The next day they said goodbye.
They never saw each other again and it’s possible that he never even knew her name, and when a few months later she discovered she was pregnant, instead of worrying, as the other militants did, she felt very happy, her face shone like a moon, because that thing, so new and strange, that was now growing inside her had been engendered the same night Bergoglio told her that strange story, there in Cordoba, in the now-defunct Hotel Contemporáneo, a story she never managed fully to understand but which she kept with her all her life, and that’s why when Bergoglio was made Pope she said to me, I always knew your father wasn’t of this world, and now you see, I was right, and anyway, that’s the story, nine months later I landed on this planet, I was brought up modestly and affectionately until, in my adolescence, I also began to hear strange communications, voices that arrived from afar, as if from other worlds, as if they had traveled through long and exhausting spaces, from a distance in which the past or the memory of the Earth may still be observing us and trying to warn us.
That’s where I come from, Consul. And it’s why I talk to my people from dark and deserted roads that nobody ever goes down. Words travel and have to be transmitted, and these words speak of rescue, of protection, of care. The planet is sick.
Much has already been lost in the world. My father and I are fighting for something similar, but from different trenches. He can’t do what I do, because he is defending a god who speaks to me not as a god, but as a man. The difference between my father and me, Consul, is that in the story of the hooded men he chooses the second ending and I choose the first. Mine are the bullets and his the mirrors. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do when I’m ready to go into action, it’s very simple: acquire the means and the theoretical and practical training for a fighter to be born inside every person. That appears banal and simple, but it’s fiendishly difficult. There’s a Jewish proverb I frequently quote: “When you know the right thing to do, the hard thing is not to do it.” That proverb offers us an optimistic image of man, I know, maybe too optimistic, as if his nature tended toward goodness, which isn’t always true, but anyway, I prefer an unlikely but possible utopia to a depressing reality. Am I a romantic? Maybe so. Hating evil is a romantic experience because it implies being alone to face the universe. And in that solitude there are no gods or theories, only memory, only the impulse of life and the throb of the present. When you put your hand gently on the earth and leave it there for a while, you can feel it vibrate, because down there many things are gestating. This is the truth, the only one we really have. Life and the past and the very memory of the stratified world turns to liquid or stone. Like touching a child’s brow to find out if he has a fever, that is how I touch the earth. In some twenty thousand years there will be a new ice age and all this that we see will go to hell, did you know that, Consul? What we are experiencing now is a thermal period in which temperatures go from 0 to 100 degrees, sometimes more, sometimes less, but I use those figures because they are what allow human life to exist, at least in the terms in which we conceive of life. But very soon everything we know will be covered by a layer of several miles of ice, and the sounds of the world will be the sounds of ice, the inner phantasmagorias of ice, because the mountains and the seas will be trampled flat by that colossal weight, and in contracting, the tectonic plates will shift, and when finally everything thaws, what will the world look like? There’s no way of knowing, we don’t even know if human life will reappear. Evolution will have to start over again from scratch.
That’s why we must protect what we still have left, as I keep saying in my lectures. It may be a losing battle, but we must go out into the field and wage it all the same, because the life of man is shorter than the life of the planet. Inside everyone, good must triumph over evil, even after the tracer bullets finish everyone off and there is nothing to be done. To die and disappear without leaving a trace is the destiny of everything that lives, but we must continue to climb stubbornly up that road to the top of the hill, where the temple is. Sometimes being good consists only of being able to forget about death. Of course you know what free will is, don’t you? The possibility for humans to choose between good and evil, which is what allows evil to exist. If it’s true that man tends toward goodness, why does he turn to evil? Because evil is also human and comes from what I call “the desire to switch off the radar.” It’s refusing to listen to the voice telling you: don’t go there, don’t go out tonight, don’t do that. People who ignore the nature of good switch off their radar, and they switch it off because they want to, they want to hit the rocks. You mustn’t feel bad about it. Freedom consists of being able to choose evil, even knowing the consequences, do you understand me? The world is full of sons of bitches, if you’ll pardon the expression, who, knowing full well what they were doing, chose to be sons of bitches. What can I tell you about the humanoid Muslims or the yellow rice eaters? They didn’t choose to be born where they were born, but when you put a knife to an old lady’s throat or hit a man when he’s down, when you set off a bomb where there are innocent people, aren’t you one big son of a bitch? If you don’t realize it, it’s worse, because that means that as well as being a son of a bitch you’re an idiot, right? Some even celebrate it, they’re filled with joy and praise already obsolete gods. All gods are obsolete.
