The Farm

by Hector Abad

  One afternoon like any other afternoon, a day like all the days of those horrible months, I went to visit my father at the clinic. He was confined to bed, down to skin and bones, his profile sharp, insatiably thirsty, and his complexion was that sallow color of death. He couldn’t stand up or walk as far as the bathroom and that made him feel offended, humiliated. When I was not dealing with the humiliations of hasty sales and loans from speculators to get together the ransom money for Lucas, I’d go to the hospital. I sat with him for at least a little while each day as long as he was sick. I passed him the bedpan every five minutes because he felt a constant need to urinate, but he barely managed to get out, with much effort, sweating, a few drops of a thick, cloudy, dismal liquid. Like lynx urine, he’d say. We’d dampen his lips, always burning and dry, with a wet cloth. Eva came to visit him too, even more than me, and took turns with my mamá to stay overnight. Toño came late, men are like that, they’re almost never any use at all when someone gets ill. He arrived for the final days, when the orchestra finally gave him leave, even though they were in the middle of a series of very important concerts that week; it cost him a promotion to the second violins. He arrived from New York virtually just to say goodbye, because Dr. Correa said there was no longer anything they could do and he always told us the truth, though not coldly like most doctors, but gently, and that’s why we’re still so fond of him. On that same trip, I’ll never forget, Toño brought a briefcase full of dollars that Jon was lending us for the ransom; he smuggled it in, without declaring the money, and if they’d found it he would have ended up in prison as a money launderer, which was all we needed. We received Jon’s thousand hundred-dollar bills and we kept them for several weeks in the safe at Mamá’s bakery, stuffed inside black X-ray bags and in a briefcase, ready to use them if necessary. Fortunately, in the end we didn’t have to, and we returned it all. It was in the same briefcase for years, in the bakery, because Toño was scared to travel with such a large amount of cash. Finally Jon decided to buy some Botero drawings with that money, and they converted the hundred thousand dollars into three sheets of Guarro laid paper, with a series of drawings of interiors (a kitchen, a living room, a bedroom), rolled up in a cardboard tube. They say one day they’ll donate those drawings – which they like more than his oils – to the Jericó Museum of Art.

  My papá also went to the radio station to record messages to Lucas, or phoned them in, with his tongue thick, half drunk, to beg his forgiveness, always asking his forgiveness, although he never said exactly what for. He begged his left-wing friends to help, to talk to the guerrilla leaders, to tell them that Lucas was the grandson of a leftist, of a revolutionary, but they all turned their backs on him. He devoted himself to heavy drinking, in order to endure it. And he would scream insults at the guerrillas, drunkenly in the street, and insult himself with the same curses that he used against them.

  One of those afternoons, the same as any other, in the hospital, I was sitting with him but with my back to him. He was breathing badly, with an oxygen mask, and they were giving him a saline solution to hydrate him, and some morphine to keep him sedated. At that moment I was looking out the window of the hospital room, concentrating on the rain, on the wind, for an immense, furious downpour was falling, with thunder and lightning that echoed through the air and gushing water forming yellow rivers in the streets. I was thinking of Lucas outside, under that icy shower pouring from the sky. Suddenly, Cobo (Lucas was the one who started calling him Cobo when he was first learning to talk) asked me to come over to the bed and came out with something I’d never expected. He told me, with a barely audible voice, almost a murmur: “My love, I have to ask you something very special that might sound strange to you.” And I said: “What, Papi? I’ll do whatever you want, you know I’d do anything for you, but what is it?” Then he said, very slowly, looking straight at me with his gentle, blue eyes: “What I want to ask you is that you never sell La Oculta, not even if – when I die – your mother and brother and sister say you can sell it to raise the ransom money for Lucas. This is what I want to ask you: that you take charge of La Oculta never being sold, not now or ever while you’re alive. And that you make Lucas promise, when he gets back, and when he inherits it from you, that he won’t sell it either.” “All right, Papi, but why?” I asked. He said that the farm was all we had, that the farm was the land that had fallen to us in the struggle of life and we couldn’t hand it over to anybody, no matter what; that his ancestors had arrived in Antioquia with nothing, with only the hope of a better life. And that La Oculta is what had given them a decent life. La Oculta had given them education, work, liberty, independence, the feeling of having a place in the world to leave and to come back to, a place to live for and a place to die. And that couldn’t be lost for anything in the world, not even the most beloved person in the whole family, and that was Lucas. He told me that I, his eldest child, would have to sacrifice my eldest if necessary, to defend our land. He also told me where he wanted to be buried, on the farm, and asked not to be cremated, he didn’t like the idea of cremation, just like Toño now. That he didn’t want a tomb but just a hole in the ground, without any marker, at most an unpolished, round, black stone, from one of the streams, he said. And that we should wrap him, or his bones, in a simple shroud, in a white sheet. I began to cry, my silent tears fell warm and slowly onto the yellow skin and bones of my papá, but I agreed. And my papá cried just like me, in silence, because we were saying goodbye forever, and he was asking me to be more attached to a wretched piece of ground than to a person. He was asking me to endure, for La Oculta, his death and even the death of my son. I didn’t understand him, frankly, though now that I’m old I understand much better.

