Diego Alejandro Arias is a lawyer, writer, and former diplomat from New Jersey. He has been published in The Acentos Review and Revista Cronopio. He served three tours of duty abroad for the U.S. government and worked on the evacuation of US citizens from Wuhan, China in 2020 and Kabul, Afghanistan in 2021. 

He currently works as a civil rights attorney and lives in New Jersey with his wife and three cats. He is in the process of completing a memoir titled Rolling Out of Cars. 

Chacón in G Minor

1.

Lina took a glass of wine from the gentleman in front of her and held it between her fingers, grasping the stem, trying to remember how to hold it correctly. She looked around the apartment. The painting across from her was a large object covering the center of the wall. It was like a window, something looking back, a world familiar to her but alien to the people that surrounded her. Eyeless deep black faces with fruits and palm trees reconstructed in bright, vivid colors like the sort of poverty porn frequently peddled by diplomats, well-meaning academics, and third tier Spanish tourists that wrap a bandana across their forehead and dress up in outfits that resemble a shock conglomeration between Indiana Jones and Dora the Explorer. She looked away, turning to her right. A man in a dark blue coat and a pair of grey trousers with white vertical lines running down his legs walked by with a champagne flute. A woman with luscious grey hair cut across her face asymmetrically and red lips accentuated by a set of pearls around her neck chatted up a young couple from Bordeaux. Lina sat down on a purple cushioned Hepplewhite settee with dark brown legs. She fell into it like rum and coke poured into a ceremonial Russian chalice, unexpected and raffish, her white silk tulle splayed about her legs like the foam of a waterfall spreading across a river in Monteverde. Her dark blue sheer exposed her breasts, her firm flesh, the purple of her nipples as elegant as a royal dinner in Dante’s purgatory, guests invited from the depths of space and time and hell and everywhere in between. The texture of the transparent cloth, which had led to countless gawking men and the conservative glances of bourgeoise women, had been selected by her closest friend in England, Miranda Snodgrass, a designer who had closed Paris Fashion Week earlier that year with a series of designs inspired by phantasmagoric images from 19^th century France (ironically finding its inspiration in the American prose of Edgar Allen Poe, particularly his first detective story, the first of its kind in the Western tradition: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”).

Lina imagined herself laying down in her bed, taking in the future that awaited her, the accolades she had chased since she was a little girl in Buenaventura, since she first left her homeland under the tutelage of a London boarding school that saw early musical promise in a young Black girl from Colombia. But those years were now so long ago, like a body dropped into a sepia-toned, bottomless abyss, long gone into the middle of the Earth. Her chest fluttered. Her thighs felt a bit weak. Her left arm had pins and needles running from the edges of her shoulder down into her fingers, the numbness spreading to the tips, across the palms.

“Ms. Duran, Ms. Duran, please, come meet Mr. Billencourt,” a younger man from the foundation said. She could not remember his name. He was a representative from L’Institut des Artistes et de la Collaboration de l’Esprit. He had a droopy face, like a grungy dog left out too long in the street without a home, digging his snout into trash and alleys looking for something worth sinking his teeth into. Lina felt uncomfortable around him, his teeth like little gremlin’s daggers looking for soft appendages, his hands like the claws of a beast too gruesome to define in books of exegesis, perhaps one of the few demons who attempted to disrobe Saint Anthony.

“Yes,” she said. She stood and walked over to them, extended her hand, and shook Mr. Billencourt’s firm, soft paw. Hands made of infant skin, uncalloused, pink like the scalp of a Belgium priest. 

“Young lady, I don’t say this often, but I cannot remember a debut performance that enthralled me, that moved me, like the one you gave today. I really am impressed.”

“Thank you, sir. I am very happy that you enjoyed it.”

“Your French is impeccable. Where did you learn it?”

“In Buenaventura sir, in Valle del Cauca, Colombia.”

“Exquisite.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The young man, eyes and nose melting down into the bottom of his face, cleared his throat and interjected.

“Ms. Duran has been playing since she was a child, very young. She fell in love with Jascha Heifetz when she was eight.”

“Ah, Heifetz, Heifetz. Yes, a genius. A man of great talent and a great heart. That explains your opening performance.”

“Mr. Billencourt, did you know that Jascha Heifetz was one of the first celebrities to own an electric car?” Lina said.

