The Dark Bride Read online

  All five were installed full time and for life in Todos los Santos’s house, all five having appeared out of nowhere, all swarthy, short-statured, and long-haired, one behind the other like those lacquered wooden dolls from Russia that you keep opening and inside you find another identical but smaller, and another and still another, in a descending line until you reach the tiniest, which in this case was little Chuza.

  When she learned of sweet Claire’s fierce death, a shadow, like a dead bird, fell across Sayonara’s gaze and her expression froze into a mask, as if she had been told of a shame that was too much her own, that in some unsuspected way had something to do with her.

  “My mother and my brother committed suicide,” she said suddenly, five or six days later, making those who heard her shudder. “Until then my pueblo had known nothing about suicide; it had never occurred to a single one of those people to die that way. And suddenly two happened one after the other, with only a few hours between them, and both in my family.”

  After a period of silence she added: “I loved my brother very much.”

  Todos los Santos asked nothing, and she tells me that she had several reasons for doing so. First, because there is pain that doesn’t allow questions or offer any answers. Second, to respect the memories of others, which are sacrosanct and private, and to avoid probing into the hidden story that had always been guessed at yet still eluded them, as if calling attention to it was a way of invoking it. And because of jealousy, I would add: I don’t think that she wanted to admit the existence of another family and other love, different from her own, in Sayonara’s life.

  “I hadn’t even been born when my mother died.” The girl didn’t make it any easier to find out much about her life, given her penchant for dropping false clues.

  So the adopted mother didn’t say anything to her adopted daughter but secretly began to watch Sayonara’s every step, especially in the shifting hours between night and dawn, and if she saw the girl heading in the direction of the train tracks, she would take her by the arm, hastily inventing some pretext, and accompany her.

  “I was afraid that her blood would pull her and throw her under the train,” Todos los Santos confesses to me. “Ways of dying are inherited, you know? Like eye color or shoe size.”

  Like Todos los Santos and her friends, I too came to know in a single sentence of the existence of Sayonara’s mother and brother and of their suicide. In a single instant they appeared, tied me to the enigma of their death, and disappeared, forcing me to spend that night awake, looking toward the river from the window of my room at the Hotel Pipatón. The formerly great Río de la Magdalena seemed to me like a long absence: slow, black, full of dredging boats—could those brown monsters that sank their feet in the water be dredgers?—and other metallic and orthopedic apparatuses that turned it into an extension of the refinery, which spread across the opposite bank, rusting the night sky with the perpetual combustion pouring from its tall smokestacks. An incongruent smell, feminine and sweet, came from those iron pipes. Don Pitula, the taxi driver who guided me around Tora—and who worked as a welder at the refinery for twenty-five years—had told me that afternoon that the perfumed smoke came from a factory that made aromatics, where they processed petroleum into shampoo, facial creams, and other cosmetics.

  “The factory that smells the best is the most poisonous,” he told me. “Working there is like signing a death sentence.”

  That frivolous, lethal fragrance seeped into my hotel room, a toxic effluvium of cheap cologne that rose through my nasal passages to my brain, where it sketched the image of Sayonara. Without ever having known or seen her, I had been trying to decipher her for several weeks, and with some degree of certainty, it had seemed until then, although perhaps I was forcing the missing pieces of her character a little to make them fit into a coherent whole. And now the specters of a mother and a brother killed by their own wills had made their brutal appearance, hopelessly exploding the puzzle that I had thus far managed to halfway assemble. Who were they? Why had they taken their lives? What deadly vocation had weighed so heavily on them? The day before, they hadn’t existed in my awareness, and now they had loaded the image of Sayonara with a past so final, so turbulent that it threatened to bury the fragile blossom of her present beneath a river of sand. That mother and brother fell upon me from out of nowhere, bringing with them a worrisome guest I had not anticipated, at least not yet and not in such an excessive dose: the breath of death, which blended that night with the cloying smell of the aromatics factory.

