The Dark Bride (42 page)

“Let's go back to the jungle,” proposed Sayonara, trying to calm him. “At least there is nothing but monkeys out there and you would have no reason to be jealous of them . . . maybe . . .”

“But nothing made any difference,” Olga tells me. “There was no salve that could soothe Sacramento's fury, and each day, from the moment she left for work, he would follow her and spy on her, to see if she breathed, if she spoke to anyone, if she walked anywhere, completely forgetting about himself and his own job as a cart man.”

“I will quit working in that house,” she suggested, “and look for another job where there are no men to make you uncomfortable . . .”

“There will be men in every house.”

“Come on, then, let's go to another pueblo. Melones, Delia Ramos's sister, lives in San Vicente Chucurí, and she's given up the profession and now she runs a beauty salon where they style hair and do manicures. She'll take us in.”

“No. Your bad reputation has already reached there.”

“Then to Medellín. I have an aunt named Calzones there . . .”

“Calzones, Melones,
putas
and more
putas
; they're all
putas
. Isn't there a single decent woman left in the world? Do you know what they say about me? That I married Sayonara, the
puta
from the Miramar,” shouted Sacramento from the bottomless anguish of his black-and-white universe: heaven with Sayonara and hell without her, or rather torment with or without her. She could be only one of two things: goddess or trash, or both things alternatively with no intermediate possibility.

“It would be better if I just killed you and then myself,” he declared, adopting a language of love that seemed like a report from the emergency room of a hospital, because he couldn't string two sentences together without including the words “blood,” “poison,” “wounds,” “dagger,” “sacrifice.”

“Hush, Sacramento, you're scaring me,” she said to him. “You're starting to talk like those heroes and martyrs . . .”

“No one will ever love you as I do.”

“It would be a relief,” she muttered, and she endured, endured, endured, until one day she got tired and fell wildly into a limitless exhaustion; hurricane winds blew once again in her heart, suddenly tearing her from her circumstances, and she accepted, in a single stroke of reason, that old, familiar certainty that life is somewhere else and flows through other streams. The irrepressible force of whim and of why-not, which is the principal motor of those who have an indomitable will, surged up in her again, blunt as a mandate, and without tempering her rage she threw a pot of boiling milk in Sacramento's face, burning his chest with the liquid and opening a gash in his forehead.

“If this is a marriage, then marriage is not a good invention,” she said, free now of any hint of docility. “I'm leaving Sacramento,
hermanito
. I'm leaving forever.”

“Then he,” Olga tells me, “recognizing the return of the real Sayonara and without daring to ask her to stay, warned her, ‘If you go, I'll die,' but she went anyway, although she knew that this time Sacramento wasn't exaggerating that much.”

“At that very moment my adopted daughter's time for returning began,” Todos los Santos tells me. “My girl went running to find Fideo, and she said: ‘Let's go, right now.' ”

“What about your sisters?” Fideo wanted to know.

“Sacramento promised me he would take care of them.”

“But how am I going to walk? Can't you see the condition I'm in?”

“Give me that ring you're wearing.”

“I can't. It's the last thing I have that was Enrique's, do you think it's some cheap trinket? It has an engraved coat of arms and is made of pure gold, a lot of karats . . .”

“Give it to me.” Sayonara took it from her, and after a while she came back saying she had traded it for an old but sturdy burro.

“During those times in Villa de Virgen del Amparo,” Fideo tells me, “Sayonara lived clinging to her longing for Payanés. ‘Come back to earth, girl,' I advised her when I saw her flying so high; ‘come down from that cloud.' ”

The more insistent and deep-rooted in her the memory of him grew, the more it began to fade. The first thing she lost was his head: How did he look at me, out of the corner of his eye or straight on? She couldn't say for sure. He has big ears, half the size of a frying pan, Fideo teased her, but Sayonara recalled them as being perfectly sized, and pink. What came from his mouth, words of love or silence? With the distance of time they both sounded the same. Were his kisses really that deep? Or were they inventions? His skin was a true gift, even with clothes on, of that she was certain.

