Much later someone would ask me that question: Where were you when they killed Escobar? I'd been asked before: Where were you when they killed Galan, or Pizarro? I thought it was possible: a life ruled by the places a person is when someone else is murdered; yes, that life was mine, and that of many. I then remembered that date (July 4) when Sara and I devoted the day to following on television the convoy that the news programs broadcast, fifteen or twenty windowless buses and canvas-roofed trucks going to the football player's funeral. On the broadcast was the thunder of the war planes that took off from the Palanquero base, the contrast of that noise with the silence of the people, and also, at least for an obsessive observer like me, the almost lyrical detail of the air that, displaced by propulsion of the engines, etched silver crests on the surface of the River Magdalena. Going to Escobar's funeral could be compassion or morbidity, pure rage or frivolous curiosity, but it had the value of the real, and I could understand it, and I'm sure that my father, more than understanding it, would have admired it, although he'd never been interested in football, at least not like me. (I have to say that my father was able to recite the names of the Santa Fe eleven of his day, because pronouncing "Perazzo, Panzuto, Resnik, and Cam pana" was pleasing to his ear, a sort of primitive verse like the melody of a drum.) And then, facing that televised route of that imitation of a funeral cortege, I felt the lack of a more solid reference to what I was observing. This often happens: when something interests me, I immediately feel the need to know physical facts to better appreciate it, and I lose interest if I don't manage to obtain them. If I'm interested in an author, I have to find out where he was born and when; if I go to bed with a new woman, I like to measure the diameter of her areolae, the distance between her belly button and the first hairs (and the women think it's a game, it seems romantic; they lend themselves to it without putting up any resistance). So at that very moment, from Sara's apartment, from Sara's telephone, I called Angelina Franco and asked her for the information I was lacking. She didn't understand at first, she reproached me for taking as a joke something as terrible as Escobar's murder, which for her-and she was right-marked a new Now this country really is fucked in the long history of fuckups, ever more serious, or lower, or more incomprehensible, or bleaker, that had filled the last several years in Colombia, the years of our adult life. But she must have noticed something in my tone of voice, or maybe I transmitted in some involuntary but nevertheless eloquent way that our incomprehension was not so different deep down, though it might seem so from outside; for in spite of not saying so right then, for me the Escobar thing was a memorandum (a yellow card, I thought later, more flippantly) that the country was sending me to emphasize not just how impossible it was to understand Colombia, but how illusory, how ingenuous was any intention of trying to do so by writing books that very few would read and did nothing but create problems for those who wrote them. In any case, Angelina gave way in the end, and assumed her role like a true cartographer. At that moment, she seemed to believe, the cortege's destination depended on the precision of her descriptions.
"Now they're at Puerto Triunfo," she said. "Now they're passing in front of the drug lord's zoo. Now they're at La Penuela. That's where the air starts to smell like cement." I remember at that moment Sara (who wasn't looking at me as if I were crazy: Sara had an extraordinary and sometimes worrying ability to accept the most arbitrary eccentricities) had brought me a glass of lulo juice, and I vaguely remember that I drank it with pleasure, but nevertheless the cement from the factories was the only valid reality for me: the juice, in my memory, didn't taste of lulo but of cement. "They're getting close to the Cave of the Condor," Angelina was saying. "There's frost on the stalagmites, Gabriel. There are ceiba trees and cedars that also have frost on them. You have to be careful up there and go slowly because the road is slippery." Yes, the road is slippery, and carries on being slippery for quite a way: Angelina, it seems, had offered this information as if it had nothing at all to do with my father's death. "Now they're going down toward Las Palmas," she went on. "There's always a bit of mist there. On top of the walls are chamber pots and biscuit tins with geraniums. Whole lives spent planting geraniums in soda-biscuit tins, Gabriel. My parents did it, my grandparents did it, it's as if around there they hadn't yet discovered that flowerpots exist." For an instant I stopped seeing the convoy on its way to the burial and began to see my father losing control of the car because of the fog, because of the slippery road, or because of his defective hand, that hand unable to react adequately in an emergency (to control the steering wheel or put the car into second and get out of a perilous situation), and I think I actually shook my head, like in cartoons, to get rid of the images and concentrate, for once, on other people's pain. Later we saw on the news the images of people arriving at the Campos de Paz cemetery. We saw the flags-the tricolored national ones and the green and white of the team-we saw the improvised banners made from sheets and spray paint, and we heard the nationalist slogans people chanted; and we began to foresee, in the tone of the broadcasters, in the looks on the faces of neighbors and the building's doorman, and even in the traffic on the streets, that particular atmosphere we get in Bogota after a bomb or a notorious murder.
It was the last time I spoke to Angelina. At Christmas I received a horrendous card from her with a greeting in English and a Santa Claus surrounded by glittery frost. Inside the card was a single phrase, "With my best wishes for the festive season," and her signature, halfway between infantile and baroque. There was also a piece of paper folded in half. It was a newspaper clipping cut out by a meticulous pair of scissors: a color photograph of a flower-covered chair. On the back, carnations, daisies, geraniums, and hibiscus formed a figure, vague at first, which after an instant became clearer. It was the dead soccer player. Over his head, in three florid arches, was written: