Santiago Gamboa - Night Prayers

“Can’t someone come to Delhi,” I asked, “like other Colombians who live in Iran?”

But she said that was impossible.

“I already told you I can’t leave, Consul, you don’t know my husband, he barely lets me go to the market. We don’t have an international line or the Internet. If anyone calls when he’s there I’m not allowed to answer. This is the only time I can receive calls, don’t you see? I depend on him for everything, he’s paranoid and jealous. The application for the passport and the birth certificate I did in secret, a Colombian friend helped me.”

“If you had the passports in your hand, could you travel?”

“Well, I could go to the airport without his knowing and get on a plane, but I don’t have the money for a ticket.”

I told her I’d think of a solution and call her again the next day, at the same time. Before she said goodbye, she thanked me and asked again, are you sure Manuel is all right?

“He’ll be better when you get here and he can see you.”

After lunch I called the lawyer. He told me there were no new developments yet, but that the police were still following a lead about the pills, and that we might be getting some good news very soon. He was sure of it. I told him I’d tracked down Manuel’s sister and made him write down her name, spelling it for him.

“Please,” I said, “let Manuel know that I’ll soon be coming to Bangkok with her. It’s very important. Get in touch with the warden and make sure the news gets through to him today.”

“Count on it, Consul. As soon as we hang up I’ll call Bangkwang. I already told you the warden was a student of mine.”

I hung up and joined Olympia. I told her everything. We couldn’t do bank transfers to Iran, and the passport couldn’t be sent by mail, so what to do? As in many other things, she had a ready-made solution.

“Organize a mobile consulate in Tehran, boss,” she said. “That way you’ll kill something like ten birds with one stone.”

A mobile consulate? and she said, yes, we take the books, the stamps, and the forms with us, and we attend to the community in the offices of the Argentine Embassy. The last time it was done was three years ago. It’s about time we did it again.

And she added:

“I know that kind of case well. In Tehran, there are a hundred and thirty Colombian women married to Iranians they met in Japan. They all went there to earn a living by sweat, but not the sweat of their brow, and ended up involved with Iranians, who are there as economic migrants and do all kinds of jobs.”

We drew up a letter to the Consular Department, saying there was an urgent need to take a mobile consulate to Tehran and pointing out that there were thirty-seven minors waiting for birth certificates and forty-nine of our countrymen and countrywomen who had applied to renew their passports and were waiting for an identification document sent by an office of the State, which was a constitutional right.

The problem with urgent communications between the consulate and the Ministry, as I said before, was the time difference: an exotic figure of ten and a half hours. I waited until nightfall and then called the Consular Department. Luckily they had already read my dispatch and were considering it. They would give me an answer by evening (Bogotá time), and I would receive it the following day.

That night I could barely sleep. It was hot, and I was anxious. Several times I got up to drink something cold and finally sat down in the living room, watching the moon come in through the window and cast strange shadows.

At moments I seemed to hear the voice of Juana, also at home, also unable to sleep, maybe embracing the child, watching over him in the darkness with attentive eyes. The voice was barely a murmur, a soft breath trying to cross the sky over Asia and reach the ears of Manuel, who must have been told by now and would be very attentive to her words. A young man in a damp, dirty cell in Bangkok, a woman lying next to a man she didn’t love, in Tehran, pretending to sleep.

Words, words, words.

Night prayers.

Those they had not said to each other and now were thinking, words that in their minds were heartrending screams, cries of anxiety and love. Two silent litanies, and me in the middle of that strange storm, near a planet created by those who never lived on it. Two fragile creatures who longed to be together and to be forgotten, and life, like a wall, coming between them.

When I got to the office the following day, Olympia said to me:

“Good news, boss, we’re going to Tehran.”

“Did the authorization come through from the Consular Department?” I asked, and she said, yes, I printed it out and it’s on your desk.

Again I asked Angie to put me through to Juana Hedayat. Two hours later, after many attempts, I was at last able to talk to her. “Your brother’s fine,” I said. “I spoke to the lawyer in Bangkok and told him everything. He already knows I met you and that you’re going to see him.”

I told her the strategy: I would go to Tehran the following week to catch up with all consular matters relating to the Colombian residents there. That same afternoon, a public announcement about the mobile consulate would be made.

“You have to be prepared,” I told her. “The ideal thing is for you to leave Iran with me.”

And she said:

“Oh, don’t worry, Consul, by the time you come I’ll have everything ready.”

I spoke with the Argentinian Embassy, which confirmed its traditional offer of lending us its premises for three days. I also wrote to the head of protocol at the Iranian Foreign Ministry announcing the journey and its purpose. We asked the travel agency for tickets. By the following Tuesday, everything had been prepared and we left on the Wednesday. We would attend to the public on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. The mission consisted of Olympia, the second secretary, and myself. We were received by a delegation from the Iranian Foreign Ministry, which put a car and a chauffeur at our disposal for the four days.

I won’t be in this story of split personalities and dreams either. And what grandiose, histrionic character will you adopt on this occasion, chère Inter-Neta? Wait, don’t be so impatient, remember what Rimbaud, your beloved poet of Aden and Harar, wrote.

Je est un autre .

My name is Beauty and I am dreaming. I dream and dream and while I do so I prefer to talk, to say what I see in my mind and pursue images, which are also words and sometimes smells or fears. It’s what I have in my head, which is tantamount to saying: what I have in my heart.

As I said, my name is Beauty or Belle or maybe Bella, depending on where I am, given that the vast world is my bed. Who am I? Let’s take it piece by piece. I was deflowered for the first time — when the moment comes I’ll explain what “first time” means — at a Guns N’ Roses concert, in the back of a milk delivery van (it smelled of milk), by a man whose mouth gave off a strong odor of raw onion and sausage and who was certainly as drunk and probably as strung out on drugs as I was, nothing very strong, nothing injected into the veins, you know me by now, I love men but I hate needles.

Oh, God, it was a needle that started this long story, this rebuke, this strange coming and going that is my life, you must know my story, it’s very popular among children, let’s see, how does it go? There were some good fairies and one bad one, and of course a curse: my finger would be pricked when I was sixteen with a spindle and I would sleep until a prince kissed me, that’s pretty much the story, and for me the best part, the funniest part, is the bit about the prince. In actual fact, I wake up with a desire for someone to stroke my skin or talk in my ear (it doesn’t matter if it’s a prince, there are no princes anymore), I wake up and die of anxiety: the flower breathing inside me, its retractable sting, or that similarity to the Virgin that we women have when we’re born — our destiny is to lose that similarity — is reconstructed in dreams, the tissues come together again, the membrane is reborn and there am I, with eyes wide open, awake and filled with desire, oh, God, the world trembles, the universe turns to jelly every time a woman is seized with the desire that I feel, a ray that descends my spine and lodges between my thighs and buttocks, and there is nothing I can do but leave this bed in which I have lain for days and nights, while the miracle of reconstruction is performed, and go out into the world.