Tales from the Town of Widows (36 page)

“Who would want to live with them, anyway?” Orquidea Morales said.

“Well, let’s find out,” the Other Widow replied. “Would anyone here consider living and working in an integrated female-male community with the same characteristics as ours?”

Soon every woman in the room found herself fantasizing about their sister community. Amparo Marín imagined herself living there, happily married to Ángel Tamacá, pregnant with his child. Pilar Villegas went a little further: she fancied herself and David Pérez surrounded by seven children of their own. The thought put a smile on her face. Cecilia pictured herself and Francisca, each with a basket of flowers, walking hand in hand over to the adjoining community to visit her son Ángel and his wife. Rosalba envisioned herself as a store caretaker, trading her granary’s surplus of barley with her peer from “the other New Mariquita.” Virgelina Saavedra tried, as a harmless exercise, to visualize herself living there and sharing her bed with a naked man instead of Magnolia, but the only image that came to her mind was of el padre Rafael mounted on top of her. She quickly put that thought out of her mind and, feeling guilty, grabbed Magnolia’s hand and brought it to her lips, making a smacking sound. Even Orquidea Morales gave free rein to her imagination. She fancied herself living in the new community, blocking a consensus decision that would allow men to go naked.

“I would,” Amparo Marín abruptly announced in her low-pitched voice.

“I would too,” Pilar Villegas said, her index finger high in the air.

“Me too,” Cuba Sánchez called from the other side of the room.

Santiago’s idea reached consensus on the first round, and so did every other proposal related to it, all of which were enthusiastically discussed in the afternoon. Before the end of the sun, the three men were invited into the church to hear the villagers’ decision.

Á
NGEL
T
AMACÁ SMILED
, obviously pleased, David Pérez shrugged his shoulders resignedly, and Campo Elías Restrepo frowned distrustfully at Santiago as the latter delivered the consensus declaration. The conditions, Santiago said, were specified in a contract that each man must sign by the end of their meeting.

“What are the conditions?” Restrepo asked.

“Well,” Rosalba hastened to answer. “Equality between individuals and between the sexes is number one.”

“What else?”

“The new community must follow the same administrative system we have. No individual can own anything, the livelihood of every—”

“But what about
my
properties? I should at least have some sort of compensation. I worked hard all my life, and now that I’m old—”

“Your livelihood will be guaranteed until the day you die, Señor Restrepo. That will be your compensation.”

“Hmmm…”

Santiago explained the project in detail, answered whatever questions the men had, and gave them a tentative schedule (which they didn’t fully understand, for it was in female time). Restrepo’s brow relaxed a little, and Pérez even wore a smile. Men and villagers agreed to sort out their differences and go to work on the new village as soon as possible.

The next morning, the three men paired up with a partner and went on different scouting expeditions to seek a location for the new
community: Ángel Tamacá offered Amparo Marín his arm, and together they went north. Pilar Villegas took David Pérez by the hand and headed west. Campo Elías Restrepo asked Sandra Villegas—after Ubaldina said no three times—and they walked east. Finding the most appropriate site—a cooler grassland area close to the river, with scattered trees, grading into woodland—took twelve expeditions. Once discovered, the site was approved within a sun, and the next morning the villagers, together with the men, walked over with machetes and knives and cut weeds and cleared gardens, but didn’t hack down a single tree.

Two suns later, a building team of twelve strong women and three men began the construction of the new village: the community of Newer Mariquita.

T
HE COMMUNITY OF
Newer Mariquita is a work of art that took a ladder and a half to build. It’s comprised of two cooperative houses; a community dining room where two meals are available every sun; a small plaza with small araucaria trees and four benches carved out of large trunks; a self-sufficient aqueduct; a large communal bathroom; a granary; a communal farm; and a small animal farm with six chickens, two turkeys, eight rabbits, and a young, rebellious rooster that crows indiscriminately throughout the day.

The twin houses face one another and from the outside look like rectangular temples with tall ceilings. The compartmented one is called Casa del Sol, the uncompartmented one is called Casa de la Luna. Each is over 130 feet long by 30 feet wide. The framework is made of lacquered wooden poles and bamboo lashed together with wire and string. The walls are covered with tree bark, and the steep-pitched roofs are made of palm thatch. On the inside, each roof is a suspended garden: purple orchids, yellow daisies, white lilies and violets hang from the top in clay pots. Each building has two doors. The
one in front leads out to the plaza, and the one in back gives access to the trails extending to the river, the woodland and the sister community of New Mariquita, which is barely over a mile away.

O
N THE MORNING
of Mariacé 7 of the ladder 1992, Ángel Tamacá sent word that his partner, Amparo Marín, had gone into labor. Eloísa set the bell ringing, and a cry of joy was heard around the community and over the small valley. The villagers stopped what they were doing and crowded into the plaza, singing and dancing and congratulating one another.

Rosalba and Cecilia rushed to the store and filled two baskets with the largest oranges, the best-looking papayas, the reddest mangoes and the best slices of cured meat. They took their baskets and, together with all the villagers, set out for Newer Mariquita.

