The Dark Bride

twenty

“You have beautiful eyes,” Dr. Antonio María Flórez said to Sayonara the third or fourth time she entered his office.

“What do you mean by that, Doc?” she asked, shaking the blue brilliance of her hair and looking at him suspiciously. “Just that, that you have beautiful eyes. Your problem is you can’t stand people saying only that to you.”

Olguita tells me that Sayonara couldn’t understand when men weren’t crazy in love with her. She couldn’t accept that there was anyone who wasn’t smitten by her, accustomed as she was to awakening love at first sight and stirring up desire with the mere brush of her skirt. If a man appeared and shuffled the cards for a game that didn’t involve passion, she would focus her interest on him for that simple fact, watching him without believing, scrutinizing him from head to foot in an attempt to decipher the mechanisms that made him immune, then she would gnaw and scratch at his indifference with the claws of a rat, until she gouged and destroyed it. To finish the job she would deploy all the splendid plumage of a seductive female, because nothing unsettled her more than not unsettling others.

“It didn’t happen only with humans,” reports Todos los Santos. “It was her stubborn way with all God’s creatures. She was so pampered in those days, and so haughty! My poor girl, she never suspected how hard things really are…”

Sayonara the dispossessed, the child prostitute of Tora, orphaned and dark-skinned, wandered the alleyways of her poor neighborhood in no particular hurry to get anywhere, ignoring the loneliness of stray dogs and the smell of fried fish and urine that enveloped everyone else, with a battery-operated radio in her hand and humming the romantic ballads of La Emisora Melodía, eating sweet oranges with clean bites and tossing the peels on the ground, sipping cool beer straight from the bottle and kicking the bottle cap down the street, freshly bathed and with her hair dripping wet, decked out in the only bit of elegance she knew, that narrow skirt with the slit up the side and the Chinese silk blouse with red and gold embroidery, and casually parting the crowd that was laboring under the hot sun on market day, just like a Moorish queen, idle and naked beneath her seven veils, along the fresh water-lined paths of her Alhambra.

Lacking holy oil, she was anointed with the arrogance of her cheap perfume; instead of a robe and crown, she paraded the impudence of her dark skin, and from the pedestal of her worn-out high heels, she treated the entire universe like a conquered vassal at her feet. If shooting stars came down from the sky, it was to bring her news of other wanderings, and for whom, if not for her, did the night watchman announce his rounds every hour with two mournful notes of his whistle? At dawn the robust aroma of coffee seeped forth from the pot and traveled to her bed to awaken her, and if the tuberoses disrupted the afternoon tranquillity with their oily smell of resurrection, they did it only to see her smile. Wandering troubles seeking consolation approached to drink her tears, the mist that flooded the valley cloaked her like a bride’s veil, cat’s eyes glowed phosphorescently when they looked at her, the days passed slowly to caress her at length, and if the great Río Magdalena took the trouble to funnel the abundance of its waters past Tora, it was only for the privilege of washing her feet.

“It wasn’t her fault,” says Fideo protectively. “So many people swore that they loved her that she believed it. Starting with you, doña Todos los Santos. You were the first one to confuse her.”

“I did what I could to get her to open her eyes,” Todos los Santos responds in self-defense. “One day I heard her say that the mockingbird sang so sweetly and so incessantly because it sang for her. Ay, my conceited child, I reprimanded her. Don’t aspire to be a gold coin and don’t have the impudence of wanting the world to love you; understand once and for all that putas are the other side of the tapestry, the rough side of life, and that it is the dark half of the moon that shines on us. Us? We are backroom tenants. They venerate us if they see us glow in the background and in the dark, but they squash us if we attempt to emerge into the light of day. Don’t forget, girl, the great truth of amor de café: we putas are always at war.”

“At war against who, madrina?” asked Sayonara, acting as if she didn’t know.

“Against everyone, girl. Against everyone.”

The madrina warned her, having guessed the harsh reality that the future was sure to bring: Girl, things aren’t like that. But a pretty girl doesn’t have to pay any mind and Sayonara kept strolling through life on a red carpet.

Things aren’t like that, but today I suspect that Todos los Santos, the wise old woman, the holy celestine, wasn’t right. That for once she was wrong because her young disciple, in the splendid egoism of her beauty, did come to be the very center of that whole universe, the privileged object of all love.

“Forgive me for saying this, Todos los Santos,” I venture, “but in that specific topic, in that precise moment, it wasn’t you, but she, who was right.”