FLIGHT Last post

That afternoon, Major Morales arrived accompanied by a large, dark-skinned soldier carrying a massive iron pot. Morales promptly dismissed the soldier, explaining with a polite smile that it was a special roast he had brought as a dinner contribution.

Ricardo asked the Major to wait in the main room while his mother and Elsa finished grinding corn in their pilón—a rustic, hollowed-tree trunk they used with a heavy wooden pestle. Freshly ground cornmeal was the essential ingredient for preparing arepas, the absolute staple of the local cuisine.

A short while later, Ricardo’s mother brought a steaming tray to the table. "Here are the arepas, Major."

Morales reached out to take one, but it was the last thing he ever did.

The heavy wooden pestle struck him squarely across the temple with a sickening crack, and he collapsed instantly to the floor. Before he could even register the blow, Elsa struck him again. The Major's legs stretched out, went limp, and he moved no more.



Ricardo jumped to his feet, his heart hammering against his ribs. "Elsa, have you gone mad? In reprisal for this, they will kill every last one of us!"

"Dear brother, I had no choice," Elsa said, her voice trembling but resolute as she gripped the bloody pestle. "He had us completely at his mercy. We must escape right now. Our brother Carlos is already waiting for us across the river at Bochalema. There are only two sentries guarding the boat landing downstream, and they only have two boats with outboard engines."

Ricardo turned sharply to Paco. "See who is outside."

Paco peeked through the window slats. A single sentry was stationed near the weapons shed.

They dragged the Major’s heavy body into the back room, and Ricardo called out to the lone guard, inventing an excuse to bring him inside. The moment the soldier stepped across the threshold, Ricardo pressed the Major’s own pistol tightly against the man's head. Paco leaped forward, wresting the soldier's rifle away. Together, they bound and gagged him tightly. The captive guard's eyes bulged with sheer terror as he caught sight of the Major’s bloody head in the corner.

In the front room, Elsa was packing a small suitcase, crying with fright as she tried to console their terrified mother. Paco slipped outside to scout and came back running.

"Ricardo, let’s hurry! We have about twenty minutes before the guard rotation."

The sprint to the boat landing was a desperate race against the clock. Navigating the dark, uneven path, Ricardo’s mother stumbled, but Elsa caught her by the arm.

"It is too dark, dear children," she whispered in a panic.

Ahead, the two remaining sentries were chatting and smoking cigarettes near the water's edge. Ricardo took a deep breath and walked straight up to them out of the shadows, while Paco quietly circled behind.

To distract them, Ricardo called out, "Is Julio with you?"

"What Julio?" one of the guards asked, frowning.

The distraction was all Paco needed. He clubbed the first guard from behind. As the second sentry whirled around in surprise, Ricardo punched him squarely in the jaw, tearing the rifle from his grip. They threw one of the confiscated rifles deep into the rushing river and tied the two dazed soldiers back-to-back around a thick tree trunk.

Before Elsa and their mother boarded the first boat, Paco stepped over to the second vessel. He sliced its mooring lines and pushed it out into the current, letting it drift helplessly downstream to ensure no one could follow them.

Ricardo and Paco pushed their own boat into the river. Ricardo yanked the start lanyard, but the motor only sputtered and died. As the canoe began to drift downstream with the current, he gave the cord two more frantic pulls. Nothing happened.

Shouts suddenly echoed from the landing behind them, and the bright beam of a flashlight began sweeping across the dark water.

Ricardo gave the lanyard one final, desperate pull. The engine caught, roaring to life with a deafening howl. Paco instantly raised his rifle and fired a wild burst toward the holder of the flashlight. The light went out, plunging the riverbank back into darkness.

Ricardo slammed the throttle forward. The canoe surged ahead, carving a violent wake of foamy white water through the river. A frantic fusillade of gunfire resounded from the shore, but the pitch-black night rendered the guerrillas' aim inaccurate.

Then, an unexpected, thunderous blast shattered the night.



A massive orange fireball erupted into the sky, illuminating the waters for miles around. A rapid crackling of secondary explosions followed immediately, raining flaming debris down into the river and igniting the thick jungle foliage along the banks. The boat, its engine screaming at top speed, flew toward Puerto Santander and the safety of the Colombian shore.

