10
It isn’t raining, but hundreds of people are marching along with black umbrellas and blocking traffic. There are more groups in different places around the city. In silence, they walk slowly toward a meeting point in downtown Medellín, protesting La Alborada. They hate the noise and love the animals that could die of fright from the exploding fireworks. Their open umbrellas symbolize a call for rain. Only a party-pooping downpour can save them.
“Turn off the music,” I ask La Murciélaga.
“For fuck’s sake,” says Pedro.
“Just for a minute, please.”
The only sound is the demonstrators’ footsteps on the pavement. Not a cheer, not a murmur. The silence is more powerful than any protest chant, though the fireworks shatter it with increasing frequency.
“You good?” La Murciélaga asks me. Without waiting for a response, she turns the music all the way back up. She doesn’t even hear when I thank her. Pedro sticks his head out the window and yells at the marchers: “In my dictatorship, the only rain you’ll see will be bullets, asswipes.”
La Murciélaga shimmies in her seat, and I remark to Julieth, “I’ll bet she dances when she’s on the toilet too.”
Pedro manages to find a shortcut out of the jam of cars, and we drive toward Las Palmas. The plan is to head up into the hills, taking our time, and get to the top around midnight, when the fireworks reach their crescendo. Beforehand, I called Pedro aside and said, you know what I’m going to say. Yeah, he said, but relax, when she calls I’ll drive you back down or find somebody else to do it, it’ll be packed up there.
If Fernanda doesn’t call me in the next hour, come hell or high water I’m going to go find her, and then I’ll get some sleep. I dream of sleeping twelve hours straight.
“Pit stop,” says Pedro, and we stop at a bar-restaurant-dance club that’s hopping. He calls the guys in the other car so they’ll stop too.
“Don’t you have a friend named Charlie?” I ask La Murciélaga when we settle at a table.
“Male or female?”
“Female.”
“Charlie? I have two guy friends with that name, but no women.”
“She studies in London.”
“What about her?”
“Her dad died yesterday.”
“Oh, Larry, I really don’t get you. What are you talking about? The only dead person I’ve been hearing about is your dad.”
“Who told you? Pedro?”
La Murciélaga shakes her head.
“Did you read it in the paper?” I ask.
“I don’t read the papers,” she says.
It had appeared on the front page and been reported on TV. They showed the grave where he’d been found but, supposedly out of respect, not the corpse. The bones. La Murciélaga hadn’t seen it on the news. She didn’t watch the news either. It was Ro who told me, she said when I insisted, nodding her head in his direction.
“What else did he say?” I ask.
“Nothing,” she says.
Tonight I’m the newcomer, and Ro, by contrast, is the longtime friend. She’s not going to drop him in it for my sake, but it’s obvious Ro’s bothered by me; he keeps eyeing me from the other end of the table.
“So who’s Charlie?” La Murciélaga asks.
“Someone I met on the plane.”
“And you like her,” she says.
I smile and take a drink.
“Men are such dumbasses.”
“About what?”
“Everything,” she says, and drinks some aguardiente. “You’re so impractical,” she adds. “Let’s dance, Larry.”
“I don’t know how to dance to this stuff.”
A robotic voice is endlessly repeating grind it, grind it, grind it, mami, and the dancers are trying to look sexy but they actually make me want to laugh. Or cry.
“You just dance,” says La Murciélaga.
“Like a coffee grinder,” I say, and she isn’t amused. “That’s what the song says, right?”
“You’re such a drag,” she says, gets up, and wiggles her way onto the dancefloor.
As the night crawls on, La Murciélaga becomes increasingly vampire-like. Weirder and more alluring. But all of that mystery evaporates in an instant whenever she hops up and down and squeals about the fireworks. Then afterward she goes strange again.
In the distance Medellín is visible, half splendid and half destitute. I still find this landscape deeply moving: because of everything that’s changed, everything that’s been lost, and because this hole amid the mountains, this cauldron where so many have died, which exiled so many and marked us all, is still standing, tougher than ever, as if it had never been the city from which I had to flee or where my father was killed.
Pedro sits down next to me to pour himself a drink. Seeing an opportunity, I ask, “Have you been to my house?”
“Which one? In London?”
“No, Fernanda’s place, where she lives now. I’ve never seen it.”
“Not even in photos?”
“No. All I’ve seen is her headboard,” I say.
When we Skype, she’s always in bed. She’s refused to show me anything else. Maybe she’s ashamed to show me how tiny it is.
“Well, you’ll be going there later,” Pedro says.
“I can take a taxi.”
“Don’t be melodramatic,” he says. “Let’s wait for her to call.”
“I don’t get why she didn’t pick me up at the airport, or why she won’t let me just go there now. I don’t get it at all, Pedro.”
He studies me for a moment and says, “What’s up with you, Larry? You’ve changed.”
“Everybody’s changed,” I tell him. Even him, I think, though he looks the same as ever.
“There’s always something left,” he says, “but with you it’s like there’s nothing.”
“You’ve only been with me two hours.”
He checks his watch and corrects me. “Three.”
“Fine, three, but I’m tired. I haven’t slept since I boarded the plane.”
I get up, and Pedro looks confused. “Hey, man, it’s no big deal,” he says.