by Hector Abad
They began to see each other more often. Eva even decided to swim in the evenings several times a week. He had lost his wife a year earlier and was still depressed, eating badly, and very skinny. He told Eva she was the greatest comfort he’d ever had when he was at a moment in his life when everything seemed lost and on the verge of collapsing. The widow Caicedo, who was very devout, told her that one day, not long before meeting her, he was talking to a priest and friend, his confessor, and that the priest had asked him what he thought he’d do with his life now, without Cristina, his wife. And that he’d answered: “I’m going to open the windows so the Holy Spirit can come in.” And he told Eva that that’s just what had happened: “I opened the windows and in you came, the gift the Holy Spirit sent me.” Eva felt useful with him, and appreciated and loved, for the widower was incapable of living without a woman nearby, maybe because that’s the way Antioqueño men of his generation were: he had no idea how to boil an egg, how to make something pretty, how to arrange a house. Eva cooked for him, arranged flowers, helped him to choose new furniture, to hang nice paintings, to ease the fading, sad memory of his late wife. He invited her to a cabin he had in La Ceja, which Eva also helped him to decorate, and they read side by side, listened to concerts, watched movies. The cabin had something very special: Caicedo had put up hummingbird feeders all over the property, so the house was surrounded by hundreds of hummingbirds of all colors and all types. They were marvelous, like tiny holy spirits with their invisible wings, Eva said. According to her, the widower enjoyed music more than she’d ever seen anybody enjoy it, not even me or Papá. I witnessed it myself when they came to New York and went to hear a concert I played in and several operas. They prepared beforehand, and he patiently taught Eva what they were going to hear, so she’d enjoy it more. He was very sensitive and although Eva sometimes had to push him in a wheelchair, because he had a bad knee and couldn’t walk far (could only swim), she didn’t mind, because with him she grew, learned, filled a void that had been growing for a while from devoting the best years of her life to the concrete work of Anita’s business, to the family. And I thought that Eva, at last, was going to stay with him since she told me she loved him as she hadn’t loved anyone in the world. I saw him as old, worn out, ailing, that was my only doubt, but I don’t think I ever mentioned the widower’s age to her. After Mamá’s funeral, to change the subject, I asked Eva what had happened with him and she broke down and cried her eyes out, because she was actually living through two bereavements at once, one for Anita and another for Caicedo.
She told me that from the start they’d had problems about his political positions. Caicedo, deep down, in spite of being so cultured and sensitive, was also deeply conservative. He’d never been with a woman who thought for herself, who contradicted him and had clear and definite political opinions. He was right-wing, Eva told me, and he got enraged when Eva talked to him about the paramilitaries, told him what they’d done, about the chainsaw murders near La Oculta, things that he, like so many other people in Colombia of his class, didn’t want to hear. The widower’s friends were almost all ranchers or industrialists, and one time, at a party in Llanogrande, a general of the Fourth Brigade had arrived, with much pomp and ceremony, the same man who’d been at La Oculta with the paramilitaries, when he was a colonel. My sister, as a result of that, had a big fight with the widower. Eva, however, admitted that it hadn’t been the worst, but rather a pretext for her to leave him; that maybe what she hadn’t been able to stand up to was something stupider and more intimate: the social pressure. Even though she felt good with him, growing and learning, people kept telling her she should find someone younger. Anita herself said the widower was not going to be company for her in old age and that she was worried about dying and leaving her with him. Eva began to think, first, that she was incapable of being on her own, and at the same time that she should think of finding someone “more suitable” to satisfy other people’s expectations, basically because of the age difference, and how old he looked beside her. People despaired of seeing her so vital and cheerful and beautiful at the side of such an unattractive man, such a wreck, at least from outward appearances. Eva had been very upset, for on the one hand Caicedo brought her back to the cultural dreams of her youth (she felt as though she were finally getting to study what she wanted), but at the same time she realized, in spite of herself, that she didn’t have enough strength of character to stay with him, because of the pressure around her. And having given up for that reason made her even angrier, even sadder. Since there was no solution to the contradictions she felt, shortly before Anita’s death, she’d told her that she’d decided to leave him due to their ideological and political differences, and also to look for someone less old, who would last longer, though deep down she knew she was doing it simply and plainly due to pressure from others.
That had been her last relationship with a man, but in her lifelong search she’d had lots of other failures. Eva wanted to find in her lovers and husbands what she was lacking, but in the end the men never fulfilled her expectations. Maybe her bad luck was also owing to her good luck. “One soon gets sick of grazing…” Grandpa Josué used to say. I mean that, because she was so beautiful, she had far more choices than most, and as Anita always said, “the beauty desires the ugly girl’s luck.” When someone can always choose something else, it’s easier to make a mistake, because of the temptation to change and never resign yourself. That’s the syndrome of actresses and other celebrities. But Eva wasn’t a frivolous and light-hearted beauty, like some flirt; quite the contrary: she was the most serious and conscientious of the three siblings, the most reliable and definite, and she could be the most joyous when struck by happiness, and the most spirited and hardworking when she wanted, which was almost always. She hadn’t been lucky with men. And nor had she been lucky at La Oculta, for she had to overcome something that was perhaps more directed at Pilar – who spent more time on the farm – than at her. Since she’d almost been murdered there, she no longer trusted that land which we’d inherited as our own safe haven, our paradise without snakes, private and immune to the maliciousness of life. It was easier to leave a man than to get rid of an inheritance, which more than an inheritance was an idea, an illusion. Eva had decided not to attach herself to any man or to any country or any land or anything.
