The Outcast Son

by Jacobo Priegue

  “Mark, please,” I begged. “Just look at Jaime.”

  He turned his head and saw Jaime hiding behind me. I didn’t know whether it was because of those folks or because he noticed I was scared. Maybe both, as I was myself realising that my voice was trembling and my body language had switched from disturbed to desperate.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he finally said, and we just walked away.

  At the entrance, a number of cars and buses and taxis infested the road. We needed to get to a hotel in the city centre, so we asked the first driver who assaulted us for the price, which was reasonable enough. I was still distressed and unsettled and looking in all directions to make sure those strange four weren’t around. We were about to load our suitcases and bags in the car when we heard him.

  “Wait!” a man’s voice said in the distance. He seemed to be far away, since we couldn’t see him. We weren’t even sure he was talking to us.

  “Wait!” he said again, this time a little closer. A blond mop came out of the sea of heads, quickly heading towards us.

  “Just in time!” Mark sighed. Patrick was running, struggling to get to us before we put our bags in the porter.

  “Sorry, man!” Patrick said, shaking hands with Mark.

  The taxi driver wasn’t very pleased with the situation. He was upset at the beginning, then angry, and then he tried to charge us for having kept him stopped and preventing him from approaching other customers. Patrick looked at him and whispered something in his ear, and that was enough for him to back off, gabbling something and looking at us with disdain. He wasn’t impressed, but he walked away and gave up demanding our money.

  “What happened, mate? Why weren’t you waiting for us at the gates?” Mark asked after having introduced us.

  “You wouldn’t believe it,” Patrick said. He was sweating and his hands shaking. Looking around as I was minutes earlier. Scanning the multitude with attention. Every face, every sudden move and every voice made him jump like a scared cat.

  “We would believe anything. Trust me,” Mark said.

  We walked for half a mile. Patrick’s car was a beautiful crossover, and it had plenty of space for all of us and our luggage. I sat next to Jaime in the backseat. He was very quiet. Excited and scared at the same time. We all were having an odd feeling, and it didn’t get any better when Patrick refused to tell us the reason he was late in front of Jaime.

  “I don’t want the boy to hear it,” he said.

  We listened to his story later on, while Jaime slept in his bed at the hotel.

  “I leave my hotel and head to the airport. As you know, it’s in the suburbs of the city, but hardly anything ever happens, so I get into my car unconcerned. I’m driving through a street. And it’s empty but for the car I have in front of me. Before I have time to react, the car stops. Right there, in the middle of the street. Blocking my way. So I have to brake as well. I’ve got this feeling, like something bad is going to happen, so I look behind to see if I can move back. But I can’t. A second car is there. It’s exactly the same make, same model and same colour.

  “This bad feeling grows. Something’s not okay. I don’t dare honk. I freeze. What can I do? My hands are still on the wheel, and I don’t look anywhere but to the front, always to the front. Two or three minutes pass, and two men get off the car ahead. At this point, I’m shitting myself, like ‘what the hell?’ but I don’t do anything. They wear jeans and black leather coats and sunglasses.

  “They look at me and approach my car. I check the rear mirror. Too scared to turn my head. Another two men, wearing exactly the same clothes, have left their car and walk in my direction as well. I can’t move. I panic. And I’m one of those people who freeze when panicking. I don’t understand anything, but I think it’s the end: the wrong place at the wrong time, as they say.

  “Without saying a word, one of the men opens the door and takes me out of my car. He’s strong, and I mean crazy strong. He forces me into the back seat of the front car, and I don’t resist him. They’re four big guys, and at this moment I feel small as a child. One them sits at the wheel in my car, and all three cars move at once. Nobody says a word, and I don’t want to ask.

  “They take me to a dodgy neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city. The four men walk with me. Two on my left and two on my right. I don’t dare look at them or look back or around to examine the place. I just want everything to be over. But I do see the building in front of us. It’s an old warehouse, one I haven’t seen before. Some of the glasses are broken, and a layer of white paint is falling down and letting the naked cement out. I notice part of the ceiling has collapsed and allows the daylight through. The gates are open. A huge double door is the only thing that seems to have been looked after. It’s heavy wood reinforced with a layer of pure steel. It doesn’t match with the rest of the building, but it tells me they’re making use of the warehouse, and I don’t want to find out what for.

  “As I walk through them, I see a fifth man, a youngster in his mid-twenties. He is playing with a knife. Smiling. He throws the blade in the air and then grabs it again by its handle. ‘We’ve got a message for your friend.’ ‘What friend?’ I ask, regretting my question before I can finish, as I feel a fist buried in my stomach and fall on to the floor. I can’t breathe. Somebody has smashed my diaphragm, and I’m struggling to recover, fighting for an ounce of fresh air. While I writhe in pain, I realise one of the men at my right has delivered the blow. He keeps a fighting posture, ready to beat the hell out of me if I dare stand up or speak again without permission. At this point, I’m sure the fifth man is the boss.

  “‘I didn’t expect you were the chatty type,’ he says with a sarcastic smile. He thinks he’s funny, the son of a bitch. ‘Now you will listen.’ My question wasn’t mean to be disrespectful. It was an automatic response. I don’t know if I’ve been taken there by mistake. I don’t know who these people are or what they’re talking about. However, after receiving the punch, my mind is clearer. It’s not a mistake. They know who I am. And the only people I intended to meet with is you guys. ‘This message is only for the man’s ears,’ he carries on. ‘The woman and the boy can’t know.’”

  Patrick looked at me. I couldn’t believe he was hoping I’d leave without knowing the whole story.

  “What?” I said.

  “I’m sorry, Laura,” he said, “but only Mark can hear this.”

  Patrick put his face down, almost ashamed. At that moment, I thought he felt bad for not being able to tell me the whole story, but now I know it was just plain embarrassment. That and my thundery stare. I was about to make a scene. I knew it, Mark knew it and Patrick was afraid so. But when I stood up, knocking my chair down to the floor, Mark held my hand smoothly.

  “It’s all right, sweetheart. I’ve got this.”

  His voice was so warm and calm. He put me at ease. I trusted him. I believed he’d look after me. After Jaime. He wouldn’t let anything bad happen to us. He loved us, after all. Still a bit annoyed with Patrick, I went to Jaime’s room, lay down on the bed, and kissed his forehead without waking him up and fell asleep.

  When I opened my eyes on the next day, Jaime wasn’t in bed. A cold lightning bolt came down from my brain to my stomach. The room was a dungeon. Its walls were oppressing me. Everything in there looked hostile to me before the thought of my boy being taken from my arms. I sprang from the bed and ran. I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know if Mark had spent the night with Jaime and me or with Patrick or somewhere else. I ran to his friend’s room and knocked on the door as if I wanted to take it down. After two minutes that felt like time itself had collapsed or stopped forever, Mark opened the door.

  “Where is he?” I shouted, waking up all the hotel guests.

  “Calm down, Laura!” Mark said. “Jaime is here with us.”

  “Let me see him! Let me see him!” I felt I wasn’t in control. I had lost my mind. I had only one target, one objective, and nothing else mattered. I broke into the room
and scanned it in search of Jaime. He was sitting at a table, doodling on a piece of paper. I ran to him and hugged him and kissed him and lifted his entire weight with my weakened arms to hold him in my lapel.

  “You are hysterical, Laura,” Mark said. “I know yesterday was upsetting, but you need to take it easy or you’ll lose your mind.”

  “Don’t dare talk to me like that! You don’t call me that! You took Jaime from my side! And you didn’t tell me anything!” My words struggled to find their way out. My brain was a computer processor spinning too quickly and dealing with infinite thoughts and possible outcomes, and my mouth couldn’t cope with it, so I guess I did look like a neurotic.

  “Just calm down, Laura,” Mark said.

  “Would you be calm if the same happened to you? Put yourself in my boots for once! What if I took the boy from you without saying a word? What if I didn’t understand why you are upset and scared and afraid after I did? What if, on top of that, I said you’re hysterical?” Now I felt I had recovered my speech, and I wouldn’t let him put me down so easily. I absolutely loved him, but when he didn’t understand me or support me, or when he argued with me for no reason, he felt like an enemy to me, and all my love washed away before his menacing eyes, fighting for being right and belittling me.

  “I’m sorry, Laura. I didn’t mean to scare you,” he finally said. “And I didn’t mean you were hysterical.”

  “Well, that’s exactly what you said, you moron!” I was a little calmer and doing my best for my eyes to look forgiving.

  I didn’t even realise Patrick was there, witnessing the whole scene from a chair next to the bed. I didn’t pay attention to him. I didn’t care. He was the one who scared me the night before, to start with, and he had told me the complete story but the very end, the most important part, the key to understanding what was going on. Or so it seemed.

  Sympathetic as I was, I couldn’t help holding a certain bitterness towards him. He had gone through a lot, but we were being hunted by a crew of lunatics. And I still had very fresh on my mind that bunch of psychos pointing at us at the airport and mumbling and plotting against us.

  Chapter 15

  Cusco

  The dawn took us to the airport again. We needed to fly to Alejandro Velasco Astete International Airport in Cusco. This was the only purpose of our trip. Despite the events that had taken place the day before, everything was going as planned: Jaime was safe, Mark was confident everything was going to be okay, and even Patrick seemed quite calmed considering what had happened to him the day before.

  I was the only one who wouldn’t stay still for a minute. I had to concentrate very hard to stop the tremble in my hands. My eyes moved around nervously, expecting to see those four again, staring at us from the same corner of the airport, waiting to finish whatever business they had with us. I was picturing and trying to anticipate the outcomes of a second encounter with those people. They looked unpredictable, impulsive and dangerous. They looked above all troubled, escaped from a horror film.

  It was very difficult for me to think of a reason for anybody to be after us. We were strangers in a foreign country. Nobody knew us, except perhaps for the people we met when I first visited Peru, and after so many years since I’d appeared on the front page of the newspapers, the only high-profile person left among us was Mark. He was a successful businessman, although I wouldn’t say he reached the status of famous, particularly in an unfamiliar city in a foreign country and on another continent.

  I was so swept away in my own thoughts that I didn’t hear a word of Mark and Patrick’s conversation, and my husband had to repeat my name several times for me to come back to the here and now.

  “Oh, sorry. I wasn’t listening.”

  “I was telling Patrick that we want to visit Machu Picchu.”

  “Yeah,” I said, although this was the last thing I was thinking about. “I guess we can.”

  It still made sense. Mark had been there before, but when we went to Cusco for the first time, he couldn’t take me to enjoy the remains of the Incan city. We had wanted to go on one of the last days of our trip, but then I found Jaime, and the many visits to the hospital, council and uncountable administration offices made us postpone our adventure. Our priority back then was to adopt Jaime, and it wasn’t as straightforward as we would’ve liked, so every plan, trip and activity had to be cancelled. But now we had the time. A couple of walks in Cusco and the market where I had found Jaime, and then days and days to enjoy the nature, the culture and the myth hidden in the mountains of Peru.

  Mark’s good mood and his relationship with Patrick made me suspicious about our guide. I realised how little I knew about him. “He’s an old friend of mine. He works for our branch in Pisco and has helped me a few times when I stayed there.” That was all the information I had until I finally met him, but with the rush and the incident he had gone through and his story, I hadn’t had the chance to learn anything new. He was just there, talking to my husband, bragging about his escapades and conquests and whispering about the women he had met.

  When he talked to me, he wouldn’t look me in the eyes. He’d avoid any conversation with me at all, and he’d always bow his head or look aside or at Mark, almost seeking his approval. Jaime seemed to feel comfortable with him, though. He liked him. And it was kind of nice to see my shy one smiling and laughing and talking to somebody, even if it was this obscure new friend of ours.

  We arrived at the airport at 8 am. I looked around. Many times. Scanning every corner of the terminal. Again, I had the feeling I was the only one worried at all, as if that scene with the disturbing family of four had never happened. Not even Jaime seemed to remember, and they weren’t there anyway to confirm I wasn’t hallucinating the day before, when their very sight made me want to take my boy and run away, back to England, back to anywhere but near them. It was a relief not to have to see their faces again.

