“I want to work in one of the hotels.”
“I know. But you have to speak like de clase alta for that. You need to know English too—for the tourists.”
She frowned. “Do you speak English?”
“Yes.”
“How did you learn so much?”
“I only learned English these last few years, after I returned to school.”
“I don’t have that much time, though.”
“No, you don’t.” He paused and looked her in the eyes. “Get the knowledge that’s available to you now. First speak Spanish as well as you can so you can get work in the city—perhaps in a shop or a café. Colombians are very proud of their Spanish. If you can speak it well, you can get a good job. A job means money. Money means an apartment. An apartment means a new life.”
She liked that he was honest with her. He knew what would become of her if she didn’t find a way off the streets—soon. She hated to think about it; she wanted to stay a child.
It had been a few months since she had bled for the first time. The women of the barrio had prepared her for what to expect. But it was traumatic in what it meant. Childhood was ending fast. She could not naïvely hope these changes would never come; they were already happening to her. She had witnessed the fate of girls not much older than herself, making her wiser than she wanted to be. She envied the privileged children who she imagined could remain blind to the darkness in the world.
“¡Vamos, Alta!” shouted the boys from outside. “Let’s go home.”
She hopped up from her seat.
“Chao, Manny. Gracias por la Coke.”
Manny watched the children as they disappeared down the block, the ball bouncing between their feet. He enjoyed their visits so much.
His life had become steady and predictable in the eight years since he had walked away from the revolution, leaving it in a fiery explosion in Bogotá. He had poured all his energy into building his new life—first finishing his degree, then working at the jobs it helped him to get. After he managed to save a little money, he went back to school at night to get a graduate degree, which had recently led to a better job.
Now, he was one of the most skilled computer engineers in the city, maybe the country. Already, he was receiving more job offers, some as far away as Mexico and the United States. Going abroad was intriguing, but Colombia had always been home. These were his people. He had sacrificed so much for his country. It would be difficult to leave.
It had not been all study and work. There had been friends with whom he would share some fun or a few beers. There had been women, too—who shared his bed but to whom he wouldn’t reveal the secrets of his heart. But what others might have called living, Manny knew as distraction. He had known life in a way that these friends and lovers could never understand. He had once fought for something and lost everything.
Recently, the distraction of friends and even sex had ceased to entice him. His only real friends now were the children. He focused on his work, wondering what it would lead to, but he never questioned his path. That was for God to decide, not for him to ask. The work allowed him to keep the ghosts of the past at bay—the ghosts and the guilt.
Manny was back on speaking terms with God, despite the old resentments between them. He wasn’t ready to ask for forgiveness, since he still didn’t feel like forgiving God. But he had decided to let their past be water under the bridge. He felt deep inside himself that God wasn’t finished with him yet, so he must have still been listening. Despite everything, he still believed in a God of love and that love would give him another chance if he remained open to it. Some days, he felt as if his life was over—on others, like it was only now about to begin.
He left the window and walked into his hot kitchen, barely cooled by the open windows and whirling fan. He had been in this small house for three years. It worked fine for him. Not everyone would have considered it comfortable, but he had known worse. It was cheap enough, safe enough, and right on the bus line to his work. He had no desire for anything more elaborate without someone to share it with. He poured himself a glass of cold water from the pitcher he kept in the refrigerator and sat down at the table. He smiled at the four empty Coke bottles on the counter.
It had been love that drove him into the revolution long ago—love for the people left on the margins of a country controlled by the rich and the strong. That same love had stirred again as he watched the children walk away today, especially the girl, La Alta. It was destinies like hers that he had tried but been woefully unable to change. He already knew the tragic story of her life. Worse, he could tell she knew it too.
When he saw her, he wondered what his daughter would have looked like. She would have been about the same age now.
His anger over such injustice could have led him straight back to the fight; but he no longer believed fighting would do any good. He had learned that huddled in the dark room at the Palace of Justice with those frightened people he had endangered.
If justice could not be won through blood, what other way was there? He didn’t want to watch while those innocent children were pulled into the underworld as their only means to survive.
If he could use what he had worked for to change one life such as that girl’s, all his sins would surely be forgiven.
A heavy knock on his front door startled him. His first thought: Perhaps the children had returned. But that was not a child’s knock.
19
MANNY OPENED THE door, then jumped back with surprise.
“Well, well, Manny del Sol. ¿Qué cuentas?”
Paulo Varga pushed past him into the house.
Manny wanted to feel happy to see a familiar face after all this time, especially of someone he had presumed dead. But Paulo’s malevolent grin as he sat on the couch and regarded his surroundings reminded Manny that Paulo had never meant well. What malice had brought him here after all these years?
“Paulo, what a joy to see you alive. I never found out how many survived.”
“Only a few of us. It was a bad day.” Paulo stretched his arms across the couch. “You’re a hard man to find, Manny.”
“I haven’t been hiding.”
