The Dark Bride

by Laura Restrepo

  “I was afraid that being so dry of emotions, my adopted daughter wouldn’t be able to manage very well as a lover. Because to go to bed without love you have to know how to love, and those who think otherwise don’t understand anything,” the old woman tells me. Coiled around her shoulders is a silver fox, very dead and very forties, that she has rescued from the trunk where she keeps her memories among mothballs. “To sweeten her insides I began to give her a cup of hot milk with five teaspoons of honey daily. Then, seeing her act so strangely, I thought I had gone a little too far with the honey. But a few years later I realized that the error had been just the opposite, too little honey. Until I came to believe that eight or nine spoonfuls was the minimum dose to make her character well tempered.”

  “And today, have you reached a conclusion?”

  “Maybe Sayonara loved too much, or maybe she couldn’t love. I still don’t know.”

  “It’s the same thing that happens to all of us,” says Machuca. “We professional women divide ourselves into a hundred loves and we don’t know how to content ourselves with the joys of one single love.”

  thirty

  In the capital, I dedicated myself to inquiring what happened to the life and paintings of don Enrique Ladrón de Guevara y Vernantes. I learned that during the first two years of his life in Tora, his family was unaware of his whereabouts—or preferred to ignore that they were—and gave him up for lost, or at least well hidden. Until the day that a friend of the family who was passing through the oil city on business brought back news of him.

  “What is Enrique doing in Tora?” asked a maternal uncle, Alfonso Vernantes. “How does he support himself?”

  “He paints,” answered the friend. “I saw several of his paintings. Your nephew Enrique paints women who reek of syphilis.”

  They went to look for him, found him, pulled him kicking and screaming from Fideo, and committed him to an insane asylum, according to some versions, and according to another, they sent him out of the country, all with the greatest stealth to avoid scandal or gossip. When I returned to Tora, I told this to Todos los Santos, who already knew.

  When they took him out of La Copa Rota, did don Enrique kick with his short, arthritic legs, did he beg with his sharp dwarf’s voice, did he order with the haughty voice of the wealthy that he be left in peace, and was it all useless? Perhaps. I will never know for certain how that scene happened, that tearing away, because when I ask Fideo, the only eyewitness, she becomes catatonic and I realize that I will only injure her further if I continue throwing memories in her face.

  “It wasn’t easy for Enrique to live among those people who are so different from us,” says his sister, María Amalia, an elderly lady, intelligent and kind, with whom I chatted one afternoon as we had tea. “Or to live in that miserable place he chose. In one of his letters to my mother he confesses it, he says that every day away from home requires of him struggle and determination.”

  “Did your mother know where he was?” I ask.

  “Of course, she always knew, but she never let anyone else know. They took Enrique out of there after my mother’s death, because they wouldn’t have dared to while she was still alive.”

  “Why didn’t your mother ask him to come back, if he himself had confessed that it wasn’t easy for him to live there?”

  “Because my mother, who adored him, was well aware that for Enrique it would be even harder to make a place for himself in our family. Do you know what it means to be a dwarf among such proud people? If you ask me what the best thing my brother found in that other world was, I would say that it was invisibility. There he felt invisible, without witnesses to his deformity. That is priceless.”

  After the committing of don Enrique—or his deportation, whichever it was—Alfonso Vernantes, the maternal uncle, personally traveled to Tora with the inquisitorial task of gathering up every last painting, to destroy the evidence of the passage of his family name through a world of infamy. If the painting was a seascape, sunset, or Paris scene, he paid little for it. He offered a better price if women appeared, if they were naked it rose higher, and when he had gathered five or six he would burn them on a pyre. In Tora they still tell stories of those strange negotiations, like the one about a small drawing of two girls embracing on a bed, for which don Alfonso paid a fortune.

  Nothing makes you more vulnerable than having the task of guarding a secret that is already public knowledge—as all secrets tend to be—or easier prey for whoever decides to take advantage of that weakness. Only a few days passed before Piruetas smelled the opportunity of a lifetime and joined forces with a photographer friend who dabbled in painting, to begin producing a series of obscene paintings that they signed with don Enrique’s name and presented to don Alfonso as if they were original works by his nephew.

  For a few weeks don Alfonso fell blindly into the trap. He saw in Piruetas and his photographer friend two irreplaceable accomplices for his delicate mission, because they were astute and discreet and because they could do what was forbidden to him: circulate among the lower echelons, scouring dangerous bars and prostitutes’ hovels in search of incriminating evidence. During that time, Piruetas and his accomplice lived the high life at the expense of the Ladrón de Guevara y Vernantes’s scruples, until don Alfonso discovered he was being duped. In his haste to swindle, Piruetas grew so bold that he began to produce paintings that were more and more ordinary and slipshod, to which was added a dispute with the photographer friend over money matters that caused a rupture between them. So, from then on Piruetas assumed the artistic labor himself and without assistance from anyone: he, who had never held a pencil in his hand, not to mention a brush.

  “This can’t be Enrique’s,” don Alfonso finally said one day, suspicious. “It’s too awful.”

  “It’s modern painting, don Alfonso, and you just don’t understand it,” replied the pseudo-painter in defense of his scrawling.

  But even don Alfonso, who because of disgust and ethics barely looked at his nephew’s paintings, even don Alfonso himself, they tell me, in spite of being blinded by propriety, saw enough to realize the difference and drive off the impostor.

  “Where can don Enrique be?” I ask Todos los Santos. “Still locked up in his asylum, or off in some remote corner of the world?”

  “He died some years ago from syphilis, as do all those who have known true love.”

  “Strange,” I say. “No matter what his sister says, I think he found his chance for happiness at La Copa Rota.”

  “Happiness, no,” she contradicts me, she who refuses to let a hollow phrase pass without filling it with cruel realism. “Let’s say that at La Copa Rota he set down his fate, and that if he wasn’t happy, at least he found his light.”

  “They say that some men take refuge in bordellos seeking the same thing that monks do in monasteries.”

  “Is that from some book?”

  “Probably.”

  “No wonder. Books are filled with shit like that.”

  thirty-one

  “These women don’t understand how things are,” Olguita tells me later, when we are alone. “They think they do but they don’t. Trust me when I tell you that Sayonara did know how to love, and that she loved Payanés from the very beginning and to the point of delirium.”

  “Then why did she do things the way she did?”

  “Because the paths of the heart are not straight, but snaking and twisting, and they let us see where they begin but not where they end. But that’s getting tangled up in conclusions of a story that begins plain and simple: Payanés was the first unknown man that Sayonara was able to get to know. In him she found bread for her hunger and water for her thirst.”

  “He has the sweetest skin I have ever known,” Olguita swears she heard Sayonara say. “But not sweet like sugar, sweet like an old pain. The sun keeps it brown from the waist up, but it is reduced in color on the rest of his body. What I miss most is his chest, his big chest with the rose tattoo, soft and bulky but o
nly a little, just enough to be strong like the chest of a man and kind like the chest of a woman. Deep within his eyes nests a sadness, a sort of helplessness in that mixed yellow color, a yellow burning with green: the eyes of a stray animal. His hair, which is also of a double color, sometimes seems black as night and sometimes shines with silver threads.”

  “That’s called gray hair.”

  “Well, he has gray hair then.”

  “Why would he have gray hair, when he’s so young?”

  “He has suffered, you see.”

  “Some women focus on the look in a man’s eyes,” Olguita tells me. “Others like men with an elegant style. There are those who complain if men are knock-kneed or flat-assed, or have tangled eyebrows or stooped shoulders. Many girls want to see them in leather shoes or boots and turn their noses up at cloth shoes, because they are a sure sign of poverty. Any woman appreciates a powerful male member and most prefer a sweetly drawn smile with healthy teeth. Once I heard that you shouldn’t sleep with men with only one ear, because if you get pregnant most likely you’ll give birth to a deaf child. And so on. But Sayonara fell in love with a chest, and she said that in Payanés’s chest she had found her happiness and her reason for living.”

