A Tale of the Dispossessed

by Laura Restrepo

  Contents

  A Tale of the Dispossessed

  La Multitud Errante

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Dedication

  For my agent,

  Thomas Colchie,

  and his wife, Elaine,

  dearest friends.

  Epigraph

  Strange things happen to people who are fleeing from terror ( . . . ); some are cruel, and others are so beautiful that faith is renewed.

  —JOHN STEINBECK

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Also by Laura Restrepo

  PROLOGUE

  As I believe that writing is to a large extent a collective effort and that each individual voice should find its generational juncture, I have wished this book to be a bridge between my books and those of Alfredo Molano, who is also a Colombian, fiftyish, and witness of the same wars and chronicler of the same struggles. With his permission, I have inserted within my text a dozen lines he has authored, which his readers will surely recognize.

  ONE

  How can I tell him that he is never going to find her, after he has been searching for her all his life?

  He told me that he finds pain in the air, that his blood is boiling, and that he is lying on a bed of nails because he lost the woman he loves at one of the turns in the road, and there is no map to tell him where to find her. He searches the whole landscape for her, never allowing himself a moment of respite or of forgiveness, though he doesn’t realize that she is only to be found within himself, ensconced in his feverishness, present in every object he touches, and staring at him through the eyes of anyone who approaches him.

  “The world tastes of her,” he has confessed to me. “My mind does not know any other destination, it goes straight to her.”

  If I could talk to him without breaking his heart, there is something I would tell him, in hopes it could stop his sleepless nights and wrongheaded search for a shadow. I would repeat this to him: “Your Matilde Lina is in limbo, the dwelling place of those who are neither dead nor alive.”

  But that would be like severing the roots of the tree that supports him. Besides, why do it if he is not going to believe me. He inhabits the dream limbo of the woman he’s after, and like her, he has adjusted to that nebulous, intermediate condition. At this shelter I have met many who were stigmatized in the same way: those who lose themselves in the very search for their lost ones. But I have seen no one more enslaved by the tyranny of that search.

  “She’s going on with her life, like me,” he stubbornly claims when I dare insinuate the opposite.

  I have come to believe that this woman is like a guardian angel who doesn’t allow him to escape from this obsessive quest. She keeps herself ten steps ahead of him, close enough for him to see her but impossibly beyond his grasp, always those ten steps that he can never bridge, and that make him follow her to the end of his days.

  He came to this refuge for weary travelers the way he goes everywhere: asking for her. He wanted to know if we had seen a woman here by the name of Matilde Lina, a laundress who got lost during the upheavals of the war. She was originally from Sasaima but lived right on the borderline between Tolima and Huila, in a village devastated by violence. I told him that we had no information about her and offered him shelter instead: a bed, a roof over his head, hot meals, and the intangible protection of this place. But he persisted in his obsession with the willing blindness of those who hope beyond hope, then asked me to check, one by one, all the names in the register.

  “Come do it yourself,” I told him, because I know very well how relentless this urging is, and I sat him down with the list of those who had stopped at this shelter, day after day, in the midst of their journey of displacement.

  I insisted that he stay with us at least a couple of nights so he could unload the mountain of fatigue weighing on his shoulders. That is what I told him, but what I wanted to say was: “Stay here, at least until I get used to the idea of not seeing you anymore.” And by then I was already feeling, inexplicably, a gnawing desire to have him close to me.

  He thanked me for the hospitality and agreed to stay the night, but for that night only. It was then that I asked him his name.

  “My name is Three Sevens,” he answered.

  “That must be a nickname. Could you tell me your name? Any name, it doesn’t matter; I need a name, something that I can enter in the register.”

  “Excuse me, but Three Sevens is my name; I don’t know of any other.”

  “Pedro, Juan, any name; please give me a name,” I insisted, claiming a bureaucratic motive, though I was really being pressed by the dark conviction that all earth-shaking events in one’s life crop up just like this, suddenly, and without a name. To know the name of this stranger in front of me was the only way—at least that’s how I felt then—to counteract the power that he had already begun to exert over me at that moment. Why? I did not know, because he was not very different from so many others who land here at the farthest corner of exile, enveloped in sickly auras, often dragging with them an old fatigue, and trying to look forward while their sight is fixed on what was left behind. Still, there was something in him that engaged me deeply. Perhaps it was the tenacity of a survivor that I perceived in his look, or his serene voice, or his dark mass of hair; or maybe it was his big bear gestures: slow and strikingly solemn. But more than anything, I felt a sort of predestination. The kind of predestination that lurks behind my ultimate and unadmitted objectives for traveling to these lands. Haven’t I really come here in search of all that this man embodies? At first I didn’t know this, since I didn’t know what I was looking for. But now I am quite certain of it and can even risk a definition: It is all that is other, that is different from me and my world; something that gains strength precisely where my world gets weaker; that brings panic and alarming voices where my world relies on certainties; that signals vitality where mine dissolves in disbelief; that seems real in opposition to what is based on words or, conversely, that becomes phantasmagoric for its lack of expression: the underside of the tapestry, where the knots of reality are revealed. Everything, finally, that I could not have imagined, had I stayed in my world.

