A Horse Called El Dorado (6 page)

One night Mama came back to the apartment late and she was in a good mood. She had got another e-mail from my grandfather Jack in Ireland. He was sending out money for my ticket using Western Union. Mama would have to provide pocket money for the journey.

‘Pocket money?’ Grandma asked, bewildered.

‘Yes, “pocket money”.’ Mama translated the e-mail for her.

‘But he has no pockets,’ said Grandma.

‘I know. I will have to buy him warm clothes,’ Mama replied.

‘Ireland is very far north,’ Grandma worried. ‘Will it be covered in snow?’

Grandma borrowed some money from people in the apartment block who were cousins of hers. One of them worked in a cinema, and he said that Ireland was full of snow and ice. All the people went about in long coats, with hats that covered their ears like Eskimos.

‘Where will we get a snow hat in Cali for Pepe?’ asked Grandma that night, combing her long, silver-grey hair.

‘Where, indeed, in the whole of Colombia will we get a hat like that?’ asked Mama, winking at me so that I would not pay any attention to Grandma.

‘But I have a hat,’ I said and got out my straw hat with the horses and men sewn onto it. I was getting worried now.

They bought me second-hand clothes. I got two T-shirts with car logos, a poncho, long trousers and a thick scarf. Grandma sewed earflaps onto my hat that could be tucked in, so that if I arrived in Ireland in a heavy snowfall I would be prepared for the worst.

‘What about gloves?’ Grandma asked. ‘He might get frostbite, like in those American war movies.’ She began to explain to me what frostbite was, but I did not understand.

‘My cousin says there is a war in Ireland,’ said Grandma, rushing into the flat one night. ‘Are we sending little Pepe to his death?’

‘There is no war where Pepe is going,’ replied Mama evenly.

‘Are you sure?’ asked Grandma, getting increasingly flustered. ‘How can you be sure?’

‘I am sure,’ said Mama. ‘His papa never said anything about a war.’

The night before I left, Grandma put on the water heater for as long as she could bear to without thinking of what it would cost. I was meant to be the only person to have a bath that night, but Mama examined the water after me and found it still hot, so everyone had a bath. Then there was the problem of washing my towel in the bathwater and getting it dry by the morning. It was packed wet into a plastic bag.

The next morning, it was decided that we should all have some food at a café in the airport. I knew that Grandma would get weepy so I said, ‘Why not stay in the apartment?’ No, she wanted to come with us. She hadn’t seen the airport since her honeymoon to Panama.

Mama carried the carpet bag to the bus stop. I carried the plastic bag with the wet towel in it and my hat. Our bus finally got to the airport through the crowded streets, and then I had two hours to wait for my flight. There were people rushing about in all directions, pushing
trolleys
and checking times. The carpet bag was labelled and taken away with other luggage. My ticket was checked at a desk, then Mama put it inside the back pocket of my trousers and buttoned the pocket closed. My passport was in my shirt pocket, which also had a button. My shirt didn’t fit me very well. It was much too big, and I had to roll the sleeves up so that my hands poked out. I liked it though; I felt like a businessman going off to an
important
meeting.

We sat for a little while in the café. The drink in my paper cup was almost untouched. I felt lonely leaving Mama, who sat looking strangely small and staring down at the table. I would miss Grandma too, whom I had grown to love despite her crazy questions. They both noticed my mood and forced themselves to smile.

‘You will have good luck in the northern world,’ said Grandma. ‘But keep warm. Remember to be careful. Watch out for frostbite!’

‘You will send me e-mails?’ Mama said.

‘How long will I be away?’ I asked, looking down at my feet.

‘Well, Pepe, because it is so expensive to travel there, you should stay as long as you can,’ replied Mama.

‘But how many days?’

‘Days?’ they both asked. ‘Weeks, months at least.’

Grandma wanted to use the toilet and got up, leaving us alone.

‘Pepe, listen to me. I want to work in the hotel as a chambermaid and then maybe in the dining room. I will earn more money so I can move into my own apartment. I cannot live with Grandma much longer. She is driving me mad!’

‘You two drive each other mad. What about me?’ I asked. I felt miserable and suddenly did not want to go. Mama hugged me. It felt good, but there were many people at other tables and it made me embarrassed. I took up my hat and stared at it. Why had Grandma ruined it, by sewing on those earflaps? I would rather that my ears froze on the sides of my head in Ireland.

‘Pepe,’ Mama began and burst into tears. But soon she got a grip on herself and said in a squeaky voice, ‘You have a lousy mother. And a lousy father.’

