The Dark Bride

thirty-four

During the strike, Frank Brasco, having completely forgotten, you could say, about his identity as a North American engineer and a high-ranking employee of the company in conflict, installed himself among the people of Tora. He tacitly declared his feelings toward the striking workers and supported them in practical ways by lending his services as a nurse to dozens of wounded men, a skill he had learned in his youth through a stint with the International Red Cross; and in legal and formal ways that couldn’t be classified as anything other than humanitarian aid. In addition, in his few free moments he would take Sayonara to eat snow cones at Isaías’s bar, the only way of giving her a tangible and comparative explanation of the nature of snow.

The company, of course, censured him by demanding his resignation, which he submitted at once together with a long public letter. Unfortunately I have not been able to find a copy of it because not even he himself kept one. In it, according to what I’ve heard, he offered a shrewd analysis of the imperialist enclave and its effects on the local populace.

But his compatriots did not forgive him, nor was he able to free himself from the sensation of belonging to a nation that mistreated and abused others. Neither worker nor boss, neither North American nor Colombian, neither a man of the tropics nor a man of the poles, he was driven by a chronic restlessness and an implacable unwillingness to align himself with his own people. And perhaps it was that inability to find himself on one side or the other that drove him to take final refuge in the winters of his native Vermont, making the decision, after his retirement, to watch from there the days of his old age pass and never to leave it again.

“Maybe because being in this snow is enough like not being anywhere,” he says to me. “In the Colombian green I found passion and the difficulty of living, while the winter white of Vermont offers me the benefits of rest. It covers me like a sheet and lets me remember in peace.”