A torrential downpour was falling over Santa Cruz when Gustavo dropped me off at Viru Viru Airport. It was one-thirty in the morning, and my flight to Bogotá was scheduled, according to the itinerary, to depart at 3:45 a.m.
Among my countless phobias, two stand out: my aversion to airport lines and crowds, and, quite literally, traveling in the middle seat. I have a particular dislike for the endless queues that form at Viru Viru, where you get the impression that people start lining up six hours before departure. I don’t know whether they do it out of fear that the plane might leave without them, because they’re worried they won’t have enough time to get their luggage weighed, or simply because some people enjoy the pointless exercise of standing around, yawning in front of a check-in counter that hasn’t even opened yet.
I, of course, had taken my precautions. I checked in online, convinced that this small triumph of modern technology would spare me the Chinese torture of standing in line. I had no luggage to check: I was traveling with nothing but my backpack and a carry-on. In theory, my passage through the airport should have been quick, painless, and even elegant.
But theory and the mechanics of airports belong to two entirely different universes.
The moment I set foot in the terminal, my phone vibrated with a message from Avianca, brief, laconic, and devastating in its simplicity:
“We regret to inform you that your flight has been rescheduled for 5:15 a.m.”
Just like that. No apology to make up for the sleep I had lost, no explanation to improve my mood. The flight was delayed, period.
I had almost four hours ahead of me to enjoy the extraordinary adventures offered by an airport waiting lounge: watching passengers come and go, observing the lines forming in front of counters that were still closed, and reflecting on the human condition in its sleepiest form.
Outside, it was still raining. Inside, time seemed to have stopped.
As if that weren’t enough, when I checked my boarding pass, I discovered another small reason for displeasure: Avianca had assigned me seat 5B. The middle seat.
There are few things I dislike more when traveling than being trapped between two strangers, reduced to the filling in a human sandwich. The experience becomes unbearable when one neighbor snores with such force that he seems to be harmonizing with the engine, while the other takes up so much space that you end up completely immobilized, wondering whether it’s worth waking him, inconveniencing him, and negotiating with him just to obtain something as basic as reaching the aisle and using the restroom.
With the delay, the rainy early morning, and the middle seat, I already had reason to suspect that this trip would be memorable. Even so, I held on to the hope of enjoying a peaceful flight.
And indeed, for the next four hours, everything went fairly well, although I barely managed to sleep. Fortunately, I had brought a book, and, to my surprise, my seatmates turned out to be pleasant people.
Or so I thought.
As the plane was already descending toward Bogotá, the unthinkable happened: pandemonium broke out. Someone had spotted a cat loose in the passenger cabin!
And that was when the true protagonist of this story made her appearance: my seatmate, an elderly woman who, the moment she learned of the intruder’s presence, reacted as though someone had just announced that a leopard was on board.
“Get me out of here!” she screamed in a panic. “I have an immediate allergic reaction to cats! If that animal so much as brushes me with a single hair, they’ll have to call a doctor to give me an injection!”
The woman was not willing to negotiate. Her demand was clear: she had to be removed from there. What was less clear was how she expected anyone to accomplish that with the plane just minutes away from landing.
Meanwhile, the other passengers split into two camps. Some, displaying admirable composure—or perhaps still half-asleep at that hour—tried to inject a little common sense into the situation.
“Calm down, everyone! It’s just a cat!”
Others, less convinced that everything was under control, demanded immediate action.
“Catch it! Catch it!”
I tried to calm her down, but it was no use. The passenger in seat 4A began fanning her, while a blonde woman in seat 6C, who appeared to be Mennonite, placed warm cloths on her forehead, as though we were attending to a lady on the verge of fainting in a fifteenth-century drawing room.
The scene was worthy of a comedy.
The flight attendants were doing everything they could to calm everyone down, but the cabin had turned into a little theater of the absurd. Amid the crew’s instructions, cries of alarm, and voices calling for calm, the cat remained the undisputed star of the show, even though no one seemed to know exactly where it was.
My seatmate, for her part, showed no signs of regaining her composure. To her, the animal was neither a lost pet nor a frightened feline. It was a four-legged, whiskered allergy bomb, capable of appearing at any moment and brushing against her with a single strand of its fur.
Just as the tension reached its peak, a shout rang out from somewhere near row 25, restoring the will to live to half the cabin.
“We’ve got it! We’ve caught the cat!”
The announcement came from a young man who sounded as satisfied as someone who had just resolved an international crisis. I don’t know whether anyone applauded, but the news was received as though a bomb had just been defused. The fugitive had been located and captured.
After four hours of waiting at Viru Viru, you would think you had exhausted your quota of absurdities for the night. But no. Life—and airport life in particular—always finds a way to surprise us.
I had left Santa Cruz in a torrential downpour, endured the delay, survived the ritual of endless queues, and suffered the misfortune of the middle seat. And now, just as I was about to arrive in Bogotá, I found myself trapped in an airborne comedy starring an escaped cat and a woman convinced that a single hair could send her straight to the emergency room.
By that point, I no longer knew what had been more unbearable: the wait, the seat, or my neighbor’s screams during landing.
The only thing I knew for certain was that, that night, I had not simply traveled from Santa Cruz to Bogotá. Without meaning to, I had journeyed through every stage of the absurd.
And I was still left with one unanswered question: how had that cat managed to escape from its carrier?
Perhaps I’ll never know. Maybe its owner doesn’t know either. No one offered a convincing explanation. And perhaps that’s for the best. Some mysteries lose their charm when someone tries to solve them.