The Thursday before Easter in 1999, nine months after my encounter with Ricardo Laverde’s landlady and eight before the end of the millennium, I arrived at my apartment and found a woman’s voice and a phone number on the answering machine. ‘This is a message for Antonio Yammara,’ said the voice, a young but melancholy voice, a voice that was both tired and sensual, the voice of one of those women who has had to grow up prematurely. ‘Señora Consuelo Sandoval gave me your name. I looked up your number. I hope I’m not bothering you, but you’re in the phone book. Please call me. I need to speak with you.’ I dialled the number immediately. ‘I was waiting for your call,’ said the woman.
‘With whom am I speaking?’ I asked.
‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ the woman said. ‘My name is Maya Fritts. I’m not sure if my surname means anything to you. Well, it’s not my original surname, it’s my mother’s, my real one is Laverde.’ And since I remained silent, the woman added what was by then unnecessary: ‘I’m the daughter of Ricardo Laverde. I need to ask you some things.’ I think I said something then, but it’s possible I simply repeated the name, the two names, her name and that of her father. Maya Fritts, Ricardo Laverde’s daughter, kept talking. ‘But listen, I live far away and I can’t go to Bogotá. It’s a long story. So the favour is a double favour, because I want to invite you to spend the day here, at my house, with me. I want you to come and talk to me about my father, to tell me everything you know. It’s a big favour, I know, but it’s warm here and the food’s good, I promise you won’t regret coming. So, it’s up to you, Señor Yammara. If you have a pencil and paper, I’ll tell you right now how to get here.’
3. The Gaze of Absent Ones
At seven the next morning I found myself driving down 80th Street, having had nothing but a black coffee for breakfast, heading for the city’s western exit routes. It was an overcast and cold morning, and the traffic at that hour was already dense and even aggressive; but it didn’t take me too long to get to the outskirts of the city, where the urban landscapes change and the lungs perceive a sudden absence of contamination. The exit had changed over the years, wide, recently paved roads flaunting the brilliant white of their signposts, zebra crossings and intermittent lines on the tarmac. I don’t know how many times I made similar trips as a child, how many times I went up the mountains that surround the city to then make that precipitous descent, and thus pass in a matter of three hours from our cold and rainy 2,600 metres down into the Magdalena Valley, where the temperatures can approach 40 degrees Celsius in some ill-fated spots. That was the case in La Dorada, the city that marks the halfway point between Bogotá and Medellín and that often serves as a stop or meeting point for those who make that trip, or occasionally even as a place for a swim. On the outskirts of La Dorada, somewhere that sounded quite separate from the city, from the hustle and bustle of its roads and heavy traffic, lived Maya Fritts. But now, instead of thinking of her and the strange circumstances that had brought us together, I spent the four hours of the trip thinking of Aura or, more specifically, about what had happened with Aura the previous night.
After taking down Maya Fritts’s directions and ending up with a badly drawn map on the back of a piece of paper (on the other side were notes for one of my upcoming classes: we would discuss what right Antigone had to break the law in order to bury her brother), I had gone through the evening routine with Aura in the most peaceable way possible, the two of us making dinner while Leticia watched a movie, telling each other about our respective days, laughing, touching as we crossed paths in the narrow kitchen. Peter Pan, Leticia was very fond of that movie, and also The Jungle Book, and Aura had bought her two or three videos of The Muppets, less for our little girl’s pleasure than to satisfy her own private nostalgia, her affection for Count von Count, her glib contempt for Miss Piggy. But no, it wasn’t the Muppets that we could hear that evening from the television in our room, but one of those films. Peter Pan, yes: it was Peter Pan that was playing — ‘All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again,’ said the anonymous narrator — when Aura, wrapped in a red apron with an anachronistic image of Santa Claus, said without looking me in the eye, ‘I bought something. Remind me to show you later.’
‘What kind of something?’
‘Something,’ said Aura.
She was stirring a saucepan on the stove, the extractor fan was on full blast and forced us to raise our voices, and the light from the hood bathed her face in a coppery tone. ‘You’re so lovely,’ I said. ‘I’ll never get used to it.’ She smiled, was about to say something, but at that moment Leticia appeared at the door, silent and discreet, with her chestnut hair still wet from her bath up in a ponytail. I picked her up from the floor, asked her if she was hungry, and the same coppery light shone on her face: her features were mine, not Aura’s, and that had always moved and disappointed me at the same time. That idea was strangely stuck in my head while we ate: that Leticia should be able to resemble Aura, she should have been able to inherit Aura’s beauty, and instead had inherited my rough features, my thick bones, my prominent ears. Maybe that’s why I was looking at her so closely as I took her to bed. I stayed with her a while in the darkness of her room, broken only by the small round nightlight that gives off a weak pastel-coloured light that changes its tone over the course of the night, so Leticia’s room is blue when she calls me because she’s had a nightmare, and can quite easily be pink or pale green when she calls me because she’s run out of water in her little bottle. Anyway: there in the coloured shadows, while Leticia fell asleep and the whisper of her breathing changed, I spied on her features and the genetic games in her face, all those proteins moving mysteriously to imprint my chin on hers, my hair colour in my little girl’s hair colour. And that’s what I was doing when the door opened a little and a sliver of light appeared and then Aura’s silhouette and her hand calling me.