The Dark Bride (20 page)

“We lived through progress yesterday,” says señor Mantilla, the owner of a small hotel in the center of town. “Since then we have only seen disintegration and abandonment.”

In the main plaza, to the right of the church and to the left of a scandalous ice cream shop with an English name, walls of mirrors, and techno music, I find a place like the one I am seeking, from the past almost to the point of nonexistence and discreet to the point of being nearly invisible. It's called the Gran Hotel Astolfi and you could say that it was extracted from the same ancient dictionary as the steamboat that brought me up the river. It has been reduced to a hostelry for travelers by foot, “Weekly or monthly room rentals with common bath,” and as a rendezvous by the hour for couples, but it still retains in the vestibule an Acme Queen salon organ and a certain solidity of finely crafted wood that speaks of better times. I ask for the owner, and although they tell me that his daughter is now in charge of the administration, I insist that I want to see him.

“The owner is don Julio Mantilla, that gentleman sitting at the front door,” they tell me.

I see him leaning against the wall, facing the street in a cowhide chair, just under the letter G of the sign that reads
GRAN HOTEL ASTOLFI
, greeting passersby with a nod of his head as if done purposely to show the freckles that crown his bald head. I introduce myself, tell him my profession, and explain that I have come looking for traces of a sad story that happened years ago and of which I have only a vague impression.

“I thought that only here, in your hotel, would someone be able to tell me about it. If I ask at that ice cream shop, for example,” I raise my voice above the blasting music flooding out of the neighboring business, “I'm sure they wouldn't be able to tell me anything.”

“Well, you won't go wrong with me,” he answers. “For a quarter of a century I've been watching what goes on in this town, from this spot, right here where you see me sitting.”

“You must know a lot of things . . .”

“Things from the past, yes, and the people who have lived here all their lives, but the modern stuff I don't understand very well. The one who knows about the new things is my daughter Adelia. Surely you would like to know about modern things, because you are young too . . .”

“It's more about an old case,” I say. “A strange occurrence that must have shaken Ambalema when it happened. A mother and a son who committed suicide. Do you remember something like that?”

“Are you talking about doña Matildita and her son Emiliano?”

“I don't know their names, not even their last name. I only know that they both committed suicide, the mother and the son, and that the boy must have had several sisters.”

“That's Matildita and her son Emiliano,” he assures me. “It has to be them, because you can count the suicides in this town with one hand and only in that case, that I know of, were there two in the same family and at the same time. Rosalba, my sister, had dealings with doña Matildita; she can tell you about that misfortune,” he says, and he invites me to the rooms at the hotel's rear patio, where he lives among rosebushes with his daughter, his two grandchildren, and his sister Rosalba, an elderly lady who would be identical to don Mantilla if on her bald head she had freckles, like him, and not the white, volatile wisp that she organizes into a small bun, like a cloud floating on top of her head. Señorita Rosalba offers me black coffee with canna cookies and dispenses, like her brother, the cordial treatment and beautiful manners of a bygone era that despite the ravages of violence you still find everywhere in this country, even on the part of people who don't know a thing about you.

I praise the splendid roses that she grows in her garden, I talk about the old tobacco haciendas in the area, anything that doesn't touch on the purpose of my visit. I don't know why, but at the last minute I start thinking that it's indecent to uncover information about a past that Sayonara never wanted anyone to know about. I am filled with doubt about how appropriate it is to link, by asking a question that is about to be answered, two worlds that she kept separate and ignorant of each other. Years have passed, I tell myself to calm down, yet I still go on talking about roses and other insignificant things until señor Mantilla forces the denouement by telling his sister what brings me here.

“The señora has come to ask about Matildita who killed herself, may she rest in peace.”

