The Dark Bride

thirty-six

The girls were already beginning to feel sleepy, hugging their stuffed animals and convinced they had known happiness that night at the fair, but Sayonara didn’t want to go back to the house to ruminate in the darkness of her room on the hollow echoes of that “I’m going” that had left her bleeding inside.

She just stood there, incapable of letting go of the already extinguished light from the bulbs, as if hypnotized by the persistent singsong of the long gone musicians and with the same expression of confusion as a child who invites another to play with her new toys and suddenly finds them faded and broken. As if holding in the folds of her skirt tops without strings, dolls without arms, and kites that don’t fly, she couldn’t shake her astonishment at seeing her spells and charms inexplicably useless and disdained.

The fury of a woman scorned or the authentic desire to die? Both, together and intertwined. Her pride wounded and crushed to her roots, with a pain in her chest as if from broken ribs, Sayonara obeyed the first stirring of her feet, which wanted to take her to foolishly and blindly finish off the night of her despair at the Dancing Miramar, where there would be no lack of men in love with her to keep her occupied while she left behind this twisted and bitter-tasting day. Already on her way, though, she was assaulted by a doubt that made her stop short. What if she ran into Payanés in the middle of Calle Caliente, forgetting about the past in the arms of Molly?

“The mere thought made her burn with fury,” Olguita tells me. “A dangerous thing. When a prostituta burns with jealousy and allows herself to get swept away by her temper, it seals her fate. Believe what I’m telling you; we’ve seen it happen a thousand times.”

Payanés unburdening himself to Molly: reason enough to go and kill her, the muy puta Molly Flan. There’s no reason that vengeance has to be only Fideo’s privilege, and how sweet it would be to kill Molly, but what for, after all, if it wouldn’t do any good anyway; the best revenge would be to go to Popayán and tear out that wife’s eyes, although thinking about it again, what did that poor woman have to do with it, there on the other side of the world breaking her back to raise a few kids while her husband is over here running around having fun with a couple of lost women and a vallenato trio. The only worthwhile thing would be to go for that bastard’s jugular, to tear him apart with your teeth, scratch his face until he was marked forever, give him a good kick in the balls, and shout in his face the four cardinal insults: bastard, liar, traitor, murderer of my dreams.

It was a vulgar but rhythmic bolero, easy to sing, in reality sung so often that it was already part of the folklore of La Catunga and of other red-light districts around the planet. From then on everything would be foreseeable: poetry of degradation; cold, hard anecdote; a script of misery that other women have already written. Drunk, Sayonara would threaten to throw herself under the wheels of the train, then she would reject that dramatically excessive exit and opt for singing rancheras with a wounded howl while hanging from the neck of some other drunk.

The following night she wouldn’t even appear at the Dancing Miramar because everyone would already know that that stage no longer belonged to her, that the most sought after puta in Tora had dropped in category and was no longer at the level of the select clientele, of the nights of champagne or the décor of mirrors and velvet, and keeping a stiff upper lip, she would have to make do with joining the cast of a cheaper bar.

“Every girl in this profession knows there will always be a cheaper bar,” Machuca tells me, “and another and another still as you move further from the center, the hill barely inclined so the fall isn’t too noticeable. And she consoles herself by thinking there are many years and many steps that she can roll down before she hits the bottom, to what is rightfully called the bottom of the bottom.”

“That night Sayonara tempted fate,” Todos los Santos tells me, disturbed by the memory. “She walked a long while on the edge of her decisions and was a step away from taking the nefarious one, the one without recourse, the one waiting for her with its door open. The all too familiar door that awaits every woman of the profession at the end of the alley. But no. Not her. She hadn’t been born to be a tango lyric. I knew it from the first day I saw her, when she was still a flea-ridden child: This one will be saved by her pride. Do you remember I told you that, the morning we met, when you first started coming around here asking questions?”

“No more yellow dresses,” declared Sayonara, as if canceling with one fell swoop the vestiges of her childhood. “To hell with hair ribbons.”

She tore off the puffy sleeves and the lacy collar, ripped off the frilly layers of tulle that covered the ample skirt, and released both braids, closing her eyes to feel the caress of her newly freed mane, which glided down her back like tumbling water. An absurd amount of hair for so small and sad a woman. Just like her mother’s and the only inheritance that remained from her. With the sheen of astrakhan fur and blue foxtails, the mass of hair invaded the night, billowing, and when the breezes grew stronger it undulated, long and free, silky and magnificent, like a river in the wind.

As if taken by the hand of a guardian angel, the winged creature that by means of theatrics and distractions dissuades its protected souls from heeding the call of the abyss, Sayonara refrained from going to Calle Caliente and headed back toward the Magdalena. When she reached the river’s edge, she allowed herself the luxury of doing what any woman without a prostituta’s courage would do under similar circumstances: she burst into tears.

