Night Prayers

1

Ah, Bangkok.

The rain and the solitude bring back memories. My notebook is filling up with question marks, arrows, parentheses. I long to reach a point of no return. I already reached it, but in life, where there is no return possible, where could one return to? Nowhere.

It’s 10:32 in the morning and I’m sitting in a bar on Silom Street with a somewhat extravagant name, Mr. Oyster, a Singha beer in my hands. It’s hot. The bottle still has little strands of ice from the refrigerator, tiny stalagmites around the label. I stroke the cold glass and feel a shiver on my skin.

I’m very happy.

The notebook (I’m already on my second) makes me look like an expatriate: an exiled industrialist or even an old actor who’s been forgotten by everybody, someone who’s come down in the world in spite of having been on a winning streak years earlier, before things like drugs, divorce proceedings, and alcohol took him away from the screen. I’d like to look like an intellectual, but that doesn’t exist anymore. The gloom of this place protects me and the other customers, that fat man between fifty and sixty, that ancient, toothless woman, that young man trembling as he drinks something that, seen from here, looks like — and I sincerely hope is — a Bloody Mary, anyway, all of them will be my company, though I don’t think I’ll talk to them. I like to drink alone, to slowly immerse myself without anybody interfering.

Through a side window I can see the sky, rough at this hour, the few clouds laden with something dense. Clouds presaging thunder and lightning. Will they add something to my notebook?

The infinite shapes of clouds.

Anyway, my one wish, in this cool corner of Mr. Oyster, is to be alone. If certain precautions are taken, there will be no surprises. It’s easy to avoid everything I hate, and now I have to carry on before this page bursts.

2

As if somebody up there was manipulating the threads of this story, the day after I got back to Delhi, as I was sorting through the mail in the office, I received an incredible proposition: the Cervantes Institute in Tokyo was inviting me to take part in a symposium on Colombian literature two weeks later. I would be there with the writers Enrique Serrano and Juan Gabriel Vásquez. I almost fell off my chair! I accepted immediately, incredulous at the happy coincidence (someone else must have declined the offer at the last moment). I wrote to the Colombian consul in Japan to tell him I was coming and, in passing, asked for information about Juana Manrique, giving the date of arrival that Manuel had given me. He said he would check on the list of people registered with the consulate and get back in touch.

Two days later he replied saying that the name was there, but that they had no recent news of her. Why had they told Manuel she wasn’t registered with them? Maybe they’d been negligent, maybe the page hadn’t been very clear, or they’d simply acted in haste. Things done and said on the telephone are usually vague and imprecise, but how happy he would have been if they’d told him she was on their list.

The consul went on to say that Juana Manrique had given the address of a hotel, and that she had never voted in elections. He added something that I already knew: many leave the country without bothering to inform the consulate, the fact that someone is registered only means they were here once.

All of us were here once.

The consul was a religious person and ended his letter with a biblical allusion: on his list, he said, he didn’t know who was who, or what they did, which was why we would have to wait for the last day, when the Lord — he wrote it with a capital letter — came to separate the good from the bad. I didn’t have a Bible to hand to check what exactly he was talking about, but I was impressed all the same.

I flew to Tokyo soon afterwards, feeling nervous and excited.

What a strange city. My first, fairly rapid, observation led me to the conclusion that it was in the future, but then, thinking of Delhi and Bogotá, I realized that Tokyo is indeed the future, but only of Tokyo.

Tokyo is the future of Tokyo.

On this kind of trip, I’m always in the habit of referring to literature, to see what other people have written and said. Books and poetry are my Lonely Planet. And so I found, for example, that when Marguerite Yourcenar arrived in Tokyo in 1982 she exclaimed: “My God, eleven million robots!” She couldn’t get past that caricature, that paternalistic image that Europeans have of Asia. Not the case with Richard Brautigan, who married a Japanese woman in 1978. Americans are (or were) better travelers, demanding nothing of the places they visit. The marriage lasted only two years, but Brautigan remained in Tokyo, until his life, as his biographers say, “dissolved into alcohol and insomnia.” An interesting dissolution. Brautigan liked haiku and wrote this:

I like this taxi driver,

racing through the dark streets of Tokyo

as if life had no meaning.

I feel the same way.

We were being put up at the Sheraton Miyako on Shirokanedai in Minato, near the residence of the Colombian embassy, a luxury hotel with a beautifully tended inner garden opposite the lobby, reminding one that gardening is one of the Japanese fine arts (through it you can learn about Buddhism).

The dinner to welcome us to the symposium was at seven-thirty in the evening, so I had time to get organized without having to rush. I went to a 7-11 to see what I could find of interest, and ended up buying a liter of gin for the same price as a little bottle at the hotel. I asked room service for some ice and soon afterwards they sent up the most beautiful ice bucket I had ever seen in my life, with cubes that looked as if they’d only just been invented, as if they came straight from Plato’s Cave: aseptic, perfect, symmetrical. I suppose these things happen to everybody on their first visit to Japan.

At the dinner, after the formal greetings and expressions of gratitude, Enrique Serrano gave us a wide-ranging talk about Japanese culture, including historical, political, and economic aspects, and then, at about eleven, we were driven back to the hotel. Once in my room, I asked for a little more of that Swarovski ice and sat down to read a novel by Kenzaburo Oe, but found I couldn’t concentrate. I was extremely anxious about the chances of finding Juana and, of course, taking her to Bangkok.

The consul was waiting for me the following day.

The branches of the trees swayed in the wind, and the cold of winter was already in the air. A leaf dancing, an empty sidewalk, the dark cherry trees, the drizzle. Everything seemed made for a haiku.

The office was next to the residence, a big, impressive building surrounded by gardens that evoked the Japanese forests with their spirits and demons.

I told the consul who Juana Manrique was and why I was looking for her. He ordered two cups of coffee, we sat down by the window, and he pointed to the clouds. They move very fast here, had I noticed? No, I said. He was a friendly man, a bit out of the ordinary. He was interested in the story of what had happened to Manuel Manrique in Bangkok, and wanted to know if we had hired a lawyer. In his experience as a jurist, he thought that the most desirable thing would be to transfer the sentence to Colombia. The problem, once again, was not having an embassy. Countries look at these things with a lot of suspicion. Then he told me his own suspicion, or rather his hypothesis: Juana Manrique hadn’t come to Tokyo to study Japanese, as she had stated when she registered with the consulate, but to work as a prostitute; that was why they’d had no further news of her. I agreed, omitting to tell him that I already knew that.

“They get them here through deception,” the consul went on, “although to be honest, the deception has more to do with some of the details than the basics, if I can put it that way. They know they’re going to work as prostitutes, but they think they’ll be high-class escorts, working a few times a week, and above all, that they’ll be able to decide the terms. That’s what they’re promised. But when they get here, things are very different. They’re forced to work on the street, which makes them very frustrated. If they show promise and gain the trust of their bosses, they get promoted to working in hotels. The trade is controlled by the Japanese Mafia. The girls are known as ‘talents’; they work in places called theater bars, where they have to do striptease, pose for pornographic photographs, and have sex with men who win draws for them. The rest of the time they’re kept in residences and aren’t allowed out, not even one day a week. Their clothes are taken away from them, they live in the nude.”

The consul was well-informed. He said there were about a thousand Colombian women doing this. That was a rough calculation, because they weren’t usually allowed to register with the consulate (the case of Juana Manrique was unusual, which suggested she was at a higher level). Naturally, their passports were taken away.

“It’s a kind of slavery,” he went on. “They’re considered to have incurred a debt, but it’s one they never stop paying off and that keeps growing at the discretion of the lender, which in this case is the Mafia. It’s like Rivera’s The Vortex but in Japan, have you read The Vortex?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s very good. And where do you think she might be?”

“Hard to say. A lot of girls go to Yokohama or Kyoto. Here in Tokyo, there are different zones. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, but it isn’t impossible.”

I made a copy of the registration document for the sake of Juana’s photograph and went back to my hotel. Before I left, the consul took me by the arm and said, almost conspiratorially, look at the color of the leaves on the trees, try to spot the differences, it’s a real source of peace. I told him I would and thanked him. When I’d turned the corner, I pulled out the document and took a good look at the photograph: Juana had very dark, very expressive eyes, and a tense smile.

My God, that was her.

The first thing to do if you’re looking for someone is to use the Internet. I typed in Juana Manrique and got 11,600 results. It’s a very common name, like her brother’s. Adding the word Japan reduced it to 190, but none of them were her. I looked at the kind of people they were but that wasn’t any help either. I tried Juana Manrique + Japan + sexual services, and the figure shot up again: 9,345 results. Then I tried something a little more specialized: Colombian women + sex + Tokyo. Again, an absurd figure: 560,689. Then I thought of another angle and wrote Tokyo + escorts. The first site I clicked on had a telephone number, which I called. Much to my surprise, there was an answering machine and multiple options, with questions I didn’t know how to answer. I replied at random and carried on until I got to an operator. Looking for company in Tokyo? Yes, I said, making it clear that I wanted a Colombian girl.

“A Colombian girl?”

There was a silence and after a while the voice said: “That’s possible. Do you want her now?”

I calculated that I had a few hours free. “Yes,” I said.

“All right, sir, we’ll send her to your hotel right now, she’ll cost five hundred dollars.”

Five hundred dollars? I swallowed and said, looking at Juana’s photograph:

“All right, but she must have natural dark hair and dark eyes, be five and a half feet tall and thirty years old. I don’t want a teenager.”

“Don’t worry, sir, we’ll send someone with the characteristics you’re looking for. Will you be paying by credit card?”

“No. In cash.”

I poured myself a drink and lay down on the bed, feeling nervous. Would it be her? It was absurd to think it would, but whoever came might know her or know something about her, it wasn’t unlikely that the Colombian women here were in contact. I’d seen that in other countries. Economic migrants meet together, organize, support each other. Were there organizations of Latin American women in Japan? There had to be. It could be another lead.

Knock, knock.

My heart skipped a beat. I got up and opened the door.

It was room service, with more ice, so I continued with my deliberations. I tried to think of other possible points of contact. All at once a light came on in my head: a church with a Colombian or Latin American priest who held masses in Spanish. That was the place! Knowing her history, it was most likely that Juana was an atheist, but there might be someone in that church who knew her, or who knew where else in Tokyo you could look for a Colombian girl.

Knock, knock.

This time there was no room for doubt, and I opened the door.

It was a woman of about thirty, with dark skin and dark eyes. About five and a half feet tall. I asked her what her name was and she said, I’m Cindy. Are you Colombian? Yes, she said, from Cartago. From her northwestern accent I realized she wasn’t Juana, but physically speaking, even though she was a bit different than the photograph, she could have been her.

She didn’t react when I told her we were compatriots, only asked me to pay her and then walked to one side, with her cell phone in her hand.

“I’m sorry, I have to call my mamiya and confirm, it won’t take a moment.”

Mamiya? That must be her protector. Then she sat down on the bed and told me that for that price I was entitled to a blowjob and complete “frontal sex.” Anything else would be extra, which struck me as fair. I asked her how long and she said, thirty minutes, forty maximum. I said that to start with we could talk for a while, that I preferred to use the time asking her a few things.

“You aren’t going to ask me difficult questions, are you?”

“No,” I said, “only easy ones. Do you know a Colombian girl named Juana Manrique? She lives here in Tokyo.”

She looked up at the ceiling and shook her head. I explained to her that she was from Bogotá and I showed her the photograph, fully aware that in a situation like this, even if she knew her, even if she was her best friend, she’d be most likely to say no… out of fear, or because she didn’t know who I was, or didn’t know the reason for my interest.

Cindy looked at the photograph and said she looked like a number of Colombian women she had known, but she wasn’t sure, and the name didn’t ring any bells. She had been in Japan for six years and had seen lots of girls come and go. I offered her a drink and she accepted; by the second sip, she seemed more trusting, so I told her who I was and why I was looking for Juana.

“I’m a consul,” I said, “and I’d like to help her. She doesn’t know it, but she’s involved in a problem I’d like to help solve.”

My explanation convinced her and she started to lower her guard. Juana did sound vaguely familiar, but she really wasn’t sure, all the same she’d think about it. I asked her if she was happy with her life and she said she was lucky; it had been hard at first, but now it was better and she could send money to her mother, who was bringing up her son in Cartago. She began by working on the street, like the others, never knowing who the guy was who was taking her to the hotel on the corner, or sometimes into his car; she’d feel scared, or disgusted, or even amused at the things Japanese men asked her to do: spit in their mouths, urinate on their faces, hit them with the heel of her shoe.

“These people are so regimented that the only time they let themselves go and enjoy life is when they have sex,” she said, “but they aren’t violent, I’ll say that for them. The thing is, the language sounds very abrupt and you always think they’re telling you off, but deep down they’re affectionate, they help you, they have feelings, they even give tips.”

In the two years she was on the street, her knees frozen with cold from lowering and raising her stockings so much (that’s how she put it), nothing untoward ever happened to her.

I asked her if there was a group of Colombian friends and she said, yes, but not an official one, just a bunch of Latin American girls who got together in a Latino restaurant called La Caverna, in the Shinjuku district.

Then I gave her my telephone number and e-mail address. She promised to call me if she found out anything. As I poured her a third drink, she got a call on her cell phone and she stiffened again.

“It’s my mamiya,” she said.

She spoke with her hand over the phone. When she hung up she said, I have to go, but if you want me again I can arrange it. I walked her to the door and said: I can’t now, but I’ll be here until Sunday and I’d love to see you again. She smiled and walked down the corridor to the elevators.

I opened my notebook and wrote: La Caverna, Shinjuku district.

That night we had a presentation at the Cervantes Institute. We talked about literature, our careers, and our relationship with the work of Gabriel García Márquez, which is an obligatory question. As I listened to either Juan Gabriel or Enrique talking, I can’t remember which, I looked out at the audience and, suddenly, I was almost certain that Juana was in the hall. A sociology student from the National University wouldn’t miss an event like this. My heart started pounding and I began looking along each row. The lights in the hall had been dimmed, and there were two spotlights shining directly at the platform, blinding me. But I did the best I could, starting from the front rows and moving back.

It’s a well-known fact that audiences for this kind of event, and for literature in general, are made up mostly of women — there are authors with a great practical sense who aim their writings at them — which is why that night, at the Cervantes Institute in Tokyo, there were at least three possible Juanas in every row.

But as I was scrutinizing the upper part of the hall, where it was darkest, I spotted a woman sitting alone in the left-hand corner. She had taken a seat some distance from the others, as if afraid to be recognized. Her age was right for Juana, so I looked straight at her, seeking out her eyes, trying to establish a modicum of contact, but at that very moment I heard the voice of the presenter saying my name and I realized it was my turn, so I started talking. I spoke a little about everything, about my life and the things I’d read and what it might mean to be a writer in this strange era, to be a Latin American writer and as if that weren’t enough a Colombian, if that still made any sense at all, if it meant something in aesthetic terms or was only an avatar that bound us to a series of landscapes, problems and complexes, to a common frame of mind and a fairly grim history, a fast-paced reality and a way of speaking, and all this transplanted to literature, where, for many, to be a Colombian seemed to oblige us to deal with certain themes and above all to deal with those themes in a particular way, which was why my generation and the ones after us were trying to escape all that, trying to be just writers, and I added that in our part of the world, being a writer was a highly uncertain and probably unhappy existence because of the helpless state, the neglect and poverty in which most of our writers grew old and died, or because of the fact that, once you reached a certain level of recognition, that became an excuse to ridicule you on the part of those who hadn’t made it or had made it some time ago and had seen their own success devalued by newcomers, not to mention the critics, most of whom were writers or frustrated writers, although as my friend Jorge Volpi says, “a literary critic isn’t a frustrated writer. A literary critic is a frustrated literary critic.”

These last words I threw out as a provocation, to see if they generated a debate, but instead of that there was laughter. I looked anxiously at the top left-hand corner of the hall and saw that the woman was no longer there. Could it have been Juana? I was starting to get impatient, I wanted the discussion to be over so that we could go up to the restaurant, where we were supposed to be having cocktails, since I assumed that the “shadow woman”—as I dubbed her — would be there to have a drink and a bite to eat before leaving. That, at any rate, was what I’d done in Paris in the years before I made it: I’d go to parties and receptions and eat and drink whatever I could, storing up the calories for harder times, which usually started when I left and walked out onto the street.

After an amusing story by Enrique about his years in the Colombian merchant navy, in which he called the ships “floating monasteries,” ideal for the study of philosophy and religion, the audience finally applauded and we started for the top floor, where wine, Serrano ham, and Spanish omelet awaited us.

In a state of great excitement, I managed to get away from those members of the audience who were trying to ask more questions, and went up to the restaurant. Oh, the relief! The mystery woman was there! But when I approached her, the mystery dissolved into thin air, because she was Spanish.

Hello, she said, how are you? What an interesting symposium, really, it’s been ages since we last had anything like this, do you live in India? Sadly, I couldn’t stay to the end, I had to come up here to make sure everything was ready.

She worked for the Cervantes Institute.

I quickly had a look around the other women present in the hope of spotting Juana, but none of them really looked like her, they were all exchange students, young girls who of course were a long way from the kind of life I was investigating. I did actually ask three of them if they knew a restaurant called La Caverna, in Shinjuku. They said no, but one of them took out her iPhone and within a second was writing down the address in a notebook.

I thanked her, then slowly, trying to emulate the invisible man, walked to the door. But just as I got there, I ran into the hosts and felt obliged to ask them if anything else had been arranged. They said yes, there was a dinner after this aperitif, so I had to wait.

At eleven at night, when it was all over — luckily things there finish early — they dropped us at the hotel and I immediately left again. I called a taxi, with my paper in my hand. Then I sank into the seat and watched the streets pass by, the flamboyant neon signs, that other nocturnal sky, an apocalypse of facades, skyscrapers that seem to burn, covered with lava or igneous winds, small planets in collision.

The taxi pulled up outside a low door with a descending staircase. Restaurante La Caverna. The street was narrow and there were lots of people on the sidewalks even though it was late. I got out of the taxi and was taken aback when I converted the price of the ride into euros (this investigation was going to ruin me!). I entered the restaurant, which now that it was after midnight was already turning into a bar, and ordered a pisco sour. There were couples sitting at tables and on high stools. Everything seemed totally normal. Latin women? Of course there were, lots of them. Almost all of those here. So I approached a waitress.

“Hello, are you Peruvian?”

“Yes,” she said.

She was about twenty-five.

”Have you been working here long?”

“Yes, to pay for my studies.”

The pisco sour was good, I finished it in one go and asked for another. When she brought it, we carried on talking.

“A friend from Colombia recommended this place to me,” I said. “Her name is Juana Manrique, do you know her?”

She thought about it for a moment, then looked up and said: the name sounds familiar, is she dark?

“Well,” I said, “that depends what you mean by dark. She has white skin, and dark hair and eyes. Here’s her photograph, do you recognize her?”

She looked at it, smiled, and said, yes, I’ve seen her, but she hasn’t been in for a while.

“She was always with two Colombian girls and a Japanese man,” she added. “A guy who never laughed, he looked like a bodyguard.”

I asked her for a third pisco sour.

“I’m sure he was a bodyguard,” I said. “Do you know what she was involved in?”

The waitress stopped and looked at me inquisitively, as if putting two and two together. When she spoke again, her tone of voice had changed.

“You know something, that sounded strange… I don’t think she recommended this place to you. I don’t think you know her, you’re looking for her, that’s it, who are you?”

“A friend of Manuel, her brother,” I said. “Juana has to go back to Bogotá, there are things she has to resolve urgently. I’m a diplomat. Do you remember the names of the Colombian girls who came with her? What did they look like? Do you remember anything about them?”

She looked at me with an earnest expression. “I’m not getting into trouble by talking to you, am I?”

“No,” I said, “I’ve already told you who I am. You’ll actually be doing Juana a favor if you help me find her.”

How difficult it is to persuade someone to do or say something they have no interest in doing or saying. You have to appeal to feelings like curiosity or a wish to save someone, if they have them. It’s exhausting. If this were a movie and the screenwriters had given me the role of an interrogator with a suspect to question, it might have been easier. There are codes and clear identities. You can hit the table or make the suspect laugh. But not here. I was nobody to her. Just a stranger coming late into her restaurant, ordering drinks, and asking unusual questions. Obviously, our paths might never have crossed in the first place, and now that they had her life would still be the same if she didn’t save anybody tonight. I realized she was reading my thoughts when she said:

“And what do I get out of this?”

It was an enormous relief to hear her say that. “It depends on what you want to get out of it,” I said.

She thought this over, then looked at me slyly. “This city is very expensive, I could give you those two names for a hundred dollars, and if you want me to go to your hotel that’ll be another two hundred, as long as you pay for the taxi rides.”

I loved her.

When we got to the Sheraton she went straight to the bathroom. I heard the water running in the shower. After a day’s work, I thought, a clean, warm place like this must have been paradise. It certainly was for me. I took advantage of her being in the bathroom to call room service and ask for one of their artistic ice buckets, and when it came I looked at it for a while. Each cube could have been a diamond.

Finally she came out with a towel covering her shoulders. She was wearing a thong. There was a slight flaccidness below the navel, and her lined belly hung over the elastic. She had been pregnant. I fantasized for a while about her pussy, but preferred to have a drink, so I said to her, put on one of my T-shirts, it’ll cover you better. Oh, and what’s your name?

“Aurora,” she said.

Then she gave me the names of the Colombian girls: Susana Montes and Natalia Collazos. She called on them for work at weekends and they helped her out, but she had never seen Juana again.

“Can we call them now?” I said.

”Of course, but wait, aren’t you going to offer me a drink?”

I poured it for her, adding two slices of lemon, while she dialed the numbers. Then I heard her talking:

“Hello? Susy? Yes, it’s me, how’s it going? Listen, a friend wants to talk to you, it’s something important, could you see him tomorrow? Yes? He’s Colombian, I’d like to introduce you to him, can you come to La Caverna?”

She held the telephone away from her and said: what time? I looked at my diary, it would have to be about midnight, is that possible? Aurora told her and nodded. Perfect, midnight tomorrow.

I hadn’t thought it would be so easy, let alone so quick, to arrange it, and neither had Aurora.

“And now what? Do you really not want me to do anything for you?”

I poured myself another gin. “Nobody said that, but for now let’s drink.”

She left just before dawn, when the subway opened. I lay in bed thinking about everything that had happened since my arrival in Bangkok.

Through the window I saw the night at its darkest point and imagined Manuel in his cell, hoping that my strength or my intuition or even my lack of scruples would help me find Juana and take her away with me.

The following day, there was an arranged visit to the National Museum. An imposing place, surrounded by red and sepia-colored trees. All totally symmetrical and perfect. They explained to us the rules of battle and code of honor of the samurai. Also that it took them three days to dress for those battles. I remembered Kurosawa’s film Kagemusha, in which a simple archer fires off a blind shot in the middle of the night.

After this we had the afternoon free, then in the evening a debate with pupils and teachers of the Faculty of Hispanic Studies at the University of Tokyo. Much to my surprise, the Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya was in the audience, there on a grant from the Japan Foundation. One of the teachers, a friend of his, had told him we were coming and he wanted to say hello. I had met him years earlier, in Madrid, along with Rodrigo Rey Rosa.

When the talk was over, the professors invited us to an informal dinner at a beer hall in Shibuya, which pleased me, because it was near La Caverna (or so I assumed). We drank beer from pitchers, ate dozens of little dishes of exquisite fish, talked about the divine and the human, and, of course, about Japanese literature: about the writer who was the most widely read and most fashionable outside Japan, Murakami; and about Oe, who for me was the best; as well as Tanizaki, a classic, as was Kawabata — his story “First Snow on Fuji” is a masterpiece — the indescribable Mishima, much admired by Marguerite Yourcenar; or the strange Osamu Dazai, who led a dissolute life in Tokyo. Of course nobody knew the Burns Bannion novels, all set in Japan and with openings like this: “I’ve never seen a bottle of beer broken into so many pieces of chiisai. A bottle of Sapporo beer, large size.”

