The Dark Bride Read online

  Also arduous was the challenge imposed upon them by the girl’s chronic skinniness, which was like that of a malnourished cat, because the more she ate the thinner she looked for her size, with hollow cheeks, scanty bust, and inordinately long extremities. Todos los Santos maintained that all of the food the girl ate went to her hair, which, at the expense of the rest of her body, grew robust and out of control, and if she were to cut it she would gain the pounds it had snatched from her.

  “It’s alive,” said Olguita, enthralled, as she combed it into braids. “And I think it bites.”

  They knew that cutting it would be a hideous crime, so they decided instead to force its owner to consume a double ration of soup, bread, and fruit, one for her and the other for her hair, which in all honesty was the only party that benefited from the overeating and ended up becoming a cascade of dark, murmuring waters.

  “Since God limited you to such poverty of flesh, you have no other choice but to study dance,” recommended Todos los Santos, resolved to find a way out by another means, and she revealed the secrets of a certain dance that wasn’t performed with footsteps, wiggling, or shaking hips but with undulation, absences, and stillness. She told the girl that Salomé had managed to bewitch John the Baptist because she knew the magic of moving without movement.

  The girl embraced those words, never needing to have them repeated, and surprised her teacher with the engrossed naturalness with which she let herself sway with a deep, measured rhythm that wasn’t cumbia or merengue, but the ebb and flow of her own blood along the clandestine paths of her body.

  “I enjoyed watching her dance,” Todos los Santos tells me. “And at the same time it terrified me, because I understood then that we were losing her. Only when she danced did she give herself license to visit the land of her own memories and to escape into the enormity of the vault that was inside her. She danced and I knew she was swimming in distant waters, as if visiting other worlds, perhaps worse, or perhaps better.”

  Perhaps worse or perhaps better, but never shared. From the beginning it was obvious that the young girl was no friend of commentary or gossip, even less so if it were about her, and that she maintained the hermeticism of a statue about her past, which made one think of the painful or guilt-ridden reasons that caused her to hide it. When they asked her where were you born, what is your name, how old are you, she slipped away with nonanswers into a silent void of memories, or sometimes just the opposite, she would overflow with words, filling the house with mindless chatter that was even more concealing than her muteness.

  “Were you born yesterday?” asked Todos los Santos. “Spit out your past, child, or it will rot inside you.”

  That negation of memory made her the pure vibration of a present that burned in front of your eyes the instant that it was contemplated, like a scene illuminated by the flash of a camera. Although at times things escaped from her, now and then she would carelessly reveal little fragments.

  “Do you like my new skirt?” asked Tana.

  “Cecilia had one just like it,” she said. “Except yellow, not green.”

  So they quickly asked her who Cecilia was, perhaps your mother, or an aunt, maybe a friend of your mother’s? Can you answer us, for the love of God, who was Cecilia?

  “What Cecilia?” was her reply, surprised at all the insistence, as if she had never uttered such a name.

  One day an old client and lover of Todos los Santos asked for a date to say good-bye; tired of going daily to the offices of the Troco to collect a perpetually delayed payment for an accident, he had decided to leave for Antioquia to help his son start a coffee farm. It was an evocative and nostalgic occasion and Todos los Santos was busy exquisitely attending to her friend while the girl, wearing her oversized blouse, devoted herself to pestering Aspirina, Tana’s dog, tying red ribbons around her ears, not paying any attention to the visit, or at least so it seemed, and without interrupting. Until at the end, when the gentleman was about to leave, she caught up with him at the door and stopped him.

  “If somewhere you run across a woman from Guayaquil that they call La Calzones,” she ventured, “tell her that her niece asked you to tell her that she’s doing fine.”

  Just like that, like a cannon shot, Todos los Santos learned that her student was happy in La Catunga and that in some part of the country she had an aunt with a vulgar nickname, by which she deduced that the girl’s vocation came to her by family tradition.

