The Armies

~ ~ ~

I do not find Otilia at home. I am in the garden, which is unchanged, as if nothing had happened, although everything has happened: I see the ladder there, leaning against the wall; in the fountain the flashing orange fish swim; one of the cats stretching in the sun looks at me, makes me think of Geraldina’s eyes, Geraldina dressed in black overnight.

“Profesor,” a voice shouts from the door, which I have left open.

In the doorway waits Sultana, with her daughter, the girl who was looking after Mauricio Rey on his sick day. As if Rey had sent her to me. But it is nothing to do with Mauricio Rey: it is my own wife, I find out, who has arranged with Sultana for her daughter to come and help once a week in the orchard.

“We met your wife at the corner,” Sultana explains. “She told me she was going to ask about you at the presbytery. You’ll have to go and find her; this is no day to be wandering the streets.”

I listen to Sultana, but I see only the girl: she no longer has messy hair, or the same look in her eyes; now she is just an impatient child, or maybe bored at the thought of work.

“It won’t be much,” I encourage her. “You just have to finish picking the oranges and then you can go home.”

Otilia has brought me temptation in person, and she does not even know it. The girl is wearing a simple dress and goes barefoot, but she does not shine now, she drifts down the corridor in little hops, peeks through the kitchen door, timidly looks at the two bedrooms, the living room, she fidgets, vulnerable and scrawny, like a little bird. She does not look like her mother: Sultana is large, big-boned, strong; she is wearing her eternal, incandescent red baseball cap; her prominent belly does not diminish her strength: she cleans the church, the police station, the town hall all on her own, washes and irons clothes, makes her living that way and wants her daughter to do the same.

“See that, Cristina?” she asks. “You’ll come here once a week, it’s easy to find.”

They carry on out into the garden. The agitation, the shock of seeing this girl walking, of pursuing and perusing this girl, perceiving the fatality of the wild aroma, raw but sharp, that each of her steps gives off, makes you forget what is most important to you in the world, Ismael. I shall speak to her, sooner or later I shall make her laugh, tell her a tale and, while she is up the ladder, I shall surely pick flowers nearby.

“I’ve never seen your garden,” Sultana says. “You’ve got fish, you like flowers, profesor. You or your wife?”

“Both of us.”

“I have to go,” she suddenly shouts to the sky, says good-bye to her daughter with a wave: “I’ll come back for you, don’t go anywhere, stay right here,” and she shakes my hand with a man’s strength, and leaves the house.

Cristina stands looking at me in the middle of a shaft of sunshine fragmented from passing through the branches of the orange tree. She blinks. She runs a shining hand over an even shinier face: does she remember me?

“I’m so thirsty,” she says.

“Go to the kitchen. Make some lemonade, there’s ice.”

“Ice.” As if pronouncing a supernatural word she runs past me, leaving me plunged in the blend of her breeze, am I staggering? I stretch out in the rocking chair, at the edge of the sun, and stay there, hearing the distant kitchen noise, the fridge door that opens, closes, the glasses and the ice clinking, the force with which Cristina pushes and strains with the lemons, wringing them out. Then nothing is heard: how much time has gone by? I grow tired of looking at my knees, my shoes; I raise my eyes: a blurry bird flies soundlessly between the trees. It is the afternoon silence, which increases in the garden, becomes hardened, remote, as if it were night time and the whole world asleep. The atmosphere, from one moment to the next, is unbreathable; it might rain at dusk; a slow feeling of unease overtakes everything, not just human, but plants, the cats who watch from nearby, the unmoving fish; it is as if one were not inside one’s own house, despite being so, as if we found ourselves in the middle of the street, in the sight of all weapons, defenceless, with no wall to protect your body and your soul, what is going on? What is happening to me? Is it that I am going to die?

When the girl comes back with the glasses of lemonade, keen to drink her own, I no longer recognize her: who is this young girl who looks at me, who talks to me? Never in my life have I forgotten like this, out of the blue, worse than a slap in the face. It is as if, in all this time, a cloth of fog had fallen on top of the sun, darkening everything: that is why I suddenly felt an enormous fear that Otilia is alone, today, walking through these peaceful streets where it is possible the war will come again. Let it come, let it return, I say to myself, shout to myself, but not with my Otilia without me.

“Smithereens,” I say aloud, and stand up to leave.

“Aren’t you going to have some lemonade?”

