by Hector Abad
ANTONIO
What Cobo used to tell us was that when he was eleven and lived in Jericó, Grandfather Josué had gone broke and lost everything he had in the depression of the 1930s. When I think of our grandfather I always imagine him old, the way I knew him, but he was a young man of thirty then, who had three children, my dad, Aunt Ester, and Uncle Bernardo, who’d all been born in Jericó like him. This young man, Josué Ángel, my grandfather, had had to sell off one by one all the properties he’d inherited from his father, José Antonio, and there were a lot of them, although they also had debts, inheritance tangles, and complications. Casablanca, La Inés, La Mesa…those were legendary names, but there was one, one single property that he’d managed to save from the general debacle, and this was La Oculta, the one his father and his mother loved most of all.
Don Josué, as my grandfather was called in Jericó, was a tough man, but very honorable, and his only determination, at the age of thirty, was to leave his mother, Mamaditas, at the very least secure despite the economic crisis. He struggled for two years to pay off all he owed, liquidate the lands that had been seized, redeem the promissory notes and expired mortgages, and in order to do this he had to sell off the cattle herds, the future harvests, and bit by bit the land of all the rest of the farms, with the sole aim of getting one on a sound footing: La Oculta. His mother and two brothers, who were still at school, would live off the oldest and biggest of the family farms, without danger of seizure or forfeit. Those tensions had given him a gastric ulcer, which he’d suffer from for the rest of his life. “It feels like I’ve got ground glass in my stomach,” he sometimes said, when he spat up blood and the pain wouldn’t let him sleep. But as well as giving himself an ulcer he’d managed to save what was most important to the family: La Oculta.
He entrusted Don Chepe Posada, a dependable friend, with the administration of the farm (for his widowed mother was not able to run it, nor did she have the experience with those struggles, and his brothers were far away) and then he informed his wife and children that they were going south, to Sevilla, a town the devil hadn’t yet reached. And the devil was the Depression. He took what was left, the furniture from the house in Jericó – which he also had to sell to pay off debts – distributed it over seven mules, and put his wife and each of his children on horses borrowed from La Oculta. Early one morning they left town, before the sun rose, and they set off in stages for the south, traveling at first along the same route that half a century earlier had been one of settlement and hope. They had passed through Palocabildo, they’d stopped on the heights of La Mama, for one last look at La Oculta, and they’d carried on to Jardín, Caramanta, Riosucio, Anserma, La Virginia, Cartago, La Victoria, and finally arrived at Sevilla five days later. As the crow flies there are barely two hundred kilometers between Jericó and Sevilla, but in that steep region they had to cross rivers and mountain ranges time and again, climb and descend slopes by impassable routes and take detours to sleep in villages off the trail one way or the other. This time it was a flight toward another new land. Miriam, his wife, was pregnant, just as Raquel, mother of the first Ángel born in our town, had arrived in Jericó. Sevilla is in the foothills of the central range of the Andes, on the way down into the Cauca Valley, and it was a town that had been founded barely thirty years earlier, in 1903, at the end of the war, by Heraclio Uribe, brother of the famous Liberal general who led that party’s army in the War of a Thousand Days.
In Jericó they’d left behind the devil, which was laying waste to the town, as well as their friends and family ties. In those years a branch of the Ángel family split off and they never spoke again. Grandfather Josué had business dealings in partnership with one of his father’s brothers, Antonio Máximo (in that generation all of Ismael’s sons had the first name Antonio – like the Aurelianos in Gabriel García Márquez’s books, since fiction is almost always a copy of reality, or an exaggeration, or a cover-up of what really happened – and that makes all the genealogies complicated, and one never understands quite who was the son of whom), and from there the story is told differently depending on which branch of the family you hear it from. According to the daughters of this Antonio Máximo, who they called Papá Toño, who only had girls and baptized them all with names beginning with E (Emilia, Eunice, Elisa, Eliana, Elena, Esther, Eva, and Emma), our grandfather Josué had been responsible for their father’s bankruptcy, since Papá Toño, our grandfather’s uncle, had been the guarantor of his loans. According to our grandfather, he and his uncle had businesses in common on various inherited properties, and they had both lost everything, except for two estates, La Oculta for us and La Tribuna for them. In fact, that’s where the Elisas (as they were known in town, to simplify things) were raised, and Papá Toño ended up marrying them all off to engineers who in the 1930s were constructing the railway in the Southwest. Since they were all girls, there are no longer Ángels on that side of the family, and all their children are called Ceballos, Orozco, Puerta, Hernández, De la Cuesta, and things like that.
