Night Prayers

by Santiago Gamboa

  The oldest was thirty-eight, a real record, and the curious thing is that she had been married for twelve years. Until now she always told her husband she didn’t like frontal penetration out of respect for me, and the guy accepted it. Can you imagine? He sodomized her, and they performed fellatio and masturbation. He’s a harbor technician and, curiously, he would tell his best friends about it, and even make jokes. My wife’s tongue is fourteen inches long and she can breathe through her ears! And they would all laugh.

  She also laughed with her friends: my husband has a small cock, no bigger than his tongue, and his semen tastes either of pastis or whiskey, depending on what he’s drunk the previous evening. And that’s how they’ve been all this time, but today she had a party at her office, drank to excess, and ended up fucking in the bathroom with one of her colleagues. This happened in France, in the offices of BNP. I can’t give you any more details. Seeing the blood flowing down her thigh, the current accounts manager of the Sully Morland branch thought she was starting her period and exclaimed, mon dieu! at least you won’t get pregnant, but she wept with pain and he thought she was weeping with love and pleasure, so he said something vulgar to her. They separated on a great misunderstanding. Later he went back to the bathroom to wash one of the tails of his shirt. She had been waiting so long for her husband and look what happened.

  Pour me another, is this really whiskey? Never mind. At least you have alcohol, I’m tired, you have no idea, dear Inter-Neta, what it means to be what I am and the tremendous solitude in which I live. Up there, there’s almost nobody left. I think that everyone, including him, drinks too much and is past caring. I drink too, but it’s different. I drink because the pain of the world is too much for me, and I can’t take another iota of pain.

  Do you want another crazy and eccentric story? This might be the best one: a young woman of twenty-two decides to give her virginity to her philosophy professor, who is married. After a class on the pre-Socratics, he takes her to a motel—this happens in Latin America—penetrates her for the first time gently, softly, until she says, oh, do it stronger, so he penetrates her again and they both laugh and kiss and she, filled with ecstasy, cries out in French, Je suis une sirène! They fuck and fuck as if we had invented original sin exclusively for them—and for that night—and then, having already been penetrated through most of the orifices in her beautiful body, when they’re having a beer and he’s smoking a cigarette and she’s preparing a line of coke, the young woman realizes she’s lost a lot of blood and the sheets of the modest motel bed are soaked, as if the Red Sea had burst into that little space of adultery and pleasure.

  As they’re about to go, the young woman suffers an attack of modesty and says: I can’t leave it like this, it’s a shame and an embarrassment, I’ll take the sheets away and wash them, and send them back by courier. The Dionysian philosophy professor, who’s exhausted, says, don’t worry, they’re used to it, they’ve seen worse things, but she insists, she’s had a French education and is stubborn, she thinks that faced with any situation in life there’s only one way to proceed that’s the right way, so she grabs the sheets and puts them on the backseat of the car.

  As luck or fatum would have it, that night, returning to the city—the motel was on the outskirts—there was a routine police roadblock, and when the officers searched the car they found the sheets. Blood! They arrested him on suspicion of murder. There was no point explaining that it was her virginal blood, and the tests would take a couple of days. They were taken to the local police station. The philosopher had to call a lawyer, and of course his wife.

  6

  I was a happy child, Consul, but in a sad, opaque world. A black and white world. And why? I still ask myself that. There was very little in that happiness, if you looked into it: clouded landscapes, gray people who hated their lives and dreamed of something different, people who never managed to live up to anything they thought was beautiful, banal creatures conscious of their own banality, prisoners of something that had no end and could never have an end. I was a little queen as long as I believed that the world was the same for everybody. Then I realized it wasn’t and that made me angry. I’m still angry, but anyway, that’s not what I want to tell you about.

