A Tale of the Dispossessed

SEVEN

After the caravan’s stampede on the day that Matilde Lina disappeared, Three Sevens was not the only one abandoned on Las Aguilas Peak. Through a wise quirk of fate, which is not as arbitrary as people suspect, there was also the image known as the Dancing Madonna, all alone and half-sunk in the thick of the churning bog.

“At the time of the ambush, our patron Madonna did not grant us any protection,” Three Sevens still recriminates, and he tells me that when he noticed her lying powerless in the mud, he felt his face burning red in a surge of rancor.

“Old piece of lumber! Selfish, unfair, and lazy! Miserable wooden doll!” were the blasphemous words he recalls screaming at her. “For years we helped carry you on our shoulders as if you weighed nothing. We kept candles lighted around you at night, and by day we protected you from the rigors of the climate with a canopy worthy of a duchess, only to have you finally let disaster fall upon us anyway.”

Trying to push away the aura of loneliness that had suddenly returned to him, Three Sevens cast the blame on the Dancing Madonna for the disappearance of Matilde Lina, the only companion that life had not taken away from him, and he started hurling those insults, and more severe ones, until he realized that this lady, who had appeared before to be dancing a sevillana, now with the same gestures seemed to be just flailing in the mud. “Not only had she failed to protect us, but quite the opposite: she herself was in urgent need of protection.”

“Then I forgave her, and took on the obligation of carrying her all by myself. So I rescued her from the swamp, polished her as best I could, hoisted her on my shoulders, and started walking in directions as yet unknown either to her or to me, and which we were in no condition to determine. ‘I ask you a thousand times to forgive me, my Blessed Queen, but your procession ends here.’ This was my warning, so that she would start forgetting her former privilege of being carried on a litter and resign herself, once and for all, to doing without her candles, or psalms and hymns, or garlands of roses made just for her. ‘From now on,’ I told her frankly, ‘you will have to be traveling in poverty and on Indian shoulders, with this jute sack as your only mantle and this sisal rope as your only luxury. Which means, my Queen, that your reign is over; now you’ll go around like everybody else.’”

“God, who never forsakes His children, wanted to give her to him as partner and guardian,” says Perpetua, blessing herself and kissing a cross that she forms by placing her thumb over her index finger. And I realize, beginning to piece things together, that Matilde Lina and the Dancing Madonna, strangely, must be a single image, both mother and Virgin, both equally love-giving and unreachable.

Life, overwhelmingly, continued its course, and people fended for themselves as best they could. Owing to a lack of witnesses, I have been able to reconstruct the following decades only in patches. Three Sevens, as I said, does not talk about himself, but I know that he survived into adulthood against all indications. I suppose that he beat the odds thanks to his pilgrim’s doggedness, the solidarity laws of the road, the shelter provided by the generous, and the benevolence of his patron Virgin. Perhaps he was greatly helped by that lucky sixth toe and, above all, by his stubborn determination to keep searching for his loved one.

The so-called Little War had ended, and a new one that didn’t even have a name was decimating the population, when Three Sevens appeared in this sweltering oil city of Tora, dressed like a peasant in white cotton, with his Dancing Virgin in his pack, wrapped in plastic and tied with a cord, and with the idea well fixed in his head that, according to some information obtained from a woman in San Vicente de Chucurí, here he would finally find his Matilde Lina.

“Did you already look for her in Tora?” that woman asked. “I knew someone there who made her living by washing and ironing and who just fits your description.”

Hundreds of people, urged by necessity, were flocking every day to that carnival of miracles, in hopes of finding salvation in black gold and attracted by floating rumors of a promising future.

“You can find work there; the oil refinery needs people.”

“In two months my uncle made enough to live on for a whole year.”

“Oil money reaches everybody.”

“In Tora things will go better for you.”

