The Dark Bride

one

Then slowly the night would open and the miracle unfold. Far off in the distance, against the immense, silky darkness, strings of colored lights would appear in La Catunga, the barrio of las mujeres, the women. Men, freshly bathed and splashed with cologne, would pile into trucks on payday and come down the mountain from the oil fields to the city of Tora, drawn like moths to a flame by those twinkling electric lights that held the greatest promise of earthly bliss.

“To see the lights of La Catunga from a distance? That was heaven, hermano,” recalls Sacramento, who has suffered a great deal because of his memories. “For that, just for that, we would break our backs working in the cruel jungle, the four hundred workers of Campo 26. Thinking of that sweetness, we withstood the rigors of Tropical Oil.”

Day after day they waded through swamps and malarial dampness, until finally the moment arrived, at the far reaches of hope, when they would glimpse the lights of La Catunga, that barrio baptized by las mujeres in honor of Santa Catalina — la Santacata, the loving Catica, the compassionate Catunga — in accordance with their devotion to her, whether for her chastity, her martyrdom, her beauty, or her royal status as a princess.

“She had enormous castles and inheritances,” relates the elderly Todos los Santos of her princess and patron saint, “herds of elephants and three rooms overflowing with jewels that had been given to her by her father the king, who was proud to have a daughter more beautiful and pure than sunlight itself.”

On foot and hatless, almost reverently but snorting like calves and jingling the coins in their pockets — that is how on each payday the men entered those narrow, brightly lit streets they had dreamed of in their barracks, Mondays with hangovers, Tuesdays with the longing of orphans, Wednesdays with the fever of lonely males, and Thursdays with the ardor of the lovelorn.

“Llegaron los peludoooos! Here come the shaggy men!” Sacramento says in falsetto to imitate a woman’s shout. “They called us the shaggy men because an oil worker was proud of arriving in La Catunga looking tough, tan, hairy and bearded. But clean and smelling fine, wearing leather boots and a white shirt, with a good gold watch, necklace, and ring to show off his salary. And always, as if it were a medal, his company ID visible on his lapel. The ID that identified you as an obrero petrolero, an oil worker. That, hermano, was our badge of honor.”

“Llegaron los peludoooos!” laughs Todos los Santos, showing the teeth she no longer has. “It’s true, that was the war cry. Tough and shaggy, that’s how we liked them, and when we saw them arriving we also shouted: Ya llegó el billete! Here comes the money!”

Back then Tora was distinguished in the great vastness of the outside world as the city of the three p’s: putas, plata, and petróleo, that is, whores, money, and oil. Petróleo, plata, and putas. Four p’s really, if we remember that it was a paradise in the middle of a land besieged by hunger. The lords and ladies of this empire? The petroleros and the prostitutas.

“We didn’t call them putas or rameras or other offensive names,” remembers Sacramento. “We just called them las mujeres, because for us there were no others. In the oil world, amor de café was the only recognized form of love.”

“Understand that Tora was founded by prostitutas according to our own law, way before the wives and fiancées arrived to impose their rights of exclusivity,” Todos los Santos tells me, regal and handsome despite her advanced age, as she finishes a glass of mistela with the manners of a countess and smokes a fat, odoriferous cigar of the traditional brand Cigalia, with gestures worthy of the equerry of that same countess.

“Have a little smoke, reina,” she offers me, reaching out the hand holding the cigar a little toward where I am not sitting, and I realize that she can’t see very well.

“How could you think of that, doña, can’t you see I’m choking?” I say, and she laughs; she seems to think I’ve said something funny.

“The ones who hold back are the most vice-ridden.” She laughs and covers her mouth with her hand, like a little girl. “If you won’t smoke, then have a mistela. It’s refreshing and pleasant. Please don’t refuse me.”

In its early days word spread to the four winds that La Catunga was the optimal marketplace for love because of the abundance of money and availability of healthy males, so beauties all over the world packed their beads and baubles and came here to try their luck.