  “That explains something,” I tell her, “but not much. Really it explains almost nothing.”

  “That’s right.”

  Not even during the hardest stages of training did the student give signs of defeat or weakening; she didn’t complain, she didn’t express pleasure or sadness, heat or cold, nor did she soften even one millimeter the military discipline she had imposed upon herself, as if responding to a sense of duty that was greater than she herself. Only once did she refuse to obey, when Todos los Santos asked her to clean the pigsty that was fairly buzzing with a horrendous stench at the rear of the house.

  “I decided to became a puta so I wouldn’t have to clean up caca ever again,” grumbled the girl.

  “Well, you made a mistake. You should know that here you will earn more from washing a gringo’s laundry than from going to bed with a man. In order to survive, a woman of the profession must also apply herself as seamstress, cook, fortune-teller, and nurse, and she must not be repelled by any task that life imposes on her, no matter how humbling or difficult it may be. So go back and get the bucket and brush and make that patio clean as a whistle.”

  One night of supernatural clarity, Todos los Santos awoke in the middle of a coughing fit and, between gasps, asked for a glass of water. The girl didn’t respond because she wasn’t on her mattress but instead was sitting at the front door in her nightshirt and barefoot, framed in the moonlight and absorbed in the slow amazement descending from the highest abysses. Her perplexity was so deep, so vibrant that, touched, the madrina scoured the cellars of her memory looking for an explanation that had been with her a long time ago, before years and years of struggling and scratching for her daily bread had taught her to live without explanations.

  “Up there in the sky, the seven planets spin and sing around the Earth,” she said, pulling up a stool to sit beside the girl in the brilliant darkness. “The Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, and the Sun. Each one has a corresponding musical note, a metal from the chart of elements, and a day of the week. The moon that robs you of your sleep is made of solid silver, whistles songs in the key of C, and reigns over Mondays. The great buzzing produced by the universe is what wise men call the music of the spheres, and the primary voice in this excellent concert is our Earth’s.”

  “If that’s true, why can’t I hear it?”

  “You do hear it, you were listening to it just now when I found you.”

  “What is our Earth singing?”

  “A song of the wind, made with your breath and mine and that of all men and women, alive, dead, and yet to be born.”

  “We’d better go back inside, madrina, or all that tremendous wind will catch you and you’ll start coughing again.”

  three

  I ask what had happened in Sacramento’s life during all this time and they tell me that in the afternoons, after five o’clock, he would visit the girl and play with her.

  “Play?” I ask. “Wasn’t he a little old to be playing?”

  “But he was just a boy . . .”

  “You told me that by then he had been given his cédula de ciudadania. He must have been at least eighteen.”

  “Yes, he had his cédula, but that doesn’t mean anything. He got it four or five years early from some crooked politicians who falsify cédulas to get minors or nonexistent or dead people to vote for them in the elections.”

  Sacramento and the girl played barefoot with the other children in the dusty alleys of the barrio of the putas. London Bridge, hot potato, jump rope. But those traditional, organiz
ed games weren’t their favorites; more than anything else they liked to play war. The girl was famous on the streets for being a rough-and-tumble scoundrel. There was no one more expert than she at executing flying kicks, spitting at a greater distance, throwing bone-crushing punches, knocking the wind out of someone with a fist to the solar plexus. Other handy diversions of hers were urinating in jars, tormenting the enemy by putting chili powder in their eyes, and playing violent games of red rover.

  “The heart of the pineapple is winding and winding, is winding and winding, all the children are falling and falling,” sings Sacramento, and he’s remembering and remembering. “It was called the heart of the pineapple and it was a rough game that left everyone injured. And me? The heart of the pineapple crushed my soul.”

