Tales from the Town of Widows

by James Canon

  “Buenas tardes, mi amor,” he said, kissing the back of Santiago’s neck.

  “How was your day?”

  “Oh, just the same. Too much work.”

  The two boys sat on the ground and ate a pretend meal of rice and beans. After dinner, Pablo took his shirt off and lay in the grass, facing the sky, his hands beneath his neck. “I’ll do the dishes later,” Santiago said, and quickly moved on to a part of the game he liked better: the massage. He began with Pablo’s feet, gently rubbing each of his twelve toes (the boy had inherited his father’s six-toed feet). Santiago worked his way up slowly, massaging Pablo’s calves and knees and thighs, spending a good amount of time on his chest. When Santiago pinched Pablo’s little brown nipples, Pablo began to howl. And when Pablo began to howl, Santiago knew it was time to start playing with his friend’s small penis, pulling on it as if it were a tit on an udder, laughing heartily at the way Pablo’s body wriggled with pleasure, like a puppy. When Santiago stopped, Pablo took him in his arms and walked with him into the river. There, with the water up to his waist, Pablo rewarded Santiago with a tender kiss for being a good wife. They spent the rest of the day swimming naked in the river, drowning crickets, peeing on anthills, throwing stones at wasps’ nests and running back into the water. The kiss, however, was the part of the day Santiago liked the best, a true expression of love that to him was worth the boredom of impersonating his mother every day.

  At night, the two boys sat on logs of wood outside Santiago’s house and listened to his grandmother’s magical tales, like the one about the old woman who turned into a cat to deceive death, or the one about the rich princess who didn’t know how to laugh. Almost every night Pablo and Santiago slept together on the bumpy earthen floor of Santiago’s house, wrapped in the same white blanket, dreaming different dreams.

  RESOLUTELY, THE DRIVER went back to the Jeep. He opened the back door and pulled out a shabby leather suitcase, unzipped it, took out a large white towel and zipped it back up. Before carrying on with whatever he was doing, the angry man looked toward the Jaramillo widow’s door, as though giving the woman a last chance to come out and settle up with him. Then he set the bag aside and from inside the Jeep he carefully pulled out a body by the legs. The body didn’t move, didn’t make any sound. The women stepped a little closer, illuminating the scene with the light of their candles. “Back off!” the driver yelled. He hastily stripped the body naked, revealing a scrawny man covered in sores and bruises, and took a cap off the man’s head with a swipe: he was almost completely bald.

  “I’m cold,” the unclothed man cried softly.

  “Ohhh!” the crowd whispered in unison, relieved to find out that the stranger wasn’t dead. The driver removed a golden chain from the naked man’s neck and a flashy watch from his wrist and put both things in the front pocket of his own dirty pants. Then he tried to pull off two rings from one of the man’s bony fingers.

  “No,” the naked man moaned. “Not the rings, please.” He firmly clenched his hand.

  “Shut up,” the driver ordered. “You swore she was going to pay me for bringing you here, but she’s not, so you’d better let go of those damn rings now.”

  “Please, not the rings.”

  “Let go, or I’ll cut off your hand,” the driver shouted, reaching for his machete.

  “Ohhh!” the crowd whispered again.

  “Stop, please. Don’t do it. For the love of God, don’t.” The despairing voice belonged to el padre Rafael, who had just been notified of the situation and now rushed to the scene together with the magistrate and the police sergeant. “Please let that poor soul die in peace.” He halted some distance away from the sordid sight and, producing a chaplet from within the pocket of his soutane, began murmuring a rosary. A few widows promptly joined him.

  The frustrated driver ignored the priest’s request and kept struggling to open the scrawny man’s hand, but he wouldn’t let go.

  “You leave that ill man alone right now, or I’ll blow your brains out.” The threat came from the magistrate, Rosalba viuda de Patiño. She stood right behind the driver, pointing a pistol at his head. Next to her, holding a revolver with both hands, was the police sergeant, Ubaldina viuda de Restrepo.

