The woman’s whole body, with the exception of her towel-covered head, came into view. She was tall, with skinny legs, long skinny twigs for arms, a beautiful curve to her back, and, as she turned slightly, displaying her marvels to me, the far more exaggerated curve of a pregnant belly. Her skin was fairer than mine, and crisscrossed with what I now realized were stitches, black stitches over still-healing scars. They were all over her shoulders and arms, most of them ten to fifteen centimeters in length, and straight, what I would later come to realize was the work of a weapon. In the moment, they neither added nor detracted from her beauty, such as it was, but only underscored her astounding strangeness. She had a few more scars on the upper parts of her legs, two across her chest, one on the outside of her right breast, but none, thanks to God, across that remarkable belly, smooth and round, her breasts lying on top of it, and from below her stomach, reaching up, her wounded thighs, between which, just visible, a dark patch of hair.
I heard her sigh. Her hands, small with gnawed fingernails, stopped their work atop her head and unwound the towel. I quickly stepped to the back of the shower, again, splashing water as I went, again. Cursing myself an idiot, again. She started singing, “I cannot forget that woman that made me suffer such a long time, I cannot forget that love . . .” And then she stopped and gave a short laugh. I heard rustling. I couldn’t see her, I heard only the smallest sounds. I didn’t know what she was doing. I didn’t have any idea of what a woman does in the morning to prepare herself for the day. And then the door opened and closed, and she was gone.
I reached outside the curtain, grabbed my towel, and wrapped it tightly around my waist, tying my erection flat to my stomach. I hadn’t really washed myself, didn’t even think about continuing. I wanted to escape. I stepped out into the steamy room, walked the corridor between the empty shower stalls, came to the door, and wondered what could be on the other side. Was the woman waiting, knowing I’d eventually emerge? Was someone new coming in? Perhaps only we two were crazy enough to shower so early, so far before daylight. Perhaps she, too, had nightmares.
I opened the door to an empty corridor and shut it behind me. There was the sign I’d ignored, heading in. “Women,” it read.
• • •
For weeks afterward, I would wake early from a different type of dream, where I traced my fingers over her rough stitches and her pure stomach, where she looked down on me from her great height and stared into my soul with eyes so powerful they drowned out all vision of her face, where her strong hands reached down, touched my young body on my neck, my shoulders, my hairless chest, reached down and down until I woke up excited and frustrated and ashamed in my bed in Bogotá, hundreds of kilometers and another world away from where she lived and had suffered. I didn’t want to have these dreams. I hated them. But they came anyway.
Worse, the memory followed me in the daytime. Of course I had noticed girls before, and wondered about what was beneath their clothes. I had seen images of naked women in magazines older boys had secreted away, showing me glimpses of women with enormous breasts and butts, lips painted to a deep red and faces caked with makeup and buffed to a flawless, inhuman sheen. But the woman in the shower, with her wounds and pregnant belly and chewed fingernails, replaced those fantasy women. The woman in the shower was different. She was real. A woman in the body of a woman, capable of being touched, of being wounded, of giving birth. A woman with a history and a future. The antiseptic smell of cleaning fluid was enough to make me stiffen.
The memory of her worked on me as powerfully, and as incomprehensibly, as my early encounter with what I was then calling God. I don’t mean this in the simple and often stupid way in which sexual passion is contrasted with religious ecstasy. The two experiences were not remotely similar—the first a rapture occurring entirely within my head, the second an assault on every nerve in my body. Nor was my reaction to her simply one of desire. If anything, the desire served merely to muddle the other reactions I’d had and add a strong layer of shame to the memory. Unlike the memory of God, which offered a clear path to me, this left me confused. It made me think there was something wrong with me. Sometimes, I blamed that woman. Mostly, I wanted to see her again. I hoped that she had an ugly face, as if an ugly face, or even a normal face, would purge the effect the rest of her body had made on me.
I learned her name, and her story, the following July.
“Would you like to be the altar boy at a baptism?” my father asked me over the phone. “I’m going to be the godfather to a very special child.”
This child, I would learn, was graced with the name Harold Peréz, named after the general in whose barracks he had been born. “The mother, Juana Peréz, she is one of our refugees,” he said. Juana, my father explained, had been in the Department of Security and Control in Envigado, a city bordering Medellín that at the time was the center for white-collar workers in the drug trade. “Her colleagues had tried to murder her with hatchets,” my father said, “so be prepared. She has some impressive scars, and I don’t want you staring.”
• • •
We all had breakfast before the baptism—my father,
