by James Siegel
The Peugeot was softly idling in front of the hotel.
Paul noticed the hotel doorman whisper something in Pablo’s ear as he bent over to usher them into the backseat. A kind of rumba was playing on the radio.
“What did he say?” Paul asked Pablo after he had pulled away from the curb.
“He wished you Many Blessings. ”
“Oh. You told him where we’re going?”
“Yes.”
“Do you do this a lot, Pablo?” Joanna asked. “With many couples?”
Pablo nodded. “ Happy job, no?”
“Sure,” Joanna said. “I think so.”
They passed a convoy of soldiers hunched together in an open made-in-Detroit Jeep. Paul couldn’t help remembering the phalanx of armed sentries at the airport.
“Lots of soldiers around, huh?” Paul said.
“Soldiers? Sí .”
“How have things been?” Paul asked, a little hesitant to ask a question he might not like the answer to.
“Things?”
“The rebels? FARC?” It sounded like a curse, Paul thought. He imagined that to the vast majority of Colombians, it was. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The leftist guerrillas already holding much of the north, and most likely the group responsible for blowing the deputy mayor of Medellín to kingdom come.
Of course, there was always the chance the car bomb had been perpetrated by the right. FARC was embroiled in a long dirty war against the United Self-Defense Forces, or USDF, a rightist paramilitary organization of singular brutality.
On the way out of the airport, they’d passed a wall covered in red graffiti, which looked uncomfortably like fresh arterial spray, as if it had been written in blood.
Libre Manuel Riojas. Manuel Riojas was the reputed USDF commander, currently residing in an American prison for drug transgressions.
Pablo shook his head. “I don’t listen . . . No politics.”
“Yes. That’s probably wise.”
“Sí.”
“Still, it must be scary sometimes?”
“Scary.” Pablo derisively waved a hand. “I mind my business. Don’t read the papers. It’s all bad.”
Before departing, Paul had sent away for a video titled The Colombian Way of Life. After he’d watched the first five minutes, it was painfully obvious it had been created for schoolkids under the age of twelve. The video followed two teenagers, Mauricio and Paula, walking around sunny Bogotá, their intent being to show that there’s more to this modern South American city than coffee, cocaine, and guerrilla violence —or so stated the back blurb.
Pablo was driving them past a street of sprawling mansions. At least Paul assumed there were mansions back there somewhere—you couldn’t actually see them. An unbroken ten-foot-high stucco wall was in the way. Electronic gates periodically announced the demarcation of each new property, their names spelled out in tile mosaics embedded into the wall.
Casa de Flora.
Casa de Playa.
They passed a spotted dog with its ribs showing, urinating against the burnt-orange wall of the Casa de Fuego.
Something was unnerving about the scene. It took Paul a while to understand what it was.
Yes. The lack of people.
Except for several beggars, emaciated-looking women listlessly cradling babies in their laps, there was absolutely no one in view. Not in this neighborhood. They were all tucked out of sight, hidden behind a modern wall of Jericho.
La Calera, Pablo told them when Paul asked what the neighborhood was called.
Then, thankfully, their surroundings began to change.
Some scattered electronic and appliance stores, then small cafeterías advertising empanadas, patatas, and huevos, followed by a glut of news vendors, lotería shops, supermercados, various bustling places of commerce—the whole enchilada. A cacophony of smells wafted in through the half-cracked windows: bus exhaust, flowers, raw fish, newsprint—Paul was tempted to ask Joanna for a full rundown. They were clearly in the midst of the completely normal life of a capital city, just as Miles had promised. And Paul wondered if there was a kind of conscious denial at work here—if there had to be an ostrichlike mentality in a country where deputy mayors had their heads blown off on a regular basis. If Colombians were able to wall off pieces of their conscious mind from the ongoing war, much as they carefully walled off poverty from the upper classes in the La Calera district.
He stopped musing; there was a sign just ahead tucked into a small grove of trees.
Santa Regina Orfanato.
“Here,” Pablo whispered. He pulled into a hidden driveway and stopped the car. A locked gate; a black buzzer set in brass.
Pablo turned off the ignition, got out, and pushed the button. “Pablo,” he said, “Señor y Señora Breidbart.”
The gate swung open ten seconds later. Pablo got back in and methodically started up the car. He drove into an inner courtyard shaded by tall, spindly pines.
“Come on,” Señor Breidbart said when the car stopped again. “Let’s go meet our daughter.”
THREE
Paul couldn’t actually feel his legs.
He knew he had them—he was clearly and unmistakably standing on them, but they felt missing in action. Gone.
A second ago a short mestiza nurse in starched white had shuffled into the room hugging a pink baby blanket to her chest.
Inside this baby blanket, Paul knew, was a baby.
Not just a baby.
His baby.
WHEN THEY’D ENTERED THE STERILE ANTEROOM, THEY WAITED A good twenty minutes for Santa Regina’s director, María Consuelo, to come greet them. It felt longer than the plane flight. Paul stood up, sat down, walked around, looked out the window, sat down, stood up again. He counted the black tiles in the floor pattern, finding a familiar solace in numbers—there were twenty-eight of them. Occasionally, he squeezed Joanna’s hand and offered her wan smiles of encouragement. Finally, María entered the room, a petite earnest-looking woman with jet-black hair wrapped tightly in a bun. She was followed by a small bustling entourage.
She greeted Paul and Joanna by their first names, as if they were old friends who’d come visiting, instead of prospective parents come begging. Then she dutifully introduced the members of her staff—the head nurse, two teachers, and her personal assistant—all of whom shook hands with them before departing in turn. María led them into her office, where they arranged themselves around a small table covered in neatly stacked piles of magazines, and then spent another twenty minutes sipping bitter coffee—brought in by a somber teenage girl—and making generally awkward small talk.
Maybe it wasn’t small talk.
Paul felt increasingly as if it were the oral exam, the written part of the test having already been aced: employment checks, bank statements, stock certificates, mortgage slips, various recommendations from family and friends attesting to their good character and all-around worthiness. And the heartfelt letter it had taken Paul a solid week to compose, rip up, rewrite, painstakingly edit, and finally send off.
My wife and I are writing this letter to tell you who we are. And who we want to be. Parents.
María began by thanking them for the care package they’d sent the orphanage—diapers, bottles, formula, toys—a kind of authorized bribe Miles assured them was pro forma when adopting in Latin America.
Then she got down to business.
She asked Paul about his job— an insurance man, isn’t that so, Paul? Well, yes—though he didn’t tell her that in his case, being an insurance man meant locking himself away in a small room and compiling the stats that set the rates real insurance men went and charged you. That his life’s work consisted of calculating the risk in every known human activity, swimming through streams of raw data in an effort to reduce life to a semimanageable minefield. The definition of an actuary: someone who wants to be an accountant but doesn’t have the personality.
“How long have you been employed there?” she asked.
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br /> “Eleven years,” he answered, wondering if that categorized him as a solid breadwinner or a working transient. Regardless, he knew she already had this information. Maybe she was simply testing his truthfulness.
Then things got a little stickier.
She asked Joanna about her job.
Human resources executive for a pharmaceutical firm. Only it became clear that María wasn’t really inquiring about the nature of Joanna’s job, as much as asking her whether or not she was intending to give it up, now that she had an infant daughter to take care of.
Good question.
One that Paul and Joanna had spent more than a few weekends debating themselves, without ever quite reaching a definitive answer. Paul could tell from María’s tone of voice that she thought Joanna giving up her job would probably be a good idea.
For a moment Joanna said nothing, and all Paul could hear was the sound of the sputtering room fan, the electrical hum of the fluorescent lighting, and his own inner voice, which was screaming at Joanna to lie.
Just this once.
The problem was, lying wasn’t really part of her M.O. She was awfully good at spotting them—lies, half-truths, gross misstatements of fact—but just about incapable of letting one pass her lips.
“I’m taking a leave of absence,” Joanna said.
Well, okay, Paul thought, true enough.
“How long ?” María asked.
Paul found himself staring at the picture gallery that took up half the wall of María’s office—multishaded adolescent faces peering out from backyard decks, swimming pools, playrooms, Little League fields, from under cocked college graduation caps—and wondering whether his daughter’s picture would be gracing that wall.
“I’m not sure,” Joanna said.
Paul looked back at María and smiled. He must’ve looked like an overgrown child hoping for candy.
“I know I’ll end up doing what’s best for the baby and best for me,” Joanna said. “I’ll be a good mother.”
María sighed. She reached for Joanna’s hand. It was a gesture Paul had seen doctors and priests make when they were about to impart bad news—one priest in particular, when Paul was eleven years old and it was his hand being reached for, patted, and held tight. The day his mom died.
“Joanna,” María said, “I, too, am sure you’ll be a good mother.” She smiled.
It took Paul a minute to understand that they’d passed.
Test over.
He felt a reservoir of pent-up anxiety flooding out of him. But only for a moment.
Because María said, “I think it’s time you met your daughter.”
María kept talking, but Paul pretty much stopped listening.
Her voice was being drowned out by the sound of his own heartbeat, which seemed raucous and dangerously irregular. And another sound too—heavy footsteps that were slowly but steadily advancing down the hall. Paul became preternaturally aware of the rivers of sweat virtually flowing down both arms.
Was that her ?
The footsteps passed by and faded into silence.
Then, after a minute or two during which Paul found it difficult to breathe, a new set of footsteps appeared on his radar screen, grew in volume and texture and clarity, and seemed to stop just outside the door.
María said, “I know you’re anxious to meet her. She’s beautiful. ”
They’d received a tiny black-and-white photograph, that’s all—passport-sized, dark, and maddeningly blurred.
The door slowly opened. The overhead fan was clearly spinning. Paul could swear the air turned stock-still.
The dark-skinned nurse walked into the room hugging a fuzzy baby blanket to her chest. Paul and Joanna shot up as Paul’s legs lost all sensation, as if he were balancing on stilts.
Slowly, the nurse peeled back the top section of blanket, revealing spiky dark hair and two bottomless black eyes. The effect was a kind of infant punk, a beguiling mixture of innocence and attitude.
Paul fell immediately and terminally in love.
