There wasn’t sadness in her words, but irritation or rather anger, the anger of someone who has suffered a deceit through inattention or neglect, yes, that was it, the anger of someone who’s been led up the garden path. ‘I’ve been remembering something,’ she said then. ‘I would have been about fourteen or fifteen, and we were just about to leave Mexico. It was a Friday, a school day, and I decided to go along with some friends who weren’t really in the mood for geography or mathematics. We were walking across a park, it was San Lorenzo Park, but that doesn’t matter. And then I saw a man who looked a lot like my dad, but in a car that wasn’t my dad’s. He stopped at the corner, looking down the avenue, and then a woman got into the car who looked a lot like my mother, but dressed in clothes that my mother wouldn’t wear and with red hair, which my mother didn’t have. That happened on the far side of the park, their only option was to turn the car around very slowly and drive right past us. I don’t know what I was thinking when I signalled for them to stop, but the resemblance was too striking. So they stopped, me on the pavement and the car on the street, and up close I realized immediately that it was them, it was my parents. And I smiled at them, asked them what was going on, and that’s when the fear started: they looked at me and spoke to me as if they didn’t know me, as if they’d never seen me before. As if I was one of my friends. I later understood they were playing. A husband who picks up a pricey hooker on the street. They were playing and they couldn’t let me ruin the game. And that night, everything was normaclass="underline" we had dinner as a family, watched television, everything. They didn’t say anything. And I spent a few days wondering what had happened, wondering without understanding and feeling something I’d never felt, feeling afraid, but afraid of what, isn’t it absurd?’ She took a gulp of air (her lips pressed against her teeth) and whispered, ‘And now I’m going to have a child. And I don’t know if I’m ready, Antonio. I don’t know if I’m ready.’
‘I think you are,’ I told her.
Mine was also a whisper, as far as I remember. And then came another: ‘Bring everything,’ I told her. ‘We’re ready.’ In reply, Aura began to weep with a silent but sustained crying that only ended when she fell asleep.
The end of 1995 was typical of that time of year for Bogotá, with that intense blue sky of the Andean highlands, with those early mornings when the temperature goes down to zero and the dry air ruins the potato or cauliflower crops, and then the rest of the day is sunny and warm and the light is so clear that you end up with sunburn on your cheeks and the nape of your neck. I devoted that time to Aura with the constancy — no: the obsession — of a teenager. We spent the days walking at the doctor’s recommendation and taking naps (her), reading deplorable research projects (me) or watching pirated films several days before they premiered in the meagre Bogotá listings (both of us). At night Aura accompanied me to novenas at the homes of my relatives or friends, and we danced and drank non-alcoholic beer and lit Catherine wheels and powder-keg volcanoes and launched rockets that exploded into rackets of colour in the yellowish night sky of the city, that darkness that’s never really dark. And never, never did I wonder what Ricardo Laverde might be doing at that same instant, if he was praying the novenas too, if there were fireworks and if he was setting off rockets or lighting Catherine wheels, and if he was doing so on his own or in company.
The morning that followed one of those novenas, a cloudy, dark morning, Aura and I had our first ultrasound. Aura had been on the verge of cancelling it, and I would have done if that hadn’t meant waiting another twenty days to find out about the child, with the risks that might entail. It wasn’t just any old morning, it wasn’t a 21 December like any other 21 December of any other year: since the early hours of the morning the radio and television and newspaper had been telling us that American Airlines Flight 965, which departed from Miami for Alfonso Bonilla Aragón International Airport in the city of Cali, had crashed into the west side of El Diluvio Mountain the previous night. It was carrying one hundred and fifty-five passengers, many of whom weren’t even going to Cali, but were expecting to catch the last flight of the evening to Bogotá. At the time the news came out they’d found only four survivors, all with serious injuries, and the figure would not go any higher. I knew the inevitable details — that the plane was a 757, that the night was clear and starry, that they were starting to talk about human error — from the news broadcasts on all stations. I regretted the accident, felt all the sympathy I’m capable of for the people waiting for their relatives, and for those who, in their seats on the plane, understood from one moment to the next that they would not arrive, that they were living their last seconds. But it was an ephemeral and distracted sympathy, and I’m sure it had died out by the time we entered the narrow cubicle where Aura, lying down and half undressed, and I, standing by the screen, received the news that our little girl (Aura was magically sure it was a girl), who at that moment measured 7 millimetres, was in perfect health. On the screen was a sort of luminous universe, a confusing constellation in movement where, the woman in the white coat told us, our little girl was: that island in the sea — every one of her 7 millimetres — was her. Beneath the electric brightness of the screen I saw Aura smile, and I’m very afraid I won’t forget that smile as long as I live. Then I saw her put a finger on her belly to smear it with the blue gel the nurse had used. And then I saw her put her finger to her nose, to smell it and classify it according to the rules of her world, and seeing that was absurdly satisfying, like finding a coin in the street.
I don’t remember having thought of Ricardo Laverde there, during the ultrasound, while Aura and I, perfectly astonished, listened to the sound of an accelerated little heartbeat. I don’t remember having thought of Ricardo Laverde later, while Aura and I listed girls’ names on the same white envelope in which the hospital had given us the written report of the ultrasound. I don’t remember having thought of Ricardo Laverde while reading this report out loud, discovering that our little girl was in a fundal intrauterine position and she was a normal oval shape, words that made Aura erupt into violent fits of laughter in the middle of the restaurant. I don’t remember having thought of Ricardo Laverde even when I made a mental inventory of all the fathers of daughters that I knew, a little to see if the birth of a daughter had a predictable effect on people, or to start looking for sources of advice or possible support, as if I guessed that what I was heading into was the most intense, most mysterious, most unpredictable experience I’d ever live through. Actually, I don’t remember with any certainty what thoughts passed through my head that day or the days that followed — while the world went through its slow and lazy passage from one year to the next — other than those of my impending paternity. I was expecting a daughter, at the age of twenty-six I was expecting a daughter, and faced with the vertigo of my youth the only thing that occurred to me was to think of my father, who at my age had already had me and my sister, and that was after my mother and he had already lost their first baby. I didn’t yet know that an old Polish novelist had spoken a long time before of the shadow-line, that moment when a young man becomes the proprietor of his own life, but that was what I was feeling while my little girl was growing inside Aura’s womb: I felt that I was about to become a new and unknown creature whose face I couldn’t manage to see, whose powers I could not measure, and I also felt that after the metamorphosis there would be no turning back. To put it in other words and without so much mythology: I felt that something very important and also very fragile had become my responsibility, and I felt, improbably, that my abilities were equal to the challenge. It doesn’t surprise me that I barely have any vague notion of living in the real world during those days, for my fickle memory has drained them of all meaning or relevance other than that related to Aura’s pregnancy.