The Farm

by Hector Abad

  When we arrived at La Oculta, the first thing I did was go to Anita’s room. Her face was the same sweet, firm face she’d always had; that rare blend of beauty and character. One can make out echoes of beauty even in old age – and character in certain wrinkles, which are like the memory of lifelong gestures. Pilar had put her in a very pretty, embroidered, red dress that I’d brought her from Mexico once and that made her look very cheerful, in spite of everything. Red was the color that suited her best. Pilar told us that in the early hours a downpour had woken her up so she looked in on Anita. The stillness and silence of the room gave her a prickly, uneasy feeling, until she turned on the light and realized she was dead. My wave of sadness grew, imagining that instant, but hugging my sisters I felt better. We were able to sit and talk all night beside her body, drinking coffee, saying Hail Marys and Our Fathers, which bring a sort of calm when repeated over and over again with the same rhythm. All my nephews and nieces, her grandchildren, started arriving with their children and husbands and wives, and La Oculta gradually filled up as if it were December, though a sad December, in March. When I die, I hope Jon will be able to lean down over the coffin lid, and see me, and talk to me, without disgust or fear, through the glass. In the United States all those things are done in funeral parlors. If I die at La Oculta, which is what everybody in our family wishes for, I’d like Pilar to dress me.

  Mamá was lying in her own bed, the one she’d shared with Papá, the one that had been Grandfather Josué’s and Grandma Miriam’s before it was theirs. The room was just as Mamá liked it. Since Cobo died, Anita hadn’t let anyone touch it. His clothes still hung in the closet, hers on the right side and his on the left: the white shirts, the hat from Aguadas, riding boots, running shoes for going to the little waterfall, shorts, pajamas, and socks. Old clothes, things you wear out in the country that are so worn out you wouldn’t even pass them on to the campesinos. An old painting of my paternal grandparents, in their forties. Family photos: all our first communions, their wedding portrait, old snapshots from when they lived in Bogotá and, framed above the bed, the imperfect sonnet Papá had written to La Oculta:

  Beds like rocks, lumpy mattresses

  Beneath the night’s embrace

  Guests sleep without haste

  On waking feel the aches

  Stiff joints soothed, pain deferred

  Doña Berta’s eggs, sore hips reward

  Yellow on little blue plates

  A priest could not eat better

  Then reading in a hammock’s pouch

  Anticipating smells of lunch

  Cassava, roast chicken and rice

  At three a shower under the waterfall

  Later a bean stew savored by all

  And hearing you snoring by my side.

  Both Cobo and Anita snored, Papá and Mamá, like an out-of-tune counterpoint, but now they would never snore again. Snoring is a strident, disagreeable music, and everyone makes fun of those of us who snore because it’s a sign of aging, but at least it proves we’re still breathing, and I felt sad at that moment to think my father hadn’t snored for years, and that, even though my mother didn’t look so dead, thanks to Pilar’s care, her sleep was now an airless one with no more snoring. I missed her snoring as I missed her breathing. Eva told Pilar that she wanted to take over our parents’ room, and please don’t change anything, don’t move anything. Don’t throw away the clothes, don’t change the photos, don’t take the books out, don’t put any other blankets on the bed or a different mattress, please don’t replace the lamp on the nightstand, don’t change the tiles in the bathroom, don’t empty the closets or take Papá’s poem down off the wall. She ran through this complete list almost in a rage, so our sister would understand. Pilar stared at her wide-eyed, because she hated that romantic clinging to old junk. It was one of the few things she fought with Mamá over. Every time my mother arrived Pilar would say: “Mami, when will you make up your mind to give Papá’s shirts to Próspero?” And Anita would simply reply with her confident and tender voice: “Leave me my little things, Pilar, that’s how I like it. You can do what you like with them when I’m gone.” Pilar could make all the decisions about the farm and almost always be in charge, but in Cobo and Anita’s room, she couldn’t. That’s why Eva wanted that to be her room from now on, her private realm, the only place in all of La Oculta where someone other than Pilar could be in charge.

