Laura Restrepo - The Dark Bride

“Come on,” she said. “You have to eat and you have to live even though others have died.”

“It would be a sin to eat this creature, cooked so strangely.”

“Stop saying silly things.”

They went into the underbrush and undressed. Payanés made love eagerly and at a certain moment even with happiness, but without recovering in that ordinary episode the strange splendor of burning waters that had made him tremble earlier on the river. On the other hand, Sayonara’s voice and gaze sweetened as if she were a little girl again, or were able to be one for the first time, and she nestled into the refuge of that embrace, seeking warmth and rest. Looking for love, perhaps? Olguita assures me that it was so, that from that very first time Payanés’s serenity had consoled her, his comforting words calmed her and his self-assurance anchored her.

“Those two, Sayonara and Payanés, were for us the authentic incarnation of the legend of the puta and the petrolero . If you ask me what the best moment in the history of La Catunga was, I would tell you that it was when they first met. Others would tell you their relationship was rife with problems, that it wasn’t perfect, and this that and the other. I don’t pay them any attention. For me love should be rough and hard, just as theirs was.”

“Is Emilia your girlfriend?” asked Sayonara, running her finger along the vivid lines of the tattoo on his chest.

“No,” he smiled. “She’s just the drilling tower where I work. We call her skinny Emilia.”

“I’m happy to hear that,” said Sayonara with unfounded relief, still unaware that here was a man who was married to his work.

“I’m a cuñero, you know? I think that with time I can become the fastest cuñero in Colombia,” he told her, and he released his hold on her to talk about his work.

“Will you stay with me tonight?” Sayonara interrupted him.

“I can’t,” he replied, without even thinking about it. “I have to get back to camp today because I have to start work at dawn.”

“When are you coming back to Tora?”

“The last Friday of next month, God willing.”

“Will you come see me?”

“Okay. But you have to leave that whole day for me. You have to swear that for that one day there won’t be any other men.”

“That’s how it went,” Olguita told me. “They were apart from the group and we couldn’t see them, because everyone’s privacy is respected, but also because they were hidden behind some patavacales , which abound there. Patavacal? The things you ask, all unimportant details. But I will tell you what you want to know; a patavacal is a tangle of prickly bushes that have a leaf in the shape of a cow’s hoof, which leaves a print in the shape of a heart. I was saying that they were away from the rest of us and hidden, but that wasn’t surprising, since it’s normal with couples in love. You look for a half-hidden flat spot, throw a blanket on the ground, and there, that’s it, you do your business. Then you go with your partner, or sometimes alone, to swim in the river and come out again as if nothing happened. I tell you that we didn’t see Payanés and Sayonara, but we knew what was going on between them, and I could read from Todos los Santos’s worried look that she was afraid the girl was going to get foolish with Sacramento’s friend and forget about the rest of the group. Later we saw them swimming naked, she slender and dark and he powerful and cinnamon-colored, both standing waist-deep in that water that wavered between lilac and mauve, and even with our view hindered by the distance, it was easy to read on their faces that they were in love. Dusk was falling, the hour when the birds’ singing ceases and the river’s breathing quiets, and as we learned later, it was then that they made their promise. The promise that was the most serious vow possible according to the laws of amor de café . They sealed a promise of fidelity for a single day each month, whenever he would come to visit from his camp. Payanés and Sayonara swore the fidelity of husband and wife for the last Friday of every month of the year, and it is well known that in these parts a promise is sacred.”

“Agreed?” he asked, pressing against him the one who from now on, by sworn promise, would be a little more his than any other man’s, including Sacramento, and he felt his heart begin to beat again at the threshold of visions of the future: He saw the water light up again, the air shimmer with phosphorescence, and her hair burn gold like the crown worn by the Virgen de Guadalupe and formed by the day’s final rays as they escaped the night in the blue liquid of her hair.

“Agreed.”

“If someday you leave Tora…,” he ventured.

“I’m not leaving Tora.”

“You never know where all this war could drive you. If you leave Tora, I mean, and you settle in any other corner, just wait for our date, then walk in a straight line until you reach the Magdalena and I will be waiting there by the shore.”

“This river is very long,” she pointed out. “It crosses the whole country…”

“You just look for the river, I’ll know where to look for you.”

“Later,” Olguita continues, “as they were dressing and the rest of us moved the party back onto the champán for the return trip, came the part with the memento. In that too they acted according to custom, because amor de café doesn’t recognize commitments that don’t involve mementos. Other people sometimes call them amulets or tokens. And notice this detail, the male always wears it, never the female, unless the promise is constant and total, which also occurs. Otherwise no, because she has to continue working, you see? And no man likes to find a trace of the previous one.”

With a small knife, Payanés cut a long wisp of her hair, braided it, wrapped it several times with hemp fibers, and tied it off, forming a necklace, and with childlike solemnity and the attitude of an altar boy he quickly blessed it, then kissed it and secured it around his neck.

“Tell me your real name,” said Payanés.

“You already know it, Sayonara.”

“That’s just a nickname.”

“I’ve already forgotten the real one.”

“Come on, tell me. Just me.”

“I can’t. If my father finds out the life I’ve chosen, he’ll come and kill me.”

“All right, then.”

It was already too late for Payanés to catch the truck back to the camp, so Sayonara accompanied him and waited for him to catch the train, which was much slower, at that fateful stop they call Armería del Ferrocarril, which is always swarming with diminutive angels of sorrow that remind one of flies.

“This is where my friend Claire said good-bye forever,” she tried to tell him through the window at the last minute, but the train had already started to move.

“Se sentaban con recato,” don Alonso Olmeda told me last night — a veteran of the Troco who frequented La Catunga in Sayonara’s time and knew and respected the mujeres de la vida .

They sat with modesty, don Alonso had said of the prostitutas of those days, and his delicate observation took me by surprise, it hit me like a peculiar clue for deciphering that world, one with which this book should be in harmony and which forced me to rethink things I had written earlier. For example, “her flesh overflowed the low neckline of the blue satinette dress.” But they sat con recato . A curious and archaic word, recato . I heard my grandmother use it often and then after she was gone, gradually less and less, as if it alluded to an extinct virtue. Recato: a magical term when it refers, as from don Alonso’s mouth, to a puta . From the Latin recaptare —to hide what is visible — it seems to refer to a secret world that avoids exhibition and which is, significantly, contrasted with the Latin prostituere , to debase, put before the eyes, expose.