The Dark Bride by Laura Restrepo Page B

princess’s!”
    â€œThat’s it.” From the haze of her mistelas Delia Ramos saw the light. “Japanese! Let her be the only Japanese girl in this red-light district, and that way she can charge an exclusive fee.”
    â€œSuch nonsense! The Japanese are yellow like chickens . . .”
    â€œIt doesn’t matter, nobody around here would know the difference because they’ve never seen one.”
    â€œBesides, coloring can be lightened with rice powders . . .”
    â€œBut she doesn’t speak Japanese.”
    â€œAnd you think, mother, that these French women of ours speak French? If they ever knew it, they forgot it a long time ago. And nobody complains; after all, the profession has a universal language.”
    Olguita suggested the name Kimono, the only word she knew in Japanese, and Delia Ramos came up with another possibility:
    â€œI say that it would be best to call her Tokyo.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œA big city in Japan.”
    â€œIt won’t do, it’ll scare off the gringo clientele.”
    â€œDespite everything, Tokyo sounds very good to me.”
    â€œIn that case Kyoto would be better.”
    â€œWhy not Sayonara?”
    â€œKimono or Sayonara,” declared Todos los Santos. “Either of the two would work.”
    â€œSayonara is more beautiful, it means good-bye.”
    â€œGood-bye forever?” sighed Delia Ramos tragically, already drunk.
    â€œIt just means good-bye.”
    â€œLet the girl choose.”
    Without even thinking about it, the girl chose Sayonara and from then on she clung to that word, which she had never heard before, as if in it she had finally found the stamp of her identity.
    â€œThen let it be Sayonara. Sayonara. You will no longer be the girl, but Sayonara,” they approved unanimously, and there descended over them, leaving their hair gray, that drizzle of soot that falls from the ceiling every time a childhood ends before its time.
    â€œFour months,” said Delia Ramos between hiccups. “Only four months and she would have been an adult.”
    â€œIt’s all the same,” said Todos los Santos, “four months more or less. Which of us didn’t start too early? Childhood doesn’t exist, it’s a luxury invented by the rich.”
    Today, despite her eyes being bathed in clouds, Todos los Santos tells me she can see with perfect clarity that upon adopting that name with the flavor of good-bye, Sayonara unknowingly—or perhaps she did know it—sealed her own fate and that of all of La Catunga.
    On one thing Todos los Santos, Olguita, Delia Ramos, Tana, and Machuca did agree that night, which was to select señor Manrique as the girl’s first client, the one who would initiate her in the profession prior to her social and official presentation at the Dancing Miramar. He was a soft, kind man of some fifty years, all reverence and old-fashioned courtesies, one of those who breaks bread with his hands so he won’t have to plunge a knife into it. He worked as the quartermaster general of the commissary at the Troco, where he earned a good living, and visited the chicas of La Catunga every night to have eventual and insignificant sex with them, dispersed among dozens of games of dominoes, imperative, long, and impassioned.
    â€œWhat do you think, girl? After all, you are the interested party . . .”
    â€œI don’t care.”
    Señor Manrique would have been accepted unanimously if a bilious blonde named Potra Zaina hadn’t planted a tempting worry at the last moment:
    â€œLet her first time at love be with Piruetas, he really knows how to dance and make a woman feel alive.”
    None of them, not even Todos los Santos, was immune to the difficult charms of Piruetas, who came in and out of their lives with a dancer’s agile moves. Unpredictable, incomprehensible, slick, he made them all suffer with his snubs; from