Bogotá again, in August

We got back from Bogotá three weeks ago and my body clock is still off. I wake at five with the feeling that someone is calling me from the kitchen. Nobody is. It's Lyon, it's September, Claire is asleep, and the only thing in the kitchen is the coffee maker.

The four of us went, as we do every other year, for three weeks in August. August in Bogotá is the month of wind and kites, and the kids remembered that from last time: the field behind my sister's housing complex, the green mountains above the city, the string tangling round their fingers. We landed at El Dorado at night, after a stopover in Madrid and eleven hours of Tomás asking how much longer, in two languages. Outside the terminal the cold of the high plain hit me in the face like a greeting. Claire says I exaggerate, that it isn't cold in Bogotá. She doesn't get it. It isn't thermometer cold: it's a cold that smells of eucalyptus and rain on asphalt, and I don't feel it anywhere else in the world.

My mother

My mother is seventy-eight and lives alone in the same apartment in Chapinero where I was born, a third floor with no lift, which she defends as though it were a virtue. This time I found her smaller. I don't know how else to put it. She isn't ill, she talks the same, she gives orders the same, she still calls me "mijo" in that tone that works as well for a caress as for a telling-off. But she was smaller, and she went up the stairs holding the rail, and when she hugged me at the door the hug lasted one second longer than it should have.

On the second day she made ajiaco. I told her not to go to all that trouble, we could order some. She looked at me as if I'd suggested selling the apartment. She spent the morning peeling three kinds of potato, shredding the chicken, digging out the guascas she kept in an old jam jar. Inés sat on a stool by the counter to watch, and my mother explained everything to her in Spanish, slowly, pointing: this is the criolla, the little yellow one that falls apart and thickens the soup; this one is the pastusa; this is the corn. Inés nodded. I don't know how much she understood. It looked to me like all of it.

The city

Bogotá had changed, the way it always has when I go back, and so had I, and I'm never sure which of us changed more. The metro is finally visible now, its grey pillars marching along the Avenida Caracas, and everyone talks about it with scepticism and a little hope, which is how people from Bogotá talk about almost everything. There are buildings where there used to be houses. The corner bakery where I bought pan de bono and roscón is now a phone shop, and that hurt more than makes any sense. Several times I caught myself explaining things to Claire with an authority I no longer have, and turning the wrong way on streets I used to know by heart.

On the street people talk to me like a local until I open my mouth for too long. Then something gives me away, I'm not sure what: a word, a pause, the way I say thank you. A taxi driver asked if I was from Bogotá. I said yes. He looked at me in the rear-view mirror and said: "But you haven't been back in a while, have you?" No, I haven't.

What I brought back

In my suitcase I brought the usual: coffee, guava paste from Vélez, a bag of arepa flour that you can find here too but isn't the same because I didn't buy it there. And a jar of guascas my mother slipped in without asking, wrapped in a supermarket bag and then in one of Tomás's sweatshirts. So now I have two jars: this one and the one Fernando found for me before he left.

On our last night the two of us stayed up late in the kitchen drinking tinto. She asked me if I was happy in France. She'd asked before, but never like that, so straight. I said yes. It was true. She said: "Bueno." And then she said that next time, if I liked, we could come in December, for the novena. That the kids would enjoy it.

The jar of guascas is in the cupboard, next to the salt. I haven't opened it yet.