“That was real war,” he said. “Holy war.”
He stared darkly into his beer.
“I fought for the Castaños in Cesar. I fought for them as if I were fighting for God.”
I nodded again.
“Osmin told me the guerrilla killed your family,” he said. “What do you fight for? Revenge?”
I wasn’t sure what to say. When I followed Osmin into this life, it had not occurred to me that I needed a reason to fight. When I saw him in Cunaviche, a door opened, and I did not even think to make a choice, I just walked forward.
“I fight for the people. For freedom from the guerrilla,” I said. I had heard him say similar things.
“Only a slave fights for freedom,” he said. “Men fight for something more.”
• • •
I did not know Luisa was Sánchez’s daughter until we went to his house and she opened the door. She wore a simple blouse and a sullen face, looking past me as if she did not know me. I knew I should say something to Jefferson. I should tell him I knew her. But then it occurred to me that if I didn’t tell him, there was no way he’d know I’d held my tongue. I had a choice. Part of her fate was in my hands. I decided I would say nothing.
She took us to a little sitting room with a few ratty chairs, a table, and squished into the corner, a piano.
“Look at that,” Jefferson said. He walked over and pressed a key, smiling like a child when a note struck.
I had never seen a piano before. It had chipped white teeth and unblemished black ones. I pressed a black key, slowly depressing it. Nothing sounded. I hit it harder, and sound rang out in the air. Jefferson clunked down a few more keys. Then he mashed the keys with his hands, sending ugly notes quivering into the air while Luisa scowled.
Jefferson was still hitting notes when Sánchez came in. I greeted him enthusiastically, “Mr. Mayor, such a pleasure, very glad to meet you,” while Jefferson clunked upon the keys.
Sánchez looked little like his daughter. He was tall, with a long nose and skin several shades paler than Luisa. A local man had told me he was not from Rioclaro. He had married a local girl who was very dark and who had died in childbirth. “The two types were not a good mix,” he said, “and so the mother died, and the girl came out angry.”
It was a simple meeting. I told him I knew that his town had been negotiating with the manager of the Telecom office in Cúcuta, who refused to lay phone lines to Rioclaro because the area was too dangerous. This was the sort of problem we could fix. I told him that was all we were here for. We knew about the phones, and wanted to help. Would he accept our help?
“Yes, of course,” he said. He even seemed grateful, so relieved the meeting had been about something so simple. Who knows what terrible things he’d imagined we’d come for as we sat and drank beers all afternoon in his town.
I didn’t offer him any money, just said that we would talk with the Telecom manager. Money could come later, once he had become accustomed to accepting our help. He thanked us. I would wait until after it was done to tell him that he was asking us to threaten the manager on his behalf. Everything worked beautifully, until Jefferson decided to have the last word.
“You see,” Jefferson said as we were leaving, “we have advantages. The state has bureaucracy, limitations, less resources. We don’t have bureaucracy, we just solve problems. If you work with us, we get things done.”
It was a mistake. Sánchez’s face went cold, the way his daughter’s had when I threatened her. I looked carefully at Jefferson, with his pitted, square face. It occurred to me that Jefferson only occupied so much space in the world. A cubic volume of flesh and blood. If I ever made my way through that engineering textbook I could calculate how much.
Sánchez let us out politely, and Jefferson clapped me on the back and told me I had done well.
• • •
That night I dreamed of what it would be like to sleep with Luisa. In my dream she opened the door for us. Her father sat before the piano and she brought us drinks, lulo juice mixed with vodka, and then she unbuckled my pants. Jefferson and her father sat at the piano and discussed telephone lines. I found myself on the floor, she was naked above me, her unlovely body rubbing against mine. When she took my dream virginity, I cried out, and Jefferson laughed, and her father laughed, but she held me with her eyes and began to devour me. My skin dissolved into hers. She was rooting inside me, fingers in my organs, while I lay paralyzed. Every nerve screamed. My desire for her was like physical pain, like a fever inside the body, and inside my mind and soul. I woke, hard to the point of agony.
I left my bed, got on my moto, and drove the four miles to a bar where I knew I could find relief. There was a girl there, beautiful, and just old enough for her beauty to have lost the innocence of youth, the innocence Osmin was always hunting down and ruining.
