Читать книгу Juventud - Vanessa Blakeslee - Страница 11

CHAPTER FOUR

Afternoons for the next couple of weeks, Manuel and Emilio organized the rally, making signs, printing leaflets and calls to action. Emilio designed T-shirts to raise money for La Maria Juventud. I had never attended a demonstration of any kind before, and couldn’t imagine what I would do. Wave signs? Shout into a megaphone? What would I shout? The rally would take place in front of the Catedral de San Pedro where Manuel and I first met. When I pressed him about the possibility of violence breaking out, he assured me that police presence would be heavy and the authorities would fly helicopters overhead. Still, I felt uneasy.

Sister Rosemary and I finished the forms. I had made mistakes, but she praised my efforts. “Always do your best, have a positive attitude, and even the most difficult task will become easier,” she said. I winced at these empty words but said nothing, wishing that she would talk to me like an adult. She promised I would never regret learning a second language and quoted to me a saying I liked: “Another language, another soul.” I would take the EFL exam in June. It would be challenging, she said. We couldn’t prepare enough.

She explained that the beatitudes, or corporal works of mercy—to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, visit the imprisoned—were not so much orders from Jesus but declarations of how a person filled with the spirit of God lives, their actions. She wrote down several verses for me: Matthew 5:3-10 and James 2:15-17. A Catholic who took Holy Orders chose to serve these calls, and others, with total dedication. She had been working at the mission for nine years—she was thirty-eight, although by her small-boned frame I had guessed younger. As for the ELN and their roots, they had traditionally recruited members who believed in Liberation Theology, a branch of Roman Catholicism that combined Marxist and Christian teaching. “I have no doubt that goodness lives with evil inside those men, as it does with all of us,” she said. “I believe much of what they advocate is just—for peace, for an end to government corruption. For the paramilitary atrocities to stop. And I can understand their criticism of the elite. The gap between the rich and poor is dire. But violence is never the way.”

Later on, I combed the house for a Bible in vain. Papi was getting ready to go out with neighbors to a jazz café on Avenida Sexta in Cali. He rarely socialized beyond the farm; a couple of times a month he accepted invitations to join acquaintances at restaurants or for a night of salsa. I knocked on his door. “A Bible?” he asked. “Why do you want that?” He stood stiffly in jeans, buttoning the cuffs to his shirt, white, the collar embroidered, the doorway ensconced by his cologne. I wondered if he had a date. Maybe if he acquired a girlfriend, he would forget about me and Manuel.

“I need to look something up,” I said. “For school.”

“I don’t think I have one,” he said. “Ask Inez.”

I left in search of her. Wouldn’t my grandparents have owned a family Bible? But then, we had no crucifixes or pictures of the Virgin Mary, no signs of religion anywhere, unlike Ana’s house or Manuel’s apartment. Papi didn’t wear a cross like so many other men. I wondered if he’d purged the house of everything holy.

Inez showed me where to find the verses in the New Testament. First I came upon the verse by James: “If a brother or sister has nothing to wear and has no food for the day, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, keep warm, and eat well,’ but you do not give them the necessities of the body, what good is it? So also faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead.’ But I had difficulty with the beatitudes. According to them, the poor and weak were supposed to inherit the land and the kingdom of heaven. Prosperity might happen for those like Manuel who had the resources to work and bring about results, but how was change supposed to occur for those who didn’t—the hungry and homeless? What about the guerillas who considered themselves Catholic—did this mean they thought their attempts were for ultimate good, and they just didn’t see how taking hostages and threatening the government made things worse?

Sister Rosemary had said that good and evil lived inside each of us—Manuel, Ana, even me. What was that evil inside me? Inside Papi? If the heart could turn black so easily, depending on what you fed it, could that happen to me? Because I wasn’t sure I could tend to mine on my own. Maybe none of us could, and that was why we were doomed. Or maybe there were places where evil took root more swiftly, and others where that same evil would be strangled, starved out. Suppose I stayed, and evaded getting abducted or killed. What would my life be like, in this place where fear permeated the everyday and exploded—while shopping for groceries, strolling through a park? Might I be harmed even if I tried to modestly do right—become lesser somehow?—when what I really craved was resilience, courage. Stability. If I found Paula, could she offer me that? What alternate life awaited me in the United States? I paged through my passport, blank except for the stamps from Costa Rica. I could always come back.

