Her mother’s reply was emphatic: ‘Don’t even dream about going to see that place.’
‘But everyone in my class has been,’ said Maya.
‘Well you’re not going,’ said Elaine Fritts. ‘Don’t even think of mentioning it again.’
‘And so I went on the sly,’ Maya told me. ‘What else could I do? A friend invited me and I said yes. My mom thought I was going to spend the weekend in Villa de Leyva.’
‘You’re kidding,’ I said. ‘You sneaked off to the Hacienda Nápoles too? How many of us must have done the same thing?’
‘Oh, so you. .’
‘Yeah, I did too,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t allowed to go, so I made up some lie too, and went to see what was forbidden. A taboo place, Hacienda Nápoles.’
‘And when did you go there?’
I made some calculations in my head, summoning up certain memories, and the conclusion made a shiver of pleasure run up my spine. ‘I was twelve. I’m a year older than you. We went there around the same time, Maya.’
‘You went in December?’
‘Yes.’
‘December 1982?’
‘Yes.’
‘We were there at the same time,’ she said. ‘Incredible. Isn’t it incredible?’
‘Well, yeah, but I’m not sure. .’
‘We went on the same day, Antonio,’ said Maya. ‘I’m sure of it.’
‘But it might have been any day.’
‘Don’t be silly. It was before Christmas, right?’
‘Right. But. .’
‘And after school broke up, right?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Well, it had to be a weekend, otherwise there wouldn’t have been adults to take us. People work. And how many weekends are there before Christmas? Let’s say three. And what day was it, a Saturday or a Sunday? It was a Saturday, because Bogotá people always went to the zoo on Saturdays, grown-ups don’t like to make a trip like that and then have to go to the office the next day.’
‘Well, there are still three days,’ I said, ‘three possible Saturdays. Nothing guarantees we chose the same one.’
‘I know we did.’
‘Why?’
‘I just do. Don’t bug me any more. Do you want me to keep telling you?’ But Maya didn’t wait for my answer. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘so, I went to see the zoo and then I went home, and the first thing I did when I walked in was to ask my mother exactly where our house was in La Dorada. I think I recognized something along the way, the landscape, I recognized a mountain or a curve in the road, or the turn-off onto the main road to Villa Elena, because to get to the Hacienda Nápoles you pass right by that road. I must have recognized something, and when I saw my mother I wouldn’t stop asking her questions. It was the first time I’d talked about it since we left, Mom was quite shocked. And as the years went by I kept asking questions, saying I wanted to go back, asking when we could go back. The house in La Dorada turned into a sort of Promised Land for me, you see? And I began little by little to do everything necessary to go back. And it all began with that visit to the zoo at the Hacienda Nápoles. And now you tell me that maybe we saw each other there, at the zoo. Without knowing you were you and I was me, without knowing we’d meet one day.’
Something happened in that instant in her gaze, her green eyes opened slightly wider, her narrow eyebrows arched as if they’d been drawn on again, and her mouth, her mouth with blood-red lips, gestured in a way I’d not seen before. I had no way of proving it, and commenting on it would have been imprudent or stupid, but at that moment I thought: That’s a little girl’s expression. That’s what you were like when you were little.
And then I heard her say, ‘And have you been back since then? Because I haven’t, I’ve never been back. The place is falling to pieces, from what I’ve heard. But we could go anyway, see what’s there, see what we remember. How’s that sound?’
Soon we were driving down the highway towards Medellín at the hottest hour of the day, moving along the ribbon of asphalt just as Ricardo Laverde and Elaine Fritts had done twenty-nine years earlier, and not only that, but doing so in the same bone-coloured Nissan in which they’d driven. In a country where it’s quite common to see cars from the 1960s in the streets — a Renault 4, a Fiat here and there, Chevrolet trucks that might even be fifteen years older — the survival of a jeep was neither miraculous nor extraordinary, there are hundreds like this on the roads. But anyone could see that this was not just any Nissan jeep, but rather the first big present Ricardo Laverde bought for his wife with the money from the flights, the marijuana money. Twenty-nine years before, the two of them had travelled around the Magdalena Valley as we were doing now; they had kissed while sitting on this seat; right here they’d talked about having children. And now their child and I were occupying those same places and perhaps feeling the same humid heat and the same relief at accelerating and getting air to blow in the windows, so we had to raise our voices to hear each other. It was either raise our voices or die of heat with the windows rolled up, and we preferred the former. ‘This jeep still exists,’ I said in a forced tone, sounding like an actor in a theatre that was too big.
‘How about that,’ said Maya. Then she raised a hand and pointed to the sky. ‘Look, military planes.’
I heard the sound of the planes that were passing over our heads, but when I looked up I only saw a flock of turkey vultures tracing circles against the sky. ‘I try not to think of Dad when I see them,’ said Maya, ‘but I can’t help it.’ Another squadron flew over in formation and this time I saw them: the grey shadows crossing the sky, the jet engines shaking the air. ‘That was the inheritance he wanted,’ said Maya. ‘The hero’s grandson.’ The road was suddenly filled with uniformed lads armed with rifles that hung across their chests like sleeping animals. Before driving onto the bridge over the Magdalena we slowed down so much and passed so close to the soldiers that the wing mirror almost brushed the barrels of their rifles. They were boys, sweaty, scared kids whose mission, guarding the military base, seemed too big for them, just as their helmets and uniforms were, and those stiff leather boots in these cruel tropics. As we passed beside the fence that surrounded the base, a structure covered in green canvas and crowned with an elaborate labyrinth of barbed wire, I saw a green sign with white letters, No Photography, and another in black letters on a white background: Human rights, the responsibility of all. On the other side of the fence military trucks could be seen driving on a paved road; beyond them, exhibited like a relic in a museum, a Canadair Sabre balanced on a sort of pedestal. In my memory the image of this plane, which Ricardo Laverde liked so much, is forever linked to Maya’s question: ‘Where were you when they killed Lara Bonilla?’