The Dark Bride

fifteen

Payanés spent thirty-six hours straight partying with his friend Molly Flan in a warm and forgettable drunken spree of Vat 69 liquor and well-paired merengue. And the next morning, levitating in the watery imprecision of his hangover, he went looking for his friend Sacramento’s girl at the place where he was told he would find her, the house of a matron called Todos los Santos.

There she was, Sacramento’s girl, who was no longer a girl but a woman, in the middle of a carefree moment, frozen in time, with Ana, Juana, Susana, and little Chuza, all five dressed in their Sunday best, with freshly ironed light-colored cotton dresses, lined up one behind another and each one braiding the hair of the one in front of her: Susana braiding Juana’s; Juana, Ana’s; Ana, Sayonara’s; and Sayonara, Chuza’s, who wouldn’t stand still or even let her hair be brushed because she was busy trying to tie ribbons onto Aspirina’s fur.

I don’t know whether Payanés, dazzled by the blue highlights in the lustrous hair of the five girls, realized at that moment, or whether he already knew — surely from Molly Flan herself — that Sayonara and the girl were two different people and yet one and the same. It wasn’t easy to reconcile the night beauty, product of her own fame and secure on her high pedestal in the love of many men, with this village girl on a Sunday morning; such a sister to her siblings and such a daughter to her madrina; so approachable and true in her simple dress, in her common, everyday gestures — just another girl among so many poor, anonymous people.

What is certain is that Payanés stood there in the arched entryway without knowing what to say, without wanting to interrupt that everyday ceremony of women in their cool and shaded patio in contrast with the iridescent heat of the street, and that he stayed there, less observing than remembering, as if dreaming about something he’d already seen before, in the privileged days of a more pious era. These girls could be my sisters, he must have thought, or any man’s sisters, and Sayonara could be my wife, or my brother’s girlfriend, and that lady Todos los Santos, or another just like her, could be my mother, and this house, why not, this house could have been my house.

“What about the violet light?” I asked Olga. “The violet light must have brought him back to earth…”

“The lights were turned off in the mornings, and an extinguished light is a silent light.”

They say that Payanés felt invaded by a calmness that partially mitigated the ravages of his hangover, due to a sort of reencounter with his own insides and a sudden realization that despite everything the world was still the same as he remembered it from his childhood.

“Wake up, boy,” Todos los Santos said suddenly, as if she had read his mind. “This isn’t a house of sisters or girlfriends, this is a house of putas.”

“Tell Sacramento that I thank him, but I’m sending his money back to him because I’m not thinking about giving up this life, which hasn’t turned out badly,” Sayonara said to him when he gave her his friend’s pay. “Tell him that while he’s away to send me more postcards, because I haven’t received any for a while and I miss them.”

Then Payanés assured her that Sacramento hadn’t sent postcards or come down to Tora because of work-related impediments, but that he always thought of her, that he was generally all right and in perfect health.

In perfect health: They assure me that was what he said. Why didn’t he say a word about the malaria that was consuming Sacramento? Why didn’t he talk about the white hospital where the nurses soothed the shadow that was left of him, of the constant shivering and fevers, of the faith deposited in quinine with side effects perhaps more noxious than the illness itself? Why did he, Payanés, always collaborative, solid, trustworthy, fail just now? So as not to give away his friend, perhaps; out of fear of being indiscreet, or in order not to worry them with bad news… or because of the same shame that causes all members of the male sex to be silent when dealing with that which deeply concerns human beings? As if loneliness, joy, weakness, pain, or malaria were shameful, nameless things that one should never admit, even in the confessional, or to a doctor, or even to oneself.

Although, truth be told, I think I can sense another motive for Payanés’s having kept silent, which is that over time, as I got to know Sacramento better, I began to doubt that he truly had been sick. With malaria, I mean, because he was always sick: with anxiety. Hungry to love and to be loved, to forgive and be forgiven, whipped by guilt of his own and of others, a bird that was always lost in the clouds of other firmaments, incapable of being happy with what his eyes see and his fingers touch — raging with fever, yes, but with fever wavering between utopias and the certainties at hand; with mythical love, but only sworn before a notary. And the vomiting: Was he struggling to throw out a swollen soul that would no longer fit inside his body?

