by Hector Abad
“Who is this guy? Who is he? I’m going to die.”
She said: “No, honey. His name is Alberto Gil, but don’t even dream of him, not even Mona Díaz could win him over.”
Mona Díaz was the tallest, most attractive, prettiest girl in our neighborhood. Libia insisted:
“He’s impossible.”
“Impossible?” I said, arching my eyebrows. “Well, I’m going to marry him!”
When the procession ended, after the downpour, I looked awful. I’d put on makeup without permission from Mamá or Papá, who were away, and I had mascara running down my whole face, black rivers, like those virgins who cry at the foot of the cross. The boy had gone and I didn’t know where. I thought he’d probably gone to El Múltiple, which was the only ice cream parlor in the neighborhood, and where all the kids always went. I convinced my friends that we should go to El Múltiple. Since we didn’t have any money, we put all our coins together to buy one single cone to share among all of us. I walked into El Múltiple and saw him sitting there, with his hair a little damp, but not much, and his clothes dry. I looked at him defiantly and spoke to him. This wasn’t something that was done back then, talking to someone you didn’t know, but I dared to speak to him.
“Hey, aren’t you ashamed, look at me, all wet, and you didn’t even lend me your jacket to cover me up.”
He didn’t answer. Of course. He looked at me shyly, smiling. The next day I saw him at church visiting the monuments. That’s what we did on Good Friday in the morning, visited monuments. He’d already gone to lots of other churches but I saw him in two: Santa Teresa and in the chapel of the Bethlemitas School. I followed him, trying to guess where he’d go. At least now he looked at me and I looked at him, from afar. We couldn’t speak to each other because we hadn’t been introduced.
When Easter Week ended, the fourth day after Easter, Pompi, a friend of his, introduced me to him. Every time I see Pompi, to this day, I thank him: “Pompi, what a dear friend you are, to have introduced me to this angel.” And Alberto declared himself to me a little while later, on May 7. I was dying inside and happy, but I feigned indifference. That’s what you did back then, and I didn’t say yes to him right away, as I would have liked to, rather I told him I’d have to think about it, that he should let me think about it until the next day. That night I barely slept, terrified he’d forget about his proposal and never ask me again. But he came back the next morning to take me to Mass. And we went to the seven o’clock Mass. On the way out he asked me: “What did you think?” And I told him yes.
Alberto had a Lambretta, and when he went past our house he’d beep the horn. I would fly to the window and watch him drive past, my heart racing, what happiness to see him drive by beeping and waving. A tiny bit later, on Mother’s Day, which is the second Sunday in May, he brought me a serenade. The music woke us all up and Papá asked me very quietly: “Princess, aren’t you a little young to be serenaded?” and I answered: “Oh, I don’t know, Papi, but I’m happy.” Then he said: “That’s what matters.” At the third song I turned on the light for a second, which was the signal girls gave to let the boy know she was awake and listening to the music. I turned it straight off and opened the blinds a bit to see him for a second. I still remember the little card he put under the door for me. He hadn’t written it, but had asked his older brother, Rodrigo, who had better handwriting and knew how to rhyme, to write it for him. You are the heart of my existence / this passion allows no resistance / any pain that strikes you offends me / far from you my soul feels empty / God made my heart just for you. And he’d signed it without even putting his whole name. He signed: Albto.
ANTONIO
The one who convinced my grandfather’s great-grandfather to go and live on the other side of the Cauca, a land of heat and mosquitos, snakes and cicadas, was an engineer called Pedro Pablo Echeverri, El Cojo, son of Don Gabriel, one of those who were founding villages in Southwest Antioquia. This ancestor of ours, who was called Isaías Ángel, had been born in El Retiro in 1840, was suspected of being fickle, sometimes Jewish and sometimes Christian, depending on the circumstances, or at least that’s what I’ve been told.
