The Dark Bride (2 page)

So as not to generate misunderstandings with the business of the international tariffs and so that the male clientele would know exactly what to go by, the custom of hanging a lightbulb of a different color in each house was established: green for the blond French women; red for the Italians, so temperamental; blue for all the women from neighboring countries; yellow for the
colombianas
; and common, ordinary white—vulgar Philips bulbs—for the
pipatonas
, who only aspired to a crust of bread to feed their brood of children. At least that's how it was until the startling Sayonara made her appearance. Startling? Made of shadow and wonder, her name charged with good-byes.

Sayonara, the aloof goddess with oblique eyes, more revered than even the legendary Yvonne and Mistinguett, and the only one in the history of the barrio whose window glowed with a violet-colored bulb.

“The violet light, that was the key,” affirms Todos los Santos. “It was a new color, unnatural, never before imagined. Because green lights are seen in stoplights, in lightning bugs, and reds and blues are at the circus, in bars, in shooting stars, on Christmas trees. But violet? Violet is a mystical color. A violet light in the dark of night produces anxiety and motivates uncertainty. And to think that we owe it to Machuca, may God protect her despite the barbarities she says about Him; it was Machuca, the blasphemer, who obtained that violet lightbulb, so one of a kind. She stole it from a traveling carousel that had stopped in town at the time.”

Sacramento, the cart man, was the first to see Sayonara arrive in Tora.

“Sayonara, no; the girl that would become Sayonara and that later would stop being Sayonara to become another woman,” emphasizes Sacramento, and I begin to understand that I have entered into a world of performances where each person approaches or retreats from his own character.

The river floated along in a lethargy of idle crocodiles, and the
champán,
the raft, that brought travelers and hustlers,
tagüeros
and
caucheros
—gatherers of ivory palm wood and rubber—lively men and those dying of hunger from every port along the Magdalena, was taking longer than usual to arrive. Sacramento was waiting for a client who might solicit his service of human-powered transport for cargo or passengers, and as he waited he grew drowsy watching the spirals of brown water, frothy with oil, twisting and untwisting as they glided lazily by. He says he didn't know when, light as a memory, she climbed into his cart with her two cardboard boxes and her battered suitcase, because he was startled from his nap by her voice ordering him:

“Take me to the best bar in town.”

He looked at her through still foggy eyes and he couldn't see her face, which was covered by a tangle of wild, dirty hair. But he did see her beat-up luggage and the poplin dress that left uncovered some skinny and dark extremities. This girl isn't even thirteen, nor does she have a peso to pay for the ride, he thought, as he yawned and took a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe away the sleep that was still hanging from his eyelashes.

“Wake up, man, I'm in a hurry.”

“Haughty little girl.”

Sacramento stood up, walked to the river, making a show of not being in a hurry, drew a little muddy water in a can, dampened his head and T-shirt, took a mouthful, and spat it out.

“The world's all fucked up,” he sputtered. “The water tastes like gasoline.”

“What is the best bar in this town?” she insisted.

“The most famous one is the Dancing Miramar. Who are you looking for there?”

“I'm going there to look for work.”

Intrigued and finally awake, Sacramento inspected the bony, tangled creature who had climbed into his cart without warning or permission.

“Do you know who works there?” he asked her. “Bad women. Very bad women.”

“I know that.”

“I mean very, very bad. The worst. Are you sure you want to go there?”

“I'm sure,” she said with a certainty that left no room for doubt. “I'm going to be a
puta
.”

Sacramento didn't know what to say, so he simply diverted his gaze to a portion of the slow journey of a log with reptilian wrinkles that was being carried along by the river's current.

“You're too skinny,” he said finally. “You won't have much luck in the business. Besides, you need manners, a little elegance, and you look like a hick from the mountains.”

“Take me there now, I can't waste time arguing with you.”

Sacramento doesn't know why he ended up obeying; he tells me that perhaps he was stirred by the freshness of the fruity lips and healthy teeth that he thought he saw beneath the tangles.

