The Dark Bride

eleven

One elusive morning, bathed in the perplexing light of an eclipse, beautiful Claire, the ethereal traveler, left this world into which she had perhaps never finished arriving. Her passing through Tora was sad and fleeting, like the shadow of someone who is present without really being there and who is not aware of the laws of gravity. Her death, however, fell upon La Catunga with the full weight of the calamity. It took everyone by surprise, leaving the barrio suspended between horror and shock and bringing to the fore how little we natives know of the foreigners who live among us. It doesn’t matter that ten years, or twenty, pass: The outsider is still a stranger — in good measure suspicious — who has just arrived. Of Claire one could think, in accordance with her pale beauty and the fleeting lines of her character, that she rose in body and soul to heaven in the ecstasy of an assumption, like the Virgin Mary. But it wasn’t thus; hers was an earthly and brutal death.

“One foul day Claire threw herself into the path of the train,” Todos los Santos tells me. “Don’t be alarmed, it was a common means of death among the prostitutas of Tora. Many of them killed themselves by the train out of despair, or loneliness, or indifference. Sometimes simply out of weariness or pure drunkenness. Never before three in the morning or after five, and all at the same spot: the corner they call Armería del Ferrocarril, in the poorer part of the barrio Hueso Blanco.”

Now there’s a gas station located there, and a car repair shop and a stand that sells newspapers, snacks, and drinks, just like on any other corner on the planet. But Todos los Santos assures me that if you watch carefully, you can see people still making the sign of the cross as they pass that corner, because they know they are stepping on unholy ground: the site of immolation.

According to tradition, Claire’s remains were gathered up in a cart and taken to the place where she had lived, located in the miserable Calle de los Veinte Cuartos — the Street of Twenty Rooms. Todos los Santos was summoned to the deceased’s room, one of the twenty that was squeezed along that alley saturated with the smell of excrement and rancid fruit. She was to carry out the compassionate act of arranging the cadaver’s parts as lifelike as possible inside the coffin, officiate over the ceremony of closing the eyelids, and, to the degree it was possible, cross the arms over the chest, wrap the body in a shroud, and cover the head with a veil of silk lace.

“My heart shriveled when I entered that place,” she tells me. “Claire was one of those who earned the most from her work; she saved what she earned and had become a rich woman. If she didn’t live like a queen it was because she didn’t want to, and because she always believed that she was here temporarily.”

Despite having lodged Claire for a dozen years, the little room was still a poor and transient-looking place, with scarcely any furnishings. Not a single animal, not a single plant, nothing incompatible with the desolate impersonality of a boardinghouse, nothing that couldn’t be packed up from one moment to the next, nothing that would involve delays when it was time to leave.

“Afterward, tying up loose ends, we came to a realization. Not even the train’s passing could cure Claire of the broken promise that was always strangling her, like a hand pressing on her throat,” Todos los Santos recalls. “During the ten years Claire had lived in Colombia she agonized under false hope; now we know for certain that there was no other motive that pushed her toward her end.”

From time to time throughout those ten years of anxiety and waiting they would hear her sigh for a certain Mariano, who, however, had never been seen in Tora. They all suspected that Claire languished in a distracted haze because she had given her heart to this Mariano. Rumors of him arrived, but he never did. His letters, staggered, also arrived, inside fine envelopes of Kimberly paper with Claire’s name and address handwritten in sepia ink and beautiful nineteenth-century script; and the rumor circulated through the pueblo that he sent his lover funds in the form of money orders.

“Yes, there were money orders, but they weren’t from him to her, it was the reverse,” clarifies Fideo, as she travels in her hammock as if on a riverboat.

“How’s that?”

“Just as it sounds. It was Claire who sent money to Mariano in the capital to support his electoral campaigns, because he was a politician.”

According to the news that Mistinguett had spread around, with who knows what basis, Claire left her native France and came to America in the footsteps of this man, who had promised to marry her one spring night on the Pont des Arts. But clearly it was not her who he finally married, as the women of La Catunga would learn on the day of Claire’s funeral.