  Like gusts of air in an empty house, the breaths of many strange men blew on her neck. Her life was tangled up in that sleepy haze of foreign bodies that passed through her bed, one after another, in the procession of their indifference. Her bedroom was conquered territory, the camp of any army, and her white sheet was the flag of her purchased love. Her naked body accepted with indolence the rubbing of skins that were odorless, or that smelled of distant places, and on which neither her touch nor her eyes wanted to linger. Until suddenly, without warning, came the contact with the skin that somehow awakened her, giving her the touch that her fingertips, alert at last, demanded, and in the skin of that stranger she felt the exact temperature that reminded her of happiness.

  “My man tastes like moss, like a manger, like the Christ Child,” announced Sayonara. “He tastes like Christmas.”

  “Hush, girl, that’s sinful talk!”

  “He smells delicious, like a forest perfume with a good smell, and he also smells like a horse. I like that about him, that he has a strong horse smell. The smell of horse sweat, which is the same as the smell of desire.”

  “Girl, such things you say!”

  “Do you know what a petrolero smells like after ten hours of forced labor under this strong sun?” Todos los Santos asks me. “No, you can’t imagine. He smells like pure race, mi reina. He smells like the whole human race.”

  “That depends on the color of his skin,” adds Olguita. “The whitest ones, the ones with more European blood, are the ones who smell the worst.”

  “Cover me with your skin,” Sayonara asked Payanés, and he spread over her and clothed her and made himself more hers than her own skin, and he blanketed her with his chest, that foreign chest, which in a simple, miraculous instant made itself so familiar. And so comforting. A chest like a roof that shields and protects, and there, outside, let the world end, let it rain sparks and let God do whatever he chooses.

  Olguita, the hopeless romantic, tells me tales and I don’t know whether they’re true or imaginary. She tells me, for example, that Payanés slept holding Sayonara with the yearning of an orphan that she knew how to calm for a while, and that his sleep lasted only the second it would take for him to relive that memory the following day, the same, eternal second that it would take for his eyelids to close and then to open again.

  “Is this how long a stranger’s love lasts?” Sayonara asked, watching him leave. “Is there a love more intense and aloof? Is there another possible form of love?”

  “A lot of poetry, a lot of poetry,” groans Todos los Santos as she reads this. “I don’t see anyone around here who is willing to tell the hard truth, which is that skin that is too familiar is no great gift, first because it starts turning gray and then little by little moves toward invisibility, old and worn like a shawl that is used every day, until finally, now intimately known, it becomes as unfamiliar as the leather in your next-door neighbor’s shoes: just skin, any old skin. But you all don’t listen to me and you keep on weaving your own versions, so it just doesn’t seem like anyone around here is interested in the truth.”

  thirty-two

  CRIMINAL HANDS BURN LA COPA ROTA was the headline that appeared one day, after the forced departure of don Enrique, among the items in the Vanguardia Petrolera, which circulated daily in Tora. It was never proved who did it, but according to reports the fire happened at seven o’clock one morning in August when there were no clients in the place. Awakened by asphyxiating smoke, Fideo jumped out of bed and ran, tripping over people because several women were sleeping on the floor, and seconds later they were all seen fleeing as the expelling archangel saw Eve, naked and barefoot and shouting obscenities. They managed to safely escape the scorching flames, and a while later, although more choked by the smoke, so did the owner of the establishment, the bar boy, and the cat. But the hut, whose straw roof had caught fire first, was engulfed by the dry summer wind that whipped up the flames and reduced it to a pile of ashes, with a half drum enthroned in the center: the one that had served as the toilet, and the only object spared for memories.

