Colombia is the setting of Jane Smith and John Smith’s first meeting: a country in political turmoil where the assassination of a local politician sends crowds into the streets and drives both future spouses toward the same hotel bar. Recalled years later from their separate perspectives, the encounter establishes a pattern central to their story: a shared past narrated through different, sometimes inconsistent accounts.

Setting and First Encounter

Six years before Jane tells her account, she is staying at the Americana Hotel in Bogotá on a routine assignment for her employer. The city is in upheaval: politicians are being killed, soldiers regularly storm buildings, and police loot hotel rooms. When news spreads that Sancho Varrón, a powerful local politician known as the Barracuda, has been shot, panic spills into the streets.

Jane recognizes the danger in the scene around her. Although she has dark hair and speaks excellent Spanish, her clothes mark her as an American tourist; with the crowd frightened and the weather gathering into dark storm clouds, she decides that staying outside is unwise. She makes her way through the people and slips into the hotel, where she sees a man calmly watching the disorder from the bar.

John’s version places him at that same hotel bar, watching the city descend into chaos when a bellboy rushes over with news of the Barracuda’s shooting. He says he was in Bogotá for work, ostensibly on appointments for his engineering firm, and was accustomed to traveling. The two accounts converge on the hotel, the political crisis, and the assassination announcement, making the unrest the circumstance that brings them into one another’s orbit.

A Shared Place, Differently Remembered

The accounts do not align perfectly in chronology. Jane places her meeting with John six years before she narrates it; John recalls meeting Jane five years earlier. The discrepancy is not resolved in these recollections. Colombia therefore functions not only as the location of their origin story but also as the first visible sign that their memories of a shared event may differ.

The narration also gives the encounter a double perspective. Jane describes her wary passage through the crowd and her first sight of the composed stranger; John’s account begins with his own position at the bar and the news brought by the bellboy. What each remembers emphasizes a different approach to the same threshold moment: she enters the hotel seeking shelter, while he is already inside, observing the commotion.

Narrative Significance

The political crisis in Colombia supplies the pressure that makes the meeting possible. The couple’s first connection begins not in calm surroundings but amid reports of assassination, street panic, and the threat of being conspicuous in a hostile crowd. That volatile setting establishes the danger and improvisation that will continue to shadow their relationship.

Later scenes in the evidence move to domestic life and violent confrontations elsewhere, including disputes over salted butter, a carefully planned dinner, and the destruction of a kitchen during a fight. Against those sharply different settings, Colombia remains the remembered point of origin: the place where the Smiths first encountered each other, and where their incompatible tellings begin to complicate the story of how they became a couple.