Laura Restrepo - The Dark Bride

“Let me see that Japanese blouse,” she asked Chalela the Turk, indicating a red satin top with a gold dragon embroidered on the back that was being displayed on a mannequin.

“That blouse is Chinese, not Japanese,” Chalela the Turk advised her.

“What’s the difference?”

“The Japanese lost the war.”

“Too bad for them…”

“Too bad.”

“Good thing you told me. Then show me another one just like it, but in another color.”

“I only have red and white left.”

“White, then.”

“But the white one is Chinese too…”

“Yes, but at least it’s discreet. You wouldn’t go around in red if your country had lost the war.”

“Very well, then,” said Chalela the Turk, and he wrapped the white blouse without understanding anything.

They brushed the girl’s hair back, tied it in a ponytail, and yanked so tight they made her cry.

“Loosen it a little, madrina, ” asked the girl.

“That wouldn’t do. This way it pulls your eyes and they really look Oriental.”

Tana loaned her some cultivated pearl earrings, they duly hung the violet lightbulb that certified her Japanese nationality, and Olguita brought a reliquary that contained fragments of a martyr’s bones, assuring her that it protected young girls their first time.

“There have already been other times,” said the girl, which she had never mentioned before.

“It doesn’t matter, keep the reliquary; it’ll protect you anyway,” answered Olga, kneeling at Sayonara’s feet as she adjusted the hem of her skirt.

When señor Manrique was at the door fantasizing over the delights that the date promised, Todos los Santos took her disciple aside to deliver the final piece of advice.

“Never, never let yourself be tempted by an offer of matrimony from any of your clients. Don’t forget that the pleasures of amor de café aren’t the same as the pleasures of the home. Señor Manriquito, I leave you with my adopted daughter,” she went on to say. “Daughter, this is Señor Manrique, treat him with affection, he is a good man.”

When the old man was alone with the quiet, slender girl who had been assigned to him, he glimpsed such rapturous faraway places in her dark glances and high cheekbones, and perceived such warm apple and cinnamon well-being in her skin, that he didn’t know what else to do but to propose matrimony.

“No, thank you,” she responded with the silky voice, the good manners, and the discernment she had been taught.

Todos los Santos slept in the kitchen that night and before dawn entered the bedroom, making her way through the air saturated with the scent of intimacy. Sayonara was no longer there and señor Manrique slept in the beatific placidity of satisfied dreams, naked, soft, and white like cottage cheese. His usual blue suit waited for him neatly at the ready on a chair, rigid and carefully laid out to allow its owner to resume his human form when he put it on again. The madrina made a silent inspection of the room and then rushed out to the patio like a madwoman, shouting to Sayonara. The girl, now without her goddess disguise, was disheveled and barefoot, bucket in hand, feeding the pigs.

“Sayonara, come here!”

“Yes, madrina ?”

“Where is the fountain pen?”

“What fountain pen?”

“What do you think? Señor Manrique’s gold fountain pen…”

“I haven’t seen it.”

“He always wears it in the pocket of his jacket and now it’s not there.”

“Maybe he lost it, who knows?”

“You listen carefully to what I am going to say. For fifteen years señor Manrique has been coming to La Catunga with his gold fountain pen, for fifteen years he has fallen asleep in any of these houses, for fifteen years he has left without losing anything. Right this minute you will go, without waking him, and leave the pen where he had it. Being a puta is a profession, but being an evil puta is filth. If I haven’t been able to make you understand that, then I’ve wasted my time with you.”

The sun burned bright, radios were already chattering, and the heat was mature when señor Manrique, rejuvenated by the cistern, gave Todos los Santos the agreed upon sum and said good-bye, stamping a kiss on her fingers; she saw in his face an expression as clear as a medal of merit, which she had never seen before.

“You look magnificent today, señor,” she said, probing the terrain.

“Not to boast, señora, but last night I devoted myself completely to the mission you bestowed upon me, and I believe that my performance as initiator and guide in matters of love was favorable. Of course, I don’t imagine that a girl so young could have taken a fancy to me…”

“I understand, señor.”

“Suffice it to say that I don’t aspire to so much. But be that as it may, and you know better than I, a woman never forgets her first man and all those who pass through her bed afterward she compares to him…”

“Of course, señor, of course,” she said condescendingly. “Of course.”

We all have our vanities and cling to our illusions, thought Todos los Santos, and she stood there watching Manrique walk down the street toward the Plaza del Desacabezado, innocent of all suspicion and puffed up in his circumspect blue suit, carrying with him, as always, his gold fountain pen in the left breast pocket of his jacket.

Today I am visiting Todos los Santos in her bedroom because she is feeling ill and has been in bed since the day before yesterday. It’s strange to find her like this, giving in to old age, propped up among the pillows on her bed and covered to the tip of her nose with a blanket despite the fact that the heat is killing the rest of us. It’s the first time I have seen her with her hair uncombed, devoid of her earrings, with no appetite for her Cigalias and mistelas .

“I’m tired of going around driving away shadows,” she tells me when I ask her why she hasn’t gotten out of bed. Then she takes my hand, places it over her tired eyes, and assures me that it makes her feel better, that it is very cool.

“Did many women take up the profession out of hunger?” I ask after a long conversation about everything and nothing. She remains pensive.

“No, not many, just the opposite, very few.”

She is quiet for a while and seems to have forgotten about me, but later she continues with the subject.

“Mostly the indias . I saw pipatonas become putas out of physical hunger, and the proof was that once they had enough money for food, they left and went back to their people. As for the rest of us, we couldn’t go back, because for our families it was as if we were dead. With the Indians things were different; maybe it’s because the missionaries never really fully explained sin to them. Or because their sins were different from ours, who knows? But it wasn’t the same. Nor were their reasons and ours the same for getting into this life. If we had been motivated only by hunger, we would have done what they did, earn a little money, then leave, spend the money, and come back, then leave again, and keep the wheel turning that way. But our motives are more lasting.” Todos los Santos lets out a harsh laugh, devoid of happiness. “They are so lasting that they endure our whole lives, because for us, once we become a puta there’s no way back. It’s like becoming a nun. A woman with this life dies being a woman of this life, although she no longer even remembers what the thing that hangs between a man’s legs is called.”

“What are those lasting motives you’re talking about?”

“Take Correcaminos, for example,” she answers, resorting to a quirk I have learned to expect from them — they speak of others when they don’t want to speak about themselves. “It happened to Correcaminos, as it did with so many others, who in twenty-four hours go from being virgins to being putas . She was a decent, illiterate girl from a poor family who one day lost her virginity, became pregnant, and was transformed into the dishonor of her family. You are no longer my daughter, she heard her very Catholic father say, and the next minute she saw herself alone in the street without hope for pardon or return, with a baby in her belly and no roof over her head. Everything that had been hers suddenly wasn’t anymore: father, mother, siblings, barrio, friends, bread on the table, morning sun, afternoon rain.”