The Dark Bride

nineteen

I know this book will have no soul as long as I find no trace of the desperation that led Sayonara’s mother and brother to take their lives, and, above all, of the hopes that pushed Sayonara herself to continue living after what happened.

Looking for answers, I leave Tora on the Magdalena, a river of mercury waters that turn rusty with the sunset, aboard an anachronistic steamboat whose existence is a pure act of faith and whose improbable advance erases from the map each port as we leave it behind: Yondó, Chucurí, Puerto Parra, Barbacoas, El Paraíso, Puerto Nare, Palestina, El Naranjo, La Dorada, Santuario, Cambao, and at the end of the trip, Ambalema, Tolima, where Sayonara was born, according to Tigre Ortiz.

I have to trust that the Magdalena can take me to the knot of memory, but I’m not sure I can rely on it. It has become a self-engrossed river, forgotten by history, detached from its own shores, allowing itself to be carried along unenthusiastically by a present of tame currents that don’t bring to mind their place of origin and that try to ignore where they are going.

For now its course has brought me to Ambalema, the once prosperous Ambalema, capital of a tobacco bonanza that has already ended and that left its planters wiped out and its inhabitants convinced that life runs backward, like memories.

“We lived through progress yesterday,” says señor Mantilla, the owner of a small hotel in the center of town. “Since then we have only seen disintegration and abandonment.”

In the main plaza, to the right of the church and to the left of a scandalous ice cream shop with an English name, walls of mirrors, and techno music, I find a place like the one I am seeking, from the past almost to the point of nonexistence and discreet to the point of being nearly invisible. It’s called the Gran Hotel Astolfi and you could say that it was extracted from the same ancient dictionary as the steamboat that brought me up the river. It has been reduced to a hostelry for travelers by foot, “Weekly or monthly room rentals with common bath,” and as a rendezvous by the hour for couples, but it still retains in the vestibule an Acme Queen salon organ and a certain solidity of finely crafted wood that speaks of better times. I ask for the owner, and although they tell me that his daughter is now in charge of the administration, I insist that I want to see him.

“The owner is don Julio Mantilla, that gentleman sitting at the front door,” they tell me.

I see him leaning against the wall, facing the street in a cowhide chair, just under the letter G of the sign that reads GRAN HOTEL ASTOLFI, greeting passersby with a nod of his head as if done purposely to show the freckles that crown his bald head. I introduce myself, tell him my profession, and explain that I have come looking for traces of a sad story that happened years ago and of which I have only a vague impression.

“I thought that only here, in your hotel, would someone be able to tell me about it. If I ask at that ice cream shop, for example,” I raise my voice above the blasting music flooding out of the neighboring business, “I’m sure they wouldn’t be able to tell me anything.”

“Well, you won’t go wrong with me,” he answers. “For a quarter of a century I’ve been watching what goes on in this town, from this spot, right here where you see me sitting.”

“You must know a lot of things…”

“Things from the past, yes, and the people who have lived here all their lives, but the modern stuff I don’t understand very well. The one who knows about the new things is my daughter Adelia. Surely you would like to know about modern things, because you are young too…”

“It’s more about an old case,” I say. “A strange occurrence that must have shaken Ambalema when it happened. A mother and a son who committed suicide. Do you remember something like that?”

“Are you talking about doña Matildita and her son Emiliano?”

“I don’t know their names, not even their last name. I only know that they both committed suicide, the mother and the son, and that the boy must have had several sisters.”

“That’s Matildita and her son Emiliano,” he assures me. “It has to be them, because you can count the suicides in this town with one hand and only in that case, that I know of, were there two in the same family and at the same time. Rosalba, my sister, had dealings with doña Matildita; she can tell you about that misfortune,” he says, and he invites me to the rooms at the hotel’s rear patio, where he lives among rosebushes with his daughter, his two grandchildren, and his sister Rosalba, an elderly lady who would be identical to don Mantilla if on her bald head she had freckles, like him, and not the white, volatile wisp that she organizes into a small bun, like a cloud floating on top of her head. Señorita Rosalba offers me black coffee with canna cookies and dispenses, like her brother, the cordial treatment and beautiful manners of a bygone era that despite the ravages of violence you still find everywhere in this country, even on the part of people who don’t know a thing about you.

