Shooting Down Heaven

by Jorge Franco

  “See here,” Libardo interrupted, “how about instead of making excuses, those bastards come and talk to me straight?”

  “Let me speak,” she said, almost shouting. “They can keep studying here at home. The school’s going to send assignments, and some of the teachers can come tutor them here.”

  “And you’re O.K. with that?” Libardo asked belligerently.

  “Of course not, but what can we do? Are you going to go down there and wave a gun around to force them to accept our kids?”

  “Not one gun. A hundred of them, a thousand, as many as it takes to make those bastards understand.”

  “Perfect,” said Fernanda, “and after the massacre, they’ll definitely welcome us with open arms.”

  She was the only person in the world who talked back to Libardo. Even his mother faltered when reproaching him for something, and though Julio and I sometimes rebelled, we were always terrified. Fernanda was the only person who dared. Plus maybe his lover, if he had one, or maybe Escobar, his boss.

  “No,” Libardo said after a silence. “You two are going to go study at the best school in the world.”

  “Which one’s that?” Julio asked.

  “Any school, doesn’t matter where, as long as it’s the best, and you’re going to show those dirtbags you’re made for big things, not graduating from some shitty school.”

  “When?” I asked.

  Libardo had this look on his face like he had it all worked out; he was already smiling and waving his arms, striding back and forth, talking loudly like the old Libardo. “Tomorrow if you like, or next week,” he said. “We’re lucky enough to be able to do whatever we want. We’ll look for the best school in the United States, or Europe, and Estrada and the rest of those bastards will eat their words.”

  “Libardo,” Fernanda broke in.

  “They won’t know what hit them,” he continued, ignoring her.

  “Libardo,” she said again.

  “You two are going to walk out of that shitty little school with your heads held high.”

  Fernanda dropped the telephone on the table, grabbed her purse, turned around, and said to Julio and me, “I’m going to the casino. I need to clear my head.”

  Libardo didn’t hear her or see her leave; he was too caught up in his rant. “And when they find out you’re graduates of the world’s finest school . . .” He raised his arm, pointed his index finger, and said emphatically, “I mean it, the world’s finest school—they won’t know what to say; imagine their stupid faces, they’ll have to eat their goddamn words.”

  He stopped pacing back and forth and stood still, looking at us. My head was about to explode, and I longed to run after Fernanda to get away from this madman.

  “Where’s your mom?” Libardo asked, looking around.

  “She went out,” Julio said.

  “At this hour?”

  “She went to the casino.”

  Libardo’s lips moved in a silent curse. Probably he said what he used to say to her when they hated each other, during a fit of jealousy or a lover’s quarrel, what the two of them would say in private.

  “Go to bed,” he instructed us.

  He gave us a kiss, and the phone started ringing again.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll unplug it now,” he said, with the tone and expression he always used to try and delude us. To delude himself.

  34

  Charlie told Larry that he wasn’t him, he wasn’t Libardo, and it was another way of saying he wasn’t to blame. In other circumstances, the comment would have bothered Larry a lot, but he didn’t react, maybe because she’d said it, or because time had passed, or because reality is very strange on a plane. So strange that just when Larry sensed they were going to talk about rejection and signals, about his neuroses, about rage or uncertainty, Charlie blurted out that she still didn’t know why she drank alone.

  “Apparently I’m still stuck back at breastfeeding,” she said. “I never got past the oral stage, had too much lithium, inherited some syndrome from my mother, or no, actually it was my father’s side, I wasn’t raised right . . .” She took a deep breath to continue and picked up her glass to drink. “What was clear to me, and what nobody understood, was that I enjoyed drinking alone. There wasn’t anything in the world that could top the pleasure of my own company. Every drink disconnected me and took me to another reality. I was floating. It was like . . .” She couldn’t think of the word. She took another drink. She looked for more words with her hands, but that wasn’t any use either.

  “Splitting in two?” Larry asked.

  “Exactly.” Charlie clapped. “Yes, exactly. I’d escape from my body and float in a warm space, and my hair would drift around my head the way it does when you’re underwater.” She put her fingers in her hair, closed her eyes, and moved her hands like waves rocking her tresses.

  “Chill out,” he said, and she looked at him in irritation.

  “You don’t get it either?”

  “It’s not that. I don’t know why I said that,” Larry said. Somebody raised a blind, and a ray of light streamed into the cabin. The glare smacked them, and they both squinted. It didn’t last long. When they were in darkness again, Larry apologized. And he asked, “So you don’t care?”

  “About what?”

  “About my dad.”

  “Oh,” Charlie said. “I’d forgotten.” She reclined her seat a little farther.

  “If you want to sleep, I’ll go back to my seat,” he said.

  “No, my head just feels heavy. Stay.”

  Her eyes were heavy, her eyelids swollen, her lashes damp, and she felt a tense knot between her eyebrows. In her hand she was holding the glass with the last drink they’d poured themselves. She nodded off, and Larry tried to take it from her so it wouldn’t spill, but she clutched it tightly.

  “No,” she murmured without opening her eyes.

  She must have fallen asleep with a glass in her hand so many times when she was drinking alone. And woken up in a puddle of booze on her binges . . .