The yellows seem quieter, the Japs, for example, but just look at them when things turn and the tide rises . . . Sword, knife, dagger, they kill with whatever’s around! The other countries in Asia hate them for the things they did in the past. Islands always want to build empires, don’t they? I won’t even mention the Chinese. Have you seen, the police there lock you up for any little thing and then just shoot you in the back of the head. And on top of that they’re Communists, which is what started all this . . . So what I say, man, is this: everyone in his own little house and everyone’s happy. I’m quite serious. Because when you look at it, the world isn’t as big as it seems. If we start messing up other people’s houses, this is going to explode before too long and in a more violent form than has been predicted. That’s why it’s necessary to fight and the hour has come.
I repeat: we’ve already lost Europe, we still have America, and make no mistake, when I say America I’m talking about the whole of America, not just the United States, they stole the name from us and want us to just fold our arms and do nothing. America is the kingdom of our ancestors and we’re going to cleanse it of scum and other scourges. I’m talking, unfortunately, about human beings. The thugs, the conspirators, the drug addicts, and the amnesiacs of religion, especially if they’re Muslim or Jewish fanatics, but Christians, too. Out of our republic!
I’m not saying we have to kill them, no, that whole Hitler thing wouldn’t go down well today; it’s enough for them to pack their things and go; some to their cathedrals of hate, the others to pray in their deserts or their bloodstained synagogues. I don’t care. And for the yellows to leave our air, to wash their hands for the last time and go back to their genetically modified rice fields and their jungles of smog and their polluted rivers. Leave us our clean America so that we can live in peace and enjoy what remains of the world, with pure water and green fields and blue seas. I’m already putting together a network of fighters. It’s a new crusade, call it what you like. I’m doing it because it’s necessary. The principle of this, I say to you, isn’t even political or religious.
It’s a bacteriological matter.
9
Ever since the international coalition led by the United States through NATO killed Fadhil Ahmad al-Hayali, Islamic State’s second-in-command, the strategy of bombing targeted areas grew, with remarkable results, and so the warplanes with their enormous firepower blew up factories and arms depots, strategic roads, bridges, as well as “safe houses” or the offices of important leaders—sometimes with lodgers, colleagues, and family—which kept the Islamists of Mosul on their toes, changing shelter daily, since so many hits, with such s
pecific targeting of what were supposedly secret locations, could only mean that someone on the inside was betraying them, a thought that plays on the nerves of any organization.
The response was a whole series of Islamist attacks on various European cities. A rifle attack on a gas station on a highway in Germany, which left two dead. A car bomb in a parking lot in Antwerp and three more explosions in Holland. According to reports, the intelligence efforts of the French police had managed to prevent nineteen attacks in just three months. The tragic events at the Bataclan in Paris were a declaration of war on the West and, incidentally, turned ISIS into the best ally of the European Far Right. But because this Madrid attack involved an embassy, it promised to be the most ambitious. That was the general view of the pundits who succeeded one another at a vertiginous rhythm on the current affairs shows on TVE, sometimes refuting, sometimes contradicting each other. They came from all over Europe and throughout the world. It was as if an army of experts, graduates of Harvard and Oxford, specialists in war, had been waiting for this crisis, which for most of them was more than predictable.
I switched off the TV and tried to read, but it was impossible. The wait was proving to be unbearable. Then I heard knocking at the door and my heart skipped a beat. Could it be her? I went slowly to the door and looked through the peephole. I saw a chambermaid, standing by a cart filled with bags of clothes, holding a hook in her hand.
“Yes?” I said.
“Laundry service, señor, your shirt is ready.”
I opened the door, what shirt? The woman checked her slip and said, oh, I’m sorry. It’s for 721.
Again, night was falling, and the noise of the city had increased.
Cities, like jungles, echo when night falls. It’s the moment when the animals come out of their caves and go on the prowl. They look for food and mates, which, collectively, produces a great din. That’s what Madrid was like when I decided to leave the hotel, louder, noisier. People walking along yelling into their phones, fixing dates, announcing visits. I watched that hullaballoo without feeling part of it, but eventually a certain nostalgia for my life in Spain prevailed. I thought I might go to the Cervecería Alemana on Plaza de Santa Ana.
As I headed in that direction, what I’d been dreading happened: every corner from Carrera de San Jerónimo all the way to Puerta del Sol, and then Calle Espoz y Mina, which thirty years ago was a sinister place, brought with it a whole series of images, of distant memories. On Plaza del Ángel I saw the Café Central and felt a stab in the pit of my stomach. I had been living in Delhi when I read the news of the death of Antonio Vega, the singer from the group Nacha Pop, which I’d heard so many times in that Café Central, although not strictly speaking in the bar itself, but from the balcony of the building opposite, where I spent a season. A slate board on the sidewalk would announce: “Today—Nacha Pop,” written in white chalk.
Then I reached Plaza de Santa Ana by the corner of the Hotel Reina Victoria, which I never entered and whose windows I was in the habit of looking at, three decades ago, when I would go with my Argentinian friends to sell leather masks on that same square. In those days, selling on the streets wasn’t prohibited. I would look at the windows of the Reina Victoria and imagine scenes of sophisticated, seductive women, with long legs, in front of their mirrors, washing themselves, or stepping out of the shower wrapped in fluffy white towels and getting dressed very slowly before going out to dinner in some exclusive spot in Madrid.
