So Elaine had to delay her departure for La Dorada by fifteen days, and in this cruelly short time organized, with the help of her future mother-in-law (after convincing her that no, she wasn’t pregnant), a small and almost clandestine wedding in San Francisco Church. Elaine had liked this church since the beginning of her life in Bogotá. She liked its thick, damp stone walls, and she also liked going in off the street and coming out onto the avenue, that violent clash of light with darkness and noise with silence. The day before her wedding, Elaine went for a walk through the centre (a reconnaissance mission, Ricardo would say); as she crossed the threshold of the church, she thought of the silence and noise and the darkness and light, and the illuminated altar caught her eye. The place seemed familiar to her that day, not as if she’d been there before, but in a more profound or private way, as if she’d read a description of it in a novel. She stared at the timid flames of the candles, at the weak yellow lamps fastened like torches to the columns. The light of the stained-glass windows lit up two beggars who were sleeping with legs crossed and hands together on top of their bellies like marble tombs of popes. To her right, a life-sized Christ on all fours, as if he were crawling; the day pouring in through the other door struck him full in the face, and the thorns of his crown and the drops of emerald green that the Christ was crying or perspiring glistened in the light. Elaine went on, walked along the left aisle towards the set-in altar at the far end, and then she saw the cage. In it, enclosed like an animal on show, there was a second Christ, with longer hair, yellower skin, darker blood. ‘It’s the best in Bogotá,’ Ricardo had told her once. ‘I swear, Monserrate’s got nothing on this.’ Elaine bent down, read the little plaque: Señor de la agonía. She took two more steps towards the pulpit, found the tin box and another inscription: Deposit your offering here and the image will be illuminated. She put her hand in her pocket, found a coin and lifted it in two fingers, as if it were a host, to let there be light: it was one peso, the coat of arms blackened as if the coin had been through fire. She dropped it into the slot. The Christ figure came to life beneath the brief blast of the spotlights. Elaine felt, or rather knew, that she was going to be happy all her life.
Then came the reception, which Elaine went through in a fog, as if it were all happening to someone else. The Laverde family held it in their house: Doña Gloria explained to Elaine that it had been impossible, at such short notice, to rent the hall of a social club or some other decent place, but Ricardo, who listened to the laborious explanation in silence, nodding, waited until his mother had gone to tell Elaine the truth. ‘They’re fucked for money,’ he said. ‘The Laverdes have pawned their whole lives.’ The revelation shocked Elaine less than she might have expected: a thousand different signals over the last few months had prepared her for it. But she was struck by Ricardo referring to his family in the third person, as if their bankruptcy didn’t affect him. ‘And us?’ asked Elaine. ‘What about us?’ ‘What are we going to do?’ said Elaine. ‘My work doesn’t pay very much.’ Ricardo looked her in the eye, put a hand on her forehead as if she might have a temperature. ‘It’s enough for a little while,’ he said, ‘and then we’ll see. If I were you I wouldn’t worry.’ Elaine thought for a second, and found she wasn’t worried. And she wondered why not. And then she asked him, ‘Why wouldn’t you be worried if you were me?’ ‘Because a pilot like me is never going to be short of work, Elena Fritts. It’s a fact and that’s just how it is.’
Later, when all the guests had gone, Ricardo led her up to the room where they’d slept together for the first time, sat her down on the bed (swept aside the few wedding presents) and then Elaine thought he was going to talk to her about money, that he was going to tell her they couldn’t go anywhere on a honeymoon. He didn’t though. He tied a blindfold over her eyes, a thick cloth that smelled of mothballs that might have been an old scarf, and said, ‘From here on you don’t see anything.’ And so, blindly, Elaine let herself be led downstairs, and blindly heard the family’s goodbyes (she thought Doña Gloria was crying), and blindly went out into the cold night air and got into a car someone else was driving, and thought it was a taxi, and on the way to who knows where asked what all this was and Ricardo told her to be quiet, not to spoil her surprise. Elaine blindly felt the taxi coming to a stop and a window opening and Ricardo identifying himself and being greeted with respect and a big gate opening with a metallic sound. As she got out of the taxi, seconds later, she felt a rough surface under her feet and a gust of cold wind messed up her hair. ‘There are some stairs,’ said Ricardo. ‘Careful, take it slow, we don’t want you falling.’ Ricardo pressed her head as one does to keep someone from banging their head on a low roof, like the police do so their prisoners won’t bang their heads on the doorframes of the patrol cars. Elaine let herself be led, her hand touched something new that soon turned into a seat and she felt something rigid against her knee, and as she sat down an image came into her head, the first clear idea of where she was and what was about to happen. And it was confirmed when Ricardo started to talk to the control tower and the light aircraft began to taxi down the runway, but Ricardo only gave her permission to take off the blindfold later, after take-off, and when she did so Elaine found herself facing the horizon, a world she’d never seen before bathed in a light she’d never seen before, and that same light was bathing Ricardo’s face, whose hands moved over the panel and who looked at instruments (needles that were spinning, coloured lights) she didn’t understand. They were going to the Palanquero base, in Puerto Salgar, a few kilometres from La Dorada: this was his wedding gift to her, these minutes spent on board a borrowed plane, a Cessna Skylark that the groom’s grandfather had obtained in order to impress his bride. Elaine thought it was the best gift imaginable and that no other Peace Corps volunteer had ever arrived at their workplace in a light aircraft. A gust of wind shook them. Then they touched down. This is my new life, thought Elaine. I’ve just landed in my new life.
And it was. The honeymoon blended into the arrival at the permanent site, the first sanctioned shagging blended into the new volunteer’s first missions: the first steps towards extending the sewer system, the first meetings with Acción Comunal. Elaine and Ricardo allowed themselves the luxury, courtesy of her CEUCA class, to spend a couple of nights in a tourist inn in La Dorada, surrounded by families from Bogotá or Antioquia cattle ranchers, and during those days even had time to find a single-storey house at a price that seemed reasonable. The house — a clear improvement, now that they were a married couple, compared to the little room in Caparrapí — was salmon pink and had an overgrown, 9-square-metre patio that nobody had taken any care of for a long time and that Elaine immediately set about salvaging. She discovered that now, in her new life, mornings had taken on a new character, and she started waking up at first light just to feel the freshness of the air before the brutal heat began to devour the day. ‘I wash early in the morning with cold water,’ she wrote to her grandparents, ‘after all my griping about the cold water in Bogotá. We use a hollow gourd called a totuma to shower with. I’m sending a photo.’ In the first days she acquired something that would prove to be essentiaclass="underline" a horse to take her to neighbouring villages. He was called Tapahueco, but Elaine found the name so hard to pronounce that she ended up calling him Truman, and he had three speeds: a slow trot, a fast trot and a gallop. ‘For 50 pesos a month,’ Elaine wrote, ‘a campesino looks after him for me and feeds him and brings him to me every morning at eight o’clock. I have blisters on my rear and every muscle in my body aches, but I’m learning to ride better all the time. Truman knows more than I do and is helping to teach me. We understand each other, and that’s what matters. With a horse a person learns to manage time better. I don’t have to depend on anyone and it’s cheaper. I’m not one of the Magnificent Seven, but I haven’t lost my enthusiasm.’