  Larry couldn’t really make sense of her story. Reclining there in her seat was a very beautiful woman, and he’d always believed beautiful people didn’t experience loneliness.

  Beauty is like a magnet . . .

  The idea that someone would have to drink alone made him sad.

  He sat gazing at her for a long time during which nothing happened. No descents or ascents or turbulence or pilot announcements or flight attendants coming down the aisle. Time didn’t even pass. Suddenly, Charlie spoke as if they’d only just now been chatting.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “Life,” he said.

  She still had the glass in her hand, and her eyes closed as she lay back like a queen. Larry started thinking about life for real now, not the one you live but the one you describe.

  “Life” is the only word that goes with any adjective. Happy life, sad life, high or low life, long or short, hard-knock, wild, bad, good, thunderous, transparent. Lush life, private, fake, shake, thug, bare, hollow or flat, cannibal, crazy life . . .

  He was still playing around with words when Charlie came out of her trance and, touched by what she was hearing, whispered, “Bastard life, goddamn life.”

  35

  The day breaks, and with the pink light the booming of the fireworks seems to diminish. Seems like anybody who hasn’t managed to set all of theirs off already is still awake, and they won’t quit till they’ve blown up every last cartridge. Dawn is also an excuse to say to Fernanda, it’s dawn, Ma, let’s go to bed. The sun that is about to rise will shine down on a Medellín that has supposedly been transformed, one that will awaken slumbering memories and illuminate Libardo’s remains.

  “When I was your age,” Fernanda tells me, “I was terrified of daybreak. I felt enormously guilty if I was still out when the
sun came up, and intense anxiety if I was still awake.”

  “Let’s go to sleep, Ma, it’s dawn now.”

  “Whereas Libardo loved it. He used to say it was the best time of day, the prettiest time, but of course he was always drunk by then.”

  Fernanda smiles, still inside the memory. I get up to make it clear that I want to rest.

  “Where are you going?” she asks.

  “To sleep, Ma.”

  “But . . .”

  She is unable to find another excuse to keep me there with her. I’m going to use Julio’s room, I tell her. It’s your room too, she says, I always knew you’d come back. Yeah, I think, but just for a few days. I don’t want to stay. I don’t want to live here. Over there I’m not Libardo’s son, or hers, or anybody’s.

  “I don’t want to see him,” she says.

  “Who?”

  “Libardo,” she says. “You go with Julio; I can’t see him. I don’t know what kind of condition he’s in. In any case, whatever they’re going to show you today isn’t him.”

  Her voice breaks off, and mine isn’t working. I can’t utter a single word. Whatever I say would come out as noise, sputtering, or a spray of spit. The Libardo I’m going to see today isn’t the one I saw the last time, alive. Today’s Libardo is the product of hatred and oblivion, though I’d like to put it to her another way.

  “I’m not going to see him either, Ma. I’ll close my eyes. Besides, Julio and I won’t be able to tell whether it’s Dad. They can decide that when they run their tests.”

  “They already ran them—it’s him,” Fernanda says.

  “Then the man we see will be somebody who is still changing, just like we all change, Ma.”

  She shakes her head and starts to cry.

  “We’re all going to end up like that someday,” I tell her. “There’s nothing abnormal about the father they’re going to give us.”

  “He didn’t used to be like that,” she insists.

  “That’s death, Ma.” I sit down across from her and take her hands.

  “No, Larry, it’s not. They found him in a garbage dump—he was rotting alone for twelve years under heaps of trash. He deserved better.”

  “Let’s not kid ourselves. We loved him a lot but . . .”

  She can believe whatever she wants—her love for him was different. She chose him, she accepted him as he was. Not me. It’s obvious to me that Libardo couldn’t have died any other way.

  “Last night, when I ran into Dad’s friends,” I say, still holding her hands, “as I was watching them sing, I thought how he could be there with them. But something didn’t sit right: I couldn’t picture him old and potbellied, singing out of tune at a karaoke bar.”

  Fernanda nods with her head bowed, sniffles, and gradually stops crying.

  “Who knows,” I say, “maybe you wouldn’t have been able to stand being married to a retired capo.”

  “But he’d be alive,” she says.

  “Sure, but maybe you’d hate him.”

  Fernanda looks at me as if she were trying to read something in my face and the words were blurry, illegible. I try to pull my hand away.

  “Did you hate him, Larry?”

  I’ve asked myself that question many times, but I’ve never been able to come up with a satisfactory answer. For starters, what did hate mean? Wanting Libardo to die? No, I never thought that. Wishing him every ill and misfortune? Not that either—his well-being was my well-being. Did hating him mean rising above him, surpassing him to be better, superior, greater than him? No, I never wanted to be like him, not even a little bit. So was hating him wanting him far away from me, not having any kind of relationship with him? Yes, a thousand times yes, countless times I’d longed to live in another world where there was no such thing as Libardo, or his story, or his shadow.

  “I couldn’t hate him,” I reply. “I tried, but I couldn’t. You can’t hate and love at the same time. When you hate someone, it’s for keeps. You know?”

