“What had the zapatero done?” I ask. “Why did they kill him? Who killed him?”
“Regular people; don’t think they were murderers or professional evil-doers. Small-business men on Calle Caliente, enraged by the evictions.”
Never before and never again were the four sources of power in such agreement, nor did they act in such synchronization. Public health measures were preached from the pulpit, the Tropical Oil Company performed marriage counseling, the Fourth Brigade decided who should be pillars of morality, and the mayor, who was the representative for Tora in the National Conservative Directorate and the fellow party member of Senator Mariano Azcárraga Caballero, the ingrate who drove beautiful Claire to her grave, was the individual who singled out those who deserved scorn and punishment for breaking ethical, hygienic, labor, and public order laws.
One of the central aims of this four-party strategy was the leveling of the red-light district, because they wanted to build on that land barrios of family housing in the image and likeness of the Barrio Staff, but in a squashed, Creole, and proletarian version. They professed to want to do away with the puterío and the red-light districts. But what it really boiled down to was that everything that had to do with poverty looked red to them, as if the poor barrio and the red-light district were one and the same. After one of their evictions, on the day Sayonara returned, the victims descended on the plaza, pushing in front of them anything they could, movable or immovable.
“But why the shoe repairman? What had he done?”
“Nothing. He hadn’t done anything.”
He only tried to calm the crowd to prevent them from vandalizing, but the level of discontent had grown so acute that it was his unfortunate fate to become the scapegoat and receive their wrath.
“Of course, Sayonara would have given a different explanation for the events,” Olga informs me. “If you had asked Sayonara, she would have told you that the shoe repairman, without knowing it, had swapped his fate for hers.”
After the crime, for a few eternal minutes, the city was submerged in a rare lethargic silence and absence, as if everyone had run inside their houses or their own hearts to hide from the horror, and it was during this span of otherworldly stillness that Sayonara walked down Calle Caliente and entered La Catunga, feeling foreign inside her own body, looking at this planet with the eyes of a stranger and trembling with apprehension as great or greater than that first time, so many years ago. Then she saw Sacramento again, the boy, sitting on his cart with his curly eyelashes and his strawlike hair, warning her that anyone who entered that place could never leave.
She looked for Todos los Santos’s house and found nothing but rubble. She went back, looked again, but she found nothing, and then she asked, Olga assures me, whether she might be dead after all, and whether the episode with the zapatero had been one of those pitiful lies that the dead tell themselves to palliate the irreversibility of their situation.
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 p
ride 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 . . .”
forty-six
“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.
After digging through boxes, sacks, and drawers, Todos los Santos presents me with the following poem, typewritten and signed by the telegraph operator Renato Leduc:
Jovian pain of losing
adored things. Pain that oft
costs your life,
and oft costs naught.
I once told you: I love you,
as I had never said before
nor ever will again so true.
I said it to you in desperation
because I knew that very soon
another would say it too.
I said it in desperation,
but I have nothing to regret.
I loved you so, I loved you
because in your eyes so fair
was a piece of infinity;
because of your chestnut hair,
because of your mouth
barbarously naked
I loved you, I loved you so . . .
But so many people loved you
at once,
that I told myself: it is implausible
to plead
—if so many people love her—
things she does not need.
I thought of killing myself
then,
but I didn’t, because
I asked myself, why?
Lost in pain and grief
I let my beard grow
because that limpid love so brief
from it derived such merriment,
since virgins have always found
—or so they say—in beards much amusement.
Jovian pain of losing . . .
Apart from being a poet, there is little I am able to find out in Tora about the author, who defined himself as a bureaucrat of the lowest level. I know that when he arrived here he lodged at the Casa de Huéspedes, belonging to Conchita la Tapatía, a fellow Mexican, and that during the many nights in which they shared reminiscences of their motherland over glasses of Vat 69, he told her that he had trained for his profession at the Escuela Nacional de Telégrafos in Mexico City, which occupied an old building on Calle Donceles, next to the women’s insane asylum, and that he had started working before he turned thirteen—before he even had hair on his balls, he said—to help support his widowed mother. That before he arrived in Tora he had passed through Paris, where the puticas in the Latin Quarter taught him how to speak French; that he was fiercely anticlerical and aluciferado, a term he himself used, meaning “possessed by the devil”; “a man who had lived a great deal,” as Todos los Santos said; a man who was stuck on Sayonara from the first time he saw her through the window of the telegraph office in Tora, who became her most assiduous and starry-eyed client, and who weekly left in her hands nearly the entirety of his scant weekly salary.
