The Dark Bride

forty-seven

The day after her return to Tora, Sayonara shook off her exhaustion by sleeping until the middle of the morning, and when she arose she found her madrina, Machuca, and Olga whispering suspiciously in the kitchen.

“Are you going to tell me what you are up to?” she asked them. “Since last night you’ve been plotting something behind my back and it’s time for you to tell me what it is.”

“We’re going to tell you, we already decided that. It’s bad news. About your sister Ana.”

“Did she die?”

“No, but that might have been preferable.” They kept beating around the bush, without daring to be specific.

From the moment of her arrival, Sayonara had been asking about her sister and they had answered her evasively. We don’t know, it seems that she lives on a finca near the village of Los Mangos, she left a telephone number but no one ever answers there, and when they do they say she moved somewhere else. Then, because of the deception and the delaying, Sayonara pitched a fit, one of those demoniac rages with eight legs and two heads that spits poison from its mouths and fire from its tail, one of those boundless bursts of anger that hadn’t possessed her since adolescence and that still gave them something to talk about in Tora.

“Either you tell me now, or I’ll tear apart this house and everything in it.”

They told her. Ana was the mistress of General Demetrio del Valle, commander in chief of Tora’s campaign of moralization and shanty eradication, who, because he was married civilly and in the eyes of the church to a rich lady from Anolaima and didn’t want to be found out, kept Ana closed up in a house next to the garrison and had spread the word that she was a cousin of his from the country whose education he had charitably offered to sponsor.

“I’m going to get her out of there even if it costs us both our lives,” announced Sayonara, and without further delay she started off.

“Wait,” suggested Todos los Santos in a softer voice, so as not to unleash the storm again. “Let her make her own life just as you have made yours. Besides, the way things are right now, it’s better to be the mistress of a gorilla than the wife of some man who’s dying of hunger.”

But Sayonara wasn’t there to hear her, and a few hours later she was clambering across the garrison’s tiled roofs, then broke a window and climbed through it.

“Del Valle pays for my private English and dressmaking lessons,” Ana told her. “He has given me a television, a record player, and a collection of LPs. He brings me marzipan fruits made by nuns and bottles of sweet wine from Oporto, and as if that weren’t enough, in bed he prefers sleeping over messing around. Does it look like I’m suffering, sister?”

“And the wrongs that the military has done to our family? Have you forgotten the atrocious way they caused the deaths of our mother and brother? And the wrongs they have done to our people, back in Tora? Have you forgotten?”

“No, hermana, I haven’t forgotten, and sometimes the anger makes my blood boil and I see red, and at those times I hate del Valle and want to strangle him with my bare hands. But then he brings marzipan, turns on the television, falls asleep like a little orphan, and I forgive him. If you saw him without his hat, with his four hairs plastered against his skull, he wouldn’t seem so ferocious to you. But I promise you one thing: If some day the anger overcomes the forgiveness, I’ll put strychnine in his café con leche. Or if some day I get tired of marzipan and studying English, I’ll take off through that window, hermana, the same one you just came in by, and I’ll go straight to Todos los Santos’s house.”

Several times I have made notes in my notebook that I should inquire about an enigma, which is: On what do Olga and Todos los Santos actually live? Finally I get up the nerve to ask and Olguita tells me that when the savings that Sayonara had left for her sisters ran out, Sacramento took charge of the situation. Persevering in the lumber business, he managed to finance the girls’ education as well as special treatment for little Chuza, who he still takes to Bucaramanga once a month to see a speech therapist, because although she’s now married, she still hasn’t spoken a word.

“Also,” Olguita tells me, “that good Sacramento sends Todos los Santos a voluntary monthly stipend, despite the fact, spiteful old woman, that she still hasn’t forgiven him. To think the only thing that getting married did for him was to acquire the obligation of maintaining the bride’s family in perpetuity. He ended up paying with interest for those seven coins he received that day when he delivered her to Todos los Santos for training!”

“Olguita also provides income,” Sacramento adds. “Just as you see her sitting there, the old girl is still an active professional who hasn’t lost her original clientele. Only those who die desert her, and not even them, because she visits them at the cemetery.”

Yesterday, which was Saturday, Olga and Todos los Santos were busy preparing lunch because Sacramento, Susana, Juana, Chuza, Machuca, and Tana were visiting.

“Here I come, don Enrique! Get ready, here I come!” shouted Fideo suddenly, when we weren’t paying her any attention because we were involved with the stuffed chicken and the onion salad, and when we ran to her side, we saw her make a final struggle to sit up in her hammock, call out once more to don Enrique, and die.

And yesterday the women decided that I had to say the final words of farewell at the burial, and this afternoon, a glass-weather Sunday, we dug the hole under the same guayacán tree and the same sky that shelters Claire. I saw many other graves in the middle of that meadow with the view of the river, barely marked with a wooden cross and maybe an epitaph: “Here lies Molly Flan,” “Finally at rest, Delia Ramos,” “N.N. new victim of the plague,” “La Costeña, love forever, your friends,” “María del Carmen Blanco alias La Fandango,” “Eternal glory for Chaparrita, heroine of the Rice Strike,” “Teresa Batista, tired of war,” “This is Melones, sister of Delia Ramos.”

When the moment arrived for me to speak, all the women looked at me as if I were the prima donna at a municipal theater performance. Then I placed a wreath of white roses in don Enrique’s name on the grave and said a few words that made some of those in attendance cry but disillusioned the rest, because just as they were beginning to be inspired, I had already finished. In matters of love, I said, everything is expectations and bets, some become shipwrecked, others somehow end up sailing smoothly, and in the midst of so much dreaming and foolishness one thing is certain: Fideo got closer than anyone to what is perhaps real love. She knew how to give it, she received it with open arms, and she kept it alive until the day of her death, and hopefully also from now on, amen.