The Farm

by Hector Abad

  ANTONIO

  The last time I went to La Oculta before the disaster was when Próspero’s brother-in-law drowned in the lake. Maybe that was one of the last omens that the disaster was approaching. I don’t know. I had gone down from New York for Easter Week and was staying there on my own, since Pilar had gone to Medellín with Alberto for some expensive and complicated dental work. I was studying a Brahms quartet that I was going to be playing as second violin a month later, and when I wasn’t practicing in my room, I’d go out for walks, or horseback riding. Próspero’s brother-in-law had come down from Medellín for a few days’ vacation with his wife and three children, a boy and twin girls. He was a nice guy who I’d been talking with the night before; Próspero had asked me to let them stay a few nights in his house, and I said of course, what could be wrong with that.

  His brother-in-law had had a hard but good life. Shortly before his son was born, seeing he had no way of supporting his family, he’d gone clandestinely to the United States, crossing all of Central America in trucks, passing through Mexico, slipping over the border. Once he was on the other side, he’d stayed there for more than twelve years, first illegally, then with false papers, and finally with his papers in order, after one of the amnesties. Little by little he’d managed to save a bit of money. During the first years he couldn’t visit and didn’t get to watch his son grow up, see him learn to read or ride a bike, because his wife and son stayed behind with her parents in one of the poor neighborhoods of Medellín. He sent them a money order every month, to support them, and she worked cleaning offices. After seven years he was able to bring them up to the United States, because he was granted residency. And they were there for another five years, and had two more children there, twin girls. Finally he decided with all he’d been able to save in twelve years they could come back. He came home, bought a taxi and two buses with the money he’d made. That’s what they lived on. He drove the taxi (they’d arrived at La Oculta in it) and rented out the two buses. He’d also built a nice little two-story house, on the same block where his in-laws lived.

  That morning I’d gone out riding early. When I came back from my ride, Próspero – who’d never learned to swim – was screaming that his brother-in-law had drowned in the lake, and that they’d been looking for his body for two hours, unable to find it. I galloped to the lake and found the police, the firemen, and people from civil defense. They were looking on from the shore. Finally they launched a boat and probed for the body from there, with a guadua bamboo pole. Próspero’s wife, the drowned man’s sister, was crying; the drowned man’s wife and son were crying; the two girls were crying.

  What had happened was that the man had gone out rowing, happily, in the bright sunshine, with the two little girls, in my father’s old beat-up canoe, which we hardly ever used anymore. In the house there were lifejackets, but they hadn’t put them on, I don’t know why. In the middle of the lake the canoe began to leak, and it slowly started to sink, until it sank completely. The girls didn’t know how to swim, and their father, who was a very weak swimmer, tried to keep them above water, holding them in his arms. At the same time he shouted for help, going from one twin to the other, pushing them up so they wouldn’t sink. The girls swallowed water, they sank and came back up again, scared to death, crying. It’s fear that drowns us, more than water. If you stay calm, you can lie on your back with your head back and float, but they don’t teach that to anyone. Próspero, his sister-in-law, and the boy were watching, shouting, going crazy, but they couldn’t do anything because they didn’t know how to swim. They ran back and forth on the shore. They watched him struggling to save the girls. And they threw ropes that couldn’t reach the middle of the lake, to try to save them, to pull them in. Finally a farm laborer came by, took off his shirt and pants, and doggie-paddled out to where the girls were. First he brought in the one who was on her own, then went back and took the second one from her father’s arms. Próspero’s brother-in-law was exhausted by then and unable to make it back to shore, he asked for help, said he was out of breath, that he couldn’t make it; the laborer was also very tired and stayed on shore watching. He didn’t have the strength to dive back in and help him keep afloat, although he was begging for help and moving his arms. He was scared that Próspero’s brother-in-law, who was a big man, would drag him under trying to save himself and that they’d both drown. His wife and son and his rescued daughters, his sister and brother-in-law, all watched from the shore as he sank for the last time.

  I dove into the water to look for the corpse. The civil defense people and the police were looking for him with poles, from little boats. When someone drowns the lake becomes smeared with death and everyone grows afraid of swimming in it. Próspero showed me more or less where his brother-in-law had gone down for the last time, and I dove underwater, with my goggles on. I was doing that for a long time, diving down and coming up again. I couldn’t see anything underwater. I had to just feel around.

  I had never touched the body of a drowned person underwater. The hair on his head, the inert flesh, the complete abandonment. “Here he is!” I shouted, and I stayed in place, brushing against the body with my toes. Others came to help. When we were finally able to get a rope around him underwater and pull him out, I saw his blackened face, with a grimace of anguish and pain. The drowned man had managed to save his daughters, but he hadn’t been able to save himself. The wife and son watched us pull out her dead husband, his dead father, from the shore; the rescued girls, owners of all the air, could scream with all the power of their lungs. The zippered plastic bag hid the body from the curious eyes of neighbors. The mother, as a symbol, gave his wedding ring to their desolate son. The police wrote a cold forensic report: black shirt, green pants, forty-seven years of age, taxi driver by profession.

