The Sound of Things Falling

5. What’s There to Live For?

Elaine would remember those last three weeks in Bogotá and in Ricardo Laverde’s company the way one remembers the days of one’s childhood, a cloud of images distorted by emotions, a promiscuous mixture of key dates without a well-established chronology. The return to the routine of classes at the CEUCA — there were very few left now, just a matter of refining certain bits of knowledge or perhaps justifying certain bits of bureaucracy — was broken by the disorder of her encounters with Ricardo, who might perfectly well be waiting for her behind a eucalyptus when she was on her way home or might have slipped a note into her book telling her to meet him at a dingy café at the corner of 17th and 8th. Elaine always showed up for these dates, and in the relative solitude of downtown cafés the two of them cast more or less lascivious glances at each other and then went into a cinema to sit in the back row and touch each other under a long black coat that had belonged to Ricardo’s grandfather, the aviator hero of the war with Peru. Indoors, in the narrow house in Chapinero, in Don Julio and Doña Gloria’s territory, they carried on the fiction that he was the son of the host family and she, the innocent apprentice of the moment; the son’s nocturnal visits to the apprentice carried on as well, of course, with their silent nocturnal orgasms. So they began to live a double life, a life of clandestine lovers who didn’t arouse anyone’s suspicion, a life in which Ricardo Laverde was Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate and Miss Fritts was Mrs Robinson and her daughter at the same time, who was also called Elaine: that must mean something, wasn’t it too much of a coincidence? During those few days in Bogotá, Elaine and Ricardo protested against the Vietnam War whenever a demonstration was called, and also attended parties organized by the American community in Bogotá, social events that seemed arranged deliberately so the volunteers could go back to talking their own language, ask out loud how the Mets or the Vikings were doing or take out a guitar and sing, all together and around a fireplace while passing a joint that was finished in two rounds, Frank Zappa’s song:

What’s there to live for?

Who needs the Peace Corps?

The three weeks ended on 1 November, when, at eight thirty in the morning, a new litter of apprentices swore loyalty to the statutes of the Peace Corps, after more promises and a vague declaration of intentions, and received their official appointment as volunteers. It was a rainy cold morning, and Ricardo was wearing a leather jacket that, upon contact with the rain, began to give off an intense smell. ‘They were all there,’ Elaine wrote to her grandparents. ‘Among those graduating were Dale Cartwright and the son of the Wallaces (the elder one, you remember). Among the audience were the Ambassador’s wife and a tall man in a tie who, I seem to have understood, is an important Democrat from Boston.’ Elaine also mentioned the deputy director of Peace Corps Colombia (his Kissinger glasses, his knitted tie), the directors of the CEUCA and even a bored municipal functionary, but at no point in the letter did Ricardo Laverde appear. Which, seen with years’ worth of distance, is nothing short of ironic, for on that very night, under the pretext of congratulating her and at the same time saying farewell in the name of the whole Laverde family, Ricardo invited her to dinner at the Gato Negro restaurant, and by the light of some precarious candles that threatened to topple into the plates of food, taking advantage of a silence when the string trio finished singing ‘Pueblito Viejo’, knelt in the middle of the aisle where the bow-tied waiters kept walking up and down and in more sentences than strictly necessary asked her to marry him. In a flash, Elaine thought of her grandparents, regretted that they were so far away and that at their age and in their states of health even considering the trip would be impossible, felt the kind of sadness we tolerate because it appears at happy moments and, once the sadness passed, bent down to kiss Ricardo hard. As she did so she inhaled the wet leather smell of his jacket and tasted meunière sauce. ‘Does that mean yes?’ said Ricardo after the kiss, still kneeling and still in the waiters’ way. Elaine burst into tears in reply, but smiling and crying at the same time. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘What a stupid question.’

So Elaine had to delay her departure for La Dorada by fifteen days, and in this cruelly short time organized, with the help of her future mother-in-law (after convincing her that no, she wasn’t pregnant), a small and almost clandestine wedding in San Francisco Church. Elaine had liked this church since the beginning of her life in Bogotá. She liked its thick, damp stone walls, and she also liked going in off the street and coming out onto the avenue, that violent clash of light with darkness and noise with silence. The day before her wedding, Elaine went for a walk through the centre (a reconnaissance mission, Ricardo would say); as she crossed the threshold of the church, she thought of the silence and noise and the darkness and light, and the illuminated altar caught her eye. The place seemed familiar to her that day, not as if she’d been there before, but in a more profound or private way, as if she’d read a description of it in a novel. She stared at the timid flames of the candles, at the weak yellow lamps fastened like torches to the columns. The light of the stained-glass windows lit up two beggars who were sleeping with legs crossed and hands together on top of their bellies like marble tombs of popes. To her right, a life-sized Christ on all fours, as if he were crawling; the day pouring in through the other door struck him full in the face, and the thorns of his crown and the drops of emerald green that the Christ was crying or perspiring glistened in the light. Elaine went on, walked along the left aisle towards the set-in altar at the far end, and then she saw the cage. In it, enclosed like an animal on show, there was a second Christ, with longer hair, yellower skin, darker blood. ‘It’s the best in Bogotá,’ Ricardo had told her once. ‘I swear, Monserrate’s got nothing on this.’ Elaine bent down, read the little plaque: Señor de la agonía. She took two more steps towards the pulpit, found the tin box and another inscription: Deposit your offering here and the image will be illuminated. She put her hand in her pocket, found a coin and lifted it in two fingers, as if it were a host, to let there be light: it was one peso, the coat of arms blackened as if the coin had been through fire. She dropped it into the slot. The Christ figure came to life beneath the brief blast of the spotlights. Elaine felt, or rather knew, that she was going to be happy all her life.

Then came the reception, which Elaine went through in a fog, as if it were all happening to someone else. The Laverde family held it in their house: Doña Gloria explained to Elaine that it had been impossible, at such short notice, to rent the hall of a social club or some other decent place, but Ricardo, who listened to the laborious explanation in silence, nodding, waited until his mother had gone to tell Elaine the truth. ‘They’re fucked for money,’ he said. ‘The Laverdes have pawned their whole lives.’ The revelation shocked Elaine less than she might have expected: a thousand different signals over the last few months had prepared her for it. But she was struck by Ricardo referring to his family in the third person, as if their bankruptcy didn’t affect him. ‘And us?’ asked Elaine. ‘What about us?’ ‘What are we going to do?’ said Elaine. ‘My work doesn’t pay very much.’ Ricardo looked her in the eye, put a hand on her forehead as if she might have a temperature. ‘It’s enough for a little while,’ he said, ‘and then we’ll see. If I were you I wouldn’t worry.’ Elaine thought for a second, and found she wasn’t worried. And she wondered why not. And then she asked him, ‘Why wouldn’t you be worried if you were me?’ ‘Because a pilot like me is never going to be short of work, Elena Fritts. It’s a fact and that’s just how it is.’

Later, when all the guests had gone, Ricardo led her up to the room where they’d slept together for the first time, sat her down on the bed (swept aside the few wedding presents) and then Elaine thought he was going to talk to her about money, that he was going to tell her they couldn’t go anywhere on a honeymoon. He didn’t though. He tied a blindfold over her eyes, a thick cloth that smelled of mothballs that might have been an old scarf, and said, ‘From here on you don’t see anything.’ And so, blindly, Elaine let herself be led downstairs, and blindly heard the family’s goodbyes (she thought Doña Gloria was crying), and blindly went out into the cold night air and got into a car someone else was driving, and thought it was a taxi, and on the way to who knows where asked what all this was and Ricardo told her to be quiet, not to spoil her surprise. Elaine blindly felt the taxi coming to a stop and a window opening and Ricardo identifying himself and being greeted with respect and a big gate opening with a metallic sound. As she got out of the taxi, seconds later, she felt a rough surface under her feet and a gust of cold wind messed up her hair. ‘There are some stairs,’ said Ricardo. ‘Careful, take it slow, we don’t want you falling.’ Ricardo pressed her head as one does to keep someone from banging their head on a low roof, like the police do so their prisoners won’t bang their heads on the doorframes of the patrol cars. Elaine let herself be led, her hand touched something new that soon turned into a seat and she felt something rigid against her knee, and as she sat down an image came into her head, the first clear idea of where she was and what was about to happen. And it was confirmed when Ricardo started to talk to the control tower and the light aircraft began to taxi down the runway, but Ricardo only gave her permission to take off the blindfold later, after take-off, and when she did so Elaine found herself facing the horizon, a world she’d never seen before bathed in a light she’d never seen before, and that same light was bathing Ricardo’s face, whose hands moved over the panel and who looked at instruments (needles that were spinning, coloured lights) she didn’t understand. They were going to the Palanquero base, in Puerto Salgar, a few kilometres from La Dorada: this was his wedding gift to her, these minutes spent on board a borrowed plane, a Cessna Skylark that the groom’s grandfather had obtained in order to impress his bride. Elaine thought it was the best gift imaginable and that no other Peace Corps volunteer had ever arrived at their workplace in a light aircraft. A gust of wind shook them. Then they touched down. This is my new life, thought Elaine. I’ve just landed in my new life.

