Shooting Down Heaven

by Jorge Franco

  The thirty-first saw the arrival of Libardo’s two sisters, who lived in Tampa, with their husbands and children, and Benito, a distant cousin of Libardo’s, whom he always claimed to love like a brother. Benito also brought his whole family. Nobody from Fernanda’s side came. She only had one brother left, Juan David; he was thirteen years younger than her and studying music in New York—financed by Libardo, of course.

  On the final night of 1993, thirty members of the family celebrated together in a restaurant with a band, party hats, whistles, and confetti, everybody trying to make Libardo believe that nothing serious was happening and life was going on as usual. Everybody except Fernanda, who could never fake anything. Even I joined in the jubilation, since my grandmother had asked that, for Libardo’s sake and everybody else’s, we all surround him with happiness. But at the stroke of midnight, when the Happy-New-Year hugs began, Libardo started crying again. And one by one, the rest of the family ended up crying too. Everybody except Fernanda and me. While they all sniffled into one another’s shoulders, she called me over to sit next to her.

  “Want a little champagne?” she asked.

  “I don’t like it,” I said.

  I didn’t like alcohol yet. I didn’t smoke either. Once, before all of this started, Libardo had offered me a drink at a party, and when I turned it down, he said, don’t tell me you’re going to turn out queer. As if queers don’t drink.

  “Toast with me, Larry,” Fernanda insisted. “Just a sip.”

  Without waiting for my response, she poured champagne into two glasses, passed one to me, and raised hers.

  “Here’s to you and me, and to not drowning when the boat goes under.” She said it without dramatics, smiling, her eyes glittering from the many glasses she’d already drunk.

  That toast gave me a different awareness of her beauty, but I couldn’t translate it into words just then. I knew she was beautiful: everybody said so—my friends, my classmates, her friends who confirmed it every time they saw her, Libardo’s buddies who stared at her avidly, the people on the street who recognized the former Miss Medellín 1973 and told her she was as gorgeous as ever, if not more so.

  But right before trying the champagne, I looked at her and saw something new in her beauty, something almost supernatural, a sort of magnetism sparkling in the depths of her eyes.

  In time, when I met other women and fell in love, I realized that what I’d seen in Fernanda that night was her own demons.

  10

  It isn’t raining, but hundreds of people are marching along with black umbrellas and blocking traffic. There are more groups in different places around the city. In silence, they walk slowly toward a meeting point in downtown Medellín, protesting La Alborada. They hate the noise and love the animals that could die of fright from the exploding fireworks. Their open umbrellas symbolize a call for rain. Only a party-pooping downpour can save them.

  “Turn off the music,” I ask La Murciélaga.

  “For fuck’s sake,” says Pedro.

  “Just for a minute, please.”

  The only sound is the demonstrators’ footsteps on the pavement. Not a cheer, not a murmur. The silence is more powerful than any protest chant, though the fireworks shatter it with increasing frequency.

  “You good?” La Murciélaga asks me. Without waiting for a response, she turns the music all the way back up. She doesn’t even hear when I thank her. Pedro sticks his head out the window and yells at the marchers: “In my dictatorship, the only rain you’ll see will be bullets, asswipes.”

  La Murciélaga shimmies in her seat, and I remark to Julieth, “I’ll bet she dances when she’s on the toilet too.”

  Pedro manages to find a shortcut out of the jam of cars, and we drive toward Las Palmas. The plan is to head up into the hills, taking our time, and get to the top around midnight, when the fireworks reach their crescendo. Beforehand, I called Pedro aside and said, you know what I’m going to say. Yeah, he said, but relax, when she calls I’ll drive you back down or find somebody else to do it, it’ll be packed up there.

  If Fernanda doesn’t call me in the next hour, come hell or high water I’m going to go find her, and then I’ll get some sleep. I dream of sleeping twelve hours straight.

  “Pit stop,” says Pedro, and we stop at a bar-restaurant-dance club that’s hopping. He calls the guys in the other car so they’ll stop too.

  “Don’t you have a friend named Charlie?” I ask La Murciélaga when we settle at a table.

  “Male or female?”

  “Female.”

  “Charlie? I have two guy friends with that name, but no women.”

  “She studies in London.”

  “What about her?”

  “Her dad died yesterday.”

  “Oh, Larry, I really don’t get you. What are you talking about? The only dead person I’ve been hearing about is your dad.”

  “Who told you? Pedro?”

  La Murciélaga shakes her head.

  “Did you read it in the paper?” I ask.

  “I don’t read the papers,” she says.

  It had appeared on the front page and been reported on TV. They showed the grave where he’d been found but, supposedly out of respect, not the corpse. The bones. La Murciélaga hadn’t seen it on the news. She didn’t watch the news either. It was Ro who told me, she said when I insisted, nodding her head in his direction.

  “What else did he say?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” she says.

  Tonight I’m the newcomer, and Ro, by contrast, is the longtime friend. She’s not going to drop him in it for my sake, but it’s obvious Ro’s bothered by me; he keeps eyeing me from the other end of the table.

  “So who’s Charlie?” La Murciélaga asks.

