TEN
After the disturbances surged in Tora, Three Sevens went from the most forgettable anonymity to become the topic of the day. He was hounded by dogs avid to crucify any scapegoat, and according to Eloísa Piña, the president of a civic committee that joined the revolt and to whom he appealed on that occasion for help, he was much less concerned about saving his own skin, which, by the way, was already singed from the tear gas, than about the certainty that Matilde Lina was there somewhere, submerged in that mass of people; and about the need to find a place in which to hide his Madonna, so suddenly famous, transformed overnight into a colonial treasure and claimed as artistic patrimony stolen from the nation.
“Go to the northeast of the city and start climbing those hills,” Eloísa Piña advised him. “Put on a hat down to your ears, wear long sleeves to hide the beatings, and do wear shoes, so the additional toe doesn’t give you away. Go across the sea of invaded neighborhoods without stopping or opening your mouth for any reason, and continue going up. When you’re completely exhausted, you’ll be reaching the last houses of a young neighborhood called Ninth of April. But I must warn you, those will never be the very last houses around, because even before the newcomers have finished building their own, people who arrived later are already starting theirs. In any case, do take a rest then, on the cliffs of Ninth of April, and inquire about the French nuns. Anyone will be able to take you to them. None of the military, the paramilitary, or the guerrillas dare to break into the shelter that the nuns have established up there, and in difficult cases like yours, they offer good protection. How? I’d say with the breath of the Holy Spirit.”
With the money that Eloísa Piña lent him reluctantly, since she harbored no hopes of recovering it soon, Three Sevens bought a pair of black shoes of the famous Colombian Farmer brand, with laces and thick rubber soles. He was crossing the last street of the urban sector with the Dancing Virgin on his shoulder and his untamed feet restrained by the rigid new leather when he was stopped by a police patrol car in full use of its power and howling siren.
“What’ve you got in that bag?” the corporal asked him, suspicious of the heavy bulk he was carrying on his shoulder.
“Firewood,” he answered without opening the sack, knocking on the wood of the covered Madonna, so that the corporal, who was not the kind of guy to lose sleep over virgins that are not flesh and blood, was finally satisfied as to the contents of the pack.
“Take off your right shoe!” he ordered next. He must have received instructions about the mischiefmaker’s identifying marks: “Extra toe on right foot.”
Three Sevens was at the bottom of despair, from which he invoked Matilde Lina: How am I going to keep looking for you, my dark saint, if I get shut away in a cell with locks and chains?
“Do you want me to take off my shoes, Corporal?” he said, playing the fool.
Three Sevens sat on the curb with the dead calm of one who realizes that there is nothing else to be done. He looked at his new shoes with fathomless sadness and got ready to untie his shoelace with the resignation of a person condemned to death who stretches his neck up toward the ax blade. But at the last instant, in a final gleam of mischief, like a clowning toreador attempting one last cabriole to dodge the bull’s horns, and without a word or shift in demeanor, he took off his left shoe.
“One, two, three, four, five.” Five toes exactly, the bureaucratic corporal counted, not one more, nor less.
“You can go,” he ordered, unaware of the sleight of foot.
ELEVEN
All in one piece, his natural color restored as if he had recaptured his escaping spirit, and in control now of the punishing shoes, which seemed softer after the scare and more pliable in response to his quickened step, Three Sevens abandoned the warring center of Tora and began climbing the mountain through the rosary of invaded towns, just as Eloísa Piña had suggested. He left behind one after the other without knowing their names, because by the time he could ask, he had already reached the next one.
“What imagination!” he said, astonished by people’s capacity to invent fantastic or ironic names, like Gardens of Delight, Paradise Heights, or Promised Land; or sometimes to commemorate ambiguous victories of the people, like Twentieth of July, Emancipation Cry, or Camilo Torres; Young Saint Theresa, Saint Peter Claver, and María Goretti, in honor of their favorite saints; Villa Nohra, the Damsel, and Mariluz in honor of women; while the rest were in series of repeated names when people could not think of anything better: Villa Areli I, Villa Areli II, Villa Areli III; Popular I, Popular II, Popular III.
After forgetting about the incident with the corporal, Three Sevens at last recovered his confidence and dared make a stop to look below. He was surprised to see in the distance, and anchored in the midst of the jungle, the reverberating metallic spires, rising like a cathedral from the refinery with its entangled web of pipes, towers, and tanks, in all the splendor of its internal fires and toxic fumes.
Wretched city with a heart of steel, thought Three Sevens, powerful heart crowned by thirteen chimneys, all painted red and white, spewing into the sky their eternal blue flares.
“I suspect that these flames have already burned up all the oxygen,” I have heard him say more than once, “and soon we won’t be able to breathe. Why shouldn’t the weather be hot, if we’re riding on top of such a furnace?”
He kept climbing up until the solid ironwork of the refinery dissolved into a mirage, and from so many pipes and so many tanks, his eyes perceived only gleams of sunlight. In the meantime, he could hear an incessant hammering, which grew progressively louder, as urgent and tireless as an obsession. It was produced by the families of newcomers who, for each existing house, were building two more: they were nailing boards here, tapping bricks into place, or flattening tin cans over there, and higher up they were making do with sticks and cardboard. As he continued to climb, the dwellings became more makeshift, more immaterial, until the last ones seemed to be built out of pure hammering on air, out of sheer yearning.
Suspended in the calcified whiteness of the noonday sun, two women were cooking over an improvised fire on the dirt road, and a barefoot old man was carrying a mattress. A yellow dog barked relentlessly at Three Sevens’s new shoes, and a group of kids stopped kicking a rag ball in order to watch him as he passed by.
Three Sevens knew that he had gone through the mirror to the other side of reality, where in the shadow of the fragile official state, the clandestine, boundless continent of outcasts extends in silence.
Matilde Lina is here, he thought. She must be here, or maybe not.
TWELVE
Three Sevens appeared at the shelter for the first time on one of those heavy, humid August afternoons in which our planet seems to cease turning. The knocking outside barely dissipated the lethargy floating through the yard, and as I got up to open the door, I resented how heavy my feet felt, bloated by the heat. I could not see much of the newcomer, wrapped as he was in a poncho, a felt hat down to his eyes and a sack on his shoulder. I asked him to follow me and offered him a seat, which he refused, caught between staying and turning back to leave as fast as he had come in. It was then that I asked him his name, left him searching for Matilde Lina’s in the register, and looked for Mother Françoise, who was then the director of the refugee shelter where I devote my days.