The Dark Bride (4 page)

“The first one was swallowed by the earth,” he told me.

“That I already know.”

“With the second and third I paid for the beer I never drank, because the shouting made me return to Todos los Santos's house. I put the other four in my pocket, but the girl looked so humbled, so gentle in that shirt that looked like a straitjacket, that I thought it was only fair to give her at least half of what was left of the profit, so I gave her two coins, which she accepted without question. I kept the last two, which got mixed up with others that a man gave me that same afternoon for moving some things, a little extra work that came to me.”

Then I asked Sacramento if he had ever gone back to look for the buried coin. He laughed with surprise and said it had never even occurred to him, but he was piqued by the idea and twenty minutes later we were in front of a storehouse that had been built on the lot that had belonged to Todos los Santos. An entire lifetime had passed from the day when Sacramento's minuscule treasure had been buried, and although the houses and people had changed, the street was still the same: a narrow passageway with no sewer or pavement. With a garden trowel, we began to scrape around the spot where he calculated the door had been. We removed dirt in no particular hurry, he for a while and then I, conversing in the meantime, very conscious that we were wasting our time. Several bottle caps turned up, and a rusted nut, a casing that looked like it was from a bullet, pieces of glass and rubber, and some other foolishness. And then, suddenly, a ten-centavo coin appeared, one of the ones with an Indian head that had stopped circulating a long time ago.

From that moment on Sacramento looked at me differently. In his eyes appeared a hint of perplexity and suspicion that I think made the existence of this book possible, because from then on he didn't dare keep any secrets from me, as if I were a sibyl and knew everything before he told me. Of course, I didn't want to take advantage of the situation to pry information from him, so I told him not to give too much importance to what had happened, that we had just found an old coin and it probably wasn't his. He didn't look at me with disappointment, as I had expected, but with incredulity and something close to anger.

“This is my coin,” he assured me. “I would recognize it anywhere.”

Faced with his emphatic tone, I had to admit my flippancy and ask for forgiveness. Then I tried to explain that I had invited him to look for the coin because those of us who make a living by writing live for the hunt of minute coincidences and subtle proofs that reassure us that what we write is, if not necessary, at least useful. Because it responds to currents that flow beneath what is ordinarily apparent, currents that turn back upon themselves and twist fate in circles. I also told him that a blind poet named Jorge Luis Borges believed that every casual meeting is an appointment. The more I talked, the more I got tangled up and the more magical my words seemed, and he listened to them, hypnotized, as if they were being spoken in some archaic tongue. Afterward, with the passing days and interminable conversations, during which he told me his whole life story, and I, something of mine, a sort of serene confidence developed between us that dispelled the magic in favor of friendship. But there was something that Sacramento never lost after that episode: the conviction that literature is a means for conjuring and that it can reveal secret clues. He, who had been anything but a reader, began to become interested in books.

Todos los Santos arranged for the girl to sleep on a straw mattress spread out beside her own bed. Before she lay down to sleep she turned off the light in the bedroom and checked to make sure that the perpetual candle was burning in its red glass holder beneath the picture of the Sagrado Corazón de Jesús. Just as she had always done and would keep on doing, she tells me, until the day she dies.

Colombia is known as the country of the Sacred Heart. He is our patron saint and in that capacity has tinged our collective spirit and our national history with the same romantic, tormented, and bloody condition. The only common element in all of the homes of the poor in Colombia—it was removed from the houses of the rich a few generations back—is the image of this Christ who looks you in the eyes with doglike resignation while he shows you his heart, which isn't found inside his body as one would expect, but has been extracted and is held in its owner's left hand, at chest level, beneath a carefully tended chestnut beard. But it's not an abstract heart, rounded, in a pretty rose color and of a less than remote likeness to the original, as it appears in Valentine's messages. The one our Christ displays is an impressive organ, throbbing, a proud crimson, with a stunningly realistic volume and design. A true butcher's prize, with two disturbing attributes: From the top a flame is burning, while the middle is encircled by a crown of thorns that draws blood.