“Extraordinary beauties came here, improving upon what was already here,” says Todos los Santos dotingly, then coquettishly begging forgiveness for the lack of modesty. “There were some real ladies, all so very elegant and pious. The candleholders in the sanctuary of the Sagrado Corazón never had an empty slot. One didn’t go around brusquely or soil her mouth with foul words, or display poor manners as occurred later, two women fighting over a man and things of the sort. None of that. Vulgarity had no place among us.”

Since there were women from so many different places, tariffs were established based upon how exotic and distant a woman’s nationality was, or how sonorous her name and unusual her customs. Those who charged the most were the French: Yvonne, big and beautiful, the languid Claire, pale as the moon, and Mistinguett, who before coming to contend with the petroleros was a favorite of the painters in Montmartre.

“She always dreamed of returning to her country, that Mistinguett; she said that there she was paid just for allowing herself to be painted in the nude. There was also a painter who came here and used her as a model in a painting, but he was a modern painter, a lover of bright colors and foolish lines. She didn’t approve the portrait and scolded him: ‘That’s not me, it looks like a chicken. I should have charged you more for wasting my time. Where do you see feathers on me, fool? Go and paint chickens and see if they turn out like women.’ She said all that and then to add insult to injury she told him that he painted unholy messes and had reawakened her anxiousness to leave the country, because in France painters truly knew their trade.”

In the strict classification by nation, after the French came the Italians, ill-tempered but professional in their work, and as the scale descended came the girls from surrounding countries such as Brazil, Venezuela, or Peru, then came the colombianas from the various regions in general, and on the bottom rung the native Pipatón Indians, who were at a disadvantage because of racial prejudices and because they were the most abundant.

Men of varying talent and diverse plumage made the trip to this utopian place to taste a mouthful of olive flesh, or blond, or mulata—of every kind and in willing abundance, without reproach or commitment, in a harmonious blend of guaracha, tango, and milonga music. There’s nothing like the vice of sweet love to kill longings and loneliness with tender kisses at the edge of a river, between sips of champagne or rum, with words whispered in one’s ears perhaps in Italian, or maybe Portuguese, nearly always in baby talk.

“They were sincere words, don’t think that we let out an ‘I love you’ if we didn’t intend for it to mean something. For every man there was a pretty phrase, ‘handsome daddy,’ ‘my little piece of caramel,’ ‘light of my eyes,’ and other flattering words like that. But ‘I love you’ was only used for the enamorado that each woman had, the one for whom her heart remained faithful.”

So as not to generate misunderstandings with the business of the international tariffs and so that the male clientele would know exactly what to go by, the custom of hanging a lightbulb of a different color in each house was established: green for the blond French women; red for the Italians, so temperamental; blue for all the women from neighboring countries; yellow for the colombianas; and common, ordinary white — vulgar Philips bulbs — for the pipatonas, who only aspired to a crust of bread to feed their brood of children. At least that’s how it was until the startling Sayonara made her appearance. Startling? Made of shadow and wonder, her name charged with good-byes.

Sayonara, the aloof goddess with oblique eyes, more revered than even the legendary Yvonne and Mistinguett, and the only one in the history of the barrio whose window glowed with a violet-colored bulb.

“The violet light, that was the key,” affirms Todos los Santos. “It was a new color, unnatural, never before imagined. Because green lights are seen in stoplights, in lightning bugs, and reds and blues are at the circus, in bars, in shooting stars, on Christmas trees. But violet? Violet is a mystical color. A violet light in the dark of night produces anxiety and motivates uncertainty. And to think that we owe it to Machuca, may God protect her despite the barbarities she says about Him; it was Machuca, the blasphemer, who obtained that violet lightbulb, so one of a kind. She stole it from a traveling carousel that had stopped in town at the time.”

Sacramento, the cart man, was the first to see Sayonara arrive in Tora.

“Sayonara, no; the girl that would become Sayonara and that later would stop being Sayonara to become another woman,” emphasizes Sacramento, and I begin to understand that I have entered into a world of performances where each person approaches or retreats from his own character.

