The Dark Bride (32 page)

“That depends on the color of his skin,” adds Olguita. “The whitest ones, the ones with more European blood, are the ones who smell the worst.”

“Cover me with your skin,” Sayonara asked Payanés, and he spread over her and clothed her and made himself more hers than her own skin, and he blanketed her with his chest, that foreign chest, which in a simple, miraculous instant made itself so familiar. And so comforting. A chest like a roof that shields and protects, and there, outside, let the world end, let it rain sparks and let God do whatever he chooses.

Olguita, the hopeless romantic, tells me tales and I don't know whether they're true or imaginary. She tells me, for example, that Payanés slept holding Sayonara with the yearning of an orphan that she knew how to calm for a while, and that his sleep lasted only the second it would take for him to relive that memory the following day, the same, eternal second that it would take for his eyelids to close and then to open again.

“Is this how long a stranger's love lasts?” Sayonara asked, watching him leave. “Is there a love more intense and aloof? Is there another possible form of love?”

“A lot of poetry, a lot of poetry,” groans Todos los Santos as she reads this. “I don't see anyone around here who is willing to tell the hard truth, which is that skin that is too familiar is no great gift, first because it starts turning gray and then little by little moves toward invisibility, old and worn like a shawl that is used every day, until finally, now intimately known, it becomes as unfamiliar as the leather in your next-door neighbor's shoes: just skin, any old skin. But you all don't listen to me and you keep on weaving your own versions, so it just doesn't seem like anyone around here is interested in the truth.”

CRIMINAL HANDS BURN LA COPA ROTA
was the headline that appeared one day, after the forced departure of don Enrique, among the items in the
Vanguardia Petrolera
, which circulated daily in Tora. It was never proved who did it, but according to reports the fire happened at seven o'clock one morning in August when there were no clients in the place. Awakened by asphyxiating smoke, Fideo jumped out of bed and ran, tripping over people because several women were sleeping on the floor, and seconds later they were all seen fleeing as the expelling archangel saw Eve, naked and barefoot and shouting obscenities. They managed to safely escape the scorching flames, and a while later, although more choked by the smoke, so did the owner of the establishment, the bar boy, and the cat. But the hut, whose straw roof had caught fire first, was engulfed by the dry summer wind that whipped up the flames and reduced it to a pile of ashes, with a half drum enthroned in the center: the one that had served as the toilet, and the only object spared for memories.

You might be thinking that this is the third or fourth time that fire has crept into this story to reduce reality to nothing. It doesn't seem accidental to me. As a Colombian, I know that I am delineating a world in perpetual combustion, always on the verge of definitive collapse, a world that despite everything manages, only God knows how, to hang on with fingernails and teeth, blazing in its final, reckless flashes as if there were no tomorrow, and yet another dawn soon fills the sky and here below the delirium gains new energy, scatological, impossible, and the new day travels along a thread of anguish toward a too predictable end, announced by the din of men and women banging on their empty pots with spoons.

And yet at midnight, against all odds, our peculiar apocalypse is once again postponed. Maybe because of that we are so dead, and at the same time so alive: because each sunset annihilates us, and the dawn redeems us.

“Where did Fideo end up, since after the fire there was no place for her?”

“Everything that goes up comes back down again,” Todos los Santos tells me, “and sometimes, very seldom, but it has happened, what goes down comes back up.”

Many of the regular clients of the Dancing Miramar and the other prestigious clubs, especially the younger ones, had allowed themselves to be attracted by the temptation of coarse love and had begun to frequent La Copa Rota, where they gathered to watch Fideo shining in her sickly light, embodying the hoarsest voice of the underground, the lowest of the lowly depths, humanity stripped of its skin, split open and displayed for sale, like meat on a carcass.

The barbaric separation from don Enrique broke the soul she didn't have, and if she was a wild beast before, afterward she became a cruel wild beast who, when she couldn't bite others, chewed and destroyed her own paws. To see her expose herself, naked, talking filth and biting flesh, made men horny and ignited their virility, so they riled her up and gave her alcohol, gave her alcohol and riled her up, and she went along with it because she could no longer find herself except in the open wound where her heart had been.

“Ay, don Enrique!” sighed Fideo from her invalid's hammock.

The more turbulent the aura surrounding her, the stronger the aroma she expelled, and the deeper she fell, the higher her prestige grew. Until Negra Florecida, owner of the Dancing Miramar, resenting the loss of regular clients and eager to regain them, decided to give them a little of the medicine they were asking for, and she took advantage of the fire at La Copa Rota to offer Fideo work at her establishment. Even today it is rumored in Tora that behind that misfortune was a match struck by order of Negra Florecida herself.

That is how they came to compete for men's love in the same arena, Sayonara and Fideo, angel and demon, life and death and a whole list of dichotomies, and the once harmonious world seemed to split in half, or at least it felt in people's hearts.

Fanaticism sprang up, uncompromising, between
sayonaros
—nostalgic for old times—and
fideístas
, revelers who lived for the moment. And although the two women had an identical smell, which was merely human, they said Sayonara smelled of incense, and she was venerated for her air of child
puta
, unattainable and sheltered in her way of being there without being, for remaining unsullied by the many hands that had touched her, while they said that Fideo smelled of musk and they sought her out because she was just a plain whore, committed to the profession without offering resistance, without holding back, baring her insides in public and not keeping a single gesture or secret or memory for herself. Well, perhaps a memory, just one, but a delicate and kind one: Ay, don Enrique!

I try to communicate to Todos los Santos what I have been deciphering and she laughs.

“Don't get me tangled up in words,” she insists. “The difference is that with Sayonara you had to love her, and that with Fideo you only had to pay her. That's it.”

