The Dark Bride

thirty-two

CRIMINAL HANDS BURN LA COPA ROTA was the headline that appeared one day, after the forced departure of don Enrique, among the items in the Vanguardia Petrolera, which circulated daily in Tora. It was never proved who did it, but according to reports the fire happened at seven o’clock one morning in August when there were no clients in the place. Awakened by asphyxiating smoke, Fideo jumped out of bed and ran, tripping over people because several women were sleeping on the floor, and seconds later they were all seen fleeing as the expelling archangel saw Eve, naked and barefoot and shouting obscenities. They managed to safely escape the scorching flames, and a while later, although more choked by the smoke, so did the owner of the establishment, the bar boy, and the cat. But the hut, whose straw roof had caught fire first, was engulfed by the dry summer wind that whipped up the flames and reduced it to a pile of ashes, with a half drum enthroned in the center: the one that had served as the toilet, and the only object spared for memories.

You might be thinking that this is the third or fourth time that fire has crept into this story to reduce reality to nothing. It doesn’t seem accidental to me. As a Colombian, I know that I am delineating a world in perpetual combustion, always on the verge of definitive collapse, a world that despite everything manages, only God knows how, to hang on with fingernails and teeth, blazing in its final, reckless flashes as if there were no tomorrow, and yet another dawn soon fills the sky and here below the delirium gains new energy, scatological, impossible, and the new day travels along a thread of anguish toward a too predictable end, announced by the din of men and women banging on their empty pots with spoons.

And yet at midnight, against all odds, our peculiar apocalypse is once again postponed. Maybe because of that we are so dead, and at the same time so alive: because each sunset annihilates us, and the dawn redeems us.

“Where did Fideo end up, since after the fire there was no place for her?”

“Everything that goes up comes back down again,” Todos los Santos tells me, “and sometimes, very seldom, but it has happened, what goes down comes back up.”

Many of the regular clients of the Dancing Miramar and the other prestigious clubs, especially the younger ones, had allowed themselves to be attracted by the temptation of coarse love and had begun to frequent La Copa Rota, where they gathered to watch Fideo shining in her sickly light, embodying the hoarsest voice of the underground, the lowest of the lowly depths, humanity stripped of its skin, split open and displayed for sale, like meat on a carcass.

The barbaric separation from don Enrique broke the soul she didn’t have, and if she was a wild beast before, afterward she became a cruel wild beast who, when she couldn’t bite others, chewed and destroyed her own paws. To see her expose herself, naked, talking filth and biting flesh, made men horny and ignited their virility, so they riled her up and gave her alcohol, gave her alcohol and riled her up, and she went along with it because she could no longer find herself except in the open wound where her heart had been.

“Ay, don Enrique!” sighed Fideo from her invalid’s hammock.

The more turbulent the aura surrounding her, the stronger the aroma she expelled, and the deeper she fell, the higher her prestige grew. Until Negra Florecida, owner of the Dancing Miramar, resenting the loss of regular clients and eager to regain them, decided to give them a little of the medicine they were asking for, and she took advantage of the fire at La Copa Rota to offer Fideo work at her establishment. Even today it is rumored in Tora that behind that misfortune was a match struck by order of Negra Florecida herself.

That is how they came to compete for men’s love in the same arena, Sayonara and Fideo, angel and demon, life and death and a whole list of dichotomies, and the once harmonious world seemed to split in half, or at least it felt in people’s hearts.

Fanaticism sprang up, uncompromising, between sayonaros—nostalgic for old times — and fideístas, revelers who lived for the moment. And although the two women had an identical smell, which was merely human, they said Sayonara smelled of incense, and she was venerated for her air of child puta, unattainable and sheltered in her way of being there without being, for remaining unsullied by the many hands that had touched her, while they said that Fideo smelled of musk and they sought her out because she was just a plain whore, committed to the profession without offering resistance, without holding back, baring her insides in public and not keeping a single gesture or secret or memory for herself. Well, perhaps a memory, just one, but a delicate and kind one: Ay, don Enrique!

I try to communicate to Todos los Santos what I have been deciphering and she laughs.

“Don’t get me tangled up in words,” she insists. “The difference is that with Sayonara you had to love her, and that with Fideo you only had to pay her. That’s it.”

“Fine, you in your way and I in mine, we both think the same,” I defend myself this time. “And now tell me, did each resent the presence of the other? Was it hard for Sayonara to suddenly find herself with competition and to see her hegemony at risk?”

“How should I put it? They were both too lost in their own worlds to worry about the other.”

They worked under the same roof, but they belonged to worlds that never touched, each one playing for all she was worth to maintain supremacy over her own, but with no awareness of the size of what was in play. Also, in their roles as infallible lovers — and both were, each in her own way — they demonstrated their inability to feel jealousy, because neither recognized the existence of a rival; what’s more, for them a rival couldn’t exist because both knew that, in terms of her own pleasure or loss, they had already won, forever, the bloody poker game that was their peculiar way of understanding love.

There is a piece of information that, while literary, seems like it could be verified with a historical or sociological examination of that period: the beginning of Fideo’s tenure at the Dancing Miramar, since it coincided with two more measurable and less allegorical worldly events — the outcome of the rice strike and the spread of syphilis to epidemic levels — and marked what could be called the end of innocence for La Catunga. And the loss of innocence brought with it the pain of seeing the familiar become strange and opened the door to loneliness, which translated into the skin of strangers seeming unfamiliar and covered with thorns. And it wrought misery, which came when people aspired for more, disdaining the dignity of poverty.

Fideo’s entry at the Dancing Miramar was the symbolic event that marked the beginning of the dissolution of La Catunga as it had been known until then: a simple port, open without suspicion to the winds of crazy love, the transparent surface of a lake before it is stirred up by the wind.