by Hector Abad
With his crisis, and with our mamá dead for two years now, there was no one to cover the holes for us, for she had always been the one to help us through difficult moments, when any of the three of us had temporary problems covering the costs. My mamá worked miracles, to keep us from fighting and to enable us to keep the farm. But now she wasn’t here to help, and without her help we no longer had Christmas or Easter. Until one month, Toño, without even letting me know, didn’t send his share for the upkeep, and Alberto and I didn’t even have enough to pay Próspero’s salary, much less the normal expenses and taxes, which started to mount up again, every trimester. Eva gave the minimum, unwillingly and late. The accounts of La Oculta were always in the red, and we had to pay interest, and the bank manager phoned up more and more often to ask when we thought we might cover our overdraft.
This coincided with the Jehovah’s Witnesses giving me notice, and overnight, our main regular source of income, that rent money, dried up as well. We signed the house up with an agency to rent it, but it was no longer a livable house, as the Jehovah’s Witnesses had adapted it into a temple and converted it into a sort of shelter with no walls or rooms: a giant open space with a roof. Then we put it up for sale, as a lot, but it wasn’t easy to sell either and months went by without being able to rent or sell it. Eva remained fixated on the idea of selling La Oculta, as she always had, and insisted that now more than ever was the favorable moment to do so. These things all happened at once and that’s when drastic, sad, mistaken, but almost inevitable decisions get made.
Débora, Lucas’s wife, came to the farm one weekend with my grandchildren, and showed me a plan of La Oculta divided into fifteen lots of three caudras each. A company belonging to friends of hers were prepared to beautifully develop and parcel out the land, with weekend ranches, a paved road, an enclosed unit with an attended gate where we’d all come in. The planned lots would have security guards, gatekeepers, gardeners, an aqueduct, and ecological paths. It was a luxury development, very tasteful, with tennis courts, a gym, mini-golf shared among all the houses, native trees planted along the ravines, a riding school for all the proprietors, where they would teach them horsemanship. She showed me the landscaping project, designed by a very famous architect, and everything else. “It’ll be like living in an exclusive club,” said Débora.
Inside I thought it was all horrendous, but I couldn’t tell her that, almost couldn’t let myself think it. “Very nice, Débora, I see,” I said, even though I wanted her to leave the farm that very minute, but how, when she was my eldest son’s wife and she was bringing us this proposal for our own benefit, to save us, with the best of intentions. You could tell they’d been thinking about it for months or years, designing it all. They were old friends of Lucas and Débora, who had come here for a change of scene several times over the years, and they’d always loved the farm and the region. And they loved it so much that they came up with the idea of parceling it out and developing it. Alberto looked and didn’t say a word, he just huffed and his nose started to sweat, his whole body; his shirt was stuck to his chest, soaked. “This belongs to the Ángel family, it’s for you three to decide,” was all he said, and he left. He probably went to fertilize the orange trees, or go horseback riding, or have a siesta at the wrong time of day for sleeping. Then Débora whispered in my ear, lowering her voice, an enormous sum of money that each of the siblings would get, if we sold the whole thing. If I insisted on keeping the old house, then I would get a much smaller share. It would be best to sell the old house too, knock it down and build one more in the style of the new subdivision. If they were offering us such a huge amount of money, I thought, what kind of profits were they expecting to make for the company in charge of developing all the lots? I didn’t mention this to Débora, which would have been like accusing her friends of having vested interests, but I did tell her that I wasn’t going to sell, that even if I wanted to I couldn’t, because I’d sworn I wouldn’t to my papá. That I would be staying in the old house with Alberto forever, even if it was without any land, but if Toño and Eva agreed, the way things were, I couldn’t object and I would give my signature for the sale of the rest of the land. If they wanted to they could sell my share and my house, when I died. Débora told me that Eva knew about the project and was a hundred per cent in favor, and I would receive part of the money in any case, as compensation. The decision, then, was in Toño’s hands. The construction company had foreign accounts, in tax havens, and could pay in dollars, or in euros. I shrugged and thought if everyone who has money takes their capital out of Colombia this country is going to be screwed.
