A Horse Called El Dorado (5 page)

I need hardly tell you how fed up everyone was, having been robbed and left stranded at the side of the road. After a lot of angry talk and cursing from the men and women, the driver organised a group to walk to the next town and send back a bus. He and six others walked away, leaving thirty of us behind.

A few of the men went to find wood for a fire. An old woman with a face like ancient tree bark produced a cooking pot and a frying pan from where she had kept them hidden from the guerrillas, under her enormous skirt! Soon, like magic, we were heating corn, rice and capers. There was a very small amount for everybody. Then we all lay around wherever there was shelter. I slept very little, watching the heaving bodies breathing in and out, and the noisy birds and insects around us.

Another
chiva
arrived at dusk, with a different driver. He chatted to Mama and tried to make her laugh. He also patted me on the head. We were allowed on the bus first and invited to sit on seats near the door, behind the driver’s bay. When everyone was seated we set off again.

We were making great time on the road, as the adults
kept saying over and over. Late at night we stopped to eat rice and beans at a
cantina
, which was a welcome break in the journey. We didn’t stay long though – the driver was anxious to get to Cartagena del Chiara, which is over halfway to Cali.

Not far from Cartagena del Chiara, the driver stopped in front of what seemed in our headlights to be rocks on the road. Then the rocks stood up – they were, in fact, two men wearing
ponchos
. They climbed slowly aboard the bus, their wide-brimmed hats pulled down over their eyes. They looked old and feeble under the dim roof lights. I thought they must have a fever, because an old woman behind us welcomed them and asked after their health. One of them nodded, a pained expression on his face. He produced a paper cup and got water from a family with a good supply in a plastic container. There was nowhere for them to sit except on the floor between the seats.

When we had got under way the men arose, produced guns from under their
ponchos
and held us up. They ordered the driver to pull the bus off the road. The driver replied that he would need one of them to assist him in steering. The bandit told him to do the steering himself, but the driver insisted that he could not steer off the road at this hour of the night, and would end up on the mud siding where trees sloped outwards. ‘There is no
automatic
steering on this ship,’ he bellowed, meaning of course the old bus.

The bandit pushed his gun into a side pocket and put
both hands to the wheel in between the driver’s
outstretched
hands. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, the driver had a pistol and he stuck it into the bandit’s neck. He took the bandit’s gun and held him hostage. It had
happened
so fast that everyone was amazed, including the other armed bandit who had begun his rounds, asking passengers for their valuables as if he were checking their tickets.

‘Eh, pig,’ the driver called to the other bandit, ‘drop your gun or I will take him out of the equation.’ The second bandit stood still, looking very foolish, not
knowing
what to do.

‘Pig, I am serious,’ the driver went on. ‘I will make bacon of him. Drop it.’

There was a tense silence. None of the passengers moved. I watched while Mama joined her hands tightly as if she were praying. The driver asked again, and getting no reply from the armed bandit, held onto the hostage and fired one shot, putting a bullet into his leg. The man who was shot crumpled onto the floor, screaming and cursing. Blood flowed out of his wound, and Mama moved over, pushing me against the window so hard that one of my elbows began to ache.

‘See, pig, I tell you no lie. I want your gun or I shoot him in the other leg, then the belly and finally the head. I have his gun. Are you blind, deaf and stupid? Don’t you understand, pig?’ The driver had got very brave. His face was less pale since he had fired the shot.

‘Take it easy,’ shouted the bandit. ‘Come and take my gun.’

‘Put it on the floor,’ ordered the driver. ‘One of the men will take it. Who knows about weapons?’

A man put his hand up and took control of the gun. The driver kicked the wounded bandit down the steps in front of the door, hitting his head hard off one of the
railings
as he fell. Then the driver walked along the bus and poked the other bandit in the chest with the gun, while the armed passenger, looking very calm, held the other gun with the barrel pointing at the bandit’s head.

‘Not such a smart piggy, are you?’ The driver teased the bandit, leading him along the aisle and pushing him down on top of his comrade.

The next part is terrible. I do not want to remember it. I was glad at what happened to the bandits, but I can still hear their cries for mercy and their threats to get even with the driver. The passengers rushed to one side of the bus to watch as he pushed them out onto the roadside. Then the driver shot the second bandit, giving him a leg wound also. There was a lot of cheering and clapping from everyone. Someone brought the driver a water flask and someone else a slice of
tortilla
, or potato omelette. He started up the bus and we drove away.

