The Dark Bride

twenty-eight

“We’ve already told you about míster Brasco, remember? He was a friend of ours who was fond of Sayonara and liked to talk to her about snow and the cold storms of his land, because he was a foreigner from far away. We called him Tell-me-why because of his habit of going around asking things, and we also called him the Hanged Man, because of what happened to him during the rice strike.”

A very tall blond man with white skin, long as a gust of wind and uncommonly thin. Míster Frank Brasco knew what it was like to have a thick rope around his neck, everything in him bracing for death, counting the minutes and confused by the possibility, unforeseeable a year earlier, of ending his days hanged in a country that he wouldn’t have even been able to locate with any precision on a map. And all because the men of Camp 26 got bored with having to swallow their pride crammed up in nasty balls of cold rice.

“What’s going on?” Payanés tried to raise his voice over the shouting as he entered the dining hall, beginning to feel carried along by the wave of a collective anxiousness that he had been unaware of until now. “Who can tell me what’s going on?” he insisted, in the middle of the melee of rice balls whizzing overhead to end up splattered on the wall.

If he had been more experienced, he might have guessed that the redoubled blood flow, the ants’ nest of expectations vibrating in the air, and the sparkle in the men’s eyes were the announcement of the arrival of the great rebellion, which returned cyclically to involve Tora in its fury, like summer in other hemispheres.

“What’s going on?” asked Sacramento in his quieter, convalescent tone.

“We’re fed up with this shitty food,” responded a man who was actively involved in the fray.

“But why today and not before, if we eat the same thing every day?”

“These gringos think they’re smart,” came the answer. “Again today, lunch is just brown sugar in hot water and rice balls. It’s not even fit for prisoners, hermano, they have no right.”

“At least in here we get rice balls. Out there they don’t even have that…,” said Sacramento.

His words came from a world that was before the loss of candor, but that wasn’t how they sounded. Just the opposite, they provoked ire and mistrust and the other men yelled at Sacramento, calling him a scab, a sellout, and a strikebreaker, and in the midst of the tumult they might have broken his skull if old Lino el Titi Vélez hadn’t stepped in. Lino el Titi was a leader of earlier strikes who still wore the crown of his faded union glory.

“I will vouch for this boy. His words are innocent and do not come from ill will,” said Lino el Titi vehemently, whose love and extracurricular life had transpired entirely among the bars and beds of La Catunga, and so he had known Sacramento from the days when he was a baby with no one to change his diapers and had to teach himself how to walk, grabbing hold of the brickwork on a corner of Calle Caliente.

“You’re content with very little,” he said to Sacramento when the others had moved away. “Even the dogs won’t eat these rice balls. The other day I gave one to a hungry stray that sniffed it and turned up his nose at it. What do you think they eat in the manager’s dining hall? They give the gringos eggs and milk, and fruits and vegetables, hot, healthy food that you could really use, boy, because this jungle is sucking up your soul.”

“Well, it’s true that the balls are pretty damn bad,” acknowledged Sacramento. “But what if the gringos get mad and decide not to toss us even the balls?”

“They can’t starve us to death because they need us to work,” Lino el Titi told him, before disappearing into the din of the minuscule battle.

Payanés, who had heard the dialogue, grabbed a ball of rice in his right hand. He did it just to participate in the fun, just because, with the shyness and remorse of a child who has stolen an apple. But he was immediately overcome with a powerful urge to throw it with all his might, he, a responsible and peaceful man, unassuming and well intentioned toward authority, who until now had felt only gratitude for the opportunity to work given him by those foreign bosses who smiled down from their photographs and decided his fate from their pool with blue reflections in their walled neighborhood. If before he felt only gratitude and submission, suddenly today, with that ball of rice in his hand and sensing the pulsing indignation of the others, he found more than enough reason to fuel his own. For the first time, he realized that the world, kind perhaps for others, had reserved a hostile face for him, and he decided that he wanted things to be different, he, Payanés, who knew how to block out suffering with such valor, or, depending on how you looked at it, with such cowardice. He, who looked down upon the complainers, who didn’t know discontent, who disdained pain to such a degree that he was incapable of detecting it even when it was inflicted upon him, who didn’t allow himself to dream except when he was asleep. Today, he suddenly allowed himself to be swept along by the furor and began to resent deep in his bones the chronic dampness of his hammock on those suffocating jungle nights, nights so short they afforded no rest. And he detested the loneliness of his endless days among so many men who, despite the crowded conditions, couldn’t keep one another company. He felt a tiredness that he had never allowed himself to feel before, and for the first time since he had left his distant city of Popayán, he allowed himself the luxury of longing for those people that he hadn’t seen since.