And it was. The honeymoon blended into the arrival at the permanent site, the first sanctioned shagging blended into the new volunteer’s first missions: the first steps towards extending the sewer system, the first meetings with Acción Comunal. Elaine and Ricardo allowed themselves the luxury, courtesy of her CEUCA class, to spend a couple of nights in a tourist inn in La Dorada, surrounded by families from Bogotá or Antioquia cattle ranchers, and during those days even had time to find a single-storey house at a price that seemed reasonable. The house — a clear improvement, now that they were a married couple, compared to the little room in Caparrapí — was salmon pink and had an overgrown, 9-square-metre patio that nobody had taken any care of for a long time and that Elaine immediately set about salvaging. She discovered that now, in her new life, mornings had taken on a new character, and she started waking up at first light just to feel the freshness of the air before the brutal heat began to devour the day. ‘I wash early in the morning with cold water,’ she wrote to her grandparents, ‘after all my griping about the cold water in Bogotá. We use a hollow gourd called a totuma to shower with. I’m sending a photo.’ In the first days she acquired something that would prove to be essential: a horse to take her to neighbouring villages. He was called Tapahueco, but Elaine found the name so hard to pronounce that she ended up calling him Truman, and he had three speeds: a slow trot, a fast trot and a gallop. ‘For 50 pesos a month,’ Elaine wrote, ‘a campesino looks after him for me and feeds him and brings him to me every morning at eight o’clock. I have blisters on my rear and every muscle in my body aches, but I’m learning to ride better all the time. Truman knows more than I do and is helping to teach me. We understand each other, and that’s what matters. With a horse a person learns to manage time better. I don’t have to depend on anyone and it’s cheaper. I’m not one of the Magnificent Seven, but I haven’t lost my enthusiasm.’

She also spent time making contacts: with the help of her predecessor, a volunteer from Ohio who was on his way home and who Elaine looked down on from the first moment (he had an apostle’s beard, but never took any initiative), she compiled a list of thirty notable locals: there was the priest, the heads of the most influential families, the mayor, the landowners who resided in Bogotá and Medellín, absent powers of a sort who had land but were never on it, and lived off it but never paid the taxes they should have: Elaine complained about this at night, in her matrimonial bed, and then complained that in Colombia all the citizens were political but no politician wanted to do anything for the citizens. Ricardo, who was now acting as if he knew it all, was openly amused and called her ingenuous and naïve and a gullible gringa, and after making fun of her and her pretensions to be a social missionary, a Good Samaritan for the Third World, he’d put on an unbearably paternalistic expression and sing, in a terrible accent, What’s there to live for? Who needs the Peace Corps? And the more annoyed Elaine got — she no longer found the song’s sarcasm amusing — the more enthusiastically he’d sing:

I’m completely stoned,

I’m hippy and I’m trippy,

I’m a gypsy on my own.

‘Go fuck yourself,’ she’d tell him, and he understood perfectly.

A couple of days before Christmas, after a long and frustrating meeting with a local doctor, Elaine arrived home dying for a shower to wash off the dust and sweat, and found they had visitors. The sun was setting and the faint lights of the neighbours’ windows were beginning to come on. She tied Truman to the nearest post and, going through the little garden, in the kitchen door, and while she looked for a Coke in the propane refrigerator the voices reached her ear. Since they came from the living room, and since they were male voices, she supposed that they were some acquaintances who’d shown up to ask the gringa for something. This had already happened on several occasions: Colombians, Elaine complained, thought the Peace Corps’ work was to do anything they couldn’t be bothered to do or found difficult. ‘It’s the colonial mentality,’ she used to say to Ricardo when they talked about the subject. ‘So many years of being used to other people doing things for them can’t be erased just like that.’ Suddenly the idea of having to greet one of these people, the idea of having to go through a series of banalities and ask about their family and children and get out the rum or the beer (because one never knew when that person might be useful in the future, and because in Colombia things didn’t get done through hard work but through real or feigned friendship), made her feel infinitely tired. But then she heard an accent in one of the voices, a vague tone that sounded familiar, and when she leaned round the corner, still unseen, she recognized first Mike Barbieri and then, almost automatically, Carlos, the harelipped man who’d helped them so much in Caparrapí. Then the men must have heard her or sensed her presence, because all three turned their heads at the same time.

‘Oh, finally,’ said Ricardo. ‘Come in, come in, don’t just stand there. These people are here to see you.’

A long time later, remembering that day, Elaine still marvelled at the certainty with which she knew, without any proof or reason to suspect, that Ricardo had lied to her. No, they hadn’t come to see her: Elaine knew it the moment the words were out of his mouth. It was a shiver, an uncomfortable feeling as she shook Carlos’s hand while Carlos didn’t meet her gaze, a certain anxiousness or mistrust at greeting Mike Barbieri in Spanish, asking him how he was, how things were going, why he hadn’t been at the last departmental meeting. Ricardo was sitting in a wicker rocking chair they’d got for a good price at a handicrafts market; the two guests, on wooden stools. In the centre, on the glass top of the table, were some papers that Ricardo snatched up, but on which Elaine managed to see a disorganized drawing, a sort of big ectoplasm in the shape of the American continent, or the shape of the American continent drawn by a child. ‘Hi. What’s up?’ asked Elaine.

‘Mike’s coming to spend Christmas with us,’ said Ricardo.

‘If you don’t mind,’ said Mike.

‘No, of course not,’ said Elaine. ‘And are you coming on your own?’

‘Yeah, just me,’ said Mike. ‘With the two of you, who else could I need?’

Then Carlos stood up, offered Elaine his seat and mumbled something that might or might not have been goodbye, and, raising a fat-fingered hand, began to walk towards the door. A big sweat stain ran down his back. Elaine looked him up and down and noticed that he’d missed a belt loop of his well-pressed trousers and the noise his sandals made and the grey colour of the skin on his heels. Mike Barbieri stayed a while longer, long enough to drink two rum and Cokes and to tell them that a volunteer from Sacramento had come to spend Thanksgiving with him, and showed him how to call the United States with a ham radio. It was magic, pure magic. You had to find a radio buff here and another one in the United States, friendly people willing to lend their radio set and telephone to make the connection, and that way you could talk to your family back home without paying a cent, but it was completely legal, not fraudulent at all, or maybe a little, but who cares: he had talked to his younger sister, to a friend he owed some money and even with an ex-girlfriend from university days, who once threw him out of her life and who now, with time and distance, had forgiven him his worst sins. And all completely free, wasn’t it amazing?

Mike Barbieri spent Christmas Eve with them, and Christmas Day as well, and the rest of the week as well, and New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day too, and on 2 January he said goodbye as if he were saying goodbye to his family, with tears in his eyes and whole sentences devoted to thanking them for their hospitality, company, affection and the rum and Cokes. They were long days for Elaine, who couldn’t manage to get excited by the holidays in the absence of candy canes and stockings hung by the fireplace and still couldn’t quite understand at what moment this disoriented gringo had settled in with them. But Ricardo seemed to have a marvellous time: ‘He’s the brother I never had,’ he’d say, hugging him. In the evenings, after a couple of drinks, Mike Barbieri took out the weed and rolled a joint, Ricardo would turn on the fan and the three of them would start talking politics, about Nixon and Rojas Pinilla and Misael Pastrana and Edward Kennedy, whose car went off the bridge and into the water, and about Mary Jo Kopechne, the poor girl who was with him and who drowned. Finally Elaine, exhausted, would go to bed. For her, as for the campesinos in her zone, the last week of the year was not a holiday, and she still had to leave the house as early as she could to get to her appointments. When she came home in the evening, dirty and frustrated by the lack of progress and with her calves aching from the hours spent on top of Truman, Ricardo and Mike were waiting for her with a meal almost ready. And after dinner, the same routine: windows wide open, rum, marijuana, Nixon, Rojas Pinilla, the Sea of Tranquillity and how it would change the world, the death of Ho Chi Minh and how it would change the war.

The first Monday of 1970 — a dry, tough, hot day, a day of so much light that the heavens seemed white instead of blue — Elaine rode off on Truman in the direction of Guarinocito, where they were building a school and she was going to talk about a literacy programme the volunteers in the department had begun to coordinate, and when she came around a corner she thought she saw Carlos and Mike Barbieri in the distance. That evening, when she got home, Ricardo had news for her: they’d got him a job, he was going to be away for a couple of days. He was going to bring a couple of televisions from San Andrés, nothing easier, but he would have to sleep over at the destination. That’s how he put it, ‘at the destination’. Elaine was pleased that he was starting to get work: maybe, after all, it wasn’t going to be so hard to make a living as a pilot. ‘Everything’s going well,’ Elaine wrote at the beginning of February. ‘Of course, it’s a thousand times easier to fly a light aircraft once you know how to read the instruments than to make village politicians cooperate with each other.’ She added: ‘And harder still for a woman.’ And then:

One thing I have learned: since the people are used to being told what to do, I have begun to act like a patrón. I’m very sorry to have to report that it gets results. I got the women of Victoria (a nearby village) to demand the doctor organize a nutrition and dental-health campaign. Yes, it’s odd to see the two together, but feeding themselves on sugar-water would destroy anyone’s teeth. So, at least I’ve accomplished something. It’s not much, but it’s a start.

Ricardo is happy, that’s for sure. Like a kid in a candy store. He’s starting to get jobs, not a lot, but enough. He doesn’t have the flying hours to become a commercial pilot yet, but that’s better, because he charges less and they prefer him for that (in Colombia everything’s better if it’s done under the counter). Of course, I see less of him. He leaves very early, flying out of Bogotá and these jobs eat up his day. Sometimes he has to sleep over at his old house, at his parents’ house, on his way out or on his way back, or both. And me here by myself. Sometimes it’s infuriating but I have no right to complain.

Between workdays Ricardo had weeks of leisure time, so in the evenings, when Elaine got home from her frustrating attempts to change the world, Ricardo had had time to get bored and bored again and to start doing things around the house with his toolbox, and the house began to look like a construction site. In March Ricardo built Elaine a shower stall in the patio, which was now a little garden: a wooden cubicle attached to the outside wall of the house that allowed Elaine to take a hose and have a shower under the night sky. In May he built a tool cupboard, and put an impregnable lock the size of a deck of cards on it to discourage any thieves. In June he didn’t build anything, because he was away more than usual: after talking it over with Elaine, he decided to go back to the Flying Club to get his commercial pilot’s licence, which would allow him to transport cargo and, most importantly, passengers. ‘So we’re going to take a serious step,’ he said. Obtaining the licence meant getting almost a hundred more flying hours, as well as ten hours of flying instruction with dual controls, so he spent the weekdays in Bogotá (slept at his old house, got his parents’ news, gave them news of his newlywed life, they all drank a toast and were happy) and went back to La Dorada on Friday afternoons, by train or by bus and once in a chartered taxi. ‘That must have cost a fortune,’ said Elaine. ‘What does it matter,’ he said. ‘I wanted to see you. I wanted to see my wife.’ One of those days he arrived after midnight, not by bus or train or even by taxi, but in a white jeep that invaded the tranquillity of the street with the roar of its engine and the glare of its headlights. ‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ Elaine said. ‘It’s late, I was worried.’ She gestured towards the jeep. ‘Whose is that?’

‘You like it?’ said Ricardo.

‘It’s a jeep.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But do you like it?’

‘It’s big,’ Elaine said. ‘It’s white. It’s noisy.’

‘But it’s yours,’ said Ricardo. ‘Merry Christmas.’

‘It’s June.’

‘No, it’s December now. You don’t notice because the weather’s the same. You really should have known, you with your Colombian ways.’

‘But where did it come from?’ said Elaine, pronouncing every syllable. ‘And how can we, when. .’

‘Too many questions. This is a horse, Elena Fritts, it just goes faster and if it rains you don’t get wet. Come on, let’s go for a spin.’

It was a 1968 Nissan Patrol, as Elaine found out, and the official colour was not white, but ivory. But this information interested her less than the two back doors and the passenger compartment, which was so spacious that a mattress could fit on the floor. Except that wouldn’t be necessary since the jeep had two fold-down cushioned beige benches on which a child could comfortably lie down. The front seat was a sort of big sofa, and Elaine made herself comfortable there, and saw the long, thin gear lever coming up from the floor and its black knob with three speeds marked on it, and she saw the white dashboard and thought it wasn’t white, but ivory, and saw the black steering wheel that Ricardo now started to move, and she grabbed hold of the handrail she found above the glove compartment. The Nissan began to move along the streets of La Dorada and soon out onto the highway. Ricardo turned in the direction of Medellín. ‘Things are going well for me,’ he said then. The Nissan left behind the lights of the town and plunged into the black night. In the beams of the headlights leafy trees sprang up and disappeared, a dog with shining eyes was startled, a puddle of dirty water twinkled. The night was humid and Ricardo opened the vents and a gust of warm air blew into the cabin. ‘Things are going well,’ he repeated. Elaine looked at his profile, saw the intense expression on his face in the darkness: Ricardo was trying to look at her at the same time as keep control of the vehicle on a road full of surprises (there could be other distracted animals, potholes that were more like craters, the odd drunk on a bicycle). ‘Things are going well,’ Ricardo said for the third time. And just when Elaine was thinking: he’s trying to tell me something, just when she was starting to get frightened by this revelation that was coming down on top of her as if out of the black night, just when she was about to change the subject out of vertigo or fear, Ricardo spoke in a tone that left no room for doubt: ‘I want to have a baby.’

‘You’re crazy,’ said Elaine.

‘Why?’

Elaine’s hands started to wave around. ‘Because having a child costs money. Because I’m a Peace Corps volunteer and make barely enough money to survive on. Because first I have to finish my voluntariado.’ Voluntariado: the word gave her tongue a terribly tough time, like a racetrack full of curves, and for a moment she thought she’d got it wrong. ‘I like this,’ she said then, ‘I like what I’m doing.’

‘You can keep doing it,’ said Ricardo. ‘Afterwards.’

‘And where are we going to live? We can’t have a baby in this house.’

‘Well, we’ll move.’

‘But, with what money?’ said Elaine, and in her voice there was something resembling irritation. She was talking to Ricardo the way one talks to a stubborn child. ‘I don’t know what world you live in, cariño, but this isn’t something you improvise.’ She grabbed her long hair with both hands. Then she looked in her bag, took out an elastic band and put her hair up in a ponytail to get it off her sweaty neck. ‘Having a baby is not something you improvise. You don’t. You just don’t.’

Ricardo didn’t answer. A dense silence settled inside the jeep: the Nissan was the only thing audible, the rumbling of its engine, the friction of its wheels against the rough tarmac. Beside the road an immense field opened up then. Elaine thought she saw a couple of cows lying underneath a ceiba tree, the white of their horns breaking the uniform black of the pasture. In the background, above a low mist, the jagged hills stood out against the sky. The Nissan moved over the uneven road, the world was grey and blue outside the illuminated space, and then the highway went into a sort of brown and green tunnel, a corridor of trees whose branches met in the air like a gigantic dome. Elaine would always remember that image, the tropical vegetation completely surrounding them and hiding the sky, because that was the moment Ricardo told her — his eyes fixed on the road, without even glancing at Elaine, even avoiding her gaze — about the business he was doing with Mike Barbieri, about the future these business deals had and the plans this business had allowed him to make. ‘I’m not improvising, Elena Fritts,’ he said. ‘I’ve thought about all this for a long time. It’s all planned out down to the last detail. Now, your not finding out about the plans until just now is another detail, and that’s, well, because you didn’t need to. Now you do. It’s to do with you now too. I’m going to explain the whole thing. And then you can tell me if we can have a baby or not. Deal?’

‘OK,’ said Elaine. ‘Deal.’

‘Good. So let me tell you what’s going on with marijuana.’

And he told her. He told her about the closure, the year before, of the Mexican border (Nixon trying to free the United States from the invasion of weed); he told her about the distributors whose business had been hindered, hundreds of intermediaries whose clients couldn’t wait and started looking in new directions; he told her about Jamaica, one of the alternatives closest to hand the consumers had, but most of all about the Sierra Nevada, the department of La Guajira, the Magdalena Valley. He told her about the people who had come, in a matter of months, from San Francisco, from Miami, from Boston, looking for suitable partners for a business with guaranteed profitability, and they were lucky: they found Mike Barbieri. Elaine thought briefly of the regional coordinator of volunteers for Caldas, an Episcopalian from South Bend, Indiana, who had already vetoed the sex education programmes in rural zones: what would he think if he knew? But Ricardo kept talking. Mike Barbieri, he told her, was much more than a partner: he was a real pioneer. He had taught things to the campesinos. Along with some other volunteers with agricultural skills, he’d taught them techniques, where to plant so the mountains protect the plants, what fertilizer to use, how to tell the male plants from the females. And now, well, now he had contacts with 10 or 15 hectares scattered between here and Medellín, and they could produce 400 kilos per harvest. He’d changed those campesinos’ lives, there was not the slightest doubt about that, they were earning more than ever and with less work, and all that thanks to weed, thanks to what’s going on with weed. ‘They put it in plastic bags, put the bags on a plane, we provide the simplest thing, a twin-engine Cessna. I get in the plane, take it full of one thing and bring it back with something else. Mike pays about 25 dollars for a kilo, let’s say. Ten thousand in total, and that’s just for the top-quality stuff. No matter how bad it goes, from every trip we come back with sixty, seventy grand, sometimes more. How many trips can be done? You do the maths. What I’m trying to tell you is that they need me. I was in the right place at the right time, and it was a stroke of luck. But it’s not about luck any more. They need me, I’ve become indispensable, and this is only just getting started. I’m the one who knows where to land, where you can take off. I’m the one who knows how to load one of these planes, how much it’ll take, how to distribute the cargo, how to conceal fuel tanks in the fuselage to be able to make longer journeys. And you can’t imagine, Elena Fritts, you just can’t imagine what it’s like to take off at night, the rush of adrenalin you get taking off at night in between the mountain ranges, with the river down below like a stream of molten silver, the Magdalena River on a moonlit night is the most striking thing you can ever see. And you don’t know what it’s like to see it from above and follow it, and come out over the open sea, the infinite space of the sea, when dawn hasn’t broken yet, and watch the sun come up over the sea, the horizon flares up as if it’s on fire, the light so bright it’s blinding. I’ve only done it a couple of times so far, but I know the itinerary now, I know the winds and the distances, I know the plane’s tics like I know this jeep’s. And the others are noticing. That I can take off and land that machine anywhere I want, take off from 2 metres of shoreline and land it in the stony desert of California. I can get it into spaces radar doesn’t reach: doesn’t matter how small they are, my plane fits there. A Cessna or whatever you give me, a Beechcraft, whatever. If there’s a hole between two radar beams, I’ll find it and get my plane in there. I’m good, Elena Fritts, I’m really good. And I’m going to get better every time, with every flight. It almost scares me to think about it.’

One day at the end of September, during a week of unseasonal downpours when the streams flooded and several hamlets were undergoing sanitation emergencies, Elaine attended a departmental meeting of volunteers at the Peace Corps headquarters in Manizales, and was in the middle of a rather agitated debate on the constitution of cooperatives for local artisans when she felt something in her stomach. She didn’t manage to get even as far as the door: the rest of the volunteers saw her crouch down with one hand on the back of a chair and the other holding her hair and vomit a gelatinous yellow mass across the red-tile floor. Her colleagues tried to take her to a doctor, but she resisted successfully (‘There’s nothing wrong with me, it’s just a woman thing, leave me alone’), and a few hours later she was sneaking into room 225 of the Escorial Hotel and calling Ricardo to come and pick her up because she didn’t feel able to get on a bus. While she waited for him she went out for a walk near the cathedral and ended up sitting down on a bench in the Plaza Bolívar and watching the passers-by, the children in their school uniforms, old men in their ponchos and vendors with their carts. A young boy with a wooden crate under his arm approached to offer her a shoe-shine, and she agreed wordlessly, to keep her accent from giving her away. She swept the square with her gaze and wondered how many of the people could tell by looking at her that she was American, how many could tell she’d been in Colombia for not much more than a year, how many could tell she’d married a Colombian, how many could tell she was pregnant. Then, with her patent-leather shoes so shiny she could see the Manizales sky reflected in the toes, she went back to the hotel, wrote a letter on the hotel’s letterhead and lay back to think of names. None occurred to her: before she knew it, she’d fallen asleep. Never had she felt so tired as on that afternoon.

When she woke up, Ricardo was at her side, naked and asleep. She hadn’t heard him come in. It was three in the morning: what kind of doorman or night watchman do these hotels have? What right did they have to let a stranger into her room without warning her? How had Ricardo proved that she was his wife, that he had a right to be in her bed? Elaine stood up with her gaze fixed on a point on the wall, so she wouldn’t faint. She leaned out the window, saw a corner of the deserted square, placed a hand on her belly and burst into silent tears. She thought the first thing she’d do when she got back to La Dorada would be to look for someone to take in Truman, because horseback riding would be forbidden for the next few months, maybe for a whole year. Yes, that would be the first thing, and the second would be to start looking seriously for a house, a family house. She wondered if she should advise the volunteer coordinator, or even call Bogotá. She decided it wasn’t necessary, that she’d work as long as her body allowed her to, and then circumstances would dictate her strategy. She looked at Ricardo, who was sleeping open-mouthed. She approached the bed and lifted up the sheet with two fingers. She saw his sleeping penis, the curly hair. Her other hand moved to her sex and then to her belly, as if to protect it. What’s there to live for? she thought all of a sudden, and hummed in her head: Who needs the Peace Corps? And then she went back to sleep.

Elaine worked until she couldn’t any more. Her belly grew more than expected in the first months, but, apart from the violent tiredness that forced her to take long morning naps, her pregnancy didn’t modify her routines. Other things changed, however. Elaine started to be aware of the heat and humidity as she never had before; in fact, she started to be aware of her body, which was no longer silent and discreet and from one day to the next suddenly insisted on desperately drawing attention to itself, like a problematic teenager or a drunk. Elaine hated the pressure her own weight put on her calves, hated the tension that appeared in her thighs every time she had to climb four measly steps, hated that her small nipples, which she’d always liked, grew bigger and darker all of a sudden. Embarrassed, guilt-ridden, she began to skip meetings saying she wasn’t feeling well, and she’d go to the expensive hotel to spend the afternoon in the pool just for the pleasure of tricking gravity for a few hours, of feeling, afloat in the cool water, that her body was back to being the light thing it had always been before.

Ricardo devoted himself to her: he made only one trip during the entire pregnancy, but it must have been a big shipment, because he came back with a tennis bag — dark blue imitation leather, gold zipper, a white panther leaping up — full of bundles of dollar notes so clean and shiny they looked fake, like the toy money of a board game. Not just the bag was full, but also the racket cover, which in this particular bag was sewn to the outside as a separate compartment. Ricardo locked it up in the tool cupboard he’d built himself and a couple of times a month he’d go up to Bogotá to change some of the dollars into pesos. He showered Elaine with attention. He drove her everywhere and picked her up in the Nissan, he went with her to her doctor’s appointments, he watched her step onto the scales and saw the hesitant needle and wrote down the latest result in a notebook, as if the doctor’s annotation might be imprecise or less reliable. He also went with her to work: if there was a school to be built, he would willingly pick up a trowel and put cement on the bricks, or carry wheelbarrow loads of gravel from one place to another, or fix with his own hands the broken mesh of a sieve; if she had to talk to Acción Comunal people, he would sit at the back of the room and listen to his wife’s ever-improving Spanish and sometimes offer the translation of a word Elaine didn’t remember. On one occasion Elaine had to visit a community leader in Doradal, a man with a luxuriant moustache and shirt open to his belly button who, in spite of his paisa snake oil hawker’s patter, couldn’t get a polio-vaccination campaign approved. It was a bureaucratic matter, things were going slowly and the children couldn’t wait. They said goodbye with a feeling of failure. Elaine climbed laboriously into the jeep, leaning on the door handle, grabbing hold of the back of the seat, and was just getting comfortable when Ricardo said, ‘Wait for me a moment, I’ll be right back.’ ‘Where are you going?’ ‘I’ll be right back. Wait one second.’ And she saw him walk back in and say something to the man in the open shirt, and then they both disappeared behind a door. Four days later, when Elaine got the news that the campaign had been approved in record time, an image came into Elaine’s head: that of Ricardo reaching into his pocket, taking out an incentive for public functionaries and promising more. She could have confirmed her suspicions, confronted Ricardo and demanded a confession, but she decided not to. The objective, after all, had been achieved. Children, think of the children. Children were what mattered.