  “Of course,” she says, and looks toward the window. There are flashes in the sky outside.

  “Now I really am going to sleep, Ma.”

  The stool scrapes as I push it back. Just another noise in this cacophonous night. She stares out, lit only dimly under the white light of the kitchen. I stand up, and she says, “Larry.”

  “What, Ma?”

  As if she were attempting to shoo my exhaustion away, or to make it stay and destroy me, or to fuck up my life, or because that’s how she is, or because it’s simply the right time to say it, Fernanda says, without turning to look at me, “Larry, do you know you have a sister?”

  36

  After the threats, the hourly phone calls, the fires at the farms, and the extortion, the day eventually came when Libardo disappeared. It started like any other. He got up at five in the morning and made himself coffee. The bodyguards patrolled the yard and, as always, woke us up with their walkie-talkies. Fernanda got up late, as she did every day. After breakfast, Julio and I did the homework our teachers were going to review that afternoon when they came to the house. It was a seemingly normal day in the last phase of our routine life.

  Nobody can say that Libardo was uneasy that day, different, as if he sensed it would be the last day he spent with us. He was exactly as uncomfortable and anxious as he’d been since December 3, when Escobar was killed. Nobody had a premonitory dream; there were no supernatural omens that might have alerted us. The phone started ringing early, as soon as he plugged it in, but we were getting used to it. At one point when I went out to the backyard for some air, I heard him in his study talking on the phone with somebody. Every time I wipe my ass I’m going to remember you, Libardo told him, but that didn’t seem strange either. That’s how he talked, that’s how he did his business. And so it continued to be a morning like any other.

  Sometime before noon we saw him and Fernanda talking in hushed voices, shut up in the study. Nothing strange, nothing that didn’t happen every day, even before that December.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” she said afterward, almost like she wanted everyone to hear. He followed her into the bedroom and closed the door.

  After a while, Fernanda came out wearing a sweatsuit and without makeup. That was how she dressed when she had to run an errand that didn’t require her to get out of the car. She used to get fixed up even to go to the grocery store, just in case she ran into somebody, she said. Libardo emerged wearing the same clothes he’d had on all day. I hadn’t noticed it, but when we realized he was missing, his clothing became the most important information we could provide. Blue jeans, a gray long-sleeved shirt, brown loafers with rubber soles, and his gray leather briefcase, whose contents he never told us. He didn’t let us snoop in there or even get near it, though later it was easy to guess what he’d been carrying. That’s what people talked about when he disappeared: Libardo had been armed that day too.

  He and Fernanda left the house together, just as they’d done innumerable times, all their lives. Bye, boys, she called from downstairs, and the two of us responded with a mechanical bye from our rooms. See you soon, Libardo said on his way out, and we didn’t reply at all. Fernanda returned two hours later to organize lunch. We didn’t ask and she didn’t say where Libardo was. It was all so natural, so routine, that explanations were unnecessary. It was only at six in the evening that we started to feel things stirring at the house. I was getting a physics lesson in the dining room, and Julio was in his room with the humanities teacher, and suddenly the bodyguards started bustling around like they did whenever Libardo arrived, but this time he wasn’t there. Or at least I didn’t see or hear him anywhere. But I did see the bodyguards in the yard, talking quietly to each other with worried looks on their faces. In any case, Fernanda didn’t interrupt our classes, so it was only when we finished, as soon as the teachers left, that she told us, “Your dad’s missing.”


  It was then we learned she’d dropped him off at a building on Avenida El Poblado, practically in Envigado. She had a dermatologist appointment, and he was going to stay there with his bodyguards. He ordered them to wait outside and went in alone, they didn’t know where—an office building, but he didn’t say where he was going.

  The lunch hour passed, and then two more hours; it was three o’clock, then four, and they started getting worried. They didn’t know what to do. Dengue tried to ask the doorman, but apart from Libardo’s full name, they didn’t have much information. They didn’t know what office he’d gone to, and Libardo didn’t appear on the list of people who’d entered the building. They decided that three of them would wait there in case Libardo came out, and Dengue and another bodyguard came home to inform Fernanda.

  She started pounding them with her fists. She moaned and cursed them, accusing them of falling down on the job. Dengue insisted that they’d followed Libardo’s orders.

  “He can do whatever he wants, but you can’t take your eyes off him,” Fernanda said.

  “Sometimes Don Libardo wants his privacy,” Dengue objected.

  She pondered a moment. She took a deep breath and went over to a chair to sit down.

  “Maybe it’s nothing, ma’am, but it’s my duty to let you know.”

  “Ramírez,” she said, “did you check that tramp’s place already?”

  Dengue lowered his head and nodded silently. Fernanda leaped out of her chair and grabbed him by the shoulders.

  “Yes, what, damn it?”

  “We talked to her,” Dengue stammered.

  Fernanda waited angrily for him to say something else.

  “He hasn’t been there all day,” Dengue said, and she started pounding him with her fists again. She was hitting him so hard, he had to grab her by the wrists and tell her to calm down. He practically dragged her to the chair and didn’t let go of her until he felt her stop struggling. Then he told her, “I need your authorization, ma’am.”