A strict, hard-working man, he soon taught his students to follow his example. The girls learnt to write through dictation and the boys to count a tree’s fruits at a single glance. When children missed class to make hay or tend their flocks, Octavio let them off, telling himself they were learning nature’s lessons instead.
As a reward for his dedication, the adults of the village offered to build Octavio a hut beside a millrace fed by water that could be drunk. Octavio saw in this little channel an allegory of the torrent that had driven the host mad. He told the villagers he would find his own lodgings and took the path towards the summit of the Hilaria range, a few kilometres away.
Rain was falling in heavy bursts. Octavio climbed until he reached a tall and shabby wall.
Bare-headed in the rain, he sheltered under some low-hanging branches beside the wall. As darkness fell, he decided to spend the night there. He pulled aside hanging white trumpets of bindweed, cut down the plants that twisted round the stones, and scraped away humus and weeds. He gathered up twigs and built a hearth in a circle of pebbles. The first flames kindled the leaves and he blew on them to get the fire going. But as the flickers lit his surroundings, he suddenly saw a huge purple rock four or five metres high bearing down on him from all sides like some drunken monster. Three great scars ran across it and the stone was covered in drawings that seemed to stare at him from a distance of a million years.
There were images of insects, stars, animals and tools. Octavio began to try to decipher the symbols. The mute stone spoke every language. It took him a few minutes to recognise a detail from the Campanero carving – the stone that had led to all these months of exile since the night of the burglary, the stone whose only readers should have been the macaws and the orchids.
He saw that the symbols were arranged almost geometrically. There was a coherence to the whole – the groups of animals were distinct from the group of stars; the mysterious object conformed to a simple architecture. Yet the writing had not been drawn by human hand. Thousands of forms of plant life had eaten into the cold nourishment of stone, covering the ground with moss and every cranny with ferns, claiming rightful ownership. Thus, at Campanero, writing was not born of man, but of the irrational power of nature and its unimpeded tropical, crazy thirst to spread, to grow ever taller and wider. It was born of a frenzy beyond all excess, the salt smell of the ocean on the wind, the shape of Hilaria’s mighty peak; it was born here, amid the mountains along the coast of Venezuela and the soundless forests of San Esteban.
The jungle protected its relics. A circle of trees rose around the stone to shade the drawings and prevent them from tanning in the sun. The place was far from the capuchin monkeys who might have rubbed against it and wiped away the marks. The air was filled with foliage that protected the stone from toucan droppings. Nature jealously guarded her heritage, surrounding it with rosewood and kapok trees, ceibas, giant interlaced creepers and ball-shaped, long-spined cactuses. Like a mother, nature defended her offspring. She had not seen men like Guerra or the brotherhood of burglars coming. Amid the lively clamour of indigenous languages, she gave birth to hieroglyphics drawn from organic depths, murmuring and moving in Campanero.
Octavio knelt before the fire, hugged his knees to his chest and remained crouching in the half-light.
The light of the fire cast the shadow of his hands onto the walls, repeating his gestures. To see him, anyone would know for certain he was descended from an animal in a cave drawing. All of humanity was contained within him. Octavio was finally witnessing the birth of a literature he had long searched for on the shelves of the church and in Venezuela’s lessons. The great book had been closed for a thousand years, resisting the ravages of time like the stone. And so literature was itself a stone.
XIII
In the village, there were two huts one hundred metres apart, one belonging to the Reyes, the other to the Atalayas. The two families traded with one another, kept within their boundaries and prevented their animals from straying onto their neighbour’s land. The differing customs that should traditionally have been a barrier between them had, by force of habit, become what bound them.
Zoilo Reyes, the father, was a cold and unpleasant man, as hard as nails, whose passion for collecting had led him to accumulate all kinds of useless objects. Though his hut was small and low-ceilinged, it resembled a hardware shop where village people came to browse and buy, even on a Sunday. He kept untidy records of scribbled-down dates and incidents, hoping his tiny observations might feed the miracles of science and invention of tomorrow. Everything in this living museum smelt of genever and fish oil.
