“What's the matter with you,
señoritinga
-who-steps-so-delicately? Are you repulsed by your sister's vomit?” Todos los Santos fumed. “Give me the rag, I'll clean it up.”
“I'm not repulsed,
madrina
,” Sayonara answered without batting an eye and handing over the rag, “it's just that I'm noticing a strange thing. Have you noticed that whenever someone vomits, they vomit carrots? Just like this, chopped into little pieces, even though they haven't been eating them . . .”
“Your sister is dying on us and you sit there philosophizing,” barked Todos los Santos.
Susana's illness turned out not to be cholera but a bout of food poisoning due to overly sterile conditions and a lack of street germs, and today, so many years after the danger has passed, Todos los Santos laughs as she describes to me Sayonara's impertinence.
“But I assure you at that moment we were not amused,” she clarifies. “We almost killed her for going around, like she always did, contemplating her navel while the rest of us were breaking our backs to keep the world from crashing down on top of us.”
Did some secret call pierce her armor to resonate within young Sayonara? Did she demonstrate attachment to anything? An object, a photograph, anything, maybe a stuffed animal?
“With gifts Sayonara was like a little child,” Todos los Santos tells me, “before they were even unwrapped she had already forgotten about them. She never demanded anything for herself, not even her share of the money she earned. She gave it to me without counting it and I distributed it in this manner: a quarter for household urgencies, another quarter for basic needs, a little for our enjoyment, and the rest I would deposit in a savings account in her name. When I asked her to look, even just out of curiosity, at how much she had put away, foreseeing the day she might have to touch that money, she would reply yawning: Ay,
madrina,
don't talk to me about numbers, they get all mixed up in my head and give me a headache.”
She never gave up her somnambulant passion for going out at night in her sleeping gown to contemplate the immensity of the sky.
“I don't know how many times she made me expose myself to the cool night air to repeat the story of the music of the spheres,” sighs Todos los Santos. “She had learned it by heart exactly as I had told it to her the first time, and if I changed a detail she would call my attention to it immediately and make me start all over again from the beginning, until I had recited it perfectly.”
I also inquire about Sayonara's fascination with poetry. I want to know if it perhaps opened some route to her most intimate thoughts.
“When she was little she led me to believe that she would be a devoted reader,” confesses Machuca, “and I had the hope of finding in her a great companion in the love of literature. But it didn't turn out that way. And not because she didn't read, the problem was that she always wanted to read the same things. That's wrong, read: She was always asking to be read to, because what she really loved was to listen. But as I told you, always the same, like a scratched record. She would come and ask me to tell her, over and over, the stories of Ophelia's drowning, the guillotining of Marie Antoinette, Joan of Arc burning at the stake, the shooting of Policarpa Salavarrieta. Always suffering heroines with tragic endings. She never tired of that. But, oh, when I would try to convince her to let me tell her about something new! Or if I invited her to read Shakespeare on her own, or Tirso de Molina or any of a number of sublime authors out there, forgotten by young people today. She only wanted to hear the same stories, over and over again.”
There were two dates that were awaited by Sayonara with joy and anxiety. The first was Tuesday, the day the mail arrived at the post office, when she would go to claim her postcards from Sacramento without fail, even during the periods when they didn't arrive with any regularity. The second, the last Friday of every month.
“The very day she made the promise to Payanés,” Olguita tells me, with as much fervor as if she were telling her own story, “Sayonara hung on her door an illustrated calendar with galloping horses, a gift from the foundry Mora Hermanos, on which she circled the last Friday of each month. And that is saying a lot when you take into account that she never wore a watch nor had any interest in whether it was Monday, Thursday, or Saturday, and I don't think she ever even learned the names of the months of the year in order. There are people who are aware of every second, but Sayonara wasn't one of them.”
She seemed constantly shaken by an internal agitation, as if squeezed into a pair of pajamas made of nettles and spurred on by some rush to get who knows where. But at the same time she showed an appalling disdain for the time of day. For her, days undulated eternally and without urgenciesâat least concrete, exterior urgenciesâand she was always surprised when darkness fell, as if she hadn't been expecting it.
