Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals (33 page)

We had come up with a plan to subsist on just over a dollar a day, meaning that our midday meal consisted of lentils and rice, with a grated up carrot added for flavor and vitamins. It was cheap, provided protein, and most important, it didn't require refrigeration.

At dinner, using the hot plate Manfred had loaned us, one of us would chop up and fry two green plantains, sprinkle on salt, and eat them with ketchup. Long ago, I had quit draining off the oil, figuring we could use the extra calories. And when we were able to sneak a few oranges off of a nearby tree, we'd squeeze the juice out and mix it with sugar and water.

We augmented our diet with occasional visits to homes that had refrigerators, accepting any invitation (Francisco's distant relatives, the kind neighbor downstairs) and tried not to make a scene as we gorged ourselves on tender meats and fresh salads. Any time we were asked over for lunch by Francisco's wealthy aunt (a Restrepo), we were always overjoyed at the thought of eating a square meal, an enthusiasm that was slightly tempered by the knowledge that the cab ride there would consume our budget for two days' worth of food. Sitting in front of the hearty stews and sumptuous entrées that the maid brought around, we would try to cram in as much as possible, eating enough to fill us for that day as well as the next.

The only time I lost my appetite was when Francisco's aunt refused him a small loan. Sitting at the table in her three-story penthouse apartment filled with servants, I couldn't help but look at the silverware in front of me and enviously think that a single place setting would buy Francisco and me food for a month. It was the only time in my life that I ever struggled with the temptation to steal.

My relationship with material things had changed. I had become practical now. The ridiculously expensive Coach wallet, the Bally shoes I'd bought myself at a duty-free shop in London, my collection of pearls—these things were completely useless to me now. These luxuries from my past seemed like relics, anthropological clues to a life lived long ago.

As our money grew sparser, so too did our visits with Manfred. After four months of failed attempts and a bank balance of less than a hundred dollars, we finally resigned ourselves to the fact that we'd have to look for a source of income elsewhere. I knew Manfred would have offered us money had he had any to spare, but his own financial situation was nearly as precarious as our own.

Francisco had tried asking all of his relatives for a loan and I'd already spent the money so generously offered up by my closest friends. I wasn't about to endure another refusal from my parents, which just left my sisters, but they were both struggling to pay their way through college. I couldn't possibly impose on them.

The shift from optimism to resignation to despair was so gradual that I didn't even notice the decline. It seemed like one day we were full of hope and patience and the next, we were on the brink of starvation. But the realization that I could not survive this way any longer came on what Francisco and I would later come to refer to as the Day of the Maracuyá.

We had been walking down the hill, treading carefully down the fifty or so irregular stone steps that led to the bus stop. Usually, I kept my gaze on the ground to watch my footing—the steps ranged in size from a few inches to several feet (one massive stair actually reached up to my midthigh and I had to sit on it and scoot down like a little girl). But this time, while taking a short rest, I happened to glance overhead for a second. In the vine above us was something that looked suspiciously edible.

I couldn't have been more excited had I discovered a hundred-dollar bill on the ground. This was something for nothing, a gift from the universe. And it was fruit, part of the food group that had been missing from our diet for months (not counting the three occasions that we had “borrowed” oranges off our neighbor's tree).

“What is it?” I asked Francisco, jumping up and down in excitement on one of the teetering steps. “Can we eat it?”

“Maracuyá,”
Francisco said in awe.

“It's maracooties? Can we eat it? Can we?”

Francisco nodded without taking his eyes off of my discovery.

The fruit was a good four feet above Francisco's outstretched arm but the fact that our potential meal was tough to reach did little to deter us. This was our reward for all we had endured. Now we just had to find a way to retrieve it.

I began looking around for a stick, but the only one that was long enough was nearly four inches in diameter and every time I swung it overhead, the weight of the club nearly toppled me over, making my aim completely random.

After a wider search of the immediate area, Francisco spotted a thin stick that was long enough, but because it was so slender, it was blown easily in the wind and the one time the switch did manage to make contact, it didn't have the weight the knock the fruit from its hold.

We refused to give up. We gathered up a pile of rocks and took turns taking aim. It looked easy, like a carnival game, and it lured us in like unsuspecting children with pockets full of quarters. The fruit was barely out of our reach—but when standing directly under it, we had to fight gravity. It was impossible to toss a rock straight up in the air, so we were forced to resort to moving farther away from our target, attempting to nick the fruit with the downward arc of our stone.

The first one to knock down a fruit was Francisco. Like hunters after freshly killed prey, we both ran to retrieve the fallen fruit. There was no need to fight over it. There was another one waiting. Francisco generously handed the
maracuyá
to me and I cradled it in my hands, holding it patiently as Francisco continued tossing stone after stone.

