The Farm

by Hector Abad

  ANTONIO

  The first piece of news they received when they arrived was that the village had changed names, and would no longer be called Piedras or Felicina, but Jericó. There had been many arguments about that biblical name. The Echeverris defended the name Felicina; the Restrepos and the Jarmillos wanted it to be called Palestina; the Santamarías voted for Jericó. Finally there was a clear majority among the settlers who had held the first town meeting a few years before. The scrutineer had been the new parish priest, Joaquín Ignacio Naranjo, a short, fat, redheaded man from Zaragoza, recently sent to the town by the Bishop of Antioquia. They called him Father Naranjito, and he was the main banner-waver for the name Jericó, which was from the bible. Eighty-three voters had a part in the decision (only 82 men could vote, landowners with solid roots, and one widow with money), and Piedras only got eleven votes, those of the oldest residents, attached to the original name; Felicina, twenty-seven; Palestina, twelve; and Jericó, the majority, thirty-three, the widow among them, swept up by the priest’s rhetoric and the support of Don Santiago, the founder. El Cojo Echeverri felt somewhat disappointed when he found out, but he wasn’t a stubborn person and much less spiteful, so eventually he thought his utopian projects could be realized in a place called Jericó.

  More than a year before Don Santiago had written to the bishop – with a not very original image, but still effective back then – telling him that a town without a priest was like a flock without a shepherd, and therefore urging him to send someone to take charge of the chapel, which was like the sheepfold of the village, even if it wasn’t finished yet. The chapel was a shed with a few cedar benches and walls of comino planks, but it already had a bronze bell, donated by Don Santiago himself and hanging from a prop at the entrance to the temple, which was rung not just as a call to Mass, but also to summon all the inhabitants for any special occasion. Up until that year of 1861, the village had only received visiting priests, barely once a year, who came to baptize the babies born in the previous twelve months, marry those who were already cohabiting or those who could wait no longer to set up house together, and bless the dead who had been buried far and wide (in a field, up in the hills, in a yard), wherever they’d breathed their last breath. Now that he was the priest in residence, Father Naranjo had officially received the cemetery lot and the keys to the chapel, but the graveyard still had to be enclosed with a high wall and someone needed to be found who wanted to take on the job of gravedigger. A large lot had also been set aside for the construction of the presbytery on one side of the main plaza. To raise the money, he’d been selling special spaces in the cemetery, to build mausoleums, but these sales wouldn’t start to come through until one of the town worthies died, someone with the means to import a marble statue and set a good example of funereal ostentation. Not caring that the land had been a donation from the founder, he had already turned death into a business, for the Church needed to make a living, and not just off the uncertain and timid alms of the parishioners. Tithes and offerings were very hard to collect, since Antioqueños have never liked to talk about their earnings. And for atheists, pederasts, suicides, and heretics, he was considering the garbage dump, to one side of the cemetery, squalid and stinking, watched over not by angels but by vultures, to serve as a warning to all.

  Father Naranjito welcomed the new settlers with a Mass before lunch, so they could take communion without breaking vigil, and during the sermon gave a long explanation about the name Jericó, with quotes in Latin that no one understood, and perhaps for that very reason admired all the more. With his shrill little voice he told them that when they had crossed the Cauca, by the Paso de los Pobres, they had embarked on the same exploit that the Jewish people had realized by crossing the River Jordan. Mysterium tremendum. And that the walls of Jericho had fallen to let them enter, after the people had circled the city seven times (the seven days they’d taken to arrive there), and that all the riches of Jericó now belonged to them. Intra tua vulnera absconde me. He did want to advise the new inhabitants, indeed he did, that one part of the riches they found there, especially if these were gold (in mines or Indian tombs, Ab maligno defende me), must be handed over for the construction of the barely begun temple, so that it could have sturdy walls, a well-tiled dome and belfry, and a floor not of earth and sand, as now, but of fired-clay tiles or even, if possible, of fine travertine marble. This was very important to remember if they didn’t want to suffer a Biblical curse. No permittas me separari a te.

