ADVANCE PRAISE
“A harrowing, international coming-of-age story, Juventud is unforgettable, erotic, and suspenseful. I was willing to follow the protagonist Mercedes anywhere; into the Cali nightclubs, to her shooting lessons, into bed with her lovers, and to the dangerous activist meetings and rallies that mark a point-of-no-return in her adolescence. This novel is part political thriller, part love story. It kept me up at night and that’s the highest praise.”
—patricia henley, National Book Award finalist and author of
Hummingbird House and In the River Sweet
“Vanessa Blakeslee’s remarkable debut novel takes us inside Colombia through the eyes of Mercedes, a privileged half-Colombian girl who leaves the safety of Papi’s hacienda to embark on a life touched by disappointment and splendid achievement. Her story echoes the conflicts of our twenty-first century’s transnational, uneasy global culture.”
—xu xi, author of Habit of a Foreign Sky
curbside splendor publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of short passages quoted in reviews.
The stories contained herein are works of fiction. All incidents, situations, institutions, governments, and people are fictional and any similarity to characters or persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
Published by Curbside Splendor Publishing, Inc., Chicago, Illinois in 2015.
First Edition
Copyright © 2015 by Vanessa Blakeslee
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015939308
isbn 978-1-94-043058-4
Edited by Gretchen Kalwinski
Designed by Alban Fischer
Cover photo © iStock
Manufactured in the United States of America.
For my parents
“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”
—gabriel garcia márquez,
Living to Tell the Tale
“There is no one so ugly he does not have beauty within him—no one so weak he does not have a great strength, and no one so poor he is not endowed with richness … Each person is of invaluable worth.”
—mother antonia brenner,
founder of the Eudist Servants of the Eleventh Hour
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
For years I kept my only photo of us propped against my bedroom mirror, until I lost it—the fading print unframed, each crease memorized. The shot is a poor one: we’re outside at night, during a street festival, the lighting dim. I’m leaning back underneath a crumbling Spanish archway, one foot up against the wall. My long, thick hair drapes over my shoulders, mouth open as if the photographer caught me by surprise. But Manuel gazes confidently into the camera, chin lifted, eyes wide. First love—was that what drew us together, and nothing more? How have I spent the last fifteen years punishing the wrong man?
On the cusp of the millennium, 1999, we appear smooth-faced and young. Manuel was twenty-one then, and I was fifteen. My American friends are always shocked at the early age Colombians start dating. At thirteen, girls start going to clubs, having sex if they have a serious boyfriend—their novios five years older, maybe more. In a country so overwhelmingly Catholic, parents give permission because many couples marry after high school.
Or at least that was the way things happened then.
This is how I remember my last five months in Santiago de Cali. Along with most of the upper-class, I moved through my daily routine largely unaffected by the troubles: one in five residents out of work and unemployment rising, the streets jammed with listless young men, the guerillas and the government still at war after four decades, one- to two- million Colombians displaced from their villages by the bloodbaths. That January, peace talks had been suspended between the FARC, the dominant rebel army, and our president, Andrés Pastrana Arango. In February, government officials met with Garcia, high-ranking leader of the other revolutionary force, the ELN—lesser in number than the FARC but no less determined to one day topple the government, to win back Colombia from the ruling elite, and install a Marxist Socialist regime. The government was purportedly extending the olive branch to the rebels, claiming to give them a legitimate political stake and control of land—for the revolutionaries and rural poor to unite in driving off the narco-traffickers. The radio programs mentioned little about the paramilitaries, however, and I wouldn’t find out until months later how also in January, these unofficial branches of Colombia’s armed forces had carried out a series of civilian massacres—the main reason for the violent backlash both guerilla armies would unleash in the months ahead. All I knew then was that the year had barely begun, and all sides had failed to agree on dates and a location for a political convention to push the peace process forward.
Otherwise, the disparity outside my windows didn’t faze me much. I was still mourning the loss of my first crush, whom I’d met at a Valentine’s dance and whose parents had swiftly enrolled him at a military school in the United States a few weeks later, after the FARC captured and assassinated three indigenous-rights activists, all American. That was my luck, I thought, almost sixteen and still no boyfriend. Like any teenage girl, I yearned to fall in love. Beyond that, I had few desires. I had never traveled outside of Latin America; my father, whom I called Papi, owned a satellite TV but we watched few channels. I never imagined living anywhere but Colombia, if not Cali, where the mist hovered along the dense jungle of the mountainsides like the smoke from my father’s cigars, and the salsa pulsated from the clubs at night.
The day I first saw Manuel, I had just completed my first dreadful term at Hebrew school. We took classes in Hebrew language and religion in addition to English, and those subjects bored me. But my father insisted I enroll since the school had the most rigorous education available, more so than the Catholic Schools or the British School. My mother had been Jewish so the school accepted me in January, even though my grades were average. Two months had passed since then, and Colombia was celebrating Semana Santa. That year, Holy Week coincided with Passover. My school celebrated the end of the term with a Seder meal at midday for students and families, and my father demanded that I participate even though he refused to attend. He listed his usual reasons for staying on the hacienda: the work of a farmer did not stop during holidays and so on. He forever avoided discussing the true reason: he distrusted organized religion. But in his eyes I needed to make a better effort to know my teachers and the other students—more of an effort, perhaps, because I was not a practicing Jewish girl but enrolled solely for academics. The description of the Seder also bored me, and the prospect of dressing in my drab uniform even though classes were on holiday put me in a sour mood. As soon as I was 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,