The Farm Read online

  I always go to bed early, before ten, because I get up very early, but that day I’d stayed up late reading in the hammock, enveloped in a novel I’d found in some room in the house, an old novel, its pages yellowing, which had definitely belonged to Cobo, because his name was written in it (Jacobo Ángel, April 17, 1967, it said on the title page, and April 20, 1967, on the last page: he liked to write the dates he started and finished each book) and it had underlinings and notes in his hand. Cobo had died a few years earlier, and his memory still stung my throat. I’d started to read it the day I arrived and was using the serene hours of the night to get pulled into it again. The book had notes in the margins and a longer commentary, handwritten by him, on the last page. I was enjoying following the trail of my father’s reading, knowing that probably during the same passages we were thinking about the same things, that he’d laughed where I laughed, that he’d been frightened where I’d been. In my family everyone always said that he and I were the ones who were most alike. At the dinner table we were always coming out with the exact same phrases, at the same time, ever since I was very small, and I remember we’d laugh and shout: “Jinx: we killed a devil!” Saying the same thing at the same time was to kill a devil, or to put it a better way, to get something bad out of the world. People believe these things, even if they’re not true, though more than superstitions they’re comforts. A magical thought, as impossible as it might be, can help to console sometimes. At our house we also repeated one of our Grandpa Josué’s beliefs, and even though it’s a lie we repeated it as if it were true. Whenever an animal died on the farm, if a cow got sick or a calf fell over a cliff and broke its spine, or if a colt got colicky and died, then my grandfather would say: “I’ve just had a sentence reversed in heaven.” He meant that someone in the family was going to die, but God, in His compassion, had liberated us from that horrible death by receiving a lesser sacrifice, the death of an animal. Thinking of that right now while I’m remembering Gaspar gives me a chill.

  Reading a novel already read and underlined by my father was like having another conversation with him through the book; it was as if we were reading and commenting on it together at the farm, as we’d done many times in our lives, from one hammock to another, in the afternoons, or in their bedroom, which used to be my grandparents’, or in the dining room, during so many long lunches. Sometimes I’d stop reading to think about the story or imagine myself in the situation I was reading about. Meanwhile, I’d reach over the edge of the hammock, stroking Gaspar’s coat, staring into the darkness, seeing nothing, distanced from the world, those things that happen to us when we read a good book, and our own thoughts float, dragged along by the ideas hidden in the writing, like two different clouds that meet and mingle in the sky. Sometimes, they even turn black and let loose a lightning bolt, a thunderclap trembles on our brow, and it rains, we cry, a deep chord gets played that we didn’t know was so tense in our chest, in the center of our body.

  All the lights in the house were off, except for one floor lamp I liked to put beside the hammock to shine on the pages. It was a white hammock, I remember perfectly, from San Jacinto, a coarse canvas that the years had smoothed into something resembling skin. It was soft, cozy, warm and cool at the same time; the fabric gave me the embrace I wasn’t getting from anyone during those days. The hammock is the perfect furniture for reading in, a friend of mine says. There were insects flying around the lamp, but they weren’t biters; at La Oculta we didn’t have plagues of mosquitoes, never any pest insects, or at least we never got bitten. Some frogs were still croaking in the lake. An iguana or a turtle dropped into the water and made that plunking sound, like a fruit falling off a tree and sinking into the lake. The hammock, the dog, and even the insects and frogs, kept me company, made me feel good, safe, with that imaginary confidence that habitual sounds give to living beings, even if they’re on their own.

  Back then I still thought of La Oculta as my real home. We, our family, have always felt something very deep, something very special when we’re there. I don’t like the word energy, but if I liked it I would have used it at this moment: the finca transmitted to us something you couldn’t touch, but which was real. A foretaste of heaven, said Alberto, my brother-in-law. Like the dog’s serenity, which at that moment was so great as he dozed that it rubbed off on me. If I hadn’t had a dog, or a hammock, or a lamp, or a book, maybe I might have been afraid to be alone at La Oculta, at night, after having received that threatening letter.