  “The big ugly bird hovered over Sayonara,” Fideo told me, referring to death, with the lucidity and the edge that come only from the mouth of the dying. “There was no doubt about that. But she knew how to handle it. Don’t pluck out my eyes, she commanded it, and the creature kept still. It didn’t leave her alone, but it didn’t harm her.”

  I learned that Todos los Santos was soon able to forget about her vigilance and fear with respect to a suicidal instinct in Sayonara, who seemed instead to be growing happier and more confident in the goodness of life, and about whom nothing aroused suspicion that she might belong to the group of those who are not comfortable on this side of heaven. If it was indeed true, as Fideo believed, that she carried the predatory bird of death on her shoulder, then it was also true that she had learned to feed it from her hand.

  twelve

  Meanwhile, what was Sacramento up to? He was setting a course, together with his friend Payanés, along a rough road of old iron and broken machinery, which the birds resented and the vegetation didn’t take long to devour. Ready now for the labor market with their hands and feet hardened with calluses, they had begun their pilgrimage to the Tropical Oil Company’s famous Camp 26, which rose up from the indifferent jungle like a great industrial city, gray and repetitive in its metallic roar and closed off by barbed wire. Armed watchmen kept safe from any threat its treasure of beams and towers, machines, turbogenerators, gears, boilers, and fire-fighting units.

  “I don’t like this, hermano, it looks like a prison,” protested Sacramento when they first saw it from afar.

  “Cheer up and stop complaining,” responded Payanés, “because that is the face of progress. Learn it well, because that’s how every last corner of the world is going to look in fifty years: total development and entertainment for mankind.”

  A recruiter just like the one that had rejected them a year before hired them on this time, as cuñero’s helpers—Payanés with card number 29-170 and Sacramento with the next, 29-171.

  “This is the most beautiful number, the one that belongs to my lucky star,” Payanés said to Sacramento. “My mother died on the twenty-ninth, a blessed day.”

  “And the other numbers you were assigned, one, seven, and zero, do they also mean something?”

  “Of course, man, zero is the universe, the symbol of eternity, and besides it’s round like an asshole.”

  “And the one and the seven?”

  “They’re extra; they don’t represent anything.”

  “I would have liked for my card to have had a five. Five is my favorite number.”

  “You don’t have any reason to complain, yours has the number twenty-nine also, the anniversary of my blessed mother.”

  “But I didn’t even know her . . .”

  “You can be sure that she would have loved you like a son.”

  “Oh, well then, if that’s so . . . ,” said Sacramento, half consoled.

  To have a contract at any of the camps, and particularly at 9, 22, and 26, the ones that produced the greatest number of barrels, was like knowing the password to heaven. There was no greater honor imaginable for a man, no better guarantee, and most of all it meant having found a port in the storm. “Now we are salaried employees,” they repeated over and over, pronouncing the words with greater pride than if they had been named kings of Rome. In the middle of that vast, drifting humanity, to become a petrolero meant salvation.

  Their joy was so great at finally having bee
n awarded their cards and the salary that qualified them as members of the working class, as part of the heroic union of petroleros, they didn’t even realize that they didn’t know what a cuñero was, much less a cuñero’s helper.

  “Look for skinny Emilia and ask for Abelino Robles, the gang leader. You just obey the orders he gives you, even if he tells you to put panties on a mermaid.”

  They assured and reassured him that of course, he could count on them, and they sailed off filled with enthusiasm, and without understanding much about exactly where they were going or what they would be doing.

  “Can you tell me who skinny Emilia is? Where I can find her?” Sacramento asked a nearby worker with a kind face.

  “Did you hear that?” the worker said to the others around him. “This guy’s dying to meet Emilia.”

  “You don’t want to fuck her because she’ll rip your dick off,” someone shouted, laughing, as the group walked away.

