A Tale of the Dispossessed

by Laura Restrepo

  We looked all over the shelter for a place to hide her. We thought of burying her under the tomatoes in the vegetable patch, or putting her up among the roof rafters, or hiding her behind the washing sinks or among the grain bags stored in the cupboard.

  “Not there, don’t you see it’s too humid for her?” Nothing satisfied Mother Françoise. “Not there either, or the pigs will chew her up. And there, least of all! The termites will finish her off. Give her to me, I already know the best place.”

  “But what are you doing, Mother?” Three Sevens protested.

  “You better shut up, it’s all your fault.”

  Cutting off all objections, the nun ordered that stones, cement, and trowels be brought in and had everybody building in the middle of the yard a high structure, strong and ostentatious, to house the image. She set the Dancing Madonna in a display case crowded with offerings and plastic flowers. There she was, in full view, but well protected and inaccessible behind glass. Before locking the case, Mother Françoise disguised the Madonna. She ordered a mantle with a triple flounce cut on the bias and a lined hood, the color of night with stars, which covered the image completely except for her pretty face and her light foot stepping on the Beast. Around the niche the nun planted shrubs and then fenced the enclosure.

  “Where all can see her is where she can least be seen,” said Mother Françoise, pleased at last.

  “What a remarkable little nun,” said Three Sevens, managing a bittersweet smile. “She put my Madonna behind bars.”

  Like a knight-errant unhorsed in the defense of his lady, not knowing what to do, he sat at the foot of the niche and let himself float halfway between relief and the desire to cry. He was happy to see his Virgin so dignified and elegant, surrounded by flowers and offerings, this Madonna who had seemed so accustomed to the hardships of traveling and the roughness of his sack. Where could he go now without her company? If he continued on his way, he would leave her behind; if he stayed, the tracks of Matilde Lina, always pushing onward, would get cold. Being at the crossroads made him feel trapped by time and froze his initiative. That was perhaps the only time I saw Three Sevens truly dejected. He was dispirited and opaque, like a desiccated bird.

  Meanwhile, Perpetua, who had been dragged by life to this same yard, was rearranging her ill-fitting dentures and watching the scene in utter disbelief: her small droopy eyes went from inspecting the Virgin, to observing her owner in puzzlement, and back to the Virgin, looking up and down at her. Suddenly her eyes lit up.

  “Sir,” she said to Three Sevens, touching his shoulder respectfully. “Sir, isn’t this the image of the Dancing Madonna, patron of the town named after her that was once around Lost River, in the department of Huila?”

  “No, madam, you are confused,” he objected, standing up, paranoid after so many episodes of persecution.

  “How strange,” Perpetua insisted, “I have been looking at her for a while and I could swear that she is the same one. I think there is no one the likes of her. . . .”

  “No, she’s not. As far as I know, this is Saint Bridget.”

  “Saint Bridget, virgin, or Saint Bridget, widow?”

  “Only Saint Bridget, that’s all, and if you don’t mind, I have to go,” Three Sevens ended, convinced by now that the old woman was an infiltrator from military intelligence who was asking him questions in order to denounce him.

  A few hours later, while Three Sevens was in the yard in his underwear hosing himself, Perpetua’s small droopy eyes, again perusing him, met with the sixth toe. This immediately brought back memories that dispelled all doubts.

  “Three Sevens! You are alive! Don’t you remember me? I am Doña Perpetua Morales. You must remember the Morales children. . . . Isn’t it true she is our patron saint, the Dancing Madonna? I could recognize her anywhere in the world. . . . And you, aren’t you Matilde Lina’s godson?”

  In the meantime, Mother Françoise, on all fours, was busy fixing a siphon with a wire and didn’t have a clue that, in building a niche for the wooden Madonna in the steaming city of Tora, she had laid the foundation for what one day, heaven knows when, would surely be the second and last neighborhood named Santa María Bailarina in honor of this Madonna. Its population will have forgotten the migrating origin of their ancestors and will have grown so accustomed to peace that they will take it for granted.