  As in children’s stories or Russian novels, I’ll begin at the beginning. Even though the beginning is boring. I was the spoiled child of the house until, when I was four, they told me I’d be having a brother. I felt as if they’d betrayed me and that triggered a hatred in me, a feeling of abandonment, even a kind of sense of being an orphan, and when the child was born I wanted him to die. He was an intruder, a stowaway. Seeing him crawling through my space, watching with horror as he took over my things, I had a lot of ideas: to push him down the stairs, to open the door so that he got out onto the street and was lost. But then I noticed that in spite of the novelty I was still being spoiled, and that saved his life. My position wasn’t in danger and in order to be sure I forced them to choose. I put them to the test. Father always opted for me. So I kept quiet. My little world continued to function more or less as before, and the years went by. I continued to ignore him. Don’t you love your little brother? they would say, and I’d say, yes, I love him, he’s the king of my country, and I’m the queen, and everybody would laugh and say we were cute, but they didn’t realize how much I despised him. His diapers, his talcum powder, his mournful crying. I hated him and told myself: God sent him to put me to the test, because in those days I believed in God, you know? I thought: he’s only here to see what I do, but then God will get him out of my way. He’ll have to be very careful. That was what I always thought, and I waited and waited, but God never granted my wish.

  Father idolized me.

  I never loved him as much as he loved me. He was a poor man whose neck had been wrung, whose wings had been scorched. What could I do? I decided to keep quiet and wait. My school friends were luckier, their families were rich and important and there wasn’t that rancid taste in their lives, that atmosphere of desolation that lived in my house. What did I do? I kept quiet. I waited.

  One day I thought God had heard me, because my brother got ill. They took him to the clinic, and I said, goodbye to all this, back to a world without him and it’ll be better. I could see from my parents’ faces that it was serious, but I noticed (and somehow knew) that it wasn’t going to be a great loss for them. They had me, why did they want more?

  One Saturday they suggested I visit him, and I accepted, all right, I’ll make a little sacrifice, but looking up I said, God, I know what you’re playing at, I’ll go see him and then you’ll take him away, right? As I walked into his room, I looked him in the eyes and something very strange happened. It was the first time I’d looked at him in that way, and what I saw changed my life. How to explain it? I realized that there was no God and that nobody had sent him to put me to the test; he was simply a little person who was terribly alone and fragile and who seemed to be saying: here is the other half of your soul. I heard that in his eyes, and there was more, a kind of path, or a world; in those days I hadn’t yet read Rimbaud, but later I understood: “In the dawn, armed with an ardent patience, we will enter splendid cities.” These were the words of the path I thought we had to take, he and I, alone, because deep down what there was in his silent eyes was a voice, the voice of a ghost that seemed to whisper: you too are here, we contain the same breath, my soul and yours are united, don’t break it, so I reached out my hand and touched him, understanding profoundly who he was, and immediately, for the first and only time in my life, I felt love, a cataclysm that almost buried me, a storm that took my breath away, something so big that from that moment it filled my life and I could never again love anybody else, not even today, only my son who is also called Manuel because they are both made of the same matter: the flesh and the bones and the blood and the look of that love.

  It wasn’t necessary to speak. We didn’t say anything to each other, we were very young! But we knew that we were together: we had re
cognized each other. That was why I devoted myself to protecting him. He was my younger brother. I protected him as much as I could from the wickedness of that city, and from that cruel thing known as childhood. I also tried to protect him from the family. I don’t know if I succeeded. And later, as he grew, I became aware of his unusual intelligence. His opinions about life and the world, and later about art, were exceptional. Everything in him was like that: brilliant, enigmatic, superhuman. Inside him something was growing that was beautiful and I was there to look after it, like a lighted ember you have to cradle in your hands to turn it into a fire. That gave us strength. Sometimes two cowards together can produce courage. That was the case with us.

  When I turned fifteen I felt that I had to find a way to escape. One day we saw the movie Papillon, with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, and we told each other this was how it had to be for us, to get away from a prison island by taking advantage of the tides, to keep trying until we escaped, it was that or death, to leave our sad house, that middle-class neighborhood with its social pretentions, that sad, hated city. Our prison island. We had to jump when the tide was high, like in Papillon.

