3
At seven the next morning I found myself driving down 80th Street, having had nothing but a black coffee for breakfast, heading for the city’s western exit routes. It was an overcast and cold morning, and the traffic at that hour was already dense and even aggressive; but it didn’t take me too long to get to the outskirts of the city, where the urban landscapes change and the lungs perceive a sudden absence of contamination. The exit had changed over the years, wide, recently paved roads flaunting the brilliant white of their signposts, zebra crossings and intermittent lines on the tarmac. I don’t know how many times I made similar trips as a child, how many times I went up the mountains that surround the city to then make that precipitous descent, and thus pass in a matter of three hours from our cold and rainy 2,600 metres down into the Magdalena Valley, where the temperatures can approach 40 degrees Celsius in some ill-fated spots. That was the case in La Dorada, the city that marks the halfway point between Bogotá and Medellín and that often serves as a stop or meeting point for those who make that trip, or occasionally even as a place for a swim. On the outskirts of La Dorada, somewhere that sounded quite separate from the city, from the hustle and bustle of its roads and heavy traffic, lived Maya Fritts. But now, instead of thinking of her and the strange circumstances that had brought us together, I spent the four hours of the trip thinking of Aura or, more specifically, about what had happened with Aura the previous night.
After taking down Maya Fritts’s directions and ending up with a badly drawn map on the back of a piece of paper (on the other side were notes for one of my upcoming classes: we would discuss what right Antigone had to break the law in order to bury her brother), I had gone through the evening routine with Aura in the most peaceable way possible, the two of us making dinner while Leticia watched a movie, telling each other about our respective days, laughing, touching as we crossed paths in the narrow kitchen. Peter Pan, Leticia was very fond of that movie, and also The Jungle Book, and Aura had bought her two or three videos of The Muppets, less for our little girl’s pleasure than to satisfy her own private nostalgia, her affection for Count von Count, her glib contempt for Miss Piggy. But no, it wasn’t the Muppets that we could hear that evening from the television in our room, but one of those films. Peter Pan, yes: it was Peter Pan that was playing – ‘All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again,’ said the anonymous narrator – when Aura, wrapped in a red apron with an anachronistic image of Santa Claus, said without looking me in the eye, ‘I bought something. Remind me to show you later.’
‘What kind of something?’
‘Something,’ said Aura.
She was stirring a saucepan on the stove, the extractor fan was on full blast and forced us to raise our voices, and the light from the hood bathed her face in a coppery tone. ‘You’re so lovely,’ I said. ‘I’ll never get used to it.’ She smiled, was about to say something, but at that moment Leticia appeared at the door, silent and discreet, with her chestnut hair still wet from her bath up in a ponytail. I picked her up from the floor, asked her if she was hungry, and the same coppery light shone on her face: her features were mine, not Aura’s, and that had always moved and disappointed me at the same time. That idea was strangely stuck in my head while we ate: that Leticia should be able to resemble Aura, she should have been able to inherit Aura’s beauty, and instead had inherited my rough features, my thick bones, my prominent ears. Maybe that’s why I was looking at her so closely as I took her to bed. I stayed with her a while in the darkness of her room, broken only by the small round nightlight that gives off a weak pastel-coloured light that changes its tone over the course of the night, so Leticia’s room is blue when she calls me because she’s had a nightmare, and can quite easily be pink or pale green when she calls me because she’s run out of water in her little bottle. Anyway: there in the coloured shadows, while Leticia fell asleep and the whisper of her breathing changed, I spied on her features and the genetic games in her face, all those proteins moving mysteriously to imprint my chin on hers, my hair colour in my little girl’s hair colour. And that’s what I was doing when the door opened a little and a sliver of light appeared and then Aura’s silhouette and her hand calling me.
‘Is she asleep?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sure?’
‘Yes.’
She pulled me by the hand to the living room and we sat on the sofa. The table was already cleared and the dishwasher running in the kitchen, sounding like an old dying pigeon. (We didn’t usually spend time in the living room after dinner: we preferred to get into bed and watch some old American sitcom, something light and cheerful and soothing. Aura had got used to missing the evening news, and could joke about my boycott, but understood how seriously I took it. I didn’t watch the news, it was as simple as that. It would take me a long time to be able to endure it again, to allow my country’s news to invade my life again.) ‘Well, look,’ Aura said. Her hands disappeared behind the edge of the sofa and reappeared with a small package wrapped up in a sheet of newspaper. ‘For me?’ I said. ‘No, it’s not a present,’ she said. ‘Or it is, but for both of us. Shit, I don’t know, I don’t know how to do things like this.’ Embarrassment was not a feeling that often bothered Aura, but that’s what this was, embarrassment, that’s what her gestures were full of. The next thing was her voice (her nervous voice) explaining where she had bought the vibrator, how much it had cost, how she’d paid cash for it so there would be no record of this purchase anywhere, how she’d despised at that moment her many years of religious education that had made her feel, as she entered the shop on 19th Avenue, that very bad things were going to happen to her as punishment, that with this purchase she would end up earning a permanent place in hell. It was a purple apparatus with a creased texture, with more buttons and possibilities than I would have imagined, but it wasn’t the shape I’d assigned it in my overly literal imagination. I looked at it (there, sleeping in my hand) and Aura looked at me looking at it. I couldn’t keep the word consolador, which is also sometimes used for this object, from appearing in my mind: Aura as a woman in need of consoling, or Aura as a disconsolate woman. ‘What is it?’ I said. A question as stupid as questions get.
‘Well, it is what it is,’ said Aura. ‘It’s for us.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s not for us.’
I stood up and dropped it on the glass-topped table and the apparatus bounced slightly (after all, it was made out of something springy). At another moment I would probably have been amused by the sound, but not there, not then. Aura grabbed my arm.
‘There’s nothing wrong with it, Antonio, it’s for us.’
‘It’s not for us.’
‘You had an accident, that’s all, I love you,’ said Aura. ‘There’s nothing wrong, we’re together.’
The purple vibrator sat there half lost among the ashtrays and coasters and coffee-table books, all chosen by Aura: Colombia from the Air, a big book on José Celestino Mutis and another recent one by an Argentine photographer about Paris (that one Aura hadn’t chosen, but had been given). I felt embarrassed, an absurd and childish embarrassment. ‘Do you need consoling?’ I said to Aura. My tone even surprised me.
‘What?’
‘That’s a consolador. Do you need consoling?’
‘Don’t do this, Antonio. We’re together. You had an accident and we’re together.’
