Breakfast in Bogota Page 2

  3

  Inside of his office at La Merced, Luke searched the newspaper for any reference to the streetcar incident from the day before. He turned the page he was on and there it was, driven towards the back, near to the advertisements, the boy’s life reduced to an eighth of a page. Juan Manuel Muñoz Pérez, eighteen years old, yesterday endangered the lives of twenty-six people when he stepped in front of a streetcar. His distraught mother, Señora Pérez Beltran, said he had been struggling to find work… Luke scanned the page and then read the article again, slower this time, in case he’d missed something. It couldn’t be right. There wasn’t any mention of the flag or of the two men he’d seen with the boy in La Casa de la Risa. They’d printed a photograph of the dead boy along with the article. A close-up from the day focussed in on his head, his right cheek grubby and worn where it had made contact with the pavement. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen. The reader had been spared the rest of Juan Manuel. The way it was all phrased was wrong, though. The article spoke of criminal intent. Said the boy had acted alone. He was a vigilante thug, a criminal. And nothing but a worthless sacrifice in someone else’s game, Luke thought, screwing up the entire page and tossing it across the room. Then there was the image of Catherine caught up in the whole damned thing. He’d left it in the cantina along with his jacket. He’d reached home and turned back, but it had been dark by the time he’d reached the square, and nothing but the abandoned streetcar remained. La Casa de la Risa was shut and the idea of her image lost there, at the centre of a city that swallowed everything, had been all he’d been able to think about since.

  A knock at the door. ‘Señor Vosey.’

  It was Telma, his secretary. Luke closed the newspaper but didn’t put it down. Telma knew how to knock, but not how to wait.

  ‘Are the candidates here?’

  ‘Señor, they’ve cancelled again.’ She came into his office and adjusted the shutters. Luke blinked at the fresh light let loose inside the room. ‘One couldn’t afford his flight from Cali and the other, well, it looks like his papers were made up. People grow desperate.’ She shook her head.

  ‘And today’s post?’

  ‘I’ll look again,’ Telma began, edging closer.

  Luke tried not to smile. She always smelled of hair lacquer. He was convinced it was an addiction of hers.

  ‘There is my sister’s boy; he could be here this afternoon, if it’s only a junior you want.’

  ‘The new draughtsman should have some experience, Telma, no matter how small, I’m sorry. And we’ll need sound references this time, ones that can be checked.’ It was the same script every time; she never listened. ‘The board won’t go in for anything less.’

  ‘But you, señor? Since Señor Palacio upped and left that pile of half-finished drafts without a word, I thought…’

  ‘You know I won’t either.’

  Telma straightened up. ‘Another from the writer,’ she said, placing a telegram on the desk in front of him. ‘You can’t avoid him forever.’

  She turned and closed the door behind her. Luke looked down; to his left lay the discarded newspaper and to his right, the telegram from one of its staff writers. Camilo Osorio had sent six telegrams and, so far, Luke had ignored five. This latest was the shortest yet. Have you considered?

  It didn’t need to say more. Luke rose and went over to the window. It was impossible to see through its diamond-patterned glaze. What had he been thinking? He opened the pane. In the unfinished street below and as far as he could see, workmen, junior architects and engineers were busy crawling over his plans for the executive village – and Camilo Osorio wanted access to all of it. He wanted access to him, Luke Vosey. The architect behind the London Arts Institute (firebombed), Madrid’s Centro Inglés (turned into a squat during the civil war, he’d read) and the garden suburbs of Heliotrope and Courtlands, three miles from London and Birmingham respectively. The past, Luke thought, taking in the scene in front of the house, was filled with nothing but forgotten vistas.