“To think that I was the one who took her to La Catunga,” he says to me. “You can't count the number of sleepless nights that regret has robbed me of.”

“You took her because she asked you to,” I tell him.

“For years I thought I could have dissuaded her that first day when she was still such a young girl and so newly arrived. Now I'm sure I couldn't have.”

“Everything was already written.” Todos los Santos exhales smoke from her Cigalia. “Eager creatures like her bargain with the future and shape it to their fancy.”

Weaving among the crowd, dodging tables and chairs, Sacramento the cart man pulled his old wooden wagon through the smell of oil reheated a hundred times emanating from stands crowded along the
malecón
that were selling greasy, delicious catfish stew and fried fish. The girl weighed so little that in an instant they were passing the main entrance to the Tropical Oil Company's facilities, where several guards armed with rifles were busy feeding their pet iguana.

“What does it eat?” asked Sacramento as he walked by.

“Flies,” answered one of the men, without lifting his head to look.

Floating among cloying organic vapors, Sacramento took a shortcut through the municipal slaughter yard.

“Get me out of here quick; I don't like this smell of guts,” protested the girl.

“Do you think I am your horse that you can just guide anywhere you want?”

“Get up, horse!” she said, laughing.

Then they crossed diagonally across the Plaza del Descabezado, so named because enthroned in its center was the decapitated statue of some important person whose identity was long forgotten by the townspeople, and that had turned green from stray dogs urinating on it each time they passed.

“Why doesn't he have a head?” she wanted to know.

“It was knocked off years ago, during a labor strike.”

“The man's, or the statue's?”

“Who knows?”

They crossed themselves as they passed the church of Santo Ecce Homo and ended up on Calle de la Campana, better known as Calle Caliente, then Sacramento announced, with chauvinistic pride, their arrival in La Catunga.

“The most prestigious
zona de tolerancia
on the planet,” he said.

The girl climbed out of the cart, straightened her poplin dress, which was wrinkled like wrapping paper, and raised her nose into the air, trying to sniff the winds that the future had reserved for her.

“This is it?” she asked, although she already knew.

In the vertical heat of midday, winding through the dust, a neighborhood lined by dirt alleyways made narrower on each side by blossoming scarlet
cayenos
and irregular dwellings made of packed dirt topped with tin roofs, each one with a door open to the street, revealing a minimal interior without mystery or secret and featuring an armoire, a slowly turning fan, a pitcher and washbasin, and a tidily made bed. Outside were mingled stray animals, little boys who wanted to be
petroleros
when they grew up, little girls who dreamed of becoming teachers, women in slippers shouting to one another as they swept their doorways or sat in rocking chairs in the shade, fanning themselves with the lid of a pot.

A poor barrio, like any other. Except for the colored lightbulbs, now extinguished and invisible, that hung from the facades as the only sign of the difference, the great, unfathomable difference. As soon as the girl tried to take a step forward, the brutal current that struck violently at her legs made her realize, once and for all, that La Catunga was enclosed within an imaginary cordon that burned like the lash of a whip.

“Once inside you will never leave,” she heard Sacramento's voice warning, and for an instant her resolved heart knew doubt.

“Where is the Dancing Miramar?” she asked in glassy syllables that tried to hide her twinges of panic.

“At the end of that passageway, against the Troco's fence.”

“Take me to the Dancing Miramar.”

“I can't, the cart won't fit in there. Besides, it's too early; no café opens until five in the afternoon.”

“Then I'll wait at the door,” she said, once again in conformity with the design of her destiny. She picked up the suitcase and the two cardboard boxes with excessive energy for the fragile twig that was her body and began walking, without paying or thanking the cart man, toward that territory marked with red steel, where it was fitting that everything outside was execrable, where life revealed itself in reverse and love fought against God's mandates.

“It's nice to say thank you!” shouted Sacramento.

