Shooting Down Heaven

by Jorge Franco

  “You’re sleeping with her!” I shout.

  “So what’s the problem?” he asks.

  “She’s my mom, asshole.”

  “So?”

  “And you’re my best friend.”

  “I don’t get it,” he says. “Are you jealous over her or over me?”

  It was my feet that got tangled up before, but now it’s my words. Unable to speak, I cry instead. Pedro angrily slams the door. He starts the engine and, a few yards on, makes a U-turn and heads back.

  Nobody says anything, there’s no music; the only sound is the rumble of the engine. We don’t pass any other cars, and there are no houses or buildings along the road, just shrubland, dumping grounds for garbage and dead bodies.

  “Stop making a fuss, Larry,” Julieth says.

  “Where are we going?” I ask, sniffling.

  “To your house,” Pedro says. “We’re going to drop you off.”

  “My mom’s place?”

  “Yeah, your house.”

  “Drop me off at my grandparents’ instead,” I say.

  He doesn’t say anything; he’s concentrating on the road. There’s not a light to be seen, not a single human being, nothing, as if Medellín didn’t exist.

  “At that party,” I say, or try to say, because my tongue is too thick, “at that house the people were captives.”

  Neither one says anything, as if I weren’t in the car. Julieth turns on the radio. Britney Spears is on. I can’t complain; it could be worse. Julieth sings along, pretending to sing in English, but it’s not English or Spanish or anything else. It’s cute.

  “La Murciélaga flew away,” I say.

  They exchange glances again and laugh. Pedro joins in on Julieth’s singing; he sings every word of the song in English.

  Finally, in the distance, the lights of Medellín glitter. Or maybe, in my exhaustion, I’ve started hallucinating.

  75

  The moment Fernanda and the prosecutor walked out of our house, our story took a sinister turn. Or maybe recklessness simply hastened the course of the inevitable: us fleeing, leaving the country with whatever fit into a couple of suitcases; Fernanda, Julio, and I hiding like sewer rats. Or maybe it was earlier, in the instant when the regional prosecutor, Jorge Cubides, first crossed paths with Fernanda and she, once again, let herself be guided by the wrong man.

  Clearly, that day was going to be unlike any other. There were pieces that didn’t fit, reactions that made no sense, unconvincing explanations, yet we allowed the possibility of having Libardo back with us to gain strength. Who wouldn’t be fueled by the return of a missing father, by the anticipation of seeing someone who’d been given up for dead? What person wouldn’t give hope one last chance when it seemed there was little to lose and so much to gain? So that day we gambled against our fears and doubts and gave in to the dream they sold us.

  Even still, as soon as Fernanda and the prosecutor left with a suitcase full of cash, the atmosphere grew strained, and when I lied to Gran and told her nothing was going on, everything was fine, I was aware of the opposite: nothing was fine, and things could definitely get worse.

  It’s always easier to connect the dots of the past than those of the present, and it’s easy now to see the signs we missed back then, even the most banal ones, like the way the morning, which had started out sunny, covered over with a blanket of storm clouds as soon as Fernanda and the prosecutor left. Or the way my grandmother, at the end of our call, told me that my grandfather had come down from outer space and in five seconds of lucidity had told her he wanted to say goodbye to his grandchildren. Gran thought he was still confused or that he’d sensed he was going to die, but afterward, when everything went down, we linked his comment to our hasty departure from the country. And other similar warnings. Scattered dots, lost in the present, that we are able to connect only with the passage of time. Not entirely, because not everything became clear. There were lingering questions that Fernanda never answered, because she didn’t want to or wasn’t able, because she never accepted the responsibility for her failure. Julio and I hovered by the phone from the moment they left, even though we knew we wouldn’t have any news for at least a couple of hours. Their supposed appointment with Eloy was set for southern Medellín, at a restaurant just inside the city limit with La Estrella.

  At around noon, the meeting would have been over for a while, and they should have been back already. Unable to eat lunch, we stayed next to the phone. At three, Fernanda still hadn’t called. Julio and I could only stare at each other in silence. There was no way we could tell Gran.

  At about five, though, I told Julio, “This is really weird. I’m going to call her.”

  “Maybe they didn’t show,” he said.

  “All the more reason for them to have been back a while ago.”

  “Don’t call yet. Let’s wait a little longer.”

  A number of scenarios flitted through my head, from the simple to the brutally gory and lethal. Anything was possible. Julio was probably going through the same thing, but he’d be afraid to mention what he was imagining too. It would make all the possibilities too real. He called his girlfriend several times, but they spoke only briefly—we had to keep the phone line open. He talked to her about trivial things to keep his mind off the wait.

  Sometime after seven, the phone rang. Julio answered, but nobody said anything. But he told me he thought he’d heard Fernanda laughing in the distance.

  “Laughing or crying?” I asked.

  “I think laughing,” he said.

  The worst part was that it was possible. Often when she’d gone out at night, she’d call to let us know she’d be late or to give us some kind of instruction, and sometimes she’d go into a fit of laughter so intense that she couldn’t speak, so she’d wait or call back after a couple of minutes.

