Читать книгу Juventud - Vanessa Blakeslee - Страница 9

CHAPTER TWO

Several days later, Manuel met me on the side street by my school. I had asked Fidel to pick me up two hours past the usual time. Thus began our ritual. Manuel and I would roam the historic district, buying a flavored ice or another street snack to eat on the steps of the Museo de Arte Colonial. When Manuel’s shirts were always dusty with sawdust and wood-shavings, and he smelled like freshly cut lumber and the faint grease of tools. I wore my horrendous school uniform with the baggy vest and the skirt that hung to the knees.

On the main street we passed a tall building, a Taca Airlines office inside the lower mall. The metal detectors beeped incessantly; a businessman sprang open his briefcase before a guard and lost his grip. Papers flew, and both men fumbled to retrieve them. A Taca ticket agent rummaged over her purse, swiftly adjusted her navy skirt and white blouse, and changed from street flats into heels. I hung back, peering through the glass at the posters of the Panama Canal and Machu Picchu. When Manuel joked about me booking a trip, I told him about my dream of becoming a flight attendant, asked if he thought that was silly.

“You’d look cute in the uniform,” he said.

We were holding hands and he drew me gently away from the glass and kissed me. Lady shoppers and businessmen in suits streamed by. My body flushed; where could we go? Since the party I had been picturing us together, out with our friends at street festivals and nightclubs, but also alone. I wanted more than just kisses and sweet touches; I wanted to be naked with him, to sit on the edge of a bed somewhere and pull him toward me in the dark.

His hand grazed my side. He hooked a finger in the waistband of my skirt. We continued walking. I bought an arepa in front of the museum, and we sat down on the steps. Below, a man dressed in a scruffy poncho and cowboy hat called after the passersby. He toted a plaster donkey that he placed on the sidewalk, gesturing for people to sit on its back and get their picture taken. But the business professionals, vagrants, and pedestrians breezed past with barely a glance. By the time the vendor handed Manuel his corncake, the Juan Valdez imitator was sitting on the poor plaster donkey like a Colombian Jesus with no place to go. Finally, a gringo couple shoved a few American dollars in the man’s palm, and the woman struck a pose with the prop.

Did I appear American to other Colombians? To Manuel? Or would he be shocked if I told him about my mother—not only that she was American, but Jewish? What difference did it make? Yet I felt sure that it would. I blew on my arepa before taking a bite of its sweetness.

The streets teemed with vagrants, dozens of young men Manuel’s age with a hunger in their eyes and a shiftless manner. Families, too, perched on corners with signs that read Ayuda, somos desplazados—Help, we are displaced. A grubby child wandered up and gawked at me eating the arepa. He stared like our dogs, waiting for a scrap of meat at mealtimes; I shrank away. Manuel got up and returned with something sugary-smelling inside a wax paper. The boy squatted next to us and choked down the steaming plantains from the greasy folds; he didn’t take his eyes off of us.

Manuel asked him where he had come from, before Cali. “My village,” the boy said, between licking his fingers. “We all left.”

“Your whole village—why?”

“A pipe blew up.” The boy raised his arms above him in a circle, his eyes wide. “Big. The kind the oil runs through. All the buildings, smashed. Like this.” He crushed the corner of the wax paper.

Manuel frowned. “Guerillas,” he said, and handed the boy a napkin. “Right?”

The boy nodded vigorously, plantain juice bathing his chin.

Soon after, I climbed into the car, breathless and tousled. The locks sounded. Fidel eyed me in the mirror. “No bags?” he said.

“What?” I said, taken aback.

“From shopping?”

“Oh, with Ana,” I said quickly. “She had an errand, not me.”

He scoffed as we jutted into the traffic. “I have never seen a girl go shopping and come back empty-handed.”

I didn’t answer but knew that I’d been caught in a lie. I prayed that he said nothing to Papi. We scooted around a city bus, its tailpipe billowing a black cloud of diesel fumes. The handgun jutted out from beneath his daily paper.

When we turned onto the road for home, I saw the remaining cane had been cut, the landscape oddly bare, like the first sight of a shorn alpaca. At our gate, two dozen men in faded clothing loitered, pacing. A small gang of children lingered to jab sticks and stones in the mud. The jefe Luis pranced on horseback among the mob. He and several field hands yelled for the desplazados to let us through, to leave; Fidel blasted the horn and inched the car ahead. Vincente thumbed the pistol in his holster.

“What do they want?” I asked, the window cool against my forehead. The sunken eyes of one of the displaced stared back at me. I thought him old at first, then realized he was much younger—his cheeks so thin that the jaw line jutted out.

“Work, what do you think?” Fidel said. “But we have nothing for them now.” The gate opened, and we zipped through.

