People of my generation do these things: we ask each other what our lives were like at the moment of those events — almost all of which occurred in the 1980s — which defined or diverted them before we knew what was happening to us. I’ve always believed that in this way, verifying that we’re not the only ones, we neutralize the consequences of having grown up in that decade, or we mitigate the feeling of vulnerability that has always accompanied us. And those conversations tend to begin with Lara Bonilla, the Minister of Justice. He had been the first public enemy of drug trafficking, and the most powerful of the legal ones; the method of the hit man on the back of a motorbike, where a teenager approaches the car in which the victim is travelling and empties a Mini Uzi into it without even slowing down, began with his murder. ‘I was in my room, doing my chemistry homework,’ I said. ‘And you?’
‘I was ill,’ said Maya. ‘Appendicitis, imagine, I’d just had surgery.’
‘Do kids get that?’
‘It’s so cruel, but yes. And I remember the commotion at the clinic, the nurses rushing in and out. It was like being in a war movie. Because they’d killed Lara Bonilla and everyone knew who’d done it, but no one knew that could happen.’
‘It was something new,’ I said. ‘I remember my dad in the dining room. His head in his hands, elbows on the table. He didn’t eat anything. He didn’t say anything either. It was something new.’
‘Yes, that day we went to bed changed,’ said Maya. ‘A different country, wasn’t it? At least that’s how I remember it. Mom was scared. I looked at her and saw her fear. Of course, she knew all sorts of things that I didn’t.’ Maya was quiet for a moment. ‘And when Galán was killed?’
‘That was at night. It was a Friday in the middle of the year. I was. . Well, I was with a friend.’
‘Oh, very nice,’ said Maya with a slanted smile. ‘You having a fine old time while the country falls to pieces. Were you in Bogotá?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was she your girlfriend?’
‘No. Well, she was going to be. Or that’s what I thought.’
‘Oops, a frustrated love,’ Maya laughed.
‘At least we spent the night together. Even though it was obligatory.’
‘The After Curfew Hour Lovers,’ said Maya. ‘Not a bad title, don’t you think?’
I liked seeing her like this, suddenly cheerful, I liked the little barely visible lines that appeared beside her eyes when she smiled. In front of us there was now a truck loaded with huge milk containers, big metal cylinders like unexploded bombs on top of which three shirtless teenagers were riding. Seeing us caused them inexplicable laughter. They waved to Maya, blew kisses at her, and she put the jeep into second gear and pulled into the other lane to overtake them. As she did so she blew a kiss back to them. It was a teasing, playful act, but there was something in the melodramatic way she closed her lips (and in the whole movie-star gesture) that filled the moment with an unexpected sensuality, or at least that’s how it seemed to me. On my side of the road, two water buffalo were bathing in a sort of marsh that opened up between the shrubs. Their wet horns glistened under the sun, their manes stuck to their faces. ‘And the day of the Avianca plane?’ I said.
‘Oh, the famous plane,’ said Maya. ‘That really fucked everything up, didn’t it.’
Once the presidential candidate Galán was dead, his policies, and among them the fight against drug trafficking, were inherited by a very young provincial politician: César Gaviria. In his attempt to take Gaviria out of the picture, Pablo Escobar had a bomb planted on a passenger airline that flew — that would have flown — the Bogotá—Cali route. Gaviria, however, did not even board the plane. The bomb exploded just after take-off, and the remains of the disintegrated plane — including three passengers who were apparently not killed by the bomb but by the impact — fell over Soacha, the same place where Galán had fallen, shot on the wooden campaign platform. But I don’t think this coincidence means anything.
‘That’s when we knew,’ said Maya, ‘that the war was against us too. Or that was the confirmation, at least. Beyond any doubt. There’d been other bombs in public places, of course, but they’d seemed like accidents, I don’t know if the same thing happened to you. Well, I’m not entirely sure accidents is the right word either. Things that happen to people with bad luck. The plane was different. It was the same deep down, but for some reason it seemed different to me, as if they’d changed the rules of the game. I’d started university that year. Agronomy, I was going to study agronomy, I suppose I was already sure that I was going to reclaim the house in La Dorada. The fact is I’d started university. And it took me the whole year to notice.’
‘Notice what?’
‘The fear. Or rather, that this thing I got in my stomach, the occasional faint feelings, the irritation, weren’t the typical symptoms of first-year jitters, but pure fear. And Mom was scared too, of course, maybe even more than I was. And then came the rest, the other attacks, the other bombs. The DAS one with its hundred dead. That one at the shopping mall with fifteen. Then the other shopping mall with however many there were. A special time, no? Not knowing when it might be your turn. Worrying when someone who was supposed to arrive wasn’t there. Always knowing where the closest pay phone is to let someone know you’re OK. If there were no pay phones, knowing that anybody would lend you their phone, all you had to do was knock on a door. Living like that, always with the possibility that people close to us might be killed, always having to reassure our loved ones so they don’t think we are among the dead. Our lives were conducted inside houses, remember. We avoided public places. Friends’ houses, friends of friends, houses of distant acquaintances, any house was better than a public place. Well, I don’t know if you know what I mean. Maybe in our house it was different. We were two women on our own, after all. Maybe it wasn’t like that for you.’
‘It was exactly like that,’ I said.
She turned to look at me. ‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘So you understand me then,’ said Maya.
And I said a couple of words whose scope I didn’t manage to fully determine: ‘I understand you perfectly.’
The landscape repeated itself around us, green plains with grey mountains in the background, like a Gonzalo Ariza painting. My arm stretched along the back of the front seat, which in those models is bulky and undivided, so you feel like you’re sitting on a sofa. With the shifting breezes and the rolling of the Nissan, sometimes Maya’s hair brushed my hand, brushed the skin of my hand, and I liked the sensation and looked forward to it from then on. We left the straight line of cattle ranches with their drinking troughs with roofs and armies of cows lying around the trunks of the acacias. We passed over the Negrito River, a stream of dark waters and dirty banks, with clouds of foam sparkling here and there, the remains of the accumulated contamination from villages and towns upstream where they dumped their waste water into the same water in which they washed their clothes. When we got to the toll booth and the Nissan came to a stop, the sudden absence of air circulating raised the temperature inside the vehicle, and I felt — in my armpits, but also on my nose and under my eyes — that I was beginning to sweat. And when we got back in motion, as we approached another bridge over the Magdalena, Maya began to tell me about her mother, about what happened with her mother at the end of 1989. I was looking at the river beyond the bridge’s yellow railings, looking at the little sandy islands that soon, when the rainy season arrived, would be covered by brown water, and meanwhile Maya was telling me about the evening when she came home from university and found Elaine Fritts in the bathroom, so drunk she’d almost passed out and clutching the toilet bowl as if it might be leaving at any moment. ‘My baby,’ she said to Maya, ‘my baby’s home. My little girl is big now. My little girl is a big girl.’ Maya picked her up as best she could and put her to bed and stayed with her, watching her sleep and touching her forehead every once in a while; she made her a herbal tea at two in the morning; put a bottle of water on the bedside table and brought her two painkillers for her hangover; and at the end of the night heard her say that she couldn’t take it any more, that she’d tried but she couldn’t do it any longer, that Maya was a grown-up now and could make her own decisions just as she’d made hers. And six days later she boarded a plane and returned home to Jacksonville, Florida, to the same house she’d left twenty years earlier with a single idea in her head: to be a Peace Corps volunteer in Colombia. To have an enriching experience, leave her mark, do her bit, small as it might be. All those things.