The Farm

by Hector Abad

  It wasn’t nostalgia for something lost; it was rather longing for something, for a house that exists. Since I don’t really have a steady job (I give private violin lessons, in the mornings, and my engagement with the orchestra is sporadic, when there are pieces that require many violinists), I can feel homesick at any time of year, and go. I also teach, but virtually, courses on music appreciation, theory, and harmony. I have them all set up, with well-chosen music as examples, practical exercises, and classes I can teach via Skype. That allows me to leave New York whenever I want and I take a 4-G device that gives me internet access at the farm, so I won’t neglect my duties during the trip and classes carry on. Meanwhile, the apprentice violinists get a break from me, and Jon gets a break from me, although when I’m away, he says, he doesn’t sleep well and stays up late almost every night.

  I read quite a lot, on paper and on screen, especially history and literature. Sometimes I also write poems here and there, but don’t publish them. I polish them up and hide them in my notebooks as if they were sins or odious secrets because what I like is traditional poetry: ten-line décimas, sonnets, madrigals…I’m so old-fashioned that there are days when I think that today’s poetry is also like today’s art: a sort of shapeless farce, all facile form and absence of art, skill, or willpower. Although a poet can’t actually work with willpower; one simply waits, and sometimes a poem arrives and sometimes it doesn’t, or to put it a better way, a poem almost never arrives and very seldom does the miracle of a theme, a tone, an internal music, and a voice all come together. Poems occur to me most of all when I’m walking on my own, and surrounded by a foreign language. One occurred to me in Japan, where I didn’t understand a single word while I walked among blossoming white cherry trees. One occurred to me in Hiddensee, an island in northern Germany, while around me everyone spoke German and I was looking for amber and pebbles on the Baltic beaches. One occurred to me in Norway, enraptured by the view of the fjords. If I’m alone and don’t understand anything that’s said, verses well up in my head, as if to combat verbal solitude. It can happen at La Oculta, if no one’s talking and I only hear the incomprehensible voices of animals, the mooing, singing, whistling, and screeching. I almost always come out with heptameters, octosyllables, or hendecasyllables, occasionally alexandrines. I’ve gone to all those places simply for Jon’s exhibitions, which have become more and more frequent since his invitation to DOCUMENTA. Thanks to Jon I’ve seen the whole world, and I’m very grateful to him, even if I’m still only attached to one single place in the world, even after seeing China, Europe, Egypt, Australia, and Japan. Sometimes, Jon smiles and asks me: “Do you want to come with me to Malaysia and Singapore or would you rather go to La Oculta by yourself?” Sometimes I go with him, sometimes I don’t.

  Jon, Jon Vacuo is his artistic name (and almost his real one, which is Pascuo), shows his recycled trash all over the globe. The galleries that sell his work are the top ones in Paris, Los Angeles, Berlin, Chicago, Milan, and right here in New York. We have a dear old friend, a ruined aristocrat who amid the ruins of his intelligence is still a very good writer, Heinrich von Berenberg, who we commission to write articles in praise of Jon’s work, and we pay him under the table, without anyone knowing. We ask him to employ the most tangled-up style possible. He takes great pains over them and gives us incomprehensible postmodern essays, that Jon polishes up, and the two of them laugh their heads off. The neo-allegory of the post-verisimilitude ran the title of Heinrich’s latest essay on Jon’s work, the first paragraph of which began: “The spatial indetermination of Vacuo’s objects, like electrons in an immense particle accelerator, allude to the encounter of Schrodinger’s cat and Fibonacci’s numbers in one of Turing’s machines. That which under the aspect of an extraordinary electronic die dispenses with chance to reach the discursive meridian of Being, penetrates the spectator’s neurons like a laser, exciting micro-particles of DNA, axons, and dendrites, until making sparks of illuminated coronas dance through the cerebellum, almost like an ancestral invitation in a rainforest fiesta of yagé.” Pretty, no? And signed by someone with a Von in his surname, much more convincing, we think, than if any old John Smith or Pepe Rodríguez had signed it. And much more so if the name is a German one, because many believe that only in German is it possible to think. Critics rave about what they don’t understand, think they’ve never read anything so sharp and profound about art. And the dealers and curators do too, and they’re the ones who make the most money and understand the least. And their clients are the same, millionaires coaxed with long and tangled words. Whenever they call Jon to ask for a price cut of five or ten thousand dollars, he says no, how could he. He pretends to be inaccessible and does very well selling his big display cabinets of trash ordered in compartments, in cells, arranged by color and shape. There are days when I think that what he makes as art isn’t so bad, or maybe I’m used to it, who knows. When he showed at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Medellín, Alberto Sierra, Julián Posada, and Ana Vélez wrote very nice essays about his work that were published in El Colombiano.

  He’s distinguished, tall, sinewy, handsome, very dignified, with the attractive contrast of his black skin, white hair, and goatee possibly even whiter than the hair on his head. It’s that neat beard that gives him a profound dignity, like a great African patriarch. He wears multicolored tunics that we have made in Liberia. When we met that night of my faux pas (a faux pas can be an impetus for love) his beard was still black, and I like it that while he’s been with me, it has gradually lightened to now being this pure white. He hasn’t minded that I’ve gone from having had jet-black curls, which were the least objectionable of my features, to gradually going bald at his side.

  Jon speaks very little, in aphorisms, like an oracle. In bed he tells me that he’s as much of an artist as Forrest Gump was an intellectual. He doesn’t even understand how he’s become such a respected artist, as they say, but he could care less about being respectable. One day when we were celebrating our anniversary, and had drunk quite a bit of champagne at a restaurant, he told me that when he’d saved up all the savings he wanted to have, we could buy a little house in Jericó and spend three months a year there. He had met an odd Jewish man that December, Doctor Ojalvo, the grandson of a Levantine merchant, and had loved the museum of contemporary art he’d managed to set up in the middle of town, a generous, respectable, and useful space. That same euphoric night he told me that perhaps we could donate his collection of contemporary American paintings and videos to the Jericó museum. I thought we’d bought the least bad stuff that had been produced over the last twenty years, what still held a distant aroma of true art. That’s what Jon told me that night, though he hasn’t repeated it since, and I hope he fulfills it one day, though the idea of waiting until old age to finally do what you want to do is one I’ve never liked. If I had enough money and could, I’d put the dream into practice today, right now, because while a person waits for dreams to come true, along comes illness or an accident and a person dies. Life is hanging by a little thread, and in the air are scissors that fly in the wind. La Oculta itself, though it seems eternal, has always been besieged by a thousand dangers; when it’s not civil wars or the crises, it’s crime or guerrillas; it’s miners, opium traffickers, or developers who offer millions for properties to turn into recreational ranches. They can’t see a green, virgin piece of land, because their eyes get injected with greed, and there can’t be a single gram of gold under the beauty of a landscape or they’ll want to rip up the whole landscape to appropriate those little nuggets of gold, or copper, or coltan.

  My biggest problem has always been uncertainty: not knowing what to do or what to think when many paths open up before me, and I’ve always had all paths open to me. To begin with I grew up in a world of women, and somehow the possibility of being like them in at least one aspect was offered to me: a taste for sex with men. But that’s the least of it, and it’s genetic. I’m sure I was born this way, I knew from very early
on. I don’t think, as Grandpa Josué believed, that I turned into a fag from being so coddled by my sisters. He tried everything possible and impossible to make me more of a man, more machito. When he took me to the farm he tried to get me to learn how to castrate bull calves, the way he did, pulling them down with a rope, and without anesthetic, and he also tried to get me to eat the testicles scrambled with eggs. “Eat, my boy, this’ll give you lots of virility, make you more manly.” I pretended to eat that repulsive offal, but I actually snuck it under the table to the dog surreptitiously, so my grandfather would think I’d taken his medicine. In any case, it wouldn’t have had any effect, for I felt myself to be what I was even before I started to grow any hairs or fuzz. And what I perceived didn’t make me feel good, because I’d always been taught that it was bad. I struggled against what I saw growing in myself, like a threat, like a mortal sin. To battle against it, the first thing that occurred to me was to start going to spiritual encounters and retreats organized by the fathers of Saint Gemma parish. I believed that with meditation and piety I could get rid of my impure thoughts and impure inclinations. We spent two or three days in silence in a house of spiritual practices on the outskirts of Medellín and I would kneel and beg God to please take this away from me, to take away this wretched attraction to men, to not let me feel enraptured by the other boys on the spiritual retreat.

  I confessed, I asked for advice, and Father Eusebio, my spiritual adviser, said that those tendencies could be controlled by willpower and by asking our Lord for lots of chastity and strength. He even put a hair shirt on me, to battle my fantasies, but it didn’t work. I would masturbate thinking about men and then cry in repentance. I took cold showers at three in the morning to chase away the erotic dreams filled with male members raining manna over me. There was a prayer group at the parish and they did things to us there to get us away from all kinds of unhealthy temptations. They told us that if we grew close to God and lived a secluded and prayerful life we could frighten away any phantom of impure thoughts. That we should control our gaze, our touch, our opportunities to sin. “One never, two not ever, three passable, four better,” was the recipe for company: never to be alone or in pairs. Father Eusebio gave me some prayer cards that served to push away any strangeness or aberration that could occur to me day or night. Sometimes I was capable of going for one or two weeks without sinning, but then I’d lapse again, I’d sink into abandon for a week, until I realized that there was nothing to be done, no matter how much I prayed or struggled what was inside was much stronger than me. It was like putting up with hunger, or thirst. A moment arrives when one simply has to eat or drink, because if not one dies. And I had to have sex, alone or in company, or I’d die. And so I stopped going to the retreats and I began resigning myself to being what I really was within myself. Only in the United States did I manage to replace guilt with pleasure, and even went to the opposite extreme, limitless madness. Balance and acceptance only came to me later, with analysis and with some meditation courses Jon made a lot of fun of, but which helped me to find something luminous, something I’m not going to spurn, something that is within me and that I think we all have inside ourselves, and those who don’t see it don’t because they haven’t looked.

  I think there are other things, however, that don’t come to us through our bloodlines, but which we choose in life. Beliefs, for example, which we choose from the bouquet of influences we receive, from what we hear and what we read, from friends or teachers. Religious and political beliefs. And that’s where things get complicated for me: Cobo was very left-wing, but at the same time very much a believer in all religious things. He himself had recommended the Saint Gemma fathers to me, and later a group of Jesuit Liberation Theologists, people who were very politicized and committed, although in matters of sex almost as closed-minded as the Legionaires of Christ or Opus Dei. Mamá was also quite into praying but without a speck of socialism; a believer in daily Mass, but a capitalist to the core, attached to all that one achieved through one’s own work, through individual effort. So politically I’ve never really known what to be, nor what to think, nor what to believe. Or rather: from Papá I received my doubts about the capitalist world and from Anita a belief in the individual, in merit, and in the economic reward and success that derive from individual talent. I think this is the luminous facet of capitalism, oblivious to its abusive or exploitative side. My Liberation Theologist friends said I was unable to break away from the egotistical bourgeois inside me, unable to work for the good of the community, for others, for my fellow man. But the best thing I saw in Cobo was his love for poor people, his compassion, and the best I saw in Anita was effort and tenacity, her solitary and individual struggle, when she was able to create a great bakery, starting from nothing, and kneading the dough with her own hands. She inherited nothing, was given nothing, she did it all herself, getting up very early every day to work. Nevertheless, I understand those who defend socialist ideas, just as, although I still believe in God (official religion disgusts me now), I also understand those who don’t believe, those who are agnostics or atheists. I’m a lukewarm believer, who is unable to share much with my fellows (my heart is not big enough to love everyone) and a guilty capitalist. More than that, there are days I wake up feeling socialist and would burn down a bank. A better way to put it would be to say that I live in uncertainty and insecurity.

  I’m a lukewarm person, and many despise me for that. Even when it comes to sex I’m lukewarm, I think, because on some nights of insomnia I think I like women a little bit, that I could leave Jon and have a child at last: we might say I have maternal yearnings, more than paternal, to put it in a totally queer way. There are days when I wake up longing to be a mother, and I would fertilize a woman if she’d let me raise my son, give him his bottle, change his diapers and bathe him, dress him up, powder his little bum, put cream on if he gets diaper rash, choose his clothes, sing him lullabies, bundle him up if he gets cold, dandle him in water if he’s too hot, smother him with kisses, all the things that men, who are very macho, deprive themselves of. I love all that, just as I would have loved to play with dolls, as my sisters did, for a doll is much prettier and more fun, with hair, eyes that open and close, with squawks, than a wretched little red car that had nothing but wheels; better to play with something that resembled an animate being than with a stupid little machine that did nothing but roll along a plastic strip. But anyway, in this house I’m also the woman: I take care of the shopping, the cooking, cleaning the apartment, while Jon makes most of the money. At least in traditional families in the old days, this was the division of labor. And I make a bit of music, compose easy salon pieces, little tunes for popular singers, also like a nineteenth-century woman. And I take notes for my family history, like an old maiden aunt. My nephews call me uncle in public, but I know they laugh at me among themselves and call me Auntie Toña, because they say I’m affected, though I don’t notice it. Damned kids, if they carry on I’ll disinherit the bunch of them, I tell them when I see them, and they laugh at me even more.

  EVA

  The bus, with its smell of gasoline and overheating engine, drove slowly down toward the River Cauca, sometimes stopping to pick up a campesino who raised a hand or waved a hat on the side of the highway, with a sack of coffee or bunches of plantains. Behind us a wake of dust, on both sides a line of trees: ceibas, pisquines, hundred-year-old samans, and the view of the Cauca, intermittently, on the right, up ahead. Sometimes from the window, I would manage to see the orange crops on the other side, in the undivided part of the old Túnez estate. The next stop – if no more passengers flagged the bus down from the side of the road – would be Puente Iglesias, before crossing the river and starting the ascent toward Marsella, Fredonia, and Cerro Bravo.

  When we got to Puente Iglesias, I looked distrustfully toward the shop where the buses always stop, and my heart bolted again. Two Toyota pickup trucks with tinted glass were parked in front of the refreshment window where they sold be
er, fruit drinks, and fish cakes. I had never seen their faces, but it had to be them. Those guys (one hard, sour-faced; the other scabby, with childish features) were sitting at a small table, drinking beer with an army lieutenant and two soldiers. Beside the truck were more young men, in dark sunglasses, armed. The ones around the table were talking animatedly, without paying much attention to the bus or the passengers, but I knew that if they saw me and recognized me they’d be quite capable of shooting me right there, in front of everybody. And if later someone asked how I’d been killed and who by, nobody would have seen anything, not the soldiers, and much less the lieutenant, or the bus driver, the conductor, the passengers, or the owner of the shop; some out of complicity, others out of fear. If they were already drinking at eight in the morning, they were definitely going to stay there, getting drunk, until the afternoon, so trying to cross the bridge, passing in front of them, was impossible. After thinking for a moment I decided that it would be best to retrace my steps and go seek help at the Toros’ farm, which wasn’t very far away. Maybe they’d lend me a horse there to go up to Jericó along the trails, or the farm manager might even drive me up to town on a motorcycle, if he had a motorcycle.

  I got off the bus, as stealthily as a cat, half covering my face with the poncho and pretending to head for the washrooms, which were behind the bar under a purple, flowering bougainvillea. When I got to the washrooms I turned the opposite way, crossed the dirt road behind the bus, and began to climb up the same slope we’d just driven down, almost running. As soon as I saw a break in the fence on the right I ducked under it and kept going up, feeling very upset, across a pasture between tall trees, black rocks, and Brahman steers who watched me pass indifferently, chewing their cud, lying under the trees in the shade. I was sweating again, from head to toe, and didn’t dare look behind me. I had to get as far away as possible. I ran. I ran until I could barely breathe and began to walk. I got a fright when the bus honked its horn twice to announce it was leaving. Maybe they were calling me, when they saw I hadn’t come back. I imagined them knocking on and opening the washroom door; I could almost smell the rank urine; I imagined the driver shrugging, the joy of the conductor who would get to pocket the change from the bill I’d given him. I heard the engine start up and another honk of the horn, and then the accelerator. I ducked down behind a rock and saw the bus head onto and slowly over the hanging bridge. The pickup trucks remained where they were parked beside the army checkpoint. The table where the men were drinking wasn’t visible from there. I was angry with myself; I thought I should have stayed on the bus, holding myself together, slumped down and pretending to sleep, but it’s hard to await death with eyes closed. Now I was there, near them, near the danger, while the bus went away toward Fredonia, around the bends, toward Medellín and safety.