I praise the splendid roses that she grows in her garden, I talk about the old tobacco haciendas in the area, anything that doesn’t touch on the purpose of my visit. I don’t know why, but at the last minute I start thinking that it’s indecent to uncover information about a past that Sayonara never wanted anyone to know about. I am filled with doubt about how appropriate it is to link, by asking a question that is about to be answered, two worlds that she kept separate and ignorant of each other. Years have passed, I tell myself to calm down, yet I still go on talking about roses and other insignificant things until señor Mantilla forces the denouement by telling his sister what brings me here.

“The señora has come to ask about Matildita who killed herself, may she rest in peace.”

“I hope so, although I don’t think it is so, because they say there is no rest for those who commit suicide,” says señorita Rosalba. She asks me if I am related to Matildita and crosses herself when I confess that I am not. “Those people had very sad lives. They were etched in the annals of the town because until then suicide was an outside affair here; yes, there had been killings, and murders, but none of us had ever known anyone who dared to leave this world by his own choice. People are afraid of the Third Brigade, also called the Home of the Pumas and the Heroes of Chimborazo, which are different names for the same brutality, because they say those men still haven’t been able to cleanse themselves from the curse that doña Matildita cast on them with her death.”

“There are a lot of bastards among those Heroes of Chimborazo,” said señor Mantilla gravely. “The only consolation is to think that their consciences are being eaten away by the weight of those deaths, the mother’s and the son’s. The brigade’s headquarters are just outside the town, as you take the highway to Ibagué. If you like we could go there, we would be happy to take you, because he who helps a traveler will be treated kindly in heaven.”

Don Mantilla calls for Wilfredo, an old man whose lower jaw hangs loosely toward the left and who works in the hotel as a bellboy, waiter, and handyman, to drive the family automobile, a ’59 Buick that has been maintained in adequate condition, to be able to take us to the nearby brigade.

“Look carefully,” the señorita warns me. “Look as Wilfredo drives past it slowly, because this is a military zone and they threaten anyone who stops with bullets. It was there, right there, where they’ve put up that guardhouse with the sentry. They built it to distract everyone, to prevent them from continuing to bring flowers, imagine that, so many years have passed and you can still see the carnations people throw from the highway, because as I told you, they don’t allow pedestrians to walk or cars to stop in front of the brigade. If they left people alone, they would already have torn down the guardhouse and built an altar in its place.”

“Altar, no, we would have built a monument,” contradicts her brother. “Many people have faith in Matilde’s holiness and swear that she works miracles, but to me she’s not a saint, more like a noble martyr for the nation, because through her sacrifice she tried to cleanse the evil she had seen in this town — France has its Joan of Arc, but we have our own martyr here in Ambalema.”

“For months after the tragedy you could still see the burned circle where it happened,” says the señorita. “A few years ago they whitened it with lime, then they built the guardhouse on top of it so that not even the memory of it would remain.”

“Where she burned, right there, they posted a sentry,” adds Wilfredo, opening his mouth so round and wide because of the defect in his jaw that his words seemed to emanate from it like soap bubbles. “He has orders to shoot anything that approaches. They say it’s to maintain public order, but we all know that it’s because they’re terrified of her spirit.”

Sayonara’s mother burned to death? She immolated herself with fire like a Buddhist monk, like a Florentine monk, like a Maid of Orleans? Suicide by fire moves me more than any other kind. During a visit to Cuba I expressed my astonishment at a statistic that reflected that a large number of women die annually by incineration, and it was explained that it is the traditional way, since time immemorial, that women commit suicide on the island, and that the practice is still as alive as ever despite attempts by the revolution to eradicate it. I was told the disconcerting details of several cases and since then have been obsessed with the idea of a closed chain, both sacred and perverse, whose links would be fire, woman, death, and back to fire, which attracts whatever has been born of it.

We stop the Buick further on, ten minutes down the highway, at a stand where all kinds of fruits are sold: bundles of oranges, mandarins, and lemons hanging from the roof beams, piles of grapefruit, guamas, watermelons, cherimoyas, anones, maracuyás, mamoncillos, and papayas in a wild array of colors and smells that convince me that nothing bad could have happened here, because nothing bad can happen at a fruit stand in tierra caliente, in a region where the weather is perpetually hot.

