Sometimes, when he walked through downtown Boston, he liked to visit the coffee shop where he had worked, to have a drink and say hello to his coworkers. It was there that he heard about the story of Feliciano Jaramillo, the brother of the Columbian girl who had been hired to replace him. Jaramillo had been in the United States for five years. He’d crossed the border illegally after traveling across Central America hidden in cargo trucks and had had several off-the-books jobs before arriving in Boston. In spite of the money he’d sent to his sister for her flight to join him there and the sums he sent home every month to his family in Taganga, a small fishing village in the Caribbean, he’d managed to save a small amount, with which he hoped to one day be able to afford rent to open up a business. The opportunity was precipitately offered to him by the manager of the apartment block where he lived, who told him about a cooperative of immigrants who were trying to raise enough money to lease and refurbish a motel on the outskirts of the city. They were looking for partners who, as well as contributing capital, would be willing to then work in the establishment. Jaramillo, pleased with his good luck, went to see the motel, unearthed two wads of bills, and trustingly handed them to the manager, who in return gave him a document signed by the supposed president of the cooperative. The weeks went by, and when Jaramillo demanded news about the business, the manager assured him that they still needed to top up the capital and that it was therefore not yet possible to sign off on the lease. Three months later Jaramillo, by then suspicious, asked to see the president of the cooperative. The manager took him to see a scruffy, half-drunk man who gave him incoherent explanations and promised him that he could be working in the motel in less than sixty days. That time passed without any progress, and Jaramillo, tormented by doubts, showed up at the manager’s office to demand his money back. There was a heated argument. The manager told him that he was only an impartial middleman and couldn’t give him any information about his investment. He suggested that he take the document to the police in order to seek justice. Then, when Jaramillo began to roar with fury and broke one of the objects on his desk, he threw him out of the office and gave him forty-eight hours to vacate the room in which he lived. Jaramillo, who didn’t have United States residency papers and therefore couldn’t turn to the law, suddenly found himself broke and evicted from his home. The adversities, however, did not end there. A few days later, the immigration police went and located him at the repair shop where he worked and arrested him. He was in prison awaiting deportation.
Angelita, his sister, couldn’t stop crying as she told Moy the story. She showed him the worthless document and went with him to the motel the next day, where they confirmed the business had never been for sale and that as a result, the deal with the cooperative had been nothing more than a scam. Moy, who felt sorry for Angelita and for Feliciano’s misfortune, saw for the first time the opportunity to do something memorable with his new life. He explained to the girl that he was a lawyer and would like to try to defend her brother, so that even if he couldn’t recover the money, he would avoid being deported. Angelita, who was twenty years old, yielded to his kindness and fell in love with him. She was the first great passion in Albert Tracy’s life.
When he first started meeting with Feliciano Jaramillo in prison and studying his case, Moy, who had been somewhat naïve, came to understand the social burdens that determine a person’s destiny. One year before, in September 2001, he had possessed absolutely nothing. A suit, a pair of shoes, and four hundred dollars. A few months later he had accumulated a modest sum (even if it was obtained by stealing from someone who had more than he did), was wearing expensive clothes, going to fashionable restaurants, and had access to some of Boston’s most elegant venues. Jaramillo, on the other hand, would never have anything close to that. If he restarted his life one hundred times over, he would fail a hundred times. Perhaps he might achieve a certain level of well-being—a comfortable house, a plate of hot food everyday, an obliging wife—but he would never be capable of breaking through to prosperity. He had dark skin and indigenous features. He knew how to read, but hardly ever understood the words he was reading. He treated people with a respect that wasn’t courtesy but rather obsequiousness.
This discovery of the afflictions of the world transformed Moy’s conscience. He became a romantic idealist who imagined poverty to be a kind of spiritual salvation that had to be preserved. During the process of Jaramillo’s defense, while he compiled information and researched the legal aid and protection systems for the most humble social classes, a feeling of revolutionary morality began to take shape in him. Suddenly he was aware of the atrocities that were committed with impunity against those who were defenseless, and he journeyed through the dark vaults in which justice was dealt out. Like Saul in Damascus, he was astonished by the evils of humanity in such close proximity, and he decided to devote his life to helping others.