  THIRTEEN

  “Those who escape from hell come here,” I tell Three Sevens as we cross the central yard, past the collective bathrooms and the open sheds of the seven sleeping quarters, arranged in tight rows of bunk beds.

  I introduce him to Elvia. She is a slight, dark woman from Quindio who feeds pieces of fruit to her bluebirds, the only thing left from her property, which was near La Tebaida.

  “I also managed to save my chickens,” Elvia tells us with a bluebird perched on her shoulder and another on her head. “But the box in which I put them fell off the canoe, and they were drowned in the river. No one knows who made the loudest racket, the chickens or me.”

  “People get rid of their dogs along the road because they bark and give their owners away,” I tell Three Sevens while showing him how the bread ovens work. “Quite often, however, they keep their birds and bring them here.”

  The only three permanent residents, Doña Solita, her daughter Solana, and her grandchild, Marisol, are sitting on a bench. Many people come and go in the ebb and flow of war, but these three remain on their bench, crisply starched and dressed up like three dolls in the shop window of a toy store. I pick up Marisol, my goddaughter, who is only a few months old and was born in the shelter.

  “Nobody comes here to stay forever; this is only a way station that offers no future. We give to the displaced five or six months of protection, food, and a roof over their heads, while they overcome the effects of their tragedy and become just people again.”

  “Is it possible to become a person again?” Three Sevens asks without looking at me, because he knows the answer better than I do.

  “Not always. However, the shelter cannot extend their stay, so they must go on their way and face life again, starting from zero. But those three, where are they going to go? Doña Solita cannot work because her hands are crippled with arthritis. Her other children were killed, and her daughter Solana was left pregnant. She is severely retarded, you know. Where in the world can these three angels from heaven live, if not here?”

  “If not here,” Three Sevens repeats, with his habit of repeating, like an echo, the last phrase that he hears.

  “When I arrived,” I tell him, “I saw the same things you are seeing now: women at the washbasins, men working at the vegetable patch, children being read stories. They were silent and slow, like sleepwalkers, their minds on other worlds while they pretended to lead normal lives. I did not find any hostility in them, but instead, a kind of beaten humility that made my heart sink. Mother Françoise told me I should not let myself be fooled. ‘Behind this air of defeat there is a very vivid rancor,’ she warned me. ‘They are trying to escape the war, but they carry it within themselves because they have not been able to forgive.’”

  From his first day with us, Three Sevens demonstrated that he did not know what inactivity was, letting it show that he had the surprising ability to do any task well, whether plastering walls, sacrificing pigs, organizing cleaning brigades, or driving the truck. No job was too big for him, and there was no problem he would not attempt to solve.

  Through his own unintended confessions I know that he has made a living in almost every trade that has cropped up along the way, because the more he looks for Matilde Lina, the more opportunities come to him. I ask him why he never eats meat, and I find out that he worked as a cleaner in a butcher shop in Sincelejo and was paid in beef lungs and bones. He knows how to sew up wounds, pull teeth, and repair broken bones because he worked as a nurse at San Onofre; he can drive a bus because he was a substitute driver on the Libertadores route; he developed his muscles as a boatman on the Magdalena River;
took stolen automobiles apart in Pereira, was a potato harvester in Subachoque and a knife sharpener in Barichara.

  Among all his skills there is one in particular that has proven indispensable for us: Three Sevens knows how to mediate a dispute.

  Conflicts explode much too frequently at the shelter because of overcrowding. People who don’t know one another must live together in close quarters for a long time and share everything, from the toilet and the stove to the adult sobs muffled by pillows but still heard in the dormitories at night. And let’s not talk about the tension and extreme mistrust generated when a group that sympathizes with the guerrillas is lodged together with a group that is fleeing from them. Three Sevens has demonstrated an inborn talent for handling impossible situations with tact and authority. He has become so indispensable for the nuns that Mother Françoise has conferred on him the position of superintendent. With this she intends to tie him to the shelter, because Three Sevens has a tendency to drift away every time the wind blows from a different direction.

