6
Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, and perhaps even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity with autonomy, the sovereign right to determine what is going to happen to us next. Disillusion comes sooner or later, but it always comes, it doesn’t miss an appointment, it never has. When it arrives we receive it without too much surprise, for no one who lives long enough can be surprised to find their life has been moulded by distant events, by other people’s wills, with little or no participation from their own decisions. Those long processes that end up running into our life – sometimes to give it the shove it needed, sometimes to blow to smithereens our most splendid plans – tend to be hidden like subterranean currents, like tiny shifts of tectonic plates, and when the earthquake finally comes we invoke the words we’ve learned to calm ourselves, accident, fluke, and sometimes fate. Right now there is a chain of circumstances, of guilty mistakes or lucky decisions, whose consequences await me around the corner; and even though I know it, although I have the uncomfortable certainty that those things are happening and will affect me, there is no way I can anticipate them. Struggling against their effects is all I can do: repair the damage, take best advantage of the benefits. We know it, we know it very well; nevertheless it’s always somewhat dreadful when someone reveals to us the chain that has turned us into what we are, it’s always disconcerting to discover, when it’s another person who brings us the revelation, the slight or complete lack of control we have over our own experience.
That’s what happened to me over the course of that second afternoon at Las Acacias, the property formerly known as Villa Elena, whose name no longer suited it one fine day and had to be urgently replaced. That was what happened to me during that Saturday night when Maya and I were talking about the documents in the wicker chest, about every letter and every photo, about every telegram and every bill. The conversation taught me all that the documents hadn’t confessed, or rather organized the contents of the documents, gave an order and a meaning and filled in a few of its gaps, although not all of them, with the stories that Maya had inherited from her mother in the years they lived together. And also, of course, with the stories her mother had made up.
‘Made up?’ I said.
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Maya. ‘Starting with Dad. She invented him entirely, or rather, he was an invention of hers. A novel, understand? A flesh-and-blood novel, her novel. She did it because of me, of course, or for me.’
‘You mean you didn’t know the truth?’ I said. ‘Elaine didn’t tell you?’
‘She must have thought it would be better that way. And maybe she was right, Antonio. I don’t have children. I can’t imagine what it’s like to have children. I don’t know what a person might be capable of doing for them. My imagination doesn’t stretch that far. Have you got kids, Antonio?’
Maya asked me that. It was Sunday morning, that day Christians call Easter and on which they celebrate or commemorate the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, who had been crucified two days before (more or less at the same time as I began my first conversation with Ricardo Laverde’s daughter) and who from this moment on began to appear to the living: to his mother, to the Apostles and to certain women well chosen for their merit. ‘Have you got kids, Antonio?’ We’d had an early breakfast: lots of coffee, lots of freshly squeezed orange juice, lots of chunks of papaya and pineapple and sapodilla plums, and a cooked breakfast with a very hot arepa, which I put in my mouth too hot and left a blister on my tongue that came back to life every time my tongue touched my teeth. It wasn’t hot yet, but the world was a place that smelled of vegetation, humid and colourful, and there, at the table on the terrace, surrounded by hanging vines, talking a few metres from a trunk with some bromeliads growing out of it, I felt good, I thought I was feeling good on this Easter Sunday. ‘Have you got kids, Antonio?’ I thought of Aura and Leticia, or rather I thought of Aura taking Leticia to the closest church and showing her the candle that represented the light of Christ. She’ll take advantage of my absence to do it: in spite of several attempts, I was never able to recover the faith I had as a little boy, much less the dedication with which my family followed the rituals of these days, from the ashes on the forehead on the first day of Lent to the Ascension (which I pictured in my head according to an encyclopedia illustration, a painting full of angels that I’ve never found since). And I had therefore never wanted my daughter to grow up in this tradition, which now seemed so alien to me. Where are you, Aura? I thought. Where is my family? I looked up, let myself be dazzled by the clarity of the sky, felt a stabbing in my eyes. Maya was looking at me, waiting, hadn’t forgotten her question.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t. It must be very strange, having kids. I can’t imagine it either.’
I don’t know why I did that. Maybe because it was too late to start talking about the family that was waiting for me in Bogotá; those are things you mention in the first moments of a friendship, when you introduce yourself and hand over two or three pieces of information to give the illusion of intimacy. One introduces oneself: the word must come from that, not pronouncing one’s own name and hearing the other’s name and shaking hands, not from kissing a cheek or two or bowing, but from those first minutes in which certain insubstantial pieces of information are exchanged, certain unimportant generalities, to give the other the sensation they know us, that we’re no longer strangers. We speak of our nationality; we speak of our profession, what we do to make a living, because the way we make our living is eloquent, it defines us, structures us; we talk about our family. Well anyway, that moment was already long past with Maya, and to start talking about the woman I lived with and our daughter two days after having arrived at Las Acacias would have raised unnecessary suspicions or required long explanations or stupid justifications, or simply seemed odd, and after all it wouldn’t be without consequences: Maya would lose the trust she’d felt until now, or I would lose the ground I’d gained so far, and she would stop talking and Ricardo Laverde’s past would go back to being the past, would go back to hiding in other people’s memories. I couldn’t allow that.
Or perhaps there was another reason.
Because keeping Aura and Leticia out of Las Acacias, remote from Maya Fritts and her tale and her documents, distant therefore from the truth about Ricardo Laverde, was to protect their purity, or rather avoid their contamination, the contamination that I’d suffered one afternoon in 1996 the causes of which I’d barely begun to understand now, the unsuspected intensity of which was just now beginning to emerge like an object falling from the sky. My contaminated life was mine alone: my family was still safe: safe from the plague of my country, from its afflicted recent history: safe from what had hunted me down along with so many of my generation (and others, too, yes, but most of all mine, the generation that was born with planes, with the flights full of bags of marijuana, the generation that was born with the War on Drugs and later experienced the consequences). This world that had come back to life in the words and documents of Maya Fritts could stay there, I thought, could stay there in Las Acacias, could stay in La Dorada, could stay in the Magdalena Valley, could stay a four-hour drive from Bogotá, far from the apartment where my wife and daughter were waiting for me, perhaps with some concern, yes, perhaps with worried expressions on their faces, but pure, uncontaminated, free of our particular Colombian story, and I wouldn’t be a good father or a good husband if I brought this story to them, or allowed them to enter this story, enter Las Acacias and the life of Maya Fritts in any way, enter into contact with Ricardo Laverde. Aura had had the strange luck to be absent during the difficult years, to have grown up in Santo Domingo and Mexico and Santiago de Chile: was it not my obligation to preserve that luck, to be vigilant to keep anything from ruining that sort of exemption that the eventful life of her parents had granted her? I was going to protect her, I thought, her and my little girl, I was protecting them. This was the right thing to do, I thought, and I did so with real conviction, with almost religious zeal.
‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ Maya said. ‘It’s one of those things that can’t be shared, so everyone tells me. Anyway. The thing is she did it for me. She invented my dad, invented him entirely.’
‘For example?’
‘Well,’ said Maya, ‘for example, his death.’
And so, with the white light of the Magdalena Valley shining in my face, I learned about the day that Elaine or Elena Fritts explained to her daughter what had happened to her father. During the previous year, father and daughter had talked a lot about death: one afternoon, Maya had come upon the slaughter of a Cebú cow, and almost immediately began to ask questions. Ricardo had resolved the matter in four words: ‘Her years were up.’ Everyone and everything runs out of years eventually, he explained: animals, people, everyone. Armadillos? asked Maya. Yes, Ricardo told her, armadillos too. Grandpa Julio? asked Maya. Yes, Grandpa Julio too, Ricardo told her. So, one afternoon towards the end of 1976, when the girl’s questions about her father’s absence were starting to get unbearable, Elaine Fritts sat Maya on her lap and told her, ‘Daddy’s years were up.’
‘I don’t know why she chose that moment, I don’t know if she got tired of waiting for something, I don’t know anything,’ Maya told me. ‘Maybe some news arrived from the United States. From the lawyers or from my dad.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘There aren’t any letters from that time, my mother burnt them all. What I’m telling you is what I imagine happened: she got some news. From my dad. From the lawyers. And decided to change her life, or that her life with my dad was over and she was going to start another different one.’
She explained that Ricardo had got lost in the sky. Sometimes that happened to pilots, she explained: it’s rare, but it happened. The sky was very big and the sea was very big too and a plane was a very small thing and the planes that Daddy flew were the smallest ones of all, and the world was full of planes like those, little white planes that took off and flew over the land and then went out and flew over the sea, and went far, very far away, far from everything, completely alone, without anyone to tell them how to get back to land again. And sometimes something happened, and they got lost. They forgot where ahead was and where was back, or they got confused and started flying in circles without knowing which way was ahead and which was back, where the left was and where the right, until the plane ran out of gasoline and fell into the sea, fell out of the sky like a little girl diving into a pool. And it sank without a sound or a noise, sank unseen because out in those places there isn’t anyone to see, and out there, at the bottom of the sea, pilots ran out of years. ‘Why don’t they swim?’ asked Maya. And Elena Fritts said, ‘Because the sea is very deep.’ And Maya, ‘But Daddy’s out there?’ And Elena Fritts, ‘Yes, Daddy’s there. At the bottom of the sea. His plane fell, Daddy fell asleep and his years ran out.’
