Rescued by Sacramento’s love through the bonds of marriage did Sayonara, the young whore from Tora, become Amanda, the one who was to be loved, Amanda, the radionovela star? Did she embody the miracle of the outlaw who becomes good through a little affection, the flower rescued from the dirt, the protagonist of the nightmare that became a dream and the dream that became reality?
“Useless words!” exclaims Todos los Santos indignantly. “Can anyone call days that were filled with bewilderment happy? Days that drove my child Sayonara, the same girl who was always dreaming of love, to seek joy trailing behind a man, and if that weren’t error enough, behind a man she didn’t love? I would also have to say: days of hardship, separated only by the arid string of good-byes and the passing one by one of countless hours of anguish.”
Life is inclined to encourage with promises and to dazzle with magic tricks, but no, it didn’t grant a miracle or the life of a radionovela, because from the very day of the wedding the mask of mirrors was removed to uncover something resembling a face. Forcing Sayonara to embark on an uncertain journey, made of confused love and shattered dreams, which left her no other choice but to dull herself with exhaustion on the long marches so that she wouldn’t have to recognize that she couldn’t recognize herself. Or that she could only find half of herself in the skin of that new woman who wanted to be called Amanda, while her other half missed having a place in this world. And it wasn’t that Amanda didn’t do everything possible, that she didn’t struggle to pull Sayonara from the tangle that confused her steps. The same obstinate determination that Sayonara had invested in becoming a prostitute, Amanda now dedicated to the task of turning herself into a lady, because her life was, today as yesterday, one long, courageous search for existence, and if one door closed, she found the strength to go through another, even if it opened at the totally opposite end of the hallway.
“No one can invoke the hackneyed ‘it has been written’ in the name of my girl, that credo of fatalists of every sort,” says Todos los Santos, “because she liked to do whatever she wanted.”
For Amanda there were no writings that dictated her fate, holy or profane. But to reach past her own star and to transform herself was a difficult task in which Sayonara wouldn’t help her because she refused to step aside, obstinately holding on to existence and fueled by the ferocious torrent of a will to live and a longing for death that had been awakened in her on that afternoon of love by the river. Nothing could dissuade her, not Payanés with the meager surrender of his affections, nor Sacramento with his excessively vehement demands for devotion, nor even Amanda herself in her rush to find roads less steep.
“Where does the soul of a woman go who loves one man and marries another?” Olga wonders out loud. “In my opinion it is divided in two, and both become lost in the waters of confusion.”
“There weren’t two, but three women in her,” argues Todos los Santos, “Amanda, Sayonara, and she herself. Sayonara loved Payanés; Amanda married Sacramento; and she loved only herself.”
“Sayonara complained that no man loved her well,” Dr. Antonio María Flórez once told me, “but it was really the other way around, as I saw it. She could never bring herself to fully love anyone. That girl reminds me of a paradoxical poem by the master Pedro Salinas. ‘Why the rush to make yourself possible, if you know that you are what will never be?’ ”
Todos los Santos asks me to read her what I am writing and I do.
“Too many words,” she protests. “The life of a puta will always be identical to the life of any other puta, even if it is the life of a woman with showy plumage, like Sayonara. In matters of men, we mujeres of the profession can only choose three categories. Only three because no others have been invented. Those we call the tormentor, the lottery, and the client, the latter of which is the most advisable and the one I recommend, because he pays you and goes away, letting you get on with your life; you can keep on playing if-I-have-seen-you-before-I-don’t-remember. The other two stripes, the lottery and the tormentor, are both pure trouble and sorrow.”
“The lottery is the shining knight who finally comes to you,” says Olguita. “He’s the lover every woman waits for, convinced that one day he will come to take you away and marry you and sweeten your life with conveniences, eternal love, flattery, and gifts. With Sacramento, Sayonara got her lottery, or at least that’s what she thought.”
“Lottery, grand prize or golden cage, which are its other names,” says Todos los Santos, “because it strangles with the finest noose, made of love, and presses against your neck like a pearl choker, or like the amulet of braided hair that Sacramento once tied around his neck and still wears. Did Amanda choose to compromise in marrying him? That’s her business. We all warned her not to do it but she, of her own free will, locked herself in that tower and threw the key into the moat.”
“And the tormentor,” continues Olga, “is the man who makes you suffer because he makes you fall in love with him but he won’t commit, or he commits only partially, like Payanés, who was just like the thorny rose he had had tattooed over his heart: a rose of pain and a compass rose, pointing in all directions. Payanés, like any self-respecting petrolero, gave you two gifts, the open road and the pain of freedom. And, if there’s anything a woman of the profession knows about, it’s freedom, but she also knows how much it rends the heart. A lover who promises you affection the last Friday of every month and complies religiously is something worth celebrating. As long as you don’t resent that in addition to the comforting Friday, God has created three others, plus four Mondays, four Tuesdays, four Wednesdays, and a lot of et ceteras for a grand total of three hundred sixty-five days in a year during which you have to deal with the ups and downs of your lonely heart.”
Torn between Sacramento and Payanés, her greatest prize and her greatest punishment, what happened, asked Olga, to Amanda’s broken heart? Was it destroyed by her inability to choose? What is most likely, perhaps most certain, is that she harbored the suspicion that well-being, if it existed at all, must be hidden somewhere between those two extremes.
Sacramento, Sayonara, and her three remaining sisters formed a rickety caravan that moved forward along the paths of displacement, and Sacramento, who had always put his love into what aroused the most suspicion in him, now turned the corner on his old torment and learned to doubt to the point of agony that which he truly loved. And at the same time, to finish tangling the skein, he insisted in distancing Amanda from Tora to save her from the assault of memories, without suspecting that memories, with their light feet, would arrive before them anywhere they went.
Behind the couple, like the colorful and fluttering tail of a kite, ran the three girls, Susana, Juana, and little Chuza, now going through periods of hunger, now filling up on pineapples or mangoes gathered from the fields they crossed, now desperately longing for their sister Ana, their mother, Todos los Santos, and their many aunts, only to forget them completely moments later, so attached to the idea of pursuing their fate beneath the immense sky, as yesterday they had been to taking shelter beneath a safe, familiar roof.
Nine days after embarking upon that crossing with neither shipwreck nor guiding star, they entered the misty forests in the mountains of Amansagatos, famous because no one has been able to determine whether the rain there is perpetual as it falls or rises, since it never reaches the ground before it is already ascending again, and evaporating. Once there they stopped near a stand of cedar, guayacán, amargoso, and other trees that thrive in humid environments, where Sacramento, on the recommendation of an acquaintance, obtained temporary work at a sawmill. On his first day of work, Amanda was stirred by a desire to properly fulfill her obligations as a new wife, and after the disgusting chore of plucking a chicken, she then inexpertly stewed it and ran downhill through sheets of rain and dense vegetation to take lunch to her husband, since she had heard that it is necessary for an honest woman to feed her husband well and without fail, because he provides protection and sustenance. When she appeared, as if on a stage in a theater, in the intense light that fell from above onto the cut clearing, Sacramento, upon seeing how beautiful she was and knowing that she was his, felt a sudden jolt of happiness flooding him inside, and a kind of foam like the head of a beer swelled his masculine pride.