Or, at least, talk about doing something.
Simple political clubs at first. Harmless debating societies.
Don’t worry, Mama, she’d tell Galina and her father. We drink coffee and argue over who’s going to pay the bill. Then we talk about changing the world.
Galina did worry.
She had a reasonably developed social conscience herself; it had never done her much good. She could still remember the rallies for Gaitán—the half-mestizo leader determined to democratize Colombia—and recall with poignant fondness the feeling that had wafted through the streets like a spring breeze in the dead of winter. I am not a man, I am a people. She could remember his riddled body on the front page of her father’s newspaper. After that, a kind of fatalism had set in—like hardening of the arteries, it came progressively with age. The young were inoculated against that particular disease; it took years of wear and tear before idealism crumbled like so much bric-a-brac.
Claudia began spending more time out of the house.
More late nights, which she’d attribute to one boyfriend or another.
Galina knew better.
Claudia was flush with love, yes. But not for a boy. That nervous agitation and those shining eyes were for a cause. She had a monstrous crush on a conviction.
Now when Galina warned her about becoming involved in la política, she was invariably met with stony silence or, worse, an exasperated shake of the head, as if Galina could have no concept of such things. Of what was wrong and needed fixing. As if she were an imbecile, blind and deaf to the world.
It was precisely the opposite. It was her very knowledge of the world—of how things worked in Colombia, or didn’t, because in truth nothing worked in their country, nothing at all—it was that painfully accrued understanding that made her so frightened for her daughter.
When did Claudia first make contact with them?
Maybe when she told Galina she was going on a holiday excursion with girlfriends. To Cartagena, she said. When she returned ten days later, there wasn’t a tan line to be seen. If anything, she looked paler. The weather was awful, she explained. Galina was sorely tempted to check the papers to confirm this. She didn’t.
Cartagena was north. But so, she knew, was FARC.
These little trips became more and more routine.
To a university seminar, she’d explain.
To visit a friend.
A camping trip.
One lie after another.
What was Galina to do? Claudia was of age. Claudia was in love. What were Galina’s options, other than to wait it out, hope it would pass like most first loves do. She was being handed a tissue of lies, and she was using it to dry her tears.
Claudia began dressing down. All kids did to some extent, but Claudia wasn’t making a fashion statement. More a statement of solidarity. She began going days without makeup, without so much as peeking into a mirror.
She didn’t know that it only made her more beautiful.
Had Galina mentioned how lovely Claudia was? How perfectly exquisite? Almost feline. Sinuous, graceful. Her eyes, of course. Oval, deep amber, and her skin what Galina’s madre used to call café au lait. She must’ve inherited her looks from someone other than Galina. Maybe from her paternal grandmother, the chanteuse, a ventello singer of some renown who’d reportedly left broken hearts from Bogotá to Cali.
One day Claudia went away and didn’t come back.
Another holiday excursion, a seaside jaunt with friends. But when Galina called these friends, frantic, panicked, two days after Claudia’s supposed return had come and gone with no Claudia, they professed total ignorance.
What holiday trip?
Odd. She didn’t feel surprise. Just confirmation. That, and simple, unrelenting terror. She sat by the telephone, trying to will it to ring. Trying to keep herself from picking it up and dialing the policía. She knew where Galina was; bringing the policía into it would’ve been worse than doing nothing.
Eventually, Claudia did call.
Galina ranted, raved, screamed. The way you admonish a child. How could Claudia not call, how could she?
Claudia wasn’t the little girl late for dinner anymore.
I’m with them, because to not be with them is to be with the others, she said.
She spoke assuredly. Logically. Even passionately. It’s possible there was a part of Galina, the long-buried part of her that once cheered beside her father for Gaitán, that might’ve even empathized with her.
In the end she said what mothers say. What they’re allowed to say. Even to revolutionary daughters who’ve gone to the hills.
You’ll be killed, Claudia. They’ll call me to pick up your body. Please. Come back. Please, I’m begging you.
But Claudia dismissed her pleas—the way, as a little girl, she had scoffed at wearing rubber boots in the rain.
Then I can’t feel the puddles, Mama.
Claudia, above all, was a girl who wanted to feel the puddles.
Her father was devastated. He threatened to go to the policía, to haul her back home. You should’ve known, he accused Galina, you should’ve known what she was up to. Galina knew he was speaking out of frustration and wounded love; he knew that going to the policía was dangerous, and going after Claudia useless, since he wouldn’t begin to know where to look.
So they sat in their private cocoon of pain. Waiting for a spring that might or might not come.
Occasionally, friends would pass on messages. It’s better if she doesn’t call you, a certain young man explained, a fellow traveler from the university who sported a four-inch goatee and wore a black beret in the fashion of Che. She’s all right, he told them. She’s committed.
Galina was committed too. To seeing her daughter’s face again. She needed to touch her; when Claudia was a child, she’d settle like a nesting bird in the billows of her dress. I’m a kangaroo, Galina would whisper, and you’re in my pocket.
Now her pocket was empty.
One day they received another message from the young man.
Be at such and such a bar at eight tonight.
When Galina asked why, he said just be there.
She didn’t ask again.
They dressed as if going to church. Wasn’t this, after all, what they’d been praying for? They arrived hours early. The bar was uncomfortably dark and seedy, patronized mostly by prostitutes and transvestites.
They waited an hour, two hours, three. In truth, Galina would’ve waited days.
Then she felt a tap on her shoulder, no, more than a tap, a warm hand alighting on her shoulder like a butterfly. She knew that touch. Mothers do. It had her blood coursing through it.
How did Claudia look? Ragged, thin, sick?