It took us forty-five minutes and nearly two dozen rocks, but finally—exhausted, filthy, and jubilant—we sat down on a log to enjoy the literal fruits of our labor. We cracked open the thick green skins in unison, ready to devour the contents in one large gulp, but instead of fleshy seeds swimming in reddish-orange juice, we were met with nearly empty shells, a few white unformed seeds inside. The fruit was unripe, useless, devoid of smell or flavor.

There was nothing to be said. We had invested nearly an hour and who knew how many calories in a pointless endeavor all in the sake of getting something to eat. We let the shells fall to the ground and sat looking down in silence.

The depression that ensued was only partly due to the fact that we had been outwitted by an egg-shaped piece of fruit. It was intensified by the realization of what I had become. I had joked in the past about being a starving student and then a starving artist, but never before had I been on the verge of actually starving.

Once we finally found the energy to make our way down the rest of the hill, I rashly squandered one-tenth of what was left of our money on a trip to the Internet café. For five dollars, I had a computer for an hour and I used my time to write a desperate plea to my sister, Heather. She was staying with my aunt and uncle at their house in West Virginia for the summer and I hated to ask her for help—she had just graduated from Vassar and was trying to figure out what her plans were. But I didn't know where else to turn. Hunger had made me desperate.

I got an e-mail back two days later with good news. Heather informed me that she had just won a Fulbright to Peru and that there was a chance she'd be able to visit. Plus, she wired me two hundred dollars, which Francisco and I happily invested in juicy steaks and a day's supply of
maracuyá,
purchased this time at the market.

And all of a sudden things started looking up. I had sent out a bunch of résumés to every potential employer imaginable, and one day I got an unexpected phone call from the creative director at McCann-Erickson. He wasn't offering a lot of money, but the ad copywriting job would buy us food on a daily basis. Days later Francisco got himself a job as a cabdriver, which wasn't glamorous, but it was an income. We would make it. We hadn't come this far to stop trying.

That was when I got the phone call.

“Heather was visiting us,” my uncle explained, calling me at my home in Colombia. “She's had an accident in the Miata. It's bad. We're not sure how much time she has left.”

There was a ticket waiting for me at the American Airlines office, he explained. I needed to pick it up and fly to D.C. before my sister's time ran out.

Chapter Eleven

Kidnapped in the United States

I have never understood the concept of fulfilling someone's last wishes after they have passed away. I mean, it's not like that person is ever going to find out or anything. I try to keep my word when it comes to living people, but once you've crossed over to the other side, all commitments are null and void as far as I'm concerned.

Personally, I don't have any special requests when it comes to my own burial. Although I admit that the idea of having my ashes scattered over the Caribbean or the Amazon does have a certain romantic appeal, for me to appreciate this ritual I would have to be around to witness it. And other than burning myself alive, I have yet to figure out a way to do this. So when it comes to my own death, my last wishes are going to be a shot of good whiskey and a strong cigarette.

This same reasoning has gotten me very frustrated when it comes to eulogies. I figure that if I wait until my friends are gone, they'll never get the chance to appreciate the fine prose I have crafted in their honor—which seemed to offer a simple solution: A few years ago, I started writing homages for the people I cared about while they were still alive. Needless to say, this hasn't gone over as well as I might have hoped. In my well-meaning attempt to provide a present for my friend Lisa, I remember the shocked look on her face when I gleefully handed her a typed piece of paper and said, “Look, Lis, I wrote your eulogy.”

What Lisa and my other friends have failed to understand is that my eulogies are not moribund prophecies—quite the opposite. I have always written them in the superstitious belief that the things you appreciate are never taken away from you. It is one of the few irrational beliefs I can't seem to shake: If I could value what I had, remember to care about the people who surrounded me while they were alive, losing them would have nothing to teach me, would be unnecessary, and therefore would not occur. At least, I always hoped the powers-that-be would see it that way.

But this time, I wondered if I was too late. As I sat down to write a tribute to my sister, I was frantically racing against time, hoping that a silly eulogy would have some magical power to cheat death and most of all timidly wishing that if I could just love her enough, there wouldn't be any real reason that she would have to die.

Over the next week as Francisco half-dragged, half-carried me to the offices I had to visit to get the stamp necessary to leave the country, the memories of her came to mind. I had known her her whole life, from the very first day of her existence. She'd been the funny one, the goofy kid, and I had been her big sister. I was five years older—enough of a gap to have a headstart on all of life's essential first lessons. I was the one who taught her right from left, who made sure she knew how to tie her shoes, who improved her pronunciation on all the essential bad words in Spanish. I informed her of the dangers of allowing llamas to spit in her eyes (living in Peru made this information essential). I even explained the safe way to cross the road.

