Say you’re leavin’ on a seven-thirty train
and that you’re headin’ out to Hollywood
When I was twenty, my best friend left the city, never to be seen again. Carolina was her name. After her brother was kidnapped, her father asked for political asylum in the US. It was granted, and they left.
Her brother was held captive for a month, and the money they paid for his release was like water off a duck’s back for Carolina’s family. Before leaving the country, they invited a group of friends and relatives to the island they owned in the archipelago of San Bernardo, where they had built a Tuscany-style mansion (although of course never in their lives had they set foot in Italy). Among the many guests, I was Carolina’s only friend. The rest were a flock of old men with bottles of Old Parr under their arms.
We sailed there on a white yacht called Alondra, and on the deck there was a band playing Cuban son, with musicians who were genuinely Cuban. Fake Cubans seemed to abound back then. The musicians from Cartagena only needed to adjust their intonation slightly to pass as defectors from Havana who, thanks to the wind and bad luck, had supposedly been diverted from their way to Miami and had ended up in this fraud of a city instead. A city that was just like theirs, except it was racist and slathered in mascara.
A few months earlier I had heard a phrase similar from the mouth of a Cuban who wasn’t a defector, but actually the opposite. I’d met him at the film festival. I was working as an usher in the theater, and he was in the competition with a forgettable film about a whore that died.
“There seems to be an elementary law of exclusion at play here: the entire Black population has been hidden away,” he said after the first drink.
We were in a bar on the city wall: the sea in front of us, the sun about to dive into the horizon, and the moist breeze hitting us on the face like a tongue bathed in saliva. I sat up straight in my wide wicker armchair, stretched my neck, and looked to one side, then to the other.
“Where?”
I had abandoned my seat in the theater just when the Bolivian film was starting. I didn’t feel like talking about hidden Blacks. Or whores or drugs. Or flea-bitten children or beaten mothers. For that, I already had the films in the Latin American competition that I was forced to watch.
Between the film festival and the university, it was hard to find people not talking about these kinds of things. Everyone did so in that overbearing tone used by those who feel the need to explain why the world is so fucked up. That was one of the reasons I liked being with Carolina. For her the world was the size of a well-poured glass; and sometimes, that was the case for me too.
On the yacht, Carolina’s mother, whose name was Soraida (although everyone, including her children, called her “Muñe”) kept exhibiting the Cuban defectors on the deck as if they were some kind of trophy from a funfair. Carolina’s father had gone to Florida to close some real estate deals. Carolina’s brother had gone with him. The young sister had stayed behind in Cartagena with her grandmother because boat trips made her terribly seasick. And Muñe, after almost losing a son, appeared happy and free, fondling those sinewy, dark-skinned, good-for-nothing young lads.
At the beginning, Carolina was upset, but a short while later, after a few rums, she began ignoring her mother. It was then that she pulled out the perico.
“Help yourself,” she said to me, “it’s premium quality.”
The truth is that I had never seen cocaine before (Carolina had never offered me any prior to that party on the yacht), be it premium or not, but from that point on, I would understand the difference. The coke from that evening was, according to her, mixed with crushed diamonds. Everything I knew about cocaine came from stories that my dad had told me. He used to work in customs and had confiscated tons of it. Sometimes, while we were having a meal, my dad would tell me about a container full of washing machines, or legs of ham, or tuna cans, all of them stuffed with the drug.
“The bricks were huge: hard, white, bright . . .” His tone would quickly mutate from dismay to fascination. And even though he would always finish his stories with some horrendous moral lesson about the sorry state cocaine addicts ended up in—swollen, sweaty, sterile, full of nervous tics—talking about it made his eyes sparkle.
So when Carolina gave me the tiny bag, I didn’t quite know what to do, but I certainly knew that I would do it. I went to the bathroom, opened it, pinched a little bit of powder, and put it on the crook between my thumb and forefinger. That much I had seen a million times in films. I snorted and my head caught fire inside. One blink of the eye later, I was out dancing to the rhythm of a caballo vamos pal monte with a guy I had never seen before. His name was Lucio. He was a friend of one of Carolina’s relatives.
The memories from that party became intermittent.
The fits of laughter began high up and the sea would swallow them up.
Lucio’s fingers drew letters on my back that I had to guess.
The red crack in the horizon resisted the imminence of the night, and every now and then, it seemed to me that it was blinking.
The clothes dripping with sweat, the hair greasy, the bodies all sticky, the thirst . . . I remember I was very thirsty.
