Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals (30 page)

Francisco and I were still living off of my savings and I didn't mind sharing my money with him until we got on our feet, but taking care of Melba seemed excessive. Every day, our money situation was becoming more and more of an issue. Nine months earlier, I had left the United States with sixteen thousand dollars. Now I was down to just over three grand.

For years, writing had been my sole means of economic support, but being a specialist in constructing English sentences (never mind that I ended a large percentage of them in prepositions) wasn't exactly in high demand in the Spanish-speaking country I was in. If Francisco and I were ever going to move out and get a place of our own, we would have to start seriously thinking about how to earn a living.

“I think we should start a raffle” was Francisco's first idea.

“A raffle?”

“Yeah, you know, we sell tickets to win something small—a ring or something and then we move on to something bigger—like my sister's house.”

It was an interesting idea but it seemed like giving away Melba's house had the potential to create a few new family problems. I imagined her coming home one day and finding other people living there. Surely she'd figure out something was up.

“Okay, well, I have another thought,” Francisco assured me. “But we're going to need a bulldozer.”

I shook my head and pointed out that he knew nothing about construction. Not a problem, he explained—he was thinking more of destruction. “There's this bridge in the south of Colombia. We need to knock it down. See, I met this guy in prison and he told me he had hidden hundreds of thousands of dollars in the concrete—”

I shook my head.

“You're right. I'm sure the guerrillas already got to it.”

As goofy as Francisco's ideas sounded, in reality, these were the ways you earned a living in Colombia. It was a surreal country. I kept hearing stories about people who bought houses from ex-drug dealers and later found millions of dollars hidden away behind the plaster of the wall. And there were cases of farmers innocently tilling up land who'd come across metal canisters in the dirt filled with thousands of hundred-dollar bills. It was the Colombian version of winning the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes, inadvertently funded by the cocaine traffickers who kept running out of places to store their ever-accumulating wealth.

There were a few good jobs to be had, but this was not a merit-based society and any well-paying gig invariably went to those who had no need for the money. Latin America as a whole was almost feudal in its approach to social class. The household you were born into determined your entire future. Your last name said more about you than any other trait you would ever possess. You could even be forgiven for being broke as long as you were from the right family. A poor Santodomingo or Grajales (the U.S. equivalent of a Rockefeller or a Ford) was seen as a sort of dethroned king, a tragic figure who needed to be aided at any cost.

Francisco was lucky to have the light skin and blue eyes so prized by the upper class, but he nevertheless got gypped out of a good last name on a technicality. His family history read like a good soap opera. Francisco's father had been christened Sánchez instead of Restrepo because at the time of his conception, the baby's mother, Cecilia, had been involved with two men. In a rage of jealousy, Jaime, the man who had by now become her husband, refused to give the baby his prestigious last name, insisting in a rage of jealousy that there was no proof the child was his, even though the boy grew up blue-eyed and light-skinned, just like Jaime and unlike Cecilia's discarded beau.

A Restrepo by any other name simply did not smell as sweet. The difference between the Sánchez family and the Restrepos was staggering. Francisco, Melba, and all the other Sánchez relatives lived modest lives, in simple, box-shaped homes with small yards and cheap furniture. But Francisco's aunt, a Restrepo, lived in a palace, a penthouse apartment with three floors filled with servants. And I hadn't even visited “the big house” located out in the country.

Being a Sánchez wasn't always easy, especially when Francisco was growing up. When his mother passed away, Francisco's father became useless as a breadwinner, turning to alcohol to dull his sense of loss, and it fell to fifteen-year-old Francisco to pick up the pieces of what was left of the family: his drunken father who was often found passed out in the park and little Melba, who was just eight years old. (By this point, Martha had already moved out and was taking care of her own husband and kids.)

Francisco did his best to earn money selling clothes and toys door to door and taking any menial job that came his way. It was a depressing existence with no end in sight, until one day something completely unexpected happened. Francisco found himself face to face with one of the most powerful men in Colombia, a leader of the Cali drug cartel who had an idea. He proposed that Francisco, with his blue eyes and light complexion, would easily pass for an American citizen, and with a fake passport he would glide effortlessly past European immigration officials, even if he had a bunch of cocaine stashed in his suitcase.

He was a nineteen-year-old boy sitting at the desk of the richest man he'd ever met in his life and he didn't have the guts or even the desire to say no. In Colombia, this was as loud as opportunity would ever knock and it altered the course of the Sánchez family's life.

