A Tale of the Dispossessed

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.