Читать книгу Juventud - Vanessa Blakeslee - Страница 10

CHAPTER THREE

The next morning, Papi had been up for an hour when I stowed my book bag in the back of the car. He, Luis, and some farmhands faced the just-risen sun with Papi’s back to me. The courtyard fountain sloshed, drowning out their talk. Fidel sat on its lip, dazed, and flicked the ash of his cigarette. When I said, “Let’s go,” he looked up in surprise and irritation and pitched the butt onto the stone pavement. Papi’s voice boomed as he headed for the house, chiding me for skipping breakfast. When I told him I’d grab an arepa outside school, he said, “You eat too many of those greasy things. Get inside.”

Sulking, I followed. At the dining table we sat in silence. The smell of coffee, eggs, and warm bread trailed Inez as she set our plates in front of us, and Papi his tinto. “Eat up,” he said, digging into his gallo pinto. “You’ll need a lot of energy if you’re going to wear that frown.”

“How do you expect me to feel, after last night?” I asked.

“I’m sorry for blowing up,” he said. “Finish those applications, and you can go to all the masses you want. I used to be quite devout at your age.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“If I still talked to family, I would tell you to ask them.”

I chewed slowly, the beans and rice flavorful but lukewarm. Other than Tía Leo, Papi didn’t speak to relatives—because of his divorce, he’d claimed. “Divorce isn’t such a big deal,” I said. “Gracia’s parents are Catholic, and they’re divorced. Why would anyone hold that against you?”

“It wasn’t just the divorce. I brought a lot on myself, especially after your mother left, but I never turned my back on family.” He scraped the last of the beans and rice from his plate with quick, harsh strokes. “I crawled to them on my belly, but they turned their backs to me. Tell me, what choice does that leave?” Someone opened the front door—Luis. He announced that an alpaca had gone missing, a young one. A field hand was searching for it.

“Couldn’t have gone far,” Papi said. He shoved his chair away, tied his bandanna around his head, and groped his shirt for his sunglasses. When I was little, I had liked this look of his and used to call him a pirate until he chased me around the house.

“I’m sure he’ll find it soon enough,” Luis said, fist on hip. “No use you wasting your morning digging through brush.”

Papi breezed past him. “Morning light is best. Won’t be the first time.”

Now I wondered: had Papi’s brothers been killed along with my grandparents or suffered a different brutal fate, and were our other relatives alive or not? Surely we must have aunts, uncles, cousins somewhere? Our land included his parents’ old property, and he rented their cement-block house to a tenant farmer’s family. Minutes later, Fidel and I wound along the narrow country roads and past the plots of such farmers, their houses little more than shacks. Once, when riding along in his pickup, Papi had told me how he had thought his family wanted for little until he was twenty-one. That spring he spent two months in Bogotá with an older cousin, ate at fine restaurants and attended the theatre for the first time, danced at clubs with beautiful women. When he returned, everywhere in the countryside there seemed no escape from poverty. That day we’d driven for three minutes before we finished passing the displaced. “Los miserables de Dios,” he muttered even as he waved, speakers booming Rachmaninov.

Late that afternoon, in the muggy upstairs office of our house, I combed through a Spanish-English dictionary. My elbow pressed upon the pile of applications. Papi had filled out some of the information—his careful block handwriting scrawled across the boxes at the top—and Sister Rosemary ticked off and completed the rest. Twenty minutes remained for the session, but we had not even finished two forms. “You’ll need to write a lot faster and not make so many mistakes if you’re going to take regular subjects in English,” she said. Her pale eyebrows rose.

“If it’s so easy for you, why don’t you write it?” I slouched, dropping the pen. “Isn’t my father paying you?”

Jaw set, she thrust the pen back at me. “For tutoring, yes. Not baby-sitting.”

My face burned through to my scalp. I snatched the pen. “The questions in the boxes—I don’t even know how to answer some of these.”

She lifted a form, glancing over it. “Which ones?”

“Like this one: Describe your participation in clubs, leadership roles, or volunteer organizations.”

“Straightforward enough, don’t you think?” She replaced the form before me, folded her hands in front of her.

