“How painful it must have been for those parents to part with their son. Only God knows what they were running away from, or what they wanted to protect him from,” Matilde Lina said out loud after looking at him warmly and long, showing her involvement. And as to this, some people will wonder how I ever came to know her exact words or the tone in which she said them. I can only answer that I just know; that without having met her, I have come to know so much about her that I feel I can take the liberty of speaking for her, without any need to add that those words were not actually heard by anyone, because at that moment the first fireworks had begun bursting and there were explosions and shooting stars in the sky, while Roman candles were spewing torrents of fireballs, and pinwheels turned round and round on the wires, splendid like sunbursts.
The crowd disappeared amid the smoke and the red glare of the fireworks, and Matilde Lina was left alone by the church doors, which were already closed. Bedazzled by the rockets and flares, her eyes lit up with reflections, she held the baby wrapped in the blanket against her body as if she would never let go of him. From then on she sheltered him by pure instinct, without having made a decision or even intending to, and he was the only one in the world allowed to penetrate the wordless and windowless space where she hid her affections.
An unreal, amphibious creature, this Matilde Lina. “Always at the riverbank, surrounded by foamy waters and white laundry,” is how Three Sevens remembers her. He says that growing up sheltered by this sweet water woman, he learned that life could be milk and honey. “When night began to fall and birds flew to their nests,” he evokes at the height of his reminiscence, “she called me and I was grateful. It was like marking the day’s end. Her voice lingered in the air until I returned to cuddle up beside her.”
Three Sevens has never wanted to part with his plaid woolly blanket, all faded and frayed now, and more than once I have seen him squeeze it as if wanting to extract one more strand of memories that could alleviate the grief of not knowing who he is. That rag cannot tell him anything, but it emanates a familiar smell that maybe reminds him of the warmth of a breast, the color of the first sky, the pangs of the first sorrow. Nothing, really, except the usual mirages of nostalgia. The rest is all stories that Matilde Lina invented for him in order to teach him how to forgive.
“Stop fretting, child,” she used to say when she found him on the verge of despair, “your parents did not abandon you because they were mean, they were just downhearted.”
“I cannot forgive them,” he grumbled.
“Those who won’t forgive cross a river of unwholesome waters and remain on that other side.”
THREE
All the thunder of rockets that night did not seem to accomplish anything; on the contrary, it seemed to work against the village. As if incited by the explosions, violence made itself felt that year, and a great Conservative rage swept through the Liberal community of Santa María and turned it into pandemonium. So that Three Sevens, still only a few months old, must have witnessed for the first time — or second? or third? — the spectacle of blazing houses in the night sky; of roaming, masterless animals bellowing in the distance; of threatening, throbbing darkness; of corpses, soft and puffy, coming downriver and clinging to the shrubbery on the banks, as if refusing to part — while the river rushed at a mad pace, apparently fearful of its own waters and trying to escape the riverbed.
“I wailed until God grew tired of hearing my cries,” Doña Perpetua tells me, recalling those Armageddon days. A resident here at the shelter, she is, by an accident of fortune, also from Santa María Bailarina and surely viewed its destruction. “I buried my husband and three of my children, then ran away with the ones I had left. Drained of tears and emaciated, when I looked at myself I muttered, ‘Perpetua, nothing is left of you but skin and bones.’”
The survivors of that massacre devoted their last reserves of courage to the rescue of their patron saint, the one that had given their town its name: a colonial Madonna carved with skill and rhythm in dark wood, which stood plagues and the passing centuries, retaining the rose-petal freshness of her cheeks and the golden borders of her mantle, and which proudly displayed the small waist and soft curve of arms so characteristic of the images traditionally called bailarinas.
“There is only one mother, but I had the good fortune of having two.” Three Sevens laughs. “Both were kind and protective. The heavenly one, carved in cedarwood. And the earthly one? The earthly one, I would say, was made of sugar and marzipan.”
With the smiling and resplendent Heavenly Mother on a litter carried on their shoulders, they fled to the mountains to wait until the massacre was over. Nothing could happen to them while they were under her protection: she, the Immaculate, full of grace, with her royal crown cast in fine silver, the crescent moon tucked in the folds of her tunic, and on the pedestal below, the snake with a satanic mien, helpless at her feet while she steps on it unaware, as if the evil in the world did not count.
The violence increased, however, and ran wild. The news that surfaced from below only brought gasps of despair.
“Those of the Conservative party painted all the doors in town blue. They even painted the cows and donkeys blue, and it was rumored that they would slash the throat of anyone daring to wear red.”
“Hell broke loose from El Totumo to Río Cascabel.”
“The blues said they would stop only when all the Liberal blood had been shed. They also said they planned to win the next elections the same way.”
Seeing that it was a lost cause, the reds from Santa María bade farewell to their land, looking back at it from a distance for the last time. Improvising a caravan, they fled toward the east, now a tattered guerrilla band, with death following closely behind, uncertainties ahead, and hunger always closing in. At the center, next to the wooden saint, marched Perpetua, her children, Matilde Lina, Three Sevens, the elderly, and the rest of the women and children. The men, armed with eight rifles and twelve shotguns, formed a protective ring around them.
“We children did not suffer,” Three Sevens confesses. “We were growing up on the march and felt no urge to stay anywhere.”
The slow march lasted for years, until it became as long as life itself. Joining them along the way were other roaming Liberal groups; people recently forced out of their homes or driven out by massacres; more survivors from ravaged towns and fields; farmer-warriors, adept both at tilling the land and at fighting a war; people who had been chased out; and various others who found reason and sustenance only in their flight.
“We were victims, but also executioners,” Three Sevens admits. “It’s true we were fleeing from violence, but also spreading it. We robbed farms, ravaged planted fields and stables, stole in order to eat, scared people with our deafening racket, and were merciless whenever we encountered those of the opposing band. War involves everyone. It’s a foul wind that gets into our nostrils, and, like it or not, even those who flee from it come to foster it in turn.”
Those who could not make it were left by the wayside under a mound of rocks and a wooden cross. The number of children was always the same: those who died were quickly replaced by those being born. The adults were living the itinerant and slippery history of those who flee: quiet hours in watch, depression along the Lord’s roads, coffee without sugar and meat without salt, bickering and tears, reconciliations and compensations, delirium caused by yellow fever or diarrhea, card games, frozen barrens that soak one’s clothes and make one shiver, dumping grounds, forests in the mist, ravines, pineapple fields aglow under the sun. A hostile smell penetrating everything, even the fabric of shirts and the leaves on trees; a constant shuffling of hopes; and the obsessive illusion of owning some land one day. Those were, and still are, the things that accompany and sustain the refugee caravan.