Santiago Gamboa - Night Prayers

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 Streets 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.

The next day, the prosecutor arrived punctually at seven in the morning, in a brand-new black Toyota Crown with smoked windows. Drizzle was falling, and it was hot. We left the center slowly, negotiating a noisy wall of cars, tuk-tuks , bicycles, and buses. Asian cities are always like that, colorful and chaotic: signs above the streets occupying the visual space, banners on both sides of the avenues. At that hour the smell was different: exhaust fumes, overheated tires, fried spicy meat, boiled coconut. Each time we stopped at a traffic light, the vendors came to the window to wave their offerings: fake watches, bags of cardamom, Montblanc pens for ten dollars, leather jackets by Armani or some other brand name.

The traffic was heavy, but it flowed.

“It used to be much worse,” the prosecutor said. “Ten years ago there was a jam that lasted for eleven days. We had to lift the cars out by helicopter. We built overpasses and this is what came after. As you can see, the bottle is filling up again and they’ll have to do something. If we didn’t have so many of the underclass coming to the city, things would be better.”

The air-conditioning was going full blast. One of the vents, the one above my leg, was dripping. At last we got onto a fast-moving lane and, with the siren on, we were able to advance. The city was left behind, and the landscape filled with poor farmhouses, plane trees, paddy fields, and palms. From time to time, we’d see an artificial lake with lotus flowers. After a while, the driver turned onto a main road that seemed to move away from the country and go back to the city, until we hit a suburb, and finally came to a wall of concrete and stone. On top, it had barbed wire and watchtowers.