He and his wife, Ana María Reyes Sánchez, had seventeen children, the youngest of whom, Eva Rosa, had shone from her earliest years. Eva Rosa helped to farm the fish, wove bags from goat hair, trimmed the cows’ hooves with maternal care and was up sowing corn before sunrise. She had a face like a china doll, pale little metallic-grey eyes, and delicate skin as yet untouched by age. She always wore a tortoiseshell comb in her hair and wrapped her centimos in a hankie hidden inside her bra, so as to keep her fortune close to her heart. Yet there came a time when modest, sensible Eva Rosa, who never indulged in gossip, became the talk of the town herself.
She had secretly fallen in love with the baby of the Atalaya family, Chinco – a dark, handsome, slightly sad-looking indigenous boy – the day he had given her a little birdcage he had made out of teak branches. Chinco Atalaya was a hard-working, honest lad. His skin was like powdered red ochre. He was quiet and a little mysterious, respectful towards all things and all people, and the way he could plough a straight furrow, harness a horse, trim a hedge and graft a rosebush was undeniably erotic.
That day, the pair set off together into the fields with flowers clinging to their hair, searching every nest they came across for a troupial for their cage. It was a warm day. Eva Rosa was wearing a light dress and laughing at everything. Chinco Atalaya took her hand shyly but firmly. His adolescent face glowed with the light of things to come. They made their way slowly through the woods, larking about, rolling in the undergrowth, opening their hearts, urging each other on. And as their laughter was hushed in the grassy hollow, they knew the cage would never be big enough to contain all the wild birds of their desires, and they shed their feathers in a flurry of kisses.
When she was six weeks late, Eva Rosa realised she was pregnant. Since Zoilo had brought his children up to believe that women, like animals, should not produce offspring until their prime years of hard graft were over, she tried several times to abort the baby using leeks pulled from the fields that, like sponges, emerged from her body soaked as purple as aubergines.
By December, Eva Rosa could no longer hold in her belly. When Zoilo found out, he stormed into the hut, searched the piles of bric-a-brac for the rifle he always kept clean and oiled, and set off to kill his daughter for having broken the family rules. Seeing her father draw his gun, in an act of self-preservation, Eva Rosa closed a door as the shot rang out. And so in the end the only punishment she received for her original sin was a splinter that struck her as the bullet hit the door with a guilty clamour.
Everyone in the village told a different version of the story. A few days later, it was Zoilo who came to apologise as humbly as an apostle and drew a veil over the whole business by hanging a handsome blue ivory crucifix right over the bullet hole.
At some point around March, Eva Rosa began to scream at the top of her voice as her contractions started. The village women lay the girl on a large upturned wicker trunk inside the Atalayas’ hut, the floor of which had been lined with dry grass. She was surrounded by a ring of girls in white dresses who wrung out red towels and placed damp cloths over her face in almost total darkness. Her mother, Ana María Reyes Sánchez, who was also pregnant, handed enamel jugs that smelt of balsam to a man whose face was barely visible in the gloom.
He was wearing striped trousers, a baseball cap and a beige gilet with lots of zipped pockets. He looked as if he
came from the city. A large bag lay open at his side containing antiseptics, compresses, rehydration sachets, sweet almond oil for cradle cap, and condoms. The only illumination came from a few tallow candles. Standing between Eva Rosa’s bloodied thighs in the barely lit room, he seemed to be bringing the child into the world with only the girl’s contractions and screams to guide him.
The labour lasted three days. Outside, Zoilo paced breathlessly up and down, anxiously kicking tin cans. Several times he had to be held back from entering the hut by two mulattos. On the second day, after rifling through his assorted junk, he found a tent which he put up opposite the Atalayas’ hut and he camped there among the peasants, ready for anything. As the third day dawned, the women emerged from the hut. Zoilo shoved his way to the front of the crowd with his arms held out to receive the child, yet to his surprise, the midwives placed twins there: one with Eva Rosa’s fair skin; the other, Chinco’s duller complexion. Moved as never before, Zoilo’s voice quavered.