We drove through Cartagena del Chiara, and onwards for half the night. Nothing else bad happened. In the town of Florencia we were let down at the bus station. Getting off, I made a gun with my hand and pointed at the driver, who grabbed my finger and grinned. Mama thanked him, as did the other passengers, but he said, ‘
De nada
,’ which means, ‘It was nothing.’ He said he was glad to be of service.

We slept in the bus station and next morning, after washing in the public toilet cubicles, boarded a long Chevrolet bus. It was a ‘
directo
’, a big bus with a printed sign saying ‘CALI’ above the front windscreen. The first part of our journey was very steep, up into the Andes, but at least there were no bandits or guerrillas. The
passengers
were clean, well-dressed people. Mama and I felt like beggars among them in our tattered clothes. We sat on the long seat at the back of the bus on our own.

After a few hours I got used to the mountain scenery, though I have to admit that the uphill driving, with all the gear changing and tight cornering, made my stomach ill. When we came down into a valley to cross a wide river, the Río Magdalena, I noticed that the roads were now
very smooth. The bus moved evenly at a steady speed, with no bumping or lurching up and down. What a
comfortable
way to travel! Soon we climbed up another steep hill, and when we reached the top the city was spread out below us in a plain, backed by another ridge of
mountains
. It was an amazing sight – Cali at last.

We zigzagged down and down in the late afternoon sunshine and the vast grid of the city streets looked like a kingdom, with high-rise buildings and lights and noise everywhere. There were more cars, buses, trucks and jeeps than I’d ever seen. Then the view disappeared, as our bus was swallowed up by the city’s outer suburbs. I squashed my face up against the window as houses, petrol stations, shops, phone boxes, banks and hotels flew by.

We walked for an hour to my grandmother Rosa’s little two-bedroom apartment. My mama’s mama,
Abuela
as I called her in Spanish, hugged me a lot, and offered us what food she had in her tiny kitchen. She was a plump woman, her silver hair tied up in a bun with a comb holding it together. Mama told her about our troubles at the commune – the burning of the huts, the shootings – and all about our long and hazardous journey. Grandma Rosa listened, hardly able to eat, her eyes wide with amazement.

‘You could have been killed,’ she kept saying, but when she looked at me she smiled, leaning across to squeeze me by the chin or tousle my hair.

After our meal we walked out into the streets. I felt so happy all of a sudden; gone were the jungle noises, this was the music of the city. There were so many people, all hurrying along in different directions, going in and out of the doorways of a thousand buildings. I could barely read the names outside the stores: Droguerías, Restaurante, El Café de la Bohemia, Banco del Estado, Hotel El Condor, Hotel La Paloma, Hotel de los Reys. I worried about getting separated from Mama and Grandma but I did not want to tell them – I also longed to be able to roam the city alone. As night drew in and more and more lights flicked on all around – in buildings,
vehicles
and all along the streets – I felt as if I was in a movie. Mama was excited too. She bought a newspaper called
El
Espectador
. ‘I wonder what has been happening in the world?’ she said, laughing.

Grandma led us into a church. It was white and looked very plain, until you got inside and saw that the walls were painted with gold and lined with statues showing Jesus, Mary and many saints. Grandma put a few
pesos
in a tin box and lit three big candles, saying a prayer of thanks that we had arrived safely. Outside in the street, she laughed and said she was glad that we had come. She kept hugging us and we had to support her in case she might fall in the street.

‘If you had been killed you would have gone into the easy life, and not have to work for a living,’ Grandma joked and as usual rubbed my chin and tousled my hair.
Mama looked strangely at her but I decided that I liked this old lady, with her old-fashioned way of speaking.

Back at the apartment I was glad of a bath, as the water had at last heated up. Mama used the tub after me and then unpacked her necklace and other jewellery from the money belt concealed on her body. I went to sleep in a bed made up on the floor, but was awoken a little later by voices raised in arguing in the kitchen. I peeked in the door.

There were two cups on the table. Mama and Grandma were shaking and pointing at each other. ‘If you can’t find a job you can sell the jewellery. I will not be able to feed you and Pepe. I am barely able to keep my job chopping vegetables and washing dishes at the hotel.’ Grandma’s face looked red, while Mama’s was white with rage. I sneaked back to bed.

Mama woke me in the morning and we went out, because there was no food in the kitchen except for
pineapple
juice. Grandma had already gone to work. Mama went to one dealer after another trying to get a good price for her jewellery and in the end sold most of it. I do not know how much she got, but she looked sad. We shopped until we each had a big bag of groceries to carry. I felt like a rich kid with his mother.

