The Dark Bride Read online

  “The infected women’s cards were marked with crosses, one or several depending on the severity, and some women’s had so many they looked like cemeteries,” said Todos los Santos. “One cross meant thin blood; two, rotten blood; three, swollen flesh; four, irremediable situation.”

  “Off with the underwear!”

  Men with white lab coats were giving orders and Sayonara was seized with a sudden anxiety attack and a growing foreboding of frozen forceps in her crotch. A strong whiff of cleaning fluids made her nauseous.

  “It smells like a circus, madrina.”

  “It is a circus, and we’re the clowns.”

  “Through here for genital inspection,” indicated a doctor of dubious qualifications, so coarse in appearance and with a lab coat so stained that he looked more like a mechanic than a doctor.

  Obeying orders like a frightened animal, the girl lay down on the examining table and began to tremble.

  “Hold on, girl,” encouraged Todos los Santos. “Think of Santa Cata, who withstood the cogged wheel without complaint.”

  “Some comfort you are, madrina.”

  The man with the stained lab coat performed the examination in view of all the others, with total disinterest, a cigarette in his mouth and without interrupting a conversation about the legitimacy of the elections, which he was carrying on with a tall, ungainly colleague who didn’t look like a doctor either, or even a mechanic, but rather a giraffe from a zoo.

  When he finished with the girl, the man moved over to a desk, signed and stamped a card of pink pasteboard, threw the fifty centavos in a drawer, and without washing his hands shouted:

  “Next!”

  Todos los Santos tried to climb onto the high table without losing her composure, but she got tangled in her skirts, suffered a sudden coughing attack, the leg that was supposed to rise wouldn’t respond, the upper part of her body managed some success and reached the table but the other half failed and hung there, heavy and grotesque, while, completely humiliated, she begged the doctor’s pardon for her lack of agility, explaining that in her youth she had been slender.

  “Hurry up,” said the man. “I’m not going to wait all morning.”

  “Can’t you see the señora needs help?” said Sayonara, and her fear yielded to her fury.

  “Up, señora, and open your legs.”

  “She is not climbing up or opening her legs, you shitty bastard,” Sayonara spat out as she grabbed Todos los Santos by the arm, struggling to pull her out to the street.

  “Don’t be a rebel, hija, you’ll leave me without a card,” protested the madrina, who still hadn’t picked up her purse or finished rearranging her hair, stockings, and skirt.

  “Let her insult me, doña,” said the doctor so loudly that the others outside could hear. “Next time the little brat is going to have to suck me off before I’ll do her the favor of renewing her card.”

  “Why don’t you suck this,” shouted a woman from Cali who had been eating a mango; she threw the pit and hit him in the eye, letting out a hearty laugh that alerted the others and made them laugh too, first a little, then more, beginning as the chatter of schoolgirls, then becoming the harassment of mutinous putas, hurling insults, trash, and rocks at the dispensary doctors who, without knowing how, managed to lock the door and barricade themselves against the revolt that was mounting outside.

  “Down with the pimping government!”

  “Down!”

  From the corner and a little apart from the rest, looking at all of this with the burned-out eyes of someone who has seen it before, Todos los Santos registered the novelty only as highlighted in insignificant details: the touch of color that the commotion brought out on Claire’s translucent cheeks, the agility with which Yvonne ran on her red stilts, the wounded-deer urgency with which the group of pipatonas and their children fled, abandoning the uprising at the onset. But more than anything she noticed the metamorphosis that her adopted daughter underwent, having seized the first line of fire, hair on end like a wild beast, vociferous, and later scampering across the roofs with a diabolical agility to reach the skylight and attack from above.

  “I watched her,” she tells me, “and said to myself: Maybe it’s better for me to never find out what this child’s past is, or what mix of blood brought about such vigor and fury.”

  “Bastards, bloodsuckers!”

  Delia Ramos, consumed with rage, incited battle with Walkyrian shouts, and a woman from the Pacific coast whom they called La Costeña harangued from the top of a wall.

  “Putas hijueputas! Son-of-a-bitch whores!” answered masculine voices from behind the barricades. “Syphilis spreaders!”

  “This is for all of our friends who were raped and abused in this dump!” trumpeted the vodka-soaked voice of Analía, and a bottle crashed against the window of the dispensary, shattering the glass.

  “Filthy gonorrhea-infected whores!” responded the barricaded men.

  “Death to corrupt officials!”

  “Down with the pimping government!”

  “Death!”

  A flying orange buzzed through the broken window and stamped itself, yellow and juicy, on a cabinet, knocking over all the flasks, and then the roof fell in with a clatter of glass.

  “They’re burning us alive!” howled the besieged men, as a rain of burning paper and rags descended upon them, which Sayonara, angel of fire, young cat on a hot tin roof, was tossing onto their heads and which fell onto the spilled alcohol, spreading the fire. From her street corner Todos los Santos saw the smoke that was beginning to rise wispy and pale and noticed that it was becoming blacker and thicker, like the clouds that precede storms. She also saw the first flames peering out, seeking something to cling to, like long, mobile, hungry tongues, and she watched the heat smash, one by one, the rest of the windows in a frenzy of invisible punches reverberating through the air.

  And she also saw, with the stupor of one contemplating someone else who has been reborn, her adopted daughter standing at the edge of the great fire, watching it, spellbound and ecstatic, captivated by the spectacle of its growing force and without retreating from her attacks or perceiving the heat building up in the iron skylight frames across which she was effortlessly balanced, as if suspended from the sky by invisible threads.

  There was something irrational and challenging in the way that girl ignored the danger, and Todos los Santos suddenly understood that her adopted daughter couldn’t, or, worse still, didn’t want to separate herself from the fascination that wouldn’t take much longer to envelop her in its burning arms.

  “Down with the pimping government!” howled the women, feverish before the excitement of the fire.

  “Down!”

  “Out of Tora with the bloodsuckers!”

  “Out!”

  Asphyxiated by the smoke, their eyes reddened and teary, and their arms raised high, like freed puppets, the besieged doctors exited in surrender at the very moment that men in olive green appeared, jogging down the street, holding their weapons.

  “Their reinforcements are coming!” Someone sounded the alarm and the rebels shot off in every direction, leaving the scene empty in a matter of seconds.

  “Here come the cops!”

  “Death to corrupt officials!”

  “Death to the police who protect them!”

  “Death to all the sons of bitches who exploit the women of Tora!”

  Todos los Santos, the only woman who remained in the plaza, without vacillation crossed the tense silence of thistles and porcupines that electrified the air to approach the dispensary as far as permitted by the fury of the blaze, which was now escaping through doors and windows, and she didn’t know whether it was because of dizziness from the heat or hallucination from the gases, but as she looked up in the air she saw Sayonara advance serenely, like Christ on top of the waves, along a narrow open path among the flames, a vertiginous ballerina on the verge of disaster. And she swears to me that she saw too how the gusts of smoke delicately stroked
her hair and how the fire approached, tame, to kiss her clothing and lick her feet.

  As she contemplated this nerve, this display of irresponsibility on the part of the insolent child, Todos los Santos became greatly annoyed and was about to shout angrily for the girl to climb down from there that very instant and to cease her strange behavior, but just as she was about to open her mouth she heard her instincts give her a countermand.

  “Suddenly I realized that her own foolishness was what would save her,” she tells me, “and that if I called out to her I would startle her and once she awakened the fire would swallow her up, because her only protection lay in her dazed state of mind. You see, if I shouted, it would break the spell, the skylight would suddenly collapse, and she would fall into the center of the burning embers. Then I looked at her calmly, without reproach, as if approving her shadowy passage over that hell, and I told her with the softest voice in my throat, in just this tone, without insulting, without haste, I told her quietly, lovingly: ‘Let’s go, child, it’s late and we should be getting back to the house.’ I don’t know how, but she heard me; somehow she descended from the roof as effortlessly as she had climbed up and the next instant was at my side, standing on the ground, urging me to run so the troops wouldn’t grab us.”

  “Run, madrina! Give me your hand and run! Don’t you see they’re almost on top of us?” she shouted, just like that, as if it had all been a children’s game and death didn’t exist, soldiers didn’t kill, sadness didn’t strike or fire burn.”

  There was no time to run; down the street that emptied into the plaza came the crush of jogging boots hammering the dust, but when they arrived with their weapons at the ready, the only traces of the rebels’ passage were Yvonne’s abandoned red shoes and four or five fake doctors, stunned and banged up, who didn’t know whether to open their mouths to curse their luck or to thank God who had saved them. Sayonara and Todos los Santos? They found a hiding place in the house of friends who had opened their doors to them.

  “A French investigator who came around in those years made inquiries and threw out some figures that reflected that the prostitutas of Tora paid more to the state in health control and fines than the Tropical Oil Company did in royalties,” Machuca tells me. Meanwhile, the girls struggled to ward off syphilis and gonorrhea with prayers and cloths dampened with warm water, and the crosses kept cropping up on carnés and in cemeteries.

  eight

  Sometime later, torrential rains came to quiet the fevers of the barrio and turned its narrow streets into rivers of mud. Nocturnal lightning flickered against the zinc roofs with fading discharges and Holy Week arrived, bringing with it a slow, sorrowful silence, in solidarity with the agonies of the crucified. Sayonara, who was once again fixated on the red Christ with the fanaticism of earlier days, tried to please him with flowers and candles and left him cigarettes and matches, plates of rice, glasses of rum, anything that would help to alleviate the bitter drink awaiting him.

  The Maundy Thursday sky dawned, vaulted over with dark clouds, and the streetwalkers of La Catunga, following tradition, dressed in mourning, covered their faces with Spanish mantillas, and went barefoot, in a vow of humility. Olguita vulnerable without her steel braces, Tana stripped of her jewels, Claire drained of life, Yvonne voluptuous, Analía sober for the moment, Delia Ramos peaceful of spirit, and Machuca abstaining from cursing; the Italians, La Costeña, the Indians with their herds of children, and others, all filed barefoot along the narrow streets of sin, in voluntary penitence, which was heightened by the rain.

