With his profits from robbing pedestrians and businessmen, Jairo had been able to move his family from a shack on the upper ridge to a house with brick walls and electricity on the lower edges. Mauro only entered or left the area in Jairo’s company because the local pandilleros came after anyone they believed invading their turf. Everyone respected Jairo because he’d survived the police, who suspected he was in one of the barrio gangs when they captured him. They locked him in a room, stripped and beat him, pinched him with pliers, played at suffocating him with a plastic bag until he fainted. This went on for days, all to get Jairo to give up the names of gang leaders and their hideout locations. Jairo told the police nothing and eventually was released. Those were years when hundreds of teenage boys were murdered on the hills, victims of paramilitary hit men dressed as civilians, vigilante militias carrying out mass murders in the name of social cleansing. People said police only appeared on the bluffs to log the dead.
Nights, Mauro lay on a mat on the kitchen floor while Jairo and his family slept in the two other small rooms. He felt the tectonic pressure of the hills around him, each sunset walling him deeper into this unmothered and unfathered life. An impulse to run with nowhere to go.
When Jairo left the cerro each day to work the sidewalks near the Hotel Tequendama, Mauro went looking for a job of his own. He tried cafeterías, fast-food chains, and shops with no luck. He started hanging around the market at Paloquemao, trying to befriend vendors until he convinced an old man named Eliseo to let him stack his produce into neat pyramids at half pay if he let Mauro sleep in the stockroom.
Elena came to the market once a week. Mauro looked forward to helping her each time. She chose her fruit carefully while other customers purchased theirs and moved on to other stalls. Lulo and guanabana were her favorites, though she said her mother preferred maracuyá. Mauro packed them for her as if they were gems so she’d find no bruises when she set them into a bowl at home. She said she came all the way to Paloquemao, to this stall in particular, because they had the best selection. She thought Mauro’s father should know and pointed to Eliseo.
“He’s not my father. I just work here.”
He was barely fifteen but somehow felt much older than Elena, who was fourteen, short and slight, almost feline with her long arms and bony hips. She dressed in bright pinks and flowery prints as if she lived by the sea and not their mountain city. Her long-lashed beetle-black eyes, often irritated from the detergents in her mother’s lavandería. Hair pulled into a braid when other girls wore theirs loose so they could touch it all the time. Never jewelry except for her necklace with a gold medal of La Virgen del Carmen. He was self-conscious when he talked to her, making an effort never to use slang or show his ignorance since stopping school. He heard educated people speak on television and read newspapers that shoppers left at the market so he could have things to talk about the next time she came to his stall. He wanted so much for Elena to believe he was worth getting to know.
That April a car bomb detonated near Calle 93. The radio reported many dead and hundreds wounded. Bombazos were nothing new, but this time Mauro thought only of Elena. He didn’t know where she lived. He imagined she could have been nearby. The area was full of shops and cafés. He pictured her hanging out with friends. Then the explosion, and all of them running to save their lives.
Mauro slept on a wooden pallet padded with cardboard, bunched under a cast-off blanket. Through the cold and humid nights, he often only managed to sleep with the help of liquor warming him from the inside. Tiberio once told him the Muisca believed night to be a time of regeneration, when the earth’s energies were most tranquil. But the city was a song of police and ambulance sirens. He could not imagine what it would be like to sleep with silence—as distant a possibility as sharing a bed with Elena.
He counted the mornings until he might see her again. When she reappeared it was all he could do not to take her in his arms. Instead, he watched as she picked her fruit and told her he was happy to know she was safe.
They slowly went from strangers to acquaintances to friends who spent a few hours together each week. He traveled to her neighborhood. Brought her cattleyas from the flower vendors at the market and used the little money he had to invite her to a mango con limón or a cheesy arepa, which they’d eat together on a bench in a park or plaza. Elena always saved her crusts for pigeons. She said it wasn’t their fault they were hungry.
“No,” Mauro said. “It’s none of our faults.”