“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.