Her mother’s life story doesn’t fit in the assigned box on the university’s financial-aid application form. The woman who hands it to her says she just needs to write that she’s an ex-combatant: the people responsible for selecting the recipients will understand. She doesn’t want to tell her that her request will be approved no matter how she puts it or how much information she provides. Instead, she explains that the committee is keenly aware of its obligations toward society, and of the country’s recent history. She asks her to be sure to send in the completed form before the deadline, that’s all. The earlier the better. The team takes note of the order the applications arrive in, though this isn’t mentioned in the instructions. They think it’s proof of a candidate’s interest. She doesn’t share their view. She’s met students in her office who’d only heard about the available benefits at the very last minute, as well as others who needed them so much they couldn’t afford the necessary transportation to request them. She’s said as much before, and received only a condescending smile in return. They keep on doing things the way they feel is right. She’s resolved to provide students with guidance when sending in their forms, even though they don’t ask for it. She knows students won’t ask for something they don’t know exists. It’ll be a sort of preselection process. Since she’s the one who hears their life stories and has learned to tell liars from truth-tellers, she chooses to improve their chances of being selected. She knows there isn’t much funding available and that often, due to mere technicalities, it doesn’t go to the candidates who most deserve it. But she’s different. Going forward, what she will do is look after the aid. Once it’s approved, she’ll advise the girl on how to find accommodation (better with a family than with friends from university—she’ll eat better that way and there’ll be fewer distractions when it comes to studying) and how to manage her stipend. It’s remarkable how easy it is to waste money. Many have ended up blowing it on cookies and sweets. This will remind her of something her mother said about the compensation they got when the war ended: some people used it to buy themselves a hamburger, and were left with nothing. She doesn’t think this will happen to her because the amount she’s receiving is different. Even though it isn’t much, to her it seems like a lot. A fortune. More than she could ever have dreamed of. Enough for her to get to university every day, buy whatever booklets are assigned, eat three meals a day, and travel home once a month. If instead of buying books she checks them out from the library, she might be able to send her mom a monthly contribution. Then she wouldn’t have to dip into the child support she gets from the littlest one’s father to feed the rest of her daughters. They could even fix up the house a little. Or think about buying chickens again, if only one at a time. Not a Pelibuey sheep, though, that’d be too great an investment for an animal no one thereabouts purchases, not only because they’re expensive but because the meat isn’t particularly tasty. At least not to the people where she’s from. She’s heard of other places where it’s worked. Where people eat it without grumbling about how it’s chewy like rope. She’s also heard of women who, thanks to Pelibueys, have gained financial independence. Women who, due to good sales, have managed to leave husbands who hit them and have taken over providing food for their children. Again, in other parts. Nobody likes Pelibueys where they live. Besides, no one has enough land to raise them. What little they have is allotted to their milpa, which keeps them fed all year round.
Their milpa is excellent. And appreciated. It doesn’t need much to flourish. Whenever there hasn’t been enough food, it’s been because of people thieving. Knowing there are no men at home, they break into their barn at night and steal a sack or two at a time. They don’t know exactly who it is, but they have their suspicions. They’re well aware of who has enough to eat all year without once going out to sow. But they haven’t seen them, so they can’t point fingers. They’ve never seen them. Their mother has told them to not go outside or peep through the windows, even if they hear noises. Who knows what state they might be in, the men who’ve come to wring them dry, or what they’d be capable of if they were caught. She knows cowardice is rash. She tells them to pretend they haven’t woken up, and to feign surprise the following day when they exclaim that there’s this or that much missing. She tells them to say they heard nothing, even though they stirred at the sound of the first step and lay there upset and listening until they left. She doesn’t want any trouble. She knows it’s not her they’ll get even with, but her daughters. She doesn’t think it’s worth fighting over such a trifling amount of corn, corn she’d have given willingly if only they’d asked. Instead, she sets some aside for her and her girls. Keeps it in the house because she knows they won’t come looking for it there. They know that if they did, she could kill them and, legally, nothing would come of it. They think she still has the gun she was forced to sell in an emergency, and that she could use it to kill them. They know she knows how, and that she wouldn’t hesitate if they forced her hand, even though she’s said over and over that she would never do it in front of her daughters. They were in the same camp once, so they’re aware she’s a good shot and that she’d consider it fair game. They agree. They wouldn’t steal under other circumstances, but right then they feel they’ve no other choice. Their children are hungry. They’ve nowhere to sow. No land. They had to sell off the parcels they’d been allotted after the war ended, piece by piece, to cover the expenses of all their fruitless harvests. And, little by little, the money had run out.
When they’d asked to borrow some, she said she had none. They didn’t believe her. In all that time, she’d never asked anyone for a cent, never complained. What’s more, she had a mill, even though she no longer had a husband. Everyone knew, too, that the father of her littlest daughter sent child support once a month. No one knew how much, but they figured it was a lot because it came from abroad and because, again, she never complained and never asked anyone for a thing. They thought she was better off than the rest of them and that she didn’t share her wealth out of meanness. Not very public-spirited, coming from someone who’d fought in the same war they had and, on top of that, had gotten twice the benefits because, during distribution, she’d also been given the share due to her other three girls’ father. No one seemed to have been informed that, when the time came to distribute the land, she’d been denied her own share for being married to him. They’d said it was one parcel per family, not per person, and that she’d have to make do with what her husband got; that she shouldn’t be ambitious, it wasn’t a good example to set, even if the war was over. Nothing for her dad or brother either. She couldn’t pretend to lay claim to something that wasn’t hers, not even when she said it was for her mom, who she thought deserved something after all they’d fought for.
They explained to her that the land was only for the living. They couldn’t parcel it out among the dead, couldn’t track their families down and make a symbolic handover. Nor could they field claims from everyone who said their family members had perished in combat. Could she imagine how many there must be? Did she think that the land they’d been given was enough for everyone? Could she think of a way of ensuring people weren’t lying, weren’t trying to take advantage of the situation? They couldn’t afford to be cheated. What they were offering was to train her for productive projects. Many ex-combatants were getting far less than she was through her husband. And then there were the soldiers. Had she heard? Many didn’t receive a thing after the conflict ended. Nothing. Not even training. They were told their situation was different: they’d been paid at the barracks or it’d been part of their military service. They weren’t owed a thing. They thanked them and then sent them packing. Those who’d lost limbs were promised pensions that were slow to arrive and, when they did, weren’t what they had originally been offered. She remembered the outcry: they were in the newspapers, they were on TV, they were heard every day on the radio.
Her husband said not to worry, that what he’d gotten was enough for them and their girls, and for the lost daughter when they eventually found her. That it was all part of setting an example for the troop, after all, they might have to regroup, and that deed would be taken into account when they were under review. She still thought it unfair, but she didn’t raise it again. She followed orders in peacetime as she had during the war, though she couldn’t help thinking that maybe it had been a bad idea to get married by the state when they were living in the reintegration camps after coming down from the mountains. She thought this, above all, when her husband, who had insisted she shouldn’t fight for what was rightfully hers, started seeing other women, women who hadn’t even fought with them, or on any other fronts. Women with pretty hands and pampered feet. They said they supported the cause, but all they did was carry papers from a regional office to one in the capital. Which didn’t strike her as particularly helpful. She’d have liked to see them in action. She’d have liked to see if they could survive bombings and dodge bullets the way she had. She wondered if they’d have been able to do his laundry after returning exhausted from an operation. She also wondered if it was just a passing fancy, a fling, or if these women would move into the house they lived in, which was hers too. In which case, she’d go back to the farm named after a horse, where her mother lived, at least for a while. It was the only place she could take her daughters. Then she’d look for a job—any kind of job—and for a place to settle down, somewhere her daughters could go to school without danger. She’d no intention of leaving them with him. He said he didn’t know what she was talking about: there was nothing going on between him and those women she kept mentioning. Even as people gossiped about it and after she’d seen it with her own eyes, he carried on denying it. He told her not to let other people muddle her thoughts and not mistake what she heard or saw. He laughed off her jealousy and said her suspicions were unfounded, that it was weird for a woman who’d survived the war to behave like any old village vieja. But the truth was he was having an affair and, if necessary, would leave her and the girls so that he could start a new life with a woman whose body bore no battle scars. He’d sell the house and move with her to the capital. He’d get a job at a cooperation organization and lead a happy life. He’d see the girls once his real wife’s anger had subsided and would send them whatever money he didn’t spend on the kids he had with his new life partner. With time, his daughters would understand that he, too, had a right to happiness after all he’d risked during the war. If they didn’t, that was their problem. It was all he could do. He wouldn’t sacrifice himself again.
It’d be an advantage, in the long run: the girls would have two homes instead of one. His new wife would always welcome them, he thought. When they went to university, they could stay with him or he could find them some other accommodation. In any case, he’d see them often and they’d forge a new relationship. The girls would play with their little brothers and sisters and, from time to time, help look after them when he and his new wife had some party or work event to attend. But first, he had to get divorced. Even though his new girlfriend said he needn’t bother, he wanted to. He wanted to close the book on that chapter of his life, but, most of all, he wanted to ensure the next one, because the way his girlfriend kept insisting that he needn’t bother made him think she might leave him at any moment. She was younger and prettier and more educated than any of the other women he’d been with, so he figured it was pretty likely.
In the end he didn’t have to devise a way of telling his wife without her kicking up a fuss because a village man on a bender killed him over some nonsense that no one could explain because no one had been paying attention. Nobody knows if her husband disrespected the other guy’s family or if he mentioned having been at the camp where they killed the man’s nephew with a bullet above the left eye, even though it hadn’t happened on the day or during the year the boy was deployed, fresh from military school, as cannon fodder. Then she had to see to the funeral and the burial and shed tears for him as if things between them had been going just as well as they were when they decided to live together for as long as the war allowed, and then marry till death did them part. She had to nod when his compañeros-in-battle came to tell her he’d been a good man, and thank them for coming to see him off. She also had to listen to his mother accuse her of leading him down the wrong path so that he lost his life even after clinging on to it in other, more difficult situations. She consoled her daughters as best she could and turned her attention to what hadn’t been sold yet. To avoid misunderstandings or the temptation to sell in times of crisis, she asked the lawyers to put the land in her daughters’ names. It would be their inheritance. Of course, this story didn’t fit in the box for her father’s situation on the university’s financial aid application. On their advice, she wrote only that he was an ex-combatant and that he had died.