When dinner was over, I asked Horacio if he’d like to go somewhere with me, without being any more specific than that. He was surprised that I knew a place in Tokyo, but he said nothing, so we went, and as we walked down the steps at the entrance Aurora approached and greeted me.

“Give us two pisco sours but make four,” I said.

“Sure,” she said.

Then she leaned toward me and whispered in my ear: she’s already in the room, she’s waiting for you, you can talk to her now. I saw her from a distance: a pretty woman, but one who looked as if she’d lived through wars and shipwrecks. Aurora introduced us, brought the drinks, and started talking to Horacio.

Susana’s northwestern accent was even more marked than Cindy’s. I bought her a drink and got straight down to business.

“I’m told you’re a friend of Juana Manrique, that you know her. I’m a friend of her brother Manuel. I’m here on his behalf.”

She gave me a guileless look and said, Manuel? Juana never stopped talking about him, day or night, he was the love of her life.

“That’s why I’d like to know about her, is she still in Japan?”

Susana frowned. “Why are you asking me that? Don’t know where she is, or what?”

A light came on, a warning light. I’d have to take it nice and slowly. The natural defenses of a woman injured by life had been activated. I ordered another pisco sour.

“Manuel’s in prison in Thailand and I’m trying to get him out. Or rather: the Colombian Foreign Ministry is trying to. I’m a diplomat. I’ve come to Japan on personal business and I’m using the opportunity to look for Juana, it’s urgent she should know what’s going on. Manuel’s desperate to see her. He was on his way to Tokyo when he was arrested. He’d been searching for her, did you know she hadn’t been in touch with Manuel for more than three years? did you know that?”

For a while she sat pensively sipping her pisco sour. Then she opened her handbag and took out a pack of menthol cigarettes. She lit one (I was surprised to discover that smoking was permitted in bars in Tokyo).

“Look,” she said, “I knew Juana was running away from something. She loved her brother but didn’t want him to know she was here, especially that she was in this line of work. They kept a close eye on her. When she was working on the street, she always had someone close by, never letting her out of his sight. I don’t know why they treated her like that. We lived together for about eight months. Or rather: they kept us in the same room, locked up. That’s not living. They always had their eye on her. Juana had style, she was well educated and spoke English; she earned a lot of money for them and they didn’t want to lose her.”

I was starting to get impatient. At the other table Horacio was chatting with Aurora.

“I need to talk to her, where is she? It’d take me a long time to explain, but right now it might be a matter of life and death.”

Susana gave me a strange, almost angry look. “She’s not here anymore, she ran away eleven months ago.”

“She ran away?” I cried.

Fortunately the bar was noisy.

But Susana was afraid to say too much, to go into details. She may have been questioned many times, maybe threatened. I felt as if I was stepping on shifting sands. I ordered another two piscos and took out my diplomatic passport.

“You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to, here’s my passport, I have nothing to hide. You can tell me where she went and nothing will happen to you. As soon as I know where she is I’ll go find her, that’s what her brother would have done. I promised him.”

Susana breathed in deeply, then took a long sip of her drink. “She went to Tehran with her Iranian bodyguard. They fell in love and he tried to pay her debt. They wouldn’t accept it and one day they disappeared. We never heard from her again. They kept me locked up for a month because of it.”

Tehran, Tehran, I thought. And what was the bodyguard’s name?

She thought for a moment, lit another cigarette, as if calling on her memory, and finally said: I don’t know his name, they called him Jaburi.

La Caverna closed at two o’clock, but we went and had a last drink at a nearby bar that was like a doll’s house, with a very low ceiling and a kind of little wooden balcony around each table. Japanese beer is very good. While we were in this second bar, we heard ringing. It was Susana’s cell phone. She spoke for a while with her hand over the receiver and when she hung up she said she had to go. I told her that if she was going to the Sheraton I’d take her. She laughed and said, no, cheeky, it’s another hotel.

It was already after three, so I called a taxi and gave Horacio a farewell hug, thanking him for the company.

The following day they picked us up early to visit the Buddhist temple of Asakusa, and then Kamakura. It was said the French writer and traveler Pierre Loti had been there, and he was an old traveling companion of mine (especially on journeys to Peking, but also to Jerusalem, Turkey, and Morocco). Displaying his proverbial racism, Loti says the Japanese smell of “rancid camellia oil.” All the same, his descriptions of the Buddhist temples are remarkable. I was so upset by what I’d heard about Juana that I barely noticed Kamakura. The temple of the great Buddha is beautiful and harmonious, and surrounded by a colorful garden, but to be honest, having seen the ancient city of Pathan, just outside Kathmandu, it didn’t strike me as anything much. What I liked most was the ride, and the fact that for most of the time we were held up by the heavy traffic on the way out of Tokyo.

That night, my friend Satoko Tamura, the translator, and her silent husband invited me to see the majestic view of the city from the tower on Rappongi Hills — an ocean of lights — and then to have dinner in the Ginza district, with its elegant commercial streets, luxury department stores, and buildings that are screens of liquid glass.

Back in my hotel room, already packing my bag to go back to Delhi, I asked myself why I had been so startled to discover that Juana was in Tehran, until I realized something incredibly obvious: Iran was one of the countries our embassy dealt with! so if, for example, she had requested a new passport or some other consular procedure, it would have had to pass through my hands. I myself would have signed it. I felt dizzy, thinking that I might be close. Unable to wait — it was Friday, I wouldn’t get to Delhi until Saturday — I sent Olympia a message asking her to look through the Tehran files for the name Juana Manrique and saying that we’d talk about it first thing on Monday.

When I got to Delhi, the heat was overpowering.

Every time I traveled anywhere else in Asia — perhaps with the sole exception of Kathmandu — I had the feeling when I got back that Delhi was a real slap in the face: its polluted air, smelling of smoke and kerosene; its streets filled with earth, garbage, and waste, its human anthills, the maddening noise of car horns and sudden accelerations; the permanent dust cloud and the sense that dengue and tetanus and malaria, in other words, everything that’s sickliest and most despicable, float in the very air you breathe; the fecal matter on the walls, the gobs of spittle, the humidity, the horrific diseases and deformities, all these counterpointed with the indolent look of those who survive, the absurdly insulting conspicuous spending of the rich in a country with eight hundred million poor, whose economy, roughly speaking, is based on the fact that two thirds of the population earns paupers’ wages, in short, all this became even more obvious on returning from a city like Tokyo where you don’t encounter unpleasant smells, not even in the fish market. Of course, its equivalent in Delhi is a place so dirty that the flesh of the fish is covered by a layer of several inches of flies.

I was tempted to go to the office on Sunday, but I wouldn’t have gained anything by it, because Olympia keeps her things under lock and key, so I spent the time organizing what I needed for the journey and in the afternoon went for a walk in Lodhi Gardens, a park that reconciles you with the city, being one of its few unconditionally beautiful and clean places, where you can lie down on the grass and listen to the cawing of the birds of prey, the parrots, the crows, the eagles, in other words, the birds of all sizes and types that are the real masters of the city.

By about seven on Monday morning, I was already on my balcony drinking a cup of strong coffee. Eagles were flying over the pines opposite and a group of workers was digging in Jangpura Park, converting what had been a very green lawn into a dusty stretch of earth. I couldn’t wait for Peter to pick me up and take me to the embassy, which, after a recent move, was now at 85 Poorvi Marg, still in Vasant Vihar but further back, far from the terrifying Olof Palme Marg and its crazed traffic.

As often happens in such cases, an element of suspense now crept in. Olympia wasn’t there, she had gone off with the chauffeur to deposit the monthly income from consular activities in the bank in Chanakyapuri, and wouldn’t be back until noon, so I went to the office to deal with other matters, such as studying visa requests and approving them — in the whole time I was there, I only ever denied one, to a Mephistophelian guru — answering mail, or discussing new cultural projects with my good friend Professor Aparajit Chattopadhyay of Jawaharlal Nehru University, a specialist on Neruda.

At noon, Olympia arrived and came up to my office, which was on the second floor of our three-story building.

“Look, boss, here’s your girl,” she said, and placed on my desk a passport renewal application from two months earlier, already signed by me.

I looked at it with genuine excitement. There it all was: telephone numbers, address, a recent photograph.

She had changed. Her hair was shorter. She was using her husband’s surname and was now called Juana Manrique Hedayat. Attached to the form was a request for a birth certificate and passport for a newborn child named Manuel Sayeq Hedayat Manrique, her six-month-old son. Everything seemed to be all right, so why had she forgotten her brother? when was she thinking of contacting him? Communications aren’t easy in Iran, but what was stopping her from sending an e-mail, a Facebook message, or making a long-distance telephone call?

All this was a mystery.

The form had the telephone number and a note that said: please call only between 9 and 11 A.M. I looked at the clock. It was after nine in the morning in Iran so I asked Angie, the secretary — the only member of staff with an international line — to call her and put her through to me in my office.

It isn’t easy to call Tehran, as I knew from having tried months earlier to send a batch of Colombian books to its book fair. Something as simple as talking to the person in charge of Latin America at the Foreign Ministry was impossible.

The telephone rang and I rushed to answer. I heard Angie say: “Madam Juana Hedayat? Please stay on the line, the consul wants to speak with you.”

“Juana?” I said.

At the other end of the line, through a storm cloud of electrical noise that sounded like a swarm of mosquitoes, I heard her say, yes, that’s me, is there some problem with my application?

“That’s not why I’m calling,” I said. “I’d like to talk to you about your brother Manuel.”

There was a silence that seemed even longer thanks to the heavy interference. I prayed that the line wouldn’t be cut off.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes, Consul, what’s happened to my brother?”

“He’s in prison in Bangkok,” I said. “There was an incident and he was arrested. He was on his way to Japan to look for you.”

“What?” Her voice broke and there was more noise on the line, and sobs. At last she recovered and spoke again. “Manuel in prison in Bangkok? he was looking for me? but… is he all right? how did he know… and you?”

I took a deep breath and told her everything, from the beginning: the journey, the arrest, the pills. The communications with Colombia, the fact that Delhi had had to deal with the case because of the post in Malaysia being vacant, my own journey to Bangkok and Manuel’s version of events, his pressing need to see her again after three years, the urgency of her coming to Bangkok, all in all, I spoke for about ten minutes without interruption, without hearing anything at the other end except that noise like a failing engine on the line. When I stopped talking I heard her crying. Not broken sobs, but sustained weeping, as if a muddy current had found an outlet.

I let her cry without adding anything. Then she asked, sobbing, are you sure he’s all right? I assured her he was, Manuel was strong and was being well protected, the lawyer was influential and knew the warden of the prison, but I insisted: it’s vital that you travel to Bangkok, he needs to see you.

“Yes, Consul, but I have two problems. My husband won’t let me leave Iran and I don’t have a passport. Or rather, I have an Iranian passport I can’t use and a Colombian one that’s out-of-date. And besides there’s my son. I can’t leave without him, and he doesn’t have a passport.”

I told her the passports weren’t a problem, we’d deal with them immediately. She had presented the forms and they were already signed.

“Can’t someone come to Delhi,” I asked, “like other Colombians who live in Iran?”

But she said that was impossible.

“I already told you I can’t leave, Consul, you don’t know my husband, he barely lets me go to the market. We don’t have an international line or the Internet. If anyone calls when he’s there I’m not allowed to answer. This is the only time I can receive calls, don’t you see? I depend on him for everything, he’s paranoid and jealous. The application for the passport and the birth certificate I did in secret, a Colombian friend helped me.”

“If you had the passports in your hand, could you travel?”

“Well, I could go to the airport without his knowing and get on a plane, but I don’t have the money for a ticket.”

I told her I’d think of a solution and call her again the next day, at the same time. Before she said goodbye, she thanked me and asked again, are you sure Manuel is all right?

“He’ll be better when you get here and he can see you.”

After lunch I called the lawyer. He told me there were no new developments yet, but that the police were still following a lead about the pills, and that we might be getting some good news very soon. He was sure of it. I told him I’d tracked down Manuel’s sister and made him write down her name, spelling it for him.

“Please,” I said, “let Manuel know that I’ll soon be coming to Bangkok with her. It’s very important. Get in touch with the warden and make sure the news gets through to him today.”

“Count on it, Consul. As soon as we hang up I’ll call Bangkwang. I already told you the warden was a student of mine.”

I hung up and joined Olympia. I told her everything. We couldn’t do bank transfers to Iran, and the passport couldn’t be sent by mail, so what to do? As in many other things, she had a ready-made solution.

“Organize a mobile consulate in Tehran, boss,” she said. “That way you’ll kill something like ten birds with one stone.”

A mobile consulate? and she said, yes, we take the books, the stamps, and the forms with us, and we attend to the community in the offices of the Argentine Embassy. The last time it was done was three years ago. It’s about time we did it again.

And she added:

“I know that kind of case well. In Tehran, there are a hundred and thirty Colombian women married to Iranians they met in Japan. They all went there to earn a living by sweat, but not the sweat of their brow, and ended up involved with Iranians, who are there as economic migrants and do all kinds of jobs.”

We drew up a letter to the Consular Department, saying there was an urgent need to take a mobile consulate to Tehran and pointing out that there were thirty-seven minors waiting for birth certificates and forty-nine of our countrymen and countrywomen who had applied to renew their passports and were waiting for an identification document sent by an office of the State, which was a constitutional right.

The problem with urgent communications between the consulate and the Ministry, as I said before, was the time difference: an exotic figure of ten and a half hours. I waited until nightfall and then called the Consular Department. Luckily they had already read my dispatch and were considering it. They would give me an answer by evening (Bogotá time), and I would receive it the following day.

That night I could barely sleep. It was hot, and I was anxious. Several times I got up to drink something cold and finally sat down in the living room, watching the moon come in through the window and cast strange shadows.

At moments I seemed to hear the voice of Juana, also at home, also unable to sleep, maybe embracing the child, watching over him in the darkness with attentive eyes. The voice was barely a murmur, a soft breath trying to cross the sky over Asia and reach the ears of Manuel, who must have been told by now and would be very attentive to her words. A young man in a damp, dirty cell in Bangkok, a woman lying next to a man she didn’t love, in Tehran, pretending to sleep.

Words, words, words.

Night prayers.

Those they had not said to each other and now were thinking, words that in their minds were heartrending screams, cries of anxiety and love. Two silent litanies, and me in the middle of that strange storm, near a planet created by those who never lived on it. Two fragile creatures who longed to be together and to be forgotten, and life, like a wall, coming between them.

When I got to the office the following day, Olympia said to me:

“Good news, boss, we’re going to Tehran.”

“Did the authorization come through from the Consular Department?” I asked, and she said, yes, I printed it out and it’s on your desk.

Again I asked Angie to put me through to Juana Hedayat. Two hours later, after many attempts, I was at last able to talk to her. “Your brother’s fine,” I said. “I spoke to the lawyer in Bangkok and told him everything. He already knows I met you and that you’re going to see him.”

I told her the strategy: I would go to Tehran the following week to catch up with all consular matters relating to the Colombian residents there. That same afternoon, a public announcement about the mobile consulate would be made.

“You have to be prepared,” I told her. “The ideal thing is for you to leave Iran with me.”

And she said:

“Oh, don’t worry, Consul, by the time you come I’ll have everything ready.”

I spoke with the Argentinian Embassy, which confirmed its traditional offer of lending us its premises for three days. I also wrote to the head of protocol at the Iranian Foreign Ministry announcing the journey and its purpose. We asked the travel agency for tickets. By the following Tuesday, everything had been prepared and we left on the Wednesday. We would attend to the public on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. The mission consisted of Olympia, the second secretary, and myself. We were received by a delegation from the Iranian Foreign Ministry, which put a car and a chauffeur at our disposal for the four days.

3. INTER-NETA’S MONOLOGUES

I won’t be in this story of split personalities and dreams either. And what grandiose, histrionic character will you adopt on this occasion, chère Inter-Neta? Wait, don’t be so impatient, remember what Rimbaud, your beloved poet of Aden and Harar, wrote.

Je est un autre.

My name is Beauty and I am dreaming. I dream and dream and while I do so I prefer to talk, to say what I see in my mind and pursue images, which are also words and sometimes smells or fears. It’s what I have in my head, which is tantamount to saying: what I have in my heart.

As I said, my name is Beauty or Belle or maybe Bella, depending on where I am, given that the vast world is my bed. Who am I? Let’s take it piece by piece. I was deflowered for the first time — when the moment comes I’ll explain what “first time” means — at a Guns N’ Roses concert, in the back of a milk delivery van (it smelled of milk), by a man whose mouth gave off a strong odor of raw onion and sausage and who was certainly as drunk and probably as strung out on drugs as I was, nothing very strong, nothing injected into the veins, you know me by now, I love men but I hate needles.

Oh, God, it was a needle that started this long story, this rebuke, this strange coming and going that is my life, you must know my story, it’s very popular among children, let’s see, how does it go? There were some good fairies and one bad one, and of course a curse: my finger would be pricked when I was sixteen with a spindle and I would sleep until a prince kissed me, that’s pretty much the story, and for me the best part, the funniest part, is the bit about the prince. In actual fact, I wake up with a desire for someone to stroke my skin or talk in my ear (it doesn’t matter if it’s a prince, there are no princes anymore), I wake up and die of anxiety: the flower breathing inside me, its retractable sting, or that similarity to the Virgin that we women have when we’re born — our destiny is to lose that similarity — is reconstructed in dreams, the tissues come together again, the membrane is reborn and there am I, with eyes wide open, awake and filled with desire, oh, God, the world trembles, the universe turns to jelly every time a woman is seized with the desire that I feel, a ray that descends my spine and lodges between my thighs and buttocks, and there is nothing I can do but leave this bed in which I have lain for days and nights, while the miracle of reconstruction is performed, and go out into the world.

The last time, the deflowering was intense: it was one of the doctors in the clinic where I woke after being asleep for twenty-two weeks. I don’t know what his rank or position was — maybe he was an anesthetist, because it didn’t hurt — but he liberated my body, brought it back to life in a little room filled with medical supplies, bottles of alcohol, gauze, and hypodermic syringes, where there was also a photocopier — a strange place for a machine like that — and to be honest that was the most enjoyable part of it, because the doctor sat me down on the glass, and as he deflowered me — was it the twenty-seventh or twenty-ninth time? — he kept making photocopies, images of my backside flat against the glass and a cylindrical shadow lying in wait, a chisel striking the mass, I won’t go into detail, I’m dreaming now and losing certain nuances of reality, which is my closed garden, the place where my handsome men, my lovers, live, those who with their breath and their words take me out of this vegetable dream and take away my treasure, always restarted—toujours recommencée, like in the poem — which, when you come down to it, doesn’t have any more value than a counterfeit coin, something beautiful but not unique, and I think, why should unique things be better? I, at least, enjoy what’s banal, but that’s another story.

Where am I? where am I? Dare to look for me. Leave everything for me. Look for me. Look for me. Maybe I am that woman on the publicity hoarding that you long for so much, the one who sometimes pays you a visit at night. My bare legs emerge from a martini glass and move about. I am the only one who listens and attends to your prayers, because I live in your imagination.

Saying this, I remembered a man, one of the few I have loved and who was called, what was the name of my Beautiful Man? I’ve forgotten, but I’m going to give him a name in this dream, his name was Lars and he was a Danish sailor, he worked on the lower deck of a yacht that did cruises in the Baltic. Lars gave me the breath of life while I was asleep in the stern and took me to his little cabin where he lifted me onto his body, then, looking through the porthole, that circular window, he said, “We are passing a purple island, and on one of its plains there is a war, the soldiers are falling, their helmets are rising in the air, and their armor is bleeding.” That was what Lars said and I listened to him while other blood bathed my thighs, the wound of his body in mine, and I longed for this man not to stop, longed for him never to take his sword out of me and that the story of the war would last all life long, in short, that that little circular window would be life, but very soon something happened and a bell rang, Lars had to go up on deck to make sure that the sea monsters of the North didn’t sink the ship, or something like that, that’s what he told me, and when I looked through the porthole I saw the battle on the purple island, but all this happened on the old Telefunken TV set in the kitchen, which was what there was on the other side of the window, and I understood something, I understood the smell of fried oil and fish, which is what should be eaten at sea, what the sea should smell like, that mixture of salty water and fish and plankton and the remains of shipwrecks, and Lars left and I understood also that the movements that were carrying me away into a state of intoxication (in case anyone has lost the thread, I’m talking about sex, sex is my storm) came not only from the fury unleashed in Lars, but from the sea itself, or rather, from the storm that was lifting the sea and I wanted to take him out of his bed, like the men who touch me, and so I loved him, Lars and the storm, and on returning to my own cabin I heard cries and knew that Lars had fallen into the tempestuous water and the waves had carried him away, oh, what pain, and I fell asleep again, the world saddened me, and Lars’s face dissolved inside me and now nothing was left, that happens when I sleep and it’s because the world goes away, people leave or go out one day onto the street and never come back, and what saddens me most is that the world carries on in the same old way without all those people, nothing changes because Lars isn’t there, or because I’m asleep, because we are all dead, nothing changes, believe me, beneath the stones life emerges again, like a snake or a poisonous plant, and when it wakes there will again be poets and sailors and milkmen, desperate and solitary people, life will have the appearance of reality and some will cry out with pleasure while others decide to slash their wrists or go away forever, wandering about, kicking tin cans after being humiliated, and life will go on having that bitter taste until I open my eyes, and when I do someone will be happy, you can believe me, whom the sea will then take away, but I say, while I dream, that it’s better to be happy just for one moment, and let ourselves be carried away, than never to be happy and to live like a rodent, that’s what I say, that’s what I think, I’ve been happy, and as I say it I ask myself, what will my next beau be like? and you, beau, ask yourself, where am I? would you dare to look for me?

4

I had never been to Tehran, and to be honest it surprised me. The airport is modern and clean — as I’ve already said, everything seems clean after Delhi — the design rather similar to Roissy, in Paris, with wide open spaces, metal ceilings, stained-glass windows looking out on the desert and the sky, glass staircases, friendly people, good signposting and a pleasant smell, maybe of lavender, at any rate not of cheap air freshener.

When we got off the airbus of Mahan Air, the Iranian state airline, we saw a plane of the Venezuelan airline Conviasa parked next to it, which does the Tehran-Damascus-Caracas route and which, according to the press, is always empty, although in this case the line of passengers seemed infinite.

Tehran, like Santiago in Chile, is dominated by snow-capped mountains, and you have the feeling that the city is on a slope. Our hotel overlooked a large part of modern Tehran, which at first sight, and leaving aside its heritage, reminded me of a Latin American city (an impression I’ve also had in some Arab cities). But as soon as I entered my room, opened the window, and breathed in the cool air of the mountains, I became aware of something rather inconvenient, which is that there is no alcohol in Iran, so that I couldn’t carry out my usual ritual of asking for a bucket of ice, lying down, and having a drink while organizing my ideas. Those ayatollahs! I hate religions that ban alcohol.

That night, the Argentinian ambassador and his wife invited us to dinner at their residence in an area in the upper part of the city, full of large buildings, identical to the rich Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, and, much to my delight, the ambassador, a refined man of great taste, opened his bar, a large wooden chest, and offered us an aperitif. I spotted a bottle of Gordon’s, so I poured myself a generous measure, with a couple of ice cubes and two slices of lemon. The ambassador did the same, and so did the second secretary who had come with me, a pleasant young diplomat from Barranquilla, Mauricio Franco de Armas, whose posting to India was his first.

We were given an overview of the situation in Iran, how a process of reform was bound to be under way soon, given that 70 percent of its population was under forty and wanted to live in a system that was open to the world; we were also told why it was that Iran, which has borders with ten countries, was destined to be the leader of the region. Through its petroleum and other industries, it was an economic powerhouse. One example: 95 percent of the medicines they consumed were made internally. European companies were well established in Iran, as well as some Asian companies, especially Japanese and Korean ones. Thanks to the embargo imposed by Washington, there was no competition from North America. France built the freeways, manufactured the road signs, and assembled cars; the Spanish beer company Mahou, as well as the Dutch Heineken and Amstel, made alcohol-free beer that didn’t exist anywhere else, flavored with pineapple, vanilla, and strawberry; Hyundai cars from Korea were assembled here, as were Toyotas and Suzukis; German cars too, Volkswagen and Mercedes. The problem of payment, given that they were not connected to the international banking system, was solved by going through a third country like Jordan, which had grown rich thanks to the embargoes on Iran and Iraq.

The ambassador’s wife was equally enchanting. She worked for the Department of Foreign Studies at the University of Tehran and immediately suggested I give a few lectures about Latin America. I could even come back and give a course now that a faculty of Latin American Studies was about to open. We had empanadas, delicious meat, and wine, and got back to the hotel just before midnight. Our mobile consulate would be opening at eight the following morning, and we needed to rest.

Back at the hotel I started thinking about Juana again. What ideas were crossing her mind now that she was so close to her brother? so close to fleeing Iran? I imagined her looking at it all with the eyes of someone looking at the things they are about to leave, which in her case included her husband: fearful eyes, anticipating homesickness; proud eyes, almost wild at the thought of what she is about to do, aware of what it will cost other people; hungry eyes that want to devour everything, swallow it up; predatory eyes that bite and don’t care about the blood. What had her life been like? and above all, the strangest, hardest thing to justify, the thing that kept hitting my brain over and over like a drop of water (that old Chinese torture): why had she never tried to get in touch with Manuel?

One word from her, and none of this would have happened.

The following day, at eight-thirty in the morning, those members of the Colombian community with procedures pending started to arrive. Olympia sat with the second secretary in what would become the dining room, and I sat at a small desk behind a staircase. The only problem we had — and it was one that almost drove us to distraction — was getting hold of an electric typewriter to fill in the passports. A typewriter that was big enough to allow the books to pass through the roller and that also had an corrector; being an antiquated machine you couldn’t use Tippex (I’d used Tippex when I wrote my first novel, typed on a Remington portable, and I remembered how it stayed on my fingers). In the end, the Cuban Embassy lent us one, which arrived just in time!

Most of those who came were women and, I have to say, almost all of them were very attractive. Apart from my own experience in Japan, I remembered what Olympia had told me about the Tokyo-Tehran connection. In the light of that, Juana’s case was just one among many.

Every time the bell rang and the secretary of the embassy opened the door, I imagined Juana coming into the room. But she didn’t. Even though I had her number, I preferred not to call her in order not to arouse suspicion. She must have had to invent an alibi to come. I continued waiting.

By three in the afternoon I had signed — and done by hand, with Mauricio and Olympia — twenty-two passports, sixteen birth certificates, and nine wedding certificates. Some of the Colombian women came with their husbands to ask for visas, but this was one of the few procedures we couldn’t do, because Iran was on the list of countries for which the Foreign Ministry obliged us to send the forms to Bogotá to be authorized. At four o’clock, we received the last forms and announced that the following day would be the deadline for applications. With that, we shut up shop for the day.

At about five the chauffeur took me to see the Grand Bazaar, one of the attractions of the city: a beautiful medieval market that at times goes underground, with winding alleyways. I bought pistachios — the best in the world — admired the pastries, the leatherwork, the many veils; just as I had in the bazaar in Damascus, I took photographs of the splendid stands selling women’s underwear (“brevity is the soul of lingerie,” who wrote that?), with their daring multicolored thongs as thin as dental floss, decorated with plastic flowers and flashing lights, corsets and panties open at the front, a whole range of models that, at least in Europe, can only be found in sex shops, which can’t help but arouse curiosity given the strict morality and Islamic modesty around women’s bodies.

Then, at seven, I went with the second secretary to the Foreign Ministry for a formal talk with the minister. His advisor for Latin America spoke excellent French and some Spanish, and the minister himself had served as ambassador in Cuba and Venezuela for ten years. Both agreed that Iran wanted closer links with our country, since they saw us as an economically prosperous area. Their friendship with Venezuela and Bolivia had opened their eyes. We returned the compliments. They insisted on their desire for Colombia to re-establish a diplomatic presence in Tehran, which it had not had since the Uribe government had severed relations in 2002. We promised to bear it in mind, ate more delicious pistachios with tea, and half an hour later were back out on the street.

That night we had dinner in a traditional restaurant: meat, kebabs, rice with saffron, mint, extraordinary flavors. It’s difficult to enjoy a dinner of that caliber without any kind of wine. Instead, we drank tea and mineral water. A little later I saw a singular spectacle, when a customer wanted to show his appreciation of the singer by offering him money. The master of ceremonies changed the sum into small notes and threw them over the singer, one by one, a shower of dinars, a colorful custom that, if any of our drug barons had seen it, would surely have become established in our country.

The following day we opened at the same hour.

The wait was a long one, but at last, about twelve, Juana appeared. She seemed unreal to me, as if looming out of a fog: an idea that materializes and takes on form and body, that emerges from a wood or a lagoon, from something symbolic, and at the same time, profoundly human. Was she beautiful? Anyone preceded by a history like hers would have been. I greeted her, holding back the emotion I felt. She was in fact very attractive. All Manuel’s words were in her: in her smile and her proud eyes, in her colossal expression of strength. She gave me a hug, then showed me her baby.

“This is Manuelito.”

Something in her expression, a certain weariness or sadness, bore witness to the blows she had received. I offered her tea. When we had moved apart from the others, I looked her in the eyes and said, have you decided? are you coming with me?

“Yes,” she replied, “everything’s ready. Is the flight on Sunday?”

I told her she could come to my hotel and we would leave from there. For obvious reasons, I didn’t put her name down as someone coming with our delegation, because that might cause diplomatic problems. But she would travel by my side. She said yes. We went to the office and she herself checked that the child’s documents were in order. Her passport had already been drawn up, as well as the birth certificate (Manuel Sayeq Hedayat Manrique). Having done this, the second secretary proceeded to remove the adhesive from the passport for the signature, but when I went to take hold of it, Juana stopped me.

“No, please, you keep them. I don’t want to take the risk of someone finding them. I’ll get to your hotel at eleven o’clock on Sunday, with everything ready. Thank you.”

I walked her to the door. She said goodbye with a sad, nervous smile. I watched her walking along the street in the direction of the avenue. Then I called my travel agent in Delhi to get his confirmation, and ordered him to send the tickets for her and the child on the same return flight that he had reserved for me. Foreseeing this situation, I had taken a return for Sunday, whereas Olympia and the second secretary were going back on Saturday. I trusted them completely, but I preferred not to have witnesses.

On the day of the flight, Juana arrived at the specified hour, with two small suitcases. Manuel Sayeq was asleep in her arms. She seemed nervous, but her eyes were hard and determined. She had swum in difficult waters, cold and deep; she was used to making definitive and even cruel decisions. I omitted to ask about her husband or to mention her life in Iran, the life she was on the point of abandoning. Now was not the time.

She was wearing a blue jacket gathered in at the waist and covering her hips, as is traditional, and a veil, which was also blue, but a little lighter. She clearly respected the hijab, which is obligatory in Iran. Her eyes were beautiful. They stood out. The day before, I had dismissed the chauffeur I had been given by the government, so I called a taxi. Toward noon we set off for the airport, and when we got there we checked in without incident. The only anxious moment was when we went through Immigration, but since she was with me and I had a diplomatic passport, nobody asked any questions. When we got on the Mahan Air plane, she clasped her son to her chest and wept in silence.

The flight lasted four and a half hours, but I preferred not to ask her any questions and she barely spoke during the journey. I only heard her making a fuss of Manuel Sayeq on two occasions when the child woke up and demanded her breast.

When we got to Delhi, Indian Immigration had a ten-day visa ready for her, which I had arranged the previous week, explaining that it was an urgent case. There were no problems, and around midnight we got to my house in Jangpura. Manuel Sayeq was asleep in his mother’s arms. I told Juana where the lights, the refrigerator, and the pantry were, and settled them in my study.

Then she took off her veil and said, “Goodbye to that rag, goodbye forever.”

She unfastened her bun and her hair fell over her shoulders.

“You really do have a lot of books, Consul,” she said. “Can I take a look?”

“Of course, they’re arranged by author, more or less in alphabetical order.”

She walked slowly between the shelves and passed her finger over a few spines. Suddenly she took one out, read something that made her smile, and looked at it again. Then another one. She also looked at my pictures. Her attention was drawn to an oil painting of Saint Sebastian.

“It’s by my mother,” I said, “She’s an artist.”

“I like them,” she said. “They suffer and prefer not to see the world, and don’t like the world to see them.”

She continued walking around among the books while I switched on my computer to check my messages. I was hoping for something from the lawyer in Bangkok, but there was nothing. Then it struck me that people don’t write work-related e-mails at the weekend.

Suddenly she said, “Do you have any art books?”

“Yes,” I said, “anything in particular?”

“Anything, especially if it’s classical.”

I went to a shelf and looked at a few books. “How about Mantegna?” I asked.

“Yes, perfect.”

Then I poured myself — I might say: threw myself into — a longed-for gin, a cold glass filled with ice and slices of lemon. I asked her if she’d like one too.

“Yes, please,” she said. “I haven’t had a damned drink for a year.”

We drank, then she asked:

“When are we going to see Manuel?”

As she asked this, with the book of Mantegna open in front of her, she stroked the image of the dead Christ with the tips of her fingers.

“We have to wait for the okay from Colombia,” I said, “but it’s a matter of a few days. They’re putting the pressure on from over there too.”

I told her I would call the lawyer in Bangkok the following day, although the fact there had been no messages suggested nothing had changed. I asked her if there was anything in Delhi she was interested in seeing. We had to spend a few days there before flying to Thailand.

“Yes,” she said, “a Sai Baba temple. That’s the only thing.”

“Sai Baba?” I said “There’s one ten blocks from here. It’s like the Vatican of Sai Baba. I’ll take you tomorrow afternoon, so you’re interested in Indian religion?”

“I think so,” she said, “although in all this time I haven’t managed to believe in anything. At least Sai Baba isn’t a god, just a guru.”

The following day, at the office, we evaluated the results of the mobile consulate and sent the respective reports to the Consular Department, along with the supporting documents, and travel and other expenses. An exhausting job. Olympia went to the bank and paid in the money taken, the stamp duty, and contributions to the savings fund. But before she left she took me aside and asked: did she come with you? I told her she had, that she was in my apartment with the child. Do you think we’ll have any problems with Iran over this? No, Olympia replied: she’s an adult, she’s a foreigner, and she has a valid passport. She can go anywhere in the world and do whatever she likes. If she does have any problems with Iranian law, it’ll be with the husband, because of the child, but that’s no concern of ours.

Then I called the lawyer in Bangkok. He told me they hadn’t yet fixed a date for the trial but that he had exerted pressure on them to hurry it up. He added that we needed to think about the guilty plea, which had to be framed in such a way that we could gain time. If it was harrowing and dramatic enough, and displayed heartfelt remorse, we might impress the judges and obtain a shorter sentence. He concluded by saying that Manuel had already been informed about his sister.

I left the office early and went home. On the way I stopped at the Prya Market and bought a couple of model Ambassador cars for the child: a black taxi with a yellow roof and a white official vehicle with a siren. I was eager to tell Juana the news.

I found her on the balcony, giving Manuel Sayeq a bottle and watching the eagles circling above the park. As they flew overhead, two green parrots with red beaks hid in the branches of a plane tree. Below, on the street, a knife grinder was pushing a beat-up old cart and shouting something. Three children were playing cricket beside a mountain of garbage.

“Manuel knows we’re together and that you’re going to Bangkok,” I said. “He must be very happy.”

She opened her eyes so wide I thought she was going to faint. The emotion made her cry and she hid her face.

“I’ll have to prepare myself,” she said, recovering, “or I won’t know what to say when I see him.”

She started crying again and I hugged her. The crying made her body shake. Suddenly she pulled her head away and in between her sobs said:

“I feel so guilty…!”

She walked to the rail and stood for a while facing the park: the birds, the clouds of smog and dust covering the sky. I judged it best to leave her alone with her thoughts.

After a while, she came back into the study, already recovered. We had a quick gin, with a lot of ice, and went out to the temple of Sai Baba, near the India Habitat Center and the Jorbagh district.

The temple was a strange construction, with a staircase of white tiles and metal bars around the prayer room. From the upper part of the walls hung banners of saffron-colored canvas. The ground was covered with rotten rose petals, paper pennants, incense and aromatic substances, lighted candles, mountains of candle wax hardened and blackened by the dust, garlands of saffron flowers, trodden fruit peel, plastic bags, and outside, on the avenue, an infinity of fried food stands, sellers of pistachios, maize, a thousand kinds of fried and salted grains, chapatis with spicy sauce, and all around, scattered on the dusty ground and the pavement, hundreds of disposable plates with the remains of food, covered in flies, besieged by dogs and crows, generating a smell of decomposing matter that mingled with that of the fried food, the pollution, the kerosene, and the fumes from the buses.

“Exactly as I imagined it,” Juana said.

She walked up very slowly, with Manuelito in her arms. When she reached the prayer room she knelt and remained like that for a long time, not changing place, only making slow movements from side to side, as if she were calming the child’s tears, whispering the words of consolation and love that I imagined she herself would have liked to hear. She seemed more like a goddess in her own temple than someone who was praying.

Suddenly I remembered my conversation with Manuel:

“What makes me a fragile person is having been unhappy in my childhood,” he had said.

I recalled that I had looked at him in silence and said nothing, but had thought: what made me fragile was the opposite, having been happy. What of it? Then Manuel had thought for a moment and added: Life, when you come down to it, always presents you with an unusual bill to pay. That’s why Marx said that in history, events happen first as tragedy and then are repeated as comedy.

By the time Juana left the temple, she seemed transformed. Her smile was clearer, and you had less sense of storms inside her. It may have been an effect of the light or my own nervousness. I don’t know. Then we went for a walk. I showed her a number of places: India Gate, Connaught Place, Gandhi’s house, Indira’s house, the mansions of Golf Links and the architecture of Sundar Nagar. That night we had dinner at the Balluchi, in Hauz Khas Village, because apart from Punjabi food they had Kingfisher beer in green bottles, the ones with the highest alcohol content.

I didn’t want to pressure her, but I was intrigued to hear about her life, what had led her to leave everything so drastically, her adventures in Japan, her relationship with Jaburi, who by now must have been desperate, hitting the walls and howling with anger. Had she left him a note? had she promised him she would come back after seeing her brother? what were her plans?

“When you feel up to it, you could tell me something about your life,” I said to her, “whatever you like. I’m curious. Manuel told me a few things.”

A shadow passed over her face. It only lasted a second, but it was noticeable. Her eyes were no longer at peace.

“Does he know I went to Tokyo to…?”

I didn’t see any point in hiding it. “He knows everything,” I said, “that’s why he went looking for you.”

There was a grave look on her face now. She seemed about to say something, but no words came out.

“You decide, if you like,” I said. “When it comes down to it, you don’t have to tell me anything.”

She looked at me. Her eyes were like rays.

“It’s all right, Consul, but for now, do you mind if we sit for a while in silence?”

A couple of days went by. In the office I was still waiting for news from Bangkok that would make it possible for me to go back and deal with the case again. But everything seemed frozen.

The Consular Department continued its contacts with the Thai embassy in Bogotá, sending them a memorandum in which they asked if Manuel Manrique could be allowed to stand trial in Colombia. The embassy transmitted it to its ministry in Bangkok and we were still waiting for a reply, even if just a comment, anything that might allow negotiations to start. For the moment it was pointless to do anything, what with the travel expenses involved.

All I could do was wait.

The women servants in my apartment became fond of the child and one of them started taking him to the park in the afternoons so that he could play and see other children, thus giving Juana a bit of free time. She took the opportunity to read Vislumbres de la India by Octavio Paz. I would get home around seven-thirty, sometimes a little later, and we’d have a couple of gins until it was time for dinner. Then she’d lock herself in her room and I’d sit and read.

A week went by.

The following Thursday they were showing a Spanish film, Carlos Saura’s Cría Cuervos, at the Cervantes Institute. I suggested it to her and we went. She liked it. Another day she went with me to a book presentation at the India Habitat Center. Then to a literature event at the Alliance Française. There is a great deal of cultural life in Delhi. The Italo-Indian cultural center offered a program linking literature and food, and invited a group of people to sample dishes that had a connection with some of their most famous films. Juana was starting to feel at ease, or at least that’s what I thought. I was curious to know how she would justify having abandoned first her home, then Manuel, then her Iranian husband. How had her life in Tehran been? what was Jaburi like? would he put pressure on her about the child? would it be something like that sentimental film Not Without My Daughter, in which Iranian men were depicted as monsters? I had no idea. She still hadn’t made up her mind to tell me anything.

Faced with the absence of news from the Consular Department, I had to write to the Indian embassy in Bogotá asking for an extension of Juana’s visa and her child’s, which fortunately was conceded without their having to leave the country. After the attacks on the Oberoi and Taj hotels in Mumbai, which the Indians, imitating the Americans, call 26/11, India had modified the legislation concerning foreigners, introducing more requirements for obtaining or extending visas. Those who had six-month visas could no longer simply go to Nepal and stamp their passports, but had to wait two months to reenter India. Fortunately, this was not the case with Juana, thanks to the recommendation of the Indian embassy in Bogotá.

One day, in the middle of breakfast, she asked if her parents had been informed.

“Manuel asked me not to,” I said. “I passed that on to the legal department of our Foreign Ministry. Frankly, I don’t know.”

She was lost in thought, so I picked up the phone and offered it to her.

“Do you want to call them? Call them, you could talk for as long as you like.”

She looked at the phone, but immediately put it back on the table.

“No, thanks, I only wanted to know. When I see Manuel we’ll decide together what to do.”

Two more weeks passed and Juana started to get impatient. That was understandable. According to the lawyer in Bangkok, things were going well and we would soon have news. His friend in the police had assured him that they were about to make a big arrest of drug traffickers. We just had to be patient.

Juana bought a sari at Fabindia, a shop selling traditional clothes, with good bargains, and one night my Nepalese maid showed her how to put it on. What a curious and beautiful garment: twenty feet of brightly colored cloth, folded until it covers the body, leaving the midriff free, which is a matter of comfort and at the same time provocative. In their saris, all Indian women looked like princesses. The men, in their common drill trousers or jeans, were more like third-class servants, except when they wore kurtas or Punjabi-style vests.

When I got back from the office, I found Juana waiting for me in her sari. I praised her fulsomely, we drank a toast, then we got ready to go out. First to look at books at Full Circle, in the Khan Market, where you could drink tea on a terrace over which crows and vultures flew; Juana looked at everything with a certain casualness, as if she didn’t want to establish a close relationship with anything that she saw, or be too startled. Like a butterfly that flits from spot to spot. Later, we ate in the restaurant in Lodhi Gardens, which had good Indian lobster dishes.

Although her sari was compact, I thought I caught a glimpse of strange signs and images beneath it. Were they tattoos, I wondered, or a printed T-shirt?

Another day I invited some friends to the house. Among them was an unusual, very pleasant Colombian, Alexis von Hildebrand, who worked for Unicef, and who had lived in Madagascar for ten years. He was the only person I had ever met who had been to the islands of Tonga. His grandfather was a Catholic philosopher, a German, a friend of Nicolás Gómez Dávila. I also invited Sudeep Sen, poet and editor of a literary review in Delhi, the aspiring guru and my collaborator at the embassy, Madhuván “Rishiraj” Sharma, who was preparing himself by interpreting the Mahabharata, and of course my friend Professor Chattopadhyay. The group was completed by a Spanish-Indian couple, Lola McDougall and Nikhil Padgaonkar, poets and photographers, and the Catalan Óscar Pujol, director of the Cervantes Institute in Delhi and professor of Sanskrit at the University of Varanasi.

I introduced Juana to them as a sociologist passing through Delhi, and the evening was unforgettable. Von Hildebrand told us of a strange tradition in the islands of Tonga: once a year the king has to go into the sea and offer a roast pig over to the king of the sharks. If the shark bites the king, it’s a sign that he has been a bad ruler.

Then Von Hildebrand went into the kitchen and came back with a half-gallon pitcher of pisco sour, his specialty, which accompanied most of the meal.

Later, as we opened the third bottle of Bombay gin, between travelers’ tales and literary quotations, Lola MacDougall suggested an amusing game: the construction of pagodas and ziggurats with books by favorite authors.

Juana, without calling attention to herself, built a simple one-story house using the poetry of E. E. Cummings, and roofed it with Rudolf Otto. I tried to build a Japanese temple out of Houellebecq (Nikhil told me, in French, tu te houellebecquises!). We all did our work and ended up with a number of concepts: an art nouveau house made of aphorisms by Lichtenberg and prose by Edmond Jarrès, an Islamic temple shared between Raymond Roussel and Vikram Seth, a Hindu temple made out of Malcolm Lowry, and a great ziggurat of confessional works: the Journal Intime of Benjamin Constant, the diaries of Ernst Jünger, La Tentación del Fracaso by Julio Ramón Ribeyro, two volumes of Anaïs Nin, and the Journal Littéraire of Paul Léautaud.

Sudeep read some poems by Dylan Thomas, to whom we raised a toast, in memory of his untimely death at the age of thirty-nine, in New York, after a series of successful recitals. In connection with that, I presented (and maintained) my theory of an apoplectic seizure brought on by hypercholesterolemia: a sedentary life, alcohol, obesity, excessive smoking, hypertension, high cerebral irrigation, and insomnia. A hundred milligrams of losartan, taken on an empty stomach, and five of amlodipine at night, plus a diet of unsaturated fats, would have prolonged his life and his work for at least twenty years. Twenty-five if he had added thirty minutes walking a day. Dommage!

Chattopadhyay, remembering his days as a Naxalite guerrilla, instructed us in how to leave my apartment in case of a police raid and where to go, and then recited various poems by Neruda, his specialty (especially “Tango del viudo”). We talked about Malraux in India (Antimémoires), Roberto Rossellini in India (he married an Indian woman), and Romain Rolland in India (he was the French ambassador there in 1921, it’s in his Diaries). Starting from there, the list of visitors became interminable: Paz (Vislumbres de la India), Pasolini (L’Odore dell’India), Herman Hesse (Aus Indien), E.M. Forster (A Passage to India), Alberto Moravia (Una Idea de la India), Michaux (Un Barbare en Asie), a long list of authors I have investigated and read for a book to which I am, of course, still hesitating whether to give the title India: A Passionate Human Family or the simpler one Masala Tea.

At four in the morning, after saying goodbye to the guests, and being reasonably drunk (“each person drinks what he needs,” as Teresa said), Juana and I bade each other good night, but then, from my room, I heard her returning to the living room to collect glasses and empty bottles, arrange the chairs, and tidy up the books. Clearly, she felt at home.

The weekend came and I suggested that she and I and the child go for a walk in Nehru Park. I had been lent a stroller for Manuel Sayeq and it was the perfect opportunity. The park was crisscrossed by paths, between gardens and groves, a cool, clean place, ideal for a Saturday. As a memory of other times, it had a statue of Lenin.

Walking between flowers and shrubs, Juana suddenly said:

“Would it bother you if I told you something about my life?”

”On the contrary,” I said. “I’ve been waiting for it for some time now.”

She gave me an affectionate look, was silent for a few more steps as she pushed Manuel Sayeq’s stroller along a path, and at last began speaking.

5. INTER-NETA’S MONOLOGUES

Some nights, when the sky was ablaze with distance storms, the Virgin Mary appeared to me. My room lit up and at the same time filled with dense shadows. Of course, she was quite different than the Virgin Mary who appeared to the three shepherd children of Fatima. Judge for yourselves.

Mine arrived with a weary air and lay down on the couch in my bedroom. Pour me a whiskey, or whatever you have, Inter-Neta, hopefully above forty proof, which is the liquid temperature best adapted to my spirit. You know what I mean.

She drank slowly, looking up at the ceiling, as if making a complicated mental calculation. The last time, she said to me: 11,186,986 girls stopped being virgins today, oh, if only you’d seen it… The youngest was seven years old and was raped by a priest, a filthy fellow who first stuck his finger in, made her suck it, then penetrated her. Don’t ask me for any more details, priests disgust me, they’re reptiles in human skin, like that Dickens character, I don’t know if you’ve read him, Uriah Heep, who always has cold hands.

The oldest was thirty-eight, a real record, and the curious thing is that she had been married for twelve years. Until now she always told her husband she didn’t like frontal penetration out of respect for me, and the guy accepted it. Can you imagine? He sodomized her, and they performed fellatio and masturbation. He’s a harbor technician and, curiously, he would tell his best friends about it, and even make jokes. My wife’s tongue is fourteen inches long and she can breathe through her ears! And they would all laugh.

She also laughed with her friends: my husband has a small cock, no bigger than his tongue, and his semen tastes either of pastis or whiskey, depending on what he’s drunk the previous evening. And that’s how they’ve been all this time, but today she had a party at her office, drank to excess, and ended up fucking in the bathroom with one of her colleagues. This happened in France, in the offices of BNP. I can’t give you any more details. Seeing the blood flowing down her thigh, the current accounts manager of the Sully Morland branch thought she was starting her period and exclaimed, mon dieu! at least you won’t get pregnant, but she wept with pain and he thought she was weeping with love and pleasure, so he said something vulgar to her. They separated on a great misunderstanding. Later he went back to the bathroom to wash one of the tails of his shirt. She had been waiting so long for her husband and look what happened.

Pour me another, is this really whiskey? Never mind. At least you have alcohol, I’m tired, you have no idea, dear Inter-Neta, what it means to be what I am and the tremendous solitude in which I live. Up there, there’s almost nobody left. I think that everyone, including him, drinks too much and is past caring. I drink too, but it’s different. I drink because the pain of the world is too much for me, and I can’t take another iota of pain.

Do you want another crazy and eccentric story? This might be the best one: a young woman of twenty-two decides to give her virginity to her philosophy professor, who is married. After a class on the pre-Socratics, he takes her to a motel — this happens in Latin America — penetrates her for the first time gently, softly, until she says, oh, do it stronger, so he penetrates her again and they both laugh and kiss and she, filled with ecstasy, cries out in French, Je suis une sirène! They fuck and fuck as if we had invented original sin exclusively for them — and for that night — and then, having already been penetrated through most of the orifices in her beautiful body, when they’re having a beer and he’s smoking a cigarette and she’s preparing a line of coke, the young woman realizes she’s lost a lot of blood and the sheets of the modest motel bed are soaked, as if the Red Sea had burst into that little space of adultery and pleasure.

As they’re about to go, the young woman suffers an attack of modesty and says: I can’t leave it like this, it’s a shame and an embarrassment, I’ll take the sheets away and wash them, and send them back by courier. The Dionysian philosophy professor, who’s exhausted, says, don’t worry, they’re used to it, they’ve seen worse things, but she insists, she’s had a French education and is stubborn, she thinks that faced with any situation in life there’s only one way to proceed that’s the right way, so she grabs the sheets and puts them on the back-seat of the car.

As luck or fatum would have it, that night, returning to the city — the motel was on the outskirts — there was a routine police roadblock, and when the officers searched the car they found the sheets. Blood! They arrested him on suspicion of murder. There was no point explaining that it was her virginal blood, and the tests would take a couple of days. They were taken to the local police station. The philosopher had to call a lawyer, and of course his wife.

6

I was a happy child, Consul, but in a sad, opaque world. A black and white world. And why? I still ask myself that. There was very little in that happiness, if you looked into it: clouded landscapes, gray people who hated their lives and dreamed of something different, people who never managed to live up to anything they thought was beautiful, banal creatures conscious of their own banality, prisoners of something that had no end and could never have an end. I was a little queen as long as I believed that the world was the same for everybody. Then I realized it wasn’t and that made me angry. I’m still angry, but anyway, that’s not what I want to tell you about.

As in children’s stories or Russian novels, I’ll begin at the beginning. Even though the beginning is boring. I was the spoiled child of the house until, when I was four, they told me I’d be having a brother. I felt as if they’d betrayed me and that triggered a hatred in me, a feeling of abandonment, even a kind of sense of being an orphan, and when the child was born I wanted him to die. He was an intruder, a stowaway. Seeing him crawling through my space, watching with horror as he took over my things, I had a lot of ideas: to push him down the stairs, to open the door so that he got out onto the street and was lost. But then I noticed that in spite of the novelty I was still being spoiled, and that saved his life. My position wasn’t in danger and in order to be sure I forced them to choose. I put them to the test. Father always opted for me. So I kept quiet. My little world continued to function more or less as before, and the years went by. I continued to ignore him. Don’t you love your little brother? they would say, and I’d say, yes, I love him, he’s the king of my country, and I’m the queen, and everybody would laugh and say we were cute, but they didn’t realize how much I despised him. His diapers, his talcum powder, his mournful crying. I hated him and told myself: God sent him to put me to the test, because in those days I believed in God, you know? I thought: he’s only here to see what I do, but then God will get him out of my way. He’ll have to be very careful. That was what I always thought, and I waited and waited, but God never granted my wish.

Father idolized me.

I never loved him as much as he loved me. He was a poor man whose neck had been wrung, whose wings had been scorched. What could I do? I decided to keep quiet and wait. My school friends were luckier, their families were rich and important and there wasn’t that rancid taste in their lives, that atmosphere of desolation that lived in my house. What did I do? I kept quiet. I waited.

One day I thought God had heard me, because my brother got ill. They took him to the clinic, and I said, goodbye to all this, back to a world without him and it’ll be better. I could see from my parents’ faces that it was serious, but I noticed (and somehow knew) that it wasn’t going to be a great loss for them. They had me, why did they want more?

One Saturday they suggested I visit him, and I accepted, all right, I’ll make a little sacrifice, but looking up I said, God, I know what you’re playing at, I’ll go see him and then you’ll take him away, right? As I walked into his room, I looked him in the eyes and something very strange happened. It was the first time I’d looked at him in that way, and what I saw changed my life. How to explain it? I realized that there was no God and that nobody had sent him to put me to the test; he was simply a little person who was terribly alone and fragile and who seemed to be saying: here is the other half of your soul. I heard that in his eyes, and there was more, a kind of path, or a world; in those days I hadn’t yet read Rimbaud, but later I understood: “In the dawn, armed with an ardent patience, we will enter splendid cities.” These were the words of the path I thought we had to take, he and I, alone, because deep down what there was in his silent eyes was a voice, the voice of a ghost that seemed to whisper: you too are here, we contain the same breath, my soul and yours are united, don’t break it, so I reached out my hand and touched him, understanding profoundly who he was, and immediately, for the first and only time in my life, I felt love, a cataclysm that almost buried me, a storm that took my breath away, something so big that from that moment it filled my life and I could never again love anybody else, not even today, only my son who is also called Manuel because they are both made of the same matter: the flesh and the bones and the blood and the look of that love.

It wasn’t necessary to speak. We didn’t say anything to each other, we were very young! But we knew that we were together: we had recognized each other. That was why I devoted myself to protecting him. He was my younger brother. I protected him as much as I could from the wickedness of that city, and from that cruel thing known as childhood. I also tried to protect him from the family. I don’t know if I succeeded. And later, as he grew, I became aware of his unusual intelligence. His opinions about life and the world, and later about art, were exceptional. Everything in him was like that: brilliant, enigmatic, superhuman. Inside him something was growing that was beautiful and I was there to look after it, like a lighted ember you have to cradle in your hands to turn it into a fire. That gave us strength. Sometimes two cowards together can produce courage. That was the case with us.

When I turned fifteen I felt that I had to find a way to escape. One day we saw the movie Papillon, with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, and we told each other this was how it had to be for us, to get away from a prison island by taking advantage of the tides, to keep trying until we escaped, it was that or death, to leave our sad house, that middle-class neighborhood with its social pretentions, that sad, hated city. Our prison island. We had to jump when the tide was high, like in Papillon.

When he was very young Manuel started to read and to watch movies, thanks to a friend on the block. Later, much to my surprise, he started to paint graffiti. Beautiful things, islands, seas, storms. He had a beautiful world inside him that I wanted to know, to touch. That was why I had to get hold of money to buy him cans of spray paint, books, and DVDs, in other words, everything an elevated soul needs, so I started to look for little jobs at school. I did my rich classmates’ assignments, whispered the answers to them in exams, or did their exams myself, putting their names on the papers. They paid me and I went off happily to look for the best for him; while my classmates looked at shopwindows full of clothes and asked the prices, I would stroll along rows of books, touching the spines, following the alphabetical order, discovering the immense pleasure of buying books, the smell of the shelves, that silence charged with wisdom that exists between books and the people who buy them, a dense atmosphere, and so I’d return home with two new ones, sometimes three, knowing that with them I was giving Manuel something of the life he didn’t have, which was the space in which both of us would later be happy.

I need to tell you some intimate things, Consul, for which I apologize. At the age of seventeen one of my classmates told me on the bus: I’ve lost my virginity. It was a Monday. She’d been to a party with her boyfriend the previous Saturday and they’d gone on to a motel. These things matter to a young girl. To me, at least. An army of ants ran through my veins, and I asked, what did you feel? and she said, I almost died, I think I fainted. And I said, inquisitively, but did it hurt? A bit at the beginning, she said, but it’s so nice that it passes. From that moment on, it turned into an obsession, but I didn’t have a boyfriend and didn’t want one. At parties I danced and hugged boys, but they didn’t take me seriously. I met one in the end, not long afterwards. He was from a foreign school and had money. When he asked me for my phone number, I said to him: call me, if you like. In the middle of the week he called and to tell the truth I really couldn’t be bothered with him, because he was quite stupid, but on Saturday, when he picked me up from home to go out for an ice cream, I said to him, look, can I make another suggestion, let’s go to a motel and you can deflower me, okay? The guy was surprised and said, you bet! he accelerated and we drove along the freeway to La Calera, and there, in a room with a jacuzzi and a disc player and a view of Bogotá, I lost my virginity, which was nothing special, or rather not very intense, but at least it was done, so the following week I said to my classmate, that’s it, I also lost my virginity, and we started comparing notes, how big was it? what did it smell of? how long did it take him to come? did he wear a condom? that kind of thing.

In the middle of the week the guy called to invite me to a party, but I said to him, forget about parties, I’m not your girlfriend, if you want to fuck let’s go and fuck, but don’t talk crap, and the guy, who was sweet but a complete dickhead, said, all right, Juana, that’s cool, we’ll do what you want, and so I had a lover, but because he never listened he fell head over heels in love with me, guys are all the same, so he’d call me and say, hey, Juanita, I want to see you, can I come to your house? and I’d say, over my dead body, call me on Saturday, and don’t be so mushy, and on Saturday he’d call and I’d say, no, I’m going to the movies with my brother, and he’d say, and what movie are you going to see? and I’d say, what nerve, the kind you don’t like, and he’d go, no, Juana, on the contrary, I’m crazy about Fellini and Pasolini and all those Italian surnames, seriously, and I’d say, thanks a lot but no thanks, call me next Saturday, and then the guy would try to get to me through my friends, but since none of them knew where I lived, there was no way, and he’d call like crazy, send text messages and crap like that, and go on Facebook, until he really drove me crazy, saying that he was dying, that he needed to see me, that he couldn’t stop crying, so I sent him a message saying, right, this bullshit is over, ciao, ciao, I’m going to block you out and I’m going to take you off my Facebook contacts and all that, okay? so it’s best if you don’t insist, thank you, and of course, the guy didn’t take any notice and through friends sent me messages and gifts, and I sent everything back, marked him as spam, until he turned up at my school, crying, and got down on his knees, so I said to him, all right, stop, that’s enough, let’s talk on Saturday, and the guy left, and on Saturday he called and I said, pick me up at the Pomona and we’ll go to a motel, but on the condition that you don’t talk to me or tell me any more of that bullshit you’ve been telling me, and that’s how it was, we fucked and the guy didn’t say a word, which was how I liked him, so I continued seeing him, although one day I said to him, look, it’ll be better if you find yourself another girlfriend, if you like we can carry on fucking until you get one, but I can tell you now it’s not going to last because I’m going to university to study sociology and I don’t want to go around anymore with spoiled brats like you or have anything more to do with people like you, do you understand me? I like you, I prefer not to be a bitch, and that’s why I’m telling you right now not to start throwing tantrums like the other time, okay?

I got him out of my hair when I started at the National, where I met really fantastic people and found my world. In my school there had been rich people and middle-class people, like me, but the rules of what was good, what was cool, were dictated by the rich, whereas at the National it wasn’t like that, there were other values. Being cultured, having courage or nobility, was much more important than a shirt or a pair of shoes. The opposite of the horrible world I had just left and had never belonged to.

My place was the National, with its lawns and its white buildings covered with graffiti, and its brick constructions, its middle-class and lower-class people preparing to go out into life like lions or crocodiles, with their stomachs to the ground, all equal in that enormous larder, a gnoseological throng, as a Cuban poet said, and that was why when I found out that they’d accepted me I felt my cheeks burn with pride, Colombia’s in my image now, I said to myself, walking along the path that led across the lawn to the sociology department, and when they called out the names of those enrolled in the first semester my eyes started watering, I thrust my hand in the air when I heard my name, yes, here I am, so overcome with emotion that they looked at me, and I thought, this is my patch, I wanted to meet everybody, to love everybody, to tell them how long I had waited for them, it was wonderful, but of course, at home it was quite the opposite, the atmosphere was grim, to avoid problems I’d told Father that I was going to enroll in law or engineering, so I said that sociology was my third option and that was the one I’d been accepted for. They didn’t believe me, but it was too late to do anything about it.

Father and Mother were conservatives, but not part of an erudite, aristocratic right wing; they belonged to that cheap, mean, jingoistic right wing that was so common there, people filled with hate and resentment who look for something or someone with whom (or through whom) to express that hate and resentment; with their admiration for the upper classes and their social aspirations; with their classism and racism. That was why Marx said that the middle class was the class least prepared for a revolution. He was only partly wrong, but if we’re talking about my parents, he was right.

As I’m sure you remember, Consul, Uribe won those elections using words that got people heated up, words like motherland, everyone wearing wristbands with the colors of the flag and talking about one thing and one thing only: “security.” The people wanted war and he promised them war. The people wanted deaths and he promised them many dead. The people wanted a patriarch, a sovereign, a satrap, and he promised them he would be a patriarch, a sovereign, a satrap. His victory was celebrated with shots fired in the air and chain saws roaring, do you remember? The paramilitaries celebrated and the left said: now we really are fucked. FARC greeted the news with a shower of grenades in Bogotá that killed a couple of junkies in a crack house near the Palacio de Nariño. FARC said, war is war, and Uribe replied, bring it on, let’s see who has more guts.

Because he represented people with guts, and Catholics to boot. The Conservatives shouted for joy. The Liberals celebrated. Our Forbes-listed millionaires opened bottles of Veuve Clicquot and rubbed their hands saying, let’s get ready to make more money. Those who didn’t have anything got drunk on aguardiente or sweet wine and sighed, saying: oh, how proud I feel to be a good Colombian! The paramilitaries fired their mini-Uzis in the air, and it was lucky those bullets didn’t land in the skulls or spines of peasants, trade unionists, community leaders, or native Indians. The Catholics bowed down before the new Messiah: “He has a picture of the Blessed Marianito that he carries sewed into his fist!” wasn’t it his foreskin? no, his fist! The evangelicals said: “He worships the Virgin Mary!” The elegant Hindu ladies in Bogotá celebrated: “He gets up at three in the morning to say chakras and meditate!” The Jews hugged each other: “He may be a bit of a Fascist, but at least he’s a friend of Israel!” The paramilitaries sang the national anthem with their hands on their hearts, and said: “Now you’re going to see what’s good for you, you sons of bitches.”

Remember, remember how it was, Consul.

The country filled with tricolor flags, everybody shouted, long live Colombia! Or long live Colombia, son of a bitch! or even long live Colombia, fucking son of a bitch! Others said, that’s enough of this crap about human rights! we’re going to show those traitors! And others, the regions controlled by the paramilitaries are areas of progress! Or: the regions controlled by the paramilitaries are areas of progress, thank you, president! Now we’re going to work and to love our country! And others, if you cut my veins, Colombia will come out! They’d even knock back aguardiente and sing songs about how patriotic it was to drink the national drink! Anyone who criticized Uribe was a supporter of terrorism; anyone who criticized Uribe was a terrorist; anyone who criticized Uribe was a fucking terrorist. Best to kill those fucking terrorists, bang, bang, you’re dead. Let’s wipe them out. They’re anti-Colombian, dangerous people.

In many regions, starting with Córdoba, where the sovereign had his estate, they cried at the tops of their voices: long live the paramilitaries! long live President Uribe! long live progress and pacification! And over everything: long live Colombia, son of a bitch! and even louder, as loud as you could get: long live the Virgin Mary, son of a bitch!

That’s how my parents were, Consul. Two small parts of that mass that felt ennobled. Nothing unites people more than hate and the desire to exercise that hate. And hate means you’re scared. You’re looking for protection and want it to be long-lasting, a military anthem all about death and battle that seeps into your soul. Every time something important or serious happened, in other words every day, my parents would say: “We have to stand by our president!” The word “president” stood in for many others: father, guru, leader, chief, benefactor, savior, liberator, god. Every time he insulted some neighboring head of state they’d say: “We’re proud of our president!” He could have urinated over the country from a helicopter, and the country would still have worshiped him. He could have shouted from the highest peak, from the top of Pico Cristóbal Colón, which is eighteen thousand feet high: “Colombian sons of bitches!” and the people would have gotten down on their knees and begged him for forgiveness.

Apart from my parents, the rest of the family was also like that. Only a brother of my mother’s, who worked as a clerk in an insurance company, said one day, during a family birthday: “Colombia is becoming a training camp for paramilitaries,” and they jumped on him, if only it were, they cried, that’s what’s missing in this country of bums, discipline and order, and that’s what we have at last, discipline and order, and my poor uncle retorted, yes, but how many people do we have to kill or disappear? and then they said to him, Omar, you’re a bit old to become a Communist, and you know what? we’ll have to kill whoever we have to kill, and good people have nothing to fear from the people who do the killing, because it must be for some reason, mustn’t it? we can’t carry on like this, anyone who gets in the way is useless, didn’t you know that? it’s a painful operation but it has to be performed, and that’s what they’re doing, thank God there are people who’ve decided to pull themselves together and do something about it, people who care about the future, and if you don’t like it go to Venezuela and then you’ll see, won’t you? That uncle never again put in an appearance at family get-togethers, and the others said, Omar has become a communist, and that’s his problem. But what they were actually thinking was: we hope they kill him.

Neither my brother nor I could stand that filthy atmosphere and that’s why I started to try to earn more money. If Father had found out he would have killed me; he always said with pride that he could support his family, but the truth is that he couldn’t manage, it wasn’t his fault, although we weren’t poor like 50 percent of Colombians, but he couldn’t, he considered it a matter of dignity and I didn’t want to hurt him, so I looked and looked, but of course, in the university you couldn’t do other people’s work for them like I had at school, people weren’t rich and the work was complicated, I barely had time for mine, so I started to look at small ads. A friend who looked after elderly people told me it was easy, you could study while you did it, all you had to do was take them out for a walk, give them food, read to them, and if it was at night it was even easier, you just had to be there while they slept, administer their medication through a saline solution, then stay up and watch over them.

I started looking until I found an ad, it was for someone to look after an old man who had recently had an operation, he was looking for a night nurse, and I told myself, great, I’ll dress up as a nurse, my friend could lend me her uniform, so I went and they hired me, he was a very frail man, just skin and bone, poor thing, lying in bed connected to a bag. I’d get there after dinner, when the other nurse finished her shift, and stay with him until the following morning. I had to replace the saline solution, give him his sedatives, put a damp towel on his forehead. It was three nights a week. At home I said I had study groups and had to sleep over at my friends’ houses. The advantage was that my mother didn’t like my fellow students, so I didn’t have a problem; Father would say, fine, you can stay over, but if you see it’s uncomfortable call me and we’ll see what we can do, maybe you could come back in a taxi, all right? and I felt very tender toward him when I heard him say that, because in our house mentioning a taxi was like talking about a bottle of French champagne, only rich people took taxis!

I started to keep my money in a savings account that I opened secretly, and from it I’d make withdrawals to take Manuel out, and to buy him books and movies and lots of acrylic paint so that he could paint all the walls he wanted, and to pay for his tickets at the movies. I was educating him and I wanted the best for him, he was my great pride. On those nights when I kept guard, listening to the labored breathing of the old man, I devoted myself to reading. The old man was a cultured person. I don’t know if I mentioned that he was French, I think I forgot to tell you that. He was French but had been living in Colombia since the sixties. In his library there were French books, and I’d look at them admiringly. Some I understood, because I’d studied the language at school. Books by Jean Genet, Albert Camus, the whole of Proust, André Gide. He had La Condition Humaine by Malraux, with what looked like a dedication by Malraux himself, could he have known him? He lived in a big old house on Fiftieth and Eighth, in Upper Chapinero. He had servants and a chauffeur. His children came every day, but they needed someone for the nights. They didn’t want to put him in a residential home. Or rather: they couldn’t until he was completely well again. I became accustomed to that routine and to the university, to my studies and my new friends.

When the old man, whose name was Monsieur Echenoz, was better, we started talking. I asked him why he had chosen to stay in a backward, violent country like Colombia, a country everyone wanted to leave, and he said, not necessarily, would you leave? I told him I would, if I could I’d go that very moment, with my brother, and he asked, where would you go? and I said anywhere, any corner of the world must be better than this, I’d like to go to Europe, to a civilized country, and he’d look at me without judging me, the sheet covering half his chest, with white hairs coming out through the buttonholes of his pajamas, and he said, a civilized country? you don’t want to leave Colombia, what you want is to get away from something you don’t like but which you could find in lots of places, and he said, I know a lot of the world, especially Africa, when I was young I worked for French petroleum companies in Zaire and Rwanda, countries full of awful things, but beautiful, too. I could say the same about Asia. In spite of the difficulties, life is much more beautiful there than in “civilized” places, what does civilization mean? There’s no future in Europe. A tired, bad-tempered continent that tries to teach other people how to live, but that’s become frozen from looking at itself so much in the mirror. You’re studying sociology, aren’t you? Italy and France governed by clowns, what does it mean to be on the left in a place like that? not much, reading the left-wing press, owning an old Manu Chao CD and T-shirts of Che Guevara and Subcomandante Marcos, worrying about the environment, about human rights in some distant country, not much more; like any affluent society, Europe is going downhill. Just like a person who has everything, who’s in love with himself and full of self-admiration, that’s what’s happening there, but what the Europeans don’t know is that they aren’t anybody’s future. The opposite is true: the future is on the margins. How can you say that this country is backward and violent, as if that were a basic racial or cultural value of one nation and not of another? What’s happening here is that it’s a young country, a very young country, and is still looking for a language. What you see in Europe, the peace they have today, cost two thousand years of war, of blood, torture, and cruelty. When the nations of Europe were the same age as Colombia they were mutual enemies and every time they met rivers of blood flowed, lagoons and estuaries of blood. The last European war left fifty-four million dead. Do you think that isn’t violence? Never forget it. Just in the capture of Berlin by the Russian troops, which only lasted a couple of weeks, more people died than in a whole century of conflict in Colombia, so get the idea out of your head that this is a particularly violent country, because it isn’t. But it is very complex and has been beaten down, and worse still, armed. It has riches and a wonderful location, and that always ends up exploding. Violence is part of the culture, the history, the life of nations. Out of violence, societies are born and so are periods of peace, it’s been like that since the dawn of time and Colombia is in the middle of this process; I assure you it will achieve it more rapidly and with less blood than Europe.

I listened to Monsieur Echenoz with skepticism and said, but in European wars people killed each other for an ideal, not here, here it’s pure barbarism, it’s money or land or cocaine, but he said, it’s the same thing, the reasons someone who’s about to shoot another man thinks he has may vary, but the deed is the same, someone will press the trigger, and when the lead breaks the skin and drills into the cranium and damages a lobe and perforates it and opens a path in the brain, a life with a history and past will be cut short and a body transformed into a bloodstained mass that will fall to the ground, and that fact, which is horrible in itself and can’t in any way be explained or justified, makes all the reasons equivalent; in the middle of the twentieth century it was ideologies, then it was land or the control of resources, reserves of hydrocarbons. Politics isn’t the reason, just the way politics represents a need to take the next step, which is to go on the attack. Ideologies are merely self-fulfilling prophecies. Force is the argument most often used by man in his history, whatever culture he belongs to, so don’t worry, nothing is being done here that hasn’t been done before in other places, and for the same reasons. What’s happening today in Colombia, deep down, is the result of an imposed formula. Do you know the contemporary name for perversity? It’s democracy. If a chimpanzee with a drum becomes popular and amusing, he could be elected president. Why are the votes of those who don’t have standards or education or culture worth the same as the votes of people who do have them? Why is a vote obtained with a revolver to the head or by brainwashing people with advertising or buying them off with fifty thousand pesos worth the same as a vote expressed freely? Ask the defenders of democracy. That’s the great perversity, but we’re not allowed to say that. If everybody had education and the variations between high and low, in terms of culture, were smaller, democracy would be universal and we’d be in Sweden, but that’s not the way it is. In Africa people vote for those in their own tribe and that’s why the party of the biggest tribe always wins, and you know the only way a tribe has to reduce the number of voters for another tribe? The machete. In many countries in Africa, it isn’t dictatorship that’s led to civil war, but democracy. The small tribes hate the system that gives power to the biggest clan, and what is power? The right to take control of a country. Here, it’s different because there are no tribes, but there are clans and, lately, tyrants. How, in an environment like this, can a candidate of the left, or an ecologist, for example, win? The one who wins is the one who has most money, like in Italy, or the one who has most arms and is stronger. The alpha male wins, because democracy, in terms of sexuality, is a masochistic relationship: power is given to the strong man so that he can exercise it over the weak man, who adopts an attitude of submission that consists of turning his back, lifting his hip, and offering his anus in order to avoid confrontation.

Monsieur Echenoz’s reactionary opinions made me jump out of my seat, and, at first, I argued with him, but then I realized there was no point. In any case, it was more stimulating to disagree with him than to talk for hours and hours with my fellow students, who thought the same way I did. Maybe because his ideas came from his experience, not just from books or from political ideologies. He said what came into his head. His notion of utopia was a system in which the dignitaries of a society, the aristocracy of thought, took the reins of power. An old-established aristocracy guaranteed to avoid the one thing that seemed to him a real sin, which was to hand the land over to foreign countries or powers.

When I asked him about the advanced democracies of Sweden and Norway, he’d say: I don’t know them, and they don’t interest me. I’m not attracted by countries where life is quiet and fair, where everybody has levels of protection and stipulated good health and happiness. I’m not interested in perfect societies; I only deigned to look at them when I discovered, through mystery novels, that horrible crimes and tragedies happened there too, which gave them a touch of humanity. Those men of ice all have some kind of hell in their brains. But I prefer life in places where, from time to time, the streets are running with blood. That’s why I’ve stayed in Colombia.

I didn’t learn much about his life. He had always worked for French companies, but after his retirement he had decided to stay in Bogotá, where his children and grandchildren were. He was a widower. His wife had committed suicide while he was in a motel with another woman. He was forty-two when that happened. His wife found out through his secretary, who, I don’t know why, although I can imagine, had promised to inform the wife when he had an appointment with his new lover. She did so and the wife, instead of showing up and causing a scene, cut her wrists in another hotel. The secretary broke down and admitted everything. Monsieur Echenoz assumed the guilt, gave up work, and never saw his lover again. His wife had left a note in which she asked just one question: “Why?” Several times he had a Browning pistol in his hand, but never summoned the courage. His wife was Belgian and had been in Colombia because of him, they had met in Africa. They had done everything together. When I asked him if his lover had been Colombian, he said no, she was Hungarian, and added: I’ll tell you the whole story another day, but in the end he never did. What he did tell me was that a man needs the company of several women, and women, too, although for different reasons. Marriage and monogamy are really stupid, he would say, and above all, the biggest source of unhappiness; a mammal needs to exercise his sexuality, and in both men and women there is a very strong life principle: curiosity. Do you have a boyfriend? he asked, and I said no, I have lovers, people who come and go but nothing more, and he said, good for you, you’re not tying anybody down, young people are quite stupid by definition, but it’s not their fault; they’re stupid because of something that’s been inculcated in them by adults, which is faith in the future; they’re stupid because they have hopes, something that sorts itself out with the passing of years; that’s why the worst thing is for a young woman to marry a young man, because that’s like two idiots uniting their idiocies; the best thing a young woman can do is be with an older man, but not get married, I’m not saying that, I’m saying be with someone older, and listen to my advice: use young men to enjoy yourself, for pleasure, and to obtain material things, let them flatter you, all that’s quite normal, don’t believe the feminists when they say that a woman defends her dignity by being independent, that’s nonsense, women don’t need money because they have something that’s much more powerful than money, and you know what it is. I’ve seen the most powerful men on the planet go to pieces over a vagina: Kennedy, Onassis, Rockefeller, and what about Paris and Menelaus? Now that’s power, and I’ll give you a piece of advice: when you want something, use it, and don’t be ashamed, many people are going to say horrible things to you, especially the feminists and the lesbians, they’re going to insult you, they’ll say it’s because of people like you that women suffer, and maybe they’re right, but you just keep going because we live life as individuals. Men do the same when they’re lucky enough to be desired, especially by older women. Who are they harming? They attract those who are already starting menopause, and they obtain money, gifts, travel. Everyone is happy, but such cases are rare. The opposite is more common. Nobody asks a man to be handsome. They ask him to be powerful or rich. To be famous, to be an alpha male. When I was young and went to the seaside, in Europe, I’d look at the sports cars pulling up at the beach clubs. Their occupants were always rich men, usually fat and vulgar, and they always had beautiful women with them. It never failed. Almost all of them were blondes, even though their eyebrows and the down on their arms were black.

Every night, Monsieur Echenoz had a new story to tell, something to give his opinion about or to teach me, something to contradict, always with the same shameless cynicism. He asked me to tell him about my course, and I talked to him about authors like Mario Bunge, Ernst Cassirer, and György Lukács, especially The Destruction of Reason, and he knew them, reduced them to comprehensible phrases, rejected them, and criticized them in a lucid way that I’d then repeat in class, and the other students would look at me in surprise, where does she get these ideas from? Sometimes Monsieur Echenoz would be interrupted by a violent coughing fit that would drain the color from his face. He had pulmonary emphysema. He had been an alcoholic three or four times during his life. He was dying and would say to me: if only I could get up and go out to buy cigarettes and alcohol, nothing worse can happen to me, I’m going to die soon anyway; I thought to bring them myself, but if his children found out they might report me and I would go to prison for identity theft.

One day I asked him if he had known Malraux and he said yes: when he was very young, in Hong Kong, he’d had to accompany him during an official visit, when Malraux was minister of culture. That was when he had dedicated his book to him. And he added: an arrogant, unscrupulous man. He would have given anything to be richer, more famous, and more powerful than he was, but deep down he never stopped being a parvenu. He actually despised him, and the only reason he kept that book was to remember the irritation such people aroused in him. Who did he admire? I asked, and he said: Céline, a writer who had the courage to say what all of France thought, and who kept saying it right to the end, when saying it earned him a prison sentence. Or Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly, accused of being a pornographer and a monarchist in a country where everybody is a monarchist and a pornographer. He liked Jarrès and Pierre Loüys. Jean Genet too, except when he campaigned for noble causes, and he said, angrily: I can’t stand writers who support noble causes! They’re opportunists who thrive on other people’s blood, hypocrites. When the streets are running with blood, the only sensible advice is that of Baron Rothschild: to buy property. Among contemporaries he admired Houellebecq, because in him he recognized that same spirit unconstrained by conservative morality. France had always had writers like that, according to him, because that crudeness and coldness was part of the Gallic chromosome. He took as an example the language itself, and said: French, which people think is a pretty, sonorous language, is one of the hardest and most hostile. You just have to look at its cruel expressions for referring to cruel things: elle s’est fait violer! (“She had herself raped” instead of “she was raped.”) It’s a language of brute peasants! Only the wicked and the homicidal can get beauty from it, people like Rimbaud or Baudelaire, or like the Marquis de Sade, who was confined to a dungeon and who, according to a very bad film, wrote with his own shit, which is quite ridiculous, of course.

As I climbed the steep, dark, gloomy streets of Upper Chapinero, I would ask myself, what will Monsieur Echenoz tell me about today? Then I started to do my classwork with him. He would tell me to reach him this or that book, and read it to him. Sometimes he himself looked at the index. Of course he couldn’t read aloud, because he didn’t have enough air in his lungs, but I could, and in this way we advanced. I would write and he would read. He would make comments, help me with my writing. He was very strict about words. He always said that ideas were an illusion of language and that’s why in writing you had to be hypnotic, precise, and direct. That’s the one truth, he would say: that which is well expressed, which convinces through its form. I took note of this and then read over what I’d written and realized the number of extraordinary things I was learning with him.

One night, about one in the morning, he had such a strong fit of coughing and choking that I had to call an ambulance. They gave him oxygen and took him away. I wanted to go with him, but one of his sons had arrived and they wouldn’t let me get in the ambulance. I thought he was going to die and I felt really anxious. They kept him in the Andes Medical Center for three weeks; I spent them keeping my eye on my cell phone in the hope that they would call and say: you can come back, Monsieur Echenoz is home again.

It was then, during those days of waiting, that the story broke in the press of eleven young men from Soacha, first presented as “disappeared,” and then reported as killed while fighting the army near Ocaña in Santander province. It was a great scandal, do you remember? Uribe went on television and said they weren’t disappeared but criminals, who had fallen in combat against the army. The family said they hadn’t been guerrillas, just unemployed young men. Uribe defended the army, but people started to protest, to go out on the street. Cases came to light in other parts of the country and there were more testimonies and accusations. The army put on a brave face: the safety of the citizens rests on our shoulders and our blood, the army is tireless in its task of building peace, these lies are being spread by terrorists and their accomplices, decent people have nothing to fear, we are an honest, humane army, our weapons are the basis of a new society, free from the scourge of violence, long live the state of law, long live President Uribe.

As was to be expected, Mother brought up the subject at dinner, saying, what’s the problem? why all this fuss over a bunch of dope fiends? Father refused to take part in the discussion, in the hope that it would die out by itself, but I couldn’t just bite my tongue, so I said, since when have we been on the side of the murderers? what’s happened to this family? when are you going to realize what’s going on in this country? and Mother lost her temper and retorted, what’s going on in this country isn’t what those terrorists at the National say, they only know what’s going on in the country that belongs to FARC and ELN, not in ours; the president, who is actually the president and not just some journalist, already explained what happened on television, and so did the attorney general, and they already know that those guys really were fighting the army, and you know how it is, those who live by the sword die by the sword, and I said, those poor guys were murdered, that’s social cleansing, like the paramilitaries do in other regions, social cleansing done by the army to earn rewards, it’s a State crime and Uribe is covering it up, and then Father got into the discussion and said, oh, Juanita, stop talking bullshit, how can it be a State crime when the army faces up to bandits, on the contrary, it’d be a crime if they didn’t defend us, Juanita, what they tell you at the university is really very twisted, you saw the president speaking, you saw the attorney general confirming that they had died while fighting, do you think they’re lying? do you think the president and the attorney general, the two highest authorities in the land, are lying? no, Juanita, let’s not exaggerate either, but I said to both of them, yes, they are lying, those boys were murdered, I believe the mothers, and then Mother said, oh, yes? and what would you have the mothers say about those lazy bums? they should have brought them up better.

I was so angry that the following Sunday I went with two fellow students to Soacha and we took part in a demonstration on behalf of the disappeared; I saw powerless women carrying pictures of their sons, raising banners, and weeping and shouting the names of those young men, some of whom had been brought back to them in bags, but not all; some said that their sons still hadn’t come back, not even dead, and my fellow students and I started shouting, and I felt grief and infinite pity, because what these poor mothers were asking for, that is, justice and truth, seemed such a crazy idea, a princely whim, because, as my parents said, who was going to question what the president and the attorney general both said, but I thought, anyone seeing these women walking, so dignified in their grief, anyone seeing how some collapse and fall on the ground and the others stop the procession and lift them up, anyone seeing that can only believe in them, and so I grabbed the arm of one of them and started to call out the name of her son, a boy who could have been my age or Manuel’s, I started to shout and she clung to me and we walked, and I noticed that she smelled of oil and onion and fresh coriander, and I thought, before coming to demonstrate these women left food ready for their other children and made the beds and washed clothes, and I felt something similar to the day I started at the National, and I thought again, this is my country! not the country of the hypocrites, not the country of those who close their eyes or the country of the murderers, and I was so moved that I started to cry and it was the woman who consoled me, saying, why are you crying, girl? and I said, I’m crying for all this, for what they did to you, because there are things that can never be made up for, and I’m crying with anger over the lies and the cynicism, and she passed her hand over my head and said, calm down, girl, keep walking, and I was able to do so, but at each step I told myself, it’s important to know and important to take revenge, there must be something I can do.

The following week Monsieur Echenoz returned home, so I went to look after him. What joy to walk up the little streets, cross the park, and climb the steps that led to his big old house. It was only then that I realized to what extent he had become part of my life, my little life, the thread of a story that I could continue. He was very frail, his skin wizened and covered with purplish veins around his nose. He was very pleased to see me and, as had been the case before his attack, I noticed that he was waiting anxiously for the other nurse to go so that he could be alone with me.

I told him about what I had seen in Soacha and said that I wanted to do something, and he said, they murdered those boys and while they’re putting together a story they come out and deny it, presenting details that deflect attention, and in the end there will be another scandal to distract people, but those women must keep going out on the street and you must support them, he said to me, and then, with a sly look, he added: you could try something else, do it from within. I looked at him in surprise, from within? Yes, he said. You’re young and pretty, you could get close to whoever you want and find out whatever you want. It may be difficult, but not impossible. Try to reach as high as you can, you may be able to help them from there. I already told you once: there is nothing a woman can’t get. Sex is the most powerful weapon on earth. I’m eighty-three years old and it’s the only thing I miss, the only reason I’d like to be young again. Anyone who tells you the opposite is either a dreamer or a fool who confuses real life with ideas and suppositions about how life should be. Infiltrate the world of those criminals and destroy them from within, if you really do hate them. It’s a world of men, of brute, unscrupulous males. If you manage to get close to it, they’ll eat out of your hand. Remember that a silly young American woman, using nothing but her mouth, almost brought down the most powerful president in the world, don’t you see? and I’ll tell you something: charge them a lot and don’t have any scruples. Destroy them and get what you can from them, when it comes down to it money is the one thing that gives us freedom in this wretched world. They’re going to tell you that you’re a prostitute but you won’t listen to them. Let them talk and shout. They’re going to tell you that you’re evil, a witch, let them bark. Never take your eyes off your goals. Your family will criticize you, forget them. Mothers tell their daughters: marry well, choose well, but that basically means “sell yourself well.” It’s the worst kind of prostitution, for a single client, and the payment is a lie called “respectability.” Don’t enter that world of insects, Juana, because you’re strong and intelligent, and you can have a destiny of your own. If you choose freedom you’ll be a truly lethal weapon. Destroy them.

In the mornings, walking down toward Seventh to go to the university and have breakfast, I would repeat to myself his stories and advice, and as I advanced, shivering with the wind you get at seven in the morning and already smelling the acid smell of the exhausts, I’d think that in spite of his cynicism and his distaste for life, Monsieur Echenoz was right: the world wasn’t made for harmony and kindness, but quite the contrary, for confrontation. The world is a boxing ring, a battlefield. And you don’t go to battlefields with smiles and soft words, no, sir, you go armed to the teeth. Seeing it any other way struck me as childish and stupid.

I remember that day, walking along Fiftieth and Seventh, I stopped at a breakfast eatery, asked for scrambled eggs with onion, coffee with milk, and orange juice, and started looking around at the recently awakened city: people cleaning their cars, beggars, a woman in uniform washing down the entrance to a pharmacy, the assistants from a cell phone store lighting cigarettes outside the door, people huddled together, shivering with cold, at the bus stop on the corner, and a black cloud over everything, bringing that wind that seems so damp. I took out a notebook and wrote: “Life is a fucking battlefield and you have to be armed to the teeth.” I read the sentence about a hundred times. Then I tore off the sheet, rolled it into a ball, and threw it in the trash can.

I set off again for the university.

Time went by. One afternoon my cell phone rang. It was the daughter of Monsieur Echenoz. I have some news for you, she said, Father died yesterday. How? It was in his sleep, the doctors say he didn’t feel a thing, he was wrapped in blankets, he seemed asleep. I was happy for him. He was already on the other side, far from this life that he had known and analyzed like nobody else. I asked about the funeral arrangements, they gave me the information, and I dropped by the undertaker’s briefly to say hello to his children. I wanted to see him one last time but the box was closed. It was better that way, since I was left with the image of his eyes filled with anger, and his words that, even though subdued by his emphysema, had been pure fire. Instead of praying, I sat down to one side and, in a little book, started to write down what I remembered of him, his cynical phrases, his judgments and opinions. I wanted at least some of his ideas to survive, and that was why I proposed to live them.

“Ideas are not made to be thought, but to be lived,” said Malraux. And Monsieur Echenoz was right: if the world was cynical and cruel, it was best to be cynical and cruel. My kindness and my love would, from now on, be hidden behind a thick iron door, and they would be only for Manuel. Reality was the place where Manuel and I had to survive, a lonely, arid steppe, a rocky desert, infested with vipers and scorpions, in which we had to search for water or weaker animals to feed ourselves on, and above all weapons; weapons to avoid others getting first to the valley, or the plain, the promised place where we could be happy.

Starting the following week, I began looking for other work and, after a series of interviews, I was again hired to look after an elderly man. I was pleased. I liked old people. It would be hard to find another Monsieur Echenoz, but I was willing to take advantage of whatever there was. This one had also had an operation. He had a horrible scar on his side. When I arrived, an old woman gave me the drugs I had to administer to him, showed me the kitchen, the towels, how the house was laid out, and then went to sleep in another room. I had to bathe him. The old man sat down in a tub of hot water and asked me to scrub his skin and clean the scar. It was disgusting, but I did it. Then I helped him out of the bath and walked him to his bed. He lay there on the blankets, naked, and asked me to bring him something, pointing to a drawer. I didn’t quite understand. I opened the drawer and found a whole lot of creams. I brought them over to him and he asked me to spread them on him. Then he pointed to another drawer and as I was about to open it he came up behind me. Inside the drawer was a black plastic dildo, and I realized that the old man, in the middle of his wrinkled and bruised body, had an erection. I ran out and hailed a taxi. I felt humiliated. When I got home, I washed my hands for hours and felt like cutting them off, like a salamander that gets rid of a limb to escape danger and it then regenerates, as good as new.

I remembered Monsieur Echenoz and I told myself, enough of this crap, now the war starts.

I knew of some girls from the industrial design department who went out with guys and charged them, so I approached them, determined to gain their trust, until they suggested going with them to a party given by some male students from Los Andes, the same age as us. There were four of them and by the time we arrived they were drunk and stoned. They gave us drinks, pills, coke. They had a bit of everything. On a trip to the bathroom I asked one of the girls how it worked, and she said, we charge them 300,000 pesos to suck them and fuck them, but it’s okay, with what they’ve taken I don’t think they’ll be able to get it up anyway, so enjoy the party and don’t forget to ask for the money as soon as you go in the bedroom, before taking your clothes off; otherwise, they’ll fall asleep and forget about the money. The only rule is not to kiss them and not to agree to swapping. We already told them that. We left the bathroom and I sat down in the living room. These rich kids were studying philosophy and letters. I heard them talking about Wittgenstein and Clément Rosset, but they were so drunk that they got everything wrong, and besides, I told myself, what could these idiots know or understand of Rosset’s tragic ideas? Everything was luxurious and I felt inhibited, but Monsieur Echenoz’s words gave me strength. Suddenly, the owner of the apartment said, okay, guys, let’s get down to business with the girls, I’m already horny, and the others said yes and put on vallenatos and pulled us up and forced us to dance, a dance that really drove me crazy because what it consisted of was the guy putting his hand under your skirt as soon as you took the first step, which I found disgusting, and I said to him, listen, honey, you’re going to have to be a little more friendly if you don’t want to be jerking yourself off tonight, and he said, hold your horses, what’s the matter? I’m paying, aren’t I? but I said, you haven’t paid me yet and my cell phone has eleven missed calls, so if you want I can go, then he said, hey, wait, don’t fly off the handle, who are you? I mean, what’s your name? and I said, Daisy, like Donald Duck’s girlfriend, but I’m no bimbo, got that? if you want to, we can go to the bedroom but pay me first, and the guy said, what a girl, yes, madame, anything else? and I said, yes, pull your pants down, I’m going to suck your cock, close your eyes and think about your professor of logic, or Paris Hilton or Ricky Martin, that’s up to you, and he said, hey, what a generous girl, and can I think about you? but I said, no way.

That was my first night. I realized I could do it without being fussy and so I carried on, almost always with rich kids from Los Andes or the Xavierian, or young executives celebrating birthdays or throwing parties; sometimes in apartments and other times in motels. I learned to despise all those daddy’s boys, living off the country. My contempt was turning into hate. Every time I charged them more, and seeing them pay I felt strong. Monsieur Echenoz was reincarnated in me and I was happy. One day, taking advantage of everyone being out of it at a party, I stole a laptop and an iPad. I didn’t care and then, when the guy called and asked, I told him he was crazy, it must have been some other whore, I hadn’t been the only whore there that night. I switched it on to delete what was on it and found a collection of sexual photographs of boys and girls; little vaginas being violently penetrated, girls performing fellatio, boys being sodomized. I called the guy back and said to him, I have your computer but there’s a problem, baby, I’m with the Secret Service. The guys started to stammer. No, I said, I’m lying, I’m not with the Secret Service but I have a really good joke for you: I’m one of the whores from the party and you’re in deep shit because I found the photos. He asked me not to report him, and said he’d give me anything. I asked him for twenty-five million pesos in cash. He was an executive in quite a big insurance company. He told me that was too much money and that I was crazy. All right, I said, the price has just gone up to fifty million, otherwise I myself will hand this over to your bosses and to the police. I advised him to ask for a loan, there were banks that gave fast credit in urgent cases, and this was one of those. Very urgent. Fifty million. I made three copies on hard disk with everything he had on it including his personal details. I arranged to meet him at the Unicentro mall, opposite the entrance to the movie houses. I told him that if anything happened to me everything would go to the police. The guy handed over the money, nothing’s going to happen to you, it’s all here! I told him to put his cell phone in the bag, I didn’t want him to call me again. He was puzzled. Hey, what about my sim card? Get another, I said. Then I went into the bookstore and bought the diaries of Luis Buñuel as a gift for Manuel, and a novel by Martin Amis called Money. I was nervous. It was the first time I had committed a crime. But I told myself, if that son of a bitch reports me, I’ll kill him. What to do with the money? I’d prepared a hiding place at home, in the ceiling of the bathroom. It would have been suspicious to put it in my account. I went home and hid it really well. Then I went to the post office and sent the three copies of the disk in three envelopes: one to the Colombian Welfare Service, another to the director of his insurance company, and a third to his home address, in his wife’s name. I fulfilled my promise to him by not sending it to the police. In case of doubt I kept another copy. I felt real pleasure imagining the guy confronted with the truth, having to explain things to his bosses and his wife. I know that life in general is quite horrible, but you mustn’t go too far either. Of course, I erased what was on the iPad, recharged it, and gave it to Manuel as a gift.

One weekend, I went back to Soacha to see the women who had been demonstrating. Things had changed and it was now common knowledge that the young men had indeed been murdered. The army was announcing a purge. I met with Señora Martha again, the one who had seen me cry the previous time, and said to her, how can I help you? but she said, there’s nothing to be done, they’re going to put some of the soldiers on trial, but everything is slow and difficult and we’re already getting threats, they say we’re with the guerrillas. My voice shook, and my hands shook, and again I felt full of hate. That day I could have killed someone. I went back home on a crowded bus and enjoyed the smell of the students, the poor crowd: those who had to cross the city for a job and then run to a night class and have the strength not to fall asleep over their books. Poor people. Only hope and probably imagination gave them the strength to bear that shitty life. When did something pleasant ever happen to them? Almost never. I was going to be their avenging angel.

The next step was to get involved with the State and its yuppies, with its security apparatus and that gang of macho men, oh so macho behind their rifles and their checkbooks of public money and the complicity of the great alpha male, the supreme asshole of the nation.

Now they would see, the sons of bitches.

I sought them out, Consul. I infiltrated the Secret Service, and how did I do it? I became their whore. I was their whore because I wanted it. I preferred to sell my body rather than my soul, which is what everybody sold in that horrible country. Everybody except me, I did the opposite. I gave them my body. Look at me, I’m pretty and I can be a really attractive chick if I put on high heels, a miniskirt, a low-cut top, and hey, presto. I was told about a bar where people from the Secret Service hung out, so I went there and hooked one of the top guys, whose name was Víctor. He’d go around with a roll of dollars, a bottle of Blue Seal whiskey, and a bag of coke in his car. It all comes from the seizures, sweetheart. We fucked first at the Paracaídas motel, then at the Calera, and then at those in the north. He didn’t like to stick to one in particular, for security reasons. They may be following me, he would say. Evil never sleeps, that was his motto. We often went out with a guy called Piedrahita who was his boss in the Narcotics division, and the parties would end up at the VIP room of the Francachela motel. It was always on the house, thanks to the owners of the motel, they never paid. They hired other whores to do striptease and played around with them, but in the end Víctor would have sex with me and Piedrahita with Mireya, a girl from Choco who looked like a transvestite, and he was crazy about her, in love with her, because he liked them black. Melanin and frizzy hair, that’s how he put it. The parties would last three or four days, until they got a call from headquarters and went off to solve a case. When things went well they’d come back with fresh supplies for the party. We did coke, drank high-class whiskey, ate paella, and watched porn movies; Piedrahita, who must have been around fifty, would get very drunk and sometimes he’d go crazy and do ugly things, he’d give the whores hundred-dollar bills to perform cunnilingus on Mireya right there in front of him, and if one of them refused he’d take out his revolver and slam it down on the table, what’s the matter, girls, don’t you like her? don’t tell me you’re racists? racism is against the constitution! Don’t be like that, darling, Mireya would say in his ear, let’s go to the bedroom, and she’d drag him away. One day a shot went off that ended up in the ceiling and Víctor had to go out with his Secret Service badge to calm the neighbors.

Another night we were in the bedroom and he came and knocked, calling to Víctor: come on, brother, hurry up and get dressed, duty calls, this fucking country won’t let anyone fuck in peace. Víctor went out into the corridor. Wait, let’s get high before we go, Piedrahita said, and prepared four lines of coke, which they snorted. Now, girls, don’t cry for us, when you’re a public servant you have to make sacrifices, I’ll leave you to enjoy yourselves but none of that dyke stuff, all right, my beauties? and he put half a bottle of whiskey, a roll of dollars, and what remained of the coke on the table. Mireya came to the couch and we talked. How is he in bed? I asked. She poured herself some whiskey in a cup of coffee and lit a cigar. What he likes is for me to jerk him off from behind; he takes tons of Viagra but it doesn’t work for him; in the year and a bit that we’ve been together he’s only stuck it in me about ten times, can you believe that? A girl always misses that. But if he finds out I told you he’ll shoot both of us.

Víctor was married with three children. He wasn’t a bad person, but I hated him. He told me he could share the stresses of his work with me, but he never talked to his wife about the atrocities he committed, out of respect for her. Son of a bitch. One night he arrived covered in blood. They had nabbed some dealers in a house in Modelia, young guys, on a tip-off from a former paramilitary who’d turned himself in. They found twenty kilos, three submachine guns, ten pistols, and a bag with two hundred thousand dollars. Piedrahita was high on coke and started slapping one of the guys around, asking him about the stash with the big money, where was it? He’d been told there was a lot more. Víctor tried to calm him down. That’s enough, boss, let’s hand some of it in and we’re done, but Piedrahita went crazy and shot the dealer in the head, and then there was nothing else they could do, he had to shoot the others. There were five of them. Five young guys. Three Secret Service officers took them down to a garage. Víctor was shaking and Piedrahita said to him: let’s load them in the van. He went to speak on the telephone and came back saying, nothing happened here, I’m going to send them to a buddy in the Lanceros battalion, they need them more than we do, and he turned and said to Yesid, the youngest officer, son, take these guys to Commander Suárez, I already talked to him and he’s waiting for them, but be quick about it, and then call me, son, this is just between ourselves, okay?

That night Víctor arrived with rolls of dollars in his pockets, and when I told him he was lucky to have such well-paid work he replied, the hell I am, I can barely enjoy the money, just give it away or waste it on drink, not even buy a house because I’ll be grabbed by the tax people, or put it in the bank, just buy gifts for my wife and kids, but only little things, and send it to my mother, but not too much, and that was really bad, one of the unfair things about life, according to him, after so much sacrifice. That day he was very drunk, and I asked him, what do the soldiers do with the dead bodies? do they bury them? and he said, no, sweetheart, they make money with them, but don’t ask too much, it might put you at risk. You don’t know the really ugly things that have to be done to protect this fucking country.

I played dumb, but I was thinking: I already know what you people do, you asshole, I don’t need you to tell me, what comes out in the newspapers is true, you’re killing people, it’ll be your turn next.

I went out with him two or three times a month, whenever he celebrated a good arrest. The rest of the time I studied, read, went to the movies. Things happened and I sensed others about to happen. Life was passing like a wind that set my teeth on edge, gave me the shivers, soaked me. Everything was happening very quickly. One day a friend from the faculty invited me to a bar in the north of the city. Politicians go there, she said, really cool people, guys with money. I was afraid I might meet someone from the Secret Service, but it was an exclusive place, only people with style went there. By the time I’d had three glasses of rum, I already had a friendly man fluttering around me, smiling and winking at me. At last he made up his mind to speak to me. He invited me to do coke and I accepted, a long line. Shall we dance? He was an adviser to a senator, I can’t remember which one. From there we went to an apartment on the beltway to continue the evening. A swanky place, belonging to a girl who had come with them. The strange thing was that I didn’t go as an escort, since nobody had offered me money, but I had the feeling it was the same thing. The bozo’s name was Juan Mario and when he asked me, what do you do, where do you study and that kind of thing, I told him at the National, and he laughed, seriously? oh, wow, really? he said, and I said, yes, I study sociology, and he said, wow, sociology at the National! you’re not with FARC, are you? That’s what my father thinks, I said, but I regretted having told him that because after a while a friend came, they hugged drunkenly, and Juan Mario said to him, hey, man, let me introduce you to this girl, let’s see if you can guess where she studies? and the guy said, no idea, I don’t know, I mean, where could it be, at Los Andes? and Juan Mario laughed and said, no, man, not even warm, it’s incredible, at the National! and the other guy said, and what’s so funny about that, it’s cool, the National’s a cool university, what’s so funny? I liked that and I said, and what’s your name? and he said, Daniel, wait, I’ll give you my card, he took it out and I read, “adviser, Congress,” so I said to him, what do all you people advise about? He laughed and said to the other guy, you see, man, the people at the National are cool, well, we study projects, we suggest the subjects to be proposed, we study the constitutionality of it, I’m a lawyer, of course, when you come down to it, those guys are really a pain, you do all the work and then the congressman comes along and finishes it off, and sometimes he fucks it up, or rather, he usually fucks it up, that’s the way it is, and how is the National? Wow, it’s amazing, I’m a big fan of Mockus, seriously, my dog’s name is Antanas, a very intelligent Labrador, I swear to you, then he asked me for my cell phone number and I gave it to him, and a sixth sense told me that if I wanted to hook him I had to leave the party; I called a taxi and went home, but the next day, sure enough, the guy called me, hi, we met last night, do you remember? you left very early, didn’t you like the party? well, to be honest, it was boring, a real drag, right? listen, do you remember me? I’m the adviser, no, the other one, the second one you met, Daniel, are you in class? will you call me when you finish? and so I started going out with him, kind of on the sly, because he had an official girlfriend but he told me I was a lot better, that he could be natural with me, say what he thought, so I asked him, and what kind of things do you think? and he said, I don’t know, the kind of things I tell you, I like you a lot, babe, with you I can talk about movies and books, and I said to him, doesn’t your girlfriend like movies or what? and he said, no, I mean yes, but only romantic movies or comedies, she spends her time watching YouTube videos and chatting, can you imagine? the other day we were talking about something and you know what she said to me? look, I can’t stand talking with you, let’s chat instead, can we do that? or else, how are you doing, darling? oh, shall we chat? and the worst of it is that she is right, we get on better when we’re chatting, do you want to see her? and he showed me photographs of the girl on his BlackBerry, a pretty girl, he even had a photograph showing her backside in a nice little thong, and how’s the sex? I asked him, good? and he said, yes but she’s a hysteric, if I give her a hug she says no, it has to happen naturally, she doesn’t like me to go close to her, wanting her, she says she feels dirty, and so I say to her, but, babe, if we don’t get close how’s it going to happen? and she says, it’ll happen naturally! it should come from the two of us, not just you, as if we have to fuck, as if it’s an obligation, no, we should just let things happen, and I said, okay, but I don’t understand how they’re going to happen if we keep miles apart, but anyway, that’s how it is, and a second later she’s already fallen asleep, she’s always tired because she’s always busy, and when we fuck, I don’t know, I tell her, or rather, I think, that it’s a new form of anal sex, you know, she looks such an asshole when we fuck, with the faces she pulls, for it to be okay you have to give her a whole bottle of wine, she’s such a bore, that’s why I like you, you don’t make such a fuss about it, and I can talk to you and say the things I think seriously, that’s what I like about people from the National, I love Mockus, did I tell you that?

We fucked in his apartment in La Cabrera, and I didn’t charge him because what interested me was the Congress, finding out things, getting information. I asked him questions as if I were a silly girl, a student, who is this senator? why does that other guy have so much power? and he’d say, well, look, babe, that one is a hard man, the hardest of the hard, and so he’d come out with things and I’d put them together, and I’d tell myself, through this son of a bitch I’d get to others, I was patient and that’s what happened. One day he said to me, how would you like to come to Buenos Aires with me, babe? there’s a meeting of the Latin American Forum for Public Administration, do you know Buenos Aires? no? it’s a great place, you’ll love it, there are a million bookstores and people who are really intellectual, just the way you like it, babe, will you come? I traveled with him and there I met other advisers, among them the adviser to the presidential private secretary, and I said to myself, that’s what you’re after, the big fish. The opportunity arrived very quickly because Daniel’s meetings finished late and he always arrived at the end, so one day I met the presidential adviser at a cocktail party at the hotel, a very elegant place in Recoleta, and I approached him, acting dumb, a woman knows how to draw attention to herself without being noticed, and the guy fell in the net, he saw me in the line at the drinks table and stepped forward, what would you like? and I said, a glass of red wine, and he said, Malbec? and I said, yes, it’s my favorite, so he picked up two and said to me, my name is Andrés Felipe, I’m adviser to the presidential private secretary, and I said, yes, I know, Daniel has told me about you, and he said, have you come with Daniel? I said yes, but it was one of those women’s yeses that mean: “yes until I find something better.” The guy realized that and said, oh, what a pity, how sad, how envious I feel because I’ve come alone, so I said to him, alone in such a cold city? I don’t believe it, with all those beautiful Argentinian women you see on the streets, and he said, you know something, my dear, they may be very pretty, but what I like is the national type, why look outside when we have such beauty inside, am I right? look at you, for example, and he pointed at the mirror I was reflected in, and I laughed, and just then Daniel came in through the door, looking for me, and I saw him in the mirror, so I told Andrés Felipe, it’s been great, I really like people from the northwest, what room are you in? and he said, 711, come whenever you like, princess, 24-hour service.

Daniel arrived, looking tired, hi, babe, what are you drinking? oh, Malbec, great, wait while I get one for myself, have you already met Andrés Felipe? and I said, yes, he’s very nice, and he said, yes, he’s a really powerful man, highly educated, with a good agenda, and protected by Uribe, obviously, but I’m going to tell you something, babe, in Bogotá we’re tired of all these people from the northwest! there’s no room for any more in the Palace, anyway, there’s nothing to be done, and I said to him, well, you people should have thought of that before, shouldn’t you?

The next day, at eleven in the morning, I called room 711 and Andrés Felipe answered, hello, my dear, I got out of a meeting today because a little bird gave me a word of advice, it said, look, stay if you can, stay and something good will happen to you. I told him I’d be right there and a minute later we were kissing on the carpet; we fucked on the couch and sitting on the washbowl and finally on the bed, which most people say is the best place to fuck; he told me he was married, that he had two children and they were the only reason he didn’t separate from his wife. His wife was a hysteric, and I said to him, seriously? and why is that? and he said, we almost never make love, whenever I want it she says, don’t pester me, I want it to happen naturally, so I said to him, oh yes, I know that, and in the end she falls asleep, right? he laughed and said, exactly, she falls asleep, and you’re left lying there, none the wiser.

I hooked up with Andrés Felipe and when we got back to Bogotá we started seeing each other, first in the airport motels and then at motels in La Calera; the ones at the airport were good but the noise of the planes wouldn’t let him talk on his cell phone. One day I was with him and Daniel called him, but he didn’t answer. Another day I got a call from Víctor, the Secret Service guy, and he said to me, where have you been, girl? I have a little gift for you, we’re going to party the whole weekend with my boss, and I said to him, okay, but I can’t talk now, I’ll call you in a little while, it’s great to hear from you; I was dying with fear that I’d be intercepted so I switched off the cell phone and said to Andrés Felipe, I have to go, darling, ciao, and he said, has something happened with Daniel? and I said, look, I don’t know if you know this, but I have a private life and sometimes things crop up, I’ll tell you later, I kissed him on the mouth and ran out in a panic, Víctor had never gotten me so scared before; I went to my friend’s house in Chapinero, changed clothes, oh, I didn’t tell you that I had different clothes for this guy and that guy and couldn’t leave them all at home; those for the advisers were high-class brand-name things that my friend kept for me.

I put on something simple and provocative, and called Víctor. He answered right away, hi, doll, shall I send someone to pick you up? tell me where you are, and so that he shouldn’t suspect anything I answered, okay, darling, I’m at a girlfriend’s, they can pick me up on Third and 66th, on the steps outside Cinelandia, and he said, okay, Yesid will be there in the black van, and soon afterwards I was with them, Piedrahita drunk with Mireya on his knees, Víctor really stoned, not in a motel but in an apartment in the north of the city, near San Cristóbal, so I said, pretending to be happy, what an elegant party today! you should have told me to wear a long dress, and Piedrahita replied, no, sweetheart, this is a real stroke of luck, we’re going to hand back the apartment later, but for now we can enjoy it, it belongs to a fugitive we caught up with this afternoon, bang, bang! we took him down and found out he was loaded, isn’t that so, Víctor? yes, boss, he said, really loaded, and he took out a roll of bills and put it in my pocket, four thousand dollars, I counted them later in the bathroom, and we started to drink and do coke and they sent Yesid out to fetch roast chicken with potatoes and melted cheese, which kind do you like, girls, Kokoriko, Cali Mío, or Distraco? Piedrahita asked, and Mireya said, oh, no, they’re rough, I heard Kokoriko gives you colitis, bring me Kentucky Fried Chicken, and with French fries please, and so we were there for three days more or less, Yesid going in and out with rib broth and oatmeal rolls and bringing bottles of aguardiente because, after a couple of days, Piedrahita and Víctor got tired of drinking whiskey and went back to the home-grown stuff, bring us some real hooch, Yesid! they screamed, and another day or two went by, I lost all sense of time, and there was also a jacuzzi and sauna and we’d get in them, all a bit messy with the chicken legs and the guacamole, but in one of our trips to bed I asked Víctor, was it a really good arrest? and he looked down at me and said, we hit it lucky, gorgeous, oh, yes? why’s that? I played dumb while I sucked him off and he kept talking, we caught four of them, all loaded, and we killed two, and you know what? the two we didn’t kill will be useful to us for something else, we have to deal with a journalist who’s making the chief nervous, a man who’s always sticking his nose in everywhere, the order came down from upstairs a while ago, we have to find something on him, but so far we haven’t found a thing, the guy’s cleaner than a nun’s panties. With those two guys we’re going to put something together to make sure he keeps quiet, what they’re going to tell the prosecutor is already being written, anyway, don’t go thinking this is some low-level thing, gorgeous, the orders come from all the way upstairs, that’s why the prize is so good, they left the booty to us, and so I asked him, and the two men who are going to make statements, what will happen to them, will they be sent to prison? and he said, we’ll hide them for a while and then bang bang, that’s the safest way, or rather, that’s what the order is from upstairs, my God, in this country life isn’t worth anything, can you do me a line of coke, doll? and so he continued talking, about this and that, until we heard Piedrahita yelling, and we went out to see what was going on and he was in his underpants, with his gun in his hand, shouting, Yesid! open the other bag, Mireya needs more coke, and then he turned up the volume on the stereo, some horrible reggaeton, the apartment was like a dance hall in La Caracas, and Víctor said to him, turn it down, chief, the neighbors are going to complain, and that only made him worse, let those sons of bitches come and I’ll shoot them in the mouth, or in the ass, don’t be paranoid, Víctor, the walls are soundproof, or do you think these dealers don’t party? Maybe the coke doesn’t agree with you, right? what are you drinking? and he grabbed a bottle of twenty-five-year-old Chivas or one of Blue Seal and filled the glass to the brim, and said to him, go on, chill out, and he went back to the bedroom where we could see Mireya with a very strange thong stuck between her buttocks and with a huge belly in front, and Piedrahita said, wow, what a big black mama, did I tell you we’re trying for a kid? and he went back to the bedroom.

It’s getting harder all the time, Víctor said, the chief’s very nervous, they’re putting pressure on him from upstairs, he went crazy again on this operation, he smashed the skull of one of the guys with the butt of his pistol, I had to grab him to stop him still hitting him when he was already dead, chief, chief, the man’s already gone, leave him, because Piedrahita goes crazy sometimes, he acts like a lunatic, and I get scared, because I’m his pupil, anyway, after the thing today they may promote me, the top brass were very pleased and they’re already giving out statements to the press; there’s a guy in the office who’s a champion with stories, we call him the poet: he’s the one who arranges things so that they look good, because in this country you have to fight with everything you have, those terrorists are worse than scorpions and they’ve been really hounding us, just imagine, they got two friends of ours last month, you can’t piss around with these people, you fuck them before they fuck you, you see? my language is getting damaged from going around with Piedrahita, I wasn’t always this way, vulgar like him, a pity he’s my chief because I can’t correct him, and the worst of it is, I come out with these words in front of my wife and children, and so I asked him, for the first time, how old is your wife? and he said, twenty-nine, and the kids seven and five, a boy and a girl, the girl’s the older of the two. He took out a photograph from his billfold and I saw them, two really ugly kids, to tell the truth, because that’s typical of Columbia, Consul, how ugly poor children are, don’t you think, I like them when they’re bigger, and it wasn’t that Víctor was poor, he had bags of money from the seizures, but he was humble, his mother had a grocery store in a little town in Boyacá, anyway, I didn’t tell him what I thought about the children, but the opposite, obviously, how beautiful, the boy looks just like you, and he said, oh, gorgeous, now you really got me, and he took out another roll of dollars and said to me, look, doll, just to show how much I appreciate you, and he gave it to me, another two thousand, he must have been carrying six thousand with him, that was the good thing about big seizures.

Then I started searching on the Internet to see what had happened. In the case of that party that lasted for four days, plus two for recovery, they had taken out a straw man with money from drug trafficking, but fronting for FARC; not long afterwards it was said that one of the prisoners had accused a journalist, and that everything was corroborated in some e-mails, that he’d been paid I don’t know how many dollars and that the Secret Service was still investigating why that journalist had attacked the government, especially a minister, they suspected that FARC was behind it, a conspiracy, in other words, that was the language they used at the time, do you remember that, Consul?

In spite of the atrocities, nothing ever happened to Víctor or his chief. They didn’t feel they were in any danger, quite the contrary: they thought they were heroes, and the worst of it is, they probably were. Heroes of that horrible country. I listened to their stories, they whacked these people, took those out, charged this one, fabricated evidence against another, arrested someone they had previously protected, threatened others, and so on. One day they took me to a party with other people from the Secret Service and there I realized that they were all in the same game. They were playing to kill. They were plainclothes policemen and they felt protected. For the chief they had various nicknames: Big Boss or Chief White Feather.

Every time I heard of someone they’d killed, I’d tell myself, people like me or my brother, people who remain buried forever on patches of waste ground, abandoned, how solitary that is, dying on a patch of waste ground, without anybody knowing where, don’t you think? That’s what happened to most of those they caught because, according to Víctor, there were a hell of a lot of traitors in the country, and that’s why they had to kill them. And, seeing him with Piedrahita, I’d say to them in my mind, you still think you’re gods, carry on while you can, sons of bitches, because very soon you’ll be singing a different song, and I continued paying attention and preparing my revenge, making accounts and calculations.

The first thing was to get Manuel out of the country and send him to Europe to study film. My dream was to pay for the education he wanted, not philosophy anymore but film, I wanted him to become a great director, and to make that possible I’d put myself through hell. I saved and saved, but of course, I also had expenses. I set myself the target of a hundred thousand dollars; I even thought to ask Víctor, telling him it was to help my brother to study, but then I had second thoughts: best not to tell him anything about myself or talk to him about our plans, which were the one beautiful thing in my life.

At home, I kept lying: that I’d been on a field trip to study a native community in the Montes de María, where there was still an ongoing situation with the guerrillas and the paramilitaries, and Mother would cry, oh, my God, Juana, and did you see terrorists from FARC? and I’d say, to pull her leg, of course, Mother, the work was with them, and Mother would lose her temper, and say, oh, daughter, you’re proving me right, I said it from the first day you went to that training camp they call a university, didn’t I? But Father would defend me, calm down, Bertha, can’t you see the girl’s pulling your leg? And then it was time to go to bed, and when there were no more sounds in the house I’d go to Manuel’s bedroom and say to him, what do you think? what do you see? tell me those beautiful things you have in your head, and then he’d hug me and cover my eyes with his divine hands and say: there’s a new constellation, a different sky where there are no stars, only volcanoes, and you and I are sitting on the edge of one of those volcanoes watching the others spit out lava, that’s what I see; the lava looks like liquid gold; there’s a terrible silence in the constellation and the eruptions boom, but we’re calm, there’s a refreshing wind and what reaches us is the echo, an echo that comes from a long way away, and then, Consul, I’d close my eyes and listen to him talking, and Manuel’s words, those worlds he had inside him, existed because he existed, and I’d fall asleep, dreaming of those skies and those volcanoes, he and I in each other’s arms. I could see him not only through his words, but because he painted them on the local walls, floating in the air, or in the water of the sea, solitary planets filled with volcanoes, that was his beautiful world. On those nights I was very happy, you can’t imagine how happy, but it made me anxious, being so happy, so terrifyingly happy. That’s why when I say that he liked movies I thought: finally I’ll be able to see our story, more of what he has inside, and I’ll be able to protect him, I was strengthened in the thought of making all these sacrifices, I’d do whatever it took to get there, even rob a bank.

I saw myself going with Manuel to the premiere of his first film, in Cannes or Venice or San Sebastian, and then I fell asleep, cradled by these fantasies, and the following week I continued with renewed strength, in order to save money, to live without fear, and I answered the calls from Andrés Felipe, who always came back on the attack when I was with Víctor, as if he had radar, and I’d arrange to see him and we’d fuck like crazy and I’d listen to his stories about his frigid wife, just so that he would trust me, because I couldn’t forget the face of that woman in Soacha and the promise I made her, you know? I’m a person with fixed ideas and if I tell someone I’m going to do something I do it, that poor woman and her son, I could imagine all too well where he might be, or rather his bones, because that damned country is built over a grave, wherever you dig you find bones, we’ve spent years digging up bones and looking for their names, and even now they keep coming out, it’s horrible, but you know what I’m talking about, don’t you?

One day I called Andrés Felipe on his cell phone and said, what’s up, are you getting bored with me? Quite the contrary, darling, he said, I was just thinking to call you and ask you to go with me to a convention in Cartagena, do you like Cartagena? and I said, oh, how wonderful, I have a new bathing suit, and he said, bring it with you because we’re going to the Santa Clara, the most beautiful hotel, and so we went, what kind of convention? I asked, and he said, what do you think, darling, a convention of advisers, and I said to him, hell, it’s pretty good being an adviser, but when we got there I realized that it was much more about security, a private thing, not open to the public, they were meeting with gringos, security advisers, and I almost had a heart attack when I heard Andrés Felipe say that the head of the Secret Service was with them, because the president was going to be there on the third day, he himself had called the meeting, that’s why I had to stay in the hotel, a bit hidden, the meetings were in private places and it wasn’t good for him to be seen with a strange girl, he explained to me, but I said to him, it’s your loss, and I’d go for walks and buy crafts, although feeling anxious, hell, if the head of the Secret Service was coming, there must be a whole security setup, and what if Víctor and Piedrahita came there and saw me? No, no, I told myself, they’re in Narcotics, but I was scared all the same, I wasn’t doing anything bad but they were law enforcers and saw the bad in everything, it was best to be careful, so I spent the afternoon walking around and at night I went to the hotel to wait for Andrés Felipe, and when I asked him how it had gone he was angry, angry with the gringos who were giving them lessons and angry with the guy from the Secret Service, who said the problem was that they had to respect the rights of the people, and in a country like ours, a country at war, either you fought to win or you protected rights, and of course, Andrés Felipe, who had done courses at Princeton, felt bad, he didn’t like that way of thinking, but he had to swallow it, because the order was to follow the instructions of the gringos, but then, when the gringos left, the very same chief had said to them, well, boys, now you know what you have to do, the terrorists are among us, not only in the mountains, if only they’d stayed there to be machine-gunned, but no, now they go around in ties in the corridors and offices of the Supreme Court, in the newsrooms of the press, in the universities, in the trade unions and NGOs, and there we can’t machine-gun them, the war consists in bringing them out into the light, so we’re going to spy on them, listen to what they say on the telephone, and since this struggle is relentless and has to be won quickly, it’s important to hurry things along with witnesses and testimonies, we can’t wait for the terrorists to fall by themselves, it’s a way to save the lives of our countrymen, are you listening to me? does anyone disagree? And everyone said, no, no! dying of fear, that’s what Andrés Felipe told me, because according to him that’s what they felt when faced with the Supremo, fear, a guy so cold and authoritarian, with that icy look, devoid of scruples, like that of a snake about to bite, and they all went out to obey him. Nobody can say a word against it, he said, but later, with a few drinks in him, smoking a joint after we’d had an amazing fuck on the terrace, Andrés Felipe told me that the chief was a hard person, true, but he was also intelligent and loyal, and sometimes he made people do ugly things but the result in the end was good, what’s that phrase? oh, darling, you must know it, for sure, the end what? and I said, the end justifies the means, hell, don’t you know something as simple as that? God knows what the advice you give must be like…

Then, in his doped-up soliloquy, Andrés Felipe told me that his family had been friendly with the president for several generations, and that in spite of that there were things he didn’t agree with, although he knew they were necessary, especially when it came to contacts with the people in blue, that was what he called them, and I asked, and who are the people in blue, darling? and he rolled another joint and took a slug of whiskey and said, who do you think, precious, do I need to draw you a picture? of course every time someone is denounced we put him under surveillance, we dig up what we can about him, because I do think there are moments in history, History with a capital “H,” when you have to choose sides and take risks, you have to stand up and be counted, do you understand me? and like a submissive girl, bowing down before him, I said, of course, and I asked him how about you, what risks are you taking in this war? and he answered, well… do you think what I do is nothing? standing side by side with the chief, advising him about things I myself don’t agree with, carrying messages, exchanging information, protecting the cause, all the things I wouldn’t do, for example, if we lived in Switzerland or Costa Rica or the United States, countries that don’t put you up against the ropes, but what can we do, we live in Colombia and this brave little country we like so much forces us to do complicated things, do you understand me? And I said, yes, of course I understand, I have a friend who says the same, and why do you like this country so much? I asked, and he said, well, because it’s mine, why else do you think? I love this fucking country, or rather, if you cut one of my veins what would come out is… Colombia! no more, no less, isn’t it the same with you? and I said, no, what comes out of me is blood, but I understand you, and to stop him looking at me suspiciously I lit his joint and slid over him and started fucking him again until he looked me in the eyes and said, all romantic, or rather all mushy, oh, Juana, you’re the bright star of my soul, the light of my life, what do you call what we’re doing? and I answered, fucking, and he said, oh no, that’s vulgar, this is making love! really, don’t you feel the same or what? and I said, of course I feel the same, we both have genital corpuscles in our mucous membranes, and he said, no, come on, are you giving me a college lecture or what? and he kissed me, and said, come here, my beautiful genius, if I didn’t have those three kids I swear I’d leave my wife and I said to him, don’t leave your wife, don’t even think about it, those kids deserve everything.

At the end of the whole thing there was a cocktail party at the convention center, and after it, when the top brass had gone and the Secret Service people were already flying back to Bogotá in their private plane, Andrés Felipe took me to a party in a very luxurious apartment in Bocagrande. There I met other advisers, all in security. The party really took off around two in the morning, with the arrival of a former Miss Colombia who really spiced things up, sang vallenatos, and excited everyone with some very pretty girls who were with her. I was surprised that she’d arrived on her own, I mean without a partner, but then I saw her sit down in the lap of the guy who owned the apartment, whose face looked familiar, an old actor or a former TV presenter. Pills were passed around, the glass ashtrays were filled with coke. At one point, I saw one of the advisers pass a pill on his tongue to his girlfriend, and then the former Miss Colombia snort a line of something, a coffee-colored powder that didn’t look like coke. I was surprised. I took whatever was going, but within certain limits. After a couple of hours, I told Andrés Felipe that I wasn’t feeling well and asked him if we could go, but he didn’t want to leave and he said, go to one of the bedrooms and lie down, princess, I’ll call you. I went to the second floor, walked along a corridor, and opened a door at random, but closed it again when I saw the owner of the apartment in bed with a young black guy. At that point I recognized him and told myself, of course, he was an old actor! Farther down the corridor, in a kind of living room, I found a couch and fell asleep.

I don’t know how much time passed but when I woke up dawn had already broken and the atmosphere was very unreal. I had a headache and my muscles felt lethargic. A group of employees was just finishing taking a table of fruit, eggs, and oatmeal rolls onto the balcony, next to the table of drinks. There were people in bathing suits coming out of a swimming pool and a Jacuzzi at the far end. I didn’t see Andrés Felipe anywhere, but I didn’t care. I went and ate a dish of fruit. Then I did a line of coke, because someone was regularly filling the ashtrays, and walked toward the Jacuzzi. I lit a cigarette and felt a little better. The former Miss Colombia was there, in her underwear, with a black thong that was like a thread. She had a glass of gin in her hand and was talking to two guys. I took my clothes off and went into the water, which brought me back to life. How delicious, a Jacuzzi at that hour. People said hello to me. Someone said they had seen Andrés Felipe on the other terrace, but I just shrugged. I heard them talking from a long way away, with the warm water on my body and the still cool breeze of the morning. They asked me who I was and I said just anything, an invented name, and that I was studying sociology at the National. One of the guys offered me a line, but I said I’d snorted not long before. The three snorted their couple of lines and continued talking, saying how difficult it was to get credit because of the fluctuation of the dollar, and the worst thing, said the former Miss Colombia, was the damned revaluation of the peso, which has screwed us all up, right? You put your savings abroad and now it turns out exactly the opposite, the good thing is to have pesos. She had a modeling agency in Bogotá, and from what I gathered some of the girls at the party were hers. They talked about the reigning Miss Colombia, she said she was betting on her this year for Miss Atlantic, but Miss Universe was going to be difficult because, according to her, Chávez had it fixed, and then the two guys said, that clown, that son of a bitch, poor Venezuelans, I don’t understand how come the gringos haven’t brought him down, and the other one said: we should bring him down ourselves, what bullshit it is always to depend on the gringos, and the first one said, yes, but if anyone finds out, can you imagine? and the former Miss Colombia said, what a pity that here in Colombia the government doesn’t help beauty queens and models, we have to do it all ourselves, there should be subventions for beauty, I envy the Venezuelans in that way, because they’re protected there, and then one of the guys said, well, what is it you don’t have? and she said, me, nothing, thanks to the agency I have everything, my girls are the best and are in demand everywhere, the problem is that sometimes they get damaged, they get sent back to me with more weight on them or with vices, and one of the two guys, passing her the little mirror with the coke, laughed and said, what vices do they get sent back to you with? and the former Miss Colombia put one line in each nostril and said, with the worst of all, the vice of easy money, that’s the worst one in this country, the one that everybody has, including us here, on this terrace in Cartagena, in this delightful Jacuzzi, without having to get up early in the morning to work like other people, and one of the guys, indicating me with his eyes, said, well, don’t exaggerate, what will our guest think, we’re entrepreneurs, we already break our backs building a heritage, generating employment and critical mass, making a country, so we deserve a little enjoyment, don’t we? I laughed and said to them, of course you deserve it. I poured myself some aguardiente from a tray and said to them, cheers, this is my first of the day, and the three of them applauded and said, wait, we’ll drink with you, and they poured themselves three glasses and we raised a toast, and the former Miss Colombia said to me, you’re pretty, what are you doing, studying with those guerrillas in the National? I shrugged again, but she insisted, you should come to my office in Bogotá, you have a lovely body, let’s see, do you mind standing up a moment? I did as she asked and she said, look, with a month of going to the gym you’ll be perfect, I have teachers who can train you, would you like that? and I said, yes, of course, a thousand thanks, then she called somebody on her BlackBerry and soon afterwards a young girl came with cards and gave me one, seriously, you’ll call me next week? I said yes, and they continued talking, one of them said to her, listen, you’re the only one who works at parties and at this hour, but the former Miss Colombia said, that’s because the talent and beauty of this country won’t allow us to rest, you have to keep your eyes wide open, and they continued talking about politics, all of them wanted the President to be reelected for a third term, this country has never been better, they said, has it? and all of them said, yes, we have foreign investment, security, business is good, oh, we don’t give a damn about the constitution of ’91, why can’t we change it? and again they filled their glasses and filled mine, and they said, a toast to our beloved president! We knocked back the aguardiente, me choking of course, but keeping quiet, and one of the guys held out the mirror and we snorted some more, and because it was finished they called a maid, a black girl with an apron, like something out of the nineteenth century, and they said to her, do us a favor and prepare some more lines, and they toasted again, to the president who’s going to win the war for us! and another said, praise be to him! and if the neighboring countries kick up a fuss we’ll take a stick to them, Chávez is just asking for an invasion, and Correa in Ecuador too, let them know that we’ll enter their territory whenever we fucking feel like it to kill terrorists, that’s why we have half a million soldiers and policemen, let them come, we’re waiting for them.

From one of the tables on the terrace, a group of guests turned to look at us, raised their glasses, and said, to the bravest president we’ve had! And those who were leaning out of the windows on the second floor, hearing the toast, also raised their glasses, as did those who were in the bedrooms and the terrace roof, all together; the servants put down their trays, from other apartments they leaned out and lifted their hands and cried in unison, long live our president!! a resounding, enveloping, all-consuming cry that was repeated from building to building, long live our president!! as if a storm had invaded the sky, something dark and electric, a storm cloud laden with omens. Then the cry drifted off through the air and faded in the distance, in a cloudy area where the sky merged with the sea and which to me, from that Jacuzzi, seemed liked the entrance to hell.

Then I drank another aguardiente and the party went on.

When I got back from Cartagena I called the former Miss Colombia’s number and went to see her. Her office was on Seventh and Eighth, below Eleventh. On the entrance door there was a plate: School of Modeling.

Oh, how good that you took the plunge, she said, remind me of your name, she gestured to me to come in and wrote something in a cheap diary, from next year, and then said, and what would you like me to call you? Oh, yes, I said, well, look, I’d like to be called Jessica, but she said, no, my dear, we already have three Jessicas, so I said, well, suggest one, like in Hotmail; we laughed, she looked at her notebook, all right, seeing you the way I saw you, seeing the brave and assertive person that you are, I’d give you a really cool French name, and the best one is Emmanuelle, you remember the movie? I said, yes, I knew everything about films, but then I said straight out, listen, I’m curious about something, do all the models have false names? and the former Miss Colombia said, well, that’s for protection, dear, because you know how men are, and I said, but is the modeling thing mainly about going with guys or what? and she cleared her throat and said, oh, my dear, we have to do a bit of everything here, the way things are right now, with the economic crisis and the revaluation of the peso, with the fall of Wall Street, if there’s any modeling work, then fine, but in the meantime, most of the girls take on what there is, obviously they’re well paid and they know who the client is, we don’t service drug traffickers or paramilitaries or guerrilla chiefs, none of that, just businessmen, sometimes foreigners, diplomats, highly placed people, the thing is, these days life has changed a lot, just imagine, at the party in Cartagena I took six girls and all of them were paid really well and were happy, because when you come down to it they’re paid to do what they like doing, which is having a good time, doing their pills and their coke, having their drinks, doing a couple of fucks almost without realizing it, they earned two million pesos, sometimes three, which was nothing in dollars, and I thought inside me, poor girls, three million? is that what they need those asses and those boob jobs for? Víctor gives me on average three thousand dollars per party, but of course, he’s middle-class, meaning he’s more generous, so I said to the former Miss Colombia, look, I’ll leave you my cell phone number, I’m not interested in modeling or any of that bullshit, just going out with really high-class guys, especially lawyers, I’m crazy about lawyers and they come in useful when there’s any problem, right? and the former Miss Colombia, who looked at me in surprise when I said this, replied, right, boss, right, and how much do we charge them? to which I said, five million, minimum, the rest is for your office, and she said, no, girl, that’s very high, so I said, okay, all right, four and a half, here’s my phone number, nice to have met you.

Three days later I was in the cafeteria of the García Márquez Cultural Center, reading Juego de Damas by R. H. Moreno Durán, when my cell phone rang. It was her. My dear, I have your first client, and I asked, conditions okay? and she said, more than okay, are you presentable? and I said, that depends, who is he? And she said, he’s a very dear friend, sixty-six years old but as strong as an ox! I told him about you and he said he’d like to meet you, he’s a lawyer, this is the address; I went home, put on a black Punto Blanco thong and a pair of Diesel jeans, and changed my blouse; instead of the tennis shoes some low-heeled shoes, made myself up like a cat, and asked for a taxi. I looked at the address: it was in the Nogal building. Great. I didn’t know it.

I arrived and he turned out to be a brilliant guy, a real old gentleman; he showed me into the library and there was something of everything, history books, literature, dictionaries of the cinema, he offered me a drink and as he was bringing ice for a whiskey I took down a book by Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, that was always on loan from the university library, he had it in Spanish and in French; when he came back with the glasses he said to me, are you interested in Lévi-Strauss? and I said, I’m sorry, I just wanted to look at this book, I’ve been waiting for it for months from the library, and then he said, you can have it, come and take a look, and he took out The Raw and the Cooked and also Tristes Tropiques, books that seemed in the realm of fantasy in the university library, and said, take them, they’re yours, I’ve already read them and I have them in French, these books are the kind you read and appreciate, it’s been years since anybody took out those poor volumes, it’ll give me pleasure to know that you’re going to read them and lend them to your friends, that’s what they’re for, to be read many times and by different people.

We sat down on the couch and talked about literature and history, about the Escolios of Nicolás Gómez Dávila, the aphorisms of Lichtenberg and Elias Canetti; then he talked about life and read me a fragment of a poem by William Blake:

That Man should labour & sorrow, & learn & forget, & return

To the dark valley whence he came, to begin his labour anew.

That’s what he was like, he said, trying to get back to a place, searching anxiously for it, but sometimes his valley was in his books or in his memory or in movies, he didn’t have much left. He told me he was a widower, his children lived in Europe, and for the moment he didn’t have a girlfriend. He was in recess. His verse from Blake had made me think of one by Mayakovsky, and he said, do you know it? can you quote it to me? and I said:

Without drinking even a drop

I have reached my soul’s aim. My solitary human voice

is raised

between cries

between tears

in the rising day.

He gave me a hug, and suddenly I noticed that his eyes had glazed. It’s very good, and he talked to me about Mayakovsky, “the unhappy Mayakovsky,” as Sabato calls him. He said that in Moscow there was a Mayakovsky Museum next to the former KGB headquarters, a strange, elliptical, theatrical museum that tried to reproduce his poetry and his world. One day you’ll visit it.

He started caressing me and kissing me, it was really nice and I was enchanted, Consul, I swear, and we had a great fuck; then he asked permission to put the TV news on and I said to him that I didn’t want to interrupt him, that it was already time for me to go, but he said no, stay with me, and we saw it there, lying naked in bed. Over our heads there passed that hurricane of horror contained in any of the news bulletins in that cursed place, with the massacres and the violence and the hypocrisy, and then those crazy women who present the final part, as if the news bulletin was about Disney World and not about a country with more displaced persons than Zaire and more executions than Liberia; reaching this point, Alfredo, that was his name, said to me, I can’t bear these idiots, and he switched it off, and then I said, it’s been really great to meet you, I have to go now, and he said, wait, he got out of bed and got dressed and as I was going out he handed me a roll of banknotes, but I said to him, don’t worry, Alfredo, the books are more than enough and I’m indebted to you, but he insisted, and I stuck to my guns, you and this house are an oasis, I don’t know why I’m telling you this, and he embraced me and said, I understand why you’re saying that, can I see you again? and I said, yes, and gave him my telephone number, call me whenever you like, it doesn’t matter what time, call me and I’ll come right away.

I left with the strange sensation that I had touched something clean and unpolluted. Of course Monsieur Echenoz had been like that too, although in a way that was Luciferian and cynical. Not Alfredo, even though he was rich and from Bogotá. I walked northward along Seventh, glancing at the books by the light of the streetlamps, and when I got home Manuel wasn’t there, he’d gone to the movies, so I shut myself in to read and take notes, remembering Alfredo’s voice as he said: “It’ll give me pleasure to know that you’re going to read them and lend them to your friends,” which was precisely what I was thinking to do, and I fell asleep with a smile.

A few days went by like that, going out from time to time with Víctor and with another couple of clients of the former Miss Colombia who turned out to be nothing special, until Andrés Felipe the adviser, as I thought of him, called me again. How’s it going, precious? and I said, I’m bored, I guess you forgot all about me, and then he said, no, precious, not at all, I’m actually calling you to ask you to go with me on a really nice jaunt, it’s to a ranch in Antioquia, how does that sound to you? it sounds great, I said, and when is it for? and he said, now, right now, get ready and I’ll send someone to pick you up, give me an address. I told him at the entrance to the Andino mall and I went there with a hand case. A car came with official plates and took me to the Catam military airport, near El Dorado. Andrés Felipe was waiting for me on one of the runways with two men dressed in dark suits who I didn’t know; we got on a helicopter and took off; I was pleased because I’d never seen Bogotá from a helicopter, in other words, as the birds, the buzzards and the vultures, see it, and the truth is that as soon as the flight takes off and you rise into the air the city looks like a trough of sugar houses and winding paths; of course if you go further it already looks like a patch of vomit, next to the hills; then I started looking at the mountains and the rivers, those beautiful landscapes that the country has, and I imagined them full of guerrillas and paramilitaries, our beautiful fields, the paths and valleys filled with mines and bones and rifle cases, and so we continued, without anybody talking, until one of the guys, looking at a BlackBerry, said to Andrés Felipe, they’ve just sent the coordinates, sir, wait and I’ll give them to the pilot, and then the helicopter turned and gained speed and two or three hours later we saw a clearing opening in the middle of the greenery and as we descended a ranch house came into view, with two swimming pools and well-tended, symmetrical, brightly colored gardens. A group of people stood beside a tree, signaling to us.

We got off and Andrés Felipe said, best if you don’t say too much while we’re here, gorgeous, you do understand? and I said, yes, but who are these friends? and he said, don’t ask too many questions, precious, I’ll tell you later. We were received with hugs and taken to the guest room, which was like a suite in a five-star motel, with air-conditioning and a bathroom with a marble tub, porcelain containers, bars of Spanish Heno de Pravia soap, and mirrors with wooden frames. The only thing missing was Benetton condoms. We left our bags and were invited to sit on the terrace, next to the swimming pool, and someone said, would you like a nice cold aguardiente? I accepted, but Andrés Felipe asked for a Coca-Cola Light. He was nervous, kept looking around, and every now and again talked in a low voice with the people from the house. A very nice lady, who seemed to be the wife of the host, asked if I wanted to put on a bathing suit; I said yes and she took me to the changing room, and in the meantime I started talking to her, do you live here? and she replied, no, I just come here to relax, and so I said to her, what kind of work do you do? No, I don’t work, I live with my husband. I felt like asking her, if you don’t work why do you need to relax? but I preferred to keep quiet, you had to be blind and stupid not to realize that the house belonged to paramilitaries, or straight drug traffickers, so instead I said, it’s a lovely house, I congratulate you on your good taste, and she said, thank you, we hired a foreign interior decorator, my husband didn’t want to build the typical Antioquian ranch house, but something high-class, and it came out well, didn’t it? Oh yes, I said, really high-class!

We went out on the terrace, and with the heat, I got straight into the pool. It was nice and cool. A waiter reached me my glass of aguardiente, but I noticed that the others weren’t drinking, so I said to myself, this party is a little strange. Better to act as if I’m stupid and not ask any questions; then I heard one of the men say that the gentleman wouldn’t be coming until the following day, we have to wait for him. After that Andrés Felipe relaxed and had a few whiskeys. The lady of the house started a conversation but I couldn’t say anything because they were talking about Colombian soccer. Our soccer that’s poor and ugly, like the country: poor and ugly, and that’s why I don’t like it. Like talking obsessively about a disease, the way most people only talk about accidents or madness. But nothing else seemed to matter to them, and they talked and talked, that if the Junior or the DIM, or something very strange called La Equidad, which sounded like a discount store for poor people, and the strange thing is that the one who most insisted on the subject was the lady of the house. I realized they were talking about all this because they didn’t have any other subject and because the reason for this meeting was a secret and could only be touched on with the husband, who would be arriving the next day. Her role was to distract us. When they served the food she showed us into a very swanky dining room, with silver cutlery and a beautiful blue and white dinner set with embossed hunting scenes, and of course wine, not Argentinian or Chilean wine but French wine, Pomerol, a delicious red wine, though it was a strange thing to drink in that tropical heat; I had about four glasses with the first course, which was an asparagus consommé; then they replaced it with a white, a Sancerre, also delicious and very cold, and the main dish arrived, which was fish, a roll of salmon with fines herbes with a salad of leeks and purée, a delicious thing, and since I love to ask awkward questions, pretending to be dumb, I wanted to know if the salmon was from some nearby river, and the lady of the house laughed and said, yes, from the river Orkla, not here in Antioquia but in Norway, and everybody laughed and I sat there like a silly young busybody but she looked at me affectionately, since I’d given her the opportunity to tell her joke and look good.

When night fell it got cooler, and they lit the fire and served us brandy and offered cigars, Montecristo and Davidoff; now the talk was about Shakira, whether or not she represented Colombia well abroad. The hostess complained that she sang in English, she didn’t think that was right because in Colombia people don’t speak English, but I said, yes, they do, it’s the mother tongue in San Andrés and Providencia, then she said, all right, and also the yuppies of Parque de la 93 in Bogotá, wasn’t it? Again everybody laughed. Andrés Felipe looked at me gratefully, I was giving a perfect performance in my role as the pretty but dumb girlfriend.

After the brandy they passed around trays with a delicious dark whiskey, served in cognac glasses, without ice, because they said it was too fine, and they talked vaguely about how well the country was doing; around midnight we retired to the bedroom and I commented to Andrés Felipe, pretending to be dumb, what elegant people, nobody snorted coke or smoked joints, and he said, no, gorgeous, it’s different here, that’s why I told you that the best thing is not to talk too much and go with the flow, although you’re doing it very well, precious, I’m really glad you came. I fell asleep after a good fuck, but before I did I thought: are they paramilitaries or just traffickers?

The following day, the host arrived at last, riding a sorrel with a high-quality saddle, surrounded by bodyguards. He greeted Andrés Felipe and said, how nice to see you, are they looking after you as you deserve? and Andrés Felipe answered, of course, Don Fermín, I wasn’t treated this well even in my grandmother’s house, and then the man said, come on, Andrés Felipe, don’t exaggerate, I knew your grandmother’s house, maybe you don’t know this, but my mother was one of her maids. Andrés Felipe didn’t know what to say and we all stood there nonplussed, there was a silence that seemed to go on forever, you could hear the air passing, so I stuck my oar in, out of pure intuition, and said, that’s the good thing about this country, the opportunity it gives us to advance, I congratulate you on your house, Señor Fermín, we’ve been feeling as if we’re in the Palace of Versailles, and then the man started to laugh and gestured to Andrés Felipe and said, and who is this very polite young lady? and he said, a friend, I invited her because I know you like to see friendly young people, and he said, good for you, come, my dear, and he took me by the arm and walked me as far as the terrace and said to me, before you leave here I’m going to give you a gift, and I looked at him and said, the only gift I need is this invitation, but I’ll take it because it came from you, and he said, yes, I like intelligent sensitive people, but go get in the swimming pool because I have to work with Andrés Felipe until lunchtime, all right?

They came out around two on the afternoon. There was a moment when Andrés Felipe tried to switch on his BlackBerry but one of Don Fermín’s security guys approached nervously and whipped the phone out of his hand. We had lunch and then another helicopter arrived. Before saying goodbye Don Fermín took me to his study, closed the door, and said: I’m going to give you your gift, just as I promised. He opened a drawer in his desk and took out a box wrapped in gold paper. Then he gave me a hug and said: take good care of that bastard and say hello to the chief for me. In the helicopter, on the way back, I opened the box and found a beautiful watch. It was perfect for me. When we landed in Bogotá, Andrés Felipe put me in a taxi and set off along the road. They were waiting for him at the Palace. I understood everything but said nothing.

I see I haven’t told you anything about my friends at the faculty, Consul. One of them was Jaime, an Aesculapian priest who had special permission from the Curia not to study at the Xavierian but at the National: a strange-looking guy, who looked more Norwegian or Hungarian, or even Russian. Yellow beard and hair, and very white, sensitive skin. He lived with his community in an area near Usme, with a Dutch priest. Actually it was a home for street kids and he was studying sociology because he wanted to understand what he should do to change the world. He was from Santander. A good person, very committed. He said that if Christ were alive today, that was where he would be. He hated the little chapels in the north of the city where rich people had their weddings. He said he could happily shoot those who celebrated Mass in those neighborhoods, without his hand even shaking, although obviously not all rich people were the same, there were shades of gray, and even some rich people who were good. The real sons of bitches, according to him, were the priests who ministered to the rich and were all opportunists and liars.

Other friends of mine were Tamara, José, and Carlos Mario. All three from Cali, very together, or rather, good students. They liked having fun and sometimes I went with them to prepare work or exams, because in the end, when it was over, we always went dancing at Café y Libro or Son Salomé. They liked salsa, as did I, and also rock in Spanish. With them I went to concerts by ChocQuibTown and Aterciopelados and Side-stepper. They were all on the left but they hated FARC and ELN. We wanted a change, simply to aspire to something different. The guerrillas were corrupted by the money from drug trafficking and kidnappings, and because of their passive attitude of hunkering down in the regions and becoming like local chieftains. The university was an open space. Sometimes FARC or ELN people came and held parades in the Plaza del Che, but it was nothing, nobody paid any attention. Anyway, that was my group, we’d come out of class and throw ourselves on the lawn to talk, to have a nap in the sun, to talk about movies or books or our lives, or politics, of course, it was all completely ordinary, commonplace, we were young students at a public university.

To me it seemed incredible that anybody could think the National belonged to the guerrillas, when from inside the truth was quite different. Most of the students were middle-class or working-class, that’s what everybody thought was strange. That the poor should have somewhere to study, that the best university in the country should be for them. That’s why they want to see it closed down and the land used for something profitable, like a shopping mall, with a theme park and a hotel attached, that’s what some people want, and that’s why they dream of seeing it closed down and its students in mass graves. It makes them angry that poor people should have opportunities, that there are good teachers and a high budget, their mouths water thinking of those millions that could be used on contracts or on buying guns and helicopters to defend the Fatherland, but which are actually spent on books and on equipping laboratories, no, the rich don’t like that because, to them, sending their children to university, at Los Andes or abroad, costs them a lot, and that’s why they feel defrauded, what’s this about giving the best to the poor? what’s the big deal, then, in being rich? They say their taxes keep the country going, but you know that isn’t true. Those who keep the country going are the poor and the middle class, who really do pay taxes. That’s why Colombia is a poor and middle-class country. Anyway, Consul, why should I tell you what you already know?

I went around with my group of friends, and in addition there were Brigitte and Lady, who had helped me get involved in that life. Once I met them in one of the open areas in Fine Arts and they asked me about the friends I’d made in the bar, and I told them, very good, excellent contact, thanks, I didn’t want to tell them that I was already flying higher, and why, and at that point I got another call from the former Miss Colombia, asking me to her office.

I have something very good for you, she said, not for now, but I’d like you to think it over and let me know, and I said, why all the mystery? I told her I’d really liked Señor Alfredo, that I’d go back whenever he called me, but the former Miss Colombia said, what I’m offering you is much better, it means getting on a plane and going to Japan to work for six months, a year maximum; you’ll be in a beautiful residence, with everything thrown in: lodging, food, light and heating, everything. You’ll be working with Japanese people, who are timid, clean, and very polite, and in a year you’ll be able to earn several hundred thousand dollars, clear, they pay high-class women like you very well there, it’s a great opportunity that I don’t offer everyone, anyway, think it over for a few days and call me, as soon as you decide you can go, we have a free place.

I walked out, lost in thought. Japan? a hundred thousand dollars? That’s what I’d been hoping to get to take Manuel away, but it wasn’t going to be easy to justify such a long time to my parents; I’d have to tell them I’d won a scholarship or something like that, it was complicated, too many lies and false papers. The thing sounded good but scared me a little. It had its pros and cons. I thought I’d be able to see how life was in Japan and later fetch Manuel so that he could study Japanese and learn to make films, like Kitano and Kurosawa and Ozu, there are bound to be good universities there, I told myself, but the problem was always the same, how to explain to him what I was doing? Just thinking about it made me dizzy, as if I was having to strip off and open my legs in the middle of a square, while everyone looked at me coldly and menacingly, no, to him I was virtue, I couldn’t show him my other side, even though the goal was to save him, or to save the two of us. That was why when he started studying philosophy at the National I stopped him from meeting my friends, it made me nervous to think that for any reason he could meet Lady or Brigitte and find out, it made me panic. How could I be with him in Japan without telling him? It was difficult, but a good opportunity. I would keep it in mind and see if anything happened that would help me decide, or if anything better came along. And there was also the other thing: the promise I made myself and which, in a way, I made to Monsieur Echenoz. His memory was still very much alive inside me.

This is where the story starts moving faster, Consul, because the next thing that happened, sometime later, was that Andrés Felipe called me one afternoon, sounding very nervous, and said, I have to see you, precious, all right? go to room 507 of the Hotel Charleston, I’m registered under the name Boris Salcedo, can you come now? When I got there, he was a bundle of nerves: they were accusing him of having links with the paramilitaries, because in a joint operation of the police and the Secret Service one of Don Fermín’s people had been arrested with a computer on which his name appeared, as a contact, and the press already had hold of it, you remember Don Fermín, the one with the ranch in Antioquia? He said that going to that fucking house had been a mistake, that he’d been following orders, that not only the press was on to it but also the prosecutor’s department, that in addition Don Fermín had given them three days to solve the problem or he’d start to talk, and the president was nervous; the advisers had told him that the best thing to do was burn him, me! Andrés Felipe cried, doing a line of coke, can you imagine? what my colleagues are suggesting is to throw me to the wolves, the sons of bitches, saying that I met with Don Fermín of my own accord to get money, they tell me the government will stand by me to protect me, and my family, but I have to declare that I went of my own accord, can you imagine? it could mean ten or more years in prison and the end of my career, what am I going to do afterwards? what’s going to happen to my wife and children? that’s why I wanted to talk to you, precious, I’m going to refuse to make a statement, I’m going to defend myself, but since you came with me it’s likely they’re going to look for you, they’re going to ask you to inform on me, they’re going to offer you things or maybe even threaten you, I don’t know, that’s why I want you to leave the country for a while, if you need money I’ll give it to you, and I said to him, well, of course, Andrés Felipe, of course I need it, and he said, look, in that case I have ten thousand dollars, take it but go somewhere else, now, today, and then I asked him, and what did I do wrong? and he said, nothing, but you were there, precious, nothing’s going to happen to you, it’s just in case they look for you and question you, but if anything bad happens to me, then I want you to remember that when we got back in the helicopter that night, I went directly to the Palace to report on the meeting, do you remember that? and I said, yes, of course, you left me in a taxi, and he said, perfect, the best thing is not to have to say anything at all, but if you do you can’t forget how it was, right? go somewhere, wait for the heat to die down.

He gave me a hug, did two lines of coke, and I asked him, have you already gone into hiding or what? and he said, no, what’s happening is that I can’t make appointments anywhere, I don’t know what to do, I thought to make a statement to the press from here, my lawyer is coming to talk with me later and then we’ll decide, but I wanted to sort things out with you first, did you tell anyone on Don Fermín’s ranch your name? and I said, no, not as far as I remember, and he said, thank God for that, that means it’ll be harder for them to locate you, well, precious, good luck and don’t contact me by cell phone, delete my number and all my calls, okay?

I left feeling nervous and making calculations, what might happen to me? I assumed that Víctor might help, after all he was in the Secret Service, so I sent him a letter, which was the only way, and wrote to him, what’s up, stranger? It worked, and the next day he called me, hi, princess, shall I send someone to pick you up? I said yes, I’ll be at the Metro Riviera, and when he saw me he said, the thing is, the heat’s on right now, I think Piedrahita is going to be out on the street all week, they’re really nervous upstairs, I stole a little moment to see you, princess, but I’m going to have to work later, I’m on a stakeout, and I licked his neck and said, don’t scare me, Víctor, who are you following that’s so dangerous? and he said, no, he isn’t dangerous, he’s a white-collar son of a bitch the chief wants to turn, that’s what they told me, we have to keep an eye on him to make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid, and of course, that got me worried, a white-collar son of a bitch? it had to be Andrés Felipe, and if they’re following him they must surely have seen me going in to the Charleston and even heard what we were talking about, but it struck me as strange that Víctor should be so calm with me, so I didn’t say anything more and concentrated on what I was doing, a classic fuck, and when we’d finished and he was taking a shower I saw his cell phone vibrate several times, so I stretched over to see the screen and two capital C’s flickered on it, CC, just that, once and once again. He dressed quickly, gave me a roll of dollars, and we did a couple of lines of coke; then he saw his phone and said, hey, wait, princess, this is urgent, and dialed and I heard him say, yes, yes, oh, fuck, seriously? okay, wait for me there, have you got everything recorded? no? good, I don’t give a damn about them, and he said to me, I have to rush, princess, we need to look for a girl who talked with the man, oh, God, this is starting to smell fishy, how many times have I told you, this country is full of bad people.

We left the motel and he dropped me at Seventh and 140th. I was dying of panic, convinced that girl was me. I started to list what Víctor knew about me, and was relieved to realize he knew almost nothing, not even my name, just my cell phone number, which since it was for this work I’d bought using false papers. But they’d have a description or photographs: of the hotel, of the helicopter that took us to the ranch. I’d have to be very careful.

I felt scared for Manuel and my parents, what would happen if they went to the house? Víctor and his chief and Secret Service guys in general weren’t so fussy, I had to act fast. Then I remembered the offer from the former Miss Colombia. To go to Japan for a year, let things cool down, and then send for Manuel. It was the only solution, but I needed to talk with someone. I was alone, what to do? For some reason a light went on in my brain and I thought, Alfredo the lawyer! he could tell me how serious the problem was and if it was worth going. I didn’t have his number and I didn’t want to call the former Miss Colombia, so I went straight to his house. Seeing me, the doorman remembered, and immediately lifted the receiver of the entry phone.

He told me to follow him. Alfredo was waiting for me in the elevator, very surprised. To what do I owe this miracle? he said, and I said, I have to talk to you, you’re the only person I can trust, I have a problem, I’m sorry, if you’re busy I can wait, and he said, don’t worry, come, would you like a drink? and I said, yes, please, anything at all, a double, and I started telling him my life story, look, I’m this and this and that’s why I got involved with a guy from the Secret Service and then with people from Congress and the government, and that’s why I ended up in this and that; I told him about the visit to Don Fermín’s ranch and he opened his eyes wide, Fermín Jaramillo? and I said, I suppose so, I didn’t ask him his full name, and Alfredo said, damn it, wait, I’ll show you a photograph, he looked for a newspaper and showed it to me, is this him? I said yes, it is, I was on his ranch with the adviser I told you about, and Alfredo, looking increasingly grave, continued listening to the story, and I ended with Víctor, and I said, I think they’re looking for me, I don’t know what I did that was so bad, that’s what scares me the most, not knowing, and he said, well, it isn’t a crime to go as someone’s companion, you don’t work for the government, the problem isn’t the law but those who are covering their tracks and trying to protect this adviser. Andrés Felipe? I asked, and he said, yes, the press are investigating contacts between the government and the paramilitaries, the secret pacts, and that young man has become key to the whole business, the likeliest thing is that they’ll put pressure on him to plead guilty and say he acted alone, that’s what they always do, that’s why your problem isn’t with the law, let’s say, with the legal law, but with the law of those guys and the government, who do what they have to in order to protect themselves. It wouldn’t surprise me if they made up some sordid affair your friend was supposedly involved in that would make the visit to Don Fermín seem unimportant.

He stood up, answered a call on his cell phone, and after a while came back. Don’t worry, I’m going to protect you. If you don’t have a safe place stay here, does your family know I exist? do you want to call them? No, I said, that’s no problem, they’re used to my being away. I heard my cell phone vibrate and when I looked at the screen my chest contracted. It was Víctor. I said to Alfredo, should I answer? No, he said, better switch off the phone so they can’t trace you.

I spent the night in a guest room, looking at the lights of Bogotá and feeling scared. All I could do was wait. There was no mention of the case on the news, but I was sure the whole thing was about to blow up. Three days later, Alfredo arranged for me to travel overland to Quito. He had a friend, a magistrate of the Ecuadorian court, who could put me up until things calmed down. In the end I made up my mind to go home, invent an excuse, and pick up my passport, but when I got there nobody was in, only the maid. Mother had gone out and Manuel, who had no classes that day, had gone to the Luis Ángel Arango Library. It hurt me not to be able to say goodbye to him, but I told myself, it isn’t for very long. I left a note saying I was going to Los Llanos, and would call as soon as I could. I took out the money Andrés Felipe had given me. I should go to the apartment in Chapinero for my other savings, I thought. I caught a taxi and went, but as I got closer I saw two vans similar to Víctor’s on the corner of the street. I went back to the Nogal building, shaken, but from Seventh I saw more Secret Service vans in the parking lot of the building. What was going on? had they tracked me down? I stayed hidden for a while on the other side of the avenue, but nothing happened, so I decided to go.

I rushed back to the city center. Now I had nowhere to go, but luckily everything was ready for me to travel to Ecuador. From a phone booth I called my university friends. Tamara reassured me, saying nobody had come looking for me in the faculty. She didn’t ask me for any details, she was a good friend. Then I called Jaime, the Aesculapian priest, and said, look, I need you to help me, it’s a matter of life and death, I have to hide for a few hours, maybe until tomorrow, but it’s very dangerous, are you up for it? and he said, of course, we’ll protect you here in the community. I went there, and I think that saved my life, Consul. I was there the whole of the following day, worrying my head off, until in the end I decided that there was no other way out and from a pay phone called Alfredo’s friend, the one who was going to get me out of the country. He was anxious, and insisted we should go that same night. I was picked up two hours later and we began the journey. He told me they had arrested Alfredo and put together a charge thanks to some cleverly edited recordings. We crossed Rumichaca Bridge on a false passport.

The following day I bought the newspaper and saw the news: former magistrate Alfredo Conde, arrested in his house. Then I went on the Internet and saw all the news bulletins. A spokesman made a public statement, saying that they would do everything they could to clarify the relationship between the lawyer and terrorism. Behind him, next to the chief of police, I noticed Piedrahita’s thin, Indian-looking face, and I thought: they know I was there, they’ve charged him, and now they’re looking for me. I also saw that Andrés Felipe was being kept in detention in a house in La Picota belonging to the prosecutor’s department, that they had grabbed him trying to leave the country.

From Quito I called the former Miss Colombia and said, I agree about Japan, but I need you to get me a ticket leaving from Ecuador, and so it was, they sent me on a route that was like a country bus, with stops in São Paulo, Dubai, Bangkok, and finally Tokyo. Five days’ traveling.

In Tokyo everything seemed phantasmagorical. I had read Murakami and imagined the city as a combination of cold, sometimes icy sentences that spoke of lonely people, all-night cafeterias, and young people who couldn’t find a place in the world and isolated themselves in little towns in the mountains, that’s how I imagined it, a place in which everyone lived submerged in his obsessions, and when I arrived, going from the airport to the center in a van, I looked through the window and said to myself, I’m alone and I’m far away, I’ve left Manuel but I’ll go back for him, I couldn’t do anything but escape to save myself, to save the two of us, because if I’m in danger then he’s in danger too, and my joints and my love lobes hurt at the thought that I couldn’t write to him or call him, what could I say to him? what explanation could I give? The best thing was to live through this time as quickly as possible and then look him in the eyes and tell him the truth. It would be painful to be separated from him, but the day would come, I just had to be strong.

Suddenly, in the middle of the city, the van turned in at an underground garage: this was my final destination. We took out the things and went up to an apartment on an upper floor, with a view of rooftops. Then I sat down to wait for things to pass, for the time to go by, that was all I wanted. I asked the woman who received me what was going to happen, but all she said was, rest, girl, you must be dead, do nothing but sleep for at least three days, the first week is for you to get used to it and the jetlag to pass and the bags under your eyes to go. So I was shut in for a week. I wanted to go out but they wouldn’t let me, and when at last I went out they gave me an escort. I don’t want to tell you names or many details of what I lived through in Tokyo, as I’m sure you’ll understand, it’s dangerous and there are people who could spend their whole lives tracking you down.

I worked with a group of Japanese who were the clients of the organization of my mamiya, a Colombian friend of the former Miss Colombia. It wasn’t a traumatic experience, but it was hard. After a while I found the lack of freedom stifling. I couldn’t go out on the street alone. I was earning good money but from it they kept deducting the costs of the journey, the costs of bringing me there, arranging my papers, and I don’t know what else. Every time I asked, my debt had increased. One day I asked a Japanese for accounts and the guy, a horrible dwarf, gave me a slap and threw me to the ground. I learned that I had to prepare myself for a new transformation: to be the submissive woman, ready to hit back when the enemy lowered his guard. I vowed that that Japanese dwarf would end up with his brain split open, and I began a tactic of seduction. Monsieur Echenoz was right again, and a month later I had him in front of me, naked. I knew what I wanted to do as soon as he forced me to kneel and suck his cock. The killer whale. I clasped him between my teeth but something strange happened: as I was about to cut into his skin the guy moaned with pleasure and ejaculated like crazy. Then he asked me to stand up straight on his back with my high heels on and walk all over him. Strange. Then he grabbed a lighter and held out his arm, which was covered in keloidal scars. I burned him and he ejaculated again, screaming with pain.

I soon realized that he was the local boss, so it struck me as a good idea to go along with him. His name was Junichiro, but I called him Juni. He knew English, although he didn’t speak much in general. He was thirty-four years old. One night he told me that, as a boy, starting at the military school in the province where he was born, his comrades forced him to lick the asses of the ten dormitory heads. For a year they gave him beatings in the toilets, urinated in his face, and of course fucked him thousands of times. From what I understood he felt guilty for having felt pleasure and that was why he liked to be punished. It purified him and excited him. I was with him for about a year. One night I heard noises in one of the rooms in the apartment and when I went to see I found him lying there almost unconscious. He was bleeding from the anus. I asked him what had happened but he said nothing, and a second later I saw Tarek, an Iranian bodyguard, come in with a towel and some drugs to cauterize him. I thought it was horrible and I walked out. I didn’t want to see him again and, fortunately, he respected me.

Then I got to know Jaburi, who was also a bodyguard. Whenever I went out I went with him, and one night, coming back to the apartment, I asked him to come with me into the shower. We fucked under the water, which was the start of my making him fall in love with me. The fucking was great. We maintained our relationship until one morning I felt something, a dizziness, my period was late, I was pregnant. It could only have been his, because we fucked without a condom. I think I must have wanted it subconsciously, so that he would get me out of there, to remind me that my life wasn’t just that, and it worked. Jaburi paid my debt and went to talk with the local bosses. We got married and they gave me an Iranian passport, because I’d left my Colombian one in the pocket of a pair of jeans and it had faded in the washing machine, maybe because it was false. Soon afterwards we got permission and were able to travel to Tehran, where Manuelito was born. But they don’t know that in Tokyo: the organization told the other girls I’d run away; I think they even said I’d been captured and tortured, I’m not sure.

In Tehran I kept putting off getting in touch with Manuel, every day I said to myself: tomorrow, next week… I had to gather my strength. I was dying to tell him that he had a nephew, actually a son. Manuelito was our son. I applied for the passports without Jaburi knowing. I hoped to run away somewhere before writing to Manuel, but without my realizing it time passed. I never imagined he’d come looking for me. It’s hard to explain what I did, but that’s what happened. In Japan I was high on pills most of the time; that’s what I chose to escape. I have lots of gaps. Sometimes I looked at a calendar and said, are we already in September? and then, ten minutes later, we were in another month, and suddenly someone said in my ear, happy New Year, and I’d smile and take another pill. Jaburi saved me but I gave him my body and made him happy for a time. I didn’t give him a son because Manuelito is mine alone. He hit me once, although you could say I asked for it. I prefer not to talk about that, but the truth is that I didn’t hate him, I felt sorry for him. He seemed to me a loser, an inferior animal. I’ll tell you what happened, Consul: one night I refused to have sex with him and he said, I’m your husband, you’re obliged. I told him that nobody obliged me to do what I didn’t want to do and I got up and locked myself in the bathroom. Then I started shouting through the window. The neighbors woke up, and his parents and brothers, who lived on the floors below, came up to our apartment. I started saying that Jaburi was a coward, that he beat me because he was incapable of having an erection and satisfying me, and I said that he wasn’t a man because he forced me to put my finger up his ass and rub him, and that, as a wife, I did it even though I was dying from disgust, and I cried that Jaburi was a lousy faggot who couldn’t get enjoyment with women and only had erections when he painted mustaches on me with a burned cork. The neighbors started laughing and saying, “Virtuous woman,” and at that moment Jaburi knocked down the door and grabbed me and hit me while I screamed and laughed. You shouldn’t hit a woman, but I enjoyed it. It was a way of telling him: you may have force and religion on your side, but I’m the one who has what you want between her legs, and I can destroy you. Again I raised my arms and prayed for Monsieur Echenoz.

The rest of the time, Jaburi was fine with me. The payment he’d obtained to save me was more than sufficient. He’ll find it hard for a while and then he’ll recover and later he’ll be happy. That’s how it always is in life. The more quickly you suffer, the better it is in the long run.

And that’s all, Consul. The rest you already know.