Shooting Down Heaven

by Jorge Franco

  Gran pleaded with us to return to her house. Julio insisted on staying to see if he could get Fernanda to tell him anything, but she barely talked to us. She was trying to go on with her life, avoided us when we confronted her, didn’t even join us for meals, ate very little, and drank a lot. Then the calls started again, not just from Eloy but also from Libardo’s friends who’d put up money for the rescue. Fernanda responded to all of them lethargically, as she did to us. Until events spoke for her and we learned, from a news program, that the regional prosecutor Jorge Cubides had turned up dead, murdered.

  Julio and I flipped out. Gran told us she was going to get us out of that house, even if it meant getting the police to do it. Libardo’s friends started calling more frequently. Investigators from the attorney general’s office came by several times to talk to Fernanda. We begged her to explain what had happened, but she told us firmly that the attorney general’s office had already questioned her and she was done talking.

  But the news made public what she had kept quiet. They showed Cubides in a video from the Palace Casino, sitting at a gaming table next to a woman. In another video, released a few days later, Cubides was driving up to a motel with the same woman, at four twenty-three in the morning. Seven hours later they left together, and the prosecutor opened the door for her to get into the car. The woman, of course, was Fernanda, and because of that image, the last one anybody had of Jorge Cubides, we were forced to flee the country without really knowing what had happened.

  78

  What room will he be in?” Fernanda asks me, clutching my arm.

  Written beside the door of each room at the funeral home is a name. Everybody must shudder when they see the name of the person they’re there to see. Will the room we’re going to say “Pedro the Dictator”? Sole potentate, through violent means, of the republic that he alone inhabited and whose constitution was drafted in accordance with strictly sexist, classist, misogynistic, racist, and otherwise bigoted parameters? Dictator of the only country in the world that has no poor or ugly people? Or will it say, “Pedro, lover and drug dealer of Miss Medellín 1973?” A hand grabs my free arm. It’s Julieth.

  “I’m all fucked up,” she says.

  “Where is he?”

  “In Room 2.”

  “That sucks,” I say. “He would have wanted Room 1.”

  I introduce her to Fernanda. I remember you, ma’am, Julieth says. Fernanda smiles faintly. I was at your house a few times, Julieth says, and Fernanda replies, oh, yes. At this moment she doesn’t care about remembering who Julieth is. Plus, Julieth hasn’t slept either and has been partying for three days straight. She’s unrecognizable, like me.

  “You’re all dressed up,” she tells me.

  I look at the jacket I’m wearing. It’s too big.

  “It’s the suit my dad got married in,” I say.

  “You should keep it unbuttoned,” Fernanda suggests.

  “Are you coming or going?” I ask Julieth.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you on your way out, or did you just arrive?”

  “I went to the bathroom,” she says.

  “Come see him with me,” I say.

  We walk past Room 4, Room 3, and in Room 2 we find my friend, in a casket he wouldn’t have liked either. It’s too somber, completely incongruous with his lifestyle. Again I say to myself, this can’t be happening. I should go up, knock on the casket, and tell him, open up right this minute, Pedro, stop the bullshit and get out of there, we’ve paid you our respects, you fucking dictator, we’ve mourned you, quit joking around, dickhead. Julieth sits down on a sofa between two elderly women and leans her head against the back.

  Fernanda tells me, “Come on, let’s go say hi to Óscar and Luz María. Poor things.”

  “People are looking at us,” I say.

  “What’s the problem?”

  The problem is that even after all this time, I’m still Libardo’s son, and she’s still his widow. People still survey us from their immaculate bubble. The only one who never watched me with those inquisitor’s eyes is laid out in that casket there, mocking us. Fernanda doesn’t care how people look at her; she goes up to Pedro’s parents and hugs them. I only hang my head. I feel guilty. I took Pedro to my old house, Libardo told me not to let him jump, I saw Pedro get undressed, saw him run toward the pool, and I didn’t do anything. I never do anything, not even right this moment when instead I’m standing very still and staring at my feet, aware of how solitary I’ve walked in this world.

  “Pedro told us you were back,” the father tells me.

  “I just arrived the day before yesterday,” I say.

  I take a few steps backward and glance again at the casket, hoping for Pedro to get up. I’m the one who should leave. The scent of the flowers is making me feel sick.

  Outside the room, I lean against a wall and manage to pull myself together. The only thing I need is sleep; maybe when I wake up, none of this will have happened.

  In Room 1, a litany begins. Startled, I recognize it. A powerful voice recites, “Do not go gentle into that good night. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay.” It sounds like Professor Leeson’s deep voice declaiming at the end of class.

  I don’t know the name written on the door. I don’t know who Antonio Rivero Conde is, but why are they reciting the Dylan Thomas poem? I try to look in, but the room is packed. The dead man must be very important. Is this coincidence yet another joke? I try to make my way inside. Excuse me, excuse me. People’s perfumes mingle with the cloying smell of the flowers. Why are they looking at me like that? Because I’m the son of Libardo, who’s finally at rest under a leafy lignum vitae?

  “Do not go gentle into that good night,” a doleful man is reciting as I reach the middle of the room. “And you, my father, there on the sad height.” There is the father in the casket he deserves. Without tacky fripperies, with the simplicity of true elegance. And sitting next to her family is a downcast daughter, Charlie, the woman I gave up for lost because I didn’t go after her when I should have.

  Life returns to my body. The certainty of believing that this is in fact happening.

  “Charlie,” I call to her out loud.

  Everybody looks at me, and the man who’s reciting goes quiet. She lifts her head and opens her eyes wide, as if reproaching me for not having arrived earlier. The poem fills the room again: “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Charlie gets up and walks resolutely toward me.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jorge Franco was born in Medellín, Colombia. He studied filmmaking and directing at the London Film School and Literature at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. His first short story collection Maldito Amor and first novel Mala Noche were both awarded numerous prestigious literary prizes.