“Wherever you put your hand on him you find a lot of man,” she sighed.

Was his hair very dark? Dark and light, black and white, both mixed. And what was it that had been beating in his forehead: the promise of bliss, or had it been a forsworn good-bye from the very beginning? She couldn't tell for sure, even when he had been with her, the memory of which is now blurred into the long string of symmetrical days.

After his head, his arms were forgotten and the imprint of his embrace became nebulous, and she lost the sensation of his neck in spite of that time when he turned his back; his legs also evaporated, and she could no longer distinguish them from the legs of other men, not to mention his feet—so absent were they that Sayonara convinced herself that when they were making love, Payanés had never removed his socks. Even his hands faded and the last traces of his caresses turned into smoke. But his chest remained, Payanés's chest, and it became as immense as the universe.

“In the memory of that chest,” Fideo assures me, “Sayonara built her home.”

A chest opened in embrace, protective like the chest of God or of any other father, as old as an elephant and soft like a bed, and warm: without cracks where the wind could slip through. Not the narrow chest of a boy, not a chest covered with hair, or wounded by a spear near the heart; not one of those sharp, lean chests like the ribs of a ship, or the muscular thorax of an athlete, none of that; not the chest of a general, loaded down with medals. But a spacious chest, sufficient, familiar and wise, ample like a hangar; abundant with milk and honey like the breasts of a woman; a chest with the dim light of a church and the well-being of a stove, with thick stone walls, high ceilings under friendly heavens, and a big wooden door that opened just enough for her. That chest.

“I say,” says Fideo, “that she confused the memory of what it was with what she wanted it to be.”

A chest that gives itself to you without your having to ask and that doesn't make you wait, that doesn't fear, doesn't frighten, doesn't delay; a chest that doesn't hold back, or measure, or stop, or mistrust, or calculate; our house, a generous chest like a banquet; crypt and castle, a cave of sleeping mammals, while outside the winter roars and blows: a flowery bed.

“Too much wishing for things that don't exist in this real world. What you're looking for is not a man, girl,” suspected Fideo, “but to die and go to heaven.”

“Maybe.”

“One day she told me about Lucía,” Fideo tells me. “She told me she had been tangled up with that woman for a good while.”

There were alienating months during which Amanda lived twenty-four hours a day with a woman she had never seen nor ever would, but whom she came to know better than a sister. It was Lucía, the wife Payanés kept in Popayán and who had been, according to him, the reason for his distance, for the rupture, for the tantrum that night by the river and all the turns that fate later took as a consequence. Sayonara, who didn't know her real name, began calling her Lucía, a name she thought sounded cold, caustic, sonorous, and haughty. She could well have won easy points and gotten the early advantage by baptizing her Ramona, or Chofa, or Filomena, but she suspected that it would be an improper tactic and an imprudent approach to ridicule or minimize her adversary.

“So it was Lucía,” says Fideo, repeating Amanda's words.

Before she knew it, she was having breakfast, lunch, and dinner with this Lucía; she even gargled with her, but gargled with cyanide, because she was being poisoned, and if she didn't leave Lucía's side day or night, even though she hated the woman, it was because after all it was only with her that Amanda could vent her feelings and because she hadn't found anyone else with whom she could maintain that uninterrupted, circular, and useless dialogue on the man doubly absent: for one and the other, because of the fault of one or the other.

“Here we are, tearing each other's hair out of love for him,” said Sayonara to Lucía, “and he's probably out there somewhere, with Molly firmly planted on his lap.”

The more force she applied to erasing Lucía from the map, the more persistent she became, and the more present, until the day came when Amanda felt that the faceless, ageless woman had installed herself permanently in her kitchen, always there, invoked by her and sitting on a stool, like another tenant except invisible to Sacramento and the girls, with her disheartening message on the tip of her tongue, sometimes resentful and tearful, other times furiously demanding what belonged to her, but always invincible in the tenacity with which she had determined not to go away, even though her hostess called her
bruja,
nightmare, pain, that woman, her.