  A few minutes earlier I’d been startled by the rumble of engines that sounded as if they were coming up to the farm from the road, a kilometer and a half down below, near the roadhouse. It was strange, that noise, for I had put the chain and lock on the iron gate myself that afternoon when I came up on my horse, and no one else had the keys. Well, Próspero had a set too, but he went to bed early, as usual, with the chickens, and he’d be snoring away with his wife Berta in his house beside the stable. Gaspar had pricked up his ears too when he heard that noise, he’d hinted at a growl, but he hadn’t stood up. Then the noise stopped completely. I thought I’d imagined it, an aural hallucination.

  PILAR

  The things that have happened, the things that still happen on this farm. First those who’ve drowned in the lake (five, as far as I know), and who make me feel a special respect for those dark, mysterious waters. Lucas getting kidnapped, which was the worst thing that ever happened to me because not only did they take my son away for almost a year but also took my father away forever, because he couldn’t bear it. The arrival of the saviors, which was a salvation worse than the damnation, a remedy worse than the illness, because never before had so much blood been spilt here. The time when they came here to kill Eva. Deaths of previous generations of Ángels, which we didn’t live through, but our grandparents told us about. And all the stories that Toño knows about our ancestors back I don’t know how many centuries ago. But those old things don’t interest me at all, not the genealogies, not the founding of the town, or all those who killed or died defending the land a hundred years ago. That’s nothing to do with me. The deaths and difficult things that have happened to me here hurt, but not the past. For example, personally, and just in the last couple of years, two people have died on me at La Oculta. First Auntie Ester; then, Mamá. Auntie Ester’s death was not as sad but harder, not just because she was dying for months and I was taking care of her, but because in a way I was the one who had to decide when it was no longer worthwhile for her to go on living. Not Mamá, my mother was perfectly fine to her last day, with her mind intact, independent and bossy as ever, doing deals with Próspero over the calves, asking how many sacks of beans the coffee harvest had brought in, how many centimeters a year the teak trunks were increasing. Mamá slipped away calmly in her sleep, without our noticing. She didn’t even ring her bell, didn’t even call me. I found her on her side, the way she always slept, on her right side, as if hugging herself. I could barely unlock that embrace to dress her, to do her up. She’d drunk her whole glass of water, she must have been thirsty. There was no anguish on her face, just distance, serenity, rest. I’d like to die like that too; the sleep of the righteous, as people say.

  The night of the wake we argued for a while about whether we should bury or cremate Mamá. I said we should cremate her and bring her ashes back to the farm. Antonio, with that silliness of his, believing that our family’s dead shouldn’t be burned, because we aren’t Hindus but converted Jews, he says, he’d rather we put her in the Ángel mausoleum in Jericó, and after a while move her remains, along with those of Cobo, to bury them together where Papá wanted to be, in the resting place, el descansadero. Eva said she didn’t care, that after death it was all the same to her. Benji, Lucas, and all my other children were for cremation, so Toño was the only one in favor of burying her and had to accept the majority’s wishes.

  Now what’s left of Mamá is under the oak tree you can see from the back of the house, facing the Cartama River, on t
he small patch of level ground where there is a bench, and everything is a more intense green because it’s been sown with groundnut fodder. Próspero doesn’t like us to call that place a “tomb” and so he calls it, more subtly, “the resting place,” and ever since he said it we’ve adopted the name. This is the part of the farm with the view I love most, the one that doesn’t look toward the west and the lake of the drowned, but toward the sunrise and the open countryside, down below, toward the flood plains of the Cauca, which now belong to other people, to old ranchers or old-guard mafiosos, although they used to be ours too, or belonged to our Ángel ancestors, many years ago.

