A Tale of the Dispossessed (2 page)

“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.

T
he 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 running 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.

“Stop fretting, child,” she used to say when she found him on the verge of despair, “your parents did not abandon you because they were mean, they were just downhearted.”

“I cannot forgive them,” he grumbled.

“Those who won’t forgive cross a river of unwholesome waters and remain on that other side.”

A
ll the thunder of rockets that night did not seem to accomplish anything; on the contrary, it seemed to work against the village. As if incited by the explosions, violence made itself felt that year, and a great Conservative rage swept through the Liberal community of Santa María and turned it into pandemonium. So that Three Sevens, still only a few months old, must have witnessed for the first time—or second? or third? —the spectacle of blazing houses in the night sky; of roaming, masterless animals bellowing in the distance; of threatening, throbbing darkness; of corpses, soft and puffy, coming downriver and clinging to the shrubbery on the banks, as if refusing to part—while the river rushed at a mad pace, apparently fearful of its own waters and trying to escape the riverbed.

“I wailed until God grew tired of hearing my cries,” Doña Perpetua tells me, recalling those Armageddon days. A resident here at the shelter, she is, by an accident of fortune, also from Santa María Bailarina and surely viewed its destruction. “I buried my husband and three of my children, then ran away with the ones I had left. Drained of tears and emaciated, when I looked at myself I muttered, ‘Perpetua, nothing is left of you but skin and bones.’”

The survivors of that massacre devoted their last reserves of courage to the rescue of their patron saint, the one that had given their town its name: a colonial Madonna carved with skill and rhythm in dark wood, which stood plagues and the passing centuries, retaining the rose-petal freshness of her cheeks and the golden borders of her mantle, and which proudly displayed the small waist and soft curve of arms so characteristic of the images traditionally called
bailarinas.

“There is only one mother, but I had the good fortune of having two.” Three Sevens laughs. “Both were kind and protective. The heavenly one, carved in cedarwood. And the earthly one? The earthly one, I would say, was made of sugar and marzipan.”

With the smiling and resplendent Heavenly Mother on a litter carried on their shoulders, they fled to the mountains to wait until the massacre was over. Nothing could happen to them while they were under her protection: she, the Immaculate, full of grace, with her royal crown cast in fine silver, the crescent moon tucked in the folds of her tunic, and on the pedestal below, the snake with a satanic mien, helpless at her feet while she steps on it unaware, as if the evil in the world did not count.

The violence increased, however, and ran wild. The news that surfaced from below only brought gasps of despair.

“Those of the Conservative party painted all the doors in town blue. They even painted the cows and donkeys blue, and it was rumored that they would slash the throat of anyone daring to wear red.”