Tales from the Town of Widows

by James Canon

  “How many people have you killed?” I asked him.

  “Haha-haha. Like you keep count,” he said. “I just close my eyes and fire until I don’t hear no fire back.” His effortless answers made me think he was telling me the truth. “What about you?” he asked. “Have you killed someone?”

  I shook my head.

  “Really?” John seemed genuinely surprised. He laid the rifle on the grass and sat next to it, his knees pressed together against his chest and his arms wrapped around them. The message was clear: he no longer needed to feel any older or taller. He’d killed people. I hadn’t.

  “What do you think about when you’re in combat?” I went on.

  “Most of the time I don’t think nothing, but sometimes I think I’m saving my own life, you know? It’s either my life or theirs, and God doesn’t want me yet.”

  “Oh, so you believe in God.”

  “I sure do. I say my prayers almost every night, and always before a battle.”

  “And do you think God approves of you killing others?”

  He considered my question for a while before declaring, “I think God doesn’t want me killing them anymore than he wants them killing us.”

  Next, I asked him questions about the daily life of a guerrilla and learned that they get up at four and fall in at five; that daily duties are assigned at five thirty. A party of two cooks all three meals, two parties of three go hunting, two parties of four scout the area for possible invasion forces, and the rest do guard duty. In the afternoon, they exercise and do target practice.

  “This camp’s nothing compared to training camp,” John assured me. “There, you learn to shoot pistols, rifles and machine guns, and how to spot aircraft, and where on the fuselage to aim. It’s awesome!” He said all this in his child’s voice, and I thought again about the file that the commandant had given me. I pulled it from my backpack and reread the page. It said John’s real name was Juan Carlos Ceballos Vargas and that he was sixteen; that his parents had died in a car accident when he was a baby; that the boy had spent his entire childhood in an orphanage, from which he’d been dismissed when he turned fifteen; and that he’d voluntarily joined the guerrillas in November of 2000. I decided to find out how much of the information on his file was true.

  “Is John your real name?”

  He shook his head.

  “What is it then?”

  “I don’t tell nobody my name.”

  “That’s fair,” I said. “I like John. It’s a nice name.”

  “It’s not just John,” he replied. “It’s John R.”

  “I still think it’s a fine name. Did you choose it yourself?”

  He nodded. “You seen Rambo?” He asked this as though Rambo had just been released.

  “All three of them,” I admitted.

  “Me too. He’s awesome! Remember his name? Rambo’s name?”

  I had to think for a moment. It had been years since I watched Rambo III. I knew it was a common name. Michael? Robert? John?

  “John!” I announced. “Oh, I get it. John R.”

  He smiled. “My grandmother had a TV. She let me watch sometimes, till she sold it. She started selling everything she had to get us food till there was nothing else to sell in that house.”

  “Where is your grandmother now?”

  He shrugged.

  “What about your father? Where is he?”

  “In jail. He got twenty years for killing a neighbor who stole a pig from us.”

  “And your mother?”

  “She got shot in the head,” he replied, matter-of-factly, as if that were the only way someone’s life could end. “That man my father killed, he had a son who was a policeman. He put my father in jail, then he killed my mother.”

  “Did someone turn the policeman in?”

  “Haha-haha,” he answered.

  “How old were you when this happened?”

  He pushed his left hand outward in front of my face, the way little boys tell their age. Five fingers.

  “And how old where you when you joined the guerrillas?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Do you know what this is?” I asked him, flashing the file in front of his eyes.

  He glanced at it and shook his head. “I can’t read. I never went to school.”

  “Here, I’ll read it for you,” I offered, and began to read each line slowly. He listened attentively, but the expression on his face didn’t change.

  “I wish that was true,” he said after I was finished. “It sounds a lot better than my life.” His eyes, black and sad, fixed on mine. I looked into them and saw a little boy learning how to shoot a pistol, hunting birds in the forest, saying prayers on his knees before going to war, opening fire on someone else’s enemy with his eyes tightly closed. I scrunched the file into a ball and threw it away.

