Laura Restrepo - The Dark Bride

“This is the most beautiful number, the one that belongs to my lucky star,” Payanés said to Sacramento. “My mother died on the twenty-ninth, a blessed day.”

“And the other numbers you were assigned, one, seven, and zero, do they also mean something?”

“Of course, man, zero is the universe, the symbol of eternity, and besides it’s round like an asshole.”

“And the one and the seven?”

“They’re extra; they don’t represent anything.”

“I would have liked for my card to have had a five. Five is my favorite number.”

“You don’t have any reason to complain, yours has the number twenty-nine also, the anniversary of my blessed mother.”

“But I didn’t even know her…”

“You can be sure that she would have loved you like a son.”

“Oh, well then, if that’s so…,” said Sacramento, half consoled.

To have a contract at any of the camps, and particularly at 9, 22, and 26, the ones that produced the greatest number of barrels, was like knowing the password to heaven. There was no greater honor imaginable for a man, no better guarantee, and most of all it meant having found a port in the storm. “Now we are salaried employees,” they repeated over and over, pronouncing the words with greater pride than if they had been named kings of Rome. In the middle of that vast, drifting humanity, to become a petrolero meant salvation.

Their joy was so great at finally having been awarded their cards and the salary that qualified them as members of the working class, as part of the heroic union of petroleros, they didn’t even realize that they didn’t know what a cuñero was, much less a cuñero ’s helper.

“Look for skinny Emilia and ask for Abelino Robles, the gang leader. You just obey the orders he gives you, even if he tells you to put panties on a mermaid.”

They assured and reassured him that of course, he could count on them, and they sailed off filled with enthusiasm, and without understanding much about exactly where they were going or what they would be doing.

“Can you tell me who skinny Emilia is? Where I can find her?” Sacramento asked a nearby worker with a kind face.

“Did you hear that?” the worker said to the others around him. “This guy’s dying to meet Emilia.”

“You don’t want to fuck her because she’ll rip your dick off,” someone shouted, laughing, as the group walked away.

Since skinny Emilia turned out not to be skinny or even a woman, but one of the drilling towers in Camp 26, Sacramento and Payanés reddened with embarrassment at their naiveté and decided that from then on they would do things on their own, opening their eyes wide and biting their tongues before asking anything. Emilia, the oldest and most venerated tower in the oil territory — a 1912 Gardner Denver — stood solidly in the center of the camp like a ritual obelisk. Pachydermic and anachronistic but also imposing and all-powerful, Emilia was brutal in the merciless obsession with which she twisted her diamond bit to tear into the earth’s heart, and famous not only for having worked day and night for decades without ever failing but also for her implacable temperament. It was said that if you handled her with intelligence and in full command of your five senses she treated you well, but the clumsy and the careless she made pay with their lives, as had already happened on two occasions, first with a pipe capper who she let fall fifty feet like a dove without wings, then, years later, a welder who she cut in two with the fulminating whip of a high-tension wire that suddenly broke without warning.

“Look at her carefully,” Abelino Robles, the veteran cuñero, advised them. “Not only does she spin furiously, but the smallest part of her weighs as much as a man. All it takes is for you to drop a wrench on your foot to put you out of commission permanently, not to mention putting a hand where it doesn’t belong.”

“This Emilia; I’ve never seen such an incredible beast,” said Payanés, impressed, looking at her deeply and lovingly as if she were a pagan temple, delicately caressing the bluntness of her iron beams and unconsciously making a pledge of fidelity that would be honored without fail from that first encounter until the day death parted them.

“So, Payanés is dead?” I ask.

“Emilia is dead.”

The alliance between the two of them was sealed that very night, when Payanés was approached by a wandering peddler who professed some skill in the art of tattooing and offered him the painless inscription of the name of the woman he loved anywhere on his body.

“Put ‘Emilia’ here, on my chest. And put a little drawing beside it.”

“How about a dagger or a swallow?”

“No, no daggers, and no swallows either.”

“What about a rose?”

“That’s it, a rose; a rose with a thorn and a drop of blood.”

“The rose didn’t turn out very well, it looked more like a carnation,” Sacramento would say later, when he saw the drawing engraved forever in blue and red ink on his friend’s left pectoral. “The drop does look very realistic. But the ‘Emilia’… the ‘Emilia,’ I don’t know, Payanés, it seems risky. If they change your position you won’t be able to take off your shirt even to take a bath.”

“They’re not going to change my position,” asserted Payanés, before he fell asleep in his hammock. “I’m going to be the best cuñero in the whole country, you’ll see.”

For three days — the three days of apprenticeship — the two young men carried out the humble task of being the cuñero ’s helpers, which consisted of clearing the mud off the platform as they watched, not missing a thing, Abelino Robles and another seasoned worker execute the job of petrolero with the precision of watchmakers and the mental concentration of lion tamers and with Emilia’s monumental and furious gears seemingly calmed by their touch.

“Now it’s your turn,” announced Abelino Robles at the beginning of the fourth day.

“Let’s go!” shouted Payanés animatedly to Sacramento. “Let’s put the panties on this mermaid.”

The drilling pipe, which needed to penetrate the earth to a depth of three thousand feet, would grow longer as the cuñeros, from a low platform, screwed on more and more lengths of fifty-foot pipe. In order to do this, Sacramento would have to grip the new piece of pipe, which was hanging vertically through the center of the tower, with a precision wrench known as the scorpion, while Payanés capped the string of buried pipes with a 130-pound steel crown fitted with special bolts. Each time the bit wore out they had to remove the fitted pipes and disassemble them, reversing the fitting process.

“You’re going to work as a team and each of you is going to depend on the other,” the veteran fitter advised them. “Sacramento, if you slip with the scorpion, the pipe will sever your friend’s hands; Payanés, if you don’t fit the band well, the pipes will slide and the scorpion will spin around, kick Sacramento, and mess him up.”

From the beginning Payanés showed natural ability, and even a certain happiness and ease of execution, and he proudly displayed on his naked torso, bathed in sweat, the throbbing petrolero ’s rose, with its sharp thorn and drop of blood. Meanwhile, Sacramento seemed afraid and uncertain, gripped with nervous tension, as if counting every minute of every hour remaining before their shift ended without accident.

“Don’t worry, hermano, I won’t let you down,” he shouted to Payanés above the deafening racket every now and then, as if to assure himself that what he was saying was true.

After eight hours of uninterrupted exertion, the whistle blew and the pair abandoned skinny Emilia to head for the barracks, arm in arm, exhausted, muddy from head to toe, and as giddy as a couple of boys who had just won a soccer match.