Eva called Toño in New York and convinced him in one minute. Or she didn’t even need to convince him: he was in one of the worst moments of his life; he was like a caged beast offered, at the very least, a bigger cage. They could tell he was weak and rushed to send the contract of sale and he went to sign them and have them authenticated at the consulate. He wasn’t even able to call me and tell me he was going to do it. I know he spoke to Lucas and Simón and Manuela and that they told him I agreed that my brother and sister should do what they wanted. A short while later Toño and Eva got their money; they deposited dollars in Toño’s account in New York, Eva had hers sent in euros to Germany. Alberto and I received a much smaller sum, in pesos, in Medellín. They gave us a fair amount, I won’t say otherwise. Alberto and I still have the old house with a small amount of land around it. The lake is still part of the farm, but there are no longer coffee fields, no longer pastures for cattle (we gave them all away, except for two). The three of us settled up with Próspero and Berta and Alberto and I made a new contract with them, just in our names. We were able to sell the house in Medellín to a building contractor and we put all the money into shares that should give us enough to live on until we die. In that same account we put what they gave us for losing our view around La Oculta.
We remain here enclosed, buried, surrounded by noise and people, day and night. People no longer arrive at the farm through the old archway, crossing the cattle guard made out of abandoned railway ties, instead we have to identify ourselves at the attended gate, to some guys in cap and uniform who look out from the sentry box and mistrustfully buzz open the gate, which closes again immediately after we drive through. Our old, dilapidated jeep is the ugliest vehicle in the whole subdivision. The neighbors watch us pass by the way you’d look at a prehistoric pachyderm.
Nothing is the same anymore. Everything began to change a few weeks after we signed the contracts. When they began the construction of the subdivision the whole place filled up with machinery, bulldozers, dredgers, steamrollers, trucks that left with debris and came back with construction materials. They moved the mountain’s core to make terraces where the new houses would be built. For two weeks chainsaws were cutting down the teak trees, which toppled almost quietly, resigned to their fate. At the same time they chopped down the coffee bushes, the shade trees in the coffee fields, the groves of old teaks by the entrance, since they had to fix the road, the mango trees from Thailand, the almond trees, the hundred-year-old saman trees, which were like immense, natural umbrellas. I can be very mean, and when they started to cut down all the trees I invited Eva to come, so she could hear how they were chopping down what we’d planted ten or twenty or thirty years ago. So she could feel even a tiny fraction of the pain I was feeling. I think it did hurt her, but she put on a brave face and even went for a swim and had a siesta. She left sour-faced and refused to stay overnight no matter how much we insisted.
On all the new lots you could see all sorts of yellow and red patches of uprooted earth. A hideous green, plastic fabric enclosed the entire perimeter of the old property. Débora told us to relax, that it was normal while they were dividing up the lots, but the peace and lush greenery would return, in a year or two, when they finished digging up and moving the earth and building the houses; that this was a land blessed by rain and sunshine. The former greenness still hasn’t come back.