That afternoon Papi’s brow was creased with worry, even after I approached his chair from behind and hugged him hello. In one hand, he crushed his purple bandanna. The living room sat silent, the stereo dark. “What’s wrong?” I asked, alarmed at his lack of attention.

“Did you see all the poor outside the gate? Because of the guerillas, they become my problem. They want land to farm, and I can’t give it to them. Not even to rent.”

“Don’t we have a lot of land?” I stepped over to the window.

“There’s not enough to go around, princesa.” He jumped up from his seat, pulled his hair with one hand, and paced. Shaka, the ridgeback, approached him with a ball and whined.

But Papi kept his cigar between his fingertips, and Shaka slumped into her place by his chair.

I fetched Manuel’s album, said, “Listen to this, and tell me what you think.” The guitars and voices soared. Papi strolled to the great windows. A breeze cut through the smoke. I doubted he was listening until he said, “Pretty good, this. Who is it?”

“This is who I’d like to have over for dinner one night soon. He played at Ana’s party. We’ve been hanging out. I want you to meet him.”

“You like this boy?” Angel, the three-legged mutt, hopped over. Papi rubbed her head. “A boyfriend—are you sure you’re ready for that?”

“Why not? As long as we like each other.” I spun the globe, my eyes following the pale golden peninsula of Florida sticking out into the Caribbean green. I hugged Shaka, avoiding the prickly ridge along her spine. Underneath me she felt warm, solid. “Will you come and visit me at boarding school?” I asked.

His calloused hands petted the mutt. “You’ll come back for vacations. You know I can’t leave the farm for that long.” Then he reached over and mussed my hair. His cigar sprouted from his wide-lipped grin.

The evening began politely enough. Having spent nearly every afternoon with Manuel for more than a week, his meeting my father felt like a necessary formality and inevitable next step. We sat in the living room, Manuel and Papi discussing Andrés Segovia and other famous guitarists. Papi shoved Manuel’s album into the player, and I reclined, listening. “A rare talent you’ve got,” Papi said. He nodded and pointed at Manuel with the CD case. “You’d better pursue it.”

Manuel stood squarely, scratched his head. “That’s a great compliment, coming from such a classical aficionado as you, sir. I certainly intend to.” He and I exchanged a heartened look.

Luis rapped at the sliding door. Papi invited him to eat with us, and I shuffled the CDs in the rack to hide my grimace. When Vincente and Guillermo, who oversaw the coffee farm, horses, and alpaca station, joined us for meals, they spoke little. When they did, the conversation revolved around livestock and the weather. They kept to themselves and their quarters, away from our house. But Luis left his shirt open in the fields with his hairy stomach bulging over his pants. Tonight Papi ordered wine to be brought up from the cellar. Both their tongues would be loose. Worse, Inez plunked down sopa de guineo—pork, potato and guineo infused with the savory smells of cilantro and onion, which I liked. But hardly the exotic dish I’d hoped for. Maybe this was her way of voicing disapproval over a boy; by her brisk demeanor as she served, I couldn’t tell. Surely my mother would not have let me down.

Luis rambled for most of dinner about the guerrillas in the southern mountain passes. They were running more peasants from villages—extended families, their whole lives, from pots and pans to sacks of rice, strapped to the backs of donkeys, begging for work. “But I don’t have the time to deal with it,” he said. “Eventually, it gets easier to turn them away.” He addressed Papi, ignoring Manuel and me.

“Easier?” Manuel asked. “What happens to them?”

Luis took a gulp of wine and shrugged. “If I give jobs to ten men, there’re ten more behind them, and a dozen more down the road besides, on and on. They can’t read or write, can’t get better jobs in the cities, so they beg out here. Am I Mother Teresa?”

I pushed at the steaming guineo on my plate. The boy who had scarfed down the plantains had told the same story of carnage in the south.

“That’s the trouble with the poor,” Papi said. He removed two cigars from the humidor, handed one to Luis. The lid clapped shut. “The poor breed more poor, while the rich feed them.”

“True,” Luis said, and lit the cigars.

“It’s become more desperate recently, no doubt.” Manuel petted the mutts under the table. “Maybe even the dogs are affected.” He cracked a grin. Papi and Luis chuckled, eyes dancing over their cigars as they puffed. Manuel said, “We all must choose where we place our energies, sooner than later. Understand we’re contributing to the good. If we’re not, well—”

“Contribute to the good, exactly,” Papi interrupted. “Each man must do as he sees fit.” He reached in the humidor, offered Manuel a cigar.

“No thanks.” Manuel waved him off. “I don’t know that contributions can, or should be, so narrowly defined. The individual tends to underestimate his influence.”

“How so? You know, it’s not often we have a bright young mind as our guest.”

“Oh, I don’t know that you want to hear all the intricacies of my stance. A rather heavy subject for such a lovely night, don’t you think? Manuel patted my arm.

