by James Canon
Being the police sergeant of Mariquita had been an easy job at the beginning. Except for the sporadic fights among drunkards in El Rincón de Gardel—the town’s bar—and the disputes of prostitutes over the wealthy patrons in Doña Emilia’s brothel, Mariquita was a peaceful town. There was no record of any person being killed or even seriously wounded. The doors and windows of every house remained wide open, except when it rained, and at night to keep wandering bats from landing on the beds. Nobody argued about politics. Everyone got along because their magistrate was designated by the central government. No matter what party he belonged to, he got equally drunk with supporters of the Partido Liberal and of the Partido Conservador. Naturally, there was some envy and hostility in Mariquita, especially among single women. On warm evenings they gathered in small groups around the plaza and savaged one another with caustic remarks about hair, outfits and reputations. But, as el padre Bartolomé used to say in his tuneless voice, “Overall, the good men and women of Mariquita observe each one of the Ten Commandments.”
“WHAT A GOOD soul el padre Bartolomé was,” Rosalba said, staring, vigilant, at the crucifix on the wall. She remembered how peacefully the old priest had died after falling asleep in the middle of a mass.
And then el padre Rafael had taken his place. When she’d first met him, Rosalba thought he was a virtuous and educated man endowed with celestial gifts. But throughout the years she’d realized that el padre Rafael was much more astute than he was virtuous or educated. She didn’t like him, but she had respect for him, especially now that he was the only “real” man left in town. One “real” man and God knew how many women. Wasn’t it the job of a magistrate to find out how many men had been taken and how many women were left? She would think so. The figures needed to be reported to the central government. Perhaps if they saw the count they would speed up the financial assistance. Take a census, she wrote in her list. She’d simply ask el padre Rafael to ring the church bell many times. People would rush to the plaza, and then she’d count them.
At that precise moment el padre Rafael rang the church bell, summoning the devoted to attend the early service. Since the men disappeared, he’d become lazy. He rose late, and he’d cut the daily religious services from three to two. He also was no longer fond of fixed schedules because, he would say, “Any time is good for God.” Mass was celebrated whenever it pleased him, and lunchtime was the only time of the day he announced with twelve resounding chimes. Now that Rosalba was at odds with the Lord, she could demand that el padre stop celebrating mass altogether. She could even run the idle priest out of town. But that wouldn’t be right, and she wanted to compete fairly. Instead, she wrote, Demand that el padre celebrate mass at seven in the morning and at six in the evening seven days a week.
“Rosalba,” a woman called through the window.
Who could it be bothering her this early? And why couldn’t they come knock on her door? Make myself available only by appointment, she wrote.
“Rosalba, you there?” a different voice shouted.
She moved to the window. About a dozen women in black, and a few naked, lice-ridden children with snotty noses, had crowded together outside the municipal office. They held their cupped hands, empty baskets, pots and gourds out to the magistrate. All of them had the same sorrowful look on their faces, as though they were in the most horrendous pain and Rosalba had the cure.
“What’s happening here?” said Rosalba, annoyed by the unexpected company. “What do you all want?”
“Help us, Rosalba,” the old Pérez widow begged, waving her container in the air.
The others joined her, “Help us. Help us.”
“If you want to talk to me, you must form a line,” the magistrate demanded.
The sight was quite overwhelming, even for a woman of her strength and bravery. Rosalba thought they should all be taken into custody for begging. But who was going to do it? Ever since her husband got killed, Mariquita hadn’t had anybody to maintain the public order and enforce the laws.
“You’re the magistrate, Rosalba. You must help us,” the Jaramillo widow demanded.
She wanted to yell at them to be quiet, to go away, to leave her alone.
“We’re hungry,” a different woman shouted.
She wanted to scream that she was no Jesus Christ to feed great crowds with little food.
“Help us. Help us.”
