by Hector Abad
I’ve lived a different way, and not just in relation to men and love, but also in relation to what the majority of people think. I confronted the traditionalists who criticized my way of being, I fought with them and tried to change at least those who were closest to me. I seduced, allowed myself to be seduced, kissed, danced, and sometimes went to bed. I took as my motto that every person is the proprietor of her own body and did what I wanted with it rather than what my husband might have wanted. I have never agreed with men simply to keep them happy in their illusion of power and dominion. No, I am audacious with them, and contradict them, and if they get bossy or demanding I stop them cold, though affectionately: they can make their own coffee and juice, they can pour the water or wine and serve the dessert. They have two hands just like us.
I didn’t believe the nuns at school when they told us (I can still hear Sister Fernanda saying it), “Girls, never forget that your body is a temple.” A temple, a temple, and what is a temple, a marble glacier, a stone slab, a confessional. They didn’t say the same thing to the boys, no, not to them, they were taught to go to brothels, as if their bodies weren’t going to become ill, until in my generation, finally, we could have boyfriends and go to bed with them without getting pregnant, and they didn’t have to keep exploiting the poverty and desperation of prostitutes, or at least that’s what I hope. Maybe the liberation of women will end the business of prostitution, though I doubt it, not even in Sweden has that sorrow ended. Or maybe there are cases when prostitution is a remedy for a necessity. There are lots of men who can’t find anyone to sleep with, and perhaps there are always women willing to resolve – as a well-paid job – this problem for crippled, abnormal, or old men. It seems such a complex problem that I’ve even joined study groups on prostitution, and we haven’t been able to agree on whether it should be banned or not.
I lived as only men had lived before: free to move around, to choose, to try out. And it seems right to me, fairer, less unequal. If I feel like going to bed with a man, I find one I like. If they were polygamous, then we can be polyandrous, and if they don’t like it, they can go find a temple. I’ve been left; I left some of them. I’ve changed lives the way a snake changes skins; I leave behind the withered, dry one and put on another, which I hope is fresh and new, ready to live again. That’s how a woman’s life can be nowadays, at least, and if someone criticizes me for having left my husbands, for not having adapted submissively to their demands and mistreatment, let them criticize, and let them grin and bear it as well because the time for humility and submission is over. Families – luckily – are no longer what they were; a couple who stays together for their whole lives, no matter what happens, understanding each other or not, sleeping together or not, loving and respecting each other or despising and rejecting each other, some even beaten, together forever, no, not that. What horror. Couples getting bored together, couples in a restaurant saying: “Let’s whisper the rosary so people think we’re having a conversation,” dying of boredom, of tedium, of spite.
I am third-hand; and the men I’ve had, all of them, have also had previous owners. These days almost everyone is secondhand or third, either widowed or most often separated after failed attempts. It doesn’t matter to me, I think it’s preferable. In Medellín they say – about cars – that the best brand is new. It might be true about cars, but not for marriage, I don’t agree. Virginity, now that we have antibiotics and contraceptives, no longer makes sense, and was never a big deal to me. I never asked a partner if he was a virgin (I wouldn’t have liked it if he was) and they didn’t ask me either; it was obvious I wasn’t, and if they’d complained about that they would have felt a burst of laughter on their noses, disdainful laughter, who do you think you are.
Husbands, what we call husbands, I’ve only had three: the president (who wasn’t president then and in my opinion should never have reached that position where he’s done more harm than good), the conductor, and the banker. I haven’t gone from bad to worse, as Pilar says; the first was the worst, the second the best, and the third was the middling one. The president was not president or anything close to it when I met him, but everyone knew he was going places, though not that far, because super intelligent he was not; he was just astute, arrogant, sure of himself, sharp, and almost without scruples. He had a dark, frightening side, which he kept hidden, a concealed capacity for violence, undoubtedly pitiless, and without regrets, truly Machiavellian. A madness that escaped from him, and that he had within, lying in wait, like a monster inside him. But this could only be clearly seen when he was drunk, then his most sincere and deepest demon came out, a will to dominate and a deaf rage if he was not obeyed, which frightened me. An alpha male, tough, implacable, full of testosterone. Tall, about six foot three, with a booming voice that intimidated people at the first syllable, surer of himself than a shark that smells blood. His friends called him “minister” from an early age. Minister of this and minister of that, because he liked to listen to and give speeches from the time he was in primary school. Left-wing or right-wing speeches, it didn’t matter, but always speeches full of big words, the kind of words Colombians capitalize: the People and the Fatherland and Justice and Liberty and the Church and Enterprise, and whatever.
