The Dark Bride

two

Todos los Santos arranged for the girl to sleep on a straw mattress spread out beside her own bed. Before she lay down to sleep she turned off the light in the bedroom and checked to make sure that the perpetual candle was burning in its red glass holder beneath the picture of the Sagrado Corazón de Jesús. Just as she had always done and would keep on doing, she tells me, until the day she dies.

Colombia is known as the country of the Sacred Heart. He is our patron saint and in that capacity has tinged our collective spirit and our national history with the same romantic, tormented, and bloody condition. The only common element in all of the homes of the poor in Colombia — it was removed from the houses of the rich a few generations back — is the image of this Christ who looks you in the eyes with doglike resignation while he shows you his heart, which isn’t found inside his body as one would expect, but has been extracted and is held in its owner’s left hand, at chest level, beneath a carefully tended chestnut beard. But it’s not an abstract heart, rounded, in a pretty rose color and of a less than remote likeness to the original, as it appears in Valentine’s messages. The one our Christ displays is an impressive organ, throbbing, a proud crimson, with a stunningly realistic volume and design. A true butcher’s prize, with two disturbing attributes: From the top a flame is burning, while the middle is encircled by a crown of thorns that draws blood.

The girl couldn’t sleep a wink in that foreign, unfamiliar room filled with unknown smells. She uncovered herself, then covered up again, unable to find a comfortable position. She felt besieged by the presence of that kind and mutilated young man who never stopped looking at her from the wall, and on whose face the candle cast dancing shadows and reflections of bloodletting. In her own bed, Todos los Santos was uncomfortable with the heat of a fitful and choking sleep, until without warning she began to snore with a sudden bubbling of mucus only to then completely suspend breathing altogether, without releasing her breath inward or outward for an entire minute, her throat closed by a plug of still air, two minutes, three, until the girl was convinced she had died. Then it returned, like waves on the ocean, that rhythmic snoring…

“Madrina,” the girl dared to call out, “madrina, that man scares me.”

“What man?” asked Todos los Santos, half asleep.

“The one with the beard.”

“That’s not a man, it’s Christ. Trust in him. Ask him to watch over your sleep.”

Trust in the enemy? She’d rather die. Maybe if she didn’t look at him… she covered her head with the pillow and closed her eyes, but she immediately guessed that Christ had stopped smiling and was making horrendous faces at her. Uncovering her eyes quickly, she tried several times to catch him in the act, but he was clever and never let her. He smiled at her, the hypocrite, and no sooner than she had closed her eyes, he began to threaten her again with evil faces.

“Madrina, Christ is making faces at me.”

“Hush, child. Let me sleep.”

The girl put the pillow where her feet had been, turned on her mattress, and lay with her face toward the other wall, which had no portraits. But the palpitations of the candle reached even the far wall, wavering in slowly burning veils. Despite her struggles to stay alert, waves of sleep began to cloud her eyes. From time to time she turned quickly, to keep Christ under control, but he only looked at her with that melancholy smile and with his wounded heart in his hand.

“Madrina, don’t you think it hurts?”

“Hurts?”

“Christ, don’t you think his heart hurts?”

Then Todos los Santos got up and, blowing out the candle, made Christ disappear. With him went the red shadows and the sad smiles, and at last, in the darkness of the calm room, the two women slept soundly.

The sun came up very early and began marking the days of a new existence for both of them. The girl began not only to lose her fear of Christ, but to approach him with a strange familiarity and an attempt at dialogue that to Todos los Santos seemed theatrical and excessive.

“You must pray, child, but not too much,” she recommended.

One day when she was cleaning the image of the bleeding Jesus with a feather duster, she found wedged between the canvas and the frame several small, strange lumps, like tiny cocoons but made of paper. She decided to unravel one and was half startled, half amazed to see that it was covered with a tight, microscopic writing that she decided to try to read with a magnifying glass. But she found no legitimate letters there, no known alphabet, just scribbling, elongated in some places, flat in others, but always with a lot of curlicues.

“Come here,” she called out to the girl. “Can you explain this to me?”

“They are messages that I write.”

“To whom?”

“To the man with the beard.”

“I’ve told you that’s Christ.”

“To Christ, then.”

“And what kind of writing is this?”

“One that he knows how to understand.”

“You never went to school?”

“No.”

“You don’t know how to write like other people?”

“No.”

“I’m going to start teaching you right now. Get a pencil and some paper.”