When she was thirty weeks and the size of her belly was becoming an obstacle in her work, Elaine obtained a special permit from the volunteer coordinator and then authorization from Peace Corps headquarters in Bogotá, for which she had to send a medical report by post, hurriedly and badly written by a young doctor doing his year of rural service in La Dorada and who wanted, with no knowledge of obstetrics or any medical justification at all, to give her a genital examination. Elaine, who by that point in the appointment was half undressed, objected and even got angry, and the first thing she thought was that she’d better not say anything to Ricardo, whose reactions could be unpredictable. But later, coming home in the Nissan, looking at her husband’s profile and his hands with their long fingers and dark hairs, she felt a fit of desire. Ricardo’s right hand was resting on the gear lever; Elaine grabbed his wrist and opened her legs and his hand understood, Ricardo’s hand understood. They arrived home without a word and hurried in like thieves, and closed the curtains and bolted the back door, and Ricardo threw his clothes on the floor without caring that they’d soon be covered in ants. Elaine, meanwhile, lay down on her side on top of the sheets, facing the white curtains, the illuminated square of the curtains. The daylight was so strong that there were shadows in spite of the curtains being closed; Elaine looked at her belly as big as a half-moon, her smooth, strained skin and the violet line from top to bottom as if drawn on with a felt-tip pen, and she saw the shadows that her swollen breasts made on the sheet. She thought how her breasts had never cast shadows on anything ever before and then her breasts disappeared under Ricardo’s hand. Elaine felt her darkened nipples close at the contact of those fingers and then felt Ricardo’s mouth on her shoulder and then felt him enter her from behind. And so, connected like puzzle pieces, they made love for the last time before she gave birth.

Maya Laverde was born in the Palermo Clinic in Bogotá in July 1971, more or less at the same time President Nixon used the words War on Drugs for the first time in a public speech. Elaine and Ricardo had moved into the Laverdes’ house three weeks earlier, in spite of Elaine’s protests: ‘If the clinic in La Dorada is good enough for the poorest mothers,’ she said, ‘I don’t see why it’s not going to be good enough for me.’

‘Ay, Elena Fritts,’ Ricardo said, ‘why don’t you do us a favour and stop trying to change the world all the time.’

Then events proved him right: the baby girl was born with an intestinal problem and needed immediate surgery, and everyone agreed that a rural clinic would not have had either the surgeons or the neonatal instruments necessary to guarantee the child’s survival. Maya was kept under observation for several days, stuck in an incubator that had once, long ago, had transparent walls, which were now scratched and opaque like glasses that get too much use; when it was time to feed her, Elaine would sit in a chair beside the machine and a nurse would take the little girl out and put her in Elaine’s arms. The nurse was an older woman with wide hips who seemed to take her time on purpose when she was carrying Maya. She smiled down at her so sweetly that Elaine felt jealous for the first time, and was amazed that something like that — the threatening presence of another mother, the savage reaction of the blood — was possible.

A little while after the baby was discharged, Ricardo had to make another trip. But it was still too soon to take her to La Dorada, and the idea of Elaine and their daughter staying alone filled him with terror, so Ricardo suggested they stay in Bogotá, in his parents’ house, under the care of Doña Gloria and the dark-skinned woman with the long black braid who floated like a phantom through the house cleaning and putting everything in order as she went. ‘If they ask, tell them I’m transporting flowers,’ Ricardo told her. ‘Carnations, roses, even orchids. Yes, orchids, that sounds good, orchids are exported, everyone knows that. You gringos love orchids to death.’ Elaine smiled. They were lying in the same narrow bed where they’d talked after making love for the first time. It was very late, one or two in the morning; Maya had woken them up crying for food, crying with her thin little nasal voice, and could only calm down once she’d clamped her tiny mouth around her mother’s erect nipple. After nursing she’d fallen asleep between the two of them, forcing them to make a space for her, to balance precariously on the edge of the little bed; and that’s how they stayed, half hanging over the edge of the bed, face to face but in the dark, so each could barely see the other’s silhouette in the shadows. They were wide awake now. The baby was sleeping: Elaine smelled her scent of sweet powders, soap and new wool. She raised a hand and stroked Ricardo’s face like a blind woman and then she started to whisper. ‘I want to go with you,’ said Elaine.

‘One day,’ said Ricardo.

‘I want to see what you do. To know it’s not dangerous. Would you tell me if it was dangerous?’

‘Of course I would.’

‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Ask me something.’

‘What happens if they catch you?’

‘They’re not going to catch me.’

‘But what happens if they do?’

Ricardo’s voice changed, there was a note of falsetto in it, something projected. ‘People want a product,’ he said. ‘There are people who grow that product. Mike gives it to me, I take it in a plane, someone receives it and that’s all. We give people what people want.’ He kept quiet for a second and then added, ‘Also, it’s going to be legalized sooner or later.’

‘But it’s hard for me to imagine,’ said Elaine. ‘When you’re not here I think about you, try to imagine what you’re doing, where, and I can’t. And that’s what I don’t like.’

Maya sighed so quietly and briefly that it took them an instant to realize where it had come from. ‘She’s dreaming,’ said Elaine. She saw Ricardo bring his big face — his hard chin, his thick lips — up close to the baby’s tiny face; she saw him give her an inaudible kiss, and then another. ‘My little girl,’ she heard him say. ‘Our little girl.’ And then, with no segue whatsoever, she saw him start to talk about the trips, about a cattle ranch that stretched out from the banks of the Magdalena and on the pastures of which an airport could be built, about a Cessna 310 Skyknight that over the last little while had become Ricardo’s favourite ride. That’s how he put it: ‘My favourite ride. They don’t make that model any more, Elena Fritts, that baby’s going to be a relic before we know it.’ He also told her about the solitude he felt while he was in the air, and how different a plane loaded with cargo felt to an empty one: ‘The air gets cold, it’s noisier, you feel more alone. Even if someone’s there. Yeah, even if there’s someone with you.’ He told her of the enormity of the Caribbean and of the fear of getting lost, the fear of the mere idea of getting lost over such a huge thing as the sea, even someone like him, who never ever got lost. He told her of the detour he had to take to avoid Cuban airspace — ‘so they don’t shoot me down thinking I’m a gringo,’ he said — and how familiar, how curiously familiar, everything seemed to him from there on, as if he were coming home instead of about to land in Nassau. ‘In Nassau?’ said Elaine. ‘In the Bahamas?’ ‘Yes,’ said Ricardo, ‘the only Nassau there is,’ and went on to say that there, in the airport, before the air-traffic controllers who saw without seeing (their vision and memories conveniently modified by a few thousand dollars), an olive-coloured Chevrolet pick-up truck and a big strong gringo, who looked just like Joe Frazier, were waiting to take him to a hotel where the only luxury was the lack of questions. The arrival always fell on a Friday. After spending two nights there — the function of those two nights was not to arouse suspicion, to turn Ricardo into just another millionaire who comes to spend a weekend with friends or lovers — after two nights of living shut up in a charmless hotel, drinking rum and eating fish and rice, Ricardo returned to the airport, admired the controllers’ blindness again, requested permission to take off for Miami like any other millionaire returning home with his mistress, and in minutes he was in the air, but not in the direction of Miami, but rather skirting around the coast and going in over the beaches of Beaufort and flying over a pattern of disperse rivers like the veins on an anatomy diagram. Then it was a matter of exchanging the cargo for dollars and taking off again and heading south, towards the Caribbean coast of Colombia, towards Barranquilla and the grey waters of Bocas de Ceniza and the brown serpent that moves through a green background, towards a town in the interior, that town placed there, between two mountain ranges, placed in the wide valley like a die that a player has dropped, that town with its unbearable climate where the hot air burns your nostrils, where the bugs are capable of biting through a mosquito net, and where Ricardo arrives with his heart in his hands, because in that town the two people he loves most in the world are waiting for him.

‘But those two people are not in that town,’ said Elaine. ‘They’re here, in Bogotá.’

‘Not for much longer.’

‘Frankly, they’re freezing to death. They’re in a house that isn’t theirs.’

‘Not for much longer.’

