by Hector Abad
People think I moved to New York, almost thirty years ago now, because I was awarded a grant to continue my violin studies. No, I came to New York to get out of Medellín, to get out of Antioquia, which is an area with a rough but real charm, and at the same time an asphyxiating, religious, intolerant, racist, homophobic, conservative place, or at least it was through and through when I left. It still is, but perhaps a bit less; the news that the world is changing has even reached Antioquia. Distant, isolated mountains produce aloof, reserved, mistrustful people, and that was not the atmosphere in which to exist with the liberty I was determined to allow myself. I wanted to live the way I chose, kiss and go to bed with whoever I desired, out of the vigilant sight of my relatives, friends, Mamá and Papá, and my sisters. They, after the initial fright and scandal, understood, or said they understood me, but couldn’t help being Antioqueños in the worst sense of the word. They knew my grandfather would have a heart attack if he found out, and Mamá preferred not to discuss the matter. Papá, though theoretically he understood my orientation, it bothered him a lot, or it made him sad. He experienced it like an illness or a misfortune, as if his son had been born with a deformity, or blind, or deaf, or missing an arm. Once, when he’d had too much to drink, he’d said (unaware I was listening) that the problem wasn’t that I was a fag, that wasn’t such a big deal, the problem was that I was going to suffer a lot in this world for being a fag, and for that reason I should make an effort not to be, undergo treatment, and if that didn’t work, try to control it with discipline, or at least hide it with abstinence. That’s what was always recommended in Antioquia, what the priests hinted at as well, and in a certain sense, I’ve never been able to stop being Antioqueño.
Perhaps that’s why sometimes I don’t forgive myself, or didn’t forgive myself, for being the way I am. Sometimes I’d like to change, for a few days, and be a brave, macho man, with a booming voice and rough, calloused hands, the kind of guy who rides a spirited horse without fear, or tames a half-wild colt with shouts and whippings, which is the ideal man in my part of the world, a guy with a moustache and hat, with spurs and a whip, a man of few words and categorical remarks, cutting, definite, who when he talks does not come out with proposals or thoughts, but judgements. That way of being is the one I most hate, and at the same time what I’d like to be – for a short time – a furious dictator, a tyrant who gives all Antioqueños the order to change, to stop being like that, so macho, so mountainous, so rough and tough, so backward. This is what makes me furious: why is goodness and strength never combined in the same person? Maybe because good people can never force, only convince. But for one instant I’d like to be strong and force them, and after forcing them, go back to being myself, what I am, a gentle person, who doesn’t like to impose or force anybody to be any way other than how they are, just to simply be, and to be as I am, because I have no other choice, and not how others might want me to be. I arrived at this tranquil acceptance thanks to a Jewish psychologist in New York, Dr. Umansky, half psychoanalyst, half constructivist. She basically taught me how to find out and accept who I was, what I am in my deepest being. I also owe this to Jon, who paid for my treatment, three extremely expensive sessions a week, for more than four years. Dr. Umansky is wise, but as implacable as a banker regarding payment for her forty-minute sessions. Her bill has to be paid every month, or she won’t see you even if you’re about to throw yourself onto the subway tracks on a desolate day.
Gradually I started living in New York, almost without realizing. First because I found work in an orchestra, as the last violinist, but in a great orchestra, and later because I fell in love with Jon body and soul. Later came therapy, and then directed meditation, which I also do, with a sage from India who spends a month a year in New York. And many years later, I ended up marrying my dear Jon, marrying a gringo, because they finally approved gay marriage here and in Colombia it’s still illegal for two men or two women to marry each other. Actually, I didn’t even want to get married, but Jon did. We’ve been living together for many years, and everything in our relationship was ever more serene; we understood each other better and we’d stopped fooling around on each other. Maturity brings with it a certain tranquility. Because at first we both cheated on each other, we lived the crazy life of the eighties, making love with lots of other men, like bonobos, and terrible things happened, atrocious sorrows like in soap operas.
Jon had always been an activist for gay rights, a leader in the fight against AIDS, a campaigner for the legalization of gay marriage. For him it was important that there should be a ceremony, signatures, certificates, and even though none of that mattered to me, I went along with it to please him, to make him happy. “And this way, if I die first,” said Jon, “you’ll inherit everything, and not my brothers, who are a bunch of bastards, who’ve always hated me for being queer.” Despite what we Colombians might think, there is still a lot of homophobia in New York as well, and more so among Afro-Americans, or among blacks, as we would say, without meaning to insult anyone with that word or that truth.
One of the reasons I could marry Jon is that he likes my farm in Colombia. Not sharing that would be like a zealous Christian marrying an atheist, or a carnivore marrying a vegan: the perpetual arguments of unsuccessful marriages. He learned to love La Oculta as the years went by, I think, because at first everything about the tropics seemed excessive to him. Or at least in recent years, when he’s there he pretends very well to like things he doesn’t like (too much heat, too much family, too much rain). He’s had to accept my environment, my house, my mountains.
Of course, strange things happen to him at La Oculta. He’s the only one who ever gets bitten by mosquitos, for example, and he complains. Pilar consoles him with a theory of her own devising: if someone never gets mosquito bites it’s because they have cancer, that mosquitos detect cancer in the scent of the skin. Jon has to put insect repellent on all day and all night, and sometimes, if it rains a lot, he also complains about the humidity, saying it affects his breathing, that his asthma comes back, like when he was a little boy. And his sleep is restless, anxious. If the dogs bark at a horse or an opossum, he thinks bandits have arrived to rob or kidnap us. But if the weather’s dry, he sings the praises of the landscape and stops complaining. It’s the least he can do. After all, it’s taken a while but I’ve learned to love New York, almost as much as he does. That’s why we live here, and I don’t complain about the cold or the prices or the tourists, but enjoy myself in the parks, on the beaches, at concerts, art shows, and museums.
* * *
Sometimes Jon takes out a canvas and easel and paints La Oculta: the farmhouse, the lake, or the landscape, in an old-fashioned realist, figurative style, in oils, in that style that seems so ridiculous in today’s art world. Those are the kinds of paintings Pilar likes, and he does them the way she likes them, so she can put them in her room, or along the outer corridors that surround the house. Then the sun shines on them and they fade, and Jon retouches them every time he comes back, to recover the real colors, though the thousands of tonalities of the tropics are inimitable in any painting. Sometimes, as he touches them up, he takes advantage of the opportunity to add something, almost always some unrealistic detail, something horrible, a monster or a skeleton, a rifle or a chainsaw, some scary effect that Pilar criticizes: “Why did you put that there, Jon? You ruined it with that chainsaw.” And Jon just laughs, or he says that at La Oculta some horrific thing is always about to happen and it’s good to remind everybody of that when they look at the painting.
When the guerrillas kidnapped my nephew Lucas, and later, when others wanted to force us to sell the farm and sent my sisters death threats, there was a moment of doubt, almost of hatred toward the farm, and we were on the verge of giving in, of letting them defeat us. Jon was furious with Colombia and said it was a failed state with no future, with a distant, uncaring, indolent, and corrupt government. He advised me to sell my share of La Oculta and said together
we should buy a cabin in Vermont, on a lake, where we could go once in a while. “If you want we could call it La Oculta,” he told me with a smile. “It’s hard to believe, but land is cheaper here than in Antioquia, so you sell there and we can buy something similar here, or even more beautiful.”
More beautiful? That phrase offended me, but I had to understand him. He is not Antioqueño and doesn’t feel what we feel. “It might be more beautiful in the summer and the beginning of fall, but after that it’s invisible,” I told him, almost scornfully. Jon smiled again, but at least he didn’t tell me about the white beauty of winter, tobogganing in January, the iridescent gleam of morning frost. I was thinking it over, or rather I told him I’d think it over, until I explained to him that the coffee-growing region of the tropics was something very different, as beautiful as Vermont might be, my memories and my blood were attached to those lands. That’s what I told him, all exaggerated and melodramatic: my blood, mi sangre. That I was not a great-grandson of Irishmen, or Dutchmen, or slaves, like New Yorkers, but of Spaniards and converted Jews, and indigenous Andean women. I talked to him of the absence of seasons, of lush, green Januaries, warm Decembers, the heat of August, and tropical orchids. Jon just smiled, discreet, tolerant, and understanding, and said that he, on the other hand, felt no nostalgia for Africa and it had never occurred to him to go and clear a plot of land in Liberia. So we kept quiet and weathered the storm.