I hesitated, then wrote, La Maria Juventud Para Justicia Social. After a pause, I added: Secretary & Event Organizer. What did they know? It certainly sounded impressive.

The nun looked over what I’d written and frowned. “La Maria Juventud? Is this true?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’m very involved. Why do you care?”

Her lips made a thin line. She shrugged, then nodded at the form. “Please, finish.”

Papi poked his face in the doorway at six o’clock and asked if she would join us for dinner, then about my progress. She showed him the incomplete forms, and he pouted, stroking his stubbly chin. “I want all eight of these in the mail, Federal Express, by Monday,” he said.

Could I miss the deadlines on purpose? What if the forms weren’t ready, and I had to wait another six months to apply again? I wanted to be with Manuel, not in my father’s swivel chair, an oversized dictionary in front of me, next to a woman who had never been in love. “But aren’t there admission tests?” I asked. “I’m not ready at all. Won’t I miss those deadlines?”

“Mercedes has a boyfriend now,” Papi said. “She’s somewhat distracted.” He smirked and reminded me of Luis. “We must convince her that going to one of these schools will be the biggest adventure of her life. She will never look back.” Then he left, humming a tune.

Shades of pink blanketed the sky as Sister Rosemary organized the forms and gathered her things. I wasn’t sure how I felt about her. She didn’t seem cold, exactly, just somewhat removed. She was an outsider, so perhaps it was part of her gringa personality. North Americans had different ways, and I guessed my mother had them, too. I might never know.

“Do you ever wish you had stayed home, and not come to Colombia?” I asked.

She wound an indigo shawl around her shoulders; it appeared a deep purple in the dying sunlight. “I miss my family, it’s true,” she said, tucking the fringed ends underneath her arms. “But with God, I have learned to accept it. I wanted to see the world, know myself. Sometimes the only way to see your life clearly is to leave it.”

The mood at dinner couldn’t have been more unlike the disaster of Manuel’s visit the week before. Papi sat tall as he ate, joked, and steered clear of topics like the Church and the poor. In Miami, he boasted, the city streets smelled like exhaust but not trash. Every middle-class family had two cars so that six people didn’t cram into a single one the size of a shoebox. The homeless pushed carts and begged underneath the highway ramps, but you didn’t see nearly as many of them, certainly not so many women and children.

Sister Rosemary disagreed, however. She pointed out that America had just as many faults as Colombia, and if the problems didn’t seem so glaring it was because Americans were not fighting the same types of wars inside their borders. But the wars were still there—over lack of health care, drug addiction, the environment. When I lived in America, I constantly felt like I was wearing a beautiful coat, she said, shiny and well-tailored on the outside, but inside the lining was ripped and the coat was not so warm.

Here, neighbor helped neighbor. The zapateria owner stopped by the mission every week, fixed belts and resoled shoes for the desplazados, for free. Once she had helped lead a peace rally downtown when a dozen youth from a cosmetology school arrived, turning heads with their outrageous dye-jobs and stylish jeans. They fanned out into the worst streets, combs, capes, and scissors in arm, to give free shampoos and haircuts; when asked, they said wasn’t that a surefire thing to lift the spirit, and needed by everyone? If more Americans saw firsthand the horrors here of dead bodies in ditches and the number of people who barely had beans and rice to eat, there would be riots, she said. But most Americans did not see it, so they did not care.

Papi nodded, his face as grave as when he had set off to find the alpaca earlier.

She had not only finished college but earned a higher theology degree in Chicago, one of the northern cities. I didn’t know any Colombian woman who was so educated and not a doctor or a lawyer. “I wish I could have had the opportunity to study in the United States,” Papi said, giving his mouth a quick pat with his napkin. “But I made my choices, and at a certain point it is too late.”

“But why couldn’t you?” I asked.

“Most people in this country cannot afford tutors to get them into American schools,” he said. “I had to make money, so I worked in the commodities business, and then decided I wanted to farm. And I met your mother.”

I blew on my steaming ajiaco. If he had married my mother, wouldn’t he have become an American citizen then, able to come and go freely to that country, and stay? Perhaps they hadn’t gotten married, and she had me illegitimately. Was that why his family turned their backs, being such devout Catholics? But then the Church here had the records of the marriage and annulment; Emilio had shown me. So Papi and Paula must have gotten married here. And with a half-American daughter, why wasn’t he a dual citizen?