Maya Fritts never questioned that version of events. That was the last Christmas they spent at Villa Elena, the last time Elaine had them cut down a yellowing shrub to decorate with the fragile coloured balls the little girl loved, with reindeer and sleighs and fake candy canes that bent the branches with their weight. In January 1977 several things happened: Elaine received a letter from her grandparents telling her that it had snowed in Miami for the first time in history; President Jimmy Carter pardoned the Vietnam draft dodgers; and Mike Barbieri – who Elaine had always secretly considered a draft dodger – showed up dead in La Miel River, shot in the back of the neck, his naked body thrown face down on the riverbank, the water playing with his long hair, his beard wet and reddened with blood. The campesinos who found him went in search of Elaine even before they went to the authorities: she was the other gringa in the region. Elaine had to be present at the first judicial proceedings, had to go to a municipal court with open windows and fans that messed up the records to say that yes, she knew him, and that no, she didn’t know who might have killed him. The next day she packed up the Nissan with everything she could fit in it, her clothes and her daughter’s, the suitcases full of money and an armadillo with the name of a murdered gringo, and went to Bogotá.
‘Twelve years, Antonio,’ Maya Fritts said to me, ‘twelve years I lived with my mother, just the two of us, practically in hiding. She didn’t just take my dad away from me, but my grandparents too. We didn’t see them again. They just came to visit a couple of times, and it would always end in a fight, I didn’t understand why. But other people came. It was a tiny little apartment, in La Perseverancia. Lots of people came to visit us, the house was always full of gringos, people from the Peace Corps, people from the Embassy. Did Mom talk to them about drugs, about what was happening with drugs? I don’t know, I wouldn’t have been aware of something like that. It’s perfectly possible they talked about cocaine. Or about the volunteers who had taught the campesinos to process the coca paste just as they’d taught them techniques for growing better marijuana before. But the business wasn’t yet what it became later. How would I have known? A child doesn’t catch things like that.’
‘And no one asked about Ricardo? None of those visitors spoke of him?’
‘No, nobody. Incredible, isn’t it? Mom constructed a world in which Ricardo Laverde didn’t exist, that takes talent. As difficult as it is to maintain a little tiny lie, she built up something huge, an actual pyramid. I imagine her giving instructions to all her visitors: in this house we don’t speak of the dead. What dead? Well, the dead. The dead who are dead.’
It was around that time that she killed the armadillo. Maya didn’t remember the absence of her father upsetting her too much: she didn’t remember any bad feelings, any aggression, any desire for revenge, but one day (she would have been about eight) she grabbed the armadillo and took him to the laundry patio. ‘It was one of those old-fashioned patios apartments used to have, you know, uncomfortable and tiny, with a stone sink and clothes lines and a window. Do you remember those laundry sinks? On one side was where you scrubbed the clothes against the ridged surface, on the other was a sort of tank, for a child it was like a deep well of cold water. I brought a bench over from the kitchen, leaned over the water and pushed Mike down with both hands, without letting go of him, and I put both my hands on his back so he wouldn’t move. I’d been told that armadillos could spend a long time under water. I wanted to see how long. The armadillo started struggling, but I held him down there, pressed against the bottom of the sink with my whole body weight, an armadillo is strong, but not that strong, I was already a good-sized girl. I wanted to see how long he could stay under water, that was all, it seemed to me that’s all it was. I remember the roughness of his body very well, my hands hurt from the pressure and then they went on hurting, it was like holding a knotty tree trunk in place so the current wouldn’t carry it off. What a struggle the creature put up, I remember perfectly. Until he stopped struggling. The maid found him later, you should have heard her scream. I was punished. Mom slapped me hard and cut my lip with her ring. Later she asked me why I’d done it and I said, To see how many minutes he could stay under. And Mom answered, Then why didn’t you have a watch? I didn’t know what to say. And that question hasn’t completely gone away, Antonio, it still runs around my head every once in a while, always at the worst moments, when life isn’t working out for me. This question appears to me and I’ve never been able to answer it.’
She thought for a moment and said, ‘Anyway, what was an armadillo doing in an apartment in La Perseverancia? How absurd, the house smelled like shit.’
‘And did you never have any suspicions?’
‘About what?’
‘That Ricardo was alive. About him being in jail.’
‘Never, no. I’ve since discovered that I wasn’t the only one, that my story wasn’t unique. In those years they were legion those who arrived in the United States and stayed there, I don’t know if you know what I mean. Those who arrived, not with shipments like my dad, though there were those as well, but as simple passengers of a commercial plane, an Avianca or American Airlines plane. And the families who were left behind in Colombia had to tell the children something, didn’t they? So they killed the father, never better said. The guy, stuck in jail in the United States, died all of a sudden without anyone ever knowing he was there. It was the easiest thing to do, easier than struggling with the shame, the humiliation of having a mule in the family. Hundreds of cases like this one. Hundreds of fictitious orphans, I was just one. That’s the great thing about Colombia, nobody’s ever alone with their fate. Shit, is it ever hot. It’s incredible. Aren’t you hot, Antonio, being from a cool climate?’
‘A little, yes. But I can take it.’
‘Here you feel every pore open. I like the early mornings, first thing. But then it gets unbearable. No matter how used to it you get.’
‘You must be pretty used to it by now.’
‘Yes, it’s true. Maybe I just like to complain.’
‘How did you end up living here?’ I asked. ‘I mean, after all that time.’
‘Oh, well,’ said Maya. ‘That’s a long story.’
Maya had just turned eleven when a classmate told her about the Hacienda Nápoles for the first time. This was the vast property, more than 3,000 hectares, that Pablo Escobar had bought towards the end of the 1970s on which to build his personal paradise, a paradise that was an empire at the same time: a tropical lowland Xanadu, with animals instead of sculptures and armed thugs instead of a No Trespassing sign. The hacienda’s land stretched over two departments; a river crossed it from one side to the other. Of course that wasn’t the information Maya’s classmate gave her, for in 1982 the name Pablo Escobar was not yet on the lips of eleven-year-old children, nor did eleven-year-old children know the characteristics of the gigantic territory or the collection of antique cars that would soon be growing in special carports or the existence of several runways designed for the business (for the taking off and landing of planes like the one Ricardo Laverde had piloted), much less had they seen Citizen Kane. No, eleven-year-old children didn’t know about those things. But they did know about the zoo: in a matter of months the zoo became a legend on a national scale, and it was the zoo that Maya’s classmate told her about one day in 1982. She told her about giraffes, elephants, rhinoceroses, huge birds of every colour; she told her about a kangaroo that kicked a football. For Maya it was a revelation so extraordinary, and it turned into a desire so important, that she had the good sense to wait until Christmas to ask to be taken to the Hacienda Nápoles as a Christmas present.
Her mother’s reply was emphatic: ‘Don’t even dream about going to see that place.’
‘But everyone in my class has been,’ said Maya.
‘Well you’re not going,’ said Elaine Fritts. ‘Don’t even think of mentioning it again.’
‘And so I went on the sly,’ Maya told me. ‘What else could I do? A friend invited me and I said yes. My mom thought I was going to spend the weekend in Villa de Leyva.’
‘You’re kidding,’ I said. ‘You sneaked off to the Hacienda Nápoles too? How many of us must have done the same thing?’
‘Oh, so you . . .’
‘Yeah, I did too,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t allowed to go, so I made up some lie too, and went to see what was forbidden. A taboo place, Hacienda Nápoles.’
‘And when did you go there?’
I made some calculations in my head, summoning up certain memories, and the conclusion made a shiver of pleasure run up my spine. ‘I was twelve. I’m a year older than you. We went there around the same time, Maya.’
‘You went in December?’
‘Yes.’
‘December 1982?’
‘Yes.’
‘We were there at the same time,’ she said. ‘Incredible. Isn’t it incredible?’
‘Well, yeah, but I’m not sure . . .’
‘We went on the same day, Antonio,’ said Maya. ‘I’m sure of it.’
‘But it might have been any day.’
‘Don’t be silly. It was before Christmas, right?’
‘Right. But . . .’
‘And after school broke up, right?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Well, it had to be a weekend, otherwise there wouldn’t have been adults to take us. People work. And how many weekends are there before Christmas? Let’s say three. And what day was it, a Saturday or a Sunday? It was a Saturday, because Bogotá people always went to the zoo on Saturdays, grown-ups don’t like to make a trip like that and then have to go to the office the next day.’
‘Well, there are still three days,’ I said, ‘three possible Saturdays. Nothing guarantees we chose the same one.’
‘I know we did.’
‘Why?’
