Cartagena

by NAM LE

  Yes, he said again. Yes, yes. He paused, his face sly: Claudia likes Cartagena.

  Fishermen, I said.

  Yes, he nodded, grinning widely. Do you remember how Luis described it?

  I brought my hand to my mouth, tapped my teeth with my fingernail. This sent Hernando into a renewed fit of laughter. We were like two drunken schoolgirls. Do I remember? I said. Only after the fortieth time.

  —

  AFTER A LONG SILENCE, El Padre sighs, his breath fluttering the candle flames on his desk, then smiles with his mouth and says:

  You are right. You have been a good soldado.

  I do not say anything. He leans back in his large chair and clasps his hands behind his neck. Even the darkness of his armpits somehow suggests violence. Hail Mary, full of grace…

  When I was your age, he says—even younger—I too had to eliminate my friends. He pauses. His voice has changed; it is softer now, damper. I did not mark your friend as a hit, he says. But I chose you to make the hit.

  I bow my head, not knowing what to say. I remind myself that, of course, I already knew this. I think of the World Cup story, and wonder distantly if El Padre’s face looked then as it does now: like a gangster in an American music video.

  He continues speaking. As he speaks, it seems that his words harden into deep noises. Afterward, he says—he is saying—afterward, I learned to not care so much about the death—only the details. Death is just a transaction. A string of consequences.

  I nod. I am becoming heavier. His words are weighing me down. My body is a rock in this chair.

  Take me, for example, El Padre says, looking at me carefully. If I die, do you know how many deaths will follow? He tells me the number. I do not know whether he is saying it with pride or sorrow or disbelief.

  But part of me is capable of thinking that this is an extraordinary thing. That one life can hold so many others up. That the other lives can be ignorant of this. It reminds me of a game of wooden blocks I used to play with my parents, where the push of a single piece could bring the whole tower crashing down.

  El Padre watches me and I watch him back, and when the realization comes through the hot swamp of my mind it comes with no satisfaction. You are no Hernando, a voice says in my head, and at that moment I know it to be true. Then another voice says, You are no El Padre. And as it speaks I watch him—this man sitting in front of me with a head of gleaming cornrows, in this warm atrium of candles—I watch him, in control, alive, and absolutely alone in a power he cannot share.

  I understand, I say.

  You have been a good soldado, he repeats. He takes a deep breath. You understand that you cannot continue in your job, however?

  Yes.

  And I will require the weapons back.

  Of course.

  I will send Damita to tell your friend who waits in the alley. She knows where they are?

  I pause. Hail Mary. Then I say, I must tell my friend myself or she will not go.

  He watches me impassively.

  The weapons are at our mocó, I add.

  He thinks, and then nods. Then go with Damita, he says. To the alley—no farther. And come back afterward for a drink.

  In the front yard outside, before we reach the gate, Damita says, He likes you.

  I laugh shortly, the first time tonight. There is something about the coolness of the air that brings me back closer to myself. It is almost over, I tell myself.

  No, he does, she says. I can tell. He always acts that way, the first time. She gives me a sidelong look. Her face is the kind they put on the cover of shiny magazines. The first time I met him, ay! I heard the same speech! If two women fight, I shave their heads, she mimics, then laughs, a quick darting laugh that makes me imagine sparks from a fire racing into a night sky.

  She stops at the gate to have a cigarette with one of the guards. Stand where I can see you, she says, waving to me like a schoolgirl stepping down from a bus.

  At first I cannot find Claudia, then I hear her harsh whisper from the opposite alley.

  Just come out, I say. They know you’re here.

  She comes as far as the corner, her forehead and kneecaps glowing white under the streetlights, and I walk to meet her there. She frowns—it makes her face look angry.

  He is letting you go?

  I don’t know, I say.

  She begins to cry—and I realize it is the first time I have ever seen her cry. Not even after her mother tried to kill herself did I see Claudia’s face like this. It is all soft.

  Hernando is dead, I say. I have to force myself to say it rather than ask it.

  I know.

  Hearing her say it severs something deep within me. For a moment it is as though I have lost contact with myself. I force myself to concentrate. In that case, I say, tell Luis I thank him. For organizing the business today.

  She nods.

  He knew that you would want revenge, she says. But he did not want to tell you about Hernando’s death, if you were in hiding, and did not already know, and there was no need…

  She trails off, seeing where that leads. Everyone knew, I think again. But I do not feel bitter at all.

  El Padre knows you are here, I repeat. He wants you to go to our mocó and bring back the guns.

  I do not want to look at her crying face. I look into the half dark behind her, make out the contours of a ditch, the banks of rubbish packed hard as rock. I think I see the face of a child appear behind a candle, and then disappear. The sky feels like it is sinking closer and closer to earth.

  My mother, I say.

  Don’t worry about that, she says. I will take her away.

  A strange look crosses her face and her narrow shoulders lurch toward me. Her teeth scrape across my lips. I feel embarrassed. I try to kiss her back but I have difficulty controlling my mouth. Her lips are on my ear. She is saying something. She is saying something but I cannot hear her, and when I try to listen I cannot remember what her voice sounds like. I am pulled back into myself.

  She is saying, Take it. She presses it into my hand, guides it into my pocket. It is hard and cold and shaped like an apple. It is one of Pedro’s grenades. I do not dare to look down.

  How do you feel? she asks me for the second time tonight. She asks it with a small laugh.

  I do not know what to say. Can I say, My body feels like it is all water? Can I say, Perhaps, perhaps I am glad?

  The revenge killings will not finish for a few weeks, I say.

  She nods again. You are scared.

  Her left hand is still wrapped around mine and it is trembling. This, I think, from Claudia, who has the steadiest hands I know. I look at her and then, in her eyes, I see a window, framed by her mother’s body, and I find myself thinking about how easy it seemed for her mother to jump to a death she did not want that badly.

  Yes, I lie to her. Yes, I am scared.

  I look back toward the house and it is clear from Damita’s posture that she has finished her cigarette, is bored with the guards, is cold and is waiting for me. The house, with its candle-lights, looks somehow sacred under the gray clouds, and the moon, which has come out beneath them, looks like a huge yellow magnet.

  My fingers rub against the cold metal in my pocket. I have to go, I say.

  Claudia embraces me again, her fingertips digging into the gaps between my back ribs. She is breathing shallowly now. Tell him you will never come back. Tell him he can trust you. She says it quietly but there is enormous pressure behind her words.

  Yes, I say. But first you must go get the guns.

  She will not let go of me.

  I hate this place, she says, wiping her eyes on my shoulder. We will leave together. Your mother too.

  My mother, I say.

  I look up at the house, shimmering high on the black hill before us. Claudia clings to me. Her body is warmer than usual. From the gate, Damita looks in our direction and I step back, away from Claudia, seeing her now as though from a growing distance. She is small, and soft
, and alone, and I force myself to look away from her.

  You must get the guns, I say.

  He will let you go.

  She has gathered her voice with effort. I smile into the night.

  He will let me go, I say after her.

  At the front door Damita loops her arm around my elbow and leads me inside. This time the guards do not search me. As we walk up the stairs, Damita’s hip bumps against mine and her bare stomach shifts and lengthens in the angled light. El Padre is behind the bay windows, standing outside on the balcony. He gestures for me to join him.

  From the balcony, the brightness of the candlelit house makes the hillside seem even blacker. We stand there in silence—El Padre and I, and a guard motionless against the far railing. As my eyes adjust, I can make out hazy lagoons of light in the distance.

  El Padre makes a quick gesture with one hand. I spin around: another guard holding a submachine gun is jogging toward me. I fumble against the leathery skin of the grenade in my pocket and maneuver it between my fingers: the pin.

  Better than basuco, says El Padre. He continues to look out over the hill. It is only when the guard is next to me that I realize he is holding out a spliff. El Padre takes it from him, takes a long drag, then holds it out to me.

  I nod—I am unable to speak—and unclench my fingers from the pin of the grenade. When I draw in the smoke it rushes deeper and deeper, without seeming to stop, into the cavities of my body.

  Much cleaner, no?

  He smiles now: a charming host. In the deflected light, I notice for the first time a flabbiness in his cheeks. His braided hair looks wet. We stand on the balcony and look out over the blacked-out barrio. There are valleys out there, and swells, and rises, all unseen by our eyes. The night air gives off traces of wood smoke, sewage. In the immediate candlelight, the glass on top of the walls glimmers hints of every color, and it is beautiful. For a moment I imagine the house is a ship floating on the silent ocean, high in the wind. This thought calms me, which is strange, for I have never seen the ocean—and I am reminded of evenings when I have stood in the cobbled yard outside my mother’s back window, watching her asleep with her makeup on, or taking her medicine with aguardiente when she thinks no one sees, or coming out of the glowing bathroom with her hands in her hair, a towel and a quick unthinking motion. It calms me, watching her like this.

  El Padre says something. His words splinter endlessly down the dark well of my thoughts. Vámonos, he is saying. Vámonos, I need something to warm my stomach.

  I look at his smiling face, the black moons of his eyes.

  Come on, he says. I have a special room for drinking. We will wait for your friend there.

  The two guards on the balcony do not move.

  We will toast your farewell, says El Padre. I hear you like to drink. He begins to walk indoors. Where will you go? Have you decided?

  I don’t know, I say. Maybe Cartagena.

  Cartagena, he repeats. Then he beckons, and the two guards fall into line behind me. Cartagena, I think, where Hernando waits for me. Even now, at the last, we are connected. I can feel Claudia’s teeth, her dry lips against my mouth. I rotate the grenade in my pocket—Hail Mary, I think—my palms slippery with sweat—and finally, when my thumb finds traction on the safety lever, I thread my middle finger through the pin and pull it out, hard. It falls free. El Padre looks back at me and smiles.

  So, he asks, have you ever been there?

  Gripping the lever tightly, I follow my benefactor into the house. A third guard opens a door from the main office and goes in ahead. No candlelight shines from inside. El Padre goes next and I go after him, as though deep into the throat of a cave, the two guards unfailingly behind me. The smell of Damita’s perfume is strong in the darkness. Somewhere in front of me, El Padre’s voice asks again about Cartagena, and this time I say, No, and as I say it, my thumb wet and unsteady on the lever, the memory returns to me, the picture as I have imagined it so many times in the past. Luis is sitting on the old colonial wall and looking out toward the ocean. As the sun rises, he says, you can see ten black lines leading into the steel gray water, each line maybe twenty meters apart, and as the water turns orange, then red, you can see that each line is made up of small black shapes and that they are moving away from the water, together, all in harmony, and then as the sun rises higher on your right you can see that each black shape is a man, there are hundreds of them, and they are hauling one enormous fishing net in from the ocean, slowly, step by step.

  ALSO BY

  NAM LE

  THE BOAT

  Stories

  A stunningly inventive, deeply moving fiction debut: the seven stories in Nam Le’s masterful collection take us across the globe, from the slums of Colombia to Iowa City; from the streets of Tehran to a foundering vessel in the South China Sea. Brilliant, daring, and demonstrating a jaw-dropping versatility of voice and point of view, The Boat is an extraordinary work of fiction that guides us to the heart of what it means to be human—and heralds the arrival of a remarkable new writer.

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