“Will you come see me?”
“Okay. But you have to leave that whole day for me. You have to swear that for that one day there won’t be any other men.”
“That’s how it went,” Olguita told me. “They were apart from the group and we couldn’t see them, because everyone’s privacy is respected, but also because they were hidden behind some patavacales, which abound there. Patavacal? The things you ask, all unimportant details. But I will tell you what you want to know; a patavacal is a tangle of prickly bushes that have a leaf in the shape of a cow’s hoof, which leaves a print in the shape of a heart. I was saying that they were away from the rest of us and hidden, but that wasn’t surprising, since it’s normal with couples in love. You look for a half-hidden flat spot, throw a blanket on the ground, and there, that’s it, you do your business. Then you go with your partner, or sometimes alone, to swim in the river and come out again as if nothing happened. I tell you that we didn’t see Payanés and Sayonara, but we knew what was going on between them, and I could read from Todos los Santos’s worried look that she was afraid the girl was going to get foolish with Sacramento’s friend and forget about the rest of the group. Later we saw them swimming naked, she slender and dark and he powerful and cinnamon-colored, both standing waist-deep in that water that wavered between lilac and mauve, and even with our view hindered by the distance, it was easy to read on their faces that they were in love. Dusk was falling, the hour when the birds’ singing ceases and the river’s breathing quiets, and as we learned later, it was then that they made their promise. The promise that was the most serious vow possible according to the laws of amor de café. They sealed a promise of fidelity for a single day each month, whenever he would come to visit from his camp. Payanés and Sayonara swore the fidelity of husband and wife for the last Friday of every month of the year, and it is well known that in these parts a promise is sacred.”
“Agreed?” he asked, pressing against him the one who from now on, by sworn promise, would be a little more his than any other man’s, including Sacramento, and he felt his heart begin to beat again at the threshold of visions of the future: He saw the water light up again, the air shimmer with phosphorescence, and her hair burn gold like the crown worn by the Virgen de Guadalupe and formed by the day’s final rays as they escaped the night in the blue liquid of her hair.
“Agreed.”
“If someday you leave Tora…,” he ventured.
“I’m not leaving Tora.”
“You never know where all this war could drive you. If you leave Tora, I mean, and you settle in any other corner, just wait for our date, then walk in a straight line until you reach the Magdalena and I will be waiting there by the shore.”
“This river is very long,” she pointed out. “It crosses the whole country…”
“You just look for the river, I’ll know where to look for you.”
“Later,” Olguita continues, “as they were dressing and the rest of us moved the party back onto the champán for the return trip, came the part with the memento. In that too they acted according to custom, because amor de café doesn’t recognize commitments that don’t involve mementos. Other people sometimes call them amulets or tokens. And notice this detail, the male always wears it, never the female, unless the promise is constant and total, which also occurs. Otherwise no, because she has to continue working, you see? And no man likes to find a trace of the previous one.”
With a small knife, Payanés cut a long wisp of her hair, braided it, wrapped it several times with hemp fibers, and tied it off, forming a necklace, and with childlike solemnity and the attitude of an altar boy he quickly blessed it, then kissed it and secured it around his neck.
“Tell me your real name,” said Payanés.
“You already know it, Sayonara.”
“That’s just a nickname.”
“I’ve already forgotten the real one.”
“Come on, tell me. Just me.”
“I can’t. If my father finds out the life I’ve chosen, he’ll come and kill me.”
“All right, then.”
It was already too late for Payanés to catch the truck back to the camp, so Sayonara accompanied him and waited for him to catch the train, which was much slower, at that fateful stop they call Armería del Ferrocarril, which is always swarming with diminutive angels of sorrow that remind one of flies.
“This is where my friend Claire said good-bye forever,” she tried to tell him through the window at the last minute, but the train had already started to move.
sixteen
“Se sentaban con recato,” don Alonso Olmeda told me last night — a veteran of the Troco who frequented La Catunga in Sayonara’s time and knew and respected the mujeres de la vida.
They sat with modesty, don Alonso had said of the prostitutas of those days, and his delicate observation took me by surprise, it hit me like a peculiar clue for deciphering that world, one with which this book should be in harmony and which forced me to rethink things I had written earlier. For example, “her flesh overflowed the low neckline of the blue satinette dress.” But they sat con recato. A curious and archaic word, recato. I heard my grandmother use it often and then after she was gone, gradually less and less, as if it alluded to an extinct virtue. Recato: a magical term when it refers, as from don Alonso’s mouth, to a puta. From the Latin recaptare—to hide what is visible — it seems to refer to a secret world that avoids exhibition and which is, significantly, contrasted with the Latin prostituere, to debase, put before the eyes, expose.
“How did they dress, don Alonso?”
“With the elegance of poor ladies who wanted to look beautiful.”
“No cleavage or bright-colored fabrics?”
“Cleavage, yes, and bright-colored, showy dresses too, but nothing that would call attention with vulgarity. The famous striptease, now obligatory in any brothel, would never have occurred to anyone at the Dancing Miramar and the other cafés in La Catunga. Instead we enjoyed dance contests and there were prizes and celebrations for the couple who performed the best tango, rumba, or cumbia. It was another world and things gave off different colors, and prostitution, forgive me for expressing a personal opinion, wasn’t disgraceful for the woman who practiced it or for the man who paid for it.”
“Even though there was payment?”
“The petrolero worked hard and earned his money. The prostituta worked hard and ended up with the petrolero’s money. They say that love for money is a sin, but I say that it’s nothing more than the law of economy, because bread doesn’t fall from the sky for anyone. And don’t believe what they tell you, that amor de café is pleasure and not love. When some fellow worker was smitten by a particular woman, the rest of us managed to stay away from her and not interfere.”
“Were you always successful?”
“No, not always. There were a few crooked girls who made their men suffer until they drove them to their deaths. No one confronted them for it because they were within their rights, and anyone who fell in love with a woman from that world was at the mercy of his own good luck. But in general, love between couples was respected and there were numerous cases of sworn and upheld fidelity, by choice of the couple and not because of any other circumstance. I can tell you the names of petroleros who had children in common agreement with prostitutes, without the women leaving the profession. It was a simple world because it wasn’t hypocritical. It wasn’t hypocritical but that doesn’t mean that it was heartless. It may sound ridiculous to you, but there was a certain feeling of chastity in all of that. A certain kind of chastity, you know, and a certain elegance. To understand it you had to have seen them, so proudly gathering their skirts when they danced a pasodoble.”