by Jorge Franco
That woman is Fernanda. Gran not only demeans my mother by referring to her without saying her name, but she also makes a contemptuous face that hurts my heart. Julio walks in with the bag.
“No, Gran, stop making things up,” he says. He looks at me and says, “I just want to take him so I can find something decent to put him in.”
Gran crosses her arms. “I wasn’t born yesterday.”
“I can’t leave him here.” Julio tries to convince her. “I have to take him to make sure he’ll fit. Dad deserves something dignified and comfortable.”
“What’s more comfortable than his own home?” Gran asks defiantly. She defies all of us by ignoring the fact that Libardo’s real home was our house, the one he built for us.
The tension intensifies with the din of stool legs scraping against the floor. Grandpa has gotten to his feet and, again with the same finger, points at the red bag Julio’s carrying.
“Is that him?” he asks Julio.
“Hi, Grandpa,” my brother says, as if he’s just spotted him.
“Don’t listen to him,” Gran says. “He doesn’t understand what’s happening.”
“Is that Libardo?” Grandpa asks again.
Gran turns to him and tells him to go to his room, to leave her in peace, to stop bothering her; she says he stinks to high heaven, tells him to take a bath, shave, go to bed, die. I look at my grandfather and think about the revolver she’s got hidden. He looks at me, and at Julio too, and in that rheumy gaze I read a litany of complaints and humiliations. And I ponder, I wonder how Grandpa figured out we were talking about Libardo and discussing where to put his remains, and how he guessed that the plastic bag contained his son, the one he’d mourned, when Gran insists he has no idea what is going on.
“Gran,” Julio says gently, “you’re going to be able to be with him forever, but I need to take him with me right now . . .”
“He’s my son,” Grandpa breaks in.
“We’re going to look for a container for him, something worthy of him,” says Julio, who’s gradually losing his composure.
“Where are you going to put him, huh?” Gran asks, and Julio loses his shit.
“How the hell do I know?” he says. “This is the first time I’ve had a father die on me. I don’t know what to do with the dead, but we can’t leave him in this bag. A box, a chest, an urn, what do I know . . .”
“Julio . . .” I try to soothe him.
“What, what, what?” he yells, balling up a fist.
“Calm down.”
“My son,” Grandpa says, the sad-mask expression on his face once more.
Julio goes off like a rocket without a fuse, as if it were I or Fernanda or somebody else complaining about dead Libardo’s return to the land of the living.
“A cardboard box or a trash can!” Julio yells. “As far as I’m concerned, they should have left him in the dump where they found him—that’s where he always should have been.”
I turn my back on him so I don’t have to deal with his tantrum. Until I hear a blow that shuts him up, a sharp slap, and a my God from our grandmother that causes me to turn around and find that it wasn’t her who hit Julio but our grandfather. My brother looks at him in bewilderment, and our grandfather stares back at him, irate. He’s returned from another planet, or from the galaxy to which our grandmother banished him, to scold his grandson:
“Show your father some respect, damn it.”
44
The photo arrived of Benito riddled with bullets, as if the single gunshot between the eyes hadn’t been enough. And beside him a spiteful little calling card accusing him of being a murderer, an ass-kisser, a snitch, though it was that last accusation that indicated the real reason he’d been killed: for being a friend of Pablo’s. Miraculously, or because they’d run out of room, they didn’t write “and Libardo’s.”
Benito had adored my dad, and he’d felt the same way about Benito, so it was also possible they’d made a pact never to rat each other out; Benito would have been targeted for his closeness to Escobar alone. But by sending us the photo—and sending it a few days before the police found his corpse—the message was clear: they were aware of not only Benito’s ties with the boss but also his ties with Libardo. Still, it seemed strange that the only person who never turned up, either dead or alive, was Libardo, not even in the bloodcurdling photos his enemies used to boast of their acts of vengeance.
