by Phil Klay
Each was addressed to me, and when I opened them, one by one, I found they were letters from older boys at my school, and from my parents and relatives. “My sweet, my dearest Juan Pablo,” began the one from my father. Each letter was a loving description of me, a catalogue of the ways I had improved the lives of those around me. “When you were born,” the letter from my mother began, “my dearest aunt, Blanca Maria, who had raised me more than my own mother, was in hospice care. I took you to see her, you were less than a week old, small enough to hold with one hand, and I put you in her arms. It gave her comfort to know that she was passing out of life as another life was beginning. When she looked at you, the shadow of death passed from her face, and it seemed that all the comfort and promise of the Resurrection settled in her soul. I knew then you would be a joy in the world.”
There were letters from other boys as well, boys in the year ahead of me who had undergone this retreat, older boys who we looked up to and who maintained hard exteriors before us but here were telling me, “You are an exceptional, hardworking cadet,” or “I can see you doing some great act of heroism,” and saying that I was their “brother in Christ.” In that place, at that moment, it was overwhelming.
And so the presence struck me. I began to tremble. Tears fell down my face and in my heart I was filled with the most remarkable joy. I walked to the window of my cell, through which I could see the branch of a tree, a bit of sky. A bird flitted into and then out of view, and I had the absurd desire to reach out, cup it in my hand, and kiss it. The stillness in my cell was exquisite. I felt as though the material world had been pierced, and life itself was flooding out from the wound. I was aware of a presence within the room, that I was not alone, though also that the presence was not separate from me. It was larger than my own spirit but somehow suffused with my own, expanding it and extending my senses to an embrace of the cell, the retreat, the whole world. I felt undone, and remade whole. I wanted to call for a priest but also to do nothing more than stand in the stillness. The joy became almost agonizing, having no outlet. And then I spoke the words of the Lord’s Prayer.
* * *
• • •
For a long time after, I was very religious. I spoke about joining the priesthood or a monastic order, cloistering myself away in prayer, removed from the material world, removed even from a sense of normal time, the progression of life and death, my life ruled by the cyclic and unchanging structures of sacred time. I imagined that during my retreat I had opened a wound where the eternal had touched the temporal, and I wanted to live in that wound, expand it, allow it to engulf my universe.
Just before Christmas, the material world intruded. My father was assigned to the 4th Brigade in Medellín. “That’s a dangerous post,” said one of my school friends, also the son of an officer. It was an odd thing to hear, because Medellín, to me, was my mother’s hometown. It was where my grandparents lived, where I had aunts and uncles and cousins spread across the city. So the new posting should have been a return to the land of my own birth, where I’d played with cousins in “Los Altos del Castillo,” as my grandmother called their neighborhood, which was really just a part of Las Mercedes. Where I’d gone up into the mountains with my grandmother to visit the town of her birth, where she’d ridden a horse and lived a life that was “poor, but not poverty of the city, because we always had food to eat,” and where she’d stayed until the time of troubles after the death of Gaitán and the family fled to the city, only to have unexpected success in the grocery business, allowing them to send their fourth child, my mother, to a school where she would interact with a higher class of people—the class my father belonged to. It should have been a wealth of cousins and grandparents and aunts and uncles, but my father quickly informed us that we wouldn’t be coming with him.
“Even if you came,” my father told me, “you would stay on base and have to go to school with the soldiers’ children. Almost none of the officers are bringing their families, and frankly, the less contact we have with your mother’s family, the safer they are.”
But my mother insisted we at least visit during the holidays, and so that December I both returned to Medellín and failed to return to Medellín. The streets and buildings remained the same, bits of concrete and steel and glass arranged in the same patterns, but those roads which throughout my childhood had been no more than a means to the loving arms of my grandparents, with their large house, their plants, and their massive oven, an ancient oven that my grandmother still used to run her home business selling cakes, those roads now belonged to a different geography, one shaped not by land and steel but by people. I was a child, barely old enough to stare longingly at a woman but still, somehow I knew that my father was right. This was not the same city where I could buy sweets and coffee with my grandmother at El Astor, walk with my grandfather through San Antonio Plaza, talking to the people he knew, businessmen and shoe shiners and women selling salted mango. Stepping out into the streets now would be as wise as stepping over the edge of a mountain cliff. The city had changed. Whatever the old web of life and commerce, gossip and backstabbing, old loves and new infatuations, I was no longer a part of it.
“Things have changed,” my father said.
* * *
• • •
After our cold Christmas in officers’ quarters, my father asked First Sergeant Santiago Jaramillo, a senior enlisted who had lost a nephew to a cartel bombing, to drive us to the airport. Jaramillo was in plain clothes, driving a plain blue sedan with a warped fender instead of an army vehicle. I thought it odd, but given the narcissism of youth, thought little about it. I sat in the backseat, my mother in the front.
Jaramillo had a shiny, shaved head with a vein bulging just over the right ear. He also swore constantly as he drove.
“Look at this fool!” he’d say as a car swerved in front of him. He’d pull ahead, swerve back in front of the other car, and shout “Faggot!” out the window. Then he’d catch himself, scrunch his thick neck into his shoulders, and apologize to my mother.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, it’s these . . . Whore! Son of a whore . . . I’m sorry, ma’am.”
