The Dark Bride

thirty-nine

“Ay, Payanés, when did you become my nightmare…?” Everything about Sayonara was turning into pain: the pain of Payanés, whom she loved and didn’t have, the pain of Sacramento, whom she loved and didn’t love, and the pain of being herself.

“Remember when they pretended to be the traveling brother and sister, and it brought such happiness to the days of Sacramento’s and Sayonara’s childhood?” Olguita asks me. “Well, it became their reality. After the wedding they had no choice but to pack their belongings and start traveling, this time for real but also to escape, like they did when they were children, to that country without memories, which is the land of nevermore.”

The continuous passing of migrating birds was their only guide during those months of flight stitched together in one postponement after another of any arrival, heading south amidst hardships that found them each day farther away, following the brown heron and the spoonbilled duck, the paco-paco, the white heron and the ruffled grouse, and so many other creatures that fled through the air and whose names they never knew. They became inhabitants of the road and they followed the whims of its turns and cutbacks without stopping to rest, one behind the other and the other behind one as if they were still following each other on make-believe horses around Todos los Santos’s patio, fed by the urge to leave and without reaching a decision to stay anywhere. And so, aboard that escape train, their days unraveled.

Rescued by Sacramento’s love through the bonds of marriage did Sayonara, the young whore from Tora, become Amanda, the one who was to be loved, Amanda, the radionovela star? Did she embody the miracle of the outlaw who becomes good through a little affection, the flower rescued from the dirt, the protagonist of the nightmare that became a dream and the dream that became reality?

“Useless words!” exclaims Todos los Santos indignantly. “Can anyone call days that were filled with bewilderment happy? Days that drove my child Sayonara, the same girl who was always dreaming of love, to seek joy trailing behind a man, and if that weren’t error enough, behind a man she didn’t love? I would also have to say: days of hardship, separated only by the arid string of good-byes and the passing one by one of countless hours of anguish.”

Life is inclined to encourage with promises and to dazzle with magic tricks, but no, it didn’t grant a miracle or the life of a radionovela, because from the very day of the wedding the mask of mirrors was removed to uncover something resembling a face. Forcing Sayonara to embark on an uncertain journey, made of confused love and shattered dreams, which left her no other choice but to dull herself with exhaustion on the long marches so that she wouldn’t have to recognize that she couldn’t recognize herself. Or that she could only find half of herself in the skin of that new woman who wanted to be called Amanda, while her other half missed having a place in this world. And it wasn’t that Amanda didn’t do everything possible, that she didn’t struggle to pull Sayonara from the tangle that confused her steps. The same obstinate determination that Sayonara had invested in becoming a prostitute, Amanda now dedicated to the task of turning herself into a lady, because her life was, today as yesterday, one long, courageous search for existence, and if one door closed, she found the strength to go through another, even if it opened at the totally opposite end of the hallway.

“No one can invoke the hackneyed ‘it has been written’ in the name of my girl, that credo of fatalists of every sort,” says Todos los Santos, “because she liked to do whatever she wanted.”

For Amanda there were no writings that dictated her fate, holy or profane. But to reach past her own star and to transform herself was a difficult task in which Sayonara wouldn’t help her because she refused to step aside, obstinately holding on to existence and fueled by the ferocious torrent of a will to live and a longing for death that had been awakened in her on that afternoon of love by the river. Nothing could dissuade her, not Payanés with the meager surrender of his affections, nor Sacramento with his excessively vehement demands for devotion, nor even Amanda herself in her rush to find roads less steep.

“Where does the soul of a woman go who loves one man and marries another?” Olga wonders out loud. “In my opinion it is divided in two, and both become lost in the waters of confusion.”

“There weren’t two, but three women in her,” argues Todos los Santos, “Amanda, Sayonara, and she herself. Sayonara loved Payanés; Amanda married Sacramento; and she loved only herself.”