“You're welcome,” she answered, brusquely turning her head back to reveal her face for the first time, and Sacramento felt the dark and ancient gaze of Asiatic eyes fall upon him. The boldness with which her eyebrows had been plucked until they disappeared and were replaced by a pencil line, and one or another scar left by the acne on her cheeks, made him think that she might not be as young as she had first seemed. One of the girl's cardboard boxes fell to the ground and she started kicking it up the street as Sacramento, sitting on his cart, watched her and wondered what that skinny, ill-mannered girl had that would make a man like him, who already had his
cédula
of citizenship, work for free and then stand rooted there, admiring the decisiveness and aplomb with which she kicked the box, as if the world were tiny compared to the force of her will.

“Wait,
niña
!” he shouted. “If you're going to stay here you're going to need a
madrina
. A veteran of the trade to teach and protect you.”

“I don't know any.”

“Well, I do. Come,” he said, springing to his feet. “I'm going to take you to a friend of mine. If you don't work out as a
puta,
maybe she'll keep you to help with the pigs and other chores.”

Sacramento's friend was none other than this matron, Todos los Santos, who is now drinking her
mistela
with birdlike sips, sucking on her cigar like a Jewish man from Miami Beach, and delving into the past to reveal to me the particulars of a love story that is both bitter and luminous, like all love stories. The old woman tries to study me, but her eyes reflect the smoke from her Cigalia, clouding her gaze and condensing it into a milky opaqueness, and I now realize that Todos los Santos has cataracts and can't see me. She knows by heart the corner of the world that shelters her and she moves about it as if she can see, which makes me the only thing around her that she doesn't know by sight. So I move closer to her, speak right into her ear; she raises her hand, knotted with arthritis, and feels my face with the soft pats of an old dove that can no longer fly.

“Ah, sí. Muy bien, muy bien,”
she approves, satisfied at making certain that my nose isn't missing and that I only have two eyes.

“Mira, madre,”
says Sacramento, “the sun is setting.”

“Yes, I see it, I see it!” she says enthusiastically and plunges her white eyes into the rosy air.

“The sky is turning red with specks of gold,” he tells her.

“With specks of gold, you say? How pretty, how pretty! And as impressive and red as it is today, I'll bet there's a broad violet edge.”

“Well, yes, more or less. If you really look at it, you can see a little violet.”

“I knew it! And are there any birds flying across?”

“Four, five, six, seven . . . seven ducks flying north to south.”

“Ay!” she sighs. “How I love the sunset.”

I have been told that Todos los Santos was conceived by a cook and a landowner from Antioquia one Palm Sunday while the wife and children were waving dry palm leaves in solemn mass. Because of her beauty and the European whiteness of the skin she inherited from her father, she became a prostitute, following the path drawn from the instant of her conception.

“There was no place for me either in my father's house or in Medellín society. Bastard male children became peons on the haciendas and that took care of the problem,” she tells me. “But with females it was more complicated. There were illegitimate daughters of landowners, like me, and then others that were called daughters of a slip who were the product of a well-bred girl's sin. The daughters of a slip had it worse, hidden in the cupboards of the big house or behind curtains, while we illegitimate girls grew up loose in the countryside, like little animals. When we were able to use our brains, some of us were buried alive with the cloistered nuns until adolescence, when a few accepted the habit and the rest did what I did, escaped the convent and landed in a bordello.”

Clandestine paths, sometimes sweet and sometimes bitter, took her from love to love and from street to street until she reached the heavily brothel-ridden city of Tora, where she was so admired and desired in her youth and maturity that she was able to know, for moments, material well-being and even the glitter of fame and fortune. Without a hint of avarice, her beauty burned with a sublime, cunning fire, and guided by a scrupulous sense of pride and decorum, the moment she saw the first ugly signs of old age she moved into a period of discretionary retirement, which she didn't hesitate to interrupt, from time to time, each time her soul demanded satisfaction and her insides, heat. She was feared and recognized as a pioneer and founder of the barrio of La Catunga: the defender of the girls' rights against the Troco, the Tropical Oil Company, and its deputy, the Colombian government; the efficient
celestina,
the instructor of young novices; now close to blindness, to her centenary, and to the most impeccable poverty, she has been elevated to the category of sage and holy mother.