Rosalba thought that the baskets, pots and gourds were getting too close to her. And that the women’s bony hands were bound to strangle her. She felt short of breath, terrified. She walked a few steps back and slammed the window closed, padlocked it and threw the key in the wastebasket. Those women were awfully impatient. Couldn’t they wait until she was settled? Limp with exhaustion, she leaned with her back against the window and let her body slide down the wall until her buttocks landed softly on the immaculate floor of her office. She felt like weeping, but she didn’t. If a man could do this job, so could she. There was no such thing as the weaker sex. Women were made of flesh and bone, just like men. A woman with her two feet planted where they should be could work like a man, or even better. She imagined what a man would and wouldn’t do in a situation like this. A real man would never be scared of a bunch of starving women. And he’d never hide from them. A man would go out there and confront them, scold them, threaten to imprison them. And if a man were smooth, like a politician, he’d promise them the universe. Rosalba too could do that. Yes, she would go out there and confront the women. She would tell them that they had to be patient until she could figure things out. She might even promise them food and clean water. Maybe electricity. Although she knew that in a poor, broken town like Mariquita, any promise would be hard to keep.
Resolute, she rose and walked up to the door, but the memory of her husband’s last words kept her from turning the knob: “Never go anywhere without a gun,” he had said to her. Then he’d put on his sombrero, kissed her on the cheek and began taking chairs and tables outside so that he could play Parcheesi with his neighbors. Months later, Rosalba learned from a neighbor that her husband had won the first game before he got shot.
The magistrate opened the first drawer on the right side of her desk and searched for her pistol. She checked it for bullets. There were three, which was all that remained from her late husband’s ammunition. She held it firmly with both hands and looked around for a proper target. Her eyes found the picture of the president of the republic hanging on the wall. He was sitting behind a desk, his arms wrapped around his chest and his head leaning slightly to the right. His graceful posture and confident, almost sardonic smile disturbed Rosalba. “What are you smiling about, Mr. President?” she said out loud. “Are you making fun of a poor woman who doesn’t know how to manage a town full of widows? And you, where were you that day our men were taken away?” She stopped, as though waiting for the picture to reply. “All this time you’ve been sitting on your scrawny ass on your comfortable chair, hiding behind your stupid desk with your arms crossed and that phony smile of yours.” She turned her eyes slightly to the right. “And you,” she said to the crucifix on the wall. “Where were you the first night we went to sleep and realized that our husbands would never again be in bed with us? Where were you when we wandered around the streets with our noses close to the ground, ransacking the entire damn village for food?” Soon she decided that it was no use talking to a headless crucifix, and so she looked back at the picture and fixed her eyes on the small white spot between the president’s eyebrows. “You scumbag!” She lifted her gun slowly. “You piece of crap!” She was lost in reverie when she saw, from the corner of her eye, a dazed bat fluttering around. But she wasn’t finished with the picture: “Mr. President, you’re not even worth one of my bullets.” She waited until the bat landed on top of the bookcase. Then she aimed the gun at it and shot it.
The loud discharge caused the women and children gathered outside to flee, and Rosalba to get in a fluster. She grabbed her list and added the following tasks
:
Hire a policewoman. Ubaldina viuda de Restrepo? Cecilia Guaraya?
Demand that no woman complain ever again.
Forbid gatherings of more than two people.
Prohibit the use of the word “Help.”
The church bell rang in the distance, announcing noon. So far Rosalba had cleaned her office thoroughly, relocated each piece of furniture, written a thoughtful and comprehensive list of priorities, and shut, permanently, that terribly harmful window of her office.
But she wasn’t entirely comfortable with her performance.
She closed her eyes and tried to visualize the ideal view of Mariquita through that window: a clear blue sky; the air perfumed with the scent of magnolias and honeysuckle; nightingales and canaries singing melodious tunes on her windowsill; a lively plaza surrounded by tall mango trees full of ripe fruit; little girls jumping rope on the sidewalk; healthy boys playing soccer on the clean main street; young men and women walking about hand in hand, in love; older couples sitting on immaculate benches, feeding each other flavored ice cones.
The magistrate opened her green eyes and sighed with resignation. She was now ready to acknowledge what in her heart she had known all along. Finally, she had clearly seen and understood what her first priority truly was, and how to achieve it.
She reached for her notebook and her pen, and at the top of the list, above everything else, she purposefully wrote:
Beg the Lord to send us a truck full of men.
Javier Vanegas, 17
Displaced
When I was a little boy, my only dream was to become a professional magician. I even learned a few cool tricks. My two best ones were the Appearing Bouquet of Flowers (which I produced from my ragged sombrero) and the Vanishing Coin (I made a coin disappear out of my open hand). I often performed them for my friends in our village. They were the only kind of entertainment we had. I used to call them “Tricks of Fun.”
But when I turned thirteen, I had to give up my dream because I had to start helping my father with the little piece of land he owned. We raised chickens and pigs, and, like everyone else in the region, cultivated coca. My two little sisters and I picked the coca leaves, and my father processed them into coca base. Our village had long been under the rule of guerrillas, so we were only allowed to sell the product to them, although the paramilitaries, who controlled the village across the river, paid much better for it.
One day, fed up with the small amount the guerrillas paid, my father hid some coca base in his boots and some more in my sombrero, and together we canoed over to the forbidden village and sold it. The following evening, five armed guerrillas came to our house and kicked the door down. My sisters started crying, my mother screaming. One of the men hit my mother in the stomach with the butt of his rifle.
They pulled my father and me out and took us to a little mound nearby where it was very dark. I was shaking. “You sold coca to the paras,” one of the men said to my father. “You broke one of the rules, and you must be punished.” Father, who had been quiet all this time, began wailing and begging for mercy. Then I heard a boom, like a big explosion, and Father dropped to the ground. “You go tell your mama that she has until tomorrow night to leave town,” the man who’d shot my father told me. Then they were gone. We packed a few clothes and some kitchen stuff and left that same night for the city.
That was four years ago. Since, we’ve become slum dwellers crammed into a one-room shack with only two rough beds made of planks and no running water or electricity. We can’t find any kind of work, so every day my mother and my sisters sit on a sidewalk in front of a busy church with their hands outstretched. As for me, I have become sort of a magician. My best tricks now consist of making food appear out of someone else’s rubbish, and making money disappear from men’s pockets and women’s purses.
I call these “Tricks of Survival.”
CHAPTER 3
The Rise and Fall of La Casa de Emilia
Mariquita, May 12, 1994
DOÑA EMILIA WOKE UP to a sunbeam on her haggard face. She was momentarily blinded by the radiance of the early light, but once her eyes adjusted, she saw only a red sky. For a moment she thought she might be dead, her soul descending to hell, but soon she felt the slimy tongue of a dog licking her cheek, the dog’s fusty breath in her ear. She had spent yet another night on a bench in Mariquita’s plaza. Scattered on the ground were the plantain leaves that had held her dinner. The stray dogs and cats had licked them clean.
Five days before, Doña Emilia had decided it was time to die. She was seventy-two, and for the last eighteen months, since the day the men disappeared, she had lived on her savings, down to the last cent. She publicly announced her decision to die, stating that old age, poverty and solitude didn’t mix well, then sat on a bench facing the half-mutilated statue, waiting for death to come and claim her. Rosalba, Ubaldina (the pigs’ owner and newly appointed police sergeant), and the Solórzano widow (the village’s cow’s owner) took pity on the old woman. They thought she had lost her mind. They gave her blankets the first night and agreed to take turns bringing her food and Perestroika’s fresh milk. The first day Doña Emilia gave half the food to the dogs and cats, but on the second day she decided that death would not visit her soon enough if she continued eating, so she began feeding everything to the growing pack of animals that kept her company. She only took a sip of milk each day. And so she began to slowly die, part by part. First, her hands closed into tight fists she couldn’t unclench; soon after, she stopped feeling her feet and ankles; then her eyes sank into her skull, and the wrinkled skin of her small face became translucent. Her sight and hearing, however, were still working fine. So was her mind, still sensible and lucid enough to comprehend that an old woman with a terrible reputation and no family or money didn’t have the slightest possibility of surviving in a town of widows and old maids.
Doña Emilia struggled to sit up. She looked around, noticing for the first time the old mango trees that a team of widows had recently revived by order of the magistrate Rosalba. They were thick with foliage and fruit. She fixed her eyes on a ripe mango hanging from the tallest branch. It was no ordinary mango: it was larger than most, and its color was the kind of orange-yellow she had only seen on summer days when the sky was on fire, as the sun went down. She didn’t crave the fruit, but she thought it would be wonderful to spend what was left of her life admiring the beauty of that mango. She stared at it for a long time without blinking, until her eyes began to idly close, almost as though she were finally dying.
She recalled, one more time, her life before Mariquita’s men had disappeared.
ONLY TWO YEARS before, she had been the successful owner of La Casa de Emilia, Mariquita’s brothel. La Casa was a grand old house with thirteen bedrooms, six full bathrooms, two recreation rooms, an interior courtyard, and twenty-four windows and twenty-three doors, all of which Doña Emilia had had modified to open outward. “Always move forward,” she used to say. “Every time you open a door toward the outside, you’re taking another step forward.” To enter the brothel a customer had to go through a door first, then a narrow hallway, then another door followed by a velvet curtain that finally opened into a bright, large room furnished with folding chairs and naked tables lined against the walls. A corner cupboard and a small counter served as La Casa’s bar. Doña Emilia herself tended it, offering aguardiente and rum by the bottle only. Occasionally she would sell bottles of smuggled whisky she bought from black marketeers. Music was provided by an antiquated Toshiba phonograph that played, loudly and continuously, whichever records the madam whimsically chose: boleros when she was dispirited, tangos when she felt nostalgic for her youth, salsa when she was cheerful, and so on. Next to the barroom there was the red room, so called because the only light in it came from fat red candles sitting on shelves on the walls. The red room was furnished with wicker armchairs, colorful cushions and a hammock slung from hooks, and it was reserved for those who preferred a mellower ambiance. Acc
ess to the rest of the house—the thirteen bedrooms, the communal kitchen and the dining room—was through a locked gate. Each girl had a copy of the key hanging from a cord around her neck.
With its twelve loving girls, its free-flowing liquor, music all night long, tidy bedrooms, clean bathrooms and showers, and incense burning throughout the house, La Casa was the finest and cleanest brothel for miles around.
Doña Emilia had been born in that same house. Her mother, a prostitute, had bled to death soon after giving birth to her. The owner of the brothel, a spinster named Matilde who was too stout for her dresses, said she hated babies. She’d drop the child off at a convent she knew. “This kid will make a good nun,” she said. But the eleven girls who worked for her, all of whom dreamed of babies but didn’t like the idea of having a big belly for that long, agreed to raise the little one together and take turns mothering her. Matilde accepted on one condition: she didn’t want to hear the baby cry. Ever. And so Emilia, who was named after Emilio Bocanegra, the first customer to come into the brothel after she was born, had eleven mothers but no father and family name; she simply was Mariquita’s illegitimate daughter Emilia. Her mothers cooed to her, played with her, and loved her, each woman in her own way. And when Emilia cried, she promptly was lulled to sleep with the only cradle song the women knew. Something about chicks saying pio, pio, pio.
Over the years the eleven girls were replaced one by one. Three of them grew too old for the job. Four went back to their native villages to marry their childhood boyfriends, who, unaware of the girls’ job, patiently awaited their return. Three more realized that they weren’t suited to prostitution and left for the city to get jobs as domestics. The last one claimed to have gotten the divine call to serve God. She offered to take ten-year-old Emilia to the convent, but Matilde, now older, heavier and lonelier, said she would keep the girl.