Tales from the Town of Widows

by James Canon

  The magistrate leaned on a lamppost—or rather a post, because the lamp part had been stolen many years ago—and watched the old woman gradually drift away. How terribly sad, she said to herself. That poor woman has gone through life with a single purpose in her mind: to prepare for death!

  THE SUN APPEARED to be playing hide-and-seek with the magistrate. Only twice, maybe three times, had the sun turned to show its face, but except for the magistrate, no one in Mariquita seemed to notice.

  “Good night, Magistrate!” Francisca shouted as Rosalba passed. She was in her nightgown, brushing her long hair in front of the open window as if the street were a mirror. Rosalba didn’t reply. Instead she cupped a hand to her forehead, shading her eyes, and looked at the sun. She held the pose for a little while, then continued walking.

  “Good afternoon, Magistrate!” called Virgelina Saavedra. She and Lucrecia, her senile grandmother, were sitting on rickety chairs outside their house, the girl knitting a quilt, the old woman looking dead, taking a siesta. Rosalba gave them half a smile and went on.

  “Good morning, Magistrate,” said Santiago Marín, the Other Widow. He was sitting on his steps, shirtless and barefoot, his long hair loose around his shoulders. Rosalba was relieved to hear someone say, at last, the word morning.

  “Good morning to you, Santiago!” she chirped. “Can you tell me about what time it is?”

  “Huh, let’s see.” Santiago rose and reached under a dirty rag and pulled out a paper bag. Inside were tallow candles, which he counted, nodding his head. Then he glanced at the candle burning on the ground before announcing: “It’s four and three-quarters candles.”

  Rosalba impatiently waited for Santiago to render that nonsense about candles into something intelligible, but he didn’t seem to think this necessary. He took a candle from the paper bag and lit it using the dying flame of the candle on the ground. Then he placed the new candle on top of the old one and gave Rosalba a close-lipped smile.

  “So? What time is it?” she asked again, a hint of exasperation in her voice.

  Only then did Santiago realize that she wasn’t familiar with his method of calculating time. He moved slowly toward her and began to explain, “You see, Magistrate, in the kind of time I keep, events are triggered by the duration of a lit candle.” He held the paper bag up in the air. “I burn one candle at a time and usually go through ten candles every sun. I light the first candle when I wake up. Before it goes out, I’m already tending my vegetable garden. I often burn two more candles while working, another while I’m cooking lunch, and one more after lunch, while I rest. I go through two more candles at work before sunset, and then two more before going to bed.”

  “That only makes nine candles,” the magistrate sharply remarked.

  “The last candle is for the Virgin Mary.”

  “And what happens if the wind blows one of your candles out, and you don’t see it?”

  “Nothing happens. I simply light it again when I see it’s out.”

  “And what if you oversleep? What if you wake up when the sun is already high over your head?”

  “Then I get to use less candles,” an annoyed Santiago answered derisively, then he flicked back his beautiful long hair and disappeared into his house.

  Insulted, hands on her hips, Rosalba looked up and down the street. Once she was completely sure nobody was looking, she stooped, blew out Santiago’s fifth candle and then walked away, with each step gently swinging her large bottom in the breeze.

  THE CAFETERÍA D’VILLEGAS, the only eatery in town, was empty when the magistrate arrived. Its owner, the Villegas widow, was folded into an old wooden chair, staring at a fragile violet in a flowerpot that rested on the windowsill. The cafeteria existed, basically, for the five families of land workers who had no one to cook for them, and who paid for their meals with their produce.

  “What’s for lunch?” the magistrate asked.

  “I haven’t cooked anything yet,” the widow said bitterly, without taking her eyes off the plant.

  “But why? It’s midday! Your customers should be here soon.”

  “Not anymore. They come whenever they please. One orders lunch, another orders breakfast and a third wants to know what’s for dinner. Everything’s backward in this damned town.” She sounded very angry. “I’m very angry,” she said.

  “I’m starving,” Rosalba announced. “I don’t care what you cook for me.” She walked to the counter, poured water from a vessel into a large blue plastic cup and brought it to a table next to the Villegas widow. There she sat facing an old picture of Pope John XXIII.

