The Dark Bride (14 page)

“She isn't injured, sick, or dead,” concluded Todos los Santos, who refused to keep looking for the girl and ordered the others to go to bed. “She left because she wanted to.”

Why had Sayonara left? It wasn't easy to deduce the motive for her fleeing, which had occurred just when her life was going splendidly. She had become a golden legend, surrounded by the love of hundreds of
petroleros,
possessed of radiant youth and a wild beauty that was magnified a hundredfold by rumors. Loved and supported by her
madrina,
who was an imposing figure in La Catunga, and by the majority of the population of the barrio, who accepted without jealousy her clear professional supremacy. She was privileged also in the art of being a
puta
, in having so many aspirants that she could give herself the luxury of rejecting drunks, foul-smelling or virus-pocked clients, men with sour characters or exotic tastes in bed; she was so spoiled and blessed among all the other women that she only needed to appear briefly in the Dancing Miramar and to dance under the spotlights, somnolent and unenthusiastic, for the men who were in love with her to express their willingness to give her their paychecks just to caress her with a look.

The day after Sayonara's disappearance, Olguita, Delia Ramos, and the others devoted themselves to figuring what had happened to her and to finding her no matter where she was, and through inquiries and interrogations they managed to follow her trail to a tiny river port an hour and a half from Tora called Madre de Dios, where some fishermen confirmed they had seen her arrive alone, walking without bags and barefoot. Beyond Madre de Dios, all trace of her vanished.

“Maybe she boarded a
chalupa
and went downriver,” said the fishermen without conviction. “Maybe, who knows?”

Isolated in her house, a perplexed and shaken Todos los Santos locked herself in her room and lit three candles of supplication on her altar.

“Tell me where she is, Jesucristo,” she begged. “If you don't know, no one knows.”

The Holy Christ smiled at her as pained as always, sweet and removed from human affairs, never uttering a word.

Then Todos los Santos began to study the postcards, remembering the faith with which Sayonara seemed to seek in them the key to some divine plan.

“Would she have gone off to look for Sacramento?” she asked herself, and the possibility seemed soothing to her, because it meant that the web of affection that they had woven together had not been broken, and that the girl wasn't wandering around lost, as feared, through the distant, unreachable shadows of her past. But no, it wasn't likely that she had followed after Sacramento, because the postcards gave no account of the location from which they had been sent.

Two things had occurred on the previous ill-fated day, mused Todos los Santos, wanting to tie up loose ends as she carefully examined the postcards to extract their secrets from them. Claire's death and Sayonara's disappearance: What did these two adversities have to do with this
PALACE IN KATMANDU
, opening its gardens to visitors, or with these two women, so absorbed in knitting their lace that to them the rest of the world doesn't exist? What the devil could be revealed by this
QUEEN ELIZABETH II OF GREAT BRITAIN
, if she seemed to be asleep with her eyes open beneath the weight of her enormous crown? What hidden thread could unite the
FUNERAL URN, MUISCA CULTURE
with the
PORCELAIN JAR, MING DYNASTY, NINETEENTH CENTURY
? Nothing, absolutely nothing, aside from the fact that both were thousand-year-old earthenware vessels. And so she continued to speculate, trying to make some sense of this nonsense, dazed with confusion, until dawn arrived, then she spent two days eating little and speaking even less, ruminating senselessly on the words on the postcards until she pushed them aside in disgust.

“No more silliness,” she ordered herself. “We only know what our hearts tell us about people, and mine is shouting to me that this girl is going to come back. I just have to give her time.”

With the first light of the fifth day, Todos los Santos, still not completely awake, saw Sayonara again. Or thought she saw the girl standing at the threshold of her vigil, there at her bedroom door. But she was shrunken, thin, and timid, just as she had appeared two years before when she arrived in Tora for the first time. The spectral apparition looked at her without smiling, once again looking more like a child than an adolescent, once again malnourished, suspicious, barefoot, and unkempt—smelling, as before, of smoke and helplessness. As if time had stagnated and everything were unreal and identical to the way it had begun.

