Night Prayers

1

All cities have a fairly definite smell, but for most of the day the smell of Bangkok is covered by a dense blanket of smog that conceals it, making it hard to perceive. When it finally appears, well after darkness has fallen — when the city is quiet, when it has at last calmed down — it’s a tangible substance that floats in the air, moves along the winding streets, and penetrates the remotest alleyways. It may come from the canals of stagnant water, where it’s quite common to see people cooking or washing clothes; from the dried fish stands in Chinatown, the satay and fried food in Patpong and Silom Road, or even the live animals that wait in wicker cages in Chatuchak Market; or it may simply come from the vapors of the Chao Phraya, the brown river that crosses the city, invading it like an insidious illness.

Today it’s pouring rain. The waters of the river heave and ripple, as if about to engulf the sampans and canoes that dare to navigate it. That’s what I see through the window of my room on the fourteenth floor of the Shangri-La Tower at the Hotel Oriental. Shangri-La: the name means “paradise” but to me it suggests something else, “solitude,” maybe, or just “waiting.” Night has already fallen, and I’m drinking gin, my face glued to the window, looking out at a landscape distorted by rain: the Chao Phraya, the lights of Bangkok, the blue skyscrapers, the storm clouds streaked with lightning, the incredible metropolis.

When I switch on the air-conditioning, the grille gives off a strong smell, a mixture of damp and rust. What time is it? Almost eight. I’ll go down soon, have dinner, then get through a few more gins. In spite of my age (I’ve just turned forty-five) I still believe in chance, the throw of the dice involved in going out into the night to look for a drink in a foreign city, an adventure we are less and less suited to with time, which is why, as the years go by, some prefer a bottle by the couch in front of the TV. But not me. I prefer to wander the city, refusing to sleep without having tried that first.

But what am I doing here, apart from launching these thoughts into the rotten air? Waiting, waiting, waiting. Or rather: remembering. I’ve made an appointment with memory.

I came to Bangkok intending to remember. To look again at what I lived through in this city a few years ago, but in another light. Sometimes, time is a question of light. With the passing of the years, while some forms become strangely opaque, others acquire brilliance. They are the same, yet they appear more vivid, and sometimes, just sometimes, we are able to grasp them. I’m not sure why. It may be no more than a wish, it may merely be words, but that’s precisely what I’m looking for: words. I want to reconstruct a story in order to tell it.

Something — I don’t know what, of course: perhaps an impulse, a creative élan, or simply an old sadness, I can’t be more specific — made me feel that I had to go over all this in writing: the events that brought me to Bangkok that first time, and their consequences. An old story trapped inside a city, which opens up onto others. At that time (the period I’m trying to remember) everything was different and I was another person. Not better or worse, only different and a little younger.

Let’s see now. Where to begin?

2

I’ll begin with the worst of it, Consul. The worst thing of all: my childhood. Although at this stage, to be honest, I don’t even know what the worst is.

I was born in Bogotá, in a lower-middle-class family, a family that was, as they say in the financial section of the newspapers, economically unsound and showing a marked downward trend. A family much affected by the crisis, down there at the bottom of all the indices and statistics, at the mercy of neoliberalism and the market economy. We also fitted the statistics in being a family of four. I was the second of two children, after an elder sister named Juana. We lived in the Santa Ana district, not up in the hills, where the rich live, but between Seventh and Ninth, which at that time was a mixture of middle-class people on the way down and what’s called the “upper working class,” in other words, the quintessence of pretention, frustration, and resentment. I don’t know, maybe I’m being unfair, but that’s how I remember it.

Mine wasn’t a happy family, and, as in Tolstoy’s novel, it was unhappy in its own way, although now that I think about it the only original thing was how all that frustration and resentment manifested itself. Anyway, that was where I was born. In an ugly old two-story house, similar to all the others in the neighborhood. Not far from an open sewer.

Mother made bouquets in a florist’s on Fifteenth that specialized in senior citizens’ parties, local festivals, and masses. Father worked in the national current accounts section of the Usaquén Park branch of the Colombian Industrial Bank, and in spite of breaking his back for ten hours a day earned just enough to pay his monthly bills. He was a model employee, but with so much pent-up resentment that I think if he’d had the opportunity to torture — anonymously — any of his colleagues or customers, and of course his boss, without there being any consequences (like in one of those virtual experiments that universities do into the cruelty or cold-bloodedness of the average person), he’d have gone about it with genuine brutality, releasing great spurts of blood, sending megawatts of electricity into nervous systems, pulling out nails with a penknife, burning testicles with a cattle prod, crushing bones. He’d have been responsible for a real massacre if the city had suddenly gone crazy and descended into chaos, sending us back to the Stone Age for a time. I can imagine him shattering the skulls of colleagues with a stone hammer, decapitating his customers with obsidian knives, jumping from one desk to another, his body covered in skins, his hair long and dirty, emitting grunts. But he had to swallow this impulse and keep his head down. He had to smile and be docile, in his cheap striped tie and his shiny suit.

The managers took advantage of him, humiliated him gratuitously. “Always look on the bright side,” he must have thought, gritting his teeth. Father had a real awareness of his class and believed it was his duty to wait patiently. Better times were around the corner. Times of revenge and justice. A happier era. In the meantime, they moved his desk to the most uncomfortable spot, gave him a chair that wobbled, placed him at the one counter window where the terminal didn’t work so that he’d have to do everything by hand. But the managers never invited him to the office on the second floor where they had cable TV. He pretended not to notice, or not to care. How inconsiderate of them, he said to Mother once, sending me to Carrefour to buy a bottle of Tres Esquinas for the Barcelona game, and then not even inviting me to sit down with them! “How inconsiderate,” that was all. He didn’t think he could express any other kind of anger. He had to keep supporting his family and it was best not to take risks.

Life wasn’t easy for him, and the worst of it was that Mother despised him for that very reason, although at home he was quite the opposite, bossy and tyrannical, as if to say, I’m the king of this little world! here everyone does what I say! and Mother, who was a traditional wife even though she never lost the opportunity to humiliate him in front of his friends, would say to him, yes, of course, go sit down and watch the game and I’ll bring you your food.

The frustrations of work had to be paid for at home. That’s how it happens in poor families or unhappy families. And that was our way of being unhappy.

Mother always said we had to be grateful for the effort and the great sacrifice he made for all of us. And maybe she was right. But how could I accept that? Father never sat down on the floor to play with me, never took me affectionately by the hand, never did anything to make me happy or arouse any kind of emotion in me. And you know why? It’s an old story, one that never changes. He only had eyes for Juana, my older sister. His heart couldn’t stretch to more, and I was left out. It was a small heart, a dry heart, because, to tell the truth, Father didn’t have many reasons to be brimming over with love. On the contrary: his life was a dusty expanse of scrubland, and there was nobody to support him. What love did he get, and from whom? Very little, almost none. Mother despised him silently, and he didn’t really have anywhere else to replenish his stocks; my grandmother was dead and he didn’t have any brothers or sisters. His father had been in a vegetative state for years… Did he ever have a girl on the side? I doubt it. Because of him, I’ve always believed that love emerges only when you get it from others, that it exists by contagion. It doesn’t come about spontaneously, but through another person.

That’s what happened to me. I spent my first years alone, a little ghost in a house where love was in short supply. It’s what I thought the world and life were like, although from time to time I witnessed amorous scenes of which I wasn’t the protagonist. The first time that someone came down to my eye level and gave me a hug, it was already too late. My world was irredeemably contaminated. I must have been about seven, maybe slightly older. And it wasn’t my parents, but my sister.

Juana picked me up from the floor. She lived up there on her throne, a spoiled only daughter, but one day she decided to look at me. She saw me and I saw her, and we liked each other, and she gave me what I hadn’t had from anybody up until then, in other words, understanding, or rather something more intimate: a mirror that fell from on high and reflected my soul back to me. Thanks to her, I survived childhood, although I can assure you it was very long. Long and painful. But how was that moment? How did it come about that Juana acknowledged me?

I think I was almost eight when, one morning, I started to feel pain and fever. My liver had become inflamed thanks to an unusual form of viral hepatitis that’s quite rare in Colombia and could have killed me. By the time they took me to the hospital, I was burning with fever. I remember the hurried departure, racing through the streets in the middle of the night wrapped in blankets at an hour when everything seems terrifying. Because of my grandfather, who had been a lieutenant colonel, we had access to the military hospital. They even gave me a private room, and I swear to you, that’s where I felt really free for the first time in my life. Through the window, I could see the lights of the city as evening fell. The sunset was like the end of the world, with those purple-colored dusks you get in Bogotá, which is an ugly city with a beautiful sky, something I’ve never quite understood.

I’d hunker down under the blankets and think, I want this to be the last thing I see, I want to disappear now and forever, and I’d pray to God, I don’t want to get out of this hospital, I don’t want to go home or to school or to my neighborhood ever again, there isn’t a single place in the world I’d like to go back to, and I’d drift into a peaceful sleep, protected by that childish hope, oh, what joy I felt! But I’d always wake up again to a rainy morning. And then my parents would arrive, and with them the horror, the frozen looks, the resentment that showed itself in everything, even in the way they breathed; the feeling of being trapped in a state of anxiety that wasn’t mine. I’d sink back into my illness, look for protection in the fever and the pains and the dizziness I felt from the pills, and ask that it never abandon me. I just had to be strong, to bear up, because at a specific time, at the end of the afternoon, they would both go. Mother could have stayed and slept there but luckily she never did. The very first night she had apologized to the head nurse — because she thought she had to — saying that she had chores to do at home, and another child, a daughter, to look after, to which the nurse replied, don’t worry, señora, that’s why we’re here, we’ll take good care of him and spoil him, he’s such a good little boy, so quiet.

Those nights in the hospital, lying in my adjustable bed and watching the lights of the city come on, were probably the happiest period of my childhood, although also the saddest. There’s a strange joy in that memory in spite of the fact that today, when I talk about it, I feel a kind of pity. I don’t know, Consul. If only I’d died.

One Saturday, Juana came with them. At first, although curious, she held back a little, but as she moved closer I noticed that she was staring at me, and suddenly she touched my forehead with her hand, a very light caress, and that was when the miracle happened. All at once Mother’s agitated voice — she’d been looking constantly at her watch and talking about an appointment at the Wella hair salon that she couldn’t miss — faded away, and Father, who was looking out at the city through the window, also seemed to disappear.

I don’t know how she did it, but somehow Juana managed to turn that hospital room into a capsule. Only her, standing there in silence, and me. Nobody else in the world, and that, just that, was what I saw: that Juana’s eyes were two caves through which you could gain access to a planet where we could live and perhaps be happy.

Then I had a vision.

A huge fire was spreading across the city from the mountains. In the midst of the spluttering concrete and the explosions, the screams and the collapsing buildings, beautiful tongues of fire appeared at my window, formed wild shapes, changed color, and vanished into the air. I didn’t fantasize about the end of the world, but I felt strong. I heard the screams coming from the streets and stopped to listen to them. What a surprise! They weren’t cries of pain but laughter. A resounding burst of laughter, as if there was something pleasurable in all that destruction. That’s what that hateful city is like: capable of confusing us with pleasure when it’s actually torturing us, a pleasure you can’t imagine anywhere else, but since it’s the only one we know there everybody believes that’s how life is, that’s what pleasure and happiness are like.

Poor people.

I saw the flames rise, heard them echoing ever more loudly against the roof, and my heart was pounding, will all this stop now? is this the end? Then I looked at Juana and started to fall into the sleep of illness and pills, but taking with me her eyes and maybe also something of her soul. I wanted that moment to last. I prayed again. But the sky was empty, nobody heard my prayers, Consul, and a few days later I had to return home, to that neighborhood of broken streets, and to my school, which was like a boil on the surface of the hills. Home was the center of my unease, something in it weighed on my mind. What was it? Only Juana was able to understand it, and that was what united us. It was what we had discovered: we were part of something dark and sad that neither of us could change. The smell of cheap lotion, the floor polish, the aroma of raincoats and jackets, whatever. The intense smell of a humiliated family that thought it deserved a second chance but never got it. Only one thing had changed: I had a trench now, somewhere I could be relatively safe. My bedroom, Juana’s bedroom, and the little corridor between them. When I got back from the hospital, that was my refuge.

Every morning the hell started again. At about six, we’d stand on the corner of the street, waiting for the school bus. I’d see the other children and feel profound contempt for them, and at the same time pity. They were happy. They chattered away nineteen to the dozen, talked over each other, laughed. Some sang, and clapped when the wheel of the bus hit a puddle and sprayed the pitted sidewalks; what sad happiness, Consul. There are some kinds of happiness that make your flesh crawl, don’t you think?

At school I wasn’t a bad student. I didn’t like calling the teachers’ attention to myself, so I made a personal decision to be a gray pupil, an invisible pupil. One more among many. It was a stupid matter of keeping up appearances, like so many other stupid matters I had to put up with during those years. Even now, in my nightmares, I return to my childhood and realize that period of pain hasn’t finished. It’s a wound that grows and opens with time.

The teachers were horrible women with torn pantyhose, varicose veins, warts, greasy hair, and sad clothes. It’s because of them that I’ve always believed evil is ugly, even though that’s not its exclusive property. These women, whose resentment, whose hatred for their mediocre lives, could be felt from miles away, were the people who were supposed to educate us! My God, what could these monsters, who exercised power over children in order to alleviate their own miserable existences, convey to us of beauty? Why did they have to be so revolting, with their mustaches and their stooped shoulders, rather than lively and beautiful? The explanation was obvious: they were there to take their revenge. Our youth and our liveliness and maybe our dreams were an insult to them, a cruel mirror of their own debasement, the poison that inflamed their brains and their spleen. And it was these devils who were supposed to teach us the value of life, love, and friendship!

So great was my revulsion that I frequently had to go to the bathroom to throw up, clinging to the water faucet. It was the only fresh clean thing in that place. The water. I let it run to cleanse my body and especially my soul of that hemlock, and absolutely the worst thing of all was seeing my classmates, children who should have been happy, who should have had the intuition to reject them, jumping all over them, telling them things or asking them questions, or doing that typical childish thing of boasting about what you did at the weekend, we went to and such a restaurant or museum or to the country. I never did anything like that at the weekend, but even so I never understood the desire for other people to know about your life, what was the point? Just telling them about something meant ruining it, contaminating it. And there were my little classmates, the poor dummies, talking over each other to tell the teachers, and the teachers would say, that’s very nice, children, your parents love you very much, you must show your gratitude and the best way is to study, so for your assignment tonight learn about the second liberation campaign, and then they’d grab their chalk and their bags and walk off, clicking their heels, and a little while later you’d see them in the staff room sticking their mouths in cups of coffee, drinking red wine, and smoking, whispering among themselves, telling each other God knows what secrets or gossip, giving each other advice on how to humiliate us even more, how to take even better revenge on life through us happy children, because of all the things they wanted to be and never succeeded in being, having turned instead into what they were, hunchbacked old crows, because, believe me, Consul, the wickedness of the soul clings to the body and deforms it, covers it in calluses and warts and other excrescences, you can see evil and you can also smell it, I experienced it every day of my childhood and adolescence, and it’s why most of my classmates ended up joining that system, that way of living in hatred and resentment, what else could they do when that’s what they saw every day?

I had to make an effort and resist, since there was something inside me I didn’t want to contaminate, something it cost me a lot to maintain. And how did I manage? Not too badly actually, just by fantasizing, letting my mind escape from that horrible prison, which was much worse than this one, Consul. Everyone thought I was there, sitting at my desk, but in fact I was light-years away, on a beautiful planet that belonged to me, in the foothills of a solitary volcano, surrounded by deep, menacing oceans, and nobody noticed, my mask was perfect because it was constructed in their image and likeness. The mask of an idiot.

The only moments of peace I had were sometimes at recess, when I went to the sport field to watch my sister play volleyball with her friends. I loved to watch them, they were so beautiful, Juana with her chestnut skin, dancing in the air. A streak of light. That’s where I spent recess, watching the ball come and go, which for them was much more than a diversion or a sport and turned into something like the goal of their young lives. It was something clean and uncontaminated: six young girls playing and believing profoundly in what they were doing. How it hurt me to hear the bell ring! They’d play for another few seconds, waiting for the field to empty, and manage to throw two or three more balls until one of the crows came and said, that’s enough, girls, go back to your classes.

That’s how I grew up, Consul. That was my world, and the worst of it is that outside school things weren’t any better.

In the city people talked and talked without stopping, gesticulating madly, expressing stupid and ignorant opinions about everything, yelling banal phrases to make themselves heard, to stand out or get one over on the others. Such vulgarity! Everything was an absurd comedy that seemed designed to grate on your nerves. Around that time I saw two episodes of a TV series called The Twilight Zone. The first was the story of an invisible man. The second was about a young man who found a magic watch that could stop time, not his time but other people’s, so that he could move about as he liked among people who couldn’t move. The invisible man was what I aspired to be and what, deep down, I had already been for a long time, but the idea of a clock that froze other people really grabbed me: to be able to stop reality with a click! People’s breathing, their stupid chatter. To be able to stop all of it!

What silence, what peace.

I always hated the things that define life in that place: the social pretentions, the desire to impress, the hatred, the congenital stinginess, the envy, all that could stop! I dreamed of pressing a button and being alone, wiping out that gesticulating verbiage; I don’t know if there’s anywhere else in the world where so much bullshit is said simultaneously, where so much nonsense is spoken at such a frenetic pace, and all the people who believe we speak “the best Spanish in the world,” my God, as if using lots of different words had some value, as if employing a few synonyms that other people, because they’re worse than ignorant, don’t use and probably don’t understand, gives us a right to say we have “the best Spanish in the world.”

And besides, you just have to look at the TV news any day to know what such a beautiful use of the language is used for: for cutting each other’s throats, for making rude remarks and jokes and well-planned accusations, have you heard how most of our governors, congressmen, councilmen, and mayors speak? In their defense, they’re drunk most of the time, which may be their most sympathetic characteristic, they drink on public platforms, in Congress, in their trailers, at meetings held in squares filled with paid deaf-mutes, wherever, if it wasn’t so serious you could die laughing. I’m sorry to be so emphatic, Consul, they may be friends of yours and I’m offending them, forgive me, it’s what I think. In any case nobody there realizes, nobody’s bothered by all that buzzing. It’s the noise of insects, all swarming together. Only an image of hell, a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, could account for that horrible sound.

That’s what my life was like, but one day something happened.

One night I went out onto the street and walked as far as the open sewer on 106th, a stinking trickle of water that crossed our neighborhood and sometimes, when it rained a lot, turned into a river. I liked to go there to watch the water flow, even though it was dirty water. On one side of the sewer there was a park with a few trees separating it from the houses, and on the other a wall about a hundred feet long and twelve feet high, with bars on the top. For years I’d stopped in that place, attracted by something. The sewer, the wall. I’d pass it and stop there. I’d lean over the bridge and look, I didn’t really know why. In the evenings there were people smoking grass between the trees or couples necking. Garbagemen taking a nap on the lawns. I’d look and look: at the sewer, the wall.

I only found out by chance. My sister’s class had been making huge cardboard models of mountains, and to paint them they’d used colored spray paints. Days later I found the box of cans in the garage and took it to my room. I looked at them for a while and chose three, one yellow, one black, one red. And I went out onto the street, Consul. There was a cool wind, the air smelled damp, as if it was going to rain, but the sky wasn’t very heavy. I walked as far as the park, jumped over the sewer, and stopped in front of the wall. I looked at it for a second, grabbed the can of black paint, shook it, and heard the little ball in the can, a sound that sent a quiver through me and made me feel dizzy. I looked at the wall and traced a straight line, about twelve feet long, and then a second one parallel to it. With the yellow can I made a thick wave and with the red filled the spaces that were left, like pregnant bellies. I stepped back and contemplated what I’d done. I was moved. I went back to the wall and painted curved arrow tips and a yellow shadow, and the colors, as they were superimposed, gave off a strange glow. I ran back to the house for the green and blue cans and added a kind of bubble to that strange figure, which now looked like a snake slithering through a tunnel, and when I’d finished, moving back to the edge of the sewer to get a good look at it, under the yellowish light of the lamppost, I felt it should be signed, so I wrote MAL in red. I didn’t dare put my full name, I took three letters out. From the L I traced a curved line below the word, like a floating ribbon, and felt euphoric, I took a deep breath and said to myself, how will it look in the morning? how will I see it in the morning? I went back home and put the cans away. I washed my hands with soap and got nervously into bed. That night I dreamed about remote desert islands, filled with virgin walls crying out to be painted.

3

The story I want to write, the one I’m now about to tell — the one I’m remembering and putting into some kind of shape here in Bangkok — happened at a strange time in my life.

In those years I was working for the diplomatic service and had recently moved to New Delhi, a city that seemed quite unconventional to a Latin American, which was why, or at least so I believed, it required a somewhat adventurous frame of mind. That’s how I thought in those days. I had spent a lot of time in Europe — twenty-four years! — telling myself that if I’d actually been a daring kind of person — as I wanted and even believed myself to be — I should long ago have moved somewhere tougher and more remote, like Beijing, Jakarta, or Nairobi.

Having spent a lot of time completing my education, then searching for stability and reaching a certain level, I was now ready to go out and lose myself, lose what I had acquired or swap it for new experiences. That’s why, when I was offered the post of consul in my country’s embassy in India, I didn’t hesitate for a second, but got ready to abandon sad old Europe.

Arriving in Delhi and seeing the comfort in which foreigners lived — including the diplomats of our neighboring countries — I had high hopes, but the illusion only lasted until I found out what my salary amounted to, a figure that tact forbids me from specifying, as Julio Ramón Ribeyro would say, and one that didn’t even allow me to dream of the traditional areas where expatriates lived, like Vasant Vihar, Sundar Nagar, or Nizzamudin East. Instead, I had to go somewhere cheaper, a middle-class area called Jangpura Extension, which struck me at first as dusty and a bit terrifying but which in the end, as often happens, I grew to love. A person can get used to anything, even the fact that two hundred yards from his home there’s a corner filled with noisy rickshaws, sleeping dogs, clapped-out taxis, a foul urinal swarming with mosquitoes, and fried food stands that are like factories for typhoid or dysentery.

The offices of the embassy were in Vasant Vihar, a rich neighborhood, although one filled with dust and having the disadvantage of being just below the flight path of planes coming in to land at Indira Gandhi International Airport, which meant that every three minutes you had to shout in order to be heard indoors.

And that wasn’t all: the front of the building faced Olof Palme Marg, where bulldozers and cranes spent an absurdly long time building an overpass — a flyover in Indian English — producing mountains of dust, the noise of pneumatic drills, and the horrific smells of drains, not to mention the traffic jams. It reached a peak one afternoon when, perhaps because of all the digging to lay the concrete, a snake some seven feet in diameter crossed Olof Palme Marg and reached the doors of the embassy, where it died, crushed by the wheels of a truck, whose driver, of course, stopped, took his head in both hands, and wept, since in India all life is sacred.

My office was on the second floor, with a view of the gardens of a dusty residence that was the embassy of the Arab Emirate of Bahrain; every time I looked through the window or went out onto my magnificent balcony I would see two guards and a dog snoozing in the sentry boxes, and a bit farther on, out on the street, groups of women in saris carrying bricks in baskets on their heads to a nearby site where their husbands were working and their children were playing amid the rubble and earth.

The principal task of the consular office was to issue visas, to Indian businessmen going to Colombia to make deals, to technicians, to students, and — rarely — to tourists. We also had to process documents from the National Tax Office legalizing the invoices of companies from India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, and even from Iran, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, countries where we had no diplomatic representation but whose affairs we handled. On request, the companies had to send the originals of the documents and their registration by a chamber of commerce, everything duly authenticated and translated before a notary.

And naturally there were problems and requests involving our compatriots, of whom there were only a hundred and twenty in the whole country — one for every ten million Indians — plus visitors, those who came to India and got into all kinds of trouble, most of them through having a romantic and distorted image of the country.

My colleague, Olympia León de Singh, was a woman in her early fifties who had been working there for more than ten years and knew the ins and outs of the “consular function” as nobody else did. In addition, she was the only Colombian in the mission who spoke Hindi, since she was married to a Sikh and had lived in Delhi for more than twenty years. When I asked her, she told me she had met her husband in Moscow in the 1970s, at Patrice Lumumba University, where both were studying international relations. Her stories, which she kept feeding me in snippets and only when she was in a good mood, were amazing. She told me that at the beginning of the 1980s the embassies brought in toilet paper in diplomatic bags, since you couldn’t get hold of it in India, and that at the airport, during stopovers, crowds of cripples and sick people would invade the runway and get on the planes to beg!

Olympia came from the Santander region of Colombia and had been raised a Communist. When she talked about Moscow in the seventies, her eyes shone. A city of abundance, culture, art. Delhi was quite the opposite: a vast village crisscrossed by oxcarts and unpaved streets, where people died of scurvy and diarrhea and where diseases that were rare in the Soviet Union, such as leprosy, were still common. This was basically true and is still true. My daily journey from Jangpura to the office took me through an intersection where you could see the following characters: a leper wrapped in a bloodstained tunic with three stumps instead of fingers and a pink orifice where his nose should have been; two eunuchs expelled from their neighborhood who begged for money in return for not cursing you; a woman walking a baby with a burned hand — according to Peter, my driver, the burn was false, made with butter and gelatin, which cheered me — as well as people selling magazines, umbrellas, pirated books, ties, and handkerchiefs.

One of the first images from soon after my arrival in Delhi was of a man in bustling Chandni Chowk Market, a very thin man displaying an elephantine testicle and an enormous rectal prolapse, two melons hanging from a skinny, twisted body, like the cams of a giant clock. Having already seen the human bazaar massed on the steps of the Jama Masjid Mosque, including a dwarf ulcerated and deformed by polio and various lepers in a terminal state, it was obvious that in Delhi, beautiful Delhi, disquieting Delhi, diseases provided those suffering from them with a stable way to earn a living.

But let’s go back to Olympia.

She was the one who, every day, brought me the problems of our community of compatriots, mainly composed of pilots for Kingfisher Airlines, young people who had come to do internships with Indian companies, and, above all, adepts of “spiritual tourism,” most of them rich ladies who found relief in the teachings of Sai Baba, Satyananda, Osho, and other contemporary philosophers who dispensed advice about life and uttered wise sayings about peace and love.

Everything my colleague hated.

On one occasion she came into my office very upset, and said, come and look at this, boss. Don’t call me boss, I begged her, and we went out to the reception room, where a middle-aged Indian was waiting nervously. He had brought with him the passport of a Colombian woman who, according to him, “had problems.” When I asked him what kind, he told me she was a follower of the guru Ravi Ravindra and that, ever since a particular “spiritual seminar,” her mind had been confused, as if she had a screw loose. She was twenty-seven years old. Problems of what kind? I asked again, and the man lowered his eyes and said:

“She wants to go out naked onto the street, she can’t sleep, she’s obsessed with Ravi, she says she’s going to be his wife and wants to go with him to Indonesia.”

“Indonesia?” I said, thinking it was one of the countries whose affairs we dealt with. “Why Indonesia?”

“Ravi is going there today to give some lectures,” he said.

I immediately set off to deal with the case.

They were keeping her in an apartment near Green Park. On seeing me, the young woman said, hello, would you like a drink? something to eat? sit down, how are you? how nice of you to come. This volley of words made it clear how serious things were; when I asked her how she was, she said, I’m fine, how nice to meet you, would you like a drink? something to eat? my taxi will be here soon, I’m going to the airport, I’m going to meet Ravi, we’re going to Indonesia, how nice to meet you, would you like a drink? something to eat? It looked like it could be complicated. I managed to persuade her to come with me to see a doctor. The friend who had been putting her up, Amrita, said she was suffering memory lapses and I wanted her to be checked over. I was afraid that she’d been drugged, maybe even raped.

Talking to her a bit more I found out that she had met the guru in Canada and that this was her third journey with him to India. She also said that she was deeply in love with him. Do you love him in a spiritual way? I asked, and she said, yes, but also as a woman, something very beautiful has grown up between us. Amrita looked at me with eyes popping out of her head and, in an aside, assured me that these were ravings, that it couldn’t be real, it was only her obsession with Ravi. I was even more perplexed. Some gurus are accused of raping Western women, weak-minded women who are easily dominated and give themselves up body and soul. Body above all. Fortunately this wasn’t the case here, at least not according to the doctor in the hospital where she was under observation for a week. Then her mother came and took her back to Tokyo, where she was studying for a doctorate on a scholarship from the Japanese government. When she left, the doctor told me they’d found psychotropic substances in her urine, had she been drugged? I was never able to find out.

Another day I was in my office, I don’t remember if I was reading a visa application or writing a letter to the tax authorities, when Olympia burst in saying, boss, boss, you’re about to get a call from the Ministry, it’s an urgent case!

When I looked at her inquisitively, wanting to know what it was about, she whispered: get ready to go to Bangkok, boss.

“Don’t call me boss,” I said, lifting the receiver.

4. INTER-NETA’S MONOLOGUES

Where I’m from is the least of my concerns, because people are born a number of times in the course of their lives. I might have read that somewhere, but I can’t remember where. If anyone knows, please tell me. When it comes down to it, I don’t really care. I’ve learned to live in front of my screen, traveling the world. This is my true home. Sometimes I get fits of nervous laughter, but that just indicates that I haven’t taken my pill. I have problems with recent memory, like the little blue fish in the movie Finding Nemo. The doctor who’s been treating me since my illness started tries to scare me, saying: you’ll lose consciousness, fall off your chair, and you won’t be able to get up. One day you’ll find yourself in a world you don’t know and you’ll have no idea where to go, so you have to look after yourself. But I don’t take anything. I’m anorexic about food and pills and things that have come through the thick, filthy air of cities.

My best friend, or rather, my man, lives in a blog called Sensations. His name, or the name he calls himself, is Ferenck Ambrossía. It may be a false name. It almost certainly is a false name, he wouldn’t be so silly as to put his body into the scrapyard of this topsy-turvy world. I don’t know where he’s from or what he looks like. I don’t care. Is he black, yellow, white? Is he a humanoid like those in the movie Blade Runner? Is he “Jewish, quechua, orangutanic, Aryan,” to quote León de Greiff? Is he one man, or many men? Is he a woman, or many women? Is he a group of convicts with time off for good behavior in the penitentiary of Moundsville, now exclusively inhabited by ghosts? Is he a mental patient with access to the Internet in some Scandinavian sanatorium, who dreams of living on the same bridge along which the character in Munch’s The Scream is walking? Or a conclave of pederast novice monks who exchange photographs of Burmese and Kenyan children on the net? Or a nervous lawyer in Edinburgh afraid of meeting the specter of Robert Louis Stevenson in the doorway of his house? Or two hysterical sisters born on Rhode Island who want to emulate Lovecraft and are getting ready to kill their parents with an ax, burn their house down, and flee north, to the country of ice? Or maybe a seller of secondhand Bibles on eBay, the pages of which are ideal for rolling joints in prison? Or a Russian porn star, who, in her free time, masturbates with an old Soviet TYPNCT-3 telescope, while weeping for her lost youth and lost empires? Is he maybe a sad young Latin American poet postponing his suicide in the hope of an unlikely signal from Rubén Darío? Or a Cameroon Airlines stewardess disappointed and angry over a French passenger on whom she performed fellatio in the toilet while the plane was flying over Chad, who promised her the earth then abandoned her? Or an Adventist priest, a follower of Lewis Carroll’s brother E. H. Dodgson, who, like him, lives in the community of Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, on the fearsome island of Tristan da Cunha? Or a young Spanish teacher at the Cervantes Institute in New Delhi, born in Bihar, who reads Lope de Vega on the Internet? Or a Norwegian assistant at Río Piedras University in Puerto Rico, unwittingly made pregnant by a Ponce taxi driver, who’s hesitating between calling her future child Grunewald or Hectorlavó? Is he perhaps a group of Chilean transvestites who escaped with their lives from Pinochet’s dictatorship and are now composing their memoirs in verse and pursuing their apocalypse in the faculties of letters? Is he a great Mexican novelist of the post-boom generation who includes dwarves, bicycles, and Leonardo da Vinci in his books, and who could well be the author of this crazy list? Is he a young Romanian female psychologist working in the psychiatric emergency department of the Hôpital de Marne-la-Vallée, who reads Cioran surrounded by the screams of the inmates in the high-security cells? Is he the illegitimate son of a chambermaid on the seventy-eighth floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York, where nine years ago a German rock star left syringes filled with blood in the washbowl? Is he the enemies of a dramatist raised in Salzburg whose memories are of bombing raids, floors collapsing, and cities in flames? Is he all of the previous, united in a transitory Confederation of the Stateless, chaired by the switchboard operator of a five-star hotel in Jerusalem the name of which we omit for security reasons? Or simply a novelist writing alone and against all hope, his one desire being to hide his face and be forgotten?

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.

5

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?

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.

The country had been saved.

Father bought bracelets with the flag of Colombia and decals that said I am a Colombian. He felt proud. My only concern was for him to stop making his speeches, so I distanced myself from all that, which deep down I didn’t care about, and devoted myself to my wall.

With my spray cans I painted another island surrounded by ocean, with protective cliffs and a little house near the shore, where I imagined Juana and I were living, and below the island, which floated like a cork, I painted dragons with huge jaws trying to swallow it, and a beautiful smoking volcano, and at the side I again put my signature, MAL, of which I was very proud, just like father with Uribe. It was the fourth time I had painted something big near the sewer, and I thought, when would I dare to paint on other walls, far from the neighborhood and my house? One way or another, going out into the city meant breaking through the protective shell of childhood.

The truth is, I was nervous.

I also started to experiment with the shapes of some letters. The S a viper of fire in the sky, biting the night. The M a mountain, the feet of a strange Martian. The U an old cabalistic sign, a horseshoe in reverse, the imminence of fire and pain. The J a seahorse because it was Juana’s letter, in other words, it meant my freedom, my hope. I foreshortened them, gave them depth and volume. Some shapes I made were kitsch, others classical. I imitated Garamond and Boldoni typefaces. I painted sunrises. I painted an image of the seabed that came to me in dreams, thick darkness with one open eye, the eye of some fish or other.

The history of the country was moving forward.

Not much time passed — a year, six months, do you remember, Consul? — before the joy of Uribe’s victory started to crack and sunlight to filter in through the cracks. As often happens, it was a few intellectuals who sounded the alarm. They criticized Uribe for behaving like a provincial Messiah, always talking about the Virgin Mary, and started alluding to his relationship with the death squads and the paramilitaries.

Father closed his ears, he couldn’t accept it. His rejection of the intellectual world became a matter of national security — as he put it — and when he saw what was happening he overflowed with justifications and reasons.

I told you! he would cry, what this country doesn’t need is that herd of pundits, and not just them, the whole mob of intellectuals who live from one cocktail to another, rich kids, idlers who spend their time criticizing the president without suggesting anything better and talking ill of the country, because let’s make no mistake about this, they’re the ones who really give Colombia bad press, what do they care? most of them come from foreign schools, they’re brought up to admire France or England or the United States, so what does it matter to them? That’s why they criticize the president and only talk about the bad things that happen here, talking about them in Europe and the United States, why do they never talk about the good things? why do they never mention the heroes of our history, or the martyrs? why don’t they say that Colombia is a power in biodiversity, in flora and fauna, that it has every possible climate and lots of greenery and clean water and blue skies? why don’t they talk about how good it is to live in Bogotá, in spite of the problems, and how great it is to have a temperate climate like the climate in Melgar or Girardot just forty minutes away? oh, no, they can’t say that because nobody’s interested, speaking well of Colombia doesn’t sell, don’t you see? that’s why they keep talking about the murderers in this country and the drug traffickers in this country and the hit men and the prostitutes and all the dead in this country, as if those things didn’t exist everywhere! that’s the truth, the sad truth, Father said whenever for some reason somebody, usually my sister, mentioned what some writer or intellectual had said against the government.

And as the years went by, he got worse and worse.

He just had to hear some name mentioned by Juana and he immediately came out with the same old story: on one side there’s us, standing shoulder to shoulder with the president, waging war on FARC and on Chávez and on all the Communists in Latin America, and on the other side there’s them, always criticizing, as if they didn’t know that what they’re saying helps our enemies, how many of those hippies are really Communists, Chavists, or even members of FARC? If they like it so much why don’t they go into the mountains or to Venezuela or Cuba! let’s see if they’re allowed to criticize things there, oh yes, I’d like to see that! If they said in Caracas or Havana half of what they say in Bogotá they’d be thrown in prison, and as most are columnists, worse still, that’s why decent people have to rally around the president, who’s an upright man and, what’s more, a believer. This country has always been Catholic, there’s nothing new about that, why does everyone criticize him when he mentions the Virgin Mary in his speeches? what’s wrong with him praying on television? It’s normal in a Catholic country, haven’t they seen how Bush goes to mass and talks about God and nobody says anything? Why keep saying that about the president? I mean, even Chávez quotes the Bible at every opportunity! It makes them angry and they criticize, but the truth is that we’ve never been better and we’ve never been respected so much in Washington.

Juana, who was already in tenth grade and had gotten used to answering back, would retort and say, what do you mean, Dad, respected? on the contrary, we’re a pure banana republic, I feel ashamed when I see Uribe going to Washington to show the figures for the Free Trade Agreement, which they’re never going to agree to while he’s president, and you know why? because there they have reports about crimes, about the State’s responsibility for massacres, reports they compiled themselves, or do you think the gringos rely on our local columnists to judge Colombia?

Father would lose his temper and say, what crimes of the State, no way, since when is fighting terrorism a crime? If the gringos had allowed the same NGOs in Iraq or Afghanistan that they’ve set up here, they’d all be in prison, from the Secretary of Defense down, but that’s because the terrorists, how shall I put this? aren’t students throwing Molotov cocktails, that’s why the army has to act like any other army in the world and when that happens there are always victims, so what? Whatever those idiots you read say, nothing is happening here that hasn’t already happened in all the countries where there’s ever been a war, but because it’s us, we’re asked to do it with surgical gloves on.

Daddy, you’re a fascist and a paramilitary! Juana would yell, like most people in this damned country, what a dumb country! gross!

Then she’d grab her jacket and go out, slamming the door, simultaneously with Mother crying, what a rude girl! but Father would intervene, leave her, Bertha, she’s always trying to pick a fight, these teenage years of Juanita’s will be the death of us, but we have to understand her, let her go for a walk and calm down, when you’re young you’re rebellious and you like to argue.

I’d sit there, glued to my chair, wishing I could take out my watch and freeze them, and as soon as I had the chance, I’d creep up to my room, grab a book, and start reading fervently, as if those signs were magic words that could take me out of that place and carry me far away, forever.

When I turned fifteen, Father and Mother decided to throw a party, and although I begged them not to, they insisted on inviting the family and a few friends. You wouldn’t believe they did it for me, Consul, obviously not; it was for them, to satisfy that ridiculous social fiction that obliges people to celebrate their children’s fifteenth birthdays. Juana had a study trip and couldn’t cancel it, so I was going to be on my own. As they wanted me to have friends of mine there, I asked Víctor, the guy from the block, because I refused to invite any of my classmates from school.

It was horrible, going with Mother to buy clothes for the party. In every shop she’d complain about the prices, tell off the assistants, and ask for discounts, or ask if they didn’t have the same thing but cheaper. The assistants all looked at her with a mixture of mockery and commiseration. Until the day of the party came. I don’t know how to describe it to you, Consul. I spent the afternoon praying that seven o’clock would never come, that was the time the guests started to arrive, uncles and aunts and cousins of Mother’s, and a couple of colleagues from the bank, all with their gifts, ridiculous things, a plastic photo frame, an Avianca Airlines toiletry bag, two pairs of socks, a spectacle case, a box of handkerchiefs with strange initials, a tie with the word Carvajal at the bottom, things they must have been given for Christmas or birthdays and that they were getting rid of, until Víctor arrived with his father and gave me two gifts. The first was a pair of goalkeeper’s gloves and some kneepads, and the second was a box of books. Inside there was a note that said:

For the young reader of the neighborhood on his fifteenth birthday. A dozen novels. With pride,

P and C

Mother looked at it scornfully and said, how stupid of me, it was such a big box, I thought it was something good, and Father, who thanked the neighbors, looked and said, hmm, funny, they must be clearing shelves! but anyway, you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, we can keep these for other birthdays, you always have to look on the bright side, isn’t that right, Manuelito? and I said, no, Dad, these books are mine, and he said, having already had a few drinks, all right, keep them if you want, son, but you’re not going to turn into one of those long-haired intellectuals, are you?

I still remember the titles.

Four of the twelve were a single novel, The Alexandria Quartet, by Lawrence Durrell; The Time of the Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa; All Fires the Fire by Julio Cortázar; and Aura by Carlos Fuentes; the rest was Colombian literature: Big Mama’s Funeral, Que viva la música!, La nieve del Almirante, Sin remedio, and El desbarrancadero.

Víctor helped me get through that horrible party, in which, for the first time, I drank soda laced with Cordillera rum, the cheapest there was in the supermarket. I had to make an effort to tolerate the tide of relatives and friends, who were all there out of obligation. It wasn’t hard to catch them exchanging mocking glances. Father’s colleagues from the bank made faces when they tasted the rum, looked scornfully at the glasses, and held back their laughter, as if saying, what is this concoction we’re being given by this nobody at his son’s birthday party? The worst of it was seeing Father go up to them and say, with a stupid smile, is everything all right? how about a toast, and the two guys would raise their glasses, hugging him and giving him the finger behind his back with the other hand. Mother’s female cousins, who only drank soda, fingered the cheap fabric of the curtains or passed their hands over the shiny covers of the furniture and looked at each other, trying hard to contain their laughter.

Everyone at the party was making fun of Father and Mother, but they didn’t realize, on the contrary, they kept proposing ridiculous toasts, requesting silence to make speeches in which they congratulated their son and thanked the guests, and Father even said, absurdly, that he “felt honored” by the presence of his work colleagues, who by now were laughing at him quite openly, to his face, but he didn’t get the message and continued with his pathetic farce, he and Mother, both thinking themselves great hosts, serving a horrible sweet wine with the food that made everybody laugh.

Watching that unbearable spectacle, I felt as if a monster had gotten into my stomach and was tearing it to shreds; I was tempted to side with the guests and make jokes, but how could I? An hour later, Father was completely drunk, demanding friendly hugs from his colleagues, who continued making ever more unpleasant jokes at which he laughed uproariously, anyway, Consul, I’m sorry to go into such detail about that night, I don’t know why I remember it so clearly now.

Juana wasn’t there, as I already said.

Around that time she started spending more and more time away.

Sometimes she’d get back very late, in the early hours of the morning, and come to my room. She’d take off her clothes, which smelled of cigarettes, alcohol, and sweet things, put on one of my T-shirts, grab me, and whisper in my ear: embrace me with all your might, you’re the only person I love in this damned world, and I’d embrace her and she’d keep saying, you’re the only person I’d protect, the only one I’d give my life for, you don’t know what a pigsty it is out there, don’t go thinking it’s better than this; there too there are sharks and stagnant waters, frozen skies and clouds, but we’re going to fight and we’re going to take off for a country where nobody knows us and we can be happy, and then she’d start crying, because she was a little drunk.

I’d embrace her and say, I’m ready, when you say the word I’ll go blindly, holding your hand. Suddenly I’d realize that she was asleep, that I’d been whispering into her deaf ear for some time, and I wondered what worlds she had returned from, so fragile and yet so brave, so full of things she preferred not to talk about and I preferred not to know.

After a while I too would fall asleep, listening to her heart.

6

It was a call from the Foreign Ministry, specifically from the Department for Consular Affairs. I don’t remember the name of the assistant director or deputy director who told me about the case, but he did so in a tone that seemed a tad sardonic. I was to fly to Bangkok that same evening. The Thai police had reported to the Ministry the arrest of a Colombian national with a small consignment of opiate pills in a hotel in the city; since Thai law was somewhat draconian, he would need legal and logistical help, even though there wasn’t much hope for him. For this type of felony, thirty years was common, although the public prosecutor would ask for the death penalty, which made it a delicate matter.

“In other words,” the man said, “another fellow countryman who’s going to rot in a foreign cell, nothing to write home about, except that in this case it’s a bit more dramatic, what with snakes and huge mosquitoes and unconventional languages. We don’t have an embassy in Thailand, and normally it’d fall within the jurisdiction of Malaysia, but the post of consul is vacant there. Nobody in Kuala Lumpur can deal with it, so you see, that’s why we thought of you. We’ve already arranged travel expenses and tickets. I think they have a reservation for you for today, what time is it there?”

Almost all flights from Delhi leave after midnight. That’s why the Thai Airways one to Bangkok was a night flight.

I boarded at two in the morning and, three and a half hours later, the screeching of the plane’s wheels woke me. A policeman stamped my passport and welcomed me. I underwent the formalities for diplomats. Then I walked through the huge glass doors and was hit by the first wave of heat.

Thailand is the tropics of Asia.

A taxi. Crossing the city at dawn to the Hotel Oriental. A pretty postmodern roof deck over the river, a room on an upper floor with a view of the skyscrapers. Just time for a shower before I dashed to the Thai Foreign Ministry, where they were expecting me.

The head of protocol greeted me at the door of the building with a copy of the case file, we walked up a flight of stairs, and he showed me into the prosecutor’s office.

“Don’t go thinking this is Midnight Express, right?” the prosecutor said in fairly refined English.

He was a short man. His face seemed to occupy half his bodily mass, and had no doubt seen better days (the marks of his acne were even more pronounced than mine). An employee in a white uniform brought in a tray with tea and biscuits. Everyone was smiling. It was the land of smiles, even if, in his case, the smile concealed a certain nervousness.

“We’ve had all kinds of things here,” the prosecutor said. “Let me confess something to you.”

He took me over to the window and pointed to the center of the city.

“Do you think I like knowing that most of those who come to my country don’t do so because of its heritage or its history, but to sleep with our women? Oh, sure, they visit the Reclining Buddha and they go to Phuket and the temples of Ayutthaya, but first things first. They take an interest in the country only after they’ve had their way with one of our women, a woman who might be from my own family, anyway, I’m sorry if I strike you as crude or impolite, you’re a diplomat and I’m not, I’m only an officer of the law, but how would you feel if your country, known for its drugs, turned into a whorehouse? wouldn’t you try, in every way possible, to at least make sure the law was enforced? The law, the law,” he said, his mind wandering a little, “is the only thing still keeping us from going crazy.”