By all accounts, my training had sunk in. By the age of four, she cursed like a Latino, avoided llamas like a Peruvian, and crossed the road like a chicken, meaning that she always got to the other side. Or so it seemed at first. After a bit more studied observation, I began to notice that my baby sister had a minor problem with her technique. Although she had gotten the stop, look, listen part down, she didn't quite grasp the fact that these steps had to be performed
before
stepping off the curb. In the midst of crossing, I would ask if she had remembered to check for traffic. Not wanting to disappoint me with a negative answer, she would set her things down on the double yellow line, dramatically look left and then to her right, and from the middle of the road, she would assure me that, yes, she had indeed made sure it was safe to cross the street.

This had all happened so long ago—to end in what? Now it was twenty years later and my little sis was dying in a hospital bed, and I was far away, unable to change the outcome. I fell to my knees and sobbed, clinging to hope and regret and wishing that just one more time I could have been there to remind her to look both ways.

“There's danger everywhere,” my friends in Cali said, upon hearing the news of my sister's accident, taking a bit of solace in the fact that there was an impending death and for once it had nothing to do with Colombia.

My biggest concern now was getting to her as quickly as possible and the only thing keeping me from it was a large pregnant woman called Esperanza. She was a Colombian immigration officer whose job was to ensure that foreigners with no money weren't going to stick around Colombia for long, taking away jobs from the country's citizens. Needless to say, the fact that I showed up every month begging that she extend my visa for free because I was unemployed and therefore broke was not going over so well.

Every visit was the same with Esperanza (whose name in Spanish ironically enough means “hope”). I would timidly step into her drab dilapidated office and begin a lengthy explanation of what I needed and she would listen to me with a pained expression that I wasn't sure whether to attribute to my presence or the fact that she was knocked up and probably experiencing morning sickness.

Esperanza was now the only thing standing between me and an exit visa, but she wasn't about to hand one over until I paid the hundred -dollar-plus fine I owed for having overstayed the legal time limit twice already. Since I didn't have the money, my only hope was to outwit Hope with a bit of psychology. Her thought processes were like those of an army drill sergeant, meaning that she considered it her job to make my life as painful as possible (yes, it did worry me that she was multiplying), so I figured I would start by begging for what I absolutely didn't want.

“Esperanza, I need to stay in the country.”

“I see,” she said, leaning back in her chair and giving me a malicious grin. “Then you'll have to go to Bogotá and request a visa.” And then trying to contain her sadistic glee, she added, “It's around four hundred dollars.”

“Well, here's the thing—I don't have any money.”

She grinned from ear to ear. “Well, then, I guess you'll just have to leave.”

“Okay, I'll leave.”

This threw her for a minute. She wasn't quite sure how to handle people who weren't fighting with her, and here I was being agreeable. But to her relief, she remembered the fine I owed just in time.

“Well, you can't leave. Not until you pay the $120 you owe.”

“Then, I'll just stay.”

“Okay. I mean, no,” she said, losing her composure for the first time. “You can't stay unless you pay the four hundred dollars in Bogotá.”

“Considering that I don't have four hundred dollars or one hundred dollars or even fifty cents to part with, it seems to me that you have two choices:You can let me stay for free or you can let me go for free, but I don't have any money to give you.”

The look on her face was all I needed. I knew that I had stood up to immigration and won. And with my $120 exit stamp in my hand that I had gotten for free, I stepped momentarily out of the depression weighing me down, realizing that I had accomplished something great and miraculous, knowing that it was a triumphant day for illegals all over the world.

There was nothing left to take care of, but my flight didn't leave for five more days because my uncle had failed to find me a vacant seat on an earlier flight. I was in a painful state of limbo—between two countries and two possibilities: I didn't know whether to begin grieving for my sister or cling to hope. I wavered drastically between the two emotions. At unexpected times, in the middle of a walk to the small corner store or simply while watching our tiny TV, I would suddenly burst into tears. Other times, I was positive that she was still alive, that she would at least hold on long enough for me to see her one more time.

I couldn't wait to get to her as quickly as possible, but on the day of my departure it was painful to leave Colombia. I had said good-bye to Manfred and Cristina the previous day and it had been hard, but it was nothing like the scene at the airport when I parted with Francisco. Tears came easy to me that week. I cried at the entrance, I cried at the gate, I cried when the woman at the ticket counter asked if any persons unknown to me had left a suspicious-looking article in my care.