“Is that so? I didn’t know.”

A man walked by with a tray of swordfish and a purple jelly of some sort. Lina took a portion with a wooden toothpick and dipped it in the sauce. The gentleman nodded. He was Black, handsome, a young man with impeccable skin and a jaw like a young Assiniboine, a Nēhiyaw-Pwat statesman.

“Thank you, sir.”

He smiled and hurried along, gently making his way across the gray rug and the bone-white drapes that framed the 11^th Arrondissement’s Place de la Nacion. The lights like embers dancing to the sounds of ghosts and angels, like some sort of painting that used to be a terrible thing but has now become a charming, fierce and jagged reality that can be breathed in, the air like patterns of whites, blacks, reds, purples, and blues, a rainbow composed of upward mobility and dreams forged out of years of violin concertos in Bogota and Lisbon and London and Madrid and New York and Warsaw. Was this triumph, she thought, was this what it felt like to float just high enough to feel the air and light seep in, even for a short time? To touch immortality with your fingers and graze its soft underbelly against one’s rough human hands?

“Did he buy the electric car from someone? Wasn’t he quite old to be around for something like that?” Mr. Billencourt asked.

“Oh no, sir. He did not buy it. Heifetz was a genius. He made it himself. He converted a French Renault into an electric vehicle in 1967,” Lina said.

“Impressive.”

“Quite impressive sir, yes,” the young representative said.   

“Do you live here in Paris, Ms. Duran?” Mr. Billencourt asked.

“No, sir. I live in Madrid. I am completing a degree at The Reina Sofia School.”

“That’s quite an institution. But after tonight, I find no surprise in your attendance there. A good friend of mine, a Polish composer, taught there for many years.”

“I am familiar with his work. He was from Dębica, correct?”

The gremlin smiled and nodded. He pressed his lips together and smiled. He was as ignorant as Billencourt was impressed. His name, Lina remembered, was Preston Golland.

“Yes, yes. He was a good friend. We traveled many years ago to New York. He left quite an impression on a society there that admired his compositions on Hiroshima,” Mr. Billencourt said.

“That and Polish Requiem, sir.”

Linda had admired Krzysztof Penderecki for many years. Partially growing up in Buenaventura, before heading off to attend boarding school, she lived in the salsa music capital of the world. Something inside of Lina challenged her to look and search beyond the music that her family knew most and focus on classical composers with not only musical greatness, but also with a penchant for dedicating their craft to those who have suffered from great injustices. Although Penderecki believed politics in music was obsolete and unnecessary, his greatest works nevertheless celebrated those who died in Hiroshima and the Polish anti-government protests of the 1970s.

For a girl like Lina, born into a city drenched in blood and strife, the idea that one could use highbrow art to draw attention to these matters caused her to see her passions as a fuel for educating those who remained ignorant of the suffering her people had endured. Above all, however, Linda admired that Penderecki believed in “liberating sound beyond all tradition.” In 2009, when Penderecki visited Medellin, Lina took a bus from Cali, and after nine long hours where her ass felt flat and sweaty and her head hurt from the exhaust accumulated along the trip, she took the tube to the Metropolitan Concert Hall, watching the master at work, his hands like knives cutting through the space around him, the orchestra at his full control. She sat there, just a girl of 11, amazed, enthralled, bewitched, having completely forgotten that she had nowhere to sleep that night. She had told her mother she had traveled to Cali to stay with her best friend, Tatiana. And Tatiana had convinced her older brother to lie for her and pick up the phone when her mom would call and ask if Lina was truly staying the night to practice violin for an upcoming concert in Palmira. “Of course, she’s coming over and staying with us. She’s already started telling me what she wants to eat for dinner,” he said over the phone.

“Thank you Pablo!” Lina said to him.

