by Phil Klay
“You’re being so gentle,” she said, laughing. “Nobody but me knows you’re such a gentle, gentle man. Slap my ass or something. You’re just back from Iraq.”
Natalia and I didn’t date during my one year in college before I dropped out to join the army, a year I spent awkward and angry. At the time, I thought the problem was Wake Forest, the popped collars and Beamers and sons of southern aristocracy, like my roommate, Carlton, a two-hundred-pound baseball player I never really got along with. My first night there, lying in the bottom of our bunk bed, wondering what Wake would be like, I saw a stream of vomit, followed by Carlton’s big body rushing down, followed by a thud. He was uninjured and unfazed—thanks, alcohol—and I spent the rest of the night cleaning up after him, never getting so much as a thank you. I guess he was just used to other people making his problems disappear. I felt out of my skin. I felt like I was somehow always violating some unwritten code, stepping over invisible lines of etiquette, revealing myself as rough, coarse, unworthy.
Natalia, on the other hand—who grew up in Springfield, North Carolina, whose father had emigrated from Medellín, Colombia, worked in a factory—seemed to feel right at home, the owner of whatever space she entered, including my dorm room. “Did you feel like this in high school?” she asked me once, and when I admitted that in some ways I had, told me, “Well then maybe the problem isn’t everybody else, maybe it’s you.”
The first week I was home after that Iraq deployment, we spent a lot of time talking about our hopes for our daughter. What dreams we had for her. Natalia had us pray every night, not for her health or that the delivery would be painless, but for the strength to be good parents, to teach her right. Even when I’m not sure I believe in God I’ve always appreciated this about her, that she makes me struggle to find the words to match our hopes. That first week, though, I held back. I didn’t mention any of the children I saw on my deployment to Natalia, not because she couldn’t handle it, but because speaking such things would make them more real, and I wanted to pretend they didn’t happen.
And then at the beginning of the second week, at the Womack hospital, after they took Natalia’s blood pressure, took it again, and did an ultrasound, they told us there was something wrong.
“Are you ready to have this baby? Because you’re having it today.” They told us to go straight to Labor and Delivery. I don’t remember who, they were all faceless.
So we told them, yes, we’d go straight to Labor and Delivery. We didn’t. We went to the hospital chapel, but the chapel at Womack is small and windowless, with white walls, cheaply made chairs, and an altar that looks like it came from Ikea, a place too ugly to even suggest there might be a God.
“I want stained glass,” Natalia said.
She meant JFK Memorial. Five minutes away, given traffic, which we couldn’t count on around that time.
“I’m not dying yet,” she said.
“This is no joke,” I tell her.
“I know,” she said. “But luckily I’ve got an Eighteen Delta with me, in case things get serious.”
So we drove to JFK, and we knelt down in the pews, and we bowed our heads. I don’t know what Natalia prayed, or who she prayed to, but I prayed to the Good Thief. Natalia’s grandmother Inez had told me once it’s good to pray to the less popular saints when things are really urgent, because the less popular saints won’t be as busy.
Then we headed back, me quiet, in that other place, that focused place, and I had Natalia call Jefe to let him know what was going on, but we didn’t call Natalia’s parents or mine, maybe so as not to tempt fate. Traffic had picked up, and we got stuck behind a pickup that was overly timid about making a left turn. The pickup had those truck balls hanging from the back, little plastic purple nuts hanging underneath the license plate, and I resisted the urge to shout, or to ram the truck, or to do anything that might raise Natalia’s blood pressure, and within about ten minutes we were back in the Womack parking lot.
When we got to Labor and Delivery, they put Natalia on Pitocin to force labor, which was the only way to cure what was wrong with her.
“I don’t feel the Pitocin yet,” my wife said.
“You will,” said the white nurse.
“Maybe it’ll be okay,” said the Asian nurse. “Latinos have thicker skin, so there’s less pain in labor.”
The white nurse narrowed her eyes but said nothing, and when they left Natalia turned to me.
“Uh . . .” she said, “that bit about Latinos and pain . . . was that science or racism?”
I wasn’t sure. Probably racism, but what good would it do right then to say so? “Science,” I said.
At first the only sign of contractions was on the monitor, nothing Natalia could feel. Just anxiety and boredom. For hours. When it started we were watching Maury, of all things, and Natalia said, “Ooookay. I think I need you for these.”
Soon she was on her hands and knees, making those noises from the birthing class videos.
Natalia held on until she couldn’t take it anymore, and she asked for the epidural. They put it in and she immediately passed out. I sat and held her hand, but the nurse told me to sleep, that I’d need my energy soon enough, so I rolled up my coat for a pillow and slept on the floor. I woke around midnight to Natalia screaming, ready to push.
Natalia would push, her face clenched in pain, looking like I’d never seen her before. It was animalistic, and not beautiful, exactly. Awe-inspiring, I suppose. I was watching this titanic thing, this thing I’d been waiting for and preparing for, this thing that clearly was taking every inch of courage and endurance Natalia had, and well . . . I was standing there like an idiot, saying, “You’re doing great, babe, you’re doing great.”
