A Tale of the Dispossessed (8 page)

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.

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.”

T
he 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.

A
fter 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.