4
It was starting to get light when, exhausted and half drunk and almost hoarse, I let Maya Fritts guide me to the guest room, or what she, at that moment, called the guest room. There was no bed, just two simple and rather fragile-looking camp beds (mine let out a crack when I dropped like a dead man onto the mattress, without pulling back the thin white sheet). A fan whirred furiously above my head, and I think I had a fleeting drunken bout of paranoia when I chose the bed that wasn’t directly under the blades, in case the contraption came loose as I slept and fell on top of me. But I also remember having received certain instructions, through the fog of sleepiness and rum. Not to leave the windows open without the screens, not to leave Coke cans anywhere (the house fills up with ants), not to throw paper down the toilet. ‘That’s really important, people from the city always forget,’ she said, or I think she said. ‘Going to the toilet is one of the most automatic things in the world, nobody thinks when they’re sitting there. And I’d rather not tell you about the problems later with the septic tank.’ The discussion of my bodily functions by a complete stranger didn’t make me uncomfortable. Maya Fritts was the most natural person I’d ever met, so different from most bogotanos whose puritanism meant they were quite capable of going through life pretending never to shit. I think I agreed, don’t know if I said anything. My leg was hurting more than usual, my hip hurt. I put it down to the humidity and exhaustion after so many hours on an unpredictable and dangerous highway.
I woke up disoriented. It was the midday heat that woke me up: I was sweating and the sheet was soaked, like the sheets at the San José Hospital under the sweats of my hallucinations, and when I looked at the ceiling I realized the fan had stopped spinning. The aggressive daylight filtered through the wooden blinds and formed puddles of light on the white floor tiles. Beside the closed door, on a wicker chair, there was something like a change of clothes: two short-sleeved checked shirts, a green towel. The house was silent. In the distance I could hear voices, the voices of people working, and the sounds of their tools as they worked: I didn’t know who they were, what they were doing at that hour, in that heat, and just as I was wondering, the noises stopped, and I thought: they will have gone for a siesta. I opened the blinds and the window and peered out with my nose practically pressed against the mosquito screen, and didn’t see anybody: I saw the luminous rectangle of the pool, saw the solitary slide, I saw a ceiba tree like the ones I’d seen along the highway, specially designed to give shade to the poor creatures who inhabited this world of harsh sunshine. Beneath the ceiba was the German shepherd I’d seen on my way in. Behind the ceiba stretched the plain, and behind the plain somewhere flowed the Magdalena River, the sound of which I could easily imagine or conjecture, because I’d heard it as a child, though at other parts of its course, far from Las Acacias. Maya Fritts was not around, so I took a cold shower (I had to kill a considerable-sized spider who held out for quite a while in a corner) and I put on the bigger of the two shirts. It was a man’s shirt; I allowed myself to pretend it had belonged to Ricardo Laverde, imagined him with the shirt on; in the image I conjured up, for some reason, he looked like me. As soon as I went out into the hall a young woman approached wearing red Bermuda shorts with blue pockets and a sleeveless shirt on the front of which a butterfly and a sunflower were kissing. She had a tray in her hands and on the tray a tall glass of orange juice. In the living room as well the ceiling fans were still.
‘Señorita Maya left the things for you on the terrace,’ she told me. ‘She’ll see you for lunch.’ She smiled at me, and waited for me to take the glass from the tray.
‘Can’t we turn on the fans?’
‘The power’s gone out,’ said the woman. ‘Would you like some coffee, sir?’
‘First a telephone. To call Bogotá, if it’s no trouble.’
‘Well, the telephone’s in there,’ she said. ‘But that’s something for you to sort out with the señorita.’
It was one of those old, all-in-one phones from the late 1970s that I remembered from my childhood: a sort of small, chubby, long-necked bird with the dial on the underside and a red button. To get a dial tone you just picked it up. I dialled my number and marvelled at feeling a childish impatience while waiting for the dial to turn back before being able to start the next number. Aura answered before the second ring. ‘Where are you?’ she said. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?’
Her tone changed, sounding cold and dense and heavy. ‘Where are you?’ she said.
‘In La Dorada. Visiting someone.’
‘The woman who left the message?’
‘What?’
‘The one who left the message on the answering machine?’
I wasn’t surprised by her clairvoyance (she’d shown signs of it since the beginning of our relationship). I explained the situation without going into details: Ricardo Laverde’s daughter, the documents she possessed and images stored in her memory, the possibility for me to understand so many things. I want to know, I thought, but didn’t say. While I was speaking I heard a series of short, perhaps guttural sounds, and then Aura was suddenly crying. ‘You are a son of a bitch,’ she said. She didn’t run all the words together in a more efficient and natural way, but separated them out and pronounced each letter of every word. ‘I haven’t slept a wink, Antonio. I haven’t checked the hospitals because I don’t have anyone to leave Leticia with. I don’t understand you. I don’t understand any of this,’ Aura said between sobs, and the way she was crying seemed almost aggressive, I’d never heard her cry like that: it was the tension, without a doubt, the tension built up throughout the night. ‘Who is that woman?’
‘No one,’ I said. ‘At least not what you’re imagining.’
‘You don’t know what I’m imagining. Who is she?’
‘She’s the daughter of Ricardo Laverde,’ I said. ‘The guy who was . . .’
I heard a huff. ‘I know who he was,’ said Aura. ‘Don’t insult me any more, please.’
‘She wants me to tell her, and I want her to tell me too. That’s all.’
‘And is she pretty? I mean, is she hot?’
‘Aura, don’t do this.’
‘But, I just don’t understand,’ said Aura again. ‘I don’t see why you didn’t call yesterday. Would that have been so difficult? Couldn’t you have picked up that phone yesterday? You spent the night there, right?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Yes what? Yes you could have picked up that phone or yes you spent the night?’
‘Yes I spent the night here. Yes I could have used this phone.’
‘So then?’
‘So nothing,’ I said.
‘What did you do? What did the two of you do?’
‘Talked. All night. I woke up late, that’s why I didn’t call till now.’
‘Oh, that’s why.’
‘Yes.’
‘I see,’ said Aura. And then, ‘You’re a son of a bitch, Antonio.’
‘But there’s information here,’ I said, ‘I can find things out here.’
‘An inconsiderate son of a bitch,’ said Aura. ‘You can’t do this to your family. Awake all night, scared to death, thinking the worst things. What a son of a bitch. The worst things. All of Friday stuck in here, waiting for news, without going anywhere in case you called just at that moment. And lying awake all night, scared to death. Didn’t you think of that? Didn’t it matter to you? What if it had been the other way round? Then it would, right? Imagine if I went away for the whole day and night with Leticia and you didn’t know where we were. You who live in fear, who thinks I’m going to fool around on you all the time. You, who wants me to phone you when I get anywhere so you know I got there. You, who wants me to call you when I’m leaving, so you know what time I left. Why are you doing this, Antonio? What’s going on? What do you want?’
‘I don’t know,’ I told her then, ‘I don’t know what I want.’
In the seconds of silence that followed I managed to hear and recognize Leticia’s movements, that sonorous trace that resembles a little cat’s bell that parents learn to notice without realizing: Leticia walking or running on the carpeted floor, Leticia talking to her toys or getting her toys to talk to each other, Leticia rearranging things in the house (things she wasn’t allowed to touch, forbidden ashtrays, the forbidden broom she liked to bring out of the kitchen to sweep the carpet: all the subtle displacements of air her little body produced). I missed her; realized I’d never spent a night away from her before, so far away from her; and I felt, as I’d felt so many times, anxiety for her vulnerability and the intuition that accidents (lying in wait for her in every room, in every street) were more likely in my absence. ‘Is Leticia all right?’ I asked.
Aura hesitated a heartbeat before answering. ‘Yes, she’s fine. She ate a good breakfast.’
‘Put her on.’
‘What?’
‘Put her on the phone, please. Tell her I want to talk to her.’
Silence. ‘Antonio, it’s been more than three years. Why don’t you want to get over it? Why do you want to keep living in your accident? I don’t know why you’d want that. I don’t see what good it can do. What is going on?’
‘I want to speak to Leticia. Give her the telephone. Call her and hand her the phone.’
Aura huffed with something that sounded like annoyance or desperation, or maybe open irritation, the irritation of someone who feels powerless: they are emotions that are hard to distinguish over the phone, you need to see the person’s face to interpret them correctly. In my tenth-floor apartment, in my city stuck up there at 2,600 metres above sea level, my two girls were moving and talking and I was listening to them and loving them, yes, I loved them both and didn’t want to hurt them. That’s what I was thinking when Leticia spoke. ‘Hello?’ she said. It’s a word children learn that nobody has to teach them. ‘Hello, sweetheart,’ I said.
‘It’s Papá,’ she said.
Then I heard Aura’s distant voice. ‘Yes,’ she told her. ‘But listen, listen to hear what he says.’
‘Hello?’ Leticia said again.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Who am I?’
‘Papá,’ she said, pronouncing the second P forcefully, taking her time over it.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m the big bad wolf.’
‘The big bad wolf?’
‘I’m Peter Pan.’
‘Peter Pan?’
‘Who am I, Leticia?’
She thought for a moment. Then she said, ‘Papá.’
‘Exactly,’ I said. I heard her laugh: a short little laugh, the wing beat of a hummingbird. And then I said, ‘Are you looking after Mamá?’
‘Aha,’ said Leticia.
‘You have to take good care of Mamá. Are you looking after her?’
‘Aha,’ said Leticia. ‘Here she is.’
‘No, wait,’ I tried to say, but it was too late, she’d got rid of the phone and left me in Aura’s hands, my voice in Aura’s hands, and my nostalgia hanging in the warm air: the nostalgia for things that weren’t yet lost. ‘OK, go and play,’ I heard Aura say in her sweetest tone of voice, speaking to her almost in whispers, a lullaby in five syllables. Then she spoke to me and the contrast was violent: there was sadness in her voice, as close as she sounded to me; there was disenchantment and also a veiled reproach. ‘Hello,’ said Aura.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
‘What for?’
‘For putting Leticia on the phone.’
‘She’s scared of the hallway,’ said Aura.
‘Leticia?’
‘She says there are things in the hallway. Yesterday she didn’t want to go from the kitchen to her bedroom by herself. I had to go with her.’
‘It’s just a phase,’ I said. ‘All her fears will pass.’
‘She wanted to sleep with the light on.’
‘It’s a phase.’
‘Yes,’ said Aura.
‘The paediatrician told us.’
‘Yes.’
‘She’s just at the nightmare age.’
‘The thing I don’t want is . . .’ said Aura. ‘I don’t want us to go on like this, Antonio.’ Before I could answer she added, ‘It’s not good for anyone. It’s not good for Leticia, it’s not good for anyone.’
So that was it. ‘I get it now,’ I said. ‘So it’s my fault.’
‘Nobody said anything about anyone’s fault.’
‘It’s my fault Leticia’s afraid of the hallway.’
‘Nobody said that.’
‘Oh please, what nonsense. As if fear was hereditary.’
‘Not hereditary,’ said Aura, ‘contagious.’ And then immediately, ‘I didn’t mean to say that.’ And then, ‘You know what I mean.’
My hands were sweating, especially the one holding the phone, and I had an absurd fear: I thought the receiver could slip out of my sweaty fist and fall to the floor, and the call would be cut off against my will. By accident: accidents do happen. Aura was talking to me about our past, about the plans we’d had before a bullet that didn’t have my name on it hit me by chance, and I was listening to her carefully, I swear I was, but no memory formed in my mind. In the mind’s eye, as is sometimes said. My mind’s eye tried to see Aura before the death of Ricardo Laverde; it tried to see myself; but it was in vain. ‘I have to hang up,’ I heard myself say, ‘I’m on a borrowed phone.’ Aura – this I remember well – was saying that she loved me, that we could get through this together, that we were going to work to achieve it. ‘I have to hang up,’ I said.
‘When are you coming back?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘There’s information here, there are things I want to know.’
There was silence on the line.
‘Antonio,’ Aura said then, ‘are you coming back?’
‘What kind of question is that?’ I said. ‘Of course I’m coming back, I don’t know where you think I am.’
‘I don’t think anything. Tell me when.’
‘I don’t know. As soon as I can.’
‘When, Antonio?’
‘As soon as I can,’ I said. ‘But don’t cry, it’s not a big deal.’
‘I’m not crying.’
‘It’s not what you think. Leticia’s going to get worried.’
‘Leticia, Leticia,’ Aura repeated. ‘Go to hell, Antonio.’
‘Aura, please.’
‘Go to hell,’ she said. ‘We’ll see you when you can make it.’
After hanging up I went out to the terrace. There, resting beneath the hammock like a pet, was the wicker box; there, on the paper, were the lives of Elaine Fritts and Ricardo Laverde, letters they wrote to each other, letters they’d written to other people. The air was perfectly still. I settled into the hammock that Maya Fritts had used the night before and there, with my head on a cushion with a white, embroidered cover, I took out the first folder and set it on my stomach, and from the folder took out the first letter. It was a piece of greenish, almost see-through paper. ‘Dear Grandpa & Grandma,’ it opened. And then the first line, independent and on its own, leaning on the paragraph that followed like a suicidal person on a cornice.
Nobody warned me Bogotá was going to be like this.
I forgot the humid heat, forgot the orange juice, forgot how uncomfortable I was in that position (and, of course, didn’t imagine the agonizing stiff neck it would cause). Lying in Maya’s hammock I forgot myself. Later I tried to remember the last time I had experienced something like that, unceremoniously blocking out the real world, my consciousness absolutely sequestered, and came to the conclusion that nothing similar had happened to me since childhood. But that reasoning, that effort, would come much later, during the hours I spent talking to Maya to fill the voids left by the letters, so she could tell me everything the letters didn’t tell but only hinted at; all that they didn’t reveal, but hid or kept quiet. That would be later, as I said, that conversation could only take place later, when I had already been through the documents and their revelations. There, in the hammock, while I read them, I felt other things, some of them inexplicable and an especially confusing one: the discomfort of knowing that this story in which my name did not appear spoke of me in each and every one of its lines. All this I felt, and in the end all my feelings were reduced to a tremendous solitude, a solitude without a visible cause and therefore without remedy. The solitude of a child.
The story, as far as I could reconstruct it and as it exists in my memory, began in August of 1969, eight years after President John Fitzgerald Kennedy signed the executive order creating the Peace Corps, when after five weeks’ training at Florida State University, Elaine Fritts, future volunteer number 139372, landed in Bogotá ready to carry out various clichés: to have an enriching experience, leave her mark, do her share, no matter how small. The journey didn’t start too well, for the gusts of wind shaking the aircraft, an old Avianca DC-4, forced her to put out her cigarette and to do something she hadn’t done since she was fifteen: cross herself. (But it was a quick blessing, just a careless sketch across her unmade-up face and chest with two strings of wooden beads. No one saw.) Before she left, her grandmother had talked to her about a passenger plane that had crashed the previous year as it arrived in Bogotá from Miami, and there, while hers began its descent towards the greenish grey of the mountains, while it emerged from the low clouds in the midst of gusts of wind and with its windows marked by highways of thick rain, Elaine tried to remember if all the passengers on the plane that crashed had died. She hung on to her knees – the wrinkled, sweaty trace of her hands on her trouser legs – and closed her eyes when the plane, with a shudder of crunching tin, touched down. It still seemed miraculous to her that she’d survived the landing, and she thought she’d write her first letter to her grandparents as soon as she could sit down at a table somewhere warm. I’ve arrived, I’m well, the people are very friendly. There is lots of work to be done. Everything’s going to be great.