  The heart of the pineapple was winding, the speeding chain of children holding hands, pressing tighter and twisting until it formed a human knot, a true pineapple heart that squeezed and asphyxiated and finally ended up with a pile of crushed children on the ground. One day several older boys from another neighborhood joined the game and the pineapple, devilish and frenetic, began to twist ankles and knock heads, and more than one kid came out bruised from the crush. But the older ones weren’t there to play, they only incited the jumble and took advantage of the confusion to touch the girl, knocking her to the ground and grabbing her hair to steal kisses and to lift her skirt. She defended herself with sharp jabs and dolphin kicks and had already managed to get them off of her and to quickly escape, when Sacramento learned of the offense and a surge of wounded dignity electrified his heart.

  “At that moment I felt that the pain stabbing me was the strongest I could ever know. Boy, was I wrong. It was a child’s pain compared to those that were to come.”

  “Over the years, Sacramento grew and filled out,” tells Todos los Santos, “but at the time he was just a skinny boy, a head shorter than the girl, with wiry hair and sweet little eyes that inspired laughter and compassion. Without taking time to realize that the others were greater in number and size, he rushed at them, avenger and executor of justice, and he managed, of course, to be beaten to a pulp and left half broken.”

  “Why do you defend her,” they shouted at him as they watched him bleeding on the ground, “when she’s just going to turn out to be a puta.”

  “That’s work, stupid bastards. We were just playing!” he shouted in a voice broken with tears that even to him sounded lamentably infantile, and to try to turn around this sorry ending, he summoned up strength from his crushed pride and rushed at them again.

  “He was lucky that the second time they knocked him down with a single blow and ran off.”

  Sacramento and the girl spent hours and hours on Todos los Santos’s patio, busy stretching the last sunny days of their childhood, playing that they were already grown up and inventing and acting out episodes and dramas with dialogues, never-ending like life itself. You could say that they were growing up as they played being grown up, like when they decided to pretend to be brother and sister who were leaving home to travel around the world in search of fame and fortune, but first they had to have breakfast, let’s pretend that this is bread and that’s milk, bread, no, I was eating eggs for breakfast, now we have to pack the suitcases, you’re the woman and you have to take care of that, no, you’re the man, you take care of it and I’ll sharpen our swords, let’s pretend that these are your clothes, these are mine and this box is the trunk where we keep them, but before we go we have to give hay to our horses. These railings are our horses! Okay, but let’s pretend that yours is sick with a tumor and we have to heal him with this bandage, and so on, and from one preparatory step to another the shadows of night were falling on the patio. Todos los Santos served them real bread and real glasses of milk, the game was over and the two adventurous siblings hadn’t even crossed the threshold of their house.

  Todos los Santos started to notice that some of her clothes were missing, first stockings, then handkerchiefs embroidered with her initials, then a short-sleeved blouse, then some other article.

  “In which trunk have the traveling brother and sister put my silk stockings?” she grew tired of asking, and as they swore that they hadn’t seen her stockings, pillowcases and hand towels began to disappear.

  One morning, as she was cleaning the kitchen, Todos los Santos perceived a strong, rancid odor whose origin she couldn’t pinpoint no matter how diligently she rummaged through boxes looking for rotten food and moved furniture to see if it was coming from dead mice. The following day the odor was even more intense and the madrina stood up on a stool to clean off the top shelves, from which she took down a reeking basket filled with dirty rags. Rags that weren’t rags; they were her lost stockings, her blouses, her pillowcases, and her handkerchiefs, twisted into knots, wadded up and stained with dried blood.

  “Girl, come here!”

  “What happened now, madrina?”

  “What is this?”

  “Who knows?”

  “This is the clothing that I was missing.”

  “How nice that you found it.”

  “Who stuffed it up there all dirty?”

  “You probably did and you just don’t remember,” said the girl as she scurried away.

  “Girl, come here!”

  “Yes, madrina?”

  “Tell me why this clothing is stained with blood.”

  “Because of a cut I have on my arm that bleeds a lot.”

  “Show it to me.”

  “It’s already healed now, madrina. It was here, on my knee.”

  “Wasn’t it on your arm?”

