The Dark Bride (21 page)

“Hush, woman, don't say evil things,” señor Mantilla reprimands his sister. “Don't disparage her soul. Besides, as if that weren't enough, doña Matildita was skillful at weaving baskets, mats, and hammocks, and by that I want to tell you, señora journalist, that she produced a lot of income for don Abelardo and no expense. And in his own coarse, rustic way he realized that; he set himself up with her and kept her as his only woman until the end.”

The couple's daughters, the Mantillas tell me, were all thin like their mother, with dark, opulent hair, almond-shaped eyes, and skin the color of fired bricks. The oldest child and only male was more like his father, with light blue eyes, lighter hair, and barely tanned skin, but he stuck to his mother with such devotion that as a young boy don Abelardo threatened to send him to an orphanage if he didn't let go of her skirts and act his age. You're a man and you're white, he kept telling the boy, so don't go around sniveling.

“That boy, who was given the name Emiliano,” says the señorita, “was the light of Matilde's eyes, her reason for being. The only luxury she permitted herself in that valley of tears was loving and taking care of that boy as if he were a real live prince, and she would have given her very life for him, as they say, only that in her case that's exactly what happened.”

When he turned eighteen, Emiliano was caught in an army roundup and was enlisted as a recruit in the Third Brigade. Military life wasn't a bad choice and don Abelardo was satisfied that his pup would be given the opportunity to progress in the arms race. Doña Matildita resented it, because it took the object of her devotion from her side and at the same time deprived her of his help, because the boy was her right hand in the innumerable chores of Los Tres Amigos. Since his military service would be short and nothing would be gained by protesting, Matildita relented, saying that at least those fools should teach you how to write, and the day he left she caressed his face, a rare gesture for her, a woman who didn't know anything about such things, and she kept saying over and over, so it would be etched into his soul: Never forget that you are
hiwi
; don't let them treat you like an animal. In spite of their prejudices, at first things were tolerable, because the brigade's close proximity allowed the boy to stop by the restaurant frequently to see his parents and because doña Matilde secretly managed daily to send him a basket filled with food.

“But it is customary for officers and superiors to humiliate the recruits,” señor Mantilla tells me, “and Emiliano was a man of rebellious pride. There was a sergeant who was more cruel than the others, that sergeant treated him brutally and shouted in his face: ‘What can you learn, you're the son of a savage,' and he ridiculed the boy in front of the others, calling him the son of Tarzan and Cheetah. Until Emiliano, who was tall and strong, chose not to swallow any more humiliation and split open the sergeant's face with a powerful punch.”

As punishment they took his clothes and buried him in a jail they called the tomb, a hole in the ground, lined with cement, deep and narrow, covered on top by a steel grate that left the prisoner exposed to the rain, which in this region is frequent, to the cold nights and to the sun's burning rays. “You're going to rot there, monkey, savage, humanoid,” shouted the sergeant from above as he passed Emiliano, and so did other officers, spitting on him and insulting him: “Don't even dream that we are going to let you out. Why don't you just die and take advantage of already being buried.”

Don Abelardo's attempts to secure his release were futile, as were the pleas of Matildita, who abandoned her duties, forgot about her daughters, and planted herself day and night in front of the entrance to the brigade, where she cried from the top of her lungs and begged for clemency from all the officers she saw coming and going.

In that hole of death, Emilano wallowed in dementia and his own excrement. He was riddled with fungus and larvae and perhaps managed to calm his hunger and anguish by eating ants and worms as he had seen his mother do. And he endured being spit upon by the Heroes of Chimborazo and urinated upon by the Pumas of the Andes. Could he at least see the moon from his dungeon? Yes, he could: the moon, the stars, and any meteor that passed compassionately over his head, and they say that he spent his nights as a prisoner in the bowels of the earth, penetrating, with his gaze and his desire, the deep bowels of the firmament. According to the Mantillas, you could hear his voice repeating: “
Soy hiwi,
” I am a man, I am a man, sometimes softly, sometimes in prayer, and other times shouting clearly so he wouldn't forget that he was a man and not filth, that he was a living being and not a cadaver. A cadaver that rebels, that wants to ignore his own decomposition, that abhors the earth that weighs upon him?

“That is what he had become,” confirms the señorita.

He managed to survive for forty-six days, stolen minute by minute from horror and death, and on the night of October 17, beneath the miserly moonlight that refused to illuminate him, he cut his veins with a piece of broken glass and agonized until dawn, when his condition was discovered by the cleaning personnel. Then they opened the steel grate and disinterred him, but he was no longer saying
hiwi
or anything else, and he arrived at the infirmary with his heart drained of its blood and still, finally truly dead after having been dead for so long in life.

When they came to tell her what had happened, doña Matildita, who was barefoot and still hadn't braided her hair, was lighting the stove as she did every day at that hour, drenching the coal with liquid fuel before lighting it with a match. The bearers of the news hadn't finished saying what they had come to say before she took off running up the highway with the gallon of fuel in her hand, and in front of the brigade she upturned it on herself and lit a match. Her hair was the first thing to burn, that sumptuous blue-black mantle that had been her only excess; it glowed red-white like a torch against the innocence of the sky until her lean body of dry wood was engulfed in flames. Her eyeballs melted and the intense fire of a mother's mourning began, the combustion of her infinite pain that wasn't of the flesh, and by the time the soldiers had put out the fire, her being had already been turned into a miserable heap of bereaved coals.

“And the girls?” I ask. “Matilde's daughters? What happened to the girls?”

But the Mantillas know little of them, not even their names, and Wilfredo shrugs his shoulders, excusing his ignorance.

“They were very little,” the three justified themselves, “and they were all so alike that we never learned how to distinguish them.”

“But the girls?” I insist. “You must know something of them . . .”

In Ambalema they only knew that they kept living with their father for a while, very unkempt and on the verge of starvation, until the restaurant was closed, because after Matildita's death there were no patrons, and the father brought from San Miguel Abajo, in the
departmento
of Antioquia, a white woman whom he married in church and according to law. That woman already had her own children who were also white and she didn't want to have anything to do with the fruit of the previous cohabitation arrangement. I didn't come here to take care of jungle children, she announced to her new husband, and Matildita's daughters were turned over to God's care.

“We never heard about them after that . . .”

I thank the Mantillas and Wilfredo for the kindness they have shown me with a basket of fruit and I say good-bye. I present myself at the Third Brigade as a journalist, ask for an interview with the commanding officer, General Omar Otoya, and I sit for a half hour in a windowless, air-conditioned waiting room, imagining that Matildita's suffering soul must wander scorched and howling through this military base at night until the darkness is filled with the smell of fear, because the Heroes of Chimborazo, who are not afraid of death, are terrified of the vengeance of the dead against the living who mistreated them. Is that the flicker of an old anxiety I see in the alert eyes of these soldiers I watch coming and going as if nothing had happened, but who know that their rifles are useless against the ash that is settling in their lungs?

An officer takes me to General Otoya's office. It is large and well ventilated, without a trace of torture or any reminder of horror, its doors open to a balcony overflowing with ferns.

“People's imaginations are limitless,” says the general, who is tall and handsome and smells like cologne and looks like he just shaved with Gillette Platinum Plus, when I ask him about soldier Emiliano Monteverde and the circumstances of his death. “There is no burying alive here, nor has there ever been, no walling in or throat slashing, or anything of the sort. Cells like tombs? Don't tell me that you allowed yourself to be duped by those horror movies.”

With the general's permission I look out over the railing on the green balcony, straining my eyes in search of the nonexistent cell, and suffice it to say that I don't see it anywhere.

The officer who led me a few minutes ago to the general's office now accompanies me back toward the reception area, and as he is returning my identification documents he gives me a sly look.

“It wasn't a disciplinary action, the thing with Emiliano Monteverde. There was a girl involved,” he says, when no one can hear us.

“What? Then you do know about it?”

“The only one who knows is my general, and you already heard him, nothing happened here.”

“But you just said . . .”

“Forget about what I said. You mentioned that you were in Tora before, right? Well, go back. Ask around there for a
prostituta
they call the Soldier's Widow. Ask her.”

The Soldier's Widow? It's not a name that is easy to forget. And then there's the coincidence that I have heard it before.

Heading downriver during my return trip to Tora, I wring my memory trying to identify who I heard mention the Soldier's Widow for the first time. Todos los Santos, no, not Olguita either. Sacramento maybe? Or Fideo? No.

The river is so docile, so still in its course, that it seems philosophically feasible to be able to bathe twice in it. I can't stop thinking about Sayonara's mother, so close to those sorceresses who burn with inner heat, whose existence Mircea Eliade mentions, saying that they carry fire hidden in their genitals and that they use it to cook with. The mother, an Indian and a witch, the daughter, an Indian and a witch: One knew how to rub wood together to ignite the fire that feeds, the other, to rub the sex organs to ignite the fire of love.

An old man wearing a bright yellow shirt is rowing his
chalupa
in the opposite direction, propelling it forward with the strong strokes of a single oar, and I become absorbed in the brilliance of that yellow sparkling against the motionless river. Now I remember: It was Machuca, the educated
puta
, the learned reader and heretic of the seventh circle that proclaims the death of God, it was she who mentioned the Soldier's Widow to me. I see her sitting behind her Olivetti Lettera 22 in a corner of the town hall in Tora, where she now works as a copier of notices, writings, and documents, taking puff after puff on her eternal cigarette without worrying about the ashes that fall, like bits of time, onto her blouse, her papers, her lap, anywhere except the tin ashtray. I also see her shoes sticking out from underneath the desk, wide and antiquated like Daisy Duck's, her fingers stained with nicotine, her poorly embalmed pharaoh's face, her crazy squirrel eyes, her enormous mouth that tells me shocking stories about the inhabitants of the former barrio of La Catunga, among which she mentions, only in passing and without emotion, the Soldier's Widow. I think I asked her about that woman with an operatic name because I remember her assuring me that she wasn't anyone worth the trouble of investigating and except for her nickname was a common, vulgar woman.

As soon as I reach Tora, before stopping by my hotel to leave my knapsack, I run to the town hall to look for Machuca; it's five o'clock and luckily they still haven't closed.

“Machuca,” I ask, “did you know the Soldier's Widow? Does she still live in Tora? Do you know where I can find her?”

“Why are you so interested. The Soldier's Widow came to La Catunga after the best times had passed and it had succumbed to the worst times. She never became a friend of ours.”

“Why not?”

“Out of embarrassment. She was a gloomy
puta,
a spoilsport, a wet blanket who was in the business by obligation and not by vocation. More candle-sucking and prayerful than a blind zealot; I think she would have liked to service her clients behind the altar so she wouldn't have to lose sight of the Holy Child, who she had turned blue from asking so many things. For health, for money, for comfort for such a lonely woman, for this and for that, because she was unhappy with this life, that one, the Soldier's Widow. She wasn't anyone we would like, and you wouldn't like her either if you got to know her. An inspired
puta,
touched by the muses, that was Todos los Santos. Oh, yes! I wish you could have seen her in her splendor; she had the strength of a tractor and the happiness of a pair of castanets. Such a joy for life! On the other hand, the poor Widow was always a spiritless, downhearted woman.

“Why did they call her the Soldier's Widow?”

“It's a long story.”

She arrived in La Catunga already in service and a veteran of the profession, with her hair dyed blond, an inconsolable air of abandonment, and dressed in the shroud of her own legend, according to which as a young woman she had been loved by a noble and gallant soldier who her brother, a sergeant in the same battalion, was pushing toward death to destroy their love.

The version of events that Machuca knows doesn't contradict that of the Mantillas. On the contrary, it raises the volume and adds two glorious elements that fill it with meaning: passion and heroism. There was no variation in the other ingredients: the same dungeon, the same boy buried in it, the same vengeful, insulting sergeant, his racial disdain, and his abuse of authority. But this time there's a woman, the sergeant's sister, who is the soldier's love. The differences in race and class are more notable and injurious because the recruit is the son of an Indian and a colonist, while the sergeant and his sister belong to an established, well-off family.