“Well, yes, damn it. I’m fed up too,” he admitted. All of a sudden he felt like demanding repayment from life for all the hardships and pettiness he’d had to endure, and throwing in the face of the Tropical Oil Company all the aches that the excessive work had burned into his muscles, driven until they cramped, and the deafening noise of the machines that cluttered his skull and dried out his thoughts, and the galley slave routine that he had so good-naturedly accepted, and above all the black weight of that sky that surrounded him every night far from the embrace of that girl who wouldn’t tell him her name but who made him a promise at the river, and he hated the fat men reeking of alcohol who were at that very moment kissing her on the neck, and he also hated, with a rebellious poison, those foreign bosses he had never even seen, and he blamed them for the heavy absence he felt and for the unsatisfied waiting he had to endure as he paid thirty days of forced labor for the dream of a single encounter of love. Then he tightened his hand on the ball of rice and threw it against the photograph on the wall with the fury of someone taking a step toward the galvanized lands of risk, knowing that there is no turning back.

What Payanés did not realize, not even at the instant that his ball smashed against míster Maier’s undaunted smile, was that he was living the first moments of what from then on would be the forever famous rice strike, the fifth and most violent of the so-called primitive, or heroic, strikes by the Tora union, which regained its strength when it was least expected, meaning when the projectiles had died down, spirits had calmed, and the rice scattered all over the floor made the dining hall look like a church vestibule after a wedding.

It was then that a belligerent and vociferous group who weren’t ready to call it quits on the ruckus, among whom were several maintenance workers — famous for their excesses — clustered around Brasco, the North American engineer who held the post of general supervisor and who was the only manager willing to mix with the Colombian workers and maintain any kind of personal relationship with them.

Too skinny and way too tall, Brasco experienced problems with the coordination of his own height: He walked as if perched on stilts and was unable to prevent his neck and arms from undulating as they stuck out from the collar and sleeves of his baggy shirt. He had already been warned by his superiors about the danger of not maintaining distances, and they had even told him they would cancel his health insurance policy if he persisted in his habit of visiting local brujos and healers. But he refused to imprison himself in that exclusive world of norteamericanos that he considered a concentration camp. That’s why he would join the workers at lunchtime and sometimes late at night, when they sat around a pot of coffee, under a riot of stars and cicadas, to tell stories of ghosts and spirits who wander around doing things that an Anglo-Saxon like him found improbable.

“But tell me why…” He always began his sentences with those words, and the workers nicknamed him that, Tell-me-why. Tell me why Mohán carries girls off to the bottom of the river if he could make love with them more comfortably and without getting wet on the shore?

“Míster has already started with his tell-me-why’s,” they would laugh. “Well, because he lives down there and that’s where his sumptuous palaces are.”

“But tell me why Luz-de-la-Ciénaga eats little children when there are so many pigs and chickens and fish…”

“Because if he doesn’t eat children he’s not scary, míster Brasco, and his stories wouldn’t interest anyone, not even you.”

According to the testimony of old workers at the Troco who took active part in the rice strike and with whom I have been able to discuss the events, Brasco was the only one of the company managers who at the hour of the ruckus didn’t take refuge in the golf club, which besides having green lawns was also, and above all, an authentic concrete fortress designed for these eventualities, although it had been camouflaged beneath the warm color of the bougainvilleas.

“We’re not going to do anything to you, míster Brasco, we just want you to taste this garbage, to see what you think,” said one of the men that surrounded him, corralling him into a corner.

“Okay, I’ll taste it, but don’t push me or touch me,” he told them. “You’re right, it’s pig slop, from now on no more rice balls,” he promised, and the workers applauded as they returned to their places to continue their lunch now that the uproar was over. The last few uninspired projectiles flew overhead. Pajabrava stood on top of a table to harangue, taking advantage of the opportunity to add followers to his anti-masturbatory crusade. Others played soccer, and the matter wouldn’t have gone any further — one more among so many harsh moments without serious consequences that occurred daily in the midst of the work stress at Campo 26—if at that moment a spokesman for the management hadn’t communicated over the loudspeakers that law enforcement officers were already on their way to the camp, that if the revolt didn’t cease there would be reprisals against the instigators, and that the workers should immediately liberate Mr. Brasco, who was being criminally detained as a hostage, or the company would have no choice but to respond with force.

