Laura Restrepo: The Dark Bride

Todos los Santos arranged for the girl to sleep on a straw mattress spread out beside her own bed. Before she lay down to sleep she turned off the light in the bedroom and checked to make sure that the perpetual candle was burning in its red glass holder beneath the picture of the Sagrado Corazón de Jesús. Just as she had always done and would keep on doing, she tells me, until the day she dies.

Colombia is known as the country of the Sacred Heart. He is our patron saint and in that capacity has tinged our collective spirit and our national history with the same romantic, tormented, and bloody condition. The only common element in all of the homes of the poor in Colombia — it was removed from the houses of the rich a few generations back — is the image of this Christ who looks you in the eyes with doglike resignation while he shows you his heart, which isn’t found inside his body as one would expect, but has been extracted and is held in its owner’s left hand, at chest level, beneath a carefully tended chestnut beard. But it’s not an abstract heart, rounded, in a pretty rose color and of a less than remote likeness to the original, as it appears in Valentine’s messages. The one our Christ displays is an impressive organ, throbbing, a proud crimson, with a stunningly realistic volume and design. A true butcher’s prize, with two disturbing attributes: From the top a flame is burning, while the middle is encircled by a crown of thorns that draws blood.

The girl couldn’t sleep a wink in that foreign, unfamiliar room filled with unknown smells. She uncovered herself, then covered up again, unable to find a comfortable position. She felt besieged by the presence of that kind and mutilated young man who never stopped looking at her from the wall, and on whose face the candle cast dancing shadows and reflections of bloodletting. In her own bed, Todos los Santos was uncomfortable with the heat of a fitful and choking sleep, until without warning she began to snore with a sudden bubbling of mucus only to then completely suspend breathing altogether, without releasing her breath inward or outward for an entire minute, her throat closed by a plug of still air, two minutes, three, until the girl was convinced she had died. Then it returned, like waves on the ocean, that rhythmic snoring…

“ Madrina, ” the girl dared to call out, “ madrina, that man scares me.”

“What man?” asked Todos los Santos, half asleep.

“The one with the beard.”

“That’s not a man, it’s Christ. Trust in him. Ask him to watch over your sleep.”

Trust in the enemy? She’d rather die. Maybe if she didn’t look at him… she covered her head with the pillow and closed her eyes, but she immediately guessed that Christ had stopped smiling and was making horrendous faces at her. Uncovering her eyes quickly, she tried several times to catch him in the act, but he was clever and never let her. He smiled at her, the hypocrite, and no sooner than she had closed her eyes, he began to threaten her again with evil faces.

“ Madrina, Christ is making faces at me.”

“Hush, child. Let me sleep.”

The girl put the pillow where her feet had been, turned on her mattress, and lay with her face toward the other wall, which had no portraits. But the palpitations of the candle reached even the far wall, wavering in slowly burning veils. Despite her struggles to stay alert, waves of sleep began to cloud her eyes. From time to time she turned quickly, to keep Christ under control, but he only looked at her with that melancholy smile and with his wounded heart in his hand.

“ Madrina, don’t you think it hurts?”

“Hurts?”

“Christ, don’t you think his heart hurts?”

Then Todos los Santos got up and, blowing out the candle, made Christ disappear. With him went the red shadows and the sad smiles, and at last, in the darkness of the calm room, the two women slept soundly.

The sun came up very early and began marking the days of a new existence for both of them. The girl began not only to lose her fear of Christ, but to approach him with a strange familiarity and an attempt at dialogue that to Todos los Santos seemed theatrical and excessive.

“You must pray, child, but not too much,” she recommended.

One day when she was cleaning the image of the bleeding Jesus with a feather duster, she found wedged between the canvas and the frame several small, strange lumps, like tiny cocoons but made of paper. She decided to unravel one and was half startled, half amazed to see that it was covered with a tight, microscopic writing that she decided to try to read with a magnifying glass. But she found no legitimate letters there, no known alphabet, just scribbling, elongated in some places, flat in others, but always with a lot of curlicues.

“Come here,” she called out to the girl. “Can you explain this to me?”

“They are messages that I write.”

“To whom?”

“To the man with the beard.”

“I’ve told you that’s Christ.”

“To Christ, then.”

“And what kind of writing is this?”

“One that he knows how to understand.”

“You never went to school?”

“No.”

“You don’t know how to write like other people?”

“No.”

“I’m going to start teaching you right now. Get a pencil and some paper.”

Many tense and fatiguing hours were dedicated to reading and writing lessons with the square-ruled notebook that Todos los Santos used to keep accounts, with an old chart they bought at the apothecary, with a number-two Mirado pencil, and with disastrous results. The girl looked around the room, she rocked nervously in her chair, she bit her fingernails and cuticles, she wouldn’t concentrate for anything in the world. She had no idea, it seemed, what Todos los Santos, who was clenching her teeth in order not to lose control and give her a whack, was saying.

“Just teach me how to work, madrina . I can’t waste any time.”

“All in due time, now settle down and read here: The dwarf im-itates the mon-key.”

“What dwarf?”

“Any dwarf, it doesn’t matter.”

Lunchtime came and the girl, who hadn’t read a single syllable, was still asking about the dwarf, so Todos los Santos put off the lesson until the next day at the same hour and shut herself up in the kitchen to calm her nerves by peeling potatoes and chopping vegetables.

Everything changed one unforgettable afternoon when the madrina was drinking mistela with her disciples Machuca and Cuatrocientos while they gossiped about a famous debt between two neighbors that had erupted in gunfire. The girl was nearby, sitting on the floor, entertaining herself with pencil and paper, without anyone paying her any attention. Until one of the women realized that if they said “bullet,” the girl would write “bullet” with large, clear, round letters; if they said “bank,” she wrote “bank”; if they said “greedy,” or “Ana” or “mandarin,” she wrote that too.

“What!?” exclaimed Todos los Santos, taking the paper in her hands. “This is incredible! Yesterday you didn’t know how to write and today you do…”

“Because yesterday I didn’t want to and today I do.”

Had Todos los Santos kept any of those invented, tight scribbles on little rolls of paper? I insinuate that perhaps the girl’s initial disinterest in conventional writing had to do with an unnecessary duplication.

“Maybe she didn’t need to learn, because in her own way she already knew…,” I say, then wonder whether I should have. I was the one who needed to learn: not to get on the wrong side of Todos los Santos.

“Don’t think I didn’t consider that,” she responds. “Instead of forcing her, I should have learned her way of writing so we could have sent messages to each other, or better yet, to Christ, because no one else would have understood us.”