Tales from the Town of Widows (29 page)

New Mariquita, Francisca 20, Ladder 1996

A
LL MORNING LONG
J
ULIA
Morales had been lying in a hammock slung between two trees in the middle of the plaza, twirling her hair around one finger, taking deep breaths, looking south. She wore a tight, faded blue dress that exposed her thighs. From time to time she swung, giving a lazy push from the ground with one of her delicate feet. Once, when a beam of sunlight struck her face, she got up and carried one side of the hammock to a different tree, then lay down again, staring longingly south, the direction the smell was coming from.

One by one her three older sisters had come around to tell her to stop fantasizing and go to work. “Smell? What smell?” her oldest sister Orquidea asked harshly. “The only thing I smell is your laziness.” Gardenia took a more aggressive approach: “Get up right now, you sluggard cow. I’ll give you something to smell. Here, smell this,” she said, showing Julia her naked posterior. And Magnolia, who had the faculty of viewing everything in relation to herself, said, “I don’t smell anything. If there were something to smell, I would’ve been the first one to smell it.”

Julia was not in the least troubled by what her sisters said. She knew what she smelled, even if no one else could detect it: a robust, slightly acrid, alluring, pungent mixture of lime peels, mineral salts,
perspiration and musk…large amounts of musk. The smell filled the air, getting stronger as the sun wore on. She had no doubt that a man was approaching town, and she was determined to be the first one to welcome him to the village of New Mariquita.

T
HE
A
MERICAN REPORTER
wore a pale guayabera shirt that was large on him and a pair of loose khaki trousers hacked off below the knees, fraying at the edges. A canteen half filled with water was slung over his left shoulder. His hair was long and yellow and greasy and gathered in a ponytail, and he had two weeks’ growth of flaxen stubble. His sneakers were nearly hidden under coats of fresh and old mud that made it impossible to tell their color or brand name. His feet were blistered, the left one badly, causing him to walk with a limp. There was an air of refinement and intellect about his face, a severely sunburned face with sky-blue eyes and a small nose. He had been traveling the country for the past six months, interviewing guerrilla, paramilitary and national army soldiers, as well as civilians touched by the Colombian conflict. He was thirty-one and answered to the name of Gordon Smith.

Walking ahead of him were a barefoot boy and a scrawny mule loaded with a medium-sized yellow duffel bag. The boy liked to be called Pito, and his mule was Pita. Pito wore a sombrero with a chewed-off brim and ragged shorts. Nothing else.

“Slow down,” Gordon shouted to Pito. “Please.”

“We’re almost there, Don Míster Gordo,” the boy said. He stood with his legs splayed, anchored in glutinous orange mud, wondering why the funny-talking gringo insisted on being called “Gordo” when he wasn’t fat.

Gordon looked at his watch; they had been riding for almost seven hours. “I’ve heard you say that three times before,” he replied, shooting the boy a suspicious glance.

Pito ignored both the comment and the look. “Sure you don’t want to ride Pita again? She’s a little old but still very strong.”

“Gracias.” Gordon shook his head. Riding the beast had made him nervous and dizzy, but he was too proud to admit it. Instead he’d told the boy that the mule didn’t look strong at all and that he felt sorry for it, which was true enough. Pita looked starved, weak-legged and poorly watered, and had a loose shoe on her right rear foot.

They continued their journey up and down the hills, among long stretches of woods and through narrow, rarely used trails that crisscrossed capriciously and often turned to sludge, making the journey even more unpredictable and puzzling. From time to time Gordon pulled out of his shirt pocket a scrap of paper with a poorly drawn map of the region they were passing through. He stared at it, turned it upside down, looked around and put it back in his pocket.

Only two days before, while interviewing a Communist guerrilla defector in the village of Villahermosa, Gordon had been introduced to an older, neurotic, pink-faced man who claimed to know of a tribe of ferocious female warriors living in a small village deep in the cordillera. Intrigued, Gordon agreed to buy him a few drinks in exchange for the telling of the entire story.

