“And about your loves, aren’t you going to tell me anything?” he asked me, and I thought: Either I speak now or never. But he had posed the question in such an offhand way, as if the issue had no bearing on him, that my last bit of courage simply evaporated.
“A woman like you must have broken many hearts. ..”
“In the past, maybe. At my age, the only heart that I break is my own.”
The church bells were already calling for six o’clock mass, and I knew that I had missed my opportunity. From the collective dormitories came the echo of some sleepy coughing, of a radio blaring its rosary of news, and the asthmatic hum of the electric fan died down as bright sunlight entered our room and I had to rush out to do my breakfast chores.
Three Sevens came into the dining hall, and while I was busy distributing the white cheese, bread, and cups of cocoa, I desperately racked my brain for a word that could bring him close to me.
He burned his lips from drinking the boiling hot chocolate and then went up to the mirror that hangs over the dish rack. I saw him putting hair gel on his comb and paste on his toothbrush. He brushed his teeth, and as he was thanking me for breakfast and saying good-bye while I gathered the dishes, I was well aware that if it wasn’t now, it would never be.
“It is not Matilde Lina that you’re looking for,” I risked finally, and my words started rolling among the empty tables in the dining hall. “Matilde Lina is only the name that you have given to all that you’re looking for.”
Tonight a heavy rainstorm is falling like a benediction on the overheated shelter, dissipating the tension due to the excess of human presence. I came to bed earlier than usual, and now I have been awake for hours, listening in the dark for the bursts of rain pelting the tin roof, the irregular roar of the electric plant, the hiss of the corner lamplight as it casts its green light on a circle of rain. It is still dark, yet the first rooster is crowing and the air outside fills with the flutter of noisy seagulls screeching like macaques. The rooster crows and crows until it forces the humidity to rise. I turn on the fan, which, with its toy-helicopter racket, dumps its artificial breeze on me.
Everything is running well, I confirm, and notice without surprise that the beneficial calm that is spreading outside has also reached my heart. It’s been more than a month since the parish priest from Vistahermosa and his colorful court left, but the spell of their solidarity still wields its protection over us. Life is so bountiful, I think, and death, after all, is so gentle. For the moment, the anguish that seems to hover over the shelter has receded, dissolving modestly into the ample space of its opposite, a splendor that dazzles me on this quiet night and creates in me the desire to believe that better days are coming, despite everything. For the first time since I met Three Sevens, anxiety has released its grip on my heart. This peace resembles happiness, I think, and since I want neither the wind nor sleep to diffuse it, I feel grateful for staying awake and turn the fan off.
The nuns’ morning prayers already float around the shelter, and I hear Three Sevens’s footsteps as he enters his half of the room. Due to some predictably favorable parallelism, the scattered fragments of the whole are fitting into place with the amazing naturalness of a fulfilled destiny.
Through the dividing curtain I make out his silhouette, and I know that Three Sevens is sitting on his cot, and that he is delaying taking off his shirt, button by button. In the semidarkness, I imagine his head of hair and feel his breathing, like that of an animal in repose. The scent of his body reaches me vividly, and I watch him taking down the flimsy fabric with blurred images that separated us.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo by Nina Subin
LAURA RESTREPO has been a professor of literature at the National University of Colombia, as well as publisher of the weekly magazine Semana. In 1984, she was a member of the Peace Commission that brought the Colombian government and the guerrillas to the negotiating table.
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