HERCULES

I was growing disgusted with my own company-paper-tiger executives, guys I didn’t like anyway. They displayed the American crassness that comes out best in foreign countries-the guffaws about cold showers and hot putas, the bleary-eyed belches as Agila beer bottles were strewn on the pavement and their pasty bellies juggling over bright surfer shorts, then hanging over the urinals. So I scraped my chair over the concrete, to a quiet lady with a dignified hair-do, in a tidy dress, and introduced myself, Digger Baker. She was the sister of Isolina’s mother, and she wasted no time to point out , across the swimming pool on a chaise lounge, Isolina. I looked over the sparkling water, blocked the sun with my hand, leaned forward and squinted. Isolina saw her tia’s out-stretched finger. When I waved, her hand across the way barely flicked. I explained to the tia out of the side of my mouth about our exhaustive week of corporate meetings, my eyes the whole time locked on that chaise lounge.

When I stood over Isolina, she lifted her sunglasses to size me up. After asking her to join me on a boat ride, she smirked, finished rubbing oil over her arm, and we walked over to the boat. A tipo named Jorge crammed the throttle on the Evinrude and flotsam ripped under the hull, while we sat in the bow pretending to look for eagles. The tropical air, with the fishy scent of the lake, blew over the smooth skin of her face as the towel around her neck slid down her back. Her thick wet-looking hair swept back and fluttered with the wind, whipping on her shoulders. I gazed at her silhouette which made graceful curves against the equatorial sky. I had the urge to reach across the boat and gently start my finger at the part in her hair, run it down, from her face with the soft nose and full lips, her neck, over her breasts, touch the rise of the nipples, the plain of her stomach, and along those mahogany-colored legs.

I started a question, "Do you know…,"then stopped. She turned toward me, smiled and said yes. Which is larger, I continued, Colombia or Mexico? "The same." The same? To the square inch? When I eventually flipped through the pages of Information Please, I realized my role, the gushing fool, the fawn, and hers the stolid and secret. You would look at her and wonder, as if you were in the jungle at night, what was there.

That evening we sat together under the canopy of the sky, as it turned from blue to crimson, oblivious to the crowd milling around us chomping on chorizo, and shrugging off the Americans who, like fraternity boys, staggered over to slap my back and give a thumbs-up. I struggled with my Spanish verbs, trying to make love like a sailor. At that point her uncle reached up to my shoulder, raised his chin, and said, "She is twenty-one." She was past twenty-one, and Colombia wasn’t nearly as big as Mexico. We had given away their Panama, and since that day have been seduced by El Dorado, cocaine, and their haunting women.

A car with its motor running waited for Isolina, to whisk her into the dark. But behind the dressing rooms, I blocked her way. I said to her, "I’m from the U.S. but I’m not rich. You should know that."

"I don’t care," she said.

"I mean I owe all kinds of money," I said, waving my arms.

She smiled and said, "And what else."

"What else? I’m older. Like your father."

"That is good. In our culture the man should be much older than the woman."

"Also, I’m not very good at jobs. I don’t last long. I’m an idealist, I have a history of throwing fits, breaking rules."

"You have a history of thinking too much. You are good right here." Then she pressed her finger into my chest and said, "Tu corazon. I am young, but this I know."

I wanted to tell her she’s wrong. I wanted to warn her.

She believed in me, which I couldn’t even do, but I believed in her. She tilted her head, gathered her hair back, and allowed me a kiss in the air near her brown cheek. Only she held-an imperceptible part of a second, with just the right fragrance and sway of her body, and enough of a gentle tug on my back, to be a promise. Through the reflective glint of the car’s back window her dark eyes fixed on mine.

