Oblivion E-Book

Hector Abad Faciolince

• Herausgeber: Old Street Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

The Number One Colombian Bestseller Oblivion is a memorial to the author's father, Héctor Abad Gómez, whose criticism of the Colombian regime led to his murder by paramilitaries in 1987. A work of deep feeling and consummate skill, it paints an unforgettable picture of a man who followed his conscience and paid for it with his life, during one of the darkest periods in Latin America's recent history. Oblivion has been magnificently translated into English by Anne McLean, two-time winner of the Independent Prize for Foreign Fiction.

Leseprobe

For Alberto Aguirre and Carlos Gaviria, survivors

And for the sake of rememberingI wear my father’s face over mine.

Yehuda Amichai

Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraphA boy hand in hand with his father123456A doctor against pain and fanaticism789101112Religious wars and an enlightened antidote13141516Travels to the East171819Happy Years202122232425Marta26272829Two Funerals3031Years of Struggle32Car Accidents3334Human and Right3536Opening the drawers37And death comes383940Friends in Exile41Oblivion42About the AuthorCopyright

A boy hand in hand with his father

1

In the house lived ten women, one boy and a man. The women were Tatá, who had been my grandmother’s nanny and was almost a hundred years old, partially deaf and practically blind; two girls who did the cooking and cleaning – Emma and Teresa; my five sisters: Maryluz, Clara, Eva, Marta and Sol; my mother; and a nun. The boy, me, loved the man, his father, above all things. He loved him more than God. One day I had to choose between God and my dad, and I chose my dad. It was the first theological disagreement of my life and I had it with Sister Josefa, the nun who looked after Sol and me, the two youngest. If I close my eyes I can still hear her harsh, gruff voice clashing with my childish one. It was a bright morning and we were out in the sun on the patio, watching the hummingbirds doing their rounds of the flowers. Out of the blue, the Sister said to me:

‘Your father is going to go to hell.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because he doesn’t go to Mass.’

‘What about me?’

‘You’re going to go to heaven, because you pray with me every night.’

In the evenings, while she got undressed behind the folding screen with the embroidered unicorns, we said Hail Marys and the Lord’s Prayer. At the end, before going to sleep, we recited the Creed: ‘I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, and of all things visible and invisible …’ She took off her habit behind the screen so we wouldn’t see her hair; she’d warned us that seeing a nun’s hair was a mortal sin. I, who understand things well, but slowly, had spent the whole day imagining myself in heaven without my father (I was leaning out a window in paradise and I could see him down below, pleading for help as he burned in the flames of hell), and that night, when she began to recite the prayers from behind the unicorn screen, I said: ‘I’m not going to pray any more.’

‘Oh, no?’ she challenged me.

‘No. I don’t want to go to heaven any more. I don’t like heaven if my daddy’s not going to be there. I’d rather go to hell with him.’

Sister Josefa leaned around the screen (it was the only time we saw her without her veil, that is, the only time we committed the mortal sin of seeing her messy, unattractive hair) and shouted: ‘Hush!’ Then she crossed herself.

I loved my father with a love I didn’t feel again until my own children were born. When I had them I recognized it, because it is an equally intense love, although different, and in a certain sense its opposite. I felt that nothing could happen to me if I was with my father. And I feel that nothing can happen to my children if they are with me. That is, I know that I would give up my own life, without a moment’s hesitation, to defend my children. And I know my father would have given his life, without a moment’s hesitation, to defend me. As a child the most unbearable idea was that my father might die, and I resolved to throw myself into the River Medellín if he did. Likewise, today I fear the death of one of my children much more than my own. All this is a very primitive, ancestral thing, which one feels in the deepest depths of consciousness, in a place that precedes thought. It is something one does not think, but which simply is, without any mitigating factors; something one knows not with the head but with the guts.

