At midnight the sky over Medellín turns to day. December has arrived amid the inebriation and fireworks.
“It’s December, Pops!” Pedro the Dictator exclaims, and hugs me enthusiastically, as if December almost hadn’t come.
The noise stuns and shakes the ground; the sky turns white, yellow, red, and silver. Medellín is a castle of pyrotechnic toys that’s exploded. The people crowded along the overlooks chug aguardiente straight from the bottle, leap and shout, climb onto car roofs to shout louder, and some are even singing the Antioquian anthem. There’s something touching about all this excitement. Maybe it’s all that time I spent abroad, the years I had no homeland.
“Oh, liberty that perfumes the mountains of my land,” La Murciélaga sings, or rather shrieks, lifting her shirt and displaying her own ample, voluptuous mountains—bounteous, the poets might say. Around her the men whistle and holler; she covers herself again and lets out an extravagant laugh.
“Let my children breathe in your fragrant essences.” Pedro finishes the lyric from Antioquia’s anthem.
There’s so much excitement in the air that even Ro hugs me. He emerges from the crowd, we come face to face, and it’s as if he has no other option but to hug me. He attempts sincerity: “I don’t know what’s up between me and you, but I forgive you,” he says.
Would you believe that bastard. Am I supposed to thank him for his forgiveness? I know exactly what’s up between him and me, but the distance and the years of absence have made me wary. Or simply a stranger.
“Relax, man,” I tell him. “We’re all good.”
Later it’s Julieth who goes honest on me. She pins me against one side of the SUV and, pressing close, whispers, “That kiss you gave me woke up some memories.”
The look on her face suggests she’s about to go for another one. But I feel like my mouth stinks, reeking of aguardiente, marijuana, airplane cabin, all these hours I’ve been awake. It feels dry with fatigue, sticky with lack of sleep.
“What do you say if later on . . . ?” Julieth says.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “I haven’t been able to get home to say hi to my mom.”
“Oh, right,” Julieth says. “I’d forgotten about the funeral.”
“No, that’s not it.”
“Anyway,” she interrupts me, “don’t go yet. That kiss got me thinking.”
“Larry!” Pedro calls to me in the distance and lifts his arm, holding the cell phone in his hand. “It’s Fernanda!”
I scurry away from Julieth and rush toward him. I snatch the phone and use my hand as a barrier between the noise and my mouth.
“Ma?”
“Hello?”
“Ma.”
There’s noise here and noise there; she can’t hear me and I can’t hear her.
“Ma, don’t hang up.”
I get in the car and try to close the windows, but the key isn’t in the ignition.
“Larry, where are you? I can’t hear you.”
“I’m in Las Palmas, at a viewpoint.”
“Larry?”
“Ma, you’re not coming in clear, but I can hear you.”
“There’s a huge racket here,” Fernanda says. “The fireworks woke me up.”
“What, Ma?”
I look around to see if I can spot Pedro. I need the keys.
“Why aren’t you here yet, Larry?”
“You said I shouldn’t come.”
“Speak up, I can’t hear you.”
“I’m heading there now. I’ll find someone to take me.”
“I can’t sleep with these fireworks, honey.”
“Don’t go to sleep, wait for me.”
“Come again?”
“Don’t go to sleep.”
“Larry, the connection’s really bad.”
“What’s that, Ma?”
“This is so frustrating,” Fernanda says.
I stick my head out the window and see Julieth dancing with a dozen strangers. “Julieth,” I call to her, “where’s Pedro? I need the keys.”
“I don’t know,” she says. “He’s around.”
“Pedro’s got keys,” Fernanda tells me.
“No, Ma, I’m looking for Pedro so he can give me the car keys.”
“He’s got keys,” Fernanda says again.
“The car keys, Ma.”
“Larry,” she says, “I don’t know if you can hear me. Call me right back from somewhere else.”
“Ma, don’t hang up!”
I curse the phone and everything around me. Screw tonight, fuck La Alborada. I stick my head out the window and yell, why don’t you all shut up, assholes? Nobody hears me; they all stare at me, laughing. Julieth dances up and sticks her tongue in my mouth.
“I couldn’t wait,” she says.
“I have to go.”
“No, come on, lame-o.”
“Help me find Pedro.”
“Did you not like it?”
“I have to get my suitcase.”
“Is it because of that girl you met on the plane? I’ll tell you right now, I don’t care—I’ve got a boyfriend too.”
“Julieth, I haven’t slept since yesterday and I haven’t seen my mom in three years.”
“And I love him,” she says. “We’ve been together five months, and he’s the man for me, but that doesn’t mean what you and I had wasn’t important to me, Larry.”
Some moron tosses a string of firecrackers that goes off right between our feet, and Julieth and I are forced to hop around to the rhythm of the explosions. The man points and laughs and his friends egg him on. I grab him by the shirt, yank him toward me, and yell in his face, “What’s your problem, motherfucker?”
His friends intervene. Careful, buddy, they warn me. Julieth butts in too: “Chill, everybody chill, he just arrived, he lives in England, and he’s not used to this.”
“Let go of me, asshole,” says the guy who threw the firecrackers at us.
“Let him go, Larry,” Julieth hisses at me, rolling her eyes as if warning me that something worse might happen.
“Leave me the fuck alone,” I tell the guy.
“England’s clearly rubbed off on you,” he says.
Julieth digs her nails into my arm and says again, “Let him go, Larry. What he did is normal here.”
“That’s why you’re all so fucked,” I say, as if I weren’t another fucked Colombian myself.
I let go of the guy, and he goes off with the others, all of them giving me dirty looks.
“I had no idea you were so violent,” Julieth admonishes me.
“I’m not,” I say. “He attacked us.”
Julieth spreads her arms wide and gestures to the sky, to Medellín in front of us, exploding in a crackle of lights. “What’s wrong with you?” she says. “It’s La Alborada, don’t you get it?”
Everything’s justified here. Fireworks, violence, bullets, dead bodies . . . all our evils have an excuse. And from pretext we move on to resignation, and from there to complete acceptance, as if it were normal. But if I say all that, I’ll look like a party pooper, and if I say the only thing I want right now, with all my heart, is to see my mother, I’ll look like a dumbass.
“Help me look for Pedro,” I say.
“He left the car unlocked, so he’ll be back any minute. Also,” she adds, “don’t move from here or somebody’ll steal the stereo.”
The guy who threw the firecrackers at us comes up again. His friends are still with him and he’s got a bottle of aguardiente.
“Hey, buddy, come here,” he says, though he’s the one approaching me. “Let’s be friends, here, have a swig.”
I take a long swallow to calm my fury. Everybody notices, and they laugh and try to smooth things over with another joke.
“Dude’s a big drinker, huh.”
“My name is Arthur,” the guy joshes in English, doing a sad imitation of a British accent. He laughs wanly and says, “No, man, I’m kidding. The name’s Arturo, but everybody calls me Artu.”
I don’t say anything. Julieth speaks instead.
“He’s Larry.”
“Larry what?” they ask.
Julieth eyes me carefully, the way people always look at me whenever I have to say who I am.
“Larry,” I say, and then, after a pause, I add, “The son of God.”
They celebrate my joke by passing the bottle around, from Artu to Julieth and around until it comes back to me and I drink again. The aguardiente kicks me in the gut, makes my insides shudder, sets my stomach and my face on fire, warns me that I’ve had enough.
“No more,” I say, coughing alcohol.
A cloud of smoke drifts over us. It comes from down below, from Medellín, and it smells like sulfur. They’ll say it’s the smell of the fireworks, but to me the smell says that down there, nothing is O.K.