‘The accident happened to me, don’t be an idiot,’ I said. ‘I was the one who was shot.’ I calmed down a little. ‘Sorry,’ I said. And then, ‘The doctor told me.’
‘But it was three years ago.’
‘That I shouldn’t worry, that the body knows how to do its things.’
‘Three years ago, Antonio. What’s happening now is something else. I love you and we’re together.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘We can find a way,’ said Aura.
I didn’t say anything.
‘There are so many couples,’ said Aura. ‘We’re not the only ones.’
But I didn’t say anything. A light bulb somewhere must have blown at that moment, because the living room was suddenly a little darker, the sofa and the two chairs and the only painting – a couple of billiard players by Saturnino Ramírez who are playing, for reasons I’ve never managed to discover, in dark glasses – had lost their contours. I felt tired and in need of a painkiller. Aura had sat back down on the sofa and was now holding her face in her hands, but I don’t think she was crying. ‘I thought you would be pleased,’ she said. ‘I thought I was doing a good thing.’ I turned around and left her alone, maybe even mid-sentence, and I locked myself in our bathroom. In the narrow blue cupboard I looked for my pills, the little white plastic bottle and its red lid that Leticia had once chewed on till it broke, to our great alarm (it turned out she hadn’t found the pills hidden under the cotton, but a two- or three-year-old child is at risk all the time, the whole world is a danger to her). With water straight from the tap I took three pills, a bigger dose than recommended or advisable, but my size and weight allow me these excesses when the pain is very bad. Then I took a long shower, which always makes me feel better; by the time I returned to our room Aura was asleep or pretending to be asleep, and I endeavoured not to wake her or to maintain the convenient fiction. I undressed, lay down beside her but with my back to her, and then I don’t know anything else: I fell asleep immediately.
It was very early, especially for a Good Friday, when I left the next morning. The light was not yet filling the air of the apartment. I wanted to think that was why, because of the general somnolence floating in the world, I didn’t wake anyone up to say goodbye. The vibrator was still on the table in the living room, coloured and plastic like a toy Leticia had lost there.
Up by the Alto del Trigo a thick fog descended over the road, unexpectedly as if a cloud had lost its way, and the almost complete lack of visibility forced me to slow down so much that farmworkers on bicycles were overtaking me. The fog accumulated on the glass like dew, making it necessary to turn on the windscreen wipers even though it wasn’t raining, and shapes – the car in front, a couple of soldiers flanking the roadway with machine guns across their chests, a cargo mule – emerged gradually from that milky soup that let no light through. I thought of low-flying planes: ‘Up, up, up.’ I thought of the fog and remembered the famous accident at El Tablazo, way back in the 1940s, but I didn’t remember whether the visibility at these treacherous altitudes had been to blame. ‘Up, up, up,’ I said to myself. And then, as I descended towards Guaduas, the fog lifted the same way it had fallen, and the sky suddenly opened and a wave of heat transformed the day: there was a burst of vegetation, a burst of fragrances, fruit stalls appeared at the side of the road. I began to sweat. When I opened the window at some point, to buy one of the cans of beer slowly warming up on top of a crate full of ice, my sunglasses misted up from the blast of heat. But the sweat was what bothered me most. My body’s pores were, suddenly, at the centre of my consciousness.
I didn’t arrive in the area until past midday. After a traffic jam of almost an hour and a half near Guarinocito (a truck with a broken axle can be lethal on a two-lane highway with no hard shoulder), after the headlands arose on the horizon and my car entered the region of cattle ranches, I saw the rudimentary little school I was supposed to see, continued for the distance indicated beside a big white pipe bordering the road and turned right, towards the Magdalena River. I passed a metallic structure where once there had been a billboard, but that now, seen from far away, resembled a sort of giant abandoned corset (a few turkey vultures, perched on the struts, guarded the plot of land); I passed a trough where two cows were drinking, their bodies very close together, pushing and getting in each other’s way, their heads protected from the sun by a squalid aluminium roof. At the end of 300 metres of unpaved road, I found myself passing several groups of boys in shorts who shouted and laughed and raised a great cloud of dust as they ran. One of them stuck out a small brown hand with his thumb extended. I stopped, pulled the car onto the shoulder; now still, I felt again on my face and body the violent slap of the midday heat. I felt the humidity again; I sensed the smells. The child spoke first.
‘I’m going where you’re going, sir.’
‘I’m going to Las Acacias,’ I said. ‘If you know where it is, I’ll take you that far.’
‘Oh well, that’s no good to me then, sir,’ the boy said without his smile disappearing for a second. ‘It’s just down there, you see. That dog’s from there. He doesn’t bite, don’t worry.’
It was a black, tired-looking German shepherd with a white mark on his tail. He noticed my presence, raised his ears and looked at me without interest; then he walked a couple of times around a mango tree, his nose to the ground and tail stuck to his ribs like a feather duster, and finally lay down beside the trunk and began licking a paw. I felt sorry for him: his fur was not designed for this climate. I drove a bit further, beneath the trees whose dense foliage didn’t let any light through, until I arrived in front of a gate of solid columns and a wooden crossbeam from which hung a board that looked recently rubbed with furniture oil, and on the board appeared, etched and singed, the graceless and bland name of the property. I had to get out to open the gate, the original bolt of which seemed to have been stuck in its place since the beginning of time; I continued on quite a way along a track across an open field made simply by driving across it, two strips of earth separated by a crest of stiff grass; and finally, beyond a post where a small vulture perched, I arrived in front of a one-storey white house.
I called out but nobody appeared. The door was open: a glass-topped dining table and a living room with light-coloured armchairs, all dominated by ceiling fans whose blades seemed animated by a sort of inner life of their own, a private mission against high temperatures. On the terrace hung three brightly coloured hammocks, and under one of them someone had left a half-eaten guava that was now being devoured by ants. I was about to ask at the top of my lungs if there was anybody at home when I heard a whistle, and then another, and it took me a couple of seconds to discover, beyond the bougainvillea bushes that flanked the house, beyond the guanábana trees that grew behind the bougainvilleas, the silhouette moving its arms as if asking for help. There was something monstrous in that overly white figure with too big a head and legs too thick; but I couldn’t look closely as I walked towards her, because all my attention was concentrated on not breaking my ankle on the stones or uneven ground, on not getting my face scratched by the low branches of the trees. Behind the house sparkled the rectangle of a swimming pool that didn’t look well cared for: a blue slide with the paint bleached by the sun, a round table with its parasol folded down, the skimmer net leaning against a tree as if it had never been used. That’s what I was thinking when I arrived beside the white monster, but by that time the head had turned into a veiled mask, and the hand into a glove with thick fingers. The woman took off the mask, passed a hand quickly through her hair (light brown, cut with intentional clumsiness, styled with genuine carelessness), greeted me without smiling and explained that she’d had to interrupt the inspection of her hives to come and receive me. Now she had to get back to work. ‘It’s stupid for you to have to go get bored in the house waiting for me,’ she said, pronouncing every letter, almost one at a time, as if her life depended on it. ‘Have you ever seen a honeycomb up close?’
I immediately realized she was about the same age as me, more or less, although I couldn’t say what secret generational communication there was between the two of us, or if such a thing really exists: an ensemble of gestures or words or a certain tone of voice, a way of saying hello or thanks or of moving or crossing our legs when we sit down, that we share with other members of our litter. She had the palest green eyes I’d ever seen and on her face a girl’s skin met a mature and careworn woman’s expression: her face was like a party that everyone had left. There were no adornments, except for two sparks of diamonds (I think they were diamonds) barely visible on her slender earlobes. Dressed in her beekeeper’s suit that hid her shape, Maya Fritts took me to a shed that might once have been a manger: a room that smelled of manure with two masks and a pair of white overalls hanging on the wall.
‘Put these on,’ she ordered me. ‘My bees don’t like bright colours.’
I wouldn’t have called the blue of my shirt a bright blue, but I didn’t argue. ‘I didn’t know bees saw in colour,’ I said, but she was already putting a white hat on my head and explaining how to secure the nylon veil of the mask. As she passed the cords under my armpits to tie them behind my back, she hugged me like a passenger on a motorbike; I liked the proximity of her body (I thought I felt the phantom pressure of her breasts against my back) but also the sureness with which her hands acted, the firmness or lack of embarrassment as they touched my body. From somewhere she took out another pair of white shoelaces, went down on one knee, used them to tie closed the bottom of the trouser legs and said, looking me in the eye without the least embarrassment, ‘So they don’t go stinging you in sensitive places.’ Then she grabbed a kind of metal bottle with golden bellows and asked me to carry it, and she stuck a red brush and a steel crowbar in her pockets.
I asked her how long she’d had this hobby.
‘It’s not a hobby,’ she told me. ‘I make my living from this, my dear. The best honey in the region, if I do say so myself.’
‘Well, congratulations. And how long have you been producing the best honey in the region?’
She explained on the way to the hives. She explained other things too. And so I learned how she had come to set up home on this property, which was her only inheritance. ‘My parents bought the land when I was born, more or less,’ she said. So, I commented, this was all that was left of them. ‘There was money left too,’ said Maya, ‘but I spent it on lawyers.’ ‘Lawyers are expensive,’ I said. ‘No,’ she said, ‘they’re like dogs: they smell fear and attack. I was very inexpert when it all started. I should say that someone less honest could have taken everything.’ As soon as she came of age and could take charge of her own life, she started planning a way of leaving Bogotá, and she hadn’t turned twenty when she did so definitively, dropping out of university and falling out with her mother over it. When the final inheritance settlement came down, Maya had already been settled here for a good decade. ‘And I’ve never regretted having left Bogotá,’ she told me. ‘I couldn’t take it any more. I detest that city. I’ve never been back. I wouldn’t know what it’s like now, maybe you can tell me. You live in Bogotá?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve never left?’
‘Never,’ I said. ‘Not even during the worst years.’
‘Me neither. I was there for all of it.’
‘Who did you live with?’
‘With my mother, of course,’ said Maya. ‘A strange life, now that I think of it, the two of us alone. Then each of us chose her own path, you know how those things go.’
In 1992 she set up the first rustic hives at Las Acacias, a curious decision at the very least in a person who, according to her own confession, didn’t know any more about apiculture at that moment than I do now. But those hives barely lasted a few months: Maya couldn’t stand having to destroy the combs and kill the bees every time she collected the honey and wax, and in secret she imagined the surviving bees were escaping with a message to the whole region and one day, when she was taking her siesta in the hammock by the pool, a cloud of vengeful stingers would fall upon her. She exchanged the four rustic hives for three with removable honeycombs and never had to kill another bee.
‘But that was seven years ago,’ I said. ‘You haven’t been back to Bogotá in all those years?’
‘Well, yes. To see the lawyers. To look for that woman, Consuelo Sandoval. But I’ve never stayed overnight in Bogotá, or even till sundown. I can’t stand it, I can’t endure more than a few hours there.’
‘And that’s why you prefer the rest of us to come and see you.’
‘No one comes to see me. But yes, that’s it. That’s why I preferred you to come here.’
‘I understand.’
Maya looked up.
‘Yes, I think you do understand,’ she said. ‘People our age usually do. We have an abnormal relationship to Bogotá. Being there through the ’80s will do that to you.’
The last syllables of her sentence were drowned out by a strident buzzing. We were a few steps from the apiary. The terrain was slightly sloping, and through the veil it wasn’t easy to see where I was placing my feet, but even so I was able to witness the best spectacle in the world: a person doing their job well. Maya Fritts took me by the arm so we would approach the hives from the side, not the front, and signalled for me to give her the bottle that I’d been carrying the whole time. She lifted it up as high as her face and squeezed the bellows once, to check the mechanism, and a ghost of white smoke came out of the spout and dissolved in the air. Maya stuck the spout into an opening in the first hive and squeezed the golden bellows again, once, twice, three times, filling the hive with smoke, and then took the lid off to spray the whole interior at once. I stepped back and brought my arm up to my face out of pure instinct; but where I’d thought I’d find a swarm of hysterical bees coming out to sting anything in their path, I saw the exact opposite: the bees were quiet and calm, and their bodies were overlapping. The buzzing died down then: it was almost possible to see the wings stopping, the black and yellow rings ceasing to vibrate as if their batteries had run out.
‘What did you spray on them?’ I asked. ‘What’s in that bottle?’
‘Dry wood and cow dung,’ said Maya.
‘And the smoke puts them to sleep? What does it do to them?’
She didn’t answer. With both hands she lifted the first frame and gave it a brisk shake, and the drugged or sleeping or stunned bees fell back into the hive. ‘Pass me the brush,’ said Maya Fritts, and she used it to delicately sweep off the few stubborn ones who stayed stuck to the honey. Some bees climbed up her fingers, wandered through the soft bristles of the brush, a bit curious or perhaps drunk, and Maya pushed them off her with a smooth gesture, the stroke of a paintbrush. ‘No, sweetie,’ she said to one, ‘you’re staying home.’ Or, to another, ‘Down you get, we’re not playing today.’ The same procedure – the extraction of the combs, sweeping off the bees, the affectionate chitchat – was repeated at the rest of the hives, and Maya Fritts watched everything with her eyes wide open and was probably making mental notes of things that I, in my ignorance, was incapable of seeing. She turned over the wooden frames, looked at them straight on and from the back, a couple of times she used the smoke from the bottle again, as if she feared some unruly bee would wake up at the wrong moment, and I took the opportunity to take off one glove and stick my hand in the cloud, just to find out a little more about that cold smelly smoke. The smell, more wood than manure, stayed on my skin until well into the night. And it would remain forever associated with my long conversation with Maya Fritts.
