I wrote down the phone numbers of Three Sevens’s contacts in the capital, but with enormous effort, I’ve refrained from calling to find out how he’s doing. Am I going to be looking for him while he’s looking for her? At least I have enough pride left not to do that.
The nasty odor comes from a tallow factory installed on a parcel of land across from the shelter. Every morning the workers bring from the slaughterhouse six or seven carloads of cattle hooves that are burned in the plant all day long to extract the tallow, which poisons the entire area with a sickening vapor. First there is the foul smell of burnt hair that later turns into a culinary smell, capable of stimulating the appetite of those blissfully unaware. Very soon this second tonality of odor becomes suspiciously sweet, like the roasting of overripe meat — very overripe; in fact, putrid. The home kitchen aroma then turns into a garbage dump stench, and the nausea it causes makes me want to escape on the run. I suppose the hooves are composed of the same substance as the horns, and I realize that the popular Spanish expression “It smells like burnt horn” is no idle comparison. The smell invading us now is on an uncertain path from fresh to rotten, and I have come to believe that it emanates not only from the tallow factory, but from our own bodies and belongings as well. My skin, my clothes, the water I try to bring to my lips, the paper I use to write, are all saturated with this morbid odor, treacherously organic, like that of a wretched Lazarus trying, and failing, to come back from the dead. It envelops me, envelops all of us, in its raw and tenacious ambivalence.
But topping all that happens in the shelter, always critical these days, is the particularly difficult situation we are now going through owing to the latest pronouncements by Commander Oquendo, of the Twenty-fifth Brigade, located right here in Tora. He has declared that the shelter is a refuge for terrorists and criminals, funded from abroad and camouflaged under the banner of so-called human rights organizations, concluding that we serve as a front for armed subversion. He says that in the face of such deceit, the forces in charge of keeping the public order have their hands tied. It is obvious that he is looking for an excuse to untie his hands and ignore human rights codes in order to proceed against us. And now, behind the challenged symbolic protection of our walls, we are waiting for the army to storm us or to send over a death squad at any moment.
Perhaps if I smoked, I could flood myself with nicotine and find some diversion from these days, so distressing that they seem theatrical; but since I don’t, I have taken up reading as if compelled to obliterate any free space for my own thoughts. However, everything I read seems to refer to me, to have been written with the sole intent to thwart my escape. There is apparently no solution, then, no possible way out. Not even through reading. Tora, with its war and its struggles, Three Sevens and Matilde Lina, Mother Françoise, and myself are hopelessly filling every available crevice, flooding the whole landscape with our burnt smell, and marking with our own pollution even books written elsewhere.
At this moment, Three Sevens seems to have disappeared from the map, perhaps finally reunited with Matilde Lina in that never-never land where she reigns. Sometimes I wish with all my heart that it has been so, for him to discover that she is just of average height and that she drags around petty miseries like all of us.
“Be merciful, O Lord,” I plead to a divinity in which I have never believed, nor do I now. “Don’t make me love someone who does not love me. Send me, if you wish, the other Seven Plagues, but for mercy’s sake, relieve me of this one, and also of this intolerable deathly smell that surrounds me. Amen.”
FIFTEEN
The tallow-processing plant no longer exists. We breathe freely again, and, piquant and green, all the vapors from the rain and the jungle are coming back to us.
Mother Françoise, who is crafty and diligent, found out that the owner, an older man living on the premises, was abandoned by his young wife, a full-bodied mulatto who had kindled the lust of all the male population. Mother cunningly convinced him that the foul smell was to blame for her desertion.
“Don Marco Aurelio,” she told him, “how could your loved one not leave you, when you made her live in the midst of this stench? Do you believe that a real beauty, a queen like her, is going to accept having her hair and her clothes reeking with grease?”
The old man, mired in grief, saw a ray of hope in this advice. He kissed Mother’s hands as a sign of gratefulness, moved his pestilent industry to a parcel that he owns in another area, and ordered the planting of geraniums, and African and Madonna lilies, in the lot across from us. His splendid mulatto has not returned yet, and wagging tongues say that she won’t because she’s gotten entangled in a love affair with a prosperous mafioso who has gold chains around his neck and a Mercedes-Benz in his garage. And that he sprinkles her body with champagne and brings her Chinese porcelain and French perfumes. Fortunately, the old man has not learned about that yet, and every morning he weeds his blooming garden under the illusion that it could bring her back.
Although everybody else seems to disagree with me, I am confident as to how this story will turn out: in order not to suffer that infernal smell, Mother Françoise is quite capable, if need be, of going after the mulatto woman to convince her that it is better to have an old and poor husband than a handsome one, full of gold.
The hell with Three Sevens, I decided that early morning in which my nostrils, in excellent humor, woke me up with the news that there were no longer traces of the stench. The hell with Three Sevens, I repeated after taking a freezing cold shower; now wide awake and without any palliatives, I stamped my seal on the decision. What I want is a man the way he should be: kind like a dog and always there like a mountain.
The hell with Three Sevens; I hereby disengage from that individual; I won’t honor him by dedicating one more thought to him; I repeat this over and over again to myself while I call a press conference, send fax messages, go down to the plaza to buy bags of grain and legumes, organize new reading courses for adults because those we have are not enough, and take care of the water leaks that have closed one of the collective dormitories. I’ve already forgotten Three Sevens, I keep saying to myself in the meantime. The only problem is that so much repetition has the opposite effect.
SIXTEEN
After the smell of death had dissipated, death itself was at our door. In less than two weeks, the wave of crimes devastating our district left a total of twenty-two persons killed, eight of them in Las Palmas, an ice-cream parlor a few minutes from here, and the rest in neighborhoods west of us.
Oquendo’s threat had been only words, but they were lethal words that have opened the way for breaking and entering, so we tried hard to secure the support of the press, as well as pronouncements from democratic entities and visits to the shelter by important personalities. Anything that could back us as a peaceful organization, both neutral and humanitarian; anything other than waiting, arms crossed and mouths shut, to be massacred with impunity.