Four days later he came to pick them up. He parked the Nissan in front of the iron gate and the little brick wall, jumped out quickly as if he were blocking traffic and opened the passenger door for Elaine. She, who was carrying Maya wrapped in white shawls and with her face covered so she wouldn’t get chilled from the wind, walked right past him. ‘No, not in the front seat,’ she said. ‘We girls are sitting in the back.’ And so, sitting on one of the fold-down seats, with the baby in her arms and her feet resting on the other seat, looking at Ricardo from behind (the hairs on the back of his neck, below the line of his well-cut hair, were like triangular table legs), she travelled from Bogotá to La Dorada. They only stopped once, halfway there, at a roadside restaurant where three empty tables looked at them from a terrace of polished cement. Elaine went into the bathroom and found an open oval hole in the floor and two footprints to indicate where she should place her feet; she crouched down and peed, holding up her skirt in both hands and smelling her own urine; and there she realized, with a bit of a start, that it was the first time since the birth that she hadn’t had any other women around. She was alone in a world of men, she and Maya were on their own, and she’d never thought that before, she’d been in Colombia for more than two years and she’d never had such a thought before.

When they were coming down into the Magdalena Valley and the heat burst in on them, Ricardo opened both windows and conversation was no longer possible, so they covered the last stretch to La Dorada in silence. The plains appeared on both sides, the hills like sleeping hippopotami, the grazing cows, the vultures tracing circles in the air and smelling something that Elaine neither smelled nor saw. She felt a drop of sweat, then another, slip down her side and disappear into her still-thick waist; Maya had started to sweat too, so she took off the blankets and stroked her chubby little thighs with one finger, the folds of her pale skin, and stared for a moment at those grey eyes that weren’t looking at her, or rather looked at everything with the same alarmed disregard. When she looked up again she saw a landscape she didn’t recognize. Had they passed the entrance to the town without her noticing? Did Ricardo have something to do before going home? She called to him from the back, ‘Where are we? What’s going on?’ But he didn’t answer, or he hadn’t been able to hear her questions over the noise. They had turned off the main road and were now driving through some meadows, following a track made by the passing of cars, going under trees that didn’t let the light through, driving along the edge of a property marked by fences: wooden stakes — some leaning so far over they were almost touching the ground — barbed wire that, when it was taut, served as a perch for colourful birds. ‘Where are we going?’ said Elaine. ‘The baby’s hot, I need to give her a bath.’ Then the Nissan stopped and, in the absence of a breeze, the inside of the jeep immediately felt a jolt of the tropics. ‘Ricardo?’ she said. He got out without looking at her, walked around to the other side of the jeep, opened the door. ‘Come on out,’ he said.

‘What for? Where are we, Ricardo? I have to get home, I’m thirsty, and so is the baby.’

‘Come out for a second.’

‘And I have to pee.’

‘We won’t be long,’ he said. ‘Come on out, please.’

She obeyed. Ricardo reached out a hand, but then realized Elaine had her hands full. Then he put a hand on her back (Elaine felt the sweat that was already soaking through her shirt) and led her to the edge of the track, where the fence turned into a wooden frame, a square made of thin tree trunks that served as a gate. With great difficulty Ricardo lifted the structure to make it swing open. ‘Come in,’ he said to Elaine.

‘In where?’ she asked. ‘Into this pasture?’

‘It’s not a pasture, it’s a house. It’s our house. It’s just that we haven’t built it yet.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘There are 6 hectares, with access to the river. I’ve already paid half and I’ll pay the other half in six months. We’ll start building as soon as you know.’

‘As soon as I know what?’

‘How you want your house to be?’

Elaine tried to look as far into the distance as she could and realized only the grey shadow of the mountain range blocked the view. The land, their land, was gently sloped, and there, behind the trees, a hill began to roll gently down towards the wide valley, towards the bank of the Magdalena. ‘It can’t be,’ she said. She felt the heat on her forehead and cheeks and knew she was blushing. She looked up at the cloudless sky. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath; she felt, or thought she felt, a breeze on her face. She leaned over to Ricardo and kissed him. Briefly, because Maya had started to cry.

The new house had white walls like the midday sky and a terrace of smooth, light tiles, so clean you could see a line of ants along the edge of the wall. The construction took longer than expected, in part because Ricardo wanted to do some of it himself, in part because the land lacked services, and not even the generous bribes that Ricardo distributed left, right and centre helped the electricity cables and water pipes arrive any faster (sewage pipes were impossible, but there, so close to the river, it was easy to dig a good septic tank). Ricardo built a stable for two horses, in case Elaine wanted to go back to horseback riding in the future; he built a swimming pool and had them put in a slide for Maya, even though the little girl wasn’t even walking yet, and had them plant carreto and ceiba trees where there was no shade, and watched undaunted as the workers painted the bottoms of the palm tree trunks white, in spite of Elaine’s protests. He also built a shed 12 metres from the house, or what he called a shed despite the cement walls being as solid as the house itself, and there, in that windowless cell, in three padlocked cupboards, he kept the impenetrable bags filled with 50- and 100-dollar bills held tightly together by elastic bands. In 1973, shortly after the creation of the Drug Enforcement Agency, Ricardo had a board etched and singed with the name of the property: Villa Elena. When Elaine said that it was very nice but she had nowhere to put such a big board, Ricardo had a brick gate built with two columns covered in stucco and whitewashed and a crossbeam with clay roof tiles, and had the sign hung there by two iron chains that looked like they’d been taken off a shipwreck. Then he had them put in a green-painted wooden door the size of a man and with a well-oiled bolt. It was a useless addition, since a person could just squeeze through the barbed wire to get onto the property, but it allowed Ricardo to go on his trips with the feeling — artificial and even ridiculous — that his family was protected. ‘Protected from what?’ said Elaine. ‘What’s going to happen to us here, where everybody loves us?’ Ricardo looked at her in that paternalistic way he had that Elaine loathed and said, ‘It’s not always going to be like that.’ But Elaine realized that he meant something else, that he was also telling her something else.

A long time later, remembering them for her daughter or for herself, Elaine had to accept that the next three years, the three monotonous and routine years that followed the construction of Villa Elena, were the happiest of her life in Colombia. Taking over the land that Ricardo had bought, getting used to the idea that it was theirs, wasn’t easy: Elaine used to go out walking among the palms and sit down in a hut and drink cold juice while thinking about the course her life had taken, about the unfathomable distance between her origins and this destiny. Then she would start to walk — even in full sunlight, it didn’t bother her — towards the river, and saw the neighbouring ranches far away in the distance, the campesinos in their sandals cut from old tyres driving the cattle with shouts, each with their own voice as unmistakable as fingerprints. The couple who worked for her now had previously made their living by driving other people’s cattle. Now they cleaned the pool, kept the whole property in good shape (fixed the hinges on the doors, got rid of a spider’s nest from the baby’s room), made fish or chicken stew on the weekends. Walking through the fields, stomping hard because they’d told her it frightened away the snakes, Elaine was pleased about having worked to improve the lot of those campesinos, although she’d done so for less time than planned, and then, like a shadow, like the shadow of a low-flying vulture, it crossed her mind that she had now turned into the same kind of person who, as a Peace Corps volunteer, she’d fought against indefatigably.

The Peace Corps. Elaine got back in touch with the Bogotá office when she thought she could leave Maya in good hands and go back to work; by telephone, deputy director Valenzuela listened to her explanations, congratulated her on her new family and told her to call back in a few days, after he’d had a chance to talk to head office back in the United States, not wanting to violate protocol. When Elaine did so, Valenzuela’s secretary told Elaine that the deputy director had gone away unexpectedly and would phone her when he got back, but days passed and the call didn’t come. Elaine didn’t let that discourage her, and one day she went out herself and found the Acción Comunal people, who welcomed her as if barely a day had passed, and she started working again in a matter of hours on two new projects: a fishing cooperative and the construction of latrines. During the hours she spent with the community leaders — or with the fishermen, or drinking beer on the terraces of La Dorada, because that’s how business got done — she left Maya with her cook’s little boy, or brought her with her to work so she could play with other babies, but she didn’t tell Ricardo, who had very fixed opinions about the indiscriminate mixing of social classes. She began to use English again, so her daughter would not be deprived of her own language, and Maya would drop Spanish perfectly naturally when talking to her, going into and coming out of each of her languages as if she were going into or coming out of a game. She had turned into a lively and clever and bold little girl: she had long, narrow eyebrows and a cheekiness about her that could disarm anyone, but she also had her own world, and would go off among the carreto trees and reappear with a lizard in a glass, or completely naked having left her clothes, out of solidarity, on top of an egg. It was around that time when Ricardo, coming back from one of his trips to the Bahamas, brought her a gift of a three-banded armadillo in a cage full of fresh shit. He never explained how he’d got it, but he spent several days telling Maya the same things, obviously, that he’d been told: armadillos live in holes they dig with their own claws, armadillos roll up into a ball when they’re scared, armadillos can stay under water for more than five minutes. Maya looked at the animal with the same fascination — her mouth half open, eyebrows arched — with which she listened to her father. After seeing her get up early to feed the creature, seeing her spend hours snuggled up to him with a shy hand on the rough shell, Elaine asked, ‘So, what’s your armadillo’s name?’

