Read Tales from the Town of Widows Online
Authors: James Canon
Tales from the Town of Widows (3 page)
Outside, the firing in the streets went on, punctuated from time to time by the heartbreaking cry of a new widow, and the weeping of another fatherless child.
W
HEN THE SHOOTING
stopped an hour later, the Morales widow went outside. The left side of her face was already swollen. The women of Mariquita had gathered on both sides of the main street, leaving just enough room for the line of men and boys being taken away by the guerrillas. These men were the Morales widow’s neighbors and friends: the ones who’d welcomed her, her husband and their two older daughters when they first arrived in Mariquita in 1970; the ones who’d brought her handpicked flowers after she gave birth to each of her two youngest children; and years later, the ones who’d consoled her when her husband passed away. These were the only men she had known in twenty-two years. And those young boys marching next to them, their younger sons, were the ones who stopped by her house every afternoon to do homework with Julio César, the ones who helped her carry her basket of groceries from the market, and the ones who played soccer every Sunday morning in the open field in front of her house.
The widow saw the women weep as their men filed past them with their heads down. She saw Cecilia Guaraya give her old husband a pair of spectacles, and Justina Pérez give hers a set of dentures. She saw Ubaldina Restrepo give her youngest stepson, Campo Elías Jr., her own rosary. She saw others hand their men family photos, food wrapped in banana leaves, toothbrushes, alarm clocks, love letters, cash. She saw the women cry as they held their men tight against their bodies, sobbing as they kissed them for the last time. They knew they would never see them again; that those husbands, sons, cousins, nephews and friends were dying right there, at that very instant, before their eyes.
In sad moments, the widow always felt nostalgic for her late husband. This time, however, she didn’t cry. She thanked God in her head for giving Jacobo the cancer that had allowed him to die at home, in her arms. She felt very sorry for the rest of the women in town, and couldn’t help letting out a long sigh when she saw the last two men vanish amid the clouds of dust raised by their marching feet.
The Morales widow turned around slowly. Just as slowly, she walked toward her house, followed by a long echo of wails. She stepped inside, held the doorknob with both hands and pushed the door closed with her forehead. She stayed like that, weeping, for a long time.
Her dearest Mariquita had turned into a town of widows in a land of men.
Gordon Smith, 28
American reporter
“John R.,” 13
Guerrilla soldier
It was Sunday afternoon. I was sitting in a clearing next to the guerrilla camp waiting for John. He had agreed to meet me there for an interview.
The guerrilla camp was a small settlement located in the highlands of the country, about three days away on foot from the closest town.
Suddenly John emerged from the woods, a little boy wrapped in an oversize olive-drab uniform with a rifle slung over his shoulder. His face was small and shiny with sweat, splashed with freckles. A shadow of soft hair above his upper lip suggested a future mustache. His hair, what I could see underneath his hat, was black. He looked no more than twelve, maybe thirteen. We shook hands and exchanged smiles.
“Sit down, kid,” I said, making room for him on the tree trunk where I was sitting.
“No, gracias,” he replied, shaking his head. “I’m good here. And by the way, I’m no kid. I’m fifteen.”
His voice hadn’t broken yet, and he spoke loudly, as if to compensate for it.
I’d first seen John during a soccer game that had taken place only two hours earlier in the same clearing. John seemed to be the youngest of both teams—a child playing jokes on his comrades. “The Boy Soldier,” I thought, would make a good title for the story.
But the boy I had in front of me now wasn’t the same John I’d seen earlier. This one pretended to be older and taller than he actually was. He lifted one of his legs and pulled out a pack of Marlboros from his sock. He smacked it three times on the palm of his free hand before offering me one. I’d given up smoking about a year ago, but I figured a cigarette might help break the ice between us, so I took one. Next, he produced a lighter shaped like a small replica of a cellular telephone.
“This is a good lighter,” he said, handing it to me. “It was made in Estados Unidos.”
