Laura Restrepo - The Dark Bride

“Amanda Monteverde,” repeated Todos los Santos, as if surrendering, and in the instant that she spoke those two words an abyss opened between her and her adopted daughter.

“It’s not bad blood, Olga. Or at least it’s not all bad blood. There’s something wrong here, something outside of the law, and it’s going to have an ugly backlash,” said Todos los Santos when Olguita pointed out that it took deep bitterness not to congratulate a daughter on the day of her wedding. “But if marriages for love are bad enough themselves, what can we expect from one contracted out of disenchantment? That Sacramento is going to pay for this, the meddling nincompoop.”

“Can’t you forgive the desire for happiness of a boy who has never had anything in his life, not a mother, or a roof, or affection, or even a name that isn’t an offense?”

“Sacramento himself is the one who is going to suffer on account of this bad idea, you’ll see. And he’s going to make us all suffer, because with this marriage he is opening a door that leads to who knows where.”

“Stop being so proud, Todos los Santos. The problem is that you raised Sayonara to be a puta and you can’t bear the fact that she’s decided to be something else.”

“Something is wrong, Olga; I know it even if I can’t put my finger on it.”

What dress was the bride going to wear for the improvised ceremony? The yellow organza number, speculated those who were betting on the matter, but they didn’t know she had torn it apart and sworn on the shreds that she was no longer a child. So?

“So it was her combat attire, what else?” Olga says to me. “Gold earrings, tight black tube skirt, and pure silk blouse: like a Chinese princess. Or, rather, Japanese.”

As was to be expected, the priest didn’t approve of the outfit: Being the first time in years that he had let a lost woman enter the church, he wanted the ceremony to be instructive, so he sent for a lace veil, long and white, and he asked her to cover herself with it. And so, as they still tell the story in Tora, the very beautiful Sayonara, from that day on better known as Amanda, was married: dressed as a puta underneath and in white on the outside.

Very beautiful, yes, but it was a somewhat literary and unreal beauty, like a classic heroine. Her sisters, friends, and coworkers in La Catunga preferred not to enter Ecce Homo, as it had long since been declared off-limits to them, and they waited for the bridal couple outside the church’s front door with their hearts flooded with ambivalent emotions, somewhere between hopefulness and disenchantment. Todos los Santos, with her eyes sunk deep in mourning-black sockets, was wearing a baseball cap to hide her recently inflicted baldness. Tana was visibly and deeply moved and glittered with jewelry. The girls in organza, of course, as with any big occasion. And Olga in dark glasses to hide her emotions and the swelling caused by her tears. Machuca was absent because even bound and gagged she couldn’t be dragged to the church.

“Life is a failure,” sighed Tana, who was prone to speak in tango lyrics.

“It can only be lived,” Todos los Santos corrected her. “There are no successes or failures; it can only be lived.”

“Sayonara is leaving us,” said Tana, who never learned, starting to weep again.

“She was never completely here.”

Finally the bridal couple emerged, their union blessed, but no one threw rice, there were no bells ringing or firecrackers exploding. Instead, in the middle of that dull, colorless afternoon, Piruetas suddenly appeared, wearing a queer’s little cap, a bright-red handkerchief around his neck, and a tropical shirt featuring blue palm trees on an orange background, and as Sayonara was removing the veil to return it to the priest, he caressed her with his eyes from head to toe with the slimy, lubricious gaze of a randy old man.

“Even if the puta wears white, she’s still a puta !” Piruetas shouted, and kept on walking, leaving everyone stunned and disgusted in the cold wake of his shadow.

“We’re leaving Tora,” said a pale Sacramento, and trembling with rage over the affront, he tore up the contract for subsidized housing and threw the pieces into the air. And right there, outside the church door, he made the impromptu decision to leave and communicated it to his wife and the sparse crowd.

“To go where?” asked Sayonara.

“Where nobody knows you or can throw your past in our faces.”

“What about the house, Sacramento? The house they were going to give us?”

“The only house waiting for us here is shame.”

“To their wives, who demand a lot, men give little. And to us putas , who ask for nothing, they give us nothing,” grumbles Fideo from her hammock sickbed, waking and immediately falling asleep again.

For a few days now Todos los Santos, who has begun the move toward the great dazzling hereafter, smoking-cigar and all, with foxtails around her neck and pink fur slippers, has begun calling not only her numerous and varied animals Felipe, but also the people around her.

“Come here, you, Felipe,” she orders me, “and listen to what I am going to tell you about my girl Sayonara’s wanderings: When taking the balance of how we have lived, measuring the sum of our days honestly, the rest of us always opt to remain, clinging to the crumbs of our survival; while she was the only one who could really leave, without fear, without a guaranteed return, in the full glory of her blossoming and vigorous life. And in a horrendous display of egotism, and hardness toward others too.”

I ask Todos los Santos how many times, honoring her own name, Sayonara said good-bye.

“You can’t just count the times she left,” she replies, “but also the times she wanted to leave, which were innumerable.”

“Ay, Payanés, when did you become my nightmare…?” Everything about Sayonara was turning into pain: the pain of Payanés, whom she loved and didn’t have, the pain of Sacramento, whom she loved and didn’t love, and the pain of being herself.

“Remember when they pretended to be the traveling brother and sister, and it brought such happiness to the days of Sacramento’s and Sayonara’s childhood?” Olguita asks me. “Well, it became their reality. After the wedding they had no choice but to pack their belongings and start traveling, this time for real but also to escape, like they did when they were children, to that country without memories, which is the land of nevermore.”

The continuous passing of migrating birds was their only guide during those months of flight stitched together in one postponement after another of any arrival, heading south amidst hardships that found them each day farther away, following the brown heron and the spoonbilled duck, the paco-paco, the white heron and the ruffled grouse, and so many other creatures that fled through the air and whose names they never knew. They became inhabitants of the road and they followed the whims of its turns and cutbacks without stopping to rest, one behind the other and the other behind one as if they were still following each other on make-believe horses around Todos los Santos’s patio, fed by the urge to leave and without reaching a decision to stay anywhere. And so, aboard that escape train, their days unraveled.

Rescued by Sacramento’s love through the bonds of marriage did Sayonara, the young whore from Tora, become Amanda, the one who was to be loved, Amanda, the radionovela star? Did she embody the miracle of the outlaw who becomes good through a little affection, the flower rescued from the dirt, the protagonist of the nightmare that became a dream and the dream that became reality?