“Hiding in plain sight. Like that day in Bogotá . . . in your civilian clothes.”
Manny said nothing. He closed his front door but stayed near it.
“You seem to have done well for yourself. No worse for wear. A nice little house, a good job, as if the past never happened.”
“What about you? Do you live in Cartagena now? You’re not from here.”
“I do live here. The beauty of the Caribbean Coast inspires me. I started painting again while I was in prison. It amazed me that they allowed me the canvases and the paints. A more malicious man could have mixed a poison from the oils. But they were generous, and it gave me a way to pass the time. I kept painting after I got out. I’ve become a much better artist.”
Manny said nothing. He always thought Paulo’s paintings were terrible and expected that they still were. His portraits never had any life in them. Even that one of Marissa, who at that time had been so full of life . . . but he didn’t want to think about it.
“I started a business after prison too,” Paulo continued. “There’s money to be made in a city like this.”
“Your kinds of business will land you right back in prison.”
Paulo laughed. “I’ve gotten smarter. Look.” He took a card out of his pocket and reached his long arm toward Manny from the couch.
Manny took it and read: Estrella de Indias: Ascenso de Talento. “Talent acquisition? Is that what they call it now?”
“In Cartagena, the opportunity is endless. There are so many young people who need work and so much money coming through every day on the cruise ships. I first hire the girls as models, and they love having their portraits painted. Once they trust me, they are receptive to doing more. The money becomes very attractive to them. I’m starting small, but I have big plans.”
Manny hande
d the card back. He was disgusted. “Are you still with M-19?”
“Loosely. But everything’s changed. It’s a political party now more than a revolutionary movement. I keep involved as far as it might help me get a civil position one day. But surely you know that. You read the news.”
“Not really. Reading the news depresses me.”
“Why don’t you do something about it? That’s what you would have done before.”
“I stopped believing anything I did would make a difference.”
“And when did you stop believing?” Paulo leaned forward where he sat. His grin had turned into a scowl. “Was it before or after you walked away as your comrades died in a burning building?”
“That’s not what happened that day. My presence couldn’t have changed the outcome.”
“Oh no? Was it that easy for you? Haven’t you wondered what happened after you ‘disappeared’? Do you have any idea what it was like up on the fourth floor once the soldiers started firing on us? It was a massacre.”
“Who started the massacre?” Manny walked across the small room, then back again. He was on edge. “I heard the shots from the basement as you came in. It damn well sounded like your gun. That wasn’t the plan. I’ve heard stories about what happened on the top floor too.”
“Have you? Did you listen to the stories the president spread about the judges we burned in hot oil or the trial records we burned? A fine time for a man like you to start believing government propaganda. What about us, helpless up there as they fired missiles at their own palace? They burned us together with their own Supreme Court to make an example.”
Manny stood still for a moment and looked at Paulo. He was a harder man now. He looked ruthless. At once, Manny believed all the stories he’d heard.
“Well? Did you torture the judges?”
“It was war up there, Manny. There are no more rules once it’s war. You do what you must to win and survive.”
“That was never the way I saw it. We used to stand for something. Everything changed that day.”
“Always such an idealist.”
“Revolution is about ideals.”
“No, it’s about power. Ideals are for the weak.”
“You were never there for the same reasons as the rest of us.”
“You were always the pawns. I’m one of the players.”
“I know that now, so I’ve left it behind.” Manny felt a wave of sadness, remembering everything he’d once believed in and how useless it was to fight for those things.
“You abandoned your precious ideals at the first sign of trouble. You think you know revolution, but you were never in a real battle. It’s easy to speak of ideals when there are no bullets humming by your ears. All those thoughts go away when weighed against survival. What did we care for the hostages when a fireball crashed through the wall and enveloped the room? By then, we were only fighting for our lives. So yes, I killed those judges and I didn’t care. Cruelty became a way to cope with the fear. I suppose hiding is another way to cope. You chose your way. I chose mine.”
“How did you get out?”
“San Juan el Bautista and I shot our way out together. But Juan was slower than me and was blamed for the dead policemen in the path we’d run. He got the harsher sentence when we appeared in court. He’s still in prison.”
Manny imagined that Paulo had somehow tricked Juan to take the fall for him. Poor young Juan had been pretty naïve. Still, it pleased Manny to know the boy had survived.
“I bet it helps to have friends like yours in prison. Especially if it’s true what I heard, that all the Escobar files were burned in the fire that day.”
“As I said, in war you do what you must to survive.”
“Well, I did what I could.”
“Yes, you did.” Paulo stood up and surveyed the room. His eyes rested on the empty Coke bottles. He tapped four fingers in a row on the countertop, counting them. “Not a bad little life. You even have friends.”
Manny stiffened.
“So, this is what it’s like to live in shame.”
“I’m not ashamed.”
