The Dark Bride (45 page)

“Hush, Olguita!” said Todos los Santos to silence her, “you shouldn't make any concessions whatsoever. Like I said, the wives gobbling cake and wine, and the
putas
? The
putas
, who feel out of style and cornered, have had to invent a whole repertoire of tricks in bed just to survive.

“To be sought after, professional women found it indispensable to know how to juggle, fence, and display other exquisite talents difficult to even imagine before, and now lost is the girl who isn't able to perform agilely and without fuss such feats as the double bowl, the golden shower, the dead dog, the angel's leap, the big suck, the dyke dip, the garage door, the drop of milk, and any number of exotic acts invented by mankind, even reaching the extreme of shaving pubic hair to guarantee the clients, ever more demanding and coarse, that they were free from lice.

“Machuca? Since she can't hear us, Machuca decided to paint her nipples purple . . .”

“He was a Mexican telegraph operator, and he called Sayonara
mi guadalupana
because he compared her to the Virgen de Guadalupe, also Mexican and with hair as long and beautiful as the Virgen del Carmen's and Sayonara's own,” Todos los Santos tells me of a man named Renato Leduc, who was brought to Tora by life's winding road. “That's what he called her,
mi guadalupana
, and since he also wrote her verses, the day he decided to return to his country because of her indifference he left her a farewell poem that I still have. I will show it to you if and when I find it, because it was such a long time ago. . . . It was before the rice strike, during the golden era of the Dancing Miramar.

After digging through boxes, sacks, and drawers, Todos los Santos presents me with the following poem, typewritten and signed by the telegraph operator Renato Leduc:

Jovian pain of losing
adored things. Pain that oft
costs your life,
and oft costs naught
.

I once told you: I love you,
as I had never said before
nor ever will again so true.
I said it to you in desperation
because I knew that very soon
another would say it too
.

I said it in desperation,
but I have nothing to regret
.

I loved you so, I loved you
because in your eyes so fair
was a piece of infinity;
because of your chestnut hair,
because of your mouth
barbarously naked
I loved you, I loved you so . . 
.

But so many people loved you
at once,
that I told myself: it is implausible
to plead
—if so many people love her—
things she does not need
.

I thought of killing myself
then,
but I didn't, because
I asked myself, why?
Lost in pain and grief
I let my beard grow
because that limpid love so brief
from it derived such merriment,
since virgins have always found
—or so they say—in beards much amusement
.

Jovian pain of losing . . 
.

Apart from being a poet, there is little I am able to find out in Tora about the author, who defined himself as a bureaucrat of the lowest level. I know that when he arrived here he lodged at the Casa de Huéspedes, belonging to Conchita la Tapatía, a fellow Mexican, and that during the many nights in which they shared reminiscences of their motherland over glasses of Vat 69, he told her that he had trained for his profession at the Escuela Nacional de Telégrafos in Mexico City, which occupied an old building on Calle Donceles, next to the women's insane asylum, and that he had started working before he turned thirteen—before he even had hair on his balls, he said—to help support his widowed mother. That before he arrived in Tora he had passed through Paris, where the
puticas
in the Latin Quarter taught him how to speak French; that he was fiercely anticlerical and
aluciferado,
a term he himself used, meaning “possessed by the devil”; “a man who had lived a great deal,” as Todos los Santos said; a man who was stuck on Sayonara from the first time he saw her through the window of the telegraph office in Tora, who became her most assiduous and starry-eyed client, and who weekly left in her hands nearly the entirety of his scant weekly salary.

“You can't offer your heart to a woman like that,” admonished his Colombian best friend, a giant of a man named Valentín.

“For a woman like that, I have nothing but heart,” Renato replied.

“Love me,” Leduc begged Sayonara.

“I can't love you. I look at you and I don't see you.”

“You have an empty pot where other women hold their feelings,” the telegraph poet told her, and she realized that he was right, in part.

Then, enamored and in pain, he quit his job, packed a trunk with all of his books and his two changes of clothes, wrote the final poem, titled it “Romance of the Lost,” sent it to the addressee in an envelope, and returned to his Mexico, where he was heard to say that he had left Colombia to flee the indifference of a distant lover bent on remaining a
puta
.

The day after her return to Tora, Sayonara shook off her exhaustion by sleeping until the middle of the morning, and when she arose she found her
madrina,
Machuca, and Olga whispering suspiciously in the kitchen.

“Are you going to tell me what you are up to?” she asked them. “Since last night you've been plotting something behind my back and it's time for you to tell me what it is.”

“We're going to tell you, we already decided that. It's bad news. About your sister Ana.”

“Did she die?”

“No, but that might have been preferable.” They kept beating around the bush, without daring to be specific.

From the moment of her arrival, Sayonara had been asking about her sister and they had answered her evasively. We don't know, it seems that she lives on a
finca
near the village of Los Mangos, she left a telephone number but no one ever answers there, and when they do they say she moved somewhere else. Then, because of the deception and the delaying, Sayonara pitched a fit, one of those demoniac rages with eight legs and two heads that spits poison from its mouths and fire from its tail, one of those boundless bursts of anger that hadn't possessed her since adolescence and that still gave them something to talk about in Tora.

“Either you tell me now, or I'll tear apart this house and everything in it.”

They told her. Ana was the mistress of General Demetrio del Valle, commander in chief of Tora's campaign of moralization and shanty eradication, who, because he was married civilly and in the eyes of the church to a rich lady from Anolaima and didn't want to be found out, kept Ana closed up in a house next to the garrison and had spread the word that she was a cousin of his from the country whose education he had charitably offered to sponsor.

“I'm going to get her out of there even if it costs us both our lives,” announced Sayonara, and without further delay she started off.

“Wait,” suggested Todos los Santos in a softer voice, so as not to unleash the storm again. “Let her make her own life just as you have made yours. Besides, the way things are right now, it's better to be the mistress of a gorilla than the wife of some man who's dying of hunger.”

But Sayonara wasn't there to hear her, and a few hours later she was clambering across the garrison's tiled roofs, then broke a window and climbed through it.

“Del Valle pays for my private English and dressmaking lessons,” Ana told her. “He has given me a television, a record player, and a collection of LPs. He brings me marzipan fruits made by nuns and bottles of sweet wine from Oporto, and as if that weren't enough, in bed he prefers sleeping over messing around. Does it look like I'm suffering, sister?”

“And the wrongs that the military has done to our family? Have you forgotten the atrocious way they caused the deaths of our mother and brother? And the wrongs they have done to our people, back in Tora? Have you forgotten?”

“No,
hermana,
I haven't forgotten, and sometimes the anger makes my blood boil and I see red, and at those times I hate del Valle and want to strangle him with my bare hands. But then he brings marzipan, turns on the television, falls asleep like a little orphan, and I forgive him. If you saw him without his hat, with his four hairs plastered against his skull, he wouldn't seem so ferocious to you. But I promise you one thing: If some day the anger overcomes the forgiveness, I'll put strychnine in his
café con leche
. Or if some day I get tired of marzipan and studying English, I'll take off through that window,
hermana
, the same one you just came in by, and I'll go straight to Todos los Santos's house.”

Several times I have made notes in my notebook that I should inquire about an enigma, which is: On what do Olga and Todos los Santos actually live? Finally I get up the nerve to ask and Olguita tells me that when the savings that Sayonara had left for her sisters ran out, Sacramento took charge of the situation. Persevering in the lumber business, he managed to finance the girls' education as well as special treatment for little Chuza, who he still takes to Bucaramanga once a month to see a speech therapist, because although she's now married, she still hasn't spoken a word.

“Also,” Olguita tells me, “that good Sacramento sends Todos los Santos a voluntary monthly stipend, despite the fact, spiteful old woman, that she still hasn't forgiven him. To think the only thing that getting married did for him was to acquire the obligation of maintaining the bride's family in perpetuity. He ended up paying with interest for those seven coins he received that day when he delivered her to Todos los Santos for training!”

“Olguita also provides income,” Sacramento adds. “Just as you see her sitting there, the old girl is still an active professional who hasn't lost her original clientele. Only those who die desert her, and not even them, because she visits them at the cemetery.”

Yesterday, which was Saturday, Olga and Todos los Santos were busy preparing lunch because Sacramento, Susana, Juana, Chuza, Machuca, and Tana were visiting.

“Here I come, don Enrique! Get ready, here I come!” shouted Fideo suddenly, when we weren't paying her any attention because we were involved with the stuffed chicken and the onion salad, and when we ran to her side, we saw her make a final struggle to sit up in her hammock, call out once more to don Enrique, and die.

And yesterday the women decided that I had to say the final words of farewell at the burial, and this afternoon, a glass-weather Sunday, we dug the hole under the same
guayacán
tree and the same sky that shelters Claire. I saw many other graves in the middle of that meadow with the view of the river, barely marked with a wooden cross and maybe an epitaph: “Here lies Molly Flan,” “Finally at rest, Delia Ramos,” “N.N. new victim of the plague,” “La Costeña, love forever, your friends,” “María del Carmen Blanco alias La Fandango,” “Eternal glory for Chaparrita, heroine of the Rice Strike,” “Teresa Batista, tired of war,” “This is Melones, sister of Delia Ramos.”

When the moment arrived for me to speak, all the women looked at me as if I were the prima donna at a municipal theater performance. Then I placed a wreath of white roses in don Enrique's name on the grave and said a few words that made some of those in attendance cry but disillusioned the rest, because just as they were beginning to be inspired, I had already finished. In matters of love, I said, everything is expectations and bets, some become shipwrecked, others somehow end up sailing smoothly, and in the midst of so much dreaming and foolishness one thing is certain: Fideo got closer than anyone to what is perhaps real love. She knew how to give it, she received it with open arms, and she kept it alive until the day of her death, and hopefully also from now on, amen.

The disaster that was spreading through the streets stopped at the doors of the houses and inside them reigned something similar to everyday tranquillity, to the continuous quiet of things. It is worth saying that despite everything, water was carried in the same buckets, the stove was lit with the same wood, the canaries still sang, and life clung to the tiniest ordinary things in its search for happiness.

“The events in La Catunga sound very appalling now that we're telling them to you,” says Todos los Santos, “but at the time, just like now, they were part of our everyday routine and we didn't really notice them. Ah! So-and-so was taken by the virus. Ah! They found a common grave with so many bodies. Ah! Lino el Titi's son was tortured to repay his father's union-related sins. That's what we would say and what we still say, ah! all blessed day, but as one would say ah! I forgot to pick up the blue dress from the cleaners. The war is like that, more scandalous when you talk about it than when you are living it.”

“Because you tell it all at the same time, but you live it event by event,” clarified Olga.

A little war, blind and without name, like all of ours, came down the river and went through the streets; tranquillity took refuge in the patios of the houses and the great tribulation was borne inside everyone. The memory of Payanés and her hopes of being with him in the future was the lamp that warmed Sayonara's vast loneliness. It was the cornerstone of her thoughts, which at every turn bumped into him in the heights and depths of hope and despair, in sparks of joy and moments of mourning. Olguita and Todos los Santos watched Sayonara dedicate her days to the ceremony of waiting, busying herself with the minimal rituals of all of those who in this world do nothing but wait, trembling with impatience: thinking, praying, and cultivating a hernia from so much effort.

“But what was she waiting for? What was it exactly that she was waiting for?”

“Ay,
mi reina,
the same thing she had always been waiting for, for the month to end and for the last Friday to arrive . . .”