“The saints were wooden and stared at me,” he tells me, “from glass eyes that cast real gazes. The one that terrified me most was Saint Judas Tadeo, with his sharp ax gripped tightly in his right hand, the patron saint of criminals because he is the only one with a weapon. You understand that with all of the violence flourishing in those days, Saint Judas Tadeo was highly revered and favored with votive candles and offerings, but I suspected that he looked harshly at me, as if reproaching me, threatening me with his decapitating ax, and I attributed to him the ability, with those blue glass balls he had in his sockets, of being able to see deep inside me and observe that I was failing in my commitment to sacrifice and suffering.”
Lent arrived rainy and charged with remorse, and every boy was supposed to choose, according to the dictates of his own conscience, the sacrifices he was willing to make, step by step along a stairway to heaven that began with privations like giving up the milk candies that were served for dessert or getting up to pray an hour earlier than was mandatory, and that ascended through fasts and vigils to reach self-inflicted injuries to the flesh, such as walking barefoot over the pebbles on the patio or tying the rough jute rope worn by the Franciscans around one's waist under his shirt. In the hands of the penitent orphans of Tora lay the power of enduring suffering in exchange for cleansing humanity of the stains of sin, and no one knows how much a charge like that weighs and overwhelms when it falls on the shoulders of a young boy.
“Don't be an idiot,” Sacramento's friend Dudi Abdala, who was a Turk and an atheist, said to him. “Go ahead and eat your milk candies, don't you see that if you don't the rector will eat them all himself?”
But Sacramento, determined to become a saint at any price, genuflected and ignored the temptation.
“If you're not going to eat them, at least give them to me,” implored Dudi Abdala, who besides being Turkish and an atheist was a glutton. “It's all the same to God . . .”
“Because of you mankind is going to get screwed up,” Sacramento reproached him, and left the candy on the tray.
At the entrance to the chapel the Franciscan brothers had placed a jar with garbanzo beans and they hung a little cloth bag around each boy's neck, in which he could place one garbanzo for each sacrifice he inflicted upon himself. The garbanzos were the irrefutable and tangible proof of the degree of goodness achieved, and the boys who suffered most would proudly display the heaviest bags.
“I struggled a great deal to be the best of all of them,” Sacramento tells me. “I injured my feet on the pebbles and I wore the jute rope, because I knew that I, being the son of a sinner, had to do twice as much as the others to achieve the same result. But I was hiding an unconfessable sin, falseness and pride, because I allowed the devil to push my hand and place unearned garbanzos in my bag so that it would look especially bulky. The full terror of this fell on me that morning as I stood alone in the chapel, when Saint Judas let me know that he was aware of my lies, and from then on he tormented my nights, never letting me sleep. Hour after hour until dawn I could hear the rasping of his ax against the sharpening stone, and I expected that at any moment he would appear to chop off my head with a single blow. In those days I used to cry a lot, mostly over my mother, because I loved her, although I had never seen her again after she left me. The priests told me not to waste my suffering on her because she would never have God's forgiveness, she was already condemned and there was nothing I could do about it.”
In the light of day it was possible to put aside temptation and advance without stumbling along the path of chastity, but night was the realm of Lucifer. After nine o'clock, after the final rattle of the electric generator, sin spread through the dormitories and plunged through the darkness into the boys' hearts, and that was when the color pictures emerged from their hiding places in the complicit glow of candlelight. They were pages from calendars, clippings from magazines, or postcards with women in bathing suits, in towels, in shorts, in underwear, that revealed unsuspected glimpses of nudity, the vertiginous secrets of the flesh, the strange wonders that the feminine sex hide under their clothes. The boys stared at them in amazement, and even God, who saw everything because He was everywhere, looked at those pictures surprised at the audacity of His own creation, incapable of preventing His eyes from gazing upon the softness of those thighs and those necks, the roundness of those knees and shoulders, the miracle of those breasts and buttocks, beside which the pleasure of milk candies and the torment of the pebbles on the patio were minor passions. The pictures showed beautiful light-skinned girls with pink nipples and beautiful dark-skinned women with purple nipples; there were timid ones who covered their chests with crossed arms and brazen ones who showed their underwear because they were sitting immodestly; blondes with equally blond pubic hair; dancers covered with feathers and tulle; beauties in garters, black silk stockings, and high heels.