  When he was very young Manuel started to read and to watch movies, thanks to a friend on the block. Later, much to my surprise, he started to paint graffiti. Beautiful things, islands, seas, storms. He had a beautiful world inside him that I wanted to know, to touch. That was why I had to get hold of money to buy him cans of spray paint, books, and DVDs, in other words, everything an elevated soul needs, so I started to look for little jobs at school. I did my rich classmates’ assignments, whispered the answers to them in exams, or did their exams myself, putting their names on the papers. They paid me and I went off happily to look for the best for him; while my classmates looked at shopwindows full of clothes and asked the prices, I would stroll along rows of books, touching the spines, following the alphabetical order, discovering the immense pleasure of buying books, the smell of the shelves, that silence charged with wisdom that exists between books and the people who buy them, a dense atmosphere, and so I’d return home with two new ones, sometimes three, knowing that with them I was giving Manuel something of the life he didn’t have, which was the space in which both of us would later be happy.

  I need to tell you some intimate things, Consul, for which I apologize. At the age of seventeen one of my classmates told me on the bus: I’ve lost my virginity. It was a Monday. She’d been to a party with her boyfriend the previous Saturday and they’d gone on to a motel. These things matter to a young girl. To me, at least. An army of ants ran through my veins, and I asked, what did you feel? and she said, I almost died, I think I fainted. And I said, inquisitively, but did it hurt? A bit at the beginning, she said, but it’s so nice that it passes. From that moment on, it turned into an obsession, but I didn’t have a boyfriend and didn’t want one. At parties I danced and hugged boys, but they didn’t take me seriously. I met one in the end, not long afterwards. He was from a foreign school and had money. When he asked me for my phone number, I said to him: call me, if you like. In the middle of the week he called and to tell the truth I really couldn’t be bothered with him, because he was quite stupid, but on Saturday, when he picked me up from home to go out for an ice cream, I said to him, look, can I make another suggestion, let’s go to a motel and you can deflower me, okay? The guy was surprised and said, you bet! he accelerated and we drove along the freeway to La Calera, and there, in a room with a jacuzzi and a disc player and a view of Bogotá, I lost my virginity, which was nothing special, or rather not very intense, but at least it was done, so the following week I said to my classmate, that’s it, I also lost my virginity, and we started comparing notes, how big was it? what did it smell of? how long did it take him to come? did he wear a condom? that kind of thing.

  In the middle of the week the guy called to invite me to a party, but I said to him, forget about parties, I’m not your girlfriend, if you want to fuck let’s go and fuck, but don’t talk crap, and the guy, who was sweet but a complete dickhead, said, all right, Juana, that’s cool, we’ll do what you want, and so I had a lover, but because he never listened he fell head over heels in love with me, guys are all the same, so he’d call me and say, hey, Juanita, I want to see you, can I come to your house? and I’d say, over my dead body, call me on Saturday, and don’t be so mushy, and on Saturday he’d call and I’d say, no, I’m going to the movies with my brother, and he’d say, and what movie are you going to see? and I’d say, what nerve, the kind you don’t like, and he’d go, no, Juana, on the contrary, I’m crazy about Fellini and Pasolini and all those Italian surnames, seriously, and I’d say, thanks a lot but no thanks, call me next Saturday, and then the guy would try to get to me through my friends, but since none of them knew where I lived, there was no way, and he’d call like crazy, send text messages and crap like that, and go on Facebook, until he really drove me crazy, saying that he was dying, that he needed to see me, that he couldn’t stop crying, so I sent him a message saying, right, this bullshit is over, ciao, ciao, I’m going to block you out and I’m going to take you off my Facebook contacts and all that, okay? so it’s best if you don’t insist, thank you, and of course, the guy didn’t take any notice and through friends sent me messages and gifts, and I sent everything back, marked him as spam, until he turned up at my school, crying, and got down on his knees, so I said to him, all right, stop, that’s enough, let’s talk on Saturday, and the guy left, and on Saturday he called and I said, pick me up at the Pomona and we’ll go to a motel, but on the condition that you don’t talk to me or tell me any more of that bullshit you’ve been telling me, and that’s how it was, we fucked and the guy didn’t say a word, which was how I liked him, so I continued seeing him, although one day I said to him, look, it’ll be better if you find yourself another girlfriend, if you like we can carry on fucking until you get one, but I can tell you now it’s not going to last because I’m going to university to study sociology and I don’t want to go around anymore with spoiled brats like you or have anything more to do with people like you, do you understand me? I like you, I prefer not to be a bitch, and that’s why I’m telling you right now not to start throwing tantrums like the other time, okay?