  ANTONIO

  After Mamá’s death I wanted to stay there for a few days, hidden in the mountains, going over my old notes about the founding of Jericó, about my family, La Oculta, and that region of Southwest Antioquia. Her death gave me the definitive push to finally get down to telling the history of the town and our farm. Remembering is like embracing the phantoms who made our lives possible here. So many things have happened on this land, in this big, red and white house, surrounded by water and greenery. Green, green in all its tones, immense green mountains, and the darkness of the lake water that doesn’t reflect the blue and white sky above it, but the black and green crags that appear higher than the sky and rise up to Jericó, the town where my father and my grandfather and great-grandparents were born, the owners of this farm, the ones who cleared the land, chopping down the forest, moving rocks and burning brush, which was all there had been here since the beginning of time.

  In the mornings, as soon as I wake up, I walk barefoot on the grass around the house and feel the dew between my toes. I breathe deeply and feel like praying again, like I did as a boy, but now I wouldn’t know who to pray to. I say something in silence and it’s almost a prayer to my ancestors, although I no longer believe, as I used to, that the spirit survives death. A prayer to nature and to the destiny this farm gave us. At that hour the clouds begin to rise from the river and I hope they pass this way. I see them coming. The clouds rise, slowly, and they pass through and over the house, they dampen it, kiss it. This cloud that rises up along the ground Próspero calls “la pelona.” I don’t know why, maybe because it brushes over the pasture, as if it were peeling it with a machete. The clouds surround me, caress me, for a moment the world disappears, the lake and the mountains disappear, I feel as if I were submerged in a glass of water with anise aguardiente, as white as milk, until the clouds pass and carry on up higher, tickling the mountainsides. Suddenly everything is tinted pink or orange toward the east, and then the river comes back into view, big and yellow in winter, dark and narrower, with crystal clear waters, in summer, making its way through the deep valley heading for the Cauca. And the two farallones reappear beneath the clouds, towering crags, two distinctively shaped hills Grandpa Josué used to call “Doña Quiteria’s chest.” With the sunlight the colors of the birds and plants also appear: the white and purple orchids that hang from the trees, the orange of the birds of paradise, the purple and pink of the impatiens, the red and black of the anthurium flowers, the marvels that Pilar has planted. Sometimes a blade of grass sticks to the sole of my foot, while I weed a plant, or a clod of earth clings to my heel, and I know that I am this dew, this blade of grass, and this black earth. I have smelled this soil, I have held it to my nose to try to figure out why we love it so. But no, it doesn’t smell of anything special, it smells of soil like any other soil. I know every butterfly, every birdsong, the ninety-seven teak trees that form the grove at the entrance, all the sounds (the water of the stream, the cicadas, the chachalaca birds (which we call guacharacas), the black-billed thrushes, mockingbirds, sparrowhawks, roosters, the woodpeckers that hammer away at the dry trunks of the cecropia trees, the macaws that make their nests in the dead trunks of the royal palms), sounds that for me are the same as silence.

  I feel that I’m part of this land, this old farm of ancestors I knew and didn’t know. I’m the only one in the family who can recite a litany of their names, because I’m the only one interested in the moth-eaten books, the birth certificates and death registries. Not like my sisters, who are more like Mamá, more direct and practical than me, more realistic, and who live in the present. I have a chest of drawers here, and one of the drawers is full of papers I’ve been collecting or writing for years; every time I come, I take the papers out and correct them or add something new that I read or was told in town. Stories, gossip, truth mixed up with lies, assumptions, and harsh facts. I like to revise and take care of these notes, the way collectors do with their coins, their maps, or their stamps; I cherish them, copy them out neatly, weigh them up and think about them. For years I’ve been intending to write something about the farm, so my nephews and nieces and their children will know and remember how things were. Then they’ll be able to know how it all began, and then they’ll also know that to hold on to this farm many people had to sweat and cry and bleed. Blood, tears, and sweat, yes, pure, salty liquids. Many of my notes are no more than digressions and fantasies. Others are historical annotations about Jericó that don’t matter to almost anyone, but I like them. This note, for example, refers to the oldest things I know about our family, and I think they’re the words with which I’d like to begin the story of the farm:

  I don’t know if we were Jews, but we couldn’t have been very pure-blooded, for we have Jewish names and surnames of conversos, so in our house we always said, without shame or pride, that maybe we were marranos, that’s to say, just lip-service Christians, and inside something else, something hidden. The first of us to arrive in Colombia, a country still called New Granada, was a young Spaniard from Toledo, a scribe by the name of Abraham Santángel. What little we know of him is that he arrived in the Indies at Cartagena when he was just twenty-four years old, traveled to Antioquia up the Magdalena River and along the royal roads that led to the Cauca, around 1786, when the Colony was in its death throes, and by the years of the Independence Wars he dictated his last will and testament in Santa Fe de Antioquia.

  Nobody knows the reason Abraham came to live in these rough lands far from the world, in these crags and hills where even a cat rolls, but he surely saw a dark future in Europe and dreamed, like so many others, that perhaps somewhere else fate would smile on him. He probably believed that over here, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, breathing fresh air and stepping on unfamiliar ground, fortune could surprise him with some joy, some rain and fertile soil, with the young loins of a generous mulata where he could sow his seed forever. The longing to expel the sadness from his body, the dream of shunning sorrow and opening a better path under different skies, are illusions that almost all of us have had, but this Abraham Santángel had the courage to convert his thoughts into acts and the bravery to expose himself to a dangerous and uncertain journey, and was able to go off on an adventure when he felt the yearning for distant countries, heeding more the obscure call of his heart than the caution dictated by reason and fear.

  It seems that fate was rather stingy with him, however, for the inheritance he left in his testament was quite poor, almost nothing. In his last will he simply declared that the little he had (the list was brief and precise) – one mare, some clothes, a bit of furniture (a trunk, a candelabra, a harness and trappings, a comino crespo bedstead, a table with nine stools) – would go to his children who he begged to share as well as they could, without dispute, and listed them, from eldest to youngest: Susana, Eva, Esteban, Jaime, Ismael, Esther, and Benjamín, all born of his legitimate union with Betsabé Correa, from Yolombó, though he doesn’t say daughter of whom, which means she might have been black, indigenous, mestizo, or a Creole born and raised here in the Indies, but nor can we discard the possibility – as her name hints – that she might also have been a conversa, even if it is most likely she was indigenous or mulata. Whatever she was, her children were entrusted to care for and respect Betsabé to the end of her days, under pain of receiving a curse from the other side of lif
e. At the end of the document he added, almost unwillingly, that he was writing his testament because he was suffering serious health problems, and since he had no way of supporting his family nor could he leave them any worldly goods, apart from these trifles, he also instructed his male heirs to work hard and with their own hands, if they didn’t want to become useless, without taking advantage of the work of others. He advised his daughters to marry soon and marry well, with gentle and upstanding men, and that all should seek an honorable destiny and none should stain the surname Ángel (in the end he put Ángel and not Santángel), the origin of which, as they well knew, and this is the most mysterious part of the document, “should never be a motive for shame or stain.” Finally, he left them a piece of advice that’s become a sort of family motto: “Remember that you are no better but no worse than anybody else; work but do not command, nor obey either.”

  This very recommendation, which we still follow in my house, is what makes us loved and hated. Rather than command, we explain, we request; and rather than obey, we decide whether what is requested of us is reasonable, can be done, and is well requested. Being disobedient and disinclined to boss others around, in a country of peons and overseers, has always been strange, atypical, and disagreeable. We don’t like other people doing things for us, but nor do we like doing other people’s things for them. We prefer to do everything with our own hands, and if we need help, we’ll still be the first to put our shoulders to the wheel. And we will put our shoulders to other people’s wheels too, as long as they’re working too and not ordering us around and watching, as if they were from another caste or a better family. That we can’t stand.