Night Prayers

by Santiago Gamboa

  We left the motel and he dropped me at Seventh and 140th. I was dying of panic, convinced that girl was me. I started to list what Víctor knew about me, and was relieved to realize he knew almost nothing, not even my name, just my cell phone number, which since it was for this work I’d bought using false papers. But they’d have a description or photographs: of the hotel, of the helicopter that took us to the ranch. I’d have to be very careful.

  I felt scared for Manuel and my parents, what would happen if they went to the house? Víctor and his chief and Secret Service guys in general weren’t so fussy, I had to act fast. Then I remembered the offer from the former Miss Colombia. To go to Japan for a year, let things cool down, and then send for Manuel. It was the only solution, but I needed to talk with someone. I was alone, what to do? For some reason a light went on in my brain and I thought, Alfredo the lawyer! he could tell me how serious the problem was and if it was worth going. I didn’t have his number and I didn’t want to call the former Miss Colombia, so I went straight to his house. Seeing me, the doorman remembered, and immediately lifted the receiver of the entry phone.

  He told me to follow him. Alfredo was waiting for me in the elevator, very surprised. To what do I owe this miracle? he said, and I said, I have to talk to you, you’re the only person I can trust, I have a problem, I’m sorry, if you’re busy I can wait, and he said, don’t worry, come, would you like a drink? and I said, yes, please, anything at all, a double, and I started telling him my life story, look, I’m this and this and that’s why I got involved with a guy from the Secret Service and then with people from Congress and the government, and that’s why I ended up in this and that; I told him about the visit to Don Fermín’s ranch and he opened his eyes wide, Fermín Jaramillo? and I said, I suppose so, I didn’t ask him his full name, and Alfredo said, damn it, wait, I’ll show you a photograph, he looked for a newspaper and showed it to me, is this him? I said yes, it is, I was on his ranch with the adviser I told you about, and Alfredo, looking increasingly grave, continued listening to the story, and I ended with Víctor, and I said, I think they’re looking for me, I don’t know what I did that was so bad, that’s what scares me the most, not knowing, and he said, well, it isn’t a crime to go as someone’s companion, you don’t work for the government, the problem isn’t the law but those who are covering their tracks and trying to protect this adviser. Andrés Felipe? I asked, and he said, yes, the press are investigating contacts between the government and the paramilitaries, the secret pacts, and that young man has become key to the whole business, the likeliest thing is that they’ll put pressure on him to plead guilty and say he acted alone, that’s what they always do, that’s why your problem isn’t with the law, let’s say, with the legal law, but with the law of those guys and the government, who do what they have to in order to protect themselves. It wouldn’t surprise me if they made up some sordid affair your friend was supposedly involved in that would make the visit to Don Fermín seem unimportant.

  He stood up, answered a call on his cell phone, and after a while came back. Don’t worry, I’m going to protect you. If you don’t have a safe place stay here, does your family know I exist? do you want to call them? No, I said, that’s no problem, they’re used to my being away. I heard my cell phone vibrate and when I looked at the screen my chest contracted. It was Víctor. I said to Alfredo, should I answer? No, he said, better switch off the phone so they can’t trace you.

  I spent the night in a guest room, looking at the lights of Bogotá and feeling scared. All I could do was wait. There was no mention of the case on the news, but I was sure the whole thing was about to blow up. Three days later, Alfredo arranged for me to travel overland to Quito. He had a friend, a magistrate of the Ecuadorian court, who could put me up until things calmed down. In the end I made up my mind to go home, invent an excuse, and pick up my passport, but when I got there nobody was in, only the maid. Mother had gone out and Manuel, who had no classes that day, had gone to the Luis Ángel Arango Library. It hurt me not to be able to say goodbye to him, but I told myself, it isn’t for very long. I left a note saying I was going to Los Llanos, and would call as soon as I could. I took out the money Andrés Felipe had given me. I should go to the apartment in Chapinero for my other savings, I thought. I caught a taxi and went, but as I got closer I saw two vans similar to Víctor’s on the corner of the street. I went back to the Nogal building, shaken, but from Seventh I saw more Secret Service vans in the parking lot of the building. What was going on? had they tracked me down? I stayed hidden for a while on the other side of the avenue, but nothing happened, so I decided to go.

  I rushed back to the city center. Now I had nowhere to go, but luckily everything was ready for me to travel to Ecuador. From a phone booth I called my university friends. Tamara reassured me, saying nobody had come looking for me in the faculty. She didn’t ask me for any details, she was a good friend. Then I called Jaime, the Aesculapian priest, and said, look, I need you to help me, it’s a matter of life and death, I have to hide for a few hours, maybe until tomorrow, but it’s very dangerous, are you up for it? and he said, of course, we’ll protect you here in the community. I went there, and I think that saved my life, Consul. I was there the whole of the following day, worrying my head off, until in the end I decided that there was no other way out and from a pay phone called Alfredo’s friend, the one who was going to get me out of the country. He was anxious, and insisted we should go that same night. I was picked up two hours later and we began the journey. He told me they had arrested Alfredo and put together a charge thanks to some cleverly edited recordings. We crossed Rumichaca Bridge on a false passport.

