I had pictured it differently, leisurely, that he would first lead me through his father’s furniture shop as he did later—the circular saws pointing out like crocodile teeth, the half-built bedframes and dressers in varieties of woods, the aroma heavy with grease and varnish. His parents’ house stood next door, and I heard the splashing of water, a woman scolding a dog. But instead he grabbed me by the hand outside the shop and led me up an outdoor staircase to an apartment. “I share this with my brothers,” he said as he opened the door.
He escorted me through the main room. On the center wall surrounding a great crucifix hung several acoustic guitars, and above the tattered couch, a poster of the singer Shakira: lips parted, back arched, blond mane flowing over her halter top. We passed a desk strewn with papers, a Bible, mostly theological books from what I could tell at a glance, but I saw a few dog-eared volumes by Garcia Márquez, our national hero, as well as Karl Marx, a name that meant nothing to me at the time, other than sounding flat and foreign. We moved on to the far room. Three twin beds filled most of the space, nightstands and short dressers cramped in between. Bars encased the louvered glass. A fan oscillated, thick with dust. The apartment radiated heat.
Heat drew us together; I had but a glance around the room, the unmade beds. I was vaguely aware of the one behind me as Manuel guided my face to his. I had thought that I wanted to talk, but I didn’t. Words interfered. I unbuttoned my clothes, fingers shaking, but left my underwear on, he did the same, and I groped for the bed, traced the muscles of his abdomen. Might someone walk in—Carlos, his parents? I felt almost as I had in the churchyard or in the driveway with the gate creeping shut behind me—cut off from everything, losing and discovering myself at once. He stood naked between my opened knees, and I pressed my thighs against him.
We lay together for what seemed like hours, but couldn’t have been since we didn’t have much time. So many mysteries unraveled that I had thought would take months to navigate once I did have a lover: his lips brushing to the back of my knee, my lower back, my thrusting against his hand, yanking down my underwear. Nakedness. We stopped just short of the act itself. But I guessed by the sure way he touched me and where, that he had done this many times, and probably—although I didn’t want to think of it—with more than one girl.
Finally we broke apart from one another and half-dressed but then lay back again, lazy in the afternoon heat. Traffic honked and thundered below. We began talking, about nothing at first—each declaring the other’s unique flaws and perfections to one another. “Where did you get this scar?” I asked, thumbing his knee. A spider bite when he was eleven, he said. He flipped me over, pinched me through the sheet. “You’ve got the most beautiful ass, you know that?” Face burning, I spun away and thrust my cheek to the pillow, laughing. I asked about his music, if he had hopes for his talent. Carlos had booked a recording studio for June, and then who knew? Maybe they would become a world famous guitar duo, maybe not.
“What do you want?” I asked, tracing his eyebrow with my middle finger. He said, “Right now? You,” and tickled my side, but after a moment he stopped and grew serious. I propped up, chin in my palm, and studied him.
“I suppose I want to live a similar life as Emilio’s, just not as a priest, obviously.” A smile once again broke over his face, and he motioned to us pressed together and half-clothed. “Be a great Catholic leader, a saint. Perhaps that’s not possible without being a priest.”
“I’m sure it is. But what exactly do you want to do?”
“Free people from evil. Expose those who feed the system. Bring peace. We’re organizing a rally this Sunday, me and Emilio? You should come, if you can.”
“I can see you now, the singing missionary of the mountains,” I said, grinning. “Riding your donkey up into the villages, strumming your guitar.” I took my chance and tickled him back near his navel, so that he reeled onto his side to stop me.
“But it’s true, you know?” he said, laughing. “And you know what’s strange? I actually feel connected somewhat to the ELN, despite the terrible things they do. Do you know their history?” And he told me how the ELN, unlike the FARC, which had four times the number of members or twenty thousand throughout Colombia, had been founded on sound principles, but those principles had been corrupted over the course of our decades-long civil war. The ELN had been started by former priests, Manuel Pérez and Camillo Torres. My Manuel was more interested in Torres, who had cast aside his priest’s robes to lead his band of guerillas against the army and was killed in battle in 1966. Pérez was a thug, according to Manuel, but history may have been different had Torres survived and went on to become leader. Pérez had succumbed to hepatitis B last year, it was rumored—this Emilio had found out as a negotiator—and the ELN was now headed by someone named Gambino. But the organization lacked a visionary who might lead them into the future.
“So you’re going to become a guerilla?” I said, rolling my eyes. “This will really go over well with my father.”
He shoved a pillow into my face, said, “That’s the last thing I’m going to be.” I pushed it away; he grabbed my wrist and we wrestled for a minute. But then he dropped his hold and lifted my chin toward him. “Guerillas kill people, Mercedes. There’s nothing romantic about them.” I told him the story of my ride home with Fidel and the bus then. He said I was never to take the bus again, he would have never let me come on the night of the church meeting had I first told him about what I had witnessed. We fell silent. The fan’s breeze stirred my hair and cooled my neck and face; tiny bumps appeared on my arms. He asked me what I wanted. Maybe to live on our farm, have a family, I told him, if I couldn’t work and travel as a flight attendant. “But right now I want to find out about Papi, as much as I can,” I said.
“I know you want to know the truth, but please be careful.” He hesitated, then asked, “If you find out anything that strikes you as odd, will you be sure to tell me?”
I nodded and said okay, still giddy. But something in his demeanor—a pointedness and preoccupation—stirred my stomach. We talked so easily. He liked me, liked my body—was I glimpsing another intention? Whatever the alarm, I squelched it, asked something else. Did Manuel think we should keep up the ruse about me going to Ana’s house on my free days after school? He didn’t like lying, but he didn’t think it wise for Papi to think we were seeing each other more than on weekends for now, and I agreed, especially with the recent hijacking. Then he urged me up; the time was getting away from us.
CHAPTER FOUR
Afternoons for the next couple of weeks, Manuel and Emilio organized the rally, making signs, printing leaflets and calls to action. Emilio designed T-shirts to raise money for La Maria Juventud. I had never attended a demonstration of any kind before, and couldn’t imagine what I would do. Wave signs? Shout into a megaphone? What would I shout? The rally would take place in front of the Catedral de San Pedro where Manuel and I first met. When I pressed him about the possibility of violence breaking out, he assured me that police presence would be heavy and the authorities would fly helicopters overhead. Still, I felt uneasy.
Sister Rosemary and I finished the forms. I had made mistakes, but she praised my efforts. “Always do your best, have a positive attitude, and even the most difficult task will become easier,” she said. I winced at these empty words but said nothing, wishing that she would talk to me like an adult. She promised I would never regret learning a second language and quoted to me a saying I liked: “Another language, another soul.” I would take the EFL exam in June. It would be challenging, she said. We couldn’t prepare enough.
She explained that the beatitudes, or corporal works of mercy—to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, visit the imprisoned—were not so much orders from Jesus but declarations of how a person filled with the spirit of God lives, their actions.
