by Hector Abad
But the fire, I thought later, and may God forgive me, also freed us of old junk: our great-grandparents’ cowhide chairs (which Toño wouldn’t let me give away), hard as rocks, the termite-eaten stools, the uneven tables, wooden beams so old they threatened to split and fall in on us from one moment to the next, a roof full of leaks and holes. And thanks to the insurance money, which I held on to for months, more than a year, before embarking on the repairs, we remade the house almost exactly the same but different and better. I planned everything very carefully, slowly, with experts, and so we were able to build up the house again, newer and safer, with the ceilings higher, with more air and more light and more views in all directions, though in the same H-shape as before, with more bathrooms and more rooms, respecting the old structure, but modernizing it all. New on top of old, which is the only way to keep these things from falling down entirely. And it was me who took that responsibility on my shoulders, though Mamá also helped with ideas, and even with a bit of money that she gave us from the bakery. Toño was in the United States, and he contributed some of his savings. Eva only said that she’d rather sell it and wasn’t going to put a single centavo toward it. She was in bad shape; she was very badly affected, crazed. She never got entirely better, not even when Benji came back from Europe from his semester at school in Berlin.
She locked herself up in her apartment, stopped going to the bakery for a month. She spent the time shivering at home, paranoid, thinking every motorcycle, every sound, every time the elevator went up, was a group of killers coming back for her. She lived through what had happened to her over and over again in her head, and was furious at the whole world, at Colombia, country of shit, she said, with Antioquia, the heart of the shit country, she said.
Because of her mental state, at that same time we had to sell the bakery, because everything was in crisis and because Eva didn’t want to go on working there. Either we sell the bakery or we sell the farm, said Eva. And we were left with no choice but to listen to her. Mamá had to give in, because she couldn’t run the bakery on her own anymore, as it had become a big important business, with various branches in different neighborhoods of Medellín. Because Eva was depressed, and fed up with bread and accounts, it had to be sold. Eva spent a few years going back and forth to Europe, spending all the money from the sale of the bakery.
From the very moment I saw the burnt-out shell of La Oculta, I got a fever, a rage, an impulse, irresistible urges to reconstruct the house, and two years later I had it looking like before, better than before. Later Toño and Eva and Benjamín, and even some of my own kids, especially Manuela, and Mamá accused me of spending a lot of money, of bankrupting everyone for this damned farm, of having spent not just the insurance money but all three of our savings, and part of the bakery money, on improving the house, on making it much prettier and more comfortable than before the fire.
But what’s so sad about the portrait of our great-grandparents being burnt? It’s not like it had been painted by Cano or Roda. Even Jon said it was terrible and made our great-grandparents look ugly. So what if the old stone mortar shattered in the heat? Nobody used it anymore anyway, as no one’s silly enough to grind corn by hand in this day and age. So what if the wood stove from the kitchen was lost? Thank goodness, when even trying to light it was a torment, and with all the smoke it leaked it’s more to blame for my bronchitis and lung ailments than cigarettes are. So what if the saddles and old riding gear got burnt, the leather reins, the sombreros, the rough, old sheets, the hard beds, the terrible mattresses, the horsehair cushions? Thank goodness, thank goodness, thank goodness: it was long past time to replace all that uncomfortable old junk. Stupid nostalgia for a more difficult past, idealized because people don’t know how tough it really was.
They tell me I’m the most antiquated of the siblings, but let’s just see, deep down I’m the most modern, the one who doesn’t look to the past, like Toño, or to the nonexistent future, which is over for us or ending, like Eva. I’m the one who lives in the present, here and now, in these few moments of life left to us, and it’s best to live them without crying, in a beautiful, bright, new house, in a house rebuilt with goodwill, with new toilets and showers, finally with hot water, because we never had anything but cold water here, to build character, as Grandpa Josué used to say, with comfortable beds and decent mattresses, with white towels that dry properly, like in good hotels, without so much useless junk, and having done it all with the same stubbornness that Toño says the original settlers of these lands must have had, without shrieking at cold embers or at the debris of that accursed fire. Not letting ourselves be intimidated, or scared, we’d send Los Músicos packing, or bribe them without anyone knowing, paying their wretched protection money without telling my brother or sister, who get scandalized by everything and make a big fuss of their indignation, to see if they’ll leave us alive and not burn down the house again. Those who stay quiet and defeated are soft, and in this life only those who dare get anywhere. It’s not that I’m brave, far from it, I’m more cowardly than my siblings, but this is my function in life, maybe because I’m the eldest, as any actor gets assigned a role in a comedy, a tragedy, or a soap opera, and well, I’ve played my part, as if I were what I’m not: a courageous woman.