“Sayonara complained that no man loved her well,” Dr. Antonio María Flórez once told me, “but it was really the other way around, as I saw it. She could never bring herself to fully love anyone. That girl reminds me of a paradoxical poem by the master Pedro Salinas. ‘Why the rush to make yourself possible, if you know that you are what will never be?’ ”

Todos los Santos asks me to read her what I am writing and I do.

“Too many words,” she protests. “The life of a puta will always be identical to the life of any other puta, even if it is the life of a woman with showy plumage, like Sayonara. In matters of men, we mujeres of the profession can only choose three categories. Only three because no others have been invented. Those we call the tormentor, the lottery, and the client, the latter of which is the most advisable and the one I recommend, because he pays you and goes away, letting you get on with your life; you can keep on playing if-I-have-seen-you-before-I-don’t-remember. The other two stripes, the lottery and the tormentor, are both pure trouble and sorrow.”

“The lottery is the shining knight who finally comes to you,” says Olguita. “He’s the lover every woman waits for, convinced that one day he will come to take you away and marry you and sweeten your life with conveniences, eternal love, flattery, and gifts. With Sacramento, Sayonara got her lottery, or at least that’s what she thought.”

“Lottery, grand prize or golden cage, which are its other names,” says Todos los Santos, “because it strangles with the finest noose, made of love, and presses against your neck like a pearl choker, or like the amulet of braided hair that Sacramento once tied around his neck and still wears. Did Amanda choose to compromise in marrying him? That’s her business. We all warned her not to do it but she, of her own free will, locked herself in that tower and threw the key into the moat.”

“And the tormentor,” continues Olga, “is the man who makes you suffer because he makes you fall in love with him but he won’t commit, or he commits only partially, like Payanés, who was just like the thorny rose he had had tattooed over his heart: a rose of pain and a compass rose, pointing in all directions. Payanés, like any self-respecting petrolero, gave you two gifts, the open road and the pain of freedom. And, if there’s anything a woman of the profession knows about, it’s freedom, but she also knows how much it rends the heart. A lover who promises you affection the last Friday of every month and complies religiously is something worth celebrating. As long as you don’t resent that in addition to the comforting Friday, God has created three others, plus four Mondays, four Tuesdays, four Wednesdays, and a lot of et ceteras for a grand total of three hundred sixty-five days in a year during which you have to deal with the ups and downs of your lonely heart.”

Torn between Sacramento and Payanés, her greatest prize and her greatest punishment, what happened, asked Olga, to Amanda’s broken heart? Was it destroyed by her inability to choose? What is most likely, perhaps most certain, is that she harbored the suspicion that well-being, if it existed at all, must be hidden somewhere between those two extremes.

Sacramento, Sayonara, and her three remaining sisters formed a rickety caravan that moved forward along the paths of displacement, and Sacramento, who had always put his love into what aroused the most suspicion in him, now turned the corner on his old torment and learned to doubt to the point of agony that which he truly loved. And at the same time, to finish tangling the skein, he insisted in distancing Amanda from Tora to save her from the assault of memories, without suspecting that memories, with their light feet, would arrive before them anywhere they went.

Behind the couple, like the colorful and fluttering tail of a kite, ran the three girls, Susana, Juana, and little Chuza, now going through periods of hunger, now filling up on pineapples or mangoes gathered from the fields they crossed, now desperately longing for their sister Ana, their mother, Todos los Santos, and their many aunts, only to forget them completely moments later, so attached to the idea of pursuing their fate beneath the immense sky, as yesterday they had been to taking shelter beneath a safe, familiar roof.

