The Dark Bride Page 17

  “Yes, she made the gesture,” she interrupts, “and from there on she let herself drown in indifference. It’s better not to undertake those defiant stances worthy of bullfighters, they’re so exhausting they just leave us empty.”

  “What about Sayonara and the Widow? Were they ever friends?” I test the terrain cautiously to see if Machuca suspects the close relationship that existed between them.

  “There was something between them, but I never really knew what, because it wasn’t friendship. I couldn’t say. It was more like mutual compassion, as if they shared some dark, bitter secret. Only God knows! Too bad he doesn’t exist.”

  “Only God knows,” I agree. “Well, Machuca, if you’ll forgive me, I would like to speak with the Soldier’s Widow. Just because of her name she deserves my respect, and besides, she must have a lot of things to say.”

  “All she says is Hail Marys as she counts off the beads of her rosary, because she took refuge in a cloistered convent, the Clarisas’ convent at Villa de Leyva, in Boyacá. She finally found her true destiny, which she had misplaced, but which was right there at the end waiting for her. You’ll find her very happy there, sucking the Holy Child’s tunic night and day, which is the only thing that she knows how to do. They say that the Clarisas refused to accept her because of her past, but in the face of the miracle of influence and money there is no door that can’t be opened, nor any Clarisa that can resist. They say her family paid good money to lock her up with her shame, to grow old behind walls that are heavier than tombstones. So you see, you’re not going to be able to get any further with that story, because what the Widow knows is cloistered right along with her.”

  twenty

  “You have beautiful eyes,” Dr. Antonio María Flórez said to Sayonara the third or fourth time she entered his office.

  “What do you mean by that, Doc?” she asked, shaking the blue brilliance of her hair and looking at him suspiciously. “Just that, that you have beautiful eyes. Your problem is you can’t stand people saying only that to you.”

  Olguita tells me that Sayonara couldn’t understand when men weren’t crazy in love with her. She couldn’t accept that there was anyone who wasn’t smitten by her, accustomed as she was to awakening love at first sight and stirring up desire with the mere brush of her skirt. If a man appeared and shuffled the cards for a game that didn’t involve passion, she would focus her interest on him for that simple fact, watching him without believing, scrutinizing him from head to foot in an attempt to decipher the mechanisms that made him immune, then she would gnaw and scratch at his indifference with the claws of a rat, until she gouged and destroyed it. To finish the job she would deploy all the splendid plumage of a seductive female, because nothing unsettled her more than not unsettling others.

  “It didn’t happen only with humans,” reports Todos los Santos. “It was her stubborn way with all God’s creatures. She was so pampered in those days, and so haughty! My poor girl, she never suspected how hard things really are . . .”

  Sayonara the dispossessed, the child prostitute of Tora, orphaned and dark-skinned, wandered the alleyways of her poor neighborhood in no particular hurry to get anywhere, ignoring the loneliness of stray dogs and the smell of fried fish and urine that enveloped everyone else, with a battery-operated radio in her hand and humming the romantic ballads of La Emisora Melodía, eating sweet oranges with clean bites and tossing the peels on the ground, sipping cool beer straight from the bottle and kicking the bottle cap down the street, freshly bathed and with her hair dripping wet, decked out in the only bit of elegance she knew, that narrow skirt with the slit up the side and the Chinese silk blouse with red and gold embroidery, and casually parting the crowd that was laboring under the hot sun on market day, just like a Moorish queen, idle and naked beneath her seven veils, along the fresh water-lined paths of her Alhambra.

  Lacking holy oil, she was anointed with the arrogance of her cheap perfume; instead of a robe and crown, she paraded the impudence of her dark skin, and from the pedestal of her worn-out high heels, she treated the entire universe like a conquered vassal at her feet. If shooting stars came down from the sky, it was to bring her news of other wanderings, and for whom, if not for her, did the night watchman announce his rounds every hour with two mournful notes of his whistle? At dawn the robust aroma of coffee seeped forth from the pot and traveled to her bed to awaken her, and if the tuberoses disrupted the afternoon tranquillity with their oily smell of resurrection, they did it only to see her smile. Wandering troubles seeking consolation approached to drink her tears, the mist that flooded the valley cloaked her like a bride’s veil, cat’s eyes glowed phosphorescently when they looked at her, the days passed slowly to caress her at length, and if the great Río Magdalena took the trouble to funnel the abundance of its waters past Tora, it was only for the privilege of washing her feet.