  Since skinny Emilia turned out not to be skinny or even a woman, but one of the drilling towers in Camp 26, Sacramento and Payanés reddened with embarrassment at their naiveté and decided that from then on they would do things on their own, opening their eyes wide and biting their tongues before asking anything. Emilia, the oldest and most venerated tower in the oil territory—a 1912 Gardner Denver—stood solidly in the center of the camp like a ritual obelisk. Pachydermic and anachronistic but also imposing and all-powerful, Emilia was brutal in the merciless obsession with which she twisted her diamond bit to tear into the earth’s heart, and famous not only for having worked day and night for decades without ever failing but also for her implacable temperament. It was said that if you handled her with intelligence and in full command of your five senses she treated you well, but the clumsy and the careless she made pay with their lives, as had already happened on two occasions, first with a pipe capper who she let fall fifty feet like a dove without wings, then, years later, a welder who she cut in two with the fulminating whip of a high-tension wire that suddenly broke without warning.

  “Look at her carefully,” Abelino Robles, the veteran cuñero, advised them. “Not only does she spin furiously, but the smallest part of her weighs as much as a man. All it takes is for you to drop a wrench on your foot to put you out of commission permanently, not to mention putting a hand where it doesn’t belong.”

  “This Emilia; I’ve never seen such an incredible beast,” said Payanés, impressed, looking at her deeply and lovingly as if she were a pagan temple, delicately caressing the bluntness of her iron beams and unconsciously making a pledge of fidelity that would be honored without fail from that first encounter until the day death parted them.

  “So, Payanés is dead?” I ask.

  “Emilia is dead.”

  The alliance between the two of them was sealed that very night, when Payanés was approached by a wandering peddler who professed some skill in the art of tattooing and offered him the painless inscription of the name of the woman he loved anywhere on his body.

  “Put ‘Emilia’ here, on my chest. And put a little drawing beside it.”

  “How about a dagger or a swallow?”

  “No, no daggers, and no swallows either.”

  “What about a rose?”

  “That’s it, a rose; a rose with a thorn and a drop of blood.”

  “The rose didn’t turn out very well, it looked more like a carnation,” Sacramento would say later, when he saw the drawing engraved forever in blue and red ink on his friend’s left pectoral. “The drop does look very realistic. But the ‘Emilia’ . . . the ‘Emilia,’ I don’t know, Payanés, it seems risky. If they change your position you won’t be able to take off your shirt even to take a bath.”

  “They’re not going to change my position,” asserted Payanés, before he fell asleep in his hammock. “I’m going to be the best cuñero in the whole country, you’ll see.”

  For three days—the three days of apprenticeship—the two young men carried out the humble task of being the cuñero’s helpers, which consisted of clearing the mud off the platform as they watched, not missing a thing, Abelino Robles and another seasoned worker execute the job of petrolero with the precision of watchmakers and the mental concentration of lion tamers and with Emilia’s monumental and furious gears seemingly calmed by their touch.

  “Now it’s your turn,” announced Abelino Robles at the beginning of the fourth day.

  “Let’s go!” shouted Payanés animatedly to Sacramento. “Let’s put the panties on this mermaid.”

  The drilling pipe, which needed to penetrate the earth to a depth of three thousand feet, would grow longer as the cuñeros, from a low platform, screwed on more and more lengths of fifty-foot pipe. In order to do this, Sacramento would have to grip the new piece of pipe, which was hanging vertically through the center of the tower, with a precision wrench known as the scorpion, while Payanés capped the string of buried pipes with a 130-pound steel crown fitted with special bolts. Each time the bit wore out they had to remove the fitted pipes and disassemble them, reversing the fitting process.

  “You’re going to work as a team and each of you is going to depend on the other,” the veteran fitter advised them. “Sacramento, if you slip with the scorpion, the pipe will sever your friend’s hands; Payanés, if you don’t fit the band well, the pipes will slide and the scorpion will spin around, kick Sacramento, and mess him up.”

