Before they went on their way again, Talia asked if she could use his phone. She thought it was time to call her father, let him know she’d made it this far and that she’d be home in a matter of hours. Aguja’s phone was down to its last drops of charge, but he handed it over. She dialed and let it ring and ring, but there was no answer.

TWENTY-THREE

Mauro saw a missed call on his phone from a number he didn’t recognize. No message was left. He hoped it was Talia calling to say she was safe, then panicked that it was the police or a hospital reporting that she’d been arrested or hurt. He was at one of the apartments at his job, fixing a light fixture for some residents. As he worked on wires, he took in the sight of the family seated at their dining room table eating breakfast. The parents, a son, two daughters. Just like his family except not like them at all, so comfortable in their routine they mostly ignored one another. The father read the morning paper. The mother gave instructions to the housekeeper as she refreshed their coffees. The children mute with boredom. Mauro could not fathom the luxury of such familial indifference.

The father, wearing a pressed shirt and trousers, a suit jacket slung over the back of another chair, started talking about the peace treaty, calling it a farce, speculating which side would be the first to cheat the other. One of the daughters said the rebel forces had already demobilized and surrendered their arms, and the father said they weren’t fools enough to give up every weapon in their arsenal; they surely had hidden stockpiles. He predicted the official peace would bring dissension from revolutionary fringes, smaller factions would gain power, and insurgents already legitimized by the treaty would turn Colombia into a formalized guerrilla nation.

He spoke loudly in a way typical of the Latin American man of a certain class, presumed authority, each an aspiring president of their own miniature republic. The father told his children they were too young to remember the massacres of the Awá in Nariño or the mass killings in Dabeiba and Chocó; an era when more parents buried their children than the other way around. Everybody wanted a peace parade, a Nobel Prize, and a new national holiday so badly they’d forgotten the hundreds of thousands dead and still missing.

As Mauro worked to restore light to the family’s hallway, he felt imperceptible. The kids had passed him in the lobby many times. They’d been raised to know some people merit polite greetings and others can go without. The father asked his name after Mauro helped him jump-start his car one day. After that, whenever he saw Mauro he would say, “How’s the family, Mauricio?” even though Mauro never told him anything about Elena or his children. The wife had visits from women friends most afternoons. Once, he was called when the kitchen sink flooded during a gathering. The wife was frantic as the housekeeper mopped the froth. A few days later the wife found Mauro in the lobby and asked if he knew anyone she could hire because her current housekeeper was leaving.