The Farm

by Hector Abad

  I told him I was prepared to convert to Judaism if he wanted me to, because I didn’t give a hoot for religion, but for him I’d be able to learn Hebrew and pretend fervor in the synagogue, if he took me, to shave my head and wear a wig, to dress like an eighteenth-century Polish peasant if necessary, but he told me that wasn’t possible, that it didn’t work like that, that Judaism wasn’t interested in conversions. He even told me he’d consulted the rabbi of Medellín, an Argentine, and the rabbi had told him that conversions for love weren’t valid, only for intimate conviction, an illumination, and that they were very cautious about accepting new believers. I told him that my papá, Cobo, not only had the same name as him, but said that we were also Jewish, that the first Ángel who’d arrived in Colombia was called Abraham and was a Sephardic Jew, for sure, and had even married a woman called Betsabé. I went so far as to ask my father for our family’s whole genealogy (which would later become Toño’s passion) to try to convince him: and I recited the complete string of our Jewish names. Jackie had his doubts, he said that in Antioquia it was very common to be called Isaías or David or Salomón. He said we were Catholics; that my mamá, Ana, could not be more Catholic and the important thing among Hebrews was the maternal line, which was the only trustworthy one.

  In fact, my mother didn’t like my going out with a Jewish boy at all either, even though her lifelong, best friend, Clarita Rozenthal, was Jewish. She’d been the first female doctor at the University of Antioquia, and she had also been in love her whole life with a goy, Gabriel Bustamente, a Catholic classmate of my father’s, but they hadn’t let her marry him either. And even though my mamá had always supported Clarita and Gabriel’s relationship, she would not allow me to be in a relationship with Jackie.

  “Clarita was going to convert to Catholicism, and not the opposite,” she said. “That’s very different. If Jackie converts to Catholicism we can think about it. Let him get baptized and have his first communion and then we’ll talk about it.”

  What had happened with Clarita Rozenthal is that when she told her parents about Gabriel Bustamente, they said that if she carried on with him it would be the same as burying her and saying Kaddish and she wouldn’t inherit anything from them, and they were rich. And furthermore they were going to curse her so everything would go bad for her in life and she’d have idiot children, or worse, children who scorned her and wouldn’t even want to look at her face. Clarita had been unable to stand up to her parents, and her older brother, and her aunts and uncles, who were all against her relationship with a goy. But Clarita had stayed in love with Gabriel, and he with her, their whole lives until they died. Mamá facilitated their encounters, sometimes in her own house, which she would discreetly leave, to allow them to be alone together. There are people who never marry and go on living as each others’ widows and widowers for the rest of their lives. I didn’t want that to happen to me with Jackie and wanted to fight for my love. I fought for almost two years with all the strategies in reach.

  On Jackie’s motorbike we could get to La Oculta in less than two hours, for he flew along the highways and we could go along the trails, like a horse. Sometimes I’d say to him on a Saturday or Sunday morning: “There’s nobody at La Oculta, let’s go.” And he’d get out the motorcycle, and we’d go, at full speed, along the road to La Pintada. Sometimes we went horseback riding, sometimes we swam, sometimes we went for a walk. One time we went hiking and I brought cold cuts, a nice cold bottle of white wine, and a blanket. And we went off into the woods. It had rained the previous day and a stream ran down from the crags of Jericó; you could hear the rushing water. In a clearing in the woods we spread out the blanket, drank wine, ate ham and cheese sandwiches (Jackie said, “it’s not kosher,” but he ate it since he was so hungry). After the wine and food we kissed and kissed as we had never kissed before.

