Finca del Placer

Subachoque, Cundinamarca. 6:10 p.m. Two hundred and fifty thousand pesos. Fifty-eight minutes on camera.

All characters are 18 or older. Fiction.

I was twenty three, and I had been on that finca since I was seventeen, which is a long time to be paid in meals. The roses go out at four in the morning and the men who cut them are gone by two in the afternoon, so the bonus was handed out in the packing shed at the end of the day, in envelopes, while the cold room hummed. Mine had two hundred and fifty thousand pesos in it and a card with a phone number written on the back in pencil. Nobody else got a card. I looked around the shed to see if anyone had noticed and nobody had, because everybody was counting.

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One of the truck drivers had told me about the Angel of Bogota once, in the way men tell you about a dog that bites: carefully, and only after a few drinks, and always about somebody else. I had laughed at it. Then the card was in my hand and the number was on the back of it and I was not laughing.

I called the number from the bus stop and a man answered in Spanish so slow it sounded like he was reading it off a wall. He said the shed, Sunday, when the finca was empty. He said bring nothing. He said if I told anyone the arrangement was finished before it began.

Sunday the gate was open and his car was parked where the trucks turn around, and he was standing in the shed with his jacket folded over a stool and his sleeves rolled up, and there was a phone on a tripod made of three stacked crates and a length of twine. I had expected a photographer. There was no photographer.

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"You cut roses," he said.

"Si, senor. Four years."

"Which house?"

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"San Rafael. The white shed, the one with the cold room."

"Ten hours a day?"

"Eleven in the season. Sometimes twelve."

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"And they pay you what they pay you."

"Minimum, and the bonus at the end."

He nodded, as if the numbers had confirmed something he had already decided on his own.

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"Show me your hands."

I showed him. He turned them over and looked at the scars and the green stains in the knuckles and nodded, once, as if the hands had passed an inspection.

Then he explained the arrangement in the same flat way he might have explained a delivery schedule. Two hundred and fifty thousand, cash, on the stool, now. The door of the shed shut and barred. Filmed from the crates. His face never in frame, and if I turned the camera toward him even by accident the whole thing ended. He would ask me nothing and I would ask him nothing. I said yes to all of it before he had finished the last part, which he noticed.

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"You are quick," he said.

"I have been thinking about it since Tuesday."

"Good. Thinking is not the same as deciding. Decide now."

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"And if I decide no?"

"Then you go home and cut roses on Monday and I find somebody else. There is no punishment in it. I do not work that way."

"And if I tell somebody?"

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"Then it is finished before it begins, and you still keep the bonus, because the bonus was yours before I ever wrote on that card." He put his hand flat on the bench. "The finca is empty until Tuesday. That is the only thing that matters now."

I put my hand on the money. He put his hand over mine and held it there a second, and his palm was dry and very warm, and that was the moment, if the file wants a moment.

The shed smelled of cold water and cut stems. There was a long steel bench down the middle where the bunches were graded, and the light over it was a hard white strip that made everything look like evidence. He had me stand at the end of the bench and take off my shirt and then my boots and then the rest, and he walked a slow circle around me with his arms folded, not saying anything, and I have never in my life felt so exactly looked at. When he came back around to the front he stopped and looked down and said, "Ah," in a tone of mild professional interest, and I laughed, and he did not, and that made me laugh harder until he put two fingers under my chin and lifted it.

Open the full Angel of Bogota episode → uncut bogota angel files, 18+

"Turn around. Hands on the bench."

The steel was cold enough to make me flinch. He stood behind me and I heard the small sounds of him getting ready, the belt, the bottle, and then his hand was between my legs from behind, cupping, and his other hand was flat on my lower back, holding me still.

"You are shaking," he said.

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"It is cold."

"It is not cold," he said. "You are frightened of the wrong thing. Nobody is coming up that road tonight. I paid the watchman to stay at the gate and he does not come inside, and the gate is chained, and the shed door is barred. Now breathe."

But he reached over and took his jacket off the stool and put it around my shoulders, which did not help at all and which I have thought about more than anything else that happened in that shed.

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He opened me with his fingers, slowly, one and then two, and I put my forehead down on the steel and breathed. The bench took my weight. Somewhere outside a dog was barking at nothing, and the cold room compressor kicked on and off, and it was all so ordinary that the extraordinary part of it felt like something I had agreed to in a previous life.

"Now," he said. "Push back against my hand. Do not wait for me."

I pushed back. He went in slowly and the curve of him found something that made my knees give, and he caught my hip with his free hand and said, "There it is," and then he fucked me with the even, patient rhythm of a man who had nowhere else to be. The bench edge dug into my thighs. His jacket slid off one shoulder and he pulled it back up, twice, and the second time he laughed under his breath, a low sound I do not think he meant to make.

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"Talk to me," he said, "or do not. I do not care which."

I talked. I do not remember most of it. I remember saying please and I remember saying that I had cut roses for four years and nobody had ever asked to see my hands, and he said nothing to that but his rhythm changed and his hand came around and closed over my throat, not squeezing, just holding, and I came on the leg of the bench without either of us touching it.

He finished not long after and stayed there a moment with his hand flat on my back.

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Then the shed was just a shed again. He brought a rag and a bottle of water from the cold room and I sat on an upturned crate and drank it while he dressed. He counted nothing, because the money was already mine. At the door he stopped.

"The Angel of Bogota does not usually do this," he said. "The finca. The country. It is not his habit."

I did not know what to say, so I said, "It was a good bonus."

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"It was a good harvest." He opened the door and the evening came in, cold and green and full of the smell of wet earth. "Tell them the bonus was two hundred and fifty. It was two hundred and fifty. Everything else is not their business."

He drove off before I had my boots laced. The card with the number I burned in the stove that night, because he had not told me to, and because in this valley the only way to keep a thing is to be able to say honestly that you have lost it.

File closed. Subject paid in full. Camera card retained.

Open the full Angel of Bogota episode → uncut bogota angel files, 18+