The Dark Bride (24 page)

“There's been an accident!” came the voice of alarm, and Nostalgia was lifted out by two fellow workers who took him to the hospital, caked with mud and with a frozen look on his face, less from pain than from confusion. His pupils were focused on a right hand that didn't seem to be his because it weighed less than the other and because it was wrapped in a towel soaked with blood.

“That's why the company has prohibited the use of metal rings or chains, loose shirttails outside of pants, or any other whim that lends itself to this kind of accident,” said Demetrio the nurse, as he removed the towel, looking at the useless space where the absent finger used to be. He was surprised by the surgical cleanness of the cut and he sewed the stump with coarse stitches, as if he were mending a burlap sack. “That's why there is a rule that workers must wear shoes and not sandals, which leave the feet unprotected. But they don't follow the rules, so they have to face the consequences.”

A massive female assembly congregated the next day at Olguita's house, and while they awaited the arrival of the mutilated man, they busied themselves by speculating on the fate of the ring finger.

“I say they should throw it to the dogs.”

“They say the ring wouldn't come off the finger . . .”

“The ring should be given back to Nayib; Nayib should reimburse Nostalgia his money and the finger should be thrown in the river.”

“To be eaten by the catfish that we will eat later? What a disgusting idea. It should be buried in some corner of the cemetery; it would fit inside a cigarette box.”

“We could also preserve it in formaldehyde, as a memento . . . ,” suggested Olga, who was sentimental and given to making the sign of the cross over things that had to do with blood.

“Bury it in your garden and plant a chamomile bush on top of it, so that it will grow really poisonous and deadly,” proposed Sayonara, who always came up with ferocious initiatives.

“The things you say, girl!”

At that moment the women parted to create an alley of honor so that the mute Nostalgia could pass. He was coming to Olguita in search of an explanation and consolation, already aware that he had lost not only a finger and part of his hand but also the possibility of continuing with his career as a welder. The company had given him a bonus and a month's leave for the damages suffered, but it was public knowledge that at the Troco the injured stayed on to run errands, to do gardening, or for other tasks for low wages and even lower dignity.

“What do you think happened to the ring?” asked Nostalgia, who hadn't thought of asking about the finger's whereabouts. “I bought it to give to my woman someday; she's been complaining for sixteen years that we haven't gotten married. It must still be in the well, I guess . . . where would the ring be? Does anyone know?”

“Forget about the ring, Nostalgia,” ordered Todos los Santos. “With your accident it has been proven once more that these barbaric lands only tolerate single men and that around here marriage brings calamity.”

Neither the finger nor the ring ever appeared, and in time Nostalgia, who became a messenger for the Troco offices, forgot about them and his welder's dreams, and although for the rest of his life he kept on showing the photographs of his wife, his children, and his dogs to anyone who would let him, he never went back to find them. But that doesn't mean he turned into a pitiful man; he maintained the custom of coming down to Tora every week or two to receive from Olga, as a sort of consolation prize, a tender embrace between freshly ironed linen sheets.

“Dress nicely and brush your hair, I am going to take you to see the other world,” Todos los Santos announced one day to Sayonara and her four sisters, Ana, Susana, Juana, and little Chuza.

They put on their stiff organza dresses—the ones reserved for national or religious holidays—with frills and bibs and broad skirts puffed up with crinoline, like light-colored cotton clouds: baby-chick yellow for Sayonara, cotton-candy pink for Ana, sky blue for Susana, mint green for Juana, and white like the snows of days gone by for little Chuza. They greased down their hair and splashed on perfume, brushed their teeth, put on their stockings and shoes, and started walking behind their
madrina
, dressed up in their Sunday best on a Tuesday and advancing through briers and underbrush that threatened to tear the organza and that messed up their hairdos. In spite of everything, they proceeded carefully and elegantly like country people when they come into town for mass, because Todos los Santos had warned them that if they wanted to know the other world, they had to arrive with their dignity intact.

“So that no one dares to pity us,” she said.

“This dress is scratchy,
madrina,
” complained Susana.

“You'll just have to put up with it.”

They reached a place outside of the fence around the Troco by walking along a path that Todos los Santos knew. They went down a hill and crossed a stream after taking off their shoes to keep them from getting wet, then sat on the rocks to dry their feet, put on their shoes again, brushed their hair, before finally arriving at their destination.

“Well, there it is. That is the other world,” announced Todos los Santos, in front of a place where the thick vines that clung to the length of the fence had fallen away, and where, due to some oversight in security, there were no armed guards to scare off curious or ill-intentioned people.

Piled one against another and sheathed in their colorful organza dresses, like packages of bonbons, the five girls could see better than if they had a first-tier box, all five faces pressed against the stretch of wire fence to avoid the quadrangular frames, the five pairs of Asiatic eyes opened so wide and round that they lost their slant. From there they saw what their fantasies could not have even attempted to imagine: the mythic and impenetrable Barrio Staff, where the Tropical Oil Company had installed and isolated the North American personnel who held positions of management, administration, and supervision, and which was a reduced-scale replica of the American Way of Life. It was as if a slice of a comfortable neighborhood in Fort Wayne, Indiana, or Phoenix, Arizona, had been removed and transplanted in the middle of the tropical jungle, with its gardens and swimming pools, its well-manicured lawns, its mailboxes like birdhouses, the golf course, the tennis courts, and three dozen white, spacious houses, all identical and completely imported, from the bedroom furniture to the roof tiles and down to the last screw. In the background and on the top of a hill, dominating the barrio, rose a house built of pine called Casa Loma, the residence of the general manager of the company, with its ample rooms, its vestibule, terraces, and garages.

For a long time the five girls looked mutely at everything, and since they didn't see anyone appear there inside the fence, they thought the other world was a bewitched and deserted place like Sleeping Beauty's castle. It seemed as if the inhabitants had left suddenly, without time to take any of their belongings with them. A solitary towel lay abandoned at the edge of a pool, the translucent water still agitated by an absent swimmer, a tricycle overturned as if the child who had been riding it had fallen and run to look for his mother, a lawn mower that was waiting for the man who had just gone inside for a glass of water. These objects were gleaming, still unused, as powerful as fetishes, possessed of a well-being not belonging to the people who used them but rather to the objects themselves.

“Doesn't anyone live here,
madrina
?” asked Sayonara in a voice lowered out of fear of shattering the mirage, but at that moment the lawn-mower man came out of nowhere, started it up, and began working.

“What is that man doing,
madrina
?” asked Susana.

“He's cutting the grass.”

“To give it to the animals?”

“No, he is cutting it because he likes it short.”

“What a strange man . . . ,” said Ana. “And why do they have those poor people locked behind this fence?”

“We are the ones who are locked away, the ones on the outside, because they can leave, but they won't let us in.”

“Why won't they let us in?”

“Because they are afraid of us.”

“Why are they afraid of us?”

“Because we are poor and dark-skinned and we don't speak English.”

“Look,
madrina,
the houses are like cages too,” said Juana, “they can't come out through the door or the windows.”

“Those are screens, so the mosquitoes don't get in.”

“The mosquitoes can't get in? And the other animals can't get in either?”

“Only dogs.”

“Can the dogs come out?”

“If the people open the door for them.”

“What is that woman doing?” asked Ana when she saw the owner of the towel stretch out on a lawn chair to sun herself.

“She is going to lie in the sun.”

“Lie in the sun? Then she must have cold blood. Machuca told me that lizards lie in the sun to get warm because they have cold blood.”

“No. She wants to lie in the sun to make her skin darker.”

“But why do they do that,” said Sayonara, “if they don't like dark-skinned people?”

“You have to understand them,” said Todos los Santos. “They weren't born here. They are North Americans.”

“Why did they come here?”

“To take oil from the land.”

“Why do they take it?”

“To sell it.”

“Oh! Is it a good business to sell land without oil?”

“What are those two doing?” asked Ana, pointing to a pair of women who were chatting at the door of a house.

“They are speaking English.”

“Then how do they understand each other?”

“Because they know how to speak English. Inside there no one speaks Spanish.”

“Someone should teach them . . .”

A group of children jumps into the pool to paddle around, a man starts washing his car, a woman picks up a hose and begins to wash her dog. Little Chuza, dazed, watched everything without missing a detail, but she didn't ask anything because little Chuza never opened her mouth.

“They wash dogs, they wash children, they wash cars . . . ,” said Juana. “What clean people! And where do they get so dirty, if there's no dirt in there?”

“There is no dirt because they clean it.”

“But why do they clean it if there is no dirt . . . ?”

“To keep busy and to kill time until they can return to their country.”

“Look,
madrina,
they're barefoot. Don't they have shoes?”

“Yes, they do. They're barefoot because they like it—they keep their shoes in their houses.”

“So they don't get dirty?”

“Maybe.”

“What if their feet get dirty?”

“Then they wash them, like their dogs.”

“But why would they wash a dog?” asked Ana, who never in her life had seen anyone wash a dog.

“So he won't smell.”

“Do their dogs smell very bad?”

“All dogs smell the same.”

“I heard something,” said Sayonara. “Señor Manrique told me. He said that the floors of some houses are covered with wool, like sheep.”

“That really is strange!” shouted Susana. “That must be one of Sayonara's lies.”

“It's true,” confirmed Todos los Santos. “They are houses with rugs.”

“What crazy people!”

“And what are those people doing over there,
madrina
?” inquired Juana, tugging on Todos los Santos's skirt.

“They are playing a game called tennis.”

“But they're not children . . . adults play too?”

“Yes,” said Susana, showing off. “And the one who catches the ball in his hand wins.”

“No, the one who throws it the furthest with the racket wins,” corrected Todos los Santos. “The racket is that squashed basket they have in their hands.”

“And inside there, in Barrio Staff,” Ana wanted to know, “do people also die?”

“Yes, they do. Death is the only thing that strikes them whenever it wants.”

A ball of rice. The critical events that occurred next originated with a soggy, cold ball of rice cooked in vegetable oil, one of those balls without salt or God's mercy that the management of the Troco distributed among the workers at lunchtime, and which they, not wanting to subject themselves to the displeasure of sinking their teeth into, preferred to kick around in the soccer matches they improvised in the building that served as their dining hall.

That morning, sheets of indecisive rain undulated across the sky, evaporating upon contact with the scorched earth, and the men of Campo 26 worked reluctantly amid dense clouds of heat. Delaying his appointment with death, Sacramento had decided to test the stamina of his weakened legs in the open air after having been released from the hospital. His unexpected recovery from an affliction lying somewhere between malaria, amebic cysts, and yearning for eternity was not so much due to the brown mixture, the white mixture, or the poisonous, pink quinine, as to the life-giving power of a dream and the palpable effects of the object that provoked it: the trinket of hair that Payanés had given him. Because as Olguita explained to me, nothing protects you with such loyalty nor transmits such vigor as an amulet made from the hair of the one you love, and the inverse is also true: An array of ills can be unleashed by a single hair from the head of someone who hates you.

“You don't have to be very sharp to realize the power of hair,” she told me one day. “You only have to see how it continues to grow after death. As if that weren't enough, it's the only part of the human body that doesn't feel pain or decompose.”

“Does it protect you even if the tuft hanging from your neck hasn't been cut for you but for someone else, and its owner doesn't even know that you are the one wearing it?” I ask her.