For Fernanda, it was a cruel blow. She’d always complained about Benito because he encouraged Libardo’s affairs; she’d cursed at him, kicked him out of the house, and in recent days had even become suspicious of him. Deep down, though, she knew the two men were like brothers and that Benito was the only person she could trust now. Once she’d managed to stop crying, Fernanda told us, “I’m going to look for them and ask them what more they want. I’ll give them everything we’ve got if they let us live, since after this the only thing left will be to come after us.”
“Who are you going to talk to?” Julio asked.
“Them.”
“Who’s them?”
“The people who’ve been calling. Next time I’m going to be crystal clear with them.”
“We don’t even know if the people calling actually have him,” I said.
“Look,” she said, “that’s what Benito thought, and they killed him.”
“How do you know it was them?”
Fernanda clutched her hair with both hands as if she were going to pull it out. She howled with fury and stomped her feet, like a little girl having a temper tantrum, but in fact she was terrified. We were terrified. She felt alone. She was overwhelmed by powerlessness or the burden of having to fight with her two sons, though she didn’t suspect that, for a long time now, Julio and I had had no idea how to fight with her. None of us—not her or Julio or me—knew what to do, and that’s what scared us, that’s what they wanted, that’s what they achieved.
The mess didn’t stop there. The man Fernanda was talking to, Rómulo, didn’t know what she was talking about when she brought up the photo of Benito. He didn’t even know who Benito was. And he even turned it around on her: don’t try to confuse me, ma’am, he said, I’ve just got your husband, and I can do whatever I want with him; I can release him if you give me what I’m asking for, or I can kill him if you don’t work with me. How can I pay you when you haven’t sent me proof of life?, Fernanda objected. I’ve got the cops breathing down my neck, Rómulo replied, but I’ll finish him off before they catch me, he said, and hung up.
No other friend of Libardo’s inspired any confidence in Fernanda. She would invite them in and hear what they had to say, but she never told them what she was thinking. She, Julio, and I were the ones who’d discuss the plans, though there really weren’t any plans. There was just us thinking out loud.
Fernanda decided to look for a way out in Libardo’s study. She emptied the drawers, pulled the letters out of their envelopes and the documents out of their folders. She gathered the billing statements in one stack, invoices and receipts in another, and she set aside the notes written in Libardo’s crude handwriting. Suspicious, she put the business cards in a pile—the culprit, the informant, the snitch, the killer might be among them. She organized the objects—every item, every knick-knack, all the crap Libardo had in drawers or on shelves. And the guns Libardo had kept locked away for our sakes. The Luger sold to him by a Russian collector, another that kind of looked like only half a pistol because it didn’t have a barrel, plus two more new-school ones: one with a silencer, and the other with the initials LV.
Everything was exposed, and there wasn’t a single spot of bare floor in Libardo’s study. She went around barefoot so she could step on the papers without ruining them. Julio and I didn’t need to look at each other to share our thoughts or feelings. Especially since one corner of the desk held a sparkling glass, full of ice and something else
, maybe vodka or gin or light rum, that made her totter as she hopped over the piles of papers, repeating, “It’s all here, boys, the truth, the answers we’re looking for.”
There on the floor was part of Libardo’s untidy life. Papers like pieces of a puzzle that only he could have put together. I took off my shoes and walked among the mounds of documents, getting a bird’s-eye view of numbers, names, letterheads, strangers’ signatures next to his, fingerprints signing agreements, maps, scraps of paper with notes, and even stray napkins with phone numbers. Nothing told me anything. Nothing was familiar except the guns, which, though I’d never seen them before, were like seeing Libardo’s toothbrush.
“Did you find anything weird?” Julio asked Fernanda.
She took a drink, waved her hand in the air as if she were shooing a fly away, and said, “To be honest, everything’s weird.”