In order not to be discovered, the orphans passed the pictures from hand to hand, barely gazing at them before hastily hiding them under the mattress. Then each one would retreat into the cave of his sheets to invoke, now alone and at ease, that mysterious happiness he had just glimpsed. Erotic activity was unleashed throughout the dormitory, and for several minutes the bunk beds shook with the frenzy of their actions. Little by little the scene dissolved into sighs and silence, and overcome by exhaustion, the eye of God closed and before ten o'clock the boys had already escapedâredeemed sinnersâto the guilt-free land of their dreams, hand in hand with those beauties with red lips, black hair, and warm thighs of milk and honey. All the boys except Sacramento, who didn't dream about kisses from beautiful women but rather the rasping of Saint Judas Tadeo's ax of justice.
“Every now and then Brother Eligio, the one in charge of discipline in the dormitories, would enter without warning. He would tear the colored photographs from our hands and rip them to pieces, say that those women were
putas
and that we were going to roast in the fires of hell.
Putas,
just like my mother, I shuddered, and I would gush with tears of anger against Brother Eligio, who insulted them like that, and against my companions too and above all against myself, for desiring women like my mother so.”
“Strange boy, that Sacramento,” says Father Nataniel. “Obedient and pious, but he never learned how to tie his shoes.”
I ask him what he is insinuating by that and as he replies he peels with a knife one of the sweet pears that he grows in the orchard of the presbytery in Puentepiedra, Cundinamarca, where he spends the long hours of his retirement.
“Nothing, simply what I am saying, that as much as I tried to teach him how to tie his shoes and in spite of the patience I invested in the endeavor, he couldn't pick it up and always went around with his shoes untied.”
Days later, when I return to Tora and see Sacramento again, the first thing I do is look at his feet. Father Nataniel is right; Sacramento still walks around with his shoelaces untied.
“I didn't believe the priests at the school when they assured me that there was no salvation for my mother,” he says to me. “I was convinced that if I got to be a saint, I could get God to forgive her and take her to His kingdom after she died, for all eternity. Whatever the cost, I was personally going to get God to forgive her, of that I was sure; what wasn't so clear was whether I myself could forgive her.”
Payanés traveled four and a half hours along the
petrolero
route to the end of the tracks, which stopped at Infantas, and from there he had to walk another two hours along with the rest of the lagging workers who were returning to Camp 26, splashing into undesirable swamps through a jungle as black and dense as the belly of a mountain. The whole way he daydreamed about the girl without a name to whom he had sworn his love every last Friday of the month; difficult, contradictory dreams that got out of control and ended up with evocations of Sacramento, who appeared to claim her and accuse him of betrayal. Either you die, or regret will kill me, Payanés said to him in his head, and this too: I propose a deal, Sacramento, brother, if you live she's yours, but if you die you leave her for me. And a little later he would rave about another deal that seemed less cruel: If she leaves her life behind and marries you, I won't see her again. But if she keeps on doing her thing, you will have to admit that I have as much right to go after her as you do. That's how he thought he would balance accounts with his sick friend, and he tried to pick up the thread of his memories again, thinking only of her, stretching the fingers of his memory as far as possible to get her back, but Sacramento, relentless, would reappear to prevent it.
He could see Emilia's silhouette in the distance, illuminated and cold in the middle of the lake of fog that flooded the camp, and was startled to have completely forgotten about her for so long. He ran to the hospital, which at night seemed to be floating amidst the somnambulant fluttering of the bats that lived under its eaves, and he slipped in surreptitiously, greasing the palm of the night watchman with a tip because visiting hours had ended much earlier. He tiptoed through the heavy, listless silence and had almost arrived at his destination when he ran right into Demetrio, the nurse. Payanés excused himself as best he could for being there after hours and asked about his friend's health.
