by Hector Abad
Several months later, one Sunday afternoon, Sergio called me, out of the blue, and invited me to go see a movie. I couldn’t contain my excitement. We met at the entrance to the cinema downtown, but he was with two girls, one of whom he introduced as his girlfriend and the other he wanted me to meet to see if I liked her. I felt an unspeakable disappointment. During the movie I felt dizzy. Sergio held hands with his girlfriend and her friend tried to hold my hand, but I didn’t want to. When the movie ended, which I didn’t pay any attention to or remember a thing about, I left almost without saying goodbye and caught the bus to go back to Laureles alone, while they went for ice cream. I was so sad, so humiliated and disappointed by Sergio’s wordless message that I felt faint. Two ladies who were near me on the bus said: “Look how young that boy is and already drunk. What is the world coming to?”
A couple of years went by before I slept with a man again; later I even did it with women, making a determined effort, almost with repugnance, trying to prove to myself that I wasn’t a fag, that I was going to be normal like everyone else, or like the majority, at least, or like Sergio, who was disciplined and controlled his impulses, it was during this period that I started going to the Saint Gemma retreats for young people, and since I’d confessed my sin with Sergio, and my thousand solitary sins, the priest insisted that I at least try to approach girls instead of men. But it wasn’t the same as that night with Sergio, never that complete, though insatiable, pleasure. In reality, I don’t think it’s ever been the same as that night at fifteen or sixteen years old, at La Oculta, not even with Jon. That was the first time and the definitive, revealing the path my desire would always take, marking out my sexual destiny. My compass.
Many years later I ran into Sergio Ialadaki in the Chicago airport. We shook hands; he was fat and ugly, with spongy bags under his eyes instead of dark circles, and a potbelly that made him look six months pregnant. He told me he had three daughters, that he’d married a Greek woman. He asked me if I had kids too. I told him no, I was gay, but I hadn’t ruled out the idea of adopting a child. He looked me in the eye very seriously, in perfect silence, and I couldn’t tell if there was a memory in that look, or rather a signal that he didn’t want to remember anything, or even that he really didn’t remember anything. One can never read other people’s minds. What I do know is that if I concentrate my mind and remember that night in the tent, if I think of my flashlight beam shining on the young Sergio as he was coming in gushes, still today, more than thirty years later, I get hard again.
EVA
I saw again, from the direction of La Oculta, the blaze of the fire, the bursts of flames swaying in the air, orange and red, and thought I saw sparks and ashes carried by the wind. I could still smell distant smoke. I closed my eyes and waited. I imagined the house burned down, Próspero locked inside, the charred posts, the heat, the scorched hammock, the books reduced to ash, Gaspar burnt to a cinder. I thought of the years of effort vanished in half an hour of hatred. Years, more than a century spent building that house. The bed under the mosquito net where I’d made love when I got married for the first time. The dining table, made from a single trunk of a parasiempre, a tree from the Chocó Valley we believed to be indestructible, immune to the passing of centuries. The teak stools Pilar had ordered from the Palermo carpentry workshop, according to a design Toño had brought back from New York, clipped from a magazine. Our grandparents’ wardrobes and dressers, dark and heavy. The old beds made of comino crespo wood, the ancient family photos on the walls, the bad but pretty paintings of flowers and landscapes and horses. In short, all that we, Papá and Mamá, our grandparents, great-grandparents, Pilar, especially Pilar, had done, had acquired, had bought, changed, inherited, received as gifts. The architects who had planned the H shape of the house’s structure, the master builders and bricklayers who had erected the walls and laid the foundations according to the instructions, the laborers who had tiled the roofs. The hampers and baskets, all the appliances, the wires carrying electric light to the rooms, the taps, the bathrooms, the pipes, the plumbing, the drains. It was one of the curses of life that everything was so difficult and slow to construct, compared to the ease and speed with which it could all be destroyed: all they needed was a little gasoline and a match struck against its box.