  The driver turned his hateful eyes on the women and spat on the ground. He seized the white towel and wrapped it around the scrawny man, then carried the bundle of bones on his shoulder to the Jaramillo widow’s door, laid it on the ground near the steps and kicked the door three more times. “He’s outside your door,” the driver yelled. “Naked, because I’m taking his clothes. You hear me?” He went back to the Jeep, ignoring the two guns that followed his every move, and collected the ill man’s clothes and shoes and stuffed them into the shabby leather suitcase. He closed the back door, got inside the Jeep and started the engine. Through the window he screamed the words Santiago, sitting across the street, had been so afraid of hearing: “It’s your own son dying outside, you heartless bitch. You’re going to hell!”

  Santiago remained still, staring in an absent way at the mass of familiar faces crowded before him; unable to see how they abruptly went from distressed to solemn. He didn’t see the women put their heads in their hands, or hold their quivering lips with the tips of their fingers. He didn’t hear their crying, or the loud engine of the Jeep as it drove away. At the moment, the throbbing of his heart in his chest was the only movement there was about him.

  PABLO AND SANTIAGO began working the lands of Don Maximiliano Perdomo on a cloudy day in 1981. It was common for parents to send their male children to work as soon as they turned twelve, and sometimes even before if they were required in the fields. Harvest season had begun and hands were needed at Yarima, Don Maximiliano’s largest coffee farm. The two boys arrived at the farmhouse early in the morning and met with Doña Marina, an unfriendly midget who was in charge of the workers’ housing. She looked at the boys with disdain, grumbled something they didn’t understand, and, with her tiny fat hand, gestured that they follow her. Pablo and Santiago walked behind Doña Marina along a narrow, muddy path, kicking away the geese that chased the little woman as if she were one of them. Doña Marina took the boys to a large shelter where Yarima’s coffee pickers stayed during harvest season. She told them where to find the straw baskets they would tie around their waists, and sent them over to the plantation. “Follow this path until you see coffee trees,” she squeaked, and then, giving them an obliged look, she added, “Thank you for keeping those beasts away from me.”

  The beans on most of the coffee trees had turned a dark cherry color. From the highest part of the hill the farm looked like thousands of Christmas trees decorated with little red lights. The steward ordered Pablo to follow, for half a day, an older Indian man with a long ponytail hanging down his back. Santiago followed a man nicknamed Cigarrillo, because he always had a cigarette in his mouth. The two men were to teach the two boys the easiest, fastest way to collect beans. Pablo and Santiago wished they could trail their own fathers, each with more than thirty years of experience in the coffee plantations, but they had been sent to Cabrera, a smaller coffee farm where bad weather was causing the crop to fail.

  “Watch my hands, son,” Cigarrillo told Santiago. His fingers fluttered like birds among the branches, hardly touching them, as dozens of red beans fell into his basket. “We only want the coffee cherries that are ready, the ones you can pluck with your own hands.” His face was sunburned, his mustache unkempt. “If there are any green cherries mixed, the coffee will taste bitter, and if there are any overripe cherries, it’ll taste sour.” Santiago checked the man’s basket for green or overripe cherries and found none. “A skilled picker will pluck the entire ripe crop in just one pass,” Cigarrillo went on, “and he should collect no less than one hundred pounds of coffee beans per day.” When the basket got full, he said, the picker must take it to the coffee mill, next to the storage building, where Doña Marina, the midget, would weigh and mark down the amount of coffee gathered, then he shou
ld go back to the plantation and do it all over again. Coffee pickers got paid, partly in cash and partly in produce, every Saturday according to the amount of pounds each man had picked during the week. “The most important thing,” Cigarrillo added, “is to have fun while you’re working. Sing songs, talk to the trees, tell them jokes. Pretend the trees are hundreds of naked women lined up, waiting for you to pull their tits.” The man guffawed. Santiago feigned a smile. He would think of pulling Pablo’s penis instead.

  The first night in Yarima’s shelter Pablo and Santiago pushed their straw mats together to sleep close, like they always had. They held each other’s hands to say their prayers, and when finished they kissed good night.