What is certain, because our father, Jacobo, Cobo, lived through it, is that our grandfather Josué arrived in Sevilla with what he was wearing, and the bleeding ulcer in his stomach. Our grandmother, Miriam Mesa, shortly after arriving in the Cauca Valley, gave birth to her fourth child, Javier. And there in the south our grandfather started from scratch. He’d go to a farm on the outskirts and buy a steer on credit, and sell it in town for a little bit more. Then two steers on credit and he’d sell them somewhere else. So, he devoted himself to buying and selling cattle, which is what he knew how to do, since he’d only done a year of medical school, and had to give up his studies at the age of nineteen (and take charge of the inheritances and businesses) when his father, José Antonio Ángel, had died in Jericó of typhoid fever. For ten years business had prospered, the land and cattle had been there to support his mother and his siblings, but in the depression, when nobody paid, nobody bought, and debts piled up, almost everything was lost, except La Oculta, the drowned man’s hat.
Almost two decades later, in 1950, when our father, Cobo, lived in Bogotá, the devil finally arrived in Sevilla, in the Cauca Valley, and there he took on his most damaging form. After the Bogotazo in 1948, the Violencia began. And since Sevilla was a Liberal town and our grandfather one of the most renowned Liberals in the region (after twenty years of hard work, he was by then the owner of a farm just outside town, the only notary in Sevilla, and a well-established cattle dealer), the hit men of the Conservative Party were going to kill him. So he had to pack up his things again, sell off his land at a loss for whatever he could get for it, and go to live in Medellín, displaced, as they say these days, for in Medellín they were killing less, or at least the police didn’t let the Conservative hit men kill all the Liberals.
It was our father, Cobo, with Pilar just born, who had advised our grandfather to return to Antioquia but not to Jericó, where there were groups of Conservatives disguised as crusaders making the rounds at night to kill or aplanchar Liberals (farmers, shoemakers, shopkeepers, good men had fallen victim), but rather to the regional capital, Medellín. And Don Josué was finally persuaded to leave Sevilla when the Conservative hit men killed his son-in-law, husband of our Aunt Ester, and all of Cobo’s classmates from the General Santander Secondary School. With the money from selling all his property in the Valley, grandfather was able to buy a house in Medellín, and that’s where we got to know him.
Mamaditas, our great-grandmother, died when I was a little boy, in the 1960s, and Chepe Posada, to facilitate the inheritance, divided the estate into three equal parts to divvy up between the brothers. He gave each lot a name: La Coqueta for the lower land, La Abadía for the upper part, and La Oculta (with the old house) in the middle. The part with the house had less land attached. Don Chepe cut three strips of paper and on each of them wrote the name of each of the three parts of the old hacienda. Then he rolled up the three papers in the same way and, to be completely sure they coul
dn’t read them, he went into the kitchen and wrapped each piece of paper up in tin foil, making a little ball. He came back from the kitchen with the three identical little balls in his hat and explained that each brother had to reach in and take one out. Grandfather, being the firstborn, got the privilege of choosing first, and then Eduardo and Elías. When they read the names of their lots (La Oculta for Josué, La Abadía for Eduardo, and La Coqueta for Elías), the first two were satisfied, but Elías, who had hoped to get La Oculta, could not hide his disappointment. He was furious and ever since that day he always insisted that his older brother had tricked them in order to get the old house and the lake. Elías said that Don Chepe, who was closer to Josué than to the other brothers, had put the one for La Oculta in the freezer for a moment and my grandfather had selected the cold one. Grandfather always said that was a crazy invention of Elías, and the proof was that La Coqueta was at least as good as La Oculta. Because of that fight the two brothers never spoke to each other again. Eduardo, who remained friends with both of them, and enjoyed La Abadía till the end of his life, said that the freezer trick was nothing more than an excess of fantasy from the imagination of Elías, who was very distrustful.
PILAR
To think that I lived my whole life laughing my head off and that my stories always made everyone laugh. Now they’re rather depressing, stories tinged with bitterness by the ailments of old age, that contaminate the past with sadness, without it having been real, because there were many luminous years, full of happiness, which I tend to forget on the bad days, and it shouldn’t be that way. We’ve been gradually losing our sense of humor and our cheerfulness over the years. Sorrows, illness, pain, and resentment mount up. It’s hard to laugh with a toothache, or a pain in the coccyx, or this cough I wake up with from smoking so much. Nevertheless we do laugh sometimes, we really do, at ourselves. When life is no longer interesting, when memorable things don’t happen to us every day, when the future shortens, we take refuge in the past, and one’s memory turns into a cork in a whirlpool, circling around the same things all the time: our grandparents, the house, the kidnapping, the fire, the death of those we love most, the betrayals by friends that make us mistrustful. Over the course of a long life things get tainted by the ugliest, foulest incidents. The past weighs on us and distresses us. Only a few fortunate people, like my mamá, know how to live to the end full of humor, vivacity, sharing encouragement and joy, immune to grievances and sorrows and eager for life and the future, no matter how short the future might be. It’s strange, she who suffered so much in her life – widowhood, kidnappings, losses, robberies, attacks, betrayals, everything – carried on to the end having that high-minded, independent, solid spirit, but most of all full of love, comprehension, and joy. She looked at everything from a distance, with a touch of irony, wisely. And she was the one who knew the most of what went on here. At eighty-nine years of age she had more curiosity than her children, and was more eager to know everything. She’d call us at eleven o’clock at night, speaking quickly, and say: turn on the television, look at the president saying such and such a thing, look how Eva’s ex-husband is really going mad now, look at him shouting like a madman and if he gets into power this country will be going to the devil, it’ll be another setback of twenty years, like in the time of the Violencia. She was the one who told us about the Twin Towers; she told us about wars or attacks, horrible viruses coming from Africa.
I’m not like her, I don’t even watch the news anymore, I don’t want to feel rage, or fear, I don’t want to feel like leaving. Besides, there’s nowhere to go in this world, and there are no longer any new worlds to discover. I’m old and tired, like this world. Even global warming seems to me like the hot flashes I’m still getting all these years after my period stopped, as if the Earth was also going through menopause. I’m old and tired, like this house, like this planet. Worse than this house, because I at least paint this house, repair, plaster it when a corner of the wall falls off, I mix up a batch of grout and put several layers of whitewash on top, improve its skin, remove the marks and freckles, cancerous lesions, cure it with injections of formaldehyde when termite holes appear on the posts or the beams, clean away the cobwebs, fumigate the roach nests, stamp on the scorpions, carry out toads by hand, sweep out the snakes, banish the bats with sulfur, catch the drips, stop the damp, disinfect the floors and mop them furiously until they shine and smell clean: I fight against decline. If only I could do the same with my body, my spirits: apply patches and mend, slap a coat of whitewash over the wrinkles. Sometimes I can; there are days and nights when I can, and I am happy again, forgetting myself.
