The Dark Bride by Laura Restrepo Page B

your boots . . .”
    â€œThat would never happen, who’s going to steal it?”
    â€œThese unfortunate things happen, look at me. Anyway, an extra shoe will certainly serve you more than a broken shovel on your journey.”
    The old man left for his homeland with Sacramento’s shoe in his pack, while the two boys agreed to take turns with the endowment: While one rested the other would work with the shovel and Payanés’s shoes, and the next day they would exchange roles.
    â€œRepeat after me: Pick, you are my father; shovel, you are my mother”—that was the only instruction given to them by the foreman before he exploded the dynamite that reduced a huge rock to gravel, sending monkeys and parrots to the moon.
    That’s how they started to work, and to suffer. They clung to their shovel as if it were the sword and shield of a wandering knight and with it they opened the way among the thousand torments of the jungle, paddling among the stagnant waters at the edge of the river, which boiled like a thick, rancid soup and gave off a fetid vapor that impeded their breathing.
    â€œIt’s malaria,” diagnosed someone. “This poisonous air is what they call malaria.”
    â€œDon’t be ignorant, malaria doesn’t fly around on its own, it spreads by mosquitoes,” corrected someone else. “They’re called anopheles. Only the female bites, and she lives only seven days, but in that time she can infect at least seven men.”
    â€œAnd those seven men are bitten by a hundred flies who then bite seven hundred more men, until there’s not a healthy Christian in the whole departamento of Magdalena.”
    â€œOr in all of Colombia.”
    â€œWell, the truth is that yes, they are biting,” complained Payanés, and the statement bothered Sacramento, because it made real a nuisance that until then he had managed to ignore.
    â€œHush, Payanés, don’t court disaster. Don’t think about the mosquitoes and they won’t bite you; they’re just like dogs, they only bite those who are afraid of them.”
    He hadn’t finished speaking those words when he began to feel the stings on his cheek, on his hand, on his thigh through the cloth of his trousers. He hadn’t seen them before and suddenly he saw them, in clouds, in battalions, forcing him to scratch himself until he drew blood, dodging their victims’ swats and laughing at the foul-smelling smoke of some cigarettes the men called repellent. He tells me that of the many bites he received in the quagmire of the Carare, there was one that infected him, and he assures me he knows which one it was.
    â€œI turned to look when that mosquito’s sting lanced my neck, like a hypodermic needle, injecting into my veins that insatiable parasite that stayed on to live inside me, to devour my blood little by little. And look how things turn out: The day I contracted malaria was the same day I heard someone talk of her for the first time.”
    He heard someone talk about Sayonara, a girl in La Catunga whom the men that visited those streets said they had fallen in love with, and whose fame had begun to spread by word of mouth even among those who didn’t know her, the thousands of seekers of destiny who walked along the roads of Magdalena after bread and work; after opportunities, as they themselves said to give a generic name to the future, to love, to their lucky star, the holy grail, the treasures of El Dorado, the philosopher’s stone, a mother’s compassion, a lover’s sheets, the roar of black gold. Sacramento says:
    â€œI think we were looking blindly for something that was worthy of all that searching; something, finally, that deserved to be sought out and that at the moment of death would allow us to say, that’s what I lived for.”
    It often turned out, due to a breath of spontaneous winds, that the object of the collective search would