‘They’re like the sun and the moon!’ he said at last. ‘May heaven protect them!’
Crying enough tears for three, he announced he would do all he could to give them a wonderful childhood and, cradling a boy in each arm, he returned to his hut where a lifelong bond with these two children awaited him – the very same children he had tried to kill just a few months earlier.
The family took care of Eva Maria as she recovered from the birth. Neighbours helped to clear up and wash the floor. A crowd of well-wishers came and went. As Octavio thrust his way through, he heard someone call out behind him.
‘Don Octavio!’
He turned round. The man in the baseball cap and beige gilet who had spent three days on the receiving end of Eva Rosa’s cries was Alberto Perezzo, the young doctor from San Pablo del Limón. Smelling strongly of disinfectant and smoke, he held out long arms covered in blood.
‘You’re a new man, Octavio!’ he gushed. ‘Had your hands placed in the wounds of Christ, or what?’
He was laughing. He spoke with the accent of the capital. The doctor put his arms around Octavio in an outpouring of warmth, and Octavio saw for the first time how this familiar gesture could immediately close the distance between doctor and patient. Exhausted from his work, Perezzo was slowly taking in what he had seen.
‘Sad, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Two kids of sixteen and fourteen with two kids of their own. That makes four mouths to feed. Not ideal conditions in which to bring up children.’
‘They’ll work it out.’
‘Well, they haven’t got much choice …’
‘There’s always a choice,’ Octavio replied sagely.
The young doctor stepped back to take a better look at him. Octavio had changed. He was in control of his body. It was clear from the way he held himself with his shoulders thrust back.
They sat down beside the tilapia pond, which was covered in shimmering white blankets of weed. Where the pond narrowed, a channel flowed off it. The young doctor rolled up his sleeves, scrubbed his arms with pink soap and splashed himself clean. He had lost weight, but there was still the same look of determination on his face. He glanced at Octavio sitting beside him with his hands flat on his knees. Though he appeared calm, Octavio was not quite at ease.
‘Doctor, what are you doing here?’
Alberto Perezzo took a moment before replying. He mopped the beads of sweat from his brow and started scrubbing his arms again, leaning over the water. The question seemed to have thrown him.
‘Things have taken a turn for the worse in San Pablo,’ he began. ‘There was some kind of raid on the church; I’m not sure exactly what it was about. Everyone says something different. I spend all my time with the sick … and because they’re stuck indoors, they end up with a distorted view of things.’
He said this to soften the blow, but Octavio, who knew nothing of the custom of treading carefully, did not visibly react. The water was making a pounding noise like a stone.
‘I don’t know any more than the next person,’ the doctor went on. ‘I heard the church had been overrun with burglars, thieves, something like that. There was a raid, anyway. I, for one, decided it was time to pack my bags.’
He fell silent, fearing he had said too much. He didn’t wish to talk about the shoot-outs that had set the barrio ablaze, the half-collapsed church, the injured women, the militias who had got involved to protect their own interests, or the police firing from behind the walls. He didn’t wish to discuss it with Octavio, who had distanced himself from that world and sown another one with walnut trees, mallows and mimosas, filled with simple country folk, children cutting down branches to make handles for tools and women carrying eggs in their aprons.
‘Whatever the truth of it,’ said the doctor, ‘it has given me the chance to see some other parts of the country, which is no bad thing! Not for you either, Octavio.’
‘No, indeed.’
‘I took a flying boat from Puerto Ayacucho to San Fernando de Atabapo. I worked for two months at a clinic in María Garrido. Makes a change from Caracas. Did you know nature provides a cure for every illness it creates? Honestly … you have no idea how many prescriptions the forest provides!’
Don Octavio said ‘I know’ and ‘exactly’ so breezily that Alberto Perezzo soon realised he wasn’t listening. Using the toe of his sandal, he was drawing lines, shapes and his initials in the sand. The water in front of them refracted the light. It flowed, solid and constant, to the other end of the country, all the way to the one hundred mouths of the Orinoco on the Paria Peninsula, carrying with it all the scents of San Esteban, all the roars of Macarao, all the tongues of Tacarigua. Its gentle progress, like his own, mingled with the promise of exile.
Seeing Octavio so downhearted, the doctor tried to end on an optimistic note.
‘But, you know, it’s not all bad in the barrio. The church has been put on a list of heritage sites to be restored. They want to turn it into a theatre.’
Octavio jumped at these words.
‘A theatre?’
‘Yes,’ replied the doctor, ‘as part of a programme to reclaim public spaces.’
Octavio stared towards the horizon and fell to contemplation. Unsettled, he mumbled to himself, ‘Why a theatre?’
Thinking the question was meant for him, Alberto Perezzo looked down at his reddened arms and eventually said, ‘True. They could have turned it into a delivery room.’
XIV
The idea of leaving came to Don Octavio quietly and straightforwardly, as plain as fact. The long journey he had already taken suddenly seemed to catch up with him, weighing heavily on him. His tall frame began to hunch a little. If he must leave again, he thought to himself, it should be for the last time. And so the courage and tenacity that had made it possible for him to wander for so long in the lands of San Esteban now also made it possible for him to return to San Pablo del Limón over the course of a few exhausting days.
He thought he wouldn’t recognise the place he had left in such a hurry. On the bus to Caracas, he saw the countryside he had taken two years to cross now pass before his eyes in the space of two days. He was dropped at La Bandera, from where he took another bus to San Pablo.
He wandered aimlessly through the jungle of alleyways, some so narrow you had to approach them sideways on. Gone were the endless expanses of countryside, the vast fields, the open plateaux that stretched for kilometres. Now the space was divided by lines of concrete with boarding houses that spread over several floors, cubes of brick piled on top of one another like insect nests. The corridors smelt of straw mattresses and crushed mangoes. At the foot of a flight of stairs, a lone beggar held a sign that read: ‘Please give generously to the national heritage of poverty.’ Everything seemed hopeless. Octavio’s head was spinning. Yet in spite of the filth and the danger, this was his barrio, the land he was born in, the deep and stony ground he had grown up on. Plunged into a nostalgia he could barely explain, he felt something approaching tenderness.
He climbed
up the hill, wanting to see his house again. Against the walls of his hovel, he found shovelfuls of rubbish, nettles and a cesspool stinking of urine. A hen was pecking at breadcrumbs by a low wall. He could hear a conversation through the door.
He knocked. The voices went quiet.
‘Who’s there?’
He knocked again.
The door was opened by a tall, stout woman built like a barrel, with rollers in her hair. She was wiping her hands on a hairdressing apron. She was used to looking down at men, but Octavio was a good head taller than her. She went weak at the knees at the sight of him, but was soon making light of it.
‘Cristo,’ she said. ‘I’d rather feed you than dress you!’
Laughter could be heard from inside the house and the voice from before asked again, ‘Who is it?’ less loudly but more insistently this time.
The woman’s rollers bobbed on her head. She shamelessly looked Octavio up and down and, leaning back into the sitting room, replied, ‘You can stop looking for a husband to support you, sweetheart … I’ve found you a tree that’ll put you in the shade.’
Then, eyeing Octavio closely, she invited him to follow her, swinging her hips as she went.
Makeshift shelves had been put up in the overfilled living room to house bits of old rubbish, crockery and packets of bread flour. There were pleasant cooking smells in the air. A younger woman was sitting beside a table. She had hairpins tucked into her dressing gown and was blowing on her nails to dry the polish. When she saw Octavio come in, she pulled her dressing gown up around her neck and, looking a little worried, asked for the third time, ‘Will somebody please tell me who this is?’
Octavio's Journey Page 6