He leaned back in his chair and looked out over the city.
“Look,” he said. “The sun is setting.”
So it was. And as it set he spoke of the beauty of their country, pointing to the shifting colors over the mountains, over the white modern high-rise apartments, the old colonial buildings of the Candelaria. “Bogotá is a beautiful city,” he said.
“Bogotá is a graveyard,” she said, parroting a phrase she’d read in a Juan Gabriel Vásquez novel.
“That’s every city,” he said. “Every city, every town. Every village worthy of the name.”
While he spoke, she stared silently out at the same city and mountains he did, but saw a different place. As a girl, she had wanted a simple faith. A sense that she was a sister to all mankind, connected to all creation, that the natural beauty and wonder of the world was a caress of God. Looking out on her city, that was gone, replaced with emptiness, churning, her soul exposed, every nerve raw. This is not my home, and this is not my father. As he spoke on and on and on, she felt herself unraveling. She was nothing but an unforgiven girl in an ugly world. A shuddering sob broke through her. The beginning of her period of mourning. And her father held her hand, and his love for her felt painful and cruel, and she wondered, if there was a God, if that was what His love actually felt like.
—
Luisa went to see Javier first. It was a task that frightened her, and so she tried to remind herself as she walked over that he wasn’t really human. Perhaps he had a tumor in his brain. Perhaps he was possessed. If there was indeed a human soul inside his body it was dying of thirst in cracked, dry soil. He wasn’t anything to be afraid of. He would be pitiable, if only there were enough of a person there to be worth pitying.
But the problem for her was that he wore the same face as the thing that had severed her father in half. Whenever she saw him in La Vigia, mounted on horseback, patrolling the town as if he were its chief of police, it provoked one of those irritating reactions in her. Terror. Sunlight on frightened faces. The smell of shit and rot in the hot sun. But fearing him was as foolish as fearing the chain saw that had torn through her father’s spine. They were both no more than tools. Mechanisms in a broader system. Though, of course, the sight of chainsaws made her shudder, too.
When the young fools hanging outside Javier’s office told her he’d be around shortly, that he was handling business, she smiled. Business! Officially he worked in the export of leather goods.
“I’ll wait inside,” she told them, almost adding, Until he oozes back this way.
On the wall of the small waiting area were photographs of Javier. Javier on a horse. Javier in his old paramilitary uniform. Javier behind Jefferson at a construction site. She made herself look at them. She’d be facing his real face soon. Might as well face the memories now.
In the days when Father Iván was helping her and a few other refugees who had stayed in the area, rather than flee all the way to Tibú or Cúcuta, she’d seen visions of him before her constantly. She’d felt isolated from all mankind then, but she wasn’t alone. She always had Javier Ocasio with her.
She had gone daily to the chapel in Cunaviche, knelt before the bloody Christ on the eastern wall of the church, and prayed the 88th Psalm. The only psalm in the Bible without hope. She asked God if He showed His wonders only to the dead, if His love was declared only in the grave, His faithfulness only in destruction. And she had received no answer, but was comforted nonetheless.
Staring at Javier’s face, the last words of the psalm echoed in her memory. Your wrath has swept over me, your terrors have destroyed me. You have taken from me friend and neighbor—darkness is my closest friend. She had come so far since then. She was not that girl. She knew so much better how to handle the Javiers of the world now.
When Javier finally arrived, she got straight to the point.
“I respect you,” she lied. “Like few people in this town do.”
And he growled. Growled. These men were children.
Carefully, without suggesting he had anything to do with her death, she brought up Alma. It was her opening gambit. To suggest he pay her family a condolence payment.
“With Jefferson gone,” she said, “everyone knows blood is in the water. This is a delicate time. And her death has angered people.”
“No one cares about a dead guerrillera.”
“I have ways of knowing what the people of this town care about,” she said. “Things they won’t tell you. It is useful knowledge.”
That surprised him. He had obviously never considered that she could be anything more than an irritant. Before he could reject the possibility, she added, “Do you want to rule over a town of people who support you, or a town of toads, croaking your every movement to the government and to the Peludos and to the Urabeños and to the police?”
She could see him considering the question seriously.
“How much would you suggest?”
She named a ridiculous figure, a year of income for a woman like Alma but an easy payment for Javier. Then she explained that it had to be exorbitant. A miserly payment would be worse than nothing. If he wanted to be a king, he had to show a king’s generosity. Now, at the beginning of his reign more than ever. He said he would consider it.
As she left, she decided to use the payment
