A Tale of the Dispossessed

FOUR

Doña Perpetua, who is very old, is the only person who knows what I want to know. She was married and had her own children on the night that she saw, at the portico of the church, the newly found boy with the fanciful foot. Later they crossed the red seas of their exodus until calamities separated them. After a wide gap of years, and thanks to the vagaries of their errant lives, she happened to come across him, now an adult, here at this shelter for wanderers.

Doña Perpetua is engaged in an endless struggle, lost beforehand, against an instrument of torture made of wires and rose paste that she proudly calls “my dental prosthesis.” While she champs at it but cannot manage to make it fit, she continues her story.

“I saw Matilde Lina teaching this boy how to train a chumbilá. She was making circles in the air with a thin bamboo pole until the bat came flying obediently and perched itself on the pole.” Perpetua copies the action, and her attempts to repeat the flexible circles with her arm and to mimic the bat’s snout with her mouth make me smile. “They would search around every pond looking for hundred-eyed frogs — the eyes are of the offspring they carry between their many folds of skin. Both the woman and the boy lived on weeds and aguadijas, the spongy ones that know how to soak up water,” Perpetua continues, lowering her voice so no one will overhear. “That’s what people said, that Matilde Lina and the boy lived only on purslane and brushwood. While everybody else toiled and suffered, they spent their time serenely, lost in talk and contemplation. The spirit of the forest took care of them, or at least that’s what we said, to avoid feeling responsible for them since we all had enough, and sometimes too much, trying to take care of ourselves.”

It was also because of an animal that Three Sevens got separated from Matilde Lina, after thirteen years of finding in her arms the warm center of the world. During one of those starvation periods in which people were willing to eat even the soles of their shoes, it occurred to them to pick up a female cat and her brood of kittens that they had found in the ruins of an abandoned farm. The animals were scrawny, gawky, toothy, and devilish with hunger. They had to take care of them in secret, lest others in the caravan who were starving might eat them, since anything with hair, feathers, or scales was quite welcome.

“Are they going to die?” asked Three Sevens, who, like the cats, had become a bundle of bones and anxiety.

One Tuesday, while fog and famine were making life dreary, the ill-humored caravan was advancing through a muddy region called Las Aguilas when those in the rear guard came to the front with the warning that Sergeant Moravia and a fiercely armed National Army squad, through a quick maneuver, had them surrounded.

“Charro Lindo, our man in charge, was easily recognizable as a handsome ladies’ man and because he wore around his neck a little flask where he kept ashes of what had been his family home,” Perpetua tells me. “But he was also well-known for his pitifully odorous feet, which emanated a nauseating smell after being always jammed inside his rubber boots. He had become notorious for this problem, his foul-smelling feet being his only defect as a lover, according to the girls who shared his blanket at night.”

Charro Lindo had been told that the only remedy for his pestilence was to soak his feet in potassium permanganate dissolved in lukewarm water, and he, anguished by the affliction that hurt his pride and made him the center of both covert and open scorn, put so much faith in this formula that he ventured forth against common sense, paying no attention to survival precautions in hostile territory. In order to locate a more civilized place where the remedy could be obtained, he discovered an escape route down the mountain. Fate brought him to Bienaventuranzas, a village that in the end did not live up to its beatific name, but quite the opposite. Unwittingly, Charro Lindo had made the mistake of dragging behind him the rest of the caravan, more than three hundred people, into the swampy domain of the notorious, diehard Conservative butcher Sergeant Moravia, who had subjected by force the entire population of that extensive neighboring region.

When he realized he had led them into a trap, Charro Lindo did not think of anything better than to pull his favorite girlfriend up on his black mule, behind the saddle, and to tell his people to run for their lives. “We’ll see each other again, if not in this life, in the next,” the handsome outlaw shouted, and just like that, with the flask of charred soil around his neck and waving his big Mexican hat, he gave orders to disband.