“I will split the cost of shipping,” my father says, and the Americano clucks while his wife strokes my hat between her pink palms, something salacious in the way she fingers the brim. The man paws his smooth coral chin for a while, until he catches from the side of his colorless eyes the slight nod of his wife. Then he says, “Yes. The Gómez Días Mu?oz and the sombrero.”
“Lo que una decisión brillante,” my father says, and the tone in his voice opens the vault in my mind.
I know who my father is. He is Ernesto Furia, once Pablo Escobar’s right-hand man, a step below the king, but with a golden crown of his own. Billions, hundreds of billions, perhaps trillions, who knows what my Colombian father has salted away in the false walls and hidden catacombs beneath our house in Envigado Finca, for I recall, too, that’s where we live.
It’s returning to me, the day the CNP, the nacional policia, scooped up my father and a few other high-ranking members of the Escobar crew, while Pablo escaped the clutches of the law, as he always manages to do. When I was allowed to visit my father in prison, he would say, “Mi hijo, cuando salga de la cárcel, quiero estar rodeado de belleza, por el art. No más crimen para mí. And he’s done that: he’s an abogado turned cocaine trafficker turned gallery owner, surrounded by beauty every day now. Colombia is corrupt, violent, and bloody, but my father saw that its most important artists lacked representation by a person with a great eye, business acumen, endless connections, and cash, all of which Ernesto Furia has. Now he flogs their work until it gallops out into the world, on a personal mission to demonstrate that Colombia offers much more than drugs and bullets and all the inocentes muertos.
Hence Galeria de Furia, a purist’s space with a not-for-sale-centerpiece: Gómez Días Mu?oz’s We Pray for the Death of Pablo Escobar. The single painting Ernesto says connects his past to a great day in the future, allows him to joke about previous pain. While my father works with the Americanos to document the transaction, I sidle up to the famous work and take it all in.
We Pray for the Death of Pablo Escobar is Mu?oz’s great painting of hope. In it, the infamous drug lord stands close to a blustery sky, surrounded by the red-clay rooftops of Medellín. On the red-tiled roof of a house in the foreground, his bare feet nearly dance the first steps of a cumbia. His white shirt is unbuttoned and bloodstained. Bullets have pierced his round belly, his neck, there is a direct shot through his forehead. The gun in his left hand is useless, his finger free of the trigger, the barrel aimed at the heavens, but his right hand still is outstretched, fending off the continuing barrage, as if he might prevent the mowing down that has already, in Mu?oz’s mind, happened. This painting, I remember, is my birthright. Ernesto Furia has sworn many times that never will Mu?oz’s masterpiece belong to anyone not a Furia, and I am the only Furia beyond him.
Ernesto pumps the man’s hand, kisses the wife on the cheek, and when they walk out of the gallery, he leads me into his office. I see how his soul gleams white these days. From the closet, he retrieves a tan suede jacket. In those few seconds, when the door is ajar, I see stacks of sombrero vueltiaos on the shelves. This hat trick with the Americanos, it was not our first time—
Then Deo and Ernesto were on the Santa Helena highway in an old silver 911 Porsche Targa with the removable roof long gone, the wing mirrors too, bullet holes pocking the doors, racing the few wispy clouds moving fast through the blue sky. Soon they were entering the gates of a huge house monitored by an impressive number of closed-circuit cameras, calling out to Deo’s mother, Adalina, who emerged like a goddess from the man-made lake, wishing her son congratulations on his last day of school, telling him his girlfriend called to wish him a happy sixteenth birthday.
In Colombia, I have a girlfriend named Isabel, a nice girl who goes to church on more than just her saint’s day. At first, when her father saw that we liked each other, he refused to let Isabel out of his sight. But my father convinced him that he was completely reformed, a do-gooder now, and that Isabel had nothing to fear, no danger would be visited upon her, if she were allowed to date Ernesto Furia’s son. Everything has worked out well. Isabel is gorgeous, and I am in love for the first time in my life.
Before I can say, “Gracias, madre,” a funny sound makes me look up. Two blue-green parrots are dancing on a nearby branch, their claws clicking on the wood, their beaks opening and closing, their high-pitched caws chirruping through the air, and I feel myself floating away.
The other three stories were just as enthralling. In frozen Moscow, Russian Abel breeds dogs free of bark and bite, but capable of furious meowing. Icarus can hold his breath for days, dives deep into the Eastern Pacific Ocean with no need for scuba gear, but loaded down with underwater cameras in order to photograph a colorful eel never before seen by man, brings it up to show his father, the man who discovered the Galápagos Islands. Zed, the son of a Turkish Ottoman pasha, reclaims his father’s throne, rules the city from a palace overlooking the Bosporus Strait. In each, the relationships between those boys and their parents were tightly enmeshed, and all slightly off-kilter.
When I finished, I looked at the stories listed in the second section, “The Rx of Life,” and from the titles it seemed that Ashby was going to widen the exposure, reveal the truth about the real Simon Tabor. Indeed, I would learn that Simon Tabor was not a hemophiliac at all, was not traipsing around the world in his dreams, but instead, was a real boy confined to his room for a completely different reason. That widening exposure, those revelations, were immediate when I began reading “An Afternoon at the Pool.”
When the last bell of the school year rang on Friday, Simon Tabor rode his bike home, parked it at the side of the house, snapped out his bike pump, retrieved his old wading pool from the garage, and inflated it until the dimmed dinosaurs in the plastic came back to life. The family’s backyard was spacious, bursting with flowers and a real pool with deep water turned nearly white in the sun. If he wanted to, Simon could have stripped down and gone for a swim, but that’s not the experience he was after.
There was a grassy verge close to the house, and there he set down the blown-up pool. He unfurled the garden hose, turned on the spigot, and waited for it to fill. When forced by his mother to water the roses, Simon did not always remember to wind the hose back up, but now he did, and stowed the contraption next to the brick steps that led to the sheltered veranda.