A Tale of the Dispossessed (7 page)

He answered with a grateful no and remained silent.

“What are you carrying in that pack?” she asked, seemingly to encourage some exchange.

“Firewood,” he answered, but I sensed that he was lying.

It took Mother Françoise quite a while to convince him to eat something and take off his poncho. Seeing that his skin was burned, she asked me to give him aspirins and apply some butesin picrate. At first, he allowed me to apply the cream only to the blisters on his face and arms, but maybe the softness of my fingers relieved him a bit from his sadness and mistrust, because he opened his shirt and showed me the burns on his chest and neck.

“How did this happen?”

“Sunburn,” he told me, and I knew he was lying again. That was to be expected: in this shelter all sorts of persecuted people come seeking refuge, and it is often a matter of life and death not to tell a single truth. So one has to distinguish between harmful lies and truths not told.

“Miss, you’re doing such a good job that I am better greased up than a truck transmission,” he said, laughing, when he was covered with the yellow ointment.

A couple of days later, well rested and recovered, he was helping around the vegetable patch and the kitchen, and he even offered to help with the administrative bookkeeping. We were in the middle of reviewing an expense list when he confessed to the Mother Superior and to me that he had been carrying in his pack the famous dancing image of the Virgin from colonial times, no less, the one so sought after by the authorities in Tora and the surrounding towns. Since we had already heard about this image from the radio and from the press, Mother Françoise raised her arms to her head and began hollering, which only surprised those who were not familiar with the excesses of her French temperament.

“What a terrible outrage!” she screamed in her very own French accent. “How could you think of doing this to me, bringing here a stolen image of the Virgin!”

“I did not steal it, Mother,” he insisted, but to no avail.

“Don’t you know that here I cannot allow weapons, drugs, or anything possibly illegal, because that would just be handing General Oquendo the excuse he’s been looking for? Don’t you think that it’s enough trouble to hide you, when they are looking all around for you, after the crazy things you did during the strike?”

“But I didn’t do anything, Mother.”

“Get that Virgin out of here, before Oquendo takes over the shelter with the claim that we’re just harboring a pack of thieves!”

“But, Mother Superior, you are so hospitable to everyone, how are you going to throw the Madonna out into the street? Don’t you see that I have been carrying her on my shoulders since I was a child? Don’t you see that she was not stolen but saved by my people from the looting and the fires?”

Three Sevens took the Virgin out of his pack and untied the cord to free her from the plastic cover, but he had not yet finished removing it when a small miracle occurred. The dark Madonna captivated the nun with her sweetness and the Gypsy gracefulness of her gestures. Holding on to her skirts, she seemed ready to dance her way up to the heavens.

We looked all over the shelter for a place to hide her. We thought of burying her under the tomatoes in the vegetable patch, or putting her up among the roof rafters, or hiding her behind the washing sinks or among the grain bags stored in the cupboard.

“Not there, don’t you see it’s too humid for her?” Nothing satisfied Mother Françoise. “Not there either, or the pigs will chew her up. And there, least of all! The termites will finish her off. Give her to me, I already know the best place.”

“But what are you doing, Mother?” Three Sevens protested.

“You better shut up, it’s all your fault.”

Cutting off all objections, the nun ordered that stones, cement, and trowels be brought in and had everybody building in the middle of the yard a high structure, strong and ostentatious, to house the image. She set the Dancing Madonna in a display case crowded with offerings and plastic flowers. There she was, in full view, but well protected and inaccessible behind glass. Before locking the case, Mother Françoise disguised the Madonna. She ordered a mantle with a triple flounce cut on the bias and a lined hood, the color of night with stars, which covered the image completely except for her pretty face and her light foot stepping on the Beast. Around the niche the nun planted shrubs and then fenced the enclosure.

“Where all can see her is where she can least be seen,” said Mother Françoise, pleased at last.

“What a remarkable little nun,” said Three Sevens, managing a bittersweet smile. “She put my Madonna behind bars.”

Like a knight-errant unhorsed in the defense of his lady, not knowing what to do, he sat at the foot of the niche and let himself float halfway between relief and the desire to cry. He was happy to see his Virgin so dignified and elegant, surrounded by flowers and offerings, this Madonna who had seemed so accustomed to the hardships of traveling and the roughness of his sack. Where could he go now without her company? If he continued on his way, he would leave her behind; if he stayed, the tracks of Matilde Lina, always pushing onward, would get cold. Being at the crossroads made him feel trapped by time and froze his initiative. That was perhaps the only time I saw Three Sevens truly dejected. He was dispirited and opaque, like a desiccated bird.

Meanwhile, Perpetua, who had been dragged by life to this same yard, was rearranging her ill-fitting dentures and watching the scene in utter disbelief: her small droopy eyes went from inspecting the Virgin, to observing her owner in puzzlement, and back to the Virgin, looking up and down at her. Suddenly her eyes lit up.

“Sir,” she said to Three Sevens, touching his shoulder respectfully. “Sir, isn’t this the image of the Dancing Madonna, patron of the town named after her that was once around Lost River, in the department of Huila?”

“No, madam, you are confused,” he objected, standing up, paranoid after so many episodes of persecution.

“How strange,” Perpetua insisted, “I have been looking at her for a while and I could swear that she is the same one. I think there is no one the likes of her. . . .”

“No, she’s not. As far as I know, this is Saint Bridget.”

“Saint Bridget, virgin, or Saint Bridget, widow?”

“Only Saint Bridget, that’s all, and if you don’t mind, I have to go,” Three Sevens ended, convinced by now that the old woman was an infiltrator from military intelligence who was asking him questions in order to denounce him.

