I kept thinking about Manuel’s story. “Let me say something that may surprise you, this isn’t going to be a crime story, it’s going to be a love story.” Now I understood those mysterious words of his, and he was right. It was a love story.
Listening to him, Bogotá had come back to me, the city I, too, had fled, although for other reasons. I knew Manuel’s neighborhood well, lower Santa Ana. My friend Mario Mendoza lived there. Did he know the family? It was possible.
Soon afterwards I went back to the hotel and wrote to Gustavo:
I already have the story, you don’t need to search further. I talked to him and he told me everything. It’s a real mess. I’ll tell you the details later. He remembers you with affection. Big hug.
I reread my notes: Maribel, Colombian Consulate, November 3, 2008. I didn’t even have her passport number.
I had accepted the mission to find her, and, somehow, I had already started. What did she look like? I put her name on the Internet and found an old and probably invalid Facebook membership. There was no photograph of her, just the image of some native children, maybe Wayuu or Paez, the picture wasn’t clear.
At seven I went out and hailed a taxi.
Teresa was waiting for me in the Blue Elephant, drinking a pink cocktail. What is it? I asked. A Singapore Sling, she said. I had tried it in the bar of the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, where it was invented. It appears in Somerset Maugham’s story “The Letter.” I still have a poster with an image of a bartender and some special glasses. But I preferred a very dry martini.
The place was very grand, with high ceilings, large windows, and leather chairs. The walls had gold veneer. It reminded me of the Coupole in Paris, with wooden window panels and fans with blades. Like the Long Bar of the Raffles or the Batavia in Jakarta. British colonial architecture.
Obsessively, I told her Manuel’s story, the way in which, in spite of the difference in age—I was almost twenty years older than he—he took me back in his story to the Bogotá of my adolescence, to those walks on foot through dark streets, in the early morning cold and the drizzle.
“So he was looking for his sister,” Teresa said, “and now you’re going to look for her.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll have to go to Japan.”
“You’ve spotted a good story and you can’t resist it,” Teresa said, biting the olive as she spoke. “That’s fine. I assume I’ll read it eventually.”
“It’s possible,” I said, “but it isn’t going to be a crime story. It’s going to be a love story. That’s what Manuel said.”
“All the better,” Teresa said. Then she turned and asked the bartender for another round. I gave her a grateful look.
“Each person drinks what he needs, and in your case what you need can be read on your face. We’ll have dinner later.”
“Jesus,” I exclaimed, “you’re my ideal woman.”
“My ex-husband said the same, but as soon as I had my daughters, I crossed the imaginary line of forty, my tits started drooping, and he went off with a twenty-eight-year-old, so you can shake hands.”
We laughed.
“Not all bad men are equal,” I said, “there is no solidarity of gender.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m speaking in double entendres.”
We drank until three in the morning in two different bars. Before we parted, Teresa took my arm.
“And what about you and me? How are we?”
I gave her a big hug and said, “You and I are very good.”
Then I got into a taxi and went back to my hotel.
The next day, at three in the afternoon, I caught a plane back to Delhi.
PART II
1
Ah, Bangkok.
The rain and the solitude bring back memories. My notebook is filling up with question marks, arrows, parentheses. I long to reach a point of no return. I already reached it, but in life, where there is no return possible, where could one return to? Nowhere.
It’s 10:32 in the morning and I’m sitting in a bar on Silom Street with a somewhat extravagant name, Mr. Oyster, a Singha beer in my hands. It’s hot. The bottle still has little strands of ice from the refrigerator, tiny stalagmites around the label. I stroke the cold glass and feel a shiver on my skin.
I’m very happy.
The notebook (I’m already on my second) makes me look like an expatriate: an exiled industrialist or even an old actor who’s been forgotten by everybody, someone who’s come down in the world in spite of having been on a winning streak years earlier, before things like drugs, divorce proceedings, and alcohol took him away from the screen. I’d like to look like an intellectual, but that doesn’t exist anymore. The gloom of this place protects me and the other customers, that fat man between fifty and sixty, that ancient, toothless woman, that young man trembling as he drinks something that, seen from here, looks like—and I sincerely hope is—a Bloody Mary, anyway, all of them will be my company, though I don’t think I’ll talk to them. I like to drink alone, to slowly immerse myself without anybody interfering.
Through a side window I can see the sky, rough at this hour, the few clouds laden with something dense. Clouds presaging thunder and lightning. Will they add something to my notebook?
The infinite shapes of clouds.
Anyway, my one wish, in this cool corner of Mr. Oyster, is to be alone. If certain precautions are taken, there will be no surprises. It’s easy to avoid everything I hate, and now I have to carry on before this page bursts.
2
As if somebody up there was manipulating the threads of this story, the day after I got back to Delhi, as I was sorting through the mail in the office, I received an incredible proposition: the Cervantes Institute in Tokyo was inviting me to take part in a symposium on Colombian literature two weeks later. I would be there with the writers Enrique Serrano and Juan Gabriel Vásquez. I almost fell off my chair! I accepted immediately, incredulous at the happy coincidence (someone else must have declined the offer at the last moment). I wrote to the Colombian consul in Japan to tell him I was coming and, in passing, asked for information about Juana Manrique, giving the date of arrival that Manuel had given me. He said he would check on the list of people registered with the consulate and get back in touch.