  The water of La Oculta Lake, three meters below the surface, is a very dark green, almost like the night. Diving blindly I had touched the body of a drowned man. And it was as if all the drowned victims, from one moment to the next, were there, in that gloomy lake where I like to swim. I have always swum in La Oculta with the fear of dying. Since that day, much more so. Sometimes still, in the Harlem nights, I dream of that man who I touched, underwater, with my own hands. I still think if I’d been there a few hours earlier, if I hadn’t gone out riding, I could have saved him. There wouldn’t be another three orphans, another widow, in this strange world where all it takes is a moment of carelessness or bad luck to turn a whole life into an unhappy one.

  EVA

  There’s a strange passion in our family that’s appeared in various members since the time of our great-grandparents, and that Pilar has manifested more than anybody. It’s difficult to understand its origin, and its nature, but it consists of an attack of irresistible generosity. Neither Antonio nor I have it, but Pilar does, to an exaggerated degree.

  With a strange frequency, but always when one least expects it, she gets the irresistible urge to give gifts, to hand over everything in exchange for nothing. Without having the means and even with things that don’t belong to her, she sets out to distribute whatever’s at hand. A friend of theirs, for example, went to the farm, and was enchanted with the mare that Jon rides, with its gentle pace and easy handling, and so Pilar gave her to him, saying in any case Jon hardly ever came to La Oculta. There was a picture of Grandma Miriam in my room, a picture I loved, for the dark face of my grandmother with her look of bismuth, sulfonamide, and quicksilver-iodine, and someone admired it. In a flash, Pilar took it down off the nail it was hanging from and obliged the admirer to take it away with her. If an acquaintance had a birthday and invited her to the party, she’d buy extravagant gifts, with her credit card, and much more than she could afford. Then she’d spend months paying it off, with interest, but she never learned her lesson.

  She’s capable of spending millions of pesos in a nursery, buying bedding plants, exotic palms, native trees to plant at the farm. She’d get into a sort of frenzy of repairs a
nd renovations and hire gardeners, painters, plasterers, carpenters, to do useless improvements, which were suddenly urgent and unable to be postponed. When the bills arrived, there was no money to pay them and she’d turn to Toño and to me, to our mamá when she was still alive, to cover what was missing. She would replace practically new mattresses, buy new sheets after giving away perfectly good ones, new pillows, cutlery, glasses, giving away the previous sets without really knowing why she’d given them away.

  When she cooked a meal, she’d buy enough meat to feed an army, and her barbecues and beans always produced two days worth of leftovers, but she sent everything to the nearby houses of the farm laborers or to the school in Palermo, so the children could be served it for lunch, or she’d give it to the maids to take home: paella, desserts, fruit, everything on the pretext of helping the poor and not letting things spoil. She’d gone as far as lending people plots on the farm to cultivate, because she’d felt sorry for a young couple of campesinos fleeing the violence of some criminal band from who knows where, from the mountains near the Chocó or the mining towns farther south, and she let them sleep for nothing in an old sharecropper’s shack from our grandfather’s day, and which she fixed up at her own expense, ordering roof tiles, cement, bricks, and other material from town, so those people wouldn’t get wet, and then it turned out they were not good people, lazy and useless drunks, and she’d have to pay them to leave or evict them by force.

  She’s given away calves, pigs, fighting cocks, teak boards, sacks of coal, sacks of coffee. If there was an abundance of anything, she didn’t sell it, but gave it away. Anyone who wanted to go to the farm, at any moment, was invited, and if necessary she would borrow money to be able to feed the crowds that arrived, and she’d hire cooks, servants, launderers, to wait on the guests like kings, and paid them all daily wages that were twice the going rate in the region, because the poor girls had so much work. She would never ask visitors to pay any share of the expenses, for the groceries or the staff. She gave away the clothes she had, her children’s clothes and her husband’s, even mine and my brother’s. If I left a pair of shoes, a hat, or a pair of boots to wear the next time I came (months later), when I returned they’d be gone because Pilar would have given them away to someone.

  At Christmas she always bought presents for everyone at the farm, everyone in the family, the employees, the farm workers, day laborers, girls who came to help out when there were a lot of people staying, their children, and even those who showed up at the last minute to visit. No one knew where she got gifts for everyone, but nobody ever went without a little package. Even though Mamá, when she was alive, gave Christmas bonuses to everyone, Pilar thought it was too little, and bought more, without asking us. She’d bring us the bills afterward because – she’d ask – how were we going to leave So-and-So or Such-and-Such with no gift on Christmas Day, that’s not right Eva, Toño, you owe me this amount.

  The bottles of wine or rum, the hammocks, the corkscrew, the ashtrays, the saddles, Cobo’s books, the ponchos, the riding whips, visitors just had to admire something and they’d be taking it with them as a gift. “Doesn’t matter to us, does it, Eva? Of course they can take it with them, right?” she’d ask in front of the person she’d just given something to, and I at least was never able to discredit her in public, and I’d just smile. Later, at night, Pilar would ask me why I was always so stubborn about selling this farm when it was so beautiful and what a wonderful time we always had here and how much our friends always loved coming to visit us. I would just say, “Ay, Pilar, you won’t understand.”