“They’re Amazons,” the crazy-looking man said while biting his nails in a compulsive manner. “Listen to this: pigs, cows and horses have disappeared, but also men like you and I. Uh-huh, all vanished from the face of the earth after being seen near where those creatures live. Country people are terrified of them. Entire Indian tribes have moved far south to avoid them. Even guerrillas and paramilitary groups don’t go near them. Believe me when I tell you, gringo. They’re direct descendants of the Amazons.” The story turned even more fantastic with each beer the man drank. By the time their meeting ended, Gordon, somewhat drunk, had made up his mind to go out into the cordillera to look for a tribe of grotesque, man-hating, heretic, cannibalistic women of gigantic proportions.

The next day, after sobering up, Gordon recognized that the story was preposterous. Even so, there was something in it that fascinated him, something that seemed perfectly plausible in a country that had been at war for nearly forty years: the existence of a town inhabited solely by women. He went to the neurotic old man’s house and paid him to draw a map of the area supposedly inhabited by the tribe. Then he hired a boy and a mule to take him there.

At the moment, after a seven-hour ride, Gordon thought the map looked the same from every angle. Fortunately, Pito didn’t need a map. He knew all the paths and shortcuts from having led cattle along them since he was a child, and from spending the last four years delivering secret coded mail between the groups of guerrillas scattered throughout the mountainous region. He’d been the fastest, most reliable courier the guerrillas had had. But recently, the heavy presence of the national army had forced the rebels to abandon the zone, leaving Pito out of work, which is why he had agreed to take Gordon across the mountains in the first place.

They had ridden a good distance when they reached an expanse of level land. The mule hastened its pace and soon Pito saw why: a thin stream ran almost soundlessly along the flat. They washed their faces and drank some water, which had a metallic taste.

“Well, this is it,” Pito said. “See those woods over there?” He pointed to a tight clump of trees and shrubs at the end of an impressively steep rise.

“What is it?” Gordon asked, squinting to better see what the boy was pointing at.

“The entrance! That man said it was at the end of the first rise after the Tres Cruces flat. This is the Tres Cruces flat, so that must be the entrance over there.”

Gordon contemplated the sight for a moment. “It looks like we’re going to need machetes or something to get through it. It seems almost impenetrable.”

“Don Míster Gordo,” Pito said, adopting a solemn tone. “You hired me to get you up to this spot right here in one piece, not to help you go across.”

The little bastard wants more money, Gordon thought. He produced from within his crotch a small plastic bag where he kept, rolled up and secured with a thick rubber band, a wad of bank notes. He began undoing the bundle.

When the boy realized what the gringo was doing, he shook his head. “I’m not going in there no matter how much money you give me. I’ve been told what’s over there. Those women eat people like you and me for dinner.”

Gordon gave a loud laugh. “Don’t tell me you believe all that.”

“I do. And you better believe it yourself. You don’t know nothing about this country.” With a dignified expression on his small Indian face, he unloaded Pita and handed the duffel bag to Gordon.

After muchas graciases were exchanged and hands grasped and shaken several times, Pito stepped aside. He watched Gordon slowly limp up the steep rise with the bag on his back. “God be with you, Don Míster Gordo,” he whispered to himself. He walked over to Pita and took the reins, but he didn’t mount. He kept staring at Gordon, hoping the gringo would see reason and choose to return to town. If he did, Pito decided, he’d take him back for half the price.

But Gordon didn’t stop. He hadn’t come this far to flinch at the last minute. Besides, he needed a new story, something interesting and exciting. It was with this thought in his head that he began tearing his way through the undergrowth, ripping at the vines with his own large and delicate hands, pushing into the thick tangle of leaves and branches and woody material until he disappeared into it.

D
URING BREAKFAST THAT
morning, Doña Victoria viuda de Morales had made excuses for her daughter with Rosalba by saying that Julia
didn’t feel well. Her other three daughters, she promised, would do Julia’s work in the communal kitchen until she recovered.

Orquidea protested in private: “So I have to toil all morning at the joiner’s workshop, and still come during my break to do that loafer’s work?”