I loved my father with an animal love. I liked his smell and also the memory of his smell on the bed when he was away on a trip. I would beg the maids and my mother not to change the sheets or the pillowcase. I liked his voice, I liked his hands, his immaculate clothes and the meticulous cleanliness of his body. I felt for my father the same way my friends said they felt about their mothers. When I was afraid during the night, I would go to his bed and he would always make space for me at his side to lie down. He never said no to me. My mother protested – she said he was spoiling me – but my father moved over to the edge of the mattress and let me stay. I inhaled my father’s scent, put my arm around him, stuck my thumb in my mouth, and slept soundly until the sound of horses’ hoofs and the jangling of the milk cart announced the dawn.

2

My father let me do anything I wanted. Well, perhaps anything is an exaggeration. I couldn’t do disgusting things like pick my nose or eat dirt; I couldn’t hit my little sister (‘not even with a rose petal’); I couldn’t go out without telling someone I was going out, or cross the road without looking both ways. I had to be more respectful to Emma and Teresa (or any of the other maids we had in those years: Mariela, Rosa, Margarita … ) than to any guest or relative; I had to bathe every day, wash my hands before and brush my teeth after eating, and keep my fingernails clean … But I was meek, and learned these basic things very quickly. By anything I mean that I could take, for example, his books or records whenever I wished, and touch his things (his shaving brush, handkerchiefs, bottle of aftershave, record player, typewriter, pen) without asking permission. I didn’t have to ask for money either. He put it like this:

‘Everything I have is yours. There’s my wallet, take what you need.’

And there it was, always, in the back pocket of his trousers. I would take my father’s wallet out and count the money he had. I never knew whether to take a peso, two pesos or five pesos. I’d think about it for a moment and decide not to take anything. My mother had warned us often:

‘Niñas – !’

My mother always called us niñas because the girls were a clear majority so she ignored the grammatical rule (one man among a thousand women turns the whole group masculine).

‘– Niñas! Professors are paid very badly in this country, they earn almost nothing. Don’t take advantage of your father because he’s silly and gives you whatever you want. He can’t help himself.’

I knew that my father would let me take all the money in his wallet. Sometimes, when it was at its fullest, at the beginning of the month, I’d take out a twenty-peso note while my father was having his siesta and take it to my room. I’d play with it for a while, knowing it was mine, and fantasize about buying things (a bicycle, a football, an electric car set, a microscope, a telescope, a horse) as if I’d won the lottery. But I would always put it back later. There was hardly ever very much money, and sometimes, at the end of the month, none at all. We weren’t rich, although it seemed like we were because we had a place in the country, a car, domestics and even a resident nun. When we asked my mother if we were rich or poor, she always answered the same way: ‘Niñas, we are neither one nor the other. We’re comfortable.’ My father often gave me money without my asking, and then I had no qualms in accepting it.

My confusion about gender, grammatical and otherwise, displayed itself the first time I managed to comb my own hair. Having neatly parted it on the right (the wrong side for a boy), I asked my sisters, referring to myself with a feminine diminutive:

‘Quedé bien peinadita? Does my hair look pretty?’

I can still hear the chorus of giggles from all five girls ringing in my ears. I’ve never combed my hair since.

According to my mother, and she’s right, my father was incapable of understanding household finances. Against her husband’s wishes, she had gone to work in a little office downtown: his professor’s salary never stretched to the end of the month and, since my father had no concept of saving, there were no reserves to fall back on. When the utility bills arrived, or when my mother told him they had to pay the builder who’d repaired the leaky roof, or the electrician who’d fixed the short circuit, my father would get in a bad mood and shut himself up in his study to calm down, reading or listening to classical music at full volume. He was generally the one who had hired the builders, but he always forgot to ask beforehand how much they would charge for their work, so they ended up charging whatever they liked. If my mother arranged for repairs, she would get a couple of quotes, do some haggling, and as a result there were never any surprises when the job was done.

