A Tale of the Dispossessed

by Laura Restrepo

  “There’s no country on earth as beautiful as this one,” I told Three Sevens that night while we were buying green mango slices sprinkled with salt from a street vendor.

  “No, there isn’t, nor a more murderous one, either.”

  In the cozy, red semidarkness of Quinto Patio, Three Sevens and I started dancing, shy merengues at first and passionate salsas later, which he, like a true Colombian, performed nimbly while I tried to follow his steps in spite of my clumsy foreign feet.

  “I must ask you something, Three Sevens,” I blurted out, making him interrupt his joyful dancing.

  “Oh, come on, why so serious? What can possibly be troubling my Deep Sea Eyes?”

  “Tell me, what happened to the cats?”

  “Cats? Which cats are those?”

  “The hungry cats that you and Matilde Lina were taking care of when you were ambushed.”

  “Oh, those cats. Nothing happened to them.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because nothing can happen to cats.”

  Later that night, just before dawn, and with a full bottle of rum tucked away, we danced a final bolero, very close and slow as it should be, and without remorse. Shielded by its pulsating rhythms and tragic words about broken wineglasses and frustrated loves, Three Sevens and I, happy, light-headed, and by then half-drunk, got closer without eagerly seeking each other, without any urgency, without asking for the other’s consent.

  “How long does a bolero last?” I now ask Doña Perpetua.

  “The old ones, about five minutes; the new ones, not more than three.”

  Not more than three. . . . The next day, which started as a Sunday but dragged on so slowly into a colorless afternoon that it might as well have been a Tuesday, I met Three Sevens in front of the bread ovens. He was taciturn and enveloped in a distancing cloud. Again he had Matilde Lina’s shadow, limp and ethereal, draped around his neck as if it were a gray silk scarf.

  NINE

  The great petroleum fever was already over when Three Sevens found himself involved, without realizing it, in the incidents that were going to bring him to this wanderers’ shelter, where he would become an obsession for me, almost as much as Matilde Lina was for him. Riding as he was on the highs and lows of his longing and heartbreaks, he failed to notice the precise moment when discontent, which burned slowly in Tora, suddenly boiled over, breaking every channel of restraint.

  “Cover your mouth with a wet handkerchief and run!” someone warned Three Sevens as he was watching the turmoil from a supply store, attentive only to any feminine face that would remind him of the one he was looking for. He did not heed the advice because he had no handkerchief and had nothing to do with what was going on, but just in case, he took his Madonna to the safety of an abandoned carriage portico. In a few seconds, the whole place was stormed by soldiers camouflaged as shrubbery, with leaves covering their helmets and branches on their backs, wearing masks and carrying hoses with containers that reminded him of fumigation tanks.

  “They are gassing us!” he heard someone shout at the time a nasty cloud engulfed him, burning his skin, locking his throat, and making his eyes swell with something a thousand times worse than pure chiles.

  That is what he says, but the newspapers in those days said that one of the agitators of the outcry was Three Sevens himself. Heaven knows.

  By averaging the different versions of the following incident, I have concluded that Three Sevens had not yet recovered from the asphyxia and dizziness caused by the tear gas when he managed to see, through the red fog in his burning eyes, a boy crossing the street holding a food carrier. One of the fake bushes probably thought it was a bomb or a Molotov cocktail.

  “It’s my father’s lunch,” the boy protested, trying to evade the soldier’s beatings while protecting with his arms what seemed, in fact, to be a food carrier but perhaps was a Molotov cocktail as the camouflaged soldier suspected. It is common knowledge that with a dirty war going on, one cannot trust the troops or even the children.

  People say it all happened at once: the soldier attacked the boy; Three Sevens, brimming with indignation, hit the soldier; the pack of fence men got into the action; and all hell broke loose.

  When the authorities began to investigate and the story of what happened was being pieced together, witnesses came forward swearing that the agitator who had infiltrated their group and attacked the soldier was a young outsider, a Communist carrying weapons and wearing no shoes, who could be easily identified because he had six toes on his right foot. He was a desecrator of temples and a thief of sacred images, among them a Virgin sculpted by the famous Legarda, which was a valuable colonial relic.

  “Mother Françoise suspects that you are a guerrilla or a terrorist,” I prodded, to see if I could make him talk, after he had been at the shelter for two or three months and there was a beginning of trust between us.

  “My war is much more cruel, Deep Sea Eyes, because I carry it inside of me,” he said, avoiding a real answer. It was during those days that he started calling me Deep Sea Eyes. “Come here, my Deep Sea Eyes, you seem listless and sad,” he calls out to me, or he asks around: “Where is my Deep Sea Eyes today? She has not yet come to say hello to me.” Or else, “Don’t look at me with such eyes, girl, or I’ll drown in them.”

  “No need to drown,” I counter. “It’s enough if you just take a good bath. Here’s the shampoo to wash your hair, and a clean shirt. Do you think you’re still living in the wild?”

