Sabina Vedovelli was talking with three weary-looking men. The fattest of them was sweating profusely, his hair stuck to his forehead, as if somebody had thrown a glass of water in his face. Listening from a distance, I thought I caught the music of the Russian language. Suddenly the fat man gave a loud laugh and said, eta horoshó, which removed any lingering doubts. I assumed they were partners of hers, the porn industry having flourished in the former Tsarist empire, thanks, among other things, to the great beauty of their young women. I found myself looking at Sabina Vedovelli’s cleavage, which was like a maelstrom between her magnificent breasts, and just as I was about to fall into that ravine I saw something really extraordinary emerge from it, nothing less than . . . the head of a small snake! a kind of periscope that appeared for a second, looked right and left, sank back down, and disappeared. Did you see that!!??, I asked Rashid, and he said, what? I felt disoriented, suspecting the wine I was drinking, my tiredness, even my illness. A snake just popped out from between Sabina Vedovelli’s breasts! I said.
Ebenezer Lottmann looked at me reprovingly, but said nothing. Rashid, as a way out of the impasse, said, oh, my friend, I see the Jerusalem syndrome has gotten to you, too many prayers create an electricity in the air that causes madness, but don’t worry, it passes, the best thing we can do is go as quickly as possible to the bar and get some more whiskey. He took his leave of his publisher with a nod and said in my ear, you’re going crazy, friend, when was the last time you had a decent fuck? But as we passed Sabina the little snake popped up again. The three Russians screamed and Rashid stopped dead. Half the room turned to look at Sabina’s fleshy promontories, and she, with a smug look on her face, took the thing out, a little rubber toy, which was greeted with shouts and laughter.
This strange bazaar of humanity seemed boundless. On the other side of the room was a mysterious-looking man trying to hide amid the velvet drapes. Seen from a distance, he looked like a medieval warrior from one of those “versatile” novels Lottmann had talked about. He was wearing a black cloak with a hood and only the lower part of his face was visible. His forearms were bare and covered with tattoos, giving them a brocade-like appearance; as I walked toward him, I could make out Roman crosses, the figure of a bloodstained Christ, Latin inscriptions in Gothic writing, an eye that looked like a sun shining over a remote fortified city, and I said to myself, here he is, the Templar, that was all this party needed, and I thought, maybe thanks to him this story will take flight and turn into a resounding bestseller, a Templar of our times! what an extraordinary stroke of luck! I hope he can be part of this narrative, I swear he’ll have a leading role, of course he will, the others will have to understand that, we’re all in the same boat, oh yes, it was time I became a “versatile writer,” and having a Templar on board was the best guarantee.
As I came level with him, these fantasies faded. I saw that one of the tattoos showed the helm of a boat, with the words, in Spanish, “God is my co-pilot,” and what I had thought was an armored breastplate turned out to be an elegant gray jacket, so I resigned myself, farewell Templar. This might well be the former evangelical pastor, so I asked him, are you from the Caribbean? and he pulled back his hood, revealing a pair of bulging eyes, and said yes, my brother, from right in the middle of the Caribbean, and how about you, if I’m not being indiscreet? I’m Colombian, I replied, and he said, oh, give me your hand, brother, Walter José Maturana, at God’s service and yours, in that order, with the Almighty first, yes indeed, and I replied, pleased to meet you; I turned to introduce him to Rashid, but Rashid was nowhere to be seen, and I thought: he must have gone back to the drinks table, I’ll catch up with him later.