  The following day I bought the newspaper and saw the news: former magistrate Alfredo Conde, arrested in his house. Then I went on the Internet and saw all the news bulletins. A spokesman made a public statement, saying that they would do everything they could to clarify the relationship between the lawyer and terrorism. Behind him, next to the chief of police, I noticed Piedrahita’s thin, Indian-looking face, and I thought: they know I was there, they’ve charged him, and now they’re looking for me. I also saw that Andrés Felipe was being kept in detention in a house in La Picota belonging to the prosecutor’s department, that they had grabbed him trying to leave the country.

  From Quito I called the former Miss Colombia and said, I agree about Japan, but I need you to get me a ticket leaving from Ecuador, and so it was, they sent me on a route that was like a country bus, with stops in São Paulo, Dubai, Bangkok, and finally Tokyo. Five days’ traveling.

  In Tokyo everything seemed phantasmagorical. I had read Murakami and imagined the city as a combination of cold, sometimes icy sentences that spoke of lonely people, all-night cafeterias, and young people who couldn’t find a place in the world and isolated themselves in little towns in the mountains, that’s how I imagined it, a place in which everyone lived submerged in his obsessions, and when I arrived, going from the airport to the center in a van, I looked through the window and said to myself, I’m alone and I’m far away, I’ve left Manuel but I’ll go back for him, I couldn’t do anything but escape to save myself, to save the two of us, because if I’m in danger then he’s in danger too, and my joints and my love lobes hurt at the thought that I couldn’t write to him or call him, what could I say to him? what explanation could I give? The best thing was to live through this time as quickly as possible and then look him in the eyes and tell him the truth. It would be painful to be separated from him, but the day would come, I just had to be strong.

  Suddenly, in the middle of the city, the van turned in at an underground garage: this was my final destination. We took out the things and went up to an apartment on an upper floor, with a view of rooftops. Then I sat down to wait for things to pass, for the time to go by, that was all I wanted. I asked the woman who received me what was going to happen, but all she said was, rest, girl, you must be dead, do nothing but sleep for at least three days, the first week is for you to get used to it a
nd the jetlag to pass and the bags under your eyes to go. So I was shut in for a week. I wanted to go out but they wouldn’t let me, and when at last I went out they gave me an escort. I don’t want to tell you names or many details of what I lived through in Tokyo, as I’m sure you’ll understand, it’s dangerous and there are people who could spend their whole lives tracking you down.

  I worked with a group of Japanese who were the clients of the organization of my mamiya, a Colombian friend of the former Miss Colombia. It wasn’t a traumatic experience, but it was hard. After a while I found the lack of freedom stifling. I couldn’t go out on the street alone. I was earning good money but from it they kept deducting the costs of the journey, the costs of bringing me there, arranging my papers, and I don’t know what else. Every time I asked, my debt had increased. One day I asked a Japanese for accounts and the guy, a horrible dwarf, gave me a slap and threw me to the ground. I learned that I had to prepare myself for a new transformation: to be the submissive woman, ready to hit back when the enemy lowered his guard. I vowed that that Japanese dwarf would end up with his brain split open, and I began a tactic of seduction. Monsieur Echenoz was right again, and a month later I had him in front of me, naked. I knew what I wanted to do as soon as he forced me to kneel and suck his cock. The killer whale. I clasped him between my teeth but something strange happened: as I was about to cut into his skin the guy moaned with pleasure and ejaculated like crazy. Then he asked me to stand up straight on his back with my high heels on and walk all over him. Strange. Then he grabbed a lighter and held out his arm, which was covered in keloidal scars. I burned him and he ejaculated again, screaming with pain.

  I soon realized that he was the local boss, so it struck me as a good idea to go along with him. His name was Junichiro, but I called him Juni. He knew English, although he didn’t speak much in general. He was thirty-four years old. One night he told me that, as a boy, starting at the military school in the province where he was born, his comrades forced him to lick the asses of the ten dormitory heads. For a year they gave him beatings in the toilets, urinated in his face, and of course fucked him thousands of times. From what I understood he felt guilty for having felt pleasure and that was why he liked to be punished. It purified him and excited him. I was with him for about a year. One night I heard noises in one of the rooms in the apartment and when I went to see I found him lying there almost unconscious. He was bleeding from the anus. I asked him what had happened but he said nothing, and a second later I saw Tarek, an Iranian bodyguard, come in with a towel and some drugs to cauterize him. I thought it was horrible and I walked out. I didn’t want to see him again and, fortunately, he respected me.

