by Hector Abad
“Can we bring laborers?” asked one of the young men, a well-dressed, fine-looking boy called Peláez with such bushy eyebrows they looked like locks of hair on his head.
“You can invite anyone you want, black, white, mulatto, or mestizo. What will be most useful is to bring women and children, because they get frightened off out there; there’s not a soul for miles. The few Indians there were, Chamíes, Katíos, and Caramantas, fled down toward Chocó when they saw us arrive fifteen years ago, thinking we were going to kill them, as whites always had, since the time of the conquistadors. Only a few women stayed behind, who are all now married to the single settlers we took with us. A few blacks liberated by Governor Faciolince are now working there, and we gave them their little square of land too, just as we did the poor whites. There’s nothing but dense woods, but with good lumber, clean and abundant water. We will also entrust laborers with their own pieces of land, if they work hard. It’s not going to be a place of masters and peons, but of proprietors. You can bring laborers, but not for them to work while you, as young masters, watch them work and yell orders, none of that. Even the peons are going to be proprietors.”
“Ah,” Peláez kept on. “So you’re one of those modern fellows who believes we are all equal, whites and blacks, rich and poor, intelligent and ignorant?”
“No, I don’t believe that,” Echeverri responded so calmly that he spoke and smiled at the same time. “What I do believe is that when you begin something you have to give everyone the same things, as when you begin to play tute or dominoes. At the start everyone gets the same counters, or the same number of cards, don’t you think?”
“That’s true,” Paláez admitted.
“Well, we’re going to do the same thing in Felicina, which is why it’s called that, like felicity: everyone will start with the same amount. Later luck, talent, or effort will be the deciding factors. As well as abuses by villains, and the stupidity of fools. These things aren’t as static as rocks, but flow like rivers.”
“So in the future there will be bosses and workhands, masters and servants…”
“It’s possible, some years down the line. Furthermore, I don’t deny that my father has laborers, and he pays them by the day. But he knows that with day laborers and wage earners he’d need a century to develop his lands. That’s why for now he prefers free men, married settlers, who will begin with the same, or almost the same. Inequalities will arise from the efforts or cunning of some, even from wickedness; from the vices or laziness or simple bad luck of others. Or from inheritance, which is my case, but anyone who has children wishes to leave them what they received or earned – whether through malice or merit or luck – don’t they? There are those who are poor because they fell off a horse and were left disabled, and there are those who are rich because a mule knocked them down and on the ground they discovered a seam of gold. Because actually there are not only injustices committed by men; there are also injustices of destiny, as a poet once said. Who knows? Maybe the inequalities will grow and then perhaps, if they get very large, in a century or more, we’ll have to shuffle the deck and redeal. But for now everyone is going to start, if not with exactly the same, then with something that is very similar: land.”
“And how can we be sure that you’re going to entrust us with land, that you’re not going to deceive us?” asked someone else.
“For that there is no more security than my word. I do not tell lies. You’ll have to believe me, and come along. Or not believe me, and stay here, idle and fateless, warming yourselves lazily in the sun,” said El Cojo Echeverri categorically.
Isaías Ángel and Raquel Abadi were the last to sign up on Cojo’s list. According to custom, one of his brothers, the eldest, Esteban, had inherited their father’s salt mines, and had also received the big house and all the land. Isaías, in El Retiro, would have had no future except that of being a farmhand on someone else’s land, a salt miner, or an artisan. Their father Ismael had died before being able to send him to study in Medellín, as he’d promised, because he was the brightest of his sons. He had learned to read, to write, and to keep accounts, but no more. Of their Jewish past, he remembered very little; words whispered on some sincere Sabbath, said in secret by their father, who spoke of the arrival of Abraham in Santa Fe de Antioquia, from Spain. Now he preferred not to be anything, in public and in private, although if asked he would say he was Catholic, and even went to Mass every Sunday, crossed himself, prayed to God – to a god who might or might not exist, he didn’t know – so as not to have problems with anyone, and not to have to answer too many questions, from himself or others.