  I asked my papá if we couldn’t sell La Oculta if one day we were starving to death, and he said precisely for that reason, no; that if one day we were starving to death, we could alleviate our hunger by farming the land of La Oculta. That I should imagine that one day – due to a solar storm, a meteorite, a computer catastrophe – we were left without electricity for ten years; there wouldn’t be any gasoline, or food, or news, or anything. In the cities people would kill out of desperation, rage, and hunger. Only those who had farms would be able to save themselves with land to cultivate, horses to get around on, cows to milk, pigs to fatten, hens for eggs, and firewood for cooking. Or think of a virus like ebola, or an airborne contagion; it would also be necessary to hide from the plague in a remote place, like in the Middle Ages. At any moment the time could come back when men had to rely on nothing but their hands, without technology, facing nature, as in the distant past. And that’s why we had to defend it however we could, always, as if we could go back to being like the Indians of the Amazon and like the first men, our ancestors. I didn’t really understand him, but he kept talking, it seemed to me, like a biblical prophet announcing a misfortune and at the same time saying, on the day of the Flood, how we had to build Noah’s ark. That very evening my papá slipped into a coma and two or three days later he died; he didn’t speak again, and Lucas never again saw his grandfather alive.

  When we could finally arrange the handover of the ransom money, which was a total odyssey (we had to take the cash hidden inside rubber tires to a zone in the jungle on the border between Antioquia and Chocó), and they set him free, skinny and wan, with a bushy beard and a festering sore on his right ankle, months old, which left him with a dark scar for life, with convulsions that hit him from one moment to the next, the first person he asked for was Cobo. He didn’t understand how Cobo could have died while he was held hostage in the mountains, because he had left him healthy and robust. He wasn’t listening to the radio the day we gave him the news, and even though other companions in captivity had repeated the news to him, he hadn’t wanted to believe that Cobo had died while he was kidnapped. I have never known, as old as I am, a grandchild who loved his grandfather so much, or a grandfather who loved a grandson more. He’d been buried for a month and a half when they freed L
ucas, and Lucas didn’t know whether to not forgive himself or not forgive his grandfather for having died like that. We told him, he died when they had you in the jungle, he died of his pain for you. And then Lucas sat in a corner, very quietly, with his eyes closed, and finally he said that this was worse than the kidnapping, worse than being chained up day and night like a dog or a slave. Later we went to the cemetery and Lucas sat all morning on top of Cobo’s grave. At the cemetery I told him what he’d said about La Oculta, and he listened to me again in silence. Later he promised that one day he’d take Cobo’s bones there, to the place he wanted to be, wrapped in a white sheet, and that he’d put a big, round, black, unpolished stone from the stream on top of the place. That was a long time ago, when we couldn’t even go to La Oculta to sleep, afraid of being kidnapped or killed. Much less could we think of taking Cobo’s remains there. We could go once in a while, by day, to take Próspero some money, but without telling him ahead of time, and returning before nightfall. We wouldn’t even drive there, but went by bus, dressed as campesinas, Eva and I, like people going to the village to visit their families. The whole region was plagued with guerrillas and if someone slept overnight they’d be kidnapped. Later the paramilitaries arrived, they said to clean up the zone, and yes, they cleaned out the guerrillas, and we could go back, but then it started to fill up with them and the corpses of their victims, and we could see that they were even worse than the guerrillas, more bloodthirsty. But anyway, we resisted, we hoped, we were able to hang on to the farm, and here I am, here we are, living here. Lucas comes here every once in a while without fear, with his children, my grandchildren, and he takes them for walks and explains why this farm is so important to our whole family, and he teaches them to swim and to ride, and I feel that the thread that began with my grandparents and continued through Cobo and through me, still lives, through Lucas and his children, and will continue through his children’s children, like in those biblical litanies that Toño likes.

  ANTONIO

  The siesta ended with a start because the church bell rang again; after the priest’s sermon, after the feast of stew and a siesta, came the lay sermon. Don Santiago Santamaría was going to speak to them. He walked toward the dais that sometimes served as the altar, took off his white, woven straw hat, cleared his throat, and began to speak in the second-person plural, something still used in those days, especially in speeches:

  “Jericoians of this new alliance. Forgive a man of few words and few sparks addressing you, but that is what my friend and partner in this enterprise, Don Gabriel Echeverri, as well as the residents who’ve been here longest, desired. Doña Quiteria and I, and all the inhabitants, extend our warmest welcome, not to this village, which barely exists yet, but to this dream, to this collective endeavor for the future of Southwest Antioquia.

  “The first thing I should tell you,” he added, smiling and pointing to the clear, blue sky and the idyllic, tropical temperature at two thousand meters, “is that for anyone who doesn’t like the climate, there’s still time to leave and reach the first inn on the road, in Palo Cabildo, before nightfall, or even go as far as the Trappist monks in Tejada, who’ll lend you a niche to sleep in.”

  Here he paused rhetorically and, seeing that nobody left, carried on: “Well, then, if we are staying, it shall be to work very hard, from sunup till sundown and with no excuses, under rain or hail, with scorching sun or frost and dew. In these solitudes everything is yet to be done, and what needs to be done shall be done solely with the strength of our arms. In this new town we have only one thing: the future. I wish to clarify, as much to the laymen as to the clergy,” and here he looked at Father Naranjito directly, “that we are not nor can we be miners or panhandlers or tomb raiders, but only settlers. Those who want to dedicate themselves to the hazardous occupation of mining can carry on south, for there are mines down there. Sleep here in town, if you wish, but first thing tomorrow take your deceptive trail. Go to Marmato, to Riosucio, even to the Chocó, or turn north and go to Segovia or to Buriticá (there indeed are mountains of gold), but go away from here. We have not come here to pan for gold or to desecrate graves. Nor have we come here to conquer, that is, to dominate and kill or humiliate Indians. The conquistadors passed this way already, two hundred years ago, and didn’t even leave Indians to humiliate; they either exterminated them or chased them all away. If there were any here, they would be welcome in this endeavor to colonize a land in its raw state. We have not come here to dominate anyone, much less to enslave: the black and mulatto people among us should feel free from now on. I see a pair of black brothers from a distant region, recently liberated from the ignominy of slavery; well, to you I say the same: work the land and be welcome here in this new town of free men. We have not come here to play cards or dice or to drink aguardiente, that is, to enrich ourselves on luck or to traffic in vices that bring men low. And we have not come alone, but with women, or to marry the women already here, for there will not be servile work, but familial work. In Jericó, we don’t want bachelors, and any man older than twenty-five who hasn’t found a wife will be charged a singleton tax, because single women are aplenty in this world of wars; so, young men, find yourselves a wife, for we haven’t come here to waste time or to desire our neighbors’ wives, but to care for and pamper our own, and to procreate many children with her. Here we shall not be judged by the color of our skin, but by the sweat of our brow, and may the sun tan all our hides, for there is no better school in life than the elements. We have come here because we wanted to, but we’ll only stay if we have strong will and patience…

  “Here my godson, El Cojo, Don Gabriel’s son, has suggested that the lands be distributed immediately, and in identical-sized plots to each family. He is a very good man, an idealist, but an unrealistic dreamer. His father and I do not believe in anything given away. We believe that those who’ve been able to amass some savings in their lives deserve more land, and those who are just starting out will have to make a greater effort. The largest pieces of land, suitable for farms, ranches, and even productive estates, will be sold very cheaply, and furthermore, those of you who already have the money for a down payment can pay in installments, and with no interest, over the course of years. When will this good fortune occur? Very soon, after a brief period during which we’ll see which of you are truly hardworking people of good conduct. Those who’ve come to drink, gamble, or idle away your hours, can head back the way you came. If anyone wants to go, let him go now, and may the Virgin accompany him!