“Nonsense. This is a welcoming home. I’m eager to hear your thoughts—what young people are up to these days, I have no idea.” Papi sat back, cross-legged, and waited.

“Well,” Manuel said, and straightened his shoulders. “I believe the lines between good and evil are clear. And for all its flaws, the Church is trying to do it right.”

“Really?” Papi said, sounding genuinely surprised. “Please, go on.”

“Now, I know what you may be thinking. Are the churches in Europe filled with gold, much of it robbed from this part of the world? Has the Vatican harbored child molesters? Sadly, yes. But that is precisely the point. Evil springs up anywhere it can, if you’re not on guard. A soul divided ends up turning black.”

“You really think the lines are that clear?” Papi said, and tugged over his finished plate. “Watch.” He picked up a knife, drew a line through the mound of rice on the edge. “In reality, some grains fall to one side, some to the other.”

“Yes, but we aren’t grains of rice,” Manuel said. “We have a conscience. A choice.”

“Pretty young for all this, aren’t you?” Luis asked with a grunt.

“I admire your ideals.” Papi pushed the plate aside, amusement flickering in his eyes. “And I am—that is, we are,” he glanced at Luis, who gave a curt nod, “—men who prefer only to deal in reality. But I’m afraid the reality is more difficult. Is there a war between good and evil? Of course, anywhere you go. Only in some places the choices are limited, and the battles bloodier. Like Colombia. Those who have the means must leave while they can. Go somewhere less chaotic where they can make a difference. For their own good and this country’s future.” He called for Inez to bring coffee.

“Then why don’t you leave, if it’s that simple?” Manuel asked.

The end of Papi’s cigar blazed sunset-orange. “I have obligations,” he said, gesturing toward the window and fields beyond. “For Mercedes, it’s different. She’s going overseas to finish school, maybe as soon as August. My idea of social justice is running this farm, providing jobs. If I were to leave, I would never come back.”

“Neither would Mercedes.”

“She can choose to come back whenever she likes, later on—if things stabilize.”

Finally, I cut in. “You speak as if I’m not here,” I said, my voice louder than I expected. “This is my home, too. What if I don’t want to leave?” Inez set down a tray and poured us each tiny cups of tinto. I spilled some sugar as I dumped it in my cup, the espresso black and scalding.

“I’m afraid that doesn’t matter, princesa. You’re fifteen. If something happened to you, I’d lose my mind.” Papi breathed heavily, nostrils flaring. “Though with your ingratitude, I sometimes wonder why I bother.” He glanced from me to Manuel. “What do you think, eh?”

“I want the best future for Mercedes, if she wants it, of course,” Manuel said.

“That’s good. He’s a bright boy, gets the point,” Papi said. “The sooner, the better.”

Scowling, I shrank in my seat, skin prickling at the tenor of their conversation. Why was I being discussed so abstractly? And why was Papi being so callous?

“Well, the obvious thing to do is leave,” Manuel said, stirring his tinto. “It’s easy. Colombia is full of men who make messes like children and refuse to clean up, just walk away without acknowledging their contribution. But I guess you don’t know any of these men, Diego?” He tapped his spoon on the cup’s edge before setting it down.

Luis dropped his cigar in the ashtray. Papi’s mouth twisted. “Just what are you accusing me of?” he said, his voice even, restrained. “Did you come here for my daughter or just to insult me?”

“Not at all,” Manuel said. He blanched. “I’m just bringing up the point that many play both sides.”

Papi raised his cigar and brought it a few inches away from Manuel’s face. “May I offer you something?”

“Whatever you like,” Manuel said quietly. “As you said, this is your home.” He lifted his cup, drank.

Papi spoke so softly I could barely hear him. “Where’s your fucking farm, eh? What do you know about having forty, fifty, a hundred workers and their families dependent on you?”

“Nothing, sir. I only meant—”

“What’s that?” Papi cried. “Please, shut your mouth and save your dignity. The only thing I can’t stand more than a witch-hunt is a lie.”

Manuel finished his tinto in one gulp and stood up. “It’s excellent coffee. I’ve got a long ride, I’d best be going, sir. Thank you very much.” He breezed out without shaking hands.

Trembling, I jumped up and darted after him.

Manuel had parked his motorcycle just inside the gate at the end of the steep driveway. At the foot of the mountain, the shadowy bodies of the alpacas shone pale in the moonlight. A few raised their heads at our approach. “I guess I won’t be back here any time soon,” he said. He started up the bike, and it chugged and huffed like an irritated boar between us. “Which is fine. The less I see of your father, the better.”

“We can still see one another,” I said, grabbing his arm. “In Cali.”

He peered over my shoulder at the house. “Pay attention to the little things more, Mercedes. There’s a lot about your father that you don’t realize. You’re too close to see it.”

