She was still relishing her moment of fame when the host, a complete unknown, delivered the news.
It was at five o’clock that afternoon that they’d discovered Daniel Claverie, forty-six years old, hanging beneath the dome of the telecommunications tower, his corpse tossed about by the autumn wind, in full sight of the cars stuck in traffic on boulevard Auguste Reyers. The viaduct’s demolition was underway, and at rush hour, when you entered the fray surrounding the boulevard, you never knew when you’d get out. In backseats, children wondered: Was it a statue? Santa Claus? A robber? More than an hour passed before the emergency paramedics arrived and managed to climb the tower and cut him down. Clav hadn’t left a note; he hadn’t known what to write.
Ecuador
BY ALFREDO NORIEGA
Ixelles
Translated from the Spanish by John Washington and Daniela Maria Ugaz
Dedicated to the memory of Samira Adamu, killed on a plane by Belgian police
There are toxic places. Everything speaks to us or against us.
—Henri Michaux
It wasn’t hard for me to go to Brussels; at least it wasn’t hard for me to leave Paris where I’d lived the past twenty-five years dogged by bad luck, or, as they say in my country, living from blunder to blunder, trapped in the inhuman drama of existence—what can I say, there’s probably no European city as cruel as the French capital. Which is why landing in Brussels was a relief. Our apartment was located in the district of Ixelles. There are a total of nineteen, I think, or twenty districts, I’m not sure, don’t have a clue, and I have little desire to check on Wikipedia just to avoid looking like an imbecile. Ixelles, in my newcomer’s eyes, was beautiful, cosmopolitan enough for me to feel at ease, but not so much that I felt ill at ease with the traditions of the Congolese or Moroccan families or, on the flip side, the niceties of the Eurocrats; both abound in Ixelles.
We lived in a house whose owner, an Italian who arrived in Belgium more than forty years earlier, had made his fortune with a roof renovation business. A man who exhaled hatred and tenacity, those basic ingredients of any entrepreneur. The proof of his success was his Porsche convertible, which slept in the garage. As we looked around at the house, he observed us with puppy-dog eyes; later, he’d ignore us, and what was more, I had the impression that he was set on making our lives impossible, but my wife, a Brit and a diplomat, had the sort of status that put a stop to his xenophobic impulses. A guy like me didn’t give him a good feeling, especially since I’d spend all day at home. We liked that house because it was close to everything my wife wanted: her work, our son’s school, and her best friends. To me it didn’t matter if we lived there or anywhere else, as long as I was with her and the little one, and far from Paris. From our balcony we could see the European Parliament, and near the horizon the Belgian flag waved over the Royal Palace.
I seldom went out. Sometimes I’d go down to Flagey Square and sit at Café Belga, a place whose only defect was being too trendy and packed with a clientele made up mostly of women who were so attractive and so inaccessible they’d make me nervous, which is why I’d only go when I could no longer bear my confinement. I’d read on our balcony, no matter the weather, which was usually rainy, and from there I’d observe the life of the city—or better said, the life of the neighborhood—without ever making out enough details to get any real idea as to who lived in the surrounding buildings. I intuited that one guy was an official who worked at the European Commission, that a group of people were an ordinary family, over there were a pair of students, a single woman, a single man—in short, the boring miscellany of any city in this piece-of-shit world we live in.
Below was a vacant lot abutting an abandoned house. Most mornings there was a kid, twenty-some years old, who would tag or paint on the walls. Street art isn’t my thing, I don’t understand how Banksy can rouse so much commotion, and above and beyond anything else, I hate art installations, the boring egocentrism of artists today. When he’d finish, the kid would put away his paints with great care, he’d use some product to wash his hands, he’d change his shirt, and then he’d leave. While he worked I’d pull out the binoculars and, forgive the hyperbole, take great pleasure in watching his naive strokes. I’m a creature of habit, or in any case, I’m repetitive; that’s why, in part, I do what I do: because there are no surprises in life, and if somehow I’m still surprised then it’s my fault and I’ll have to deal with it alone. That’s been the only way for me to distance myself from people and, though it seems contradictory, to get closer to their vacuity.
At three o’clock I’d pick up my son from school, only five minutes away from our house. For three hours we’d play, or watch TV, or I’d take him to the park, and sometimes when he’d close himself up in his childish world, I’d return to mine. My wife would get home at seven. Hearing her keys turn in the lock, my love for her would swell in my chest and remind me where I was standing and why. I’d have little to tell her, and yet, over dinner, I’d talk to her about my day, attempting to lend my trifles some meaning. She’d listen with the easy pleasure of someone whose days were spent confronting the giants of European politics, which is to say, spent in the limbo in which we’ve all chosen to live, approaching neither hell nor heaven. One day she’d be at a NATO event, another at a conference about youth unemployment; one week she’d be dealing with the Germans and the French who now threatened to abandon the Union. Deep down, human impotence seemed to dictate not only her fate, but the fate of us all.
One morning, after dropping my son off at school, I sat right down to my desk. I was hoping to see if the kid was around, but I had such a strong, almost violent urge to write that I was completely absorbed for three whole hours, as if I were a pilot flying through a storm (a bad analogy, I know—my apologies). When I finally got up I went to the balcony. The kid was there, but not alone; there were two cops thrashing him. Someone must have filed a complaint, I figured, one of those sons of bitches who proliferate in all parts of the world and don’t have anything better to do with their time than mess with the lives of others. The bigger of the two cops pulled out his truncheon and whacked the kid with it, the other cop caught him with pepper spray right in the eyes. It seemed they were overdoing it, but I guessed that the Belgian police were just as bestial as all police, and that was that. The kid covered his face with his hands and fell back. They whacked him with the club again. When he tried to defend himself, the cops unleashed themselves on him without holding back. I screamed, but the wind covered my voice. None of my neighbors’ heads popped out of their windows.
The kid collapsed. I went to look for my camera. When I got back, the cops had disappeared, leaving him sprawled on the ground. I left the apartment, running. I didn’t know how to get into the vacant lot. A wall encircled the empty house in front of it. I went back up to my apartment to see if I could locate an entrance. I couldn’t see the kid now, so I got my binoculars. There were no signs of him, or of the cops; just the first strokes of his painting on the wall. If he could get over the wall, I thought, I should be able to do the same.
Before heading back down I drank a glass of water since my throat was dry. I went and stood in front of the empty house; it was incredible how many abandoned structures there were, as if they were the city’s scars, or its sad memories. All the front windows had been boarded up, the front door too. At first glance, it seemed impossible to enter. Maybe the way to get in, I thought, was from the other side of the block. I checked it out. In the building on the opposite side of the abandoned house there was an open iron gate leading into a large patio. I went in. It was a little public park, which, from my window, I had thought was the interior courtyard of the building. I climbed up the wall that separated the lot from the abandoned building, and, dropping down, found myself inside.
The site, in some way, seemed like it mirrored my own life: chaos, abandon, a delicious sort of anarchy, confinement. I peered up. From this angle, my balcony, with its wicker armchair, looked set like a per
fect stage. You could even see a few of our pictures on the walls and a corner of my desk. The kid, then, must have known me just as well as I knew him. He probably waited for me before he started performing, probably saw me looking through my binoculars at his paintings. I went to the spot where he was beaten. There was a small bloodstain, two jars of paint, a broken bracelet. I grabbed the bracelet and put it in my pocket, then went home. I lay down on the couch and fell asleep.
I woke with a start, thinking I had slept past the time to pick up my boy at school, but no. I still had time to eat and take a shower.
The afternoon was a pleasant reminder that I still had a future and dreams ahead of me. My son was a little agitated, probably he’d had a bad day, a fight with a little friend, a scolding from his teacher, or maybe a stomachache. We watched TV and fell asleep together—a grave mistake, as he didn’t end up going to bed that night until much later, trampling on my few moments of tranquility with my wife, when we could talk together, make love, or just hold each other on the balcony like a couple of teenagers.
