The Dark Bride Read online

  Sayonara received them with jubilant shouts as if they were what they actually were, updates on pasteboard that reached her hands through mysterious routes from other worlds to notify her that she wasn’t alone in this one. She would interrupt whatever she was doing to take them from house to house, showing them to her friends, and after reading each one many times, she would stick them with tacks to the wall around the red Christ, forming a rhombus, a circle, a butterfly pattern, or other figures, sometimes geometrical, sometimes whimsical, that were covered with the vermilion reflections of the votives and in some impious way were integrated with the fascination and panic that the sacred space inspired in her.

  Each time she received a new postcard, Sayonara disapproved of its corresponding place on the wall according to the old design. So she would pull them all down, taking advantage of the opportunity to read them again, shuffle and mix them, and arrange them again, one by one, letting herself be guided by impulses or whims. PLATE AND VEGETABLE DISH IN DELICATE SEVRES PORCELAIN now far from QUEEN ELIZABETH II OF GREAT BRITAIN and to the right of TORERO EXECUTING A PASS WITH CAPE ON A YOUNG BULL; DANCE CLASS, OIL PAINTING BY PIETRO LONGHI diagonally across from LACQUERED TABLE WITH CHINOISERIE, DETAIL; SECTION OF THE GARDENS OF LUXEMBOURG next to BALCONY OF THE QUINTA DE BOLÍVAR SANTAFÉ DE BOGOTÁ, and so on indefinitely, in variable and cabalistic order that neither she nor anyone else could interpret but that seemed to be foreshadowing the course of the events of her life.

  ten

  Through the American Frank Brasco, I came to know of Sayonara’s fascination with snow, despite her never having seen it, or perhaps precisely because of that.

  “You must be crazy, Sayo,” Brasco said to her. “We’re melting at ninety degrees in the shade and you’re asking me about snow . . .”

  To Sayonara, a woman of the tropics accustomed to the frenzy of a vegetation perpetually sprouting and blossoming, to a voracious and persistent green that in a matter of hours swallows anything that remains still, the immobile silence of snow-covered fields must have been very perplexing. That sleepy landscape, hidden beneath an immense whiteness, barely conceived from photographs and postcards, must have been pure magic to her, or merely the hoax of foreigners, as if someone were to swear to a European that in other latitudes the sky stretched in red and white squares, like a quilt.

  “She was more than simply curious,” Frank Brasco assured me. “That snow, which she had never seen, created a deep longing within her; it was something she needed urgently, who knows why.”

  Otherworldly and overwhelming—as if seen through Sayonara’s eyes—the forests of this wintery Vermont appear before me, where Brasco the engineer was born and later spent many winters, until he finally established himself here permanently, now retired and at the doorstep of old age, in the midst of an austerity and a voluntary isolation that one could say is almost hermetic. I’ve come here looking for him because I have learned that he treasures memories of the time he worked for the Tropical Oil Company as general supervisor of Campo 26. He was at the time a man with a liberal attitude, accustomed to conducting relationships with women within the scope of a university environment, to such a degree that the possibility of seeking love in the world of prostitution had never even occurred to him. Besides, a bad case of poorly tended hepatitis in his childhood had left his liver sensitive to and incompatible with alcohol, so he considered himself immune to what he thought were the reasons that pushed the rest of the men as a mass toward the barrio of La Catunga. For that reason, despite regularly going down from 26 to the neighboring city, Frank Brasco had never crossed the boundaries of the zona de tolerancia and certainly would never have if chance hadn’t caused, for a few revealing and fascinating days, his path to cross with that of Sayonara, the dark lover of Tora.

  “What was the first thing you noticed about her?”

  “From the very first moment, I was shaken by her beauty and pained by her excessive youth, because she was practically a girl. A beautiful and frightened girl, like a feline, and dedicated to being a puta. But I also immediately perceived an unyielding temperament and a certain, unusually powerful intensity. How can I describe it? A human warmth that kept her capacity for expression intact. Not that she was always affectionate, or happy. Sometimes, it was just the opposite, she would walk past you so absorbed in her affairs that she didn’t even notice that you were there. But at those moments her presence weighed on you, and you couldn’t avoid it. Every movement of her body, every sentence she spoke, her way of looking at something or laughing, everything about her was naturally surprising and not premeditated, was sure, exact. As if the earth were a planet populated by extraterrestrials and she was the only one who had really been born here.”