A young Colombian who had never traveled, Francisco's first trip out of the country was made as a
mula.
Trembling, with five kilos of cocaine duct-taped to his legs, Francisco walked up to the immigration counters in Madrid, and half an hour later he walked out of the airport a rich man. When he returned home two weeks later, it was as a hero, his arms burdened with gifts, clothes, and toys for his family, not to mention the ten thousand dollars in cash he carried in his suitcase.

From then on, it became a game. Francisco bought himself boots and a cowboy hat and went to Germany disguised as a Texan. He grew himself a beard, borrowed a guitar, and traveled to Holland as an American backpacker. And one time, he went with his cousin, the two of them posing as an American couple spending their vacation abroad.

The money changed Francisco's family's life. His cousin made the trip just once, so nervous she bit her nails down to the quick, but when she returned to Colombia, she had the money to buy the plot of land that she transformed into her dream house. Francisco made his own investments. Eventually, he bought himself three cabs. He rented one out, drove one himself, and handed the third over to his father so that his dad would have a way to earn a living.

It all worked wonderfully for a while, but selling drugs never went on forever. There was a saying in Colombia: “What flows
in
like water flows
out
like water.” Those that didn't quit by choice were coerced by force, ending their vocation by either death or imprisonment, often leaving a family even worse off than before. Incarceration turned a breadwinner into a dependent. Not only was a jailed father unable to provide for his family, he suddenly became an expense. There were legal fees plus the cost of international plane tickets for the families that could afford to visit.

I saw these effects firsthand. Suddenly deprived of their mother's income, Stephanie, Jenny, and Toño were now surviving on what their father brought in from his small grocery store. They had lost their house, been forced to move in with Melba, and now lived an even more meager existence than before. Worst of all was the psychological effect of having watched their mother walk out the door one day and never come back.

They all dealt with this loss in their own way. Toño was angry, almost violent, hating anything remotely connected to the United States. Jenny would erupt in willful outbursts, challenging anyone to tell her what to do. But little Stephanie was just sad and lonely, seeking anyone who could take her mother's place. She often trailed me around the house, trying to convince me to let her participate in whatever activity I happened to be involved in: “What are you writing? Do you need any help?” or “What are you reading? Will you read it to me?”

At night, she liked to jump into bed with me and beg, “Can I sleep with you? I don't take up much room. Just this once, okay?” And every morning, there were the same questions: “Will you take a shower with me? Pleeeeaaase? I'll help you wash your hair.”

She was so persistent and sweet that eventually she wore me down. I didn't let her into the tiny bed with Francisco and me (at least not at night), but eventually I started bathing with her because it made her so happy. She'd make me kneel down while she soaped up my hair and then she'd hand me the shampoo, expecting me to return the favor.

It wasn't really a maternal urge on my part. I didn't think of her as a daughter. It was more like hanging out with a younger version of myself. I had been a lonely kid too. I had felt like there had been no one to take care of me, so I sympathized with her plight. Besides, hanging out with Stephanie was actually a lot of fun. When she forgot how sad she was, she was charming, smart, and confident, and I appreciated the fact that she was always gracious every time I made another botched attempt to act like a grown-up. Once, I tried to teach her a song, but the only Spanish tune I remembered from my childhood was one she already knew, so she decided to teach me one instead. Francisco laughed as we performed it for him in the living room, hand motions and all, as Stephanie belted out the words with all her heart.

After another humiliating failure (a disastrous attempt to sew clothes for her dolls), one day, I sat both of the girls down at the dining room table to perform the one arts-and-crafts project guaranteed to be a success. I took a sheet of white paper, carefully folded it up, and began skillfully carving away at it with a pair of scissors. I extended the paper hopefully and sure enough, I had created a perfect snowflake.

“It's beautiful,” Stephanie remarked, beaming up at me.

I tried to contain my pride. “Do you want me to teach you how to make one?” She nodded.

My exultation lasted all of two minutes. “So, what do you call it?” she asked.

What was she talking about? “You don't know what it is? It's a—” I paused, realizing I didn't know how to say snowflake. Francisco was watching a soccer game on TV (technically in the living room part of the house but in reality only two feet away). “Francisco, what do you call a piece of snow—you know, that individual grain of snow that's unlike any other?” I asked in Spanish.

Francisco shrugged without looking away from the screen. I took a sigh and reached for my dictionary.
“Copo de nieve.
That's what it is. A
copo de nieve.”
Both of the girls gave me a blank stare. “Around Christmastime, you know, snowflakes?”

The game had gone into halftime and Francisco walked over. “Wow, that's really neat. What is it?”

“A
copo de nieve,”
I announced.

“A what?”

And suddenly it occurred to me—it had never snowed in Cali. There was nothing wrong with my perfectly crafted snowflake— these people had just never seen one before. They didn't even know what the word meant.

This was the lesson that kept recurring in my travels: that the ideas I had been raised with, the truths that had formed my childhood, my adolescence, and my early adulthood were limited by geography. They collapsed in on themselves when transferred to a foreign place. “The way things are” was rarely a true statement; it needed to be amended to “the way things are
here.
” So much of what I had learned growing up was really just arbitrary.

In San José, I had once taken the wrong side of an argument with a cabdriver who had told me that Costa Rica had just two seasons. A country with two seasons? What a ridiculous notion. I kept insisting that there were actually four, but that Costa Ricans had chosen to lump them together differently. We could have done the same thing in the United States by insisting that we had six months of Sprimmer followed by half a year of Wintumn. Later, I realized how shortsighted I was being. Just because I grew up in a country that had four seasons didn't mean that every place did. Four seasons was a result of the latitude that the United States occupied. In the tropics where the temperature rarely varied, the only major change in the climate was whether it rained or not, resulting in two seasons: “wet” and “dry.”

My father had been so right—memorization wasn't a type of learning; it was the opposite of learning. The minute you memorized a fact, you took it to be true. “There are four seasons” sounded like a pronouncement from God. But when you understood what caused the seasons—the tilt of the earth, a country's position relative to the sun—you didn't fall quite so easily into the same trap.

It was one of the most difficult things to do—stepping outside of your own culture. In a different country, it wasn't enough to speak the language. You had to construct your world all over again, begin with the basics, learn the essential distinctions from scratch, redefine Good and Evil, Wrong and Right, Happiness and Pain.

This was why I did not judge Francisco for his past as a drug mule. Had he been from the States, I would have expected other things of him. But he wasn't an American, he was a Colombian. He had done what was acceptable (even prestigious) to accomplish in the place he had been born.

I accepted his past on the condition that it remain his past. My only request was that he never get involved in any illegal activity again. As I said to him jokingly, “It's one ‘get out of prison free' card per customer.”

Whether Francisco's actions had been wrong or right was irrelevant. It was merely a practical decision: I did not want fear and flight to be part of my life anymore.

Chapter Ten

The Road Less Traveled Is Usually the One with Guerrillas on It

Note to reader: Hi, this is Wendy, the one who's been writing this book so far. Just wanted to let you know that the next five pages are kind of rough going, full of politics, ideas, and a few discerning conclusions about the state of humanity. Sorry for the inconvenience. If you can hold on for just a thousand or so words, I assure you that the plot will pick up again. (And not that you heard it from me, but a few really bad things are just about to occur.) Thanks for your attention. We now return you to your regularly scheduled book.

There is something about politics that seems to get people riled up. It is the educated person's football. Saying you are a fan of Israel or Palestine or Cuba or the United States seems so much more significant and logical than being on the side of, say, the Dallas Cowboys. You get all the fun of cheering for your team (“Go guerrillas!”) yet none of the arbitrariness. It's a game you can believe in—without all the commercials.

For a long time, I had been trying to pick my teams in the arena of world conflict, but the more I learned about politics, the more difficult siding with one group or the other had become. Before I went to Lebanon, I did a lot of research, figuring that I'd know what group to side with by the time I arrived, but every additional piece of information I gleaned only further complicated my understanding of the country. The Maronite Christians had a long list of offenses committed against them by the Muslims, the usual atrocities of war—terrorist acts, torture, rape. But for every indignity a Maronite could name, a Shiite or Sunni could match it with another equally horrific act perpetrated upon them by a Christian.

After a bit more investigation, I discovered that I hadn't been the only one with problems figuring it all out; it seemed that the Lebanese had had a tough time picking sides as well. It was a land of ever-changing alliances. At one point it had been Maronites against all Muslims. Then it changed to Sunni Muslims against their former brothers, the Shiites. Then it was Maronites on the side of Israel against the Palestine Liberation Organization. Then it was Maronites on the side of Lebanon against Israel.

It was difficult to imagine a more complicated situation, yet somehow Colombia still managed to provide the Middle East with some pretty tough competition. Now that I had been living in the country for two months, it had become even more important for me to be able to speak intelligently about politics (plus I would know who to root for when I watched the news), but the more I learned about guerrilla war and how it intersected with the drug trade, the fuzzier my understanding of the whole situation became.

As best I could tell, the country's first step in the wrong direction began when Colombians began trying to find an export that Americans were willing to shell out money for. They had dabbled in sugar, bananas, even petroleum, but they finally struck it big for the first time when Juan Valdez began gracing the breakfast tables of nearly every American home, and Colombia became synonymous with coffee.