My father never had enough money because he gave or lent money to anyone who asked – relatives, acquaintances, strangers, beggars. The students at the university took advantage of him. So did the caretaker of the farm, Don Dionisio, a brazen Yugoslav who made my father give him advances on future apples, pears and Mediterranean figs that never showed up in our orchards. In the end Dionisio bought some land of his own with these advances, and used it to set up a business on the side, selling strawberries and garden vegetables he’d propagated from our stock, and doing quite well for himself. Then my father hired our maid Teresa’s parents Don Feliciano and Doña Rosa to be the caretakers, as they’d been starving to death up in Amalfi, a village in the northeast. Unfortunately Don Feliciano, almost eighty years old and racked by arthritis, was incapable of looking after the crops, so within six months Don Dionisio’s vegetables and strawberries had gone to ruin and the farm was choked with weeds. But of course we couldn’t send Doña Rosa and Don Feliciano back to Amalfi to starve to death for the sake of a few spoiled vegetables; we’d have to wait for them to die of old age. And in the end that’s what happened, whereupon Edilso and Belén moved in as the new caretakers. Thirty years later they are still there, under a very strange contract of my father’s invention: we supply the land, they look after the cows, and all the milk is theirs to keep or sell.

I knew that his students frequently asked him to lend them money because I often accompanied him to the university, and his office resembled a place of pilgrimage, with students lined up outside the door. It’s true that some wanted to discuss academic or personal matters, but most were there to ask for loans. Whenever I was there, I’d see my father take out his wallet several times to hand over bills that would never be returned. Consequently there was always a swarm of scroungers around him.

‘Poor kids,’ he’d say, ‘they can’t even afford lunch; and it’s impossible to study when you’re hungry.’

3

Before I started kindergarten, I had to stay at home every day with Sol and the nun, which I didn’t like. When I tired of my solitary little boy’s games (fantasies on the floor with castles and soldiers), the most entertaining thing Sister Josefa could think of, apart from praying, was to watch the hummingbirds sipping at the flowers on the patio. Or sometimes we went for a stroll around the neighbourhood, Sister Josefa pushing my sleeping sister in the buggy, while I rode on the bars at the back when I got tired of walking.

This daily routine bored me, so I would ask my father to take me along to his office, in the Department of Public Health and Preventative Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine, next door to Saint Vincent de Paul Hospital. If he was too busy to have me with him that morning, he would at least take me for a drive around the block. I’d sit on his knees and steer, while he kept an eye on me. His car was a big, old, noisy, pale blue Plymouth, an automatic, and it would start to overheat and smoke under the bonnet at the very sight of the first slope. Whenever he could, at least once a week, my father did take me to the university. On the way in we would pass the amphitheatre where anatomy classes were taught, and I’d beg him to show me the cadavers. He would always answer: ‘No, not yet.’ We had the same exchange every week:

‘Daddy, I want to see a dead person.’

‘No, not yet.’

Once, when he knew there wasn’t a class, or a corpse, we did go inside the amphitheatre, which was very old; the kind with stands all around so students could get a good view of the dissection. In the centre of the room was a marble slab for the protagonist of the class, just like in the Rembrandt painting. That day the amphitheatre was empty of cadavers, students and anatomy professors. However, in this emptiness there persisted a smell of death, like an impalpable ghostly presence, that made me aware, in that very moment, of my heart beating in my chest.

While my father was teaching, I would sit at his desk and wait for him, drawing pictures or pretending to write, tapping at the typewriter the way he did, with the index finger of each hand. From the distance, Gilma Eusse, the secretary, watched me, smiling mischievously. She had a framed wedding photo of herself in a bridal gown, marrying my father. I asked over and over again why she had married my father, and she would explain, smiling, that it had been a wedding by proxy, to a Mexican man named Iván Restrepo, and that my father had merely represented him in the church. While she told me of this incomprehensible wedding (as incomprehensible as that of my own parents, which was also by proxy, the only photos showing my mother marrying Uncle Bernardo) Gilma Eusse smiled with the most cheerful, friendly face a person could imagine. She seemed the happiest woman in the world until one day she put a gun in her mouth and shot herself – no one knew why. But on those mornings of my childhood she’d help me roll the paper into the typewriter, so I could write. When my father came back from class I’d show him the result.

