Invisible Country

by Annamaria Alfieri

  All skin and bones, old Hector Mompó came running toward her. Or at least as close to running as a man of his age and frailty could manage. Like many poor peasants had always been, he was practically naked, sporting only a double apron of dressed leather, an old straw hat brim, and heavy silver spurs bound to his horny bare feet with rawhide thongs. Nearly eighty, he would have been a young man when the first dictator Francia required all the males in Paraguay to wear hats so they could doff them when they passed militiamen or government functionaries on the roads. Hector—like many of the peasant class—wore a brim without a hat. He caught up with Maria Claudia at the church steps and swept the brim off his bald head with a cavalier’s gesture, bowing low. “At your service to do Pai Gregori’s bidding,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.

  Maria Claudia, suppressing a guffaw, managed to blurt out, “You will be in my prayers,” and hurried on.

  Across the grassy square, Alberta Gamara chatted with a group of women near her tiny café. An ugly cucuru toad hopped into the shade of a tree. The toads and Alberta were the only creatures in the village that had not grown thin during the war. Everyone knew the toads stayed fat eating the myriad insects, but no one knew how Alberta did it.

  Near the flagpole, white-haired and mustachioed Saturnino Fermín, wearing his habitual, ancient three-cornered hat, and the cadaverous, wrinkled, and cross-eyed Gaspár Otazú, in his mock military shirt, spoke intently together. They paused to greet small, wiry Josefina Quesada as she passed, towing her maimed and broken grandson, Pablo. The old lady stopped under an orange tree to light a cigar. Three of the many villagers who revered her for her gift of prophecy approached.

  Maria Claudia turned away. Their old Indian practice of believing in dreams and visions bordered on heresy. But then, curious about what Josefina would say, she stopped to listen. Padre Gregorio would need to know how people reacted to his announcement, and this oracle would greatly influence their response.

  “Before the Jesuits came,” Josefina said, her voice, like that of many of her countrywomen, low and gruff from many years of constant cigar smoking, “our people had no marriage laws. The Spanish had taught the Guarani the rule of one woman for one man. Before they came, people lay with whomever they wanted. Sex was no different from eating or sleeping. Girls gave their love freely and were admired all the more. But we cannot easily return to the old practice. Our blood may see the good, but our hearts have been taught to leap to jealousy. People will be born because of what the padre said, but people may also die because of it.” She pushed her unruly gray hair back from her handsome, weathered face, and with her bony old hand took the empty sleeve of her uncomprehending grandson and pulled him slowly toward the Yotté family’s luxurious house at the edge of the village.

  Maria Claudia removed her mantilla and folded it. Josefina was probably right. People could not easily return to those old ways. The Spanish conquerors had found the local people humble and amiable, easily converted. Today’s Paraguayans, although they still spoke their old language, worshiped the Spaniards’ God with great fervor. Go back to the old beliefs, birth bastards without shame? She certainly could not.

  She forewent her usual Sunday morning visit to the graves of her mother and father and prayers for Fidel Robles, who had no grave. He had been her husband for eight days before he went away to die. She tried to remember him for something other than fumbling lovemaking and boyish dreams of military glory that marked the whole of their time as man and wife. She crossed the cobblestone patio to find the padre.

  As soon as she opened the small, arched sacristy door, a strange acrid scent and the sound of the priest praying in a low voice slowed her steps. An apprehension she could not name chilled her blood. Without thinking, she covered her head with her mantilla and moved toward the light inside the belfry and the sound of the praying.

  Padre Gregorio, kneeling next to a man lying on the floor, implored with his eyes without unclasping his hands.

  “Who is that?” she heard herself ask.

  The padre blessed himself and stood. His face was pale as paper. “Ricardo Yotté. He is dead.” He bent and picked up the vial of holy oil that lay next to the body.