Elaine’s mother had died in childbirth, and she had been raised by her grandparents since her father, on a reconnaissance mission near Old Baldy, stepped on an anti-personnel mine and returned from Korea with his right leg amputated at the hip and lost to life. He hadn’t been back for a whole year yet when he went out to buy cigarettes and never came back. They never heard from him again. Elaine was a baby when that happened, so she didn’t really notice the absence, and her grandparents took charge of her education and also of her happiness as meticulously as they had with their own children, but with much more experience. So the adults in Elaine’s life were these two figures from another time, and she herself grew up with notions of responsibility unlike those of most other children. On social occasions she would hear opinions from her grandfather that filled her with pride and sadness at the same time: ‘This is how my daughter should have turned out.’ When Elaine decided to postpone her journalism degree to volunteer for the Peace Corps, her grandfather, who had worn black for nine months after Kennedy’s assassination, was her biggest supporter. ‘With one condition,’ he said. ‘That you don’t stay down there, like so many others. It’s good to lend a hand, but your country needs you more.’ She agreed.
The Embassy staff, Elaine Fritts said in her letter, found her a room in a two-storey house out near the racetrack, half an hour north of Bogotá, in a collection of badly paved streets that turned to mud whenever it rained. The world where she would spend the next twelve weeks was a grey place still under construction: most of the houses didn’t have roofs because the roof was the most expensive part and was left for last, and the daily traffic was made of big orange mixers as noisy as bees in a nightmare, dump trucks that emptied mountains of gravel in any old place, workers with sponge cake in one hand and a soda pop in the other who whistled obscenely at her as soon as she walked out of the house. Elaine Fritts – the palest green eyes that had ever been seen in this place, her long, straight, chestnut-coloured hair sweeping like a curtain down to her waist, her nipples standing out under her flowered blouse in the morning chill – kept her eyes fixed on the puddles, on the reflection of the grey skies, and only raised her head when she got to the open field that separated the neighbourhood from the Autopista Norte, more than anything to make sure the two cows that grazed there were a comfortable distance away. Then she had to climb aboard a small yellow bus with unpredictable timetables and no predetermined stops and start, from the first moment, to elbow her way through the thick soup of passengers. ‘The rest was very simple,’ she wrote. ‘You just have to get off in time.’ In the half-hour of the journey, Elaine had to get from the aluminium turnstile at the front door (which she learned to move by bumping it with her hips, without needing to use her hands) to the back door, and get off the bus without knocking off the two or three passengers who were hanging on with one foot in the air. All this required an apprenticeship, of course, and during the first week it was normal to go a mile or two beyond the place she needed to get off and arrive at the CEUCA several minutes after her eight o’clock class had already started, soaked through by the persistent drizzle, walking down unknown streets.
The Centro de Estudios Universitarios Colombo-Americano, or Colombian-American University Study Centre: a long pretentious name for a few rooms full of people Elaine found familiar, too familiar. Her colleagues, at this stage of training, were white, in their twenties as was she, and like her they were tired of their own country, tired of Vietnam, tired of Cuba, tired of Santo Domingo, tired of mornings catching them off guard, making small talk with their parents or their friends, and going to bed knowing they’d just witnessed a unique and regrettable day, a day that would immediately go down in the universal history of infamy: the day a sawed-off shotgun killed Malcolm X, a car-bomb killed Wharlest Jackson, a bomb in the post office killed Fred Conlon, police gunfire killed Benjamin Brown. And at the same time the coffins kept arriving from every inoffensively or picturesquely named Vietnamese operation, Deckhouse Five, Cedar Falls, Junction City. The My Lai revelations began to start popping up and soon they’d be talking about Thanh Phong, one barbarous act replaced and displaced another, rapes became interchangeable. Yes, that’s how it was: in her country, a person woke up and didn’t know what to expect, what cruel joke history might be about to play, what would be spat in her face that day. When had this happened to the United States of America? That question, which Elaine asked herself in a thousand confusing ways every day, floated in the air of the classrooms, above all the white, twenty-year-old heads, and also occupied their spare time, lunches in the cafeteria, the trips from the CEUCA to the shantytowns where the apprentice volunteers did their field work. The United States of America: who was ruining it, who was responsible for the demolition of the dream? There, in the classroom, Elaine was thinking: that’s what we’ve fled. She thought: we’re all fugitives.
The mornings were devoted to learning Spanish. For four hours, four arduous hours and with a stevedore’s tension in her shoulders, Elaine unravelled the mysteries of the new language in front of a teacher in riding boots and turtleneck sweaters, a thin, haggard woman who often brought her three-year-old son to class because she had no one to leave him with at home. To each slip-up with the subjunctive, to each mistakenly gendered word, Señora Amalia responded with a speech. ‘How are you going to work with the poor people of this country if you can’t understand them?’ she would say to them leaning on her two closed fists on her wooden desk. ‘And if you can’t get them to understand you, how do you expect to win the confidence of the community leaders? In three or four months, some of you will be going out to the coast or up to the coffee-growing region. Do you think the Acción Comunal people are going to wait while you look up words in the dictionary? Do you think the campesinos are going to sit in their villages while you lot try to figure out how to say La leche es mejor que el aguapanela?’ But in the afternoons, during the hours taught in English that appeared in the official programme as American Studies and World Affairs, Elaine and her classmates listened to lectures from Peace Corps veterans who for one reason or another had stayed in Colombia, and from them they learned that the important phrases weren’t the ones to do with sugar-water or milk, but rather some quite different ones, the common ingredient being the word No: No, I’m not from the Alliance for Progress, No, I’m not in the CIA, and, especially, No, I’m very sorry, I don’t have any dollars.
At the end of September, Elaine wrote a long letter to her grandparents to say happy birthday to her grandmother, thank them both for the cuttings from Time, and ask her grandfather if he’d seen the new Paul Newman and Robert Redford movie, which people were already talking about in Bogotá (though the film itself would take a little longer to arrive). Then, suddenly solemn, she asked them what they knew about the crimes in Beverly Hills. ‘Everybody has an opinion here, you can’t sit down to lunch without talking about the subject. The photos are horrific. Sharon Tate was pregnant, I don’t know how anyone could do something like that. This world’s a scary place these days. Grandpa, you’ve seen worse things, haven’t you? Please tell me the world has always been like this.’ And then she changed the subject. ‘I think I already told you about the squatter neighbourhoods,’ she wrote. She explained that every class of the CEUCA is divided up into groups, and each group has its neighbourhood, that the other three members of her group are Californians: all men, very good at putting up walls and talking to the leaders of the local council (Elaine explained), and also very good at getting hold of very high-quality marijuana from La Guajira or Santa Marta at a good price for downtown Bogotá (this she didn’t explain). So anyway, she went up the mountains around Bogotá with them once a week along muddy roads where it’s not unusual to step on a dead rat, between houses made of cardboard and rotten wood, beside septic tanks open to all eyes (and noses). ‘We have a lot to do,’ Elaine wrote. ‘But I don’t want to tell you any more about the work right now, I’ll save that for the next letter. I want to tell you that I had a lucky break.’