  ANTONIO

  Why did I do what I thought I’d never do? It was like falling out of the sky and breaking my spine, like a loose tile falling on my head while I was walking calmly down the street. But no. It was more like walking through a rugged, dangerous landscape, on the edge of a precipice, trying not to fall, and, exhausted from trying to keep my balance, letting myself fall into the abyss, as if attracted by the vertigo of death, and almost resigned. Sometimes it seems like the most important things happen for no reason and all of a sudden, as if they fall out of the sky, like an avalanche that comes loose from a mountain and drags you away. Many things are like that, brusque and sudden, but since many others are not, one prefers to think everything is a slow process, with gestation and development. That’s how things get built, almost always, arduously and slowly, but what is destroyed, what gets lost, is a matter of a second. Creating a human life takes, at least, five minutes of sex, nine months of gestation, two years of intensive attention, and then twenty more to form a person entirely. Death, however, often arrives as a bolt from the blue, as a bullet, as a hurricane, as a rapidly fatal heart attack. Only if one dies in old age does death seem like the work of days or years, of a constant and gradual wasting away, the drip that wears away the stone or the moth that eats its way right through a dictionary. One can die bit by bit – and that’s the most normal – but also suddenly as if struck by lightning, like a thunderbolt out of a cloudless sky, or an unforeseen storm. A tree that has been growing for two centuries can be felled in two minutes with a chainsaw.

  It also sometimes happens that what seems sudden and motivated by a single, isolated cause, is actually obeying a cluster of hidden or invisible events that coincide at the same moment until becoming irresistible, and everyone gives in because at just that moment nobody has the force to resist. Fate is like that, or maybe destiny, because all this has very little to do with willpower. A feared but unexpected, even mistaken decision, gets made because many things happen, almost at the same time, that force you to commit that error. So you crash, you kill yourself in an accident, because there was a moment of carelessness and because at that very moment that truck was coming the other way, or the motorcycle, and not at another time, because you leaned on a branch that seemed sound but was rotten inside.

  In this case, circumstances left me with no option but to commit the mistake, knowing perfectly well that it was a mistake, or at least an irremediable decision, which could never be undone. And I made that decision; I was unable not to make it. For more than a century La Oculta has so often been saved at the last minute, when it seemed we were going to have to hand it over or lose it. In the last few decades it’s been saved, always, by some in extremis help from my mamá, who solved problems by some miracle, pulling money out of places there didn’t seem to be any. And this time it could have been saved too, even though our mamá was no longer around to save us as she always had, Pilar was still firm and not prepared to give in, but it was me, her ally in all the other crises, the most convinced that we had to preserve the farm, who weakened. Actually there were a whole bunch of things clustering, hiding like a virus, waiting for the perfect moment, and they fell on us right then and there when they saw our defenses were down, and they took over the farm.

  There are days when I feel resigned and days when I can’t forgive myself, or even worse, when I can’t forgive Jon, because in some way I hold him responsible for what happened. Or Lucas, my nephew, or Eva, or all of them together. But poor Jon’s not to blame, or not only him; Jon had only been sincere, and I should understand that. Just as my grandfather wasn’t responsible for the economic crisis of the ’30s, Jon isn’t to blame for having been born in the United States and for feeling almost nothing for a piece of someone else’s land that meant almost everything to me, to us.

  A person is unfair, in any case, and always looks for others to blame for the bad things that happen. I’m angry with him now that I know that our plans to live in Colombia one day will never come true, he has enclosed himself even more inside his world, in his studio, with his friends from there and his family. He has thrown himself into New York life completely, with the fury of a recaptured youth, now that he no longer feels the danger of that fatal attraction, of the call of that world away in the tropics I’ve felt all these years we’ve lived together. I’ve just told him, as coldly as I was able to, that I’m not going to spend C
hristmas with him, that I’m going to go to La Oculta, to visit Pilar, who is still there, entrenched in the house as if it were the last bastion under siege by barbarians. I want to see how everything is after what we did. I’m afraid to go, but I have to go. Jon shrugged with indifference as if to say, “Do whatever you want.” He knows that if I go it won’t be to stay, for there’s almost nothing left of La Oculta. Lately he just shrugs and says, “that’s okay,” never contradicting me; it’s worse than arguing; it’s as if he had a lover and was happy I’d be going away. Before we didn’t like to be away from each other even for a few days, but now I see him as if liberated, calm, even happy to regain his solitude, and I don’t know whether it’s solitude or freedom to be with another and not with me. He manages to make me jealous, but I’m still going to La Oculta, to see it, probably to say goodbye as well, and to be aware of the consequences of my signature, or my actions. I tell him we’ll see each other in January and he shrugs again, says relax, to stay until February if I want.