Santiago Gamboa - Night Prayers

The frustrations of work had to be paid for at home. That’s how it happens in poor families or unhappy families. And that was our way of being unhappy.

Mother always said we had to be grateful for the effort and the great sacrifice he made for all of us. And maybe she was right. But how could I accept that? Father never sat down on the floor to play with me, never took me affectionately by the hand, never did anything to make me happy or arouse any kind of emotion in me. And you know why? It’s an old story, one that never changes. He only had eyes for Juana, my older sister. His heart couldn’t stretch to more, and I was left out. It was a small heart, a dry heart, because, to tell the truth, Father didn’t have many reasons to be brimming over with love. On the contrary: his life was a dusty expanse of scrubland, and there was nobody to support him. What love did he get, and from whom? Very little, almost none. Mother despised him silently, and he didn’t really have anywhere else to replenish his stocks; my grandmother was dead and he didn’t have any brothers or sisters. His father had been in a vegetative state for years… Did he ever have a girl on the side? I doubt it. Because of him, I’ve always believed that love emerges only when you get it from others, that it exists by contagion. It doesn’t come about spontaneously, but through another person.

That’s what happened to me. I spent my first years alone, a little ghost in a house where love was in short supply. It’s what I thought the world and life were like, although from time to time I witnessed amorous scenes of which I wasn’t the protagonist. The first time that someone came down to my eye level and gave me a hug, it was already too late. My world was irredeemably contaminated. I must have been about seven, maybe slightly older. And it wasn’t my parents, but my sister.

Juana picked me up from the floor. She lived up there on her throne, a spoiled only daughter, but one day she decided to look at me. She saw me and I saw her, and we liked each other, and she gave me what I hadn’t had from anybody up until then, in other words, understanding, or rather something more intimate: a mirror that fell from on high and reflected my soul back to me. Thanks to her, I survived childhood, although I can assure you it was very long. Long and painful. But how was that moment? How did it come about that Juana acknowledged me?

I think I was almost eight when, one morning, I started to feel pain and fever. My liver had become inflamed thanks to an unusual form of viral hepatitis that’s quite rare in Colombia and could have killed me. By the time they took me to the hospital, I was burning with fever. I remember the hurried departure, racing through the streets in the middle of the night wrapped in blankets at an hour when everything seems terrifying. Because of my grandfather, who had been a lieutenant colonel, we had access to the military hospital. They even gave me a private room, and I swear to you, that’s where I felt really free for the first time in my life. Through the window, I could see the lights of the city as evening fell. The sunset was like the end of the world, with those purple-colored dusks you get in Bogotá, which is an ugly city with a beautiful sky, something I’ve never quite understood.

I’d hunker down under the blankets and think, I want this to be the last thing I see, I want to disappear now and forever, and I’d pray to God, I don’t want to get out of this hospital, I don’t want to go home or to school or to my neighborhood ever again, there isn’t a single place in the world I’d like to go back to, and I’d drift into a peaceful sleep, protected by that childish hope, oh, what joy I felt! But I’d always wake up again to a rainy morning. And then my parents would arrive, and with them the horror, the frozen looks, the resentment that showed itself in everything, even in the way they breathed; the feeling of being trapped in a state of anxiety that wasn’t mine. I’d sink back into my illness, look for protection in the fever and the pains and the dizziness I felt from the pills, and ask that it never abandon me. I just had to be strong, to bear up, because at a specific time, at the end of the afternoon, they would both go. Mother could have stayed and slept there but luckily she never did. The very first night she had apologized to the head nurse — because she thought she had to — saying that she had chores to do at home, and another child, a daughter, to look after, to which the nurse replied, don’t worry, señora, that’s why we’re here, we’ll take good care of him and spoil him, he’s such a good little boy, so quiet.

Those nights in the hospital, lying in my adjustable bed and watching the lights of the city come on, were probably the happiest period of my childhood, although also the saddest. There’s a strange joy in that memory in spite of the fact that today, when I talk about it, I feel a kind of pity. I don’t know, Consul. If only I’d died.

One Saturday, Juana came with them. At first, although curious, she held back a little, but as she moved closer I noticed that she was staring at me, and suddenly she touched my forehead with her hand, a very light caress, and that was when the miracle happened. All at once Mother’s agitated voice — she’d been looking constantly at her watch and talking about an appointment at the Wella hair salon that she couldn’t miss — faded away, and Father, who was looking out at the city through the window, also seemed to disappear.

I don’t know how she did it, but somehow Juana managed to turn that hospital room into a capsule. Only her, standing there in silence, and me. Nobody else in the world, and that, just that, was what I saw: that Juana’s eyes were two caves through which you could gain access to a planet where we could live and perhaps be happy.

Then I had a vision.

A huge fire was spreading across the city from the mountains. In the midst of the spluttering concrete and the explosions, the screams and the collapsing buildings, beautiful tongues of fire appeared at my window, formed wild shapes, changed color, and vanished into the air. I didn’t fantasize about the end of the world, but I felt strong. I heard the screams coming from the streets and stopped to listen to them. What a surprise! They weren’t cries of pain but laughter. A resounding burst of laughter, as if there was something pleasurable in all that destruction. That’s what that hateful city is like: capable of confusing us with pleasure when it’s actually torturing us, a pleasure you can’t imagine anywhere else, but since it’s the only one we know there everybody believes that’s how life is, that’s what pleasure and happiness are like.

Poor people.

I saw the flames rise, heard them echoing ever more loudly against the roof, and my heart was pounding, will all this stop now? is this the end? Then I looked at Juana and started to fall into the sleep of illness and pills, but taking with me her eyes and maybe also something of her soul. I wanted that moment to last. I prayed again. But the sky was empty, nobody heard my prayers, Consul, and a few days later I had to return home, to that neighborhood of broken streets, and to my school, which was like a boil on the surface of the hills. Home was the center of my unease, something in it weighed on my mind. What was it? Only Juana was able to understand it, and that was what united us. It was what we had discovered: we were part of something dark and sad that neither of us could change. The smell of cheap lotion, the floor polish, the aroma of raincoats and jackets, whatever. The intense smell of a humiliated family that thought it deserved a second chance but never got it. Only one thing had changed: I had a trench now, somewhere I could be relatively safe. My bedroom, Juana’s bedroom, and the little corridor between them. When I got back from the hospital, that was my refuge.