Juan speak at a youth retreat, a soft-spoken man, broad and graying, with a rosary cinched to his cargo pants. Once, when Emilio had gone to visit an impoverished village the priest was ministering to in the southern Andes, they’d gone to swim at a waterfall, removed their clothes. A knotted patchwork of bullet wounds scarred the priest’s shoulder. What had happened for this man, in mid-life, to repent and work to rescue those most at risk to join the guerillas? Father Juan removed his glasses, and as he rubbed them with the end of his shirt, he stared at the peasant teenagers diving and shouting. “Some are born with black hearts—do you believe that?” the priest asked. “Well, I don’t. The heart is the most neglected aspect of humanity, and the most critical. How it grows, whether it hardens with greed and fear or expands with love, depends on how we each are taught to feed it. When it turns black, the only way to reclaim it is through pain.”
Even the three bullets hadn’t been enough to stop him, back when he was known as Juan Perez. That wasn’t what drove him inside a village church in the Andes one night, where he crawled up to the altar on his knees and prostrated on his belly, begging God for peace and salvation or else he’d get back in his car and, alone on his way to Medellín, drive himself off the next cliff. Escobar’s empire was collapsing. The heads of the Cali cartel, the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers and their subordinates, including Juan Perez and Diego Martinez, had given themselves the name Los Pepes and arranged the murders—“as clean as possible” they had agreed upon meeting. Then one of Escobar’s traffickers received the bloody head of an alpaca on a platter, with a note threatening that he would be “the first of his herd to go to the slaughter.” Two days later he went missing.
Juan Perez hadn’t known about the hit. He suspected Diego had carried it out because he raised alpacas on his plantation. When he confronted Diego and asked what they had done with the trafficker, if he had used him to find out some crucial information, Diego told Juan he could find him in the alpaca pasture and do the questioning himself. Instead, Juan found the man’s body disemboweled, dumped behind the alpaca shed. Vultures circled and picked at the bloated corpse. The stench was rancid from ten feet away.
That was what had driven Juan from Cali that night, into the chapel, never to return to the cartel.
“From Father Juan, I saw just how important it is to stay connected to the youth—not just the peasants who are drawn by the guerillas, but those who think that joining the paras will keep their families’ lands safe,” Emilio said, voice husky. He cleared his throat. “Around that time your father abruptly ceased cartel activity, which is why we suspect he had a falling out. That’s why, even though his businesses have been legitimate for over a decade, we think he pays people off to keep quiet. Or receives illegal payments himself for the same reason. To which organization, we’re not sure. Silence commands a hefty price.”
“No one knows for sure,” Manuel added. He cupped the back of my neck gently; his hand felt cold. “We’re trying to find evidence that proves the current connection. Your father has been a person of interest to the Colombian and American authorities, and to activist groups, for a long time.”
“But this isn’t just some rumor,” I said. My stomach had become granite. “Father Juan’s not some employee, upset because my father fired him. And you’re telling me he’s still involved somehow—Diego?” How desperately I wanted it not to be true. His name on my tongue, those three syllables I wasn’t used to uttering. Another name, another life.
Men with automatic rifles had once stood watch from towers across our property and patrolled at night. The ninjas, I’d called them—stone-faced young men, their snug black T-shirts and camouflaged pants showing off trim physiques. I had darted behind the fountain whenever they crossed the courtyard in jaunty strides, throwing the caps of their Coca-Colas onto the stonework. Their Adam’s apples jutted toward the sky as they tipped the bottles upward and guzzled. Their shoulders rippled beneath the rifles strapped to their backs. After the cartels, the violence had waned for a time. The posts they’d occupied had long since gone deserted, my ninjas happily forgotten, and Papi allowed both displaced and tenants to dismantle the towers for firewood and building materials. A guard still kept watch twenty-four hours, in the small room over the main gate, roughly a hundred meters from the main house—a fixture at the large haciendas. “It’s a big farm, you know,” I said quietly.
“He provides a lot of jobs, it’s true,” Emilio said. “We’re convinced that individually, he’s not a threat—not anymore. But he still contributes to the larger problem of doling out payoffs for protection. And that’s a very big deal.”
A gust lifted the tent flap, the light bulbs swaying overhead. We were the only three left. I clung to Manuel’s shoulder as we arose. Speckles, gray and white, dotted the Virgin’s face in the streetlight; the water streamed in its silvery arc, but I couldn’t hear it. Dizzy, I collapsed into Manuel. He led me to a bench, waved his brother away.
“What do I do now?” I cried softly. “What do I do?”
Manuel didn’t speak, just stroked my hair. His eyes had momentarily lost their liveliness; I could tell he felt sorry for me. The pungent fragrance of roses mixed with the odor of cooked meat from a street cart, and my stomach turned. Children milled around the cart, eating chorizo on a stick. “I can’t have girls sleep over, but in this case my parents would let you stay with us,” he said, and after a pause, “Do you want to go back?”
I wanted to see his house, meet his parents—but like this? I shook my head. The lights of the bus flashed at the crest of the hill.
“Look, you’re not taking the bus. Hop on my bike.”
“If Papi sees you—”
“So what?”
He removed his jacket and I wriggled into the sleeves. The leather was warm, the rest of me numb.
Moments later, we whipped down the autopista. I had never ridden a moto before, and as I clung to Manuel, his T-shirt billowing white in the moonlight, I thought: this is what it means to be free, to never die. We were going fast, but I wanted it. The world revealed itself in a new way, more alive. Low overhead, a passenger jet roared in ascent from the nearby Cali airport, heading north out of the valley. What power airplanes possessed, to remove people from one place, to deliver them into a new life. No doubt it was headed for another country, perhaps even the U.S. One day soon I might board one of those flights, either on my way to study in an oddly named state of snow, or to work in a uniform, dress shoes, and pantyhose, wheeling a suitcase.
We swooped down the exit ramp, through the outlying towns that led to the hacienda. The one- and two-story pulperías and shops loomed like gravestones, their fronts shuttered, graffiti splashed over the corrugated metal. Inside a well-lit market, men and boys played pool, the music pulsating through me. I shivered, my legs cold; Manuel must have been freezing in his thin shirt. A skinny, filthy man warbled and staggered along the crumbling sidewalk, one of Cali’s many crack heads. The street reeked of trash and old rainwater. We turned at the zapateria where Papi and the hired men had their boots and holsters made. Tonight no boots or belts hung outside on display, but the small shop stared back, shadowed and asleep.
Cali lay beneath us as we hugged the winding hillside, the city ablaze like the candles lit by parishioners. We passed the turn where the bus had been robbed, but I felt safe. Then we descended down a side road spotted with boxy middle-class homes, the cars squeezed in short driveways behind locked gates, one after another like rows of prison cells. The scent of earth and cows replaced the city stench, and then the flat road to the plantation, muddy from the recent rains, with Papi’s fields stretching out on either side as far as one could see to the tree line of the jungle and the slopes where the coffee grew wild. At last the hacienda came into view.
Manuel dropped me off a few dozen meters away. I pushed the button on my keychain to open the gate, the barbed wire on top glinting in the moonlight. On the concrete walls the wire was partially hidden by the purple bougainvillea that grew over the top, but here and there the metal still shone. One of the ridgebacks, Zulu, jumped to her feet and growled low as I passed until I called her name and reached to pet her. The stereo glowed on the mantle, the dinner dishes dried in the rack.