The Dark Bride Read Online Free PDF Page A

and it probably wasn’t his. He didn’t look at me with disappointment, as I had expected, but with incredulity and something close to anger.
    â€œThis is my coin,” he assured me. “I would recognize it anywhere.”
    Faced with his emphatic tone, I had to admit my flippancy and ask for forgiveness. Then I tried to explain that I had invited him to look for the coin because those of us who make a living by writing live for the hunt of minute coincidences and subtle proofs that reassure us that what we write is, if not necessary, at least useful. Because it responds to currents that flow beneath what is ordinarily apparent, currents that turn back upon themselves and twist fate in circles. I also told him that a blind poet named Jorge Luis Borges believed that every casual meeting is an appointment. The more I talked, the more I got tangled up and the more magical my words seemed, and he listened to them, hypnotized, as if they were being spoken in some archaic tongue. Afterward, with the passing days and interminable conversations, during which he told me his whole life story, and I, something of mine, a sort of serene confidence developed between us that dispelled the magic in favor of friendship. But there was something that Sacramento never lost after that episode: the conviction that literature is a means for conjuring and that it can reveal secret clues. He, who had been anything but a reader, began to become interested in books.

two
    Todos los Santos arranged for the girl to sleep on a straw mattress spread out beside her own bed. Before she lay down to sleep she turned off the light in the bedroom and checked to make sure that the perpetual candle was burning in its red glass holder beneath the picture of the Sagrado Corazón de Jesús. Just as she had always done and would keep on doing, she tells me, until the day she dies.
    Colombia is known as the country of the Sacred Heart. He is our patron saint and in that capacity has tinged our collective spirit and our national history with the same romantic, tormented, and bloody condition. The only common element in all of the homes of the poor in Colombia—it was removed from the houses of the rich a few generations back—is the image of this Christ who looks you in the eyes with doglike resignation while he shows you his heart, which isn’t found inside his body as one would expect, but has been extracted and is held in its owner’s left hand, at chest level, beneath a carefully tended chestnut beard. But it’s not an abstract heart, rounded, in a pretty rose color and of a less than remote likeness to the original, as it appears in Valentine’s messages. The one our Christ displays is an impressive organ, throbbing, a proud crimson, with a stunningly realistic volume and design. A true butcher’s prize, with two disturbing attributes: From the top a flame is burning, while the middle is encircled by a crown of thorns that draws blood.
    The girl couldn’t sleep a wink in that foreign, unfamiliar room filled with unknown smells. She uncovered herself, then covered up again, unable to find a comfortable position. She felt besieged by the presence of that kind and mutilated young man who never stopped looking at her from the wall, and on whose face the candle cast dancing shadows and reflections of bloodletting. In her own bed, Todos los Santos was uncomfortable with the heat of a fitful and choking sleep, until without warning she began to snore with a sudden bubbling of mucus only to then completely suspend breathing altogether, without releasing her breath inward or outward for an entire minute, her throat closed by a plug of still air, two minutes, three, until the girl was convinced she had died. Then it returned, like waves on the ocean, that rhythmic snoring . . .
    â€œ Madrina, ” the girl dared to call out, “ madrina, that man scares me.”
    â€œWhat man?” asked Todos los Santos,