by Jorge Franco
Pedro suggests we split up and check the bedrooms and bathrooms.
“Or wherever you guys think they might have her,” he says.
“I don’t know her,” I say again.
“How are you not going to spot a Swedish chick among all these natives?” says Pedro, irritated.
“Did you see the fireplace?” I ask. “They’re roasting something wrapped in rags.”
“What was Inga doing with these weirdos?” La Murciélaga asks.
Julieth tugs my hand and says, “You come with me.”
Something about all this reminds me of Libardo right after he’d disappeared. Back then, too, somebody suggested splitting up to look for him, and I went up to his room, where I already knew he wasn’t, but it was the only place in the world I thought he might be. Should be. I found him in the photos Fernanda had hung on the wall, and I reviewed his history with us in each one. Happy fragments of his crazy life, some of them now faded with the passage of time, others in black and white like old movies or like they say dreams are. Those walls held only smiles and hugs, the things people like to immortalize in photos. The perfect life of an imperfect family. The handsome, ambitious man with his beauty queen and one son who looks like him and another who looks like her. At any rate, that man wasn’t the Libardo I’d gone looking for in his room, the one others were combing the hospitals and morgue for, searching high and low, scouring heaven and earth.
“Murci told me that Swedish chick’s a huge slut,” Julieth says in my ear.
Or that’s what I hear as I let her lead me to the second floor. Pedro and La Murciélaga stay downstairs.
“But don’t tell her I said that,” Julieth says.
“Let’s go to the kitchen—I’m dying of thirst,” I say.
“In a minute,” she says, and casually opens the door to a bedroom as if it were her own. There’s an unmade bed, soda bottles on the floor, but nobody’s there. “Inga?” Julieth asks, but Inga doesn’t answer.
We go into a hall bathroom, two more bedrooms, and the master, where there’s a naked couple screwing.
“Sorry,” Julieth says, closes the door, and cracks up, leaning against the wall.
The people downstairs are still doing their thing: thank you to life, which has given me so much, it’s given me sound and the alphabet.
I don’t know why, but right from the start I knew Libardo wasn’t coming back. Or, rather, when nobody could think of anywhere else to look for him, I said to myself, Dad’s not coming back. I said it to Julio, and he freaked out, knocked me on the floor with a blow to the chest, and told me, don’t you ever say that again. The people close to Libardo tried to give us hope—we were the littlest mourners, we were the sons. But I think we all knew he wasn’t coming back. We wanted him to come back, but every one of us, deep down—my grandmother, Fernanda—we all knew why he’d been taken.
After that, Julio, Fernanda, and I would sleep together at night, all three of us in her and Libardo’s bed. We slept in our regular clothes so if anybody called with news in the middle of the night, we’d be ready, just in case. Of course, it isn’t really accurate to say we slept. We’d get only an hour or two of shuteye. By four in the morning, we’d be in the kitchen drinking hot chocolate, not talking, afraid to look at one another and discover the truth in one another’s eyes.
“Do you have a girlfriend, Larry?” Julieth asks, heading up to an attic.
“I don’t know,” I say. She stops and looks at me, puzzled.
“I don’t think so,” I add, in an attempt to be clearer.
Julieth scolds me. “I’m being serious, Larry.”
“I really don’t know,” I tell her. “I met someone on the plane, but . . .”
“What?” She breaks in, surprised, almost worried. “Are you being serious? You’re still hung up on her?”
Could be. I regret having told Julieth, especially given our history.
“Go on, keep going.” I shoo her along so she’ll stop quizzing me.
She turns around and climbs up a steep staircase. Her round butt is right at my eye level. Immediately, I recall that butt without clothes.
“Inga, Inga!” Julieth yells into the dark maw of the attic. She climbs up a little higher and stops.
“What’s up?”
“Where’s the light switch?” she says.
“Let me get by.”
I scooch to one side, but we end up jammed in the narrow stairwell. She grabs my face and plants a wet kiss on my mouth. Our tongues intertwine, we swap spit. I slide my hand to touch her.
“You should turn on the light,” she says.
I tread gingerly, groping the walls—there’s got to be a switch somewhere. Julieth sits down on the landing, staring into the darkness, and calls again, “Inga!”
All we hear is the muffled singing of the group downstairs.
“She isn’t here either,” says Julieth. “Let’s go.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if those guys killed her,” I say.
“Grow up, Larry,” she says, and moves past me, without giving me another kiss.
Actually, I don’t want any more kissing, just a glass of water and to get out of here, go home, talk to Fernanda, and sleep for two days straight. This house is bringing back bad memories—it looks like the one we used to have, my friends’ houses, my girlfriends’ houses, places where I wasn’t given a warm welcome. What’s Libardo’s kid doing here? Sometimes I didn’t get past the gates, other times I’d manage to reach the front door, and only rarely was I allowed in. I never complained about it. I told Fernanda on the condition that she didn’t say anything to Libardo, but she couldn’t keep her mouth shut. And then he’d say something like this: when you go to Gabriel’s place, tell his dad I said hi—the two of us set up a car dealership in Panama last year. Or, tell Valentina’s dad we’ve got to get together again, we haven’t seen each other since last January. Like that, pretty smooth but with the information necessary to bust down the doors that were shutting in my face.
“Larry,” says Julieth.
“What?”
“Why are you still standing there? What are you doing?”
“Thinking.”
“Oh, Larry,” she says. “What we had was a long time ago. It was great, but I’m seeing somebo—”
I cut her off. “Let’s find the kitchen. I’m thirsty.”
Downstairs we run into Pedro and La Murciélaga, who look upset. Did you find her?, Pedro asks. Not a trace. You’re shitting me, La Murciélaga says. Where did that chick get off to? Maybe she left. Right, she got tired of waiting for us and left. Thank you to life, which has given me so much, it’s given steps to my weary feet . . . Jesus, what’s up with these people? How long are they going to keep singing the same damn thing? Let’s jet, Pedro, the Swedish chick’s massive, she can take care of herself. With them I’ve walked cities and fields, beaches and deserts, mountains and plains . . .
“Hey, guys.” The woman who first greeted us appears out of nowhere. “Did you find your friend?”
The four of us shake our heads.
“Nobody saw her leave?” Pedro asks her.
“Actually I never even saw her come in,” the woman says.
“Do you people realize the kind of diplomatic shitstorm that’ll kick up if something happens to this Swedish chick?” Pedro asks, his tone menacing.
The woman shrugs and says, smiling, “The meat’s ready. Come on, there’s enough for everybody.”
“The hell with your meat,” Pedro says, furious. “Let’s get out of here.”
He takes off like a bat out of hell. Pedro, Pedro, La Murciélaga calls after him, trying to catch up. Did you call her cell? She doesn’t have a cell phone, he says. O.K., so call the number she called you from, Julieth suggests. Pedro whirls around and says, do you think I’m an idiot, that’s the first thing I d
id, and this dude answered who said he’d lent her the phone, full stop. That’s super sketchy, says La Murciélaga. And Julieth says, don’t get all worked up over it, she probably went off with some guy. Pedro stops again. Julieth says, don’t look at me like that, you know what she’s like.
Inside the house, the singers seem to have reached the song’s climax. Pedro grabs his head and yells, “In my dictatorship, pansy-ass parties like this will be outlawed!”
La Murciélaga puts her arm around him and leads him to the car. Julieth and I follow behind as the people in the house keep intoning hoarsely, thank you to life, thank you to life, thank you to liiiiiiife.
17
Death brought Charlie and Larry together. For her, it was her father’s, a noble death, that of a prominent, well-respected man. Larry’s father, on the other hand, was a criminal, disappeared, unseemly even in death. She would have a corpse she still remembered, elegant and done up for the funeral. She’d be able to hug it and weep over it. Whereas Larry would find a heap of bones, maybe with a bullet hole in its skull, a grin of false teeth, or a shattered femur.
Charlie slept, and Larry pondered why people attach so much importance to the dead body when the thing that really hurts is the absence.
Is it just so they can be certain the person’s dead? . . .
“I fell asleep,” Charlie said, and he started. “I’m thirsty,” she added.
“I’ll bring you some water,” Larry told her, then realized he hadn’t addressed her by the formal usted.
Before he could get up, she downed the last dregs of gin and melted ice in her glass, gulping as if it were water. Larry took the opportunity to shift in his seat and stretch a bit.
“Did you rest any?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t really know how I feel. Everything hurts, and at the same time I don’t feel anything. I don’t know if this moment is real or if I’m making it up so I can get through the flight. I want it to be over already and at the same time I want it to never end, for us to keep flying till . . .” She fell silent and closed her eyes again. Two fat tears rolled down her cheeks and disappeared somewhere on her neck.
“Rest here if you like,” Larry said, gesturing to his shoulder.
“I’ll get your shirt wet.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Plus I feel guilty falling asleep,” Charlie said.
“Guilty?”
“It feels unfair that he’s dead and I’m sleeping.”
“But . . .” Larry was going to say, but he’s dead. He stopped and said, “You need to rest, you’ve got a hard day ahead of you.”
“I’ve got a hard life ahead of me.”
“It’s tough at first,” Larry murmured. “You think you’re not going to be able to do it, but after a while . . .”
“How long?”
“I don’t know, it depends. Maybe months, maybe years. When you least expect it, you feel like somebody’s tugging on you.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Something or somebody. An invisible hand, an unknown force. Suddenly you feel yourself being pulled, and without realizing it, you’re on the other side.”
“Who helped you?” she asked without looking at him, lying on his shoulder, in a voice he wouldn’t have even heard if they hadn’t been so close together.
“Nobody.”
“You?”
“Not even me.”
Larry had to tell her the truth.
Reality itself opened my eyes and reached out its hand to lift me up. Libardo wasn’t the solution—he was the problem. Without him, there wouldn’t be any uncertainty or fear . . .
“The truth,” said Larry. “The truth was what saved me.”
He said it knowing that the truth was such a complicated thing that, at that moment, Charlie wasn’t going to find out more.
“What’s going to save me?” she asked, more to herself than to him. Then she added, “Or who?”
They sat in silence a while, listening to the noise of the engines. They were midway across the ocean—they were a dot in the vastness, the everythingness and nothingness, an abyss between two worlds—a sort of limbo. The two of them up in the sky, traversing the night at an incredible speed inside a metal tube full of fuel. They both were leaving an old era and entering a new one.
“Thank you,” Charlie said.
Something vibrated inside Larry, a shiver wrapping him from head to toe, something like a signal for his heart. Suddenly, a passenger let out a thunderous snore that drowned out the drone of the engines. Charlie laughed loudly, the first time the whole flight. Larry laughed too.
“I envy him,” he said.
“Go to sleep, then.”
“I’d rather talk to you.”
“So let’s talk about something else,” Charlie suggested. Two more snores rang out, and they laughed again. “Where do you think we are?” she asked.
“In the middle of nowhere,” he replied.
18
Where did we get the idea that after Escobar’s death, we’d wake up in a city cradled by birdsong and morning rain, refreshed by the warm breeze on sunny afternoons? That wasn’t the kind of city we were built for—we weren’t made to live in paradise. Escobar’s own son, his blood still hot, had sworn vengeance, and even though he spoke in the haste of a tantrum, the fury in his words had whipped up hate. The men who’d slain the monster weren’t content with cutting off its head. They wanted to gobble up its corpse, right down to the entrails. The government, borne along by momentum like a lumbering tank, was looking to finish the job. Libardo started getting cabin fever, and Fernanda decided to go back to the casinos, even if it meant being escorted by a couple of the boys. It was the only place she felt relaxed.
In the enormous house, the bunker Libardo had built to protect us, my brother and I used to hang out every afternoon, staring at each other or watching TV to learn about all the things Libardo and Fernanda refused to tell us. We speculated about what would happen next and what we would do. I was set on fleeing, but Julio wanted to stay. His passion was the family’s farms; he hadn’t even considered going to college, wanted to start running them straight out of high school, overseeing the livestock and harvests.
“I’ll die if I have to go live somewhere else,” he used to tell me. “Move to another city and, even worse, speak another language.”
“You might get killed if you stay,” I said.
“I’d rather die of a bullet than of sadness,” he said.
Looking at each other, what we saw was two pipsqueaks talking about life and death, surrounded by bodyguards and maids. The fragile calm we enjoyed was sheltered by Libardo’s fortune. In a world where money determined everything, we believed that money would get us absolution too. But we hadn’t figured that the money was going to run out sooner rather than later.
Escobar’s family was urgently seeking asylum, though they were a hot potato that no country wished to take on. If even they were looking for a new life abroad, how could we not leave too? We weren’t bound to them by any sort of affection, though in a way their life resembled ours.
Libardo never told me, but I overheard him saying it to someone else: the shipments will get taken care of—there’s too much money and power involved for an empire to collapse overnight. He said with convincing frankness: our national hypocrisy will save us. But his optimism was belied by his irritable mood, the insults he hurled out left and right, the threats he issued whenever he talked on the phone, and especially the fear that showed on his face.
Things weren’t any better at school. For starters, nobody had expected us back. They’d assumed we’d gone into hiding, so there was a huge commotion when we showed up under increased protection. Our bodyguards had instructions not to budge from the school all day. We weren’t the only ones; I’m not sure how many other student
s like us there were.
That first day, Fernanda insisted on speaking to the headmaster. Her presence at the school always caused a stir. She knew it and encouraged it. She’d get herself dolled up like back when she was a beauty queen and wear tight blouses so her tits would bounce when she walked. At first it was nice knowing our mother was pretty, but as we got older, the tenor of our classmates’ comments changed. They lusted after Fernanda, or at least that’s what they wanted us to think. That day, she fixed herself up nicer than ever. She needed to show that nothing had changed and put space between all of us and the death of Libardo’s boss.
“You deserve special treatment,” she told us, though I didn’t understand why she wanted them to favor us. Was she looking to turn the tables and have us switch to being victims instead of victimizers? It was a nice concept, but she’d have to persuade an entire nation, the whole world, everybody who was pointing zealous fingers at us.
We arrived in two SUVs, and four of the boys, four of Libardo’s fighters, piled out and opened Fernanda’s door, offering her a supportive hand so she could descend elegantly in her high heels. I felt as if the entire school, students, teachers, and staff, were all turning to stare at us. Some of the youngest kids came up to her thinking she was who knows who. Fernanda tousled the hair of a few of them. She smiled at all of them. Julio and I kept our eyes glued to the floor as we climbed the stairs to the headmaster’s office. Fernanda’s heels rapped like stone on the steps.
“I’m here to see Mr. Estrada,” she announced herself.
They didn’t ask who was making the request. They already knew her. Libardo’s wife. Libardo’s kids.
“If you don’t mind waiting, Doña Fernanda,” the assistant said. “The headmaster’s on the phone just now, but he’ll be with you momentarily.”
She settled on a sofa in the waiting room and signaled for us to sit beside her. I shook my head no; Julio didn’t even respond. I made one last attempt: “Let’s go, Ma.”
“No sir. I need to remind him of several things he has an obligation to understand.”