‘Look what I wrote.’

There were a few lines of gobbledygook:

Jasiewiokkejjmdero

jikemehoqpicñq.zkc

ollq2”sa9lokjdoooo.

‘Very good!’ my father would say with a satisfied chuckle, and congratulate me with a big kiss on the cheek, next to my ear. His kisses, large and resounding, deafened us and rang in our ears for a long time afterwards, like a memory at once happy and painful. One week he set me a task before he went off to teach: a page of vowels, first A, then E, and so on; and over the following weeks he introduced more and more consonants, the most common to start with – C, P, T – and then all the rest, even X and H, which although silent and rarely used, was very important because it was the first letter of the name we shared. As a result, when I started school I already knew all the letters of the alphabet, not just by name but by sound. When the first grade teacher, Lyda Ruth Espinosa, taught us to read and write, I learned in a second, understanding the mechanism straight away, as if by magic, as if I’d been born to read.

There was one word, however, that I could not get into my head, and it took me years to learn to read it correctly. Every time it appeared in print (thank goodness not often) my mind went blank, and my voice wouldn’t work. I trembled in dread whenever I saw it coming, knowing I wouldn’t be able to pronounce it properly. It was the Spanish word for parish priest: párroco. I could never remember where the stress fell, and absurdly, almost always put it on rolling the R – ‘parrrrrroco’ – rather than on one of the vowels. Or I might say ‘parróco’, with the stress in the middle, or ‘parrocó’, with the stress at the end. In any case, never ‘párroco’. My sister Clara took inordinate delight in teasing me about this mental block, and was forever writing the word down and asking me, with a radiant smile: ‘Chubby, what does it say here?’ As soon as I saw the word I’d turn red and not be able to read it.

It was the same, years later, when it came to dancing. My sisters were all great dancers, and like them I had a good ear, at least for singing, but when they asked me to dance I’d get the stress all wrong, keeping time only with their laughter at my total lack of rhythm. And although there came a day when I learned to read párroco correctly, dance steps have forever eluded me.

It is difficult enough to have just one mother; I can’t tell you what it was like to have six. I think my father understood early on that making fun of me was certain to put me off anything for good, that if I even suspected that what I was doing might appear ludicrous or laughable, I would never try it again. When he celebrated even the meaningless gobbledygook I wrote, teaching me slowly and patiently how each letter represented a sound, perhaps it was so that my early errors wouldn’t provoke laughter. On his typewriter I learned the whole alphabet, the numbers and all the punctuation marks, which may explain why a keyboard – much more than a pencil or pen – is for me the truest representation of the act of writing. That way of going along pressing sounds, as on a piano, to convert ideas into letters and words, seemed to me from the start – and still seems to me – one of the most extraordinary acts of magic in the world.

In any case, my sisters, blessed with the incredible linguistic ability of women, never let me speak. I only had to open my mouth to say something, and they’d already said it, in more detail and much more wittily and intelligently than I ever could have. Sometimes it seems to me that I learned how to write only so that I could communicate every once in a while.

From a very early age I wrote letters to my dad, which he celebrated as if they were Seneca’s epistles or masterpieces of literature. Now, when I realize how limited my writing talent is (I almost never succeed in making my words as clear as the ideas in my thoughts, and what I do strikes me as poor and clumsy, mere stuttering compared with my sisters’ articulacy), I remember the confidence my father had in me. Then I straighten my shoulders, and on I go. If he liked even my scribbles, what does it matter if what I write doesn’t entirely satisfy me? I think the only reason I’ve been able to keep writing all these years, and to commit my writings to print, is because I know my father, more than anyone, would have enjoyed reading these pages of mine that he never got to read, that he’ll never read. It is one of the saddest paradoxes of my life: almost everything I’ve ever written has been for someone who cannot read me, and this book itself is nothing more than a letter to a shade.

4

There was one custom in my house that even the laughter and teasing of my friends and classmates could not eradicate. When I got home from school, my father would greet me with hugs, kisses and all sorts of endearments, winding up in a contented chuckling. The first time my friends witnessed it they laughed at this ‘faggoty’ pampering. This insult took me by surprise. Until that moment I had believed that all fathers greeted their sons this way. But no – it turned out that in Antioquia this was not the case. A greeting between father and son had to be distant, rough and without apparent affection.

For some time I was embarrassed and avoided these effusive greetings if there were strangers around, not wanting to be laughed at. But I missed my father’s hugs and kisses, which made me feel safe, so after a while I let him greet me as he always had. My classmates could laugh and say whatever they liked. After all, this affectionate greeting was my father’s thing, not mine – I merely allowed him to do it. And besides, not all my classmates ridiculed me. I remember one, when we were nearly grown up, confessing: ‘Man, I’ve always wished I had a father like yours. Mine hasn’t kissed me once in my whole life.’

‘You write because you were a spoiled child,’ someone who called himself a friend once said to me. He said it in English, to sharpen the gibe and, although it infuriated me, I think he was right.

My father always thought – and I agree, and imitate him – that indulging one’s children is the best system of education. In a book of notes that I assembled after his death under the title Manual of Tolerance, he wrote the following: ‘If you want your son to be good, make him happy; if you want him to be better, make him happier. We make our children happy so they’ll be good and so their goodness then increases their happiness.’ It’s possible that no one, not even parents, can make their children completely happy. What is certainly true is that they can make them very unhappy. He never hit us, not even lightly, and was very permissive – what people in Medellín call un alcahueta, a pushover. Indeed, I might almost say he showed me too much love, though I’m not sure if excess exists when it comes to love. Perhaps it does, since after all there are unhealthy loves, and something often repeated to raise a laugh at family gatherings is one of the first sentences I ever spoke, still in baby talk:

‘Daddy, don’t adore me so much!’

Years later, when I read Kafka’s Letter to his Father, I remember thinking that I could write the same letter, only its exact opposite, substituting antonyms and turning the situations the other way round. My father didn’t frighten me, but inspired trust; he wasn’t despotic, but tolerant; he didn’t make me feel weak, but strong; he didn’t think me stupid, but brilliant. Without having read a single story, much less a book of mine, he divined my secret and spread the word that I was a writer, though it infuriated me that he treated as fact what was only a fantasy. How many people can say they had the father they would wish for if they were born again? I can.

I now believe the more love one receives from one’s parents in childhood, the better one copes with the vicissitudes of life. Without the disproportionate love my father gave me, I would have been a much unhappier person.

Many people complain about their fathers. In my city there is a terrible saying: ‘A man only has one mother, but his father could be any old son of a bitch.’ I might, perhaps, come close to agreeing with the first half of this sentence, taken from a tango lyric, even though, as I’ve mentioned, I myself had half a dozen mothers. But with the second half, I utterly disagree. In fact, I think I even had too much of a father. My father was, and in a way continues to be, a constant presence in my life. I find myself obeying him even now – though not always, for he also taught me how to disobey if necessary. When I’m mulling over something I’ve done or am going to do, I try to imagine what my father would have said, and have resolved many moral dilemmas simply by appealing to the memory of his attitude to life, his example, and his words.

I don’t mean to give the impression that he never told us off. His voice was like thunder when he got angry, and he thumped the table with his fist if we spilled something or said something stupid during dinner. In general he was very indulgent towards our weaknesses if he considered them incurable, like an illness. But if he thought it was something we could correct, all his indulgence vanished. His professional interest in hygiene meant he couldn’t stand us being dirty, and he made us wash our hands and clean our nails in a ritual that seemed practically pre-surgical. Above all, he hated it if we displayed a lack of social conscience or understanding of the country we lived in. One day when he was ill and couldn’t make it in to the university, he was upset that a lot of students would have paid the bus fare to class for nothing, so I said:

‘Why don’t you phone them and let them know?’