He was reminded of the first time he saw Joanna, across an airport waiting lounge filled with tired and frustrated people, wearily looking up to witness this pale-skinned and blue-eyed vision of loveliness haranguing an unforthcoming airline employee for information. Femininity and fearlessness seemed to meet in equal proportion, and he’d experienced something akin to a cocaine-induced rush, something he’d tried a few times in his frat days. That joyous but dangerous burst of pure exultation, which threatened to race your heart to heights of ecstasy, or break it in two.
Possibly both.
The nurse held their daughter out to them, and somehow Paul reached out for her first. The instant he pressed her to his chest, she felt as if she belonged there.
Joanna leaned in and softly brushed the baby’s forehead with one perfectly manicured finger. The baby opened her tiny mouth.
“Look,” Paul said to no one in particular, “she’s smiling at us.”
María laughed. “It’s gas, I think. She’s a beauty, though, no?”
“Oh yes,” Paul said, “she’s a beauty.” His daughter’s skin was the palest shade of olive. Her nocturnal eyes seemed to express an intimate kind of understanding. That she’d finally come home.
Paul looked up at Joanna. Tears had reduced her eyes to two pale blue lakes.
María Consuelo beamed at them.
“I knew this child was meant for you,” she said. “I always know. Have you chosen a name yet?”
“Yes,” Paul said. “Joelle.” It was an amalgam of Joseph, Joanna’s paternal grandfather, and Ellen, his mom. Both deceased. Both sorely missed, especially now.
“Joelle.” María sounded it out, then shook her head affirmatively. It had passed muster.
“Can I, honey?” Joanna put her arms out and Paul tentatively handed the baby over. She was so unbearably light, so ridiculously tiny, he was afraid that she might disappear at any second.
But no.
Joanna gathered her up in her arms and cooed.
“Ooooh . . . yes, Joelle . . . Gooood girl . . . Mommy’s here . . .” She placed her pinkie into Joelle’s tiny hand and Joelle fastened onto it.
A kind of circle had been formed, Paul thought: Joanna, Joelle, and himself. A circle is self-contained and self-sufficient.
It has no beginning and no end, forever.
FOUR
On the way back from Santa Regina, they passed a field of human heads.
Maybe they should’ve taken that as a sign, an omen signaling what was to come. But that’s the problem with omens—they only become omens based on later events.
There was Joanna pressing a very sleepy Joelle to her chest.
There was Paul mentally traversing the newly discovered terrain of fatherhood.
There were twenty heads sticking up out of the ground.
Heads that were clearly and emphatically, well, alive. They were blinking their eyes, opening their mouths, slowly looking up and down, left and right.
“Hambre,” Pablo said, sighing.
“What?” Paul said. Hambre meant what? Hunger.
Joanna had seen them too. She’d instinctively brought Joelle closer to her chest as if to protect her, her maternal instinct suddenly pressed into action.
Pablo said, “They are protesta .”
Hunger strike.
They’d buried themselves up to their necks in a section of unpaved road. Twenty or thirty of them, mostly young men and women. They looked like something out of Hieronymus Bosch, Paul thought, doomed penitents trapped in the third circle of hell.
“What are they protesting?” Joanna asked.
Pablo shrugged. “Conditions,” he said.
“How long have they—?”
“Long time,” Pablo said. “Four, five weeks.”
Maybe not much longer.
The first thing Paul heard was the siren.
An ambulance, he guessed—because he saw a station wagon with Ambulancia painted on its side
suddenly pulling up onto the sidewalk. Its roof light was conspicuously inert. No, the siren was coming from somewhere else.
Two police cars. Urbano guardia. One of them cutting right in front of them, causing Pablo to jam the brakes and veer suddenly to the left, where their car came to rest with its front bumper virtually touching a brick wall.
Joelle began crying.
She wasn’t the only one.
The policemen used long black nightsticks.
It looked like that bar game where little plastic groundhogs pop their heads up in random order and you score points by bopping them on the head. Only in the bar game they can pop back down. They can lie low and hide.
Not here.
In mere minutes, minutes in which Joelle grew increasingly agitated and Pablo attempted to turn the car around, the ground turned scarlet.
Which is why the ambulance was there—the result of good civic planning.
Pablo finally managed to get the car in the opposite direction and take off down a ridiculously narrow side street, barely avoiding sudden streams of people running from all directions to watch.
The field of bloodied heads receded into the distance. It was harder for Paul to get the sight out of his head.
Joanna was shaking—or was that him? When he put his arm around her and hugged, it was hard to tell. He’d been here a day, he thought, less than a day, but he was increasingly convinced that Bogotá wasn’t third world as much as fourth dimension.
Locombia, he’d overheard someone on the plane refer to Colombia: the mad country.
He had a pretty good idea now what they were talking about.
He was ecstatic that they were taking Joelle from here. They might’ve come to Colombia to rescue themselves—from loneliness, the doldrums, a life without kids—but they were rescuing her too. From this . Joelle would grow up in a place of relative safety and calm. Where she’d never see people buried up to their necks in a city street, and even if she did, policemen wouldn’t be bludgeoning them half to death.