Ana Cuenco and Rosita Viterbo went to help Hortensia up. No man stepped forward; either they were more frightened than we were or they thought this was a women’s matter.
“‘Get out of my house,’ Hortensia screamed, but the Dorado woman did not go. ‘Didn’t you hear? Get out,’ Rosita Viterbo screamed, and the Dorado woman still did not move.
“Then Ana and Rosita jumped on her; they each grabbed an arm and took her to the patio door; once they were there they pushed her out and closed the door.”
“They did?”
“All by themselves.” Otilia sighed. “Thank God Gloria didn’t turn up with her brother, who would not have allowed it. If a single man got involved, more would follow, and worse things would have happened.”
“Like shots being fired.”
“That’s how stupid men are,” she said staring hard at me and unable to help smiling. But a moment later her face froze. “How sad: Ana and Rosita began serving up the pork; Hortensia Galindo was in a terrible state, sitting in her chair, the plate on her knees, untouched. I saw her tears falling to the plate. Her twins sat beside her eating, unconcerned. No one could console her, and soon they forgot to even try.”
“That’s the pork’s fault,” I said. “Too delicious.”
“Don’t be cruel. Sometimes I wonder if I’m really still living with Ismael Pasos, or with a stranger, a monster. It’s better to think that everyone was suffering like I was, Ismael, and was saddened. Nobody asked for another drink. There was no music, just as Father Albornoz would have liked. They ate and they left.”
“I’m not cruel. I repeat that it hurts me that any man should be held captive against his will, no matter what he has, or what he doesn’t have, because they’re taking those who have nothing too; that said, it’s better to disappear voluntarily, on one’s own, so they don’t force us to disappear, which must be much worse. I’m grateful for my age, half a step from the grave, and I feel sorry for the children, who have a hard road ahead of them, with all this death they’re inheriting, and through no fault of their own. But compared to Marcos Saldarriaga’s fate I’m much more distressed by that of Carmina Lucero, the baker. They took her too, the same day.”
“Carmina,” my wife screamed.
“I found out today.”
“Nobody ever told us.”
“They only talked about Marcos Saldarriaga.”
“Carmina,” my wife said again. And I saw she was starting to cry. Why did I tell her?
“Who told you?” she asked me with a sob.
“Lie down first,” I answered.
But she stayed there, aghast.
“Who was it?” she said.
“Maestro Claudino. He fixed my knee today. I have to take him a hen.”
“A hen,” she said, without understanding. Then she added, strangely, because we have two hens, while she turned out the light and lay down beside me, “And how will you buy it?”
Not waiting for my answer, she began to speak of Carmina Lucero: she had never known such a good woman, and she thought of Carmina’s husband and her children, how they must have suffered.
She said, “When things at home weren’t going well, Carmina gave us as much bread as we needed on credit.”
Every once in a while I would hear her moan fade into the hot air we were breathing, just when I thought that restorative sleep was at last about to come and help us, and indeed we were more than exhausted resting on a bed in a town in a country under torture and I did not yet dare to reveal that Carmina had already died in captivity two years ago; nevertheless: that night neither of us could sleep.
~ ~ ~
Why stay in bed? Dawn breaks and I leave the house: I retrace my steps back toward the cliff. On the mountain across the way, at this time of the morning, the scattered houses look eternal, far from each other, but united anyway because they are and always will be on the same mountain, high and blue. Years ago, before Otilia, I imagined myself living in one of them for the rest of my life. No one lives in them today, or very few of them anyway; not more than two years ago there were close to ninety families, and what with the war — the drug traffickers and army, guerrillas and paramilitaries — there are only sixteen left. Many died, most of them must have had to leave: who knows how many families are going to stay on now? Will we stay? I look away from the landscape because for the first time I cannot stand it, everything has changed now — but not the way it should have, damn it.
A pig walks toward me along the edge of the cliff, sniffing the ground. It stops for a moment at my feet, lifts its snout, snorts, eyes up my shoes: whose pig is this? All through the town, every once in a while, a pig or a hen will wander, no sign of an owner. It is possible that it is I who has forgotten the names of the owners of the pigs; I used to recognize them. And what if I took this pig to Maestro Claudino, instead of a hen?
I hear a shout in the early morning, and then a shot. It is up ahead, at the corner. The detonation has formed a black cloud of smoke there. A white shadow runs across the street, from that corner to the next. Nothing more is heard, except footsteps hurrying away till they disappear. Today I got up early to go out, better to go out, one cannot go for a quiet stroll these days; I hear my footsteps now, echoing one behind the other, speeding up, in a definite direction; what am I doing here, at five in the morning? I discover that the route back to my house is the same one the running shadow took. I stop, it is not prudent to follow fleeing shadows, there are no more shots to be heard, a private matter? Could be; it does not seem like the war, it is another war: someone caught someone stealing, someone simply caught someone, who? I keep walking, stop, listen: nothing else, no one else. My knee: “You have to rest it for three days,” Maestro Claudino warned me, and here I am back and forth. Will you start hurting me again, knee? No, my painless steps round the corners, I am cured, what an embarrassment that pain was, Otilia, what a premonition, what a mistake, let nobody miss me when I’m gone, but let nobody have to help me to the toilet, Otilia, die after I do.
I walk without knowing where to, in the opposite direction from the shadow, away from the gunshot; better find a place where I can sit and watch the sun rise over San José, although I could use another shot of cane liquor for this other pain as if inside my breath, what is it? Can it be that I am going to die? More shots ring out, machinegun bursts this time — I freeze, they are distant — so it wasn’t another war, it is the real war, we are going mad, or we have gone mad, where have I finished up? It’s the school; habit brought me here.
“Profesor, you’re up early to teach?”
It’s Fanny, who was Fanny? The caretaker. Smaller than she used to be, the same apron as years ago. Did I not slip into her camp bed more than many years ago, did I not smell her? Yes. She smelled of sugar water. And her head has been painted white. She still lives here, but now none of her children are with her, what am I saying, her children must be old by now, they will have gone. I remember her husband: he died young, on his way back from some saint’s day fiesta; he fell into a ditch and his mule landed on top of him.
“Profesor, it seems they took someone today or yesterday.”
Her eyes are as bright as ever, like the time I smelled her, but her body is in ruins worse than mine.
And she says: “You had better go home.”
“That’s where I’m going.”
And she closes the door, just like that: she won’t remember what I remember. I set off again toward home, on the other side of the town. I am far away; when did I leave, at what time? I simply did not want to follow the direction of the running shadow. Now I can go back, the shadow will have gone now, I think, and I think I’m going back but in the plaza the soldiers stop me, they escort me, at gunpoint, to a group of men sitting on the steps of the church. We know each other; over there I see Celmiro, older than I am: a friend dozing. Some say good morning. Arrested. Today Otilia will not be bored by my news. I watch the brightening dawn, which descends from the mountaintop like fluttering sheets; the weather is still cool, but it makes way, minute by minute, for the stubborn heat, if I had an orange in my hand, if the shade of the orange tree, if Otilia was looking over her fish, if the cats.