“I hope so, although I don't think it is so, because they say there is no rest for those who commit suicide,” says señorita Rosalba. She asks me if I am related to Matildita and crosses herself when I confess that I am not. “Those people had very sad lives. They were etched in the annals of the town because until then suicide was an outside affair here; yes, there had been killings, and murders, but none of us had ever known anyone who dared to leave this world by his own choice. People are afraid of the Third Brigade, also called the Home of the Pumas and the Heroes of Chimborazo, which are different names for the same brutality, because they say those men still haven't been able to cleanse themselves from the curse that doña Matildita cast on them with her death.”

“There are a lot of bastards among those Heroes of Chimborazo,” said señor Mantilla gravely. “The only consolation is to think that their consciences are being eaten away by the weight of those deaths, the mother's and the son's. The brigade's headquarters are just outside the town, as you take the highway to Ibagué. If you like we could go there, we would be happy to take you, because he who helps a traveler will be treated kindly in heaven.”

Don Mantilla calls for Wilfredo, an old man whose lower jaw hangs loosely toward the left and who works in the hotel as a bellboy, waiter, and handyman, to drive the family automobile, a '59 Buick that has been maintained in adequate condition, to be able to take us to the nearby brigade.

“Look carefully,” the señorita warns me. “Look as Wilfredo drives past it slowly, because this is a military zone and they threaten anyone who stops with bullets. It was there, right there, where they've put up that guardhouse with the sentry. They built it to distract everyone, to prevent them from continuing to bring flowers, imagine that, so many years have passed and you can still see the carnations people throw from the highway, because as I told you, they don't allow pedestrians to walk or cars to stop in front of the brigade. If they left people alone, they would already have torn down the guardhouse and built an altar in its place.”

“Altar, no, we would have built a monument,” contradicts her brother. “Many people have faith in Matilde's holiness and swear that she works miracles, but to me she's not a saint, more like a noble martyr for the nation, because through her sacrifice she tried to cleanse the evil she had seen in this town—France has its Joan of Arc, but we have our own martyr here in Ambalema.”

“For months after the tragedy you could still see the burned circle where it happened,” says the señorita. “A few years ago they whitened it with lime, then they built the guardhouse on top of it so that not even the memory of it would remain.”

“Where she burned, right there, they posted a sentry,” adds Wilfredo, opening his mouth so round and wide because of the defect in his jaw that his words seemed to emanate from it like soap bubbles. “He has orders to shoot anything that approaches. They say it's to maintain public order, but we all know that it's because they're terrified of her spirit.”

Sayonara's mother burned to death? She immolated herself with fire like a Buddhist monk, like a Florentine monk, like a Maid of Orleans? Suicide by fire moves me more than any other kind. During a visit to Cuba I expressed my astonishment at a statistic that reflected that a large number of women die annually by incineration, and it was explained that it is the traditional way, since time immemorial, that women commit suicide on the island, and that the practice is still as alive as ever despite attempts by the revolution to eradicate it. I was told the disconcerting details of several cases and since then have been obsessed with the idea of a closed chain, both sacred and perverse, whose links would be fire, woman, death, and back to fire, which attracts whatever has been born of it.

We stop the Buick further on, ten minutes down the highway, at a stand where all kinds of fruits are sold: bundles of oranges, mandarins, and lemons hanging from the roof beams, piles of grapefruit,
guamas
, watermelons, cherimoyas,
anones, maracuyás
,
mamoncillos
, and papayas in a wild array of colors and smells that convince me that nothing bad could have happened here, because nothing bad can happen at a fruit stand in
tierra caliente
, in a region where the weather is perpetually hot.

“Before everything happened, this stand was a
merendero
, a makeshift roadside restaurant, called Los Tres Amigos,” says señor Mantilla. “It was always full of tobacco merchants, hacienda owners, hacienda workers, soldiers, and even brigade officers. The owner was a man from Antioquia named Abelardo Monteverde, the husband of doña Matildita, a Guahiba Indian who had a gift for cooking and seasoning.”

“There was a vulgar saying around town, if you'll forgive me for repeating it,” ventured Wilfredo, releasing more soap bubbles into the air, “and that is that Matildita's food tasted so good because she lit the stove with a flame that she took from her groin.”