“Why did you leave the States then, if it was so great?” I asked.

He sopped up his soup with a piece of bread. “America has many good opportunities for some businesses but not for others. I wasn’t happy there until I met your mother. By then I had decided I wanted to farm in Colombia, near my family. The simple life.”

This was the best answer I was going to get out of him: vagueness and half-truths. “Well, then you should understand why I don’t want to leave home,” I said.

“I understand perfectly why you don’t want to leave,” he said. “You just don’t understand why you must go.”

Sister Rosemary asked him something about the coffee trade, and the conversation moved on; I wished she had not been there, and I might have pressed him further. If I searched his drawers and files, maybe I could find some answers about his business affairs with the farm and elsewhere. Even though, I realized, the answers I wanted were probably not located on paper.

Someone thumped the glass door, opened it a crack. Luis stomped the mud off his boots, entered, and removed his hat when he saw company. “Pardon me,” he said. “But I think you should turn on the news.”

We rarely watched television during mealtimes. Papi believed it corrupted the soul. But this time he hunted for the remote and flicked on the big screen. The Colombian news was broadcasting coverage of an airplane on a dirt strip, followed by headshots of wanted guerilla leaders. The large print at the bottom read: “ELN hijacks domestic Avianca flight and takes 46 hostages.”

Sister Rosemary made a sound in her throat. Papi and Luis stood a few feet from the TV, their arms crossed and legs spread wide. Five men dressed in business suits had boarded a turboprop from Bucaramanga that morning, bound for Bogotá. But once in the air, the men pulled handguns and forced the plane to land on a remote airstrip where they met ELN guerillas who whisked away the hostages. They abandoned the plane in the jungle.

“Pretty brilliant, huh?” Luis said to Papi. He wore a wide grin but shook his head slowly as he watched the screen. “Do you know what this is going to do to the country?”

“Fools,” Papi said. “This will come back at them tenfold.” He shook his head, too, but as he returned to the table his arms remained tightly crossed, his eyebrows furrowed into a single barbed wire. He paced by his chair, and when his gaze fell on me, he pointed to the screen. “What did I tell you, about the troubles getting worse? How happy do you think those flight attendants are right now, marching through the jungle with guns at their backs?”

“I could work an international route. I wouldn’t be scared to fly to other countries.”

“And you don’t think that’s next?” Papi asked, his voice sharpening. “These guerillas will hijack Delta Airlines if they think it will win them more ransom money.”

Sister Rosemary looked from Papi to me in puzzlement; I had never mentioned my desire to be a flight attendant to her. I stared into my empty soup bowl. Inez skirted around us, clearing dinnerware. Luis remained in front of the TV, but had twisted his head around to listen. Why wouldn’t he leave? The nun pushed back her chair and stood, hugging herself. She had shrunken from the woman who had been talking and laughing moments ago.

Papi apologized to her for yelling, wiped his brow with the bandanna. The rains drummed, gushing out the gutters. He asked Luis to drive her back to the mission. She squeezed my shoulder good-bye, leaned in close and pressed a card into my hand. “My number, direct, in case you need me,” she whispered in my ear, smoothing my hair as she withdrew. Lavender, I smelled, and the faintest trace of sunscreen. I nodded, brushed the back of my hand along the fringed tail of her shawl as she hovered at the door, awaiting Luis to jog up with the umbrella.

Once the two of us were alone Papi grasped the back of a chair, leaned forward. “Maybe I should have insisted your mother raise you. Then we wouldn’t be facing this separation now. I know you’re afraid. But this problem we face, there’s no escaping it.”

I asked what had happened earlier with the young alpaca, lost on the mountainside. He had hacked through the brush for two hours before he found the creature, he said, but the little thing had slid down a slope and broken both its hind legs. He’d had to shoot it on the spot. I told him I was sorry before I hugged him good-night. I imagined the flight attendants in their snug skirts—stumbling up the jungle paths, heels sinking in the mud, faces smacked with insects and heat. Were the guerillas the same men in fatigues and machine guns as the ones who’d stopped the bus, spray-painted ELN PRESENTE across the back? Don’t move, they’d barked, voices muffled behind black knit masks. They had sounded much more frightening than Papi at his worst, yelling at me for sneaking off.

