Slash and Burn

  The girls didn’t take gifts either. After the community representative accused her of saving the best for her daughters when she was recruited by one of the churches to distribute toys, on the recommendation of teachers from the local school, the mother forbade them from standing in line for anything—even when various churches paid them visits around Christmastime. Wanting to dispel any doubts, she presented them with a report on the toys they’d delivered and gave them permission to search her house so they could see for themselves how her girls hadn’t gotten a single toy, because they’d wanted to make sure the rest of the kids each had a gift for that holiday.

  The people from the church told her it wasn’t necessary, but called someone else to handle the distribution the following year. As an excuse, they cited the need to make everyone feel included and to share the responsibility around so as not to overburden a single person. Even so, they couldn’t convince her that they hadn’t been taken in by what the community representative was touting.

  She didn’t attend their services again or take the girls to the kids’ lunches that were sometimes held to lure in adults. She wouldn’t let the girls accept the education grants the church managed alongside international donors, nor did she let them take photos of her and her daughters so the donors could see where their money was going, even if not all of it reached them. And before the incident with the toys, she’d felt uncomfortable when they hadn’t wanted to photograph her and her family in their own house, but instead in one whose condition was worse, because it’d help arouse more pity in the people who lived in other countries, and move them to donate more, or faster. She didn’t want her girls partaking in what she considered a scam, even though the church people said it wasn’t, that she was misinterpreting things, that all they wanted was to illustrate what conditions were really like there.

  The community representative said they shouldn’t insist, that the girls were as prideful as their mother and no good could be expected of them. He did his best to make them look bad, not because he was obsessed with the mother, but because he was after the house she kept. And she knew. She knew he wanted to get her to go and leave her land vacant for him to take. The peer pressure and even his romantic overtures had been attempts on his part to get near her parcel of land, to enter the house unrestricted. Which is why she never stayed away long.

  When she needed to leave to try and recover her firstborn from the place she’d been taken as a baby, she had to pay the señora who looked after her other daughters an additional fee to stop anyone from entering and sacking her house in the middle of the night.

  The woman she hired had always thought it was a question of protecting her belongings: her cornmill, the grain she’d harvested for the entire year, some jewelry maybe. But what she was actually guarding was an order she’d been given. She didn’t tell her this, though. There was no need. She might be a good person, but she was a civilian. She wouldn’t understand. Or she’d understand it all so well she’d get spooked and run off at once without caring that she’d left the girls behind, or even take them with her and figure out a way of not giving them back, not so she could hold on to them and raise them as her own, but so she could keep her away from them. She might turn them over to an institution, then ensure that she herself was taken to a different one, for many years. Best to avoid alarming her, to say it was a favor and not to give any explanations she couldn’t understand.

  Saying she was simply looking after her house was the perfect excuse.

  34

  She wanted to stay in that house not only to comply with the order she’d received, but also to ensure her daughters had someplace to return to if their lives took a turn for the worse. This her mother understood, because she had felt the same about the farm named after a horse and because she’d tried to offer the same for her kids back when you couldn’t count on anywhere to be safe. What she had trouble understanding was the other part, the part about the order. She thought the war had ended a long time ago.

  She’d had her doubts at first. She’d been one of those people who still couldn’t sleep easy through the night and suspected the war hadn’t ended and wouldn’t for some time, that the announcement had been no more than a ploy to pick out those who’d either supported or secretly collaborated with the government’s rivals, and that they were all being closely watched. She thought she should continue taking the same precautions with her supplies and movements, that she mustn’t even show any happiness in the company of strangers at the news of peace filling the radios and TVs—and that she must never ask questions, not even to those she considered close. She told the daughters still under her roof to carry on being polite but distant with the neighbors, especially with those who were just settling into the houses of the men and women who’d left with no warning. She recommended they didn’t get too close so as not to leave themselves open to any interrogations disguised as small talk, in which even the simplest habits might seem suspicious to people they knew nothing about.

  She felt any invitation might be a decoy, a trap to reveal the course of her intentions. And so she was constantly on edge. She was suspicious of anyone walking down her street, especially if they rummaged through the trash after something salvageable, to eat or to sell, because she thought no one in their right mind would rifle through garbage.

  She went out only a handful of times and never much farther than the door. She had the feeling she might be stopped at the corner by the news that everything had gone back to the way it was before, that the past had never actually ended.

  Until a time came when she understood that the fear she hadn’t let herself feel before had, all at once, come over her. She knew then that it had ended and that she was free to go wherever she pleased. That’s when she went looking for a reliable place where she felt safe: the farm named after a horse.

  She would’ve liked to return to the house her husband had built for her and their kids, but there was no house to return to nor hands to help raise one: her sons had left, the girls she had with her didn’t want to go back there, and she didn’t have the strength to put up those walls on her own.

  The doctor said she’d probably started getting sick around then, that what she called exhaustion was a symptom of her ailment, and that, if she’d started treatment then, she might not be as near death as she was now. She refrained from telling him that he knew nothing of death or its imminence. She listened patiently to his rebukes. She figured he must have grown up in one of the neighborhoods in the capital for which the war was only a distant din and a string of press releases.

  She wasn’t wrong. His house had never been ransacked. His only concern had been getting good grades. He didn’t have children and wouldn’t be in the country much longer: in just a few months, he’d apply to a program to continue his studies in some other place, where he’d eventually settle. There, he wouldn’t complain of patients who didn’t take care of themselves or scold them for seeking medical care when it was too late. There was no sense arguing or explaining anything to him because, even if he understood, he could do nothing for her but give her the medication the pharmaceutical companies gifted him as a way of promoting their brands and which, after the humiliation he’d put her though, she’d never have accepted anyway.

  She hoped the second girl her daughter had raised wouldn’t treat her patients like that. When she was back from university for the holidays, she sat her down and told her as much.

  The girl swore she wouldn’t. She felt she could do that now because she’d finally passed the subject which had stood between her and her goal and kept her so constantly nervous and quiet. She couldn’t fathom how she hadn’t passed it the first time because it didn’t seem all that difficult, looking at it now, and it wasn’t. She’d no doubts about the second time: neither the schedule nor the group she was assigned had been to her advantage. The same people in charge of overseeing her progress had told her they didn’t understand why she’d been put in that one, when it wasn’t designed for the de
gree she was studying.

  Why hadn’t she said something earlier? They could’ve avoided the problem altogether. Or made up for it at least.

  She didn’t know it was possible. Or that it mattered.

  Would her mother forgive her for it? She could’ve saved her so much distress.

  It wasn’t her fault. It’s hard to see in the dark.

  But her mother has always been able to.

  She’s never known how. Though she gave birth to her, she never taught her any of the things that had helped her survive. The one thing she did teach her to do was cook. The year she’d come down to the city pregnant with her second daughter, who she’d resolved never to part with, she realized the girl could do nothing that wasn’t related to rifles, operations, and sending messages. She couldn’t help her wash and iron the clothes she was given to launder: her hands were too rough. And she couldn’t work in a shop either, because people didn’t like mothers with their children, especially not if they appeared out of nowhere, like she had. Seeing as she had to contribute and didn’t want to leave the house too often, to avoid exposing herself and getting caught, her mother decided to teach her to prepare simple dishes that her sisters would have no trouble selling on the streets.

  She didn’t like it, but she had no choice. The only time she’d ever cooked anything at the camp, it’d been as punishment for talking back to a compañero and for disobeying a commander’s order to let him wash first, all on the same occasion.

  That day, she’d just returned from three days of fighting and fleeing. They’d barely made it out. She was tired and hungry. But most of all, she felt dirty. She had to wash her clothes, and her hair, and her clothes, before moving on: she was menstruating.

  The man who’d ordered her to wait had spent that entire time in the camp, where he’d remain for the next few days. Seeing no reason to obey such a ridiculous directive, she’d told him to stop badgering her with his nonsense and carried on walking toward the river.

  When she returned, a small committee was waiting to prosecute her. After hearing her version of events, they reduced the sentence for her disobedience, sending her to work as a cook’s assistant; they also sent the man to launder the troop’s clothes for the same period.

  These days, they laughed about it. Back then, though, they’d hated each other a little, and hated their chores.

  She still saw the kitchen as a sentence and tried to escape it, even after the year she spent with her mother.

  Her mother had to take her to task several times for the way she shaped her sandwiches and chopped her vegetables. They often argued over it because her mother said people picked up on those sorts of things when buying food, while she maintained that it was just food and no one was going to die over it. Her sisters took their mother’s side. They noticed that people bought the ones their mother made first, only taking hers when there was nothing else left, and always grudgingly. They’d ask them not to make such ugly sandwiches next time, or to fix them up better if they wanted them to keep buying from them.