“Before everything happened, this stand was a merendero, a makeshift roadside restaurant, called Los Tres Amigos,” says señor Mantilla. “It was always full of tobacco merchants, hacienda owners, hacienda workers, soldiers, and even brigade officers. The owner was a man from Antioquia named Abelardo Monteverde, the husband of doña Matildita, a Guahiba Indian who had a gift for cooking and seasoning.”

“There was a vulgar saying around town, if you’ll forgive me for repeating it,” ventured Wilfredo, releasing more soap bubbles into the air, “and that is that Matildita’s food tasted so good because she lit the stove with a flame that she took from her groin.”

“That, Wilfredo, is ignorant gossip,” says señor Mantilla with annoyance.

“Because she was an indígena, people think she was a witch and say things like that,” says the chastised Wilfredo in self-defense, and this time the bubbles burst before they float into the air.

“They used to say, señora, that don Abelardo was Matildita’s husband, although husband was just a way of speaking, because they were never married in a church even though they produced offspring, a male and several females. Around here a white man gets together with an Indian woman but he never marries her, and a white woman never marries or gets together with an Indian man. That is the custom.”

“They say that Indian women are versed in witchcraft,” insists Wilfredo, exposing himself to being hushed again, “and I know men that won’t eat food they’ve prepared so that they won’t fall prisoner to their fire, which isn’t healthy. So many men won’t let go of their Indian women because they have fallen under her spell and have renounced the cross.”

Like so many other antioqueños with colonizing blood, don Abelardo Monteverde was drawn to Ambalema by tobacco fever, built this stand with his own hands, and set up his restaurant here. The coal stoves, the ceramic sink, and the room where the family lived were in the back, where today there is an orchard with fruit trees. I look around: This is where Sayonara was born. Her mother, the Guahiba Indian, must have given birth to her squatting over a basin and hidden behind the bushes, with no help, not even complaining or celebrating.

“Matildita cooked, washed dishes, and waited on the tables, and thanks to her the establishment became famous and attracted a lot of people who were fans of her roast pork tolimense, her poteca de auyama, her stuffed goat, and her liver and onions. As I said, everything Matildita touched turned out delicious.”

“How did don Abelardo meet Matildita?” I ask.

“ ‘Meet’ isn’t the appropriate word. Let’s say instead that he captured her in one of those hunting expeditions that the white colonists organized in the eastern plains. It wasn’t vermin that they downed with their rifles or even mountain birds, but sometimes those too. They went out to guahibiar, that’s what they called it, and it meant to shoot at the Guahibo Indians, chasing them over those immense flatlands that offered no refuge, because between the bullet and the Indians there wasn’t a single tree in sight. They say that to prevent themselves from being killed,” señor Mantilla says to me, “the Guahibos shouted that they too were hiwi, which in their native language means ‘people,’ but the white men didn’t seem to understand.”

She was coming back from gathering fronds from the palms scattered in the forests that grow along the shores of the Río Inírida, and Abelardo, the antioqueño, wanted to bring her back alive. Since she had a pagan name and spoke a savage tongue, he baptized her Matilde and taught her Spanish, which was a civilized language.

“Despite her training, Matildita kept her bad habits and because of that she earned reprimands from don Abelardo; one day I saw him with my own eyes forbidding her to eat worms. ‘They’re good, moriche worms,’ she said with that difficult accent that she never lost. And she also said: ‘Bachao ants are delicious.’”

“Did she eat ants too?” The idea seemed hilarious to señorita Rosalba. “Maybe out of sight from her husband the little devil would stuff herself with ants! And why not, since up around Santander even the whites like ants roasted with salt. I remember that Matildita used to complain often about not being able to fry terecay turtles in oil. Matildita was also a bit of a scoundrel, and while everyone saw her as so self-sacrificing and submissive, she had her own character, she pitched fits and gave in to her habits, so while she may have prepared civilized food for her clients, she preferred for herself and her children wild yucca, sweet potatoes, yams, and red pepper, which are pig slop for white men and delicacies in the mouths of Indians.”

