The Dark Bride Read online

  “I’m leaving Tora, girl,” he announced. “I am going to sign up as a petrolero to come back bronzed by the sun, shaggy and with a lot of money, so the mujeres of La Catunga won’t ever laugh at me again.”

  “Okay,” she said, “we were going far away; I was going to be a petrolero too and we were going through the jungle with our horses and . . . ”

  “No more silly games; this time it’s for real. Adiós.”

  The girl just stood there against the falling sunset, devoid of sorrow or glory, featuring an invisible sun with insipid tones of gray and brown, and watched Sacramento’s tiny figure as it moved away into the distance, along the edge of the Tropical Oil Company’s fence, toward the point at which the underbrush swallowed the path, where the pueblo ended and the Carare-Opón jungle began.

  “Adiós, hermano mío. I hope you come back rich and powerful!” she shouted, waving her hand, and it was the first of many times that he would hear her say good-bye without a trace of sadness in her voice.

  five

  The girl became an adult on that afternoon of insipid twilight when Sacramento departed. In accordance with the new name she had been given, she was no longer called Girl, rather Sayonara. She was never again seen engaged in childish brawls in the barrio, and if from time to time she opened the treasure chest, it was to adorn herself with jewelry and gaze at herself in the mirror.

  “The mirror, always looking at yourself in the mirror,” Todos los Santos reproached her, seeing her absorbed and distant as if it were she who had left Tora. “You should know that the mirror is not an object of confidence because it is inhabited by Vanity and Deceit, two evil creatures that swallow everything they reflect. He who looks a lot in the mirror will end up spending a lot of time alone.”

  She no longer paid attention even to her friend Christ, or to Aspirina, who anxiously followed her everywhere; nor to the conversations of las mujeres on the patio, which she as a girl had followed as if hypnotized and without missing a single word.

  “ ‘Run along, girl! Go play, adult problems aren’t to be heard by tender ears,’ that’s how we had to shoo her away, but later came a time when she wouldn’t join us even when we especially invited her.”

  One day in May her state of stupefaction reached such a point that she threw to the pigs, instead of potato peels, the rose petals they had prepared for the passing of the Virgin in the procession.

  “That’s what you call throwing pearls before swine,” joked the others. “If you continue in this manner, you’re going to end up throwing potato peels to the Virgin.”

  Only her hair seemed to keep her company during that period of isolated adolescence when she could spend the entire day bringing out its shine with a brush and arranging it into all kinds of styles: crazy woman, a Phrygian cap, Medusa, ragpicker, Policarpa Salavarrieta, or Ophelia drowned in the well, based on the characters that Machuca described in her stories.

  “Her hair purred like a contented cat when she brushed it,” Olga recalls.

  Sometimes she would steal a cigarette and smoke it in front of the mirror, breathing deeply and practicing slow gestures, elegant ways of lighting the match or exhaling the smoke, walking around in tight skirts and sitting with her legs crossed.

  “What are you dreaming about, girl?”

  “I’d like to have a herd of elephants and to see snow, and for my father to be a king so I could smoke cigarettes in the salons of his palace.”

  One torrential afternoon, Todos los Santos announced it was time for her to start working: señor Manrique had already been summoned, he had been informed that he would be meeting a young girl recently arrived from Japan who had not yet mastered the Spanish language, and he had shown himself to be in agreement with everything. Sayonara said all right, that it was all right by her, and Todos los Santos set about preparing the proper costume as must be done for amor de café, where illusion, theater, and duplicity predominate.

  “Hadn’t señor Manriquito seen the girl?” I ask.

  “Many times. But since adults often look at children without seeing them, he had seen her scurrying around without ever really noticing her.”

  So the name, the client, and the date had already been chosen and now they needed to physically transform the girl into Sayonara, or rather into an authentic Japanese woman, or more precisely into a fake Japanese woman but superior to an authentic one. In a glorified junk store called El Pequeño Paris, the madrina bought a black silk skirt, long and tubular, with a deep slit rising to mid-thigh. Then she marched twenty yards down Calle Caliente under the shade of her parasol to reach the Bazar Libanés.