  You might be thinking that this is the third or fourth time that fire has crept into this story to reduce reality to nothing. It doesn’t seem accidental to me. As a Colombian, I know that I am delineating a world in perpetual combustion, always on the verge of definitive collapse, a world that despite everything manages, only God knows how, to hang on with fingernails and teeth, blazing in its final, reckless flashes as if there were no tomorrow, and yet another dawn soon fills the sky and here below the delirium gains new energy, scatological, impossible, and the new day travels along a thread of anguish toward a too predictable end, announced by the din of men and women banging on their empty pots with spoons.

  And yet at midnight, against all odds, our peculiar apocalypse is once again postponed. Maybe because of that we are so dead, and at the same time so alive: because each sunset annihilates us, and the dawn redeems us.

  “Where did Fideo end up, since after the fire there was no place for her?”

  “Everything that goes up comes back down again,” Todos los Santos tells me, “and sometimes, very seldom, but it has happened, what goes down comes back up.”

  Many of the regular clients of the Dancing Miramar and the other prestigious clubs, especially the younger ones, had allowed themselves to be attracted by the temptation of coarse love and had begun to frequent La Copa Rota, where they gathered to watch Fideo shining in her sickly light, embodying the hoarsest voice of the underground, the lowest of the lowly depths, humanity stripped of its skin, split open and displayed for sale, like meat on a carcass.

  The barbaric separation from don Enrique broke the soul she didn’t have, and if she was a wild beast before, afterward she became a cruel wild beast who, when she couldn’t bite others, chewed and destroyed her own paws. To see her expose herself, naked, talking filth and biting flesh, made men horny and ignited their virility, so they riled her up and gave her alcohol, gave her alcohol and riled her up, and she went along with it because she could no longer find herself except in the open wound where her heart had been.

  “Ay, don Enrique!” sighed Fideo from her invalid’s hammock.

  The more turbulent the aura surrounding her, the stronger the aroma she expelled, and the deeper she fell, the higher her prestige grew. Until Negra Florecida, owner of the Dancing Miramar, resenting the loss of regular clients and eager to regain them, decided to give them a little of the medicine they were asking for, and she took advantage of the fire at La Copa Rota to offer Fideo work at her establishment. Even today it is rumored in Tora that behind that misfortune was a match struck by order of Negra Florecida herself.

  That is how they came to compete for men’s love in the same arena, Sayonara and Fideo, angel a
nd demon, life and death and a whole list of dichotomies, and the once harmonious world seemed to split in half, or at least it felt in people’s hearts.

  Fanaticism sprang up, uncompromising, between sayonaros—nostalgic for old times—and fideístas, revelers who lived for the moment. And although the two women had an identical smell, which was merely human, they said Sayonara smelled of incense, and she was venerated for her air of child puta, unattainable and sheltered in her way of being there without being, for remaining unsullied by the many hands that had touched her, while they said that Fideo smelled of musk and they sought her out because she was just a plain whore, committed to the profession without offering resistance, without holding back, baring her insides in public and not keeping a single gesture or secret or memory for herself. Well, perhaps a memory, just one, but a delicate and kind one: Ay, don Enrique!

  I try to communicate to Todos los Santos what I have been deciphering and she laughs.

  “Don’t get me tangled up in words,” she insists. “The difference is that with Sayonara you had to love her, and that with Fideo you only had to pay her. That’s it.”

  “Fine, you in your way and I in mine, we both think the same,” I defend myself this time. “And now tell me, did each resent the presence of the other? Was it hard for Sayonara to suddenly find herself with competition and to see her hegemony at risk?”

  “How should I put it? They were both too lost in their own worlds to worry about the other.”

  They worked under the same roof, but they belonged to worlds that never touched, each one playing for all she was worth to maintain supremacy over her own, but with no awareness of the size of what was in play. Also, in their roles as infallible lovers—and both were, each in her own way—they demonstrated their inability to feel jealousy, because neither recognized the existence of a rival; what’s more, for them a rival couldn’t exist because both knew that, in terms of her own pleasure or loss, they had already won, forever, the bloody poker game that was their peculiar way of understanding love.