I met Jon at an exhibition. As I was wandering by the work, smiling at how bad I thought it was, drinking lots of the wine they give away for free at openings, suddenly a tall, handsome, distinguished man approached me. When I saw him an idea occurred to me which I disagreed with: I thought, unwillingly, and without telling anyone, that perhaps his incredible beauty and bearing had been obtained by the same system my grandfather and great-grandfathers had used to create their best horses: bringing together carefully chosen slaves and calculatedly breeding them, until almost creating a new human species, superior to ours. I immediately discarded this odious eugenic idea and meanwhile he was asking me, very kindly, in a very sweet voice, if I’d liked what I’d seen of the exhibition. My answer came straight from the gut and was as frank and imprudent as my secret thought had been: “Absolute shit, señor, but I suppose one shouldn’t say such things.” He laughed really hard and went to talk to another group without a word. A little while later I found out he was the artist.
I realized because I started talking to a friend about the artist’s name, Jon. I was telling her that in Antioquia the name Jon was very common, especially Jhon Jairo, with the H before the O, and I knew lots of Johns in the States, but no Jons without an H. Then she pointed to him with her chin, saying: “That’s him, maybe black people spell it without the H.” I looked and it was him, the same one I’d told that the show was shit. I wanted to hide from shame, turn invisible, go back in time, also because the man – in his multicolor African tunic – had struck me as handsome and sweet; I liked his mannerisms and his way of speaking, the elegant way he went from one group to another during the vernissage. After a w
hile I approached to take my leave and told him: “I’m very old-fashioned and don’t know much about art; I was born in some isolated mountains in South America and the news hasn’t yet reached there that art is like this nowadays.” He asked for my phone number and I was happy that he did, that I hadn’t offended him.
He called me the next day and we got along from the start. He also thought his art was shit, a farce, he said, but he explained that it was more or less what curators and galleries were asking for now: installations full of theories, philosophical or sociological elaborations, lots of boring stuff with found objects, but all wrapped up in sophisticated philosophical dressing. Grand words for very stupid ideas and very poor visual experiences. We agreed. That very night he took me back to his apartment – where he had some of his work that I loved, sculptures of penises and trees, all very erotic and phallic – and that very night what had to happen happened and it was bliss. He was as beautiful naked as clothed, and it was my first experience with a black man, which is also something I don’t really know how to explain, but it’s like returning to the African origins of our species, something darker, deeper, and more complete. I felt like I was back on the grasslands of the first men, or rather (perhaps I shouldn’t have thought this either) I felt like a woman on the primordial plains, and not like the sort of man I am. I’ll say something more, although it might sound arrogant: what Jon liked most about me, as he told me from the first day, was my skin, which is smooth, and the smell of my body, which according to him is something like basil, which he loves like nothing else. It was as if I liked the animal in him – and I was carnivorous – and he liked the vegetal in me – and he was vegetarian.
We had an open relationship for a long time, because that’s the way things were back then, and we went with the flow. When we met we were both very young, full of life, with the elated enthusiasm we were all feeling at being completely free for the first time in history. We didn’t think AIDS could touch us, and if it didn’t touch us – I think now – it was only by a miracle, because lots of our friends started to get sick, one after another. That scared us, and enraged us, for it was as if we were suffering from the curse all the most reactionary preachers in the United States had announced. Maybe out of fear of contagion, or the luck of having not been infected, or because we felt that a life like that, so extravagant, resembled the lack of seriousness and limitless disorder of contemporary art, that intellectual ostentation that preferred tangled theories to beauty, one day we distanced ourselves from the perpetual orgy, resolved to be faithful and to devote ourselves more to our work and to taking care of each other, and trying to be happy in moderation and not in abandon. He was the one who proposed it and I was in the perfect moment to receive the proposal. I know I have an Eva, but also a Pilar, inside me.
So in the summer of 1993, when Medellín was so violent that I almost never went there, we moved in together and started to live a New York working family lifestyle, a more bourgeois life, maybe, but also more serene and productive. Not complete fidelity, which unfortunately on my part never quite came about, especially when I went to Medellín and got together with my old friends from the scene, but at least an attempt at fidelity and complete loyalty to him. We no longer say yes to everyone, like before, but rather sometimes, not often, it happens that we’re unable to say no, even if afterward we feel bad for having said yes. Anyway, this is something I think inside, hidden within me, because, as far as I know, he has always kept his promise, and as far as he knows, so have I, because it’s better that way.