“She was endlessly working to keep her house and the restaurant in order, and besides cooking, she wove cotton and made cloth to dress her children and herself.”

“Don’t exaggerate, Julio, remember she was dirty and kept her children naked. She sent the eldest, the boy, to school, but not the girls, because she made them work,” says the señorita critically, and I imagine Sayonara and her sisters running around the place. I see them with their own faces and their long hair, but with the bodies of lizards, of cats, of dragonflies; dirty and illiterate, peeling potatoes and scrubbing dishes, as señorita Rosalba testifies, but agile and free, indomitable, capricious, and foul-mouthed.

“Hush, woman, don’t say evil things,” señor Mantilla reprimands his sister. “Don’t disparage her soul. Besides, as if that weren’t enough, doña Matildita was skillful at weaving baskets, mats, and hammocks, and by that I want to tell you, señora journalist, that she produced a lot of income for don Abelardo and no expense. And in his own coarse, rustic way he realized that; he set himself up with her and kept her as his only woman until the end.”

The couple’s daughters, the Mantillas tell me, were all thin like their mother, with dark, opulent hair, almond-shaped eyes, and skin the color of fired bricks. The oldest child and only male was more like his father, with light blue eyes, lighter hair, and barely tanned skin, but he stuck to his mother with such devotion that as a young boy don Abelardo threatened to send him to an orphanage if he didn’t let go of her skirts and act his age. You’re a man and you’re white, he kept telling the boy, so don’t go around sniveling.

“That boy, who was given the name Emiliano,” says the señorita, “was the light of Matilde’s eyes, her reason for being. The only luxury she permitted herself in that valley of tears was loving and taking care of that boy as if he were a real live prince, and she would have given her very life for him, as they say, only that in her case that’s exactly what happened.”

When he turned eighteen, Emiliano was caught in an army roundup and was enlisted as a recruit in the Third Brigade. Military life wasn’t a bad choice and don Abelardo was satisfied that his pup would be given the opportunity to progress in the arms race. Doña Matildita resented it, because it took the object of her devotion from her side and at the same time deprived her of his help, because the boy was her right hand in the innumerable chores of Los Tres Amigos. Since his military service would be short and nothing would be gained by protesting, Matildita relented, saying that at least those fools should teach you how to write, and the day he left she caressed his face, a rare gesture for her, a woman who didn’t know anything about such things, and she kept saying over and over, so it would be etched into his soul: Never forget that you are hiwi; don’t let them treat you like an animal. In spite of their prejudices, at first things were tolerable, because the brigade’s close proximity allowed the boy to stop by the restaurant frequently to see his parents and because doña Matilde secretly managed daily to send him a basket filled with food.

“But it is customary for officers and superiors to humiliate the recruits,” señor Mantilla tells me, “and Emiliano was a man of rebellious pride. There was a sergeant who was more cruel than the others, that sergeant treated him brutally and shouted in his face: ‘What can you learn, you’re the son of a savage,’ and he ridiculed the boy in front of the others, calling him the son of Tarzan and Cheetah. Until Emiliano, who was tall and strong, chose not to swallow any more humiliation and split open the sergeant’s face with a powerful punch.”

As punishment they took his clothes and buried him in a jail they called the tomb, a hole in the ground, lined with cement, deep and narrow, covered on top by a steel grate that left the prisoner exposed to the rain, which in this region is frequent, to the cold nights and to the sun’s burning rays. “You’re going to rot there, monkey, savage, humanoid,” shouted the sergeant from above as he passed Emiliano, and so did other officers, spitting on him and insulting him: “Don’t even dream that we are going to let you out. Why don’t you just die and take advantage of already being buried.”

Don Abelardo’s attempts to secure his release were futile, as were the pleas of Matildita, who abandoned her duties, forgot about her daughters, and planted herself day and night in front of the entrance to the brigade, where she cried from the top of her lungs and begged for clemency from all the officers she saw coming and going.