  “Heaven protect me from your scolding, my Deep Sea Eyes”—he calls me this, “my Deep Sea Eyes,” as if my blue eyes belonged to him, as if all of me were his, and when I hear him, I surrender myself unconditionally to his ownership. Though I understand at the same time that this way of addressing me confirms the distance between us: large blue eyes come from another race, social class, and skin color; another kind of education, another way of handling the knife and fork at the dinner table, of shaking hands in greeting, of finding different things funny; another way of being, difficult and fascinating, but definitely “other.” When Three Sevens calls me Deep Sea Eyes, I also understand that between my eyes and his there is an ocean. But he knows that by using my—my Deep Sea Eyes—this my is like a little boat: insufficient, frail, and precarious, but a vessel after all in which to attempt the crossing. That is how my desire reads this, because the only certainty I can find lies in just a few uncertain words.

  TEN

  After the disturbances surged in Tora, Three Sevens went from the most forgettable anonymity to become the topic of the day. He was hounded by dogs avid to crucify any scapegoat, and according to Eloísa Piña, the president of a civic committee that joined the revolt and to whom he appealed on that occasion for help, he was much less concerned about saving his own skin, which, by the way, was already singed from the tear gas, than about the certainty that Matilde Lina was there somewhere, submerged in that mass of people; and about the need to find a place in which to hide his Madonna, so suddenly famous, transformed overnight into a colonial treasure and claimed as artistic patrimony stolen from the nation.

  “Go to the northeast of the city and start climbing those hills,” Eloísa Piña advised him. “Put on a hat down to your ears, wear long sleeves to hide the beatings, and do wear shoes, so the additional toe doesn’t give you away. Go across the sea of invaded neighborhoods without stopping or opening your mouth for any reason, and continue going up. When you’re completely exhausted, you’ll be reaching the last houses of a young neighborhood called Ninth of April. But I must warn you, those will never be the very last houses around, because even before the newcomers have finished building their own, people who arrived later are already starting theirs. In any case, do take a rest then, on the cliffs of Ninth of April, and inquire about the French nuns. Anyone will be able to take you to them. None of the military, the paramilitary, or the guerrillas dare to break into the shelter that the nuns have established up there, and in difficult cases like yours, they off
er good protection. How? I’d say with the breath of the Holy Spirit.”

  With the money that Eloísa Piña lent him reluctantly, since she harbored no hopes of recovering it soon, Three Sevens bought a pair of black shoes of the famous Colombian Farmer brand, with laces and thick rubber soles. He was crossing the last street of the urban sector with the Dancing Virgin on his shoulder and his untamed feet restrained by the rigid new leather when he was stopped by a police patrol car in full use of its power and howling siren.

  “What’ve you got in that bag?” the corporal asked him, suspicious of the heavy bulk he was carrying on his shoulder.

  “Firewood,” he answered without opening the sack, knocking on the wood of the covered Madonna, so that the corporal, who was not the kind of guy to lose sleep over virgins that are not flesh and blood, was finally satisfied as to the contents of the pack.

  “Take off your right shoe!” he ordered next. He must have received instructions about the mischiefmaker’s identifying marks: “Extra toe on right foot.”

  Three Sevens was at the bottom of despair, from which he invoked Matilde Lina: How am I going to keep looking for you, my dark saint, if I get shut away in a cell with locks and chains?

  “Do you want me to take off my shoes, Corporal?” he said, playing the fool.

  Three Sevens sat on the curb with the dead calm of one who realizes that there is nothing else to be done. He looked at his new shoes with fathomless sadness and got ready to untie his shoelace with the resignation of a person condemned to death who stretches his neck up toward the ax blade. But at the last instant, in a final gleam of mischief, like a clowning toreador attempting one last cabriole to dodge the bull’s horns, and without a word or shift in demeanor, he took off his left shoe.

  “One, two, three, four, five.” Five toes exactly, the bureaucratic corporal counted, not one more, nor less.

  “You can go,” he ordered, unaware of the sleight of foot.

  ELEVEN

  All in one piece, his natural color restored as if he had recaptured his escaping spirit, and in control now of the punishing shoes, which seemed softer after the scare and more pliable in response to his quickened step, Three Sevens abandoned the warring center of Tora and began climbing the mountain through the rosary of invaded towns, just as Eloísa Piña had suggested. He left behind one after the other without knowing their names, because by the time he could ask, he had already reached the next one.

  “What imagination!” he said, astonished by people’s capacity to invent fantastic or ironic names, like Gardens of Delight, Paradise Heights, or Promised Land; or sometimes to commemorate ambiguous victories of the people, like Twentieth of July, Emancipation Cry, or Camilo Torres; Young Saint Theresa, Saint Peter Claver, and María Goretti, in honor of their favorite saints; Villa Nohra, the Damsel, and Mariluz in honor of women; while the rest were in series of repeated names when people could not think of anything better: Villa Areli I, Villa Areli II, Villa Areli III; Popular I, Popular II, Popular III.

  After forgetting about the incident with the corporal, Three Sevens at last recovered his confidence and dared make a stop to look below. He was surprised to see in the distance, and anchored in the midst of the jungle, the reverberating metallic spires, rising like a cathedral from the refinery with its entangled web of pipes, towers, and tanks, in all the splendor of its internal fires and toxic fumes.

