“Well, if it can't be forever, then it will be never,” Sayonara lashed out angrily and capriciously at a silent Payanés, because she didn't know how to accept anyone's disagreement.
“You have to realize that for being a
puta
, Sayonara had strange ideas,” offers Machuca. “And an undesirable temperament, of course, because there aren't many clients willing to put up with fits and demands.”
“That's true,” adds Olga, “for a
puta
, Sayonara was a pain in the neck. Besides, it's not fair to imagine in Payanés a hardheadedness that didn't exist. He is a good man, you have to say that, and he was truly in love. It must also be true that the breaking of the strike had damaged his spirits and weakened his convictions, because the same thing happened to all of us. After that fiasco, even the air was poisoned.”
“Commitments forever are fine for boleros and soap operas,” interrupts Todos los Santos, “but they had no place in La Catunga. My foolish girl liked to go around repeating foreign ideas and fancy phrases she learned from other places. Imagine,” she said, scandalized, “talking about forever in this troubled land where we don't even know what's going to happen in the next few hours . . .”
“Precisely because of that,” says Olga. “Because of that, precisely.”
“Only moth eggs are forever,” adds Fideo, who it seems woke up today in the delirious phase of her illness.
“You should know that in Popayán . . . ,” began Payanés, but Sayonara rushed to interrupt him to talk about something else, anything else that would make noise, because she knew that what he was about to say to her would break her heart.
“In Popayán . . . ,” insisted Payanés, determined to confess but impeded by difficulties, as if each syllable were a huge rock that he had to carry on his shoulder, and Sayonara saw that an unburdening was coming at her from which she wouldn't be able to protect herself, and in that instant of painful revelation, before the words reached her ears, she also understood why Payanés never spoke about his yesterdays, as if he had just floated in on a pink cloud. And she knew then what everyone except she had suspected; what her
madrina
had guessed a long time ago and why she had kept saying: “Don't ask him any questions. Go to see him on Fridays and charge him hard cold cash for your love, but don't get involved with him or ask him any questions. Hope stays alive as long as you don't ask, because answers destroy it.”
“In Popayán I left children, and a wife too. Not the wife I would like to have, but the one I have . . .” Payanés squatted at the river's edge, conflicted and sort of dazed from the exertion of having spoken the truth, and he started throwing flat stones in the water to make them skip across the still surface. The RÃo Magdalena, which had once ignited its waters to receive them, a bonfire that consumed but didn't burn, now passed in front of them tame and bored, an apathetic witness of their fateful encounter, without showing off laundresses, or turtles, or old musicians, or anything like herds of pigs coming down to calm their thirst.
“Sayonara was stunned by the bluntness of the blow,” Olguita tells me, “and she couldn't find a way to digest the bitter cake. And she felt ridiculous in her braids and ribbons, her highbrow words, her doll's dress, and her packed belongings. But of course, since after a while Payanés was still absorbed with his stones and gave no sign of communication, she began to pace around him, trying to move closer but without daring to.”
The fine thread that bound them had been broken and she couldn't find a way to mend it, although she was now willing to forgive in exchange for very little, and if that wasn't possible, then in exchange for next to nothing, anything, just so that he would allow her to approach the clean smell of his white shirt, or lean her head against his big chest, or trail her index finger along the open petals of the rose tattoo, or to imagine the security of his muscles beneath the cloth of his trousers.
“What are you doing?” she finally dared to ask, but Payanés didn't even turn to look at her.
“Bread and cheese.”
“What?”
“Nothing. That's what we call this way of making stones dance across the smooth water back at home, âmaking bread and cheese,' ” he said with the insipid voice of disenchantment, and watching roll across the ground, like decapitated dwarfs, all the treasured desires of those lonely nights in the
petrolero
camp.
“Ay,
amor mÃo,
let me close my eyes and rest against you even for an instant, because life is so heavy and I can't bear it anymore,” Sayonara wanted to implore, but she knew she wouldn't receive a response and any plea would sink to the bottom of a sea of strangeness.
“Shall we go?” she murmured hopelessly, knowing that her quarter hour of happiness had already passed.
“Go where?”
“Anywhere . . .”
“So where are we going to go, with all these girls and all this stuff? Look, Sayonara, or whatever your name is, you can't demand anything from me . . .”
“But I'm not demanding anything.” She wanted to retract her words and erase the traces of her unfounded illusion, but it turned out that she and the four girls, all five dressed in colorful organza as if they were wrapped in gift paper, with their three bags and two boxes, weren't a demand but a supplication, an unconditional and mute offering to someone who would love and protect them.
Meanwhile, in the patio of her house, Todos los Santos, who was feeding
auyama
to a captive tapir, sensed the disaster that was about to occur; she smelled it in a fetid gust that rose from the river.
“Ay! my innocent girl,” she lamented out loud, though she was only heard by a
guacamaya
, a few parakeets, and the tapir, “how many times have I told you that a
puta
's love isn't love for life but only for hours. How many times do I have to tell you that the unattainable girl smells like roses and one who gives herself away smells like filth. Get hold of yourself and endure the lashâwe'll see if you learn next time.”
What came next was the awkward ending of a ridiculous scene. Walking along without destination or conviction, lugging the boxes, they decided to stop at a parody of a fair unloaded from a cart and anchored to the foot of the train station, illuminated by anemic lightbulbs and animated unsuccessfully by the monotonous melodies of three musicians with a propensity for yawning. It was an ephemeral monument to artificial happiness: a suitable mausoleum in which to give a third-rate burial to a love story with such a calamitous ending.
The girls won trinkets throwing darts at a cardboard clown, bought gummy caramels that got stuck in their hair, took off their shoes, and got their frilly organza dresses dirty. Payanés, who didn't know whether to think of them as treasures or monsters, as always occurs with the children of others, made an effort to behave himself and treated them to a double order of tutti-frutti popsicles and roasted corn with lard and salt. He bought each one a stuffed animal, and after a while, barely opening his mouth and looking somewhere else, he said good-bye with a laconic “I'm going.” And Sayonara, who understood that it was a farewell without reprieve, watched him depart through the underbrush that closed around him in shadows, feeling the dizziness of a slight death sicken her heart. But, in spite of everything, she didn't lose the illusion that at the last minute he would turn his head and at least say to her, “I'll see you. A month from today, by the river, I'll see you.”
“And did he say it?”
“No, he didn't say it. He left just like that, without saying another word.”
The girls were already beginning to feel sleepy, hugging their stuffed animals and convinced they had known happiness that night at the fair, but Sayonara didn't want to go back to the house to ruminate in the darkness of her room on the hollow echoes of that “I'm going” that had left her bleeding inside.
She just stood there, incapable of letting go of the already extinguished light from the bulbs, as if hypnotized by the persistent singsong of the long gone musicians and with the same expression of confusion as a child who invites another to play with her new toys and suddenly finds them faded and broken. As if holding in the folds of her skirt tops without strings, dolls without arms, and kites that don't fly, she couldn't shake her astonishment at seeing her spells and charms inexplicably useless and disdained.
The fury of a woman scorned or the authentic desire to die? Both, together and intertwined. Her pride wounded and crushed to her roots, with a pain in her chest as if from broken ribs, Sayonara obeyed the first stirring of her feet, which wanted to take her to foolishly and blindly finish off the night of her despair at the Dancing Miramar, where there would be no lack of men in love with her to keep her occupied while she left behind this twisted and bitter-tasting day. Already on her way, though, she was assaulted by a doubt that made her stop short. What if she ran into Payanés in the middle of Calle Caliente, forgetting about the past in the arms of Molly?
“The mere thought made her burn with fury,” Olguita tells me. “A dangerous thing. When a
prostituta
burns with jealousy and allows herself to get swept away by her temper, it seals her fate. Believe what I'm telling you; we've seen it happen a thousand times.”
