Cartagena (3 page)

Hernando had been chasing the ball. I had followed him because I wanted to speak in secret about a new strategy for the game.

What are you doing? Hernando called out to the man.

Hey,
puto
! the man said. Why aren't you working? Life isn't a bowl of cherries.

You should not have kicked our ball away, said Hernando.

I am doing you a favor. The man paused briefly, then swiveled to look over his shoulder. At that moment I realized he was there with another man, a uniformed policeman, also sitting on a motorbike.

Come here, the policeman said to Hernando. He was smiling. The first man began to smile too.

Hernando walked over without hesitating. He was wearing only pants and his sweating body looked large and powerful next to the shape of the sitting policeman. I watched and said nothing.

You would argue with a business leader in our community? the policeman said cheerfully. He unclipped his holster. Hernando did not move. Turn around, the policeman said. You will argue at the station.

I watched as the policeman handcuffed Hernando. Then I felt my arms being jerked behind my back—the other man had approached silently—and I felt the cold click of metal around my wrists. This man led me to his motorbike and sat me down behind him, facing backward, away from him. He smelled of alcohol.

As the motorbike started moving, I slouched into the man's back to keep my balance. I saw the park diminishing—everyone had vanished from the football game—but I could not see where we were going.

Hernando's bike was in front of ours so I could not see him either. The handcuffs cut into my wrists. Soon I realized we were going away from downtown Medellín. We were not going to any police station. We began to climb a hill leading us west, higher and higher, into steep slumland. Fear surged through my body: I twisted around, trying to locate Hernando, but the man growled and elbowed me on the side of my head. A voice sang out. We skidded onto a dirt road. The back tire kicked dust into my face and I coughed, my eyes still smarting. When the dust cleared I made out scrapwood shacks, a series of clothes lines, two women glancing up then down from a cooking fire—the power cables didn't run this high—then suddenly, as we swerved again, the city—far below—the vast concrete valley sealed in by a film of smog as flat and blue as a lake.

We turned away onto a narrow track. My breath now coming hot, fast. I could feel the man's sweat on the skin of my back, soaking through my shirt. Sunlight flared from corrugated tin roofs and plastic sheeting on the hillside below us. The ground grew thicker with olive-colored shrubs and banana trees.

The man said something but I could not hear it in the wind. At that moment I realized there were no more houses anywhere in sight. The motorbike slowed.

Jump! someone yelled. It was Hernando. Automatically I leaned to the side of the bike. I tried to jump but my pants got caught in the chain. Then the bike pitched onto its right side and I began to roll down the grassy hill, my hands cuffed behind me. I heard a couple of gunshots. I kept rolling until the ground leveled off. My head felt like it had been stabbed at the back. Moments later I felt someone's boots roll me onto my stomach. I
waited for the shot. All I could smell was earth, and grass, and it smelled richer than I had ever smelled anything before. I waited. But the gunshot did not come, and then I felt someone unlock and remove my handcuffs. Hernando helped me to my feet. Blood leaked from his right armpit. He led me up the hill to where my captor, the businessman, lay under the bike, one leg bent so far back the wrong way the foot almost touched the hip. Hernando handed me a gun.

It is his, he said.

And the policeman? I asked.

Your corrupted friend is dead, Hernando said sternly to the man, as though it were he who had asked the question.

The man groaned. The flesh around his mouth had gone loose. I did not know then—as I do now—that this was a sign of fear.

You must do this, said Hernando. He looked at me like a brother. He said, Ron, you must do this so we are in it together.

I took the gun, which felt unexpectedly warm and heavy in my hand, and which gave off a smell like a match being lit in a dark room. I pointed it at the man's head. His sunglasses were broken and bent around his ear and the fragments shone in the afternoon light. I aimed at the blackness in the middle of his ear and shot.

After a while, I turned my back to the man's face and tried to lift the motorbike from his broken lower body. I felt filled with a tremendous lightness, as if every breath I took was expanding inside me. Then I remembered something.

The policeman. How did you—

Hernando let out a short, burp-sounding laugh. He bent his knees as though about to sit down on an invisible chair, then tipped onto his ass. He seemed suddenly drunk.

The stupid
puto
stopped, he said, because the handcuffs were uncomfortable against his back. But he would not turn me around to face the same way as him—he said he did not want a
faggot rubbing up behind him. Hernando burped again. So he handcuffed my hands in front. At the top of the hill, I stopped him like this.

Hernando tilted his head backward and lifted his arms up, high up, arching them over his head. I saw the gashes in his right armpit that the policeman's fingernails must have made when the cuffs looped over his face and under his throat.

