The Fire(short story)

Image created with bing

The first winter without horses at the hacienda was really cold. The wind scraped the eaves as if it wanted to take away the shadows of the portraits; the iron gate creaked with the same sadness with which the old bones of the house creaked. The stables - once always full of horseshoe thuds and snorts — now smelled of damp straw and silence. The dynasty of the Sarmiento, owners of these lands since the routes were roads of beasts, kept the mansion at the top of the hill: a building with carved balconies, shelves full of souvenirs and a library with maps that no one consulted anymore.

Pilar came back from the city with her clothes stained with paint and her hair shorter than any of the older women in the house. He brought ideas that did not fit in the familiar drawers: call-up brochures, notebooks, masks made with newspapers and an energy that smelled of mouths that did not accept more silence. His hands were weathered by street work, and his eyes, by the habit of looking at people instead of at signs of authority. One day, instead of ordering the stables to be restarted or checking scriptures, he locked himself in the barn and started hanging boards that would be the skeleton of a stage.

What are you going to do with this place, Pilar? - don Ernesto asked one night, his usual voice worn out by cigars and by years of ordering crops.
"To open the windows for him—" she replied, as she tied a curtain with worn cords. May the hacienda stop being just a haven for memories and become a place where stories are told.

He watched her with that mixture of pride and bewilderment that pervades men who have lived in a world without questions.

He called together street musicians, puppeteers with poet's dark circles, dancers who told stories with their feet and young people who spoke for their memory. He offered them hot food, bunk beds in the barn and the freedom to tell whatever they wanted. There were no contracts, just loud agreements and clenched hands. He baptized the company: The Fire. The idea was simple and dangerous at the same time: to bring theater to the villages that had been, for decades, almost private territory of the Sarmiento.

The first performance was in the Plaza de El Milagro, a riverside town where the harvests had arrived with delays and the payments with excuses. La Lumbre set up their stage under the tamarind tree, with hand-painted posters and out-of-tune guitars. That afternoon there were mosquitoes and heavy skies; people came to browse, to receive cheap entertainment, to combat the routine of a working week.

The opening play was a fable —the fox and the Bridges. At first glance, a light comedy: the fox promised roads and miracles in exchange for wheat and favors. The audience laughed at the clumsiness of the animal. But, in the end, the fox took off her mask and, instead of revealing her face, unfolded a scroll with names and dates: records of land sales and contracts signed on drunken nights or confusion. In the front row, the foreman, who had worked for the Sarmientos for thirty years, pressed his lips together. A peasant let out a laugh that had been hidden for years; a woman covered her face with her apron because she did not want to be seen crying.

After that performance, the conversations in El Milagro changed the topic from novel to testimony. The actors of the Fire were not talking about ideology; they were doing something more subtle: articulating the facts, turning rumors into stories told aloud, giving them a form that people could sustain. They gathered stories of harvests that never arrived, of day laborers who disappeared during silent strikes, of cases of wine that vanished the night of the harvest. The monologues and short pieces they performed mixed satire with memory: a barrel that confessed not wanting to be an accomplice, letters never sent read as if they were love letters or denunciations, gossip turned into theatrical testimonies.

Are those real names? - asked someone in the audience, voice trembling.
"Yes," said the puppeteer, with the calmness of one who has listened many a night. They are the footprints of those who thought that their silence would protect them forever.

The theater began to work as a catalyst. After each performance people brought receipts, letters, old keys and testimonials that they had forgotten in dusty chests. Impromptu assemblies were formed in stockyards, gatherings in markets and evenings in churches. Memory, previously fragmented and private, began to be assembled into collective narratives. Neighbors who had never spoken to each other shared stories about who had received what and when; young people took notes; women, who had carried the weight of intimacy, felt authorized to tell.

The reaction in the big house was not long in coming. The last generations of the Sarmientos - don Ernesto, their eldest daughter, the granddaughter who preferred to embroider and the trusted lawyer — looked with surprise and then with fear at what was happening in their domain. The first responses were veiled threats: warning letters, early morning calls, pleadings about the preservation of order and family reputation. Don Ernesto sent for the lawyer.

"You have to go—" said the lawyer, with the file in his hands. We cannot allow these young people to light fires that we will not be able to put out.

"They are not incendiaries," Pilar replied. They are storytellers. They want people to remember.

"People are not prepared for certain truths—" the man replied, feigning concern. Stability is a good thing.

Pilar, without violence but with serenity, proposed a gesture that baffled the family: she invited her family to a private function at the Casa Grande. I did not seek to humiliate them in public; I wanted to show them that the Fire was not a destructive horde but an instrument to name what had been silenced.

The main room of the house was filled with tapestries and stares that had no practice in looking down. There were pressed napkins, clinking glasses and a curious silence. La Lumbre mounted a piece that recreated, with humor and apparent awkwardness, a land auction of more than forty years ago: half-written pacts, contracts with illegible clauses and characters hiding behind their titles.

Is this a joke? - murmured the granddaughter, who had been embroidering until then without looking up.
"It's a way of showing what happened," Pilar replied quietly, from the stage. I'm not here to humiliate. I'm here to make them listen.

When he finished, the air became tense. A silence broke out like a taut string: no one knew whether to applaud or reproach. Then Pilar spoke with a calmness that weighed as much as a sentence.

—I don't want to destroy the house," he said. I want the house to acknowledge what he has done. Let those who have been silent be allowed to speak.

