‘Goodbye, Uncle Mike.’
‘Goodnight, lovely,’ said Mike.
‘Sleep tight,’ said Elaine.
‘She’s so big,’ said Mike. ‘How old is she now?’
‘Five. She’s about to turn five.’
‘Holy smoke. How time flies.’
The cliché annoyed Elaine. Annoyed her more than it should have, it almost made her angry, it was like an affront, and suddenly her annoyance turned into surprise: at her disproportionate reaction, at the strangeness of the scene with Mike Barbieri, at the fact that her daughter had called him Uncle. She asked Mike to wait for her there, because the floor was too slippery and if he came in soaking wet he risked hurting himself; she brought him a towel from the servants’ bathroom and went to get a glass of water from the kitchen. Uncle Mike, she was thinking, what’s he doing here? And she thought it in Spanish too, what the hell is he doing here? And suddenly there was that song again, What’s there to live for? Who needs the Peace Corps? When she walked into Maya’s room, when she breathed in her scent that was different from all others, she felt an inexplicable desire to spend the night with her, and thought that later, when Mike had left, she’d carry Maya to her bed so she could keep her company until Ricardo got back. Maya had fallen asleep again. Elaine bent down over the head of her bed, looked at her, brought her face up close, breathed in her breath. ‘Here’s your water,’ she said, ‘do you want a sip?’ But the little girl didn’t say anything. Elaine left the glass on her bedside table, beside the string merry-go-round where a horse with a broken head was trying, slowly but tirelessly, to catch up with a clown. And then she went back to the front of the house.
Mike was using the towel vigorously, rubbing his ankles and shins. ‘I’m getting it all muddy,’ he said when he saw Elaine come back. ‘The towel, I mean.’
‘That’s what it’s for,’ said Elaine. And then, ‘So you came to see Ricardo.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. He looked at her with the same empty expression. ‘Yeah,’ he repeated. He looked at her again: Elaine saw the drops running down his neck, his beard dripping like a leaky tap, the mud. ‘I came to see Ricardo. And it seems like he’s not here, right?’
‘He should have been back today. Sometimes these things happen.’
‘Sometimes he gets delayed.’
‘Yeah, sometimes. He doesn’t fly by a precise itinerary. Did he know you were coming?’
Mike didn’t answer straight away. He was concentrating on his own body, on the muddy towel. Outside, in the dark night, in that night that blended with the rocky hills and became infinite, another downpour was unleashed. ‘Well, I think so,’ said Mike. ‘Maybe I’m the one who’s confused.’ But he didn’t look at her as he spoke: he dried off with the towel and had that absent expression, like a cat cleaning itself with strokes of its tongue. And then Elaine thought that Mike might keep drying himself till the end of time if she didn’t do something. ‘Well, come in and sit down and have a drink,’ she said then. ‘Rum?’
‘OK, but no ice,’ said Mike. ‘See if it’ll warm me up. I can’t believe how cold it is.’
‘Do you want one of Ricardo’s shirts?’
‘That’s not a bad idea, Elena Fritts. That’s what he calls you, isn’t it? Elena Fritts. A shirt, yeah, not a bad idea.’
And so, wearing a shirt that wasn’t his (short-sleeved with blue checks on a white background, a breast pocket with a missing button), Mike Barbieri drank not one, but four glasses of rum. Elaine watched him. She felt comfortable with him: yes, that’s what it was, comfort. It was the language, perhaps, coming back to her language, or perhaps the codes they shared and the disappearance, while they were together, of the necessity of explaining themselves that was always there with Colombians. Being with him had something of indisputable familiarity, like coming home. Elaine had a drink too and felt accompanied and she felt that Mike Barbieri was also accompanying her daughter. They talked about their country and politics back home just as they’d done years before, before Maya existed and before Villa Elena existed, and they told stories of their families, their personal histories and also recent news, and doing so was comfortable and agreeable, like putting on a nice wool coat on a winter’s evening. Although it wasn’t easy to know where the pleasure came from in talking about the 2-dollar bill that had just been reissued back home, or about the bicentennial celebrations of independence, or about Sara Jane Moore, the muddle-headed woman who had tried to assassinate the president. It had stopped raining and a cool breeze came in from the night heavy with the scent of hibiscus. Elaine felt light-hearted, even cosy, so she didn’t hesitate for a second when Mike asked if there was a guitar around and in a matter of seconds he was tuning it up and started singing Bob Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel songs.
