A Tale of the Dispossessed

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.