In that hole of death, Emilano wallowed in dementia and his own excrement. He was riddled with fungus and larvae and perhaps managed to calm his hunger and anguish by eating ants and worms as he had seen his mother do. And he endured being spit upon by the Heroes of Chimborazo and urinated upon by the Pumas of the Andes. Could he at least see the moon from his dungeon? Yes, he could: the moon, the stars, and any meteor that passed compassionately over his head, and they say that he spent his nights as a prisoner in the bowels of the earth, penetrating, with his gaze and his desire, the deep bowels of the firmament. According to the Mantillas, you could hear his voice repeating: “Soy hiwi,” I am a man, I am a man, sometimes softly, sometimes in prayer, and other times shouting clearly so he wouldn’t forget that he was a man and not filth, that he was a living being and not a cadaver. A cadaver that rebels, that wants to ignore his own decomposition, that abhors the earth that weighs upon him?

“That is what he had become,” confirms the señorita.

He managed to survive for forty-six days, stolen minute by minute from horror and death, and on the night of October 17, beneath the miserly moonlight that refused to illuminate him, he cut his veins with a piece of broken glass and agonized until dawn, when his condition was discovered by the cleaning personnel. Then they opened the steel grate and disinterred him, but he was no longer saying hiwi or anything else, and he arrived at the infirmary with his heart drained of its blood and still, finally truly dead after having been dead for so long in life.

When they came to tell her what had happened, doña Matildita, who was barefoot and still hadn’t braided her hair, was lighting the stove as she did every day at that hour, drenching the coal with liquid fuel before lighting it with a match. The bearers of the news hadn’t finished saying what they had come to say before she took off running up the highway with the gallon of fuel in her hand, and in front of the brigade she upturned it on herself and lit a match. Her hair was the first thing to burn, that sumptuous blue-black mantle that had been her only excess; it glowed red-white like a torch against the innocence of the sky until her lean body of dry wood was engulfed in flames. Her eyeballs melted and the intense fire of a mother’s mourning began, the combustion of her infinite pain that wasn’t of the flesh, and by the time the soldiers had put out the fire, her being had already been turned into a miserable heap of bereaved coals.

“And the girls?” I ask. “Matilde’s daughters? What happened to the girls?”

But the Mantillas know little of them, not even their names, and Wilfredo shrugs his shoulders, excusing his ignorance.

“They were very little,” the three justified themselves, “and they were all so alike that we never learned how to distinguish them.”

“But the girls?” I insist. “You must know something of them…”

In Ambalema they only knew that they kept living with their father for a while, very unkempt and on the verge of starvation, until the restaurant was closed, because after Matildita’s death there were no patrons, and the father brought from San Miguel Abajo, in the departmento of Antioquia, a white woman whom he married in church and according to law. That woman already had her own children who were also white and she didn’t want to have anything to do with the fruit of the previous cohabitation arrangement. I didn’t come here to take care of jungle children, she announced to her new husband, and Matildita’s daughters were turned over to God’s care.

“We never heard about them after that…”

I thank the Mantillas and Wilfredo for the kindness they have shown me with a basket of fruit and I say good-bye. I present myself at the Third Brigade as a journalist, ask for an interview with the commanding officer, General Omar Otoya, and I sit for a half hour in a windowless, air-conditioned waiting room, imagining that Matildita’s suffering soul must wander scorched and howling through this military base at night until the darkness is filled with the smell of fear, because the Heroes of Chimborazo, who are not afraid of death, are terrified of the vengeance of the dead against the living who mistreated them. Is that the flicker of an old anxiety I see in the alert eyes of these soldiers I watch coming and going as if nothing had happened, but who know that their rifles are useless against the ash that is settling in their lungs?

An officer takes me to General Otoya’s office. It is large and well ventilated, without a trace of torture or any reminder of horror, its doors open to a balcony overflowing with ferns.

“People’s imaginations are limitless,” says the general, who is tall and handsome and smells like cologne and looks like he just shaved with Gillette Platinum Plus, when I ask him about soldier Emiliano Monteverde and the circumstances of his death. “There is no burying alive here, nor has there ever been, no walling in or throat slashing, or anything of the sort. Cells like tombs? Don’t tell me that you allowed yourself to be duped by those horror movies.”