A nurse asked if I wanted to catch the baby and I went in and helped catch her and we brought her up to Natalia’s chest and she lay there. She was beautiful, or seemed beautiful to us, our vision distorted by parental love. Now, looking at the pictures, it’s clear she looked like a dirty little gremlin. Still. She was making small mewing noises. I wept. With the help of the nurse I cut her umbilical cord, hands shaking. She was on Natalia’s chest for forty-five minutes. We sang to her. We recited RinRin Renacuajo, a fairy tale my mother-in-law had told me to memorize. Before they took her away to the NICU, and Natalia went to sleep, they asked us her name, and we told them it was Inez.
Natalia woke me around 2:30 a.m. “I’m in a lot of pain,” she said.
The nurse on duty, a super-sweet Texan named Jacklyn, who’d worked in ER beforehand, examined Natalia, pressing here and there on her stomach until Natalia cried out. There was a gush of blood. Jacklyn’s hand came up bloody. And then the lights came on and there were people rushing around. I stood by Natalia’s head, holding her hand.
“I’m going to scrape your uterus,” a female doctor said, “and it’s gonna hurt.” And she put her hand up my wife’s vagina as Natalia repeated, over and over when not screaming, “Please stop, please stop. Please, please, please stop.”
When she withdrew her hand, a lot more blood came out. I’m a medic, you’d think I would be able to handle a thing like this. But I didn’t know much of anything about labor complications, so I didn’t have any base of knowledge that would let me categorize and file away whatever I was seeing, and besides, even if I did, this was my wife. I couldn’t just separate out the body in front of me, a physical object in need of mechanical fixes, from the presence of Natalia in pain. She was losing a lot of blood. A lot for a man, and my wife is a small woman.
It didn’t just come out in a stream. There were chunks, failed clots. All this, it was later explained, was the fault of the magnesium. I didn’t know that. All I knew was that I’d seen major blood loss before, even from men I’ve loved, but it had never felt like this. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my wife looking at me, maybe in the hope I’d let her know it was all okay, but I couldn’t stop staring at the
bloody mess between her legs and spilling over the sides of the bed. The pool of it, filled with clumps of clot.
They put in an IV, fumbling a bit. I could have done it better and wanted to offer, wanted to take charge, but instead I stroked her hair, tried to stay out of their way, to not become another issue the doctors would have to deal with. Natalia was looking at me strangely. I smiled at her.
“You’re all right, babe,” I said.
They gave her a transfusion. The doctor explained in a very authoritative, calm way that it was okay. “Look around, there’s not a million people running around doing things right now,” she said. It was true. Where did they go?
“That means you’ll be okay. This is serious but totally normal. The magnesium is stopping your uterus from contracting so we’re going to put you back on Pitocin.” Then it was over, and Natalia fell asleep and so did I.
The next morning, I went to see my daughter in the NICU. I sang to her, and I wept. I don’t know why. It was still hard to conceptualize this small wrinkled thing as my daughter, or myself as a father. I wouldn’t feel like a father for some time, not until I’d spent time fathering—changing diapers, feeding her, reading to her, leaving her for training and then missing her. But even in the strangeness of it all there were physical things that made sense, that felt natural and right. Cuddling her in my arms, holding her on my chest, singing softly to her. It still surprises me how physical an experience it is, having a baby. Babies need contact and you, as the parent, need it, too.
“Can you imagine if we’d had a birth like this a hundred years ago?” Natalia asked me when I came back.
“You’d have died,” I said. “You’d have died and then I’d have been sad for the rest of my life.”
And that was the birth of my child.
4
JUAN PABLO 2015–2016
The next morning I sit behind General Cabrales in the National Capitol as he briefs the representatives in the Second Commission on the coming change in force posture. “All assuming the nation votes yes,” he adds. Of course, it’s a foregone conclusion that they will. Every bit of polling says the yes vote is the only outcome. Peace is inevitable. It’s an odd thing for a military man to concede.
Afterward, Colonel Carlosama pulls me aside and asks if I know or have had any dealings with Representative Ana Maria de Salva.
“She wants to have lunch with you. You, specifically. By name.”
“I don’t know her, sir,” I say, though I remember seeing her basic information on the handout detailing the members of the Second Commission.
“Liberal Party, but keeps her distance from President Santos. Possibly not a friendly lunch. The general is curious what she wants, so make a note of what she bites down on.”
Strange. And troubling. Why me, and not the general, or at least Colonel Carlosama?
He hands me a piece of paper with an address. “La Hacienda. If it’s the place I think, it has terrible food. At one.”
“One? Sir, I’ll miss the—”
“Afternoon session. Yes, lucky you.” He looks down the corridors of the Capitol building, at the men and women hustling by, pretending they’re deciding the fate of the nation, when it is really decided by men like us. Or if not decided, caused by men like us.
“She’s from Norte de Santander,” he says. Immediately I think of my conversation with Mason about the Mil Jesúses and Operation Agamemnon, and I worry that I know what this meeting will be about.
“Careful,” he adds. “The women from that department . . . they’re tough.”