The beautiful French woman was mourned, like so many fellow prostitutas who had died before her, in the red hall of the Dancing Miramar, surrounded like a bride by carnations and tapers; the face — miraculously spared by the impact and still beautiful — was enveloped in the silk lace veil; definitive was the paleness of her death and delicate the shadow cast by her eyelashes on her cheeks of soft Sevres porcelain, like that depicted on the postcard sent by Sacramento.

Except for Sayonara, who wasn’t anywhere to be found, all of La Catunga was there, accompanying in grief someone who had died by her own hand and far from her homeland. The main hall of the Miramar — with its rows of mirrors, its Venetian chandeliers, its red and black velvet upholstery — in the semidarkness of midnight glistened dreamlike and splendid like a salon at Versailles, but beneath the indiscreet intrusion of the sun, it had more the look of a real funeral parlor: sad, faded, dusty, and airless.

The Dancing Miramar — doubly promiscuous? — was the unique and shared precinct for the rites of love and the rites of death, and not by choice but for lack of another alternative. Save for a few veterans, like Todos los Santos or Olguita, who were owners of houses with plots of land, the other women had only minuscule rooms in a jumble of precarious and collective buildings, with a common bath and kitchen. And those cubicles, which could scarcely hold a bed, certainly had no room for even a tenth of the huge crowd that generally appeared at funerals.

On the other hand, by decree of the parish priest, not even a dead prostitute, literally speaking, could enter the church, which provided an opportunity for La Negra Florecida, owner of the Dancing Miramar, who charged each girl ten pesos a night to dance in her establishment and snag clients, and a hundred and twenty for a funeral service, taking into account that the latter fee was paid only once. She made it available only during the day and as part of the deal she provided the tapers, the candelabras, black coffee in little cups for the ladies, rum in discreet quantities for the gentlemen, a sign at the entrance with a black emblem and the name of the deceased written in gothic letters, along with four dozen white, sweet-smelling flowers.

That afternoon, as they mourned Claire, those present witnessed the arrival of an imposing funeral wreath, the size of a truck wheel, into which at least two hundred roses of spectral whiteness had been intertwined and across which was a purple cloth ribbon with gold letters reading: MARIANO AZCÁRRAGA CABALLERO Y SEÑORA. The girls of La Catunga read the pompous name and were left breathless; fifteen months earlier Mariano Azcárraga Caballero, electoral baron of high caliber and kingpin of the reigning political party, had been elected senator. And “Señora”? Three months earlier there had been news of the existence of that wife, by way of the daily newspaper El Tiempo, which published a photograph of her on her wedding day with the same Mariano in whom Claire had deposited, until that day of irreparable sorrow and supreme anguish, all of her faith, her hope, and the better part of her charity.

“That’s what she got for not mistrusting power, which is always poisonous and treacherous and disdainful of people,” notes Fideo from the sidelines.

Dragging her trailing legs and bearing the wreath, Olguita approached Claire and placed it at her feet.

“Your Mariano wants you to know that he’s with you at the hour of your death,” she said quietly, rearranging a lock of limp, blond hair.

The Dancing Miramar no longer exists, but La Negra Florecida does and today she’s the mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother of a tribe of men and women who are university graduates. She is very ill from an intestinal infection that they call, as she told me, the seventeen types of fecal material, and when I asked her, most likely with a look of surprise on my face, to repeat the name of her illness, she told me that if I didn’t believe her she would show me the lab results, to which I quickly responded that that would not be necessary, that I had really come to ask her about something else.

“A hundred twenty pesos per dead person wasn’t much to charge,” she told me, “if you take into account that after the funeral I had to pay a rezandero to cleanse the place, because it would be contaminated after four or five hours of sheltering a tearful, moaning crowd. Around here there has always been a belief that after a funeral the walls are still in grief. If they aren’t cleaned no one will want to come back at night to fall in love, sing, and laugh.”

The Dancing Miramar: dual shelter of love and of death? No, an entire universe, and threefold, like the Trinity: birth, love, and death.

“I didn’t just take care of death,” La Negra Florecida told me, looking at me through her glasses, thick as the bottom of a bottle, as the seventeen types of fecal material ravaged her intestines. “I also handled births: I had set up a delivery room on the second floor, because there were many girls who ended up pregnant. When the time came I sent someone to fetch Cuatrocientos, who helped with the deliveries.”

