Laura Restrepo - The Dark Bride

“You better kill yourself,” said Lino el Titi, “before you let him escape or let anyone harm him. There are two orders, both equally important: Don’t let him escape and don’t let him die. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“Do you have a friend you trust who can accompany you?”

“Yes, Payanés. He’s been my traveling partner for months now.”

“Are you sure he won’t betray you for any reason?”

“Sure enough.” Sacramento began to feel again the burning memory of Sayonara’s hair being tied to his best friend’s neck.

“Then take him and have him help you watch the gringo. Nobody else should know where you are.”

Caranchas took Sacramento and Payanés to a small toolshed tacked onto the power plant. Dark and humid, it was where they were hiding Brasco, who awaited word on his fate in sorry condition. He was the color of a corpse, this man who was normally pale, his blue eyes injected with blood and his hands tied behind his back, his whole suffering body stretched out, feet on an oil drum and neck encircled by a rope hanging from one of the ceiling beams.

“If they try to rescue you by force,” the three men guarding him warned, “we’ll give your drum a good kick and it’s good-bye, míster . Good-bye forever.”

“So, they had Tell-me-why in the gallows,” Sacramento explains to me, “and concerning his fate, nothing had been written yet.”

How did the events unravel from that moment on, how was the committee divided between the moderates from operations and the radicals from maintenance, how did the situation get out of control for the workers: these are things that Sacramento and Payanés, because of their being locked up with the candidate for hanging in that suffocating shed, didn’t learn about until several days afterward.

“Caranchas had said that we were to wait there without taking our eyes off míster until he came with instructions. But hours passed and it seemed as though everyone had forgotten about us. From far off came shouts from the crowd, but it was just noise and we couldn’t make out any of the words: It was impossible to tell if they were the voices of friends or enemies. So Payanés and I waited blindly without hearing anything, locked up in that hot place, resentful and mutually distrustful because of the jealousy between us, without knowing whether the armed forces had entered or not, with our gringo standing on the drum and measuring the increasing voltage of the threats against him by the three men from maintenance, who were getting drunk off a bottle of guarapo añejo that was also souring their mood and fueling their arrogance.”

Every now and then, one would leave the hiding place to try to find out something, then return with fragmented and contradictory news. The troops already have us surrounded; a lot of workers are fleeing the camp through the rear into the jungle; we have already declared a strike indefinitely; the management declared the strike illegal; Lino el Titi and a commission are negotiating the release of míster Brasco; the gringos said that they won’t negotiate and that we can do whatever we want with Brasco; Lino el Titi is not in charge anymore; Mono Nieves has been wounded and now Caranchas is commanding the revolt; Caranchas says everything’s screwed up and that the only order is to loot and destroy the camp.

“You don’t know what it’s like to have a rope around your neck for four hours, without understanding what’s going on outside and fearing that at any minute they’ll kick the drum out from under you and that you’ll just hang there, like a sausage in the cupboard. My body became numb from holding the same position for such a long time, while my head, sticking out from the other side of the rope as if it weren’t mine, was spinning a thousand revolutions per minute. Fortunately, I trusted Payanés. I knew him well because we shared a fondness for skinny Emilia, the camp’s oldest and most prized piece of machinery, and on several occasions he had joined me during the periodic repairs that had to be made on her. Sacramento, however, I was seeing for the first time, but I sized up his character and something told me that although he was just a kid he could also be trusted. As for the trio from maintenance, I was dead, but I figured that as long as Payanés and the kid stayed with me, my neck had some chance of being spared from the noose. There was, however, a sort of rivalry between those two that worried me. It was as if they felt uncomfortable with each other.”

“Even then the tension was noticeable?” I ask Brasco.

“Yes, it was noticeable; don’t ask me how I knew, but it was evident. At that point I didn’t know that a woman was the cause, so I imagined all sorts of things, like they had different ideas about what to do with me. Believe me, when you are in the gallows you get very paranoid. .. Had I suspected that the trouble was over a woman, I would have been a little calmer.”

At some point Brasco told them he really needed to urinate.

“That, you’re not going to be able to do,” responded one of the drunks after studying him for a minute. “We can’t untie your hands and we’re not in the mood to grab hold of your thing. Everyone assembled here is too macho for that. Ask for something else, water, a cigarette, anything, and we’ll be happy to help you out, but there’s no solution for that other little problem.”

“It’s urgent,” insisted Frank Brasco. “Don’t make me go through the shame of wetting my pants. Payanés, please, untie my hands.”

“I will untie them,” decided Payanés, and he also released his neck from the noose. “But, míster Brasco, don’t you try to escape.”

“It’s a deal,” promised Brasco. Once free he attended to his needs behind the door, then asked permission to rest a little. “I’ve been standing for too long,” he said, as he sat down on the ground, and his guardians didn’t say a word.

“Okay, back to your position, míster . If Caranchas comes in here and finds us like this, cuddling on the floor like brothers taking a siesta, he’ll shoot us all,” said Payanés after a good while, and Brasco heeded him.

As if a premonition had driven Payanés, barely two seconds later Caranchas returned. He was soaked with sweat, gasping as if he had been running, and frowning as if he had a toothache.

“Your compatriots have abandoned you, míster Questions,” Caranchas blurted out. “They say they don’t negotiate or compromise, and they won’t be blackmailed on account of your kidnapping. They say you could never be trusted and that you’re probably our accomplice. They also say that for some time they’ve been warning you and despite that you got mixed up in this and dug your grave with your own hands.”

“That’s not true; I don’t believe you, Caranchas. I don’t believe they’re saying that.”

“If it’s not true, then why don’t they withdraw the troops? There they are, three hundred yards away, aiming their guns at us from the fence, and any minute now they’re going to come in and seize the camp. You’re not worth shit to us, míster Tell-me-why,” shouted Caranchas, more disillusioned than angry. “We were wrong about you. Anyway, we’re not letting the troops in, even if we have to blow up the camp to keep them out.”

“The man spoke with such disenchantment,” Brasco tells me, the snow glistening on his shovel in the Vermont air as he throws it aside, “I would have sworn that the next thing he was going to do was kick the oil drum out from under me to put an end to the comedy of errors. But he didn’t do it. He simply left and I just stood there, with the rope around my neck, suddenly very tired and horribly confused.”