The festive air of a few minutes ago froze with the stridency of the declaration, and the mere mention of reprisals and the presence of uniformed officers burned their spirits triple what the rice balls had. Frank Brasco, who had already left the dining hall, was the first to be surprised by the inopportunely timed threats and was on his way to the golf club to report that the incident was already over and that he was safe and sound when he was detained by the same maintenance men who had corralled him earlier.

“You’re not going anywhere, míster Brasco. Nobody wanted to take you as a hostage, but now they have forced us to. You heard for yourself that it was their idea, and since things are the way they are, we have to listen to them, because you have become our only guarantee.”

“At that moment I felt afraid. For the first time in the two years that I had been working at the 26 I was afraid,” Frank Brasco tells me as he shovels the snow from the entrance to his cabin in Vermont, where I have come to interview him. “The men from operations were decent and proper and I felt safe with them, but there were some barbarians among the men from maintenance. They had a reputation for being unpredictable in fights with the bosses, and it was precisely one man, Mono Nieves, and another they called Caranchas, both radicals from maintenance, who were taking me hostage. It was to my disadvantage that they had found me at a particular moment when I was behind the dining hall where the others couldn’t see us, and I knew that being caught between those two irrational parties was going to be difficult, on one side the managers and on the other Mono Nieves and his men, who had just been handed on a silver platter the perfect opportunity to start an imbroglio.”

“Don’t worry, boys. I’m going to the office to tell them there’s been a misunderstanding. You’ll see, with a little goodwill everything will be cleared up,” Brasco tried to say, but at that point Mono Nieves and his men had already hatched plans in their heads.

“But tell me why you have to do this,” Brasco began.

“There is no tell-me-why that can save you,” interrupted Nieves. “You come with us and forget about asking questions.”

Meanwhile, in the dining hall, the tension had become unbearable for the more than two hundred men who knew they were cornered in a building that would soon become a trap with no way out. From the loudspeakers came threats of the siege of the camp if the workers didn’t release engineer Brasco at once, “deliberately captured as a hostage by the group of rebels in the dining hall.”

“Where is Tell-me-why?” Lino el Titi Vélez started shouting, trying to take control, but the engineer had disappeared and nobody knew where he was.

They tell me that traditionally in critical situations like this, with the imminence of disaster, the old union spirit for fighting is reborn. It had been dormant for a couple of years after a slew of debilitating strikes that ended in deaths and massive layoffs, and the old leaders, among them Lino el Titi, came out of their slumber to roar again like shaggy beasts, and their roars were recognized by the multitude. They declared themselves in permanent assembly and set midnight as zero hour to declare the strike. Someone produced a pen, another a sheet of notebook paper, and five veterans, swept up by the sudden enthusiasm and already having forgotten the punishment that had previously paralyzed them, sat around a table. Minutes later, one of them, nicknamed Bollo de Yuca because his mother had been selling balls of yuca at the entrance to the camp for years, read out loud the sheaf of petitions they had just improvised, which began with the demand for the immediate withdrawal of law enforcement officers.

The second demand got right to the heart of the matter and centered on the rice: “The workers of Campo 26 are fed up with the abominable quality of the food that the Tropical Oil Company provides for us, in particular the abhorred and inedible greasy rice balls, which we demand be replaced by decent, good-quality rice, and which should be accompanied by a portion of meat or vegetable, and in no case shall rice again be accepted by the workers as the sole lunch ingredient, as has happened so often in the past.” To this stipulation they added a detailed list of the daily humiliations that had been poisoning the men’s spirits for a long time, demanding potable water in the camp to halt intestinal infections, diarrhea, and dysentery; clothes-washing facilities near the barracks, because the men had nowhere to scrub their clothes; a section in the cemetery in Tora so that the workers’ mortal remains would have a Christian burial and wouldn’t be just dumped into any clearing in the wild jungle; and lastly, a sufficient number of latrines, because the existing ones, numbering one for each fifty men, forced them to make lines that were so long that the majority chose to relieve themselves behind the bushes, creating unclean and unhealthy conditions.

Over the loudspeakers, the management threatened to intervene if engineer Brasco wasn’t delivered to the front door of the hospital within the half hour. But how were they supposed to return him if they didn’t know his whereabouts? Then Mono Nieves, Caranchas, and the rest of the maintenance crew leadership appeared and confessed to the strike committee that they were holding Brasco and they would free him in exchange for the demilitarization of the area.

“We have Tell-me-why and we also have control of the power plant, which we have just seized. We will put ourselves at your disposal if you give us three seats on the committee,” proposed Mono Nieves.