ANTONIO
The few dogs in the remote village began to bark a long time before the first settlers of the convoy arrived along the one and only cobbled street. They came from very far away, from different towns in Antioquia (from the old towns to the new ones), and they were happy to arrive.
The first thing they heard in the village, from afar, was something that sounded like the buzzing of a swarm of bumblebees, and then a clearer tumult of voices, shouts, and howling of dogs that were also arriving and would growl and snap at the local dogs, neighing, mooing, and the sound of iron horseshoes and unshod hoofs. Later they began to hear the softer sounds of bare feet and rope-soled sandals, which were like a beat, a pulse of footsteps of women and children, the sound of walking, which is what humankind has been doing since the beginning of the world, since the fantastic footprints of Laetoli from thirty-five-thousand centuries ago: walking from one place to another, far, very far, escaping a volcano or an enemy, with a dream of finding a better land, even if no one has promised us that, just our own imagination, the beautiful illusion of a new land, of good land where food springs forth and where we won’t die of hunger, or lava, or fire, or beasts, and that’s so far away that not even our enemy tribe’s evil intentions can reach us there.
In the village there was great excitement and all the inhabitants – very few so far, two or three hundred souls who nobody had ever counted – thronged the plaza awaiting the new arrivals. A trio (tiple, guitar, and a singer with maracas) sang songs to make the time pass more quickly, to feign sadness and feign happiness. The girls were hoping for suitors; the single men, for potential wives; the lonely were hoping for friends. Even the priest, Father Naranjito, was anxiously hoping for a cook or a substitute niece to make his celibate work of shepherding souls easier and less lonely.
A postal rider, on his way to Carmanta, had announced early that morning that the group would arrive around midday, if they made good time up the last rise from the tropical lowlands without any mishaps, along the path that snaked up the slope to Palocabildo. It was a tortuous and steep ascent from 600 meters above sea level at the river’s edge, to more than 2,000 in the village. The postman, before carrying on south, on a fresh horse, said that he’d left them at dawn where they’d camped the previous night on the west bank of the Cauca. As he stopped for a moment to drink a coffee, he’d learned that they were getting up very early to commit to the final climb. He said he’d seen them sleeping on the heap of bundles that shielded them from the night winds; that some sleepless ones were mending horse blankets, halters, and girths. They’d said the worst problem was the plague of mosquitos that had attacked them from sundown until almost midnight, but when he reached them, under clear moo
nlight, the plague had already passed. There was a group of children with lots of bites on their faces and arms, with a bit of fever, but sleeping together serenely, like little angels. That’s what he’d said, with the set phrases learned by heart that humble people always use, and that, more often than not, are the most apt.
In any event, the arrival of almost two hundred people, a long and tired procession of mules, oxen, dogs, horses, saddlebags full of piglets and hens, cows, calves, and many children, men, and women, some on horseback, some on foot, the poorest barefoot and others in espadrilles, the richest in riding boots, was the most important thing to happen in the town since it was founded. It might be said that this was its second foundation, and maybe the real one. Over the following months other settlers would keep arriving, but more gradually, in fives or sixes, sometimes just a married couple hiding out, escaping from their family’s disapproval, from the patriarchal curse depriving them of their inheritance, sometimes a dozen adventurers hungry for new experiences, some lively fellow from the capital wanting to buy cheap already cleared land from the naïve ones, other times lone men with wicked faces, who offered to work as lumberjacks, hated questions, and preferred not to talk to anybody, but sawed up a cedar tree in two days, from sunup to sundown, into perfect boards, unleashing all their contained fury against the innocent wood.
Those who arrived that day might have been as many as the original settlers, who, according to a quick headcount by the priest the previous week, were no more than two hundred and fifty, for a hundred and thirty had shown up for Mass on Sunday and that was not including the children, the sleepyheads, the sick, and those who’d stayed out in the countryside. The town was still barely a town, more like a disorderly camp. There were no more than seventy houses – though calling them houses was flattery dictated by optimism – most of them modest, just huts with wooden walls, dirt floors, and thatch roofs, and around what was planned to be the main square, for the moment, barely four constructions, two of them solid and complete and two yet to be finished.
Paradoxically, the two most important were the ones not yet completed: a wattle-and-daub chapel, with a half-finished roof, also palm thatch, that sooner or later would become the church, and whose primary function – apart from daily masses – was to bring everyone together at the same time; and the second, on the corner of the adjoining block, a small café, which also served as a bar, a place for conversation and, in the back room, a brothel (with just one loose woman, old and outlandish, foul-mouthed Margot, whose official task was waiting tables). It was odd that the priest and prostitute had arrived on the same day in the village and from the same town; but at least in that day and age, both were complementary trades, for, as a writer said, they pursued the same aim: “The church liberated man from his desolation for a few moments, and the same thing happened in the brothel.” Or, as a campesino would have put it more plainly, in one house we sin and in the other we are forgiven, or in one we relieve our bodies and in the other they cure our souls. The two completed constructions on the future plaza were two impressive houses, with garden walls and clay-tiled roofs, facing the chapel: those of the two founding fathers of the town, Echeverri and Santamaría, who’d had the outrageous idea of populating their forests with a strange and newfangled system for Antioquia: not the dominion of single men, conquest, extermination, and servitude, but egalitarian discourse, settling families and donating pieces of land.
In reality, to understand the square it still had to be imagined. The future plaza was a field donated by Santiago Santamaría, just a cleared square, outlined as well as it could be by a shallow irrigation ditch, two hundred and fifty yards a side. The plaza wasn’t level, for there were no flat surfaces in these mountains, but the plot was the gentlest slope that Don Santiago had found in the zone. It also had the advantage of being well supplied with clean water by a couple of streams and little rivers that came down from springs up in the unspoiled mountain. Everything was so steep in those places, they said if you tied a rooster up by the leg he’d end up hanging. Santamaría himself had traced out the plaza, some ten years earlier, alongside his friend, Don Gabriel Echeverri. After dismounting and finishing the quadrangular outline, which they’d staked out with a length of rope and then marked with a furrow dug with a large hoe, they’d walked around the whole perimeter ringing a little bell, accompanied by ten or twenty peons, who’d helped them with the chore, and a few women who accompanied them praying and singing. “We’re founding a town,” they said quietly and without any solemnity.
In the center of the dreamed-up plaza they’d left standing a few fine trees that had been there in the middle of the woods: two ceibas, a romerón pine tree, a comino, and two white guayacans. The town was so precarious that at the arrival of the new settlers there were still one or two black-eared white milk cows grazing there, as if the plaza were still a farm. It was an invisible town, which had nevertheless already been baptized twice, first as the Village of Piedras and later as Felicina, but actually, as a future settlement, it only existed in some of its inhabitants’ heads. With the arrival of the new settlers it seemed that it could finally be called a town because it had the most important thing: living people, flesh, muscles, children, tears, blood, bones, words, ingenuity, the principle material of any settlement. Later would come the school, the theater, the bar, the restaurant, the seminary, the convent, the asylum, the barbershop, the boardinghouse, the courthouse, the town hall, the cemetery…
Along with Echeverri’s grandson, Gabriel, an eminent person had also arrived, a Swedish nobleman called Carlos Segismundo von Greiff, who was going to be in charge of the precise layout of the streets. He had experience, for just eight years earlier, in 1853, he’d drawn the map of a new town, San Juan de los Andes, for Don Pedro Antonio Restrepo Escovar, the founder, in the township of Soledad, not too far from there. They called this fine foreigner Míster Grey, and he was a somewhat elderly person by then, with his red beard already turned white, but tall and steady, as straight as a broomstick in spite of his years; he was on his way to the mines in the south, to visit his British friends, but at the request of Restrepo, who was a very good friend of Don Santiago Santamaría, he was going to be so kind as to pause in the town long enough to draw up a freehand map, after some measurements he would take with his instruments, and suggest the best plan for the streets and blocks, designing the checkerboard out from the square chosen for the plaza. Míster Grey, who was a geographer and surveyor, very much liked the climate of the place and the location of the town, and he praised the founders’ good taste with his marked foreign accent. One of his sons was with him as well, Bogislao, who would become the grandfather of León de Greiff, who would sing of Bolombolo, his “off-the-map locality,” more than half a century after these times.
