Santiago Gamboa - Night Prayers

It’s getting harder all the time, Víctor said, the chief’s very nervous, they’re putting pressure on him from upstairs, he went crazy again on this operation, he smashed the skull of one of the guys with the butt of his pistol, I had to grab him to stop him still hitting him when he was already dead, chief, chief, the man’s already gone, leave him, because Piedrahita goes crazy sometimes, he acts like a lunatic, and I get scared, because I’m his pupil, anyway, after the thing today they may promote me, the top brass were very pleased and they’re already giving out statements to the press; there’s a guy in the office who’s a champion with stories, we call him the poet: he’s the one who arranges things so that they look good, because in this country you have to fight with everything you have, those terrorists are worse than scorpions and they’ve been really hounding us, just imagine, they got two friends of ours last month, you can’t piss around with these people, you fuck them before they fuck you, you see? my language is getting damaged from going around with Piedrahita, I wasn’t always this way, vulgar like him, a pity he’s my chief because I can’t correct him, and the worst of it is, I come out with these words in front of my wife and children, and so I asked him, for the first time, how old is your wife? and he said, twenty-nine, and the kids seven and five, a boy and a girl, the girl’s the older of the two. He took out a photograph from his billfold and I saw them, two really ugly kids, to tell the truth, because that’s typical of Columbia, Consul, how ugly poor children are, don’t you think, I like them when they’re bigger, and it wasn’t that Víctor was poor, he had bags of money from the seizures, but he was humble, his mother had a grocery store in a little town in Boyacá, anyway, I didn’t tell him what I thought about the children, but the opposite, obviously, how beautiful, the boy looks just like you, and he said, oh, gorgeous, now you really got me, and he took out another roll of dollars and said to me, look, doll, just to show how much I appreciate you, and he gave it to me, another two thousand, he must have been carrying six thousand with him, that was the good thing about big seizures.

Then I started searching on the Internet to see what had happened. In the case of that party that lasted for four days, plus two for recovery, they had taken out a straw man with money from drug trafficking, but fronting for FARC; not long afterwards it was said that one of the prisoners had accused a journalist, and that everything was corroborated in some e-mails, that he’d been paid I don’t know how many dollars and that the Secret Service was still investigating why that journalist had attacked the government, especially a minister, they suspected that FARC was behind it, a conspiracy, in other words, that was the language they used at the time, do you remember that, Consul?

In spite of the atrocities, nothing ever happened to Víctor or his chief. They didn’t feel they were in any danger, quite the contrary: they thought they were heroes, and the worst of it is, they probably were. Heroes of that horrible country. I listened to their stories, they whacked these people, took those out, charged this one, fabricated evidence against another, arrested someone they had previously protected, threatened others, and so on. One day they took me to a party with other people from the Secret Service and there I realized that they were all in the same game. They were playing to kill. They were plainclothes policemen and they felt protected. For the chief they had various nicknames: Big Boss or Chief White Feather.

Every time I heard of someone they’d killed, I’d tell myself, people like me or my brother, people who remain buried forever on patches of waste ground, abandoned, how solitary that is, dying on a patch of waste ground, without anybody knowing where, don’t you think? That’s what happened to most of those they caught because, according to Víctor, there were a hell of a lot of traitors in the country, and that’s why they had to kill them. And, seeing him with Piedrahita, I’d say to them in my mind, you still think you’re gods, carry on while you can, sons of bitches, because very soon you’ll be singing a different song, and I continued paying attention and preparing my revenge, making accounts and calculations.

The first thing was to get Manuel out of the country and send him to Europe to study film. My dream was to pay for the education he wanted, not philosophy anymore but film, I wanted him to become a great director, and to make that possible I’d put myself through hell. I saved and saved, but of course, I also had expenses. I set myself the target of a hundred thousand dollars; I even thought to ask Víctor, telling him it was to help my brother to study, but then I had second thoughts: best not to tell him anything about myself or talk to him about our plans, which were the one beautiful thing in my life.

At home, I kept lying: that I’d been on a field trip to study a native community in the Montes de María, where there was still an ongoing situation with the guerrillas and the paramilitaries, and Mother would cry, oh, my God, Juana, and did you see terrorists from FARC? and I’d say, to pull her leg, of course, Mother, the work was with them, and Mother would lose her temper, and say, oh, daughter, you’re proving me right, I said it from the first day you went to that training camp they call a university, didn’t I? But Father would defend me, calm down, Bertha, can’t you see the girl’s pulling your leg? And then it was time to go to bed, and when there were no more sounds in the house I’d go to Manuel’s bedroom and say to him, what do you think? what do you see? tell me those beautiful things you have in your head, and then he’d hug me and cover my eyes with his divine hands and say: there’s a new constellation, a different sky where there are no stars, only volcanoes, and you and I are sitting on the edge of one of those volcanoes watching the others spit out lava, that’s what I see; the lava looks like liquid gold; there’s a terrible silence in the constellation and the eruptions boom, but we’re calm, there’s a refreshing wind and what reaches us is the echo, an echo that comes from a long way away, and then, Consul, I’d close my eyes and listen to him talking, and Manuel’s words, those worlds he had inside him, existed because he existed, and I’d fall asleep, dreaming of those skies and those volcanoes, he and I in each other’s arms. I could see him not only through his words, but because he painted them on the local walls, floating in the air, or in the water of the sea, solitary planets filled with volcanoes, that was his beautiful world. On those nights I was very happy, you can’t imagine how happy, but it made me anxious, being so happy, so terrifyingly happy. That’s why when I say that he liked movies I thought: finally I’ll be able to see our story, more of what he has inside, and I’ll be able to protect him, I was strengthened in the thought of making all these sacrifices, I’d do whatever it took to get there, even rob a bank.

I saw myself going with Manuel to the premiere of his first film, in Cannes or Venice or San Sebastian, and then I fell asleep, cradled by these fantasies, and the following week I continued with renewed strength, in order to save money, to live without fear, and I answered the calls from Andrés Felipe, who always came back on the attack when I was with Víctor, as if he had radar, and I’d arrange to see him and we’d fuck like crazy and I’d listen to his stories about his frigid wife, just so that he would trust me, because I couldn’t forget the face of that woman in Soacha and the promise I made her, you know? I’m a person with fixed ideas and if I tell someone I’m going to do something I do it, that poor woman and her son, I could imagine all too well where he might be, or rather his bones, because that damned country is built over a grave, wherever you dig you find bones, we’ve spent years digging up bones and looking for their names, and even now they keep coming out, it’s horrible, but you know what I’m talking about, don’t you?