Snowstorms in a Hot Climate (3 page)

Maybe my lack of courage was symptomatic. I was feeling out of joint in all kinds of ways. Maybe I’d just been on the road too long. You know what traveling is like. Your only pasts and futures are names on a map, and the theft had suddenly swept away what little sense of purpose I had. I wasn’t ready to come home yet, but I didn’t know where else to go. Also I was tired of being on my own. An excuse, I know, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t any truth in it. Latin America isn’t easy for a woman traveling alone. It was my choice all right, but it took energy. Of course, there had been opportunities to change my status, and there’d been a fair number of encounters on the road from Tijuana to Bogotá. I’d met a great woman in Guatemala City who I would have traveled with, but she was going up while I was going down, and no one like her came along again. As for the men, well, that had its own pattern. A week here, a week there, always easy, always defined. That old on-the-road morality; fuck who you want when you want, and then move off, leaving no regrets behind. It’s amazing how your taste can be muddied by the fact that this one you won’t have to meet at the launderette or someone’s dinner party six months from now. In the days before AIDS and herpes descended like some plague from a revengeful God, anything and everything was easy. Even afterward we still took risks in the pursuit of pleasure. And the
Bogotá hotel at that time had a constant stream of unattached traveling males, many of whom were happy to be careless with their affections.

I was quite a desired object in those days. I’d been on the road for over a year. My street credibility was high. Like everything else on the trail, there was an accepted hierarchy to mating. For example, it was always a coup to lay someone who had made it down to Chile or Bolivia, although the real star fucks came with Tierra del Fuego. Another continent scored high too. In terms of women, I was something of a catch: alone, fairly sussed, and with a clutch of passport stamps as aphrodisiacs. Just like home, really, only with the power structures based on different rules.

Anyway, by the time I got to Bogotá I had begun to tire of it all. I was lonely and felt in need of some company, but I couldn’t bring myself to go through the foreplay of travel itineraries. So I opted out. Stayed in my room and read Trollope and two Jane Austens that I’d traded in my copy of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
for. I remember I got very into the eroticism of innocence. I lay curled between cold sheets and worried for Emma and Mr. Knightley. And when the Frenchman on his way north from Chile made a careless, grubby pass at me, I longed for a world where ankles glimpsed under long dresses ignited more sexual passion than naked breasts. After a while people began to leave me alone. I got that “English girl” reputation, remember? It was really quite a change for me—woman of easy virtue led to redemption and chastity through the study of nineteenth-century literature.

My isolation made those weeks a little surreal. Another excuse? Maybe, I don’t know anymore. I had planned to be out of Bogotá by Easter, had banked on it. Semana Santa, with its rumors of Catholic hysteria, was not something I wanted to be caught up in. But I underestimated the disruptive power
of Christ’s death on a Catholic bureaucracy. Banks, airlines, offices—everywhere—simply shut down for days. My passport came through on the Thursday before Good Friday. But when I tried to buy an airline ticket out, it was like late-night shopping on Christmas Eve. I stood in a queue for two hours and then they closed early and turned everyone away. I was so angry. I remember standing outside the shop, paralyzed with fury and frustration. Useless, of course. So I decided to take it easy on myself. If I was going to be stuck here, at least I could treat myself a little. I was downtown, in the shiny expensive part of the city, where the hotels ran on credit cards and expense accounts. I marched straight into the coffee shop of one of the grander ones, sat down, and ordered a shrimp salad. It cost three times my night’s rent, but I didn’t care. I was suddenly tired of slumming it, and I wanted to be somewhere else. With another class of travelers. And it was there, as I eked out each mouthful for maximum pleasure, that I first saw him. Lenny. The man of my dreams. Just sitting there, about five tables away from me, a copy of the
International Herald Tribune
in his hands. What can I tell you about that moment, Marla? Maybe it was his looks, or the way he was dressed. Maybe it was because he was more interested in the news than in the cheapest way to fly to Panama. Or maybe it really was a case of star-crossed chemistry—Mills & Boon at first sight. I don’t know. It hardly matters anymore. Whatever it was, I noticed him.

