“Finally,” Todos los Santos says to me, and a minuscule brilliance lights up her blind eyes, “when I thought that nothing would change, Sayonara left behind the slippery and self-absorbed skin of her adolescence.”
thirty-seven
“I put her in that life, and it’s only right that I separate her from it” was the credo that Sacramento imposed on himself as a mandate, and he was a faithful crusader, willing to do anything to see his cause triumph. Now, in addition, he had a powerful ally in his quest to save the woman he adored, because the Tropical Oil Company had made the profitable, corporate decision to redeem all the prostitutas in the area.
The exchange of salary for love opened the door to immoderation and irrationality: desire, which burns, also consumes wealth and doesn’t leave anything in return, except renewed desires. And neither the company, nor progress, nor order could find a way to derive benefit from that vicious circle, or at least that was the explanation of the problem according to the enveloping syllogism of don Horacio Laguna, with whom I am having a conversation at the old-fashioned café El Diamante.
“Capitalism can’t grow healthily like that,” he tells me, “and that’s why the gringos who managed the company declared themselves the enemies of promiscuity, at least of ours, the Colombians’.”
Although they offered houses, education for their children, health subsidies, and even access to a commissary where they sold meat below the prices in the plaza, the majority of the workers refused to jump through that hoop, as a matter of principle and due to ancestral fondness for the vice of sweet love. But not Sacramento, who saw the new policy as his key to the future.
While brigades of Franciscans of uncertain Mediterranean accent, wrapped in rough brown robes, looking as if they had escaped the Middle Ages, landed in Tora to minister courses in premarital preparations, other brigades, also wearing hoods, except over their faces, ran through the streets harassing the populace and punishing a posteriori its “friendship with the strike’s bandits.” One afternoon when Sayonara was returning from the port of Madre de Dios, where she had traveled for three days to entertain outside clients, she suddenly had a bad feeling that made her hasten her steps. She reached the house gasping to find an opaque look of sterile fury on the faces of Todos los Santos and Susana, who sat immobile on the sidewalk next to the front door, displaying the humiliating desolation of their recently shaved heads. Together with seven other women from La Catunga, they had been forcefully and cruelly sheared, with ugly scratches on their skulls and loose strands of hair here and there that had escaped the ravages of the shears.
“They told us they were shaving us so we would learn. They didn’t do anything to Juana and Chuza because they weren’t here when the hooded men invaded,” Susana told her, and Sayonara couldn’t speak a word because a knot of indignation choked her.
“And Ana?” she was finally able to ask, not having seen her sister.
“She still has all her hair, but she’s not here. Yesterday she went away with some soldiers that wanted to see her dance.”
“My poor sister! This life surrounded by putas has thrown her to the dogs!” wailed Sayonara, out of her mind and throwing herself upon Todos los Santos in attack, but the others pulled her away, reminding her that you don’t touch your mother even with a rose petal, so she started smashing her knuckles against the walls and kicking the doors. “My poor sister, broken and raped, all because of me and this life of putas where I brought her. The bastards took her away!”
“They didn’t take her away; she went of her own free will.”
“Lies! How can you say that, madrina, on top of everything else and as if it were nothing?!”
“Just yesterday we went to find her at the temporary camp that del Valle set up in Loma de Tigres, because we had been told they were keeping her there. We organized more than twenty to go demand her return, her and four other girls from the barrio, but when Ana came out herself, and we all heard her words, she told us she wanted to stay. It did no good to beg her, or threaten her, or reason with her. She said she didn’t want to come back, and she didn’t.”
A painful and prolonged sound escaped from Sayonara’s mouth, more the howl of an animal than a human cry. The loss of Payanés had carried her toward a high, severe pain, you might even say almost elegant if you take into account that the absence of love creates an intensity comparable only to that of its presence. The sadness that invaded her now had, however, a muddy and base nature, and it was nothing like the lofty penitence of golden needles of the earlier one. But added together, the one sublime and the other despicable, they pushed her to the limit of her own hope, where she discovered that something had died in her, which made her think vaguely of a punishment from God which must be accepted. It was then that Sacramento appeared with the plans for the future workers’ barrio in his hand and the signed promise of a house in his pocket. He proposed marriage in a church, offered to take her and her sisters out of La Catunga and to give them a more dignified and secure life, and Sayonara, without thinking twice, said yes.
“I would say she didn’t even think once,” muses Olga, “but it was to be expected, because it is well known that Sayonara’s fate is guided by a racing star with a capricious course.”
“Are you going to live in a house that comes from the same people who vilify you?” Todos los Santos asked her, indignant and incredulous, as her hand, operating on its own, went over her stripped skull as if taking stock of the damage.
“Even if it were the devil himself, as long as I can get out of here,” replied Sayonara. And just then an insipid, misty rain began falling from the sky, but not completely covering the sun, and a faint rainbow was cast across the river, like the flimsiest of bridges.
“San Isidro, patron of celestial phenomena,” Olga tells me she prayed at that moment, “protect this child from the attack of her whims, which drive her from place to place without her being able to master them…?”
“My girl was sick from hoping too much,” Todos los Santos explains to me, demonstrating a tolerance today that it seems she didn’t at the time. “I kept telling her that you can’t expect so many things, because life isn’t one of the Magi who will come bearing gifts.”
“What was your name before you came to Tora?” Sacramento asked his bride-to-be later. “That’s what I want to call you, your real name, the regular one, and that’s the one I have to give the priest who is going to marry us.”
“I don’t think you’ll like it…”
“Tomasa? Herminia? Eduviges? Come on, don’t be afraid, tell me, any name will do; it doesn’t matter if it’s ugly.”
“My name was Amanda.”
“Amanda!” Sacramento was shocked. “But that’s a name for a puta too…”
“To you it would seem like a name for a puta even if my name were Santa Teresa de Jesús, hermanito.”
“Hush, don’t tell me anything else. Everything I discover about you is a new dagger that I have to carry around stuck into my body.”
“If we’re going to go on like this, you’ll be more wounded than the Virgen Dolorosa, who had to bear seven daggers, all in her heart.”