by Hector Abad
Finally Toño ended up getting married, to the man he says he likes best of all, Jon, a gringo, and not so long ago, he married almost in old age, in New York, after Papá had died, even though he didn’t invite us to the wedding, not even Mamá, or either of us, and Jon’s family wasn’t at the ceremony either, because he comes from a very religious, very traditional, black family, members of an evangelical church, even more horrified about those things than Antioqueños, and that’s saying something. I think Alberto and I are like a hinge between two worlds. Sometimes I think I’m the last one in my family to live the way Grandma Miriam lived, Eva the first to live the way my daughters live, and Toño the first to live as my grandchildren will, because don’t try telling me it’s not true, there are more gay men every day all over, all the girls complain, when they like a boy, for his kindness, his gentlemanly behavior, because he makes them laugh, and he’s sweet, no way, it’ll turn out he’s gay and that’s the end of that.
Which life is better: the old-fashioned way I live or the modern ways of my sister and brother? I don’t say my way, or like my parents or grandparents; I don’t say my siblings’ way; it’s better not to judge. Who knows. I’m old now and that’s how I lived; they’re a bit younger, but not that much, and they lived the way they did too. Who lived better? That nobody knows, everybody does what they can and what feels right. We never know anything. One chooses a route, thinking it’s the best, calculating the steps that are going to lead you to a happy life, but no calculation works. We pursue an aim, and we might even achieve it, but once we get there, no one can be sure it was the best possible one. Mamá, who was more modern than I am, and at almost ninety was just as lively and vivacious as ever, said everything’s good, that whatever happens is fine. I should have learned from her, and tried to be as open and liberal as she was, always adapting. Sometimes I try and sometimes I forget. That’s the way I am, “fancying myself bourgeois,” as Toño puts it, and even though I don’t know what he means by that, I say, yes, I like the good life, elegant things in their places, and little things make me happy, the garden, flowers, Alberto’s company, Colombian music, a well-laid table. I might be very normal, but that’s how I am, straightforward and authentic like this farm where I live. But, is this the best I could have done with my life? Eva, I’m sure, thinks no, she thinks she can still get something much better out of her life than this. Sometimes I think it’s unfair not to let her search further, not to let her go entirely, cut the string of the kite, give her the money she has buried in this farm so she can fly off to wherever she wants.
EVA
I continued up the road at a trot. I know this region really well: the trails, the trees, the water courses, the woods. I have it memorized like a local campesino, better even than Pilar. It’s true that she has spent much more time than any of us at La Oculta, but she hasn’t got as much wanderlust as I do. Pilar is a homebody, sedentary, in the image I have of her in my head she’s always sewing, sitting in a room or on the porch, just like Mamá, our aunts, and our grandmothers. Sewing and talking, talking and sewing. Telling over and over again the story of her courtship and marriage with Alberto, which we all know by heart. When she gets up, she walks around the house and plans improvements in the garden, which she’s always expanding. Then she goes inside and moves from one room to the next in a frenzy of work. She sees spiderwebs, dirt, damp spots where no one else notices them; whenever she sees a termite hole she has an attack, and shouts and gets agitated like a hen. Her life has been spent in a war to the death against termites. She climbs up extremely high ladders, balancing with a syringe in one hand, and squirts formaldehyde into the holes. I think it’s the same formaldehyde and the same syringe she uses to do up corpses. She also battles against blemishes, damp stains, and fungus on the walls. She’s always calling poor Próspero to mix up some whitewash, and get out the swab to patch the lime. Every week some part of the house had to be whitewashed, no matter what. And if she doesn’t notice anything wrong with the house, then she gets the notion to cut down some trees or plant some palms, buy or order some custom-made furniture, collect the fallen teak leaves and burn them, change the color of the flowers because she’s sick of orange, move fences and improve the garden, or make stone pathways. And then she hires day laborers from town and we have to pay their wages between the three of us. But she’s always right there, in the house or right around the house. I, on the other hand, have traveled around the area in every way possible: walking, jogging, in a jeep, on a bicycle, and on horseback. As if I were a man, yes, sometimes I feel like it has fallen to me to take on the role of the man of this house, the one who makes money and organizes the bills, who controls and covers the territory.
I dug my heels into the mare’s side and began to gallop along the track. The animal’s warm body warmed me up too. I’d learned to ride as a very young girl, at the same time as I learned to walk, and felt myself and the horse to be a single body. “We have to form a centaur when we ride!” Cobo used to say, just as Grandpa Josué used to tell him, and anyone who hasn’t felt like a centaur, doesn’t know how to ride a horse. When one feels that, the body experiences a kind of serenity that’s very difficult to describe. Noche felt a sure hand guiding her, and I knew that the mare saw much better than I did in the darkness. I could trust her eyes much more than mine. I’d ridden endless times, day and night, and I always felt sure of the animal. “To ride well,” Cobo also used to say, “the intelligent one needs to trust the brute.” Sometimes the horseshoes struck sparks on the stones, and those sparks spoke to me about the animal’s strength, her potency, which I could feel between my legs.
