A Tale of the Dispossessed

by Laura Restrepo

  “Stop fretting, child,” she used to say when she found him on the verge of despair, “your parents did not abandon you because they were mean, they were just downhearted.”

  “I cannot forgive them,” he grumbled.

  “Those who won’t forgive cross a river of unwholesome waters and remain on that other side.”

  THREE

  All the thunder of rockets that night did not seem to accomplish anything; on the contrary, it seemed to work against the village. As if incited by the explosions, violence made itself felt that year, and a great Conservative rage swept through the Liberal community of Santa María and turned it into pandemonium. So that Three Sevens, still only a few months old, must have witnessed for the first time—or second? or third? —the spectacle of blazing houses in the night sky; of roaming, masterless animals bellowing in the distance; of threatening, throbbing darkness; of corpses, soft and puffy, coming downriver and clinging to the shrubbery on the banks, as if refusing to part—while the river rushed at a mad pace, apparently fearful of its own waters and trying to escape the riverbed.

  “I wailed until God grew tired of hearing my cries,” Doña Perpetua tells me, recalling those Armageddon days. A resident here at the shelter, she is, by an accident of fortune, also from Santa María Bailarina and surely viewed its destruction. “I buried my husband and three of my children, then ran away with the ones I had left. Drained of tears and emaciated, when I looked at myself I muttered, ‘Perpetua, nothing is left of you but skin and bones.’”

  The survivors of that massacre devoted their last reserves of courage to the rescue of their patron saint, the one that had given their town its name: a colonial Madonna carved with skill and rhythm in dark wood, which stood plagues and the passing centuries, retaining the rose-petal freshness of her cheeks and the golden borders of her mantle, and which proudly displayed the small waist and soft curve of arms so characteristic of the images traditionally called bailarinas.

  “There is only one mother, but I had the good fortune of having two.” Three Sevens laughs. “Both were kind and protective. The heavenly one, carved in cedarwood. And the earthly one? The earthly one, I would say, was made of sugar and marzipan.”

  With the smiling and resplendent Heavenly Mother on a litter carried on their shoulders, they fled to the mountains to wait until the massacre was over. Nothing could happen to them while they were under her protection: she, the Immaculate, full of grace, with her royal crown cast in fine silver, the crescent moon tucked in the folds of her tunic, and on the pedestal below, the snake with a satanic mien, helpless at her feet while she steps on it unaware, as if the evil in the world did not count.

  The violence increased, however, and ran wild. The news that surfaced from below only brought gasps of despair.

  “Those of the Conservative party painted all the doors in town blue. They even painted the cows and donkeys blue, and it was rumored that they would slash the throat of anyone daring to wear red.”

  “Hell broke loose from El Totumo to Río Cascabel.”

  “The blues said they would stop only when all the Liberal blood had been shed. They also said they planned to win the next elections the same way.”

  Seeing that it was a lost cause, the reds from Santa María bade farewell to their land, looking back at it from a distance for the last time. Improvising a caravan, they fled toward the east, now a tattered guerrilla band, with death following closely behind, uncertainties ahead, and hunger always closing in. At the center, next to the wooden saint, marched Perpetua, her children, Matilde Lina, Three Sevens, the elderly, and the rest of the women and children. The men, armed with eight rifles and twelve shotguns, formed a protective ring around them.

  “We children did not suffer,” Three Sevens confesses. “We were growing up on the march and felt no urge to stay anywhere.”

  The slow march lasted for years, until it became as long as life itself. Joining them along the way were other roaming Liberal groups; people recently forced out of their homes or driven out by massacres; more survivors from ravaged towns and fields; farmer-warriors, adept both at tilling the land and at fighting a war; people who had been chased out; and various others who found reason and sustenance only in their flight.