  “Let me see that Japanese blouse,” she asked Chalela the Turk, indicating a red satin top with a gold dragon embroidered on the back that was being displayed on a mannequin.

  “That blouse is Chinese, not Japanese,” Chalela the Turk advised her.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “The Japanese lost the war.”

  “Too bad for them . . .”

  “Too bad.”

  “Good thing you told me. Then show me another one just like it, but in another color.”

  “I only have red and white left.”

  “White, then.”

  “But the white one is Chinese too . . .”

  “Yes, but at least it’s discreet. You wouldn’t go around in red if your country had lost the war.”

  “Very well, then,” said Chalela the Turk, and he wrapped the white blouse without understanding anything.

  They brushed the girl’s hair back, tied it in a ponytail, and yanked so tight they made her cry.

  “Loosen it a little, madrina,” asked the girl.

  “That wouldn’t do. This way it pulls your eyes and they really look Oriental.”

  Tana loaned her some cultivated pearl earrings, they duly hung the violet lightbulb that certified her Japanese nationality, and Olguita brought a reliquary that contained fragments of a martyr’s bones, assuring her that it protected young girls their first time.

  “There have already been other times,” said the girl, which she had never mentioned before.

  “It doesn’t matter, keep the reliquary; it’ll protect you anyway,” answered Olga, kneeling at Sayonara’s feet as she adjusted the hem of her skirt.

  When señor Manrique was at the door fantasizing over the delights that the date promised, Todos los Santos took her disciple aside to deliver the final piece of advice.

  “Never, never let yourself be tempted by an offer of matrimony from any of your clients. Don’t forget that the pleasures of amor de café aren’t the same as the pleasures of the home. Señor Manriquito, I leave you with my adopted daughter,” she went on to say. “Daughter, this is Señor Manrique, treat him with affection, he is a good man.”

  When the old man was alone with the quiet, slender girl who had been assigned to him, he glimpsed such rapturous faraway places in her dark glances and high cheekbones, and perceived such warm apple and cinnamon well-being in her skin, that he didn’t know what else to do but to propose matrimony.

  “No, thank you,” she responded with the silky voice, the good manners, and the discernment she had been taught.

  Todos los Santos slept in the kitchen that night and before dawn entered the bedroom, making her way through the air saturated with the scent of intimacy. Sayonara was no longer there and señor Manrique slept in the beatific placidity of satisfied dreams, naked, soft, and white like cottage cheese. His usual blue suit waited for him neatly at the ready on a chair, rigid and carefully laid out to allow its owner to resume his human form when he put it on again. The madrina made a silent inspection of the room and then rushed out to the patio like a madwoman, shouting to Sayonara. The girl, now without her goddess disguise, was disheveled and barefoot, bucket in hand, feeding the pigs.

  “Sayonara, come here!”

  “Yes, madrina?”

  “Where is the fountain pen?”

  “What fountain pen?”

  “What do
you think? Señor Manrique’s gold fountain pen . . .”

  “I haven’t seen it.”

  “He always wears it in the pocket of his jacket and now it’s not there.”

  “Maybe he lost it, who knows?”

  “You listen carefully to what I am going to say. For fifteen years señor Manrique has been coming to La Catunga with his gold fountain pen, for fifteen years he has fallen asleep in any of these houses, for fifteen years he has left without losing anything. Right this minute you will go, without waking him, and leave the pen where he had it. Being a puta is a profession, but being an evil puta is filth. If I haven’t been able to make you understand that, then I’ve wasted my time with you.”

  The sun burned bright, radios were already chattering, and the heat was mature when señor Manrique, rejuvenated by the cistern, gave Todos los Santos the agreed upon sum and said good-bye, stamping a kiss on her fingers; she saw in his face an expression as clear as a medal of merit, which she had never seen before.

  “You look magnificent today, señor,” she said, probing the terrain.

  “Not to boast, señora, but last night I devoted myself completely to the mission you bestowed upon me, and I believe that my performance as initiator and guide in matters of love was favorable. Of course, I don’t imagine that a girl so young could have taken a fancy to me . . .”