‘I just do. Don’t bug me any more. Do you want me to keep telling you?’ But Maya didn’t wait for my answer. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘so, I went to see the zoo and then I went home, and the first thing I did when I walked in was to ask my mother exactly where our house was in La Dorada. I think I recognized something along the way, the landscape, I recognized a mountain or a curve in the road, or the turn-off onto the main road to Villa Elena, because to get to the Hacienda Nápoles you pass right by that road. I must have recognized something, and when I saw my mother I wouldn’t stop asking her questions. It was the first time I’d talked about it since we left, Mom was quite shocked. And as the years went by I kept asking questions, saying I wanted to go back, asking when we could go back. The house in La Dorada turned into a sort of Promised Land for me, you see? And I began little by little to do everything necessary to go back. And it all began with that visit to the zoo at the Hacienda Nápoles. And now you tell me that maybe we saw each other there, at the zoo. Without knowing you were you and I was me, without knowing we’d meet one day.’
Something happened in that instant in her gaze, her green eyes opened slightly wider, her narrow eyebrows arched as if they’d been drawn on again, and her mouth, her mouth with blood-red lips, gestured in a way I’d not seen before. I had no way of proving it, and commenting on it would have been imprudent or stupid, but at that moment I thought: That’s a little girl’s expression. That’s what you were like when you were little.
And then I heard her say, ‘And have you been back since then? Because I haven’t, I’ve never been back. The place is falling to pieces, from what I’ve heard. But we could go anyway, see what’s there, see what we remember. How’s that sound?’
Soon we were driving down the highway towards Medellín at the hottest hour of the day, moving along the ribbon of asphalt just as Ricardo Laverde and Elaine Fritts had done twenty-nine years earlier, and not only that, but doing so in the same bone-coloured Nissan in which they’d driven. In a country where it’s quite common to see cars from the 1960s in the streets – a Renault 4, a Fiat here and there, Chevrolet trucks that might even be fifteen years older – the survival of a jeep was neither miraculous nor extraordinary, there are hundreds like this on the roads. But anyone could see that this was not just any Nissan jeep, but rather the first big present Ricardo Laverde bought for his wife with the money from the flights, the marijuana money. Twenty-nine years before, the two of them had travelled around the Magdalena Valley as we were doing now; they had kissed while sitting on this seat; right here they’d talked about having children. And now their child and I were occupying those same places and perhaps feeling the same humid heat and the same relief at accelerating and getting air to blow in the windows, so we had to raise our voices to hear each other. It was either raise our voices or die of heat with the windows rolled up, and we preferred the former. ‘This jeep still exists,’ I said in a forced tone, sounding like an actor in a theatre that was too big.
‘How about that,’ said Maya. Then she raised a hand and pointed to the sky. ‘Look, military planes.’
I heard the sound of the planes that were passing over our heads, but when I looked up I only saw a flock of turkey vultures tracing circles against the sky. ‘I try not to think of Dad when I see them,’ said Maya, ‘but I can’t help it.’ Another squadron flew over in formation and this time I saw them: the grey shadows crossing the sky, the jet engines shaking the air. ‘That was the inheritance he wanted,’ said Maya. ‘The hero’s grandson.’ The road was suddenly filled with uniformed lads armed with rifles that hung across their chests like sleeping animals. Before driving onto the bridge over the Magdalena we slowed down so much and passed so close to the soldiers that the wing mirror almost brushed the barrels of their rifles. They were boys, sweaty, scared kids whose mission, guarding the military base, seemed too big for them, just as their helmets and uniforms were, and those stiff leather boots in these cruel tropics. As we passed beside the fence that surrounded the base, a structure covered in green canvas and crowned with an elaborate labyrinth of barbed wire, I saw a green sign with white letters, No Photography, and another in black letters on a white background: Human rights, the responsibility of all. On the other side of the fence military trucks could be seen driving on a paved road; beyond them, exhibited like a relic in a museum, a Canadair Sabre balanced on a sort of pedestal. In my memory the image of this plane, which Ricardo Laverde liked so much, is forever linked to Maya’s question: ‘Where were you when they killed Lara Bonilla?’
People of my generation do these things: we ask each other what our lives were like at the moment of those events – almost all of which occurred in the 1980s – which defined or diverted them before we knew what was happening to us. I’ve always believed that in this way, verifying that we’re not the only ones, we neutralize the consequences of having grown up in that decade, or we mitigate the feeling of vulnerability that has always accompanied us. And those conversations tend to begin with Lara Bonilla, the Minister of Justice. He had been the first public enemy of drug trafficking, and the most powerful of the legal ones; the method of the hit man on the back of a motorbike, where a teenager approaches the car in which the victim is travelling and empties a Mini Uzi into it without even slowing down, began with his murder. ‘I was in my room, doing my chemistry homework,’ I said. ‘And you?’
‘I was ill,’ said Maya. ‘Appendicitis, imagine, I’d just had surgery.’
‘Do kids get that?’
‘It’s so cruel, but yes. And I remember the commotion at the clinic, the nurses rushing in and out. It was like being in a war movie. Because they’d killed Lara Bonilla and everyone knew who’d done it, but no one knew that could happen.’
‘It was something new,’ I said. ‘I remember my dad in the dining room. His head in his hands, elbows on the table. He didn’t eat anything. He didn’t say anything either. It was something new.’
‘Yes, that day we went to bed changed,’ said Maya. ‘A different country, wasn’t it? At least that’s how I remember it. Mom was scared. I looked at her and saw her fear. Of course, she knew all sorts of things that I didn’t.’ Maya was quiet for a moment. ‘And when Galán was killed?’
‘That was at night. It was a Friday in the middle of the year. I was . . . Well, I was with a friend.’
‘Oh, very nice,’ said Maya with a slanted smile. ‘You having a fine old time while the country falls to pieces. Were you in Bogotá?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was she your girlfriend?’
‘No. Well, she was going to be. Or that’s what I thought.’
‘Oops, a frustrated love,’ Maya laughed.
‘At least we spent the night together. Even though it was obligatory.’
‘The After Curfew Hour Lovers,’ said Maya. ‘Not a bad title, don’t you think?’
I liked seeing her like this, suddenly cheerful, I liked the little barely visible lines that appeared beside her eyes when she smiled. In front of us there was now a truck loaded with huge milk containers, big metal cylinders like unexploded bombs on top of which three shirtless teenagers were riding. Seeing us caused them inexplicable laughter. They waved to Maya, blew kisses at her, and she put the jeep into second gear and pulled into the other lane to overtake them. As she did so she blew a kiss back to them. It was a teasing, playful act, but there was something in the melodramatic way she closed her lips (and in the whole movie-star gesture) that filled the moment with an unexpected sensuality, or at least that’s how it seemed to me. On my side of the road, two water buffalo were bathing in a sort of marsh that opened up between the shrubs. Their wet horns glistened under the sun, their manes stuck to their faces. ‘And the day of the Avianca plane?’ I said.
‘Oh, the famous plane,’ said Maya. ‘That really fucked everything up, didn’t it.’
Once the presidential candidate Galán was dead, his policies, and among them the fight against drug trafficking, were inherited by a very young provincial politician: César Gaviria. In his attempt to take Gaviria out of the picture, Pablo Escobar had a bomb planted on a passenger airline that flew – that would have flown – the Bogotá–Cali route. Gaviria, however, did not even board the plane. The bomb exploded just after take-off, and the remains of the disintegrated plane – including three passengers who were apparently not killed by the bomb but by the impact – fell over Soacha, the same place where Galán had fallen, shot on the wooden campaign platform. But I don’t think this coincidence means anything.
‘That’s when we knew,’ said Maya, ‘that the war was against us too. Or that was the confirmation, at least. Beyond any doubt. There’d been other bombs in public places, of course, but they’d seemed like accidents, I don’t know if the same thing happened to you. Well, I’m not entirely sure accidents is the right word either. Things that happen to people with bad luck. The plane was different. It was the same deep down, but for some reason it seemed different to me, as if they’d changed the rules of the game. I’d started university that year. Agronomy, I was going to study agronomy, I suppose I was already sure that I was going to reclaim the house in La Dorada. The fact is I’d started university. And it took me the whole year to notice.’
‘Notice what?’
‘The fear. Or rather, that this thing I got in my stomach, the occasional faint feelings, the irritation, weren’t the typical symptoms of first-year jitters, but pure fear. And Mom was scared too, of course, maybe even more than I was. And then came the rest, the other attacks, the other bombs. The DAS one with its hundred dead. That one at the shopping mall with fifteen. Then the other shopping mall with however many there were. A special time, no? Not knowing when it might be your turn. Worrying when someone who was supposed to arrive wasn’t there. Always knowing where the closest pay phone is to let someone know you’re OK. If there were no pay phones, knowing that anybody would lend you their phone, all you had to do was knock on a door. Living like that, always with the possibility that people close to us might be killed, always having to reassure our loved ones so they don’t think we are among the dead. Our lives were conducted inside houses, remember. We avoided public places. Friends’ houses, friends of friends, houses of distant acquaintances, any house was better than a public place. Well, I don’t know if you know what I mean. Maybe in our house it was different. We were two women on our own, after all. Maybe it wasn’t like that for you.’
‘It was exactly like that,’ I said.
She turned to look at me. ‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘So you understand me then,’ said Maya.
And I said a couple of words whose scope I didn’t manage to fully determine: ‘I understand you perfectly.’