With the general’s permission I look out over the railing on the green balcony, straining my eyes in search of the nonexistent cell, and suffice it to say that I don’t see it anywhere.

The officer who led me a few minutes ago to the general’s office now accompanies me back toward the reception area, and as he is returning my identification documents he gives me a sly look.

“It wasn’t a disciplinary action, the thing with Emiliano Monteverde. There was a girl involved,” he says, when no one can hear us.

“What? Then you do know about it?”

“The only one who knows is my general, and you already heard him, nothing happened here.”

“But you just said…”

“Forget about what I said. You mentioned that you were in Tora before, right? Well, go back. Ask around there for a prostituta they call the Soldier’s Widow. Ask her.”

The Soldier’s Widow? It’s not a name that is easy to forget. And then there’s the coincidence that I have heard it before.

Heading downriver during my return trip to Tora, I wring my memory trying to identify who I heard mention the Soldier’s Widow for the first time. Todos los Santos, no, not Olguita either. Sacramento maybe? Or Fideo? No.

The river is so docile, so still in its course, that it seems philosophically feasible to be able to bathe twice in it. I can’t stop thinking about Sayonara’s mother, so close to those sorceresses who burn with inner heat, whose existence Mircea Eliade mentions, saying that they carry fire hidden in their genitals and that they use it to cook with. The mother, an Indian and a witch, the daughter, an Indian and a witch: One knew how to rub wood together to ignite the fire that feeds, the other, to rub the sex organs to ignite the fire of love.

An old man wearing a bright yellow shirt is rowing his chalupa in the opposite direction, propelling it forward with the strong strokes of a single oar, and I become absorbed in the brilliance of that yellow sparkling against the motionless river. Now I remember: It was Machuca, the educated puta, the learned reader and heretic of the seventh circle that proclaims the death of God, it was she who mentioned the Soldier’s Widow to me. I see her sitting behind her Olivetti Lettera 22 in a corner of the town hall in Tora, where she now works as a copier of notices, writings, and documents, taking puff after puff on her eternal cigarette without worrying about the ashes that fall, like bits of time, onto her blouse, her papers, her lap, anywhere except the tin ashtray. I also see her shoes sticking out from underneath the desk, wide and antiquated like Daisy Duck’s, her fingers stained with nicotine, her poorly embalmed pharaoh’s face, her crazy squirrel eyes, her enormous mouth that tells me shocking stories about the inhabitants of the former barrio of La Catunga, among which she mentions, only in passing and without emotion, the Soldier’s Widow. I think I asked her about that woman with an operatic name because I remember her assuring me that she wasn’t anyone worth the trouble of investigating and except for her nickname was a common, vulgar woman.

As soon as I reach Tora, before stopping by my hotel to leave my knapsack, I run to the town hall to look for Machuca; it’s five o’clock and luckily they still haven’t closed.

“Machuca,” I ask, “did you know the Soldier’s Widow? Does she still live in Tora? Do you know where I can find her?”

“Why are you so interested. The Soldier’s Widow came to La Catunga after the best times had passed and it had succumbed to the worst times. She never became a friend of ours.”

“Why not?”

“Out of embarrassment. She was a gloomy puta, a spoilsport, a wet blanket who was in the business by obligation and not by vocation. More candle-sucking and prayerful than a blind zealot; I think she would have liked to service her clients behind the altar so she wouldn’t have to lose sight of the Holy Child, who she had turned blue from asking so many things. For health, for money, for comfort for such a lonely woman, for this and for that, because she was unhappy with this life, that one, the Soldier’s Widow. She wasn’t anyone we would like, and you wouldn’t like her either if you got to know her. An inspired puta, touched by the muses, that was Todos los Santos. Oh, yes! I wish you could have seen her in her splendor; she had the strength of a tractor and the happiness of a pair of castanets. Such a joy for life! On the other hand, the poor Widow was always a spiritless, downhearted woman.

“Why did they call her the Soldier’s Widow?”

“It’s a long story.”

She arrived in La Catunga already in service and a veteran of the profession, with her hair dyed blond, an inconsolable air of abandonment, and dressed in the shroud of her own legend, according to which as a young woman she had been loved by a noble and gallant soldier who her brother, a sergeant in the same battalion, was pushing toward death to destroy their love.