On her way to Claire’s funeral, Todos los Santos stopped at her house to get Sayonara, but she couldn’t find the girl. She asked around the block if anyone had seen her, but no one had. Claire was buried at sunset in a field where cows were grazing, free of crosses or tombstones, removed from the village and at the edge of the Río Magdalena, a place they called the Other Cemetery. It was there, with no shelter other than a flight of herons and no monument other than a weeping willow, that suicide victims, masons, unbaptized babies, women who had had abortions, and prostitutas went to find eternal rest — all unredeemable sinners to whom the priests refused burial in the Cementerio Mayor. At least with the double stigma of prostitution and suicide, Claire’s unlucky star marked her for exile in death, just as it had in life.

“Claire wasn’t a sad woman,” says Todos los Santos in an elegiac tone, “she was sadness itself disguised as a woman. I have never known a more helpless soul in all the days of my life. However, it was she who brought to our attention that in the France of the Louis we, the courtesans, triumphed and we proudly let ourselves be called daughters of happiness.”

I always imagined this beautifully surreal scene: a group of women wrapped in black clothes yet immune to the suffocating and shadowless midday heat, standing in front of a fresh hole in the red dirt of Tora in the middle of a vast nothingness of high pastures. A couple dozen Cebu cattle with several herons perched on their backs watching with infantile curiosity and slowly forming a circle around the field’s unusual visitors.

Months later, when I myself had to attend a burial in the same place and under similar circumstances, I was able to verify that there in fact was a heat that was unbearable for me, tolerable for them, and the cattle also were there with their tick-removing herons, and the dead woman who yields docilely to the red earth. And yet, the foreshadowed image contained a double error that I will correct at once: There was shade after all, because the grave had been dug beneath the shelter of an enormous violet guayacán tree in full bloom, and the women weren’t standing, solemn but at the same time eager to leave that place, as is often the case with the mourners in the Jardines del Recuerdo, the Tierra del Apogeo, the Valle de la Paz, and the rest of the cemeteries in our cities; instead they were idle and lying down in a clearing with the patience of rocks, as placid as if they had come to stay, chatting among themselves openly about the deceased’s virtues, about her bad habits, about the illness that led her to the grave, about anything in general and in particular, and about the chicken stew that they were going to cook right there and consume with rum in complicity with the traveler to the next world and as a means of invoking her well-being.

As the stew was eaten and beautiful Claire was remembered, and afterward too, during the shoveling of dirt on the coffin, Todos los Santos looked from time to time toward the path leading to the pueblo with a presentiment of her adopted daughter Sayonara’s arrival, which nevertheless didn’t occur then or later, while they waited at home until after eleven that night without receiving word that she was at the Dancing Miramar, the neighborhood cafés, the home of one of her friends, the rocks at the river with the laundresses, the Arab’s shops, the Acandai waterfall, or other usual places; they grew so worried that toward midnight Todos los Santos, Olga, and Machuca went looking for her at the hospital, the police station, and finally the morgue, but all without result.

“She isn’t injured, sick, or dead,” concluded Todos los Santos, who refused to keep looking for the girl and ordered the others to go to bed. “She left because she wanted to.”

Why had Sayonara left? It wasn’t easy to deduce the motive for her fleeing, which had occurred just when her life was going splendidly. She had become a golden legend, surrounded by the love of hundreds of petroleros, possessed of radiant youth and a wild beauty that was magnified a hundredfold by rumors. Loved and supported by her madrina, who was an imposing figure in La Catunga, and by the majority of the population of the barrio, who accepted without jealousy her clear professional supremacy. She was privileged also in the art of being a puta, in having so many aspirants that she could give herself the luxury of rejecting drunks, foul-smelling or virus-pocked clients, men with sour characters or exotic tastes in bed; she was so spoiled and blessed among all the other women that she only needed to appear briefly in the Dancing Miramar and to dance under the spotlights, somnolent and unenthusiastic, for the men who were in love with her to express their willingness to give her their paychecks just to caress her with a look.

