Laura Restrepo - The Dark Bride

Stubborn in his foolishness, Sacramento kept arguing reasons for mercy and heaping on descriptions of his misfortune, refusing to recognize that there is no human power that can convince a stranger to cross the mass of the Andes unshod, of his own will, for no good reason and without receiving anything in return.

“What do you mean that you’re leaving us your place?” Payanés, who was sharper at this sort of dealing, asked the old man.

“There’s plenty of work to go around here, what there’s not enough of is willing men. The only requirement for a man is that he have two hands, bring his own tool, and be willing to work like an animal and leave the child’s play behind. And your shovels? Where are your shovels?”

“We don’t have shovels.”

“They only hire personnel with tools.”

“Serious problem, hermano, ” said Payanés to Sacramento, removing his red baseball cap to scratch his head.

“Well, if you want I’ll sell you my shovel.”

“Well, seeing that it’s an old shovel, and I’m not exactly rich…”

The give and take of the negotiation started high, rapidly descended to midrange, and stagnated with the bartering of trifles — the shovel for the red cap, a pound of coffee and the shovel for the missal that Sacramento was carrying, the coffee for the red cap — until the old man convinced himself of the calamitous insolvency of his opponents and chose to move on to look for a higher bidder.

“Don’t go,” said Sacramento, grabbing him by the sleeve. “I’ll give you my shoe for your shovel.”

“What in the hell do I need with a single shoe?”

“In case someone steals one of your boots…”

“That would never happen, who’s going to steal it?”

“These unfortunate things happen, look at me. Anyway, an extra shoe will certainly serve you more than a broken shovel on your journey.”

The old man left for his homeland with Sacramento’s shoe in his pack, while the two boys agreed to take turns with the endowment: While one rested the other would work with the shovel and Payanés’s shoes, and the next day they would exchange roles.

“Repeat after me: Pick, you are my father; shovel, you are my mother”—that was the only instruction given to them by the foreman before he exploded the dynamite that reduced a huge rock to gravel, sending monkeys and parrots to the moon.

That’s how they started to work, and to suffer. They clung to their shovel as if it were the sword and shield of a wandering knight and with it they opened the way among the thousand torments of the jungle, paddling among the stagnant waters at the edge of the river, which boiled like a thick, rancid soup and gave off a fetid vapor that impeded their breathing.

“It’s malaria,” diagnosed someone. “This poisonous air is what they call malaria.”

“Don’t be ignorant, malaria doesn’t fly around on its own, it spreads by mosquitoes,” corrected someone else. “They’re called anopheles. Only the female bites, and she lives only seven days, but in that time she can infect at least seven men.”

“And those seven men are bitten by a hundred flies who then bite seven hundred more men, until there’s not a healthy Christian in the whole departamento of Magdalena.”

“Or in all of Colombia.”

“Well, the truth is that yes, they are biting,” complained Payanés, and the statement bothered Sacramento, because it made real a nuisance that until then he had managed to ignore.

“Hush, Payanés, don’t court disaster. Don’t think about the mosquitoes and they won’t bite you; they’re just like dogs, they only bite those who are afraid of them.”

He hadn’t finished speaking those words when he began to feel the stings on his cheek, on his hand, on his thigh through the cloth of his trousers. He hadn’t seen them before and suddenly he saw them, in clouds, in battalions, forcing him to scratch himself until he drew blood, dodging their victims’ swats and laughing at the foul-smelling smoke of some cigarettes the men called repellent. He tells me that of the many bites he received in the quagmire of the Carare, there was one that infected him, and he assures me he knows which one it was.

“I turned to look when that mosquito’s sting lanced my neck, like a hypodermic needle, injecting into my veins that insatiable parasite that stayed on to live inside me, to devour my blood little by little. And look how things turn out: The day I contracted malaria was the same day I heard someone talk of her for the first time.”

He heard someone talk about Sayonara, a girl in La Catunga whom the men that visited those streets said they had fallen in love with, and whose fame had begun to spread by word of mouth even among those who didn’t know her, the thousands of seekers of destiny who walked along the roads of Magdalena after bread and work; after opportunities, as they themselves said to give a generic name to the future, to love, to their lucky star, the holy grail, the treasures of El Dorado, the philosopher’s stone, a mother’s compassion, a lover’s sheets, the roar of black gold. Sacramento says:

“I think we were looking blindly for something that was worthy of all that searching; something, finally, that deserved to be sought out and that at the moment of death would allow us to say, that’s what I lived for.”

It often turned out, due to a breath of spontaneous winds, that the object of the collective search would take a woman’s name, and then the chosen one would rapidly be converted into a legend, and her glory would extend everywhere the oil pipes ran. That happened with Sayonara, the slender girl. Sayonara, the novia, the lover, of everyone and no one, silent and dark: Each man who passed through Tora left the city dazzled by her. Whether it was true or just an empty boast, there was no man who didn’t pride himself on having been with her.

“It’s the simple things that we understand the least,” Sacramento acknowledges. “How was I to imagine at the time that my scraggly, wild girl, my sister on those endless imaginary journeys, was the Japanese goddess that every voice spoke to me of? Or had I imagined it in the fires of my youthful longing?”

“Sayonara,” Sacramento was heard to say one night when the heat nearly drove him mad, and the name refreshed him just by its repetition and it sounded like happiness. As the days passed he got to thinking that it was a talisman against the difficulties of life, and he began to tie himself to the memory of the woman, although it wasn’t his own exclusive memory, because after all he had never seen her, or at least that’s what he thought, but her fame was a patrimony diffused through those mountains and vast lands. Like the troubadour’s mysterious and anonymous Lady of Provence, Sayonara had become, in petrolero land, the inspiration of every man proud enough to call himself one. At least that was the reasoning that called Sacramento to his senses, while his heart busied itself, stubbornly, in the belief that the beautiful woman he dreamed of belonged to him alone, because the others bought and used her, but he would adore her forever. He committed the error of letting his guard down and allowing the delirium of that woman’s name to lodge in his bloodstream in the form of jealousy, which is as obstinate as malaria itself, and from then on he began to carry within him the two plagues, which embraced him like twin rivers of fever and fire, distinct yet confluent.

“That was the serious problem, that Sacramento was jealous of Sayonara even before he loved her,” sighs Todos los Santos.

But the first symptoms of Sacramento’s recently acquired double illness took months to incubate and manifest themselves, and they gave him respite from the putridness of the Río Opón’s quagmire. Together with Payanés, after having bought a new pair of shoes, he went to try his luck as a repairman on the oil pipeline that flowed into the Bahía of Cartagena, and then they joined the railway workers on the section of line that stretched between Papayal and Espíritu Santo. Wherever they went they heard a pained sighing, a sort of prayer intoned by dozens of lonely men to the young prostituta from Tora.