Breakfast in Bogota

by Helen Young

  ‘They say he really is dead,’ she said. ‘And it was just a boy who shot him.’

  The body from the square, Luke thought. Over her shoulder, he looked up at the building and watched as the embassy staff fled. Where were the fire trucks, or the police to stop the mob? Someone struck out violently at a small official, who’d counted himself lucky in getting free of the building. The fool had stayed to watch. The first punch was followed by another as a second man joined in. Luke ran over and managed to get the first one off so that the official could escape. The second man turned and hit Luke square in the jaw so that he staggered backwards. He heard Felisa scream. He grabbed her hand and they ran.

  ‘Your face!’ she cried, when they stopped for breath in a doorway.

  ‘Where are we?’ Luke asked.

  He’d lost all sense of direction. His jaw throbbed and his lip was bleeding.

  Felisa peered out onto the street.

  ‘It isn’t safe,’ he said, pulling her back.

  ‘We’re on Fourteenth,’ she said. ‘I’m sure we are. It’s close to Seventh.’

  ‘It’s not far from the apartment.’ It wasn’t, was it? But he was struggling to control his breathing. There was blood all over his hands and his shirt. The mob were looking for people like him, people who stood out a mile. ‘We’ll have to run,’ he told her.

  Luke peered out at the street again. It was filling with smoke and he rubbed his eyes. They both did. It was hard to know which way the fire was turning. It was hard to know which way to run. As they hesitated, more buildings were being torched, to their left and to their right. And the noise, that was the most disorientating thing of all – the rawness of the people’s rage played out in smashed glass and falling masonry. Soon, they’d be trapped.

  ‘We need to move,’ he said, pulling her back onto the street.

  They ran up to Seventh Avenue, taking cover when they needed to – Luke pulling her one way, then Felisa pulling him another, working hard to keep each other alive. When they reached Seventh, they didn’t have time to feel relieved. The entire street was on fire. He looked towards the old town – Plaza de Bolívar and La Candelaria. There, the flames engulfed the skyline, blocking out any views of the mountains above. He heard the familiar ding of the streetcar bell and instinctively jumped up onto the pavement. Luke turned to see a stationary tram consumed by fire, its interior a pit of smoke. There was another tram further up the street loaded with people, rocking it dangerously back and forth. He tightened his grip on Felisa’s hand and pulled her away from the centre. If they could just get back to his apartment, he was sure they’d be safe.

  ‘I can’t!’ she cried.

  ‘It’s not far, come on.’

  ‘Luke, stop.’ Felisa wrestled free. ‘I have to go back.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘These are my people, Luke.’

  ‘What? You’ll be killed!’ He grabbed her again.

  ‘Luke, please.’ Felisa broke free of him and ran.

  ‘No!’ He went after her but was almost run over by a mob pushing a looted sedan into the street. When he’d picked his way past it, she had gone.

  He stood in the street for some time, as though waiting for her to return. He had never felt more lost. Machine-gun fire rang out from the direction of the square and he hit the ground along with the other people in the street. A man crouching at his side stared at him in disbelief, as though he were unwelcome to share in his misery. Luke rose as another round of bullets came to meet them. He didn’t care. He ran towards it, towards the square and what he hoped would be Felisa.

  As he got closer, he tripped over something lifeless, landing in agony on his damaged leg. He knew what it was he’d fallen over but didn’t stop to look; Felisa was out there somewhere and he had to find her. The smoke from the building fires sunk lower and it got harder for him to see where he was going. He ran until he was forced to stop and admit he was lost. Aside from the pain in his jaw and leg, he was unscathed. Thinking he’d reached the square, he’d ended up down a side street walking over broken glass that crunched underfoot. Luke turned and tried to retrace his steps. Everywhere, people were carrying things from the newly breached shop fronts and those who weren’t were running for their lives. He should be doing that too, he thought. Luke emerged onto what he hoped was the main road again. Instead, he’d come closer to the foothills of the mountain. He rubbed his stinging eyes. How had he arrived there? He must be in La Candelaria. His jaw wasn’t broken. He’d forgotten to check before. He turned around. Each direction seemed familiar, carrying with it shocked cries, gunfire, or both.

  The first blow came from behind, so that he felt as if he’d stumbled. The second one spun him around to meet his assailants, before the last sent his head against the wall behind him with such force he thought he heard the brickwork crack. He lost consciousness like that, upright, as though anything was possible.

  *

  Luke opened his eyes. It was raining. He could feel it on his face and the parts of his body that had become exposed in the struggle. His shirt was torn and his jacket gone. He’d been robbed. He was alive, though. His head felt light and unhindered. He tried to rise and almost blacked out with the pain of it, remembering the boy’s boot on the head in the square as though the weight of it had found him here. Luke closed his eyes, unsure how long he’d been on the ground. The day was turning to night. No one came and he wondered if he looked dead. In his unconscious mind he’d heard footsteps passing and people shouting but he wasn’t sure what was real or imagined. He tried to open his eyes again and found this time it was possible to keep them open. He sat upright, forcing himself to do it whatever the cost. Waves of nausea came and went, and then came again. He checked his limbs. They weren’t broken. He raised a hand to his head, afraid to touch the spots that were numb, even now. He brought his fingers away and looked at them. The blood was dark and like jelly, as though it had tried to clot. Good, he thought. Luke pulled the remains of his shirt around himself and tried to stand. He moved slowly, using the wall for support. He felt the nausea come again and vomited. It was better after that. His wallet and papers were in his jacket and gone now. Christ, he thought, taking one step and then another, finding it got easier once he’d remembered how it went. The numbness in his head was quickly replaced by pain as his body remembered it was alive, punishing him for it. He used the buildings to stumble onwards, trying not to draw attention to himself. He turned down one street and then another, confused and without direction. They all looked the same; it was disorientating. He vomited again. It helped. Faces hurried past him in the half-light. Soon it would be night and here he was, wandering the streets where the ack-ack echo of gunfire could still be heard. That was coming from the square. He knew this at least. A gunfight was going on there. Where was she, he thought, looking around himself, hoping she wasn’t one of those stretched across the flagstones with nothing but the sky for cover.

  That’s how they all ended. That’s what the photographs showed that he’d seen in the British press, and his name beside them, as though he’d singlehandedly murdered them all. Bodies piled one on top of the other indiscriminately, as though death came without order. Which it did. People who were strangers in life twisted and split apart so that it was hard to tell whose limbs belonged where. And Catherine hadn’t returned. That’s when he had the idea that she could have been one of them. That’s when, from his cell, he’d started searching each photograph for her – especially the ones the military police forced him to look at during those long, painful questionings. What seemed impossible at first became an obsession. If he only looked hard enough, close enough, he’d find her, or at least part of her. Catherine, Catherine and Catherine again.

  Luke’s head throbbed. A young woman, startled by his appearance, flew past and disappeared into a side street.

  ‘Catherine!’ he shouted after her, and again at someone new who’d crossed the street to avoid him.

  Maybe she was here, in Bogot
á. It was possible. Wasn’t he looking for her anyway? That’s why he’d come out tonight. Yes, she was here and he needed to find her.

  ‘Catherine!’ he shouted again, walking into the road to pass a burning building. It’d be easy to find her now he knew how to look. Dark-haired and eyes the colour of sea spray, like no colour at all. He approached an elderly couple and grabbed the man, asking him if he’d seen a woman who met this description. The man swore at him and struggled free. Someone was sure to know. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, squinting to check each figure who passed, going towards those who wouldn’t. Eventually he stopped. The pain in his head was getting worse. She had eluded him here as she had in London. He sunk down to the pavement edge and buried his head in his hands.

  ‘Luke!’

  Someone was calling his name.

  ‘Luke, oh Luke, it is you.’

  He looked up and there she was, at his side. She was here. He hadn’t been wrong. She had found him.

  ‘Catherine.’

  ‘Let’s get you up.’

  Rocío put an arm under his and the two of them rose.

  ‘You’re here.’

  ‘I am,’ she said.

  36

  In Rocío’s room in the boarding house in Las Cruces, he thought he was back on the farm again. The one on the Dorset coast. The war was raging and he was on holiday. No, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t a holiday. He was confusing the trip with Catherine and this later journey. He kept returning to that farm, remembering how it felt like the ends of the earth after the verdict. There hadn’t been enough evidence to convict him of treason in the end. Cowardice, however, he was guilty of that. It was written all over his face. He stank of it, they said. A banishment – that’s what he got. The farm with the others, stuck there turning the land. He’d been cast out. You’re not an architect any more, they’d said at the trial, you’re a labourer. He’d laboured all right – he’d made that word his own – head pressed deep to the earth, sinews stretched, raking up the soil, sweat-rashed. The farmer had not been kind. He had a son gone off to fight – a son who’d stepped on a mine in a field in France; been sown by other soldiers’ boots into the ground like his limbs might grow again. ‘But you’re the rotten crop,’ the farmer had spat when he’d first arrived, fresh and untouched by any of it. After that day in the field early on, when Luke had fallen from the fence and broken his leg, it was the great barn he’d been dragged to, half-conscious and in pain. It hadn’t been a room. A room implied walls, a window, and a door, not a vast chasm, ancient and forgotten. It was a week before he realised they’d just left him there. Less than basic rations, a bucket to piss in and plenty of time to pray. The doctor didn’t come for a full fortnight. Too busy, he’d said. Hadn’t been told for a week, he said. He reset the bone without ceremony – the only hymn Luke’s screams which set the skylarks free from their nests in the rafters. ‘I’ve done it, but you’re not worth saving,’ he’d come in close to whisper. A broken leg and on your back in the dry? What sacrifice was it, really?

  Luke was aware of Rocío leaning over him, washing his body and binding his head. He heard the shooing of children and then the madam standing in the doorway, saying he couldn’t stay here. He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out, just an inward cry, a sadness locked so tight inside himself it frightened him to hear it. He was restless and kicked off the covers, which Rocío replaced again and again. His leg throbbed. The old break returned. As much as sleep tried to overtake him in the darkened room, he kept waking, looking about for some lost thing. It didn’t make sense; he was here and so was she.

  ‘You called me Catherine again,’ Rocío said.

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘She has quite a hold over you.’

  He watched her cross the room and dip a bloody cloth into a bowl of water on the nightstand. Outside the window, a torrent of rain fell. He could hear it.

  ‘How do you feel, Luke?’

  ‘By the look on your face, terrible.’

  ‘I was so worried.’

  She returned and sat down, running the cloth gently across his forehead. He flinched.

  ‘The city is on its knees and you were just sitting there, Luke, as though you had gone for a stroll.’

  ‘Gaitán is dead. There was a boy, on the square.’

  ‘Yes, I know it. Such a good man. The communists took hold of the radio stations. They say Gómez is dead too. You know him?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘A minister. I know some of his friends. The wireless called it a rebellion.’

  ‘By the communists?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No, it was the people.’ And she had run to join them. ‘Felisa,’ he said, trying to rise.

  ‘No, Luke, you have to rest.’ Rocío gently pushed him back down.

  Felisa. He had gone to find her and had failed.

  ‘Sleep now,’ she said, watching him, waiting until he closed his eyes.

  Luke did as she asked and in the darkness was a worse nightmare than any he’d imagined possible, Felisa running towards that gunfire.