“They sat down to work out an arrangement among themselves whose terms I didn’t really know the details of,” Sacramento tells me. “And when they reached an agreement, Lino el Titi started to give orders on forming committees for guard duty, food, and I don’t know what else. One of those orders was directed at me, a man who could be trusted, he said, because he had known me since I was running around in diapers. He named me as a member of a security squad and assigned me the mission of going with the men from maintenance to where they had hidden Tell-me-why and sticking with him twenty-four hours a day, or until ordered otherwise.”

“You better kill yourself,” said Lino el Titi, “before you let him escape or let anyone harm him. There are two orders, both equally important: Don’t let him escape and don’t let him die. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“Do you have a friend you trust who can accompany you?”

“Yes, Payanés. He’s been my traveling partner for months now.”

“Are you sure he won’t betray you for any reason?”

“Sure enough.” Sacramento began to feel again the burning memory of Sayonara’s hair being tied to his best friend’s neck.

“Then take him and have him help you watch the gringo. Nobody else should know where you are.”

Caranchas took Sacramento and Payanés to a small toolshed tacked onto the power plant. Dark and humid, it was where they were hiding Brasco, who awaited word on his fate in sorry condition. He was the color of a corpse, this man who was normally pale, his blue eyes injected with blood and his hands tied behind his back, his whole suffering body stretched out, feet on an oil drum and neck encircled by a rope hanging from one of the ceiling beams.

“If they try to rescue you by force,” the three men guarding him warned, “we’ll give your drum a good kick and it’s good-bye, míster. Good-bye forever.”

“So, they had Tell-me-why in the gallows,” Sacramento explains to me, “and concerning his fate, nothing had been written yet.”

How did the events unravel from that moment on, how was the committee divided between the moderates from operations and the radicals from maintenance, how did the situation get out of control for the workers: these are things that Sacramento and Payanés, because of their being locked up with the candidate for hanging in that suffocating shed, didn’t learn about until several days afterward.

“Caranchas had said that we were to wait there without taking our eyes off míster until he came with instructions. But hours passed and it seemed as though everyone had forgotten about us. From far off came shouts from the crowd, but it was just noise and we couldn’t make out any of the words: It was impossible to tell if they were the voices of friends or enemies. So Payanés and I waited blindly without hearing anything, locked up in that hot place, resentful and mutually distrustful because of the jealousy between us, without knowing whether the armed forces had entered or not, with our gringo standing on the drum and measuring the increasing voltage of the threats against him by the three men from maintenance, who were getting drunk off a bottle of guarapo añejo that was also souring their mood and fueling their arrogance.”

Every now and then, one would leave the hiding place to try to find out something, then return with fragmented and contradictory news. The troops already have us surrounded; a lot of workers are fleeing the camp through the rear into the jungle; we have already declared a strike indefinitely; the management declared the strike illegal; Lino el Titi and a commission are negotiating the release of míster Brasco; the gringos said that they won’t negotiate and that we can do whatever we want with Brasco; Lino el Titi is not in charge anymore; Mono Nieves has been wounded and now Caranchas is commanding the revolt; Caranchas says everything’s screwed up and that the only order is to loot and destroy the camp.

“You don’t know what it’s like to have a rope around your neck for four hours, without understanding what’s going on outside and fearing that at any minute they’ll kick the drum out from under you and that you’ll just hang there, like a sausage in the cupboard. My body became numb from holding the same position for such a long time, while my head, sticking out from the other side of the rope as if it weren’t mine, was spinning a thousand revolutions per minute. Fortunately, I trusted Payanés. I knew him well because we shared a fondness for skinny Emilia, the camp’s oldest and most prized piece of machinery, and on several occasions he had joined me during the periodic repairs that had to be made on her. Sacramento, however, I was seeing for the first time, but I sized up his character and something told me that although he was just a kid he could also be trusted. As for the trio from maintenance, I was dead, but I figured that as long as Payanés and the kid stayed with me, my neck had some chance of being spared from the noose. There was, however, a sort of rivalry between those two that worried me. It was as if they felt uncomfortable with each other.”

“Even then the tension was noticeable?” I ask Brasco.

“Yes, it was noticeable; don’t ask me how I knew, but it was evident. At that point I didn’t know that a woman was the cause, so I imagined all sorts of things, like they had different ideas about what to do with me. Believe me, when you are in the gallows you get very paranoid. .. Had I suspected that the trouble was over a woman, I would have been a little calmer.”

At some point Brasco told them he really needed to urinate.

