Toward six-thirty a serene apocalypse of fires began to softly descend, one of those sunsets in Tora that, as Olga says, are so beautiful they hurt; one just like that other one with pink hues that Sacramento sent on one of his postcards of hopeless love; or copied from that bloody sky that convinced beautiful Claire of the sweetness of death; or like the ones that don Enrique painted to please his clientele, adorned with birds in flight and a glimmering horizon: a sunset just like those that Todos los Santos is able to contemplate in spite of not being able to open those other heavy eyelids that have been born under her eyelids.
“Here he comes!” Olguita suddenly shouted, and everyone stood up in unison, as if they had heard the national anthem. “Here he comes! He looks strong and handsome, all dressed in white!”
But she hadn’t finished her announcement when his image vanished, like an inopportune cloud in the middle of the rays of the sunset.
“In white, yes, like a phantom,” grumbled Todos los Santos, trying to lower the volume on the scene. “Don’t embellish or exaggerate, Olga, you only saw his ghost. To me, Payanés is slippery, one of those who goes through life without underwear on under his trousers. You notice that he doesn’t even have a name, Payanés, the man from Popayán, because his presence is nothing more than a gust of freedom. Which is what this girl has always pursued deep down,” she said, but Sayonara, in agony, wasn’t listening to her, “but she disguises her impulse and tries to make an appearance of refuge, of a loving chest, of protection, of paternal love, of anything: This girl only loves her own flight.”
“But that is love,” Olguita, the cripple, defended her, pounding her withered, steel-clad legs against her stool. “To run off using someone else’s feet!”
“It’s him,” said Sayonara, now without the shadow of worry, shrouded in an old dignity and a new security, as if she had just deciphered some serious riddle or the key to something profound, and they knew the hour of the myth had come: the puta and the petrolero.
It is true that in a strict sense she was no longer a prostituta and he was no longer a petrolero, but maybe one day they would be again — he a prostituto and she a petrolera, as a favorite poet of Machuca’s named Rafael Pombo would have said — but if that didn’t happen it wasn’t a waste, because the sworn truth was that the women saw them depart, with the eyes that God put in their heads, together up along the Magdalena, one behind the other and the other behind the one, and both following the trail of life, or, better still, the force that pulls life from outburst to outburst without letting us know where it is carrying us, he dressed in white, with the rose incarnate wounding his chest and his profile facing forward, and she with her hair in the wind, gazing backward, clinging to what she is leaving behind and with the aura of death’s beloved child reverberating around her more now, but it had surrounded her as long as they had known her. United at last, the puta and the petrolero, joined as one in the warm rapture of an embrace, while before them stretched the road to an uncertain future, like any worthwhile future.
“That is how we watched them depart in the scent of a legend and along the edge of the river, while we cried bittersweet tears and wished them ‘God be with you’ with waves of our handkerchiefs,” reports Olga, letting out a round, translucent sigh.
“Mirages,” replies Todos Los Santos. “You were just seeing mirages, nothing more than reflections of desire. But me — blind as I am, I have my ways — I saw my girl leave by herself, her only company her solitude, searching for whatever it was that was plaguing her.”
“As an old, experienced woman, I know these things,” continues Olga, “and I assure you that Sayonara left with Payanés and that she has been happy with him. And unhappy too, of course, but you can’t take that away from her, the troubles of love aren’t troubles. She has been happy for all of us because we deserve it, after so much activity and struggle.”
“Me? I still write postcards to her, because I had confirmation that she appreciated receiving them,” Sacramento tells me. “With everything else, including the marriage, I wasn’t able to do anything except bother her, but my postcards cheered her up, as she told me herself. Since I don’t know where to send them, I keep them here, in this shoe box, so I can give them to her the day she returns.”
“Because she is going to return,” Todos los Santos assures me, wrapped in her silver fox, as she caresses a Felipe with soft fur sleeping in a ball in her lap. “My girl will come back sooner or later, because the turns in her road always pass by my house.”
acknowledgments
This book would not exist without the interest that has been invested in it, day to day, by Thomas Colchie, my adviser and literary agent; his wife, Elaine; and María Candelaria Posada, my old university classmate and, through entire lives of closeness, my editor today. I thank them and also Jaime González, Samuel Jaramillo, and Bernardo Rengifo, dear friends who read, reread, commented on, and added their bits to the manuscript.
For their kindness and thorough, factual knowledge, I thank Juan María Rendón, Alberto Merlano, and Marco Tulio Restrepo, directors of Ecopetrol, the firm that financed a portion of the research for this novel.
I thank also Rafael Gómez and Carlos Eduardo Correa S.J., who will know how valuable their generous and intelligent advice was when they read these pages, and Antonio María Flórez, the Spanish doctor who told me of his conversations with prostitutes in the health clinic of a Colombian pueblo in tierra caliente. Álvaro Mutis, for a certain sentence among those that appear here and from whom I heard it. Leo Matiz for the rights to the evocative photograph that appears on the cover. Sofía Urrutia, who made me aware of “La maison Tellier,” the story by Maupassant that was key in finding the tone for this novel. Graciela Nieto, who will be surprised when she encounters, from the mouth of one of the characters of this fiction, an anecdote from real life that she related to me. María Rosalba Ojeda, my right hand for domestic matters and other urgencies. And as always and for so many reasons, my son, Pedro, my sister, Carmen, and my mother, Helena.
In Barrancabermeja, I thank don Marteliano, a former worker at the Tropical Oil Company, and the Pacheco family, with its three generations of oil workers. Hernando Martínez — Pitula — a former worker at Ecopetrol and today a taxi driver, who was my guide through the city. The many people that I had the opportunity to interview, among them Jorge Núñez and Hernando Hernández, current president of the oil workers union. Monseñor Jaime Prieto, bishop of Barrancabermeja. The legendary Negra Tomasa, William Sánchez Egea, Manuel Pérez, and don Aristedes. The Japonesa—who told me her entire life story. Amanda and her sister Lady, Gina, whose help was so valuable, Abel Robles Gómez, Dr. Orlando Pinilla of Bucaramanga, the civil leader Eloisa Piña, señora Candelaria, a resident of the barrio Nueve de Abril. Librarian Jairo Portillo. César Martínez, Luis Carlos Pérez, father Gabriel Ojeda, and Gustavo Pérez.