If a friend of mine was elected president I wouldn’t ask for anything for La Oculta. Not that he pave the road, or build an aqueduct nearby, or find jobs for Próspero’s children in some ministry or anything like that. I’d just ask him to help those in the village, in Palermo, so they could have a decent school, drinking water, a hospital (because Palermo doesn’t even have a rural doctor, and that’s the worst, people die of the stupidest things), jobs, because people here want to work, to be able to buy a little house, a little piece of land, what we already have, it’s not much to ask, here in this country of rain and sunshine, lush and green. There is enough land for every family to have a little house, a patch of earth. La Oculta is a dream that we all have, a dream come true in our case, in our family, but an unrealizable dream for almost everyone else: a place, a roof, a view we enjoy, a way of waking up in the morning, looking outside, and feeling comfortable with the air you inhale, the tree you can see, the flowers that bloom, the water that flows, the sun that warms us, the cloud or person passing by, or the skinny mare grazing in the field. Yes, I believe that all the people in this country, and if not all of Colombia, at least those in Antioquia, have a dream hidden in their heads, the secret dream of having a piece of land, a little bit of land that makes us feel secure, a hidden reserve for the thousand misfortunes that might befall us. That dream was fulfilled for one moment in history, or at least that’s what Toño says, and then was lost.
In every family of Antioquia there is a lament for a hacienda lost by their uncles, their grandparents, or great-grandparents. It was a large piece of land, fertile, covered in cattle, crops of corn, and beans, with horses and dogs, but they had to sell it when Uncle Such-and-Such gambled it away, or because Grandfather was a drunk, because Aunt So-and-So got cancer and they had to pay for her treatment in Los Angeles and she died anyway, because father put it up as collateral for a friend and the friend went broke and then it was taken away. Some smart-aleck cousin who ended up with it all by playing the saint while actually being a thief. The most common is that the grandfather had many children and left the land in the hands of the grandmother and it was kept intact while she was alive and didn’t let them fight over it, but when the grandmother died the kids fought tooth and nail because they couldn’t agree on how to share the inheritance and had to sell it in the end. Or they divided it up into thirteen lots, each too small to plant a lettuce. That was the story for Próspero, who had seventeen siblings and didn’t inherit anything, just the death taxes. There are thousands of stories like that, and all are regretted. In reality it’s the local version of the lost paradise, of the promised land that was once given to us and for some sin or some mistake we weren’t able to retain.
That’s why Alberto and I wanted to retain La Oculta and we were going to retain it no matter what until we died. And it’s not out of selfishness, it’s so Antonio and Jon can come from the United States and feel happy here. So my children and grandchildren can come and feel the same happiness I felt as a little girl and young woman, when my grandparents and parents were still alive, and youth itself was happiness. Even if they go to the seaside and to faraway places. But even if they’d rather spend their vacations in Spain or Morocco, they know they can always come here, and they have their house here, their old landscape, a plate of hot food, daybreak with the same fantastic view their great-grandp
arents saw, the perfect climate that makes Alberto feel like he’s in heaven. I don’t want my grandchildren driving past here some time when they’re grown up, saying, “This used to belong to my grandparents but for some reason they left it, they sold it, because they fought with their brother and sister or wanted money to travel to China, what idiots.” If this place has always been a paradise for the Ángel family since they discovered it and cleared it, why are we going to say it’s a hell that we have to get rid of. It can’t be that they were all mistaken. Cobo was not mistaken when he told me not to sell it. The mistaken ones were those who sold the land. When our uncles or cousins who sold their land come to visit, they sit by the wall or lie down in a hammock and weep in silence. They know this landscape was theirs, that this view was theirs as well, and out of indifference or stubbornness, they lost it. But at least, while it still belongs to us, all our relatives can come even if just for a few days, because we want others to come and take it in. This house is like the papers Toño writes, which he doesn’t want to keep locked up in a drawer forever, but hopes to publish one day, so many can enjoy or suffer what’s happened here, and think about things, think about their own houses and their own fathers and grandfathers, even if they were never here but in other towns, other parts of the country, or the world, because the whole world is full of Ocultas, of Ocultas that, whatever they might be called, resemble our Oculta.