A Tale of the Dispossessed (4 page)

T
o 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.

“They beat Matilde Lina, they snatched the boy away from her and dragged her off somewhere,” Doña Perpetua tells me, making her sibilant sounds whistle past the torturing dental prosthesis of which she is so proud.

From that moment, Matilde Lina’s deeds were erased from the factual world and enthroned in a quagmire of speculation. Of no avail to her were the coltish kicks she knew well how to impart or the large impressions with which her teeth had adorned so many other people’s skins. Did they conquer her by chopping off her tresses or by calling her whorish or crazy? Did they force her to kneel in the mud, did they break her body, did they break her soul? Did her screams resound through the mountain ravines? Or was what gave people goose pimples the soft cooing of the spotted owl or the cackle of some outlandish bird? Or of all the birds that knew her name and began to shout it in a bewildered litany?

Three Sevens doesn’t know. He either doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know. And if he knows, he won’t tell, keeping all the silence and all the horror to himself. He talks to me about her as if she had just reemerged for him yesterday: the passing of time does not mitigate the ardor of his remembrance.

After the ambush at Las Aguilas, Matilde Lina never appeared again, in life or in death, and no one could offer any news, large or small, of this woman recast by the toils of war, like so many others. Three Sevens was still alive but sentenced to death for the second time, allowed to meet his improbable destiny as a solitary child, orphaned and abandoned for the second time. A child of the woodlands, flying with the capricious four winds, in the midst of a country that refuses to be accountable for anything or anybody.

I can now imagine him, dazed after the catastrophe. He is lost in a trance, sitting at the edge of the road, and it is very slowly getting dark. Nothing is moving around him, and he doesn’t feel pressed by time; he has no place to go. While he waits, he is growing older without realizing it. He only knows that the woman who was by his side has disappeared and that someday she must appear again. When she comes back, the child will wake up already an adult, and they will start walking, shoulder to shoulder. Silent days, months, and years are lethargically passing by on the road, but the woman who is supposed to return cannot find the way.

“So much life, and never more . . . ,” sighs Three Sevens occasionally, twice repeating the phrase, which I have heard uttered before by someone else in some other place, without my being able to comprehend it fully then or now.

“So much life, so much life . . .”

“And never more. . . .” I add, just to go along.

I
wonder how a kid only twelve or thirteen, as Three Sevens must have been, could have resisted such a blow. How long was he given to periods of silence, how deep into the waters of his inner being was he thrust? What kinds of perplexities did he need to wade through before the day that, summoning all his energies, he put himself afloat again, transformed into the man I love without any hopes of reciprocation?

“His worst enemy has always been his guilt,” Perpetua tells me, backing her argument with the authority of someone who knew him long before tragedy struck.

“Guilt?”

“Guilt, for not having been able to prevent their dragging her away. Guilt for not searching hard enough for her. Guilt for still being alive, for breathing, eating, walking: he believes all of that is betraying her. As the years go by without his finding her, he gets more and more entangled in a web of recriminations that haunt him while he’s awake and batter him when he’s asleep.”

How can this be, if at the shelter Three Sevens preaches the habit of forgiveness? “The mistakes of the past are left at the door. He who takes refuge here should know that from now on, all his unpaid accounts are with his conscience and with God.” This is the warning he offers to all, even to those who bring with them a scandalous reputation, be it as a thief, whore, guerrilla, or murderer. To those who gossip about the sullied pasts of others, he says outright: “Cut that out, Mr. So-and-so, in this shelter nobody is good or evil.”

“This is the kind of reasoning that entangles all reason,” the old woman tells me. “The only one Three Sevens cannot forgive is himself.”

“Why does he have to pay for a crime he didn’t commit?” I inquire. “Why does he have to punish himself so?”

“Because his guilt follows different twists and turns, Three Sevens did not really look upon Matilde Lina as his mother,” she says, revealing what I already know better than anybody else. “I had seven children and lost three, and I know very well how a son looks at his mother. Matilde Lina had an extravagant temperament, but she was a woman of strong presence, with a girlish face and large breasts. Many lusted after her body and did not succeed because she knew how to kick and bite to defend herself. I saw her washing by the river, her blouse open, half-unbuttoned, with Three Sevens at her side, a growing boy beginning to show fuzz on his face and in other places he dared not confess. Her breasts were exposed, and the boy looked at them, as still as a rock, gasping for breath and becoming a man before that vision.”