When we arrived on the island, no one was sober. As soon as we touched dry land, Muñe and one of the percussionists lost themselves in the depths of a hammock. That weekend, I inhaled more cocaine than oxygen. On Monday, when I got back home, I locked myself in to sleep for two whole days.
I had met Carolina three years earlier. She wasn’t one of those friends that you’d keep all your life. She hadn’t been to my First Communion or to my quinceañera party, nor did we live in the same neighborhood. It made sense: she was rich and I wasn’t. I met her working as a promo girl for Lucky Strike cigarettes, a job that a friend of my dad’s had managed to get for me for the summer season. They paid very well. My duties consisted of getting wrapped up in a Lycra uniform and walking in and out of bars giving away packets of smokes. You had to paint your lips bright red, smile, and spit out the slogan left, right, and center, giving the impression that this made us feel an irrepressible excitement. I needed to work because since starting at the university, I hadn’t received a penny from my dad, not even to cover printing costs. Carolina didn’t need to work—of course she didn’t—yet back then she was obsessed with being independent and moving out on her own to a bare room in the Marbella guesthouse.
“And why would you want to do that?” I asked her one of those evenings.
We’d already done our rounds in the bars. We were parked up on a jetty, perched on the hood of her Mitsubishi, smoking, staring at the lights that outlined the bay’s shape.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“I dunno.”
Carolina never won her independence, not even from the Sunday lunches that they used to make in her home. Yet in her head, she said, she’d taken huge steps toward a nominal independence. Six months after I’d met her, her ambitions changed. She was convinced that the only possible way out for the country’s economy (and of her own financial situation) was to legalize not so much the consumption of drugs, but the trafficking. Exporting cocaine. Not the leaf, or the flower, or the cheap workforce growing it. Rather, exporting the end product in optimal conditions.
“Premium-quality products,” she’d say, “that’s what we’d sell.”
“Right.”
“We’d be more than Acapulco Gold. We’d be ‘Colombia Diamond.’ Do you like that name?”
“No.”
Carolina didn’t go to college. She had plenty of time to fill up her nose with dust and her head with fantasies. In her ideal world, my father was unemployed and hers became an ambassador. Her dad’s business was a well-known secret. Some people said that he was now clean, that he was no longer involved, that he had left all that behind, and with what he’d collected, he’d set up a real estate business. He now built sumptuous blocks of flats that no one with an ordinary job could ever afford to buy. When they kidnapped Carolina’s brother, rumor said it was a settling of scores. That the FARC had nothing to do with it, that in actual fact he had been taken by some people from Cali who, in addition to demanding money as a condition for his release, were demanding that the family leave the country.
“They are up to their necks,” my dad told me one evening. “If they don’t leave, the young lad’s head is going to be delivered to them wrapped in cellophane.” As he was saying that, he slit his throat with his index finger and then knocked back his beer. My father was a haggard version of John Travolta. He enjoyed acting like a tough guy with a good conscience.
The idea of exporting cocaine, like all the obsessions Carolina had, soon disappeared. She told me one day when we had gone to pick up her little sister from school, which was opposite the Bocagrande esplanade. We got there early. She parked the car, we got out, and we went to sit on a bench. The seashore was carpeted with dead fish because that week a cruise liner had arrived in the city and there had been an oil spill from it. The air was coated with a strong, sour, putrid smell that settled in the pit of my stomach and made me want to puke.
“My business idea is over,” she said.
“Oh, is it now?”
She shook her head heavyheartedly, like someone who’d just been cheated.
“I looked into it: there’s just too much competition.”
“Is there now?”
She went to buy something from the corner shop.
I went closer to the sea, picked up a stick, and prodded the eye of one of the dead fish. Blood sprouted from the socket. Carolina came back with two cans of cold beer. As soon as I grabbed mine, I placed it on my forehead to relieve my discomfort. She knocked hers down in three swigs. Then she burped.
Carolina’s brother was called Jorge. He was two years older than us, and the only conversation I’d had with him had been about King Kong. Carolina was busy in the bathroom doing her makeup, while I waited for her in her bedroom before going out together. I was trying on some of the hundreds of pairs of sandals she had, when Jorge came in and said:
“Tell me something. You watch a lot of movies, right?”
I raised my shoulders.
“Sometimes I work at the film festival.”
“How come King Kong falls for a gal?”
“What do you mean?”
“Yeah, I don’t get it. A monkey falling in love with a woman? Makes no sense.”