Not long after dawn, someone opened Papi’s door and whispered—a woman’s voice I didn’t recognize—followed by footsteps on the stairs and the click of the front door. I drifted back to sleep. When I crept downstairs mid-morning, music flooded the sound system, an album by the famous guitarist Pepe Romero. It was surprising, since Papi never listened to music in the mornings, only at the close of the day. Even the dogs acted aware. They tugged over an old toy in the living room and glanced up expectantly every time one of the maids passed by.

Papi, still damp from his shower and dressed in boots and faded work jeans, read his newspaper as he ate breakfast. The front page depicted the Avianca turboprop in grainy color, headshots of the ELN leaders alongside, “Gambino” named in the caption.

“I want to go with you this morning,” I said, referring to the property rounds he conducted on Saturdays.

“Oh?” He regarded me over his paper. “Why is this?”

“Can’t I come?” I had accompanied him before, but rarely—perhaps three times a year at most, to see how the fields changed with the growth cycles of the sugarcane.

He folded his paper and set it aside. “You had better change. It’s been muddy.”

We climbed into his splattered pickup and headed out, turning left on the road toward the cane fields. A minute later we veered off-road. Our land seemed to go on forever; I liked this feeling which was more akin to stewardship than ownership—that everything as far as I could see was our responsibility and, in turn, sustained us, from the chicken in our soup to the aguardiente, better known as guaro, a grain alcohol made from sugarcane and a fixture at parties on the haciendas. As we headed farther away from the main road and over deep tire tracks, we passed our many field workers and wagons pulled by tractors and horses. I asked what the workers were doing—hadn’t we just drained these fields? Even though Papi had explained the intricacies of farming sugarcane dozens of times, I always forgot. Left to itself, sugarcane matured about once a year, but big operations like ours managed multiple growing cycles. Currently we yielded three main harvests, he said, but the way he and Luis decided to rotate the fields depended on several factors. In one field workers were replanting; they dropped pairs of cut stalks into furrows, and these would grow shoots in several weeks. Then we passed another set of fields, void of workers, where only short green shoots pointed up from the ground; Papi called these ratoons and said that these grew naturally after a field’s first harvest. A field only needed replanting every three harvests. And we passed yet a third set of fields that swarmed with workers and plows; these peasants were planting sweet corn. When I asked why we did this, he said that this set of cane fields had been harvested late, so Luis had decided to plant a different crop in its place—fallow planting, it was called.

“Displaced farmers?” I asked. Papi always referred to our field employees as workers, not campesinos.

He gripped the wheel with one hand and adjusted the bandanna on his forehead with the other, eyes darting on the road ahead, watching for potholes. “Yes,” he said. “I gave those fields to some of the displaced who have been fleeing through here. But only for a few months, until those fields are ready to grow cane again.”

We rolled along in silence, my heart hurting as if struck by the stones the tires kicked up. This was the Papi I had loved all my life: the father who had taken me for rides on his saddle, laughed at the way the dogs backed up against his chair, demanding to be stroked, even the Papi of stern remarks who wanted me to go to the best schools. “Did sugarcane bring you to Florida?” I asked.

“I worked for a rum factory at first. That’s how I learned about sugar. Why is that important?”

“I’m your daughter,” I replied, tight-lipped. “Don’t I have a right to know?”

He said, “Family business is no one else’s. I don’t know that you understand.”

“Of course I do. But will you stop talking to me like I’m an employee? Please.”

The truck lurched into a pothole; we bobbed in our seats. “If I tell you,” he began, “that puts things in jeopardy. I signed on to certain arrangements. You must swear not to tell anyone.” His black eyes bore into mine. He let go of the gear shift and held out his hand. For a second I didn’t realize he meant for me to grasp it. Scratches etched his fingers, his callouses scraping my palm.

“I won’t. I promise.” I cast him a sidelong glance. “You didn’t get rich in Miami working for the rum company, or the sugar refinery. Did you?”

He shook his head, his mouth taut as a rope. “Sugarcane, no. Cocaine is what I shipped.”

Another pickup approached, tires spewing mud. The faded blue seemed to take forever to reach us, Vincente at the wheel. He raised a wiry arm in greeting as he rolled by, but I remained still. “How?” I asked. “Why?”