Behind them, there was nothing left but the flaming, apocalyptic ruins of the weapons shed and their childhood home.

Ricardo looked back at the inferno, then turned to his brother. "Was that your handiwork, Paco?"

"Yes," Paco replied with a grim grin over the roar of the motor. "Don’t you remember that old trick with the matchbook and the cigarette? I rigged it to a string holding down the safety lever of a grenade inside the ammo crates."

By the time they reached a brightly lit boat landing in Puerto Santander, Paco had already discarded the automatic rifle into the depths of the river. The Colombian border guards found no weapons on them. What followed was a grueling interrogation at a Colombian army post, followed immediately by the administration of Ricardo's life-saving anti-rabies vaccine.

Carlos arrived the following afternoon.

His grueling work at Bochalema had visibly aged him, and his somber demeanor stood in stark contrast to Ricardo’s immense sense of relief. Carlos lowered his head as they sat together, his voice heavy with cynicism. He told his brothers that Colombia held the exact same seeds of disaster—the very same madness they had just fled in Venezuela.

"How so, dear brother?" Ricardo asked, his brow furrowing.

With immense sadness in his eyes, Carlos replied, "Poverty, and an entrenched landowning class completely indifferent to the true causes of misery, facing a small cadre of well-intentioned intellectuals who compose the government. Democracy is applicable only to them, entirely excluding us—the current perioikoi. The country is revolution-ripe, Ricardo. It will eventually cause the exact same disaster you just escaped."

"Perioikoi? What language is that? Chinese?" Paco asked, teasingly mocking his older brother's academic tone.

"No," Carlos replied smoothly, looking at his younger brother with a tired, knowing smile. "Look it up in Greek history."

 

 [A1] 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Across the river (first post - beginning)

Image
  Priming the irrigation pump could be a nuisance. After many unsuccessful tries, he finally achieved the desired effect. With suction restored, a torrent of brown water from the Zulia River rushed from the outlet, flowing through the loose furrows and toward the waiting seeds. He would harvest in three months, but storing the grain would require dozens of steel barrels—and barrels were in short supply. Ever since the government had ousted the foreign oil companies, smuggling Colombian gasoline had become a thriving business. Empty barrels were at a premium. The value of a single empty container surpassed that of three barrels of maize, and they could be re-used indefinitely. "By harvest time, I will have no barrels left; they will steal or seize the few I have," Ricardo reflected silently. The government's desertion had created a lawless void, quickly filled by sullen-faced Colombian guerrillas. They protected the small farmers, providing them with food and shelter. Howe...
Read more

La Tetera

Image
                                                                         Había una vez en Tacoma un hombre que tenía una hija, el regalo más precioso que su esposa le había dado jamás. Para uno de sus cumpleaños, cuando la niña aún era joven, ella le regaló una hermosa tetera de cerámica marca Rosenthal. Pasaron los años y la madre la exhibía con indiscutible orgullo en la repisa sobre la chimenea, justo al lado de la cocina, como el centro de su vida familiar. Sin embargo, el tiempo tiene una forma implacable de desmantelar las ilusiones. A medida que la hija crecía y se hacía adulta, comenzó a darse cuenta de que su padre no era el hombre maravilloso e infalible que ella tanto había amado en su infancia. Era, en realidad, un hombre lleno de grietas y defectos, alguien que estaba muy por debajo del ídolo...
Read more

THE LADY AT ELBA

Image
 I did not visit Elba as a tourist. I went there to search for my wife Emma’s grandfather’s birth certificate. Together with our daughter, Laura, we visited Poggio, the mountain town of her ancestors. The island cast a spell on us as we toured it, yet I could not help feeling a strange, heavy sadness while walking those ancient streets. At the town’s San Defendente church, the wooden pews bore small metallic tags engraved with the surnames of the families who had donated them. Looking closely, I gasped; I recognized many of those names as the exact surnames of my childhood classmates back in my Venezuelan hometown. Today, Romans and Milanese own most of those ancestral houses, using them as seasonal holiday homes. Emma's grandfather had once owned a vineyard in the vicinity, but the phylloxera epidemic and cryptogamic blights decimated the vines. Left with nothing, he sold the ruined farm and migrated to the Venezuelan highlands to cultivate coffee. Because he died as an Italian ci...
Read more