The Dark Bride by Laura Restrepo Page A

crotch. A strong whiff of cleaning fluids made her nauseous.
    â€œIt smells like a circus, madrina .”
    â€œIt is a circus, and we’re the clowns.”
    â€œThrough here for genital inspection,” indicated a doctor of dubious qualifications, so coarse in appearance and with a lab coat so stained that he looked more like a mechanic than a doctor.
    Obeying orders like a frightened animal, the girl lay down on the examining table and began to tremble.
    â€œHold on, girl,” encouraged Todos los Santos. “Think of Santa Cata, who withstood the cogged wheel without complaint.”
    â€œSome comfort you are, madrina .”
    The man with the stained lab coat performed the examination in view of all the others, with total disinterest, a cigarette in his mouth and without interrupting a conversation about the legitimacy of the elections, which he was carrying on with a tall, ungainly colleague who didn’t look like a doctor either, or even a mechanic, but rather a giraffe from a zoo.
    When he finished with the girl, the man moved over to a desk, signed and stamped a card of pink pasteboard, threw the fifty centavos in a drawer, and without washing his hands shouted:
    â€œNext!”
    Todos los Santos tried to climb onto the high table without losing her composure, but she got tangled in her skirts, suffered a sudden coughing attack, the leg that was supposed to rise wouldn’t respond, the upper part of her body managed some success and reached the table but the other half failed and hung there, heavy and grotesque, while, completely humiliated, she begged the doctor’s pardon for her lack of agility, explaining that in her youth she had been slender.
    â€œHurry up,” said the man. “I’m not going to wait all morning.”
    â€œCan’t you see the señora needs help?” said Sayonara, and her fear yielded to her fury.
    â€œUp, señora, and open your legs.”
    â€œShe is not climbing up or opening her legs, you shitty bastard,” Sayonara spat out as she grabbed Todos los Santos by the arm, struggling to pull her out to the street.
    â€œDon’t be a rebel, hija, you’ll leave me without a card,” protested the madrina, who still hadn’t picked up her purse or finished rearranging her hair, stockings, and skirt.
    â€œLet her insult me, doña,” said the doctor so loudly that the others outside could hear. “Next time the little brat is going to have to suck me off before I’ll do her the favor of renewing her card.”
    â€œWhy don’t you suck this,” shouted a woman from Cali who had been eating a mango; she threw the pit and hit him in the eye, letting out a hearty laugh that alerted the others and made them laugh too, first a little, then more, beginning as the chatter of schoolgirls, then becoming the harassment of mutinous putas , hurling insults, trash, and rocks at the dispensary doctors who, without knowing how, managed to lock the door and barricade themselves against the revolt that was mounting outside.
    â€œDown with the pimping government!”
    â€œDown!”
    From the corner and a little apart from the rest, looking at all of this with the burned-out eyes of someone who has seen it before, Todos los Santos registered the novelty only as highlighted in insignificant details: the touch of color that the commotion brought out on Claire’s translucent cheeks, the agility with which Yvonne ran on her red stilts, the wounded-deer urgency with which the group of pipatonas and their children fled, abandoning the uprising at the onset. But more than anything she noticed the metamorphosis that her adopted daughter underwent, having seized the first line of fire, hair on end like a wild beast, vociferous, and later scampering across the roofs with a diabolical agility to reach the skylight and attack from above.
    â€œI watched her,” she tells me, “and said to myself: Maybe it’s