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“So much life, so much life…”

“And never more. ..” I add, just to go along.

SIX

I wonder how a kid only twelve or thirteen, as Three Sevens must have been, could have resisted such a blow. How long was he given to periods of silence, how deep into the waters of his inner being was he thrust? What kinds of perplexities did he need to wade through before the day that, summoning all his energies, he put himself afloat again, transformed into the man I love without any hopes of reciprocation?

“His worst enemy has always been his guilt,” Perpetua tells me, backing her argument with the authority of someone who knew him long before tragedy struck.

“Guilt?”

“Guilt, for not having been able to prevent their dragging her away. Guilt for not searching hard enough for her. Guilt for still being alive, for breathing, eating, walking: he believes all of that is betraying her. As the years go by without his finding her, he gets more and more entangled in a web of recriminations that haunt him while he’s awake and batter him when he’s asleep.”

How can this be, if at the shelter Three Sevens preaches the habit of forgiveness? “The mistakes of the past are left at the door. He who takes refuge here should know that from now on, all his unpaid accounts are with his conscience and with God.” This is the warning he offers to all, even to those who bring with them a scandalous reputation, be it as a thief, whore, guerrilla, or murderer. To those who gossip about the sullied pasts of others, he says outright: “Cut that out, Mr. So-and-so, in this shelter nobody is good or evil.”

“This is the kind of reasoning that entangles all reason,” the old woman tells me. “The only one Three Sevens cannot forgive is himself.”

“Why does he have to pay for a crime he didn’t commit?” I inquire. “Why does he have to punish himself so?”

“Because his guilt follows different twists and turns, Three Sevens did not really look upon Matilde Lina as his mother,” she says, revealing what I already know better than anybody else. “I had seven children and lost three, and I know very well how a son looks at his mother. Matilde Lina had an extravagant temperament, but she was a woman of strong presence, with a girlish face and large breasts. Many lusted after her body and did not succeed because she knew how to kick and bite to defend herself. I saw her washing by the river, her blouse open, half-unbuttoned, with Three Sevens at her side, a growing boy beginning to show fuzz on his face and in other places he dared not confess. Her breasts were exposed, and the boy looked at them, as still as a rock, gasping for breath and becoming a man before that vision.”

I can also see Matilde Lina by the water’s edge, busy in her occupation, immersed in herself and unaware of her nakedness, at a moment of deep intimacy that is not disrupted by anything, not even the stirring that burns in the boy’s gaze.

“Of course, he was not the first adolescent to stare at his mother’s breasts,” I object to Perpetua, and she laughs.

“No, of course not,” she answers. “And he will not be the first one to keep searching for them in all the other breasts that cross his way.”

SEVEN

After the caravan’s stampede on the day that Matilde Lina disappeared, Three Sevens was not the only one abandoned on Las Aguilas Peak. Through a wise quirk of fate, which is not as arbitrary as people suspect, there was also the image known as the Dancing Madonna, all alone and half-sunk in the thick of the churning bog.

“At the time of the ambush, our patron Madonna did not grant us any protection,” Three Sevens still recriminates, and he tells me that when he noticed her lying powerless in the mud, he felt his face burning red in a surge of rancor.

“Old piece of lumber! Selfish, unfair, and lazy! Miserable wooden doll!” were the blasphemous words he recalls screaming at her. “For years we helped carry you on our shoulders as if you weighed nothing. We kept candles lighted around you at night, and by day we protected you from the rigors of the climate with a canopy worthy of a duchess, only to have you finally let disaster fall upon us anyway.”

Trying to push away the aura of loneliness that had suddenly returned to him, Three Sevens cast the blame on the Dancing Madonna for the disappearance of Matilde Lina, the only companion that life had not taken away from him, and he started hurling those insults, and more severe ones, until he realized that this lady, who had appeared before to be dancing a sevillana, now with the same gestures seemed to be just flailing in the mud. “Not only had she failed to protect us, but quite the opposite: she herself was in urgent need of protection.”

“Then I forgave her, and took on the obligation of carrying her all by myself. So I rescued her from the swamp, polished her as best I could, hoisted her on my shoulders, and started walking in directions as yet unknown either to her or to me, and which we were in no condition to determine. ‘I ask you a thousand times to forgive me, my Blessed Queen, but your procession ends here.’ This was my warning, so that she would start forgetting her former privilege of being carried on a litter and resign herself, once and for all, to doing without her candles, or psalms and hymns, or garlands of roses made just for her. ‘From now on,’ I told her frankly, ‘you will have to be traveling in poverty and on Indian shoulders, with this jute sack as your only mantle and this sisal rope as your only luxury. Which means, my Queen, that your reign is over; now you’ll go around like everybody else.’”

“God, who never forsakes His children, wanted to give her to him as partner and guardian,” says Perpetua, blessing herself and kissing a cross that she forms by placing her thumb over her index finger. And I realize, beginning to piece things together, that Matilde Lina and the Dancing Madonna, strangely, must be a single image, both mother and Virgin, both equally love-giving and unreachable.

Life, overwhelmingly, continued its course, and people fended for themselves as best they could. Owing to a lack of witnesses, I have been able to reconstruct the following decades only in patches. Three Sevens, as I said, does not talk about himself, but I know that he survived into adulthood against all indications. I suppose that he beat the odds thanks to his pilgrim’s doggedness, the solidarity laws of the road, the shelter provided by the generous, and the benevolence of his patron Virgin. Perhaps he was greatly helped by that lucky sixth toe and, above all, by his stubborn determination to keep searching for his loved one.

The so-called Little War had ended, and a new one that didn’t even have a name was decimating the population, when Three Sevens appeared in this sweltering oil city of Tora, dressed like a peasant in white cotton, with his Dancing Virgin in his pack, wrapped in plastic and tied with a cord, and with the idea well fixed in his head that, according to some information obtained from a woman in San Vicente de Chucurí, here he would finally find his Matilde Lina.

“Did you already look for her in Tora?” that woman asked. “I knew someone there who made her living by washing and ironing and who just fits your description.”

Hundreds of people, urged by necessity, were flocking every day to that carnival of miracles, in hopes of finding salvation in black gold and attracted by floating rumors of a promising future.

“You can find work there; the oil refinery needs people.”