* * *
• • •
I have enough time before lunch to check in with Captain Maloof, the smart young officer who’d given us our briefing on the new members of the Second Commission and, typical of an eager new captain briefing a general, had clearly gone far deeper in his research than necessary.
“De Salva,” he says, smiling. “She’s interesting.” Which is not what I wanted to hear. And he rattles on about her “low funds” fortune and her “eccentric” voting record, how she runs Chiva buses stocked with liquor to bring people to the polls on election days, how she modernized her gambling operation after Law 643 made the whole thing legal, how she used to drive a bus. Each piece of information is more useless than the last.
“Okay. She’s unusual. Is she corrupt?” I say brusquely, annoyed I have to spell it out.
“Oh,” he says, surprised. “No, not at all, I don’t think.”
“Son of a bitch,” I say. If she were corrupt, I’d have a better sense of how to handle her.
* * *
• • •
The restaurant is a cartoon version of a finca, with white stucco walls and framed portraits of Colombian expressions like, “You’re going to teach your father to make kids?” “When you’re going I’m coming,” and “The devil knows more through his age than through being the devil.” I’m not sure whether the restaurant is targeted toward nostalgic Colombians or foolish tourists, but whatever the marketing strategy, neither group has shown up. I’m the only customer.
Exactly at one, Ana Maria de Salva walks in. She’s a strong-featured woman with straight black hair, eyes of a brown so dark the iris drowns the pupil, high cheekbones, and a haughty manner you wouldn’t expect from someone with her peasant background. I stand up to greet her, but she clucks at me in a way that makes me feel I’m being scolded by my mother.
“Good,” she says, looking around at the empty restaurant.
She sits and buries herself in the menu, a colorful array of pictures of typical fare—bandeja and church empanadas and lentil soup. I feel I should say something.
“Is anything good here?” I ask.
“This is the worst restaurant within a mile of the Capitol,” she says. “Nothing is good.”
When the waiter comes, de Salva orders sancocho and I order the steak. It’s hard to ruin a steak. “Just warm it,” I say. And then for some reason I repeat the instructions I once heard an American soldier give in a restaurant near Tres Esquinas. “I want it to moo.”
When the waiter leaves, de Salva looks at me disapprovingly. “I want it to moo? Is that supposed to impress me? I’d think a military man would prove his courage combating guerrilla, not bacteria.”
“I’ve fought my share of both.”
“Man discovered fire tens of thousands of years ago, and it has worked out well for him. Maybe you should take advantage of the technology.”
“You Bogotános and your modern ways,” I say.
“I am not, and will never be, a Bogotáno.”
There’s not much to say to that, and when our food arrives she stares at me intently, judgmentally, as I pick up knife and fork, cut into my steak, and the juices run.
“Disgusting,” she says, as I pop a piece of steak in my mouth and do my best to enjoy it.
She slurps her soup, makes a face, and slurps some more. And then she sits up straight.
“I heard you had a meeting with a lawyer from Cúcuta last week.”
I become very still. How does de Salva know about the meeting? It’s possible she’s connected to the Mil Jesúses, too. I can’t be the only person in this rotten city they’ve reached out to.
She slurps more soup.
“A loathsome man,” she says. “With a loathsome list of clients. And when I heard that a senior officer in the special forces was meeting with this man, I thought to myself, why?”
“I’ve had a variety of meetings while here in the Capitol,” I say. “Are you asking in relation to your duties as a member of the Second Commission?”
The lawyer from Cúcuta, loathsome or not, arranged for us to get some rather key pieces of intelligence leading to the El Alemán raid. Which was a success, and a demonstration of how effective the army could be if the Agamemnon mission could be transferred over from the police.
&
nbsp; She snorts. “No. I am asking as a representative of Norte de Santander. Which, I’m sure, means nothing to you. Most of us here”—she waves a hand in the general direction of the National Capitol—“don’t really represent, do we?”
I’m not sure what she means.
“You’re from Antioquia, yes?” she says. “That department has seventeen representatives. Seventeen! You probably don’t even know who they are.”
She cocks her head, eyes me aslant. I think of a bird examining a beetle it’s about to snap into its beak.
“I usually figure their party is more important than their department.” When I vote, I vote by the party list.
“Yes. Party over department every time. Which means elites in Bogotá decide what is best for people in Tibú. And elites in Bogotá don’t care about the people of Tibú, do they?”
I say nothing. According to Maloof, this woman holds enough personal power in her very small department that she can do whatever she wants and still be on the party list. That makes her unpredictable.
“I don’t come from the same twenty families as everybody else here. I don’t care about them, I don’t care about what they want, I only care about the people. I am a representative who represents.”
Said that way, it sounds like a good thing, but Norte de Santander is complicated, a place where the state often has little presence, provides few services, little order, little ability even to adjudicate basic legal disputes over land and contracts. Where the economy sometimes owes more to smuggling goods from Venezuela and drugs and illegal mining than to anything coming from the central government. What would a true and honest representative of such a place look like?
“That’s very good,” I say.
She sits back and considers me for a moment, then nods. “I was a bus driver, you know, when I started running the chance.”
I nod and fold my hands together, trying to look relaxed, ready to be told a story. She smiles.