He couldn’t help it. He knew no other way to drive. In the backseat, I’d giggle at the curses, then stifle my giggles as my mother turned sternly back to me.
But as we rose above the city on long, winding roads up the mountainside, the cursing stopped. We reached a traffic light, Jaramillo slowing at first as the light turned red, then bolting through at the last moment, the car swerving into a hard right, centripetal force pressing me into the side of the car, seat belt cutting against my neck as he skirted in front of oncoming traffic, horns blaring.
It squeezed the breath out of me, but when my breath returned, I waited for the sound. For an “Idiot!” or “Faggot!” or “Son of a whore!” I waited for my mother to say something sharp, but there was nothing. My mother held herself straight, her face in the mirror still, expressionless, her left hand gripped on the edge of the seat and her right on the handle of the car door.
After the second crazy turn I realized we were being followed. Of course, I knew about the kidnappings, but had always felt that only happened to other, lesser people. I was the son of an army officer, I was immune. But no, I realized in the car. That had it backward. I was the son of an army officer. Therefore, I was a target.
When I returned to Bogotá, I had nightmares of being lost in the winding turns of a city I didn’t know, a city where every face is like the face of a relative, but then, when I draw near, different. No one knows me, no one can tell me which turns I must take, or even where my final destination must be.
To be honest, I don’t know if the two things, the nightmares and the trip to the airport, were related, but they added to the uneasiness of my waking hours, the already uneasy waking hours of a new adolescent, charged with hormones and emotions now heightened by the aftershocks of repetitive, peculiar dreams and the anxiety
of a father in a war zone, a war zone that happens to be the city of my family, and a city where I do not belong.
When we returned to Medellín for our next visit, in the midst of Holy Week, I was full of nervous excitement. And it was in that state that I first encountered Juana Peréz.
* * *
• • •
We came on Holy Thursday and, along with another officer’s family, went straight to the 4th Brigade Headquarters under escort. The base was different, packed with people, many of them civilians.
“We’ve had to convert Fourth Brigade into a refugee camp,” my father explained. The general in charge, General Bedoya, was trying to organize something like a witness protection program. The civilians on base were witnesses to the crimes of the Medellín cartel. I think my father wanted me to see them, to know the luck I had in life, to know what drugs were doing to Colombia, and to spend time around people brave enough to stand up to Escobar. I hardly spoke to any of them, spending the time reading instead.
“This will be an education for him,” he told my mother. “He’ll get to see what this work is and how it doesn’t wait, not even for God.”
As if to prove his point, on Holy Saturday a canister bomb was launched over the walls of 4th Brigade, right where the officers’ quarters were. No one was killed, and my father wasn’t displaced, but we did lose water and power for two days, meaning that we had to use the group showers in the building where they were billeting our “refugees.” This, too, my father thought would be “an education.” And he was right.
* * *
• • •
I woke very early Easter morning, disturbed by another one of my peculiar nightmares, and left to take a shower. As in my dream, the route I walked was both strangely similar to what I knew and different in ways my sleepy mind wasn’t processing. I entered a group bathroom, one I thought I had used before, ignoring the very important sign on the door.
Inside was a corridor with various stalls, each with a little curtain that stopped about a foot short of the floor. One stall was occupied, the water running. I got in the stall across the way, turned on the water, and waited for it to warm. I missed my home in Bogotá, and I missed the Medellín Holy Week of my childhood memories, when everyone in the street put on purple clothes, emptying the factories of purple cloth and creating processions that turned the streets into bright ribbons of color. There at 4th Brigade, you mostly saw army green.
The water warmed, I stepped in, and I heard the other shower turn off, then the other shower curtain being swept aside. Idly curious, I peered through the crack between my curtain and the stall and saw a column of flesh cut across by what looked like black twine, a curious sight. I leaned my head and moved closer to the crack to get a better view. The other person shifted, and there in front of me, no more than a meter from my face, was a naked woman’s breast.
My jaw hung slack, my eyes widened. I could have spit and hit the nipple. For a moment I did nothing but look, shocked by the sight. The nipple swayed, moved out of view, and I bolted back to the edge of the shower, my shower sandals splashing water. Idiot! I thought to myself. I was terrified she’d look in around the edge of my curtain. I had the ridiculous desire to sing in a high-pitched voice, or hum, the way I imagined a woman might hum in the shower. I took shallow breaths of air. The antiseptic smell of cleaning solution, carried up by the steam, flooded my nostrils. The nipple swung back into view and I stared, breathless. Blood rushed to my face in shame, but it also, I realized, was rushing to another, much more disobedient organ. I covered myself with my hands. What if she swept aside the curtain? What would I say?
A curved belly appeared before the crack, then shoulders and long, thin arms, here too with the patches of flesh appearing as though they were bound in black twine, poorly wrapped, then all was covered with a white towel. It was too much, and I wanted to weep. Instead I clenched my jaw, controlled my breathing, remained still with my hands trying painfully to bend down that disobedient organ, to tuck it between my legs.