  “Someone I met on the plane.”

  “And you like her,” she says.

  I smile and take a drink.

  “Men are such dumbasses.”

  “About what?”

  “Everything,” she says, and drinks some aguardiente. “You’re so impractical,” she adds. “Let’s dance, Larry.”

  “I don’t know how to dance to this stuff.”

  A robotic voice is endlessly repeating grind it, grind it, grind it, mami, and the dancers are trying to look sexy but they actually make me want to laugh. Or cry.

  “You just dance,” says La Murciélaga.

  “Like a coffee grinder,” I say, and she isn’t amused. “That’s what the song says, right?”

  “You’re such a drag,” she says, gets up, and wiggles her way onto the dancefloor.

  As the night crawls on, La Murciélaga becomes increasingly vampire-like. Weirder and more alluring. But all of that mystery evaporates in an instant whenever she hops up and down and squeals about the fireworks. Then afterward she goes strange again.

  In the distance Medellín is visible, half splendid and half destitute. I still find this landscape deeply moving: because of everything that’s changed, everything that’s been lost, and because this hole amid the mountains, this cauldron where so many have died, which exiled so many and marked us all, is still standing, tougher than ever, as if it had never been the city from which I had to flee or where my father was killed.

  Pedro sits down next to me to pour himself a drink. Seeing an opportunity, I ask, “Have you been to my house?”

  “Which one? In London?”

  “No, Fernanda’s place, where she lives now. I’ve never seen it.”

  “Not even in photos?”

  “No. All I’ve seen is her headboard,” I say.

  When we Skype, she’s always in bed. She’s refused to show me anything else. Maybe she’s ashamed to show me how tiny it is.

  “Well, you’ll be going there later,” Pedro says.

  “I can take a taxi.”

  “Don’t be melodramatic,” he say
s. “Let’s wait for her to call.”

  “I don’t get why she didn’t pick me up at the airport, or why she won’t let me just go there now. I don’t get it at all, Pedro.”

  He studies me for a moment and says, “What’s up with you, Larry? You’ve changed.”

  “Everybody’s changed,” I tell him. Even him, I think, though he looks the same as ever.

  “There’s always something left,” he says, “but with you it’s like there’s nothing.”

  “You’ve only been with me two hours.”

  He checks his watch and corrects me. “Three.”

  “Fine, three, but I’m tired. I haven’t slept since I boarded the plane.”

  I get up, and Pedro looks confused. “Hey, man, it’s no big deal,” he says.

  “I’m just going to pee,” I tell him.

  Fireworks are booming near and far. I look for the lights in the sky, but only the noise floats in the air. As I urinate, I think about my house. A huge house, way too big for four people, a mansion for two kids. We’re probably going to talk about the house again now, about the years we lived there without the blessing—or tragedy—of having it all. We’ll talk about Libardo again as if it were yesterday, now when there are some days I don’t think of him at all. Libardo has returned from a time that doesn’t exist and become real time, a date, a number, a death certificate, and he will make a place for himself where he will stay. And I’ll go back to being “Libardo’s son” or “Larry, Libardo’s kid” and nothing more.

  11

  Larry was drinking to process his trip home too. Charlie got up to fetch two more glasses of gin, and when she stood she noticed she was already feeling the effects of the drinks. She’d become more limber again, as if the alcohol had lightened her pain.

  The rumpled blanket and the cushion dented with her weight remained in the seat. She left her shoes on the floor, next to her purse, and Larry spotted the little packet of Kleenex he’d given her in one corner.

  She reappeared with two brimming glasses and said, “The first memory I thought of when I heard the news was this one time when I got lost at Disney World. I was five years old, and I was lost for half an hour, terrified with all those people milling around me. But I kept looking for my parents, positive they’d appear at some point. I feel the same way now, except one of them I’m never going to see again.”

  She started crying again and tried to console herself with a couple of sips from her glass. Larry shifted in his seat.

  “The ‘never’ part is what kills me,” Charlie sobbed.

  “Do you have any other siblings?” he asked.

  “A sister. Two years younger than me,” she said quietly, with the volume of sadness, of nighttime, her eyes glassy. Then she added, “This is where everything ends. I can’t see anything beyond this moment.”

  “Parents leave us so much, but they take something too,” Larry said.

  Charlie shook her head, took a long swig, and said, “I feel like he took everything.”

  Two fat tears welled up in her eyes, and she swiftly wiped them away with her hand and let out a wail that disarmed Larry.

  “Your father’s death,” he said, “obeys the laws of life. My father’s obeys a natural law in Colombia—the law of the jungle.”

  “Was he murdered?” Charlie asked, worried she might be prying.

  “He was kidnapped,” Larry said.

  Charlie raised her eyebrows, opened her swollen eyes wider, and sighed.

  “He disappeared one day, and I never saw him again,” Larry said, then fell silent. She didn’t ask anything else.

  The airplane shuddered with a couple of powerful jolts. Instinctively, she grabbed Larry’s hand, and he was caught off guard more by the squeeze of her fingers than by the turbulence. Though the flight smoothed out again after a few seconds, Charlie downed the rest of her drink.