  Luke waited until he could hear Rocío leave the room and move downstairs with the other girls before pulling back the covers, rising and finding his clothes. He quickly dressed, picking up a rough woollen poncho from the back of a chair. He went along the corridor and down the stairs. He didn’t want them to come running. He still felt nauseous, although the worst of the pain had passed. He reached up and touched his face. It was badly swollen and it took most of his energy not to cry out. At the foot of the stairs he could hear a wireless turned up loudly. The women were there, in the back somewhere. At the front of the house the inner door was locked; he slid the bolt across as quietly as he could. Thankfully, the outer door was open.

  Outside, it was dark. The boarding house had felt safe and now he was exposed again. A foreigner and an easy target. He pulled the poncho tight and took a moment to remember the route. He planned to avoid the most obvious path to the main square and stick to the roads closest the mountain. At some point he would have to bear downwards and hit Seventh; he didn’t know another way and didn’t want to risk being seen. Many of the roads in the centre had been used as blockades to stem the mob’s progress and so he found himself turning first one way and then another to reach it. After what felt like hours, he ended up close to the main square. This was where everyone had been. Bodies, piled one on top of the other, meant many hadn’t left. Lone rebels were still fighting from the rooftops, picking off those stupid enough to break cover. Most of the mob, he noticed, had grown tired and were running away from the square. In front of him a boy of about twelve dragged a rusted machete along the roadside. Keeping close to the buildings, Luke edged closer to the square. That was where Felisa had run.

  A metallic wail split the air close to his head, the shock of which made him stumble backwards. The bullet had come close to his right ear and taken a bite out of the plaster behind him. He kept low, covering his head, forcing himself to move forward. The buildings either side of him fell away and he was back out in the open again. He looked across the square. A whole corner was on fire. The Palacio Liévano and the government buildings, where Gaitán had made his speech months before, were missing. On the side closest to him, the palace still stood, as did the Capitolio. There was a wide, ugly gash in the police barricade in front. People were still running towards it, trying to make for the steps. The police were nowhere to be seen. He recognised the army, firing at anything, regardless of which direction it ran. A small group of men and women flew past him and he followed, managing to get as far as one of the smaller fountains in the centre of the square before three of the group were cut down ahead of him. A woman fell to the ground beside him. He reached down to help her, his hands pressed to her stomach, so that she died staring up at him. He covered his ears. Couldn’t catch his breath. If Felisa was here, there was a chance she was inside these buildings. That’s where he’d have gone.

  The firing stoppe
d. He looked out from behind the fountain. The army weren’t looking at the government buildings. They were focussing in on a small group of rebels with guns of their own. No one was watching the steps of the Capitolio. Luke left his hiding place and ran. He jumped the barbed wire lacing the barricade and fell up the steps, ignoring the searing pain in his leg. He ran through the columns and across the inner courtyard, slamming the heavy door behind him.

  Inside it was quiet, in stark contrast to everything that had come before it. But he could hear his breath, all right. He put his hands on his knees and threw up. It was the stench that did it. Piss and faeces. The lowest offering for the highest office. The destruction here was worse than the square. Amputated tables, chairs, curtains torn from hooks and windows smashed through so that moonlight poured in. A man ran past him carrying a pair of gilt candlesticks. He pulled open the main door and ran out. Moments later, the sound of gunfire.

  ‘Felisa!’ Luke cried, taking the stairs two at a time. He reached the landing, a wide corridor, and pushed open the first door, nothing, just an office, paper strewn everywhere. He tried another, empty again. Everyone had fled already. A hand on his shoulder spun him around. His assailant raised a finger to his lips.

  ‘In here,’ the man said, leading Luke inside a darkened room. As soon as the door was closed the man flicked a switch and the room lit up. It was a washroom. The man straightened out the soap and then busied himself tidying cloths that had fallen to the floor.

  ‘Nobody’s been in here,’ he said, his accent American. ‘Seems they’d rather defecate on the carpets.’

  ‘Why haven’t you escaped?’

  ‘It’s safe here.’

  ‘Safe?’

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said, wiping his palms on his trousers. ‘I’m Peter K. James, from Boston.’