Night Prayers

by Santiago Gamboa

  Another day I was in my office, I don’t remember if I was reading a visa application or writing a letter to the tax authorities, when Olympia burst in saying, boss, boss, you’re about to get a call from the Ministry, it’s an urgent case!

  When I looked at her inquisitively, wanting to know what it was about, she whispered: get ready to go to Bangkok, boss.

  “Don’t call me boss,” I said, lifting the receiver.

  4

  INTER-NETA’S MONOLOGUES

  Where I’m from is the least of my concerns, because people are born a number of times in the course of their lives. I might have read that somewhere, but I can’t remember where. If anyone knows, please tell me. When it comes down to it, I don’t really care. I’ve learned to live in front of my screen, traveling the world. This is my true home. Sometimes I get fits of nervous laughter, but that just indicates that I haven’t taken my pill. I have problems with recent memory, like the little blue fish in the movie Finding Nemo. The doctor who’s been treating me since my illness started tries to scare me, saying: you’ll lose consciousness, fall off your chair, and you won’t be able to get up. One day you’ll find yourself in a world you don’t know and you’ll have no idea where to go, so you have to look after yourself. But I don’t take anything. I’m anorexic about food and pills and things that have come through the thick, filthy air of cities.

  My best friend, or rather, my man, lives in a blog called Sensations. His name, or the name he calls himself, is Ferenck Ambrossía. It may be a false name. It almost certainly is a false name, he wouldn’t be so silly as to put his body into the scrapyard of this topsy-turvy world. I don’t know where he’s from or what he looks like. I don’t care. Is he black, yellow, white? Is he a humanoid like those in the movie Blade Runner? Is he “Jewish, quechua, orangutanic, Aryan,” to quote León de Greiff? Is he one man, or many men? Is he a woman, or many women? Is he a group of convicts with time off for good behavior in the penitentiary of Moundsville, now exclusively inhabited by ghosts? Is he a mental patient with access to the Internet in some Scandinavian sanatorium, who dreams of living on the same bridge along which the character in Munch’s The Scream is walking? Or a conclave of pederast novice monks who exchange photographs of Burmese and Kenyan children on the net? Or a nervous lawyer in Edinburgh afraid of meeting the specter of Robert Louis Stevenson in the doorway of his house? Or two hysterical sisters born on Rhode Island who want to emulate Lovecraft and are getting ready to kill their parents with an ax, burn their house down, and flee north, to the country of ice? Or maybe a seller of secondhand Bibles on eBay, the pages of which are ideal for rolling joints in prison? Or a Russian porn star, who, in her free time, masturbates with an old Soviet TYPNCT-3 telescope, while weeping for her lost youth and lost empires? Is he maybe a sad young Latin American poet postponing his suicide in the hope of an unlikely signal from Rubén Darío? Or a Cameroon Airlines stewardess disappointed and angry over a French passenger on whom she performed fellatio in the toilet while the plane was flying over Chad, who promised her the earth then abandoned her? Or an Adventist priest, a follower of Lewis Carroll’s brother E. H. Dodgson, who, like him, lives in the community of Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, on the fearsome island of Tristan da Cunha? Or a young Spanish teacher at the Cervantes Institute in New Delhi, born in Bihar, who reads Lope de Vega on the Internet? Or a Norwegian assistant at Río Piedras University in Puerto Rico, unwittingly made pregnant by a Ponce taxi driver, who’s hesitating between calling her future child Grunewald or Hectorlavó? Is he perhaps a group of Chilean transvestites who escaped with their lives from Pinochet’s dictatorship and are now composing their memoirs in verse and pursuing their apocalypse in the faculties of letters? Is he a great Mexican novelist of the post-boom generation who includes dwarves, bicycles, and Leonardo da Vinci in his books, and who could well be the author of this crazy list? Is he a young Romanian female psychologist working in the psychiatric emergency department of the Hôpital de Marne-la-Vallée, who reads Cioran surrounded by the screams of the inmates in the high-security cells? Is he the illegitimate son of a chambermaid on the seventy-eighth floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York, where nine years ago a German rock star left syringes filled with blood in the washbowl? Is he the enemies of a dramatist raised in Salzburg whose memories are of bombing raids, floors collapsing, and cities in flames? Is he all of the previous, united in a transitory Confederation of the Stateless, chaired by the switchboard operator of a five-star hotel in Jerusalem the name of which we omit for security reasons? Or simply a novelist writing alone and against all hope, his one desire being to hide his face and be forgotten?

  I don’t really care who Ferenck Ambrossía is, because I love him anyway. He’s my man, my male. Real life ends with the first filter. Those of us who get to my stage are pure, volatile, subtle, diaphanous, ethereal. A new race of angels. A newly born angelic militia. Oh, how happy I am on the infinite steppes of my screen! In the sugar plantations of this delightful and perfect world! The true Orplid.

  From now on, I’m going to tell you a few dreams or hallucinations, subdivisions, transformations of my psyche. What does it matter what they are? Postmodernism, as Bakhtin said, is defined by its abolition of the frontier between genres. That was what Ferenck whispered to me one night, before we launched into a violent fuck via the screen. My maelstrom is inflamed just remembering it, moistening my légèrement culottée pantyhose and lavender Intimissimi panties, because in spite of the fact that I never leave this rhomboid space I’m not one of those who wear Victoria’s Secret. I’m an elegant woman.

  Anyway, dear friends. Listen to me. Hear the desperate, anxious voice of this woman whose one objective is love, words, life. In short, poetry. Let yourselves be led by my soft round hand that knows about the affairs of men, exemplary stories that have sometimes been and may continue to be of interest to the muses.

  5

  The following day, before getting on the school bus, I looked at my painting on the wall. A bright snake, an almost psychedelic wave. My heart beat faster on seeing my signature, those letters in red, and I wanted to talk about it, but I restrained myself and didn’t say anything to Juana. Better to keep the secret for a while and see what else there was inside it.

  At school, in that boring, unhealthy classroom, I’d found something better to do than listen to those monsters croaking away: make sketches that I would later reproduce on walls. That was how I first came to draw an island surrounded by a fierce ocean. In the middle there was a huge volcano, and in its foothills a little man sitting on his own, gazing at the fury of the ocean. I made a sketch in pencil and another one in color. The volcano was a dark blue cone at first, with red and yellow edges. Then I darkened it with ocher tones. It must be a volcanic island, I thought, but I also put in a little vegetation. My arms seemed to move of their own accord. I was thirteen years old, Consul. I had just made an important discovery, which I hoped would give me strength. That’s why I decided to keep it secret, not expose it to anything or anybody, for the moment.

  Sometime later, another little miracle happened.

  We’d come to the first year of the high school diploma course and a new teacher asked us to get some books. Five Go to the Mystery Moor by Enid Blyton. The Nightingale and the Rose by Oscar Wilde. Five Weeks in a Balloon by Jules Verne. A couple of years earlier I had read a number of Blyton’s books about The Five, so I thought it was a good sign and I felt quite cheerful when I went home.

  Of course, the last thing my parents thought to do was buy them. As far as they were concerned, books had to be borrowed, so Mother made a few calls and managed to get hold of the one by Enid Blyton and the one by Verne. For the one by Wilde, they sent a note to the teacher saying they hadn’t been able to get hold of it, and asking her to excuse me, because it was strange that my sister didn’t have it among her school things from previous years, but the teacher replied with the names of bookstores where we could get hold of it and a recommendation to give the b
oy his own library. Mother read it and turned green with anger. That night she told Father, who blinked in disgust, but said, okay, we won’t impoverish ourselves over a wretched book, how much could it cost? Hearing them, I felt nauseous. Then he looked at me and asked, what’s this new teacher like? I didn’t know what to say, and shrugged my shoulders. She’s like the others, Dad, I replied. And is she young? he wanted to know, and I said, I don’t know, Dad, I don’t know how old she is, but he insisted, already with a throb in his voice that presaged anger, I’m not asking you her exact age, I just want to know if she’s young, it’s not such a difficult question, is the teacher young? Yes, I said, younger than the others, and she’s new, she started this year.

  Father snorted and said, of course, that explains it! She must be one of those silly new graduates who come into a job and want to disrupt everything, turn it all upside down, I’ve seen them in the office, I know what they’re like! the ones who think that just because they’re good with computer programs and files they know it all, and because they’re young and pretty their bosses agree to everything. I hate them. Anyway, Bertha, buy the boy his book tomorrow, we’re not going to give her the pleasure of humiliating us.

  The next day we went to the National Bookstore in the Unicentro Mall, Mother resignedly and me secretly happy, and when one of the assistants brought it I couldn’t help giving a nervous laugh, it was really beautiful! Mother looked at the price, made a face, and asked if there was a cheaper edition, so the assistant went to the back room and I stayed with her by the counter, feeling embarrassed. It was strange: Mother stood there with her mouth pursed, looking dignified and even proud, as if demanding compensation for an insult, as if the assistants in the store ought to be paying us to be there. After a while the young man came back with another edition, an illustrated one, which fortunately was more expensive, so Mother decided to buy the first one. Of course, when we got home, she made sarcastic remarks about the price, and said, we’ll have to cover it so that it doesn’t get damaged, that way we’ll be able to sell it next year, if that stupid teacher is still at the school. I was so happy to have it, even if only for a few months, that I didn’t care about the pettiness of it all, and I ran upstairs to my room. For the first time, I had a new book! I clasped it to my chest and said to myself, this one beautiful object will help me to pull through.

  But life goes on and gets to us, Consul, and unfortunately things start all over again, so that after that little joy there I was once more, sitting at the table in the dining room in front of an unappetizing dish. I had to make a great effort to eat anything, and to put up with Father’s comments, because by now he was already starting to proclaim, ever more insistently, the country’s need for a savior, someone who would come in with a firm hand and restore order, reestablish harmony, clear the air. Change the atmosphere in which we were living.

  I don’t know what was going on in his work or in his inner life, if he had one, but it was clear that suddenly, without anything particular happening, Father had started to change. Having previously had few political opinions, and moderate ones at that, he now spoke passionately about what he read in the press or saw on the TV news. Whatever he was thinking just had to come out, and it came out in the strangest ways. It’s very likely that what he said to us at the dinner table was what he would have liked to say at work, but nobody there listened to him. His opinions didn’t interest anybody. At home, on the other hand, we were obliged to hear them and that’s what we did, stoically, hear that endless droning, that litany of rancor toward reality and the present day, that ultimate in resentment, depicting a country in a situation of chaos and moral collapse from which it could only emerge thanks to a true patriot, and who could else could that be but that soldier of Christ and champion of order, Álvaro Uribe, who at the time, very close to the elections, was already flying high in the opinion polls?

  Father was mesmerized by Uribe.

  It was that enthusiasm that turned him into a man with strong opinions, a secret amateur columnist, and Mother, hearing him talking about topics she considered of major importance, must have thought her husband had at last stopped being a resentful but docile bureaucrat and had turned into something new, a citizen whose ideas were appreciated and discussed by others, and which he shared generously with his family in order to show them the way, an ideological and moral beacon who filled her with pride.

  I guess that’s why we had to put up with that pantomime and listen to him talk about politics, economics, recent history, as if instead of being in the dining room of his house he was on a TV show, debating with experts, and so he kept giving us arguments and counterarguments, without anybody contradicting him. He would present objections and answer them, interrupt himself and take over, a horrible spectacle that made me feel ashamed for him, a spectacle designed to exacerbate my sense of the ridiculous and my own self-esteem.

  It was like being hit in the stomach, squeezed by pincers, it was my own Loch Ness Monster starting to emerge and I closed my eyes, trying to escape, to go far away, but when my hallucinations finished and I came back to the table he was still there, endlessly spouting his opinions, quickly gulping a mouthful of rice in order not to lose the thread, saying things that sounded false even though they might have been right, ideas that, uttered by him, were pure bullshit: that in Colombia the terrorists had become stars, that everyone wanted to have their photographs taken with them, that it was incredible that anyone could still be talking about negotiating, that Tirofijo’s empty seat next to Pastrana was a mockery, a symbol of a total lack of principles, and he’d repeat ardently, the blood rushing to his cheeks, what we need here is a firm hand, we have to make sacrifices, if you don’t believe me look at Chile, which is an example now to the whole of Latin America, here we have to take over the helm and change direction, and we have to do so with resolution, a sense of duty, and a love of our country, and Mother, feeling obliged to support what he said, as if we were on Big Brother or some daytime quiz show, would say to him, oh, Alberto, I hope God hears you, Álvaro Uribe is the only one who isn’t talking about making deals and handing the country over to the guerrillas, quite the opposite, he wants to fight them, that’s the only language the terrorists understand, fight them and keep fighting, he’s going to stand up to them, oh, yes, and let’s hope those other crooks, rich kids, and traitors just go away.

  And Father would say, yes, Bertha, the other candidates are the spoiled children of this country, they’re all from foreign schools, always looking outside, people who feel ashamed of being Colombian, that’s how they are and that’s why they’re handing over the country, whereas Uribe comes from the middle classes and from the mountains of Antioquia, with all the moral values and traditional courage of the countryside, that’s what we need, a man who loves Colombia, who if you opened his veins would ooze Colombian blood, with pride, and that’s something we’ve never seen in a candidate, Uribe is the first one to talk about true patriotism, national dignity, to glorify the flag and stand up to terrorism, and that’s why I say, Bertha, that if Uribe doesn’t win, we’ll have to scoop this country up from the floor with a spoon, and we may even have to ask the gringos to send in the Marines to sort out our problem for us, the way it happened in Panama, and we’ll have to swallow the humiliation, how can there be people who don’t realize? You just have to see his slogan: “A firm hand and a big heart.”

  They would talk and talk for more than an hour, and since Juana was always studying at the house of one of her friends, I had to face it all by myself, unable to get up from the table until they’d brought their pathetic show to an end.

  I often dreamed of running away, Consul: going out one morning and not getting on the school bus. Or rather: the two of us not getting on the school bus. I couldn’t run away unless it was with Juana. I couldn’t leave her behind, in our everyday life. Sometimes I’d say to her, Juana, when are we leaving? why do we have to wait so long? and she’d reply, you don’t have to do anything, just wait, I’m goin
g to arrange everything and when it’s ready we’ll go away forever, far from this hell. We’ll go away without leaving anything that’ll help them trace us.

  Hearing her, my heart would thump in my chest. All that sacrifice was going to have an end, and that end was near. The two of us were working for the same thing: she with her intelligence and her strength and I with my capacity to resist. We’d get away from this rabid world and build a better one.

  Books helped me, but I still had to get them.

  A neighbor on the block had an enormous library, but didn’t like to read. His parents were teachers and they bought him children’s books, but he was only interested in football, Internet sex, and American cable TV series. He was fourteen years old. His name was Víctor and one day I suggested a deal: if he passed them on to me, I’d read them and then tell him the story, and that way we’d both be happy: he could devote himself to football, RedTube, and HBO, and I could do all the reading I wanted.

  He agreed.

  That was how I came to read Mark Twain’s stories of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, White Fang and Call of the Wild by Jack London, and things by Joseph Conrad like Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, and the sad, exotic adventures of David Balfour by Stevenson, and Ivanhoe by Walter Scott, and the works of Rudyard Kipling, especially Kim. Soon after, little by little, came Salgari’s series about Sandokan and the Tigers of Malaysia, The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas, and King Solomon’s Mines by Rider Haggard.