  Zaragoza, where the priest had been born, was a mining town full of slaves and rough overseers, and he seemed not to understand that this new population wanted to be very different; he carried on speaking with the same covetousness and the same tone with which he’d spoken to the miners of his hometown.

  The recently arrived farmhands and artisans looked in astonishment at the old settlers, who were no less surprised to hear this rash sermon. And they were even more surprised when the priest said that, finally, he was going to recite a prayer to counteract the Lord’s terrible prophecy. And there he read a passage from the Book of Joshua, in the Latin of the Vulgate, which he then translated into Spanish, more or less saying: “Cursed before the Lord be the man who rises up and rebuilds this city, Jericho. With the loss of his firstborn son he shall lay the foundation thereof and with the loss of his youngest son shall he set up its gates.” The chosen reading did not seem like a very good omen, but the priest clarified that the prophecy was no longer valid since Christ had come to redeem the Jewish people and all men, and that it was now possible to build a new Jericó without danger and without fear of the terrible curse being fulfilled, as long as – he repeated, wagging his finger like someone brandishing a whip – the recent arrivals, Jericoians of the New Alliance (that’s what he called them), donated a tenth of their earnings in gold and silver, a share of their animals and crops, and finished building the Lord’s new temple as soon as possible.

  The settlers didn’t understand the sermon too well, but they did note the priest’s covetousness, and looked at each other raising their eyebrows, scratching their heads, and shrugging their shoulders. But, to be on the safe side, they handed over – from the little they brought with them – alms toward the future church. The priest, finally, after almost an hour of dark words, sent them out with the well-worn formula: Ite in pace missa est. The parishioners, who the whole time had been dreaming of lunch (the scent of the sancocho reached them from the pots on the street), came out hungry, hot, with their hats in hand, almost in a stampede, to line up in front of the steaming stew.

  EVA

  The first thing I did when I got out of the clinic was try to get in touch with Próspero. I wanted to see him, talk to him, and I sent him a message to come to Medellín any day he could to have a meal with me, so he could tell me what had happened after my escape across the lake. Pilar had gone to the farm and had already told me what had happened to Próspero that night, but I wanted to know all the details. As for Los Músicos, Pilar hadn’t been too clear, but she said some of the neighbors were going to help her convince them to leave us alone. The fact is Pilar and my mamá went back after a year, and hired builders in Jericó and Palermo, and brought in material, without anyone doing anything to stop them, and that was very mysterious to me, and no matter how many times I asked Pilar I never got a satisfactory answer. Suddenly Los Músicos who almost murdered me were no longer our enemies but almost allies. I couldn’t bear the idea, but I kept my mouth shut.

  Próspero took the bus that stops at the roadhouse, came up to Medellín, and had lunch with me in my apartment in his clean Sunday clothes. Almost without tasting a bite of food, Próspero told me, to start with, something he hadn’t been able to tell me when I’d gone there the last time. That Los Músicos had already been close to La Oculta – a few months before – committing horrible, monstrous deeds, doing what they maybe would have done to me if I hadn’t escaped through the lake. Or to him and Berta, if a miracle hadn’t happened, a
miracle Próspero attributed to the ghost of the drowned seminarian.

  It had happened one day at dusk. He had seen the black jeeps go up the track toward Casablanca and they’d stopped on the other side of the lake, on the small, level clearing where there was room to park cars. Próspero told me that he spied on them for two or three hours, from behind the Virgin’s rock. The first thing he saw was them dragging out three young guys with their hands tied with wire from the backs of the jeeps. Próspero managed to recognize one of them, the son of the barber in Palermo, but he didn’t know the other two, and so he thought they must be from Támesis or La Pintada, or some other little village, but not Palermo or Jericó. Los Músicos were drinking aguardiente and smoking marijuana at the same time as they beat, kicked, and swore at the kids. They’d left the doors of the vehicles open and played music: salsa, merengue, vallenatos.