  I got him out of my hair when I started at the National, where I met really fantastic people and found my world. In my school there had been rich people and middle-class people, like me, but the rules of what was good, what was cool, were dictated by the rich, whereas at the National it wasn’t like that, there were other values. Being cultured, having courage or nobility, was much more important than a shirt or a pair of shoes. The opposite of the horrible world I had just left and had never belonged to.

  My place was the National, with its lawns and its white buildings covered with graffiti, and its brick constructions, its middle-class and lower-class people preparing to go out into life like lions or crocodiles, with their stomachs to the ground, all equal in that enormous larder, a gnoseological throng, as a Cuban poet said, and that was why when I found out that they’d accepted me I felt my cheeks burn with pride, Colombia’s in my image now, I said to myself, walking along the path that led across the lawn to the sociology department, and when they called out the names of those enrolled in the first semester my eyes started watering, I thrust my hand in the air when I heard my name, yes, here I am, so overcome with emotion that they looked at me, and I thought, this is my patch, I wanted to meet everybody, to love everybody, to tell them how long I had waited for them, it was wonderful, but of course, at home it was quite the opposite, the atmosphere was grim, to avoid problems I’d told Father that I was going to enroll in law or engineering, so I said that sociology was my third option and that was the one I’d been accepted for. They didn’t believe me, but it was too late to do anything about it.

  Father and Mother were conservatives, but not part of an erudite, aristocratic right wing; they belonged to that cheap, mean, jingoistic right wing that was so common there, people filled with hate and res
entment who look for something or someone with whom (or through whom) to express that hate and resentment; with their admiration for the upper classes and their social aspirations; with their classism and racism. That was why Marx said that the middle class was the class least prepared for a revolution. He was only partly wrong, but if we’re talking about my parents, he was right.

  As I’m sure you remember, Consul, Uribe won those elections using words that got people heated up, words like motherland, everyone wearing wristbands with the colors of the flag and talking about one thing and one thing only: “security.” The people wanted war and he promised them war. The people wanted deaths and he promised them many dead. The people wanted a patriarch, a sovereign, a satrap, and he promised them he would be a patriarch, a sovereign, a satrap. His victory was celebrated with shots fired in the air and chain saws roaring, do you remember? The paramilitaries celebrated and the left said: now we really are fucked. FARC greeted the news with a shower of grenades in Bogotá that killed a couple of junkies in a crack house near the Palacio de Nariño. FARC said, war is war, and Uribe replied, bring it on, let’s see who has more guts.

  Because he represented people with guts, and Catholics to boot. The Conservatives shouted for joy. The Liberals celebrated. Our Forbes-listed millionaires opened bottles of Veuve Clicquot and rubbed their hands saying, let’s get ready to make more money. Those who didn’t have anything got drunk on aguardiente or sweet wine and sighed, saying: oh, how proud I feel to be a good Colombian! The paramilitaries fired their mini-Uzis in the air, and it was lucky those bullets didn’t land in the skulls or spines of peasants, trade unionists, community leaders, or native Indians. The Catholics bowed down before the new Messiah: “He has a picture of the Blessed Marianito that he carries sewed into his fist!” wasn’t it his foreskin? no, his fist! The evangelicals said: “He worships the Virgin Mary!” The elegant Hindu ladies in Bogotá celebrated: “He gets up at three in the morning to say chakras and meditate!” The Jews hugged each other: “He may be a bit of a Fascist, but at least he’s a friend of Israel!” The paramilitaries sang the national anthem with their hands on their hearts, and said: “Now you’re going to see what’s good for you, you sons of bitches.”