When El Cojo Echeverri came through town looking for settlers for his family’s uncultivated lands, Isaías was just a twenty-one-year-old kid, recently married to a girl called Raquel Abadi, daughter of El Retiro’s cobbler, which either through a scribe’s error, or a priest’s cover up, ended up being Abad, without the i, when she was registered as the mother of Elías Ángel Abad, in Jericó’s oldest book of births and baptisms. She had Elías at the age of seventeen, in the same bed where she slept, with the help of a midwife and after seventeen hours of labor.
El Cojo had spent months convincing people in the towns of Antioquia to join up with a venture that had no precedents in the region, and seemed too good to be true. If it worked out, it could be advantageous to the two founding families, his and the Santamarías’, but it could also be a good idea for the colonizing families who decided to join the adventure. The most difficult thing was to get them to believe that there was such a venture that all could benefit from. So El Cojo had to go to a lot of effort to persuade them he was not a windbag, a conman who was trying to trick the stupidest and neediest people of every village. The proposal was basically very simple: the founding families, owners of those immense uncultivated lands, would give out property rights of portions of their grandfathers’ lands to new settlers as long as they would reside there and help to clear the land and build roads for certain days of the month. There were no other conditions.
From the first day each settler would be assigned a lot in some part of the recently founded town, already drawn up on the map (but not yet in existence), which was then called Aldea de Piedras. And after a few months of serious work, at most a year, each head of a family would also be granted a plot of land outside the town, where they could grow their basic crops. In addition, those who had enough savings to contribute an initial share, could purchase on very good terms and without interest, since the lands were rough, cheap, and difficult to work, larger plots, up to two hundred hectares, or more, for which deeds of ownership could be signed, duly certified in front of the notary public of Fredonia (the only town in the zone that had functionaries at that time), with well-established boundaries and precise markings: the stream, the boulder, the ceiba, the headland, the river, the ditch.
He would reserve the lion’s share for his family, and he hid this from no one, since they were, after all, the original and legitimate owners – the flattest lands, on the shores of the rivers (along the River Silencio, the Cartama, the Frío, the Piedras, and most of all the Cauca), where they could establish dairy farms and graze steers. Echeverri himself, in fact, in association with the Santamarías, had a ranch near Tarso, which they’d called Canaan, like the promised land, and another they’d given the name of Damascus, all names they’d found in the Book of Joshua. It would also be the two founding families’ exclusive right to charge tolls for use of the future roads. The mule drivers, merchants, and everyone who wanted to make use of these new routes to the west and the south would have to pay these tolls. They would conserve these privileges, yes, but in order to populate the deserted forests they were prepared to surrender a good part of their property. It was rugged terrain, but with lots of good water, and fertile, volcanic soil, so it would be good for growing food crops and raising animals, after the trees had been chopped down, the weeds pulled up, and the rocks dug out.
Struggling to achieve a dream, and following the instructions of his father, Don Gabriel, el Cojo was searching the villages of Antioquia for vigorous young families without a lot of resources, but keen to progress, who wanted to participate in this enterprise, which for the most incredulous was nothing but a collective madness, or a trick. They didn’t want bachelors, but fertile couples, with or without children, so that among them they’d populate these lonely hills and farm the land. “If it’s so good they w
ouldn’t be giving so much of it away,” said the mistrustful. El Cojo was a tall, thin, ungainly man, just over thirty, not exactly handsome, slightly cross-eyed, with one leg longer than the other due to an old fracture from falling off a horse, but with a silver tongue. He had a genuine frankness and a contagious enthusiasm. He had some quality that inspired confidence, and he and his father were sure he could convince one or two hundred Antioqueño families to go and work and live there, in those distant wilds where the devil had yet to arrive.
“Not you, Isaías, but who knows, perhaps your children’s children, or the children of your children’s children might be able to go to university one day, thanks to these efforts,” El Cojo said to the young Ángel, a man of fair features, wide forehead, and a friendly smile. Not very educated, just primary school, and perhaps for that very reason, no nonsense.
