It was strange: the two of us, both accused and both victims. Both deprived of freedom.
“It would be quite stupid if we both ended up in prison.”
“More stupid still if you’d both ended up dead, which is how these fights usually end up, isn’t it? Don’t worry, you still have an advantage over him. He can’t claim victory yet. The prisons of the world are full of people who, basically, didn’t want to do it. Chance and bad luck are the limits of free will. I exclude that other percentage of bastards who on the other hand did what they did in full knowledge. For them it’s the opposite: prison is a way to postpone their natural death, with half a dozen bullets between their chest and their back, when ninety-three percent of their internal juices spill out onto the asphalt and happily flow into the sewers, where they’ll be able to mix with the shit of the city.”
I thought again about my cellmate.
“Did they put him with me because he’s Colombian?”
Pedro slapped one of the sides of the bed.
“What questions you ask, friend. How should I know? Maybe some little genius said: hey, what a coincidence, these two sons of bitches are from the same country, right? Let’s put them in the same room and see what happens. I’m sorry, I’m imitating, I don’t know anyone who speaks like that.”
“I know, Pedro. I know your style.”
We got to the cell and the priest was sitting beside the bed, reading the Bible. His face really was very inflamed. His right eyelid was a purple mass and it wasn’t very clear if a black, bloody thing in the middle was the eye.
Seeing me he contracted the muscles of his face, as if saying, ouch, what a thrashing they gave this one.
“I heard you’re Colombian.”
The priest looked up, surprised.
“Yes, and what else were you told?”
“That you were brought here because they were going to lynch you.”
“Forgive me for not standing, and were you told why they wanted to lynch me?”
“Yes.”
He showed me his arm, which was in a suspensory bandage.
“You see how far the hand of the devil reaches. And what happened to you?”
“I had a fight in a bar, the other person was badly hurt. It wasn’t my fault.”
His left eye moved up and down, examining me.
“From Bogotá?” he said.
“Yes, but I’ve been living outside Colombia for years.”
“Almost better, although I confess something, I couldn’t. My country is the most beautiful there is in this world and if the Lord put me there, it was for a reason.”
I tried not to contradict him.
“Do you know any other countries?”
“Not many, apart from this shithole here, forgive my language. But I don’t need to know any others, what for if I live in the best? I went to the United States and look at it: in the hands of the Jews, and with a black man as president who’s a friend to the Muslims.”
Just then his male nurse came to take him away. They had to take a statement from him.
As he went out he said to me:
“Father Ferdinand Palacios, at your service.”
Soon afterwards Pedro came to take me out to the exercise yard. Apparently my treatment required a little sun and wind.
“What do you think of your cellmate?”
“He’s friendly, but strange.”
“I advise you not to judge him. If you’re going to have to share a room with him the best thing is to look for his good side. Everyone has a good side.”
“He seems to be in a pretty bad condition,” I said.
“He’s hurt, that’s why he’s here. If they agree to extradite him, he’ll serve his sentence in Colombia.”
“I’d rather be in a different cell, or alone.”
“That’s a privilege, but don’t be alarmed. This hotel has very good security. Nothing will happen to you. Your case is going through the normal channels, and while that teacher’s still breathing, there won’t be any changes. Ask the priest to pray for him, it might help.”
18
That whole week, Araceli kept sending me messages. In one she said: “Experiencing this love with him has given me back the confidence I’d lost, and I feel stronger now. I think I can even understand his affair with that little bitch. I just needed confirmation about myself. Thank you, my darling.”
Another day, I was in a medieval literature class—it was about Count Lucanor, I remember—when I received another of her messages: “Sweetheart, we just fucked three times in the Jacuzzi, I never even got that when I was his girlfriend! Forgive me for telling you. I know you understand me. I love you.”
My relations with these two women, Doctor, led me to think about myself. Both were frivolous and a little crazy, but they lived with an intensity I’d never known. I felt as if I was outside the world and started to think that the way they loved was normal. Of course, poetry helped me formulate the right questions, but also told me that I didn’t have any answers. Life had been needlessly cruel, expressing a wickedness that, when it came down to it, could only be in people. A wickedness that hovers in the air and suddenly chooses you at random. It’s not personal, I’m just a grain of sand, but how can any kind of faith be feasible when God has gone and there’s nothing to replace him? Those were the questions. I wrote and wrote, hoping to find answers. If there’s nothing at the end of the road, what can give light to the heart of man?
I spent nights and nights like that.
What were my sacrifices? what rituals? I wept for no reason, standing by the window, looking at the rain. Seeking the calming effect of the rain. I stood in front of the mirror and insulted myself. I undressed and hit myself. One night the doorman knocked at my door to tell me that the neighbors had heard cries, a strange moaning. I told him everything was fine. A strange Manuela was emerging, a mutant creature with scales, capable of surviving without clean air; an animal feeding on garbage, able to perpetuate itself in a world of wild beasts. Being that way, I told myself in one of the poems, the true monster was me, and so what salvation could I aspire to? Life itself was showing it to me, with its constant trials and brutal messages. I had it in front of my nose, on the page: it was poetry itself. This is how I summed it up (in a third poem): the ruthless impulse that had torn me away from life was the very same one that now fed into my only possible salvation. Humiliation, contempt, vileness, shame, and dishonor. Meanness and derision. I knew all these things because I had lived through them all. My eyes were like the windows of a solitary rocket about to explode in space. Through them, I could look at the world and, perhaps, feel protected. Closer to something that might resemble God, but wasn’t God. I could even fake a smile, a grimace that to everyone out there looked like a smile.
