The stalking was simple at first: somebody would call and then hang up. The call could pass for a wrong number, but then there would be five, ten more calls until late into the night. Libardo would lie sleepless with rage, and Fernanda was climbing the walls. Whoever it was didn’t even give Libardo time to insult them; Fernanda got the brunt of his tirades instead. You goddamn sewer rats, I’m going to find you, I’ll drag you out of your fucking holes and make you regret it, Libardo would say, but they’d already hung up before he even got to the first obscenity.
“We’ll unplug the phones at night,” he told us. “In this house we’re going to sleep in peace. They can stay up all night on their own.”
“Who is it calling?” I asked.
“The people who killed him.”
“But what do they want? Why do they keep hanging up?”
“To screw with us, to scare us, but we’ve gone through darker times than this before,” Libardo said, resolute.
It wasn’t true—we’d never experienced anything like this, at least not as a family. Libardo had probably faced death many times in his life; he’d have felt it bearing down on him with a pistol in his mouth, with a chainsaw rumbling at his throat. Who knows how often he’d believed his final moment had arrived, and who knows how he kept managing to elude it. But now they were messing with his family, and Escobar wasn’t around to help him out.
During the day they called every hour on the hour. Libardo had instructed us not to answer, but the endless ringing was worse than the silence on the other end of the line. It echoed like an air raid siren, like a dripping faucet on a sleepless night, like a madman’s shouting on the streets or a burst of gunfire in the wee hours. More than a noise, it was an icy shock that ran to the very tip of every nerve. So it was better to pick up the handset and immediately drop it again. It would ring again only exactly sixty minutes later, like the bird in a cuckoo clock.
Fed up, Libardo managed to get our number changed and, at least as far as noise went, calm returned to the house. But the harassment didn’t let up. My philosophy teacher, Mario Palacio, in a fit of self-righteousness, decided to mock Julio and me and all the other students he referred to as “cartel kids.” He wouldn’t name names, but he’d look at us pointedly when discussing “the corrosive epidemic of drug trafficking”; he’d stop next to us while preaching about “the mafia culture that has aggravated our city’s social ills.” He gave a lot of exams, and I received a failing grade on every single one, supposedly because philosophy was a way of looking at the world and, he claimed, I was blinded “by the ephemeral gleam of easy money.” To make up the failed exams, he gave me an additional assignment. He handed me a small, worn red book that looked like a missal, titled The Five Philosophical Theses of Mao Tse-tung. And he told me, “I don’t want a summary of the book, I want an examination of how each thesis can be applied to the new social and economic model of Medellín.” He said it in the dogmatic tone that he used in class to convince us that his way of looking at the world was the correct one.
“Poor bastard,” said Libardo when I told him about the assignment and showed him the red book. He looked at it with disgust and added, “Screw that assignment and Mao what’s-his-face too. That bitter old coot isn’t going to ruin your year over a completely useless class. Let me talk to him.”
Of course they never talked; he sent Dengue in his stead. I never knew what was said, but in any case the Mao assignment was dropped, though I continued to do badly on the exams. What’s more, other teachers made common cause with Palacio and took the same attitude toward us. My schoolyear hung in the balance.
Then one day, the phone rang again, and nobody said anything on the other end of the line. It rang again exactly sixty minutes later. And every hour every night. And the next day and the days after. We unplugged the telephones again before going to bed, but when we plugged them in the next day, they’d start ringing right on the hour once more.
Libardo cursed and hurled threats right and left. Into the void, knowing there was nothing else he could do. He could keep getting new phone numbers, and they’d find them out every single time.
Then we started getting clear, direct messages through emissaries sent by Los Pepes. They wanted our properties, the most valuable ones, and large quantities of cash.
“At least they’re looking to negotiate,” Fernanda said.
“Does this seem like a negotiation to you?” Libardo replied in fury.
“Well, yeah,” she said. “Each side’s contributing something, right?”
“They’re demanding everything.”
“But they’re offering us peace,” Fernanda said.
“Are you all out of brains or something?” Libardo said. Leaping up and pointing a finger at him, she replied, “What I am is all out of patience with you. I’ve had it up to here!” With the same finger she drew a line across her forehead. She stormed out and into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
“What a harpy,” Libardo remarked.
Any spark could set us off. Somebody always ended up slamming a door at the end of a conversation. The next day we’d hug it out, like a team before a game, and apologize, promising love, loyalty, and unity. The four of us with the water up to our necks, but clutching one another.
In any case, Libardo failed in his efforts to keep Julio and me out of everything that was going on. It was impossible not to let us be drawn in—we weren’t little kids, and the whole business with the phone calls, plus the mood swings, the news stories, and the rumors, ended up pulling us right into the power struggle. Ironically, while the country believed one war was over, another was beginning, and I was an unwilling recruit to one side.
Los Pepes were out of control. There were a lot of them, and they had a lot of power. According to Libardo, all he needed to guarantee his safety in the conflict was a Pepe. That was the only thing he was looking to hook in a turbulent river. Los Pepes had been around for two years, ever since Escobar had burned the mutilated bodies of the Moncadas and the Galeanos, and now they were not only stampeding over everything in an unrestrained herd but also exhibiting a terrifying level of hatred. They murdered people and left a message with every corpse, burned properties, tortured victims with unprecedented cruelty. We were actually lucky that their attention to us had been limited to anonymous phone calls and specific demands. The question that haunted us was when they were going to take the next step.
Libardo waited for the maid to clear the plates from the table. Once we were alone, he said, “Every revolution has involved a long series of battles. The ideas that changed the world traveled winding, difficult paths. The changes we’re after can’t be achieved overnight. We’ve lost a lot of people, but we’ve kept going. And we’re not going to stop.”
It wasn’t a new speech—he was always saying that Escobar was hated and persecuted for being a subversive. That in this conservative, oppressive society, his ideas were shocking because they were so revolutionary. Libardo picked up the fork that had been left for dessert, gripped it tightly in his fist, and said, “Revolutions demand sacrifices, and sooner or later this retrograde society will embrace Pablo’s social message. I’m going to keep fighting for those changes, boys, so you’ll be proud of me one day.”
His voice cracked. While waiting for the lump in his throat to clear, he grasped the fork in both hands as if he were going to bend it. Though it was hardly the moment for it, I ventured a question: “What kind of changes, Pa?”
He looked at me and smiled. His eyes welled up. He let out a quiet laugh, and finally bent the fork. “The little squirt’s a smart one, huh?” he said. “I like that.” He spread his arms and said, “Come here.”
I got up and approached him slowly, more alert to Julio’s reaction than to Libardo’s, looking for support in my brother’s eyes, but Julio was as bewildered as I was.
“You too, Julio,” Libardo said. “Come here.”
“Me?”
“Of course, son, you come here too.”
He wrapped his strong, hairy arms around us. He kissed us. He smelled like sweat and soil. His three-day beard pricked my face. I was annoyed that he and Fernanda were both trying to fix everything with a hug. Warm washcloths on foreheads. No hug has ever saved anybody from a fatal disease. Drops of herbal tinctures, floral teas to distract us from our suffering.
I tried to pull away, but he squeezed us tighter. We couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t perceive anything apart from his heavy breathing, until the noise of the fork crashing to the floor made us all jump.