I tried to laugh but I sensed he was being serious.
“Can you recommend a movie to me?” he said later. “A good one, not like King Kong.”
“Who the hell is Yuliet?” I said.
“Dunno.” he replied. “Yuliet who?”
At that very moment, Carolina came out of the bathroom and we got going.
Jorge had done two terms of industrial engineering at college in Bogotá and had gone back home because his dad needed him in the family business. When he returned, he bought himself a degree from a mediocre local institution before becoming the manager of his dad’s building company. The day he was kidnapped he was coming back from his trail-bike practice ride in the city outskirts.
Carolina could have gone to study in Bogotá or in Miami or wherever the hell she’d wanted to, but she just didn’t. She had signed up for a theater course at the School of Fine Arts. She enjoyed the first month. She had blended in with the others perfectly: all flower power and hot flushes on the steps to the school. Her classmates adored her, and in her view, they were all talented and authentic and trendsetting like Andy Warhol.
“Andy Warhol hasn’t set a trend in fifty years,” I said to her.
After three months, she could no longer stand being surrounded by “filthy hippies.” She had ups and downs. She’d go from worship to contempt in a matter of hours. In her social map I was a rare constant. When she got tired of talking, she would look straight into my eyes and say: “Sometimes I think I made you up, that you exist only in my head.” I’d seethe and light up a cigarette.
Carolina hated her brother and Muñe, she was indifferent to her little sister, and she adored her dad. I couldn’t understand how people so close to one another could inspire in me such extremely different feelings. I didn’t have much experience when it came to family ties. I didn’t have a mother or siblings or grandparents. I had some aunts and uncles that lived in a village far away and whom I’d seen only once or twice in my life, who knows why. And then there was my dad, whose presence was becoming more and more haphazard. I’d always felt sorry for my dad’s background story. I imagined him as a young widower, his law degree interrupted and a baby in his arms. He left me to my own devices very early on, which meant I grew up a bit like I was no one’s daughter. It wasn’t bad. Independence was, I thought, a good legacy.
The School of Fine Arts was in San Diego, the district where I used to live. The months she did attend, Carolina would skip her classes, ring my doorbell, and make me come down at five in the afternoon with the idea of going to hang out on a jetty. Most of the time I’d refuse, telling her I had to study, that unlike her, there were people with no choices. She’d get upset.
“Selfish bitch,” she’d shout from the pavement.
I would close the door to the balcony and go inside.
The day her brother got kidnapped she had also come to find me. I had an exam the following day and didn’t feel like seeing her. She rang the bell several times and I didn’t come out. Then she shouted my name out loud. Then she threw stones at my balcony. Then she went back to the doorbell, until she got bored and left. When my dad returned from work, he found a note under the door. It said something about what’d happened to her brother and to call her. At first, I thought she had made it up. I switched on the local news channel and waited to see if they would report the incident. They only mentioned an anti-FARC mission taking place at Los Montes de María. An army commander read from a list of aliases in an enthusiastic tone, informing the journalists of the casualties. He was a short, dark-skinned man; the uniform looked tight on him. He would have benefited from some dental work. My dad used to say that police represented the first line of the fascist poor, that social category so deep-rooted in our country.
I gave Carolina a call.
“Is it true?”
“Yes.”
“How’s Muñe?”
“Sedated.”
“And you?”
“Drunk.”
My dad was making a stew with too much onion. When I went into the kitchen to tell him that I was off to see Carolina, I found him with bright-red eyes.
“But I’ve cooked us a meal,” he complained.
I left.
He didn’t like Carolina, but he didn’t interfere with my things nor did I with his. On Fridays, for instance, he used to bring women home and I wouldn’t say a word. Always the same two or three—he rarely improvised. Women who wore a lot of makeup and were very loud in bed. The following morning, they never stayed to have breakfast with us. They would exit the room when my father and I were already at the table. They would poke in their heads with their eyes all smudged, their broken lips, their porous skin, punished by the light of day. “Bye, sweetie,” they would say, and blow kisses from the door.
My dad would raise his chin and growl something.
I took some clothes to Carolina’s house to last me a couple of days, as well as my college books. Late the first night, when we had already turned the bedroom light off and I was about to fall asleep, Carolina said:
“I hope they kill him.”
Carolina’s family came from a town in Córdoba. I wasn’t exactly sure which one because they never referred to it directly. For them, life had started when they moved to Cartagena and began building those towers lined in marble. They lived in a massive three-story penthouse with a completely independent apartment for their staff. That apartment alone was bigger than my flat in San Diego.
I spent almost a month in Carolina’s house after Jorge’s kidnapping. During that time, we didn’t see much of Muñe, the little sister, or her dad. The sister was staying at an aunt’s, and according to Carolina, her dad spent his time at work trying to get the ransom money together. I thought that it would have been enough just to sell the brother’s motorbike, but I didn’t share my views. I honestly couldn’t have cared less.
In that house I lived at my leisure. During that time, I stopped attending college, and since I didn’t have enough clothes, I’d borrow Carolina’s. I’d also wear her perfumes, go to the supermarket in her 4×4, pay for everything with her credit card, and even give orders to her maid, Yanilsa. I would decide what we’d have for lunch, what we’d watch on satellite TV. I even answered the phone. Carolina spent her days lying on the sofa, malleably accepting all my decisions. She would get aggressive only when Muñe turned up, dressed up in her robe, shuffling in her slippers like an old woman. Carolina would say to her:
“Why don’t you pay for a nice Black guy to eat you out?”
Muñe stared at her as if she spoke a different language.
The strangest thing that happened round those days was the arrival of a certain cousin called Alfonso, who came from the village. He had phoned several times before and was always very solicitous, saying the right things: asking how everything was, concerned to know if there were any updates, and letting us know that the entire family had Jorge in their prayers.
“Thank you very much, Alfonso,” I’d say to him.
When I asked Carolina who this guy was, she said:
“He was one of my dad’s houseboys. He let him go because he was useless.”
One day, cousin Alfonso came to their door. The porter told Yanilsa, and Yanilsa let him in. Carolina and I received him because Muñe had been put back to sleep.
“Dear cousin, I am entirely at your disposal,” he said to Carolina. “Please tell me what it is you need.”
He was an utterly bland guy: pleated trousers, stripy shirt well tucked in, loafers, rucksack on the shoulder. His face pale and moldy-looking, as if he’d just emerged from the jungle.
“Nothing,” she said. “We are fine,” and she offered him something to drink.
Alfonso refused the offer and looked at the window: a panoramic view over the sea. From there, the sailboats looked like toys, the clouds seemed to be made of cotton, and the sky was a poster-blue color because it turned out the glass had a special filter. On the promenade next to the bay, people were walking, looking tiny in the distance. Some evenings I would stare out of that window for a long while, imagining that I could pick up those little people with my fingers and move them around or simply drown them in the bay. Like Zeus on Mount Olympus, deciding the destiny of the mortals. Anyone looking out from up there was required to feel powerful.
“Could you leave us alone for a moment?” Alfonso asked me.
Carolina shook her head and I didn’t move. Alfonso stared at the ground. When he raised his face back up, his eyes were tainted red with fury:
“They are going to kill you all,” he said. “Tell your mother that you need to gather your things and leave. They are going kill you all because your father is a pig who doesn’t know how to do business.”
Carolina was speechless for a few seconds and then burst into tears. I asked Alfonso to leave. I was shaking but managed to shove him toward the door. Every few seconds, the guy would step back and scream:
“He’s a fucking dirty swine! He’s going to die, you are all going to die!”
When I did manage to get him out, he stuck the tip of his shoe in the door, stopping me from shutting it completely.
“You get yourself the hell out of here,” he said, his finger pointing up, “because these people are not safe.” His face was livid. He removed his foot and the door slammed shut. I looked at the buzzer screen and he was still there, breathing slowly and noisily. The fear I felt blended with pity and even a certain amount of empathy.
“These people are always safe, Alfonso,” I whispered.
Three days later, Jorge was sent back.
I saw Carolina only once again after the yacht party. I had found a full-time job at a pizzeria, and she was busy filling in applications for some college in Florida. Her dad had come back for her. The rest of her family had gone to live in Weston.
One afternoon Carolina came to the pizzeria to get me. I said to my boss that I had to attend a family emergency, and the guy, who was simply the sweetest, not only let me finish early but also gave me a pizza to take with me.
We looked for a jetty to park by, but it was school holidays and they were all full of skinny teenage girls with their crop tops and hair down to their waist.
“Let’s go to one of the buildings,” Carolina said.
She had the keys to some of the flats in the buildings her father managed. Most of them were empty. When she got sick of Muñe and Jorge, she fled to one of these huge flats and stared out of the window. The view calmed her down, she’d say. Mind you, I’m sure every time she did it, she scoffed a Xanax first.
I had gone with her to one of these flats just once. It was on the top floor with an outdoor jacuzzi. We went with a guy from the School of Fine Arts who had got hold of some marijuana for us. We went into the jacuzzi and he stated something totally obvious about Cartagena and racism, to which I replied:
“There seems to be an elementary law of exclusion at play here: the entire Black population has been hidden away.”
The guy frowned and nodded slowly, as if he were trying to solve a riddle. Then he dodged the topic, saying he felt like he was in Aerosmith’s video for the song “Crazy,” and burst out laughing. Carolina took off her underpants, climbed on top of him, and kissed him. I got out of the jacuzzi feeling disgusted.
This time we went to a different flat. It was on floor eleven and had a massive balcony with two immaculately white loungers. We sat down and I opened the box with the pizza. Carolina had bought a six-pack of beer. I asked how her family was and she said they were fine. She asked after my father and I said the same, although “fine” was not a word my dad would have used to refer to himself. Never. When someone asked him “How are you?” he’d reply “Not bad,” and that was, in the midst of it all, an encouraging answer. Not bad. So-so, average, unremarkable. That was what his world was like, his girlfriends, his stratum, his days. His life. And that was what it would always be like. And mine? What would my life be like?
It was hot and there was no wind. We could hear the music coming from a van parked by the water down below. We could also hear laughter.
“Do you have a visa to go to the US?” Carolina asked.
I shook my head. She knew I didn’t. We had talked about it one of those first evenings, dressed for Lucky Strike, perched on the hood of her car. “They cannot close the borders to the world, they are going to suffocate in their own stupidity,” she’d said back then, when she wanted to live in the Marbella guesthouse and grow dreadlocks. “Sure they can,” I replied, “and they will not suffocate—they will have more and more air to breathe.”
“I don’t know if I’ll go to college,” she was saying now. “Perhaps I’ll find a job.”
“Right.”
“And I won’t be able to come back for a while, you know? The conditions for political asylum include not returning to Colombia for five years.”
“Sure.”
“But I was thinking that, I don’t know, perhaps we could meet up somewhere in the middle. Like in Mexico. Maybe Cancún. They say it’s dreadful but it’s a good place to get drunk. Or somewhere nicer . . . Cuba! You love Cuba, don’t you?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“I’d pay for it all, of course. If you want to and you are able to. Will you be able to?”
“Not sure, don’t think so.”
“Why?”
“I don’t think I’ll be able to.”
“But why?”
I knocked down the beer and my eyes filled with tears. I thought it would be easy to push Carolina and throw her over the balcony. I imagined her body falling against the pavement, the crack of her bones when hitting the ground, followed by people screaming, running to surround her. Carolina was a believable case for suicide, I wouldn’t have to convince anyone. A sad rich girl, lost in drugs, with a conflictive family who wouldn’t miss her. “After what happened to her brother, she was never the same,” I imagined myself saying to the police, to my dad, to hers. I saw all of them agreeing, with a grave and resigned expressions, thinking to themselves: “There was nothing we could have done to save her.” It was getting dark. The red split on the horizon was waging a battle with the impending night. The bay was a deep hole, but beyond it the lights were beginning to come on like a pale sign of hope.
What would my life be like?
Carolina placed her hand over mine:
“We will see each other again,” she said, “I promise.”
I dried my tears and nodded.
“Yes, for sure we will.” 
Margarita García Robayo, born in Colombia in 1980, is the author of three novels, a book of autobiographical essays, and several collections of short stories, including Worse Things, which was awarded the prestigious Casa de las Américas Prize in 2014. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including Región: cuento político latinoamericano (Political Latin American Short Stories, 2011) and Childless Parents (2014). Her books have been translated into French, Portuguese, Italian, Hebrew, and Chinese. Holiday Heart will be her second book to appear in English, after Fish Soup.
Carolina Orloff, originally from Buenos Aires and now based in Edinburgh, is a translator and researcher in Latin American literature who has published extensively on Julio Cortázar as well as on literature, cinema, politics, and translation theory. She is the co-translator of Jorge Consiglio’s Fate and of Ariana Harwicz’s trilogy—comprising Tender, Feebleminded, and Die, My Love—which was shortlisted for the Valle Inclán Prize and longlisted for the Booker International Prize in 2018. In 2016, Orloff co-founded Charco Press, where she acts as publishing director. For her work at Charco Press, she was named Emerging Publisher of the Year by the Saltire Society of Scotland in 2018. Orloff holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh.
Illustration: Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo
