The Dark Bride by Laura Restrepo Page A

a name so coarse and devoid of style.”
    â€œBut if that name brings the girl good memories,” Olguita dared to venture, her nature made velvety by the polio that had withered her legs.
    â€œGood memories don’t exist. All memories are sad,” Todos los Santos said, ending the discussion.
    â€œLet’s call her María, Manuela, or Tránsito, for God’s sake, they were all important women and heroines in novels,” proposed Machuca, the blasphemer, who was a high school graduate with a diploma, and a devoted reader.
    â€œWhat does that have to do with anything? None of them had to offer up their asses.”
    â€œWell, if that’s the requirement, then call her Magdalena.”
    â€œDon’t even mention that renegade, first she sinned, then she spent the rest of her life crying with regret.”
    â€œThen what about Manón or Naná, who made history in Paris?” suggested Machuca, her mouth watering.
    â€œParis and Tora can’t be mentioned on the same day.”
    â€œWhy not Margarita, then?”
    â€œMargaritas also cry too much. And they fall in love with money, and die spitting blood. I tell you, names of flowers bring bad luck.”
    â€œWell, Flor Estéves, who was my aunt on my father’s side,” offered Delia Ramos, “was said to have found heaven in a sailor’s love.”
    â€œSailors kiss, then they leave,” Todos los Santos recited the only line of poetry her memory had retained.
    â€œRosa la Rosse always sounded so sweet to me . . . ,” sighed Olguita. “I would have loved to have been called that. But I got tangled up in this profession without realizing it and when I opened my eyes I was already a consecrated puta and they just kept calling me Olguita, like when I was good. They say that God doesn’t forgive those who work under the names they were baptized with. They say it sullies the holy name and takes it in vain.”
    â€œGod has gotten so old and he still hasn’t stopped inventing sins.”
    â€œIt doesn’t do me any good to give you ideas, if you don’t pay any damn attention,” said Machuca testily, but she tried again anyway. “Call her Filomena, who was the winner in a tournament of beautiful breasts.”
    â€œMaybe that Filomena had hers very much in order,” interjected Delia Ramos, “but on this child they’re barely showing, and you can tell that as an adult they’ll sprout scant and pointed, like a Turkish slipper.”
    â€œI heard about an incredibly extraordinary puta who was called Cándida . . . ,” mused Olguita.
    â€œDon’t even think about it,” said Machuca. “That Cándida deserves a place among the gods of Olympus for bearing eternal torture chained to a bed, like Prometheus to his rock. Cándida is a myth of sublime flight and this poor little girl of ours is nothing more than a vile mortal.”
    â€œYou read so many books and invent so many beautiful things,” said Tana to Machuca, “and just look at the sad name you’ve got.”
    â€œI use it because that’s what a poet I once loved called me,” said the latter in self-defense, then became lost in the shadows of days gone by.
    They got tangled up in meditations without reaching a satisfactory solution and instead ended up postponing other urgent decisions, like fixing the fee and selecting the corresponding color of lightbulb in accordance with the standing hierarchies and conventions in La Catunga. The girl was as copper-colored and Indian-looking as the pipatonas , and according to that she should have been accorded a minimal remuneration, but Todos los Santos aspired to the highest destiny for her student and she wouldn’t resign herself to condemn the girl to a lowly white lightbulb.
    â€œIt can’t be,” she lamented. “With those beautiful almond eyes she’s got, like a Japanese