“You have mine,” I tell the girl, recognizing her at last, and, lost, I ask her, “Where did Sultana tell me Otilia was going?”

She looks at me perplexed, not understanding.

But eventually: “To the presbytery.”

Why would you think, Otilia, that I am at the presbytery? It has been years since I have gone to see the priest.

My arms and legs swing with no rhythm whatsoever as I proceed along the streets as if through piles of cotton, what bad dream do these empty, uneasy streets belong to; down each of them I am pursued by physical, floating, dark air, although I see that the sun weighs heavily on the streets: why did I not bring my hat? To think that not long ago I prided myself on my memory, one of these days I am going to forget myself, I shall leave me forgotten in some corner of the house, forget to take myself out for a walk, the neighbors are doing the right thing — I say, I repeat — there are fewer and fewer people in the town, and with reason, anything could happen, everything could happen, and whatever happens there will be war, screams will echo, powder will explode, I only stop saying it when I discover that I am talking out loud as I walk, to whom, to whom?

Only in the plaza are there scattered groups of men; their voices can be heard and occasionally a whistle, as if it were a Sunday. I make for the door of the presbytery, just past the entrance to the church itself, but before touching the knocker I turn back: in the plaza the same dispersed groups, apparently calm, habitual, turn to inspect me briefly: seeing them really is as if they were all flooded in fog, the same fog I saw in the garden; is it that I am going to die today? A silence identical to the fog encloses our faces, from all sides. It is possible that shots will be heard, from here, or that they will reach our very ears, graze them. Then it will be time to flee. I knock with haste. Señora Blanca opens the door. Her nervous, powdered face peeks out around the edge of the door. She is Father Albornoz’s assistant, his sacristan, his right hand, the one who collects money during mass and probably counts it, while Father Albornoz rests, soaking his feet in a pail of salted water, as I saw him do on every one of my visits.

“Your wife has just left,” says the woman. “She was here, asking for you.”

“I am playing cat and mouse with Otilia,” I tell her.

I am about to say goodbye, but she interrupts me.

“The Father wants to see you.” And she opens the door all the way.

I see the priest, at the back, his aquiline profile, in his black habit, his black schoolboy shoes, Bible in hand: the churchyard cherimoya and lemon trees form a backdrop to his grey head, the cool garden, beautified by large azalea bushes and clumps of geraniums.

“Father Albornoz, I am looking for my wife.”

“Come in, come in, profesor, just for a coffee.”

He was another of my pupils, from the age of eight. I was a boy as well: I was only twenty-two years old when I returned to San José to the teacher’s post, and began to teach for the first time in my life, getting used to the idea that it would be for three years at most in my home town, out of gratitude, and then I would go, where? I never knew, and in any case I never went, because here I would end up, almost buried. Something similar happened to Horacio Albornoz: he left and came back as a priest. He came to pay his respects the first day.

He still remembered the poem by Pombo that he and his classmates memorized for me: And this magnificent carpet Oh Earth! Who to you gave it? And the trees to cool and shade it? And the Earth says: God did.

“I’m sure my vocation springs from there,” he told me, laughing.

And we began to visit each other once a week: we would drink coffee at my house or in the presbytery, we talked about the news in the paper, the Pope’s latest dictates, and once in a while a confidence or two would slip out, until we reached that rare state of mind that allows us to believe there is another friend in the world.

A few months after Albornoz came back as a priest, a woman arrived in San José with a baby girl in her arms; she got down from the dusty bus — the only passenger — and went directly to the presbytery, in search of help and work. Father Albornoz, who up till then had refused the sporadic offers from several ladies of good will to take charge of his cleaning, his cooking and making his bed, of his clothes and his meager things, immediately accepted the stranger into the parish. She is now Señora Blanca, who over the years has become the sacristan. Her daughter is now one of the many girls who left, years ago; and Señora Blanca goes on being just a shadow, silently kind, so delicate she seems invisible.

One afternoon years ago, when instead of having coffee we were drinking wine, three bottles of Spanish wine that the Bishop of Neiva had given him, Father Albornoz asked the sacristan to leave us alone. He was sad in spite of the wine, his eyes were watery, his mouth downcast: I even thought he might burst into tears.

“And if not you, who can I tell?” he said at last.

“Me.” I said.

“Or the Pope,” he answered, “if I were brave enough.”