“You better come back in one piece from Medellin. I have no idea why you’d travel all the way to the other side of the country to see some old Polack play that shit music.” “Ay Pablo,” she said. “Agua que no has de beber, déjala correr, asi es contigo,” he said. “And that’s how it’ll always be,” Lina replied. “Amen,” he joked. Lina used stipend money awarded by her new British school to stay the night at El Intercontinental in El Poblado, using a letter from the boarding school director that she was leaving to London within several weeks. The hotel concierge, not understanding English very well, provided the 11-year-old girl a room, and she paid in cash. The staff at the hotel whispered as she left three days later. Is she some sort of celebrity? Is she the daughter of some British diplomat? Lina spoke in English to the front desk, making them more comfortable with hosting a child that walked around with wads of cash and letters written by the British Embassy and academic institutions in London. “No one called the police?”Pablo asked when she returned to Cali. “No, nothing,”she replied. Pablo would go on to nickname her The Heiress, a name that followed her to England and was picked up by media when she started performing throughout Europe. In a South American world of football players with nicknames like The Shadow, The Train, The Kid, she became Lina “The Heiress” Duran, the first musical celebrity of her Colombian generation.

“To liberate sound is to free the air around us from conventions, from everything we hate and love. Penderecki had been a firm believer in this philosophy.”

“Brilliant, Ms. Duran, brilliant. I very much look forward to hearing you play again,” Mr. Billencourt replied.

2. 

Two men banged on the window. They were screaming and trying to open the car, pulling on the handle, and jerking their arms backwards, tugging at the door as if they could rip it open and toss it into the air. One man moved his face so close to the window that Adam could see the cavity fillings in his mouth. His teeth full of silver, shining and full of spittle and bloodlust. He was wild, livid, furious. Another man jumped on top of the hood and stomped his feet on it, denting the metal, and he kicked in the windshield, forming spider webs that would eventually begin to crack as the big boot continued to stomp on the glass. The car could only protect him for so long, and he knew he had no choice but to remain inside until someone arrived. He knew that if he stepped out of the car these people would kill him. He knew that there was no turning back if he unlocked the door and exited. There was no getting out of this without contacting the embassy. He took the Motorola phone out of his glove compartment, dialed the switchboard, and waited for the marine to pick up. His fingers shook. He tried to catch his breath. Why the fuck did he venture out to Playa Chacón, a little beach in Timbiquí, miles away from Cali. How maddening, to drive around in these damn streets with potholes and dirt alleys, and little kids running around with soccer balls and people screaming and swaying about like there aren’t cars swerving around the dense, populated streets. Why don’t these people watch where they walk? Why is there no order here, no rule of law? What in God’s name would he say to the Ambassador? To the Regional Security Officer? To his direct supervisor? Where the hell was all of this headed?  

“Hello, Post One,” the marine said.

“Hi, hi. I just had an accident, and a small child ran into my car. He’s unconscious.” He paused and placed his index finger to his ear. He could barely make out what the young marine was saying on the other line. A man picked up a rock and threw it at the car. “Excuse me, sorry, I am in grave danger. This kid ran into the car, and these people want to hurt me. Can you place the RSO on the phone, please, please, as soon as possible.”

“Yes sir, connecting you now,” he said.

The line went silent, and the phone rang once again.

“Hello, this is James Howard.”

“Hi James, this is Adam Weitsz. I am a USAID cultural fellow. I am being attacked by a mob in the outskirts of Cali.”

“Cali? How did you end up there?”

“It was for a cultural program. I am in immediate danger. A child ran under my car, and he is unconscious. I need help. A group of people are gathered around the car banging on the window and hood. These people are going to kill me. I am certain of it.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll contact local police. Is the child okay?”

“I’m telling you, I didn’t see him. He came out of nowhere. He just ran across the street, and I didn’t see him coming.”

“You should return to Bogota immediately. Come on the first flight you can, and we’ll work something out. You can’t stay there.”

“I’m in the car right now. The child is in the middle of the road. Dozens of people are starting to gather around the car. What should I do?”

“Remain calm, stay in the vehicle. I’ll contact local police in the area.”