  “I understand, señor.”

  “Suffice it to say that I don’t aspire to so much. But be that as it may, and you know better than I, a woman never forgets her first man and all those who pass through her bed afterward she compares to him . . .”

  “Of course, señor, of course,” she said condescendingly. “Of course.”

  We all have our vanities and cling to our illusions, thought Todos los Santos, and she stood there watching Manrique walk down the street toward the Plaza del Desacabezado, innocent of all suspicion and puffed up in his circumspect blue suit, carrying with him, as always, his gold fountain pen in the left breast pocket of his jacket.

  six

  Today I am visiting Todos los Santos in her bedroom because she is feeling ill and has been in bed since the day before yesterday. It’s strange to find her like this, giving in to old age, propped up among the pillows on her bed and covered to the tip of her nose with a blanket despite the fact that the heat is killing the rest of us. It’s the first time I have seen her with her hair uncombed, devoid of her earrings, with no appetite for her Cigalias and mistelas.

  “I’m tired of going around driving away shadows,” she tells me when I ask her why she hasn’t gotten out of bed. Then she takes my hand, places it over her tired eyes, and assures me that it makes her feel better, that it is very cool.

  “Did many women take up the profession out of hunger?” I ask after a long conversation about everything and nothing. She remains pensive.

  “No, not many, just the opposite, very few.”

  She is quiet for a while and seems to have forgotten about me, but later she continues with the subject.

  “Mostly the indias. I saw pipatonas become putas out of physical hunger, and the proof was that once they had enough money for food, they left and went back to their people. As for the rest of us, we couldn’t go back, because for our families it was as if we were dead. With the Indians things were different; maybe it’s because the missionaries never really fully explained sin to them. Or because their sins were different from ours, who knows? But it wasn’t the same. Nor were their reasons and ours the same for getting into this life. If we had been motivated only by hunger, we would have done what they did, earn a little money, then leave, spend the money, and come back, then leave again, and keep the wheel turning that way. But our motives are more lasting.” Todos los Santos lets out a harsh laugh, devoid of happiness. “They are so lasting that they endure our whole lives, because for us, once we become a puta there’s no way back. It’s like becoming a nun. A woman with this life dies being a woman of this life, although she no longer even remembers what the thing that hangs between a man’s legs is called.”

  “What are those lasting motives you’re talking about?”

  “Take Correcaminos, for example,” she answers, resorting to a quirk I have learned to expect from them—they speak of others when they don’t want to speak about themselves. “It happened to Correcaminos, as it did with so many others, who in twenty-four hours go from being virgins to being putas. She was a decent, illiterate girl from a poor family who one day lost her virginity, became pregnant, and was transformed into the dishonor of her family. You are no longer my daughter, she heard her very Catholic father say, and the next minute she saw herself alone in the street without hope for pardon or return, with a baby in her belly and no roof over her head. Everything that had been hers suddenly wasn’t anymore: father, mother, siblings, barrio, friends, bread on the table, morning sun, afternoon rain.”

  “Can you imagine that?” said Olga indignantly, listening to us as she chopped parsley to add to a compress for Fideo, who lay in a hammock due to her chronic illness. “Everything was taken from her and her child with only six words: You are no longer my daughter. Like a damning curse. To hear that, as if he had said ‘abracadabra,’ and to have everything disappear, absolutely everything, forever and ever. As if by a spell.”

  “To be so evil to her, her own father!”

  “Delia Ramos was raped by her stepfather and when her mother found out, she burned with such jealousy that she punished Delia, throwing her out of the house,” shouted Fideo from her hammock, who by now had ascertained that we were talking about misfortune.

  “Of course, when we asked Delia Ramos if it was true, she denied it. She never wanted to confess to anyone. The old man didn’t even remember what he had done and Delia, in contrast, martyred herself with guilt and regret. I knew about it because her sister told me, a girl named Melones who was also in the business, not here in Tora but in San Vicente Chucurí, and was crushed to death in an accident involving two buses on the Libertadores highway,” interrupted Olguita, who is fond of going into detail. “Do you remember that horrendous accident? They made Delia Ramos go identify the body and she came back telling that she knew it was her sister because of a burn mark she had on her upper thigh ever since hot depilatory wax spilled on it.”

