Santiago Gamboa - Night Prayers

“The day after tomorrow I’m going back to Delhi,” I said. “I’ll call you frequently, and keep in contact. It’s important to know the date of the hearing in time. My compatriot is ready to plead guilty, but I’d prefer things to be cleared up before that, I hope the police can get at the truth. He’s innocent, I have no doubt of that.”

The old lawyer looked at me in silence. “It’s good that he’s innocent,” he said, “that’ll make things easier. The truth always comes out in the end. Don’t worry, Consul. You can go knowing I’ll be taking up the reins of the case and keeping you informed.”

From there I called Teresa, I wanted to say goodbye. We arranged to meet at seven that evening in the bar of the Blue Elephant. Then I went down onto the street and walked aimlessly until I reached a place called Paradise Tower. It was a shopping mall. On one of its avenues there was a little bar that looked out on a park and there I sat down and watched the people. The rain had stopped. I ordered a double gin with lemon and ice. A second later, a young girl sat down beside me. She was wearing white hot pants that looked like cream against her skin. The color of her nails and heels didn’t match. She asked me what my name was, where I was from, if I was alone, and if I’d buy her a drink. I told her she could order whatever she liked, but that I wasn’t looking for company. She ordered a Singha beer and moved slowly away, looking back at me.

I kept thinking about Manuel’s story. “Let me say something that may surprise you, this isn’t going to be a crime story, it’s going to be a love story.” Now I understood those mysterious words of his, and he was right. It was a love story.

Listening to him, Bogotá had come back to me, the city I, too, had fled, although for other reasons. I knew Manuel’s neighborhood well, lower Santa Ana. My friend Mario Mendoza lived there. Did he know the family? It was possible.

Soon afterwards I went back to the hotel and wrote to Gustavo:

I already have the story, you don’t need to search further. I talked to him and he told me everything. It’s a real mess. I’ll tell you the details later. He remembers you with affection. Big hug.

I reread my notes: Maribel, Colombian Consulate, November 3, 2008. I didn’t even have her passport number.

I had accepted the mission to find her, and, somehow, I had already started. What did she look like? I put her name on the Internet and found an old and probably invalid Facebook membership. There was no photograph of her, just the image of some native children, maybe Wayuu or Paez, the picture wasn’t clear.

At seven I went out and hailed a taxi.

Teresa was waiting for me in the Blue Elephant, drinking a pink cocktail. What is it? I asked. A Singapore Sling, she said. I had tried it in the bar of the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, where it was invented. It appears in Somerset Maugham’s story “The Letter.” I still have a poster with an image of a bartender and some special glasses. But I preferred a very dry martini.

The place was very grand, with high ceilings, large windows, and leather chairs. The walls had gold veneer. It reminded me of the Coupole in Paris, with wooden window panels and fans with blades. Like the Long Bar of the Raffles or the Batavia in Jakarta. British colonial architecture.

Obsessively, I told her Manuel’s story, the way in which, in spite of the difference in age — I was almost twenty years older than he — he took me back in his story to the Bogotá of my adolescence, to those walks on foot through dark streets, in the early morning cold and the drizzle.

“So he was looking for his sister,” Teresa said, “and now you’re going to look for her.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll have to go to Japan.”

“You’ve spotted a good story and you can’t resist it,” Teresa said, biting the olive as she spoke. “That’s fine. I assume I’ll read it eventually.”

“It’s possible,” I said, “but it isn’t going to be a crime story. It’s going to be a love story. That’s what Manuel said.”

“All the better,” Teresa said. Then she turned and asked the bartender for another round. I gave her a grateful look.

“Each person drinks what he needs, and in your case what you need can be read on your face. We’ll have dinner later.”

“Jesus,” I exclaimed, “you’re my ideal woman.”

“My ex-husband said the same, but as soon as I had my daughters, I crossed the imaginary line of forty, my tits started drooping, and he went off with a twenty-eight-year-old, so you can shake hands.”

We laughed.

“Not all bad men are equal,” I said, “there is no solidarity of gender.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m speaking in double entendres.”

We drank until three in the morning in two different bars. Before we parted, Teresa took my arm.

“And what about you and me? How are we?”

I gave her a big hug and said, “You and I are very good.”

Then I got into a taxi and went back to my hotel.

The next day, at three in the afternoon, I caught a plane back to Delhi.

Ah, Bangkok.

The rain and the solitude bring back memories. My notebook is filling up with question marks, arrows, parentheses. I long to reach a point of no return. I already reached it, but in life, where there is no return possible, where could one return to? Nowhere.

It’s 10:32 in the morning and I’m sitting in a bar on Silom Street with a somewhat extravagant name, Mr. Oyster, a Singha beer in my hands. It’s hot. The bottle still has little strands of ice from the refrigerator, tiny stalagmites around the label. I stroke the cold glass and feel a shiver on my skin.

I’m very happy.

The notebook (I’m already on my second) makes me look like an expatriate: an exiled industrialist or even an old actor who’s been forgotten by everybody, someone who’s come down in the world in spite of having been on a winning streak years earlier, before things like drugs, divorce proceedings, and alcohol took him away from the screen. I’d like to look like an intellectual, but that doesn’t exist anymore. The gloom of this place protects me and the other customers, that fat man between fifty and sixty, that ancient, toothless woman, that young man trembling as he drinks something that, seen from here, looks like — and I sincerely hope is — a Bloody Mary, anyway, all of them will be my company, though I don’t think I’ll talk to them. I like to drink alone, to slowly immerse myself without anybody interfering.

Through a side window I can see the sky, rough at this hour, the few clouds laden with something dense. Clouds presaging thunder and lightning. Will they add something to my notebook?

The infinite shapes of clouds.

Anyway, my one wish, in this cool corner of Mr. Oyster, is to be alone. If certain precautions are taken, there will be no surprises. It’s easy to avoid everything I hate, and now I have to carry on before this page bursts.

As if somebody up there was manipulating the threads of this story, the day after I got back to Delhi, as I was sorting through the mail in the office, I received an incredible proposition: the Cervantes Institute in Tokyo was inviting me to take part in a symposium on Colombian literature two weeks later. I would be there with the writers Enrique Serrano and Juan Gabriel Vásquez. I almost fell off my chair! I accepted immediately, incredulous at the happy coincidence (someone else must have declined the offer at the last moment). I wrote to the Colombian consul in Japan to tell him I was coming and, in passing, asked for information about Juana Manrique, giving the date of arrival that Manuel had given me. He said he would check on the list of people registered with the consulate and get back in touch.