  “Just one more question,” I said, noticing he was now looking at his watch. “Tell me what made you join the guerrillas.”

  “I was hungry.”

  John R. grabbed his rifle and stood up. It was almost four in the afternoon, and he was scheduled for guard duty from four to eight.

  “Promise you won’t twist what I told you to make me look like a bad guy,” he said.

  “I promise,” I assured him. To prove it, I kissed a cross made with my thumb and index finger, a gesture widely used by Colombians to indicate they’ll honor their word.

  Then he asked me for a present. “Anything,” he said.

  I looked inside my backpack. There was a change of underwear, a toothbrush, a travel-size toothpaste, two sets of batteries, aspirins, antibiotics, a roll of toilet paper and a beat-up copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I’d just started reading. Nothing John R. would want. But then, in the side pocket, I found a Christmas floatie pen I’d gotten the last time I visited New York.

  “Feliz Navidad, John R.,” I said, handing him the pen.

  “Navidad? But it’s only April.”

  “Any time’s good for Christmas.”

  I gave him the pen and told him to tilt it back and forth, and saw him watch Santa and his reindeer float smoothly over a miniature snowy village.

  “Haha-haha.” His face lit up. “Is it made in Estados Unidos?”

  “I’m not sure,” I confessed.

  His lower lip dropped in disappointment.

  I took the pen back from him and carefully checked it. At last I found, on the little silver ring that divided the upper part of the pen from the lower one, engraved in very small print, the three words John R. wanted to hear.

  “Sí,” I said. “Made in USA.”

  He thanked me four or five times, turned around and headed for the camp, tilting the pen back and forth as he walked, saying “Haha-haha,” again and again until his little body disappeared into the woods.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Magistrate Who Didn’t Know How to Rule

  Mariquita, October 29, 1993

  FOR MORE THAN A week, Rosalba had been closely watching the sky. Each time she looked, the clouds and the sun, the moon and the stars, everything above her village had seemed a little farther away. Today, as she stepped outside of her house and looked up at the sky once more, she decided that her green eyes weren’t lying. It was true: Mariquita was sinking. She crossed herself and started down the street, toward the plaza.

  Rosalba viuda de Patiño, as she liked to introduce herself, was the widow of the police sergeant. She was a comely woman with a pale complexion, thin arms and legs, a small waist, and the largest bottom of all the women in Mariquita. She wore her long chestnut hair gathered up in a chignon at the nape of her neck, and she had a mole between her eyebrows that looked as if a fly had settled on her forehead. When she laughed—a rare occurrence since her husband’s death—she squinted and her mouth opened in an oval wide enough that the many silver fillings of her molars flashed. She was forty-six, but the deep creases around her eyes—which now lingered after she stopped laughing—and the thin, freckled skin of her hands
made her look much older.

  Walking down the main street, Rosalba noticed a few new piles of garbage and rubble. They kept rising everywhere. With the village sinking, it was just a matter of time before the widows and their children found themselves immersed in trash. The rickety old man with the rickety old truck that used to come to Mariquita once a week to collect the garbage had stopped coming soon after the day the men disappeared. With the town’s treasurer and the magistrate gone, who was going to pay for his services? Not the widows. They had other priorities, like feeding their children and themselves.

  “Damned old man!” Rosalba said without stopping. She turned left at the corner and encountered a new deserted house, the Cruzes’. Since the men disappeared, several women had left Mariquita with their remaining children, their elders and whatever they could manage to carry on their mules or their own backs. In less than a year Mariquita’s population had been significantly reduced. Abandoned houses had sprung up on every block and were soon dismantled. Roofs, doors, windows, flooring, everything was removed that could be removed until all that was left of them were four adobe walls with two or three openings of various shapes. Rosalba knitted her brow and kept walking.