  If he hears rumors that people are migrating to the lowlands of the Guainía in search of gold, or that thousands are going to Araracuara and to the river region of the Inírida to make a living in the coca plantations, right away his torment, which had abated for a while, shakes him up again and fills him with the certainty that Matilde Lina must be over there, blended within the wandering multitude.

  “But where could you be going, if this is truly the end of the world? How long do you think you can keep getting on the road, when all the roads finally wind up here?” I ask him, but he turns a deaf ear and puts on his Colombian Farmer shoes as if they were his Seven-league Boots. Then we see him again wearing the garments he had on when he first arrived: felt hat down to his ears, peasant poncho, white cotton pants. From the window, and with my heart pounding, I accompany him as he disappears down the road.

  So far, he has always come back in a few weeks, totally exhausted and downcast, but with his knapsack chock-full of oranges and milky bars for his Deep Sea Eyes, and for Mother Françoise, and with a box of guava pastries that he distributes among Perpetua, Solana, Solita, and Marisol.

  Maybe if he returns, it will be not to abandon his Dancing Madonna or the many human beings in dire need of his help who are waiting for him. And though I know it is not true, I close my eyes and pretend that, perhaps, and why not, he will also come back partly for me.

  FOURTEEN

  I can’t see how, but Mother Françoise has discovered what is tormenting my heart.

  “It does not seem prudent to fall in love with one of the displaced,” she casually dropped on me the other day, just like that, without preamble, though I hadn’t breathed a word to her.

  “So it does not seem prudent to you, Mother?” I countered, charging my question with all the ill feelings I had accumulated since the bad smells had started. “And is there anything going on here that has the slightest connection with prudence?”

  Mother Françoise’s meddling bothers me because I would a thousand times prefer to have no witnesses to this absurd, unanswered love. But the foul smell of burnt hooves bothers me more than that or, should I say, makes my life impossible, because it coincides with the present crisis for the security of the shelter, and with the fact that it’s already three months since Three Sevens left for the capital in his effort to contact a certain organization that might help locate Matilde Lina. In all that time we have received no news from him, no communication about the possibility of his return. So I add to the external pressures the uncertainty about ever seeing him again, and the anxiety is eating me up. What saves me is some compensatory instinct that must regulate the body’s humors, and which, when I am at my wits’ end, somehow calms the tide of grief and grounds my spirit on the shoals of apathy.

  I wrote down the phone numbers of Three Sevens’s contacts in the capital, but with enormous effort, I’ve refrained from calling to find out how he’s doing. Am I going to be looking for him while he’s looking for her? At least I have enough pride left not to do that.

  The nasty odor comes from a tallow factory installed on a parcel of land across from the shelter. Every morning the workers bring from the slaughterhouse six or seven carloads of cattle hooves that are burned in the plant all day long to extract the tallow, which poisons the entire area with a sickening vapor. First there is the foul smell of burnt hair that later turns into a culinary smell, capable of stimulating the appetite of those blissfully unaware. Very soon this second tonality of odor becomes suspiciously sweet, like the roasting of overripe meat—very overripe; in fact, putrid. The home kitchen aroma then turns into a garbage dump stench, and the nausea it causes makes me want to escape on the run. I suppose the hooves are composed of the same substance as the horns, and I realize that the popular Spanish expression “It smells like burnt horn” is no idle comparison. The smell invading us now is on an uncertain path from fresh to rotten, and I have come to believe that it emanates not only from the tallow factory, but from our own bodies and belongings as well. My skin, my clothes, the water I try to bring to my lips, the paper I use to write, are all saturated with this morbid odor, treacherously organic, like that of a wretched Lazarus trying, and failing, to come back from the dead. It envelops me, envelops all of us, in its raw and tenacious ambivalence.

