Laura Restrepo - The Dark Bride

“Also,” Olguita tells me, “that good Sacramento sends Todos los Santos a voluntary monthly stipend, despite the fact, spiteful old woman, that she still hasn’t forgiven him. To think the only thing that getting married did for him was to acquire the obligation of maintaining the bride’s family in perpetuity. He ended up paying with interest for those seven coins he received that day when he delivered her to Todos los Santos for training!”

“Olguita also provides income,” Sacramento adds. “Just as you see her sitting there, the old girl is still an active professional who hasn’t lost her original clientele. Only those who die desert her, and not even them, because she visits them at the cemetery.”

Yesterday, which was Saturday, Olga and Todos los Santos were busy preparing lunch because Sacramento, Susana, Juana, Chuza, Machuca, and Tana were visiting.

“Here I come, don Enrique! Get ready, here I come!” shouted Fideo suddenly, when we weren’t paying her any attention because we were involved with the stuffed chicken and the onion salad, and when we ran to her side, we saw her make a final struggle to sit up in her hammock, call out once more to don Enrique, and die.

And yesterday the women decided that I had to say the final words of farewell at the burial, and this afternoon, a glass-weather Sunday, we dug the hole under the same guayacán tree and the same sky that shelters Claire. I saw many other graves in the middle of that meadow with the view of the river, barely marked with a wooden cross and maybe an epitaph: “Here lies Molly Flan,” “Finally at rest, Delia Ramos,” “N.N. new victim of the plague,” “La Costeña, love forever, your friends,” “María del Carmen Blanco alias La Fandango,” “Eternal glory for Chaparrita, heroine of the Rice Strike,” “Teresa Batista, tired of war,” “This is Melones, sister of Delia Ramos.”

When the moment arrived for me to speak, all the women looked at me as if I were the prima donna at a municipal theater performance. Then I placed a wreath of white roses in don Enrique’s name on the grave and said a few words that made some of those in attendance cry but disillusioned the rest, because just as they were beginning to be inspired, I had already finished. In matters of love, I said, everything is expectations and bets, some become shipwrecked, others somehow end up sailing smoothly, and in the midst of so much dreaming and foolishness one thing is certain: Fideo got closer than anyone to what is perhaps real love. She knew how to give it, she received it with open arms, and she kept it alive until the day of her death, and hopefully also from now on, amen.

The disaster that was spreading through the streets stopped at the doors of the houses and inside them reigned something similar to everyday tranquillity, to the continuous quiet of things. It is worth saying that despite everything, water was carried in the same buckets, the stove was lit with the same wood, the canaries still sang, and life clung to the tiniest ordinary things in its search for happiness.

“The events in La Catunga sound very appalling now that we’re telling them to you,” says Todos los Santos, “but at the time, just like now, they were part of our everyday routine and we didn’t really notice them. Ah! So-and-so was taken by the virus. Ah! They found a common grave with so many bodies. Ah! Lino el Titi’s son was tortured to repay his father’s union-related sins. That’s what we would say and what we still say, ah! all blessed day, but as one would say ah! I forgot to pick up the blue dress from the cleaners. The war is like that, more scandalous when you talk about it than when you are living it.”

“Because you tell it all at the same time, but you live it event by event,” clarified Olga.

A little war, blind and without name, like all of ours, came down the river and went through the streets; tranquillity took refuge in the patios of the houses and the great tribulation was borne inside everyone. The memory of Payanés and her hopes of being with him in the future was the lamp that warmed Sayonara’s vast loneliness. It was the cornerstone of her thoughts, which at every turn bumped into him in the heights and depths of hope and despair, in sparks of joy and moments of mourning. Olguita and Todos los Santos watched Sayonara dedicate her days to the ceremony of waiting, busying herself with the minimal rituals of all of those who in this world do nothing but wait, trembling with impatience: thinking, praying, and cultivating a hernia from so much effort.

“But what was she waiting for? What was it exactly that she was waiting for?”

“Ay, mi reina, the same thing she had always been waiting for, for the month to end and for the last Friday to arrive…”

“She went to the clinic every day to care for Fideo, who was improving little by little with the injections of penicillin mixed with benzoin that Dr. Antonio María gave her,” says Olga, “and the rest of the time, Sayonara waited. And she plucked daisy petals, which is classic in these cases, since the daisy is recognized as the most convenient flower, because it only knows how to say yes or no, he loves me or he loves me not, that’s all, so that if it is not to be, then let it be no for once and for all, so I can just die and get it over with, without further delay, because a person in love can’t bear anything in between.”

“And she constantly questioned me,” adds Machuca. “I had become her informant and adviser and she interrogated me as if her joy depended on the words that I would have the grace to speak. ‘He’s going to come,’ I assured her. ‘He’s going to come, you’ll see.’ ”

“How do you know, doña Machuca? Why are you so sure?”

“I’ve already told you, because he’s been seen looking for you lately. And since you are so eager to see him, why don’t you go and look for him? You know where to find him…”

“Don’t even think about it, doña Machuca. I could never do that. Why don’t you just tell me about Emilia again?”

“ ‘Ay, niña ! Don’t you ever get tired of it?’ I asked her,” says Machuca, “and I would repeat the news of how they shut down Campo 26. How the old workers and the strikers were discriminated against with the argument that their experience wasn’t worth anything now because the company valued personnel who had studied in technical institutes, and as part of the modernization process they were getting rid of obsolete machinery. How they had sold skinny Emilia for junk and several people had heard Payanés say that anything they did to Emilia they were doing to him, that if Emilia was no longer there, then he didn’t have a commitment to the Tropical Oil Company anymore, or any reason to stay on at the Campo.”

They also heard him say that he was going to look for better oil regions in Catatumbo, or around Tibú, where they had begun to recruit, or if not there, then in Cusiana, where they were laying pipe, or in Yopal and Orocué, in the far reaches of the Llano, the western plain; that maybe he went to look for work in Saldaña, where they were drilling, or in Tauramena, in the Casanare jungle, where a contracting company was looking for welders and pipe fitters.

“They say that Payanés is going around saying that he is willing to go anywhere that the voice of the pipe calls him, and that if it’s necessary he’ll follow its trail all the way to Saudi Arabia. They say that before he leaves he will come looking for you.”

“Then I will go with him,” Sayonara swore to Machuca.

“And what are you going to do when hunger strikes you?” Todos los Santos wanted to know.

“I can mount a show of exotic dances and he can sell tickets at the entrance, or I can sell outside a movie theater the empanadas de pipián that you taught me how to make. I can do housework as I learned in Villa de la Virgen del Amparo, like ironing shirts and polishing parquet floors, or I could work as a hairdresser. Maybe I would become a puta again, you never know…”