The pastor, with his untidy gray beard, raised his index finger and said, I know who you are now, brother, you’re the novelist! the first thing I want to tell you is that I haven’t read your books, but when I saw your name it sounded familiar, so I started searching for it on the Internet, telling myself, I’ve heard it before somewhere, and then it came to me, a woman I had dealings with some years ago was a fan of yours, not because of a book but because of an article, something about mature women, she’d stuck it up on the wall and always said, if ever I meet the man who wrote this I’m going to smother him with kisses, starting with his dick, those were her exact words, and having heard your name mentioned so often, I’ve remembered it ever since, and now I’ve actually met you! oh God, life is amazing, isn’t it? you can’t imagine how important that article of yours was to her, and how it helped her, my God, the poor woman was trying to get down to two grams and clung to those words as if they were her last hope. Two grams of what? I said to him, and he replied, what do you think, my brother? two grams of smack, horse, don’t you get it? heroin, brother, when I received her into the Church she was on four sachets a day and she didn’t have any veins left, poor thing, she’d lost her looks because the smack rots your gums and your teeth fall out like seed from a rotten corncob, poor girl, nobody wanted to hump her anymore and that’s when the drama started, she was used to giving the dealers blowjobs or sleeping with them in exchange for coke and horse, but then they got bored with her and said, that’s it, Cinderella, go sell your pussy to junkies because we don’t want you anymore, either bring us money or the flow dries up, baby, the party’s over, can you imagine, the same guys who got her hooked in the first place just so they could fuck her when she was nice and pretty now left her in the trash, oh, brother, this world really is one big shithouse and stinks like rancid cottage cheese, because to add to that, when she went with junkies they gangbanged her, three or four of them at a time, and when she had the smack inside her the poor woman didn’t know what was going on, sometimes they even crapped on her, and I really mean that, she was like the living dead when I pulled her out of the garbage, I put Christ into her nostrils and if you saw her today, my friend, you’d be knocked out, even her mother who brought her into the world wouldn’t recognize her, she’s clean again, and by a miracle of the Lord, the Big Enchilada, the Man Upstairs, she doesn’t have anything nasty in her blood, because I tell you, with what they put in her she should have had AIDS the size of a Soviet ship, but anyway, Christ held out his hand to her, and she’s the woman who has your article hanging on her wall.
I saw Rashid in the distance. He signaled to me, making a fanlike gesture with his fingers that meant, see you later, so I said to Maturana, listen, all I know about you is what the conference gave us and that’s why I’d like to get to know you, I mean, my God, you must have seen some pretty harsh things in your life, I guess? The man twisted the hairs of his beard and said, yes indeed, brother, I’ve seen the devil in Technicolor and black and white, and I’ve even seen him in the mirror, brother, because between you and me I can tell you I came out of the garbage truck with the engine on, or when they’d already closed the lid and were throwing earth on top, really, everything’s passed through this body, smack, mushrooms, weed, coke, crack, freebase, I was so addicted, brother, I’d lost all sense of shame, until one day I touched bottom and I won’t tell you how it was to wake up the day after, man, that was really rough, no kidding, try to imagine the scene, opening your eyes on the sidewalk of an avenue at three in the afternoon, with the sun beating down, pants torn, no shoes on your feet, so thirsty you could have drunk a gallon of gasoline, the syringe still in your forearm and a cop slapping you and saying, hey, hey, wake up, what’s your name? and you making an effort to remember something as basic as your name, who the fuck you are and what you’re called, that isn’t an easy question to answer, brother, and then seeing them almost dying of disgust as they lift you up and put you in the back of a patrol car with the bars around, and hearing them say, this scumbag fell out of the garbage truck, I’d rather clean a dog’s vomit with my tongue than touch him again, I’d rather kiss an ass with colitis than smell the breath of this bag of germs, anyway, things like that, and then they put me in jail for destitution, vagrancy, a long way from where I’d grown up because all this happened in the north,
in a little town in West Virginia I’d gone to for some business that turned out badly, and I went straight to prison, my friend, I’m not telling you the half of it, but it was there that I met the man who saved me, the Jesus Christ of the Caribbean, anyway, that’s the story I’m going to tell, so it’s better if I don’t tell you the rest now.
