Although, truth be told, I think I can sense another motive for Payanés’s having kept silent, which is that over time, as I got to know Sacramento better, I began to doubt that he truly had been sick. With malaria, I mean, because he was always sick: with anxiety. Hungry to love and to be loved, to forgive and be forgiven, whipped by guilt of his own and of others, a bird that was always lost in the clouds of other firmaments, incapable of being happy with what his eyes see and his fingers touch — raging with fever, yes, but with fever wavering between utopias and the certainties at hand; with mythical love, but only sworn before a notary. And the vomiting: Was he struggling to throw out a swollen soul that would no longer fit inside his body?
Was Payanés also a prisoner of this suspicion about his friend and therefore hid the information about the complaint of malaria? That might have been. Did he omit the matrimonial message to Sayonara out of pure precaution, thinking that Sacramento himself, who was unaware of the girl’s double identity, wouldn’t want — of that he was almost certain — to marry someone that he saw as a sister? That might have been. Or maybe not?
It is clear that the most overwhelming hypothesis — the only serious one — would hold that behind this sin of omission could be the hand of fate that was gradually beginning to raise the foundation of a tragedy. Although I doubt that there is a genre that could be called tropical tragedy: The excessive light of the tropics blurs the sharp contours of any drama, makes it more rounded, wraps it in dreams, and finally dissolves it in forgetfulness.
Moved by a force greater than himself and acting against his custom and his helpful nature, Payanés had acted in accordance with his own convenience, in his own favor, from the moment that Todos los Santos and Sayonara had welcomed him so effusively and joyously, with fresh lemonade and the empanaditas they had fried up, as if the recent arrival had been Sacramento himself. Payanés, always concerned about taking care of others, had fallen prey to the temptation of allowing himself to be taken care of, of resting in the hands of others, because they had made him feel at home, in a house with clean laundry drying on lines, with chattering parakeets on a mango branch, wood burning in the stove, and chickens in the yard, everything that must taste like heaven to a man returning from the uncaring harshness of a work camp.
Ana, Juana, Susana, and Chuza spied on him from their hiding place behind a plantain tree and, mute with shyness, lowered their eyes when he asked them their names. Did Payanés think that on that patio he felt the noise of the world calm, the smell of lemons invite him to breathe, even if it was all only borrowed? He must have secretly been thankful for Sacramento’s absence, for the alignment of the stars that allowed him to fill the space the other man had left, to be for a while that other person who could not be there, to appropriate his air. And to fall in love with the woman to whom he is bringing someone else’s message of love? It is not surprising in any case that on this occasion Payanés would speak so little and so vaguely about the distant sick man.
“There’s an orillada today. Do you want to come?” invited Todos los Santos.
Sundays during the season when the river rose, when its waters were calm and full of fish, the women of La Catunga would organize what they called an orillada, an outing with grilled fish, rum, and a wood-wind band on la orilla, the shore, of the Magdalena, on one of the beaches of brown sand that would disappear a few months later, along with the fish, when the volume of flow would grow angry again and overrun the riverbanks.
“It’s thirty pesos,” Todos los Santos told him. “For that you get food, drink, music, and love.”
“Only thirty pesos? Then happiness is cheap.”
“Temporary happiness, maybe. The other kind doesn’t exist.”
When Payanés reached into his pocket to pull out his money, he realized that he had already spent all of his own and all he had left was Sacramento’s, which burned his fingers when he touched it. He turned it over and over in his head while the old lady waited with her hand extended. Sacramento, hermano, don’t take it wrong, he thought, trying to calm his stomach. I’ll repay these bills with identical ones.
An hour later, as he followed the thread of the river aboard a champán festooned for the party and overflowing with music and people, Payanés was still navigating foreign waters. He didn’t dance with the girls as the other men did, or drink rum straight from the bottle like the old women. Instead, he was quiet and took refuge from the sun under the roof of palm fronds and tanned hides, grateful for the north winds that tempered the morning air and helped disperse the antiquated tunes with which the band was trying to liven up the boat ride, but which in him stirred who knows what sharp sense of lack, like a needle in his heart. Olguita tells me this and I ask her if she isn’t perhaps speaking of a desired and nurtured longing, like the thorn on the rose that Payanés had requested be tattooed on his chest.
“In that he was a man like any other, in love with his sadness. That’s why he liked to get drunk every now and then, because it was the next day, during el guayabo, the hangover, when his troubles were dearest to him,” replied Olguita, and I reflect on the fact that unlike other Spanish words for hangover like cruda, or resaca, the Colombian term guayabo has two meanings: It means both hangover and nostalgia.
Sayonara had sat next to Payanés and talked with him, placing her mouth near his ear to protect her words from being scattered by the wind, without realizing, perhaps, that her right arm brushed, just barely, his left arm. But Payanés noticed; what’s more, he focused only on the solace of that touch.
“Look,” she said as she pointed. “See that herd of wild pigs? They come down to the riverbank when they’re thirsty. There, that’s La Ciénaga de Doncella, if you look carefully you can see tracks from the turtles who come out at night to lay their eggs.”
“And there, where those women are washing clothes?” he asked.
“That’s La Ciénaga de Lavanderas,” she said, without pulling away her body, which was pleasant and smelled nice and which he began to caress with his desire, as if the light contact were the promise of what was to come.
Afterward a cadaver floated by, solemn and swollen like a bishop, so close to the boat that one of the boatmen had to push it away with the tip of his pole so that it wouldn’t flood them with its sweet smell of death.
“Was he killed by the good guys or the bad guys?” asked Payanés, while the others continued to dance as if they hadn’t seen anything.
“You never know,” answered Sayonara.
“Do a lot come by here?”
“More every day. I don’t know why the dead look for the river; who knows where they want it to take them.”
But with the closeness of that girl’s warm, tanned skin, the rest of the world was a faded backdrop for Payanés: the thirsty pigs from the mountain, the cadaver with its shame on display, the turtles and their tracks, the rocks that give a surface for the women to wash on, the women who rinse their sheets in waters of death, the flutes with their racket, even the girl’s voice that was stitching words and pointing out trifles, lesser inventions of God, who was above all else the Creator of that skin that was brushing against his with the same indulgence with which the bottom of the champán was licking the surface of the water.