by Tom Epperson
His cellphone rings.
“Roberto,” says Daniel, “get your ass back to the hotel, I’m tired of waiting for you.”
Roberto sees the yellow Twingo parked crookedly in front of the hotel. He walks in the lobby. “Your friend’s in the restaurant,” Rodolfo says.
He finds Daniel sitting at a table, engaged with his cellphone. He barely glances at Roberto as he sits down.
“I ordered breakfast, do you want something?”
Roberto shakes his head. “I’m not hungry.”
“You should eat. Probably our last chance to have decent food for a while. Maybe ever.”
“Did you really see a fatal accident?”
“Yeah, two German tourists were killed by a truck. I’ll bet they didn’t think their vacation would end like that.”
“What happened?”
“The truck ran right into them. The police had arrested the driver, he was crying, he said he’d fallen asleep because he had to drive all night or the trucking company would fire him, but he looked drunk to me.”
Now Daniel puts away his phone. He’s wearing an orange T-shirt and brown pants and a tan vest with many pockets. He’s bleary-eyed and puffy-faced.
“Thanks for coming,” says Roberto.
“I came because I haven’t given up trying to talk you out of this.”
“It’s too late.”
“My mother always tells me it’s never too late to come to your senses.”
The waitress arrives with Daniel’s breakfast: eggs scrambled with tomatoes and onions, and bright slices of papaya and mango. It looks delicious. She asks what Roberto would like.
“Just some coffee,” he says, then he looks again at Daniel’s plate. “And exactly what he has.”
The waitress walks away. “And two glasses of whiskey!” Daniel calls after her.
“Daniel, this is no time to get drunk.”
“But it’s my understanding that if you’re drunk, it hurts less when they kill you.”
“Nobody’s going to kill us.”
Daniel picks up a piece of mango and bites into it.
“Either you have a drink with me or I’m going to go home. Fuck Tulcán.”
Roberto sighs. He looks out the window into the old courtyard, where generations of Saldamandos walked, and still walk as ghosts, according to Rodolfo. It’s filled with greenery and flowers, brimming with the beauty of the morning.
The waitress comes back with Roberto’s coffee and the two whiskeys. Daniel grabs his glass.
“Let’s drink to the trip, Roberto. May it be successful, and may we be safe.”
Roberto smiles. “To the trip.”
He touches glasses with Daniel, then downs the whiskey in two gulps.
* * *
They leave Robledo on a two-lane blacktop highway that winds over the dry mountains. Not far from the town, they pass half a dozen guys in single file on bicycles, all lean and ascetic-looking, with tremendous thighs. One of the things Roberto’s country is a world leader in, along with extra-judicial killings and internal refugees, is great bicycle racers, and most of them come from here in Espinar province.
“Look at those guys,” says Roberto. “That’d be a great life, being an athlete. It’s so pure and simple. If you’re the fastest guy you win. Hard work pays off.”
“Are you kidding me?” says Daniel. “Do you realize how corrupt the world of professional cycling is? There’s a new doping scandal every week!”
“Okay, you don’t want to be a bicycle racer. So what would you do if you weren’t a photographer?”
“I don’t know. Be a poet, I guess. Except there’s not any money in it. And I’m a lousy writer,” and then he says loudly, in his “poetry” voice, “Our lives are rivers, gliding free to that unfathomed, boundless sea!”
“Jorge Manrique. I studied him in high school.”
“I’d give my left nut if I could write like that.”
“Photography’s an art form too.”
“Yeah, I’m sure someday they’ll be hanging my pictures of Fernanda’s tits on the wall right next to the Mona Lisa.”
As Robledo recedes behind them, Roberto feels a lifting of his spirits. He’s forgetting and he needs to forget about Robledo, as well as Caroline and Clara and his father and his friends and the job he’s lost and the home he’s left and the grandmother he will never see again and the terrors of last night. All that matters now is the road beneath him and the friend beside him and the destination they both are moving toward. He’s going into the unknown in search of another story, and there’s a deep and familiar joy in this.