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The new owners of the lots began to build their houses: enormous mansions in different styles: California, Bauhaus, colonial, narco-mafioso style. Almost all of them have pools, lawns, stables, open-air Jacuzzis, and manicured gardens. From the back of the house I can no longer see the landscape that my mind remembers, our photos show, and my eyes yearn for: before me are several tiled roofs of immense houses, and blue swimming pools, fake, everything surrounded by tall fences of exotic plants, with thorns, and at night streams of light disturb the dusk and illuminate the bland, geometric gardens. Now the border of La Oculta is the cedar tree where the ashes of my mamá and the bones of my papá are buried, the resting place. At least that was respected in the plans, but behind the cedar, a meter from it, passes the wire and the neighbor’s fence. The silence is made up of different music, each one worse, and now there are no trails and animals, but paved roads where motorcycles and quad bikes come racing past at full speed, armor-plated four-by-fours with tinted windows, gigantic, expensive horses, purebreds, Arabian, Spanish, American Quarter Horses, and people who ride them in uniforms, with boots and whips, as if they were cavalry soldiers, Olympic athletes about to jump hurdles, or something like that. Armed guards drive around the perimeter fence on noisy Japanese motorbikes, because many of the buyers are businessmen or dealers from Medellín, nouveaux riches or old money, I don’t really know, since we have nothing to do with them, but in any case they’re afraid of people coming in and robbing them or kidnapping them or killing them, and they protect themselves.
The following December, to pretend, to feign that everything could be the same again, or at least similar, all my children and grandchildren came to spend Christmas and Eva came with Benjamín. On Christmas Eve Toño arrived from New York. Jon stayed in Harlem with his new life, finally liberated from his old promise to live in the tropics. Toño looked for a moment toward the lake, and another moment in the other direction, down toward the river. He squeezed his eyes shut and covered his face.
“It’s incredible: what the civil wars, guerrillas, and paramilitaries didn’t manage to do to us, the businessmen did.”
That was all he said. Then he shut himself up in his room for the three days he stayed and only came out to eat or to drink a coffee. He said there was no point in writing what he’d planned to write and that he was going to burn all those fucking papers. That’s what he said, swearing. When he came out and saw the disaster all around he couldn’t contain his rage and sometimes his tears. “I’m getting used to it now,” I told him, to console him, but there was no solace to be had and it wasn’t even true that I’d gotten used to it, or would ever get used to it. Eva just swam in the lake; she said it brought her peace, that it was her salvation, her way of meditating. Benjamín accompanied her, rowing the little boat close behind, the way my papá used to when we were girls. Benji said he didn’t want to run the risk, that his mamá wasn’t that young anymore and he might have to save her, and he always kept a white ring buoy in the boat. It angered Eva that he took care of her like that, following her and treating her like an old lady, and sometimes she’d lift her head out of the water and tell him frankly that she didn’t like it, why didn’t he leave her alone, read a book or go for a walk, but Benjamín didn’t pay any attention to her and carried on smiling and rowing beside her, like a dog, as if he were Gaspar back from the dead, who always swam like that, like him, behind Eva. When she got out of the lake, Eva read books in the hammock, frenetically, to avoid us and pretend everything was normal. Débora said she slept very soundly, knowing no one could come in and attack us in this enclosed, protected unit; that now nobody could come and kidnap Lucas, or threaten Eva’s life, like before, when the land was open to the steps of all intruders. Lucas and all my children just played cards, dominoes, and scrabble, and drank beer. For them the parceling off of the lots was nothing strange, but simply the new way young people with money liked to live, enclosed in little protected ghettos, in opulent bubbles. We turned up our own music louder and louder, so we didn’t have to hear the music from the other houses. We heard the neighbors’ voices and fireworks, the sound of their cars and motorcycles going by.