The river floated along in a lethargy of idle crocodiles, and the champán, the raft, that brought travelers and hustlers, tagüeros and caucheros—gatherers of ivory palm wood and rubber — lively men and those dying of hunger from every port along the Magdalena, was taking longer than usual to arrive. Sacramento was waiting for a client who might solicit his service of human-powered transport for cargo or passengers, and as he waited he grew drowsy watching the spirals of brown water, frothy with oil, twisting and untwisting as they glided lazily by. He says he didn’t know when, light as a memory, she climbed into his cart with her two cardboard boxes and her battered suitcase, because he was startled from his nap by her voice ordering him:

“Take me to the best bar in town.”

He looked at her through still foggy eyes and he couldn’t see her face, which was covered by a tangle of wild, dirty hair. But he did see her beat-up luggage and the poplin dress that left uncovered some skinny and dark extremities. This girl isn’t even thirteen, nor does she have a peso to pay for the ride, he thought, as he yawned and took a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe away the sleep that was still hanging from his eyelashes.

“Wake up, man, I’m in a hurry.”

“Haughty little girl.”

Sacramento stood up, walked to the river, making a show of not being in a hurry, drew a little muddy water in a can, dampened his head and T-shirt, took a mouthful, and spat it out.

“The world’s all fucked up,” he sputtered. “The water tastes like gasoline.”

“What is the best bar in this town?” she insisted.

“The most famous one is the Dancing Miramar. Who are you looking for there?”

“I’m going there to look for work.”

Intrigued and finally awake, Sacramento inspected the bony, tangled creature who had climbed into his cart without warning or permission.

“Do you know who works there?” he asked her. “Bad women. Very bad women.”

“I know that.”

“I mean very, very bad. The worst. Are you sure you want to go there?”

“I’m sure,” she said with a certainty that left no room for doubt. “I’m going to be a puta.”

Sacramento didn’t know what to say, so he simply diverted his gaze to a portion of the slow journey of a log with reptilian wrinkles that was being carried along by the river’s current.

“You’re too skinny,” he said finally. “You won’t have much luck in the business. Besides, you need manners, a little elegance, and you look like a hick from the mountains.”

“Take me there now, I can’t waste time arguing with you.”

Sacramento doesn’t know why he ended up obeying; he tells me that perhaps he was stirred by the freshness of the fruity lips and healthy teeth that he thought he saw beneath the tangles.

“To think that I was the one who took her to La Catunga,” he says to me. “You can’t count the number of sleepless nights that regret has robbed me of.”

“You took her because she asked you to,” I tell him.

“For years I thought I could have dissuaded her that first day when she was still such a young girl and so newly arrived. Now I’m sure I couldn’t have.”

“Everything was already written.” Todos los Santos exhales smoke from her Cigalia. “Eager creatures like her bargain with the future and shape it to their fancy.”

Weaving among the crowd, dodging tables and chairs, Sacramento the cart man pulled his old wooden wagon through the smell of oil reheated a hundred times emanating from stands crowded along the malecón that were selling greasy, delicious catfish stew and fried fish. The girl weighed so little that in an instant they were passing the main entrance to the Tropical Oil Company’s facilities, where several guards armed with rifles were busy feeding their pet iguana.

“What does it eat?” asked Sacramento as he walked by.

“Flies,” answered one of the men, without lifting his head to look.

Floating among cloying organic vapors, Sacramento took a shortcut through the municipal slaughter yard.

“Get me out of here quick; I don’t like this smell of guts,” protested the girl.

“Do you think I am your horse that you can just guide anywhere you want?”

“Get up, horse!” she said, laughing.

Then they crossed diagonally across the Plaza del Descabezado, so named because enthroned in its center was the decapitated statue of some important person whose identity was long forgotten by the townspeople, and that had turned green from stray dogs urinating on it each time they passed.

“Why doesn’t he have a head?” she wanted to know.

“It was knocked off years ago, during a labor strike.”

“The man’s, or the statue’s?”

“Who knows?”

They crossed themselves as they passed the church of Santo Ecce Homo and ended up on Calle de la Campana, better known as Calle Caliente, then Sacramento announced, with chauvinistic pride, their arrival in La Catunga.

“The most prestigious zona de tolerancia on the planet,” he said.

The girl climbed out of the cart, straightened her poplin dress, which was wrinkled like wrapping paper, and raised her nose into the air, trying to sniff the winds that the future had reserved for her.