  “One on my knee and another on my arm.”

  “But you don’t have any scabs or scars . . .”

  “It was a pretty small cut.”

  “Then why did it bleed so much . . .?”

  “It was very deep, I think.”

  “Could it have been a bullet wound?”

  “More likely from a knife, a very sharp one . . .”

  “Did you get it in the war? Or was it the police?”

  Then the girl covered her face and moved away to cry and Todos los Santos, after closing the kitchen door to be alone with her, sat the girl on her lap and began to repeat the same complicated saga about the pollination of flowers that she herself had heard from the nuns dozens of years earlier and under similar circumstances, with the protagonist of a bee who buzzed around a rose to accomplish an incomprehensible and loving mission, in the midst of a great anatomical mixing of stamens, corollas, and pistils, until by some miracle of God, who is merciful, finally, at the end of all this dancing, a beautiful peach was born.

  “God’s baby or the bee’s?” asked the girl.

  “The bee and the flower’s baby. Something like that is happening to you. Now do you understand? That’s why you shouldn’t feel ashamed about your blood or hide it in a basket as you have done, even though they tell you it stains and poisons. What you have to do is collect it every month in some little cloths that I will give you and show you how to wash with warm water so they won’t smell bad, and you shouldn’t worry because it’s something natural that happens to all women. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, madrina,” said the girl, starting to cry again, but this time with more momentum.

  “Then why are you crying?”

  “It hurts, madrina, every time the blood comes out. My insides burn. Do you think I’m injured inside? Do you think the bee you were talking about got inside me and stung me there, inside? That’s what it feels like, madrina, like a wasp sting.”

  “It’s a wound that opens in all women once a month and that never heals because it’s a wound of love. But you’ll see, when you start going with men, how much happiness the red roses inside you will bring you every time they appear, because it will be the signal that you aren’t pregnant. I can already see you, like the others, counting the days that your blood is late in staining your clothes.”

  “Does it happen to men too?”

  “No. It
is God’s will that it only happens to women. That’s why we love more, too, because our insides hurt.”

  “Like Jesus’ heart?”

  “Yes. Just like that.”

  Then the girl stopped crying, wiped her nose on her sleeve, and went back out to the patio to resume playing brother and sister, who were now facing the problem of not having any blankets for the tremendously cold nights they would encounter on their long journey, and from that day forward the sister adventurer could look for fame and fortune without panicking at the onset of her menstrual cycle, which was no longer a sin that had to be hidden on the top shelf, and she learned how to use white cloths that she washed later in warm water, scrubbed with a pumice stone and hung to dry in the sun, knowing that if she ever had a daughter, she would calm her by patiently explaining the mystery of how the blood that appears in her underwear, which is the bee’s blood, makes it possible for fruit to be born from a flower.

  “Do you remember the treasure chest?” Todos los Santos asks Sacramento.

  Frequently the two children would entertain themselves with a cookie box that they called the treasure chest. It contained a delightful collection of items such as broken necklaces, buttons, loose stones, old brooches, and fairy-tale earrings, and it made the children’s eyes shine with sparkles of emerald green, ruby red, French pink, depending on the color of the beads they were looking at.

  “How wonderful!” exclaimed the girl, completely absorbed, and she would begin to tell Sacramento lies, as big as a house, that he would pretend to believe.

  “She made up that the box contained the jewels that Santa Catalina had been given by her father the king, and she made me promise that I would defend them with my life, property, and honor against anyone who tried to steal them.”

  Sacramento swore on his knees, she tapped him on the shoulder a couple times with a sword that was really a stick and named him Knight of the Order of the Holy Diamond. He was ashamed that the older kids would see him playing like that and he wouldn’t let her name him a knight unless there were no witnesses; after all, he was already a man who worked and supported himself and he found that game—like so many things of hers—shamefully simple. Poor Sacramento, he never suspected that that title would be, by a long shot, the most honorable that he would ever have bestowed upon him in his life.