  Her shoulders stiffened with fear. One glance took in Ricardo’s face, arrogant even in death, hair and clothing disheveled as it never had been in life. She wanted to move closer, but could not. She had known him as a child, when she went to his house to play with his sisters. “What happened to him?”

  The padre shook his head. “At first I thought he had fallen from up there.” He glanced up at the bell tower. It held no bell. Theirs, like all the others in the country, had long ago been taken away by the dictator’s English engineers, to be melted down for cannons. “But there are stab wounds in his chest. He was murdered.”

  “Oh, Lord!” She saw immediately how dangerous this was. “We will have to tell the comandante.” She did not have to look into the padre’s eyes to know the alarm in them. Luis Menenez, the commander of this village and the territory around it, had been second only to Ricardo Yotté in his power and devotion to the dictator. With Yotté gone, he would ascend to become the most feared person in the area. Incurring his wrath could mean torture, death, even for a priest. “I will say I found him,” she said.

  “Do not be absurd. I must tell Menenez the truth. But first, I want Alivia León to look at the body. There are strange things about this. She is more than a midwife. With all she knows about the human body’s sicknesses and cures, she is the only one left in the village who might explain what happened here.”

  “Someone will have to tell his sisters,” Maria Claudia said. The Yotté girls had been her closest friends. She hated the thought of delivering the dreadful news, but she should be the one to do it.

  The priest’s face, already grave, twisted with grief. “Those poor women. First their father, then their mother. Now this. How will they bear it?”

  * * *

  Alivia took a slow pace along the calle León to her family’s estancia just across a stream from the edge of town. Her daughter Xandra had gone off to care for César, the horse she suddenly seemed so obsessed with feeding. Alivia’s husband Salvador—where had he gone, hobbling away despite the pain of his lost foot? Of late, he mumbled excuses and disappeared. Perhaps he had started taking Padre Gregorio’s advice before it was given. She twisted her gold wedding ring. Salvador had never been that kind of man, but war had changed him. Along with his foot and far worse, their sons, he had lost his capacity for joy.

  Alivia was tired. “Souls for Paraguay,” the priest had said. She had brought Paraguay four souls, if she did not count the two infant boys who lay in the cemetery. She had given her country her three sons that had lived past infancy. Juan, tall and studious and so thin. His hands so like her father’s. He had reached a man’s height but never had a chance to fill out. When the tocsin sounded, he was among the first to march off, saying he would defend her and his country from the invaders. Salvador followed soon afterwards because he could not allow his son to fight if he himself stayed at home, as if staying home were an option for any man.

  Then went handsome Aleixo, the strongest of her boys, so robust in his enthusiasm, so graceful and quick. He was the one she was sure would survive. But he had not.

  In the end, they took even poor little Mariano who was only twelve. His voice had not even changed. She had hidden him on the roof. Ricardo Yotté had come with soldiers and demanded the boy he knew must be on the property. He had known all the village boys from birth. He laughed when Alivia pled with him and laughed even harder when the boy peed himself and water dripping from the eaves on a clear day gave him away.

  She stopped a tear with the back of her hand. She had lived after they died, though she did not think she could. Paraguay had taken their souls and their dear bodies. Not even their bones came back. She had nothing left of the sons of her heart.

  The padre wanted the women to bring more souls to Paraguay. She was past her time f
or bearing children, but even if she could have more sons, she would not. Why have them? So that some insane despot could lead them off to horrible deaths from wounds or disease?

  But in her heart she knew if she could, she would gladly bear another son. Not for Paraguay. For herself and for Salvador, who had not one son left to carry his name. He never spoke of his loss. Nor did she, not only because the dictator forbade mourning as unpatriotic, but because she could not bring her pain to Salvador and add it to his, which was already too great. His amputated foot tortured him. Still, every morning he strapped on the wooden foot he had made for himself and walked out to work in the fields.

