Laura Restrepo - A Tale of the Dispossessed

“Looking for what? Days and nights pursuing what?” Three Sevens asks himself now, in front of me. “Nobody really knew, and I, being a child, knew even less. I remember our hopes then because they are the same as now: ‘When the war slows down…’”

When the war slows down… When will that occur? Over half a century has gone by and nothing has changed. The war does not cease, only its face changes. I write to René Girard, my former professor at the university, telling him that this endless and sweeping violence is unbearable because it is irrational, and he answers that war is never irrational, that nothing can find more reasons to erupt than war itself.

Though Matilde Lina, the laundress from Sasaima, and the child with eleven toes were involved in tragedy, they never saw it that way. While the others were suffering from hunger, they were oblivious to food; sadness and fear found no fertile ground in their souls; desolate, cold nights were just nights and nothing more; the cruelties of life were simply life, because they did not aspire to a different or better one. Though the others had lost everything, they had lost nothing, because one cannot lose what one has never had or wanted to have.

“Since he lacked a given name, we fell into the habit of calling the child with the extravagant foot Twenty-one, because of his extra digit, until one day Charro Lindo strongly prohibited it under threat of punishment because it was not charitable, he said, to be calling attention to people’s physical defects,” Perpetua tells me, explaining that Charro Lindo was a young and handsome Liberal bandit who had inherited from an uncle the command of their procession of homeless travelers.

Despite the peremptory order, a thoughtless man would occasionally call him Twenty-one in the presence of the big chief, who would then smack him hard, knocking him to the ground. After that, instead of Twenty-one, people began calling him Three Sevens as a euphemism and in covert defiance of authority. The moniker stuck to the child forever.

“I remember Twenty-one as clearly as if he were in front of me now,” Doña Perpetua assures me. “Born out of nowhere and having the oddity of that foot with an even number of toes, he tended to be withdrawn and very shy as a child. But I swear to you that the extra little toe did not prevent him from running: he sprinted barefoot like a gazelle all over the muddy roads.”

At some point during their journey, Matilde Lina so often used the child as a refuge that she detached herself from other people’s concerns. Never an expert at that, now she isolated herself from their motives, their words, their actions. She simply followed the group without asking questions or favors, so that she and the boy became a pair of lighthearted dreamers, practically unnoticed by the others, powerful and untouchable in their extreme defenselessness.

Three Sevens learned to walk behind her, to advance by placing his small feet trustingly in her tracks, sometimes staying fully awake and occasionally dozing off, but without lagging or breaking step, as if those footsteps were already familiar to him before he was born. To drive away the silence that falls over people in flight, Matilde Lina taught him the art of conversation, but only about animals. In their waking hours in the mountains, they crouched together to perceive the distant hoot of the spotted owl, or the amorous rounds of a she-tiger in heat, or the red eyes and foul breath of the devil dogs. The dialogue between them was an irrelevant chatter, always an amazed, light-hearted questioning about the habits of animaldom.

“Do you hear that?” she would ask him while a storm raged. “It’s not thunder, it’s a stampede of masterless horses.”

Or she would indicate to him, “Look, these are ocelot tracks,” or capybara’s, or chigüiro’s, for she was very skilled at identifying, without hesitation, any animal traces.

Coiled into her memory lay Sasaima, the land of her childhood, and she often spoke lovingly about its many animals: of the swallows crossing the beam of light coming from above in the Gualivá caves; of the sleek, black toads that become invisible as they sit on the sleek, black stones of the Río Dulce; of the chumbilá, which is a winged mouse given to vice, because when the farmers catch it, they teach it to smoke and the animal enjoys it.

“That’s all they talked about, beasts and bugs,” Doña Perpetua tells me. “Those two were not interested in anybody else.”

I understand only too well that nobody else elicits their passion or even their curiosity, and that is because each is the continent where the other dwells as sole inhabitant. Look at me, Three Sevens; touch me, breathe my smell, listen to the inner rumblings that torment me with their failure to be turned into speech. .. Are you aware that I am here and now, and she is not; that I am the presence that the eye registers and the touch confirms? Will you finally have the courage to recognize that here in this world catching up with someone is better than an illusory, useless pursuit? That a flesh-and-blood woman is a hundred times preferable to a remembered one, or an imagined one, even though she might not be a laundress born in Sasaima or know a whit about tropical animals?

“Albeiro must have taken away the pliers,” I hear Three Sevens say while he works on the construction of a new roadside stall. “Albeiro! Where are the pliers?” he shouts with self-assurance, and I would like to warn him against fooling himself. What does he know about the Albeiros or about the pliers? What does he know about the present circumstances?

D oña Perpetua, who is very old, is the only person who knows what I want to know. She was married and had her own children on the night that she saw, at the portico of the church, the newly found boy with the fanciful foot. Later they crossed the red seas of their exodus until calamities separated them. After a wide gap of years, and thanks to the vagaries of their errant lives, she happened to come across him, now an adult, here at this shelter for wanderers.

Doña Perpetua is engaged in an endless struggle, lost beforehand, against an instrument of torture made of wires and rose paste that she proudly calls “my dental prosthesis.” While she champs at it but cannot manage to make it fit, she continues her story.

“I saw Matilde Lina teaching this boy how to train a chumbilá. She was making circles in the air with a thin bamboo pole until the bat came flying obediently and perched itself on the pole.” Perpetua copies the action, and her attempts to repeat the flexible circles with her arm and to mimic the bat’s snout with her mouth make me smile. “They would search around every pond looking for hundred-eyed frogs — the eyes are of the offspring they carry between their many folds of skin. Both the woman and the boy lived on weeds and aguadijas , the spongy ones that know how to soak up water,” Perpetua continues, lowering her voice so no one will overhear. “That’s what people said, that Matilde Lina and the boy lived only on purslane and brushwood. While everybody else toiled and suffered, they spent their time serenely, lost in talk and contemplation. The spirit of the forest took care of them, or at least that’s what we said, to avoid feeling responsible for them since we all had enough, and sometimes too much, trying to take care of ourselves.”

It was also because of an animal that Three Sevens got separated from Matilde Lina, after thirteen years of finding in her arms the warm center of the world. During one of those starvation periods in which people were willing to eat even the soles of their shoes, it occurred to them to pick up a female cat and her brood of kittens that they had found in the ruins of an abandoned farm. The animals were scrawny, gawky, toothy, and devilish with hunger. They had to take care of them in secret, lest others in the caravan who were starving might eat them, since anything with hair, feathers, or scales was quite welcome.