by Hector Abad
PILAR
Alberto is lying down in our bedroom with a toothache. His teeth are very bad, poor guy, but he never complains. He could be feeling the sharpest pain and his face would never show it; he’s like a horse, in that no matter how much something hurts you can never tell by the expression, or at least I can never recognize a look of pain on a horse’s face; horses might be still or agitated, might lose their appetite, and Alberto’s the same, he might stay in bed and not eat, but he doesn’t moan, doesn’t say anything, or put on a long face, is always serene, like a saint.
We went to Medellín the other day to see the dentist, Jaime Andrés, who went to school with my brother, a lovely guy. Jaime said he’d have to perform an operation to replace the front teeth and put some little screws in the incisors, directly into the jawbone, so they wouldn’t fall out again. And he also had to put a crown on the left side. Although he barely charges us for the work, just for the materials, the titanium screws, the gold for the crown, the anesthetic, the implants, it’s going to cost us close to eight million pesos. We don’t have it at the moment and I called each of our children, one after the other, to see if they could help us. Every son and every daughter is different. I love them all as much as each other, the same quantity of love, but I’m not going to say how I love each of them, the quality or tenderness of my love. What hurt most was what Manuela said: “The best thing to do would be to have them all out, once and for all, and for him to get dentures; you can’t be spending so much money on dental surgery every year. What does it matter at this stage.” At this stage! I’m never going to forget that. It cut me to my soul, seemed cruel, as if we were going to die tomorrow, as if anyone might not die tomorrow, with teeth or without them. Lucas said he was going to talk it over with Débora, his wife, to see how much they could give us. I hope he doesn’t forget. Lorenzo has no money, he can barely make ends meet at the end of each month. Florencia isn’t working, but said she’d take something out of her investments, each week, to help me out as much as she could bit by bit. She’s very big-hearted, Flor, and her husband is generous and discreet. Simón is in Barcelona on a grant that he won and I better not even ask him, because from so far away it’s very difficult for him to help out. Each child is the way they are, you see. Manuela says horrible things, but one day shows up with five million pesos in her hand and doesn’t say a word to us, leaves them in an envelope on the bedside table. Alberto’s toothache hurts me. We aren’t that old yet: I’m sixty-four and he’s sixty-eight. We’re still in the youth of old age, as someone I don’t know once said, one of those writers that Toño and Eva read. I don’t read much and I read slowly because I take drops that make me sleepy. Ten little drops that dull my senses and knock me out, but if not for those blessed drops, I wouldn’t sleep, and not sleeping is the worst, because then I really would end up crazy. Alberto and I are sometimes three years apart, sometimes four, depending on the month of the year.
Alberto and I had no experience when we got married. I was the last person to get married the way my grandmother got married, at the beginning of the last century, or like my mamá, like my aunts: without knowing anything about anything. Once my Aunt Ester told me that she, who was married for five years and had two children, had never known a man. That is, never in her life had she seen a naked man. Her husband was murdered very early on, by the Conservative death squads in the Valley, because he was a Liberal. They made love, of course, but only at night, with the curtains closed, in complete darkness. She felt, but didn’t see; they never looked at each other without clothes on. Actually, something had changed when I married Alberto. At least it didn’t have to be so dark, and we looked at each other happily, we looked. We looked and looked. And Alberto said to me as he looked at me: “Keep still, I want to memorize you all at once and forever.”
It seems to me that a honeymoon is much more exciting for a couple of virgins than for couples today, who’ve already done everything before they get married and have more experience than the bohemian singers, actresses, and poets of a century ago; or those who called themselves singers, actresses, and poets. You know what I mean. To get married the way Alberto and I did – without having ever done it – was more exciting, and also more complicated. To begin with, the normal thing was to spend an hour in the bathroom, getting dolled up, before going out into the bedroom the first night. I did: I bathed, put on all the perfumes I had, one here, another there, and finally came out in a long nightie and wrapped in a silk dressing gown, like a dessert, more decorated than the wedding cake. The only thing that Doña Helena had told Alberto, preparing him for the first night, was a shy phrase:
“My son, take a little Vaseline.”
But he didn’t bring any or understand what it might be for. I, although full of emotions and expectations, was rigid and scared; no one had told me anything, and I hadn’t asked. Since I was so clear about what I wanted, they thought I knew everything when I knew nothing. I lay down face up, with my legs together, as stiff as a board. When I came into the room I’d seen Alberto’s pajama bottoms, raised like a tent in the middle, a pole straining against the cloth. He was ready, and that made me feel very happy, very lucky; but I didn’t really know how things were, or what was going to happen, or if it was going to hurt or not. Since he was a virgin too, and without any experience, he didn’t know where to put it. His friends had invited him to go with them to hookers, but he’d never wanted to. Alberto was going to be a priest, as I said, and although it had never occurred to me to be a nun, when it came to sex I was a novice.
We were at a borrowed farm, in Sabaneta. It belonged to the Saldarriaga family, the owners of Pintuco, the paint factory. It was the most elegant finca there was near Medellín in those days; we had thought of going to La Oculta for our honeymoon, but back then getting to La Oculta was a very long trip, first by jeep and then on horseback, a five-hour journey; you couldn’t drive up to the house, so we gave up that idea. Alberto had Plittway pajamas, an expensive brand, pale yellow, almost transparent, like silk. We both had a different pair of pajamas for each night of our honeymoon. His were very elegant and expensive, long pants and shirts with long sleeves. My nighties were pretty, but more ordinary, because there was no extra money for luxuries at my house.
The first night we couldn’t do anything, he didn’t know the geography, and I wasn’t about to show him the way, no, and I didn’t really know the terrain that well either. We took off our pajamas, and I opened my legs a tiny bit, but not much, trembling like a little bird, I don’t know whether from emotion or fright; he moved a bit on top of me, but finally lost heart. We kissed and that was it. And we looked at each other, and looked. It was the first time in my life that I slept in the nude and, of course, in the morning I woke up with a cold and a sore throat. Alberto went to the pharmacy and bought me some lozenges, on his way out of Mass in Sabaneta. In the morning, when he got up to go to the bathroom, I saw his hairy back and bum. My papá didn’t have hair on his bum or his back; much less Toño, because he’s completely hairless, like an Indian. Alberto looked like a bear to me, I didn’t know men were like that, hairy all over, and I was terrified.
After the first night in Sabaneta we were going to San Andrés, so at midday we went to the airport. On the island it was just as difficult; we couldn’t get it together even once all week. Alberto did persevere, on top of me, but I wasn’t much help, rigid, full of desire but also fear, with my legs barely apart, and since he was very considerate, he didn’t dare push my legs open, to really get inside me. We seemed like two idiots, frankly. When we got back from San Andrés I did nothing but cry because we hadn’t been able to do it and I didn’t know who to tell. The normal thing would have been to tell Eva, or Mamá, but I felt strange with them. I had always felt closer to my papá than to anyone else in the world; I had complete, absolute trust in him. He was a friendly, discreet, precise person. Also, my father was a doctor, so he had to know more about that than my mamá, so I told him. Papá smiled, th
en he looked serious and took Alberto into his study and the two of them spoke alone for a while; he explained a few things, I don’t really know what he said to him. And he sent us to see Dr. César Villegas, a friend of his, downtown, and Alberto went in alone again. Later he told me that the doctor had explained angrily, mockingly, and almost contemptuously how it was done. He said he showed him some plastic models of a penis and vagina that he kept hidden in a drawer. That was how we both finally, at the same time, lost our blasted virginity, and got out of that one.
He began to buy a magazine called Lux, which supposedly gave tips on eroticism, and so, gradually, we began to get going. It took a long time before I had an orgasm; well, to tell the truth, my first pregnancy and baby, Lucas, came before I did. For some years sex was a mechanical, quick thing. Later it got a lot better; we had and still have – because we’re still husband and wife in the full sense of the words – a rich and complete life, in that aspect as well, in spite of our years.
ANTONIO
One thing I loved about the farm was the horses. Before I devoted myself entirely to music there was a time when I thought I might study veterinary medicine. Actually, what I wanted to study was equine medicine, horses, just horses. But to get there you’d have to see dogs, cats, rabbits, cows, canaries, bees, and all that bored me. When I was four or five years old, I was frightened of horses, and terrified of riding them; if Grandpa Josué or my papá forced me to ride, I’d cry like crazy and have convulsive attacks of terror, trembling and screaming, with tears and slobber. Thanks to Eva I lost my fear and finally learned to ride. She let me ride with her in her saddle, and held on to me, and explained everything to me slowly, you move the reins like this, your heels like this, until I gradually lost my fear of them, and learned. Now, when I go to the farm, what I most enjoy, aside from playing the violin in the corridor facing the lake, is riding the old La Oculta horses, at least the gentle mares, the trotters less than the pacers.
I liked the story of our horses at the farm, which were nothing out of this world, they weren’t horses from millionaire breeders or mafiosos, but they were our own horses. They were like another family who we watched reproduce and die two or three times in our lifetimes, because horses live for about twenty-eight years, at most thirty, thirty-five in rare cases, no more. So we’d all seen our own colts or fillies being born, we’d seen our mares give birth, and they were the great-granddaughters of Grandpa Josué’s mares. We’d witnessed, as well, the retirement of horses, because a moment always arrived when they got to be put out to pasture. We didn’t sell old horses at the farm, or send them to the butcher’s to be made into sausages, but retired them when they got to be more or less twenty-five or twenty-eight years old, if they hadn’t died before that. Retiring them meant setting them free and not riding them again and letting them die of old age. Furia, a horse who’d been my grandfather’s and then my father’s, spent the last four years of his life in the pastures grazing placidly, old, fat, and serene, until one dawn we found him lying under a tree, dead. And the same with the rest of them: Toquetoque, Patasblancas, Horizonte, La Silga, Terremoto, Tarde, Día, Misterio…all those we’ve retired.
We inherited the mares and stallions, just as people inherit riding gear and farm implements, or as land, furniture, and houses are passed down. Grandpa Josué said that the horses of La Oculta were from a good breed: gentle and lively at once, often gray duns that end up white, every couple of generations a sorrel. Our animals didn’t have weak hoofs and weren’t skittish: they were reliable for long mountain rides on the edge of steep precipices, strong enough to cross torrential rivers without getting spooked, had good teeth, were obedient to the heel and resistant to tropical diseases. In recent years, the same trainer has broken them all in, Egidio, the foreman of La Inés, who is very good at it. The most important thing is that the mares conserve their fine, quick, almost imperceptible steps, which makes long journeys in the saddle comfortable, for one sits almost still, without any battering of bums, and this is priceless on day- and year-long rides, up and down slopes.
Grandpa Josué used to say that our Creole Ángel horses needed to breed with an Arabian or Spanish or Lusitanian (but never, ever an English thoroughbred or French dray) stallion, once every seven generations, to renew their fine appearance, to regain the size, intelligence, and good disposition that can get lost in these badlands with the passage of time. Also to moderate the lascivious appetite of the males (the best-looking stallion was always left uncastrated, as a stud, enclosed in a stable on the farm) that drove them crazy from the time they were colts, but without losing the gentleness of the old paso fino, which had been achieved with so much effort, with so many pondered and discussed crossbreedings; so the males born of the renovated cross had to be sold or castrated, and the mares had to be mounted (for one time only a rougher ride, but more jaunty) by paso fino stallions from another Creole ranch, from the stables of the Garcés family in Jericó, or from the Peláez family at El Retiro, who had the best paso fino horse stock in Antioquia, aside from the mafiosos (who had sublime horses on the strength of their checkbooks and threats), and knew a lot more about this than the Ángels, of course, and even more than the Uribes and the Ochoas. Of course, to the Peláezes this thing of mixing in a Spanish horse every once in a while was not just a trick, but also heresy. The Peláez family is conservative, in this and other matters, and very lazy, but at least they were well-spoken, and not bandits; decent people with whom you could speak the truth, and straightforward: if they offered you a Vitral yearling they weren’t going to con you, like the mafiosos, who always cheated.
Grandpa Josué said that everything he knew about horses he’d learned from his elders, and this equine eugenics also applied to humans, as he maintained that they themselves, his ancestors, also had a theory that in the Ángel family once a century they also had to inject Levantine or Mediterranean blood, Moorish or Semite, Portuguese, Greek or Italian, so that in the beneficial melting pot of the local races – Black, Indian, mestizos – what had crossed the sea with the hopes of a new world would not be entirely lost, with all their utopian ideals. I don’t believe in this nonsense about races, maybe not even in horses, much less in human beings, but that’s what our grandfather said, and I can’t forget it much as I wish I could. Of course with dogs, horses, and cows one can look for certain characteristics and discard others, but human virtues and defects are so varied, and are less of the body than the spirit, so transferring the rearing of animals to the raising of children was an abuse of the theories of the human race. That was what had driven mad a nation as intelligent and ponderous as the German people, who out of their love for purebred dogs and horses had extrapolated the issue to people, and using absurd eugenics had divested themselves of genetic variety and richness, which is what had made marvels in other lands, and the best example of this is in the new world, in the north and the south, where we are no more but no less than anybody else, as the first of our ancestors who came to these, for him, distant lands said, and where we are, or aspire to be, an amber tone, a beautiful color, the color of mixed races and bastards, and what else are Colombians but mestizos, zambos, mulattos, and bastards?
EVA
He had a motorcycle and I came to think there was no better man in Medellín than this boy; I fell madly in love, for at least two years. His name was Jacobo, like my papá, but we called him Jackie. He was Jewish, Jackie Bernstein. He told me Bernstein meant amber in German, burnt stone, and his skin was a perfect amber color, because thanks to his motorcycle, a capricious old wreck, a Ducati racing bike from Italy, he was always tanned. He also wore a pair of killer Ray-Bans. My father had expressly forbidden us from ever getting on a motorbike, he said we could do whatever we wanted except ride on motorcycles, because motorbikes were more dangerous than revolvers, he said. So I had to arrange to meet him far away from the house in order to ride on Jackie’s bike. Back then no one wore helmets; they weren’t mandatory, and I never thought I could get ki
lled; the only thing I was frightened of was running into someone from my family, who would tell my papá they’d seen me on a motorbike. I tied my hair up in a ponytail so my messy hair wouldn’t give me away. When I got home I’d smooth out my hair with my hands and put it back up in a very tight ponytail.
I sometimes got excited when I went horseback riding at La Oculta, by the rubbing of the saddle between my legs, but when I started riding on the back of Jackie’s motorbike, the excitement was double. That trembling, the bike’s vibrations, that potency when he accelerated, braked, went around curves, and me hugging Jackie at the same time, my breasts pressed against his back, all that produced a profound emotion. I was terrified when I got down off the back of the bike that the moistness that inevitably formed between my legs would filter through and be noticeable. It almost hurt, down there, when I went out with him. I was very young and still a virgin, but I wasn’t planning to be a virgin bride, like Pilar. Jackie said he wanted to be my boyfriend, but his family couldn’t find out because they would have disinherited him if they discovered he had a shikse girlfriend, that’s what he called me, a shikse, a Gentile, a Christian.