by Hector Abad
EVA
Pilar asked me to come to the farm before the work began. It was torture; I shouldn’t have gone. When I arrived at La Oculta the first thing I heard was an unbearable noise of engines rising and falling in pitch, disturbing the silence all day long. “What’s going on?” I asked Pilar. “It’s the chainsaws. They’re chopping down the coffee bushes, the teaks, and the shade trees,” she told me. I’m sure Pilar invited me so that I’d be hurting in my bones and skin, as a tree hurts when it’s cut down. I felt like a trunk that was going to be sliced at the ankles and toppled over. The teaks were barely ten years old and they were tall, but they weren’t ready to be harvested as they didn’t have the width or density yet to make good timber. “They’re going to use them for the fences, as stakes and crossbeams for the roofs of some of the new houses,” Pilar explained. “They’re not good wood yet, but they have to clear the land for the building work.” Some of the shade trees, the guayacans or the carobs, would supply wood for furniture, doors, and windows. I didn’t want to hear that noise of chainsaws, much less all day long, from sunup to sundown. Pilar’s face looked awful. Alberto tried to pretend things were like they were centuries ago, the chainsaws like “your ancestors’ axes.” A hundred and fifty years ago La Oculta had started the same way, with the chopping down of trees, and in the end history was repeating itself, symmetrically. I didn’t appreciate his black humor.
To change the subject, I tried to give them some good news: Jon had managed to sell the four Botero drawings in New York, and he’d gotten almost the same as he’d paid for them after Lucas was released: eighty-thousand dollars, just twenty-thousand less, at a time when the art market was difficult. And that they might be buying a log cabin in Vermont. That Jon thought Vermont was much prettier than Antioquia, especially in the fall. Pilar just said: “Oh really? How nice for them.” Alberto said he was going to the orchard, to prune and fertilize the orange trees. He put on his headphones to drown out the chainsaws and everything else with music. Próspero’s eyes were popping out of his head, which he kept shaking, and he just walked aimlessly in the tiny space left around the house, as if he were witnessing a tragedy. I couldn’t stand so much tension anymore. I could see in their eyes that I was to blame for everything that was happening, that my selfishness was why La Oculta would never again be what it had been.
I dove into the lake, which is what I always do when I want to be saved. The water washes me, cleans me, calms me. Swimming in the lake is my meditation. I don’t speak, no one speaks to me, I move my arms and legs rhythmically, breathe deeply, exhale, tire myself out, stop thinking. An hour swimming back and forth from one shore to the other, without Los Músicos pursuing me, without siblings making comments, without eyes that look at me in silent reproach. I put earplugs in so I can think better. While I swim I think about Benjamín, who is still studying in Europe. When he returns he might not recognize La Oculta, if he comes with his cousins to visit Pilar and Alberto. In any case this time I don’t swim peacefully and the water does not calm me. Maybe I now prefer swimming in the pool in Medellín, which has never been mine, and where nobody has drowned. While I move my arms I do nothing but think about the people who have drowned in the lake and feel that they’re looking at me with their white eyes from the muddy bottom, with anger, with reproach. I received a lot of money, in euros, for my third, and I sent it to Benji so he could invest it there, in Germany, which is a solid and safer country, a country with public lakes where I’ve swum without feeling I’m swimming in a cold soup of drowned people. I am achieving what I wanted: I have almost nothing now: a few pesos in cash to survive on here, austerely, in a mini-apartment where I sleep, as if it were a hotel, to feel light, unencumbered by baggage. I don’t even cook anymore, and I’ve filled the kitchen with old books of my father’s that were at La Oculta. I don’t want things, or maybe the only things I want are books, to leave them in my will to a public library, and that’ll be it. Pilar told us to take what we wanted, when we signed the papers, and the only thing I took from the house were books, nothing else: not one object, not one painting, not one piece of furniture, or any souvenir. Books, only books. Now in my apartment if I open the pantry I find books; there are magazines in the oven; books in the kitchen cupboards, in the bathrooms, in the medicine cabinet, in the front hall closet, behind the sofas, and even in the dining room where I never dine: books and more books. I have breakfast at the kitchen counter, without cooking anything. Raw food, cereal with milk, fruit, so I don’t have to cook, and then I have lunch and dinner out, on my own or in company.
