It was a close-up of a mestiza girl of dark, biblical beauty, without makeup or adornment, who breathed an air of virgin jungles and at the same time of unfathomed depths, a truly jarring photograph. She had the bearing of the Tahitian women painted by Gauguin. But not a drop of the ingenuousness of the noble savage. Hers were the softened features of an everyday india, but her expression, I didn’t know why, hinted at urban wiles.
I lay the photograph aside to keep looking for my sergeant and before I realized it, I had it in my hands again and was looking at the vigorous fall of that strong hair, parted in the middle, the unmanicured perfection of her almond-shaped fingernails, the eyes of a girl who has seen too much, the vague manner in which her full lips were parted. “As beautiful as Jerusalem and as terrible as an army with battle orders”: studying her I finally understood how Shulamite from the Song of Songs could be so beautiful and so terrible at the same time.
The back of the photograph was also a surprise. It was signed, without a date, by Tigre Ortiz, one of the great Colombian photographers, of whom it was said that he had photographed and loved the most beautiful women on the continent, among them the goddess María Félix. Beneath his signature and between quotation marks appeared a single word, “Sayonara.”
“Did you find what you were looking for?” asked the young man in charge of the archives when he returned from lunch.
“No, but I found this,” I said, as I handed him the photo of the girl. “Do you know who it is?”
“Everybody knows who she is. She was a famous prostituta here in Tora.”
Sometime later in Santafé de Bogotá, I looked for Tigre Ortiz, now retired and in his eighties, to ask him to tell me the story behind that photograph, with little hope that he would remember, because he must have taken it so many years ago. Yes, he remembered that photo, and all the others; he had the memory of an elephant.
He told me that the Tropical Oil Company — the Troco — had hired him at some point to take a series of photographs for a catalog of its installations and for which he had had to travel to Tora, Infantas, and El Centro in search of oil towers, iron beams, and all kinds of machinery.
“I clearly remember,” he said, “a famous Gardner Denver derrick from the beginning of the century, a museum piece that was still functioning like a Swiss watch and was a source of great pride. Several workers asked me to photograph them at the base of the tower.”
At the end of two weeks of photographing, he went out with some engineers to celebrate the culmination of the work in Tora’s red-light district. And he saw her there, toward the middle of the afternoon, barefoot, wearing a loose camisole and brushing her hair on the patio of her house.
“As soon as I saw her I thought of Santi Muti, a poet friend who used to talk about ‘the definitive air of a beautiful india.’ Because that was exactly what that girl had, the self-assurance of a beautiful Indian that could take your breath away.”
He asked her to allow him to photograph her just as she was, and before answering, she sought the consent of an older woman, who according to Tigre must have been her mother. He thought the woman would want to charge him, but she simply said: “Go on, hija, let him take your picture, it won’t hurt.”
“I asked the girl where she was from,” Tigre continued, “because I have always believed that women who are as forceful as Eve all come from Tolima. And I was right. First she told me she was Japanese, then she laughed and confessed that she had been born in Ambalema, Tolima.
fifteen
Payanés spent thirty-six hours straight partying with his friend Molly Flan in a warm and forgettable drunken spree of Vat 69 liquor and well-paired merengue. And the next morning, levitating in the watery imprecision of his hangover, he went looking for his friend Sacramento’s girl at the place where he was told he would find her, the house of a matron called Todos los Santos.
There she was, Sacramento’s girl, who was no longer a girl but a woman, in the middle of a carefree moment, frozen in time, with Ana, Juana, Susana, and little Chuza, all five dressed in their Sunday best, with freshly ironed light-colored cotton dresses, lined up one behind another and each one braiding the hair of the one in front of her: Susana braiding Juana’s; Juana, Ana’s; Ana, Sayonara’s; and Sayonara, Chuza’s, who wouldn’t stand still or even let her hair be brushed because she was busy trying to tie ribbons onto Aspirina’s fur.
I don’t know whether Payanés, dazzled by the blue highlights in the lustrous hair of the five girls, realized at that moment, or whether he already knew — surely from Molly Flan herself — that Sayonara and the girl were two different people and yet one and the same. It wasn’t easy to reconcile the night beauty, product of her own fame and secure on her high pedestal in the love of many men, with this village girl on a Sunday morning; such a sister to her siblings and such a daughter to her madrina; so approachable and true in her simple dress, in her common, everyday gestures — just another girl among so many poor, anonymous people.
What is certain is that Payanés stood there in the arched entryway without knowing what to say, without wanting to interrupt that everyday ceremony of women in their cool and shaded patio in contrast with the iridescent heat of the street, and that he stayed there, less observing than remembering, as if dreaming about something he’d already seen before, in the privileged days of a more pious era. These girls could be my sisters, he must have thought, or any man’s sisters, and Sayonara could be my wife, or my brother’s girlfriend, and that lady Todos los Santos, or another just like her, could be my mother, and this house, why not, this house could have been my house.
“What about the violet light?” I asked Olga. “The violet light must have brought him back to earth…”
“The lights were turned off in the mornings, and an extinguished light is a silent light.”
They say that Payanés felt invaded by a calmness that partially mitigated the ravages of his hangover, due to a sort of reencounter with his own insides and a sudden realization that despite everything the world was still the same as he remembered it from his childhood.
“Wake up, boy,” Todos los Santos said suddenly, as if she had read his mind. “This isn’t a house of sisters or girlfriends, this is a house of putas.”
“Tell Sacramento that I thank him, but I’m sending his money back to him because I’m not thinking about giving up this life, which hasn’t turned out badly,” Sayonara said to him when he gave her his friend’s pay. “Tell him that while he’s away to send me more postcards, because I haven’t received any for a while and I miss them.”
Then Payanés assured her that Sacramento hadn’t sent postcards or come down to Tora because of work-related impediments, but that he always thought of her, that he was generally all right and in perfect health.
In perfect health: They assure me that was what he said. Why didn’t he say a word about the malaria that was consuming Sacramento? Why didn’t he talk about the white hospital where the nurses soothed the shadow that was left of him, of the constant shivering and fevers, of the faith deposited in quinine with side effects perhaps more noxious than the illness itself? Why did he, Payanés, always collaborative, solid, trustworthy, fail just now? So as not to give away his friend, perhaps; out of fear of being indiscreet, or in order not to worry them with bad news… or because of the same shame that causes all members of the male sex to be silent when dealing with that which deeply concerns human beings? As if loneliness, joy, weakness, pain, or malaria were shameful, nameless things that one should never admit, even in the confessional, or to a doctor, or even to oneself.