‘Don’t say that, Mama. You two are my only parents. Don’t say anything bad about my parents,’ I begged her, but this caused more tears to flow and then I began to feel weepy too.

Grandma came back and, seeing our sadness, tried to be jolly.

‘I like the airport. It is better than a circus. And do you know, the sight of those aeroplanes beats any trapeze act, elephants and tigers. You’ve never seen a circus?’ she asked me.

‘Yes, I have,’ I said. ‘We all acted in our own circus at the commune.’

‘Oh, don’t mention that commune to me,’ snapped Grandma.

Then my flight number was called and there was no more time for tears. It was a strange moment. I often
picture
it in my mind at night.

How do you say goodbye to your mother? You hug her. She tells you how much she loves you. And you know how much it hurts to love her, just at the moment of leaving her. I picked up my hat and the plastic bag with the towel. Mama was shouting something. Grandma was saying, he looks so small. I turned around and walked away, towards the queue of people waiting to board the aeroplane.

My first time inside an aeroplane! The engines were
revving
like the sound of all the animals along the Río
Putumayo
. I was asked for my ticket by a smiling woman in uniform and shown to a seat. It was very comfortable.

The aeroplane soon started rolling down the runway, then it roared and began moving faster and faster.
Suddenly
we were off the ground. The other passengers looked very calm, talking quietly or reading
newspapers
, so I settled in to enjoy my first flight. I decided that aeroplanes must have been invented so that man could be more like a bird. It was such a thrill to be inside the belly of this huge metal bird, flying up through the clouds. We were given food and drinks, and the pilot’s voice came through little speakers, saying it was a lovely sunny day in Bogotá, where we would land in two hours’ time.

Getting off the aeroplane in Bogotá, I felt as if I had always been flying. My feet did not seem to be on the ground. I was in a kind of dream. One of the hostesses brought me to a desk with a sign: ‘Lufthansa’. I was taken in behind the counter. Another hostess made phone calls and yet another hostess arrived as I was staring across the
desk at the crowds of people. What a sight! It was a lot better than television.

We went to a room with a big conveyer belt, the ‘
luggage
carousel’. The carpet bag with its label was going round and round until I grabbed it. The hostess led me on, through barriers and along corridors. Men looked at her and she smiled. To an air pilot she said, ‘Meet my new man, captain!’ They laughed. I clung onto my hat and the towel in its plastic bag while she carried the carpet bag. I offered to carry it, but she shook her head and smiled again.

I was left waiting in a lounge with airport workers in different uniforms. There was a television hanging from the ceiling, but it was showing news programmes and I couldn’t reach up to change the channel. It was a relief to hear my name called at last. A hostess took me back out through the bustle and crowds for my flight to Zürich, in Switzerland.

It was a long way to Switzerland. We flew for hours, though I slept for most of the time. At Zürich airport I began to feel lonely. Everyone spoke a strange language, and seemed to be in a terrible hurry. Why had I left Mama and Grandma? Would I ever see El Dorado again? He was my only friend, the only one I could tell my troubles to. I wished I could go back to the commune.

Finally a hostess who spoke very bad Spanish showed me to where I had to go for my next flight. Soon I was in another aeroplane seat, waiting for another take-off. This
time we landed in London. This airport was enormous, and even more full of people, but now they were
speaking
English, so at least I could understand. The hostess who took charge of me made me feel like a piece of
baggage
. She took me by the hand as we pushed through the crowd. I was annoyed.

Then we stopped. ‘Do you like burger and chips?’ she asked, showing her shining teeth in a big smile. I thought hostesses had some problem – they seemed to smile almost all the time. Their faces must get very tired! I was hungry, so I nodded and she got me a take-away in a cardboard box. I sat and ate at a plastic-topped table. The waiting in London went on for hours, until night came. I watched an awful lot of television and began to hate airports.

At last I was on the flight to Dublin on Ryanair! Not long after take-off we were told to prepare for the descent and then as we came down with a bump,
slowing
along the runaway, a voice thanked us and said, ‘It is raining in Dublin – Ryanair can do nothing about the weather!’

I got off ahead of the other passengers and was shown along by a hostess into a crowded room. She soon
spotted
a man holding a piece of cardboard with ‘Our
Grandson
Pepe Carroll’ written on it. This was Grandad, a tall man with a beard and round glasses. He wore denims, a shirt and a jacket, and I noticed that he had soil on his boots. He thanked the hostess, praising the staff for escorting me safely through the various airports and then
took a long look at me. He shook my hand very
formally
and then seemed to change his mind and gave me a hug.