  “Do you mean that she had a conclusive way of being there?”

  “Exactly. How did you know?”

  “I have heard that before.”

  “I remember a Colombian song that goes, more or less, I love my woman because she is pure reality. It must have been written about her.”

  Frank Brasco tells me that from the first day they met, Sayonara devoted herself to asking about snow and kept insisting on the subject even at the moment when they were saying good-bye forever.

  “It was her obsession,” he tells me. “And I still don’t understand why I didn’t bring her here so she could experience winter, which made her so anxious. I also wonder why snow interested her so much, why it tugged at her, to the point of a mania.”

  As he shovels away the dense layer of snow that obstructs the entrance to his cabin, engineer Brasco struggles to bring to mind the memory of the thousand tones of green of the verdant Colombian landscape, from the most fiery to those streaked with black, the fresh sprouts of bamboo shoots, the nocturnal leaves of the yarumo plant bathed in moonlight, the chatter of the parakeets after a downpour, the piquant aroma of the high pastures, the smell of lemons that refreshes the hours of suffocating heat in Tora.

  “And the slices of green mango with salt that they sell on the corners,” he adds. “How I would love to eat green mango with salt again!”

  “Sayonara wasn’t the only delirious one,” I say. “In the middle of this cold air and sunk to the knees in snow, you’re talking about green mango with salt . . .”

  “I asked her: ‘Why do you like the snow so much, Sayo, when you’ve never seen it?’ ”

  “Yes, I have seen it, in my dreams. And in pictures. Look, míster Brasco,” Sayonara said to him, handing him one of the postcards sent by Sacramento, the reproduction of a painting by Alfred Sisley that showed the sweet way in which winter covered a village street.

  “Isn’t it true that this is your pueblo, míster?” Frank Brasco tells me she asked him.

  “No, this is a French village. Mine is in the far north of the United States, near the border with . . .”

  “Okay, okay, don’t explain to me where it is, just tell me if it is just like this one in the postcard.”

  “Only a little.”

  “I say it must be just the same, because all towns look the same when they are covered with snow. Do you know, míster, why it is that snow never comes to Tora?” she asked, and immediately started to talk about something else, without waiting for an answer.

  The next day, at exactly six in the morning, when Brasco, still half awake and suffocated by a buzzing dizziness that had tormented him through the night, came out of his room and went to the bathroom to refresh himself by submerging his head in clear water, he saw her sitting there on a bench, already bathed and dressed, impatient, waiting for him.

  “Is it true, míster,” she said suddenly, without saying good morning first, “that sometimes the snow falls blue and clean like the sky, and other times gray and soiled like dirt?”

  “It’s almost always white, but there are so many shades that the Eskimos who live in the frozen lands of Alaska have a hundred different words for the color white. To live in Colombia you must know a thousand different words for green . . .”


  “Green, green, you always talk about green and what I want to talk about is white. And is it true, yes or no, that when a lot of snow falls you shouldn’t wear silk stockings because they get stuck to your legs and if you try to take them off you’ll tear off your skin and everything? Is it true?”

  “Where did you hear that . . . ?”

  “Somebody was going around saying it.”

  “You must be crazy. In the middle of this dizzying heat you come to me talking about snow . . .”

  “My friend Claire doesn’t like it either.”

  “Doesn’t like what?”

  “Talking about snow. I asked her and she avoided the subject because she says it made her sad to remember it. Is it true that snow is sad, míster Brasco?”

  “No, Sayo, it’s not sad. It’s white, and beautiful, and happy, and I do like to talk about it. It’s just that it makes me laugh to see how anxious it makes you . . .”

