The Word of the Speechless

by Julio Ramón Ribeyro

  He was skinny and pale, with that worn-out face of young men who eat poorly and don’t know what to do with their lives.

  “Give me five hundred soles,” he said. “I’ve lost one child, and I don’t want the same thing to happen to the one who’s on his way.”

  Then he left. I didn’t want to detain him, but I kept building his room. I painted it with my own hands. When I got tired, I climbed up to the shantytown and chatted with the folks there. I tried to make friends, but they were all wary of me. It’s difficult to make friends when you’re old and live alone. People say, “There must be something wrong with that man if he’s alone.” The poor little kids, who don’t know anything about this world, sometimes followed me and threw rocks. It’s true: a man alone is like a dead body, like a ghost who walks among the living.

  •

  Those men with the hats and the patent leather shoes came several more times and walked up and down the beach. I didn’t like them because I blamed them for Samuel’s fate. One day I said to them, “The man helping me build the boat was a good Christian. You were wrong to turn him in. He must have had a good reason to kill his wife.”

  They started laughing.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. We aren’t the police. We’re from the municipality.”

  They must have been, because shortly thereafter came the notification. A commission came to me from the shantytown to show me. They were up in arms. Now they treated me well, and called me “Papá Leandro.”

  Of course, I was the oldest and the most skilled, and they knew I would help them. The piece of paper said that all the inhabitants of the ravine had to leave within three months.

  “It’s your problem!” I said. “As for me, nobody’s throwing me out of here. I’ve been here for seven years.”

  They pleaded with me so much, I ended up listening to them.

  “We’ll find a lawyer,” I said. “This land doesn’t belong to anybody. They can’t kick us out.”

  When the lawyer came, we met at my house. He was a short little man, who wore glasses and a hat and carried a very well-worn briefcase full of papers.

  “The city wants to build a new bathing establishment,” he said. “That’s why they need to clear out the area, to build a new path. But this land belongs to the state. Nobody can kick you out of here.”

  Then he made each head of household give him fifty soles, and he left with some signed papers. Everybody congratulated me. They said, “We don’t know what we would do without you!”

  The truth is, the lawyer gave us courage and we were happy.

  “Nobody,” we said, “nobody will kick us out of here. This land belongs to the state.”

  Several weeks passed. The men from the city didn’t come back. I’d finished Toribio’s room and put glass in the window. The lawyer sometimes came to lecture us and make us sign papers. I strutted around among the people in the shantytown, and said, “You see? You should never disrespect the old folks! If it weren’t for me, you would already be nailing your stakes into the desert.”

  However, on the first morning of winter, a group came running down the ravine and into my house, shouting.

  “They’re here! They’re already here!” they said, pointing up.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “The crew! They’ve started plowing a road!”

  •

  I climbed up immediately and arrived when the workers had knocked down the first abode. They had a lot of machinery. There were some policemen standing with a tall man and another shorter one, who was writing in a large notebook. I recognized this last one: even those pencil pushers made their way to our shacks.

  “These are our orders,” the workers said, as they broke down the walls with their equipment. “We can’t do anything about it.”

  It’s true, you could see through the cloud of dust that their work gave them sorrow.

  “Orders from who?” I asked.

  “The judge,” they answered, and pointed to the tall man.

  I went over to him. The policemen wanted to stop me, but the judge motioned to them to let me pass.

  “There seems to be a mistake here,” I told him. “We live on state property. Our lawyer says that nobody can throw us out of here.”

  “That’s it precisely,” the judge said. “We’re removing you because you are living on land that belongs to the state.”

  People started shouting. The policemen cordoned off an area around the judge while the pencil pusher—as if nothing was going on—looked calmly at the sky, the landscape, and continued writing in his notebook.

  “You people must have relatives,” the judge said. “Anybody left without a home today should go live with relatives. Then you’ll work things out from there. I’m very sorry, believe me. I’ll try to help you out.”

  “At least let us call our lawyer!” I said. “The workers shouldn’t do anything until our lawyer arrives.”

  “You can call him,” the judge said, “but the work will continue.”

  “Who’s going to come with me to the city?” I asked.

  Several wanted to come, but I chose a few who were wearing shirts.

  We took a taxi to the city center and went up the stairs together. The lawyer was there. At first he didn’t recognize us, but then he started shouting.

  “Cases are either won or lost! There’s nothing more I can do. This isn’t a shop where we return your money if the product is bad. This is a lawyer’s office.”

  We argued for a long time, but finally we had to leave. We didn’t talk on the way back, we didn’t know what to say. When we reached the cliffs, the judge had already left but the police were still there. The people of the shantytown greeted us angrily. Some said the whole thing was my fault, that I had made a deal with the lawyer. I paid no attention to them. I saw that Samuel’s house, the first one built on the site, had come down and all the rocks were scattered on the ground. I recognized one white stone, one that had been on the shore for a long time, near my house. When I picked it up, I saw that it was cracked. How strange: that stone, which the sea had polished and rounded for years, was now cracked. The pieces fell apart in my hands, and I went down to my house, looking at one piece and then the other, while the people hurled insults at me, and I felt a strong urge to cry.