  EVA

  I went back to La Oculta only to please Mamá and after several years of not going at all, and only because she decided to revive an old family tradition: spending Christmas all together at the farm. In fact, we all had to stop going for quite a few years; first because of the guerrillas, who robbed, kidnapped, and killed people, and then because of the paramilitaries, who were extortionists, thieves, and murderers. When things more or less normalized, because the state reclaimed the right to be the only organization allowed to kill, Pilar began to go back, and she got in a frenzy about rebuilding the house, repairing the bits that had been burnt down, to make it like it used to be, or even better than before. Until after a while she resolved to go and live there, with Alberto, who’d just retired, and then Mamá got it into her head that we all had to spend the Christmas holidays together at La Oculta. Easter too, she hoped, but if not, at least Christmas. My mother had a theory, and had always lived accordingly, and it was that the elderly have to buy company. Once I overheard Mamá telling her sister, my Aunt Mona, on the phone:

  “Listen, Mona, I know that when we get old, we have to pay not to be left on our own, but it’s the best-spent money in the world. That’s why we can’t give our children their inheritance while we’re still alive, so we won’t end up all alone and hidden away in an old age home.”

  Mamá invited all of us and paid for everything and that’s why Toño came from New York every December, with or without Jon, and almost every Easter too, or as a surprise, at any time of year, when he got tired of life in Harlem. If we didn’t get together two or three times a year, Mamá said, then we’d stop being united, stop loving each other and no longer be a family. Mamá shopped for everyone, paid for everything for her children and grandchildren, so there wouldn’t be any excuses: food, wine, extra staff. She began planning in June for what she called “the season,” and she’d go to all the sales to start buying up provisions for Christmas: canned goods, soap, toilet paper, tins of peas, jars of artichokes and palm hearts, things that last. Not booze, though; she’d say, if you’re going to drink rum, beer, whiskey, or aguardiente, you can buy it yourselves. The only alcohol she brought was wine, which she bought up whenever she found bottles at a discount. At the beginning of December she started buying perishables, and around the 15th she’d send a truck full of all the things needed for the holidays, as well as boxes full of wrapped presents, Christmas gifts to put under the tree on the 24th for her children and grandchildren, for the laborers and the domestic staff.

  After she died I felt that the single most solid part of my life had crumbled away. And that the less solid parts, starting with La Oculta, now meant nothing to me. I always thought I would rather spend the December vacations traveling somewhere far away, to Patagonia, for example, or to Mexico and Guatemala, after all that Santiago had taught me about Mayan culture, but I never did, so Mamá would be happy at having her whole family around her. Now that she’s gone, I don’t plan to ever go back to the farm, or at least not at Christmas. Without her it would never be the same.

  I always worked with Mamá at the bakery, so it would have been almost impossible for us to have been any closer or to see each other more: we spent all our workdays together. But resisting my mother’s will, as well as Pilar’s, that we always spend the holidays together as a family, was also impossible. And well, anyway it was an agreeable obligation, because I loved La Oculta too. If I stopped loving the place, if I came to hate it for years, it’s because one time I was almost murdered there. The first time I
went back after almost getting killed, that first December that we spent the Christmas holidays there all together again, I was still trembling with fright at just setting foot in the house, just hearing the floorboards creak under my feet. But I was with Benjamín, who hugged me to calm me down, and with Pilar and Alberto, who were living there by then, and with my brother who’d come down from New York, and with Mamá who was alive and as lucid as ever, as well as a whole bunch of kids (Pilar’s grandchildren) who jumped into the dark waters of the lake as if it were nothing, so gradually I began to compose myself. When I saw Próspero, our lifelong foreman, after so long, older but almost the same as ever, with just one or two fewer teeth, with that open and discreet kindness that is his way of treating people, I couldn’t hold back the tears and I clung to him for a long time, since it was like seeing a ghost, someone who’d been dead for years and then came back to life.