  “It wasn’t her fault,” says Fideo protectively. “So many people swore that they loved her that she believed it. Starting with you, doña Todos los Santos. You were the first one to confuse her.”

  “I did what I could to get her to open her eyes,” Todos los Santos responds in self-defense. “One day I heard her say that the mockingbird sang so sweetly and so incessantly because it sang for her. Ay, my conceited child, I reprimanded her. Don’t aspire to be a gold coin and don’t have the impudence of wanting the world to love you; understand once and for all that putas are the other side of the tapestry, the rough side of life, and that it is the dark half of the moon that shines on us. Us? We are backroom tenants. They venerate us if they see us glow in the background and in the dark, but they squash us if we attempt to emerge into the light of day. Don’t forget, girl, the great truth of amor de café: we putas are always at war.”

  “At war against who, madrina?” asked Sayonara, acting as if she didn’t know.

  “Against everyone, girl. Against everyone.”

  The madrina warned her, having guessed the harsh reality that the future was sure to bring: Girl, things aren’t like that. But a pretty girl doesn’t have to pay any mind and Sayonara kept strolling through life on a red carpet.

  Things aren’t like that, but today I suspect that Todos los Santos, the wise old woman, the holy celestine, wasn’t right. That for once she was wrong because her young disciple, in the splendid egoism of her beauty, did come to be the very center of that whole universe, the privileged object of all love.

  “Forgive me for saying this, Todos los Santos,” I venture, “but in that specific topic, in that precise moment, it wasn’t you, but she, who was right.”

  twenty-one

  Hired by the mayor, the gynecologist Antonio María Flórez had arrived in town with his wife, Albita Lucía, and their four children almost a year after the fiery riot that had reduced the clinic to rubble. When he saw the disastrous state of the facilities that were supposed to serve as his offices, instead of wasting time seeking official assistance or submitting bureaucratic claims, he set about the task of reconstructing the place brick by brick with his own hands to expedite his plans. He had decided to eliminate the coercive mechanism of the health card—which had already been abolished de facto by the riled-up women—and offer instead free, voluntary medical attention for the prostitutas. He had come to Tora to replace the previous charlatans in white lab coats, driven out of town by a ferocious collective vengeance, which one day took the form of a cruel joke and the following day became a threat or a serious hint, poisoning each minute of their lives until they were run off.

  When he first arrived, Dr. Antonio María was the object of similar treatment. The girls, convinced that he too had come to make a fortune building up his business of disrespect and extortion, welcomed him the very first night by fouling the door to his house with the fetid corpse of a hanged cat, but that didn’t frighten him off, nor did the campaign of vicious rumors that spread through the pueblo, saying he was a faggot, a squealer, an atheist, and a pimp. They circulated odious lies, that his feet stank, that he u
sed to beat his mother mercilessly, and that he was so miserly that his children were on the verge of starvation. But Dr. Antonio María, a good man who was unscathed by the slander, continued diligently with his modest work as an amateur carpenter and lent a deaf ear to all the foolish babble. He was so tidy in appearance and in character that no one seriously believed the rumors about his reeking feet; since he turned out to be an orphan, the one about hitting his mother was spoiled; he admitted his atheism with such pride that no one dared to reproach him for it; the generous aromas that emanated from his wife’s kitchen when she cooked made people doubt the deprivation of his children; and so forth. One after another the false accusations were eroded away without his even having to deny them.