  “Maybe it wasn’t anybody,” Julio said. “I mean, maybe it wasn’t the call we’re waiting for.”

  Much later, Eloy called. He was really upset. He asked for Fernanda, and Julio told him she wasn’t back yet. Eloy got angry and said he was going to make us pay for not taking things seriously; he called us liars and, before hanging up, warned us to get ready to receive Libardo’s corpse. In a rage, Julio kicked the shit out of a door. I wept silently. Then I called Gran. Julio didn’t stop me.

  “Gran,” I said, “we’ve got a big problem.”

  I caught her up on what was going on, she was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “You can’t stay there. I’ll send Eladio to pick you up.”

  We waited, sitting on the stairs, where we’d always sat ever since we were kids when we were left alone, staring at the front door. Fernanda and Libardo used to find us there on those steps when they came home late from their parties. While we waited for Gran’s bodyguard to arrive, I told Julio, “Usually it’s kids who fight against their parents and not the other way around, like it is with us.”

  All he said was “hmm” in a way that encompasses all of life’s ironies. Then he said, “Speaking of fighting . . .”

  He went to Libardo’s study and came back with the pistol he’d been fooling with that morning. He sat down next to me. There we remained on that step, no longer the children waiting expectantly in their pajamas for their parents to come home, but two armed young men who had stopped expecting anything from them.

  76

  Wasn’t my house around here?” I ask Pedro.

  “Which one? Fernanda’s?”

  “Mine, the one we lived in with Libardo, the house from before.”

  “Yes,” Julieth says animatedly, “it’s around here, I remember.”

  “Can we go see it?” I ask.

  “Make up your mind,” Pedro says. “First you want to go to your grandma’s house, then to the old house—why don’t you go to Fernanda’s place and stop running around in circles?”

  “Fir
st to the house and then to my grandma’s place,” I say. Maybe returning to the house will reconnect me to this land. Returning to the good memories, to my boyhood days, days of backyard and swimming pool.

  “What if somebody’s living there?” Julieth asks.

  “No,” Pedro says. “It’s empty. The government confiscated it.”

  “See that?” I say to Julieth. “That’s somebody who knows more about my family than I do.”

  “Are you done yet?” Pedro asks me.

  Two more blocks, and there’s the bunker. The rush of memories clamps my heart. The time I lived in that house as well as my years of absence. The happy years, the uneventful ones, the lazy afternoons, the tumultuous mornings, the anxious nights, the tenderness and violence. Everything squeezes me, pains me, and frees me. The headlights illuminate the façade, which is painted with clumsy graffiti and fractured by the roots and branches that have seized possession of the house.

  “I want to go in,” I say.

  “How?” Julieth asks.

  “Through the door, obviously.”

  “Do you think there’s any booze left inside?” Pedro asks.

  I get out and walk toward the booth that always used to have a heavily armed guard. I try to open the gate, but it’s locked. So I do what anyone would do when arriving at a house: I knock. I hear footsteps on the other side of the wall and the soft singing of a song that seems familiar. The fear of living is the lord and master of many other fears, sings a voice that’s familiar too.

  “Who is it?” somebody asks from the other side.

  “Me,” I reply.

  The voice keeps singing, insatiable and trifling, in a dull anguish that rises unbidden. I hear a key fighting with the rusty lock. The door opens, and he appears, smiling, his face aglow, the way everybody must look when they’ve been resurrected.

  “Pa,” I say.

  “Give me a hug, son.”

  I hug him with the strength I’ve been storing up for this moment for twelve years. He smells the same as always: a little bit like liquor, a little like cigarettes, like his cologne, like fireworks, a little like horses, like soil, like money—all in all, he smells like Libardo.

  “Come in,” he says.

  “It’s dark, I can barely see.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll take you.”

  He takes me by the hand and leads me through the front yard, which is overgrown.

  “Can you believe they’re trying to sell the house?” he says. “They’ve been trying to do it for years, and they’re going to waste another thousand years at it because this house will never be sold, not as long as I’m looking after it.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “I never left, son. They haven’t been able to get rid of me, even dead.” His laugh echoes through the empty rooms. A bit of light from the other buildings finds its way in. I start shaking—I don’t know whether it’s out of excitement or fear. “What’s wrong?” he asks.

  “I don’t understand,” I say. “Just this morning we went to get you, to get your . . .”

  “Remains,” he says, since I can’t. “Reason doesn’t need remains, Larry. The heart doesn’t need proof, and that’s why you and I are here.” He squeezes my cold hands and says, “Wait for me. I’ll be right back.”

  I go over to the glass door that leads out to the backyard and see that it’s getting lighter. A new day is dawning, yet another day where I haven’t slept. The living room fills with a glow; it’s him, returning with a lit candle. He’s singing the song he greeted me with, the fear of living is an act of bravery, trying to take on each new day.

  “You always were afraid of the dark,” he says, and places the candle in the middle of the living room.

  Outside I can hear Pedro and Julieth laughing loudly; they’ve gone into the backyard and are horsing around like little kids.

  The candle reveals more clearly the man I’ve seen only in my memory for twelve years, the man who’s been fading day by day and whose photos I started studying to keep him from disappearing altogether. He seems tired, but he’s still smiling at me. He looks out at the backyard and says, “That Pedro. He’s still running around, just like when he was a kid. He’s a good friend.”

  “No,” I say. “Pedro betrayed me.”

  “Don’t judge him,” he says, “especially not for that.”

  “You knew?”

  He makes a gesture that says, that’s life.

  Pedro calls for me to join them. He’s shirtless, and Julieth is doubled over with laughter on the grass. Pedro starts removing his pants and yells, “Larry, come here, let’s go swimming.”

  He tries to take off Julieth’s shirt, and she stops him despite her laughing fit.

  “No,” Libardo says. “Tell him not to do it.”

  “What?”

  Pedro calls to me again: “Like we used to, Larry. Last one in’s a rotten egg!”

  “No,” Libardo says.

  Pedro, in his underwear, runs toward the pool, shouting wildly like when he used to compete with me to see who’d be first to leap into the cold water. Julieth shrieks excitedly but is too chicken to follow him.

  “Tell him to stop,” Libardo says.

  “Why, Pa?”

  Pedro keeps yelling all the way to the edge of the pool; it’s a shout of triumph, of winning the race. He leaps, momentum carrying him forward, but instead of the splash of him hitting the water I hear a dull thud against the cement floor.

  The wind blows out the candle. Libardo vanishes with a sigh. Julieth keeps laughing until the silence compels her to call to Pedro, Pedro, Pedro, who doesn’t answer. The only sound is the occasional firework in the distance. I go out into the backyard and tell Julieth to come with me. She wraps her arms around herself, trembling with fear or foreboding. We look over the edge and see Pedro in the bottom of the empty pool, swimming in the gush of blood that’s spilling from his head.

  77

  Fernanda came back two days after she left with the prosecutor. Those days had been a living hell, more uncertain than when Libardo had disappeared. Not only were we reliving that history, but we might end up without Fernanda too. In addition, Gran was upset with us because we hadn’t told her earlier. She hammered home that Libardo was her son and she had the right to know what Fernanda and the prosecutor were planning. To top things off, Fernanda didn’t come looking for us when she returned. Lucila found her sleeping in her bedroom and called us at our grandparents’ house.

  “What about my dad?” I asked Lucila.

  “She’s alone, or that’s what it seems like. She hasn’t woken up yet,” she replied.

  “Wake her up and ask about him.”

  Meanwhile, Julio and Gran were arguing by the front door. Julio wanted to go see Fernanda right away, and Gran was forbidding it with the same old arguments: that woman’s crazy, she’s a danger to you boys, she’s irresponsible, a gambling addict, and other claims that she’d repeated many times over the course of our lives. Lucila came back to the phone and told me, “She’s locked in her room and isn’t answering.”

  I hung up and joined in Julio’s argument with Gran. We had even more reason now to go back home.

  “But what kind of mother doesn’t even call after putting you through this agony?” Gran said.

  Julio threatened to go out and flag down a cab. Seeing that we were determined, Gran relented on the condition that Eladio stayed with us.

  “Don’t let them out of your sight,” she ordered the bodyguard, “and call if there’s any news about my son.”

  On the drive there, which was mostly silent, we talked about the slim possibility that we’d find Libardo at the house. He would have been the first to let us know he’d been released. And Eloy’s accusations confirmed that the plan had failed.

  Lucila was waiting for us outside. The look o
n her face made it clear the news wasn’t good.

  “She’s alone in the backyard,” she told us.

  We raced inside and from the living room saw her lying on a chaise longue, still in her pajamas and smoking. She was staring at the sky and slowly blowing smoke into the air. When we slid open the glass door, the noise made her turn toward us. Julio stepped forward first, his aggravation on the tip of his tongue.

  “What happened, Ma?”

  Fernanda turned back to stare upward and took a long drag. She was pale, with a reddened nose and puffy eyes, perhaps from sleeping, crying, or drinking. She didn’t respond to Julio. She coughed as if she’d choked on a bit of smoke.

  He said again, “What happened? Where were you? Why didn’t you get in touch?”

  Fernanda stuck out her tongue a little, as if she were spitting out a flake of tobacco. Her eyes welled up.

  “Nothing happened, that’s why I didn’t get in touch,” she said.

  “What do you mean, nothing? Did you meet up with them? Did you give them the money?”

  “I told you, nothing happened. I didn’t meet up with them. I didn’t give them the money.”

  “Why?”

  “They don’t have him.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “I found out.”

  “How?”

  “I found it out. They don’t have him. So we’re right back where we started. And I’ve had a rough few days; I need to be left alone.”

  “What about the money?” Julio asked.

  “That’s what you’re worried about?” Fernanda said.

  “Of course I’m worried—it wasn’t ours.”

  “It should be the other way around,” she said.

  “If you knew they didn’t have him, why did you take so long to come back?” I asked.

  She turned her back on us and said again, “I need to be alone, please. Go away.”

  I left ahead of Julio. I shut myself in my room and wept with rage. Not only had we reached a dead end but, worse still, she’d put us in a situation that would be impossible to escape unscathed.