  It was a warm afternoon and a soledad was watching us from a branch, with her long blue tail, without a sound, as if taking care of us, as if approving of what we were doing with her gentle eyes. I remembered, but didn’t tell Jackie, that seeing a soledad was a sign announcing a pregnancy. Rays of sunshine fell on our skin and Jackie took off his shirt. Then he took off my blouse and my bra. He looked at me; I looked at him. He said my skin shone like no other skin, that my breasts shone even more than the rest of my skin and that my nipples were the most beautiful things he’d ever seen. He kissed them, licked them, gently nibbled them. I was going crazy and I touched him. I slipped my hand into his pants, pushed them down. He had something smooth, straight, eager, and erect. He didn’t have the little hood my brother had: he was circumcised. I thought that was better, as I’d read that circumcised ones were less likely to transmit diseases. I told him to be careful, that I’d never done it before, and he did it with a gentleness I don’t think anyone has had with me since. So slowly, so sublime, so delicately that only a couple drops of blood were left on the blanket that I didn’t even feel. He pulled out before he came to avoid any risks (the soledad watching from the branch), and then he lay on his back, very pensively. He said he was very sorry but he’d never be able to defy his parents. That he was dying to marry me, but he couldn’t, and now he was guilty of having taken my innocence. That he’d never tell anyone what we’d done, that I didn’t have to worry about that. I felt like crying, but I didn’t cry, I laughed. I looked at him smiling my best smile, trying to look cheerful, and said, well, that made me sad, but well, I understood. I stood up and went for a walk in the woods, barefoot and naked. He watched me go and when I came back to where he was, Jackie was ready again, he’d forgotten his repentance and we did it again, more slowly, fearlessly. He came inside me and then we were scared to death for several weeks, until my period came. When it came I was very happy, we both were, it was a relief for us, at that point in our lives, not to have to confront bigger things, a huge family fight or a clandestine abortion, which in those days was dangerous and sordid. I never told him about the bird.

  We slept together again sometimes, almost always in the same woods at La Oculta. Sometimes we’d hop on the motorbike and go all the way to La Oculta just to do it. Sometimes we couldn’t stand such a long journey and we’d go to a pine forest in El Retiro. I had my first orgasm with him, lots of orgasms. I mean my first orgasm in company, and multiples very soon too, because I’d already figured out how to have them with my own fingers long before. I think that women who don’t learn how to have them on their own have more trouble having them with someone else later. After a while I realized that he loved me more than I loved him, and that he was suffering desperately for not being able to stay with me, to marry me. After coming on my chest, he’d lie on his back and cry like a baby. I’d caress him and think he was a coward, but I’d say, never mind, he’d find a Jewish girl he could love, that there were the Lerner girls, the Zimermans, the Maneviches, the Dyners, that he should go out with one of them and he’d forget about me. He said he’d been introduced to all the Jewish girls in Medellín and none of them was as pretty as me with clothes on, let alone naked. None of them had skin as radiant as mine, none had hair as long or as black; none got as wet as I did. I was enraged that he was comparing me to others, but I stayed quiet, feeling like crying, but laughing myself silly. Laughter is often – at least for me – the best protection.

  One day someone came to my house with the story that I was seen with a boy on the back of a Ducati motorcycle. My papá called me into his study after dinner and shut the door behind us. He didn’t chastise me, but his blue eyes welled up and he told me he couldn’t take it if I were killed in a motorcycle accident, he’d never forgive himself. He begged me in the name of what I most loved to please stop exposing my life to danger in that way; that in the hospital he saw victims of motorcycle crashes every week, injured and dead. He said he’d lend me the car whenever I wanted it, even if he had to go to work by bus, but he begged me please not to get on a motorcycle ever again. I couldn’t disobey him, and I saw Jackie on foot, in other p
laces, but never again on the bike or at La Oculta. I told him that in my house there were taboos too, like at his. Not religious ones, but almost religious; that at my house the sin was to ride a motorbike, much worse than eating pork, or sleeping with a circumcised Jew.

  Finally they sent him to Israel to work on a kibbutz for two years, and he met a Russian girl there who he ended up marrying. Before getting married he wanted to say farewell to me with one last trip to the woods at La Oculta. I didn’t want to anymore, I was very disappointed in him, in his cowardice, and had started going out with another guy, a classmate at university. But I agreed. And I even rode on the back of the bike again, defying my father’s request. I didn’t have an orgasm, but he did. He came in my belly button again, like Onan in the Torah, he said to me, and then burst into tears.

  “And who in the Bible are you crying like now?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “I don’t know the Bible by heart either.”

