“Your grandparents,” she said, chin lifted, “they were gunned down by guerillas.”
A web of cracks split across the mosaic tiles that she rested the platter against, and the counter chilled my arms. “Why didn’t Papi ever tell me?” I asked.
“Too painful, perhaps. And you knowing may lead to other questions.”
“About my mother?”
She squeezed her sponge, hesitated before she spoke. “Your mother, yes. This farm did not have all the comforts it has now. When she arrived, you know—the house was just a few bare rooms. I didn’t think she would stay, even with my help.”
“Because she was rich? From Miami?”
Loose hairs clung to her damp cheeks as Inez shook her head. She raised her suds-covered hands. “You think your mother could kill a chicken?” she asked, and mimed snapping one’s neck in the air. “No, not if her life depended on it, and all we had running around here was chickens and goats. So she left. Your Papi let her go. He had to. She had a nervous breakdown.”
I ran a towel over a pot. A breakdown, how did that happen? How did you kill a chicken? I was half-American; did this mean I wasn’t worthy of Colombia, wasn’t tough enough? That I might, too, end up broken one day? “But if he loved her,” I said, “why why couldn’t he have lived with her in America? Don’t they have ranches there?”
Her face remained as smooth as a plate; she peeked over my shoulder at the men. “If I know one thing in my life, it’s that your father is a good man. But I also know a few other things.” She dragged another pot into the sink, dipped her sponge in soap and scrubbed. After a few moments, she paused and brushed a moist rope of hair behind her ear. “Your father cannot go to the United States,” she said calmly. Then blasted scalding water over the pot.
CHAPTER TWO
Several days later, Manuel met me on the side street by my school. I had asked Fidel to pick me up two hours past the usual time. Thus began our ritual. Manuel and I would roam the historic district, buying a flavored ice or another street snack to eat on the steps of the Museo de Arte Colonial. When Manuel’s shirts were always dusty with sawdust and wood-shavings, and he smelled like freshly cut lumber and the faint grease of tools. I wore my horrendous school uniform with the baggy vest and the skirt that hung to the knees.
On the main street we passed a tall building, a Taca Airlines office inside the lower mall. The metal detectors beeped incessantly; a businessman sprang open his briefcase before a guard and lost his grip. Papers flew, and both men fumbled to retrieve them. A Taca ticket agent rummaged over her purse, swiftly adjusted her navy skirt and white blouse, and changed from street flats into heels. I hung back, peering through the glass at the posters of the Panama Canal and Machu Picchu. When Manuel joked about me booking a trip, I told him about my dream of becoming a flight attendant, asked if he thought that was silly.
“You’d look cute in the uniform,” he said.
We were holding hands and he drew me gently away from the glass and kissed me. Lady shoppers and businessmen in suits streamed by. My body flushed; where could we go? Since the party I had been picturing us together, out with our friends at street festivals and nightclubs, but also alone. I wanted more than just kisses and sweet touches; I wanted to be naked with him, to sit on the edge of a bed somewhere and pull him toward me in the dark.
His hand grazed my side. He hooked a finger in the waistband of my skirt. We continued walking. I bought an arepa in front of the museum, and we sat down on the steps. Below, a man dressed in a scruffy poncho and cowboy hat called after the passersby. He toted a plaster donkey that he placed on the sidewalk, gesturing for people to sit on its back and get their picture taken. But the business professionals, vagrants, and pedestrians breezed past with barely a glance. By the time the vendor handed Manuel his corncake, the Juan Valdez imitator was sitting on the poor plaster donkey like a Colombian Jesus with no place to go. Finally, a gringo couple shoved a few American dollars in the man’s palm, and the woman struck a pose with the prop.
Did I appear American to other Colombians? To Manuel? Or would he be shocked if I told him about my mother—not only that she was American, but Jewish? What difference did it make? Yet I felt sure that it would. I blew on my arepa before taking a bite of its sweetness.
The streets teemed with vagrants, dozens of young men Manuel’s age with a hunger in their eyes and a shiftless manner. Families, too, perched on corners with signs that read Ayuda, somos desplazados—Help, we are displaced. A grubby child wandered up and gawked at me eating the arepa. He stared like our dogs, waiting for a scrap of meat at mealtimes; I shrank away. Manuel got up and returned with something sugary-smelling inside a wax paper. The boy squatted next to us and choked down the steaming plantains from the greasy folds; he didn’t take his eyes off of us.
Manuel asked him where he had come from, before Cali. “My village,” the boy said, between licking his fingers. “We all left.”
“Your whole village—why?”
“A pipe blew up.” The boy raised his arms above him in a circle, his eyes wide. “Big. The kind the oil runs through. All the buildings, smashed. Like this.” He crushed the corner of the wax paper.
Manuel frowned. “Guerillas,” he said, and handed the boy a napkin. “Right?”
The boy nodded vigorously, plantain juice bathing his chin.
Soon after, I climbed into the car, breathless and tousled. The locks sounded. Fidel eyed me in the mirror. “No bags?” he said.
“What?” I said, taken aback.
“From shopping?”
“Oh, with Ana,” I said quickly. “She had an errand, not me.”
He scoffed as we jutted into the traffic. “I have never seen a girl go shopping and come back empty-handed.”
I didn’t answer but knew that I’d been caught in a lie. I prayed that he said nothing to Papi. We scooted around a city bus, its tailpipe billowing a black cloud of diesel fumes. The handgun jutted out from beneath his daily paper.
When we turned onto the road for home, I saw the remaining cane had been cut, the landscape oddly bare, like the first sight of a shorn alpaca. At our gate, two dozen men in faded clothing loitered, pacing. A small gang of children lingered to jab sticks and stones in the mud. The jefe Luis pranced on horseback among the mob. He and several field hands yelled for the desplazados to let us through, to leave; Fidel blasted the horn and inched the car ahead. Vincente thumbed the pistol in his holster.
“What do they want?” I asked, the window cool against my forehead. The sunken eyes of one of the displaced stared back at me. I thought him old at first, then realized he was much younger—his cheeks so thin that the jaw line jutted out.
“Work, what do you think?” Fidel said. “But we have nothing for them now.” The gate opened, and we zipped through.
That afternoon Papi’s brow was creased with worry, even after I approached his chair from behind and hugged him hello. In one hand, he crushed his purple bandanna. The living room sat silent, the stereo dark. “What’s wrong?” I asked, alarmed at his lack of attention.
“Did you see all the poor outside the gate? Because of the guerillas, they become my problem. They want land to farm, and I can’t give it to them. Not even to rent.”
“Don’t we have a lot of land?” I stepped over to the window.
“There’s not enough to go around, princesa.” He jumped up from his seat, pulled his hair with one hand, and paced. Shaka, the ridgeback, approached him with a ball and whined.
But Papi kept his cigar between his fingertips, and Shaka slumped into