Something crunched beneath my foot, under a yellow receipt, and for a moment I thought Libardo was sending me a sign. The answer, my son, is there, under your big toe. I stooped down and picked up the piece of paper, hoping to find in it the solution to the current state of affairs, but what had crunched was a pair of reading glasses, the kind Libardo used to keep all over the place because he always forgot where he’d left them. The lenses had shattered, and one arm had broken off.
Fernanda scolded me. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t see them. They were covered up.”
Though Libardo hadn’t sent me a sign, I did experience a flash of lucidity; I realized that the things heaped up in that room weren’t going to contribute anything new to what we already understood. The information might be useful in the future, if we ever had to sell some asset to get by, but when it came to Libardo’s situation, nothing in those piles was going to help us.
“Ma,” I said, “there isn’t anything here.”
“You’ve barely looked, you twerp.”
“If what you want is to find him, he’s not here.”
“Larry’s right, Ma,” Julio said. “We’ve known who’s got him from the start.”
Fernanda took a drink. She shook her hair back, haughty, ready to defend the task she’d been toiling away at in that study for an entire week. She perched on the edge of the desk and said, “I hadn’t realized my boys knew so much. I’m just going to go rest, and you two can wake me up when your dad comes home.”
“Ma,” I said, “it’s one thing for us to know who has him and something totally different to be able to get him back.”
“There’s definitely important information in these papers,” Julio said, “but what we need is to get in touch with one of those people who’s a real heavyweight.”
“Oh, a heavyweight,” Fernanda said.
“Yes, you must know one of them.”
Fernanda drained her glass. She held her breath a moment and then blew it out. She must have felt useless, nothing but a former beauty queen.
“Remember, it wasn’t so long ago they were all the same, they were on the same side,” I said.
“And the one who’s calling you isn’t the one who’s got Dad,” Julio said.
“Oh no?” Fernanda said. “What else can you two know-it-alls tell me?”
Julio and I looked at each other and realized it would be better to wait till she wasn’t drinking. Though I knew, just as she and Julio did, that every minute we let pass was one less minute of life for Libardo.
45
Gran serves linden tea to calm our nerves. She has a cup too, and pours the last of the pot for Grandpa. Libardo, in the bag, rests on another armchair. Gran tells us she used to have a silver pitcher, just lovely, that she used only to serve tea, but she’s had to hock all of her silver over the years to get by and pay for Grandpa’s treatments. She pouts and twists her lips to point at him, but he’s lost in thought, staring into the bottom of his cup. Julio takes the hint when she mentions her money problems.
“The situation’s really complicated, Gran,” he says. “Not only is it summer, we’ve been having law enforcement issues too. Getting rid of those guerrillas has been a nightmare, but what are you going to do.”
“I’m not trying to put you down, honey,” our grandmother says, “but your father would have solved that problem in an instant.”
“We’re working on it, Gran; we’ve got some tough people on our side, but we have to handle things delicately.”
“I know, honey.”
“Nothing is easy, Gran.”
“Except gaining weight,” she says.
Grandpa laughs and tells us, as if revealing a secret, “Carmenza’s a whale.”
Gran shushes him.
I get up to see if we can put an end to this reunion. I haven’t come to bring them Libardo’s remains. I go over to a bookcase and pick up a large picture frame with a photo of a little girl who’s looking out the way Libardo used to do.
“What’s her name?” I ask Gran.
“Put that down, Larry,” Julio tells me.
“Rosa Marcela,” our grandmother responds, and then asks in surprise, “You didn’t know?”
“I found out today,” I say.
“Larry,” Julio says again.
“Bug off,” I tell him.
“Doesn’t she look just like him?” Gran asks me.
I study the photo again and say, “They’ve got the same eyes.”
“And the same laugh,” Gran says, her voice sweet.
“Do you know where she lives?”
“Larry.”
“Lay off, Julio, he has the right to know about it too,” Gran says. She turns to me. “Of course I do, sweetie, I visit a lot, and she comes here too, though she’s frightened of him.” Again she points at our grandfather with her mouth and adds, “And Vanesa’s a sweetheart too.”
