They didn’t stop crying until they heard the celluloid Mary Magdalene swear and swear again that she had seen Christ resplendent, his wounds healed and gloriously resuscitated, and then they left the Patria Theater feeling lightened, free of guilt and empty of tears, prepared to bear another year of life without complaint or protest. Until the next Maundy Thursday, with its rain and tears, would come to bring the world purifying alleviation in the form of streams and torrents of water.
On the way back home along the Calle del Comercio, a few steps removed from the others, Todos los Santos and Sayonara walked arm in arm, one old and the other young, one pale-skinned and the other dark, one the mother and the other the daughter: both threatening and haughty in their black dresses, not looking back or greeting anyone.
“Mother whore, daughter whore, who does the blanket cover more?” commented the pious as they watched the pair pass.
“If the girl were hers,” murmured others, “that procuress wouldn’t have allowed her to work the street, she would have installed her in a convent school, in Bucaramanga or in Cúcuta.”
“A convent?” says Todos los Santos, terrified. “Why would I leave her in the hands of nuns? Who are those señoras to educate her better than I?”
After living together for two years, everything that Sayonara knew she had learned from her madrina. She echoed her madrina’s expressions, had the same deep gaze, the identical habit of walking around barefoot, and of curing illnesses with infusions of parsley. She had even inherited the peculiar style of cleaning her teeth, scrubbing so hard that the brush barely lasted a month.
“Under my wing that girl was growing up beautiful and strong. In her steps I found my own footprint and in her mirror I could read the same traces of my youth.
“I taught her how to be a prostitute and not anything else because it was the trade that I knew, just as the shoemaker can’t train a bricklaying apprentice nor should a viola player try to give piano lessons.
“I did what I did without doubting my conscience,” Todos los Santos assures me, “because I have always believed that a puta can have a life that is just as clean as any decent housewife, or as corrupted as any indecent housewife.”
nine
They say that at some moment in their itinerant existence the men from all the camps in the world, from the oil wells of Infantas to the vast fuel deposits of Iraq, passed religiously through the streets of sin in La Catunga, as if coming to fulfill a promise, because it was the heart and sanctuary of the extensive oil labyrinth. In La Catunga the circle was completed; it was the obligatory point of return for their travels.
“As a boy I had lived invisibly in Tora, leading a humble existence, hauling people and packages with my cart,” says Sacramento. “Living that way it is difficult for anyone to notice you, especially the majeres de café, who were accustomed to rubbing elbows with engineers, contractors, trained personnel. That’s why I left, thinking I would return with some distinction, which is the purpose of everyone who leaves.”
“With what they gave him for selling the cart, Sacramento bought a pair of walking shoes and started walking,” Todos los Santos tells me.
Where to? He didn’t have to ask anyone; he took off walking by the compass of the wandering multitude, joining the great river of seekers of fortune until he arrived at the oil installations at El Centro, where he found a population drowning in a persistent downpour that lashed diagonally, soaking mankind to the bone and reminding them of their helplessness. He arrived at dawn and immediately, without shrinking back from the weather’s sudden attacks, took his place in the queue under the deluge, in front of the recruiting office. After hours of waiting, with his skin wrinkled under his soaked clothing, he gathered the courage to exchange words with the man waiting behind him.
“Raindrops were falling from his hair too and running into his eyes, his mouth and his ears, as they were into mine. So I asked him: A lot of rain, isn’t it? An insignificant question, just to find a subject, and he answered me: Yeah, except maybe for frogs in a pond. From there we could converse more seriously because his words and mine had already been intertwined, and he confessed that he had come from the city of Popayán to try out his luck. Popayán? Where in the hell is that? I asked him, again just for the pleasure of chatting, or the need to find an accomplice, because I already knew more or less where the city of Popayán was.”
“It’s on the other side of the country,” he answered.
“That’s not so bad, there are several here who come from the other side of the planet. I’ve seen Armenians, Canadians, Jews, Greeks…”
“Well, I still had to walk three months to get here.”
“ ‘Okay, Payanés’—I called him that because that’s what they call people who are from Popayán, and I kept calling him Payanés through the many good days that we were close friends, and even afterward—‘now that you’re here hold my place in line while I go take a leak,’ I said eagerly and in confidence, like any timid guy who wants to hide his urgent condition. In truth I had decided to talk to him because I had to go badly and didn’t want to lose my place in that line of men, winding long and nervous like a poisonous snake.”
At noon, the rain gave way to a brilliant sun that dried the clothes on their backs, then around three in the afternoon it was finally their turn to face the recruiter, a robust man with the neck and disposition of an ill-tempered young bull.
“Show me your palms!” he bellowed, and they obeyed instantly. “Those are the hands of a lady, aren’t you ashamed? Get out of here, we don’t need women!”
“Respect!” demanded Sacramento, but without much conviction, so the bull wouldn’t charge him.
“Yeah, respect,” echoed Payanés, and from that first adversity they became accomplices for all the others to come.
“I’ll kill that son of a bitch,” boasted Sacramento when the beast was no longer within earshot. “I’ll choke him with my bare hands, then we’ll see whether they’re a lady’s hands.”
“You’re not going to choke anybody, much less that giant,” said Payanés, taking his new friend over to join a group of fellow rejects as they headed out to look for work as road laborers, to wield shovels until their hands were covered with calluses and they could return to the recruiting officer stronger and better prepared.
They penetrated the dense, hungry jungles of Carare through a tunnel they barely managed to open with slashes of their machetes and that snapped shut behind them like the jaws of a beast. They walked in the dark, feeling their way and withstanding scratches, roars, venom, and harassment from slimy fauna and hairy flora whose existence Sacramento had never dreamed of even in his worst nightmares, and that Payanés pointed out and classified according to their place in the animal, mineral, or vegetable kingdom.
“This is a sarrapial, those giant burning flowers are called cámbulos, those shouts you hear are from white-faced maicero monkeys, this must be the footprint of a momano, half ape and half human, who walks upright through the jungle, wary and nearly hairless, hiding from people because he’s shy and ashamed of his nakedness.”