“If every family has an average of ten children,” said El Cojo, “and that’s not preposterous if they’re well fed on the beans, eggs, milk, and corn these lots will produce, in twenty years the region will have the population it needs to come from nowhere and build a little paradise. This is our destiny, this is on the horizon, if we have perseverance and a little luck. Within twenty years, when ten- or twenty-thousand souls are living there, no one will believe that just a couple of decades earlier all there was in these wilds were vermin and impenetrable forest. I’m already imagining a geographer writing at the end of this century that the colonizers of the Southwest offered the spectacle of a free, property-owning, comfortably-off, and happy society.”
While listening to El Cojo, Isaías Ángel was thinking of the words he’d use to convince his wife, Raquel. Staying in El Retiro would mean resigning themselves to being peons and servants to others for their whole lives; going to the new land meant the possibility of a different kind of life, where they could be owners and rulers not just of a piece of land, but of their destiny. He knew that Raquel – who had received a sum of money from an uncle when she married – aspired to more than scrubbing plates, sweeping up dead leaves, and washing clothes. That’s why, as he listened to Echeverri explain the deal, his eyes shone and he couldn’t wait to tell Raquel to go and say farewell to her parents, receive their blessing, and help him pack up as much as would fit on three burros.
EVA
My eyes had adjusted to the darkness and could make out some shapes among the shadows. I was on the track that went up to Casablanca, a very steep hill; my sweat was mixing with the lake water. On either side there were lines of striated concrete, and in the center a strip of grass and weeds. Sometimes I walked on the concrete, rough on the soles of my feet, but without thistles, and sometimes on the grass in the middle. When I had the energy I ran or jogged uphill for a stretch, then walked to catch my breath and look behind me.
I was panting and crying, but I didn’t even notice I was crying; the tears mixed with the drops of water running down my face from my wet hair, and with the sweat, which was more copious by the minute. The stars were colder and more distant than ever and their wan glow did nothing to help light my way.
The Casablanca dogs sensed my presence when I crossed the cattle guard at the entrance to my Vélez cousins’ farm and took the dirt road that led up to the house. The stones hurt my feet and I moved over to the edge, on the other side of a wire fence, to walk on the grass. The dogs ran toward me, barking. When they got close they recognized me and stopped barking; they came over wagging their tails, sniffing my hands, licking my wet legs. I’ve always gotten along well with dogs. I got to the house of Rubiel, the Casablanca foreman, and rapped on the door with my knuckles.
“Open up, Rubiel, quick, open up! It’s Eva, from La Oculta. Open up, Rubiel, open up! They want to kill me, Rubiel, open the door!”
Sor, Rubiel’s wife, came to open the door, looking alarmed and sleepless. They’d heard the shots a while earlier. I went in fearfully and closed the door behind me, as if locking out a monster, a phantom. I sat on the floor; I couldn’t speak. Sor gave me a towel to dry off; she got me some of my cousin Martis’s clothes, so I could change. Putting on clean, dry clothes made me feel better. I would have liked to put on a bit of perfume to mask the smell of sweat, lake water, dirt, leaves, and the thorns that tore my skin. She heated me up a mug of aguapanela, lent me a pair of socks to warm up my aching, bloody feet. When I was at last able to babble out what had happened, Rubiel said very quietly that I’d better go. They could come looking for me at any moment and kill them as well if they saw they were hiding me.
I nodded, as I finished getting dressed. Sor brought me a pair of my cousin’s running shoes as well. I asked Rubiel to lend me a horse. I told him I’d leave the horse in town, in Jericó, Támesis, or Palermo, or somewhere. Or maybe at the roadhouse, if I could. Wherever I could get to.
Rubiel got out a flashlight and, upset and hurrying, we went together to the stables; between the two of us we saddled a black mare. Her name was Noche. I’d picked her out for her color, as she’d be less visible in the darkness. Rubiel said, in a whisper, that if the men came he wouldn’t tell them I’d been there, but that I had to leave immediately, he begged. We were very alert, speaking very quietly as we finished hitching up the saddle, almost in the dark, and sometimes we thought we heard the buzzing of a distant engine.
“I’ll leave the mare with someone trustworthy, Rubiel. Turn off all the lights. Goodbye and thank you,” I said as I hoisted myself up onto the horse.
