Night Prayers

by Santiago Gamboa

  Bangkok, the unique. Buddhism recommends a veiled indifference toward history, but the Thais are proud of never having been colonized. Neither the kingdom of Siam, with its former capital Ayutthaya, nor present-day Thailand ever fell into French, English, or Dutch hands. Unlike its neighbors. Laos, Cambodia, and the two Vietnams formed French Indochina. Burma, Malaysia, and Singapore were English. Maybe they smile because they feel proud, and it may be that all this is true (even though it sounds somewhat forced to me).

  And now comes something marvelous, incredible! One of the strangest discoveries of humanity! A case that kept the eyes and attention of science focused on my beautiful kingdom of Thailand! By one of its lakes, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, an English doctor found a child with two heads. After careful observation he discovered that it wasn’t one, but two, two children with a single body. From them, that strange genetic anomaly took its name: Siamese twins.

  With their oval eyes, dark skin, and low stature, the Thais are, in fact, very smiley. “Welcome to the land of smiles,” you read at the airport. The king is considered a god and his subjects lie down on the ground before him (they don’t kneel). The Royal Palace of Sanam Luang, with its brightly colored pagodas and stupas, is beautiful, as is the imposing 150-foot-long, gold-plated Reclining Buddha. He’s a smiling Buddha. Strange to see millions of people worshiping someone who smiles.

  Bangkok, capital of paid sex in all its forms, even the most despicable or circus-like. Sex in all its cruelty and misery. The district of Patpong is the brothel of the European middle classes. Here, a modest waiter from Berlin or Madrid becomes The Mambo King! For very little (coming from his paradise of the euro) he can buy himself a wife-lover-masseuse-slave who knows the Kama Sutra back to front, who can cook and agrees to play the game, who kisses him on the mouth and says, darling, I’ve missed you, will you take me with you next time? The fiction of love (but isn’t love always a fiction? Oh, Mr. Ambrossía, don’t read this). The European male looks for sexual tourism in Thailand, Oriental punctiliousness, while the European woman goes to the Caribbean, to Cuba and Jamaica (some to Colombia), where she finds the anthropomorphic intensity of the black man without having to go to Africa, which is less amusing than the Caribbean and has malaria.

  But attention, future customers! The Thai sex industry involves twenty-five percent of the women between fifteen and forty, and there are boys too. It’s the paradise of novices and virgins, but can lead to unpleasant surprises: gonorrhea, hepatitis, herpes, AIDS. Many of the young girls (even virgins) are heroin addicts. They inject themselves in the knuckles or in the groin so that the marks can’t be seen.

  Smokers of heroin are called moo, which means pig, because when they smoke it they grunt. Those who use syringes are pei, in other words, ducks, “because they live in stagnant water.” The white man is farang, a word that has traveled through several continents, all in the southern part of the world, and which basically, in its origin, means “Frenchman,” and by extension “European” or even “Western Christian” (al-Faranj in Arabic, farangi in Farsi and Urdu and even in Amharic, the language of Ethiopia).

  An old Thai chronicle gives the following description of the farang: “They are excessively tall, hairy, and dirty. They educate their children for a long time and devote their lives to accumulating wealth. Their women are tall, sturdy, and very beautiful. They do not grow rice.”

  8

  My passion for walls continued and one day, I don’t know as a result of what, I summoned up the courage to tell Juana. We went to the sewer and she stood there for a while in silence, a few paces ahead of me, facing the images. My islands and volcanoes glittered; my igneous snakes, my red crocodiles and dinosaurs, everything that I felt in my stomach and in my soul. She gazed at them in silence and I left her quietly meditating, not daring to breathe in order not to disturb her. After a while I put my hand on her arm and she turned.

  She was weeping with joy.

  You’re an artist, she said, moved. She gave me a hug, clinging to me with her whole body, and I could feel her trembling. Then she looked me in the eyes and said: from now on, I’m going to work so that you have what you need.

  Juana did her classmates’ assignments for them, earned money for it, and began to bring me cans of spray paint. Montana Gold were the best, although Belton were cheap, and easier to get hold of. Ten thousand pesos per can, depending on the dollar exchange rate. Of course, Consul, the revaluation of the peso during those years helped me a lot and I never knew what it was due to, but anyway, I mustn’t be distracted from the story. I liked the Montana for the way they penetrated the wall. As if the concrete, the brick, or the stucco had been created out of that color. You have no idea how it felt, shaking the can and hearing the little ball, and then, when I had the image clear, pressing the valve and almost touching the color expelled by the spray.

  I started to look at Keith Haring’s lonely and slightly hysterical dolls, and the designs of an Englishman named Banksy, a pioneer, someone who simply wanted to put on the street what he thought that street lacked, police officers kissing one another, windows in industrial walls with a view of the sea, playful rats, anyway, my work wasn’t like that, I dreamed of other things, not populating the city but giving a little reality to what I had inside me. As I’ve already said, mine was an art of escape. Everything in me tended toward flight. I wanted to leave, I hated my life.

  My sister started studying sociology at the National University. She had been given a scholarship because of her average grade in the high school diploma and the SAT tests, and because she did well in the entrance exam. That was the only reason my parents let her study that subject, because for them, as for most Colombians, studying sociology was like studying to become a member of FARC, a kind of apprenticeship, especially at the National. We were deep into the government of Uribe and anyone who wasn’t a fascist and a patriot was suspect, all kinds of people were accused of being with the guerrillas, you just had to defend human rights or the Constitution to be considered a terrorist.

  Every time Juana brought her university friends home Mother would say, are they guerrillas? are they all like that in your class? Father would barely greet them, he would put the newspaper in front of his face so as not to see them. Once he said to Juana, you see, princess, I can’t pay for you to go to a university like the Rosario or Los Andes or the Xavierian, but at least try to change to economics and in the meantime I’ll save, and then, when you graduate, I’ll pay for you to do a decent doctorate in Argentina, okay? It’s just that with these hippies you’re going to give your mother a heart attack, do it for her sake. He told her he was going to ask for a loan to send her to Europe, or the United States. Once he went into debt to buy her an iPod and a new cell phone. He loved her but didn’t understand her.

  From that time I remember another argument at the dinner table.

  It was very violent, and left me breathless for several days. Mother said something about the pre-Independence period, known as the Foolish Fatherland, and Juana, who already felt stronger for being at the university, said, well, it can’t ever have been more foolish than this, we live in a country of fools right now, a really dangerous and corrupt country.

  Father looked at Mother and felt obliged to respond. This country may be foolish now, he said, but it’s the safest and the best we’ve had in all the time I can remember, with more security and peace and with more well-being. At least since I was born and since the two of you were born.

  The best? Juana retorted, oh, Daddy, what are you, one of those snakes in Congress? it’s a horrible time! A Mafioso president, an army that murders and tortures, half the Congress in jail for complicity with the paramilitaries, more displaced people than Liberia or Zaire, millions of acres stolen at gunpoint, shall I go on? This country maintains itself on massacres and mass graves. You dig in the ground and you find bones. What can be more foolish than this brainless and insane little republic?

  Of course, my parents jumped on
her, gesticulating like wild animals, is that what they teach you at university? to insult authority and order? what side are the professors who say these things to you on? who’s giving you these analyses of what’s happening in the country? do the rector and the Ministry of Education know you’re being taught this? do the professors go around in uniforms and boots? how many have warrants out against them for capture and extradition? do they sit down with weapons on their desks? do they demand ransoms from the cafeteria or the Plaza del Che? do they give their classes with Venezuelan or Cuban accents? or in Russian? or directly in Arabic? Show some respect to our president, young lady, who’s the first Colombian to get up and go to work! do you hear? when you’re relaxing from your evenings out or from reading anti-Colombian texts with those aspiring terrorists you go around with, or when you’re fast asleep, he’s already in his office, studying and making decisions, giving orders and analyzing what’s best for this country, and I tell you one thing: you may not like it but the reason you can sleep easily and continue going to study in that nest of idlers is because he’s there, watching over your sleep, and not only you but forty-five million Colombians, do you hear me, young lady?