“This is it?” she asked, although she already knew.

In the vertical heat of midday, winding through the dust, a neighborhood lined by dirt alleyways made narrower on each side by blossoming scarlet cayenos and irregular dwellings made of packed dirt topped with tin roofs, each one with a door open to the street, revealing a minimal interior without mystery or secret and featuring an armoire, a slowly turning fan, a pitcher and washbasin, and a tidily made bed. Outside were mingled stray animals, little boys who wanted to be petroleros when they grew up, little girls who dreamed of becoming teachers, women in slippers shouting to one another as they swept their doorways or sat in rocking chairs in the shade, fanning themselves with the lid of a pot.

A poor barrio, like any other. Except for the colored lightbulbs, now extinguished and invisible, that hung from the facades as the only sign of the difference, the great, unfathomable difference. As soon as the girl tried to take a step forward, the brutal current that struck violently at her legs made her realize, once and for all, that La Catunga was enclosed within an imaginary cordon that burned like the lash of a whip.

“Once inside you will never leave,” she heard Sacramento’s voice warning, and for an instant her resolved heart knew doubt.

“Where is the Dancing Miramar?” she asked in glassy syllables that tried to hide her twinges of panic.

“At the end of that passageway, against the Troco’s fence.”

“Take me to the Dancing Miramar.”

“I can’t, the cart won’t fit in there. Besides, it’s too early; no café opens until five in the afternoon.”

“Then I’ll wait at the door,” she said, once again in conformity with the design of her destiny. She picked up the suitcase and the two cardboard boxes with excessive energy for the fragile twig that was her body and began walking, without paying or thanking the cart man, toward that territory marked with red steel, where it was fitting that everything outside was execrable, where life revealed itself in reverse and love fought against God’s mandates.

“It’s nice to say thank you!” shouted Sacramento.

“You’re welcome,” she answered, brusquely turning her head back to reveal her face for the first time, and Sacramento felt the dark and ancient gaze of Asiatic eyes fall upon him. The boldness with which her eyebrows had been plucked until they disappeared and were replaced by a pencil line, and one or another scar left by the acne on her cheeks, made him think that she might not be as young as she had first seemed. One of the girl’s cardboard boxes fell to the ground and she started kicking it up the street as Sacramento, sitting on his cart, watched her and wondered what that skinny, ill-mannered girl had that would make a man like him, who already had his cédula of citizenship, work for free and then stand rooted there, admiring the decisiveness and aplomb with which she kicked the box, as if the world were tiny compared to the force of her will.

“Wait, niña!” he shouted. “If you’re going to stay here you’re going to need a madrina. A veteran of the trade to teach and protect you.”

“I don’t know any.”

“Well, I do. Come,” he said, springing to his feet. “I’m going to take you to a friend of mine. If you don’t work out as a puta, maybe she’ll keep you to help with the pigs and other chores.”

Sacramento’s friend was none other than this matron, Todos los Santos, who is now drinking her mistela with birdlike sips, sucking on her cigar like a Jewish man from Miami Beach, and delving into the past to reveal to me the particulars of a love story that is both bitter and luminous, like all love stories. The old woman tries to study me, but her eyes reflect the smoke from her Cigalia, clouding her gaze and condensing it into a milky opaqueness, and I now realize that Todos los Santos has cataracts and can’t see me. She knows by heart the corner of the world that shelters her and she moves about it as if she can see, which makes me the only thing around her that she doesn’t know by sight. So I move closer to her, speak right into her ear; she raises her hand, knotted with arthritis, and feels my face with the soft pats of an old dove that can no longer fly.

“Ah, sí. Muy bien, muy bien,” she approves, satisfied at making certain that my nose isn’t missing and that I only have two eyes.

“Mira, madre,” says Sacramento, “the sun is setting.”

“Yes, I see it, I see it!” she says enthusiastically and plunges her white eyes into the rosy air.

“The sky is turning red with specks of gold,” he tells her.

“With specks of gold, you say? How pretty, how pretty! And as impressive and red as it is today, I’ll bet there’s a broad violet edge.”