I tried to think of what I should do at dawn so at least they wouldn’t burn me like the house. I had to decide which trail to take down to the road, maybe to Juan’s roadhouse. I hoped no one would see me; someone could tell Los Músicos, by radiotelephone or by messenger, that they’d seen me go by. I had to try to get down to the roadhouse without being seen. There were three options: through the meadows, opening the latches and wooden gates; through La Mariela, which was the same way Los Músicos’ trucks had gone; or down the same road I’d come up, passing in front of Casablanca and behind La Oculta Lake.
I had another moment of crying and an instant later another one of laughter and happiness, because tears were coming out of my body and that meant I was alive, and because my heart was beating hard and that meant the same thing; I felt like a survivor. I put the poncho back on because I was cold. I thought of Benji with tenderness and intensity. At that time he was doing a semester in Berlin, because he went to the Colegio Alemán, Medellín’s German school, and he would be in class, not thinking about his mother hidden in the mountains, resuscitated, who was conjuring him up by squeezing her eyelids shut. I thought of my brother in New York, who would be sleeping beside his gringo; I thought of my sister, of my nephews and nieces. I thought of my mamá and of the bakery we were in the process of selling, because I didn’t want to keep working there, and I saw Mamá already looking very old and very tired. I thought of my employee, Patri, who came every second day, to water the plants and change Gaspar’s water, feed him and take him out for a walk. Now she’d never again greet him as she always did: “Hello, Don Gaspar, come.” I half-slept thinking of them, especially my son, and of a theory my niece Flor told me once, that all women who live with cats suffer from sadness. Now her theory was true, for I was not going to live with a dog like before, but alone, and with the thought that I was going to turn into a sad woman, if instead of a dog I got a cat (I even named him: Prrr), I fell asleep, I’m not sure for how long, maybe just a few seconds, maybe half an hour, maybe an hour and a half. In my light sleep I saw Noche, the mare, who turned into Gaspar, who turned into a cat, who turned into smoke. I wasn’t really asleep, it was a half doze, anxious and light the way dogs sleep, with one eye open and the other closed. Every once in a while the horse startled me, changing her position or exhaling noisily through her nostrils, brrrr, a huff halfway between bored and resigned, a wordless phrase that said we’ll-just-be-patient-because-what-else-can-you-do-when-you’ve-got-a-bit-in-your-mouth.
Near dawn, a gust of chill wind made me shudder as a shiver ran up my spine. The hairs on my arms were damp with either sweat or dew. Finally the birds and roosters began to wake up and a slight radiance lit up the edges of the mountains on the far side of the River Cauca, just visible between the leaves of the trees. I rubbed my eyes. My mouth was dry and my tongue felt like sandpaper. Beside La Oculta Lake rose a thin column of white smoke. I gave Noche a little kick with my heel and prepared to leave the woods in the first light of daybreak. I’d decided to take the Camino de la Virgen, the same way Los Músicos had gone, although not all the way on the road, but taking shortcuts and detours through the meadows. I remembered something my papá used to say: “What’s the safest place for a fly? On the flyswatter.” That’s why I decided to go where they’d gone. When we reached the gate by the water tank the mare wanted to turn left, to go back to Casablanca, but I obliged her to turn right, toward the danger. I soon left the road again and crossed a grove of coffee shrubs; from there I could get back out to the road, a little lower, without fear of being seen. I also wanted to be sure there was nobody posted on the road, waiting for me. It wasn’t very likely, since they didn’t operate that way, they prefer
red the cover of darkness, but it could happen, if their only aim was to finish me off. I hoped to reach the roadhouse before seven and catch the bus there for Medellín. There was no way I was going to go back to the farm to get my jeep, I didn’t dare. I didn’t want to see if Próspero was alive or dead either, or collect Gaspar’s body, to bury him. No better idea than the bus occurred to me, for now.
The trail was deserted and I arrived at the roadhouse before six, much earlier than I’d thought. It was still closed, and completely silent. I urged the mare into a trot and went as far as the gate to La Oculta. My heart started its accelerated palpitating again; my palms were sweating. The gate was open. They’d broken the chain with wire cutters or something like that. I realized those men had left their four-by-fours halfway up the hill, so I wouldn’t hear them coming. Had they all left by now or would they have gone back to La Oculta? Although I was dying to know how poor Próspero and his wife were, to see what state the burned-down house was in, to say goodbye to my dog, I was afraid to go back up to the place where it had all started, six or seven hours ago. In the air I could only catch a burnt smell, and I could see the column of white smoke, up above, on the lakeside.
