The Dark Bride

eighteen

Payanés traveled four and a half hours along the petrolero route to the end of the tracks, which stopped at Infantas, and from there he had to walk another two hours along with the rest of the lagging workers who were returning to Camp 26, splashing into undesirable swamps through a jungle as black and dense as the belly of a mountain. The whole way he daydreamed about the girl without a name to whom he had sworn his love every last Friday of the month; difficult, contradictory dreams that got out of control and ended up with evocations of Sacramento, who appeared to claim her and accuse him of betrayal. Either you die, or regret will kill me, Payanés said to him in his head, and this too: I propose a deal, Sacramento, brother, if you live she’s yours, but if you die you leave her for me. And a little later he would rave about another deal that seemed less cruel: If she leaves her life behind and marries you, I won’t see her again. But if she keeps on doing her thing, you will have to admit that I have as much right to go after her as you do. That’s how he thought he would balance accounts with his sick friend, and he tried to pick up the thread of his memories again, thinking only of her, stretching the fingers of his memory as far as possible to get her back, but Sacramento, relentless, would reappear to prevent it.

He could see Emilia’s silhouette in the distance, illuminated and cold in the middle of the lake of fog that flooded the camp, and was startled to have completely forgotten about her for so long. He ran to the hospital, which at night seemed to be floating amidst the somnambulant fluttering of the bats that lived under its eaves, and he slipped in surreptitiously, greasing the palm of the night watchman with a tip because visiting hours had ended much earlier. He tiptoed through the heavy, listless silence and had almost arrived at his destination when he ran right into Demetrio, the nurse. Payanés excused himself as best he could for being there after hours and asked about his friend’s health.

“No better. That boy will probably go on to the other side…”

“Just a minute, what do you mean, to what other side?”

“Are you an idiot? Where are you from that you don’t understand Spanish? I am saying that he will probably die.”

“Then why the hell don’t they operate on him! Give him some medicine, something, but don’t just let him die!”

“Be quiet, you’ll wake up the few of them that are asleep. And get used to the idea; we did what we could.” The nurse took off his white lab coat and hurried off to get ready to go home.

“Did you convey my promise of marriage to her?” Sacramento spat the question at Payanés, scrutinizing him with yearning eyes, in whose depths the mist of the other shore could already be seen.

“Yes, hermano, I gave her your promise,” assured the other man, careful with his words so as not to lie outright, and at the same time speaking to the dying man as if he were a child for whom he wanted to relieve a great pain with subtle deceit.

“Did she say yes?”

“Yes, she said yes.”

“Okay, then. Now I will have to get better so I can fulfill my promise. But how do I know you’re not lying to me?”

“She gave me a lock of hair as a pledge…”

“This is it,” said Sacramento without a shadow of a doubt, ripping the amulet from Payanés’s neck with a single pull and putting it to his nose to smell it, with a surprising eagerness for someone on the brink of dying. “Yes, this is it, this is her hair… now, please tie it around my neck.”

Payanés obeyed without protest, because you don’t deny a terminal patient his last elixir of hope; because deep down he knew he could recover his memento as soon as his friend expired and because he understood, in a subtle way that he didn’t know how to put into words, that for several months and especially now, as they were about to say goodbye, he and his friend were like two parts of the same person, the part who stays and the part who goes away, and that the double confusion of the amulet — your neck, my neck — was another one of the many signs of the coming and going between two destinies that had become interwoven and merged together without fault on the part of either.

“And the girl,” Sacramento continued to question his friend, “did you give her the money?”

“She didn’t want to take it, hermano, she says she would rather you send her postcards.”

There was a long, final silence, in rhythm with the rocky trickle of the waters of death, as they tossed themselves upon Sacramento’s pillow.

“Those two, are they the same person?” asked Sacramento, speaking with tenderness what surely would be his last words.

“What are you talking about?” said Payanés, and he wished with his whole soul that his friend hadn’t asked the question.

“That’s why I sent you to see them both, so you could confirm what I always knew, that the girl and Sayonara are one. I put her in that world and now it’s only right that I separate her from it. But if I can’t, Payanés, hermano, you have to promise me that you will do it for me.”