“Why do you say that? You don’t have proof.”

He drew me closer and into a long kiss. “You know Ana’s church, La Maria, in the Ciudad Jardín? Sunday evenings, after mass, my brother Emilio leads a meeting. It’s up to you, of course. But he has become somewhat of an expert on cartel and guerilla connections. If it’s proof you want, he may have it. Goodnight.” The guard opened the gate. The bike’s lone headlight flew down the deserted road, as if Manuel couldn’t wait to put a great distance between him and the hacienda. I swallowed hard, my mouth bitter.

When I entered, I overheard Luis. “You smell something?” he doubled over with laughter, chest heaving. “It reeks of self-righteousness in here.”

Papi laughed more like a gentleman, as if he had a tickle in his throat, his elbow on the table and cigar thrust forward. “I should hire him to work a day in the cane fields with all his poor pals,” he said to Luis. “Rich city boy wouldn’t last a day.”

“He’s not some rich city boy, okay?” I interrupted. “He works hard. He’s smart.”

“If he’s so smart, why isn’t he at university?” Papi asked. “Not too smart, if you ask me.”

“And he’s dedicated to the Church, you know what that means,” Luis said, nudging Papi. A fresh glass of wine sloshed in the jefe’s hand. His eyes blazed red and he grinned too widely, like a clown. “Cooking, cleaning, and popping out babies, one right after another,” he said to me. “You think I’m kidding, huh? Man, what an exciting life. I’m jealous.”

“His brother’s going to become a priest, so maybe he’ll decide to become a man of the cloth,” Papi said, and raised his eyebrows. If he was serious or facetious, I couldn’t tell. “You never know.”

“Better him than us.” Luis elbowed Papi again.

“I like priests,” Papi replied. “I haven’t ruled out the priesthood yet, myself.”

Luis snorted with laughter. “Only if he’s still a virgin,” he said. “Or else you can forget that. Is church boy still a virgin, Mercedes?” He thumped the table. The sugar bowl and glasses shook.

“Luis—that’s enough.” Papi pushed his chair away and wandered to the door, gazing over the moonlit valley. Luis’s laughter died. He hung his head, caught his breath. I ran upstairs.

One afternoon a couple of days later, Fidel held up the rosary I’d presented him, bought from a Catholic store downtown. He looped it over the rearview mirror. “Thank you,” he said. “I don’t go to church like I should.”

I sat tall in the back, kneading my skirt, chin raised. “I have a lot of after school activities coming up.” I searched for his gaze in the mirror. “You might have to wait for me.”

His eyes met mine and held them. “Whatever you say, princesa.” He slid on his sunglasses—Ray-Bans, brand new. Expensive for a driver. Then he cranked up the radio and drove, the long red beads slapping the dash whenever we hit a pothole.

I arrived home to find Papi in the living room, his hair neatly combed. A slight, pale woman, distinctly un-Colombian, was seated next to him. Inez chopped and puttered about the stove, chicken simmering. The mutts, Angel and Cocoa, trotted up to sniff my legs, their nails scratching the tile. “This is my daughter, Mercedes.” Papi arose, his touch light on my shoulder; his dress boots squeaked. The gringa beamed at the both of us, stood, and clutched her hands in front of her gray skirt. School applications covered the coffee table, forms and pens strewn on top. “Mercedes, this is Sister Rosemary. She teaches at the mission.”

She extended her palm, and we exchanged con mucho gustos. The poor attended the mission schools, so why was she here? Papi loathed the Church, after his divorce.

“I hope you get along,” Papi said. “From now on Sister Rosemary’s going to help you with your English and to prepare your applications, for two hours every day after school.”

I glared at him, anger expanding in my chest like smoke. “Two hours a day?” I said. “No thanks. It’s too much. ” I pleaded that I’d study extra on my own and ask the teachers if I could stay after school. My voice sounded shrill and strained, unlike myself. I ditched my school bag and stood there, arms folded.

Angel scratched and gnawed at a leg sore; in the courtyard, the ridgebacks and Cocoa tumbled and yapped in play. “Why don’t you go ahead and prepare?” Papi said to the nun. He instructed her where to find the office—at the top of the stairs between his bedroom and mine.

Papi then turned to me, motioned for me to sit. He peeled the purple bandanna from his head and balled it in his fist. “You really think I don’t know what’s going on? That I don’t know you’ve been running around with that boy? You haven’t even bothered with the forms.”

“I went shopping with Ana this week. Ask Fidel. He’ll show you the gift I bought him.”

He raised a hand. “Don’t cross me, hija.”

I drew a pillow onto my lap and picked at its fringed trim.

He sifted through the applications, held up a form. “These are complicated,” he said. “They must be filled out correctly, and my written English is not perfect. Besides, you have to pass a language exam. So I asked around. Our neighbors recommended the nun.”

