Laura Restrepo: The Dark Bride

“I enjoyed watching her dance,” Todos los Santos tells me. “And at the same time it terrified me, because I understood then that we were losing her. Only when she danced did she give herself license to visit the land of her own memories and to escape into the enormity of the vault that was inside her. She danced and I knew she was swimming in distant waters, as if visiting other worlds, perhaps worse, or perhaps better.”

Perhaps worse or perhaps better, but never shared. From the beginning it was obvious that the young girl was no friend of commentary or gossip, even less so if it were about her, and that she maintained the hermeticism of a statue about her past, which made one think of the painful or guilt-ridden reasons that caused her to hide it. When they asked her where were you born, what is your name, how old are you, she slipped away with nonanswers into a silent void of memories, or sometimes just the opposite, she would overflow with words, filling the house with mindless chatter that was even more concealing than her muteness.

“Were you born yesterday?” asked Todos los Santos. “Spit out your past, child, or it will rot inside you.”

That negation of memory made her the pure vibration of a present that burned in front of your eyes the instant that it was contemplated, like a scene illuminated by the flash of a camera. Although at times things escaped from her, now and then she would carelessly reveal little fragments.

“Do you like my new skirt?” asked Tana.

“Cecilia had one just like it,” she said. “Except yellow, not green.”

So they quickly asked her who Cecilia was, perhaps your mother, or an aunt, maybe a friend of your mother’s? Can you answer us, for the love of God, who was Cecilia?

“What Cecilia?” was her reply, surprised at all the insistence, as if she had never uttered such a name.

One day an old client and lover of Todos los Santos asked for a date to say good-bye; tired of going daily to the offices of the Troco to collect a perpetually delayed payment for an accident, he had decided to leave for Antioquia to help his son start a coffee farm. It was an evocative and nostalgic occasion and Todos los Santos was busy exquisitely attending to her friend while the girl, wearing her oversized blouse, devoted herself to pestering Aspirina, Tana’s dog, tying red ribbons around her ears, not paying any attention to the visit, or at least so it seemed, and without interrupting. Until at the end, when the gentleman was about to leave, she caught up with him at the door and stopped him.

“If somewhere you run across a woman from Guayaquil that they call La Calzones,” she ventured, “tell her that her niece asked you to tell her that she’s doing fine.”

Just like that, like a cannon shot, Todos los Santos learned that her student was happy in La Catunga and that in some part of the country she had an aunt with a vulgar nickname, by which she deduced that the girl’s vocation came to her by family tradition.

“That explains something,” I tell her, “but not much. Really it explains almost nothing.”

“That’s right.”

Not even during the hardest stages of training did the student give signs of defeat or weakening; she didn’t complain, she didn’t express pleasure or sadness, heat or cold, nor did she soften even one millimeter the military discipline she had imposed upon herself, as if responding to a sense of duty that was greater than she herself. Only once did she refuse to obey, when Todos los Santos asked her to clean the pigsty that was fairly buzzing with a horrendous stench at the rear of the house.

“I decided to became a puta so I wouldn’t have to clean up caca ever again,” grumbled the girl.

“Well, you made a mistake. You should know that here you will earn more from washing a gringo’s laundry than from going to bed with a man. In order to survive, a woman of the profession must also apply herself as seamstress, cook, fortune-teller, and nurse, and she must not be repelled by any task that life imposes on her, no matter how humbling or difficult it may be. So go back and get the bucket and brush and make that patio clean as a whistle.”

One night of supernatural clarity, Todos los Santos awoke in the middle of a coughing fit and, between gasps, asked for a glass of water. The girl didn’t respond because she wasn’t on her mattress but instead was sitting at the front door in her nightshirt and barefoot, framed in the moonlight and absorbed in the slow amazement descending from the highest abysses. Her perplexity was so deep, so vibrant that, touched, the madrina scoured the cellars of her memory looking for an explanation that had been with her a long time ago, before years and years of struggling and scratching for her daily bread had taught her to live without explanations.

“Up there in the sky, the seven planets spin and sing around the Earth,” she said, pulling up a stool to sit beside the girl in the brilliant darkness. “The Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, and the Sun. Each one has a corresponding musical note, a metal from the chart of elements, and a day of the week. The moon that robs you of your sleep is made of solid silver, whistles songs in the key of C, and reigns over Mondays. The great buzzing produced by the universe is what wise men call the music of the spheres, and the primary voice in this excellent concert is our Earth’s.”

“If that’s true, why can’t I hear it?”

“You do hear it, you were listening to it just now when I found you.”

“What is our Earth singing?”

“A song of the wind, made with your breath and mine and that of all men and women, alive, dead, and yet to be born.”

“We’d better go back inside, madrina, or all that tremendous wind will catch you and you’ll start coughing again.”

I ask what had happened in Sacramento’s life during all this time and they tell me that in the afternoons, after five o’clock, he would visit the girl and play with her.

“Play?” I ask. “Wasn’t he a little old to be playing?”

“But he was just a boy…”

“You told me that by then he had been given his cédula de ciudadania . He must have been at least eighteen.”

“Yes, he had his cédula, but that doesn’t mean anything. He got it four or five years early from some crooked politicians who falsify cédulas to get minors or nonexistent or dead people to vote for them in the elections.”

Sacramento and the girl played barefoot with the other children in the dusty alleys of the barrio of the putas . London Bridge, hot potato, jump rope. But those traditional, organized games weren’t their favorites; more than anything else they liked to play war. The girl was famous on the streets for being a rough-and-tumble scoundrel. There was no one more expert than she at executing flying kicks, spitting at a greater distance, throwing bone-crushing punches, knocking the wind out of someone with a fist to the solar plexus. Other handy diversions of hers were urinating in jars, tormenting the enemy by putting chili powder in their eyes, and playing violent games of red rover.

“The heart of the pineapple is winding and winding, is winding and winding, all the children are falling and falling,” sings Sacramento, and he’s remembering and remembering. “It was called the heart of the pineapple and it was a rough game that left everyone injured. And me? The heart of the pineapple crushed my soul.”

The heart of the pineapple was winding, the speeding chain of children holding hands, pressing tighter and twisting until it formed a human knot, a true pineapple heart that squeezed and asphyxiated and finally ended up with a pile of crushed children on the ground. One day several older boys from another neighborhood joined the game and the pineapple, devilish and frenetic, began to twist ankles and knock heads, and more than one kid came out bruised from the crush. But the older ones weren’t there to play, they only incited the jumble and took advantage of the confusion to touch the girl, knocking her to the ground and grabbing her hair to steal kisses and to lift her skirt. She defended herself with sharp jabs and dolphin kicks and had already managed to get them off of her and to quickly escape, when Sacramento learned of the offense and a surge of wounded dignity electrified his heart.