Laura Restrepo - The Dark Bride

“And the girls?” I ask. “Matilde’s daughters? What happened to the girls?”

But the Mantillas know little of them, not even their names, and Wilfredo shrugs his shoulders, excusing his ignorance.

“They were very little,” the three justified themselves, “and they were all so alike that we never learned how to distinguish them.”

“But the girls?” I insist. “You must know something of them…”

In Ambalema they only knew that they kept living with their father for a while, very unkempt and on the verge of starvation, until the restaurant was closed, because after Matildita’s death there were no patrons, and the father brought from San Miguel Abajo, in the departmento of Antioquia, a white woman whom he married in church and according to law. That woman already had her own children who were also white and she didn’t want to have anything to do with the fruit of the previous cohabitation arrangement. I didn’t come here to take care of jungle children, she announced to her new husband, and Matildita’s daughters were turned over to God’s care.

“We never heard about them after that…”

I thank the Mantillas and Wilfredo for the kindness they have shown me with a basket of fruit and I say good-bye. I present myself at the Third Brigade as a journalist, ask for an interview with the commanding officer, General Omar Otoya, and I sit for a half hour in a windowless, air-conditioned waiting room, imagining that Matildita’s suffering soul must wander scorched and howling through this military base at night until the darkness is filled with the smell of fear, because the Heroes of Chimborazo, who are not afraid of death, are terrified of the vengeance of the dead against the living who mistreated them. Is that the flicker of an old anxiety I see in the alert eyes of these soldiers I watch coming and going as if nothing had happened, but who know that their rifles are useless against the ash that is settling in their lungs?

An officer takes me to General Otoya’s office. It is large and well ventilated, without a trace of torture or any reminder of horror, its doors open to a balcony overflowing with ferns.

“People’s imaginations are limitless,” says the general, who is tall and handsome and smells like cologne and looks like he just shaved with Gillette Platinum Plus, when I ask him about soldier Emiliano Monteverde and the circumstances of his death. “There is no burying alive here, nor has there ever been, no walling in or throat slashing, or anything of the sort. Cells like tombs? Don’t tell me that you allowed yourself to be duped by those horror movies.”

With the general’s permission I look out over the railing on the green balcony, straining my eyes in search of the nonexistent cell, and suffice it to say that I don’t see it anywhere.

The officer who led me a few minutes ago to the general’s office now accompanies me back toward the reception area, and as he is returning my identification documents he gives me a sly look.

“It wasn’t a disciplinary action, the thing with Emiliano Monteverde. There was a girl involved,” he says, when no one can hear us.

“What? Then you do know about it?”

“The only one who knows is my general, and you already heard him, nothing happened here.”

“But you just said…”

“Forget about what I said. You mentioned that you were in Tora before, right? Well, go back. Ask around there for a prostituta they call the Soldier’s Widow. Ask her.”

The Soldier’s Widow? It’s not a name that is easy to forget. And then there’s the coincidence that I have heard it before.

Heading downriver during my return trip to Tora, I wring my memory trying to identify who I heard mention the Soldier’s Widow for the first time. Todos los Santos, no, not Olguita either. Sacramento maybe? Or Fideo? No.

The river is so docile, so still in its course, that it seems philosophically feasible to be able to bathe twice in it. I can’t stop thinking about Sayonara’s mother, so close to those sorceresses who burn with inner heat, whose existence Mircea Eliade mentions, saying that they carry fire hidden in their genitals and that they use it to cook with. The mother, an Indian and a witch, the daughter, an Indian and a witch: One knew how to rub wood together to ignite the fire that feeds, the other, to rub the sex organs to ignite the fire of love.

An old man wearing a bright yellow shirt is rowing his chalupa in the opposite direction, propelling it forward with the strong strokes of a single oar, and I become absorbed in the brilliance of that yellow sparkling against the motionless river. Now I remember: It was Machuca, the educated puta , the learned reader and heretic of the seventh circle that proclaims the death of God, it was she who mentioned the Soldier’s Widow to me. I see her sitting behind her Olivetti Lettera 22 in a corner of the town hall in Tora, where she now works as a copier of notices, writings, and documents, taking puff after puff on her eternal cigarette without worrying about the ashes that fall, like bits of time, onto her blouse, her papers, her lap, anywhere except the tin ashtray. I also see her shoes sticking out from underneath the desk, wide and antiquated like Daisy Duck’s, her fingers stained with nicotine, her poorly embalmed pharaoh’s face, her crazy squirrel eyes, her enormous mouth that tells me shocking stories about the inhabitants of the former barrio of La Catunga, among which she mentions, only in passing and without emotion, the Soldier’s Widow. I think I asked her about that woman with an operatic name because I remember her assuring me that she wasn’t anyone worth the trouble of investigating and except for her nickname was a common, vulgar woman.

As soon as I reach Tora, before stopping by my hotel to leave my knapsack, I run to the town hall to look for Machuca; it’s five o’clock and luckily they still haven’t closed.

“Machuca,” I ask, “did you know the Soldier’s Widow? Does she still live in Tora? Do you know where I can find her?”

“Why are you so interested. The Soldier’s Widow came to La Catunga after the best times had passed and it had succumbed to the worst times. She never became a friend of ours.”

“Why not?”

“Out of embarrassment. She was a gloomy puta, a spoilsport, a wet blanket who was in the business by obligation and not by vocation. More candle-sucking and prayerful than a blind zealot; I think she would have liked to service her clients behind the altar so she wouldn’t have to lose sight of the Holy Child, who she had turned blue from asking so many things. For health, for money, for comfort for such a lonely woman, for this and for that, because she was unhappy with this life, that one, the Soldier’s Widow. She wasn’t anyone we would like, and you wouldn’t like her either if you got to know her. An inspired puta, touched by the muses, that was Todos los Santos. Oh, yes! I wish you could have seen her in her splendor; she had the strength of a tractor and the happiness of a pair of castanets. Such a joy for life! On the other hand, the poor Widow was always a spiritless, downhearted woman.

“Why did they call her the Soldier’s Widow?”

“It’s a long story.”

She arrived in La Catunga already in service and a veteran of the profession, with her hair dyed blond, an inconsolable air of abandonment, and dressed in the shroud of her own legend, according to which as a young woman she had been loved by a noble and gallant soldier who her brother, a sergeant in the same battalion, was pushing toward death to destroy their love.

The version of events that Machuca knows doesn’t contradict that of the Mantillas. On the contrary, it raises the volume and adds two glorious elements that fill it with meaning: passion and heroism. There was no variation in the other ingredients: the same dungeon, the same boy buried in it, the same vengeful, insulting sergeant, his racial disdain, and his abuse of authority. But this time there’s a woman, the sergeant’s sister, who is the soldier’s love. The differences in race and class are more notable and injurious because the recruit is the son of an Indian and a colonist, while the sergeant and his sister belong to an established, well-off family.