Don Ernesto remained silent, his hands on the cane. His face, always rigid with habit, fell into an expression that mixed surprise with something akin to acceptance. It was not a thunderous surrender, but a slow and human rift.

After that performance, the Light intensified its journey. They weren't just pieces: they were oral compilations. In each village they asked the public to bring evidence and secrets: receipts, letters, photos, testimonies. At one fair, a woman held up a letter that she never sent to the big house; at another, a small man showed an iron key with which a room that no one remembered was opened. The actors did not give verdicts; they read, dramatized and returned the stories to the people for discussion, verification, expansion.

Demands began to arise: restitution of plots, outstanding payments, the opening of promised schools that never arrived. What had started as entertainment was transformed into a memory movement that demanded reparation.

The Fire became a kind of communal catalyst that taught to tell: to put names to facts, to gather evidence and to organize stories that served to mobilize public opinion.

"Look at this," a neighbor said to Pilar, holding out a yellowed receipt. I paid for seeds that never arrived.

"You kept it all this time," an actress observed, stroking the paper. That's keeping the truth.

"I thought no one would see him—" the neighbor replied. I preferred remembering to having to order food at the doorstep.

The pressure grew until they ran into the bureaucracy and the interests that surrounded the Sarmientos. They offered arrangements: to donate a place, to inaugurate a school, to finance a scholarship. Promises that, in the past, had always been gestures that momentarily soothed the discomforts without transforming them. This time the Community demanded more: documents, written commitments, concrete refunds. It was not hatred they were asking for, but clear accounts.

The climax of the mobilization came one waning moonlit night in the square of the municipal seat. The atmosphere smelled of wood, a campfire and coffee; chairs brought by neighbors creaked as a crowd waited. Journalists arrived from the city with recorders; a municipal official announced, in a trembling voice, that an investigation would be opened. The Fire left the festive tones and staged a public reading session: testimonies, papers, names. The square became a court without judges, a living archive where memories took the voice.

And now what? - asked a young man with a notebook, the pencil trembling in his hand.
"Now we count," Pilar replied. And then, together, we will see what kind of justice we can build.

The mobilization was growing. There were days of tension, veiled threats and harassment. Bribes and pacts were attempted behind closed doors. The Fire was accused of destabilizing; Pilar, of opportunistic. There were nights when the actors returned to the barn with a beaten mood, and others when the laughter of a child in the front row gave them strength back.

Something changed in the patriarch's behavior. Don Ernesto, seeing that the power dynamic was cracking in ways that he could not control, made unexpected decisions: he resigned from his position in the local board of trustees and convened an open assembly to read the property records, with surnames, dates and testimonies. It was a symbolic gesture that had real consequences: the public reading highlighted what had previously only circulated in whispers.

"I don't want my name to weigh like a tombstone," Don Ernesto said in the square, in a voice that this time did not seek condescension but reparation. I want this to be done with truth.

There were mixed reactions. Some, discovered in the lists, defended themselves with explanations, corruption veiled by the lack of information or by the complexity of the old procedures. Others asked for forgiveness with tears and proposed concrete reparations: the return of a plot, the hiring of day laborers with fair wages, the creation of a school whose direction would be chosen by the community. Small but symbolic agreements were signed; the restitution of a portion of land, the retroactive payment for unrecognized works, the injection of funds for the community radio that began to broadcast the songs of the Fire.

The Fire, without marking itself as a party or a political party, was pushing the conversation towards forms of self-government: cooperatives of small producers, neighborhood assemblies and a community radio that broadcast bulletins made by the inhabitants themselves. The old client-employer relationship was transformed into more horizontal collaboration networks, although with frictions and resistances.

Not all the wounds healed. There were resentments that persisted, families that broke ties and nights when fear once again hung over the villages.

But there were also concrete and lasting changes: a school that really worked, a collective of farmers who decided in assembly, a public register of contracts and payments accessible to anyone who wanted to consult it.

The granddaughter who had laughed that night in the main hall ended up playing an active role in organizing the seed distribution committees. Don Ernesto grew old seeing everything with a mixture of pride and humility; he died in peace, surrounded by those who remembered both his flaws and his final gestures of recognition. Pilar continued on her way with the troupe; she passed through many villages, left behind lots of songs and a method for counting, and became a respected and — at times— uncomfortable figure for those who preferred to return to the old practices.

Years later, the hacienda was no longer the only command center. There were cooperatives that managed small plots with clear numbers, radios that broadcast news made by the people and squares where voices ran from equal to equal. The fire had ignited a spark that, with its humor and its devotion to stories, taught the communities to look at themselves and to name what belonged to them.

On a warm summer afternoon, Pilar went up to the old stage that was still left in the barn and looked at the valley. The carved balconies were still there, mute witnesses of times and names; the stables smelled of straw and, in the background, of the faint presence of horses that came by again from time to time. The fire hadn't destroyed the big house; it had changed what it meant to be in it. He had taught to count: not to settle accounts with resentment, but to build, between loose memories, a shared history.

As she was getting off the stage, Pilar felt the familiar touch of the wind coming down the plain. He thought of the voices they had loved and those that had been silenced. He thought of the laugh of the granddaughter who was now handing out seeds with steady hands. And, looking to the horizon, he knew that the true legacy was not an estate or a surname: it was the possibility that stories, once told, will open doors where there were only walls before