By ten we were finally alone. My wife was scared about the latest news that the extreme right had won elections in France. In all of Europe, she told me, the xenophobic and Nazi parties were about to achieve historic results. They’re hysterical, I said; the two words—Nazism and hysteria—had always been tied together for me, like conjoined twins sharing a single heart. We spent the night talking politics, wondering about our own destinies in this world without memory. We imagined ourselves on the beach in my country, eating fresh fish with fried plantains, building sand castles. I couldn’t tell her what I’d seen happen to the kid in the vacant lot; it seemed like it would dampen her night.
Though being witness to something like that would usually have unsettled me, I slept soundly. I woke up before my son started crying for his milk and went out to the balcony wrapped in a blanket to watch the sunrise. To my surprise I saw that the new painting, only started the day before, had been completed. I felt an enormous relief; Brussels, so devoid of angels and so full of waving flags, once again seemed like a beacon of hope. My morning proceeded as usual. I went out to the balcony a few times with the hope of catching sight of the kid. But I never saw him. I examined his painting through my binoculars, and it seemed to have a rougher style than usual, without the subtleties I’d seen in his work before—maybe a by-product of his encounter with the cops, or of having been finished in the dark.
My wife was tired when she came home from work. I told her what had happened the day before as we watched, on French TV, a sensationalist news story on the growing success of the extreme right.
You have to report it, she said to me.
But the kid came around, I explained, telling her about the finished painting. You shouldn’t let them get away with these things, she responded, and then she gave me the address of Committee P, which is the force that polices Belgium’s cops.
I fell asleep and had nightmares. I woke as early as I had the morning before, sat in the wicker chair, and again witnessed the day dawning before me. The painting was still there, without so much as a new brushstroke. On the way to school we walked past the police station of Ixelles, which is next to the Maison Communale, as they call the town hall in Brussels. I guessed that the cops I’d seen were based at this station. Two officers caught my eye, and they seemed harmless enough, consumed by their own apathy.
On my way back, I decided to go in. I walked up to the counter where a female officer was talking on the phone. When she hung up, I told her what I’d seen in the vacant lot. I spoke, I admit, hastily. Her eyes widened and, without saying a word, she motioned a coworker over. The coworker asked to see my ID.
I don’t have it, I said.
What are you doing here? he asked.
Nothing, I snarled; I don’t like it when strangers use the familiar pronoun tu with me.
The guy got rough, as if I’d somehow provoked him. He came around to my side of the counter. Take everything out of your pockets and put your hands up, he said.
Why? I haven’t done anything wrong.
I’m not asking what you’ve done, do what I say.
Sir, I replied, maybe I haven’t explained myself, but I’d like to report something.
The guy couldn’t hold out any longer; he grabbed me and slammed me against the wall, pressing his forearm into my neck. A sharp pain stabbed into my side as the officer prodded my ribs with his truncheon.
You’re going to calm down, he whispered in my ear, as if he were confessing something.
Yes, I said breathlessly.
He let go of me. I stood petrified. Regaining my breath. My name, where I lived, that I was the husband of a British diplomat—I told it all to him—and that my ID was back at my house, I was just on my way to drop my son off at school, which is why I didn’t have anything on me.
Get out of here, the officer said, we don’t want to see you around here again. He grabbed the collar of my shirt and pushed me into the street.
The sun, beaming brightly over the buildings, overwhelmed me. For a moment I lost my bearings. I started walking. A few yards ahead, as I reached a flower shop, the neighborhood became familiar once again. I spent the rest of the morning wandering the streets. Though I hate beer, I drank one at a bar whose name, under the circumstances, seemed rather ironic: le Sans Souci. I don’t know why, but it reminded me of Quito’s Capilla del Robo, with that colonial, baroque style that always manages to sadden me—I’ve never been able to distance myself from the horror and loss I see in those buildings. My city, I thought, buried by the Andes, trying to seem devout just so it could exist, exactly like I was doing now.
I went to fetch my little one. I avoided walking past the station. He, a creature of habit like me, didn’t understand why we took a different route home. We’ll get to know a new park, I told him. I took him to the park next to the vacant lot. We spent awhile there; he playing on the slide while I stood at the exact angle from which our apartment was visible. It started to drizzle and we went home. I didn’t tell my wife what had happened, she had enough problems; dealing with technocrats and politicians was nearly as rough as dealing with armed, cocky men in uniforms.