He clenched and unclenched the bandanna. His expression was one of sadness. Why did he act as if this was the only hope for me? If Colombia was so dangerous, why hadn’t we already left? Didn’t he understand that I was bound to break out—pursue my own ambitions, however I chose? That if I went to the United States, I would somehow seek out my mother, her family? I could not see myself at boarding school and ignoring the possibility that she might be a few cities or states away. The dog whined in her throat. Finally he said, “Three days a week, then. But you had better be here at exactly four o’clock on those days, with your nose in those books. Monday, Wednesday, Friday.” He struck his finger to his knee as he named the days. Then handed me the bandanna and told me to dry my face and get upstairs. Tears wet my stiff yellow blouse. My brown vest gaped.

Sunday afternoon the house hummed and creaked, deserted but for the spinning fans and parrots in the courtyard cage. Papi and the men had gone to a horse auction, and the maids had the day off. I left and caught the bus on the valley road. Every time we creaked to a halt, I swallowed and tried to squelch the nausea brought on by the diesel fumes, cow manure, and fear. We passed where the bandidos had set up their roadblock, and I raked my sweaty palms over my thighs. My friends and I were forbidden to even ride the city buses in Cali’s center because armed bandits hijacked those, too, despite the police. But today the only presence blocking the road was a herd of cows. The driver honked, the cows trotted to the side of the road, and I exhaled in relief.

Manuel met me at the bus stop, on the corner of La Maria church where we had first kissed. He steered me across a courtyard with well-manicured rosebushes and into a smaller makeshift outbuilding—no more than a frame constructed of two-by-fours with plastic sheeting for sides and a roof and a few dozen folding chairs arranged in a semicircle. Young people streamed in after us. He refused to tell me what the meeting would be about, just said, “You’ll see,” and nodded toward the front. A young man dressed in a collared blue shirt and jeans stood there, hands on hips. He surveyed the assembly similar to the way Papi observed our alpacas from the fence. “My brother, Emilio,” Manuel said.

But for subtle differences, I might have guessed they were twins: Emilio stood a few inches taller and broader than Manuel, whose build remained slight, more boyish. Yet they had the same soft black hair, the same delicate jaw line and cheekbones, the same eyes.

Emilio called the room to attention. Bodies squeezed together; a faint odor of perspiration and cologne filled my nostrils. Carlos took the last chair by the entrance, and Ana slid onto his lap. Those gathered fell quiet.

The meeting turned out to be an open forum on how the Catholic Church advocated that the local community might peacefully defend itself against the two dominant rebel groups, the ELN and the FARC. Since January, attacks and kidnappings on the Church and civilians had sharply arisen across Colombia, but especially in the Andes region—incidents like the bus hijacking, as one young man brought up in a quivering voice, toying with his ponytail as he stood above the crowd. “How is turning the other cheek going to faze these so-called revolutionaries?” he said. Emilio reminded everyone that it wasn’t just the leftist guerillas who terrorized civilians, but the paramilitaries who infiltrated villages controlled by the ELN or the FARC, then rounded up and assassinated anyone deemed “sympathetic” to the guerillas’ cause. Despite the fixation of the politicians and media on the guerillas, the paras were responsible for a majority of the violence and horrific civilian massacres. “Sympathizers” included pharmacists who filled prescriptions for guerilla leaders, doctors who treated them, even bus drivers who had provided transport—ordinary citizens just doing their jobs who faced torture or death at the hands of the paras if they didn’t comply.

I had listened to enough of Fidel’s radio broadcasts to know both factions caused most of Colombia’s unrest. But I had never paid much attention to exactly what occurred in which province or town—now I wondered why I hadn’t. Had I believed our military and the paras a lesser evil, if such a thing even exists? Emilio was correct—the media focused mainly on the threats posed by the guerillas. “The private armies of the Autodefensas only protect the wealthy,” Emilio was saying. “Some of you may even know those who fund the AUC. But we must stand against them as well as the guerillas.” Military patrols had cut through our hacienda on their way into the mountains, and Papi invited them to stay for dinner, spend the night. The soldiers who had shown up last year—hadn’t Fidel been one of them? He’d been in uniform when he asked Papi for a job after returning from their mission; Papi even addressed him as Captain. Had the troops been military or paramilitary, and what had been the lettering on their uniforms? Was Fidel, with his Virgin Mary figurine on the dashboard, capable of slitting a bus driver’s throat for giving a guerilla a ride? Maybe Papi had just been polite in housing them—or they didn’t give him a choice. Emilio said the Colombian army and paramilitaries were one and the same, that the paras simply carried out the dirty work of human rights abuses that the army wanted “taken care of” but didn’t want to be responsible for.

