Dad threw our cat out the window when I was ten.
I remember my age because days before or later, that I can’t clearly remember, a bomb exploded in front of Centro 93 shopping mall. It was the third Thursday of April. At the time the bomb went off many among the dead, injured, and traumatized were most likely having lunch or a cup of coffee. We didn’t live far, but besides for our windows shaking everyone was fine.
Some days later I read about the attack in the magazine Semana. The photo next to the article showed a man dressed in a gray suit, white shirt, and striped necktie carrying a little boy whose face and hands were covered in blood. The toddler’s white overalls were also bloodstained. The boy’s face spoke incomprehension. His charred hair made me think of the blond hair of the pigs my father used to kill and cook during the end of year celebrations. The burnt hair of pigs and humans smells the same.
Behind the odd couple there were two soot-covered, damaged white cars, a smoke curtain, and the world still on fire.
The cat was gray and small, barely months old, and would start meowing early in the morning.
Mom had brought it one day, she often brought home things and animals she’d found or had been given, and told us the cat would live with us from that day onwards. Father, who worked late and would usually wake up after eight and sometimes nine, would not lose sleep because of the kitty.
I was having corn flakes while dad read the paper and drank coffee next to me when mom came and asked if we’d seen it.
Seen what? Said father.
The cat.
No, I haven’t, he said smiling.
What did you do?
Nothing, he said, still smiling.
But she knew he had. When they were living in New York, one or two years before I was born, father had invited his associates over for drinks and dinner. During the evening, the cat they had would constantly come to rub himself against my father’s leg, a cat’s greeting and call for attention. Father, who was somewhat drunk and had done a line or two of coke, grabbed the cat, walked with it into the kitchen, and stuck it inside the freezer. The cat meowed for a while but then went quiet. When mother found in horror the ice-hard cat’s corpse the day after, father simply said he had not meant to kill it.
Alberto.
What?
What did you do?
Nothing, I tell you.
Then we heard meowing coming from somewhere outside.
Mother opened the window and looked out trying to find where the meowing came from.
It’s still alive, said father. He laughed in disbelief.
You threw it out the window?
That fucking cat can fly, he said shaking his head, and went to put some milk in his coffee. God, he mumbled. Six floors. Six fucking floors.
I thought about that photograph more than twenty years after the terrorist attack and found an article about it online after a quick search. The two-year-old boy was called Andres Felipe. The man who saved him, Tito.
The boy was with his grandmother and one of his uncles in a parked blue Fiat waiting for the return of Andres’ parents. The bomb concealed in another car parked nearby killed both of the adults. Tito found the hurt boy crying near the overturned car, and grabbed and carried him asking for help. He left the kid with one of the paramedics that had recently arrived and waited until the ambulance carrying him left. Andres was scarred for life. About a quarter of his face was burnt and his right eye gone. But he was alive.
Tito didn’t go to the hospital the days after the horror. He never tried to find the boy he’d rescued.
Mother called the building’s watchman to ask about the cat.
It’s in apartment 101, Doña Myriam. It landed on the rooftop. The owner said you can come down to pick it up whenever you want. Why would a cat jump from the window?
Is it hurt? She asked.
Apparently not a scratch. That cat can fly, Doña Myriam.
I went down with mom. The lady in apartment 101 was a widow in her fifties named Doña Ana. The apartment with its ornate rugs and lamps and chairs and tables looked like I imagined apartments did fifty or sixty years earlier. That apartment was a Time Machine. On a filing cabinet against one of the walls of the living room was a glass display that contained a taxidermized adult tabby cat with large honey-colored eyes that looked like jewels.
That’s my Charles, she said proudly. He was my sole companion after my husband died. Now he’s also dead and I have no one left. Follow me, your cat’s in the kitchen. The two women drank coffee and chatted for about an hour while I stared at Charles. It was the first time I saw a mounted animal and found its lifelike presence fascinating. Mother decided the best thing for all was for Doña Ana to keep our cat. The widow cried, told us to come see the cat whenever we felt like it, hugged both of us, wrapped her hands on mom’s and thanked her a thousand times before we left.
Mom told me hours or days later that the woman’s husband was one of the 101 passengers of flight 203, the one that the Medellin cartel had exploded in the air minutes after take off in November of 1989.
I suspected Doña Ana wanted us to come again to see her.
We never did.
In August of that same year, Roberto Escobar, brother of Pablo Escobar, opened a parcel bomb that left him blind. In December, one day before father’s 52nd birthday, police officers shot and killed Pablo Escobar according to the official version. The unofficial version said that he’d shot himself in the head.
The bomb of Centro 93 was his last terrorist attack.