The version of events that Machuca knows doesn’t contradict that of the Mantillas. On the contrary, it raises the volume and adds two glorious elements that fill it with meaning: passion and heroism. There was no variation in the other ingredients: the same dungeon, the same boy buried in it, the same vengeful, insulting sergeant, his racial disdain, and his abuse of authority. But this time there’s a woman, the sergeant’s sister, who is the soldier’s love. The differences in race and class are more notable and injurious because the recruit is the son of an Indian and a colonist, while the sergeant and his sister belong to an established, well-off family.

“I’ll let you out of that hole if you swear you’ll never see her again,” bribes the sergeant, but the soldier, steadfast and faithful, refuses to renounce his loved one in spite of the torments of his corner of hell, and he advances so far in his unbreakable resistance that he can’t withdraw again, even as he begins to rot alive in his grave.

“Will you swear now?”

“I won’t swear anything.”

“Do you swear? I will give you one last chance?”

“Let your fucking mother swear, that’s why she gave birth to you.”

“Then you’ll stay there forever, because you’re a bastard, a cretin, and an Indian.”

This second version also details the reaction of the soldier’s father — don Abelardo Monteverde, according to the Mantillas — who fulfills a decisive role in the tragedy’s denouement.

“The soldier’s father,” Machuca tells me, “was an astute and cunning antioqueño who believed that the sergeant would tighten the tourniquet up to the end without his son giving in an inch, so he looked for the boy’s girlfriend and managed to convince her to write in her own hand a false letter confessing that she no longer loved him, saying good-bye forever, and which she was to put in an envelope and deliver to her brother with some memento that was irrefutably hers. The purpose was to make the boy, faced with his love’s change of heart, finally renounce his devotion to her so that the sergeant would lift the punishment and set him free.”

“You can see with your own eyes, you wretch,” the sergeant had said to the soldier, passing the false letter through the bars along with a medal of the Virgen del Carmen that the girl always wore pinned to her bodice. “My sister doesn’t love you. Don’t let yourself die because of her, she’s going to marry someone more civilized than you, someone from her own class.”

In both versions the soldier takes his own life by opening his veins — in the first, overwhelmed by desperation and suffering, in the second, destroyed by the evidence of his loss of love. When the girlfriend learns what happened, she fights bitterly with her brother and leaves her parents’ house forever. Her refusal to forgive causes her to confront life on her own and to subsist by turning to prostitution. That is how, after much fighting, much wandering, she comes to live in La Catunga.

“No matter what else she is, the Widow was the protagonist of an intense story,” I say to Machuca.

“There are people whose own story is too big for them.”

“Why do you say that so harshly, Machuca, if she made the noble gesture of leaving her family for…”

“Yes, she made the gesture,” she interrupts, “and from there on she let herself drown in indifference. It’s better not to undertake those defiant stances worthy of bullfighters, they’re so exhausting they just leave us empty.”

“What about Sayonara and the Widow? Were they ever friends?” I test the terrain cautiously to see if Machuca suspects the close relationship that existed between them.

“There was something between them, but I never really knew what, because it wasn’t friendship. I couldn’t say. It was more like mutual compassion, as if they shared some dark, bitter secret. Only God knows! Too bad he doesn’t exist.”

“Only God knows,” I agree. “Well, Machuca, if you’ll forgive me, I would like to speak with the Soldier’s Widow. Just because of her name she deserves my respect, and besides, she must have a lot of things to say.”

“All she says is Hail Marys as she counts off the beads of her rosary, because she took refuge in a cloistered convent, the Clarisas’ convent at Villa de Leyva, in Boyacá. She finally found her true destiny, which she had misplaced, but which was right there at the end waiting for her. You’ll find her very happy there, sucking the Holy Child’s tunic night and day, which is the only thing that she knows how to do. They say that the Clarisas refused to accept her because of her past, but in the face of the miracle of influence and money there is no door that can’t be opened, nor any Clarisa that can resist. They say her family paid good money to lock her up with her shame, to grow old behind walls that are heavier than tombstones. So you see, you’re not going to be able to get any further with that story, because what the Widow knows is cloistered right along with her.”