“That, you’re not going to be able to do,” responded one of the drunks after studying him for a minute. “We can’t untie your hands and we’re not in the mood to grab hold of your thing. Everyone assembled here is too macho for that. Ask for something else, water, a cigarette, anything, and we’ll be happy to help you out, but there’s no solution for that other little problem.”

“It’s urgent,” insisted Frank Brasco. “Don’t make me go through the shame of wetting my pants. Payanés, please, untie my hands.”

“I will untie them,” decided Payanés, and he also released his neck from the noose. “But, míster Brasco, don’t you try to escape.”

“It’s a deal,” promised Brasco. Once free he attended to his needs behind the door, then asked permission to rest a little. “I’ve been standing for too long,” he said, as he sat down on the ground, and his guardians didn’t say a word.

“Okay, back to your position, míster. If Caranchas comes in here and finds us like this, cuddling on the floor like brothers taking a siesta, he’ll shoot us all,” said Payanés after a good while, and Brasco heeded him.

As if a premonition had driven Payanés, barely two seconds later Caranchas returned. He was soaked with sweat, gasping as if he had been running, and frowning as if he had a toothache.

“Your compatriots have abandoned you, míster Questions,” Caranchas blurted out. “They say they don’t negotiate or compromise, and they won’t be blackmailed on account of your kidnapping. They say you could never be trusted and that you’re probably our accomplice. They also say that for some time they’ve been warning you and despite that you got mixed up in this and dug your grave with your own hands.”

“That’s not true; I don’t believe you, Caranchas. I don’t believe they’re saying that.”

“If it’s not true, then why don’t they withdraw the troops? There they are, three hundred yards away, aiming their guns at us from the fence, and any minute now they’re going to come in and seize the camp. You’re not worth shit to us, míster Tell-me-why,” shouted Caranchas, more disillusioned than angry. “We were wrong about you. Anyway, we’re not letting the troops in, even if we have to blow up the camp to keep them out.”

“The man spoke with such disenchantment,” Brasco tells me, the snow glistening on his shovel in the Vermont air as he throws it aside, “I would have sworn that the next thing he was going to do was kick the oil drum out from under me to put an end to the comedy of errors. But he didn’t do it. He simply left and I just stood there, with the rope around my neck, suddenly very tired and horribly confused.”

Then Payanés said he would go out to verify what Caranchas had said about the closeness of the troops and he came back in a few minutes to confirm that it was true.

“Groups of workers are arming themselves with sticks, bars, and rocks, and they’re getting ready to mount resistance,” he reported, then he showed us the ground coffee beans that he was holding in his hand and a pair of tin cans for preparing it. He built a fire on the other side of the door, boiled some water, threw the coffee in, and then he poured it from one can to the other, filtering it through the cloth of his shirt. He approached Brasco with the steaming liquid, whose hands were still tied, and held it as the American drank, sip by sip, blowing on it first so he wouldn’t burn his mouth.

“But tell me why,” Brasco murmured, “why do things have to end up like this…?”

“Drink your coffee and don’t ask us questions, míster gringo,” Payanés advised, “because we can’t answer them.”

“So what do we do now?” asked Sacramento worriedly.

“Now we lock Sor Juana Inés in her cell so she can please herself,” answered Payanés, who for a while now had been mulling over the secrets that Pajabrava had said about the nuns.

“I’m serious. I wish I could find old Lino el Titi to ask him what we should do!”

“If there’s a strike, we have to support it,” mumbled one of the drunks.

“Of course, you idiot, but how? On one side we have Lino el Titi and his men, on another we have Caranchas and his men, and on yet another we have drunks like you. And you’re all proposing different things.”

“Let’s arm ourselves with sticks and go out to see who confronts us,” said another man, more drunk than the first, and then he fell asleep, conquered by the guarapo. His two friends stood up and went out to participate in the melee.

“A single shot would have been enough to ignite the wells and engulf the whole camp in flames,” Brasco says to me, “and lacking faith I gave myself up to Mohán, Patasola, Luz-de-la-Ciénaga, and to all those ghosts they had been telling me about. If they can’t save us, I thought, no one can.”

“Let’s loosen that rope necktie, míster interrogator, we’re leaving,” Payanés suddenly said to him, removing the noose from around his neck and untying his hands. “You too, Sacramento.”

“What for?” asked Sacramento. “I’m not moving until Lino el Titi gives me orders.”

“We’re going to defend Emilia until Titi comes and tells us what to do. We’re not going to let anyone hurt her, no matter what side they’re from. If they get too close, it will have to be over our dead bodies.”

Outside, night had already fallen, the world spun black, and in it reigned a chaos heavy with foreboding. The great rice uprising had just begun.