‘You can keep doing it,’ said Ricardo. ‘Afterwards.’
‘And where are we going to live? We can’t have a baby in this house.’
‘Well, we’ll move.’
‘But, with what money?’ said Elaine, and in her voice there was something resembling irritation. She was talking to Ricardo the way one talks to a stubborn child. ‘I don’t know what world you live in, cariño, but this isn’t something you improvise.’ She grabbed her long hair with both hands. Then she looked in her bag, took out an elastic band and put her hair up in a ponytail to get it off her sweaty neck. ‘Having a baby is not something you improvise. You don’t. You just don’t.’
Ricardo didn’t answer. A dense silence settled inside the jeep: the Nissan was the only thing audible, the rumbling of its engine, the friction of its wheels against the rough tarmac. Beside the road an immense field opened up then. Elaine thought she saw a couple of cows lying underneath a ceiba tree, the white of their horns breaking the uniform black of the pasture. In the background, above a low mist, the jagged hills stood out against the sky. The Nissan moved over the uneven road, the world was grey and blue outside the illuminated space, and then the highway went into a sort of brown and green tunnel, a corridor of trees whose branches met in the air like a gigantic dome. Elaine would always remember that image, the tropical vegetation completely surrounding them and hiding the sky, because that was the moment Ricardo told her — his eyes fixed on the road, without even glancing at Elaine, even avoiding her gaze — about the business he was doing with Mike Barbieri, about the future these business deals had and the plans this business had allowed him to make. ‘I’m not improvising, Elena Fritts,’ he said. ‘I’ve thought about all this for a long time. It’s all planned out down to the last detail. Now, your not finding out about the plans until just now is another detail, and that’s, well, because you didn’t need to. Now you do. It’s to do with you now too. I’m going to explain the whole thing. And then you can tell me if we can have a baby or not. Deal?’
‘OK,’ said Elaine. ‘Deal.’
‘Good. So let me tell you what’s going on with marijuana.’
And he told her. He told her about the closure, the year before, of the Mexican border (Nixon trying to free the United States from the invasion of weed); he told her about the distributors whose business had been hindered, hundreds of intermediaries whose clients couldn’t wait and started looking in new directions; he told her about Jamaica, one of the alternatives closest to hand the consumers had, but most of all about the Sierra Nevada, the department of La Guajira, the Magdalena Valley. He told her about the people who had come, in a matter of months, from San Francisco, from Miami, from Boston, looking for suitable partners for a business with guaranteed profitability, and they were lucky: they found Mike Barbieri. Elaine thought briefly of the regional coordinator of volunteers for Caldas, an Episcopalian from South Bend, Indiana, who had already vetoed the sex education programmes in rural zones: what would he think if he knew? But Ricardo kept talking. Mike Barbieri, he told her, was much more than a partner: he was a real pioneer. He had taught things to the campesinos. Along with some other volunteers with agricultural skills, he’d taught them techniques, where to plant so the mountains protect the plants, what fertilizer to use, how to tell the male plants from the females. And now, well, now he had contacts with 10 or 15 hectares scattered between here and Medellín, and they could produce 400 kilos per harvest. He’d changed those campesinos’ lives, there was not the slightest doubt about that, they were earning more than ever and with less work, and all that thanks to weed, thanks to what’s going on with weed. ‘They put it in plastic bags, put the bags on a plane, we provide the simplest thing, a twin-engine Cessna. I get in the plane, take it full of one thing and bring it back with something else. Mike pays about 25 dollars for a kilo, let’s say. Ten thousand in total, and that’s just for the top-quality stuff. No matter how bad it goes, from every trip we come back with sixty, seventy grand, sometimes more. How many trips can be done? You do the maths. What I’m trying to tell you is that they need me. I was in the right place at the right time, and it was a stroke of luck. But it’s not about luck any more. They need me, I’ve become indispensable, and this is only just getting started. I’m the one who knows where to land, where you can take off. I’m the one who knows how to load one of these planes, how much it’ll take, how to distribute the cargo, how to conceal fuel tanks in the fuselage to be able to make longer journeys. And you can’t imagine, Elena Fritts, you just can’t imagine what it’s like to take off at night, the rush of adrenalin you get taking off at night in between the mountain ranges, with the river down below like a stream of molten silver, the Magdalena River on a moonlit night is the most striking thing you can ever see. And you don’t know what it’s like to see it from above and follow it, and come out over the open sea, the infinite space of the sea, when dawn hasn’t broken yet, and watch the sun come up over the sea, the horizon flares up as if it’s on fire, the light so bright it’s blinding. I’ve only done it a couple of times so far, but I know the itinerary now, I know the winds and the distances, I know the plane’s tics like I know this jeep’s. And the others are noticing. That I can take off and land that machine anywhere I want, take off from 2 metres of shoreline and land it in the stony desert of California. I can get it into spaces radar doesn’t reach: doesn’t matter how small they are, my plane fits there. A Cessna or whatever you give me, a Beechcraft, whatever. If there’s a hole between two radar beams, I’ll find it and get my plane in there. I’m good, Elena Fritts, I’m really good. And I’m going to get better every time, with every flight. It almost scares me to think about it.’
One day at the end of September, during a week of unseasonal downpours when the streams flooded and several hamlets were undergoing sanitation emergencies, Elaine attended a departmental meeting of volunteers at the Peace Corps headquarters in Manizales, and was in the middle of a rather agitated debate on the constitution of cooperatives for local artisans when she felt something in her stomach. She didn’t manage to get even as far as the door: the rest of the volunteers saw her crouch down with one hand on the back of a chair and the other holding her hair and vomit a gelatinous yellow mass across the red-tile floor. Her colleagues tried to take her to a doctor, but she resisted successfully (‘There’s nothing wrong with me, it’s just a woman thing, leave me alone’), and a few hours later she was sneaking into room 225 of the Escorial Hotel and calling Ricardo to come and pick her up because she didn’t feel able to get on a bus. While she waited for him she went out for a walk near the cathedral and ended up sitting down on a bench in the Plaza Bolívar and watching the passers-by, the children in their school uniforms, old men in their ponchos and vendors with their carts. A young boy with a wooden crate under his arm approached to offer her a shoe-shine, and she agreed wordlessly, to keep her accent from giving her away. She swept the square with her gaze and wondered how many of the people could tell by looking at her that she was American, how many could tell she’d been in Colombia for not much more than a year, how many could tell she’d married a Colombian, how many could tell she was pregnant. Then, with her patent-leather shoes so shiny she could see the Manizales sky reflected in the toes, she went back to the hotel, wrote a letter on the hotel’s letterhead and lay back to think of names. None occurred to her: before she knew it, she’d fallen asleep. Never had she felt so tired as on that afternoon.