“No better. That boy will probably go on to the other side . . .”
“Just a minute, what do you mean, to what other side?”
“Are you an idiot? Where are you from that you don't understand Spanish? I am saying that he will probably die.”
“Then why the hell don't they operate on him! Give him some medicine, something, but don't just let him die!”
“Be quiet, you'll wake up the few of them that are asleep. And get used to the idea; we did what we could.” The nurse took off his white lab coat and hurried off to get ready to go home.
“Did you convey my promise of marriage to her?” Sacramento spat the question at Payanés, scrutinizing him with yearning eyes, in whose depths the mist of the other shore could already be seen.
“Yes,
hermano
, I gave her your promise,” assured the other man, careful with his words so as not to lie outright, and at the same time speaking to the dying man as if he were a child for whom he wanted to relieve a great pain with subtle deceit.
“Did she say yes?”
“Yes, she said yes.”
“Okay, then. Now I will have to get better so I can fulfill my promise. But how do I know you're not lying to me?”
“She gave me a lock of hair as a pledge . . .”
“This is it,” said Sacramento without a shadow of a doubt, ripping the amulet from Payanés's neck with a single pull and putting it to his nose to smell it, with a surprising eagerness for someone on the brink of dying. “Yes, this is it, this is her hair . . . now, please tie it around my neck.”
Payanés obeyed without protest, because you don't deny a terminal patient his last elixir of hope; because deep down he knew he could recover his memento as soon as his friend expired and because he understood, in a subtle way that he didn't know how to put into words, that for several months and especially now, as they were about to say goodbye, he and his friend were like two parts of the same person, the part who stays and the part who goes away, and that the double confusion of the amuletâyour neck, my neckâwas another one of the many signs of the coming and going between two destinies that had become interwoven and merged together without fault on the part of either.
“And the girl,” Sacramento continued to question his friend, “did you give her the money?”
“She didn't want to take it,
hermano
, she says she would rather you send her postcards.”
There was a long, final silence, in rhythm with the rocky trickle of the waters of death, as they tossed themselves upon Sacramento's pillow.
“Those two, are they the same person?” asked Sacramento, speaking with tenderness what surely would be his last words.
“What are you talking about?” said Payanés, and he wished with his whole soul that his friend hadn't asked the question.
“That's why I sent you to see them both, so you could confirm what I always knew, that the girl and Sayonara are one. I put her in that world and now it's only right that I separate her from it. But if I can't, Payanés,
hermano,
you have to promise me that you will do it for me.”
I know this book will have no soul as long as I find no trace of the desperation that led Sayonara's mother and brother to take their lives, and, above all, of the hopes that pushed Sayonara herself to continue living after what happened.
Looking for answers, I leave Tora on the Magdalena, a river of mercury waters that turn rusty with the sunset, aboard an anachronistic steamboat whose existence is a pure act of faith and whose improbable advance erases from the map each port as we leave it behind: Yondó, ChucurÃ, Puerto Parra, Barbacoas, El ParaÃso, Puerto Nare, Palestina, El Naranjo, La Dorada, Santuario, Cambao, and at the end of the trip, Ambalema, Tolima, where Sayonara was born, according to Tigre Ortiz.
I have to trust that the Magdalena can take me to the knot of memory, but I'm not sure I can rely on it. It has become a self-engrossed river, forgotten by history, detached from its own shores, allowing itself to be carried along unenthusiastically by a present of tame currents that don't bring to mind their place of origin and that try to ignore where they are going.
For now its course has brought me to Ambalema, the once prosperous Ambalema, capital of a tobacco bonanza that has already ended and that left its planters wiped out and its inhabitants convinced that life runs backward, like memories.