That man approaching step by step, his silhouette dressed in white, could it be him? Or not? It was.
But it wasn’t his customary gaze, it was as if he had been expecting to embrace a solitary woman and not crash into that image that unfurled into five, she and her sisters, she and her quadruple reflection, from oldest to youngest, and, as if that weren’t enough, with luggage and paraphernalia scattered around the gathered family.
“Where are you moving to?” asked Payanés from a distance, and Sayonara could only respond with a slight gasp that seemed almost like a hiccup, but that had a cataclysmic impact within her, causing a momentary paralysis of the principal organs and a brusque rush of blood to the upper half of her body, leaving the lower half limp as a rag.
“I have waited for you, hour after hour, for thirty days and thirty nights,” Payanés said to her when they found themselves face to face, but more than an affirmation, his words were a reproach.
“And I for you.”
“What about your sisters?” he asked.
“I brought them with me,” she stuttered, stating the obvious.
“But why?” insisted the petrolero, who was anticipating the delights of his appointment for love.
Sayonara was stunned by that question she hadn’t expected and whose response seemed so clear, so beyond words, that she had no idea how to answer it. Why had she brought them? Why hadn’t she come alone, as it should have been, to the only anxiously awaited meeting of her entire life? She, the beautiful whore, the seductress, the favorite disciple, why was she behaving with the dull-wittedness of a novice? She looked at her sisters beside her, as lonely as she herself and equally ignorant of their own loneliness, and her heart shrank at the armadillo-like timidity in those four pairs of eyes that almost didn’t dare rest on what they were looking at and that gave up on everything beforehand, because they knew nothing in this world could ever belong to them. And yet they were waiting for something, who knew what, so nice and extraordinary, that the future was about to give them on this unique day.
“I brought them with me because I am myself and my sisters,” she said finally, as if wanting to cry without being able to, as if wanting to avoid weeping but failing.
But Payanés wasn’t a man to go around acquiring family responsibilities in the name of love. The last Friday of every month, that’s what they had agreed on from the beginning and he was willing to stick with that to the end. But nothing more. Don’t ask him for a permanent home or a quiet heart, because he couldn’t give them; only an arm for working, another to embrace, and a road in front of him, as they often say in this land of the rootless.
“But didn’t you yourself tell me, Todos los Santos,” I ask, “or were they Olguita’s suppositions, that Payanés longed for his own house when he entered the patio of your house? Didn’t he see in you a mother and in Sayonara’s sisters, his own sisters?”
“It’s possible. And that in Sayonara he had found the memory of a first love, that too might have been. But for someone like him, it’s one thing to carry the weight of longing for a family and something altogether different to carry the weight of a family,” she clarifies. “When they come to Tora, all men are fleeing from commitment and they become enthralled with speculation, which ties them down much less.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Sayonara asked her beloved.
“Since we failed in the strike I’ve been in a devil of a mood, thinking and rethinking about where we went wrong. I can’t concentrate on anything else.”
“I thought that tonight you and I could swear our commitment to love each other forever…,” Sayonara ventured, aware that she had never before said anything that so challenged both the risk of pretentiousness and the sense of the ridiculous.
Payanés, who looked at her with blank eyes as if she were speaking German, must have thought that the pompous yellow organza dress the girl was wearing was a most appropriate costume for such a stilted discourse. The words “commitment” and “forever” had meaning for him if they were associated with something eternal, such as the metallic solidity of skinny Emilia, but not with the unprotected candor with which this girl had come to give him her life and to dump her sisters on him as part of the package.
“Well, if it can’t be forever, then it will be never,” Sayonara lashed out angrily and capriciously at a silent Payanés, because she didn’t know how to accept anyone’s disagreement.
“You have to realize that for being a puta, Sayonara had strange ideas,” offers Machuca. “And an undesirable temperament, of course, because there aren’t many clients willing to put up with fits and demands.”
“That’s true,” adds Olga, “for a puta, Sayonara was a pain in the neck. Besides, it’s not fair to imagine in Payanés a hardheadedness that didn’t exist. He is a good man, you have to say that, and he was truly in love. It must also be true that the breaking of the strike had damaged his spirits and weakened his convictions, because the same thing happened to all of us. After that fiasco, even the air was poisoned.”
“Commitments forever are fine for boleros and soap operas,” interrupts Todos los Santos, “but they had no place in La Catunga. My foolish girl liked to go around repeating foreign ideas and fancy phrases she learned from other places. Imagine,” she said, scandalized, “talking about forever in this troubled land where we don’t even know what’s going to happen in the next few hours…”
“Precisely because of that,” says Olga. “Because of that, precisely.”
“Only moth eggs are forever,” adds Fideo, who it seems woke up today in the delirious phase of her illness.
“You should know that in Popayán…,” began Payanés, but Sayonara rushed to interrupt him to talk about something else, anything else that would make noise, because she knew that what he was about to say to her would break her heart.
“In Popayán…,” insisted Payanés, determined to confess but impeded by difficulties, as if each syllable were a huge rock that he had to carry on his shoulder, and Sayonara saw that an unburdening was coming at her from which she wouldn’t be able to protect herself, and in that instant of painful revelation, before the words reached her ears, she also understood why Payanés never spoke about his yesterdays, as if he had just floated in on a pink cloud. And she knew then what everyone except she had suspected; what her madrina had guessed a long time ago and why she had kept saying: “Don’t ask him any questions. Go to see him on Fridays and charge him hard cold cash for your love, but don’t get involved with him or ask him any questions. Hope stays alive as long as you don’t ask, because answers destroy it.”
“In Popayán I left children, and a wife too. Not the wife I would like to have, but the one I have…” Payanés squatted at the river’s edge, conflicted and sort of dazed from the exertion of having spoken the truth, and he started throwing flat stones in the water to make them skip across the still surface. The Río Magdalena, which had once ignited its waters to receive them, a bonfire that consumed but didn’t burn, now passed in front of them tame and bored, an apathetic witness of their fateful encounter, without showing off laundresses, or turtles, or old musicians, or anything like herds of pigs coming down to calm their thirst.
“Sayonara was stunned by the bluntness of the blow,” Olguita tells me, “and she couldn’t find a way to digest the bitter cake. And she felt ridiculous in her braids and ribbons, her highbrow words, her doll’s dress, and her packed belongings. But of course, since after a while Payanés was still absorbed with his stones and gave no sign of communication, she began to pace around him, trying to move closer but without daring to.”