Then the white towel swept upward, and I could see it above the top of my curtain. She was drying her hair, this woman. I leaned again to the right side of the stall, peered through the crack, and saw that the towel was over her face, covering her eyes completely. My body relaxed, slightly. There were a few golden seconds where I was certain she couldn’t see me. Without thinking, I inched closer to the edge of the curtain, trying to get a better look than the mere slivers I’d had before.
The woman’s whole body, with the exception of her towel-covered head, came into view. She was tall, with skinny legs, long skinny twigs for arms, a beautiful curve to her back, and, as she turned slightly, displaying her marvels to me, the far more exaggerated curve of a pregnant belly. Her skin was fairer than mine, and crisscrossed with what I now realized were stitches, black stitches over still-healing scars. They were all over her shoulders and arms, most of them ten to fifteen centimeters in length, and straight, what I would later come to realize was the work of a weapon. In the moment, they neither added nor detracted from her beauty, such as it was, but only underscored her astounding strangeness. She had a few more scars on the upper parts of her legs, two across her chest, one on the outside of her right breast, but none, thanks to God, across that remarkable belly, smooth and round, her breasts lying on top of it, and from below her stomach, reaching up, her wounded thighs, between which, just visible, a dark patch of hair.
I heard her sigh. Her hands, small with gnawed fingernails, stopped their work atop her head and unwound the towel. I quickly stepped to the back of the shower, again, splashing water as I went, again. Cursing myself an idiot, again. She started singing, “I cannot forget that woman that made me suffer such a long time, I cannot forget that love . . .” And then she stopped and gave a short laugh. I heard rustling. I couldn’t see her, I heard only the smallest sounds. I didn’t know what she was doing. I didn’t have any idea of what a woman does in the morning to prepare herself for the day. And then the door opened and closed, and she was gone.
I reached outside the curtain, grabbed my towel, and wrapped it tightly around my waist, tying my erection flat to my stomach. I hadn’t really washed myself, didn’t even think about continuing. I wanted to escape. I stepped out into the steamy room, walked the corridor between the empty shower stalls, came to the door, and wondered what could be on the other side. Was the woman waiting, knowing I’d eventually emerge? Was someone new coming in? Perhaps only we two were crazy enough to shower so early, so far before daylight. Perhaps she, too, had nightmares.
I opened the door to an empty corridor and shut it behind me. There was the sign I’d ignored, heading in. “Women,” it read.
* * *
• • •
For weeks afterward, I would wake early from a different type of dream, where I traced my fingers over her rough stitches and her pure stomach, where she looked down on me from her great height and stared into my soul with eyes so powerful they drowned out all vision of her face, where her strong hands reached down, touched my young body on my neck, my shoulders, my hairless chest, reached down and down until I woke up excited and frustrated and ashamed in my bed in Bogotá, hundreds of kilometers and another world away from where she lived and had suffered. I didn’t want to have these dreams. I hated them. But they came anyway.
Worse, the memory followed me in the daytime. Of course I had noticed girls before, and wondered about what was beneath their clothes. I had seen images of naked women in magazines older boys had secreted away, showing me glimpses of women with enormous breasts and butts, lips painted to a deep red and faces caked with makeup and buffed to a flawless, inhuman sheen. But the woman in the shower, with her wounds and pregnant belly and chewed fingernails, replaced those fantasy women. The woman in the shower was different. She was real. A woman in the body of a woman, capable of being touched, of being wounded, of giving birth. A woman with a history and a future. The anti
septic smell of cleaning fluid was enough to make me stiffen.
The memory of her worked on me as powerfully, and as incomprehensibly, as my early encounter with what I was then calling God. I don’t mean this in the simple and often stupid way in which sexual passion is contrasted with religious ecstasy. The two experiences were not remotely similar—the first a rapture occurring entirely within my head, the second an assault on every nerve in my body. Nor was my reaction to her simply one of desire. If anything, the desire served merely to muddle the other reactions I’d had and add a strong layer of shame to the memory. Unlike the memory of God, which offered a clear path to me, this left me confused. It made me think there was something wrong with me. Sometimes, I blamed that woman. Mostly, I wanted to see her again. I hoped that she had an ugly face, as if an ugly face, or even a normal face, would purge the effect the rest of her body had made on me.
I learned her name, and her story, the following July.
“Would you like to be the altar boy at a baptism?” my father asked me over the phone. “I’m going to be the godfather to a very special child.”
This child, I would learn, was graced with the name Harold Peréz, named after the general in whose barracks he had been born. “The mother, Juana Peréz, she is one of our refugees,” he said. Juana, my father explained, had been in the Department of Security and Control in Envigado, a city bordering Medellín that at the time was the center for white-collar workers in the drug trade. “Her colleagues had tried to murder her with hatchets,” my father said, “so be prepared. She has some impressive scars, and I don’t want you staring.”
* * *
• • •
We all had breakfast before the baptism—my father, my mother, an officer from the B2, little baby Harold, and Juana Peréz. I knew her immediately by her hands, even though her fingernails had grown out. And of course I knew her scars.