The Dark Bride (40 page)

In spite of Sacramento's warnings, Machuca made her own inquiries about Sayonara's exact whereabouts, and wrapping herself up in a threadbare shawl to hide her unmistakable appearance as an old
prostituta
, she knocked at the door of the house, passing herself off as a beggar seeking a crust of bread. The door was opened by a very skinny, taciturn young woman, sheathed in an austere blue dress, like a novice's, her hair hidden beneath a handkerchief tied around her head, whom Machuca didn't recognize at first as Sayonara.

“Come back at noon, that is when we distribute soup to those in need,” she was told by the blue shadow that had been Sayonara the magnificent, and who stepped back in alarm when the indigent woman in the threadbare shawl grabbed her hands.

“Is that you, Machuca?” she asked, suddenly recognizing her friend.

“He goes down to the river every Friday, to look for a certain girl . . . I only came to tell you that.”

“Payanés?” Amanda dared to ask, lowering her voice as if she were speaking a sacrilege.

“There are those who swear they have seen him even on Wednesdays, and on Saturdays. Alone, throwing stones in the river, wearing cologne, dressed entirely in white, with all of his pay in his pocket, waiting, always waiting.”

“They say that?”

“They say that.”

“Tell me who he is waiting for . . .”

“You know very well . . .”

“Tell me . . .”

“For a girl, who, before she left him for someone else, was called Sayonara. It is said that he who waits loses hope, but that's not the case with him. His seems to be a hope goaded on week after week by an infinite patience. Every time they tell him you got married in a church, wearing a white veil, he says the commitment you have with him is before and above any other.”

Fearing the displeasure of the lady of the house, who was wary of strangers and suspicious of any words whispered behind her back, Amanda hurriedly said good-bye to Machuca, acting as if she hadn't listened to her. But she had. She gathered up her confidence, folded it over twice with great tenderness as if it were a fine linen handkerchief, carefully put it away hidden against her heart, clinging to it to stay alive during those times of transit through the lands of nothingness.

“Where are you, Payanés, who is kissing you . . . ? If not me, who is embracing you . . . ?” She gave in to a sighing that was half killing her, half reviving her. “Don't force me to bear so much unfulfilled desire gnawing at my heart . . .”

I have in my hand a small testament of what happened in those days of languishing sadness. It is a note hastily written in pencil by Machuca to Todos los Santos, three or four days after her encounter with Sayonara. Months afterward, they would make peace and everything would go back to the way it had been before, but due to some yes-it-is-no-it-isn't, the friendship between Machuca and Todos los Santos had frayed during the period following the strike, marked in all of La Catunga by reticence, arguments, and strained nerves. So, even though they had stopped speaking, Machuca wanted to alert her old friend about Sayonara, whom she had seen surrendered to an unhealthy resignation. After a formal salutation, she wrote: “Several days ago I chanced upon your adopted daughter, who, as you may know through news from other sources, resides with her husband in Villa de la Virgen del Amparo, in this same
departamento
of Santander. I found her in good health and free of material contingencies, but I regret to inform you,
comadre,
that something must be done, because there is nearly nothing left of our girl's former happiness.” Underneath, in black ink and in Todos los Santos's handwriting, appears a kind of reply, jotted down after she'd read the letter, and directed at no one in particular: “Nothing can be done. We must simply wait until life, which once brought her here, brings her back again.”

We are going through strange days, with little talk and even less understanding, due to the bad taste provoked in Sacramento and the old ladies by the constant recollection of events subsequent to the wedding. My questions have stirred up bitter memories and now I can't find a way to penetrate the wells of silence inside of which Sacramento drowns in feelings of guilt, Olguita in tears, and Todos los Santos in recriminations. And as if that weren't enough, winter, or glass weather, as the fishermen on the Magdalena call it, has made the temperature drop in Tora by a few degrees, and the arrival of the cold—in reality a slight diminishment of the heat—has brought with it another inconvenience, Todos los Santos's lack of bladder control, which causes her to become soaked every now and then by the lukewarm moisture of her own urine. Too proud to let anyone know what has happened, she keeps rocking as usual in her chair on the patio, feeding her animals, or napping in her bed.