“I was young, chasing dollars and women. The money was easy. But mostly I wanted to come back and buy land.” Here Papi opened his hands toward the surrounding fields. “I wanted to give my parents who had broken their backs all their lives a nice house.”

“When were you going to tell me?”

“I hoped you would never ask. But all of that is far behind me now, I want you to know.”

I shook my head. “You’ve been lying to me my whole life. Why should I believe you?”

His eyes flitted and his grip on the wheel tightened. “How was I supposed to make you, a little girl, understand? Maybe I shouldn’t have told you now. I thought you might be old enough.”

A breeze blew in through the half-opened window and raindrops stung my cheeks. “I won’t say anything,” I said.

We drove on, the mud thickening as the lane sloped down at the bottom of the fields. He turned off, and we headed toward a cluster of trees; I had never been to this part of our property before. “I want you to see something,” he said.

Matted, skinny dogs descended upon the truck, barking. He slowed to a crawl. Several dozen shanties built out of scrap metal, bamboo, and cardboard leaned among the trees. Laundry hung on lines between branches. Women squatted in the murky shallows of a creek, washing clothes. A child of five or six, bare below the waist, crouched behind a fallen branch as he defecated; he hugged himself and ducked down as we rumbled past. The air smelled of burnt garbage, and trash littered the ground everywhere: metal cans, scraps of paper and plastic containers, a torn canvas shoe. A few men sat around on crates or logs, or even in the dirt. Most of them didn’t move as we crept by, but some advanced at a clip, extended their hands and called out, “Jefe, tiene más trabajo, jefe?” One had droopy eyes and a scar down his face that made my stomach curl. He said, “Boss, your truck is dirty. Let me wash it for you!”

Papi spoke to them through his half-open window, shook his head, and waved. “Why aren’t you in the fields, planting?” he shouted at them. The oldest among them muttered a reply, something about other jobs at the main house. “No, no—what do you know how to plant, other than coca? You, tell me the crops you’ve grown.” He pointed from one man to the next, and each shook his head no. “The men in the pickups can tell you where to get the seeds, yuca and corn. Okay? Next time I drive through, don’t let me see grown men lounging around like housecats.” Then he touched the gas and we charged up the slope on the other side of the trees, out of the settlement.

From there we passed the cement-block houses and smaller plots of land, one after another, of our tenant farmers. I had seen their homes before; these simple dwellings were a vast improvement from the shacks we had just passed. Chickens clucked in the yards, dogs lunged and circled on their chains. A few children tottered and chased one another, barefoot in shorts and shirts. Several mothers bent over hoes in small gardens, most of the others alongside husbands in their plots. Two women carrying a hamper between them waved as we rolled past. At one property, Papi pulled off and jumped out, leaving me in the cab.

Talking to the tenants, he bent down to plug his fingers in their garden plot and poke the toddler in his belly; the child let out a delighted squeal. Papi accepted an envelope from the farmer and briefly checked the contents before the couple led him over to their cottage, where a set of shiny pipes ran up the outer wall and inside. I imagined my father exchanging suitcases of money on the boat docks of Barranquilla, or over sacks of cocaine amassed inside a warehouse, surrounded by men with handguns—images I had gleaned from TV and movies. Something told me these depictions weren’t quite accurate. Could there be other groups beside the ELN and the FARC, or the Autodefensas, the AUC paramilitary army, and why did he maintain ties when he seemed strained just talking about it? Had the ELN been to blame for his parents’ murders?

He returned. We left the row of tenant plots behind and cut back across the fields. I tried to picture myself as thirty years old, driving a pickup, discussing the harvest cycles with the jefes and collecting rent. But I couldn’t.

“You’re quiet,” Papi said. “What you saw down there must have shocked you.”

“No, the coca.”

“I had thought you might have figured it out. But I wasn’t a kingpin or anything. I tried to stop as soon as I could, but once you’re in—it’s difficult, almost impossible. Please, keep this quiet.”

Haciendas dotted the cleared foothills—how many had been built with blood money? Behind our house, past the coffee shrubs where the alpaca had gone missing, might Papi allow peasant farmers to grow coca? The alpacas dozed underneath a tree in a great heap, the valley too hot for them. Their eyes remained slits as they slept, forever on the lookout for predators; the breeze carried their musty scent. The broken one he’d had to shoot—what had they done with it? I only hoped they’d given it to one of the men begging for work, for his wife to roast over a fire and not the vultures to eat. “Why did you show me the displaced?” I cried.

The truck stopped. The gate inched open. “Because, my daughter,” he said, “that is how close the poor are to us, and why we must provide for them in small ways. Otherwise, if thousands continue to pour out of the hills with the guerillas, squatters will take over. That’s what happened in Nicaragua. The guerillas and the poor drove the people like us out, seized plantations, and let the lands go to filth and ruin. Even more suffered and starved. Then we will be the displaced, and Colombia will descend into even more of a bloodbath.”

“Is that what happened to your parents?”

He shot me a sharp glance, and his face flushed red. “Who told you that?”

The engine revved as we clambered from gravel onto the stone pavers. One of the alpacas popped up her head, ears twitching. “Nobody, I was just wondering,” I said. We zipped through and the gate shut swiftly behind us.

Papi opened the door but his hands dropped to his lap, and he leaned back in the seat. “Not because of land.” He sifted the keys in his palm, stared at the fields. “Someday I may tell you.” The dogs hurdled down the stone steps, jumped and crowded the truck. He greeted them, smiling and calling their names like children on his way to the house.

In Ana’s upstairs living room with the Virgin Mary eying us from the wall, we cranked up Gracia’s dance music, sipped Fanta (a treat, as Papi did not allow soda), and talked about our boyfriends. It was late Sunday morning. The rally was set to take place that afternoon. With Ana’s parents at morning mass and no one but the maids downstairs, we were able to speak freely. Ana had made reservations for Carlos’s birthday at the Mirador. Afterward, we might all go out to a club; she was thinking of booking a room at the Intercontinental and buying, for herself, some sexy lingerie. She stared at her lap as she said this, but a slight smile played across her lips.

“What happened to his present?” I asked, prodding her rib.

She shrank away, feigning protest. “He wants sex. What else do I get? Colored condoms?”

I laughed but Gracia wrinkled her nose. “Those are awful,” she said. “Use the pill.”

“I thought you didn’t want to be having sex with Carlos,” I said. “Are you sure you want to stay the night with him somewhere?”

Ana waved at me, brief and dismissive. “Oh, it’s fine. He’s into me.” She giggled and sipped her Fanta, then asked how things were going with Manuel.

Grinning, I told them he knew what he was doing, and it was better than I had ever imagined. “But he insists sex is a sin, that he won’t,” I said.

“Are you kidding?” Gracia said. “I give you a month at the most. Just be sure you use something, or else.”

A beat of silence hung in the air. We all knew what she meant. Only two options existed for a pregnant teenage girl in Colombia—either to drop out of school and life, marry her novio, and give birth to the first in a long line of babies, or seek out one of the illegal abortion doctors.

“So our sexy guitarist Manuel is hard to get,” Ana said. “That means he lives his faith.”

“Oh, please,” Gracia said, rolling her eyes. She set down her soda can; it scraped the glass. “There’s nothing more beautiful than sharing that experience with someone you love,” she said to me. “And you don’t have to be married. The Church is wrong.”

“Manuel won’t agree,” Ana said, her chin tensed. She toyed with her soda tab. “If you take the pill, don’t tell him. Just have him pull out and believe that works.”

At noon, Ana handed each of us a T-shirt printed with the titles of a dozen groups with names like La Maria Juventud Para Justicia Social, some affiliated with Catholic Churches, others with Cali universities. Across the front, the words LIBERTAD and COLOMBIA blazed in bold black lettering, a Colombian flag in the backdrop. Then the three of us piled into the family’s Land Rover and the driver whisked us off to the Plaza de Cayzedo. I was expecting something larger than the youth group meeting, but more formal: Manuel and Emilio each leading the demonstrators in a few rounds of chants, and then everyone would disperse. We would have the rest of the day to ourselves.

When the armored Land Rover trailed behind the edges of the gathering three blocks away, the size of the crowd astonished me. A group of young men hoisted a large banner overhead: VIVA LA PAZ, and on the other side, COLOMBIA SOY YO. A pair of older women frantically waved miniature Colombian flags in yellow, blue, and red, their arms linked around each other’s waists. A father paraded a toddler on his shoulders. Just beyond the thousands of demonstrators, a white tent and stage had been erected next to the cathedral steps. TV cameras formed a horseshoe in front; an anchorwoman fluffed her hair in front of a hand mirror. I had never seen the square so filled with people.

We moved through the crowd and up the cathedral steps. On the portable stage Carlos adjusted sound equipment. His pudgy middle poking out the flag on his T-shirt’s front. He grabbed each of our hands and pulled us up; below, the city police pressed back at the crowd’s edge. The square swelled, alive with whistles and chants. Our spot seemed ideal, until I looked up. Atop a roof a sniper in black uniform crouched, the stage and its speakers an easy target for someone with a rifle or a bomb. And where was Manuel?

He emerged from the mobbed cathedral steps moments later and bounded onto the stage. He didn’t say hello at first, just took my hands and squeezed them. Singing broke out over the rising chants and claps, and electricity charged the air. We stood there for a moment, staring at each other and swaying. “I’m so glad you’re here,” he said, and added, “I’m nervous. Only just a little.” He tilted his head toward the crowd, grinning. He let go of my hands and quickly brushed his palms on the sides of his jeans.

I cupped his shoulder. “You’ll be great.” He paced a few steps, scratching his head, then bent over and lifted his guitar from the case. He checked the strings. I told him I had driven the property with my father the day before and visited the encampment of desplazados. But I stopped short. I couldn’t bring myself to divulge further.

“Did you?” he remarked, rising. “You’re brave.” He drew me to him and kissed my head. His scent mixed with the factory odor of the new T-shirt. When he stepped back, he smoothed my hair and said, “I’m so in love with you, Mercedes.”

When Emilio stepped up to the mike and thanked those who had assembled, Manuel let go my hand and stood alongside his brother. The multitude quieted to a murmur.

“Today is independence day,” Emilio said. “I want to invite you all to celebrate this day in the spirit of freedom—freedom from fear and violence. Think about each moment, and how we can make ourselves more and more free in that way.”

The ponytailed young man from the social justice meeting spoke, halting but convicted, from notecards. He turned out to be the leader of the Universidad del Valle peace organization. Then a priest, obese and commanding, led a prayer for Colombia and other nations that suffered atrocities. I had rarely thought about the world outside before, but now I pictured countries like ours, in Africa and Asia, with jungles, refugees, guns. I recalled the eyes of our desplazados and tried to guess at the numbers of people who lived that way on our planet: so many Colombias, countries I couldn’t name, worlds without end. On stage the same light shone in Manuel’s eyes as when he lay back in bed with me, talking of his dreams, telling me that he loved me.

I had thought that Manuel would speak to this gathering like he did at the youth group, but after the speeches concluded, Emilio led the demonstrators in a chant. “LIBERTAD! LIBERTAD!” we cried in unison. From the back of the stage, Ana, Gracia, and I pumped our fists in the air, the flags fluttering in the breeze. Manuel said, “This is a song we want to play for anyone who worries,” and the whistles and cries died down. Manuel and Carlos began playing, voices soaring in harmony; the loudspeakers crackled. Thousands sang along. Ana wiped a tear from my cheek; I hadn’t even realized it was there.

Afterward, Manuel approached with his guitar case, rubbed the back of his head, and stretched. I liked his forearms, muscular from maneuvering furniture. Ana caught my eye, her brow raised; time to leave. “Will I see you tonight?” I asked him.

“Sorry,” he said. “But I’ve got to stay and clean up, and I’m exhausted.” He touched my chin. “Soon. I want to hear what happened with your father.”

I nodded, disappointed. I had hoped that we could at least meet in Ana’s neighborhood for a walk before Fidel came to pick me up and the busy school week started. At the far end of the square a few groups lingered, carrying on their chants for peace. Manuel kissed me good-bye, our fingers entwined. Someone called out for him. Was this how things would always be with us, his causes always tearing him away? At last I climbed down from the stage with Ana and Gracia, the two of them jabbering and me silent. As we crossed the square I marveled at how quickly its everyday filthiness had returned, with the magical efficiency of a circus that had performed, dismantled, and left town. Nothing remained on the ground but some abandoned cardboard signs, a trampled miniature Colombian flag, and trash.