  Then I got to know Jaburi, who was also a bodyguard. Whenever I went out I went with him, and one night, coming back to the apartment, I asked him to come with me into the shower. We fucked under the water, which was the start of my making him fall in love with me. The fucking was great. We maintained our relationship until one morning I felt something, a dizziness, my period was late, I was pregnant. It could only have been his, because we fucked without a condom. I think I must have wanted it subconsciously, so that he would get me out of there, to remind me that my life wasn’t just that, and it worked. Jaburi paid my debt and went to talk with the local bosses. We got married and they gave me an Iranian passport, because I’d left my Colombian one in the pocket of a pair of jeans and it had faded in the washing machine, maybe because it was false. Soon afterwards we got permission and were able to travel to Tehran, where Manuelito was born. But they don’t know that in Tokyo: the organization told the other girls I’d run away; I think they even said I’d been captured and tortured, I’m not sure.

  In Tehran I kept putting off getting in touch with Manuel, every day I said to myself: tomorrow, next week … I had to gather my strength. I was dying to tell him that he had a nephew, actually a son. Manuelito was our son. I applied for the passports without Jaburi knowing. I hoped to run away somewhere before writing to Manuel, but without my realizing it time passed. I never imagined he’d come looking for me. It’s hard to explain what I did, but that’s what happened. In Japan I was high on pills most of the time; that’s what I chose to escape. I have lots of gaps. Sometimes I looked at a calendar and said, are we already in September? and then, ten minutes later, we were in another month, and suddenly someone said in my ear, happy New Year, and I’d smile and take another pill. Jaburi saved me but I gave him my body and made him happy for a time. I didn’t give him a son because Manuelito is mine alone. He hit me once, although you could say I asked for it. I prefer not to talk about that, but the truth is that I didn’t hate him, I felt sorry for him. He seemed to me a loser, an inferior animal. I’ll tell you what happened, Consul: one night I refused to have sex with him and he said, I’m your husband, you’re obliged. I told him that nobody obliged me to do what I didn’t want to do and I got up and locked myself in the bathroom. Then I started shouting through the window. The neighbors woke up, and his parents and brothers, who lived on the floors below, came up to our apartment. I started saying that Jaburi was a coward, that he beat me because he was incapable of having an erection and satisfying me, and I said that he wasn’t a man because he forced me to put my finger up his ass and rub him, and that, as a wife, I did it even though I was dying from disgust, and I cried that Jaburi was a lousy faggot who couldn’t get enjoyment with women and only had erections when he painted mustaches on me with a burned cork. The neighbors started laughing and saying, “Virtuous woman,” and at that moment Jaburi knocked down the door and grabbed me and hit me while I screamed and laughed. You shouldn’t hit a woman, but I enjoyed it. It was a way of telling him: you may have force and religion on your side, but I’m the one who has what you want between her legs, and I can destroy you. Again I raised my arms and prayed for Monsieur Echenoz.

  The rest of the time, Jaburi was fine with me. The payment he’d obtained to save me was more than sufficient. He’ll find it hard for a while and then he’ll recover and later he’ll be happy. That’s how it always is in life. The more quickly you suffer, the better it is in the long run.

  And that’s all, Consul. The rest you already know.

  PART III

  1

  The urgent communication from Bangkok came as a shock. I was starting to get accustomed to the company of Juana and Manuelito Sayeq when one day, as often happens when you’re waiting for something, the telephone rang.

  It was Angie, the secretary.

  “There’s a call from Bangkok, Consul. It’s urgent.”

  It was the lawyer, sounding very upset. He said that for some reason (something beyond his control), the legal authorities had suddenly brought the hearing forward to that very morning, abruptly, and that in court, when given the chance to speak, Manuel had refused to plead guilty, which made everything very difficult.

  “Didn’t you tell me the young man had agreed?” the lawyer asked angrily, clearly blaming me. “That you’d explained to him what was at stake?”

  I was stunned.

  I told him I had, but that something had probably changed inside him. I assumed that on learning about Juana and the child his desire to be free had revived. Even though that freedom was utopian and unrealizable.

  “And now what do we do?” the lawyer asked. “I remind you that your countryman can be tried under article 27, the old military law with an immediate death penalty, and they don’t even have to wait until the end of the trial. Actually they don’t need a trial at all, just an order from the prosecutor’s department. I told him: from now on they can finish this at any moment. It’s very serious, what can we do?”

  I found it strange that he should ask me that question (which of the two of us was the lawyer with important contacts in Bangkok?) but I preferred not to get into an argument, so I said to him:

  “For now, defend him, do everything you can to defend him and get him acquitted. It’s the only option.”

  “I’ve already told you that isn’t re
alistic,” the lawyer insisted, still nervous, or rather annoyed, as if I had deceived him.

  I hung up angrily and called Colombia, but … The damned time difference! I had to wait four hours. At last, at around six-thirty, I managed to talk with the Consular Department. I told them it was urgent that I travel to Bangkok, that the trial had begun that morning, without warning. I couldn’t tell them my principal idea, which was to ask Juana to persuade Manuel to plead guilty and gain time. I wasn’t sure that could still be done, but it was the only way out. The famous lawyer wasn’t going to be of much use.