“I too am from this river. But from another pueblo, further upstream,” she confessed. “I too,” she had said, wanting to say, “like these thirsty pigs, and these old musicians, and these even older turtles, and this ageless cadaver, and the women washing at the shore.” Payanés, although he scarcely heard her, could never again in his life be near the Magdalena without remembering her.
“Not the Magdalena or any other river, or city, or mountain,” Olguita assures me, who is the one most convinced of Payanés’s great love for Sayonara. “From that day on he couldn’t open his eyes again, or close them, without remembering her.”
They found a wide sandy beach surrounded by meadows where they ran the champán aground, disembarked, unloaded the provisions, and proceeded to set up the orillada. The young women adorned their hair with flame-red cayena flowers and prepared a pot filled with a cool drink spiked with just a little alcohol, while the older women, drinking straight rum, started preparing a viudo according to the tradition of the people who inhabited the shores of the river. They dug a hole in the beach that would serve as an oven, covered it with vihao leaves, and placed catfish and smallmouth bass right on top, whole, almost alive, they were so fresh — pulled from the water by the boatmen during the ride — together with chunks of yuca and plantain, all bathed in a mixture of chopped onion, salt, and tomato. They covered the viudo with more vihao leaves and on top of the hole, level with the ground, they built a fire.
“Come, girl,” ordered Todos los Santos, who was no friend of sentimentality during work hours, separating Sayonara and Payanés. “Come give some attention to these important gentlemen who are waiting for you.”
Without even realizing when, Payanés was left alone, sitting on a tree trunk on the shore, absorbed in the flies buzzing before his eyes and drawing arabesques against the sky. Through his hazy senses, dulled by the memory of yesterday’s intoxication, he observed the others with that air of incomprehension and absence that unfailingly mark foreigners. Now that contact with her skin had been broken, the world was flooded with smoke and broken into unconnected visions of a very old scene, taken from pagan times. Young women with flowers in their hair dancing to the rhythm of some forgotten music, in full abandonment to laughter and movement; other women, dark and wrinkled, squatting with their skirts gathered between their legs in front of the hole in the ground that gave off an overly strong smell of food, a smell that was perhaps pleasant, thought Payanés, if one were hungry, but which his ravaged stomach found nearly intolerable. He felt as though he were spying on the secrets of a foreign tribe, as though it were the remote ancestors of these women who were really dancing and their ancient mothers who were preparing the concoction of yucas and fish. Just a few hours ago everything was diaphanous and healthy in the freshness of the patio, then on the river the presence of the girl with the sweet-smelling skin had expanded his soul, but now, watching her laugh as she tolerated a fat man wearing a hat and kissing her on the neck, life for Payanés was broken into four parts: the smell of food that had no place in his lack of appetite, the brown sand that soiled his white pants and stuck to his shoes, a love that had been dying inside of him even before it was fully born, and finally, he himself, a stony guest of this strange party, and he couldn’t seem to make those four parts add up to any whole.
The beating of drums had been added to the flutes, along with an accompanying choir and the voice of a drunk old woman who shattered the air every now and then with interjections, and at other moments with ayes and weeping. After a period of anxiously observing Sacramento’s girl, who was now embracing another gentleman and disappearing with him into the underbrush, Payanés was finally able to understand something. This feeling of malaise like ground glass in my stomach is the same thing that is killing Sacramento, he must have thought, and at once he corrected the error of a worry that he knew instinctively was wrong.
“There, just as she is: a puta. That’s how God wants me to love her,” he said out loud, and felt drops of relief that mitigated the sensation of chewing glass.
When the food was ready, the old women served it on green plantain leaves and distributed it, inviting everyone to eat with their hands. Payanés, who was a man from the mountains and as such inexpert in the art of eating fish, choked on the bones, was repulsed by those round, staring eyes challenging him to gobble them up, and mistrusted that scaly, aquatic being as if it were poisoned.
“You look like you’re eating a porcupine,” laughed Sayonara, once again at his side, and she tried to show him. “You pull out the meat with your fingers and make a little pile, like this, then you squeeze it a little, you feel it, before you put it in your mouth so you can find the bones and remove them.”
She picked up a piece, cleaned the bones from it just as she had explained, and tried to get him to eat it.
“I can’t,” said Payanés, pushing away that bit of meat that was too white, too soft. “I can’t. I’m still thinking about that dead body.”
“Come on,” she said. “You have to eat and you have to live even though others have died.”
“It would be a sin to eat this creature, cooked so strangely.”
“Stop saying silly things.”
They went into the underbrush and undressed. Payanés made love eagerly and at a certain moment even with happiness, but without recovering in that ordinary episode the strange splendor of burning waters that had made him tremble earlier on the river. On the other hand, Sayonara’s voice and gaze sweetened as if she were a little girl again, or were able to be one for the first time, and she nestled into the refuge of that embrace, seeking warmth and rest. Looking for love, perhaps? Olguita assures me that it was so, that from that very first time Payanés’s serenity had consoled her, his comforting words calmed her and his self-assurance anchored her.
“Those two, Sayonara and Payanés, were for us the authentic incarnation of the legend of the puta and the petrolero. If you ask me what the best moment in the history of La Catunga was, I would tell you that it was when they first met. Others would tell you their relationship was rife with problems, that it wasn’t perfect, and this that and the other. I don’t pay them any attention. For me love should be rough and hard, just as theirs was.”
“Is Emilia your girlfriend?” asked Sayonara, running her finger along the vivid lines of the tattoo on his chest.
“No,” he smiled. “She’s just the drilling tower where I work. We call her skinny Emilia.”
“I’m happy to hear that,” said Sayonara with unfounded relief, still unaware that here was a man who was married to his work.
“I’m a cuñero, you know? I think that with time I can become the fastest cuñero in Colombia,” he told her, and he released his hold on her to talk about his work.
“Will you stay with me tonight?” Sayonara interrupted him.
“I can’t,” he replied, without even thinking about it. “I have to get back to camp today because I have to start work at dawn.”
“When are you coming back to Tora?”
“The last Friday of next month, God willing.”