After checking all the hives, after returning smokers and brushes and little crowbars to their places in the shed, Maya took me back to the house and surprised me with a suckling pig that her staff had been cooking all morning for us. Having acclimatized to the midday heat unawares, the first thing I felt on entering was instant relief, and as I received that sudden hit of shade and cool air I finally realized how much I’d been suffering inside the overall, gloves and mask. My back was drenched with sweat and my shirt stuck to my chest, and my body was screaming for any sort of comfort. Two fans, one over the living room and the other over the dining table, were spinning furiously. Before we sat down to eat, Maya Fritts got a box from somewhere and brought it into the dining-room. It was made of woven wicker, the size of a small suitcase, with a stiff lid and reinforced bottom, and on each end was a handle or a woven grip to make it easier to pick up and carry. Maya put it at the head of the table, like a guest, and sat opposite it. Then, while she served the salad from a wooden bowl, she asked me what I had come to know about Ricardo Laverde, if I had got to know him well.
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘It was just a few months.’
‘Do you mind remembering those things? Because of your accident, I mean?’
‘Not any more,’ I said. ‘But, like I said, I don’t know much. I know he loved your mother very much. I know about the flight from Miami. But I didn’t know about you.’
‘Nothing? He never talked about me?’
‘Never. Only about your mother. Elena, wasn’t it?’
‘Elaine. Her name was Elaine, the Colombians changed it to Elena and she let them. Or she got used to it.’
‘But Elena doesn’t mean Elaine.’
‘If you only knew,’ she said, ‘how many times I’d heard her explain that.’
‘Elaine Fritts,’ I said. ‘She should be a stranger to me, but she isn’t. It’s odd. Do you know about the black box?’
‘The cassette?’
‘Yes. I had no way of knowing I’d be here today, Maya. I would have tried to keep that tape. I don’t think it would have been so difficult.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ said Maya. ‘I’ve got it.’
‘What?’
‘Of course, what did you expect? It’s the plane my mother died on, Antonio. It took me a little longer than you. To find the tape, I mean, Ricardo’s house and the tape. You had an advantage, you were with him at the end, but anyway, I looked and finally got there. It’s not my fault either.’
‘And Consu gave you the tape.’
‘Yes, she gave it to me. And I’ve got it. The first time I heard it I was devastated. I had to let whole days go by before listening to it again, and in spite of that I think I’ve been very brave, most other people would have put it away and never listened to it again. But I did, I listened to it again and since then I haven’t stopped. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard it now, twenty or thirty. At first I thought I played it again to find something in it. Then I realized that I keep playing it precisely because I know I’m not going to find anything. Dad just heard it the once, right?’
‘As far as I know.’
‘I can’t even imagine what he felt.’ Maya paused. ‘He adored her. He adored my mother. Like any good couple, of course, but with him it was special. Because of what happened.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Well, because he went away and she stayed the same as before. She remained sort of paralysed in his memory, in a way.’
She took off her glasses, and pinched her tear ducts: the universal gesture of those who do not want to cry. I wondered where in our genetic code these things are imprinted, these gestures repeated in all parts of the world, in all races, in all cultures, or almost all of them. Or maybe it wasn’t like that, but cinema had made us think so. Yes, that was possible too. ‘Sorry,’ said Maya Fritts. ‘It still happens.’ On the pale skin of her nose a blush appeared, a sudden cold.
‘Maya,’ I said, ‘can I ask you something?’
‘Maybe.’
‘What’s in there?’
I didn’t have to clarify what I was talking about. I didn’t look at the wicker box, I didn’t point at it in any way (not even with my mouth, as some do: pursing the lips and moving one’s head like a horse). Maya Fritts, however, looked across the table and answered me while staring at the empty place.
‘Well, that’s what I asked you to come for,’ she said. ‘Let’s see if I can explain it properly.’ She paused, encircled her glass of beer with her fingers but didn’t go so far as to take a sip. ‘I want you to talk to me about my father.’ Another pause. ‘Sorry, I already told you that.’ Yet another pause. ‘Look, I didn’t ever . . . I was very young when he . . . The thing is, I want you to tell me about his final days, you lived through them with him, and I want you to tell me in as much detail as possible.’
Then she stood up and brought the wicker crate, which must have weighed quite a lot because Maya had to lean it against her belly and hold it with both handles like a washerwoman from another century. ‘Look, Antonio, it’s like this,’ she said. ‘This box is full of things about my father. Photos, letters written to him, letters he wrote and that I’ve collected. All this material I’ve acquired, it’s not like I’ve found it in the street, it’s cost me a lot of effort. Señora Sandoval had a lot of things, for example. She had this photo, see.’ I recognized it immediately, of course, and I would have recognized it even if someone had cropped it or removed the figure of Ricardo Laverde. There were the pigeons of Bolívar Plaza, there was the corn cart, there was the Capitolio, there was the grey background of my grey city. ‘It was for your mother,’ I said. ‘It was for Elaine Fritts.’
‘I know,’ said Maya. ‘Had you seen it before?’
‘He showed it to me. The day after he’d had it taken.’
‘And did he show you other things? Did he ever give you anything, a letter, a document?’
I thought of the night I refused to go into Laverde’s boarding house. ‘No, nothing,’ I said. ‘What else have you got?’
‘Stuff,’ said Maya, ‘unimportant stuff, stuff that doesn’t mean anything. But having them makes me feel calmer. They’re the proof. Look,’ she said, and she showed me a stamped piece of paper. It was a bill: at the top, on the left, was a hotel logo, a circle of some undefined or indefinable colour (time had taken its toll on the paper) above which were distributed the words Hotel, Escorial and Manizales. To the right of the logo, the following inscrutable text:
Accounts are charged on the Friday of every month and must be settled immediately. All rooms include meals. Anyone occupying a room will be charged by the hotel for the minimum stay of one day.
Then there was the date, 29 September 1970, the hour of the guest’s arrival, 3:30 p.m., and the room number, 225; above the square that followed, handwritten, the date of departure (30 September, she’d just stayed one night) and the word Paid. The guest was called Elena de Laverde – I imagined her giving her married name to avoid any potential harassment – and during her brief stay at the hotel she’d made one phone call and eaten one dinner and breakfast, but she hadn’t used the cablegram, laundry, press or car service. A paper without importance and at the same time a window into another world, I thought. And this crate was full of similar windows.
‘Proof of what?’ I asked.
‘Pardon?’
‘You said before that these papers are the proof.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, proof of what?’
But Maya didn’t answer. Instead she kept going through documents with her hand and spoke without looking at me. ‘All this I acquired not long ago,’ she told me. ‘I found out some names, wrote to the United States telling them who I was, I negotiated by letter and by phone. And one day a package arrived with the letters Mom wrote when she first arrived in Colombia, back in ’69. That’s how it’s been with all this, a historian’s work. Many people think it’s absurd. And I don’t know, I don’t really know how to justify it. I’m not even thirty yet and I live way out here, far from everything, like an old maid, and this has become important to me. Constructing my father’s life, finding out who he was. That’s what I’m trying to do. Of course, I wouldn’t have got into anything like this if I hadn’t been left like this, alone, with nobody, and so suddenly. It all started with what happened to my mother. It was so absurd . . . The news reached me here, I was in this hammock where I am now, when I heard that the plane had crashed. I knew she was on that plane. And three weeks later, my father.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘Reading El Espacio,’ she said. ‘It came out in El Espacio, with photos and everything.’
‘Photos?’
‘Of the pool of blood. Of two or three witnesses. Of Señora Sandoval, the one who told me about you. Of his room, and that was very painful. A sensationalist tabloid I’d always despised; I’d always despised its topless women and even its crossword puzzles, which are too easy. And I have to see the most important news of my life there. Tell me it’s not ironic. That’s how it was, I went to buy something in La Dorada and there was the paper, hanging up next to the beach balls and toy masks and kites for tourists. Then, one day, I realize. It might have been a Saturday (I was having breakfast here on the terrace, and I only do that on weekends), yeah, let’s say one Saturday, I realized I was all alone. Months had passed and I had grieved a lot and I didn’t know why I suffered so much, since we’d been apart for a long time, each living our own lives. We didn’t have a life in common or anything like that. And that’s what happened to me: I was alone, I’d been left alone, there was no longer anyone between me and my own death. That’s what being orphaned is: there’s no one ahead, you become next in line. It’s your turn. Nothing changed in my life, Antonio, I’d spent many years without them, but now they’re nowhere. They’re not just not with me: they’re nowhere. It was as if they’d absented themselves. And as if they were watching me, too, this is difficult to explain, but they watched me, Elaine and Ricardo were watching me. It’s tough, the gaze of absent ones. Anyway, you can imagine what happened next.’
‘It always seemed strange to me,’ I said.
‘What did?’
‘Well, that a pilot’s wife should die in a plane crash.’
‘Oh. Well, that’s not so strange when you know certain things.’
‘Like what?’
‘Have you got time?’ Maya asked me. ‘Do you want to read something that has nothing to do with my father and at the same time everything to do with him?’
From the crate she took out a copy of Cromos magazine with a design I didn’t recognize – the name in white letters in a red box – and a colour photo of a woman in a swimming costume, her hands delicately placed on a sceptre, the crown balanced on her puffed-up hair: a beauty queen. The magazine was from May 1968, and the woman, as I immediately discovered, was Margarita María Reyes Zawadzky, Miss Colombia that year. The cover had various headlines, yellow letters over the blue background of the Caribbean Sea, but I didn’t have time to read them, because Maya’s fingers were already opening the magazine to the page marked with a yellow post-it note. ‘You have to handle it gently,’ Maya told me. ‘Paper doesn’t last at all in this humidity. I don’t know how this has held together all these years. OK, here it is.’ THE SANTA ANA TRAGEDY, was the headline in block capitals. And then a few lines to claim: ‘Thirty years after the air accident that scarred Colombia, Cromos recovers the exclusive testimony of a survivor.’ The article appeared beside an ad for Club del Clan, and it struck me as funny because I remembered having heard my parents talk about that television programme on several occasions. The drawing of a young woman playing guitar above the words Televisión limitada. ‘A message to the youth of Colombia,’ boasted the ad, ‘is not complete if it doesn’t include the Clan Club.’
I was about to ask what the article was about when my eyes fell on the surname Laverde, scattered across the page like a dog’s dirty paw prints.
‘Who is this Julio?’
‘My grandfather,’ said Maya. ‘Who at the time of those events wasn’t my grandfather yet. Nowhere near being my grandfather, he was fifteen years old.’
‘Nineteen thirty eight,’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘Ricardo isn’t in this piece.’
‘No.’
‘He hadn’t been born yet.’
‘Not for a good few years,’ said Maya.
‘So then?’
‘So, that’s why I asked you: have you got time? Because if you’re in a hurry I’d understand. But if you really want to know who Ricardo Laverde was, start there.’
‘Who wrote it?’
‘That doesn’t matter. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.’
‘What do you mean it doesn’t matter?’
‘The staff,’ said Maya impatiently. ‘Someone on the editorial staff wrote it, some journalist, a reporter, I don’t know. Some nameless guy who showed up at my grandparents’ house one day and started asking questions. And then sold the article and then wrote others. What does it matter, Antonio? What does it matter who wrote it?’
‘But I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘What is this?’
Maya sighed: it was a ridiculous sigh, like that of a bad actor, but in her it seemed genuine, just as genuine as her impatience. ‘This is the story of one day,’ she said. ‘My great-grandfather takes my grandfather to an exhibition of planes. Captain Laverde takes his son Julio to see planes. His son Julio is fifteen. Later he will grow up and get married and have a son he’ll name Ricardo. And Ricardo will grow up and then he’ll have me. I don’t know what’s so hard to understand. This is the first gift my father gave my mother, a long time before they were married. I read it now and I understand perfectly well.’
‘What?’
‘Why he gave this to her. To her it seemed a brazen gesture and even a little pretentious: look what they wrote about my family, my family’s in the press, and so on. But later she started to realize. She was a stray gringa who was going out with a Colombian without understanding very much about Colombia or that Colombian. When a person is new in a city, the first thing to find is a guide, right? Well, that’s what this 1968 magazine article about a day of thirty years earlier was. My father was offering my mother a guide. Yes, a guide, why not think of it like that. A guide to Ricardo Laverde. A guide to his emotions with all the routes well marked, and everything.’
I left a silence and she added, ‘Well, see for yourself. Shall I get you a beer?’
I said yes please, a beer, thanks. And I started to read. There was a short section title: A Holiday in Bogotá. And then the story began:
That Sunday of 1938 they were commemorating four hundred years since its founding, and the city was full of flags. The anniversary was not that exact day, but a little later; but the flags were already up all over the city, for the people of Bogotá back then liked to do things in good time. Many years later, remembering that ill-fated day, Julio Laverde would talk about the flags more than anything else. He remembered walking with his father from their family home to the Campo de Marte, in the neighbourhood of Santa Ana, which at that time was less a neighbourhood than an area of empty ground and was quite separate from the city. But with Captain Laverde there was not the slightest possibility of catching a bus or accepting a lift; walking was a noble and honourable activity and moving on wheels was something for the nouveau riche. According to Julio, Captain Laverde spent the entire walk talking about the flags, repeating that a true bogotano needed to know the significance of the city’s flag and constantly testing his son on civic history.
‘Don’t they teach you these things at school?’ he’d say. ‘It’s a disgrace. Where is this city headed in the hands of such citizens?’
And then he’d force him to recite that the red was a symbol of liberty, charity and health, and the yellow of justice, virtue and clemency. And Julio repeated uncomplainingly, ‘Justice, virtue and clemency. Liberty, charity and health.’
Captain Laverde was a decorated hero of the war against Peru. He’d flown with Gómez Niño and Herbert Boy, among other legends, and had been commended for his conduct in the Tarapacá operation and in the taking of Güepí. Gómez, Boy and Laverde, those were the three names that were always mentioned later when people talked about the Colombian Air Force’s role in the victory. The three musketeers of the air: one for all and all for one. Although they weren’t always the same musketeers. Sometimes it was Boy, Laverde and Andrés Díaz; or Laverde, Gil and Van Oertzen. It depended on who was telling the story. But Captain Laverde was always one of them.
Going to See a Hero
On that Sunday morning, at the Campo de Marte, there was to be a military fly-past to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of Bogotá. It was as lavish an event as a Roman emperor might have organized. Captain Laverde had arranged to meet three veterans there, friends he hadn’t seen since the armistice because none of them lived in Bogotá, but he had other reasons for attending the review as well. On the one hand, he’d been invited to the presidential grandstand by President López Pumarejo himself. Or almost: General Alfredo De León, who was very close to the president, had told him that the president would be very pleased to count on his illustrious presence.
‘Imagine,’ he’d said to him, ‘a figure like yourself who has defended our colours against the enemy aggressor, a man like you to whom we owe the liberty of our nation and the integrity of our borders.’
The honour of the presidential invitation was one of the other reasons. But there was an added reason, less honourable but more urgent. Among the pilots who were going to be flying was Captain Abadía.
César Abadía was not yet thirty, but Captain Laverde had already predicted that this young man from the provinces, skinny and smiling who had already clocked up fifteen hundred flying hours despite his youth, was going to become the best pilot of light aircraft in Colombian history. Laverde had seen him fly during the war with Peru, when the captain was not a captain but a lieutenant, a young man from Tunja who gave lessons in bravery and control to the most experienced German pilots. And Laverde admired him from a position of sympathy and experience: the sympathy of knowing that one is also admired and the experience of knowing that one has what the other lacks.
But what mattered to Laverde was not to see Captain Abadía’s reputed aerial feats himself. What he sought and desired was that his son should see them. That was why he was taking Julio to the Campo de Marte. That was why he had made him cross Bogotá on foot, through the flags. That was why he had explained they were going to see three types of plane, the Junkers, the Falcons of the observation squadron and the Hawks of the attack squadron. Captain Abadía would be flying a Hawk 812, one of the most agile and fastest machines ever invented by man for the tough and cruel tasks of warfare.
‘Hawk means halcón in English,’ the captain told young Julio, as he mussed the boy’s short hair. ‘You know what a hawk is, right?’
Julio said that he knew very well, and politely thanked his father for the explanation. But he spoke without enthusiasm. He was looking down at the ground as he walked, or maybe looking at the shoes of the people in the crowd, the fifty thousand people among whom they were now mingling. The coats brushing against him, wooden walking sticks and closed umbrellas banging into each other or getting tangled up, ponchos leaving a smell of wool in their wake, dress uniforms of soldiers, their chests covered in medals, police on duty strolling slowly among the crowd or observing from above, astride tall, ill-fed horses leaving a hazardous trail of stinking excrement in unpredictable places . . . Julio had never seen so many people in one place together for the same purpose.
An Uncomfortable Foreboding
Suddenly he wasn’t feeling well. Maybe it was the noise the people made, their enthusiastic greetings, their shouted conversations, or maybe the mixture of smells coming off their clothes and their breath. Whatever the case, Julio suddenly felt as if he were stuck on a merry-go-round that was spinning too fast.
‘I feel woozy,’ he said to Captain Laverde.
But Laverde didn’t pay any attention to him. Or rather, he did pay attention, but not to worry about how he was feeling but to introduce him to a man who was now approaching. He was tall, had a Rudolph Valentino-style moustache and was wearing a military uniform.
‘General De León, this is my son,’ said the captain. And then he spoke to Julio. ‘The general is the General Prefect of Security.’
‘General Prefect General,’ said the general. ‘I wish they’d change the name of the rank. Captain Laverde, the president has sent me to see you to your place. It’s so easy to get lost in this throng.’
That was Laverde: a captain who generals came to look for on behalf of the president. And that’s how the captain and his son found themselves walking towards the presidential grandstand a couple of steps behind General De León, trying to follow him, not to lose sight of him and to pay attention to the extraordinary world of the celebrations at the same time. It had rained the previous night and there were still puddles here and there, and if there wasn’t a puddle there were patches of mud where the heels of the women’s shoes were getting stuck. This happened to a young lady with a pink scarf: she lost a shoe, a cream-coloured one, and Julio bent down to retrieve it while she stood smiling, paralysed like a flamingo. Julio recognized her. He was sure he’d seen her in the society pages: she was a foreigner, he thought, the daughter of a businessman or an industrialist. He tried to find the name in his memory, but he didn’t have time, because Captain Laverde was now grabbing him by the arm and making him climb the creaking wooden steps that led up to the presidential grandstand, and over his shoulder Julio managed to see how the pink scarf and cream-coloured shoes were starting to climb another set of steps, those up to the diplomatic grandstand. They were two identical structures and they were separated by a strip of land as wide as an avenue, like two-tiered cabins constructed on thick piles, placed side by side but both facing the empty ground above which the planes would pass. Identical, yes, except for one detail: in the middle of the presidential grandstand stood an 18-metre-tall pole from which waved the Colombian flag. Years later, talking about what happened that day, Julio would say that the flag, placed in that precise space, had made him wary from the start. But it’s easy to say such things after it’s all over.