I began to speak to the mare, in a soft voice, I don’t know whether to calm her down or to calm me. To feel less alone:
“Noche, Noche, don’t worry, we’re going up and quickly, you see, there are men chasing me and we have to escape, you have to help me, Noche, if not they’ll kill you too. Let’s go up fast. I have to hide in the woods, be careful, don’t let me fall off, if you see a wire fence you’ll have to stop, but slowly, without throwing me, Noche, Noche.”
I don’t know why, but I always speak familiarly with horses, as with friends. And my first horse was called Amigo.
I was carrying the flashlight in my left hand, but I didn’t want to turn it on and risk giving any clues in case anyone was watching. I had all my senses sharpened. It might have occurred to them to drive up and look for me there, but I didn’t hear anything. Every once in a while the hooting of an owl or a currucutú. The buzzing of the occasional lost insect, one or two fireflies, the light cool breeze that came down off the Jericó crags. All of a sudden, from the direction of La Oculta, a strange noise started up: they’d turned on a motor, like a chainsaw. Yes, they’d started up a chainsaw and they were cutting something. A moment later, as quickly as it had begun, it stopped. I didn’t understand what it could have been and didn’t even want to imagine the worst.
I kept going up the road, toward the crags. I had to look for the little gateway that led to the water tank; I’d go in there and up across the pasture, looking for the edge of the woods. At the base of the crags I could wait until the sun came up. As far as I knew, groups like Los Músicos of Jericó didn’t do much work in daylight. They preferred to do their misdeeds in the shadows so nobody would see. Night is day for the wicked, Papá used to say.
When I figured we must be getting close to the gate, I turned on the flashlight for a second and saw, between the lines of barbed wire and the matarratón trees of the hedge, the gate to the tank. I dismounted to open it. I pulled the mare through by her halter, closed the latch, and swung back up into the saddle, with the flashlight turned off. I went around the side of the Casablanca water tank and carried on uphill along the little dirt track through the pasture. We went at a gallop. I knew there were two more gates to pass through before the native forest would begin to close in, first undergrowth and ferns, shrubs, the odd coffee plant, and then the first tree trunks. Nobod
y knew this terrain better than me, nobody. Los Músicos definitely didn’t. Maybe Próspero or Egidio, the foreman of La Inés, both born and raised in Palermo, but not Los Músicos.
I could hear frogs croaking, the beating wings of nocturnal birds, and sometimes the lowing of a distant cow. I was breathing easier, squeezing my thighs against the warm mare. I was scared to run into a wire fence without seeing it and I slowed the mare to a walk. The moon wasn’t up, there weren’t many stars, just a few offerings of light from faraway houses. Once again I thought that maybe, tonight at least, I might not be murdered. It would be difficult for them to find me there. I opened another two gates when the mare stopped; the animal saw obstacles I couldn’t see in the darkness. I got down, turned on the flashlight for a moment, shielding most of the beam with my hands, opened the latch, guided the mare through, and closed it again. I got back up on the horse and set off uphill at a trot. When I reached the edge of the woods I looked in the saddlebags. There was a canteen, but it was empty. There was a small poncho. I put it on, to shield myself from a bit of the dampness of the forest. I thought that even though the poncho was white, in the dense woods, no one would see me. I figured it must be about one in the morning, more or less, and I thought to keep warm I’d spend the night on horseback, quiet and still. The warmth of the gentle and noble animal made me feel better.
I was thirsty, but I didn’t want to think about that. I discarded the idea of tying up the mare to go in search of water from some stream coming down from the mountain. It was the animal’s company that made me feel safe. On horseback, besides, I could gallop away and escape, if anyone did come near. There were still at least four hours until it would begin to grow light. I closed my eyes and tried to absorb through my ears and nose all the sounds and smells of the night. My mouth was dry. I started remembering Pilar’s stories, I don’t know why, probably to calm myself down and not sleep, the stories she always tells when we’re at La Oculta, and that make us all laugh and cry. The evil tricks she played on me at school, when I was so levelheaded and she was such a lazybones. The story of the little turtle on the airplane, one time when she was going to Cartagena, or the one about the United States visas that she managed to get for all the players on the basketball team despite hell and high water, or the story of Don Marcelino, when he died and she had to transport him, disguised and seated in the car, in make-up and a hat, so the army and police wouldn’t realize she was transporting a dead body.
I was trying to remember what happened with the turtle in the airplane aisle when I heard something, opened my eyes, and saw a huge brightness down below. Flames rising up to the sky, from La Oculta. There was a wind and it was carrying ashes and sparks. In my nostrils the smell of smoke became more precise, for me it was the smell of death, of defeat. They were burning down the house. Then came the sound of an explosion and an even brighter flash, like a mushroom of fire; I didn’t know what it was. Later I was told that it was the gas tank of my jeep, when it exploded, for they’d begun by setting fire to my jeep. I started to cry hard, sobbing convulsively. I pleaded for them at least not to have burnt Próspero and Berta inside the house.