Was Payanés also a prisoner of this suspicion about his friend and therefore hid the information about the complaint of malaria? That might have been. Did he omit the matrimonial message to Sayonara out of pure precaution, thinking that Sacramento himself, who was unaware of the girl’s double identity, wouldn’t want — of that he was almost certain — to marry someone that he saw as a sister? That might have been. Or maybe not?

It is clear that the most overwhelming hypothesis — the only serious one — would hold that behind this sin of omission could be the hand of fate that was gradually beginning to raise the foundation of a tragedy. Although I doubt that there is a genre that could be called tropical tragedy: The excessive light of the tropics blurs the sharp contours of any drama, makes it more rounded, wraps it in dreams, and finally dissolves it in forgetfulness.

Moved by a force greater than himself and acting against his custom and his helpful nature, Payanés had acted in accordance with his own convenience, in his own favor, from the moment that Todos los Santos and Sayonara had welcomed him so effusively and joyously, with fresh lemonade and the empanaditas they had fried up, as if the recent arrival had been Sacramento himself. Payanés, always concerned about taking care of others, had fallen prey to the temptation of allowing himself to be taken care of, of resting in the hands of others, because they had made him feel at home, in a house with clean laundry drying on lines, with chattering parakeets on a mango branch, wood burning in the stove, and chickens in the yard, everything that must taste like heaven to a man returning from the uncaring harshness of a work camp.

Ana, Juana, Susana, and Chuza spied on him from their hiding place behind a plantain tree and, mute with shyness, lowered their eyes when he asked them their names. Did Payanés think that on that patio he felt the noise of the world calm, the smell of lemons invite him to breathe, even if it was all only borrowed? He must have secretly been thankful for Sacramento’s absence, for the alignment of the stars that allowed him to fill the space the other man had left, to be for a while that other person who could not be there, to appropriate his air. And to fall in love with the woman to whom he is bringing someone else’s message of love? It is not surprising in any case that on this occasion Payanés would speak so little and so vaguely about the distant sick man.

“There’s an orillada today. Do you want to come?” invited Todos los Santos.

Sundays during the season when the river rose, when its waters were calm and full of fish, the women of La Catunga would organize what they called an orillada, an outing with grilled fish, rum, and a wood-wind band on la orilla, the shore, of the Magdalena, on one of the beaches of brown sand that would disappear a few months later, along with the fish, when the volume of flow would grow angry again and overrun the riverbanks.

“It’s thirty pesos,” Todos los Santos told him. “For that you get food, drink, music, and love.”

“Only thirty pesos? Then happiness is cheap.”

“Temporary happiness, maybe. The other kind doesn’t exist.”

When Payanés reached into his pocket to pull out his money, he realized that he had already spent all of his own and all he had left was Sacramento’s, which burned his fingers when he touched it. He turned it over and over in his head while the old lady waited with her hand extended. Sacramento, hermano, don’t take it wrong, he thought, trying to calm his stomach. I’ll repay these bills with identical ones.

An hour later, as he followed the thread of the river aboard a champán festooned for the party and overflowing with music and people, Payanés was still navigating foreign waters. He didn’t dance with the girls as the other men did, or drink rum straight from the bottle like the old women. Instead, he was quiet and took refuge from the sun under the roof of palm fronds and tanned hides, grateful for the north winds that tempered the morning air and helped disperse the antiquated tunes with which the band was trying to liven up the boat ride, but which in him stirred who knows what sharp sense of lack, like a needle in his heart. Olguita tells me this and I ask her if she isn’t perhaps speaking of a desired and nurtured longing, like the thorn on the rose that Payanés had requested be tattooed on his chest.

