On the day before our cruise left the shores of Colombia, E and I had to leave for Cartagena, in which we had our last stopover in a hostel with a private room because we thought we had deserved the luxury of privacy after having slept in a hammock for 3 months. After three martinis and few cheap snacks from the busstation bar, I don’t remember much, except E pointing her greasy finger against the window and saying, “I really don’t like that jesus figurine down there.” E didn’t mind spending our last money on a cab rather than food for the ride, I certainly did, but buses were hard to grasp. And having arrived in the last country only for a few days we did not want to try to understand another south american bus system.
Leaving the bar, E nearly walked in front of a speeding taxicab – she was momentarily distracted by her own complaining. I remember this made my heart jump, then I thought it was funny, so I tried to push her in front of the next car.
It was E’s turn to sit next to the driver.
Like usual, E chatted with our driver. I sat behind the driver’s seat and never actually saw the guy’s face, but I heard him. oh, I heard that voice, or should I say, those voices, for I will take them to my grave. The fact that I never saw his face made my dreams all the more disturbing. Seated behind him, I only saw his fleshy neck and his dark eyes in the rear view mirror.
E and he spoke about the rain in Colombia, Queen, Indian food and some more about Queen. From the back he looked like a lumbering guy with puffy eyes and multiple instant macaronis in the back of his car.
Then it happened. E asked “and you, are you from Cartagena?” the guy looked in the rear view mirror at me and in a perfect woman’s voice said, “who, me? no, I’m from Lima, you know in Peru.”
I froze. I searched his eyes in the mirror for the jest but they were dark and flat. E leaned forward to look at the man’s face. “and how long have you been in Colombia for?” E continued. His greasy hand slowly ran down the back of his hair, he looked in the mirror and said, in a precise feminine articulation, “let’s see, I grew up in Lima but when my wife got pregnant we moved to Cartagena, that was about 15 years ago.” Suddenly I saw him driving us back to his apartment, watching him put on a wig and a floral dress and then chopping us into pieces and placing us in the freezer.
I grabbed E’s arm, scared, horrified, but she seemed to be enjoying this performance and, like a kid with a new toy, started asking our driver a handful of questions to discover who would answer. Sometimes our driver would answer as a man, sometimes as a woman. Sometimes a deep hoarse voice would speak; next a lady’s precise intonation would respond about his life in the city.
It was starting to get dark. We were lost in a generic subdivided landscape with a bilingual monster. I considered hopping out at the next light and leaving E with the madman but I knew he would find me and slice me into filets while screaming like the queen of england would. I closed my eyes, I put my right hand out the window, and i listened to their three-way conversation for what seemed to be an extremely long period of time.
Before the taxi had actually parked at our hostel I jumped out and ran up to our room, locked the door, turned on all the lights and locked myself in the bathroom, I took a lengthy shower, surely I’d been imagining things, I was just fatigued from our travels.
When I finally left the bathroom with only a small towel barely covering the necessary, E was banging on the front door. I opened the door and who was standing there but E, the taxi driver. “mind if I use your bathroom?” the driver asked in a normal man’s voice.