A Tale of the Dispossessed

by Laura Restrepo

  SIXTEEN

  After the smell of death had dissipated, death itself was at our door. In less than two weeks, the wave of crimes devastating our district left a total of twenty-two persons killed, eight of them in Las Palmas, an ice-cream parlor a few minutes from here, and the rest in neighborhoods west of us.

  Oquendo’s threat had been only words, but they were lethal words that have opened the way for breaking and entering, so we tried hard to secure the support of the press, as well as pronouncements from democratic entities and visits to the shelter by important personalities. Anything that could back us as a peaceful organization, both neutral and humanitarian; anything other than waiting, arms crossed and mouths shut, to be massacred with impunity.

  We knew that it was not easy to attract attention or ask for help in the midst of a country deafened by the noise of war. And if it was almost impossible to do it from any of the large cities, it was even more so from these craggy cliffs where neither the law of God nor that of man exists. Nor do the forces supposedly in charge of the public order ever reach us, but only those who, as civilians, come with the intent to annihilate us; and neither are the newspapers interested, nor do the edges of maps reach this far. That was why we were flabbergasted when we saw a delegation coming.

  It was the most unusual, theatrical, and harmless of all delegations, composed of the rosy-cheeked parish priest of Vistahermosa, a freelance photographer, two radio reporters, and half a dozen girls about fifteen, wearing platform shoes and T-shirts that left their navels exposed and bearing names taken from Beverly Hills rather than the traditional Christian calendar, such as Natalie, Kathy, Johanna, Lady Di, Fufi, and Vivian Jane. They were all eighth-year students from Our Lady of Mercy School for Girls in Tora. Also making their presence felt, and in black from head to toe, their instruments stuffed into an old ocher Volkswagen they called the Mustard Menace, were the five members of Last Judgment, a heavy metal group from Antioquía, with tattoos and piercings even on their eyelids. “The latest thing; these boys are very modern,” was Perpetua’s remark when she saw them.

  A motley bunch, ranging in age from fourteen to eighty and coming from every point on the compass, the members of this unusual delegation have nothing in common other than their intent to draw a human circle of unarmed protection around the shelter until the danger subsides, at least the immediate danger. Such is the trend starting to develop all over the country as the only means of resistance for people of peace against the violent people of every stripe.

  “We will not abandon to the mercy of fate those who are threatened,” preached the parish priest during mass, which he set up at the foot of the niche built for the Dancing Madonna. He was pounding on every word with such fire that nobody would have believed that he was a potbellied, pink-cheeked little man, scarcely five feet tall.

  “Wouldn’t you like to sit here in the shade, Padre, where it’s cooler?” I asked him, seeing that he was flushed and gasping for breath after the service, as if he had truly ingested the body of Christ and drunk His blood.

  “In a minute,” he answered, “after I find the man who brought us here. I don’t see him around.”

  “And who is the man that brought you?”

  “I don’t know his name, but people call him Three Sevens. He was asking for solidarity with this shelter, and got people to listen at the Office of Foreign Affairs, at the editorial offices of El Tiempo, the Episcopal Chancery, the Red Cross, even at the Plaza de Bolívar in Santa Fe de Bogotá. . . .”

  “So it was Three Sevens!” screamed Mother Françoise, who was also listening. “Three Sevens made this miracle come true! What a nice young man, our own Three Sevens. . . . Who would have thought!”

  Then I saw him approaching, sticking his body half out the window of the dilapidated microbus, jam-packed with foodstuffs, and sporting his white linen shirt and an open smile that brightened his face. He was surrounded by a bunch of female members of the Animal Protection Society of Tenjo, who had offered to take care of feeding the caravan and the seventy-two displaced people currently in our shelter. As the commander in chief of this small army of girls and musicians, priests and older ladies, Three Sevens was never more handsome than when I saw him come through the door of the shelter, looking primitive and splendid, like a postatomic, epic hero, and then walk to the stone niche to kneel in front of his patron saint. It was the thrilling moment of return, the triumphal entrance of the prodigal son who had reappeared to be with his own and defend what he loved.