Such an opening worried me. The priest was a grimace of repentance. He spent a long minute screwing up his courage to begin before allowing me to gather, through puerile allusions, and without neglecting the wine, that Señora Blanca was also his woman, and that the girl was the daughter of them both, that they slept in the same bed like any married couple every night in this peaceable town. I know very well that savage gossip did the rounds from the start, when the woman and child arrived after him, but it occurred to none of us to be scandalized. What for?

“And what does it matter?” I told him. “Was that not a healthy and sane attitude, so different to the ones adopted by so many other priests in so many countries, hypocrisy, bitterness, even perversion, abuse, rape of children? Did he not go on being, most importantly, the parish priest?”

“Yes,” he replied in confusion, his eyes attentive, as if it had never occurred to him. But he added: “It is not easy to overcome. One suffers, before and after.”

After another minute he decided: “What I am never going to give up is the Lord’s work, my mission, in the midst of the daily sadness of this country.”

And it seemed that, at last, in this way, he had found the absolution that he needed. I still wanted to tell him, excusing him: “You are certainly not the first, this is very common in many towns,” but I began to speak of other things: now he seemed to have tremendous regret at having confided his secret to me, and perhaps desired that I would soon leave, and soon forget it, but I shall never forget the shadow of Señora Blanca, that afternoon, when she saw me to the door, the wide mute smile on her face, so grateful she seemed to be about to kiss me.

There I left them years ago, here I find them.

There I left them because Father Albornoz never asked me to visit again, and nor did he visit me. Here I find them, the same but older, while we sit in the small reception room of the presbytery, with the frosted window overlooking the plaza. After the attack two years ago, Father Albornoz traveled to Bogotá and persuaded the government to pay for the resurrection of the dynamited church: allowing the church to remain destroyed would be a victory for the destroyers, whoever they were, he argued; so another church rose in the same place, a better house for God and for the Father, said Dr. Orduz, who unlike the priest did not obtain any aid for his hospital.

If the priest is going to talk to me in front of Señora Blanca, it is not possible, I think, that Otilia has confided in him about my wall and my ladder, my secret. Otilia: you would not be able to undergo my confession in my place. So, what is he going to say? We drink our coffee without a word. On the other side of the frosted window one can make out the whole plaza, the tall oaks that surround it, the imposing town hall. The plaza is a sort of sloping rectangle; we, in the presbytery, are up above; the town hall is down below.

“And if it happens again?” the Father asks me, if the guerrillas get as far as this plaza, as before?”

“I don’t think so,” I tell him. “I don’t think they will this time.”

We hear some screams, from the plaza. Señora Blanca does not flinch; she sips her coffee as if she were in heaven.

“I only wanted to tell you, Ismael, to come back and see me, and soon. Come back as a friend, or as a penitent, whenever you want; don’t forget me, what’s wrong with you? If I don’t visit you it’s because of what happened today, what’s happened since yesterday, and what will happen tomorrow, unfortunately for this town in torment. We no longer have the right to have friends. We must struggle and pray even in our dreams. But the doors of the church are open to all, my duty is to receive the lamb who has gone astray.”

His sacristan watches him transfixed. As for me, it seems that Otilia did confess on my behalf.

“These are difficult days for everyone,” the priest goes on. “Uncertainty reigns even in the heart, and that is when we must put to the test our faith in God, who sooner or later will redeem us entirely.”

I stand up.

“Thank you, Father, for the coffee. I have to go and find Otilia. You know better than anyone that this is no day to be wandering the streets looking for each other.”

“She came here specifically, asking after you, and we talked. That reminded me of how long it has been since we've seen each other, Ismael. Don’t be such a recluse.”

He sees me to the door, but there we stop, immersed in an unexpected, whispered conversation: so many things have happened that we have not discussed — because of absence — that we try to go over everything, in one minute, and so we recall, in still quieter voices, Father Ortiz, from El Tablón, whom we knew, who was killed, after being tortured, by paramilitaries: they burned his testicles, chopped off his ears, and then they shot him for promulgating liberation theology.

“What can one say, then, when it comes to the sermon?” the Father asks me, his hands open, eyes wide. “Anyone can accuse us of whatever they like, merely for appealing for peace, appealing to God,” and, with that, as if he decided on it at the last moment, like someone making up their mind to take a short stroll, he leaves the presbytery with me, tells the sacristan to lock the door, to wait for him. “I’ll only be a minute,” he says, as she stares at him in terror.