Manuel leapt up. “How much longer will it be before the Church toughens its stance against both insurgencies?” he asked. “Archbishop Duarte states that it is his personal duty to take on the risks himself in trying to protect his people. Why don’t the rest of us do the same—isn’t it our right?” But his words only met a silent room, with heavy looks exchanged over clasped hands and the creak of chairs. No one agreed with or challenged him, not even Emilio.

After the meeting’s close, Emilio walked toward us. The two brothers exchanged a quick embrace. “What’re you doing up there, Professor? Trying to put the audience to sleep?” Manuel said, brushing his brother’s shoulder in a playful jab. Emilio, grinning, shook his head and clicked his teeth. “You just better stick to building cabinets.” Their easy way with each other made me yearn for a sibling. Manuel introduced us, and when Emilio’s lips brushed my cheek my stomach flipped. I hoped Emilio had not felt anything.

Emilio ushered us over to a table and folding chairs in the corner, away from the young people chatting in clusters—a small relief. Dampness chafed my underarms. Ana waved, exiting the tent behind Carlos. Manuel disappeared and returned a moment later, handing us each a cup of lukewarm water; I managed a few tiny sips, the water too chlorinated for my taste. A street lamp lit the worn face of the courtyard Virgin, her robe and feet hidden by roses, in full bloom and deepest red. “So tell me what it is you do again,” I said to Emilio. “Besides studying to be priest. Since you don’t build cabinets.”

“Cabinets, no,” Emilio said. He and Manuel exchanged small smiles, and Manuel chuckled in his throat. “Only one of us is handy with a saw, I’m afraid. Hmm, what to call my current duties? A peacekeeper, of sorts?”

“More like a go-between,” Manuel said, adjusting his seat. “Right? A liaison.”

“That’s it.” Emilio nodded, sipped some water. “I’m a representative for the diocese between the guerilla leaders and the government. So I have access to diocese records going way back. The Church is rather excellent at keeping records. Among other things.” He rolled the cup, light now, in his slender fingers; his hands lacked the musculature of Manuel’s.

“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked.

Emilio removed a folder and legal pad from a backpack, placed a document before me. Even in the dull light, the seal glimmered; an ink smudge marked the tail end of a signature. He said, “I don’t suppose you know that your father, Diego Martinez, was formally excommunicated in the early nineties? Or what might have led to that?”

I lifted my cup and let the water touch my lips but didn’t drink. “His divorce,” I said. “He says the parish priest won’t even look at him if they run into each other—that he crosses the street.”

“Divorce? That’s what he told you?” Emilio’s remark sounded more a statement than a question. “According to church records, he and your mother were married in 1982, divorced the following year, and he received an annulment a few months after that. He had to be in good standing at the time to get an annulment.”

“What does that mean? He got into an argument with the priest or something?”

Manuel leaned forward on his elbows and lowered his voice. “The Church mandates excommunication for a variety of things.” He closed his hand over mine and squeezed, the coarse warmth of his palm jarred me ,but I didn’t pull back. “In the case of your father, for very specific reasons. It was the eyewitness testimony of a former cartel operative that turned him in.”

“Cartel?” I said. “That’s impossible.” Somewhere in the middle of the tent a cell phone rang. The young man with the ponytail answered it, talking excitedly. His group rocked with laughter. “If you’re going to make accusations like that, you’d better have proof.”

The brothers exchanged knowing looks. Manuel nodded toward the manila folder, and Emilio withdrew a stapled packet. “This is the testimony of a dear friend, Father Juan. Only much later in his life did he find the Church. Before that, he was a subordinate in the drug war until after the collapse of the Medellín cartel. This is far too long for you to read tonight,” Emilio said, and tucked the packet back inside the folder. He folded his hands on top. “I’ll just tell you his story.”

Emilio was seventeen when he heard Father Juan speak at a youth retreat, a soft-spoken man, broad and graying, with a rosary cinched to his cargo pants. Once, when Emilio had gone to visit an impoverished village the priest was ministering to in the southern Andes, they’d gone to swim at a waterfall, removed their clothes. A knotted patchwork of bullet wounds scarred the priest’s shoulder. What had happened for this man, in mid-life, to repent and work to rescue those most at risk to join the guerillas? Father Juan removed his glasses, and as he rubbed them with the end of his shirt, he stared at the peasant teenagers diving and shouting. “Some are born with black hearts—do you believe that?” the priest asked. “Well, I don’t. The heart is the most neglected aspect of humanity, and the most critical. How it grows, whether it hardens with greed and fear or expands with love, depends on how we each are taught to feed it. When it turns black, the only way to reclaim it is through pain.”

