What I don’t mention is that I’ve fired plenty of guns: Colts, long Colts, Smith & Wessons, and even assault rifles, all before my fifteenth birthday. Not because I wanted to, but because from the time I was born, Libardo insisted we needed to learn to defend ourselves, and set up a shooting range on the farm. Whenever we went there on vacation, he made us practice. Fernanda never said anything either way, but she always started at every shot, resigned, knowing deep down that we really were going to need to defend ourselves, but tormented because we shouldn’t have been shooting real weapons at that age. I could load a nine-millimeter with my eyes closed before my voice even changed.
Afterward I forgot everything, all of Libardo’s instructions, every recommendation about how to aim, inhaling and then holding your breath as you fire. I even forgot the applause when I hit the target and the twinkle of pride in his eyes when he bragged about his sons’ bravery, marksmanship, and spunk. I forgot it from the day when, in the middle of a party, Libardo decided to show off our shooting skills and ordered his men to untie a two-month-old calf, one that didn’t even have any meat on it yet, and release it real far away, more than a hundred yards off, and then had them bring him his arsenal and announced that the night’s meal was going to be on us—on me and Julio, I mean—because we, he declared, were going to shoot the calf dead with a single bullet in the head.
He handed Julio a semiautomatic shotgun; I was better with handguns, so he gave me a Glock. He’d never asked us to shoot an animal before, or a bird, or even a tree—nothing that was alive. We’d always shot at people-shaped targets, sure, with a black bull’s-eye on the head, but never an animal.
I started shaking from the minute they released the calf. Julio would shoot first because he was the oldest. Lucky for me. I prayed he’d hit it so I wouldn’t have to go next, but he was shaking too; his smile was nervous, and he was sweating. He liked animals more than I did, especially livestock; it was like he was made for the farm ever since he was a kid, built for barns and corrals. Libardo was putting him to a test that he was bound to fail. Even so, he adjusted his stance and took aim at the calf, which was fidgeting restlessly, anxious to return to the pen and be with its mother.
“Right in the head, son,” said Libardo, belching rum, and then, to top it off, “Blow its head off—the body’s going on the grill.”
Julio couldn’t hold still, not because the calf was moving, but because he was thinking the same thing I was, and wishing, like me, for that calf to take off for the horizon, run into the brush, and disappear amid the vegetation, saving itself and saving us from doing what we didn’t want to do.
“What are you waiting for?” Libardo asked, exasperated, because Julio kept aiming the gun but couldn’t make up his mind to shoot, and the guests were starting to jeer and laugh.
He looked at me very seriously, as if to say, get ready, if this kid can’t pull it off, you’re my other card, the ace up my sleeve. But he said again, “Go on and shoot, dammit—we’re all getting bored.”
Fernanda was watching quietly, but when she saw how Julio was shaking, she slowly walked over. She must have been planning to intervene, to face Libardo down, and she knocked back the rest of her drink in one go. But before she could confront him, the shotgun went off and she jumped, as usual, at the bang. Libardo, for his part, hopped up and down excitedly, though his delight faded when he realized that though the calf was dead, the shot had torn one side of its body apart. Despite the mistake, the guests applauded, and to restore the festive mood, Libardo said, “It’ll be chicken after all, ladies and gentlemen—the kid’s wrecked our beef.”
Anyway, that was the last day I ever held a gun.
“I like shooting bobble rockets,” says Julieth. “You never know what they’re going to do.”
“This one night,” Pedro breaks in, “she set off two bottle rockets in two different apartments. They had to take one poor old lady to the emergency room with heart palpitations.” He chortles and continues: “She was watching TV, and the bottle rocket came in the window and went off on her bed.”
Julieth and La Murciélaga crack up. Julieth tries to say something, but she’s laughing too much to catch her breath.
“We had to run so hard,” La Murciélaga says, “our legs almost gave out.” She points to Pedro. “This asshole ditched us—he got in the car and took off.”
“I wasn’t about to get myself caught,” says Pedro.
Julieth, finally able to speak, says, “It was in the papers.”
“Did they catch you?” I ask.
“No, the two of us got out of there.” She gestures at La Murciélaga. “We jumped down a gully and got away, but it was on Teleantioquia and in El Colombiano and they said the old lady almost died of fright.”
“Is it always like this, or just today?” I ask.
“What?”
“Huh?”
“La Alborada?”
“Medellín,” I say. “Is it always like this or just today?”
The three of them exchange puzzled glances. There’s no need for them to reply. It’s hard to say what I mean by “like this.” Looking back, I recall that it’s always been like this; Medellín has always bobbed on the waves of a restless sea.
“Let’s go buy the hydroponic weed,” says La Murciélaga. Julieth hops excitedly and Pedro says, “In my dictatorship, ladies, drugs will be a staple good.”
The other two clap and burst with pleasure, like the fireworks booming outside.
8
The flight map on the screens showed the plane leaving Europe behind, poised over Portugal, about to enter the Atlantic. But to them the large blue blotch was much more than an ocean. It was a zone of oblivion into which Charlie and Larry had each tossed their histories when they left Medellín years earlier. The pasts they dropped are still lying there on the seafloor, and there they’ll remain until the ocean dries up.
Charlie found him with his eyes closed, as if he were sleeping, though he denied it afterward. Standing in the aisle, she asked, “Did I wake you?”
“No,” he said.
“You had your mouth open,” she said.
“How long have you been there?” Larry asked her.
“A little while. I wanted to thank you.”
The passengers on either side of Larry grumbled in irritation.
“I didn’t do anything,” he said.
“Of course you did,” said Charlie, and fell quiet, as if she was still in shock from the news, or waiting for him to say something else. They looked at each other in silence, and then she said, “Come with me.”