Before sitting down he looked me straight in the eyes and said:

“Let me tell you a joke. An Australian joke. To Australians, Thailand is a paradise, and I’m not surprised: young women, parties, casinos. They buy fake branded goods, they dirty our beaches, they live like kings, and they pay almost nothing. An Australian dies and goes to heaven. There, God says to him: you’ve been good, you’re entitled to have one wish granted. The man thinks it over for a while and says, I’d like to go back to Thailand! So God, being understanding, lets him go back to Thailand, only transformed into a Thai, ha ha, do you get it? The Australians laugh a lot at that.”

The prosecutor took out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. Not a single muscle in my face had moved in response to his joke, and he appreciated that.

“This whole situation, I’ll tell you right now, doesn’t help to make us especially understanding toward strangers, at least not me. Bangkwang Prison may seem to you somewhat… harsh, yes, that’s the word. There isn’t a prison in the world that isn’t, is there? Violence is the midwife of history. This kind of history, at least. They call Bangkwang the Bangkok Hilton. Even I’m shocked by it, but I never forget that its ‘guests’ aren’t there because they talked at a religious retreat or drove through a red light. Yesterday I lifted the body of a young woman who jumped from the fourteenth floor of a tower in Bangkok Central. Her body, if you don’t me saying this, looked quite horrible lying there on the asphalt surface of a parking lot, like a piece of nonfigurative art. She was nineteen years old and her stomach was stuffed full of pills. Those guys are murderers, shall I describe to you how her parents looked? I don’t have to, see for yourself.”

He held out the local paper and there they were, a couple my age, both with expressions of horror on their faces.

Then he said:

“Now then, let me show you your compatriot’s case.”

He opened a copy of the same folder I had and read out the facts:

Manuel Manrique, 27 years old, Colombian, passport number 96670209, visa number 31F77754WZ, entered Thailand by plane, coming from Dubai, on Emirates flight 1957, on… 22nd, checked in at the Regency Inn Hotel, a three-star establishment, room 301, Suan Plu Soi 6, Sathorn Road, Thungmahamek, Silom, Bangkok. He was arrested there on… 24th in possession of a bag containing four hundred ecstasy pills made in Burma.

The accused had been planning to leave the country on… 24th for Tokyo on Japan Airlines flight 2108. His contacts in the country are unknown, as is the way in which he obtained the drugs. Given the weight of evidence the prosecutor is asking for the death penalty or thirty years’ imprisonment if he pleads guilty.

I was surprised that he had planned to go to Tokyo, and I said to the prosecutor, why Tokyo?

“I don’t know,” he said, “and frankly, I don’t care. There are Mafias and drug addicts there too, and countrymen of mine and yours who live off that, and get up to all the dirty business they can. The Japanese are strange at first sight and you may think for a while that they’re different, but deep down they consume the same shit as everybody else. They just have more money, that’s all.”

“And where was he going after Tokyo?” I wanted to know.

“I don’t know, look in the attached documents, I think there’s a photocopy of the airline ticket.”

I leafed through and saw a copy of his passport. He had a visa to enter Japan. The ticket was a return ticket. His return flight to Colombia was from Bangkok via Dubai and São Paulo to Bogotá. Strange.

“When can I see him?”

The prosecutor stroked his beard, looked at his watch, and said: “Let me make a suggestion: go back to your hotel and sleep for a while, you look tired. Oh, these night flights… I don’t suppose you’ll find the heat and humidity too excessive, coming from Delhi. Nobody can explain how human beings with spines and brains ever thought to build a city in that place, with those temperatures. As I said, you should rest. Then treat yourself to a copious lunch and try our traditional cuisine. In the afternoon, cross the river and have a look at the temples. Go to an English bookstore, buy something, have a stroll around, then go back to your hotel at the end of the afternoon. Have a light dinner and go to sleep. I’ll come and pick you up at seven in the morning to take you to Bangkwang.”

I went back to the hotel and sat down at the bar. I hadn’t seen much of Bangkok, but had a sense of a slow, endless traffic jam, concrete bridges between the buildings, fast food stands, markets. The deafening din of the tuk-tuks (cousins to the rickshaws of Delhi). It wasn’t the first city in Asia I’d visited.

It was about eleven in the morning.

I took out the file and switched on my laptop. Opening my e-mail, I found a message from the Consular Department with Manuel Manrique’s record as an attachment: it was clean! No legal proceedings, no run-ins with the police. Nothing. A poor rookie who’d tried it once and fallen in the attempt. That wasn’t so unusual. After all, he was only twenty-seven years old. And something else that I’d seen in the file: the only stamps in his passport were from this journey. He had never been outside Colombia before. The passport had only recently been issued.

It was hot and the gin was good. I carried on reading and the surprises started.

According to the Consular Department file, Manrique had graduated in philosophy and letters from the National University and was studying for his doctorate. A philosopher? Now that was unusual. With what I had, I went on the Internet and started searching. I asked for a bite to eat, ravioli or the kind of meat snacks I’d seen on the street. Something that could be eaten with one hand. Various things appeared: his graduate thesis on Gilles Deleuze and three articles in the faculty review: one on Spinoza, another on post-Fordism, and a third on Chomsky. Hell. He was an educated guy, what the hell was he doing in Thailand? Why was he on his way to Tokyo instead of returning to Colombia with the pills? Who on earth was this Manuel Manrique?

The snack was good, with an aromatic sauce and a touch of sesame in oil. I tried to open some of the articles but the portals of the philosophy reviews weren’t very modern. You could only consult the index, the rest was in grey. I looked for him on Facebook, but there were 1,086 profiles with the name Manuel Manrique. Philosophy, though? I immediately wrote to my philosopher friend Gustavo Chirolla.

Do you know someone named Manuel Manrique who studied philosophy at the National University? He’s twenty-seven now. He may have finished three or four years ago. I’ll tell you why later.

For a while I looked at the Chao Phraya, its brown waves, the canoes and sampans taking the tourists across, the oily reflections of the sun. The river moved at a thick crawl. The water wasn’t clear. Something painful seemed to flow in it.

Much to my surprise, Gustavo’s answer arrived immediately, what time was it in Colombia? barely midnight of the day before.

Gustavo said:

Yes, I knew a Manuel Manrique. He was a postgraduate student of mine at the National four years ago. A shy boy, rather quiet. Very intelligent. He was very interested in literature and films, and in the image. That’s why he was studying Deleuze. I remember talking to him about the poetics of Rimbaud, and about Godard and Bergman. I was struck by how thin he was. He looked like something out of a painting by El Greco or a sculpture by Giacometti. With a gleam in his eyes, as if he was on the verge of asking something urgent and sensitive, but which he never managed to ask. He finished his postgraduate studies and I never saw him again. Let me make some inquiries and see if I can find out anything else. Have you met him? Is he in India? Let me know.

I wrote back:

I haven’t seen him yet, but he’s in prison in Bangkok. Pills. Don’t tell anyone, this is confidential. I’m trying to find out who he is, because I have to deal with the case. Ask what circles he moved in, who he mixed with. We have to handle this with caution. I don’t know if his family has been informed.

All the best.

I kept searching. What the hell had a philosopher come to Thailand for? At first glance, I couldn’t believe he might be guilty. I remembered the prosecutor’s advice, that I should look at temples. Nothing could have been farther from the way I felt, but I decided to go out anyway. Better not to be seen spending too much time in the bar, this was a business trip, and I had to stay for a few days. It wasn’t at all unlikely that the prosecutor was investigating me, even spying on my movements at that very moment, obsessed as he was with protecting his country from undesirable elements. I went out.

It was hot on the street and I hailed a taxi.

“Bangkok Central,” I said.

I stopped near a commercial area and started walking aimlessly. Before long, I came to a hotel, and I went in and headed for the bar. The light was pleasant there. I ordered a gin and tonic and got down to business. Deleuze. University of Vincennes. It rang a bell.

Years earlier, when I was a correspondent for the newspaper El Tiempo in Paris, the French writer Daniel Pennac, in an interview, had told me that he had been a pupil of Deleuze at the University of Vincennes and that in his classes, where political and aesthetic issues were hotly debated, Deleueze had decreed the death of the novel. But Pennac had in his bag, well hidden, the recently published translation of The Green House by Mario Vargas Llosa. If they had discovered him he would have been the laughingstock of the year, but he couldn’t wait to lock himself in the bathroom and carry on reading.

Later, still in Paris, it had fallen to me to write about the suicide of Deleuze. He had jumped from the balcony of his house onto Boulevard Neil. Another “nonfigurative” death, like that of the young girl the prosecutor had told me about. Deleuze was ill and the pain had become unbearable. If I remembered correctly, it was a respiratory illness, perhaps emphysema. I took out my laptop and searched my files. The article was there, dated November 1995. I reread it:

DEATH OF A PHILOSOPHER

Paris

In despair thanks to a progressive respiratory infection, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze dragged himself to the window of his house in the seventeenth arrondissement of Paris and threw himself out, bringing to an end seventy years of life and philosophy. The last journey of this nomad lasted barely a few seconds, crossing the air until he slammed into the sidewalk of Boulevard Neil and lay there in the cold, at eight in the evening. Passersby gathered around the body and minutes later an ambulance carried it to hospital, where he died. It is unlikely that those who tried desperately to save his life knew that in that bruised body lay one of the most unorthodox thinkers of the century, the great agitator of the University of Vincennes in the 1970s, author of such key works as Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, the thinker whom Michel Foucault called “the only philosophical mind in France.”

He was born in Paris on January 18, 1925, and his life was spent in classrooms and cafés. He entered the Sorbonne in 1944 and from 1948 worked as a teacher in various places, a high school in Orléans, another in Amiens, until he obtained a professorship in Lyons in 1964, and finally arrived in Paris in 1968, at the University of Vincennes, where he left his mark on a whole generation that experienced May ’68 alongside him and remained in a state of permanent revolt. Those who were his pupils remember his classes as veritable explosives launched against morality and tradition. The young women who began the year in patent leather shoes and tartan skirts ended it converted into agitators for free love, raising their voices against the establishment and cohabiting with Palestinian guerrillas, refugees from Cyprus, rebels from Guatemala, Nigeria, or Pakistan. Deleuze was the great time bomb of Vincennes, and his classes, which ended in the neighboring bars, were aimed straight at the heart of Conservative morality. The two crucial encounters of his life took place in 1962 and 1968: the first with Michel Foucault and the second with Félix Guattari, his collaborator on much of his work.

His work began in 1953 with Empiricism and Subjectivity, where he sketched his theory of the “multiple,” and continued in 1962 with Nietzsche and Philosophy, Kant’s Critical Philosophy in 1963, and Proust and Signs in 1964. One of the characteristics of Deleuze is his rereading of classic philosophers, so that he wrote about Bergson, Bacon, Spinoza, and Leibniz, but also about Kafka, Melville, and other writers (Essays Critical and Clinical). Deleuze’s vision is neither conformist nor explanatory: it is a flashlight that shows us something previously unseen, that tries to clarify a moment. It is difficult to grasp the work of Deleuze as a totality, since it encompasses cinema, literature, history, science, music, daily life, politics… Everything.

After the death of Michel Foucault from AIDS in 1984, that of Louis Althusser in 1990 after being confined to a psychiatric hospital for strangling his wife, and the suicide of the situationist Guy Debord, the death of Gilles Deleuze brings the Parisian school of philosophy to a tragic end, establishing a macabre statistic. The ideas nevertheless remain, resting on this definitive assertion by Michel Foucault: “One day, perhaps, the century will be Deleuzian.”

I read it twice.

I was surprised to realize how much I’d known about Deleuze at the time. I’d never been comfortable with abstract thought, and most likely I’d turned to Gustavo for help, but I can’t remember now. Nor can I explain how it was that it was published in the section Life Today, because the article isn’t exactly exciting from a journalistic point of view.

It was time to get moving, so I went back out on the street. Night was falling.

I walked aimlessly until I saw, on an upper floor, a sign that read “Bangkok Rare Books.” I went in without thinking. They had travel books from the beginning of the twentieth century and a literature section with editions of Graham Greene for $850. I passed my hand over the spines of The Power and the Glory, Heinemann, London, 1940, and The End of the Affair, Heinemann, London, 1951.

Except for the temples, I’d followed the prosecutor’s advice. My budget forbade me from buying any of this, or even sniffing it. But what a pleasure. I left old Graham Greene happily enough, and went down to look for a last drink before going back to the hotel.

7. INTER-NETA’S MONOLOGUES

Do you want to know, O mortal, what my most unmentionable desires are? Friend: those are precisely the ones you will never know, that’s why they are unmentionable, but I can tell you others, simple things, did you know that there are cities in this vast world through which, some days, I’d like to wander? I’m dying to do that! To be part of the crowd, even if only for a few hours or minutes, to lose myself in the streets and subway stations, attend their help centers, look for relief in their help lines for lonely people.

What are these cities?

I will talk to you about one among the many in my nocturnal constellation, because there are stars that shine with greater intensity. Let’s see, let’s see, what is that beautiful, coppery, not-quite-golden light on the right-hand side of my map? What’s the name of that star washed up close to the sea, at the beginning of a wide arm, like a baby’s inert limb?

It’s Bangkok.

The Asian capital of smiles. The capital of foot massage and other kinds, like the “body to body” (which may include a “happy ending,” just imagine), multiple relaxation, anti-depression, and anti-jet-lag massages. There are 36,874 registered massage parlors. The body is connected by nerve endings to the soles of the feet and from there you can control and remedy deficiencies and boost energy. A strange machine, the body! You can help it to be happy.

Bangkok resembles that old TV series, Fantasy Island: “Its possibilities are limited only by the imagination.” And so you ask yourself: imagine? imagine? But… What do you imagine? How do you imagine that place of pleasure and also of pain?

Bangkok is one of the most polluted cities in the world. Pedestrians breathe through masks that are sold at the cash registers of supermarkets. Some afternoons, the sky seems to be closer to our heads. The alleyways of Sampeng are difficult to walk down without a mask. Everything is on open display and the air is the same: fried crickets eaten with salt, monkeys’ brains floating in jars, stomachs of dried fish boiled in water (good for gastritis), sharks’ fins. Men drink snake’s blood to combat impotence (divine impotence, mother of drunk poets!). In Chatuchak Market live cobras sleep in baskets. Their blood can cost three dollars. If it’s a queen cobra it can reach a hundred, and if it’s an albino as much as five thousand. C’est plus cher, mon vieux! Once you’ve chosen your snake, the vendor takes it out of the basket, slashes its jugular with a knife, and collects the liquid in a glass. He mixes it with a spoonful of honey and a small glass of whiskey. The customer drinks it in one go.

Bangkok, in the Thai language — a tonal language with 48 vowel sounds and 41 consonants — means City of the Island, but it has a second name: City of the Angels (Krung Thep). Its traffic jams are famous throughout South-east Asia. In addition, it’s too hot and the waters of the Chao Phraya aren’t sufficient to cool it down. On the contrary: its dark color resembles that of stagnant lagoons and many of the canals that divide up the city are filled with black water. Is it conscience? Beneath every living city is a city of the dead, a necropolis, and in it its unconscious, its tormented opium dreams. No city can be realistic and maybe for that reason Bangkok moves in dreams. The proliferation of canals gives it another nickname: the Venice of the Orient. Here we need music, maybe something by Haydn.

Bangkok, the unique. Buddhism recommends a veiled indifference toward history, but the Thais are proud of never having been colonized. Neither the kingdom of Siam, with its former capital Ayutthaya, nor present-day Thailand ever fell into French, English, or Dutch hands. Unlike its neighbors. Laos, Cambodia, and the two Vietnams formed French Indochina. Burma, Malaysia, and Singapore were English. Maybe they smile because they feel proud, and it may be that all this is true (even though it sounds somewhat forced to me).

And now comes something marvelous, incredible! One of the strangest discoveries of humanity! A case that kept the eyes and attention of science focused on my beautiful kingdom of Thailand! By one of its lakes, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, an English doctor found a child with two heads. After careful observation he discovered that it wasn’t one, but two, two children with a single body. From them, that strange genetic anomaly took its name: Siamese twins.

With their oval eyes, dark skin, and low stature, the Thais are, in fact, very smiley. “Welcome to the land of smiles,” you read at the airport. The king is considered a god and his subjects lie down on the ground before him (they don’t kneel). The Royal Palace of Sanam Luang, with its brightly colored pagodas and stupas, is beautiful, as is the imposing 150-foot-long, gold-plated Reclining Buddha. He’s a smiling Buddha. Strange to see millions of people worshiping someone who smiles.

Bangkok, capital of paid sex in all its forms, even the most despicable or circus-like. Sex in all its cruelty and misery. The district of Patpong is the brothel of the European middle classes. Here, a modest waiter from Berlin or Madrid becomes The Mambo King! For very little (coming from his paradise of the euro) he can buy himself a wife-lover-masseuse-slave who knows the Kama Sutra back to front, who can cook and agrees to play the game, who kisses him on the mouth and says, darling, I’ve missed you, will you take me with you next time? The fiction of love (but isn’t love always a fiction? Oh, Mr. Ambrossía, don’t read this). The European male looks for sexual tourism in Thailand, Oriental punctiliousness, while the European woman goes to the Caribbean, to Cuba and Jamaica (some to Colombia), where she finds the anthropomorphic intensity of the black man without having to go to Africa, which is less amusing than the Caribbean and has malaria.

But attention, future customers! The Thai sex industry involves twenty-five percent of the women between fifteen and forty, and there are boys too. It’s the paradise of novices and virgins, but can lead to unpleasant surprises: gonorrhea, hepatitis, herpes, AIDS. Many of the young girls (even virgins) are heroin addicts. They inject themselves in the knuckles or in the groin so that the marks can’t be seen.

Smokers of heroin are called moo, which means pig, because when they smoke it they grunt. Those who use syringes are pei, in other words, ducks, “because they live in stagnant water.” The white man is farang, a word that has traveled through several continents, all in the southern part of the world, and which basically, in its origin, means “Frenchman,” and by extension “European” or even “Western Christian” (al-Faranj in Arabic, farangi in Farsi and Urdu and even in Amharic, the language of Ethiopia).

An old Thai chronicle gives the following description of the farang: “They are excessively tall, hairy, and dirty. They educate their children for a long time and devote their lives to accumulating wealth. Their women are tall, sturdy, and very beautiful. They do not grow rice.”

8

My passion for walls continued and one day, I don’t know as a result of what, I summoned up the courage to tell Juana. We went to the sewer and she stood there for a while in silence, a few paces ahead of me, facing the images. My islands and volcanoes glittered; my igneous snakes, my red crocodiles and dinosaurs, everything that I felt in my stomach and in my soul. She gazed at them in silence and I left her quietly meditating, not daring to breathe in order not to disturb her. After a while I put my hand on her arm and she turned.

She was weeping with joy.

You’re an artist, she said, moved. She gave me a hug, clinging to me with her whole body, and I could feel her trembling. Then she looked me in the eyes and said: from now on, I’m going to work so that you have what you need.

Juana did her classmates’ assignments for them, earned money for it, and began to bring me cans of spray paint. Montana Gold were the best, although Belton were cheap, and easier to get hold of. Ten thousand pesos per can, depending on the dollar exchange rate. Of course, Consul, the revaluation of the peso during those years helped me a lot and I never knew what it was due to, but anyway, I mustn’t be distracted from the story. I liked the Montana for the way they penetrated the wall. As if the concrete, the brick, or the stucco had been created out of that color. You have no idea how it felt, shaking the can and hearing the little ball, and then, when I had the image clear, pressing the valve and almost touching the color expelled by the spray.

I started to look at Keith Haring’s lonely and slightly hysterical dolls, and the designs of an Englishman named Banksy, a pioneer, someone who simply wanted to put on the street what he thought that street lacked, police officers kissing one another, windows in industrial walls with a view of the sea, playful rats, anyway, my work wasn’t like that, I dreamed of other things, not populating the city but giving a little reality to what I had inside me. As I’ve already said, mine was an art of escape. Everything in me tended toward flight. I wanted to leave, I hated my life.

My sister started studying sociology at the National University. She had been given a scholarship because of her average grade in the high school diploma and the SAT tests, and because she did well in the entrance exam. That was the only reason my parents let her study that subject, because for them, as for most Colombians, studying sociology was like studying to become a member of FARC, a kind of apprenticeship, especially at the National. We were deep into the government of Uribe and anyone who wasn’t a fascist and a patriot was suspect, all kinds of people were accused of being with the guerrillas, you just had to defend human rights or the Constitution to be considered a terrorist.

Every time Juana brought her university friends home Mother would say, are they guerrillas? are they all like that in your class? Father would barely greet them, he would put the newspaper in front of his face so as not to see them. Once he said to Juana, you see, princess, I can’t pay for you to go to a university like the Rosario or Los Andes or the Xavierian, but at least try to change to economics and in the meantime I’ll save, and then, when you graduate, I’ll pay for you to do a decent doctorate in Argentina, okay? It’s just that with these hippies you’re going to give your mother a heart attack, do it for her sake. He told her he was going to ask for a loan to send her to Europe, or the United States. Once he went into debt to buy her an iPod and a new cell phone. He loved her but didn’t understand her.

From that time I remember another argument at the dinner table.

It was very violent, and left me breathless for several days. Mother said something about the pre-Independence period, known as the Foolish Fatherland, and Juana, who already felt stronger for being at the university, said, well, it can’t ever have been more foolish than this, we live in a country of fools right now, a really dangerous and corrupt country.

Father looked at Mother and felt obliged to respond. This country may be foolish now, he said, but it’s the safest and the best we’ve had in all the time I can remember, with more security and peace and with more well-being. At least since I was born and since the two of you were born.

The best? Juana retorted, oh, Daddy, what are you, one of those snakes in Congress? it’s a horrible time! A Mafioso president, an army that murders and tortures, half the Congress in jail for complicity with the paramilitaries, more displaced people than Liberia or Zaire, millions of acres stolen at gunpoint, shall I go on? This country maintains itself on massacres and mass graves. You dig in the ground and you find bones. What can be more foolish than this brainless and insane little republic?

Of course, my parents jumped on her, gesticulating like wild animals, is that what they teach you at university? to insult authority and order? what side are the professors who say these things to you on? who’s giving you these analyses of what’s happening in the country? do the rector and the Ministry of Education know you’re being taught this? do the professors go around in uniforms and boots? how many have warrants out against them for capture and extradition? do they sit down with weapons on their desks? do they demand ransoms from the cafeteria or the Plaza del Che? do they give their classes with Venezuelan or Cuban accents? or in Russian? or directly in Arabic? Show some respect to our president, young lady, who’s the first Colombian to get up and go to work! do you hear? when you’re relaxing from your evenings out or from reading anti-Colombian texts with those aspiring terrorists you go around with, or when you’re fast asleep, he’s already in his office, studying and making decisions, giving orders and analyzing what’s best for this country, and I tell you one thing: you may not like it but the reason you can sleep easily and continue going to study in that nest of idlers is because he’s there, watching over your sleep, and not only you but forty-five million Colombians, do you hear me, young lady?

Oh, yes? watching over my sleep? said Juana, you’re kidding, and does he watch over the sleep of the murdered trade unionists, does he watch over the sleep of the negro leader in Chocó who was shot by those who helped his campaign? does he watch over the four million displaced persons? or the anonymous corpses in the mass graves this damned country has so many of? No, Daddy, don’t be taken in. The only ones who can sleep easily here are the paramilitaries, and not just sleep: they can continue killing trade unionists and governors, mayors and left-wing students, young unemployed people and drug addicts; they can continue making money and making deals with the State to steal its money; they can continue terrorizing the peasants, taking their lands away from them just by accusing them of being guerrillas, Daddy… The paramilitaries are the only ones who can sleep easily in this country! Not the decent people, not the humble people who, ridiculous as it seems, keep supporting the president out of ignorance or because they’ve been bought off with subsidies, the State money he gives away as if it’s a gift! Because never before has so much been stolen, never before have the paramilitaries been able to speak in Congress, forcing the congressmen to listen to them, have you already forgotten that? do you remember how the security service threw out a representative of the victims who was raising a banner? don’t you remember? well, I do, that happened in this respectable country, the representative of the victims kicked out so that the murderers could speak! what kind of democracy is that? what do you call a government that allows that, eh? The reason I can sleep easily, Daddy, and who knows for how much longer, is because, thank God, there are also decent people in Congress, like Senator Petro, who put their lives on the line to make the country open its eyes.

Father restrained himself from banging his fist on the table or throwing his glass at the wall and said, oh, Juanita, better keep quiet, okay? you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re just repeating what the terrorists at the National teach you, but that’s because you’re very young and you don’t know where everyone comes from, that’s why you don’t know that senator’s a Communist and used to be a guerrilla, a terrorist! he has blood on his hands so he can’t come along now and give lessons to anybody. The president himself has already said that, did you know that? and Juana, who was a student leader in her year, said, Daddy, the M-19 wasn’t communist, because being a Communist, at least in this world, means adhering to the thoughts of Marx or Lenin or even Mao, and the M-19 wasn’t like that, it was a Bolivarian, Latin American socialism, and in any case being a Communist or having been a Communist isn’t a crime, as far as I know, where did you get that from? On the other hand, being a paramilitary, supporting the massacres of peasants and the parapoliticians in Congress is being a decent person, who loves progress, his country, and the Virgin Mary, is that right? That’s the problem, Daddy: everything here is back to front, but if anyone says that the top paramilitary leader is the president, people scream and cross themselves.

No, young lady, Father retorted, if that were true they wouldn’t have been extradited, they wouldn’t be in gringo prisons paying for what they did, how do your teachers at the National explain that? and she said, everyone knows they were sent there to shut their mouths, to stop them accusing him, him and his buddies, basically he betrayed them, because the characteristic of true Mafia bosses, and this is a well-known fact, is the ability to get rid of those who helped them rise to the top, haven’t you seen The Godfather, Daddy? you should watch it again, it’s obvious you didn’t understand it. In Colombia The Godfather is an item on the local news.

They argued and argued, screaming at each other.

Mother kept quiet, watching them angrily. I was analyzing the stains on the ceiling or the tip of my shoe.

You see, Consul, how hellish the days and nights were in that horrendous lunatic asylum.

Apart from books, my sister and I loved the cinema. We dreamed about movies. We’d see them and then go smoke a joint in the park, next to my sewer and my drawings. Or we’d go up on the roof of the house and there we’d comment on them, relive them, bring them into our secret life. The most important thing for us, of course, was auteur cinema: Wong Kar-wai, Fellini, Scorsese, Tarantino, George Cukor, Cassavetes, Kurosawa, Mike Nichols, Tarkovsky. But sometimes, weirdly, the movies that contributed most to our games were the commercial ones, the ones from Hollywood. I’d imagine I was Edward Norton and she was Helen Hunt, for example, or we’d choose characters from other movies. She liked Sabrina, a remake they did with Harrison Ford of a film by Billy Wilder, and I liked Tom Hanks in Charlie Wilson’s War, in which Juana chose to be the character played by Julia Roberts, as long as she could change it and not be a right-wing millionairess but an activist, the leader of an NGO, but I said to her, Juana, if you change it you throw away the story, better to choose another character, but she’d insist, what we have to do is change the bad things, so that the movies are better, and I’d say to her, why are you so radical? not everyone can be good, for there to be goodies there also have to be baddies, and she’d answer, that’s silly, I don’t have to be bad if I don’t want to.

One of our idols was Wong Kar-wai.

In his films we found the sense of abandonment, the terrible need for affection, that was so much ours, and he made us dream of other worlds: Asia! Hong Kong! We knew those cities existed on maps, but when we watched Wong Kar-wai we realized that people like us lived in them: lonely people in phantom cities, fragile people on avenues and in cafés, with an imperious need to invent reasons to carry on and the feeling that they’d lost even before they started, that there was something terribly wrong from the start, anyway, all the things you can see in In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express, 2046, and even My Blueberry Nights; we saw them at the film society and the others we rented or downloaded from the Internet, and it was amazing, a recognition and a pleasure in that recognition that was beyond us, but he wasn’t the only one, we also loved the movies of Cassavetes, Opening Night and Shadows and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, where the characters were even more desperate, and when we saw them we understood that only in the world of art could our lives be transformed into something beautiful, an enormous contradiction, Consul, but that’s how it is: that great frustration we felt could generate something durable, we’d understood that ever since we were very young and that’s why we believed that, deep down, our lives had something of value, provided we could stay together.

Seeing the films of Cassavetes we felt that other people, in the 1970s, had lived through similar things, and as they were New Yorkers they went to theaters and to empty bars, like those in Hopper, where people drink whiskey without ice or soda, late at night, and there are actors, and depressed dramatists, alcoholics, and so, from movie to movie, we went further into that world, and also in Martin Scorsese’s movies about New York, from Mean Streets to Casino, characters who weren’t completely well-adjusted, who had a desire to escape and a great fragility, the uncertainty of having been wounded very early in the ring, of coming out almost mutilated, hiding a blow or a cut that makes us feel ashamed and wretched, as Sartre wrote, that’s how life appeared to us, and when later I read Huis Clos I understood perfectly what it was saying, as if a missing piece, a piece I had longed for, had become part of my cells, a fierce understanding of the ideas, the certainty that something is true, and that’s why one of his phrases echoed for years in my brain, “Hell is other people,” you can’t arrive at such concision without having felt and lived what I did in those years, Consul, I can assure you.

The roof of the house was one of the places where we felt free. Watching the planes cross the sky made us nervous because we knew that one day we too would leave, what kinds of things happened up there, inside those little moving lights, what questions were those who were traveling in them asking themselves? where were they going? We would invent stories for the passengers: one who’s going to study a long way away, who’s just wiped away his tears because his girlfriend, at the last moment, told him that in spite of their passionate farewell she didn’t think she’d wait for him, a poor boy who was thinking, as in the poem by Neruda, how threatening the names of the months are, and suddenly Juana would interrupt me, listen, Manuel, do you think a lot about sex? have you lost your virginity? and I’d say, come on, Juana, who am I going to lose my virginity with if I don’t have any girlfriends, and she’d say, okay, I’m going to find you a really pretty girl who’ll guide you, or do you also like guys, eh? I’d like that even better, a gay brother, we could share boyfriends! but I said, I don’t think so, at least not for now, I’ll let you know if there’s any change.

9

The next day, the prosecutor arrived punctually at seven in the morning, in a brand-new black Toyota Crown with smoked windows. Drizzle was falling, and it was hot. We left the center slowly, negotiating a noisy wall of cars, tuk-tuks, bicycles, and buses. Asian cities are always like that, colorful and chaotic: signs above the streets occupying the visual space, banners on both sides of the avenues. At that hour the smell was different: exhaust fumes, overheated tires, fried spicy meat, boiled coconut. Each time we stopped at a traffic light, the vendors came to the window to wave their offerings: fake watches, bags of cardamom, Montblanc pens for ten dollars, leather jackets by Armani or some other brand name.

The traffic was heavy, but it flowed.

“It used to be much worse,” the prosecutor said. “Ten years ago there was a jam that lasted for eleven days. We had to lift the cars out by helicopter. We built overpasses and this is what came after. As you can see, the bottle is filling up again and they’ll have to do something. If we didn’t have so many of the underclass coming to the city, things would be better.”

The air-conditioning was going full blast. One of the vents, the one above my leg, was dripping. At last we got onto a fast-moving lane and, with the siren on, we were able to advance. The city was left behind, and the landscape filled with poor farmhouses, plane trees, paddy fields, and palms. From time to time, we’d see an artificial lake with lotus flowers. After a while, the driver turned onto a main road that seemed to move away from the country and go back to the city, until we hit a suburb, and finally came to a wall of concrete and stone. On top, it had barbed wire and watchtowers.

This was Bangkwang Prison.

“There’s an old legend,” the prosecutor said. “Before, when all this area was wilder, chimpanzees used to come and climb the walls. They liked to walk between the security cables and get into the watchtowers. Some even went down into the cells. The guards discovered it was fun to shoot them, and the prisoners would keep them and eat them. They were full of protein. Then they stopped coming. Now everybody misses them, and they say the ghosts of the chimpanzees run about the roofs. We’re a superstitious country. How about yours? I’ve seen that you don’t have the death penalty, but that there are more executions than there are here, how can that be? You’ll have to explain it to me.”

Fortunately the questions were rhetorical, since he continued speaking, gesticulating, explaining.

It was already nearly nine and the thermometer was still rising. The fact is, I would have given my life for an iced gin (even at that hour). The prosecutor parked to one side of the gate, and, after saluting the guards, we went up to the offices. There he introduced me to the warden, a man with a face full of scars and warts who shook my hand without looking at me.

He knows why I’m here, I thought, he must have received hundreds of diplomats asking for the same thing.

He made no attempt to be polite, and deep down I was pleased. If anything annoyed me about my job, it was unnecessary smiles and feigned interest. Then he led us along a corridor without air conditioning, from where you could already hear the sounds of the prisoners. Heat rose in a kind of thick steam.

“Please sit here,” he said when we came to a kind of classroom. “We’ll bring him.”

I waited, beating my fingers on a table perforated by termites. Then came the sound of a barred door opening, the jangling of keys.

I saw him come in, dragging his feet, his ankles chained together. It was true that he was thin. Gustavo had given a good description: he was indeed like a figure out of El Greco.

As he approached, I noticed he was very nervous, although he said nothing until the guard let go of his arm. We introduced ourselves, and he looked at me with surprise.

“The writer?”

I nodded, feeling rather uncomfortable.

“I haven’t read your books,” he said, “but let me say something that may surprise you. This isn’t going to be a crime story, it’s going to be a love story. I’ll explain why later.”

He seemed to sway, looked around nervously, and continued:

“They told me I have to plead guilty, or they’ll give me the death penalty, is that right? When am I going to get out of here? You have come to get me out, haven’t you?”

I nodded. Then I looked at the prosecutor.

“Leave us alone, please.”

“I don’t understand your language,” he replied irritably. “Nobody here understands it, it’s the same as being alone.”

“His feet are chained, he’s not going anywhere.”

“Good for him,” he said. “You have ten minutes.”

He lit a cigarette and walked reluctantly to the end of the cellblock. Then he made a noise — I don’t know if it was a word, I wasn’t listening — and the others too moved away.

The prisoner looked at me insistently. “Have you come to get me out? Will I leave here with you?”

“I wish that were possible,” I said. “The charge against you is a serious one. They’re going to ask for the death penalty, and there’s not much you can do, except plead guilty. If you do that, they’ll give you thirty years and then you can apply for a pardon or the king’s mercy. That can take eight or nine years. This afternoon I’m going to hire the best lawyer in Bangkok, but I know from the prosecutor that acquittal is impossible. There’s a bag of pills as evidence. I’m going to consult with Bogotá so that the Ministry can ask officially for your sentence to be served in Colombia, but that takes time, and there’s nothing we can do if it’s a death sentence. Do you understand? Once it’s been pronounced it can be carried out at any moment. The lawyer and the prisoner are informed two hours in advance.”

“Are you telling me to plead guilty?” he said, shaking his head, clearly upset. “The first time I saw that damned bag of pills was when the police showed up. I don’t know where it came from. I was doing something else, Consul, not that.”

“I believe you, but that’s not the problem. We’re going to investigate to see if we can find out what happened. It may be they’ll catch someone. In any case, until the day of the hearing there’s nothing to be done.”

Manuel looked at me without blinking and I asked him a question. The dumbest and saddest of questions.

“Are they treating you well?”

He didn’t answer in words. His face clouded over and his eyes filled with tears.

“Do you want me to call someone in Colombia?” I said.

He moved his head, saying, no, no… A scared, staccato no. I put a hand on his forearm and said, what about your family?

“I don’t have anyone,” he said. “It’s best if everything stays here.”

His fear seemed to go back a long way, even before Bangkwang and the bag of pills. A fear that had become part of his bloodstream, his cells. In his expression, I recognized what Gustavo had said: it was as if he had questions dammed up inside him and was afraid to bring them out into the light, to give them reality.

“I’m a friend of Gustavo Chirolla,” I said.

A light shone deep inside. He took a deep breath and said, “Old Tavo! Such a good teacher. A pity I didn’t often dare talk to him.”

Our time was almost up, and the prosecutor was starting to get impatient. He gave me a sign, a click of the fingers.

“I’ll be staying here and going over the case with the lawyer,” I said to Manuel. “It’s going to be all right. I’ll be back in three days. You can send for me if anything happens. I’ll be here for you.”

He sank back into himself, like an animal retreating to the far end of its cave. The same curt expression as at the beginning. He moved a few steps forward and turned, without saying anything. I waved goodbye, but the prosecutor came between us and pushed me outside.

“Let’s go,” he said, “I have to be in my office by noon.”

Back at the hotel, I sat down to put my ideas in order. He’s innocent, there’s no doubt about it. What could he have meant by those words of his? “Let me say something that may surprise you. This isn’t going to be a crime story, it’s going to be a love story. I’ll explain why later.”

A love story? What kind of love can there be in all this?

I sent the Consular Department an e-mail, saying that I needed funds to hire a lawyer because of the complexity of the situation. I also asked for legal advice and precedents. It was just after noon. I left my jacket and tie on the chair in my room, put on something more comfortable, and went out again.

Hotel Regency Inn, Room 301. Suan Plu Soi 6, Sathorn Road, Thungmahamek, Silom.

It was a fairly ordinary street. If you replaced the signs in the Thai language with ones in Spanish, it could have been in Bogotá, Lima, or Mexico City. A car missing a wheel at the side of the street. A bakery. On the corner, a pharmacy with a wooden counter painted blue. A wall with old faded signs and posters. Maybe advertising, maybe electoral propaganda.

The hotel was at number six, an old building, dirty, but with pretentions. The Regency Inn sign hung from the second floor, although the “n” in “Regency” had fallen off. Its three-star status seemed a bit excessive, although I hadn’t yet gone in. I preferred to wait a while. Wait for what? I had no idea, but I killed time in the bakery. I walked past twice, looking furtively inside. In the end I made up my mind and went in. A dark, damp lobby. Carpets with cigarette burns. A smell of cigarette butts and stale air.

“Welcome, sir, how can I help you?” said a young man with rotten teeth, with MP3 earbuds in his ears.

I looked at him for a moment without knowing what to say.

“I’d like to see the rooms, how much does a night cost?”

“Twenty-five dollars, wait, I’ll give you a key,” he said.

The smell of his decaying teeth knocked me out. I looked at the board where the keys were, 301 was free.

“I’d like 301.”

“Oh, that one? Very well, take it, sir. Don’t forget to hand it in before you go out. How many nights would that be?”

Already on my way to the elevator, I said, without looking at him: I’d like to see it first, then we’ll see.

It was the room where they had arrested Manuel Manrique. I didn’t think I’d find anything, I just wanted to take a look. Room 301 was the last room in a corridor that ended in a window, looking out on a rough, damp courtyard, with plants that clung to the wall and climbed the pipes.

I opened the door, thinking that the police must have recorded everything many times. I was greeted by the same damp smell as in the lobby, but more concentrated. The air conditioner started up, filling the space with the gas from its condenser. That happens with old machines. The bed was small but decent, and next to it was a wardrobe of laminated wood. The carpet seemed in a better state than the one on the stairs. The window was at the same level as a curved overpass. At night, the lights of the cars must filter in through the blinds.

I imagined Manuel sitting on that bed, the room receiving the intermittent flashing of the car lights projected on the wall. Maybe eating a chicken sandwich and a Diet Coke. The image of someone who wants something to happen, or who is protecting himself from something lying in wait for him. The smell of the room seemed to suggest: here he suffered in silence, in solitude. It struck me that in the middle of the night a place like that must have been populated by demons, at that cold hour when the birds call sadly to the sun. How long did Manuel spend here? I’d have to ask him. There were yellowish tiles on the bathroom floor. A mosquito was fluttering around the shower curtain, which was blackened and broken. I put my head in, but there was nothing. A mirror. The washbowl faucet was dripping.

I went back to the corridor, the elevator. I descended to the lobby. I handed back the key and went out on the street, realizing that I was sweating. It was an oppressive place, or maybe it was me, or the story. I walked to the intersection with an avenue, hailed a taxi, and went back to the hotel.

When I opened my e-mail, there was already a reply from Colombia: “Send budget to authorize funds. Write detailed report on the situation.”

I called the Mexican embassy to talk with the counselor there, Teresa Acosta. I’d been told she could help me, and sure enough, she gave me an appointment for that same afternoon.

The offices were in the Thai Way Tower, not very far from my hotel, an unusual granite and glass building in the business district, North Sathorn Road, the face of Asian capitalism, the most conspicuous, most strident face of modernity.

“We haven’t had any cases of prisoners,” Teresa said, “but I’ve known of many, especially Australians and Brits. The best option is for the defendant to plead guilty and beg the king for clemency. That’s what they’d interpret as a proper show of respect for their legal system. Diplomacy is important. Sometimes, you can arrange for the defendant to serve his sentence in his own country. The hard part is doing all that without having an embassy. I’ll be honest with you. They’ll listen, but they won’t pay you the same attention, because they aren’t obliged to.”

She gave me the telephone number of the lawyer. I called him from her office, and on Teresa’s recommendation, he agreed to see me the following day. In addition, Teresa offered to go with me, a gesture I greatly appreciated.

She was a friendly, attractive woman, who looked good for her age: about forty, or maybe slightly more. I liked her, she struck me as a generous person. I suggested we go down on the street and have a drink while I heard her advice on what to do. She accepted, and we went to a bar near her office.

She had been in Bangkok for three years, she was a career diplomat. The problems of her compatriots mostly revolved around robberies and the usual tricks played on tourists. Only once had there been a minor case involving possession of a small quantity of drugs, and it had resulted merely in provisional detention. That was how she knew the lawyer, who helped them with everything.

I told her Manuel’s story and she listened to me with a surprised expression.

“A young philosopher?” she said. “That’s the strangest thing I’ve ever heard! There have been cases of people accused of things in order to keep the police or even the press quiet and give breathing space to those who are really involved. It’s a delicate matter. You’ll have to handle it with kid gloves.”

We kept ordering gin and Cuba Libres until we felt pleasantly drunk and a tad hungry. She suggested we have dinner in a place typical of her neighborhood, Sukhumvit, which turned out to be a very lively area full of restaurants and bars, with tables out on the street and neon signs.

“Do you like fish?” she said as we sat down on the terrace of a place called Bo Lan. “Because if you do, you can try this, look.”

She pointed to the menu: red snapper in turmeric curry with coconut milk, a Renaissance dish that’s called geng guwa pla dtaeng in Thai. We ordered it, and as we drank our aperitifs I thought of the great Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, who died in the airport of this city as he was changing planes and who actually wrote a novel called The Birds of Bangkok. I mentioned it to Teresa.

“I know the book,” she said. “There’s an episode where Pepe Carvalho has dinner in a Chinese restaurant called the Shangri La, eats duck, and then goes to the Atami massage parlor, which if I’m not mistaken still exists. You can go there later, if you like. The women are supposed to be stunning.”

“It isn’t Vázquez Montalbán’s best novel,” I said. “There’s something very eighties Spain about it, the way it depicts Asia as a ridiculously exotic place. The characters talk like in Tintin: ‘Velly nice city, we visit?’”

The food was delicious, and we drank more alcohol, including the Mekong, a cocktail mentioned by Vázquez Montalbán (it was through reading him that I’d discovered the Singapore Sling and Lagavulin whisky). After the check, Teresa invited me to have one last drink on the terrace of her apartment.

“I’ll offer you a tour of Bangkok in one minute,” she said.

She lived on the top floor of a huge building, from which, sure enough, there was a 360-degree view of the city: the metallic purple lights of the skyscrapers, the black silhouette of the river, the congested roads in the distance, the luminous profile of a never-ending metropolis.

Her apartment was a pleasant deux pièces with antiques, designer objects, and an original José Luis Cuevas on the wall, Portrait of a Woman. We continued talking.

“My husband and I separated rather abruptly,” she said, “but there are people who get married at the point at which we parted. I loved him a lot. I still do.”

Her elder daughter was completing a doctorate in human rights and lived in Aguascalientes. The younger one was about to graduate in political science from the Sorbonne. She was a career civil servant but she liked literature and, of course, kept under lock and key a few poems of her own that she wouldn’t have shown anybody for anything in the world. She talked to me about Bonifaz Nuño, Octavio Paz, Gerardo Deniz. I told her I had read Gatuperio and she could hardly believe her eyes. “You know Deniz? You’re kidding! He’s hardly known outside Mexico!”

When a conversation turns to literature, there’s no end to it, so we refilled our glasses. I tried to sum up for her what I admired about Mexico. A sea of letters that comes and goes in the Gulf, that rocks and sways through the jungles of Chiapas and the deserts of Sonora, Ciudad Juárez and the north. Mexico was the country of Colombian writers. That struck her as amusing. Others say the opposite, that people go to Mexico to die.

“It’s the same thing,” I said, quite merry by now. “Where we live, we die, don’t we?”

She asked about Octavio Paz in Delhi. I told her that from a literary point of view India was Pazian or Octavian, I’m not sure of the word, Paztec? Octavian? Octopazian? We laughed.

The residence of the Mexican embassy is a tourist attraction, I told her, I was shown it by your colleague Conrado Tostado, the cultural attaché, the same person who gave me your telephone number, of course. It’s on Prithviraj Road. The nim tree is still there, where Paz married Marie José in 1964, a year before I was born, and she cried out, ’64? then we’re the same age, that’s something to be celebrated, before you go you have to try a tequila, and she took out a colored bottle, pulled the cork, and said, wait and see, this is really fantastic stuff from Mexico, and she showed me the label, José Cuervo, Special Family Reserve, it’s like brandy, better even, and I added: if we talk about the development of the human spirit, the most influential personalities of the twentieth century are Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff, the Bacardis, and José Cuervo, don’t you think it’s strange that there are no women? and she said, there is a Japanese woman, Banana Split! she cried, laughing drunkenly, letting drops fall from her mouth, but I said, that doesn’t count because it doesn’t have alcohol, and she said, then you just have to pour a little in, right? and what about Bloody Mary? and I said, we’re forgetting the most obvious, Margarita! and a very important lady, Veuve Clicquot! then she stood up and said, look, listen to this, but only one, I swear, and she put on José Alfredo Jiménez.