Did you see Sabina Vedovelli? he asked. She’s going to be the center of attention: there’s a rumor around that she’s going to tell her life story, and I said, I’m new at this, I don’t know what kind of things are being rumored. Maturana continued: may God forgive me if I’m slandering anybody, I’m only repeating what I’ve heard, but they say she’s been the lover of Mafiosi and politicians and all kinds of VIPs, they say Berlusconi, you remember the bald guy who was president of Italy a few years ago and became famous for banging young girls? and I said yes, of course, and he continued, well, they say one night he gave her as a gift to the president of Russia, who was on a state visit, and at dinner Sabina got up on the table and danced and threw plates and glasses on the floor, and then she lifted her skirt and went closer to the men, who must have been drunk and coked-up, and she pulled aside her G-string and peed in their faces, she was aiming streams of urine at them while they sang the balalaika or some crap like that, and they mixed it with champagne and drank it, and then they both screwed her, one from in front and the other from behind, on the table, and they gave her a tremendous fricassee of cock, that’s what they say, I don’t have any evidence, but what a life, eh? and they also say that she always carries in her suitcase a pair of underpants that belonged to Pope John Paul II and that she worships them as if they were the Turin Shroud and they say she lost her virginity at the age of eighteen, because until then she only took it up the ass, and that the first man who gave it to her from the front and took her virginity was a pilot of the Swedish airline SAS, flying from Rome to Gothenburg, who came out of the cabin to take a leak in the middle of the night and found her in the bathroom, with her pants down and crying with fear, and when the giant, who was probably called something like Olaf the Bastard, saw her, he closed the door, took out his cock and impaled her on it as they crossed the Apennines, and they say that’s why she kept the taste for screwing in exotic places, even while parachuting or at the bottom of the sea, and that she’s had sex with various kinds of living creatures, not all of them human, in fact human isn’t necessarily what she likes best, anyway, brother, everybody says something, because it’s like this Vedovelli woman is from another planet.
Suddenly, I heard a voice beside me saying, are you the writer? It was a young woman with rectangular glasses. Hi, she said, I’m Marta Joonsdottir, I’m from Iceland, I write for the Ferhoer Bild in Reykjavik, I’m here to cover the conference, my readers would be interested to hear about your opinions, maybe you could grant me an interview, so I said, yes of course, it would be an honor, although I’m not quite sure how interested your readers would be, and then I said, let me introduce the ex-Reverend Walter José Maturana, and Maturana looked at the girl and said, it’s nice to see a young woman who’s pure of heart, with her soul shining out of her eyes, and she replied, thanks for the compliment, Father, but don’t be deceived, these eyes have already seen everything an adult person ought to see and more, I know about your evangelical work and I’d like to talk about that as the conference goes on, and he said, whenever you like, I’ll try not to die first.
Just as he said that, there was another coup de théâtre, a second bomb going off, even louder than the first, which made the building shake. A murmur went through the room, there were a few stifled cries, and the candles flickered. Two seconds later, the musicians struck up again as loudly as ever and the guests continued talking, all except Marta Joonsdottir, whose eyes screwed up like frightened squirrels, how can this be normal? she cried, and I replied, I don’t think it is, it isn’t normal for anybody, but everyone pretends because they’re too embarrassed to say anything or they don’t believe it. Marta looked at me gravely and said: one of these days there’ll be a flicker of light and a moment later we’ll all be dead, and that’ll be normal too. Before she walked away she added: I’ll look for you.
I moved away from the pastor and went to one of the windows that looked out on the western part of the city. I heard the sound of a siren and the roar of engines and saw an intense blaze creating sinuous shapes and flashes of light. That’s where it must have fallen, I thought. But then I saw something strange: below, on King David Street, people were strolling along as if it were a cool summer night, indifferent to what was happening or, at least, what I thought was happening, because by this time, with all those glasses of whiskey and the long journey, I was not the right person to judge the gravity of what was happening, or how much danger we were all in.
Rashid reappeared and said, the smell of the candles is choking us, friend, it’s time for a change of scenery, let’s go, the city is calling us, it’ll be an honor to show you something of this huge coffin that is Jerusalem under siege, a nest of flames whose combustion brings forth monsters, igneous creatures; a fallen burial mound, dressed in funeral clothing; a dolmen brought to its knees but resisting blindly. Let me show you how people enjoy themselves at night in this city.