“In that he was a man like any other, in love with his sadness. That’s why he liked to get drunk every now and then, because it was the next day, during el guayabo, the hangover, when his troubles were dearest to him,” replied Olguita, and I reflect on the fact that unlike other Spanish words for hangover like cruda, or resaca, the Colombian term guayabo has two meanings: It means both hangover and nostalgia.

Sayonara had sat next to Payanés and talked with him, placing her mouth near his ear to protect her words from being scattered by the wind, without realizing, perhaps, that her right arm brushed, just barely, his left arm. But Payanés noticed; what’s more, he focused only on the solace of that touch.

“Look,” she said as she pointed. “See that herd of wild pigs? They come down to the riverbank when they’re thirsty. There, that’s La Ciénaga de Doncella, if you look carefully you can see tracks from the turtles who come out at night to lay their eggs.”

“And there, where those women are washing clothes?” he asked.

“That’s La Ciénaga de Lavanderas,” she said, without pulling away her body, which was pleasant and smelled nice and which he began to caress with his desire, as if the light contact were the promise of what was to come.

Afterward a cadaver floated by, solemn and swollen like a bishop, so close to the boat that one of the boatmen had to push it away with the tip of his pole so that it wouldn’t flood them with its sweet smell of death.

“Was he killed by the good guys or the bad guys?” asked Payanés, while the others continued to dance as if they hadn’t seen anything.

“You never know,” answered Sayonara.

“Do a lot come by here?”

“More every day. I don’t know why the dead look for the river; who knows where they want it to take them.”

But with the closeness of that girl’s warm, tanned skin, the rest of the world was a faded backdrop for Payanés: the thirsty pigs from the mountain, the cadaver with its shame on display, the turtles and their tracks, the rocks that give a surface for the women to wash on, the women who rinse their sheets in waters of death, the flutes with their racket, even the girl’s voice that was stitching words and pointing out trifles, lesser inventions of God, who was above all else the Creator of that skin that was brushing against his with the same indulgence with which the bottom of the champán was licking the surface of the water.

“I too am from this river. But from another pueblo, further upstream,” she confessed. “I too,” she had said, wanting to say, “like these thirsty pigs, and these old musicians, and these even older turtles, and this ageless cadaver, and the women washing at the shore.” Payanés, although he scarcely heard her, could never again in his life be near the Magdalena without remembering her.

“Not the Magdalena or any other river, or city, or mountain,” Olguita assures me, who is the one most convinced of Payanés’s great love for Sayonara. “From that day on he couldn’t open his eyes again, or close them, without remembering her.”

They found a wide sandy beach surrounded by meadows where they ran the champán aground, disembarked, unloaded the provisions, and proceeded to set up the orillada. The young women adorned their hair with flame-red cayena flowers and prepared a pot filled with a cool drink spiked with just a little alcohol, while the older women, drinking straight rum, started preparing a viudo according to the tradition of the people who inhabited the shores of the river. They dug a hole in the beach that would serve as an oven, covered it with vihao leaves, and placed catfish and smallmouth bass right on top, whole, almost alive, they were so fresh — pulled from the water by the boatmen during the ride — together with chunks of yuca and plantain, all bathed in a mixture of chopped onion, salt, and tomato. They covered the viudo with more vihao leaves and on top of the hole, level with the ground, they built a fire.

“Come, girl,” ordered Todos los Santos, who was no friend of sentimentality during work hours, separating Sayonara and Payanés. “Come give some attention to these important gentlemen who are waiting for you.”