A
MPARO
M
ARÍN AND
Ángel Tamacá lived in Casa del Sol. Until that morning, Amparo had been the community’s meal caretaker for two consecutive rungs. Ángel was the community’s animal farm caretaker. They shared the house with two other couples—Pilar Villegas and David Pérez, who only recently had agreed to move in together after a ten-rung courtship, and Magnolia Morales and Virgelina Saavedra, who, wanting a change, had moved from New Mariquita two rungs before, after Virgelina’s grandmother died.

Across from them, in Casa de la Luna, lived six people: Campo Elías Restrepo, the maintenance caretaker, who saw his wife Ubaldina once a rung, and who had yet to hear anything nice from her but was hopeful he might one day win her over; Cuba and Violeta Sánchez, who had helped build the new village and now were in charge of its cleaning; and Sandra Villegas and Marcela López, who were best friends, and who together with Pilar, David, Magnolia and Virgelina took care of the communal farm, the vegetable garden and the orchard. The sixth
resident was David’s grandmother, the Pérez widow. She spent her days sitting outside in a rocking chair, saying her prayers mechanically. She had long forgotten what she prayed for and to whom.

W
ALKING DOWN THE
footpath, through a small stretch of woods, the women began considering names for the new baby. They would suggest them to Amparo and Ángel.

“If it’s a girl, she should be named after her two grandmothers: Cecilia Aracelly,” said the aged, almost senile señorita, Cleotilde.

“No,” Cecilia replied. “If it’s a girl, her name ought to be Mariquita. After all she’d be New and Newer Mariquita’s first baby ever.”

“I agree,” said Aracelly.

Rosalba was silent. Until now she hadn’t even considered the possibility that the baby might be a girl. Ever since she’d learned that Amparo Marín was pregnant, Rosalba had decided it would be a boy. It had to be a boy for their community to have a chance to survive. She couldn’t understand how the villagers could be so irrational. The new baby would be named after his grandfathers or his father or his uncle or cousin or any other man. It didn’t matter as long as it was a male name, because the baby would be a boy. At a bend in the road, just before the descent that led to the new village, Rosalba finally said, “What if it’s a boy?”

“Ángel!” Cecilia replied at once. “His name should be Ángel like his father and his grandfather.”

“How about Gordon?” Rosalba said. “Like Míster Esmís.”

“Gordon Tamacá?” Francisca said aloud. “It sounds awfully funny.” The women laughed hysterically and soon began shouting their suggestions, which were the names of their departed sons, husbands, fathers and other men whose lives they wanted to immortalize.

“How about Pablo?” said the Other Widow. This was the first time Santiago had mentioned, in public, his lover’s name since his
death. The women stopped and grew quiet, as if Pablo’s memory had called for a moment of silence. Rosalba, however, was so absorbed in thinking of male names that she didn’t even hear Pablo’s name being pronounced. She kept walking with the basket hanging from her arm and didn’t stop until she reached the part of the trail where the village of Newer Mariquita came into view. There she stood, feeling increasingly anxious in the face of the looming news of the baby’s gender, gazing fondly at the beautiful landscape of high mountains and seemingly endless reaches of trees and vegetation, inaccessible mountainsides and valleys, large pastures covered with tall grass and wild flowers, plowed fields, gardens, and a tiny village that lay slumbering in the heat. Then she saw Ángel in the distance. He was jumping up and down with excitement, waving his hands in the air. The baby had been born. Rosalba pressed the basket firmly against her body with both hands and held her breath for a short while until she heard Ángel’s cries, “It’s a boy! It’s a boy!” he shouted, his words echoing all over the valley.

At that very moment, all the high mountains disappeared before Rosalba’s eyes. The vast stretches of trees and wild vegetation, the untouched mountainsides and valleys, all vanished, as if by magic. Only an open, clear horizon stood between Newer Mariquita and the rest of the world. Rosalba gazed intently at the fantastic sight, experiencing its extraordinary simplicity and expansiveness. She was aware that it was just a vision, that the actual transformation wasn’t in the distant view but in herself and how she now saw the world. The universe had given her new eyes, and she had used them to discover new philosophies of life, work and independence, new landscapes of harmony and order, wherever she looked. She now understood that Newer Mariquita would be not only an extension of land over the small valley but also an extension of the community’s philosophies, their female concept of time and their strong senses of justice and freedom, and that it would signal the beginning of a communalistic system of government that would eventually extend itself across the
mountainous geography of the country, throughout its flat-topped hills, its plains and jungles and deserts and peninsulas, until the end of time.

Rosalba was wiping the tears from her eyes when the group caught up with her. They, too, had heard Ángel’s shouts and now were running to meet him, giving cheers for the new boy and his parents, for the two Mariquitas, for life. Rosalba took Eloísa’s hand in hers, and together they followed slowly the group down the slope toward Newer Mariquita, feeling fulfilled.

Their race had been granted a second opportunity on earth.