Breakfast in Bogota

by Helen Young

  ‘Señor Presidente Ospina Pérez, under the weight of a profound emotion I address Your Excellency, interpreting the wishes and will of this multitude that hides its burning heart, lacerated by so much injustice, under a clamorous silence, to ask that there be peace and mercy for the nation.’

  At Luke’s side, Felisa drew breath and reached up for his ear.

  ‘Peace and mercy,’ she whispered.

  He felt it like a chill wind blowing. ‘Peace and mercy.’ It was like a plea, the last desperate bid of someone confined to the scaffold. Gaitán was speaking about them. Even those around them who had coughed and whispered their way into the square were silent now. All across the city, he thought, others will be feeling like this. President Ospina in some fine room inside the presidential palace will be feeling it too. Gaitán’s words repeated to him down the line, ‘peace and mercy’, from aide to politician, ‘peace and mercy’, until finally someone brave enough will have whispered in his ear, ‘peace and mercy,’ knowing the message was meant for him alone. Gaitán, their chief mourner, addressed the people again. They were hanging on his every word, urging him to tell them to strike; now was the moment, they would do it, if he only asked.

  ‘Go home,’ he said at last.

  Go home? Had he really said that? Go home? He wants us to leave, they now repeated. The address hadn’t lasted more than ten minutes. Felisa tugged at Luke’s sleeve.

  ‘It’s done,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’

  The crowd began to disperse as Gaitán had asked. Some people were angry. They had come thinking something was about to begin, that they had been invited to start it.

  ‘Stop that!’ Luke shouted at a group of boys who were trying to shake one of the scaffold poles loose behind them. There were still people climbing down from it.

  ‘Don’t, Luke. Come away.’ Felisa pulled at his arm.

  ‘Ospina is a dog,’ someone close to them said.

  ‘My brother was beaten last week, outside his own house and only an hour from here,’ said another, and then a third: ‘He won’t help. Ospina doesn’t care, none of them do.’

  ‘If Gaitán told me to spit on any one of them politicians, I would.’

  ‘I would do worse.’

  Gaitán has brought his cause to the president’s door, Luke thought. Ospina had only to open the windows of his office to hear the decree; to hear the public cry. He had made the people bold.

  ‘Do you think Ospina will step down?’ Luke asked as they made their way back onto Seventh.

  ‘He might.’

  ‘Or worse,’ Luke said. ‘He might be pushed.’

  ‘Why would that be worse?’ Felisa asked.

  ‘If it brought more instability, it might be.’

  ‘We’re knocking at his door now, he can’t ignore us, Luke.’

  They walked on in silence. It was as though, in some way, they were still under Gaitán’s spell. For Luke’s part, it was shyness too. He didn’t want to be the first to own it, when Felisa knew so much more than he did. Perhaps she is waiting for me, he thought, wondering how or in what way he might get her to speak again. In the end he found himself asking after Camilo. He was their only common ground.

  ‘He will have been there,’ she said. ‘Covering it.’

  He thought of the moment in the square when she had taken his hand.

  ‘And what do you think he’ll write?’

  ‘Gaitán spoke well, he’ll say something about that. The main thing is the challenge to Ospina.’

  ‘From the people.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Felisa stopped.

  ‘They offered up their silence so Gaitán could speak for them.’

  ‘You saw that?’

  Luke swallowed. ‘I read the copies of Jornada you gave me.’

  Felisa nodded.

  ‘And I’ve been listening to Gaitán’s question time on the wireless.’

  ‘I don’t have that luxury,’ she said.

  ‘Then come over and listen to mine, whenever you like.’

  Felisa blushed and they were returned to silence. She looked cold, he thought. He realised her own journey home would have taken her in the opposite direction across the square. He was glad she had decided to walk with him.

  ‘Here,’ he said, taking off his jacket and handing it to her.

  ‘No, it’s all right.’

  ‘Please.’