  This latest commission had come from Anglo-Colombian Oil and he’d wasted no time getting it off the ground, pouring himself into every part of it. The plot had started life as a large farm run by Jesuit priests. Thanks to him it was very different to that now, although it had kept its name, La Merced, along with some of its land, which he’d turned into a pretty park. The houses he’d designed were in the Tudor Revival style; a nod to the medieval, with black and white plastering, bay windows, sloped roofs – that was what they knew him for, from before the war. They hadn’t seen anything like it here. Most architects had trouble leaving England, the continent, family. He hadn’t minded, he’d said. And after everything that had happened, they understood.

  Luke watched a team of bricklayers surround and then climb a makeshift bamboo scaffold, passing batches of red tiles up for the sharply pitched roof. Above them, the tilers balanced on the new rafters, filled with the task of covering the timbers. From their bare, arched backs, the view inclined steeply towards Monserrate, more than a thousand feet above. He held up his thumb and closed one eye, obscuring the white church at its peak. Let Osorio come, Luke thought. I have nothing to hide.

  4

  ‘I’m not drinking, thank you.’

  ‘A man like you should.’ Señora Rojas came across the room of his apartment with the bottle of whisky he’d pushed to the back of the cupboard some months before. Luke smiled at his housekeeper and let her pour. It seemed unintelligent to argue with the person who washed and fed you.

  ‘Will you join me?’ he asked.

  She shook her head at him as she always did when he encouraged her to vice. It was a game they played. ‘Only at funerals,’ she said, pushing the stopper back in. ‘I must feed my husband.’ She padded back to the kitchen.

  He raised the glass to his lips, letting the alcohol lick his gums. He hadn’t been back to the cantina for the photograph yet. He considered abandoning her there. He imagined it as something he was capable of doing but then lowered the glass.

  It was raining. Luke listened to the tumult fire off the tiles and pepper the pavement below.

  ‘Volver,’ he sang, turning the volume up on the wireless beside him. The tango came at him like a flood. Luke closed his eyes. ‘Volver…’

  ‘What?’ Señora Rojas came back into the room. She’d changed into her regular shoes and was wearing her coat.

  ‘You’ll drown if you leave now,’ Luke said, turning the music down.

  ‘And I’ll sink if I don’t.’ She tightened the belt on her jacket. ‘Señor Rojas likes to eat too, you know.’ She looked down at the untouched glass in Luke’s hand. ‘And drink.’

  ‘Your health,’ he said, raising it.

  When Señora Rojas had gone, Luke rose and went into the small kitchen-cum-maid’s room. He poured the whisky down the sink and left the glass upright on the draining board. Perhaps he’d had another? Let her think so. He hadn’t been drunk since those first few months in Bogotá. With the stress of the project, it was better to keep your head than lose it. There were other reasons too. Drink had stopped numbing the past as it used to. It had started to enhance it.

  He crossed the hall and went into the bedroom. On top of the bed, a drawer from the dresser had been turned upside down and its contents scattered. He hadn’t been able to find the other photograph of Catherine. The one from her brother Albie’s party and their last night together before she’d left for France. In it, she was wearing the green dress that made him lose his mind, act crazy around her. He was there, leaning around her with the lighter, her face caught between the flame and the camera’s flash so that she looked like a frightened rabbit. That’s what you’d have thought if you didn’t know her; didn’t know that look in her eye that was anything but frightened.

  From the bedroom window there was a good view of Seventh Avenue, running off into the distance towards the city centre. The apartment was close to the site as well, unlike those of the people he was building for. They lived u
p in Barrancabermeja alongside the main oil refinery. All oil men up there, until they came down to Bogotá to play.

  Luke went back over to the bed. He shovelled up the mess – lonely socks, pocket squares and an old cigar box that rattled tie pins, loose buttons and service medals, dropping it all back into the drawer. He picked up a pair of sunglasses and put them on, catching sight of himself in the window glass. Brown rims, barely worn and expensive, bought on the Strand after he’d signed the contract at Shell Mex House. They’d said he was going somewhere hot. They went back into the drawer with the last of the junk. Catherine wasn’t there, which was undoubtedly a good thing. He had promised himself he would stop. Stop dragging her with him, not to the brothel, not to the cantina for breakfast, not anywhere else he chose to go. If he couldn’t leave her behind here, thousands of miles from London, then where on earth could he? The moon? He looked out of the window. It was late and Camilo Osorio threatened the horizon, pencilled into his diary for one o’clock the next day. A mark in the afternoon that wasn’t a blot, Luke told himself. He went over to the curtains and pulled them shut.

  *

  Early mornings were commonplace. Luke sat upright in the bed, his vision obscured by a palette of bright orange dots that he couldn’t rub away. His leg felt dead, a slab of meat where he’d lain on it and stopped the blood. He pulled the covers back and tried to bring the damaged limb back to life. Resuscitation was agony. As always, it would be a waiting game. This time the death had been his own, met beneath falling masonry. So much dust. He coughed to try and clear his lungs of it but already the structure of the dream was becoming less formed, less concrete. This is real, he told himself, looking around the room. He leaned down for his wristwatch on the nightstand; five o’clock. A reassuring milky light spilled in through the cracks in the curtains. Other real things occurred to him – the discarded drawer that lay on the floor beside the chest, the need to piss, hunger – so that he was able to forget what had not been real. He rose carefully and staggered to the bathroom to begin his day.

  *

  At La Merced, the rain from the night before had left puddles the size of small craters throughout the site. The men had worked out it was quicker to throw materials and tools to each other across them, rather than walk around. ‘Don’t!’ he’d shouted but they were natural adopters of shortcuts and so he’d spent most of the morning trying to prevent tragedy. He had to admire their resilience. It was eleven o’clock by the time the sun had drunk most of the puddles dry. Luke sunk lower beneath the brim of his straw hat. He took off his jacket and threw it onto a pile of bamboo he knew was behind him. ‘Tenga cuidado! Move it!’ a man shouted from inside of the pile that had been on the ground but was now on this man’s shoulders. He’d almost walked right through him.

  ‘My fault,’ Luke replied, picking his way over the potholes towards a quiet spot. Out here on site he was exposed, thrown in with the locals who didn’t care who he was or who he had been. ‘It’s what you wanted, Luke,’ he murmured. In front of him, a large red brick house was nearing completion. A new structure, unlived in, was a beautiful thing to behold, he thought. The bay window glaze was in, set tight into hand-carved lintels. Either side of the bays were two gabled wings – offices with bedrooms above. Mounted on top of each wing was a chimney stack and, clinging to each of these, a pair of workmen whose job it was to finish the pointing. Luke squinted up at them and walked over. The pair on the left kept twisting to catch sight of the other two across the drop. Someone is going to fall, he thought. Christ, it felt like a daily battle to keep them all alive. It had to be the foreman’s doing, promising them a drink apiece if they finished first. That had happened before and, although he hadn’t wanted to, he’d had to dismiss drunk men. He’d find the foreman before it came to that again. Further up the street he found only a cart horse being laden down with bricks. The horse was trying to buck itself free of the load. It didn’t know that it couldn’t get away from the cart like that and was churning up the dirt with its hooves. A roof tile smashed at his feet.

  ‘Hey!’ he called up.

  The man who’d dropped it looked down at him with wild eyes. ‘Sorry, sorry! You move!’ he shouted.

  ‘Move?’

  ‘Move, mister, now!’

  Luke heard the cry from the street then and saw the cart horse heading his way, spraying its heavy weight of bricks left and right. And there was the foreman, finally, standing in the middle of the road and right in the horse’s path. Luke heard his own voice join the others, calling at him to get out of the way, and he did so, just in time, but the horse moved too. The cart tipped, and he didn’t see the foreman after that.

  The dust hadn’t quite cleared when Luke found himself in the dirt, heaving the cart upwards alongside the other men while the foreman belched and groaned below. Luke hooked his weight against the cart’s broken side. Everyone who had seen it was there too, lifting alongside him – some pushing, some pulling. ‘Who is it?’ someone asked. The foreman hadn’t been popular. What was his name? Luke strained against the weight of remembering. Every time the cart looked as if it might right itself, it fell back and the crushed man cried out again. Isidro, his name was Isidro and his family came from Tolima. Luke wasn’t going to let him die.

  ‘Push, now!’ Luke said.

  The men worked together, but without the horse braced to it, there was nothing to help pivot the cart upwards.

  ‘Lift again.’ An unfamiliar voice came out of the dust, its owner holding a timber joist which he was already hooking under the cart beside the foreman.

  ‘Now!’ Luke shouted as they tried again.

  The stranger put his weight against the joist, damp and red in the face. Luke listened as it cracked and then started to splinter – they’d all be thrown backwards into the dirt – but then the cart let out its breath and sprang upwards, rocking violently on its frame. Beneath, the crushed man was barely conscious. Luke helped to drag him free from the earth and lift him onto the back of the cart. Everyone crowded in. The men fought against each other to be in the group to lift the frame. Luke watched it being dragged away, taking the same path as the horse had earlier. They’d have to bring her under control. If they’d used vehicles, it would have been otherwise, but things were done differently here. He found another man and told him to run ahead to the doctor some six blocks away. The man wouldn’t budge, not until Luke told him he would pay.

  Luke tried to bring his breathing under control. Those who’d helped had tried to do right by the foreman, he understood that and was glad for it. ‘Everyone here can collect an extra ten centavos this week,’ he said to a sea of blank faces.

  With nothing else to interest them, the men returned to their work. He should get back to his office too. The journalist would be here soon and he was filthy.

  ‘Will he live?’ It was the man who had given him his best chance.

  ‘Let’s hope so.’ Luke turned. ‘Good idea about that joist.’

  ‘Simple physics.’ The young man smiled and looked down at his feet so that Luke did too. Worn brown leather, the same as his satchel. He offered his hand. ‘Camilo Osorio.’

  ‘You are, aren’t you?’ Luke said, extending his. ‘You’re early.’

  *

  Camilo Osorio sat across from Luke wearing a look free from disaster. He didn’t seem affected by the event with the cart. It isn’t the story he’s come for, Luke thought, wondering if he should offer him a drink. He wanted one and it would be the normal thing to do after a crisis, drink. He leaned back in his chair. It could not have been worse timing, Osorio arriving when a man’s life hung in the balance.

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t write about it,’ Camilo said.

  ‘It might make for interesting reading.’

  ‘You mean, the brave architect, his face in the dirt?’ Camilo smiled and the door flung open. Telma appeared, carrying a tray laden with hot towels, coffee and papers. She put the tray down on the desk and handed over the cups with instructio
ns to wash. Then she handed Luke his post for the afternoon. Memos from the board, questions from the executives and, on top of this, the updated employment file for the draughtsman role. Luke thanked her and pushed the pile to one side. Camilo’s eyes followed.

  ‘Tell me, how have you settled in here?’

  ‘In Bogotá?’

  Luke handed him a towel and took the other, blackening it instantly.

  ‘Pack horses and competing labourers are different to what you’re used to.’

  ‘It’s the same the world over.’

  ‘Really? It was Madrid last, wasn’t it?’ Camilo put the towel to one side and produced a notebook from beneath the desk. He opened it and waited.

  ‘I thought you’d have done your research, Señor Osorio?’ Luke smiled and sipped at his coffee. He might be free in an hour.

  ‘Camilo, please.’ He paused. ‘The Centro Inglés was one of the greatest examples of the new modernist style in Europe. It was a great loss.’

  ‘It is still standing, you understand.’

  ‘But sadly as a symbol of bourgeois oppression.’

  ‘Right.’

  Luke finished his coffee and noticed Camilo’s cup was full.

  The journalist picked it up. ‘I followed the story of its capture.’ He drank. ‘It made me want to cry to think of the glass alone. Wasn’t it the first time it had been engineered on such a scale?’

  ‘The eyes of the city.’ Luke smiled.