Tales from the Town of Widows

by James Canon

  At that moment, a beam of sunlight came through the window and illuminated Cleotilde’s face with a distinctive glow. This time the magistrate saw a sixty-seven-year-old woman of grand stature. Her gray hair, smooth mustache and white bristles, her clenched hand and permanent frown, were all pieces of the woman’s unspoken past; a past that commanded nothing but a great deal of respect.

  “We were wondering if—if you would like to take the job. Do you want to take the job, Señorita Guarnizo?” Rosalba asked.

  It had taken Cleotilde a lifetime to confront her fears, but only two days to accept the fact that even with all its poverty and chaos, with its wild children, their indifferent mothers and its incompetent magistrate, Mariquita was the closest to heaven she would ever be. Today, for the very first time in her life, she felt thoroughly prepared to wed herself inseparably to something, anything.

  “I do,” she answered resolutely.

  Ángel Alberto Tamacá, 35

  Guerrilla commandant

  We had been marching for days and used up all our food supplies. Right before sunset, we came upon a small thatch-roofed hut. I decided they would feed us. A middle-aged, thickset woman opened the door before we knocked, as if she had been waiting for us, and went back inside without saying a word. We followed her. The house was just a single room, dark and small. It reeked of dead animal. A man lay on the ground against the wall, covered partly with a white sheet and partly with a swarm of green flies. The woman was applying compresses to his face. He’d been badly beaten.

  “They killed the pigs and the chickens and ate all the food,” she informed us, with not a trace of resentment on her face.

  “Who did it?” I asked.

  “The paramilitaries. Who else? They accused my husband of helping the guerrillas. Look at what they did to him.” She lifted the sheet. The man’s arms were crossed over his belly. Both hands had been chopped off, and the stumps were wrapped in bloody rags tied up with string.

  “Shhh,” she said to the man. “It’ll be all right.” She gently covered his arms with the sheet.

  I got closer to the man and felt for the pulse on his neck. He was dead. He had been dead for hours. “Señora,” I said, “this man has passed.” And then, “I’m sorry.”

  The woman soaked the rag in the water, wrung it and patted the man’s face with it. “It’ll be all right,” she repeated with a tender smile, shooing the flies away.

  “Señora,” I tried again. “Did you hear what I just said?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t even have coffee to offer you,” she said, addressing the men behind me. “You see, they killed the pigs and the chickens and ate all the food.”

  We crossed ourselves and left in silence.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Widow Who Found a Fortune Under Her Bed

  Mariquita, August 1, 1996

  THE DREAM WAS SO incredibly vivid that when Francisca viuda de Gómez woke from it, she was awfully disappointed. In her dream she’d been in the kitchen, making lard soup for dinner, when she heard the church bell ringing insistently. She ran to the window and in the distance made out an endless line of male figures slowly coming down the mountain, toward the village. Mariquita’s men were coming back from the war!

  Feeling more obliged by her moral duties than delighted by her husband’s imminent return, Francisca went outside to meet him. She stood under the mango tree across the street and waited. As the figures neared her house, Francisca noticed two things: the former guerrillas were all faceless, and except for their olive-drab peaked caps and knee boots, they were naked, with small penises and enormous testicles. Now, how would she recognize Vicente, her husband? She remembered that he had a distinctive scar shaped like a five-pointed star on the right side of his forehead. But each of these marching figures had the same flat, pale surface where his face used to be. The sun was setting, and there she stood, watching the mysterious figures march along the street, giggling nervously.