The other young men who were in the café – less needy and yet to start families – asked for time to think about it and left. Isaías remained in the Silencio Café on his own with El Cojo Echeverri, who, after a sip of his coffee, said sadly:
“That’s how it is everywhere. Many come to look, and feel curious, ask skeptical questions, but very few sign on. Maybe they don’t believe me, or think that all gifts contain deception. In any case, we now have more than ninety families who have agreed to go and we’ve arranged to meet in Fredonia two days hence. That’s why we have to hurry and leave tomorrow. You’re going to have to organize everything in the blink of an eye. You’ll barely have time to say farewell to your family.”
“Then I better go and talk it over with Raquel. She’s pregnant, four months along, but it doesn’t matter, it’s better that she come with me straight away. She’s always telling me about her thirst for adventure, her desire for a new life, and I don’t think she’ll object, quite the contrary, I think she’ll be happy that we’re going. The only sad thing is leaving behind the family, but she has a sister who might want to come with us; I’ll invite her as well. Almost everything I own will fit on three mules. And I’ll have Esteban, my older brother, sell the rest, which is hardly anything: a potato crop I have planted in one of his fields, that’s half grown. Raquel has a few gold coins, and I know she’ll want to use them to buy land, if it’s good and cheap. What time are we leaving?”
“We’ll meet right here, tomorrow morning at six,” said El Cojo. “You have what’s left of the day to get everything ready. There are seven other families staying in various houses in town. We’re going to leave in a caravan very early. In Fredonia we’ll have a few days to wait, maybe weeks, for more people to join, but the sooner we leave the better.”
He paused, looked at Isaías with his lazy eye and abruptly changed the subject:
“Don’t worry, my associates the Santamarías are or were like you, the Ángels and the Abadi, and nobody’s going to say anything if you light a candle on Friday evenings. As long as you eat pork, though it’s not allowed, nobody will say a word. What you can’t do is get fussy and not eat ham or chicharrón. You know what my father and Don Santiago say? I don’t know if it’s true, but they say it’s easier for you people to be settlers, because you’re the ones who most like to move and live somewhere else, because you’ve been wandering for millennia, as they were condemned to do in the Book of Psalms. There’s no one who has a more fervent desire to have his own land, from which you cannot be expelled, and for that very reason you’ll work harder than anybody.”
Isaías, without a word, remembered a curious recommendation from his father: “Son, remember that we don’t like pork, but we have to eat swine so they won’t criticize us. Besides, in these crags there’s no way that sheep will thrive and it’s been a long, long time since we’ve forgotten the taste of God’s lamb, who takes away the world’s sins. In the Biblical lands and those of the Koran, pork was harmful, but here in these mountains things are very different, and this is our land now.” He looked at Pedro Pablo’s lazy eye; an optical illusion made it look like it itched, that from here on in he’d be winking at him eternally; Isaías sketched an understanding smile. They shook hands and that was that.
EVA
One morning, while I was swimming in La Oculta
, one of the lake’s drowned victims told me this story. He had a deep, dark voice, but clear and sharp as if he were speaking a hand’s span away from my ear:
“In Jericó, people’s houses were always open, as if someone might just revive and return to the world, or as if a guest from far away might be able to enter without knocking and without anyone hearing his footsteps, exactly at lunchtime. They always set an extra place at the table, with a clean plate and cutlery and a serviette, with a glass ready to be filled, in case the prodigal son suddenly showed up, because in every Jericó family there was always a prodigal son, from whom they’d had no word since the last war, or since the absurd argument with his father, or grandfather, which had ended in thoughtless words, curses no one would take back, and the women, especially the women, held on to the secret hope of seeing him appear one day, tall and strapping like a broncobuster, with his smile intact and his resonant singing voice, with his loud bursts of laughter and the simple confidence that nothing bad could happen to them.
