“I couldn’t forgive his betrayal,” Sacramento confesses. “But at the same time I couldn’t forgive her for having separated me from my best friend, and I blamed her for our misfortune. Today I regret hurting her with the accusation, but at the time I let myself get carried away with a question that had no answer, whose fault was it, hers, his, or perhaps mine; or was it life’s?”
For Sacramento, who fluctuated between seething with jealousy and mourning his lost friendship, Payanés didn’t just pursue him in his thoughts, he also laid traps in the physical world.
“I thought I saw Payanés everywhere,” he says. “He was crouching behind every tree until I might let down my guard so he could go to her. And those eyes of his, yellow streaked with green, which you don’t see in these parts, but I saw them in the faces of all the men who looked at her. And at the same time, how I missed his presence as a brother from those days of sharing bread, pick, shovel, and even shoes, knowing that my luck would be his too, sharing together the rocks in the road or the coins of our daily pay! But I couldn’t forgive him for having tried to take her away from me and I wondered if despite the marriage he hadn’t taken her from me anyway.”
That night rife with bird calls, after hours of filling his lungs with her breath and feeling its sweetness when he inhaled it and its poison when he exhaled it, Sacramento got up, prepared some strong coffee on the little stove, and sobbed dejectedly over the steaming cup. As dawn broke, Amanda and the girls were surprised to find their belongings gathered up and the pair of suitcases packed and knotted with rope.
“We’re leaving,” announced Sacramento. “We need to go further, to where the shadow of your bad reputation doesn’t reach. And I’m warning you now, so that we don’t fall into the same quagmire again: I don’t want you going around like a wild filly. No bare feet or hair blowing in the wind.”
Sayonara listened distractedly as she softly sang the profane verses with which the barefoot missionary women taught her mother her first words in the white man’s language:
I wonder at this ruffling,
The wind in my tresses fair.
Perhaps consumed with love,
It sings and celebrates my hair.
Couplets that her mother sang to her when she was young? Or that she never sang being what she was, an Indian, a Guahiba, shy about singing and lazy about speaking Spanish.
“Don’t sing that anymore,” Sacramento scolded her, jealous of everything, and now even the wind. “You must try to not be so obvious; don’t show your true colors so they won’t notice you.”
“Fine,” she said, resigned, still not suspecting how deep she could tumble down that path toward total renunciation. “I’m going to buy a real pretty clasp, or maybe some nice ribbon, and if you want I’ll tie my hair back so no one will see it.”
“It would be better if you just cut it off…,” he grumbled, and she, ignoring him, started singing the verses again.
“Sacramento had always been, by natural inclination, a soul given to extravagant behavior,” Todos los Santos tells me confidentially, as if I didn’t already know. “But the insecurities of that troubled love drove him even further and set him on a path of obsession tending toward cruelty, and the more he suffered, the more he tortured.”
Everything he adored in Amanda, everything that bewitched him about her, was also a target for his scorn.
He wanted to tear out that particle of lunar material encrusted in Amanda’s forehead, which had accidentally landed between her eyebrows and radiated like a talisman, like a prearranged signal or a soft, wordless revelation, and made her an object of passion for men. Sacramento needed to extirpate it, whatever it was — malign tumor, philosopher’s stone, or golden nugget — because the hypnotic power of that woman, who was public before but now, according to words sworn at the altar, had become completely his, was concentrated in that tiny meteorite and not so much in charm or beauty, intelligence or carnal attributes, to say nothing of the gift of seduction, because the bare truth was that Amanda, or Sayonara, had no other gift as appealing as that special way of hers of seducing by not seducing.
Don’t wear earrings anymore, they’re too suggestive, ordered Sacramento, and she obeyed in order not to hurt him, but the secret wasn’t in the earrings. Don’t walk like that, it’s provocative, but the truth was that she walked with the same rhythmic cadence as any woman from the tropics. Don’t be so haughty when you answer, because your rebelliousness ignites desires, and she tried to please him but she still ignited them even when she was silent. Don’t laugh, because your laughter is an invitation, but she invited when she was serious as much as she did when she was laughing. Don’t look men straight in the eyes, because you challenge them with your gaze, but even when she kept her eyes on the ground no one failed to notice the stone, or the patina, or the gift, or whatever it was: that glimmer of moon and silence, of shadow and awe, with which she cast her spell.
“Don’t try to take that from her, it’s not her fault, she was born that way, lustrous,” Todos los Santos had uselessly warned Sacramento.
Seven months after the wedding, Machuca chanced upon the married couple in Villa de la Virgen del Amparo, a stately city of rigorous architecture and rigidly moral people that since the eighteenth century had had its own coat of arms, a royal warrant from His Majesty Carlos III, and a cathedral with authentic lepers in its entryway.
Machuca the heretic, who had been born — and who would have thought it? — in this hallowed place, had returned to her homeland for a couple of days to renew her identification documents in order to be able to vote in the coming elections, and she tells me of her surprise upon spotting Sacramento, who had gone back to his initial profession of being a cart man and was busy running errands around the market plaza. Machuca hugged him effusively and asked about Sayonara, and he greeted her formally, distantly. He confessed that in order to supplement the family income, Amanda had taken a position as a domestic servant in the home of one of the most traditional families in Villa de la Virgen del Amparo.
“They hadn’t helped themselves with the money that Sayonara had accumulated in Tora working on her back, because how was Sacramento going to endure such a blow to his pride,” Olguita tells me. “He told her that it was dirty money, wrongly earned, that he was no pimp or kept man and he preferred to die of starvation than to have to touch it.”
“That was a relief,” says Machuca. “At least the girl didn’t sacrifice her savings struggling to save that deformed marriage, which was all screwed up from the start.”
“But I am going to ask you a big favor, señora Machuca,” she tells me Sacramento explained to her with elaborate circumlocutions, “which is that you don’t approach Amanda too much, and please don’t be offended by my asking this, because I have nothing but respect for you, but as you well know customs are not the same everywhere, and it so happens that the people who hired Amanda are very high-class and scrupulous, and if they come to suspect, of course I say this to you with no desire to injure you, as I have been explaining, if these people come to suspect what Amanda’s prior economic activity was, they would surely kick her out, and again I beg you to forgive my impertinence and the abuse of confidence; I’m sure you can understand.”
In spite of Sacramento’s warnings, Machuca made her own inquiries about Sayonara’s exact whereabouts, and wrapping herself up in a threadbare shawl to hide her unmistakable appearance as an old prostituta, she knocked at the door of the house, passing herself off as a beggar seeking a crust of bread. The door was opened by a very skinny, taciturn young woman, sheathed in an austere blue dress, like a novice’s, her hair hidden beneath a handkerchief tied around her head, whom Machuca didn’t recognize at first as Sayonara.