The day after Sayonara’s disappearance, Olguita, Delia Ramos, and the others devoted themselves to figuring what had happened to her and to finding her no matter where she was, and through inquiries and interrogations they managed to follow her trail to a tiny river port an hour and a half from Tora called Madre de Dios, where some fishermen confirmed they had seen her arrive alone, walking without bags and barefoot. Beyond Madre de Dios, all trace of her vanished.

“Maybe she boarded a chalupa and went downriver,” said the fishermen without conviction. “Maybe, who knows?”

Isolated in her house, a perplexed and shaken Todos los Santos locked herself in her room and lit three candles of supplication on her altar.

“Tell me where she is, Jesucristo,” she begged. “If you don’t know, no one knows.”

The Holy Christ smiled at her as pained as always, sweet and removed from human affairs, never uttering a word.

Then Todos los Santos began to study the postcards, remembering the faith with which Sayonara seemed to seek in them the key to some divine plan.

“Would she have gone off to look for Sacramento?” she asked herself, and the possibility seemed soothing to her, because it meant that the web of affection that they had woven together had not been broken, and that the girl wasn’t wandering around lost, as feared, through the distant, unreachable shadows of her past. But no, it wasn’t likely that she had followed after Sacramento, because the postcards gave no account of the location from which they had been sent.

Two things had occurred on the previous ill-fated day, mused Todos los Santos, wanting to tie up loose ends as she carefully examined the postcards to extract their secrets from them. Claire’s death and Sayonara’s disappearance: What did these two adversities have to do with this PALACE IN KATMANDU, opening its gardens to visitors, or with these two women, so absorbed in knitting their lace that to them the rest of the world doesn’t exist? What the devil could be revealed by this QUEEN ELIZABETH II OF GREAT BRITAIN, if she seemed to be asleep with her eyes open beneath the weight of her enormous crown? What hidden thread could unite the FUNERAL URN, MUISCA CULTURE with the PORCELAIN JAR, MING DYNASTY, NINETEENTH CENTURY? Nothing, absolutely nothing, aside from the fact that both were thousand-year-old earthenware vessels. And so she continued to speculate, trying to make some sense of this nonsense, dazed with confusion, until dawn arrived, then she spent two days eating little and speaking even less, ruminating senselessly on the words on the postcards until she pushed them aside in disgust.

“No more silliness,” she ordered herself. “We only know what our hearts tell us about people, and mine is shouting to me that this girl is going to come back. I just have to give her time.”

With the first light of the fifth day, Todos los Santos, still not completely awake, saw Sayonara again. Or thought she saw the girl standing at the threshold of her vigil, there at her bedroom door. But she was shrunken, thin, and timid, just as she had appeared two years before when she arrived in Tora for the first time. The spectral apparition looked at her without smiling, once again looking more like a child than an adolescent, once again malnourished, suspicious, barefoot, and unkempt — smelling, as before, of smoke and helplessness. As if time had stagnated and everything were unreal and identical to the way it had begun.

“Are you a person or a memory?” whispered Todos los Santos.

Todos los Santos was on the verge of collapse when she was rescued by another sudden apparition in the doorway. This time it was the real Sayonara, the same smiling, beautiful girl who had left the house on the day of Claire’s death.

“Madrina,” she said, pushing forward the small replica of herself, “this is my younger sister, Ana. I have come to ask if she can live here with us.”

On three other occasions over the course of the following year in similarly mysterious circumstances, Sayonara disappeared and reappeared without advising anyone of her intentions or telling anyone where she had gone, and always with identical results, and those three new opportunities also had their own names: Susana, Juana, and Chuza. So that by December the house was full and all five sisters were present, as Sayonara swore to Todos los Santos, promising her that she wouldn’t be bringing any more. Sayonara was the eldest, then Ana, Susana, Juana, and finally Chuza, a very tiny, very dark little child with shining eyes, hair to her waist, and the reflexes of a lizard, who didn’t speak Spanish or any other language and measured no more than twenty inches in height.

All five were installed full time and for life in Todos los Santos’s house, all five having appeared out of nowhere, all swarthy, short-statured, and long-haired, one behind the other like those lacquered wooden dolls from Russia that you keep opening and inside you find another identical but smaller, and another and still another, in a descending line until you reach the tiniest, which in this case was little Chuza.