The road begins to descend, and with the change in altitude comes a change in landscape. There are green fields and clumps of trees and cattle everywhere. This is dairy country. Gleaming metal tanker trucks roll past, looking like they contain gasoline or oil but actually filled with milk. Cows are grazing not only in fenced-in pastures but are tied up in shallow ditches right next to the road to take advantage of the free grass, and then, when Daniel comes round a curve at his usual high speed he has to hit the brakes because the road ahead is blocked by twenty or so cows trotting along, being herded not too skillfully by two young women with sticks. The cows are spilling over onto the other side of the road, stopping traffic in both directions. Daniel curses and honks his horn. Finally the women get the cows to a little dirt road and open a gate. As the cows crowd through it Daniel swings his Twingo around a couple of stragglers and grumbles, “When is this country going to enter the fucking twenty-first century?”
Once, there was a great lake here, sacred to the Indians. But the dairy farmers have taken the lake bit by bit and turned it into pasture for their cows and now there isn’t much left of it. Roberto can see its pitiful remnants, glittering off in the distance. The three-year drought has just made things worse. He wonders what will happen to the green valley when the last of the lake is gone.
Daniel pulls off the road and parks at a restaurant, saying he needs to pee. All the whiskey and coffee of the morning have given Roberto a full bladder too and he follows Daniel into the bathroom. Then they take a table and get more coffee and Daniel orders a dessert: a curd cheese called cuajada drenched in sugarcane syrup. Daniel takes a bite then closes his eyes as he chews.
“Roberto, you better hurry because this is too good to be true.”
Roberto has one bite and allows Daniel to gobble up the rest. Then Daniel takes a pill bottle out of one of his vest pockets and shakes out an orange tablet into his hand and washes it down with some water.
“What’s that?” says Roberto.
“Malarone. I don’t want to get malaria again. I’ve never been so sick.”
“That’s not the medicine that made you go crazy in Orito, is it?”
Roberto was awakened in the middle of the night in his cheap hotel room in Orito by a commotion outside his door. Daniel was running up and down the hallway in his underwear, while a harried hotel employee was trying to get him under control. He seemed to be avoiding invisible objects on the floor, and it turned out he was hallucinating he was lost in a twisting maze filled with slithering crocodiles.
“No, that was mefloquine,” Daniel says. “I think this shit’s okay. Want one?”
“No thanks. I’ll just put on plenty of mosquito repellent. I never seem to get bitten.”
“Mosquitoes love me,” Daniel says, “like I love cuajada.”
They pass out of dairy country and move into a different kind of mountains. They’re heavily forested, with clearings here and there where small farms nestle. With each turning of the road a new prospect is revealed of deep-green mountains, they seem to be not mere mountains but rapturous dreams of mountains, white clouds drifting among them, and for a little while it is like Roberto has left the car and is drifting among the mountains with the clouds.
“Just think,” Daniel says, breaking the spell, “that moron Mario Garro might be the next mayor. Did I ever tell you about the time I met him at a party?�
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Roberto only half listens as Daniel tells his Mario Garro story; he’s looking at the mountains and the old joke comes to mind. When God created this country it was so beautiful the angels wanted to leave heaven and live there, so to make it less attractive God was forced to populate it with the most vile and evil race of men on earth.
* * *
They turn off on another road and begin to twist down slowly out of the mountains. The climate changes. Roberto sees banana trees and then coffee plants as the air gets warmer and more humid and they lower their windows and Roberto takes his jacket off. This road is older and narrower and full of cracks and crumbling at the edges. They pass little shrines with crosses and flowers where people have died in wrecks. And then a big purple truck is bearing down on them as they round a blind curve, it’s passing another truck and Roberto thinks the last thing he will see in his life is purple. He grabs the dashboard to brace himself as Daniel shouts “Fuck!” and hits the brakes and swerves half off the road. They seem to be just centimeters from plunging over a steep slope and then the purple truck cuts in ahead of the other truck and misses the car by a whisker.