  We crossed the checkpoint and waited until one of the screens showed our boarding gate. Then we walked through a wide corridor, went up and down some escalators, entered our plane to Cusco and enjoyed a peaceful and oddly relaxing journey amongst the mighty peaks of the Andes.

  The shadow of our plane moved fast and intermittently along the Huatanay river banks, reshaping itself in capricious silhouettes of imaginary animals and forgotten dark terrors. We were already there, overflying an uneven grill of red roofs that stained the natural landscape down the valley and offered a combination of pure, unspoiled mountains and unruly buildings erected throughout the centuries.

  The first time I was there, it felt like pure chance. But now, amidst the lazy clouds of the Andes, Cusco seemed to be calling my name like an ancient Incan mermaid. It was as I remembered. An arid grid of brown architecture broken in two halves by the enormous landing strip of Alejandro Velasco Astete International Airport. The city itself was a long and narrow band of houses, only a reminiscence of what many say was the original puma contour the Incan had chosen to furnish with their homes and temples.

  We arrived in Cusco at 11 am. The city felt hot under the midday sun, relieved with difficulty by a bunch of vague clouds that projected their dim shade over us. We left the terminal and took a taxi. It looked a bit expensive, but we weren’t in the mood for bargaining. Not even Patrick. It wasn’t a long ride, but our driver was resolved to practise his English with us as much as our patience allowed it. It was sort of fun at the beginning. We could understand almost everything he said, and he understood me and my Spanish accent without any problem. But Patrick and Mark had to say everything twice or three times for him to get it.

  He reminded me of myself and my first years in England. I remembered how much I used to hate when somebody repeated the same thing, in the exact same words, but louder or even shouting, as if my problem were in my ear and not in my lack of vocabulary. It was equally annoying when I tried my best to find the correct words, obviously taking my time, and the person I was talking to finished my sentences. And finally, the third type
: the switcher. This is a person who can speak some Spanish and decides to switch in the middle of the conversation, crushing your self-esteem and every hope of being perceived as a competent speaker.

  This third type was the most annoying one, but now I understand their point. Particularly those of them who only wanted to practice and saw in me a chance to improve their skills. That wasn’t Patrick. Patrick would go through all three stages in scarcely ten minutes. He raised his voice using the same words – how on Earth would that guy, probably a second-year student of English, know the meaning of “gentrification”? He finished his sentences as if he were running out of time. Or patience. Or neurons. And he finally switched to Spanish to speed up the conversation. He was a jerk. I would’ve felt sorry for the taxi driver if I hadn’t felt relieved when he stopped speaking, but it wasn’t nice.

  We arrived at the centre of Cusco drained by the conversation. Our hotel was at Portal Mantas Street, next to the historic Plaza de Armas, and from our window we could see the corner where the colonial church had been constructed. The many rainbow flags didn’t surprise me this time, but I felt ridiculous and embarrassed at the memory of having asked if a Gay Pride Parade was taking place in the city when I first visited it. Now it’s something I can laugh at, but sadly, like the old building blocks, a few people remained who would still get offended when somebody confused the flag of their city and the LGBT symbol.

  I had just unpacked when I decided to have a look out the window to enjoy the views of the square. I saw them. A burning flash blinded me. I couldn’t shout. My lungs wouldn’t obey. My mouth was full of cold steel. A blinding stream of electricity covered my skin like a painful blanket. They weren’t even looking at me. But they were there. Up to something. Laughing and joking and waiting for something or somebody. They’re waiting for you, Laura. You and the kid, said a creepy voice in my brain. The world was spinning around me, and the colours of the flags mixed with the grey and brown of the buildings. All confused by pain. All threatening my life and my baby’s life and my dreams of everlasting happiness. My vision gradually shut down. I couldn’t distinguish shapes or colours anymore, only shiny dots rushing around and growing bigger. My legs weren’t mine. They seemed lost in an infinite space where my command couldn’t reach. I collapsed.