Even the three bullets hadn’t been enough to stop him, back when he was known as Juan Perez. That wasn’t what drove him inside a village church in the Andes one night, where he crawled up to the altar on his knees and prostrated on his belly, begging God for peace and salvation or else he’d get back in his car and, alone on his way to Medellín, drive himself off the next cliff. Escobar’s empire was collapsing. The heads of the Cali cartel, the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers and their subordinates, including Juan Perez and Diego Martinez, had given themselves the name Los Pepes and arranged the murders—“as clean as possible” they had agreed upon meeting. Then one of Escobar’s traffickers received the bloody head of an alpaca on a platter, with a note threatening that he would be “the first of his herd to go to the slaughter.” Two days later he went missing.

Juan Perez hadn’t known about the hit. He suspected Diego had carried it out because he raised alpacas on his plantation. When he confronted Diego and asked what they had done with the trafficker, if he had used him to find out some crucial information, Diego told Juan he could find him in the alpaca pasture and do the questioning himself. Instead, Juan found the man’s body disemboweled, dumped behind the alpaca shed. Vultures circled and picked at the bloated corpse. The stench was rancid from ten feet away.

That was what had driven Juan from Cali that night, into the chapel, never to return to the cartel.

“From Father Juan, I saw just how important it is to stay connected to the youth—not just the peasants who are drawn by the guerillas, but those who think that joining the paras will keep their families’ lands safe,” Emilio said, voice husky. He cleared his throat. “Around that time your father abruptly ceased cartel activity, which is why we suspect he had a falling out. That’s why, even though his businesses have been legitimate for over a decade, we think he pays people off to keep quiet. Or receives illegal payments himself for the same reason. To which organization, we’re not sure. Silence commands a hefty price.”

“No one knows for sure,” Manuel added. He cupped the back of my neck gently; his hand felt cold. “We’re trying to find evidence that proves the current connection. Your father has been a person of interest to the Colombian and American authorities, and to activist groups, for a long time.”

“But this isn’t just some rumor,” I said. My stomach had become granite. “Father Juan’s not some employee, upset because my father fired him. And you’re telling me he’s still involved somehow—Diego?” How desperately I wanted it not to be true. His name on my tongue, those three syllables I wasn’t used to uttering. Another name, another life.

Men with automatic rifles had once stood watch from towers across our property and patrolled at night. The ninjas, I’d called them—stone-faced young men, their snug black T-shirts and camouflaged pants showing off trim physiques. I had darted behind the fountain whenever they crossed the courtyard in jaunty strides, throwing the caps of their Coca-Colas onto the stonework. Their Adam’s apples jutted toward the sky as they tipped the bottles upward and guzzled. Their shoulders rippled beneath the rifles strapped to their backs. After the cartels, the violence had waned for a time. The posts they’d occupied had long since gone deserted, my ninjas happily forgotten, and Papi allowed both displaced and tenants to dismantle the towers for firewood and building materials. A guard still kept watch twenty-four hours, in the small room over the main gate, roughly a hundred meters from the main house—a fixture at the large haciendas. “It’s a big farm, you know,” I said quietly.

“He provides a lot of jobs, it’s true,” Emilio said. “We’re convinced that individually, he’s not a threat—not anymore. But he still contributes to the larger problem of doling out payoffs for protection. And that’s a very big deal.”

A gust lifted the tent flap, the light bulbs swaying overhead. We were the only three left. I clung to Manuel’s shoulder as we arose. Speckles, gray and white, dotted the Virgin’s face in the streetlight; the water streamed in its silvery arc, but I couldn’t hear it. Dizzy, I collapsed into Manuel. He led me to a bench, waved his brother away.

“What do I do now?” I cried softly. “What do I do?”

Manuel didn’t speak, just stroked my hair. His eyes had momentarily lost their liveliness; I could tell he felt sorry for me. The pungent fragrance of roses mixed with the odor of cooked meat from a street cart, and my stomach turned. Children milled around the cart, eating chorizo on a stick. “I can’t have girls sleep over, but in this case my parents would let you stay with us,” he said, and after a pause, “Do you want to go back?”

I wanted to see his house, meet his parents—but like this? I shook my head. The lights of the bus flashed at the crest of the hill.

“Look, you’re not taking the bus. Hop on my bike.”

“If Papi sees you—”

“So what?”

He removed his jacket and I wriggled into the sleeves. The leather was warm, the rest of me numb.

Moments later, we whipped down the autopista. I had never ridden a moto before, and as I clung to Manuel, his T-shirt billowing white in the moonlight, I thought: this is what it means to be free, to never die. We were going fast, but I wanted it. The world revealed itself in a new way, more alive. Low overhead, a passenger jet roared in ascent from the nearby Cali airport, heading north out of the valley. What power airplanes possessed, to remove people from one place, to deliver them into a new life. No doubt it was headed for another country, perhaps even the U.S. One day soon I might board one of those flights, either on my way to study in an oddly named state of snow, or to work in a uniform, dress shoes, and pantyhose, wheeling a suitcase.

