The Dark Bride

thirty-seven

“I put her in that life, and it’s only right that I separate her from it” was the credo that Sacramento imposed on himself as a mandate, and he was a faithful crusader, willing to do anything to see his cause triumph. Now, in addition, he had a powerful ally in his quest to save the woman he adored, because the Tropical Oil Company had made the profitable, corporate decision to redeem all the prostitutas in the area.

The exchange of salary for love opened the door to immoderation and irrationality: desire, which burns, also consumes wealth and doesn’t leave anything in return, except renewed desires. And neither the company, nor progress, nor order could find a way to derive benefit from that vicious circle, or at least that was the explanation of the problem according to the enveloping syllogism of don Horacio Laguna, with whom I am having a conversation at the old-fashioned café El Diamante.

“Capitalism can’t grow healthily like that,” he tells me, “and that’s why the gringos who managed the company declared themselves the enemies of promiscuity, at least of ours, the Colombians’.”

Although they offered houses, education for their children, health subsidies, and even access to a commissary where they sold meat below the prices in the plaza, the majority of the workers refused to jump through that hoop, as a matter of principle and due to ancestral fondness for the vice of sweet love. But not Sacramento, who saw the new policy as his key to the future.

While brigades of Franciscans of uncertain Mediterranean accent, wrapped in rough brown robes, looking as if they had escaped the Middle Ages, landed in Tora to minister courses in premarital preparations, other brigades, also wearing hoods, except over their faces, ran through the streets harassing the populace and punishing a posteriori its “friendship with the strike’s bandits.” One afternoon when Sayonara was returning from the port of Madre de Dios, where she had traveled for three days to entertain outside clients, she suddenly had a bad feeling that made her hasten her steps. She reached the house gasping to find an opaque look of sterile fury on the faces of Todos los Santos and Susana, who sat immobile on the sidewalk next to the front door, displaying the humiliating desolation of their recently shaved heads. Together with seven other women from La Catunga, they had been forcefully and cruelly sheared, with ugly scratches on their skulls and loose strands of hair here and there that had escaped the ravages of the shears.

“They told us they were shaving us so we would learn. They didn’t do anything to Juana and Chuza because they weren’t here when the hooded men invaded,” Susana told her, and Sayonara couldn’t speak a word because a knot of indignation choked her.

“And Ana?” she was finally able to ask, not having seen her sister.

“She still has all her hair, but she’s not here. Yesterday she went away with some soldiers that wanted to see her dance.”

“My poor sister! This life surrounded by putas has thrown her to the dogs!” wailed Sayonara, out of her mind and throwing herself upon Todos los Santos in attack, but the others pulled her away, reminding her that you don’t touch your mother even with a rose petal, so she started smashing her knuckles against the walls and kicking the doors. “My poor sister, broken and raped, all because of me and this life of putas where I brought her. The bastards took her away!”

“They didn’t take her away; she went of her own free will.”

“Lies! How can you say that, madrina, on top of everything else and as if it were nothing?!”

“Just yesterday we went to find her at the temporary camp that del Valle set up in Loma de Tigres, because we had been told they were keeping her there. We organized more than twenty to go demand her return, her and four other girls from the barrio, but when Ana came out herself, and we all heard her words, she told us she wanted to stay. It did no good to beg her, or threaten her, or reason with her. She said she didn’t want to come back, and she didn’t.”

A painful and prolonged sound escaped from Sayonara’s mouth, more the howl of an animal than a human cry. The loss of Payanés had carried her toward a high, severe pain, you might even say almost elegant if you take into account that the absence of love creates an intensity comparable only to that of its presence. The sadness that invaded her now had, however, a muddy and base nature, and it was nothing like the lofty penitence of golden needles of the earlier one. But added together, the one sublime and the other despicable, they pushed her to the limit of her own hope, where she discovered that something had died in her, which made her think vaguely of a punishment from God which must be accepted. It was then that Sacramento appeared with the plans for the future workers’ barrio in his hand and the signed promise of a house in his pocket. He proposed marriage in a church, offered to take her and her sisters out of La Catunga and to give them a more dignified and secure life, and Sayonara, without thinking twice, said yes.

“I would say she didn’t even think once,” muses Olga, “but it was to be expected, because it is well known that Sayonara’s fate is guided by a racing star with a capricious course.”

“Are you going to live in a house that comes from the same people who vilify you?” Todos los Santos asked her, indignant and incredulous, as her hand, operating on its own, went over her stripped skull as if taking stock of the damage.

“Even if it were the devil himself, as long as I can get out of here,” replied Sayonara. And just then an insipid, misty rain began falling from the sky, but not completely covering the sun, and a faint rainbow was cast across the river, like the flimsiest of bridges.

“San Isidro, patron of celestial phenomena,” Olga tells me she prayed at that moment, “protect this child from the attack of her whims, which drive her from place to place without her being able to master them…?”

“My girl was sick from hoping too much,” Todos los Santos explains to me, demonstrating a tolerance today that it seems she didn’t at the time. “I kept telling her that you can’t expect so many things, because life isn’t one of the Magi who will come bearing gifts.”

“What was your name before you came to Tora?” Sacramento asked his bride-to-be later. “That’s what I want to call you, your real name, the regular one, and that’s the one I have to give the priest who is going to marry us.”