I walked behind him to the exit and a second later we were walking up King David Street, just like the people I had been so surprised to see from the window. We had gone three blocks when I saw the Icelandic journalist on the opposite sidewalk, so I called her over, so you also wanted to go for an evening stroll? to which she replied, I’m going back to my hotel, did you think I was staying at the King David? no newspaper in Iceland could afford it, I’m in a small hotel on Agrippa Street, the Hotel Agrippa. I introduced her to Rashid, who invited her to have a drink with us, and she accepted.
We could hear explosions in the distance, but Rashid did not slow down at all. We came to a shopping street, Ben Yehuda, and turned into some narrow side streets that were quite lively, couples in the darkness, people on their own enjoying the night. We walked past some old doors until Rashid entered one and said to us, here we are, welcome to the Diwan, the curtain rises!
In my mind, I categorized the bar as noisy postmodern, dark and insalubrious, and its clientele as fringe characters, drunks, drug addicts, mentally unbalanced people addicted to prescription drugs, tranquilizers, and psychoactives, people who had had tough childhoods and had crossed the thin line between reality and the mental hospital, just like in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and in the case of the women, with the addition of being easy lays, not forgetting that some of the habitués of these bars usually belong to various high risk groups, people with AIDS or carriers of multiple staphylococcus, pneumocystitis, various kinds of gonorrhea, hepatitis B or C, candida albicans, Kaposi’s sarcoma, anyway, all of this might well have been in the Diwan, but I said nothing and walked to the counter with a certain reluctance and a vague feeling that I was crossing a line, until I was able to take my first slug from the glass of whiskey Rashid put in my hand. Then we went to the back of the room, where music was playing loudly, and sat down.
Rashid stopped to say hello to some acquaintances of his, so I asked Marta, do you like the place? and she said, very much, it’s the kind of bar I go to in Reykjavik, where I can chill out, a space where nobody looks at anyone and everyone respects everyone else, not like those awful places with leather armchairs and indirect lighting where people go to see and be seen; I have a long history of love affairs and friendships in bars like this, and what about you? do you like it? I forgot what I had thought when I came in, because I had already stopped feeling nervous, so I said, it’s a typical bar of our time, when the archeologists of the future want to figure out our civilization they’ll find traces of places like this, which are exactly the same in different parts of the world, do you live in Reykjavik? and she said, no, in Paris, I’m their arts correspondent, that’s why they sent me to cover the conference, I’m a graduate in philosophy and letters, and philology too.
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sp; When I heard that I said, I’m a philologist too, that makes us colleagues. I proposed a toast to the noble science of philology and I said, the only thing I’ve read from your country is Paradise Reclaimed by Halldór Laxness, oh, and Meek Heritage, too, but Marta shuddered and said, that novel isn’t by Laxness, it’s by Frans Sillanpää, who’s Finnish, you’re confusing them because they’re both Northern, just like everyone does, and she added, bitterly: the rest of the world doesn’t distinguish between Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland, and yet they’re so different! You’re right, I said, I confused two writers, but not your countries. She took a sip of her whiskey and said, I’ll forgive you if you change this shit for something stronger for me, this is no time to be drinking something that’s only forty proof! I stood up and went to the bar. I saw a green bottle with a sinister name, Black Death. I asked for a glass of it and took it to Marta.
She took a sip of it and her cheeks turned very pink, and she cried, Brennivín! they have this at the bar? drinking Brennivín is the most patriotic thing an Icelander can do, and added, I have to confess something, this drink has a connection with the first time I got drunk and also, predictably, lost my virginity, it all happened on the same night. I’d been drinking a bit and dancing in an old disco called Nasa, in the center of Reykjavik, where underground bands played like Björk’s Sugarcubes, Juliette and the Licks, Ghostigital, who play really weird rock, and there I was, only fifteen, and I wanted to drink up the world in one go or snort it into my brain with a line of coke; what I did was drink and drink until a guy wearing a helmet with horns and a leather vest took me on the dance floor and whirled me around and around; my feet literally lifted off the ground. From there we went to the men’s bathroom to have sex, he was nice and he treated me quite well; it hardly hurt at all. The next day he gave me a couple of aspirins and drove me home on his motorbike. I never saw him again.
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