wielding a stick in her fist like a club, screaming at him to stop and take his punishment like a man after he upset her for some forgettable reason. Scared, he ran into the water to escape, and as he swam through the weeds away from the shore, he became entangled in what he at first thought was a thick piece of rope, but was terrified to discover was actually a long, thick black water snake. It thrust its triangular head and darting tongue at his face as it slithered and squirmed around his body trying to escape and he gave a great involuntary scream that he immediately regretted, because boys, he knew, were not supposed to be afraid of snakes. His mother called him a sissy for months afterward, never tiring of embarrassing him by telling the story to anyone who would listen. The blow to his pride, he remembered, had hurt him more than the beating she administered when he eventually went home to receive his punishment.
As for Claire, her message stung, but he harboured no strong feelings against her, certainly nothing to compare to the depths of the bitterness he felt toward his mother. But why couldn’t she have just told him to his face that their relationship was over? He would have felt bad but would have soon recovered if she had made an effort to explain her reasons. This time he was older and less able to cope than when he was a resilient teenager back in 1935 and better able to shrug off the damage she had inflicted on his psyche.
That evening after work he went home, changed out of his suit, threw a poncho over his shoulders, went out into the dark, cold drizzle of Bogota’s perpetual winter and flagged down a cruising taxi.
“Llevarme a un bar,” he told the driver. The driver laughed and drove him to a place he knew in a poor but tough part of the city where no diplomat would dare venture. A woman in a tight sweater and short skirt smoking a cigarette at the entrance greeted him like an old friend and offered to drink with him inside.
“No, gracias,” he said. But on seeing the look of disappointment that crossed her dark-brown, acne-scarred face, he reached into his pocket and gave her a twenty peso note. The woman smiled at him through broken teeth and pushed open the door for him. If this generous customer had problems and wanted to be left alone, she would respect his wishes.
Oscar stepped inside and waited a minute for his eyes to adjust to the bright lighting and low ceiling. The floor was wet and slippery from the water tracked in on the boots of customers, a duo was playing mournful Andean flute music, and there was a smell of damp ponchos, cheap perfume, and clogged toilet drains. With his dark skin, high cheek bones, and straight black hair, Oscar looked no different than the people who lived in the neighbourhood, and when he opened his mouth, he spoke with a local Spanish accent acquired from his live-in cook and maid. It was a perfect disguise. The waiter who led him to a table in the darkest corner of the room poured him, without asking, a shot of aguardiente, the cheap rot-gut anise-flavoured sugarcane liquor favoured by the vast majority of poor Colombians out for a night on the town.
“Quieres que deje esta contigo?” he asked, and when Oscar nodded his agreement he left the bottle on the table and departed.
Oscar raised his glass and tossed its contents down his throat, only to gag on the raw drink and spit half of it out onto the floor. He refilled his glass and drank from it again, this time slowly, letting the alcohol dull his senses. Throughout the evening he continued to drink, determined to drive Claire from his mind through an act of will, just as he had with the existential issues of belief and redemption that had plagued his life in the aftermath of the fire. But the more he drank, the more he thought of her and the more he realized he would never forget her. The initial impact of her message had worn off, but he missed her more than ever.
One of the reasons he had so eagerly accepted the offer of a posting to Bogota, he now saw, was because he had expected Claire to ease his entry into the class-conscious society of Colombia. Now he would have to do it by himself, and wasn’t sure he was up to the challenge. He had become dependent on her. He was shy, withdrawn, and found it hard to make friends. She was outgoing and mixed easily with people from all walks of life. She could discuss fashion trends, gourmet cooking, and travel destinations, subjects of little interest to him but which were of never-ending fascination for people in the diplomatic world he now inhabited. The Canadian staff at the embassy, while friendly enough, spent most of their spare time socializing with each other and playing tennis at the local country club while their children swam in a heated pool under the watchful eyes of a lifeguard.
An embassy colleague had once taken him to the club to meet the manager, helpfully explaining that the club rules denied membership to Negros and Indians unless they held diplomatic passports. While he was greeted and shown around courteously, he just couldn’t see himself spending his free time at a club that excluded people like him.
By the time he finished his second bottle of aguardiente, Oscar was finding it hard to remain awake and decided to go home. He put a fistful of money on the table, rose to his feet, and stood for a moment until his head cleared enough to let him make his way to the exit without stumbling against the tables and chairs. Outside and looking for a taxi, he felt someone take hold of his arm. It was the prostitute he had met when he first entered the bar.
“Cuidado, no estas solo,” she said, pointing at four men who had followed him outside, thinking he would be an easy mark despite his size. She hurried off as he turned and faced them. They pulled knives and surrounded him.
“Tu dinero, Indio, y rapido!” the one in charge told him, coming close with his knife in his hand.
Even with his senses impaired, Oscar was more than a match for his assailants. Reacting automatically, he drew on the hand-to-hand combat skills learned in the army to break the arm of his first attacker. He then turned on the others, kicking and beating them and driving them away. He calmed down on his way home in a taxi when he realized how close a call he had had. The police, had they been summoned to deal with the attempted robbery, would have submitted a report to the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and it would have called in his ambassador to ask what his first secretary had been doing brawling with criminals in such an unsavoury place. He might well have been fired; he decided to stay out of bars in the future.
The next day, he bought half a dozen cases of aguardiente and began drinking in the mornings as soon as he woke up, in his office when no one was looking, and at home when he was alone in the evenings. He told himself that he could stop whenever he wanted, but he soon could not get through the day without his ration of alcohol. Fortunately, through trial and error, he learned that if he kept his consumption to one bottle a day, he could keep his depression at bay, remain steady on his feet, and not slur his words. Thus, although he began to display major errors in judgement at work, everyone assumed that was because he was basically incompetent, and no one suspected that it was because he had a drinking problem.
One year into his posting, Pilar Lopez y Ordonez, the receptionist, rang Oscar in his office.
“There’s someone here at the front desk to see you.”
“Who is it? What does he want?”
“He wouldn’t give his name. He just said he had something important to say to the Indian. I guess that means you.”
Pilar was the twenty-two-year- old daughter of an old Colombian family whose ancestors had come with the first wave of Spanish colonists to New Granada in the sixteenth century to look for gold and to establish cattle ranches and coffee plantations. Despite the black roots of her straight, dyed blond hair, her piercing black eyes, and dark brown complexion, she would have been offended if anyone had insinuated that Indian blood ran in her veins. If asked, she would have said that she had nothing against los indios, as she and members of her class disdainfully called Indians, as long as they knew their place: and their place was working for pittances seven days a week and twelve months each year as maids and cooks
