The Dark Bride Read online

  “Raindrops were falling from his hair too and running into his eyes, his mouth and his ears, as they were into mine. So I asked him: A lot of rain, isn’t it? An insignificant question, just to find a subject, and he answered me: Yeah, except maybe for frogs in a pond. From there we could converse more seriously because his words and mine had already been intertwined, and he confessed that he had come from the city of Popayán to try out his luck. Popayán? Where in the hell is that? I asked him, again just for the pleasure of chatting, or the need to find an accomplice, because I already knew more or less where the city of Popayán was.”

  “It’s on the other side of the country,” he answered.

  “That’s not so bad, there are several here who come from the other side of the planet. I’ve seen Armenians, Canadians, Jews, Greeks . . .”

  “Well, I still had to walk three months to get here.”

  “ ‘Okay, Payanés’—I called him that because that’s what they call people who are from Popayán, and I kept calling him Payanés through the many good days that we were close friends, and even afterward—‘now that you’re here hold my place in line while I go take a leak,’ I said eagerly and in confidence, like any timid guy who wants to hide his urgent condition. In truth I had decided to talk to him because I had to go badly and didn’t want to lose my place in that line of men, winding long and nervous like a poisonous snake.”

  At noon, the rain gave way to a brilliant sun that dried the clothes on their backs, then around three in the afternoon it was finally their turn to face the recruiter, a robust man with the neck and disposition of an ill-tempered young bull.

  “Show me your palms!” he bellowed, and they obeyed instantly. “Those are the hands of a lady, aren’t you ashamed? Get out of here, we don’t need women!”

  “Respect!” demanded Sacramento, but without much conviction, so the bull wouldn’t charge him.

  “Yeah, respect,” echoed Payanés, and from that first adversity they became accomplices for all the others to come.

  “I’ll kill that son of a bitch,” boasted Sacramento when the beast was no longer within earshot. “I’ll choke him with my bare hands, then we’ll see whether they’re a lady’s hands.”

  “You’re not going to choke anybody, much less that giant,” said Payanés, taking his new friend over to join a group of fellow rejects as they headed out to look for work as road laborers, to wield shovels until their hands were covered with calluses and they could return to the recruiting officer stronger and better prepared.

  They penetrated the dense, hungry jungles of Carare through a tunnel they barely managed to open with slashes of their machetes and that snapped shut behind them like the jaws of a beast. They walked in the dark, feeling their way and withstanding scratches, roars, venom, and harassment from slimy fauna and hairy flora whose existence Sacramento had never dreamed of even in his worst nightmares, and that Payanés pointed out and classified according to their place in the animal, mineral, or vegetable kingdom.

  “This is a sarrapial, those giant burning flowers are called cámbulos, those shouts you hear are from white-faced maicero monkeys, this must be the footprint of a momano, half ape and half human, who walks upright through the jungle, wary and nearly hairless, hiding from people because he’s shy and ashamed of his nakedness.”

  Sacramento tore off a leaf and it turned out to be an insect, he was about to grab a stick but it was a snake, he heard the beautiful song of a bird and it too turned out to be a snake: a singing ophidian.

  “I’m never going to learn,” he said, disheartened. “Nothing here is what it seems and everything acquires the gift of transforming itself into its opposite. The only certain thing is the hungriness with which the jungle looks at you; let down your defenses for a second and you’ll get swallowed up.”

  Eight days later, green, weak, and moldy from the humidity and lack of sun, their stomachs out of sorts from drinking amoebic broth and chewing corozo seeds, they found themselves on an old camino real opened by the conquistador Jiménez de Quesada along the Río Opón, upon which the Troco wanted to build a road to Campo Escondido and so was recruiting fresh blood for the work of leveling and moving earth.

  They arrived around midnight and were greeted by the miracle of the river transformed into a bed of placid stars, which at the edge came away from the water and took off in flight.

  “Those floating lights you see are female lightning bugs calling their mates,” said Payanés.

