The Farm

by Hector Abad

  I am left with my nephews, Eva’s son with the orchestra conductor and Pilar and Alberto’s five children. Though I don’t see them often I always have my nephews and nieces in mind; they are the tiny bit of me that will still be alive when I die: they are a distant proof of paternity, an hors d’oeuvre or dessert at the meal I wasn’t invited to, a quarter of their blood is like mine. Eva had Benji late, because she almost couldn’t decide whether to have children, and the strange thing is that she didn’t have him when they were married, but after separating from her third husband, the banker, during a few weeks when she started seeing the second one again, Bernal, and going out with him. She got back together with him, just to get pregnant, I think, because Bernal – with all his defects: as conservative as he became over time, his neurosis, his desire to always be alone – seemed to her the least bad of all the men she’d sampled in her life. I love my nieces and nephews, sometimes I even think they are the motor that makes me exert myself in this life, the impulse that keeps me playing violin, to save some money, to keep La Oculta, to investigate the past of Jericó and the farm. I only wish I had more than these six: Lucas, Manuela, Lorenzo, Florencia, Simón, and Benjamín, because I get so much from each of them. Lucas is strength and enthusiasm, vital energy; Manuela is beauty, and capable of helping without expecting anything in return, like Pilar; Lorenzo has goodness, Alberto’s saintliness, and no one could ever expect a betrayal or anything bad from him; Florencia is the spitting image of her grandmother, with her character, her permanent good mood, because she says she suffers from such a cheerful disposition that she laughs her head off in her dreams, and I’ve seen it; Simón is scientific and sane, intelligence on legs, and best of all he has a joyful spark, intelligence with laughter, like Pilar at the best moments of her life; and Benji, being the youngest, and Eva’s only son, with a misanthropist hermit for a father, is the one I feel the most paternal connection to; he has a scientific and rational brain, a sharp mind, and is a moral, practical, serene, and inspiring presence.

  Sometimes I wonder if I mythologize my sisters as I mythologize our ancestors in Jericó, if I see them as more special than they are. Perhaps they are two regular women of Antioquia like any other women born there in the middle of the twentieth century. They’re so different from each other that it might seem strange that I love them each as much as the other. If I put them on a set of scales, the pointer would be exactly in the center, without leaning to one side or the other. As long as I can remember I’ve observed them with interest and curiosity, with love and passion, the way you watch the drama of a film unfold, two films showing at the same time. They are a mystery I have to decipher day by day. My heart could be shared between them like an apple cut exactly down the middle into two identical and symmetrical halves. I don’t judge them, I don’t think that one is better or worse than the other. I believe that they don’t judge me either and have accepted me as I am, with light and shadow, virtues and defects, with Jon and without Jon. I think that if Pilar had not had at her side a man like Alberto, who is completely exceptional among men, she might not have been able to form such a traditional family, as she always wanted. If Alberto’d had adventures, lovers, little flings, as almost all men do, and Pilar had found out, it’s not impossible that her path would have been more complicated, closer to Eva’s, or at least her loyalty wouldn’t have been as joyful as it is but more resentful and angry. And if Eva’s first experiences hadn’t been with such disagreeable, macho, selfish men, maybe she wouldn’t have had to assume that attitude of mistrust, liberty, and evening the score. Since they were free, she chose freedom too, out of a private feeling that it was only fair.

  I’ve had a lot of partners too. I lived the first half of my life like Eva: searching, sampling, without guilt, in liberty, to see if I could find one with whom I wanted to put down roots, enjoying the variety, in light of not being able to enjoy the pleasures of permanence. And the second half of my life, since I met Jon, has been more like Pilar’s, though with the odd, brief adventure that I don’t want to recount here because just thinking about them makes me feel guilty. He tells me he hasn’t had any other lovers since we’ve been together. There are things in life that you only tell yourself, as long as you’re not found out, hidden things that are nevertheless not the core of life, but a dark part of our intimacy that we don’t share with anybody, and that are like clouds that would cause useless wounds, desolate ruptures in a relationship that runs along well and happily because there is a small field of open air and secrets. I know that Pilar and Alberto have no secrets, and that strikes me as purer, cleaner, nicer. But how many couples can live like that? They’re like the ten just men of the Bible, those few who manage to keep God from evaporating the world in a ball of fire. But anyway, the sins of the body are not enough to warrant the Flood, or the fire and brimstone destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The Catholic God is a drama queen. Learned morals are much more rigid than the inclinations of our bodies. One does what one can; Eva has done what she could; Pilar and Alberto have done what they could; I’ve done what I could.