When I called Tía Leo later that night, Jacki answered. I had long admired my cousin—she surfed as well as any boy, and belly danced. Since her father had died, however, she was helping her mother more: managing tenants, selling off land. They’d heard about the hijacking and were worried for us. I told her it was just Colombian craziness but that Papi was determined to send me away to school, adding, “That’s why I want to talk to your mom.”

“That poor cabin crew,” Jacki said. “Did I tell you I might be working for Taca? Mami got me the interview. I just got the call back.” Four hundred girls had applied for six spots, she said, and now she was in the final group of twenty-four. I asked why the job was so competitive. She said among other skills you had to speak excellent English.

Jacki prattled on, but her news distracted me. Of course, an airline like Taca would require employees, especially flight attendants, to speak Spanish and English—no problem for my cousin since she was half-American, raised with a father from Arizona. Hard to believe Taca wouldn’t hire her, with her thin, athletic build, gringa features, and knowledge of both cultures. Did she find me a peculiar cousin, half-American, but with a foreigner’s choppy grasp of English? In what ways might I be different, had my mother stayed? Would I be more worldly and poised? Outspoken? Would she have hovered over my studies and agreed with Papi that I go away to boarding school? She might have enrolled me in dance classes, or stayed up late with me, watching American TV rather than the telenovelas Inez and the maids blasted in the laundry room, that I knew by heart. I’d met few Americans, had seen even fewer in Cali. What did it mean to be an American? Why wonder, when Paula had fled this valley of armed teenagers at roadblocks and most other gringos did the same? The only exception being diplomats and special forces.

My aunt picked up. When I asked how she was, she said, “Ah, well, I knew this year wouldn’t be easy. So many bills. Now I’m managing a few rentals owned by Californians—that’s keeping us afloat. If only I’d taken some business courses or something years ago, and not left everything to your uncle. The tenants and taxes—I had no idea. And you?”

I asked if she’d persuade my father to let me stay with her and finish school. She remained quiet for a few moments. “I will,” she said, “but only if you promise to take seriously the benefits of an education in the United States. Look at Pilar.” Jacki had disregarded obtaining her degree there like her older sister. But now Pilar lived in LA, had a career she loved in television production, and earned a salary unheard of by Costa Rican standards. By the way my aunt spoke, Pilar might be helping them financially. Tía Leo doubted my father would listen. “He can be such a stubborn goat,” she said. Her tone, sorrowful and frustrated, penetrated the phone.

“Is that what caused difficulty with the family?” I asked. “With your parents?”

“No,” she said. “He betrayed them about something, and they turned their backs. Everyone did, even me for a while. Only after what happened to them”—emotion caught in her throat—“did he and I reconcile.”

“You know, Papi has never told me the story. About your parents.”

“It’s a long story. But I prefer not to tell it over the phone.”

A beat of silence hung between us. “Well, I’d like to know something,” I said.

My aunt’s dogs barked; she yelled for them to be quiet. She said, “Okay, then. Diego had betrayed them twice with promises. The third time he asked our parents for forgiveness, they didn’t give it. They may have welcomed him back, in time, but I think the hurt was too much for them. And the shame of his deeds upon the family—can you imagine? He might have proven himself otherwise, reconciled, but no. Too late. His heart hardened. Then the guerillas came through.”

“ELN or FARC?”

“FARC,” she replied. “They were kidnapped, taken into the mountains. They died there.” Her voice quivered. “After this happened, Diego believed he had brought it on them. When they died, neither had forgiven the other. So your father never forgave himself. I don’t know that he ever will.”

“Other relatives?” I asked. “In Colombia?”

“Panama and here,” she said. “Many left in the eighties and early nineties. Our Martinez cousins, your great aunt and uncle, even abandoned property they couldn’t sell in time. Then after what happened to our parents, the remaining relatives fled. Between the guerillas and the cartels—it was a bloodbath. Only your father stayed.”