I watched him and he laughed again. Inside, the light air filled me like
sacol
. Help me lift this, I said. But he did not look at the bike. He remained sitting on the grass, half naked, embracing his legs tightly.

For me too, he said. That was my first time too. He frowned, looking straight ahead. His face was as white as a plastic bag. Then a change came over it as though he was going to be sick. Then his face changed again and he smiled, but now the smile only affected his mouth.

Finally, I lifted the bike and rested it on its side stand. We have to go, I said. You ride behind me.

He nodded. I helped him to his feet and onto the motorbike. All the way down the hill he gripped me tightly, like a
chica
on her first ride.

AFTER THAT, OF COURSE
, more things changed than just the fact that Hernando and I became friends. You do not kill a policeman and business leader and expect the streets to owe you protection.

El Padre approached me—through a
nero
whom I knew but did not know to be employed by El Padre—and told me he would protect me. He would take me off the streets, like he took other kids off the onion farms, but he would raise me above these farm kids: I would be given an office job. There was strength in me, he said on the telephone. I could go back to my own barrio,
where, with my new status, I would be safe. We are similar, he said. We are both
soldados
, we do what needs to be done, and we have both lost our fathers to the conflict of Colombia. He said, I will be your benefactor.

Hernando, meanwhile, had disappeared from the
gallada
. His reputation had increased as a consequence of killing the policeman, and we all assumed he was hiding. Then several weeks later, someone reported seeing him at one of the gringo-led programs in the city that are known to combat violence and drugs and poverty by staging plays in public parks.

I tracked him down and told him about my new job and said that I could ask my agent to give him an office job as well, or at the least, employ him as a
soldado
. What is this shit? I said, grinning. I gestured at his windowless, white-plastered room, crammed with stacks of cardboard and paper. The room smelled strongly of bleach. Hernando sat behind a scratched steel desk and behind him was a poster depicting a gun with a melted barrel, and underneath, the words: THIS MAKES YOU A MAN?

Forget all this, I said. You can start again. My agent will get you a stainless police record.

Hernando looked at me for a long time. Then he told me he was happy to see me. He had cropped his hair and it changed his face, making his features seem somehow tired, muted. Finally he said, So now you have an office job. What is it like?

I told him about everything: the salary, the bonuses, the weapons. The respect from the barrio. He listened carefully. Then he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. I sat down, watching him, wondering what he did in this room every day. He looked older.

But what is it like? he said at last.

I realized he was asking about the killing. At that point, I had not yet received my first assignment and the question irritated me. It is easy, I said.

Who is your agent?

I told him.

He paused again.

What?

You must listen to me, Ron. The man you know as El Padre is a dangerous man.

I laughed, thinking he was joking.

Listen to me.

Of course he is dangerous. He is a legend.

Yes, said Hernando, speaking slowly. And even so, in the game, he is a small player. Which makes him even more dangerous for you. He leaned suddenly forward, the steel desk wobbling under his weight. Listen, Ron, you must stop. You must quit your office job.

You are being funny, no?

I was embarrassed for him. What had the
nero
said who had found him? That Hernando, looking like a peasant, had instructed him to return to school or he would surely end up the victim of the never-ending culture of violence—at which the
nero
had applauded and told Hernando to return to his new faggot friends. I had hidden my uneasiness. No one in the
gallada
would have dared to talk to Hernando in that manner before.

This is what your gringo friends tell you? I asked.

I do not need a gringo to see with my eyes. He looked away from me. But they are right about some things. About El Padre, for instance, who is a dog of the drug lords. He is a man who kills the innocent to protect the rich.

They are not innocent, I said quickly. He is cleaning the streets of the very people you denounce. I caught myself at the last moment from saying “I.” His words affected me. I calmed my breathing. You say this when you do not even know him.

He came to me too, Hernando said.

Neither of us spoke for a while. His clothes were faded and worn, his left shoe ripped at the toe. I became conscious of my Nike shoes, my Adidas Squadra jersey with its mesh panels.

It is dangerous for you to say this shit in public.

Hernando said softly, as though to himself, No one should have to do what you do. He stood up and walked around the desk.

They pay you? Where you work, this program?

Hernando smiled. His smile was heavy at the corners of his mouth. I am happy here, he said.

I can help you. I have made almost one million pesos already.

You are like a brother to me, he said simply, and I want to see you safe. He frowned, trying to follow a thought with words. We cannot help each other, Ron. Maybe 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 Andrés 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.