A little while after the baby was discharged, Ricardo had to make another trip. But it was still too soon to take her to La Dorada, and the idea of Elaine and their daughter staying alone filled him with terror, so Ricardo suggested they stay in Bogotá, in his parents’ house, under the care of Doña Gloria and the dark-skinned woman with the long black braid who floated like a phantom through the house cleaning and putting everything in order as she went. ‘If they ask, tell them I’m transporting flowers,’ Ricardo told her. ‘Carnations, roses, even orchids. Yes, orchids, that sounds good, orchids are exported, everyone knows that. You gringos love orchids to death.’ Elaine smiled. They were lying in the same narrow bed where they’d talked after making love for the first time. It was very late, one or two in the morning; Maya had woken them up crying for food, crying with her thin little nasal voice, and could only calm down once she’d clamped her tiny mouth around her mother’s erect nipple. After nursing she’d fallen asleep between the two of them, forcing them to make a space for her, to balance precariously on the edge of the little bed; and that’s how they stayed, half hanging over the edge of the bed, face to face but in the dark, so each could barely see the other’s silhouette in the shadows. They were wide awake now. The baby was sleeping: Elaine smelled her scent of sweet powders, soap and new wool. She raised a hand and stroked Ricardo’s face like a blind woman and then she started to whisper. ‘I want to go with you,’ said Elaine.
‘One day,’ said Ricardo.
‘I want to see what you do. To know it’s not dangerous. Would you tell me if it was dangerous?’
‘Of course I would.’
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Ask me something.’
‘What happens if they catch you?’
‘They’re not going to catch me.’
‘But what happens if they do?’
Ricardo’s voice changed, there was a note of falsetto in it, something projected. ‘People want a product,’ he said. ‘There are people who grow that product. Mike gives it to me, I take it in a plane, someone receives it and that’s all. We give people what people want.’ He kept quiet for a second and then added, ‘Also, it’s going to be legalized sooner or later.’
‘But it’s hard for me to imagine,’ said Elaine. ‘When you’re not here I think about you, try to imagine what you’re doing, where, and I can’t. And that’s what I don’t like.’
Maya sighed so quietly and briefly that it took them an instant to realize where it had come from. ‘She’s dreaming,’ said Elaine. She saw Ricardo bring his big face — his hard chin, his thick lips — up close to the baby’s tiny face; she saw him give her an inaudible kiss, and then another. ‘My little girl,’ she heard him say. ‘Our little girl.’ And then, with no segue whatsoever, she saw him start to talk about the trips, about a cattle ranch that stretched out from the banks of the Magdalena and on the pastures of which an airport could be built, about a Cessna 310 Skyknight that over the last little while had become Ricardo’s favourite ride. That’s how he put it: ‘My favourite ride. They don’t make that model any more, Elena Fritts, that baby’s going to be a relic before we know it.’ He also told her about the solitude he felt while he was in the air, and how different a plane loaded with cargo felt to an empty one: ‘The air gets cold, it’s noisier, you feel more alone. Even if someone’s there. Yeah, even if there’s someone with you.’ He told her of the enormity of the Caribbean and of the fear of getting lost, the fear of the mere idea of getting lost over such a huge thing as the sea, even someone like him, who never ever got lost. He told her of the detour he had to take to avoid Cuban airspace — ‘so they don’t shoot me down thinking I’m a gringo,’ he said — and how familiar, how curiously familiar, everything seemed to him from there on, as if he were coming home instead of about to land in Nassau. ‘In Nassau?’ said Elaine. ‘In the Bahamas?’ ‘Yes,’ said Ricardo, ‘the only Nassau there is,’ and went on to say that there, in the airport, before the air-traffic controllers who saw without seeing (their vision and memories conveniently modified by a few thousand dollars), an olive-coloured Chevrolet pick-up truck and a big strong gringo, who looked just like Joe Frazier, were waiting to take him to a hotel where the only luxury was the lack of questions. The arrival always fell on a Friday. After spending two nights there — the function of those two nights was not to arouse suspicion, to turn Ricardo into just another millionaire who comes to spend a weekend with friends or lovers — after two nights of living shut up in a charmless hotel, drinking rum and eating fish and rice, Ricardo returned to the airport, admired the controllers’ blindness again, requested permission to take off for Miami like any other millionaire returning home with his mistress, and in minutes he was in the air, but not in the direction of Miami, but rather skirting around the coast and going in over the beaches of Beaufort and flying over a pattern of disperse rivers like the veins on an anatomy diagram. Then it was a matter of exchanging the cargo for dollars and taking off again and heading south, towards the Caribbean coast of Colombia, towards Barranquilla and the grey waters of Bocas de Ceniza and the brown serpent that moves through a green background, towards a town in the interior, that town placed there, between two mountain ranges, placed in the wide valley like a die that a player has dropped, that town with its unbearable climate where the hot air burns your nostrils, where the bugs are capable of biting through a mosquito net, and where Ricardo arrives with his heart in his hands, because in that town the two people he loves most in the world are waiting for him.
‘But those two people are not in that town,’ said Elaine. ‘They’re here, in Bogotá.’
‘Not for much longer.’
‘Frankly, they’re freezing to death. They’re in a house that isn’t theirs.’
‘Not for much longer.’
Four days later he came to pick them up. He parked the Nissan in front of the iron gate and the little brick wall, jumped out quickly as if he were blocking traffic and opened the passenger door for Elaine. She, who was carrying Maya wrapped in white shawls and with her face covered so she wouldn’t get chilled from the wind, walked right past him. ‘No, not in the front seat,’ she said. ‘We girls are sitting in the back.’ And so, sitting on one of the fold-down seats, with the baby in her arms and her feet resting on the other seat, looking at Ricardo from behind (the hairs on the back of his neck, below the line of his well-cut hair, were like triangular table legs), she travelled from Bogotá to La Dorada. They only stopped once, halfway there, at a roadside restaurant where three empty tables looked at them from a terrace of polished cement. Elaine went into the bathroom and found an open oval hole in the floor and two footprints to indicate where she should place her feet; she crouched down and peed, holding up her skirt in both hands and smelling her own urine; and there she realized, with a bit of a start, that it was the first time since the birth that she hadn’t had any other women around. She was alone in a world of men, she and Maya were on their own, and she’d never thought that before, she’d been in Colombia for more than two years and she’d never had such a thought before.