Laura Restrepo: The Dark Bride

When she limped onto the patio, Olguita, who had had polio, was surprised to see the scrawny novice that Todos los Santos had adopted, and thought that the madrina was losing her marbles, surely due to menopause.

“I’ve still got plenty of bleeding to do,” Todos los Santos said, and asked Olguita why she thought the student was so lacking.

“She’s a malnourished and wretched girl,” replied Olguita, “and you’re going to lose what’s left of your money trying to save her from anemia.”

“You don’t have an eye. When this girl becomes a woman all the men are going to love her. There won’t be one who can resist her. You’ll see; it’s just a question of applying some willpower and knowing how to wait.”

Todos los Santos and Sayonara were brought together by chance, but they were united by urgency. They needed each other, like a fish needs the cloud that will later become water, for obvious and complementary reasons. To prosper in the pursuit of survival, Todos los Santos had everything except youth, and youth was the only thing the girl wasn’t lacking.

“Work wasn’t so good for me anymore and I often went around fearing that old age would drag me to the verge of starvation, because it’s well known that no one can retire off of prostitution, if it’s exercised honestly. When I saw her come through the door of my house, I had a whiff of intuition and knew that it was me, thirty years earlier, stepping across the threshold at that moment. Patience and a willing spirit, I told myself, because we’re going to start all over again here, from the very beginning, as if the wheel were beginning to turn anew. Here comes love again with all its pains, which after everything is said and done are more tolerable than this nothingness that is bogging down my days. That’s what I thought. And, in all frankness, I also thought: God is sending me what I have been asking Him for, the fount of my subsistence in this last stretch of life.”

Todos los Santos served Sacramento a bit of lunch and dismissed him with a few coins.

“A few, no; seven coins exactly,” corrects Sacramento. “They were ten-centavo coins, which in those days bore the image of a large-nosed and plumed Indian on one side. They burned in my hand like hot oil because they were the payment I received for selling an innocent into a life of vice. I felt myself falling and I thought it was my own profile, with a crown of feathers and a Judas nose, stamped onto the coins. No, señora, I told her, you don’t have to give me anything, but she insisted with the justification that she was paying for the ride in my cart. It was the only money I had earned that morning and there was very little work available in the afternoons, so I speculated that if she was giving them to me for my honest work it was valid compensation, and that my conscience had no reason to be afraid.”

Sacramento went out into the street without daring to look at the girl, and the heat of an afternoon drowned in its own light fell upon him with the full weight of guilt. He didn’t see a soul around. The barrio had taken refuge in the dark, cooler interior of the houses for a siesta, and he, who had no house, consoled himself thinking that he was holding in his hand triple what he needed to ask for a cold beer in the bar across the street. He lost the impulse at the mere idea of abandoning the shade to cross the colorless fringe where the sun beat mercilessly and he sat down right there, on the ground, leaning against the door that had just closed behind him, his eyes fixed on the cool drops that were condensing on the bottle of beer the bartender was going to take out of the refrigerator when he gave her his money. But he kept his ears tuned to what might be happening inside Todos los Santos’s house, where an ominous silence was vibrating, which he interpreted as a signal that the girl who wanted to be a puta had already been swallowed up by calamity.

The sting of regret attacked again and Sacramento thought he heard the voice of his conscience ordering him to renounce the wicked money. Terrified that he might be discovered in his secret act, like a dog hiding a bone, he scraped the earth with both hands until he had opened a hole and in it he buried the seven coins, one after the other. Once he had covered the hole he breathed with relief, now rid of the evidence of the crime; he squatted very still to slow the beating of his heart and hummed a popular song that lulled him to sleep. He tells me that he dreamed about the cold beer that another man, less punctilious than he, would be drinking at the bar across the way.

Meanwhile, in the house, alone now with the girl, Todos los Santos proceeded to roll up her sleeves, put on rubber gloves, and tie her hair back with a cord: the necessary preparation for a first-class skirmish.

“Well, then, let’s begin your education,” she announced in solemn initiation.

To tame the girl and give her some luster she had to start by pulling the hunger out of her, little by little, in a gradual, calculated nutritional plan that would take months, beginning with potato broth with parsley, followed by a mixture of oatmeal or pearl barley, and evolving gradually to green beans, lentils, and lima beans, because a creature that has learned to feed herself on air, like a bromeliad, can’t be terrorized with sausage and tripe stew unless she’s been carefully conditioned; otherwise she’ll burst.

Todos los Santos served the girl some broth in a pewter cup and set it on the table with a piece of bread. Without waiting for it to cool or using a spoon, the girl guzzled it down and as soon as the señora had turned her back, she hid the bread in the pocket of her dress.

“I’m done,” she announced. “I want more.”

“Please, madrina , may I have another serving?” enunciated Todos los Santos in a didactic tone, inviting the proper formula.

“If you want another serving, go ahead, but give me some more.”

Since a thorough bath was the next step to be imposed, Todos los Santos took the girl to the patio and stripped her: She was a frog, a cricket, an incredibly young kitten, dark and savage, her nose blocked with dried mucus and giving off a dense smell of smoke and loneliness. Cruz soap in hand, the señora attacked the lice crawling over the girl’s head, and then, with suds and scouring pad, she started ridding the young body of the obstinate shell of ancient dirt that she wore like armor, until finally she appeared, dazed and blue, in the defenselessness of her tender skin. She chattered with cold as if she had just been born, alert and glistening as she dripped cool water like the threads of stars that appear at night in the reflection of a pool. There wasn’t much of an inventory that could be made: a tumult of hair sprouting from her head, two skinny arms, two dark, elongated legs, two tiny hints of breasts, and a minimal sweetness of moss, pleated and secret, under her arms and between her legs.

“She was a bundle of scared chicken bones, anxious to find a connection to the world,” says Todos los Santos. “I dried her with a towel, put a large cotton nightgown on her, and told her not to be afraid. ‘I am going to treat you well,’ I promised her.”

“This dress is too big and ugly,” protested the girl. “Give me a tight, shiny one, because I don’t look like a puta in this one.”

“What are you going to show off, tadpole?” retorted Todos los Santos. “Wait until you get a little flesh and then you can squeeze it into tight clothing.”

The sun’s edge had advanced, striking full upon the front of the house and falling mercilessly on the sleeping ball that was Sacramento, who awoke suffocated by the discomfort of a sweaty body and a dry mouth. If she wants to be a puta , let her, he thought, the devil with guilty consciences. He burrowed in the earth again and recovered his coins, but only six; the seventh had disappeared, swallowed by the dust. With his money in his pocket he crossed the street with determination and entered the bar.