Days and nights passed, I don’t know how many. I remained vigilant, devoted to writing. I wandered naked and dirty through the apartment. I ate out of a big pan of rice that I’d cooked and from which I scooped whole mouthfuls with my hand. I drank water by sticking my mouth up against the faucets of the dishwasher and sucking it from there. I defecated and urinated. I slept on the carpet in the corner of the living room. I masturbated with a cucumber and then ate it. I looked at the rain through the window for hours, the wet rooftops of the city, and the people down there, that noisy mass in which the demon of adversity lay hidden. I felt cold and tried to imagine how every morning would be on this cold plain. I watched flies buzzing against the windowpane before squashing them. I became cruel to the little creatures that inhabited my world. I was the great predator.
I recovered my animal strength.
I wrote and wrote until something told me: it’s over, now it’s ready.
You’ve finished. It was a strange voice.
I was exhausted and went to sleep.
The next day, which was Saturday, at six in the
morning, my cell phone rang hysterically until it made me jump. Who could be calling at this hour?
Banal reality had remembered me.
Damn, I said to myself seeing her name on the screen, it’s Rafaela. I felt miles away from her. What could have happened to that silly girl now? I was holding the telephone in my hand and by the time I made up my mind to answer it had already gone to voicemail, so I closed my eyes again. My pillow was still warm. The telephone rang again and I thought, should I answer? Calls at such an early hour are the devil’s work. I reduced the volume to zero, but then it started vibrating.
No, I said, no and no. I’ll call her later, after a good breakfast, when I’m fully awake.
That was worse, because after twenty minutes it was the entryphone that rang, again and again. I had no other remedy but to pick up. The doorman said: Señorita Rafaela is here for you. Shit, I thought, that fucks up everything. Let her up, I said. What stupid story could she have come with?
Opening the door, I found her in tears, had something happened to her the previous night? I took her over to the couch and said, breathe deeply, calm down, I’ll make us some coffee and we’ll talk, okay?
She hadn’t stayed up all night and she hadn’t taken drugs, quite the contrary. She brought with her the smell of soap and a recent shower. I poured the coffee and grabbed some cookies. I went with them to the living room and found her still crying.
“That son of a bitch has gotten me pregnant!” she suddenly burst out.
Shit, I said to myself.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“I’m already quite late and last night, when I looked at the calendar, I said to myself, shit, so late? Twenty days. I got scared and went this morning to buy one of those tests they sell in drugstores. I did three different tests and all three were positive.”
She showed me the little plastic sticks with the red mark; I didn’t know much about these things but it must have been like she said.
“What are you planning to do?” I said. “Aren’t there clinics for that here in Bogotá?”
“For having an abortion?”
She said it with total contempt, as if the complete sentence was: “That’s what hookers and poor women do, those who have sex when they’re drunk or on drugs, not a beautiful rich girl like me.”
So I corrected myself and said:
“I mean, termination of pregnancy.”
She started crying again, took out her cell phone, and turned it on, angrily, nervously, as if waiting for something.
“The worst of it is that the bastard hasn’t sent me a single damned message since he left for Europe, unless that old bitch confiscated it! Do you think that’s possible?”
I said maybe he was somewhere without a network. Or maybe he lost it and had to buy a new one and didn’t know her number.
“What, like there’s no Wi-Fi in London or Paris? He hasn’t gone to the fucking African jungle. And if he lost it he could have sent me an e-mail, couldn’t he? or used Messenger, he doesn’t need to have my number for that!”
I didn’t have any other arguments, so I said:
“And why don’t you write to him and tell him?”
That also annoyed her. I had the feeling she’d come to me because she needed someone to yell at.
“Me? He’s the one who went away and left me stranded! I’m not writing to him no matter what he does to me, the bastard.”
I looked at my watch: it was barely eight in the morning. It wasn’t a good idea to offer her a drink.
“You should go to the gym and stop thinking about it,” I said.
That wasn’t a good idea either.
“Like it’s so easy to stop thinking! I’m pregnant by a son of a bitch who’s vanished into thin air, how can you think I should go to the gym?”
I’d run out of ideas.
“Would you like a drink?”
“I’m pregnant!” she cried furiously. “I can’t drink alcohol.”
Then she thought better of it and said, okay, what the hell, do you have rum and Coke? But have one with me.
I poured two Cuba Libres and we drank them slowly. It did her good, because after a while she stopped her yelling.
“I can’t tell my mother,” she said, “let alone my sisters. You’ll keep it secret, won’t you?”
