Each time she received a new postcard, Sayonara disapproved of its corresponding place on the wall according to the old design. So she would pull them all down, taking advantage of the opportunity to read them again, shuffle and mix them, and arrange them again, one by one, letting herself be guided by impulses or whims. PLATE AND VEGETABLE DISH IN DELICATE SEVRES PORCELAIN now far from QUEEN ELIZABETH II OF GREAT BRITAIN and to the right of TORERO EXECUTING A PASS WITH CAPE ON A YOUNG BULL; DANCE CLASS, OIL PAINTING BY PIETRO LONGHI diagonally across from LACQUERED TABLE WITH CHINOISERIE, DETAIL; SECTION OF THE GARDENS OF LUXEMBOURG next to BALCONY OF THE QUINTA DE BOLÍVAR SANTAFÉ DE BOGOTÁ, and so on indefinitely, in variable and cabalistic order that neither she nor anyone else could interpret but that seemed to be foreshadowing the course of the events of her life.
ten
Through the American Frank Brasco, I came to know of Sayonara’s fascination with snow, despite her never having seen it, or perhaps precisely because of that.
“You must be crazy, Sayo,” Brasco said to her. “We’re melting at ninety degrees in the shade and you’re asking me about snow…”
To Sayonara, a woman of the tropics accustomed to the frenzy of a vegetation perpetually sprouting and blossoming, to a voracious and persistent green that in a matter of hours swallows anything that remains still, the immobile silence of snow-covered fields must have been very perplexing. That sleepy landscape, hidden beneath an immense whiteness, barely conceived from photographs and postcards, must have been pure magic to her, or merely the hoax of foreigners, as if someone were to swear to a European that in other latitudes the sky stretched in red and white squares, like a quilt.
“She was more than simply curious,” Frank Brasco assured me. “That snow, which she had never seen, created a deep longing within her; it was something she needed urgently, who knows why.”
Otherworldly and overwhelming — as if seen through Sayonara’s eyes — the forests of this wintery Vermont appear before me, where Brasco the engineer was born and later spent many winters, until he finally established himself here permanently, now retired and at the doorstep of old age, in the midst of an austerity and a voluntary isolation that one could say is almost hermetic. I’ve come here looking for him because I have learned that he treasures memories of the time he worked for the Tropical Oil Company as general supervisor of Campo 26. He was at the time a man with a liberal attitude, accustomed to conducting relationships with women within the scope of a university environment, to such a degree that the possibility of seeking love in the world of prostitution had never even occurred to him. Besides, a bad case of poorly tended hepatitis in his childhood had left his liver sensitive to and incompatible with alcohol, so he considered himself immune to what he thought were the reasons that pushed the rest of the men as a mass toward the barrio of La Catunga. For that reason, despite regularly going down from 26 to the neighboring city, Frank Brasco had never crossed the boundaries of the zona de tolerancia and certainly would never have if chance hadn’t caused, for a few revealing and fascinating days, his path to cross with that of Sayonara, the dark lover of Tora.
“What was the first thing you noticed about her?”
“From the very first moment, I was shaken by her beauty and pained by her excessive youth, because she was practically a girl. A beautiful and frightened girl, like a feline, and dedicated to being a puta. But I also immediately perceived an unyielding temperament and a certain, unusually powerful intensity. How can I describe it? A human warmth that kept her capacity for expression intact. Not that she was always affectionate, or happy. Sometimes, it was just the opposite, she would walk past you so absorbed in her affairs that she didn’t even notice that you were there. But at those moments her presence weighed on you, and you couldn’t avoid it. Every movement of her body, every sentence she spoke, her way of looking at something or laughing, everything about her was naturally surprising and not premeditated, was sure, exact. As if the earth were a planet populated by extraterrestrials and she was the only one who had really been born here.”
“Do you mean that she had a conclusive way of being there?”
“Exactly. How did you know?”
“I have heard that before.”
“I remember a Colombian song that goes, more or less, I love my woman because she is pure reality. It must have been written about her.”
Frank Brasco tells me that from the first day they met, Sayonara devoted herself to asking about snow and kept insisting on the subject even at the moment when they were saying good-bye forever.
“It was her obsession,” he tells me. “And I still don’t understand why I didn’t bring her here so she could experience winter, which made her so anxious. I also wonder why snow interested her so much, why it tugged at her, to the point of a mania.”
As he shovels away the dense layer of snow that obstructs the entrance to his cabin, engineer Brasco struggles to bring to mind the memory of the thousand tones of green of the verdant Colombian landscape, from the most fiery to those streaked with black, the fresh sprouts of bamboo shoots, the nocturnal leaves of the yarumo plant bathed in moonlight, the chatter of the parakeets after a downpour, the piquant aroma of the high pastures, the smell of lemons that refreshes the hours of suffocating heat in Tora.
“And the slices of green mango with salt that they sell on the corners,” he adds. “How I would love to eat green mango with salt again!”
“Sayonara wasn’t the only delirious one,” I say. “In the middle of this cold air and sunk to the knees in snow, you’re talking about green mango with salt…”
“I asked her: ‘Why do you like the snow so much, Sayo, when you’ve never seen it?’ ”
“Yes, I have seen it, in my dreams. And in pictures. Look, míster Brasco,” Sayonara said to him, handing him one of the postcards sent by Sacramento, the reproduction of a painting by Alfred Sisley that showed the sweet way in which winter covered a village street.
“Isn’t it true that this is your pueblo, míster?” Frank Brasco tells me she asked him.
“No, this is a French village. Mine is in the far north of the United States, near the border with…”
“Okay, okay, don’t explain to me where it is, just tell me if it is just like this one in the postcard.”
“Only a little.”
“I say it must be just the same, because all towns look the same when they are covered with snow. Do you know, míster, why it is that snow never comes to Tora?” she asked, and immediately started to talk about something else, without waiting for an answer.
The next day, at exactly six in the morning, when Brasco, still half awake and suffocated by a buzzing dizziness that had tormented him through the night, came out of his room and went to the bathroom to refresh himself by submerging his head in clear water, he saw her sitting there on a bench, already bathed and dressed, impatient, waiting for him.
“Is it true, míster,” she said suddenly, without saying good morning first, “that sometimes the snow falls blue and clean like the sky, and other times gray and soiled like dirt?”