Santiago Gamboa - Night Prayers

I don’t really care who Ferenck Ambrossía is, because I love him anyway. He’s my man, my male. Real life ends with the first filter. Those of us who get to my stage are pure, volatile, subtle, diaphanous, ethereal. A new race of angels. A newly born angelic militia. Oh, how happy I am on the infinite steppes of my screen! In the sugar plantations of this delightful and perfect world! The true Orplid.

From now on, I’m going to tell you a few dreams or hallucinations, subdivisions, transformations of my psyche. What does it matter what they are? Postmodernism, as Bakhtin said, is defined by its abolition of the frontier between genres. That was what Ferenck whispered to me one night, before we launched into a violent fuck via the screen. My maelstrom is inflamed just remembering it, moistening my légèrement culottée pantyhose and lavender Intimissimi panties, because in spite of the fact that I never leave this rhomboid space I’m not one of those who wear Victoria’s Secret. I’m an elegant woman.

Anyway, dear friends. Listen to me. Hear the desperate, anxious voice of this woman whose one objective is love, words, life. In short, poetry. Let yourselves be led by my soft round hand that knows about the affairs of men, exemplary stories that have sometimes been and may continue to be of interest to the muses.

The following day, before getting on the school bus, I looked at my painting on the wall. A bright snake, an almost psychedelic wave. My heart beat faster on seeing my signature, those letters in red, and I wanted to talk about it, but I restrained myself and didn’t say anything to Juana. Better to keep the secret for a while and see what else there was inside it.

At school, in that boring, unhealthy classroom, I’d found something better to do than listen to those monsters croaking away: make sketches that I would later reproduce on walls. That was how I first came to draw an island surrounded by a fierce ocean. In the middle there was a huge volcano, and in its foothills a little man sitting on his own, gazing at the fury of the ocean. I made a sketch in pencil and another one in color. The volcano was a dark blue cone at first, with red and yellow edges. Then I darkened it with ocher tones. It must be a volcanic island, I thought, but I also put in a little vegetation. My arms seemed to move of their own accord. I was thirteen years old, Consul. I had just made an important discovery, which I hoped would give me strength. That’s why I decided to keep it secret, not expose it to anything or anybody, for the moment.

Sometime later, another little miracle happened.

We’d come to the first year of the high school diploma course and a new teacher asked us to get some books. Five Go to the Mystery Moor by Enid Blyton. The Nightingale and the Rose by Oscar Wilde. Five Weeks in a Balloon by Jules Verne. A couple of years earlier I had read a number of Blyton’s books about The Five, so I thought it was a good sign and I felt quite cheerful when I went home.

Of course, the last thing my parents thought to do was buy them. As far as they were concerned, books had to be borrowed, so Mother made a few calls and managed to get hold of the one by Enid Blyton and the one by Verne. For the one by Wilde, they sent a note to the teacher saying they hadn’t been able to get hold of it, and asking her to excuse me, because it was strange that my sister didn’t have it among her school things from previous years, but the teacher replied with the names of bookstores where we could get hold of it and a recommendation to give the boy his own library. Mother read it and turned green with anger. That night she told Father, who blinked in disgust, but said, okay, we won’t impoverish ourselves over a wretched book, how much could it cost? Hearing them, I felt nauseous. Then he looked at me and asked, what’s this new teacher like? I didn’t know what to say, and shrugged my shoulders. She’s like the others, Dad, I replied. And is she young? he wanted to know, and I said, I don’t know, Dad, I don’t know how old she is, but he insisted, already with a throb in his voice that presaged anger, I’m not asking you her exact age, I just want to know if she’s young, it’s not such a difficult question, is the teacher young? Yes, I said, younger than the others, and she’s new, she started this year.

Father snorted and said, of course, that explains it! She must be one of those silly new graduates who come into a job and want to disrupt everything, turn it all upside down, I’ve seen them in the office, I know what they’re like! the ones who think that just because they’re good with computer programs and files they know it all, and because they’re young and pretty their bosses agree to everything. I hate them. Anyway, Bertha, buy the boy his book tomorrow, we’re not going to give her the pleasure of humiliating us.

The next day we went to the National Bookstore in the Unicentro Mall, Mother resignedly and me secretly happy, and when one of the assistants brought it I couldn’t help giving a nervous laugh, it was really beautiful! Mother looked at the price, made a face, and asked if there was a cheaper edition, so the assistant went to the back room and I stayed with her by the counter, feeling embarrassed. It was strange: Mother stood there with her mouth pursed, looking dignified and even proud, as if demanding compensation for an insult, as if the assistants in the store ought to be paying us to be there. After a while the young man came back with another edition, an illustrated one, which fortunately was more expensive, so Mother decided to buy the first one. Of course, when we got home, she made sarcastic remarks about the price, and said, we’ll have to cover it so that it doesn’t get damaged, that way we’ll be able to sell it next year, if that stupid teacher is still at the school. I was so happy to have it, even if only for a few months, that I didn’t care about the pettiness of it all, and I ran upstairs to my room. For the first time, I had a new book! I clasped it to my chest and said to myself, this one beautiful object will help me to pull through.

But life goes on and gets to us, Consul, and unfortunately things start all over again, so that after that little joy there I was once more, sitting at the table in the dining room in front of an unappetizing dish. I had to make a great effort to eat anything, and to put up with Father’s comments, because by now he was already starting to proclaim, ever more insistently, the country’s need for a savior, someone who would come in with a firm hand and restore order, reestablish harmony, clear the air. Change the atmosphere in which we were living.

I don’t know what was going on in his work or in his inner life, if he had one, but it was clear that suddenly, without anything particular happening, Father had started to change. Having previously had few political opinions, and moderate ones at that, he now spoke passionately about what he read in the press or saw on the TV news. Whatever he was thinking just had to come out, and it came out in the strangest ways. It’s very likely that what he said to us at the dinner table was what he would have liked to say at work, but nobody there listened to him. His opinions didn’t interest anybody. At home, on the other hand, we were obliged to hear them and that’s what we did, stoically, hear that endless droning, that litany of rancor toward reality and the present day, that ultimate in resentment, depicting a country in a situation of chaos and moral collapse from which it could only emerge thanks to a true patriot, and who could else could that be but that soldier of Christ and champion of order, Álvaro Uribe, who at the time, very close to the elections, was already flying high in the opinion polls?