“Look at her carefully,” Abelino Robles, the veteran cuñero, advised them. “Not only does she spin furiously, but the smallest part of her weighs as much as a man. All it takes is for you to drop a wrench on your foot to put you out of commission permanently, not to mention putting a hand where it doesn’t belong.”
“This Emilia; I’ve never seen such an incredible beast,” said Payanés, impressed, looking at her deeply and lovingly as if she were a pagan temple, delicately caressing the bluntness of her iron beams and unconsciously making a pledge of fidelity that would be honored without fail from that first encounter until the day death parted them.
“So, Payanés is dead?” I ask.
“Emilia is dead.”
The alliance between the two of them was sealed that very night, when Payanés was approached by a wandering peddler who professed some skill in the art of tattooing and offered him the painless inscription of the name of the woman he loved anywhere on his body.
“Put ‘Emilia’ here, on my chest. And put a little drawing beside it.”
“How about a dagger or a swallow?”
“No, no daggers, and no swallows either.”
“What about a rose?”
“That’s it, a rose; a rose with a thorn and a drop of blood.”
“The rose didn’t turn out very well, it looked more like a carnation,” Sacramento would say later, when he saw the drawing engraved forever in blue and red ink on his friend’s left pectoral. “The drop does look very realistic. But the ‘Emilia’… the ‘Emilia,’ I don’t know, Payanés, it seems risky. If they change your position you won’t be able to take off your shirt even to take a bath.”
“They’re not going to change my position,” asserted Payanés, before he fell asleep in his hammock. “I’m going to be the best cuñero in the whole country, you’ll see.”
For three days — the three days of apprenticeship — the two young men carried out the humble task of being the cuñero’s helpers, which consisted of clearing the mud off the platform as they watched, not missing a thing, Abelino Robles and another seasoned worker execute the job of petrolero with the precision of watchmakers and the mental concentration of lion tamers and with Emilia’s monumental and furious gears seemingly calmed by their touch.
“Now it’s your turn,” announced Abelino Robles at the beginning of the fourth day.
“Let’s go!” shouted Payanés animatedly to Sacramento. “Let’s put the panties on this mermaid.”
The drilling pipe, which needed to penetrate the earth to a depth of three thousand feet, would grow longer as the cuñeros, from a low platform, screwed on more and more lengths of fifty-foot pipe. In order to do this, Sacramento would have to grip the new piece of pipe, which was hanging vertically through the center of the tower, with a precision wrench known as the scorpion, while Payanés capped the string of buried pipes with a 130-pound steel crown fitted with special bolts. Each time the bit wore out they had to remove the fitted pipes and disassemble them, reversing the fitting process.
“You’re going to work as a team and each of you is going to depend on the other,” the veteran fitter advised them. “Sacramento, if you slip with the scorpion, the pipe will sever your friend’s hands; Payanés, if you don’t fit the band well, the pipes will slide and the scorpion will spin around, kick Sacramento, and mess him up.”
From the beginning Payanés showed natural ability, and even a certain happiness and ease of execution, and he proudly displayed on his naked torso, bathed in sweat, the throbbing petrolero’s rose, with its sharp thorn and drop of blood. Meanwhile, Sacramento seemed afraid and uncertain, gripped with nervous tension, as if counting every minute of every hour remaining before their shift ended without accident.
“Don’t worry, hermano, I won’t let you down,” he shouted to Payanés above the deafening racket every now and then, as if to assure himself that what he was saying was true.
After eight hours of uninterrupted exertion, the whistle blew and the pair abandoned skinny Emilia to head for the barracks, arm in arm, exhausted, muddy from head to toe, and as giddy as a couple of boys who had just won a soccer match.
For only three weeks Sacramento was able to enjoy this occupational happiness, which for him meant, above all else, the possibility of getting closer to Sayonara. The illness, which had already infected him with its germ and dogged his steps, then fell upon him with all of its fury. The first manifestation was a dull, nagging pain, which made him dizzy and which he attributed to the eight hours a day that he spent focused on the bit.
“My thoughts were growing more and more confused and my love for Sayonara more tormented, and I blamed it on the noise of the machinery. But even when I had moved away from the drilling equipment, its roar pursued me; I heard it all night and its vibration rattled me to the bone.
“Later I lost my appetite and even when I’d had nothing to eat I vomited yellow, watery bile, for which I also found a justification, this time in the hardened balls of cold rice with lard that were passed around at lunchtime; they were so compact and inedible that we would use them as soccer balls.”
Then he was overtaken by a waxy paleness and a pain in his temples, and a rising fever made its appearance. Sacramento, incapable of working and declared contagious by the medical staff, was moved to the camp’s neat white hospital, where he came to share space and destinies with other lucky souls who were cured in fifteen or twenty days, and also with others less fortunate who were being consumed by mountain leprosy, malaria, intestinal infection, or tuberculosis and who represented nothing more to the company than financial loss.
Forgotten in that antiseptic corner of industrial paradise, Sacramento defended himself from the invading parasite with all of his available energy, and the ferocity of the internal combat began to produce extremely high fevers, combined with shivering and a trembling of his bones, which creaked in self-defense.
“I’m turning black, hermano,” he said to a nurse called Demetrio.
“It’s the melancholic fluids that are spreading through your body,” explained Demetrio, who knew nothing of diplomacy when it came time to explain to his patients the symptoms of their illnesses.
“The black fluids, you mean?”
“Yes. They flow, little by little, blackening the liver, the spleen, the brain, the red blood cells. Well, just about everything; they turn everything black.”
“Hermano, I’m burning alive,” Sacramento complained to his friend Payanés, who came to visit whenever he could. “I’m burning with fever and with love and I’m roasting over a low fire. Don’t I look black to you?”
“Black, no; just a little yellow. But it’ll go away. Sooner or later everybody gets over it.”