This is what happened. One afternoon, after a long session with the neighbourhood council – talking about contaminated water, declaring the absolute necessity of building an aqueduct, agreeing there was no money to do so – Elaine’s group ending up drinking beer in a windowless shop. After a couple of rounds (the brown glass bottles accumulating on the narrow table) Dale Cartwright lowered his voice and asked Elaine if she could keep a secret for a few days. ‘Do you know who Antonia Drubinski is?’ he asked. Elaine, like everyone else, knew who Antonia Drubinski was: not only because she was one of the most senior volunteers, or because she’d already been arrested twice for civil disorder offences in the public highway – where disorder should be read as protests against the Vietnam War, and public highway should be read as in front of the US Embassy – but because Antonia Drubinski’s whereabouts were unknown, and had been for several days.
‘Anything but unknown,’ said Dale Cartwright. ‘They know where she is, the thing is they don’t want it to become news.’
‘Who doesn’t want that?’
‘The Embassy. The CEUCA.’
‘And why not? Where is she?’
Dale Cartwright looked around and dropped his head.
‘She’s gone to the mountains,’ he whispered. ‘She’s gone to join the revolution, it seems. Anyway, that’s not important. The important thing is that her room is free.’
‘Her room?’ said Elaine. ‘That room?’
‘That room, yes. The very one that’s the envy of the whole class. And I thought maybe you’d like to get it. You know, live ten minutes away from the CEUCA, shower with hot water.’
Elaine thought for a minute.
‘I didn’t come here for material comforts,’ she finally said.
‘Hot showers,’ Dale said again. ‘Not having to manoeuvre like a quarterback to get off the bus.’
‘But the thing is the family . . .’ said Elaine.
‘What about the family?’
‘I pay them 750 pesos rent,’ said Elaine. ‘It’s a third of their earnings.’
‘And what’s that got to do with it?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t want to deprive them of that money.’
‘But who do you think you are, Elaine Fritts?’ said Dale with a theatrical sigh. ‘Do you think you’re unique and irreplaceable? That’s incredible. Elaine, dear, fifteen new volunteers are arriving in Bogotá today. There’s another flight from New York on Saturday. All over the country there are hundreds, maybe thousands of gringos like you and me, and lots of them are coming to Bogotá to work. Believe me, your room will be taken before you finish packing.’
Elaine took a sip of her beer. Much later, when everything had happened, she’d remember that beer, the gloomy atmosphere in the shop, the reflection of the last rays of twilight in the panes of the aluminium-topped counter. That’s where it all started, she would think. But at that moment, at Dale Cartwright’s transparent offer, she did a quick calculation in her head. She smiled.
‘And how do you know I make quarterback manoeuvres to get off the bus?’ she finally said.
‘All is known in the Peace Corps, my dear,’ he said. ‘All is known.’
And that’s how three days later Elaine Fritts travelled for the last time from out near the racetrack, but this time weighed down with luggage. She would have liked it if the family had seemed a little sad, she couldn’t deny it, she would have liked a sincere hug, perhaps a going-away present like the one she’d given them, a musical box that began to spew out the notes of the theme song to The Sting when it was opened. There was none of that: they asked her for the key and saw her to the door, more out of mistrust than courtesy. The father left in a hurry, so it was just the mother, a woman whose figure filled the doorframe and who watched her go down the stairs and out to the street without offering any help with her luggage. At that moment the little boy appeared (he was an only child, his shirt was untucked and he was carrying a blue-and-red wooden toy truck), and asked something she didn’t really understand. The last thing Elaine heard before turning round was her hostess’s reply.
‘She’s leaving, son, she’s going to live in a rich folks’ house,’ said the woman. ‘Ungrateful gringa.’
A rich folks’ house. It wasn’t true, because rich folks didn’t take in Peace Corps volunteers, but at that moment Elaine didn’t have the arguments to embark on a debate about the economy of her second family. Her new accommodation, she had to confess, had luxuries that would have seemed unimaginable to Elaine a few weeks earlier: it was a comfortable construction on Caracas Avenue, with a narrow façade, but very long inside, with a little garden at the back and a fruit tree in a corner of the garden, beside a tiled wall. The façade was white, the wooden window frames painted green, and to get in you had to open an iron gate that separated the front garden from the pavement and that let out a squeal whenever someone arrived. The main door led into a dark but pleasant corridor. On the left-hand side were French doors that opened onto the living room, and further along was the dining room, and further along the corridor skirted the narrow interior patio where the geraniums grew in hanging planters; on the right, the bottom of the staircase was the first thing one saw. Elaine understood it all at a glimpse of the wooden steps: the red carpet had once been a fine one, but was now worn from use (on certain steps the grey threads of the base weave were beginning to show through); the copper rods that kept the carpet in place had lost their rings, or rather the rings had broken free of the wooden floor, and sometimes, when you went up quickly, you’d feel a slip and hear the brief jingle of loose metal. The staircase, for Elaine, was like a memorandum or a witness to what this family had been and no longer was. ‘A respectable family who’d come down in the world’, the man at the Embassy had said when Elaine went to complete the paperwork for the move. Come down in the world: Elaine thought a lot about those words, tried to translate them literally, failed in the attempt. Only when she noticed the carpet on the staircase did she understand, but she understood instinctively, without organizing it into coherent phrases, without making a scientific diagnosis in her head. In time it would all make sense, because Elaine had seen similar cases several times in her life: families with fine pasts who one day notice that the past doesn’t bring in money.
The family was called Laverde. The mother was a woman with plucked eyebrows and sad eyes whose abundant red hair – exotic in this country, or perhaps it was dyed – was eternally fixed in a perfect coiffure that smelled of freshly applied hairspray. Doña Gloria was a housewife who never wore an apron: Elaine never saw her wielding a duster, and nevertheless the dressing tables, the bedside tables, the porcelain ashtrays, never had a trace of the yellow dust one breathed out in the street: everything cared for with the obsession of those who depend entirely on appearances. Don Julio, the father, had a scar on his face, not straight and thin as a cut would have left, but extended and asymmetrical (Elaine thought, mistakenly, of some skin ailment). Actually it wasn’t just the cheek: the damage extended down beneath the line of his beard, it was like a stain trickling over his jaw and bathing his neck, and it was very difficult not to stare at it. Don Julio was an actuary by profession, and one of the first conversations in the dining room, under the bluish light of the chandelier, was devoted to telling their guest about insurance policies and probabilities and statistics.
‘How do you know what kind of life insurance a man should buy?’ the father said. ‘The insurers need to know these types of things, of course, it’s not fair that a man in his thirties in good health should pay the same as an old man who’s already had two heart attacks. That’s where I come in, Señorita Fritts: to look into the future. I’m the one who says when this man will die, when this other one will die, what is the probability that this car will crash on these highways. I work with the future, Señorita Fritts, I’m the one who knows what is going to happen. It’s a question of numbers: the future is in the numbers. Numbers tell us everything. Numbers tell me, for example, if the world considers that I’ll die before I’m fifty. And you, Señorita Fritts, do you know when you’re going to die? I can tell you. If you give me some time, a pencil and paper and a margin of error, I can tell you when it’s most likely that you’ll die, and how. Our societies are obsessed with the past. But you gringos aren’t interested in the past at all, you look forward, you’re only interested in the future. You’ve understood it better than us, better than the Europeans: the future is what we have to focus on. Well, that’s what I do, Señorita Fritts: I earn my living by keeping my eye on the future, I support my family by telling people what’s going to happen. Today these people are insurers, of course, but one fine day there will be other people interested in this talent, it’s impossible there won’t be. In the United States they understand better than anyone. That’s why you people are going forwards, Señorita Fritts, and that’s why we’re so far behind. Tell me if you think I’m mistaken.’