  “If it weren’t for the violet, I, too, would have lost track of time,” the Villegas widow said. “Do you know that this particular violet blooms every ninety suns?”

  “Do you at least have any rice cooked? People eat rice with every meal.”

  “I’ve watched the entire process three times already, and it never fails. It takes ten suns for the buds to be in full bloom, twenty more for their color to fade and after that, ten more suns for the flowers to die. Sometimes they’re purplish, sometimes bluish, but they’re always lovely.”

  “In Italy they don’t eat much rice,” Rosalba said, contemplating the fat pope. “They eat spaghetti day and night.” She imagined the pope eating a full bowl of spaghetti for breakfast. “I don’t know about you, but I like rice better.”

  “I like purplish better,” the widow returned. She waited a few seconds before continuing, her voice much lower now, “According to my calculations, I’ll have flowers for seventeen more suns, which means that in twenty-five suns my daughters can start plowing. And then…” She stopped and began silently counting on her fingers. “In thirty-three suns they can begin to sow!” she announced. “I’d better write this down.” She reared up and vanished through a beaded curtain.

  Rosalba was furious. How dare she ignore the magistrate’s request for food. Her eyes went from the cup full of water on her table to the fragile violet, from the fragile violet to the pope, and from the pope back to the cup full of water, again and again, as though negotiating a bothersome decision with her conscience.

  After a while, the Villegas widow emerged and was relieved to see the magistrate had left. Then she noticed the plastic cup lying on the windowsill, empty. She was devastated by grief when she realized that her flowerpot was flooded with watery mire, and her precious violet was swimming in it.

  BACK IN HER house, the magistrate had just started making a pot of potato soup when she remembered that early that morning she’d used up the salt in her kitchen. She picked half a dozen mangosteens from her orchard, put them in a basket and went to the market to trade them for salt. The marketplace was depressing. A few small tomatoes and yuccas and some dry oranges lay on empty sacks spread on the ground. The magistrate walked about asking for Elvia, the López widow, also known as the salt woman. Elvia had learned, from her Indian ancestors, how to obtain salt from a saltwater spring located on a hillside near Mariquita. She boiled the springwater in a large copper pan for hours until it condensed. When the water had cooled, there’d be coarse salt at the bottom of the pan. It was bitter and grainy, but good enough to season and preserve food.

  “The salt woman hasn’t been here yet, Magistrate,” a woman missing all her front teeth told her.

  “Is she coming soon?”

  “I don’t know what time she’s keeping,” the woman replied, shrugging.

  This sort of answer regarding each woman’s time had become quite common, and to hear this over and over upset the magistrate.

  She traded her mangosteens for a few tomatoes and walked away.

  ALONG THE EMPTY streets of Mariquita the magistrate went with her head down and her shoulders hunched, feeling despondent: her village had turned into a Babel without a tower. How could she ever govern a community where time was a candle, a plant, or the movement of someone’s bowels, for that matter? How was she ever going to carry out any of the grand things she’d conceived for her
town of widows, when ninety-four people couldn’t even agree on when morning was morning, when night was night? Perhaps if she closed her eyes and walked the other way, she would forget about all this. Maybe that was the only way to go through life. Yes, maybe Rosalba had solved the mystery of existence: every time you encounter an obstacle in your path, all you ought to do is shut your eyes and walk in the opposite direction. Maybe Rosalba’s mother had been wrong all along when she said that there was no worse blindness than that of those who refused to see. Maybe Rosalba didn’t need to see, to really see, the bad things that happened around her.

  Or maybe she did.

  Up and down the quiet streets the magistrate went, looking like an ant with her thin arms and legs and her large behind, feeling like a failure as she finally saw, really saw, exhausted women working the parched fields in the scorching sun, breaking their backs so their families wouldn’t starve to death; old shacks defying gravity with their cracked, weed-infested walls; scrawny dogs and cats that kept mysteriously disappearing as food became scarce….

