A Tale of the Dispossessed

by Laura Restrepo

  “They beat Matilde Lina, they snatched the boy away from her and dragged her off somewhere,” Doña Perpetua tells me, making her sibilant sounds whistle past the torturing dental prosthesis of which she is so proud.

  From that moment, Matilde Lina’s deeds were erased from the factual world and enthroned in a quagmire of speculation. Of no avail to her were the coltish kicks she knew well how to impart or the large impressions with which her teeth had adorned so many other people’s skins. Did they conquer her by chopping off her tresses or by calling her whorish or crazy? Did they force her to kneel in the mud, did they break her body, did they break her soul? Did her screams resound through the mountain ravines? Or was what gave people goose pimples the soft cooing of the spotted owl or the cackle of some outlandish bird? Or of all the birds that knew her name and began to shout it in a bewildered litany?

  Three Sevens doesn’t know. He either doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know. And if he knows, he won’t tell, keeping all the silence and all the horror to himself. He talks to me about her as if she had just reemerged for him yesterday: the passing of time does not mitigate the ardor of his remembrance.

  After the ambush at Las Aguilas, Matilde Lina never appeared again, in life or in death, and no one could offer any news, large or small, of this woman recast by the toils of war, like so many others. Three Sevens was still alive but sentenced to death for the second time, allowed to meet his improbable destiny as a solitary child, orphaned and abandoned for the second time. A child of the woodlands, flying with the capricious four winds, in the midst of a country that refuses to be accountable for anything or anybody.

  I can now imagine him, dazed after the catastrophe. He is lost in a trance, sitting at the edge of the road, and it is very slowly getting dark. Nothing is moving around him, and he doesn’t feel pressed by time; he has no place to go. While he waits, he is growing older without realizing it. He only knows that the woman who was by his side has disappeared and that someday she must appear again. When she comes back, the child will wake up already an adult, and they will start walking, shoulder to shoulder. Silent days, months, and years are lethargically passing by on the road, but the woman who is supposed to return cannot find the way.

  “So much life, and never more . . . ,” sighs Three Sevens occasionally, twice repeating the phrase, which I have heard uttered before by someone else in some other place, without my being able to comprehend it fully then or now.

  “So much life, so much life . . .”

  “And never more. . . .” I add, just to go along.

  SIX

  I wonder how a kid only twelve or thirteen, as Three Sevens must have been, could have resisted such a blow. How long was he given to periods of silence, how deep into the waters of his inner being was he thrust? What kinds of perplexities did he need to wade through before the day that, summoning all his energies, he put himself afloat again, transformed into the man I love without any hopes of reciprocation?

  “His worst enemy has always been his guilt,” Perpetua tells me, backing her argument with the authority of someone who knew him long before tragedy struck.

  “Guilt?”

  “Guilt, for not having been able to prevent their dragging her away. Guilt for not searching hard enough for her. Guilt for still being alive, for breathing, eating, walking: he believes all of that is betraying her. As the years go by without his finding her, he gets more and more entangled in a web of recriminations that haunt him while he’s awake and batter him when he’s asleep.”

  How can this be, if at the shelter Three Sevens preaches the habit of forgiveness? “The mistakes of the past are left at the door. He who takes refuge here should know that from now on, all his unpaid accounts are with his conscience and with God.” This is the warning he offers to all, even to those who bring with them a scandalous reputation, be it as a thief, whore, guerrilla, or murderer. To those who gossip about the sullied pasts of others, he says outright: “Cut that out, Mr. So-and-so, in this shelter nobody is good or evil.”

  “This is the kind of reasoning that entangles all reason,” the old woman tells me. “The only one Three Sevens cannot forgive is himself.”

  “Why does he have to pay for a crime he didn’t commit?” I inquire. “Why does he have to punish himself so?”

