He counted the mornings until he might see her again. When she reappeared it was all he could do not to take her in his arms. Instead, he watched as she picked her fruit and told her he was happy to know she was safe.

They slowly went from strangers to acquaintances to friends who spent a few hours together each week. He traveled to her neighborhood. Brought her cattleyas from the flower vendors at the market and used the little money he had to invite her to a mango con limón or a cheesy arepa, which they’d eat together on a bench in a park or plaza. Elena always saved her crusts for pigeons. She said it wasn’t their fault they were hungry.

“No,” Mauro said. “It’s none of our faults.”

Months later, in December, Elena snuck him into her house, on the poorer margins of Chapinero, while her mother worked in the laundry on the ground floor. They slid through the side door, up the stairs, past the bedrooms to the flat and unshingled roof. The surrounding buildings were still low enough that the city unfolded before them among brown mountain cushions.

Elena never complained about the tedium of Bogotá’s everlasting gray, its reputation as the rainiest capital in Latin America, a brume-billowed horizon and reluctant sun that only ever teased at warmth. Not even about the traffic, the noise, the rumble of tremors under their feet. Not the way Mauro did. He envied her for this, and for many other things too. She had a mother’s love and the security of having lived in one home all her life, even if parts of the house were crumbling while every extra peso went to keeping the lavandería in business. He knew that in her mind, Elena had experienced a lonely childhood. No siblings. A father who left when she was a baby to work in Venezuela and never returned. Few friends beyond the people in her neighborhood, since most of her free time was spent helping her mother run the laundry shop. This solitude could be why she’d welcomed him so easily into her life. He was also jealous of her predisposition for forgiveness, counting herself fortunate, not forsaken. He compared it to his anger at the chaotic landscape, the city with its funereal sky, home to his mother, her back forever turned, tongue pointed in accusal.

How serene their Bogotá looked from up there, exhaled into rest after a long-held breath. Escobar had been killed on a Medellín rooftop a few days before and there was a confused electric current of ecstatic joy and hope that this would mark the end of the violence, tinged with disquiet for what might come next.

Mauro told Elena that Escobar was the perfect scapegoat for a country that was no better than he was. In showing his lack of conscience, he forced the population to confront its own. “Can any of us born of this land be certain we’d behave differently with that kind of money and power?” He remembered Jairo and the boys in Ciudad Bolívar gathered on the cliffs to drink and shine their guns, saying there was more honor in being a narcotraficante than a politician.