Santiago Gamboa - Night Prayers

I listened to Monsieur Echenoz with skepticism and said, but in European wars people killed each other for an ideal, not here, here it’s pure barbarism, it’s money or land or cocaine, but he said, it’s the same thing, the reasons someone who’s about to shoot another man thinks he has may vary, but the deed is the same, someone will press the trigger, and when the lead breaks the skin and drills into the cranium and damages a lobe and perforates it and opens a path in the brain, a life with a history and past will be cut short and a body transformed into a bloodstained mass that will fall to the ground, and that fact, which is horrible in itself and can’t in any way be explained or justified, makes all the reasons equivalent; in the middle of the twentieth century it was ideologies, then it was land or the control of resources, reserves of hydrocarbons. Politics isn’t the reason, just the way politics represents a need to take the next step, which is to go on the attack. Ideologies are merely self-fulfilling prophecies. Force is the argument most often used by man in his history, whatever culture he belongs to, so don’t worry, nothing is being done here that hasn’t been done before in other places, and for the same reasons. What’s happening today in Colombia, deep down, is the result of an imposed formula. Do you know the contemporary name for perversity? It’s democracy. If a chimpanzee with a drum becomes popular and amusing, he could be elected president. Why are the votes of those who don’t have standards or education or culture worth the same as the votes of people who do have them? Why is a vote obtained with a revolver to the head or by brainwashing people with advertising or buying them off with fifty thousand pesos worth the same as a vote expressed freely? Ask the defenders of democracy. That’s the great perversity, but we’re not allowed to say that. If everybody had education and the variations between high and low, in terms of culture, were smaller, democracy would be universal and we’d be in Sweden, but that’s not the way it is. In Africa people vote for those in their own tribe and that’s why the party of the biggest tribe always wins, and you know the only way a tribe has to reduce the number of voters for another tribe? The machete. In many countries in Africa, it isn’t dictatorship that’s led to civil war, but democracy. The small tribes hate the system that gives power to the biggest clan, and what is power? The right to take control of a country. Here, it’s different because there are no tribes, but there are clans and, lately, tyrants. How, in an environment like this, can a candidate of the left, or an ecologist, for example, win? The one who wins is the one who has most money, like in Italy, or the one who has most arms and is stronger. The alpha male wins, because democracy, in terms of sexuality, is a masochistic relationship: power is given to the strong man so that he can exercise it over the weak man, who adopts an attitude of submission that consists of turning his back, lifting his hip, and offering his anus in order to avoid confrontation.

Monsieur Echenoz’s reactionary opinions made me jump out of my seat, and, at first, I argued with him, but then I realized there was no point. In any case, it was more stimulating to disagree with him than to talk for hours and hours with my fellow students, who thought the same way I did. Maybe because his ideas came from his experience, not just from books or from political ideologies. He said what came into his head. His notion of utopia was a system in which the dignitaries of a society, the aristocracy of thought, took the reins of power. An old-established aristocracy guaranteed to avoid the one thing that seemed to him a real sin, which was to hand the land over to foreign countries or powers.

When I asked him about the advanced democracies of Sweden and Norway, he’d say: I don’t know them, and they don’t interest me. I’m not attracted by countries where life is quiet and fair, where everybody has levels of protection and stipulated good health and happiness. I’m not interested in perfect societies; I only deigned to look at them when I discovered, through mystery novels, that horrible crimes and tragedies happened there too, which gave them a touch of humanity. Those men of ice all have some kind of hell in their brains. But I prefer life in places where, from time to time, the streets are running with blood. That’s why I’ve stayed in Colombia.

I didn’t learn much about his life. He had always worked for French companies, but after his retirement he had decided to stay in Bogotá, where his children and grandchildren were. He was a widower. His wife had committed suicide while he was in a motel with another woman. He was forty-two when that happened. His wife found out through his secretary, who, I don’t know why, although I can imagine, had promised to inform the wife when he had an appointment with his new lover. She did so and the wife, instead of showing up and causing a scene, cut her wrists in another hotel. The secretary broke down and admitted everything. Monsieur Echenoz assumed the guilt, gave up work, and never saw his lover again. His wife had left a note in which she asked just one question: “Why?” Several times he had a Browning pistol in his hand, but never summoned the courage. His wife was Belgian and had been in Colombia because of him, they had met in Africa. They had done everything together. When I asked him if his lover had been Colombian, he said no, she was Hungarian, and added: I’ll tell you the whole story another day, but in the end he never did. What he did tell me was that a man needs the company of several women, and women, too, although for different reasons. Marriage and monogamy are really stupid, he would say, and above all, the biggest source of unhappiness; a mammal needs to exercise his sexuality, and in both men and women there is a very strong life principle: curiosity. Do you have a boyfriend? he asked, and I said no, I have lovers, people who come and go but nothing more, and he said, good for you, you’re not tying anybody down, young people are quite stupid by definition, but it’s not their fault; they’re stupid because of something that’s been inculcated in them by adults, which is faith in the future; they’re stupid because they have hopes, something that sorts itself out with the passing of years; that’s why the worst thing is for a young woman to marry a young man, because that’s like two idiots uniting their idiocies; the best thing a young woman can do is be with an older man, but not get married, I’m not saying that, I’m saying be with someone older, and listen to my advice: use young men to enjoy yourself, for pleasure, and to obtain material things, let them flatter you, all that’s quite normal, don’t believe the feminists when they say that a woman defends her dignity by being independent, that’s nonsense, women don’t need money because they have something that’s much more powerful than money, and you know what it is. I’ve seen the most powerful men on the planet go to pieces over a vagina: Kennedy, Onassis, Rockefeller, and what about Paris and Menelaus? Now that’s power, and I’ll give you a piece of advice: when you want something, use it, and don’t be ashamed, many people are going to say horrible things to you, especially the feminists and the lesbians, they’re going to insult you, they’ll say it’s because of people like you that women suffer, and maybe they’re right, but you just keep going because we live life as individuals. Men do the same when they’re lucky enough to be desired, especially by older women. Who are they harming? They attract those who are already starting menopause, and they obtain money, gifts, travel. Everyone is happy, but such cases are rare. The opposite is more common. Nobody asks a man to be handsome. They ask him to be powerful or rich. To be famous, to be an alpha male. When I was young and went to the seaside, in Europe, I’d look at the sports cars pulling up at the beach clubs. Their occupants were always rich men, usually fat and vulgar, and they always had beautiful women with them. It never failed. Almost all of them were blondes, even though their eyebrows and the down on their arms were black.