It was only one logical step away to assume that if Americans were able to part with eight dollars a pound for something that woke them up in the morning, they'd be willing to pay much more for something that woke them up at night. And while mild-mannered Señor Valdez continued strolling through the commercials on network television, Pablo Escobar began to dominate the news—Pablo's advantage being that his publicity was free.

The great thing about this new Colombian export was that unlike coffee, which required very specific climatic conditions and obsessive care, the coca plant was a common bush that hedged nearly everybody's lawn. Discovering that money was literally growing on shrubs had two major effects: (1) Normal, everyday Colombians starting snipping off the profits and (2) their yards began looking pretty shabby.

Finding a stash of cocaine in a Colombian garage was about as likely as coming across a barbecue in a garage in the United States. The principal difference, however, was that in the States, your neighbor wasn't likely to come riding by on a motorcycle carrying an AK-47 and shooting your windows in just because you were a little late returning what you had borrowed—unless of course, you lived in Montana.

This new, nearly ubiquitous Colombian wealth kind of put a damper on the whole underground Marxist revolutionary movement. Communist rhetoric had worked well when the peasants were worried about the effect of rain on their crops; however, it was failing miserably now that the peasants were concerned about the effect of rain on their Mercedes.

The Marxist guerrillas weren't about to lose out when everyone else was making a profit. After all, the arms that they needed to forward their movement did
not
grow on trees. So when the leaders of the cocaine cartels began looking for guards to protect their laboratories, the guerrillas filled out job applications, figuring their experience trying to overthrow the government would be considered adequate employment crossover skills.

From there, things got a bit blurred. The guerrillas were working for the cartels, the government was trying to destroy both groups, and everybody was busy running for political office. (Even Pablo Escobar got himself elected to congress.) So everyone began attending the same cocktail parties; they were just shooting each other in the parking lot.

These days, the guerrilla groups that still espoused an ideology of creating a decent life for the poor masses (this would make them good guys, right?) funded their “revolution” through kidnapping, cocaine, and extortion (um, make that bad guys). Wealthy landowners became victims (good guys) and were forced to pay a
vacuna,
a monthly sum that they handed over just so that the guerrillas (bad guys) would leave them in peace. However, lots of wealthy landowners (good guys) got fed up and in order to defend their lands and protect their families, they hired private militia (rich guys become bad guys again). These private armies (bad guys) were a little too good at what they did—apparently, they'd been overachievers in paramilitary school—and instead of just protecting their employers they began massacring whole villages of innocent Colombians because guerrillas were rumored to be among them. So the guerrillas began protecting the villagers (making them good guys again). In the end, the Colombian government was making deals with the drug traffickers, the drug traffickers were making deals with the guerrillas, yet everyone managed to remain at war with one another. Try finding a team to root for in all of that.

I spent my first few months in Colombia, trying to sort it all out—and miraculously enough, I finally did. I wish I could claim that my epiphany was a result of intense research and exceptional insight. However, my conclusion came to me the easy way: I stole it from someone else.

The most invaluable clue for comprehending international conflict had landed in my lap six years earlier thanks to a woman named Marta, my mother's best buddy from college. Marta and I were so similar—at times it struck me that there'd been some sort of administrative mix-up in the spirit world and that I had wound up being born by mistake to Cathie Dale instead of to her. As my mother put it with a tinge of jealousy every time I mentioned her college friend's name, “No wonder you like Marta. She's a Thinker,” with emphasis on the word “thinker,” as if it were a nationality or race. “Rhoda is Irish, Amanda is Asian. Marta—she's a Thinker.”

During one of our infrequent chats (I wanted to see her more often, but she lived in Tucson), Marta was discussing her intellectual obsession du jour, the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. She had spent months absorbing any information she could get her hands on, and her desk and shelves were stacked high with books and magazine articles tackling the issue from every possible angle.

“So what do
you
think?” I had asked her, figuring that her analysis would be pretty accurate and credible.

“After reading all about the history of the Muslims, the Croats, and the Serbs, comprehending the ethnic conflict that has plagued the area for centuries, understanding the religious differences and the main grievances cited by each group, I have finally come to understand exactly why it is they are fighting.” She paused before sharing her conclusion, the words that would form the basis of my understanding of Colombia and any other world conflict for that matter: “They're fighting because they want to.”