Nine days after embarking upon that crossing with neither shipwreck nor guiding star, they entered the misty forests in the mountains of Amansagatos, famous because no one has been able to determine whether the rain there is perpetual as it falls or rises, since it never reaches the ground before it is already ascending again, and evaporating. Once there they stopped near a stand of cedar, guayacán, amargoso, and other trees that thrive in humid environments, where Sacramento, on the recommendation of an acquaintance, obtained temporary work at a sawmill. On his first day of work, Amanda was stirred by a desire to properly fulfill her obligations as a new wife, and after the disgusting chore of plucking a chicken, she then inexpertly stewed it and ran downhill through sheets of rain and dense vegetation to take lunch to her husband, since she had heard that it is necessary for an honest woman to feed her husband well and without fail, because he provides protection and sustenance. When she appeared, as if on a stage in a theater, in the intense light that fell from above onto the cut clearing, Sacramento, upon seeing how beautiful she was and knowing that she was his, felt a sudden jolt of happiness flooding him inside, and a kind of foam like the head of a beer swelled his masculine pride.

“But I wasn’t the only one who turned to look at her,” he remembers uneasily, because in order for him to feel humiliated, his woman didn’t need to cast her eyes on another man, it was enough for another man to cast his eyes on her.

What caused the bitter taste was Amanda’s arrival, with all her radiant youth enveloped in white light, the lunch pot held in one hand, her soaked dress licking her body, and her wild tresses dripping wet, and all of the workers spread throughout the clearing stopped what they were doing, axes frozen, to pierce her with their eyes, like pins in a tailor’s pincushion.

“It was always the same,” Sacramento tells me in an anxious tone, as if begging me to understand him. “As soon as she would appear, no matter where it was and even though they didn’t know her, men would begin to act strangely. They would straighten their backs, wipe their sweaty hands on their shirts, cough to bring attention to themselves. I don’t know how else to describe it, but it was strange. As if they were communicating in code or in some secret male language the fact that she was there. That she, the beauty, was there bewitching them, even though she wasn’t doing a thing, making them anxious, leaving their desire and memories scorched.”

Sacramento grabbed her forcefully by the wrist, almost hurting her, and pulled her aside, shaken.

“How dare you come here like that, with your clothes wet, don’t you see that you’re leading them on, half naked like this?”

“But it’s pouring rain, Sacramento, what do you want me to do? You’re all wet too, hermanito, what’s the matter…?”

“Don’t call me hermanito, I’m your husband. You want to know what’s the matter? They already know, that’s what’s the matter…,” he said with a choked voice, as if relaying the worst of news.

“They already know what?”

“About your past.”

“They don’t know anything. What are you talking about? Nobody has said anything and we haven’t even told them our names. It’s you who are going to give us away, because you think about it so much that they’re bound to hear your thoughts…”

“Well, if they don’t know yet, they’re going to guess from your brazen manners. Go home now,” he ordered her, then he made her promise never again to appear in the clearing, not even to bring him food.

“Fine,” she said, resigned, “but you’re going to die from hunger down here, and I, from boredom up there.”

“I prefer to die from hunger than to let them look at my wife like that. It’s a matter of honor,” he said to her, and it was the first time Sayonara had heard that word, “honor,” which would eventually draw so many tears from her.

The next morning, Amanda and the girls stayed up on the patch of the mountain they had been allotted to scratch away the overgrowth and see if one day they would be able to reap a meager harvest; and meanwhile Sacramento went down the mountain to the sawmill to earn his daily wages. In the evening, stung by fleas and by resentment, he returned to their rented room, four walls of rough-hewn planks, exuding dampness and rootlessness.

“What did you do all day?” he asked his wife.

“I caught a zaíno and a lizard and roasted them so you would have some hot food.”

“What happened, you didn’t bring me any lunch?”

“But you told me…”

“All the men’s wives brought them lunch, everyone’s but mine, and I was so hungry. The other workers must have thought that I have a wife who has fun while her husband works and goes hungry…”

The dialogue was so ridiculous that Amanda burst out laughing, because she still laughed then, unaware of the scope of her melodrama, and Sacramento, in spite of his indignation, couldn’t avoid laughing too at his own excess.

Then, already lying down, she allowed herself to be overcome with tenderness and gratitude toward him, as she watched him cover the cracks between the planks with clay so that the girls, who were sleeping, wouldn’t be troubled in the night by the wisps of mist or cries of night birds. For a moment, as the Coleman lantern buzzed cozily, Sayonara enjoyed feeling that fear remained outside and the girls were floating peacefully along in their dreams. And calming the obsessive, burning memory of Payanés, she let herself be soothed by the idea that like this, like now, she was okay, and that it was comforting and pleasing to have a husband.