  From a corner, sitting on his mat, Pacho, a short, pudgy young man with rosy cheeks, watched the two boys by the light of a Coleman lamp. “Look what we got here, guys,” the young man shouted so that everyone in the shelter could hear him. “Two fags kissing each other and praying to God.” He stood up, seized the lamp and strode toward the boys. “Kissing and praying—you know how fucking wrong that is?” he asked, in a tone that seemed much more like an answer than a question. He shook his head censoriously before adding, “It’s very fucking wrong.” Santiago and Pablo didn’t comprehend what the man was saying, but whatever it was, he’d made it sound as though they had committed a terrible sin. They leaned into each other, distressed. The man stood over them now, his torso enlarged and distorted by its proximity. “That’s so sweet,” he said, imitating a woman’s voice. “Come on, I want to see the two of you kissing again.”

  “Shut up, Pacho,” Cigarrillo grumbled from his mat, half asleep. “Leave those kids alone and let us sleep.”

  But the men, who in the past few weeks had done nothing except work, were eager for any kind of entertainment. A few of them sat on their mats and made ready to watch the spectacle from a distance; others got up and gathered around the boys, calling for the show to begin immediately.

  “Come on, mariquitas. We don’t have all night,” said a guy missing nearly all of his front teeth. He stroked Santiago’s bottom with his bare foot.

  “I’m frightened, Pablo,” Santiago whispered in his friend’s ear. “Let’s kiss one more time so we all can go to sleep.” Pablo shook his head.

  “Kiss him, kiss him,” the aroused spectators sang in unison.

  “Please, Pablo, just one more kiss,” Santiago whispered again, his soft voice choked with panic, his heart pounding against his small, bony chest.

  “Kiss him, kiss him—”

  Santiago asked so insistently that Pablo felt he must do it. All right, he said with his head. The two boys held each other tightly. Santiago glanced at the men, from the one to the other, to indicate that he and Pablo were ready to please them, then gently kissed his friend’s trembling lips for just a moment, until the first kick separated their faces. The stirred men fell upon the two boys like hungry beasts, thrashing their slight bodies with furious fists, stomping them with enraged, crusty feet. Numbed by fear, the boys didn’t feel the heavy blows that came from every side. They hardly screamed, hardly cried, hardly saw or heard anything.

  “Stop it now!” The sudden shriek came from the door. “Get out of the way! Move!” The voice was unmistakable. Carrying a lamp that was half her size, Doña Marina was pushing her tiny body through the crowd. The men went back to their mats, laughing and whispering. Pablo and Santiago raised their beaten faces from their mats and began to cry. “Good Lord! What have you done to these poor kids?” Doña Marina laid the lamp on the earthen floor and stroked the boys’ heads with her little hands. “These kids just got here today,” she said to no one in particular. “They haven’t done anything to you. Why would you hurt them?” she shouted. “Why?”

  “Because they’re faggots,” a voice replied from the back. “That’s why.” She looked toward the corner from which the voice had come, but there was no one to see: the men had blown out the light of their lamp, leaving most of the room in complete darkness. “You’re all going to pay for this,” she yelled into the darkness. “No breakfast for anyone tomorrow.” Doña Marina kindly helped the boys rise from their mats. She took them back to the farmhouse where she lived with the cooks and the maids. She disinfected their cuts gently and without making any comments or asking questions, but when she began dressing their wounds, she suddenly said, “I know you boys aren’t that, what that rascal said.” Her voice had an undernote of warning that the boys, still utterly distressed by the thrashing, couldn’t recognize. “I know you’re not. I just do.” She was quiet again, as if she were finished talking, although in her mind she was choosing her next round of words carefully. Only when she started applying cold compresses to their swollen faces did she continue, “If you were that, what the man said you were, I’d advise you first to keep it to yourselves, and second to be very careful around here. The countryside is rough. But since you’re not that, I won’t advise you nothing.” She gave them a conspiratorial smile and continued treating their wounds. When she finished she took them to the storage building where, she said, they would sleep from then on.

  When she left, Pablo and Santiago hugged each other and wept quietly. One stroked the other’s broken nose with the tips of his fingers. The other kissed his friend’s swollen eyes time and time again.

  They slept together inside a coffee sack.

  EL PADRE RAFAEL and his followers had stopped reciting the rosary and joined the rest of the crowd in relentless gossiping. Now and then they glanced over their shoulders at Santiago, wondering when the full impact of the tragedy would hit him and what his reaction would be. Nurse Ramirez warned the entire group not to get near the ill man, then pulled el padre Rafael and the magistrate aside to talk to them.

  “Whatever illness Pablo has, it might be contagious,” the nurse began in a small voice, shooting the magistrate a warning glance. Mariquita’s children, she argued, hadn’t been vaccinated against anything in over six years. They would not survive an epidemic. She recommended locking Pablo up in Francisca’s burned-out shack until he died—which from the man’s looks should be soon—then incinerating his body. The magistrate and the priest seemed appalled by the nurse’s advice.

  “We can’t leave one of our own to die like that—isolated, in a dump, surrounded by…rats and creatures,” the magistrate said, her agitated voice rising above a whisper.

  “I agree,” el padre Rafael interposed. “Pablo Jaramillo must die like a Christian and get a Christian burial.”

  “The future of our village is uncertain as it is,” the buxom nurse retorted. “I only know our children is all we have. If we lose them—” She didn’t finish her sentence. Instead she put a fatalistic look on her face, a face with a large witch’s nose and sad fish eyes. “Just think about it,” she added.

  They thought about it, together and for less than a minute, and concluded that they had no alternative: Mariquita’s future must come first. “But who’s going to take Pablo to Francisca’s old house?” the magistrate asked. El padre shrugged and the nurse shrugged and the magistrate, shrugging, asked yet another question: “Wouldn’t that person have to be quarantined?”

  At that precise moment Santiago rose, a candle in his hand, and began walking slowly across the street, toward Pablo. Pablo lay curled up on his side, his face turned to the door of his mother’s house as though waiting for it to open. Santiago stood next to him, contemplating by the light of the candle the little there was to contemplate, struggling to recognize his old friend. Perhaps this was an error. Perhaps the Jeep driver had mistakenly driven into the wrong town, the wrong street. It had to be an error. Pablo was such a handsome man: tall, dark, well built, with thick, black hair…

  “Santiago? Is it you?” Pablo said, somehow sensing his friend’s presence.

  Santiago nodded mechanically as Pablo turned himself languidly onto his back. With great difficulty Pablo drew his left arm from under the towel in which he was wrapped, uncovering the upper part of his body, and stretc
hed it out to touch Santiago, but Santiago was a little too far away, and Pablo’s arm fell limply to the ground with a graceless plop. “The rings,” he mumbled.

  Santiago looked at Pablo’s skeletal hand wiggling like a worm in the dirt. Two solid gold bands clung to his ring finger. “What about them?”

  “Take one,” Pablo said in a whisper. “I promised you a ring. Remember?”

  IT WAS JUNE of 1984. Pablo and Santiago had just turned fifteen. They’d left Yarima to work, on Doña Marina’s recommendation, at Don Maximiliano’s country house, located about three hours away on foot from Mariquita. The wealthy landowner had had it built on a mesa five years ago, and it was a monument to his poor taste and lack of imagination. Casa Perdomo was a wide, graceless box with interconnecting rooms and few windows, as if purposely designed to prevent light from invading its dwellers’ privacy. It had taken Don Maximiliano several months to convince his wife to leave the city and move into it. To compensate for its ugliness, Doña Caridad had stuffed the house with furniture of remarkable quality, turning each room into a jumble of fancy tables and chairs and cabinets and beds, all of which largely contributed to a permanent state of confusion.

  Following Doña Marina’s indirect advice, Pablo and Santiago had introduced themselves as first cousins. They were soon entrusted with the house’s maintenance—painting and repainting the walls, fixing broken doors, replenishing the stoves with firewood, keeping up the plumbing system, stocking the storage room. There was always something to do. The two young men shared a small windowless bedroom in the back of the house, next to the maid’s room, furnished with two trunks for their few clothes, two folding beds and a lamp. At the end of the work day, Pablo and Santiago had only to enter that room and close the door to experience a mighty sense of calmness, safeness and intimacy. The room’s absolute quiet, its refreshing lack of adornment, the lamplight casting shadows that swayed on the white walls—it all created an isolated world where everything seemed possible for the two young men, even their secret love and growing desire. Inside that bedroom, massaging each other’s feet, calves and knees was no longer part of a childish game, but an essential part of their life together; kissing was no longer a reward but a desirable way of reminding one another, without words, of their most intimate feelings. Inside that bedroom there was no husband or wife, only two young men, each in love with the other.