Elaine didn’t say anything. From the other side of the table the couple’s younger son was looking at her, a sideways mocking smile, long thick eyelashes that gave his black eyes a vaguely feminine quality. He’d looked at her like this from the start, with an insolence that, for some reason, she felt flattered by. Nobody in Colombia had looked at her like that: months after her arrival, Elaine still hadn’t slept with anyone who wasn’t North American, who didn’t have orgasms in English.
‘Ricardo doesn’t believe in the future,’ said Don Julio.
‘Of course I do,’ said the son. ‘But in my future I won’t be asking to borrow money.’
‘Now then, let’s not start that,’ said Doña Gloria with a smile. ‘What’s our guest going to think, having just arrived, and all.’
Ricardo Laverde: too many Rs for Elaine’s obstinate accent. ‘OK, Elena, say my name,’ Ricardo had ordered her while showing her the bathroom that went with the room she’d be staying in, pastel-coloured bedside table and the dresser with three drawers and the canopied bed that had been his older sister’s until she got married (there was a studio photo of the girl: her hair with a straight centre parting, her gaze lost in the distance, the photographer’s baroque signature). The guest room: legions of gringos like her had passed through there. ‘Say my name three times and I’ll give you an extra blanket,’ this Ricardo Laverde said to her. It was a game, but a hostile one. Uncomfortably, Elaine entered into the game.
‘Ricardo,’ she said with her tongue tangled up. ‘Laverde.’
‘Bad, very bad,’ said Ricardo. ‘But it doesn’t matter, Elena, your mouth looks pretty saying it.’
‘My name’s not Elena,’ said Elaine.
‘I don’t understand, Elena,’ he said. ‘You’re going to have to practise, I’ll help you if you want.’
Ricardo was a couple of years younger than her, but he acted as if he had far more experience of the world. At first they would meet at dusk, when Elaine got back from her classes at the CEUCA, and they’d exchange a few phrases in the sitting room on the second floor, almost under Paco the canary’s cage: How are you, How did you get on, What did you learn today, Say my name three times without getting tongue-tied. ‘Bogotanos are very good at talking without saying anything,’ Elaine wrote to her grandparents. ‘I’m drowning in small talk.’ But one afternoon they met on 7th Avenue, and it struck them as such a remarkable coincidence that they had both just spent the morning shouting slogans outside the US Embassy, calling Nixon a criminal and singing, ‘End it Now, End it Now, End it Now!’
A long time later Elaine would find out that the encounter had not been coincidental in the slightest: Ricardo Laverde had waited for her to come out of the CEUCA and had followed her for hours, spying on her from afar, hiding among the people on the street and behind the signs saying Calley = Murderer and Proud To Be A Draft Dodger and Why Are We There, Anyway? and soaking up all the songs a couple of metres behind the spot Elaine had stationed herself, while rehearsing different versions, various intonations, of the words he eventually said to her: ‘Well now, this is a coincidence, isn’t it? Come on, let me buy you a drink, and you can tell me all your complaints about my parents.’
Away from the Laverde house, far from the carefully arranged porcelain and the gaze of a military officer in oils and the canary’s irritating whistle, her relationship with the son of her hosts was transformed or started from scratch. There, sitting with a hot chocolate in her hands, Elaine told him things and listened to what Ricardo told her. So she found out that Ricardo had graduated from a Jesuit-run high school, that he’d started to study Economics – a sort of bequest or imposition of his father’s – and a few months earlier he’d dropped out to pursue the only thing he was actually interested in: flying planes. ‘My father doesn’t like it, of course,’ Ricardo would tell her much later, when they could confess such things to each other. ‘He’s always been resistant. But my grandfather’s on my side. I can count on my grandfather. And Papá can’t do anything. It’s not easy to contradict a war hero. Even if it was just a little war, an amateur war compared to the one that came before and the one that followed in the world, an inter-war war. But anyway, a war is a war and all wars have their heroes, right? The worth of the actor does not depend on the size of the theatre, my grandfather said. And of course, for me it was lucky. My grandfather supported me when it came to planes. When I started to get interested in learning how to fly, my grandfather was the only one who didn’t call me crazy, immature, deranged. He supported me, supported me openly, even confronting my father, and it’s not easy to say no to a hero of the air war. My father tried, that I remember perfectly, but without success. That happened a few years ago, but I remember it as if it were yesterday. Sitting right here, my grandfather where you are, under the cage, my father where I am. My grandfather passing a hand over Dad’s scar on his face and telling him not to make me catch his fears. A lot of time would have to pass before I understood all the cruelty that gesture contained, a tired old man, although he didn’t seem so, patting the face of a strong young man, although he didn’t seem so. Not just that, of course, but the scar as well, the fact that it was the scar that received the pats . . . You’ll say that it would be quite difficult to pat my father’s face without touching his scar in some way, and yes, that may be, and more so because my grandfather was right-handed. And of course, the pats of a right hand fall on the left cheek of the person receiving them, on my father’s left cheek, his disfigured cheek.’
The conversation about the origin of the disfigured cheek would come much later, when they were already lovers and the curiosity for each other’s bodies had led to a curiosity for each other’s lives. Neither was surprised when they started having sex, which was like a piece of furniture that had been there the whole time without either of them noticing. Every night, after dinner, host and guest would keep talking for a while, then they’d say goodnight and climb the stairs together, and when they got to the second floor Elaine went to the end of the hall and into the bathroom, locked the door and minutes later came back out in a white nightgown and with her hair tied up in a long ponytail. One rainy Friday night – the water was crashing against the skylight and drowning out any other noises – Elaine came out of the bathroom as she always did, but, instead of finding the corridor dark and the glow of the streetlights shining through the skylights of the interior patio, she saw the silhouette of Ricardo Laverde leaning against the banister. Against the light she couldn’t see his face very well, but Elaine read the desire in his pose and in his tone of voice.
‘Are you going to sleep?’ Ricardo asked.
‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘Come in and tell me about planes.’
It was cold, the wood of the bed creaked with every single movement of their bodies, and also it was a little girl’s bed, too narrow and short for these games, so Elaine ended up pulling off the bedspread with one tug and spreading it out on top of the carpet, beside her felt slippers. There, on the woollen bedspread, freezing to death, they had a quick and to-the-point encounter. Elaine thought her breasts seemed smaller in Ricardo Laverde’s hands, but she didn’t tell him that. She put her nightgown back on to go out to the bathroom, and there, sitting on the toilet, thought she’d give Ricardo time to go back to his own room. She also thought she’d enjoyed being with him, that she’d do it again if the occasion arose, and that what had just happened must be forbidden in the statutes of the Peace Corps. She washed in the bidet, looked in the mirror and smiled, turned off the bathroom light before opening the door, and returning to her bedroom in the dark, walking slowly so she wouldn’t trip, she found that Ricardo had not left, but had rather remade the bed and was waiting for her there, lying on his side, resting on his elbow, leaning his head on his hand like the leading man of some terrible Hollywood movie.
‘I want to sleep alone,’ said Elaine.
‘I don’t want to sleep, I want to talk,’ he said.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘And what shall we talk about?’
‘Whatever you want, Elena Fritts. You suggest a topic and I’ll follow.’
They talked about everything except themselves. They were naked and Ricardo let his hand wander over Elaine’s belly, his fingers through her straight hair, and they talked of intentions and projects, convinced, as only new lovers can be, that saying what you wanted was the same as saying who you were. Elaine talked about her mission in the world, about youth as a weapon of progress, of the obligation to confront worldly powers. And she asked Ricardo questions: Did he like being Colombian? Would he like to live in another part of the world? Did he hate the United States? Had he read any of the New Journalists? But it took another seven couplings over the next two weeks before Elaine dared to ask the question that had intrigued her since the first day: ‘What happened to your father’s face?’ ‘How prudent the señorita is,’ said Ricardo. ‘It’s never taken anybody so long to ask me that question.’ They were going up to Monserrate in the cable car when Elaine asked: Ricardo had waited for her to come out of the CEUCA and told her it was time for some tourism, that a person couldn’t come to Colombia just to work, that she should stop behaving like such a Protestant, for the love of God. And now Elaine was holding onto Ricardo (her head glued to his chest, her hands clenched around his elbows) every time a gust of wind shook the cabin on its cable and the tourists all gasped at the same time. And over the course of the afternoon, suspended in the air or sitting in the pews of the church, wandering in circles around the gardens of the sanctuary or seeing Bogotá from an altitude of 3,000 metres, Elaine began to listen to the story of an aerial exhibition in a year as distant as 1938, she heard talk of pilots and acrobatics and of an accident and the half a hundred dead the accident left. And when she woke up the next morning a package was waiting for her next to her recently served breakfast. Elaine tore off the wrapping paper and found a magazine in Spanish with a leather bookmark stuck between the pages. She started to think the bookmark was the gift, but then she opened the magazine and saw the surname of her hosts and a note from Ricardo: So you’ll understand.
Elaine devoted herself to understanding. She asked questions and Ricardo answered them. His father’s burnt face, Ricardo explained over the course of several conversations, that map of skin darker and rougher and more jagged than the desert of Villa de Leyva, had formed part of the landscape that surrounded him his whole life; but not even as a child, when one asks everything and assumes nothing, did Ricardo Laverde take an interest in the causes of what he saw, the difference between his father’s face and everyone else’s. Although it was also possible (Laverde said) that his family hadn’t even given him time to feel that curiosity, for the tale of the accident at Santa Ana had floated among them ever since it happened and never evaporated, being repeated in the most diverse situations and thanks to the widest range of narrators, and Laverde remembered versions heard at Christmas novenas, versions from Friday-afternoon tea parties and others on Sundays at the football stadium, versions on the way to bed in the evening and others on the way to school in the mornings. They talked about the accident, yes, and they did so in every tone of voice and with all sorts of intentions, to demonstrate that planes were dangerous, unpredictable things like rabid dogs (according to his father), or that planes were like Greek gods, always putting people in their place and never tolerating men’s arrogance (according to his grandfather). And many years later he, Ricardo Laverde, would tell of the accident as well, adorning and adulterating it until he realized that it wasn’t necessary. At school, for example, telling the origins of his father’s burnt face was the best way to capture his classmates’ attention. ‘I tried with my grandfather’s war exploits,’ said Laverde. ‘Then I realized no one wants to hear heroic stories, but everyone likes to be told about someone else’s misery.’ And that’s what he would remember, the faces of his classmates when he told them about the accident at Santa Ana and then showed them pictures of his father and his scarred face so they’d see he wasn’t lying.
‘Now I’m sure,’ said Laverde. ‘If nowadays I want to be a pilot, if there’s nothing else that interests me in the world, it’s Santa Ana’s fault. If I end up killing myself in a plane, it’ll be Santa Ana’s fault.’
That story is to blame, said Laverde. It was that story’s fault that he’d accepted his grandfather’s first invitations. It was that story’s fault that he’d started to go to the runways of the Guaymaral Aeroclub to fly with the heroic veteran and to feel alive, more alive than ever. He walked between the Canadian Sabres and managed to get to sit in the cockpits (his surname opened them all), and then managed (again his surname) to get the best flying instructors at the Aeroclub to devote more hours than they’d been paid for to him: the story of Santa Ana was to blame for all that. He would never feel so much like a dauphin as he’d felt during those times, would never again know what it’s like to have a little inherited power. ‘I’ve made good use of it, Elena, I swear,’ he said. ‘I’ve learned well, been a good student.’ His grandfather always said he had the makings of a good pilot. His instructors were veterans too: mostly of the war with Peru, but some who’d flown in Korea and been decorated by the gringos, or at least that’s what was said. And they all agreed that this boy was good, that he had a rare instinct and golden hands and, what was most important, that the planes respected him. And the planes were never wrong.
‘And so that’s how it’s been till now,’ said Laverde. ‘It kills my father, but I’m now the boss of my own life, with one hundred flying hours you become boss of your own life. He spends his days guessing the future, but it’s other people’s future, Elena, my father doesn’t know what’s in mine, and his formulas and statistics can’t tell him either. I’ve wasted a lot of time trying to find out, and only now, in the last few days, have I come to understand the relationship between my life and my dad’s face, between the accident at Santa Ana and this person you see before you, who is going to do great things in life, a grandson of a hero. I’m going to get out of this mediocre life, Elena Fritts. I’m not afraid, I’m going to restore the name Laverde to its rightful place in aviation history. I’m going to be better than Captain Abadía and my family’s going to be proud of me. I’m going to leave this mediocre life and get out of this house where we suffer every time another family invites us for dinner because we’ll have to invite them over in return. I’m going to stop counting centavos as my mother does every morning. I’m not going to have to offer a bed to a gringo so my family will have enough to eat, sorry, no offence, I didn’t mean to offend you. What do you want, Elena Fritts, I’m the grandson of a hero, I’m made for better things. Great things, that’s how it is, I say it and I mean it. No matter whether people like it or not.’
They were on their way down in the cable car, the same way they’d gone up. The sun was setting, and the sky over Bogotá had turned into a gigantic violet blanket. Below them, in the fading light, the pilgrims who’d walked up and were walking down looked like coloured drawing pins on the stone steps. ‘What strange light this city has,’ said Elaine Fritts. ‘You close your eyes for a second and it’s already night by the time you open them.’ A gust of wind shook the cabin, but this time the tourists didn’t cry out. It was cold. The wind sighed as it blew through the cabin. Elaine, her arm around Ricardo Laverde, leaning on the horizontal bar that protected the window, found herself suddenly in the dark. The heads of the other passengers were vague silhouettes against the background of the sky, black on black. Ricardo’s breathing reached her in waves, a smell of tobacco and clean water, and there, floating over the eastern hills, watching the city light itself up for the night, Elaine wished the cabin would never reach the bottom. She thought, perhaps for the first time, that a person like her could live in a country like this. In more than one sense, she thought, this country was still just starting, barely discovering its place in the world, and she wanted to be part of that discovery.