Despite the crisis and the embassy siege, there were streams of people on the streets, an incredible hustle and bustle. Hadn’t the pundits said that people were nervous? The Spanish tend to overdo things, and when all is said and done, Madrid is one big bar. It’s many other things, of course: a huge bookstore, an enormous boxing ring. A call center, too. Everyone was carrying a cell phone glued to their ear, shouting away.
“You’ve got a lot of nerve, you bitch!”
“Where are you? I don’t see you!!”
“ . . . no, but listen, now she comes and tells me that I have to tell Lucía, and why the hell should I tell Lucía? and then she goes and dumps me . . . ”
Yelling into that sacrosanct piece of equipment seemed to be the great national pastime, maybe to keep silence at bay at all costs; as if falling silent endangered their lives and was seen as a kind of surrender; as if forcing your foolish chatter on other people was a new human right. Was silence outdated, démodé?
Suddenly, from high up, a powerful spotlight swept quickly over the square. It was the helicopter again. The problem hadn’t gone away! But the people around me seemed absorbed in other dilemmas, in the demanding effort to have a good time and forget what didn’t matter.
I was lucky to find one of the few outside tables of the Cervecería Alemana free, and I sat down and continued looking at the Hotel Reina Victoria with its purple lights. I ordered a beer, a portion of calamari, and another of tortilla. Then another beer, and a third. The food in Madrid is delicious and the body puts on a special effort to make room for it. Ah, the flavors! The adolescent who had lived here three decades ago asked, through me, for a shot of whiskey and another beer. The waiter, sweating, repeated the order:
“A beer, a shot of JB, and another portion of calamari.”
Spain, Spain.
“And one of croquettes!”
This last cry seemed to come from a long time ago, from the days of the Café Comercial on Glorieta de Bilbao. Although the bar I most frequented in my youth was the Blanca Doble, on Calle Santísima Trinidad, in the Chamberí district. It was opposite that bar, at number 9 of that street, that I lived for five years, all the time I was at the university. I shared an apartment with the young poet—now dead by his own hand—Miguel Ángel Velasco.
The JB and the beer arrived. And with them, more memories. Some happy, some sad. Others simply very sad, with that strange sadness that’s a mixture of nostalgia and an awareness that you can never go back. Thinking about my neighbor—and, in those years, also brother—the poet Miguel Ángel Velasco, my mind made another leap: now I was in Barcelona, in September 2011.
More than just remembering, I saw what happened that day as if on a Moviola:
I’m strolling amid the shelves of the Central Bookstore, I stop, read the spine of one book, open another, check the alphabetical order. I’m looking for two things: the complete poems of José María Panero, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. I’m doing this, skimming over titles, when something on the table where the new books are draws my attention: La muerte una vez más, by Miguel Ángel Velasco. I open it to look at the photograph on the flap, that face of his that was always so theatrical. Then the biographical information, but as I read it I feel dizzy and the bookshop starts to spin around me. The text begins by saying:
“The untimely death of Miguel Ángel Velasco on October 1, 2010, at the age of 47, moved both the world of poetry and . . . ”
“Another beer with a shot of JB,” I tell the waiter.
“Something else to eat?”
“No, just the drinks.”
“Coming right up.”
I was moved to tears again, and made a leap to another date: now it’s September 18, 1985, when I landed for the first time in Madrid. I was nineteen. More than anything else in the world, I longed to write novels, and the only thing that would keep me close to them, or so I thought, was to study something like Hispanic Philology. Looking for a place to live, I came across an ad in the newspaper Segunda Mano that said: “Double room in shared apartment for rent.” It was at 9, Calle Santísima Trinidad and I set off to look at it. It was a furnished apartment on the fourth floor, with two adjoining rooms and a balcony overlooking the street. No telephone. The price was good and the location was perfect, so I decided to take it. The owner, an old lady from La Rioja named Visitación Isazi, told me: “The other young man who lives here is a poet from Palma de Mallorca, you’ll g
et along well.”
That same night I met him.
He swept in like a hurricane, knocked at my door, introduced himself, and asked if I had heard his telephone ringing (he had one). I told him I had, several times. Being a native of the very provincial city of Bogotá (“a young man pure of heart, recently arrived from the provinces”), I had never seen anybody like him: long curly hair, riding boots, a pink pirate shirt open to the chest, necklaces, rings, bracelets. He entered his part of the apartment (also two adjoining rooms, larger and more comfortable than mine, with decor that looked like something from a film by Alex de la Iglesias) and immediately, through a sealed door between our respective sitting rooms, I heard him say on the telephone:
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