  But the anger of the women of La Catunga, goaded by the fresh memory of the disgrace they had suffered, refused to give up the sweetness of their revenge. The doctor had finished the basic construction stage and was beginning to install the windows in his clinic. One morning señora Albita Lucía was on her way to the main plaza, when from a high window the dirty contents of a chamber pot were emptied on her head. The affront was excessive even for the hardened patience of Dr. Antonio María, who would surely not have thought twice about it if it had fallen on him. But it was as if someone had punched him, this attack against the curly red hair of his wife, an abundantly freckled and vivacious woman with white, perfumed skin whom he adored as the sun of his days. So he made the instant, irrevocable decision to leave within twenty-four hours the town that had greeted them with such hostility.

  They were going to leave on the noon train the following day. The doctor spent a night traumatized by the remaining bitterness of the undertaking that he would be abandoning before he even began it, and in the morning, while his family finished packing their recently unpacked trunks, he went to stand in the frame where the door to his clinic would have been installed, wearing his doctor’s coat and with his stethoscope around his neck.

  “Spread the word that at eleven-thirty I will hold my first and last consultations,” he said to some passersby, and he didn’t have to wait more than a quarter of an hour for patients to begin to appear.

  It was then that Antonio María Flórez saw what would make him decide not to leave and would cause him to stay in Tora for the next ten consecutive years, until he became almost on a par with Santa Catalina, a saintly benefactor of the barrio of La Catunga: some unmistakable red pustules soaked in infectious pus and a few small, soft tumors, with gummy elasticity, on the thighs of three of the five women he examined.

  “It is treponema pallidum,” he declared. “This town is going to be consumed by syphilis.”

  The weight of that diagnosis reduced the seriousness of the incident with the chamber pot and the other injuries in the doctor’s eyes, and it caused him to reflect on the fact that after all it is enough to speak words of forgiveness for it to be granted.

  “I forgive you all,” he said loudly, and raised his arms to the sky as he hurried to his house along streets that the fierce midday sun had left without a single soul.

  He convinced his wife of the need to unpack once again, he enrolled his children in the only lay school in the pueblo, and from then on he dedicated all of his time to helping and consoling the women infected with the illness, advising the healthy ones on how to avoid infection and combating venereal disease with the tenacity of a fanatic, like that which Savonarola would have launched against the carnal splendor of the Renaissance.

  Soon he realized that the elimination of pressure and blackmail had resulted in the surprising consequence that more than half of the women refused to visit the gynecologist’s office.

  “Why, Doctor,” I asked Antonio Maria Flórez, when I had the opportunity to meet him. “How do you explain the fact that so many wouldn’t come?”

  “The majority out of fatalism, because they were convinced that no one dies before his time. They believed in those kinds of things, in deep-rooted, commonly held tenets, like fate is up to God, or when it’s someone’s turn it’s his turn. I arrived in Tora when the prostitutas were still queens and señoras of position, but that didn’t mean that deep down they didn’t have a strong awareness of living in sin. And since they took for granted that sin implies punishment, they saw venereal infection as a debt they didn’t have to get rid of, because in some way it was deserved. They dealt with the subject of infection like Russian roulette: They went to bed with this man or that one like someone who puts a revolver to his temple, and they pulled the trigger to see if they were spared or got a bullet. They couldn’t grasp the idea that God could forgive them. Once I heard Fandango say, when she found out that her best friend had contracted syphilis, that now it was time to pay for a whole life of being in disharmony with heaven.”

  “It’s curious, Doctor, that women so easygoing about sex would be so panicked by a gynecologist,” I say to him.

