Oy, Caramba!

by Ilan Stavans

  Because Barrera did erase the next message, over and over.

  The number 2,516.

  When it appeared, at three in the morning, with Ricky slumbering in the next room and Barrera watching his son’s in-box, as if it were a wild animal about to leap out of the machine. One second after that number flickered inside the new message from Comando Anesthesia, his finger was there, stabbing it: obliterated, gone, gone forever. Though no, it came back, it returned from who knows where, the e-mail reappeared on the screen each time he erased it, and now, now, now the number was reemerging directly on the screen. It did not come in a message, it did not tumble into the in-box, did not have a subject, not from anyone, not with a reply even feasible, just flashing on and off the screen, invading his screen and Ricky’s screen, not a wink, he responded to his son’s unasked question the next morning, I never sleep, you know that.

  Except this time it was true.

  And this time Ricky was the one who pretended that everything was normal, everything was fine. This time it was the boy’s turn not to say anything.

  Not a word.

  Not even to remind his father that his birthday was coming up, three days from now.

  Barrera called in sick.

  He heard Ricky puttering around the house, sitting at his computer and then getting up noisily and then sitting down quietly again. And Barrera didn’t tell his son he should be going to school, didn’t tell him anything, both of them secluded in the house as if a blizzard had descended in the garden, right there outside the door, a plague seething just beyond the threshold if either one of them dared to open the door.

  Barrera looked at the empty screen, waited, tried not to close his eyes, closed them and instantaneously opened them again, because that woman was inside the in-box of his eyes, in there and out there and in here somewhere, esa mujer. He wasn’t going to fall asleep, he couldn’t afford to fall asleep.

  His eyes strayed to the picture of Cynthia. Her last photo before she became too ill to go out, not a sign of what was gnawing away at her bones, a smile like heaven on her lips, and underneath, the words she wanted him to remember when things got rough, the words she had written in her flawless, tight script, Don’t ever look back.

  “Easy for you to say that,” he said to her. And then shook his head. No, no, he wasn’t going to start speaking to Cynthia’s photo as if it were a person of flesh and blood and limbs and ears. What came next? Talking to the screen as if it were—asking what would happen if these messages started to appear in every screen, everywhere, for everyone, if—A todos, no, came the answer on the screen. Sólo a tu hijo.

  Not everyone. Just your son.

  Barrera tried to rub that one out as soon as it materialized, get rid of the son of a bitch. It didn’t go away, it wouldn’t go away until it was good and ready. Those words came and went of their own accord now, regardless of what he did, regardless of the fact that now only two days remained until Ricky’s birthday, neither of them mentioning this, calling in sick, father and then son—yes, a bug is going around—eating up the supplies in the fridge and the pantry, not venturing out even to retrieve the Washington Post, watching the papers accumulate outside like a dead dog in the snow, hardly acknowledging each other’s existence, except at breakfast, except to say thanks for the pancakes, Dad, except to answer just like your mother used to make them, hijo, not mentioning that one day from now, tomorrow, it was going to be Ricky’s birthday. The only difference between them: that the son slept at night and that Barrera had not slept for five days, for five nights. Not a wink, not for a minute, not for an hour. Now truly nothing, nada.

  Staring at the night, staring at the night as if it were a screen, staring at his wife’s photo as if it were a window into day.

  Antes de que cumpla los diecisiete.

  Four hours to go before his son turned seventeen.

  Si quieres que esto se termine, ya sabes lo que tienes que hacer.

  But he didn’t, he didn’t know what he needed to do.

  Dime qué tengo que hacer?

  What if he did ask the photo what to do, what was needed?

  Don’t ever look back, his wife’s only answer, then and now.

  Dime qué tengo que hacer, qué quieres de mí?

  He didn’t know anymore if he was thinking those words or saying them out loud, What do you want from me? The glimmer of a whisper that nobody present or faraway could ever have registered. Not even Barrera could have heard those words, so faint, so quiet, not with a tape recorder, not with a secret camera. Ricky couldn’t eavesdrop on those words—that’s how hidden Barrera’s thoughts had become.

  What do you want from me?

  The screen said nothing.

  Do you want to take my boy, is that what you want?

  No answer, not a shimmer on the screen, before his mind foundered for lack of sleep, faltered into a sea of confusion, unable to distinguish anything anymore, having to comfort himself with those words written so many days ago they seemed a mirage, This is not a threat, your dad knows this is not a threat.

  What do you want from me?

  “What happened in Colombia, Dad? Before I was born?”

  It couldn’t be Ricky who was asking that again. He went to his son’s room, and Ricky was blessedly asleep, smiling; the kid was smiling into the softness of the pillow, smiling as if hell did not exist, as if he would not have to awaken to his seventeenth birthday a few hours from now and find out that hell did exist.

  “Nothing,” he whispered to Ricky. “Nothing happened.”

  He left the room and went straight to his own computer and opened an e-mail addressed to his son. He typed in what he had just murmured to Ricky, spilled the black and quiet milk of denial onto the screen, a last desperate attempt to keep at bay the other words, the other words that had been simmering inside him since the message about the dog, the perro on the screen—we are going to kill you like a human being should be killed: slowly, so you know what is happening to you—since then.

  “Nothing,” Barrera wrote. “Nothing happened.” And he heard his voice say, “That’s God’s truth,” and he began to write those words as well and then found his fingers erasing them, all of it. He discovered the blank screen once again there, the cursor blinking on and off and once again asking him to—asking him to . . . what, what did that woman want from him?

  “Ricardo,” he said those syllables out loud and then wrote his son’s name down on the screen. “Querido Ricardo, Ricky mío,” my Ricky, my Ricardo. And then he was about to write: “We all do things in our lives that”—but no, it wasn’t that. And then: “There was a woman many years ago who”—and it wasn’t that either.

  It was, it was . . .

  It happened before Ricky was born.

  “This happened before you were born, Ricardo. I like to tell myself that it happened so you could be born, so I could marry your mother. So I could come to this country and live a decent life without violence, escape from the fate of the father who abandoned me, the mother who made her living by selling what women sell. I knew that I would never leave you alone. I knew that I would stay by the side of the gringa I loved.

  “I met her at the consulate at Bogotá, your mother. You know that much.”

  Barrera read over what he had written.

  Yes, what he needed to do.

  Si quieres que esto se termine.

  His hands were commanding themselves, were flying solo, were flowing word after word onto the keyboard and through the screen and into this letter to his son.

  “She liked me. I realized that she liked me because—well, there are things that men know, that women know, that don’t need to be expressed with words. But she made her case, so to speak, by always asking that this new mulatto interpreter from Buenaventura by way of Medellín, that this man Barrera be the one to translate for her whenever there was a particularly complicated situation, a complicated person, someone whose visa we would have to deny, some pain that was being inflicted and which
she couldn’t avoid and wanted to share and I was the employee she chose for that sharing. I was the one . . . An ally, someone who would understand, even approve, perhaps forgive her hard choices.

  “That morning, we . . .”

  Barrera stopped. He erased the last three words.

  “That morning when that woman came in, she . . .”

  And again he stopped and again he removed the phrase.

  “It started—what happened, I mean—it really started the night before. Your mother and I, we’d been out for drinks and intended to go dancing after dinner. She was trying a sancocho de pescado—but not me, no fish stew for me. Buenaventura had cured me of the sea—I was a steak man—and I can remember the precise moment when everything changed, when what was to happen the next day was set in motion.