When he reached the presidency he called me and said, maybe a year after taking office: “Evita, my dear, let’s get together.” And we got together. Even though he was president of a pernicious government, I didn’t refuse.
We arranged to meet on a Thursday at La Oculta and he arrived by helicopter. He concocted a visit to some town, Jardín or Bolívar or Tarso, I can’t remember which, to inaugurate a school or a slaughterhouse, more likely a slaughterhouse than a school, and decided – he told his wife – “to spend the night at the estate of some old classmates.” A lawyer, he’s one of those who says spend the night instead of sleep, estate instead of farm, deceased instead of dead, classmate instead of friend, steed instead of horse, educational institute instead of school, and other idiocies like that. Whenever I see him I have to tell him: try to speak normally, dear, in Spanish, with your unseeing people and your sex-trade workers and your afro-descendants you’re not going to win me over. I’ve always said blind people, whores, and blacks, which is normal and has nothing bad about it because at least it’s clear. As for the friends with whom the president was going to spend the night, that was me, and I’d arrived by jeep a few hours earlier. In reality he didn’t have friends, much less female friends: he had allies, subordinates, party members, people who loved or hated him for his acts, many who feared his powerful fist, or thrived in his shadow, but real friends, not a single one, just lots of servants, secretaries, and subordinates. A flick of the president’s finger was enough to behead whoever he wanted. If he couldn’t do it with the law, he’d do it fiscally, delving into their taxes; if he couldn’t do it fiscally, he’d do it with their private life, tapping telephones and hacking into their email accounts; if none of that worked, he’d resolve it with lead, without even giving an order, but simply by allusions. He came, took me to bed, like a rooster as usual, he came too soon, infuriatingly, and fell asleep. He slept nervously, uneasily; he tossed and turned like a cement mixer; when we were married he didn’t move so much; after a restless hour or so, he fell into a deeper sleep. Veni, vidi, vici, he could have said, like Caesar. As if conquering me was some great feat. He came, he came, but he didn’t gain anything, just my scorn. He slept at my side and I thought: I could put poison in his ear and murder him, like in a Shakespeare play, sink a knife into his jugular, put a viper in his bed, but I didn’t have any poison at hand, nor the guts to kill anybody.
I opened my legs without any real emotion, simply out of curiosity, to find out whether time and power had worked a miracle of metamorphosis on him; whether the youthful bad lover had turned into a warm and calm, even wise mature man. Whether power, as some say, had brought some charisma over his soul. Whether he had finally received a gift and acquired any grace, at least in
bed. As if. Brusque, tactless, disagreeable, quick. As if I were a mannequin, an inflatable doll, a hole. He even hurt me. He made love as if some superior power had given him an order to make love: militarily. He moved his pelvis with rhythmic momentum, like a metronome. His instrument very firm, like steel, the sword entering like someone killing an enemy, like the torero going in for the final pass, but it all turned out to be more like the final blow, a failure. And he extracted his dagger bathed in blood to hide it quickly in its sheath. At four in the morning he was up, impatient, shouting hysterically, waking up his ministers with some ancestor of the cell phone, Avantel it was called, an advanced telephone, calling the pilots to prepare quickly, because for him there was no one more despicable than those who sleep a lot. That’s why they took off at first light, the blades frightening the poor tricolored macaws and little green parrots and raising a dust storm. I pretended to be asleep.
