Laura Restrepo - The Dark Bride

Since he knew about señor Manrique, Sacramento was attacked by a frenzy of labor that was incomprehensible to the neighbors who always caught him taking a siesta in the shade of some tree and who now saw him slaving away under the broiling sun like a mad ant, thumping his cart along the streets of the pueblo from dawn well into night to carry cans of gasoline from the docks to the sawmill and lumber from the sawmill to the docks, to carry recently arrived travelers from the train station to the Hotel Pipatón and travelers about to depart, from the Hotel Pipatón to the train station, to haul cement or bricks to construction sites, cans of water to the higher barrios, sacks of rice and grain from the river to the cooperative and from the cooperative to the Troco’s kitchens. They even saw him dragging up to the peak of Cristo del Pronto Alivio sick people who were going there to beg for their health and the recently healed who were going to give thanks for the miracle of their healing. At the end of a week of maximum output he presented himself in Todos los Santos’s house with his pockets filled with coins, which he dumped on the table in the kitchen.

“I have come to pay for the girl’s thing.”

“What thing?”

“Her first night of love.”

Olguita, Tana, Machuca, Delia Ramos, all of them had gathered to prepare tamales for the leper colony bazaar, with corn masa and pork wrapped tightly in banana leaves, then tied with string, and they all stiffened with their hands in the masa when they saw the boy’s expression of pathetic solemnity as he delivered his capital; the wind of life or death ruffling his hair; the lyric tenor’s ardor with which he had burst onto the scene of tamale preparation, trying to prevent the inevitable by presenting his petition; his delicate supplication that broke into stammering when the chuckling started and he saw the women doubled up with laughter over the yellow corn flour, and their laughter slid like liquid fire through his ears, ulcerating his body inside, burning even more because of the presence of his idolized Claire, who wasn’t making tamales with the others, of course, but was sitting there in the background painting her fingernails killer red, and who, like the others, threw the boiling flood of her laughter in his face.

“Come here, my precious child,” said Machuca, still shaking from the hilarity of it, crushing his face against her soft breasts. “This boy is worth his weight in gold.”

“Such beautiful curly eyebrows!” said Olguita, kissing his eyes. “When he grows up he’s going to be a considerate man, God bless him.”

Once again able to be serious, Todos los Santos gathered up the coins on the table, put them in a paper bag, took some more coins from her savings drawer, and put them in the bag too.

“Take this,” she said to Sacramento, giving him the bag. “Take the girl to the movies. Buy some chocolates and cotton candy, you’ll have more than enough there.”

The two kids went to the movies together and saw a few westerns in which a riled-up John Wayne didn’t leave an Indian standing. But when they got back to Todos los Santos’s house, Sacramento said he didn’t want to go inside and stubbornly insisted on saying good-bye at the door.

“I’m leaving Tora, girl,” he announced. “I am going to sign up as a petrolero to come back bronzed by the sun, shaggy and with a lot of money, so the mujeres of La Catunga won’t ever laugh at me again.”

“Okay,” she said, “we were going far away; I was going to be a petrolero too and we were going through the jungle with our horses and… ”

“No more silly games; this time it’s for real. Adiós .”

The girl just stood there against the falling sunset, devoid of sorrow or glory, featuring an invisible sun with insipid tones of gray and brown, and watched Sacramento’s tiny figure as it moved away into the distance, along the edge of the Tropical Oil Company’s fence, toward the point at which the underbrush swallowed the path, where the pueblo ended and the Carare-Opón jungle began.

“ Adiós, hermano mío . I hope you come back rich and powerful!” she shouted, waving her hand, and it was the first of many times that he would hear her say good-bye without a trace of sadness in her voice.

The girl became an adult on that afternoon of insipid twilight when Sacramento departed. In accordance with the new name she had been given, she was no longer called Girl, rather Sayonara. She was never again seen engaged in childish brawls in the barrio, and if from time to time she opened the treasure chest, it was to adorn herself with jewelry and gaze at herself in the mirror.

“The mirror, always looking at yourself in the mirror,” Todos los Santos reproached her, seeing her absorbed and distant as if it were she who had left Tora. “You should know that the mirror is not an object of confidence because it is inhabited by Vanity and Deceit, two evil creatures that swallow everything they reflect. He who looks a lot in the mirror will end up spending a lot of time alone.”

She no longer paid attention even to her friend Christ, or to Aspirina, who anxiously followed her everywhere; nor to the conversations of las mujeres on the patio, which she as a girl had followed as if hypnotized and without missing a single word.

“ ‘Run along, girl! Go play, adult problems aren’t to be heard by tender ears,’ that’s how we had to shoo her away, but later came a time when she wouldn’t join us even when we especially invited her.”

One day in May her state of stupefaction reached such a point that she threw to the pigs, instead of potato peels, the rose petals they had prepared for the passing of the Virgin in the procession.

“That’s what you call throwing pearls before swine,” joked the others. “If you continue in this manner, you’re going to end up throwing potato peels to the Virgin.”

Only her hair seemed to keep her company during that period of isolated adolescence when she could spend the entire day bringing out its shine with a brush and arranging it into all kinds of styles: crazy woman, a Phrygian cap, Medusa, ragpicker, Policarpa Salavarrieta, or Ophelia drowned in the well, based on the characters that Machuca described in her stories.

“Her hair purred like a contented cat when she brushed it,” Olga recalls.

Sometimes she would steal a cigarette and smoke it in front of the mirror, breathing deeply and practicing slow gestures, elegant ways of lighting the match or exhaling the smoke, walking around in tight skirts and sitting with her legs crossed.

“What are you dreaming about, girl?”

“I’d like to have a herd of elephants and to see snow, and for my father to be a king so I could smoke cigarettes in the salons of his palace.”

One torrential afternoon, Todos los Santos announced it was time for her to start working: señor Manrique had already been summoned, he had been informed that he would be meeting a young girl recently arrived from Japan who had not yet mastered the Spanish language, and he had shown himself to be in agreement with everything. Sayonara said all right, that it was all right by her, and Todos los Santos set about preparing the proper costume as must be done for amor de café, where illusion, theater, and duplicity predominate.

“Hadn’t señor Manriquito seen the girl?” I ask.

“Many times. But since adults often look at children without seeing them, he had seen her scurrying around without ever really noticing her.”

So the name, the client, and the date had already been chosen and now they needed to physically transform the girl into Sayonara, or rather into an authentic Japanese woman, or more precisely into a fake Japanese woman but superior to an authentic one. In a glorified junk store called El Pequeño Paris, the madrina bought a black silk skirt, long and tubular, with a deep slit rising to mid-thigh. Then she marched twenty yards down Calle Caliente under the shade of her parasol to reach the Bazar Libanés.