The girl couldn't sleep a wink in that foreign, unfamiliar room filled with unknown smells. She uncovered herself, then covered up again, unable to find a comfortable position. She felt besieged by the presence of that kind and mutilated young man who never stopped looking at her from the wall, and on whose face the candle cast dancing shadows and reflections of bloodletting. In her own bed, Todos los Santos was uncomfortable with the heat of a fitful and choking sleep, until without warning she began to snore with a sudden bubbling of mucus only to then completely suspend breathing altogether, without releasing her breath inward or outward for an entire minute, her throat closed by a plug of still air, two minutes, three, until the girl was convinced she had died. Then it returned, like waves on the ocean, that rhythmic snoring . . .

“
Madrina,
” the girl dared to call out, “
madrina,
that man scares me.”

“What man?” asked Todos los Santos, half asleep.

“The one with the beard.”

“That's not a man, it's Christ. Trust in him. Ask him to watch over your sleep.”

Trust in the enemy? She'd rather die. Maybe if she didn't look at him . . . she covered her head with the pillow and closed her eyes, but she immediately guessed that Christ had stopped smiling and was making horrendous faces at her. Uncovering her eyes quickly, she tried several times to catch him in the act, but he was clever and never let her. He smiled at her, the hypocrite, and no sooner than she had closed her eyes, he began to threaten her again with evil faces.

“
Madrina,
Christ is making faces at me.”

“Hush, child. Let me sleep.”

The girl put the pillow where her feet had been, turned on her mattress, and lay with her face toward the other wall, which had no portraits. But the palpitations of the candle reached even the far wall, wavering in slowly burning veils. Despite her struggles to stay alert, waves of sleep began to cloud her eyes. From time to time she turned quickly, to keep Christ under control, but he only looked at her with that melancholy smile and with his wounded heart in his hand.

“
Madrina,
don't you think it hurts?”

“Hurts?”

“Christ, don't you think his heart hurts?”

Then Todos los Santos got up and, blowing out the candle, made Christ disappear. With him went the red shadows and the sad smiles, and at last, in the darkness of the calm room, the two women slept soundly.

The sun came up very early and began marking the days of a new existence for both of them. The girl began not only to lose her fear of Christ, but to approach him with a strange familiarity and an attempt at dialogue that to Todos los Santos seemed theatrical and excessive.

“You must pray, child, but not too much,” she recommended.

One day when she was cleaning the image of the bleeding Jesus with a feather duster, she found wedged between the canvas and the frame several small, strange lumps, like tiny cocoons but made of paper. She decided to unravel one and was half startled, half amazed to see that it was covered with a tight, microscopic writing that she decided to try to read with a magnifying glass. But she found no legitimate letters there, no known alphabet, just scribbling, elongated in some places, flat in others, but always with a lot of curlicues.

“Come here,” she called out to the girl. “Can you explain this to me?”

“They are messages that I write.”

“To whom?”

“To the man with the beard.”

“I've told you that's Christ.”

“To Christ, then.”

“And what kind of writing is this?”

“One that he knows how to understand.”

“You never went to school?”

“No.”

“You don't know how to write like other people?”

“No.”

“I'm going to start teaching you right now. Get a pencil and some paper.”

Many tense and fatiguing hours were dedicated to reading and writing lessons with the square-ruled notebook that Todos los Santos used to keep accounts, with an old chart they bought at the apothecary, with a number-two Mirado pencil, and with disastrous results. The girl looked around the room, she rocked nervously in her chair, she bit her fingernails and cuticles, she wouldn't concentrate for anything in the world. She had no idea, it seemed, what Todos los Santos, who was clenching her teeth in order not to lose control and give her a whack, was saying.

“Just teach me how to work,
madrina
. I can't waste any time.”

“All in due time, now settle down and read here: The dwarf im-itates the mon-key.”