“Who’s Vanesa?” I ask.
“Rosa Marcela’s mother. You didn’t know that either?”
Gran’s eyes gleam. She’s never said anything like that to Fernanda. Julio stands up and sets his cup on the coffee table. Gran sips her tea as if it were ambrosia.
“We’re leaving, Gran,” Julio says.
“Do you want to go see her?” she asks me. Julio looks at me angrily.
“I do.”
“Hold on,” she says, and gets up. She moves gently, like a sweet little grandmother who’s trying hard to indulge her grandson, and goes into the kitchen.
Julio says, “Drop the bullshit, Larry, we’ve got to go. We’ve still got a lot to do.”
“It’s just for a minute,” I tell him.
“Don’t get Gran wound up,” he says. “You don’t realize how much this game of yours could cost us.”
“Cost us?”
“Yeah, dumbass, a lot,” he tells me, his temper flaring. “Are you ready to share the little that Libardo left us with that brat? Her mother’s behind this, in case you didn’t know that either.”
Gran emerges from the kitchen, fanning herself with a sheet of pink paper and smiling vibrantly.
“Here you go,” she says, “and I wrote down the phone number too, just in case.”
I look at the information to see where they live. Julio grabs the bag. Gran steps in front of him.
“Where are you taking him?” she asks.
“I told you. We’re going to look for something to keep him in.”
“He’s not leaving here,” she says firmly.
“Do we have to go through all that again?” Julio replies.
She lifts her hand to her chest and says, “I can’t take this.”
“I’ll bring him to you this afternoon,” Julio says.
Meanwhile, Grandpa has fallen asleep, his teacup between his legs.
“I can’t take this, boys,” Gran says again.
Julio doesn’t do anything. I go over and ask her to sit down.
“
Let’s go, Larry,” Julio says, and strides toward the door.
“Oh, honey, oh dear.”
Gran tries to catch her breath. Julio looks for a way out. I wish for the earth to swallow me. Julio turns around and looks at me. He gives me a commanding gesture. I walk by our grandfather and stroke his sparse, matted hair, pick up his cup, and place it on the table. I look at the photo of Rosa Marcela, at our grandmother collapsed in an armchair, at our snoring grandfather, at my brother, who’s heading out with Libardo under his arm. And I follow him because, as they say, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
46
Out of the blue, men we’d never seen before started showing up at the house. Fernanda said they were prominent lawyers or people who knew that sphere well. I wasn’t sure whether she meant the legal sphere or the drug trafficking one. I preferred not to ask. As long as Libardo returned, I didn’t care what she had to do. I would have welcomed the devil himself into our home to get Libardo back. I was still hoping that if he reappeared, we’d go live in another country and start a different life. But the news we were hearing about the Escobar family suggested that it wasn’t so easy to shed the past. Of course, Escobar was Escobar; dead or alive, his name had split Colombian history in two. Whereas Libardo was a secondary character; they wouldn’t even know who he was in other countries, and that fueled my hope. But men came, they went, they called, and my dad still didn’t come back.
Fernanda also decided to remove Dengue from his position as head of security. She didn’t fire him, but instead assigned him to watch the house and named another man, Albeiro, as her personal bodyguard.
“I still don’t understand why Dengue left Libardo alone that day,” she told us, and her breath ran out when she said “that day.”
Dengue, for his part, since he was hanging around the house, took the opportunity to vent to us. Or, rather, to confuse us, because he got us second-guessing Fernanda’s decisions. He claimed he could get in touch with the men who were holding Libardo, that he’d been given firsthand information, that he still had some pull with the police, that if our mother had let him finish his work, Libardo would already be with us. He sought me out to complain to more than he did Julio. I seized on his desperation to soothe my own. I was sick of being cooped up—I wasn’t even allowed to go outside. So I told Dengue, “I can talk to her, but I need a favor from you. I need to go out, see my friends; I’ve got to get out of this house for a little while every day.”