by Tom Epperson
Daniel was looking up, and Roberto’s gaze followed his. Armed men in black masks were on the rooftops watching them . . . hopping from roof to roof as they followed them . . .
“Roberto?”
An elderly man with a neatly trimmed white beard is peering at him from under an umbrella. It’s Professor Gaviria, one of his favorite teachers at the university. He hasn’t seen him in years. Roberto smiles and stops and talks to him in the rain. As above him he hears the birds . . .
* * *
“Ismenia! Ismenia! Bring Roberto some aguardiente!”
“I don’t really want any, Grandma.”
“It’s Sunday, and it’s raining, and my grandson is going away,” his grandmother says firmly. “We are going to drink aguardiente.”
As it turned out, he didn’t have to break the news to her. His father came by this morning and did it for him. Ismenia comes in from the kitchen with two cups of the clear liquor, made from sugarcane and flavored with anise. Roberto can’t stand the stuff, but he’s always getting stuck drinking it when he goes to his grandmother’s.
He’s sitting with her on an overstuffed purple sofa; Ismenia sets the cups down on the coffee table in front of them. She is a cheerful young black woman with a gold ring in her left nostril.
“When are you going to get rid of that hideous ring?” his grandmother says. “Why would you purposely mar such a pretty face?”
Ismenia giggles. “But it’s the style, the boys like it.”
“Oh, that’s a good reason, the boys like it,” grumbles his grandmother, and then she picks up her cup. “Let’s drink to your safe journey, Roberto.”
“And to your health, Grandma.”
He clinks cups with her and then takes the smallest sip possible.
She’s living on the second floor of a two-hundred-year-old house that’s been divided into apartments. When his grandfather died seven years ago, she sold their house and moved here. She had lived in the Montería district when she was young, and she says this is where she wants to finish out her life.
She is thin and frail. She has sparse white hair cut in a boyish way. She’s wearing a light-blue blouse and white pants and shoes covered with flowers and butterflies. But despite the shoes, she is not at all sentimental, and is one of the strongest people he’s ever met. Still faintly visible in the wrinkles of her face is a long scar running diagonally across her forehead. It’s a souvenir of the massacre that took place on the steps of the National Cathedral during the Killing Time. She and dozens of other students were chanting socialist slogans and shaking their fists in the air when the Army opened fire. Students were screaming and falling and many were crawling across the steps trying to find cover behind the stone columns of the cathedral as bullets hit around them and chips from the marble steps flew through the air, but his grandmother ran. She ran as fast as she could and leapt over the bodies of her friends and she felt bullets plucking at her clothes but somehow none touched her. She ran off the steps and ducked down behind a food vendor’s cart; she could smell the meat cooking on the grill, but the vendor himself had wisely taken off. She stayed crouched there and listened to the gunfire and the moans of the wounded, and then she saw the green pants of a soldier tucked into his shiny black boots. She looked up. He was looking down at her. Young. Surprised-looking. And then he pointed his rifle at her head. She had time only to suck her breath in sharply then he pulled the trigger. But nothing happened, either he was out of ammunition or the rifle had jammed. But her reprieve was brief as he turned the gun around and cracked her in the forehead with the butt.
All became silent . . . she was drifting down an endless river in an eternal dusk . . . the water was warm and she couldn’t feel her body . . . she was staring at a single star low in the sky . . . and then she woke up. To pain in her head, to a rumbling, rolling motion, to the smells of piss and shit and blood, to a smothering and a crushing, and to a blackness she thought was blindness. She struggled upward for air, pushing her way through what were unmistakably human beings. And then she could breathe again. And then she clawed at her eyes and she could see again; the soldier’s rifle butt had split her forehead open and her eyes had been covered with blood.
She was in the back of a van moving down a street. By mistake she had been put in with the dead. The corpses were both male and female. In the tangle of bloody limbs it was hard to tell how many there were. Maybe twelve or fourteen. Her friend Nora was lying facedown, but she recognized her by her dress—white with big black polka dots, which everyone had been teasing her about a few hours before. Nora had never had any sense of fashion. She saw her friend Rafael in a corner of the van. His upper body and his head were propped up by other bodies. One eye was open and appeared to be looking at her; the other was a gruesome empty hole. He was not a handsome guy, he had a scrawny body and a narrow, beakish face, but that didn’t stop the girls from liking him. He was always joking and he would make them laugh until they slept with him. Not her though. She had not yet slept with anybody. She was a budding revolutionary, but she was also still a good Catholic girl.
Wondering if it was all just a nightmare, she began to scream. She screamed until she screamed the van to a stop. She heard the door at the end of the van opening and then she saw the civilian driver and a soldier peering in. They were clearly spooked by the sight of a live girl covered with blood and screaming her head off in the middle of all the dead bodies.
His grandmother was lucky. She did not disappear into the twisting dark bowels of the state’s security apparatus never to be heard from again. Her father’s brother, it so happened, was a prominent member of the government, the deputy minister of finance. He interceded for his wayward niece, and after a few days, and the payment of an enormous bribe to the head of the Army, the notorious General Hurtado, she was released—on condition that she leave the country.
She went to New York. She enrolled at Columbia University and began working on a graduate degree in sociology. She never intended not to return. She also never intended to give up trying to make her country a better place for its people. But how could she do both? At least without winding up once more in a pile of corpses?
The Killing Time ended and was replaced with just another killing time. She got her PhD and then came home. She looked around for something to do. Not something that would shake the world but that would just make it slightly better. She befriended a twelve-year-old girl and her eight-year-old brother she found living on the street near her apartment. The girl was prostituting herself to take care of her brother. She would take men to what was called Carton City, which was a weedy vacant lot where prostitutes had sex with their clients on flattened cardboard boxes. His grandmother got them off the streets and into a Catholic orphanage, but now that she was aware of them she started seeing homeless children everywhere and what could be done about them?
She realized she needed to create her own institution for homeless children and set about looking for a location for it. Every place she saw was too small, too costly, too this or that, but then a friend told her about an abandoned military base not too far outside the city that might be suitable. She drove out to take a look. It had once been the headquarters for the Army’s cavalry unit, but there wasn’t much use in modern warfare for men armed with swords who would jump on their horses and charge the enemy. There were office buildings and stables and barracks, set amid many hectares of beautiful countryside. A sparkling steam ran through it all and his grandmother looked at it and imagined children swimming in it and knew she had to have this place.
She found out the Army still owned it. Rather than try to navigate the labyrinth of military bureaucracy in an attempt to find someone who could say yes or no, she thought it best to start at the top.
For her meeting with General Hurtado, she put on her sleekest skirt, her sheerest nylons; she had heard Hurtado had an eye for the ladies. It was unpleasant to make herself alluring to the man whose men had murdered her friends, but she had decided th
at nothing mattered except the ultimate goal. If Nora and Rafael could give up their lives, she could certainly give up such a petty thing as her pride.
His grandmother had brought her connections to bear in getting the meeting, and the general, perhaps resenting that, received her coolly. He was a small man with oily dark hair; his eyes never left her face as he listened in stony silence to her enthusiastically outlining her plans. She told him she knew he had a big family and asked him how he would feel if one of his little grandsons somehow wound up on the street, would he not move heaven and earth to help him? And discreetly leaving unmentioned all the atrocities the Army had been accused of committing during the Killing Time, she said what better way to get good publicity than to turn some dilapidated old Army buildings into a bright little paradise filled with laughing innocent kids?
When she was done, General Hurtado maintained his silence; then she saw his gaze shift just a little, from her eyes to her forehead, and the scar that ran across it. He asked her if she was still a Marxist.
She said no, and she didn’t think she ever had been really, she had just been naïve and confused, it was a long time ago. A few years could seem like a long time only to someone very young, the general replied. She told him to think back to when he was very young, a man such as himself must have been filled with a nearly uncontrollable vigor and energy that occasionally got him into a lot of trouble. This caused the general to smile a little, and then she noticed him glance at her legs and she knew she had him.
So she had secured her location, but she still needed to raise a great deal of money to bring her plans to fruition. She began to make the rounds of the city’s rich, and this is what led indirectly to Roberto’s own existence. She showed up for a meeting with a wealthy manufacturer, but he was very busy that morning and passed her along to his son, who had just recently begun to work in the business. He was a nice-looking but rather shy young man with a bit of a stutter. He and Roberto’s grandmother swiftly fell in love, and in the course of time, he became Roberto’s grandfather.
His grandmother ran the Carlota Home for Needy Children (as it was called—named after General Hurtado’s late beloved mother) for over forty years, until she retired. It helped thousands of children and is still the foremost institution of its kind in the country.
His grandmother complains she is cold, and Ismenia comes swooping in with a black mantilla that she drapes over her shoulders. His grandmother looks critically at her nose ring, as if it’s the first time she’s ever seen it.
“Why don’t you get rid of that thing?” she says. “You look like an Indian in the jungle!”
Ismenia laughs and looks at Roberto. “She tells me to get rid of it twenty times a day!”
“Grandma, leave Ismenia alone.”
“But do you think it looks good?” his grandmother says.
“Yes, I do, but that’s not the point. It’s what Ismenia thinks that counts.”
His grandmother snorts and shakes her head, dismissing the matter for the moment.
Last year, she had ovarian cancer. She was operated on and received chemotherapy. She responded well to the treatments, but Roberto’s father has told him that the prognosis is not good, that he expects the cancer to come back and kill her. Roberto will be very sad when that happens. She’s the person whose approval means the most to him. More so even than his father’s, because from the time he was a child, she has seemed to understand in some uncanny way everything about him. She’s told him she knows he won’t believe her but she’s convinced there’s some deep soul-to-soul connection between them, a connection that probably predates the birth of either of them. She’s right, he doesn’t believe her, but he has come here today hoping to hear she approves of his leaving the country. After all, when she was young, she did the same thing and for the same reason.
