At that moment, the Fearless Girl’s voice interrupts my musings, But if you want I can show you room 416, which is practically the same thing, her voice bringing me back abruptly, Room 416, of course, thank you very much, Señorita, so long as it has a view of the acacia garden, too. It does, Señor, from a different angle, but I think you’ll still be able to see the acacias, tell me when your friends plan to arrive, Aguilar makes up a date that she notes down, No problem, the little French flags confirm on the keyboard, room 413 will be available then and I promise you that those acacias won’t have gone anywhere, My friends are the kind of people who pay attention to details like that, I say with a silly little laugh in an attempt to match her irony, Of course, Señor, the customer is always right.
The Fearless Girl takes me by surprise by asking me point-blank what my name is, and I tell her Sergio Stepansky, like an alter ego of the poet León de Greiff, which is the first thing that pops into my head, I’m not sure why I don’t want to reveal my name to this woman I’ve decided to trust, Follow me, Mr. Stepansky, it’s less a request than an order, so I walk behind her to the fourth floor. I was returning to the scene of events to relive what had happened, to obtain information, to remember, to purge, to find solace, to torture myself, to have something to hold on to, for exactly what I couldn’t say. My discomfort grew at each step and my breathing became agitated, so much so that the Fearless Girl asked me whether I was all right, It’s nothing, I answered, I smoke too much and I get out of breath on the stairs, but since we had come up in the elevator, she gave me one of those looks that made it clear that she could see I was a little odd, and yet she said politely, Yes, smoking is no joke.
She was walking in front of me and even though some kind of death was lodged in my chest, I couldn’t stop looking at her legs; she really was pretty, this girl enumerating the hotel’s advantages for me, the merits that had earned it each of the five stars adorning its logo, If she only knew that I’m dying, I thought as she sang the praises of the Italian restaurant, the recently remodeled rooms, the gym with professional trainers on staff, the top floor bar open twenty-four hours a day, and there I was with my suffering on rewind, it was along this same seemingly interminable corridor, the same carpet muffling my steps, that the door that opened then opens again now; the tall, dark man who received me that day in room 413 looked more tired than upset, I still have a clear idea of his height and the color of his skin but I can’t manage to fill in the rest of him, he becomes blurred in my memory or maybe I never managed to look him in the face, and I didn’t hear his voice either because when I asked for Agustina all he did was let me in without a word, which means that I couldn’t say whether the male voice I’d heard recorded on the answering machine when I returned from Ibagué was his, the voice that advised me to pick up Agustina at this hotel. The man opened the door for me and then must have left immediately because he wasn’t there a second later, when I turned desperately to ask what had happened to my wife.
The minute I cross the threshold, I seem to see Agustina again in the corner on the floor, gazing intently out the window at the acacias; the Fearless Girl’s handset rings and she answers, speaks to someone for a minute, and then says to me, Excuse me for a minute, Mr. Stepansky, but they need me downstairs, don’t worry, I’ll be back right away, soothing me because she suspects that something is wrong but my mind is on other things and I can’t quite fathom what she’s saying, Look around the room yourself if you want, adds the Fearless Girl, here’s the closet and here inside is the safe, here’s the bathroom, the television turns on like this, I’ll be right back, excuse me for a second, Mr. Stepansky.
That day, there in her corner, my wife looked away from the acacias, then turned her head, everything happening so slowly that I had the impression that each of her movements was framed by a single, specific instant; upon seeing me she seemed to come back to life and her face softened as if suddenly bathed in relief, and she got up and came toward me like someone returning to her own kind after a long absence, You’re here, she said and I held her as tight as I could, I felt her press against me and I knew that we were saved, I still didn’t know what from, but we were saved, It’s all over now, Agustina, as bad as it was, it’s over now, let’s go home, my love, I whispered in her ear, but all of a sudden I felt her whole body grow tense and push away from mine; if at first she had sought me, now she tore herself brusquely away, if before she had recognized me, an instant later she didn’t know who I was; her gestures became theatrical and stagy, and she looked at me with deep dissatisfaction, Maybe it wasn’t me she was waiting for, is the thought that pierces my mind now like a stiletto, I’m not going anywhere with you, she said, and her voice sounded false like that of a bad actor reciting her lines from memory, and turning her back on me and returning to her corner, she collapsed again on the rug like a broken doll and became absorbed once more in the movement of the acacia branches in the wind.
DO YOU REALLY THINK, Agustina angel, that your noble family still lives on the bounty of the land they inherited? Well, climb out of that nineteenth-century romance, doll, because your grandfather Londoño’s fertile estates are nothing but pretty country today, and step down into the twentieth century and kneel before His Majesty King Don Pablo, ruler of the three Americas and absurdly rich thanks to the gringos’ glorious War on Drugs, lord and master of yours truly and also of your brother, as he once was of your esteemed father. Don’t you get it that the only things that flourish today on all those acres that Joaco inherited are polo ponies, country houses, and crimson sunsets, because the hard cash is slipped to him under the table from the crooks in the government and Pablo’s launderettes? And do you think Pablo comes to your brother, to Spider, to any of us, because he really needs our money? In the beginning, maybe, but not anymore, darling, of course not; if he still uses us it’s so he can control us, he came up with this arrangement to bring the country’s oligarchy to its knees, he hinted as much to me in a single sentence the first of the two times I’ve seen him in person.
He’d made me catch a commercial flight to Medellín and wait at a downtown hotel for his men to come and pick me up, then they brought me to a secret airstrip and from there I was taken to Naples in his private plane, a Cessna Titan 404 piloted by a gringo Vietnam vet. Naples? Naples is the whimsical name chosen by Pablo for one of his many properties, a place in the heart of the jungle with three Olympic-size pools and motocross courses and a gorgeous zoo with elephants, camels, flamingos, and all kinds of animals, because believe it or not, Pablo is a Greenpeace kind of guy and a sportsman and a liberal and a champion of animal rights.