Читать книгу Juventud - Vanessa Blakeslee - Страница 12

CHAPTER FIVE

One afternoon following the rally, I stepped out of school to find Papi on the sidewalk. In the crook of his windbreaker he cradled the bulky folder of applications; he approached me at a clip. Several letter-sized white envelopes fell out, hitting the toe of his oxford. He squatted and gathered them, careful not to let his crisp slacks brush the gritty sidewalk. “What are you doing here?” I asked. My stomach somersaulted even though Manuel and I hadn’t arranged to meet.

He waved the letters. “Sister Rosemary contacted your teachers to write you letters of recommendation for the schools. I needed to pick them up. We can mail everything right now.” He’d squeezed his pickup onto the side street. I climbed in and as we shut both doors, the locks sounded. How odd to see him out of his rubber boots during the day. The outline of his gun bulged from beneath his pant leg; when he left the hacienda he wore it on his ankle.

He locked his gun in the glove box before we went through the metal detectors and inside the lower mall. At the shipping counter, I wrote the schools’ addresses on large envelopes and matched up the application materials for each—all neatly divided and paper-clipped together by Sister Rosemary. Papi paid, and the clerk dropped the packages into a huge plastic chute—my future falling out of sight.

Since the hijacking, Fidel had become glued to talk radio. One day the news reported that the ELN had released nine of the frailest hostages from the Avianca flight, including a baby and elderly captives. Experts were saying the ELN had only done this because of a promise they had made the previous July to stop kidnapping the weak. The guerillas had also released a nun, an American, and a Colombian congressman. Then the announcer mentioned the massive peace rally, organized and led mostly by young people as a response to the hijacking. “Turn that up,” I said.

Fidel’s fingers hovered over the dial. “You went to that rally the other day, right?”

“So what if I did?”

“Juventud,” he said. “Must be fun.” His tone sounded mocking. He raised the volume just barely, but the report had concluded.

The car glided into Ana’s neighborhood, the mansions like great marble prisons behind their high gates. At Ana’s the curtains were drawn, the house deserted and asleep at siesta. “It’s a peaceful group,” I said, and clutched the door handle, ready to jump out.

“Doesn’t matter,” he replied. “It’s the narrow-minded extremists I’d be worried about.” The news broadcast rattled off updates on bandido activity outside the city, routes to avoid.

I lifted my chin. “I refuse to live in fear,” I said, a quip of Manuel’s.

He flicked off the radio and twisted around to face me, the rosary beads dangling from the mirror, red as blood. He said, “That’s not what I’m talking about. Things quickly get out of control, even the best-intended messages of peace. Strong words bring about a strong response, sometimes.”

“Isn’t that the idea?”

His face softened as he glanced over me. “Just be careful, princesa. You know who your father is.” Then he unlocked the doors, and I sprang onto the sidewalk.

The car coasted away and turned the corner. I paced until Manuel roared up on his moto a minute later, no helmet, to my irritation and dismay—I was coming to learn that he often left it behind when dashing around, preoccupied. But I said nothing, just smiled and swung onto the back. Soon we were weaving in and out of traffic, and the brief yet eternal afternoon hours stretched ahead.

The apartment appeared much the same as on my first visit, dim and stuffy. Beats drifted low from the stereo, the singers’ voices faint. I started for the bedroom, but Manuel drew me back and shook his head—Emilio was home, napping. In the half-lit hallway we clung together, kissing; he steered us over to the sagging couch. I slid my hands to his stomach, the soft cotton of his T-shirt a contrast to the firm muscles underneath, sliding farther, until he pulled back and regarded me with a playful smile. He started telling me that he found me so mature for my years, so beautiful. “But I’ve never met another girl like you,” he said. “You’re bold. And I’m honored that you want me to be your first. But right now, with what the Church is facing—I can’t just forgo my beliefs and pretend it doesn’t matter. Do you understand?”

I told him yes even though I didn’t and kissed him again. His hips and the hardness underneath his jeans pressed against me, his hands running up and down my body as if they couldn’t get enough. He reached underneath my skirt and felt me.

“How is your brother going to take vows as a priest?” I kissed his neck, inhaling his scent. Cedar and musk. “Is he crazy?”

“No, not crazy. He just has extraordinary faith—from his habits, mostly. The first hour of every day he prays and studies. Some thought of the saints as crazy, you know?”

How easily he forgot that I wasn’t Catholic. I wasn’t even sure if I’d been baptized. I said, “Lucky you’re not up for the priesthood.” Grinning, I gripped him through the crotch of his jeans. “I’m afraid you wouldn’t make it.”