I remembered Fernando Vallejo’s words: “If Mexico were the center of the world, José Alfredo would be classical music.” That’s quite a salute, he was an intelligent man, Vallejo, all honor to him, and she put on “Ella” and raised the volume, and seeing that I was worried about the neighbors said, don’t worry, the Thais are even-tempered people, and anyway I don’t have people above me or on either side, just offices.

We listened to two more songs until I looked at my watch and saw, to my horror, that it was two in the morning. I’m sorry, Teresa, I have to go, what a wonderful evening, could you call me a taxi? And she said, you just have to ask the doorman, there’s a taxi stand opposite.

When I got to my hotel I found another message from Gustavo:

Hello, old man, I found out that Manuel lost touch with the philosophy people when he left university, but that a few weeks ago he was asking questions. His sister disappeared a few years ago and apparently he was investigating. I’m going to get hold of the telephone numbers of these people and ask them what he wanted, what they talked about. Would that help you? Not that such things are easy here. Keep me up-to-date.

I answered immediately:

Thanks, Tavo, and if you can find out who his sister was, what kind of people she had dealings with, and when she disappeared, all the better. Thanks, brother. Have a hug from me.

10. INTER-NETA’S MONOLOGUES

I divide myself and I am many, contradictory, wild, clandestine. Today I’m dedicating this space to a friend of mine so that he can tell his story, so that he can talk to you directly, dear bloggers, who is he? is he a projection of me? is he you?

Guess, read, invent.

I have a thousand nicknames, but the one I like most is Tongolele. That’s the one they gave me in the Splendor, a karaoke bar in Culiacán in the north of Mexico, where I went to sing once with a boyfriend I had. Or let’s say a friend with benefits, since he was married, not that that kind of thing bothers me. I sang “Ella,” by José Alfredo, and my friend whispered in my ear: you sing like Tongolele, and so that’s how I stayed. I hope you like it. I love it. I’ve seen that part of the public is like me and that’s why I’m going to talk to you quite openly: the name I was born with is horrible, decadent, demeaning: Wilson Amézquita. I had to put up with that horror, God forgive me, until I came of age, when they finally operated on me, as if it were a deformity or a tumor. I feel a knot in my stomach just saying it. Amézquita, that’s gross! I changed it to Jennifer Mor, which is so much more elegant and romantic, suggesting a woman sitting in a drawing room reading the classics, something like Racine’s Phaedra, while outside, in New York, it’s pouring rain and you hear the muffled sound of taxis hooting their horns. I mean, Wilson! I wouldn’t call a tennis ball Wilson! The name suggests a urinal with sawdust and flies in a chichi bar in Choachí. I’m a lady, I have delicate and beautiful things in my mind.

I changed sex in the Tarabaya Memorial clinic in Bangkok, at the age of twenty-one, after I’d recognized a great truth: I liked being with men, not with fags. Forgive me, I’m well-read and I know such words shouldn’t be used, but they told me I should talk as if I were in my own home. So if they bother you, I’m sorry. As I said, I had my operation in Bangkok. A long way away, but safe. A lot of people have sex changes there, they’re used to it and it always goes well. I read about it in a magazine and then made inquiries. My girlfriends told me I was crazy. Tongolele, you’ve gone crazy! You’ve really lost it! But I was sure. Scheherazade, who’s like a sister to me, was the only one who looked at it a bit scientifically and told me it wasn’t worth it, that it was an unnecessary risk. According to her, women have three pussies: one in the mouth, another in the vagina and the third behind, in the you know what, right? And so she said and still says: of those three I have two and I’m happy with that and I make my men happy, those who also like cock. For Scheherazade that’s enough, but not for me. I wanted real men, the kind who fuck but won’t let themselves be fucked. When I’d recovered from the operation, which takes time — but of course, Bangkok is wonderful! — I went to see a physical trainer, because now came the external transformation… I showed him a photograph of Pamela Anderson, the stunner I wanted to look like, and said: I need to be like that, what do I have to do? how much does it cost?

He didn’t say it was impossible, although he looked at me sadly. Couldn’t you have chosen an easier model? I said no, Pamela Anderson was the woman of my dreams: if I’d been a man, a man in my soul, it was a girl like her I’d have liked by my side. I’d have liked to find her every morning between the sheets, in the shower, look after her when she had a cold, or see her sitting on the toilet, taking her morning leak. That’s why I want to be like her. Not that it was such a stretch. What I mean, my friends, is that I was already a woman, men gave me the eye when I stood up, when I went out for a walk; I felt that look, the kind that lifts miniskirts, goes through panty material, and burrows away inside, like a termite but really nice, it’s great to be looked at like that, isn’t it, my tongolelos? But let me carry on with my story: with the photograph of Pamela I went to see the best plastic surgeon, a really nice Colombian, Tomás Zapata, who’s the one who beautifies the women who matter in this world, beginning with Amparito Grisales and Fanny Mikey, I’m talking about the body, not the soul, and not only in Colombia but also in Spain and Brazil, where the major leagues are, and I said, Tomasito, my dear friend, this is what there is and this is what we want to have. Then I took out a photograph of Pamela who was originally wearing a thong but who I’d stripped using Photoshop, since I needed to make things clear. Tomás grabbed it from me and said: we’re going to make you very similar, or rather the same, my darling, and the rest is up to you, with that grace and intelligence God gave you. Oh, I love that Tomás! Because as the classics say: there is no beauty without brains.

But anyway, I’ve been invited here to talk about aspects of my life and my relationship with Pamela, not to philosophize, so I’ll carry on: first came the silicon, the Botox, the nips and tucks, and then, when I’d recovered from it all, I started the physical work. Three hours a day in the gym. The tanning I do with P.A. products, which are the best, the acronym is like an amulet. I attend to everything, every detail, because the body is a painting. Let’s say, for those of you girls who are cultivated, like Rembrandt’s Night Watch. Every fold of the clothes is perfect. That’s how a girl should be if the aim is to be the most beautiful woman in the world, or at least in my world, let’s not be presumptuous. If you want to be a lady and not a floozy. Every tiny thing has to be perfect because otherwise the whole effect is ruined. This lovely hair I have, for example, is natural. You see what I look like today. The day after tomorrow, I’ll be thirty-five and nobody believes me. They all think I’m in my twenties. And some men even confuse me with the original, after a few drinks, but I always say to them: no, darling, I’m the other one, the number two, the original is unattainable! The other day a boyfriend of mine, to make me mad, said I was the poor man’s Pamela. How dumb can you get? If only he knew that I’ve won seven beauty contests in trans bars, at the Latin American level, and have been Miss Wet T-shirt Trans for 2007, 2008, and 2009. In 2010 it was stolen from me and given to the girlfriend of a drug trafficker, a filthy bitch who bribed the judges. When it’s a clean competition, I always win, I’m the most beautiful because I’m identical to Pam. I can imagine you must all be wondering if I know her. Well, I have a little bit of gossip for you: yes, we did see each other once. At a charity parade. She was in her dressing room and I was in mine, but I preferred not to say hello to her. I was scared. What if she’d said something rude to me? What if she’d looked at me anxiously? When it comes down to it, she and I are the two faces of one and the same person. That’s why I prefer not to know her and to continue dreaming. What could I do? I’d either keep quiet, or I could say simply: I always wanted to be you. But that, my darlings, is something you don’t say to anyone. Not even a goddess.

11

In those years I had just one friend, Consul, a friend from school who was quite eccentric, and lived a strange life. A quiet guy who spent his evenings reading. His name was Edgar Porras, but sometimes, to play around or to be provocative, he liked to call himself Edgar Allan Porras. As you might imagine, his favorite author was Poe, and he always carried a book by him in his coat, which was a kind of very theatrical olive green overcoat.

He lived in upper Santa Ana, the rich part, and his house was a palace with nine bedrooms and lots of floors, in the last row before the hills. He knew English and French because he’d lived in various countries, but almost never spoke them. He said he was only interested in languages for reading. I was impressed by his library, it made me feel small. I only knew the little English and French I’d learned at school, which wasn’t enough to read seriously. He on the other hand had, and had read, books in the original language by Céline, Malraux and Camus, Poe and Lovecraft, Salinger and Dylan Thomas, Roth and Bellow, and even authors I had barely heard of like David Foster Wallace, Kurt Vonnegut, John Cheever, and Thomas Pynchon.

I went to his house at weekends and sometimes slept over. The pretext was studying. My parents didn’t usually allow such things, but since he was from a rich family he impressed Father, who always ended up agreeing. Like the social climbers they were, they thought it was an achievement that their son was spending time with rich families, and Mother, who was addicted to “aspirational” soap operas, talked proudly about the Porras family at the florist’s. Of course Edgar and I never studied, being there was an excuse to do other things, because his family was always going out to dinners or cocktail parties, and the few times they were at home it was because they were throwing parties or dinners for lots of people, and since the house was very big we could be in his room and not hear a thing.

Señor Porras represented a French oil company, although I never quite understood what exactly his job was. A kind of diplomat in his own country. Edgar’s siblings were older, two brothers and a sister. They were almost never at home, or when they were they almost never left their rooms, I already told you it was a strange house. There was no obligation to be together for meals, so everyone went to the kitchen, served themselves, and went to their rooms to eat as they chatted on Facebook, listened to music, or hung out with other friends. The kitchen was a little restaurant with a bit of everything. The sister’s name was Gladys and she was older than Juana.

As well as being crazy about books, Edgar was also sex-mad and once told me that he knew how to spy on Gladys when she was having a bath. One Sunday he insisted that we go look at her. The bathroom had a high window that looked into a lavatory. If you climbed on the toilet you could see the shower cubicle. I said no but he insisted, saying she was really something, that she had huge tits and a fabulous ass. I found it strange that he should talk like that about his sister, and I told him that, but for him it was normal. Life is life, he would say, you have to take things as they come. He confessed to me that he’d steal her used panties and thongs, smell them, and jerk off. Finally we went to look at her, and to our surprise, she was with a guy and they were fucking like crazy. Standing with her back to him, her hands clutching the faucets, lifting her ass, and then on her knees sucking his cock, which was incredible. Edgar wanted to make a video and ran to his room for his BlackBerry, I’m going to put it on YouTube! he said. I preferred not to look, thinking of my sister.

In that family everything was strange, out of proportion, but I liked him, plus he was very generous. He passed on to me half the things they brought him back from their travels. The only time I ever had a Lacoste T-shirt was thanks to him, also a pair of Adidas and a Nike T-shirt. At that age, things like that are important. Later you forget, but at the age of seventeen they mark you.

His eldest brother, Carlos, would give us matchboxes filled with marijuana and say: take it nice and slowly, don’t overdo it, kids, okay? and if they catch you don’t say a word, if I saw you I’ll say I don’t remember. His father locked the bar, but Edgar knew how to open it by removing a wooden panel, so on Saturdays we’d steal bottles of wine or whiskey, whatever we could find, and take them with us to the parks in Santa Ana and Santa Bárbara, where we’d read poetry, especially Barba Jacob and León de Greiff, and of course, poems by Poe in English that Edgar knew by heart, and would yell at the quarries and the hills, cursing them, challenging Bogotá like a Colombian Rastignac.

Sometimes he’d read me things he’d written himself, and that surprised me. I’d never before met anybody who wanted to be a writer, an idea my father would have thought sinister. Edgar used to say that being a writer was the greatest thing a human being could aspire to. As far as he was concerned, anything in book form was sacred.

He had a text about vocation that he read to me every now and again and which I remember word for word, I don’t know who he copied it from or if it was actually his, but it stayed with me for a long time. It more or less went like this:

You realize you’re a writer when the things that swirl or echo in your head won’t let you concentrate on anything else: neither reading nor watching a movie nor listening to what other people are saying, not even your teacher or your best friend. When your girlfriend yells: you’re not listening to me! and slams the door and takes off, and you exclaim, what a relief, and keep thinking about your things. It’s a relief when our loved ones leave us alone. If what’s happening inside your head is more powerful than what’s outside and can be translated into sentences, you’re a writer. If you don’t write, then you should think about it, it might suit you. If you are a writer, the worst thing is not to write. The bad news, given the times we live in, is that you can also tell yourself you’re really fucked.

I, on the other hand, never told him I painted graffiti. That was a secret world, the one closest to my heart, and I could only share it with Juana. Several times he asked me, what about you, man, don’t you write? how can you not write if you like novels so much? not even poetry? and I’d say, I prefer reading, I’m very passive or very cerebral, I like to contemplate the world from a distance, to see without being seen, it’s an idea of the sublime I read about later, Consul, the sublime as the terrible seen from a safe place, that was the kind of thing I said to Edgar when, guessing that I had secrets, he started asking questions.

When we heard that David Foster Wallace had committed suicide, Edgar dressed all in black and invited me over to his house. He looked pale. We stole a bottle of Martini from his father’s bar, along with four packs of salt and vinegar potato chips imported from England, a jar of high-quality tuna, and a Dutch cheese, and went to Usaquén Cemetery to throw a dinner in his honor. Edgar took with him a couple of original editions. I had managed to get hold of Spanish versions of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which according to Edgar were amazing in the original. As I already said, I had a complex about the fact that I didn’t know English. Or rather: that I didn’t speak it as naturally and resonantly as the people from bilingual schools. I could say everything, using few words, but reading literature was frustrating. On every line I’d find things that I understood well enough from the context, but that left me with the feeling I was missing the most important part.

To get into the cemetery you had to go around the wall and along a side passage until you came to a garage door that was always kept shut. It was a barred door and you could climb over it and jump down on the other side. That’s what we did.

Edgar liked the upper part of the cemetery, toward the hills, adjacent to the parking lot of a supermarket, because there was a series of graves without stones, with names written by hand on fresh cement. One of them said: “My son.” There we sat down and opened the bag of food. We ate and drank toasts to the soul of David Foster Wallace, inviting him to this poor, simple cemetery in a poor, simple country in one of the poorest and simplest regions of the world. We kept passing each other the bottle of Martini until we were drunk. We staggered around, sang, cried out the titles of Wallace’s books, and, incredibly, I felt free, so free it made me dizzy. I would have been capable of anything, however absurd or impossible. I could have run to the top of the hill and left that city forever.

To make things more exciting, Edgar rolled a joint and we took great puffs at it, and when we finished it we read out loud, and at that moment a gust of wind knocked over our plastic cups and Edgar cried, he’s here! it’s Wallace! We welcomed him with a bow and a few more drinks.

My head was spinning and I started throwing up, which forced me to move away; being young, that kind of thing embarrassed me. He was rich, free, brought up to do as he pleased, while I concealed a little hell in my house. I was shy. When he appeared, I told him I’d gone to take a leak and had felt the need to be alone. He said, sure, brother, I understand, but we finished the bottle and the joint, and we went home.

His brothers and sister were in their respective rooms, but they gave us more grass and half a bottle of aguardiente, so we started consuming all that while listening to “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen. I loved that song and I confess, Consul, that in those years I thought it had been written for me, just for me.

You remember the bit that says:

Is this the real life?

Is this just fantasy?

Caught in a landslide

No escape from reality

Open your eyes

Look up to the skies and see,

I’m just a poor boy (Poor boy), I need no sympathy

I never understood why Edgar, who was neither poor nor unhappy, liked it so much. He played at being a tormented, anguished spirit, at odds with the world, but in reality there was nothing to torment him, let alone anything to be at odds with, in the world or anywhere else. Reality was generous to him. When I told my sister, she said: rich people always think up ways to be depressed. They like being unhappy. It’s very elegant to be sad.

To go back to that night: at two in the morning, listening to Queen and reading David Foster Wallace, drinking aguardiente as if it was water, already drunk, until I realized I was about to faint. So I went to the bathroom, turned on the shower, and stuck my head in, hoping the water would cleanse me, and in fact it did me good and I even felt pleasure in those cold drops running over my neck and down my chest. When I finished, I had the shock of my life: there was Gladys, watching me. She was wearing a short T-shirt that left her navel free and a blue Gef thong.

Are you very drunk?

It’s passing, thanks, but she said, come to my room. I repeated that I felt better but she insisted, grabbing my arm and pulling me down the corridor. Her room was bigger than Edgar’s and looked out on the garden; music was playing that I didn’t know, some kind of French rap. With her was a guy, also in underpants, different than the one we had seen in the shower. Gladys told him I wasn’t feeling well, that I was drunk, and the guy took out a little bag of coke, prepared a line on a mirror, and offered it to me. Take this, breathe it in well, he said. Then he prepared four more lines for the two of them. At first I didn’t feel anything, but then a wave of well-being swept over me. I left the room, thanking them, and went back to Edgar’s room, he’d fallen asleep with his flies open, wearing a pair of dark glasses and the headphones from his iPad, connected to the YouJizz porn site, the Asian Amateurs section.

In spite of the fact that, deep down, Edgar and I knew we weren’t equals, it was a respectful friendship. I told him all about my life, and the only thing he said was, shit, if I’d experienced all that I’d be a novelist, and a poet for sure. Basically, you’re very lucky, brother. An unhappy childhood is the best gift a writer can have. I’m going to have to approach it from the other side: either do things in the style of Carlos Fuentes or reject my family and my class, like Bryce Echenique. Those are my two options. Otherwise, I’m fucked, but you’re made for life.

I looked at him sarcastically and said, the problem, brother, is that I’m not a writer.

Because Edgar, Consul, was fully aware of his vocation, even though he hadn’t written a thing yet or only short fragments. He liked to say, quoting Monterroso, “fragment: genre much used in ancient times.” To me, it was all a great mystery: his self-confidence, his amazing cultural knowledge given that he was so young, his extravagant and sometimes brilliant ideas, ideas he didn’t share with anybody but me, which can’t have been very stimulating for him. That’s how he was, Edgar Porras, young millionaire and intellectual who wanted to know a suffering he didn’t have, and maybe that’s why, Consul, he chose me, his exact opposite, as his friend. But I couldn’t choose. A poor person can’t choose to be rich, not even as a game.

I remember one of his stories. He told it to me several times, changing a few details. I don’t know if he wrote it in the end. It went like this: A young man from Bogotá was having a sex chat with a woman named Asaku, presumably Japanese. Asaku put the computer on her windowsill and sat down there, opened her legs and put things inside her, the necks of bottles, cucumbers, plastic dragons. The young man was jerking off like crazy, excited by the fact that Asaku, unlike the girls he knew, had lots of pubic hair, which seems to be a tradition in Japan, or at least that’s what he thought.

Behind her, in the next building, he could see a window that was like Asaku’s backstage area, and which in spite of being lighted had a curtain in front of it. The story really gets going when the young man, still jerking off while Asaku is sticking a Gormiti action figure in her vagina, sees that curtain open; behind it, a man raises his hand, with something sharp in it, and brings it down seven times into the figure of a woman, who’s shorter and frailer than him, until she falls to the floor, clearly dead. Asaku doesn’t see or hear anything, since just at that moment her orgasm starts; the murder is happening behind her back; the young man lets go of his cock and yells into his microphone, but Asaku, drowning in an ocean of endorphins, takes her time in reacting, and when he tells her there has been a murder she laughs and doesn’t even turn around, she tells him he’s drunk or stoned, but he insists and says, you have to report it, where do you live? in what city? She refuses to tell him, saying: you’re making all this up to poke around in my life, don’t even think about it, you’ll never find out.

Edgar’s story began with that murder. He wanted to write it to find out who the murderer was and who the woman was and why he killed her by the window, in full view of anyone who was having virtual sex with a stranger.

I told him I thought it sounded like something by Murakami, and he thought this over for a while and said, it’s possible, but I believe in unconscious influences.

At school our classmates could never understand how Edgar, a guy from a good family, handsome, knowing lots of languages, could be my friend. That’s why they started to spread gossip, people said cruel things, that I was his servant, that his parents paid me to help him with his studies and whisper the answers to him in exams. I heard about all this gossip and never said anything, but Edgar was affected by it. During recess he would say to me, what a bunch of jealous sons of bitches, and the girls? what a herd of loudmouthed bitches.

One of these bitches, Daniela, was about to turn eighteen and was organizing a big party in her house. She lived in a very comfortable apartment near the beltway, and to spice it up announced that her parents weren’t going to be there, which meant it would be a really long party, and that got everybody excited. Of course it didn’t even occur to me that I might go to something as dumb as that, and I kept my distance. Everybody commented on what they would like to do, which girls they’d like to make out with, and what drinks they’d like to get drunk on. The girls wondered what clothes they would wear, and with what shoes, what necklaces and earrings, the kinds of things that get people like that all worked up but just depressed me, so that I sunk into my shell and at recess opted to take shelter in the toilets.

As I’m a polite person, as soon as I received the envelope with the invitation — a ridiculous card, of course, with emoticons dancing under the words “be with me for my eighteenth April”—I hastened to respond with a note in which I thanked her for the invitation but declined it on the grounds that I had a family get-together on the same date.

Daniela didn’t give a damn about my refusal, of course, but when she found out that Edgar wasn’t coming either she started to panic. Swallowing her contempt, she made up her mind to talk with me during recess, escorted by her best friend, a girl named Gina, a really nasty girl who loved to spread horrible gossip about Daniela — that she slept around with guys from other schools, that she popped pills, that she’d had an abortion — when the truth is that both of them were crude, dumb girls, real sluts, both obsessed with being the beauties of the class when they were actually pretty average, Daniela with a boob job and her face always smeared with makeup, like a high-class escort, and Gina short and fat, an Indian-looking face with slanted eyes, which in that city meant she was the kind of girl that all the guys ended up with at parties when they were already drunk and stoned and none of the other girls would put out, anyway, Gina and Daniela sought me out during the long recess and found me in the place where I was reading, on the waste ground at the far end.

Manuel, said Daniela, I felt really bad when I found out you weren’t coming to my party, I mean, like, that’s terrible, the whole point is so we can all be together! So I asked my mother to call your house and speak with your parents, and guess what, she’s just sent me a text saying that she talked to your mother and there’s no problem about you coming.

I hated them, Consul, because of the stupid importance that women give their birthdays, but I restrained myself, I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of insulting them, so I said, look, Daniela, I don’t like parties, I won’t be good company, don’t take it badly, but she glared at me and decided to lay her cards on the table, of course I take it badly, she said, very badly, not because I give a damn if you come or not, it’s your life, right? nothing to do with me, but it’s just that Edgar says he won’t come either and of course that’s because of you, so I have to ask you to come, I’m asking for a favor, just one little favor, nothing more, I’ll give you whatever you want, I’m quite serious, it’s important to me that he come, when he arrives you can go, if you like I’ll get the chauffeur to drive you home or wherever you like, but don’t spoil this for me, all right? it’s my birthday, dammit!

I told her it was too much: if I left home I couldn’t go back half an hour later, so she said, all right, then tell me what the hell you like to do and I’ll treat you, maybe you’d like to go see a late-night movie? would you like to go to a restaurant? I really will treat you, whatever you say, ask me for whatever you like, shit, there must be something you like, isn’t there?