  “Such tireless vegetation, so many creatures giving off light, so many males trying to copulate,” said Sacramento. “Nature is a very loving thing, hermano.”

  They removed their shoes and lay down among the rest of the men, beneath the immense sky and with their heads firmly resting on their shoes, which are the most cherished possession in the life of a foot traveler. Despite their precaution, they went to sleep with four and awoke with three: Payanés’s two and only the right shoe belonging to Sacramento, who sat in a gully hugging his widowed shoe and began to cry. He cried from exhaustion and because he was an orphan and because of the desolation of his abandoned foot, which was condemned to the sharp edges of the rocks and to the itching from the ticks and chiggers that embedded themselves in the plants, where they lay their crops of eggs.

  “Monday, Wednesday, and Friday you get the complete pair,” Payanés said consolingly, handing him a tin can of hot coffee. “Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday I’ll have it. Two Sundays a month for you, two Sundays for me.”

  “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday,” corrected Sacramento, “the first son of a bitch who lets down his guard tonight will have to limp around, because I’m going to steal a left shoe.”

  “Why would they have only stolen one?”

  “It must have been some damned one-legged thief.”

  “It won’t be hard to recognize him then.”

  “What if the thief has all of his legs, and if someone else had stolen only one of his shoes too?”

  “Then that means that a cycle has begun that not even God can end.”

  Sacramento and Payanés racked their brains trying to imagine what luck could befall two men with three shoes, when toward them came an old man, ill-humored and mumbling curses.

  “I’m getting out of here,” he said, chewing his words, as Sacramento studied the sturdy pair of raised-heel boots with leather straps the old man was wearing. “If you want my place you can have it. I’d rather die of hunger in my homeland than leave my bones buried in these shitty swamps. They’re plagued with bugs, look, there goes one, and there’s another. They say they bite, the filthy creatures. I’m getting out of here, yessir, before a fucking bug eats me.”

  “Well, if you’re leaving, why don’t you do me the favor of leaving me your boots?” proposed Sacramento, inspired by the muses of his desperation.

  Astonished, Payanés looked at him.

  “What do you mean, my boots?” the old man shot back. “Do you by chance have a million pesos to give me for them?”

  “I don’t have anything to give you for them, but look at my situation and you’ll understand, somebody stole my shoe, which there is a great need for around here, and since you’re going home and probably have another pair waiting for you there . . .”

  “And how am I supposed to get home, fly? Stupid idiot. That’s just what I need, some blockhead to start asking me for presents. Maybe you think I look like baby Jesus?”

  Stubborn in his foolishness, Sacramento kept arguing reasons for mercy and heaping on descriptions of his misfortune, refusing to recognize that there is no human power that can convince a stranger to cross the mass of the Andes unshod, of his own will, for no good reason and without receiving anything in return.

  “What do you mean that you’re leaving us your place?” Payanés, who was sharper at this sort of dealing, asked the old man.

  “There’s plenty of work to go around here, what there’s not enough of is willing men. The only requireme
nt for a man is that he have two hands, bring his own tool, and be willing to work like an animal and leave the child’s play behind. And your shovels? Where are your shovels?”

  “We don’t have shovels.”

  “They only hire personnel with tools.”

  “Serious problem, hermano,” said Payanés to Sacramento, removing his red baseball cap to scratch his head.

  “Well, if you want I’ll sell you my shovel.”

  “Well, seeing that it’s an old shovel, and I’m not exactly rich . . .”

  The give and take of the negotiation started high, rapidly descended to midrange, and stagnated with the bartering of trifles—the shovel for the red cap, a pound of coffee and the shovel for the missal that Sacramento was carrying, the coffee for the red cap—until the old man convinced himself of the calamitous insolvency of his opponents and chose to move on to look for a higher bidder.

  “Don’t go,” said Sacramento, grabbing him by the sleeve. “I’ll give you my shoe for your shovel.”

  “What in the hell do I need with a single shoe?”

  “In case someone steals one of your boots . . .”

  “That would never happen, who’s going to steal it?”

