by Jorge Franco
“Don’t tell me,” I say, but she doesn’t hear me.
“I barely earn enough to cover our insurance and things for the house. Oh, the house is ours, he . . .”
“Don’t tell me,” I interrupt her. “There’s no need.”
How can I explain that my rudeness is born of fear? Didn’t she ever learn how the cartels work? The less you know, the longer you live. Vanesa looks at me in confusion, and I apologize.
“I’m sorry, I haven’t slept for two days.”
“I can imagine,” she says. “This must be very hard for all of you. It certainly is for me.”
“No,” I say. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but it doesn’t hurt anymore.”
A chill pierces my chest when I see Libardo and Vanesa together, embracing, kissing, every photo displaying a love story. That’s what the photos Fernanda has in her room look like, with that same lavish outlay of affection. I don’t know if they’re from the same time period or if they’re from after Libardo got fed up. The two women don’t seem to fit. Right up to the end, Libardo was always affectionate with Fernanda. There are photos confirming his love for her too.
“I always wanted you all to meet Rosa Marcela,” Vanesa says. “Ultimately, she’s . . .” I gesture again to indicate that I understand. If she doesn’t feel able to call things by their names, she shouldn’t. “She knows about you,” she says, “because Doña Carmenza tells her stories. I would have liked to, but Doña Fernanda . . . You know, Larry.”
“I do know,” I say, “and she’s going to cut off my balls when she finds out I’m here.”
Vanesa looks down. I go over to her and say, “Can I ask you a favor?”
“Of course.”
“I’m so exhausted I can barely function. Would it be O.K. if I lie down for a little bit? Right here, on the sofa, is fine.”
She stands up, smiles candidly, and says, “No, please, not here. Come and rest in Rosi’s room. She’ll be coming home from school any minute, but I’ll tell her not to disturb you.”
I follow her upstairs and go into Rosa Marcela’s room, an unfamiliar world. A doll house, the smell of flowers, life inside a rainbow.
“Lie down,” Vanesa tells me. “I’ll bring you a blanket.”
“No, there’s no need.”
“Of course there is. This room doesn’t get any sun, so it’s pretty chilly.”
She goes out, leaving me surrounded by unblinking gazes and fixed smiles. A menagerie of stuffed animals, a deluge of hearts in the unicorn kingdom.
“Here you go,” Vanesa says, and hands me a blanket. “Shall I close the curtain?”
“It’s fine. Thank you.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. I’m just going to rest for a minute, so I can make it till tonight.”
“You probably didn’t get to sleep with all the fireworks, huh?” she says.
“Nope.”
“I’ll be around,” she says, and closes the door gently, as if I were already asleep.
I take off my shoes, lie back on the pillow, pull the blanket over me, turn on my side, and find myself eye to eye with a pink gorilla. It smiles at me, and I smile back. I reach out my hand, and we hug. It must be a girl, I think when I smell its musky fragrance.
54
The backyard looked like a freshly bombed field. Fernanda locked the doors leading out to it and made it a no-go zone. The threat to anyone who went in was not banishment but death. She got the whole staff together and warned them. Not even the gardener could go out there. To drive the idea home, Julio stood next to her, holding Libardo’s pistol, and said, “And anybody who doesn’t like this rule can leave.”
Julio and Fernanda had just put a price on our lives, and they might well turn out to be worth nothing since we’d found nothing in the backyard so far.
“Our own people are going to kill us,” I said. “They’re going to get greedy for what might be buried there.” From a distance, the guards and maids eyed the mounds of soil and the holes that Fernanda and Julio were still digging, now in broad daylight.
“Or the neighbors,” I added.
Sometimes I helped dig, not because I wanted to but because I couldn’t stand Fernanda’s withering looks. Or her rude comments, like the one she offered when I suggested, Ma, don’t you think we should tell the guards we’re going to give them part of what we find. She replied with another question: how did you turn out such a moron, Larry? It’s so they won’t kill us, Ma. She glared at me and left. My fear did make an impression, though; I found out she’d gone to a notary to file an extrajudicial statement saying that if anything happened to us, our employees were the ones responsible, and she left a list of all the people who worked for us and their addresses. Then she brought them back together to tell them she’d done so.
“You’re going to have to keep an even closer watch on us now,” she said.
We dug for a couple more weeks. We no longer limited ourselves to the Xs marked on the map, instead excavating wherever we thought we might find something. We’d destroyed every growing thing in the yard, and even the pool was cloudy with earth. The gleaming marble was obscured at the bottom and on the edges. The motor and filters jammed, and the murky water filled with bubbles and frogs. Fernanda cried at the end of every day, and Julio did what he could to calm her.
“It’s not the end of the world, Ma. We’ve still got enough money to last a long time. Plus, if Dad comes back . . .”
Any remark about Libardo’s return always trailed off. Reduced to a gesture. A sigh, a shrug.
“We need cash,” Fernanda would say. “It’s our only insurance. They can freeze our accounts, confiscate our assets; now they’re saying something about forfeiture.”
We smelled like earth, us and the whole house, just like the backyard and farmhands did. We got blisters from digging, but Fernanda didn’t let anybody else help.
The people who claimed to have Libardo had stopped calling, and the silence had Fernanda on the verge of despair. Until one day she answered a call from a guy named Eloy, who asked, without saying hello, if the digging in the backyard was about what they assumed it was. Fernanda didn’t respond and asked for the other guy, Rómulo, and said she wouldn’t talk to anyone but him. Irate, she hung up and went to interrogate the employees. They all swore they hadn’t leaked word of our search. Even so, Fernanda fired several. Of the seven bodyguards, she kept only three, along with the two maids.
On our last day of digging, we heard a bloodcurdling scream from Fernanda. We thought she’d finally found something. We ran to her and found her writhing in pain in the hole. She’d fallen and hit her head on the shovel, and her forehead was bleeding. And she was crying, of course. We took her to the emergency room despite her objections. Luckily the wound was not serious or deep. The doctors cleaned and dressed it, unaware that the real injury was to her spirit and her pride. When we got home, I put my foot down.
“No more of this treasure hunt bullshit. There’s nothing there. We should think about what we’re going to do instead. It’s been six months since they took Dad, and we’re still in the exact same place.”
“What else can we do?” Fernanda asked. “We’ve looked for him, I’ve tried to negotiate, I’ve given them money. I’ve given anything they’ve asked for to get him back—I know Libardo can start over from scratch, what matters is that he’s alive. But I don’t know what to think anymore.”
She wept, and the swelling on her forehead grew larger. She covered her face with her hands, her fingernails black with soil as if she’d been digging with them. Julio and I looked at each other, disconcerted; he had dirt on his face, on his neck, and I must be just as filthy, just as anxious. Suddenly, I saw it all clearly: we weren’t digging to find some cache that Libardo had hidden. We were digging to exhume him, to have him with us, dead or alive. We were desperately defying God, life, time
, with what, for the world and for us, Libardo represented: money. We were looking for anything we could to assuage our guilt over doing nothing for him, keeping quiet. I thought all this but didn’t say it, just as I didn’t dare suggest that we needed to go on with our lives, to pick up our stories where we’d left off when he disappeared.
A month later, I went to spend a weekend at Pedro’s house, and when I got back on Sunday evening I saw that the holes in the yard had been filled in and the pool cleaned. I felt a wave of relief when I saw the house looking like it used to. Though there was no grass, I knew it would grow back.
Another day, Eloy called again and asked Fernanda why we’d stopped digging. This time she played along and told him we’d found what we were looking for. You did?, Eloy exclaimed, so how much did you find? Enough for you to release Libardo and leave us alone, Fernanda said, and hung up. She called us to her bedroom and told us, “I’ve been thinking.”
We looked at each other, afraid of what was coming.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “There’s still one way out we haven’t considered.”
“Which is . . .” Julio said.
“The right one,” Fernanda finished his sentence. “The justice system, the police, the attorney general’s office.”
“But they already know,” I said.
“Yes, but we haven’t gotten them involved,” she said. “It’s time to ask for their help.”
Fernanda was always surprising us. We didn’t say anything about her proposal; it wasn’t rash like some of her other decisions, but I, for one, needed to consider it a little more. All I said was, “They know everything we’re doing already. They’ve got to be keeping an eye on us from one of those buildings.” I gestured around us and said, “We need to move.”
“Not yet,” Fernanda said firmly. “What if they set him free or he escapes, where will he go? How will he find us?”
“He can go to Gran’s, and she’ll tell him where we went,” I said.
Fernanda let out a wild laugh. That’s great, she said, out of the frying pan and into the fire. She shut herself in the bathroom, and we could still hear her fake, sarcastic, venomous ha, ha, ha. Whenever she reacted like that, I felt like I was sitting in front of one of the slot machines where she squandered her time and our money.
55
The conveyer belt spat suitcases out onto the baggage carousel, and passengers emerged from the crush to retrieve the ones that belonged to them. Many returned a suitcase after confirming it wasn’t theirs; their energy waning, all they wanted was to leave the airport as soon as possible and bring their trip to an end. Larry wandered around the carousel a few times, looking not for his luggage but for Charlie among the mob. He walked slowly, studying the travelers’ tired faces, the agonized expressions of people struggling to heap suitcases and parcels onto carts. Larry was looking for her in a daze, as if he didn’t want to find her. He was also watching the revolving suitcases, trying to imagine which one might be hers. Hard-sided, oversized, with an emblazoned brand name—it could be any of them, or none of them, because if he didn’t see Charlie then her suitcase wouldn’t be on the carousel either.
I don’t want her to see me looking for her . . .
He wanted and at the same time didn’t want to find her. There was still the possibility they might run into each other again on the flight to Medellín. Truthfully, the only thing Larry wanted at that moment was to figure out what he wanted.
To not return to Medellín. Not find her. Find her and not return . . .
He sat down across from the carousel on a row of seats. He placed his backpack between his legs and leaned his head back. He took a deep breath, and the air felt as heavy as it had inside the plane. Pilots and flight attendants went by, laughing as if they hadn’t been crammed inside a plane for far too long. Passengers from other flights, chatting animatedly as if they didn’t realize what returning meant. People went by, people arrived, other people left, and Charlie never appeared. With every blink, Larry felt as if he might fall asleep. He had an hour to make his connection to Medellín. An hour till he returned. His stomach growled, his guts writhed, the monster in his intestines attacked.
No way. Not here, please . . .
He looked around for the bathroom sign. The monster reared up. Charlie could be in the bathroom too—she could be crying, washing her face, changing her clothes, stashing her colorful outfit and putting on something black, maybe that’s why he couldn’t find her. The monster quaked.
Damn it . . .
He hoisted the backpack and raced for the restrooms.
Shit doesn’t follow orders . . .
The restroom stank. It was full of travelers who were also in urgent intestinal need. Larry shut himself in a filthy stall; luckily, it had toilet paper. Everything else was routine.
Even Queen Elizabeth has to do it . . .
56
The eyes looking at me were so large and so black that I thought they were part of a dream and felt happy. I’m finally asleep, I said to myself in that same dream, but with my next blink I realized it was her, the little girl from the photos, Libardo’s daughter, my sister.
“Hi,” I say, and she runs to hide behind an armchair. Her face is hidden, but her legs are sticking out. She’s wearing a school uniform and a pair of dirty sneakers. I’m still hugging the stuffed gorilla. “Rosa Marcela,” I call to her, and she doesn’t answer. She tries to draw her legs back, but there’s no room. I imitate a couple of growls and get ready to waggle the gorilla in case she peeks out.
“Rosi,” her mother calls from the other end of the house.
“Rosi,” I call quietly, and ask, “What’s this gorilla’s name?”
“Nasty.”
“What?”
“Her name’s Nasty,” she says, without poking her head out.
“Why’d you name it that?”
She giggles mirthfully. Maybe she’s mocking my silly question. I sit up, uncertain how long I’ve slept. Or whether I’ve slept at all. I look at the gorilla’s smiling face and tell Rosa Marcela, “Well, it’s been very nice to me.”
“She’s a girl,” she clarifies.
“Yes, I knew that,” I say.
Vanesa peeks in the door and shakes her head. “Did she wake you up?” she asks. “Where is she? I told her not to bother you.”
I point to the armchair where she’s hiding. Rosa Marcela tries to conceal her legs.
“Get out from there, young lady,” Vanesa says firmly. She apologizes to me. “I don’t know when she slipped away from me.”
Rosa Marcela peers out slowly; she looks at her mother and then at me with a guilty expression on her face. I recall the saying: more alike than a bastard child. She’s a little-girl version of Libardo, made more beautiful by affection.
“No worries,” I tell Vanesa, “I wasn’t sleeping.
“But she didn’t let you rest, and she disobeyed me,” she says, gesturing for Rosa Marcela to get up. “Why didn’t you listen to me?” she asks.
“I wanted to meet him,” Rosa Marcela says.
“Really, Vanesa, it’s no problem,” I say, though I’d have liked to keep sleeping till the next morning.
“Let’s go,” she says to Rosa Marcela, grabbing her hand. “Keep resting, Larry,” she tells me. “I promise she won’t bother you again.”
“No,” I say. “I want to talk to her.”
“Are you sure?” Vanesa asks.
“Absolutely,” I say.
Rosa Marcela races out of the room. As I put on my shoes, I remark to Vanesa, she looks just like him, more than Julio and I do. Vanesa smiles and nods. She doesn’t say anything.
“Do you tell her about him?”
“Yeah, tons. And she’s been asking lots of questions lately.”
“Does she know everything?”
“What
’s everything?” she asks.
“Well, what happened.” I’m quiet a moment, then say, “What he was.”
“Why would I tell her that? Maybe if we were rich or had that kind of lifestyle,” she says. “She’s not going to understand it now, much less later on.”
“You’re right. Sorry,” I say.
“I get it,” she says. “You must have gone through that, but you all had a different kind of life. Rosi asks me what happened to her daddy, and I tell her he got lost and couldn’t come back.” She swallows and blinks rapidly. “She tells me she’s going to look for him till she finds him.”
Now I’m the one who’s choked up. I wobble as soon as I stand. My feet are still swollen, and my shoes are tight. Vanesa says, “Rosi’s going to have something to eat. Do you want to join us?”
In the kitchen, Rosa Marcela’s at a small table eating an arepa with cheese. She looks down when she sees me. Vanesa tells me to have a seat, asks what I want to eat while she pours hot chocolate for Rosa Marcela.
“Same thing,” I say.
“Hot chocolate?”
“Yes, and an arepa.”
Vanesa smiles at me. She’s got an innocent, almost ingenuous expression. It’s impossible not to compare her to Fernanda. Vanesa is much younger, which is why she looks so vibrant, but I can’t help seeing Fernanda at the other end.
“Why were you sleeping in my bed?” Rosa Marcela asks me.
“Rosi,” her mother admonishes her.
“Because I heard it was the best bed in the house,” I say.
“Who told you that?” she asks, looking at Vanesa.
“Nasty, your gorilla.”
“No way,” she says. “You didn’t even know her name.”
“But she told me,” I say.
She looks at me, unconvinced. She drinks her chocolate and ends up with a brown mustache. Now she really does look more like Libardo.
“Don’t you have a home?” she asks me.
“That’s enough, Rosi,” Vanesa says. “Stop asking silly questions and eat.”