It must have been two or three in the morning when something happened that didn’t shock Elaine (she’d think later) as much as it should have shocked her. Mike was singing the part of ‘America’ where the couple gets on a Greyhound bus when they heard a sound outside, in the distance, in the quiet night, and the dogs began to bark. Elaine opened her eyes and Mike stopped playing; both of them sat still, listening to the silence. ‘Don’t worry, nothing ever happens around here,’ said Elaine, but Mike was already on his feet and had gone to find the olive green knapsack he’d brought with him and taken out a big, silver-plated pistol, or a silver pistol that looked big to Elaine, and had gone outside, raised his arm and fired two shots at the sky, one, two, two explosions. Elaine’s first reaction was to protect Maya or to neutralize her unease or her fear, but when she reached her daughter’s room in four strides she found her asleep, deep in an imperturbable sleep and far from all sounds and noises and worries, incredible. When she got back to the living room, however, something had broken in the atmosphere. Mike was justifying himself with a twisted sentence: ‘If it was nothing before, now it’s even less.’ But Elaine had lost the urge to hear the song about the Greyhound bus and the New Jersey Turnpike: she felt tired; it had been a long day. She said goodnight and told Mike to sleep in the guest room, the bed was made, tomorrow they could have breakfast together. ‘Who knows, maybe even with Ricardo.’
‘Yeah,’ said Mike Barbieri. ‘With any luck.’
But when she woke up, Mike Barbieri had gone. A note, that was all he’d left, a note on a paper napkin, and in the note three words on three lines: ‘Thanks, Love, Mike.’ Later, remembering that strange and hazy night, Elaine would feel two things: first, a profound hatred towards Mike Barbieri, the most profound hatred she’d ever felt; and second, a sort of involuntary admiration for the ease with which that man had gone through the night, for the massive deception he’d carried out for so many and such intimate hours without giving himself away for a moment, for the incombustible serenity with which he’d pronounced those final words. With any luck, Elaine would think, or rather the words would repeat themselves in her head tirelessly, with any luck, that’s what Mike Barbieri had said to her without a muscle in his face twitching, a feat worthy of a champion poker player or a Russian roulette enthusiast, because Mike Barbieri knew perfectly well that Ricardo wasn’t going to return to Villa Elena that night and he’d known it from the start, from the time he arrived by motorcycle at Elaine’s house. In fact, that’s precisely why he’d come: to tell Elaine. He’d come to tell her that Ricardo wasn’t going to come back.
He knew very well.
He knew very well, he who’d been to see Ricardo days earlier to tell him about the new business opportunity they could not afford to miss, to convince him that the shipments of marijuana were bringing in pocket money compared to what they could be earning now, to explain what this coca paste that was coming in from Bolivia and Peru was and how in some magic places it was transformed into the luminous white powder for which all of Hollywood, no, all of California, no, all of the United States, from Los Angeles to New York, from Chicago to Miami, were willing to pay whatever they had to. He knew very well, having direct contact with those places, where a few Peace Corps veterans, who had just spent three years in the Cauca Valley and in Putumayo, had turned into overnight experts in ether and acetone and hydrochloric acid, and where they assembled bricks of the product that could illuminate a dark room with their phosphorescence. He knew very well, he who’d done some numbers on a piece of paper with Ricardo and calculated that any Cessna, with the passenger seats removed, could carry some twelve canvas rucksacks full of bricks, 300 kilos in total, and that, at 100 dollars a gram, a single trip could produce 90 million dollars of which the pilot, who ran so many risks and was so indispensable to the operation, could keep two. He knew very well, having listened to Ricardo’s enthusiasm, his plans to make this trip and just this trip and then retire, retire forever, retire from piloting cargo planes and also passenger planes and all piloting except flying for pleasure, retire from everything except his family, a millionaire forever before the age of thirty.