  “You have come back,” I told him, and immediately regretted it, fearing that by uttering those words I could revive in him the compulsion to leave again.

  “Have I?” he answered with a question, like being caught in the act, still unsure whether his own thinking agreed with his actions.

  The ladies from the microbus improvised some fires in the middle of the yard, set cooking pots over the flames, and began their toil of peeling potatoes, preparing casava, slicing plantains, husking corn, and cracking some beef backbones to thicken the sancocho stew that they would distribute among all.

  “At first, when we founded the Protection Society, it was just to shelter cats and dogs. Then we expanded our efforts to include orphans and soldiers’ widows, and now, look at us here,” one of the women, Luz Amalia de Montoya, tells me. This lady, with her carefully made-up eyes and rouged cheeks, fifties-style bob, and a double row of fake pearls and costume earrings, could be much more easily pictured watching a noontime soap opera and comfortably sipping chamomile tea than perched up here, challenging danger and distributing crackers and bowls of oatmeal among children and women whose names she doesn’t know, totally oblivious to the absurd fact that her old-fashioned soft roundness could be our best shield against the bullets.

  Though I have never succeeded in developing a taste for sancocho, a grayish, heavily starched porridge that in all honesty I totally dislike, now that it is starting to boil and bubble, I have to admit it emanates a beneficial vapor that penetrates my lungs and, deep inside, turns into joy. How wonderful to perceive the smell of this soup, I think. Nothing bad can happen in a place where people gather around a big pot of soup. Life is stirring here, while death awaits outside, and the barrier between one and the other is just a bubbling pot of soup, a spider weaving its web, a fabric of minimal moves that builds up into a protecting wall.

  Just like the huts of the invaders, everything up here is made out of nothing: of footprints, of memories, of three short nails and a couple of flattened-out metal cans, out of smells, intentions, affections, potted geraniums, and a photo of grandma. In the rest of the world everything is burdened with the unreality of matter; here, we levitate. Our days recover the freedom to invent themselves, and thanks to the strange arithmetic that results from adding nothing to nothing, our days can follow one another in a significant way—I mean, they are able to keep their meaning.

  One of the ladies hands me a bowl of sancocho, and floating in its center is a challenging chicken foot, talons and all.

  “Try this, it’s very tasty and loaded with vitamins. Eat some, to recover your strength,” she tells me in such a kind manner that I am ashamed to refuse, and accept the bowl.

  How can I get rid of this sharp chicken claw, which has been presented to me as a delicacy but horrifies me with its human resemblance, so gnarled and funereal? I would rather die than eat it, and between these two extremes, my salvation could be to give it to one of the dogs, but that is impossible without everybody noticing. Three Sevens, watching from a distance, realizes my predicament and comes up to me, amused.

  “Would my Deep Sea Eyes be grateful if I asked her for that chicken foot that has her in such a tizzy?”

  Trying not to laugh, I transfer it to his plate, and as he gladly bites into it, I return to my own bowl and begin to take in the thick concoction spoonful by spoonful, though I still don’t like it, and it is boiling hot, and I am sweltering and not hungry; but in spite of everything, it goes down to my stomach, where
it turns into joy, so much joy that in a playful mood I stretch my hand and tousle Three Sevens’s hair.

  “Have the cooks perhaps not realized that what my lady requires here is a filet mignon, well done?” he pretends to shout, putting me on the spot. I give him a shove and say no, that I don’t want any filet mignon, that if I took the trouble of coming here from the other end of the world, it was precisely to measure up to this soup, even though it looks ugly to me.

  “Then, please come and serve her a chicken neck and a good chunk of beef backbones!”

  It is now ten o’clock on this evening full of forebodings, and in the alley opposite the entrance to the shelter, Last Judgment, roaring electronically, seems to officiate like the parish priest over a cosmic, bloodless sacrifice, in front of an audience composed of the displaced and more than a hundred people from neighboring towns, who keep coming, summoned by this thundering and sacred decibel discharge that is protecting us from all evil, enveloping us in a bulletproof bubble, invulnerable and more powerful than fear. Solana, Solita, and Marisol, half-terrified and half-mesmerized, are attending their first heavy metal concert. Three Sevens is checking some cables because there seems to be some sound interference. “Against the exploiters, the Helter-Skelter day will come,” the vocalist shouts, gesturing like an enraged demon. Mother Françoise comes up to me.

  “We are saved,” she screams in my ear to make herself audible. “These boys’ racket could discourage even the bloodiest criminals.”

  Near midnight, enough aguardiente has gone around to make some people reel, gorged with alcohol. The heavy metal group from Antioquía has lent the microphone to a local group of vallenato musicians. Someone is setting off firecrackers, and the rest of the people are quite comfortable in a dance party that threatens to continue until dawn.

  “Enough!” commands Mother Françoise, barking with authority. “The party is over! This is chaos!”

  “No, Mother, it’s not chaos,” I try to explain after a few drinks myself. “It’s not chaos, it is HISTORY, in big letters, don’t you see? Only it’s fragmented into many small and amazing histories, the stories of the ladies who rescue dogs in Tenjo, of these apocalyptic rock musicians, of these students with names like Lady Di, who adore Shakira’s songs, have their navels exposed, and came all the way up here risking their lives. . . . It is also your history, Mother Françoise!”

  “So even you are drunk, too? That’s the last drop in the bucket. . . . The spree is over, ladies and gentlemen! Mais, vraiment, c’est le comble du chaos . . .”

  SEVENTEEN

  Our shelter was already filled to the brim even before the arrival one afternoon of fifty-three survivors from the massacre at Amansagatos. They had all managed to escape the overpowering guerrillas by jumping into the waters of the Opón River, including the children, the elderly, and the wounded, and had then crossed the jungle in exhausting nightly journeys beside the silent riverbed. The nuns decided to take them in, despite the overcrowded conditions, and during this emergency, Three Sevens and I have had to share, as sleeping quarters, the hundred square feet of the administration office.

  In order to separate, at least symbolically, his privacy from mine, we hung in the middle a wide piece of light fabric with a faded, big-flower print. We hung it low enough to clear the blades of the ceiling fan, which makes the fabric undulate and sway as it blows, creating a stagy atmosphere in the small room. For me the last few nights have been long and uncertain, with him sleeping on his side and me wide awake on mine, knowing he’s far away even though the same darkness shelters both of us and the same soft breeze brushes over our bodies.

  A hundred times I have been about to move close to him, but I restrain myself: the short gap between us seems impossible to bridge. A hundred times I wanted to stretch my hand out to touch his, but such a simple movement seems imprudent and unfeasible, like trying to swim across a sea. I am overcome with the raw fear of the diver who wants to jump from a high cliff into a deep well and stops just at the edge, advancing inch by inch until his feet are next to the abyss, but right before the decisive moment, he decides to turn back, even though, in the flutter of vertigo, he has already sensed the contact with the waters that would have engulfed him. Everything pulls me over to his side. But I don’t dare. The flimsy fabric that divides our common space stops me like a stone wall, and the pale, showy flowers become like red traffic signals that tell me not to go. So, while I lie in wait, I have learned to recognize the various intensities of his breathing and have become familiar with the gibberish he mutters during his sleep.

  “Did my Deep Sea Eyes have a good night’s rest?” he asks me at dawn when we meet in the kitchen.

  “I did, but it seems you didn’t, judging by the rings under your eyes . . . ,” I respond, testing the ground, and he laughs.

  “How’s that for a compliment,” is all he says.

  And that’s the way our night hours go by, one by one—he getting lost in his thoughts and I trying to find him. As soon as he falls asleep, I listen attentively, waiting for his unintelligible babble, to see if I can figure out what disturbs him. Once, just after five in the morning, when I was trying to unravel and make some sense of the web that has trapped him, I heard him scream. I could not contain my compassion for him, or perhaps for myself, and almost without thinking, I threw a shawl over my shoulders and crossed to the other side of the curtain.

