‘Maya,’ I said, ‘can I ask you something?’
‘Maybe.’
‘What’s in there?’
I didn’t have to clarify what I was talking about. I didn’t look at the wicker box, I didn’t point at it in any way (not even with my mouth, as some do: pursing the lips and moving one’s head like a horse). Maya Fritts, however, looked across the table and answered me while staring at the empty place.
‘Well, that’s what I asked you to come for,’ she said. ‘Let’s see if I can explain it properly.’ She paused, encircled her glass of beer with her fingers but didn’t go so far as to take a sip. ‘I want you to talk to me about my father.’ Another pause. ‘Sorry, I already told you that.’ Yet another pause. ‘Look, I didn’t ever. . I was very young when he. . The thing is, I want you to tell me about his final days, you lived through them with him, and I want you to tell me in as much detail as possible.’
Then she stood up and brought the wicker crate, which must have weighed quite a lot because Maya had to lean it against her belly and hold it with both handles like a washerwoman from another century. ‘Look, Antonio, it’s like this,’ she said. ‘This box is full of things about my father. Photos, letters written to him, letters he wrote and that I’ve collected. All this material I’ve acquired, it’s not like I’ve found it in the street, it’s cost me a lot of effort. Señora Sandoval had a lot of things, for example. She had this photo, see.’ I recognized it immediately, of course, and I would have recognized it even if someone had cropped it or removed the figure of Ricardo Laverde. There were the pigeons of Bolívar Plaza, there was the corn cart, there was the Capitolio, there was the grey background of my grey city. ‘It was for your mother,’ I said. ‘It was for Elaine Fritts.’
‘I know,’ said Maya. ‘Had you seen it before?’
‘He showed it to me. The day after he’d had it taken.’
‘And did he show you other things? Did he ever give you anything, a letter, a document?’
I thought of the night I refused to go into Laverde’s boarding house. ‘No, nothing,’ I said. ‘What else have you got?’
‘Stuff,’ said Maya, ‘unimportant stuff, stuff that doesn’t mean anything. But having them makes me feel calmer. They’re the proof. Look,’ she said, and she showed me a stamped piece of paper. It was a bilclass="underline" at the top, on the left, was a hotel logo, a circle of some undefined or indefinable colour (time had taken its toll on the paper) above which were distributed the words Hotel, Escorial and Manizales. To the right of the logo, the following inscrutable text:
Accounts are charged on the Friday of every month and must be settled immediately. All rooms include meals. Anyone occupying a room will be charged by the hotel for the minimum stay of one day.
Then there was the date, 29 September 1970, the hour of the guest’s arrival, 3:30 p.m., and the room number, 225; above the square that followed, handwritten, the date of departure (30 September, she’d just stayed one night) and the word Paid. The guest was called Elena de Laverde — I imagined her giving her married name to avoid any potential harassment — and during her brief stay at the hotel she’d made one phone call and eaten one dinner and breakfast, but she hadn’t used the cablegram, laundry, press or car service. A paper without importance and at the same time a window into another world, I thought. And this crate was full of similar windows.
‘Proof of what?’ I asked.
‘Pardon?’
‘You said before that these papers are the proof.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, proof of what?’
But Maya didn’t answer. Instead she kept going through documents with her hand and spoke without looking at me. ‘All this I acquired not long ago,’ she told me. ‘I found out some names, wrote to the United States telling them who I was, I negotiated by letter and by phone. And one day a package arrived with the letters Mom wrote when she first arrived in Colombia, back in ’69. That’s how it’s been with all this, a historian’s work. Many people think it’s absurd. And I don’t know, I don’t really know how to justify it. I’m not even thirty yet and I live way out here, far from everything, like an old maid, and this has become important to me. Constructing my father’s life, finding out who he was. That’s what I’m trying to do. Of course, I wouldn’t have got into anything like this if I hadn’t been left like this, alone, with nobody, and so suddenly. It all started with what happened to my mother. It was so absurd. . The news reached me here, I was in this hammock where I am now, when I heard that the plane had crashed. I knew she was on that plane. And three weeks later, my father.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘Reading El Espacio,’ she said. ‘It came out in El Espacio, with photos and everything.’
‘Photos?’
‘Of the pool of blood. Of two or three witnesses. Of Señora Sandoval, the one who told me about you. Of his room, and that was very painful. A sensationalist tabloid I’d always despised; I’d always despised its topless women and even its crossword puzzles, which are too easy. And I have to see the most important news of my life there. Tell me it’s not ironic. That’s how it was, I went to buy something in La Dorada and there was the paper, hanging up next to the beach balls and toy masks and kites for tourists. Then, one day, I realize. It might have been a Saturday (I was having breakfast here on the terrace, and I only do that on weekends), yeah, let’s say one Saturday, I realized I was all alone. Months had passed and I had grieved a lot and I didn’t know why I suffered so much, since we’d been apart for a long time, each living our own lives. We didn’t have a life in common or anything like that. And that’s what happened to me: I was alone, I’d been left alone, there was no longer anyone between me and my own death. That’s what being orphaned is: there’s no one ahead, you become next in line. It’s your turn. Nothing changed in my life, Antonio, I’d spent many years without them, but now they’re nowhere. They’re not just not with me: they’re nowhere. It was as if they’d absented themselves. And as if they were watching me, too, this is difficult to explain, but they watched me, Elaine and Ricardo were watching me. It’s tough, the gaze of absent ones. Anyway, you can imagine what happened next.’
‘It always seemed strange to me,’ I said.
‘What did?’
‘Well, that a pilot’s wife should die in a plane crash.’
‘Oh. Well, that’s not so strange when you know certain things.’
‘Like what?’
‘Have you got time?’ Maya asked me. ‘Do you want to read something that has nothing to do with my father and at the same time everything to do with him?’
From the crate she took out a copy of Cromos magazine with a design I didn’t recognize — the name in white letters in a red box — and a colour photo of a woman in a swimming costume, her hands delicately placed on a sceptre, the crown balanced on her puffed-up hair: a beauty queen. The magazine was from May 1968, and the woman, as I immediately discovered, was Margarita María Reyes Zawadzky, Miss Colombia that year. The cover had various headlines, yellow letters over the blue background of the Caribbean Sea, but I didn’t have time to read them, because Maya’s fingers were already opening the magazine to the page marked with a yellow post-it note. ‘You have to handle it gently,’ Maya told me. ‘Paper doesn’t last at all in this humidity. I don’t know how this has held together all these years. OK, here it is.’ THE SANTA ANA TRAGEDY, was the headline in block capitals. And then a few lines to claim: ‘Thirty years after the air accident that scarred Colombia, Cromos recovers the exclusive testimony of a survivor.’ The article appeared beside an ad for Club del Clan, and it struck me as funny because I remembered having heard my parents talk about that television programme on several occasions. The drawing of a young woman playing guitar above the words Televisión limitada. ‘A message to the youth of Colombia,’ boasted the ad, ‘is not complete if it doesn’t include the Clan Club.’