Two months after that December we spent with the whole family, maybe in March, the owners of the two houses downhill from the lake ordered an inspection by the municipal Secretariat of Public Works because they feared that the lake might burst its banks one day. The relevant authorities came, engineers, health inspectors, and they said the lake was a danger to the houses downhill from it and that it should be drained and dried out. I informed my brother and sister. Eva came for a weekend and swam in the lake for the last time. She brought a very young and very pretty girlfriend, Susanita Posada, who stayed on the dock watching her swim, as if taking care of her, but without following her. She seemed like a daughter. Toño didn’t want to or couldn’t come; he groaned when I told him over the phone, and hung up rudely. I didn’t want to watch, but I saw everything they did, like a masochist. They opened a drainage channel with twelve-inch pipes and the water began to flow out down into the old gulley where the stream once ran. The lake emptied slowly and two weeks later there was a dark, muddy, ugly, foul-smelling bed. It all filled up with insects and a terrible odor. Thousands of rotting fish lay on the bottom; snakes, turtles, and iguanas longed for the water, looking and twisting from the edge, stunned and dried up like me. An almost complete skeleton of a young woman appeared, as white as chalk, which the police took away in a sack, as a Jane Doe. The next day some police came to question us, about this or that, about who it could be, about whether we could go into town and give a declaration to an examining court in Jericó. They looked at us as if we were hiding something. Dozens of vultures circled over the hole where the lake had been, and they ate the dead carp, the rotten tilapias, and the trout flipping about in death throes in the last puddles. Alberto and I went to Medellín for a few weeks, to Florencia’s house, until the stench subsided. We’d have to wait for some vegetation to grow up over the old lakebed. We’ve been left with a pestilential wetland, full of mosquitos that affect all the owners of the houses in the subdivision, who now complain about how many flies and mosquitos there are. They fumigate every three months with a disgusting chemical, which makes us cough, irritates our eyes, and makes us dizzy for two or three days after they spray. The fumigation company, of course, says it’s innocuous, that it only affects insects and not humans. On the side of the old lake there is no longer any view, it’s just a filthy, unpleasant hollow. On the riverside the house overlooks the roofs and fences of new houses and the wire mesh of the perimeter fence, crowned with rolls of barbed wire, electrified like in a concentration camp. Over the top wires, you can just see the tops of the crags. And the noise is permanent, or that thing that is music to others and noise to us. Not even Alberto, who adores music, likes this mishmash of different rackets, each fighting to drown out the others.
La Oculta is no longer hidden or silent, but exposed to all the indiscreet neighbors’ looks, from above and below. In the mornings you hear the buzzing of the lawnmowers cutting the neighbors’ grass as short as possible. Their buzzing is almost identical to the chainsaws, although a little less intense. Everything is worse than before, but now they say our house is worth more because it’s inside an enclosed subdivision and our taxes have gone up. We have to pay a fee for the gatekeepers, the motorcycle guards, and the night watchmen. Débora says at least we always have clean water. Yes, and every month they charge us for it, as if they weren’t taking it from our own springs. Alberto closed up inside himself and looks after the few orange and mandarin trees we have left around us. Sometimes he goes out riding, but he doesn’t like it so much anymore; he says the horses don’t trot as well on asphalt as on the old mountain trails, that the noise of their hoofs on the pavement is not natural. The quad bikes startle them. Próspero is getting old and can’t find much to do. Sometimes he says it’s getting to be time for us to die. Everything is dead, actually, and we are the only th
ings left to die.
Toño never comes down from New York to visit now and much less Eva. She travels a lot, or shuts herself up in her apartment in Medellín, with her books. She travels with that girl, Posadita, as if they were a couple, though they don’t live together, I don’t think. A little while ago she called to tell me about a trip to France and Germany, to visit Benji, and she said that over there they take good care of the countryside and value it highly, that it’s not like here, where they can just build whatever they want all over the countryside, and even to put up a doghouse or a dovecote over there they had to get permission from all the neighbors. That they had laws to protect the landscape, and nobody can get around them. I couldn’t even believe what she was telling me and I just laughed. Toño calls me once or twice a month, but the conversation doesn’t flow and is made up of routine questions about me, about Jon, about Alberto and my kids. The sentences are uncomfortable, disconnected like two old rusty hinges on a door that doesn’t open very often or ever get oiled. The only new thing he’s told me is that his left hand has begun to shake so it’s very hard for him to play the violin. We avoid the subjects of Eva and La Oculta and our words come out like strident, out-of-tune screeches. In order not to quarrel we usually hang up quickly and say goodbye with the false promise of seeing each other in the next few months. I hang up and think: yeah, at my funeral.