Without even realizing when, Payanés was left alone, sitting on a tree trunk on the shore, absorbed in the flies buzzing before his eyes and drawing arabesques against the sky. Through his hazy senses, dulled by the memory of yesterday’s intoxication, he observed the others with that air of incomprehension and absence that unfailingly mark foreigners. Now that contact with her skin had been broken, the world was flooded with smoke and broken into unconnected visions of a very old scene, taken from pagan times. Young women with flowers in their hair dancing to the rhythm of some forgotten music, in full abandonment to laughter and movement; other women, dark and wrinkled, squatting with their skirts gathered between their legs in front of the hole in the ground that gave off an overly strong smell of food, a smell that was perhaps pleasant, thought Payanés, if one were hungry, but which his ravaged stomach found nearly intolerable. He felt as though he were spying on the secrets of a foreign tribe, as though it were the remote ancestors of these women who were really dancing and their ancient mothers who were preparing the concoction of yucas and fish. Just a few hours ago everything was diaphanous and healthy in the freshness of the patio, then on the river the presence of the girl with the sweet-smelling skin had expanded his soul, but now, watching her laugh as she tolerated a fat man wearing a hat and kissing her on the neck, life for Payanés was broken into four parts: the smell of food that had no place in his lack of appetite, the brown sand that soiled his white pants and stuck to his shoes, a love that had been dying inside of him even before it was fully born, and finally, he himself, a stony guest of this strange party, and he couldn’t seem to make those four parts add up to any whole.

The beating of drums had been added to the flutes, along with an accompanying choir and the voice of a drunk old woman who shattered the air every now and then with interjections, and at other moments with ayes and weeping. After a period of anxiously observing Sacramento’s girl, who was now embracing another gentleman and disappearing with him into the underbrush, Payanés was finally able to understand something. This feeling of malaise like ground glass in my stomach is the same thing that is killing Sacramento, he must have thought, and at once he corrected the error of a worry that he knew instinctively was wrong.

“There, just as she is: a puta. That’s how God wants me to love her,” he said out loud, and felt drops of relief that mitigated the sensation of chewing glass.

When the food was ready, the old women served it on green plantain leaves and distributed it, inviting everyone to eat with their hands. Payanés, who was a man from the mountains and as such inexpert in the art of eating fish, choked on the bones, was repulsed by those round, staring eyes challenging him to gobble them up, and mistrusted that scaly, aquatic being as if it were poisoned.

“You look like you’re eating a porcupine,” laughed Sayonara, once again at his side, and she tried to show him. “You pull out the meat with your fingers and make a little pile, like this, then you squeeze it a little, you feel it, before you put it in your mouth so you can find the bones and remove them.”

She picked up a piece, cleaned the bones from it just as she had explained, and tried to get him to eat it.

“I can’t,” said Payanés, pushing away that bit of meat that was too white, too soft. “I can’t. I’m still thinking about that dead body.”

“Come on,” she said. “You have to eat and you have to live even though others have died.”

“It would be a sin to eat this creature, cooked so strangely.”

“Stop saying silly things.”

They went into the underbrush and undressed. Payanés made love eagerly and at a certain moment even with happiness, but without recovering in that ordinary episode the strange splendor of burning waters that had made him tremble earlier on the river. On the other hand, Sayonara’s voice and gaze sweetened as if she were a little girl again, or were able to be one for the first time, and she nestled into the refuge of that embrace, seeking warmth and rest. Looking for love, perhaps? Olguita assures me that it was so, that from that very first time Payanés’s serenity had consoled her, his comforting words calmed her and his self-assurance anchored her.

“Those two, Sayonara and Payanés, were for us the authentic incarnation of the legend of the puta and the petrolero. If you ask me what the best moment in the history of La Catunga was, I would tell you that it was when they first met. Others would tell you their relationship was rife with problems, that it wasn’t perfect, and this that and the other. I don’t pay them any attention. For me love should be rough and hard, just as theirs was.”

“Is Emilia your girlfriend?” asked Sayonara, running her finger along the vivid lines of the tattoo on his chest.

“No,” he smiled. “She’s just the drilling tower where I work. We call her skinny Emilia.”

“I’m happy to hear that,” said Sayonara with unfounded relief, still unaware that here was a man who was married to his work.

“I’m a cuñero, you know? I think that with time I can become the fastest cuñero in Colombia,” he told her, and he released his hold on her to talk about his work.

“Will you stay with me tonight?” Sayonara interrupted him.