“Are you a person or a memory?” whispered Todos los Santos.

Todos los Santos was on the verge of collapse when she was rescued by another sudden apparition in the doorway. This time it was the real Sayonara, the same smiling, beautiful girl who had left the house on the day of Claire's death.

“Madrina,”
she said, pushing forward the small replica of herself, “this is my younger sister, Ana. I have come to ask if she can live here with us.”

On three other occasions over the course of the following year in similarly mysterious circumstances, Sayonara disappeared and reappeared without advising anyone of her intentions or telling anyone where she had gone, and always with identical results, and those three new opportunities also had their own names: Susana, Juana, and Chuza. So that by December the house was full and all five sisters were present, as Sayonara swore to Todos los Santos, promising her that she wouldn't be bringing any more. Sayonara was the eldest, then Ana, Susana, Juana, and finally Chuza, a very tiny, very dark little child with shining eyes, hair to her waist, and the reflexes of a lizard, who didn't speak Spanish or any other language and measured no more than twenty inches in height.

All five were installed full time and for life in Todos los Santos's house, all five having appeared out of nowhere, all swarthy, short-statured, and long-haired, one behind the other like those lacquered wooden dolls from Russia that you keep opening and inside you find another identical but smaller, and another and still another, in a descending line until you reach the tiniest, which in this case was little Chuza.

When she learned of sweet Claire's fierce death, a shadow, like a dead bird, fell across Sayonara's gaze and her expression froze into a mask, as if she had been told of a shame that was too much her own, that in some unsuspected way had something to do with her.

“My mother and my brother committed suicide,” she said suddenly, five or six days later, making those who heard her shudder. “Until then my pueblo had known nothing about suicide; it had never occurred to a single one of those people to die that way. And suddenly two happened one after the other, with only a few hours between them, and both in my family.”

After a period of silence she added: “I loved my brother very much.”

Todos los Santos asked nothing, and she tells me that she had several reasons for doing so. First, because there is pain that doesn't allow questions or offer any answers. Second, to respect the memories of others, which are sacrosanct and private, and to avoid probing into the hidden story that had always been guessed at yet still eluded them, as if calling attention to it was a way of invoking it. And because of jealousy, I would add: I don't think that she wanted to admit the existence of another family and other love, different from her own, in Sayonara's life.

“I hadn't even been born when my mother died.” The girl didn't make it any easier to find out much about her life, given her penchant for dropping false clues.

So the adopted mother didn't say anything to her adopted daughter but secretly began to watch Sayonara's every step, especially in the shifting hours between night and dawn, and if she saw the girl heading in the direction of the train tracks, she would take her by the arm, hastily inventing some pretext, and accompany her.

“I was afraid that her blood would pull her and throw her under the train,” Todos los Santos confesses to me. “Ways of dying are inherited, you know? Like eye color or shoe size.”

Like Todos los Santos and her friends, I too came to know in a single sentence of the existence of Sayonara's mother and brother and of their suicide. In a single instant they appeared, tied me to the enigma of their death, and disappeared, forcing me to spend that night awake, looking toward the river from the window of my room at the Hotel Pipatón. The formerly great Río de la Magdalena seemed to me like a long absence: slow, black, full of dredging boats—could those brown monsters that sank their feet in the water be dredgers?—and other metallic and orthopedic apparatuses that turned it into an extension of the refinery, which spread across the opposite bank, rusting the night sky with the perpetual combustion pouring from its tall smokestacks. An incongruent smell, feminine and sweet, came from those iron pipes. Don Pitula, the taxi driver who guided me around Tora—and who worked as a welder at the refinery for twenty-five years—had told me that afternoon that the perfumed smoke came from a factory that made aromatics, where they processed petroleum into shampoo, facial creams, and other cosmetics.