I couldn’t stay there, a feeling of panic returned, I urged the mare into a gallop and passed the second roadhouse, La Reina, which belonged to the Restrepos, and kept on till La Pava, the Trujillos’ farm. Pedro, the foreman there, had known me for my whole life. As I approached the house I saw him in the corral, milking the cows. I almost burst into tears when I dismounted and walked over to him, but I held them back. I asked him if I could take a shower and leave the mare here, if he could unsaddle her and give her some food and water. I was speaking very nervously, agitated, but Pedro prudently asked me no questions. He offered me a glass of milk, and I drank it down in one gulp. Then I saw a hose and drank water without stopping, as if I’d just crossed a desert. It was as if I couldn’t sate my thirst. Finally we spoke. Pedro offered me a coffee and squirted a little fresh milk directly into the cup. It tasted glorious.
I didn’t want to tell him anything, but he probably guessed many things from my terrified, exhausted face. Pedro told me he’d heard a chainsaw in the middle of the night, up above, and nobody chops down trees at night, before dawn, and then an explosion and the smell of smoke, like from a house fire. I did nothing but nod my head and I think he understood, without my having to say a word. I asked him what time the bus came down from Palermo and he said around quarter or ten past seven. Did I want to send something to Medellín? I remained silent; my hands were shaking. I asked Pedro if he could lend me some money, and he went straight inside and came out with a twenty-thousand peso bill in his hand. He gave it to me without any questions.
“My pleasure, Doña Eva.”
Then I asked if the farm had a radiotelephone. He said no, that it was broken; that Don Horacio hadn’t wanted to have it repaired because the only thing it did was let people in town know when someone was at the farm. The Trujillos had also been subjected to pressure to sell. I realized that having phoned Pilar the day before had been a mistake. Even if there had been a radiotelephone, I realized I couldn’t have used it, because then they’d know where I was. Besides, who was I going to call? Who was going to take the risk of coming to get me? Pilar would, I knew Pilar would dare to come for me, she wasn’t afraid of anything, but I didn’t want her to take that risk. I had to get out of there on my own. The police? No, that would be worse. I couldn’t trust them. I looked at Pedro with fear, desperate, on the verge of tears, and I don’t know if he understood what I was thinking or not, if he could see the terror I felt written all over my face; I imagine he could. I was very confused, I hadn’t slept, I still felt like I was being chased, cornered, with no idea how to get to a safe place quickly, to Pilar’s place, or my mamá’s, or to my own home in Medellín, to the telephone to call Benjamín and cry and cry.
“Pedro, you know what they look like, don’t you?”
“Who?”
“Those ones.”
Pedro moved his head and eyes to say yes. The mere question bothered him, made him nervous. A few months earlier those same men had killed his brother; or they hadn’t killed him, but almost, or even worse: they’d shot him several times and left him for dead, lying in a ditch. A bullet had severed his spinal cord and now he was there, in a room in the back of the house, paralyzed.
“Those people are very evil, Doña Eva, be careful,” he said in a low voice.
“I know. Could you look inside the bus, when it arrives, and tell me before I get on? You never know if one of them might be on board. I’ll hide over there,” and I pointed to a bench behind a wall, on one side of the corral.
“Okay,” said Pedro.
The bus arrived at almost twenty past seven and was half empty. It was a red ladder bus that covered the Jericó-Palermo-Puente Iglesias-Fredonia-Medellín route. The bus driver said good morning to Pedro when he stopped. Pedro told him there was a passenger. He came back to the corral and told me none of them were on the bus. We shook hands; he had understood that something very serious was happening. I asked him to go up to La Oculta later, very carefully, to see if Próspero was all right, and to tell Rubiel that I’d left the mare with him. Pedro closed his eyes and lowered his head in agreement.
