by Hector Abad
ANTONIO
The only bad thing about La Oculta was how far away it was from the sea. The view from the top of La Mama had oceanic dimensions, it’s true, but that immensity is not the sea, in any case, nor could it be, because the sea is very far from there and there is nothing on land as big as the sea. The Pacific, by air, is actually not that far, between La Oculta and the shore of the Pacific Ocean there is a strip of land one or maybe two hundred kilometers wide, at most. But it means crossing mountains, plains, terrible roads, and then the densest jungle in the world, the Darién. The River Chocó, geologically, Simón, my scientist nephew, tells me, is an ancient Amazon, all that’s left of the ancient, primordial Amazon, when the Amazon River flowed into the Pacific. Then the Andes rose up near the ocean, and the Amazon had to reverse its course, all across the American continent, toward the other side through interminable plains, to the Atlantic. On the western side of the Andes only one intact piece of the original, primordial Amazon jungle remained, for the mountains here are a little bit more inland: and there it is, impenetrable, with Amazonian plants older than the ones in the other Amazon, a unique forest, wet and tough, impenetrable, as ancient as the most ancient jungle on the planet, as rainy as the rainiest place on earth. And that was the jungle that kept the people of Jericó from reaching the nearest ocean. Not even today, in the twenty-first century, is there a road to take us there. It’s not even possible to overcome this block that keeps Central and South America apart. In this corner of the world, everything is detained. And just before you get to the densest and boggiest jungle in the world, you come across our little paradise, La Oculta, in Jericó.
The eyes of the people of Jericó, in the time of my grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents, had never seen the sea. Abraham, the first, had crossed it, it’s true, when he left Spain to come to the Indies, but then his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren would never see the ocean. They withdrew to this remote part of the world, into these impressive but inhospitable mountains, far from the sea. They carried on speaking the resonant, old form of Spanish that their elders spoke, and even today, if you ask the residents of Jericó if they’ve ever seen the sea, more than half of them have only seen it on television.
When I tell Pilar this, and speak to her of the sea, of what I feel at the seashore, near New York, in the summer, she shrugs, almost with rage, and says: “And who says you have to see the ocean to be happy, or New York, or Europe, or Japan, or Africa, or wherever? You’ve seen almost the whole world, from Brazil to Australia to Hong Kong, but nowhere have I seen you happier than right here. Alberto and I are happy here, and even if the sea is far away, when we’ve gone anywhere else we’ve always wanted to come back to this very place. This is what we like. Is it so hard to understand such a simple thing?”
PILAR
We were alone, Auntie Ester and I, in the old dining room of La Oculta. That’s when she was already very ill, in the last weeks of her life. She had spent almost the whole morning talking about her memories of Jericó, of her childhood in town, of leaving for the south, with her parents and my papá, on horseback down into the Cauca Valley during the crisis in the 1930s, in search of a second chance, of a new life. The only thing our grandfather hadn’t sold in Jericó was his mother’s house and La Oculta, so she could live off what the farm brought in. She told me that her brother, Cobo, was always asking questions, and that he’d talked so much all along the way with Grandfather Josué that when they arrived in Sevilla he hadn’t gone into fourth grade, as he should have, but fifth, since according to our grandfather he’d asked about so many things during those days that it was the equivalent of a whole year of schooling. She spoke for a while, as usual, of the Violencia, of her husband murdered by the Conservatives and the return to Antioquia, as if the family had always lived like a pendulum that flees from hunger or from blood. They called us for lunch and I helped her walk to the dining table, very slowly. When we were having our soup, with her sweet and worn-out ninety-year-old voice, without lifting her eyes from her bowl, she started telling me something with all the inflexions alerting me to the fact that she was about to say something important:
“Mijita, there’s something that you and I have never talked about, and we talk about everything. I think all these investigations Antonio’s been doing about us and the surname Ángel and Jericó are really wonderful, but there’s something I have to tell you before I die, a very nasty sin my father committed, your grandfather, that is, the person who gave us all this name that you girls and Toño are so proud of.” Here my aunt stopped, glanced over at me with her eyes as sharp as needles, to make sure I was listening attentively, ate three spoonfuls of vegetable soup, very slowly, looked back down at her plate, and carried on speaking:
“I don’t think anyone knows what I’m about to tell you, and you’ll see if you tell or not, but don’t tell until after I die, because I don’t want gossip or questions from anybody. I came here to die and I think the day is fast approaching, so I have to tell you this to see what you think, and you can decide if you want Toño and Eva to know, or if you’d rather keep this secret story all to yourself. I’ve carried it for half my life, since your grandma Miriam told me, and I wish she hadn’t, because since that moment I loved my father much less, I stopped feeling the respect I’d always felt for him. He stopped being the idol who’d pulled us up out of misery over and over again, and became an ordinary man, a being of flesh and blood. Your grandmother Miriam and I talked a lot, much like you and I in these months, because we lived together from the time I was widowed, which means we lived together for more than thirty years, but she never told me about this offense of my papá’s in all those years, perhaps to protect his image in the eyes of his children.