‘He doesn’t have a name,’ said Maya.

‘What do you mean? He’s yours. You have to name him.’

Maya looked up, looked at Elaine, blinked twice. ‘Mike,’ she said. ‘He’s called Mike the armadillo.’

And that’s how Elaine found out that Barbieri had come to visit a couple of weeks earlier, while she was out managing projects with no future with the departmental boss. Ricardo hadn’t said anything to her: why? She asked him as soon as she could, and he fended her off with three simple words: ‘Because I forgot.’ Elaine didn’t let it go at that. ‘But what did he come for?’

‘To say hello, Elena Fritts,’ said Ricardo. ‘And he might come again, so don’t be surprised. As if he wasn’t a friend of ours.’

‘But the thing is he’s not a friend of ours.’

‘He’s a friend of mine,’ said Ricardo. ‘He is my friend.’

Just as Ricardo had announced, Mike Barbieri visited them again. But the circumstances of the visit were not ideal. During the month of April in 1976, the rainy season had turned into a civil disaster: in the shantytowns of all the big cities houses were collapsing and burying the squatters who’d built them, on the mountain roads the landslides blocked traffic and isolated towns, and in one case there was the cruel paradox of a village, which had no system of rainwater collection, being left with no drinking water while a flood of biblical proportions rained down on them. The Miel River flooded and Elaine and Ricardo were helping to open ditches to clear the water from the flooded houses. From the television screen, the weather forecaster told them of trade winds and chaos in the Pacific currents, of hurricanes with stupid names that were beginning to form in the Caribbean, and the relationship that all that had with the downpours that were devastating Villa Elena, disrupting the household routines and also their domestic lives. The humidity was so intense that their clothes would never dry once they were washed and the drainpipes got clogged with fallen leaves and drowned insects and the terrace flooded three or four times, so that Elaine and Ricardo had to get up in the middle of the night to defend themselves, naked but for the rags and brooms, from the water that was already threatening to invade the dining-room. At the end of the month Ricardo had to go on one of his trips, and Elaine had to struggle alone against the threat of water. Afterwards she’d go back to bed to try to get a bit more sleep, but she never could, and would turn on the television to watch, as if hypnotized, a screen where another rain rained, an electrical rain in black and white whose static sound had a curious sedative effect on her.

The day Ricardo should have come home went by without Ricardo arriving. It wasn’t the first time it had happened — delays of two and even three days were acceptable, since Ricardo’s business was not without its unforeseen contingencies — and she mustn’t worry about them. After eating a plate of rice and fish and a few slices of fried plantain, Elaine put Maya to bed, read her a few pages of The Little Prince (the part about drawing the sheep, which made Maya laugh and laugh) and, when the little girl turned over and fell asleep, Elaine kept reading out of inertia. She liked Saint-Exupéry’s illustrations and she liked, because it reminded her of Ricardo, the passage where the Little Prince asks the pilot what that thing is and the pilot says, ‘It’s not a thing. It flies. It’s a plane. My plane.’ And she was reading the Little Prince’s alarmed reaction, the moment when he asks the pilot if he fell out of the sky too, when she heard an engine and a man’s voice, a greeting, a shout. But when she came out she didn’t find Ricardo, but Mike Barbieri, who had arrived by motorcycle and was drenched from head to toe, his hair stuck to his forehead, his shirt stuck to his chest, his legs and back and the insides of his forearms covered in big gobs of fresh mud.

‘Do you know what time it is?’ Elaine said to him.

Mike Barbieri was standing on the terrace dripping wet and rubbing his hands together. The olive green knapsack he’d brought was lying beside him on the floor, like a dead dog, and Mike was staring at Elaine with a blank expression on his face, like the way the campesinos looked at her, Elaine thought, they looked without seeing. After a couple of long seconds, he seemed to wake up, to snap out of the torpor his journey had brought on. ‘I’ve come from Medellín,’ he said, ‘I never expected to get caught in a downpour like this. My hands feel like they’re falling off from the cold. I don’t know how it can be so cold in such a hot place. The world must be coming to an end.’

‘From Medellín,’ said Elaine, but not as a question. ‘And you’re here to see Ricardo.’

Mike Barbieri was going to say something (she was perfectly well aware that he was going to say something) but he didn’t. His gaze left her face and glided past her like a paper plane; Elaine, turning around to see what he was looking at, found Maya, a little ghost in a lace nightie. In one hand she had a stuffed animal — a rabbit with very long ears and a ballerina’s tutu that had once been white — and with the other she was pushing her chestnut hair off her face. ‘Hello, beautiful,’ said Mike, and Elaine was surprised by the sweetness in his tone. ‘Hello, sweetie,’ she said to her. ‘What happened? Did we wake you up? Can’t you sleep?’

‘I’m thirsty,’ said Maya. ‘Why is Uncle Mike here?’

‘Mike came to see Daddy. Go to your room, I’ll bring you a glass of water.’

‘Is Daddy back?’

‘No, he’s not back yet. But Mike came to see all of us.’

‘Me too?’

‘Yes, you too. But now it’s time to sleep, say goodnight, you’ll see him another day.’

‘Goodbye, Uncle Mike.’

‘Goodnight, lovely,’ said Mike.

‘Sleep tight,’ said Elaine.

‘She’s so big,’ said Mike. ‘How old is she now?’

‘Five. She’s about to turn five.’

‘Holy smoke. How time flies.’

The cliché annoyed Elaine. Annoyed her more than it should have, it almost made her angry, it was like an affront, and suddenly her annoyance turned into surprise: at her disproportionate reaction, at the strangeness of the scene with Mike Barbieri, at the fact that her daughter had called him Uncle. She asked Mike to wait for her there, because the floor was too slippery and if he came in soaking wet he risked hurting himself; she brought him a towel from the servants’ bathroom and went to get a glass of water from the kitchen. Uncle Mike, she was thinking, what’s he doing here? And she thought it in Spanish too, what the hell is he doing here? And suddenly there was that song again, What’s there to live for? Who needs the Peace Corps? When she walked into Maya’s room, when she breathed in her scent that was different from all others, she felt an inexplicable desire to spend the night with her, and thought that later, when Mike had left, she’d carry Maya to her bed so she could keep her company until Ricardo got back. Maya had fallen asleep again. Elaine bent down over the head of her bed, looked at her, brought her face up close, breathed in her breath. ‘Here’s your water,’ she said, ‘do you want a sip?’ But the little girl didn’t say anything. Elaine left the glass on her bedside table, beside the string merry-go-round where a horse with a broken head was trying, slowly but tirelessly, to catch up with a clown. And then she went back to the front of the house.

Mike was using the towel vigorously, rubbing his ankles and shins. ‘I’m getting it all muddy,’ he said when he saw Elaine come back. ‘The towel, I mean.’

‘That’s what it’s for,’ said Elaine. And then, ‘So you came to see Ricardo.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. He looked at her with the same empty expression. ‘Yeah,’ he repeated. He looked at her again: Elaine saw the drops running down his neck, his beard dripping like a leaky tap, the mud. ‘I came to see Ricardo. And it seems like he’s not here, right?’

‘He should have been back today. Sometimes these things happen.’

‘Sometimes he gets delayed.’

‘Yeah, sometimes. He doesn’t fly by a precise itinerary. Did he know you were coming?’

Mike didn’t answer straight away. He was concentrating on his own body, on the muddy towel. Outside, in the dark night, in that night that blended with the rocky hills and became infinite, another downpour was unleashed. ‘Well, I think so,’ said Mike. ‘Maybe I’m the one who’s confused.’ But he didn’t look at her as he spoke: he dried off with the towel and had that absent expression, like a cat cleaning itself with strokes of its tongue. And then Elaine thought that Mike might keep drying himself till the end of time if she didn’t do something. ‘Well, come in and sit down and have a drink,’ she said then. ‘Rum?’