The landscape repeated itself around us, green plains with grey mountains in the background, like a Gonzalo Ariza painting. My arm stretched along the back of the front seat, which in those models is bulky and undivided, so you feel like you’re sitting on a sofa. With the shifting breezes and the rolling of the Nissan, sometimes Maya’s hair brushed my hand, brushed the skin of my hand, and I liked the sensation and looked forward to it from then on. We left the straight line of cattle ranches with their drinking troughs with roofs and armies of cows lying around the trunks of the acacias. We passed over the Negrito River, a stream of dark waters and dirty banks, with clouds of foam sparkling here and there, the remains of the accumulated contamination from villages and towns upstream where they dumped their waste water into the same water in which they washed their clothes. When we got to the toll booth and the Nissan came to a stop, the sudden absence of air circulating raised the temperature inside the vehicle, and I felt – in my armpits, but also on my nose and under my eyes – that I was beginning to sweat. And when we got back in motion, as we approached another bridge over the Magdalena, Maya began to tell me about her mother, about what happened with her mother at the end of 1989. I was looking at the river beyond the bridge’s yellow railings, looking at the little sandy islands that soon, when the rainy season arrived, would be covered by brown water, and meanwhile Maya was telling me about the evening when she came home from university and found Elaine Fritts in the bathroom, so drunk she’d almost passed out and clutching the toilet bowl as if it might be leaving at any moment. ‘My baby,’ she said to Maya, ‘my baby’s home. My little girl is big now. My little girl is a big girl.’ Maya picked her up as best she could and put her to bed and stayed with her, watching her sleep and touching her forehead every once in a while; she made her a herbal tea at two in the morning; put a bottle of water on the bedside table and brought her two painkillers for her hangover; and at the end of the night heard her say that she couldn’t take it any more, that she’d tried but she couldn’t do it any longer, that Maya was a grown-up now and could make her own decisions just as she’d made hers. And six days later she boarded a plane and returned home to Jacksonville, Florida, to the same house she’d left twenty years earlier with a single idea in her head: to be a Peace Corps volunteer in Colombia. To have an enriching experience, leave her mark, do her bit, small as it might be. All those things.
‘The country changed on her,’ said Maya. ‘She arrived in a place and twenty years later she no longer recognized it. There is a letter that’s always fascinated me, it’s from late 1969, one of the first. My mother says that Bogotá is a boring city. She doesn’t know how long she can live in a place where nothing ever happens.’
‘Where nothing ever happens.’
‘Yeah,’ said Maya. ‘Where nothing ever happens.’
‘Jacksonville,’ I said. ‘Where’s that?’
‘North of Miami, way north. I only know from seeing it on maps, because I’ve never been. I’ve never been to the States.’
‘Why didn’t you go with her?’
‘I don’t know. I was eighteen,’ Maya told me. ‘At that age life’s just starting, you’re only just discovering it. I didn’t want to leave my friends, I’d just started seeing someone . . . It’s funny because as soon as Mom left I realized Bogotá was not for me. One thing led to another, as they say in movies, and here I am, Antonio. Here I am. Twenty-eight years old, alone and single, all my body parts still in good working order and living alone with my bees. Here I am. Melting in the heat and taking a stranger to see a dead Mafioso’s zoo.’
‘A stranger,’ I repeated.
Maya shrugged and said something that didn’t mean anything.
‘Well, no, but anyway.’
When we got to the Hacienda Nápoles the sky had begun to cloud over and the air was sweltering. It would soon rain. The name of the property was painted in now peeling letters on the arch of the unnecessarily huge white gate – an eighteen-wheeler could easily have driven through – and on the crossbeam, precariously balanced, was a light aircraft, white and blue like the gate: it was the Piper that Escobar used during the early years and to which, he used to say, he owed his wealth. Passing beneath that plane, reading the registration number stencilled on the underside of the wing, was like entering a timeless world. Time, however, was present. To be more precise: it had wreaked havoc. Since 1993, when Escobar was shot dead on a Medellín rooftop, the property had gone into a vertiginous decline, and that, above all, was what Maya and I saw as the Nissan advanced along the paved track between the fields of lemon trees. There were no cattle grazing in these meadows, which, among other things, explained why the grass was so long. The weeds were devouring the wooden posts. That’s what I was staring at, the wooden posts, when I saw the first dinosaurs.
They were what I’d liked most on my first long-ago visit. Escobar had ordered their construction for his children, a tyrannosaurus and a brontosaurus built to scale, a friendly-looking mammoth (grey and bearded like a tired grandfather) and even a pterodactyl floating over the pond with an anachronistic snake in its talons. Now their bodies were crumbling into bits, and there was something very sad and perhaps somewhat indecent in the vision of those cement-and-iron structures out in the open. The pond itself had turned into a lifeless puddle, or at least that’s what it looked like from the path. After leaving the Nissan on a patch of neglected land, in front of a wire fence that might once have been electrified, Maya and I began to walk through the same places we had gone through in a car years ago, as children, almost teenagers, who didn’t yet understand very well what the owner of all that did for a living or why their parents wouldn’t allow them such innocent fun. ‘Back then you weren’t allowed to walk, remember? Nobody got out of their car.’
‘It was forbidden,’ I said.
‘Yes. I’m shocked.’
‘By what?’
‘Everything seems smaller.’
She was right. We told a soldier we wanted to see the animals and asked him where they were, and Maya openly handed him a 10,000-peso note as encouragement. And so, guided or accompanied or escorted by a beardless youngster in camouflage cap and uniform who moved lazily, his left hand resting on his rifle, we arrived at the cages in which the animals were sleeping. The humid air filled with a dirty smell, a mixture of excrement and rotting food. We saw a cheetah lying at the back of his cage. We saw a chimpanzee scratching his head and another running in circles with nothing to chase. We saw an empty cage, the door open and an aluminium basin leaning against the bars.
But we didn’t see the kangaroo who kicked the football, or the famous parrot who could recite the line-up of the Colombian national team, or the emus, or the lions and elephants Escobar had bought from a travelling circus, or the miniature horses or the rhinoceroses, or the incredible pink dolphin Maya dreamt of for a week straight after that first visit. Where were the animals we’d seen as kids? I don’t know why our own disappointment should have surprised us, for the deterioration of the Hacienda Nápoles was well known, and in the years gone by since Escobar’s death various testimonies had circulated in the Colombian press, a sort of extremely slow-motion film on the rise and fall of the criminal empire. But maybe it wasn’t our disappointment that surprised us, but the way we experienced it together, the unexpected and especially unjustified solidarity that suddenly united us: we had both come to this place at the same time, this place had been a symbol of the same things for both of us. That must have been why later, when Maya asked if we could go as far as Escobar’s house, I felt as if she’d taken the words out of my mouth, and it was me who pulled out some wrinkled and grimy money to bribe the soldier with this time.
‘Oh no. You can’t go in there,’ he said.
‘And why not?’ asked Maya.
‘You just can’t,’ he said. ‘But you can walk around it and you can look in the windows.’
That’s what we did. We walked around the perimeter of the construction and together saw its ruined walls, its dirty or broken windows, the splintering wood of its beams and columns, the broken and chipped tiles of the outside bathrooms. We saw the billiard tables inexplicably still there six years later: in those salons that time had darkened and dirtied, the green felt shone like jewels. We saw the pool empty of water, but full of dry leaves and pieces of bark and sticks that the wind had blown in. We saw the garage where the collection of antique cars was rotting away, we saw the flaking paint and broken headlights and dented bodywork and missing cushions and seats converted into a disorder of popping springs, and we remembered that according to legend one of these machines, a Pontiac, had belonged to Al Capone and another, again according to legend, to Bonnie and Clyde. And later we saw a car that had never been luxurious but basic and cheap, however its value was undoubtedly great: the famous Renault 4 in which the young Pablo Escobar, long before cocaine became the source of his riches, competed in local races as a novice driver. The Renault 4 Cup, that amateur trophy was called: the first time Escobar’s name appeared in the Colombian press, long before the planes and the bombs and the debates about extradition, was as a racing-car driver in this competition, a young provincial in a country that was still a small province in the world, a young trafficker who was still making the news for activities other than that incipient trafficking. And there was the car, asleep and broken and devoured by neglect and time, the bodywork cracked open, another dead animal whose skin was full of worms.
But maybe the strangest thing that afternoon was that everything we saw we saw in silence. We looked at each other frequently, but we never spoke anything more than an interjection or an expletive, perhaps because all that we were seeing was evoking different memories and different fears for each of us, and it seemed imprudent or perhaps rash to go rummaging around in each other’s pasts. Because it was that, our common past, that was there without being there, like the unseen rust that was right in front of us eating away at the car doors and rims and fenders and dashboards and steering wheels. As for the property’s past, we weren’t overly interested: the things that had happened there, the deals that were made and the lives that were extinguished and the parties that were held and the violence that was planned, all that was a backdrop, scenery. Without a word we agreed we’d seen enough and began to walk towards the Nissan. And this I remember: Maya took my arm, or slipped her arm in mine like women used to do in times gone by, and in the anachronism of her gesture there was an intimacy I could not have predicted, that nothing had foretold.
Then it began to rain.
It was just drizzle at first, although with fat drops, but in a matter of seconds the sky turned as black as a donkey’s belly and a downpour drenched our shirts before we had time to seek shelter anywhere. ‘Shit, that’s the end of our stroll,’ said Maya. By the time we got to the Nissan, we were soaked to the skin; since we’d run (shoulders raised, one arm up to shield our eyes), the fronts of our trousers were wet through, while the back, almost dry, seemed made of a different fabric. The windows of the jeep fogged up immediately with the heat of our breathing, and Maya had to get a box of tissues out of the glove compartment to clean the windscreen so we wouldn’t crash. She opened the vents, a black grille in the middle of the dashboard, and we began to move cautiously forward. But we had only gone about 100 metres when Maya stopped suddenly, rolled down the window as fast as she could so I, from the passenger seat, could see what she was looking at: thirty steps away from us, halfway between the Nissan and the pond, a hippopotamus was studying us gravely.
‘What a beauty,’ said Maya.
‘Beauty?’ I said. ‘That’s the ugliest animal in the world.’
But Maya paid me no attention. ‘I don’t think it’s an adult,’ she went on. ‘She’s too little, just a baby. I wonder if she’s lost.’
‘And how do you know it’s female?’
But Maya was already out of the jeep, in spite of the downpour that was still falling and in spite of a wooden fence between us and the piece of land where the creature was. Its hide was dark iridescent grey, or that’s how it looked to me in the diminished afternoon light. The raindrops hit and bounced off as if they were falling against a pane of glass. The hippopotamus, male or female, juvenile or full-grown, didn’t bat an eyelid: it looked at us, or looked at Maya who was leaning over the wooden fence and looking at it in turn. I don’t know how much time went by: one minute, two, which in such circumstances is a long time. Water dripped off Maya’s hair and all her clothes were a different colour now. Then the hippopotamus began a heavy movement, a ship trying to turn around in the sea, and I was surprised to see such a long animal in profile. And then I didn’t any more, or rather I saw its powerful arse and thought I saw streams of water sliding over its smooth, shiny skin. It wandered away through the tall grass, with its legs hidden by the weeds in such a way that it seemed not to make any progress, but just to get smaller. When it reached the pond and got into the water, Maya returned to the jeep.
‘How long are those creatures going to last, that’s what I wonder,’ she said. ‘There’s no one to feed them, no one to take care of them. They must be so expensive.’
She wasn’t talking to me, that was clear: she was thinking out loud. And I couldn’t help but remember another comment identical in spirit and even in form that I had heard a long time ago, when the world, or at least my world, was a very different one, when I still felt in charge of my life.
‘Ricardo said the same thing,’ I told Maya. ‘That’s how I met him, when he commented how sorry he felt for the animals from the zoo.’
‘I can imagine,’ said Maya. ‘He worried about animals.’
‘He said they weren’t to blame for anything.’
‘And it’s true,’ said Maya. ‘It’s one of the few, very few, real memories I have. My dad looking after the horses. My dad stroking my mom’s dog. My dad telling me off for not feeding my armadillo. The only real memories. The rest are invented, Antonio, false memories, made-up memories. The saddest thing that can happen to a person is to find out their memories are lies.’
Her voice was twanging, but that could have been due to the change in temperature. There were tears in her eyes, or maybe it was rainwater running down her cheeks, around her lips. ‘Maya,’ I asked then, ‘why was he killed? I know this piece of the puzzle is missing, but what do you think?’ The Nissan was on the move again and we were travelling the kilometres that separated us from the entrance gate, Maya’s hand closed over the black knob of the gear lever, water ran down her face and neck. I insisted: ‘Why, Maya?’ Without looking at me, without taking her eyes off the drenched panorama, Maya said those five words I’d heard from so many mouths, ‘He must have done something.’ But this time they seemed unworthy of what Maya knew. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but what? Maybe you don’t want to know.’ Maya looked at me with pity. I tried to add something but she cut me off. ‘Look, I don’t want to talk any more.’ The black blades moved across the windscreen and swept the water and leaves away. ‘I want us to stay quiet for a while, I’m tired of talking. Do you understand, Antonio? We’ve talked too much. I’m sick of talking. I want to be silent for a while.’
So in silence we arrived at the gate and passed beneath the white and blue Piper, and in silence we turned left and headed for La Dorada. In silence we drove along the part where the trees met over the top of the road, keeping the light from passing through and on rainy days lessening the difficulties drivers faced. In silence we came back out into the bad weather, in silence we saw the yellow railings of the bridge over the Magdalena, in silence we crossed it. The surface of the river bristled under the downpour, it wasn’t smooth like the hippopotamus’s hide but rough like that of a gigantic sleeping alligator, and on one of the little islands a white boat was getting wet with its motor pulled up. Maya was sad: her sadness filled the Nissan like the smell of our wet clothes, and I could have said something to her, but I didn’t. I kept silent: she wanted to be in silence. And so, in the middle of that obliging silence, accompanied only by the thundering of the rain on the jeep’s metal roof, we went through the toll booth and headed south through the cattle ranches. Two long hours in which the sky gradually darkened, not due to the dense rain clouds but because night fell halfway there. By the time the Nissan lit up the white façade of the house, it was completely dark. The last thing we saw were the eyes of the German shepherd gleaming in the beam of the headlights.
‘Nobody’s home,’ I said.
‘Of course not,’ said Maya. ‘It’s Sunday.’
‘Thanks for the outing.’
But Maya didn’t say anything. She walked in and took off her wet clothes as she went, skirting around the furniture without turning on any lights, voluntarily blind. I followed her, or followed her shadow, and realized that she wanted me to follow her. The world was blue and black, made not of figures but of outlines; one of them was Maya’s silhouette. In my memory it was her hand that reached for mine, not the other way around, and then Maya said these words: I’m tired of sleeping alone. I think she also said something simple and very understandable: Tonight I don’t want to be so alone. I don’t remember having walked to Maya’s bed, but I see myself perfectly sitting on the edge of it, beside a bedside table with three drawers. Maya turned down the sheets and her spectral silhouette stood out against the wall, in front of the mirror on the wardrobe, and it seemed like she was looking in the mirror and as she did so her reflection was looking at me. While I was attending to this parallel reality, that fleeting scene that elapsed in my absence, I got into her bed, and I didn’t resist when Maya got in beside me and her hands undid my clothes, her hands tainted by the sun acted as naturally and deftly as my own hands. She kissed me and I felt her breath at once fresh and fatigued, an end-of-the-day breath, and I thought (a ridiculous thought and also indemonstrable) that this woman hadn’t kissed anyone for a long time. And then she stopped kissing me. Maya touched me futilely, took me futilely in her mouth, her futile tongue ran over my body without a sound, and then her resigned mouth returned to my mouth and only then did I realize she was naked. In the semi-darkness her nipples were a violet tone, a dark violet like the red scuba divers see at the bottom of the sea. Have you been underwater in the sea, Maya? I asked her or think I asked her. Way down deep in the sea, deep enough for colours to change? She lay down beside me, face up, and at that moment I was overcome by the absurd idea that Maya was cold. Are you cold? I asked. But she didn’t answer. Do you want me to go? She didn’t answer this question either, but it was a pointless question, because Maya didn’t want to be alone and she’d already settled that. I didn’t want to be alone at that moment either: Maya’s company had become indispensable to me, just as the disappearance of her sadness had become urgent. I thought how the two of us were alone in this room and in this house, but alone with a shared solitude, each of us alone with our own pain deep in our flesh but mitigating it at the same time by the strange arts of nakedness. And then Maya did something that only one person in the world had ever done before: her hand rested on my belly and found my scar and caressed it as if she were painting with one finger, as if she’d dipped her finger in tempera and were trying to make a strange and symmetrical design on my skin. I kissed her, in order to close my eyes more than to kiss her, and then my hand moved over her breasts and Maya took it in hers, took my hand in hers and put it between her legs and my hand touched her smooth straight hair, and then her soft inner thighs, and then her sex. My fingers under her fingers penetrated her and her body tensed and her legs opened like wings. I’m tired of sleeping alone, she’d told me, this woman who was now looking at me with wide-open eyes in the darkness of her room, wrinkling her brow like someone who’s on the verge of understanding something.
Maya Fritts did not sleep alone that night, I wouldn’t have let her. I don’t know when her well-being began to matter so much to me, I don’t know when I began to regret that there could be no possible life together for us, that our common past did not necessarily imply a common future. We’d had the same life and nevertheless had very different lives, or at least I did, a life with people who were waiting for me on the other side of the Cordillera, four hours from Las Acacias, 2,600 metres above sea level . . . In the darkness of the bedroom I thought of that, although thinking in the darkness is not advisable: things seem bigger or more serious in the darkness, illnesses more destructive, the presence of evil closer, indifference more intense, solitude more profound. That’s why we like to have someone to sleep with, and that’s why I wouldn’t have left her alone that night for anything in the world. I could have got dressed and left in silence, carrying my shoes and leaving the doors ajar, like a thief. But I didn’t: I saw her fall into a deep sleep, undoubtedly because she was so tired both from all the driving and from all the emotions. Remembering tires a person out, this is something they don’t teach us, exercising one’s memory is an exhausting activity, it drains our energy and wears down our muscles. So I watched Maya sleep on her side, facing me, and I watched her hand slide under her pillow once she was asleep and hug it or cling to it, and it happened again: I saw her as she’d been as a girl. I didn’t have the slightest doubt that this gesture contained or embodied the little girl she’d once been, and I loved her in some imprecise and absurd way. And then I fell asleep too.
When I woke up, it was still dark. I didn’t know how much time had passed. I hadn’t been woken by the light, or the sounds of the tropical dawn, rather by the distant murmur of voices. I followed the sounds to the living room and was not surprised to find her as I did, sitting on the sofa with her head in her hands and a recording playing from her tiny stereo. I didn’t have to hear more than a few seconds, only a couple of those phrases spoken by strangers in English had to reach me to recognize the recording, for deep down I’d never stopped hearing that dialogue that spoke of weather conditions and then of work and of how many hours pilots could fly before they were obliged to rest, deep down I recognized it as if I’d heard it yesterday. ‘Well, let’s see,’ said the first officer just as he’d done some time ago, in Consu’s house. ‘We’ve got 136 miles to the VOR, and 32,000 feet to lose, and slow down to boot so we might as well get started.’ And the captain said, ‘Bogotá, American nine six five request descent.’ And Operations said, ‘Go ahead, American nine six five, this is Cali ops.’ And the captain said, ‘All right, Cali. We will be there in just about twenty-five minutes from now.’ And I thought, just as I’d thought before: No you won’t. You won’t be there in twenty-five minutes. You’ll be dead, and that will change my life.
Maya didn’t look at me when I sat down beside her, but she lifted her face as if she’d been waiting for me, and on her cheeks I saw the trail of her tears and I stupidly wanted to protect her from what was going to happen at the end of the tape. They’d be parking at gate two and landing on runway zero one, the plane’s headlights were on because there was a lot of visual traffic in the area, and I sat beside Maya on the sofa and put my arm around her back and hugged her and held her close to me, and the two of us sank into the sofa like a couple of old insomniacs, that’s what we were, an old married couple who can’t sleep and meet like ghosts in the early hours to share their insomnia. ‘I’m going to talk to the people,’ said the voice, and then, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain. We have begun our descent.’ And then I felt her sob. ‘There goes my mom,’ she said. I thought she wouldn’t say anything else. ‘She’s going to be killed,’ she said then, ‘she’s going to leave me all alone. And I can’t do anything, Antonio. Why did she have to be on that flight? Why didn’t she get a direct flight? How much bad luck can one person have?’ and I held her, what else could I do but hold her tight, I couldn’t change what had happened or stop the flow of time on the tape, time that advanced towards what had already happened, towards the definitive. ‘I’d like to wish everyone a very, very happy holiday and a healthy and prosperous 1996,’ the captain said from the tape. ‘Thank you for flying with us.’
And with those false words – the year 1996 would not exist for Elaine Fritts – Maya went back to remembering, back to the exhausting work of memory. Was it for my benefit, Maya Fritts, or maybe you’d discovered you could use me, that nobody else would allow you this return to the past, that nobody but me would invite those memories, listen to them with the discipline and dedication I listened to them? And so she told me of the December afternoon she came back into the house, after a long day of work in the apiary, ready to take a shower. She’d had an outbreak of acariasis in the beehives and had spent the week trying to minimize the damage and preparing concoctions of anemone and coltsfoot; she still had the intense odour of the mixture on her hands and was desperate for a wash. ‘Then the phone rang,’ she said. ‘I almost didn’t answer it. But I thought: what if it’s important? I heard Mom’s voice and actually thought, well, at least it’s not that. It’s nothing important. Mom always called at Christmas, that’s one thing we hadn’t lost in spite of the years. We talked five times a year: on her birthday, on mine, at Christmas, on New Year’s Day and on Dad’s birthday. The birthday of the deceased, you understand, that the living mark because he’s not here to celebrate it. That time we were talking for quite a while, telling each other unimportant things, and at some point my mother said look, we have to talk.’ And that’s how Maya found out, during a long-distance telephone call, down the line from Jacksonville, Florida, the truth about her father. ‘He hadn’t died when I was five. He was alive. He’d been in prison, and now he was out. He was alive, Antonio. And not only that, but he was in Bogotá. And not only that but he’d tracked down my mother, who knows how. And he wanted us all to get together.’ ‘Pretty night, huh?’ says the captain from the black box. And the first officer, ‘Yeah, it is. Looking nice out here.’ ‘For us to get together, Antonio, get that,’ said Maya. ‘As if he’d gone out for a couple of hours to pick up some groceries.’ And the captain, ‘Feliz Navidad, señorita.’
I don’t know if there are any studies of people’s reactions to revelations such as that one, how a person behaves in the face of such a brutal change in circumstances, in the face of the disappearance of the world as they’d known it. One might think that in many cases a gradual readjustment would follow, the search for a new place in the elaborate system of our lives, a re-evaluation of our relationships and of what we call the past. Perhaps that might be the most difficult and least acceptable aspect, the change to the past, which we used to believe was fixed. In Maya Fritts’s case the first thing was incredulity, but that didn’t last long: in a matter of seconds she had yielded to the evidence. This was followed by a sort of contained fury, partially caused by the vulnerability of this life in which a mere phone call can topple everything in such a brief space of time: all you have to do is pick up the receiver and a new fact comes through it into the house, something we’ve neither sought nor requested and that sweeps us along like an avalanche. And the contained fury was followed by open fury, the shouts down the telephone, and the insults. And the open fury was followed by hatred and hateful words: ‘I don’t want to see anybody,’ Maya said to her mother. ‘Whether he believes it or not, I’m warning you. If he shows up here, I’ll shoot him.’ Maya spoke with a broken voice, very different from what it must have been then, what I was now seeing on the sofa, the soft even serene sobbing. ‘Uh, where are we?’ asked the first officer on the black box, and in his voice there is some alarm, the anticipation of what’s to come. ‘This is where it starts,’ Maya said to me. And she was right, it was starting there. ‘Where we headed?’ said the first officer. ‘I don’t know,’ said the captain. ‘What’s this? What happened here?’ And there, with the first disoriented lurches of the Boeing 757, with its movements of a lost bird at 13,000 feet in the Andean night, Elaine Fritts’s death was beginning. There were those voices again that have now realized something, those voices that feign serenity and control when they’ve lost all control and serenity is a façade. ‘Left turn. So you want a left turn back around?’ ‘Naw . . . Hell no, let’s press on to . . .’ ‘Press on to where, though?’ ‘Tuluá.’ ‘That’s a right.’ ‘Where we going? Come to the right. Let’s go to Cali. We got fucked up here, didn’t we?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘How did we get fucked up here? Come to the right, right now. Come to the right, right now.’
‘They fucked up here,’ Maya said or rather whispered. ‘And Mom was on board.’
‘But she didn’t know what was going on,’ I said. ‘She didn’t know the pilots were lost. At least she wouldn’t have been scared.’
Maya considered the idea. ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘At least she wasn’t scared.’
‘What would she have been thinking of?’ I said. ‘Have you ever wondered, Maya? What would Elaine have been thinking of at that moment?’
Sounds of anguish began to be heard. An electronic voice delivered desperate warnings to the pilots: ‘Terrain, terrain.’ ‘I’ve asked myself a thousand times,’ said Maya. ‘I had told her quite clearly that I didn’t want to see him, that my dad had died when I was five and that was that, nothing was going to change that. Not to try to change things for me at this stage. But then I was a wreck for several days. I got sick. I had a fever, a high fever, and feverish and all I still went out to work in the hives out of fear of being home when my dad arrived. What would she have been thinking? Maybe that it was worth a try. That my dad had loved me very much, had loved us both, and that it was worth trying. She called back another time and tried to justify what my dad had done, said that in those days everything was different, the world of drug trafficking, all that. That they were a bunch of innocents, that’s what she told me. Not that they were innocent, no, that they were innocents, I’m not sure if you realize what a distance there is between the two concepts. Anyway, it’s the same. As if innocence might exist in this country of ours . . . Anyway, that was when my mother decided to get on a plane and fix things up in person. She told me she was going to get on the first flight she could. That if her own daughter was going to shoot her, well she’d just take it. That’s what she said to me, her own daughter. That she was just going to endure it, but she wasn’t going to be left wondering what might have happened, full of doubts. Oh, now we’re at this part. It’s so painful, incredible, after all this time.’ ‘Shit,’ said the pilot on the recording. ‘Up, baby,’ said the pilot. ‘Up.’
‘The plane is crashing,’ said Maya.
‘Up,’ said the captain in the black box.
‘It’s OK,’ said the first officer.
‘They’re going to be killed,’ said Maya, ‘and there’s nothing to be done.’
‘Up,’ said the captain. ‘Easy does it, easy.’
‘And I didn’t get to say goodbye,’ said Maya.
‘More, more,’ said the captain.
‘OK,’ said the first officer.
‘How was I supposed to know?’ said Maya. ‘How could I have known, Antonio?’
