The Dark Bride Read Online Free Page A

get a little flesh and then you can squeeze it into tight clothing.”
    The sun’s edge had advanced, striking full upon the front of the house and falling mercilessly on the sleeping ball that was Sacramento, who awoke suffocated by the discomfort of a sweaty body and a dry mouth. If she wants to be a puta , let her, he thought, the devil with guilty consciences. He burrowed in the earth again and recovered his coins, but only six; the seventh had disappeared, swallowed by the dust. With his money in his pocket he crossed the street with determination and entered the bar.
    â€œA good, cold beer,” he asked in a man’s voice, as he heard the first howl come from the house across the street.
    Inside, the madrina was trying to get into the girl’s hair strand by strand with an orthopedic comb with very close teeth, in order to eradicate any trace of knots or critters, and with each pull the girl shrieked, tried to bite the señora and wriggled away to take refuge under some piece of furniture. The madrina drove her back out with swats of a broom, grabbed her by the collar, and subjected her again to the torture until the girl bit her again and the struggle recommenced. When Sacramento and the owner of the bar decided to enter Todos los Santos’s house, they found both women staring at the ceiling, vanquished and exhausted, and reigning over them, unconquered like a corsair’s flag, the black mane still filled with its crop of lice.
    â€œSacramento had a cruel childhood and Olguita believes for that reason one must try to understand him,” Todos los Santos tells me, “but I say to her that she’d better not come to me with speeches about psychology, because lots of people have come around here lately to see if I have been traumatized by this prostitution business, and I’ve sent them all packing. Blessed Sacramento, I say to Olga, he had a difficult childhood, but the rest of us didn’t have one or even know what it was.”
    One afternoon when he isn’t present, the madrina tells me that Sacramento was born one day to a girl in the neighborhood who left him in the care of some friends while she traveled to the coast to settle accounts with the man who had deserted her. Since she never came back, the infant was raised from house to house and from one woman’s arms to another’s, like so many other children that belong to everyone and to no one, until the Franciscan monks arrived in Tora to evangelize. They opened the only school in the barrio and accepted him as an errand boy and kitchen helper and gave him a scholarship.
    â€œThis was a land where the normal thing was to be a puta, and to be an hijo de puta —the son of a puta —was the logical and painless consequence,” Todos los Santos informs me. “Sacramento would have grown up as sad or as happy as anyone else if the monks hadn’t taken it upon themselves to convince him of his shame.”
    â€œTo remind him of his origins they goaded him, calling him hijo de La Catunga or hijo de los callejones, son of the alleys, and when he turned seven years old they christened him with the name Sacramento,” adds Olga.
    Sacramento was the name they gave all the bastard children, dousing them with baptismal water and condemning them to that distinction, which couldn’t be erased because it had been inflicted in a solemn blessing. The illegitimacy remained stamped on their birth certificates, on their cédulas de ciudadania —the official government-issued identity cards—and on their military cards, but people arranged to ignore these and various other punishing scars. According to Christian tradition, the priests baptized any child with a string of three or more names and they did the same with the bastards—Juan Domingo Sacramento, Sacramento Luis del Carmen, and Evelio del Santo Sacramento—and that made it easier for others, out of compassion, to remove the punitive