by Jorge Franco
Fernanda was way out of Libardo’s league. She wasn’t from a wealthy or prominent family—she was a normal girl, middle class, but pretty and ambitious. He was from humbler stock—very, very humble. He dropped out of high school and joined the street gangs in the upper section of San Cristóbal. When I asked him what he used to do in the gangs, he told me, we did everything, we fucked shit up everywhere, we were always getting into trouble. He even sounded nostalgic about it. When I asked him how he met Escobar, he told me Benito had introduced them. And when I asked him why he did what he did, he told me, because that’s how life is, kid, you’ll understand that one day.
I never did understand, but I figured it was like being born black or white, tall or short. That was what we were, end of story. Though there was always something or somebody to remind me who I was. At first it used to piss me off—I would come to blows. Now I just brush it off.
Once, after a kiss, a girlfriend, my very first one, told me, you’re not to blame for what you are. It was true, but that didn’t clear me of the burden. Fernanda often told me the same thing when I was freaking out about being Libardo’s son. And then she’d give me a hug because ultimately she, too, was “to blame” for what I was. Over the course of my life, I’ve heard it a million times: you’re not to blame for what you are. I heard it over and over until the phrase wore out and lost all meaning.
Another girlfriend in London told me that too, the one I decided to tell my story to because I was convinced I’d found the love of my life. You’re not to blame, Larry. And I said, shove your platitude up your ass, and she stormed out in a fury and I never saw her again. I later realized that when women said that, they weren’t really saying it to me but to themselves instead, rationalizing being friends with me, kissing me, having sex with me. If you’re not to blame, then neither is anybody else. Just like that, easy-peasy.
The only person I’d have wanted to hear the phrase from was Libardo himself, but he never said it. Even after the many times I told him he was to blame, he kept quiet. It took me a long time to realize he stayed quiet because he didn’t feel any blame. He never felt guilty about his actions: the accusations never bothered him, he wasn’t tormented by his crimes, and he hadn’t decided to have children so he could be burdened with remorse. He must have understood it from birth, what he told me that time: that’s how life is, Larry.
At any rate, you always had to interpret what was behind Libardo’s words. When he told us, I want you to go to the best school, to speak English, French, whatever languages you can, to study at the best university, to start companies, it was his way of telling us he didn’t want us to be like him, who never went to college or even finished high school and who spoke street Spanish. He didn’t want us to follow in his footsteps.
He used to brag about his friendships with important politicians and businessmen, about the deals they made and the meetings they invited him to. And the thing he boasted about most was the parties. Him and his beauty queen, because they didn’t invite him without Fernanda. Until one day she realized something.
“None of the other men take their wives,” Fernanda said, connecting dots.
“Of course they do,” he said.
“They bring their girlfriends, mistresses, whatever,” Fernanda said, “but none of them are married to the women they take.”
Libardo huffed. “What do you know?”
“I’ve seen photos of them in the society pages with very different women. They’re lying to you, Libardo. They want to make you think you’re one of them, but they only invite you to the parties they take their hussies to. And they’re putting me on that same level.”
Libardo grumbled, perturbed. “I’m not going to butt into their lives,” he said. “They can sleep with whatever women they want. Those parties are where we do business.”
“Well, you’re going to have to go on your own from now on. I’m not going to be considered one of those tramps.”
Fernanda wasn’t looking at him as she spoke, emphasizing her irritation. He got up, walked to the window, and stared out.
“Did you know?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I don’t pay attention to those things.”
They were both quiet a while, and then it was Fernanda who stood up and said, “I’m going to have them serve dinner.”
“Fernanda.”
She stopped.
“Given what you’ve said,” Libardo asked, “are you sure you want me going alone?”
“Is that a threat?”
Libardo didn’t respond. He kept looking at her, leaning against the glass. She took a step forward and said, “I hope I’m wrong. I hope that when you need those guys, they’ll have your back.”
She left the room, leaving a trail of truth behind her.
That same night, after dinner, we were in their room watching TV when Libardo told Fernanda, “The deputy attorney general agreed to talk to us. But I’m not going. One of the Arangos, a Molina, and Benito are going in my place.”
I looked at Fernanda, whose demeanor was like a thermometer for measuring her reaction. She was concentrating on a small hand mirror, plucking her eyebrows. She arched them, brought them together by scrunching her forehead, raised them again, brought the mirror close to her face, and skillfully kept tweezing.
“Didn’t the Arangos turn themselves in?” she asked.
“Just Jonathan.”
I looked at her again to see if her expression had changed, if she was looking at Libardo, but she was still focused on her eyebrows. Suddenly she moved the mirror, and her eyes met mine. I looked swiftly back at the television.
“So you’re going to surrender too,” Fernanda said.
“No fucking way,” Libardo said. “The Diago meeting isn’t official.”
Fernanda got up from the bed and went into the bathroom. Libardo kept talking: “Pablo implicated him in the group. I think he’s playing dumb and we’re going to have to have a talk with him. If he helps us get the government off our backs, it’ll give us some breathing room to fight the other bastards.”
Fernanda peered out and said, “Larry, Julio, look at the time. It’s going to be impossible to get you up in the morning.”
As I left, I heard Fernanda say to Libardo, don’t talk to them the way you talk to your people. He said, I wasn’t talking to them, and anyway they’re men now. Then don’t talk to me like that, Fernanda said, and don’t act like a thug in front of your sons. Libardo raised his voice, indignant: Thug? Thug? I couldn’t make out anything after that; I didn’t want to hear what came next.
A little while later, after I was in bed and had turned out the light, Fernanda came into the room.
“Larry.”
My heart started beating faster. When she came in like that, it was because something had happened between them. I always used to wonder why she came to me and not Julio. Sure, I was more like her, I looked like her and had her features, shared her sensitivity and some of her tastes, but Julio was her son too, the older one, and it should have been his job to console her. But she chose me, her kindred spirit, as she told everybody we were—she used to say it proudly, like a peacock, and her eyes would shine, her words sparkle.
“You asleep, Larry?
She came over to the bed and groped for the edges of the mattress so she didn’t bump into it. Sometimes, when she came to my room like that, it was because she’d been drinking and she’d trip over a shoe, over some clothes I hadn’t picked up, or she’d get lost in the darkness and end up on the floor, laughing uncontrollably. I didn’t find it at all amusing to see her sprawled on the floor, collapsed in laughter, crawling over to my bed, where she’d climb in, reeking of alcohol.
“Larry?”
She was sober now. She smelled like the creams she applied before bed.
“Larry.”
I shifted a little. There wasn’t much point
in pretending to be asleep. It never put her off. I moved over to give her room. She lifted the sheets and slipped into bed. She spooned me from behind and murmured, “I don’t want to sleep with him.”
“What’s wrong?”
“He’s really worked up. It’s best to leave him alone.”
“What’s going to happen to us, Ma?”
“Nothing, darling,” she said, and ran her fingers through my hair, and then, as if time had ceased passing, as if I hadn’t gotten older and she was still dandling me in her arms, she added, “Go to sleep now, sweetie.”
22
At midnight the sky over Medellín turns to day. December has arrived amid the inebriation and fireworks.
“It’s December, Pops!” Pedro the Dictator exclaims, and hugs me enthusiastically, as if December almost hadn’t come.
The noise stuns and shakes the ground; the sky turns white, yellow, red, and silver. Medellín is a castle of pyrotechnic toys that’s exploded. The people crowded along the overlooks chug aguardiente straight from the bottle, leap and shout, climb onto car roofs to shout louder, and some are even singing the Antioquian anthem. There’s something touching about all this excitement. Maybe it’s all that time I spent abroad, the years I had no homeland.
“Oh, liberty that perfumes the mountains of my land,” La Murciélaga sings, or rather shrieks, lifting her shirt and displaying her own ample, voluptuous mountains—bounteous, the poets might say. Around her the men whistle and holler; she covers herself again and lets out an extravagant laugh.
“Let my children breathe in your fragrant essences.” Pedro finishes the lyric from Antioquia’s anthem.
There’s so much excitement in the air that even Ro hugs me. He emerges from the crowd, we come face to face, and it’s as if he has no other option but to hug me. He attempts sincerity: “I don’t know what’s up between me and you, but I forgive you,” he says.
Would you believe that bastard. Am I supposed to thank him for his forgiveness? I know exactly what’s up between him and me, but the distance and the years of absence have made me wary. Or simply a stranger.
“Relax, man,” I tell him. “We’re all good.”
Later it’s Julieth who goes honest on me. She pins me against one side of the SUV and, pressing close, whispers, “That kiss you gave me woke up some memories.”
The look on her face suggests she’s about to go for another one. But I feel like my mouth stinks, reeking of aguardiente, marijuana, airplane cabin, all these hours I’ve been awake. It feels dry with fatigue, sticky with lack of sleep.
“What do you say if later on . . . ?” Julieth says.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “I haven’t been able to get home to say hi to my mom.”
“Oh, right,” Julieth says. “I’d forgotten about the funeral.”
“No, that’s not it.”
“Anyway,” she interrupts me, “don’t go yet. That kiss got me thinking.”
“Larry!” Pedro calls to me in the distance and lifts his arm, holding the cell phone in his hand. “It’s Fernanda!”
I scurry away from Julieth and rush toward him. I snatch the phone and use my hand as a barrier between the noise and my mouth.
“Ma?”
“Hello?”
“Ma.”
There’s noise here and noise there; she can’t hear me and I can’t hear her.
“Ma, don’t hang up.”
I get in the car and try to close the windows, but the key isn’t in the ignition.
“Larry, where are you? I can’t hear you.”
“I’m in Las Palmas, at a viewpoint.”
“Larry?”
“Ma, you’re not coming in clear, but I can hear you.”
“There’s a huge racket here,” Fernanda says. “The fireworks woke me up.”
“What, Ma?”
I look around to see if I can spot Pedro. I need the keys.
“Why aren’t you here yet, Larry?”
“You said I shouldn’t come.”
“Speak up, I can’t hear you.”
“I’m heading there now. I’ll find someone to take me.”
“I can’t sleep with these fireworks, honey.”
“Don’t go to sleep, wait for me.”
“Come again?”
“Don’t go to sleep.”
“Larry, the connection’s really bad.”
“What’s that, Ma?”
“This is so frustrating,” Fernanda says.
I stick my head out the window and see Julieth dancing with a dozen strangers. “Julieth,” I call to her, “where’s Pedro? I need the keys.”
“I don’t know,” she says. “He’s around.”
“Pedro’s got keys,” Fernanda tells me.
“No, Ma, I’m looking for Pedro so he can give me the car keys.”
“He’s got keys,” Fernanda says again.
“The car keys, Ma.”
“Larry,” she says, “I don’t know if you can hear me. Call me right back from somewhere else.”
“Ma, don’t hang up!”
I curse the phone and everything around me. Screw tonight, fuck La Alborada. I stick my head out the window and yell, why don’t you all shut up, assholes? Nobody hears me; they all stare at me, laughing. Julieth dances up and sticks her tongue in my mouth.
“I couldn’t wait,” she says.
“I have to go.”
“No, come on, lame-o.”
“Help me find Pedro.”
“Did you not like it?”
“I have to get my suitcase.”
“Is it because of that girl you met on the plane? I’ll tell you right now, I don’t care—I’ve got a boyfriend too.”
“Julieth, I haven’t slept since yesterday and I haven’t seen my mom in three years.”
“And I love him,” she says. “We’ve been together five months, and he’s the man for me, but that doesn’t mean what you and I had wasn’t important to me, Larry.”
Some moron tosses a string of firecrackers that goes off right between our feet, and Julieth and I are forced to hop around to the rhythm of the explosions. The man points and laughs and his friends egg him on. I grab him by the shirt, yank him toward me, and yell in his face, “What’s your problem, motherfucker?”
His friends intervene. Careful, buddy, they warn me. Julieth butts in too: “Chill, everybody chill, he just arrived, he lives in England, and he’s not used to this.”
“Let go of me, asshole,” says the guy who threw the firecrackers at us.
“Let him go, Larry,” Julieth hisses at me, rolling her eyes as if warning me that something worse might happen.
“Leave me the fuck alone,” I tell the guy.
“England’s clearly rubbed off on you,” he says.
Julieth digs her nails into my arm and says again, “Let him go, Larry. What he did is normal here.”
“That’s why you’re all so fucked,” I say, as if I weren’t another fucked Colombian myself.
I let go of the guy, and he goes off with the others, all of them giving me dirty looks.
“I had no idea you were so violent,” Julieth admonishes me.
“I’m not,” I say. “He attacked us.”
Julieth spreads her arms wide and gestures to the sky, to Medellín in front of us, exploding in a crackle of lights. “What’s wrong with you?” she says. “It’s La Alborada, don’t you get it?”
Everything’s justified here. Fireworks, violence, bullets, dead bodies . . . all our evils have an excuse. And from pretext we move on to resignation, and from there to complete acceptance, as if it were normal. But if I say all that, I’ll look like a party pooper, and if I say the only thing I want right now, with all my heart, is to see my mother, I’ll look like a dumbass.
“He
lp me look for Pedro,” I say.
“He left the car unlocked, so he’ll be back any minute. Also,” she adds, “don’t move from here or somebody’ll steal the stereo.”
The guy who threw the firecrackers at us comes up again. His friends are still with him and he’s got a bottle of aguardiente.
“Hey, buddy, come here,” he says, though he’s the one approaching me. “Let’s be friends, here, have a swig.”
I take a long swallow to calm my fury. Everybody notices, and they laugh and try to smooth things over with another joke.
“Dude’s a big drinker, huh.”
“My name is Arthur,” the guy joshes in English, doing a sad imitation of a British accent. He laughs wanly and says, “No, man, I’m kidding. The name’s Arturo, but everybody calls me Artu.”
I don’t say anything. Julieth speaks instead.
“He’s Larry.”
“Larry what?” they ask.
Julieth eyes me carefully, the way people always look at me whenever I have to say who I am.
“Larry,” I say, and then, after a pause, I add, “The son of God.”
They celebrate my joke by passing the bottle around, from Artu to Julieth and around until it comes back to me and I drink again. The aguardiente kicks me in the gut, makes my insides shudder, sets my stomach and my face on fire, warns me that I’ve had enough.
“No more,” I say, coughing alcohol.
A cloud of smoke drifts over us. It comes from down below, from Medellín, and it smells like sulfur. They’ll say it’s the smell of the fireworks, but to me the smell says that down there, nothing is O.K.
23
Where to even start?” Charlie said. “I’m nothing but secrets.”
It sounded like she was confiding in him, as if that were her contribution to their game, which she was already showing signs of regretting. Now she was the victim of her own invention.