“Oh no?” Paulo turned toward him. “You walked away from your brothers. You hid while we fought to the death. You have been free, living well, it appears, while I spent five years in prison. If you had stood your ground and done your time, you could live proud now, but you took the easy way.”
“I watched my wife die. Don’t talk to me about sacrifice.”
“That’s your hardship? Do you know what prison’s like, Manny? Can you even imagine what your young friend San Juan el Bautista has endured there?”
Manny turned toward the window. The late afternoon traffic grew heavy. He didn’t want to be reminded of those times. He had worked so hard to move on, but somehow he always knew that life would reach back at him.
“This is an evil land we live in,” Paulo said.
“It’s made evil by men like you.”
“And you!”
“Perhaps.” Manny sat down at his kitchen table. He was shaken, afraid. Paulo leaned back in his seat and glared at him.
“You have a debt to pay, Manny. Surely, you know that.”
“How can you say that after all I gave to the revolution? After 1980?”
Paulo spat. It landed with a thud on the tile floor. “You’ve hung your pride on 1980 for too long. That can’t excuse you from your cowardice. What you heard about the judge who burned in hot oil was true. I poured it on him myself. In prison, I dreamed of doing that to you. Believe me, I thought of you every day in prison. The others—and there weren’t many who lived—assumed you were dead, but I knew you were out there somewhere living as a free man.”
Manny stood up sharply from his chair. Paulo laughed.
“Doing what we can to survive. That’s what I did in prison too. So, yes, Escobar helped me get out early, and your young friend, San Juan el Bautista, helped me pass the lonely nights.”
“You sick bastard!”
Manny grabbed a kitchen knife and took a step forward. Paulo braced his sturdy frame with amusement in his eyes. Manny knew he would be no match for Paulo, not after these sedentary years.
“I know you want to kill me,” Paulo said, “but think before you do something stupid.”
“What do I care? Everyone I love is dead.”
“Are they?” Paulo took a long look at the four empty Coke bottles.
Manny felt sick to his stomach. Paulo had watched the children come to his house, perhaps more than once. He now remembered what people had said about Paulo in the early days—his work for the drug lords and prostitution rings had solidified his influence on the streets. Talent acquisition—a fancy phrase for pulling young kids into prostitution and drugs. Now, Manny had unwittingly put those children in danger of Paulo’s recruitment. He would surely have noticed the girl. It was clear she would be beautiful. He put the knife down.
“Get out of my house. I don’t want to hear any more from you.”
“But you will. Next time you see me, I will not come alone. And I will have a proposition for you. Think hard about how you can afford to answer.”
After Paulo left, Manny sat back down at the kitchen table. He sat there for a long time, as the traffic died down, the sky darkened, and sounds of night filled the city. He didn’t bother to turn on a lamp.
Images flooded back into his mind: Marissa, so beautiful on the day they wed, so sad on the day she died; his infant daughter, whose very face had grown hard for him to remember; the faces of his comrades who died; poor Juan, who perhaps wished he had; the exploding building in Bogotá as he watched with the crowd. The last image that came into his mind was from that afternoon, of the young girl they called La Alta, with her innocent smile that was slowly hardening with the wisdom of fear. She was the daughter he had not been allowed to love and who he would be unable to protect from the evil of the world.
Finally, he stood up and walked to the bar at the corner of his block. He drank a beer
and ate a choripan, which made him feel better.
Returning to his house, he turned on a lamp and opened the drawer of the small wooden desk next to his bed. He pulled out the letter and read it again. It was an employment offer from Intel, in the United States. The salary offered was an unfathomable amount compared to what he had earned in the jobs he had worked. When he received this letter a week ago, he had been afraid. It was the kind of opportunity he had been working for. But could he leave his homeland? Could he be happy in a new place? He loved Colombia.
But Colombia did not love him. It never had.
Now that Paulo had found him and set his mind on revenge, there would be no peace for him here. He had no choice but to accept this offer.
And the children? Perhaps leaving would be the best he could do for them too. His love had only put them in danger. What could he really do for them if he stayed? They would have to learn to survive on their own with or without him.
20
“HEY, CHICA, COME here a minute.”
The girl turned and looked toward the voice. Night had just fallen. The man who had spoken stood in a lighted doorway—an unusual sight on this block. She had seen him around the neighborhood recently. He was always nice, but not kind like Manny, who she knew was looking out for her. He watched her with a different kind of interest. She didn’t like the look in his eyes now. She felt wary but didn’t want to offend or anger him. She stepped toward him but stayed in the street while he stood in the doorway.
“What’s your name?”
“They call me La Alta.”
He laughed. “You are becoming too much of a woman for that name. What’s your real name?”
“Cristina.”
“I’m Paulo. Won’t you come in? I won’t hurt you.”
“No, gracias.”
His look turned mean. “I asked you to come in. It’s rude to refuse an invitation.”
She was afraid. If she tried to walk away now, he might force her to come in. She was quick, but she doubted she could outrun him. She stepped toward the door.
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