My cell phone vibrated and I froze.
“Answer it,” she said, “I don’t mind.”
I looked at the screen: it was another message from Araceli. A photograph from the elevator on the Eiffel Tower. The note said: “It scares me to be so happy, and I miss you, my sweet girl. ILU.” There was no sign of the husband. I closed the messages and switched off the phone.
“Who’s writing to you at this hour?” she asked. “Your boyfriend?”
“No,” I said, “a friend from Cali. Nothing important.”
We served ourselves another Cuba Libre and she asked if she could hear some music. She took off her shoes and stretched out on the couch.
“This is a nice apartment,” she said, “do you rent it or is it your family’s?”
“I rent it, I got it very cheap. It belongs to a relative of my mother’s.”
“You’ve never told me anything about your family or your life,” she said, “do your parents live in Cali? Do you have brothers and sisters?”
“I don’t like talking about it,” I said. “I’m sorry, can we talk about something else?”
“Oh, sure, I’m sorry.”
She took a long slug from the glass and lay there looking at the ceiling.
“It’s really nice here, and very well located,” she said. “No sweat, if you don’t want to talk about your family I understand, I also hate to be asked certain things.”
She paused, then looked up again at the ceiling.
“What do you think he’s doing right now?”
“That depends,” I said. “Do you know where he is?”
“I think he’s still in London, he told me the conference lasts until the end of the month.”
“He’s probably in some meeting, bored, reading papers or taking notes. Maybe he’s thinking about you, or he’s in a store buying you something.”
“I don’t think so,” she said, “with that skinny witch he won’t have time for anything, unless he makes an excuse and gets away from her. But she won’t let him out of her sight for even a second. If she wasn’t famous too, I could tell you who she is. In fact, when you find out you’re going to say . . . What?!? I wish I could tell you, believe me.”
“I understand, don’t worry. It’s best you don’t tell me anything.”
Once again, she took out her cell phone and looked at it, this time with a degree of tenderness. Outside it was drizzling, the wind was making the branches of the trees knock together. It was a cold but mild morning. Somewhere not very far away, a bird sang.
“Do you really think I should tell him?” she said. “Why not? After all, he is the father. I’ll have to tell him sometime.”
“It’s up to you,” I said.
“Yes, but you gave me the idea. If you were pregnant and in love, what would you do? I mean, obviously if the same thing happened to you that happened to me.”
I thought about it. The idea was so alien to my life that it had almost never entered my mind, not even as a hypothesis.
“I’d make up my mind myself whether or not to keep it, before telling him anything, because if the man’s married it’s most likely he’ll want you to get rid of it. Especially if he already has children.”
Rafaela sat up abruptly on the couch. She looked at me.
“How do you know he has children?”
“No,” I said, keeping my cool, “it’s just a guess. Married men have children.”
“Oh, okay.”
I swallowed my saliva. I had to be more carefu
l not to put my foot in it. Fortunately she was so engrossed in her story that a moment later she’d forgotten all about it.
“Do you think I have to decide alone?” she said, caressing the screen of her cell phone. “I guess it depends, because if he’s also in love, as he’s told me so many times, he’s bound to be happy about it. It would have been nice to receive the news together.”
“Only you can know that,” I said.
Still looking up at the ceiling, she took another sip of her Cuba Libre and said:
“He was the one who came looking for me and from the start he behaved very well, like a real gentleman. Things between us happened very quickly, and I was like, really surprised to see that the weeks went by and he kept calling me, and then he started taking me with him when he had to travel. We went to Lima, Mexico, Panama. I love traveling with him.”
She paused for a moment, took a sip from her glass and continued.
“I’d had a boyfriend for six years, but at that time I was very confused and had asked him for a break, time to think: that’s why I was free when I met him. When my boyfriend came back and said, Rafi, darling, how much longer are you going to think? I didn’t know what to do because I was already into the other guy, so I said to him: look, I don’t want to continue, you’re a terrific person and I love you, but no, do you understand me? He begged me, cried. He asked me if there was someone else, and of course, you never say that, especially not in a case like mine, so I said again, no, you don’t understand, I’m going through a big change right now, I’m not ruling it out in the future, Jimmy, that was his name, so don’t be too upset, relax for now, all right? I have to go through this alone. I prefer you not to be around because I don’t want you to suffer, I love you too much for that, and I respect you too much, do you understand me? He didn’t understand a damned thing obviously, but I got him off my back after three boxes of Kleenex. When he left my place, I forgot him after two minutes, and you know what the hardest part was? Changing the fucking favorites on my cell phone!”
We laughed. She wasn’t as stressed now as she had been.
“Look, if you want my advice, I’d say don’t keep it,” I said. “Don’t bring something like that into your relationship, because as far as I can see your relationship isn’t about making a home together but about being boyfriend and girlfriend, traveling and having fun. He’s with you because he wants to recapture his youth, and that’s fine. Take it easy, take it for what it is, and if it continues you’ll know. How many women end up alone and with kids because the man gets scared off? You’re young, and having a child is a big burden to carry for the rest of your life.”
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