noah aristízabal revisited shortly before the coming of the fall
I had not seen Noah in ten years. The last time was shortly after graduating from college -- I remembered the shaky flight back to Colombia, the bumpy drive to his finca, the gray clouds, the dead land, the deadpan mountains. It was a short visit, ceremonial in tone. His cheeks were liver-spotted, with large splotches spiraling into smaller ones, making twin cones out of his jowls. They looked like ritual markings. He seemed as gray and dead as the land.This time, the Andes glared a bright pink in the morning sun, the greenery lively with bright blue highlights. I had tugged and sworn at a rented Renault to get there, slowly edging the last straggles of the cordillera at four a.m. and making a heady descent from the deep, poorly paved grooves of the mountains into a perfectly flat valley. There were dozens of cows on either side of the road. They looked up from their grazing and glanced at the car (which stuttered, on this last stretch, at 10 m.p.h., refusing to speed up no matter how hard I stepped on the pedal); two calves hobbled along after me for a short while.
I arrived at ten-thirty. The house was painted white, its wooden beams tarred a shiny black. A satellite dish poked its eye from its perch on the front porch. I rang the bell. A girl answered.
"Is Mr. Aristizabal in?" I asked in Spanish.
"Emilio!" she said in English. "We’ve been expecting you. He’s out in the fields."
"I’m Misaela," she said. She wore a gingham dress -- simple but classy, expensive-looking, imported. Her eyes were hazel, with metallic flecks around the pupils. She was in her early twenties.
Misaela led me into the house, down a narrow but well-lit corridor, and out into the back porch. The house seemed smaller than I remembered. The porch overlooked a clay tennis court, which served as a feeding ground for a gaggle of geese, three peacocks, some chickens, and a turkey. Further back from the court there were, dimly visible, an orange orchard, a few lone lines of tobacco, and a semi-circular coffee plantation that clung to the slightly rising hill beyond. Somewhere in there, I thought, there’s an old man. The sky was streaked with washed-out blues. Cloud-less.
She poured coffee onto an espresso tasse. I took it and filled it to the brim with sugar.
"So you’re my cousin," she said, leaning towards me, holding the tiny cup with both hands.
"No," I said. "I’m a friend of Noah’s. Our family is."
"But he calls you his nephew." She leaned a bit closer. A bit of cleavage peeked through the dress’ v-neck.
"I call him uncle. Ever since I was a kid." I reached for an aspirin I had saved from the trip over. I gulped it down with the last of the bittersweet coffee.
"I thought he might have had a brother," she said.
"I never knew he had a daughter," I said, putting the saucer and cup down on a table, staring at her cleavage. My phone rang. I reached for it and in doing so knocked the cup down. The phone slid out of my jacket pocket, clattered onto the table, still ringing. Nothing was broken.
"Sorry," I said. I reached for the cup.
"The phone."
"What?" I looked at it and realized it was still ringing. "Oh." I flipped it open, said hello.
"Emilio, you there?"
I nodded, then said yes. It was my boss, calling from Boston, to find out what had happened to a certain publicity account that had been in my charge but had now gone under, and whether the money had been already re-wired to corporate or to the other charge account or what. He told me he’d been trying to reach me the week before the trip but no luck. He asked me if I’d really given my cat to Maureen (a co-worker) and whether I thought she was the motherly sort, and the right woman for that sort of chore. I told him it was a cat. Cats are mostly decorative items. Very low maintenance.
"The money’s in the corporate," I lied.
I asked him if he wanted me to fax him the receipts, and he said not to bother, it could wait. Twenty grand, but it could wait.
"My boss," I told Misaela. "He was worried about me."
"Right. Pharmaceuticals."
Noah had told her about me then. He hadn’t said anything to me about her.
Noah and I had exchanged a few letters over the years. I wrote to tell him of my business trip down to Colombia two months ago, to which he had replied by inviting me down here. He had paid for prep-school and college, and secured me a job not long after. He sent my father a monthly stipend. He Fed-Exed a novel or a memoir every Christmas -- vanity press items from the late forties, penned by retired Senators, frustrated dictators, sometimes himself. He had sent a check for a thousand dollars and a twenty-CD set of vallenato music for my last birthday. He was a childhood relic. And here I was, running to him on the cheapest rental I could find, a child.
"How are your parents doing?" Misaela asked.
"My mother passed away three years ago. My dad’s retired."
"I’m sorry. Dad talks about them all the time." She had just produced a fourth tray of coffee, seemingly out of thin air. "He still feels bad about what happened."
"It wasn’t his fault," I said. "The Rojas Pinilla thing threw land deals out of kilter. My dad’s always been grateful for what Noah did. What he’s done for us since."
Noah arrived at four, half an hour after Misaela and I had eaten a late lunch. He walked out of the grove of orange trees. The trees filtered the sunlight, giving him a rich green cast -- an old man clothed in forest. He walked towards us at a shambling pace. No cane, though. I half-expected him to be carrying one. He looked young half a mile away. He grew older as he came nearer, wrinkles setting in, loose skin flapping in the undersides of his arms, under his neck. The liver spots I remembered from childhood weren’t there. He was small and gangly -- not the shrunken quality of the very old, just compact. An active bearded octogenarian, waving at me.It took him fifteen minutes to cover the mile from the field to the house. Not bad.
"I’ll go warm his food," Misaela said. She disappeared into the house.
Noah slapped my knee and the heavens cracked, thunder pealing, a late afternoon strobe flash, I bolted up from the seat, got tangled in the table, fell on my phone, and glanced my forehead on some sharp corner. He laughed. I got up, feeling dizzy and sullen and childish. I started raining.
"Be with you in a moment, kid," Noah said, walking back to the fields.
He walked to the tennis courts, flapped his arms. The geese honked and ran straight at me, followed by hens and cocks, peacocks, ducks, and an old man, all scattering into the house -- Noah turned and said, "In here, kid, hurry." I walked in and he shut the porch door, then double-locked it.
"Caulking needs work," he said.
The rain pelted on the roof. I looked up, but it didn’t seem to be leaking.
"The door, kid," he said, pointing at it. "It’s the door that needs work."
The door was shiny, black, gummy-looking -- like the roof. A chicken was pecking at my shoes. My forehead throbbed. I touched where I’d hit it; I could feel a bruise coming. My fingers felt wet but there wasn’t any blood. I was in the house of my patron, my family’s benefactor, in the midst of farm animals. A goose honked.