“Well, yes, more or less. If you really look at it, you can see a little violet.”

“I knew it! And are there any birds flying across?”

“Four, five, six, seven… seven ducks flying north to south.”

“Ay!” she sighs. “How I love the sunset.”

I have been told that Todos los Santos was conceived by a cook and a landowner from Antioquia one Palm Sunday while the wife and children were waving dry palm leaves in solemn mass. Because of her beauty and the European whiteness of the skin she inherited from her father, she became a prostitute, following the path drawn from the instant of her conception.

“There was no place for me either in my father’s house or in Medellín society. Bastard male children became peons on the haciendas and that took care of the problem,” she tells me. “But with females it was more complicated. There were illegitimate daughters of landowners, like me, and then others that were called daughters of a slip who were the product of a well-bred girl’s sin. The daughters of a slip had it worse, hidden in the cupboards of the big house or behind curtains, while we illegitimate girls grew up loose in the countryside, like little animals. When we were able to use our brains, some of us were buried alive with the cloistered nuns until adolescence, when a few accepted the habit and the rest did what I did, escaped the convent and landed in a bordello.”

Clandestine paths, sometimes sweet and sometimes bitter, took her from love to love and from street to street until she reached the heavily brothel-ridden city of Tora, where she was so admired and desired in her youth and maturity that she was able to know, for moments, material well-being and even the glitter of fame and fortune. Without a hint of avarice, her beauty burned with a sublime, cunning fire, and guided by a scrupulous sense of pride and decorum, the moment she saw the first ugly signs of old age she moved into a period of discretionary retirement, which she didn’t hesitate to interrupt, from time to time, each time her soul demanded satisfaction and her insides, heat. She was feared and recognized as a pioneer and founder of the barrio of La Catunga: the defender of the girls’ rights against the Troco, the Tropical Oil Company, and its deputy, the Colombian government; the efficient celestina, the instructor of young novices; now close to blindness, to her centenary, and to the most impeccable poverty, she has been elevated to the category of sage and holy mother.

Today, the morning undulates innocent and warm and there is no trace of evil in this clear sky that Todos los Santos can’t see but can guess, as she also guesses the pansies, the caracuchos and the cayenos that explode in reds, violets, and tongues of yellow fire. She says that more than hearing the ruckus the parrot is making in his cage, and the rainwater dripping into the cistern, she is longing for them. And the striated green of the croton leaves? She says yes, she sees it, that she keeps it very much alive and flowering in her mind’s eye, just like each and every one of her memories.

She tells me that on that afternoon, when Sacramento appeared at her house with the aspiring prostituta, just one look at the wild and disheveled creature standing in front of her, half challenging and half imploring, was enough for her to recognize in the girl that singular mixture of helplessness and arrogance that fueled male desire better than any aphrodisiac, and since she knew from years of experience it was a virtue that was hard to find, she said that it was all right, she could stay, that she was going to put the girl to the test to see if she would work out.

When she limped onto the patio, Olguita, who had had polio, was surprised to see the scrawny novice that Todos los Santos had adopted, and thought that the madrina was losing her marbles, surely due to menopause.

“I’ve still got plenty of bleeding to do,” Todos los Santos said, and asked Olguita why she thought the student was so lacking.

“She’s a malnourished and wretched girl,” replied Olguita, “and you’re going to lose what’s left of your money trying to save her from anemia.”

“You don’t have an eye. When this girl becomes a woman all the men are going to love her. There won’t be one who can resist her. You’ll see; it’s just a question of applying some willpower and knowing how to wait.”

Todos los Santos and Sayonara were brought together by chance, but they were united by urgency. They needed each other, like a fish needs the cloud that will later become water, for obvious and complementary reasons. To prosper in the pursuit of survival, Todos los Santos had everything except youth, and youth was the only thing the girl wasn’t lacking.

