When I returned to Bogotá, I had nightmares of being lost in the winding turns of a city I didn’t know, a city where every face is like the face of a relative, but then, when I draw near, different. No one knows me, no one can tell me which turns I must take, or even where my final destination must be.
To be honest, I don’t know if the two things, the nightmares and the trip to the airport, were related, but they added to the uneasiness of my waking hours, the already uneasy waking hours of a new adolescent, charged with hormones and emotions now heightened by the aftershocks of repetitive, peculiar dreams and the anxiety of a father in a war zone, a war zone that happens to be the city of my family, and a city where I do not belong.
When we returned to Medellín for our next visit, in the midst of Holy Week, I was full of nervous excitement. And it was in that state that I first encountered Juana Peréz.
• • •
We came on Holy Thursday and, along with another officer’s family, went straight to the 4th Brigade Headquarters under escort. The base was different, packed with people, many of them civilians.
“We’ve had to convert Fourth Brigade into a refugee camp,” my father explained. The general in charge, General Bedoya, was trying to organize something like a witness protection program. The civilians on base were witnesses to the crimes of the Medellín cartel. I think my father wanted me to see them, to know the luck I had in life, to know what drugs were doing to Colombia, and to spend time around people brave enough to stand up to Escobar. I hardly spoke to any of them, spending the time reading instead.
“This will be an education for him,” he told my mother. “He’ll get to see what this work is and how it doesn’t wait, not even for God.”
As if to prove his point, on Holy Saturday a canister bomb was launched over the walls of 4th Brigade, right where the officers’ quarters were. No one was killed, and my father wasn’t displaced, but we did lose water and power for two days, meaning that we had to use the group showers in the building where they were billeting our “refugees.” This, too, my father thought would be “an education.” And he was right.
• • •
I woke very early Easter morning, disturbed by another one of my peculiar nightmares, and left to take a shower. As in my dream, the route I walked was both strangely similar to what I knew and different in ways my sleepy mind wasn’t processing. I entered a group bathroom, one I thought I had used before, ignoring the very important sign on the door.
Inside was a corridor with various stalls, each with a little curtain that stopped about a foot short of the floor. One stall was occupied, the water running. I got in the stall across the way, turned on the water, and waited for it to warm. I missed my home in Bogotá, and I missed the Medellín Holy Week of my childhood memories, when everyone in the street put on purple clothes, emptying the factories of purple cloth and creating processions that turned the streets into bright ribbons of color. There at 4th Brigade, you mostly saw army green.
The water warmed, I stepped in, and I heard the other shower turn off, then the other shower curtain being swept aside. Idly curious, I peered through the crack between my curtain and the stall and saw a column of flesh cut across by what looked like black twine, a curious sight. I leaned my head and moved closer to the crack to get a better view. The other person shifted, and there in front of me, no more than a meter from my face, was a naked woman’s breast.
My jaw hung slack, my eyes widened. I could have spit and hit the nipple. For a moment I did nothing but look, shocked by the sight. The nipple swayed, moved out of view, and I bolted back to the edge of the shower, my shower sandals splashing water. Idiot! I thought to myself. I was terrified she’d look in around the edge of my curtain. I had the ridiculous desire to sing in a high-pitched voice, or hum, the way I imagined a woman might hum in the shower. I took shallow breaths of air. The antiseptic smell of cleaning solution, carried up by the steam, flooded my nostrils. The nipple swung back into view and I stared, breathless. Blood rushed to my face in shame, but it also, I realized, was rushing to another, much more disobedient organ. I covered myself with my hands. What if she swept aside the curtain? What would I say?
A curved belly appeared before the crack, then shoulders and long, thin arms, here too with the patches of flesh appearing as though they were bound in black twine, poorly wrapped, then all was covered with a white towel. It was too much, and I wanted to weep. Instead I clenched my jaw, controlled my breathing, remained still with my hands trying painfully to bend down that disobedient organ, to tuck it between my legs.
Then the white towel swept upward, and I could see it above the top of my curtain. She was drying her hair, this woman. I leaned again to the right side of the stall, peered through the crack, and saw that the towel was over her face, covering her eyes completely. My body relaxed, slightly. There were a few golden seconds where I was certain she couldn’t see me. Without thinking, I