While the men dreamed of finding a job in the refinery, prostitutes and girls of marrying age dreamed of catching an oil worker, famous around the country for being well paid, single, and spendthrift. It was rumored that the money they freely spent was enough not only to keep wives and mistresses, but also to provide well-being for the women selling food in the fields, street vendors of corn on the cob and meat turnovers, along with masseurs, prayer women, distillers of firewater, dressmakers, striptease dancers, and lottery vendors.

Three Sevens followed his own dream, not shared with anyone. He went through the territory against the flow of the crowds, with the singular intent of encountering just around the next corner, face-to-face, his “Desaparecida,” so for him every corner brought first anxiety and then disappointment.

“I bought a medal of gold and a lace shirt for her,” he tells me, “so if I met her, I would not be caught by surprise without a present. And I could not indulge in the luxury of taking a rest, because I might fall asleep and not see her as she passed by.”

A medal of gold and a lace shirt… A medal of gold and a lace shirt. Tonight I can’t sleep, because it’s too hot. And because I have learned that he once wanted to give her a medal of gold and a lace shirt.

“Everybody ends up here, and sooner or later she too will come,” Three Sevens used to repeat to himself whenever he felt his faith start to quaver. He lived among the men by the refinery fence, allowing time to go by, but he did not make common cause with them. The fence men hold on to their hope, clinging to the high mesh wire that surrounds the refinery to keep out outsiders and those lacking IDs. Standing there for one, two, or even five months, in sunlight and starlight, they wait to be let in and have their names entered on the payroll. They gather in bunches along the wire fence, holding on to a promise that nobody has made, waiting for the opportunity that life owes them.

In the midst of this growing crowd, Three Sevens watched all kinds of people walking about, going in circles, expectant and alert: welders who had come following the voices of the oil pipes from Tauramena, Cusiana, or Saudi Arabia; grinders who had already tried their luck in Saldaña, Paratebueno, or Iraq; graduates from a technical institute; master technicians, adventurers, and novice engineers — with Three Sevens being the strangest one, wandering without any other purpose than to ask if by chance anyone knew or had seen or heard about a quiet Sasaimite woman with shifting eyes by the name of Matilde Lina, who earned her living as a washerwoman. If somebody asked him for more details, he just murmured that she was like everybody else, neither tall nor short, neither white nor black, not pretty or ugly, either, not lame or harelipped, and with no birthmarks on her face. There was nothing, absolutely nothing that would distinguish her from the others, except for the many years of his life that he had invested in searching for her.

The opportunities for employment were good for the first to arrive, enough for those who arrived next but scarce for those who followed. The company ended the hiring, and from then on, the rest just waited and waited for countless days for the wire fence to open and let them in.

“We had convinced ourselves that oil was the magic wand that could right every wrong,” says Perpetua, who also came to Tora riding on that illusion. “Perhaps it was so at the beginning, but not true later, though the idea, like a stone in one’s shoe, was firmly embedded in many people’s minds. While some quickly left, pushed out by frustration, others came in. We saw them arrive, without any luggage but with an expectant gaze that we could easily identify because, at some point, all of us had that same look. Those of us who arrived first bunched together to make room for them, but without offering any warnings, because experience itself would eventually darken their hopeful gaze.

With the passing of time and the lack of food, the men by the wire fence grew skinnier. The women selling turnovers took up their baskets and went to another plaza looking for customers, and the unmarried girls began to dream of military men or emerald hunters. Even Three Sevens’s unflappable disposition was showing signs of fatigue and hopelessness. On one dizzy evening that hangs heavily on his conscience, having already spent his last paper bill on a white rum spree, he gave away the lace blouse he had bought for Matilde Lina to the first young whore with an honest smile that he met, and after an hour of love, he also slipped the medal on her.

And now here I am, thinking about all of this, so far from my own surroundings, and lying in this disorderly bed, unable to sleep. On account of the heat. On account of the noise from the electric plant. On account of the fear that lurks at night in every dark corner of this besieged place. On account of knowing that a man named Three Sevens, if that could be a name, once long ago bought for his loved one, a lace shirt and a medal of gold.