Laura Restrepo: The Dark Bride

A poor barrio, like any other. Except for the colored lightbulbs, now extinguished and invisible, that hung from the facades as the only sign of the difference, the great, unfathomable difference. As soon as the girl tried to take a step forward, the brutal current that struck violently at her legs made her realize, once and for all, that La Catunga was enclosed within an imaginary cordon that burned like the lash of a whip.

“Once inside you will never leave,” she heard Sacramento’s voice warning, and for an instant her resolved heart knew doubt.

“Where is the Dancing Miramar?” she asked in glassy syllables that tried to hide her twinges of panic.

“At the end of that passageway, against the Troco’s fence.”

“Take me to the Dancing Miramar.”

“I can’t, the cart won’t fit in there. Besides, it’s too early; no café opens until five in the afternoon.”

“Then I’ll wait at the door,” she said, once again in conformity with the design of her destiny. She picked up the suitcase and the two cardboard boxes with excessive energy for the fragile twig that was her body and began walking, without paying or thanking the cart man, toward that territory marked with red steel, where it was fitting that everything outside was execrable, where life revealed itself in reverse and love fought against God’s mandates.

“It’s nice to say thank you!” shouted Sacramento.

“You’re welcome,” she answered, brusquely turning her head back to reveal her face for the first time, and Sacramento felt the dark and ancient gaze of Asiatic eyes fall upon him. The boldness with which her eyebrows had been plucked until they disappeared and were replaced by a pencil line, and one or another scar left by the acne on her cheeks, made him think that she might not be as young as she had first seemed. One of the girl’s cardboard boxes fell to the ground and she started kicking it up the street as Sacramento, sitting on his cart, watched her and wondered what that skinny, ill-mannered girl had that would make a man like him, who already had his cédula of citizenship, work for free and then stand rooted there, admiring the decisiveness and aplomb with which she kicked the box, as if the world were tiny compared to the force of her will.

“Wait, niña !” he shouted. “If you’re going to stay here you’re going to need a madrina . A veteran of the trade to teach and protect you.”

“I don’t know any.”

“Well, I do. Come,” he said, springing to his feet. “I’m going to take you to a friend of mine. If you don’t work out as a puta, maybe she’ll keep you to help with the pigs and other chores.”

Sacramento’s friend was none other than this matron, Todos los Santos, who is now drinking her mistela with birdlike sips, sucking on her cigar like a Jewish man from Miami Beach, and delving into the past to reveal to me the particulars of a love story that is both bitter and luminous, like all love stories. The old woman tries to study me, but her eyes reflect the smoke from her Cigalia, clouding her gaze and condensing it into a milky opaqueness, and I now realize that Todos los Santos has cataracts and can’t see me. She knows by heart the corner of the world that shelters her and she moves about it as if she can see, which makes me the only thing around her that she doesn’t know by sight. So I move closer to her, speak right into her ear; she raises her hand, knotted with arthritis, and feels my face with the soft pats of an old dove that can no longer fly.

“Ah, sí. Muy bien, muy bien,” she approves, satisfied at making certain that my nose isn’t missing and that I only have two eyes.

“Mira, madre,” says Sacramento, “the sun is setting.”

“Yes, I see it, I see it!” she says enthusiastically and plunges her white eyes into the rosy air.

“The sky is turning red with specks of gold,” he tells her.

“With specks of gold, you say? How pretty, how pretty! And as impressive and red as it is today, I’ll bet there’s a broad violet edge.”

“Well, yes, more or less. If you really look at it, you can see a little violet.”

“I knew it! And are there any birds flying across?”

“Four, five, six, seven… seven ducks flying north to south.”

“Ay!” she sighs. “How I love the sunset.”

I have been told that Todos los Santos was conceived by a cook and a landowner from Antioquia one Palm Sunday while the wife and children were waving dry palm leaves in solemn mass. Because of her beauty and the European whiteness of the skin she inherited from her father, she became a prostitute, following the path drawn from the instant of her conception.

“There was no place for me either in my father’s house or in Medellín society. Bastard male children became peons on the haciendas and that took care of the problem,” she tells me. “But with females it was more complicated. There were illegitimate daughters of landowners, like me, and then others that were called daughters of a slip who were the product of a well-bred girl’s sin. The daughters of a slip had it worse, hidden in the cupboards of the big house or behind curtains, while we illegitimate girls grew up loose in the countryside, like little animals. When we were able to use our brains, some of us were buried alive with the cloistered nuns until adolescence, when a few accepted the habit and the rest did what I did, escaped the convent and landed in a bordello.”

Clandestine paths, sometimes sweet and sometimes bitter, took her from love to love and from street to street until she reached the heavily brothel-ridden city of Tora, where she was so admired and desired in her youth and maturity that she was able to know, for moments, material well-being and even the glitter of fame and fortune. Without a hint of avarice, her beauty burned with a sublime, cunning fire, and guided by a scrupulous sense of pride and decorum, the moment she saw the first ugly signs of old age she moved into a period of discretionary retirement, which she didn’t hesitate to interrupt, from time to time, each time her soul demanded satisfaction and her insides, heat. She was feared and recognized as a pioneer and founder of the barrio of La Catunga: the defender of the girls’ rights against the Troco, the Tropical Oil Company, and its deputy, the Colombian government; the efficient celestina, the instructor of young novices; now close to blindness, to her centenary, and to the most impeccable poverty, she has been elevated to the category of sage and holy mother.

Today, the morning undulates innocent and warm and there is no trace of evil in this clear sky that Todos los Santos can’t see but can guess, as she also guesses the pansies, the caracuchos and the cayenos that explode in reds, violets, and tongues of yellow fire. She says that more than hearing the ruckus the parrot is making in his cage, and the rainwater dripping into the cistern, she is longing for them. And the striated green of the croton leaves? She says yes, she sees it, that she keeps it very much alive and flowering in her mind’s eye, just like each and every one of her memories.

She tells me that on that afternoon, when Sacramento appeared at her house with the aspiring prostituta, just one look at the wild and disheveled creature standing in front of her, half challenging and half imploring, was enough for her to recognize in the girl that singular mixture of helplessness and arrogance that fueled male desire better than any aphrodisiac, and since she knew from years of experience it was a virtue that was hard to find, she said that it was all right, she could stay, that she was going to put the girl to the test to see if she would work out.