The Dark Bride by Laura Restrepo

lady, aren’t you ashamed? Get out of here, we don’t need women!”
    â€œRespect!” demanded Sacramento, but without much conviction, so the bull wouldn’t charge him.
    â€œYeah, respect,” echoed Payanés, and from that first adversity they became accomplices for all the others to come.
    â€œI’ll kill that son of a bitch,” boasted Sacramento when the beast was no longer within earshot. “I’ll choke him with my bare hands, then we’ll see whether they’re a lady’s hands.”
    â€œYou’re not going to choke anybody, much less that giant,” said Payanés, taking his new friend over to join a group of fellow rejects as they headed out to look for work as road laborers, to wield shovels until their hands were covered with calluses and they could return to the recruiting officer stronger and better prepared.
    They penetrated the dense, hungry jungles of Carare through a tunnel they barely managed to open with slashes of their machetes and that snapped shut behind them like the jaws of a beast. They walked in the dark, feeling their way and withstanding scratches, roars, venom, and harassment from slimy fauna and hairy flora whose existence Sacramento had never dreamed of even in his worst nightmares, and that Payanés pointed out and classified according to their place in the animal, mineral, or vegetable kingdom.
    â€œThis is a sarrapial, those giant burning flowers are called cámbulos, those shouts you hear are from white-faced maicero monkeys, this must be the footprint of a momano, half ape and half human, who walks upright through the jungle, wary and nearly hairless, hiding from people because he’s shy and ashamed of his nakedness.”
    Sacramento tore off a leaf and it turned out to be an insect, he was about to grab a stick but it was a snake, he heard the beautiful song of a bird and it too turned out to be a snake: a singing ophidian.
    â€œI’m never going to learn,” he said, disheartened. “Nothing here is what it seems and everything acquires the gift of transforming itself into its opposite. The only certain thing is the hungriness with which the jungle looks at you; let down your defenses for a second and you’ll get swallowed up.”
    Eight days later, green, weak, and moldy from the humidity and lack of sun, their stomachs out of sorts from drinking amoebic broth and chewing corozo seeds, they found themselves on an old camino real opened by the conquistador Jiménez de Quesada along the Río Opón, upon which the Troco wanted to build a road to Campo Escondido and so was recruiting fresh blood for the work of leveling and moving earth.
    They arrived around midnight and were greeted by the miracle of the river transformed into a bed of placid stars, which at the edge came away from the water and took off in flight.
    â€œThose floating lights you see are female lightning bugs calling their mates,” said Payanés.
    â€œSuch tireless vegetation, so many creatures giving off light, so many males trying to copulate,” said Sacramento. “Nature is a very loving thing, hermano .”
    They removed their shoes and lay down among the rest of the men, beneath the immense sky and with their heads firmly resting on their shoes, which are the most cherished possession in the life of a foot traveler. Despite their precaution, they went to sleep with four and awoke with three: Payanés’s two and only the right shoe belonging to Sacramento, who sat in a gully hugging his widowed shoe and began to cry. He cried from exhaustion and because he was an orphan and because of the desolation of his abandoned foot, which was condemned to the sharp edges of the rocks and to the itching from the ticks and chiggers that embedded themselves in the plants, where they lay their crops of eggs.
    â€œMonday, Wednesday, and Friday you get the complete pair,” Payanés said consolingly, handing him a