* * *
The kid never came back. His painting was left intact; I studied it every day to see if it had changed, but nothing ever happened. One night, my wife confessed that she’d noticed me acting strangely; I seemed different, she clarified.
Come on, I said, I hate it when you interpret my moods, you know that.
She knew my moods usually had to do with my work more than anything else; how often I’d suffered for my pipe dreams, how many times I’d been left dumbfounded, tied up in a foolish knot. It’s all part of my unwillingness to deal with reality, my way of watching it without daring to touch it. She said she was sorry.
That Sunday we went out to eat at an “ephemeral” Ecuadoran restaurant. I call it that because it only ever opened on the first Sunday of every month, out of a living room in the municipality of Schaerbeek, in a mostly Moroccan area. The owners decorated the entrance with tables full of pots and trays of the delicacies that any far-flung compatriot dreams of: steamed fava beans, empanadas, ceviche, mote, chochos, tostados, hornados, fritadas, and an extensive et cetera. My wife loved it; I’d say she craved Ecuadoran food more than me.
You’re a very folksy gringa, I’d often say to get a rise from her.
You’re an idiot Frenchified impostor, she’d shoot back. Though it isn’t very British of her, she’d learned to defend herself tooth and nail against my dumb jokes.
We sat at a table next to another family: father, mother, their three children, the mother’s sister, and the father’s cousin. They chattered like any carefree family, as if in that space they could finally own their idiosyncrasies. And you, the woman asked, when did you move here?
I told them a little bit about our story, so different from their own that I seemed a foreigner in their eyes; for them, coming and settling down in Brussels had
been a heroic act. Stories of immigrants. If I wanted to make someone cry, I’d tell such a story, but I exhaust my experience of the topic in two paragraphs. I listened to their stories with an ethnologist’s arrogant air.
One story, however, was worthy of retelling: that of the restaurant owner they were friends with—a guy from Babahoyo, which is surely one of the ugliest cities in Ecuador, a sort of slum built in the middle of a tropical plain, where the eponymous river and the Caracol River meet. He came here alone, and after four years of radical struggle he was able to bring his family. Among them came his eldest son, a seventeen-year-old kid. One Sunday, playing basketball at a nearby park in Schaerbeek, a Moroccan boy, accusing him of cheating, stabbed and killed him. All hell broke loose. The police came, not only to get the killer, but to contain the anger of some thirty young Ecuadorans seeking revenge. These were two communities not used to interacting, living similar stories in Spain and in Belgium.
The police, of course, couldn’t do anything; only deal blows or spray gas. The victim’s father put a stop to the brawl himself. Someone gave him a megaphone and he was able to quiet everyone with a few phrases. Damn you! he screamed at the boys. My child’s death must be respected! If you ever want to look me in the eye, then come to his burial with your hands clean!
At least that’s what they told me he said. I raised my eyes at that short and stout man, sweating, busy with the dishes, who didn’t look like the prototypical hero, just the opposite; in my eyes he had the look of the classic crafty Ecuadoran who has only one guiding principle: the dollar bill.
Anyway, the story didn’t end there, it took another turn, having to do with the restaurant. After the burial, the parents of the killer came to visit. They found that they were similar—both were fighters, and both had that timeless, borderless ethic of ordinary people. The Ecuadoran lived with his family in a two-bedroom flat in a basement of Schaerbeek, a spruced-up rathole. I tried to imagine the broken-language encounter between the two sad families—one family from the desert, the other from the tropics—with gestures and mannerisms becoming more and more emphatic, exaggerated. They spent all evening sharing the grief of having lost their children, feeling the betrayal of fate, maybe also the betrayal of God, but this is all conjecture. By the end of the evening, the Moroccan man handed over a room to the Ecuadoran, with which he could do as he pleased. That’s how this family climbed out of their hole, becoming a model of success for their countrymen; though what propelled their success was death.
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