Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals (29 page)

With time, I figured I would get used to my daily dousing of cold water, but I doubted I would ever grow accustomed to the electrical shocks in the kitchen—the other source of physical anguish in my new household had become the stove. A typical hour of cooking would go like this: I would be happily watching my pot, waiting for it to boil—which in itself was a painfree experience (other than the fact that I wasn't much enjoying my new role as Person Who Cooks)—when I would attempt to stir the chicken soup that Francisco had taught me how to make. This did not seem like an irrational thing to do—after all there were many recipes in the United States that went so far as to advocate stirring constantly. However, in Colombia, whenever I reached into the pot with a metal spoon, currents of electricity would race through my arm. The first time, the shock was so unexpected that I quickly flung the utensil into the air and ran screaming into the other room.

I complained to Francisco that the stove wasn't working properly, that it was out to get me, and at that very moment was planning my death. Francisco sat me down and calmly explained that all stoves in Colombia were this way. It wasn't the appliance's fault. I was the one to blame: After all, how could I possibly think of cooking on an electric stove without wearing rubber-soled shoes? I told him that in the past I really hadn't ever thought of cooking; how could he expect me to know that I had to don a special kind of footwear?

Realizing I was new to all this (after all, in the States I'd always had stoves that used gas), Francisco explained the other precautions I was to take in order to prepare the midday meal: If I were to stand on a board on the floor, use a wooden spoon instead of a metal one, and ensure that my hands were completely dry before attempting to stir, I would be sure to diminish the electric current running through my body to levels far below those used to get essential information out of prisoners of war.

In an effort to adapt to Colombian culture, I also tried to get over my cultural prejudices regarding food. In Cali, I sportingly sampled what I had formerly refused in Costa Rica—rubbery tripe and canned sardines—but chicken soup was what never failed to defeat me. It wasn't the broth per se that creeped me out. It was the little chicken feet with their little chicken claws that lined that bottom of my bowl that I was not too enthusiastic about. But Francisco took to these extremities the way I gobbled down Reese's peanut butter cups: licking off the outside and sucking on the yellow goo on the inside.

One day as I watched Francisco devour a suspiciously familiar piece of a cow's anatomy, my American breeding came through again and I couldn't help but comment on the disgusting nature of what he was putting into his mouth.

“It's delicious,” he said, apparently completely oblivious to the fact that he was eating an animal's tongue. “Do you want some?”

I shivered in revulsion, looking at all the hairs lining my beau's meal. “You actually expect me to kiss those lips?”

“You'll like it,” he said, pointing to his mouth. “Two tongues inside.”

My first three weeks in Cali slipped by, day after day of domesticity in one of the most dangerous countries in the world. During that time, violence was something distant we just heard about on the news. There would be a guerrilla attack or a paramilitary massacre in some city with a foreign name far away from us, but this had as much direct impact on my life as gang violence in South Central Los Angeles.

A year or two earlier, I might have gone running off to the jungle in search of adventure, but now I wanted to revel in a quieter existence. My travels had been eventful and exhilarating but also emotionally draining. I wanted to sit back for a while and enjoy being part of a family—no prison escapes, no bombs, just a simple life with Francisco spiced up with a dose of Colombian flavor to keep it from being bland.

Melba's neighborhood of Jamundí seemed like the right place for it. It was a planned community, which would have been mind numbing and depressing had it existed in Orange County, but located on the outskirts of Cali, suburban life was hardly sterile and dull. Even though the streets were nearly identical when looked at from a distance—each block consisted of one long rectangular building divided up into separate townhouses—when you moved in closer, you realized that the whole place was swimming in a flurry of activity, music, and commerce.

There wasn't a commercial property in the whole neighborhood so the residents of Jamundí had transformed their living rooms into stores, restaurants, and any other enterprise imaginable. With the addition of an oven and some glass-enclosed cases, a family was suddenly in business as a bakery. Fit the place with some shelves, dry goods, and vegetables, and they transformed their place into a small grocery store. Everyone was a budding entrepreneur. There were living room restaurants that dispensed soup and a different lunch every day. Other places specialized in nighttime snacks. On outdoor barbecues on the sidewalk, women grilled hot dogs and hamburgers or corn patties with melted cheese called
arepas.
Our neighborhood also included a video store (whose merchandise consisted of grainy movies recorded off of HBO), two arcades (a living room equipped with several Nintendos where kids sat down and rented the games by the hour), and a drugstore (staffed by a knowledgeable pharmacist who would diagnose your condition, sell you medication, and even inject you with your purchases in the back room). And there were several makeshift businesses as well. Sometimes there would just be a handmade sign outside of someone's home: Clothes for Sale or Homemade Ice Cream or Mechanic.

In Jamundí, the
arepas
came hot off the grill, the
papas rellenas
were prepared as you watched. Milk was lukewarm, fresh from the cow, and clothes were tailor-made. For the price of a pair of socks at The Gap, a professional dressmaker would create a garment from scratch made to fit your measurements.

Living there was peaceful and predictable in a comforting sort of way. Every morning began the same: Francisco and I would walk over to the “bakery” where we'd pick out breakfast, which varied depending on what was due to come out of the oven in our neighbor's living room. My favorite was the
pan de bono,
small doughnut-shaped breads made with fresh cheese that we'd gulp down with sweet cups of Colombian coffee. We'd bring enough home for Melba and the girls—their brother, fourteen-year-old Toño, was already at school by then and their father Eduardo had already gone to work.

I'd spend the morning reading or jotting down notes in my journal while Francisco hung out with his sister. Sometimes I'd cook. Other times it fell to Francisco or Melba. But by noon, the house took on a frenetic pace. The girls went to school from one to five in the afternoon, meaning that they swallowed down their lunches, grabbed their school bags, and raced out the door by twelve thirty.

In the afternoon, there were just four of us left in the house— Melba, her two-year-old son, Francisco, and me—so after Francisco and I had taken our “siesta,” an hour of precious alone-time in our room that rarely resulted in actual sleep, the four of us would go for a walk or run some errands in town.

It was a simple life, the kind that would have bored me to exasperation two years earlier, but prison had put things in perspective for me. The six months I had spent not having Francisco made having him all the more poignant. So while I grumbled about the difficulties of squeezing us both into a cramped twin bed or voiced my opposition to the overcharged electric stove, the truth was, I didn't care where we lived or what our circumstances were.

We had waited so long to be together. And now that we were finally in Colombia, I couldn't help but think that everything was going to be okay, that the hard part really was finally over.

I figured that all I had to do was stick to my domestic existence and nothing terrible would occur. I simply had to avoid prisons, crime, drug cartels, and guerrilla war, and life would turn out just fine. But the problems plaguing Colombia crept in insidiously. They attached themselves like a virus to the poverty that flowed into most Colombian homes. And not even Jamundí was immune.

One day it occurred to me that Melba didn't seem like the kind of woman to get divorced. She loved flaunting her status as matron of the house, a devoted mother who looked after her son and two nieces and possessed a spotless home. But where was her husband?

“Is Melba separated?” I asked Francisco one afternoon in our bottom bunk, both of us semiclothed and still slightly out of breath after half an hour of tumbling and turning on the tiny bed.

He gave me a look that let me know I had struck a nerve.

“What?” I asked, suspiciously. “Where is he?”

“Miami.”

This was disappointing. Miami was a perfectly reasonable place to be. “What's he do in Miami?”

“He's in prison there.”

I was shocked. Melba was straight as an arrow, even prudish, certainly not the kind of woman to be married to a criminal.

While I tried to adjust my outlook to squeeze in this new information, it suddenly occurred to me that Melba's husband wasn't the only family member missing from the house. Where was Stephanie, Jenny, and Toño's mother? “What about Martha? Don't tell me your sister is in prison too.”

Francisco nodded his head. And that was how I got my introduction to what typical family life was really like in Colombia.

Being a drug mule in Colombia was like playing the lottery. Everyone was doing it because everyone believed they could win. Most
mulas
were everyday people—teachers, mechanics, even doctors who saw this as their only chance at a better life. The ten or fifteen grand they stood to gain was more than a lawyer earned in a year. All it took was one successful trip carrying a few kilos of heroin or cocaine aboard an airplane to turn their lives around. And assuming the worst, that they didn't make it, what were they really giving up? They were already poor. They already dealt with violence on a daily basis.

In a country where the average citizen was forced into breaking the law on a daily basis just to get through life (bribes were standard practice for everything from getting a driver's license to getting out of being arrested if you were caught walking out of the house without ID), the idea of taking the next step wasn't such a big deal. Many people did it just once and returned to Colombia with the money for a house, a car, or a savings account and went back to their normal lives. And of course, there were the unlucky ones—like Francisco's family members who did it just once and got caught.

Melba's husband, Leonardo, a Mormon who wouldn't even go shopping on Sunday, had decided that slipping five kilos of cocaine in a suitcase was an acceptable thing to do. He had figured that if he could make just one successful trip to Miami, it would be a way out of poverty. So he bought a plane ticket (being sure to schedule it for a weekday—he didn't want to violate the Sabbath) and boarded the plane, his bags full of more than just Books of Mormon. He was caught at immigration and was now serving the second year of his three-year prison sentence.

Francisco's sister Martha had fared even worse, her punishment a year longer due to the nature of her crime. She had assumed they would never suspect a mother with her son so she had brought young Toño along. For him it was going to be the trip of a lifetime. He was eleven years old and he had finally arrived at the country that had created Disney World. And he was going to see Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and look, wasn't that a pretty doggy racing over to welcome them to the airport? Unfortunately, this pretty doggy had been specially trained to sniff out little boys' feet, especially when their moms had hidden drugs in her little boy's shoes. From there, the rest of the day was a blur. His mother was dragged away in handcuffs and he was sent back to Colombia alone wearing a pair of flip-flops—the DEA agents had confiscated his shoes.

That afternoon, after becoming privy to Francisco's family members' darkest secrets, my relationship with them changed significantly. I had spent a month living in relative harmony with everyone, but ironically enough my new insider status damaged the connection I had with Melba. Upon learning about her situation, I had initially thought it would make me able to relate to her better— after all, I certainly knew what it was like to wait for a man in prison.

I did my best to console her, but she seemed to resent it. She was not like me—she believed in societal expectations I placed no stock in: “Be pretty, find a man to take care of you, get married and have kids, and everything will be okay.” She followed rules that had betrayed her, but because they were all she had left, she clung to them for her survival, hiding behind a facade of sanctimonious respectability. And because I refused to accept this code, she failed to believe anything I had to say. So instead of bringing us closer, my attempt to offer her advice only strained our friendship.

Over the next month, she grew increasingly impatient with any attempt I made to engage her in conversation. Not wanting to exacerbate the tension that had bubbled up out of nowhere (I still wasn't sure exactly what to attribute it to), I tried to stay out of her way as much as possible, but every time Francisco and I prepared to leave the house, she grew friendly and enthusiastic and asked if she could come along. This change of attitude so surprised me that at first I wondered if I had been wrong about her antagonism toward me, but after a few trips into the city with her I understood the source of her fake cordiality: She was tagging along to take advantage of the fact that I paid for everything.

I had often wondered how Melba was supporting herself. She didn't have a job and her husband was in prison. All I knew was that anytime a bill arrived at our table, Melba conveniently disappeared. I'd been paying rent for a month now, which was really only fair, but now I was buying groceries for the entire household, picking up the tab for the girls' lunches when we ate takeout, even shelling out Melba's bus fare when we all went out together. She would glide innocently past the guy collecting the passengers' money as if she hadn't seen him, and Francisco would shrug his shoulders and dish out enough for all three of us.