The Farm

by Hector Abad

  In any case, I’m going to tell Toño and Pilar that I’m selling them my share of La Oculta very cheaply; they can give me as little as they like, I don’t want to ever go back to that blessed, that wretched land, and much less now that my mamá no longer exists, what I loved most about this family, my incredible mamá who always tried to understand me and supported me despite my being so different from her, despite my having lived in such a different way than she did. When I was a little girl, Silvia Roltz, a young classical dance teacher, lived across the street from us. I asked my mamá to let me study ballet with her, told her there was nothing I would like more than to be a ballerina. My mamá, with her gentle firmness, looked me in the eye and said no, that it would serve no purpose. I finally began to take dance classes with her – she, who has managed to live her life as she wanted, without bowing to pressure from anyone – in my fifties, and now I’m enjoying it. But I have no grudge against Mamá, I can say now that she’s dead, for she taught me other things. She taught me, for instance, that money cannot be despised, that form is important, and that you don’t always have to say the pure, unvarnished truth. From her I learned, I tried to learn at least, that although we disagree with someone we should maintain our composure, the elegance of disagreement. When I was twenty it bugged me that my mother should be so diplomatic, so polite. But over the years I’ve come to understand that her old-fashioned courtesy was not hypocritical, that it’s better to be indirect (to tell Pedro so Juan will understand) than rude. Whether I liked them or not, the manners she taught me were a social necessity, a lubricant of daily life, and a way of being more civilized, less frank, less direct, less craggy, less of a campesina, and less like someone from Jericó, like my papá, who held nothing back and said everything he thought to your face, and that’s why he had so many problems, so many futile fights that wore him down.

  I don’t want to undervalue his realism. Doing accounts and making myself necessary at Anita’s Bakery, it’s true, I abandoned my passion for dance or psychology, but I learned other things. And when in my personal life I never abandoned the search for a better partner, a man who would respect me for what I was, and whom I could truly, completely respect, my mamá never criticized me or my curiosity for everything and my thirst for knowledge and accepted with tranquility and without ill will my husbands and boyfriends and lovers and friends. I had total intimacy with her, and we were always together. We arrived at an arrangement: I would dream less and help her with her company, but I could live freely, and she wouldn’t interfere in that with her religiosity or her old-fashioned views on life. Maybe she saw in my liberty a liberation of her own, once she was old, although she never said so, a life very different from the submissive life of the majority of women from her generation.

  I better get back to my loves and losses. I don’t want to recount all the men I’ve had, boyfriends or husbands. They’re gone now; I’m not so attractive anymore. If I start making lists, I’ll skip names because I’ve forgotten them, and for the best, or I’ll omit them because there are some I want to forget. It’s sweet to be able to forget a few of the men I’ve dated. I don’t have as many urges as I used to have either. Sex could be wonderful, exultant, years ago, for example with the cyclist, who was the exact opposite of the president: a sweetheart, a pleasure, a gentle laugh, a great lover. He was simple and patient as if I were a field for sowing. But now taking a man to bed is almost like a task, a duty. Getting old is very sad. I have this body, which now turns on very slowly, like an old grill, like an iron that takes ages to heat up. Now I just go out with girlfriends, and only see Caicedo every once in a while, but without sleeping with him: he was my last companion, the most important of all, and I call him sometimes and we go out for lunch. He says: “Evita, why did we split up? What’s wrong with me? What did I do?” He didn’t do anything to me, in fact, and he had been the man who gave me the most, taught me most, who recovered music for me, ballet, a taste for opera and for the best books. I left him out of cowardice, because I couldn’t stand people criticizing me for being with a man so much older than me, and not very attractive, even though I loved being with him and found it sweet to dissolve in his embrace. I also left him because of his right-wing friends, his military and industrial cohorts with no social sensitivity, and I left him because of a car he bought, it makes me laugh to remember. That was the day we split up. He came to pick me up at home and told me he had a surprise for me; he took me to a dealership of gigantic trucks and showed me an immense car, a sort of disguised Hummer that looked like a tank, a weapon of war. I told him, outraged, that I would never get into a car like that, aggressive and ostentatious, in a city full of poor, hungry, miserable people. That it was a pure Mafioso car, a gutless rich man’s car. The salesman told him he shouldn’t change his mind, but rather his girlfriend. I told the salesman he was right and told Caicedo to decide. I turned my back on him, hailed a taxi, and left. That same night he arrived at my house in the immense, ostentatious, shiny, new, yellow car. Let’s take her for a first spin, he said, and I told him never to come back, that he’d made his choice. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back, the drop that overflows the glass of water, Llorente’s flower vase. Sometimes we leave people we love over a stupid incident, a shirt we don’t like, a scent, a lemonade he didn’t pour us, an enormous car we disagreed with.

  I have this house, I have a third of that farm where I almost never go, and even less often since Mamá died. With her death we Ángels had our wings broken and we haven’t been able to raise up the farm again. Pilar digs her heels in but it’s out of stubbornness, more of a denial; she denies the farm is not what it once was and stays there hardheadedly. I could quite easily never return to La Oculta, I might even leave the country forever, if Benji stays in Germany or goes to live in Canada, where he’s been offered a position. But Pilar says never say never. I’ve always been like this: myself and the opposite of myself. I’m going to phone Toño and tell him I’ll sell him my third. Yes, that’s what I’m going to do. I don’t know. I’ve never really known, because another thing I’ve thought to do is give my share to my brother and sister. If it weren’t for Benjamín, I would give it away. Or take whatever they want to give me for it, even if it’s a pittance, and I’d donate it to some foundation that’s doing something for people’s health or education. The thought of Benjamín is what keeps me from doing that. Perhaps it is our children who make us selfish, who make us think of property as if it were food for our children. If Benji didn’t exist, I wouldn’t have any property now, none. I’d live in a hotel, I’d make sure to have a minimal income for food and shelter, and no more. Have no things, no furniture, no books, and especially no house or farm. Property is a headache and an injustice: property makes us stingy and mean. Property ties us down. If I had nothing, what freedom and what purity I’d feel. Rid of everything at last. To not pay taxes, not think of the payroll or the leaks in the roof or the fences or the animals. That would be ideal. But I can’t, I still can’t, damn it. At this stage of life and still not able to do what I want, exactly what I want, it can’t be, I need to be able to, in spite of what anyone and everyone thinks.

  ANTONIO

  Grandpa Josué, even though he was Liberal or called himself one, whenever anyone talked to him about agrarian reform he would turn red, get nervous, confused, and turn back into a Conservative like his parents and grandparents. That began to happen in the seventies, during the Lleras Restrepo government. The complicated thing is that Cobo, my papá, was in favor of agrarian reform, and then they’d have tremendous arguments. “Look here, son,” Don Josué would say, “I understand that there are a lot of people without any land, but is that my fault? We have defended this little patch of land tooth and nail for almost a hundred years and we didn’t win it in a raffle. I knew my grandfather Elías, who was called Don Ángel in Jericó, and he walked barefoot and had hands more calloused and rough than any farmhand nowadays; he had cleared the jungle with his own hands and ax blo
ws. He was a patirrajo, as you city folk say, although by my time we all wore shoes. But, tell me, because we are no longer patirrajos, thanks to effort and hard work, does that mean we have to hand over our land to the new patirrajos? My own father, your grandfather, who died so young and didn’t go barefoot, taught me to break in colts and geld calves, to prune coffee trees and produce good beans. I knew how to do all those things, and when I had to give up my studies to return to the village and the farm I did so willingly, without complaints or feeling sorry for myself. I harvested, washed, peeled, and dried coffee beans in the sun. I’ve done all this with my own hands, following his example, washing the beans gently, sorting them by hand, discarding the husks, so I feel no guilt of having been lazy, having exploited or taken advantage of anybody. I have farmhands and campesinos working for me? Yes, but they’re people who had no work who I pay a decent wage, with benefits, as required by law, as a minimum. But I work with them, shoulder to shoulder, not watching over them from a distance and giving orders as if they were slaves. They’re the same as me with less land, less luck, that’s all. And it was your great-grandfather, my grandfather, who left this land to us, that is the luck we had, and he had inherited from his father, just as I am going to leave it to you. Or do you want me to change my will and leave it to the poor? If that’s the case, let me know and I won’t kill myself trying to keep it, I’ll drink it away.”

  Cobo listened to him while looking at his hands and then answered: “Look, Papá, agrarian reform is for the huge haciendas on the coast or the plains, in the foothills of the Andes, thousands and thousands of barely used hectares; they have thousands of skinny cows out there running loose, and a couple of hands who don’t even get minimum wage or any social security, and the people in the villages are starving to death, without a square foot of space to plant a bit of cassava, surrounded by fertile, green fields, and they’re threatened or killed if they dare to sneak under the wire fence; and those lands, at least out on the coast, are fertile and flat, not mountainous and rough like La Oculta. That’s where the large estates need to be shared. In the Southwest the land is not so badly distributed, and that has been the secret of Antioquia’s success, even with bad land.”

  Our grandfather’s land, in the middle of the last century, was no more than 400 cuadras, 250 hectares, most of which was devoted to cattle ranching, but with thirty thousand coffee trees in the uplands. Don Josué lived in fear that his land would be considered a large estate and parceled up into twenty-five plots to be handed out to the poor people of Jericó and Támesis. La Oculta had already been divided into three pieces, shared between him and his two brothers, and it didn’t seem like that much land to him, since his father had three times as much. At my grandfather’s death, his eight children, my father among them, each received fifty cuadras, slightly more than 30 hectares, which was more or less the size of plots that the agrarian reform bill was going to hand over to each campesino family on the coast (though they never fulfilled that promise), so the threat of agrarian reform didn’t affect the next generation. Rather, since those lots weren’t big enough to provide any revenue, but only worries, expenses, and headaches, one by one all our uncles and aunts sold off the pieces of land they’d inherited.

  We were not campesinos, like our grandfather had been, but we still had our last little piece of land, to honor his memory, maybe, although probably rather to enjoy the privilege of watching daybreak there, to feel what we feel – it’s something deep and ancient – to be at a place we know to be our own, and that no one can take away from us. I think this happens in all parts of the world and that’s why people are killing people in Israel and in Ukraine and in Syria. Here too. But something has changed, in any case, since Anita’s death. Since we cremated her and scattered her ashes in the resting place, Christmases have lost most of their charm, despite Pilar and Alberto’s efforts to liven up the season. There were ridiculous arguments about the shopping (about whether Pilar was wasteful, buying absurdly large quantities, squandering food), about paying the servants, even about gifts for the staff. And now the older nephews and nieces have opinions and want certain things done their way because everyone’s contributing to the expenses. They forced us, for example, to get an internet connection and television, when for us La Oculta was a place to be free from television and internet, where one could disconnect from reality, from the news of the world. I heard the sound of television and saw children watching it from their bed, and I felt that it was heretical and that the children were committing a grave infraction by watching cartoons instead of frolicking in the waterfall in the stream, watching the birds, lassoing calves, or climbing trees. When it was my mamá who paid the bills and dominated, there was peace, but since her death everything has become more complicated, and any decision, any extra expense, every change in the old daily habits, turns into a neverending argument.

  Near La Oculta there were still people looking for gold. Sometimes small planes or helicopters spent entire days flying over the zone, apparently taking aerial photos, studying topographical maps, and tracking geographical signs in the shapes of the ranges, in search of veins of metal. Apart from the miners, there were also ever encroaching groups of people who would buy a hacienda and divide it up into lots. Chainsaws were heard again, not decapitating people, like in the times of the paramilitaries, but felling trees. They stole land from the mountains, and the sources of water, woods, and fields disappeared and lavish weekend houses appeared where once a stream had begun. It had happened in Tínez, the great hacienda that had belonged to the founders of Jericó, near La Pintada. The threats approached, no longer in the form of guerrillas or paramilitaries, but as real estate speculators, with pamphlets in full color that spoke of the development of the area, of its valuation, of how close to Medellín it would be once the freeway was completed. We, at least Pilar and I, kept holding on for the time being, while Eva – again and again – kept giving us reasons why we should sell.