  I don’t believe in so-called love at first sight, at least that which is understood as an unmistakable intuition signaling beforehand that something will soon come to bind you: that sudden bolt that forces you to hunch your shoulders and squint your eyes to protect you from being overtaken by something earth-shattering, which for some mysterious reason has more to do with your future than with your present. I remember clearly that the moment I saw Three Sevens coming in, even before knowing his name, or lack of it, I asked myself the same question that I would later ask so many times: Would his coming be my salvation or my downfall? I sensed there would be no halfway terms here. Three Sevens? 7—7—7? I did not know what to write.

  “How do you sign your name, in letters or in numbers?”

  “I seldom sign anything, miss, because I don’t trust papers.”

  “All right, then, it’s Three Sevens,” I told him, and also myself, accepting the inevitable. “Please come with me now, Mr. Three Sevens; a hearty bowl of soup won’t do you any harm.”

  The anxiety burning in
side him, bigger than himself, did not let him eat, but that did not surprise me. Everyone who comes up to this place is driven by the same intensity. It did surprise me not to be able to look into his soul. In spite of the fact that in this work one learns to discern people’s deep intentions, there was something in him that did not fit any pattern. I don’t know whether it was the way he was dressed, definitely as an outsider, or his attempt at a disguise that didn’t quite work, or if what aroused my suspicion was that unwieldy pack he was lugging around and which he never left out of sight, as if it contained some precious or dangerous cargo.

  Besides, I found it disquieting that he looked so much inward and so little outward; I don’t know exactly what it was, but something in him prevented my even guessing his nature. And I can repeat this now, to close my argument: What I found intimidating in his essence was that he seemed to be made of different matter.

  After accepting hospitality just for one night, he stayed on, contrary to his own decision. Often he would say good-bye late at night because he was leaving for good, but the nights went by and he would still be here, in the grip of who knows what chain of obligations or feelings of guilt. Since the moment he first asked me, coming through the door, about his Matilde Lina, he never stopped telling me about her, as if not mentioning her would mean losing her completely, or maybe that evoking her in my presence was the best way to recover her.

  “Where and when did you see her for the last time?” I asked him as I asked everyone, as if this humanitarian formula were an abracadabra that could conjure up what was not there. His imprecise and evasive reply made me realize that too many years had elapsed and too many things had happened since that loss.

  Sometimes, at the end of the day, when the activities of the shelter quiet down and the refugees seem to sink into their own depths, Three Sevens and I take a pair of wicker rocking chairs outside and sit by the road for a while, tying together periods of silence with bits of conversation; and then, sheltered by the warmth of the setting sun and the soft twinkle of the first stars, he opens his heart to me and speaks of love. But not of love for me: he speaks meticulously, with prolonged delight, of what has been his great love for her. Making a tremendous effort, I comfort him, I inquire, I listen to him infinitely, at times letting myself be carried away by the sensation that, before his eyes and little by little, I am becoming her or, rather, that she is recovering her presence through me. But at other times, what burns inside me is a profound discomfort that I can barely manage to hide.

  “That’s enough, Three Sevens,” I tell him then, trying to make light of it. “The only thing I do not know about your Matilde Lina is whether she preferred to eat her bread with butter or marmalade.”

  “I can’t help it,” he explains. “Whenever I start talking, I always end up talking about her.”

  The night is covering the last vestiges of light in the sky, and down below, in the distance, the crests of fire in the refinery towers appear insignificant and harmless, like lighted matches. Meanwhile, both of us continue spinning the wheels of our conversation. I ask him everything, and he keeps answering me in docile surrender, but he does not ask me anything. My inquisitive words take possession of his inner thoughts, trapping him in the web of my questioning. All the while, my own self recedes to a safe place, escaping through the slow current of my concerns, which he never questions and will never get to know.

  Three Sevens takes out a pack of cigarettes from his pants pocket, lights one, and allows himself to be led by the slender thread of smoke to that thoughtless zone where he so often takes refuge. While I’m watching him, a small voice without any bite shouts inside me: There is pain here, it’s waiting for me, and I must flee. I listen to and believe in that voice, seeing the logic of its warning. Nonetheless, instead of running away, I stay on, each time a bit closer and a bit more silent.

  Perhaps my anxiety is only a reflection of his, and perhaps the emptiness that he sows in me is the offspring of the immense mother absence locked up inside him. At first, during the early days of his stay, I thought it would be possible to alleviate his sorrow, as I have learned to do in this job of mine, which in essence is nothing but nursing shadows. From experience I sensed that if I wanted to help him, I would have to scrutinize his past until I learned where and how these memories had found their way into his soul to cause all his misery.