It wasn't like I was going away on vacation. I didn't know when I would see Francisco again. Our separation was to be just temporary, but there was no definite date for my return. Nothing was certain. The rest of my life was on hold, pending the outcome of the unsure future that awaited me in West Virginia.

Francisco stayed with me until the last possible minute, which given the ultra-secure measures that characterized the Cali airport, wasn't very long. The first of three X-ray scans my bags would go through was immediately upon entering the airport. Then, at the ticket counter, the place was swarming with guards, and since Francisco wasn't in possession of a ticket, they wouldn't even let him walk up to the counter with me. He had to wait behind a bright yellow line painted on the floor while I got my boarding pass.

However, it was the final line that was the hardest. As I took my place among the hordes of passengers waiting to clear immigration, I began to realize that this was it, that these were our last few minutes together. Other couples stuck it out through money problems, minor jealousies, and arguments over the position of the toilet seat; Francisco and I had loved each other through near starvation, guerrilla war, and false imprisonment.

I had vowed not to leave him just because things got too tough, but this time my sister needed me more. It was like a game of paper-scissors-rock, Heather against Francisco. Death trumps poverty. Heather wins.

Francisco would have to find a way to make it on his own for a while. His new cabdriving job didn't start for a few more days, which meant he had yet to see any income. And I had reluctantly taken out thirty-five dollars from the ATM machine so that I'd have something in my pocket while in the United States, leaving just enough in our account for Francisco to survive on for a week.

“Take care of your sister and come back to me,” he whispered into my ear. “You're going to be okay. It'll all work itself out. God may squeeze you a little bit, but He never strangles you.”

We stretched out our good-bye as long as the security guards would allow. The line moved on without us as we hugged, then kissed, then reluctantly separated. It was as far as Francisco was permitted to go.

There was a partition made of tinted glass that I was forced to walk around alone. But after all the time Francisco had spent in prison, we laughed at the notion that something like a wall could separate us. Although I couldn't view Francisco through the smoky glass, I spotted the glow of his lighter, which he held aloft for me to see, so I would know he was still there, waiting.

It was the memory of that small flickering flame that would help me get through the three months that were to come.

The realization that I had arrived in the most powerful country in the world came to me by way of my senses. The unnatural white of the fluorescent lights, the crisp chill of the air-conditioning, the ubiquitous presence of blandly inoffensive music—the sudden appearance of these things jolted my fragile system. I had forgotten what it was like to be in an environment where everything was so carefully controlled.

In Colombia, you were subject to the whims of nature. When it was cold outside, you felt a chill. When it was hot, you sweated it out. When it was dark and the electricity was down, you went to bed. But here, we had overcome climate and seasons. We were even more powerful than the sun.

Walking through National airport, I felt the grandeur and simultaneous sterility of the country I had been born into. Colombia was harsh, even cruel, but it was this very unpredictability that gave it its flavor. In the United States, everything was always perfect, ordered, improved.

I felt out of place. I didn't know if this was due to the contrast between what I was feeling and what I was seeing—I felt so out of control yet I was walking through a meticulously planned environment—or was it simply that I had been gone so long that this no longer seemed like home?

I made my way through the crowd trying to find my aunt and uncle, hoping that a familiar face would make the whole experience less jarring. As I scanned the group in front of me, I suddenly spotted someone I recognized, but it didn't bring about the desired reassurance. Instead, I went through a moment of pure terror and confusion when I realized that the person who had come to pick me up at the airport was the same as the one who was supposed to be wasting away in a hospital.

I hugged her, I pinched her, I cried over her, and when I was convinced that I truly was standing in front of my sister, that she was living and breathing, it suddenly dawned on me that something was terribly wrong with this picture.

“What the hell is going on? What about the accident?” I shouted. I have generally saved the word “fuck” for very special occasions but this one seemed to merit it. “What the fuck am I doing in the United States?”

“Uncle Bob wanted to see you,” she responded. “And he didn't think you'd come if he just asked.”

(Fuck.)

On the drive over to my aunt and uncle's house, my sister helped me piece together how I had wound up in the United States. She had wanted to help me out of my dire financial circumstances but hadn't had any money to send so she had gone to my aunt and uncle for help. Somehow the phrase “boyfriend freed from prison followed by starvation in war-torn Colombia” had sort of slipped out of my sister's mouth, and my uncle had readily handed her two hundred dollars and then secretly plotted to get me back to the United States. Knowing I would never willingly leave Francisco behind, he had found my Achilles' heel, an unwavering devotion to my siblings.