The Dark Bride

forty-one

At a certain distance from Todos los Santos’s house there flows a gully of stinking, black waters. When the wind blows in this direction, the smell reaches here. The gully carries along decomposed organic material, broken toys, used sanitary napkins, syringes, bottle caps, cotton balls that may have been used to cleanse infections, the remains of a mattress, pieces of blue plastic, yesterday’s paper: life, that is, in the intimacy of its residues and its dirtiness. But the water that runs through that gully sounds the same, stone by stone, as the water that flows clean along other estuaries.

“The lesson that can be derived there,” deduces Todos los Santos, “is that there is no bad that is not good nor good that isn’t also bad.”

The lesson isn’t clear to me, but I take advantage of the favorable climate to ask her about related matters.

“Explain to me, if I am not boring you, Todos los Santos, when prostitución is a sin and when it isn’t.”

“There is a lot of rationalizing out there on the subject, but the consensus is that it is always a sin.”

“But an absolved sin when the woman suffers in bed,” clarifies Olguita, “and a condemned sin when she enjoys it, in which case she will surely go to hell when she dies, because she has not paid, like everyone else, her debts to the beyond.”

“If I could ask the genie in the bottle for a wish,” rants Fideo deliriously, “it would be for enormous tits that I could jerk a man off with.”

“What a stupid way to waste a wish. Everyone has his own wishes! Before going to bed, Sayonara would stand before the Sagrado Corazón and ask him for a strange blessing,” remembers Todos los Santos. “She would stand there and repeat out loud, every day, the same phrase: Jesus, may you keep murderers from killing tonight, so the people in the world can sleep without fear.”

We were talking on the patio and drinking lemonade, we in our rockers, the Felipes in their cages, and Fideo shaking in her penultimate death throes, all drowsy from the heat and the smell of vinegar filtering through the air today somnambulantly, impregnating the still hours of the afternoon.

“Let’s go back to the parable of black waters and clear waters,” I ask Todos los Santos.

“Ridiculous!” she replies. “The only thing that matters is we are splashing around in our shit in this town because neither the authorities nor the oil company have been capable of constructing a sewer system.”