  “We were at a table on the sidewalk and two gamins—you know, street kids—they were watching us from behind a parked car. They’d been shooed away by the waiter and then the maître d’ and then some burly security guards, but the boys—waifs, really—kept on popping up, peering at us. One of them, well, he even winked at me and sort of smirked, a leer perhaps I’d call it, but his teeth were perfectly white, straight and perfect, as if he had been well nourished at home, as if nobody had ever beat him or punched him or raped him or forced him to roam the avenues of Bogotá. I knew that kid. I could have been that kid when my father left us in Buenaventura. I think that if I hadn’t been blessed with English, with the certainty that I belonged elsewhere, I’d have taken to the streets myself, and I’m sure that my mother wouldn’t have come after me to bring her son home. My mother was too busy sniffing for a substitute for her vanished gringo, my vanished gringo dad. So when the gamin winked at me, I knew what his lewd gesture meant. It was a wink of encouragement, that said, yes, I should ask the gorgeous redhead home with me, I should show her a good time, promised me that she would say yes—and how strange that I should need his approval, from that lost child not older than eight, because I turned to her and said: You know, I never sleep, but I think tonight will be different. Tonight I won’t sleep due to another reason. And she answered, as the street urchin had anticipated she would, she answered: We’ll see if you’re right.

  “My response to that acknowledgment had been unexpected—not what she or I had been planning, I think, but maybe not unexpected for the two gamins. Because I stood up with my plate—half the steak was still on it and all the potatoes and remnants of a lovely béarnaise sauce—and I carried it with me to the kids and just gave it to them, plate and all, a reward for their witnessing of my triumph, what I had not dared to do or ask or dream of up till that moment, and somehow also a way of telling them, You can also make it this far, like I have. I educated myself, I read every book in every library, I found a way. I’m going to make love to this wondrous gringa and then we’re going to leave this stink hole of a country, and I did it all on my own. You don’t have to stay behind. You can come along too. You can also change your life.

  “And I waited a bit, while they tasted the steak, munched at it in a much too leisurely way for two famished scamps so I asked them how the meat was, if it was good, and the kid who had winked at me, he repeated his perfect smile with his perfect teeth, so out of place in that grimy, bedrugged face, he said, in Spanish of course, he said: ‘The steak up the street, at El Barranco, it’s better, free-ranging cattle, more tender, juicier, you know.’ And he deciphered the surprise in my eyes and added: ‘Sobras.’ Leftovers. He and his pal had been scrounging in the garbage. They knew where the best meat could be found, and now he was acting as my culinary guide to Bogotá, my gourmet gamin.

  “When I returned to the woman who was going to be your mother, she listened to my story and nodded in that birdlike, wonderway of hers, just like you. From the moment I met her I was so taken with her ability to stop what she was doing, like a chachalaca, a bird you’ll only see if you were to finally come back one day to Colombia with me. Think of a bird that can dance the cha-cha and then cease suddenly, Ricardo, well, that’s how she looked at me, entirely still, as if she were wary of some assault from nearby. The very first time I laid eyes on her I realized how vulnerable she was underneath that show of toughness. And it wasn’t just that we had to be cautious—in fact, as employees of the US government in a country torn apart by civil war and narcos and the FARC and bombs, we’d make a nice morsel for anyone intent on kidnapping, her especially. I wasn’t worth anything, not then, later yes, when I became a citizen, took on the country of my dad. Now yes, if someone were to kill me now . . . But I was telling you about that look of hers, which came, I said, from somewhere other than fear of the immediate violence that could be done to us. No, it came from some older tremor, something else we shared. She looked at me when I came back from giving away my steak and said: ‘You’re too good to be true.’ And then: ‘Mañana.’ One of the few words in Spanish she ever learned, knew before she was sent to Colombia, the word everyone associates with Latin America and siestas, everyone assumes I represent when I tell them I was born way down south. Your mother repeated it in English: ‘Tomorrow. I’ll come home with you tomorrow night. Because, first, in the morning, there’s something I need you to do, first you have to do something.’

  “A test. That’s what she had in store for me.

  “It was a woman. Maybe you won’t believe me, but I can’t remember her name. Someday we can look it up, there must be files on her somewhere. Her husband was called Esteban, Esteban something. And he had been killed, headed a trade union, a coffee worker I think, maybe textiles, food workers? And his wife was seeking asylum, or a visa if asylum couldn’t be granted. One for her, one for her son. Her seventeen-year-old son. Yes, seventeen.”

  Barrera stopped. He reread the last paragraph. He erased the Yes, seventeen. Then he erased Her seventeen-year-old son. Ricky didn’t need to know the age of that boy.