For several years I lived only on memories, not being able to return. My sisters and Mamá even came to New York to visit us in December, but spending Christmas here, in this cold, accustomed as we were to spending it at La Oculta, swimming, sunbathing, making rice dishes, barbecues, and chicken stews in the open air, going horseback riding, was so strange. I watched Pilar and Alberto here, saw Mamá looking a bit withered in this city, and they didn’t even seem real to me, they were like holograms, and we didn’t enjoy ourselves. We pretended we weren’t uncomfortable and drank a lot of whiskey to feign a cheerfulness we didn’t feel. The topic of conversation turned again and again to La Oculta. Only Eva was happy, and she said if she sold her share of the farm she’d spend three months a year in New York, going to concerts and winter exhibitions, checking out the new restaurants, the galleries, the science museums, the inventions. Eva had always had an incredible thirst for knowledge, for culture, and in a way her work at the bakery – that destiny Papá and Mamá thrust on her – had diminished her.
To help him to understand me, when he insisted on the idea of a cottage in Vermont, at night I would tell Jon something about the farm that in my opinion was irreplaceable: the aromas from the kitchen, at breakfast or midday. The smell of the stables when there were cows that had just calved and we milked them in the early hours, to the sound of the lowing of the young calves in the corral, with our grandfather and cousins. There was never a cappuccino as frothy as a cup of Colombian coffee with fresh, warm milk squeezed straight from the udder: de la vaca a la boca, straight from the cow into the mouth, as Grandpa Josué used to say, inhaling through his nostrils to catch the scent of grass in the fresh milk. The bats that came out at dusk every evening and ate insects on the wing, praised by my father, in spite of how ugly we thought they were, because they kept things balanced so there wouldn’t be too many insects and demonstrated that our region was free of insecticides. The toads that hopped inside the house at night, and which we had to frighten away with a broom, because Mamá was petrified of them and if she saw one she’d have a fit. If a toad or a frog got inside the house in the daytime, so much the worse. Cobo would catch it and crucify it with pins on a board. Then he’d get a razor blade and slice it open. He taught us anatomy with the poor little creature that couldn’t free itself and we saw how its heart beat, how its pink lungs inflated, where the liver and the intestines were. If it was a venomous toad, its skin filled up with a disgusting milk and Papá said the chemical composition of that poison should be studied, since from the poisons of nature come anesthetics, analgesics, glues, and medicines.
And I kept talking to Jon, unceasingly, of everything that occurred to me about La Oculta. The terrestrial firmament the fireflies created with their appeals of light. The perpetual music of Alberto, who can’t live a minute of his life without music, because he hates silence, and when the rest of us tire of his constant bambucos, porros, and pasillos, of so many boleros and so many corny ballads, and we tell him, he smiles and puts on his headphones, to give us a rest from his music but to go on hearing it in his head, always, even at night, even when he’s sleeping. The smell of molasses, when the horses go into their stalls and paddocks and Próspero gives them water mixed with molasses and bran, so they drink till they’re round-bellied, and the bees and wasps come to taste the horses’ sweet, sweet molasses water. The midday sun, beating down on your body stretched out on a towel on the dock, or on one of the rocks around the edge of the lake, those huge, black rocks, like little tablelands, which came from I don’t know where, and the color of your skin that turns darker each day, more alluring, more like the color of the rocks (and more like yours, Jon, like yours). Conversations about science with my nephews who are educated and intelligent, especially Simón. They’ve done doctorates in physics, in biology, in geography, and tell us about the antiquity of these mountains, their fossils, their formation, the shape the glaciers had given to some parts of the mountain, or a narrow valley. Rum and coke at dusk; ice-cold beer at midday, the various colors: mulata, blond, or mestizo, like the skin tones of different members of the family; aguardiente or gin and tonic on some Friday afternoons, for a lively euphoria; Anita’s delicious pisco sours, with pisco imported from Peru, which she used to serve as an aperitif before lunch, with the rim of the glass dipped in sugar; the white wines that Eva preferred, Riesling, Gewürztraminer, because of the time she’d spent living in Germany. The sweet delights of alcohol, its gentle euphoria, when it’s not excessive and just serves to get us all chatting easily and happily, because everyone talks about the harm booze does, the havoc it wreaks, which is not untrue, but its benefits need to be mentioned as well.