Deep down she was suffering, so I said: I’ll try to persuade Edgar but stop fucking me around. You already screwed things up for me calling my house. And don’t worry, you’ll never understand what I like, not in a thousand years.

Before the end of recess I talked with Edgar and told him he should go to the party, it mattered a lot to the girls. Then he, being the unpredictable person he was, said: I have an idea, man, a great idea! I’ll take my mother’s car and we’ll go to Daniela’s for a while. And then we’ll go whoring, okay? The hour has come to live the life of the Parnassians, to explore brothels, which is where real life is, the real world, are you up for it? I told him I was.

And we went there, Consul, in a Citroën I’d never seen before. I was very nervous because Edgar didn’t have a license, although with his contacts and his luck it was unlikely anything would happen. When Daniela opened the door her face lit up. The pounding of the music hit us full on. She hugged Edgar and gave him a kiss as we went in. She was wearing a tight miniskirt, fishnet stockings, and very high heels. The perfect drawing-room whore. Edgar handed over his gift and, without looking at me, she grabbed him by the arm and pulled him inside. I stayed back, with my gift dangling from my hand.

I preferred not to go where everyone else was, so I went and sat down in the living room, by a window. A minute later a waiter passed with a tray of drinks and I gestured to him, but he didn’t stop. Then I moved to a second living room from where you could see the parlor. All my classmates were there, and people from other years. Some weren’t from our school. They had set up a big screen to show videos. I thought to go out on the terrace and smoke a cigarette, but at that moment a woman in an apron approached and asked me if I wanted to eat something.

I said yes, but then didn’t see her again.

Sometime later I saw Edgar among the others. He was dancing with Daniela and around them there were other girls raising their glasses and drinking toasts in time to reggae or rap or some other kind of music. I looked at my watch: an hour and a half had gone by. I felt hungry and was starting to get impatient. It didn’t look as if Edgar wanted to leave. Slowly I walked back along the corridor, opened the door, and walked to the elevators. When one of them opened, two classmates who were arriving late came out, laughing loudly.

How’s the party? they asked, is it good?

Very good, I said, and pointed to the door at the end of the corridor. They didn’t even register the fact that I was leaving.

I went outside. It was drizzling.

I didn’t have money for a taxi so I started walking without worrying about the drizzle. I’d have liked to have my paint cans with me, and I thought that if it stopped raining I’d go to the wall. I had an urgent need to express something: revulsion, anger, humiliation. I missed my colors, but there was still quite some way to go. After a few blocks I noticed something in my jacket pocket. I put my hand in, it was the gift I hadn’t managed to hand over. I opened it to see what Mother had bought, and to be honest I was pleased I still had it with me. A box of handkerchiefs. I threw it in the nearest trash can and carried on along Seventh. If I was lucky I could find a bus that went to Usaquén.

When I got home the lights were still on, so I decided to wait. Father and Mother were watching television in the living room. I took out my cell phone, thinking I might call Juana, but then remembered she was traveling. Under the eave of the garage there was a dry spot and I sat down to wait. It was still raining, more heavily now. I was cold and tired, but I’d received a lesson that was more important than the cold and the tiredness.

I never went back to Edgar’s house, in spite of his repeated invitations. We’d see each other at recess and he’d ask me, what’s up, brother? but I’d say, nothing, problems at home, I’ll tell you later. He told me about the party, how the time had passed and they’d gotten him drunk.

I fucked Daniela in the bathroom, man, he said, on all fours and against the washbowl, and I almost fucked the other whore too.

But I didn’t listen to him, just smiled and shrugged. With time he got tired of seeking me out.

It was better that way.

Losing my only friend strengthened me, Consul. Solitude accentuates what you have inside you, so now I devoted myself to walls. I had already seen one in the upper part of Usaquén, more than three hundred feet high. It was on the edge of a lot where they were going to start building something. It wasn’t completely clean, of course, it already had a few things on it, rude drawings, the odd word, hearts, a few old posters, but, far from bothering me, this gave me strength, as if the soul of the wall was in a crude state, just waiting for an image.

I went the next day, still feeling revulsion at the previous night. My hands were shaking as I grabbed the spray can. It was my first wall outside my own neighborhood and that was tantamount to a conquest, to pushing back the frontiers, broadening my horizons. I looked at it for a while from the opposite sidewalk and felt it palpitating, so the first thing I painted was just that, the silhouette of a palpitating heart, a heart that was at the same time a small continent drifting, and as I contemplated it from the sidewalk, it acquired relief, its veins and folds emerged, along with the outline of the surrounding water, the devouring monsters, the storms that lay in wait for it.

The cans sped through my fingers as if everything already existed, in the spirit or the soul of the wall, until I could do no more and I sat down to look at the stars, the lights of the houses. Then, already calmer, I contemplated my drawing, that small piece of my world in a distant street, at the beginning of night, and I felt comforted. I turned and looked at it again from the corner and it filled me with resolve. Suddenly I felt something on my cheeks, what was it? I was crying.

When I told Juana about Edgar, she listened to me calmly, without judging anybody, and in the end repeated her old question, are you still a virgin?

I had turned eighteen and couldn’t even imagine myself seducing women, so I replied, what do you think? when have you ever seen me with a girl?

But you do want to? she asked, and I said, yes, of course, that’s all I ever think about, it’s bubbling up inside me, so she said, come with me to a party next Saturday, a gorgeous friend of mine will show you what to do, all right?

I spent the week thinking, but not only about the party and Juana’s friend. It was the end of the year and school would soon be over. What would happen to my life? What would happen to Juana and me? Painting gave me strength, but reality opened up in front of me more broadly, with vast dark spaces to cover. I thought and thought. I would have liked to be a poet, to direct all that emptiness and those questions forward, project myself into the future, and even have visions. I had read Schelling and wanted to fully understand my own experience, luck, destiny, good and evil. I felt I was outside that reality and needed to understand it, to outline a little theory that would allow me to carry on. What was happening to me and my sister was tiny compared with the great ills of the world, but each person experiences things individually. Hence the absence of enthusiasm, that terrible clash with life, pure and simple. What to think? I liked being alone, going out to the fields, sitting down between the furrows, and waiting to hear the bells ring.

The following Saturday Juana took me to the apartment of a very unusual guy — although these days, Consul, he would only have made me laugh — with earrings, tattoos on his arms, and a sleeveless T-shirt clinging to his body, as if we weren’t in Bogotá but Acapulco. The music playing was Metallica, 80s rock, and Kiss. Juana introduced me and poured me a whiskey. She told me to drink slowly and that if I felt bad I should tell her.

Don’t worry, I’ve been drunk before and even snorted coke, so don’t worry.

She almost fainted, coke? who gave you that crap? Edgar’s sister, I said, but only once. I swear. Typical of those rich kids, she said, then she shrugged and joined in the dancing. She reached out her arms to me and said, come on, dance with me, but I refused, I’d never done it, it wasn’t something I enjoyed. She insisted, you have to learn, when you learn it’s fun, you’ll understand music in a way you can only do by dancing, so I joined her and tried to follow, making clumsy steps as I clung to her waist and looked her in the eyes, and little by little, very slowly, the rhythm appeared and a certain balance I could absorb, and then I danced seven songs in a row and drank two more glasses of whiskey until I felt merry, euphoric, which was something I had never felt in all the times I’d gotten drunk with Edgar.

Then I found out that the hosts were two friends from the university, both homosexuals, one from Sociology, the one who’d opened the door, and the other from History, a professor, a guy of about forty who not only didn’t have tattoos or earrings or anything like that, but in addition was fat, not obese, just reasonably fat, and quite calm and relaxed, who’d seen it all before, all the fights and debates.

What I liked most was his home.

An apartment on Sixth and Fourth full of books and antiques, some pre-Columbian and some brought back from Asia and the South Pacific. The first thing I did when I came in, before greeting the other guests, was to look through the library. Heidegger, Deleuze, Virilio, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization by Richard Sennett, the works of Lacan in French, the works of Michel Foucault in French, Chomsky, the Mahabharata, an edition of Gaddafi’s Green Book, three biographies of Mao, Del Poder y la Gramática by Malcolm Deas, The Intellectuals and the Masses by John Carey, the biography of Che by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen, the collected poems of Rubén Darío, the collected poems of León de Greiff in three volumes, the complete works of Mayakovsky, Rimbaud in French, Baudelaire in French, books that later, as time passed, I sought out and bought, and of course read, you can’t imagine, Consul, how important it was for me, going to that party, especially after Daniela’s fiasco.

In the dining room, around a huge pitcher of pisco sour, there was another group from Philosophy, some postgrads, some from other universities. That was where I met your friend Gustavo Chirolla. I was struck by the way he argued, with his coastal accent and his enormous affection and respect for those who argued with him. That night they talked about various subjects and I stood listening in a corner, hypnotized by what they were saying, I can’t remember it in detail but I’m sure they talked about politics, that was the great topic in those horrible days, local politics, everybody felt concerned, everybody thought they had to make their position clear, do you remember, Consul? it was an implicit duty, we were like Cubans, and out of that emerged loves and hates, something that ended when Uribe went and Colombia became a normal country again, or rather, went back to being a shitty country but a normal one, and people went back to the old grayness and lobotomy, which by comparison seemed like a sign of balance and even of progress.

They talked of all that and also of very specific things, Leibniz, social structures, the new critical thinking. I was dazzled listening to them, especially Gustavo. This man knows about everything, I told myself, and at one point, very shyly, I asked him where he taught, and that was when he told me a couple of things about his work and his classes at the Xavierian University. I told him about my interest in philosophy and in the National University, and he said that he recommended it to me, that we were sure to see each other there.

For some time now I had liked philosophy. It was the only thing that might have an answer for my failed existence, that frustration that only disappeared with painting, books, or movies. Art and its human stories helped me to understand that I was not alone, but studying literature struck me as unnecessary, and the cinema was a utopia. Juana wanted me to make a movie, but I said to her, for that you have to be a millionaire or the son of millionaires, don’t kid yourself. Kubrick had a rich uncle who paid for his first film, don’t you remember? And if we find a producer, which is highly unlikely, we’d have to forget about making art. You can’t make the movie you want if the money isn’t yours.

She believed in me blindly and said that she didn’t mind spending her life working to pay for it. I let her fantasize, but I knew it was impossible, among other things because the movie I carry inside me is so tough that nobody would go to see it.

There remained philosophy: Anaxagoras, Epictetus, Peter Abelard, Saint Anselm, Scottus Eriugena, Emmanuel Kant. They had thought about everything. How to explain that profound sense of rejection? the certainty that something in life was wrong, profoundly wrong? what to call that feeling of insubstantiality, of emptiness? These were the answers I was looking for.

Hearing those people confirmed me in my decision to study at the National, although the truth was, I didn’t really have much choice. Los Andes was out of reach, as was the Xavierian.

Plus, I’d be close to Juana.

At midnight, after a few whiskeys and a joint, a woman named Tania came up to me and asked me to dance. She whispered in my ear: are you Juana’s brother? I didn’t know you were so young and handsome. We danced for a while, she clung to me as soon as we took the first step, kissed me on the mouth, sucked my ear, and said, well, darling, shall we fuck? I’d heard people say that kind of thing in movies, so I said, nervously, yes, of course.

We went to one of the bedrooms on the second floor and without needing any words she opened my fly and started sucking my cock. She had a piercing in her tongue and she rubbed it hard against my glans. Then she took off her clothes, sat down on a hassock, and moved her thong aside. We fucked and it was really great, she made me feel as if it wasn’t the first time. She had experience, she moved well, and she knew how to guide me. Thanks to that, I didn’t come in the first thirty seconds, but by the time we had finished I was another person. She got upset because she couldn’t find her bra, then she wanted to light a cigarette and the lighter didn’t work. In the end she found her clothes, dressed with her back to me, and then snorted a line of coke through each nostril. I asked her for her phone number, but she didn’t even reply. Suddenly she looked at me, as if surprised to see me still there, and said, are you planning to sleep here or what? Then something happened that made the atmosphere even tenser than it already was: bending to look for her huge Dr. Martens boots, she let out a loud and unmistakable fart. Not vaginal wind, but a classic fart. A fart that resounded through the room, and really annoyed her, although she didn’t even say “sorry” or “it just came out.” I asked her for her phone number again, but she said:

Look, there’s no point our seeing each other again. I have a boyfriend, a really great Spanish guy who’s traveling right now. I’m thirty-two years old, I’m not going to get involved with a child.

With those words she left the room, through which a sharp, foul-smelling wind was already blowing.

I felt very sick and didn’t know what to do.

She left me alone in that stinking room that suddenly seemed like the saddest, most squalid place in the world. I searched for my clothes and got dressed. Then I opened the window and breathed in the clean night air. From some star or from the mountains there came a voice that said: get used to losing everything. I was puzzled. It sounded like a phrase of Edgar’s, the kind he invented without it coming from his guts, for the pure pleasure of combining sounds. Then I thought it sounded more like Paulo Coelho and I decided to erase it.

I walked downstairs and went back to the party.

Seeing me, Juana came up to me, well? did you like it? I told her it had been great, and so as not to hurt me she said, Tania wanted to fuck you as soon as she saw you. She’s the one you have to thank. I hugged her and said, let’s dance, let’s forget this, teach me some more steps.

12

I woke up at nine, somewhat the worse for wear after that mixture of drinks the night before, but a couple of aspirins with Alka-Seltzer and a furtive swig of gin revived me.

I ran down and took a taxi opposite the hotel, with the lawyer’s address in my hand, but very soon fell into the paralyzing hydra of the traffic, the great ill of Asian cities. Or of modern cities. You go so slowly that the road fills with intruders.

My head heated up again and the pain returned.

I got to the address with two minutes to spare. Teresa was waiting for me on the street outside the building.

“Thanks for coming and for being punctual,” I said, giving her a kiss. “How do you feel?”

“A bit rough, to be honest,” she said with a smile, “but it’ll soon pass. It’s been a while since I had Cuba Libres and tequila one after the other. It was worth it.”

I did mention that I’d give my life to postpone the appointment and have a Bloody Mary, which at that hour of the morning has the virtue of grabbing hold of your body, messing it up, and putting it back together again without any of the pieces missing.

The lawyer was an elderly man of about seventy. His venerable appearance seemed like a good sign.

“Sit down, welcome.”

He made a gesture with his hand and a second later a servant appeared with a tray. Cold water, an orange-colored soda, tea, and coffee. Biscuits and pistachios. I missed something more aggressive in terms of alcohol content. I grabbed a coffee and a glass of water. Teresa did the same.

“Good,” the man said, “I don’t suppose you’ll be upset to know that this morning, first thing, I myself called the prosecutor and asked for a copy of the report on your compatriot Manuel Manrique. You should know that the prosecutor was my pupil at university and has great respect for me. There’s nothing illegal about that. I told him that I’d be dealing with the case and that you’d be coming to see me later.”

That struck me as an excellent omen. I told him that I was grateful, that I had a mandate from the Ministry to hire him as of now. We were convinced of Manrique’s innocence. I suggested trying to find previous cases in which the accused had been the victim of an injustice.

“Don’t worry, Consul,” he said. “I know what you’re thinking, and I’ll tell you something: you’re not on the wrong track in any way. This very day I’ll begin to put together a solid number of cases. In addition, and this too is, let’s say, somewhat privileged information, I know that the police are hot on the heels of a network of amphetamine traffickers from Burma. It may even be that between now and the trial we’ll have some good news.”

I told him I had to go back to Delhi that weekend, but it was only Wednesday. In any event I would be dealing with the case and would be coming frequently.

We signed documents, he gave me his particulars, and, just as I was about to get up, he gently held me back by the arm.

“Go and see the young man,” he said, “it’ll do him good. I’ll make sure they respect him in Bangkwang and don’t mistreat him, but it’s good that you see him regularly. These little things make all the difference. The prison warden is merely a functionary who wants to do well by his country. This kingdom may appear small but it’s big, Consul. The eyes of the king cannot reach into all corners.”

“I’ll go see him tomorrow,” I said. “Today I have to ask the prosecutor for authorization.”

“Don’t worry about that,” the lawyer said. “I’ll make sure that nobody stops you going in. Go tomorrow about ten, I’ll arrange everything.”

We left after reading, sealing, and signing an interminable series of documents that the lawyer would send by courier to the embassy in Delhi just a few minutes later. Then he let me use his telephone and I called Olympia. I asked her to make sure that as soon as the documents arrived they were passed on to Bogotá by diplomatic baggage.

By the time we left, it was almost noon, and we saw a sign on the other side of the avenue: Lobster’s Bar, Wine & Cocktails.

I said to Teresa, “Let me buy you a soda, or whatever you like. It’s just midnight in Colombia and I’m dying for a Bloody Mary.”

But Teresa said, “Oh, yes, Mr. Consul, and what time do you think it is in Mexico?”

We had two Bloody Marys each, to which she added a Singha beer. I looked at her in silence, but she hastened to say:

“Don’t make that face, my rule is not to drink before twelve o’clock, and look, we’re past that. Some people wait until two in the afternoon, but there are times when that’s simply not realistic. Right, I’m off to the embassy, let’s talk later. Call me.”

She got in a taxi and disappeared into the traffic.

I hailed another and went back to Suan Plu Soi 6, Sathorn Road. I had the impression, or rather the intuition, that the Regency Inn Hotel still had something to tell me. Again I walked around before making up my mind to enter; if someone saw me, I thought, they might alert the true criminals (“but this isn’t going to be a crime story”).

This time, the young man I had seen before wasn’t at the reception desk. Instead, there was a woman my age, so I asked her if I could see room 301, which was still free. She handed over the keys. As I went in, I saw myself reflected in the closet mirror. I sat for a while on the bed, without thinking of anything specific. There was nothing new, only the dense air. This was all so unfair. Something dark seemed to be making its way through the air, without seeing reason, without listening to the words of a young man who had already known, before arriving here, what it was to suffer and be very alone.

I went back to my hotel and locked myself in my room. I wanted to read, to think, even to forget. To prepare myself for the following encounter. The next day I would go early to Bangkwang.

The time had come to start listening to him.

13. INTER-NETA’S MONOLOGUES

On days like these, dear internauts, I feel the need to do something intimate, to expose another small corner of my mind to your eyes. I’m going to talk to you about the liquid of purity and madness. The most important creation of the soul in alcoholic terms. Can anyone guess? You’re not even warm. Because it’s a drink that’s served very cold.

Like so many things in the world and in life, gin was invented in the seventeenth century (some say 1550, who is right?) by a distinguished member of the medical profession, the Dutchman Franciscus Sylvius de le Boë, and as he was a physician its original use — as you can imagine — was very different than the one we give it today: it was a diuretic. It helped us take a leak. De le Boë’s ambitious idea was to relieve constipation and stomachaches according to some, gallstones and liver complaints according to others, with a mixture of distilled barley, rye, and corn, and in order to increase its potency he added berries of juniper (French: genièvre; Dutch: genever) to the brew.

Did Shakespeare drink it? If De le Boë did indeed invent it in 1550, then old Will would have been in time. It’s highly unlikely that he never suffered from constipation or needed to provoke urination.

John Cheever wrote: “A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey’s gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.”

When the recipe crossed the English Channel and reached the British Isles, at the time of William of Orange — who was Dutch, like Rembrandt and van Gogh and Rip Van Winkle and Heineken beer — the legend was born that the name genever came from Guinevere, the wife of King Arthur of the Round Table, an intelligent woman generous with her private parts, who cuckolded the king with Lancelot of the Lake. (I would have done the same, with a name like that!)

By the way, do you know why the Swiss don’t drink whiskey?

Because they have a lake of gin (Lake Geneva, get it?).

Before then, the English used to get plastered — what a crude word that is, how much more refined is se soûlaient la gueule—on pear liqueurs and French wines, but the closing of trade with France led to authorization being given for the distilling of grains native to the British Isles. When it comes to binges and benders, you have to be independent.

Gin was a “smash hit.” Two and a half million gallons in 1690, five million in 1727, and twenty-one million ten years later. With a population of six and a half million, that makes, let’s see, three and a half gallons a head per year! Not bad. Alarmed, in 1736 Parliament passed the Gin Act, levying high taxes on sales, thus restoring order and saying: “We’re Protestants! We have to defer gratification!”

The English say, with their English sense of humor: “There’s always someone trying to stop us from getting drunk,” but the producers continued bottling the stuff secretly and consumption increased. Bernard Shaw would say much later: “Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.”

In 1742, there were twelve thousand arrests. Faced with this landslide of prisoners — drunks sleeping it off in prison cells — Parliament lowered the taxes. Life is short and drink is long and plentiful. The producers went back to making legal gin, of excellent quality. The first to have a registered name, in 1749, was Booth’s, the oldest distillery in England.

As Frank Sinatra says: “Alcohol may be man’s worst enemy, but the Bible says love your enemy.”

It was normal to drink it without ice. Sometimes with a little sugar. Lord Byron said that gin and water was the origin of his inspiration. In a grim period it was recognized as the drink (not bitter but sweet) of the lower classes. Charles Dickens, being a puritan, denounced the “gin palaces.” Prime Minister Gladstone tried to limit its sale to certain bars and lost his seat. “I was buried under a torrent of gin,” he said.

The favorite son of gin is the dry martini, which takes us to the other side of the Atlantic.

Humphrey Bogart’s last words were: “I should never have switched from Scotch to martinis.” They were his doom, as they were for many elegant drunks with their tuxedos and their cigarette cases. A martini in the hand was a symbol of success in the country where success matters. We are in the United States, friends.

Someone once said that the martini was the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet. Is that possible? At the Tehran conference of 1943, President Roosevelt gave it to Stalin to try. Stalin looked at the glass, drank it cautiously, looked at his advisers, then licked his mustache and asked for more. Later, Nikita Khrushchev would say that the martini was the true “lethal weapon” of the United States.

“When I get to heaven I am going to ask St. Peter to take me to the man who invented the dry martini,” wrote William Buckley. “Just so I can say thanks.”

Who was that man? Not an easy question to answer.

There are three hypotheses. The “San Francisco theory” attributes it to the bartender Jerry Thomas, born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1825, who worked in the bar of the Hotel Occidental in San Francisco. In 1862 he published his Bartenders’ Guide, in which he includes inventions such as the Tom & Jerry and the Blue Blazer. Et voilà! In a later edition, in 1887 there appears a new cocktail called the Martinez. Martinez was a town in California and, according to the legend, Thomas made it for a man who was on his way to Martinez. “Very well, friend, this is a new drink I’ve just invented for your journey,” he said. Martinez became Martine, and then Martini.

But the citizens of Martinez have their own theory (the “Martinez theory”). It’s this: in about 1870 there was a bar owned by a Frenchman named Jules Richelieu, who had moved there from New Orleans. On one occasion a miner came in and asked for a whiskey. Richelieu filled his hip flask, but the man, on trying it, spat it out and cursed. Ashamed, the Frenchman is supposed to have said: “Wait, I’d like you to try something different.” He made a mixture and served it in a glass with an olive. The miner tried it, smiled, drank it all down in one go, and asked Richelieu: “What is it?” Richelieu replied: “It’s a Martinez cocktail.”