“That’s right,” Doña Victoria asserted, and then, slamming a basket full of red onions on the counter, she added, “Here, chop these before you go.”

Orquidea had recently been transferred from her mother’s kitchen to the joiner’s workshop as part of a new campaign started by the council of New Mariquita, which consisted of training every worker to perform several different tasks. Gardenia had been sent to the fields and Magnolia assigned to follow the roof-patching team. Julia, however, had been allowed to stay doing kitchen work, because Doña Victoria convinced the five council members that it was Julia’s special touch that made each and every dish from her kitchen so scrumptious.

Julia Morales, the most beautiful of the four Morales girls, was despised by her sisters on account of her good looks. She had big, rounded hazel eyes flecked with gray, which glowed against her brown skin. Her nose was small and lightly turned up at the tip, like a doll’s, and her lips full and well-defined. Her gait was so spectacular that watching her walk unescorted around the plaza was often the most anticipated event of the sun. Julia was taller than most of the women in town, and she had the most refined manners. She also had beautiful black hair that rippled in long waves to her waist, and a large penis hanging between her legs.

Julia’s astounding transformation was the product of her own self-discipline, perseverance and dedication. She’d spent entire suns following her mother and sisters, paying great attention to how they moved, adopting and improving on their feminine mannerisms. And although Julia couldn’t articulate any sounds, she listened intently to her sisters’ speech patterns, which she translated into a series of smooth and delicate motions of her body and limbs. The result was an exquisite and
precise sign language that to the eyes of a foreigner might have seemed as though Julia Morales was performing a mysterious dance from a faraway land.

F
ROM WHERE HE
stood, Gordon saw a dreamlike village of white houses with bright tile roofs of orange and red, flowering mango trees, a few well-defined roads and a church, the spire of which broke the otherwise perfect harmony of the view. Green hills rose behind the village; several plots of maize, rice and coffee and the runners of potato plants dotted the stretch of fields on the hillsides.

There were no Amazons in sight, or women, or anything that resembled either. Gordon looked at the palms of his hands: they were bleeding. His lacerated arms and legs and ripped pants also testified to his struggle through the thick undergrowth. He wiped his hands on the front of his guayabera shirt and felt the bloody wounds chafing against the fabric. His face was unharmed; he had used his duffel bag to protect it from the strong prickly vines and the gigantic leaves covered in bristles that repeatedly bounced back.

Moving slowly forward, Gordon heard distant shouts and female laughter, but he didn’t see anyone. He noticed that the height of the dwellings was standard, which clearly eliminated the remote possibility of running into a giant. He kept descending the hill, cautiously, considering what he would say when he met the first group of women, and wondering what kind of reception they would give him. They’d certainly be stunned, but would they welcome him or greet him with contempt? And what if they asked the reason why he was there? Should he admit to being a reporter? That might get them on the defensive. Maybe he should claim to be lost and show them his bloody hands; surely they wouldn’t hurt an injured man.

By this time he had entered the village and was limping along a small street. The houses he passed by were all uniform: they had white
facades with a front door and a large window, the frames of which were painted green. All doors and windows were open, and Gordon had the odd feeling he was being watched through the curtains. He could no longer hear the shouts and laughter he’d heard earlier. Suddenly he saw something move farther down the road: a large bundle hanging between two trees with something alive in it. Gordon kept going, a little apprehensively, looking behind him again and again. Before reaching the corner he made out that the bundle was a hammock with a handsome woman sleeping in it. Gordon drew near her, moving slowly and silently because he didn’t want to wake her up. At that moment he heard a loud cry from behind. When he looked back he saw an army of naked women rushing out of their dwellings, screaming furiously and running toward him with sticks and stones.

W
HEN
G
ORDON WOKE
up, he saw nothing but the dazzling white of a ceiling. He thought he was dead, his soul floating on air, among clouds. Little by little he began tracing in his mind the sequence of events leading up to this moment. The woman in the hammock. The cry. The army of naked screaming women. Then blackness.

So, where was he now? There was only one answer: the women had captured him, and he was in prison.