I would tell him again about charades, one of our favorite games, which we played in two groups of all ages. Each team had three minutes to act out a word, and the ones who guessed it fastest won. Pilar’s kids liked to make the older ladies act out spicy words, like orgasm, or masturbation, and they wrote them down, anticipating the laughter, so they’d be acted out wordlessly in front of Anita, who with so many years behind her was the one who laughed hardest and most enjoyed seeing her grandchildren embarrassed and excited by their attempts to scandalize her.
I also told him about the neighbors who came from the other farms to share a drink and chat about any subject, at sunset, to talk about everything, land and cattle, music, dreams, as little as possible about politics or religion, to avoid arguments, because they tended to be more conservative and we were more liberal and unbelieving than average: Don Marcelino from La Querencia, Mario and Amalia from El Soñatorio, Camila from La Botero, Mariluz and Fernando from La Inés, Jaime and Ástrid from El Balcón, José from Casablanca, the Sierras from La Arcadia, el Bocha and Martis from Punta de Anca, Ismael from Las Nubes, Miriam and Doña Elvira from La Palma, Álvaro, Diego, and Darío from Potrerito…and others.
All this I told to Jon, to explain why I didn’t want us to buy a cottage in Vermont and why I missed La Oculta so much. When he got tired of listening to me, or sick of my eternal lists of neighbors he didn’t know and had no desire to get to know, he would start to stroke my back, the way you stroke a horse’s back to calm him down, until he started to kiss me on the nape of my neck, saying he understood, we’ll keep waiting, we won’t buy any cottages in Vermont or Upstate New York, and he’d gently, slowly bite me on the back, and then lick the bites, he’d reach out for me and me for him, in this simple love men make with men, that people imagine to be so flamboyant and filthy, when it’s almost always simple, and lovely, and easy. So, when we finish, happy and smiling, w
e both fall serenely asleep in one another’s arms, like two people who simply love each other, even if their genitals are similar, and that’s the only difference.
When it snows and feels like winter is going to last forever I look at the photos I have here of the farm and dream that one day I’m going to be there again, one day, with or without Jon. I don’t have nostalgia for Colombia, much less for Medellín, which is a pressure cooker of fetid odors and a slaughterhouse, a swarm of displaced, destitute people, and beggars. You drive down the highway that runs alongside the river, admiring the incredible orange flowers on the cámbulo trees, and suddenly you start to see, on the left, an inferno of beings who look like they’ve walked straight out of Dante, women bathing in the putrid river water, squabbling men smoking bazuco, children sniffing glue, couples who shit and mate in the street, like animals, and it’s all a shock, a shame for a city so vigorous, so clean, innovative, the little silver cup turned into a hotpot of venality. I don’t dream of the patria, as patriots say, because my homeland is terrible: what fills me with lethal saudade is my longing for that farm. Everybody says, “but you live in New York, what more could a person want than to live in New York,” and nevertheless I dream of La Oculta every week, two or three times a month at least, because I carry it with me inside even if I don’t live there. I dream I’m swimming in the lake or in the river, against the current. I dream I’m riding a horse without a shirt on, that I’m climbing the mango trees and eating as many as I like, which is like biting a yellow heart, and the sweet, yellow blood runs down my chin, my throat, my chest. I dream I’m milking cows, or climbing fast up the crags, almost weightless. I even dream I’m flying through the air and see La Oculta from a hawk’s-eye view. My sisters tell me they dream very similar dreams. La Oculta makes people dream. La Oculta is like a dream we live. And also, if I fantasize about how my future life will be, I always see myself walking or riding around the farm down there, far from the world, in the coffee-growing zone, as if I had no choice but to go back there to die among the stones where my parents are buried. I’m definitely going to be the last of the Ángels, at least of this branch of the family, and the last of the Ángels has to have his tomb there, at La Oculta, the land that gave us everything, that allowed my father to be a doctor and my uncles to be engineers and lawyers, to which I owe the possibility of having had a violin at an early age and later of having been able to come and live here, in New York, where sometimes I perish from the cold and from nostalgia at not being there, at La Oculta. Jon taught me what nostalgia means. Nostos in Greek, he told me, is “return,” and algia, “ache,” so just as myalgia is muscle ache, nostalgia is an ache to return. All my voyages, all my voyages, are voyages of return, León de Greiff, a poet of my land, once wrote.