The Dark Bride

three

I ask what had happened in Sacramento’s life during all this time and they tell me that in the afternoons, after five o’clock, he would visit the girl and play with her.

“Play?” I ask. “Wasn’t he a little old to be playing?”

“But he was just a boy…”

“You told me that by then he had been given his cédula de ciudadania. He must have been at least eighteen.”

“Yes, he had his cédula, but that doesn’t mean anything. He got it four or five years early from some crooked politicians who falsify cédulas to get minors or nonexistent or dead people to vote for them in the elections.”

Sacramento and the girl played barefoot with the other children in the dusty alleys of the barrio of the putas. London Bridge, hot potato, jump rope. But those traditional, organized games weren’t their favorites; more than anything else they liked to play war. The girl was famous on the streets for being a rough-and-tumble scoundrel. There was no one more expert than she at executing flying kicks, spitting at a greater distance, throwing bone-crushing punches, knocking the wind out of someone with a fist to the solar plexus. Other handy diversions of hers were urinating in jars, tormenting the enemy by putting chili powder in their eyes, and playing violent games of red rover.

“The heart of the pineapple is winding and winding, is winding and winding, all the children are falling and falling,” sings Sacramento, and he’s remembering and remembering. “It was called the heart of the pineapple and it was a rough game that left everyone injured. And me? The heart of the pineapple crushed my soul.”

The heart of the pineapple was winding, the speeding chain of children holding hands, pressing tighter and twisting until it formed a human knot, a true pineapple heart that squeezed and asphyxiated and finally ended up with a pile of crushed children on the ground. One day several older boys from another neighborhood joined the game and the pineapple, devilish and frenetic, began to twist ankles and knock heads, and more than one kid came out bruised from the crush. But the older ones weren’t there to play, they only incited the jumble and took advantage of the confusion to touch the girl, knocking her to the ground and grabbing her hair to steal kisses and to lift her skirt. She defended herself with sharp jabs and dolphin kicks and had already managed to get them off of her and to quickly escape, when Sacramento learned of the offense and a surge of wounded dignity electrified his heart.

“At that moment I felt that the pain stabbing me was the strongest I could ever know. Boy, was I wrong. It was a child’s pain compared to those that were to come.”

“Over the years, Sacramento grew and filled out,” tells Todos los Santos, “but at the time he was just a skinny boy, a head shorter than the girl, with wiry hair and sweet little eyes that inspired laughter and compassion. Without taking time to realize that the others were greater in number and size, he rushed at them, avenger and executor of justice, and he managed, of course, to be beaten to a pulp and left half broken.”

“Why do you defend her,” they shouted at him as they watched him bleeding on the ground, “when she’s just going to turn out to be a puta.”

“That’s work, stupid bastards. We were just playing!” he shouted in a voice broken with tears that even to him sounded lamentably infantile, and to try to turn around this sorry ending, he summoned up strength from his crushed pride and rushed at them again.

“He was lucky that the second time they knocked him down with a single blow and ran off.”

Sacramento and the girl spent hours and hours on Todos los Santos’s patio, busy stretching the last sunny days of their childhood, playing that they were already grown up and inventing and acting out episodes and dramas with dialogues, never-ending like life itself. You could say that they were growing up as they played being grown up, like when they decided to pretend to be brother and sister who were leaving home to travel around the world in search of fame and fortune, but first they had to have breakfast, let’s pretend that this is bread and that’s milk, bread, no, I was eating eggs for breakfast, now we have to pack the suitcases, you’re the woman and you have to take care of that, no, you’re the man, you take care of it and I’ll sharpen our swords, let’s pretend that these are your clothes, these are mine and this box is the trunk where we keep them, but before we go we have to give hay to our horses. These railings are our horses! Okay, but let’s pretend that yours is sick with a tumor and we have to heal him with this bandage, and so on, and from one preparatory step to another the shadows of night were falling on the patio. Todos los Santos served them real bread and real glasses of milk, the game was over and the two adventurous siblings hadn’t even crossed the threshold of their house.

Todos los Santos started to notice that some of her clothes were missing, first stockings, then handkerchiefs embroidered with her initials, then a short-sleeved blouse, then some other article.

“In which trunk have the traveling brother and sister put my silk stockings?” she grew tired of asking, and as they swore that they hadn’t seen her stockings, pillowcases and hand towels began to disappear.

One morning, as she was cleaning the kitchen, Todos los Santos perceived a strong, rancid odor whose origin she couldn’t pinpoint no matter how diligently she rummaged through boxes looking for rotten food and moved furniture to see if it was coming from dead mice. The following day the odor was even more intense and the madrina stood up on a stool to clean off the top shelves, from which she took down a reeking basket filled with dirty rags. Rags that weren’t rags; they were her lost stockings, her blouses, her pillowcases, and her handkerchiefs, twisted into knots, wadded up and stained with dried blood.