  And if I tell her to come with me to Vermont, wondered Frank Brasco, more as a pleasurable and irresponsible musing than as a real possibility. And if I tell her not to be afraid because she will like my village even though it’s not just like the postcard and because her silk stockings won’t adhere to her skin, he stopped to consider, and that the snow extends blue-white and radiant there because there’s no one to walk in it.

  “But I didn’t tell her,” he confesses to me, “because deep down I didn’t have the slightest intention of taking on such a commitment and because it was evident that she wasn’t there to ramble on about fate but to inquire about certain very concrete aspects of the snow problem that she was still unsure about.”

  So Sayonara sat there looking up, with her eyes lost in a sky reverberating with light and heat, and asked:

  “What flies higher, míster, snow or an airplane?”

  “Snow doesn’t fly, it falls.”

  “Airplanes also fall, sometimes.”

  “Okay, okay. Let’s say that airplanes fly higher, then, because they can go over the clouds. Snow falls from the clouds.”

  “Then snow is pieces of cloud? And when snow falls, does it stay there forever?”

  “No, because it melts, like ice.”

  “It falls onto animals, and the animals turn white. It falls on the trees, and the trees turn white . . . oh, how I would like all the trees and roofs in Tora to turn white! It would be so pretty. And I would have a good wool coat to protect me from the cold,” she assured him, and her dark body, embraced by the sun, shivered beneath her light cotton sleeveless dress. “Do you wear a coat, míster Brasco, back where you’re from?”

  “A coat lined with fur and high boots and gloves and a wool cap.”

  “That’s what I would like! A red wool hat . . . Olguita, she knows how to knit, she could make me one . . . if snow ever falls in Tora, of course, because if not then, why . . . ? And is it true, míster, that snow burns?”

  “It could be, yes. It’s so cold that it burns.”

  “So cold that it burns!” she laughed, hitting her thighs with the palms of her hands. “The things this gringo says! It’s a good thing, snow, and Claire wasn’t right when she said it was sad. How I would like to have a little snow, even just a handful!”

  “Some day, some day,” he lied, as he thought, And if I tell her to come with me to Vermont and to bring Todos los Santos with her? And Olguita too so she could knit them red wool caps. It would be a folly the size of a mountain, he realized, so he didn’t say anything and he felt falling upon his shoulders, soft and wilted like snowflakes, the words of love that he never said.

  “Don’t be a liar, míster!” Sayonara protested, as if she were reading his thoughts. “How am I going to feel snow if it’s never going to snow in Tora? At the very most we might get hail, and that on Judgment Day, but snow, what you call snow, it only falls over there, where the big world is.”

  The big world, she had said, and those words were accompanied by a wide, circular gesture of her hand and arm, as if indicating a very long journey, impossible, unthinkable.

  “But Tora is also part of the big world,” he said, trying to cheer her up.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. The big world is faaaaar away, there, way away, where only airplanes go.”

  “What do you want to know about the big world? Ask me anything, I’ll answer you.”

  “No lies?”

  “Only the truth.”

  “Then tell me, míster Brasco, when the airplanes fly over us, what happens with the caca and pipí that the people inside make? Does it fall on our heads?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve always wondered the same thing.”

  “You see? Why should I ask you if you don’t know anything. Just keep talking about the snow. What did you tell me it was made of?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Flour or sand. Or rice. Who knows, it must be some very white powder.”

  Frank Brasco clears the path that leads to his cabin, throwing to the side shovelfuls of flour, or sand, or rice, and meanwhile he describes to me Sayonara’s animated black eyes, which keep searching, without seeing all the green shining uselessly around her, because she preferred to lose herself in white-painted dreams.

  “Did you ever consider, señor Brasco, the possibility of staying in Tora to live?” I ask.

  “When I lived there I had the sensation of belonging in an unavoidable way to this world here, and now that I live here it’s the opposite, I feel that I have never felt as at home as I did there.”

  He never slept with her, he confesses to me, and not because of lack of desire, but because he arrived in La Catunga during the so-called rice strike, initiated by the workers of Campo 26, which broke out in a labor and civil action in Tora, and during which the entire population declared solidarity with the demands of the petroleros. The prostitutas struck too, joining the striking ranks by making the decision not to work until the strike succeeded, with the result that for nearly twenty days and nights they didn’t go to bed for money, and if they made love, it was only out of love.

