After the threats, the hourly phone calls, the fires at the farms, and the extortion, the day eventually came when Libardo disappeared. It started like any other. He got up at five in the morning and made himself coffee. The bodyguards patrolled the yard and, as always, woke us up with their walkie-talkies. Fernanda got up late, as she did every day. After breakfast, Julio and I did the homework our teachers were going to review that afternoon when they came to the house. It was a seemingly normal day in the last phase of our routine life.
Nobody can say that Libardo was uneasy that day, different, as if he sensed it would be the last day he spent with us. He was exactly as uncomfortable and anxious as he’d been since December 3, when Escobar was killed. Nobody had a premonitory dream; there were no supernatural omens that might have alerted us. The phone started ringing early, as soon as he plugged it in, but we were getting used to it. At one point when I went out to the backyard for some air, I heard him in his study talking on the phone with somebody. Every time I wipe my ass I’m going to remember you, Libardo told him, but that didn’t seem strange either. That’s how he talked, that’s how he did his business. And so it continued to be a morning like any other.
Sometime before noon we saw him and Fernanda talking in hushed voices, shut up in the study. Nothing strange, nothing that didn’t happen every day, even before that December.
“I’m going to take a shower,” she said afterward, almost like she wanted everyone to hear. He followed her into the bedroom and closed the door.
After a while, Fernanda came out wearing a sweatsuit and without makeup. That was how she dressed when she had to run an errand that didn’t require her to get out of the car. She used to get fixed up even to go to the grocery store, just in case she ran into somebody, she said. Libardo emerged wearing the same clothes he’d had on all day. I hadn’t noticed it, but when we realized he was missing, his clothing became the most important information we could provide. Blue jeans, a gray long-sleeved shirt, brown loafers with rubber soles, and his gray leather briefcase, whose contents he never told us. He didn’t let us snoop in there or even get near it, though later it was easy to guess what he’d been carrying. That’s what people talked about when he disappeared: Libardo had been armed that day too.
He and Fernanda left the house together, just as they’d done innumerable times, all their lives. Bye, boys, she called from downstairs, and the two of us responded with a mechanical bye from our rooms. See you soon, Libardo said on his way out, and we didn’t reply at all. Fernanda returned two hours later to organize lunch. We didn’t ask and she didn’t say where Libardo was. It was all so natural, so routine, that explanations were unnecessary. It was only at six in the evening that we started to feel things stirring at the house. I was getting a physics lesson in the dining room, and Julio was in his room with the humanities teacher, and suddenly the bodyguards started bustling around like they did whenever Libardo arrived, but this time he wasn’t there. Or at least I didn’t see or hear him anywhere. But I did see the bodyguards in the yard, talking quietly to each other with worried looks on their faces. In any case, Fernanda didn’t interrupt our classes, so it was only when we finished, as soon as the teachers left, that she told us, “Your dad’s missing.”
It was then we learned she’d dropped him off at a building on Avenida El Poblado, practically in Envigado. She had a dermatologist appointment, and he was going to stay there with his bodyguards. He ordered them to wait outside and went in alone, they didn’t know where—an office building, but he didn’t say where he was going.
The lunch hour passed, and then two more hours; it was three o’clock, then four, and they started getting worried. They didn’t know what to do. Dengue tried to ask the doorman, but apart from Libardo’s full name, they didn’t have much information. They didn’t know what office he’d gone to, and Libardo didn’t appear on the list of people who’d entered the building. They decided that three of them would wait there in case Libardo came out, and Dengue and another bodyguard came home to inform Fernanda.
She started pounding them with her fists. She moaned and cursed them, accusing them of falling down on the job. Dengue insisted that they’d followed Libardo’s orders.
“He can do whatever he wants, but you can’t take your eyes off him,” Fernanda said.
“Sometimes Don Libardo wants his privacy,” Dengue objected.
She pondered a moment. She took a deep breath and went over to a chair to sit down.
“Maybe it’s nothing, ma’am, but it’s my duty to let you know.”
“Ramírez,” she said, “did you check that tramp’s place already?”
Dengue lowered his head and nodded silently. Fernanda leaped out of her chair and grabbed him by the shoulders.
“Yes, what, damn it?”
“We talked to her,” Dengue stammered.
Fernanda waited angrily for him to say something else.
“He hasn’t been there all day,” Dengue said, and she started pounding him with her fists again. She was hitting him so hard, he had to grab her by the wrists and tell her to calm down. He practically dragged her to the chair and didn’t let go of her until he felt her stop struggling. Then he told her, “I need your authorization, ma’am.”
“To do what?” she asked, her whole body tense.
“To proceed.”
None of the bodyguards had ever asked her for instructions. At most, some household task—the groceries, an order to take Julio and me somewhere or pick us up, the simple matters of everyday life. What Dengue was asking for now had to do with things that Libardo normally dealt with. She said, “Do what he would have done.”
They went back to the building and two men took each floor. Another man kept a gun pointed at the doorman. They entered each office by whatever means were necessary, depending on the reception they got. They forced anyone they encountered to get down on the floor; they shot two people in the hand who tried to go for the phone; and another man who tried to run ended up getting shot in both legs. They ransacked every room they entered, searching wildly, suite by suite and floor by floor, for a man they already knew they weren’t going to find. An hour later, they left in defeat; an hour after that, the police arrived, and according to the news reports, six people had been wounded but none were killed.
Given the uproar, there was no way the country wasn’t going to find out that Libardo had disappeared. But nobody paid much attention. Ever since the war between Escobar and Los Pepes had begun, everybody had grown accustomed to each group displaying the other side’s casualties like trophies. Especially the people who’d taken my father.
We didn’t sleep that night. We were still hoping we might get a phone call. It had happened before with a few who’d gone missing and were later traded for money or people. That’s what Benito, who’d set up in Libardo’s study to organize a search, reassured us. Later, my grandmother arrived alone. She didn’t intend to tell her husband anything until we knew for sure what had happened. She blamed all of us, but she lashed out at Fernanda.
“You left him alone,” she told her. “You left him alone right when he needed support most. You made him worry wherever he went. You poisoned his sons against him and made his life more difficult.”
Fernanda replied, “Out of respect for Libardo and for my children, shut your mouth.”
“I’m not going to shut up. He’s my son.”
“Gran, we still don’t know anything,” Julio said, trying to calm her.
“So go screech at somebody in your own home,” Fernanda said, “but you’re going to respect mine.”
She went up to her room and called down to me and Julio. She started weeping on the bed, and my brother and I sat on either side of her, awkward and sad. I was the one who should have been sandwiched between the two of them, sobbing. I was the youngest; they should have comforted me, but I was the first one to reach out my hand and place it on Fernanda’s back. I let it rest there, not moving, just so she’d feel that she wasn’t alone. She’d stayed strong till our grandmother arrived; she’d cried but hadn’t collapsed.
But then the situation overcame me. Fear advanced. I lifted my feet onto the bed because I could no longer feel the floor. I leaned against Fernanda, clung to her. I stuck out my arm and sought Julio’s fingers with my other hand. He hesitated but finally took it, and also moved closer to Fernanda, and we all became a single body with three wounds.