A Tale of the Dispossessed

EIGHT

This place is alien to me and alien to all that is familiar. It is ruled by special codes that require an enormous and constant effort at interpretation on my part. However, for reasons that I can’t quite understand, this is where the deepest and most essential part of my being is called into play. It is here that a voice, muddled but demanding, summons me. Because in my own way, though the others are unaware of it, I too belong to this wandering multitude, which drags me through blessings and disappointments with the powerful sway of its ebb and flow.

Three Sevens is not aware, either. Like the rest of them, he sees me as an anchor, as one of the pillars in the place that has offered him shelter somewhere along his journey without end. He is getting now to the point that I have already reached: but how or why I got here, where I came from, where I am going, he never questions. He takes my steadfastness for granted, and, knowing how uncertain that is, I invite him to rely on it nonetheless. I do this in deepest sincerity, with the notion that if I stay on, it is simply so that he — he and those with him — might be able to make it. It feels strangely seductive to act as safe harbor while knowing one is adrift.

But what to do with Matilde Lina — the Undefinable, the Perplexed, the One Who Vanished? And how to get rid of her intangible presence? With her heavy eyelids, her nebulous hair, and her faint heartbeat, she belongs to a ghostly world that utterly escapes my control. Her tragedy and her mystery fascinate and disturb Three Sevens, luring him like a powerful abyss. She is a fierce rival. No matter which way I think about it, I can’t see how to defeat her enormous presence, conceived in the imagination of a man who has been shaping it throughout his lifetime into his own likeness, until he found the perfect fit within the confines of his memories, and of his guilt and desires.

“Let her sleep, do her that favor,” I say to Three Sevens. “You are the one who keeps her imprisoned in the torment of her false wakefulness. Let her drift away in peace; do not incite her with the insistence of your remembrance.”

“And if she were alive?” he asks me. “If she’s still alive, I cannot bury her; and if she’s dead, I have to bury her. I cannot just leave her, abandoned and restless like a wandering soul. Whether she’s dead or alive, I must find her.”

“Have you considered the possibility that this might not be feasible?” I say cautiously, letting each word out slowly.

“And what if she is looking for me? What if she is unable to have a life of her own because she is so attached to mine? And what if she suffers from thinking that I’m also suffering?”

“Well, then, let’s go dancing,” I proposed to him the other night. “Here in your country I have learned that when problems have no solution, the best thing one can do is to go dancing.”

It was a cool Saturday in December, and he accepted. We drove down in the nuns’ truck to a popular dance place, Quinto Patio, in the very center of Tora. Christmas was approaching, and in the narrow streets bedecked with colored lights, people of goodwill were sharing custards and sweets, singing carols accompanied by penny whistles and tambourines, and stopping at the crèches to recite the season’s prayers. Neither the quicksilvery moon that embraced us, nor the sweet scent of jasmine, nocturnal and intense, nor the blare from the jukeboxes playing the Niche Group’s salsa from Cali, nor even the upcoming celebration of the birth of the King of the Heavens had managed to stop the killings. Once in a while the war would explode its insidiousness in our faces: gunshots on one corner or an explosion in the distance, while at the same time, the mad euphoria of being alive, so characteristic of this indescribable land, swelled all around us.

“There’s no country on earth as beautiful as this one,” I told Three Sevens that night while we were buying green mango slices sprinkled with salt from a street vendor.

“No, there isn’t, nor a more murderous one, either.”

In the cozy, red semidarkness of Quinto Patio, Three Sevens and I started dancing, shy merengues at first and passionate salsas later, which he, like a true Colombian, performed nimbly while I tried to follow his steps in spite of my clumsy foreign feet.

“I must ask you something, Three Sevens,” I blurted out, making him interrupt his joyful dancing.

“Oh, come on, why so serious? What can possibly be troubling my Deep Sea Eyes?”

“Tell me, what happened to the cats?”

“Cats? Which cats are those?”

“The hungry cats that you and Matilde Lina were taking care of when you were ambushed.”

“Oh, those cats. Nothing happened to them.”

“How do you know?”

“Because nothing can happen to cats.”

Later that night, just before dawn, and with a full bottle of rum tucked away, we danced a final bolero, very close and slow as it should be, and without remorse. Shielded by its pulsating rhythms and tragic words about broken wineglasses and frustrated loves, Three Sevens and I, happy, light-headed, and by then half-drunk, got closer without eagerly seeking each other, without any urgency, without asking for the other’s consent.

“How long does a bolero last?” I now ask Doña Perpetua.

“The old ones, about five minutes; the new ones, not more than three.”

Not more than three. .. The next day, which started as a Sunday but dragged on so slowly into a colorless afternoon that it might as well have been a Tuesday, I met Three Sevens in front of the bread ovens. He was taciturn and enveloped in a distancing cloud. Again he had Matilde Lina’s shadow, limp and ethereal, draped around his neck as if it were a gray silk scarf.