Santiago Gamboa - Night Prayers

Father was mesmerized by Uribe.

It was that enthusiasm that turned him into a man with strong opinions, a secret amateur columnist, and Mother, hearing him talking about topics she considered of major importance, must have thought her husband had at last stopped being a resentful but docile bureaucrat and had turned into something new, a citizen whose ideas were appreciated and discussed by others, and which he shared generously with his family in order to show them the way, an ideological and moral beacon who filled her with pride.

I guess that’s why we had to put up with that pantomime and listen to him talk about politics, economics, recent history, as if instead of being in the dining room of his house he was on a TV show, debating with experts, and so he kept giving us arguments and counterarguments, without anybody contradicting him. He would present objections and answer them, interrupt himself and take over, a horrible spectacle that made me feel ashamed for him, a spectacle designed to exacerbate my sense of the ridiculous and my own self-esteem.

It was like being hit in the stomach, squeezed by pincers, it was my own Loch Ness Monster starting to emerge and I closed my eyes, trying to escape, to go far away, but when my hallucinations finished and I came back to the table he was still there, endlessly spouting his opinions, quickly gulping a mouthful of rice in order not to lose the thread, saying things that sounded false even though they might have been right, ideas that, uttered by him, were pure bullshit: that in Colombia the terrorists had become stars, that everyone wanted to have their photographs taken with them, that it was incredible that anyone could still be talking about negotiating, that Tirofijo’s empty seat next to Pastrana was a mockery, a symbol of a total lack of principles, and he’d repeat ardently, the blood rushing to his cheeks, what we need here is a firm hand, we have to make sacrifices, if you don’t believe me look at Chile, which is an example now to the whole of Latin America, here we have to take over the helm and change direction, and we have to do so with resolution, a sense of duty, and a love of our country, and Mother, feeling obliged to support what he said, as if we were on Big Brother or some daytime quiz show, would say to him, oh, Alberto, I hope God hears you, Álvaro Uribe is the only one who isn’t talking about making deals and handing the country over to the guerrillas, quite the opposite, he wants to fight them, that’s the only language the terrorists understand, fight them and keep fighting, he’s going to stand up to them, oh, yes, and let’s hope those other crooks, rich kids, and traitors just go away.

And Father would say, yes, Bertha, the other candidates are the spoiled children of this country, they’re all from foreign schools, always looking outside, people who feel ashamed of being Colombian, that’s how they are and that’s why they’re handing over the country, whereas Uribe comes from the middle classes and from the mountains of Antioquia, with all the moral values and traditional courage of the countryside, that’s what we need, a man who loves Colombia, who if you opened his veins would ooze Colombian blood, with pride, and that’s something we’ve never seen in a candidate, Uribe is the first one to talk about true patriotism, national dignity, to glorify the flag and stand up to terrorism, and that’s why I say, Bertha, that if Uribe doesn’t win, we’ll have to scoop this country up from the floor with a spoon, and we may even have to ask the gringos to send in the Marines to sort out our problem for us, the way it happened in Panama, and we’ll have to swallow the humiliation, how can there be people who don’t realize? You just have to see his slogan: “A firm hand and a big heart.”

They would talk and talk for more than an hour, and since Juana was always studying at the house of one of her friends, I had to face it all by myself, unable to get up from the table until they’d brought their pathetic show to an end.

I often dreamed of running away, Consul: going out one morning and not getting on the school bus. Or rather: the two of us not getting on the school bus. I couldn’t run away unless it was with Juana. I couldn’t leave her behind, in our everyday life. Sometimes I’d say to her, Juana, when are we leaving? why do we have to wait so long? and she’d reply, you don’t have to do anything, just wait, I’m going to arrange everything and when it’s ready we’ll go away forever, far from this hell. We’ll go away without leaving anything that’ll help them trace us.

Hearing her, my heart would thump in my chest. All that sacrifice was going to have an end, and that end was near. The two of us were working for the same thing: she with her intelligence and her strength and I with my capacity to resist. We’d get away from this rabid world and build a better one.

Books helped me, but I still had to get them.

A neighbor on the block had an enormous library, but didn’t like to read. His parents were teachers and they bought him children’s books, but he was only interested in football, Internet sex, and American cable TV series. He was fourteen years old. His name was Víctor and one day I suggested a deal: if he passed them on to me, I’d read them and then tell him the story, and that way we’d both be happy: he could devote himself to football, RedTube, and HBO, and I could do all the reading I wanted.

He agreed.

That was how I came to read Mark Twain’s stories of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, White Fang and Call of the Wild by Jack London, and things by Joseph Conrad like Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness , and the sad, exotic adventures of David Balfour by Stevenson, and Ivanhoe by Walter Scott, and the works of Rudyard Kipling, especially Kim . Soon after, little by little, came Salgari’s series about Sandokan and the Tigers of Malaysia, The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas, and King Solomon’s Mines by Rider Haggard.

Usually, we got together in his room.

Time passed.

One day he was in the back garden of his house, kicking a ball at the wall, while I told him the story of the latest Salgari novel he had been given. Without our noticing, his mother arrived and heard everything from upstairs. When I’d finished the story, which if I remember correctly was Sandokan Fights Back , Víctor said, good, let me bring you the latest. I stayed out in the garden, waiting for him, and saw his mother come out.

Hello, Manuelito, I heard you telling Víctor the story of a novel, do you read his books?

I froze. We’d been discovered.

Goodbye, novels.

But his mother said: you can take whatever books you like. I’ll lend them to you. And it isn’t necessary for you to tell Víctor the stories. If he doesn’t want to read them, we’ll see about that.

A moment later Víctor arrived with a book in his hand, and when he saw her he hid it under his jacket, but she said, don’t hide it, give it to Manuel. Books are for those who read them.

That’s how I gained a library.

In my house it was the opposite, I had to hide them or pretend they came from school in order not to draw attention to them, because Father said with pride that he couldn’t just sit there doing nothing and that’s why he didn’t read novels or watch movies, why he only read biographies and newspapers and watched the TV news, that way he could spend time sitting in his chair, sometimes with a notebook in which he wrote things down that he later used in his speeches at the dinner table. Father despised the world of culture. He hated it because he felt excluded from it.

When Uribe won the elections, Father was so pleased that he went to the neighborhood store for a bottle of Molino Rojo champagne and that night, that Sunday night, he uncorked it at the table, and served all of us, including me, and raised his glass saying, this country has been saved, dammit, it’s been saved, long live life, there’s a future, now those terrorists are going to see. I gulped down that horrible drink and didn’t say a word. Juana did the same, not caring very much, but Father and Mother gave each other a big hug and when they separated I saw that they had tears in their eyes. The country has been saved, Bertha, he kept saying, emotionally, and Mother repeated, it’s been saved, Alberto, and they hugged each other again, and so on until the bottle was finished. Then they went out on the street to watch the parade of cars going along Seventh, celebrating with music and honking horns, the buses making a great din, that cloud of joy rising into the air and coming to rest on the hills.