  There is a certain private prejudice in defending one’s relatives, taking care of an inheritance to leave it to a family member. It’s possible, it’s almost certain, that our properties will be squandered by a useless son-in-law, a careless nephew or a hedonistic granddaughter: we know that everything is exposed to the mishaps of the future, but at least for the time being we want to protect our paternal and maternal heritages. People will say that all this is no more than a bourgeois preoccupation, further complications for proprietors of movable and immovable goods. I have a Marxist friend who likes to argue with me and he explains it like this. “To begin with,” he tells me, “property is theft,” quoting Proudhon, the French anarchist. And then he carries on with his stream of thought: “What happens is that if one does not have land or a house or any objects of value – works of art, family silver, china, books, etc. – rather these goods are public, this selfish and stingy manner of thought disappears. And even more so if we don’t have children to leave all these things to. I even think it’s better not to have children or a traditional family, because it’s the family where selfishness is implanted and developed. For that very reason the Church, which is old and wise, forbids its priests from marrying and having children. For the same reason, the Russian Leninists thought the best way forward was to take children away from their families and let the State take charge of them.” He was a Leninist about that and about many other things; but the idea of taking children away from their families in Russia failed. It’s impossible to dictate rules that contradict human nature: people rebel even in the midst of the toughest and most oppressive regime; there are some things that are unacceptable to our deepest psyches.

  But in any case maybe it is children, paternity, maternity, that makes us worse, more selfish, more calculating and stingy. Or more prudent, urging us to rise at dawn, exert ourselves, know the purest love. As I don’t have children, my argument is based on hearsay, but those who do have them get furious with me and say I understand nothing: that children are everything, that their children have taught them altruism and goodness, and their grandchildren, even more. The fact is that those of us who never had children – monks, gay men, nuns, hermits, single or sterile people, Catholic priests who faithfully practice celibacy – have a less small outlook on life: we can envision a future without ourselves or our children, but rather with other similar beings who should be better than we are now, and instead of leaving an inheritance for our descendants, we can think of living and working for the benefit of all. I have done nothing more than investigate my ancestors like an ant, as if my family background were my life, since I can’t have a family life going forward. What for, what for? I don’t know, simply to find out where I come from, or better yet, to be able to control and replace with words what I haven’t been able to realize with deeds, to have at least a paper child that will be a testimony of my time here, a useless but beautiful form
of paternity and posterity, at least for a while. And I love this kind of child, my papers and notes, like a descendant who will speak for me when I die.

  EVA

  There is always something that hasn’t been said and I am an expert in detecting silences, half-truths, words barely whispered in secret. I watch from a corner, quietly, pretend to be reading or sewing, but my ears are wide open, and I watch, watch out of the corner of my eye, watch with the eye that occultists say we all have in secret places. Someone hides something, always, people hide what they don’t want to be known, and we only discover it by indirect indications. They’re not big things, not necessarily, it doesn’t have to be a skeleton in the closet, it just might be one little bone, the last vertebra, the tiny bit left of our monkey’s tail.

  I know for example that Pilar, after Los Músicos almost killed me, or maybe even before that, had started to pay them a monthly fee, protection money, which they call a vaccine, without telling Toño or me. Paying those people, paying those who kill kids who smoke dope in the village (smoking bazuco while killing them), those who had carved up three kids on the road into the farm with a chainsaw, those who had burned down half our house but had meant to burn it all, those who told us we had to “sell or sell” La Oculta. Pilar never told us, but once I heard her talking to a neighbor. She gave the money to him and he took it to Los Músicos, at first. Later they resolved to make another deal, which would allow Pilar to save face, to keep her from blackening the Ángel name, so she wouldn’t have to hand money directly over to the thugs. The arrangement consisted in us renting some fields to him so he could graze some cattle there and he, in compensation, would pay the fee to Los Músicos in town so they wouldn’t do anything to us. I understand that went on for years. I had stopped going to La Oculta by then, and Toño wasn’t going either, out of rage and repugnance for what was happening. Jon had him almost convinced about a cabin in Vermont, where the autumn was a fabulous explosion of all the shades of ochre, orange, yellow, and red. Toño wasn’t even coming down from New York in those years. What for, he said to me, if I can’t go to La Oculta I’d rather not even go to Colombia. My country is La Oculta, a few friends, the taste of mangos and curubas, but especially the farm. He’d rather invite Pilar, Mamá, and me to go to New York, and we’d all squeeze into Jon’s apartment in Harlem. But Pilar and Alberto got bored in New York, since they weren’t interested in the museums or art exhibitions, and even though Pilar loved the stores on Fifth Avenue, she said nothing was worse than walking along there without money, like poor children in Medellín going to the ice cream parlor to watch rich children eat ice cream cones. My mamá felt strange not being able to organize Christmas in her way. She’d make buñuelos, but they’d explode in the deep fryer, and the natilla custard didn’t taste like natilla, and the leg of ham in Jon and Toño’s oven came out burnt or undercooked, never quite right.

  Of the three of us, for years, only Pilar kept going to the farm with Alberto every once in a while, and they even talked to those bandits, I think, though they didn’t tell us. Once she had to give them lunch, because they’d camped near the house. She has that levelheadedness; even if she’s dying inside, she’ll never show anyone her fear. They would have killed me, because I would have insulted them. Pilar gave them chicken stew. She served sancocho to the same men who had gone there to kill me, no less, the same ones who’d set our house on fire and carved up those boys. Once – Próspero told me – she even lent a room to an army colonel who’d gone there to have a meeting with them. I happened to meet that colonel once he was a general, in Caicedo’s house, and when he heard my name and saw my hardened eyes – I looked at him with rage as I said, without offering my hand, “My name is Eva Ángel, from La Oculta” – I saw something very odd in his demeanor: a mixture he couldn’t disguise of anger, mistrust, and fear, most of all fear.

