Laura Restrepo: The Dark Bride

Moving forward with some difficulty due to her high heels and the tube skirt, without light from lantern or moon, Sayonara persevered, balancing herself among the mounds of rubble and thinking she glimpsed here and there traces of her past: This bit of dust was oranges from breakfast, that brick is from the afternoon you told me, those dirt clods were coins in my pocket, that pile of clay…

“Aspirina’s collar!” she suddenly shouted, because there was Aspirina’s collar with each and every one of the fake diamonds, glittering and real in the middle of that pile of nothing and inviting Sayonara to restore her faith in her own existence.

She didn’t find much else to celebrate, no patio, no window, no sky on the other side of the window, no mirror next to the cistern, no canaries in their cages, no pigsty or stand of plantain trees, no grain store on the corner, no Dancing Miramar with its dancing contests and red velvet decor. What to believe, the collar, which was there, or all the rest, which wasn’t?

“And my mother, Matildita Monteverde? And my madrina , Todos los Santos?” she asked out loud in the darkness.

“About your mother, I don’t know anything,” a human voice answered her, coming from she didn’t know where. “About your madrina, I can give you a message. After the eviction came the demolition, and Todos los Santos went to Olga’s house to live.”

“So they didn’t knock down Olga’s house?”

“No. The improvements haven’t reached that far yet. This part here is not called La Catunga anymore but La Constancia, and they say that soon it’s going to be a respectable barrio.”

Sayonara expressed her thanks for the information and moved away from this second stage of her past, which the bulldozers would soon be leveling, just as the first, that of her childhood, had been devoured by flames, and just as the third, that of her marriage, had already started to haunt her from the quiet side of her memories.

Olguita’s patio smelled of everything, the good and the bad, of aromatic herbs growing in pots, of enticing food browning in the oven, of the urine of domesticated animals, of the stench of the gully that ran nearby with its black waters tumbling over rocks. Todos los Santos was dipping a quadruped afflicted with mange in benzyl benzoate when she saw Sayonara approach, and the days of waiting had been so many and so long that she didn’t know whether it was really her or merely the incarnation of her memory. She couldn’t greet the girl, or manifest her great joy or ask anything, because she understood that her adopted daughter, who looked pale and undone, didn’t want warm welcomes or answers, she only wanted to tell about the horror of the lynching once and again and again, as if freezing the scene in words could prevent it from happening.

“Is it true that sometimes someone else dies for you?” was her very first sentence as she entered. “I have the sensation, madrina, that a zapatero has just succumbed to a death that was meant for me.”

“As much as Olga and I argued with her, we couldn’t rid her mind of that fanaticism,” Todos los Santos tells me. “She swore that she had seen the ray of death descend from heaven straight toward her and then veer away at the last second to strike Alpamato.”

Without listening to explanations, Sayonara went into the bedroom and walked straight up to the Master, the young, tormented Jesus Christ with his exposed heart who knew, like her, what it was like to offer a neighbor your entrails; the same Christ who had filled the days of her youth with terror and with solace, the one who during so many hours of her work, as she lay in bed, had illuminated with burning lamps the minimal truth of a lonely and naked girl, rendering her invulnerable by bathing her in his red-black glow.

“Señor mío Jesucristo,” she implored, kneeling before the painting, “patron saint of the broken, take the soul of your servant Alpamato, now that you have thrown his body to the wild beasts. If it is true that he died instead of me, following your holy example, thank him for me. Tell him that the day will come when I too will have to accept the death of another and that I hope to do so then with as much generosity as he has just done for me.”

“What is happening in this pueblo, madrina ?” she asked as she went out to the patio.

“Strange things. Boys kill cats and skin them, some people leave their homes and no one ever hears from them again. I’m telling you, things are happening. The other morning, in the middle of Calle Caliente, doña Magola’s peacock turned up stabbed to death.”

“A peacock stabbed to death? Who would want to stab a peacock to death?”

“I don’t know, maybe the same person who skins cats. And the girls?” was the only thing Todos los Santos was able to inquire. She didn’t even want to ask about Sacramento, because she blamed him for the misfortunes of the family and all of Tora.

“The girls are fine, back in Virgen del Amparo. Sacramento is taking better care of them than if he were their father. I came alone, madrina, ” Sayonara announced, “and I don’t plan to go back to him.”

“You do everything backward,” said her madrina reproachfully. “You stop being married just now, when wives are going around puffed up with pride and putas have to hide to avoid animosity. Give me that papaya, how much is that guanábana ? — that’s what the ladies say when they go to the market, like that, pointing at the fruit with their stiff fingers so that you’ll notice the brilliance of the band of gold on their hand,” she said. “And they buy inexpensive meat at the commissary with a card that certifies them as the legitimate spouse of a company worker. You’ll see them, they devote their entire afternoon to a foreign pastime they call a canasta tea, which consists of playing cards and swallowing little cakes and sweets.”

“You’re too hard on them,” chastised Olga, who felt congratulatory because of Sayonara’s return and offered mantecadas and pandeyucas , because for them there was no better way to express affection than by showering others with an abundance of food. “Married women also scrub the floor and put salt in the soup and suffer disillusions, just like us…”

“Hush, Olguita!” said Todos los Santos to silence her, “you shouldn’t make any concessions whatsoever. Like I said, the wives gobbling cake and wine, and the putas ? The putas , who feel out of style and cornered, have had to invent a whole repertoire of tricks in bed just to survive.

“To be sought after, professional women found it indispensable to know how to juggle, fence, and display other exquisite talents difficult to even imagine before, and now lost is the girl who isn’t able to perform agilely and without fuss such feats as the double bowl, the golden shower, the dead dog, the angel’s leap, the big suck, the dyke dip, the garage door, the drop of milk, and any number of exotic acts invented by mankind, even reaching the extreme of shaving pubic hair to guarantee the clients, ever more demanding and coarse, that they were free from lice.

“Machuca? Since she can’t hear us, Machuca decided to paint her nipples purple…”

“He was a Mexican telegraph operator, and he called Sayonara mi guadalupana because he compared her to the Virgen de Guadalupe, also Mexican and with hair as long and beautiful as the Virgen del Carmen’s and Sayonara’s own,” Todos los Santos tells me of a man named Renato Leduc, who was brought to Tora by life’s winding road. “That’s what he called her, mi guadalupana , and since he also wrote her verses, the day he decided to return to his country because of her indifference he left her a farewell poem that I still have. I will show it to you if and when I find it, because it was such a long time ago. .. It was before the rice strike, during the golden era of the Dancing Miramar.