• • •
For a long time after, I was very religious. I spoke about joining the priesthood or a monastic order, cloistering myself away in prayer, removed from the material world, removed even from a sense of normal time, the progression of life and death, my life ruled by the cyclic and unchanging structures of sacred time. I imagined that during my retreat I had opened a wound where the eternal had touched the temporal, and I wanted to live in that wound, expand it, allow it to engulf my universe.
Just before Christmas, the material world intruded. My father was assigned to the 4th Brigade in Medellín. “That’s a dangerous post,” said one of my school friends, also the son of an officer. It was an odd thing to hear, because Medellín, to me, was my mother’s hometown. It was where my grandparents lived, where I had aunts and uncles and cousins spread across the city. So the new posting should have been a return to the land of my own birth, where I’d played with cousins in “Los Altos del Castillo,” as my grandmother called their neighborhood, which was really just a part of Las Mercedes. Where I’d gone up into the mountains with my grandmother to visit the town of her birth, where she’d ridden a horse and lived a life that was “poor, but not poverty of the city, because we always had food to eat,” and where she’d stayed until the time of troubles after the death of Gaitán and the family fled to the city, only to have unexpected success in the grocery business, allowing them to send their fourth child, my mother, to a school where she would interact with a higher class of people—the class my father belonged to. It should have been a wealth of cousins and grandparents and aunts and uncles, but my father quickly informed us that we wouldn’t be coming with him.
“Even if you came,” my father told me, “you would stay on base and have to go to school with the soldiers’ children. Almost none of the officers are bringing their families, and frankly, the less contact we have with your mother’s family, the safer they are.”
But my mother insisted we at least visit during the holidays, and so that December I both returned to Medellín and failed to return to Medellín. The streets and buildings remained the same, bits of concrete and steel and glass arranged in the same patterns, but those roads which throughout my childhood had been no more than a means to the loving arms of my grandparents, with their large house, their plants, and their massive oven, an ancient oven that my grandmother still used to run her home business selling cakes, those roads now belonged to a different geography, one shaped not by land and steel but by people. I was a child, barely old enough to stare longingly at a woman but still, somehow I knew that my father was right. This was not the same city where I could buy sweets and coffee with my grandmother at El Astor, walk with my grandfather through San Antonio Plaza, talking to the people he knew, businessmen and shoe shiners and women selling salted mango. Stepping out into the streets now would be as wise as stepping over the edge of a mountain cliff. The city had changed. Whatever the old web of life and commerce, gossip and backstabbing, old loves and new infatuations, I was no longer a part of it.
“Things have changed,” my father said.
• • •
After our cold Christmas in officers’ quarters, my father asked First Sergeant Santiago Jaramillo, a senior enlisted who had lost a nephew to a cartel bombing, to drive us to the airport. Jaramillo was in plain clothes, driving a plain blue sedan with a warped fender instead of an army vehicle. I thought it odd, but given the narcissism of youth, thought little about it. I sat in the backseat, my mother in the front.
Jaramillo had a shiny, shaved head with a vein bulging just over the right ear. He also swore constantly as he drove.
“Look at this fool!” he’d say as a car swerved in front of him. He’d pull ahead, swerve back in front of the other car, and shout “Faggot!” out the window. Then he’d catch himself, scrunch his thick neck into his shoulders, and apologize to my mother.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, it’s these . . . Whore! Son of a whore . . . I’m sorry, ma’am.”
He couldn’t help it. He knew no other way to drive. In the backseat, I’d giggle at the curses, then stifle my giggles as my mother turned sternly back to me.
But as we rose above the city on long, winding roads up the mountainside, the cursing stopped. We reached a traffic light, Jaramillo slowing at first as the light turned red, then bolting through at the last moment, the car swerving into a hard right, centripetal force pressing me into the side of the car, seat belt cutting against my neck as he skirted in front of oncoming traffic, horns blaring.
It squeezed the breath out of me, but when my breath returned, I waited for the sound. For an “Idiot!” or “Faggot!” or “Son of a whore!” I waited for my mother to say something sharp, but there was nothing. My mother held herself straight, her face in the mirror still, expressionless, her left hand gripped on the edge of the seat and her right on the handle of the car door.
After the second crazy turn I realized we were being followed. Of course, I knew about