When she learned of sweet Claire’s fierce death, a shadow, like a dead bird, fell across Sayonara’s gaze and her expression froze into a mask, as if she had been told of a shame that was too much her own, that in some unsuspected way had something to do with her.

“My mother and my brother committed suicide,” she said suddenly, five or six days later, making those who heard her shudder. “Until then my pueblo had known nothing about suicide; it had never occurred to a single one of those people to die that way. And suddenly two happened one after the other, with only a few hours between them, and both in my family.”

After a period of silence she added: “I loved my brother very much.”

Todos los Santos asked nothing, and she tells me that she had several reasons for doing so. First, because there is pain that doesn’t allow questions or offer any answers. Second, to respect the memories of others, which are sacrosanct and private, and to avoid probing into the hidden story that had always been guessed at yet still eluded them, as if calling attention to it was a way of invoking it. And because of jealousy, I would add: I don’t think that she wanted to admit the existence of another family and other love, different from her own, in Sayonara’s life.

“I hadn’t even been born when my mother died.” The girl didn’t make it any easier to find out much about her life, given her penchant for dropping false clues.

So the adopted mother didn’t say anything to her adopted daughter but secretly began to watch Sayonara’s every step, especially in the shifting hours between night and dawn, and if she saw the girl heading in the direction of the train tracks, she would take her by the arm, hastily inventing some pretext, and accompany her.

“I was afraid that her blood would pull her and throw her under the train,” Todos los Santos confesses to me. “Ways of dying are inherited, you know? Like eye color or shoe size.”

Like Todos los Santos and her friends, I too came to know in a single sentence of the existence of Sayonara’s mother and brother and of their suicide. In a single instant they appeared, tied me to the enigma of their death, and disappeared, forcing me to spend that night awake, looking toward the river from the window of my room at the Hotel Pipatón. The formerly great Río de la Magdalena seemed to me like a long absence: slow, black, full of dredging boats — could those brown monsters that sank their feet in the water be dredgers? — and other metallic and orthopedic apparatuses that turned it into an extension of the refinery, which spread across the opposite bank, rusting the night sky with the perpetual combustion pouring from its tall smokestacks. An incongruent smell, feminine and sweet, came from those iron pipes. Don Pitula, the taxi driver who guided me around Tora — and who worked as a welder at the refinery for twenty-five years — had told me that afternoon that the perfumed smoke came from a factory that made aromatics, where they processed petroleum into shampoo, facial creams, and other cosmetics.

“The factory that smells the best is the most poisonous,” he told me. “Working there is like signing a death sentence.”

That frivolous, lethal fragrance seeped into my hotel room, a toxic effluvium of cheap cologne that rose through my nasal passages to my brain, where it sketched the image of Sayonara. Without ever having known or seen her, I had been trying to decipher her for several weeks, and with some degree of certainty, it had seemed until then, although perhaps I was forcing the missing pieces of her character a little to make them fit into a coherent whole. And now the specters of a mother and a brother killed by their own wills had made their brutal appearance, hopelessly exploding the puzzle that I had thus far managed to halfway assemble. Who were they? Why had they taken their lives? What deadly vocation had weighed so heavily on them? The day before, they hadn’t existed in my awareness, and now they had loaded the image of Sayonara with a past so final, so turbulent that it threatened to bury the fragile blossom of her present beneath a river of sand. That mother and brother fell upon me from out of nowhere, bringing with them a worrisome guest I had not anticipated, at least not yet and not in such an excessive dose: the breath of death, which blended that night with the cloying smell of the aromatics factory.

“The big ugly bird hovered over Sayonara,” Fideo told me, referring to death, with the lucidity and the edge that come only from the mouth of the dying. “There was no doubt about that. But she knew how to handle it. Don’t pluck out my eyes, she commanded it, and the creature kept still. It didn’t leave her alone, but it didn’t harm her.”

I learned that Todos los Santos was soon able to forget about her vigilance and fear with respect to a suicidal instinct in Sayonara, who seemed instead to be growing happier and more confident in the goodness of life, and about whom nothing aroused suspicion that she might belong to the group of those who are not comfortable on this side of heaven. If it was indeed true, as Fideo believed, that she carried the predatory bird of death on her shoulder, then it was also true that she had learned to feed it from her hand.