None of her neighbors were in favor of her letting her daughter go so far away. In her shoes, they wouldn’t have let her go to the capital either: they would’ve made her see reason, pull out of the admissions exams, and find a husband she could start a home with that would keep her busy and safe. She’d never have cut her hair. By that point, she’d have at least one son. She might even have given birth to twins if she’d paid any mind to one of the boys who had courted her and was now in a relationship with her next youngest sister’s classmate.
He’d courted that sister, too. And he would’ve made overtures or at least intimations to the littlest daughter if their mother hadn’t gone to his house one day and asked him to stop pestering her girls. The girls hadn’t dared to tell him directly, but the fact that he kept trying to get together with them got on their nerves.
It wasn’t a problem: the truth was, he’d have liked to have gotten involved with the eldest daughter who’d been his classmate at school, but she’d married someone else, someone older, from another town. He couldn’t compete. He’d tried it on with the other sisters, not because he wanted to be near the eldest at any cost, but because he thought he could succeed with them where he hadn’t with her. Deep down, what he wanted was to be connected to that family. Not that he was in love with the mother, she mustn’t worry about that. He just missed his own.
She’d known her during the war. They hadn’t been close, but she remembered a handful of things (faces she pulled, expressions she used), which she shared with him whenever he asked. Sometimes, when the boy asked about his mother, she would tell him things about other women she’d known in battle, stories no one could claim as their own and which might help the boy feel better.
About her death, she can’t say much. She wasn’t there when it happened: she’d left to give birth to her daughter. His mother must’ve had him just before. It’s possible her condition had made it difficult for her to move with her usual agility, but whenever the boy asked if she thought his mother had died because of him, she always said no. Though she hadn’t been in the usual camps during the offensive, she knew her group hadn’t stood a chance under the circumstances.
She’d heard as much from a deserter, a teenage boy who, on the third day of the skirmish, dropped his rifle and raced toward the highway that took buses to the other side of the country. There, he’d been mistaken for a frightened civilian and taken in a car with white flags to a refugee zone, which he’d soon left out of fear someone might find out what he’d done, prosecute him, and execute him on the spot.
Most likely no one had thought him involved at the time because he trembled just like everybody else and was built differently from the people in the hills. He’d joined their forces only days earlier, by order of his mother—who sympathized with the cause—and under pressure from his brothers, who took her side. Figuring the training he’d received wouldn’t help him put up much of a fight, he left. He left his compañeros behind. Planes chased them. Bullets whistled past as he ran. They made people scream. Made his compañeros fall. Made him keep running till there was only silence. Not even then did he slow down. He kept running until the people in the white-flagged car signaled for him to stop and begged him to let them help. He thought it was a trap, that they were coming to make him pay for what he’d done. He kept on walking, as if he couldn’t hear them, until he spotted an approaching military vehicle in the distance.
The soldiers would never have guessed he was on the other side: they didn’t stop to check the civilian car. And if they had, they wouldn’t have been able to pick him out as a combatant: he was too frightened. None of the combatants they’d seen so far trembled like he did. They were skillful shots and refused to surrender, despite the order the soldiers shouted through their megaphones.
The mother of the boy courting her daughters was like that. The deserter said she’d shot at the plane until it fell out of the sky and, in the time they spent together, had tried her best to save the others. She gave instructions and made sure no one made any mistakes that might jeopardize them. But not even her willingness or readiness could save them from the counterattack that followed.
Though he was ashamed to have fled, he’d rather feel the sorrow that had long kept him from moving or talking than end up flung on a field with the rest of them. He didn’t think having his name scrawled on a wall would be any consolation to his mother.
He was wrong: she’d have preferred it to the news that he’d quit the mission she’d sent him on. When she heard he was still alive and had crossed the border to shirk his duty, she sent word that he’d better not come back, not even for her funeral. She didn’t want him crying for her beside his brothers, who’d all survived, though not without difficulty. He obeyed her wish and didn’t come back until she was buried, a few months after the peace agreement was signed.
He arrived in time to sign up as a war veteran and enroll for the benefits to which he was entitled for services rendered. Since no one from his troop was there to report his desertion, no one could hold him accountable. But the father of the girls the other boy was courting had thrown a wrench in his plans.