  Oh, yes? watching over my sleep? said Juana, you’re kidding, and does he watch over the sleep of the murdered trade unionists, does he watch over the sleep of the negro leader in Chocó who was shot by those who helped his campaign? does he watch over the four million displaced persons? or the anonymous corpses in the mass graves this damned country has so many of? No, Daddy, don’t be taken in. The only ones who can sleep easily here are the paramilitaries, and not just sleep: they can continue killing trade unionists and governors, mayors and left-wing students, young unemployed people and drug addicts; they can continue making money and making deals with the State to steal its money; they can continue terrorizing the peasants, taking their lands away from them just by accusing them of being guerrillas, Daddy … The paramilitaries are the only ones who can sleep easily in this country! Not the decent people, not the humble people who, ridiculous as it seems, keep supporting the president out of ignorance or because they’ve been bought off with subsidies, the State money he gives away as if it’s a gift! Because never before has so much been stolen, never before have the paramilitaries been able to speak in Congress, forcing the congressmen to listen to them, have you already forgotten that? do you remember how the security service threw out a representative of the victims who was raising a banner? don’t you remember? well, I do, that happened in this respectable country, the representative of the victims kicked out so that the murderers could speak! what kind of democracy is that? what do you call a government that allows that, eh? The reason I can sleep easily, Daddy, and who knows for how much longer, is because, thank God, there are also decent people in Congress, like Senator Petro, who put their lives on the line to make the country open its eyes.

  Father restrained himself from banging his fist on the table or throwing his glass at the wall and said, oh, Juanita, better keep quiet, okay? you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re just repeating what the terrorists at the National teach you, but that’s because you’re very young and you don’t know where everyone comes from, that’s why you don’t know that senator’s a Communist and used to be a guerrilla, a terrorist! he has blood on his hands so he can’t come along now and give lessons to anybody. The president himself has already said that, did you know that? and Juana, who was a student leader in her year, said, Daddy, the M-19 wasn’t communist, because being a Communist, at least in this world, means adhering to the thoughts of Marx or Lenin or even Mao, and the M-19 wasn’t like that, it was a Bolivarian, Latin American socialism, and in any case being a Communist or having been a Communist isn’t a crime, as far as I know, where did you get that from? On the other hand, being a paramilitary, supporting the massacres of peasants and the parapoliticians in Congress is being a decent person, who loves progress, his country, and the Virgin Mary, is that right? That’s the problem, Daddy: everything here is back to front, but if anyone says that the top paramilitary leader is the president, people scream and cross themselves.

  No, young lady, Father retorted, if that were true they wouldn’t have been extradited, they wouldn’t be in gringo prisons paying for what they did, how do your teachers at the National explain that? and she said, everyone knows they were sent there to shut their mouths, to stop them accusing him, him and his buddies, basically he betrayed them, because the characteristic of true Mafia bosses, and this is a well-known fact, is the ability to get rid of those who helped them rise to the top, haven’t you seen The Godfather, Daddy? you should watch it again, it’s obvious you didn’t understand it. In Colombia The Godfather is an item on the local news.

  They argued and argued, screaming at each other.

  Mother kept quiet, watching them angrily. I was analyzing the stains on the ceiling or the tip of my shoe.

  You see, Consul, how hellish the days and nights were in that horrendous lunatic asylum.

  Apart from books, my sister and I loved the cinema. We dreamed about movies. We’d see them and then go smoke a joint in the park, next to my sewer and my drawings. Or we’d go up on the roof of the house and there we’d comment on them, relive them, bring them into our secret life. The most important thing for us, of course, was auteur cinema: Wong Kar-wai, Fellini, Scorsese, Tarantino, George Cukor, Cassavetes, Kurosawa, Mike Nichols, Tarkovsky. But sometimes, weirdly, the movies that contributed most to our games were the commercial ones, the ones from Hollywood. I’d imagine I was Edward Norton and she was Helen Hunt, for example, or we’d choose characters from other movies. She liked Sabrina, a remake they did with Harrison Ford of a film by Billy Wilder, and I liked Tom Hanks in Charlie Wilson’s War, in which Juana chose to be the character played by Julia Roberts, as long as she could change it and not be a right-wing millionairess but an activist, the leader of an NGO, but I said to her, Juana, if you change it you throw away the story, better to choose another character, but she’d insist, what we have to do is change the bad things, so that the movies are better, and I’d say to her, why are you so radical? not everyone can be good, for there to be goodies there also have to be baddies, and she’d answer, that’s silly, I don’t have to be bad if I don’t want to.

  One of our idols was Wong Kar-wai.

  In his films we found the sense of abandonment, the terrible need for affection, that was so much ours, and he made us dream of other worlds: Asia! Hong Kong! We knew those cities existed on maps, but when we watched Wong Kar-wai we realized that people like us lived in them: lonely people in phantom cities, fragile people on avenues and in cafés, with an imperious need to invent reasons to carry on and the feeling that they’d lost even before they started, that there was something terribly wrong from the start, anyway, all the things you can see in In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express, 2046, and even My Blueberry Nights; we saw them at the film society and the others we rented or downloaded from the Internet, and it was amazing, a recognition and a pleasure in that recognition that was beyond us, but he wasn’t the only one, we also loved the movies of Cassavetes, Opening Night and Shadows and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, where the characters were even more desperate, and when we saw them we understood that only in the world of art could our lives be transformed into something beautiful, an enormous contradiction, Consul, but that’s how it is: that great frustration we felt could generate something durable, we’d understood that ever since we were very young and that’s why we believed that, deep down, our lives had something of value, provided we could stay together.

  Seeing the films of Cassavetes we felt that other people, in the 1970s, had lived through similar things, and as they were New Yorkers they went to theaters and to empty bars, like those in Hopper, where people drink whiskey without ice or soda, late at night, and there are actors, and depressed dramatists, alcoholics, and so, from movie to movie, we went further into that world, and also in Martin Scorsese’s movies about New York, from Mean Stre
ets to Casino, characters who weren’t completely well-adjusted, who had a desire to escape and a great fragility, the uncertainty of having been wounded very early in the ring, of coming out almost mutilated, hiding a blow or a cut that makes us feel ashamed and wretched, as Sartre wrote, that’s how life appeared to us, and when later I read Huis Clos I understood perfectly what it was saying, as if a missing piece, a piece I had longed for, had become part of my cells, a fierce understanding of the ideas, the certainty that something is true, and that’s why one of his phrases echoed for years in my brain, “Hell is other people,” you can’t arrive at such concision without having felt and lived what I did in those years, Consul, I can assure you.

  The roof of the house was one of the places where we felt free. Watching the planes cross the sky made us nervous because we knew that one day we too would leave, what kinds of things happened up there, inside those little moving lights, what questions were those who were traveling in them asking themselves? where were they going? We would invent stories for the passengers: one who’s going to study a long way away, who’s just wiped away his tears because his girlfriend, at the last moment, told him that in spite of their passionate farewell she didn’t think she’d wait for him, a poor boy who was thinking, as in the poem by Neruda, how threatening the names of the months are, and suddenly Juana would interrupt me, listen, Manuel, do you think a lot about sex? have you lost your virginity? and I’d say, come on, Juana, who am I going to lose my virginity with if I don’t have any girlfriends, and she’d say, okay, I’m going to find you a really pretty girl who’ll guide you, or do you also like guys, eh? I’d like that even better, a gay brother, we could share boyfriends! but I said, I don’t think so, at least not for now, I’ll let you know if there’s any change.