The Dark Bride

forty-six

“He was a Mexican telegraph operator, and he called Sayonara mi guadalupana because he compared her to the Virgen de Guadalupe, also Mexican and with hair as long and beautiful as the Virgen del Carmen’s and Sayonara’s own,” Todos los Santos tells me of a man named Renato Leduc, who was brought to Tora by life’s winding road. “That’s what he called her, mi guadalupana, and since he also wrote her verses, the day he decided to return to his country because of her indifference he left her a farewell poem that I still have. I will show it to you if and when I find it, because it was such a long time ago. .. It was before the rice strike, during the golden era of the Dancing Miramar.

After digging through boxes, sacks, and drawers, Todos los Santos presents me with the following poem, typewritten and signed by the telegraph operator Renato Leduc:

Jovian pain of losing

adored things. Pain that oft

costs your life,

and oft costs naught.

I once told you: I love you,

as I had never said before

nor ever will again so true.

I said it to you in desperation

because I knew that very soon

another would say it too.

I said it in desperation,

but I have nothing to regret.

I loved you so, I loved you

because in your eyes so fair

was a piece of infinity;

because of your chestnut hair,

because of your mouth

barbarously naked

I loved you, I loved you so.. .

But so many people loved you

at once,

that I told myself: it is implausible

to plead

— if so many people love her—

things she does not need.

I thought of killing myself

then,

but I didn’t, because

I asked myself, why?

Lost in pain and grief

I let my beard grow

because that limpid love so brief

from it derived such merriment,

since virgins have always found

— or so they say — in beards much amusement.

Jovian pain of losing.. .

Apart from being a poet, there is little I am able to find out in Tora about the author, who defined himself as a bureaucrat of the lowest level. I know that when he arrived here he lodged at the Casa de Huéspedes, belonging to Conchita la Tapatía, a fellow Mexican, and that during the many nights in which they shared reminiscences of their motherland over glasses of Vat 69, he told her that he had trained for his profession at the Escuela Nacional de Telégrafos in Mexico City, which occupied an old building on Calle Donceles, next to the women’s insane asylum, and that he had started working before he turned thirteen — before he even had hair on his balls, he said — to help support his widowed mother. That before he arrived in Tora he had passed through Paris, where the puticas in the Latin Quarter taught him how to speak French; that he was fiercely anticlerical and aluciferado, a term he himself used, meaning “possessed by the devil”; “a man who had lived a great deal,” as Todos los Santos said; a man who was stuck on Sayonara from the first time he saw her through the window of the telegraph office in Tora, who became her most assiduous and starry-eyed client, and who weekly left in her hands nearly the entirety of his scant weekly salary.

“You can’t offer your heart to a woman like that,” admonished his Colombian best friend, a giant of a man named Valentín.

“For a woman like that, I have nothing but heart,” Renato replied.

“Love me,” Leduc begged Sayonara.

“I can’t love you. I look at you and I don’t see you.”

“You have an empty pot where other women hold their feelings,” the telegraph poet told her, and she realized that he was right, in part.

Then, enamored and in pain, he quit his job, packed a trunk with all of his books and his two changes of clothes, wrote the final poem, titled it “Romance of the Lost,” sent it to the addressee in an envelope, and returned to his Mexico, where he was heard to say that he had left Colombia to flee the indifference of a distant lover bent on remaining a puta.