Many tense and fatiguing hours were dedicated to reading and writing lessons with the square-ruled notebook that Todos los Santos used to keep accounts, with an old chart they bought at the apothecary, with a number-two Mirado pencil, and with disastrous results. The girl looked around the room, she rocked nervously in her chair, she bit her fingernails and cuticles, she wouldn’t concentrate for anything in the world. She had no idea, it seemed, what Todos los Santos, who was clenching her teeth in order not to lose control and give her a whack, was saying.

“Just teach me how to work, madrina. I can’t waste any time.”

“All in due time, now settle down and read here: The dwarf im-itates the mon-key.”

“What dwarf?”

“Any dwarf, it doesn’t matter.”

Lunchtime came and the girl, who hadn’t read a single syllable, was still asking about the dwarf, so Todos los Santos put off the lesson until the next day at the same hour and shut herself up in the kitchen to calm her nerves by peeling potatoes and chopping vegetables.

Everything changed one unforgettable afternoon when the madrina was drinking mistela with her disciples Machuca and Cuatrocientos while they gossiped about a famous debt between two neighbors that had erupted in gunfire. The girl was nearby, sitting on the floor, entertaining herself with pencil and paper, without anyone paying her any attention. Until one of the women realized that if they said “bullet,” the girl would write “bullet” with large, clear, round letters; if they said “bank,” she wrote “bank”; if they said “greedy,” or “Ana” or “mandarin,” she wrote that too.

“What!?” exclaimed Todos los Santos, taking the paper in her hands. “This is incredible! Yesterday you didn’t know how to write and today you do…”

“Because yesterday I didn’t want to and today I do.”

Had Todos los Santos kept any of those invented, tight scribbles on little rolls of paper? I insinuate that perhaps the girl’s initial disinterest in conventional writing had to do with an unnecessary duplication.

“Maybe she didn’t need to learn, because in her own way she already knew…,” I say, then wonder whether I should have. I was the one who needed to learn: not to get on the wrong side of Todos los Santos.

“Don’t think I didn’t consider that,” she responds. “Instead of forcing her, I should have learned her way of writing so we could have sent messages to each other, or better yet, to Christ, because no one else would have understood us.”

Encouraged by the miracle of the sudden dominion over letters and taking care not to destroy her student’s initiative and temperament, the madrina took upon herself the painstaking task of polishing the most offensive edges of the girl’s rebelliousness. She trained the child in the healthy customs of brushing your teeth with ashes; saying good morning, good night, and thank you very much; listening patiently to the troubles of others and keeping her own quiet; taking sips of anise tea in a glass, pretending it was aguardiente, the strong licorice-flavored liquor; chewing cardamom seeds to freshen her breath; letting down her hair every day and brushing it in the sun to infuse it with warmth and brilliance.

The child, for her part, approached the lessons with the tenaciousness of a mule that surmounted any obstacle, with a few unyielding exceptions, such as using silverware, which her manual clumsiness converted into deadly weapons, or the habit of speaking loudly and stridently at any hour and on every occasion, including when she prayed.

“Sacred Heart of Jesus, I confide in you!” the girl shouted at the painting, overcome with fervor.

“Don’t shout at him so, you’ll make him lose his hair. My holy God, how this creature howls!” complained the madrina, who knew from personal experience the advantages of a discreet and velvety tone, although the habitual consumption of tobacco had turned hers gravelly.

She begged the girl to lower her voice, then she ordered and exhausted herself with chastisements, but it was beyond the girl’s control, and despite all of her attempts, she continued bellowing and raising a ruckus like the vegetable sellers in the market.

“Let her have a taste of her own medicine,” decided Todos los Santos. And she took the girl to a loud and imposing waterfall formed by the Río Colorado near Acandai. There she made the child recite at full volume the poem “La Luna” by Diego Fallon, until her voice could be heard over the roar of the water, with the hope of filing down her vocal cords a bit. The goal was to tire her of shouting, but she tired first of Diego Fallon, so her teacher familiarized her with Neruda’s despairing song, Bécquer’s dark swallows, Valencia’s languid camels, and assorted pages of a popular collection of romances that was much in vogue at social gatherings in La Catunga.

Day after day the girl made her voice rise over the sound of the cascade, which was polishing it in tune with the musical scale and modulating its diverse gradations of volume. Once, Todos los Santos opened the book to a certain poem by Rubén Darío and indicated for the girl to begin her exercises by reading it at the top of her voice. It was about a princess who steals a star from the sky.

“Isn’t this princess Santa Catalina, our protectress?” asked the girl excitedly.