I thanked her and told her I wished we might talk more. “Come to Costa Rica, daughter,” she said. Hija—she often called me that, even though I was not her own.

I explained how I was in love. She laughed. “Ah, I see now why you’re not leaving. You must visit, yes,” she said, “but I also meant for school.” Then she informed me of how many gringos, Americans and Canadians but also Europeans and British, had recently relocated to Costa Rica, and how many good private schools had cropped up there. “If you went to American high school here, you wouldn’t be so far away, and you would get the education your father wants. Should I mention this to him?”

I told her yes. At least Costa Rica felt familiar, and I would be close to Tía Leo and Jacki. I might even live with them, visit Cali on weekends. Hardly thrilling but a viable compromise. She promised to call Papi soon, and we hung up.

For a long time I remained at my window seat, legs drawn. My grandparents’ bodies—had they ever been recovered? She hadn’t mentioned the deaths of their two brothers—had they crossed Papi and ended up behind the alpacas’ shed? Fatigues-clad youth marched the faceless figures of the grandparents I had never met—forced them to their weakened knees in a half-lit thicket, then pressed guns to the backs of their gray heads. Shots cracked, and the malnourished bodies tumbled down, lost forever in the impenetrable brush.

Papi and Luis had been right. The morning radio commentators talked about how the hijacking—only the third in Colombia’s history—had already paralyzed the country. Since the ELN and the FARC had never before targeted domestic air travel, flying had long been deemed the safest way to avoid roadblocks and kidnappings on rural routes. I didn’t even know what the Valle de Cauca beyond our plantation looked like—several times a year, I flew with Papi to Bogotá or to Barranquilla if he had business there. For years, Ana’s family had kept a beach house on the Caribbean, in Santa Marta, and flew there on weekends. But I couldn’t imagine that they would risk a trip after this. Colombians who needed to travel could now only trust the international airports with high security, or private aircraft.

One afternoon Fidel dropped me off at Ana’s house. I’d told Papi that I needed to see her to plan a surprise party. This was partly true; I was helping Ana with her ideas to celebrate Carlos’s birthday, but over the phone. Instead I met Manuel in front of the church on his moto. The walk would have taken us forty minutes at most. He drove fast. We darted around patches of missing pavement, wandering mutts. His street lacked the trimmed hedges and guard booths of Ana’s. I hopped off the bike unsteady, Manuel’s arm smooth and solid.

I had pictured it differently, leisurely, that he would first lead me through his father’s furniture shop as he did later—the circular saws pointing out like crocodile teeth, the half-built bedframes and dressers in varieties of woods, the aroma heavy with grease and varnish. His parents’ house stood next door, and I heard the splashing of water, a woman scolding a dog. But instead he grabbed me by the hand outside the shop and led me up an outdoor staircase to an apartment. “I share this with my brothers,” he said as he opened the door.

He escorted me through the main room. On the center wall surrounding a great crucifix hung several acoustic guitars, and above the tattered couch, a poster of the singer Shakira: lips parted, back arched, blond mane flowing over her halter top. We passed a desk strewn with papers, a Bible, mostly theological books from what I could tell at a glance, but I saw a few dog-eared volumes by Garcia Márquez, our national hero, as well as Karl Marx, a name that meant nothing to me at the time, other than sounding flat and foreign. We moved on to the far room. Three twin beds filled most of the space, nightstands and short dressers cramped in between. Bars encased the louvered glass. A fan oscillated, thick with dust. The apartment radiated heat.

Heat drew us together; I had but a glance around the room, the unmade beds. I was vaguely aware of the one behind me as Manuel guided my face to his. I had thought that I wanted to talk, but I didn’t. Words interfered. I unbuttoned my clothes, fingers shaking, but left my underwear on, he did the same, and I groped for the bed, traced the muscles of his abdomen. Might someone walk in—Carlos, his parents? I felt almost as I had in the churchyard or in the driveway with the gate creeping shut behind me—cut off from everything, losing and discovering myself at once. He stood naked between my opened knees, and I pressed my thighs against him.