“What? It's already night?” she would ask, and she would protest when Todos los Santos would wake her in the morning. “What is it,
madrina
? Is it morning already?”
She would stuff herself with candy at odd hours and then not eat a bite of lunch. She would go shouting into the street when the whole barrio was taking a siesta and would fall asleep in the middle of parties. She wouldn't accept dates or commitments with precise schedules, and if she accepted them she wouldn't honor them. She was like the fishermen on the river, Olguita tells me, who lie in the shade to wait for the rising tide to fill their nets with fish. Sayonara was waiting too, standing at the edge of life. But what was it that she awaited so anxiously? Great advents, I suspect, but I can't be sure, perhaps because for her too they were never manifested as anything precise.
It is only clear to me that her waiting was not patient, not placid or resigned, and if she didn't know tomorrow's date, it was because what she yearned for wasn't coming tomorrow or the day after or even next week, but it forced her to wait, to allow time to pass and the wind to blow. Meanwhile, she was inwardly tense and anxious, and the fact that her desires had no name of their own, far from mitigating them, made them overwhelming. What was inside the impenetrable mind of that child, pushed by the world into an adult existence? For long periods there were lagoons of water so still they seemed frozen, and every now and then intense high tides appeared that didn't correspond with the vagueness of the moons unleashing them.
I think I can imagine Sayonara well as a young girl, when she arrived in La Catunga, bony and with scraggly hair like a hungry cat already determined to become a
puta
. I find decipherable the adolescent who discovers her own beauty in the mirror and starts to make use of the fascination she exercises over others. I am not surprised by the girl who has burning eyes because she saw her mother burn. I know about the strength of her character when it was put to the test; about her cleverness in measuring strengths, diving in at first to pull back later; about her incendiary irreverence. However, I must admit that I am perplexed by the young woman who emerges later; though more admired, she is more self-absorbed, allowing herself to be looked at without seeing anyone, as available to men as she is oblivious to them, and holding herself in the circular path of her own time frame, without building solid bridges to the world around her. Was she preparing herself, perhaps, and storing energies?
Every now and then I ask myself to what degree Sayonara's spirit and sensibility weren't blinded by her crushing past. How could she cry for her brother without bleeding to death? How could she remember her mother without turning to ash? How could she love without rekindling the horror? There are sights that can destroy you, and the worst death is rarely your own. In this country marked by violence, we have learned that one of two things can happen to a child who witnesses the atrocious death of family members: Either he is carbonized or he becomes illuminated. If he is carbonized he is reduced to half a person, but if he is illuminated he can become a person and a half. In Sayonara, the approximation of one of those two opposing destinies was beginning to present itself, but it still wasn't clear which.
“We've already told you about
mÃster
Brasco, remember? He was a friend of ours who was fond of Sayonara and liked to talk to her about snow and the cold storms of his land, because he was a foreigner from far away. We called him Tell-me-why because of his habit of going around asking things, and we also called him the Hanged Man, because of what happened to him during the rice strike.”
A very tall blond man with white skin, long as a gust of wind and uncommonly thin.
MÃster
Frank Brasco knew what it was like to have a thick rope around his neck, everything in him bracing for death, counting the minutes and confused by the possibility, unforeseeable a year earlier, of ending his days hanged in a country that he wouldn't have even been able to locate with any precision on a map. And all because the men of Camp 26 got bored with having to swallow their pride crammed up in nasty balls of cold rice.
“What's going on?” Payanés tried to raise his voice over the shouting as he entered the dining hall, beginning to feel carried along by the wave of a collective anxiousness that he had been unaware of until now. “Who can tell me what's going on?” he insisted, in the middle of the melee of rice balls whizzing overhead to end up splattered on the wall.
If he had been more experienced, he might have guessed that the redoubled blood flow, the ants' nest of expectations vibrating in the air, and the sparkle in the men's eyes were the announcement of the arrival of the great rebellion, which returned cyclically to involve Tora in its fury, like summer in other hemispheres.
“What's going on?” asked Sacramento in his quieter, convalescent tone.
“We're fed up with this shitty food,” responded a man who was actively involved in the fray.
“But why today and not before, if we eat the same thing every day?”
“These gringos think they're smart,” came the answer. “Again today, lunch is just brown sugar in hot water and rice balls. It's not even fit for prisoners,
hermano,
they have no right.”
“At least in here we get rice balls. Out there they don't even have that . . . ,” said Sacramento.
His words came from a world that was before the loss of candor, but that wasn't how they sounded. Just the opposite, they provoked ire and mistrust and the other men yelled at Sacramento, calling him a scab, a sellout, and a strikebreaker, and in the midst of the tumult they might have broken his skull if old Lino el Titi Vélez hadn't stepped in. Lino el Titi was a leader of earlier strikes who still wore the crown of his faded union glory.
“I will vouch for this boy. His words are innocent and do not come from ill will,” said Lino el Titi vehemently, whose love and extracurricular life had transpired entirely among the bars and beds of La Catunga, and so he had known Sacramento from the days when he was a baby with no one to change his diapers and had to teach himself how to walk, grabbing hold of the brickwork on a corner of Calle Caliente.
“You're content with very little,” he said to Sacramento when the others had moved away. “Even the dogs won't eat these rice balls. The other day I gave one to a hungry stray that sniffed it and turned up his nose at it. What do you think they eat in the manager's dining hall? They give the gringos eggs and milk, and fruits and vegetables, hot, healthy food that you could really use, boy, because this jungle is sucking up your soul.”
“Well, it's true that the balls are pretty damn bad,” acknowledged Sacramento. “But what if the gringos get mad and decide not to toss us even the balls?”
“They can't starve us to death because they need us to work,” Lino el Titi told him, before disappearing into the din of the minuscule battle.
Payanés, who had heard the dialogue, grabbed a ball of rice in his right hand. He did it just to participate in the fun, just because, with the shyness and remorse of a child who has stolen an apple. But he was immediately overcome with a powerful urge to throw it with all his might, he, a responsible and peaceful man, unassuming and well intentioned toward authority, who until now had felt only gratitude for the opportunity to work given him by those foreign bosses who smiled down from their photographs and decided his fate from their pool with blue reflections in their walled neighborhood. If before he felt only gratitude and submission, suddenly today, with that ball of rice in his hand and sensing the pulsing indignation of the others, he found more than enough reason to fuel his own. For the first time, he realized that the world, kind perhaps for others, had reserved a hostile face for him, and he decided that he wanted things to be different, he, Payanés, who knew how to block out suffering with such valor, or, depending on how you looked at it, with such cowardice. He, who looked down upon the complainers, who didn't know discontent, who disdained pain to such a degree that he was incapable of detecting it even when it was inflicted upon him, who didn't allow himself to dream except when he was asleep. Today, he suddenly allowed himself to be swept along by the furor and began to resent deep in his bones the chronic dampness of his hammock on those suffocating jungle nights, nights so short they afforded no rest. And he detested the loneliness of his endless days among so many men who, despite the crowded conditions, couldn't keep one another company. He felt a tiredness that he had never allowed himself to feel before, and for the first time since he had left his distant city of Popayán, he allowed himself the luxury of longing for those people that he hadn't seen since.
“Well, yes, damn it. I'm fed up too,” he admitted. All of a sudden he felt like demanding repayment from life for all the hardships and pettiness he'd had to endure, and throwing in the face of the Tropical Oil Company all the aches that the excessive work had burned into his muscles, driven until they cramped, and the deafening noise of the machines that cluttered his skull and dried out his thoughts, and the galley slave routine that he had so good-naturedly accepted, and above all the black weight of that sky that surrounded him every night far from the embrace of that girl who wouldn't tell him her name but who made him a promise at the river, and he hated the fat men reeking of alcohol who were at that very moment kissing her on the neck, and he also hated, with a rebellious poison, those foreign bosses he had never even seen, and he blamed them for the heavy absence he felt and for the unsatisfied waiting he had to endure as he paid thirty days of forced labor for the dream of a single encounter of love. Then he tightened his hand on the ball of rice and threw it against the photograph on the wall with the fury of someone taking a step toward the galvanized lands of risk, knowing that there is no turning back.