  But topping all that happens in the shelter, always critical these days, is the particularly difficult situation we are now going through owing to the latest pronouncements by Commander Oquendo, of the Twenty-fifth Brigade, located right here in Tora. He has declared that the shelter is a refuge for terrorists and criminals, funded from abroad and camouflaged under the banner of so-called human rights organizations, concluding that we serve as a front for armed subversion. He says that in the face of such deceit, the forces in charge of keeping the public order have their hands tied. It is obvious that he is looking for an excuse to untie his hands and ignore human rights codes in order to proceed against us. And now, behind the challenged symbolic protection of our walls, we are waiting for the army to storm us or to send over a death squad at any moment.

  Perhaps if I smoked, I could flood myself with nicotine and find some diversion from these days, so distressing that they seem theatrical; but since I don’t, I have taken up reading as if compelled to obliterate any free space for my own thoughts. However, everything I read seems to refer to me, to have been written with the sole intent to thwart my escape. There is apparently no solution, then, no possible way out. Not even through reading. Tora, with its war and its struggles, Three Sevens and Matilde Lina, Mother Françoise, and myself are hopelessly filling every available crevice, flooding the whole landscape with our burnt smell, and marking with our own pollution even books written elsewhere.

  At this moment, Three Sevens seems to have disappeared from the map, perhaps finally reunited with Matilde Lina in that never-never land where she reigns. Sometimes I wish with all my heart that it has been so, for him to discover that she is just of average height and that she drags around petty miseries like all of us.

  “Be merciful, O Lord,” I plead to a divinity in which I have never believed, nor do I now. “Don’t make me love someone who does not love me. Send me, if you wish, the other Seven Plagues, but for mercy’s sake, relieve me of this one, and also of this intolerable deathly smell that surrounds me. Amen.”

  FIFTEEN

  The tallow-processing plant no longer exists. We breathe freely again, and, piquant and green, all the vapors from the rain and the jungle are coming back to us.

  Mother Françoise, who is crafty and diligent, found out that the owner, an older man living on the premises, was abandoned by his young wife, a full-bodied mulatto who had kindled the lust of all the male population. Mother cunningly convinced him that the foul smell was to blame for her desertion.

  “Don Marco Aurelio,” she told him, “how could your loved one not leave you, when you made her live in the midst of this stench? Do you believe that a real beauty, a queen like her, is going to
accept having her hair and her clothes reeking with grease?”

  The old man, mired in grief, saw a ray of hope in this advice. He kissed Mother’s hands as a sign of gratefulness, moved his pestilent industry to a parcel that he owns in another area, and ordered the planting of geraniums, and African and Madonna lilies, in the lot across from us. His splendid mulatto has not returned yet, and wagging tongues say that she won’t because she’s gotten entangled in a love affair with a prosperous mafioso who has gold chains around his neck and a Mercedes-Benz in his garage. And that he sprinkles her body with champagne and brings her Chinese porcelain and French perfumes. Fortunately, the old man has not learned about that yet, and every morning he weeds his blooming garden under the illusion that it could bring her back.

  Although everybody else seems to disagree with me, I am confident as to how this story will turn out: in order not to suffer that infernal smell, Mother Françoise is quite capable, if need be, of going after the mulatto woman to convince her that it is better to have an old and poor husband than a handsome one, full of gold.

  The hell with Three Sevens, I decided that early morning in which my nostrils, in excellent humor, woke me up with the news that there were no longer traces of the stench. The hell with Three Sevens, I repeated after taking a freezing cold shower; now wide awake and without any palliatives, I stamped my seal on the decision. What I want is a man the way he should be: kind like a dog and always there like a mountain.

  The hell with Three Sevens; I hereby disengage from that individual; I won’t honor him by dedicating one more thought to him; I repeat this over and over again to myself while I call a press conference, send fax messages, go down to the plaza to buy bags of grain and legumes, organize new reading courses for adults because those we have are not enough, and take care of the water leaks that have closed one of the collective dormitories. I’ve already forgotten Three Sevens, I keep saying to myself in the meantime. The only problem is that so much repetition has the opposite effect.