A Tale of the Dispossessed

SIX

I wonder how a kid only twelve or thirteen, as Three Sevens must have been, could have resisted such a blow. How long was he given to periods of silence, how deep into the waters of his inner being was he thrust? What kinds of perplexities did he need to wade through before the day that, summoning all his energies, he put himself afloat again, transformed into the man I love without any hopes of reciprocation?

“His worst enemy has always been his guilt,” Perpetua tells me, backing her argument with the authority of someone who knew him long before tragedy struck.

“Guilt?”

“Guilt, for not having been able to prevent their dragging her away. Guilt for not searching hard enough for her. Guilt for still being alive, for breathing, eating, walking: he believes all of that is betraying her. As the years go by without his finding her, he gets more and more entangled in a web of recriminations that haunt him while he’s awake and batter him when he’s asleep.”

How can this be, if at the shelter Three Sevens preaches the habit of forgiveness? “The mistakes of the past are left at the door. He who takes refuge here should know that from now on, all his unpaid accounts are with his conscience and with God.” This is the warning he offers to all, even to those who bring with them a scandalous reputation, be it as a thief, whore, guerrilla, or murderer. To those who gossip about the sullied pasts of others, he says outright: “Cut that out, Mr. So-and-so, in this shelter nobody is good or evil.”

“This is the kind of reasoning that entangles all reason,” the old woman tells me. “The only one Three Sevens cannot forgive is himself.”

“Why does he have to pay for a crime he didn’t commit?” I inquire. “Why does he have to punish himself so?”

“Because his guilt follows different twists and turns, Three Sevens did not really look upon Matilde Lina as his mother,” she says, revealing what I already know better than anybody else. “I had seven children and lost three, and I know very well how a son looks at his mother. Matilde Lina had an extravagant temperament, but she was a woman of strong presence, with a girlish face and large breasts. Many lusted after her body and did not succeed because she knew how to kick and bite to defend herself. I saw her washing by the river, her blouse open, half-unbuttoned, with Three Sevens at her side, a growing boy beginning to show fuzz on his face and in other places he dared not confess. Her breasts were exposed, and the boy looked at them, as still as a rock, gasping for breath and becoming a man before that vision.”

I can also see Matilde Lina by the water’s edge, busy in her occupation, immersed in herself and unaware of her nakedness, at a moment of deep intimacy that is not disrupted by anything, not even the stirring that burns in the boy’s gaze.

“Of course, he was not the first adolescent to stare at his mother’s breasts,” I object to Perpetua, and she laughs.

“No, of course not,” she answers. “And he will not be the first one to keep searching for them in all the other breasts that cross his way.”