Free The Dark Bride by Laura Restrepo Page B

happiness. “They are so lasting that they endure our whole lives, because for us, once we become a puta there’s no way back. It’s like becoming a nun. A woman with this life dies being a woman of this life, although she no longer even remembers what the thing that hangs between a man’s legs is called.”
    â€œWhat are those lasting motives you’re talking about?”
    â€œTake Correcaminos, for example,” she answers, resorting to a quirk I have learned to expect from them—they speak of others when they don’t want to speak about themselves. “It happened to Correcaminos, as it did with so many others, who in twenty-four hours go from being virgins to being putas . She was a decent, illiterate girl from a poor family who one day lost her virginity, became pregnant, and was transformed into the dishonor of her family. You are no longer my daughter, she heard her very Catholic father say, and the next minute she saw herself alone in the street without hope for pardon or return, with a baby in her belly and no roof over her head. Everything that had been hers suddenly wasn’t anymore: father, mother, siblings, barrio, friends, bread on the table, morning sun, afternoon rain.”
    â€œCan you imagine that?” said Olga indignantly, listening to us as she chopped parsley to add to a compress for Fideo, who lay in a hammock due to her chronic illness. “Everything was taken from her and her child with only six words: You are no longer my daughter. Like a damning curse. To hear that, as if he had said ‘abracadabra,’ and to have everything disappear, absolutely everything, forever and ever. As if by a spell.”
    â€œTo be so evil to her, her own father!”
    â€œDelia Ramos was raped by her stepfather and when her mother found out, she burned with such jealousy that she punished Delia, throwing her out of the house,” shouted Fideo from her hammock, who by now had ascertained that we were talking about misfortune.
    â€œOf course, when we asked Delia Ramos if it was true, she denied it. She never wanted to confess to anyone. The old man didn’t even remember what he had done and Delia, in contrast, martyred herself with guilt and regret. I knew about it because her sister told me, a girl named Melones who was also in the business, not here in Tora but in San Vicente Chucurí, and was crushed to death in an accident involving two buses on the Libertadores highway,” interrupted Olguita, who is fond of going into detail. “Do you remember that horrendous accident? They made Delia Ramos go identify the body and she came back telling that she knew it was her sister because of a burn mark she had on her upper thigh ever since hot depilatory wax spilled on it.”
    The three interrupt each other, remembering the misadventures of Melones, and meanwhile I think to myself that between being cast out of her home and reaching La Catunga, Delia Ramos and Correcaminos, whose name literally meant “road traveler,” must not have gone down too many roads. All they had to do was take a step, because La Catunga is around the corner from any street, and the difference between calling oneself Rosalba or Anita and nicknaming oneself Puta is a single word.
    â€œWhen others refuse to offer a hand, mother prostitution receives you with open arms,” says Olguita, “although afterward she swallows you alive and she makes us all pay for it.”
    â€œOpposite sides of the same coin,” I think out loud, “virgin and puta . Honor and shame.”
    â€œThat’s right, opposite sides of the very same coin. And let the devil throw it into the air to see which you end up with.”
    â€œDid Correcaminos’s father ever forgive her? Or Delia Ramos’s mother?”
    â€œNot them or anyone,” shouted Fideo. “You can go from there to here, but from here to there all the doors are locked.”
    â€œAll,”