Laura Restrepo - The Dark Bride

“As a result of the virulence of the strike,” don Honorio Laguna explains to me, “the company management had begun to reconsider its position. They realized that to have rootless men piled up in barracks with a hammock and a single change of clothes as their only belongings and with a puta as their only love, or in other words with everything to gain and nothing to lose, was to be confronted by bitter enemies that were impossible to manage. On the other hand, a man with a house, a wife, and children, which sizable burden the company helped him to support, would think twice before risking his job to join the fight. At least that’s what the Tropical Oil Company decided: that it was time to modernize its structure to better control the untamed personnel that it kept caged up in the petrolero camps.”

“Sacramento knew that only by setting up a home far from La Catunga would he be able to separate Sayonara from prostitution,” Machuca tells me. “That’s why he ran to sign up on the list. And also to get back at Payanés: An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, you betrayed me in matters of love, so I will betray you in matters of work. It was clear that he did it for her and only for her, but that wasn’t a valid excuse for the others.”

Because it turned out that with the help of scabs and through sentimental weakness of the workers in not damaging the equipment to make it unusable, the company was able to partially resume operations in Campo 26, giving the coup de grâce to a workers’ movement that it had already weakened through violence.

“We workers hadn’t counted on the eighty survivors of the killing spree at Orito, who had arrived in Tora two weeks before the strike, looking for a petrolero ’s salary,” says don Honorio; “or the forty-some families made homeless by the flooding of the Río Samaná; or the group of recent arrivals from Urumita, Guajira, who offered themselves for work; or the one hundred sixty Pipatón Indians recently expelled from their ancestral lands by the Troco itself in its project to expand operations; the displaced from who knew where, the one hundred twenty-seven from somewhere else, the thousands of unemployed who proved to be more than willing to accept any job without imposing conditions.”

“Not to mention the Sacramentos who betrayed us out of anger,” comes the poison-filled voice of Todos los Santos.

“Don’t judge, Todos los Santos,” responds Olga, and for the first time since I have met her I detect harshness in her voice. “No man knows another’s thirst.”

“One thing has to be cleared up,” announces Machuca, “which is that Sacramento was never a rat. He didn’t sneak in to work behind the strikers’ backs to help break them and benefit from the situation. That never even occurred to him. His only error was to put his name on the list to receive a house, but given the circumstances, that was an error people considered criminal.”

The strike bulletin, which appeared every day come hell or high water, had become the visible testimony of the fact that the strikers didn’t give in and continued the struggle in hiding. Dodging threats, beatings, and arrest, they managed to circulate fourteen bulletins, but when the fifteenth was in the process of being created, General Valle and his men descended upon Adela Lightfoot’s house, arresting her and the band of musicians, seizing the mimeograph machine, and destroying pots and pans, utensils, and papers — saying it was “ guerrillero material” they had found inside. They didn’t lay a hand on Sayonara or Payanés because the two managed to escape across the roof and then later to hide in separate locations. That day, for the first time since the strike had been declared, people kept waiting for the bulletin and interpreted it as a clear signal that things were going badly.

“It’s true that the rice strike achieved almost none of its demands and that it ended in failure,” recognizes don Honorio Laguna, as he drinks the last sip of his coffee, “but it was a valiant, dignified failure, and that’s fairly close to a victory. Well, one thing concrete was achieved, and that was that at the 26 they never gave us balls of rice for lunch again,” he adds in closing and laughs at his own joke.

During the strike, Frank Brasco, having completely forgotten, you could say, about his identity as a North American engineer and a high-ranking employee of the company in conflict, installed himself among the people of Tora. He tacitly declared his feelings toward the striking workers and supported them in practical ways by lending his services as a nurse to dozens of wounded men, a skill he had learned in his youth through a stint with the International Red Cross; and in legal and formal ways that couldn’t be classified as anything other than humanitarian aid. In addition, in his few free moments he would take Sayonara to eat snow cones at Isaías’s bar, the only way of giving her a tangible and comparative explanation of the nature of snow.

The company, of course, censured him by demanding his resignation, which he submitted at once together with a long public letter. Unfortunately I have not been able to find a copy of it because not even he himself kept one. In it, according to what I’ve heard, he offered a shrewd analysis of the imperialist enclave and its effects on the local populace.

But his compatriots did not forgive him, nor was he able to free himself from the sensation of belonging to a nation that mistreated and abused others. Neither worker nor boss, neither North American nor Colombian, neither a man of the tropics nor a man of the poles, he was driven by a chronic restlessness and an implacable unwillingness to align himself with his own people. And perhaps it was that inability to find himself on one side or the other that drove him to take final refuge in the winters of his native Vermont, making the decision, after his retirement, to watch from there the days of his old age pass and never to leave it again.

“Maybe because being in this snow is enough like not being anywhere,” he says to me. “In the Colombian green I found passion and the difficulty of living, while the winter white of Vermont offers me the benefits of rest. It covers me like a sheet and lets me remember in peace.”

After the strike, Tora, as short on water and choked with the stench of open sewage ditches as always, remained submerged in the nostalgia of what it could have been but wasn’t. Drowned in the painful immobility of its failure and the renewed proof of its impotence, the city saw itself additionally divided into two jealous and resentful halves: the families and friends of the striking workers who remained faithful to the bitter end on one side, and on the other, people aligned with those who wavered and allowed themselves to be tempted by the company’s lures, offers, and enticements. The workers who weren’t fired, among them Sacramento and Payanés, returned to work under conditions that were equal to or worse than before. Those who had fallen were honored with speeches and floral offerings. Three-fourths of those arrested and detained at the baseball field were freed and the other fourth were tried by a war tribunal and condemned to long sentences at the island prison of Gorgona.

After escaping from Adela Lightfoot’s house on the day it was invaded, Sayonara took refuge among a group of women who were scrubbing clothes at the public washing facility and so managed to go unnoticed, but she lost track of Payanés. When she returned to Todos los Santos’s house, she received the information that he too was safe, and after another week she learned that he had returned to work at Camp 26.