Laura Restrepo - A Tale of the Dispossessed

“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.

“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.

T he 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.