Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Laura Restrepo is the bestselling author of six novels, including The Dark Bride, A Tale of the Dispossessed, and Delirio, which received Spain's prestigious Alfaguara Prize. She lives in Colombia.

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"How can I tell him that he will never find her, after he has been searching for her all his life? If I could talk to him without breaking his heart, there is something I would tell him, in hopes it would stop his sleepless nights and wrongheaded search for a shadow. I would repeat this to him: 'Your Matilde Lina is in limbo, the dwelling place of those who are neither dead nor alive.' But that would be like severing the roots of the tree that supports him. Besides, why do it if he is not going to believe me."

In the midst of war, the protagonists of A Tale of the Dispossessed are continuously searching: for a promised land, a destiny, the face of a woman who has disappeared -- searching for an impossible love and, conversely, for a love that is possible.

A way station for refugees from violence is the setting for an intense love triangle in which an uprooted and wandering people lead the reader to experience the collective drama of forced relocation. A Tale of the Dispossessed speaks to us about the inexorable law that has led man, expelled from paradise since the days of Adam through to modern times, in his search for a way back home.

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A Tale of the Dispossessed/La Multitud Errante

Ecco

Chapter One

How can I tell him that he is never going to find her, afterhe has been searching for her all his life?

He told me that he finds pain in the air, that his bloodis boiling, and that he is lying on a bed of nails because helost the woman he loves at one of the turns in the road, andthere is no map to tell him where to find her. He searchesthe whole landscape for her, never allowing himself amoment of respite or of forgiveness, though he doesn't realizethat she is only to be found within himself, ensconced inhis feverishness, present in every object he touches, andstaring at him through the eyes of anyone who approacheshim.

"The world tastes of her," he has confessed to me. "Mymind does not know any other destination, it goes straightto her."

If I could talk to him without breaking his heart, thereis something I would tell him, in hopes it could stop hissleepless nights and wrongheaded search for a shadow. Iwould repeat this to him: "Your Matilde Lina is in limbo,the dwelling place of those who are neither dead nor alive."

But that would be like severing the roots of the tree thatsupports him. Besides, why do it if he is not going tobelieve me. He inhabits the dream limbo of the woman he'safter, and like her, he has adjusted to that nebulous, intermediatecondition. At this shelter I have met many whowere stigmatized in the same way: those who lose themselvesin the very search for their lost ones. But I have seenno one more enslaved by the tyranny of that search.

"She's going on with her life, like me," he stubbornlyclaims when I dare insinuate the opposite.

I have come to believe that this woman is like aguardian angel who doesn't allow him to escape from thisobsessive quest. She keeps herself ten steps ahead of him,close enough for him to see her but impossibly beyond hisgrasp, always those ten steps that he can never bridge, andthat make him follow her to the end of his days.

He came to this refuge for weary travelers the way hegoes everywhere: asking for her. He wanted to know if wehad seen a woman here by the name of Matilde Lina, alaundress who got lost during the upheavals of the war. She was originally from Sasaima but lived right on the borderlinebetween Tolima and Huila, in a village devastated byviolence. I told him that we had no information about herand offered him shelter instead: a bed, a roof over his head,hot meals, and the intangible protection of this place. Buthe persisted in his obsession with the willing blindness ofthose who hope beyond hope, then asked me to check, oneby one, all the names in the register.

"Come do it yourself," I told him, because I know verywell how relentless this urging is, and I sat him down withthe list of those who had stopped at this shelter, day afterday, in the midst of their journey of displacement.

I insisted that he stay with us at least a couple of nightsso he could unload the mountain of fatigue weighing on hisshoulders. That is what I told him, but what I wanted to saywas: "Stay here, at least until I get used to the idea of notseeing you anymore." And by then I was already feeling,inexplicably, a gnawing desire to have him close to me.

He thanked me for the hospitality and agreed to staythe night, but for that night only. It was then that I askedhim his name.

"My name is Three Sevens," he answered.

"That must be a nickname. Could you tell me yourname? Any name, it doesn't matter; I need a name, somethingthat I can enter in the register."

"Excuse me, but Three Sevens is my name; I don'tknow of any other."

"Pedro, Juan, any name; please give me a name," Iinsisted, claiming a bureaucratic motive, though I wasreally being pressed by the dark conviction that all earthshakingevents in one's life crop up just like this, suddenly,and without a name. To know the name of this stranger infront of me was the only way -- at least that's how I feltthen -- to counteract the power that he had already begunto exert over me at that moment. Why? I did not know,because he was not very different from so many others wholand here at the farthest corner of exile, enveloped in sicklyauras, often dragging with them an old fatigue, and tryingto look forward while their sight is fixed on what was leftbehind. Still, there was something in him that engaged medeeply. Perhaps it was the tenacity of a survivor that I perceivedin his look, or his serene voice, or his dark mass ofhair; or maybe it was his big bear gestures: slow and strikinglysolemn. But more than anything, I felt a sort of predestination.The kind of predestination that lurks behindmy ultimate and unadmitted objectives for traveling tothese lands. Haven't I really come here in search of all thatthis man embodies? At first I didn't know this, since I didn'tknow what I was looking for. But now I am quite certain ofit and can even risk a definition: It is all that is other, that is different from me and my world; something that gainsstrength precisely where my world gets weaker; that bringspanic and alarming voices where my world relies on certainties;that signals vitality where mine dissolves in disbelief;that seems real in opposition to what is based on words or,conversely, that becomes phantasmagoric for its lack ofexpression: the underside of the tapestry, where the knots ofreality are revealed. Everything, finally, that I could nothave imagined, had I stayed in my world.

Excerpted from A Tale of the Dispossessed/La Multitud Erranteby Restrepo, Laura Excerpted by permission.
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