The Dark Bride (18 page)

The beating of drums had been added to the flutes, along with an accompanying choir and the voice of a drunk old woman who shattered the air every now and then with interjections, and at other moments with
ayes
and weeping. After a period of anxiously observing Sacramento's girl, who was now embracing another gentleman and disappearing with him into the underbrush, Payanés was finally able to understand something. This feeling of malaise like ground glass in my stomach is the same thing that is killing Sacramento, he must have thought, and at once he corrected the error of a worry that he knew instinctively was wrong.

“There, just as she is: a
puta
. That's how God wants me to love her,” he said out loud, and felt drops of relief that mitigated the sensation of chewing glass.

When the food was ready, the old women served it on green plantain leaves and distributed it, inviting everyone to eat with their hands. Payanés, who was a man from the mountains and as such inexpert in the art of eating fish, choked on the bones, was repulsed by those round, staring eyes challenging him to gobble them up, and mistrusted that scaly, aquatic being as if it were poisoned.

“You look like you're eating a porcupine,” laughed Sayonara, once again at his side, and she tried to show him. “You pull out the meat with your fingers and make a little pile, like this, then you squeeze it a little, you feel it, before you put it in your mouth so you can find the bones and remove them.”

She picked up a piece, cleaned the bones from it just as she had explained, and tried to get him to eat it.

“I can't,” said Payanés, pushing away that bit of meat that was too white, too soft. “I can't. I'm still thinking about that dead body.”

“Come on,” she said. “You have to eat and you have to live even though others have died.”

“It would be a sin to eat this creature, cooked so strangely.”

“Stop saying silly things.”

They went into the underbrush and undressed. Payanés made love eagerly and at a certain moment even with happiness, but without recovering in that ordinary episode the strange splendor of burning waters that had made him tremble earlier on the river. On the other hand, Sayonara's voice and gaze sweetened as if she were a little girl again, or were able to be one for the first time, and she nestled into the refuge of that embrace, seeking warmth and rest. Looking for love, perhaps? Olguita assures me that it was so, that from that very first time Payanés's serenity had consoled her, his comforting words calmed her and his self-assurance anchored her.

“Those two, Sayonara and Payanés, were for us the authentic incarnation of the legend of the
puta
and the
petrolero
. If you ask me what the best moment in the history of La Catunga was, I would tell you that it was when they first met. Others would tell you their relationship was rife with problems, that it wasn't perfect, and this that and the other. I don't pay them any attention. For me love should be rough and hard, just as theirs was.”

“Is Emilia your girlfriend?” asked Sayonara, running her finger along the vivid lines of the tattoo on his chest.

“No,” he smiled. “She's just the drilling tower where I work. We call her skinny Emilia.”

“I'm happy to hear that,” said Sayonara with unfounded relief, still unaware that here was a man who was married to his work.

“I'm a
cuñero,
you know? I think that with time I can become the fastest
cuñero
in Colombia,” he told her, and he released his hold on her to talk about his work.

“Will you stay with me tonight?” Sayonara interrupted him.

“I can't,” he replied, without even thinking about it. “I have to get back to camp today because I have to start work at dawn.”

“When are you coming back to Tora?”

“The last Friday of next month, God willing.”

“Will you come see me?”

“Okay. But you have to leave that whole day for me. You have to swear that for that one day there won't be any other men.”

“That's how it went,” Olguita told me. “They were apart from the group and we couldn't see them, because everyone's privacy is respected, but also because they were hidden behind some
patavacales
, which abound there.
Patavacal?
The things you ask, all unimportant details. But I will tell you what you want to know; a
patavacal
is a tangle of prickly bushes that have a leaf in the shape of a cow's hoof, which leaves a print in the shape of a heart. I was saying that they were away from the rest of us and hidden, but that wasn't surprising, since it's normal with couples in love. You look for a half-hidden flat spot, throw a blanket on the ground, and there, that's it, you do your business. Then you go with your partner, or sometimes alone, to swim in the river and come out again as if nothing happened. I tell you that we didn't see Payanés and Sayonara, but we knew what was going on between them, and I could read from Todos los Santos's worried look that she was afraid the girl was going to get foolish with Sacramento's friend and forget about the rest of the group. Later we saw them swimming naked, she slender and dark and he powerful and cinnamon-colored, both standing waist-deep in that water that wavered between lilac and mauve, and even with our view hindered by the distance, it was easy to read on their faces that they were in love. Dusk was falling, the hour when the birds' singing ceases and the river's breathing quiets, and as we learned later, it was then that they made their promise. The promise that was the most serious vow possible according to the laws of
amor de café
. They sealed a promise of fidelity for a single day each month, whenever he would come to visit from his camp. Payanés and Sayonara swore the fidelity of husband and wife for the last Friday of every month of the year, and it is well known that in these parts a promise is sacred.”

“Agreed?” he asked, pressing against him the one who from now on, by sworn promise, would be a little more his than any other man's, including Sacramento, and he felt his heart begin to beat again at the threshold of visions of the future: He saw the water light up again, the air shimmer with phosphorescence, and her hair burn gold like the crown worn by the Virgen de Guadalupe and formed by the day's final rays as they escaped the night in the blue liquid of her hair.

“Agreed.”

“If someday you leave Tora . . . ,” he ventured.

“I'm not leaving Tora.”

“You never know where all this war could drive you. If you leave Tora, I mean, and you settle in any other corner, just wait for our date, then walk in a straight line until you reach the Magdalena and I will be waiting there by the shore.”

“This river is very long,” she pointed out. “It crosses the whole country . . .”

“You just look for the river, I'll know where to look for you.”

“Later,” Olguita continues, “as they were dressing and the rest of us moved the party back onto the
champán
for the return trip, came the part with the memento. In that too they acted according to custom, because
amor de café
doesn't recognize commitments that don't involve mementos. Other people sometimes call them amulets or tokens. And notice this detail, the male always wears it, never the female, unless the promise is constant and total, which also occurs. Otherwise no, because she has to continue working, you see? And no man likes to find a trace of the previous one.”

With a small knife, Payanés cut a long wisp of her hair, braided it, wrapped it several times with hemp fibers, and tied it off, forming a necklace, and with childlike solemnity and the attitude of an altar boy he quickly blessed it, then kissed it and secured it around his neck.

“Tell me your real name,” said Payanés.

“You already know it, Sayonara.”

“That's just a nickname.”

“I've already forgotten the real one.”

“Come on, tell me. Just me.”

“I can't. If my father finds out the life I've chosen, he'll come and kill me.”

“All right, then.”

It was already too late for Payanés to catch the truck back to the camp, so Sayonara accompanied him and waited for him to catch the train, which was much slower, at that fateful stop they call Armería del Ferrocarril, which is always swarming with diminutive angels of sorrow that remind one of flies.

“This is where my friend Claire said good-bye forever,” she tried to tell him through the window at the last minute, but the train had already started to move.

“Se sentaban con recato,”
don Alonso Olmeda told me last night—a veteran of the Troco who frequented La Catunga in Sayonara's time and knew and respected the
mujeres de la vida
.

They sat with modesty, don Alonso had said of the
prostitutas
of those days, and his delicate observation took me by surprise, it hit me like a peculiar clue for deciphering that world, one with which this book should be in harmony and which forced me to rethink things I had written earlier. For example, “her flesh overflowed the low neckline of the blue satinette dress.” But they sat
con recato
. A curious and archaic word,
recato
. I heard my grandmother use it often and then after she was gone, gradually less and less, as if it alluded to an extinct virtue.
Recato:
a magical term when it refers, as from don Alonso's mouth, to a
puta
. From the Latin
recaptare
—to hide what is visible—it seems to refer to a secret world that avoids exhibition and which is, significantly, contrasted with the Latin
prostituere
, to debase, put before the eyes, expose.

“How did they dress, don Alonso?”

“With the elegance of poor ladies who wanted to look beautiful.”

“No cleavage or bright-colored fabrics?”

“Cleavage, yes, and bright-colored, showy dresses too, but nothing that would call attention with vulgarity. The famous striptease, now obligatory in any brothel, would never have occurred to anyone at the Dancing Miramar and the other cafés in La Catunga. Instead we enjoyed dance contests and there were prizes and celebrations for the couple who performed the best tango, rumba, or
cumbia
. It was another world and things gave off different colors, and prostitution, forgive me for expressing a personal opinion, wasn't disgraceful for the woman who practiced it or for the man who paid for it.”

“Even though there was payment?”

“The
petrolero
worked hard and earned his money. The
prostituta
worked hard and ended up with the
petrolero
's money. They say that love for money is a sin, but I say that it's nothing more than the law of economy, because bread doesn't fall from the sky for anyone. And don't believe what they tell you, that
amor de café
is pleasure and not love. When some fellow worker was smitten by a particular woman, the rest of us managed to stay away from her and not interfere.”

“Were you always successful?”

“No, not always. There were a few crooked girls who made their men suffer until they drove them to their deaths. No one confronted them for it because they were within their rights, and anyone who fell in love with a woman from that world was at the mercy of his own good luck. But in general, love between couples was respected and there were numerous cases of sworn and upheld fidelity, by choice of the couple and not because of any other circumstance. I can tell you the names of
petroleros
who had children in common agreement with prostitutes, without the women leaving the profession. It was a simple world because it wasn't hypocritical. It wasn't hypocritical but that doesn't mean that it was heartless. It may sound ridiculous to you, but there was a certain feeling of chastity in all of that. A certain kind of chastity, you know, and a certain elegance. To understand it you had to have seen them, so proudly gathering their skirts when they danced a
pasodoble
.”

“Were you in love with any of them, don Alonso?”

“It's a story that wouldn't be honorable to confess because I am the widower of a good and noble woman. Out of respect for the dead. But I will tell you one thing, many of us were in love with
prostitutas
, and with the passing of the years and a look back in time, now that we're closer to death, we have to recognize that they were the great passion of our lives.”

As a young boy, Sacramento wanted to be a saint. No one knows how long and dark the nights of a lonely, sleepless boy can be under the high, resonant ceilings of a monastery, his heart knotting and twisting as he begs forgiveness from God the Father, who sees everything because he's a great swollen eye, a voyeuristic, furious, and triangular eye that would blink with benevolence only toward those who become a model of chastity, humility, and sacrifice. No one can measure the depths of loneliness of a boy who wants to be a saint.

Especially when the mercy that this child pursues is not only for his sins but for the sins of the whole world, and above all for the shame of his mother, whose fruit is this very child, conceived by her in sin. At the charity school for orphans and abandoned children that the Franciscan fathers presided over in Tora, where Sacramento attended his first years of elementary school—the only studies he would complete in his life—the majority of the students dreamed of becoming
petroleros
when they grew up. One wanted to be a butcher like his father and grandfather and another spoke of training to become a fighter pilot. But Sacramento had decided to reach sainthood. I was told this by Father Nataniel, who was one of his teachers and spiritual mentors.

Sacramento himself still keeps alive the memory of the morning they sent him to the sacristy to collect the prayer book that the rector had left behind. He was about to complete the errand when he suddenly found himself alone in the deserted chapel, panic-stricken by the looks of so many saints scrutinizing him from their high, deep niches, shrouded in the quiet violet light filtering through the stained-glass windows.