“Work wasn’t so good for me anymore and I often went around fearing that old age would drag me to the verge of starvation, because it’s well known that no one can retire off of prostitution, if it’s exercised honestly. When I saw her come through the door of my house, I had a whiff of intuition and knew that it was me, thirty years earlier, stepping across the threshold at that moment. Patience and a willing spirit, I told myself, because we’re going to start all over again here, from the very beginning, as if the wheel were beginning to turn anew. Here comes love again with all its pains, which after everything is said and done are more tolerable than this nothingness that is bogging down my days. That’s what I thought. And, in all frankness, I also thought: God is sending me what I have been asking Him for, the fount of my subsistence in this last stretch of life.”

Todos los Santos served Sacramento a bit of lunch and dismissed him with a few coins.

“A few, no; seven coins exactly,” corrects Sacramento. “They were ten-centavo coins, which in those days bore the image of a large-nosed and plumed Indian on one side. They burned in my hand like hot oil because they were the payment I received for selling an innocent into a life of vice. I felt myself falling and I thought it was my own profile, with a crown of feathers and a Judas nose, stamped onto the coins. No, señora, I told her, you don’t have to give me anything, but she insisted with the justification that she was paying for the ride in my cart. It was the only money I had earned that morning and there was very little work available in the afternoons, so I speculated that if she was giving them to me for my honest work it was valid compensation, and that my conscience had no reason to be afraid.”

Sacramento went out into the street without daring to look at the girl, and the heat of an afternoon drowned in its own light fell upon him with the full weight of guilt. He didn’t see a soul around. The barrio had taken refuge in the dark, cooler interior of the houses for a siesta, and he, who had no house, consoled himself thinking that he was holding in his hand triple what he needed to ask for a cold beer in the bar across the street. He lost the impulse at the mere idea of abandoning the shade to cross the colorless fringe where the sun beat mercilessly and he sat down right there, on the ground, leaning against the door that had just closed behind him, his eyes fixed on the cool drops that were condensing on the bottle of beer the bartender was going to take out of the refrigerator when he gave her his money. But he kept his ears tuned to what might be happening inside Todos los Santos’s house, where an ominous silence was vibrating, which he interpreted as a signal that the girl who wanted to be a puta had already been swallowed up by calamity.

The sting of regret attacked again and Sacramento thought he heard the voice of his conscience ordering him to renounce the wicked money. Terrified that he might be discovered in his secret act, like a dog hiding a bone, he scraped the earth with both hands until he had opened a hole and in it he buried the seven coins, one after the other. Once he had covered the hole he breathed with relief, now rid of the evidence of the crime; he squatted very still to slow the beating of his heart and hummed a popular song that lulled him to sleep. He tells me that he dreamed about the cold beer that another man, less punctilious than he, would be drinking at the bar across the way.

Meanwhile, in the house, alone now with the girl, Todos los Santos proceeded to roll up her sleeves, put on rubber gloves, and tie her hair back with a cord: the necessary preparation for a first-class skirmish.

“Well, then, let’s begin your education,” she announced in solemn initiation.

To tame the girl and give her some luster she had to start by pulling the hunger out of her, little by little, in a gradual, calculated nutritional plan that would take months, beginning with potato broth with parsley, followed by a mixture of oatmeal or pearl barley, and evolving gradually to green beans, lentils, and lima beans, because a creature that has learned to feed herself on air, like a bromeliad, can’t be terrorized with sausage and tripe stew unless she’s been carefully conditioned; otherwise she’ll burst.

Todos los Santos served the girl some broth in a pewter cup and set it on the table with a piece of bread. Without waiting for it to cool or using a spoon, the girl guzzled it down and as soon as the señora had turned her back, she hid the bread in the pocket of her dress.

“I’m done,” she announced. “I want more.”

“Please, madrina, may I have another serving?” enunciated Todos los Santos in a didactic tone, inviting the proper formula.

“If you want another serving, go ahead, but give me some more.”

Since a thorough bath was the next step to be imposed, Todos los Santos took the girl to the patio and stripped her: She was a frog, a cricket, an incredibly young kitten, dark and savage, her nose blocked with dried mucus and giving off a dense smell of smoke and loneliness. Cruz soap in hand, the señora attacked the lice crawling over the girl’s head, and then, with suds and scouring pad, she started ridding the young body of the obstinate shell of ancient dirt that she wore like armor, until finally she appeared, dazed and blue, in the defenselessness of her tender skin. She chattered with cold as if she had just been born, alert and glistening as she dripped cool water like the threads of stars that appear at night in the reflection of a pool. There wasn’t much of an inventory that could be made: a tumult of hair sprouting from her head, two skinny arms, two dark, elongated legs, two tiny hints of breasts, and a minimal sweetness of moss, pleated and secret, under her arms and between her legs.