  We got back on the motorcycle, drove back to Medellín, he went back to Israel, and I haven’t seen him since. Someone told me he lives in the United States with his wife; that he graduated in medicine, specialized in obstetrics, and makes a lot of money looking after rich women, doing fertility treatments, in vitro inseminations, births, and abortions, in a small town in southern California. Good for him. And to think I would have turned Jewish for him, Buddhist for him, Muslim for him, atheist for him, whatever he wanted. Love drives you crazy and that thing I felt was love, my first love. Maybe I was spared from being bored my whole life in small-town California, how would I know.

  ANTONIO

  They were sweaty, tired, dusty, but happy at having arrived. They talked loudly, sang coplas, challenged each other with trovas, told of the adventures of the trail: injuries they’d done themselves with machetes, wandering mules, exhausted donkeys, runaway horses, the calf swept away in the Cauca when she fell off the raft and the swimmer who dove in after her, to save her, and almost drowned too, when he got to the rapids. They showed each other the blisters on their feet and described the throbbing of their legs, the itching of the crab bites in their private parts, the colic and pains in their guts, the pustules, the fevers diagnosed by touch. In the two and a half days of the crossing from Fredonia (six or seven for those who came from Marinilla, Rionegro, and El Retiro), no child had died, and that was a good sign. There were no old people with them. Many, almost all of them, had had to spend two weeks in quarantine below Fredonia, to prove that they weren’t diseased, but most of all to prove their patience and civil conduct.

  There had already been deaths in the Aldea de Piedras. Measles, scarlet fever, and cholera had visited even these remote lands. But people were buried in the fields, where they’d fallen ill, for it was futile to take them into a town where there was not yet a doctor or a priest, and where the cemetery had not yet been consecrated. In the lot set aside for this purpose, donated by the founders, no one had yet been buried, and Don Santiago’s calves were still kept there as they were being weaned, and from his herd came milk, butter, and cheese to sell to the settlers. That was why – people said – there were no ghosts in town, or apparitions, or fear of the dead yet, or of death. No one wanted to think of death; there would be plenty of time to get old and die in peace, here, in this new land, and they hoped to God there would never be a Cain in this town, that no one would ever dare to raise a hand and kill any of his brothers.

  The sad thing, however, is that the first two official deaths in Jericó were two brothers, the Trejo brothers, originally from Envigado. They both wanted to marry the same woman, a girl who’d grown up in Aldea de Piedras, and they were the first- and second-born sons of their household. The girl had made eyes at the eldest boy first, but had then resolved to accept the proposal of the younger one, who was more even-tempered and inspired more confidence. The older one could not resign himself to this disdain, and something gripped his heart. A deaf hatred, a limitless resentment grew within him. One Sunday evening he got drunk in the new town’s only canteen and went to look for his brother at home; he asked him to come outside, insulted him, and told him to bring his machete. Their parents had gone to bed and were fast asleep when the eldest brother issued his challenge. The younger brother didn’t want to fight a duel, much less with his brother, but nor did he want to be intimidated or humiliated. The machetes flashed and they both rolled their ruanas around their left forearms, like woolen shields. Since the eldest was drunk, he received the first cut, a deep wound in the left shoulder. He grew furious and managed to slash his younger brother in the thigh. They were both bleeding heavily and kept injuring each other more and more, in the arm, in the neck, in the ribs. None of them were fatal blows, but they both lost a lot of blood. Unfortunately there was no one there to separate them and the trails of blood drenched the ground. They both bled to death little by little, without a word.

  In the town they called them “the two Cains,” from the moment they picked them up off the ground early that morning. The younger one was already dead and the eldest, conscious but in his death throes, did not ask for forgiveness. He himself told the story of how the duel had gone. From then on, the fiancée, a girl whose last name was Arcila, never looked at another man. When the nuns of the Order of St. Clare came to town, years later, she was the first to request entry, and cloistered herself with them. No one saw her face again in the fifty-four years that followed until her funeral. The two brother suitors were buried near each other in the cemetery, one beside the other, face to face. They buried them both with their machetes in the coffin, as a reminder and a warning. There could not have been a sadder or less promising inauguration for a cemetery.