Payanés unburdening himself to Molly: reason enough to go and kill her, the
muy puta
Molly Flan. There's no reason that vengeance has to be only Fideo's privilege, and how sweet it would be to kill Molly, but what for, after all, if it wouldn't do any good anyway; the best revenge would be to go to Popayán and tear out that wife's eyes, although thinking about it again, what did that poor woman have to do with it, there on the other side of the world breaking her back to raise a few kids while her husband is over here running around having fun with a couple of lost women and a
vallenato
trio. The only worthwhile thing would be to go for that bastard's jugular, to tear him apart with your teeth, scratch his face until he was marked forever, give him a good kick in the balls, and shout in his face the four cardinal insults: bastard, liar, traitor, murderer of my dreams.
It was a vulgar but rhythmic bolero, easy to sing, in reality sung so often that it was already part of the folklore of La Catunga and of other red-light districts around the planet. From then on everything would be foreseeable: poetry of degradation; cold, hard anecdote; a script of misery that other women have already written. Drunk, Sayonara would threaten to throw herself under the wheels of the train, then she would reject that dramatically excessive exit and opt for singing
rancheras
with a wounded howl while hanging from the neck of some other drunk.
The following night she wouldn't even appear at the Dancing Miramar because everyone would already know that that stage no longer belonged to her, that the most sought after
puta
in Tora had dropped in category and was no longer at the level of the select clientele, of the nights of champagne or the décor of mirrors and velvet, and keeping a stiff upper lip, she would have to make do with joining the cast of a cheaper bar.
“Every girl in this profession knows there will always be a cheaper bar,” Machuca tells me, “and another and another still as you move further from the center, the hill barely inclined so the fall isn't too noticeable. And she consoles herself by thinking there are many years and many steps that she can roll down before she hits the bottom, to what is rightfully called the bottom of the bottom.”
“That night Sayonara tempted fate,” Todos los Santos tells me, disturbed by the memory. “She walked a long while on the edge of her decisions and was a step away from taking the nefarious one, the one without recourse, the one waiting for her with its door open. The all too familiar door that awaits every woman of the profession at the end of the alley. But no. Not her. She hadn't been born to be a tango lyric. I knew it from the first day I saw her, when she was still a flea-ridden child: This one will be saved by her pride. Do you remember I told you that, the morning we met, when you first started coming around here asking questions?”
“No more yellow dresses,” declared Sayonara, as if canceling with one fell swoop the vestiges of her childhood. “To hell with hair ribbons.”
She tore off the puffy sleeves and the lacy collar, ripped off the frilly layers of tulle that covered the ample skirt, and released both braids, closing her eyes to feel the caress of her newly freed mane, which glided down her back like tumbling water. An absurd amount of hair for so small and sad a woman. Just like her mother's and the only inheritance that remained from her. With the sheen of astrakhan fur and blue foxtails, the mass of hair invaded the night, billowing, and when the breezes grew stronger it undulated, long and free, silky and magnificent, like a river in the wind.
As if taken by the hand of a guardian angel, the winged creature that by means of theatrics and distractions dissuades its protected souls from heeding the call of the abyss, Sayonara refrained from going to Calle Caliente and headed back toward the Magdalena. When she reached the river's edge, she allowed herself the luxury of doing what any woman without a
prostituta
's courage would do under similar circumstances: she burst into tears.
It occurred at the hour in which the silver phosphorescence of the
yarumos
glistened, those beautiful trees of the moon, but she wasn't in the mood to notice the landscape. As Ana, Juana, Susana, and Chuza closed their eyes, tiny sleeping bundles curled up in tulle and sheltered from the sky beneath some bush, Sayonara gave in, without suppressing hiccups or sobs, to an uncontrollable, inconsolable, magdalenic weeping, as she had never allowed herself before nor would allow afterward, surprised at the salty taste of her tears and by their burning nature, like that of holy water, reddening her cheeks as they coursed down them. She let them fall, drop by drop, without thinking of anything more specific than her own sorrow. In all the sorrows of yesterday and today molded into one, without name or face, one big, soft sorrow like a breast that feeds and consoles, old familiar sorrow, so bitter but when all is said and done so much her own.