Laura Restrepo - The Dark Bride

“First I saw her, then I recognized her and then I suddenly realized what she was doing…”

Sayonara was extending her delicate fingers with their almond-shaped nails through the holes in the wire fence to touch the thick hand of a worker who was none other than Payanés: separated by the fence and the presence of the armed forces but joined together by a shared look, dissolved in the sweetness of their encounter, hypnotized and dormant in the timeless moment of their contact. Their index fingers sought each other with pleasure and confidence, unaware that the mere touch would bring rebirth and give new impulse to their story, unaware that salvation would be won if the connection was made — fingers inter-twined — or disaster if not.

“Sparks, mi reina, ” sighs Olguita. “Between his index finger and hers sparks and stars emanated to illuminate the sky.”

“I only had to see how they looked at each other to know everything,” Sacramento tells me. “I felt a sharp pain in my gut and a great desire to fall dead; then came a nausea, like a sour mouthful, the quiet taste of death. What was life for them was death for me, and every time I tell it I kill myself again as if I am reliving it. The world was paralyzed for me and it became night in the middle of the day, as if the images had fled and all that remained around me was a nothingness frozen in black and white, while I burned over hot coals. Jealousy? No, it was jealousy that had burned me earlier, but now it was worse, because as I told you it was pure death, but a wrenching one, not a gentle one. With the passing of the hours my panic dimmed and I faded away to ashes, and the only thing that remained alive in me was the memory of unbearable pain. I was there but I no longer had bones, or flesh, or eyes, or hair: I was a mass of dazed pain that walked without knowing where.”

Sacramento didn’t notice when the troops violently pulled the prostitutas away from the fence as the women tried to hang on to the wire with hands like hooks. Nor does he remember the many hours of being blocked off without communication from outside, which prevented them from receiving food and forced them to eat iguanas, chigüiros, cats, and other domesticated animals; nor did he know when Lino el Titi, demonstrating the power of his old charisma and newly recovered leadership, said that any worker who damaged a machine would pay with his life.

“Faced with this last measure, Caranchas and the men from maintenance confronted him with his error, warning him that he would have to settle accounts if the company brought in scabs and reactivated production, thus thwarting the strike,” don Honorio informs me. “But Lino el Titi, being a petrolero , the son of a petrolero , and now the father of three petrolero sons, could not tolerate the idea of damaging a means of production which, he believed, would give substance to the families of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren tomorrow. He was a straight man, Lino el Titi, incapable of comprehending that others played crookedly.”

Besieged by hunger and the psychological war being waged by General del Valle, who kept airplanes flying low over the camp, and resolved to continue the strike clandestinely in Tora, the workers, through their strike committee, agreed to abandon the installations without committing industrial sabotage in exchange for the troop’s agreement to allow them to leave peacefully, without aggression, firings, or reprisals. Despite his great anguish, Sacramento does remember the exodus of men passing in single file through a double cordon of defiant troops, the unbearable tenseness, the sensation of expecting a shot in the neck at any moment, the certainty that one of the soldiers aiming at them would shoot and unleash a massacre.

That was when Lino el Titi, surrounded by the strike committee and a group of bodyguards, appeared out of nowhere and approached Sacramento, distinguishing him as someone in the leader’s full confidence.

“You know Machuca, right?” he asked Sacramento. “When you get to Tora look for her and tell her to dig out the mimeograph machine, oil it, and fill it with ink, because the strike bulletin is going to circulate again. You will be in charge of it. The committee members will send you the content, we’ll figure out how, and you will be responsible for seeing that a thousand copies are printed daily. Machuca knows how to type, how to use the mimeograph machine, and how to do things quietly. Is this your friend?” he asked, referring to Payanés.

“That’s Payanés,” responded Sacramento, spitting out the word “Payanés” as if he were saying “Judas,” but Lino el Titi didn’t notice the subtlety.

“Well, then, you, Payanés, you’ll be in charge of distribution, which must be handled in secret,” he ordered. “You’ll give the bulletins to the neighborhood leaders and they will give them to the block coordinators, so that they can be circulated to everyone. That way at least eight or ten people should read each copy. Is that understood?”

“ Sí , señor,” said Payanés, puffed up with pride, barely able to believe that he had been honored with such a responsibility. “Yes, sir, don’t worry, we will do everything exactly as you say, but I have one question, señor: Who are the neighborhood leaders and the block coordinators?”

“They know who they are, they know from the last strike, and they will come forward ready to do their part as soon as they see the first bulletin passing from hand to hand. The bulletin is the heart of the strike,” Lino el Titi informed Payanés, before he disappeared majestically, surrounded by his guards. “As long as the bulletin goes out, the strike will remain alive.”

“Payanés urged me to identify myself to the troops as a North American functionary, so they would release me as was my right and I could spare myself a lot of anxiety,” Frank Brasco tells me, “but I wasn’t eager to do that. First out of anger at my people, who had given me up for dead, and then out of solidarity with the Colombians, because I felt closer to them and because their claims were based on reason and basic worker rights. So I covered my head with a straw hat and hid my mouth and nose under a handkerchief, as I saw others doing, and I left the camp pressed against and hidden by the mass of workers.”

Then all at once what had been expected occurred: the burst of betrayal from the soldiers’ rifles and the workers’ response with bottles of sulfuric acid and phenol, with the tragic result — which could only be tallied three days later — of eleven dead workers and three burned soldiers. It’s a good thing don Honorio describes this to me, because Sacramento, who was lost in the unconsciousness of his immense sorrow, doesn’t remember it clearly; he didn’t even hear the shots, he says, because inside him the voices of desperation were shouting even louder.

“We made history,” don Honorio assures me, and tears trickle down the furrows on the left side of his face.

I have in my hands a copy of the sixth strike bulletin, printed in faded purple letters stiff from the rigor mortis that attacks paper over the years. This same piece of paper must have passed through Payanés’s hands fresh from the mimeograph machine, its ink still damp, and he must have given it to Sayonara, his accomplice, his beloved, his efficient and unconditional helper in the risky task of clandestine printing and distribution, at a moment that must have made them feel like protagonists not only in their own personal drama but also in the history of their nation, which for an instant sat them in its lap.

“The cocktail of collective enthusiasm, solidarity, and fear was so explosive,” Frank Brasco tells me in Vermont, “that you could say that we were all in love with everyone, that we didn’t need to drink to get drunk and that we didn’t need physical contact to make love.”