I had a surprise for Pilar as well, but I’m not going to tell her for a while: I have a new love, a good love, a different love, very different, Posadita. I didn’t take her to the farm, as I’d thought I might, because it seemed unfair to expect Pilar and Alberto to deal with another piece of news at this moment. If I had taken her I would have had to sleep with her in Cobo and Anita’s bed, and that would have been one last desecration, another one. Too much for a moment like this. I didn’t want to tell her. It’s a recent thing, something I didn’t expect. It was like a discovery around the same time as I was feeling fed up with men. Being with a woman is something different, softer, something I’d never allowed myself to experience. It’s easy, actually, very natural, and it doesn’t feel to me (as I once thought) like a confusion of instincts. And besides, Posadita is very young, almost as young as Benjamín, with that softness of youth, that delicacy of youth. Smooth and radiant skin, timidity. For once I wasn’t going to learn, but to teach. I didn’t want to verbalize anything or explain either, and Pilar wants everything explained in words, always with words.
I did tell Toño, because given how he is, I thought he’d understand without a word. But Toño, when I told him on the phone, said one single word, in a very loud voice: “What?!” After a while he said, half apologetically, halfheartedly, that it was fine, not to worry, perfect; then we hung up. I know what Pilar would have said if I showed her or if I told her. She’d open her eyes as wide as a frightened calf, and that look would be enough to say what she’d then say in words: “That’s all we need.” I don’t plan on telling Benjamín anything, or explaining; I want him to realize gradually, and if he wants to know anything more, anything specific, he can ask me and I’ll explain. I’d like the answers to arrive in his case before the questions. I feel something sweet and tranquil inside, something consoling like a compensation for this tragedy of selling the farm. I’m surprised myself that I can like a woman so much. I finally hope, and I’m convinced, that a relationship is going to last, because I’m built to last as well, if things work out, and maybe this one, so different, might work out. Everything is so new that I still don’t know. It’s like a softening throughout my entire body, like swimming under water, but not stifling.
Posadita, who’s name is Susana, advised me to make the deal. She’s an architect and agreed after looking at the budget, the expenses, and the proposal by Débora’s friends’ company, which is very important, one of the most respectable construction companies in Medellín. “It’s a serious offer, and a very good one, that you shouldn’t turn down,” she told me. “If you and your brother and sister don’t accept it, they’ll find another farm in the region, and you’ll lose the opportunity. They already have all the permits from Jericó, and those construction licenses are hard to acquire and take a long time; you have to grease a lot of palms and use a lot of leverage. It’s now or never.” Now or never. Susana has never seen La Oculta and perhaps for that very reason she could speak so surely, without a single doubt. That’s another reason I didn’t want to take her, so she wouldn’t get doubtful.
I felt that I was going to the farm for the last time. I wanted to dive down into the lake and I did, as if escaping from myself. I dove underwater and counted to twenty-six before coming up for air. The body is stubborn and does not want to die. Well, I don’t want to die yet either. In the water, all of a sudden, I burst into tears. But, what are a f
ew salty tears in a sea of fresh water? Even if they’d been drops of blood they’d have gone unnoticed. When I got out of the lake, Pilar had already served the fruit. Then there was a sancocho, as there always was on the first day of a visit. On one wall of the dining room were the photos of Mamá and Papá, like an altar to the ancestors on the wall. Each one had their flower, a fresh rose for each. All they needed were lit candles. Their eyes looked at me in reproach as well, and not so much for Susana, but for having sold. I went into Toño’s room, to see the paintings and photos of other older relatives; their eyes didn’t say anything to me: inexpressive, inert, cold. The sancocho tasted good, tasted as good as all the sancochos in my memory, the ones Mamá made, but the lunch was tense, silent. When we finished, I put the earplugs back in my ears and had a siesta in a hammock. I tried to think of bees on the coffee flowers, when the buzzing managed to penetrate into my eardrums. It was not a restful siesta and I said goodbye the moment I woke up. I didn’t want to hear Pilar’s laments or her nagging complaints and I wanted to get straight back to Medellín, to be with Posadita, to hold her. I had no desire to listen to the horrendous concerto of chainsaws. They insisted I stay overnight, said that the night was still and silent as ever. I didn’t want to. Somehow I managed to escape from them, from everything, from the past. Especially from the past, from all the burden of family. Let Pilar carry it, if she wants, I don’t want to carry that burden anymore.
