“Altar, no, we would have built a monument,” contradicts her brother. “Many people have faith in Matilde’s holiness and swear that she works miracles, but to me she’s not a saint, more like a noble martyr for the nation, because through her sacrifice she tried to cleanse the evil she had seen in this town — France has its Joan of Arc, but we have our own martyr here in Ambalema.”
“For months after the tragedy you could still see the burned circle where it happened,” says the señorita. “A few years ago they whitened it with lime, then they built the guardhouse on top of it so that not even the memory of it would remain.”
“Where she burned, right there, they posted a sentry,” adds Wilfredo, opening his mouth so round and wide because of the defect in his jaw that his words seemed to emanate from it like soap bubbles. “He has orders to shoot anything that approaches. They say it’s to maintain public order, but we all know that it’s because they’re terrified of her spirit.”
Sayonara’s mother burned to death? She immolated herself with fire like a Buddhist monk, like a Florentine monk, like a Maid of Orleans? Suicide by fire moves me more than any other kind. During a visit to Cuba I expressed my astonishment at a statistic that reflected that a large number of women die annually by incineration, and it was explained that it is the traditional way, since time immemorial, that women commit suicide on the island, and that the practice is still as alive as ever despite attempts by the revolution to eradicate it. I was told the disconcerting details of several cases and since then have been obsessed with the idea of a closed chain, both sacred and perverse, whose links would be fire, woman, death, and back to fire, which attracts whatever has been born of it.
We stop the Buick further on, ten minutes down the highway, at a stand where all kinds of fruits are sold: bundles of oranges, mandarins, and lemons hanging from the roof beams, piles of grapefruit, guamas, watermelons, cherimoyas, anones, maracuyás, mamoncillos, and papayas in a wild array of colors and smells that convince me that nothing bad could have happened here, because nothing bad can happen at a fruit stand in tierra caliente, in a region where the weather is perpetually hot.
“Before everything happened, this stand was a merendero, a makeshift roadside restaurant, called Los Tres Amigos,” says señor Mantilla. “It was always full of tobacco merchants, hacienda owners, hacienda workers, soldiers, and even brigade officers. The owner was a man from Antioquia named Abelardo Monteverde, the husband of doña Matildita, a Guahiba Indian who had a gift for cooking and seasoning.”
“There was a vulgar saying around town, if you’ll forgive me for repeating it,” ventured Wilfredo, releasing more soap bubbles into the air, “and that is that Matildita’s food tasted so good because she lit the stove with a flame that she took from her groin.”
“That, Wilfredo, is ignorant gossip,” says señor Mantilla with annoyance.
“Because she was an indígena, people think she was a witch and say things like that,” says the chastised Wilfredo in self-defense, and this time the bubbles burst before they float into the air.
“They used to say, señora, that don Abelardo was Matildita’s husband, although husband was just a way of speaking, because they were never married in a church even though they produced offspring, a male and several females. Around here a white man gets together with an Indian woman but he never marries her, and a white woman never marries or gets together with an Indian man. That is the custom.”
“They say that Indian women are versed in witchcraft,” insists Wilfredo, exposing himself to being hushed again, “and I know men that won’t eat food they’ve prepared so that they won’t fall prisoner to their fire, which isn’t healthy. So many men won’t let go of their Indian women because they have fallen under her spell and have renounced the cross.”
Like so many other antioqueños with colonizing blood, don Abelardo Monteverde was drawn to Ambalema by tobacco fever, built this stand with his own hands, and set up his restaurant here. The coal stoves, the ceramic sink, and the room where the family lived were in the back, where today there is an orchard with fruit trees. I look around: This is where Sayonara was born. Her mother, the Guahiba Indian, must have given birth to her squatting over a basin and hidden behind the bushes, with no help, not even complaining or celebrating.
“Matildita cooked, washed dishes, and waited on the tables, and thanks to her the establishment became famous and attracted a lot of people who were fans of her roast pork tolimense, her poteca de auyama, her stuffed goat, and her liver and onions. As I said, everything Matildita touched turned out delicious.”
“How did don Abelardo meet Matildita?” I ask.
“ ‘Meet’ isn’t the appropriate word. Let’s say instead that he captured her in one of those hunting expeditions that the white colonists organized in the eastern plains. It wasn’t vermin that they downed with their rifles or even mountain birds, but sometimes those too. They went out to guahibiar, that’s what they called it, and it meant to shoot at the Guahibo Indians, chasing them over those immense flatlands that offered no refuge, because between the bullet and the Indians there wasn’t a single tree in sight. They say that to prevent themselves from being killed,” señor Mantilla says to me, “the Guahibos shouted that they too were hiwi, which in their native language means ‘people,’ but the white men didn’t seem to understand.”
She was coming back from gathering fronds from the palms scattered in the forests that grow along the shores of the Río Inírida, and Abelardo, the antioqueño, wanted to bring her back alive. Since she had a pagan name and spoke a savage tongue, he baptized her Matilde and taught her Spanish, which was a civilized language.
“Despite her training, Matildita kept her bad habits and because of that she earned reprimands from don Abelardo; one day I saw him with my own eyes forbidding her to eat worms. ‘They’re good, moriche worms,’ she said with that difficult accent that she never lost. And she also said: ‘Bachao ants are delicious.’”
“Did she eat ants too?” The idea seemed hilarious to señorita Rosalba. “Maybe out of sight from her husband the little devil would stuff herself with ants! And why not, since up around Santander even the whites like ants roasted with salt. I remember that Matildita used to complain often about not being able to fry terecay turtles in oil. Matildita was also a bit of a scoundrel, and while everyone saw her as so self-sacrificing and submissive, she had her own character, she pitched fits and gave in to her habits, so while she may have prepared civilized food for her clients, she preferred for herself and her children wild yucca, sweet potatoes, yams, and red pepper, which are pig slop for white men and delicacies in the mouths of Indians.”
“She was endlessly working to keep her house and the restaurant in order, and besides cooking, she wove cotton and made cloth to dress her children and herself.”
“Don’t exaggerate, Julio, remember she was dirty and kept her children naked. She sent the eldest, the boy, to school, but not the girls, because she made them work,” says the señorita critically, and I imagine Sayonara and her sisters running around the place. I see them with their own faces and their long hair, but with the bodies of lizards, of cats, of dragonflies; dirty and illiterate, peeling potatoes and scrubbing dishes, as señorita Rosalba testifies, but agile and free, indomitable, capricious, and foul-mouthed.