“The factory that smells the best is the most poisonous,” he told me. “Working there is like signing a death sentence.”

That frivolous, lethal fragrance seeped into my hotel room, a toxic effluvium of cheap cologne that rose through my nasal passages to my brain, where it sketched the image of Sayonara. Without ever having known or seen her, I had been trying to decipher her for several weeks, and with some degree of certainty, it had seemed until then, although perhaps I was forcing the missing pieces of her character a little to make them fit into a coherent whole. And now the specters of a mother and a brother killed by their own wills had made their brutal appearance, hopelessly exploding the puzzle that I had thus far managed to halfway assemble. Who were they? Why had they taken their lives? What deadly vocation had weighed so heavily on them? The day before, they hadn't existed in my awareness, and now they had loaded the image of Sayonara with a past so final, so turbulent that it threatened to bury the fragile blossom of her present beneath a river of sand. That mother and brother fell upon me from out of nowhere, bringing with them a worrisome guest I had not anticipated, at least not yet and not in such an excessive dose: the breath of death, which blended that night with the cloying smell of the aromatics factory.

“The big ugly bird hovered over Sayonara,” Fideo told me, referring to death, with the lucidity and the edge that come only from the mouth of the dying. “There was no doubt about that. But she knew how to handle it. Don't pluck out my eyes, she commanded it, and the creature kept still. It didn't leave her alone, but it didn't harm her.”

I learned that Todos los Santos was soon able to forget about her vigilance and fear with respect to a suicidal instinct in Sayonara, who seemed instead to be growing happier and more confident in the goodness of life, and about whom nothing aroused suspicion that she might belong to the group of those who are not comfortable on this side of heaven. If it was indeed true, as Fideo believed, that she carried the predatory bird of death on her shoulder, then it was also true that she had learned to feed it from her hand.

Meanwhile, what was Sacramento up to? He was setting a course, together with his friend Payanés, along a rough road of old iron and broken machinery, which the birds resented and the vegetation didn't take long to devour. Ready now for the labor market with their hands and feet hardened with calluses, they had begun their pilgrimage to the Tropical Oil Company's famous Camp 26, which rose up from the indifferent jungle like a great industrial city, gray and repetitive in its metallic roar and closed off by barbed wire. Armed watchmen kept safe from any threat its treasure of beams and towers, machines, turbogenerators, gears, boilers, and fire-fighting units.

“I don't like this,
hermano,
it looks like a prison,” protested Sacramento when they first saw it from afar.

“Cheer up and stop complaining,” responded Payanés, “because that is the face of progress. Learn it well, because that's how every last corner of the world is going to look in fifty years: total development and entertainment for mankind.”

A recruiter just like the one that had rejected them a year before hired them on this time, as
cuñero
's helpers—Payanés with card number 29-170 and Sacramento with the next, 29-171.

“This is the most beautiful number, the one that belongs to my lucky star,” Payanés said to Sacramento. “My mother died on the twenty-ninth, a blessed day.”

“And the other numbers you were assigned, one, seven, and zero, do they also mean something?”

“Of course, man, zero is the universe, the symbol of eternity, and besides it's round like an asshole.”

“And the one and the seven?”

“They're extra; they don't represent anything.”

“I would have liked for my card to have had a five. Five is my favorite number.”

“You don't have any reason to complain, yours has the number twenty-nine also, the anniversary of my blessed mother.”

“But I didn't even know her . . .”

“You can be sure that she would have loved you like a son.”

“Oh, well then, if that's so . . . ,” said Sacramento, half consoled.

To have a contract at any of the camps, and particularly at 9, 22, and 26, the ones that produced the greatest number of barrels, was like knowing the password to heaven. There was no greater honor imaginable for a man, no better guarantee, and most of all it meant having found a port in the storm. “Now we are salaried employees,” they repeated over and over, pronouncing the words with greater pride than if they had been named kings of Rome. In the middle of that vast, drifting humanity, to become a
petrolero
meant salvation.