Laura Restrepo - The Dark Bride

The fine thread that bound them had been broken and she couldn’t find a way to mend it, although she was now willing to forgive in exchange for very little, and if that wasn’t possible, then in exchange for next to nothing, anything, just so that he would allow her to approach the clean smell of his white shirt, or lean her head against his big chest, or trail her index finger along the open petals of the rose tattoo, or to imagine the security of his muscles beneath the cloth of his trousers.

“What are you doing?” she finally dared to ask, but Payanés didn’t even turn to look at her.

“Bread and cheese.”

“What?”

“Nothing. That’s what we call this way of making stones dance across the smooth water back at home, ‘making bread and cheese,’ ” he said with the insipid voice of disenchantment, and watching roll across the ground, like decapitated dwarfs, all the treasured desires of those lonely nights in the petrolero camp.

“Ay, amor mío, let me close my eyes and rest against you even for an instant, because life is so heavy and I can’t bear it anymore,” Sayonara wanted to implore, but she knew she wouldn’t receive a response and any plea would sink to the bottom of a sea of strangeness.

“Shall we go?” she murmured hopelessly, knowing that her quarter hour of happiness had already passed.

“Go where?”

“Anywhere…”

“So where are we going to go, with all these girls and all this stuff? Look, Sayonara, or whatever your name is, you can’t demand anything from me…”

“But I’m not demanding anything.” She wanted to retract her words and erase the traces of her unfounded illusion, but it turned out that she and the four girls, all five dressed in colorful organza as if they were wrapped in gift paper, with their three bags and two boxes, weren’t a demand but a supplication, an unconditional and mute offering to someone who would love and protect them.

Meanwhile, in the patio of her house, Todos los Santos, who was feeding auyama to a captive tapir, sensed the disaster that was about to occur; she smelled it in a fetid gust that rose from the river.

“Ay! my innocent girl,” she lamented out loud, though she was only heard by a guacamaya , a few parakeets, and the tapir, “how many times have I told you that a puta ’s love isn’t love for life but only for hours. How many times do I have to tell you that the unattainable girl smells like roses and one who gives herself away smells like filth. Get hold of yourself and endure the lash — we’ll see if you learn next time.”

What came next was the awkward ending of a ridiculous scene. Walking along without destination or conviction, lugging the boxes, they decided to stop at a parody of a fair unloaded from a cart and anchored to the foot of the train station, illuminated by anemic lightbulbs and animated unsuccessfully by the monotonous melodies of three musicians with a propensity for yawning. It was an ephemeral monument to artificial happiness: a suitable mausoleum in which to give a third-rate burial to a love story with such a calamitous ending.

The girls won trinkets throwing darts at a cardboard clown, bought gummy caramels that got stuck in their hair, took off their shoes, and got their frilly organza dresses dirty. Payanés, who didn’t know whether to think of them as treasures or monsters, as always occurs with the children of others, made an effort to behave himself and treated them to a double order of tutti-frutti popsicles and roasted corn with lard and salt. He bought each one a stuffed animal, and after a while, barely opening his mouth and looking somewhere else, he said good-bye with a laconic “I’m going.” And Sayonara, who understood that it was a farewell without reprieve, watched him depart through the underbrush that closed around him in shadows, feeling the dizziness of a slight death sicken her heart. But, in spite of everything, she didn’t lose the illusion that at the last minute he would turn his head and at least say to her, “I’ll see you. A month from today, by the river, I’ll see you.”

“And did he say it?”

“No, he didn’t say it. He left just like that, without saying another word.”

The girls were already beginning to feel sleepy, hugging their stuffed animals and convinced they had known happiness that night at the fair, but Sayonara didn’t want to go back to the house to ruminate in the darkness of her room on the hollow echoes of that “I’m going” that had left her bleeding inside.

She just stood there, incapable of letting go of the already extinguished light from the bulbs, as if hypnotized by the persistent singsong of the long gone musicians and with the same expression of confusion as a child who invites another to play with her new toys and suddenly finds them faded and broken. As if holding in the folds of her skirt tops without strings, dolls without arms, and kites that don’t fly, she couldn’t shake her astonishment at seeing her spells and charms inexplicably useless and disdained.

The fury of a woman scorned or the authentic desire to die? Both, together and intertwined. Her pride wounded and crushed to her roots, with a pain in her chest as if from broken ribs, Sayonara obeyed the first stirring of her feet, which wanted to take her to foolishly and blindly finish off the night of her despair at the Dancing Miramar, where there would be no lack of men in love with her to keep her occupied while she left behind this twisted and bitter-tasting day. Already on her way, though, she was assaulted by a doubt that made her stop short. What if she ran into Payanés in the middle of Calle Caliente, forgetting about the past in the arms of Molly?

“The mere thought made her burn with fury,” Olguita tells me. “A dangerous thing. When a prostituta burns with jealousy and allows herself to get swept away by her temper, it seals her fate. Believe what I’m telling you; we’ve seen it happen a thousand times.”

Payanés unburdening himself to Molly: reason enough to go and kill her, the muy puta Molly Flan. There’s no reason that vengeance has to be only Fideo’s privilege, and how sweet it would be to kill Molly, but what for, after all, if it wouldn’t do any good anyway; the best revenge would be to go to Popayán and tear out that wife’s eyes, although thinking about it again, what did that poor woman have to do with it, there on the other side of the world breaking her back to raise a few kids while her husband is over here running around having fun with a couple of lost women and a vallenato trio. The only worthwhile thing would be to go for that bastard’s jugular, to tear him apart with your teeth, scratch his face until he was marked forever, give him a good kick in the balls, and shout in his face the four cardinal insults: bastard, liar, traitor, murderer of my dreams.

It was a vulgar but rhythmic bolero, easy to sing, in reality sung so often that it was already part of the folklore of La Catunga and of other red-light districts around the planet. From then on everything would be foreseeable: poetry of degradation; cold, hard anecdote; a script of misery that other women have already written. Drunk, Sayonara would threaten to throw herself under the wheels of the train, then she would reject that dramatically excessive exit and opt for singing rancheras with a wounded howl while hanging from the neck of some other drunk.

The following night she wouldn’t even appear at the Dancing Miramar because everyone would already know that that stage no longer belonged to her, that the most sought after puta in Tora had dropped in category and was no longer at the level of the select clientele, of the nights of champagne or the décor of mirrors and velvet, and keeping a stiff upper lip, she would have to make do with joining the cast of a cheaper bar.