“Don’t get off track. This is a book of poems, not prayers. Don’t confuse the earth with the sky, just keep on reciting.”

“I can’t, madrina, it’s too beautiful.”

“Nonsense. Give it to me,” said the veteran, and she began reading about the king’s great anger at the theft.

“You must be punished,” brayed the sovereign. “Go back to the sky and what you have stolen you must now return.”

“The princess grows sad over her sweet flower of light,” Rubén Darío went on, “but then, smiling, good Jesus appears.”

“From my fields I offered her that rose,” clarified Jesus. “They are flowers for the girls who think of me in their dreams.”

“I think this good Jesus is the same one who lives in our bedroom,” said the girl. “He gave me a rose too the other day.”

“Hush, you’re mixing things up and making me lose the rhythm. Religion in excess makes good nuns and miserable putas,” warned Todos los Santos.

“The princess is beautiful, because now she has the brooch in which verse, pearl, feather, and flower shine, along with the star,” rhymed Rubén Darío. The girl was suddenly overwhelmed by a sighing that was foreign to her temperament and she moved away to cry. It was then that Todos los Santos discovered in her disciple an inclination for poetry and a fascination with sad stars that alarmed her and seemed to her a dangerous symptom in a promising apprentice of the most merciless profession known to man.

“It’s not a game, child,” she said. “Prostitutes, like boxers, cannot allow themselves a weakness or they’ll get knocked out. Life is one thing and poetry is another; don’t confuse shit with face cream.”

When it became necessary to hasten the training of the girl’s voice, the two women went to stand at the edge of the brand-new Libertadores highway, where ravaging progress entered Tora, and to subject themselves to the ultimate test of infernal noise that rose up to the heavens from the river of vehicles.

“Sailors kiss and then leave!” shouted the girl to the roar of the passing trucks that in their stampede almost tore off her clothing and left reduced to wind the already volatile sailors’ love.

After such a din, when the girl returned home she appreciated being back amid the imperceptible sounds of silence, never before noticed: the faint song of the hummingbird, the whistle of light as it passes through the lock of a door, the buzzing of neighbors on the other side of the wall, the brushing of bare feet against the patio tiles. She had managed to break the tyranny of noise and in recompense was given the calming gift of intimacy, which allows one to pray in secret, to hum boleros, recite sonnets, and whisper phrases in someone’s ear with the purr of a stuffed toy tiger.

“That’s better,” said Todos los Santos. “Now you have the tone and you are ready to acquire the timbre. Your voice should sound like the great bell of the Ecce Homo. Listen to it. Look at it. The bell tower was built on top of the first derrick in Tora’s oil field. Listen to it now as it calls to Ángelus, and tomorrow also when it rings the morning prayers. Listen to it always because that is how your voice should sound, deep and tranquil, just like the great bell in your pueblo.”

“But, madrina,” objected the girl, “this isn’t my pueblo.”

“But it will be, as soon as your voice sounds like its great bell.”

Also arduous was the challenge imposed upon them by the girl’s chronic skinniness, which was like that of a malnourished cat, because the more she ate the thinner she looked for her size, with hollow cheeks, scanty bust, and inordinately long extremities. Todos los Santos maintained that all of the food the girl ate went to her hair, which, at the expense of the rest of her body, grew robust and out of control, and if she were to cut it she would gain the pounds it had snatched from her.

“It’s alive,” said Olguita, enthralled, as she combed it into braids. “And I think it bites.”

They knew that cutting it would be a hideous crime, so they decided instead to force its owner to consume a double ration of soup, bread, and fruit, one for her and the other for her hair, which in all honesty was the only party that benefited from the overeating and ended up becoming a cascade of dark, murmuring waters.

“Since God limited you to such poverty of flesh, you have no other choice but to study dance,” recommended Todos los Santos, resolved to find a way out by another means, and she revealed the secrets of a certain dance that wasn’t performed with footsteps, wiggling, or shaking hips but with undulation, absences, and stillness. She told the girl that Salomé had managed to bewitch John the Baptist because she knew the magic of moving without movement.

The girl embraced those words, never needing to have them repeated, and surprised her teacher with the engrossed naturalness with which she let herself sway with a deep, measured rhythm that wasn’t cumbia or merengue, but the ebb and flow of her own blood along the clandestine paths of her body.

“I enjoyed watching her dance,” Todos los Santos tells me. “And at the same time it terrified me, because I understood then that we were losing her. Only when she danced did she give herself license to visit the land of her own memories and to escape into the enormity of the vault that was inside her. She danced and I knew she was swimming in distant waters, as if visiting other worlds, perhaps worse, or perhaps better.”