She, as obstinate as ever, stubborn as ever, will probably carry on living there, in the old house. One day she’ll die there and I’ll have to come and prepare her body, even though I don’t know how. Who would be widowed first: Alberto or Pilar? I tried to imagine it and didn’t know which would be worse. She smoked more, she had more of a chance to die first. I said goodbye to the two of them as if to two dying people. When I climbed into the jeep I didn’t cry, but tears were falling from some part of me, and those salty tears made me angry, I cried without wanting to, angry to be crying, like an ocular incontinence, if such a thing exists. I at least would never be a widow, or leave a widower. That night, when I got back to Medellín, I slept hugging Posadita tightly, my strange discovery so late in life, who I hope will be my first and last girlfriend, my final companion. I embraced her, embraced her youth and stopped crying. Before going to sleep I swore to myself that I would never again cry over La Oculta. No more, I was going to banish nostalgia, animism, our silly family traditions, from my life. No more nostalgia, only the present, no future either.
PILAR
What happened was that Toño and Jon had a very important conversation, one night when Jon was unable to sleep and told him he had to confess something very serious, something that he’d never been able to say. Toño told me he’d turned on the lamp on the bedside table and thought that Jon had a lover, something like a double life. But no, what he told him was something else, I don’t know whether better or worse, but in any case it changed their life plans radically. He told him that he was very sorry but he was never going to be able to live in Colombia, not even six months a year, not even three, and much less in a town like Jericó, where there was nothing to do. Much less would he live in a city like Medellín or Bogotá, which have neither the charm of the countryside nor the advantages of great cities. That he wasn’t prepared to walk down the street in fear, that he wasn’t fond of so much rain, so much sun, so much humidity. He also thought the friendliness and kindness of the people of Antioquia was not normal, the excess of courtesy, according to him, was actually hiding a fear of violence. That he had learned to love La Oculta, and to appreciate it, that he was impressed by the exuberance of the tropics, but the way an explorer of inhospitable places is impressed, or someone who goes to a botanical garden to see carnivorous plants with foul-smelling flowers, for a day, a few hours, a little while, but living in that excess was too much for him and even damaging. That he didn’t breathe well when it was so humid and among so many plants and that old houses gave him asthma.
He also said that in reality he believed that our family, and in general all of Antioquia, suffered from a type of finca madness. He’d been starting to think that for a while. That he definitely did not understand that attachment to land, to the ancestors who’d settled it, to rural property. That it was insane to spend one’s life buying and selling farms. That land in the United States was more fertile and cheaper, and besides, it was the campesinos who worked the land and not the people who lived in the cities, who nevertheless always had their minds on fincas. That he did not understand this anachronistic, ancestral attachment to an agricultural or small-town family past. That here in the States they were happy to liberate themselves from the unhappy small towns their families were from and to which they never wanted to return, like stubborn homing pigeons, always returning to their first nest. That the Ángel family, furthermore, two or three generations ago, had left the countryside, had made the leap into the liberal professions and the city, had received the blessing of not having to work the land with their hands, crumbling clods of earth with their fingers, but they carried on determined to maintain that root, that attachment to trees, manure, plows, corn, the crowing of roosters and grunting of pigs. That as beautiful as the landscape might be, it was a monotonous landscape, the same every day, and he was not going to be able to bear waking up to the same crags, the same lake, the same blue mountains, the same birds, as incredible as they might be, after a month they started to get repetitive and they were always the same and sang the same cacophony every morning. That to see so many birds he’d rather go to the Natural Science Museum. And he kept talking like that for hours, like someone throwing verbal punches.
