Laura Restrepo - The Dark Bride

“It wasn’t her fault,” says Fideo protectively. “So many people swore that they loved her that she believed it. Starting with you, doña Todos los Santos. You were the first one to confuse her.”

“I did what I could to get her to open her eyes,” Todos los Santos responds in self-defense. “One day I heard her say that the mockingbird sang so sweetly and so incessantly because it sang for her. Ay, my conceited child, I reprimanded her. Don’t aspire to be a gold coin and don’t have the impudence of wanting the world to love you; understand once and for all that putas are the other side of the tapestry, the rough side of life, and that it is the dark half of the moon that shines on us. Us? We are backroom tenants. They venerate us if they see us glow in the background and in the dark, but they squash us if we attempt to emerge into the light of day. Don’t forget, girl, the great truth of amor de café: we putas are always at war.”

“At war against who, madrina ?” asked Sayonara, acting as if she didn’t know.

“Against everyone, girl. Against everyone.”

The madrina warned her, having guessed the harsh reality that the future was sure to bring: Girl, things aren’t like that. But a pretty girl doesn’t have to pay any mind and Sayonara kept strolling through life on a red carpet.

Things aren’t like that, but today I suspect that Todos los Santos, the wise old woman, the holy celestine, wasn’t right. That for once she was wrong because her young disciple, in the splendid egoism of her beauty, did come to be the very center of that whole universe, the privileged object of all love.

“Forgive me for saying this, Todos los Santos,” I venture, “but in that specific topic, in that precise moment, it wasn’t you, but she, who was right.”

Hired by the mayor, the gynecologist Antonio María Flórez had arrived in town with his wife, Albita Lucía, and their four children almost a year after the fiery riot that had reduced the clinic to rubble. When he saw the disastrous state of the facilities that were supposed to serve as his offices, instead of wasting time seeking official assistance or submitting bureaucratic claims, he set about the task of reconstructing the place brick by brick with his own hands to expedite his plans. He had decided to eliminate the coercive mechanism of the health card — which had already been abolished de facto by the riled-up women — and offer instead free, voluntary medical attention for the prostitutas . He had come to Tora to replace the previous charlatans in white lab coats, driven out of town by a ferocious collective vengeance, which one day took the form of a cruel joke and the following day became a threat or a serious hint, poisoning each minute of their lives until they were run off.

When he first arrived, Dr. Antonio María was the object of similar treatment. The girls, convinced that he too had come to make a fortune building up his business of disrespect and extortion, welcomed him the very first night by fouling the door to his house with the fetid corpse of a hanged cat, but that didn’t frighten him off, nor did the campaign of vicious rumors that spread through the pueblo, saying he was a faggot, a squealer, an atheist, and a pimp. They circulated odious lies, that his feet stank, that he used to beat his mother mercilessly, and that he was so miserly that his children were on the verge of starvation. But Dr. Antonio María, a good man who was unscathed by the slander, continued diligently with his modest work as an amateur carpenter and lent a deaf ear to all the foolish babble. He was so tidy in appearance and in character that no one seriously believed the rumors about his reeking feet; since he turned out to be an orphan, the one about hitting his mother was spoiled; he admitted his atheism with such pride that no one dared to reproach him for it; the generous aromas that emanated from his wife’s kitchen when she cooked made people doubt the deprivation of his children; and so forth. One after another the false accusations were eroded away without his even having to deny them.

But the anger of the women of La Catunga, goaded by the fresh memory of the disgrace they had suffered, refused to give up the sweetness of their revenge. The doctor had finished the basic construction stage and was beginning to install the windows in his clinic. One morning señora Albita Lucía was on her way to the main plaza, when from a high window the dirty contents of a chamber pot were emptied on her head. The affront was excessive even for the hardened patience of Dr. Antonio María, who would surely not have thought twice about it if it had fallen on him. But it was as if someone had punched him, this attack against the curly red hair of his wife, an abundantly freckled and vivacious woman with white, perfumed skin whom he adored as the sun of his days. So he made the instant, irrevocable decision to leave within twenty-four hours the town that had greeted them with such hostility.

They were going to leave on the noon train the following day. The doctor spent a night traumatized by the remaining bitterness of the undertaking that he would be abandoning before he even began it, and in the morning, while his family finished packing their recently unpacked trunks, he went to stand in the frame where the door to his clinic would have been installed, wearing his doctor’s coat and with his stethoscope around his neck.

“Spread the word that at eleven-thirty I will hold my first and last consultations,” he said to some passersby, and he didn’t have to wait more than a quarter of an hour for patients to begin to appear.

It was then that Antonio María Flórez saw what would make him decide not to leave and would cause him to stay in Tora for the next ten consecutive years, until he became almost on a par with Santa Catalina, a saintly benefactor of the barrio of La Catunga: some unmistakable red pustules soaked in infectious pus and a few small, soft tumors, with gummy elasticity, on the thighs of three of the five women he examined.

“It is treponema pallidum ,” he declared. “This town is going to be consumed by syphilis.”

The weight of that diagnosis reduced the seriousness of the incident with the chamber pot and the other injuries in the doctor’s eyes, and it caused him to reflect on the fact that after all it is enough to speak words of forgiveness for it to be granted.

“I forgive you all,” he said loudly, and raised his arms to the sky as he hurried to his house along streets that the fierce midday sun had left without a single soul.

He convinced his wife of the need to unpack once again, he enrolled his children in the only lay school in the pueblo, and from then on he dedicated all of his time to helping and consoling the women infected with the illness, advising the healthy ones on how to avoid infection and combating venereal disease with the tenacity of a fanatic, like that which Savonarola would have launched against the carnal splendor of the Renaissance.

Soon he realized that the elimination of pressure and blackmail had resulted in the surprising consequence that more than half of the women refused to visit the gynecologist’s office.

“Why, Doctor,” I asked Antonio Maria Flórez, when I had the opportunity to meet him. “How do you explain the fact that so many wouldn’t come?”

“The majority out of fatalism, because they were convinced that no one dies before his time. They believed in those kinds of things, in deep-rooted, commonly held tenets, like fate is up to God, or when it’s someone’s turn it’s his turn. I arrived in Tora when the prostitutas were still queens and señoras of position, but that didn’t mean that deep down they didn’t have a strong awareness of living in sin. And since they took for granted that sin implies punishment, they saw venereal infection as a debt they didn’t have to get rid of, because in some way it was deserved. They dealt with the subject of infection like Russian roulette: They went to bed with this man or that one like someone who puts a revolver to his temple, and they pulled the trigger to see if they were spared or got a bullet. They couldn’t grasp the idea that God could forgive them. Once I heard Fandango say, when she found out that her best friend had contracted syphilis, that now it was time to pay for a whole life of being in disharmony with heaven.”