If someone made the mistake of mentioning the absent one while they were having their soup, nobody raised their eyes from the bowl, to make sure not to meet the gaze of the man at the head of the table, because they didn’t want to make him feel ashamed of his flaring nostrils, his trembling lip, and flooded eyes. Furtively, in the end, the man wipes not his lips but his eyelids with his serviette, and at that moment one of the women stands up, collects the soup bowls and goes to the kitchen for the first trays of the main course. Sometimes, by mistake, they’d pour a little guanábana juice in the absent one’s empty glass, and at the end of the meal nobody drank it.
This had occurred so many times, with the sons of the Ángels, the Londoños, the Santamarías, the Abads. It was a constant in the town that some son would get offended and take off, or there would be no trace of one after a battle, or one would emigrate north, or east, in search of fortune, never to return and change his parents’ lives into one of perpetual waiting, and that strange sensation of never having a full table.”
ANTONIO
Perhaps I also love and miss that farm so much because there, at La Oculta, was the first time. I’ll never forget. A friend from our neighborhood, Sergio Ialadaki, had come with me to the farm, and we asked my parents if we could pitch a tent and camp out on the other side of the house, by the lake, near everything but at the same time out of the adults’ sight, like an adventure for adolescents who are starting to grow up. They said we could. We were fifteen and didn’t want to sleep inside the house, it’s true, and I don’t think we really even knew why. What I mean is that it wasn’t something planned, but something felt, intuited rather than thought out, like a vague premonition of new, as yet unknown emotions. We said we wanted to make a campfire in the open air, with kindling we collected in the woods, like people used to do, to be out in the elements for a while, like explorers, and when we got tired we wanted to lie down in the tent, on top of air mattresses. What we didn’t say, but what we did, was to put the air mattresses very close together and cover them both with the same blanket. That day we’d swum in the lake with my papá following us in the canoe, because he didn’t like us swimming alone without lifejackets. Not long before, a young seminary student had drowned in the lake, and in the air and water lingered a memory of death, the remains of a tragedy, as if something of the spirit of the boy who would never now be a priest had stayed in the place forever. After swimming we’d gone to climb the waterfall in our bathing suits and stretched out in the sun, very close to each other, on a big, flat rock. I was feeling the pleasure of the hallucinogenic drug that is the midday sun on your bare skin, in that full, warm, tropical light at La Oculta. Just brushing against his skin was enough for me to get as hard as a rock; he looked at my shorts and I looked at his, and we saw the material raised, tense: his and mine. When we stretched out on the rock, on a couple of towels, in the full sun, I took some suntan lotion out of my backpack and started to rub some over my chest and shoulders; I was rubbing it in myself, but I pretended that my hand was actually Sergio’s hand and that he was caressing me. I rubbed it in slowly, very slowly, and as I did so I looked at him, to see if he understood that the movements of my hand over my body were actually his covert caresses. Then he put some lotion on as well and stared at me as he rubbed it in, slowly as I had done, slowly caressing his nipples, his arms, his firm, flat stomach. I would have given anything to be his hand at that moment, but I was afraid he didn’t want that. He didn’t really know what he wanted; only I knew what I did.