  “Death gets a kick out of scaring us,” Larry said.

  12

  Despite the sense of unease provoked by Escobar’s death, that December, free of his shadow, felt different. Getting out of Colombia on that vacation made us believe things were going to get better. Libardo allowed Fernanda to convince him we should go back so Julio and I could finish high school at our old school. They’ve only got one year left, she said, and then they’ll go do college somewhere else.

  We returned at the end of January. There was a strange feeling in the air that nobody could identify. A mix of uncertainty, fear, and calm. People talked about how there might be some attempt to seek vengeance, retaliation, but there was also talk of opportunities and rebuilding, starting over. I deluded myself that people would stop looking at us like they had before, that Libardo’s sins had died along with Escobar’s, even though lots of people were still scared, waiting for him to lash out one last time from beyond the grave.

  Rumor had it that his hand was out there somewhere, that when they’d opened his casket at the cemetery so the crowd could get a look before he was buried, somebody who loved him had removed his hand and swore to use it to seek vengeance.

  “But how did they manage that?” I asked. “It’s not like the casket would have been left open that long.”

  “Somebody cut it off,” said Julio.

  “Nobody cut anything off,” said Libardo.

  “How do you know?” I asked. “You weren’t at the funeral.”

  Libardo gave me a reproachful look. He hated to be reminded he’d let fear keep him away. As a precaution, he claimed, though I didn’t see the distinction.

  “It’s a symbol,” said Libardo. “The hand business is a legend to show that Pablo’s still got the power—his hand is still active, he lives among us.”

  “Who has it?” Julio asked.

  “Nobody,” Libardo replied. “I told you it’s like a symbol. He’s still here, people loved him a lot, they respected him.”

  “So everything’s going to stay the same?” I asked.

  “Yes . . . no,” Libardo said. “I mean, Pablo’s legacy means we can live in peace, and like I said, with him gone, the government won’t be fucking with us anymore.”

  “What’s a legacy?” Julio asked.

  But Libardo failed to tell us—maybe didn’t want to mention—that Escobar’s enemies weren’t going to be satisfied with his death. And Escobar’s enemies were also Libardo’s enemies, my family’s enemies—which means they were my enemies, even though I had no idea who they were.

  We started to suspect it, though, as Libardo shed the optimistic tone he’d had at the start of the new year and became irritable and paranoid. He wouldn’t let us leave the house without his men, and even Fernanda had to have bodyguards when she went to the casinos.

  “I might as well not go,” she said. “Those guys bring bad luck.”

  Julio and I started our final year of high school, which would also be our final year in Medellín. Libardo already planned to send us to France so we could improve our French, and then we’d go on to college, also abroad. He was sure he’d be able to handle the pressure without our noticing. But the noose swiftly tightened on him. Pablo’s inner circle shrank as members were killed or kidnapped, or fled, or turned themselves in. There were a lot of rumors about who had actually killed Escobar, and the more theories that emerged, the more enemies we had: the gringos, the government, Los Pepes, the Cali cartel, the Norte del Valle cartel, the victims, and on and on. But the only ones who publicly claimed responsibility for all those deaths were Los Pepes, and they were the ones Libardo feared most. The group, whose full name was Persecuted by Pablo Escobar, went from victims to victimizers. They celebrated their acts of vengeance by leaving triumphant messages with each corpse.

  “I know who those bastards are,” Libardo told somebody over the telephone. “I know their names and their faces. I know where they live and how they work, but there’s nobody left to wage war again
st them, man—everybody’s turned chicken.”

  It was a matter of surrendering or holding firm. The country was in the grip of a moralistic fervor, and overnight we became the target of the same people who used to cheer us on. Even at school, where we were supposedly beyond the reach of society’s prejudices. And then, to top it all off, Fernanda threw gas on the flames.

  “Your dad has a mistress,” she told us.

  That day, she’d been clutching a glass of white wine ever since we got home from school. She walked through the backyard and paced around the pool, staring into its depths as if she were searching for something under the water. She saw us watching her from the living room and didn’t even lift her hand to wave, didn’t even smile. She took a long swig and then lay back on a deck chair to stare up at the sky. She stayed like that till it grew dark and then came into the study, where Julio and I were doing our homework. She’d refilled her wineglass, and that was when, leaning against the doorjamb, she told us about Libardo’s mistress.

  “How did you find out?” Julio asked.

  “You already knew?” she asked him.

  “I don’t know shit.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that.”

  “I just want to know how you found out, who told you, to see if it’s true.”

  “Of course it’s true,” Fernanda said. “I’ve seen her. I know who she is.”

  “Who is she?” I asked.

  “A tramp,” she said, and her voice splintered.

  I looked down, and I think Julio did too. Fernanda dropped into an armchair, let her body sag, and wailed, “She’s a twenty-two-year-old little twerp, and he’s already given her an apartment and a car.”

  Her sentences tangled together, her eyeliner was smeared, and she was sniffling.

  “He’s twenty-five years older than her—she could be his daughter,” she continued. “I can’t believe he’s not embarrassed to go out with her.”