The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump

by Martin Amis

  For months Kevin was deeply withdrawn; he responded only listlessly to other children, and was indifferent to adults. When he divided his toy soldiers into goodies and baddies, the baddies always won.

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  What happened to Kevin was an accident: an accident in a very accident-prone city, but an accident. Another child, ten-year-old Bryan, will find it harder to gain the (in fact nonexistent) consolation of “closure.” He was shot in the back by his best friend. Bryan’s offense? It wasn’t as if he threatened to take his football home—all he did was say he didn’t want to play anymore. Bryan now has a palsied gait (a slow, bobbing hop) and a face deprived of symmetry; and he looks blind, too (though he isn’t), because his gaze seeks nothing. Kevin, on the other hand, amiably complied when his grandmother, parting his hair and lifting his bangs, showed me the entry wound, the exit wound; they looked like vaccination scars. As we took our leave, the dog gave us an eloquent snarl: good riddance to bad rubbish. The dog, it seemed, had taken on the fear and distrust that ought to belong to Kevin.

  In the forecourt of the house opposite, a fully adult male (statistically quite a rarity in this neighborhood) was closing up his house for the night; he stared at us with frank but nonspecific hostility, all the while rearranging the contents of his crimson running shorts.

  Some residents try to disguise it with fancy grilles and lattices, but most of the houses in nondowntown Cali are wholly and candidly encaged. The male adult across the street now proceeded to wall himself up in his personal penitentiary. In El Distrito, the boys rage all night and sleep all day (in their coffins and crypts); and at dusk they all turn into vampires.

  We always had to be out by five—but wait. There was still time to visit Ana Milena. Some years ago her sister had been paralyzed after being shot in the throat by a neighbor; she died of depression and self-starvation in 1997. Seven years later, Ana broke up with her boyfriend. So he attacked her in broad daylight at a bus stop, stabbing her in the navel, the neck, and twice in the head. Their daughter (then nearly three) stood and watched, and hid her face. She still insists that her mother was hit by a car.

  Gang slang for a homemade gun is una pacha: a baby bottle. The violence starts at once and doesn’t go away. Kevin’s scars are not at all disfiguring. He has an entry wound and an exit wound. His was easily the most hopeful story I heard in Cali. In general, you assent to the existence of entry wounds; but when you consider the effects—emotional, psychological, and (almost always) physical—you doubt the existence of exit wounds. The thing is never over.

  2. LA ESPERANZA

  Occupying about a quarter of Colombia’s third city, Aguablanca (Whitewater) consists of approximately 130 barrios; each barrio has two or three gangs, and all the gangs are theoretically at war with all the others. What do they fight about? They don’t fight about drugs (ecstasy and dope are universally popular, but the cocaine trade is reserved for the criminally mature). They fight about turf (a corner, a side street); they fight about anything at all to do with disrespect (what might be called “eyebrow” clashes); and they fight about the fight that went before (venganza operates like a series of chain letters).

  Yet the main fuel of the murder figures, here as elsewhere, is the fantastic plenitude of weaponry. A homemade gun costs just over twenty pounds, a hand grenade just over twelve (a hand grenade is what you’ll be needing if, for instance, you gate-crash a party and get turned away). “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people,” argued Ronald Reagan. You could take this line further, and say that people don’t kill people either. Bullets kill people. In Cali they cost fifty cents each, and can be sold to minors individually, like cigarettes.

  Three teenage girls, acting as the representatives of a barrio called El Barandal (The Rail), advised us not to enter; but a couple of hundred yards farther down the road, at La Esperanza (Hope), we were casually welcomed. I asked what had made the difference, and our driver said that El Barandal was even poorer and dirtier and, crucially, fuller; there was more humiliation, more wrath, and more guns. Sara, the friendliest of the Esperanzans, had a different emphasis: “Somos todos negros, y somos buena gente.” We’re all black, and we’re good people. And good people they would need to be.

  Every South American country has its own name for places like this. In Bogotá the word is tugurio (hovel), but the Chilean version best evokes La Esperanza: callampa (mushroom). “Whitewater” suggests a fast-flowing river, or even foaming rapids. The marshlands where the barrios sprouted up, in the 1980s, are now whitened by their own putrefaction. The endless ditch isn’t deep enough to submerge the tubs and tires that disturb its caustic mantle. Yet the egrets still consider it worth their while to paddle and peck in it; when they flap their wings you expect them to fly off on half-corroded stilts.

  The people here are desplazados, displaced peasants, mainly from the country’s Pacific coast. Cali contains about seventy thousand of the displaced. Some are pushed from the land by that irresistible modern force, urbanization; others are fleeing what might be the final convulsions of a civil war that began in 1948. But here they are, with no money and no jobs. Colombia does not provide free health care or free education for its citizens; and the first explanation you reach for is the enormous South American lacuna—taxation. Taxation, necessarily of the rich, is not enforced. To paraphrase the former president Lleras Camargo, Latin Americans have gone to jail for many strange reasons, but not one, in the whole continent, has ever gone to jail for tax fraud.

  Of the four houses I ducked into at La Esperanza, Sara’s, counterintuitively, was easily the worst. Your first step took you onto a nail bed of chipped, upward-pointing tiles on bare soil: this was clearly a work in progress, but for a moment it felt like a booby trap. Then a communal area, and a dorm of crushed cots. Then, finally, out toward the water, a kitchen-bathroom, with lots of exposed (and ingenious) plumbing, a hot plate, a heap of compost in the corner, and a largely ornamental fridge with four eggs in its ever-open door. A huge negress, already stripped to the waist, pushed past us and disappeared into a wooden wigwam. There came a gush of water and a burst of song.

  Outside, the ladies laugh, and playfully squabble about whose house is the prettiest. La Esperanza’s lone shop has only a handwritten sign on its door, saying NO FIO (no credit), and sells only tobacco and starch, but the residents call it their supermercado. As for the rancid water, into which the barrio seems about to collapse—you just tell yourself, said Sara, that it’s a nice sea view.

  Colombia has the Atlantic on its right shoulder and the Pacific on its left (and its neck goes straight to Panama). It also straddles the equator. At noon, on a clear day, your shadow writhes around your shoes like a cat. We paid our visit on one of the cooler mornings (the clouds were the same color as the water); and it was onerous to imagine the barrio under a sky-filling sun. Just back down the road, at the entry point to Aguablanca, the smell of the blighted canal, with its banks of solid rubbish, grips you by the tonsils. This smell is La Esperanza’s future.

  3. STAG NIGHT

  The classic venganza, in Cali gangland, is not a bullet through the head but a bullet through the base of the spine. Some thought has gone into this. “One month after the attack,” says Roger Micolta, the young therapist from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), “the victims ask me, ‘Will I ever walk?’ Two months after, they ask me, ‘Will I ever fuck?’ ” The answer to both questions is invariably no. Thus the victims not only have to live with their wounds—they have to wear them, they have to wheel them; and everybody knows that they have lost what made them men.

  At the municipal hospital in Aguablanca, at therapy time in the midafternoons, crippled innocents, like limping Bryan, are outnumbered by crippled murderers—by cripples who have done much crippling of their own. They go through interminable sets of exercises: pull-ups, sideways rolls. Girlfriends and sisters take hairbrushes to their legs, to encourage sensation. One young man, inching along the parallel bars, keeps
freezing and closing his eyes in helpless despair. Another has a weight strapped to his ankle; he is watched by his mother, who reflexively swings her own leg in time with his.

  In the back room there is a storyboard used for psychosexual counseling. “Lo más frustrante: estar impotente. No poder sentir, no comprensión, no tener ganas.” (To be unable to feel, to understand, to have no desire.) The MSF educational posters, too, rightly and aggressively zero in on the question of testosterone. A typical specimen shows a pistol with its shaft curling into a droop: “To carry a gun doesn’t make you a man.” Another shows a series of waistbands with the gun positioned behind the belt buckle and pointing straight downward. In Cali, all the stuff you have ever read or heard about male insecurity, phallic symbols, and so on, is almost tediously verified, everywhere you look.

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  Nearby, in the market streets, the shops are disconcertingly full of goods, essentials and nonessentials—cheap cameras, exercise gear, shower organizers (an item badly needed in La Esperanza). The armless, headless mannequins are faithful to the indigenous female type: high and prominent backsides, hefty breasts with nipples the size of drawer pulls. At the patisserie there is an elaborate cake representing a thonged muchacha. Another represents a penis. The testicles are hirsute with squiggles of chocolate; the blancmange-hued helmet bears a thin swipe of cream, appreciatively indicating the slit. A hen-night item, you might suppose. The inscription says “Chupame, cario” (suck me, honey), in a toilingly decorative hand. There is no female form for it in Spanish—no caria. But you wonder. In Cali, maybe the “pecker” cake is meant for the stags.

  That night there was a cookout on a downtown rooftop. Our fellow guests were professionals, academics; there was music and some dancing—very chaste and technical. Yet even here a sexual trapdoor can open up beneath you. At one point a young woman began an innocent conversation with a handsome young guest, and after some joking in male undertones she was grinningly handed a paper napkin. The suggestion was that she would now be able to wipe away her drool.

  All the outer walls around us were topped by spikes of glass, varying dramatically in size, shape, and thickness. If glass-topped walls constitute a kind of architecture, then here we had it in its Gothic phase. In Britain this form of crime prevention was a very frequent (and stimulating) sight in my childhood—but not in my youth. Again and again you kept vaguely thinking: two or three generations, forty or fifty years—that’s how far back they are. Just now, Colombia seems to be poised to turn from oligarchy to something more progressive. If there is a current theme in the evolution of South America, it appears to be this: the vested interests (very much including the United States) are tolerating an improvement in the caliber of the political leaders, with Kirchner in Argentina, Lula in Brazil, and now, perhaps, Uribe in Colombia.

  Beyond the shard-studded walls you could see an entire mountainside of lights. This was the callampa of Siloé, which, I am told, is roughly twice as violent as Aguablanca.

  4. THE CENTRAL DIVIDE

  We were on the central divide of the dual carriageway, about three hundred yards from one of the most decidedly nonenterable barrios. Three muchachos approached. When I offered Marlboros, I got two takers; they lowered their heads as they smoked, embarrassed by the fact that they didn’t inhale. The third boy declined. He didn’t say “No fumo,” he said “No puedo fumar.” It wasn’t that he didn’t smoke. He couldn’t smoke—much as he’d like to.

  Then he lifted his T-shirt and showed us why. His right shoulder, his right breast, and his right armpit, where he had recently been shot, formed an unmade bed of bandages and brown sticky tape. He had recently been stabbed, too, and with a vengeance. From his sternum to his navel ran the wound, not yet a scar, pink and plump, like a garden worm.

  He turned out to be a patient of Roger Micolta’s (one of the less tractable). His name was John Anderson. This was by no means the first time he had been shot, or the first time he had been stabbed. He was sixteen.

  Like everyone else, they were keen to be photographed, but first they had to go and get their weapon. After rooting around in a rubbish dump across the road, they returned with a sawed-off shotgun. John posed, with his flintlock, his knife wound (like an attempt at vertical seppuku), his stupidly wonky hairstyle, his trigger-happy stare. Abruptly you were struck by the thinness and inanity of it: an existence so close to nonexistence.

  It couldn’t have been clearer that John Anderson had only weeks to live. To say this of human beings is to say both the best and the worst. They can get used to anything.

  5. THE LESS-INTERESTING CRIPPLED MURDERER

  And I got used to it, too. You find yourself thinking: if I had to live in El Distrito, I wouldn’t stay at Kevin’s but at Ana Milena’s, where they have cable TV and that nice serving hatch from the kitchen to the living room. And if I had to live in La Esperanza, I would gently but firmly refuse Sara’s offer and try to bribe myself into the place four houses along, where the man has a working fridge and a working fan (and ten dependents). Similarly, I now found myself thinking: you know, this crippled murderer isn’t nearly as interesting as the crippled murderer I interviewed the day before yesterday. And so it seemed. Raul Alexander was nothing much, compared to Mario.

  When we called, Raul was lying on his bed watching The Simpsons. In Kevin’s house, in Ana’s house, in Sara’s house, there were never any young men. When there is a young man in the house, it’s because he can’t walk away from it. He will certainly be a cripple, and very probably a crippled murderer.

  With his buzz-cut hair and ingenuous little face, Raul looked like the kind of waiter you might grow fond of at a resort hotel. It sounds tactless, but the truth was that we were settling for Raul. We had hoped for Alejandro. Alejandro was the crippled murderer who, in his prime, couldn’t get to sleep at night if he hadn’t killed someone earlier that day. But we’d already skipped an appointment with Alejandro, more than once, and when we did appear his mother told us he had taken the dog to the vet. Was this a particularly savage Latino anathema, or just a weak excuse? I thought of the gang verb groseriar (no respetar). And it was a relief, in the end, to make do with Raul.

  Asked about his childhood, he described it as normal, which it seemed to be, except for a father who remained in situ well into Raul’s teens. He started stealing car parts, then cars, then cars with people inside them. “One on Monday, one on Thursday.” Then he got competitive with a friend: there would now be six armed carjackings a day. He started stealing money that was on its way to or from shops, factories, banks. He did nine months in prison and emerged, predictably fortified. By now the bank deliveries were oversubscribed, with queues of heisters in the street; so Raul started venturing within. These weekly capers were not to last. He did thirty months, came out for three days, and went back in for three years. During his last stretch, Raul killed a man, for the first time, he claimed: payback for a stabbing.

  Blooded, his bones made, Raul took a job in an office. That last sentence may look slightly odd to a non-Caleo, but when someone around here says that he worked in an office or did “office work,” you know exactly what they did: they sat by a phone, on a retainer (250 pounds a month), and did targeted assassinations through an agent for a further 100 pounds a time. Boys who work in offices, incidentally, are not called “office boys,” so far as I know, but boys, very young boys, are valued in office work, because they are cheap, fearless, and unimprisonable till the age of eighteen. Raul would at this stage have been in his twenties. The most popular day for office murders, incidentally, is Sunday: that’s when people are more likely to be found at home.

  Raul’s downfall? By this point my faith in his veracity, or in his self-awareness, never high, began to dwindle. How did he tell it? He had some trouble with a guy who shot his cousin, a murder that a friend of his (Raul’s) impulsively avenged. There was this consignment of marijuana. Raul circled and meandered, and it all seemed to come down to un problema, a po
ker game, a spilt drink—an “eyebrow” venganza.

  We took our leave of Raul Alexander heartlessly early (one of us had to get to the airport), and filed through a sunny nook containing his wheelchair and his walker. When, minutes earlier, I asked him how many people he had killed, he pouted and shrugged and said: “Ocho?” You thought: oh, sure. But even if Raul was dividing his score by two, or by ten, he was nothing much, compared to Mario.

  6. MARIO

  He, too, is lying on his bed—apparently naked but for a pale blue towel draped over his waist. The reproductions on the wall of the adjacent sitting room—a wide-eyed young princess, a wooden cottage near a waterfall, a forest with a white horse picked out by opalescent sunbeams—prompt you, in describing Mario, to seek the heroic frame. You think of the fallen Satan, hurled over the crystal battlements. Mario was once very radiant and dynamic; but he has made the journey from power to no-power, and now he lies on his bed all day with his clicker and his Cartoon Network.

  Although the long legs are tapering and atrophying, Mario’s upper body still ripples. The armpits, in particular, are unusually pleasing; they look shaved or bikini-waxed, but a glance at the half-naked relative in the kitchen, who has his hands clasped behind his head, confirms that the abbreviation is natural. Mario’s trouble, his difficulty, begins with his face. With its close-set eyes divided by a shallow bridge, its very strong jaw (full of avidity and appetite), Mario’s is the face of a mandrill. If you’d seen Raul Alexander coming for you, on the street, in a bar, or standing in your doorway, you would have tried to resist him, or reason with him, or buy him off. If you’d seen Mario coming for you, in his pomp, you wouldn’t have done anything at all.