The local police came around twenty minutes after the crowd had begun to pick up bricks and attempt to break the windshield. Six officers with machine guns and rifles crowded around the Timbiquí residents, pushing some aside, and knocking some over with the butts of their weapons. One large police officer slammed his buttstock into a man’s face, shattering his nasal bridge. Blood gushed out and he fell back to the ground, holding on to his face and screaming obscenities at the uniformed officers. Two officers cleared the space around the driver’s door, and asked Adam to open it. “Quick, make it quick. We don’t have a lot of time. Open the fucking door!” They dragged him out and covered him with riot shields, placing their arms around his shoulders and pushing civilians out of the way that were launching glass bottles, rocks, and whatever they could get their hands on. The officers opened the door to a large SUV and pushed Adam inside. “This is something else, huh? These people went batshit, they’re going to kill this guy. Take him to Guapi. They said there’s a flight there for him,”an officer said. “Wait, wait,”he spoke into a radio, “We leave him there?…But what about the kid?” He looked at his colleague driving the truck down a muddy highway. “They said to take him to Guapi, that we cannot arrest him. He’s a diplomat.” “Alright, make it quick. I don’t want anyone tailing us over this shit.” The other officer made a face. “Uff, he reeks. Smells like whiskey and cigarettes.” Adam’s shirt, which was no longer tucked inside his pants, had gotten caught up in the door when the officers had slammed it shut. He sat there in the backseat, panting, unbuttoning his top and placing his hands over his face. The officers reached Juan Casiano Airport in Guapi, about thirty minutes from Timbiquí. They walked him over to the front desk where airport staff took Adam’s diplomatic identification card and asked him to sit in the waiting area. “The flight has not arrived. He’ll need to wait. It should be headed out of Guapi in two hours,” a young woman in a red uniform said. Onlookers and passengers watched him, covered in blood and dirt and sweat, clothing torn apart, as he walked across the lobby and entered a large space with plastic chairs bolted down to black tiles. The uniformed men asked him if he was okay and made their way out of the waiting area. The flight left at 6:00 pm, and he proceeded to a connecting route out of Cali towards Dulles Airport in Virginia. 

Before the flight took off from Cali, a bustle of drama formed outside the departure gate. The national police had issued an arrest warrant an hour before his flight to Dulles was scheduled to depart, and they attempted to force the aircraft to remain on the tarmac when they learned he planned to leave the country. The national prosecutor, however, pushed the justice department to suspend the police order and allowed Adam to leave Colombia without any judicial interdiction. For weeks and months, Colombian authorities attempted to press the embassy in Bogota and the U.S. government in Washington to force Adam to return to Cali and stand trial for the murder of the little boy he ran over in Playa Chacón, but the State Department protected him from prosecution and even threatened to cut off funding to security operations in Tunja if they continued to press the U.S. Ambassador on the issue. It became a political issue pitting the right-wing federal cabinet in Bogota and Valle del Cauca’s liberal governor on national television, newspapers, and radio. To put an end to the controversy, The President of Colombia, a descendant of a wealthy landowner family from Medellin, stated that nothing could be done due to Adam’s diplomatic immunity and that the Americans had followed protocol. “The Vienna Convention is very clear on this, and there’s no point on pushing this matter any further,” he told international press during a briefing outside of the National Palace. Following a lawsuit from the boy’s family in Buenaventura, the U.S. fourth circuit court of appeals decided that Adam would not be prosecuted in Virginia, and that the Americans had every right to deny the extradition.  

3.

Lina exited the Cambronne Ligne 6 at 3:13 pm and walked down Boulevard Garibaldi, reaching an apartment complex about fifteen minutes later. She adjusted her hair in the front entrance’s glass door. A man walked down the stairs and Lina turned around, facing the bushes that framed the building’s exterior. She took her cellphone out of her coat and called a friend. The man walked by as she turned her back to him. He made his way towards Fremicourt.

“Hello Miranda.”

“Yes, hey there Lina.”

“Can we meet in fifteen minutes at the hotel? I’ve got some things I need to carry to the Opéra Bastille before 6:30.”

“Sure, that’s fine. Are you excited about tonight, love?”

“Absolutely. I can’t believe the day has come. I’m so nervous, my hands are shaking. Thanks so much for meeting up in a bit. I’m a couple of stops away from your flat. So, I’ll be out there shortly.”

“Sounds great, Lina. See you in a bit.”

“Gracias, chica.”

Lina turned and checked the buttons on the left-hand side of the two front doors. She hit 7C. The intercom made some noises and then a beep. A man answered.

“Hello there.”

“Hey there, sorry I’m a bit early. Got here sooner than I thought.”

“Oh, you’re British?”

“Yes, sir. Raised in Brixton.”

“Sure, come up. Come up.”