“Fine, you in your way and I in mine, we both think the same,” I defend myself this time. “And now tell me, did each resent the presence of the other? Was it hard for Sayonara to suddenly find herself with competition and to see her hegemony at risk?”

“How should I put it? They were both too lost in their own worlds to worry about the other.”

They worked under the same roof, but they belonged to worlds that never touched, each one playing for all she was worth to maintain supremacy over her own, but with no awareness of the size of what was in play. Also, in their roles as infallible lovers—and both were, each in her own way—they demonstrated their inability to feel jealousy, because neither recognized the existence of a rival; what's more, for them a rival couldn't exist because both knew that, in terms of her own pleasure or loss, they had already won, forever, the bloody poker game that was their peculiar way of understanding love.

There is a piece of information that, while literary, seems like it could be verified with a historical or sociological examination of that period: the beginning of Fideo's tenure at the Dancing Miramar, since it coincided with two more measurable and less allegorical worldly events—the outcome of the rice strike and the spread of syphilis to epidemic levels—and marked what could be called the end of innocence for La Catunga. And the loss of innocence brought with it the pain of seeing the familiar become strange and opened the door to loneliness, which translated into the skin of strangers seeming unfamiliar and covered with thorns. And it wrought misery, which came when people aspired for more, disdaining the dignity of poverty.

Fideo's entry at the Dancing Miramar was the symbolic event that marked the beginning of the dissolution of La Catunga as it had been known until then: a simple port, open without suspicion to the winds of crazy love, the transparent surface of a lake before it is stirred up by the wind.

At night all cats are brown, and that night all men were cats. With feline and furtive steps they traversed the extreme tension of the 26, all around them a night hermetic and strangely devoid of noise for the first time in seven years—the quiet, heavy machines like enormous animals dreaming in the mist—because the rebels had extinguished the power plant and blocked the valves in and out. With technology forcibly silenced, the human voice took possession of the camp, newborn and still testing its own strength in the form of anonymous shouting that at times ebbed and at times surged, and it was also possible to hear tremulous breathing and other slight noises produced by figures who were crouched in anticipation of something, who were moving toward somewhere, who were protecting themselves behind barricades of oil drums.

“Despite my nervousness I was thinking about her,” Sacramento tells me, “and by saying that I'm not telling you anything new, because I have never been able to think about anything else. I cursed myself for not having sent her postcards again, since she enjoyed receiving them so much, but at the same time I forgave myself by reflecting that I hadn't done it, not because I had forgotten or out of laziness, but because of my confusion about words; since I had confirmed what I suspected, that the girl and Sayonara were one and the same, I lost the sense of how I should write to her, especially in the ticklish area of how to address her: Adored fiancée? Señorita? Dear girl? My beloved? I got all tangled up in those meditations on grammar while the revolt in the camp was growing, and vigorously. Payanés, the gringo
míster
Brasco, and I went to find Emilia. I lit the way with a company-issued lantern in my hand, holding it far out from my body so it wouldn't reveal too much in case someone decided to shoot at me. The other two men thought it would be prudent to put out the lantern because mistrust and confusion were alive and palpable in the darkness. I didn't want to extinguish it because its greenish light calmed me, but they convinced me, so we continued on in the dark, sniffing our way uncertainly, until we found our tower.”

“At first, spokesmen from management harangued over the loudspeakers, threatening reprisals against the striking workers and attacks from the troops,” I am told in a bar in Tora by don Honorio Laguna, an old welder who was also present the night preceding the strike. “But then somebody smashed the speakers and we didn't hear anything else from the enemy, nor did we know the color that things were starting to take. We began to see groups organizing with tools and iron bars urging the seizure of flash points like the pumping stations, the warehouses, and the UCD plant. And there were others who were saying we should rig the machines, by which they meant remove some vital piece so they would explode when the scabs tried to start them up again. Or that we should cap the pipes, and some even proposed attacks against the golf club with all those foreigners inside.”

“I had wild ideas that night,” Sacramento tells me, “and I let myself get carried away by the suggestion that we should arm ourselves so we could crush the skull of anyone who crossed our path. Because we were sure that under such crazy circumstances there was no Lino el Titi to step forward, or anyone else with authority to give us better orders.”

“It's well known that Sacramento had lost heart that night, having decided to join the participants of the last judgment. What I mean,” says Machuca, “is that he was already anticipating the personal catastrophe that was about to befall him. He must have sensed that the world was going to end for him, so it would be that much better if it just ended for everyone.”

But he couldn't make any headway down the road to annihilation because Payanés was obstinate and had a different plan in mind. He kept on repeating that they shouldn't join the mob who were fucked anyway, that they weren't going to destroy the machines that were their only guarantee of sustenance; instead they were going to defend skinny Emilia from anyone who tried to damage her.

“He talked about that tower as if rather than a framework of steel it were a woman, exposed and solitary, in the midst of all that vandalism,” says Sacramento, “and I was bothered by his way of referring to something as if it had a soul.”

“Look at her,” exhorted Payanés, “my Emilia, tame and quiet beneath the stars, and more loving than ever.”

“I wanted to check, so I turned to look at the stars,” says Sacramento, “but the sky must have been stormy, because I could only make out five or six, nothing in comparison to what the nights of a
petrolero
are like, dotted with stars, as the song goes. So I told Payanés not to exaggerate, that it wasn't the time for it.”

“Sacramento and Payanés spent the night perched like monkeys in the tower, airing, through questions and accusations, the rivalry that had unsettled them and to which both of them avoided direct reference in order to mask the real issue,” says Machuca. “Every now and then they would throw stones down below against suspected threats, but they did so blindly in the pitch dark and without really intending to hit anyone. With them was Frank Brasco and later they were joined by old Pajabrava, who also climbed up to ensconce himself in the tower.”