The Dark Bride

forty-three

“During those times in Villa de Virgen del Amparo,” Fideo tells me, “Sayonara lived clinging to her longing for Payanés. ‘Come back to earth, girl,’ I advised her when I saw her flying so high; ‘come down from that cloud.’ ”

The more insistent and deep-rooted in her the memory of him grew, the more it began to fade. The first thing she lost was his head: How did he look at me, out of the corner of his eye or straight on? She couldn’t say for sure. He has big ears, half the size of a frying pan, Fideo teased her, but Sayonara recalled them as being perfectly sized, and pink. What came from his mouth, words of love or silence? With the distance of time they both sounded the same. Were his kisses really that deep? Or were they inventions? His skin was a true gift, even with clothes on, of that she was certain.

“Wherever you put your hand on him you find a lot of man,” she sighed.

Was his hair very dark? Dark and light, black and white, both mixed. And what was it that had been beating in his forehead: the promise of bliss, or had it been a forsworn good-bye from the very beginning? She couldn’t tell for sure, even when he had been with her, the memory of which is now blurred into the long string of symmetrical days.

After his head, his arms were forgotten and the imprint of his embrace became nebulous, and she lost the sensation of his neck in spite of that time when he turned his back; his legs also evaporated, and she could no longer distinguish them from the legs of other men, not to mention his feet — so absent were they that Sayonara convinced herself that when they were making love, Payanés had never removed his socks. Even his hands faded and the last traces of his caresses turned into smoke. But his chest remained, Payanés’s chest, and it became as immense as the universe.

“In the memory of that chest,” Fideo assures me, “Sayonara built her home.”

A chest opened in embrace, protective like the chest of God or of any other father, as old as an elephant and soft like a bed, and warm: without cracks where the wind could slip through. Not the narrow chest of a boy, not a chest covered with hair, or wounded by a spear near the heart; not one of those sharp, lean chests like the ribs of a ship, or the muscular thorax of an athlete, none of that; not the chest of a general, loaded down with medals. But a spacious chest, sufficient, familiar and wise, ample like a hangar; abundant with milk and honey like the breasts of a woman; a chest with the dim light of a church and the well-being of a stove, with thick stone walls, high ceilings under friendly heavens, and a big wooden door that opened just enough for her. That chest.

“I say,” says Fideo, “that she confused the memory of what it was with what she wanted it to be.”

A chest that gives itself to you without your having to ask and that doesn’t make you wait, that doesn’t fear, doesn’t frighten, doesn’t delay; a chest that doesn’t hold back, or measure, or stop, or mistrust, or calculate; our house, a generous chest like a banquet; crypt and castle, a cave of sleeping mammals, while outside the winter roars and blows: a flowery bed.

“Too much wishing for things that don’t exist in this real world. What you’re looking for is not a man, girl,” suspected Fideo, “but to die and go to heaven.”

“Maybe.”