Two AM: Letters Without a Sender

By two in the morning, the temperature inside my study had plummeted so severely that the vapor of my breath clouded the glass faces of the analog meters. I switched on the dual-burner electric hotplate and set an enamel saucepan of water with a cinnamon bark stick to boil, hoping to take the edge off the freezing drafts. Resting upon the green felt counter mat was a weathered cardboard shoebox where I preserved the letters listeners had slipped beneath the corrugated iron shutter of the corner bakery across three broadcast years. Letters without postage stamps, penned on quad-ruled school paper, cheap café napkins from Avenida Jiménez, or the blank margins of utility bills.

There were notes from all manners of nocturnal souls: a neighborhood baker in Palermo who described how the scent of warm anise bread pulled from the brick ovens at three in the morning was his only solace following the loss of his wife; an administrative typist from the Ministry of Finance who transcribed stanzas of classical Colombian verse to endure the cold solitude of her boarding house in La Candelaria; and a botany student who mailed us delicate pen-and-ink studies of nocturnal moths gathered along the misty slopes of Chingaza.

I slipped a Billie Holiday vinyl onto the felt slipmat and pulled the flexible desk lamp close to my papers.

—It is a quarter past two in the morning on Radio Neblina —I spoke into the diaphragm, feeling the heavy, velvet silence of Bogotá encasing our brick tenement—. Tonight I wish to read several of the letters you have left for us along 53rd Street. They bear neither surnames nor corporate titles, but they possess the unblemished truth of things that can only be written when the entire house sleeps in darkness.

I unfolded a sheet of blue-lined ledger paper creased into four folds and read with deliberate slowness: 'To whoever kindles this microphone: my grandfather passed away last Tuesday. For forty years he worked as an artisanal typesetter in a print shop in San Victorino. He left behind a cedar box filled with lead sort letters and this worn 78-rpm tango record that I no longer possess a gramophone to play. If ever it should spin upon your station, I will know that his craft did not perish in vain.'

While Lady Day's voice drifted through the melancholic strains of 'Lover Man', the telephone rang again. I lifted the earpiece expecting another mature voice of the graveyard shift, but the person speaking at the other end was a very young man whose ragged, rapid breathing betrayed an acute, agonizing distress.

—Hello... is this the fourth-floor broadcast room? —the boy asked in a terrified, trembling whisper.

—Yes, you are with Radio Neblina. What is your name, friend?

—I prefer not to give my name, miss —the youth answered, the distinctive chime of coins dropping into a public telephone slot clinking across the line—. I'm calling from a Telecom phone booth near the Ciudad Salitre intercity bus terminal. At noon today, my bus leaves for the Venezuelan border. I have the ticket in my coat pocket and a canvas duffel bag with two changes of clothes.

My heart gave a painful lurch. In that bitter year of 1987, tens of thousands of young Colombians packed canvas bags to escape the gathering storms of cartel violence, economic collapse, and the fear that shadowed everyday neighborhoods.

—Why did you telephone the radio station at this hour, son?

—Because I cannot sleep on the plastic benches of the waiting hall, and I brought a pocket radio with foam earphones —the boy confessed, his voice breaking on the final syllable—. All my life I lived in the Santa Fe quarter. Tonight I realized I'm terrified that I will never see my mother again, but I'm even more terrified that I will forget how the eucalyptus air of the eastern hills smells on rainy mornings. Your station sounds like that mountain air, miss. It sounds like the home I am abandoning.

I pressed my thumbnail against my palm, feeling the crushing weight of his exile as though he were my own younger brother.

—Listen to me carefully, son —I told him with quiet, unshakeable firmness, looking out toward the dark silhouettes of the mountain ridge—. You will never forget the scent of the hills because it is branded into the physical memory of your bones. Wherever your journey takes you, work with clean hands, avoid corrupt companions, and write to your mother every single week, even if it is only upon a five-cent picture postcard. A homeland is never truly lost so long as you preserve with dignity the words you were taught beneath its roof.

—Thank you, Sofía —the boy whispered just as the harsh rhythmic beep of the telephone meter signaled his coins had expired—. I will never forget tonight.

The line went dead with a hollow click. I broadcast an acoustic bamboo flute melody my uncle had recorded in the Andean highlands of Silvia, Cauca, in 1978. I let the sweet, earthy woodwinds saturate the capital's ether, knowing that somewhere on a wooden bench at the bus terminal, an eighteen-year-old boy with a duffel bag sat with closed eyes, drinking in the final melody of his native soil.