“How do you know that?” I asked. On the lighter I read “Made in China.”
“A gringo gave it to me. He came here to interview our comandante.”
I wasn’t the first foreign reporter to brave the dangers of Colombia in search of a good story. In the two years I lived there, I met a lot of guys from different parts of the world who were interviewing guerrillas, paramilitaries, army soldiers, coca growers, or, like me, all of them.
“And how do you know he was from Estados Unidos?”
“He looked like you, pale and blond, with blue eyes. And he talked funny like you.”
John and I each took drags on our cigarettes, but I choked on the smoke and began to cough.
He burst into laughter, “Haha-haha-haha-haha…”
This was the John I’d seen earlier, the mischievous laughing boy; his “hahas” made him unique. I put out the cigarette and watched him laugh until I got my breath back.
Then, abruptly, he said, “I’m only thirteen.” He looked down, as though ashamed of being a child. “I don’t tell nobody, though. There’s this guy who said he was fourteen and they don’t respect him no more. Like you need to be full-grown to kill people.”
When I’d chosen John as the subject for my interview, the com
mandant had given me the boy’s file. According to it, John hadn’t yet been in battle. I doubted that. I knew commandants doctored their recruits’ files, especially if they were underage.
“How many people have you killed?” I asked him.
“Haha-haha. Like you keep count,” he said. “I just close my eyes and fire until I don’t hear no fire back.” His effortless answers made me think he was telling me the truth. “What about you?” he asked. “Have you killed someone?”
I shook my head.
“Really?” John seemed genuinely surprised. He laid the rifle on the grass and sat next to it, his knees pressed together against his chest and his arms wrapped around them. The message was clear: he no longer needed to feel any older or taller. He’d killed people. I hadn’t.
“What do you think about when you’re in combat?” I went on.
“Most of the time I don’t think nothing, but sometimes I think I’m saving my own life, you know? It’s either my life or theirs, and God doesn’t want
me
yet.”
“Oh, so you believe in God.”
“I sure do. I say my prayers almost every night, and always before a battle.”
“And do you think God approves of you killing others?”
He considered my question for a while before declaring, “I think God doesn’t want me killing them anymore than he wants them killing us.”
Next, I asked him questions about the daily life of a guerrilla and learned that they get up at four and fall in at five; that daily duties are assigned at five thirty. A party of two cooks all three meals, two parties of three go hunting, two parties of four scout the area for possible invasion forces, and the rest do guard duty. In the afternoon, they exercise and do target practice.
“This camp’s nothing compared to training camp,” John assured me. “There, you learn to shoot pistols, rifles and machine guns,
and how to spot aircraft, and where on the fuselage to aim. It’s awesome!” He said all this in his child’s voice, and I thought again about the file that the commandant had given me. I pulled it from my backpack and reread the page. It said John’s real name was Juan Carlos Ceballos Vargas and that he was sixteen; that his parents had died in a car accident when he was a baby; that the boy had spent his entire childhood in an orphanage, from which he’d been dismissed when he turned fifteen; and that he’d voluntarily joined the guerrillas in November of 2000. I decided to find out how much of the information on his file was true.
“Is John your real name?”
He shook his head.
“What is it then?”
“I don’t tell nobody my name.”
“That’s fair,” I said. “I like John. It’s a nice name.”
“It’s not just John,” he replied. “It’s John R.”
“I still think it’s a fine name. Did you choose it yourself?”
He nodded. “You seen
Rambo
?” He asked this as though
Rambo
had just been released.
“All three of them,” I admitted.
“Me too. He’s awesome! Remember his name? Rambo’s name?”
I had to think for a moment. It had been years since I watched
Rambo III.
I knew it was a common name. Michael? Robert? John?
“John!” I announced. “Oh, I get it. John R.”
He smiled. “My grandmother had a TV. She let me watch sometimes, till she sold it. She started selling everything she had to get us food till there was nothing else to sell in that house.”
“Where is your grandmother now?”
He shrugged.
“What about your father? Where is he?”
“In jail. He got twenty years for killing a neighbor who stole a pig from us.”
“And your mother?”
“She got shot in the head,” he replied, matter-of-factly, as if that were the only way someone’s life could end. “That man my father killed, he had a son who was a policeman. He put my father in jail, then he killed my mother.”
“Did someone turn the policeman in?”
“Haha-haha,” he answered.
“How old were you when this happened?”
He pushed his left hand outward in front of my face, the way little boys tell their age. Five fingers.
“And how old where you when you joined the guerrillas?”
“Eleven.”
“Do you know what this is?” I asked him, flashing the file in front of his eyes.
He glanced at it and shook his head. “I can’t read. I never went to school.”
“Here, I’ll read it for you,” I offered, and began to read each line slowly. He listened attentively, but the expression on his face didn’t change.
“I wish that was true,” he said after I was finished. “It sounds a lot better than my life.” His eyes, black and sad, fixed on mine. I looked into them and saw a little boy learning how to shoot a pistol, hunting birds in the forest, saying prayers on his knees before going to war, opening fire on someone else’s enemy with his eyes tightly closed. I scrunched the file into a ball and threw it away.
“Just one more question,” I said, noticing he was now looking at his watch. “Tell me what made you join the guerrillas.”
“I was hungry.”
John R. grabbed his rifle and stood up. It was almost four in the afternoon, and he was scheduled for guard duty from four to eight.
“Promise you won’t twist what I told you to make me look like a bad guy,” he said.
“I promise,” I assured him. To prove it, I kissed a cross made
with my thumb and index finger, a gesture widely used by Colombians to indicate they’ll honor their word.
Then he asked me for a present. “Anything,” he said.
I looked inside my backpack. There was a change of underwear, a toothbrush, a travel-size toothpaste, two sets of batteries, aspirins, antibiotics, a roll of toilet paper and a beat-up copy of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, which I’d just started reading. Nothing John R. would want. But then, in the side pocket, I found a Christmas floatie pen I’d gotten the last time I visited New York.
“Feliz Navidad, John R.,” I said, handing him the pen.
“Navidad
?
But it’s only April.”
“Any time’s good for Christmas.”
I gave him the pen and told him to tilt it back and forth, and saw him watch Santa and his reindeer float smoothly over a miniature snowy village.
“Haha-haha.” His face lit up. “Is it made in Estados Unidos?”
“I’m not sure,” I confessed.
His lower lip dropped in disappointment.
I took the pen back from him and carefully checked it. At last I found, on the little silver ring that divided the upper part of the pen from the lower one, engraved in very small print, the three words John R. wanted to hear.
“Sí,” I said. “Made in USA.”
He thanked me four or five times, turned around and headed for the camp, tilting the pen back and forth as he walked, saying “Haha-haha,” again and again until his little body disappeared into the woods.
Mariquita, October 29, 1993
F
OR MORE THAN A
week, Rosalba had been closely watching the sky. Each time she looked, the clouds and the sun, the moon and the stars, everything above her village had seemed a little farther away. Today, as she stepped outside of her house and looked up at the sky once more, she decided that her green eyes weren’t lying. It was true: Mariquita was sinking. She crossed herself and started down the street, toward the plaza.
Rosalba viuda de Patiño, as she liked to introduce herself, was the widow of the police sergeant. She was a comely woman with a pale complexion, thin arms and legs, a small waist, and the largest bottom of all the women in Mariquita. She wore her long chestnut hair gathered up in a chignon at the nape of her neck, and she had a mole between her eyebrows that looked as if a fly had settled on her forehead. When she laughed—a rare occurrence since her husband’s death—she squinted and her mouth opened in an oval wide enough that the many silver fillings of her molars flashed. She was forty-six, but the deep creases around her eyes—which now lingered after she stopped laughing—and the thin, freckled skin of her hands made her look much older.
Walking down the main street, Rosalba noticed a few new piles of garbage and rubble. They kept rising everywhere. With the village sinking, it was just a matter of time before the widows and their children found themselves immersed in trash. The rickety old man with the rickety old truck that used to come to Mariquita once a week to collect the garbage had stopped coming soon after the day the men disappeared. With the town’s treasurer and the magistrate gone, who was going to pay for his services? Not the widows. They had other priorities, like feeding their children and themselves.
“Damned old man!” Rosalba said without stopping. She turned left at the corner and encountered a new deserted house, the Cruzes’. Since the men disappeared, several women had left Mariquita with their remaining children, their elders and whatever they could manage to carry on their mules or their own backs. In less than a year Mariquita’s population had been significantly reduced. Abandoned houses had sprung up on every block and were soon dismantled. Roofs, doors, windows, flooring, everything was removed that could be removed until all that was left of them were four adobe walls with two or three openings of various shapes. Rosalba knitted her brow and kept walking.
Lately, she had gotten into the habit of sitting on a bench in the plaza to watch the villagers going about their ordinary occupations. Indifferent old women draped in black lace on their way to church; young women shouting at intervals that they were selling fresh arepas, used clothes, soap, candles, etc.; half-naked children following them, begging for the things they sold, waiting for the women to lower their guard so they could steal something, anything, from them. After a few minutes, the tediousness of the routine would prove unbearable, and Rosalba would find someone to talk to. Today she sat down on a bench half covered in bird droppings. The bench faced the distant sun, which was just breaking through the also distant morning clouds.
Three biblical-looking women wearing long nightgowns and bearing large water jugs appeared from around a corner. Orquidea, Gardenia and Magnolia, the Morales sisters, were on their way to the river,
which was nearly an hour away on foot. Long ago, the men of Mariquita had dammed and channeled a nearby stream to provide running water for kitchens and laundry areas in the village. Now it was nothing but weed-infested tubes. A year of unusually dry weather had dried up the stream and the aqueduct and ruined most of the crops, leaving the women and children in the grips of famine as well as drought.
“Good morning,” Rosalba shouted to the Morales sisters.
None replied.
Rosalba looked around for someone, anyone, to talk to; to complain to about the poor manners of the three sisters and other things that bothered her. There was no one.
“Everyone must be busy doing nothing,” she said bitterly, addressing an old mango tree that stood next to her. “I’ve never seen women more passive than the widows of this village. We’re running out of food and don’t even have manure to fertilize the soil. It’s true that we’re going through a dry spell, but we can’t blame nature for our hardship. Not when we haven’t done a thing. All this time we’ve been sitting here, complaining, waiting for the news of our predicament to travel across the mountains and reach Mr. Governor. For Mr. Governor to meet with his council. For them to notify the central government. For Mr. President to meet with his congress. And for the congress to authorize Mr. President to authorize the council to authorize Mr. Governor to authorize someone else to offer some assistance to a bunch of stupid widows in some dry region somewhere…”
A small flock of half-starved pigs appeared, followed by their shepherd, Ubaldina viuda de Restrepo, who was yelling abuse at them. She was the widow of Don Campo Elías Restrepo—once the richest man in town—and she had lost him and seven stepsons to the rebels. Ubaldina kept her pigs in a little barbed-wire-fenced shed at the rear of her garden. She herded them around town twice a day so the animals could feed themselves on trash. She had marked their left ears with red paint, and she counted them several times a day to make sure none had been stolen.
The pigs stopped every few seconds to ransack each pile of garbage they came across. “Move, you stupid beast!” she yelled at the skinniest one. It was well behind the rest.
“When am I getting my chops, Ubaldina?” Rosalba shouted. She hadn’t eaten meat in over three months, even though she had paid, long ago, for two full pork chops.
“Maybe next week,” Ubaldina replied. “I still haven’t sold the ears and the feet.”
Ubaldina, who had been left with two useless refrigerators at home after Mariquita’s electricity had been cut off, would only kill an animal when every part of it had been sold.
“A disaster for the poor is an opportunity for the rich,” Rosalba whispered to the tree. “You know how much that greedy woman charges for a pound of meat of those garbage-fed pigs? Three thousand pesos! To be able to afford some, I had to rent the back room of my house to Vaca. You know, the cobbler’s widow, the big-eyed Indian who’s always chewing her cud. Why, of course Ubaldina knows that! I told her myself. She simply doesn’t care. But I’m not the only one. You know Lucrecia Saavedra? The old seamstress? The poor thing had to barter her spare pair of scissors for tripe to make soup!”
As Rosalba was complaining to the tree, a small convoy of green Jeeps spattered with mud pulled into town. The women rushed out of their houses, imagining that it was relief sent by the government. Fifteen strangers in military uniforms got out of the Jeeps in complete silence. In the same silence they went about the filthy streets of Mariquita, followed closely by unclothed children and mothers with their hands outstretched, chanting, “Please, please, please…” The soldiers asked a few questions of el padre Rafael, the priest (the only man the guerrillas hadn’t taken). They wrote their findings in small notebooks. They also took photographs of the dilapidated plaza, and of the large group of women that had gathered around the Jeeps to beg.
The oldest of the military men climbed onto the hood of his Jeep and tried to appease the widows. He was a short, fair-haired fellow with
an ill-favored aspect. His skin was sweaty and shiny, and his face had scars of various shapes and lengths. “My name is Abraham,” he began in a gentle voice that didn’t match his appearance. “We’re not here to give our condolences on your loss, though all of you have our deepest sympathies. We’ve come to evaluate the material damage done to your village so that you can be compensated accordingly.” He reinforced his statements with swift motions of his small hands. “Unfortunately, it’s going to take some time before any help can reach you. You see, our nation’s undergoing yet another undeclared civil war. Many villages were attacked by guerrillas and paramilitary groups before yours, and so…” Despite the disheartening news he was delivering, the little man appeared to have hypnotized the women and children. They stared at him entranced, as though waiting for him to lay eggs or sweat milk. Only one woman remained in full control of her senses: Rosalba viuda de Patiño.
“We appreciate your honesty, señor,” she interrupted Abraham’s speech. “But tell us, who’s going to provide us and our children with food until we get some rain?”
“I’m afraid that I don’t have an answer for that, señora, but—”
“And what about clothing? These rags we have on will soon fall apart.” She quickly turned toward the women and said, “Are we supposed to walk around naked like Indians for the rest of our lives?”
“Señora, listen to me—”
“No,” Rosalba interposed, turning to the man. “You listen to us. Did you by any chance take pictures of our empty cisterns and our trash piled up everywhere? Did you write in your little notebook that our village is sinking?”
“Or that we haven’t had electricity for a year?” Ubaldina, the pigs’ owner, echoed her.
“Or that the only telephone in town doesn’t work?” shouted Magnolia Morales from the back.
More women began to angrily shout their complaints, making Abraham nervous. He knew that if the storm of protests turned into
a riot, he and his fourteen men alone would not be able to control it. Not only did the women outnumber them, but they and their children were also hungry. People were more likely to revolt when they had empty stomachs.
Suddenly, Rosalba broke into tears. “What are we going to do?” she wailed. “We’re all going to die of hunger, buried in rubbish, and only the vultures will notice.”
“Señora,” said Abraham, bewildered by Rosalba’s shifting attitude. “What this town needs is a strong leader like you. Why don’t you take up the office of magistrate until the government decides what to do?”
“I know nothing about civil law or judicial procedures,” she confessed to Abraham, wiping the tears from her eyes with the back of her hands, “but my husband was Mariquita’s police sergeant. A very brave man who sacrificed his life fighting the rebels.”
“That alone,” Abraham replied, “makes you the perfect leader for this village.”
He didn’t intend for Rosalba to take his suggestion seriously; he only wanted to stop her from wailing. But the woman, who was not accustomed to compliments of any sort, surprised him by accepting the job. Abraham got down off the Jeep and hand-wrote a document designating her the acting magistrate. Then he made it official by singing, tunelessly and along with his soldiers, the Colombian national anthem.
O
N HER FIRST
full day as magistrate, Rosalba left for her office at seven. She wore a white apron on top of her black dress, and carried a broom, a mop and a bucket filled with soapy water. She also had a stub of a pencil tucked behind her ear, and, in the pocket of her apron, a small notebook and her pistol. As she went down the main street, she thought of the grand things she would do for Mariquita. Every time an idea came into her head, she stopped, put down the cleaning supplies,
pulled out her notebook and pencil and wrote it down on her list of priorities.
Bring back running water into town
.
Develop an irrigation system for crop
s.
Send someone into the city for some fertilizer and seeds
.
Mariquita’s municipal office was a small house by the plaza. On the front wall was a plaque that still bore the name of the former magistrate, Jacinto Jiménez. The guerrillas had executed him in front of his horrified wife and children, then taken away his eighteen-year-old son. The poor Jiménez widow cried for days. But then, one morning, she packed her clothes and her many pairs of shoes and together with her two daughters left for Ibagué, where she soon married a butcher who made her happy again. Before she left, she gave Rosalba (they’d been very good friends) the key to the municipal office.
The magistrate was surprised at how easily the key turned in the lock after almost a year. She pushed the door open and was greeted by a number of squeaky bats that had made the office their home. She stepped aside, repelled. The hideous creatures fluttered around and crashed into the walls, disturbed by the shaft of light coming in through the door. Rosalba waited for them to quiet. Then, with an air of determination, she went inside, unlocked and opened the only window and watched the flock of bats swoop past her head and fly out of the building. She began dusting the furniture of her office, interrupting her duties now and then to write in her notebook.
Organize cleaning squads to sweep the garbage off the streets
. She brushed the cobwebs from the corners of the ceiling.
Have a team of women sow rice
,
cotton and drought-tolerant sorghum
. She rearranged the bookcase and the shaky coatrack and moved the desk from one corner to another.
Restore electricity seven days a week
. She swept and mopped the floors twice.
Make the telephone work again
. She brought in a beautiful begonia in a flowerpot and placed it in a corner.
Reopen the school
. Finally, the magistrate burned eucalyptus leaves to free the room from evil spirits.
When she was finished, Rosalba stood behind the old mahogany desk and looked around. Her office was now the cleanest and neatest place in the entire village. She was content. She squeezed her opulent
behind into the chair and slid her hands across the smooth surface of the desktop. “I’m going to bring Mariquita back to what it used to be,” she said. “No, what am I saying? I’m going to transform it into a much better village than the men could have ever created. I know how to do it. After all, I’m a born leader.”
R
OSALBA WAS FROM
the town of Honda by the Magdalena River. When she was fourteen, her mother choked to death on a fish bone. Rosalba took charge of the house and her four younger brothers, assigning chores to each member of the family, from simple tasks like peeling potatoes to more difficult jobs like grinding corn in the wooden mortar. Even her youngest brother, who was only four, had a duty: to bring water from the river for cooking and cleaning. Rosalba’s strict enforcement of the rules earned her the resentment of her brothers. Everyone had to be up at six in the morning and in bed by eight at night. A daily sponge bath in the cold water of the river was mandatory. Prayers had to be recited before every meal and at bedtime. Bowls of steaming soup had to be eaten completely. “Por favor” and “Muchas gracias” were required at all times, while complaints, fights and curse words were considered punishable offenses.