  The new arrivals had traveled for eight or nine hours a day, with one or two stops to eat, on the banks of a clear stream. Sometimes Isaías and Raquel, at dusk, would take themselves away from the rest of the group and bathe or cool off in the woods; Isaías would look with enchantment at his wife’s belly which was beginning to become convex, full, and he touched it tenderly. Raquel was frightened to make love, but they lay down on Isaías’s white ruana and she touched him very softly, with her perfect hands and fingers, until he finished and could rest. Afterward they embraced and laughed, and talked about the future of their firstborn in the new land. They dreamt big dreams for him, and didn’t just discuss the name they’d give him, whether it would be a boy or a girl, but also the name of the land they’d leave to him, as El Cojo had promised. If it were a boy, they decided, he’d be called Elías or Israel; and if she were a girl, they’d name her Eva, as the first woman. And the first land they resolved to call La Judía if the child was male, and Palestina if female. They enjoyed these dreams and enchantments and laughed.

  Since the new settlers brought convoys of cows and calves, colts and oxen, and since they came with mule trains and donkey convoys, they proceeded very slowly, and the trail was not very wide. Sometimes an animal would take off into the woods and they’d have to wait until it was found. They’d slept at roadhouses where there were any, or out in the open, under roofs of rubberized canvas, in circles made of the harnesses, saddlebags, bundles, and equipment, taking turns to keep an eye on the oxen, cows, and horses. A couple of children had fevers, and two horses had died of exhaustion on the final ascent from the Cauca, on the toughest part of the snail trail (that’s what they called the part of the trail that rose like a corkscrew) and were now the vultures’ pleasure, but all the rest were good and healthy.

  At the front of the long procession came Don Gabriel’s son, Pedro Pablo, El Cojo, riding his white mule, and at his left was our ancestor, Isaías Ángel, that young man from El Retiro who from then on would be Echeverri’s best friend, which I know from a couple of letters that were preserved at La Oculta until the night of the fire. Pilar, who throws everything out, thought those charred papers weren’t worth the trouble of saving, and chucked them into a hole with all the debris. Echeverri and Míster Grey, during the journey, had t
alked to Isaías about the world and what was going on in it, for him so distant and strange. They told him about the war in North America, Lincoln’s great battle to liberate the Negroes from slavery and unify the country; about the settlers in that huge country who received uncultivated lands in the west; sometimes barren lands and sometimes fertile lands, but with little rain to make them flourish; they told him about Europe and the new countries they were cooking up, big and prosperous and free, with Bismarck in Germany, with Garibaldi and Cavour in Italy. Míster Grey spoke nostalgically of his native Sweden and the sea of the Vikings, which he now had few hopes of ever seeing again. Here, in this wild, mountainous country where a hidden voice had called him, similar, if not greater, projects than those of Europe had yet to be realized: constructing a worthy, united, and free nation, where the space was shared out fairly and not arbitrarily as the Spaniards had done, and where everyone would have a house and land of their own, water, air, and home, because only the labor of individuals, combined with public works, created national wealth. It was no longer a time for violent conquests, or domination and extermination, but a time of pacific conquest. Things like that were also what he, El Cojo, wanted for Antioquia and for Felicina, the name he favored for the town: a promise of happiness, a sort of commune of free men, all with land, all proprietors without envy, with a couple of days a month of communal work. That would have to work well. They talked very animatedly, El Cojo pleased with the temperament and manners of the young man from El Retiro, and Isaías thrilled that the wise old man and young dreamer were opening his eyes to a wider world, and also happy to see the new land, the land where all would have land. That year, 1861, was a marvelous one in many parts of the world: people were breathing optimism, unity, liberty, friendship, the dreams that almost a century earlier the French Revolution had not been able to fulfill. El Cojo had read enlightened authors and said that with education and well-being, without abuses or injustice, people would be good. The Swede was less optimistic, he distrusted human nature, but he was pleased that there were young men with utopian dreams even in these rough tropical mountains, so far from what for him was the heart of the civilized world, his old Europe.