‘OK, but no ice,’ said Mike. ‘See if it’ll warm me up. I can’t believe how cold it is.’

‘Do you want one of Ricardo’s shirts?’

‘That’s not a bad idea, Elena Fritts. That’s what he calls you, isn’t it? Elena Fritts. A shirt, yeah, not a bad idea.’

And so, wearing a shirt that wasn’t his (short-sleeved with blue checks on a white background, a breast pocket with a missing button), Mike Barbieri drank not one, but four glasses of rum. Elaine watched him. She felt comfortable with him: yes, that’s what it was, comfort. It was the language, perhaps, coming back to her language, or perhaps the codes they shared and the disappearance, while they were together, of the necessity of explaining themselves that was always there with Colombians. Being with him had something of indisputable familiarity, like coming home. Elaine had a drink too and felt accompanied and she felt that Mike Barbieri was also accompanying her daughter. They talked about their country and politics back home just as they’d done years before, before Maya existed and before Villa Elena existed, and they told stories of their families, their personal histories and also recent news, and doing so was comfortable and agreeable, like putting on a nice wool coat on a winter’s evening. Although it wasn’t easy to know where the pleasure came from in talking about the 2-dollar bill that had just been reissued back home, or about the bicentennial celebrations of independence, or about Sara Jane Moore, the muddle-headed woman who had tried to assassinate the president. It had stopped raining and a cool breeze came in from the night heavy with the scent of hibiscus. Elaine felt light-hearted, even cosy, so she didn’t hesitate for a second when Mike asked if there was a guitar around and in a matter of seconds he was tuning it up and started singing Bob Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel songs.

It must have been two or three in the morning when something happened that didn’t shock Elaine (she’d think later) as much as it should have shocked her. Mike was singing the part of ‘America’ where the couple gets on a Greyhound bus when they heard a sound outside, in the distance, in the quiet night, and the dogs began to bark. Elaine opened her eyes and Mike stopped playing; both of them sat still, listening to the silence. ‘Don’t worry, nothing ever happens around here,’ said Elaine, but Mike was already on his feet and had gone to find the olive green knapsack he’d brought with him and taken out a big, silver-plated pistol, or a silver pistol that looked big to Elaine, and had gone outside, raised his arm and fired two shots at the sky, one, two, two explosions. Elaine’s first reaction was to protect Maya or to neutralize her unease or her fear, but when she reached her daughter’s room in four strides she found her asleep, deep in an imperturbable sleep and far from all sounds and noises and worries, incredible. When she got back to the living room, however, something had broken in the atmosphere. Mike was justifying himself with a twisted sentence: ‘If it was nothing before, now it’s even less.’ But Elaine had lost the urge to hear the song about the Greyhound bus and the New Jersey Turnpike: she felt tired; it had been a long day. She said goodnight and told Mike to sleep in the guest room, the bed was made, tomorrow they could have breakfast together. ‘Who knows, maybe even with Ricardo.’

‘Yeah,’ said Mike Barbieri. ‘With any luck.’

But when she woke up, Mike Barbieri had gone. A note, that was all he’d left, a note on a paper napkin, and in the note three words on three lines: ‘Thanks, Love, Mike.’ Later, remembering that strange and hazy night, Elaine would feel two things: first, a profound hatred towards Mike Barbieri, the most profound hatred she’d ever felt; and second, a sort of involuntary admiration for the ease with which that man had gone through the night, for the massive deception he’d carried out for so many and such intimate hours without giving himself away for a moment, for the incombustible serenity with which he’d pronounced those final words. With any luck, Elaine would think, or rather the words would repeat themselves in her head tirelessly, with any luck, that’s what Mike Barbieri had said to her without a muscle in his face twitching, a feat worthy of a champion poker player or a Russian roulette enthusiast, because Mike Barbieri knew perfectly well that Ricardo wasn’t going to return to Villa Elena that night and he’d known it from the start, from the time he arrived by motorcycle at Elaine’s house. In fact, that’s precisely why he’d come: to tell Elaine. He’d come to tell her that Ricardo wasn’t going to come back.

He knew very well.

He knew very well, he who’d been to see Ricardo days earlier to tell him about the new business opportunity they could not afford to miss, to convince him that the shipments of marijuana were bringing in pocket money compared to what they could be earning now, to explain what this coca paste that was coming in from Bolivia and Peru was and how in some magic places it was transformed into the luminous white powder for which all of Hollywood, no, all of California, no, all of the United States, from Los Angeles to New York, from Chicago to Miami, were willing to pay whatever they had to. He knew very well, having direct contact with those places, where a few Peace Corps veterans, who had just spent three years in the Cauca Valley and in Putumayo, had turned into overnight experts in ether and acetone and hydrochloric acid, and where they assembled bricks of the product that could illuminate a dark room with their phosphorescence. He knew very well, he who’d done some numbers on a piece of paper with Ricardo and calculated that any Cessna, with the passenger seats removed, could carry some twelve canvas rucksacks full of bricks, 300 kilos in total, and that, at 100 dollars a gram, a single trip could produce 90 million dollars of which the pilot, who ran so many risks and was so indispensable to the operation, could keep two. He knew very well, having listened to Ricardo’s enthusiasm, his plans to make this trip and just this trip and then retire, retire forever, retire from piloting cargo planes and also passenger planes and all piloting except flying for pleasure, retire from everything except his family, a millionaire forever before the age of thirty.

He knew very well.

He knew very well, he who accompanied Ricardo in the Nissan to a ranch in Doradal with its property lines too far away to see, this side of Medellín, and there introduced him to the Colombian side of the business, two men with wavy black hair and moustaches who spoke softly and gave the impression of feeling very much at ease with their consciences and after greeting Ricardo they attended to and entertained him as he’d never been entertained or attended to in his life. He knew very well, he who’d been at Ricardo’s side while the bosses showed him around the property, the paso fino horses and the luxurious stables, the bullring and barns, the swimming pool like a cut emerald, the fields that stretched further than the eye could see. He knew very well, having helped load the Cessna 310-R with his own hands, having taken the rucksacks out of a black Land Rover with his own hands and put them into the plane, he who couldn’t contain himself and had given Ricardo a big hug, a hug of true comrades, feeling as he did so that he’d never loved any Colombian this much. He knew very well, having watched the Cessna take off and followed it with his gaze, its white shape against the grey background of the clouds that were now threatening rain, and having watched it get smaller and smaller until it disappeared in the distance, and then got back into the Land Rover and let them drive him out to the main road where he caught the first bus heading in the direction of La Dorada.

He knew very well.

He knew very well, having received the phone call twelve hours before arriving at Villa Elena that gave him the news, and in an urgent and then threatening tone demanded explanations. And he couldn’t give any, of course, because nobody could explain how DEA agents were waiting for Ricardo in the very spot he landed, or how the two dealers — one from Miami Beach, the other from the university zone of Massachusetts — waiting for Ricardo’s shipment in a covered Ford pick-up truck hadn’t noticed their presence. It was said that Ricardo was the first to notice that something was wrong. It was said that he tried to get back to the cockpit, but he must have realized his effort would be futile, for he’d never be able to get the Cessna in motion in time to escape. So he ran down the runway towards the woods that surrounded it, chased by two agents and three German shepherds who caught up with him 30 metres from the edge of the woods. He had already lost at the moment of running off, it was obvious that he’d lost, and that’s why no one could explain what happened next. It’s possible to think it was out of fear, a reaction to the moment’s vulnerability, to the agents’ shouts and to their own weapons pointing at him, or perhaps it was out of despair or rage or powerlessness. Of course, Ricardo couldn’t have thought that firing a random shot could help him in any way, but that’s what he did, using a.22-calibre Taurus he’d started carrying in January: it was a random shot and only one shot, over his shoulder without bothering to aim and with no desire to hurt anyone, with such bad luck that the bullet pierced the right hand of one of the agents, and that same hand in a plaster cast would be enough later, during the trial for drug trafficking, to increase the sentence, even though it was a first offence. Ricardo dropped the Taurus on the way into the woods and shouted something, they say he shouted something, but those who heard him didn’t understand what he said. When the dogs and the second agent found him, Ricardo was lying in a puddle with a broken ankle, his hands black with dirt, his clothes torn and covered in pine gum and his face disfigured by sadness.