Laura Restrepo - The Dark Bride

For only three weeks Sacramento was able to enjoy this occupational happiness, which for him meant, above all else, the possibility of getting closer to Sayonara. The illness, which had already infected him with its germ and dogged his steps, then fell upon him with all of its fury. The first manifestation was a dull, nagging pain, which made him dizzy and which he attributed to the eight hours a day that he spent focused on the bit.

“My thoughts were growing more and more confused and my love for Sayonara more tormented, and I blamed it on the noise of the machinery. But even when I had moved away from the drilling equipment, its roar pursued me; I heard it all night and its vibration rattled me to the bone.

“Later I lost my appetite and even when I’d had nothing to eat I vomited yellow, watery bile, for which I also found a justification, this time in the hardened balls of cold rice with lard that were passed around at lunchtime; they were so compact and inedible that we would use them as soccer balls.”

Then he was overtaken by a waxy paleness and a pain in his temples, and a rising fever made its appearance. Sacramento, incapable of working and declared contagious by the medical staff, was moved to the camp’s neat white hospital, where he came to share space and destinies with other lucky souls who were cured in fifteen or twenty days, and also with others less fortunate who were being consumed by mountain leprosy, malaria, intestinal infection, or tuberculosis and who represented nothing more to the company than financial loss.

Forgotten in that antiseptic corner of industrial paradise, Sacramento defended himself from the invading parasite with all of his available energy, and the ferocity of the internal combat began to produce extremely high fevers, combined with shivering and a trembling of his bones, which creaked in self-defense.

“I’m turning black, hermano, ” he said to a nurse called Demetrio.

“It’s the melancholic fluids that are spreading through your body,” explained Demetrio, who knew nothing of diplomacy when it came time to explain to his patients the symptoms of their illnesses.

“The black fluids, you mean?”

“Yes. They flow, little by little, blackening the liver, the spleen, the brain, the red blood cells. Well, just about everything; they turn everything black.”

“ Hermano, I’m burning alive,” Sacramento complained to his friend Payanés, who came to visit whenever he could. “I’m burning with fever and with love and I’m roasting over a low fire. Don’t I look black to you?”

“Black, no; just a little yellow. But it’ll go away. Sooner or later everybody gets over it.”

Despite Payanés’s forced words of comfort, Sacramento felt weaker and weaker, more diminished, while a microscopic but audacious enemy was growing and multiplying inside him, assuming the frightening shapes of rings, clubs, and bunches of grapes.

Twice a day apathetic nurses went by the beds of those they called convalescents, among whom — with who knows what criteria — Sacramento had been placed. They performed their duties on the run, without paying much attention to anyone or asking any questions, distributing the only available medicine: quinine for fevers, aspirin for pain, brown mixture for infections, and white mixture for unknown ills.

“Don’t get too excited about the medicine, it’s more toxic than the illness is,” Demetrio would say to Sacramento as he gave him his ration of quinine. “Look at these pills, they’re pink and round like women. And hurtful like women.”

Like a bad actor, Sacramento would perform the same brief, equivocal scene every morning. He would stand up on his trembling legs, splash water on his face, halfheartedly run a comb through his tangled hair, and announce that he was cured, that he wanted to be taken to skinny Emilia because he was ready to go back to work.

“Tell me where there’s oil,” he would rant, “and that’s where I’ll drill the hole.”

The next minute, exhausted by the futile exertion, he would collapse back onto his bed, surrendering to the fever, renouncing his existence in this world and withdrawing into his delirious passion for Sayonara. He would spend hours immobile with his eyes rolled back, searching for her, pleading and whispering incoherently into her ear, his whole body lifeless, feeling the sweat cooling on his skin and turning into a fine film of salt, telling him that everything was useless, that his dreams had already been shattered forever.

“I started to think that letting myself die from love was the only course, and that the sooner it happened the better.”

Resigned to the other side of hibernation, receptive now to the idea of nothingness, he noticed with annoyance how without his consent his body reinitiated the war against the parasite; how his army of white blood cells remobilized, infuriating once more the fevers and the deterioration, stirring up again the demands of life, which in spite of his wishes refused to surrender without attempting one last battle.

On his first free Friday, Payanés traveled to La Catunga but he was unable to get into the Dancing Miramar, which was overflowing with people, not to mention the line two blocks long formed by those waiting for the opportunity to enter. He settled for a few drinks in a third-rate bar in the company of a young thing called Molly Flan. He returned to the camp on Sunday night and the first thing he did was to run to the hospital to bring news of Sayonara to his bedridden friend.

“I didn’t get to see her, hermano, but I heard what they were saying about her. That she’s the most sought-after woman in Tora and that she’s not a woman but a panther.”

“Were you with her?”

“I told you I wasn’t, she was too much in demand. They say she only goes with gringos, engineers, and administrative personnel. They say she has no interest in lowly laborers.”

“Then it’s true that she exists…” Spikes of fever turned a black spot in front of Sacramento’s watery eyes into a cat, then a swamp, a woman, storm clouds, then a cat again.

“Tell me more,” he asked Payanés, who noted his friend’s hopeless thinness and the sickly color of his skin, wavering between yellow and green.

“I should go, Sacramento. I have to get some sleep before I go back to work tomorrow.”

“Tell me once more and then you can go.”

“What do you want me to tell you about?”

“The panther, tell me about the panther.”

“What panther?”

“That woman, Sayonara; didn’t you say she looks like a panther?”

“If I were you I would aim a little lower so you don’t get disappointed. I met a woman they call Molly Flan, you can’t imagine how bewitching her eyes are…”

“Hush, my head aches. Tell me about Sayonara.”

“Again?”

“One last time.”

“I already told you what they say about her, that she’s dark and inspires fear. She smells like incense and she hypnotizes when she dances, like a snake.”

The black spot in front of Sacramento’s eyes changed shapes again and turned into a hairy snake, and then a panther without eyes or a tail, and then into a shapeless oil spot with golden highlights, a rapturous spot shaped with a waist and long, elastic legs, two legs that twisted like ribbons around his throat, choking and asphyxiating him with thirst.

“Give me some water, hermano .”

“They say the camp’s water is polluted and spreads sickness.”

“Give me some water anyway. When are you going to see her again?”

“Who?”

“That woman…”

“Next Friday I’ll take you with me so you can see her yourself. You’ll be fine…”

“Don’t talk shit, Payanés; I’m going to die.”