The Dark Bride

forty-four

“One day she told me about Lucía,” Fideo tells me. “She told me she had been tangled up with that woman for a good while.”

There were alienating months during which Amanda lived twenty-four hours a day with a woman she had never seen nor ever would, but whom she came to know better than a sister. It was Lucía, the wife Payanés kept in Popayán and who had been, according to him, the reason for his distance, for the rupture, for the tantrum that night by the river and all the turns that fate later took as a consequence. Sayonara, who didn’t know her real name, began calling her Lucía, a name she thought sounded cold, caustic, sonorous, and haughty. She could well have won easy points and gotten the early advantage by baptizing her Ramona, or Chofa, or Filomena, but she suspected that it would be an improper tactic and an imprudent approach to ridicule or minimize her adversary.

“So it was Lucía,” says Fideo, repeating Amanda’s words.

Before she knew it, she was having breakfast, lunch, and dinner with this Lucía; she even gargled with her, but gargled with cyanide, because she was being poisoned, and if she didn’t leave Lucía’s side day or night, even though she hated the woman, it was because after all it was only with her that Amanda could vent her feelings and because she hadn’t found anyone else with whom she could maintain that uninterrupted, circular, and useless dialogue on the man doubly absent: for one and the other, because of the fault of one or the other.

“Here we are, tearing each other’s hair out of love for him,” said Sayonara to Lucía, “and he’s probably out there somewhere, with Molly firmly planted on his lap.”

The more force she applied to erasing Lucía from the map, the more persistent she became, and the more present, until the day came when Amanda felt that the faceless, ageless woman had installed herself permanently in her kitchen, always there, invoked by her and sitting on a stool, like another tenant except invisible to Sacramento and the girls, with her disheartening message on the tip of her tongue, sometimes resentful and tearful, other times furiously demanding what belonged to her, but always invincible in the tenacity with which she had determined not to go away, even though her hostess called her bruja, nightmare, pain, that woman, her.

“All that was missing was for me to serve her a cup of coffee every morning,” Amanda said to Fideo, and she also told her that she finally understood that she thought more about Lucía than she did about Payanés, and probably even more than did Payanés himself, who in Amanda’s eyes was becoming less her old love and more the actual husband of that phantasmagoric Lucía.

“It’s me who is giving him to Lucía,” Sayonara said to herself, alarmed, and she decided to make peace with the woman, give back her human qualities and her right not to be a miscreant or a succubus, and she stopped wishing for her character to be sour or for her to have sagging tits and bad breath.

Simultaneously she gave Lucía the peremptory order to leave her mind and license to exist out there, in her own environment, so that they wouldn’t have to continue stepping on each other’s toes or beating on each other like a couple of boxers fighting over the close quarters in the ring, the gold medal, and the single portion of air. From then on she ignored the other woman’s company, even though she had become so necessary, and she said adiós, hopefully forever, and while at first there was an absence, later she felt strong without Lucía and satisfied at having unencumbered herself of that dual and unbearable alliance, of complicity and rivalry, with a stranger.

“Of course, from time to time Lucía returned,” Fideo tells me, “but more faintly and only to make courtesy visits. She would sit silently on her stool, drink her black coffee, say thank you, ask permission to withdraw, and she would return to Popayán, her native city.”