“I wouldn’t?” he said, laughing. “Let’s just say it’s not my calling.”

“But your brother is so attractive. You both are. Girls must have chased him.”

“Oh, they did. But he made up his mind for good, last year. I think they’ve left him alone since then.” He drew me close and kissed me again, slow and sweet. Then he said, “You never told me what happened the other day with your father. What did he tell you?”

“Nothing you don’t already know,” I answered, my tone mischievous.

“Tell me,” he said. He tickled my ribs and I snickered but drew back, slightly annoyed at the shift to conversation and the frustration we had worked up together. I guided his hand beneath my underwear. “I’ll tell you later,” I whispered into his ear.

He gave me what I wanted then, or at least the most we could accomplish, and I had my first sweet release of pleasure in that shadowed apartment on the sunken couch, with his brother, asleep in the next room. Only Emilio might not have been asleep because a few minutes after we had finished, he shuffled out, squinting. We were sitting up then, hands to ourselves but disheveled. Emilio muttered a hello and sank into his desk chair. He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, picked up one notepad, then another. Manuel raised an eyebrow and shot me a half-smirk as if to say, that was close. I sat up with my skirt smoothed over my knees, but I liked the idea that Emilio might know what had just happened, and was possibly tempted by our exploits.

“What you showed me at the meeting was a start,” I said. “Do either of you know anyone else I can talk to? What about the priest you mentioned, Father Juan?”

Emilio frowned. He tore off a sheet of notes, crumpled them in the trash. “That won’t be easy,” he said. “He spends most of his time in the mountains, remember? Trying to catch village boys before they get recruited by the FARC and ELN.”

”But which group would have an interest in kidnapping me? That’s what Papi’s most worried about. I’ll look for information—I just have to make sure nobody’s around.”

“Watch yourself,” Manuel said, and picked up his guitar. “Diego’s not a stupid man.”

“Well, what do you suggest?” I laughed. “That I interview him? Set up a tape recorder?”

“Not at all.” Manuel adjusted the strap, tugged the strings. “Because if you ask too many questions, he might wonder if you have other aims against him—to expose him.”

“Expose him?” I asked, and caught the laugh in my throat. “What good would that do?”

“Because the world needs transparency,” Emilio cut in. “The end of lies will be the end of this fallen world, and the beginning of the new Earth.” His fingers tapped the rigid, dark cover of a book I assumed to be the Bible.

“Look, I just need to know the truth for my own sake,” I said. “Until then I can’t even think of inheriting the hacienda one day.” To Emilio, I asked, “Why is it so important to you? About my father?”

He sneered, as if my question was both absurd and juvenile. “To you I’m just the leader of La Maria Juventud. I don’t think you realize what being an activist requires. Let’s just leave it at that for now, okay?” He swiveled in the chair, knees wide, a pencil playing between his fingers. Part of me disliked his haughtiness, but when he regarded me I felt that twinge again. An attraction.

“And I should be looking out for what, exactly?” I asked, a hint of sarcasm in my tone.

“Changes of routine, unannounced trips somewhere, visitors.” Emilio let the last word hang in the air like a question.

I told them about the woman’s voice outside Papi’s bedroom door, the light steps on the stairs. “Doubtful,” Emilio said. “Way to go, Diego. Getting lucky on his hot date.”

I winced. Good thing I hadn’t disclosed Papi’s confession. Emilio hunched over his notebooks, Manuel tinkered with a new song. I told him how captivated I was by the set he and Carlos had played at the rally. “Really?” he said. He’d been composing lately, he told me, and sometimes he had to leave his work in the shop to jot them down, the calls for peace, justice, and togetherness more fervent—and the most joyful, exhausting experience he’d ever had. I longed to tell him what he had told me at the rally: that I loved him in return. But Emilio sat there, scrawling away amidst Karl Marx and Thomas à Kempis, stabbing notecards onto a bulletin board.

At our next meeting, I asked Sister Rosemary about baptism, and sins that couldn’t be forgiven. If I had been baptized, I was sort of halfway there, she told me with a laugh, but I hadn’t been fully inducted into the Church out of my own free will, another sacrament altogether. The baptism should be relatively easy to find out. There were two types of sins—small or venial sins, such as missing church or lustful thoughts, and mortal sins, like killing, stealing, and adultery. But when I asked her about excommunication, she cocked her head and eyed me suspiciously.

“Excommunication?” she asked. “For that you must do something, or many things, which cut yourself off from God, and in turn the community no longer allows you to belong. You cannot go to mass and receive the Eucharist. Perhaps you have heard mention of this in the news, that the archbishop has threatened the guerillas with excommunication?”

