Arturo Fontaine - La Vida Doble

I’m writhing. The earth opens up beneath my feet. I sink into the same bottomless swamp as always. This thing is stronger than I am. The handcuffs return, squeezing my wrists, the slave of memory returns. The mental torment takes my breath away. If only I knew how to howl like a wolf. If I just had more air. My stomach wrenches.

If I could only rest. I’m not complaining about the world. I’m the one who doesn’t belong here. I’m not interested in the question of the meaning of life. It’s obvious that life has meaning. How could it not? This isn’t just about a theory. I do not want to go on living. Period.

Keep in mind that Dante puts traitors in the last circle of the Inferno. Their tears freeze like a visor over their eyes and it keeps them from crying, and their anguish grows and accumulates without end. Their souls go to Hell even when their bodies are still alive in the world. A demon guards them on earth for as long as they live. But for them, hell begins not the day they die but the day they commit their betrayal.

I would lose it suddenly, I would seek it out and yearn for it, for his gaze close by me, covering me, and later I would find it again, contemplating me. Because what attracted me were those masculine backs and arms and legs and chins, and of course the mocking and tender smiles of some and the staring, intense eyes of others, but I enjoyed them most of all if I felt Flaco’s great, shining eyes on me. His peremptory orders in that cavernous voice, the release, the sweetness of fulfilling them, humiliating myself; and his forehead in concentration, his dilated pupils, and the trembling of his lips, it all made me throb. I didn’t know who the others were, nor would I ever know.

One of them told me, “My name is Phoebus,” just like that, like Apollo, and he was what you call an homme beau. He put his arms around me and pressed me against him and I felt it against my belly, against my thigh. After that night I found myself with him a few more times. An homme beau. There were thugs in that place, as you know, men and women of the repression who frequented the club, despicable and disgraceful — monsters, if you like. They hid themselves among slender whores and rent boys and gorgeous transvestites that you’d only recognize as transvestites, if you even did, by their muscular backs, and stupendous fags and horrible fags and maybe one or another prisoner who would return under the salt sky of dawn to the underground cell that I knew well, and pimps and young men with piercing eyes and old men who weren’t so old, well-heeled, gray-haired aficionados of these games, and simple mafiosos who put on airs and felt at ease here. Once I thought I recognized two actors I’d seen not long before in a play by Heiner Müller. I’m not sure.

There, inside that mansion cum club and hotel, sliding in the restless dark with those sharp guitar rhythms and provocative drums, we melted into a single high-voltage sea, and the hate coincided with attraction and the rage dovetailed with compassion and the fear with laugher and the violence with tenderness and the desertion with intimacy. Nothing is true, believe me, nothing of what they teach us is true.

In the bathrooms you could always find some upper or a line of white powder. In one of the bathrooms, there was always someone naked in the sunken bathtub, and bodies would go up to it with their kidneys full of beer, and they would unzip, draw, swords would cross for a moment, and they would empty themselves in a fountain spray. I liked to see that those repugnant things, it made me laugh to see those manly men clashing their swords and then forming, euphoric, a proud yellow arc of triumph. And someone received that golden water as a blessing. You wanted details, didn’t you? There’s a baptism for you.

I watch Macha in the cafeteria. Gato never sets foot in here. I watch Macha at his table eating his charquicán beef stew or his beans with noodles with a bottle of Cristal beer. His agents surround him, the women and men of his horde. I remember the scene exactly. Great Dane is there. I’ve already mentioned him to you: he was at Oliver with the girl with Siamese cat eyes, he’s the one who kicked in the door of the safe house I gave them. He’s a handsome and simple blond, with a huge body and a big head and long, well-tended hair. Sometimes I see him in a karate gi. Great Dane is a black belt and he smashes bricks obsessively on the patio with the calloused edges of his giant hands. There’s Iris Molina, skinny and gaunt, with a mysterious voice and an oily, astute gaze. She’s the one who went first into the safe house. She’s an expert in pistol shooting and she hopes to make the Olympic team. (She never will.) There’s Mono Lepe, with his rebellious hair, dark circles under his eyes, his flat nose crooked from some ugly punch, his narrow little shoulders. There’s Chico Marín, his lips always livid, his eyes always darting, abrupt and nervous like a lizard, his head shaved. He’s wide and thick like a cube. There’s Pancha Ortiz, whose anxious eyes follow Macha constantly; she has haughty, high breasts and is the mother, she confessed to me once, of a pair of fraternal twins. She was the one who talked to me about the beauty of guns. There’s Indio Galdámez, in a gray sweatshirt with dark spots of old perspiration. Indio is attractive, proud, and reticent. His hair is greasy and he has a green boa tattooed on his left forearm. And then there are the other men, coarse and forgettable, and women who are rougher and more common, with indiscreetly dyed blond hair and whose names I never learned. Am I exaggerating? From this home in Ersta, Stockholm, do I see things in black and white? Obviously, none of them had the words “I am a monster” written on their faces. Mono Lepe hovers at the bedside when his little Carmen has a fever. He makes her hot lemonade and won’t go to bed until the fever breaks and the girl falls asleep. He takes her to day care every day in the Nissan 4×4 that Central gives him to use. I know all this from Gato.

But they’re surrounded by an imaginary circle of silence, enigma, and risk. They share in the true mysteries of Central. Every one of them is a trunk full of secrets in the shape of a body. A brotherhood of blood. The others in the cafeteria treat them carefully, look at them with admiration: they’ve been chosen for this. They are the workers of death. And death inspires respect, even here. Macha has told Flaco: “In my team, a person who has killed no one is no one. Around here, Flaco, it’s a corpse that baptizes you.”

But Macha hardly speaks. He’s shy, he’s stony. But, you know, the others talk to him. His difference. His distance. His contained sadness. Once in a great while, the surprise of a smile under his bushy moustache. Then the row of large, even teeth. His conspicuous cheekbones, his cleft chin, the sharp lines of his face, and his dangerous eyes, his eyelashes long like a foal’s: all this intrigues me. I’d like to sit at his table, look at him from close up, smell him. And at the same time there is this, my hate: he killed Canelo. The gang he commands loves him with a doglike loyalty. Is it jealousy, damned jealousy, this bitterness I feel when I see the way Pancha looks at him? And what of it?

One Friday, I don’t know why but I remember it was a Friday, Flaco took me out to lunch. He brought me to the Giratorio, the rotating restaurant on the top floor of a building on Avenida Lyon. From up there you could see a good portion of Santiago. San Cristóbal Hill was in front of us as we started lunch and we turned, we turned without noticing it while we ate an exquisite sole and drank a Santa Rita white wine. I felt happy up there. Everything was left behind, down below. The snow-covered mountains paraded in front of us and Flaco showed me the Plomo, the Provincia, the Punta de Damas, the San Ramón, mountain names I’d never heard and that seemed to me mysterious, poetic, evocative. He described the way to climb up the sheer cliff of El Altar — anchors, ice ax — or the La Paloma glacier, the hanging glacier of San Francisco wedged into the Morales canyon. Two days it had taken them to go up, bivouacking only once. They’d slept hanging from the rock. During the night a sudden jerking and a collision woke Flaco up. A bolt had come loose, and he was left hanging by only the other one.