Inside the flat, Adam poured some Malbec into a glass and sat back down on a red couch. The shades were closed, but the apartment had a direct view of the tower. He was playing a 1968 rendition of Joaquín Rodrigo’s masterpiece, En Aranjuez con tu Amor, performed by Dyango, the celebrated Spanish musician.

“You know, in the evening it shimmers like a dream, so sweet and vivid. I’ve come to love this city so, so much.”

“It’s quite lovely.” She looked around the living room. “You’ve got a beautiful home. So well decorated. You weren’t kidding when you said you had an old school taste.”

He leaned into her and moved some blond hair from her face, pulling it behind her ear.

“I love your hair. It looks great against your skin.”

“Against?” She laughed and sipped from her glass.

“Your hair, it’s blonde and your skin is brown. It looks lovely.”

She moved away from him and placed her glass on the table in front of her.

“Would you like to hear some other music?”

“Of course, tell me what you like to hear. I’ve got my Spotify on the computer there.”

She walked over to his computer and typed in a song.

“I’m sure you’ll love this.”

He drank from his glass, blinked, and shook his head.

“Let’s hear it then. I’m interested in what your generation listens to these days.”

“Oh, I think you’ll be surprised what we listen to Alex.”

“Well, it’s Adam, actually, but..” A violin played. The song began and he stared at her.

“You listen to this, do you?”

“This is one of my favorite songs.” She swayed back and forth, moving her arms across her body, moving about the room, and gliding her feet across his carpet and marble tiles.

“I’m not familiar with this one, but God, it’s haunting. It’s absolutely beautiful.”

She danced. She shook her head, and her blonde hair flashed back and forth in front of Adam. He felt dizzy. Her body looked close, yet far away, like a dream image, a pantomime from another world, a ghost inside a glass sculpture.

“The title, what’s the title?”

“Chaconne in G Minor.”

“It’s so, so haunting.”

“Is it, Adam?”

“Yes, where did you say you were from? Bristol?”

“Brixton, London. But you mean to ask, where are you from?”

He coughed. “Come again?”

“Where am I from? It’s okay. I understand the question. My family is from Colombia. My parents are from a little beach on the pacific coast.”

He coughed. He held his chest. “Colombia? Did you say Colombia?” He was coughing repeatedly now, holding on to his throat and hurling spit into his glass.

“From a little place called Timbiquí.”

He was wheezing, gasping for air, and dropping to the floor. Blood smeared across his mouth.

“You….know…,” he gasped for air, taking in a long shot of oxygen, “him?”

Lina stopped dancing and walked over to Adam. He was on all fours, crawling towards her. Blood on the marble. Blood on his rug.

“The little beach. Playa Chacón in Timbiquí.”

His arms gave out and he fell flat to the floor. He gasped and gasped and gasped and gasped.

She cleared her throat and grabbed her purse, cleaned the prints off anything she had touched, which she had carefully noted since she had arrived. She gathered her things, walked to the front door, and turned to face Adam. His eyes were closing, the shadows reaching beneath him, fingers of demons pulling at his shirt and pants, and, slowly, the light shrinking from the glossy sockets in his skull.

She observed him. A figure, bloated, its tongue bulging out of its mouth, its power no longer a burden, a weight, but rather a memory in the ether, a threat that once crossed oceans to escape from the atrocity of its actions, but now just a pale, dying thing. 

She exited and closed the door behind her. The hallway of the building was old and had no cameras—of this she had been very careful before she left for Paris. She changed out of her black dress, took the blond wig off, and made her way to the elevator. She left Boulevard Garibaldi and met up with Miranda thirty minutes after she had agreed to see her. She had texted Miranda while leaving the flat that she had stopped to buy some hot chocolate and fresh bread, her best friend’s guilty Parisian pleasures. They ate and chatted for about an hour before leaving to the Opera house.

Later that evening, after an hour and a half of some of the best violin played since before the pandemic had shut the city down for more than a year, she received a standing ovation that lasted over ten minutes. It was her first show in Paris, her largest accomplishment since moving to Europe, performing at the same venue that played Richard Strauss and Georges Bizet. In the dressing room, before she left to attend an afterparty at a benefactors’ home, she held her brother’s primary school identification card in her hand, he wore a white t-shirt with a small logo on the right side of his chest, and she cried mercilessly as she looked directly into a vanity mirror, the light bulbs hot and bright and full of noise, and she wondered, if now this, then where next?