“I don’t think you’ll like it…”

“Tomasa? Herminia? Eduviges? Come on, don’t be afraid, tell me, any name will do; it doesn’t matter if it’s ugly.”

“My name was Amanda.”

“Amanda!” Sacramento was shocked. “But that’s a name for a puta too…”

“To you it would seem like a name for a puta even if my name were Santa Teresa de Jesús, hermanito.”

“Hush, don’t tell me anything else. Everything I discover about you is a new dagger that I have to carry around stuck into my body.”

“If we’re going to go on like this, you’ll be more wounded than the Virgen Dolorosa, who had to bear seven daggers, all in her heart.”

“Her name is Sayonara, understand?” exploded Todos los Santos, coming out of her room, where she had sought refuge, “and you are nobody to come around and take away her name.”

“No, madrina, my name isn’t Sayonara. I have a name just like everybody else, the one my mother and father gave me when I was baptized, and today I am going to quit being a puta for the good of my sisters and because I want to go back to using my real name. Even if it hurts, madrina, my name is Amanda Monteverde.”

“Amanda Monteverde,” repeated Todos los Santos, as if surrendering, and in the instant that she spoke those two words an abyss opened between her and her adopted daughter.

“It’s not bad blood, Olga. Or at least it’s not all bad blood. There’s something wrong here, something outside of the law, and it’s going to have an ugly backlash,” said Todos los Santos when Olguita pointed out that it took deep bitterness not to congratulate a daughter on the day of her wedding. “But if marriages for love are bad enough themselves, what can we expect from one contracted out of disenchantment? That Sacramento is going to pay for this, the meddling nincompoop.”

“Can’t you forgive the desire for happiness of a boy who has never had anything in his life, not a mother, or a roof, or affection, or even a name that isn’t an offense?”

“Sacramento himself is the one who is going to suffer on account of this bad idea, you’ll see. And he’s going to make us all suffer, because with this marriage he is opening a door that leads to who knows where.”

“Stop being so proud, Todos los Santos. The problem is that you raised Sayonara to be a puta and you can’t bear the fact that she’s decided to be something else.”

“Something is wrong, Olga; I know it even if I can’t put my finger on it.”

What dress was the bride going to wear for the improvised ceremony? The yellow organza number, speculated those who were betting on the matter, but they didn’t know she had torn it apart and sworn on the shreds that she was no longer a child. So?

“So it was her combat attire, what else?” Olga says to me. “Gold earrings, tight black tube skirt, and pure silk blouse: like a Chinese princess. Or, rather, Japanese.”

As was to be expected, the priest didn’t approve of the outfit: Being the first time in years that he had let a lost woman enter the church, he wanted the ceremony to be instructive, so he sent for a lace veil, long and white, and he asked her to cover herself with it. And so, as they still tell the story in Tora, the very beautiful Sayonara, from that day on better known as Amanda, was married: dressed as a puta underneath and in white on the outside.

Very beautiful, yes, but it was a somewhat literary and unreal beauty, like a classic heroine. Her sisters, friends, and coworkers in La Catunga preferred not to enter Ecce Homo, as it had long since been declared off-limits to them, and they waited for the bridal couple outside the church’s front door with their hearts flooded with ambivalent emotions, somewhere between hopefulness and disenchantment. Todos los Santos, with her eyes sunk deep in mourning-black sockets, was wearing a baseball cap to hide her recently inflicted baldness. Tana was visibly and deeply moved and glittered with jewelry. The girls in organza, of course, as with any big occasion. And Olga in dark glasses to hide her emotions and the swelling caused by her tears. Machuca was absent because even bound and gagged she couldn’t be dragged to the church.

“Life is a failure,” sighed Tana, who was prone to speak in tango lyrics.

“It can only be lived,” Todos los Santos corrected her. “There are no successes or failures; it can only be lived.”

“Sayonara is leaving us,” said Tana, who never learned, starting to weep again.

“She was never completely here.”

Finally the bridal couple emerged, their union blessed, but no one threw rice, there were no bells ringing or firecrackers exploding. Instead, in the middle of that dull, colorless afternoon, Piruetas suddenly appeared, wearing a queer’s little cap, a bright-red handkerchief around his neck, and a tropical shirt featuring blue palm trees on an orange background, and as Sayonara was removing the veil to return it to the priest, he caressed her with his eyes from head to toe with the slimy, lubricious gaze of a randy old man.

“Even if the puta wears white, she’s still a puta!” Piruetas shouted, and kept on walking, leaving everyone stunned and disgusted in the cold wake of his shadow.

“We’re leaving Tora,” said a pale Sacramento, and trembling with rage over the affront, he tore up the contract for subsidized housing and threw the pieces into the air. And right there, outside the church door, he made the impromptu decision to leave and communicated it to his wife and the sparse crowd.

“To go where?” asked Sayonara.

“Where nobody knows you or can throw your past in our faces.”

“What about the house, Sacramento? The house they were going to give us?”

“The only house waiting for us here is shame.”

“To their wives, who demand a lot, men give little. And to us putas, who ask for nothing, they give us nothing,” grumbles Fideo from her hammock sickbed, waking and immediately falling asleep again.