Twenty or thirty years ago we’d spent our honeymoon at La Oculta and it had been the same. The worst lover I’ve had in my whole life: hasty, brusque, impatient. A stallion lasts longer mounting a tied-up mare. He’d get an erection, jump my bones, and that was that. Sex of a procreator, not a lover. Or conquistador, a violator of the neighboring tribe. “Who are you sleeping with?” was the only thing he said to me, the last time, as he penetrated me, and I said, “With Gustavo,” but he corrected me: “No, ma’am: with the President of the Republic.” And I started to laugh. I felt like I was in a Fernando González book, a dictator novel. Our marriage didn’t even last a year because he was as conceited as a feline and as unfaithful as a canine. He was teaching political science at a university and ended up getting involved with a student who got pregnant, his little wife now and forever, for he pretends to be monogamous. She declared herself by having a child of his and he had no choice but to leave me and go and live with her. They couldn’t even get married because in those days there was no such thing as civil marriage, only Catholic, and they hadn’t annulled ours. Later he fought for an annulment for years because appearances are what matter most to him. Paying papal lawyers, he finally managed it, declaring I don’t know what immaturity on my part, or his part, when we were married. And he married his student, without ceasing to betray her as well, no matter how strongly his speeches defended matrimony, conjugal fidelity, and the family as the supreme good.
It was never good being with him or talking with him or walking with him and much less sleeping with him; not the first time, at La Oculta, nor the last time, in the same bed. Thank goodness we didn’t have any children. I did get pregnant by him, during our marriage, but he never knew. He never knew I had a second-month abortion, either, all alone, without ever telling anyone. I had seen his darkness and would never have wanted to raise a descendant of his, someone who looked at me with those eyes of a monster, which would emerge from his entrails. I had forgotten about that, luckily, or not forgotten, but buried it in one of those zones of the mind we hardly ever return to, and only now do I let it rise to consciousness. I had two abortions; I only want to remember one, the one I’ve occasionally talked about, but there were two. I never recognized that horrible pregnancy with Gustavo, because I never wanted to have a child of his. In his genes lurked something dark, sick, ancestral, the worst demons of our nature. A kind of irremediable evil, like that of Cain. His ancestors, who were also from the Southwest, from Jericó, had been expelled from there and sent to Salgar, for being wicked. The mad, the lazy, and the bad-natured were sent to Salgar, confined there, not allowed to leave without being sent to rot in a dungeon, and the grandparents of very bad people ended up in that town; I know them and I see them in the mirror of my mind, I have their names on the tip of my tongue but I won’t repeat them, in case I might be able to forget them. Poets with the gift of the gab but without souls, who think they’re marquises but are just thugs, more resourceful than intelligent, heartless, earsplitting politicians, victims of cruel parents who mistreated them until their bodies and souls were deformed. However, one cannot generalize, it’s always unfair, and even in Salgar there are very good people, I don’t deny it, and I can see their faces in my memory.
I don’t remember my politician husband with displeasure, however. It was one more experience in my life. I felt what many women have felt: the attraction for the abyss, for the malevolent and violent but powerful man, dark in his wickedness, unscrupulous in his customs, implacable, who will protect you with his infinite power as long as you’re as submissive as a meek dog. We women are disgraceful in that way.
The last night I spent with him he asked me if I’d like to be consul or cultural attaché in some country. I told him I’d think about it. For a couple of days I thought I’d like to live in Rome for a year, or in Paris, or in Madrid, I became enchanted with the idea of living in Barcelona, by the sea. Then I felt lazy, or more than lazy, the certainty that I’d despise myself if I accepted that charity, and I told him no, thanks anyway. In Colombia the ex-girlfriends and ex-wives of presidents always end up with a little diplomatic post in Europe. A little something to keep them happy as compensation. I decided to stay in Medellín, at the bakery, improving my mother’s business, going to La Oculta every once in a while as well. Wretched farm. Three or four years later I had my run-in with Los Músicos. I told him what had happened with them, by phone, and I think he was one of those responsible for keeping Los Músicos away from La Oculta; I think we owe him that favor, but I’m not grateful. Now we’re even more tied to that piece of land that we inherited. My life has tied me to it as if it were a bad husband from whom I couldn’t manage to free myself. When they almost killed me there, I was finally able to divorce myself from that farm, break free, stop truly loving the place, see its real face, dark like its lake, dark like the heart of my first husband. I hate you, La Oculta. I hate you as I hate the black heart of a powerful man I was once capable of loving for a very short time. For this I also disdain and distrust my own heart, which must have its black cavities as well, because whose doesn’t; we’re all made up of the same things, though probably in different proportions.