We lay together for what seemed like hours, but couldn’t have been since we didn’t have much time. So many mysteries unraveled that I had thought would take months to navigate once I did have a lover: his lips brushing to the back of my knee, my lower back, my thrusting against his hand, yanking down my underwear. Nakedness. We stopped just short of the act itself. But I guessed by the sure way he touched me and where, that he had done this many times, and probably—although I didn’t want to think of it—with more than one girl.

Finally we broke apart from one another and half-dressed but then lay back again, lazy in the afternoon heat. Traffic honked and thundered below. We began talking, about nothing at first—each declaring the other’s unique flaws and perfections to one another. “Where did you get this scar?” I asked, thumbing his knee. A spider bite when he was eleven, he said. He flipped me over, pinched me through the sheet. “You’ve got the most beautiful ass, you know that?” Face burning, I spun away and thrust my cheek to the pillow, laughing. I asked about his music, if he had hopes for his talent. Carlos had booked a recording studio for June, and then who knew? Maybe they would become a world famous guitar duo, maybe not.

“What do you want?” I asked, tracing his eyebrow with my middle finger. He said, “Right now? You,” and tickled my side, but after a moment he stopped and grew serious. I propped up, chin in my palm, and studied him.

“I suppose I want to live a similar life as Emilio’s, just not as a priest, obviously.” A smile once again broke over his face, and he motioned to us pressed together and half-clothed. “Be a great Catholic leader, a saint. Perhaps that’s not possible without being a priest.”

“I’m sure it is. But what exactly do you want to do?”

“Free people from evil. Expose those who feed the system. Bring peace. We’re organizing a rally this Sunday, me and Emilio? You should come, if you can.”

“I can see you now, the singing missionary of the mountains,” I said, grinning. “Riding your donkey up into the villages, strumming your guitar.” I took my chance and tickled him back near his navel, so that he reeled onto his side to stop me.

“But it’s true, you know?” he said, laughing. “And you know what’s strange? I actually feel connected somewhat to the ELN, despite the terrible things they do. Do you know their history?” And he told me how the ELN, unlike the FARC, which had four times the number of members or twenty thousand throughout Colombia, had been founded on sound principles, but those principles had been corrupted over the course of our decades-long civil war. The ELN had been started by former priests, Manuel Pérez and Camillo Torres. My Manuel was more interested in Torres, who had cast aside his priest’s robes to lead his band of guerillas against the army and was killed in battle in 1966. Pérez was a thug, according to Manuel, but history may have been different had Torres survived and went on to become leader. Pérez had succumbed to hepatitis B last year, it was rumored—this Emilio had found out as a negotiator—and the ELN was now headed by someone named Gambino. But the organization lacked a visionary who might lead them into the future.

“So you’re going to become a guerilla?” I said, rolling my eyes. “This will really go over well with my father.”

He shoved a pillow into my face, said, “That’s the last thing I’m going to be.” I pushed it away; he grabbed my wrist and we wrestled for a minute. But then he dropped his hold and lifted my chin toward him. “Guerillas kill people, Mercedes. There’s nothing romantic about them.” I told him the story of my ride home with Fidel and the bus then. He said I was never to take the bus again, he would have never let me come on the night of the church meeting had I first told him about what I had witnessed. We fell silent. The fan’s breeze stirred my hair and cooled my neck and face; tiny bumps appeared on my arms. He asked me what I wanted. Maybe to live on our farm, have a family, I told him, if I couldn’t work and travel as a flight attendant. “But right now I want to find out about Papi, as much as I can,” I said.

“I know you want to know the truth, but please be careful.” He hesitated, then asked, “If you find out anything that strikes you as odd, will you be sure to tell me?”

I nodded and said okay, still giddy. But something in his demeanor—a pointedness and preoccupation—stirred my stomach. We talked so easily. He liked me, liked my body—was I glimpsing another intention? Whatever the alarm, I squelched it, asked something else. Did Manuel think we should keep up the ruse about me going to Ana’s house on my free days after school? He didn’t like lying, but he didn’t think it wise for Papi to think we were seeing each other more than on weekends for now, and I agreed, especially with the recent hijacking. Then he urged me up; the time was getting away from us.