  “Because his guilt follows different twists and turns, Three Sevens did not really look upon Matilde Lina as his mother,” she says, revealing what I already know better than anybody else. “I had seven children and lost three, and I know very well how a son looks at his mother. Matilde Lina had an extravagant temperament, but she was a woman of strong presence, with a girlish face and large breasts. Many lusted after her body and did not succeed because she knew how to kick and bite to defend herself. I saw her washing by the river, her blouse open, half-unbuttoned, with Three Sevens at her side, a growing boy beginning to show fuzz on his face and in other places he dared not confess. Her breasts were exposed, and the boy looked at them, as still as a rock, gasping for breath and becoming a man before that vision.”

  I can also see Matilde Lina by the water’s edge, busy in her occupation, immersed in herself and unaware of her nakedness, at a moment of deep intimacy that is not disrupted by anything, not even the stirring that burns in the boy’s gaze.

  “Of course, he was not the first adolescent to stare at his mother’s breasts,” I object to Perpetua, and she laughs.

  “No, of course not,” she answers. “And he will not be the first one to keep searching for them in all the other breasts that cross his way.”

  SEVEN

  After the caravan’s stampede on the day that Matilde Lina disappeared, Three Sevens was not the only one abandoned on Las Aguilas Peak. Through a wise quirk of fate, which is not as arbitrary as people suspect, there was also the image known as the Dancing Madonna, all alone and half-sunk in the thick of the churning bog.

  “At the time of the ambush, our patron Madonna did not grant us any protection,” Three Sevens still recriminates, and he tells me that when he noticed her lying powerless in the mud, he felt his face burning red in a surge of rancor.

  “Old piece of lumber! Selfish, unfair, and lazy! Miserable wooden doll!” were the blasphemous words he recalls screaming at her. “For years we helped carry you on our shoulders as if you weighed nothing. We kept candles lighted around you at night, and by day we protected you from the rigors of the climate with a canopy worthy of a duchess, only to have you finally let disaster fall upon us anyway.”

  Trying to push away the aura of loneliness that had suddenly returned to him, Three Sevens cast the blame on the Dancing Madonna for the disappearance of Matilde Lina, the only companion that life had not taken away from him, and he started hurling those insults, and more severe ones, until he realized that this lady, who had appeared before to be dancing a sevillana, now with the same gestures seemed to be just flailing in the mud. “Not only had she failed to protect us, but quite the opposite: she herself was in urgent need of protection.”

  “Then I forgave her, and took on the obligation of carrying her all by myself. So I rescued her from the swamp, polished her as best I could, hoisted her on my shoulders, and started walking in directions as yet unknown either to her or to me, and which we were in no condition to determine. ‘I ask you a thousand times to forgive me, my Blessed Queen, but your procession ends here.’ This was my warning, so that she would start forgetting her former privilege of being carried on a litter and resign herself, once and for all, to doing without her candles, or psalms and hymns, or garlands of roses made just for her. ‘From now on,’ I told her frankly, ‘you will have to be traveling in poverty and on Indian shoulders, with this jute sack as your only mantle and this sisal rope as your only luxury. Which means, my Queen, that your reign is over; now you’ll go around like everybody else.’”

  “God, who never forsakes His children, wanted to give her to him as partner and guardian,” says Perpetua, blessing herself and kissing a cross that she form
s by placing her thumb over her index finger. And I realize, beginning to piece things together, that Matilde Lina and the Dancing Madonna, strangely, must be a single image, both mother and Virgin, both equally love-giving and unreachable.

  Life, overwhelmingly, continued its course, and people fended for themselves as best they could. Owing to a lack of witnesses, I have been able to reconstruct the following decades only in patches. Three Sevens, as I said, does not talk about himself, but I know that he survived into adulthood against all indications. I suppose that he beat the odds thanks to his pilgrim’s doggedness, the solidarity laws of the road, the shelter provided by the generous, and the benevolence of his patron Virgin. Perhaps he was greatly helped by that lucky sixth toe and, above all, by his stubborn determination to keep searching for his loved one.

  The so-called Little War had ended, and a new one that didn’t even have a name was decimating the population, when Three Sevens appeared in this sweltering oil city of Tora, dressed like a peasant in white cotton, with his Dancing Virgin in his pack, wrapped in plastic and tied with a cord, and with the idea well fixed in his head that, according to some information obtained from a woman in San Vicente de Chucurí, here he would finally find his Matilde Lina.

  “Did you already look for her in Tora?” that woman asked. “I knew someone there who made her living by washing and ironing and who just fits your description.”

  Hundreds of people, urged by necessity, were flocking every day to that carnival of miracles, in hopes of finding salvation in black gold and attracted by floating rumors of a promising future.

  “You can find work there; the oil refinery needs people.”

  “In two months my uncle made enough to live on for a whole year.”

  “Oil money reaches everybody.”

  “In Tora things will go better for you.”

  While the men dreamed of finding a job in the refinery, prostitutes and girls of marrying age dreamed of catching an oil worker, famous around the country for being well paid, single, and spendthrift. It was rumored that the money they freely spent was enough not only to keep wives and mistresses, but also to provide well-being for the women selling food in the fields, street vendors of corn on the cob and meat turnovers, along with masseurs, prayer women, distillers of firewater, dressmakers, striptease dancers, and lottery vendors.

  Three Sevens followed his own dream, not shared with anyone. He went through the territory against the flow of the crowds, with the singular intent of encountering just around the next corner, face-to-face, his “Desaparecida,” so for him every corner brought first anxiety and then disappointment.

  “I bought a medal of gold and a lace shirt for her,” he tells me, “so if I met her, I would not be caught by surprise without a present. And I could not indulge in the luxury of taking a rest, because I might fall asleep and not see her as she passed by.”

  A medal of gold and a lace shirt . . . A medal of gold and a lace shirt. Tonight I can’t sleep, because it’s too hot. And because I have learned that he once wanted to give her a medal of gold and a lace shirt.

  “Everybody ends up here, and sooner or later she too will come,” Three Sevens used to repeat to himself whenever he felt his faith start to quaver. He lived among the men by the refinery fence, allowing time to go by, but he did not make common cause with them. The fence men hold on to their hope, clinging to the high mesh wire that surrounds the refinery to keep out outsiders and those lacking IDs. Standing there for one, two, or even five months, in sunlight and starlight, they wait to be let in and have their names entered on the payroll. They gather in bunches along the wire fence, holding on to a promise that nobody has made, waiting for the opportunity that life owes them.

  In the midst of this growing crowd, Three Sevens watched all kinds of people walking about, going in circles, expectant and alert: welders who had come following the voices of the oil pipes from Tauramena, Cusiana, or Saudi Arabia; grinders who had already tried their luck in Saldaña, Paratebueno, or Iraq; graduates from a technical institute; master technicians, adventurers, and novice engineers—with Three Sevens being the strangest one, wandering without any other purpose than to ask if by chance anyone knew or had seen or heard about a quiet Sasaimite woman with shifting eyes by the name of Matilde Lina, who earned her living as a washerwoman. If somebody asked him for more details, he just murmured that she was like everybody else, neither tall nor short, neither white nor black, not pretty or ugly, either, not lame or harelipped, and with no birthmarks on her face. There was nothing, absolutely nothing that would distinguish her from the others, except for the many years of his life that he had invested in searching for her.

  The opportunities for employment were good for the first to arrive, enough for those who arrived next but scarce for those who followed. The company ended the hiring, and from then on, the rest just waited and waited for countless days for the wire fence to open and let them in.

  “We had convinced ourselves that oil was the magic wand that could right every wrong,” says Perpetua, who also came to Tora riding on that illusion. “Perhaps it was so at the beginning, but not true later, though the idea, like a stone in one’s shoe, was firmly embedded in many people’s minds. While some quickly left, pushed out by frustration, others came in. We saw them arrive, without any luggage but with an expectant gaze that we could easily identify because, at some point, all of us had that same look. Those of us who arrived first bunched together to make room for them, but without offering any warnings, because experience itself would eventually darken their hopeful gaze.

