“Maybe because being in this snow is enough like not being anywhere,” he says to me. “In the Colombian green I found passion and the difficulty of living, while the winter white of Vermont offers me the benefits of rest. It covers me like a sheet and lets me remember in peace.”
After the strike, Tora, as short on water and choked with the stench of open sewage ditches as always, remained submerged in the nostalgia of what it could have been but wasn't. Drowned in the painful immobility of its failure and the renewed proof of its impotence, the city saw itself additionally divided into two jealous and resentful halves: the families and friends of the striking workers who remained faithful to the bitter end on one side, and on the other, people aligned with those who wavered and allowed themselves to be tempted by the company's lures, offers, and enticements. The workers who weren't fired, among them Sacramento and Payanés, returned to work under conditions that were equal to or worse than before. Those who had fallen were honored with speeches and floral offerings. Three-fourths of those arrested and detained at the baseball field were freed and the other fourth were tried by a war tribunal and condemned to long sentences at the island prison of Gorgona.
After escaping from Adela Lightfoot's house on the day it was invaded, Sayonara took refuge among a group of women who were scrubbing clothes at the public washing facility and so managed to go unnoticed, but she lost track of Payanés. When she returned to Todos los Santos's house, she received the information that he too was safe, and after another week she learned that he had returned to work at Camp 26.
“I'll wait for him here, then,” they say she announced, and she prepared to allow time to run its course and to temper the agony of uncertainty. “I'm sure my days of joy are behind me,” she said. “Will remembering hurt less each day, or more?”
Until finally, after a stretch of anonymous Mondays and the dissipation of lost Thursdays, as if born out of the intensity of the waiting, the last Friday of the month arrived in La Catunga and Sayonara was aware of it, even before waking, in the smiling wind that entered her window dragging along chirps and small shivers, as if it blew from a country of birds. She took refuge in the light cave of her sheets to dream about the man who had promised to return, and she drew him toward her with the obstinacy of her thoughts and the pulsating of her feminine parts, stretching the minutes of her awakening to allow the tickle that had begun to stir her eyelids to descend along her neck and bubble across her breasts, small and tight like a nut when they were exposed, but now, with the nearness of her beloved, spongy and welcoming and replete with promise.
Now fully awake, she confirmed contentedly that in the deepest recesses of her being, in the middle of the curve of her hip, there where so many men had foraged without leaving a trace, an untouched space grew warm and damp, anxious to receive, seeking a tenant like a magnet drawing metal.
She rose without anyone having to beg her, contrary to her custom of lounging in bed until the fifth or sixth time her
madrina
called her to breakfast. And she had already crossed the patio, scattering the chickens, and had bathed using gourds filled with clear water from the cistern when she heard the first shout, “The chocolate is ready!” that on any other day would have found her lost in the mists of morning slumber.
“Sayonara! Your breakfast is getting cold!”
“No, thank you,
madrina,
not today.”
“Come! The
arepas
are burning . . .”
“Forget the
arepas, madrina,
not today.”
“Did you feed the canaries?”
“I'm coming.”
“Didn't I ask you to pour boiling water on the latrine? It reeks and it's clogged.”
“I'm coming,
madrina,
” she said, but she didn't move. She kept brushing her long hair with slow strokes, letting the brush sleep in her hand and her mind soar with the memory of the joy that was to come, while she went about, without really noticing, the impossible task of matching the different rhythms of her own being.
“There are mysteries in this life,” I hear Todos los Santos reflect, “so remote that the human mind can't even begin to touch them. One of them is the magic of electricity, another is the composition of a rainbow, and another, more impenetrable still, is the Immaculate Conception. But none is as astounding as happiness. You,” she points at me, “you who have studied at a university, do me the favor of explaining that human vice of placing your entire joy in the hands of someone else. That's what my girl Sayonara did with that
petrolero
who they called Payanés and about whom we knew so little. She gazed at him as if she were under a spell and clung to his love like a baby to his mother's breast or a shipwreck victim to the plank that saved him, as if she really needed him to survive, and without thinking or consulting she gave him the blossoming branch of her hope. My girl who had everything, who never lacked a mother's care, or the attentions of men who loved her, or physical beauty, or health, or food on the table, nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Why did she have to go looking for what she had never lost? Who can explain that mystery to me? Maybe you, who, as you say, studied at a university?”
“I must be lovesick, because my body hurts from wanting him so much. If I don't touch him, I'm going to die,” Sayonara confessed that morning to Olguita, saying it just like that, because the rare alchemy that makes your happiness rest in the hands of someone else was operating in her with an irrevocable simplicity.
Around three, Todos los Santos came upon her adopted daughter cleaning her teeth with ashes, as she herself had taught her. Then she watched her squeeze some clothing and other objects into some boxes and put on the puffy yellow organza dress, braid her hair with silk ribbons, and dress up her sisters too. Ana in chrysanthemum pink, Susana in sky blue, Juana in celery green, and little Chuza in immaculate lily white. During the remainder of the afternoon Todos los Santos watched as Sayonara soared along on the breeze of her anxiety, looking at everything with the already absent eyes of someone who is not going to come back and scurrying all over the house as she moved various articles, without rhyme or reason, from here to there and from there to here. Todos los Santos didn't ask any questions when she saw Sayonara drag a heavy clay pot from one end of the hallway to the other, nor when she decided to rescue a Chinese folding screen from a trash heap, not even when she freed the Nativity shepherds, forgotten since December, from their wrapping to place them, offhandedly, on a shelf with the other porcelain objects.
“Christmas is over, to hell with the shepherds!” exclaimed an annoyed Todos los Santos, returning them to their box. “You'd better not get used to chewing anxiety,” she advised her adopted daughter, “which is a stubborn vice, like that of horses who chomp on air in the stable and then don't want to eat anything else. You're as skinny as you are because you feed on sheer nerves.”