  He heard them working the kids over from dusk until night had fallen. When it got dark, they turned on the headlights of the jeeps. The three boys howled with pain, begged for help; the thugs shouted and their nasty words could be heard above the music: disgusting filth, threats, swear words, mocking, and curses. “They were martyring them,” Próspero told me, with one of his beautiful old-fashioned words. “The paracos were martyring them, Doña Eva,” that’s what he said, “and I didn’t want to tell you when you were there because all I wanted to do was forget about that; it would have been better never to have seen it. And also because I was scared, because in Palermo everyone says that nobody can say anything about what’s going on, that we all have to swallow our words. Fear and fury; fury at the cowardice of not being able to do anything.” Próspero didn’t dare approach the place, and hardly even raised his head, but he could hear everything from behind the rock with his heart in his throat.

  He heard them say: “You going to talk or not, you son of a bitch; tell us or I’ll rip your nuts off with these pliers, fucking scum.” They were smoking, knocking back the aguardiente, asking them questions, turning up or turning down the music, but the boys only screamed and begged them not to kill them. From the back of one of the jeeps they took out a chainsaw and started it up. It made a deafening noise, “like when they’re felling a cedar or when a plane flies over very low to take photos,” said Próspero. They started it up, revved it, and shoved it near the boys’ necks, with its atrocious buzzing. They laughed evilly like madmen; the air smelled of bazuco, liquor, and marijuana. Próspero couldn’t look: he heard over the music and the chainsaw noise, he smelled, he sensed, he imagined. At some point they turned off the chainsaw. They stubbed out their cigarettes on the boys and burnt them with their lighters. “I’m gonna light your ear on fire, haha haha, look how well this torch burns with all the grease, look at how black it’s getting, like a pig’s ear!” The boys screamed and cried and begged: “We didn’t do anything, I swear on my mother we didn’t do anything, the worst we ever did was maybe steal a sack of oranges.” The others said they were thieves, guerrillas, snitches. Finally Próspero began to smell the iron scent of blood, and a sound of machete blows or stabbing, because the men said they weren’t going to waste bullets on those lowlifes. By then it was very dark and the moans started to grow weaker, the last screams, the gurgling, the death rattles. Then the chainsaws started up again to chop them into pieces, to leave the bodies in bits scattered on the ground, carved up like beef cattle. Próspero didn’t know what was worse, the noise or the iron blood smell. The last thing they did was hack off their heads with the chainsaw and kick them into the ditch. They started the engines of their cars. They left them naked, in pieces, tortured, thrown on the side of the road that goes up to Casablanca. The police came the next day to gather up the bodies in plastic bags, after Próspero called it in on the radiotelephone. On top of the body of one of the young guys, they left a sign that said:

  We Músicos are cleaning up the zone of guerrillas, drug addicts, and pickpockets. Gentlemen farmers, don’t forget to send your contributions on the tenth of each month.

  They left another, which Próspero took from the chest of the other boy and that one he put away, with brown coagulated bloodstains on it:

  I died for being a snitch and a blabbermouth and because I’m a guerrilla bastard.

  We couldn’t eat a single thing, Próspero and I, that day, remembering what they’d done to those three boys, and then the visit they’d paid us, the night I’d been reading in the hammock. He’d woken up when they shot Gaspar and had looked out the window. He’d grabbed his machete, just like the night the guerrillas had come to the farm for Lucas, but then he’d put it back in his sheath. What could he do?

