Chicó, Bogotá, 1968
My adoptive parents, Pat and Joan, particularly my father, were careful to keep from me the truth of what had happened when I was a baby, the death of my birth mother and what Pat had discovered about my biological father. As far as I was concerned, I had always been called Phillip. I did have a vague memory of being taken to get that teddy bear after I had been adopted. I kept the toy in childhood, but I was blissfully unaware of the murky circumstances around my birth and the first few months of my life.
By 1968 I was walking and talking and becoming a little livewire. To help me burn off some of that energy, my mother Joan often took me shopping with her. There weren’t many areas in Bogotá where a European woman could go walking with her child without fear of attracting some unwanted attention, but Chicó was one of them. It might only have been a twenty-minute car journey to the north but it was more rarefied air, even coming from the Tequendama. With its upmarket boutique shops, manicured gardens and wide, clean pavements, it was the perfect place in which to be seen and a regular haunt for Mother and me.
In Chicó, Mother was happy to walk with me by her side but she still took no chances. We never went anywhere without Martinez in his dark uniform, an armed escort. On one of these outings to the shopping mall, the pavement was busy with women buying provisions or simply whiling away the hours before their husbands returned from work. I felt quite the little lad about town in my shorts and braces. We walked along, me holding her hand, taking in the bustle, the colourful clothes, the roar of the traffic and the smell from the street vendors. I loved getting outside and these walks were my first glimpses into the big, wide world beyond my bedroom, a world I’d only really seen from the eighth floor.
Being so young, everything was new and exciting, but even I could tell when the mood suddenly changed. We were outside the shopping centre when Mother’s grip tightened slightly. I saw a young man crouch down and brandish a camera directly in front of us. I heard the click of the shutter and he grabbed my arm, trying to wrench me away. Mother pulled me towards him and, for a split second, there was a brief tussle. She held firm. I could hear shouts behind me. The man let go of my arm and fled, Martinez in close pursuit. People around us were still yelling. I looked up at Mother to see her standing, white-faced, hand to her mouth. She moved me over to a fountain outside a clothes shop. I could see Martinez had his revolver out and he was calling out to a group of people. I couldn’t see the young man with the camera.
Some passers-by were coming towards us. Others were standing, staring. There were screams from women at the entrance to the shopping centre. I didn’t know where to look next and my attention fell on a long rail of clothes being wheeled out of the shop just ahead of us. I was aware of movement behind it and I looked up to see the man with the camera running back towards us out of the shop. I tried to shout, ‘Mother!’, but the words wouldn’t come. There was a clatter as he banged into the rail and stumbled behind the clothes. I heard Martinez shouting behind him before a loud crack made me jump and momentarily silenced all other noise around me as my hearing was swamped by a whistling sound.
Mother pulled me away from the shop but I couldn’t help look around. From what I could see of him the man was lying on the ground. People were running towards him, their mouths open wide, but it seemed to me as if no words were coming out. All I could hear was this screeching sound. They were covering the young man with newspapers. Martinez was there, busying himself around the motionless figure. I saw him pick up the man’s camera. And I saw a pool of blood seeping out under the newspapers covering the man’s head.
‘Come on, Phillip.’ Mother pulled me with great force and as I heard my name I realised my hearing was returning. Her words were accompanied by the screams and cries and other exclamations from people nearby.
Suddenly, our other armed protection officers surrounded us and we were quickly shown into our waiting car, Martinez joining us. Once safely inside, Mother checked me over, up and down my arms and legs, holding my face and looking into my eyes. Then she hugged me tightly. We made the short journey back to the hotel in near silence. The ringing in my ears stopped but the images would take longer to erase.
Back at the apartment Dad was home earlier than usual. I ran to greet him and he came down to my level. ‘You’re OK, little chap?’
I nodded and buried my head in his warm embrace.
‘That’s my boy.’ He ruffled my hair and went to make a fuss over my mother, something he didn’t always do. ‘None of you were hurt, that’s the main thing,’ he said, before getting up to fix their favourite drinks.
‘You think it was . . . ’ I heard Mother say.
‘Probably,’ Dad replied. ‘Nothing stays secret for long in this country.’
‘It couldn’t just have been a coincidence? Someone targeting a western woman with a child?’
Dad shook his head as he handed Mother her scotch and soda. He retrieved something from his jacket pocket. ‘Here, look at this.’
I sat up and climbed over to where Mother was sitting. Dad had handed her a photograph. She took one look and gasped. A hand shot to her mouth, just as it had done on the street that morning. I looked over. It was a photo of Mother and me taken outside. In the picture I was wearing my shirt, shorts and braces, the clothes I had put on today. I remembered that the man had taken a photograph before he tried to grab me.
‘It was no coincidence,’ Dad said. ‘He had a specific target. I don’t know whether it was a full-blown attempt or whether he was just briefed with taking a photo and got carried away. It doesn’t matter.’
‘What will it mean?’ Mother said.
‘No more trips to the shopping centre.’
Dad knew then what else it meant. Now, more than ever, it was vital to move from the hotel. Here, it was too easy to monitor our movements. He stepped up his efforts after that day and soon found a three-bedroom house, built over three levels and located in a middle-class district. The rented accommodation was next door to the home of an army colonel. Dad knew the colonel would have permanent police stationed outside and it would be as safe a place as any. It would only be temporary but that was good. He liked that feeling, for now, at least.
In the short term, I was sad that I could no longer go out for walks with my mother. I was too young to understand the reasons and wondered if it was something I had done. Why was I the one who had to miss out doing something I enjoyed? Being stuck in the apartment meant we had to come up with other ways to amuse ourselves. Joan wasn’t what you could call a ‘mummy’ sort of mother. She left a lot of the day-to-day business of rearing a child to the maids who effectively became nannies. It suited her to take me along when she was doing things she enjoyed, like going to the shopping centre. She was less at ease getting down to my level and playing with me. When we sat in the apartment she liked reading to me – but again it would not be traditional children’s stories but magazines she wanted to read. Once she was relaying an article from the Reader’s Digest about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and, in particular, how his team kept him alive while they battled to save him. I looked over at the magazine and saw a picture of the president, as many would remember him, smiling and waving, with his wife Jackie by his side.
‘Who’s that?’ I said, pointing to the image of the president.
‘Oh, that’s Uncle Carlos’s friend,’ Mother said.
‘Which Uncle Carlos?’ I had so many. There was the lawyer, the banker and we had other Carloses who dropped by and were all affectionately dubbed ‘uncle’.
‘Echeverri.’ She showed me the picture of the limousine and explained what happened at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, on that sunny day in November five years earlier. ‘He and President Kennedy knew each other well.’
Of all my Uncle Carloses, I liked Echeverri the best. He was jolly and fun to be around and he nearly always brought a new toy for me when he came to visit. It was funny to think he knew the president of the United States of America.
Echeverri, it seemed, knew everyone.