“But I wasn’t the only one who turned to look at her,” he remembers uneasily, because in order for him to feel humiliated, his woman didn’t need to cast her eyes on another man, it was enough for another man to cast his eyes on her.
What caused the bitter taste was Amanda’s arrival, with all her radiant youth enveloped in white light, the lunch pot held in one hand, her soaked dress licking her body, and her wild tresses dripping wet, and all of the workers spread throughout the clearing stopped what they were doing, axes frozen, to pierce her with their eyes, like pins in a tailor’s pincushion.
“It was always the same,” Sacramento tells me in an anxious tone, as if begging me to understand him. “As soon as she would appear, no matter where it was and even though they didn’t know her, men would begin to act strangely. They would straighten their backs, wipe their sweaty hands on their shirts, cough to bring attention to themselves. I don’t know how else to describe it, but it was strange. As if they were communicating in code or in some secret male language the fact that she was there. That she, the beauty, was there bewitching them, even though she wasn’t doing a thing, making them anxious, leaving their desire and memories scorched.”
Sacramento grabbed her forcefully by the wrist, almost hurting her, and pulled her aside, shaken.
“How dare you come here like that, with your clothes wet, don’t you see that you’re leading them on, half naked like this?”
“But it’s pouring rain, Sacramento, what do you want me to do? You’re all wet too, hermanito, what’s the matter…?”
“Don’t call me hermanito, I’m your husband. You want to know what’s the matter? They already know, that’s what’s the matter…,” he said with a choked voice, as if relaying the worst of news.
“They already know what?”
“About your past.”
“They don’t know anything. What are you talking about? Nobody has said anything and we haven’t even told them our names. It’s you who are going to give us away, because you think about it so much that they’re bound to hear your thoughts…”
“Well, if they don’t know yet, they’re going to guess from your brazen manners. Go home now,” he ordered her, then he made her promise never again to appear in the clearing, not even to bring him food.
“Fine,” she said, resigned, “but you’re going to die from hunger down here, and I, from boredom up there.”
“I prefer to die from hunger than to let them look at my wife like that. It’s a matter of honor,” he said to her, and it was the first time Sayonara had heard that word, “honor,” which would eventually draw so many tears from her.
The next morning, Amanda and the girls stayed up on the patch of the mountain they had been allotted to scratch away the overgrowth and see if one day they would be able to reap a meager harvest; and meanwhile Sacramento went down the mountain to the sawmill to earn his daily wages. In the evening, stung by fleas and by resentment, he returned to their rented room, four walls of rough-hewn planks, exuding dampness and rootlessness.
“What did you do all day?” he asked his wife.
“I caught a zaíno and a lizard and roasted them so you would have some hot food.”
“What happened, you didn’t bring me any lunch?”
“But you told me…”
“All the men’s wives brought them lunch, everyone’s but mine, and I was so hungry. The other workers must have thought that I have a wife who has fun while her husband works and goes hungry…”
The dialogue was so ridiculous that Amanda burst out laughing, because she still laughed then, unaware of the scope of her melodrama, and Sacramento, in spite of his indignation, couldn’t avoid laughing too at his own excess.
Then, already lying down, she allowed herself to be overcome with tenderness and gratitude toward him, as she watched him cover the cracks between the planks with clay so that the girls, who were sleeping, wouldn’t be troubled in the night by the wisps of mist or cries of night birds. For a moment, as the Coleman lantern buzzed cozily, Sayonara enjoyed feeling that fear remained outside and the girls were floating peacefully along in their dreams. And calming the obsessive, burning memory of Payanés, she let herself be soothed by the idea that like this, like now, she was okay, and that it was comforting and pleasing to have a husband.
“Hermanito,” she sighed, and fell asleep contentedly.
Sacramento lay by her side and just looked at her for a long time. “Your face is so pretty,” he kept saying to her, but around midnight he still couldn’t calm or contain himself or refrain from awakening her.
“You weren’t having fun, were you?” he asked her.
“When?”
“Today, at lunchtime.”
“In this dead place? How do you think I could have fun in this dead place?”
“With other men…”
“No, Sacramento, I spent the day hoeing with the girls, and we didn’t have any fun.”
“Did you think about him very often? Do you miss him?”
“Payanés? I try to forget him, Sacramento, but you keep reminding me about him.” Sayonara turned her back to him, covered her face with her arms, and pretended to cry to see if she could escape his renewed attacks of jealousy. And when Sacramento saw that olive-skinned back, reflecting the warm glow of the Coleman lantern, he began to kiss her shoulders as he asked for forgiveness. “That roasted lizard you cooked for me was very good and I’m a thankless husband,” he rattled on. “Forgive me, mi vida, how could I have mistrusted you,” his voice becoming gradually more unsettled until it turned into reproach again. “No jealousy or anger, because I forgive you for the step that you took. Such a dark fate, such an ungrateful road. Such false promises. The wounds of ungrateful love, weaving through the familiar empty words spoken out of sheer spite, until they turn into insults. You go from hand to hand, everyone is talking about you. Your lips deceive me, lying, betraying…”
“Enough, Sacramento! Hush now, you’re going to frighten my sisters. Stop all this silliness, I want to go back to sleep.”
Then he embraced her trembling with love and misgivings, and she let herself be embraced, but the dream of that other embrace came to her forcefully and she couldn’t help that it hurt to rest her head against the chest that wasn’t her beloved’s.
“Like animals that want to bolt and go back to the stable,” Olguita says to me, “that is how a woman in love thinks: always struggling to escape from everything else to be able to return to the memory of her beloved, the only place where she can find comfort and rest.”
I want to ascertain Sacramento’s feelings in those days toward Payanés, and I ask him if he thought too often of his friend.