“You can’t offer your heart to a woman like that,” admonished his Colombian best friend, a giant of a man named Valentín.
“For a woman like that, I have nothing but heart,” Renato replied.
“Love me,” Leduc begged Sayonara.
“I can’t love you. I look at you and I don’t see you.”
“You have an empty pot where other women hold their feelings,” the telegraph poet told her, and she realized that he was right, in part.
Then, enamored and in pain, he quit his job, packed a trunk with all of his books and his two changes of clothes, wrote the final poem, titled it “Romance of the Lost,” sent it to the addressee in an envelope, and returned to his Mexico, where he was heard to say that he had left Colombia to flee the indifference of a distant lover bent on remaining a puta.
forty-seven
The day after her return to Tora, Sayonara shook off her exhaustion by sleeping until the middle of the morning, and when she arose she found her madrina, Machuca, and Olga whispering suspiciously in the kitchen.
“Are you going to tell me what you are up to?” she asked them. “Since last night you’ve been plotting something behind my back and it’s time for you to tell me what it is.”
“We’re going to tell you, we already decided that. It’s bad news. About your sister Ana.”
“Did she die?”
“No, but that might have been preferable.” They kept beating around the bush, without daring to be specific.
From the moment of her arrival, Sayonara had been asking about her sister and they had answered her evasively. We don’t know, it seems that she lives on a finca near the village of Los Mangos, she left a telephone number but no one ever answers there, and when they do they say she moved somewhere else. Then, because of the deception and the delaying, Sayonara pitched a fit, one of those demoniac rages with eight legs and two heads that spits poison from its mouths and fire from its tail, one of those boundless bursts of anger that hadn’t possessed her since adolescence and that still gave them something to talk about in Tora.
“Either you tell me now, or I’ll tear apart this house and everything in it.”
They told her. Ana was the mistress of General Demetrio del Valle, commander in chief of Tora’s campaign of moralization and shanty eradication, who, because he was married civilly and in the eyes of the church to a rich lady from Anolaima and didn’t want to be found out, kept Ana closed up in a house next to the garrison and had spread the word that she was a cousin of his from the country whose education he had charitably offered to sponsor.
“I’m going to get her out of there even if it costs us both our lives,” announced Sayonara, and without further delay she started off.
“Wait,” suggested Todos los Santos in
a softer voice, so as not to unleash the storm again. “Let her make her own life just as you have made yours. Besides, the way things are right now, it’s better to be the mistress of a gorilla than the wife of some man who’s dying of hunger.”
But Sayonara wasn’t there to hear her, and a few hours later she was clambering across the garrison’s tiled roofs, then broke a window and climbed through it.
“Del Valle pays for my private English and dressmaking lessons,” Ana told her. “He has given me a television, a record player, and a collection of LPs. He brings me marzipan fruits made by nuns and bottles of sweet wine from Oporto, and as if that weren’t enough, in bed he prefers sleeping over messing around. Does it look like I’m suffering, sister?”
“And the wrongs that the military has done to our family? Have you forgotten the atrocious way they caused the deaths of our mother and brother? And the wrongs they have done to our people, back in Tora? Have you forgotten?”
“No, hermana, I haven’t forgotten, and sometimes the anger makes my blood boil and I see red, and at those times I hate del Valle and want to strangle him with my bare hands. But then he brings marzipan, turns on the television, falls asleep like a little orphan, and I forgive him. If you saw him without his hat, with his four hairs plastered against his skull, he wouldn’t seem so ferocious to you. But I promise you one thing: If some day the anger overcomes the forgiveness, I’ll put strychnine in his café con leche. Or if some day I get tired of marzipan and studying English, I’ll take off through that window, hermana, the same one you just came in by, and I’ll go straight to Todos los Santos’s house.”
Several times I have made notes in my notebook that I should inquire about an enigma, which is: On what do Olga and Todos los Santos actually live? Finally I get up the nerve to ask and Olguita tells me that when the savings that Sayonara had left for her sisters ran out, Sacramento took charge of the situation. Persevering in the lumber business, he managed to finance the girls’ education as well as special treatment for little Chuza, who he still takes to Bucaramanga once a month to see a speech therapist, because although she’s now married, she still hasn’t spoken a word.
The Dark Bride Page 34