“My God, girl, what are you doing?” asked Olguita, upon seeing Sayonara in such a crazy state.
“I don't know if he'll come for me, Aunt Olga. Maybe he doesn't remember . . .” was how she responded, and she kept on with her endless running about, sheer purposelessness that calmed her anxiety and mitigated the back and forth of an uncertainty that said yes when coming and no when going. Is he aware of the date? Will he be able to come? Will he want to? And the inclement seesawing in her chest, pounding her ribs, coming and going and saying yes, no, yes.
“Sayonara! There is a client at the door and he wants to know if you . . .”
“Not today,
madrina,
tell him I can't today.”
“But it is don Anselmo . . .”
“I can't.”
“Not Anselmo Navas, not him. It's the generous don Anselmo Fuentes!”
“Tell him tomorrow.”
“He says it has to be today, because tomorrow he's leaving for Valledupar . . .”
“Well, then tell him to have a nice trip, and that as far as I'm concerned he might as well leave today,” and the whole time she was caught up in that useless motion, unable to control the trembling in her hands that prevented her from getting a grasp on reality.
“I already told you,
madrina,
I'm not available for anyone today. Another day, with pleasure. Not today.”
She mopped the patio tiles, then swept the kitchen and once again mopped the already clean patio, her energies fixed on erasing the day once and for all, on throwing out the hours that stretched out before her like dead cows and which separated her from the only thing that interested her and gave her a reason for existing: the awaited, definitive hour, the hour of their reunion.
Will he come? Will he not come? No one saw Sayonara approach the river's edge, only herons sweeping through the air without disturbing it. The water breathed tamely like an animal in a stable and in the sky the afternoon died a natural death, without bloody reds or sudden bursts of orange, only a luminous mauve that faded into a series of increasingly tired grays. No one was coming.
Unaware of their oldest sister's anguish, the other girls entertained themselves by striking palm fronds to the cadence of a children's rhyme: I looked for paper and pencil,
tibi-dÃ,
to write a letter to the wolf,
tobo-dó,
and the wolf answered me,
tibi-dÃ,
with a howl of love; first Juana with Ana and Susana with Chuza, then they changed partners, in an amusing synchronization of hands, arms, and voices.
That man approaching step by step, his silhouette dressed in white, could it be him? Or not? It was.
But it wasn't his customary gaze, it was as if he had been expecting to embrace a solitary woman and not crash into that image that unfurled into five, she and her sisters, she and her quadruple reflection, from oldest to youngest, and, as if that weren't enough, with luggage and paraphernalia scattered around the gathered family.
“Where are you moving to?” asked Payanés from a distance, and Sayonara could only respond with a slight gasp that seemed almost like a hiccup, but that had a cataclysmic impact within her, causing a momentary paralysis of the principal organs and a brusque rush of blood to the upper half of her body, leaving the lower half limp as a rag.
“I have waited for you, hour after hour, for thirty days and thirty nights,” Payanés said to her when they found themselves face to face, but more than an affirmation, his words were a reproach.
“And I for you.”
“What about your sisters?” he asked.
“I brought them with me,” she stuttered, stating the obvious.
“But why?” insisted the
petrolero
, who was anticipating the delights of his appointment for love.
Sayonara was stunned by that question she hadn't expected and whose response seemed so clear, so beyond words, that she had no idea how to answer it. Why had she brought them? Why hadn't she come alone, as it should have been, to the only anxiously awaited meeting of her entire life? She, the beautiful whore, the seductress, the favorite disciple, why was she behaving with the dull-wittedness of a novice? She looked at her sisters beside her, as lonely as she herself and equally ignorant of their own loneliness, and her heart shrank at the armadillo-like timidity in those four pairs of eyes that almost didn't dare rest on what they were looking at and that gave up on everything beforehand, because they knew nothing in this world could ever belong to them. And yet they were waiting for something, who knew what, so nice and extraordinary, that the future was about to give them on this unique day.
“I brought them with me because I am myself and my sisters,” she said finally, as if wanting to cry without being able to, as if wanting to avoid weeping but failing.
But Payanés wasn't a man to go around acquiring family responsibilities in the name of love. The last Friday of every month, that's what they had agreed on from the beginning and he was willing to stick with that to the end. But nothing more. Don't ask him for a permanent home or a quiet heart, because he couldn't give them; only an arm for working, another to embrace, and a road in front of him, as they often say in this land of the rootless.
“But didn't you yourself tell me, Todos los Santos,” I ask, “or were they Olguita's suppositions, that Payanés longed for his own house when he entered the patio of your house? Didn't he see in you a mother and in Sayonara's sisters, his own sisters?”
“It's possible. And that in Sayonara he had found the memory of a first love, that too might have been. But for someone like him, it's one thing to carry the weight of longing for a family and something altogether different to carry the weight of a family,” she clarifies. “When they come to Tora, all men are fleeing from commitment and they become enthralled with speculation, which ties them down much less.”
“What's wrong with you?” Sayonara asked her beloved.
“Since we failed in the strike I've been in a devil of a mood, thinking and rethinking about where we went wrong. I can't concentrate on anything else.”
“I thought that tonight you and I could swear our commitment to love each other forever . . . ,” Sayonara ventured, aware that she had never before said anything that so challenged both the risk of pretentiousness and the sense of the ridiculous.
Payanés, who looked at her with blank eyes as if she were speaking German, must have thought that the pompous yellow organza dress the girl was wearing was a most appropriate costume for such a stilted discourse. The words “commitment” and “forever” had meaning for him if they were associated with something eternal, such as the metallic solidity of skinny Emilia, but not with the unprotected candor with which this girl had come to give him her life and to dump her sisters on him as part of the package.