Mauro was the one who put it in her head that Bogotá was just another pueblo masquerading as a metropolis and there was more to discover. In their mountains and hungry valleys, they were all descendants of massacred Indigenous Peoples, their violated foremothers. They could hate the conquistadores for what they stole, but they couldn’t deny they carried the same genetic particles that pushed the original invaders to wander into the unknown. Los españoles occupied their land, christened it Nueva Granada. Diluted their bloodlines. Killed their tribes. The people they used to be. But instead, Mauro thought, they’d become something else. An adapted people unique to land reconceived by force as the New World; a singed species of birds without feathers who can still fly.

“Maybe,” he once told Elena, “we are creatures of passage, meant to cross oceans just like the first infectors of our continent in order to take back what was taken.”

Elena had more education than Mauro, but she let him believe his ideas were more important.

People say drugs and alcohol are the greatest and most persuasive narcotics—the elements most likely to ruin a life. They’re wrong. It’s love.

THREE

The Bogotá of Elena’s and Mauro’s childhoods was another city from the one Talia knew. To the child, bombings and kidnappings were mostly faraway occurrences in guerrilla-occupied territories or distant campo villages, death tallies mere embers on news feeds. The hurricane of violence of the eighties and nineties was a specter in magazine retrospectives, horror written with near nostalgia, depicted on telenovelas. Nothing Talia, sheltered as she was, believed she needed to fear. In Bogotá, a girl of Talia’s age could almost forget the terror, pretend it was happening in some other country across the continent, that the faces of the disappeared had nothing in common with her schoolmates’ families, and the hardened expressions of children kidnapped or orphaned into fighting the nameless tentacled war could not have just as easily been hers.

Mauro and Elena’s city of clouds was now a place where tourists came to dance and drink without the threat of death. The last broad-scale civilian-targeted bombing the capital had seen came the year before Talia was born, when their family was already on the northern continent, but her parents’ generation was raised in a time when the Andean air tasted of gunfire. On the nightly news, in the morning papers, on sidewalks. Executions of presidential candidates, teachers, judges, journalists, elected officials, and so many innocents. Cars and buses loaded with half tons of dynamite, enough to take down a building. A siege of the Palace of Justice. Exploded airplanes. Entire barrios in shambles. Exterminations of the so-called desechables. Children stolen and forced to the front lines. Hundreds of thousands tortured, maimed, displaced. Massacres of police and of the poor—cartels, army, narco-guerrillas, and paramilitaries each trying to take down the other’s loyal or purchased soldiers, and it was unclear who did the most killing.

Mauro was no criminal, and Elena was no saint, but Mauro felt they were unevenly matched in that Elena told him her secrets and he told her almost none of his.