“Hermanito,” she sighed, and fell asleep contentedly.

Sacramento lay by her side and just looked at her for a long time. “Your face is so pretty,” he kept saying to her, but around midnight he still couldn’t calm or contain himself or refrain from awakening her.

“You weren’t having fun, were you?” he asked her.

“When?”

“Today, at lunchtime.”

“In this dead place? How do you think I could have fun in this dead place?”

“With other men…”

“No, Sacramento, I spent the day hoeing with the girls, and we didn’t have any fun.”

“Did you think about him very often? Do you miss him?”

“Payanés? I try to forget him, Sacramento, but you keep reminding me about him.” Sayonara turned her back to him, covered her face with her arms, and pretended to cry to see if she could escape his renewed attacks of jealousy. And when Sacramento saw that olive-skinned back, reflecting the warm glow of the Coleman lantern, he began to kiss her shoulders as he asked for forgiveness. “That roasted lizard you cooked for me was very good and I’m a thankless husband,” he rattled on. “Forgive me, mi vida, how could I have mistrusted you,” his voice becoming gradually more unsettled until it turned into reproach again. “No jealousy or anger, because I forgive you for the step that you took. Such a dark fate, such an ungrateful road. Such false promises. The wounds of ungrateful love, weaving through the familiar empty words spoken out of sheer spite, until they turn into insults. You go from hand to hand, everyone is talking about you. Your lips deceive me, lying, betraying…”

“Enough, Sacramento! Hush now, you’re going to frighten my sisters. Stop all this silliness, I want to go back to sleep.”

Then he embraced her trembling with love and misgivings, and she let herself be embraced, but the dream of that other embrace came to her forcefully and she couldn’t help that it hurt to rest her head against the chest that wasn’t her beloved’s.

“Like animals that want to bolt and go back to the stable,” Olguita says to me, “that is how a woman in love thinks: always struggling to escape from everything else to be able to return to the memory of her beloved, the only place where she can find comfort and rest.”

I want to ascertain Sacramento’s feelings in those days toward Payanés, and I ask him if he thought too often of his friend.

“I couldn’t forgive his betrayal,” Sacramento confesses. “But at the same time I couldn’t forgive her for having separated me from my best friend, and I blamed her for our misfortune. Today I regret hurting her with the accusation, but at the time I let myself get carried away with a question that had no answer, whose fault was it, hers, his, or perhaps mine; or was it life’s?”

For Sacramento, who fluctuated between seething with jealousy and mourning his lost friendship, Payanés didn’t just pursue him in his thoughts, he also laid traps in the physical world.

“I thought I saw Payanés everywhere,” he says. “He was crouching behind every tree until I might let down my guard so he could go to her. And those eyes of his, yellow streaked with green, which you don’t see in these parts, but I saw them in the faces of all the men who looked at her. And at the same time, how I missed his presence as a brother from those days of sharing bread, pick, shovel, and even shoes, knowing that my luck would be his too, sharing together the rocks in the road or the coins of our daily pay! But I couldn’t forgive him for having tried to take her away from me and I wondered if despite the marriage he hadn’t taken her from me anyway.”

That night rife with bird calls, after hours of filling his lungs with her breath and feeling its sweetness when he inhaled it and its poison when he exhaled it, Sacramento got up, prepared some strong coffee on the little stove, and sobbed dejectedly over the steaming cup. As dawn broke, Amanda and the girls were surprised to find their belongings gathered up and the pair of suitcases packed and knotted with rope.

“We’re leaving,” announced Sacramento. “We need to go further, to where the shadow of your bad reputation doesn’t reach. And I’m warning you now, so that we don’t fall into the same quagmire again: I don’t want you going around like a wild filly. No bare feet or hair blowing in the wind.”

