The Dark Bride

forty-two

One of Amanda’s obligations in Villa de la Virgen del Amparo, according to the agreement stipulated from the beginning with her patrona, señora Leonor de Andrade, was to accompany her every evening to six o’clock mass. While the cathedral’s interior was the kingdom of overbearing colonial saints floating in incense smoke and the stink of withered lilies, outside in the square, a boisterous, pagan court of merchants, which in biblical times would have been driven away with lashes of a whip, had set up camp. There were lepers who hung around the temple awaiting the eventual miracle of their healing and who in the meantime extorted the consciences of the worshipers by exhibiting the horror of their wounds and mutilations; and there were lottery ticket sellers with their sheets of winning tickets pouncing on the devout multitudes, knowing that those who pray the most also bet the most.

It was there, in the midst of the anguished, afflicted throng that assaulted her as she left mass every afternoon, where one day Amanda discovered Fideo among a scruffy group of low-class prostitutas who were waiting to be taken to a male penal colony in the jungles of Guaviare, where they would lend their sexual services, according to the generalized practice that upon becoming too old or sick to work in the urban centers, putas were recruited by chulos to serve prisoners, border guards, brigades of rubber harvesters, liberal guerrilleros, advance squads of tagüeros, and others exposed to the harshest desolation and isolation known to man.

“Will you give me some money to buy a drink, girl?” Fideo asked Sayonara, taking her by the arm, recognizing her as she passed by.

“What are you doing here?”

“Life goes on. Give me some money for a drink, I said.”

“A drink! You should be asking for medicine, Fideo. I can tell just by looking at you that you’re very sick.”

“I may be sick, but you’re half dead. Look at that nun’s costume they make you wear.”

Amanda convinced her to come to her patrona’s house at noon the following day, to accept the charity of a good bowl of soup, and Fideo accepted the invitation for the rest of the week and the following one as well, because the chulo who was coordinating the putas’ trip to Guaviare kept looking for reasons to delay it and to keep squeezing them: The women had to give him additional money for land travel, an extra sum for river travel, a portion for the dentist who was going to go ahead and extract rotten teeth so that they wouldn’t complain of toothaches once it was already too late.

So, in the company of tramps, street urchins, and begging monks, and between spoonfuls of corn chowder or potato soup, Fideo and Sayonara exchanged information about their respective troubles.

“Tell me about don Enrique,” Sayonara asked. “Was he really a dwarf?”

“A dwarf with a big pipí and an even bigger heart.”

“You have to go back to Tora, Fideo, to have Dr. Antonio María treat you, before the sickness in your blood kills you.”

“Don’t feel sorry for me, look at yourself. My problem is just malignant syphilis, but your illness is mental, which is more injurious and less pardonable. Go back to your madrina, you have a place there. Or are you happy playing the part of the dubious wife who deserves the punishment of a slow death?”

“Each of us has to deal with her own calvary,” responded Sayonara, to justify her resolute decision to stay where she was.

In truth she had other motives she didn’t confess: In the painful process of renouncing her own existence, Amanda was little by little carving out a peaceful place where she could begin to understand Sacramento. Being decent turned out to be a more arduous, inclement proposition than being a mere puta, but she was determined to conquer it, and Sacramento was responding to her progress with better treatment and less ambivalence, and, as always, with his gentle dedication to the girls, Susana, Juana, and Chuza, whom he provided with an education, familial affection, and a kind life.

Hidden in the blue dress of the wayward novice, Sayonara’s body was letting itself be domesticated and locked in its cage, her name crouched behind the name Amanda, and her eyes took refuge deep within their sockets, while her whole being and all of her desire wandered miles from there, searching for a trace of Payanés along the waters of the Magdalena.

Amanda received, whether she wanted to or not, free daily lessons in proper comportment and decency from her patrona, distinguished mistress in such matters, and if as Todos los Santos’s disciple she had learned how to be a person, as doña Leonor’s employee she had earned the opportunity to learn how to be no one. If before she was encouraged to be beautiful, friendly, and trusted, now revealed to her were the secrets of invisibility, humility, insubstantial presence, and the faintness of a shadow.

Doña Leonor’s two unmarried daughters, Nena and Márgara, lived with her and it didn’t take Amanda long to understand that in the eyes of their mother the two did not enjoy the same moral approval. Nena measured up, but Márgara failed to: for receiving telephone calls at all hours; for maintaining relations with men from classes beneath her own; for not properly understanding that “honor is more fragile than glass” and that “it is not enough to be, one must seem”; for wearing tight and improper-colored dresses; and, what seemed to most unnerve her mother, for not controlling her scandalous laughter, while her sister Nena, from a young age, knew only too well that it was preferable to barely smile.

Amanda learned the Ten Commandments so that she could put them into practice, and Sacramento breathed a sigh of relief, resuscitating little by little his battered honor and allowing himself to look others in the eyes again, and the unmentionable past became evanescent, and even, for moments, forgettable.