The deputy director of Peace Corps Colombia was a small, thin, distant man with thick-framed glasses like Henry Kissinger’s and a knitted tie. He received Elaine in his shirtsleeves, which would not have been odd if the man hadn’t been wearing a short-sleeved shirt as if he were in the unbearable heat of Barranquilla or Girardot instead of freezing to death up on this plateau. He used so much brilliantine in his black hair that the light from the neon strip lighting could produce the illusion of premature greying at his temples or white roots in his parting as straight as that of any military officer. She couldn’t tell if he was North American or local, or an American son of locals, or a local son of Americans; there were no clues, no posters on the walls or music playing anywhere or books on the shelves that might allow someone to guess at his life, his origins. He spoke perfect English, but his surname – the long surname that looked up at Elaine from the desk, carved in a brass sign that looked solid – was Latin American or at least Spanish, Elaine didn’t know if there was any difference. The interview was routine: all the Peace Corps volunteers had passed or would pass through this dark office, sit in this uncomfortable chair where Elaine now half-rose to smooth her long aquamarine skirt with her hands. Here, before the lean and aloof Mr Valenzuela, all those who’d been trained in the CEUCA sat sooner or later and listened to a short speech on how the training was approaching its end, how the volunteers would soon be travelling to the places where they would fulfil their mission, speeches on generosity and responsibility and the opportunity to make a difference. They listened to the words permanent site placement and then immediately the same question: ‘Do you have any preference?’ And the volunteers pronounced recently acquired names of unknown content: Bolívar, Valledupar, Magdalena, Guajira. Or Quindío (which they’d pronounce Kwindio). Or Cauca (pronounced Coka). Then they’d be transferred to a place near their final destination, a sort of intermediate stop where they’d spend three weeks at the side of a volunteer with more experience. Field training, it was called. All this was decided in a half-hour interview.
‘So, what’s it gonna be?’ said Valenzuela. ‘Cartagena is out, so’s Santa Marta. They’re already full. Everyone wants to go there, to be on the Caribbean.’
‘I don’t want to go to a city,’ said Elaine Fritts.
‘No?’
‘I think I can learn more in the countryside. The spirit of a people is in its campesinos.’
‘The spirit,’ said Valenzuela.
‘And a person can help more,’ said Elaine.
‘Well, that too. Let’s see, tropical or temperate?’
‘Wherever I can be more helpful.’
‘Help is needed all over, miss. This country is still only half-baked. Think about what you know as well, the things you do well.’
‘Things I know?’
‘Of course. You’re not going to go plant potatoes if you’ve never even seen a photo of a hoe.’ Valenzuela opened a brown folder that had been beneath his hand the whole time, turned a page, looked up. ‘George Washington University, journalism major, right?’
Elaine nodded. ‘But I have seen hoes,’ she said. ‘And I learn fast.’
Valenzuela grimaced with impatience.
‘Well, you’ve got three weeks,’ he said. ‘That, or become a burden and make a fool of yourself.’
‘I’m not going to be a burden,’ said Elaine. ‘I . . .’
Valenzuela shuffled some papers, took out a new folder. ‘Look, in three days I’m meeting with the regional leaders. I’ll find out there who needs what, and I’ll find out where you can do your field training. But what I know for sure is that there’s a place near La Dorada, do you know where I mean? The Magdalena Valley, Miss Fritts. It’s far away, but it’s not another world. In this place it’s not quite as hot as in La Dorada, because it’s a little way up the mountain. You go by train from Bogotá, it’s easy to get to and get back from, you’ll have noticed that the buses here are a public menace. Anyway, it’s a good place and not much in demand. It’d help to know how to ride a horse. It’d help to have a strong stomach. There’s a lot of work to be done with the people from Acción Comunal, community development, you know, literacy, nutrition, things like that. It’s just three weeks. If you don’t like it, it won’t be too late to change your mind.’
Elaine thought of Ricardo Laverde. Suddenly, having Ricardo a few hours away by train seemed like a good idea. She thought of the name of the place, La Dorada, and translated it in her head: The Golden One.
‘La Dorada,’ said Elaine Fritts, ‘sounds good.’
‘First the other place, then La Dorada.’
‘Yes, that place too. Thanks.’
‘OK,’ said Valenzuela. He opened a metal drawer and took out a piece of paper. ‘Look, before I forget. This is for you to fill in and return to the secretary.’
It was a questionnaire, or rather a carbon copy of a questionnaire. The heading was just one question, typed in capital letters: What are some of the things which you have found different about your home in Bogotá? Below the question were several subheadings separated by generous spaces, ostensibly to be filled in by the volunteers with as much detail as possible. Elaine answered the questionnaire in a motel in Chapinero, lying on her stomach on an unmade bed that smelled of sex, using a telephone directory to support the page and covering her bum with the sheet to protect it from Ricardo’s hand, its risqué roving, its obscene incursions. Under the subheading Physical Discomforts and Inconveniences, she wrote: ‘The men of the household never lift the seat when they use the toilet.’ Ricardo told her she was a spoilt, fussy girl. Under Restrictions on Guests’ Freedom she wrote: ‘The door is barred at nine, and I always have to wake up my señora.’ Ricardo told her she was too much of a night-owl. Under Communication Problems she wrote: ‘I don’t understand why they speak so formally with their children, calling them usted instead of tú.’ Ricardo told her she still had a lot to learn. Under Behaviour of Family Members she wrote: ‘The son likes to bite my nipples when he comes.’ Ricardo didn’t say anything.
The whole family accompanied her to catch the train at Sabana Station. It was a large solemn building with fluted columns and a carved stone condor on the high point of the façade, wings extended as if it were about to take off in flight and carry away the attic in its talons. Doña Gloria had given Elaine a bouquet of white roses, and now, as she crossed the foyer with her suitcase in one hand and her handbag across her chest, the flowers had turned into a hateful nuisance, a sort of duster that crashed against other travellers leaving a trail of sad petals on the stone floor, and the thorns stabbed Elaine every time she tried to get a better grip on the stems and protect them from the hostility of the environment. The father, for his part, had waited until they arrived at the platform before presenting his gift, and now, in the midst of the hustle and bustle of people and the cries of the shoeshine boys and the importuning of beggars, he explained that it was a book by a journalist that had come out a couple of years ago but was still selling, that the guy was uncouth but the book, from what he’d heard, wasn’t bad. Elaine tore off the wrapping paper, saw a design of nine blue frames with trimmed corners, and inside the frames saw bells, suns, Phrygian caps, floral sketches, moons with women’s faces, skulls and crossbones and dancing demons, and it all seemed a bit absurd and gratuitous, and the title, Cien años de soledad, exaggerated and melodramatic. Don Julio put a long fingernail over the E of the last word, which was backwards. ‘I didn’t notice till I’d already bought it,’ he apologized. ‘If you want we can try to exchange it.’ Elaine said it didn’t matter, that she wasn’t going to get on the train with nothing to read because of a silly typo. And days later, in a letter to her grandparents, she wrote: ‘Send me something to read, please, I get bored at night. The only thing I have here is a book the señor gave me as a going-away present, and I’ve tried to read it, I swear I’ve tried, but the Spanish is very difficult and everybody has the same name. It’s the most tedious thing I’ve read in a long time, and there’s even a typo on the cover. It’s incredible, it’s in its fourteenth printing and they haven’t corrected it. When I think of you reading the latest Graham Greene, it doesn’t seem fair.’
The letter goes on:
Well, let me tell you a bit about where I am and where I’m going to be for the next two weeks. There are three mountain ranges in Colombia: the Eastern Cordillera, the Central and (you guessed it) the Western Cordillera. Bogotá is 8,500 feet up in the first. What my train did was descend the mountain down to the Magdalena River, the largest in the country. The river runs through a beautiful valley, one of the prettiest landscapes I’ve ever seen in my life, a real paradise. The journey here was also impressive. I’ve never before seen so many birds and so many flowers. How I envied Uncle Philip! I envied his knowledge, of course, but also his binoculars. He’d love it here! Tell him I send my best regards.