“Come on, mother. We're going to change our clothes, because we've had another accident,” Sacramento says to her, delicately using the plural conjugations of the verbs and helping her to get up.

“You too, son?” she asks. “Has this foul weather weakened your kidneys too?”

We couldn't drive away the cold from her with the hot water bottle or the foxtails that she makes us wrap around her throat, or the famous pink rabbit-skin slippers that she keeps on her feet night and day.

“Be still, there's nothing to do,” she tells us, swatting away our attempts to care for her. “Let's just wait for winter to go away and take the intemperance with it, and meanwhile we'll swim in urine. Nothing else can be done.”

However, I think we have discovered a more or less effective way, if not of curing this small catastrophe, of at least anticipating it. Todos los Santos, taciturn and withdrawn, has begun every now and then to break the long silences that overwhelm our conversations with an explosive cascade of words which are sometimes scolding, sometimes advice or warning, but are most often simply nostalgic digression. The content varies, but the form, always torrential, alerts us, because her urinary incontinence, by some curious anatomical symbiosis, is usually preceded by verbal incontinence. In these circumstances she mentioned for the first time the episode that she refers to as the elephant. When the thing with the elephant happened . . . and she's off and running.

“Seen from above, all human life seems like a tangle of whims, becauses and for-no-reasons, and only by intense scrutiny and through searching for its meaning over the long term do you begin to find a pattern. Even those who are most caught up in the foolishness are clear about their motives for doing what they do, and there is no chance occurrence that isn't, in and of itself, a known result,” she began saying a little while ago, as the rest of us rushed to place a basin under her skirts. “Forget about the basin and grab your notebook so you can write,” she ordered me, “because today I feel the need to talk.”

“Keep talking,” I say, “keep talking, I'm recording it in my memory. What were you saying about motives?”

“At night, we old people go to bed not to sleep, but to brood and ponder, and this morning, almost as the alarm began to ring, I realized clearly why Sayonara had married. She was trying to recover her name.”

“What are you saying?”

“The name that you carry is the sign of the life you have lived, and if you want to change your life, you must begin by changing your name. Sayonara had to go back to being Amanda to be able to make her visit . . .”

“What visit? To whom?”

“To her father, who was still alive, and even today the news of his demise hasn't reached us here. You cannot go before your father saying that you have buried the family name that he has conferred on you and that you also changed your baptismal name for another that sounded prettier. That is in poor taste. Amanda must have imagined, speculating about the eventuality, that when she saw her father again and he asked her: ‘What have you done with your life, daughter?' she would be able to look him in the eyes and say to him, without lying too much: ‘I got married, Father; I am a married woman who has fulfilled her duty to take care of her sisters and teach them by good example.' However, being Sayonara, she would have cast her eyes on the ground, ashamed, silent, in such a way that her father would become suspicious.”

“Around here few adversities are as feared as parental rage,” interposes Sacramento, “and much is done to prevent it. Or to pacify it, if it has already been unleashed.”

“So how did Sayonara know where to look for her father?” I ask them.

“She had been making inquiries for some time,” replies Sacramento, “and she knew exactly where he was.”

Her source of information was a gentleman named Alfredo Molano, a wanderer by profession and very up-to-date on news about rambling and ramblers, who was known to have brought the news that Abelardo Monteverde, her father, was working as a merchant selling a variety of goods in the town of Sasaima, that he was still married to the same white woman, had educated her children, who were now grown, and was raising the new brood of little ones that they had had together. With that information in hand, Amanda took it into her head to go and find him.

“So what did that man do for you, apart from abandoning you, for you to be going to thank him?” Sacramento said to try to dissuade her.

