“What do you think,” he whispers. “Should I do the chemo, or just have some fun on the way out?”
It’s not a question I want to answer. We both know I’ve been running it through my head since his visit to my mother, that I can’t claim not to have an opinion on whether he should die quick or die painfully. It’s all that’s been on my mind. So I sit there, trying to form what I feel into words. Something about the man he is, about what he means to my mother, and about the crazy things he’s done in that old, beat-up car. “I think,” I say, knowing the words make me even more a traitor to my mother and to this place than I already am, “I think that old Buick can still do a few flips.”
Uncle Carey grins wide, that big, goofy, gap-toothed grin. “Promise me something,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“Don’t come for the funeral. Be somewhere else. Somewhere awesome.”
Which is, of course, when I start crying, and Uncle Carey wraps me up in a bear hug, a hug that always used to mean getting lifted up off your feet and shaken around a bit, but not this time. He just holds me as tight as he’s able to muster. It’s not very tight. I bring myself under control, I kiss him on his cheeks, and then I slip his grasp, free.
7
ABEL 2001–2002
I was still having nightmares when I met Luisa. The dreams were horrible because they were real. Things I knew or had seen happen to other people. I would run through the street without a weapon, Iván chasing behind. Toads for the guerrilla would come to slit my throat. Or Jefferson would come and do to me the things I had seen him do to other people, and I would scream that I loved him, that he should spare me because I loved him and worshipped him more than all the world. And he would tell me that is why he must do this, because a warrior must kill the things he loves.
Because of the nightmares, I would stay out very late, drinking. On the road to Rioclaro there was a gas station where they sold alcohol, and behind the gas station were plastic tables by the river, lights strung across the trees, and a few speakers to play music. I liked it because normal people went there, especially the girls who didn’t just want to sleep with paracos because they had money.
I was still a virgin then, though I’d made attempts to cure myself. But taking off my clothes, I’d become terrified, feeling naked even before I was naked. In each case the women were whores, confident and unashamed in front of a young, nervous man, and their confidence made it worse. More shameful, each time I failed. More full of fear and dread and a desire to cover myself so deeply in earth no one would ever find me. But at the gas station, with normal people and normal girls, girls who had no interest in a man like me, I felt safe. I watched normal life. Workers sharing stories from the day’s labor, girls flirting playfully, the old drinking until they could no longer walk, and boys starting fights that never ended in murder.
Being there reminded me that the world I lived in—of paracos and narcos and guerrillas and criminals—it was just the thinnest sliver of life. Most people are not killers, and even then, as I was still finding my new place in the world, I suspected that a killer is not just a different kind of person, but a different kind of thing. I was a different kind of thing, though I had never killed anyone myself. At the river I would see carpenters, bakers, construction workers, shopkeepers, farmers. Mothers, babies sucking on their breasts, calling their drunkard husbands home. Men shouting their fanciful dreams out in loud voices. Girls with cruel laughter and kind faces. Every sort of person was there and yet I, with my pistol tucked in my pants like a gangster in a telenovela, did not belong. I had been torn from the world of those people, and there was no way to stitch myself back in. Even if they respected me, a current of fear kept them distant. I was not alive the way they were. Still, at night, with a beer in my hand, I liked to watch, a pale ghost feeding off the colors of the living.
That’s where I saw her. Roberto Carlos’s “Amigo” was playing on the radio, there was a table of young people my age, and one of them, a beautiful girl whose name I don’t remember, got up and started dancing. In the middle of the conversation, without saying anything or inviting anyone to join her, she got up and began swaying, moving her hips, her eyes closed. She had a perfect body, a shirt that ended an inch above her belly button, long legs and curvy hips. She knew she was beautiful. She must have. Women who are not beautiful don’t make scenes like that. She danced and swayed, she sung the lyrics of the song, and the conversation at the table jerked and stuttered. Some of the men stared at her openly, some looked quietly down. Her movements were like a magnet for the eyes—to look away took effort and you could see, in the faces of the boys not looking at her, the effort it took. And when she opened her eyes, she’d point at a boy, sing loudly, smile, close her eyes, and lift her face to the sky while she slid her hands down her stomach as her hips