Perhaps worse or perhaps better, but never shared. From the beginning it was obvious that the young girl was no friend of commentary or gossip, even less so if it were about her, and that she maintained the hermeticism of a statue about her past, which made one think of the painful or guilt-ridden reasons that caused her to hide it. When they asked her where were you born, what is your name, how old are you, she slipped away with nonanswers into a silent void of memories, or sometimes just the opposite, she would overflow with words, filling the house with mindless chatter that was even more concealing than her muteness.

“Were you born yesterday?” asked Todos los Santos. “Spit out your past, child, or it will rot inside you.”

That negation of memory made her the pure vibration of a present that burned in front of your eyes the instant that it was contemplated, like a scene illuminated by the flash of a camera. Although at times things escaped from her, now and then she would carelessly reveal little fragments.

“Do you like my new skirt?” asked Tana.

“Cecilia had one just like it,” she said. “Except yellow, not green.”

So they quickly asked her who Cecilia was, perhaps your mother, or an aunt, maybe a friend of your mother’s? Can you answer us, for the love of God, who was Cecilia?

“What Cecilia?” was her reply, surprised at all the insistence, as if she had never uttered such a name.

One day an old client and lover of Todos los Santos asked for a date to say good-bye; tired of going daily to the offices of the Troco to collect a perpetually delayed payment for an accident, he had decided to leave for Antioquia to help his son start a coffee farm. It was an evocative and nostalgic occasion and Todos los Santos was busy exquisitely attending to her friend while the girl, wearing her oversized blouse, devoted herself to pestering Aspirina, Tana’s dog, tying red ribbons around her ears, not paying any attention to the visit, or at least so it seemed, and without interrupting. Until at the end, when the gentleman was about to leave, she caught up with him at the door and stopped him.

“If somewhere you run across a woman from Guayaquil that they call La Calzones,” she ventured, “tell her that her niece asked you to tell her that she’s doing fine.”

Just like that, like a cannon shot, Todos los Santos learned that her student was happy in La Catunga and that in some part of the country she had an aunt with a vulgar nickname, by which she deduced that the girl’s vocation came to her by family tradition.

“That explains something,” I tell her, “but not much. Really it explains almost nothing.”

“That’s right.”

Not even during the hardest stages of training did the student give signs of defeat or weakening; she didn’t complain, she didn’t express pleasure or sadness, heat or cold, nor did she soften even one millimeter the military discipline she had imposed upon herself, as if responding to a sense of duty that was greater than she herself. Only once did she refuse to obey, when Todos los Santos asked her to clean the pigsty that was fairly buzzing with a horrendous stench at the rear of the house.

“I decided to became a puta so I wouldn’t have to clean up caca ever again,” grumbled the girl.

“Well, you made a mistake. You should know that here you will earn more from washing a gringo’s laundry than from going to bed with a man. In order to survive, a woman of the profession must also apply herself as seamstress, cook, fortune-teller, and nurse, and she must not be repelled by any task that life imposes on her, no matter how humbling or difficult it may be. So go back and get the bucket and brush and make that patio clean as a whistle.”

One night of supernatural clarity, Todos los Santos awoke in the middle of a coughing fit and, between gasps, asked for a glass of water. The girl didn’t respond because she wasn’t on her mattress but instead was sitting at the front door in her nightshirt and barefoot, framed in the moonlight and absorbed in the slow amazement descending from the highest abysses. Her perplexity was so deep, so vibrant that, touched, the madrina scoured the cellars of her memory looking for an explanation that had been with her a long time ago, before years and years of struggling and scratching for her daily bread had taught her to live without explanations.

“Up there in the sky, the seven planets spin and sing around the Earth,” she said, pulling up a stool to sit beside the girl in the brilliant darkness. “The Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, and the Sun. Each one has a corresponding musical note, a metal from the chart of elements, and a day of the week. The moon that robs you of your sleep is made of solid silver, whistles songs in the key of C, and reigns over Mondays. The great buzzing produced by the universe is what wise men call the music of the spheres, and the primary voice in this excellent concert is our Earth’s.”

“If that’s true, why can’t I hear it?”

“You do hear it, you were listening to it just now when I found you.”

“What is our Earth singing?”

“A song of the wind, made with your breath and mine and that of all men and women, alive, dead, and yet to be born.”

“We’d better go back inside, madrina, or all that tremendous wind will catch you and you’ll start coughing again.”