferocity that went beyond beauty and that attracted and intimidated. Certainly one could also talk about a notable hybrid vigor, stemming from the mixture of blood, that illuminated her youthfulness with the spirit and sparkle of a filly.
I speak blindly about all this because I never met Sayonara personally. I learned the details of her life through the stories and memories of her people, particularly those of Todos los Santos, one of those monumental beings whom life grants us the privilege of getting to know. I forged a wonderful friendship with her through our many afternoons of conversation on Olguita's patio, in the shade of the rubber trees, and because of that it would be absurd to call research, or reporting, or a novel, something that was a fascination on my part with a few people and their circumstances. Let's just say that this book was born out of a chain of tiny revealed secrets that stripped the leaves, one by one, from Sayonara's days, in an attempt to reach the pith.
Todos los Santos, Sacramento, Olguita, Machuca, and Fideo were extraordinary narrators, gifted with an astonishing ability to tell their tragedies without pathos and to speak of themselves without vanity, imprinting on the facts the intensity of those who are willing, for motives I still do not understand, to confess to a stranger for the sole reason that she writes, or because she's precisely that, a stranger, or maybe because of the simple fact that she listens. As if the act itself of telling their own story to a third party would stamp it with a purpose, would make it somehow lasting, would clarify its meaning.
It was by accident that I entered the world of La Catunga. I was working against the clock on a report about a completely unrelated matter, the theft and clandestine distribution of gasoline by a criminal organization called the gasoline cartel, and because of that I landed in Tora on a Tuesday at eleven in the morning aboard a small plane belonging to the airline Aces. By two o'clock that afternoon Sayonara had already crossed my path, by pure chance but with a frightening obstinacy.
I needed a photograph of Sergeant Arias Cambises for my weekly magazine. He had been murdered six months earlier because he knew too much about the cartel's operations, and I went to look for a photograph of him at the archives of the daily newspaper
Vanguardia Petrolera
. The young man in charge was just leaving for lunch, but he kindly allowed me to look around on my own.
“I'll be back in half an hour,” he told me, and I went right to work.
I didn't find what I was looking for in the alphabetical files, so I started rummaging around in the piles of unclassified material, a veritable Pandora's box with a little of everything, except photos of Sergeant Arias Cambises: pictures of public disturbances, of
bambuco
composers hugging their guitars, teenage girls being presented to society, a demonstration in the twenties led by the famous labor leader MarÃa Cano, notable figures receiving awards, a native Charles Atlas called El Indio Amazónico, who swam underwater across the RÃo Magdalena. Even a litter of angora kittens playing with balls of yarn in a basket. Hundreds of photographs of all kinds and, suddenly, something that couldn't be passed over.
It was a close-up of a mestiza girl of dark, biblical beauty, without makeup or adornment, who breathed an air of virgin jungles and at the same time of unfathomed depths, a truly jarring photograph. She had the bearing of the Tahitian women painted by Gauguin. But not a drop of the ingenuousness of the noble savage. Hers were the softened features of an everyday
india
, but her expression, I didn't know why, hinted at urban wiles.
I lay the photograph aside to keep looking for my sergeant and before I realized it, I had it in my hands again and was looking at the vigorous fall of that strong hair, parted in the middle, the unmanicured perfection of her almond-shaped fingernails, the eyes of a girl who has seen too much, the vague manner in which her full lips were parted. “As beautiful as Jerusalem and as terrible as an army with battle orders”: studying her I finally understood how Shulamite from the Song of Songs could be so beautiful and so terrible at the same time.
The back of the photograph was also a surprise. It was signed, without a date, by Tigre Ortiz, one of the great Colombian photographers, of whom it was said that he had photographed and loved the most beautiful women on the continent, among them the goddess MarÃa Félix. Beneath his signature and between quotation marks appeared a single word, “Sayonara.”
“Did you find what you were looking for?” asked the young man in charge of the archives when he returned from lunch.
“No, but I found this,” I said, as I handed him the photo of the girl. “Do you know who it is?”
“Everybody knows who she is. She was a famous
prostituta
here in Tora.”
Sometime later in Santafé de Bogotá, I looked for Tigre Ortiz, now retired and in his eighties, to ask him to tell me the story behind that photograph, with little hope that he would remember, because he must have taken it so many years ago. Yes, he remembered that photo, and all the others; he had the memory of an elephant.
He told me that the Tropical Oil Companyâthe Trocoâhad hired him at some point to take a series of photographs for a catalog of its installations and for which he had had to travel to Tora, Infantas, and El Centro in search of oil towers, iron beams, and all kinds of machinery.
“I clearly remember,” he said, “a famous Gardner Denver derrick from the beginning of the century, a museum piece that was still functioning like a Swiss watch and was a source of great pride. Several workers asked me to photograph them at the base of the tower.”
At the end of two weeks of photographing, he went out with some engineers to celebrate the culmination of the work in Tora's red-light district. And he saw her there, toward the middle of the afternoon, barefoot, wearing a loose camisole and brushing her hair on the patio of her house.
“As soon as I saw her I thought of Santi Muti, a poet friend who used to talk about âthe definitive air of a beautiful
india
.' Because that was exactly what that girl had, the self-assurance of a beautiful Indian that could take your breath away.”
He asked her to allow him to photograph her just as she was, and before answering, she sought the consent of an older woman, who according to Tigre must have been her mother. He thought the woman would want to charge him, but she simply said: “Go on,
hija,
let him take your picture, it won't hurt.”