“She’s somewhat distracted.” He smirked and reminded me of Luis. “We must convince her that going to one of these schools will be the biggest adventure of her life. She will never look back.” Then he left, humming a tune.
Shades of pink blanketed the sky as Sister Rosemary organized the forms and gathered her things. I wasn’t sure how I felt about her. She didn’t seem cold, exactly, just somewhat removed. She was an outsider, so perhaps it was part of her gringa personality. North Americans had different ways, and I guessed my mother had them, too. I might never know.
“Do you ever wish you had stayed home, and not come to Colombia?” I asked.
She wound an indigo shawl around her shoulders; it appeared a deep purple in the dying sunlight. “I miss my family, it’s true,” she said, tucking the fringed ends underneath her arms. “But with God, I have learned to accept it. I wanted to see the world, know myself. Sometimes the only way to see your life clearly is to leave it.”
The mood at dinner couldn’t have been more unlike the disaster of Manuel’s visit the week before. Papi sat tall as he ate, joked, and steered clear of topics like the Church and the poor. In Miami, he boasted, the city streets smelled like exhaust but not trash. Every middle-class family had two cars so that six people didn’t cram into a single one the size of a shoebox. The homeless pushed carts and begged underneath the highway ramps, but you didn’t see nearly as many of them, certainly not so many women and children.
Sister Rosemary disagreed, however. She pointed out that America had just as many faults as Colombia, and if the problems didn’t seem so glaring it was because Americans were not fighting the same types of wars inside their borders. But the wars were still there—over lack of health care, drug addiction, the environment. When I lived in America, I constantly felt like I was wearing a beautiful coat, she said, shiny and well-tailored on the outside, but inside the lining was ripped and the coat was not so warm.
Here, neighbor helped neighbor. The zapateria owner stopped by the mission every week, fixed belts and resoled shoes for the desplazados, for free. Once she had helped lead a peace rally downtown when a dozen youth from a cosmetology school arrived, turning heads with their outrageous dye-jobs and stylish jeans. They fanned out into the worst streets, combs, capes, and scissors in arm, to give free shampoos and haircuts; when asked, they said wasn’t that a surefire thing to lift the spirit, and needed by everyone? If more Americans saw firsthand the horrors here of dead bodies in ditches and the number of people who barely had beans and rice to eat, there would be riots, she said. But most Americans did not see it, so they did not care.
Papi nodded, his face as grave as when he had set off to find the alpaca earlier.
She had not only finished college but earned a higher theology degree in Chicago, one of the northern cities. I didn’t know any Colombian woman who was so educated and not a doctor or a lawyer. “I wish I could have had the opportunity to study in the United States,” Papi said, giving his mouth a quick pat with his napkin. “But I made my choices, and at a certain point it is too late.”
“But why couldn’t you?” I asked.
“Most people in this country cannot afford tutors to get them into American schools,” he said. “I had to make money, so I worked in the commodities business, and then decided I wanted to farm. And I met your mother.”
I blew on my steaming ajiaco. If he had married my mother, wouldn’t he have become an American citizen then, able to come and go freely to that country, and stay? Perhaps they hadn’t gotten married, and she had me illegitimately. Was that why his family turned their backs, being such devout Catholics? But then the Church here had the records of the marriage and annulment; Emilio had shown me. So Papi and Paula must have gotten married here. And with a half-American daughter, why wasn’t he a dual citizen?
“Why did you leave the States then, if it was so great?” I asked.
He sopped up his soup with a piece of bread. “America has many good opportunities for some businesses but not for others. I wasn’t happy there until I met your mother. By then I had decided I wanted to farm in Colombia, near my family. The simple life.”
This was the best answer I was going to get out of him: vagueness and half-truths. “Well, then you should understand why I don’t want to leave home,” I said.
“I understand perfectly why you don’t want to leave,” he said. “You just don’t understand why you must go.”
Sister Rosemary asked him something about the coffee trade, and the conversation moved on; I wished she had not been there, and I might have pressed him further. If I searched his drawers and files, maybe I could find some answers about his business affairs with the farm and elsewhere. Even though, I realized, the answers I wanted were probably not located on paper.
Someone thumped the glass door, opened it a crack. Luis stomped the mud off his boots, entered, and removed his hat when he saw company. “Pardon me,” he said. “But I think you should turn on the news.”
We rarely watched television during mealtimes. Papi believed it corrupted the soul. But this time he hunted for the remote and flicked on the big screen. The Colombian news was broadcasting coverage of an airplane on a dirt strip, followed by headshots of wanted guerilla leaders. The large print at the bottom read: “ELN hijacks domestic Avianca flight and takes 46 hostages.”
Sister Rosemary made a sound in her throat. Papi and Luis stood a few feet from the TV, their arms crossed and legs spread wide. Five men dressed in business suits had boarded a turboprop from Bucaramanga that morning, bound for Bogotá. But once in the air, the men pulled handguns and forced the plane to land on a remote airstrip where they met ELN guerillas who whisked away the hostages. They abandoned the plane in the jungle.
“Pretty brilliant, huh?” Luis said to Papi. He wore a wide grin but shook his head slowly as he watched the screen. “Do you know what this is going to do to the country?”
“Fools,” Papi said. “This will come back at them tenfold.” He shook his head, too, but as he returned to the table his arms remained tightly crossed, his eyebrows furrowed into a single barbed wire. He paced by his chair, and when his gaze fell on me, he pointed to the screen. “What did I tell you, about the troubles getting worse? How happy do you think those flight attendants are right now, marching through the jungle with guns at their backs?”
“I could work an international route. I wouldn’t be scared to fly to other countries.”
“And you don’t think that’s next?” Papi asked, his voice sharpening. “These guerillas will hijack Delta Airlines if they think it will win them more ransom money.”
Sister Rosemary looked from Papi to me in puzzlement; I had never mentioned my desire to be a flight attendant to her. I stared into my empty soup bowl. Inez skirted around us, clearing dinnerware. Luis remained in front of the TV, but had twisted his head around to listen. Why wouldn’t he leave? The nun pushed back her chair and stood, hugging herself. She had shrunken from the woman who had been talking and laughing moments ago.
Papi apologized to her for yelling, wiped his brow with the bandanna. The rains drummed, gushing out the gutters. He asked Luis to drive her back to the mission. She squeezed my shoulder good-bye, leaned in close and pressed a card into my hand. “My number, direct, in case you need me,” she whispered in my ear, smoothing my hair as she withdrew. Lavender, I smelled, and the faintest trace of sunscreen. I nodded, brushed the back of my hand along the fringed tail of her shawl as she hovered at the door, awaiting Luis to jog up with the umbrella.
Once