And he noticed me too. As he flipped back his paper to call the waiter, he looked straight at me. And kept on looking. What did he see? I remember making this cold-blooded checklist of myself. Yeah, I looked OK. I was advert thin from subsistence food; I was brown from months of beach living; and I was not unconfident. I was also ready. And being Lenny, no doubt he saw that too. Anyway, we played eyes for a while; just the basic vocabulary of interest, but with a certain ceremony. It suited me
well. It had been the ceremony I had been craving. I was, I realized, looking to be wooed. By the time I got to the last shrimp, courtship was progressing nicely. I would, I decided, let him make the move. It was then he got up and left. Just like that—folded his newspaper on the table, called the waiter, signed the check, and staring me full in the face, got up and walked out. It was done with such style that I couldn’t help but be impressed. Maybe if I’d been older or wiser I might have read it as a warning. Some people like to control. As it was, the adrenaline was pumping. I decided to shrug it off and settle for his newspaper instead. After all, it wasn’t every day an
International Herald Tribune
came my way. I walked casually over to his table, picked it up, and carried it back to my seat. No one even registered the heist. Except him. Because as I sat down to read I suddenly spotted him, out through the window, standing on the sidewalk watching me. And as he caught my eye, he nodded and smiled. I snapped the paper up in front of my face, and when I looked again he was gone. But I had this sneaky feeling that the first round had gone to him. I should have realized then. What begins as a contest always ends as one too.

Good Friday arrived very early the next morning. I couldn’t sleep. A damp Colombian mist had rolled in during the night, and the cold had woken me. I was up and out of the hotel well before eight
A.M.
, even then the day had a different feel to it. I drank sweet milky coffee at the street stall on the corner, while the owner told me how this and Christmas were always the two quietest days of the year. It was true. The place was empty. As if everyone was indoors, waiting. He asked me if I was going to watch the procession. The hotel had been buzzing for days with talk of Semana Santa. Four months ago I had seen in the New Year in Puerto Vallarta in Mexico, in a vast church crammed with people, while outside beneath the stars the village square flowed with
aquardiente
. But that had been about birth, and this
was death. It would be a spectacle indeed if the same energy was poured into mourning.

The procession was scheduled to begin just after noon. It would move through part of the city, climaxing in one of the biggest and most grandiose of Bogotá’s churches. I idled my way through the morning, walking out of bounds along streets made safe by their emptiness. Around noon I made my way to the city center. Here I found the people, thousands of them, all sober Sunday best in black and gray, a sea of lace mantillas on dark heads. The route of the procession was already jammed with crowds. I had come prepared. All my valuables, including my watch and my new blue passport, had been left in the safekeeping of La Madre at the hotel. All I carried was enough money to buy a cup of coffee and my bus fare home. I remember wondering if Good Friday made honest men of Colombian thieves. I had no urge to test the theory.

I managed to squeeze myself a place in the crowd on the opposite side of the square, halfway up the steps to a large bank facing the church where the procession would end. We all stood glued together, waiting. There was a sense of excitement in the air, muted but powerful. Then, from somewhere in the distance, came this rumbling sound, low and rhythmic, like chanting out of unison. Everyone pushed forward in anticipation. The noise got louder, until from the bottom of one of the streets leading into the square I spotted this wave of people, and above them a large figure of Christ on the cross, swaying its way toward us. It was impossible to tell where the procession ended and the crowd began. Everyone seemed to be moving. The statue was huge—six, maybe seven feet high—and in the crush the men carrying it couldn’t control it properly. It was lurching from side to side, and more than once it came near to falling. With each lurch the crowd would let out a kind of moan. God, it was bizarre. Like some cult reenactment of the Stations of the Cross. And
Our Lord fell for the third time … The wave of chanting grew louder, a bed of devotion to support him on his way. The statue itself was grotesque. A typically Latin American Christ, baroque Catholic, all twisted limbs and bloodied torn flesh. Theater of the streets. The cross swayed, dangerously this time, and someone near me started to cry.

