‘Her room?’ said Elaine. ‘That room?’
‘That room, yes. The very one that’s the envy of the whole class. And I thought maybe you’d like to get it. You know, live ten minutes away from the CEUCA, shower with hot water.’
Elaine thought for a minute.
‘I didn’t come here for material comforts,’ she finally said.
‘Hot showers,’ Dale said again. ‘Not having to manoeuvre like a quarterback to get off the bus.’
‘But the thing is the family. .’ said Elaine.
‘What about the family?’
‘I pay them 750 pesos rent,’ said Elaine. ‘It’s a third of their earnings.’
‘And what’s that got to do with it?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t want to deprive them of that money.’
‘But who do you think you are, Elaine Fritts?’ said Dale with a theatrical sigh. ‘Do you think you’re unique and irreplaceable? That’s incredible. Elaine, dear, fifteen new volunteers are arriving in Bogotá today. There’s another flight from New York on Saturday. All over the country there are hundreds, maybe thousands of gringos like you and me, and lots of them are coming to Bogotá to work. Believe me, your room will be taken before you finish packing.’
Elaine took a sip of her beer. Much later, when everything had happened, she’d remember that beer, the gloomy atmosphere in the shop, the reflection of the last rays of twilight in the panes of the aluminium-topped counter. That’s where it all started, she would think. But at that moment, at Dale Cartwright’s transparent offer, she did a quick calculation in her head. She smiled.
‘And how do you know I make quarterback manoeuvres to get off the bus?’ she finally said.
‘All is known in the Peace Corps, my dear,’ he said. ‘All is known.’
And that’s how three days later Elaine Fritts travelled for the last time from out near the racetrack, but this time weighed down with luggage. She would have liked it if the family had seemed a little sad, she couldn’t deny it, she would have liked a sincere hug, perhaps a going-away present like the one she’d given them, a musical box that began to spew out the notes of the theme song to The Sting when it was opened. There was none of that: they asked her for the key and saw her to the door, more out of mistrust than courtesy. The father left in a hurry, so it was just the mother, a woman whose figure filled the doorframe and who watched her go down the stairs and out to the street without offering any help with her luggage. At that moment the little boy appeared (he was an only child, his shirt was untucked and he was carrying a blue-and-red wooden toy truck), and asked something she didn’t really understand. The last thing Elaine heard before turning round was her hostess’s reply.
‘She’s leaving, son, she’s going to live in a rich folks’ house,’ said the woman. ‘Ungrateful gringa.’
A rich folks’ house. It wasn’t true, because rich folks didn’t take in Peace Corps volunteers, but at that moment Elaine didn’t have the arguments to embark on a debate about the economy of her second family. Her new accommodation, she had to confess, had luxuries that would have seemed unimaginable to Elaine a few weeks earlier: it was a comfortable construction on Caracas Avenue, with a narrow façade, but very long inside, with a little garden at the back and a fruit tree in a corner of the garden, beside a tiled wall. The façade was white, the wooden window frames painted green, and to get in you had to open an iron gate that separated the front garden from the pavement and that let out a squeal whenever someone arrived. The main door led into a dark but pleasant corridor. On the left-hand side were French doors that opened onto the living room, and further along was the dining room, and further along the corridor skirted the narrow interior patio where the geraniums grew in hanging planters; on the right, the bottom of the staircase was the first thing one saw. Elaine understood it all at a glimpse of the wooden steps: the red carpet had once been a fine one, but was now worn from use (on certain steps the grey threads of the base weave were beginning to show through); the copper rods that kept the carpet in place had lost their rings, or rather the rings had broken free of the wooden floor, and sometimes, when you went up quickly, you’d feel a slip and hear the brief jingle of loose metal. The staircase, for Elaine, was like a memorandum or a witness to what this family had been and no longer was. ‘A respectable family who’d come down in the world’, the man at the Embassy had said when Elaine went to complete the paperwork for the move. Come down in the world: Elaine thought a lot about those words, tried to translate them literally, failed in the attempt. Only when she noticed the carpet on the staircase did she understand, but she understood instinctively, without organizing it into coherent phrases, without making a scientific diagnosis in her head. In time it would all make sense, because Elaine had seen similar cases several times in her life: families with fine pasts who one day notice that the past doesn’t bring in money.
The family was called Laverde. The mother was a woman with plucked eyebrows and sad eyes whose abundant red hair — exotic in this country, or perhaps it was dyed — was eternally fixed in a perfect coiffure that smelled of freshly applied hairspray. Doña Gloria was a housewife who never wore an apron: Elaine never saw her wielding a duster, and nevertheless the dressing tables, the bedside tables, the porcelain ashtrays, never had a trace of the yellow dust one breathed out in the street: everything cared for with the obsession of those who depend entirely on appearances. Don Julio, the father, had a scar on his face, not straight and thin as a cut would have left, but extended and asymmetrical (Elaine thought, mistakenly, of some skin ailment). Actually it wasn’t just the cheek: the damage extended down beneath the line of his beard, it was like a stain trickling over his jaw and bathing his neck, and it was very difficult not to stare at it. Don Julio was an actuary by profession, and one of the first conversations in the dining room, under the bluish light of the chandelier, was devoted to telling their guest about insurance policies and probabilities and statistics.
‘How do you know what kind of life insurance a man should buy?’ the father said. ‘The insurers need to know these types of things, of course, it’s not fair that a man in his thirties in good health should pay the same as an old man who’s already had two heart attacks. That’s where I come in, Señorita Fritts: to look into the future. I’m the one who says when this man will die, when this other one will die, what is the probability that this car will crash on these highways. I work with the future, Señorita Fritts, I’m the one who knows what is going to happen. It’s a question of numbers: the future is in the numbers. Numbers tell us everything. Numbers tell me, for example, if the world considers that I’ll die before I’m fifty. And you, Señorita Fritts, do you know when you’re going to die? I can tell you. If you give me some time, a pencil and paper and a margin of error, I can tell you when it’s most likely that you’ll die, and how. Our societies are obsessed with the past. But you gringos aren’t interested in the past at all, you look forward, you’re only interested in the future. You’ve understood it better than us, better than the Europeans: the future is what we have to focus on. Well, that’s what I do, Señorita Fritts: I earn my living by keeping my eye on the future, I support my family by telling people what’s going to happen. Today these people are insurers, of course, but one fine day there will be other people interested in this talent, it’s impossible there won’t be. In the United States they understand better than anyone. That’s why you people are going forwards, Señorita Fritts, and that’s why we’re so far behind. Tell me if you think I’m mistaken.’