I loved writing all those names on the envelope-Isolina Del Rosario Carvalho Echeverry. Months of exchanges followed-views of our futures, descriptions of parental expectations, and erratic pledges. She said as far as the past, she was still a virgin and mine didn’t matter. Our intercontinental conversations were enthusiastic, but clumsy with the hollow two second delay. I had her repeat everything to make sure "I need to visit you."wasn’t really "I have a new novio." It wasn’t and she came to New York. Off the Avianca jet she stepped, flanked by a cousin, and received by another aunt on the Upper East Side. I was dutiful-stood in the foyer, took questions from the aunt, armed myself with flowers, tickets, and taxis, and brought her home early enough to sip tea (with the aunt). Isolina and I stood where love had preceded us-in front of Trump Tower, Tiffany’s, in the misty breeze on the Empire State Building. We stopped on First Avenue where the people raced by-men on Zoloft, teenage Blacks in high-low haircuts and Raiders jackets, women going for Dr.Goldfarb’s dermabrasion, and students with nasal rings looking for Wenders film. A man in a long rumpled coat with bushy gray sideburns topped by an off-kilter red hairpiece asked Isolina the time, and her eyes implored me. I was world-weary-tired, stale, lonely, and hungry; but now, not with her. I waved him off, back to his grit and stench, and squeezed a fistful of her panther-black hair. That’s all I wanted, to hold on and get out of this place. The chaperone, the fifteen year-old cousin constantly in tow, was to report on our behavior. I sent little Paola back to the wondrous continent, like a courier to the queens court, with the good news-and the good response, my invitation back to Bogota.

Staring out from the airliner at the ocean below I imagined the meridians and latitudes crisscrossing-in my less vulnerable years I wandered across them as if they were no more than cracks on a sidewalk. The seventh daughter of a schoolmaster in St. Etienne whispered in my ear and pressed into my hand a skeleton key to her pied-a-terre on the Ile. Saint Louis. From the black lava beaches on the far side of Thira I witnessed every phase of the moon with a fiery Athenian medical student. And Nicole and I lay together in twisted sheets the morning the Dean of Ezra Stiles called to report she was Summa-we broke open Cordon Rouge and talked about an apartment in Frisco and a view of Mt. Tam. I was boozy, immune, and the world was just an amusement park ride. And I was prosperous in love, but committed to indecision.

Unlike with Chantal and Nicole, Alexandra and Gul, with Isolina there was a chance for me-an opportunity inn a world meant for couples and kids I saw receding from me. I sensed it the moment after landing in Santa Fe de Bogota, and she and I stood on the ramp in the crisp electrical air of the Andean altiplano. What she told me then-with her family we’ll go to Cali where I’ll go before her uncle, and then come back to Bogota alone-was a plan, so simple it made me quake. I sensed a certain moment near; I was afraid to define it. Maybe it would be on that bus ride back to Bogota, with the traffic fumes, the hot dust, and the illiterate peasants; amid those simple props, the ones that reminded me every time I never belonged. With Isolina, according to plan, I would.

I filed through the ceremony of aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, and godparents and thereby announced myself as a suitor. Enoc, her father, looked up and grinned, with both his hands shaking mine; and his wife stood back with the matronly posture of a first lady, hair-do impervious to water, lips puckered and eyebrows pinched.

Maintained at a respectable distance from her house, in the Hotel Country on Calle 15, I sat on the bed half-watching CNN waiting for her morning ring from the lobby. There she was, golden arms stretched across the stairs, wearing my earrings dotted with lapis stones, and a heavy brass barrette. She leaned her cheek out for my kiss. We cringed at the heat and pain of our abstinence. My room was one flight up, I could do it in three steps.

Isolina’s casa was really a flat, waferred in another complex, erected in another Latino sprawl-far from any Ivy League dorm, Greek isle, or views of the Notre Dame. On her divan, we sat under the portrait of her mother’s father, who elongated his face like a statesman, like Simon Bolivar. Isolina’s dangling bracelet charmed me with its jingle, as she pulled out her carta de ciudadano de Colombia. I squinted at the photo. In it I realized she was indistinguishable from any of multitudes of nubile mestizas, from Bogota to Oaxaca to Montevideo-the hair gooped up, the dark liner pressed thick on the lids, the beauty pageant smile, and the crucially lifted breasts-all perhaps from watching the novellas on Univision.

I slapped the citizen ID repeatedly in my hand and said with a self-righteous drawl, "We’ll never carry cards like this in the U.S."

"Why not ?"

"Personal freedom," I said, sitting more upright. "If you applied for a job, they’d know if you beat your dog, marched against abortion, of even if you have herpes.

"Maybe they should know."

I nodded my head and shrugged one shoulder. "Yeah, maybe." When she held the card up and smiled into it like a mirror, I smiled too-at no more than her damned winsome air of assuredness. At the dinner table, I was mashing the potatoes in the ajiaco, when Enoc passed me the guacamole and crema de leche, instructing me to add them to the soup, and asked, "You served in the military?"

I slipped a Cipro in my mouth and said,"No." He was an Auxiliary to the Minister of Defense, so I gave a well-enunciated testimonial: Nixon, Vietnam, the Selective Service, college deferment, and finally the lottery. I skirted some small details about the four of us at Berkeley, lightheaded and cackling to Abby Hoffman on the radio, in a haze of cannabis, over the ashes of our draft cards and under the poster "Fighting for Peace is like Fucking for Virginity.

"Then you never served?"

I plopped the cream in the soup and said, "My father flew fifty missions over Vietnam," with one eye trying to catch his nod; then hastily added, "He was a colonel."

Isolina emerged from her bedroom with fresh lipstick, in a wave of perfume, and with pictures from Leticia. She pointed to it on the map, and appendage of Columbia, deep and dark, at the confluence of Brazil and Ecuador. The latter, she boasted, made a "muy estupido" attempt to seize it. I flipped through the photos. In the one I stopped at, her family stood at the edge of the Rio Amazonas, andshe was holding a canoe paddle. But next to her, shirtless, with a long mane and a Charles Atlas forearm draped over her was "Capax", the real Tarzan of the jungle; not just a movie character. I coughed on my jealousy and referred to him as Rambo of the Campo, pointing to his pitifully expanded chest like a puffer. Besides that , I insisted, Tarzan lives in Africa, not Burbank, not Colombia. She responded by picking up Capax and flicking him, like he was the Queen of Spades, across the room.

Isolina had caught my attention, in her letter I received two days before departure, warning me: family, they’ll talk about it. She carefully explained it, "patria potestas, the family over the individual. I belong to my father." She described the lineage, like her grandfather who shuffled around the tiny flat since the last days of La Violencia, emphysematous, until the final mercy of a stroke. Then the obligations, matins and vespers with Enoc’s sister, weekend treks to Cali, holidays in breezeless Neiva, holy communions in Perrera. And, she said, there’s dear Carlos.

From her cramped living room, I witnessed Carlos, her brother, emerging from his very own room, contorted and ataxic, receiving his phenobarbital, and wondered if I should protect the TV or the china. It seemed that eighteen years ago, coming out the birth canal, he was dropped to the floor. As the handed his limp body over, compensation, they said in a huff, is not going to make him normal. Ever since then, his head and arms have been flailing, as if for sanity. On his left hand, over the snuff-box, was a keloid, his bite block for when anything frustrated him.

Carlos was writhing in the chair next to me, slapping his spoon into his ajiaco, like a snare drum. With a napkin I dabbed the milky drops on my shirt. The family had a refined way of ignoring his autistic shrieks, and Isolina would even kiss him mid-tantrum. Lacking such, I strained to feign approval. Enoc pointed at the luggage by the door and said, "He knows we’re going to Cali in the morning." On Enoc’s other arm were the hands of his wife, wrapping around it like a boa.

With another family in Normandy, many years back when I was too young to comprehend as much, there was a similar scene, as the father described to me his fascination with the highbar, and he still had one in the front yard from which he and his son swung like monkeys. Over dinner that night in Rouens, with the sky still light at ten o’clock, the mother told me, we use crème on everything, and passed me the bowl. I watched her eyes as her husband continued on excitedly about that bar. From her neck, I followed a line over the pattern of yellow flowers on her dress, the slender arm, the delicate hand where her finger twirled circles, or hearts, on his arm. I studied the same treatise on love, this time, in Bogota, with an agonizing revelation, as Maria Christina, Isolina’s mother, squeezed grip marks on the arm of her husband, while he drove his message about the duty of family.