  With the passing of time and the lack of food, the men by the wire fence grew skinnier. The women selling turnovers took up their baskets and went to another plaza looking for customers, and the unmarried girls began to dream of military men or emerald hunters. Even Three Sevens’s unflappable disposition was showing signs of fatigue and hopelessness. On one dizzy evening that hangs heavily on his conscience, having already spent his last paper bill on a white rum spree, he gave away the lace blouse he had bought for Matilde Lina to the first young whore with an honest smile that he met, and after an hour of love, he also slipped the medal on her.

  And now here I am, thinking about all of this, so far from my own surroundings, and lying in this disorderly bed, unable to sleep. On account of the heat. On account of the noise from the electric plant. On account of the fear that lurks at night in every dark corner of this besieged place. On account of knowing that a man named Three Sevens, if that could be a name, once long ago bought for his loved one, a lace shirt and a medal of gold.

  EIGHT

  This place is alien to me and alien to all that is familiar. It is ruled by special codes that require an enormous and constant effort at interpretation on my part. However, for reasons that I can’t quite understand, this is where the deepest and most essential part of my being is called into play. It is here that a voice, muddled but demanding, summons me. Because in my own way, though the others are unaware of it, I too belong to this wandering multitude, which drags me through blessings and disappointments with the powerful sway of its ebb and flow.

  Three Sevens is not aware, either. Like the rest of them, he sees me as an anchor, as one of the pillars in the place that has offered him shelter somewhere along his journey without end. He is getting now to the point that I have already reached: but how or why I got here, where I came from, where I am going, he never questions. He takes my steadfastness for granted, and, knowing how uncertain that is, I invite him to rely on it nonetheless. I do this in deepest sincerity, with the notion that if I stay on, it is simply so that he—he and those with him—might be able to make it. It feels strangely seductive to act as safe harbor while knowing one is adrift.

  But what to do with Matilde Lina—the Undefinable, the Perplexed, the One Who Vanished? And how to get rid of her intangible presence? With her heavy eyelids, her nebulous hair, and her faint heartbeat, she belongs to a ghostly world that utterly escapes my control. Her tragedy an
d her mystery fascinate and disturb Three Sevens, luring him like a powerful abyss. She is a fierce rival. No matter which way I think about it, I can’t see how to defeat her enormous presence, conceived in the imagination of a man who has been shaping it throughout his lifetime into his own likeness, until he found the perfect fit within the confines of his memories, and of his guilt and desires.

  “Let her sleep, do her that favor,” I say to Three Sevens. “You are the one who keeps her imprisoned in the torment of her false wakefulness. Let her drift away in peace; do not incite her with the insistence of your remembrance.”

  “And if she were alive?” he asks me. “If she’s still alive, I cannot bury her; and if she’s dead, I have to bury her. I cannot just leave her, abandoned and restless like a wandering soul. Whether she’s dead or alive, I must find her.”

  “Have you considered the possibility that this might not be feasible?” I say cautiously, letting each word out slowly.

  “And what if she is looking for me? What if she is unable to have a life of her own because she is so attached to mine? And what if she suffers from thinking that I’m also suffering?”

  “Well, then, let’s go dancing,” I proposed to him the other night. “Here in your country I have learned that when problems have no solution, the best thing one can do is to go dancing.”

  It was a cool Saturday in December, and he accepted. We drove down in the nuns’ truck to a popular dance place, Quinto Patio, in the very center of Tora. Christmas was approaching, and in the narrow streets bedecked with colored lights, people of goodwill were sharing custards and sweets, singing carols accompanied by penny whistles and tambourines, and stopping at the crèches to recite the season’s prayers. Neither the quicksilvery moon that embraced us, nor the sweet scent of jasmine, nocturnal and intense, nor the blare from the jukeboxes playing the Niche Group’s salsa from Cali, nor even the upcoming celebration of the birth of the King of the Heavens had managed to stop the killings. Once in a while the war would explode its insidiousness in our faces: gunshots on one corner or an explosion in the distance, while at the same time, the mad euphoria of being alive, so characteristic of this indescribable land, swelled all around us.