  Reluctantly, it seemed, she took it and put it on. They continued in silence. When they reached the corner of Jiménez, Felisa stopped.

  ‘I should go,’ she said.

  ‘Won’t you come back and have something to eat?’

  They’d arrived in front of the El Tiempo offices. She looked at him and then up at the building.

  ‘I said I’d wait for Camilo.’

  ‘I see,’ Luke said. ‘What we’re doing with the redevelopment, it’s going to improve things, Felisa, for the people.’

  ‘Perhaps it will,’ she said. ‘I was thinking about that during the speech.’

  ‘So was I.’

  ‘I don’t know if Deputy Martin, or those in power against Gaitán, see it like that.’

  ‘But I do. Why shouldn’t that money be used for this?’

  Felisa looked at him and came close. ‘You really believe that, don’t you?’

  ‘I do, actually,’ he said. ‘I have such ideas, Felisa.’

  She looked up at the building again. ‘I don’t know how long Camilo will be. Perhaps there is time to eat first?’

  When they reached his apartment, they were hardly inside the door before they were kissing again. It was urgent and restless, as though something had been building since the square, since the silence that had been forced upon them. Both of them, he thought, knowing that this might be their only chance, that today, they were under some sort of spell that wouldn’t last into tomorrow.

  And now here Felisa was, sleeping soundly in his bed beneath his arm, her dark hair spread across the pillow. They were naked, and he was content to stay that way. He looked down at her. Her breasts were small and beautiful and her figure light yet firm beside his. Beneath his. She had cried out early, or maybe it was him. They’d held onto each other a long time afterwards. He couldn’t remember a moment like it. Only if he stretched back far enough would he find something that came close, that felt as sacred. He didn’t want to do that. Not now.

  ‘Luke,’ she said, looking up at him. ‘I dreamed I’d left.’

  ‘And should you?’

  He wasn’t ready to let her go and so kissed her again.

  ‘Camilo might come looking for me.’

  ‘He won’t come here. I don’t think I want to talk about him,’ Luke said, laying his head down on her chest.

  ‘Are you mine, Luke?’

  ‘I think I have been for some time.’

  Felisa sighed. ‘It feels hopeless though, doesn’t it?’

  ‘What does?’ he said, sitting up and kissing her again, not wanting an answer. He couldn’t help himself. He wanted, needed to show her how much she meant to him.

  ‘Please, Luke. You must let me speak.’ He drew back. ‘You must hear this. Everything I am, I owe to him.’

  ‘To him?’

  ‘Yes, to Camilo.’

  ‘But not like this, surely.’

  ‘He’s given me so much.’

  ‘He doesn’t deserve your pity.’

  ‘It isn’t pity. I am grateful.’

  ‘And now, here, is this gratitude too?’

  ‘Why would you say that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Because of what he has, of what you’re saying now. He’s become a friend to me, but I think I hate him.’

  ‘What have I done?’

  ‘Nothing, you’ve done nothing,’ he said, taking a deep breath. ‘It’s me.’

  She waited for him to speak again.

  ‘Jealousy,’ he whispered. ‘It’s that.’ He smiled but it felt weak and sickly. He felt weak and sickly and he was sure she saw it. Saw
that she had made a mistake.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, rising. ‘I should go.’

  ‘No, don’t.’

  ‘I think I should.’ She kept dressing.

  ‘The article Camilo wrote, it wasn’t wholly true,’ he said, letting it rush out before he could stop himself.

  ‘Enough, Luke. If you’re suggesting he’d make something up, that he’d lie…’

  ‘No, Felisa, I’m not suggesting that.’

  ‘Then what is it?’

  ‘There were things I left out.’

  ‘Well that doesn’t matter, does it? You don’t have to tell the world your business, if it’s private.’ She sat down again. ‘You don’t have to tell me.’

  ‘I do,’ he mumbled. ‘I can see that. The thing is, Felisa, what I didn’t say wasn’t private. It was actually quite public.’ He folded the sheet over himself. ‘This is very white,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t noticed before.’