  From the beginning Payanés showed natural ability, and even a certain happiness and ease of execution, and he proudly displayed on his naked torso, bathed in sweat, the throbbing petrolero’s rose, with its sharp thorn and drop of blood. Meanwhile, Sacramento seemed afraid and uncertain, gripped with nervous tension, as if counting every minute of every hour remaining before their shift ended without accident.

  “Don’t worry, hermano, I won’t let you down,” he shouted to Payanés above the deafening racket every now and then, as if to assure himself that what he was saying was true.

  After eight hours of uninterrupted exertion, the whistle blew and the pair abandoned skinny Emilia to head for the barracks, arm in arm, exhausted, muddy from head to toe, and as giddy as a couple of boys who had just won a soccer match.

  For only three weeks Sacramento was able to enjoy this occupational happiness, which for him meant, above all else, the possibility of getting closer to Sayonara. The illness, which had already infected him with its germ and dogged his steps, then fell upon him with all of its fury. The first manifestation was a dull, nagging pain, which made him dizzy and which he attributed to the eight hours a day that he spent focused on the bit.

  “My thoughts were growing more and more confused and my love for Sayonara more tormented, and I blamed it on the noise of the machinery. But even when I had moved away from the drilling equipment, its roar pursued me; I heard it all night and its vibration rattled me to the bone.

  “Later I lost my appetite and even when I’d had nothing to eat I vomited yellow, watery bile, for which I also found a justification, this time in the hardened balls of cold rice with lard that were passed around at lunchtime; they were so compact and inedible that we would use them as soccer balls.”

  Then he was overtaken by a waxy paleness and a pain in his temples, and a rising fever made its appearance. Sacramento, incapable of working and declared contagious by the medical staff, was moved to the camp’s neat white hospital, where he came to share space and destinies with other lucky souls who were cured in fifteen or twenty days, and also with others less fortunate who were being consumed by mountain leprosy, malaria, intestinal infection, or tuberculosis and who represented nothing more to the company than financial loss.

  Forgotten in that antiseptic corner of industrial paradise, Sacramento defended himself from the invading parasite with all of his available energy, and the ferocity of the internal combat began to produce extremely high fevers, combined with shivering and a trembling of his bones, which creaked in self-defense.

  “I’m turning black, hermano,” he said t
o a nurse called Demetrio.

  “It’s the melancholic fluids that are spreading through your body,” explained Demetrio, who knew nothing of diplomacy when it came time to explain to his patients the symptoms of their illnesses.

  “The black fluids, you mean?”

  “Yes. They flow, little by little, blackening the liver, the spleen, the brain, the red blood cells. Well, just about everything; they turn everything black.”

  “Hermano, I’m burning alive,” Sacramento complained to his friend Payanés, who came to visit whenever he could. “I’m burning with fever and with love and I’m roasting over a low fire. Don’t I look black to you?”

  “Black, no; just a little yellow. But it’ll go away. Sooner or later everybody gets over it.”

  Despite Payanés’s forced words of comfort, Sacramento felt weaker and weaker, more diminished, while a microscopic but audacious enemy was growing and multiplying inside him, assuming the frightening shapes of rings, clubs, and bunches of grapes.

  Twice a day apathetic nurses went by the beds of those they called convalescents, among whom—with who knows what criteria—Sacramento had been placed. They performed their duties on the run, without paying much attention to anyone or asking any questions, distributing the only available medicine: quinine for fevers, aspirin for pain, brown mixture for infections, and white mixture for unknown ills.

  “Don’t get too excited about the medicine, it’s more toxic than the illness is,” Demetrio would say to Sacramento as he gave him his ration of quinine. “Look at these pills, they’re pink and round like women. And hurtful like women.”

  Like a bad actor, Sacramento would perform the same brief, equivocal scene every morning. He would stand up on his trembling legs, splash water on his face, halfheartedly run a comb through his tangled hair, and announce that he was cured, that he wanted to be taken to skinny Emilia because he was ready to go back to work.