  “These unfortunate things happen, look at me. Anyway, an extra shoe will certainly serve you more than a broken shovel on your journey.”

  The old man left for his homeland with Sacramento’s shoe in his pack, while the two boys agreed to take turns with the endowment: While one rested the other would work with the shovel and Payanés’s shoes, and the next day they would exchange roles.

  “Repeat after me: Pick, you are my father; shovel, you are my mother”—that was the only instruction given to them by the foreman before he exploded the dynamite that reduced a huge rock to gravel, sending monkeys and parrots to the moon.

  That’s how they started to work, and to suffer. They clung to their shovel as if it were the sword and shield of a wandering knight and with it they opened the way among the thousand torments of the jungle, paddling among the stagnant waters at the edge of the river, which boiled like a thick, rancid soup and gave off a fetid vapor that impeded their breathing.

  “It’s malaria,” diagnosed someone. “This poisonous air is what they call malaria.”

  “Don’t be ignorant, malaria doesn’t fly around on its own, it spreads by mosquitoes,” corrected someone else. “They’re called anopheles. Only the female bites, and she lives only seven days, but in that time she can infect at least seven men.”

  “And those seven men are bitten by a hundred flies who then bite seven hundred more men, until there’s not a healthy Christian in the whole departamento of Magdalena.”

  “Or in all of Colombia.”

  “Well, the truth is that yes, they are biting,” complained Payanés, and the statement bothered Sacramento, because it made real a nuisance that until then he had managed to ignore.

  “Hush, Payanés, don’t court disaster. Don’t think about the mosquitoes and they won’t bite you; they’re just like dogs, they only bite those who are afraid of them.”

  He hadn’t finished speaking those words when he began to feel the stings on his cheek, on his hand, on his thigh through the cloth of his trousers. He hadn’t seen them before and suddenly he saw them, in clouds, in battalions, forcing him to scratch himself until he drew blood, dodging their victims’ swats and laughing at the foul-smelling smoke of some cigarettes the men called repellent. He tells me that of the many bites he received in the quagmire of the Carare, there was one that infected him, and he assures me he knows which one it was.

  “I turned to look when that mosquito’s sting lanced my neck, like a hypodermic needle, injecting into my veins that insatiable parasite that stayed on to live inside me, to devour my blood little by little. And look how things turn out: The day I contracted malaria was the same day I heard someone talk of her for the first time.”

  He heard someone talk about Sayonara, a girl in La Catunga whom the men that visited those streets said they had fallen in love with, and whose fame had begun to spread by word of mouth even among those who didn’t know her, the thousands of seekers of destiny who walked along the roads of Magdalena after bread and work; after opportunities, as they themselves said to give a generic name to the future, to love, to their lucky star, the holy grail, the treasures of El Dorado, the philosopher’s stone, a mother’s compassion, a lover’s sheets, the roar of black gold. Sacramento says:

  “I think we were looking blindly for something that was worthy of all that searching; something, finally, that deserved to be sought out and that at the moment of death would allow us to say, that’s what I lived for.”

  It often turned out, due to a breath of spontaneous winds, that the object of the collective search would take a woman’s name, and then the chosen one would rapidly be converted into a legend, and her glory would extend everywhere the oil pipes ran. That happened with Sayonara, the slender girl. Sayonara, the novia, the lover, of everyone and no one, silent and dark: Each man who passed through Tora left the city dazzled by her. Whether it was true or just an empty boast, there was no man who didn’t pride himself on having been with her.

  “It’s the simple things that we understand the least,” Sacramento acknowledges. “How was I to imagine at the time that my scraggly, wild girl, my sister on those endless imaginary journeys, was the Japanese goddess that every voice spoke to me of? Or had I imagined it in the fires of my youthful longing?”

