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.
twelve
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.
Their joy was so great at finally having been awarded their cards and the salary that qualified them as members of the working class, as part of the heroic union of petroleros, they didn’t even realize that they didn’t know what a cuñero was, much less a cuñero’s helper.
“Look for skinny Emilia and ask for Abelino Robles, the gang leader. You just obey the orders he gives you, even if he tells you to put panties on a mermaid.”
They assured and reassured him that of course, he could count on them, and they sailed off filled with enthusiasm, and without understanding much about exactly where they were going or what they would be doing.
“Can you tell me who skinny Emilia is? Where I can find her?” Sacramento asked a nearby worker with a kind face.
“Did you hear that?” the worker said to the others around him. “This guy’s dying to meet Emilia.”
“You don’t want to fuck her because she’ll rip your dick off,” someone shouted, laughing, as the group walked away.
Since skinny Emilia turned out not to be skinny or even a woman, but one of the drilling towers in Camp 26, Sacramento and Payanés reddened with embarrassment at their naiveté and decided that from then on they would do things on their own, opening their eyes wide and biting their tongues before asking anything. Emilia, the oldest and most venerated tower in the oil territory — a 1912 Gardner Denver — stood solidly in the center of the camp like a ritual obelisk. Pachydermic and anachronistic but also imposing and all-powerful, Emilia was brutal in the merciless obsession with which she twisted her diamond bit to tear into the earth’s heart, and famous not only for having worked day and night for decades without ever failing but also for her implacable temperament. It was said that if you handled her with intelligence and in full command of your five senses she treated you well, but the clumsy and the careless she made pay with their lives, as had already happened on two occasions, first with a pipe capper who she let fall fifty feet like a dove without wings, then, years later, a welder who she cut in two with the fulminating whip of a high-tension wire that suddenly broke without warning.