  Her body was useless to give him another son. She longed to be again that young woman Salvador had fallen in love with. After their first child, Juan, was born, she had wondered if he would still want her. The first time they made love after the birth, she had felt timid, somehow shyer than their first night. For some weeks after the baby came, they had abstained. Salvador’s joy in the birth of his son had transformed him for a while from a quiet man into one who talked and talked—about the boy’s future, about his love for her. It seemed during those first weeks that because he could not express himself with his body, he was forced to use words: joy and plans flowed from him. Then came a night when the period of abstinence was over. She felt the hardness of him, and it frightened her a little. It could hurt more than on their first night. But he was gentle and slow and caressed her until the pain of not having him inside her was greater than the pain she feared, and she grasped him to her. They made love again and again by candlelight, looking often right into each other’s eyes.

  “A traveler told me once,” he said as dawn was breaking, “that up in the Amazon there is a tribe of people who believe that the seed of the father not only starts the baby, but builds it up throughout the pregnancy of the mother.”

  “What a silly idea,” she said. She was about to remind him that she was a midwife like her mother and would never believe such a tale.

  He put his finger to her lips. “No,” he said, “this is going to be my way with you. To make you pregnant, and then to make love to you over and over, as many times as I can. So that the babies will come out healthy and beautiful.”

  And happy, she thought, if the mother’s happiness has anything to do with the baby’s. Joy had flowed in her that morning, even to the tips of her toes.

  The last one living of their beautiful, healthy babies was the second to live beyond infancy, Xandra, that young woman running across the campo to the horse hidden in the forest. Healthy and strong, she ran like a colt—her arms round and graceful, her thick, black hair loose and trailing behind her like the mane of a Thoroughbred.

  Perhaps Salvador’s love while she was pregnant with Xandra had made the girl strong. But happy? Xandra was easily agitated, especially during the past few days. She pretended gaiety, but she was troubled. How could she be truly happy? At nineteen, she must long to have a husband, a lover, children of her own. But there were no men. Should she have a baby with whatever man was available? She deserved the love of a real husband. Someone to thrill her in her bed, to support her in her weakness; someone who needed her strength.

  If Xandra followed the priest’s dictum, who would she choose? Old Josefina’s grandson, poor Pablo, had gone to war like her little Mariano when he was only twelve. At fourteen, he was alive, but he would never be well again. He might survive for years, but father children?

  Would one of the old ones have her tender, young daughter? Practically naked, lecherous Hector Mompó? The timid Saturnino Fermín with his silly three-cornered hat? Gaspár Otazú in his homemade military garb? They were too old even for the war. Babies they might be able to make, but husbands, never. No bony wrinkled old man could make her fiery daughter’s bed happy.

  There were only two other men in the village besides Salvador, but the thought of either of them with her daughter made her stomach burn. Ricardo Yotté—

  A shouting behind her spun her around. Maria Claudia, ordinarily so decorous, was running and waving. Alivia hurried toward her and in breathless gasps, Maria Claudia said the very name Alivia had been thinking: “Ricardo Yotté!”

  “What?”

  “He is dead. Murdered. You have to come. The padre needs you.”

  Well, that bastard Yotté was dead. It seemed something to celebrate, except that someone would have to pay dearly for his death.

  3

  Salvador León left the church straight after mass, embraced his thin, careworn wife, mumbled a vague “something to take care of,” and left her with the others waiting to greet the padre. He put on his straw hat and rolled his blue poncho under his right arm, leaving his left hand free for the cane that bore the weight he could not relinquish to his false foot. He had a long walk to the hiding place.

  The sun, high now, had burned off the morning chill. His good white shirt of heavy cotton that Alivia had so handsomely embroidered for him was already soaking up sweat brought on by the heat and the anguish of his leg and of his mind. A spicy scent in the air told him the wind came from the Mato Grosso up across the Brazilian border. No rain today. The heat meant a long siesta, which he would welcome. But even though it was Sunday, after the midday rest, he would work in the fields. No visiting with friends, sipping yerba maté, and gossiping about their aches and pains, their crops, their neighbors’ business. No time and no friends left to gossip with.