  “I’ll talk about the strike later, if you want, because it’s a story that is well worth the trouble of telling. But now I want to concentrate on the memory of Sayonara, without interference. I want you to know that her body and mine never touched, but other things did, which were probably our souls—they caressed each other at will, accompanied each other and rocked to the same rhythm, like a boat on an ocean swell. And those were days so charged with energy and enthusiasm, because of the tremendous explosion of hope, of fear and solidarity that the strike awakened in all of us, that it seemed like you were making love without ever needing to.”

  “But there is something I don’t understand, señor Brasco, and allow me to advance a single question about the subject of the strike. Which side were you on, the American boss’s or the Colombian workers’?”

  “The Colombian workers’ side, of course. Why do you think my stay in Colombia ended so quickly? Since Tropical Oil couldn’t prove charges of my collaboration with the enemy, the letter they sent asking for my resignation alluded to ‘inconvenient relationships’ with Colombian prostitutes, expressly prohibited to American employees, they said, to avoid infection with syphilis and other venereal diseases. It was an allusion to her, to Sayonara, because they had seen us together during the strike. That was the apparent motive of my dismissal, but things were as I am telling you: I never had physical contact with her, or any other woman. Now let me tell you about the last night I spent in your country, at Todos los Santos’s house.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “There were about fifteen people sleeping there with me while outside the threat continued, because the company and the government, which had broken the strike by force, were merciless and continued to pursue the guilty.”

  In one of the rooms, on mattresses laid out on the floor, slept Sacramento, Frank Brasco, and the other men, and the women were scattered around the rest of the house: Sayonara, Todos los Santos, Machuca, Analía, and a fe
w others. Brasco tells me that despite the tension and the overpopulation, there was harmony in the sleeping house, and that the warmth of close bodies staved off any danger. Every now and then a cough, a somnambulant sigh, a creaking of floorboards gave testimony to the affinity of the human flock when it finds itself gathered, pacified, protected by a roof and a door that isolate it from the rest of the world. In his sleeplessness, Brasco happily realized how much it pleased him to feel like a member of a clan, linked by unspoken affections to those who lay next to him on this side of the wall, inside the protecting and hermetic circle that is a family and a home.

  “The only feeling of well-being that can compare with the one I felt that night in the midst of so much company,” he tells me, “is this cozy solitude in which I now live.”

  Early the next morning, before four o’clock, he had to leave overland for Bogotá, where he would take an airplane back to his homeland, so he got up while it was still dark, among the clamor of crickets and other nocturnal animals he couldn’t identify, and he began to urinate, trying not to make any noise that would disturb the others. But Sayonara was already up and she approached him, barefoot, with sleep tangled in her hair and her body wrapped in a sheet to protect her from the cool dawn air.

  “That’s right, better urinate now, míster,” she ordered him, laughing. “That way you won’t spray us from the air.”

  “I will never forget you,” he promised her.

  “You’re never going to forget me? Listen to the things that occur to this gringo! Don’t speak useless words, míster Brasco. Memories melt, like snowflakes.”

  eleven

  One elusive morning, bathed in the perplexing light of an eclipse, beautiful Claire, the ethereal traveler, left this world into which she had perhaps never finished arriving. Her passing through Tora was sad and fleeting, like the shadow of someone who is present without really being there and who is not aware of the laws of gravity. Her death, however, fell upon La Catunga with the full weight of the calamity. It took everyone by surprise, leaving the barrio suspended between horror and shock and bringing to the fore how little we natives know of the foreigners who live among us. It doesn’t matter that ten years, or twenty, pass: The outsider is still a stranger—in good measure suspicious—who has just arrived. Of Claire one could think, in accordance with her pale beauty and the fleeting lines of her character, that she rose in body and soul to heaven in the ecstasy of an assumption, like the Virgin Mary. But it wasn’t thus; hers was an earthly and brutal death.