The night is a better adviser for such things, which are harder to do, at least for the first time, in broad daylight. We were going to cook on the campfire. Mamá had given us rice, eggs, sausages, and a little chicken broth left over from lunch; we heated it all up in an old, blackened pot, hanging from a branch propped up on two forked sticks right over the flames. Sergio had brought a guitar and sang some Beatles, Elton John, Joan Serrat, and James Taylor songs. He also sang a song by Georges Moustaki, who was part Greek, like him. His soft voice thrilled me and I sang along occasionally on the choruses. I hadn’t brought my violin, because, sadly for me, violins aren’t suited for those kinds of outings, and you have to take special care of them, because they’re expensive and easily damaged by humidity. We’d snuck the remains of a bottle of rum, and we had two or three shots, mixed with orange juice. They tasted strong. We were shivering, not from the cold, I don’t think, but from the desire built up over the course of the day. Finally we climbed into the tent and shone the flashlight around. We pushed the two air mattresses together, but we got undressed with our backs to each other, without looking, and then turned off the flashlight. We were breathing for a while in the silence. I heard his breathing; I suppose he heard mine too. We were less than a millimeter apart, but not daring to touch. All of a sudden Sergio said his skin was stinging a bit because he’d had too much sun and I asked him if he wanted me to put some moisturizer on. He thought that was a good idea. I began to caress his chest, his abdomen, there I skipped over to his thighs, very slowly, face up first, and then face down. I passed him the tube of lotion and he began to massage me as well. We were in total darkness, and could only hear a few crickets, the frogs croaking, the sound of the channel of water that fed the lake, and his hand rubbing my skin. I was straining straight up in the middle of my body, but I didn’t know if he was feeling the same thing. I offered to put some more lotion on him and my hand went down to his belly button and then further down, to the edge of his underwear. As if by mistake, two of my fingers passed under the elastic border, beyond it until touching his pubic hair, and then four fingers, all except the thumb, with the pretext of rubbing in lotion so he wouldn’t feel the sting of the afternoon’s sunburn. I went a little lower down, and there it was, rising up, as hard as a rock, stiff and ready; I barely touched it, one finger just lightly brushed against it. It lifted a little more at my touch and a tiny moan escaped his throat. I felt the happiness of knowing he felt the same as I did. I passed him the lotion again and this time it was he who went below my belly button, he who slipped past the barrier of the elastic waistband of my shorts, he who reached the place where the proof of my feeling the same as him stood. Our faces leaned in toward each other, without kissing, just breathing each other’s breath. And then he began to caress me up and down, and I stretched out my hand and reached inside his shorts and began to do the same. We moved our pelvises in unison and hurled our breath in each other’s faces. The tension was so high that in less than two minutes we’d both come, in perfect silence, but with a tremendous whole-body shudder, and brief final moan of happiness. I’d felt an electric current surge through all the bones of my skeleton. I think Sergio did too. I held his semen to my nose and it smelled delicious, like mild soap. I didn’t taste it, but I smeared it on my chest. It was the first time I made love with anyone, the first time I came in someone else’s hand, the first time I touched the viscosity of semen not my own. Afterward we slept, deeply, side by side, withou
t touching each other again.
The next day the ritual was the same. Walk in his footsteps, stretch my shadow over his shadow, breathe in his breath, look at him without missing a single detail of his body: that was my only occupation all day. We went swimming in the lake (under my father’s watchful eye, who paddled behind us in the canoe), with the memory of the drowned seminarian, who shouted to us: live, live before you die, youngsters, don’t waste the most beautiful years of your lives, and then we went to climb up the waterfall and lie in the sun on top of another big rock, and lying face down we held hands. We took deep breaths. We looked at the bulge in the front of each other’s shorts when we turned around. We had to wait until nighttime. And that night, I think, was one of the best nights of my life, at least the night I had the most orgasms. I came five times, touching him, feeling him touch me, breathing his breath again without kissing. He couldn’t do it anymore after the third time, but for me it was like nothing was enough, it was a crazy thing, an insatiable desire. A desire like none I’ve ever felt since, something deep, uncontainable, which I don’t imagine would ever have stopped resurging had dawn not eventually arrived. The last time I came no semen came out, not a drop, because there was none left.
When we got back to Medellín, Sergio didn’t speak to me again or look me in the face, for months. He avoided me around the neighborhood. He’d turned even more melancholic than before and the dark circles under his eyes, his most attractive feature, grew purple. I think he took refuge in religion and in self-flagellation, trying to bend his inclinations to the traditional side, even if it meant betraying himself. I also felt somewhat ashamed of what had happened, and also went to see the priests, but if he’d given a sign I would have slept with him again in a second, even if it meant I had to confess afterward. I’d secretly kept a pair of his underpants, I remember, they were blue and white checked, and I sniffed them and touched myself. I couldn’t get to sleep if I didn’t come thinking about those two nights at La Oculta, in the same tent and under the same blanket. It’s the only time in my life I’ve had a fetish. The second night I had turned on the flashlight and shone it on his body while he came: those white spurts shooting up to his chest, toward my face, were the memory that most excited me.