“She was a bundle of scared chicken bones, anxious to find a connection to the world,” says Todos los Santos. “I dried her with a towel, put a large cotton nightgown on her, and told her not to be afraid. ‘I am going to treat you well,’ I promised her.”

“This dress is too big and ugly,” protested the girl. “Give me a tight, shiny one, because I don’t look like a puta in this one.”

“What are you going to show off, tadpole?” retorted Todos los Santos. “Wait until you get a little flesh and then you can squeeze it into tight clothing.”

The sun’s edge had advanced, striking full upon the front of the house and falling mercilessly on the sleeping ball that was Sacramento, who awoke suffocated by the discomfort of a sweaty body and a dry mouth. If she wants to be a puta, let her, he thought, the devil with guilty consciences. He burrowed in the earth again and recovered his coins, but only six; the seventh had disappeared, swallowed by the dust. With his money in his pocket he crossed the street with determination and entered the bar.

“A good, cold beer,” he asked in a man’s voice, as he heard the first howl come from the house across the street.

Inside, the madrina was trying to get into the girl’s hair strand by strand with an orthopedic comb with very close teeth, in order to eradicate any trace of knots or critters, and with each pull the girl shrieked, tried to bite the señora and wriggled away to take refuge under some piece of furniture. The madrina drove her back out with swats of a broom, grabbed her by the collar, and subjected her again to the torture until the girl bit her again and the struggle recommenced. When Sacramento and the owner of the bar decided to enter Todos los Santos’s house, they found both women staring at the ceiling, vanquished and exhausted, and reigning over them, unconquered like a corsair’s flag, the black mane still filled with its crop of lice.

“Sacramento had a cruel childhood and Olguita believes for that reason one must try to understand him,” Todos los Santos tells me, “but I say to her that she’d better not come to me with speeches about psychology, because lots of people have come around here lately to see if I have been traumatized by this prostitution business, and I’ve sent them all packing. Blessed Sacramento, I say to Olga, he had a difficult childhood, but the rest of us didn’t have one or even know what it was.”

One afternoon when he isn’t present, the madrina tells me that Sacramento was born one day to a girl in the neighborhood who left him in the care of some friends while she traveled to the coast to settle accounts with the man who had deserted her. Since she never came back, the infant was raised from house to house and from one woman’s arms to another’s, like so many other children that belong to everyone and to no one, until the Franciscan monks arrived in Tora to evangelize. They opened the only school in the barrio and accepted him as an errand boy and kitchen helper and gave him a scholarship.

“This was a land where the normal thing was to be a puta, and to be an hijo de puta—the son of a puta—was the logical and painless consequence,” Todos los Santos informs me. “Sacramento would have grown up as sad or as happy as anyone else if the monks hadn’t taken it upon themselves to convince him of his shame.”

“To remind him of his origins they goaded him, calling him hijo de La Catunga or hijo de los callejones, son of the alleys, and when he turned seven years old they christened him with the name Sacramento,” adds Olga.

Sacramento was the name they gave all the bastard children, dousing them with baptismal water and condemning them to that distinction, which couldn’t be erased because it had been inflicted in a solemn blessing. The illegitimacy remained stamped on their birth certificates, on their cédulas de ciudadania—the official government-issued identity cards — and on their military cards, but people arranged to ignore these and various other punishing scars. According to Christian tradition, the priests baptized any child with a string of three or more names and they did the same with the bastards — Juan Domingo Sacramento, Sacramento Luis del Carmen, and Evelio del Santo Sacramento — and that made it easier for others, out of compassion, to remove the punitive moniker and to call them just Domingo, Luis del Carmen, Evelio, and so on. But this Sacramento, the cart man, ended up with the hard luck of being given only that name, or if it was accompanied by others, they were no longer remembered, and because of that he was the only hijo de La Catunga whom the entire barrio called by that name, Sacramento, which was the same as calling him hijo de La Catunga, or hijo de los callejones.

