In the Beginning Was the Sea

19

…and so he ended up with all this land. I’m not criticizing him, I love the guy as much as anyone, but frankly I think he had delusions of grandeur. When he died, he owned over a thousand hectares — can you imagine? He had a lumber business — at least that’s what I’ve heard — and the lumbermen were allowed to cut down what they wanted whenever they felt like it. There was no system to what he was doing out there on the finca. Actually, the last time I saw him in Bogotá, he was blind drunk, ranting and raving about everyone and everything like a moron. He insulted my mother, me, you, Elena — the whole human race in general. “The human being is a piece of shit, the human being is a piece of shit, the human being is a piece of shit…” He must have said that a thousand times before he finally fell asleep. The next morning, he didn’t remember a thing. Can you imagine a guy like that running a sawmill with fifteen lumbermen in Turbo? I mean, the balls of the guy! I think Jorge was right — what with the whole highbrow-anarcho-lefty businessman bullshit, that mixture of colonial, bohemian and hippie could never have survived. It’s astonishing he reached the age of thirty-four.

I’m worried this letter will leave you even more confused than you were, but the thing is I’m not exactly the best person to try and explain this whole mess. The reason I’m writing is not because I think I understand what happened, but because I know you must be feeling shocked and terribly alone after his death. I was more surprised than anyone when I found out what he was doing at the finca. As I understood it, the original plan was just to move out to the sea and enjoy life, buy a little boat for fishing, a few cows, a few chickens. When he asked my advice on the first farm, I told him I thought it sounded too big, but then again he didn’t need to use all the land or walk the fields every day. Obviously he didn’t listen to me. Maybe he had some bourgeois dream of being a landowner… I don’t know, I still don’t get it. But buying the second finca was sheer madness — not that he asked my opinion. Though, as you know, by then our friendship was a bit strained. But, since I’ve raised the subject, there’s something I’d like to say — as much for my own peace of mind as for yours. Even with everything that happened, we were still fond of each other. Right to the end we still loved each other. But he started to attack me — especially when he was shitfaced — for what he called my intellectual snobbery. Basically, he accused me of becoming pretentious after I moved to Bogotá, of being pretentious. What hurt me most was that he would come out with all this shit with a kind of primitive — and in his case completely phoney — machismo of a guy who feared neither God nor man, it was like some pathetic attempt to portray himself as some kind of outlaw, a mixture of Jimi Hendrix and a character out of Rivera’s The Vortex. I visited him in Envigado once and I didn’t like what I saw. By that time, he’d been living on the fincafor a while, and this was the first time he and Elena had come back to town together. They’d been there for a week, boozing every night, and when I got to their apartment they were in the middle of a serious session — booze, dope, pounding music — and the place was crawling with freeloaders and hangers-on. He and Elena were playing up the role of beatnik rebels, people who don’t believe in anyone or anything, hardened by the sea and the salt air — you get the idea.

As usual, J. was the one paying for the booze, the weed, the music, even the food.

The two of them were unbearable. They were horribly aggressive, all glib contemptuous humour and equally glib anarchism. Obviously the next morning, when they were hungover, they were back to being their friendly, normal selves. Elena was kind and gentle, nothing like the proud courtesan she’d been posing as the night before. I said to J. — and maybe this was a little tactless — I said he should be a little more wary of these provincial parasites from Envigado who were only out for what they could scrounge. J. reminded me — and I suppose he had a point — that I was from Envigado just like them, even if I had studied literature and philosophy in Bogotá, and he accused me of wasting my life in mental masturbation because I was afraid of facing up to real life, of being too quick to judge and too smug about it… I said exactly what I’ve said in this letter, that he was turning into [words crossed out] and Elena was turning into some punk version of María Félix. Obviously we made up again, in fact J. even spent the whole afternoon referring to Elena as “María”. But after that we were always a little wary of each other, we treated each other with kid gloves, we never talked about anything in detail and both of us just assumed that we were right…