  In time I ended up recognizing two truths that would have been evident to anyone but me, and if I had not seen them before, it was because I had refused to. The first truth was that it was I, rather than Three Sevens himself, who suffered to the point of distraction from that recurrent, ever-present past of his. “The air hurts him, blood boils in his veins, and he lies on a bed of nails,” are the words that I wrote at the beginning, putting them in his mouth, and which I now need to modify if I want to be honest: The air hurts me. Blood boils in my veins. And my bed? My bed without him is a penitent’s hair shirt, a nest of nails.

  According to the second truth, every effort would be useless: the deeper I go, the more I convince myself that this man and his memory are one and the same.

  TWO

  The story of his memories—that is, the trajectory of his obsession—began the same day he was born, the first of January 1950. He was not exactly born that day but appeared in a rural town named Santa María Bailarina after the Dancing Madonna, now erased from history but which had its time and place, years ago and far away, along the trail to El Limonar, municipality of Río Perdido, at the divide between Huila and Tolima. As best I was able to reconstruct, by piecing together isolated details from his volatile life story, Three Sevens was found on the front steps of a church as people were leaving after midnight mass. The church was still under construction and inaugurated prematurely to celebrate the arrival of 1950, which seemed to bring ill winds.

  “Big trouble is brewing,” people were saying. “Violent hordes are storming down the mountains, chopping everyone’s head off.”

  These were echoes of the Little War, which had been spreading since the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and was now threatening to tighten the noose around the peaceful town of Santa María. The villagers were getting ready to celebrate the New Year with fireworks, praying that this would calm the rabble as they passed through. It was then that they saw him.

  A small, quiet bundle, wrapped like a tamale in a plaid, soft-wool blanket: he was not moving or crying, he was just there. Newborn and naked under the immense dark skies, he lay even then in his distinctive way, luminous and solitary.

  “Look, he has an extra toe,” the people exclaimed, amazed when they lifted the blanket. Just as I was, so many years later, the first time I saw him barefoot.

  Maybe that is the reason some people mistrusted him from the beginning, because of that sixth toe on his right foot, which seemed to have appeared just like that, out of the blue, as a dangerous omen announcing that the natural order of things was being disrupted. Other people, less superstitious, only laughed at that extra kernel, pink, cute, and perfectly round, pressed against the other five, in a row edging the tiny fan of his foot.

  “The old year left us at the church door a child with twenty-one digits!” was the rumor spreading all over town. And Matilde Lina, eager about anything new, elbowed her curious way into the tight human circle gathered around the phenomenon. When she faced the cause of their amazement, that extra toe, she did not think for an instant that it was a defect; on the contrary, she took it as a blessing to come into this world with an additional gift. She knew very well that every rarity is a wonder and that every wonder carries its own meaning.

  So from that moment it was Matilde Lina, the river laundress poor as a meadowlark, who became the great presence in the life of the child. It was she who, in an enlightened moment—almost like his second birth—took him in her arms and looked into his eyes, at his hands, at his male parts.

  “How painful it must have been for those parents to part with their son. Only God knows what they were runn
ing away from, or what they wanted to protect him from,” Matilde Lina said out loud after looking at him warmly and long, showing her involvement. And as to this, some people will wonder how I ever came to know her exact words or the tone in which she said them. I can only answer that I just know; that without having met her, I have come to know so much about her that I feel I can take the liberty of speaking for her, without any need to add that those words were not actually heard by anyone, because at that moment the first fireworks had begun bursting and there were explosions and shooting stars in the sky, while Roman candles were spewing torrents of fireballs, and pinwheels turned round and round on the wires, splendid like sunbursts.

  The crowd disappeared amid the smoke and the red glare of the fireworks, and Matilde Lina was left alone by the church doors, which were already closed. Bedazzled by the rockets and flares, her eyes lit up with reflections, she held the baby wrapped in the blanket against her body as if she would never let go of him. From then on she sheltered him by pure instinct, without having made a decision or even intending to, and he was the only one in the world allowed to penetrate the wordless and windowless space where she hid her affections.

  An unreal, amphibious creature, this Matilde Lina. “Always at the riverbank, surrounded by foamy waters and white laundry,” is how Three Sevens remembers her. He says that growing up sheltered by this sweet water woman, he learned that life could be milk and honey. “When night began to fall and birds flew to their nests,” he evokes at the height of his reminiscence, “she called me and I was grateful. It was like marking the day’s end. Her voice lingered in the air until I returned to cuddle up beside her.”

  Three Sevens has never wanted to part with his plaid woolly blanket, all faded and frayed now, and more than once I have seen him squeeze it as if wanting to extract one more strand of memories that could alleviate the grief of not knowing who he is. That rag cannot tell him anything, but it emanates a familiar smell that maybe reminds him of the warmth of a breast, the color of the first sky, the pangs of the first sorrow. Nothing, really, except the usual mirages of nostalgia. The rest is all stories that Matilde Lina invented for him in order to teach him how to forgive.