Detour

TWENTY-FIVE

Galina was staring at mother and child.

She was thinking:

Holy Mary, Mother of God.

For just a moment it was like that picture on my bureau. Faded almost to black and white after so many years, but suddenly come to life. Yes.

It was me. And her. My child.

She was back in my arms. She was that young again.

Just a niña. My niña.

Was she ever that small?

Was she?

You can remember, can’t you?

CLAUDIA.

Clau-di-a.

Her name was like a song. Scream it down the streets of Chapinero around suppertime, or down the stairs of their apartamento after school, and it was hard to keep its singsong rhythm out of your voice—even when you were good and mad. Even when you were pretending to be mad, because Claudia hadn’t done her homework yet, or she was late to dinner.

It was impossible to really be mad at her. She was that kind of child. The gift from God. She always got around to doing her homework eventually, and she always did it well enough to get As.

She might be late for supper too, but when she arrived, out of breath and suitably contrite, she’d barrage them with a dizzying recounting of the day’s events.

Turn down the radio and eat, Galina would say.

But the truth was, she enjoyed listening to the radio more than she enjoyed seeing her scrawny daughter eat.

Claudia was one of those oddly aware children. Precociously sensitive to the world and to most of its inhabitants. An unrepentant toy-sharer, even after her favorite doll—Manolo the bullfighter—had his leg torn off by the bratty girl down the hall.

She was the kind of child who wore out the word why.

Why this, why that, why them?

In a country like Colombia, Galina always believed why was a word best avoided.

Maybe it was destined, then, that when Claudia got to La Nacional University—with honors, of course—she’d fall in with a certain crowd. That when she started getting answers to those persistently indignant questions—like why do one percent of Colombians control ninety-eight percent of the wealth, why has every program to alleviate poverty and hunger failed miserably, why were the same people saying the same things in the same positions of power, why, why, why—she’d align herself with those who might do something about it.

Or, at least, talk about doing something.

Simple political clubs at first. Harmless debating societies.

Don’t worry, Mama, she’d tell Galina and her father. We drink coffee and argue over who’s going to pay the bill. Then we talk about changing the world.

Galina did worry.

She had a reasonably developed social conscience herself; it had never done her much good. She could still remember the rallies for Gaitán—the half-mestizo leader determined to democratize Colombia—and recall with poignant fondness the feeling that had wafted through the streets like a spring breeze in the dead of winter. I am not a man, I am a people. She could remember his riddled body on the front page of her father’s newspaper. After that, a kind of fatalism had set in—like hardening of the arteries, it came progressively with age. The young were inoculated against that particular disease; it took years of wear and tear before idealism crumbled like so much bric-a-brac.

Claudia began spending more time out of the house.

More late nights, which she’d attribute to one boyfriend or another.

Galina knew better.

Claudia was flush with love, yes. But not for a boy. That nervous agitation and those shining eyes were for a cause. She had a monstrous crush on a conviction.

Now when Galina warned her about becoming involved in la política, she was invariably met with stony silence or, worse, an exasperated shake of the head, as if Galina could have no concept of such things. Of what was wrong and needed fixing. As if she were an imbecile, blind and deaf to the world.

It was precisely the opposite. It was her very knowledge of the world—of how things worked in Colombia, or didn’t, because in truth nothing worked in their country, nothing at all—it was that painfully accrued understanding that made her so frightened for her daughter.

When did Claudia first make contact with them?

Maybe when she told Galina she was going on a holiday excursion with girlfriends. To Cartagena, she said. When she returned ten days later, there wasn’t a tan line to be seen. If anything, she looked paler. The weather was awful, she explained. Galina was sorely tempted to check the papers to confirm this. She didn’t.

Cartagena was north. But so, she knew, was FARC.

These little trips became more and more routine.

To a university seminar, she’d explain.

To visit a friend.

A camping trip.

One lie after another.

What was Galina to do? Claudia was of age. Claudia was in love. What were Galina’s options, other than to wait it out, hope it would pass like most first loves do. She was being handed a tissue of lies, and she was using it to dry her tears.

Claudia began dressing down. All kids did to some extent, but Claudia wasn’t making a fashion statement. More a statement of solidarity. She began going days without makeup, without so much as peeking into a mirror.

She didn’t know that it only made her more beautiful.

Had Galina mentioned how lovely Claudia was? How perfectly exquisite? Almost feline. Sinuous, graceful. Her eyes, of course. Oval, deep amber, and her skin what Galina’s madre used to call café au lait. She must’ve inherited her looks from someone other than Galina. Maybe from her paternal grandmother, the chanteuse, a ventello singer of some renown who’d reportedly left broken hearts from Bogotá to Cali.

One day Claudia went away and didn’t come back.

Another holiday excursion, a seaside jaunt with friends. But when Galina called these friends, frantic, panicked, two days after Claudia’s supposed return had come and gone with no Claudia, they professed total ignorance.

What holiday trip?

Odd. She didn’t feel surprise. Just confirmation. That, and simple, unrelenting terror. She sat by the telephone, trying to will it to ring. Trying to keep herself from picking it up and dialing the policía. She knew where Galina was; bringing the policía into it would’ve been worse than doing nothing.

Eventually, Claudia did call.

Galina ranted, raved, screamed. The way you admonish a child. How could Claudia not call, how could she?

Claudia wasn’t the little girl late for dinner anymore.

I’m with them, because to not be with them is to be with the others, she said.

She spoke assuredly. Logically. Even passionately. It’s possible there was a part of Galina, the long-buried part of her that once cheered beside her father for Gaitán, that might’ve even empathized with her.

In the end she said what mothers say. What they’re allowed to say. Even to revolutionary daughters who’ve gone to the hills.

You’ll be killed, Claudia. They’ll call me to pick up your body. Please. Come back. Please, I’m begging you.

But Claudia dismissed her pleas—the way, as a little girl, she had scoffed at wearing rubber boots in the rain.

Then I can’t feel the puddles, Mama.

Claudia, above all, was a girl who wanted to feel the puddles.

Her father was devastated. He threatened to go to the policía, to haul her back home. You should’ve known, he accused Galina, you should’ve known what she was up to. Galina knew he was speaking out of frustration and wounded love; he knew that going to the policía was dangerous, and going after Claudia useless, since he wouldn’t begin to know where to look.

So they sat in their private cocoon of pain. Waiting for a spring that might or might not come.

Occasionally, friends would pass on messages. It’s better if she doesn’t call you, a certain young man explained, a fellow traveler from the university who sported a four-inch goatee and wore a black beret in the fashion of Che. She’s all right, he told them. She’s committed.

Galina was committed too. To seeing her daughter’s face again. She needed to touch her; when Claudia was a child, she’d settle like a nesting bird in the billows of her dress. I’m a kangaroo, Galina would whisper, and you’re in my pocket.

Now her pocket was empty.

One day they received another message from the young man.

Be at such and such a bar at eight tonight.

When Galina asked why, he said just be there.

She didn’t ask again.

They dressed as if going to church. Wasn’t this, after all, what they’d been praying for? They arrived hours early. The bar was uncomfortably dark and seedy, patronized mostly by prostitutes and transvestites.

They waited an hour, two hours, three. In truth, Galina would’ve waited days.

Then she felt a tap on her shoulder, no, more than a tap, a warm hand alighting on her shoulder like a butterfly. She knew that touch. Mothers do. It had her blood coursing through it.

How did Claudia look? Ragged, thin, sick?

If that had been the case, maybe they would’ve been able to talk her back—the way you talk someone down off a ledge. Maybe they could’ve simply lifted her off her feet and carried her back home.

Claudia didn’t look ragged. Or thin. Certainly not sick.

She looked happy.

What’s your greatest wish for your children?

The wish you end each nightly prayer with?

The one you whisper to yourself when they tell you to blow out the candles for another birthday you’d rather not be celebrating?

I wish, you murmur, for my child to be happy.

Only that.

Claudia looked radiantly, unmistakably happy.

Was beaming too strong a word?

If she’d been in the throes of first love before, now she was clearly in the midst of a full-fledged affair. One look at her, and Galina knew they’d be leaving without her.

Claudia kissed Galina, then her father.

The three of them held hands, just like when Claudia was four and she’d coerce them into another game of dog and cat. Claudia was always the cat. And the cat was always captured.

Galina asked her how she was.

But she already knew the answer.

“Good, Mama,” Claudia said.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Galina asked, then began doing what she’d promised herself she wouldn’t. Crying, crumbling, falling to pieces.

“Shhh . . . ,” Claudia whispered, daughter-suddenly-turned-mother. “Stop, Mama. I’m fine. I’m wonderful. I couldn’t tell you. You know that.”

No. All Galina knew was that Claudia was her heart. And that from now on life would consist of hurried meetings in transvestite bars and furtive messages from friends.

Claudia told them little of anything specific. Where she was. Whom she was with. She mostly asked about home. How was her cat, Tulo? And her friends, Tani and Celine?

For their entire time together, Galina refused to let go of her hand. She must’ve thought, in some primitive part of her brain, that if she never let go, Claudia would be forced to stay with them. That as long as they were touching, they couldn’t be apart.

She was wrong, of course. Hours flew by, the opposite of all those days waiting to hear from her when she’d felt stuck in time.

Claudia announced she had to leave.

Galina had one last, enormous plea left in her. She’d been practicing it as Claudia asked about home, about relatives and schoolmates, as Galina sat and held her hand like a lifeline.

“I want you to listen to me, Claudia. To sit and hear everything I have to say. Yes?”

Claudia nodded.

“I understand how you feel,” she began.

She did understand. It didn’t matter.

“You think I’m too old. That I can’t possibly feel what you feel. But I do. There was a time, when I was very young, that I was just like you. But what I know, I know. FARC, the USDF—it doesn’t matter. Both sides are guilty. Both sides are blameless. In the end they are each other. Just as innocent. Just as murderous. And everyone dies. Everyone. I’m asking you as your one and only mother in the world. Please. Don’t go back to them.”

She might’ve been speaking Chinese.

Or not speaking at all.

Claudia couldn’t hear her, and even if she could, she was incapable of understanding a word.

She patted Galina’s hand, smiled, the way you do to those already claimed by senility. She stood up, embraced her father while Galina remained frozen to her chair. Then Claudia reached down, put her head in the hollow of her neck.

“I love you, Mama,” she said.

That’s all.

On the way home, they sat in complete, numbing silence. They’d dressed as if going to church, but they returned from a funeral.

There were just a few messages from her after that.

From time to time the boy from the university called with news. Every time Galina opened the paper, she held her breath . . .

THE DOOR CREAKED OPEN.

Galina stopped talking.

Tomás—one of the guards—nodded at her, motioned for her to get up.

Joelle was out of danger now. Joanna would have to give her back, return to her room.

“What happened to her?” Joanna asked Galina, transferring Joelle to her, suddenly desperate to know the ending. “You didn’t finish the story.”

Galina simply shook her head, pressed Joelle to her chest. Then she headed to the door.