Laura Restrepo - The Dark Bride

“Can you imagine that?” said Olga indignantly, listening to us as she chopped parsley to add to a compress for Fideo, who lay in a hammock due to her chronic illness. “Everything was taken from her and her child with only six words: You are no longer my daughter. Like a damning curse. To hear that, as if he had said ‘abracadabra,’ and to have everything disappear, absolutely everything, forever and ever. As if by a spell.”

“To be so evil to her, her own father!”

“Delia Ramos was raped by her stepfather and when her mother found out, she burned with such jealousy that she punished Delia, throwing her out of the house,” shouted Fideo from her hammock, who by now had ascertained that we were talking about misfortune.

“Of course, when we asked Delia Ramos if it was true, she denied it. She never wanted to confess to anyone. The old man didn’t even remember what he had done and Delia, in contrast, martyred herself with guilt and regret. I knew about it because her sister told me, a girl named Melones who was also in the business, not here in Tora but in San Vicente Chucurí, and was crushed to death in an accident involving two buses on the Libertadores highway,” interrupted Olguita, who is fond of going into detail. “Do you remember that horrendous accident? They made Delia Ramos go identify the body and she came back telling that she knew it was her sister because of a burn mark she had on her upper thigh ever since hot depilatory wax spilled on it.”

The three interrupt each other, remembering the misadventures of Melones, and meanwhile I think to myself that between being cast out of her home and reaching La Catunga, Delia Ramos and Correcaminos, whose name literally meant “road traveler,” must not have gone down too many roads. All they had to do was take a step, because La Catunga is around the corner from any street, and the difference between calling oneself Rosalba or Anita and nicknaming oneself Puta is a single word.

“When others refuse to offer a hand, mother prostitution receives you with open arms,” says Olguita, “although afterward she swallows you alive and she makes us all pay for it.”

“Opposite sides of the same coin,” I think out loud, “virgin and puta . Honor and shame.”

“That’s right, opposite sides of the very same coin. And let the devil throw it into the air to see which you end up with.”

“Did Correcaminos’s father ever forgive her? Or Delia Ramos’s mother?”

“Not them or anyone,” shouted Fideo. “You can go from there to here, but from here to there all the doors are locked.”

“All,” adds Olga, “except those of your memories.”

I have convinced Todos los Santos to get up and take a walk, and as we stroll, with me supporting her arm, the river turns red and the herons fly just above its surface, brushing the burning water with their wings. The momentary freshness of a breeze off the mountain abruptly ceases and the heat seizes the opportunity to fall upon us and crush us.

“The river blushed, didn’t it?” asks Todos los Santos. “That’s why it got hot, because the river turned red.”

“And out of pleasure?” I continue. “Has anyone joined the profession because she liked it?”

Todos los Santos laughs in that peculiar manner of las mujeres when they are really amused, throwing their heads back and striking their thighs with the palms of their hands.

“It is a profession that has its compensations,” she says, “that cannot be denied. Sometimes you sing and sometimes you cry, as with everything, but I will tell you one thing, a girl in this life has more opportunities for happiness than, let’s say, a dentist. Or a locksmith, for example.”

“Oh God, yes,” assures Olguita, laughing, as she walks behind us.

Any worthwhile life is woven with white ceremonies and black ceremonies, in an inevitable chain where some justify the others. Although the easy encounter with señor Manrique floated by, inoffensive, among Sayonara’s days, the following Tuesday Todos los Santos was forced to introduce her disciple to the murky ceremonies of a shameful routine. Every Tuesday by law, week after week, the prostitutes of La Catunga had to appear at dawn in the center of town, on Calle del Comercio, and stand in line in front of the antivenereal dispensary to have their health cards renewed.

“Only on that day,” Todos los Santos tells me, “were they disrespectful and treated us like putas .”

“Why do we need a card, madrina ?” asked Sayonara, running behind the older woman, unable to match her steps.

“So the government will let us work. They require it of anyone in La Catunga who wears a skirt, even the nuns. They don’t cure the sick women, they just charge them double to say they’re healthy.”

“But why, madrina ?”

“The government officials pocket the fifty centavos that each of us pays for the validation.”

“Well, if they’re going to steal from us, why do we go?”

“So they’ll let us live in peace.”

“What happens if we don’t have a card?”

“They kick our asses right into jail.”

They found the others waiting in line beneath the rising sun, messy and gray, as if they had swallowed ashes. The collective disgust cut off any attempt at conversation and Sayonara knew instinctively that it was better not to continue asking questions, because putting words to grave matters only makes them graver. There was Yvonne, perched on a pair of red spiked heels; Claire, mortally beautiful; Analía, stealing sips of vodka from a poorly camouflaged bottle; the pipatonas suckling their babies; Olga with her legs in the armor plating of her orthopedic devices. Leaning against a wall, all identical in the eyes of the corrupt officials, with no preferred lightbulb status or nationality or fee differential, no color of skin better than any other. On Tuesdays the dignity of any of them was worth fifty centavos, not one more or one less.

“The infected women’s cards were marked with crosses, one or several depending on the severity, and some women’s had so many they looked like cemeteries,” said Todos los Santos. “One cross meant thin blood; two, rotten blood; three, swollen flesh; four, irremediable situation.”

“Off with the underwear!”

Men with white lab coats were giving orders and Sayonara was seized with a sudden anxiety attack and a growing foreboding of frozen forceps in her crotch. A strong whiff of cleaning fluids made her nauseous.

“It smells like a circus, madrina .”

“It is a circus, and we’re the clowns.”

“Through here for genital inspection,” indicated a doctor of dubious qualifications, so coarse in appearance and with a lab coat so stained that he looked more like a mechanic than a doctor.

Obeying orders like a frightened animal, the girl lay down on the examining table and began to tremble.

“Hold on, girl,” encouraged Todos los Santos. “Think of Santa Cata, who withstood the cogged wheel without complaint.”

“Some comfort you are, madrina .”

The man with the stained lab coat performed the examination in view of all the others, with total disinterest, a cigarette in his mouth and without interrupting a conversation about the legitimacy of the elections, which he was carrying on with a tall, ungainly colleague who didn’t look like a doctor either, or even a mechanic, but rather a giraffe from a zoo.

When he finished with the girl, the man moved over to a desk, signed and stamped a card of pink pasteboard, threw the fifty centavos in a drawer, and without washing his hands shouted:

“Next!”

Todos los Santos tried to climb onto the high table without losing her composure, but she got tangled in her skirts, suffered a sudden coughing attack, the leg that was supposed to rise wouldn’t respond, the upper part of her body managed some success and reached the table but the other half failed and hung there, heavy and grotesque, while, completely humiliated, she begged the doctor’s pardon for her lack of agility, explaining that in her youth she had been slender.