“Take the flashlight, Doña Eva,” he said, “but don’t use it much.”
I took the flashlight, turned it off, and trotted up the road.
ANTONIO
Whenever I come back home to New York from Colombia, the first days, when I wake up, I have the strange impression of still being at La Oculta. It’s the absence of birdsong and the noise of sirens that reminds me I’m somewhere else. Fire engines, ambulances, police cars. Then, at breakfast time, so silent here, I miss the hubbub of children, Pilar’s grandkids, who always wake us up with their games and shouting, a joyful annoyance. Here I eat cereal with yogurt, pancakes, bagels with cream cheese, cinnamon buns, smoked salmon, things like that. Not arepas with quesito, sausages, blood pudding, frothy hot chocolate, scrambled eggs with tomatoes and onions, or pandeyuca like down there. If I bring back frozen arepas they never taste the same, and in New York there are so many fine, aged cheeses from all over the world, but no quesito. At siesta time – I don’t take a siesta in New York, only at the farm – I miss the feel of the hammocks, the midday heat, the sound of cicadas, the strange light one wakes up to, at four or five, which looks nothing like the light at one or two o’clock, when it was so intense it hurt even when our eyes were shut. The light at the farm, so special, the intense light of the tropics, doesn’t leave my head, in spite of the darkness of winter, in spite of the cold, or perhaps precisely because of the cold and darkness. I know I’ve changed spaces, places, I know I’ve gone back to sleeping with Jon – the best thing about coming home – but inside I remain there for a few days, elevated, spellbound by the memory. He notices, he looks me in the eye and says:
“You’re still there, I can see it in your eyes. You’re home, remember.”
“Give me three days and I’ll turn back into the perfect New Yorker, have patience with me, the tropics stick to the skin like toad’s milk, which doesn’t come off even when you scrub with soap and a scouring sponge.”
When I wake up, before taking the violin out of its case to start practicing, I turn on the computer for a moment to check my email. I feel a stab of pain knowing I’ll never have any more messages from Anita, but as I think that, on the screen appears my farm, the mountains, La Oculta. I have it in front of me: the lake, the white walls with red baseboards, the wooden floorboards of the bedrooms, which sag and creak a bit, always in the same places I know by heart; the even railings made from the trunks of black palms, along the open corridors that run round the outside of the house on all four sides; the tiles tanned by
the elements and covered in moss; the hammocks strung from the pillars that overlook the lake or the view down to the river; the gigantic trees – pisquines, samans, oaks, walnuts, cinchonas, ceibas, mamoncillos, madrones, cominos, barcinos, willows – invaded by parasitic plants, creepers, mosses, lichen, bromeliads, orchids; the crags that rise almost vertically up to Jericó and which I’ve climbed so many times with friends and cousins, when I was a boy, and now with my nephews and nieces.
Outside it’s snowing; a sad, silent snow is falling and melting on the sidewalks; through the window I see people walk past dressed in black and shivering with cold. Here, in New York, in Harlem. Not at home; at home it hasn’t snowed at least since the time of the last ice age. At my house it never snows; it’s never cold and never hot, like in Paradise. If I want cold I climb the mountain; if I want heat I walk down toward the River Cartama. But in the middle, halfway between the tropical lowlands and the cold mountain air, the climate is always mild, and what surrounds us always looks like that: green and flourishing, perpetually warm. And the landscape opens up before us, immense, mountains and deep valleys that never end but melt into the horizon where the green turns blue like in a seascape. From La Oculta the mountains look big and powerful like the sea. That’s what it’s like, just as it looks in the photo that opens in front of me. La Oculta is always there, so I never forget it, to maintain the illusion that I’m still there, or at least that I’ll return there one day. To go on believing that Cobo and Anita are still alive there, in some way, even if turned into earth, into ashes, into blades of grass, or leaves on the trees. I look at the photograph and it’s as though I were praying: this is my home, my real home, my coffee farm in the tropics, in the mountains of Antioquia.