I thought about that tempered love, and then of my own family. When I was seventeen, my mom kissed me, my dad put down his Schlitz to shake my hand and tell me to call if I had trouble, and I stuffed a wad of his fifties in my jeans. I got in my rusted black VW with the Cocoa Beach HS sticker. On the floor I put a stack of ham and cheese and a tin of chocolate chips that would get me to Tulsa-and got out three time zones later on Telegraph Avenue. I wouldn’t see them again for three years. Try to explain that patria.

Enoc persisted, flipping the pages of a phone book in his hand, and asked about my apellido, my family name. Was it German or English? Ah, yes, (whatever, family history’s not my forte). We ran our fingers up and down the white pages of Bogota, Medellin, and Cali, between Aguilar and Bonilla-no Baker. Isolina was clearing the table and I hooked her by the arm."Isolina, I’m the only Baker in Colombia." She gave a complacent smile.

"Did you hear me?" I said, " Baker for President. Vote Baker. And win."

Isolina threw her arms around my neck, and said, "I vote Baker. I want to win." Isolina Rosario De Baker Carvalho.

Gathering in the living room with our aromatica tea, Isolina, Maria Christina, and Enoc harmonized along with the tangos on a scratchy 33-rpm, to those Argentine household names they cheered-Gardel, Sosa, and Gomez. Then they stopped and extended their arms toward me: sing something. I soloed, in a near-perfect octave, one verse from Gershwin’s "Summertime." Match that. They paused, looked at me as if I had just sung "Ninety-Nine Beers on the Wall" and picked up again, with Sosa.

We had to be up early, so a taxi was called to take me to the hotel. Enoc, still crooning, clasped my hand and Maria Christina looked my way and closed her eyes. Isolina gave me a reassuring look and, down at the curb, the generous taste of her scarlet lips. I gently pushed my fingers deep into her hair, and imagined them sliding down, down; the barrette fell to the concrete.

The taxi driver told me, " I’ll show you the real city." Okay. Near the center of Bogota, in an area with overflowing trash cans, emaciated cats, and children curled up on the sidewalks, high-heeled girls with long thighs congregated on the corners. He slowed and I looked. One or two protruded their breasts out of their dresses, the pink nipples bouncing. Skirts were hiked to the crotch. Hips sashayed. Eyelids fluttered as if in climax and brightly colored lips pulsated.

"Gringo. You want? I protect. Very safe," said the driver. A girl with large bangs came up to the window, reached between my legs, and puckered, "ten thousand pesos."

The one over there in the brown tights and the white shirt, she’s cute," I said guiltily.

The seasoned taxi driver said, "Ha. She’s a he."

I shuddered and said, "Please, to the hotel."

The driver shrugged his shoulders and said, "Seguro?"

I said, "Yes, I’m sure. I have a novia."

"Gringo, I have a wife. Which one do you want?"

"Hotel Country, Calle 15."

I called Isolina the minute I walked in my hotel room. While the phone rang, I took a deep breath, and looked across the room at the mirror. In a face that had never changed since the day I started shaving, I now took into account: vacant eyes, a covering of wrinkles, and a topping of disturbing shocks of gray.

"Digger, you are a crazy man. Why do you call?"

My face grimaced, I grabbed my hair and said, "Isolina, I’m sorry it’s late. I miss you. I wish you were here."

"Go to sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.

The next morning, outside of Bogota on our way to Cali, we turned off the Pan-American Highway. The road took off like a DC-10, soaring to the clouds, twisted on itself like a reedy serpent, and eventually gave a dizzy view down the escarpment to the valley below. Over that eastern cordillera of the Andes, our Russian Lada swayed into and out of each hairpin turn. We slid on the seat from end to end. My arm was braced, and with the sharper right-hand curves Isolina warmly pressed on it. Turn right, Isolina’s breast; turn left, Carlos’s drool.

The drivers were lawless, weaving and bobbing, peeking and ducking; but never the cursing and fist-waving of our eastern seaboard. Enoc pulled up behind oil trucks spewing blue fumes and horse carts packed with roots, poked his nose out, crossed his chest, and mashed the accelerator.

"What’s the speed limit here?" I asked.

"We don’t have any."

We headed up the second cordillera, shaded from the sun. Isolina asked me, "What religion are you?" In the rear view mirror, her father’s eyes latched on to me and he clicked the radio off. Maria Christina gradually leaned back in her seat, her ear tipping in my direction. Isolina then added, " Do you go to church?"

I pulled at my collar and said "I’m Protestant." I saw the eyebrows in the mirror, and the judgmental glance from Maria Christina. In the silence I was reminded of the Catholic joke of St. Peter at the Golden Gate gruffly barring a supplicant because she gave the same answer. When she corrected herself with "Your Holy Father Peter, I meant prostitute," he apologized and opened the gate to heaven. Her parents cautiously resumed their conversation and Isolina took my cold hand.

Seven hours into the trip to Cali, near the top of a mountain, just past a turnoff for a leper colony, we emerged from the cloud into a resplendent sun. The cars ahead were avoiding an object in our lane. I recognized it as a heap of raw material off a truck, then a carcass, then a ghastly sight-a young girl! We swerved around her like she was an old tire. With a swing of my head, I inspected closer- it was a girl in a clean blue dress, with neatly combed hair, on the hot macadam, asleep. I blurted a suppressed, "My God!" Enoc never touched the brake, the others didn’t flinch, and we zoomed ahead. I gazed at the road out the back window and analyzed: was she grazed and stunned by a vehicle? A suicidal acting out? Perhaps not a girl, a pony? I cringed at the recurring thought: at any minute, the wheels of some sugar cane truck- thump, thump, over her. Isolina put her hand on the back of my head, it was sweaty.

The village, Silvia, was our last stop before Cali. It was almost hidden in the crevices of the Cordillera Occidental, the last ridge of the Andes, cut by the raging River Ovejas. The Gaumbiano Ingians, like displaced figures, quietly roamed the pretty streets of Silvia in their traditional purple skirts and black ponchos. They had black fedoras over their shiny hair, ruddy cheeks on somber faces, and the necks of the women glittered with multiple bands of gold. As we walked up the street, Isolina jostled me and I gave her a pat on the rear. Immediately, she braced, stopped, and glared at me, with a mortal face I hadn’t seen before. I flopped my arm around her cool shoulder in a dismissing gesture.

The Gaumbiano children, in a festive frenzy, or one wondered, in retribution to people like me, were armed with bags of harina, white flour that looked too much like cocaine. The air in the center of town was full of clouds, as they surrounded any unsuspecting non-Gaumbiano, like a pack of wolves, and pelted them with puffs of the harina. Maria Christina in her freshly coiffed hair cowered by a church almost trembling. Isolina and I dashed off and in minutes returned, with the car door opened. Maria Christina, slipping into the car, gave me a tight smile, but Enoc provided the approving nod.

By nightfall, Cali. Fernando, Enoc’s artist brother, had a house perched wall-to-wall with others, adobe-like, on a hill with a view of the night lights of Cali. With the door and windows cracked, the famed breeze through the Causa Valley washed away the day’s swelter. In the living room were several abstract paintings, the largest of a woman’s head, medusa-like with hair windswept. Fernando had an odd face, artsy I suppose, long with a dog-leg; reason enough to be eccentric.

What inspired his painting, what were his hours, what about public opinion, did he get tired of the same genre, and what were his goals? As I continued the interview, as if I was from the Smithsonian, the attention finally brought a smile, albeit crooked, to her uncle. Isolina and I inspected the surrealism and microscopic figures, with surprising details like a baby at the bosom, or a drape of poppy flowers. Our foreheads touched as we shared a magnifying glass to examine the many female nudes, their smooth hips, breasts, and darkened erotic areas-our breaths were mutually palpable. I said, " Fernando, the Americans could never do something like this."

His head angled further, the smile gone. Isolina looked at me, shaking her head, no, no, and explained slowly," Digger, he is American. We live in the Americas, and we are Americans. You mean to say the Norteamericanos. They have a lot to learn from us." I stood there like a reproached schoolchild, and with my tired eyes, gazed into those hidden ones, dark like a Goya sky. I didn’t respond, but took the lick.

