Colombiano

  Camila.

  13

  ‘PEDRO … BABY … I … I don’t know what to say.’

  Camila hugged me. Soon she was crying too. She was always friendly with Papá. She jokingly called him her suegro, and he called her daughter-in-law.

  ‘I’m so sorry, baby … I have no idea how you must feel.’

  But that wasn’t true. Looking into my eyes, Camila saw my horror, my shock, and my frustration. But she also saw something else: my guilt.

  ‘It’s not your fault.’ She clasped my cheeks in her hands. ‘If that’s what you’re thinking, Pedro, it’s not true.’

  I knew she was trying to help, but of course it was my fault! Out in the dinghy, Papá had told me I’d risked all our lives. In the end I’d cost him his life. The Guerrilla didn’t kill people for supplying water. They killed Papá to send a message. In response to my speaking to the Paramilitary recruiters, this was the ping-pong ball they’d smashed at me and the world:

  Don’t even think of joining our enemy. This is what will happen.

  As for my rudeness to Zorrillo, I hadn’t even begun to comprehend what it would cost us. Although I would soon enough.

  I leaned into Camila and buried my nose deep in her neck. She stroked my hair, comforting me. I’d been growing it long for the school vacation. Little things like that, which had been important, now seemed ridiculous.

  It must have been five minutes before I raised my head and wiped my eyes. I felt a little calmer. The urgency had gone. I’d accepted the Guerrilla platoons had gotten away. With over an hour’s start, they would be deep in the Amazon by now. But Papá would be proud of how hard I’d tried to rouse the authorities into action. Then I remembered – he was no longer there to be proud.

  ‘Pedro, baby,’ Camila said, still stroking my hair. ‘When you feel strong enough, we should be with your mother. She needs you.’

  She was right. I’d been sitting in the gutter feeling sorry for myself while Mamá had probably been staring at the mountains, terrified. I nodded and Camila stood. Holding my hands and leaning back, she pulled me to my feet. Shaking and numb, I signalled a passing colectivo.

  ‘It’s okay,’ said Camila. ‘I’ve got money.’ She indicated a waiting taxi.

  The taxista must have known what had happened because he didn’t comment on the blood or where we were going.

  ‘Where’s Palillo?’ I asked Camila.

  She shrugged. ‘Geography?’

  Reaching Llorona plaza, the taxista claimed he couldn’t drive further because he had another urgent pick-up. He was obviously too afraid to go up the hill. Camila argued, but I said it was fine. Uncle Leo would be with Mamá by now, so a little more time wouldn’t make much difference. Besides, there was one more place I could seek help.

  14

  WHEN THE GUERRILLA killed Ariel Mahecha’s father for being a sapo, Padre Rojas had been among the first on the scene. He’d ridden the parish’s 85cc Yamaha – affectionately dubbed Little Red Riding Hood – behind the army truck that transported the body through town and stayed comforting the widow until after midnight. Surely his replacement, Padre Guzmán, would perform the funeral rites and offer Mamá comfort?

  Leaving Camila watching the highway for the police and army, I banged on the presbytery door. When no one answered, I peeked through the blinds and tapped on a window. A side door was unlocked. I hesitated, but it was an emergency.

  Inside, it was dark and smelled of stale beer and cigarette smoke.

  ‘Father Guzmán!’ I called out, my foot crunching on an empty can.

  Suddenly, a light flicked on and a chubby, bald man in pyjamas towered over me, holding a bronze candelabrum at shoulder height, as though ready to strike.

  ‘Stay right there! I’m phoning the police!’

  I didn’t recognise Padre Guzmán at first without his toupée. When I finally did, I held up my hands. ‘I’m sorry, Father. I knocked and called out. My name is Pedro Juan Gutiérrez González. I’m the son of—’

  ‘I don’t care if you’re the son of God. You can’t come barging in like this. I have a good mind to tell your father.’

  ‘That’s why I’m here, Padre. My father’s dead.’

  The priest lowered the candelabrum. ‘I’m very sorry to hear that, son.’ He spoke as though he were measuring out a goblet of communion wine, watching the level of his words scrupulously so as to pour into them the right amount of sympathy. ‘Dead how?’