  “That boy, that young man—name of Luis? maybe Lalo, yes, Lalo I think it was, from Eduardo—Lalo had received a death threat. I had read it in her file. They were going to kill him like a dog. No, not like a dog. Yes, that’s how they were threatening to kill him. Slowly.

  “Before the woman came in for the interview, your mother left the room. Left me alone with her. On purpose. ‘I want to see how you handle this, by yourself,’ Cynthia said, stepping out the back door, adding, there on the threshold, almost as an afterthought, that I’d been selected for a training program back in the States. She’d recommended me, the sky was the limit. I remember those words, the sky being the limit, everything open for me, her and the country and the future and someone like you, the sky. She’d recommended me, your mother reiterated, but she wanted first to observe me, in action, she said, one last crack. I also remember those words, just as I can still remember, have been repeating to myself all these years the word for word of the death threat.

  “That’s what I was examining attentively when that woman entered the room and sat down without my invitation, just sat down and pierced me with the black coil of her eyes as I read the message written on that crude piece of paper scrawled by someone who did not mind if an expert analyzed the handwriting, if the criminal’s fingerprints were smudged all over that scrap of paper, a person who was an expert himself, an expert at creating fear in others, not concerned about his own fear, that’s what I understood as I read.

  “‘Have you denounced this to the police?’ I asked in Spanish.

  “‘2,516.’

  “‘Perdone? Qué dijo?’

  “‘2,516,’ she said. ‘The number of trade union members who have been murdered in the last ten years, 2,515 plus one, my husband.’ And she pronounced his family name, the one I can’t remember now, she said Esteban, Esteban and that surname. And before I could comment, offer my condolences, say something, anything, she added: ‘Do you know how many arrests there have been, how many culprits have been arrested?’ And she answered her own question: ‘One,’ she said. ‘One man has been arrested, a policeman, a policeman who
should have been protecting people like my husband and instead was killing them. One person, that’s all, and he’ll be out on bail soon and then he’ll be up in the mountains with the paras and never be seen again.’

  “Inside your mother’s big broad desk, I knew a tape recorder was turning, registering every word of hers and mine, I knew that in your mother’s office a security camera always recorded everything, every whisper.

  “I answered: ‘You can’t expect us to take in every person who’s threatened, who says she’s threatened, who offers no more proof than a piece of paper whose origin we can’t substantiate. Surely you can see that, ma’am. No podemos aceptar a todos.’

  “‘A todos, no,’ she said. ‘Sólo a mi hijo.’

  “Not everyone. Just my son.

  “And then she winked at me.

  “It wasn’t really a wink, more like the flutter of an eyelid, a shuttering, the rapid deployment of a butterfly in her eyes, closing them just enough so I wouldn’t catch even a glimpse of the promise of tears, because she was not going to give me or anybody else the satisfaction of seeing her cry. She’s cried so much there’s nothing left, and then the opposite thought, She hasn’t cried for years, is scared to start because she may never stop, like my mother never dared to let herself go, not ever. And then that woman stood up, refused to sit down again, though I insisted.

  “She didn’t explain why, just stood there, brusquely said one word. ‘God,’ that’s the word she said and added: ‘God often comes to us from behind, remember that. He comes when we least expect him, from behind.’ And again her eyes that opened and shut rapidly.

  “And I don’t know why—yes, I know why, of course I know why—I confused that fluttering again with a wink. It joined me and her to the gamins of last night, that night before the night you were conceived, and it wasn’t me answering her, I forgot where I was, who I was, what I wanted to become, forgot who was listening to me from the other side of the back door. I forgot how often in the past I had taken the files and folders and papers that your mother would pass to me, how often I had closed them with a snap. And now it was open, that file, the death threat was lying in there, calling to me, asking me to read it again. And when I picked it up because I could not say no to it, deny it one last appraisal, what revealed itself, what had been hidden below that death threat, was the faded photo of her dead husband and also the prettified visa photo of her living son, one next to the other, her two men, and then, if only for a minute, it was just me and my sad beating heart, if only for a minute, and I said: