Laura Restrepo - The Dark Bride

“That’s called gray hair.”

“Well, he has gray hair then.”

“Why would he have gray hair, when he’s so young?”

“He has suffered, you see.”

“Some women focus on the look in a man’s eyes,” Olguita tells me. “Others like men with an elegant style. There are those who complain if men are knock-kneed or flat-assed, or have tangled eyebrows or stooped shoulders. Many girls want to see them in leather shoes or boots and turn their noses up at cloth shoes, because they are a sure sign of poverty. Any woman appreciates a powerful male member and most prefer a sweetly drawn smile with healthy teeth. Once I heard that you shouldn’t sleep with men with only one ear, because if you get pregnant most likely you’ll give birth to a deaf child. And so on. But Sayonara fell in love with a chest, and she said that in Payanés’s chest she had found her happiness and her reason for living.”

Like gusts of air in an empty house, the breaths of many strange men blew on her neck. Her life was tangled up in that sleepy haze of foreign bodies that passed through her bed, one after another, in the procession of their indifference. Her bedroom was conquered territory, the camp of any army, and her white sheet was the flag of her purchased love. Her naked body accepted with indolence the rubbing of skins that were odorless, or that smelled of distant places, and on which neither her touch nor her eyes wanted to linger. Until suddenly, without warning, came the contact with the skin that somehow awakened her, giving her the touch that her fingertips, alert at last, demanded, and in the skin of that stranger she felt the exact temperature that reminded her of happiness.

“My man tastes like moss, like a manger, like the Christ Child,” announced Sayonara. “He tastes like Christmas.”

“Hush, girl, that’s sinful talk!”

“He smells delicious, like a forest perfume with a good smell, and he also smells like a horse. I like that about him, that he has a strong horse smell. The smell of horse sweat, which is the same as the smell of desire.”

“Girl, such things you say!”

“Do you know what a petrolero smells like after ten hours of forced labor under this strong sun?” Todos los Santos asks me. “No, you can’t imagine. He smells like pure race, mi reina . He smells like the whole human race.”

“That depends on the color of his skin,” adds Olguita. “The whitest ones, the ones with more European blood, are the ones who smell the worst.”

“Cover me with your skin,” Sayonara asked Payanés, and he spread over her and clothed her and made himself more hers than her own skin, and he blanketed her with his chest, that foreign chest, which in a simple, miraculous instant made itself so familiar. And so comforting. A chest like a roof that shields and protects, and there, outside, let the world end, let it rain sparks and let God do whatever he chooses.

Olguita, the hopeless romantic, tells me tales and I don’t know whether they’re true or imaginary. She tells me, for example, that Payanés slept holding Sayonara with the yearning of an orphan that she knew how to calm for a while, and that his sleep lasted only the second it would take for him to relive that memory the following day, the same, eternal second that it would take for his eyelids to close and then to open again.

“Is this how long a stranger’s love lasts?” Sayonara asked, watching him leave. “Is there a love more intense and aloof? Is there another possible form of love?”

“A lot of poetry, a lot of poetry,” groans Todos los Santos as she reads this. “I don’t see anyone around here who is willing to tell the hard truth, which is that skin that is too familiar is no great gift, first because it starts turning gray and then little by little moves toward invisibility, old and worn like a shawl that is used every day, until finally, now intimately known, it becomes as unfamiliar as the leather in your next-door neighbor’s shoes: just skin, any old skin. But you all don’t listen to me and you keep on weaving your own versions, so it just doesn’t seem like anyone around here is interested in the truth.”

CRIMINAL HANDS BURN LA COPA ROTA was the headline that appeared one day, after the forced departure of don Enrique, among the items in the Vanguardia Petrolera , which circulated daily in Tora. It was never proved who did it, but according to reports the fire happened at seven o’clock one morning in August when there were no clients in the place. Awakened by asphyxiating smoke, Fideo jumped out of bed and ran, tripping over people because several women were sleeping on the floor, and seconds later they were all seen fleeing as the expelling archangel saw Eve, naked and barefoot and shouting obscenities. They managed to safely escape the scorching flames, and a while later, although more choked by the smoke, so did the owner of the establishment, the bar boy, and the cat. But the hut, whose straw roof had caught fire first, was engulfed by the dry summer wind that whipped up the flames and reduced it to a pile of ashes, with a half drum enthroned in the center: the one that had served as the toilet, and the only object spared for memories.

You might be thinking that this is the third or fourth time that fire has crept into this story to reduce reality to nothing. It doesn’t seem accidental to me. As a Colombian, I know that I am delineating a world in perpetual combustion, always on the verge of definitive collapse, a world that despite everything manages, only God knows how, to hang on with fingernails and teeth, blazing in its final, reckless flashes as if there were no tomorrow, and yet another dawn soon fills the sky and here below the delirium gains new energy, scatological, impossible, and the new day travels along a thread of anguish toward a too predictable end, announced by the din of men and women banging on their empty pots with spoons.

And yet at midnight, against all odds, our peculiar apocalypse is once again postponed. Maybe because of that we are so dead, and at the same time so alive: because each sunset annihilates us, and the dawn redeems us.

“Where did Fideo end up, since after the fire there was no place for her?”

“Everything that goes up comes back down again,” Todos los Santos tells me, “and sometimes, very seldom, but it has happened, what goes down comes back up.”

Many of the regular clients of the Dancing Miramar and the other prestigious clubs, especially the younger ones, had allowed themselves to be attracted by the temptation of coarse love and had begun to frequent La Copa Rota, where they gathered to watch Fideo shining in her sickly light, embodying the hoarsest voice of the underground, the lowest of the lowly depths, humanity stripped of its skin, split open and displayed for sale, like meat on a carcass.

The barbaric separation from don Enrique broke the soul she didn’t have, and if she was a wild beast before, afterward she became a cruel wild beast who, when she couldn’t bite others, chewed and destroyed her own paws. To see her expose herself, naked, talking filth and biting flesh, made men horny and ignited their virility, so they riled her up and gave her alcohol, gave her alcohol and riled her up, and she went along with it because she could no longer find herself except in the open wound where her heart had been.

“Ay, don Enrique!” sighed Fideo from her invalid’s hammock.

The more turbulent the aura surrounding her, the stronger the aroma she expelled, and the deeper she fell, the higher her prestige grew. Until Negra Florecida, owner of the Dancing Miramar, resenting the loss of regular clients and eager to regain them, decided to give them a little of the medicine they were asking for, and she took advantage of the fire at La Copa Rota to offer Fideo work at her establishment. Even today it is rumored in Tora that behind that misfortune was a match struck by order of Negra Florecida herself.