I began to feel chilled. The cross was in front of us now, beginning its drunken journey up the steps of the church. Behind it trundled the inevitable Virgin Mary, life size and dazzling in blue and white china robes, hands clasped in prayer, eyes to heaven, the perfect example of Catholic passivity. And the ultimate con job, reified and deified in one image. All I could think of was bread and circuses as I stood there crushed by the crowd. God, Marla, I wish you’d been there. I was in need of atheist companionship.

The voice came from nowhere, interrupting my heartbeat. “You look so angry. How come you’re not amazed by the spectacle?”

He was standing right behind me. Funny. In the coffee shop he’d looked European rather than American. Close to, his eyes were very bright; blue-gray, like a cat’s. His hair was so blond it was almost white. In the middle of such Latin American darkness, he stood out like an albino. I don’t remember replying to him. The only thing I can recall about that moment is the fact that I wasn’t surprised to see him.

“Have you been in the cathedral yet?” He was almost shouting to make himself heard over the noise.

I shook my head. “I didn’t make a reservation.”

He smiled. “Everyone should see it once. Like the pyramids at full moon. They’ll be following the Stations of the Cross. Christ is scheduled to die in less than an hour.”

Maybe he was right. Maybe it did have to be seen. I pushed myself up on tiptoe to catch a glimpse of the vast wooden doors
of the cathedral, a river of people pushing their way in. Our Lady was having trouble making it up the last few steps. “We’d never get across the square, let alone inside.”

“Sure we will. Just keep your eyes on the back of my head and follow me.”

He turned and broke out of the crowd, not waiting to check if I was behind him. Together we fought our way out to more open spaces, and then he plowed ahead, fast turns down small alleyways and side streets where the crush was not solid. He moved like a man who knew the city. And then around a corner at the end of a street, a side door to the cathedral. He paused to let me catch up.

“Have you got anything to cover your head?”

I hadn’t. He moved over to a small stall set up by the cathedral wall, littered with devotional pictures and rosary beads. His conversation with the old woman was short and to the point. He came back with an offering of black lace. The act of putting it over my hair unlocked the whole box of Sunday morning childhood memories. It all came tumbling out; late-morning mass with my stomach weak from hunger and no hope of food until after communion. Sometimes even the incense smelled of roasting meat. I could feel the texture of the host against my tongue as I tried to peel it off the roof of my mouth. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned …” Devotion drowned by saliva. Maybe this was why I had wanted to stay lost in the crowd.

Inside the air was stiff with sweat and incense. If you looked up into the vaulted ceiling, you could see smoke hanging over the main altar, tendrils of it snaking out into the body of the church. There must have been a thousand people in there, jammed together in the semidarkness. Christ and Mary were making painful, lumbering progress down the aisle. We edged forward until we stood by the end of a crowded pew. Next to me a woman was standing, staring at the altar. I watched her lips
chewing out silent prayers while her hands fingered a rosary. There was something almost nervous in her movement, as if this had more to do with anxiety than comfort. Over her head the church was dense with prayer. The weight of worship was almost tangible. My throat had gone dry, and I found it hard to breathe. The atmosphere was solid, as if some great black bird had landed on the roof of the church, and the warmth of its body and spread wings was suffocating the people below. I remember thinking what a giveaway it was that I should imagine its color to be black. Ex-Catholics have an ambivalent relationship with the Holy Spirit. I felt excluded. And oppressed. I didn’t fit in and I couldn’t get out. I turned and started to fight my way back toward the open door. He could stay or he could follow. For that moment I didn’t care.

Outside, light and air engulfed us. I stood against the wall, feeling the stone cold through my sweater. I took in great gulps of air and began to feel better. I was looking for a way to make light of it, but he got in before my defenses were up.

“What’s the problem? Claustrophobia? Or maybe a sliver of Catholic glass lodged somewhere, trying to get out?”

I shook my head. “Trying to get in, more likely,” I said, folding up the lace mantilla and handing it to him. He continued to watch me, as if he knew there was more to say.

“I was a Catholic once,” I murmured. “As a child. But I turned my back on it as soon as I could think for myself.”