  ‘The sheet, Luke?’

  ‘Where I come from, if you were presented with a white feather, during the conflict, it meant you were a coward. It meant you thought your life was worth more than those who went to fight.’

  ‘White feathers, Luke? I’m confused. What does this have to do with the article? You were an architect, then you went to work for the ministry, that’s fighting of a sort, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I went to work in government and for a time, a very short time, I did fight as you call it. But then I stopped believing in it. You see, the type of fighting I was doing meant I had to use what I knew, what I had learned as an architect. What I wrote up in my reports informed where the bombs would drop. I had to look at detailed maps of those cities and say – here, and here, and this place, these are the best targets.’

  ‘Oh, Luke, not really?’

  ‘It’s true. It was guesswork, to some extent. I had no way of knowing whether those locations had been turned over to residential use. I hadn’t been to some of those places since the early thirties. Christ, some I’d never been to.’

  ‘Luke, your hands are shaking.’

  ‘Are they? I need a drink. Do you need a drink?’

  She nodded. ‘I’ll go.’

  Felisa rose and pulled on a shirt from a pile. She left the room. He couldn’t breathe. He’d told her. It had been pressing down on him and still was, although he’d managed to let some of it out. Some of it was free. He rose to open the window.

  ‘No, Luke, you’re naked,’ she said, smiling at him shyly as she came back into the room. He got back into bed. Felisa handed him one of the glasses and placed the other on the table beside him. She went over to the window and opened it.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said as she got back into the bed.

  He handed her the other glass. They clinked them together. To celebrate the truth, he supposed.

  ‘I don’t think there’s any shame in not wanting to be a part of that,’ Felisa said. ‘Using something beautiful, a gift, for something ugly, like war.’

  ‘If only that were it,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe I’m going to tell you this. I took something, you see, and that something hurt more people.’ He drank. ‘You can’t just leave a position like that. You sign up. You have to stay, by law. So, I took the coward’s way out. I stole reports and maps for upcoming bombardments – things I had written which I knew they’d never forgive me taking. They still trusted me then, so it was easy to simply walk out the front door with whatever I wanted.’

  ‘You stole from the government, for what you believed in?’

  He nodded. ‘It held up the effort for months afterwards. They arrested me, questioned me, really questioned me, quite a few of them were involved in that. Then there was the trial. The evidence said that thousands more had died because of what I’d done. Good British soldiers and civilians, because I had allowed Hitler to advance his munitions factories.’ Felisa nodded. ‘At the time I’m not sure I cared. The whole thing was rotten. I took whatever they threw at me, but it was when they called my work into question, when they wanted to wipe out all of that – any knowledge of it… My name was mud. Luke Vosey, Public Enemy, I— I remember the headlines, the beatings, all of it.’

  ‘What evidence did they have?’

  ‘None to start with. I wouldn’t tell them what I did with the papers; I mean, I burned them, obviously, in the pit of a firebombed house at the end of my street. I thought that was quite clever at the time, but it was a bit stupid, really. Someone saw the fire. You see, you had to report everything then, as a matter of public duty. They had this as proof, I mean the woman who’d seen me was a local drunk, but they didn’t care. I didn’t care. That truth didn’t feel as bad as when I was a part of it. It was the photographs that haunted me, that finally convinced me to turn. We’d get these aerial shots sent back from each mission, those weren’t so terrible as everything looks manageable from above – a blackened hole here, untouched areas there. No, it was the photographs taken on the ground. In those, you’d come face to face with someone’s arm, someone’s husband, or a baby… I mean, what was a baby doing in a munitions factory?’

  ‘Stop, Luke, that’s enough.’

  Felisa put both glasses down and took hold of him. He let himself implode. Disintegrate. He was right back there, to the moment after the trial when he realised what had been lost and what would never be brought back.