  It’s something shameful, but if not for Pilar, for those depths she stooped to, La Oculta would by now have been lost to our family. She has defended it even by cheating, with vileness, like paying protection money to the paramilitaries. Toño and I would have let them invade it, would have traded it for a plate of lentils, anything but sully our hands with those men who were smeared in blood.

  Later Los Músicos disappeared, or rather, were disappeared and killed one by one. But there were several years in which they worked shoulder to shoulder with the military. The time Pilar gave them sancocho that same colonel from the Fourth Brigade was there. He was the one who met with them on our land, and later slept in the house, I don’t know which room and I hope at least not in Cobo and Anita’s room, which is now mine. He, that colonel who later became a general and then a commander, and when he retired was given homages, told Pilar: “Don’t worry, Doña Pilar, we’re thick as thieves with these boys, hand in glove.” For once the colloquial expressions were literally true. They did their dirty work for them.

  For a while, after Lucas was kidnapped, and some others in the region were as well, the people with farms thought it necessary to protect themselves. They called the politicians and military officials they knew and sponsored those “self-defense groups,” and hired them, transported them, armed them, paid them, and brought them together at their haciendas. The ones who gave them the least, gave them sancocho, like Pilar. “Death to kidnappers, no more extortion, no more guerrillas, death to thieves, clean up the marijuana smokers.” The region filled up with slogans like that, painted on every wall, on every stone, and signed by the Autodefensa Unión de Colombia. Until they started to murder and kidnap anyone who didn’t pay their “vaccines,” and even those who did, and to ask for more and more protection money every month, and to bring in miners and form alliances with drug traffickers who offered to buy farms, and whose very offers were threats and blackmail. That’s why Pilar paid, so they wouldn’t do anything to us, but then they wanted to buy the land, and started to send those notes.

  Then the landowners turned against the paracos and made war on them. They forgot that they had summoned them up and began to say it had all been by force, extortion, that they’d had no option but to pay the “vaccines.” Allied with the government, they forced them to demobilize and then killed the ones who talked too much, and later they extradited almost all the leaders to the United States, as drug traffickers, but that was only when they started naming the companies, politicians, military officers, and landowners who had summoned and financed them, who had trained them with their officer friends, even with experts brought in from Britain and Israel, revealing that they’d given them provisions, weapons, ammunition, help, silence, and protection. They got them out of the country so they wouldn’t reveal the whole truth, so that the oldest and supposedly cleanest names in the country would not appear on the lists of paramilitary funders. So they wouldn’t reveal the names of all the colonels, generals, sergeants, and captains who had helped them in their massacres.

  By a miracle they didn’t give Pilar’s name, but no, what nonsense, we’re small fry, a tiny drop in a lake of blood. Pilar was able to do something very ugly to conserve the land, but Toño and I, though we never gave a peso personally, always suspected, knew that our older sister had to be doing something like that, and preferred to close our eyes and mouths, we played the fools. And they have also done to us the most disgusting and abject things to try to take our land away, first the guerrillas, supposedly to return the land to the people, to the poor, to the campesinos, to the Afro-Colombian and indigenous comrades. Liars. To keep the ransom money for themselves, and then buy the land cheaply because it wasn’t worth anything because they were there, devaluing it with their mere presence, doing their own deadly business. And later the paramilitaries, supposedly to protect us from the guerrillas. Deceivers: to take possession of the land themselves as well, by fair means or foul: either you sell it to us or your orphans can; sell it to us or leave it to your widow to sell, they used to say. To hand over that land to the miners and drug traffickers, their closest allies.

&n
bsp; ANTONIO

  When I was investigating and reading about the history of Jericó, three or four years ago, I went and stayed there for a few weeks. I didn’t want to know everything only through the filter of reading; I wanted to breathe the air of the place and had the illusion of feeling something old in its streets, the urge to perceive something of the nineteenth century while living in the twenty-first and coming from New York. Anita was still alive and I spent a few days with her in Medellín, before carrying on to the town. I took the chance to go to a concert that Bernal, Eva’s ex-husband, was conducting, with an orchestra of young people from the barrios of Medellín, the Academia Filarmónica. They played Beethoven’s Fifth so well and then Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, with a Spanish soloist, that I managed to reconcile with my city for a little while and think there might be a future here, with music and violins, which have always meant so much to me.

  When I got to Jericó, the town was papered over, on almost all the red, green, and blue balconies, across the lacy latticework over the windows, on the open, polished, wooden gates, on the stone walls, were white notices or stencils proclaiming a succinct, unvarying slogan: No to mining! These signs told me the town had self-respect, that there were people here who still believed in working for a living and not in receiving royalties for handing over mineral rights, and that having to choose between beauty and riches, they’d prefer the former.