  “We were victims, but also executioners,” Three Sevens admits. “It’s true we were fleeing from violence, but also spreading it. We robbed farms, ravaged planted fields and stables, stole in order to eat, scared people with our deafening racket, and were merciless whenever we encountered those of the opposing band. War involves everyone. It’s a foul wind that gets into our nostrils, and, like it or not, even those who flee from it come to foster it in turn.”

  Those who could not make it were left by the wayside under a mound of rocks and a wooden cross. The number of children was always the same: those who died were quickly replaced by those being born. The adults were living the itinerant and slippery history of those who flee: quiet hours in watch, depression along the Lord’s roads, coffee without sugar and meat without salt, bickering and tears, reconciliations and compensations, delirium caused by yellow fever or diarrhea, card games, frozen barrens that soak one’s clothes and make one shiver, dumping grounds, forests in the mist, ravines, pineapple fields aglow under the sun. A hostile smell penetrating everything, even the fabric of shirts and the leaves on trees; a constant shuffling of hopes; and the obsessive illusion of owning some land one day. Those were, and still are, the things that accompany and sustain the refugee caravan.

  “Looking for what? Days and nights pursuing what?” Three Sevens asks himself now, in front of me. “Nobody really knew, and I, being a child, knew even less. I remember our hopes then because they are the same as now: ‘When the war slows down . . .’”

  When the war slows down . . . When will that occur? Over half a century has gone by and nothing has changed. The war does not cease, only its face changes. I write to René Girard, my former professor at the university, telling him that this endless and sweeping violence is unbearable because it is irrational, and he answers that war is never irrational, that nothing can find more reasons to erupt than war itself.

  Though Matilde Lina, the laundress from Sasaima, and the child with eleven toes were involved in tragedy, they never saw it that way. While the others were suffering from hunger, they were oblivious to food; sadness and fear found no fertile ground in their souls; desolate, cold nights were just nights and nothing more; the cruelties of life were simply life, because they did not aspire to a different or better one. Though the others had lost everything, they had lost nothing, because one cannot lose what one has never had or wanted to have.

  “Since he lacked a given name, we fell into the habit of calling the child with the extravagant foot Twenty-one, because of his extra digit, until one day Charro Lindo strongly prohibited it under threat of punishment because it was not charitable, he said, to be calling attention to people’s physical defects,” Perpetua tells me, explaining that Charro Lindo was a young and handsome Liberal bandit who had inherited from an uncle the command of their procession of homeless travelers.

  Despite the peremptory order, a thoughtless man would occasionally call him Twenty-one in the presence of the big chief, who would then smack him hard, knocking him to the ground. After that, instead of Twenty-one, people began calling him Three Sevens as a euphemism and in covert defiance of authority. The moniker stuck to the child forever.

  “I remember Twenty-one as clearly as if he were in front of me now,” Doña Perpetua assures me. “Born out of nowhere and having the oddity of that foot with an even number of toes, he tended to be withdrawn and very shy as a child. But I swear to you that the extra little toe did not prevent him from running: he sprinted barefoot like a gazelle all over the muddy roads.”

  At some point during their journey, Matilde Lina so often used the child as a refuge that she detached herself from other people’s concerns. Never an expert at that, now she isolated herself from their motives, their words, their
actions. She simply followed the group without asking questions or favors, so that she and the boy became a pair of lighthearted dreamers, practically unnoticed by the others, powerful and untouchable in their extreme defenselessness.

  Three Sevens learned to walk behind her, to advance by placing his small feet trustingly in her tracks, sometimes staying fully awake and occasionally dozing off, but without lagging or breaking step, as if those footsteps were already familiar to him before he was born. To drive away the silence that falls over people in flight, Matilde Lina taught him the art of conversation, but only about animals. In their waking hours in the mountains, they crouched together to perceive the distant hoot of the spotted owl, or the amorous rounds of a she-tiger in heat, or the red eyes and foul breath of the devil dogs. The dialogue between them was an irrelevant chatter, always an amazed, light-hearted questioning about the habits of animaldom.

  “Do you hear that?” she would ask him while a storm raged. “It’s not thunder, it’s a stampede of masterless horses.”

  Or she would indicate to him, “Look, these are ocelot tracks,” or capybara’s, or chigüiro’s, for she was very skilled at identifying, without hesitation, any animal traces.

  Coiled into her memory lay Sasaima, the land of her childhood, and she often spoke lovingly about its many animals: of the swallows crossing the beam of light coming from above in the Gualivá caves; of the sleek, black toads that become invisible as they sit on the sleek, black stones of the Río Dulce; of the chumbilá, which is a winged mouse given to vice, because when the farmers catch it, they teach it to smoke and the animal enjoys it.

  “That’s all they talked about, beasts and bugs,” Doña Perpetua tells me. “Those two were not interested in anybody else.”

  I understand only too well that nobody else elicits their passion or even their curiosity, and that is because each is the continent where the other dwells as sole inhabitant. Look at me, Three Sevens; touch me, breathe my smell, listen to the inner rumblings that torment me with their failure to be turned into speech. . . . Are you aware that I am here and now, and she is not; that I am the presence that the eye registers and the touch confirms? Will you finally have the courage to recognize that here in this world catching up with someone is better than an illusory, useless pursuit? That a flesh-and-blood woman is a hundred times preferable to a remembered one, or an imagined one, even though she might not be a laundress born in Sasaima or know a whit about tropical animals?

  “Albeiro must have taken away the pliers,” I hear Three Sevens say while he works on the construction of a new roadside stall. “Albeiro! Where are the pliers?” he shouts with self-assurance, and I would like to warn him against fooling himself. What does he know about the Albeiros or about the pliers? What does he know about the present circumstances?

  FOUR

  Doña Perpetua, who is very old, is the only person who knows what I want to know. She was married and had her own children on the night that she saw, at the portico of the church, the newly found boy with the fanciful foot. Later they crossed the red seas of their exodus until calamities separated them. After a wide gap of years, and thanks to the vagaries of their errant lives, she happened to come across him, now an adult, here at this shelter for wanderers.

  Doña Perpetua is engaged in an endless struggle, lost beforehand, against an instrument of torture made of wires and rose paste that she proudly calls “my dental prosthesis.” While she champs at it but cannot manage to make it fit, she continues her story.

  “I saw Matilde Lina teaching this boy how to train a chumbilá. She was making circles in the air with a thin bamboo pole until the bat came flying obediently and perched itself on the pole.” Perpetua copies the action, and her attempts to repeat the flexible circles with her arm and to mimic the bat’s snout with her mouth make me smile. “They would search around every pond looking for hundred-eyed frogs—the eyes are of the offspring they carry between their many folds of skin. Both the woman and the boy lived on weeds and aguadijas, the spongy ones that know how to soak up water,” Perpetua continues, lowering her voice so no one will overhear. “That’s what people said, that Matilde Lina and the boy lived only on purslane and brushwood. While everybody else toiled and suffered, they spent their time serenely, lost in talk and contemplation. The spirit of the forest took care of them, or at least that’s what we said, to avoid feeling responsible for them since we all had enough, and sometimes too much, trying to take care of ourselves.”

  It was also because of an animal that Three Sevens got separated from Matilde Lina, after thirteen years of finding in her arms the warm center of the world. During one of those starvation periods in which people were willing to eat even the soles of their shoes, it occurred to them to pick up a female cat and her brood of kittens that they had found in the ruins of an abandoned farm. The animals were scrawny, gawky, toothy, and devilish with hunger. They had to take care of them in secret, lest others in the caravan who were starving might eat them, since anything with hair, feathers, or scales was quite welcome.

  “Are they going to die?” asked Three Sevens, who, like the cats, had become a bundle of bones and anxiety.

  One Tuesday, while fog and famine were making life dreary, the ill-humored caravan was advancing through a muddy region called Las Aguilas when those in the rear guard came to the front with the warning that Sergeant Moravia and a fiercely armed National Army squad, through a quick maneuver, had them surrounded.

  “Charro Lindo, our man in charge, was easily recognizable as a handsome ladies’ man and because he wore around his neck a little flask where he kept ashes of what had been his family home,” Perpetua tells me. “But he was also well-known for his pitifully odorous feet, which emanated a nauseating smell after being always jammed inside his rubber boots. He had become notorious for this problem, his foul-smelling feet being his only defect as a lover, according to the girls who shared his blanket at night.”

  Charro Lindo had been told that the only remedy for his pestilence was to soak his feet in potassium permanganate dissolved in lukewarm water, and he, anguished by the affliction that hurt his pride and made him the center of both covert and open scorn, put so much faith in this formula that he ventured forth against common sense, paying no attention to survival precautions in hostile territory. In order to locate a more civilized place where the remedy could be obtained, he discovered an escape route down the mountain. Fate brought him to Bienaventuranzas, a village that in the end did not live up to its beatific name, but quite the opposite. Unwittingly, Charro Lindo had made the mistake of dragging behind him the rest of the caravan, more than three hundred people, into the swampy domain of the notorious, diehard Conservative butcher Sergeant Moravia, who had subjected by force the entire population of that extensive neighboring region.

  When he realized he had led them into a trap, Charro Lindo did not think of anything better than to pull his favorite girlfriend up on his black mule, behind the saddle, and to tell his people to run for their lives. “We’ll see each other again, if not in this life, in the next,” the handsome outlaw shouted, and just like that, with the flask of charred soil around his neck and waving his big Mexican hat, he gave orders to disband.

  FIVE

  To avoid falling into the clutches of Sergeant Moravia, some families climbed up places so steep that one could hardly gain a foothold; others attempted to descend the mountain, struggling to resist the magnetic pull of the abyss. Perpetua and her children sought refuge in the underbrush, and she has no idea how long she was hiding, crouching and keeping her legs stiff trying to make herself thin, while the pounding of her heart obliterated everything else. She felt, or thought she felt, the enemy crisscrossing overhead while she held her breath as much as possible so as not to give herself away. Terror possessed her for quite some time before she dared try to see what had happened to the others. Deep in the mud mixed with blood, she found some who were still alive, some dead, and some who had gone loony, now recast forever in the wide
world.

  Decades later, Three Sevens was to inform us in the curt, flat manner he assumes when talking about himself that he and Matilde Lina had stayed back that day in order to finger-feed some milk to the kittens they were trying to save; they had kept to their business, unaware of any danger, and did not hear the commotion until the epithets and rifle butts were upon them during the ambush. They accepted death without mounting any resistance, but death, who rejects lives surrendered freely, refused to collect its bill all at once.

  “Agony, more cunning and obstinate than death, has had me in its grip since then,” Three Sevens tells me, and I feel the sudden impulse to caress his Arawak Indian hair, so black and thick, and so close to my hand now in this placid moment as night falls, while we both bend side by side over the furrows, planting legumes. The sun, which chastised us without mercy all day, has now become mild. The flocks of mosquitoes flutter in the last rays of light, finally disregarding us, while the fertile soil we are turning gives off a comforting and reassuring smell. And my hand, already intent of purpose, is anticipating the texture of his straight hair, which it is about to touch. My fingertips rejoice at the proximity of the contact. My arm stretches forward confidently, but suddenly I retreat: something is shouting at me to stop. The mass of black hair moves away, reverberating and burning me in a flash of contradictory signs.

  I reread my last remarks and wonder why it is that his hair fascinates me. His hair, always his hair. Or rather, hair itself: the luxury and luster and the enticing warmth of the beings endowed with hair, as if my fingers were destined to disappear in the soft density of dark hair; as if an irrational and orphaned mammal instinct guided my affections.