  “I find it fairly logical. To begin with, there is no one more full of mystery than a prostituta, and her state of health is one of the secrets she hides with greatest care because her livelihood depends on others believing that she’s healthy. But there’s something else that I don’t know how to classify, and which constitutes the main obstacle: The gynecologist has to do with her thinking about what she is doing, treating it rationally, and they can’t bear that. They work in prostitution as blindly as a man condemned to the firing squad who prefers to be blindfolded before he’s shot. Also, to practice it they make use of faculties that are beyond reason, as I suppose happens with witchcraft. It is something that happens to them down there, under their skirts, under the sheets, always far from their faces. The further from their faces and their brains, the better. Many of them hate being kissed, especially on the mouth or the breasts, while from the waist down they give the client license to act more or less as he pleases. When they fall in love with a man, they incorporate their whole beings into the sexual act, but generally they behave like split beings: From the waist up is the soul and from the waist down, business. You must understand that as a gynecologist, you are the eye that sees, the one who uncovers what is hidden, warns of the risks, removes the blindfold with regard to sicknesses. That’s why at first so many stayed away from me, because whether or not they wanted to, I forced them to integrate the two halves of their bodies through a process of reflection and acknowledgment that I’ve always felt was very painful for them. But it’s normal; you can be a bullfighter or a fire-eater if you accept death as fate, but as soon as you put prudence and common sense in the mix, you flee in terror. The same thing happens with them. I think that’s why for months my presence was much more uncomfortable for so many of them than that of the previous doctors, who simply swindled them, that is, they made a pact of blind complicity with the women. So great was their need to deceive themselves that they took pleasure in deceiving me, and for that sometimes it was enough for them to resort, a half hour before their appointment, to the old trick of bathing themselves by sitting on a washbasin, with warm water, lava soap, bicarbonate of soda, and a lot of lemon. With this procedure they cleaned the secretions and eliminated the odor, so that I would find everything in order and go on to the next. Why would they go to the trouble of deceiving me? You tell me, if the era of obligatory consultations and cards was over. I think they did it simply to avoid facing the truth. The women of La Catunga treated me very cordially, very affectionately, but they became nervous when they lay down on the examining table in my office. Petroleum had to grow scarce in the area and prostitution had to decline as a business before they would seek me out without apprehension, truly driven to heal themselves, to remove their bodies from the orbit of sickness, and to enroll it, so to speak, into the desired realm of health.”

  Dr. Antonio María was convinced that this peculiar mental universe of the prostitutas of Tora was directly rooted in their Christian upbringing, because as he told me, among the Pipatón Indians a different attitude could be perceived. They sold their bodies to eat and to feed their children and
that seemed to be sufficient justification for them, without getting so many knots in their heads.

  “The pipatonas were my most assiduous patients,” he tells me, “taking into consideration, as far as I knew, that they were also seeing their own medicine men, relying on both my drugs and their traditional cures. What is certain is that among them the illness struck with much less virulence than among the rest.”

  They had a clear and unfettered view of a profession that they entered and left according to their needs, and they didn’t make a great distinction between the man who paid them to possess them and the one who, outside of prostitution, possessed them without paying. They needed to survive and that was that. Good, for them, was to stay alive; and bad, to die; they didn’t have a sexual ethic any more complicated than that, or, more precisely, they didn’t adhere so much to an ethic as to a sort of biological determinism, according to which woman was woman, prostituta or not, and man was man, no matter who he was. It amused me to learn that for the Pipatón women the male body was comprised of head, arms, legs, trunk, and little trunk, and the female, of head, arms, legs, trunk, and for-the-little-trunk.

  Dr. Antonio María, who wasn’t about to sit around waiting for a frenzy of cankers and eruptions to sprout up around him, took on the task of visiting house to house to pull the negligent and stubborn out of hiding. Among these latter was Sayonara, who on the day of the uprising, while doing everything possible to make the flames lick the mustaches of the impostors, had sworn on the holy cross of Christ that she would never again let a doctor, fake or documented, put his hands on her, even if tuberculosis had her spitting blood or leprosy reduced her to stumps. So, when she happened to see through the partially open window that Dr. Antonio María was knocking on her door in the mourning tie he wore every day in honor of the marshal Antonio José de Sucre, murdered more than a century earlier, with his leather bag filled with implements, medicinal herbs, and bottles, and with his face shaded by the wide hat he wore to protect himself from the sun, she slipped out through the patio, and if she didn’t jump onto the roof to fly away, it was only because Todos los Santos’s hand managed to grab her by the ankle and hold on to her tenaciously.