Santiago Gamboa - Night Prayers

Three days later I was in the cafeteria of the García Márquez Cultural Center, reading Juego de Damas by R. H. Moreno Durán, when my cell phone rang. It was her. My dear, I have your first client, and I asked, conditions okay? and she said, more than okay, are you presentable? and I said, that depends, who is he? And she said, he’s a very dear friend, sixty-six years old but as strong as an ox! I told him about you and he said he’d like to meet you, he’s a lawyer, this is the address; I went home, put on a black Punto Blanco thong and a pair of Diesel jeans, and changed my blouse; instead of the tennis shoes some low-heeled shoes, made myself up like a cat, and asked for a taxi. I looked at the address: it was in the Nogal building. Great. I didn’t know it.

I arrived and he turned out to be a brilliant guy, a real old gentleman; he showed me into the library and there was something of everything, history books, literature, dictionaries of the cinema, he offered me a drink and as he was bringing ice for a whiskey I took down a book by Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind , that was always on loan from the university library, he had it in Spanish and in French; when he came back with the glasses he said to me, are you interested in Lévi-Strauss? and I said, I’m sorry, I just wanted to look at this book, I’ve been waiting for it for months from the library, and then he said, you can have it, come and take a look, and he took out The Raw and the Cooked and also Tristes Tropiques , books that seemed in the realm of fantasy in the university library, and said, take them, they’re yours, I’ve already read them and I have them in French, these books are the kind you read and appreciate, it’s been years since anybody took out those poor volumes, it’ll give me pleasure to know that you’re going to read them and lend them to your friends, that’s what they’re for, to be read many times and by different people.

We sat down on the couch and talked about literature and history, about the Escolios of Nicolás Gómez Dávila, the aphorisms of Lichtenberg and Elias Canetti; then he talked about life and read me a fragment of a poem by William Blake:

That Man should labour & sorrow, & learn & forget, & return

To the dark valley whence he came, to begin his labour anew.

That’s what he was like, he said, trying to get back to a place, searching anxiously for it, but sometimes his valley was in his books or in his memory or in movies, he didn’t have much left. He told me he was a widower, his children lived in Europe, and for the moment he didn’t have a girlfriend. He was in recess. His verse from Blake had made me think of one by Mayakovsky, and he said, do you know it? can you quote it to me? and I said:

Without drinking even a drop

I have reached my soul’s aim. My solitary human voice

is raised

between cries

between tears

in the rising day.

He gave me a hug, and suddenly I noticed that his eyes had glazed. It’s very good, and he talked to me about Mayakovsky, “the unhappy Mayakovsky,” as Sabato calls him. He said that in Moscow there was a Mayakovsky Museum next to the former KGB headquarters, a strange, elliptical, theatrical museum that tried to reproduce his poetry and his world. One day you’ll visit it.

He started caressing me and kissing me, it was really nice and I was enchanted, Consul, I swear, and we had a great fuck; then he asked permission to put the TV news on and I said to him that I didn’t want to interrupt him, that it was already time for me to go, but he said no, stay with me, and we saw it there, lying naked in bed. Over our heads there passed that hurricane of horror contained in any of the news bulletins in that cursed place, with the massacres and the violence and the hypocrisy, and then those crazy women who present the final part, as if the news bulletin was about Disney World and not about a country with more displaced persons than Zaire and more executions than Liberia; reaching this point, Alfredo, that was his name, said to me, I can’t bear these idiots, and he switched it off, and then I said, it’s been really great to meet you, I have to go now, and he said, wait, he got out of bed and got dressed and as I was going out he handed me a roll of banknotes, but I said to him, don’t worry, Alfredo, the books are more than enough and I’m indebted to you, but he insisted, and I stuck to my guns, you and this house are an oasis, I don’t know why I’m telling you this, and he embraced me and said, I understand why you’re saying that, can I see you again? and I said, yes, and gave him my telephone number, call me whenever you like, it doesn’t matter what time, call me and I’ll come right away.

I left with the strange sensation that I had touched something clean and unpolluted. Of course Monsieur Echenoz had been like that too, although in a way that was Luciferian and cynical. Not Alfredo, even though he was rich and from Bogotá. I walked northward along Seventh, glancing at the books by the light of the streetlamps, and when I got home Manuel wasn’t there, he’d gone to the movies, so I shut myself in to read and take notes, remembering Alfredo’s voice as he said: “It’ll give me pleasure to know that you’re going to read them and lend them to your friends,” which was precisely what I was thinking to do, and I fell asleep with a smile.

A few days went by like that, going out from time to time with Víctor and with another couple of clients of the former Miss Colombia who turned out to be nothing special, until Andrés Felipe the adviser, as I thought of him, called me again. How’s it going, precious? and I said, I’m bored, I guess you forgot all about me, and then he said, no, precious, not at all, I’m actually calling you to ask you to go with me on a really nice jaunt, it’s to a ranch in Antioquia, how does that sound to you? it sounds great, I said, and when is it for? and he said, now, right now, get ready and I’ll send someone to pick you up, give me an address. I told him at the entrance to the Andino mall and I went there with a hand case. A car came with official plates and took me to the Catam military airport, near El Dorado. Andrés Felipe was waiting for me on one of the runways with two men dressed in dark suits who I didn’t know; we got on a helicopter and took off; I was pleased because I’d never seen Bogotá from a helicopter, in other words, as the birds, the buzzards and the vultures, see it, and the truth is that as soon as the flight takes off and you rise into the air the city looks like a trough of sugar houses and winding paths; of course if you go further it already looks like a patch of vomit, next to the hills; then I started looking at the mountains and the rivers, those beautiful landscapes that the country has, and I imagined them full of guerrillas and paramilitaries, our beautiful fields, the paths and valleys filled with mines and bones and rifle cases, and so we continued, without anybody talking, until one of the guys, looking at a BlackBerry, said to Andrés Felipe, they’ve just sent the coordinates, sir, wait and I’ll give them to the pilot, and then the helicopter turned and gained speed and two or three hours later we saw a clearing opening in the middle of the greenery and as we descended a ranch house came into view, with two swimming pools and well-tended, symmetrical, brightly colored gardens. A group of people stood beside a tree, signaling to us.

We got off and Andrés Felipe said, best if you don’t say too much while we’re here, gorgeous, you do understand? and I said, yes, but who are these friends? and he said, don’t ask too many questions, precious, I’ll tell you later. We were received with hugs and taken to the guest room, which was like a suite in a five-star motel, with air-conditioning and a bathroom with a marble tub, porcelain containers, bars of Spanish Heno de Pravia soap, and mirrors with wooden frames. The only thing missing was Benetton condoms. We left our bags and were invited to sit on the terrace, next to the swimming pool, and someone said, would you like a nice cold aguardiente? I accepted, but Andrés Felipe asked for a Coca-Cola Light. He was nervous, kept looking around, and every now and again talked in a low voice with the people from the house. A very nice lady, who seemed to be the wife of the host, asked if I wanted to put on a bathing suit; I said yes and she took me to the changing room, and in the meantime I started talking to her, do you live here? and she replied, no, I just come here to relax, and so I said to her, what kind of work do you do? No, I don’t work, I live with my husband. I felt like asking her, if you don’t work why do you need to relax? but I preferred to keep quiet, you had to be blind and stupid not to realize that the house belonged to paramilitaries, or straight drug traffickers, so instead I said, it’s a lovely house, I congratulate you on your good taste, and she said, thank you, we hired a foreign interior decorator, my husband didn’t want to build the typical Antioquian ranch house, but something high-class, and it came out well, didn’t it? Oh yes, I said, really high-class!