As they have so many times in the past, Daniel and Roberto exchange a look of relief at the close call.
“Crazy drivers in this fucking country,” mutters Daniel, a pretty crazy driver himself.
They’ve gone only another kilometer or two when Daniel slows down and pulls off the pavement. Roberto sees a heavily eroded dirt road that goes up the side of a hill.
“You’ll never guess who lives up there,” Daniel says.
“Who?”
“Ramiro Navia.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, he bought a house here two or three years ago.”
“That’s right, he’s from around here.”
“His family owns a big coffee plantation. We drove right by it.”
“Wasn’t his father kidnapped by the guerrillas?”
“Yeah, they had to pay a huge fucking ransom.”
“Man, I haven’t seen Ramiro in years. So you guys are still friends?”
“Yeah, we still see each other pretty often.”
Ramiro Navia was in their circle of friends in college. He was like Daniel in that he was apolitical and fun-loving, but unlike Daniel, he was also an excellent student. He got a degree in architecture then joined one of the top firms in the city.
Daniel just sits behind the wheel, gazing through the windshield at the rutty road. Roberto can guess what’s on his mind.
“It would be nice to see Ramiro,” he says, “but we don’t have time.”
“He’s not there anyway. He and his wife and kids are on a trip to Europe.”
“Okay.”
“But he said I could come stay there any time I want. It’s really beautiful and peaceful. There’s this young couple that are the caretakers, she’s a great cook. There’s a swimming pool. Plenty of booze.”
“Daniel, come on. We don’t have time, all right?”
Now Daniel looks at Roberto. “Or else we’ve got plenty of time. We drive up that road, eat, drink, bullshit, swim in the pool. Go to bed late, get up late, get you back to Robledo in plenty of time to catch your plane. And then tomorrow night you’ll be with Caroline. Bet that’d make her really happy, huh?”
“I thought you didn’t like Caroline. You said if I married her it would be a disaster.”
“I think being married to Caroline would definitely be better than getting your head cut off in the jungle.”
“I’ll tell her you said that, she’ll be so pleased. Now let’s get going.”
Daniel pulls the Twingo back out on the road. He looks so glum Roberto feels a little sorry for him.
“On our way back,” says Roberto, “if we have time, we’ll stop off here and have a drink and take a swim in the pool.”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m twelve years old.”
They complete the descent from the mountains into equatorial heat. They’re now in the province of Chimoyo. It’s mid-afternoon. They’re around 150 kilometers from Tarapacá. They ought to get there in plenty of time for Roberto to meet Chano in the bar at eight.
On both sides of the road, fields are planted in sugarcane. The plants can grow over three meters high, Roberto’s seen fields stretching endlessly and blowing in the wind in an emerald rippling, but these plants look stunted and tattered because of the drought. They pass the shacks of the sugarcane workers, see their scrawny children and flea-bitten dogs, and then Daniels says, “Jesus, look at that.”
A bony cow is grazing in a brownish patch of pasture. Lying beneath it on her back is a little girl, who’s grasping one of its teats and sucking on it.
Daniel pulls off the road. He reaches in the back seat for his camera bag, which contains two Nikon D4 cameras, filters, lenses, lens-cleaning cloths, memory cards, and batteries. He gets out of the car with one of the cameras. Now Roberto notices two men standing by a fence in the shade of a small tree. They’re both holding machetes, and are glaring at Daniel as he walks toward the pasture.
“Daniel!” calls Roberto.
Daniel looks back at him and he nods at the men. Daniel looks at them, then returns to the car. He gets back in, points the camera at the cow and the girl and adjusts the long zoom lens and snaps a couple of pictures and then takes off.
