Santiago Gamboa - Night Prayers

I introduced Juana to them as a sociologist passing through Delhi, and the evening was unforgettable. Von Hildebrand told us of a strange tradition in the islands of Tonga: once a year the king has to go into the sea and offer a roast pig over to the king of the sharks. If the shark bites the king, it’s a sign that he has been a bad ruler.

Then Von Hildebrand went into the kitchen and came back with a half-gallon pitcher of pisco sour, his specialty, which accompanied most of the meal.

Later, as we opened the third bottle of Bombay gin, between travelers’ tales and literary quotations, Lola MacDougall suggested an amusing game: the construction of pagodas and ziggurats with books by favorite authors.

Juana, without calling attention to herself, built a simple one-story house using the poetry of E. E. Cummings, and roofed it with Rudolf Otto. I tried to build a Japanese temple out of Houellebecq (Nikhil told me, in French, tu te houellebecquises! ). We all did our work and ended up with a number of concepts: an art nouveau house made of aphorisms by Lichtenberg and prose by Edmond Jarrès, an Islamic temple shared between Raymond Roussel and Vikram Seth, a Hindu temple made out of Malcolm Lowry, and a great ziggurat of confessional works: the Journal Intime of Benjamin Constant, the diaries of Ernst Jünger, La Tentación del Fracaso by Julio Ramón Ribeyro, two volumes of Anaïs Nin, and the Journal Littéraire of Paul Léautaud.

Sudeep read some poems by Dylan Thomas, to whom we raised a toast, in memory of his untimely death at the age of thirty-nine, in New York, after a series of successful recitals. In connection with that, I presented (and maintained) my theory of an apoplectic seizure brought on by hypercholesterolemia: a sedentary life, alcohol, obesity, excessive smoking, hypertension, high cerebral irrigation, and insomnia. A hundred milligrams of losartan, taken on an empty stomach, and five of amlodipine at night, plus a diet of unsaturated fats, would have prolonged his life and his work for at least twenty years. Twenty-five if he had added thirty minutes walking a day. Dommage!

Chattopadhyay, remembering his days as a Naxalite guerrilla, instructed us in how to leave my apartment in case of a police raid and where to go, and then recited various poems by Neruda, his specialty (especially “Tango del viudo”). We talked about Malraux in India ( Antimémoires ), Roberto Rossellini in India (he married an Indian woman), and Romain Rolland in India (he was the French ambassador there in 1921, it’s in his Diaries ). Starting from there, the list of visitors became interminable: Paz ( Vislumbres de la India ), Pasolini ( L’Odore dell’India ), Herman Hesse ( Aus Indien ), E.M. Forster ( A Passage to India ), Alberto Moravia ( Una Idea de la India ), Michaux ( Un Barbare en Asie ), a long list of authors I have investigated and read for a book to which I am, of course, still hesitating whether to give the title India: A Passionate Human Family or the simpler one Masala Tea .

At four in the morning, after saying goodbye to the guests, and being reasonably drunk (“each person drinks what he needs,” as Teresa said), Juana and I bade each other good night, but then, from my room, I heard her returning to the living room to collect glasses and empty bottles, arrange the chairs, and tidy up the books. Clearly, she felt at home.

The weekend came and I suggested that she and I and the child go for a walk in Nehru Park. I had been lent a stroller for Manuel Sayeq and it was the perfect opportunity. The park was crisscrossed by paths, between gardens and groves, a cool, clean place, ideal for a Saturday. As a memory of other times, it had a statue of Lenin.

Walking between flowers and shrubs, Juana suddenly said:

“Would it bother you if I told you something about my life?”

”On the contrary,” I said. “I’ve been waiting for it for some time now.”

She gave me an affectionate look, was silent for a few more steps as she pushed Manuel Sayeq’s stroller along a path, and at last began speaking.

Some nights, when the sky was ablaze with distance storms, the Virgin Mary appeared to me. My room lit up and at the same time filled with dense shadows. Of course, she was quite different than the Virgin Mary who appeared to the three shepherd children of Fatima. Judge for yourselves.

Mine arrived with a weary air and lay down on the couch in my bedroom. Pour me a whiskey, or whatever you have, Inter-Neta, hopefully above forty proof, which is the liquid temperature best adapted to my spirit. You know what I mean.

She drank slowly, looking up at the ceiling, as if making a complicated mental calculation. The last time, she said to me: 11,186,986 girls stopped being virgins today, oh, if only you’d seen it… The youngest was seven years old and was raped by a priest, a filthy fellow who first stuck his finger in, made her suck it, then penetrated her. Don’t ask me for any more details, priests disgust me, they’re reptiles in human skin, like that Dickens character, I don’t know if you’ve read him, Uriah Heep, who always has cold hands.

The oldest was thirty-eight, a real record, and the curious thing is that she had been married for twelve years. Until now she always told her husband she didn’t like frontal penetration out of respect for me, and the guy accepted it. Can you imagine? He sodomized her, and they performed fellatio and masturbation. He’s a harbor technician and, curiously, he would tell his best friends about it, and even make jokes. My wife’s tongue is fourteen inches long and she can breathe through her ears! And they would all laugh.

She also laughed with her friends: my husband has a small cock, no bigger than his tongue, and his semen tastes either of pastis or whiskey, depending on what he’s drunk the previous evening. And that’s how they’ve been all this time, but today she had a party at her office, drank to excess, and ended up fucking in the bathroom with one of her colleagues. This happened in France, in the offices of BNP. I can’t give you any more details. Seeing the blood flowing down her thigh, the current accounts manager of the Sully Morland branch thought she was starting her period and exclaimed, mon dieu! at least you won’t get pregnant, but she wept with pain and he thought she was weeping with love and pleasure, so he said something vulgar to her. They separated on a great misunderstanding. Later he went back to the bathroom to wash one of the tails of his shirt. She had been waiting so long for her husband and look what happened.

Pour me another, is this really whiskey? Never mind. At least you have alcohol, I’m tired, you have no idea, dear Inter-Neta, what it means to be what I am and the tremendous solitude in which I live. Up there, there’s almost nobody left. I think that everyone, including him, drinks too much and is past caring. I drink too, but it’s different. I drink because the pain of the world is too much for me, and I can’t take another iota of pain.

Do you want another crazy and eccentric story? This might be the best one: a young woman of twenty-two decides to give her virginity to her philosophy professor, who is married. After a class on the pre-Socratics, he takes her to a motel — this happens in Latin America — penetrates her for the first time gently, softly, until she says, oh, do it stronger, so he penetrates her again and they both laugh and kiss and she, filled with ecstasy, cries out in French, Je suis une sirène! They fuck and fuck as if we had invented original sin exclusively for them — and for that night — and then, having already been penetrated through most of the orifices in her beautiful body, when they’re having a beer and he’s smoking a cigarette and she’s preparing a line of coke, the young woman realizes she’s lost a lot of blood and the sheets of the modest motel bed are soaked, as if the Red Sea had burst into that little space of adultery and pleasure.