at the mission for nine years—she was thirty-eight, although by her small-boned frame I had guessed younger. As for the ELN and their roots, they had traditionally recruited members who believed in Liberation Theology, a branch of Roman Catholicism that combined Marxist and Christian teaching. “I have no doubt that goodness lives with evil inside those men, as it does with all of us,” she said. “I believe much of what they advocate is just—for peace, for an end to government corruption. For the paramilitary atrocities to stop. And I can understand their criticism of the elite. The gap between the rich and poor is dire. But violence is never the way.”
Later on, I combed the house for a Bible in vain. Papi was getting ready to go out with neighbors to a jazz café on Avenida Sexta in Cali. He rarely socialized beyond the farm; a couple of times a month he accepted invitations to join acquaintances at restaurants or for a night of salsa. I knocked on his door. “A Bible?” he asked. “Why do you want that?” He stood stiffly in jeans, buttoning the cuffs to his shirt, white, the collar embroidered, the doorway ensconced by his cologne. I wondered if he had a date. Maybe if he acquired a girlfriend, he would forget about me and Manuel.
“I need to look something up,” I said. “For school.”
“I don’t think I have one,” he said. “Ask Inez.”
I left in search of her. Wouldn’t my grandparents have owned a family Bible? But then, we had no crucifixes or pictures of the Virgin Mary, no signs of religion anywhere, unlike Ana’s house or Manuel’s apartment. Papi didn’t wear a cross like so many other men. I wondered if he’d purged the house of everything holy.
Inez showed me where to find the verses in the New Testament. First I came upon the verse by James: “If a brother or sister has nothing to wear and has no food for the day, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, keep warm, and eat well,’ but you do not give them the necessities of the body, what good is it? So also faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead.’ But I had difficulty with the beatitudes. According to them, the poor and weak were supposed to inherit the land and the kingdom of heaven. Prosperity might happen for those like Manuel who had the resources to work and bring about results, but how was change supposed to occur for those who didn’t—the hungry and homeless? What about the guerillas who considered themselves Catholic—did this mean they thought their attempts were for ultimate good, and they just didn’t see how taking hostages and threatening the government made things worse?
Sister Rosemary had said that good and evil lived inside each of us—Manuel, Ana, even me. What was that evil inside me? Inside Papi? If the heart could turn black so easily, depending on what you fed it, could that happen to me? Because I wasn’t sure I could tend to mine on my own. Maybe none of us could, and that was why we were doomed. Or maybe there were places where evil took root more swiftly, and others where that same evil would be strangled, starved out. Suppose I stayed, and evaded getting abducted or killed. What would my life be like, in this place where fear permeated the everyday and exploded—while shopping for groceries, strolling through a park? Might I be harmed even if I tried to modestly do right—become lesser somehow?—when what I really craved was resilience, courage. Stability. If I found Paula, could she offer me that? What alternate life awaited me in the United States? I paged through my passport, blank except for the stamps from Costa Rica. I could always come back.
Not long after dawn, someone opened Papi’s door and whispered—a woman’s voice I didn’t recognize—followed by footsteps on the stairs and the click of the front door. I drifted back to sleep. When I crept downstairs mid-morning, music flooded the sound system, an album by the famous guitarist Pepe Romero. It was surprising, since Papi never listened to music in the mornings, only at the close of the day. Even the dogs acted aware. They tugged over an old toy in the living room and glanced up expectantly every time one of the maids passed by.
Papi, still damp from his shower and dressed in boots and faded work jeans, read his newspaper as he ate breakfast. The front page depicted the Avianca turboprop in grainy color, headshots of the ELN leaders alongside, “Gambino” named in the caption.
“I want to go with you this morning,” I said, referring to the property rounds he conducted on Saturdays.
“Oh?” He regarded me over his paper. “Why is this?”
“Can’t I come?” I had accompanied him before, but rarely—perhaps three times a year at most, to see how the fields changed with the growth cycles of the sugarcane.
He folded his paper and set it aside. “You had better change. It’s been muddy.”
We climbed into his splattered pickup and headed out, turning left on the road toward the cane fields. A minute later we veered off-road. Our land seemed to go on forever; I liked this feeling which was more akin to stewardship than ownership—that everything as far as I could see was our responsibility and, in turn, sustained us, from the chicken in our soup to the aguardiente, better known as guaro, a grain alcohol made from sugarcane and a fixture at parties on the haciendas. As we headed farther away from the main road and over deep tire tracks, we passed our many field workers and wagons pulled by tractors and horses. I asked what the workers were doing—hadn’t we just drained these fields? Even though Papi had explained the intricacies of farming sugarcane dozens of times, I always forgot. Left to itself, sugarcane matured about once a year, but big operations like ours managed multiple growing cycles. Currently we yielded three main harvests, he said, but the way he and Luis decided to rotate the fields depended on several factors. In one field workers were replanting; they dropped pairs of cut stalks into furrows, and these would grow shoots in several weeks. Then we passed another set of fields, void of workers, where only short green shoots pointed up from the ground; Papi called these ratoons and said that these grew naturally after a field’s first harvest. A field only needed replanting every three harvests. And we passed yet a third set of fields that swarmed with workers and plows; these peasants were planting sweet corn. When I asked why we did this, he said that this set of cane fields had been harvested late, so Luis had decided to plant a different crop in its place—fallow planting, it was called.
“Displaced farmers?” I asked. Papi always referred to our field employees as workers, not campesinos.
He gripped the wheel with one hand and adjusted the bandanna on his forehead with the other, eyes darting on the road ahead, watching for potholes. “Yes,” he said. “I gave those fields to some of the displaced who have been fleeing through here. But only for a few months, until those fields are ready to grow cane again.”
We rolled along in silence, my heart hurting as if struck by the stones the tires kicked up. This was the Papi I had loved all my life: the father who had taken me for rides on his saddle, laughed at the way the dogs backed up against his chair, demanding to be stroked, even the Papi of stern remarks who wanted me to go to the best schools. “Did sugarcane bring you to Florida?” I asked.
“I worked for a rum factory at first. That’s how I learned about sugar. Why is that important?”
“I’m your daughter,” I replied, tight-lipped. “Don’t I have a right to know?”
He said, “Family business is no one else’s. I don’t know that you understand.”
“Of course I do. But will you stop talking to me like I’m an employee? Please.”
The truck lurched into a pothole; we bobbed in our seats. “If I tell you,” he began, “that puts things in jeopardy. I signed on to certain arrangements. You must swear not to tell anyone.” His black eyes bore into mine. He let go of the gear shift and held out his hand. For a second I didn’t realize he meant for me to grasp it. Scratches etched his fingers, his callouses scraping my palm.
“I