The Show Begins
The atmosphere was festive. The air smelled of fried food. People carried drinks in their hands that they were finishing before going up. Every plank of the two sets of steps was filled with people who hadn’t fitted into the grandstands, and so was the strip of ground in between the two sets of steps. Julio felt queasy and he said so, but Captain Laverde didn’t hear him. Walking between the guests was difficult: he had to greet his acquaintances at the same time as spurning social climbers, to be very careful not to snub somebody who was due a greeting while being equally careful not to honour someone who wasn’t. Making their way through the people, without getting separated for a moment, the captain and his son reached the railing. From there Julio saw two men with receding hairlines speaking with a circumspect air a few metres from the flagpole, and those he did recognize immediately: it was President López, wearing a light-coloured suit, dark tie and round-framed glasses, and President-elect Santos, wearing a dark suit, light waistcoat and round-framed glasses as well. The man on his way out and the man on his way in: the country’s destiny settled on two square metres of carpentry. A small crowd of distinguished people – the Lozanos, the Turbays, the Pastranas – divided the presidents’ box from the back part of the grandstand, the upper level, where the Laverdes were. From the distance, the captain saluted López, López returned the greeting with a smile that didn’t show his teeth, and the two of them made mute signals to each other about meeting later because the thing was starting now. Santos turned to see to whom López was gesturing; recognized Laverde, nodded slightly, and at that moment the triple-engine Junkers appeared in the sky and dragged everyone’s gaze in their slipstream.
Julio was absorbed. He had never seen such complex manoeuvres up so close. The Junkers were heavy, and their streaky bodies made them look like big prehistoric fish, but they moved with dignity. Each time they passed, the air they displaced arrived at the stand in waves, ruining the hairdos of the women not wearing hats. The cloudy Bogotá sky, that dirty sheet that seemed to have covered the city since its foundation, was the perfect screen for the projection of this film. Against a background of clouds the triple-engine planes flew past and now the six Falcons, as if from one side to the other of a giant theatre. The formation was perfectly symmetrical. Julio forgot the bitter taste in his mouth for a moment and his dizziness disappeared. His attention wandered over to the hills east of the city, their misty silhouette that extended back, long and dark like a sleeping lizard. It was raining over the hills: the rain, he thought, would soon be here. The Falcons flew past again and again he felt the tremor in the air. The thunder of the engines didn’t manage to drown out the shouts of admiration from the stands. The translucent discs of the spinning propellers threw off brief sparkles of light when the plane banked to turn. Then the fighter planes appeared. They came out of nowhere, immediately assuming a V-formation, and it was suddenly difficult to remember that they weren’t living creatures, that there was someone in command. ‘There’s Abadía,’ said a woman’s voice. Julio turned to see who had spoken, but then the same words were being repeated from another side of the stand: the star pilot’s name moved among the people like a nasty rumour. President López raised a martial arm and pointed at the sky.
‘Here we go,’ said Captain Laverde. ‘Here comes the real thing.’
Beside Julio there was a couple in their fifties, a man in a polka-dot bow tie and his wife, whose mousy face didn’t hide the fact that she’d once been beautiful. Julio heard the man say that he was going to go and get the car. And he also heard the wife. ‘But don’t be silly. Stay here and we’ll go afterwards. You’re going to miss the best part.’
The Audacity of the Pilot
At that moment, the squadron flew past at a low altitude in front of the stand and then in a straight line to the south. Applause broke out, and Julio clapped too. Captain Laverde had forgotten him: his eyes were fixed on what was happening in the sky, the dangerous designs that were taking place up there, and then Julio understood that his father had never seen anything like this before either. ‘I didn’t know the things you could do in a plane,’ he would say much later, when the episode was relived in social get-togethers, or family dinners. ‘It was as though Abadía had suspended the laws of gravity.’ Returning from the south, Captain Abadía’s Hawk fighter left the formation, or rather the rest of the Hawks peeled away from his. Julio didn’t know when Abadía had been left alone, or where the other eight pilots had gone, having disappeared all of a sudden as if the cloud had swallowed them. Then the solitary aircraft flew past in front of the stand doing a roll that drew shouts and applause. Heads followed it and saw it twist and turn over and return, this time flying lower and faster, tracing another roll with the mountains as background, then disappear once again into the northern skies, then reappear in them, as if looming out of nowhere, and heading towards the grandstands.
‘What’s he doing?’ said someone.
Abadía’s Hawk was flying straight towards the spectators.
‘But what’s that crazy man doing?’ said someone else.
This time the voice came from below, from one of the men with President López. Without knowing why, Julio looked at the president at that moment and saw him clutching the wooden railing with both hands, as if he wasn’t standing on a construction well planted on the ground, but at the rails of a ship on the high sea. Again Julio sensed the acrid taste in his mouth, the dizziness and also a sudden sharp pain in his forehead behind his eyes. And that was when Captain Laverde said, in a low voice to no one specifically, or just to himself, with a mixture of admiration and envy, as if watching someone else resolve an enigma, ‘Good God. He wants to grab the flag.’
What happened next occurred for Julio as if outside of time, like a hallucination produced by the migraine. Captain Abadía’s fighter plane approached the presidential grandstand at 400 kilometres per hour, but it seemed to be floating in one place in the cool air; and a few metres away performed a roll in the air and then another one – loop the loop, Captain Laverde called it – and all in the middle of a deathly silence. Julio remembered that he had time to look around, to see faces paralysed by fear and astonishment, and mouths open as if they were screaming. But there were no screams: the world was hushed. In one instant Julio realized that his father was right: Captain Abadía had planned to finish his double roll so close to the waving flag that he could grasp the fabric in his hand, an impossible pirouette dedicated to President López the way a toreador dedicates a bull. All this he understood, and he still had time to wonder if the rest had understood too. And then he felt the shadow of the plane in his eyes, an impossibility since the sun was not shining, and he felt a gust of something that smelled burnt, and he had the presence of mind to see how Abadía’s fighter plane did a strange leap in the air, bent as if it were rubber and hastened to the ground, destroying as it did the wooden roofs of the diplomatic stand, taking the stairs of the presidential grandstand down with it and shattering into bits as it crashed against the field.
