“If the demon tempts me on the hour of my death, I will tell him he has no part of me, because on the Day of the Holy Cross I said a thousand times . . .”
He paused, and locked eyes with her. A few seconds passed.
“Jesus?” she said.
He nodded. Yes, go on.
“Jesus,” she said. “Jesus . . . Jesus, Jesus, Jesus Jesus Jesus Jesusjesusjesus.”
He clenched his teeth and sucked in some air. She did not seem to believe him, but that was fine. She just had to tell people what he wanted her to. “Okay,” he said. “Good. It is a good prayer.”
“Yes,” she agreed.
He shifted in his chair, straightening his posture. “I would tell you that the people of La Vigia have been forgotten by their government, but that would not be true. The government has never cared about us. Bogotá cannot forget a people it never knew. To them, we are nothing. The province of a province. The land of no one.”
“And this land? What is it to you?”
“The birthplace of a new Colombia.”
Then he ordered his men to drive the journalist to a clinic an hour south, where she could get her injuries attended to.
“If you want to talk more,” she said, “I don’t need the doctor. I can wait.”
Cracked ribs could lead to pneumonia, he told her. Get it looked at, we’ll talk later. Meanwhile, he would have someone call a reporter to meet her at the clinic. And the first thing she needed to tell them was that Jefferson Paúl López Quesada was the one who rescued her.
“On the way back,” he told his men, “pick up Abel, and bring him here.”
After she left, the nausea and pain returned. He popped a few pills, and then popped a few more, and sat in his house, and turned on the TV, and was bored by the news, and ultimately decided not to wait for Abel before watching one of the DVDs he had given him as a gift. So strange, that so few of his men thought to give him gifts. It was something to keep note of.
—
Abel.”
Deysi was seated in her shop, sewing. She was short and plump, with a youthful face that must not be so different from the one she’d had as a girl, before the violence had come and taken her family from her. Her fingers, though, were worn and calloused, with cracked skin and blotches, and they moved rapidly and assuredly when she was doing the sort of intricate work that required a needle and thread, and not a machine. It was remarkable to see her make patterns blossom on fabric, like watching the flurry of a musician’s fingers somehow drawing music from simple, nylon strings. Abel liked to watch her work. He liked the serious expression that came to her face. He liked even more when she looked up and said his name and gave him a smile. She was smiling now.
“I’d like”—Abel looked around the shop. He hadn’t come with an excuse to be there, so he looked around and randomly grabbed at a roll of purple fabric—“two meters of this.”
“For what?”
Good question. What on earth could he do with two meters of purple fabric? “It’s a secret,” he said.
She smiled again, amused, and he felt full, overflowing. He wanted to tell her that he was going to see his boss tonight. That they would watch a movie and he would leave and maybe that would be the last time he saw Jefferson. There were forces at work in the world changing things for the better.
“Very mysterious, Abel.”
There it was, his name again. When she said his name, he felt like less of a stranger, looking in on real life. He felt like he belonged.
“You know,” he said, “you were always kind to me, and I never understood why.”
She stopped her needlework and looked at him curiously.
“The first year after”—he didn’t want to say it—“after I left the paracos was very hard.”
She nodded her head.
“I was very lucky. Mr. Bejar gave me a job. Not everyone liked that. One day, after he’d paid me for the week, a couple of men followed me home and hit me with a brick.” He laughed gently. “I woke up with no money and a big headache.”
For a long time, he’d lived in fear. He lost weight. He moved. He grew a mustache and combed his hair a different way. He thought about changing his name. A stupid thought, in a town this small.
Those were paranoid days, when he’d refused to sit near windows, and something as simple as an overheard argument from his neighbors would set off fantasies of the guerrilla coming to torture him. Another paramilitary he knew disappeared and Abel was certain he’d been taken by the guerrilla, a gasoline-soaked rag stuffed in his mouth, and left like that until the fumes burned through his insides. But Deysi had always smiled at him.
“That’s terrible,” she said.
Now what? Ask her to go dancing on Saturday? This wasn’t how the conversation was meant to go.
“That was a long time ago. It wasn’t so bad, and maybe . . .”
“What?”
“Maybe I deserved to have a hard time, coming back.” He ran his fingers over the purple fabric. “I’ve tried to pay for what I’ve done.”
“No,” she said. “You are a good man. I’ve always seen that.”
He nodded. He didn’t think anyone had ever told him that before, and now he had nothing to say. He felt silly, and happy to have come, and he paid for his two meters of cloth and left, full of life. Deysi was a very good person, he thought. And that, plus the knowledge of the curse working its terrible power, led to a change in Abel.
When he walked out everything seemed very different than before he’d walked in. There were birds singing and of course he’d heard them before but it seemed like a sudden shock that birds sang like this, all the time, and
