Laura Restrepo - The Dark Bride

Doña Leonor’s two unmarried daughters, Nena and Márgara, lived with her and it didn’t take Amanda long to understand that in the eyes of their mother the two did not enjoy the same moral approval. Nena measured up, but Márgara failed to: for receiving telephone calls at all hours; for maintaining relations with men from classes beneath her own; for not properly understanding that “honor is more fragile than glass” and that “it is not enough to be, one must seem”; for wearing tight and improper-colored dresses; and, what seemed to most unnerve her mother, for not controlling her scandalous laughter, while her sister Nena, from a young age, knew only too well that it was preferable to barely smile.

Amanda learned the Ten Commandments so that she could put them into practice, and Sacramento breathed a sigh of relief, resuscitating little by little his battered honor and allowing himself to look others in the eyes again, and the unmentionable past became evanescent, and even, for moments, forgettable.

Amanda also learned to look back with new eyes. She had always heard her friends and fellow workers in La Catunga called mujeres, or at worst putas , but not in an offensive way; now she knew that they were also shameless adulterers, hussies, busconas , loose women, pelanduscas, fufurufas , and pelafustanas . If as a puta she knew that sex could be boring, now, as a decent woman, she had heard that it was also filthy. And she could see herself in a distant mirror once when she heard doña Leonor say:

“I found a little Indian woman for the necessary duties; I hope she doesn’t turn out to be a thief…”

Everything went well as long as Sacramento didn’t get angry, which occurred at increasingly less frequent intervals, but from time to time the incubus would begin to growl at him again and to show its claws, especially on those nights when he failed in his attempts to make love to his wife.

“How do you expect me to behave like a man if you destroy my manhood with your conduct? For the others you would dress up, wear perfume, you would wear high heels, and now that you live with me you don’t even brush your hair…” He would blame her and open up again, like a wound in his memory, the fascination with that woman she had been before he had forced her to become someone else.

“Damned if I do, damned if I don’t,” Amanda weakly protested. “It would be best if I just died, or maybe I have already died and I just haven’t realized it yet.”

Nevertheless, life was bearable thanks to the softer tone it had been assuming, in which being awake was very similar to a slow, grayish dream. Until Leonor de Andrade’s youngest offspring came home on vacation. He had long eyelashes, studied law in the capital, and his name was Rodrigo; and Amanda made the imprudent mistake of mentioning him to Sacramento.

“That boy Rodrigo makes me laugh,” she told her husband. “He knows how to pull coins out of his ears.”

“When jealousy is unleashed it is important to tie it up again quickly, with rope, a gag, and a straitjacket, so it doesn’t cause too much damage,” pontificates Todos los Santos. “But when he thought that that boy Rodrigo had taken notice of his wife, Sacramento gave free rein to his feelings of jealousy and let them run wild and wreak havoc, like stallions from hell.”

“Let’s go back to the jungle,” proposed Sayonara, trying to calm him. “At least there is nothing but monkeys out there and you would have no reason to be jealous of them… maybe…”

“But nothing made any difference,” Olga tells me. “There was no salve that could soothe Sacramento’s fury, and each day, from the moment she left for work, he would follow her and spy on her, to see if she breathed, if she spoke to anyone, if she walked anywhere, completely forgetting about himself and his own job as a cart man.”

“I will quit working in that house,” she suggested, “and look for another job where there are no men to make you uncomfortable…”

“There will be men in every house.”

“Come on, then, let’s go to another pueblo. Melones, Delia Ramos’s sister, lives in San Vicente Chucurí, and she’s given up the profession and now she runs a beauty salon where they style hair and do manicures. She’ll take us in.”

“No. Your bad reputation has already reached there.”

“Then to Medellín. I have an aunt named Calzones there…”

“Calzones, Melones, putas and more putas ; they’re all putas . Isn’t there a single decent woman left in the world? Do you know what they say about me? That I married Sayonara, the puta from the Miramar,” shouted Sacramento from the bottomless anguish of his black-and-white universe: heaven with Sayonara and hell without her, or rather torment with or without her. She could be only one of two things: goddess or trash, or both things alternatively with no intermediate possibility.

“It would be better if I just killed you and then myself,” he declared, adopting a language of love that seemed like a report from the emergency room of a hospital, because he couldn’t string two sentences together without including the words “blood,” “poison,” “wounds,” “dagger,” “sacrifice.”

“Hush, Sacramento, you’re scaring me,” she said to him. “You’re starting to talk like those heroes and martyrs…”

“No one will ever love you as I do.”

“It would be a relief,” she muttered, and she endured, endured, endured, until one day she got tired and fell wildly into a limitless exhaustion; hurricane winds blew once again in her heart, suddenly tearing her from her circumstances, and she accepted, in a single stroke of reason, that old, familiar certainty that life is somewhere else and flows through other streams. The irrepressible force of whim and of why-not, which is the principal motor of those who have an indomitable will, surged up in her again, blunt as a mandate, and without tempering her rage she threw a pot of boiling milk in Sacramento’s face, burning his chest with the liquid and opening a gash in his forehead.

“If this is a marriage, then marriage is not a good invention,” she said, free now of any hint of docility. “I’m leaving Sacramento, hermanito . I’m leaving forever.”

“Then he,” Olga tells me, “recognizing the return of the real Sayonara and without daring to ask her to stay, warned her, ‘If you go, I’ll die,’ but she went anyway, although she knew that this time Sacramento wasn’t exaggerating that much.”

“At that very moment my adopted daughter’s time for returning began,” Todos los Santos tells me. “My girl went running to find Fideo, and she said: ‘Let’s go, right now.’ ”

“What about your sisters?” Fideo wanted to know.

“Sacramento promised me he would take care of them.”

“But how am I going to walk? Can’t you see the condition I’m in?”

“Give me that ring you’re wearing.”

“I can’t. It’s the last thing I have that was Enrique’s, do you think it’s some cheap trinket? It has an engraved coat of arms and is made of pure gold, a lot of karats…”

“Give it to me.” Sayonara took it from her, and after a while she came back saying she had traded it for an old but sturdy burro.

“During those times in Villa de Virgen del Amparo,” Fideo tells me, “Sayonara lived clinging to her longing for Payanés. ‘Come back to earth, girl,’ I advised her when I saw her flying so high; ‘come down from that cloud.’ ”

The more insistent and deep-rooted in her the memory of him grew, the more it began to fade. The first thing she lost was his head: How did he look at me, out of the corner of his eye or straight on? She couldn’t say for sure. He has big ears, half the size of a frying pan, Fideo teased her, but Sayonara recalled them as being perfectly sized, and pink. What came from his mouth, words of love or silence? With the distance of time they both sounded the same. Were his kisses really that deep? Or were they inventions? His skin was a true gift, even with clothes on, of that she was certain.