I can also see Matilde Lina by the water’s edge, busy in her occupation, immersed in herself and unaware of her nakedness, at a moment of deep intimacy that is not disrupted by anything, not even the stirring that burns in the boy’s gaze.

“Of course, he was not the first adolescent to stare at his mother’s breasts,” I object to Perpetua, and she laughs.

“No, of course not,” she answers. “And he will not be the first one to keep searching for them in all the other breasts that cross his way.”

A
fter the caravan’s stampede on the day that Matilde Lina disappeared, Three Sevens was not the only one abandoned on Las Aguilas Peak. Through a wise quirk of fate, which is not as arbitrary as people suspect, there was also the image known as the Dancing Madonna, all alone and half-sunk in the thick of the churning bog.

“At the time of the ambush, our patron Madonna did not grant us any protection,” Three Sevens still recriminates, and he tells me that when he noticed her lying powerless in the mud, he felt his face burning red in a surge of rancor.

“Old piece of lumber! Selfish, unfair, and lazy! Miserable wooden doll!” were the blasphemous words he recalls screaming at her. “For years we helped carry you on our shoulders as if you weighed nothing. We kept candles lighted around you at night, and by day we protected you from the rigors of the climate with a canopy worthy of a duchess, only to have you finally let disaster fall upon us anyway.”

Trying to push away the aura of loneliness that had suddenly returned to him, Three Sevens cast the blame on the Dancing Madonna for the disappearance of Matilde Lina, the only companion that life had not taken away from him, and he started hurling those insults, and more severe ones, until he realized that this lady, who had appeared before to be dancing a
sevillana,
now with the same gestures seemed to be just flailing in the mud. “Not only had she failed to protect us, but quite the opposite: she herself was in urgent need of protection.”

“Then I forgave her, and took on the obligation of carrying her all by myself. So I rescued her from the swamp, polished her as best I could, hoisted her on my shoulders, and started walking in directions as yet unknown either to her or to me, and which we were in no condition to determine. ‘I ask you a thousand times to forgive me, my Blessed Queen, but your procession ends here.’ This was my warning, so that she would start forgetting her former privilege of being carried on a litter and resign herself, once and for all, to doing without her candles, or psalms and hymns, or garlands of roses made just for her. ‘From now on,’ I told her frankly, ‘you will have to be traveling in poverty and on Indian shoulders, with this jute sack as your only mantle and this sisal rope as your only luxury. Which means, my Queen, that your reign is over; now you’ll go around like everybody else.’”

“God, who never forsakes His children, wanted to give her to him as partner and guardian,” says Perpetua, blessing herself and kissing a cross that she forms by placing her thumb over her index finger. And I realize, beginning to piece things together, that Matilde Lina and the Dancing Madonna, strangely, must be a single image, both mother and Virgin, both equally love-giving and unreachable.

Life, overwhelmingly, continued its course, and people fended for themselves as best they could. Owing to a lack of witnesses, I have been able to reconstruct the following decades only in patches. Three Sevens, as I said, does not talk about himself, but I know that he survived into adulthood against all indications. I suppose that he beat the odds thanks to his pilgrim’s doggedness, the solidarity laws of the road, the shelter provided by the generous, and the benevolence of his patron Virgin. Perhaps he was greatly helped by that lucky sixth toe and, above all, by his stubborn determination to keep searching for his loved one.

The so-called Little War had ended, and a new one that didn’t even have a name was decimating the population, when Three Sevens appeared in this sweltering oil city of Tora, dressed like a peasant in white cotton, with his Dancing Virgin in his pack, wrapped in plastic and tied with a cord, and with the idea well fixed in his head that, according to some information obtained from a woman in San Vicente de Chucurí, here he would finally find his Matilde Lina.

“Did you already look for her in Tora?” that woman asked. “I knew someone there who made her living by washing and ironing and who just fits your description.”