The Dark Bride

twenty-nine

Night was falling so softly that part of its darkness melted into foam before settling. Sitting in rocking chairs, the women chatted on the patio while upon their heads, shoulders, and laps soft black flakes fell, piling up until they were completely covered. Tana warded off melancholy with the false luxury of her fake jewels. Olguita, always looking for someone to protect, was knitting a scarf for a night watchman, a lover of hers, who coughed because of the damp night air. Sayonara soared far away as she braided and unbraided her lustrous mane, dominating God knows what anxieties in that incessant doing and undoing. Ana and Susana searched for the three bright stars that formed Orion’s belt. Sitting at her older sister’s feet, little Chuza lined up a long row of pebbles on the ground. Todos los Santos served mistela in delicate pink cups. And Machuca fanned herself with the lid of a pot while she told a story from centuries earlier that half intrigued them, half annoyed them, because according to her, it involved real facts about pagan whoring.

The story took place, as Olga remembered it, in a lost, nameless country where all women, regardless of rank or age, had to go once during their lives to the temple of the goddess to give themselves to the first stranger who solicited their love, without denying anyone. They would adorn their heads with garlands of gauze and daisies and offer themselves in honor of the deity. The men, in turn, were to circulate there, also willing to give themselves to any woman for that one time. There were rich women dressed in brocades and attended by servants, beggars covered with rags, beautiful young women who were quickly chosen and could then return home free of the commitment, and ugly women that no man looked at and who had to remain there for two or three years, sitting among the multitudes that filled the temple, before they were able to fulfill their obligation. And there were as many handsome men who were pleasing to the chosen woman as there were deformed or sick men who filled her with horror.

The women of La Catunga listened to all of this openmouthed and confused, and when Machuca finished her story a silence so great fell upon the patio that you could hear, almost, the frozen humming of the three stars adorning Orion’s belt.

“That is the strangest story you’ve ever told us.” Todos los Santos’s voice emerged from the darkness. “I think it’s pure invention.”

“Wasn’t there another temple where the men sat for the women to come and choose?” asked Ana, who now participated in the women’s conversations, although no one took the trouble of answering her.

“How dare you, Machuca, say that they gathered in the temple,” said Tana angrily, who was orthodox in her convictions. “Only you would believe that, you’re so corrupt and such a heretic. And what temple could it be? It can’t be God’s temple…”

“It was the temple of the goddess.”

“There are no goddesses, you know that. Except Virgin Mary, who is pure and chaste, and doesn’t go around offering to raise her skirts.”

“They chase us out of the church when we go to pray,” someone was heard to say, “don’t even talk about going there to find a man.”

“There were goddesses before,” Machuca assures the others. “And things were different. Everything was different, because women were in charge.”

“Well, I prefer the world the way it is now,” countered Sayonara, who always took a contrary position. “What if a disgusting man with an ugly face appeared, or one with bad breath, or rough skin, and you weren’t allowed to refuse!” She burst out laughing. “What good did it do for women to be in charge if they couldn’t refuse an ugly man. I would cover my face with my hair so the man would pass right by me and go bother the next woman.”

Now the others were amused too. Suddenly everything seemed funny and they laughed so hard that they tossed their heads back and hit their legs with their palms, as they usually did when they were really happy.

“You say that now, because you’re young,” preached Todos los Santos. “It’s worse if you have to wait three years because nobody wants you.”

“Oh, no,” countered Sayonara again. “It’s always better to be alone than to be in poor company.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know loneliness. It really has rough skin.”

While Olga is telling me about what they talked about that night, which would be nearly the same as this one if Sayonara were still here, I try to decipher the mystery that lies beneath contact with the skin of a stranger. To not refuse a man you didn’t know? To give yourself up to the unknown, to allow yourself to be taken, would it be burying yourself or saving yourself? What hidden dimensions would be opened, of terror and of pleasure, of discovery and of loss?

“Is it difficult to have an unfamiliar man so close?” I ask, now that I find them sitting in rocking chairs in the middle of another patio like that one, decades later, shrouded by an identical darkness, under the same three stars that mark the belt of Orion, the celestial hunter who this night, just as on that one, wanders the ether, pursuing beasts. When they hear the question they look at each other and the laughter returns and the palms hitting the legs, and they are girls again.

“Sometimes the client turns out to be a fool and things get nasty,” replies Machuca, the pen pusher, who is still wearing half-sleeves of black cloth on her forearms, the ones she uses at the town hall so that her blouse doesn’t get stained when she writes.

“Tell the truth,” goad the others, “tell her, Machuca, that you liked it. And how!”

But Machucha doesn’t tell; she plays innocent.

“You have to learn to be there without being there. To train your mind to disengage from what the body is doing. You don’t let them touch your face, not to kiss you at all, because the only thing they end up doing is messing up your hair and your makeup,” asserts Tana, and my head is filled with the memory of so many paintings of Christian martyrs who turn toward heaven their serene faces, untouched and illumined, while their bodies, subjected to torture, melt in fear.

“And the body,” I ask, “doesn’t it feel any desire or pleasure?”

“The desire for the client to finish quickly and the pleasure of him paying you so you can come home with food from the market,” says one of them, and they all laugh heartily.

