Before that happens, the daughter who’ll travel abroad in her sister’s place will feel afraid. She’ll hear steps on the roof of their house like those that had once turned to leaps, then screams, and then hacking on their front door when she was just a little girl. Her mind will go to the man who’d once insisted they hand over the eldest daughter the mother had raised and, faced with her silent refusal, started trying to bring down their house.
If an ex-soldier from the village hadn’t reinforced those parts of the house that the first man had weakened, this other man would’ve entered with ease. If her father hadn’t built the house the way he had, the first man would’ve had no trouble seizing her sister and taking her away. Everyone in the community knew he’d done the same to others. It was said he broke into the houses of the women he desired and stayed there for as long as he liked. It was also said he waited on roads for other village girls, diverted them to where he wanted them, and then sent them back on their way with instructions to keep quiet. If they ever accused him, he’d end them after killing their parents in front of their eyes and blaming it all on the girls, claiming they’d asked for it.
He’d put a sharpened machete to the necks of the community’s women and demand they move like he’d told them to and do what he wanted. He expected a beverage at the end of each encounter. If there wasn’t one waiting for him, he took it as an offense and punished them for it. He hit them where everyone could see and made them prepare him something to drink right away. He also told them that if they didn’t want to force him to do it all over again, they should make sure a beverage was waiting for him the following day.
Though he’d have preferred to move on to another woman’s house, he’d go back to that one just to make sure she’d learned her lesson. He wouldn’t take any refusals or objections. Or negotiations: his word was to be respected.
His family refused to intervene. His mother said there was no way her son was doing what he was being accused of. His brothers preferred not to get involved. Though his sisters believed there might be some truth to the claims, they could do nothing about it: when their turn had come to take him into their beds at night, no one had offered them a helping hand. If they did anything to stop him from going to other women he’d only return to them.
His father was the only one who could get his attention, the only person he obeyed. But he was elderly and very ill, so no one wanted to trouble him. The doctor had said he was to avoid any anger or commotion, which is why the family tried to protect him from hearing anything that might upset him. But seeing as no one else was willing to help, the girls’ mother went to speak to him the day after his son’s visit.
She asked him to keep his boy away from her girls. She’d already asked him directly. Once she’d even pried her eldest daughter from where he’d cornered her.
She wasn’t asking to be reimbursed for the damage he’d done to her home, but to let them sleep peacefully and live at ease. Otherwise, she’d be forced to find some way of handling it herself. He knew she could: they’d been together at a couple of camps. Her father had been a friend of his. They’d gone to the mountains together during the invasions. They’d attended the same lectures and read the same leaflets given to them by the catechists. He knew what was just and what he had to do if he didn’t want someone else to do it themselves. So he agreed to talk to his son, and to cover the cost of repairing the damage the boy had caused.
The man’s mother didn’t appreciate the measures taken. She said she didn’t understand why they had to pay for the house of a woman who had nothing to do with them. Upset as she was, she spread word that the woman, finding herself alone, was trying to make others cover her and her daughters’ expenses, and that she’d found in her husband a fool who would slip her some money. But, deep down, she knew what her husband was doing. She knew her son was responsible for the damage and her husband was paying for it. He always had. During the war, he’d gone to the mountains so his son wouldn’t have to, and asked those fighting there not to recruit him. He knew that if he were to join their forces, he’d be liquidated in weeks: the boy didn’t heed instructions or fight for any causes other than the one everyone knew about.
Sometimes he thought the boy should’ve fallen in the war so that his mother wouldn’t have to go through what she was going through then, and so she could fabricate a story that framed him as a hero. But when he’d had the chance to decide, he’d been swayed by how much she’d suffer if her son died. He’d thought his boy might somehow help her get ahead, and so he chose to believe what she did: that their son could change, even though it wasn’t true. Now, he had to pay for it.
If he’d had the strength, he would’ve fixed the roof over the heads of the mother and her daughters himself, as well as replacing the door his boy had damaged with his machete. But his body was at its limit. He asked her to understand. He also asked her to understand that he could only afford the services of the village’s ex-soldier, who now applied himself to these sorts of labors. His only other option would’ve been to make his son answer for what he’d done, but he was sure nobody wanted that: neither his wife nor his son, neither her nor her daughters.
In return for the fear his son had caused her daughters he could offer only the occasional sweet. He’d bring them himself so that her girls wouldn’t have to go anywhere near his boy. Or he could give them to her, if she preferred. He didn’t want any misunderstandings.
She’d rather he kept his sweets. She worried his son might use them as an excuse to cozy up to the girls or get something out of them. And she knew sugar was no cure for fear. The only thing that might mitigate their fear was for him to keep his son in line. She knew he couldn’t ask him to leave the community—after all, he was the one putting food on his and his wife’s table—but she needed him to keep the boy away from her house, from her daughters, and from the paths they walked. If he could take care of that, she wouldn’t file a complaint with the person who’d been in charge of administering justice in the area ever since her husband had died. Nor would she say anything if that person ever asked her about what had happened, if word of it were ever to reach them.
The boy’s father thanked her. He said he wished his children had turned out like her or her husband, or like any of the others he’d fought alongside. He apologized again and asked permission to leave so he could find his son and reprimand him and then come to an agreement with the ex-soldier so she wouldn’t go another night without a door and with holes in her roof. Even though he was dead, her husband was still his superior. Even though she no longer had a radio, she was still in charge of conveying information.
This meant nothing to his son. She was just a husbandless woman with a daughter he wanted for himself. But his father was a figure he respected and so he did as he was told. He left the area she and her daughters frequented. But he sent word that, once his father died, he’d come after the girl he’d chosen. And he expected her to have a drink waiting for him.
Meanwhile, the girls could walk wherever they liked and he would leave at once. The mother’s mind was at peace because she knew that her compañero-in-struggle would do his best to ensure her daughters remained safe while he was alive, but she was always worrying about his health. If he died—and he might at any moment—she’d have to find another way of handling the situation.
The ex-soldier suggested she electrify the roof. It was illegal, and she might find that a rat’s corpse, or that of a squirrel or a cat, would fall at her feet more often than she liked, but she’d be safe from intruders. So long as she didn’t tell a soul, she’d surprise anyone trying: he thought the son of the man hiring him was only the first to try and hurt her. He thought the boy had marked a trail that others would open into a path.
He didn’t want her to misunderstand him, or fear him either, but he had to admit that her eldest daughter was really lovely. Though the others were still young, you could tell they’d be beautiful too. She’d better protect them, because guerrillas always got what they wanted. He knew this because he’d been in the military back when they attacked them and had been a part of the troop that’d gone after them in the hills.
He couldn’t say how it was that he was still alive: he wasn’t the smartest or best trained. He thought it must have been a matter of luck or divine providence, because he’d been sent places he shuddered to remember.
When she asked him where, he named the place where she’d fought. He also mentioned the name of the place her daughters’ father had overseen. And he told her he’d experienced the worst moments of his life then, that the people who controlled those hills were tough and he never wanted to relive that experience, not for anything in the world.
She didn’t remember ever seeing him in combat. Maybe this is what had saved him. Maybe it was just that, in his olive-green uniform, weapon in hand, he looked like any of his fellow soldiers, and she hadn’t been able to tell him apart from the others. They might have once been face to face and yet she couldn’t summon him up: her mind had made sure to erase all that had happened during that time. In a few years, it would even erase the face of the man she’d had her three daughters with. More than his face, she’d remember the feeling of being with him. And, soon, she wouldn’t much remember that feeling either.
In this respect, she wished she were more like her mother, who could share details of every day she’d spent with her father, every mark on his body. But as long as a future existed for the people who’d fought for one, like she had, there seemed to be no room for any past. Something either swallowed up everything that’d happened or made it seem so distant it felt like it might not have happened at all, despite the marks it had left on their bodies. Maybe that’s why people had stopped seeing them as they once had and started thinking they could come up and hurt them without suffering any repercussions. The past was a luxury only those who hadn’t been forced to fire at it could afford. Maybe that was why her compañero’s son thought he had the authority to take what wasn’t his. Maybe that was why that son’s son thought, now, many years later, that he could hound them without fear of consequences. He leaped on their roof just like his father had and, from way up there, yelled the very same things.
His grandmother had shared his father’s story and sent the boy to finish what her son had started, as revenge for what’d been done to him. And she was convinced the girls’ mother was the one who’d killed him—or, at the very least, who’d given the order—because her son had been struck down by bullets from an AK-47 just days after someone came to her husband with a complaint about his boy that sent him into a fiercer rage than he could handle, after which he died of a heart attack.
Rather than any of the girls, what that man’s son wanted was the body of their mother. He figured he’d make her quake and come out and give herself up and admit that what she’d done was wrong, then let herself be killed. But she was just like the ex-soldier had said they were in the place where he’d fought. She could end him any time she pleased. Except she’d rather let him wear himself out from jumping and screaming, like his dad. She waited, in silence, for the day to brighten and for him to leave, retracing his steps.