  •

  “Those people!” I said to myself the following days. “Let them be crushed, splattered! As for my house, it won’t be so easy for them to bring their machinery here. There’s too much cliff to cut through!”

  It was true: the crew worked slowly. When nobody was watching, they dropped their tools and smoked, chatting among themselves.

  “It’s a real pity,” they’d say, “but those are our instructions.”

  In spite of the insults, I also thought it was a pity. That’s why I didn’t go up there, so as not to see the destruction. To get to the city, I used the ravine in La Pampilla. There I ran into the fishermen and told them: “They’re throwing the shantytown out to sea.”

  They merely said, “It’s an outrage.”

  We knew it, of course, but what could we do? We were divided, fighting among ourselves, we didn’t have a plan, everybody wanted different things. Some wanted to leave, some wanted to protest. Some, the poorest ones, those who had no work, joined the crew and destroyed their own homes.

  But most went farther down the ravine. They built their houses twenty meters from the tractors so that, the next day, they could collect what was left from them and build them again ten meters farther away. This is how the shantytown came to me, falling one stretch farther down every day, till it seemed that I would soon have to carry it on my shoulders. Four weeks after the work began, the shantytown had reached my doorstep: destroyed, defeated, full of dusty men and women who said to me, over the railing, “Don Leandro, we have to come to your embankment! We’ll stay there till we find something else.”

  “There’s no room!” I answered them. “That big room you see there is for my son Toribi
o, who’s going to live there with Delia. Anyway, you folks never lifted a finger to help me. Go to hell! Or to the desert, for all I care!”

  But that was unfair. I knew very well that the women’s bathing huts, made of wood, and the men’s huts, made of reeds, could shelter those who’d been evicted. I turned this idea over in my head. It was winter, so the huts were empty. But I didn’t want to say anything, perhaps so they’d really know what suffering is. Finally, I gave in.

  “The women who are pregnant can come.” (Almost all of them were pregnant, because in the arid shantytowns, among so much that is shriveled and wilted, the only things that always flower, that are always on the verge of ripening, are the bellies of our women.) “They can stay in the wood huts and manage there!”

  The women came. But the next day I had to let in the children and then the men, because the crew kept advancing, patiently, that’s true, but accompanied by the terrible racket of machinery and falling rocks. My house was filled with shouts and arguments. Those who couldn’t fit went to the beach. It looked like a campground for people without hope, people waiting to be executed.

  We lived like that for a week, I don’t know why, since we knew they were going to come. One morning the crew appeared behind the railing with all its machinery. When they saw us, they stopped, not knowing what to do. Nobody made a move to give the first blow of the crowbar.

  “You want to throw us into the sea?” I said. “You will not pass. Everybody knows very well that this is my house, that this is my beach, that this is my sea, that I and my sons have cleaned everything here. I’ve been living here for seven years and those who are with me, all of them, are my guests.”

  The supervisor tried to convince me. Then came the engineer. We stood our ground. We were more than fifty strong, and we were armed with all the rocks of the sea.

  “You will not pass,” we said, looking at each other with pride.

  The machines were stopped all day. Sometimes the supervisor came down, sometimes we went up to discuss things. In the end, the engineer said he would call the judge. We believed there would be a miracle.

  The judge came the next day, accompanied by the police and other gentlemen. Leaning on the railing, he spoke to us.

  “We’re going to work this out,” he said. “Believe me, I’m very sorry about it. They can’t throw you into the sea, that’s obvious. We’re going to find you a place to live.”

  “He’s lying,” I said later to my people. “They’ll cheat us. They’ll end up throwing us into a ditch.”

  That night, we stayed up late discussing our options. Some started to weaken.

  “Maybe they’ll give us a good piece of land,” those who were afraid said. “Anyway, the police have their clubs, their guns, and they can shoot us.”

  “We can’t give in,” I insisted. “If we stay united, they won’t be able to throw us out.”

  The judge returned.

  “Those who want to go to Pampa de Comas, raise your hands!” he said. “I have arranged for them to give you twenty plots of land. Two trucks will come to pick you up. The city is doing you a favor.”

  At that moment, I felt lost. I knew they would all betray me. I wanted to protest, but I couldn’t find my voice. In the midst of the silence, I saw one hand rise, then another, then another, and soon all but a small group of hands were raised, as if begging for alms.

  “There’s no water where they’re taking you!” I shouted. “There’s no work! You’ll only have sand to eat! You’ll have no choice but to let the sun kill you!”

  But nobody paid any attention to me. They’d already begun to roll up their mattresses, quickly, eagerly, as if they were afraid of missing this last opportunity. All afternoon they paraded up the cliff through the ravine. When the last men had left, I stood in the middle of the embankment and looked at the crew, resting behind the railing. I looked at them for a long time, not knowing what to say to them, because I realized they felt sorry for me.

  “You can start,” I said finally, but nobody paid any attention to me.

  Picking up a crowbar, I added, “Look, I’ll set the example.”

  Some laughed. Others got up.

  “It’s late,” they said. “The work day is over. We’ll come back tomorrow.”