The world exploded. There was an explosion of noise: shouts, heels against wood floors, the sound bodies make when they flee. A black cloud that didn’t look like smoke, but like dense ash, exploded down there where the plane had fallen, and remained in place for longer than it should have. From the area of impact came a wave of brutal heat that killed those who were closest to it in seconds, and the rest felt like they were being charred alive. The luckiest ones thought they were dying of asphyxiation, because the heat was consuming all the oxygen in the air. It was like being inside an oven, one of those present would say later. When the set of steps was detached from the stand, the boards and rails gave way and both the Laverdes fell to the ground, and that was when, Julio would say much later, the pain began.
‘Papá,’ he called, and saw Captain Laverde stand up to try to help a woman who had been trapped beneath the wood of the steps, but it was obvious the woman was beyond all help. ‘Papá, something’s wrong with me.’
Julio heard the voice of a man calling a woman. ‘Elvia,’ he shouted, ‘Elvia.’ And Julio recognized the guy with the polka-dot bow tie who’d gone to fetch the car, walking among the fallen bodies, stepping on some of them or tripping over them. There was that burnt smell, and Julio identified it: it was the smell of meat. Captain Laverde turned around and Julio saw, reflected on his face, the disaster of what had happened. Captain Laverde took him by the hand and began to walk to get away from the catastrophe, looking for a way to get to a hospital as quickly as possible. Julio had now begun to cry, less from the pain than from the fear, when they walked past the diplomatic stand and he saw two dead bodies, and recognized the cream-coloured shoes on one of them. Then he passed out. He woke up hours later, in pain and surrounded by worried faces, in a bed in the San José Hospital.
Lucky to Survive
No one ever knew how it happened, if the plane broke up in the air or if it came from the crash, but the fact is that Julio received a gob of motor oil full in the face, and the oil burned his skin and his flesh and it was lucky it didn’t kill him, as it did so many others. There were fifty-five dead after the accident: first among them was Captain Abadía. It was explained that the manoeuvre had produced a ball of air; that the plane, after the double roll, had entered a void; that all that caused the loss of altitude and control and the inevitable downfall. In the hospitals, the injured people received that news with indifference or amazement, and heard that the Treasury would pay for the funerals of the dead, that the poorest families would receive assistance from the city and that the president had visited all the injured the first night. He had certainly visited young Julio Laverde, at least. But he was not awake at the time and was unaware of the visit. His parents told him about it in great detail.
The next day, his mother stayed with him while his father attended the funerals of Abadía, Captain Jorge Pardo and two cavalry soldiers stationed at Santa Ana, all buried at the Central Cemetery after a procession that included several representatives of the government and the cream of the military Air and Ground Forces. Julio, lying on the good side of his face, received morphine injections. He saw the world as if from inside an aquarium. He touched the sterilized dressing and was dying to scratch, but he couldn’t scratch. At the moments of greatest pain he hated Captain Laverde and then he said an Our Father and asked forgiveness for his evil thoughts. He also prayed that his injury wouldn’t become infected, because he had been told that it might. And then he saw the foreign girl and started talking to her. He saw himself with his burnt face. Sometimes her face was burnt too and sometimes it wasn’t, but she always had the pink scarf and the cream-coloured shoes. In those hallucinations the young woman spoke to him sometimes. She asked him how he was. She asked him if he was in pain.
And sometimes she asked him, ‘Do you like planes?’
Night was falling. Maya Fritts lit a scented candle to frighten off the mosquitoes. ‘They all come out at this hour,’ she said. She handed me a stick of repellent and told me to put it everywhere, but especially on my ankles, and when I tried to read the label I realized how ferociously dark it was getting. I also realized that there was now no possibility whatsoever of my returning to Bogotá, and I realized that Maya Fritts had realized that too, as if we’d both been working on the assumption until now that I would spend the night here, with her, like a guest of honour, two strangers sharing a roof because they weren’t such strangers, after all: they had a dead man in common. I looked at the sky, marine blue like one of those skies of Magritte’s, and before it got completely dark I saw the first bats, their black silhouettes outlined against the background. Maya stood up, put a wooden chair in between the two hammocks, and on top of the chair arranged a lit candle, a small polystyrene cooler filled with chunks of ice, a bottle of rum and a bottle of Coke. She went back to lie down in her hammock (a skilful manoeuvre of opening it and getting in with a single movement). My leg hurt. In a matter of minutes the musical scandal of crickets and cicadas burst out and a few minutes later had calmed down again, and only a few soloists chimed up here and there, interrupted every once in a while by the croak of a lost frog. The bats fluttered 3 metres above our heads, coming in and out of their refuges in the wooden roof, and the yellow light moved with the puffs of a gentle breeze, and the air was warm and the rum was going down nicely. ‘Well, someone’s not going to be sleeping in Bogotá tonight,’ said Maya Fritts. ‘If you want to call, there’s a telephone in my room.’
I thought of Leticia, of her little sleeping face. I thought of Aura. I thought of a vibrator the colour of ripe mulberries.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t have to phone anybody.’
‘One less problem,’ she said.
‘But I don’t have any clothes either.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘that we can fix.’
I looked at her: her bare arms, her breasts, her square chin, her small ears with narrow lobes where a spark of light flashed every time she moved her head. Maya took a sip, rested her glass on her belly, and I did the same. ‘Look, Antonio, this is the thing,’ she said then, ‘I need you to tell me about my father, about the end of his life, about the day of his death. Nobody else saw the things that you saw. If all this is a puzzle, then you have a piece that nobody else has, if you see what I mean. Can you help me?’ I didn’t answer immediately. ‘Can you help me?’ Maya insisted, but I didn’t answer. She leaned on one elbow, anyone who’s been in a hammock knows how difficult it is to lean on one elbow, you lose your balance and get tired pretty fast. I sunk into my hammock so that I was wrapped in the material that smelled of humidity and past sweat, of a history of men and women lying here after swimming in the pool or working on the property. I stopped looking at Maya Fritts. ‘And if I tell you what you want to know,’ I said, ‘are you going to do the same?’ I was suddenly thinking about my virgin diary, about that solitary and lost question mark, and some words sketched themselves out in my head: I want to know. Maya didn’t reply, but in the shadows I saw her settled down into her hammock the same way I was in mine, and that was all I needed. I started to talk, I told Maya all that I knew and thought I knew about Ricardo Laverde, all that I remembered and what I feared I’d forgotten, all that Laverde had told me and also all that I’d found out after his death, and that’s how we stayed until after midnight, each wrapped in our hammock, each scrutinizing the roof where the bats moved, filling with words the silence of the warm night, but without ever looking at each other, like a priest and sinner in the sacrament of confession.