done with the reading, hand-washing, and nibbling of bitter foods on my plate, I fled.
I headed off alone, since I still hadn’t befriended any students. This was, in part, a silent rebellion against my father for removing me from my previous high school in la Ciudad Jardín, where Ana and Gracia, the closest girls I could count as friends, attended. The Hebrew school was located off the Plaza de Cayzedo downtown, in the historic district. I had told our driver I would meet him on the main street across the square. I walked slowly, enjoying the dry April afternoon. A crowd spilled out of the great Catedral de San Pedro, and the bells tolled three o’clock. Incense permeated the air, a scent faintly like burnt sugarcane mixed with the gritty Cali fumes of car exhaust. I stopped, curious. Old women and men, children, teenagers, bowed their heads and made the sign of the cross. An eerie stillness crept over the square. I made a sign of the cross, too, just because it seemed right, then remembered and felt strange for doing so in my Hebrew uniform. I didn’t believe in religion, but nevertheless Catholicism surrounded me; only in that respect had I ever felt like an outsider in my homeland.
From a side street, a procession appeared of a half-dozen young men, bare-chested, hoisting a chipped, plaster Jesus statue shoulder high. I pressed among the bystanders for a better view. Three more young men followed, carrying a rugged cross made of twisted tree limbs. A throng of pilgrims surrounded the last trio, whose grave faces captivated me, especially the one with the lightly tanned face, delicate features, and head of thick dark hair. He caught my hand as he passed by, and I gasped; just as quickly, he released me. Only after he was a dozen strides ahead, his back to the throng, did I step away, leaving me to wonder if I had imagined the encounter. I knew I hadn’t, but someone rubbed my elbow—an old man grinned up at me, eyes yellow and teeth missing, and said, “Knows what he likes when he sees it. Me too,” and slid his hand along my waist. I wrestled out of his grasp and hurried off. “No shame in it,” the old man said, trailing after me, and spat on the cobblestones. “Think you’re too good! Juventud.”
Youth, he muttered. But at that moment, I felt suddenly older. Halfway across the square, I spun around. The young man and tail end of the cross slipped inside the tall cathedral doors. Cali teemed with two million people. I wasn’t likely to see him again.
In the driver’s seat, Fidel snoozed with his El País and lotto tickets strewn across his lap, the handle of his 9mm just visible beneath the newspaper. I rapped on the bulletproof glass to wake him, and minutes later, we were passing the open buses on the autopista toward home. Fidel, whom I guessed to be in his early thirties, had only been with us a few months. Atop the dash he had affixed a plastic Virgin Mary statue that bobbed as we struck potholes, and below, a sticker of a sexy girl in a bikini—a contradiction I caught myself smirking at more than once. We hadn’t spoken much beyond small talk about the weather and Cali’s often-gridlocked traffic. Unlike Medellín and Bogotá, Cali’s infrastructure was terrible: detours, gravel roads, and broken pavement proliferated, even in the city’s center. Sometimes the commute to and from my school took over an hour.
Today the holiday had cleared the highway of traffic. We wound our way through outlying towns. The latest reggaeton hit belted from the radio, and Fidel drummed the wheel.
“Have you ever been in love?” I asked.
He glanced at me in the rearview mirror, grinning. “Why? You have a boyfriend now, princess?” Princesa was the nickname of Papi’s workers for me.
I shook my head and stared out the window. “I just wondered if you believed in love.”
“Why are you asking me? Your father is the one to ask.”
We’d stopped at a light. A few teenage boys and older men with creased faces held up bunches of peppers for sale, sleeves of cheap sunglasses and watches. Papi didn’t have a serious novia; he never did. Occasionally he had parties at the farm and invited our neighbors, hacienda owners, and sometimes a woman would stay the night in his room. But in the morning her high heels clicked faintly out the door, followed by an engine’s rumble. Such women remained elusive, absent from our daily life.
Seas of sugarcane rushed past on either side, the valley speckled with the bamboo lean-tos and rubbish heaps of the poor. A pregnant woman draped laundry over tree branches, a toddler balanced on one hip.
Or did Fidel mean something about Papi and my mother? She had left when I was less than two, and where she was now Papi said he could only guess. The phone had never rung with her voice on the other end, and no letter had ever arrived for me in her handwriting. The simple life was too empty for her, Papi would say, stirring his tinto for a beat too long. She needed ideas, unusual personalities, and expeditions. I knew little else about her.
We sped around a bend. Fidel slammed on the brakes and we lurched, tires shrieking. A half-dozen Jeeps and canvas-topped trucks surrounded a city bus. We skidded to a stop just short of a Jeep’s rear. A camouflaged figure leaped out, pointed and shouted at us; pock-marked and thick-browed, he was no more than a teenager. Fidel flicked off the music and snatched the 9mm onto his lap. The dozen bandidos on foot pointed automatic rifles at the bus. Passengers spilled out and lined up with their hands behind their heads, the small children wailing. An old woman stumbled from the bus into the gravel, her dress askew, lumpy thighs and swollen veins exposed. A bandido yanked her to standing.
“Get down,” Fidel hissed. He palmed the steering wheel and shifted gears; our car jerked to the left. Then he punched the gas. We surged forward and swung around the hijacked bus, into the blind curve of the other lane. I crouched forward into the back of his seat like the crash position on airplane emergency cards, silently choking down the stench of burnt rubber. Oh, God, I thought, hoping for what or whom to save us? So this was how life could just end, one instant chatting about boyfriends over the beats of reggaetón, and then the next, smashed or shot? I recalled T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men:” This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.
“Pigs. Robbing on Semana Santa. You can get up now, Mercedes.”
But I stayed hunched, rubbing my sweaty palms in my skirt folds. We heard about hijackings and robberies but I had only witnessed one, a long time ago: a checkpoint where Papi had paid off the armed men with American dollars. Colombians who had the means avoided rural routes and traveled cross-country by domestic airlines. If Fidel had not acted so quickly, would I have been dragged from the car, forced into a Jeep—and then what? At last the tires crunched gravel. We had turned onto the road that led up to the gate of our hacienda.
On either side, Papi’s sugarcane crop arose like two pale green walls bordering the road home. Rubber-booted workers fanned across the fields and hopped in and out of pickups. Fidel beeped at Luis, Papi’s main jefe, as we zipped past, who touched his hat brim from astride his Paso Fino. March and April brought an end to the dry season; the workers were draining the soil to prepare for the next crop. Our hacienda was situated in the Valle de Cauca at the foothills of the Andes, where on the steep hillsides we grew coffee, and on the warm valley slopes, raised alpacas and horses. Thousands of acres of cane not being enough for Papi, he became irritable when idle. He and his half dozen jefes, men whom I had known ever since I could remember, ran the farm and oversaw the workers who labored in our fields or rented small plots of land from us.
Our jefes lived in a guesthouse near the stable, all middle-aged but unmarried—uncles and protectors, even if they weren’t our blood. I imagined myself riding next to them one day, running the farm with Papi. Most had lost their families to either the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, better known as the FARC, or the Ejército de Liberación Nacional, the ELN—if not the guerillas, then the bloodiness of the drug cartels. In the evenings they gathered outside to smoke cigars and drink rum or beer, and their laughter drifted to my bedroom window. Our land, aglow in the sunset, stretched empty and vast.
The car approached