At that moment I began to hear the sound of engines coming up the Casablanca track. There were two pairs of intense, slow lights exploring the night, coming uphill. They were heading for my cousins’ house. They didn’t turn off the lights or the engines. A light came on in Sor and Rubiel’s house, in the distance. I thought I heard a voice, a shout of rage, but very far off, incomprehensible. I was pleading inside, to no one, to fate, not to hear any shots. A short while later the lights began to move up the same path I’d come up a while before on the mare. I was watching the fire further below and the beams of light alternately. My heart began to pump as fast as it could again. I had to convince myself that nobody knew where I was, not even Rubiel, that nobody could see me, among all the trees. I stroked Noche, so she wouldn’t decide to neigh. But even if she did, why would it occur to anybody to think an unseen horse has a rider, or that I was riding her? Horses neigh, that’s all there is to it. I took off the poncho and stuffed it back into the saddlebag, to feel safer without anything very bright on. Two big pickup trucks drove very slowly behind the water tank, but they kept going up the road. They were looking for me along the track. After ten minutes the lights disappeared over the hill, heading down toward La Mariela. I began to breathe more calmly; my heart settled down. At least tonight they weren’t going to find and kill me.
ANTONIO
Sometimes, at night, I delve into my papers. In New York I also keep copies of the documents I have in the drawers in La Oculta and I try to reconstruct its history, what I know and what I imagine happened there, in the southwest of Antioquia, what I would call my fatherland if the word fatherland hadn’t been so sullied by the malodorous mouths of all the nationalist politicians in the world. No, I’m not a regionalist or anything like that, but if I think about it, I say unabashedly that of all the towns in Southwest Antioquia, Jericó is the prettiest. I’m reconstructing the origins of La Oculta, and writing, not as a serious and trustworthy historian, which I’m not, but as an aficionado of various kinds of reading and an enthusiast of what wiser and more educated people have told me.
* * *
I know that Pedro Pablo Echeverri was sitting in El Silencio Café in El Retiro, slowly savoring a black coffee sweetened with grated panela. It would be about nine or ten in the morning and a warm sun was brightening up the fresh mountain air. The place honored its name; only the deliberate voices of the engineer and a few neighbors could be heard. Four or five young men (I can see them in my mind: barefoot, badly dressed), between twenty and thirty years of age, would be listening to him carefully, with an almost reverent attention.
El Cojo will have told them that Don Gabriel, his father, and a friend of his, Santiago Santamaría, son of Don Juan Santamaría, had founded a town on the left bank of the River Cauca, facing west, and that the town had already had two names, first the Aldea de Piedras and now Felicina, since it had been authorized to have its own priest. Piedras, he said, not because the land was so stony (it was black and fertile, actually, enriched with ashes from the Nevado del Ruiz volcano, carried by the winds from age-old eruptions), although there were large black rocks scattered among the mountains, but rather for a fast-flowing river, the Piedras, which descended there, between huge rocks, fed by many torrential streams, from the high plains down to the rich lowlands of the Cauca.
Now the proprietors wanted these lands to produce food for the settlers, and eventually, if there was more than enough and good roads were built, they could begin to sell the surplus products. The mining villages, farther south, toward the Cauca Valley, were extracting a lot of gold, but didn’t produce any food, no meat or milk or cassava or beans or plantains or potatoes or agave, and all those things could be produced on their lands and that of their relatives, if they chopped down the woods and worked it well. But a good route had to be cleared, or improved where it existed, as far as Marmato, so the mule drivers could go and take swine and steers and provisions to the British and German entrepreneurs, who didn’t have enough food to feed their Indian, Negro, and mixed-race, half-enslaved miners, who were starving to death on them, dying of hunger and the horrendous conditions in the pits.
The condition for populating and developing those expanses in the Southwest was to found a town and fill it up with young families who wanted to have lots of children. They’d been gathering people in Marinilla, in Rionegro, in Fredonia, Titiribí, Medellín, and La Ceja. In Sonsón and Abejorral it was futile, for the people there were heading farther south, to Aguadas, Salamina, and Manizales, to invade the former estates of the Villegas and the Aranzazus. El Retiro was going to be the last stop before returning to Felicina, with those who dared to follow him. Anyone who knew a trade would be useful, blacksmith, baker, leatherworker, lumberman, but even those who had no trade would be welcome; all they needed were a couple of strong arms and a desire not
to sit vegetating in a corner. They were looking for second sons with neither land nor position, they were looking for fertile couples, at best with children already, bold, but not wicked, adventurers.
“First thing tomorrow morning I’m taking the Minas road as far as Fredonia,” said Echeverri in a deliberate, sure voice. “There we’ll spend less than a week getting everything ready and interviewing new settlers. In two or three days we’ll reach the Cauca, which we’ll cross at the Paso de los Pobres, on a raft, poled across by two expert ferrymen, and once across we’ll already be on the lands that for now belong to my father and Don Santiago Santamaría. There is more than enough for all. I assure you that within the year we’ll be parceling out the plots, not as gifts, but cheap and on credit. We are going to be fair and generous, especially with the first to sign up and those who work hardest clearing the land and building roads. Settlers who arrive later, attracted by the good news, will not find the land so cheap, as it will be sold to them at a higher price, after other veteran settlers, like yourselves, have received their plots.”