This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access. W hen Antonio Cadavid met her, she had long hair, she was naked, and she was dead. The Magdalena River brought her three years ago, tangled up in the branches and the rubbish that the current drags along. She came floating down from some town up the river. Did they throw her into the water in Puerto Triunfo or in Puerto Nare?
No one would ever know. It was then that Cadavid chose her and gave her a name. He called her Sonia. A fisherman found her in some bend of the largest graveyard in Colombia: the Magdalena River. In the town they said she was a guerilla, which they said about all the cadavers that slid down the river searching for the sea while the buzzards tore at their skin and guts.
But Sonia came down intact and beautiful. In this uninhabited place, Moca-Moca spends an hour every afternoon talking to a woman whom he never saw alive but feels is his own. In the end, the dead belong to whoever cares for them.
His visits have acclimatized him to the smell of cadaverine, which is intensified by the midday heat. After that he scrubs clean the marble stone that he had installed out of gratitude for the favors he has received, and before saying good-bye he begs, with one hand on the grave, for her to reveal the lottery numbers again.
A few months ago Sonia whispered the winning figure into his ear, and Moca-Moca paid off his debts with the two million pesos that he collected. If left unsettled, they would have gotten him killed and thrown into the Magdalena, that river which—more than a river—is the red sea of Colombia. There are no mass graves in these parts. All the victims of shootings and knifings go into the river, which carries them forever.