  ANOTHER RAINY SEASON had begun, and a new leak had appeared in Francisca’s roof. She pulled a chamber pot from under her bed, put it next to the armoire where the roof was leaking, and watched how the rainfall mixed with her urine, creating tiny bubbles. She remembered that it was the first day of the month, and the thought put a smile on her face. With visible excitement she fetched, out of the drawer of her night table, a cloth bag and an ancient book of divinations called Veritas, which contained one thousand oracular messages. Veritas could only be consulted once on the first day of every month, by following two simple steps: First, formulate an explicit question while addressing the book. Second, pick, at random, a small numbered ball from a bag that contained one thousand of them. The chosen figure corresponded to the message that would answer one’s question. Francisca carried Veritas and the bag to her old rocking chair and sat down, and as she lifted the book from her lap with both hands, she said loudly to it, “Veritas, tell me, What’s the secret to happiness?” She had been asking the same exact question every month for the past few years. All the answers were vague and unintelligible, written in old-fashioned Spanish that Francisca could hardly read. Still, she found Veritas quite amusing and looked forward to the first day of every month.

  She introduced her hand into the cloth bag and gave the thousand little balls a vigorous stir before drawing out the one with the number 739 written on it.

  739. TRANSFORMATION

  ARCANE:…And the light it gave off was dazzling and the heat was scorching and the flames overwhelmingly high, and yet fire and heaven never united.

  EXEGESIS: All transformations in life must be considered in accord with the effect they bring about.

  JUDGEMENT: If it brings you unhappiness, rid yourself of it.

  Francisca repeated the prophetic message time after time, like a prayer, somehow sensing that, this time, Veritas had answered her question, and that the answer would have a great impact on her life. She put the book and the bag away and looked around the room thoughtfully. The one thing that brought her the most unhappiness was Vicente, her husband. But how to get rid of someone who dwells in one’s mind? The thought of it left her exhausted. She went back to the rocking chair.

  Almost four years had gone by since the day the men disappeared from Mariquita; four years since Vicente Gómez, Mariquita’s barber, was kicked out of his house by guerrillas, brutally beaten and then forced to join them. All this time Francisca had secretly hoped that the insurgents would eventually realize that except for cutting hair, shaving beards and trimming mustaches, Vicente was of no use to a group of revolutionaries, or to the world, and kill him. She closed her eyes and made an effort to remember what Vicente looked like sitting on the toilet. This was a harmless memory exercise that she did almost every morning, the sole purpose of which was to let out some of the frustration she had accumulated over the years. To her surprise, today she only pictured the toilet—its white ceramic bowl, its hinged, plastic seat and lid, even the silvery flushing device. She tried a second time, and again she saw nothing but the deserted toilet. She was delighted to realize that without the help of his picture, she was no longer able to visualize her husband’s face. Like those of the men in her dream, Vicente’s face was nothing but a flat, pale surface with no facial traits whatsoever. Perhaps getting rid of her largest source of unhappiness was not as difficult as she had imagined.

  The message had said something about transformation, and so Francisca decided she would change her life. She would introduce the changes gradually, so as not to upset the priest or the most puritan women. First, Francisca would wear her long hair down. She had beautiful coal black hair, too beautiful to be kept up in a graceless bun. Second, she’d request permission from the magistrate to wear dresses that were not black. After all, the other day she’d seen Cleotilde Guarnizo, the new schoolmistress, in a dress with yellow buttons on it. Then she’d concentrate on fixing her dilapidated house: mend the leaks and fill the chinks in the walls. She would have liked to paint her entire house bright red, but
she couldn’t afford to. For the time being, all she could do to transform her house was to rearrange her scant furniture.

  She began this task by pushing the shabby cedar armoire from one corner to another, except this time she placed it at an angle. She noticed that the part of the wooden floor on which the armoire had been resting, though covered with dust and cobwebs, was still smooth and glossy. It had taken her two years to convince her stingy husband to floor their house with pine boards. He’d argued that it was an unnecessary expense, and she’d replied that the dust from their earthen floor was killing her slowly. She even pretended to have a persistent cough, allergies, asthma and other respiratory problems. But it wasn’t until she claimed that the continuous inhalation of dust was keeping her from becoming pregnant that Vicente hired a carpenter, not only to floor their house with the smoothest pine boards he could find, but to polish them twice, three times, four times or, like he told the worker, “Until I can see my wife’s underwear reflected on them.”

