THIRTEEN
“Those who escape from hell come here,” I tell Three Sevens as we cross the central yard, past the collective bathrooms and the open sheds of the seven sleeping quarters, arranged in tight rows of bunk beds.
I introduce him to Elvia. She is a slight, dark woman from Quindio who feeds pieces of fruit to her bluebirds, the only thing left from her property, which was near La Tebaida.
“I also managed to save my chickens,” Elvia tells us with a bluebird perched on her shoulder and another on her head. “But the box in which I put them fell off the canoe, and they were drowned in the river. No one knows who made the loudest racket, the chickens or me.”
“People get rid of their dogs along the road because they bark and give their owners away,” I tell Three Sevens while showing him how the bread ovens work. “Quite often, however, they keep their birds and bring them here.”
The only three permanent residents, Doña Solita, her daughter Solana, and her grandchild, Marisol, are sitting on a bench. Many people come and go in the ebb and flow of war, but these three remain on their bench, crisply starched and dressed up like three dolls in the shop window of a toy store. I pick up Marisol, my goddaughter, who is only a few months old and was born in the shelter.
“Nobody comes here to stay forever; this is only a way station that offers no future. We give to the displaced five or six months of protection, food, and a roof over their heads, while they overcome the effects of their tragedy and become just people again.”
“Is it possible to become a person again?” Three Sevens asks without looking at me, because he knows the answer better than I do.
“Not always. However, the shelter cannot extend their stay, so they must go on their way and face life again, starting from zero. But those three, where are they going to go? Doña Solita cannot work because her hands are crippled with arthritis. Her other children were killed, and her daughter Solana was left pregnant. She is severely retarded, you know. Where in the world can these three angels from heaven live, if not here?”
“If not here,” Three Sevens repeats, with his habit of repeating, like an echo, the last phrase that he hears.
“When I arrived,” I tell him, “I saw the same things you are seeing now: women at the washbasins, men working at the vegetable patch, children being read stories. They were silent and slow, like sleepwalkers, their minds on other worlds while they pretended to lead normal lives. I did not find any hostility in them, but instead, a kind of beaten humility that made my heart sink. Mother Françoise told me I should not let myself be fooled. ‘Behind this air of defeat there is a very vivid rancor,’ she warned me. ‘They are trying to escape the war, but they carry it within themselves because they have not been able to forgive.’”
From his first day with us, Three Sevens demonstrated that he did not know what inactivity was, letting it show that he had the surprising ability to do any task well, whether plastering walls, sacrificing pigs, organizing cleaning brigades, or driving the truck. No job was too big for him, and there was no problem he would not attempt to solve.
Through his own unintended confessions I know that he has made a living in almost every trade that has cropped up along the way, because the more he looks for Matilde Lina, the more opportunities come to him. I ask him why he never eats meat, and I find out that he worked as a cleaner in a butcher shop in Sincelejo and was paid in beef lungs and bones. He knows how to sew up wounds, pull teeth, and repair broken bones because he worked as a nurse at San Onofre; he can drive a bus because he was a substitute driver on the Libertadores route; he developed his muscles as a boatman on the Magdalena River; took stolen automobiles apart in Pereira, was a potato harvester in Subachoque and a knife sharpener in Barichara.
Among all his skills there is one in particular that has proven indispensable for us: Three Sevens knows how to mediate a dispute.
Conflicts explode much too frequently at the shelter because of overcrowding. People who don’t know one another must live together in close quarters for a long time and share everything, from the toilet and the stove to the adult sobs muffled by pillows but still heard in the dormitories at night. And let’s not talk about the tension and extreme mistrust generated when a group that sympathizes with the guerrillas is lodged together with a group that is fleeing from them. Three Sevens has demonstrated an inborn talent for handling impossible situations with tact and authority. He has become so indispensable for the nuns that Mother Françoise has conferred on him the position of superintendent. With this she intends to tie him to the shelter, because Three Sevens has a tendency to drift away every time the wind blows from a different direction.
If he hears rumors that people are migrating to the lowlands of the Guainía in search of gold, or that thousands are going to Araracuara and to the river region of the Inírida to make a living in the coca plantations, right away his torment, which had abated for a while, shakes him up again and fills him with the certainty that Matilde Lina must be over there, blended within the wandering multitude.
“But where could you be going, if this is truly the end of the world? How long do you think you can keep getting on the road, when all the roads finally wind up here?” I ask him, but he turns a deaf ear and puts on his Colombian Farmer shoes as if they were his Seven-league Boots. Then we see him again wearing the garments he had on when he first arrived: felt hat down to his ears, peasant poncho, white cotton pants. From the window, and with my heart pounding, I accompany him as he disappears down the road.
So far, he has always come back in a few weeks, totally exhausted and downcast, but with his knapsack chock-full of oranges and milky bars for his Deep Sea Eyes, and for Mother Françoise, and with a box of guava pastries that he distributes among Perpetua, Solana, Solita, and Marisol.
Maybe if he returns, it will be not to abandon his Dancing Madonna or the many human beings in dire need of his help who are waiting for him. And though I know it is not true, I close my eyes and pretend that, perhaps, and why not, he will also come back partly for me.
FOURTEEN
I can’t see how, but Mother Françoise has discovered what is tormenting my heart.
“It does not seem prudent to fall in love with one of the displaced,” she casually dropped on me the other day, just like that, without preamble, though I hadn’t breathed a word to her.
“So it does not seem prudent to you, Mother?” I countered, charging my question with all the ill feelings I had accumulated since the bad smells had started. “And is there anything going on here that has the slightest connection with prudence?”
Mother Françoise’s meddling bothers me because I would a thousand times prefer to have no witnesses to this absurd, unanswered love. But the foul smell of burnt hooves bothers me more than that or, should I say, makes my life impossible, because it coincides with the present crisis for the security of the shelter, and with the fact that it’s already three months since Three Sevens left for the capital in his effort to contact a certain organization that might help locate Matilde Lina. In all that time we have received no news from him, no communication about the possibility of his return. So I add to the external pressures the uncertainty about ever seeing him again, and the anxiety is eating me up. What saves me is some compensatory instinct that must regulate the body’s humors, and which, when I am at my wits’ end, somehow calms the tide of grief and grounds my spirit on the shoals of apathy.