I hadn’t but nodded anyway—not off to a good start, I thought, in the venial sin department. “So to be excommunicated, a person would have to commit mortal sins?”

“Not only many mortal sins, but also not show remorse for them. There’s a big difference between a repentant sinner and one who refuses or keeps committing the same sins—insincerity, if you will.” She leaned forward and placed her hand lightly on my forearm. “These questions— what’s troubling you?”

Papi’s voice boomed from the doorway. “I thought you were supposed to be speaking English,” he said, his tone upbeat, joking. “Isn’t that what I’m paying for?” He wore a two-day beard and his pants were streaked with dirt. This was unusual, as he liked casual clothes but also had a penchant for appearing neat.

“Indeed, sir,” she said, and jumped of her seat. “Mercedes just needed some clarifications.” She gathered our materials. Papi blocked my attempt to brush past.

“What are you bugging the nun about, eh?” He reached over to pinch my cheek but I ducked.

“Nothing,” I said, smiling. “Just questions about American schools.”

“You’ve been seeing this boy every weekend,” he said, stepping back into the hall. “I hope you’re not in love with him.” He sounded bemused, facetious. I pictured him in the alpaca field, the sun in his eyes and his work shirt splattered, a gun in one hand and a body pooling blood at his feet.

Downstairs reeked of bandeja paisa, and I grimaced. Although I loved chicharrón, the greasy combination of fried pork and dirty rice gave me a stomachache. Inez bustled about, her long braid swinging across her back. I asked about my baptism, if she recalled it.

“Of course,” she said. She sliced an avocado; her fingers wielded the knife deftly.

“How could I forget? Your mother didn’t want anything to do with it. She was Jewish, you know. But your father insisted.”

That night I found a verse in the Bible borrowed from Inez: Revelation, Chapter 21. “Behold, I make all things new …They are accomplished. I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.” I read further about the second coming of Jesus but recoiled at the idea of God as a great external power whom we were to rely on to rescue our bloody mess, showing up to judge humanity one day. If we were to be rescued we needed to do it ourselves, the same way Manuel and Emilio had worked to create the peace rally; I didn’t see anyone coming to save us. A final judgment would only be useful if it meant all of us examining ourselves, seeing how we’d done and how we might do better—more of a final observation. But then what was final with God? I liked the line about God being the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. Perhaps because of the poetry, I read it over and over again.

I met Gracia at La Iglesia de San Francisco, near the municipal theatre and her dance studio. She showed up in tight black exercise pants, her backpack slung over one shoulder, listening to her battered old Walkman half tucked away, wires disappearing beneath the bag’s zipper. She was either crazy or fearless or both, and somehow the thieves hadn’t ripped the headphones from her ears yet. I scolded her; she stuffed it and the earphones away and zipped up her bag, laughing. Then she exclaimed that she had news. “I might be going to the dance academy in Bogotá next term,” she said, her words rushing out almost on top of one another.

I asked her what she was talking about; she had mentioned nothing of this until now. The possibility of my going to school in America had sparked her to investigate the Bogotá dance academies, she said, where the teachers hailed from Spain, Argentina, even the U.S. Her parents enthusiastically approved. She didn’t want to get her hopes up, but she had just mailed the applications and audition tapes. She added, “I haven’t told Ana yet, so don’t say anything.”

“What about Esteban? Aren’t you in love with him?”

She grew quiet. “I am,” she said. “He could move there with me, I suppose.”

“Don’t you want to marry him?”

She laughed. “I don’t know if I want to marry anyone. They all end in unhappiness anyway, like my parents. But this opportunity I just can’t pass up.” She explained how recruiters from international dance companies visited the Bogotá academies, searching for new talent.

“Who knows where it will lead?” she said. “I’m not going to dance at that restaurant forever.” We walked for a moment in silence, skirting the rubble of the crumbling sidewalk. I was taken aback not only by her news, but that she had told me before Ana. This marked the first time she confided in me outside the company of her cousin, and I couldn’t help but feel pleased at this turn in our friendship. And of course, I bemoaned that we would miss her.

“Oh, you’ll probably be in California or somewhere else, a thousand miles away by then,” she said. She asked about the American schools. I told her the applications had been mailed, although my aunt had introduced the idea about finishing school in Costa Rica. “The lesser of two evils, I suppose,” she said. “But other than Manuel, why don’t you want to get out of here?”

“Live in the cold, where it snows? And have to speak English everywhere I go? No.”

“Maybe I just think differently because of dance,” she said. “A dancer has to be able to move around—and I mean both ways, with her body and with travel, if she wants to perform for great audiences and become famous.”

“Is that what you want?”

“What artist doesn’t?” she said. “We sacrifice too much for anything less.”

We crossed the plaza near the theatre, the farmacia just beyond. An old man in a tatty suit crouched on a crate with a large, mysterious box and microphone, singing into a karaoke machine he must have lugged around with him from corner to corner. A plastic container sat near his feet, a few coins at the bottom. He had a harelip and missing teeth, not one of the uprooted peasants but a desplazado of another sort. Into which category did he fall, sinner or saint? Who were we to ever judge another when we could not know a single experience of anyone, let alone all the experiences that shape a life?

“Do you think Ana will marry Carlos?” I asked.

Gracia frowned. “I’m worried for her,” she said. “For instance, with the birth control.” We crossed the street, Gracia charging ahead in her espadrilles. “I’m afraid she won’t use anything or something will go wrong with those flimsy condoms. I can just see it.”

We entered the store, the shelves behind the counter crammed with medications. Many could be bought without a doctor’s prescription. Gracia fished inside her bag, produced a thin pastel box, and gestured for the clerk to assist us. He asked how many we’d like. Gracia and I exchanged glances and burst out laughing. “Three,” she told him. To me she said, “That should have you covered for a few months.” I paid for the supply out of my Christmas money, about thirty U.S. dollars.

On the sidewalk I opened one of the boxes and peeked inside. “Good luck,” Gracia said. “And if Manuel doesn’t come to his senses and forget this idea of sexual sin, then I suggest he enter the priesthood like his brother.”

At home, bedroom door latched, I read the pill package three times. I couldn’t take them for another two weeks, which felt as far away as Christmas, and so stuck the pack in my purse pocket where the maids or Inez weren’t likely to stumble across them. I didn’t mention the pills to Manuel during our phone call that night, either. Instead I asked him if Emilio could obtain more solid information. “I know my brother can come off as arrogant sometimes,” Manuel said, “but I promise he’s not bluffing. He has all sorts of connections with political groups, government. I know how important finding out the truth is to you. It would be for me, too.”

Moments after we hung up the phone rang again, and I expected to hear his voice. He likely had forgotten to mention something, or to tell me again that he loved me, which he had not said since the rally.

But whoever spoke sounded gruff and robotic, hardly human. “If you want to keep your nice life on the hacienda, Mercedes Martinez, you better stop hanging out with La Maria Juventud.” He stopped then, breathing raggedly—the armed guerillas of my nightmares suddenly transfigured, real. The alien, electronically altered voice somehow reminded me of the man with the karaoke machine from earlier, but this was someone who knew about me. The blood rushed in my ears. I saw myself standing on the edge of a jungle precipice, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. “You can tell your lover boys Manuel and Emilio they’re going to die,” he said, and clicked off.

The phone was a brick in my hand. My breath jolted—I needed to move, to walk. The caller had known me—did I know him? Might he have been one of the jefes, or even Fidel, disguised, delivering the threats at my father’s demand? I roamed downstairs into the darkened living room and lowered onto the tile, the coolness rising to the bottoms of my feet as I leaned back against Papi’s chair. I yearned for the dogs, their furry muzzles and solid warmth; they slept on an old mattress on his balcony. I remained as the terrorist had wanted me: paralyzed by fear, and alone. Until a chain jingled, and Angel slowly hopped down the stairs on her three legs, climbed into my lap. Calmer now, I crawled into bed.

But I slipped in and out of sleep, only to awaken in a sweat. I saw myself ripped out of a crowd, hauled into the back of a camouflaged Jeep, beaten with a rifle butt in an encampment shrouded with leaves. In some dreams I was abducted alone; in others Manuel and I were together, sometimes Emilio as well, jostled by masked men. The guerillas swept their guns in our direction, as if spraying hoses, yelling, and I heard again the voice on the phone. My dreams possessed the sensory sharpness of visions: the sweaty stink of the guerillas’ body odor, mixed with damp earth and the smoke of campfires, the snaps and swishes of the jungle.

In one I was marched to a drop-off to be killed. I could see across and down to the next mountain slope. It appeared bottomless. Even in the dream I realized this was a view I had experienced as a child: on a visit to Costa Rica we had once taken a zip-line rainforest tour. Nowhere else did such giant, ancient, exquisite trees exist. I wept with shock that this was the simple, final end, but also with joy at sight of the trees, each as magnificent and breathtaking as a view of Earth from space.

The guerilla told me to look ahead, to not turn around. I felt the barrel of his gun press into the back of my skull.

In none of my dreams did anyone come for us.