I got on and handed the only bill I had to the driver’s assistant, but he didn’t have any change. He said he’d give me my change later, when other passengers got on. I sat at the back, beside one of the ladder exits. An hour and a half to Fredonia; two hours to Medellín. I had time to think; I had time to cry; I had time for everything. Sitting in the bus, I sighed with relief, I was moving away from danger and in three and a half hours I would be home.
ANTONIO
There’s nothing strange about people falling in love. The strange thing is that there are some people who never fall out of love. That’s what Pilar’s like. If everyone was like her and Alberto, that would be the end of sin, of adultery, and all priests as well as most novelists would be out of a job. Pilar wouldn’t allow herself to fall out of love because then her life would fall over a cliff, lose all its meaning. She and Alberto are the way they are through and through, to their very core. In a certain way our love for and attachment to La Oculta is similar to Pilar’s love for Alberto. People love their farms the way they love their husbands or wives, an old love into which we’ve invested a lot of time and almost all our energy. We learned to love the place as children and teenagers with genuine, spontaneous happiness, love at first sight, in the childhood sunshine and the blue days (as Machado might have put it). But in spite of sometimes having reasons to stop loving it, we could not abandon it without feeling that at the same time we were betraying ourselves, renouncing our own selves, our most beloved attachments and hopes. Giving up a farm like La Oculta is like giving up someone we once believed was the love of our lives. What was the farm? A small fulfilled promise of what America was said to be and mostly was not: a place where you can get a piece of land if you work hard. What was love? Something you were going to receive forever, if you always gave it; somewhere you went to sow, to reap, and to die. Pilar still trusted those dreams that for her never shattered, the dream of a country and a place in that country, and the dream of love with Alberto, and her five children, what she most wanted. Selling the land was a betrayal as grave as if her own children had sold her into slavery.
I was living another American dream, farther north, without being completely convinced by its marvels; I had Jon and I had my hope of retiring to La Oculta one day, or at least to Jericó, even though my love was barren and childless. Eva, on the other hand, as ever in her life, was fickle. Not disloyal, and not unfaithful either. She simply did not get attached to things the way we did, not to people, or houses, or land, or anything. Just in the last ten years she’d changed apartments at least four times, because from one day to the next she’d get bored and decide to move to another neighborhood. She always got excited abo
ut starting a new life, in another place, with another love, with another landscape, without ever getting permanently attached to anything. She was the freest of all of us, the one who let herself get swept up by her impulses, which were like wind currents she was carried away by and couldn’t or didn’t want to resist. She hadn’t put down roots in any man or any land. Maybe she was more wary or weary from her experiences. In that sense, perhaps, she was the most deeply Ángel of all the Ángels.
Her last boyfriend, Santiago Caicedo, had lasted for quite a while, almost four years, and it was strange that they’d broken up, because I thought she’d seemed very happy with him. They’d met swimming at the Pablo Restrepo pool in Medellín, and water was the best element in which to meet Eva. Although they swam at the same pool for years they’d never coincided before, because Eva swam at midday, to get tanned and so that thanks to the sun and vitamin D, she’d never get osteoporosis, though she might get skin cancer. The widower Caicedo, however, swam there in the evenings. One day my sister hadn’t been able to go at noon and at seven they’d ended up swimming in the same lane. He was in his seventies, but kept pace with Eva doing breast stroke and was even faster than her at front crawl; no matter how hard she pushed herself she couldn’t keep up with him. That was the first thing she liked about the old man, his vigor. She asked him why he didn’t swim at twelve, so they could see each other again and she could have the challenge of beating him one day, but he said he’d soaked up so much sun in his youth that his skin couldn’t take one more ultraviolet ray, his dermatologist had categorically forbidden it. His skin had that blotchy wilted pallor of white people who’ve sunbathed too much in the tropics. When they finished swimming, he invited her out for dinner and in spite of his age, there was an undercurrent of empathy, something very strong between the two of them. Caicedo, for a start, reminded her very much of our father, Eva told me, because they had similar interests: classical music, films, history, and literature. Furthermore, he treated her with respect, without making fun of her questions or interests, and in that sense was better than my papá, who had always insisted that she should devote herself to the bakery instead of dreaming.