  Lately, she had gotten into the habit of sitting on a bench in the plaza to watch the villagers going about their ordinary occupations. Indifferent old women draped in black lace on their way to church; young women shouting at intervals that they were selling fresh arepas, used clothes, soap, candles, etc.; half-naked children following them, begging for the things they sold, waiting for the women to lower their guard so they could steal something, anything, from them. After a few minutes, the tediousness of the routine would prove unbearable, and Rosalba would find someone to talk to. Today she sat down on a bench half covered in bird droppings. The bench faced the distant sun, which was just breaking through the also distant morning clouds.

  Three biblical-looking women wearing long nightgowns and bearing large water jugs appeared from around a corner. Orquidea, Gardenia and Magnolia, the Morales sisters, were on their way to the river, which was nearly an hour away on foot. Long ago, the men of Mariquita had dammed and channeled a nearby stream to provide running water for kitchens and laundry areas in the village. Now it was nothing but weed-infested tubes. A year of unusually dry weather had dried up the stream and the aqueduct and ruined most of the crops, leaving the women and children in the grips of famine as well as drought.

  “Good morning,” Rosalba shouted to the Morales sisters.

  None replied.

  Rosalba looked around for someone, anyone, to talk to; to complain to about the poor manners of the three sisters and other things that bothered her. There was no one.

  “Everyone must be busy doing nothing,” she said bitterly, addressing an old mango tree that stood next to her. “I’ve never seen women more passive than the widows of this village. We’re running out of food and don’t even have manure to fertilize the soil. It’s true that we’re going through a dry spell, but we can’t blame nature for our hardship. Not when we haven’t done a thing. All this time we’ve been sitting here, complaining, waiting for the news of our predicament to travel across the mountains and reach Mr. Governor. For Mr. Governor to meet with his council. For them to notify the central government. For Mr. President to meet with his congress. And for the congress to authorize Mr. President to authorize the council to authorize Mr. Governor to authorize someone else to offer some assistance to a bunch of stupid widows in some dry region somewhere…”

  A small flock of half-starved pigs appeared, followed by their shepherd, Ubaldina viuda de Restrepo, who was yelling abuse at them. She was the widow of Don Campo Elías Restrepo—once the richest man in town—and she had lost him and seven stepsons to the rebels. Ubaldina kept her pigs in a little barbed-wire-fenced shed at the rear of her garden. She herded them around town twice a day so the animals could feed themselves on trash. She had marked their left ears with red paint, and she counted them several times a day to make sure none had been stolen.

  The pigs stopped every few seconds to ransack each pile of garbage they came across. “Move, you stupid beast!” she yelled at the skinniest one. It was well behind the rest.

  “When am I getting my chops, Ubaldina?” Rosalba shouted. She hadn’t eaten meat in over three months, even though she had paid, long ago, for two full pork chops.

  “Maybe next week,” Ubaldina replied. “I still haven’t sold the ears and the feet.”

  Ubaldina, who had been left with two useless refrigerators at home after Mariquita’s electricity had been cut off, would only kill an animal when every part of it had been sold.

  “A disaster for the poor is an opportunity for the rich,” Rosalba whispered to the tree. “You know how much that greedy woman charges for a pound of meat of those garbage-fed pigs? Three thousand pesos! To be able to afford some, I had to rent the back room of my house to Vaca. You know, the cobbler’s widow, the big-eyed Indian who’s always chewing her cud. Why, of course Ubaldina knows that! I told her myself. She simply doesn’t care. But I’m not the only one. You know Lucrecia Saavedra? The old seamstress? The poor thing had to barter her spare pair of scissors for tripe to make soup!”