  Wretched city with a heart of steel, thought Three Sevens, powerful heart crowned by thirteen chimneys, all painted red and white, spewing into the sky their eternal blue flares.

  “I suspect that these flames have already burned up all the oxygen,” I have heard him say more than once, “and soon we won’t be able to breathe. Why shouldn’t the weather be hot, if we’re riding on top of such a furnace?”

  He kept climbing up until the solid ironwork of the refinery dissolved into a mirage, and from so many pipes and so many tanks, his eyes perceived only gleams of sunlight. In the meantime, he could hear an incessant hammering, which grew progressively louder, as urgent and tireless as an obsession. It was produced by the families of newcomers who, for each existing house, were building two more: they were nailing boards here, tapping bricks into place, or flattening tin cans over there, and higher up they were making do with sticks and cardboard. As he continued to climb, the dwellings became more makeshift, more immaterial, until the last ones seemed to be built out of pure hammering on air, out of sheer yearning.

  Suspended in the calcified whiteness of the noonday sun, two women were cooking over an improvised fire on the dirt road, and a barefoot old man was carrying a mattress. A yellow dog barked relentlessly at Three Sevens’s new shoes, and a group of kids stopped kicking a rag ball in order to watch him as he passed by.

  Three Sevens knew that he had gone through the mirror to the other side of reality, where in the shadow of the fragile official state, the clandestine, boundless continent of outcasts extends in silence.

  Matilde Lina is here, he thought. She must be here, or maybe not.

  TWELVE

  Three Sevens appeared at the shelter for the first time on one of those heavy, humid August afternoons in which our planet seems to cease turning. The knocking outside barely dissipated the lethargy floating through the yard, and as I got up to open the door, I resented how heavy my feet felt, bloated by the heat. I could not see much of the newcomer, wrapped as he was in a poncho, a felt hat down to his eyes and a sack on his shoulder. I asked him to follow me and offered him a seat, which he refused, caught between staying and turning back to leave as fast as he had come in. It was then that I asked him his name, left him searching for Matilde Lina’s in the register, and looked for Mother Françoise, who was then the director of the refugee shelter where I devote my days.

  On my return, I was happy to see that the strange figure of Three Sevens was still there. I felt sure that he was going to continue on his journey, but he did not. He was still standing at the table that served as reception desk, had stopped checking the register, and was clutching his pack as if afraid someone might try to snatch it away. He seemed tired and unwell, and I thought he had to be boiling hot under so much clothing. Mother Françoise must have had the same thought, because she asked him if he wanted to have a lemonade, since it was so hot . . .

  He answered with a grateful no and remained silent.

  “What are you carrying in that pack?” she asked, seemingly to encourage some exchange.

  “Firewood,” he answered, but I sensed that he was lying.

  It took Mother Françoise quite a while to convince him to eat something and take off his poncho. Seeing that his skin was burned, she asked me to give him aspirins and apply some butesin picrate. At first, he allowed me to apply the cream only to the blisters on his face and arms, but maybe the softness of my fingers relieved him a bit from his sadness and mistrust, because he opened his shirt and showed me the burns on his chest and neck.

  “How did this happen?”

  “Sunburn,” he told me, and I knew he was lying again. That was to be expected: in this shelter all sorts of persecuted people come seeking refuge, and it is often a matter of life and death not to tell a single truth. So one has to distinguish between harmful lies and truths not told.

  “Miss, you’re doing such a good job that I am better greased up than a truck transmission,” he said, laughing, when he was covered with the yellow ointment.

  A couple of days later, well rested and recovered, he was helping around the vegetable patch and the kitchen, and he even offered to help with the administrative bookkeeping. We were in the middle of reviewing an expense list when he confessed to the Mother Superior and to me that he had been carrying in his pack the famous dancing image of the Virgin from colonial times, no less, the one so sought after by the authorities in Tora and the surrounding towns. Since we had already heard about this image from the radio and from the press, Mother Françoise raised her arms to her head and began hollering, which only surprised those who were not f
amiliar with the excesses of her French temperament.

  “What a terrible outrage!” she screamed in her very own French accent. “How could you think of doing this to me, bringing here a stolen image of the Virgin!”

  “I did not steal it, Mother,” he insisted, but to no avail.

  “Don’t you know that here I cannot allow weapons, drugs, or anything possibly illegal, because that would just be handing General Oquendo the excuse he’s been looking for? Don’t you think that it’s enough trouble to hide you, when they are looking all around for you, after the crazy things you did during the strike?”

  “But I didn’t do anything, Mother.”

  “Get that Virgin out of here, before Oquendo takes over the shelter with the claim that we’re just harboring a pack of thieves!”

  “But, Mother Superior, you are so hospitable to everyone, how are you going to throw the Madonna out into the street? Don’t you see that I have been carrying her on my shoulders since I was a child? Don’t you see that she was not stolen but saved by my people from the looting and the fires?”

  Three Sevens took the Virgin out of his pack and untied the cord to free her from the plastic cover, but he had not yet finished removing it when a small miracle occurred. The dark Madonna captivated the nun with her sweetness and the Gypsy gracefulness of her gestures. Holding on to her skirts, she seemed ready to dance her way up to the heavens.