  Lately we had not spoken much to each other, despite our tight coexistence and so many shared chores; perhaps after the first impulse our mutual trust had congealed, or we feared reopening wounds that we already knew were incurable, or we simply had no time, because the endless tasks at the shelter did not leave any space for personal matters.

  While the nuns were starting off their day with hurried steps along the corridor, I took a glass of water to Three Sevens and curled up at his feet, waiting for him to talk. But deep-seated silences are hard to break. He was keeping things to himself, and I was holding mine back, so we were each locking up our own procession of concerns. I was very anxious for him to break the silence, and he, by not talking, was leaving it to me.

  Since his return from the capital, Three Sevens had not mentioned Matilde Lina again. I was glad about that and grateful to him, thinking that probably this was a good sign. But words not uttered have always frightened me, as if they were lurking out of sight just waiting for an occasion to jump in my face. Deep down I resented their absence as a loss, as if the most intimate link between us, the indispensable bridge for crossing from his isolation to mine, had been threatened.

  I knew well that these thoughts were arbitrary and absurd; obviously the essential change in Three Sevens during the last weeks has been his excited emotional state, the self-assurance with which he has assumed his central position and leadership, his identification with the collective enthusiasm. Or rather, a display of inner strength that placed him at the axis of the collective enthusiasm. “He’s beside himself,” I commented to Mother Françoise when I saw him working without respite from dawn to well past midnight.

  I write “beside himself” and wonder why the Western world gives such a negative charge to this expression, implying disintegration or madness. After all, to be beside oneself is precisely what allows being with the other, getting into another, being the other. Three Sevens was beside himself, and it seemed he was seeking liberation from the obsession that had enthralled him. So it seemed, but I could not be sure; and one should not underestimate one’s own fidelity to old griefs.

  While he was drinking the water that I brought him, I decided to break the self-censorship that I had imposed upon myself in his presence and began telling him in detail about my coming to the shelter three years ago. I spoke about the deep bond I had with my mother, who has been eagerly waiting for my return; about the very loving memory I had of my father, dead for too long; of my university studies; of the children I never had; of my fondness for writing about all that happens to me.

  “And about your lo
ves, aren’t you going to tell me anything?” he asked me, and I thought: Either I speak now or never. But he had posed the question in such an offhand way, as if the issue had no bearing on him, that my last bit of courage simply evaporated.

  “A woman like you must have broken many hearts. . . .”

  “In the past, maybe. At my age, the only heart that I break is my own.”

  The church bells were already calling for six o’clock mass, and I knew that I had missed my opportunity. From the collective dormitories came the echo of some sleepy coughing, of a radio blaring its rosary of news, and the asthmatic hum of the electric fan died down as bright sunlight entered our room and I had to rush out to do my breakfast chores.

  Three Sevens came into the dining hall, and while I was busy distributing the white cheese, bread, and cups of cocoa, I desperately racked my brain for a word that could bring him close to me.

  He burned his lips from drinking the boiling hot chocolate and then went up to the mirror that hangs over the dish rack. I saw him putting hair gel on his comb and paste on his toothbrush. He brushed his teeth, and as he was thanking me for breakfast and saying good-bye while I gathered the dishes, I was well aware that if it wasn’t now, it would never be.

  “It is not Matilde Lina that you’re looking for,” I risked finally, and my words started rolling among the empty tables in the dining hall. “Matilde Lina is only the name that you have given to all that you’re looking for.”

  Tonight a heavy rainstorm is falling like a benediction on the overheated shelter, dissipating the tension due to the excess of human presence. I came to bed earlier than usual, and now I have been awake for hours, listening in the dark for the bursts of rain pelting the tin roof, the irregular roar of the electric plant, the hiss of the corner lamplight as it casts its green light on a circle of rain. It is still dark, yet the first rooster is crowing and the air outside fills with the flutter of noisy seagulls screeching like macaques. The rooster crows and crows until it forces the humidity to rise. I turn on the fan, which, with its toy-helicopter racket, dumps its artificial breeze on me.