  Then the tables turned. The sandwiches her mother made were no longer as tasty or perfect as the ones she made. Sales fell once she went back to the mountains. Her mother clung to this as a cover story for her disappearance: her daughter had decided to open a cafeteria somewhere else in the city, where people paid good money for things they only ever got a couple of cents for here. She’d left her granddaughter with her so she could devote herself to it entirely and save up enough for the girl to go to school. She didn’t want her girl to experience what she had when she was taken out of school because there was too little money to waste it on notebooks, uniforms, and shoes.

  Everyone believed it.

  Her neighbors asked her to bring back some of what she cooked when she visited, so they could have the pleasure of tasting it again. She said she would. Then, after some time had passed and she hadn’t been able to take them anything, the mother pretended that she’d left the city to start a business in a tourist area, where she was earning better and would soon be able to open a little restaurant of her own. Perhaps, eventually, she could turn it into an inn or a small hotel.

  By the time her neighbors were asking new questions that required her to come up with new lies, her daughter turned in her radio and came down from the mountains to the camp she’d been assigned. The first of the daughters she raised was already walking and talking, and calling her grandmother Mamá, even though she’d explained that her mamá was someone else. She couldn’t show her a photo because the combatants were forbidden from appearing in any without their superiors’ permission, for security reasons. And she couldn’t tell her why they didn’t have any: the girl was too little to understand, and might repeat something that would get her daughter or the entire family into trouble. All she said was that, one day, her mamá would come for her.

  She would’ve done if they’d let her leave, even just for a day. But after the year she’d spent away from the struggle, giving birth and bringing up her girl, her superiors thought she might end up staying and set a poor example during the peace process. So they refused. They said she had to wait for the day marked on the calendar, just like the rest of the mothers, to see her baby again. In the meantime, she could call her mother, let her know the date, and ask her to bring her daughter then. They’d handle her firstborn.

  When she visited her in that camp, her mother asked if she thought the war was over. The daughter had asked the same question of her husband, who’d answered that their orders were to believe it. Later, after they turned in their equipment and were given the houses they would live in, he told her that their orders were also to not believe it entirely, to remain skeptical. The lives they were living might fall apart at any moment. They had to be ready, in case they were betrayed. Of course, she never told her mother this. The command wasn’t meant for civilians.

  Wasn’t that what she was now?

  Was she?

  35

  Her daughters were. The littlest one most of all, whose father—unlike the father of her sisters—hadn’t fought or passed down to her any physiological ways of responding, defending herself, or protecting others if the war broke out again. She was more defenseless than the rest, because she hadn’t lived in a camp, or been conceived during the disarmament. She hadn’t grown up in the community when its residents still trained regularly and formed circles to discuss their actions as a group or receive instructions about the future. The poor girl hadn’t once heard the sound of gunfire. She wouldn’t know what to do if, one day, the place they lived in was attacked and her mother wasn’t around to lift her up in her arms: her feet turned inwards and were no good for running, she wasn’t old enough to be learning to fire a gun.

  Her grandmother said she wouldn’t manage it even if she were: her eyes couldn’t see very far. It saddened her to see the girl banging into things all the time without ever once complaining, as if she no longer noticed her injuries or had simply learned to accept them.

  In that way, she was a bit like them.

  Would she mind if she got her a gift? She had some savings and could use them to buy her the glasses she’d been needing for so long.

  It seemed silly: she was at death’s door and no amount of money could change that. But she could buy her granddaughter happier days. The girl’s mother wouldn’t have to wait for her name to come up on the charity list she’d signed her up to so that her girl could get around better and do better at school. Also, it’d make her happy to do something for them. Her daughter doesn’t want her to feel guilty.

  She says she doesn’t. How could she? She’s done everything within her power. Which is why she’d feel bad if she did nothing for the girl’s eyes, now that she can.

  She swears the money wasn’t sent by her sons and that she isn’t withholding anything from her other daughters. Nobody will come complaining or reproach her for it later.

  She’d rather they saved it for her burial: they’ll need every cent then.

  H
er mother laughs. Burials don’t cost a thing, she says: all you have to do is dig a ditch in the backyard.

  Opening a ditch in the backyard is the thing she most fears. She doesn’t smile when her mother points out where she might fit—in the fetal position, like people thereabouts, not lying straight like Christians—and offers to dig it little by little so that, when the day comes, no one else has to do the work.

  She asks her what’s wrong. Doesn’t she have a sense of humor? She needn’t worry: she’s already picked out a spot in the graveyard of the farm named after a horse. That was why she’d wanted to stay there.