by Hector Abad
The months go by and life goes on. I know one day I’ll wake up with an urge to get down to work and improve things again. If I can prepare the dead, I can also prepare this house that they’ve killed for me, compose the view they stole from us. I have plans, but I haven’t yet gathered the strength to start putting them into practice. I want to fill in the lakebed with truckloads of rubble and earth, to make a garden. And at the front I’m going to construct a fake hill, to shield the view of the neighboring houses, so from the corridors of the house we’ll only see the top tips of the crags and no rooftops. I’m going to cover the hills in bougainvillea of all different colors, Cobo’s favorite plant, so they’ll flower and cheer up my view. That same hill will protect us from the noise and from noticing the other houses; it will hide us away again. One day I’ll do it, when I recover from this paralysis I’m in. I have to be able to do it, but for now I can’t, I’m like a sleepwalker, quiet and bewildered.
Sometimes I wake up in the early hours and get up and walk around the house. At least during the week, since most of the new houses are weekend getaways, almost all the lights will be off in the surrounding properties and there won’t be music, so I can hear the crickets like in the old days, almost the only creatures to have survived the disaster. Because of the fumigations there are no frogs or fireflies anymore, and the bats haven’t come back, and there aren’t any parrots or macaws nesting in the dry trunks of the royal palms, which were also cut down. The floorboards creak in the same places and I lie down in a hammock, in the outer corridor, to let the morning dew settle on my face. For a moment I have the illusion that everything is the same; that in a few hours day will begin to break over the crags, and I won’t have the view of them blocked by neighboring houses or metal fences to keep intruders out of the subdivision. Sometimes I fall asleep in the hammock and dream of the lake, and I walk over the surface of the lake, as in a miracle. Alberto wakes up and approaches in bare feet, with slow, silent steps, but the floorboards creak in the same places and I wake up. He asks me if I’m okay and I say yes. He asks me if I want coffee and I say yes. The aroma of the coffee is still very good and we lie back in the hammock, side by side, our legs entwined, to slowly sip our coffee as the sun comes up. Although I cough and my voice is hoarse, I smoke a cigarette, slowly, in front of him even though he’s quit. I like to see the glowing, red tip, and smell the fragrance of tobacco. Until the light arrives, we have the illusion of still living in La Oculta, like we always wanted to. I don’t want day to break and it seems sad to prefer nighttime. I tell Alberto: “It used to be that happiness was waiting for the dawn to see the view; daytime was life. Now it’s only good at night, when everything’s dark.”
It begins to get light and a thick, white mist covers the whole landscape. It’s drizzling. Little by little the silence starts filling up with birdsong. A veil of compassionate mist has fallen over all the ugliness. It used to be that veil hid beauty and happiness was waiting for it to dissipate. Now we wish that dense veil would stay forever.
“Let’s imagine that beneath the mist everything is the same as it used to be,” says Alberto.
“I wish I could,” I tell him.
He pats my leg and, leaning back in the hammock, we stare into the mist.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
While making this book I’ve realized, more than ever, that writing a novel is a collective job. That in the end only the one who puts the words on the page should sign it is an imprecision and an injustice. There are some who are completely unaware of the phrases and ideas they contributed. They are the majority: people plundered by my eyes or ear. Others I consulted on specific points and they cleared up my doubts. There are those who gave me peace, time, the wherewithal to live, or company. My Spanish publisher Alfaguara had infinite patience with me, through years of drought and unmet deadlines. El Espectador and the Library of the Eafit University also gave me space and free time. I received space, peace, and affection from Beatrice Monti von Rezzori and her idyllic writers’ retreat in Tuscany. Time and silence were supplied by the German Academic Exchange (DAAD) and the Freie Universität Berlin, in the form of a Samuel Fischer Fellowship, sponsored by the Holtzbrinck Editorial Group.
I’ll mention a few names of people I owe great debts of gratitude, without whom I would have been unable to finish The Farm: the historians Roberto Luis Jaramillo and Nelson Restrepo gave me information and shed light on Jericó and the colonization of Southwest Antioquia; any truths, if there are any, in the history of the settlement of Jericó I got from them; the fantasies and errors are mine alone. My friends Ricardo Bada, Eva Zimerman, Ana Vélez, Elena Serrano, Laura García, Ángela Aranzazu, Jaime Abello, Ana Cadavid, Jaime García, Sonia Cárdenas, and Carlos Gaviria kept me from sinking into discouragement and helped me to improve the manuscript. So did my soulmate editor, Pilar Reyes; my publishers in Colombia, Gabriel Iriarte and the succinct and precise Ana Roda, and my German agent, the sweet and efficient Nicole Witt. Próspero, my friend from La Ceja, lent me nothing less than his own name. Elkin Rivera, copyeditor in extremis, saved me from, at least, 126 anacolutha. To the writers Mario Vargas Llosa, Javier Cercas, Leila Guerriero, and Rosa Montero I owe something very important: they scolded me for not writing and spurred me on to not give up. Alexandra Pareja, my beloved pareja, put up with my absences and even worse, my often absent presence, in addition to revising the manuscript and supplying ideas fundamental to its improvement.
Finally, Amalia and Mario Ceballos (relatives of mine from La Oculta in Southwest Antioquia), my sisters, my mother, and my children know that without them this book would not exist either, because they are its primordial clay and first destination.