“What dwarf?”

“Any dwarf, it doesn't matter.”

Lunchtime came and the girl, who hadn't read a single syllable, was still asking about the dwarf, so Todos los Santos put off the lesson until the next day at the same hour and shut herself up in the kitchen to calm her nerves by peeling potatoes and chopping vegetables.

Everything changed one unforgettable afternoon when the
madrina
was drinking
mistela
with her disciples Machuca and Cuatrocientos while they gossiped about a famous debt between two neighbors that had erupted in gunfire. The girl was nearby, sitting on the floor, entertaining herself with pencil and paper, without anyone paying her any attention. Until one of the women realized that if they said “bullet,” the girl would write “bullet” with large, clear, round letters; if they said “bank,” she wrote “bank”; if they said “greedy,” or “Ana” or “mandarin,” she wrote that too.

“What!?” exclaimed Todos los Santos, taking the paper in her hands. “This is incredible! Yesterday you didn't know how to write and today you do . . .”

“Because yesterday I didn't want to and today I do.”

Had Todos los Santos kept any of those invented, tight scribbles on little rolls of paper? I insinuate that perhaps the girl's initial disinterest in conventional writing had to do with an unnecessary duplication.

“Maybe she didn't need to learn, because in her own way she already knew . . . ,” I say, then wonder whether I should have. I was the one who needed to learn: not to get on the wrong side of Todos los Santos.

“Don't think I didn't consider that,” she responds. “Instead of forcing her, I should have learned her way of writing so we could have sent messages to each other, or better yet, to Christ, because no one else would have understood us.”

Encouraged by the miracle of the sudden dominion over letters and taking care not to destroy her student's initiative and temperament, the
madrina
took upon herself the painstaking task of polishing the most offensive edges of the girl's rebelliousness. She trained the child in the healthy customs of brushing your teeth with ashes; saying good morning, good night, and thank you very much; listening patiently to the troubles of others and keeping her own quiet; taking sips of anise tea in a glass, pretending it was
aguardiente,
the strong licorice-flavored liquor; chewing cardamom seeds to freshen her breath; letting down her hair every day and brushing it in the sun to infuse it with warmth and brilliance.

The child, for her part, approached the lessons with the tenaciousness of a mule that surmounted any obstacle, with a few unyielding exceptions, such as using silverware, which her manual clumsiness converted into deadly weapons, or the habit of speaking loudly and stridently at any hour and on every occasion, including when she prayed.

“Sacred Heart of Jesus, I confide in you!” the girl shouted at the painting, overcome with fervor.

“Don't shout at him so, you'll make him lose his hair. My holy God, how this creature howls!” complained the
madrina
, who knew from personal experience the advantages of a discreet and velvety tone, although the habitual consumption of tobacco had turned hers gravelly.

She begged the girl to lower her voice, then she ordered and exhausted herself with chastisements, but it was beyond the girl's control, and despite all of her attempts, she continued bellowing and raising a ruckus like the vegetable sellers in the market.

“Let her have a taste of her own medicine,” decided Todos los Santos. And she took the girl to a loud and imposing waterfall formed by the Río Colorado near Acandai. There she made the child recite at full volume the poem “La Luna” by Diego Fallon, until her voice could be heard over the roar of the water, with the hope of filing down her vocal cords a bit. The goal was to tire her of shouting, but she tired first of Diego Fallon, so her teacher familiarized her with Neruda's despairing song, Bécquer's dark swallows, Valencia's languid camels, and assorted pages of a popular collection of romances that was much in vogue at social gatherings in La Catunga.

Day after day the girl made her voice rise over the sound of the cascade, which was polishing it in tune with the musical scale and modulating its diverse gradations of volume. Once, Todos los Santos opened the book to a certain poem by Rubén Darío and indicated for the girl to begin her exercises by reading it at the top of her voice. It was about a princess who steals a star from the sky.