And the captain, ‘Up, up, up.’
The cool early morning filled up with Maya’s weeping, soft and fine, and also with the singing of the first birds, and also with the sound that was the mother of all sounds, the sound of lives disappearing as they pitch over the edge into the abyss, the sound made by Flight 965 and all it contained as they fall into the Andes and that in some absurd way was also the sound of Laverde’s life, tied irremediably to that of Elena Fritts. And my life? Did my own life not begin to throw itself to the ground at this very instant, was that sound not the sound of my own downfall, which began there without my knowledge? ‘So you fell out of the sky, too?’ the Little Prince asks the pilot who tells the story, and I thought yes, I’d fallen out of the sky too, but there was no possible testimony of my fall, there was no black box that anybody could consult, nor was there any black box of Ricardo Laverde’s fall, human lives don’t have these technological luxuries to fall back on. ‘Maya, how is it that we’re hearing this?’ I said. She looked at me in silence (her eyes red and flooded, her mouth looking devastated). I thought she hadn’t understood me. ‘I don’t mean . . . What I want to know is how this recording came . . .’ Maya took a deep breath. ‘He always liked maps,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Maps,’ said Maya. ‘He always liked them.’
Ricardo Laverde had always liked maps. In school he always did well (always in the top three of his class), but he did nothing as well as he drew maps, those exercises in which the student had to draw, with a soft leaded pencil or a nib or a drawing pen, on tracing paper and sometimes on wax paper, the geographies of Colombia. He liked the sudden straight line of the Amazon trapezoid, he liked the tempered Pacific coast like a bow without an arrow, he could draw from memory the peninsula of La Guajira and blindfolded he could stick a pin in a sketch, as others might pin the tail on the donkey, without a second thought, to show the exact location of the Nudo de Almaguer. In all of Ricardo’s scholastic history, the only calls from the discipline prefect came when they had to draw maps, for Ricardo would finish his in half the allotted time and for the rest of the class he’d draw his friends’ maps in exchange for a 50-centavo coin, if it was a map of the political administrative division of Colombia, or a peso, if it was hydrography or a distribution of thermic levels.
‘Why are you telling me this?’ I said. ‘What’s it got to do with?’
When he came back to Colombia, after nineteen years in prison, and had to find work, the most logical thing was to look where there were planes. He knocked on various doors: flying clubs, aviation academies and found them all closed. Then, following a sort of epiphany, went to the Agustín Codazzi Geographical Institute. They gave him a couple of tests, and two weeks later he was flying a twin-engine Commander 690A whose crew was composed of a pilot and co-pilot, two geographers, two specialized technicians and sophisticated aero-photography equipment. And that’s what he was doing for the last months of his life: taking off in the early morning from El Dorado Airport, flying over Colombian airspace while the camera in the back took 23 by 23 negatives that would eventually, after a long laboratory and classification process, end up in the atlases from which thousands of children would learn the tributaries of the River Cauca and where the Occidental Cordillera begins. ‘Children like our children,’ said Maya, ‘if either of us ever has any kids.’
‘They’ll study Ricardo’s photos.’
‘It’s nice to think,’ said Maya. And then, ‘My father had made good friends with his photographer.’
His name was Iragorri. Francisco Iragorri, but everyone called him Pacho. ‘A skinny guy, about our age, more or less, one of those with the features of the baby Jesus, pink cheeks, upturned nose, not a single hair to shave.’ Maya tracked him down and called him and invited him to come to Las Acacias at the beginning of 1998, and he was the one who told her what happened on Ricardo Laverde’s last night. ‘They always flew together, after the flight they’d have a beer and say goodbye. And a couple of weeks later they’d meet up at the Institute, at the Institute laboratory, and work together on the photos. Or rather Iragorri would work and let my father watch and learn. To do photo finishing. To analyse a photo in three dimensions. How to use a stereoscopic viewfinder. My father enjoyed all that with childlike enthusiasm, Iragorri told me.’ The day before he was killed Ricardo Laverde had showed up at the lab looking for Iragorri. It was late. Iragorri thought the visit wasn’t to do with work, and a couple of sentences, a couple of glances later, understood that the pilot was going to ask him for a loan: nothing easier than anticipating financial favours. But he wouldn’t have guessed the reason in a thousand years: Laverde was going to buy a recording, a black box recording. He explained to Iragorri what flight it was from. He explained who had died on that flight.
‘The money was for some bureaucrat who was going to get him a copy of the cassette,’ said Maya. ‘It seems something like that is not so difficult if you have the right contacts.’
The problem was the amount of the loan: Laverde needed a lot of money, more, obviously, than anyone would have on hand, but also more than a person could withdraw from a cash machine. So the two friends, the pilot and the photographer, made a decision: they stayed there, wasting time in the facilities of the Agustín Codazzi Geographical Institute, in the darkroom and the restoration offices, amusing themselves with old contact sheets or fixing the topography on a job they were behind on or rectifying wrong coordinates, and at about eleven thirty they went to the nearest cash machine to withdraw the maximum amount allowed and did so twice: once before and once after midnight. So they tricked the machine’s computer, that poor apparatus that only understands digits; that’s how Ricardo Laverde acquired the amount of money he needed. ‘Iragorri told me all that. It was the last piece of information I could find,’ Maya told me, ‘until I learned that my father was not alone when he was shot.’
‘Until you learned that I existed.’
‘Yes. Until I found that out.’
‘Well Ricardo never spoke to me about that job,’ I said. ‘Never mentioned maps or aerial photos or a twin-engine Commander.’
‘Never?’
‘Never. And not because I didn’t ask.’
‘I see,’ said Maya.
But it was obvious: she was seeing something that escaped me. In the living-room window the trees were beginning to appear, the silhouettes of their branches were beginning to detach themselves from the dark background of that long night, and also inside, around us, things recovered the lives they had during the day. ‘What do you see?’ I asked Maya. She seemed tired. We were both tired, I thought; I thought that under my eyes there would also be grey circles like the ones under Maya’s eyes. ‘Iragorri sat there the day he came,’ she said. She pointed at the empty armchair across from us, the nearest to the stereo system from which no sound was now coming. ‘He just stayed for lunch. He didn’t ask me to tell him anything in return. Or to show him my family’s papers. Much less sleep with me.’ I looked down, guessed that she was doing the same. And Maya added, ‘The truth is that you, my dear friend, are a user.’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’ Maya smiled: in the dawn’s blue light I saw her smile. ‘The thing is I remember perfectly, he was sitting there and we’d just been brought some lulo juice, because Iragorri was teetotal, and he’d added a spoonful of sugar and he was stirring it like this, slowly, when we got to the thing about the cash machine. Then he told me that of course, of course he’d lent my dad that money, but he didn’t really have money to spare. So he said look, Ricardo, don’t take this the wrong way, but I have to ask you how you’re going to pay me back. When you’re going to pay me back, and how? And that’s when my dad, according to Iragorri, told him, Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ve just done a job that I’ll be getting good money for. I’m going to pay you all this back with interest.’
Maya stood up, took a couple of steps towards the rustic table her little stereo sat on and pressed rewind. The silence filled with that mechanical murmur, as monotonous as running water. ‘That sentence is like a hole, everything goes down it,’ said Maya. ‘I’ve just done a job, my dad said to Iragorri, that I’ll be getting good money for. Not very many words, but they’re fuckers.’
‘Because we don’t know.’
‘Exactly,’ said Maya. ‘Because we don’t know. Iragorri didn’t ask me at first, he was discreet or shy, but eventually he couldn’t help it. What kind of job would it have been, Señorita Fritts? I can see him there, looking away. See that piece of furniture, Antonio?’ Maya pointed to a wicker structure with four shelves. ‘See the pre-Columbian pieces up top?’ There was a little man sitting cross-legged with an enormous phallus; at his side, two pots with heads and prominent bellies. ‘Iragorri stared at them up there, far from my eyes, he couldn’t look at me as he said what he said, he didn’t dare. And what he said was: Your dad wouldn’t have been mixed up in something fishy? Fishy like what? I asked. And he, looking up there the whole time, looking at the pre-Columbian figurines, blushed like a child and said, well, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter, what does it matter now. And you know what, Antonio? That’s what I think too: what does it matter any more?’ The murmur of the tape player stopped then. ‘Shall we listen to it again?’ said Maya. Her finger pressed a button, the dead pilots began to chat again in the distant night, in the middle of the night sky, at an altitude of 32,000 feet, and Maya Fritts came back to my side and put a hand on my leg and rested her head on my shoulder and I could smell her hair in which I could still detect the previous day’s rain. It wasn’t a clean smell, but I liked it, I felt comfortable with it. ‘I have to go,’ I said then.
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
I stood up, looked out the big window. Outside, behind the hills, the white stain of the sun was coming up.