  I was able to swim in the lake again, after looking at it with mistrust for several days from morning till evening, after much hesitation about whether or not to swim in those dark, ominous waters. Diving into the lake was maybe the most difficult thing: like overcoming a phobia, like taking a black butterfly, alive, out of a room with your fingers, like catching a venomous snake with your bare hands. I was also able to go horseback riding again. But my whole body palpitated in the lake, remembering and trying to forget at the same time, and in the saddle I still trembled with fear, and felt a twinge of pain, the pain of memory, even though before I’d always loved riding horses. I almost haven’t recovered, really, from all that happened to me, and I still have to take pills for the pain and drops to sleep. I think forever; now it’ll be forever. Life hasn’t been easy, though it’s also been magnificent. It was great when I’d cross the lake five or six times, racing against my friend Caicedo, who’d been an Olympic swimmer (in the Melbourne Games, in ’56), or when I went for walks with Toño or riding with my son, or when I’d sit and sew and talk with Mamá and Pilar and remember all we’d lived through, and how much we’d laughed and enjoyed ourselves; then it felt like it was worth having suffered so much. Telling it is one thing, but living through it…living it is something else.

  Even though it was more than fifteen years ago, I still remember what happened as if it were yesterday. At that time Pilar wasn’t living at the farm yet, but she had told me to relax, that I could go to La Oculta without worrying, that things were good there because since the paracos had expelled the guerrillas there were no more robberies and the kidnappings had stopped. And I went on my own for a week, to rest, to not think about anything. It was the end of May and the weather was really nice. I was forty and a few years old and still good-looking, or at least that’s what everybody told me. I had just broken up with a guy, one of those silly boyfriends I sometimes had, to pass the time and keep from getting lonely. Then I’d regret it, not breaking up with them but having been with them, and I’d get angry, weighing up the time wasted on another pointless dream.

  After I’d been at La Oculta for two or three days I received a very strange letter. Próspero handed it to me and said a boy had given it to him in town. On a folded piece of paper, without an envelope, it said simply, Eva Ángel (without a “Señora,” without a “Doña,” without the name of the farm, without any address) and when I unfolded the paper – roughly torn out of a school notebook – the following was handwritten, or rather, printed:

  AS WE ALREDY WARNED DOÑA PILAR YOU PEOPLE HAVE TO SELL OR SELL THE FARM. THIS ZONE IS NOT FOR LONELY OLD BITCHES. EETHER SELL NOW OR YOUR ORFANS CAN SELL. WE WILL BE EGSPECTING YOU THIS AFTERNOON IN PALERMO AT 3 OCLOCK SHARP IN THE PARK WITH THE PAPERWERK TO LOOK OVER AND START THE TRANSFER. THIRD AND FINAL WARNING.

  EL MÚSICO

  IF YOU DONT SHOW UP ABYD BY THE CONSECUENCES

  Próspero told me that he’d once been stopped in the atrium of the church in Palermo and they’d told him to tell Pilar that, if we sold, they’d pay us in dollars and in twelve monthly payments. The price was set by them and even though it was much higher than the commercial value of La Oculta, we knew that when those people bought a place, they only paid the first installment, on signature of the transfer of ownership, they occupied the farm, took over everything, dug up all the land and dredged the streams in search of gold, planted coca or poppies, and then didn’t pay any more of the installments. More than that: if someone demanded the rest of the payments, they’d die, or disappear. I had never met any of Los Músicos, but they were famous in the region. Just the disgusting handwriting and bad spelling told me a lot about them.