After asking him a series of very specific questions, he determined that the boy didn’t deserve any of the benefits. He said that, the war being over, they wouldn’t prosecute him for cowardice, but that if he didn’t leave right that second, they’d get him for attempted fraud.
When the girls’ father died, he stopped by to offer his condolences. He told the man’s wife that he harbored no ill feelings and asked her not to think he’d had anything to do with her husband’s death: ever since people had found out about what he’d done, they seemed to want to blame him for anything bad that happened around there. He admitted to being behind the disappearance of a couple of sacks of corn and maybe some livestock, but nothing like what’d happened to her husband. The way he saw it, it wasn’t stealing: he was just collecting what he was owed for his services during the war. Who cared if it’d been only a few days, what mattered was that he’d been forced. If they’d lived in another country, he could’ve sued them for millions. What he took was merely symbolic. What’s more, it was recompense for everything his mother had done for them. Though he couldn’t say whether his mother had helped her or her husband, she had fed many guerrillas. Countless times she’d sent him to grind corn so she could cook food for the troops that came through her farmhouse. As far as he knew, she’d never received a cent in return. The fairest thing would be for him to get back a little of what she’d given, which was his patrimony, his inheritance.
He also assured her that he’d never stolen from her and never would. He would have done if he’d found out she had anything of value in the house. But thanks to luck and her discretion, he never did. The few times he’d visited her, it was because she’d called him over to give him some grain or chicken. Through she couldn’t say whether his mother had ever fed her or her husband, she was grateful that she had fed her compañeros.
The women in the neighborhood didn’t understand why a man with armfuls of food would be leaving a lonely woman’s house in the middle of the day. They assumed she was paying him for sexual favors, because the boy was too young to be with her out of love. He wasn’t ugly either. They wondered if he might have been involved somehow in her husband’s death. They didn’t dare ask her because they knew it wasn’t true, and that she’d become cross and never help them again. It’s not like she was sorting out their entire lives, or paying for their groceries, but she was always willing to pitch in when needed. And whenever something found its way into her hands, she shared it without ceremony or any provisions for reciprocity. Just like her husband had. It was a pity he’d died, because from that moment on, people kept breaking into her barn. Whenever she asked the neighbors if they’d seen anyone go in when she wasn’t around, or if they’d heard any sounds of looting the night before, they said nothing. They didn’t want any trouble: the men doing the robbing might get annoyed and break into their houses when their husbands or life partners weren’t around, and teach them a thing or two about discretion.
The robbers respected the men’s presence, even those who were elderly or weaker than they were. They viewed the women as they had before the war, even though they’d fought beside them, saved their lives on occasion, and could even kill them now, claiming they’d trespassed on their property. But they knew none of them would. They wouldn’t want their children to think of them as murderers. Nor would they want to shoulder the weight of their neighbors’ judgment. They couldn’t stand the thought of being told they’d gone too far, that it was unbelievable how much they’d changed since wartime, that nobody would have thought they’d care enough about their possessions to end the life of a compañero-in-combat, even if that compañero was stealing from them. They would’ve shared what they had, if only they’d been asked. But no man wanted to suffer the embarrassment of asking a woman for help, especially one without a husband. They’d be ridiculed. Their own wives would scorn them. Maybe even leave them. There was only one option: to do what they’d been doing. The other women would have to understand.
She couldn’t. She didn’t think it was fair for them to take what she’d toiled to get for her daughters. Nor could she accept the women’s sudden interest in advising her on how to raise her girls, even though they’d never lifted a finger to help. None of them had helped when her husband died. None of them had contributed to her search for her missing daughter, or looked after the ones who lived with her, not even when she had to leave the country to find her firstborn. She didn’t care if they were saying, now, that it was for her own good, that they didn’t want her daughter to go the way of one of the other girls who’d taken the admissions exam with her at the university and become addicted to drugs after studying abroad in a neighboring country, even though she’d been accepted at the university she applied to. They wanted her to be like the second girl, who’d also been admitted but decided she ought to get married and have kids while she was still young, and revisit her studies later, if necessary: she’d gotten together with a boy whose parents had emigrated a long time ago and sent money every month. The boy had a brother who might be a good match for her daughter, if she didn’t become too peculiar. She was a pretty girl, but not the only one in those parts. Best make up her mind soon. She wouldn’t be young for ever. She couldn’t spend too long dreaming of universities and foreign cities. Neither could her mother.