  Their marriage had not always been bad. Francisca remembered how much her husband used to enjoy making her believe he was truly guessing the color of her underwear. Eventually it became a daily game, and the merry couple agreed on a prize for the winner: every time Vicente guessed correctly he’d get a long kiss, but if he failed he’d give Francisca five hundred pesos. She found the game to be erotic, and so she bought revealing lingerie in unusual colors. Every morning he guessed right, and she rewarded him with a long kiss that usually led to passionate sex. As a result, Barbería Gómez often opened late for business. Francisca had figured out from the beginning that it was the shiny floor that gave away the color of her underwear, but she didn’t confess to him that she knew until after seven months. And even when she told him, they laughed together and kissed some more, and he gently rubbed her belly, surprised that it was almost unnoticeable. She was six months pregnant.

  But now, all that was left of their love and merriment was a small, shiny rectangle on the lower part of her house, covered with dust. She dragged the rocking chair close to the window and emptied the chamber pot, which was on the brink of overflowing. She pulled and pushed the bed in every possible direction, and finally resolved to leave it in the middle of the bedroom so that her broom and mop could easily access all four corners of the room when she cleaned it.

  It was then, after moving the bed around, that Francisca noticed a small piece of paper showing through the crack of a loose floorboard. It was a will signed by a Señorita Eulalia Gómez, stating that she had left her entire fortune—two hundred million pesos—to Vicente. Eulalia had been Vicente’s great-aunt, his only relative—a wealthy spinster who had died of old age in Líbano, her hometown, fifteen years before. With the help of a hammer Francisca pried up the board and found buried, under the dirt floor, underneath the bed where she had lain for many years, a large bag filled with bank notes. She felt a sudden rush of anger furiously traveling through her body. She moved randomly about the room and didn’t stop until she caught a glimpse of her own reflection in a piece of mirror hanging from the wall. She approached the mirror, cautiously, as though afraid it would cast back a monstrosity. But all she saw was a pitiful thing, a foolish woman who had spent more than half her married life living in poverty while her husband had a fortune buried under their bed. She abruptly flew into a rage and went around the house breaking dishes and glassware, knocking pictures off the walls, kicking chairs and tables and ripping down curtains. Finally, when she was completely exhausted, she fell to her knees with her hands flat, hitting the floor with her forehead, weeping.

  She stayed like that for a long while, recalling how her husband had begun to change after he noticed that Javier, their son, wasn’t growing up as fast as the rest of the boys of Mariquita. And when Dr. Ramírez finally confirmed that their son was a midget, Vicente stopped talking to her for almost a year. He threw a large party for Javier’s fifth birthday, but the morning after, he locked his son in a room and forbade Francisca to let him be seen by anybody in town. He cut her weekly allowance in half, as if the size of their son dictated the amount of money she was permitted to spend. He started drinking every night and stopped eating at home, and when Francisca asked him for money to buy an extra pound of rice or a loaf of bread, he refused. Instead, he accused her of being a greedy, wasteful wife who spent her allowance heedlessly. For years Francisca lived poorly, buying only the bare essentials for the house, wearing torn clothes, looking for sales and discounts, begging for bargains, stretching to the maximum the insignificant amount of money that Vicente gave her weekly, and which he cut down even more every time he looked at his son.

  And then Javier died. When the doctor pronounced his death due to malnutrition, Vicente blamed it on his wife. He told everyone in town that Francisca was a cruel, horrible mother and a coldhearted wife. And she believed it. She even wished herself dead because she’d birthed a midget and let him die and was most likely going to lose her husband too: that charming man who used to notice the color of her underwear and who was late for work every morning so that he could stay home making love to her.

  Francisca rose from the floor and walked around the house collecting all her husband’s belongings—clothes, pictures, hats and shoes, shaving cream and his small collection of long-playing records. Then she gathered her own mourning apparel—dresses, veils, stockings, mantillas, scarves and any other piece of black cloth she came across. All these she crammed into a cardboard box and set in the doorway, then kicked it out violently, shouting: “If it brings you unhappiness, rid yourself of it!” Feeling proud of herself, she went back to her bedroom and dug her fortune out of the hole. The bank notes were all the same denomination––ten thousand––and they’d been arranged with the face of Colombian heroine Policarpa Salavarrieta facing up. Francisca had never seen so much money. She couldn’t imagine how she would ever spend two hundred million pesos. Perhaps she should move away from Mariquita; go to a big city where she could start a new life, a real life with a large house, a handsome husband and healthy children. Mariquita had nothing to offer a rich woman like herself. Yes, it was true that these days some women were farming and that food, though sometimes limited, was not lacking. But with food or without it, Mariquita was a miserable village where nothing happened. The only reason she’d stayed was because of her friends. She had very good friends; kind and loyal friends, like Victoria viuda de Morales, Elvia viuda de López and Erlinda viuda de Calderón, to name a few. What would happen to them if she left? Perhaps she should take some of them with her. Six or eight. Six sounded more realistic. But which six? Oh, what a dilemma! To think she had to wait a whole month before being allowed to consult Veritas again.

  So many things could happen in a month…

  She looked through the window. The rain had stopped, the sky had cleared and already someone had taken away the box she had thrown out onto the street. A bright new world was awaiting Francisca. She stacked her money on top of shelves and tables and chairs. Then she went to her room to get dressed.

  When Francisca left her house, she had on a pair of red slacks and a yellow blouse that revealed a lot of cleavage. She’d brushed her hair long and smooth and put makeup on her face, and she had a bag slung over her right shoulder. She strode purposefully toward the market where she was known as “La Masatera,” because it was there, under a faded green tent, that she had sold the best masato in town for some four years. Her recipe for the fermented maize drink had been passed down among her ancestors for generations. When Francisca arrived, her friends and neighbors were meekly setting up their stalls and bringing out their scanty merchandise for selling and bartering. Some stretched their necks, some strained their eyes; all wanted to make certain that the woman violating the magistrate’s ban on bright-colored clothing was indeed “La Masatera.” Walking among her friends, Francisca, with her handbag full of pesos, felt somewhat different—a little prettier, a little more interesting.

  She stood in the middle of the market and
waited for the crowd to gather around her. Once she got everyone’s attention, she bluntly said, “I found a fortune buried under my bed.” She paused and waited for her friends’ reaction, which had already occurred in the form of astonishment, a form that Francisca, a rather thoughtless individual, mistook for incredulity. “Don’t you believe me?” she asked, her hands on her narrow hips. Before the women had the opportunity to reply, she opened her bag and flashed large rolls of bills. “And this is not even a hundredth of it,” she boasted in case there were any doubts. “I’m having a dilemma, though. Shall I stay in town or leave? What do you all think?” Disconcerted, the women looked at one another, Francisca’s words jumbled up in their minds. Francisca observed them long and hard. Poor things! she thought. They could never help me find an answer because they’re content here. They’re convinced that this is all they can manage. They’re so doubtful and insecure, so poor. She gave money to all her friends, then excused herself and headed for the magistrate’s office.

  “The magistrate wishes not to be interrupted this morning,” Cecilia said without taking her eyes off of the typewriter. “Come back in the afternoon.” But Francisca was determined to see the magistrate. She took a couple of bills from her bag and with feigned discretion placed them on top of Cecilia’s typewriter.

  “Perhaps if we pretend that you didn’t see me…” Francisca said. It took Cecilia a few seconds to establish the connection between the pesos in front of her eyes and the widow’s unfinished sentence––after all, no one had ever bribed her before––but once she understood the deal she snatched the money and made it disappear between her generous breasts.

  The last time Francisca had been inside the magistrate’s office, she had brought a live pig and offered it in exchange for the schoolmistress’s job. Naturally, she’d been thrown out of the building. But today it was different: Francisca was rich. She straightened her shoulders and pushed out her chest and went inside the office. She found Rosalba sitting at her desk, writing what looked like a letter on a piece of yellowed paper.