A few hours later, while Three Sevens was in the yard in his underwear hosing himself, Perpetua’s small droopy eyes, again perusing him, met with the sixth toe. This immediately brought back memories that dispelled all doubts.

“Three Sevens! You are alive! Don’t you remember me? I am Doña Perpetua Morales. You must remember the Morales children. . . . Isn’t it true she is our patron saint, the Dancing Madonna? I could recognize her anywhere in the world. . . . And you, aren’t you Matilde Lina’s godson?”

In the meantime, Mother Françoise, on all fours, was busy fixing a siphon with a wire and didn’t have a clue that, in building a niche for the wooden Madonna in the steaming city of Tora, she had laid the foundation for what one day, heaven knows when, would surely be the second and last neighborhood named Santa María Bailarina in honor of this Madonna. Its population will have forgotten the migrating origin of their ancestors and will have grown so accustomed to peace that they will take it for granted.

“
T
hose who escape from hell come here,” I tell Three Sevens as we cross the central yard, past the collective bathrooms and the open sheds of the seven sleeping quarters, arranged in tight rows of bunk beds.

I introduce him to Elvia. She is a slight, dark woman from Quindio who feeds pieces of fruit to her bluebirds, the only thing left from her property, which was near La Tebaida.

“I also managed to save my chickens,” Elvia tells us with a bluebird perched on her shoulder and another on her head. “But the box in which I put them fell off the canoe, and they were drowned in the river. No one knows who made the loudest racket, the chickens or me.”

“People get rid of their dogs along the road because they bark and give their owners away,” I tell Three Sevens while showing him how the bread ovens work. “Quite often, however, they keep their birds and bring them here.”

The only three permanent residents, Doña Solita, her daughter Solana, and her grandchild, Marisol, are sitting on a bench. Many people come and go in the ebb and flow of war, but these three remain on their bench, crisply starched and dressed up like three dolls in the shop window of a toy store. I pick up Marisol, my goddaughter, who is only a few months old and was born in the shelter.

“Nobody comes here to stay forever; this is only a way station that offers no future. We give to the displaced five or six months of protection, food, and a roof over their heads, while they overcome the effects of their tragedy and become just people again.”

“Is it possible to become a person again?” Three Sevens asks without looking at me, because he knows the answer better than I do.

“Not always. However, the shelter cannot extend their stay, so they must go on their way and face life again, starting from zero. But those three, where are they going to go? Doña Solita cannot work because her hands are crippled with arthritis. Her other children were killed, and her daughter Solana was left pregnant. She is severely retarded, you know. Where in the world can these three angels from heaven live, if not here?”

“If not here,” Three Sevens repeats, with his habit of repeating, like an echo, the last phrase that he hears.

“When I arrived,” I tell him, “I saw the same things you are seeing now: women at the washbasins, men working at the vegetable patch, children being read stories. They were silent and slow, like sleepwalkers, their minds on other worlds while they pretended to lead normal lives. I did not find any hostility in them, but instead, a kind of beaten humility that made my heart sink. Mother Françoise told me I should not let myself be fooled. ‘Behind this air of defeat there is a very vivid rancor,’ she warned me. ‘They are trying to escape the war, but they carry it within themselves because they have not been able to forgive.’”

From his first day with us, Three Sevens demonstrated that he did not know what inactivity was, letting it show that he had the surprising ability to do any task well, whether plastering walls, sacrificing pigs, organizing cleaning brigades, or driving the truck. No job was too big for him, and there was no problem he would not attempt to solve.

Through his own unintended confessions I know that he has made a living in almost every trade that has cropped up along the way, because the more he looks for Matilde Lina, the more opportunities come to him. I ask him why he never eats meat, and I find out that he worked as a cleaner in a butcher shop in Sincelejo and was paid in beef lungs and bones. He knows how to sew up wounds, pull teeth, and repair broken bones because he worked as a nurse at San Onofre; he can drive a bus because he was a substitute driver on the Libertadores route; he developed his muscles as a boatman on the Magdalena River; took stolen automobiles apart in Pereira, was a potato harvester in Subachoque and a knife sharpener in Barichara.

Among all his skills there is one in particular that has proven indispensable for us: Three Sevens knows how to mediate a dispute.

Conflicts explode much too frequently at the shelter because of overcrowding. People who don’t know one another must live together in close quarters for a long time and share everything, from the toilet and the stove to the adult sobs muffled by pillows but still heard in the dormitories at night. And let’s not talk about the tension and extreme mistrust generated when a group that sympathizes with the guerrillas is lodged together with a group that is fleeing from them. Three Sevens has demonstrated an inborn talent for handling impossible situations with tact and authority. He has become so indispensable for the nuns that Mother Françoise has conferred on him the position of superintendent. With this she intends to tie him to the shelter, because Three Sevens has a tendency to drift away every time the wind blows from a different direction.

If he hears rumors that people are migrating to the lowlands of the Guainía in search of gold, or that thousands are going to Araracuara and to the river region of the Inírida to make a living in the coca plantations, right away his torment, which had abated for a while, shakes him up again and fills him with the certainty that Matilde Lina must be over there, blended within the wandering multitude.

“But where could you be going, if this is truly the end of the world? How long do you think you can keep getting on the road, when all the roads finally wind up here?” I ask him, but he turns a deaf ear and puts on his Colombian Farmer shoes as if they were his Seven-league Boots. Then we see him again wearing the garments he had on when he first arrived: felt hat down to his ears, peasant poncho, white cotton pants. From the window, and with my heart pounding, I accompany him as he disappears down the road.