  ‘Shot.’

  ‘Guerrilla?’

  I nodded. ‘Padre, would you come up and say a prayer with our family? Then my father needs to be buried in his plot.’ I gave directions to our finca.

  ‘Shot, you say?’ He massaged his scalp. ‘Then the police are there?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘I’m new to this. I’ll phone Bogotá for instructions.’

  ‘But you will perform the burial rites? And we’ll need a truck to bring Papá to the cemetery.’

  ‘A truck? Unfortunately, my superiors have only seen fit to furnish me with a motorbike.’

  Suddenly, the bedroom door behind him crashed open and the mulata maid emerged wearing an emerald green nightgown. She was statuesque, with skin as smooth as milk chocolate. The priest flushed like blown coal.

  ‘Señorita Mosquera, what are you doing in my room? I told you to vacuum it tomorrow.’

  ‘Vacuum it yourself, Orlando!’ she barked. Guzmán feigned outrage until she said contemptuously, ‘The boy isn’t stupid.’

  ‘What would you have me do?’

  ‘Phone one of your parishioners.’ She unhooked the wall phone. ‘I saw a dozen trucks here on Sunday.’

  Placing his arm across my back, Guzmán ushered me to the door, mumbling tissue-thin promises about how he’d try to help. ‘I trust to your discretion regarding Señorita Mosquera. We don’t want her to lose her job, do we?’

  I departed unconvinced, although unable to argue.

  ‘Wait!’ The mulata maid raced after me. ‘You look pale, Pedro. You should eat something.’ She held out a plate of pastry pasteles. Flashing a panda keychain, she whispered, ‘His motorbike is in the shed.’

  ‘Thanks, but I can’t take it. You’d get fired.’

  ‘He’s a nice man underneath,’ she said sadly as I turned away.

  Underneath what? I wondered. Underneath three robes of cowardice, his toupée and thirty excess kilos of hypocrisy?

  ‘Pedro, look!’ Standing by the highway, Camila waved excitedly. ‘Here comes your uncle.’

  Pulling up in his blue truck, Uncle Leo leaned across Mamá and wound down the window. ‘I told you to take your mother to my house.’

  ‘Where’s Papá?’ I demanded of Mamá. ‘Did the police arrive?’

  But Mamá wouldn’t look at me. Instead, she concentrated on shredding a tissue. I raced to the back of the truck and looked in the tray. No body. No shovel. Nothing.

  ‘You left him! Mamá! How could you?’

  Finally, Mamá spoke. ‘You said five minutes.’

  I flushed with guilt but controlled my voice. ‘We need to go back up. He’s all alone.’

  ‘We thought we saw something,’ said Leo. ‘Strange men approaching.’

  ‘Impossible! The Guerrilla are long gone. And anyway, you could have brought Papá with you.’

  ‘I know it’s hard, but we’ve done all we can. Leave this to the authorities.’

  ‘Then get out! I’ll drive.’ I grabbed for his door handle, but he banged down the lock and scrambled to wind up the window.

  ‘Don’t you think you’ve done enough for one week?’

  His message was clear. I was responsible for my father’s death. He knew it. I knew it. And he could tell Mamá about my meeting the Paramilitaries at any time.

  ‘Coward!’ I spat. I ran to retrieve my bike from where it lay beside the church.

  ‘Wait!’ Camila sprinted alongside me, grabbing under the seat as I began pedalling off. ‘We’ll go up together.’

&nbs
p; I unhitched her hands. ‘Please, Camila! I need to get there quickly.’

  ‘Then I’ll find a truck. I’ll steal one if I have to.’

  I loved Camila so much. She was fearless devotion during a storm of treachery.

  ‘And find Palillo!’ I called back.

  As I crossed the bridge and stood pedalling for the ascent, I saw what I most feared: black dots circling in the sky above our finca.

  15

  NORMALLY, THE UPHILL pedal took twenty-four minutes. I did it in thirteen. A wake of turkey vultures scattered as I launched my bike at them. Luckily, none had reached Papá.