  They emerged from the Dancing Miramar, leaving behind the barbershop, the apothecary, the billiard halls, the cantinas, the statue of the headless man, and the municipal slaughterhouse. When they reached Ecce Homo, the pealing of the bells exploded into the air and the interior of the church overflowed with lilies, while the altar was set for the last supper and the saints were clothed in purple raiment. But they kept walking.

  “They didn’t enter the church?”

  “The parish had forbidden them to enter unless they had publicly renounced their profession.”

  “Did they really walk barefoot?”

  “Barefoot and in a holy trance, without dodging mortifications or garbage heaps.”

  The black pilgrimage of penitents arrived at its destination, the Patria Theater, around eleven that morning and the early show, exclusively for them, was Jesus of Nazareth with Spanish subtitles and in Technicolor, which according to Olga was almost the same as real life.

  “A sacred ceremony in an unholy temple,” I comment.

  “We putas were born to rub luck against the grain,” assents Todos los Santos.

  From the moment that the Christ child trotted behind his sheep on the screen of the Patria Theater, before he got into his predicament, much before the terrible denouement, the women of La Catunga burst into tears. They gave free rein to a cascade of warm and comforting tears, salty and sweet like sea and river currents. They cried because they weren’t able to withstand so much death and love. They cried for the man who would pardon them on the cross, for his father Joseph’s troubles and his mother Mary’s lacerations. And they cried for themselves, for their mothers who they hadn’t seen for so long, for their fathers who they had never seen, for their own children and for the children they would never have, for their sorrows as lonely women, for all the men who had gone and those to come, for the sins they had committed and those they would commit, for the past and for the future.

  They didn’t stop crying until they heard the celluloid Mary Magdalene swear and swear again that she had seen Christ resplendent, his wounds healed and gloriously resuscitated, and then they left the Patria Theater feeling lightened, free of guilt and empty of tears, prepared to bear another year of life without complaint or protest. Until the next Maundy Thursday, with its rain and tears, would come to bring the world purifying alleviation in the form of streams and torrents of water.

  On the way back home along the Calle del Comercio, a few steps removed from the others, Todos los Santos and Sayonara walked arm in arm, one old and the other young, one pale-skinned and the other dark, one the mother and the other the daughter: both threatening and haughty in their black dresses, not looking back or greeting anyone.

  “Mother whore, daughter whore, who does the blanket cover more?” commented the pious as they watched the pair pass.

  “If the girl were hers,” murmured others, “that procuress wouldn’t have allowed her to work the street, she would have installed her in a convent school, in Bucaramanga or in Cúcuta.”

  “A convent?” says Todos los Santos, terrified. “Why would I leave her in the hands of nuns? Who are those señoras to educate her better than I?”

  After living together for two years, everything that Sayonara knew she had learned from her madrina. She echoed her madrina’s expressions, had the same deep gaze, the identical habit of walking around barefoot, and of curing illnesses with infusions of parsley. She had even inherited the peculiar style of cleaning her teeth, scrubbing so hard that the brush barely lasted a month.

  “Under my wing that girl was growing up beautiful and strong. In her steps I found my own footprint and in her mirror I could read the same traces of my youth.

  “I taught her how to be a prostitute and not anything else because it was the trade that I knew, just as the shoemaker can’t train a bricklaying apprentice nor should a viola player try to give piano lessons.

  “I did what I did without doubting my conscience,” Todos los Santos assures me, “because I have always believed that a puta can have a life that is just as clean as any decent housewife, or as corrupted as any indecent housewife.”

  nine

  They say that at some moment in their itinerant existence the men from all the camps in the world, from the oil wells of Infantas to the vast fuel deposits of Iraq, passed religiously through the streets of sin in La Catunga, as if coming to fulfill a promise, because it was the heart and sanctuary of the extensive oil lab
yrinth. In La Catunga the circle was completed; it was the obligatory point of return for their travels.

  “As a boy I had lived invisibly in Tora, leading a humble existence, hauling people and packages with my cart,” says Sacramento. “Living that way it is difficult for anyone to notice you, especially the majeres de café, who were accustomed to rubbing elbows with engineers, contractors, trained personnel. That’s why I left, thinking I would return with some distinction, which is the purpose of everyone who leaves.”

  “With what they gave him for selling the cart, Sacramento bought a pair of walking shoes and started walking,” Todos los Santos tells me.

  Where to? He didn’t have to ask anyone; he took off walking by the compass of the wandering multitude, joining the great river of seekers of fortune until he arrived at the oil installations at El Centro, where he found a population drowning in a persistent downpour that lashed diagonally, soaking mankind to the bone and reminding them of their helplessness. He arrived at dawn and immediately, without shrinking back from the weather’s sudden attacks, took his place in the queue under the deluge, in front of the recruiting office. After hours of waiting, with his skin wrinkled under his soaked clothing, he gathered the courage to exchange words with the man waiting behind him.