‘I like your hat,’ he said as we retrieved the carpet bag. ‘I have a bit of a hat myself in the jeep. You’ll need it here in Ireland.’ He grinned broadly. ‘I bet your belly is hanging down? I mean, are you hungry? We could eat here at the airport. I do not like the fast food at all, but you might?’

‘I’m not hungry,’ I yawned. ‘Just sleepy.’

‘Right so, let’s get you to the farm, and away from this mob. It’s a lot quieter down in the county Meath. Pepe, I’m delighted to meet you and that you’ll be spending some time with us. Your dad should be home from Canada at some stage.’

I took to Grandad immediately, and thought he would have fitted in well at the commune. His messy jeep – ‘the crock’ as he called it – must have been very old. A pane of glass on one side was missing and had been replaced with a sheet of polythene that flapped as we drove along. There were boxes, crates, rolls of plastic, egg trays, bamboo canes, two big balls of rope, tools and a brush handle in the back, and a deep, rich smell of vegetables.

We drove slowly for a while along lanes of traffic and I stared out of the window at aeroplanes landing and taking off against the night sky. The roaring of their engines made them seem like monsters waiting to swoop down on us. The city lights thinned gradually as we chugged along, with Grandad telling me about their small farm, and about
the kinds of crops that grow well in the Irish climate. He showed me his hat too, a battered-looking fisherman’s hat which looked a hundred years old.

We got to a place called Kells, and Grandad stopped the jeep with a big screeching of brakes and lumbered out. He returned with a comic for me, the
Dandy
.

‘We can get you something better when you get
settled
,’ he said kindly. ‘Don’t be surprised if you see me reading the
Dandy
myself.’ I explained to Grandad that I could not read in English, only in Spanish. ‘Ah well, you can look at the pictures anyway,’ he said, ‘and I’ll ask your grandmother about teaching you a bit of English. Anyway, you can make sense to me, and isn’t that enough to be getting on with?’

A short while later we turned off the road, up a bumpy laneway. We stopped in front of a little house, and my grandmother came out. She was a warm, plump woman with short hair, and she smelled of the countryside as she wrapped her arms around me. Her hands, like Grandad’s, were coarse, with the shadows of earth in the fingernails. I looked from one to the other, at their bright, ruddy faces. I would grow to love these people. They worked on the land as I had, and it immediately united us.

‘What is this?’ Grandma asked. ‘A towel, and it’s damp? Give me that till I wash it and dry it for you.’

‘Look, he has a better hat than mine,’ said Grandad, pointing it out to Grandma.

They showed me my room upstairs. It used to be my
papa’s, and still had some of his childhood toys in the wardrobe – a train set with lots of bits missing from the box; a spud-gun and a water pistol; books; a stamp album with three Colombian stamps – I was delighted. His camera had a crack in the casing. There was a radio without batteries, and a hurley stick that I thought was a boomerang at first. Best of all were the Airfix model
aeroplanes
and boats, most of them broken but still
wonderful
since they were my papa’s. Three big jars contained seashells, marbles and old coins. On the walls were posters of pop groups and solo guitarists. No wonder Papa had gone out in the world playing music.

I heard Grandma calling me for a bath and she brought a towelled robe that had belonged to my papa. ‘Give yourself a good scrub, Pepe,’ she said. ‘I hope you will be happy here with us. We are old fogies but we try not to be grumpy. You can tell me if you want anything special?’ I wondered what she meant by ‘old fogies’. She showed me the hot and cold taps, one with a red spot, the other blue.

‘Grandma, I was born in the jungle but I’m not a monkey,’ I said.

‘Oh, you’re able to crack a joke like your father,’ she laughed.

I laughed too. I had never heard of anyone ‘cracking’ a joke before.

I was left alone in the quiet bathroom. It had thick bubble glass and outside it was pitch dark. I rubbed soap into my hair and played with the sponge, submerging it
in the water and then squeezing it out over myself. Then I lay there for a long time in the hot water, wondering what would happen to me.

After my bath I got into bed and Grandma brought me some hot cocoa. It was sweet and delicious, but after one sip I was fast asleep. It was dark and I could hear jeeps coming into the commune and shots being fired. The guerrillas were back. My mother was shaking me to get up and run, but when I opened my eyes it was Grandma, with Grandad standing behind her.

‘Are you all right, Pepe?’ she asked, sitting down on the bed and stroking my forehead.

‘You gave a shout. I think you must have been fighting a tiger in the jungle,’ said Grandad. ‘You’re safe here. We have two dogs, Bran and Emo, and two cats, Max and Mojo. They’re all outside keeping watch.’

Grandma stayed in the room with me, talking softly until I dozed off again.