When we passed a café Mama grinned at the aroma of coffee, ice cream and food, and we went in. We had a great feast. Down the street we found an internet café and sent two e-mails: one to the commune, and the other
to my papa. I had not heard from him since last
navidades
(Christmas).

Mama soon got a job at the same hotel as Grandma, cooking and cleaning. I was hardly allowed out on my own at first, except some mornings to Simago, the
supermarket
; then back to watch the television with Grandma – usually quiz games, soap operas and black-and-white movies that sometimes made her weep when the couple would start kissing at the end.

I heard Mama and Grandma late at night arguing about what to do with me. When I heard this I thought of running away and somehow getting back to the
commune
. I tried to remember the edge of the jungle outside Araracuara where Jairo had brought us.

Eventually, I also got a job at the hotel. I worked in the kitchen, washing dishes and enormous cooking pots. Besides the few
pesos
that we earned, we could usually get some leftover food at the end of each night. The
portero
of the kitchen kept telling us to wash our hands and we had to wear plastic caps to cover our hair. Some nights there was no food left over. So we went back to Grandma and she would usually cook a
tortilla
for us all.

Mama finally got an e-mail from my papa. She showed it to me up on the screen at the internet café. There were three lines in Spanish asking about my life; the rest was in English that I couldn’t read. I begged her to explain the e-mail as we waited for it to print out. Sitting at a table,
she had coffee while I bought myself some juice,
carefully
counting the change.

‘I will tell you what he says after I talk to Grandma,’ Mama said.

‘Why?’ I shouted, annoyed.

‘Don’t be such an old curiosity cat,’ she told me.

I was told nothing, but had to listen that night as they discussed it. My ear got hot as it lay jammed against the door listening to them.

‘Joseph is such a ___’ My mama used awful language about my papa.

‘Let the boy go. It is no life for a boy working in a kitchen. There is no future in that,’ Grandma said.

‘What do you mean? Do you think I like working there? I hate being a cook,’ Mama roared.

‘You are not a cook anyway,’ Grandma said. ‘You would have to go to school to become a hotel cook.’

They talked on and on, mainly about me, and that kept me listening. It seemed that I had grandparents in a
country
in the northern hemisphere. My papa’s people. I knew they existed, but because I had never seen them they did not mean anything to me.

The next day when the van left the hotel to collect
foodstuffs
, I made sure to sneak on board. At the rear of the food market the driver saw me and I asked him not to tell on me. He said he did not care, so long as I did not steal anything. He just kept talking to the other men in the market and the forklift driver, who should have been
loading up stuff for the hotel. It looked like the van would not move for a while, so I climbed out and started walking.

Ah, to be alone in the street! In the window of a shop called a ‘travel bureau’, I saw a map of the world. This was what I was looking for. Colombia had an arrow pointing to it, with a cartoon of a man wearing big
sunglasses
. When I went inside a man stuck out his tongue at me and made jokes to the young woman behind the counter. I told the woman that I was looking for my grandparents’ country as I leafed through some
brochures
on the desk. The man got angry. ‘Get out of here,’ he said. ‘Go to the library if you want to read.’

I asked an old man on the street how to find the library, and he gave me directions. It was a long walk, but when I got there the lady behind the counter was friendly. I asked her to show me a map of Iran, where my grandparents were. She opened an enormous book, and pointed out Iran on a map. There was a photograph too, of men riding camels across the desert.

Later, when I told Mama and Grandma about it, they laughed until they nearly cried.

‘It was Iran,’ I told them, ‘where my papa was born?’

Again they howled with laughter. I stared at them, wondering why they were laughing at me.

‘I am sorry, Pepe,’ said Mama. ‘You are not going to Iran.’ She wrote the name of the country on the top of the cereal box for me: Ireland.

I went to the library again a week later, and the woman showed me Ireland on the map. It looked like a dog with a flabby ear and one eye which was a lake. It was a small country, surrounded by the sea. There were no deserts.

Now e-mails started coming from my Irish
grandfather
, Jack Carroll. It seemed so strange and exciting. Mama and I asked for extra shift work in the hotel kitchens in order to earn more money for my trip. I was impatient for my big adventure, but had to wait until we had saved enough for an aeroplane ticket. I also had to get a passport, and Grandma fussed over me, nearly pulling out my hair with a comb when I went to get my photograph taken. But our life continued very slowly and I felt I would never get to Ireland.