“You remember,” she said, “that your grandma Miriam wasn’t born in Jericó but in El Retiro, don’t you? Well, I always knew that she, before meeting Josué, had had a boyfriend there, a real fiancé, who she adored, the son of a family from the coast who’d moved to El Retiro and who was called Fadi Ajami, son of Don Hussein Ajami, a Turk, or to be more precise, a Palestinian, although back then they were all called Turks, all those who arrived with Ottoman passports. Fadi had a printing press, one of the few, or maybe the only one in El Retiro at the time. She and Mono Ajami – as he was called due to his blond hair and blue eyes – were going to be married in 1919 or ’20, I’m not sure, and they were engaged, but something happened and Fadi’s brother, I can’t remember what his name was now, I think maybe Hassán, one of those Arab names, was killed by some bandits at his hacienda over by Sonsón, and left two very young orphaned daughters, I can’t remember what their names are, or were – I don’t even know if they’re still alive. Their mother, Fadi and Hassán’s mother, told Fadi that he had to marry his brother’s widow, who was Palestinian like them, Farah Abdallah. He didn’t love his sister-in-law, he didn’t even like her, or get along with her, but that was the custom and the law of the household: if one son died, and left a widow and descendants, if there was a single male in the family, then he had to take care of them and marry her. And there was no discussion possible: that’s how it was and that was the end of it.
“So this Fadi Ajami had to tell your grandmother Miriam, with an aching soul, that they couldn’t be married because he was obliged to marry his young widowed sister-in-law, Farah. Imagine, we were all about to be Ajamis, and Palestinians, and not Ángels and Jewish, as your brother says we are, although this thing about our Judaism I don’t entirely believe. The thing is that your Grandma Miriam was very hurt when her Arab fiancé left her in the lurch and resolved to get married quickly to the first suitor who appeared. And that’s when your Grandpa Josué showed up, our papá, who had some investments in salt shipments together with Miriam’s father, Don Bernardo Mesa, who was also a cousin of Mamaditas and, you know what they say, ‘blood is thicker than water,’ or, as your own grandpa used to say, one has to find a spouse among one’s own tribe.
The thing was, there was no salt in Jericó and so salt was shipped by mule train from El Retiro, and your grandpa sold it in Jericó. You don’t know how important salt was back then, salt was like today’s refrigerators, the only way to keep many things from rotting, especially meat, beef jerky, that was a way of preserving it. Anyway. He was very young and he’d had to take charge of his family’s business dealings because his father…well, you already know, the typhoid and all that.
“The thing was that your grandpa, who was a very young man, very fine-looking, was in El Retiro shortly after Miriam’s Turkish boyfriend left her in the lurch. That was when the young man from Jericó caught her eye, and they became engaged, and a few months later they were married. I have the letters they wrote to each other during their engagement, which are very romantic and quite pretty. But here is the secret and the sin, mijita, which is not nice to tell, but I’m going to tell you. What happened was not so unusual in those days when there were no antibiotics and men lost their virginity in the brothels: your Grandpa Josué had syphilis when he married your Grandma Miriam, although he didn’t know it, and their first child was not your papá as they’ve always said, but a little girl, who was baptized Ester, like me, but who was born blind, sickly, and syphilitic. That little girl died when she was a few weeks old, and just as well with all the problems she had, but they promised that the next daughter they had would also be called Ester, if they got cured and could have more children, and that’s why I was called Ester. If you go to the Ángel mausoleum in the Jericó cemetery, you’ll see a little plaque with my name on it, as if I’d already died. It says, ‘Ester Ángel, born and died at the beginning of 1920, two short weeks,’ in other words, three years before I was born. If you want when I die you can bury me right there, beside the girl I wasn’t, or who I replaced.
