Laura Restrepo - The Dark Bride

“Hurry up,” said the man. “I’m not going to wait all morning.”

“Can’t you see the señora needs help?” said Sayonara, and her fear yielded to her fury.

“Up, señora, and open your legs.”

“She is not climbing up or opening her legs, you shitty bastard,” Sayonara spat out as she grabbed Todos los Santos by the arm, struggling to pull her out to the street.

“Don’t be a rebel, hija, you’ll leave me without a card,” protested the madrina, who still hadn’t picked up her purse or finished rearranging her hair, stockings, and skirt.

“Let her insult me, doña,” said the doctor so loudly that the others outside could hear. “Next time the little brat is going to have to suck me off before I’ll do her the favor of renewing her card.”

“Why don’t you suck this,” shouted a woman from Cali who had been eating a mango; she threw the pit and hit him in the eye, letting out a hearty laugh that alerted the others and made them laugh too, first a little, then more, beginning as the chatter of schoolgirls, then becoming the harassment of mutinous putas , hurling insults, trash, and rocks at the dispensary doctors who, without knowing how, managed to lock the door and barricade themselves against the revolt that was mounting outside.

“Down with the pimping government!”

“Down!”

From the corner and a little apart from the rest, looking at all of this with the burned-out eyes of someone who has seen it before, Todos los Santos registered the novelty only as highlighted in insignificant details: the touch of color that the commotion brought out on Claire’s translucent cheeks, the agility with which Yvonne ran on her red stilts, the wounded-deer urgency with which the group of pipatonas and their children fled, abandoning the uprising at the onset. But more than anything she noticed the metamorphosis that her adopted daughter underwent, having seized the first line of fire, hair on end like a wild beast, vociferous, and later scampering across the roofs with a diabolical agility to reach the skylight and attack from above.

“I watched her,” she tells me, “and said to myself: Maybe it’s better for me to never find out what this child’s past is, or what mix of blood brought about such vigor and fury.”

“Bastards, bloodsuckers!”

Delia Ramos, consumed with rage, incited battle with Walkyrian shouts, and a woman from the Pacific coast whom they called La Costeña harangued from the top of a wall.

“ Putas hijueputas! Son-of-a-bitch whores!” answered masculine voices from behind the barricades. “Syphilis spreaders!”

“This is for all of our friends who were raped and abused in this dump!” trumpeted the vodka-soaked voice of Analía, and a bottle crashed against the window of the dispensary, shattering the glass.

“Filthy gonorrhea-infected whores!” responded the barricaded men.

“Death to corrupt officials!”

“Down with the pimping government!”

“Death!”

A flying orange buzzed through the broken window and stamped itself, yellow and juicy, on a cabinet, knocking over all the flasks, and then the roof fell in with a clatter of glass.

“They’re burning us alive!” howled the besieged men, as a rain of burning paper and rags descended upon them, which Sayonara, angel of fire, young cat on a hot tin roof, was tossing onto their heads and which fell onto the spilled alcohol, spreading the fire. From her street corner Todos los Santos saw the smoke that was beginning to rise wispy and pale and noticed that it was becoming blacker and thicker, like the clouds that precede storms. She also saw the first flames peering out, seeking something to cling to, like long, mobile, hungry tongues, and she watched the heat smash, one by one, the rest of the windows in a frenzy of invisible punches reverberating through the air.

And she also saw, with the stupor of one contemplating someone else who has been reborn, her adopted daughter standing at the edge of the great fire, watching it, spellbound and ecstatic, captivated by the spectacle of its growing force and without retreating from her attacks or perceiving the heat building up in the iron skylight frames across which she was effortlessly balanced, as if suspended from the sky by invisible threads.

There was something irrational and challenging in the way that girl ignored the danger, and Todos los Santos suddenly understood that her adopted daughter couldn’t, or, worse still, didn’t want to separate herself from the fascination that wouldn’t take much longer to envelop her in its burning arms.

“Down with the pimping government!” howled the women, feverish before the excitement of the fire.

“Down!”

“Out of Tora with the bloodsuckers!”

“Out!”

Asphyxiated by the smoke, their eyes reddened and teary, and their arms raised high, like freed puppets, the besieged doctors exited in surrender at the very moment that men in olive green appeared, jogging down the street, holding their weapons.

“Their reinforcements are coming!” Someone sounded the alarm and the rebels shot off in every direction, leaving the scene empty in a matter of seconds.

“Here come the cops!”

“Death to corrupt officials!”

“Death to the police who protect them!”

“Death to all the sons of bitches who exploit the women of Tora!”

Todos los Santos, the only woman who remained in the plaza, without vacillation crossed the tense silence of thistles and porcupines that electrified the air to approach the dispensary as far as permitted by the fury of the blaze, which was now escaping through doors and windows, and she didn’t know whether it was because of dizziness from the heat or hallucination from the gases, but as she looked up in the air she saw Sayonara advance serenely, like Christ on top of the waves, along a narrow open path among the flames, a vertiginous ballerina on the verge of disaster. And she swears to me that she saw too how the gusts of smoke delicately stroked her hair and how the fire approached, tame, to kiss her clothing and lick her feet.

As she contemplated this nerve, this display of irresponsibility on the part of the insolent child, Todos los Santos became greatly annoyed and was about to shout angrily for the girl to climb down from there that very instant and to cease her strange behavior, but just as she was about to open her mouth she heard her instincts give her a countermand.

“Suddenly I realized that her own foolishness was what would save her,” she tells me, “and that if I called out to her I would startle her and once she awakened the fire would swallow her up, because her only protection lay in her dazed state of mind. You see, if I shouted, it would break the spell, the skylight would suddenly collapse, and she would fall into the center of the burning embers. Then I looked at her calmly, without reproach, as if approving her shadowy passage over that hell, and I told her with the softest voice in my throat, in just this tone, without insulting, without haste, I told her quietly, lovingly: ‘Let’s go, child, it’s late and we should be getting back to the house.’ I don’t know how, but she heard me; somehow she descended from the roof as effortlessly as she had climbed up and the next instant was at my side, standing on the ground, urging me to run so the troops wouldn’t grab us.”

“Run, madrina ! Give me your hand and run! Don’t you see they’re almost on top of us?” she shouted, just like that, as if it had all been a children’s game and death didn’t exist, soldiers didn’t kill, sadness didn’t strike or fire burn.”

There was no time to run; down the street that emptied into the plaza came the crush of jogging boots hammering the dust, but when they arrived with their weapons at the ready, the only traces of the rebels’ passage were Yvonne’s abandoned red shoes and four or five fake doctors, stunned and banged up, who didn’t know whether to open their mouths to curse their luck or to thank God who had saved them. Sayonara and Todos los Santos? They found a hiding place in the house of friends who had opened their doors to them.