Santiago Gamboa - Night Prayers

But anyway, I’ve been invited here to talk about aspects of my life and my relationship with Pamela, not to philosophize, so I’ll carry on: first came the silicon, the Botox, the nips and tucks, and then, when I’d recovered from it all, I started the physical work. Three hours a day in the gym. The tanning I do with P.A. products, which are the best, the acronym is like an amulet. I attend to everything, every detail, because the body is a painting. Let’s say, for those of you girls who are cultivated, like Rembrandt’s Night Watch . Every fold of the clothes is perfect. That’s how a girl should be if the aim is to be the most beautiful woman in the world, or at least in my world, let’s not be presumptuous. If you want to be a lady and not a floozy. Every tiny thing has to be perfect because otherwise the whole effect is ruined. This lovely hair I have, for example, is natural. You see what I look like today. The day after tomorrow, I’ll be thirty-five and nobody believes me. They all think I’m in my twenties. And some men even confuse me with the original, after a few drinks, but I always say to them: no, darling, I’m the other one, the number two, the original is unattainable! The other day a boyfriend of mine, to make me mad, said I was the poor man’s Pamela. How dumb can you get? If only he knew that I’ve won seven beauty contests in trans bars, at the Latin American level, and have been Miss Wet T-shirt Trans for 2007, 2008, and 2009. In 2010 it was stolen from me and given to the girlfriend of a drug trafficker, a filthy bitch who bribed the judges. When it’s a clean competition, I always win, I’m the most beautiful because I’m identical to Pam. I can imagine you must all be wondering if I know her. Well, I have a little bit of gossip for you: yes, we did see each other once. At a charity parade. She was in her dressing room and I was in mine, but I preferred not to say hello to her. I was scared. What if she’d said something rude to me? What if she’d looked at me anxiously? When it comes down to it, she and I are the two faces of one and the same person. That’s why I prefer not to know her and to continue dreaming. What could I do? I’d either keep quiet, or I could say simply: I always wanted to be you. But that, my darlings, is something you don’t say to anyone. Not even a goddess.

In those years I had just one friend, Consul, a friend from school who was quite eccentric, and lived a strange life. A quiet guy who spent his evenings reading. His name was Edgar Porras, but sometimes, to play around or to be provocative, he liked to call himself Edgar Allan Porras. As you might imagine, his favorite author was Poe, and he always carried a book by him in his coat, which was a kind of very theatrical olive green overcoat.

He lived in upper Santa Ana, the rich part, and his house was a palace with nine bedrooms and lots of floors, in the last row before the hills. He knew English and French because he’d lived in various countries, but almost never spoke them. He said he was only interested in languages for reading. I was impressed by his library, it made me feel small. I only knew the little English and French I’d learned at school, which wasn’t enough to read seriously. He on the other hand had, and had read, books in the original language by Céline, Malraux and Camus, Poe and Lovecraft, Salinger and Dylan Thomas, Roth and Bellow, and even authors I had barely heard of like David Foster Wallace, Kurt Vonnegut, John Cheever, and Thomas Pynchon.

I went to his house at weekends and sometimes slept over. The pretext was studying. My parents didn’t usually allow such things, but since he was from a rich family he impressed Father, who always ended up agreeing. Like the social climbers they were, they thought it was an achievement that their son was spending time with rich families, and Mother, who was addicted to “aspirational” soap operas, talked proudly about the Porras family at the florist’s. Of course Edgar and I never studied, being there was an excuse to do other things, because his family was always going out to dinners or cocktail parties, and the few times they were at home it was because they were throwing parties or dinners for lots of people, and since the house was very big we could be in his room and not hear a thing.

Señor Porras represented a French oil company, although I never quite understood what exactly his job was. A kind of diplomat in his own country. Edgar’s siblings were older, two brothers and a sister. They were almost never at home, or when they were they almost never left their rooms, I already told you it was a strange house. There was no obligation to be together for meals, so everyone went to the kitchen, served themselves, and went to their rooms to eat as they chatted on Facebook, listened to music, or hung out with other friends. The kitchen was a little restaurant with a bit of everything. The sister’s name was Gladys and she was older than Juana.

As well as being crazy about books, Edgar was also sex-mad and once told me that he knew how to spy on Gladys when she was having a bath. One Sunday he insisted that we go look at her. The bathroom had a high window that looked into a lavatory. If you climbed on the toilet you could see the shower cubicle. I said no but he insisted, saying she was really something, that she had huge tits and a fabulous ass. I found it strange that he should talk like that about his sister, and I told him that, but for him it was normal. Life is life, he would say, you have to take things as they come. He confessed to me that he’d steal her used panties and thongs, smell them, and jerk off. Finally we went to look at her, and to our surprise, she was with a guy and they were fucking like crazy. Standing with her back to him, her hands clutching the faucets, lifting her ass, and then on her knees sucking his cock, which was incredible. Edgar wanted to make a video and ran to his room for his BlackBerry, I’m going to put it on YouTube! he said. I preferred not to look, thinking of my sister.

In that family everything was strange, out of proportion, but I liked him, plus he was very generous. He passed on to me half the things they brought him back from their travels. The only time I ever had a Lacoste T-shirt was thanks to him, also a pair of Adidas and a Nike T-shirt. At that age, things like that are important. Later you forget, but at the age of seventeen they mark you.

His eldest brother, Carlos, would give us matchboxes filled with marijuana and say: take it nice and slowly, don’t overdo it, kids, okay? and if they catch you don’t say a word, if I saw you I’ll say I don’t remember. His father locked the bar, but Edgar knew how to open it by removing a wooden panel, so on Saturdays we’d steal bottles of wine or whiskey, whatever we could find, and take them with us to the parks in Santa Ana and Santa Bárbara, where we’d read poetry, especially Barba Jacob and León de Greiff, and of course, poems by Poe in English that Edgar knew by heart, and would yell at the quarries and the hills, cursing them, challenging Bogotá like a Colombian Rastignac.

Sometimes he’d read me things he’d written himself, and that surprised me. I’d never before met anybody who wanted to be a writer, an idea my father would have thought sinister. Edgar used to say that being a writer was the greatest thing a human being could aspire to. As far as he was concerned, anything in book form was sacred.

He had a text about vocation that he read to me every now and again and which I remember word for word, I don’t know who he copied it from or if it was actually his, but it stayed with me for a long time. It more or less went like this:

You realize you’re a writer when the things that swirl or echo in your head won’t let you concentrate on anything else: neither reading nor watching a movie nor listening to what other people are saying, not even your teacher or your best friend. When your girlfriend yells: you’re not listening to me! and slams the door and takes off, and you exclaim, what a relief, and keep thinking about your things. It’s a relief when our loved ones leave us alone. If what’s happening inside your head is more powerful than what’s outside and can be translated into sentences, you’re a writer. If you don’t write, then you should think about it, it might suit you. If you are a writer, the worst thing is not to write. The bad news, given the times we live in, is that you can also tell yourself you’re really fucked.