Her last weekend there Ricardo Laverde arrived. He came by surprise, arranging it all himself, taking the train to La Dorada on his own and from there getting to Caparrapí by bus and then asking around for directions, describing the gringos whose existence, of course, everybody for miles around knew about. It didn’t strike Elaine as at all strange that Ricardo Laverde and Mike Barbieri should get along so welclass="underline" Barbieri gave Elaine the afternoon off to show her bogotano boyfriend around (that’s what he called him, her novio bogotano) and said he’d see them in the evening, for dinner. And that night, in a matter of hours — hours spent, truth be told, in the middle of a field, around a campfire and in the presence of a jug of guarapo — Ricardo and Barbieri discovered how much they had in common, because Barbieri’s father was an airmail pilot and Ricardo didn’t like aguardiente, and they hugged and talked about planes and Ricardo opened his eyes wide as he talked about his courses and his instructors, and then Elaine interrupted to praise Ricardo and repeat the praise others had offered of his talent as a pilot, and then Ricardo and Mike talked about Elaine right in front of her, what a nice girl she was and how pretty, yes, pretty too, with those eyes, said Mike, yes, especially the eyes, said Ricardo and told secrets as if instead of having just met they’d roomed together in a frat house, and sang For she’s a jolly good fellow and regretted in tandem that Elaine had to go to another site, this site should be your site, fuck La Dorada, fuck The Golden One, fuck it all the way, and they drank a toast to Elaine and to the Peace Corps, for we’re all jolly good fellows, which nobody can deny. And the next day, in spite of the hangovers, Mike Barbieri accompanied them in person to catch the bus. The three of them arrived in the village plaza on horseback, like colonialists of times gone by (although theirs were squalid old nags, which would never have served colonialists of times gone by), and on Ricardo’s face, as he politely carried her luggage, Elaine saw something she’d never seen before: admiration. Admiration for herself, for the ease with which she moved through the village, for the affection she’d earned from the people in three short weeks, for the natural and yet undeniably authoritative way she made herself understood by the locals. Elaine saw that admiration in his face and felt that she loved him, that she’d unexpectedly started to feel new and more intense things for this man who also seemed to love her, and at the same time felt that she’d arrived at a happy point: when this place could no longer surprise her too much. True, there would always be contingencies, in Colombia people always managed to be unpredictable (in their behaviour, in their manners: one never knew what they were actually thinking). But Elaine felt in charge of the situation. ‘Ask me if I’ve got the hang of things here,’ she said to Ricardo as they climbed aboard the bus. ‘Have you cogido el tiro a la vaina, Elena Fritts?’ he asked. And she answered, ‘Yeah. I’ve got the hang of things here.’
She had no way of knowing just how mistaken she was.
5. What’s There to Live For?
Elaine would remember those last three weeks in Bogotá and in Ricardo Laverde’s company the way one remembers the days of one’s childhood, a cloud of images distorted by emotions, a promiscuous mixture of key dates without a well-established chronology. The return to the routine of classes at the CEUCA — there were very few left now, just a matter of refining certain bits of knowledge or perhaps justifying certain bits of bureaucracy — was broken by the disorder of her encounters with Ricardo, who might perfectly well be waiting for her behind a eucalyptus when she was on her way home or might have slipped a note into her book telling her to meet him at a dingy café at the corner of 17th and 8th. Elaine always showed up for these dates, and in the relative solitude of downtown cafés the two of them cast more or less lascivious glances at each other and then went into a cinema to sit in the back row and touch each other under a long black coat that had belonged to Ricardo’s grandfather, the aviator hero of the war with Peru. Indoors, in the narrow house in Chapinero, in Don Julio and Doña Gloria’s territory, they carried on the fiction that he was the son of the host family and she, the innocent apprentice of the moment; the son’s nocturnal visits to the apprentice carried on as well, of course, with their silent nocturnal orgasms. So they began to live a double life, a life of clandestine lovers who didn’t arouse anyone’s suspicion, a life in which Ricardo Laverde was Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate and Miss Fritts was Mrs Robinson and her daughter at the same time, who was also called Elaine: that must mean something, wasn’t it too much of a coincidence? During those few days in Bogotá, Elaine and Ricardo protested against the Vietnam War whenever a demonstration was called, and also attended parties organized by the American community in Bogotá, social events that seemed arranged deliberately so the volunteers could go back to talking their own language, ask out loud how the Mets or the Vikings were doing or take out a guitar and sing, all together and around a fireplace while passing a joint that was finished in two rounds, Frank Zappa’s song:
What’s there to live for?
Who needs the Peace Corps?
The three weeks ended on 1 November, when, at eight thirty in the morning, a new litter of apprentices swore loyalty to the statutes of the Peace Corps, after more promises and a vague declaration of intentions, and received their official appointment as volunteers. It was a rainy cold morning, and Ricardo was wearing a leather jacket that, upon contact with the rain, began to give off an intense smell. ‘They were all there,’ Elaine wrote to her grandparents. ‘Among those graduating were Dale Cartwright and the son of the Wallaces (the elder one, you remember). Among the audience were the Ambassador’s wife and a tall man in a tie who, I seem to have understood, is an important Democrat from Boston.’ Elaine also mentioned the deputy director of Peace Corps Colombia (his Kissinger glasses, his knitted tie), the directors of the CEUCA and even a bored municipal functionary, but at no point in the letter did Ricardo Laverde appear. Which, seen with years’ worth of distance, is nothing short of ironic, for on that very night, under the pretext of congratulating her and at the same time saying farewell in the name of the whole Laverde family, Ricardo invited her to dinner at the Gato Negro restaurant, and by the light of some precarious candles that threatened to topple into the plates of food, taking advantage of a silence when the string trio finished singing ‘Pueblito Viejo’, knelt in the middle of the aisle where the bow-tied waiters kept walking up and down and in more sentences than strictly necessary asked her to marry him. In a flash, Elaine thought of her grandparents, regretted that they were so far away and that at their age and in their states of health even considering the trip would be impossible, felt the kind of sadness we tolerate because it appears at happy moments and, once the sadness passed, bent down to kiss Ricardo hard. As she did so she inhaled the wet leather smell of his jacket and tasted meunière sauce. ‘Does that mean yes?’ said Ricardo after the kiss, still kneeling and still in the waiters’ way. Elaine burst into tears in reply, but smiling and crying at the same time. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘What a stupid question.’