“Are they going to die?” asked Three Sevens, who, like the cats, had become a bundle of bones and anxiety.
One Tuesday, while fog and famine were making life dreary, the ill-humored caravan was advancing through a muddy region called Las Aguilas when those in the rear guard came to the front with the warning that Sergeant Moravia and a fiercely armed National Army squad, through a quick maneuver, had them surrounded.
“Charro Lindo, our man in charge, was easily recognizable as a handsome ladies’ man and because he wore around his neck a little flask where he kept ashes of what had been his family home,” Perpetua tells me. “But he was also well-known for his pitifully odorous feet, which emanated a nauseating smell after being always jammed inside his rubber boots. He had become notorious for this problem, his foul-smelling feet being his only defect as a lover, according to the girls who shared his blanket at night.”
Charro Lindo had been told that the only remedy for his pestilence was to soak his feet in potassium permanganate dissolved in lukewarm water, and he, anguished by the affliction that hurt his pride and made him the center of both covert and open scorn, put so much faith in this formula that he ventured forth against common sense, paying no attention to survival precautions in hostile territory. In order to locate a more civilized place where the remedy could be obtained, he discovered an escape route down the mountain. Fate brought him to Bienaventuranzas, a village that in the end did not live up to its beatific name, but quite the opposite. Unwittingly, Charro Lindo had made the mistake of dragging behind him the rest of the caravan, more than three hundred people, into the swampy domain of the notorious, diehard Conservative butcher Sergeant Moravia, who had subjected by force the entire population of that extensive neighboring region.
When he realized he had led them into a trap, Charro Lindo did not think of anything better than to pull his favorite girlfriend up on his black mule, behind the saddle, and to tell his people to run for their lives. “We’ll see each other again, if not in this life, in the next,” the handsome outlaw shouted, and just like that, with the flask of charred soil around his neck and waving his big Mexican hat, he gave orders to disband.
FIVE
To avoid falling into the clutches of Sergeant Moravia, some families climbed up places so steep that one could hardly gain a foothold; others attempted to descend the mountain, struggling to resist the magnetic pull of the abyss. Perpetua and her children sought refuge in the underbrush, and she has no idea how long she was hiding, crouching and keeping her legs stiff trying to make herself thin, while the pounding of her heart obliterated everything else. She felt, or thought she felt, the enemy crisscrossing overhead while she held her breath as much as possible so as not to give herself away. Terror possessed her for quite some time before she dared try to see what had happened to the others. Deep in the mud mixed with blood, she found some who were still alive, some dead, and some who had gone loony, now recast forever in the wide world.
Decades later, Three Sevens was to inform us in the curt, flat manner he assumes when talking about himself that he and Matilde Lina had stayed back that day in order to finger-feed some milk to the kittens they were trying to save; they had kept to their business, unaware of any danger, and did not hear the commotion until the epithets and rifle butts were upon them during the ambush. They accepted death without mounting any resistance, but death, who rejects lives surrendered freely, refused to collect its bill all at once.
“Agony, more cunning and obstinate than death, has had me in its grip since then,” Three Sevens tells me, and I feel the sudden impulse to caress his Arawak Indian hair, so black and thick, and so close to my hand now in this placid moment as night falls, while we both bend side by side over the furrows, planting legumes. The sun, which chastised us without mercy all day, has now become mild. The flocks of mosquitoes flutter in the last rays of light, finally disregarding us, while the fertile soil we are turning gives off a comforting and reassuring smell. And my hand, already intent of purpose, is anticipating the texture of his straight hair, which it is about to touch. My fingertips rejoice at the proximity of the contact. My arm stretches forward confidently, but suddenly I retreat: something is shouting at me to stop. The mass of black hair moves away, reverberating and burning me in a flash of contradictory signs.
I reread my last remarks and wonder why it is that his hair fascinates me. His hair, always his hair. Or rather, hair itself: the luxury and luster and the enticing warmth of the beings endowed with hair, as if my fingers were destined to disappear in the soft density of dark hair; as if an irrational and orphaned mammal instinct guided my affections.
“They beat Matilde Lina, they snatched the boy away from her and dragged her off somewhere,” Doña Perpetua tells me, making her sibilant sounds whistle past the torturing dental prosthesis of which she is so proud.
From that moment, Matilde Lina’s deeds were erased from the factual world and enthroned in a quagmire of speculation. Of no avail to her were the coltish kicks she knew well how to impart or the large impressions with which her teeth had adorned so many other people’s skins. Did they conquer her by chopping off her tresses or by calling her whorish or crazy? Did they force her to kneel in the mud, did they break her body, did they break her soul? Did her screams resound through the mountain ravines? Or was what gave people goose pimples the soft cooing of the spotted owl or the cackle of some outlandish bird? Or of all the birds that knew her name and began to shout it in a bewildered litany?
Three Sevens doesn’t know. He either doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know. And if he knows, he won’t tell, keeping all the silence and all the horror to himself. He talks to me about her as if she had just reemerged for him yesterday: the passing of time does not mitigate the ardor of his remembrance.
After the ambush at Las Aguilas, Matilde Lina never appeared again, in life or in death, and no one could offer any news, large or small, of this woman recast by the toils of war, like so many others. Three Sevens was still alive but sentenced to death for the second time, allowed to meet his improbable destiny as a solitary child, orphaned and abandoned for the second time. A child of the woodlands, flying with the capricious four winds, in the midst of a country that refuses to be accountable for anything or anybody.
I can now imagine him, dazed after the catastrophe. He is lost in a trance, sitting at the edge of the road, and it is very slowly getting dark. Nothing is moving around him, and he doesn’t feel pressed by time; he has no place to go. While he waits, he is growing older without realizing it. He only knows that the woman who was by his side has disappeared and that someday she must appear again. When she comes back, the child will wake up already an adult, and they will start walking, shoulder to shoulder. Silent days, months, and years are lethargically passing by on the road, but the woman who is supposed to return cannot find the way.
“So much life, and never more…,” sighs Three Sevens occasionally, twice repeating the phrase, which I have heard uttered before by someone else in some other place, without my being able to comprehend it fully then or now.