Laura Restrepo - The Dark Bride

“Only the truth.”

“Then tell me, míster Brasco, when the airplanes fly over us, what happens with the caca and pipí that the people inside make? Does it fall on our heads?”

“I don’t know. I’ve always wondered the same thing.”

“You see? Why should I ask you if you don’t know anything. Just keep talking about the snow. What did you tell me it was made of?”

“What do you think?”

“Flour or sand. Or rice. Who knows, it must be some very white powder.”

Frank Brasco clears the path that leads to his cabin, throwing to the side shovelfuls of flour, or sand, or rice, and meanwhile he describes to me Sayonara’s animated black eyes, which keep searching, without seeing all the green shining uselessly around her, because she preferred to lose herself in white-painted dreams.

“Did you ever consider, señor Brasco, the possibility of staying in Tora to live?” I ask.

“When I lived there I had the sensation of belonging in an unavoidable way to this world here, and now that I live here it’s the opposite, I feel that I have never felt as at home as I did there.”

He never slept with her, he confesses to me, and not because of lack of desire, but because he arrived in La Catunga during the so-called rice strike, initiated by the workers of Campo 26, which broke out in a labor and civil action in Tora, and during which the entire population declared solidarity with the demands of the petroleros . The prostitutas struck too, joining the striking ranks by making the decision not to work until the strike succeeded, with the result that for nearly twenty days and nights they didn’t go to bed for money, and if they made love, it was only out of love.

“I’ll talk about the strike later, if you want, because it’s a story that is well worth the trouble of telling. But now I want to concentrate on the memory of Sayonara, without interference. I want you to know that her body and mine never touched, but other things did, which were probably our souls — they caressed each other at will, accompanied each other and rocked to the same rhythm, like a boat on an ocean swell. And those were days so charged with energy and enthusiasm, because of the tremendous explosion of hope, of fear and solidarity that the strike awakened in all of us, that it seemed like you were making love without ever needing to.”

“But there is something I don’t understand, señor Brasco, and allow me to advance a single question about the subject of the strike. Which side were you on, the American boss’s or the Colombian workers’?”

“The Colombian workers’ side, of course. Why do you think my stay in Colombia ended so quickly? Since Tropical Oil couldn’t prove charges of my collaboration with the enemy, the letter they sent asking for my resignation alluded to ‘inconvenient relationships’ with Colombian prostitutes, expressly prohibited to American employees, they said, to avoid infection with syphilis and other venereal diseases. It was an allusion to her, to Sayonara, because they had seen us together during the strike. That was the apparent motive of my dismissal, but things were as I am telling you: I never had physical contact with her, or any other woman. Now let me tell you about the last night I spent in your country, at Todos los Santos’s house.”

“I’m listening.”

“There were about fifteen people sleeping there with me while outside the threat continued, because the company and the government, which had broken the strike by force, were merciless and continued to pursue the guilty.”

In one of the rooms, on mattresses laid out on the floor, slept Sacramento, Frank Brasco, and the other men, and the women were scattered around the rest of the house: Sayonara, Todos los Santos, Machuca, Analía, and a few others. Brasco tells me that despite the tension and the overpopulation, there was harmony in the sleeping house, and that the warmth of close bodies staved off any danger. Every now and then a cough, a somnambulant sigh, a creaking of floorboards gave testimony to the affinity of the human flock when it finds itself gathered, pacified, protected by a roof and a door that isolate it from the rest of the world. In his sleeplessness, Brasco happily realized how much it pleased him to feel like a member of a clan, linked by unspoken affections to those who lay next to him on this side of the wall, inside the protecting and hermetic circle that is a family and a home.

“The only feeling of well-being that can compare with the one I felt that night in the midst of so much company,” he tells me, “is this cozy solitude in which I now live.”

Early the next morning, before four o’clock, he had to leave overland for Bogotá, where he would take an airplane back to his homeland, so he got up while it was still dark, among the clamor of crickets and other nocturnal animals he couldn’t identify, and he began to urinate, trying not to make any noise that would disturb the others. But Sayonara was already up and she approached him, barefoot, with sleep tangled in her hair and her body wrapped in a sheet to protect her from the cool dawn air.

“That’s right, better urinate now, míster ,” she ordered him, laughing. “That way you won’t spray us from the air.”

“I will never forget you,” he promised her.

“You’re never going to forget me? Listen to the things that occur to this gringo! Don’t speak useless words, míster Brasco. Memories melt, like snowflakes.”

One elusive morning, bathed in the perplexing light of an eclipse, beautiful Claire, the ethereal traveler, left this world into which she had perhaps never finished arriving. Her passing through Tora was sad and fleeting, like the shadow of someone who is present without really being there and who is not aware of the laws of gravity. Her death, however, fell upon La Catunga with the full weight of the calamity. It took everyone by surprise, leaving the barrio suspended between horror and shock and bringing to the fore how little we natives know of the foreigners who live among us. It doesn’t matter that ten years, or twenty, pass: The outsider is still a stranger — in good measure suspicious — who has just arrived. Of Claire one could think, in accordance with her pale beauty and the fleeting lines of her character, that she rose in body and soul to heaven in the ecstasy of an assumption, like the Virgin Mary. But it wasn’t thus; hers was an earthly and brutal death.

“One foul day Claire threw herself into the path of the train,” Todos los Santos tells me. “Don’t be alarmed, it was a common means of death among the prostitutas of Tora. Many of them killed themselves by the train out of despair, or loneliness, or indifference. Sometimes simply out of weariness or pure drunkenness. Never before three in the morning or after five, and all at the same spot: the corner they call Armería del Ferrocarril, in the poorer part of the barrio Hueso Blanco.”

Now there’s a gas station located there, and a car repair shop and a stand that sells newspapers, snacks, and drinks, just like on any other corner on the planet. But Todos los Santos assures me that if you watch carefully, you can see people still making the sign of the cross as they pass that corner, because they know they are stepping on unholy ground: the site of immolation.

According to tradition, Claire’s remains were gathered up in a cart and taken to the place where she had lived, located in the miserable Calle de los Veinte Cuartos — the Street of Twenty Rooms. Todos los Santos was summoned to the deceased’s room, one of the twenty that was squeezed along that alley saturated with the smell of excrement and rancid fruit. She was to carry out the compassionate act of arranging the cadaver’s parts as lifelike as possible inside the coffin, officiate over the ceremony of closing the eyelids, and, to the degree it was possible, cross the arms over the chest, wrap the body in a shroud, and cover the head with a veil of silk lace.