Read Online The Dark Bride by Laura Restrepo - Free Book Online

all of them he obtained benefits of bed and kitchen in exchange for gazes from his lying eyes; they all loved him without charging him a peso so that he, in return, would teach them tango steps and the latest pirouettes in the dancing salons of Pereira and the capital.
    â€œHey, Piruetas!” they would shout competitively at him when they saw him pass, a figure of ambiguous temperament, malevolent hat, and patent-leather shoes. “Slay me with those eyes! Come, love, show me a new number, one of the ones only you know.”
    â€œ Prostitutas, like bullfighters, try to ease sorrows with superstitions,” Todos los Santos assures me. “One of their many beliefs says that the man who breaks a woman in marks her life from then on. That’s why the selection of the first client was a delicate matter and why a melancholy man would be rejected, for example, or a glutton or a sick man. All the pains, of the body and the soul, are transmitted through the sheets.”
    â€œPiruetas for Sayonara?” shot Tana. “Don’t even think about it, he’s a fancy man who plays crooked.”
    â€œLife is short and you have to know how to enjoy it, and we aren’t going to condemn the girl to bitterness by starting her out with a tattered old man,” interjected Machuca.
    â€œOn the contrary, she shouldn’t become accustomed to thinking work is idleness and the salary is enjoyable, because later there’s no way to rid her of the habit.”
    â€œWho said such foolishness! If she is going to live off of her body, then let her at least shake it out and enjoy it. Sanctimoniousness will only bring you communion wafers!”
    â€œDeath is always crouching somewhere and the trick is to discover where before it lashes out at you.” Todos los Santos uttered those somber words and the other women didn’t understand what they had to do with anything. “I’ll say just one thing: In this barrio death dances around, so very slyly, in Piruetas’s shoes.”
    An uncomfortable silence descended and the women pressed against one another, seeking the antidote to that shivering thought.
    â€œI am not one to prohibit the girl from dealing with Piruetas,” continued Todos los Santos. “You all know that for years he has been in and out of my bed as he chose. He casts his net over all of us and sooner or later she too will have to feel the brush of his effeminate fingernails, sparkling with polish. But it’s preferable that it be later rather than sooner.”
    The dawn fell thick with humidity and shrouded in the screaming of seagulls over the gentleness of the river, and the girls went each one to her own home, grateful along the way for the existence of affable men like Manrique, who soften the ominous fascination that they all, without exception, felt toward cruel men like Piruetas.
    When he learned that the girl’s hour had arrived, and that the chosen novio for her first time was old Manrique, Sacramento’s spirit crashed to the ground and shattered into a thousand pieces.
    â€œSo even then you loved her?” I ask.
    â€œLoved her, no. Love, what people call love, not sleeping at night or eating during the day thinking about a woman, señorita Claire inspired something like that in me, always solitary even when she was accompanied, with that mystery of hers, made of dark circles under her eyes and pale skin under her dress. Or señora Machuca, with her thirty years of life so well lived that there was nothing beautiful or ugly in this world left for her to discover. Or even Olguita, so compassionate, her legs useless, like a mermaid, who half frightened me and half fascinated me with those steel orthopedics pressing against her flesh. I loved and desired all of them until I was crazy and even beyond. But the girl? No one falls in love with a wild-haired, slippery, surly tadpole. At that time she was to me something worse and much stronger than