“Where to?”
“Up there. Come on.”
Larry lifted his legs to climb over the woman dozing beside him. Charlie led him to the first-class galley and wordlessly poured two glasses of gin at the bar the flight attendants had set up. He asked about the flight attendants, more to say something than to find out where they were. “They’re probably napping,” Charlie said.
“As long as the pilot’s awake,” he said.
“Yeah, right. The only people awake on this thing are the two of us.”
Charlie smiled for the first time, though the smile was shot through with sadness. He took the opportunity to ask her name, and she looked at him in silence, thinking, or hesitating, and finally said, “María Carlota Teresa Valentina. But don’t worry,” she added, seeing Larry’s expression. “You can call me Charlie.”
He told her his name while she downed her drink. Larry wasn’t even halfway through his. She poured herself another and asked, “Why are you going to Colombia?”
“I’m going to my dad’s funeral.”
Charlie opened her eyes wide, very surprised, as if she couldn’t believe the coincidence. Larry explained: “He didn’t just die now. It was years ago, but they found his remains a few days back.”
Charlie cleared her throat awkwardly. She didn’t understand. A flight attendant suddenly appeared and asked to get by them so she could open a door and pull out a folder full of papers. Still smiling, she told them they were welcome to anything they wanted, but they needed to take their drinks to their seats. Larry knocked back the rest of his gin to prepare to return to coach, but when the flight attendant left, Charlie told him, “The seat next to me’s empty—come and sit with me.”
“But . . .”
“Come on, man,” Charlie insisted. “Everybody’s passed out.”
Larry couldn’t help smiling when he dropped into the puffy chair and felt the cool leather against his skin.
There are some things you don’t forget . . .
Charlie’s eyes were glittering from all her crying, or from the two gins she’d downed. She tucked the blanket around her legs, reclined her seat a little, grabbed the full glass she’d brought with her, and said to Larry, “All right, tell me the story.”
9
Libardo watched Escobar’s funeral on TV. He’d made up his mind to go to the cemetery, but when he learned that other close associates wouldn’t be going, he was overcome with fears and doubts, and on the day of the funeral he stayed away.
“If anybody was going to be there, it should have been me,” Libardo sobbed.
“In the coffin?” I asked, distraught.
“No,” he said, tenderly ruffling my hair. “No, son, I mean the funeral—I should have been with him till the very end.”
He was tormented by that guilt day and night. He cried in front of the TV when he saw the casket and the crowds chanting Pablo’s name and waving hundreds of white handkerchiefs. When he saw the mother, the musicians playing the dead man’s favorite songs, and when the casket sank into the earth.
That weeping was also a symptom, a warning about the fragility of the moment. I felt vulnerable even in my own home, as if the walls were gradually disappearing or the doors no longer closed, as if the roof had suddenly blown off and everyone was an enemy. I didn’t say anything; I swallowed my fear in silence, though I was sure it was obvious. I could see it in Libardo, in Fernanda, in Julio, in the staff and bodyguards, in everybody who came to visit us, so why wouldn’t they notice it in me? But it was better to keep quiet; anything I said could be misinterpreted and lead to an accusation or an argument. After the dining table incident, I kept my opinions to myself and let them make the decisions. I’d said what I had to say that night: because of Libardo, we were going to be killed.
As he’d planned, we spent Christmas in the Dominican Republic. It was the four of us plus our grandparents—Libardo’s parents. Julio and I got more gifts than we had in years past. It was Libardo’s way of assuaging his guilt and trying to convince us not to return to Medellín. Julio wanted to spend the rest of our vacation on the farm, and Fernanda already wanted to go back, even though she’d been enjoying herself at all of Santo Domingo’s biggest casinos.
The thirty-first saw the arrival of Libardo’s two sisters, who lived in Tampa, with their husbands and children, and Benito, a distant cousin of Libardo’s, whom he always claimed to love like a brother. Benito also brought his whole family. Nobody from Fernanda’s side came. She only had one brother left, Juan David; he was thirteen years younger than her and studying music in New York—financed by Libardo, of course.
On the final night of 1993, thirty members of the family celebrated together in a restaurant with a band, party hats, whistles, and confetti, everybody trying to make Libardo believe that nothing serious was happening and life was going on as usual. Everybody except Fernanda, who could never fake anything. Even I joined in the jubilation, since my grandmother had asked that, for Libardo’s sake and everybody else’s, we all surround him with happiness. But at the stroke of midnight, when the Happy-New-Year hugs began, Libardo started crying again. And one by one, the rest of the family ended up crying too. Everybody except Fernanda and me. While they all sniffled into one another’s shoulders, she called me over to sit next to her.
“Want a little champagne?” she asked.
“I don’t like it,” I said.
I didn’t like alcohol yet. I didn’t smoke either. Once, before all of this started, Libardo had offered me a drink at a party, and when I turned it down, he said, don’t tell me you’re going to turn out queer. As if queers don’t drink.
“Toast with me, Larry,” Fernanda insisted. “Just a sip.”
Without waiting for my response, she poured champagne into two glasses, passed one to me, and raised hers.
“Here’s to you and me, and to not drowning when the boat goes under.” She said it without dramatics, smiling, her eyes glittering from the many glasses she’d already drunk.
That toast gave me a different awareness of her beauty, but I couldn’t translate it into words just then. I knew she was beautiful: everybody said so—my friends, my classmates, her friends who confirmed it every time they saw her, Libardo’s buddies who stared at her avidly, the people on the street who recognized the former Miss Medellín 1973 and told her she was as gorgeous as ever, if not more so.
But right before trying the champagne, I looked at her and saw something new in her beauty, something almost supernatural, a sort of magnetism sparkling in the depths of her eyes.
In time, when I met other women and fell in love, I realized that what I’d seen in Fernanda that night was her own demons.