  Along the empty streets of Mariquita the magistrate went with her head down and her shoulders hunched, feeling overthrown as she finally heard, really heard, the clucking of the Sánchez widow’s hens, trained to lay eggs in the widow’s bed; and the grunting of Ubaldina’s pigs, all of which were hoarded inside the woman’s house to prevent them from being stolen….

  On a sunny afternoon of a day no one recalls, in a town the existence of which no one remembers, a poor magistrate dressed in her Sunday clothes wandered up and down the streets, looking like an ant, feeling like a failure.

  Rogelio Villamizar, 25

  Right-wing paramilitary soldier

  His name was Góngora, and he was just an ignorant campesino, like me. But he’d been with the forces much longer and become a squad leader. I was assigned to his detachment; that’s how I came to witness what I’m about to tell you.

  We’d been chasing a guerrilla column in the jungle for several days, and they seemed to have been swallowed by the wild vegetation. We were about to give up and return to our base when we ran into a small group of Indians, five or six. We knew the Indians in that region fed rebels and often hid them in their reservations. The Indians were naked, their bodies covered with paint. They ran when they saw us, so we shot at their legs. All but one managed to escape into the thick scrub. The brilliant colors on his skin made him an easy target. He was a small man with long hair, and he looked even smaller after we tied him to a tree. A bullet had hit him in the left thigh and he was making grimaces of pain. We stepped aside and let our squad leader do what he liked the most.

  “Where are the guerrillas,” Góngora asked him. The Indian opened his mouth as though he wanted to speak, but he made no sound. Góngora walked up to him and slapped him twice across the face—nothing humiliates an Indian more than being slapped in the face. Góngora asked him the same question again. This time, the Indian’s answer was an awful gurgling sound. Pissed off, Góngora hit him in the face with the handle of his revolver. The Indian made that horrible noise again, and his face twisted into a pained expression. Blood was gushing from his nose and mouth, and still he wouldn’t tell our leader what he wanted to hear.

  Góngora shouted a stream of abuse at the Indian, then put the tip of his revolver on the Indian’s brow and said, “I’m losing my patience. Where are the damn guerrillas hiding?” The Indian started making louder and more annoying sounds, his eyes suddenly brimming over with tears. Most prisoners would have talked by now, if for nothing else, so as not to prolong their misery: they all know that after blurting out, they’ll get killed no matter what. And so I marveled at this Indian’s loyalty and bravery. The sounds he made, annoying though they were, seemed to be the only ways he could safely express his fear without betraying anyone.

  Góngora took a few steps back, aiming his revolver at the Indian’s head. I looked into the Indian’s eyes: he stared blankly past our leader, past us. Then I looked at my comrades, and then at Góngora. But when he pressed the trigger, I just looked away.

  Later we found out that the guerrillas had cut out the Indians’ tongues.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Day Time Became Female

  Mariquita, date unknown

  THE MAGISTRATE HAD BEEN sequestered in her bedroom for several suns now, severely depressed. She had been defeated in her attempt to govern Mariquita. She was a worthless, stupid, arrogant, self-centered middle-aged woman who’d been given the opportunity of a lifetime and miserably failed. The two major events of her so-called administration—the Procreation Campaign and the Next Generation decree—had ended in disaster. The village still had no running water or electricity or a working phone, and all its access roads were now overgrown with thick shrubbery. Mariquita might as well have been erased from the nation’s map.

  All this caused Rosalba to have strong feelings of guilt, though her dominant emotion was fear: fear that her tenure as magistrate was at risk. Soon someone would plot to overthrow her, someone younger, more intelligent and better qualified.

  During the length of her depression, Rosalba had refused to see her few friends and acquaintances. Only her boarder was allowed to come into her bedroom. Vaca brought Rosalba food three times a sun, gave her periodic reports of the people who had stopped to visit or to inquire about the magistrate’s health, and impatiently listened to Rosalba’s self-abuse. One morning, however, fed up with Rosalba’s whining, Vaca went to see the nurse.

