Snowstorms in a Hot Climate (2 page)

Later, as the sky turned crimson, the button-bright hostess brought dinner. I pushed a few carrots around the plastic plate but left the dead chicken as votive offering to Thor, just in case of thunderbolts. On the stereo I plugged into Handel’s oratorio. Coffee came and went. I had a brandy and wondered if I was drunk enough to sleep. I closed my eyes, but Elly’s letter was burning a hole in the bottom of my bag. The compulsion to reread what I already knew by heart was overwhelming.

Not here, not rubbing spaces with so many other people. I clambered out of my seat, realizing as I stood up that the alcohol had, after all, had some effect. In the loo my face looked significantly more yellow under the strip lighting. It seemed too early in the trip to have contracted hepatitis. It must be the booze. I sat down on the toilet seat and, from the inner recesses of my bag, dug out the crumpled airmail envelope. Elly, in trouble.

It read like she spoke. Maybe that was what made it so raw: more than anything she said, it was the sound of her voice again after so long. I folded the letter carefully and slid it back into the envelope. Next to it sat a battered postcard. I didn’t need to read that to know what it said. On the front was a picture of a sunset over a coral reef. On the back the words

Soon. Since then there had been a Christmas card and a bunch of flowers three days after my birthday. No words at all. What could it be that took so long to tell? I think I knew even then it had to be a man.

Back in the cabin I found myself another seat, further away from the screen, and waited for New York and the end of the beginning.

O
f course I recognized her immediately. Even in the crush of the arrivals lounge her smallness stood out against the crowd. Yet if she was the same she was also changed. I knew that instantly too. Her hair was shorter, cropped and spiky with flashes of red amid the brown. But it was more than that. We stood facing each other grinning like idiots, transfixed.

“My God, it’s really you,” she said at last, and suddenly we were caught in a clumsy, clutching embrace. It was then I understood part of the change. She was too thin. The baggy summer trousers and loose jacket disguised the lack of flesh. It was like holding an adolescent girl. I could feel the contours of her rib cage pushing through the cotton top. She broke away from me,
still smiling. I noticed the beginning of filigree line work around the eyes, and the slight bruising of shadows beneath them. I had always known she would age well, but the fragility surprised me. There was still a glow about her, but I detected a tension that had not been there before, a new way of holding her body against the air. Did she see all this when she looked in the mirror, or had it been too gradual? Maybe it was I who was overreacting. God knows what differences she saw in me.

“You look great,” she said breathlessly. “Whatever you’ve been doing it suits you.”

There was just a touch of America in her voice. I liked it, even though it reminded me of how long it had been.

“You’ve cut your hair,” I said, because it seemed easier than anything else.

“And you’ve grown yours.”

Another pause. She had always been better than I in social circumstances. She took me by the arm. “No more talk till we get out of here, right? The car’s outside. I’ve left it on a quadruple yellow line, and there are armies of cops and tow trucks all around.”

She reached down for my suitcase and began pulling it toward the door. I picked up the other side, and together we made a lopsided exit through the doors into a full-blown East Coast twilight.

Being outside was about as pleasant as having a sack pulled over your head. The air was so heavy that it seemed to clog up your nostrils, as if it was almost too damp to breathe. Maybe all the oxygen had already been used up by the people who had breathed it before. Summer in New York. How could anyone imagine touching in this heat, let alone being intimate? Had the birthrate been seasonal until the invention of air-conditioning? Elly seemed oblivious of the imminent suffocation.

The car turned out to be a Cadillac which would have been new around the time of
American Graffiti
. It wore its experience well, as if it were under the impression it was something of a collector’s item. For all I knew about cars it could well have been. For all Elly knew either. Either she had learned or someone had done her buying for her.

Inside I pulled on my seat belt. She waited for me to finish.

“So,” she said gaily, hands on the wheel. “Where do you want to go?”

“How about home?”

“Which one? I’m afraid you have a choice.” She made a face. “I’m sorry. I did try to warn you in the letter, but I probably didn’t put it right.”

I swallowed my surprise. “What are you offering?”

“An apartment in Manhattan or a house in Westchester.”

The mystery needed to be kept in scale. Neil Simon rather than Great Gatsby. “Manhattan, I think.”

“Good. I thought you would.”

From behind us, twenty yards down the concourse, came the shriek of a police whistle, followed by a bulky cop, waving his arms in exaggerated fury. Elly rolled down her window and gave him what might have passed for a West Point salute. We moved off in search of the city.

L
ater, on the terrace, we sat and watched the night move. I had left English time behind, blasted it away in a jet-stream shower: the power of water pressure, as American as apple pie and long-range missiles. Out of the bathroom I wrapped myself in a robe, picked up the glass of bourbon waiting for me on the bedside table, and together, the liquor and I went in search of Elly.

We found her in a large canvas chair on the terrace, an urban lookout post fringed with window boxes filled with geraniums and facing out over a dark mass of trees. Central Park and exclusive real estate. New Yorkers pay for greenery like Arabs pay for water. I wondered what the Westchester house looked like. Behind us, through tall French windows, was a spacious sitting room lined with bookcases and the odd, exclusive Chinese print. On the floor, a huge rug on polished boards and four powerful speakers. Planned elegance. Hardly consistent with the Elly I once knew, full of chaos and good intentions.

The hum of the city moved up in hot airstreams toward us. We sat cloaked in heat, the night bringing scant relief. I poked my ice cubes down into the golden brown liquid and watched as the water and the liquor merged to form oily patterns on the surface.

I looked at her. In the darkness she was more like the Elly I remembered. Her new angularity was subdued, rubbed soft by night shadows. I stretched out my legs and felt again how large my body was in comparison with hers. The familiarity of the feeling gave me a strange pleasure. If the night had not been so charged with questions, it might almost have been two years ago. There was silence. It didn’t bother me. Patience is a virtue I am familiar with. She screwed up her face into a half smile, half grimace. It was a gesture I knew very well.

“I’m not sure I know where to begin,” she said at last. “It all seems so long ago.”

“How about Colombia, seventeen months ago? The last time I heard from you was a letter from an unpronounceable place somewhere near the Ecuador border. I had to look it up on a map to find it. You had just had your money and passport stolen, and you were going to Bogotá to get things sorted out.”

She looked at me hopefully, as if she thought I might continue, tell it for her. What was it that could be so hard to say?

I helped. “Come on, Elly Cameron. I just mortgaged my summer vacation on the promise of a good fairy tale. If you make it riveting enough, it might even conquer my jet lag.”

She stared down at her hands, then out into the night. Then she began.

W
ell at first I was just freaked out. I’d already spent a month in Colombia, traveling with my valuables more or less sewn to my skin. Everywhere you went you heard horror stories. It seemed the whole national economy was based on the rip-off. Looking back on it, I think I’d been in a state of perpetual tension right from the moment I’d stepped off the plane in Cartagena Airport. So, when it actually happened, when I got back to my room after the shower and found the door prized open and my money belt with passport, traveler’s checks, and tickets gone, I think I was almost relieved that I didn’t have to worry about the possibility anymore. Except, of course, I knew then that I would have to go to Bogotá. The armpit of the world—
that’s what people called it, although those who had been to Panama City would spend hours arguing the respective horrors of the two capitals. I had vowed never to go near it. Instead I’d done this amazing trip, skidding along the western edge of the country, through crumpled mountain ranges, lost valleys, and small, friendly cities. I had even got to feel quite safe by Colombian standards. Confident even. You know what they say about pride … well, the place I fell to was Bogotá.

Of course, there wasn’t any point wingeing. I had no option. I couldn’t cross borders without a passport; I couldn’t eat without money; and Bogotá was the only place with a consulate and an American Express office. So I started the grinding journey back up onto the central plain—four days of mountain climbing in the back of diesel buses belching smoke and fumes. When I wasn’t on the road I was sleeping. I think I sent you the postcard from Popayán. I can’t remember anymore. Just like in the movies, all the towns were beginning to look the same by then.

I finally reached Bogotá late one night, after a stomach-churning eleven-hour bus ride that the ticket seller had sworn would take only eight. Even so I remember that when we actually arrived I didn’t want to get out of the bus. Now I come to think about it, I can’t imagine what I was frightened of. I had nothing left to lose. But that long climb down from the hills toward the carpet of lights on the valley floor had given me enough time to start worrying, regardless of reason.

When I did finally screw up my courage, haul out my rucksack, and step into the mudscape, a dozen taxi drivers instantly assaulted me. I picked the least murderous looking and gave him the name of a cheap hotel someone had recommended from the
South American Handbook
.

The city seemed to go on forever. Miles and miles of slum suburbia. Houses made up of corrugated iron and cardboard. Maybe it was simply the scale that made it so devastating. God
knows, I’d seen enough poverty before, just never in such massive doses. The hotel was on the outskirts of the inner city, houses shuttered up and no streetlights. When I got there it turned out they had only a double room. I took it anyway. It was cold, and I had to go to bed with my clothes on and the blankets wrapped around me. I was too tired even to be anxious.

Next day I started reconstructing my life. The consulate was sympathetic but philosophical. It can’t have been the most glamorous job in the world, making endless records of hard-luck tales. There were five other people waiting the morning I went. The rip-off stories were more or less clever, more or less painful. Some people had lost everything but the clothes they stood up in. One guy had lost even that, trusting his bag to a Colombian “friend” while he went swimming. I felt sorry for him really, but he was such a wimp. He was flying home as soon as he could arrange passage and passport.

As for me? Well, the normal wait was two, maybe three weeks. Cables had to be sent, facts checked—the usual bureaucracy. The money was easy. Just like the adverts; American Express refunded within two days, although, of course, having no passport to back up the checks caused its own hassles. Still, Bogotá coped. It was a city that had grown used to that particular problem.

Passport, money, and airline ticket inquiries took most of the first week. When I was not in smart downtown offices waiting to see someone or other, I was in the hotel. With the exception of a quick gawp at the Gold Museum, I did no joyriding. I had no wish to discover Bogotá. I remember thinking at the time that I lived rather like a small animal. I would go only where the predators were the same size as me, and I did not stray into alien territory. It wasn’t just my paranoia. The first day I left the hotel the lady of the house (she was a surrogate
mother to all of her “guests”) made frantic signs for me to take off my watch.
“No salgas con reloj. Es Malo. Malo,”
she twittered excitedly.
“Te lo van a robar.”
In the downstairs common room where the travelers congregated, the favorite topic was Bogotá horrors. One girl had her spectacles lifted off her nose as she walked down the street, while another had lost an earring. She had pierced ears and carried a bloody lobe to prove it. In the hierarchy of rip-offs, she was undisputed queen. I was insignificantly low down and determined to stay there.