  “This business of handing over plots of land, or entrusting larger pieces of land at a giveaway price, we are not doing just because we are good or very stupid men, but because it is a business which over time will benefit us. We don’t want our lands and our families to face the same fate as the Aranzazu family, in the south of Antioquia, who finally had great extensions of their lands expropriated by the state because they had not been capable of exploiting them. Or worse, what is happening to the Villegas family, who have had people invading their properties for years and now spend their lives in court cases and disputes, paying expensive lawyers in Bogotá to take their cases before the government, fighting against settlers well established on other people’s lands, which they consider their own, and who are not going to be removed by fair means or foul.

  “We also have faith that commerce will bring some traffic to the region; there are already many muleteers who pass this way, and take to the south news of what is brewing here. Jericó’s fame will spread far and wide. And things will go very well for some of you, not so well for others, and for some, may heaven grant it shall be very few, it won’t go well at all. Be that as it may, what we hope is that merit will do better than sharpness, hard work better than cunning. Here there are no suspicions or secrets; everything is open. You all, in receiving, in the very moment of receiving, for having had the valor to come all the way here, are giving too, for you are giving your work in exchange for uncertainty, your present in exchange for
the future. So you must not be humble, nor humble yourselves, but feel yourselves proprietors and protagonists in a work of progress in these virgin lands.

  “We cannot promise felicity or prosperity, and that is why our town will not be called Felicina, as our utopian godson wished, always so virtuous and dreamy, but we do have firm confidence that work is better than idleness and laziness, at least almost always. And I am now at your disposal to resolve whatever doubt or question might occur to any of you. That is all. Oh, one last thing: as you’ll have noticed, in Jericó there is no prison and no police, there is no mayor, no judges, no notary. The government in Medellín has named me a justice of the peace so I can settle any dispute or difference that might arise between settlers, whether it’s a matter of water rights, boundary lines, drunkenness, or jealousy. I expect all of your good conduct will defer as long as possible the arrival of those institutions, the arrival of which will indicate certain development, undoubtedly, but also the beginning of problems, disagreements, and disputes. One day here there will also be judges, constables, mayors, one day there’ll be a jailhouse, guards, and police, we’ll even have to have a gravedigger and break the ground of the cemetery one day, but the later the better, for I hope no one has come here in much hurry to die, and that we’ll all die of wrinkles, the least horrible of deaths,” he concluded with a smile.

  One of the recent arrivals, José Bernardo Londoño, who came with seven offspring, asked if there was a school. Don Santiago said there wasn’t one yet, but they were in a hurry to build one and already had a lot reserved, donated by his friend Echeverri. A town, he said, is not just houses and people. A true town needs to have a church, a theater, a school, and places to get together and converse. But most of all a school, so the children can learn to add up, subtract, and express themselves well. If among the new arrivals there was someone who was good at reading, writing, and sums, and who also liked to teach, they could immediately be named teacher and be put in charge of the school, which between them they’d all start to build. He, for a start, would also donate a chalkboard and desks, plus a monthly salary, for the first year. Later they’d see if they could all contribute to pay the teacher. At that moment Father Naranjito asked for the floor and said that a school was a very good idea for the boys and that he would offer to teach religion and biblical history. But as far as the girls were concerned, he thought they should open a separate establishment where they’d be taught gardening, embroidery, cooking, and at most basic notions of how to add and subtract to be able to help with the administration of the home. Reading, on the other hand, was not a good idea for girls, as he had seen how they grew careless of their duties when they got caught up in sinful novels and immoral stories that damaged their behavior. Here, El Cojo Echeverri, with his face contorted with rage, interrupted the priest brusquely: “Look, Father, for the moment there is no way to build two schools here, but what we’ll do is begin with them all together, little men and little women, and if we eventually see that the latter are little brutes and only fit for sewing and cooking, we’ll make them their own separate school, where they can learn the things you suggest: embroidery, gardening, and culinary arts. But for now, let the boys and girls all start together, don’t you think, godfather? Remember what Governor Faciolince said, about ten years ago: ‘In Turkey where women are debased and degraded, men are likewise, debased slaves. In France where woman is queen, liberty wields everywhere her sovereign rule.’ ”