“Hush, Payanés, don’t court disaster. Don’t think about the mosquitoes and they won’t bite you; they’re just like dogs, they only bite those who are afraid of them.”
He hadn’t finished speaking those words when he began to feel the stings on his cheek, on his hand, on his thigh through the cloth of his trousers. He hadn’t seen them before and suddenly he saw them, in clouds, in battalions, forcing him to scratch himself until he drew blood, dodging their victims’ swats and laughing at the foul-smelling smoke of some cigarettes the men called repellent. He tells me that of the many bites he received in the quagmire of the Carare, there was one that infected him, and he assures me he knows which one it was.
“I turned to look when that mosquito’s sting lanced my neck, like a hypodermic needle, injecting into my veins that insatiable parasite that stayed on to live inside me, to devour my blood little by little. And look how things turn out: The day I contracted malaria was the same day I heard someone talk of her for the first time.”
He heard someone talk about Sayonara, a girl in La Catunga whom the men that visited those streets said they had fallen in love with, and whose fame had begun to spread by word of mouth even among those who didn’t know her, the thousands of seekers of destiny who walked along the roads of Magdalena after bread and work; after opportunities, as they themselves said to give a generic name to the future, to love, to their lucky star, the holy grail, the treasures of El Dorado, the philosopher’s stone, a mother’s compassion, a lover’s sheets, the roar of black gold. Sacramento says:
“I think we were looking blindly for something that was worthy of all that searching; something, finally, that deserved to be sought out and that at the moment of death would allow us to say, that’s what I lived for.”
It often turned out, due to a breath of spontaneous winds, that the object of the collective search would take a woman’s name, and then the chosen one would rapidly be converted into a legend, and her glory would extend everywhere the oil pipes ran. That happened with Sayonara, the slender girl. Sayonara, the novia, the lover, of everyone and no one, silent and dark: Each man who passed through Tora left the city dazzled by her. Whether it was true or just an empty boast, there was no man who didn’t pride himself on having been with her.
“It’s the simple things that we understand the least,” Sacramento acknowledges. “How was I to imagine at the time that my scraggly, wild girl, my sister on those endless imaginary journeys, was the Japanese goddess that every voice spoke to me of? Or had I imagined it in the fires of my youthful longing?”
“Sayonara,” Sacramento was heard to say one night when the heat nearly drove him mad, and the name refreshed him just by its repetition and it sounded like happiness. As the days passed he got to thinking that it was a talisman against the difficulties of life, and he began to tie himself to the memory of the woman, although it wasn’t his own exclusive memory, because after all he had never seen her, or at least that’s what he thought, but her fame was a patrimony diffused through those mountains and vast lands. Like the troubadour’s mysterious and anonymous Lady of Provence, Sayonara had become, in petrolero land, the inspiration of every man proud enough to call himself one. At least that was the reasoning that called Sacramento to his senses, while his heart busied itself, stubbornly, in the belief that the beautiful woman he dreamed of belonged to him alone, because the others bought and used her, but he would adore her forever. He committed the error of letting his guard down and allowing the delirium of that woman’s name to lodge in his bloodstream in the form of jealousy, which is as obstinate as malaria itself, and from then on he began to carry within him the two plagues, which embraced him like twin rivers of fever and fire, distinct yet confluent.
“That was the serious problem, that Sacramento was jealous of Sayonara even before he loved her,” sighs Todos los Santos.
But the first symptoms of Sacramento’s recently acquired double illness took months to incubate and manifest themselves, and they gave him respite from the putridness of the Río Opón’s quagmire. Together with Payanés, after having bought a new pair of shoes, he went to try his luck as a repairman on the oil pipeline that flowed into the Bahía of Cartagena, and then they joined the railway workers on the section of line that stretched between Papayal and Espíritu Santo. Wherever they went they heard a pained sighing, a sort of prayer intoned by dozens of lonely men to the young prostituta from Tora.
“Maybe they grieved for many women, each man for his own,” acknowledges Sacramento today, “but to me it was as if they only spoke of her. No other names entered my ears, only Sayonara, Sayonara, falling like snow onto the high treetops in the midst of the suffocating heat, and I couldn’t believe that there was any greater passion than the one that emanated from her.”
Without knowing how or when, Sacramento began to build his life upon the messianic obsession of rescuing the beautiful object of his fantasies from her wrong path, apparently without suspecting that he knew her in flesh and blood — very little flesh and blood — because that distant Japanese girl with the legendary wake who pursued and trapped him was the same skinny girl that he had personally taken to Todos los Santos to teach her how to be someone, before she had a rare and exotic name but was simply called “the girl,” and she didn’t come from the Orient, like the three wise men, but from some pueblo like so many others whose name nobody bothered to ascertain. And she held no fascination or mysteries, just the existence of a cornered, hungry animal, with such force of character, freedom of spirit, and mulish stubbornness, that if Sacramento had been an attentive reader of souls, like Todos los Santos, he also would have perceived — or did he perceive it? — that the ordinary girl could convert herself into a living relic of the oil world, with the sole requirement that she choose to do so.
Each time Sacramento came upon civilization, the first thing he did, even before using a washbasin to rinse his face, or sitting down in front of a plate of hot food, was to send a postcard addressed to the girl in Tora, via the occasional traveler, migratory workers, the river mail, or the comings and goings of the mule drivers. He did it just like that, out of an affectionate impulse, the natural inclination toward the only thing in his life that resembled rootedness. Without fully comprehending that a mocking fate, which amuses itself at the expense of mortals, obliged him to send missives to someone who he adored without knowing it, and forced him to pursue through the labyrinth of roads precisely that which he had left behind.
They were colorful postcards with photographs and motifs of unexpected themes and diverse nationalities, on the backs of which Sacramento scrawled a few gerunds bearing his greetings. Like a FAÇADE OF THE PANCHAYAT PALACE IN KATMANDU, CAPITAL OF NEPAL, which read: “Thinking of you and remembering you, nothing more for the moment, Sacramento.” Or a LADIES FROM TOLEDO IN TYPICAL DRESS MAKING THE TRADITIONAL LACE OF THE REGION, with a note on the reverse that added adverbs to the usual gerunds: “Everything going well hoping the same for you remembering you affectionately and also señora Todos los Santos.” Or Sayonara’s favorite, PLATE AND VEGETABLE DISH IN DELICATE SEVRES PORCELAIN, on which was written, in blue ink, the following courtesy: “Hoping and wishing to see you again soon, yours respectfully Sacramento.”
Sayonara received them with jubilant shouts as if they were what they actually were, updates on pasteboard that reached her hands through mysterious routes from other worlds to notify her that she wasn’t alone in this one. She would interrupt whatever she was doing to take them from house to house, showing them to her friends, and after reading each one many times, she would stick them with tacks to the wall around the red Christ, forming a rhombus, a circle, a butterfly pattern, or other figures, sometimes geometrical, sometimes whimsical, that were covered with the vermilion reflections of the votives and in some impious way were integrated with the fascination and panic that the sacred space inspired in her.