“I can’t,” he replied, without even thinking about it. “I have to get back to camp today because I have to start work at dawn.”

“When are you coming back to Tora?”

“The last Friday of next month, God willing.”

“Will you come see me?”

“Okay. But you have to leave that whole day for me. You have to swear that for that one day there won’t be any other men.”

“That’s how it went,” Olguita told me. “They were apart from the group and we couldn’t see them, because everyone’s privacy is respected, but also because they were hidden behind some patavacales, which abound there. Patavacal? The things you ask, all unimportant details. But I will tell you what you want to know; a patavacal is a tangle of prickly bushes that have a leaf in the shape of a cow’s hoof, which leaves a print in the shape of a heart. I was saying that they were away from the rest of us and hidden, but that wasn’t surprising, since it’s normal with couples in love. You look for a half-hidden flat spot, throw a blanket on the ground, and there, that’s it, you do your business. Then you go with your partner, or sometimes alone, to swim in the river and come out again as if nothing happened. I tell you that we didn’t see Payanés and Sayonara, but we knew what was going on between them, and I could read from Todos los Santos’s worried look that she was afraid the girl was going to get foolish with Sacramento’s friend and forget about the rest of the group. Later we saw them swimming naked, she slender and dark and he powerful and cinnamon-colored, both standing waist-deep in that water that wavered between lilac and mauve, and even with our view hindered by the distance, it was easy to read on their faces that they were in love. Dusk was falling, the hour when the birds’ singing ceases and the river’s breathing quiets, and as we learned later, it was then that they made their promise. The promise that was the most serious vow possible according to the laws of amor de café. They sealed a promise of fidelity for a single day each month, whenever he would come to visit from his camp. Payanés and Sayonara swore the fidelity of husband and wife for the last Friday of every month of the year, and it is well known that in these parts a promise is sacred.”

“Agreed?” he asked, pressing against him the one who from now on, by sworn promise, would be a little more his than any other man’s, including Sacramento, and he felt his heart begin to beat again at the threshold of visions of the future: He saw the water light up again, the air shimmer with phosphorescence, and her hair burn gold like the crown worn by the Virgen de Guadalupe and formed by the day’s final rays as they escaped the night in the blue liquid of her hair.

“Agreed.”

“If someday you leave Tora…,” he ventured.

“I’m not leaving Tora.”

“You never know where all this war could drive you. If you leave Tora, I mean, and you settle in any other corner, just wait for our date, then walk in a straight line until you reach the Magdalena and I will be waiting there by the shore.”

“This river is very long,” she pointed out. “It crosses the whole country…”

“You just look for the river, I’ll know where to look for you.”

“Later,” Olguita continues, “as they were dressing and the rest of us moved the party back onto the champán for the return trip, came the part with the memento. In that too they acted according to custom, because amor de café doesn’t recognize commitments that don’t involve mementos. Other people sometimes call them amulets or tokens. And notice this detail, the male always wears it, never the female, unless the promise is constant and total, which also occurs. Otherwise no, because she has to continue working, you see? And no man likes to find a trace of the previous one.”

With a small knife, Payanés cut a long wisp of her hair, braided it, wrapped it several times with hemp fibers, and tied it off, forming a necklace, and with childlike solemnity and the attitude of an altar boy he quickly blessed it, then kissed it and secured it around his neck.

“Tell me your real name,” said Payanés.

“You already know it, Sayonara.”

“That’s just a nickname.”

“I’ve already forgotten the real one.”

“Come on, tell me. Just me.”

“I can’t. If my father finds out the life I’ve chosen, he’ll come and kill me.”

“All right, then.”

It was already too late for Payanés to catch the truck back to the camp, so Sayonara accompanied him and waited for him to catch the train, which was much slower, at that fateful stop they call Armería del Ferrocarril, which is always swarming with diminutive angels of sorrow that remind one of flies.

“This is where my friend Claire said good-bye forever,” she tried to tell him through the window at the last minute, but the train had already started to move.