“He gave me my being,” she answered, just like that; five dry, withering words that may not have meant much, but that didn't offer any room for argument.

“He is going to leave Sasaima,” she said. “I have a feeling, if I don't go now to look for him, I won't find him.”

“All the more reason. I don't know what your hurry is to go digging up sorrows.”

Nothing could be done. Sayonara was burning with an urgency that didn't allow delays, an itch that made her stand up when she sat down; it woke her up if she lay down, tightened her throat and suffocated her appetite.

“She understood it as a mandate,” Olguita tells me, “or a mission she had to accomplish. She thought she should go to look for her father, as if her fate were demanding it.”

“Shoo, Felipe!” Todos los Santos drives away one of the Felipes, in this particular instance a quadruped with black fur, similar to a small pig, who is trying to eat her slipper.

“What did Amanda expect from her father?” I want to know.

“We all yearn for paternal approval,” responds Todos los Santos. “Even the worst sinners are afraid of living without it. Why? Because it's human nature, and also her nature, Sayonara's. She needed to know that her father didn't condemn her for what she had done. If you ask me, I would say that was precisely why she stopped doing it.”

“What did Amanda expect from her father?” Sacramento echoes my question. “That's exactly what her father wanted to know, as soon as he saw her.”

About to board a bus, because just at that moment he was hurrying to depart for Venezuela, don Abelardo Monteverde rubbed his eyes incredulously when he recognized his daughter Amanda—a ghost the past had vomited up without asking permission or giving warning—standing on a corner of the market plaza in Sasaima, her hair and the dark blue suit that she wore then, like a novice's, soaking wet, and hidden behind her, also very wet and biting their nails with shyness and fear, were the three younger sisters, in organza and crinolines. Wiping from his forehead the copious sweat caused by such an unforeseen and embarrassing situation, don Abelardo didn't ask what had happened to Ana, he didn't know which was which, he didn't inquire where they had come from, how they had survived in the intervening years, or even where they were going. Nor did he ask if they were hungry, or why their clothes were wet, and he never learned that they had traveled two days by bus, enduring stops and searches from first the army, then the
guerrilleros,
and then seven and a half hours by foot, along rugged paths and in the rain, to find him.

“You've found me at a bad moment, daughter,” he said to Amanda, addressing her because she was the eldest. “I don't have any cash in my pocket and I'm about to leave on a trip. What do you need?”

“I only want your blessing, señor
padre
, for me and for my sisters.”

“That's all?”

“
Sí,
señor
padre
, that's all.”

“Well, that being the case, there's no problem,” said don Abelardo Monteverde, with his shirt open across a chest that was sparsely covered with hair and an enormous belly hanging over his tightly cinched waist, and he raised a fat right hand to bestow his blessing upon them.

“May God protect you,” he said four times, ceremoniously, touchingly, while being rushed by the bus driver who kept honking his horn to hurry the passengers because darkness was rapidly approaching.

Don Abelardo, his boot already resting on the bus's running board, hesitated for a moment, holding back from his lips the
hasta lueguito
he had ready to end the surprise visit by these daughters, so remote now in his memory and his affections.

“Wait a second, I'll pay you for the delay,” he said to the driver, and then he signaled for the girls to wait for him where they were standing. He crossed the market plaza in huge strides, took out a ring of keys, opened a door, and went into a house that must have been where he lived, or was perhaps his warehouse.

Several minutes later he returned with a porcelain elephant under his left arm and a length of cloth in his right hand.

“Take this,
mija
,” he said to Amanda, handing her the elephant and the cloth and looking at her for an instant with a foolish expression that, forcing things a bit, could have been interpreted as tenderness. “Accept this from me, so you don't go away empty-handed.”

Then he gave each one a kiss on the forehead: the clumsy and rough kiss of a man who never kisses. But a kiss nonetheless, the pathetic, shaky, and guilty gesture of someone who might have wished for things to be different and was seeking forgiveness.