it is too late. But maybe you can still help your own family.
Maybe you should leave the city, I said.
He smiled again, then leaned forward to embrace me. Maybe, he said.
The next week I used a proxy to buy a house in the barrio next to El Poblado, and moved my mother there in secret. I did not speak to Hernando again until four days ago, when I was given the order by El Padre to assassinate him.
***
WHEN WE WERE STILL LIVING at the old place, and I had nine years and my mother twenty-four, it rained for a week and another two days. School was canceled – the rain so heavy the roads were waist-high with mud, people trapped in their houses. On the tenth day the rain stopped and it felt like a holiday. People wandered outdoors, as though for the first time, and the sun was warm against their skin and the grass and the trees deeper in their color and the faces of strangers flushed like ripe fruit. During this time a militia set up roadblocks along the Avenida Oriental and hijacked a public bus at the exit to our barrio. They raped two of the women and killed my father, then dumped his body and his guitar outside the back alley of my school. The papers said some of the hijackers were police agents.
They broke his guitar? my mother asked when the uniformed men came, their shirts wet at the armpits and their leather shoes splashed with mud. Of course by that time we already knew.
Why? one of them asked. Would you like it? He looked surprised. Maybe –
He stopped talking at his partner's look.
That evening it rained again, heavily, the air a mix of gray and green before the night came down. A couple of neighbors visited – my mother exchanged soft words with them at the front door – then afterward no one else came. All night she did not speak and I did not know what to think. She sat on the brown carpet in the main room, in the dark, with my father's notepapers and sheet music. The gaslight from the kitchen made her face seem misshapen. For hours I sat on my parents' bed with the door open, watching her arranging the papers in careful piles, calmed by how her fingers moved individual pieces from pile to pile, without pause, as though following some special sequence. I watched her fingers and her strange face, and I watched the rain leaking from the thatched kitchen ceiling behind her, and I waited for her to tell me what would happen to us.
He had been a musician, a teacher at an elementary school. His death had been a mistake – everyone told us this. What no one told us was that he, too, had made a mistake: to challenge his attackers – to even draw attention to himself – when he had only his mouth and his hands for protection. What no one told us was that in this city no death is entirely a mistake.
The rain did not stop for two days. My mother stayed cross-legged on the carpet, which, in the rain-dimmed light, changed color to dull orange. She wore the same gray dress and did not eat. On the third morning, a car with mounted speakers drove past and announced that Andres Pastrana Arango had won the presidential election. I remembered that my father liked to call him the hippie candidate. I took some money from my mother's purse and went out into the street to buy some food. I played football with some kids.
That night, when I put two mangoes and a bag of boiled water in front of her, my mother saw me again. She told me to sit by her. We sat in silence. Then, in the dark, she leaned toward me and kissed whatever part of my body was closest to her, the outside of my knee, she kissed it twice, then two more times. And then she spoke my name, Juan Pablo, she said, and I looked at her and she said, You must say nothing of it, and think nothing, for you are a man now. I said, Mother? but her only answer was my name, spoken again like a chant, Juan Pablo, Juan Pablo, Juan Pablo .
***
THERE ARE BLACKOUTS EVERY MONTH in the barrios, sometimes for days in a row. As Claudia and I enter the barrio where El Padre's
Maybe you should leave the city, I said.
He smiled again, then leaned forward to embrace me. Maybe, he said.
The next week I used a proxy to buy a house in the barrio next to El Poblado, and moved my mother there in secret. I did not speak to Hernando again until four days ago, when I was given the order by El Padre to assassinate him.
***
WHEN WE WERE STILL LIVING at the old place, and I had nine years and my mother twenty-four, it rained for a week and another two days. School was canceled – the rain so heavy the roads were waist-high with mud, people trapped in their houses. On the tenth day the rain stopped and it felt like a holiday. People wandered outdoors, as though for the first time, and the sun was warm against their skin and the grass and the trees deeper in their color and the faces of strangers flushed like ripe fruit. During this time a militia set up roadblocks along the Avenida Oriental and hijacked a public bus at the exit to our barrio. They raped two of the women and killed my father, then dumped his body and his guitar outside the back alley of my school. The papers said some of the hijackers were police agents.
They broke his guitar? my mother asked when the uniformed men came, their shirts wet at the armpits and their leather shoes splashed with mud. Of course by that time we already knew.
Why? one of them asked. Would you like it? He looked surprised. Maybe –
He stopped talking at his partner's look.
That evening it rained again, heavily, the air a mix of gray and green before the night came down. A couple of neighbors visited – my mother exchanged soft words with them at the front door – then afterward no one else came. All night she did not speak and I did not know what to think. She sat on the brown carpet in the main room, in the dark, with my father's notepapers and sheet music. The gaslight from the kitchen made her face seem misshapen. For hours I sat on my parents' bed with the door open, watching her arranging the papers in careful piles, calmed by how her fingers moved individual pieces from pile to pile, without pause, as though following some special sequence. I watched her fingers and her strange face, and I watched the rain leaking from the thatched kitchen ceiling behind her, and I waited for her to tell me what would happen to us.
He had been a musician, a teacher at an elementary school. His death had been a mistake – everyone told us this. What no one told us was that he, too, had made a mistake: to challenge his attackers – to even draw attention to himself – when he had only his mouth and his hands for protection. What no one told us was that in this city no death is entirely a mistake.
The rain did not stop for two days. My mother stayed cross-legged on the carpet, which, in the rain-dimmed light, changed color to dull orange. She wore the same gray dress and did not eat. On the third morning, a car with mounted speakers drove past and announced that Andres Pastrana Arango had won the presidential election. I remembered that my father liked to call him the hippie candidate. I took some money from my mother's purse and went out into the street to buy some food. I played football with some kids.
That night, when I put two mangoes and a bag of boiled water in front of her, my mother saw me again. She told me to sit by her. We sat in silence. Then, in the dark, she leaned toward me and kissed whatever part of my body was closest to her, the outside of my knee, she kissed it twice, then two more times. And then she spoke my name, Juan Pablo, she said, and I looked at her and she said, You must say nothing of it, and think nothing, for you are a man now. I said, Mother? but her only answer was my name, spoken again like a chant, Juan Pablo, Juan Pablo, Juan Pablo .
***
THERE ARE BLACKOUTS EVERY MONTH in the barrios, sometimes for days in a row. As Claudia and I enter the barrio where El Padre's
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