  As Rosalba was complaining to the tree, a small convoy of green Jeeps spattered with mud pulled into town. The women rushed out of their houses, imagining that it was relief sent by the government. Fifteen strangers in military uniforms got out of the Jeeps in complete silence. In the same silence they went about the filthy streets of Mariquita, followed closely by unclothed children and mothers with their hands outstretched, chanting, “Please, please, please…” The soldiers asked a few questions of el padre Rafael, the priest (the only man the guerrillas hadn’t taken). They wrote their findings in small notebooks. They also took photographs of the dilapidated plaza, and of the large group of women that had gathered around the Jeeps to beg.

  The oldest of the military men climbed onto the hood of his Jeep and tried to appease the widows. He was a short, fair-haired fellow with an ill-favored aspect. His skin was sweaty and shiny, and his face had scars of various shapes and lengths. “My name is Abraham,” he began in a gentle voice that didn’t match his appearance. “We’re not here to give our condolences on your loss, though all of you have our deepest sympathies. We’ve come to evaluate the material damage done to your village so that you can be compensated accordingly.” He reinforced his statements with swift motions of his small hands. “Unfortunately, it’s going to take some time before any help can reach you. You see, our nation’s undergoing yet another undeclared civil war. Many villages were attacked by guerrillas and paramilitary groups before yours, and so…” Despite the disheartening news he was delivering, the little man appeared to have hypnotized the women and children. They stared at him entranced, as though waiting for him to lay eggs or sweat milk. Only one woman remained in full control of her senses: Rosalba viuda de Patiño.

  “We appreciate your honesty, señor,” she interrupted Abraham’s speech. “But tell us, who’s going to provide us and our children with food until we get some rain?”

  “I’m afraid that I don’t have an answer for that, señora, but—”

  “And what about clothing? These rags we have on will soon fall apart.” She quickly turned toward the women and said, “Are we supposed to walk around naked like Indians for the rest of our lives?”

  “Señora, listen to me—”

  “No,” Rosalba interposed, turning to the man. “You listen to us. Did you by any chance take pictures of our empty cisterns and our trash piled up everywhere? Did you write in your little notebook that our village is sinking?”

  “Or that we haven’t had electricity for a year?” Ubaldina, the pigs’ owner, echoed her.

  “Or that the only telephone in town doesn’t work?” shouted Magnolia Morales from the back.

  More women began to angrily shout their complaints, making Abraham nervous. He knew that if the storm of protests turned into a riot, he and
his fourteen men alone would not be able to control it. Not only did the women outnumber them, but they and their children were also hungry. People were more likely to revolt when they had empty stomachs.

  Suddenly, Rosalba broke into tears. “What are we going to do?” she wailed. “We’re all going to die of hunger, buried in rubbish, and only the vultures will notice.”

  “Señora,” said Abraham, bewildered by Rosalba’s shifting attitude. “What this town needs is a strong leader like you. Why don’t you take up the office of magistrate until the government decides what to do?”

  “I know nothing about civil law or judicial procedures,” she confessed to Abraham, wiping the tears from her eyes with the back of her hands, “but my husband was Mariquita’s police sergeant. A very brave man who sacrificed his life fighting the rebels.”

  “That alone,” Abraham replied, “makes you the perfect leader for this village.”

  He didn’t intend for Rosalba to take his suggestion seriously; he only wanted to stop her from wailing. But the woman, who was not accustomed to compliments of any sort, surprised him by accepting the job. Abraham got down off the Jeep and hand-wrote a document designating her the acting magistrate. Then he made it official by singing, tunelessly and along with his soldiers, the Colombian national anthem.

  ON HER FIRST full day as magistrate, Rosalba left for her office at seven. She wore a white apron on top of her black dress, and carried a broom, a mop and a bucket filled with soapy water. She also had a stub of a pencil tucked behind her ear, and, in the pocket of her apron, a small notebook and her pistol. As she went down the main street, she thought of the grand things she would do for Mariquita. Every time an idea came into her head, she stopped, put down the cleaning supplies, pulled out her notebook and pencil and wrote it down on her list of priorities. Bring back running water into town. Develop an irrigation system for crops. Send someone into the city for some fertilizer and seeds.