  The three interrupt each other, remembering the misadventures of Melones, and meanwhile I think to myself that between being cast out of her home and reaching La Catunga, Delia Ramos and Correcaminos, whose name literally meant “road traveler,” must not have gone down too many roads. All they had to do was take a step, because La Catunga is around the corner from any street, and the difference between calling oneself Rosalba or Anita and nicknaming oneself Puta is a single word.

  “When others refuse to offer a hand, mother prostitution receives you with open arms,” says Olguita, “although afterward she swallows you alive and she makes us all pay for it.”

  “Opposite sides of the same coin,” I think out loud, “virgin and puta. Honor and shame.”

  “That’s right, opposite sides of the very same coin. And let the devil throw it into the air to see which you end up with.”

  “Did Correcaminos’s father ever forgive her? Or Delia Ramos’s mother?”

  “Not them or anyone,” shouted Fideo. “You can go from there to here, but from here to there all the doors are locked.”

  “All,” adds Olga, “except those of your memories.”

  I have convinced Todos los Santos to get up and take a walk, and as we stroll, with me supporting her arm, the river turns red and the herons fly just above its surface, brushing the burning water with their wings. The momentary freshness of a breeze off the mountain abruptly ceases and the heat seizes the opportunity to fall upon us and crush us.

  “The river blushed, didn’t it?” asks Todos los Santos. “That’s why it got hot, because the river turned red.”

  “And out of pleasure?” I continue. “Has anyone joined the profession because she liked it?”

 
Todos los Santos laughs in that peculiar manner of las mujeres when they are really amused, throwing their heads back and striking their thighs with the palms of their hands.

  “It is a profession that has its compensations,” she says, “that cannot be denied. Sometimes you sing and sometimes you cry, as with everything, but I will tell you one thing, a girl in this life has more opportunities for happiness than, let’s say, a dentist. Or a locksmith, for example.”

  “Oh God, yes,” assures Olguita, laughing, as she walks behind us.

  seven

  Any worthwhile life is woven with white ceremonies and black ceremonies, in an inevitable chain where some justify the others. Although the easy encounter with señor Manrique floated by, inoffensive, among Sayonara’s days, the following Tuesday Todos los Santos was forced to introduce her disciple to the murky ceremonies of a shameful routine. Every Tuesday by law, week after week, the prostitutes of La Catunga had to appear at dawn in the center of town, on Calle del Comercio, and stand in line in front of the antivenereal dispensary to have their health cards renewed.

  “Only on that day,” Todos los Santos tells me, “were they disrespectful and treated us like putas.”

  “Why do we need a card, madrina?” asked Sayonara, running behind the older woman, unable to match her steps.

  “So the government will let us work. They require it of anyone in La Catunga who wears a skirt, even the nuns. They don’t cure the sick women, they just charge them double to say they’re healthy.”

  “But why, madrina?”

  “The government officials pocket the fifty centavos that each of us pays for the validation.”

  “Well, if they’re going to steal from us, why do we go?”

  “So they’ll let us live in peace.”

  “What happens if we don’t have a card?”

  “They kick our asses right into jail.”

  They found the others waiting in line beneath the rising sun, messy and gray, as if they had swallowed ashes. The collective disgust cut off any attempt at conversation and Sayonara knew instinctively that it was better not to continue asking questions, because putting words to grave matters only makes them graver. There was Yvonne, perched on a pair of red spiked heels; Claire, mortally beautiful; Analía, stealing sips of vodka from a poorly camouflaged bottle; the pipatonas suckling their babies; Olga with her legs in the armor plating of her orthopedic devices. Leaning against a wall, all identical in the eyes of the corrupt officials, with no preferred lightbulb status or nationality or fee differential, no color of skin better than any other. On Tuesdays the dignity of any of them was worth fifty centavos, not one more or one less.