Two days later he replied saying that the name was there, but that they had no recent news of her. Why had they told Manuel she wasn’t registered with them? Maybe they’d been negligent, maybe the page hadn’t been very clear, or they’d simply acted in haste. Things done and said on the telephone are usually vague and imprecise, but how happy he would have been if they’d told him she was on their list.
The consul went on to say that Juana Manrique had given the address of a hotel, and that she had never voted in elections. He added something that I already knew: many leave the country without bothering to inform the consulate, the fact that someone is registered only means they were here once.
All of us were here once.
The consul was a religious person and ended his letter with a biblical allusion: on his list, he said, he didn’t know who was who, or what they did, which was why we would have to wait for the last day, when the Lord—he wrote it with a capital letter—came to separate the good from the bad. I didn’t have a Bible to hand to check what exactly he was talking about, but I was impressed all the same.
I flew to Tokyo soon afterwards, feeling nervous and excited.
What a strange city. My first, fairly rapid, observation led me to the conclusion that it was in the future, but then, thinking of Delhi and Bogotá, I realized that Tokyo is indeed the future, but only of Tokyo.
Tokyo is the future of Tokyo.
On this kind of trip, I’m always in the habit of referring to literature, to see what other people have written and said. Books and poetry are my Lonely Planet. And so I found, for example, that when Marguerite Yourcenar arrived in Tokyo in 1982 she exclaimed: “My God, eleven million robots!” She couldn’t get past that caricature, that paternalis
tic image that Europeans have of Asia. Not the case with Richard Brautigan, who married a Japanese woman in 1978. Americans are (or were) better travelers, demanding nothing of the places they visit. The marriage lasted only two years, but Brautigan remained in Tokyo, until his life, as his biographers say, “dissolved into alcohol and insomnia.” An interesting dissolution. Brautigan liked haiku and wrote this:
I like this taxi driver,
racing through the dark streets of Tokyo
as if life had no meaning.
I feel the same way.
We were being put up at the Sheraton Miyako on Shirokanedai in Minato, near the residence of the Colombian embassy, a luxury hotel with a beautifully tended inner garden opposite the lobby, reminding one that gardening is one of the Japanese fine arts (through it you can learn about Buddhism).
The dinner to welcome us to the symposium was at seven-thirty in the evening, so I had time to get organized without having to rush. I went to a 7-11 to see what I could find of interest, and ended up buying a liter of gin for the same price as a little bottle at the hotel. I asked room service for some ice and soon afterwards they sent up the most beautiful ice bucket I had ever seen in my life, with cubes that looked as if they’d only just been invented, as if they came straight from Plato’s Cave: aseptic, perfect, symmetrical. I suppose these things happen to everybody on their first visit to Japan.
At the dinner, after the formal greetings and expressions of gratitude, Enrique Serrano gave us a wide-ranging talk about Japanese culture, including historical, political, and economic aspects, and then, at about eleven, we were driven back to the hotel. Once in my room, I asked for a little more of that Swarovski ice and sat down to read a novel by Kenzaburo Oe, but found I couldn’t concentrate. I was extremely anxious about the chances of finding Juana and, of course, taking her to Bangkok.
The consul was waiting for me the following day.
The branches of the trees swayed in the wind, and the cold of winter was already in the air. A leaf dancing, an empty sidewalk, the dark cherry trees, the drizzle. Everything seemed made for a haiku.
The office was next to the residence, a big, impressive building surrounded by gardens that evoked the Japanese forests with their spirits and demons.
I told the consul who Juana Manrique was and why I was looking for her. He ordered two cups of coffee, we sat down by the window, and he pointed to the clouds. They move very fast here, had I noticed? No, I said. He was a friendly man, a bit out of the ordinary. He was interested in the story of what had happened to Manuel Manrique in Bangkok, and wanted to know if we had hired a lawyer. In his experience as a jurist, he thought that the most desirable thing would be to transfer the sentence to Colombia. The problem, once again, was not having an embassy. Countries look at these things with a lot of suspicion. Then he told me his own suspicion, or rather his hypothesis: Juana Manrique hadn’t come to Tokyo to study Japanese, as she had stated when she registered with the consulate, but to work as a prostitute; that was why they’d had no further news of her. I agreed, omitting to tell him that I already knew that.
“They get them here through deception,” the consul went on, “although to be honest, the deception has more to do with some of the details than the basics, if I can put it that way. They know they’re going to work as prostitutes, but they think they’ll be high-class escorts, working a few times a week, and above all, that they’ll be able to decide the terms. That’s what they’re promised. But when they get here, things are very different. They’re forced to work on the street, which makes them very frustrated. If they show promise and gain the trust of their bosses, they get promoted to working in hotels. The trade is controlled by the Japanese Mafia. The girls are known as ‘talents’; they work in places called theater bars, where they have to do striptease, pose for pornographic photographs, and have sex with men who win draws for them. The rest of the time they’re kept in residences and aren’t allowed out, not even one day a week. Their clothes are taken away from them, they live in the nude.”
The consul was well-informed. He said there were about a thousand Colombian women doing this. That was a rough calculation, because they weren’t usually allowed to register with the consulate (the case of Juana Manrique was unusual, which suggested she was at a higher level). Naturally, their passports were taken away.
“It’s a kind of slavery,” he went on. “They’re considered to have incurred a debt, but it’s one they never stop paying off and that keeps growing at the discretion of the lender, which in this case is the Mafia. It’s like Rivera’s The Vortex but in Japan, have you read The Vortex?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s very good. And where do you think she might be?”
“Hard to say. A lot of girls go to Yokohama or Kyoto. Here in Tokyo, there are different zones. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, but it isn’t impossible.”
I made a copy of the registration document for the sake of Juana’s photograph and went back to my hotel. Before I left, the consul took me by the arm and said, almost conspiratorially, look at the color of the leaves on the trees, try to spot the differences, it’s a real source of peace. I told him I would and thanked him. When I’d turned the corner, I pulled out the document and took a good look at the photograph: Juana had very dark, very expressive eyes, and a tense smile.
My God, that was her.
The first thing to do if you’re looking for someone is to use the Internet. I typed in Juana Manrique and got 11,600 results. It’s a very common name, like her brother’s. Adding the word Japan reduced it to 190, but none of them were her. I looked at the kind of people they were but that wasn’t any help either. I tried Juana Manrique + Japan + sexual services, and the figure shot up again: 9,345 results. Then I tried something a little more specialized: Colombian women + sex + Tokyo. Again, an absurd figure: 560,689. Then I thought of another angle and wrote Tokyo + escorts. The first site I clicked on had a telephone number, which I called. Much to my surprise, there was an answering machine and multiple options, with questions I didn’t know how to answer. I replied at random and carried on until I got to an operator. Looking for company in Tokyo? Yes, I said, making it clear that I wanted a Colombian girl.
“A Colombian girl?”
There was a silence and after a while the voice said: “That’s possible. Do you want her now?”
I calculated that I had a few hours free. “Yes,” I said.
“All right, sir, we’ll send her to your hotel right now, she’ll cost five hundred dollars.”
Five hundred dollars? I swallowed and said, looking at Juana’s photograph:
“All right, but she must have natural dark hair and dark eyes, be five and a half feet tall and thirty years old. I don’t want a teenager.”
“Don’t worry, sir, we’ll send someone with the characteristics you’re looking for. Will you be paying by credit card?”
“No. In cash.”
I poured myself a drink and lay down on the bed, feeling nervous. Would it be her? It was absurd to think it would, but whoever came might know her or know something about her, it wasn’t unlikely that the Colombian women here were in contact. I’d seen that in other countries. Economic migrants meet together, organize, support each other. Were there organizations of Latin American women in Japan? There had to be. It could be another lead.
Knock, knock.
My heart skipped a beat. I got up and opened the door.
It was room service, with more ice, so I continued with my deliberations. I tried to think of other possible points of contact. All at once a light came on in my head: a church with a Colombian or Latin American priest who held masses in Spanish. That was the place! Knowing her history, it was most likely that Juana was an atheist, but there might be someone in that church who knew her, or who knew where else in Tokyo you could look for a Colombian girl.
Knock, knock.
This time there was no room for doubt, and I opened the door.
It was a woman of a
bout thirty, with dark skin and dark eyes. About five and a half feet tall. I asked her what her name was and she said, I’m Cindy. Are you Colombian? Yes, she said, from Cartago. From her northwestern accent I realized she wasn’t Juana, but physically speaking, even though she was a bit different than the photograph, she could have been her.
She didn’t react when I told her we were compatriots, only asked me to pay her and then walked to one side, with her cell phone in her hand.
“I’m sorry, I have to call my mamiya and confirm, it won’t take a moment.”
Mamiya? That must be her protector. Then she sat down on the bed and told me that for that price I was entitled to a blowjob and complete “frontal sex.” Anything else would be extra, which struck me as fair. I asked her how long and she said, thirty minutes, forty maximum. I said that to start with we could talk for a while, that I preferred to use the time asking her a few things.
“You aren’t going to ask me difficult questions, are you?”
“No,” I said, “only easy ones. Do you know a Colombian girl named Juana Manrique? She lives here in Tokyo.”
She looked up at the ceiling and shook her head. I explained to her that she was from Bogotá and I showed her the photograph, fully aware that in a situation like this, even if she knew her, even if she was her best friend, she’d be most likely to say no … out of fear, or because she didn’t know who I was, or didn’t know the reason for my interest.
Cindy looked at the photograph and said she looked like a number of Colombian women she had known, but she wasn’t sure, and the name didn’t ring any bells. She had been in Japan for six years and had seen lots of girls come and go. I offered her a drink and she accepted; by the second sip, she seemed more trusting, so I told her who I was and why I was looking for Juana.
Night Prayers Page 14