‘Is she asleep?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sure?’
‘Yes.’
She pulled me by the hand to the living room and we sat on the sofa. The table was already cleared and the dishwasher running in the kitchen, sounding like an old dying pigeon. (We didn’t usually spend time in the living room after dinner: we preferred to get into bed and watch some old American sitcom, something light and cheerful and soothing. Aura had got used to missing the evening news, and could joke about my boycott, but understood how seriously I took it. I didn’t watch the news, it was as simple as that. It would take me a long time to be able to endure it again, to allow my country’s news to invade my life again.) ‘Well, look,’ Aura said. Her hands disappeared behind the edge of the sofa and reappeared with a small package wrapped up in a sheet of newspaper. ‘For me?’ I said. ‘No, it’s not a present,’ she said. ‘Or it is, but for both of us. Shit, I don’t know, I don’t know how to do things like this.’ Embarrassment was not a feeling that often bothered Aura, but that’s what this was, embarrassment, that’s what her gestures were full of. The next thing was her voice (her nervous voice) explaining where she had bought the vibrator, how much it had cost, how she’d paid cash for it so there would be no record of this purchase anywhere, how she’d despised at that moment her many years of religious education that had made her feel, as she entered the shop on 19th Avenue, that very bad things were going to happen to her as punishment, that with this purchase she would end up earning a permanent place in hell. It was a purple apparatus with a creased texture, with more buttons and possibilities than I would have imagined, but it wasn’t the shape I’d assigned it in my overly literal imagination. I looked at it (there, sleeping in my hand) and Aura looked at me looking at it. I couldn’t keep the word consolador, which is also sometimes used for this object, from appearing in my mind: Aura as a woman in need of consoling, or Aura as a disconsolate woman. ‘What is it?’ I said. A question as stupid as questions get.
‘Well, it is what it is,’ said Aura. ‘It’s for us.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s not for us.’
I stood up and dropped it on the glass-topped table and the apparatus bounced slightly (after all, it was made out of something springy). At another moment I would probably have been amused by the sound, but not there, not then. Aura grabbed my arm.
‘There’s nothing wrong with it, Antonio, it’s for us.’
‘It’s not for us.’
‘You had an accident, that’s all, I love you,’ said Aura. ‘There’s nothing wrong, we’re together.’
The purple vibrator sat there half lost among the ashtrays and coasters and coffee-table books, all chosen by Aura: Colombia from the Air, a big book on José Celestino Mutis and another recent one by an Argentine photographer about Paris (that one Aura hadn’t chosen, but had been given). I felt embarrassed, an absurd and childish embarrassment. ‘Do you need consoling?’ I said to Aura. My tone even surprised me.
‘What?’
‘That’s a consolador. Do you need consoling?’
‘Don’t do this, Antonio. We’re together. You had an accident and we’re together.’
‘The accident happened to me, don’t be an idiot,’ I said. ‘I was the one who was shot.’ I calmed down a little. ‘Sorry,’ I said. And then, ‘The doctor told me.’
‘But it was three years ago.’
‘That I shouldn’t worry, that the body knows how to do its things.’
‘Three years ago, Antonio. What’s happening now is something else. I love you and we’re together.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘We can find a way,’ said Aura.
I didn’t say anything.
‘There are so many couples,’ said Aura. ‘We’re not the only ones.’
But I didn’t say anything. A light bulb somewhere must have blown at that moment, because the living room was suddenly a little darker, the sofa and the two chairs and the only painting — a couple of billiard players by Saturnino Ramírez who are playing, for reasons I’ve never managed to discover, in dark glasses — had lost their contours. I felt tired and in need of a painkiller. Aura had sat back down on the sofa and was now holding her face in her hands, but I don’t think she was crying. ‘I thought you would be pleased,’ she said. ‘I thought I was doing a good thing.’ I turned around and left her alone, maybe even mid-sentence, and I locked myself in our bathroom. In the narrow blue cupboard I looked for my pills, the little white plastic bottle and its red lid that Leticia had once chewed on till it broke, to our great alarm (it turned out she hadn’t found the pills hidden under the cotton, but a two- or three-year-old child is at risk all the time, the whole world is a danger to her). With water straight from the tap I took three pills, a bigger dose than recommended or advisable, but my size and weight allow me these excesses when the pain is very bad. Then I took a long shower, which always makes me feel better; by the time I returned to our room Aura was asleep or pretending to be asleep, and I endeavoured not to wake her or to maintain the convenient fiction. I undressed, lay down beside her but with my back to her, and then I don’t know anything else: I fell asleep immediately.
It was very early, especially for a Good Friday, when I left the next morning. The light was not yet filling the air of the apartment. I wanted to think that was why, because of the general somnolence floating in the world, I didn’t wake anyone up to say goodbye. The vibrator was still on the table in the living room, coloured and plastic like a toy Leticia had lost there.
Up by the Alto del Trigo a thick fog descended over the road, unexpectedly as if a cloud had lost its way, and the almost complete lack of visibility forced me to slow down so much that farmworkers on bicycles were overtaking me. The fog accumulated on the glass like dew, making it necessary to turn on the windscreen wipers even though it wasn’t raining, and shapes — the car in front, a couple of soldiers flanking the roadway with machine guns across their chests, a cargo mule — emerged gradually from that milky soup that let no light through. I thought of low-flying planes: ‘Up, up, up.’ I thought of the fog and remembered the famous accident at El Tablazo, way back in the 1940s, but I didn’t remember whether the visibility at these treacherous altitudes had been to blame. ‘Up, up, up,’ I said to myself. And then, as I descended towards Guaduas, the fog lifted the same way it had fallen, and the sky suddenly opened and a wave of heat transformed the day: there was a burst of vegetation, a burst of fragrances, fruit stalls appeared at the side of the road. I began to sweat. When I opened the window at some point, to buy one of the cans of beer slowly warming up on top of a crate full of ice, my sunglasses misted up from the blast of heat. But the sweat was what bothered me most. My body’s pores were, suddenly, at the centre of my consciousness.
I didn’t arrive in the area until past midday. After a traffic jam of almost an hour and a half near Guarinocito (a truck with a broken axle can be lethal on a two-lane highway with no hard shoulder), after the headlands arose on the horizon and my car entered the region of cattle ranches, I saw the rudimentary little school I was supposed to see, continued for the distance indicated beside a big white pipe bordering the road and turned right, towards the Magdalena River. I passed a metallic structure where once there had been a billboard, but that now, seen from far away, resembled a sort of giant abandoned corset (a few turkey vultures, perched on the struts, guarded the plot of land); I passed a trough where two cows were drinking, their bodies very close together, pushing and getting in each other’s way, their heads protected from the sun by a squalid aluminium roof. At the end of 300 metres of unpaved road, I found myself passing several groups of boys in shorts who shouted and laughed and raised a great cloud of dust as they ran. One of them stuck out a small brown hand with his thumb extended. I stopped, pulled the car onto the shoulder; now still, I felt again on my face and body the violent slap of the midday heat. I felt the humidity again; I sensed the smells. The child spoke first.