Jon’s apartment is on 115th near Lenox Avenue, not very far from Central Park. It’s on the third floor and was his parents’. He and his three brothers grew up there. When his father died, Jon took over the lease, which can pass from parents to children, for a ridiculous rent that would be absurd to give up in New York. It was a spacious, bright apartment that he’d renovated, knocking down walls, to make it into a loft. Both of us were a bit tired, almost astonished at having lived through those crazy years, those years of unfettered liberty, irresponsible and delicious years, about which it’s not worth going into detail because they’re very well known; I don’t think there’ve been many other times in the history of the world when there’s been so much liberty. And it had been exciting, and worth experiencing, but also horrible. I’m not nostalgic for those years. Jon and I decided to live differently, in a sort of island of calm, without being sanctimonious about it, strictly monogamous as far as possible. We gradually dropped the habit of fooling around on each other, first out of fear and later out of conviction, until the habit of fidelity settled on us, and it didn’t taste bad. Not that there weren’t lots of temptations, but we tried to avoid them. It wasn’t out of laziness or prudence or chastity that I began to be anchored to Jon. A person gets used to a body the way one gets used to a farm or a landscape: there is something comforting about always seeing the same thing every day: there is charm in routine, the way you appreciate a violin piece more that you’ve played and heard many times. As La Oculta will always be my home, the only place I feel is my own, joined to me like a limb, Jon is my other half, or I am his rib, in the rewritten bible of our times, the husband I want to have for the rest of my life. I don’t know the reason, but it’s as if my body and my head had decided without even thinking about it. That’s simply the way it is.
He has carried on being an artist. He doesn’t work at home, but has a studio near here, on 122nd. He makes artworks that sell for thirty thousand dollars, out of trash he finds in the streets of Harlem. Carefully Recycled Garbage, his last exhibition was called, the one he was setting up when Anita died, in roughly the same vein as the long-ago one where I met him. “A gigantic lie,” he says at night in bed, with the lights out, and although I can’t see his face in the darkness, I can see his ironic, sideways smile, his perfect teeth. He lives off that fallacy – which is a sort of nostalgia for the art of the crazy years – and bit by bit he’s become rich and cynical. The farce isn’t total, for he manages to give an aesthetic touch even to the most absurd, but it’s not exactly what he’d do if he felt less tied to what the galleries, the theorists of the academy, and museum curators ask for these days. Years ago we agreed that this is what the contemporary art world is like, a collective hallucination, a gigantic lie, but we resolved to live within these absurd rules, without shouting that the emperor had no clothes, and adapting to going with the flow, with what Venice and DOCUMENTA demanded. Jon was invited to participate in 1997, and in Kassel I helped him set up an installation of carved-up tree stumps and New Year’s Eve rag dolls – the kind they sell along the roadside in Antioquia in December, with sombreros, wearing old clothes, and covered in firecrackers – with old and new chainsaws hanging from the walls; it was very successful and articles came out talking about the experience of an Afro-American artist in the violent tropical Andes. On opening day, when the guests arrived, we had fifteen actors in paramilitary uniforms who started up their chainsaws in unison, and severed the figures filled with cotton soaked in red dye. It was like entering hell. It had a huge impact and since then he always gets invited to all the most important contemporary art fairs. A very famous critic praised the work saying that “installations of this kind reveal the materiality of the civilization in which we live, because they install all that otherwise would obtain no perdurability in the critical conscience of contemporaneity.” Ay, I can’t stand words that end in “ity,” but the attention was good for Jon. Since then he earns more; there are people ready to pay thousands of dollars for an old chainsaw with Jon Vacuo’s signature; I imagine they hang them in their living rooms, and explain what they mean. Frankly, although I understand the historical significance of objects, the social statement behind them, and I even helped him to plan it, it makes me laugh. I can’t imagine Pilar’s living room, or Mamá’s, or a corridor of La Oculta, with an old chainsaw hanging from a hook, with a piece of paper beside it, in garbled prose, explaining in dense paragraphs the importance of t
his work as part of the historical memory of conflict in Colombia. Jon says his only aim is to accumulate two million dollars and retire to do what he likes. Jon has become cynical and practical, but he doesn’t suffer the way I do, or ask himself so many questions.
I don’t know how much of that sum he’s saved up because he never shows me his bank statement. I know he spends a lot on his family, because he’s very generous and has many more nephews and nieces than I do, several of them unemployed or addicted to drugs. What I do know is that, for years, all I’ve had to say is: “Jon, I’m a little homesick. I want to go and see my mother, my sisters, and La Oculta.” He immediately goes to his computer and buys me a business-class ticket on a direct flight from New York to Medellín. It is, or was, the only luxury I allowed myself, three or four times a year, when nostalgia was killing me.