  His way veered left. As he walked, Alivia, moving much faster than he, followed the road to the right, along the calle León, to home. Their paths diverged, and the metaphor in that growing separation hurt as much as the pain of his missing foot. She carried herself with such dignity, erect as always, as if there were a bundle on her head, resolute even in her crushing sadness, though exhausted to the bone from the years of toil keeping herself and Xandra alive. Unlike his own, her thick hair was still mostly black, but the haunted look in her great, dark eyes showed the ravages of the past three years.

  It always seemed as if Alivia were the aristocrat and he the peasant, instead of the other way around. His father had objected to her, but nothing could have kept Salvador from her once he had fallen in love with her beautiful face and warm smile. Eventually, because he could not help himself, he became Alivia’s lover, and far from getting her out of his system, making love to her bound him to her. Her sweet body, her strength, her warmth. The taste and the smell of her. He wanted to drink her in, to consume her. He defied his father. “I will stay with her and only her, with or without marriage.” It was a challenge. He was an only son. They were the most prominent family in the area. The old man would have no legitimate grandsons to carry the family’s position forward. But his proud father did not give in, expected Salvador would eventually relent and marry a girl of his own kind. “Fuck her, support her brats if you must, but I insist you marry a woman of substance,” his father had said. By “substance” he meant of pure Spanish blood.

  The old dictator Francia—El Supremo—rescued them. Help from the most unlikely place. The decree said that within Paraguay, no penninsulare, or member of the white elite, would be allowed to contract marriage with another member of that same class. They could marry only mestizos or mulattoes or Indians. They called the decree the bando because it was announced to the sound of fife and drum. Salvador’s father and those like him were indignant, saying Francia was out to break the power of any family that might challenge his absolute rule. But Salvador and Alivia danced and sang, drank aguardiente, and made love for two days to celebrate. Then they were married in the church, under the eyes of his bitter father.

  Salvador continued along, walking on a carpet of fallen petals until he came to the cross that marked the spot where his father had fallen from his horse. No one knew whether the old man’s heart had given out or if the horse was perhaps attacked by a snake or a jaguar. The horse had come home riderless, and they had found his father here. Salvador had followed the old custom of marking, with a rough wooden c
ross, the spot where a person had died of an accident or violence. On the cross were carved the words, “León cué,” Guarani for “León was here.”

  Salvador knelt down to whisper a prayer. “I am sorry, but you were wrong,” he said aloud to the cross before him and to the memory of that proud, intransigent old man. “She has more real substance than any woman I have ever known.” He took a knife from the waist of his baggy pants, cut some flowering oleander, and draped the pink blossoms over the arms of the cross. If they erected a cross in every place where a Paraguayan had died in the past three years, there would be vast tracts of the country where no one would be able to walk for all the crosses.

  He wished he could tell Alivia about the pain in his heart, but his thoughts clung to the war whose horrors he tried in vain to forget and could not reveal to her, of boy soldiers crawling away from battle dragging their shattered limbs, or their half-naked little bodies lying dead in the mud. He must not put into her mind pictures that would torment her, with visions of their sons suffering so. And never, never could he confess to her the dark secret he kept, of the depths to which he had sunk to survive the war.

  Why, when so many had died, had he come through? Why had he not perished in place of one of his sons? Why … when he deserved to die.

  He leaned heavily on his cane to rise and brushed the red dust from his knees. He passed along the red clay road that soon entered a deliciously cool wood where the branches of the towering old trees met overhead. From them hung lianas and bougainvillea, covering the limbs with pink and purple flowers.

  His path followed a stream where hundreds of butterflies fluttered over ferns along the bank, each species clustered together—black ones that wore emerald and ruby eyes on their wings, great red ones the size of his hand, small green ones with nearly transparent wings. They flew about and drank from the stream but never crossed into one another’s territory, each group content to stay within its own borders. There were no wars among the butterflies.