The Dark Bride by Laura Restrepo Read Free Book Online

go back inside, madrina, or all that tremendous wind will catch you and you’ll start coughing again.”

three
    I ask what had happened in Sacramento’s life during all this time and they tell me that in the afternoons, after five o’clock, he would visit the girl and play with her.
    â€œPlay?” I ask. “Wasn’t he a little old to be playing?”
    â€œBut he was just a boy . . .”
    â€œYou told me that by then he had been given his cédula de ciudadania . He must have been at least eighteen.”
    â€œYes, he had his cédula, but that doesn’t mean anything. He got it four or five years early from some crooked politicians who falsify cédulas to get minors or nonexistent or dead people to vote for them in the elections.”
    Sacramento and the girl played barefoot with the other children in the dusty alleys of the barrio of the putas . London Bridge, hot potato, jump rope. But those traditional, organized games weren’t their favorites; more than anything else they liked to play war. The girl was famous on the streets for being a rough-and-tumble scoundrel. There was no one more expert than she at executing flying kicks, spitting at a greater distance, throwing bone-crushing punches, knocking the wind out of someone with a fist to the solar plexus. Other handy diversions of hers were urinating in jars, tormenting the enemy by putting chili powder in their eyes, and playing violent games of red rover.
    â€œThe heart of the pineapple is winding and winding, is winding and winding, all the children are falling and falling,” sings Sacramento, and he’s remembering and remembering. “It was called the heart of the pineapple and it was a rough game that left everyone injured. And me? The heart of the pineapple crushed my soul.”
    The heart of the pineapple was winding, the speeding chain of children holding hands, pressing tighter and twisting until it formed a human knot, a true pineapple heart that squeezed and asphyxiated and finally ended up with a pile of crushed children on the ground. One day several older boys from another neighborhood joined the game and the pineapple, devilish and frenetic, began to twist ankles and knock heads, and more than one kid came out bruised from the crush. But the older ones weren’t there to play, they only incited the jumble and took advantage of the confusion to touch the girl, knocking her to the ground and grabbing her hair to steal kisses and to lift her skirt. She defended herself with sharp jabs and dolphin kicks and had already managed to get them off of her and to quickly escape, when Sacramento learned of the offense and a surge of wounded dignity electrified his heart.
    â€œAt that moment I felt that the pain stabbing me was the strongest I could ever know. Boy, was I wrong. It was a child’s pain compared to those that were to come.”
    â€œOver the years, Sacramento grew and filled out,” tells Todos los Santos, “but at the time he was just a skinny boy, a head shorter than the girl, with wiry hair and sweet little eyes that inspired laughter and compassion. Without taking time to realize that the others were greater in number and size, he rushed at them, avenger and executor of justice, and he managed, of course, to be beaten to a pulp and left half broken.”
    â€œWhy do you defend her,” they shouted at him as they watched him bleeding on the ground, “when she’s just going to turn out to be a puta .”
    â€œThat’s work, stupid bastards. We were just playing!” he shouted in a voice broken with tears that even to him sounded lamentably infantile, and to try to turn around this sorry ending, he summoned up strength from his crushed pride and rushed at them again.
    â€œHe was lucky that the second time they knocked him down with a single blow and ran off.”
    Sacramento and the girl spent hours and hours on Todos los Santos’s patio,