She drinks some more aguardiente, then clutches the mantilla more closely around her.
“Are you still cold, Grandma?”
“No. Are you?”
“I wasn’t cold to begin with.”
She looks vaguely out the window at a rooftop glistening with rain.
“The country was so much colder when I was young. All the snow is melting off the high mountains.”
Ismenia brings in a plate of bread and hard cheese to go with the odious aguardiente.
“It was just on the TV,” she says excitedly in her high-pitched childish voice, “Mario Garro is running for mayor!”
There will be a special election soon to replace the city’s recently disgraced and jailed mayor. Mario Garro is the star anchorman of the country’s number one TV station. He’s long been hinting he has political ambitions; Gloria Varela recently wrote a column about it. He has a deep voice that is sweet to the ear and a big, handsome head that has never had an original thought in it.
“Are you going to vote for him?” asks Roberto.
Ismenia giggles and says, “Why not?”
“What about you, Grandma? Are you going to vote for Mario Garro?”
She looks blank.
“You know, the guy on TV? He’s running for mayor.”
She frowns and shakes her head. “Voting. It’s always like choosing between the plague and cholera.”
He laughs. Before she leaves Ismenia bends down and whispers in his ear, “Get her to eat something, she won’t eat.”
He eats some cheese and bread.
“Mm, this is delicious. You should have some, Grandma.”
“No thank you, darling, I’m not hungry.”
“I’m going to miss you.”
“Why? Am I going someplace?”
“No, Grandma, I am. I’m going to Saint Lucia. We just talked about it.”
“Oh, yes. To see that girl. What’s her name?”
“Caroline. But I’m not going just to see her. I have to leave the country. Because they’ve threatened to kill me. Remember?”
“Of course I remember,” she says peevishly, “I’m not stupid.”
He takes his glasses off, and begins to clean them with a napkin. He’s noticed she’s been having problems with her memory ever since the operation, but it’s never been this bad before.
“Whose hands are those?”
He looks up. She’s staring at his hands as he cleans his glasses.
“They’re my hands, Grandma. Who else’s would they be?”
“But they don’t look like Clemente’s hands.”
“I’m not Clemente. I’m Roberto. Your grandson.”
She looks at him thoughtfully, and nods, as if they’ve been having a serious discussion and he’s just made an excellent point. And then she sighs.
“Poor Ismenia,” she says.
“Why poor Ismenia?”
“She’s losing her mind. She doesn’t know where she is, or what to do.”
* * *
The rain has stopped. He leaves his car where it’s parked and walks down San Francisco Street to Liberty Plaza.
It’s only two blocks from the offices of The Hour. He would often come here to sit on a bench and eat lunch, or just to watch the people and the pigeons and think about things. Four large imposing buildings face in on the plaza: the Capitol Building, where Congress meets to run the country for the benefit of the rich and ruthless, the Ministry of Justice, which is the seat of the Supreme Court and where a generation ago most of the justices died fiery terrible deaths during a guerrilla attack, the Municipal Building, which houses the mayor’s office (temporarily minus its mayor), and the National Cathedral, where his grandmother was almost murdered. In the middle of the plaza is a large bronze statue of a cavalryman on his horse. The cavalryman is holding a flapping flag, and the horse is frozen in mid-leap. This is Colonel Cordoba, the country’s national hero. Every schoolboy can tell you how, in 1883, Colonel Cordoba rode himself and his horse off a cliff to their deaths to keep the country’s flag from falling into the hands of an invading army. It’s a thrilling statue. Cordoba is bent low over his horse’s back, his eyes fixe
d on the valiant void in front of him, while the horse seems just as eager for self-sacrifice and glory as its rider. Colonel Cordoba seems to be the perfect hero for Roberto’s doomed, crazy country.
He walks slowly across the plaza, thinking about his grandmother. The world is slipping from her grasp, just as she is slipping from the grasp of those around her. How can you say a proper good-bye to someone who can’t remember for more than a minute or two that you’re going? He hopes if he ever gets to such a point, someone will take pity on him and put a bullet in his head.
Puddles of rain on the plaza reflect the gray, uneasy sky. He remembers as a child looking down into puddles and imagining jumping in and falling into the sky forever.
A group of soldiers stroll by, casually carrying Israeli assault rifles. One sees soldiers everywhere, it’s like living in an occupied country, but people don’t even notice them, they’re part of the scenery.
A middle-aged couple sit on a bench. The woman is feeding popcorn to the pigeons. The man is reading a tabloid called The Pulse. On the front page is a picture of a TV star whose breasts are barely contained in a tight top under the headline: “VALENTINA: ‘I DON’T REGRET MY BOOB JOB!’” Further down the page is a picture of a worker killed in a grotesque accident at a building site, a piece of rebar sticking out of his neck. The man as he reads is digging vigorously into his right ear with his little finger.