  We insist on opposing death and change with a surname and a piece of land. It was for our surname that I, when I was very young, even went so far as to have girlfriends. I slept with them without desire, how absurd, because the idea of being damaged (as they used to say when I was twenty) bothered me, and I struggled against the deepest part of myself, because I suffered at the thought of not having children and being the end of the line of the Ángel name, which was so important to my papá. I tried many strategies, to supposedly cure myself. First religion, which didn’t work. Then I thought I could spend the rest of my life sleeping with women, but thinking about men while I was with them, so I could come and inseminate them and then have Angelitos. For a while I wanted to give up sex completely and become celibate, an ascetic, unsullied bachelor, but that was like fasting, something one can manage for a while, but it’s not possible to fast for a whole lifetime. Even chastity can turn into an aberration that deforms your character. Celibacy is like fasting; if one is a decrepit old man, without any hormones left and therefore without desires, who can even stop eating and still live for a while as he dries out, then fasting and being celibate are possible. Chastity is a recipe dictated by sanctimonious old men who are chaste due to a lack of testosterone and call the fact of having desire lust, simply because they don’t miss sex. And temperance when it comes to eating is also a rule of old dyspeptic men: since they have bad digestion, they don’t want anyone else to eat very much, and they call someone with an appetite a glutton, because they get indigestion from one tomato and a couple leaves of lettuce. Young people, on the other hand, are able to digest a fork, if they happen to bite it, to feel hunger and desire seven times a day.

  When I began to live with Jon, I suggested we do what my friends Andrés and Lucho had done. They’d adopted an orphan who’d been rescued from a garbage dump in Moravia in Medellín, and they have him here, in New York. They’re neighbors of ours, and he’s growing up very well, and even makes fun of their gay tastes and gay mannerisms, and he has quite a few girlfr
iends. He’s a handsome teenager (Gregorio, he’s called), better looking than his fathers, with very long lashes and curls that almost touch his eyebrows. But the thing is, apart from how complicated it is for a gay couple to adopt a child, even if they’re married, I have some disagreeable genetic beliefs: I believe in direct descent, in the biological inheritance of blemishes, virtues, and defects. Children put up for adoption in general come from parents with problems such as drug addiction, alcoholism, prostitution: it’s like entering a raffle for a tiger, and may adopted children and their parents forgive me because no one is to blame for being what they are and there are adopted children who are angels, perfect wonders, like Andrés and Lucho’s son who as well as being handsome is very intelligent. Enthusiasts of adoption are convinced Rousseauians: they believe that everything depends on nurture, and that’s not true, if only it were. I like to see my father’s face in mine, I like to recognize my grandmother’s toes in mine, the tics of my uncles or some other relative in my tics. It doesn’t even bother me to know that my asthma is inherited and if one day my gallbladder or prostate fails, it’ll probably be because one of my ancestors suffered from that same Achilles heel. I am not an expert on the laws of inheritance, neither civil nor genetic, but apart from the odd exception, our illusion of immortality, or at least of posterity, has to do with the survival of our genes and our possessions.

  Sometimes I think of another solution closer to that of a couple of lesbian friends, Consuelo and Margarita. They asked some handsome and intelligent acquaintances (I don’t think anyone requests ugly and stupid when they go to a sperm bank) to donate semen. They had a party and with plastic syringes they’d bought at a pharmacy (without needles), injected the fresh semen themselves, on fertile days that they’d calculated with charts, and now they have a girl and a boy. But that’s much easier for women; in Jon’s and my case, we’d have to hire a womb, something that’s legal in the United States, but not in Colombia. Well, in Colombia everything can be resolved with money. I could even have asked a woman I liked to donate a handful of ova, and fertilize them myself, in vitro, and then implanted the fertilized ovum in a healthy young woman willing to carry the pregnancy to term in exchange for payment. But I never did and now I’m too old for that; I never wanted to enter into the judicial complications of that tangled kind of paternity.