Sayonara listened distractedly as she softly sang the profane verses with which the barefoot missionary women taught her mother her first words in the white man’s language:

I wonder at this ruffling,

The wind in my tresses fair.

Perhaps consumed with love,

It sings and celebrates my hair.

Couplets that her mother sang to her when she was young? Or that she never sang being what she was, an Indian, a Guahiba, shy about singing and lazy about speaking Spanish.

“Don’t sing that anymore,” Sacramento scolded her, jealous of everything, and now even the wind. “You must try to not be so obvious; don’t show your true colors so they won’t notice you.”

“Fine,” she said, resigned, still not suspecting how deep she could tumble down that path toward total renunciation. “I’m going to buy a real pretty clasp, or maybe some nice ribbon, and if you want I’ll tie my hair back so no one will see it.”

“It would be better if you just cut it off…,” he grumbled, and she, ignoring him, started singing the verses again.

“Sacramento had always been, by natural inclination, a soul given to extravagant behavior,” Todos los Santos tells me confidentially, as if I didn’t already know. “But the insecurities of that troubled love drove him even further and set him on a path of obsession tending toward cruelty, and the more he suffered, the more he tortured.”

Everything he adored in Amanda, everything that bewitched him about her, was also a target for his scorn.

He wanted to tear out that particle of lunar material encrusted in Amanda’s forehead, which had accidentally landed between her eyebrows and radiated like a talisman, like a prearranged signal or a soft, wordless revelation, and made her an object of passion for men. Sacramento needed to extirpate it, whatever it was — malign tumor, philosopher’s stone, or golden nugget — because the hypnotic power of that woman, who was public before but now, according to words sworn at the altar, had become completely his, was concentrated in that tiny meteorite and not so much in charm or beauty, intelligence or carnal attributes, to say nothing of the gift of seduction, because the bare truth was that Amanda, or Sayonara, had no other gift as appealing as that special way of hers of seducing by not seducing.

Don’t wear earrings anymore, they’re too suggestive, ordered Sacramento, and she obeyed in order not to hurt him, but the secret wasn’t in the earrings. Don’t walk like that, it’s provocative, but the truth was that she walked with the same rhythmic cadence as any woman from the tropics. Don’t be so haughty when you answer, because your rebelliousness ignites desires, and she tried to please him but she still ignited them even when she was silent. Don’t laugh, because your laughter is an invitation, but she invited when she was serious as much as she did when she was laughing. Don’t look men straight in the eyes, because you challenge them with your gaze, but even when she kept her eyes on the ground no one failed to notice the stone, or the patina, or the gift, or whatever it was: that glimmer of moon and silence, of shadow and awe, with which she cast her spell.

“Don’t try to take that from her, it’s not her fault, she was born that way, lustrous,” Todos los Santos had uselessly warned Sacramento.

Seven months after the wedding, Machuca chanced upon the married couple in Villa de la Virgen del Amparo, a stately city of rigorous architecture and rigidly moral people that since the eighteenth century had had its own coat of arms, a royal warrant from His Majesty Carlos III, and a cathedral with authentic lepers in its entryway.

Machuca the heretic, who had been born — and who would have thought it? — in this hallowed place, had returned to her homeland for a couple of days to renew her identification documents in order to be able to vote in the coming elections, and she tells me of her surprise upon spotting Sacramento, who had gone back to his initial profession of being a cart man and was busy running errands around the market plaza. Machuca hugged him effusively and asked about Sayonara, and he greeted her formally, distantly. He confessed that in order to supplement the family income, Amanda had taken a position as a domestic servant in the home of one of the most traditional families in Villa de la Virgen del Amparo.

“They hadn’t helped themselves with the money that Sayonara had accumulated in Tora working on her back, because how was Sacramento going to endure such a blow to his pride,” Olguita tells me. “He told her that it was dirty money, wrongly earned, that he was no pimp or kept man and he preferred to die of starvation than to have to touch it.”