There are days when I wake up lucid, and then I despise the countryside. The cows, the hens, the smell of manure, the mosquitos, the toads that Cobo dissected with frightening ruthlessness. In the countryside people walk around in a stupor, in the best cases, and others turn suspicious, sly, mistrustful. They spend their lives looking after fences and pigs, hating their neighbors, mistreating their animals, gossiping, because, since there’s nothing to do, they devote themselves to hearsay, to malicious rumors. The countryside dulls the wits because there’s no cinema, or newspapers, or libraries, or concert halls, theaters, exhibitions, lectures, universities, or people of all kinds coming and going and arguing in the cafés. There is no intelligent, informed conversation, which is the best way to stop being ignorant. There are no foreigners to open your eyes to other places, everyone is a villager and a local and all think themselves the center of the universe, their universe, their tiny little world. In the countryside it’s possible to die of boredom and for your mind to be extinguished through lack of use. Cobo, who loved La Oculta so much, used to sometimes say: “With just a tiny predisposition toward foolishness, the countryside can turn us into complete idiots.” They’ll tell me that nowadays with the internet it’s possible to have everything you want in the countryside: music, films, theater, lectures, conversations, social networks. Well yes, but it’s not the same. Those who stay in the countryside gradually become savages, they start to turn the color of the earth and end up resembling cows or, in the best of cases, birds. It’s the direct contact with other people that civilizes us, and civil comes from civis, a “citizen, one who lives in a city.” Cobo taught us that too, he was fascinated by etymology, and didn’t call himself a doctor but a poliatrist, according to what a colleague of his had taught him, Dr. Abad, one who cures the polis, doctor to the city.
I think almost all campesinos would choose not to be campesinos, if they could. It’s eas
ier and more interesting to be a doctor or a botanist than an expert in shovels, pickaxes, plows, manure, and hoes. The thing is, in Cobo an attachment survived and an affection for the place that had enabled his family not to have to work with their hands from sunup till sundown. In Cobo love for the countryside was more like weariness of civilization: a rest in silence. It’s strange, he profoundly loved this part of the country, perhaps because La Oculta was the proof of an effort, the palpable proof of something achievable not by cunning, luck, or deceit, but by work. It was these fields, tamed by his forefathers, that had enabled two generations of Ángels to study and live in the city. When he went back there for a few weeks, he felt complete and if his friends asked him what he was doing, he always replied with the same words: tending my garden.
* * *
It’s the contrast that makes us love La Oculta: time devoted to contemplation and silence, the pause in a life of work whether routine or even intellectual, getting away from it all, even though it’s true that it’s within the mundane noise of the cities where progress occurs. Although perhaps a tranquil atmosphere apart is the best place for thinking. Darwin lived in the countryside and developed his most brilliant ideas there; Einstein would go to a cabin outside Berlin to think. It’s difficult to miss city life if one doesn’t spend time in the country, and vice versa. There you can read and study more and concentrate better. And it’s difficult for me, now that I almost never go out to the country, to miss the city, which I’m fed up with. It makes me tense, puts my nerves on edge at all hours. The traffic, the smoke, the noise, the thousands of commitments, arrangements, emails. It’s always the same: we only want what we don’t have. And it’s always the same: I never know what to think, I contradict myself, I agree with A and disagree with A, I love and at the same time hate the countryside. But maybe La Oculta might not be exactly the countryside, but rather something else. La Oculta is the deepest and most obscure part of our origin, the black, smelly fertilizer that everyone in our family grew out of.