Laura Restrepo - The Dark Bride

“How wonderful!” exclaimed the girl, completely absorbed, and she would begin to tell Sacramento lies, as big as a house, that he would pretend to believe.

“She made up that the box contained the jewels that Santa Catalina had been given by her father the king, and she made me promise that I would defend them with my life, property, and honor against anyone who tried to steal them.”

Sacramento swore on his knees, she tapped him on the shoulder a couple times with a sword that was really a stick and named him Knight of the Order of the Holy Diamond. He was ashamed that the older kids would see him playing like that and he wouldn’t let her name him a knight unless there were no witnesses; after all, he was already a man who worked and supported himself and he found that game — like so many things of hers — shamefully simple. Poor Sacramento, he never suspected that that title would be, by a long shot, the most honorable that he would ever have bestowed upon him in his life.

“To have been named Knight of the Order of the Holy Diamond by her…,” he says to me, “I think when I die that will be the best memory I leave behind.”

I’ve been told that a miracle prevented the infidels from sawing in half, with a cogged wheel, Santa Catalina virgin and martyr, and that they had to limit themselves to decapitating her and were unable to stem the flow of milk that ran from her wounds instead of blood, nor the curative aroma exhaled by her bones for the benefit of the sick who happened to be nearby. I’ve also been told that the anniversary of this horrifying episode is the date favored by the mujeres of La Catunga for being initiated into their professional life, their baptism by fire, as they themselves call it. I have noticed that prostitution promotes tendencies and fixations similar to those that in other instances I have observed in sicarios from communes in Medellín, truck drivers who have to pass through regions of violencia, the bazuco dealers on Calle del Cartucho in Bogotá, mafiosos, judges, witnesses, bullfighters, guerrillas, antiguerrilla commandos, and so many other Colombians who risk their lives on a routine basis. To begin with, they all wear one or several medals featuring the Virgen del Carmen, whom they familiarly call La Mechudita because of her thinness, her wit, and her characteristic long hair, and whom they venerate as the patron saint of difficult professions.

Like the others, the mujeres of La Catunga know that those who fully embrace their profession risk their skin; unlike others, the mujeres know that they also risk their souls. Hence the meticulous, manic way in which they perform self-imposed purifying rituals, hence the importance that they bestow upon a saint like Catalina; they, who in some dark way also become martyrs, yield to tragedy and accept the notion of life as a sacrifice.

Four months remained before the celebration of the fiestas of Santa Cata, just enough time to round out the girl’s education in love. But, as I had heard said so many times in Tora, man proposes and hunger imposes. Todos los Santos’s savings, which were diminishing, wouldn’t last until the date she had set for the girl’s initiation into the profession. So Todos los Santos decided to force her hand and release the artist into the game while she was still a little wet behind the ears, short on training, unpredictable in conduct, and psychologically immature.

“You don’t make a man fall in love with you through gymnastics in bed or tricks in the bedroom,” was her first strictly professional lesson. “Leave that to those who don’t have other skills. What you should do is spoil him and console him as only his mother ever has.”

One midnight in La Catunga, with the song of the cicadas particularly intense, a council of advisers was assembled at Todos los Santos’s house. Over mistelas, Pielroja cigarettes, and sweet pastelitos de gloria they argued without reaching agreement on any of the details of the mise-enscène. The greatest polemic centered around the choosing of the girl’s nombre de guerra , which in this case would also have to serve as her Christian name, because she swore she didn’t remember having been baptized.

“At least tell us what they called you before you came here,” said Tana the Argentine, a veritable rattle of bracelets and necklaces, given to her by her lover, an engineer for the company.

“They didn’t call me anything,” she lied, or perhaps she was confessing true abandonment.

What she did tell them was that she would like to be called La Calzones, the underwear girl, in homage to her aunt, for whom she seemed to profess some admiration or affection.

“Over my dead body!” shouted Todos los Santos. “I have never heard a name so coarse and devoid of style.”

“But if that name brings the girl good memories,” Olguita dared to venture, her nature made velvety by the polio that had withered her legs.

“Good memories don’t exist. All memories are sad,” Todos los Santos said, ending the discussion.

“Let’s call her María, Manuela, or Tránsito, for God’s sake, they were all important women and heroines in novels,” proposed Machuca, the blasphemer, who was a high school graduate with a diploma, and a devoted reader.

“What does that have to do with anything? None of them had to offer up their asses.”

“Well, if that’s the requirement, then call her Magdalena.”

“Don’t even mention that renegade, first she sinned, then she spent the rest of her life crying with regret.”

“Then what about Manón or Naná, who made history in Paris?” suggested Machuca, her mouth watering.

“Paris and Tora can’t be mentioned on the same day.”

“Why not Margarita, then?”

“Margaritas also cry too much. And they fall in love with money, and die spitting blood. I tell you, names of flowers bring bad luck.”

“Well, Flor Estéves, who was my aunt on my father’s side,” offered Delia Ramos, “was said to have found heaven in a sailor’s love.”

“Sailors kiss, then they leave,” Todos los Santos recited the only line of poetry her memory had retained.

“Rosa la Rosse always sounded so sweet to me…,” sighed Olguita. “I would have loved to have been called that. But I got tangled up in this profession without realizing it and when I opened my eyes I was already a consecrated puta and they just kept calling me Olguita, like when I was good. They say that God doesn’t forgive those who work under the names they were baptized with. They say it sullies the holy name and takes it in vain.”

“God has gotten so old and he still hasn’t stopped inventing sins.”

“It doesn’t do me any good to give you ideas, if you don’t pay any damn attention,” said Machuca testily, but she tried again anyway. “Call her Filomena, who was the winner in a tournament of beautiful breasts.”

“Maybe that Filomena had hers very much in order,” interjected Delia Ramos, “but on this child they’re barely showing, and you can tell that as an adult they’ll sprout scant and pointed, like a Turkish slipper.”

“I heard about an incredibly extraordinary puta who was called Cándida…,” mused Olguita.

“Don’t even think about it,” said Machuca. “That Cándida deserves a place among the gods of Olympus for bearing eternal torture chained to a bed, like Prometheus to his rock. Cándida is a myth of sublime flight and this poor little girl of ours is nothing more than a vile mortal.”

“You read so many books and invent so many beautiful things,” said Tana to Machuca, “and just look at the sad name you’ve got.”