It occurred at the hour in which the silver phosphorescence of the yarumos glistened, those beautiful trees of the moon, but she wasn’t in the mood to notice the landscape. As Ana, Juana, Susana, and Chuza closed their eyes, tiny sleeping bundles curled up in tulle and sheltered from the sky beneath some bush, Sayonara gave in, without suppressing hiccups or sobs, to an uncontrollable, inconsolable, magdalenic weeping, as she had never allowed herself before nor would allow afterward, surprised at the salty taste of her tears and by their burning nature, like that of holy water, reddening her cheeks as they coursed down them. She let them fall, drop by drop, without thinking of anything more specific than her own sorrow. In all the sorrows of yesterday and today molded into one, without name or face, one big, soft sorrow like a breast that feeds and consoles, old familiar sorrow, so bitter but when all is said and done so much her own.

“She cried all night, she, the inconsolable one, until the weeping calmed her. There’s a reason people say,” Todos los Santos explains to me, “that it is good to cry out sorrows. It means that you rid yourself of pain through your eyes in its true consistency, which is water. Why do you think tears are salty? Because they are sorrowful water. That’s why.”

A girl’s tears that fell into the river, which also performed its role, forgiving, baptizing. To understand better: The Magdalena sucked up the suffering and bristled with compassion. So, against a background of moonlight on the yarumos, the girl’s silhouette became cleaner and lighter as the waters clouded, grew sad, flowed more hesitatingly. Until finally, on the verge of dehydration, Sayonara decided that it was enough. I am myself and my tears, she was able to recognize for the first time since she was born, and she stopped crying.

Over the nocturnal fields wandered large and imprecise beasts that exhaled warm breaths, and the waters of the river became polished and compact: a mass of darkness that invited one to walk upon it. From where did such an enormous flow of living waters come? From where so much liquid running through its bed? Rain, sap, milk, blood, snow, sweat, and tears, the Magdalena was fed by the effluvia of nature and the moods of men.

Although the night prevented her from seeing the dead bodies carried along by the current, Sayonara felt them pass, inoffensive in their slow, white transit. They flowed past one by one, embraced as a couple, or sometimes in a chain, holding hands, transformed into foam, porous material that floated, peaceful, pale, finally impregnated with moonlight after having spilled onto the shore, so long ago now, all the uneasiness and pain in their blood. Sayonara, the girl of good-byes, placed her feet in the water to be near them and contained her panic as they brushed her ankles in passing, got tangled in her legs with the viscosity of algae, and sent her messages in their peculiar language, which was a gurgle of organic substance disintegrating in shadows. Later, when the moon hid and the sky was bursting with stars, she didn’t want to leave the river or remove her feet from the water because she knew that the silent pilgrimage also carried with it her loved ones, her burned mother, sweet Claire, her beloved brother, flowing down the Magdalena purified at last and converted into gentle memories, after so many years of suffering and making her suffer, stalking her like ghosts.

“That’s why they don’t let themselves be buried,” Sayonara finally understood. “That’s why they look for the river, because underground, alone and quiet, they die, while in the current they travel, they can look at the sky all they want and visit the living…”

She also knew: I am myself and my dead, and she felt less alone, as if the millions of steps between herself and them had evaporated.

Todos los Santos tells me that only at dawn the next day, a Saturday and the day of the fiesta of San Onofre, did Sayonara return to the house with the four girls and their belongings, and that as soon as she saw her adopted daughter enter, with the shredded dress, her hair wild and her eyes ravaged from all the crying, she realized that it was true: Something serious had happened to her. Something serious and definitive.

“I didn’t dare ask her,” the old woman says to me, “because she had already lost the habit of answering me. I would say things to her a dozen times without receiving an answer, as if she were deaf by her own will, or as if answering would exhaust her tongue.”

She took Juana and Ana aside and interrogated them in a severe tone, commanding them to tell her whether someone, or something, had hurt her, but the two girls swore that no, they hadn’t seen any attack or accident.

“I served her breakfast, waiting for the words to come on their own, but they didn’t come. I saw her bitten by lost love and marked by loneliness, everything in her weariness and injury like in a draft mule. Then I decided to ask her, committing all my understanding to interpreting her response, and I was surprised that her voice came easily, without my having to beg, and sweet again, as it had sounded once when she was a child:

“ ‘Life hurts a little, madre.’ ”

Todos los Santos felt that Sayonara was serene — wounded and mistreated, but serene, and like Moses, saved from the water: the victor over her own phantoms. That is how the madrina knew that during the night her adopted daughter had been doing the same thing that snakes do, when they rub against rough rocks to slip out of their old skin and exhibit a new one.

“Finally,” Todos los Santos says to me, and a minuscule brilliance lights up her blind eyes, “when I thought that nothing would change, Sayonara left behind the slippery and self-absorbed skin of her adolescence.”