“All that was missing was for me to serve her a cup of coffee every morning,” Amanda said to Fideo, and she also told her that she finally understood that she thought more about Lucía than she did about Payanés, and probably even more than did Payanés himself, who in Amanda's eyes was becoming less her old love and more the actual husband of that phantasmagoric Lucía.

“It's me who is giving him to Lucía,” Sayonara said to herself, alarmed, and she decided to make peace with the woman, give back her human qualities and her right not to be a miscreant or a succubus, and she stopped wishing for her character to be sour or for her to have sagging tits and bad breath.

Simultaneously she gave Lucía the peremptory order to leave her mind and license to exist out there, in her own environment, so that they wouldn't have to continue stepping on each other's toes or beating on each other like a couple of boxers fighting over the close quarters in the ring, the gold medal, and the single portion of air. From then on she ignored the other woman's company, even though she had become so necessary, and she said
adiós,
hopefully forever, and while at first there was an absence, later she felt strong without Lucía and satisfied at having unencumbered herself of that dual and unbearable alliance, of complicity and rivalry, with a stranger.

“Of course, from time to time Lucía returned,” Fideo tells me, “but more faintly and only to make courtesy visits. She would sit silently on her stool, drink her black coffee, say thank you, ask permission to withdraw, and she would return to Popayán, her native city.”

From the first moment, when I first saw the photograph of Sayonara, I had the feeling that she had died under violent circumstances. Just as I had guessed that she was a
prostituta
from her crudely plucked eyebrows and her soft, cold gaze that was like the touch of silk; just as I suspected—erroneously—that her name was Clara, in contrast with the dark light she radiated; and as I remember having thought that she possessed the sort of beauty that opens the door to death.

I have followed the occurrences in her life, trying to record her slight footprint and her uncertain trail. The Girl, Sayonara, and Amanda: I have witnessed three different people and I haven't been able to fully integrate them into a true and definitive identity. And I would only be able to do it poorly, as I am convinced that not even she could do it.

“I am divided inside, Doc,” Dr. Antonio María tells me that he heard her lament once, “and each of those who live in me pulls in her own direction. I'm tired, Doc, of all the pulling, it is nearly tearing me apart, and I want to rest as one single person.”

“We're all like you, divided,” the doc tells me he said to her, “but when we are one and able to rest, it's because we're dead.”

I have wanted to understand the passion of the woman who was not called Sayonara in vain and accompany her along the paths of her recurrent farewell. I wanted to know what her problem was, but it seems to be a given that the problem is always something else, and that behind the motives that drive someone, another motive often lurks. Life is debated in deep waters while words and explanations slide across the smooth surface.

That's fine, I think. That's how it should be. That the memory of Sayonara stays where it should be, in the interlinings of supposition and expectation, half veiled and half revealed by the recollections that others have of her. Or of them. Of those three: Amanda, the Girl, and Sayonara. And as for me, it is enough to reach the end of her story delicately. With just enough coherence and without forcing things, without excessive literary adjustments and without trying to clarify the mystery of her trinity. I should allow her stele to extend among the shadows, plural and slight, refraining from calcifying it by exposing it to the light of day.

Now I want to retrace the steps she took among her people on that decisive and rain-swept day, the day of her return to Tora, when they saw her arrive just as she had left, her hair dripping water, wearing the black skirt with the slit up the side and the Chinese blouse with its tight row of buttons and its domesticated dragon.

“Just as she had arrived, yes, but with the difference that she now breathed more deeply,” Todos los Santos corrects me, “but that was noticed only by those of us who loved her. What I mean is that there was something new about her, a gift she had acquired during her absence, which was maturity. A splendid maturity, without hurry or stridency, sweet and serene like the morning star.”