A Tale of the Dispossessed (5 page)

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.

T
his 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.

T
he great petroleum fever was already over when Three Sevens found himself involved, without realizing it, in the incidents that were going to bring him to this wanderers’ shelter, where he would become an obsession for me, almost as much as Matilde Lina was for him. Riding as he was on the highs and lows of his longing and heartbreaks, he failed to notice the precise moment when discontent, which burned slowly in Tora, suddenly boiled over, breaking every channel of restraint.

“Cover your mouth with a wet handkerchief and run!” someone warned Three Sevens as he was watching the turmoil from a supply store, attentive only to any feminine face that would remind him of the one he was looking for. He did not heed the advice because he had no handkerchief and had nothing to do with what was going on, but just in case, he took his Madonna to the safety of an abandoned carriage portico. In a few seconds, the whole place was stormed by soldiers camouflaged as shrubbery, with leaves covering their helmets and branches on their backs, wearing masks and carrying hoses with containers that reminded him of fumigation tanks.

“They are gassing us!” he heard someone shout at the time a nasty cloud engulfed him, burning his skin, locking his throat, and making his eyes swell with something a thousand times worse than pure chiles.