“That, Wilfredo, is ignorant gossip,” says señor Mantilla with annoyance.

“Because she was an
indígena
, people think she was a witch and say things like that,” says the chastised Wilfredo in self-defense, and this time the bubbles burst before they float into the air.

“They used to say, señora, that don Abelardo was Matildita's husband, although husband was just a way of speaking, because they were never married in a church even though they produced offspring, a male and several females. Around here a white man gets together with an Indian woman but he never marries her, and a white woman never marries or gets together with an Indian man. That is the custom.”

“They say that Indian women are versed in witchcraft,” insists Wilfredo, exposing himself to being hushed again, “and I know men that won't eat food they've prepared so that they won't fall prisoner to their fire, which isn't healthy. So many men won't let go of their Indian women because they have fallen under her spell and have renounced the cross.”

Like so many other
antioqueños
with colonizing blood, don Abelardo Monteverde was drawn to Ambalema by tobacco fever, built this stand with his own hands, and set up his restaurant here. The coal stoves, the ceramic sink, and the room where the family lived were in the back, where today there is an orchard with fruit trees. I look around: This is where Sayonara was born. Her mother, the Guahiba Indian, must have given birth to her squatting over a basin and hidden behind the bushes, with no help, not even complaining or celebrating.

“Matildita cooked, washed dishes, and waited on the tables, and thanks to her the establishment became famous and attracted a lot of people who were fans of her roast pork
tolimense,
her
poteca de auyama,
her stuffed goat, and her liver and onions. As I said, everything Matildita touched turned out delicious.”

“How did don Abelardo meet Matildita?” I ask.

“ ‘Meet' isn't the appropriate word. Let's say instead that he captured her in one of those hunting expeditions that the white colonists organized in the eastern plains. It wasn't vermin that they downed with their rifles or even mountain birds, but sometimes those too. They went out to
guahibiar,
that's what they called it, and it meant to shoot at the Guahibo Indians, chasing them over those immense flatlands that offered no refuge, because between the bullet and the Indians there wasn't a single tree in sight. They say that to prevent themselves from being killed,” señor Mantilla says to me, “the Guahibos shouted that they too were
hiwi,
which in their native language means ‘people,' but the white men didn't seem to understand.”

She was coming back from gathering fronds from the palms scattered in the forests that grow along the shores of the Río Inírida, and Abelardo, the
antioqueño
, wanted to bring her back alive. Since she had a pagan name and spoke a savage tongue, he baptized her Matilde and taught her Spanish, which was a civilized language.

“Despite her training, Matildita kept her bad habits and because of that she earned reprimands from don Abelardo; one day I saw him with my own eyes forbidding her to eat worms. ‘They're good,
moriche
worms,' she said with that difficult accent that she never lost. And she also said: ‘
Bachao
ants are delicious.'”

“Did she eat ants too?” The idea seemed hilarious to señorita Rosalba. “Maybe out of sight from her husband the little devil would stuff herself with ants! And why not, since up around Santander even the whites like ants roasted with salt. I remember that Matildita used to complain often about not being able to fry
terecay
turtles in oil. Matildita was also a bit of a scoundrel, and while everyone saw her as so self-sacrificing and submissive, she had her own character, she pitched fits and gave in to her habits, so while she may have prepared civilized food for her clients, she preferred for herself and her children wild yucca, sweet potatoes, yams, and red pepper, which are pig slop for white men and delicacies in the mouths of Indians.”

“She was endlessly working to keep her house and the restaurant in order, and besides cooking, she wove cotton and made cloth to dress her children and herself.”

“Don't exaggerate, Julio, remember she was dirty and kept her children naked. She sent the eldest, the boy, to school, but not the girls, because she made them work,” says the señorita critically, and I imagine Sayonara and her sisters running around the place. I see them with their own faces and their long hair, but with the bodies of lizards, of cats, of dragonflies; dirty and illiterate, peeling potatoes and scrubbing dishes, as señorita Rosalba testifies, but agile and free, indomitable, capricious, and foul-mouthed.