Pretty soon, they run into a line of cars and trucks held up by road construction. Even out here in the countryside, beggars and vendors have gathered. An obese black man with massive arms and short withered legs is spinning around and around on the road in a wheelchair. A guy is walking around with a basket of bootlegged DVDs and a small monkey on his shoulder; if you want a DVD, you hand the money to the monkey. A young guy with a bashful smile leans down to Daniel’s window and says he lost his job at a sawmill and is trying to get enough money for a bus ticket so he can return to his home in Macallacta; Roberto’s never heard of Macallacta, but he says it like it’s an instantly recognizable name like Paris or London. He lives in Macallacta with his two younger brothers, one of whom dove off a bridge into a river and injured his brain and now crawls around on the floor like a baby. He says he’s worried about his brothers and wants to get back to them as soon as he can. He has such an earnest and likeable way about him Roberto and Daniel both half-believe him and give him what ought to be enough money for a ticket to Macallacta even if it’s on the other side of the country, and the guy is so choked up he can hardly thank them as he vigorously shakes their hands.
In a few minutes the traffic starts to move. They drive by the young guy, who’s smoking a cigarette and talking to the guy with the monkey. He sees them and smiles and waves and they wave back.
“Does it look to you like he’s in a hurry to get to Macallacta?” asks Daniel.
“Not really.”
They look at each other and laugh.
In ten minutes they’re stopped again. Roberto thinks it’s more construction, but then he sees young men with guns wearing green camouflage fatigues and black boots. It’s an Army checkpoint. Roberto’s encountered over the years many checkpoints and roadblocks, manned by various types of men with guns: soldiers, police, paramilitaries, guerrillas. Since bad things can befall you at a checkpoint, you don’t ever want to seem suspicious, so even if you’re shaking in your shoes, you try to act relaxed, and if you plan to lie or dissemble, you need to think it through ahead of time.
“We’re going to Tarapacá,” says Roberto.
“Okay,” says Daniel. “What are we going to do there?”
“See a couple of girls?”
“Great. Are they good-looking?”
“They’re amazing. Especially mine.”
“But mine is better in bed.”
“How would you know that?”
“Believe me, I know.”
Roberto laughs, but he’s nervous. He wonders if the checkpoint has anything to do with what’s going on in Tulcán. There are eight or ten vehicles ahead of the Twingo. As
it moves slowly forward, Roberto and Daniel see off to the side of the road a guy in handcuffs standing among some soldiers. The guy is wearing red shorts and flip-flops and a white T-shirt with blood on it. The soldiers are practicing martial arts moves on him, striking and kicking him with high-pitched Bruce Lee-ish mews and screams. He staggers and bleeds but is empty-eyed and silent.
Daniel gives Roberto a glance, but neither says anything. Only one car is ahead of them now. A sergeant wearing sunglasses is taking a look at the driver’s identification card when suddenly the horn of Daniel’s car begins to blast. HONK HONK HONK!
The sergeant gives the car a startled look.
HONK HONK HONK! HONK HONK HONK!
A panicky-looking private is pointing his assault rifle at the car.
“Daniel, stop it,” yells Roberto, “they’re going to shoot us!”
“I can’t stop it, it’s the fucking car alarm!”
Roberto looks around and sees half a dozen rifles pointed at them. They hold their hands up. Daniels sticks his head out the window and shouts to the sergeant: “I’m sorry, it’s the car alarm, I don’t know how to fix it!”
Abruptly the horn falls silent. The sergeant has unholstered his sidearm and is approaching the car.
“I’m really sorry about that,” Daniel says. “It’s the fucking car alarm, it just goes off like that sometimes. I’ve been meaning to have it fixed.”
The sergeant leans down and peers through the window at Roberto and Daniel. Roberto’s relieved when he sees him reholster his gun.
“IDs?” he says.
They quickly get their ID cards out of their billfolds and hand them to the sergeant. He looks them over.
“You’re a long way from home.”
“We’re on our way to Tarapacá,” says Roberto.
“Why are you going there?”
“To see some friends.”
“What are their names?”