The final hypothesis (the “New York theory”) is that of a mysterious bartender named Martini di Arma di Taggia, an Italian immigrant, who worked in the bar of the now-defunct Knickerbocker Hotel in New York (on 42nd and Broadway). According to this version it was invented in 1912, and became popular because it was the favorite drink of John D. Rockefeller, a hypothesis supported by one of the best known experts on cocktails, the Englishman John Doxat, author of The World of Drinks and Drinking (1971).

For sad Jack London, the martini was a symbol of social ascent: going from whiskey to martini was like jumping from the frozen wastes of the Yukon to the drawing rooms of the Upper West Side.

Oh, no! What do we do now?

We close the bars!

On January 16, 1920, thirty-six states ratified the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting the sale of alcohol.

Buñuel, who was in Los Angeles around that period, wrote in his memoirs: “I have never drunk as much as I did during the period of Prohibition.”

It lasted until 1934, when Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the decree repealing it in the Oval Office of the White House, in front of the press. To drive home the point, he mixed the first legal martini for the cameras and the flashbulbs.

The dry martini entered literature and the cinema. Hollywood grabbed hold of it and the actors drank it like crazy. David Niven always had a glass in his hand. Marlene Dietrich only chose lovers who drank martinis (as she admitted once to Hemingway), and its short glass, like an upside-down umbrella, was reproduced in paintings, photographs, and advertisements. The one by Mel Ramos is famous: a naked woman sitting in a glass of martini.

The best verse was written by Dorothy Parker (hers is the brilliant phrase: “brevity is the soul of lingerie”). Her poem says:

I like to have a martini,

Two at the very most.

After three I’m under the table,

After four I’m under the host.

14

I graduated high school at the end of that year and enrolled to study philosophy at the National University. Mother took her head in her hands and started crying. Father said angrily, oh, my God, first the girl becomes a guerrilla and now this fool wants to become an intellectual, it’s like a disease! what did we do to have children like this, Lord? why are you trying our patience?

Whenever we were out on the street and Father saw beggars under a bridge, he would say, look, Manuel, a philosophers’ convention, is that what you want from life? you’re going to die of hunger! To stop him bugging me, I showed him an Internet page that said the philosopher Fernando Savater had been paid twenty-five thousand euros for a lecture. Father looked at it suspiciously and said, it isn’t possible, it must be a mistake or a fake, Manuel, you faked it, you can fake anything with the Internet… Who is this Savater?

The university! At last I was leaving that absurd high school behind. Getting out and spending my time with people similar to me was a blessed respite. Although not without its drawbacks. One mistake we make when we’re young is to believe that people who are interested in the same things as we are must necessarily be similar to us. Nature does its work, the spirit blows where it will. There are envious and wicked people even in worlds that we would think are dominated by clarity and beauty, but be that as it may, at the university I began a period of calm, intense reading, and for the first time felt that I was finding some kind of harmony.

The first semester passed, then the second.

Apart from my own classes, I loved to wander around the fine arts department, sometimes sneaking into one of the studios to see what they were doing. There too, surrounded by the smell of turpentine, in those spaces dominated by the sensual qualities of color and volume, I felt a great sense of peace, although I never regretted my choice. I was getting to know the world. Sometimes, when I left my classes late or stuck around for a talk in the lecture theater, I’d paint secretly on the walls of the faculty: letters, islands, storms, skies.

It was a period of long silences, Consul. My life had settled into a pleasant routine, and repeating it daily, without any upsets, was a genuine relief. Attending my classes, reading in the library, going to seminars and lectures, reading on the bus, reading on the lawns of the university, reading at home, going to the movies, scribbling in exercise books, taking notes. Life at home was the same as ever, but now I could also be a long way away. As I got used to the outside world, Mother and Father came to seem as if they belonged to another era, like an old sepia photograph.

Another semester passed, and another.

Sometimes Juana would come and find me after my classes and we’d have a glass of red wine in the cafeteria or go up to Chapinero for a bite to eat. I can still see her on the sidewalk, her hands deep in her pockets, shivering with cold in the wind coming down from the hills or avoiding the fumes from the buses. We’d eat whatever, Chinese food, fried chicken, pizza, and talk about my courses, the things we were both reading, movies, and sometimes also about politics, but while I talked or listened to her talking I felt something strange, a kind of premature nostalgia, as if in those chats of ours I already had a premonition of what was soon going to happen: her disappearance, the way that suddenly, without anything unusual happening, she stopped being among us, without a word, which was worse than if she’d died, Consul, because when someone dies you’re there, you witness their deterioration and are aware of the advance of death, its progress, and there even comes a time when you want it to come and set everyone free.

Juana disappeared without anything to suggest it was about to happen, although later, remembering those afternoons at the university, it seemed to me that a wind of anguish was already blowing our way, the urgency of something that was about to fall, because sad and tragic things do announce their coming, I believe, they don’t come just like that, they aren’t mere chance, don’t you agree? At least that’s how I remember it now, how I imagine it, even though I always end up wondering, what could she have feared in those years? I knew very little of Juana’s life. Her constant absences, coming back early in the morning, bursting into tears for no obvious reason, all that was a mystery. That’s how we remember people who disappear or die, everything that happened before seems bathed in a symbolic glow, an aura that, with hindsight, appears to be the forewarning of a tragedy.

I’ve observed that there are two ways to die.

The first is an illness that causes us to deteriorate and submerges us in a slow agony. That’s sad, but in a way it’s good for the relatives and friends, who have time to get used to the idea, although it’s painful to the dying person himself, because of all the pain, decay, and indignity it carries with it. The second is the opposite: a gunshot in the back of the neck, a brain hemorrhage, a traffic accident. Your relatives suffer but you go quietly. You go quickly to the other side. That’s the best way.

But there’s a third way, at least in our country, a way that’s cruel for everybody: disappearance. For everybody? The victim suffers from imagining the anguish of his nearest and dearest. The relatives suffer because they cling to any hope they can, and when it’s lost they suffer even more when they imagine the terrible loneliness of the death: someone kneeling in a patch of waste ground, in the early morning, shaking with fear, pissing in his pants, then two or three flashes and, already, a lifeless body falling into a hole, the earth covering it, vegetation growing over it and hiding it, the long suffering of those who spend years investigating, searching for that place, that horrible, monstrous place, trying to understand the reasons, the still inexplicable reasons, for what happened, why he was killed, to find his bones and clasp them and kiss them, trying to relieve the loneliness, to bathe it with tears.

When Juana disappeared I felt all that: grief, hatred, sadness, pity, resentment, guilt.

There wasn’t even a date, at what moment did she go? We didn’t know, we didn’t even realize. She would go on her travels, giving vague details, and the family got used to it. I got used to it. Juana would ask me to understand, tell me that she was still working on our escape plan, that I shouldn’t ask questions, that I should trust her blindly. That’s why I didn’t know at what moment it happened.

One day I simply noticed she wasn’t there anymore.

And so began that succession of ideas, of intolerable images, of hurtful words. My first reaction was to grab my bag of spray cans and paint her on all the walls of the city: her eyes, the palm of her hand supporting her chin, her smiling face, her figure walking towards me, and a question, where are you? For me it was inconceivable that the world should continue to turn without her, that the sun should rise and shoots should emerge from the trunks of trees and there should be disasters in distant places, how could the wheel not stop? One day, on Thirtieth, I walked past one of my paintings and saw that someone, an anonymous graffiti artist, had written beside it: “Why don’t you come back? can’t you see how he’s suffering?” Somehow, the city was answering me.

She’s been murdered, I thought, she must be in one of those mass graves in this country that’s rich in cemeteries, our beautiful national territory, the body must be rotting, her bones must be starting to separate without anybody caressing them, without my having had the chance to kiss them.

Where are you, Juana?

I thought it would be enough to love her and walk about the city, reproducing her and calling to her on streets and avenues; I thought that intuition or a ray of sunlight, as in the poem by Salvatore Quasimodo, would indicate a place, but that didn’t happen. We reported her missing, and the small amount of information we were able to obtain showed that she hadn’t been arrested or murdered or kidnapped, of course the disappeared have no record of their disappearance, that’s why they call them disappeared, but you have to start somewhere, and Father, with that blind faith of his in the country that, according to him, “we had at last,” went to police stations, prisons, courthouses, hospitals, the ombudsman, and, finally, to his hated NGOs.

That’s when he started to change: his admiration for Uribe weakened and one day I heard him say that human rights weren’t being respected in Colombia, that our family had already lost the war, and that there had been enough raised fists and hot air. With bloodshot eyes and an expression that might well have been weariness, he said, we have to do things differently, we can’t carry on like this.

One Sunday, much to my surprise, he came and woke me early. Get dressed quickly and come with me, Manuel, your mother doesn’t want to come. I got up without knowing what it was about and had the shock of my life: Father was going to a demonstration for the disappeared! He was wearing a T-shirt that said Where are they? and holding a banner with a colored photograph of Juana. I had taken that photograph, Consul, and it was one of the best ones we had of her. On it she was smiling, just about to puff at a cigarette, looking out of the corner of her eye, as if keeping a humorous eye on someone, and raising a glass of wine. Father had chosen that photograph, and below it, in black letters, he had written Juana Manrique, twenty-four, disappeared November 2008.

I got up and took a quick shower, put on a white T-shirt, on which I wrote my sister’s name, and went out with him, by his side for once, feeling that for the first time something united us. How strange this is, I thought, after a life spent not understanding each other, with me thinking him mediocre, always judging him harshly, but that morning, seeing him advancing along Seventh to Plaza de Bolívar, raising the banner with his daughter’s name and shouting, where is she? I admired him, for the first time in my life I wasn’t ashamed of him and I felt proud to be by his side, absorbing his cries so that his voice and mine should be one, and so I also raised my fist and cried out, feeling less alone, cried out for what we had lost that now made us both the same person.

Juana Manrique! where is she?

A mass of people was advancing, yelling slogans, holding up flags and banners with bloodstained silhouettes of the country, patterns of bones, mounds of corpses, crows with military hats, an enormous skeleton with a scythe in its hand and the presidential sash across its chest, saying, “Colombia, I will liberate you.” And the cry went up:

“Uribe, watch out, the people are coming!”

The demonstration reached Plaza de Bolívar, where the organizers had set up an enormous dais for the main event just in front of the steps of Congress. For a couple of hours there were orators citing testimonies and giving analyses, declarations of support from some senators and political personalities, songs, and even a mime show, the mimes weeping in silence, swallowing their sighs and their tears just as we were all doing in that square, a couple thousand sad, angry people, some still hopeful, until slowly it started to spit, the sky darkened, and the rain came down, in a neutral, subdued way at first, but then, after some terrifying claps of thunder, the downpour really began, forcing some of the people to run and take shelter in the colonnades of the cathedral or under the eaves on Eighth Street. Others took out umbrellas and remained in front of the stage, where the mimes were looking up at the clouds and making gestures of surprise. That’s how the rain is in Bogotá, it always arrives at the worst or saddest moments.

We started walking back along Seventh looking for some transportation heading north, but the street was closed because of the demonstration so we had to go on foot, dodging puddles, from eave to eave, avoiding the rain. Father didn’t care about getting wet, but jealously protected the banner with the photograph of Juana, maybe he was trying to protect her; and so we walked side by side in silence in that ghostly city that is Bogotá in the rain.

Without knowing how, absorbed in our thoughts, we reached Chapinero, just as the black clouds dispersed and you could finally see a piece of the sky.

As we crossed Fiftieth and Seventh a black Mercedes passed us. One of its wheels hit a puddle and the water it threw up splashed our pants, making them even wetter than they already were. The driver turned and looked at me, just for a second, but long enough for me to recognize him. It was Edgar Porras.

The Mercedes moved away and I saw him looking at me in the rearview mirror, I hesitated for a moment, but then I grabbed Father’s arm and said, let’s carry on, old man, let’s walk a little more, it’s only just twelve-thirty, we should be in time for lunch.

Mother didn’t change. Whenever she mentioned Juana’s disappearance her voice was sad, but the tragedy didn’t seem to have shifted anything essential inside her. She carried on the same, and had her problems with Father. Luckily, I was almost never there at mealtimes.

Sometimes, Father would come into my room in the early hours. He would apologize and say, I saw the light was on, Manuel, can I come in for a while? I can’t get to sleep, dammit… He’d sit down on my bed, take a quart of aguardiente from the pocket of his dressing gown, and have a few slugs. He’d offer it to me and I’d say, I can’t sleep either, that’s why I’m reading. But he’d say, if only I could, Manuel, if only I could stop thinking. He’d sit there for a while in silence. Then we’d hug and he’d go. Seeing his resigned expression, I knew he would spend the night awake. His prayers, like mine, drifted up into the darkest part of the sky and faded away. There was nobody who could listen to them.

I told you that we never found out exactly when she disappeared, because she had gotten us used to her being away for long periods, and this was just the latest one; only when too much time had passed without her coming back did I decide to call her on her cell phone, and not getting any reply or any e-mail message, I realized that something was wrong. So I said to Father, do you know when Juana is coming back? And he looked worried and said, I was just about to ask you the same question, son, I don’t have any idea, how come you don’t know? That’s how it all started. That’s when we reported her missing and began the round of police stations, prisons, and hospitals.

Sometime later Mother said something that stayed in everybody’s heads, but which nobody dared to repeat. She said it to Father when he had come back from one of his fruitless visits to some hospital or courthouse.

Oh, Alberto, maybe she ended up with FARC.

She said it, and Father immediately put his hand over her mouth, a gesture that was meant to be strong but in fact was merely desperate.

Never say that again, Bertha. Ever.

Then he took out his handkerchief and dried his eyes.

I sought out her classmates, the friends who had known her. It was a long and difficult process, since I didn’t even know their names. It’s incredible how little we know of the people we love. Little by little, I tracked down some of them, but nobody knew anything. They told me vague things, that she had gone on a journey, that she was doing fieldwork. None of them thought it possible that she had gotten involved with the guerrillas, who were very discredited in the university. I said that one night to Father and he moved his head, as if to dismiss the thought, and said, I knew, I knew that, but thanks anyway, Manuel.

Father ended up lodging an official registration of her disappearance with the help of the NGO Caritas. From that day on, he devoted himself to studying disappearances in Colombia in the hope of finding some clue, some lead that would show him the path to follow. He also devoted himself to aguardiente for a while, but the pain from his ulcer soon put a stop to that. He and Mother didn’t talk much, at least not in front of me.

The worst thing about such situations is that life goes on.

A year passed, then another year. Father aged about ten years and Mother started taking control of things at home. The bank, knowing what had happened and seeing what bad shape he was in, told him he could take early retirement, and he thought about it seriously. But he preferred to carry on working. At home, the memory of Juana was just too strong and too sad.

I finished my philosophy degree and started a doctorate, and that’s when I studied aesthetics with Gustavo Chirolla. It was the best course I ever took. But although Gustavo was fond of me I never dared to talk to him about anything personal or try to be his friend. My fellow students were on friendly terms with him, they even went to his house, he was very open, a great guy. I was dying to do that but I never dared. I don’t know why, Consul. What had happened with Juana made me feel distant, and also guilty, very guilty. Because of everything I had lost, I wasn’t like the others. Without her, life wasn’t worthwhile. Mine, at least. I decided to wait a little while to see if a miracle would happen.

With time, the suffering turned into something secret, a little fire that united my father and me, even though we almost never mentioned it. I knew that it was there, nothing more.

But early one morning, I was woken by some kind of light, and I sat up in bed.

Juana was alive.

I could feel her presence, as if a wind filled with words had burst into the room, and in that magma, in that invisible net, there was her voice. I heard it. It was a voice surrounded by many voices, cries surrounded by many cries. I heard it. She was alive and I had to start looking for her again. Almost three years had passed.

Of course, I didn’t say anything to Father.

I decided to begin with Tania, the woman who’d initiated me into sex, and with whom I hadn’t spoken since. It took me two weeks to find her, but in the end I did. She wasn’t studying anymore, she never completed her course in systems engineering, and was now working in the IT department of the El Tiempo publishing group. On my way there, I remembered her Spanish boyfriend. The newspaper had been bought by Spaniards and I put two and two together. In the course of looking for her, I’d discovered that her real name wasn’t Tania but María Claudia. Tania was her student name, a very common name in her generation, I suppose because of Che Guevara’s girlfriend.

She received me in an office with a view of the hills, and I told her what had happened. Every now and again we heard the planes taking off from the runways of the airport. To persuade her to help me, I showed her the list of offices that we had scoured in the search for my sister, the civil and legal actions I’d started with my father. She was touched by all that, and decided to speak out.

Listen, I liked Juana very much, she helped me in lots of things and was always great to me. You can’t even imagine what I owe her. That’s why I’m going to start by telling you something you may not like, but it’s important that you know.

I looked at her nervously, swallowed, and said, tell me, please, whatever it is.

Juana was working for a former Miss Colombia who ran a modeling agency, she said, and after clearing her throat added: but it was more than just modeling, what the girls did was go out with men who had money. It was actually an escort agency, you know what that means?

Yes, I said. High-class prostitution.

I think Juana’s disappearance has more to do with that than with anything political, Tania went on. I didn’t know her that well either. Look, this is the telephone number of the agency. That’s all I know.

Now she was the one who was a little nervous.

Did you also work as an escort?

I’ll be honest with you, she said, after all, you and I know each other. At that time I was in financial difficulty, I’d just broken up with a real son of a bitch, a slacker, an alcoholic, a junkie, and I had a three-year-old child. I was on the fucking street, I didn’t know what to do. Your sister threw me a lifeline, it was legal, she introduced me to the former Miss Colombia and I started working and earning good money. Soon afterwards I met a Spanish executive with a good position who became my boyfriend and is still my boyfriend. He helped me to get out, but I owe it all to Juana. Call this number and tell them it’s from me. I’ll talk to them today to make sure they see you and help you, all right? And please, when you find her tell her I’m dying to see her.

I left with a strange mixture of emotions. I couldn’t believe that Juana had gotten herself involved in that world, but at the same time I was overcome with joy. She was alive, or might be. My intuition had been correct.

But after I’d taken a few steps, a shadow fell over me, bringing with it some terrible words, terrible because they had no answer: she would never have abandoned me! I couldn’t imagine a situation that would have stopped her getting in touch with me. Apart from death, of course. But I had a lead, and in such cases a lead is worth everything. The following day I would go and see this mysterious former Miss Colombia.

Juana always said: I’m working so that we can escape, so that we can get out of this wretched city and go somewhere where nobody will find us, so you must believe blindly in me.

There was a light at the end of the tunnel.

Maybe desperation was part of it, and I just had to wait. But three years had passed.

The following day I called the telephone number, introduced myself as Tania’s friend, and a voice gave me an appointment for six in the evening. I left the university early, feeling nervous. It was on 78th, just below Eleventh. As I was walking to the bus stop, it struck me that on a day like this I would have liked to have a friend, someone I could tell the hopes and fears I felt. It was difficult always being alone. Although I wasn’t alone, I told myself: my sister is somewhere and I’m going to find her.

The building was in the process of being refurbished, although the workers appeared to be taking a break. On the first floor, with an entrance from the street, there was a drugstore that also sold stationery. I walked as far as the lobby and found a doorman dozing over an issue of El Espectador. I asked him about the modeling agency and he pointed out a plaque next to the entry phones: School of Modeling, third floor.

The elevator isn’t working, he added, grouchily. You’re going to have to use the stairs.

I walked up the three floors feeling a bit intimidated, filled with doubts, afraid of what I was about to hear. The door was opened by a woman who didn’t look like a model and who turned out to be the school secretary. She smiled and said, yes, yes, the director is waiting for you, sit here a moment, we’ll be with you shortly.

On the table there were copies of the magazine TV y Novelas with pages missing, and cards advertising a plastic surgery clinic selling various comprehensive beauty “combos” in a three-in-one offer: lips, breasts, and hips, or breasts, bottom, and thighs. The offer had expired the previous September.

The secretary came back and said, follow me, and she admitted me to a large office piled high with fashion magazines. A woman who looked familiar was sitting behind the desk. She was probably around fifty, maybe slightly less. You could see the effort she made to keep herself young, the gym and the operations, the diets and implants, the dyed hair.

When she smiled, her name almost came back to me. She gave me her hand and invited me to sit down, a soda? she said, I have Colombiana Light, which is really good. I said yes. Then we sat for a while in silence until she said: Tania tells me you’re looking for Juana and that you already know what she was doing with us. I nodded. Tania thinks you may be able to help me, I said. I took my folder from my backpack with the list of places where we had been looking and the missing persons report.

The former Miss Colombia let me read to the end, listening attentively, and then said, look, I’m going to tell you something, what happened to Juana has nothing to do with that, she hasn’t disappeared, and she certainly isn’t dead, let me explain. What we do here is absolutely confidential, we never give out details of what our models do, but in this case, because it’s such a delicate matter, I’m going to break the rules. I want you to know that it’s the girls themselves who ask that no information be given to family members or friends, real or supposed, let alone to clients. Those are the rules of the game. Oh, would you mind waiting a second, please, I forgot to take my pill.

She stood up and went into the adjoining bathroom. I started leafing through a magazine, trying to contain my emotions, Juana was alive! I didn’t care about the circumstances, any situation, however disastrous or degrading, was redeemable, my God, my heart was almost coming out of my chest, one of my arms started shaking, and I wanted the woman to take her time coming back.

Suddenly I heard a loud sniff from behind the bathroom door; five seconds later, a second one, even louder. Then the woman came back to her desk.

Sorry about that. Now then, before anything else I want to make it clear to you that what I’m going to tell you you mustn’t repeat anywhere, let alone in front of a judge or anything like that. The reason I’m telling you this is because I want to help you and your family, but in a confidential way, without it leaving these four walls, do you understand what I’m saying?

She looked me in the eyes. Her own eyes were beautiful. One of the few things in her body that didn’t appear altered. I told her she needn’t worry. This was a totally personal search. If Juana’s disappearance had nothing to do with politics there’d be no need for legal action. That seemed to reassure her.

Well, what I can tell you is this: she went to Japan to work. Three years ago.

Japan? I was stunned, incredulous. Japan? You mean she went there to…?

Yes, to work as an escort. She’s making tons of money. At that time I had a good contact, a Colombian woman who received them and put them in the best houses. Everything is very select there. I can tell you my associate was called Maribel, I don’t know her surname, and to tell the truth I haven’t heard from her in more than two years. I think she was detained by immigration, and I don’t know what happened, if they sent her back here or if she’s in prison over there. Apparently her papers weren’t in order. Since that time I haven’t heard from Juana. Look, I can give you this: a copy of your sister’s ticket and travel itinerary. She left from Quito, not from Bogotá. I never knew why and I didn’t ask. I’d already talked to her about the possibility of Japan, and one afternoon she called me up and said she was interested. She asked me to get her a ticket, leaving from Quito, and told me it was critical she didn’t give me any explanation. Here’s the photocopy.

From Quito to São Paulo. From there to Dubai. From there to Bangkok and then to Tokyo. I was puzzled. I didn’t know you could do that route. I asked, why such a long way around?

To avoid visas, darling. You don’t go through the United States or through Europe, you see? A Schengen visa is very difficult to get, and as for the United States, forget it. This way you pass under the radar, if you see what I mean.

I thanked her and put the paper in my pocket. And when did you last hear of her?

The last time was when Maribel wrote to me from Tokyo saying she had arrived and that they were finding a place for her. That was a week after the flight, November 3, 2008. Up until then, I was responsible. From that point on, everyone makes their own life and doesn’t owe anyone an explanation, because we’re talking about adults here, free, independent adults, right? That was the last I heard. A month later I tried to talk to Maribel about another girl who wanted to go, but she took a long time to reply and then, three months later, she wrote and told me she was having legal problems and had to stop. I never heard any more after that.

I looked again at the photocopy of the ticket, and read my sister’s name about ten times. The letters danced in front of my eyes, I couldn’t believe it. At last I had something concrete. The former Miss Colombia stood up and went back to the bathroom. Again I heard two sniffs. Then she came out and said:

It’s possible your sister was arrested along with Maribel. That’s where you could start looking.

I asked her again if she had any contact information for Maribel in Colombia, but she said no. She didn’t even know her last name. Well, I said, you’ve been an enormous help, do I owe you anything? No, come on, said the former Miss Colombia. Go find your sister and when you’re with her tell her I miss her and she should give me a call.

When we said goodbye she gave me a kiss on the cheek.

I went back out on the street, feeling strange. Japan, Quito, what the hell did it all mean? I took the copy of the ticket from my pocket and made two photocopies in the stationery store. On the way home, I read it again at least a hundred times. At the traffic light on Eleventh, a couple looked at me in alarm from their car and I hid my face. I was crying.

When I got home, I locked myself in my room.

I switched on my computer and started searching: Japan, escorts, Colombian women in Japan. There were lots of names and telephone numbers, and I didn’t know what to do. I looked for the Colombian embassy in Japan and the Japanese embassy in Colombia. I copied down all the numbers, a very long list. Also the codes and the time difference. It was eight in the evening in Bogotá, nine the following morning in Tokyo. The timing was right, I was sure to get through. But I didn’t have any money. My heart was still pounding. When I went down to the living room I saw Father on the couch, with his head thrown back and a newspaper open on his lap. He was asleep. As soon as I took one step, he opened his eyes, are you going out at this hour? Yes, I said, and I need money. He looked at me in surprise. How much? About ten thousand pesos, I said. He pointed to his jacket and said, take it from my wallet. With the money in my hand I said goodbye. Thanks, Dad, I won’t be back late. He didn’t reply, but as soon as I opened the door I heard him from the living room, it isn’t to buy drugs, is it?

No, Dad. It isn’t for that. I swear.

That’s good, son. Take care.

I took a bus to the Church of Lourdes, because I’d seen a few call shops in the vicinity. I found one on Eleventh and asked how much it cost to call Tokyo. Seven hundred pesos for a minute. Hell, that’s expensive, I thought. I could only talk for about fifteen minutes. I went to one of the booths, dialed the number of the Colombian embassy, and waited. When the ringing started, my heart began pounding, and a drop of sweat ran down my back. Six rings, seven. They finally answered, and I explained that I was calling from Bogotá, that I had a sister who was lost in Japan, and gave the name and her identity card number. I was about to repeat it when a voice said, please hang on, I’ll put you through to the consulate; there was an internal switchboard noise, followed by some music by Vivaldi. I looked at the digital counter, three minutes and forty-six seconds, and then they answered at last, and I quickly explained that I was calling from Bogotá and that my sister was lost in Tokyo, and the name, and then the official said, can you repeat that, please? one moment, and left me waiting, and I looked at the counter, seven minutes and fifty seconds, my heart was stopping me from breathing, and then the man came back and said, no, there’s no record of anyone with that name, so I asked, what if she’s in prison? and they said, oh, one moment, and again Vivaldi, ten minutes and five seconds, more Vivaldi, twelve minutes and fifty seconds; the voice returned and said, no, there’s nobody registered under that name, all right, thanks, I said, and hung up, fourteen minutes and forty-eight seconds. I paid the ten thousand pesos and went out with my head about to burst.

I went up to Seventh and started walking back, looking at the expanse of the hills, the darker areas between the lights of the buildings and the lampposts, and I was filled with reproaches, questions, guilt: why didn’t you tell me? did you think I was going to judge you? do you think I’d have tried to stop you? It’s possible, it’s possible, where are you at this precise moment, while I’m walking along a horrible avenue filled with buses and vulgar people rushing along the sidewalks?

I got home at eleven. I didn’t want to meet Father in the living room, let alone Mother, so I made a few detours. I was grateful that he hadn’t asked me what the money was for. Ever since Juana had disappeared, he had become more generous toward me. Mother, on the other hand, continued with her suspicions and her silences, and those horrible ironic remarks of hers, a way of dealing with problems that consisted of not discussing them at the time, pretending they didn’t exist, and then bringing them out in front of other people and ridiculing Father. What most bothered me about her was her apparent insensitivity toward what had happened to Juana. I say apparent, Consul, because I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt, after all it was her eldest child, but the truth is, she didn’t give a damn, I’d even say she was pleased. That’s how she was, resentful and evil.

In my room, I went on the Internet and started to look at images of Tokyo: it seemed to me a strange, unreal city. Then I looked out at the night from my window. In Japan it was already the following day, which meant that Juana was in the future. She ran away to the future, I thought. She’s intelligent.

That was the moment, Consul, when I decided to go to Japan and look for her.

The next question, obviously, was, how to get there? Of course the decision was connected to another one, the decision to leave home forever. I couldn’t turn to Father, because if I did I’d have to tell him everything and hurt him even more. I felt that now was the moment, that, as they say in romantic stories, fate was knocking at my door. Knock, knock. The hour had come for me to go. Deciding to do so made me euphoric and I started with the most complicated thing. I took out Juana’s plane ticket, went on a website offering cheap flights, eDreams, and checked the fares. The journey from Bogotá—Juana’s was from Quito — would cost seven thousand dollars. In other words, to find her, I would need at least twice that. About fifteen thousand dollars, thirty million pesos, which was in the realm of fantasy, even for Father.

Where could I get hold of that kind of money? I fell asleep making calculations. Working and saving, it would take at least two years. Out of the question. Sell something? I had nothing of value. Rob? I couldn’t think whom. A sliver of an idea crossed my mind: Father worked in a bank, couldn’t I rob it? After all, Brecht taught us that it’s a worse crime to create a bank than to rob it. But these were idle thoughts, it would be like planting a dagger in Father’s heart, and he’d already been hurt enough.

What to do, then?

I spent a week thinking and nothing occurred to me. Everything that came to mind was impossible or ridiculous. I actually imagined I was robbing a supermarket like the Pomona on Seventh, not far from my house, but I calculated that I would have to rob it at least three times to get the full amount together. It was impossible for someone like me to get hold of that much money.

After a while I hit on an idea that was also fairly desperate, but was the only one that didn’t seem impossible.

The former Miss Colombia.

Maybe she could think of a way for me to make that journey. Without asking for an appointment I went to the modeling agency. The secretary said, oh, you’re back! Obviously you like it, and winked. I wasn’t too sure what she was referring to, but she announced me and the former Miss Colombia received me in the same office, looking rather more of a mess than the first time, maybe due to the fact that there were a half-empty bottle of aguardiente and a plastic cup on the desk. When she saw me, she smiled and said:

How did it go with Juana? did you find her?

I said no, I’d barely started. I told her I’d called the Colombian embassy in Tokyo and that they had no record of her. Nor had she been arrested. I don’t know why I felt the need to tell her all that.

The former Miss Colombia looked at me with interest and offered me a drop of aguardiente. I accepted. Then she went to the bathroom and came back ten seconds later, rubbing her gums with one finger.

So what are you planning to do, darling? she said.

I’m convinced Juana is there and I want to go and find her, I said. I’ve already made up my mind, but I have a problem: the money. The journey costs fifteen thousand dollars and I don’t have it. That’s why I came here. Maybe you can think of a way to finance me, make me a loan, something like that.

The former Miss Colombia didn’t say no immediately, but moved her head up and down.

Okay, okay, she said. It’s difficult, and it is a lot of money, but let me see. Write your cell phone number on this piece of paper, and if I think of something I’ll make sure they call you, and you’ll come, all right?

I thanked her and went out on the street. That she hadn’t said no, or laughed in my face, seemed to me already a success. She was the only person who could help me. Now I just had to wait.

And that was what I did: I waited and waited, nervously watching the display screen of my cell phone. Five or six days went by, I can’t remember exactly, until at last it rang.

Manuel Manrique? a voice asked. You have an appointment at the modeling agency on Friday night at seven. I said I’d be there on time.

Three nervous, frantic days passed. When you’re waiting, time is heavy, impossible to get hold of. I don’t know anything about time.

By 6:40 on Friday evening I was at the door of the building, looking insistently at my watch. I smoked a cigarette, then another. 6:49. I went in slowly and walked up to the third floor. The secretary was more jovial than usual. How delightful of you to come back and see us, she said loudly; but as she said the last words drool ran from her mouth. Very strange.

This time the former Miss Colombia had a bottle of vodka and a cooler. With her was a man who also looked familiar, an old TV heartthrob whose name I couldn’t remember.

They poured me a drink. She was the one who spoke first.

I’ve been thinking over what you told me about Tokyo, but the truth is, what we might be interested in is Bangkok. I told her that my sister’s journey had taken her through Bangkok.

She and the man looked at each other for a moment and nodded. Then he spoke.

We’d be prepared to pay for your entire journey, to give you the fifteen thousand dollars, but you have to bring us back a small case some friends of ours in Bangkok are sending us.

And what’s in this case? I said, although, Consul, you’d have had to be an idiot not to realize that it was something to do with drugs. I knew where I was and who they were, but my need was great and required me to take risks. Beggars can’t be choosers.

Some pills, the kind that people take in discos, the man said. It’s no problem, my friends there will help you to pack them. We’ve already done it lots of times and nothing ever happens.

It was my only chance and I thought I’d be able to get away from them. Or that I’d come back with her. When I was with Juana, we’d find a way to get out of this. So I said yes.

I accept. What do I have to do?

A relatively simple process started. I had to go to 100th Street to get a passport. Then decide on a date. The Holy Week holidays would be ideal in order not to arouse suspicion. They agreed. That was less than a month away. They gave me half a million pesos for the preparations: a suitcase, vacation clothes, things for the journey, a diary, a camera, I had to make my journey credible. They asked for my address in Bogotá and my parents’ names. That bothered me, since I knew that if I didn’t do what they wanted they would go looking for them. But that would be after Juana, and with her the problems of the world would cease to exist. Together we could face anything, so I gave them the dates, the names, I told them where my father worked, the telephone number of his office.

They checked it in front of me, calling him, telling him it was a special offer of a trip to Cartagena de Indias, to which he, of course, answered no and told them to go to hell and hung up on them, insulting them for calling him and bothering him during working hours, which was very much like him, of course, a trip to Cartagena de Indias? what an idea.

I couldn’t keep the things at home, so I left them at the modeling agency.

One Thursday, I arrived after five in the evening to leave a digital camera that I had gotten hold of, secondhand, at the Lago shopping mall, and the secretary opened the door to me, smiling from ear to ear. She was more cheerful than usual and said, come in, darling, can I help you?

I explained it to her and she came with me to the office of the former Miss Colombia, who wasn’t there. I bent down to open the suitcase and put in the camera and a memory stick.

When I turned around, I saw that she was lifting her skirt and showing me her shaved pubis; the strange thing is that she was laughing and at the same time drooling, a strange expression, either of stupidity or anal dilation, so I said to her, are you all right? and she said, oh, darling, don’t you think I’m pretty or what? look how sexy I am, and she reached out her hand and said, here, take this and she came up to me and gave me a red pill, take it, handsome, and just see how good you feel.

I put it under my tongue without swallowing it and straightened up, but she threw herself on me and tried to kiss me, and in the struggle I ended up swallowing the damned pill; a minute later I felt a tickling in my blood, a great calm, and a desire for lots of things, as if my body and my skin couldn’t cope, and then the woman led me over to a couch, pulled down my trousers, and started to suck my cock. A mountain of sugar dissolved in my veins, and I lost all notion of time. Suddenly she turned, put herself on all fours, kneeling on the couch, and said, will you fuck me, darling? I stopped seeing her, there was nothing in front of me but a spiral of colors, like fireworks.

I regained consciousness on the street, walking to Seventh with the sun behind me, in the middle of a violent sunset that brought out the outlines of the hills and turned them into masses of color, like paintings by Rothko; I walked along, feeling strong, and told myself, all this is about to change, for the first time my life is going to be truly mine.

When I got to Eleventh I had a hallucination: Juana was sitting in the branches of a willow tree, next to a shop selling cell phones. With her hand, she said to me, come, Manuel, come, and she whispered, I’m waiting for you, you’ll find me if you follow the signs I left, a path of shiny leaves in the wood, a symbolic wood, like the one in Baudelaire, you’ll see, it’ll be easy, and when we’re together we’ll go to another planet, the one you’re going to create with your imagination for the two of us, so that both of us can be happy.

Five days later, I left my home forever.

I said goodbye to Father, who was in the dining room underlining and analyzing the newspaper, which he did every morning before going to work. I put my hand on his shoulder and said, goodbye, Dad, look after yourself. He looked at me for a moment, a little surprised, but didn’t say anything; then I waved goodbye to Mother, who barely responded, just lifted her chin slightly.

By ten, I was at the airport. The flight to São Paulo wasn’t leaving until past noon. The former Miss Colombia and her friend went with me as far as Immigration. In the Juan Valdez Café, before boarding, the man gave me an envelope with five thousand dollars, which I put in my jacket. I already had a list with the telephone numbers and names I had to contact, and in any case, they said, someone would be waiting for me at the airport. In Bangkok I would spend a couple of days making those contacts. Once that was done, and everything was ready, I would go to Tokyo for a week to look for my sister. Then I would go back to Bangkok to pick up the merchandise and make the return journey to Colombia. They agreed that, in that way, I would arouse less suspicion. It was a simple plan.

My secret plan was different: once I found Juana in Japan, I’d get lost. Nothing else mattered to me anymore.

They went with me to the international departures entrance and said goodbye with big hugs, as if they were my parents. I was trembling slightly as I walked to Immigration.

I was leaving Bogotá, leaving Colombia. I couldn’t believe it.

The Immigration officer asked me a routine question, where are you traveling to? São Paulo, I replied, showing my boarding pass. He stamped my passport. I passed through baggage check, where they searched me a couple of times. I went into the duty-free shop. Then I sat down in the departure lounge and looked at the other passengers, the hustle and bustle, the rush.

When I got on the plane everything was new. They gave me a window seat, just behind the wing. Was I nervous? Yes, a little. The movie of my whole life passed through my mind, the way they say it happens when you’re about to die. Next to me sat a young Brazilian girl with an iPod. She smelled good and was very beautiful. When she leaned forward she revealed the top half of her tanned ass. She asked me if I was going to Brazil on vacation. A few moments later, the plane started moving and taxied to the runway. It gathered speed and I sank into my seat. I felt a strange pleasure and a second later saw my hated city from above.

Poor, wretched Bogotá, I thought, I’m never going to see you again.

The plane did a number of turns until I lost sight of it. I felt something strange running down my cheeks. I was crying again.

I crossed the world. I flew over the Amazon and the Atlantic. I passed over Africa and reached the Persian Gulf. Then Asia Minor, India, and finally, the Malay Peninsula and my first destination, Thailand.

At Bangkok airport I was absolutely determined to get away from the former Miss Colombia and her partner, so once I’d collected my baggage, I slipped away through the crowd, hailed a taxi, and went to a hotel that I had chosen over the Internet with that in mind. It wasn’t the one they had booked for me and I thought that this way I could evade them. To avoid upsets, I stayed in my room after registering. The plan was not to go out until three days had passed, during which time I would wait before carrying on to Tokyo.

I’m not naive, I knew they would look for me and raise the alarm. The only thing I could do was remain hidden, not move, and each day would be a small triumph. The first one was like that. There were no strange movements. That night, I went down and ate in the cafeteria and didn’t see anything threatening, although the service people looked at me with strange expressions. Twelve thousand miles from my city, everything was bound to be strange, I told myself. The second day was the same, and I ventured outside. To be on the safe side, I took the money, the passport, and the ticket with me. If they came to my room they could keep everything, nothing that was in the case mattered to me. I went down to the river and crossed it in a canoe. I saw the skyline of the city in the sunset and it struck me as sad. The river was sad too, as if it was carrying along with it something that never get completely clean, as if it was running through a membrane that was about to burst painfully.

When night fell I had dinner in a restaurant that had a terrace over the Chao Phraya. I kept looking at it, hypnotized by that desolation. I should have listened to what it was telling me, but I couldn’t understand it. I got back to the hotel at eleven that night and lay down to sleep, thinking that the following day, very early, I would go to the airport. At six in the morning someone knocked at the door. I was scared and stayed in bed, hoping they would go away, which was highly unlikely. They knocked more loudly and I got up and looked through the peephole. They were police officers and that calmed me down. I opened the door and asked what was going on, but instead of answering they pushed me with my face against the wall. Then they handcuffed me and took me out into the corridor.

They brought me here and the rest you know. They found those pills in my case, but they weren’t mine, I didn’t put them there. I was trying to escape and they caught me, and that was the punishment. The police know that. I haven’t committed any crime.

15

Manuel stopped speaking and sat there in silence, in the darkest corner of his cell. I supposed it was the first time he had spoken so much, the first time he had told his life story in such an extensive and desperate way. It was clear to me that he wanted to save himself. That was the deep meaning of his story: a cry for help. Then he said:

“Consul, the reason I told you all this is because I want to ask you something. Find her for me. Go to Tokyo and bring back Juana. That may seem a lot to ask, but it’s my last request. Think of it as the final wish of a condemned man.”

I was silent for a moment, looking at him. In spite of everything, he still believed in something. He was barely twenty-seven years old, that must have been it. We soon forget our youth and what it entails. I noted down a few names. This wasn’t really my role, I was thinking, but I’d once written: “When you know the right thing to do, the hard thing is not to do it.” That phrase had acquired a new meaning, its eloquence was showing me the way, there in the hot, dirty air of Bangkwang.

I said yes, I would go and find her, but in return he had to plead guilty to save his life.

“If you find her, my life is hers,” Manuel said. “I’ll do whatever Juana says.”

When I left, it was pouring rain. Another of those tropical downpours that arrive suddenly and obscure the air. I refused the tea offered me by one of the prison trusties and walked back to my taxi. The driver was asleep in the backseat.

We returned to the city beneath columns of water and roaring clouds. The paddy fields glittered, illuminated by a slanting sun that came from another part of the sky. I went straight to see the lawyer, thanked him for arranging my visit, and again asked him to take personal charge of the case. As he spoke, I saw that he had an open book on the table. It was The History of Rome by Jules Michelet, in an English translation. Once again he had surprised me.

Noticing that I was looking at the book, he said:

“You know what I’ve always thought? It’s curious that your culture, Western culture, comes from that crazy empire, with its Caligulas and its Heliogabaluses. It’s no surprise that you’re living through such an incomprehensible era today.”

I looked at him with approval. I thought to say something but preferred to keep silent, now was not the time to start a historical discussion.

“The day after tomorrow I’m going back to Delhi,” I said. “I’ll call you frequently, and keep in contact. It’s important to know the date of the hearing in time. My compatriot is ready to plead guilty, but I’d prefer things to be cleared up before that, I hope the police can get at the truth. He’s innocent, I have no doubt of that.”

The old lawyer looked at me in silence. “It’s good that he’s innocent,” he said, “that’ll make things easier. The truth always comes out in the end. Don’t worry, Consul. You can go knowing I’ll be taking up the reins of the case and keeping you informed.”

From there I called Teresa, I wanted to say goodbye. We arranged to meet at seven that evening in the bar of the Blue Elephant. Then I went down onto the street and walked aimlessly until I reached a place called Paradise Tower. It was a shopping mall. On one of its avenues there was a little bar that looked out on a park and there I sat down and watched the people. The rain had stopped. I ordered a double gin with lemon and ice. A second later, a young girl sat down beside me. She was wearing white hot pants that looked like cream against her skin. The color of her nails and heels didn’t match. She asked me what my name was, where I was from, if I was alone, and if I’d buy her a drink. I told her she could order whatever she liked, but that I wasn’t looking for company. She ordered a Singha beer and moved slowly away, looking back at me.

I kept thinking about Manuel’s story. “Let me say something that may surprise you, this isn’t going to be a crime story, it’s going to be a love story.” Now I understood those mysterious words of his, and he was right. It was a love story.

Listening to him, Bogotá had come back to me, the city I, too, had fled, although for other reasons. I knew Manuel’s neighborhood well, lower Santa Ana. My friend Mario Mendoza lived there. Did he know the family? It was possible.

Soon afterwards I went back to the hotel and wrote to Gustavo:

I already have the story, you don’t need to search further. I talked to him and he told me everything. It’s a real mess. I’ll tell you the details later. He remembers you with affection. Big hug.

I reread my notes: Maribel, Colombian Consulate, November 3, 2008. I didn’t even have her passport number.

I had accepted the mission to find her, and, somehow, I had already started. What did she look like? I put her name on the Internet and found an old and probably invalid Facebook membership. There was no photograph of her, just the image of some native children, maybe Wayuu or Paez, the picture wasn’t clear.

At seven I went out and hailed a taxi.

Teresa was waiting for me in the Blue Elephant, drinking a pink cocktail. What is it? I asked. A Singapore Sling, she said. I had tried it in the bar of the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, where it was invented. It appears in Somerset Maugham’s story “The Letter.” I still have a poster with an image of a bartender and some special glasses. But I preferred a very dry martini.

The place was very grand, with high ceilings, large windows, and leather chairs. The walls had gold veneer. It reminded me of the Coupole in Paris, with wooden window panels and fans with blades. Like the Long Bar of the Raffles or the Batavia in Jakarta. British colonial architecture.

Obsessively, I told her Manuel’s story, the way in which, in spite of the difference in age — I was almost twenty years older than he — he took me back in his story to the Bogotá of my adolescence, to those walks on foot through dark streets, in the early morning cold and the drizzle.

“So he was looking for his sister,” Teresa said, “and now you’re going to look for her.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll have to go to Japan.”

“You’ve spotted a good story and you can’t resist it,” Teresa said, biting the olive as she spoke. “That’s fine. I assume I’ll read it eventually.”

“It’s possible,” I said, “but it isn’t going to be a crime story. It’s going to be a love story. That’s what Manuel said.”

“All the better,” Teresa said. Then she turned and asked the bartender for another round. I gave her a grateful look.

“Each person drinks what he needs, and in your case what you need can be read on your face. We’ll have dinner later.”

“Jesus,” I exclaimed, “you’re my ideal woman.”

“My ex-husband said the same, but as soon as I had my daughters, I crossed the imaginary line of forty, my tits started drooping, and he went off with a twenty-eight-year-old, so you can shake hands.”

We laughed.

“Not all bad men are equal,” I said, “there is no solidarity of gender.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m speaking in double entendres.”

We drank until three in the morning in two different bars. Before we parted, Teresa took my arm.

“And what about you and me? How are we?”

I gave her a big hug and said, “You and I are very good.”

Then I got into a taxi and went back to my hotel.

The next day, at three in the afternoon, I caught a plane back to Delhi.