“That was a relief,” says Machuca. “At least the girl didn’t sacrifice her savings struggling to save that deformed marriage, which was all screwed up from the start.”

“But I am going to ask you a big favor, señora Machuca,” she tells me Sacramento explained to her with elaborate circumlocutions, “which is that you don’t approach Amanda too much, and please don’t be offended by my asking this, because I have nothing but respect for you, but as you well know customs are not the same everywhere, and it so happens that the people who hired Amanda are very high-class and scrupulous, and if they come to suspect, of course I say this to you with no desire to injure you, as I have been explaining, if these people come to suspect what Amanda’s prior economic activity was, they would surely kick her out, and again I beg you to forgive my impertinence and the abuse of confidence; I’m sure you can understand.”

In spite of Sacramento’s warnings, Machuca made her own inquiries about Sayonara’s exact whereabouts, and wrapping herself up in a threadbare shawl to hide her unmistakable appearance as an old prostituta, she knocked at the door of the house, passing herself off as a beggar seeking a crust of bread. The door was opened by a very skinny, taciturn young woman, sheathed in an austere blue dress, like a novice’s, her hair hidden beneath a handkerchief tied around her head, whom Machuca didn’t recognize at first as Sayonara.

“Come back at noon, that is when we distribute soup to those in need,” she was told by the blue shadow that had been Sayonara the magnificent, and who stepped back in alarm when the indigent woman in the threadbare shawl grabbed her hands.

“Is that you, Machuca?” she asked, suddenly recognizing her friend.

“He goes down to the river every Friday, to look for a certain girl… I only came to tell you that.”

“Payanés?” Amanda dared to ask, lowering her voice as if she were speaking a sacrilege.

“There are those who swear they have seen him even on Wednesdays, and on Saturdays. Alone, throwing stones in the river, wearing cologne, dressed entirely in white, with all of his pay in his pocket, waiting, always waiting.”

“They say that?”

“They say that.”

“Tell me who he is waiting for…”

“You know very well…”

“Tell me…”

“For a girl, who, before she left him for someone else, was called Sayonara. It is said that he who waits loses hope, but that’s not the case with him. His seems to be a hope goaded on week after week by an infinite patience. Every time they tell him you got married in a church, wearing a white veil, he says the commitment you have with him is before and above any other.”

Fearing the displeasure of the lady of the house, who was wary of strangers and suspicious of any words whispered behind her back, Amanda hurriedly said good-bye to Machuca, acting as if she hadn’t listened to her. But she had. She gathered up her confidence, folded it over twice with great tenderness as if it were a fine linen handkerchief, carefully put it away hidden against her heart, clinging to it to stay alive during those times of transit through the lands of nothingness.

“Where are you, Payanés, who is kissing you…? If not me, who is embracing you…?” She gave in to a sighing that was half killing her, half reviving her. “Don’t force me to bear so much unfulfilled desire gnawing at my heart…”

I have in my hand a small testament of what happened in those days of languishing sadness. It is a note hastily written in pencil by Machuca to Todos los Santos, three or four days after her encounter with Sayonara. Months afterward, they would make peace and everything would go back to the way it had been before, but due to some yes-it-is-no-it-isn’t, the friendship between Machuca and Todos los Santos had frayed during the period following the strike, marked in all of La Catunga by reticence, arguments, and strained nerves. So, even though they had stopped speaking, Machuca wanted to alert her old friend about Sayonara, whom she had seen surrendered to an unhealthy resignation. After a formal salutation, she wrote: “Several days ago I chanced upon your adopted daughter, who, as you may know through news from other sources, resides with her husband in Villa de la Virgen del Amparo, in this same departamento of Santander. I found her in good health and free of material contingencies, but I regret to inform you, comadre, that something must be done, because there is nearly nothing left of our girl’s former happiness.” Underneath, in black ink and in Todos los Santos’s handwriting, appears a kind of reply, jotted down after she’d read the letter, and directed at no one in particular: “Nothing can be done. We must simply wait until life, which once brought her here, brings her back again.”