So, let me tell you about the river. In times gone by passenger steamships would come down from the Mississippi and even from London, that’s how important the river was. And there are still ships here that look straight out of Huckleberry Finn, I’m not exaggerating. My train arrived in a town called La Dorada, which is where I’m going to be stationed permanently. But according to the Peace Corps’ arrangements the volunteers have to do three weeks of field training in a different place from our permanent site, in the company of another volunteer. Theoretically the other volunteer should have more experience, but that’s not always the case. I’ve been lucky. They placed me in a municipality a few miles from the river, in the foothills of the Cordillera. It’s called Caparrapí, a name that seems designed to make me look ridiculous trying to pronounce it. It’s hot and very humid, but liveable. And the volunteer I’ve been assigned to is a terribly nice guy and knows a lot of things, particularly things I’m entirely ignorant of. His name’s Mike Barbieri, he’s a University of Chicago drop-out. One of those guys who makes you feel at ease immediately, two seconds and you feel like you’ve known him your whole life. There are some people who are just naturally charismatic. Life in other countries is easier for them, I’ve noticed. These are the people who eat up the world, who aren’t going to have any problems surviving. If only I could be more like that.
Barbieri had already been in the Peace Corps in Colombia for two years, but before that he’d spent another two in Mexico, working with campesinos between Ixtapa and Puerto Vallarta and before Mexico he’d spent several months in the poor neighbourhoods of Managua. He was tall, wiry, fair but tanned, and it wasn’t unusual to find him shirtless (a wooden crucifix hanging invariably round his neck), wearing Bermuda shorts and leather sandals and nothing else. He’d welcomed Elaine with a beer in one hand and in the other a plate of small arepas of a texture that was new to her. Elaine had never met anyone so talkative and at the same time so sincere, and in a few minutes she found out he was about to turn twenty-seven, his team was the Cubs, he hated aguardiente and that that was a problem here, that he was afraid, no, absolutely terrified of scorpions and he advised Elaine to buy open shoes and check them carefully every morning before putting them on. ‘Are there a lot of scorpions here?’ asked Elaine. ‘There can be, Elaine,’ said Barbieri in the voice of a fortune-teller. ‘There can be.’
The apartment had two bedrooms, a living room and hardly any furniture, and was on the second floor of a house with sky-blue walls. On the first floor there was a shop with two aluminium tables and a counter – caramel candies, corn cakes, Pielroja cigarettes – and behind the shop, where as if by magic the world became a domestic one, lived the couple who ran it. Their surname was Villamil; their age was somewhere above sixty. ‘My señores,’ said Barbieri when he introduced them to Elaine, and, realizing that his señores hadn’t understood the name of the new tenant, he told them in good Spanish: ‘She’s a gringa, like me, but she’s called Elena.’ And that’s how the Villamils referred to her: that’s what they called her to ask if she had enough water, or to get her to come and say hello to the drunks. Elaine put up with it stoically, missed the Laverdes’ house, was ashamed of her spoilt little girl thoughts. In any case, she avoided the Villamils whenever possible. A concrete stairway on the exterior wall of the building allowed her to leave without being seen. Barbieri, affable to the point of impertinence, never used it: there was never a day he didn’t stop in at the shop to tell them about his day, his achievements and failures, to hear the anecdotes the Villamils and even their customers had to tell, and to try to explain to those old campesinos the situation of the blacks in the United States or the theme of a song by The Mamas & the Papas. Elaine, in spite of herself, watched him do this and admired him. She took longer than she should have to discover why: in a way, this extroverted and curious man, who looked at her brazenly and talked as if the world owed him something, reminded her of Ricardo Laverde.
For twenty days, the twenty hot days that her rural apprenticeship lasted, Elaine worked shoulder to shoulder with Mike Barbieri, but also beside the local leader of Acción Comunal, a short, quiet man whose moustache covered his harelip. He had a simple name, for a change: he was called Carlos, just Carlos, and there was something hermetic or menacing in that simplicity, in that lack of a surname, in the phantasmal way he’d appear to collect them in the mornings and disappear again in the afternoons, after dropping them off. Elaine and Barbieri, out of some sort of previous agreement, had lunch at Carlos’s house, an interregnum between two intensive work sessions with the campesinos in the surrounding villages, interviews with local politicians, ever fruitless negotiations with landowners. Elaine discovered that all the work in the countryside was done by talking: to teach the campesinos to raise chickens with tender flesh (keeping them in enclosures instead of letting them run around wild), to convince the politicians to build a school using local resources (since nobody expected anything of the central government) or to try to get the rich to see them as more than simply anticommunist crusaders, they first had to sit round a table and drink, drink until they didn’t understand the words any more. ‘So I spend my days on the backs of decrepit horses or talking to half-drunk people,’ Elaine wrote to her grandparents. ‘But I think I’m learning, although without really noticing. Mike explained that in Colombian Spanish this is called cogerle el tiro of something. Understanding how things work, knowing how to get them done, all that. Getting the hang of things, we might say. That’s what I’m doing. Oh, one little thing: don’t write to me here any more, send the next letter to Bogotá. I’m going back to Bogotá soon and will spend a month there on the final details of my training. Then to La Dorada. There I start the serious stuff.’
Her last weekend there Ricardo Laverde arrived. He came by surprise, arranging it all himself, taking the train to La Dorada on his own and from there getting to Caparrapí by bus and then asking around for directions, describing the gringos whose existence, of course, everybody for miles around knew about. It didn’t strike Elaine as at all strange that Ricardo Laverde and Mike Barbieri should get along so well: Barbieri gave Elaine the afternoon off to show her bogotano boyfriend around (that’s what he called him, her novio bogotano) and said he’d see them in the evening, for dinner. And that night, in a matter of hours – hours spent, truth be told, in the middle of a field, around a campfire and in the presence of a jug of guarapo – Ricardo and Barbieri discovered how much they had in common, because Barbieri’s father was an airmail pilot and Ricardo didn’t like aguardiente, and they hugged and talked about planes and Ricardo opened his eyes wide as he talked about his courses and his instructors, and then Elaine interrupted to praise Ricardo and repeat the praise others had offered of his talent as a pilot, and then Ricardo and Mike talked about Elaine right in front of her, what a nice girl she was and how pretty, yes, pretty too, with those eyes, said Mike, yes, especially the eyes, said Ricardo and told secrets as if instead of having just met they’d roomed together in a frat house, and sang For she’s a jolly good fellow and regretted in tandem that Elaine had to go to another site, this site should be your site, fuck La Dorada, fuck The Golden One, fuck it all the way, and they drank a toast to Elaine and to the Peace Corps, for we’re all jolly good fellows, which nobody can deny. And the next day, in spite of the hangovers, Mike Barbieri accompanied them in person to catch the bus. The three of them arrived in the village plaza on horseback, like colonialists of times gone by (although theirs were squalid old nags, which would never have served colonialists of times gone by), and on Ricardo’s face, as he politely carried her luggage, Elaine saw something she’d never seen before: admiration. Admiration for herself, for the ease with which she moved through the village, for the affection she’d earned from the people in three short weeks, for the natural and yet undeniably authoritative way she made herself understood by the locals. Elaine saw that admiration in his face and felt that she loved him, that she’d unexpectedly started to feel new and more intense things for this man who also seemed to love her, and at the same time felt that she’d arrived at a happy point: when this place could no longer surprise her too much. True, there would always be contingencies, in Colombia people always managed to be unpredictable (in their behaviour, in their manners: one never knew what they were actually thinking). But Elaine felt in charge of the situation. ‘Ask me if I’ve got the hang of things here,’ she said to Ricardo as they climbed aboard the bus. ‘Have you cogido el tiro a la vaina, Elena Fritts?’ he asked. And she answered, ‘Yeah. I’ve got the hang of things here.’
She had no way of knowing just how mistaken she was.