“Girl, come here!”

“What happened now, madrina?”

“What is this?”

“Who knows?”

“This is the clothing that I was missing.”

“How nice that you found it.”

“Who stuffed it up there all dirty?”

“You probably did and you just don’t remember,” said the girl as she scurried away.

“Girl, come here!”

“Yes, madrina?”

“Tell me why this clothing is stained with blood.”

“Because of a cut I have on my arm that bleeds a lot.”

“Show it to me.”

“It’s already healed now, madrina. It was here, on my knee.”

“Wasn’t it on your arm?”

“One on my knee and another on my arm.”

“But you don’t have any scabs or scars…”

“It was a pretty small cut.”

“Then why did it bleed so much…?”

“It was very deep, I think.”

“Could it have been a bullet wound?”

“More likely from a knife, a very sharp one…”

“Did you get it in the war? Or was it the police?”

Then the girl covered her face and moved away to cry and Todos los Santos, after closing the kitchen door to be alone with her, sat the girl on her lap and began to repeat the same complicated saga about the pollination of flowers that she herself had heard from the nuns dozens of years earlier and under similar circumstances, with the protagonist of a bee who buzzed around a rose to accomplish an incomprehensible and loving mission, in the midst of a great anatomical mixing of stamens, corollas, and pistils, until by some miracle of God, who is merciful, finally, at the end of all this dancing, a beautiful peach was born.

“God’s baby or the bee’s?” asked the girl.

“The bee and the flower’s baby. Something like that is happening to you. Now do you understand? That’s why you shouldn’t feel ashamed about your blood or hide it in a basket as you have done, even though they tell you it stains and poisons. What you have to do is collect it every month in some little cloths that I will give you and show you how to wash with warm water so they won’t smell bad, and you shouldn’t worry because it’s something natural that happens to all women. Do you understand?”

“Yes, madrina,” said the girl, starting to cry again, but this time with more momentum.

“Then why are you crying?”

“It hurts, madrina, every time the blood comes out. My insides burn. Do you think I’m injured inside? Do you think the bee you were talking about got inside me and stung me there, inside? That’s what it feels like, madrina, like a wasp sting.”

“It’s a wound that opens in all women once a month and that never heals because it’s a wound of love. But you’ll see, when you start going with men, how much happiness the red roses inside you will bring you every time they appear, because it will be the signal that you aren’t pregnant. I can already see you, like the others, counting the days that your blood is late in staining your clothes.”

“Does it happen to men too?”

“No. It is God’s will that it only happens to women. That’s why we love more, too, because our insides hurt.”

“Like Jesus’ heart?”

“Yes. Just like that.”

Then the girl stopped crying, wiped her nose on her sleeve, and went back out to the patio to resume playing brother and sister, who were now facing the problem of not having any blankets for the tremendously cold nights they would encounter on their long journey, and from that day forward the sister adventurer could look for fame and fortune without panicking at the onset of her menstrual cycle, which was no longer a sin that had to be hidden on the top shelf, and she learned how to use white cloths that she washed later in warm water, scrubbed with a pumice stone and hung to dry in the sun, knowing that if she ever had a daughter, she would calm her by patiently explaining the mystery of how the blood that appears in her underwear, which is the bee’s blood, makes it possible for fruit to be born from a flower.

“Do you remember the treasure chest?” Todos los Santos asks Sacramento.

Frequently the two children would entertain themselves with a cookie box that they called the treasure chest. It contained a delightful collection of items such as broken necklaces, buttons, loose stones, old brooches, and fairy-tale earrings, and it made the children’s eyes shine with sparkles of emerald green, ruby red, French pink, depending on the color of the beads they were looking at.

“How wonderful!” exclaimed the girl, completely absorbed, and she would begin to tell Sacramento lies, as big as a house, that he would pretend to believe.

“She made up that the box contained the jewels that Santa Catalina had been given by her father the king, and she made me promise that I would defend them with my life, property, and honor against anyone who tried to steal them.”

Sacramento swore on his knees, she tapped him on the shoulder a couple times with a sword that was really a stick and named him Knight of the Order of the Holy Diamond. He was ashamed that the older kids would see him playing like that and he wouldn’t let her name him a knight unless there were no witnesses; after all, he was already a man who worked and supported himself and he found that game — like so many things of hers — shamefully simple. Poor Sacramento, he never suspected that that title would be, by a long shot, the most honorable that he would ever have bestowed upon him in his life.

“To have been named Knight of the Order of the Holy Diamond by her…,” he says to me, “I think when I die that will be the best memory I leave behind.”