by Hector Abad
EVA
I can’t deny that I was a bit nervous after receiving the note with the order to sell the farm. Let’s say my senses were on alert; that even though I was reading I wasn’t entirely distracted, but was reading with one eye and keeping the other on reality. I couldn’t get that disgusting note completely out of my head, with its bad spelling, clumsily printed letters, scrawled by a person who hadn’t even finished primary school. It all bothered me, even the false and annoying name: El Músico. What kind of musicians might those be? They were the very opposite of music; they were the music of bullets, the rattle of weapons, and of threats, nothing more. As far as I knew, the ones who sent the note were some paramilitary guys involved in drugs, theft, and illegal mining, who took people’s land by force, operating around Támesis, Salgar, and Jericó, and who’d been invading farms to plant coca and poppies, to set up cocaine labs and kitchens, to extract gold illegally and fill the streams with mercury. They didn’t want any neighbors or witnesses. They wanted to be the bosses of everything, by hook or by crook. In the letter they said exactly what they wanted: that Pilar and I had to “sell or sell” La Oculta. They didn’t even mention Toño because he’s lived abroad for so long they didn’t even know he existed.
In any case, I didn’t want to think about the threat and was trying to concentrate on the novel. I remember that in the book I was reading there was a commentary by my father on the last page. It was something about how literature should be. I should go find it; I want to reread it. Yes, I still have the book here; it has a charred edge because of what happened later. Here is his note, it must be someone else’s thoughts, because it’s in quotes: “That’s how literature should be: full of action, with no space for clichés or sentimental meditations. He’d heard much praise for Joyce, Kafka, Proust, but he’d resolved not to follow the path of the so-called psychological school or stream of consciousness. Literature should go back to the style of the Bible or Homer: action, suspense, images, and just a pinch of mind games.”
Having the book in my hands again revives me, helps me remember exactly what happened later: Suddenly Gaspar perked up his ears and, scratching the wooden floorboards of the porch, barking furiously, ran toward the back deck. I jumped out of the hammock like a spring, startled. I turned off the lamp and peered into the darkness in the direction of the dog’s growls and barking. I saw streams of light from two or three flashlights. Then the semi-darkness was broken by a flash and at the same time I heard a shot and Gaspar’s pained howl. Another flash, another shot. Now there was silence and the flashlights were switched off.
My first impulse was to run and help my dog. I thought better of it and changed direction. I realized my only escape route was the lake. I ran down the porch and climbed blindly down the wooden ladder that led to the dock, kicked off my sandals, without breaking my run, and took a deep, very deep breath when I got to the end of the dock. I managed to think it was good I was wearing shorts instead of long pants. I took a run-up with all my strength and dove into the cold water, as far out as I could from the dock and the house. Even with my eyes open everything turned black, black, black as pitch, darker than the night. I couldn’t see anything at all. I held my breath in my chest and swam underwater as fast as I could, away from the house diagonally out into the lake. I remember thinking if I didn’t have these damned big tits, which were weighing me down like ballast, I’d be able to swim much faster. I came up for air and took three big puffs, as much as I could fit in my lungs and ducked back underwater.
I began to count one two three…I knew I was capable of swimming for almost a whole minute underwater, because it was a drill I liked to do in the pool where I exercised almost every day in Medellín. I wouldn’t lift my head until I’d counted to sixty. I have to count slowly, I told myself, so each number will take up a whole second, eight nine ten eleven, I seemed to hear Papá’s voice in my head, twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen, never swim in the lake at night unless absolutely necessary, eighteen nineteen twenty twenty-one, only if someone falls in and is drowning, twenty-two twenty-three twenty-four twenty-five, or to save your own life, twenty-six twenty-seven twenty-eight twenty-nine, I’m not going to make it, I thought, thirty thirty-one thirty-two thirty-three, my heart is going to explode, thirty-four thirty-five thirty-six, they came here to kill me, they’ll kill me if they see me, thirty-seven thirty-eight thirty-nine forty, I’m going to let out a bit of air, forty-one forty-two, I felt a little better after exhaling, I felt my long hair brush against my face, forty-three forty-four forty-five forty-six forty-seven, I’m going to burst, my mind is clouding over I feel faint, forty-eight forty-nine, I have to get out of the water very slowly so they don’t hear anything, fifty fifty-one fifty-two, a little bit more, fifty-three fifty-four, my head aches, a tingling electricity is running through my whole body, slower, fifty-five fifty-six, take a breath and duck straight back down, fifty-seven fifty-eight fifty-nine sixty, a bit more, two more strokes sixty-one sixty-two sixty three, I’m going up, I’m out.
