‘What’s he doing?’ said someone.
Abadía’s Hawk was flying straight towards the spectators.
‘But what’s that crazy man doing?’ said someone else.
This time the voice came from below, from one of the men with President López. Without knowing why, Julio looked at the president at that moment and saw him clutching the wooden railing with both hands, as if he wasn’t standing on a construction well planted on the ground, but at the rails of a ship on the high sea. Again Julio sensed the acrid taste in his mouth, the dizziness and also a sudden sharp pain in his forehead behind his eyes. And that was when Captain Laverde said, in a low voice to no one specifically, or just to himself, with a mixture of admiration and envy, as if watching someone else resolve an enigma, ‘Good God. He wants to grab the flag.’
What happened next occurred for Julio as if outside of time, like a hallucination produced by the migraine. Captain Abadía’s fighter plane approached the presidential grandstand at 400 kilometres per hour, but it seemed to be floating in one place in the cool air; and a few metres away performed a roll in the air and then another one — loop the loop, Captain Laverde called it — and all in the middle of a deathly silence. Julio remembered that he had time to look around, to see faces paralysed by fear and astonishment, and mouths open as if they were screaming. But there were no screams: the world was hushed. In one instant Julio realized that his father was right: Captain Abadía had planned to finish his double roll so close to the waving flag that he could grasp the fabric in his hand, an impossible pirouette dedicated to President López the way a toreador dedicates a bull. All this he understood, and he still had time to wonder if the rest had understood too. And then he felt the shadow of the plane in his eyes, an impossibility since the sun was not shining, and he felt a gust of something that smelled burnt, and he had the presence of mind to see how Abadía’s fighter plane did a strange leap in the air, bent as if it were rubber and hastened to the ground, destroying as it did the wooden roofs of the diplomatic stand, taking the stairs of the presidential grandstand down with it and shattering into bits as it crashed against the field.
The world exploded. There was an explosion of noise: shouts, heels against wood floors, the sound bodies make when they flee. A black cloud that didn’t look like smoke, but like dense ash, exploded down there where the plane had fallen, and remained in place for longer than it should have. From the area of impact came a wave of brutal heat that killed those who were closest to it in seconds, and the rest felt like they were being charred alive. The luckiest ones thought they were dying of asphyxiation, because the heat was consuming all the oxygen in the air. It was like being inside an oven, one of those present would say later. When the set of steps was detached from the stand, the boards and rails gave way and both the Laverdes fell to the ground, and that was when, Julio would say much later, the pain began.
‘Papá,’ he called, and saw Captain Laverde stand up to try to help a woman who had been trapped beneath the wood of the steps, but it was obvious the woman was beyond all help. ‘Papá, something’s wrong with me.’
Julio heard the voice of a man calling a woman. ‘Elvia,’ he shouted, ‘Elvia.’ And Julio recognized the guy with the polka-dot bow tie who’d gone to fetch the car, walking among the fallen bodies, stepping on some of them or tripping over them. There was that burnt smell, and Julio identified it: it was the smell of meat. Captain Laverde turned around and Julio saw, reflected on his face, the disaster of what had happened. Captain Laverde took him by the hand and began to walk to get away from the catastrophe, looking for a way to get to a hospital as quickly as possible. Julio had now begun to cry, less from the pain than from the fear, when they walked past the diplomatic stand and he saw two dead bodies, and recognized the cream-coloured shoes on one of them. Then he passed out. He woke up hours later, in pain and surrounded by worried faces, in a bed in the San José Hospital.
Lucky to Survive
No one ever knew how it happened, if the plane broke up in the air or if it came from the crash, but the fact is that Julio received a gob of motor oil full in the face, and the oil burned his skin and his flesh and it was lucky it didn’t kill him, as it did so many others. There were fifty-five dead after the accident: first among them was Captain Abadía. It was explained that the manoeuvre had produced a ball of air; that the plane, after the double roll, had entered a void; that all that caused the loss of altitude and control and the inevitable downfall. In the hospitals, the injured people received that news with indifference or amazement, and heard that the Treasury would pay for the funerals of the dead, that the poorest families would receive assistance from the city and that the president had visited all the injured the first night. He had certainly visited young Julio Laverde, at least. But he was not awake at the time and was unaware of the visit. His parents told him about it in great detail.
The next day, his mother stayed with him while his father attended the funerals of Abadía, Captain Jorge Pardo and two cavalry soldiers stationed at Santa Ana, all buried at the Central Cemetery after a procession that included several representatives of the government and the cream of the military Air and Ground Forces. Julio, lying on the good side of his face, received morphine injections. He saw the world as if from inside an aquarium. He touched the sterilized dressing and was dying to scratch, but he couldn’t scratch. At the moments of greatest pain he hated Captain Laverde and then he said an Our Father and asked forgiveness for his evil thoughts. He also prayed that his injury wouldn’t become infected, because he had been told that it might. And then he saw the foreign girl and started talking to her. He saw himself with his burnt face. Sometimes her face was burnt too and sometimes it wasn’t, but she always had the pink scarf and the cream-coloured shoes. In those hallucinations the young woman spoke to him sometimes. She asked him how he was. She asked him if he was in pain.
And sometimes she asked him, ‘Do you like planes?’
Night was falling. Maya Fritts lit a scented candle to frighten off the mosquitoes. ‘They all come out at this hour,’ she said. She handed me a stick of repellent and told me to put it everywhere, but especially on my ankles, and when I tried to read the label I realized how ferociously dark it was getting. I also realized that there was now no possibility whatsoever of my returning to Bogotá, and I realized that Maya Fritts had realized that too, as if we’d both been working on the assumption until now that I would spend the night here, with her, like a guest of honour, two strangers sharing a roof because they weren’t such strangers, after alclass="underline" they had a dead man in common. I looked at the sky, marine blue like one of those skies of Magritte’s, and before it got completely dark I saw the first bats, their black silhouettes outlined against the background. Maya stood up, put a wooden chair in between the two hammocks, and on top of the chair arranged a lit candle, a small polystyrene cooler filled with chunks of ice, a bottle of rum and a bottle of Coke. She went back to lie down in her hammock (a skilful manoeuvre of opening it and getting in with a single movement). My leg hurt. In a matter of minutes the musical scandal of crickets and cicadas burst out and a few minutes later had calmed down again, and only a few soloists chimed up here and there, interrupted every once in a while by the croak of a lost frog. The bats fluttered 3 metres above our heads, coming in and out of their refuges in the wooden roof, and the yellow light moved with the puffs of a gentle breeze, and the air was warm and the rum was going down nicely. ‘Well, someone’s not going to be sleeping in Bogotá tonight,’ said Maya Fritts. ‘If you want to call, there’s a telephone in my room.’