The Dark Bride

thirty-one

“These women don’t understand how things are,” Olguita tells me later, when we are alone. “They think they do but they don’t. Trust me when I tell you that Sayonara did know how to love, and that she loved Payanés from the very beginning and to the point of delirium.”

“Then why did she do things the way she did?”

“Because the paths of the heart are not straight, but snaking and twisting, and they let us see where they begin but not where they end. But that’s getting tangled up in conclusions of a story that begins plain and simple: Payanés was the first unknown man that Sayonara was able to get to know. In him she found bread for her hunger and water for her thirst.”

“He has the sweetest skin I have ever known,” Olguita swears she heard Sayonara say. “But not sweet like sugar, sweet like an old pain. The sun keeps it brown from the waist up, but it is reduced in color on the rest of his body. What I miss most is his chest, his big chest with the rose tattoo, soft and bulky but only a little, just enough to be strong like the chest of a man and kind like the chest of a woman. Deep within his eyes nests a sadness, a sort of helplessness in that mixed yellow color, a yellow burning with green: the eyes of a stray animal. His hair, which is also of a double color, sometimes seems black as night and sometimes shines with silver threads.”

“That’s called gray hair.”

“Well, he has gray hair then.”

“Why would he have gray hair, when he’s so young?”

“He has suffered, you see.”

“Some women focus on the look in a man’s eyes,” Olguita tells me. “Others like men with an elegant style. There are those who complain if men are knock-kneed or flat-assed, or have tangled eyebrows or stooped shoulders. Many girls want to see them in leather shoes or boots and turn their noses up at cloth shoes, because they are a sure sign of poverty. Any woman appreciates a powerful male member and most prefer a sweetly drawn smile with healthy teeth. Once I heard that you shouldn’t sleep with men with only one ear, because if you get pregnant most likely you’ll give birth to a deaf child. And so on. But Sayonara fell in love with a chest, and she said that in Payanés’s chest she had found her happiness and her reason for living.”

Like gusts of air in an empty house, the breaths of many strange men blew on her neck. Her life was tangled up in that sleepy haze of foreign bodies that passed through her bed, one after another, in the procession of their indifference. Her bedroom was conquered territory, the camp of any army, and her white sheet was the flag of her purchased love. Her naked body accepted with indolence the rubbing of skins that were odorless, or that smelled of distant places, and on which neither her touch nor her eyes wanted to linger. Until suddenly, without warning, came the contact with the skin that somehow awakened her, giving her the touch that her fingertips, alert at last, demanded, and in the skin of that stranger she felt the exact temperature that reminded her of happiness.

“My man tastes like moss, like a manger, like the Christ Child,” announced Sayonara. “He tastes like Christmas.”

“Hush, girl, that’s sinful talk!”

“He smells delicious, like a forest perfume with a good smell, and he also smells like a horse. I like that about him, that he has a strong horse smell. The smell of horse sweat, which is the same as the smell of desire.”

“Girl, such things you say!”

“Do you know what a petrolero smells like after ten hours of forced labor under this strong sun?” Todos los Santos asks me. “No, you can’t imagine. He smells like pure race, mi reina. He smells like the whole human race.”

“That depends on the color of his skin,” adds Olguita. “The whitest ones, the ones with more European blood, are the ones who smell the worst.”

“Cover me with your skin,” Sayonara asked Payanés, and he spread over her and clothed her and made himself more hers than her own skin, and he blanketed her with his chest, that foreign chest, which in a simple, miraculous instant made itself so familiar. And so comforting. A chest like a roof that shields and protects, and there, outside, let the world end, let it rain sparks and let God do whatever he chooses.

Olguita, the hopeless romantic, tells me tales and I don’t know whether they’re true or imaginary. She tells me, for example, that Payanés slept holding Sayonara with the yearning of an orphan that she knew how to calm for a while, and that his sleep lasted only the second it would take for him to relive that memory the following day, the same, eternal second that it would take for his eyelids to close and then to open again.

“Is this how long a stranger’s love lasts?” Sayonara asked, watching him leave. “Is there a love more intense and aloof? Is there another possible form of love?”

“A lot of poetry, a lot of poetry,” groans Todos los Santos as she reads this. “I don’t see anyone around here who is willing to tell the hard truth, which is that skin that is too familiar is no great gift, first because it starts turning gray and then little by little moves toward invisibility, old and worn like a shawl that is used every day, until finally, now intimately known, it becomes as unfamiliar as the leather in your next-door neighbor’s shoes: just skin, any old skin. But you all don’t listen to me and you keep on weaving your own versions, so it just doesn’t seem like anyone around here is interested in the truth.”