Table of Contents
___________________
Chapter Seven: Parish House Of Soacha
Bonus Material: Excerpt from Cervantes Street
for Isaías Fanlo
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
—from “Sonnet XXIX,” William Shakespeare
CHAPTER ONE
güicán
1987
Lucas’s family lived on a farm where the days were cold and the nights so frigid that the sky frosted over with stars. The icy water that gushed from the spigot in the makeshift bathroom outside the house descended from the snowcapped mountains and it was so stinging that the members of the family only washed once a week, two or three of them at a time.
Lucas was too small to wash by himself, so he showered with his father, Gumersindo. His mother, Clemencia, and his sisters, Adela and Lercy, showered together. No one looked forward to the occasion, except Lucas who was both frightened and excited by Gumersindo’s genitals. Lucas struggled to suppress the pleasure that his father’s nakedness awakened in him.
One day Lucas grabbed his father’s penis to soap it and Gumersindo slapped the boy’s face against the lichen-covered walls. “Men don’t do that!” he shouted. “Don’t you ever do that again.”
Lucas would never forget his father’s look of disgust and his harsh tone. For the rest of his childhood his biggest terror was that he would touch his father’s penis by accident.
* * *
Lucas grew up hearing about how his father was the only surviving member of a massacre that killed his entire family. Whenever he got drunk, Gumersindo would yell, “The military said that the farmers around here sympathized with the bandoleros and used that as an excuse to exterminate whole families! But the motherfuckers did it to steal our land! If they killed every single member of a family, there would be no one left to claim ownership of the farm.” Sometimes, depending on how inebriated he was, he would start weeping as he roared, “I’m still alive because on that day I was sent to town to buy food supplies! When I got back home, I found my parents and my brothers and sisters shot in the head and hacked with machetes.” He’d explode with fury, shouting, “Hacked to pieces!” Then he always added, “With their tongues sticking out from the base of their necks.”
Lucas felt sorry for his father being left an orphan at the age of fourteen. He wondered how he would have managed if he had had to grow up overnight in order to save the farm, which had been in his father’s family for generations. Lucas had heard many times—too many times, he thought—how Gumersindo, before he had grown a mustache, hired a married couple to help him run the farm in exchange for a place to live, food, and a share of the crops.
Lucas’s father’s family had planted anthuriums, sunflowers, carnations, daisies, and roses, which they sold in the local market. The soil at the top of the mountain was so fertile that in addition to the flowers, they had also cultivated the potatoes, fava beans, carrots, and roots that the indigenous people of the region ate, and sold them in Güicán’s Sunday market. Gumersindo would boast to the family around the dining table: “It’s a good thing I learned to read and write and have a good head for numbers. That’s why we have a roof over our heads and you don’t go hungry. So study; learn your arithmetic.”
One rainy afternoon when Lucas and his mother were in the kitchen, sitting by the stove shelling fava beans, Clemencia reminisced about the time she met his father: “He went to Güicán for the annual festival of Corpus Christi. Gumersindo had turned eighteen and decided he should look for a wife.” Then she fell quiet, as if she were unsure of stirring up a well of memories. Lucas hoped that if his mother didn’t want to say more about her courtship, she would instead talk about the festival of Corpus Christi—his favorite time of the year—when the townspeople decorated the churches and plazas with flower arrangements and fruit baskets, and built bamboo arches over the street corners in the shapes of dinosaurs, cows, and horses.
“I had just turned sixteen,” Clemencia continued. “Your grandparents had sent me to Güicán to study with the nuns—my parents wanted me to finish high school. We lived about twelve hours away by bus in the Llanos Orientales, where we had a plot of land and some cows. My ambition was to become a teacher in a rural school, near where we lived. The girls in the school in Güicán were allowed to go out in a large group one night during the festival, under the supervision of a nun. At the last minute Sister Rosana became indisposed. We were all disappointed—it was the only time during the school year that we could see people dancing in the streets—so the nuns took pity on us and told us we could go out unsupervised, but only if we stuck together and did not dance or talk to men.
“We didn’t have money for the rides. We just walked around gawking and laughing. A group dressed in regional costumes was dancing bambucos. I was standing there with some girls, tapping my foot, my hips swaying, when a handsome man approached and asked me to dance. I was flattered that he had noticed me, but I told him that I wasn’t allowed to dance. Then the other girls started saying, ‘Oh, go ahead, Clemencia. We won’t tell.’ That’s how I met your father. I loved dancing and he was a good dancer, and so we clicked.”
Clemencia stopped shelling the beans to smooth her hair, a blush rising on her cheeks. “We danced for a while . . . When I got tired I told him I had to join my friends. But they had left already, and there I was alone with a strange man. I was attracted to him, but a little scared too. Gumersindo asked me if I wanted something to drink and I said yes. I was so thirsty I drank a bottle of beer fast without thinking. I started feeling a little tipsy. Your father said, ‘Come, I’ll walk you back to your school.’ Somehow we ended up in a pasture outside town; I became his woman that night.” Sadness came over her face. “Okay, that’s enough for today. Don’t look so downcast, Lucas. I’ll tell you the rest some other time. We have to hurry and shell these beans or dinner is not going to be ready. You know how your father gets if his dinner isn’t on the table when he gets home from the fields.”
On another rainy afternoon that winter, when Lucas was helping her with the cooking, Clemencia resumed the story of his