Laura Restrepo - The Dark Bride

Everything seemed to indicate at the time of the rice strike, which would go on to mark a before and an after in the history of Tora and its people, that Sayonara was a girl of fragile love and momentary enthusiasms, incapable of settling her volatile heart for very long on any single soul. She had something about her then that was elusive, an incapacity for committing, a difficulty in seeing into the future or fixing her eyes on what was really in front of her.

Her refusal to open herself to others was especially evident in her relationships with men, close to her body and far from her interest, and this prompted frequent scolding from Todos los Santos, who reprimanded her inability to put her heart into the task of serving her clients.

“You are with them but you don’t seem to notice them,” the older woman would say to her. “You don’t listen to them, you don’t pamper them. You treat them like ghosts. I don’t know how long your bad habit of going around self-absorbed will last. It’s as if the rest of us are invisible.”

Once, señor Manrique, who never stopped flattering Sayonara with requests for her time and demonstrations of his senile love, had asked her to iron his dark-blue suit, and in a moment of carelessness she had burned it. Another time she inconsiderately dismissed an engineer from the Troco, who had waited an entire afternoon without moving an inch just for the opportunity to be with her, with the excuse that she was tired. She publicly berated a rich landowner, who suffered greatly because of his fondness for her, for robbing land from others at gunpoint. “Go home, don Tomasito, or I’ll tell your wife about you,” she once said, ridiculing a married man who had approached her surreptitiously.

“You forget that you’re a working woman, not a spoiled girl, and you have an obligation to lend your services with courtesy and according to professional standards,” Todos los Santos said to her, perhaps without realizing that it was precisely that rude and inconsiderate way of offering them her beauty that fired men up and drove them to fall in love with her.

But as I have been told, it wasn’t an attitude toward men specifically but toward the world in general. Some have described her to me as egotistical, but egotism doesn’t fit with the tenacity with which she committed herself to her work on behalf of her sisters, not allowing herself to rest until she had rescued them one by one from abandonment. Which doesn’t mean that when she had them by her side once again, she stayed close to them and helped them with their daily affairs. Far from acting as a mother to Ana, Juana, Susana, and Chuza, from the very first day Sayonara left that role up to Todos los Santos, and what’s more, in their presence she became one more little girl — always the younger sister with the heartrending memory of her big brother? — and just like the others she fought over silly matters, she did bad things behind Todos los Santos’s back, she allied herself with one in opposition to the rest, she made them all cry equally.

Todos los Santos was not in agreement with this division of labor and always resented that Sayonara had left her with the hard work of administering authority over those creatures that were frequently unmanageable, especially in the first days, when they were recently arrived and, due to their touching timidity and defenselessness, irritated her with habits like hiding food under their beds, burying foreign objects in the patio, and, the most inconvenient of all, raising their skirts and defecating in any corner as if they were animals.

Sayonara was always closer to little Chuza than to the other sisters, and she would take the child with her to the washing rocks at the river, to the market, to the Patria theater, to visit friends, perhaps because the child’s muteness made her the ideal companion for an older sister who didn’t have ears for anything but her own internal voices. Little Chuza, in turn, worshiped Sayonara as one should only do with the saints in heaven. She wouldn’t lose sight of her for an instant; she would clown around and do somersaults to get Sayonara’s attention. Enraptured, she would watch her older sister as she brushed her hair, or dressed, even when she shouted in fits of anger, or sang with joy, or was quiet and absent. Little Chuza lived to idolize her sister, and lacking words, she would cover her mouth with both hands, trembling with admiration.

Those who knew her when she first came to La Catunga say that Sayonara was very personable as a young girl, but they complain of the evanescent disposition she later developed. Once, an epidemic of cholera spread through the region, and the air, reverberating with microbes, filtered threateningly through the windows. Alarmed, Todos los Santos temporarily shut down the business and closed her house to outsiders to prevent the contagion from reaching the children, whom she forbade to drink water that hadn’t been boiled or to eat raw fruit or vegetables, caramels, or any other food that wasn’t prepared at home. Despite the precautions, Susana showed signs of having contracted the illness, a fever so high it made her glisten in her bed and gave her a looseness of the bowels that wasn’t helped with the traditional extract of corona-de-Cristo, nor with Dr. Antonio María’s new pharmaceutical prescriptions. In an emergency operation, Tana took Ana, Juana, and Chuza to her house in order to move them away from the source of infection, and Todos los Santos stayed home with Olguita and Sayonara to watch over the sick child, who in addition to the previously mentioned maladies was racked by a series of vomiting spells that doubled her over, nearly pulling her heart through her mouth, and made them fear dehydration. While the two older women wore themselves out in the kitchen with poultices and medicinal soups, they asked Sayonara to take a rag and clean the floor of the room, soiled with vomit, and when they returned they found her there, paralyzed, with the rag in her hand and looking at the smelly mess without having lifted a finger.

“What’s the matter with you, señoritinga -who-steps-so-delicately? Are you repulsed by your sister’s vomit?” Todos los Santos fumed. “Give me the rag, I’ll clean it up.”

“I’m not repulsed, madrina ,” Sayonara answered without batting an eye and handing over the rag, “it’s just that I’m noticing a strange thing. Have you noticed that whenever someone vomits, they vomit carrots? Just like this, chopped into little pieces, even though they haven’t been eating them…”

“Your sister is dying on us and you sit there philosophizing,” barked Todos los Santos.

Susana’s illness turned out not to be cholera but a bout of food poisoning due to overly sterile conditions and a lack of street germs, and today, so many years after the danger has passed, Todos los Santos laughs as she describes to me Sayonara’s impertinence.

“But I assure you at that moment we were not amused,” she clarifies. “We almost killed her for going around, like she always did, contemplating her navel while the rest of us were breaking our backs to keep the world from crashing down on top of us.”

Did some secret call pierce her armor to resonate within young Sayonara? Did she demonstrate attachment to anything? An object, a photograph, anything, maybe a stuffed animal?

“With gifts Sayonara was like a little child,” Todos los Santos tells me, “before they were even unwrapped she had already forgotten about them. She never demanded anything for herself, not even her share of the money she earned. She gave it to me without counting it and I distributed it in this manner: a quarter for household urgencies, another quarter for basic needs, a little for our enjoyment, and the rest I would deposit in a savings account in her name. When I asked her to look, even just out of curiosity, at how much she had put away, foreseeing the day she might have to touch that money, she would reply yawning: Ay, madrina, don’t talk to me about numbers, they get all mixed up in my head and give me a headache.”