  There were already cell phones back then, big, clunky things, but they only worked in the city. We didn’t get a signal at La Oculta, and there was no landline at the farm. So I went to the radiotelephone to speak to Pilar, but I couldn’t tell her exactly what was happening because radiotelephone calls could be heard in every house in the region, and in Palermo, the closest village, as well. There was a private channel that not everybody could hear, but we couldn’t be sure. I told Pilar, or half told her, what was going on, and she more or less understood, although not entirely. Pilar told me not to take any notice of it, that those guys were crazy but cowardly, that she was going to fix everything by calling the town butcher, who was the contact with them, and that anyway she’d already told them we had no intention of selling La Oculta for any reason, and if they’re listening in let them hear. Much better. Pilar’s like that, feisty, head-on, less fearful than me. I was alarmed, but I didn’t leave the farm, as I should have, that very instant. I was very happy there, reading a lot, doing yoga, eating salads and vegetables, purifying my body, checking out each of the flowers in the garden, which Pilar had looking lovelier than ever, swimming in the lake, going horseback riding along the trails, up to La Mama in the highlands, and down to the Cartama River in the tropical lowlands. Also, I still felt at that time that if I was on our land nothing could happen to me; outside everything was unprotected, dangerous, and risky, but on the farm I felt safe and sure, as if I were inside an impregnable fortress, in a castle with a drawbridge and the lake like a crocodile-filled moat, like in children’s stories, even if the crocodiles were only iguanas, turtles, and carp.

  Even though afterward I never went back to loving La Oculta the way I used to, I admit that the landscape of this region is the one that most moves me of all the landscapes I’ve seen anywhere in the world, and wherever I go I carry it with me. It might not be the most beautiful, there might be better ones, more pleasant and less dramatic, but it’s the landscape that is fixed in my head. The landscape that brightened up my father’s face whenever we arrived at the farm. I was there with him once, sitting together in the same hammock, looking at the lake and the mountains, and realized that this place, that afternoon, in that light, at that moment, and in that company, was indeed the most beautiful place on earth. And it’s something I’ve felt since then, on other occasions, in those luminous moments that can only be compared to the ecstasy you sometimes feel on seeing certain paintings or hearing certain music, when Antonio plays some concert pieces for us on his violin, for example, along with a recording of his orchestra, or when I used to listen to arias with my friend Santiago, the widower, as my family called him, my companion who I split up with shortly before Mamá died.

  Even when I stopped going to the farm for several years I could summon up the landscape from memory if I closed my eyes. And I still dream of it several times a year. It’s the landscape of my childhood, when we’d go and spend the season with our grandparents, the place of my youth, the site of the happiest and most wretched moments of my life, where my body has enjoyed the most pleasure and suffered the most pain, the landscape of my true home, our lost and recovered home. My most frequently recurring dream is of something happening, some fright, I’m being chased, and I run outside and I can walk on La Oculta Lake. I run over the surface of the water and start to laugh, happy as the gods, or those little lizards, running on top of the water, away from danger.
r />   Just arriving at La Oculta was enough to make me feel a euphoria mixed with serenity, a tranquil joy, a rapport with the mountains, with the sounds, with the infinite colors of the flowers and fruits, with the breezes that rose up from the river, with the dark water of the lake, with the dawn chorus, with the flashing light of fireflies and the calls of the currucutú – tropical screech owls – at night, with the buzzing of the cicadas at midday, with the flight of the cranes, the parrots and butterflies, with the distant humming of bees visiting the coffee flowers, with the mooing and smells of animals in the stable, with the incredible colors of the macaws, with the iridescent feathers of the soledad birds, with the noise of the teak leaves when they fall on the dirt path, with the sweltering heat of the afternoon and the dew-drenched cool of the morning.

  I’d taken my dog, a golden lab called Gaspar. Gaspar was gentle, but a good watchdog, though he’d never bitten anyone in his life. The most he’d do, if he heard intruders, was growl and bark, displaying a rage that was no more than an inconsequential warning. That’s what a good dog does, or at least the dogs I like, the ones who bark but don’t bite.

  Gaspar and I looked after each other and kept each other company. He was always at my feet, or by my side, he never left me alone. If I stood up, he stood up; if I went to swim in the lake, he jumped into the water and swam with me; if I went for a walk or a ride around the farm, he came with me, chasing me, running in zigzags through the fields, following scents imperceptible to us, sniffing everything, marking out with his urine an imaginary territory that he felt was as much his as I felt the farm was mine, that land that had been our great-grandparents’, that our father had left to us, that would one day be my son Benjamín’s.