“You don’t know, mijita, the meaning of rage and shame. Your Grandma Miriam got married, more resigned than in love, more hurt than sure, to someone who she didn’t love as much as the Turk Ajami, but who she at least liked, and right away she got pregnant, but as a result of that pregnancy she also got infected; your poor grandma, in the very act, got the best and the worst, life and sickness. That’s hard to forgive. Luckily your Grandpa Josué’s younger brother, Elías, was studying medicine by then, and in those days there was a treatment for syphilis, a long and painful process, for to treat a person they poisoned the whole body with arsenic, mercury, various things, and people either died or got better. You remember when Grandma Miriam got angry with your grandpa, she always said the same phrase?”
“Yes, Auntie,” I said: “Bismuth, sulfonamide, and quicksilver-iodine!”
“Yes, exactly, ‘bismuth, sulfonamide, and quicksilver-iodine.’ All she had to do was say those words for your grandpa to fall silent, dumbfounded, as if sunken in his own guilt and disconcertion. That phrase obliged him to go back in time, to a time when he’d had to get down on his knees and beg for your grandma’s forgiveness, on his knees. Well anyway, that’s what they were given to treat their syphilis in Medellín, mijita, so they could try to have more children, but for a year they were forbidden to have relations or even to sleep in the same bed. When they were finally cured by the blasted mixture of bismuth, sulfonamide, and quicksilver-iodine, your grandpa returned to Jericó, to look after the salt business and especially La Oculta, the cattle and the coffee, and your grandma Miriam went to spend a few months with her family in El Retiro.”
Auntie Ester had served herself the main course, but she’d barely touched it. The look in her eye was hard, cold, but she felt lightened, alleviated of a weight. Her eyes seemed to be looking backward, even though they were looking off into space or fixed on an unimportant spot on the ceiling. She smiled with a slight sweetness, and began to speak again:
“Well, you know how my uncles used to explain away that phrase with a silliness that my papá had threatened to put rat poison in your grandma Miriam’s coffee. What rot. What shut him up was his deepest, oldest guilt at having infected his virgin bride, who he loved so much, with his brothel sin. I think it was that guilt that made him a gentle and timid man for his whole life, as if forever purging an indelible guilt, of which your grandma took care to remind him every once in a while. I know that your grandma, when she was recovering in El Retiro, saw her former fiancé, Mono Ajami. Then she returned to Jericó and your papá was born. I’m not saying anything more, because that’s all I can say, mijita, with full knowledge. From there on in I can imagine many things, but I’ve never said what I imagine because that would be like letting madness loose, and it’s best to keep that chained up with seven locks, is what I say.”
EVA
The glory and tragedy of love are so simple. I can’t understand why poets, psychologists, and treatise writers spend so much time going over it, when it’s such a simple thing, which for me is this: two people fall in love, and while still loving each other (while still in love with each other, I emphasize), little by little, almost without noticing, they fall out of love, until eventually they end up hating each other. The reason is so simple, so animal and human at the same time, so low, so high, so normal, so sad: boredom with sex, boredom, that is, of having sex with the same person. It’s precisely sex, the essential factor that carries us away with delirium, to love each other madly, to the exaltation of happiness, of harmony, of communion, which is called love, and is its most human and most beautiful mask. Something so fleshbound it becomes spiritual. And that same thing that made them unique and happy, inseparable and faithful, with eyes for no one else, gradually wears away. And one tragic morning, one night on the town, on an unimportant trip, sex with someone else, a prostitute, an idiot, an ugly or useless woman, seems more erotic than sex with the beautiful, kind, glorious loved one. And that furtive sex, if it gets found out, and even if it doesn’t (because these things are known unknowingly), is unforgiveable for both. He can’t forgive himself, and gets confused, and she can’t forgive him and curses him.
I know, I’ve lived through it so many times, I know men and I know myself as well. When I was married to the banker, I couldn’t believe it, but that’s how it was: he would go off with women who weren’t worth – and I don’t say this out of vanity – my little toe. Silly little girls, tacky, brainless, and without any spark. But these women had different tits, different thighs, other scents, different hair, different eyes, other voices. And that made them profoundly attractive to him, much more attractive than me, even though he loved me, and I know he loved me, but his eye was caught by other bodies, the way dogs follow the scent of a female dog in heat, unable to resist. I’m not playing the saint here, I felt it too, perhaps less forcefully than him, but I felt it too: that a clandestine, furtive, occasional love would make me scream with pleasure more intensely even if afterward I felt angry and only wanted to get dressed and for the other man to get dressed and go, quickly. Yes. I felt it too, though a bit less than them, and less than him. But maybe since I’ve been like that I can intimately understand what they do, what happened to my banker – I couldn’t forgive him though, no matter how rationally I thought about it, I could not forgive him. We are like that: free and liberated in mind; if a friend asks if we think it’s okay if they’re unfaithful out of pure carnal urgency we say of course, go ahead, we only live once, tomorrow the worms will be eating us: we give the same advice to everyone. But to our spouses no, this sin is not permitted to our own partners, because each of us is a god unto ourselves, and betraying fallen angels is all well and good, but you don’t do that to the true god. The problem, I believe, is insoluble even if there are solutions proposed by culture and history. Pilar’s solution, as dictated by religion and tradition, is not to sin and that’s that. Trying to take importance away from sex, and live that way, eating the same traditional meal every day and suppressing the desire to taste exotic dishes. Some, very few, manage to live that way, but it’s very unusual in these times of so much freedom. With men, in this culture, we’re more permissive. They
have adventures and their submissive wives wait for them at home until they come back. They have children out of matrimony, who show up when they die, and there didn’t use to be a problem, for natural children didn’t have many rights, but these days they have to be given a share of the inheritance, a share of the farm.
I never had an Alberto, so faithful and so calm, nor have I ever wanted to be like Pilar. I’ve known men more profoundly, having had all sorts of types of men, some much worse, and much more unfaithful and more sexual than Alberto, real dogs, but amusing dogs. They did it behind my back, and I knew, but at least for a while I forgave them, I tolerated their vices, and got even with them without their knowing. Unfaithful to me? Take that, my love, same to you, without your ever knowing. For a woman it’s easy to find someone to sleep with; all men always want to go to bed with a good-looking young woman who’s new to them. All of them, all, or all except for one in a thousand, to not leave out some rare cases, mysterious and almost unique, the way saintliness, heroism, and disinterested goodness is unique. But sex for revenge doesn’t give one a sense of getting even but of failure; it’s good for nothing, it doesn’t console. Since revenge didn’t do any good for my third marriage, I separated from him as well, and now I can barely remember him, he passed through my life without glory or sorrow.
When I split up with my third husband I realized I’d soon be too old to have a baby. I went back over all the men I’d had at that stage, official boyfriends and lovers, the three husbands, friends to spend time with. I made a chart and tried to think which of them was best, or the least bad, in his habits, genes, and appearance, and concluded that the best of all had been my second husband, Bernal, the orchestra conductor. I invited him out for dinner, we went out a few times, until I sprang on him what I wanted: not to sleep with him, since neither of us was interested in each other anymore, but to have a child with him, and so we wouldn’t have to go through the embarrassment or trouble of sleeping together again after so long, we could do it through artificial insemination. I asked him to be my donor. He didn’t have any children and he hesitated for two or three months, but in the end he agreed. He told me he was curious to see how a child of his would turn out, curious to watch a child grow up, but that he didn’t have the time or inclination to raise a child, to be a proper father. He’d give him his surname, he’d see him once in a while, but no more. That was more or less all that I wanted, a boy who looked like the conductor, with his honesty and good nature, as far as possible. And that’s how Benji was born, like a calculation, and I raised him on my own, practically on my own, though he knows who his father is and they see each other once in a while, but no more than that. I don’t think I played that part of my life badly, at least I’ve never regretted it.