  “The magistrate’s stopped loving herself,” Nurse Ramírez said after listening to the long list of symptoms Vaca named. She prescribed a cup of marjoram tea eight times a sun, frequent sponge baths, and wearing clean clothes and makeup, if she could find any in the market. And so Vaca went back home, dragged Rosalba out of bed, to the patio, gave her a cold bath and made her lie naked in the sun, like a washed sheet, to dry. She then helped Rosalba put on a red dress and did her graying hair in a chignon at the back of her head, a good inch and a half higher than usual, so that the back of Rosalba’s neck showed.

  THIRTY-TWO CUPS OF marjoram tea later…

  Darkness had begun to spread languidly over Mariquita. Feeling a bit more animated, the magistrate went outside and sat on her steps. The street was empty, and only a steady pounding sound was heard in the distance. The Ospinas must be grinding maize, Rosalba thought. She imagined the sturdy Ospina widow beating kernels repeatedly with a heavy flail.

  The sound of footsteps interrupted Rosalba’s thought. She leaned forward, squinting her eyes at the approaching shadow, until she recognized the expressionless face of the schoolmistress. Cleotilde hadn’t come once to visit. She hadn’t even asked after the magistrate’s condition. But Rosalba couldn’t blame the old woman for her indifference toward her. If anyone in town could claim to have been ill-treated by the magistrate, it was Cleotilde.

  “Good evening to you, Señorita Guarnizo,” Rosalba said in an unusually cordial tone of voice. The teacher merely acknowledged her with a motion of her head and walked past her as fast as her seventy-four years and goutish toes allowed her. “Would you like to join me for a bowl of soup, Señorita Guarnizo?” Rosalba shouted. “Vaca always makes a little extra.”

  Cleotilde stopped abruptly. She wanted to say yes, she’d be pleased to, but the request had taken her by surprise—she couldn’t remember the last time the magistrate had invited her into her house—and despite the teacher’s natural eloquence, no words came to her mind.

  “Please, Señorita Guarnizo,” Rosalba sounded almost humble. “I need your wise advice on some matters that are tormenting me.”

  Wise advice, advice, vice, ice, ce…The words echoed in the teacher’s mind. She turned around, not entirely convinced it was she the magistrate was talking to. But the pitiful scene before her eyes cleared all her doubts: sitting all alone with her eyes fixed on her own feet—chapped and swollen in the shabby sandals she wore—with the dilapidated facade of her house as her only backdrop, the once-arrogant
magistrate looked utterly dejected. Cleotilde tilted her head down and lowered her spectacles with her index finger. “It pleases me to hear that my recommendations are appreciated around here,” she remarked.

  Rosalba gave a timid laugh, then, addressing the teacher’s knees, said, “Your recommendations aren’t just appreciated, Señorita Guarnizo. They’re treasured.”

  Treasured, easured, sured, ed… The flattering sounds resonated in Cleotilde’s ears along the hallway toward Rosalba’s dining room.

  Later on, after they’d eaten two bowls of soup apiece, and the magistrate had apologized several times for Vaca’s lack of talent for cooking, the two women sat in tall wicker armchairs in the living room drinking coffee and analyzing the “disastrous effects,” as Cleotilde put it, that the “time dilemma,” as Rosalba put it, would have on Mariquita if it weren’t tackled promptly.

  “Have you thought about any possible solutions?” Cleotilde inquired.

  “Oh, several,” Rosalba lied. “I’m just not happy with any of them, and I thought you and I could…perhaps come up with some tonight.”

  “I’d like that,” the teacher returned, “but it’s getting late, and I must prepare my ethics class for tomorrow. I’ll come back tomorrow afternoon.”

  Visibly disgruntled, Rosalba rose and began walking in circles, glancing at the endless number of lists that hung neatly arranged on every wall of her house: lists of priorities, an updated count of widows and maidens, schedules for the cleaning and disinfecting of the village’s homes, inventories of medications needed in the infirmary, records of her own unpaid and long-overdue salaries, lists of stray dogs and cats with a full description—which was brought up to date periodically as they kept mysteriously disappearing—and lists of lists. She had recorded the entire history of Mariquita since the men were taken away, in a journal made of pointless lists.