A Tale of the Dispossessed

SEVENTEEN

Our shelter was already filled to the brim even before the arrival one afternoon of fifty-three survivors from the massacre at Amansagatos. They had all managed to escape the overpowering guerrillas by jumping into the waters of the Opón River, including the children, the elderly, and the wounded, and had then crossed the jungle in exhausting nightly journeys beside the silent riverbed. The nuns decided to take them in, despite the overcrowded conditions, and during this emergency, Three Sevens and I have had to share, as sleeping quarters, the hundred square feet of the administration office.

In order to separate, at least symbolically, his privacy from mine, we hung in the middle a wide piece of light fabric with a faded, big-flower print. We hung it low enough to clear the blades of the ceiling fan, which makes the fabric undulate and sway as it blows, creating a stagy atmosphere in the small room. For me the last few nights have been long and uncertain, with him sleeping on his side and me wide awake on mine, knowing he’s far away even though the same darkness shelters both of us and the same soft breeze brushes over our bodies.

A hundred times I have been about to move close to him, but I restrain myself: the short gap between us seems impossible to bridge. A hundred times I wanted to stretch my hand out to touch his, but such a simple movement seems imprudent and unfeasible, like trying to swim across a sea. I am overcome with the raw fear of the diver who wants to jump from a high cliff into a deep well and stops just at the edge, advancing inch by inch until his feet are next to the abyss, but right before the decisive moment, he decides to turn back, even though, in the flutter of vertigo, he has already sensed the contact with the waters that would have engulfed him. Everything pulls me over to his side. But I don’t dare. The flimsy fabric that divides our common space stops me like a stone wall, and the pale, showy flowers become like red traffic signals that tell me not to go. So, while I lie in wait, I have learned to recognize the various intensities of his breathing and have become familiar with the gibberish he mutters during his sleep.

“Did my Deep Sea Eyes have a good night’s rest?” he asks me at dawn when we meet in the kitchen.

“I did, but it seems you didn’t, judging by the rings under your eyes…,” I respond, testing the ground, and he laughs.

“How’s that for a compliment,” is all he says.

And that’s the way our night hours go by, one by one — he getting lost in his thoughts and I trying to find him. As soon as he falls asleep, I listen attentively, waiting for his unintelligible babble, to see if I can figure out what disturbs him. Once, just after five in the morning, when I was trying to unravel and make some sense of the web that has trapped him, I heard him scream. I could not contain my compassion for him, or perhaps for myself, and almost without thinking, I threw a shawl over my shoulders and crossed to the other side of the curtain.

Lately we had not spoken much to each other, despite our tight coexistence and so many shared chores; perhaps after the first impulse our mutual trust had congealed, or we feared reopening wounds that we already knew were incurable, or we simply had no time, because the endless tasks at the shelter did not leave any space for personal matters.

While the nuns were starting off their day with hurried steps along the corridor, I took a glass of water to Three Sevens and curled up at his feet, waiting for him to talk. But deep-seated silences are hard to break. He was keeping things to himself, and I was holding mine back, so we were each locking up our own procession of concerns. I was very anxious for him to break the silence, and he, by not talking, was leaving it to me.

Since his return from the capital, Three Sevens had not mentioned Matilde Lina again. I was glad about that and grateful to him, thinking that probably this was a good sign. But words not uttered have always frightened me, as if they were lurking out of sight just waiting for an occasion to jump in my face. Deep down I resented their absence as a loss, as if the most intimate link between us, the indispensable bridge for crossing from his isolation to mine, had been threatened.

I knew well that these thoughts were arbitrary and absurd; obviously the essential change in Three Sevens during the last weeks has been his excited emotional state, the self-assurance with which he has assumed his central position and leadership, his identification with the collective enthusiasm. Or rather, a display of inner strength that placed him at the axis of the collective enthusiasm. “He’s beside himself,” I commented to Mother Françoise when I saw him working without respite from dawn to well past midnight.

I write “beside himself” and wonder why the Western world gives such a negative charge to this expression, implying disintegration or madness. After all, to be beside oneself is precisely what allows being with the other, getting into another, being the other. Three Sevens was beside himself, and it seemed he was seeking liberation from the obsession that had enthralled him. So it seemed, but I could not be sure; and one should not underestimate one’s own fidelity to old griefs.

While he was drinking the water that I brought him, I decided to break the self-censorship that I had imposed upon myself in his presence and began telling him in detail about my coming to the shelter three years ago. I spoke about the deep bond I had with my mother, who has been eagerly waiting for my return; about the very loving memory I had of my father, dead for too long; of my university studies; of the children I never had; of my fondness for writing about all that happens to me.

“And about your loves, aren’t you going to tell me anything?” he asked me, and I thought: Either I speak now or never. But he had posed the question in such an offhand way, as if the issue had no bearing on him, that my last bit of courage simply evaporated.

“A woman like you must have broken many hearts. ..”

“In the past, maybe. At my age, the only heart that I break is my own.”

The church bells were already calling for six o’clock mass, and I knew that I had missed my opportunity. From the collective dormitories came the echo of some sleepy coughing, of a radio blaring its rosary of news, and the asthmatic hum of the electric fan died down as bright sunlight entered our room and I had to rush out to do my breakfast chores.

Three Sevens came into the dining hall, and while I was busy distributing the white cheese, bread, and cups of cocoa, I desperately racked my brain for a word that could bring him close to me.

He burned his lips from drinking the boiling hot chocolate and then went up to the mirror that hangs over the dish rack. I saw him putting hair gel on his comb and paste on his toothbrush. He brushed his teeth, and as he was thanking me for breakfast and saying good-bye while I gathered the dishes, I was well aware that if it wasn’t now, it would never be.

“It is not Matilde Lina that you’re looking for,” I risked finally, and my words started rolling among the empty tables in the dining hall. “Matilde Lina is only the name that you have given to all that you’re looking for.”

Tonight a heavy rainstorm is falling like a benediction on the overheated shelter, dissipating the tension due to the excess of human presence. I came to bed earlier than usual, and now I have been awake for hours, listening in the dark for the bursts of rain pelting the tin roof, the irregular roar of the electric plant, the hiss of the corner lamplight as it casts its green light on a circle of rain. It is still dark, yet the first rooster is crowing and the air outside fills with the flutter of noisy seagulls screeching like macaques. The rooster crows and crows until it forces the humidity to rise. I turn on the fan, which, with its toy-helicopter racket, dumps its artificial breeze on me.

Everything is running well, I confirm, and notice without surprise that the beneficial calm that is spreading outside has also reached my heart. It’s been more than a month since the parish priest from Vistahermosa and his colorful court left, but the spell of their solidarity still wields its protection over us. Life is so bountiful, I think, and death, after all, is so gentle. For the moment, the anguish that seems to hover over the shelter has receded, dissolving modestly into the ample space of its opposite, a splendor that dazzles me on this quiet night and creates in me the desire to believe that better days are coming, despite everything. For the first time since I met Three Sevens, anxiety has released its grip on my heart. This peace resembles happiness, I think, and since I want neither the wind nor sleep to diffuse it, I feel grateful for staying awake and turn the fan off.

The nuns’ morning prayers already float around the shelter, and I hear Three Sevens’s footsteps as he enters his half of the room. Due to some predictably favorable parallelism, the scattered fragments of the whole are fitting into place with the amazing naturalness of a fulfilled destiny.

Through the dividing curtain I make out his silhouette, and I know that Three Sevens is sitting on his cot, and that he is delaying taking off his shirt, button by button. In the semidarkness, I imagine his head of hair and feel his breathing, like that of an animal in repose. The scent of his body reaches me vividly, and I watch him taking down the flimsy fabric with blurred images that separated us.