I know this book will have no soul as long as I find no trace of the desperation that led Sayonara’s mother and brother to take their lives, and, above all, of the hopes that pushed Sayonara herself to continue living after what happened.
Looking for answers, I leave Tora on the Magdalena, a river of mercury waters that turn rusty with the sunset, aboard an anachronistic steamboat whose existence is a pure act of faith and whose improbable advance erases from the map each port as we leave it behind: Yondó, Chucurí, Puerto Parra, Barbacoas, El Paraíso, Puerto Nare, Palestina, El Naranjo, La Dorada, Santuario, Cambao, and at the end of the trip, Ambalema, Tolima, where Sayonara was born, according to Tigre Ortiz.
I have to trust that the Magdalena can take me to the knot of memory, but I’m not sure I can rely on it. It has become a self-engrossed river, forgotten by history, detached from its own shores, allowing itself to be carried along unenthusiastically by a present of tame currents that don’t bring to mind their place of origin and that try to ignore where they are going.
For now its course has brought me to Ambalema, the once prosperous Ambalema, capital of a tobacco bonanza that has already ended and that left its planters wiped out and its inhabitants convinced that life runs backward, like memories.
“We lived through progress yesterday,” says señor Mantilla, the owner of a small hotel in the center of town. “Since then we have only seen disintegration and abandonment.”
In the main plaza, to the right of the church and to the left of a scandalous ice cream shop with an English name, walls of mirrors, and techno music, I find a place like the one I am seeking, from the past almost to the point of nonexistence and discreet to the point of being nearly invisible. It’s called the Gran Hotel Astolfi and you could say that it was extracted from the same ancient dictionary as the steamboat that brought me up the river. It has been reduced to a hostelry for travelers by foot, “Weekly or monthly room rentals with common bath,” and as a rendezvous by the hour for couples, but it still retains in the vestibule an Acme Queen salon organ and a certain solidity of finely crafted wood that speaks of better times. I ask for the owner, and although they tell me that his daughter is now in charge of the administration, I insist that I want to see him.
“The owner is don Julio Mantilla, that gentleman sitting at the front door,” they tell me.
I see him leaning against the wall, facing the street in a cowhide chair, just under the letter G of the sign that reads GRAN HOTEL ASTOLFI, greeting passersby with a nod of his head as if done purposely to show the freckles that crown his bald head. I introduce myself, tell him my profession, and explain that I have come looking for traces of a sad story that happened years ago and of which I have only a vague impression.
“I thought that only here, in your hotel, would someone be able to tell me about it. If I ask at that ice cream shop, for example,” I raise my voice above the blasting music flooding out of the neighboring business, “I’m sure they wouldn’t be able to tell me anything.”
“Well, you won’t go wrong with me,” he answers. “For a quarter of a century I’ve been watching what goes on in this town, from this spot, right here where you see me sitting.”
“You must know a lot of things…”
“Things from the past, yes, and the people who have lived here all their lives, but the modern stuff I don’t understand very well. The one who knows about the new things is my daughter Adelia. Surely you would like to know about modern things, because you are young too…”
“It’s more about an old case,” I say. “A strange occurrence that must have shaken Ambalema when it happened. A mother and a son who committed suicide. Do you remember something like that?”
“Are you talking about doña Matildita and her son Emiliano?”
“I don’t know their names, not even their last name. I only know that they both committed suicide, the mother and the son, and that the boy must have had several sisters.”
“That’s Matildita and her son Emiliano,” he assures me. “It has to be them, because you can count the suicides in this town with one hand and only in that case, that I know of, were there two in the same family and at the same time. Rosalba, my sister, had dealings with doña Matildita; she can tell you about that misfortune,” he says, and he invites me to the rooms at the hotel’s rear patio, where he lives among rosebushes with his daughter, his two grandchildren, and his sister Rosalba, an elderly lady who would be identical to don Mantilla if on her bald head she had freckles, like him, and not the white, volatile wisp that she organizes into a small bun, like a cloud floating on top of her head. Señorita Rosalba offers me black coffee with canna cookies and dispenses, like her brother, the cordial treatment and beautiful manners of a bygone era that despite the ravages of violence you still find everywhere in this country, even on the part of people who don’t know a thing about you.
I praise the splendid roses that she grows in her garden, I talk about the old tobacco haciendas in the area, anything that doesn’t touch on the purpose of my visit. I don’t know why, but at the last minute I start thinking that it’s indecent to uncover information about a past that Sayonara never wanted anyone to know about. I am filled with doubt about how appropriate it is to link, by asking a question that is about to be answered, two worlds that she kept separate and ignorant of each other. Years have passed, I tell myself to calm down, yet I still go on talking about roses and other insignificant things until señor Mantilla forces the denouement by telling his sister what brings me here.
“The señora has come to ask about Matildita who killed herself, may she rest in peace.”
“I hope so, although I don’t think it is so, because they say there is no rest for those who commit suicide,” says señorita Rosalba. She asks me if I am related to Matildita and crosses herself when I confess that I am not. “Those people had very sad lives. They were etched in the annals of the town because until then suicide was an outside affair here; yes, there had been killings, and murders, but none of us had ever known anyone who dared to leave this world by his own choice. People are afraid of the Third Brigade, also called the Home of the Pumas and the Heroes of Chimborazo, which are different names for the same brutality, because they say those men still haven’t been able to cleanse themselves from the curse that doña Matildita cast on them with her death.”
“There are a lot of bastards among those Heroes of Chimborazo,” said señor Mantilla gravely. “The only consolation is to think that their consciences are being eaten away by the weight of those deaths, the mother’s and the son’s. The brigade’s headquarters are just outside the town, as you take the highway to Ibagué. If you like we could go there, we would be happy to take you, because he who helps a traveler will be treated kindly in heaven.”
Don Mantilla calls for Wilfredo, an old man whose lower jaw hangs loosely toward the left and who works in the hotel as a bellboy, waiter, and handyman, to drive the family automobile, a ’59 Buick that has been maintained in adequate condition, to be able to take us to the nearby brigade.
“Look carefully,” the señorita warns me. “Look as Wilfredo drives past it slowly, because this is a military zone and they threaten anyone who stops with bullets. It was there, right there, where they’ve put up that guardhouse with the sentry. They built it to distract everyone, to prevent them from continuing to bring flowers, imagine that, so many years have passed and you can still see the carnations people throw from the highway, because as I told you, they don’t allow pedestrians to walk or cars to stop in front of the brigade. If they left people alone, they would already have torn down the guardhouse and built an altar in its place.”