The Dark Bride Read Online Free Page B

moniker and to call them just Domingo, Luis del Carmen, Evelio, and so on. But this Sacramento, the cart man, ended up with the hard luck of being given only that name, or if it was accompanied by others, they were no longer remembered, and because of that he was the only hijo de La Catunga whom the entire barrio called by that name, Sacramento, which was the same as calling him hijo de La Catunga, or hijo de los callejones .
    As if that punishment weren’t enough, the Franciscans filled his soul with a horror of the sins of the flesh and with a visceral mistrust of women, above all of his puta of a mother, who had abandoned him to chase after her instincts, like a lowly animal. Some time later the monks left Tora, and Sacramento, who ended up in the streets, had to accept the coarse and spontaneous tenderness with which the women of La Catunga offered him a bowl of soup, cured a wound with gentian violet or a sore throat with methylene blue, let him sleep at the foot of their beds, taught him sad love songs, and terrorized him with ghost stories. They did the same, out of maternal instinct, generous and indiscriminate, for all of the many boys and girls who roamed the barrio in need of affection and were unsure of their parentage. And so the boy grew up with twisted thoughts, troubled about work, tortured, loving what he hated and hating what he loved, always finding a spur for the turmoil boiling in his head, where adoration and gratitude toward the women was mixed with a painful rancor for their many sins and deep down a chronic incapacity to forgive them.
    I asked Sacramento if by chance he remembered what had happened to the infamous coins. Of course he remembered; the most minute, decisive details are the last things lost by our memory.
    â€œThe first one was swallowed by the earth,” he told me.
    â€œThat I already know.”
    â€œWith the second and third I paid for the beer I never drank, because the shouting made me return to Todos los Santos’s house. I put the other four in my pocket, but the girl looked so humbled, so gentle in that shirt that looked like a straitjacket, that I thought it was only fair to give her at least half of what was left of the profit, so I gave her two coins, which she accepted without question. I kept the last two, which got mixed up with others that a man gave me that same afternoon for moving some things, a little extra work that came to me.”
    Then I asked Sacramento if he had ever gone back to look for the buried coin. He laughed with surprise and said it had never even occurred to him, but he was piqued by the idea and twenty minutes later we were in front of a storehouse that had been built on the lot that had belonged to Todos los Santos. An entire lifetime had passed from the day when Sacramento’s minuscule treasure had been buried, and although the houses and people had changed, the street was still the same: a narrow passageway with no sewer or pavement. With a garden trowel, we began to scrape around the spot where he calculated the door had been. We removed dirt in no particular hurry, he for a while and then I, conversing in the meantime, very conscious that we were wasting our time. Several bottle caps turned up, and a rusted nut, a casing that looked like it was from a bullet, pieces of glass and rubber, and some other foolishness. And then, suddenly, a ten-centavo coin appeared, one of the ones with an Indian head that had stopped circulating a long time ago.
    From that moment on Sacramento looked at me differently. In his eyes appeared a hint of perplexity and suspicion that I think made the existence of this book possible, because from then on he didn’t dare keep any secrets from me, as if I were a sibyl and knew everything before he told me. Of course, I didn’t want to take advantage of the situation to pry information from him, so I told him not to give too much importance to what had happened, that we had just found an old coin