The next day the sun in Cali was fierce. The water from the pool dripped off me, as I waited for Isolina to stroll out in her bathing suit. The picture of her taken at Lake Betania, in sunglasses and bikini, had sat on my desk in Boston like a space heater against the window, where outside it reminded me of cold war Prague. She walked up, in her jeans, and said, " I forgot my suit in Bogota."

"Isn’t there one you could borrow?’

"No. I don’t know of any." I was ready to say, I’ll buy one, but had the realization that her suit was not really forgotten, but folded upstairs in her suitcase. She sat next to me, rolled her pants up, and put her feet in the water. The only sound was the gentle slapping of the water. Then she said, "I can’t go to Bogota with you.

I received the news like a shiv between the ribs. My eyes fixed on her feet underwater. "Why not?"

"They want me here to watch Carlos."

"That’s not the reason," I said. She looked up and said nothing. "They don’t want you to go with me." I stopped and turned toward her. "That’s the crucial point of the entire trip, our trip to Bogota."

We sat wordless for several minutes. I drew a detailed picture in my mind: me, bouncing in the back bus to Bogota, slack-faced, with cacophony of the campesinos, the choking exhaust fumes, and the dust sticking to my eyes.

She said, "No me has debido tocar mi cola."

"What?"

"Mi cola." She slapped her rear.

"What are you saying, Isolina?"

"My mother saw it. When you hit my butt. She saw."

"You mean your parents don’t want me to be with you alone. Because I tapped your butt?" I sounded like a Tennessee lawyer.

"It’s not that. They think when you are alone with me it is much worse."

"Then they don’t know me. Did you tell them about the others? The little Latinos here who always wrestle you in the back of taxis?"

"I can’t tell them things like that."

"I treat you well." In my fluster, my Spanish was fractured.

"I am sorry. It is the mind of my parents."

"You sound like you agree with them."

"They are my parents. I live with them, and they support me. I have to do whatever they say. No choice. I cannot live alone."

"I’ll support you."

"No. That’s impossible. I stay with my family."

I started to get up. " I’ll talk to them, right now."

"No. That will make it worse."

"Then I’ll leave tonight."

"Digger. Don’t." She grabbed my hand.

I said goodbye to her mother, both of us straight-backed with her steely gaze matching mine.

Isolina and Enoc walked me to the corner to flag a cab. I lugged my suitcase and a shoulder bag. We were quiet, processional, with me in front.

We stood on the corner waiting for a cab. Isolina looked at me and said, "You should stay. My family wants it." Her hand was on my chest. I really wanted to stay in Cali. "Digger. Stay?" I put my bags down. A taxi stopped. I motioned it on.

Enoc turned to me. I looked at Isolina, drew in a breath, then turned to Enoc. I said, "What was the story with that girl on the road?"

"What girl?"

"The one in the middle of the mountain road, near the leper colony."

"Oh her."

"What was wrong with her?"

"Hercules," said Enoc.

"I don’t understand."

He sniffed his fist.

"Cocaine?"

He shook his head and said,"No."

"Glue?"

"Yes, glue. Her mind is missing from sniffing glue. It is called Hercules." I wasn’t sure if I believed him.

"Why didn’t her parents rescue her?" I said. Isolina grabbed my arm.

Enoc laughed. "She has no parents. She has no home."

I looked back and forth at them, shrugged my shoulders, and said, "We should have stopped." Both of them winced and shook their heads, like it was unthinkable.

Isolina took her hand down, looked at me, and said, "Digger. Stop?"

"Yeah, stop. Christ," I said in English. I waved my hand in the air at the yellow cars in the traffic and picked up my luggage. A taxi pulled up. I gave Isolina a South American kiss, on her right cheek, while Enoc leaned in and said to the driver, "Estacion. Autobus." He then clasped my hand, pushing taxi money in it, which I thought would be rude to refuse. I stuffed the money in my jeans and got in. Isolina’s hand rested on the top, as her eyest, pained and inquisitive, looked down at me.

She then leaned in and said, "You’ll always find the higher purpose."

I turned my head away and said, "For what?"

"For leaving."

I leaned up to the front seat, put two fingers on the driver’s shoulder, and said, "Do you know the road to the leper colony?”