The two grand houses of the future plaza, that of Don Santiago Santamaría (great-grandson of David, converso born on the island of Curaçao) and that of Don Gabriel Echeverri (son of Gabriel the elder, of Basque origin), had been built side by side, the first, some twenty years earlier, and the second, twelve. The first, to serve as an inn and post house, for the mail arrived there, on the abrupt and terrible old trail. And the second to serve as a warehouse and granary. Right there they began renting out horses, selling hay and sugarcane for pack animals, and meals and beds (complete with fleas and ticks) for travelers. The two big houses were stationed on the roadside of the infamous stretch from Medellín that carried on south, so bad and impassable that not even Von Humboldt himself had dared to take it. Both houses had been, successively and sometimes at the same time, hostel, post stop, stables, granary, and roadside inn for the mule drivers who came and went with provisions from Medellín and Fredonia to Caramanta, Marmato, and Riosucio. Both, without having planned it, were eventually to be the origin of the village, alongside a few peons who kept the stretch of road half open, and slept in shacks nearby. Don Gabriel’s house, the second to be built, was not only the larger, but also the better preserved. It
was two stories high and had fired clay roof tiles, brought from the Guayabal brickworks, on the way out of Medellín, in several mule trains. Right there beside the front door, they had lit a large fire and welcomed the new arrivals with the smell of sancocho, the local stew (which would be served after the thanksgiving Mass). The pot of broth boiled and bubbled over the crackling flame of the dry wood, giving off an aroma that sharpened their hunger. The sancocho was the same thick soup as ever, the traditional meat and vegetable stew that all cultures in the world have invented after discovering fire and making resistant containers: boiling everything the earth offers in salted water.
In the immense pot a huge wooden spoon stirred the chunks of meat and vegetables, boiled over a slow fire: cabbage, cassava, corn on the cob, ripe and green plantain, carrots, potatoes, arracacha, which were added in turn depending on how long each ingredient needed to cook to become tender but not fall apart. A bowl of diced chili peppers and cilantro on the side, because not everyone likes cilantro or spicy food. On top of the embers as they burned down, beside the sancocho fire, on a flat earthenware pan, they were grilling arepas de mote, that is, corn cakes of ground maize that had been soaked with ash. The recent arrivals – upon emerging from Mass – brought over their plates or little clay pots and received an abundant serving. None could miss out on a piece of pork loin or fillet of beef. Each would also be given a large, round, crispy arepa. Don Santiago had donated a steer and Don Gabriel a hog for the celebration; the rest of the inhabitants had all contributed ingredients to the stew. Each would also receive, to drink, gourds full of aguapanela cut with sour orange juice, ideal for giving a boost of energy and quenching thirst. Jericó’s panela, unrefined sugarcane rock, was the best and had been a gift of the Tejada family for the fête; they had a sugar mill down in the tropical lowlands, an aromatic mill that drove noses crazy from afar, when they began to boil the sugarcane juice and the air filled with the sweetest perfume in existence. If the serving of sancocho didn’t sate their hunger, or the aguapanela their thirst, they could go back for second helpings as often as they wished. And many did go back for more, some twice or even three times. When everyone was as full as they could get, Gregorio Máximo Abad, one of the young men just arrived from El Retiro, spoke for all the new settlers and, looking Don Santiago in the eyes, said simply and profoundly: “The feast was good, Don Santiago; next year we’ll invite everyone to a meal in Jericó.”