  “I was very afraid for you, Doña Eva, but I couldn’t go outside. When I saw them go in holding their flashlights and pistols, I knew they were going to kill you, and I also knew that if I appeared at that moment, they would have killed me too. I didn’t turn on any lights and locked us inside. I hugged Doña Berta, both of us scared to death, crying quietly. After a while I realized something strange was happening because I heard those guys arguing; then we heard more shots and thought they’d killed you, but then they said that old witch had flown away on them, forgive me, those were their words, and I prayed to heaven that you’d had time to hide in the woods. I never imagined that you would have dived into the lake; if I dove into the lake without a lifejacket I’d drown, especially at night. After a while they came and broke down our door, dragged us out and made me open the main bedroom, your mamá and the doctor’s room. I lied and told them that I didn’t have a key to that room, that it was always sealed up. Then they went down the track and came back up carrying a chainsaw; you don’t know what I felt when I saw that, I thought they were going to chop us up in pieces. But no, what they wanted was to cut a hole in the door to your mother’s room, to get in. They started up the chainsaw and began to slash it, but right there came the first miracle: they ran out of gas, the chainsaw’s tank was empty.

  “Then they asked me for the keys to your car, the jeep. I went to where you always leave them and handed them over. Then they asked me for a hose and chopped off a piece of it with a machete, stuck it into the gas tank of your car, the Palomo, as I used to call your little white jeep, and started to suck on the other end to fill up a milking bucket. At first they said it was to put gasoline in the chainsaw. They were drunk or high or on crack and weren’t thinking straight, every few minutes they changed their plans. Whether they should kill us or not, whether they should steal things from the main bedroom, look for the documents, they said all kinds of things, crazy things, like they were deranged. Luckily they got sick of sucking gasoline and spitting it out, if they’d managed to get any more they would have burned down the whole house. Because the new plan was no longer filling up the chainsaw, but setting the house on fire. They took the little gasoline they’d managed to get out, half a bucket, and sprayed it around on the deck and the edge of the house until they ran out. They tied Berta and me to the window bars of the bathroom beside the stables. I realized what they were planning to do and told them they were going to burn us alive if they left us tied up there. They laughed and slapped and kicked us. ‘Before you were thankful we didn’t kill you right away,’ they said. ‘Don’t worry, the smoke will get you before the flames do.’ They made a trail of gasoline from your jeep and set it alight; there was a smell of gasoline everywhere and then heat, blazes, a noise like a gust of hot wind blowing through. The first to burn was your car, the Palomo, which exploded pretty quickly with a horrendous noise, like a bomb, but the gas started to burn all over the place then. The heat was awful, but neither the smoke nor the flames reached where we were tied up. If the wind had been coming from the other direction the whole house would have burned down and we would have been burned alive or asphyxiated. Luckily the wind was blowing the other way, off the lake, that was the miracle of the sainted drowned seminarian, and the flames went out toward the garden, instead of coming inside the house, they went up into the branches of the trees. That
’s why everything didn’t burn down, just a part, and that’s why we weren’t burned alive. The gasoline burned up quickly, but later some wooden things kept burning, the straw roof, the floorboards, and the posts of the deck, which burned up completely, and some chairs, tables, benches, part of the wooden floorboards of the corridors.

  “We spent the whole night tied up until Juan, from the roadhouse, showed up, having heard noises in the night. He came up at about eight in the morning to see what had happened and untied us and asked in terror what had happened and where you were. Later Pedro, the caretaker of La Pava, rode up. He came on a black mare, Noche, which he had to return to Casablanca. He told us you’d gone on the seven o’clock bus and by the grace of God should be arriving in Medellín by then. That you’d looked terrible, all bruised and scraped, but that you were fine, that you were alive. We were pleased to know they hadn’t been able to harm you, and put out whatever was still smoldering with water and dragged the charred things out onto the patio. Berta begged me, and is still begging me, to leave La Oculta. But where are we supposed to go at this stage, already as old as we are. We don’t have a house to go to, and our kids aren’t going to take it well if we show up to live with them. I still have almost ten years till I can retire, you know. So we’re going to carry on enduring, and hope one day things change. Doña Pilar has already been there and she said not to worry, they’re going to rebuild the house and Los Músicos aren’t going to come back to bother us. I don’t know what she did to arrange that, but I hope it’s true.”