  And they left, too, leaving me humiliated though still master of my meager belongings.

  •

  That was the last night I spent in my house. I left at dawn so as not to watch. I carried everything I could toward Miraflores, followed by my dogs, always along the beach, because I didn’t want to be separated from the sea. I wandered aimlessly, for a while watching the waves, then looking at the cliffs, tired of life, actually, tired of everything, as the day dawned.

  When I reached the big culvert that carried all the filthy water from the city, I thought I heard somebody calling me. When I turned, I saw somebody running down the beach. It was Toribio.

  “I heard they threw you out!” he said. “I’ve been reading the papers. I wanted to come yesterday but I couldn’t. Delia is waiting for us on the embankment with our belongings.”

  “Go away,” I answered. “I don’t need you. You’re no good for anything.”

  Toribio grabbed my arm. I looked at his hand and I saw that it was worn, that it was already the hand of a real man.

  “Maybe I’m no good for anything, but you’ll teach me.”

  I kept looking at his hand.

  “I have nothing to teach you,” I said. “I’ll wait for you. Go get Dalia.”

  By the time the three of us started down the beach, there was enough light. The air we breathed was good, but we walked slowly because Delia was pregnant. I was looking, always looking, from one side to the other, for the right place. Everything looked so dry, so neglected. No morning glory or nasturtium were growing anywhere. Suddenly, Toribio, who’d gone on ahead, let out a shout: “Look! A higuerilla!”

  I ran to him, and there, up against the cliff, in between the white shells, a higuerilla was growing. I looked for a long time at its rough leaves, its coarse stem, its pods covered in spikes that cut any hand that tries to caress them. My eyes clouded over.

  “Here,” I said to Toribio. “Hand me that crowbar!”

  And, digging through the rocks, we raised the first timber of our new home.

  Huamanga, 1959

  from

  CAPTIVES

  BARBARA

  I KEPT Barbara’s letter for ten years. During one period, I carried it around in my pocket with the hope of finding somebody to translate it for me. Then I left it in a folder along with other old papers. Finally one afternoon, prey to one of those sudden bouts of destructiveness in which one turns a certain kind of ferocity on the annihilation of all traces of one’s past, I tore it up along with everything one tears up under these circumstances: train tickets from a long journey, receipts from a hotel where we were happy, the program notes of a forgotten play. Nothing, then, remained of Barbara, and I will never know what she said to me in that letter written in Polish.

  It was in Warsaw, years after the end of the war. Out of the ruins the Poles had built a new capital, a rather ugly one, riddled with concrete buildings that an architect might call totalitarian. I was among thirty thousand young people who attended one of those Youth Festivals, which later fell on harder times. In those days, we were gullible and optimistic. We believed that all we had to do was gather young people from all over the world in one city for fifteen days, have them travel, talk, dance, eat, and drink together, and that would bring peace to the world. We knew nothing of man or history.

  I first saw her at one of those friendship visits—encounters, they were called—that Polish young people made to the foreign delegations. Her head was perfectly round and golden; she was tiny, agile, and slim; and her profile was so delicately drawn that it was frightening to look at it for long, as if the gaze would use it up and demolish it. We made friends using sign language. During the encounter, which was also a celebration of folklore and
an exchange of virtuosities, someone danced, and Barbara sang us an enigmatic and wild song that left us smitten.

  She worked in a laboratory where I went several times to pick her up. In Lenin Square, in front of the Palace of Culture, we danced every night with thousands of other young people to the music of several orchestras whose rhythms melded together. After dancing, we would all go to a dark nearby park, where, in the name of universal solidarity, we would make out. That first time, I pressed her against me so brutally that she gasped for breath then folded, as if broken, in my arms.

  Unlike other young men who quickly turned their friends into lovers—at night, on the way back to our hostel, cigarettes were lit and stories of violent and vile fornications were recounted—my relationship with Barbara was rather ambiguous and slow moving. To a large extent this was due to the fact that we didn’t understand each other. Barbara spoke Polish and Russian and I, Spanish and French. Reduced to facial expressions and hand gestures, our friendship was limited, even more so because we lacked the love that invents all the rest. From me there was only desire, but it was a desire that required the assistance of words to find its way, words that in this case were impossible.

  One night we drank beer, a repugnant brew in a bar that pretended to be like in the West, and I saw that Barbara wanted to communicate something to me. On other occasions I had seen her making a similar motion, but now it was more explicit: she grabbed the skirt of her dress, stroked the fabric, and pulled its hem toward her knees or lifted it to carelessly show me part of her divine thigh. What did Barbara want? Had she finally managed to understand what I desired? I laughed to see her so eager and struggling with such disarming determination to communicate to me what she was thinking. Only after a lot of fuss did I understand that she wanted to tell me the following: I live outside the city, one day we will go to my house, we have to take the train.

  Beautiful Barbara had finally surrendered. She understood! One night I, too, would arrive at the hostel to light my cigarette and tell my story, the one about the Latin macho claiming his small piece of this Central European garden, a story to make you laugh, to remember later and boast about, until life would take charge of voiding it of all content and reducing it to a rather paltry incident.