  “Sayonara,” Sacramento was heard to say one night when the heat nearly drove him mad, and the name refreshed him just by its repetition and it sounded like happiness. As the days passed he got to thinking that it was a talisman against the difficulties of life, and he began to tie himself to the memory of the woman, although it wasn’t his own exclusive memory, because after all he had never seen her, or at least that’s what he thought, but her fame was a patrimony diffused through those mountains and vast lands. Like the troubadour’s mysterious and anonymous Lady of Provence, Sayonara had become, in petrolero land, the inspiration of every man proud enough to call himself one. At least that was the reasoning that called Sacramento to his senses, while his heart busied itself, stubbornly, in the belief that the beautiful woman he dreamed of belonged to him alone, because the others bought and used her, but he would adore her forever. He committed the error of letting his guard down and allowing the delirium of that woman’s name to lodge in his bloodstream in the form of jealousy, which is as obstinate as malaria itself, and from then on he began to carry within him the two plagues, which embraced him like twin rivers of fever and fire, distinct yet confluent.

  “That was the serious problem, that Sacramento was jealous of Sayonara even before he loved her,” sighs Todos los Santos.

  But the first symptoms of Sacramento’s recently acquired double illness took months to incubate and manifest themselves, and they gave him respite from the putridness of the Río Opón’s quagmire. Together with Payanés, after having bought a new pair of shoes, he went to try his luck as a repairman on the oil pipeline that flowed into the Bahía of Cartagena, and then they joined the railway workers on the section of line that stretched between Papayal and Espíritu Santo. Wherever they went they heard a pained sighing, a sort of prayer intoned by dozens of lonely men to the young prostituta from Tora.

  “Maybe they grieved for many women, each man for his own,” acknowledges Sacramento today, “but to me it was as if they only spoke of her. No other names entered my ears, only Sayonara, Sayonara, falling like snow onto the high treetops in the midst of the suffocating heat, and I couldn’t believe that there was any greater passion than the one that emanated from her.”

  Without knowing how or when, Sacramento began to build his life upon the messianic obsession of rescuing the beautiful object of his fantasies from her wrong path, apparently without suspecting that he knew her in flesh and blood—very little flesh and blood—because that distant Japanese girl with the legendary wake who pursued a
nd trapped him was the same skinny girl that he had personally taken to Todos los Santos to teach her how to be someone, before she had a rare and exotic name but was simply called “the girl,” and she didn’t come from the Orient, like the three wise men, but from some pueblo like so many others whose name nobody bothered to ascertain. And she held no fascination or mysteries, just the existence of a cornered, hungry animal, with such force of character, freedom of spirit, and mulish stubbornness, that if Sacramento had been an attentive reader of souls, like Todos los Santos, he also would have perceived—or did he perceive it?—that the ordinary girl could convert herself into a living relic of the oil world, with the sole requirement that she choose to do so.

  Each time Sacramento came upon civilization, the first thing he did, even before using a washbasin to rinse his face, or sitting down in front of a plate of hot food, was to send a postcard addressed to the girl in Tora, via the occasional traveler, migratory workers, the river mail, or the comings and goings of the mule drivers. He did it just like that, out of an affectionate impulse, the natural inclination toward the only thing in his life that resembled rootedness. Without fully comprehending that a mocking fate, which amuses itself at the expense of mortals, obliged him to send missives to someone who he adored without knowing it, and forced him to pursue through the labyrinth of roads precisely that which he had left behind.

  They were colorful postcards with photographs and motifs of unexpected themes and diverse nationalities, on the backs of which Sacramento scrawled a few gerunds bearing his greetings. Like a FAÇADE OF THE PANCHAYAT PALACE IN KATMANDU, CAPITAL OF NEPAL, which read: “Thinking of you and remembering you, nothing more for the moment, Sacramento.” Or a LADIES FROM TOLEDO IN TYPICAL DRESS MAKING THE TRADITIONAL LACE OF THE REGION, with a note on the reverse that added adverbs to the usual gerunds: “Everything going well hoping the same for you remembering you affectionately and also señora Todos los Santos.” Or Sayonara’s favorite, PLATE AND VEGETABLE DISH IN DELICATE SEVRES PORCELAIN, on which was written, in blue ink, the following courtesy: “Hoping and wishing to see you again soon, yours respectfully Sacramento.”