As if that punishment weren’t enough, the Franciscans filled his soul with a horror of the sins of the flesh and with a visceral mistrust of women, above all of his puta of a mother, who had abandoned him to chase after her instincts, like a lowly animal. Some time later the monks left Tora, and Sacramento, who ended up in the streets, had to accept the coarse and spontaneous tenderness with which the women of La Catunga offered him a bowl of soup, cured a wound with gentian violet or a sore throat with methylene blue, let him sleep at the foot of their beds, taught him sad love songs, and terrorized him with ghost stories. They did the same, out of maternal instinct, generous and indiscriminate, for all of the many boys and girls who roamed the barrio in need of affection and were unsure of their parentage. And so the boy grew up with twisted thoughts, troubled about work, tortured, loving what he hated and hating what he loved, always finding a spur for the turmoil boiling in his head, where adoration and gratitude toward the women was mixed with a painful rancor for their many sins and deep down a chronic incapacity to forgive them.

I asked Sacramento if by chance he remembered what had happened to the infamous coins. Of course he remembered; the most minute, decisive details are the last things lost by our memory.

“The first one was swallowed by the earth,” he told me.

“That I already know.”

“With the second and third I paid for the beer I never drank, because the shouting made me return to Todos los Santos’s house. I put the other four in my pocket, but the girl looked so humbled, so gentle in that shirt that looked like a straitjacket, that I thought it was only fair to give her at least half of what was left of the profit, so I gave her two coins, which she accepted without question. I kept the last two, which got mixed up with others that a man gave me that same afternoon for moving some things, a little extra work that came to me.”

Then I asked Sacramento if he had ever gone back to look for the buried coin. He laughed with surprise and said it had never even occurred to him, but he was piqued by the idea and twenty minutes later we were in front of a storehouse that had been built on the lot that had belonged to Todos los Santos. An entire lifetime had passed from the day when Sacramento’s minuscule treasure had been buried, and although the houses and people had changed, the street was still the same: a narrow passageway with no sewer or pavement. With a garden trowel, we began to scrape around the spot where he calculated the door had been. We removed dirt in no particular hurry, he for a while and then I, conversing in the meantime, very conscious that we were wasting our time. Several bottle caps turned up, and a rusted nut, a casing that looked like it was from a bullet, pieces of glass and rubber, and some other foolishness. And then, suddenly, a ten-centavo coin appeared, one of the ones with an Indian head that had stopped circulating a long time ago.

From that moment on Sacramento looked at me differently. In his eyes appeared a hint of perplexity and suspicion that I think made the existence of this book possible, because from then on he didn’t dare keep any secrets from me, as if I were a sibyl and knew everything before he told me. Of course, I didn’t want to take advantage of the situation to pry information from him, so I told him not to give too much importance to what had happened, that we had just found an old coin and it probably wasn’t his. He didn’t look at me with disappointment, as I had expected, but with incredulity and something close to anger.

“This is my coin,” he assured me. “I would recognize it anywhere.”

Faced with his emphatic tone, I had to admit my flippancy and ask for forgiveness. Then I tried to explain that I had invited him to look for the coin because those of us who make a living by writing live for the hunt of minute coincidences and subtle proofs that reassure us that what we write is, if not necessary, at least useful. Because it responds to currents that flow beneath what is ordinarily apparent, currents that turn back upon themselves and twist fate in circles. I also told him that a blind poet named Jorge Luis Borges believed that every casual meeting is an appointment. The more I talked, the more I got tangled up and the more magical my words seemed, and he listened to them, hypnotized, as if they were being spoken in some archaic tongue. Afterward, with the passing days and interminable conversations, during which he told me his whole life story, and I, something of mine, a sort of serene confidence developed between us that dispelled the magic in favor of friendship. But there was something that Sacramento never lost after that episode: the conviction that literature is a means for conjuring and that it can reveal secret clues. He, who had been anything but a reader, began to become interested in books.