In spite of its disadvantages (kidnapping, guerrilla war, drug mafia violence, paramilitary massacres, etc.), Colombia was still the most breathtaking country I had ever seen, teeming with green tropical plants that took over the landscape like ebullient kudzu. From the moment I had set foot on the shores of Sapzurro, the place had gotten to me. Even then I had sensed it—my new country was bursting to the seams with optimism.

That was the thing about Colombia—it took away everything but hope. You
hoped
you wouldn't get kidnapped, you
hoped
the guerrillas wouldn't attack, you
hoped
the paramilitaries wouldn't get to you, you
hoped
you'd find a million dollars in the ground. Against all logic, you still convinced yourself you'd find a way. It was intoxicating. It was like religion. It was wonderful and inspiring and false. And it was the only explanation I could find for my irrational love of the place.

Granted, there were the warm tropical nights that lingered in my memory—evenings punctuated by the beat of the
cumbia
flavored with the taste of strong Colombian
aguardiente.
But these were just details. The real reason I loved Colombia defied explanation. The whole place was ancient and mystical in a way that only Gabriel García Márquez was able to portray. I had come to the conclusion that he was not a magic realist at all. He was a realist—he had just described Colombia the way it is.

I imagined myself settling into a quiet and contented existence with Francisco here. I envisioned the small house we would buy in the hills, the daily trip to the corner store to buy the strange fruits I was becoming accustomed to:
anonas, maracuyá, guayaba.
The only obstacle I could foresee was the issue of money. Below the surface of the enthusiasm I felt for my new home was the nagging worry that we wouldn't find a way to earn a living.

I'd had a couple of backup plans before I left the States, but my attempts to write for AFP and Hughes Aircraft had already fallen through. Francisco had gone back to all the travel agencies where he had worked a decade earlier, but they were never hiring. In this economy, they had already laid off everyone they could spare.

Getting a good job had proven impossible, so we both hoped to resort to the path favored by our neighbors: We would start up a home-based business. Fortunately, Melba had gone to Miami to be near her husband for an indefinite period of time, leaving us in charge of the house and providing me with a tremendous sense of relief, one that had come cheap at the price of two hundred dollars. Right before her departure, she'd stood glancing over at the American Airlines counter with a pathetic stare, explaining that she didn't have quite enough for the ticket for her son. I'd swallowed my anger, walked straight to the ATM, and come back with a stack of twenties that she pocketed with a cold “thank you.”

Now that she was gone, not only was I calmer and happier, Francisco and I had taken over the master bedroom, which provided us with some much needed privacy. And since the only other adult in the household was Melba's brother-in-law who spent most of his time at his grocery store across town, Francisco and I basically had the house at our disposal. Every afternoon after we got Stephanie, Jenny, and Toño off to school, Francisco and I would settle in at the dining room table and brainstorm potential business ventures.

“How about we sell a trip ourselves?” Francisco asked one morning over breakfast, animatedly tossing aside the classifieds.

“What do you mean?”

“Every Colombian wants to visit the United States. We sell a trip to Disney World.”

I could see him getting excited about the idea. “Do you really think it would work?” I asked.

“Most Colombians don't even think about taking their vacation in the United States because they can't get in. The visa restrictions are too tough. But if you go with a tour group, your admission to the country is practically guaranteed. At one of the travel agencies where I used to work, part of my job was helping tourists get American visas.”

I'd never set foot in Florida (a layover at the Miami airport didn't count) and Francisco had never even visited the United States. I could just imagine the fiasco, both of us as disoriented tour guides, trying desperately to locate Disney World.

“Well, it's got to be around here somewhere, Francisco. For God's sake, pull the bus over at that gas station and ask how to get to the happiest place on Earth.”

“No, no, we'll find it. I think we need to make a right at the next light.”

“Francisco, this is really not the time to refuse to ask for directions.”

“You distract the passengers. I'll pull out the map.”

There had to be other businesses that we would be better suited for. “What about planning the trip?” I asked Francisco. “What about the logistics? What if we get trapped somewhere between Fantasyland and Tomorrowland and can't find our way out?”

“There are package deals already set up. We do the selling and then tack on a big commission for us.”

I didn't hold out a lot of hope. In this economy, most people were struggling just to survive. Who had the money for an overseas vacation? But Francisco returned from the travel agency so enthusiastic, with his arms full of glossy brochures, that I didn't have the heart to spoil the plan. Besides, I believed in him. He was always so confident in his ability to take care of himself that it was hard not to trust him, and fortunately, our investment would be minimal. It was only ten dollars to put an ad in the paper: “Visit Disney World! U.S. visas arranged.” And we got the girls to distribute flyers around the neighborhood by offering them two dollars a piece.