Amanda also learned to look back with new eyes. She had always heard her friends and fellow workers in La Catunga called mujeres, or at worst putas, but not in an offensive way; now she knew that they were also shameless adulterers, hussies, busconas, loose women, pelanduscas, fufurufas, and pelafustanas. If as a puta she knew that sex could be boring, now, as a decent woman, she had heard that it was also filthy. And she could see herself in a distant mirror once when she heard doña Leonor say:

“I found a little Indian woman for the necessary duties; I hope she doesn’t turn out to be a thief…”

Everything went well as long as Sacramento didn’t get angry, which occurred at increasingly less frequent intervals, but from time to time the incubus would begin to growl at him again and to show its claws, especially on those nights when he failed in his attempts to make love to his wife.

“How do you expect me to behave like a man if you destroy my manhood with your conduct? For the others you would dress up, wear perfume, you would wear high heels, and now that you live with me you don’t even brush your hair…” He would blame her and open up again, like a wound in his memory, the fascination with that woman she had been before he had forced her to become someone else.

“Damned if I do, damned if I don’t,” Amanda weakly protested. “It would be best if I just died, or maybe I have already died and I just haven’t realized it yet.”

Nevertheless, life was bearable thanks to the softer tone it had been assuming, in which being awake was very similar to a slow, grayish dream. Until Leonor de Andrade’s youngest offspring came home on vacation. He had long eyelashes, studied law in the capital, and his name was Rodrigo; and Amanda made the imprudent mistake of mentioning him to Sacramento.

“That boy Rodrigo makes me laugh,” she told her husband. “He knows how to pull coins out of his ears.”

“When jealousy is unleashed it is important to tie it up again quickly, with rope, a gag, and a straitjacket, so it doesn’t cause too much damage,” pontificates Todos los Santos. “But when he thought that that boy Rodrigo had taken notice of his wife, Sacramento gave free rein to his feelings of jealousy and let them run wild and wreak havoc, like stallions from hell.”

“Let’s go back to the jungle,” proposed Sayonara, trying to calm him. “At least there is nothing but monkeys out there and you would have no reason to be jealous of them… maybe…”

“But nothing made any difference,” Olga tells me. “There was no salve that could soothe Sacramento’s fury, and each day, from the moment she left for work, he would follow her and spy on her, to see if she breathed, if she spoke to anyone, if she walked anywhere, completely forgetting about himself and his own job as a cart man.”

“I will quit working in that house,” she suggested, “and look for another job where there are no men to make you uncomfortable…”

“There will be men in every house.”

“Come on, then, let’s go to another pueblo. Melones, Delia Ramos’s sister, lives in San Vicente Chucurí, and she’s given up the profession and now she runs a beauty salon where they style hair and do manicures. She’ll take us in.”

“No. Your bad reputation has already reached there.”

“Then to Medellín. I have an aunt named Calzones there…”

“Calzones, Melones, putas and more putas; they’re all putas. Isn’t there a single decent woman left in the world? Do you know what they say about me? That I married Sayonara, the puta from the Miramar,” shouted Sacramento from the bottomless anguish of his black-and-white universe: heaven with Sayonara and hell without her, or rather torment with or without her. She could be only one of two things: goddess or trash, or both things alternatively with no intermediate possibility.

“It would be better if I just killed you and then myself,” he declared, adopting a language of love that seemed like a report from the emergency room of a hospital, because he couldn’t string two sentences together without including the words “blood,” “poison,” “wounds,” “dagger,” “sacrifice.”

“Hush, Sacramento, you’re scaring me,” she said to him. “You’re starting to talk like those heroes and martyrs…”

“No one will ever love you as I do.”

“It would be a relief,” she muttered, and she endured, endured, endured, until one day she got tired and fell wildly into a limitless exhaustion; hurricane winds blew once again in her heart, suddenly tearing her from her circumstances, and she accepted, in a single stroke of reason, that old, familiar certainty that life is somewhere else and flows through other streams. The irrepressible force of whim and of why-not, which is the principal motor of those who have an indomitable will, surged up in her again, blunt as a mandate, and without tempering her rage she threw a pot of boiling milk in Sacramento’s face, burning his chest with the liquid and opening a gash in his forehead.

“If this is a marriage, then marriage is not a good invention,” she said, free now of any hint of docility. “I’m leaving Sacramento, hermanito. I’m leaving forever.”

“Then he,” Olga tells me, “recognizing the return of the real Sayonara and without daring to ask her to stay, warned her, ‘If you go, I’ll die,’ but she went anyway, although she knew that this time Sacramento wasn’t exaggerating that much.”

“At that very moment my adopted daughter’s time for returning began,” Todos los Santos tells me. “My girl went running to find Fideo, and she said: ‘Let’s go, right now.’ ”

“What about your sisters?” Fideo wanted to know.

“Sacramento promised me he would take care of them.”

“But how am I going to walk? Can’t you see the condition I’m in?”

“Give me that ring you’re wearing.”

“I can’t. It’s the last thing I have that was Enrique’s, do you think it’s some cheap trinket? It has an engraved coat of arms and is made of pure gold, a lot of karats…”

“Give it to me.” Sayonara took it from her, and after a while she came back saying she had traded it for an old but sturdy burro.