Toño told me all this like a Catholic telling the blasphemies of a heretic, a Protestant, or a convinced and aggressive atheist. He told me sadly, and with a lot of anger, that Jon had deceived him for so long and allowed him to get his hopes up that they’d go to Jericó, that they’d donate their modern art collection to the town museum, and that they’d spend a few weeks or months with us each year. But at the same time Toño had always known that Jon didn’t understand La Oculta, saying that maybe it was true that the farm was a madness of ours, and in general the fever for farmland a collective madness of Antioquia. Jon had practically given him an ultimatum: he either got those ideas out of his head (the return to that land of his elders, life in a sad little town) or they’d each have to go their own way and just maintain a friendship. Toño had been taken by surprise by this cancellation of their plans, so suddenly, and he started asking more questions, and hearing answers he didn’t want to hear: that he should open his eyes, that, frankly, we could not compare Antioquia to the United States. And to look at our crazy way of always being all together; that he had a family too but at most they were obliged to get together once a year, in November, for Thanksgiving, and that was it, because they all spent their Christmases apart. That the Antioquian way of living all together, as if they were puppies for their whole lives, was sort of ridiculous, like an ancient culture, tribal, but without any basis in the contemporary civilized world, in the urban, dispersed, globalized world, in which adults scattered to all corners of the globe and chose their relationships by their own tastes and affinities, and not those relics of blood or land. That a person loved his family, yes, but from afar, because up close families could be a plague, because everyone knows each other too well, and knew how to hurt each other where it hurt most, touched sensitive spots, and clung to shared things and properties, when the best thing to do was sell up and divide the proceeds, and each to his own, follow his own path and make his own life.
Toño understood very well what Jon was saying, but it depressed him anyway. He put on one side of the scales all his nostalgia, all his obsession for La Oculta and the Ángel family, and on the other side his relationship with Jon, his life in New York. He had dreamed of having both, of a life divided between periods here and periods there, but now his partner didn’t want to share half his life, or accept that Toño should come her
e for a few months on his own, nor would he supply the money necessary for him to do it, since it was Jon who had more money of the two and without his help he couldn’t afford it. So Toño got depressed, started just going through the motions in his violin classes, lost his enthusiasm for his notes on Jericó and our forefathers; he no longer wanted to tell one by one the life of each couple of Ángels throughout the nineteenth century, to the twentieth century. Now what for, he said. All his plans for a life with Jon in Jericó, near La Oculta, had suddenly gone to hell. To put pressure on him, Jon had asked him to pay his share of the household expenses, something he’d never demanded. And so Toño’s earnings started to go toward food, transportation, and half the bills for their Harlem apartment, which Jon used to pay entirely. Now it was hard for Toño to send his share of the farm expenses to Colombia, and they’d come late. He called me, apologized, said to give him a little time until he got paid for some concert. Jon’s savings were not going to go to fulfilling his dream of living in the tropics, in Jericó; the collection of work by contemporary artists was not going to go to Dr. Ojalvo’s museum in town, either, and Jon was planning to make a local donation instead, to some small museum in the United States.
Toño even considered the possibility of splitting up with Jon and returning to Colombia, but even though he felt full of resentment, he wasn’t willing to leave him. He loved him, he still loved him, he was used to his presence and his body, having spent the happiest and fullest years of his life with him. Apart from that, he thought, if he did come back, the only place he’d have to live would be the farm, but living with me and Alberto would also be crazy; exchanging a husband for a sister and brother-in-law was a very strange bargain. “If I went to live with you two,” he told me over the phone, “we’d end up fighting; and that’s the last thing I want. I don’t want to fight with anybody, not with Jon and not with you.”