PILAR
During the holidays, when we were still in school, Eva always went to work in Mamá’s bakery; she helped her do the accounts on a calculator with a crank handle, and she drew with a pencil some very neat graphs of expenses on sheets of green paper as big as pillow cases. Mamá had opened a small business in Laureles, our neighborhood, Anita’s Bakery, but she didn’t have her income and expenditures very well organized: the sugar, different types of flour, oil, butter, the electricity the ovens used, yeast, the salary for the single baker she had at first. The pencil sharpener also had a crank handle back then and Eva used it frequently so her figures would be clear and neat, with very fine, firm, and rounded strokes. When she finished doing the accounts, she went inside as well, with Mamá, where the ovens were, to help her make pastries and prepare the fillings for the pies, which she was starting to sell alongside the bread.
Toño was still very young and lived in another world. He’d arrived late, when we didn’t think we’d get another sibling. And as a baby he’d been like another one of our dolls for Eva and me. He was always a beautiful little boy, with lots of very black, curly hair, and refined features like a girl’s. In the street people often asked, what’s the little girl’s name? And he used to answer, with angry laughter: Antonia. He always had a very feminine face, and since he was beardless, and still is, there was something ambiguous in his appearance, male and female at the same time. His voice is very soft and reedy, though I wouldn’t say it’s affected, but rather a delicate voice, like an Italian’s. He’s skinny and tall, with long, thin, refined hands, and has always moved with elegant gestures, like a ballet dancer. When Mamá opened the bakery he was still very small; he would have been seven or eight, if that, and was studying violin all day, with a small violin, but a very fine one, said Papá, who’d ordered it from the United States. The house was like a permanent rehearsal, sometimes very pretty, but other times an unbearable squeaking, when he had to repeat the same piece all afternoon, to memorize it, or when he was trying to hone a note that wasn’t coming out right, straining his long fingers. Some people, especially other boys, and our cousins, began to say he was strange. Faggy, they used to say back then. Papá would always say: “Be a man, my son, bien machito!” when he’d get startled by a bug or spend hours combing his beautiful black locks in front of the mirror. His eyes were very black too, and if he stared at you for a while – hard, deeply – people felt pierced, analyzed. That was his only severity, because in other things he wasn’t able to be machito and was gentle and soft. He was scared of riding horses at La Oculta; he couldn’t milk a cow or catch a cricket. Even though we had taught him to swim, he said he couldn’t swim in the lake because when he got into the water he heard the voices of the people who’d drowned there calling him from the depths, saying: “Come, come, come and keep me company, I’m so cold,” or worse, in December, they’d sing him carols: “Come, what’s taking you so long…” He didn’t like
boy’s games, he didn’t go out to play soccer in the street, or throw stones at birds. He was scared of getting hit by a ball on the hands, he took care of his fingers as if they were made of glass: he said his violin teacher had told him that a violinist’s hands were his treasure. If Martica the manicurist came to paint Mamá’s nails, he liked to get a manicure too. If Papá saw that, he’d shout that he’d taken care of his own nails for his entire life, with a pair of nail clippers and nothing else. Grandpa Josué said that so many women and so much pampering were turning Toño effeminate, and Papá and Mamá suffered, but there wasn’t much they could do: Toño was the way he was. He was delicate and sweet, very innocent. Why did he have to be changed into a rude little urchin? Eva and I liked him the way he was, delicate and tender.
I was bad at accounting and worse at kneading dough, so I never helped Mamá and Eva at the bakery. I preferred to go out with my friends, or with Alberto, who took me to movies, to parties, family gatherings. Eva, on the other hand, had this destiny, that no one had assigned her, but that’s how it was: to be by my mother’s side at work, apply modern methods to the administration of Anita’s Bakery, which is still called that, even though it had to be sold during the crisis, after Cobo’s death, when it seemed like this country was going to hell and when Eva got sick of trying to keep such a difficult business afloat. Mamá invested the money from the sale and lived off the interest for the rest of her days. With that same income, plus Papá’s pension, she always helped us to resolve problems at La Oculta. And more so when she still had the bakery and Eva helped her with the management. Mamá, who hadn’t gone to university, managed the bakery’s accounts perfectly well while we were growing up, but the business was also growing and when the time came for Eva to start university, the bakery was already a bit big for Mamá to manage alone, thanks to her own success.
Come to think of it, someone had assigned her that destiny of helping Mamá as an unavoidable sentence. When Eva was getting ready to go to university, she wanted to study humanities (her dream had always been to be a psychologist or a dancer), but Papá said she should do a degree in business administration, to be able to help Mamá in the family business. “While Anita devotes herself to this pure and lovely trade of making bread for everyone, you can help her with the numbers and management of the bakery,” Cobo declared, like an oracle. And Mamá thought that was a good decision, first of all because Eva was her favorite, and secondly because she thought if she went into humanities she could lose her way. She thought Eva needed to stop dreaming and be a bit more realistic. Since Eva wasn’t rebellious back then and was very good-tempered, she didn’t take it badly, just changed her plans. She was even cheerful about it, as if it didn’t make much difference to her. She obeyed because Cobo said so, because Mamá wanted it, and because it seemed reasonable to help out the family. Eva always put one thing first: responsibility. Although she felt she didn’t have the raw material to be an administrator, she obeyed and learned how to do it, and did it well. I remember she applied to study psychology at the University of Antioquia at the same time, and did really well on the entrance exam, in which she analyzed a film called The Turning Point, about two ballerinas who had to decide between an artistic career or changing to something more practical. Although she was accepted at both the universities she applied to, she didn’t enroll in the University of Antioquia, in humanities, but at Eafit, a new, private, and rather expensive university in Medellín specializing in finances, for the city’s future entrepreneurs. But she never seemed to have regretted that decision, or at least she never told Papá she did. She did say so to Mamá sometimes, when she had those cyclical crises that have affected her all her life, maybe due to not having followed her true vocation.
Eva was very happy at university, I’m sure of that, always surrounded by flirting friends. Her classmates, professors, students in other courses, bus drivers, street sweepers that saw her walk by, all fell in love with her. There was a very important French professor who had never accepted that Antioqueña aberration of starting classes very early in the morning, but one year he agreed to teach a course at six a.m., “just for the pleasure of seeing Evita Ángel fresh out of the shower,” he said. Every weekend two or three suitors courted her with serenades and recited verses to “Evita, who evades and never invites us.” No one ever serenaded me except Alberto. Beauty is like a prison sentence: it opens all doors to you and then closes them. Not that I was ugly, or that I couldn’t have had more boyfriends if I’d wanted; I wasn’t ugly, just faithful. As faithful as a dog, and for life. I never thought I was going to be able to find anyone better than Alberto and from the moment I saw him I knew I was going to marry him. We were married when I was eighteen and he was twenty-one. And it’s not that Eva was unfaithful, just restless; since she was so responsible, she wanted to find the best husband in the world, not the first to cross her path.
ANTONIO
My sisters don’t care at all about these things and start yawning and get distracted as soon as I start telling them, but for me it’s been important to discover the origins of La Oculta. For years I’ve researched in books, in old family papers, and I’ve visited archives of property registries, notaries, parishes, to find out all I can about the farm. I’ve talked to historians and priests; I’ve read, I’ve asked our oldest relatives, Papá’s sisters, our cousins, uncles, and my father and grandfather when they were still alive.
It’s quite simple. Almost all these lands along the western bank of the River Cauca, from the mouth of the River San Juan (near Bolombolo) and that of the River Cartama (just below La Pintada), up as far as the high plains of the Citará mountain range, belonged to two families: the Echeverris and the Santamarías. These Echeverris and Santamarías were not nobles who would have been entrusted with a parcel of souls and land by the King of Spain, which is the origin of many large estates in this part of the world (the Aranzazu and the Villegas families, for example, were grandees who received land grants and trusts), rather the origin of these properties is more recent and, shall we say, more meritorious. Both families received these lands from the Republicans, who ousted the Royalists, for having been allies of the Liberating Army.
I suspect my sisters couldn’t care less, but it matters to me that La Oculta was never a piece of land donated by Spanish monarchs to second sons or third-rate nobles, sent to the New World to get rid of a second litter of cadging and conflictive courtiers. Nor was it ever a mission, or a monastery, or a seminary for training priests, which started up many other towns in the Americas. Jericó didn’t begin with conquistadors or monks, but with simple people, and if not equals, at least very similar in their attire and way of talking. La Oculta was an insignificant portion of an immense extension of lands the Republic handed over in repayment of legitimate debts incurred with two merchants, one, Echeverri, of Basque origin, and the other, Santamaría, from Jewish stock, neither of whom had a noble hair on their heads, nor any monastic inclinations either, but much business acumen, much faith in the value of hard work every day, in companies managed with order and moderation. There is some merit in this origin, rather than the sort of unwarranted luck of having inherited a noble title and received lands out of the roulette of birth or the repentance of some Viceroy who paid for his sins by donating land to the Franciscans, Jesuits, or Benedictines.