Laura Restrepo: The Dark Bride

“I use it because that’s what a poet I once loved called me,” said the latter in self-defense, then became lost in the shadows of days gone by.

They got tangled up in meditations without reaching a satisfactory solution and instead ended up postponing other urgent decisions, like fixing the fee and selecting the corresponding color of lightbulb in accordance with the standing hierarchies and conventions in La Catunga. The girl was as copper-colored and Indian-looking as the pipatonas , and according to that she should have been accorded a minimal remuneration, but Todos los Santos aspired to the highest destiny for her student and she wouldn’t resign herself to condemn the girl to a lowly white lightbulb.

“It can’t be,” she lamented. “With those beautiful almond eyes she’s got, like a Japanese princess’s!”

“That’s it.” From the haze of her mistelas Delia Ramos saw the light. “Japanese! Let her be the only Japanese girl in this red-light district, and that way she can charge an exclusive fee.”

“Such nonsense! The Japanese are yellow like chickens…”

“It doesn’t matter, nobody around here would know the difference because they’ve never seen one.”

“Besides, coloring can be lightened with rice powders…”

“But she doesn’t speak Japanese.”

“And you think, mother, that these French women of ours speak French? If they ever knew it, they forgot it a long time ago. And nobody complains; after all, the profession has a universal language.”

Olguita suggested the name Kimono, the only word she knew in Japanese, and Delia Ramos came up with another possibility:

“I say that it would be best to call her Tokyo.”

“What’s that?”

“A big city in Japan.”

“It won’t do, it’ll scare off the gringo clientele.”

“Despite everything, Tokyo sounds very good to me.”

“In that case Kyoto would be better.”

“Why not Sayonara?”

“Kimono or Sayonara,” declared Todos los Santos. “Either of the two would work.”

“Sayonara is more beautiful, it means good-bye.”

“Good-bye forever?” sighed Delia Ramos tragically, already drunk.

“It just means good-bye.”

“Let the girl choose.”

Without even thinking about it, the girl chose Sayonara and from then on she clung to that word, which she had never heard before, as if in it she had finally found the stamp of her identity.

“Then let it be Sayonara. Sayonara. You will no longer be the girl, but Sayonara,” they approved unanimously, and there descended over them, leaving their hair gray, that drizzle of soot that falls from the ceiling every time a childhood ends before its time.

“Four months,” said Delia Ramos between hiccups. “Only four months and she would have been an adult.”

“It’s all the same,” said Todos los Santos, “four months more or less. Which of us didn’t start too early? Childhood doesn’t exist, it’s a luxury invented by the rich.”

Today, despite her eyes being bathed in clouds, Todos los Santos tells me she can see with perfect clarity that upon adopting that name with the flavor of good-bye, Sayonara unknowingly — or perhaps she did know it — sealed her own fate and that of all of La Catunga.

On one thing Todos los Santos, Olguita, Delia Ramos, Tana, and Machuca did agree that night, which was to select señor Manrique as the girl’s first client, the one who would initiate her in the profession prior to her social and official presentation at the Dancing Miramar. He was a soft, kind man of some fifty years, all reverence and old-fashioned courtesies, one of those who breaks bread with his hands so he won’t have to plunge a knife into it. He worked as the quartermaster general of the commissary at the Troco, where he earned a good living, and visited the chicas of La Catunga every night to have eventual and insignificant sex with them, dispersed among dozens of games of dominoes, imperative, long, and impassioned.

“What do you think, girl? After all, you are the interested party…”

“I don’t care.”

Señor Manrique would have been accepted unanimously if a bilious blonde named Potra Zaina hadn’t planted a tempting worry at the last moment:

“Let her first time at love be with Piruetas, he really knows how to dance and make a woman feel alive.”

None of them, not even Todos los Santos, was immune to the difficult charms of Piruetas, who came in and out of their lives with a dancer’s agile moves. Unpredictable, incomprehensible, slick, he made them all suffer with his snubs; from all of them he obtained benefits of bed and kitchen in exchange for gazes from his lying eyes; they all loved him without charging him a peso so that he, in return, would teach them tango steps and the latest pirouettes in the dancing salons of Pereira and the capital.

“Hey, Piruetas!” they would shout competitively at him when they saw him pass, a figure of ambiguous temperament, malevolent hat, and patent-leather shoes. “Slay me with those eyes! Come, love, show me a new number, one of the ones only you know.”

“ Prostitutas, like bullfighters, try to ease sorrows with superstitions,” Todos los Santos assures me. “One of their many beliefs says that the man who breaks a woman in marks her life from then on. That’s why the selection of the first client was a delicate matter and why a melancholy man would be rejected, for example, or a glutton or a sick man. All the pains, of the body and the soul, are transmitted through the sheets.”

“Piruetas for Sayonara?” shot Tana. “Don’t even think about it, he’s a fancy man who plays crooked.”

“Life is short and you have to know how to enjoy it, and we aren’t going to condemn the girl to bitterness by starting her out with a tattered old man,” interjected Machuca.

“On the contrary, she shouldn’t become accustomed to thinking work is idleness and the salary is enjoyable, because later there’s no way to rid her of the habit.”

“Who said such foolishness! If she is going to live off of her body, then let her at least shake it out and enjoy it. Sanctimoniousness will only bring you communion wafers!”

“Death is always crouching somewhere and the trick is to discover where before it lashes out at you.” Todos los Santos uttered those somber words and the other women didn’t understand what they had to do with anything. “I’ll say just one thing: In this barrio death dances around, so very slyly, in Piruetas’s shoes.”

An uncomfortable silence descended and the women pressed against one another, seeking the antidote to that shivering thought.

“I am not one to prohibit the girl from dealing with Piruetas,” continued Todos los Santos. “You all know that for years he has been in and out of my bed as he chose. He casts his net over all of us and sooner or later she too will have to feel the brush of his effeminate fingernails, sparkling with polish. But it’s preferable that it be later rather than sooner.”

The dawn fell thick with humidity and shrouded in the screaming of seagulls over the gentleness of the river, and the girls went each one to her own home, grateful along the way for the existence of affable men like Manrique, who soften the ominous fascination that they all, without exception, felt toward cruel men like Piruetas.

When he learned that the girl’s hour had arrived, and that the chosen novio for her first time was old Manrique, Sacramento’s spirit crashed to the ground and shattered into a thousand pieces.

“So even then you loved her?” I ask.

“Loved her, no. Love, what people call love, not sleeping at night or eating during the day thinking about a woman, señorita Claire inspired something like that in me, always solitary even when she was accompanied, with that mystery of hers, made of dark circles under her eyes and pale skin under her dress. Or señora Machuca, with her thirty years of life so well lived that there was nothing beautiful or ugly in this world left for her to discover. Or even Olguita, so compassionate, her legs useless, like a mermaid, who half frightened me and half fascinated me with those steel orthopedics pressing against her flesh. I loved and desired all of them until I was crazy and even beyond. But the girl? No one falls in love with a wild-haired, slippery, surly tadpole. At that time she was to me something worse and much stronger than love. She was the pain of my conscience.”