  Felisa kissed the top of his head and it brought him back into the room. He turned his face to hers and kissed her back, wanting her to know how much it had taken to get this far. He felt she understood – the urgency, the need – everything he did. It coursed through him. He’d been so lost for so long. So without hope of coming back to this moment of belonging. This moment. This. Her face was wet. Was she crying, even now?

  No. He was.

  ‘Luke,’ she cried out. ‘It’s you.’

  *

  Late that same night he went out with her to find a car to take her back to Tres Esquinas. She had insisted on returning. Luke drew his jacket around her for the second time. When he closed the door of his apartment and was alone again, it was well after midnight. He collapsed onto the bed, wondering whether any of it had been real. In the sheets he could still smell the perfume in her hair, like she had bathed inside the cup of some sacred flower, but even this was more an idea of the smell than the thing itself. Nothing about the evening had seemed real. On Monday, he thought, they’d meet again, and everything would be different.

  19

  The light was so bright that it became heat – the sky embraced it – falling masonry, bricks, glass shards blocking out the sun. It was gone – all of it – all of them. Luke sat upright in the bed. He couldn’t breathe. Another night lost. He rose and stumbled from the bed towards the kitchen. He found the water jug and lifted it to his lips, finding repose at last, resting back against the cool sink. The nightmares had returned. Yesterday’s encounter with Felisa had left its mark. Had he agreed to Osorio’s project for her and the people, or was it another selfish act, like those he’d been accused of in the past? He was no Gaitán. Last night he’d been followed by a thousand pairs of eyes, and the bodies they belonged to were piled one against another in the scattered basements of the cities he had loved, Hamburg, Dresden…

  Dresden. He saw it again now, as fresh as this morning. He’d been there in the late twenties as a student, staying in the Altstadt in a small rented room overlooking the Elbe. There had been a cocktail party in an apartment on the Schloßstraße. He’d snuck in with a friend. A local boy named Robert. They’d met at college, were studying together. The party was Luke’s first taste of something grander than himself. They’d pinched cigarettes and flirted with the women. One day, Robert took him to where he lived on the Striesener Straße to meet his mother, father and younger sister. The small apartment looked onto one of the city’s central arteries. He remembered the address again later, in ’45, when it was marked as a point of focus for the incendiaries. That’s how he saw them, civilians and soldiers both, strewn across urba
n battlefields.

  He went back into the bedroom and opened the window, closing the curtains again so he might undress. A gust of fresh air blew through the drapes – it was a welcome breeze just passing through the neighbourhood. It was sobering to feel alive. He grabbed a clean towel and went to wash.

  When Luke arrived at La Merced for their last day on site, Felisa was already there. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, her sketchbook open and the tin of watercolours at her feet. The desks and chairs she had shared with the foreman and her one-time rival Alfonso Blanco were gone, as was Blanco, now that the work had been completed.

  ‘Come and sit upstairs,’ he said at last. He hadn’t wanted to disturb her.

  Felisa looked up and smiled.

  ‘There’ll be three of us, though,’ he said, wondering how she could look at him after what he had revealed. ‘Telma will be here soon.’

  ‘She already is,’ Felisa said.

  ‘Are they almost finished?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But if you’d prefer, I can get started on the new project.’

  ‘What I would prefer…’ he began.

  Felisa smiled sweetly. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Should I come and sit down there too?’ Telma called from the top of the stairs.

  ‘You’re fine where you are,’ Luke replied.

  They laughed.

  ‘Señor Vosey,’ Felisa said. ‘I’ll be up shortly.’

  *

  There wasn’t much furniture left in his office and he wondered if he might choose a new space or relocate to his apartment sooner. Inside the room, Telma had already formed a new working space for herself, taking a corner of his desk since her own had gone.

  ‘I’m paid until today,’ she said, shrugging, when she caught him staring.

  ‘As you wish, Telma.’

  ‘And the girl in here, too?’ Telma rose when Felisa entered. ‘I’ll make coffee,’ she said, squeezing past her and out into the hall.