The story of his memories—that is, the trajectory of his obsession—began the same day he was born, the first of January 1950. He was not exactly born that day but appeared in a rural town named Santa María Bailarina after the Dancing Madonna, now erased from history but which had its time and place, years ago and far away, along the trail to El Limonar, municipality of Río Perdido, at the divide between Huila and Tolima. As best I was able to reconstruct, by piecing together isolated details from his volatile life story, Three Sevens was found on the front steps of a church as people were leaving after midnight mass. The church was still under construction and inaugurated prematurely to celebrate the arrival of 1950, which seemed to bring ill winds.
“Big trouble is brewing,” people were saying. “Violent hordes are storming down the mountains, chopping everyone’s head off.”
These were echoes of the Little War, which had been spreading since the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and was now threatening to tighten the noose around the peaceful town of Santa María. The villagers were getting ready to celebrate the New Year with fireworks, praying that this would calm the rabble as they passed through. It was then that they saw him.
A small, quiet bundle, wrapped like a tamale in a plaid, soft-wool blanket: he was not moving or crying, he was just there. Newborn and naked under the immense dark skies, he lay even then in his distinctive way, luminous and solitary.
“Look, he has an extra toe,” the people exclaimed, amazed when they lifted the blanket. Just as I was, so many years later, the first time I saw him barefoot.
Maybe that is the reason some people mistrusted him from the beginning, because of that sixth toe on his right foot, which seemed to have appeared just like that, out of the blue, as a dangerous omen announcing that the natural order of things was being disrupted. Other people, less superstitious, only laughed at that extra kernel, pink, cute, and perfectly round, pressed against the other five, in a row edging the tiny fan of his foot.
“The old year left us at the church door a child with twenty-one digits!” was the rumor spreading all over town. And Matilde Lina, eager about anything new, elbowed her curious way into the tight human circle gathered around the phenomenon. When she faced the cause of their amazement, that extra toe, she did not think for an instant that it was a defect; on the contrary, she took it as a blessing to come into this world with an additional gift. She knew very well that every rarity is a wonder and that every wonder carries its own meaning.
So from that moment it was Matilde Lina, the river laundress poor as a meadowlark, who became the great presence in the life of the child. It was she who, in an enlightened moment—almost like his second birth—took him in her arms and looked into his eyes, at his hands, at his male parts.
“How painful it must have been for those parents to part with their son. Only God knows what they were running away from, or what they wanted to protect him from,” Matilde Lina said out loud after looking at him warmly and long, showing her involvement. And as to this, some people will wonder how I ever came to know her exact words or the tone in which she said them. I can only answer that I just know; that without having met her, I have come to know so much about her that I feel I can take the liberty of speaking for her, without any need to add that those words were not actually heard by anyone, because at that moment the first fireworks had begun bursting and there were explosions and shooting stars in the sky, while Roman candles were spewing torrents of fireballs, and pinwheels turned round and round on the wires, splendid like sunbursts.
The crowd disappeared amid the smoke and the red glare of the fireworks, and Matilde Lina was left alone by the church doors, which were already closed. Bedazzled by the rockets and flares, her eyes lit up with reflections, she held the baby wrapped in the blanket against her body as if she would never let go of him. From then on she sheltered him by pure instinct, without having made a decision or even intending to, and he was the only one in the world allowed to penetrate the wordless and windowless space where she hid her affections.
An unreal, amphibious creature, this Matilde Lina. “Always at the riverbank, surrounded by foamy waters and white laundry,” is how Three Sevens remembers her. He says that growing up sheltered by this sweet water woman, he learned that life could be milk and honey. “When night began to fall and birds flew to their nests,” he evokes at the height of his reminiscence, “she called me and I was grateful. It was like marking the day’s end. Her voice lingered in the air until I returned to cuddle up beside her.”
Three Sevens has never wanted to part with his plaid woolly blanket, all faded and frayed now, and more than once I have seen him squeeze it as if wanting to extract one more strand of memories that could alleviate the grief of not knowing who he is. That rag cannot tell him anything, but it emanates a familiar smell that maybe reminds him of the warmth of a breast, the color of the first sky, the pangs of the first sorrow. Nothing, really, except the usual mirages of nostalgia. The rest is all stories that Matilde Lina invented for him in order to teach him how to forgive.
“Stop fretting, child,” she used to say when she found him on the verge of despair, “your parents did not abandon you because they were mean, they were just downhearted.”
“I cannot forgive them,” he grumbled.
“Those who won’t forgive cross a river of unwholesome waters and remain on that other side.”