  I gathered a small pile of rocks and hurled them at the vultures. After I struck one in the neck, we established a fragile truce: the vultures wouldn’t come within my throwing range and I wouldn’t attack them. But if I strayed too far from Papá, they’d bob their purple heads and dart in with their hooked beaks raised high.

  It was a hot, windless afternoon with blue skies and no cloud. I hadn’t seen Papá for two and a half hours. All that time, he’d been lying on his back in the blazing sun. His face was pale, although a crimson splotch extended from his right cheek to his forehead. His mouth had opened slightly, which made it look like his jaw had become stuck mid-sentence.

  I stomped on a trail of ants and sat beside him. Mamá had arranged a chain of dandelions around his body and placed a rock beneath his head as a pillow. I adjusted the rock to force his mouth shut. But then there was the problem of his eyes.

  I kept looking away because I couldn’t bear the sight of those eyes – dull, frozen, brown and unseeing – but neither could I stop myself from staring. I knew I should put two fingers over the lids and slide them down. I’d seen it done in movies. They always did it so gracefully, as though calmly and respectfully closing eyelids on dead people is a skill we’re all born with. But not me. Hours earlier, I’d hugged Papá on my way to a geography exam. Now, I could barely bring myself to touch him.

  As long as my mind had been occupied with doing something, I hadn’t had to think about why I was doing it. And now, even with clear evidence in front of me, I kept thinking: This has not happened. Not to me. Not to my family.

  I watched Papá for minutes on end, and he continued staring skyward with black wings reflected in his irises. I looked up. Above us, scores of vultures circled like a swirling black plague, waiting. Finally, I closed Papá’s eyes and rested my head against his chest.

  The stillness and silence shrouding Papá was the most complete I’d ever experienced. The silence came from where his breathing used to be. But it wasn’t only his breathing that was missing. It was his presence.

  Finally, I opened my eyes, sat up and listened for an approaching vehicle. But no one came. Not the police, not the army and not even Señor Muñoz’s man with a truck.

  After an hour, my arm was sore from pitching rocks at the vultures. Fierce sun was beating down on Papá’s face. Reaching over the fence, I removed the scarecrow from Mamá’s pumpkin patch and twisted its wooden pole into the earth so that it cast a shadow over him. However, within a minute, a vulture landed on it, knocking it over.

  I looked around for shade. Only ten metres from the fence line stood Papá’s favourite oak tree. Beneath it was a wooden bench he’d fashioned by hand, where he sometimes read to me while I looked out over Llorona. If I could move him there, we’d both be more comfortable.

  However, I was afraid to cross Zorrillo’s dirt line or move Papá’s body. Straight after Papá was shot, I’d been willing to defy the Guerrilla. But my blood had now cooled. We have people everywhere watching you, Zorrillo had said. I was convinced that if I broke either of Zorrillo’s prohibitions, he’d find out.

  So even when the phone began ringing at four o’clock and I thought it might be Camila calling, I didn’t dare go inside to answer. It might be the Guerrilla testing me. Instead, I stripped off my bloodied shirt and covered Papá’s face.

  As time wore on, hunger and thirst cleared my thoughts. I began talking to Papá, asking his advice. Normally, I could approach him with any problem. Even if he couldn’t help me solve it, he’d always say something that made me feel better.

  ‘True, Pedro,’ he’d say, ‘you don’t know whether you’ll pass your exams, but you can only do your best. If you fail, you can always resit them.’

  ‘True, Pedro, you shouldn’t have crashed the Mazda. You’ll have to work hard to pay for the repairs. But luckily, it’s only a car, not a person.’

  ‘What if I don’t know what to be when I grow up?’ I once asked.

  ‘There’s no answer to that,’ he responded. ‘But that’s okay. Not knowing is an important part of life.’

  He always said something comforting, but this time he didn’t. What do you do when the one person you’ve relied on your entire life suddenly isn’t there?

  By half past five the sun had lost its sting and the temperature dropped. I was still in my school shorts with my shirt off, but even when I began shivering I couldn’t go inside for a pullover. Three hours had passed since I’d returned to Papá. The phone had rung numerous times, but I didn’t answer for the same reasons that I didn’t drag Papá down to the cemetery myself.

  Fear was one reason, of course. But there was another, even stronger one: I still held out hope. The police or army would come. Buitrago would react to my messages. Uncle Leo would return, or Padre Guzmán would change his mind.

  By then, the colectivo passengers would have spread the news throughout the region. Papá had friends with trucks. He had suppliers, contractors and buyers. He had fellow worshippers from church. All it would take was one adult to do what was right.

  Even if everyone else failed, I knew Camila wouldn’t rest until she’d hired a truck driver. But when the sun dropped, my hope wavered like a kite in flagging wind. I also began to wonder what had happened to Palillo. Maybe he’d skipped geography and gone to Francisco’s Pool Hall. Then an even more worrying thought assailed me: Palillo had also been seen with the recruiters. What if something had happened to him or his family?

  Darkness fell. Stars and a half moon emerged. I could make out the constellations of Orion and Capricorn. They were the same clusters I marvelled at most nights. Normally, they would have been beautiful, but the world had changed and everything now shone less brightly.

  I talked to Papá again, telling him not to worry – I wouldn’t abandon him. I would bury him in consecrated ground so that he could enter heaven. I still had faith. And finally that faith was rewarded when Palillo appeared, pedalling uphill on his bicycle.

  16

  STILL IN SCHOOL uniform, Palillo threw down his pushbike and satchel. He offered no explanation as to where he’d been or why he’d taken so long.

  ‘Your family’s okay?’ I asked.

  He nodded.

  ‘I thought maybe the Guerrilla had gone after you too.’

  He simply shook his head and his strong arms enveloped me. His hug was fierce and full of energy.

  It was exactly what I needed – someone to squeeze the desolation out of me, if only for a few seconds. That was the sensitive Palillo: rare as a sun shower but well worth the wait. I could tell by his big, long, sorry hug that he knew everything.

  Then, just as quickly, he let me go, and sensitive Palillo became Palillo the Comedian. For Palillo, sorrow was to be laughed away. Sometimes you had to ignore the obvious – like my dead father lying on the road in front of us – and replace it with the absurd.

  ‘At least put some clothes on!’ Palillo said, pretending to notice my bare chest for the first time. He covered his eyes, reached into his school satchel and tossed me his own sweater. I pulled it on and Palillo’s eyes lit upon the scarecrow.

  ‘Friend of yours?’

  From this opening, I sensed an impending comedy routine. Normally, Palillo’s joy was infectious. However, I wasn’t in the mood.

  ‘Please don’t start.’

  ‘We had one of these when I was growing up in Turbo,?
?? he said, standing the scarecrow back up. ‘But in Turbo scarecrows are black.’

  ‘Can you wait here?’ I asked, trying to ignore his antics.

  ‘On the other hand, in Turbo, vultures aren’t black.’

  ‘I’m serious! I need to phone Camila.’

  ‘They’re white. And they’re not called vultures. They’re called politicians. But I’m not racist.’ He displayed his palms defensively. ‘Some of my best friends are white.’

  I laughed and Palillo knew he had me, but only for a moment because then I started crying and he had to hug me again.

  ‘Please stop this!’ I said. ‘Help me phone Camila!’

  ‘I’ll help you, but first …’ He took a chicken sandwich from his satchel. ‘Eat!’

  We sat next to Papá, sharing the sandwich. The food, the sweater and Palillo’s company lifted my spirits like smoke from a rekindled campfire. I was no longer hungry. No longer cold. No longer alone. Filled with fresh hope, I grabbed my bicycle before he could detain me with more comedy routines. But then Palillo broke the news.

  ‘Camila’s not coming. She’s in her room, grounded.’

  ‘Why didn’t you just tell me?’ I said angrily, mounting my bicycle anyway. ‘I still need to phone for a truck.’

  ‘No trucks available. After geography, Principal Prada told me what happened. Then I spoke to Camila through her window. She told me you needed a truck. That’s what I’ve been doing for the past five hours. I called you a million times.’

  Palillo had been unable to persuade anyone to come with a truck because I’d stupidly alerted the colectivo passengers to the Guerrilla’s involvement. I slammed the bike down, devastated.

  ‘Does it have to be a truck?’ Palillo asked.