A Tale of the Dispossessed

FOURTEEN

I can’t see how, but Mother Françoise has discovered what is tormenting my heart.

“It does not seem prudent to fall in love with one of the displaced,” she casually dropped on me the other day, just like that, without preamble, though I hadn’t breathed a word to her.

“So it does not seem prudent to you, Mother?” I countered, charging my question with all the ill feelings I had accumulated since the bad smells had started. “And is there anything going on here that has the slightest connection with prudence?”

Mother Françoise’s meddling bothers me because I would a thousand times prefer to have no witnesses to this absurd, unanswered love. But the foul smell of burnt hooves bothers me more than that or, should I say, makes my life impossible, because it coincides with the present crisis for the security of the shelter, and with the fact that it’s already three months since Three Sevens left for the capital in his effort to contact a certain organization that might help locate Matilde Lina. In all that time we have received no news from him, no communication about the possibility of his return. So I add to the external pressures the uncertainty about ever seeing him again, and the anxiety is eating me up. What saves me is some compensatory instinct that must regulate the body’s humors, and which, when I am at my wits’ end, somehow calms the tide of grief and grounds my spirit on the shoals of apathy.

I wrote down the phone numbers of Three Sevens’s contacts in the capital, but with enormous effort, I’ve refrained from calling to find out how he’s doing. Am I going to be looking for him while he’s looking for her? At least I have enough pride left not to do that.

The nasty odor comes from a tallow factory installed on a parcel of land across from the shelter. Every morning the workers bring from the slaughterhouse six or seven carloads of cattle hooves that are burned in the plant all day long to extract the tallow, which poisons the entire area with a sickening vapor. First there is the foul smell of burnt hair that later turns into a culinary smell, capable of stimulating the appetite of those blissfully unaware. Very soon this second tonality of odor becomes suspiciously sweet, like the roasting of overripe meat — very overripe; in fact, putrid. The home kitchen aroma then turns into a garbage dump stench, and the nausea it causes makes me want to escape on the run. I suppose the hooves are composed of the same substance as the horns, and I realize that the popular Spanish expression “It smells like burnt horn” is no idle comparison. The smell invading us now is on an uncertain path from fresh to rotten, and I have come to believe that it emanates not only from the tallow factory, but from our own bodies and belongings as well. My skin, my clothes, the water I try to bring to my lips, the paper I use to write, are all saturated with this morbid odor, treacherously organic, like that of a wretched Lazarus trying, and failing, to come back from the dead. It envelops me, envelops all of us, in its raw and tenacious ambivalence.

But topping all that happens in the shelter, always critical these days, is the particularly difficult situation we are now going through owing to the latest pronouncements by Commander Oquendo, of the Twenty-fifth Brigade, located right here in Tora. He has declared that the shelter is a refuge for terrorists and criminals, funded from abroad and camouflaged under the banner of so-called human rights organizations, concluding that we serve as a front for armed subversion. He says that in the face of such deceit, the forces in charge of keeping the public order have their hands tied. It is obvious that he is looking for an excuse to untie his hands and ignore human rights codes in order to proceed against us. And now, behind the challenged symbolic protection of our walls, we are waiting for the army to storm us or to send over a death squad at any moment.

Perhaps if I smoked, I could flood myself with nicotine and find some diversion from these days, so distressing that they seem theatrical; but since I don’t, I have taken up reading as if compelled to obliterate any free space for my own thoughts. However, everything I read seems to refer to me, to have been written with the sole intent to thwart my escape. There is apparently no solution, then, no possible way out. Not even through reading. Tora, with its war and its struggles, Three Sevens and Matilde Lina, Mother Françoise, and myself are hopelessly filling every available crevice, flooding the whole landscape with our burnt smell, and marking with our own pollution even books written elsewhere.

At this moment, Three Sevens seems to have disappeared from the map, perhaps finally reunited with Matilde Lina in that never-never land where she reigns. Sometimes I wish with all my heart that it has been so, for him to discover that she is just of average height and that she drags around petty miseries like all of us.

“Be merciful, O Lord,” I plead to a divinity in which I have never believed, nor do I now. “Don’t make me love someone who does not love me. Send me, if you wish, the other Seven Plagues, but for mercy’s sake, relieve me of this one, and also of this intolerable deathly smell that surrounds me. Amen.”