We swooped down the exit ramp, through the outlying towns that led to the hacienda. The one- and two-story pulperías and shops loomed like gravestones, their fronts shuttered, graffiti splashed over the corrugated metal. Inside a well-lit market, men and boys played pool, the music pulsating through me. I shivered, my legs cold; Manuel must have been freezing in his thin shirt. A skinny, filthy man warbled and staggered along the crumbling sidewalk, one of Cali’s many crack heads. The street reeked of trash and old rainwater. We turned at the zapateria where Papi and the hired men had their boots and holsters made. Tonight no boots or belts hung outside on display, but the small shop stared back, shadowed and asleep.

Cali lay beneath us as we hugged the winding hillside, the city ablaze like the candles lit by parishioners. We passed the turn where the bus had been robbed, but I felt safe. Then we descended down a side road spotted with boxy middle-class homes, the cars squeezed in short driveways behind locked gates, one after another like rows of prison cells. The scent of earth and cows replaced the city stench, and then the flat road to the plantation, muddy from the recent rains, with Papi’s fields stretching out on either side as far as one could see to the tree line of the jungle and the slopes where the coffee grew wild. At last the hacienda came into view.

Manuel dropped me off a few dozen meters away. I pushed the button on my keychain to open the gate, the barbed wire on top glinting in the moonlight. On the concrete walls the wire was partially hidden by the purple bougainvillea that grew over the top, but here and there the metal still shone. One of the ridgebacks, Zulu, jumped to her feet and growled low as I passed until I called her name and reached to pet her. The stereo glowed on the mantle, the dinner dishes dried in the rack. I shut the door behind me, but inside appeared different, altered: Papi was watching a news bulletin and drinking beer from a sweating bottle, both unusual activities for him. As soon as I walked in, he muted the TV and bolted to his feet.

“Sorry I’m late,” I said.

“Where have you been all evening, eh?” He clamped a hand on my shoulder, steered me to the couch, and sat us both down. Before I could wriggle aside, I caught his scent and cologne, and trembled.

The Papi you know is different than the man Emilio talked about, I told myself, breathing long and slow. Right now it’s just you and Papi.

“I went to church,” I finally said. After the long ride home I had figured that Manuel’s idea to tell the truth—or at least the part I was able to tell—was better than a lie. I said, “I took the bus because I was afraid to tell you.”

“To church?” He brushed his palms on his jeans and stood up. “That’s one thing. Taking the bus is another. What the hell were you thinking?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry works nicely until you’re dead. Then it’s harder to say.”

“I hear you, Papi!”

He bumped the coffee table, knocking a magazine to the floor. He didn’t bother to pick it up. “Listen, with this boy business, I don’t want any sneaking around. From now on, we must be honest with one another. That’s all I ask, okay? Now which church was it?”

“You didn’t need to worry. I was in the nice part of town.”

“Which church?”

“La Maria, where Ana goes.”

He set down the beer hard, drew back and began to rub his temple—then shot forward and swatted the bottle, knocking it to the floor. Beer trickled out as it rolled, hollow against the tile. The dogs scattered from their places, skirting the spilled contents. “Very disappointing,” he muttered, and then more loudly, “Never are you to go there again, is that clear?”

I cringed. Was this the parish that had excommunicated him years ago? “The service went fine,” I mumbled. “I don’t understand.”

“What don’t you understand? Are you stupid or something? It’s trouble,” he screeched, voice cracking in fury. The veins on his neck bulged like barbed wire. “You might as well forget applying to those fancy schools—they won’t want you. Tell me, have I raised an idiot? Eh?”

No, that’s you, I thought and bit my knuckle, mind racing. I didn’t know yet what I was going to do. I couldn’t tell anyone what I had found out; I could not see myself telling Ana or Gracia. Nor could I run away to Cali or anywhere else, to get lost in a barrio with prostitutes, drug addicts, and the displaced; I would be killed. I had no money, no bank account that I knew of—he gave me an allowance every week to buy arepas after school, more if I was going to a street fair or shopping. “Do you know nothing?” he cried. I remained frozen, afraid to stay for what other awful things he might say. Afraid to go.

Finally he stopped. He knelt on one knee at the coffee table between us, removed his tobacco pouch and papers from his shirt pocket. “The school deadlines are the end of this month,” he said, and jerkily began to roll a cigarette. “You don’t realize, mi hija, but some people would think nothing of kidnapping or killing you. And I can’t protect you forever. So leave, or it will only be a matter of time.” He spilled some leaves and swore—“Imbécil!”

“Imbécil?” I said at last, rising. “You raised me. And I do realize it. Protect me—you think I have no idea what goes on around here?”

He crushed the cigarette between his lips, snapping the filter, cursed, and rerolled it. The embers flared. Smoke, leafy and sweet, trailed me up the steps.