There is just one direct route between La Dorada and Bogotá, just one way to make this journey without unnecessary detours or delays. It’s the one used by all the transport, produce, merchandise and passengers too, for those companies rely on covering the distance in the shortest possible space of time, and that’s also why a mishap on the only route can be very damaging. You turn south and take the straight road that runs by the river that takes you to Honda, the port where travellers used to arrive when no planes flew over the Andes. From London, from New York, from Havana, Colón or Barranquilla, they would arrive by sea at the mouth of the Magdalena, and change ship there or sometimes carry on in the same one. There followed long days of sailing upriver on tired steamships, which in the dry season, when the water level fell so low that the riverbed emerged, would get stranded on the banks between crocodiles and fishing boats. From Honda each traveller would get to Bogotá however they could, by mule or by train or in a private car, depending on the era and the resources, and that last leg could also take a while, from several hours to several days, for it’s not easy to go, in barely 100 kilometres, from sea level to an altitude of 2,600 metres where that grey-skyed city rests. So far in my life no one has been able to explain convincingly, beyond banal historical causes, why a country should choose as its capital its most remote and hidden city. It’s not our fault that we bogotanos are stuffy and cold and distant, because that’s what our city is like, and you can’t blame us for greeting strangers warily, for we’re not used to them. I, of course, can’t blame Maya Fritts for having left Bogotá when she got the chance, and more than once I’ve wondered how many people of my generation had done the same, escaped, not to a tropical lowland town like Maya had, but to Lima or Buenos Aires, to New York or Mexico, to Miami or Madrid. Colombia produces fugitives, that’s true, but one day I’d like to find out how many of them were born as Maya and I were at the beginning of the 1970s, how many like Maya or like me had a calm or protected or at least unperturbed childhood, how many traversed their teenage years and fearfully became adults while the city around them sank into fear and the sound of gunshots and bombs without anyone having declared any war, or at least not a conventional war, if such a thing exists. That’s what I’d like to know, how many left my city feeling in one way or another that they were saving themselves, and how many felt that by saving themselves they were betraying something, turning into proverbial rats fleeing the proverbial ship by the act of fleeing the city in flames. I shall tell you that one day I saw burning between the night / a crazy city haughty and populous, says a poem by Aurelio Arturo. I, unblinking, watched it collapse, / fall, like a rose petal under a hoof. Arturo published that in 1929: he had no way of knowing what would later happen to the city of his dream, the way Bogotá would adapt itself to his lines, entering into them and fulfilling their requisites, as iron adapts to its mould, yes, as molten iron always fills the mould it’s poured into.
It burned like a thigh between forests of fire,
and cupolas were falling and walls fell
over the beloved voices as over wide mirrors
. . . ten thousand shrieks of pure brilliance.
The beloved voices. I was thinking of them that strange Monday, when after the weekend at Maya Fritts’s house, I found myself coming into Bogotá from the west, passing under the planes taking off from El Dorado Airport, passing over the river, and then driving up 26th Street. It was just after ten in the morning and the trip had gone without mishaps or collapses or traffic jams or accidents that would have held me up on a road so narrow in places that vehicles had to take it in turns to pass. I was thinking through everything I’d heard over the weekend and about the woman who had told it to me, and also about what I’d seen at the Hacienda Nápoles, whose cupolas and walls were falling down too, and also, of course, I was thinking about Arturo’s poem and about my family, my family and Arturo’s poem, my city and the poem and my family, the beloved voices of the poem, Aura’s voice and Leticia’s voice, which had filled my recent years, which in more than one sense had rescued me.
And the flames were like my own hair,
red panthers loose in the young city,
and the walls of my dream were collapsing to the ground,
just as a city collapses in screams.
I drove into the parking garage of my building as if returning after a lengthy absence. Through the window a doorman I’d never seen before waved me in; I had to perform more manoeuvres than usual to get into my space. When I got out I felt cold, and I thought that the car’s interior had conserved the warm air of the Magdalena Valley and that this contrast had undoubtedly led to the violent shutting of my pores. It smelled of cement (cement has a cold smell) and of fresh paint: they were doing some work I hadn’t remembered they were starting over the weekend. But the workers had left, and there, in the parking garage of my building, in another car’s space, was a gasoline barrel cut in half, and in it the remains of the fresh cement. As a child I had liked the feeling of wet cement on my hands, so I looked around – to make sure no one would see me and think I was crazy – and I approached the barrel and stuck two fingers carefully into the now almost hardened mixture. And I went up in the lift like that, looking at my dirty fingers and smelling them and enjoying that cold smell, and so I went up the ten floors to my apartment, and was about to ring the bell with the dirty fingers. I didn’t, and not only so I wouldn’t get the bell or the wall dirty, but because something (a quality of the silence on this high floor, the darkness of the panes of smoked glass in the door) told me that there was no one home to open the door for me.
Now, there is something that has happened to me all my life when I return from sea level to the altitude of Bogotá. It’s not just me, of course, but happens to many and even the majority, but since I was little it always seemed that my symptoms were more intense than other people’s. I’m talking about a certain difficulty in breathing for the first two days after my return, a slight tachycardia unleashed by efforts as minimal as climbing the stairs or getting down a suitcase, and that lasts while my lungs get used to this rarefied air again. That’s what happened to me as I opened with my own keys the door to my apartment. My eyes mechanically registered the clean dining table (no envelopes to open, no letters or bills), the telephone table where the red light of the answering machine was blinking and the little screen indicated that there were four new messages, the swinging door into the kitchen (it had been left stuck half open, I should oil the hinges). All this I saw while feeling the lack of oxygen that my heart was demanding. What I didn’t see, however, were any toys at all. Not in the carpeted corners or abandoned on the chairs or lost in the hall. There were none, not the plastic fruit in its basket, not the chipped little teacups, not the chalk for the board or any coloured paper. Everything was perfectly orderly, and that was when I took two steps towards the telephone and played the messages. The first was the dean’s office, asking why I hadn’t taught my 7 a.m. class, and asking me to report as soon as possible. The second was Aura.
‘I’m calling so you won’t worry,’ said that voice, the beloved voice. ‘We’re fine, Antonio. Leticia and I are fine. It’s Sunday now, eight o’clock at night, and you haven’t come back. And I don’t know where we can go from here. You and me, I mean, I don’t know where you and I can go, what’s left after what’s happened to us. I’ve tried, I’ve tried hard, you know I have. And I’m tired of trying, even I get tired. I can’t do it any more. Forgive me, Antonio, but I can’t do it any longer, and it’s not fair on our little girl.’ She said this: It’s not fair on our little girl. And then she said other things, but the time the answering machine gave her had run out and her message was cut off. The next message was also from her: ‘I got cut off,’ she said with a broken voice, as if she’d been crying in between the two messages. ‘Well, I don’t have anything else to say anyway. I hope you’re fine too, that you got home OK, and that you forgive me. I just can’t do it any more. I’m sorry.’ Then came the last message: it was the university again, but not the dean’s office this time, but the secretary. They were asking if I’d supervise a thesis, an absurd project on revenge as a legal prototype in the Iliad.
I had listened to the messages standing by the phone with my eyes open but without looking at anything, and now I played them again so I could hear Aura’s beloved voice while I walked around the apartment. I walked slowly, because I couldn’t get enough air: no matter how deeply I breathed, I couldn’t get the feeling of breathing comfortably, and my closed lungs made themselves felt effortlessly, my rebellious bronchial tubes, my self-sabotaging alveoli refusing to receive the oxygen. In the kitchen there was not even one single dirty plate, not a glass or a piece of cutlery out of place. Aura’s voice was saying she was tired, and I walked down the hall towards Leticia’s room, and Aura’s voice was saying it wasn’t fair on our little girl and I sat down on Leticia’s bed and thought that what would be fair would be that Leticia were here with me, so I could take care of her as I’d taken care of her until now.
I want to take care of you, I thought, I want to take care of both of you, together we’ll be protected, together nothing will happen to us.
I opened the wardrobe: Aura had taken all of Leticia’s clothes, a child of Leticia’s age goes through several outfits a day, you have to be washing clothes all the time. My head hurt all of a sudden. I attributed it to the lack of oxygen. I thought I’d lie down for a few minutes before going to find a painkiller, because Aura was always complaining about my tendency to take medication at the first symptoms, and not give the body the chance to defend itself on its own. ‘Forgive me,’ said Aura’s voice out there in the living room, from the other side of the wall. Aura was not in the living room, of course, and I had no way of knowing where she was. But she was fine, and Leticia was fine, and that’s what mattered. Maybe, with a little luck, she’d phone back. I lay down on this bed that was too small for me, on which my long grown-up body did not fit, and my eyes focused on the mobile that hung from the ceiling, the first image that Leticia saw when she woke up in the morning, the last thing she probably saw when she went to bed at night. From the ceiling hung an aquamarine egg, four arms stuck out from the egg and from each arm hung a figure: an owl with big spiral eyes, a ladybird, a dragonfly with muslin wings, a smiling bee with long antennae. There, concentrating on the forms and colours that were moving in an imperceptible way, I thought of what I’d say if Aura called back. Would I ask her where she was, if I could go and pick her up or if I had the right to hope she’d come back? Would I keep quiet so she could realize she’d made a mistake abandoning our life? Or would I try to convince her, tell her that together we could defend ourselves better from the evil of the world, or that the world was too risky a place to be wandering on our own, without anyone waiting for us at home, who worries about us when we don’t show up and who can go out to look for us?