“Remember Pilar, the island girl,” growls Fideo, in a man’s voice from her invalid’s hammock, now that she can speak because she has decided to recuperate, just to be contrary, since everyone had accepted her death as a fact. “One day Pilar announced that she was leaving because she couldn’t put up with their breaths. That’s how she said it: ‘I can’t put up with their breaths anymore.’ She gathered up her stuff and left.”

“That isn’t funny; I understood what she meant,” says Todos los Santos. “To know the breath of a stranger brings an uneasiness that is sometimes too much to bear. I’m not talking about garlic breath or the smell of alcohol or cigarettes; those breaths smell like things, they’re always the same. The unbearable breaths are the ones that are particular to the person, to his private affairs.”

“But is there any case where a woman enjoys it?” I ask again, although I have heard here in Tora a phrase that is repeated so often that it has become a saying: Men pay to feel and we charge because we don’t feel.

“You tell her, Machuca… tell her why they call you the Glutton.”

“I didn’t become a puta to flee from misery,” says Machuca, “or because I was raped. They didn’t drag me into the profession or deceive me into it; I came to it out of sheer pleasure and enjoyment. Why should I lie, I always knew how to enjoy parties, money, aguardiente, tobacco, and above all other earthly pleasures, the smell of a man. The warmth of a man, you understand? I’m not one of those women who cries about the life that fate gave her. I enjoyed my youth and spent it going out on the town until I had nothing left but crumbs. And the bed? The bed was my altar, strangers were my fiancés, and the sheets were my wedding dress. That’s why these women think I’m a bruja, a witch, and I can only say to them: Maybe you’re right, and I hope there’s a God somewhere so that on Judgment Day I can shout in his face that I did what I did because I did it in honor of lust and because I wanted to.”

“You see? She is a bruja,” laugh the others. “Bruja rebruja, puta reputa.”

For Olguita there were no unknown men, because she only had to look them in the eyes to know them, whether they were cross-eyed, one-eyed, or blind or were hiding some trick of love behind their silky eyelashes, or whether the most beautiful, unfaithful blue sparkled in their pupils; all she had to do was speak to them affectionately to know them.

For others, like Tana and Machuca, all men were passed over because they had never found the man who would live on in their dreams. Others more unfortunate still, like beautiful Claire, found him only to lose him later.

“There is no worse torment than that of a whore in love,” brays Fideo with a midnight voice. “Others come, always others, while the one she waits for keeps her waiting.”

Speaking of Mary Magdalene from biblical times, Saramago mentions the deep wound that is “the open door through which others enter and my beloved does not.” Among the prostitutes of Tora, it was the pain and festering of that wound that threw them, at three o’clock in the morning and at a corner called Armería del Ferrocarril, under the old train cars passing noisily and leaving behind traces of rust, and at times of blood.

Todos los Santos believes that Sayonara didn’t suffer the rigors of that wound through which happiness escaped and death entered. She assures me that hers was another pain, which even she herself didn’t recognize as pain, and which didn’t push her toward death but unleashed in her a ferocious appetite for life. She had an itch in her soul, Todos los Santos tries to explain to me. Sayonara, to whom they all returned, whom no man abandoned or stopped loving, she who knew how to love many, to be happy with many, to find herself in many, she, la bienamada, the well loved, nevertheless had a misfortune: her incapacity to surrender herself to the blessing of a single love.

She loved good men who loved her well, and yet others came to erase those footprints and open new paths in her heart. Any of them would have been enough for her to have approached peacefulness, but she preferred to fill herself with open spaces that became yearnings for new loves: noble gentlemen, faithful in their ways, who deposited their fervor in her and who nevertheless in her eyes were nothing more than moments, honest but fleeting, of a longer and much more complicated journey.

“Do you think, as a mother, that it was possible for a man to make your adopted daughter love him?” I ask Todos los Santos, and expect the worst, because I know how irascible she gets when I force her to speculate. Yet she surprises me with her doubt.

“I have often asked myself that very same thing.”

A while after Sayonara’s arrival in La Catunga, during the period of training and apprenticeship, when she was still the girl and not yet Sayonara, Todos los Santos was worried about not being able to find a crack from which to look inside her tortoise’s heart, always hidden and withdrawn into its shell. Was there anything or anyone in the world that could stir her up? A memory that could awaken her longing? Some unconfessable desire that she wanted to ask of the Sacred Heart? Had her many past hungers convinced her that the only worthwhile pleasure was a plate of rice with lentils?

“I was afraid that being so dry of emotions, my adopted daughter wouldn’t be able to manage very well as a lover. Because to go to bed without love you have to know how to love, and those who think otherwise don’t understand anything,” the old woman tells me. Coiled around her shoulders is a silver fox, very dead and very forties, that she has rescued from the trunk where she keeps her memories among mothballs. “To sweeten her insides I began to give her a cup of hot milk with five teaspoons of honey daily. Then, seeing her act so strangely, I thought I had gone a little too far with the honey. But a few years later I realized that the error had been just the opposite, too little honey. Until I came to believe that eight or nine spoonfuls was the minimum dose to make her character well tempered.”

“And today, have you reached a conclusion?”

“Maybe Sayonara loved too much, or maybe she couldn’t love. I still don’t know.”

“It’s the same thing that happens to all of us,” says Machuca. “We professional women divide ourselves into a hundred loves and we don’t know how to content ourselves with the joys of one single love.”