He went white with rage.

‘What part of the world do you think you live in? Europe? Japan? Or perhaps you think everyone lives in neighbourhoods like Laureles? Don’t you know there are parts of Medellín where they don’t even have running water, let alone a telephone?’

I remember another of his rages, a lesson as hard as it was unforgettable. A group of local kids, around ten or twelve years old, somehow got mixed up in a loutish expedition, a sort of miniature Kristallnacht. Diagonally opposite our house lived a Jewish family – the Maneviches. The bossiest kid on the block, a big boy with a shade of down on his upper lip, made a plan to go and stand outside the ‘Jews’ house’ to throw stones and shout insults. I joined the gang. The stones weren’t very big, bits of gravel really, and scarcely made a noise against the window panes, much less broke them. As we threw them we shouted a phrase whose origins I’ve never known: ‘Hebrews eat bread! Hebrews eat bread!’ Perhaps it was meant to be some kind of cultural affirmation of the arepa, the cornmeal rolls we ate. One day my father came home from the office while we were doing this. Enraged, he jumped out of the car, grabbed me by the arm with a violence I had never before known, and dragged me to the front door of the house.

‘You don’t do that! Ever! We are going to speak to Señor Manevich right now, and you are going apologize to him.’

He rang the bell. A very pretty, haughty girl, older than me, answered, and eventually a sullen and aloof Señor César Manevich came to the door.

‘My son is going to apologize to you, and I assure you this will never happen again,’ my father said.

He squeezed my arm and, looking down at the floor, I said: ‘Sorry, Señor Manevich.’

‘Louder!’ insisted my father, and I repeated louder: ‘Sorry, Señor Manevich!’ Señor Manevich nodded very slightly, shook hands with my father and closed the door. I had a scratch on my arm, the only mark my father ever left on my body. It is a mark I deserved and the memory of which still shames me, not only because of everything he was to tell me later about the Jewish people, but also because my brutal, idiotic act had been prompted solely by a herding instinct and not by any genuine opinions, good or bad, about Jews. Perhaps this shame is at the root of my adult rejection of groups, parties, associations and mass demonstrations – all gangs that might lead me to think and act not as an individual but based on this weakness: the desire to belong to a crowd.

When we got back from the Manevich family’s house, my father – as he always did at important moments – took me into his study with him and shut the door. Looking me in the eye, he said the world was still full of a plague called anti-Semitism. He told me what the Nazis had done to the Jews scarcely twenty-five years earlier, and that it had all begun with the act of throwing stones at windows, during the terrible Kristallnacht, or night of broken glass. Then he showed me some terrifying pictures of the concentration camps. He said that his best friend and classmate, Klara Gottman, the first female doctor to graduate from the University of Antioquia, was Jewish, and that some of the greatest geniuses humanity had produced over the last century, in science, medicine and literature, had been Jewish. If it weren’t for them there would be much more suffering and much less happiness in this world. He reminded me that Jesus himself was a Jew, and that many Antioquians – possibly including ourselves – had Jewish blood, because in the past all the Jews in Spain had been forced to convert. It was my duty to respect and treat them like any other human being, or even better, because the Jewish people, along with the indigenous peoples of the Americas, black people and gypsies, were among those who had suffered the worst injustices over the last few centuries. And if my friends persisted in such barbaric behaviour, I could never play with them in the street again. As it turned out, this threat was unnecessary: the other children had observed ‘how furious Dr Abad was’ from across the road, and that was enough to deter them from throwing stones or shouting insults at the Manevich family’s windows ever again.

5

When I started kindergarten, with its strict rules, I felt abandoned and mistreated. It was as if I’d been sent to jail without having committed a crime. I hated going to school: the lines, the desks, the bell, the timetables, the sisters’ threats at the mere suggestion of happiness or hint of freedom. My first school, La Presentación – which my mother had attended and where all my sisters studied – was a convent school. Even though, of course, it was a girls’ school, boys were admitted for the first two years of kindergarten, before the start of elementary school. We were, however, overwhelmingly in the minority – an endangered species. I don’t remember a single boy among my classmates, so for me school was like an extension of home: women, women, and more women. The one exception was on the bus, where there was the driver and another little boy; dressed in our white shirts and dark blue shorts, we would sit together on one of the back seats. For the entire journey this little boy would take his willy out from one side of his shorts, and rub it and scratch it and pull at it non-stop, and he did the same on the way back, all the way from school until the bus dropped him off at his house. I didn’t dare say anything, but simply watched in baffled amazement. I still find his behaviour somewhat baffling even now, and have never forgotten it.

Every morning I waited for the school bus in the doorway, but when it nosed around the corner, my heart trembled and I ran inside, terrified.

‘Where are you going?’ Sister Josefa shouted furiously, trying to grab me by my shirt.

‘I’m coming. I’m just going to say goodbye to my dad,’ I replied from the bottom of the staircase.

I ran up to his room, into the bathroom (where he would be shaving), hugged his knees and started to kiss him, supposedly to say goodbye. But the farewell ceremony lasted so long that the bus driver would grow tired of honking his horn and waiting, and by the time I came downstairs, the bus would have gone, and I would no longer have to present myself at La Presentación. Another day of respite! Sister Josefa would get angry and say that if they kept spoiling me, I would never amount to anything, but my father always replied with a chuckle: ‘Calm down, Sister, everything in its own time.’

This scene was repeated so often that eventually my father took me into his study, looked me in the eye and asked me, very seriously, if I didn’t actually want to go to school yet. I said I didn’t, and immediately school was delayed for a year. It was wonderful, such an immense relief that even now, forty years later, I feel light-hearted when I remember that moment. Was he wrong? The following year there wasn’t a single day when I wanted to stay at home, and from that point on I never missed school unless I was ill. In all my years of elementary, secondary and university education I never failed a subject. ‘The best form of education is happiness,’ my father used to say, perhaps with an excess of optimism. But he said it because he truly believed it.

The following year, the bus never left without me. Or to be accurate, I missed it just once, a day I’ll never forget. A few weeks after starting back at the same convent school – the second attempt at weaning me – I remember a dreamy mood stole over me at breakfast one morning. I spent ages savouring the taste of my fried egg yolk, and the bus drove off without me. I saw it turn the corner, and though I ran after it, nobody on the bus heard my shouts. No one in the house realized the bus had gone without me and I didn’t want to go back in, so I made up my mind to walk to school instead. La Presentación was in the city centre, on Ayacucho, close to San José church, where the police have their headquarters now. I walked down Carrera 78, where we lived, to 33rd Avenue, and set off in vaguely the right direction.

As I crossed over the Bulerías roundabout, cars honked their horns at me and a taxi had to brake hard, its tyres screeching as it barely avoided hitting me. I was sweating, with my leather satchel on my shoulder, walking as fast as I could along the side of the road. The roundabout had been an almost insurmountable obstacle, but I’d overcome it and carried on towards the river, where I thought the bus usually went. I stopped for a minute to rest on the bridge over the River Medellín, at the bottom of Nutibara Hill, and stared through the railings at the water flowing by. If my father ever died, I planned to throw myself into this very river. I’d never seen it up so close, so dirty, so ominous. Before getting my breath back, I started walking again, along the side of the road. At that moment – I can still hear it now – there was a second screech of brakes at my side. Was I about to be killed by another taxi? No. A man in a Volkswagen, introducing himself as René Botero, called to me from his window: ‘What are you doing here, kid? Where are you going?’ ‘To school,’ I said. ‘Get in and I’ll drive you,’ he yelled, ‘before you get killed by a car, or snatched!’ I was still several miles away from La Presentación, and we didn’t exchange another word during the fifteen-minute journey.