“Don Quixote left his little village to protect the weak and right the twisted ways of the world,” I said to him on one occasion. “He left to have adventures and an admirable life.”
During that fleeting time of ideological change, Moy began to think that the al-Qaeda attacks in which he himself had almost died could be excused in light of the wrongs and injustices that some Muslim countries in the Third World had suffered for decades. Would it not have been a form of justice if Jaramillo had arranged for a bomb to be planted in the apartment manager’s office or one of the apartment blocks for which he was responsible? Was violence not the only option left for the desperately poor and the outcasts? Perhaps Bin Laden was, like Don Quixote, a crazy vigilante who had tried to remedy discrimination by throwing his spears at the tallest windmills.
Feliciano Jaramillo, after one hearing and two appeals, was ejected from the country with no compensation. Angelita, frightened, decided to go back to Colombia with him. Moy followed them. Followed her out of love, and him out of solidarity. They settled in Bogotá, and with the savings stolen from the widow, they opened a small legal advice office. For the first few months, Moy spent almost all his time studying Colombian laws and the language. Then he started to attend proceedings and draft documents—complaints, intimations, and letters rogatory—for workers and peasants who had suffered some kind of abuse and come there in search of help. It was an intense time for him. He had the conviction that he was doing something useful for others, felt once again the youthful emotion of loving someone, and he had begun to fulfill those magnificent dreams that had come back to life in New York when he’d met Albert Fergus. He was living in a different country and learning a new language, he’d bought a car he drove at perilous speeds along the badly surfaced roads surrounding the city, he drank chicha every night at La Candelaria, a bar where he went with Jaramillo and some of the people he was protecting, and he had even started to consider the possibility of having a child with Angelita.
He now only vaguely remembered the streets of Manhattan and the smell of food—meat, coffee, pastries, mustard—that always hung in the air, but not one day went by on which he did not remember, with deep sorrow, his son Brent and Adriana. Moy always claimed that he had never stopped loving his wife, even during the times when he had been in love, first with Angelita and then with Alicia, the girl he ended up following to Spain. On the contrary, he presented his romantic experience as proof that true love, that love which is held fast by the buttresses life erects, was something ontologically different from frenzied passion. He was able to be in love with Angelita and continue loving Adriana, in the same way that he enjoyed drinking chicha at La Candelaria but when he was at home and stayed up reading till the small hours, poured himself a whisky.
Although many years were yet to pass before Brandon Moy’s story concluded, it was in Bogotá that the disillusionment began. He knew from the outset that Angelita’s love would be fragile and perishable; he was twenty years older than her, and they formed part of different natures, antagonistic worlds in which it was impossible to find long
-lasting bonds other than the bonds of sexuality. What Moy had not imagined is that through Angelita he would become aware of his own estrangement, the process of disintegration that had been taking place in his life.
One day, after he had been in Bogotá for two months, they took a trip to Lake Guatavita, where, as legend would have it, the gold of El Dorado is to be found. They left the car at the end of the road and followed a trail on foot up to the edge of the summit, where the tree-covered slopes of the crater and the colossal fissure that the Spanish conquerors had dug into one side to drain water and lay bare the fabulous treasures could be seen. The scenery was so breathtaking that Moy felt a kind of animal spirituality and wanted to tear off Angelita’s clothes in the midst of the vegetation, but just when he was about to do it, some young people appeared on the path, descending from the summit and singing as they came. Angelita blushed as she watched them and then suddenly began to call out and head toward them, overjoyed as she finished fastening the buttons Moy had tried to undo.
There were two boys and three girls the same age as Angelita, whom she knew from Santa Marta, the Caribbean city where she’d been working before leaving to follow Feliciano to Boston. Two of them, Felipe and Rosalinda, had gotten married and now lived in Bogotá. The others had come to visit them for a few days and were doing some sightseeing around the region. Angelita, exhilarated, suggested that they go back to the city together and all have dinner at her house—some tamales, empanadas, and patacones. They would buy beer and wine to celebrate. She didn’t consult Moy about the gettogether, but when she had recovered from her excitement, she introduced him to her friends adoringly. “This is my American sweetheart,” she said. “He’s a real handsome gentleman.”
Whilst they dined that night, the group of friends recalled old times and talked about people Moy didn’t know. Angelita asked them about friends and family members she hadn’t seen again since she’d left for the United States, and they couldn’t stop talking, telling her how everything was going in Santa Marta and the events and miracles that had taken place recently. Moy, without saying a word, watched them laughing and reminiscing about anecdotes and amusing situations from the past. He was seated apart, behind one of the armchairs in the living room, observing like a meticulous taxonomist wanting to capture everything. He slowly started to realize that as he witnessed Angelita expressing that innocent joy, she was a different creature, a woman he did not know. But when they finished dinner, tipsy from the alcohol, one of the young men, Ramiro, suggested playing a game they apparently used to have fun with when they met up in their free time in Santa Marta. All the others enthusiastically went along with the idea. Angelita ran off to get a pack of cards and found a radio station that played dance music. They sat in a circle around the table, forcing Moy to take part, and distributed the cards. The way the game worked was simple—the players who had the least number of points in their hand had to dance together to the music that was playing at that moment on the radio. The others rated them and then, after deliberating, decided who had been the worst performer. The person chosen had to take off an item of clothing. Then the cards were dealt again.
Moy didn’t have bad luck. He had to dance with one of the girls, with Ramiro, and with Angelita. He only got voted off on one occasion and had to remove a shoe. Angelita didn’t fair so well and ended the evening in her underwear, like Felipe, who was the overall loser.
Seeing the laughter and satisfaction this mischievous game provoked, with its crazy, adolescent amusement, Moy suddenly felt weighed down by the years, the heaviness that had been gradually piling on with age to detach him from everything. Hypnotized, he stared at Angelita’s mouth, her unrestrained peals of laughter, the faces she pulled, like those of an unwitting child who still takes things lightheartedly. That night he had a hunch that it was now too late to try to experience the adventures he had passed up when he was young. He started to think he felt nostalgia for something that couldn’t be recovered. And the strangest and most incomprehensible thing was that it wasn’t painful to have missed out on life in that way.
From that day on, he couldn’t stop looking at Angelita through glasses tinted by this idea. Her impetuosity, her zeal, and her euphoria seemed increasingly ridiculous to him. Sometimes he viewed her with compassion, the way one looks at young people who believe in impossible miracles and utopias that will never come to pass. Moy even found her carnal gestures of love, which were impassioned and affectionate, annoying and unconvincing, the dramatic exaggeration of that which does not last. Some days he got bored. He liked to go for walks around Bogotá, climb up Mount Monserrate, and spend time there taking in the grayish view of the city, the leaden sky that domed it all the way to the horizon. He often remembered Cavafy’s poem—“You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. This city will always pursue you.” The landscape that could be seen from the mountain—low-rise houses with a few nondescript, misshapen skyscrapers—looked nothing like New York. The climate was completely different—no biting cold or burning heat, and the air lay stagnant, like in a quicksand marsh. There were different smells—heartier stews, groves, moist wood, and trash. Moy was certain when he gazed at the calm, sometimes sleepy rooftops of Bogotá that despite what Cavafy said, there were other countries and other shores, and that life, being so very short, could only be rewarding if one devoted oneself to discovering them.
Moy spent several years going against his own instincts, believing that there was some lost paradise he had to search for (the paradise of Albert Fergus, of his youth) and sensing that it was now too late to do so. He made an effort to behave like Angelita, closing his eyes and laughing in the face of just about anything, casting off the disillusionment he was suffering, but sometimes he couldn’t find a way to escape from himself. In those moments, he went to Mount Monserrate, or if it was nighttime, he went for a walk through one of the city’s bustling neighborhoods. It was on one of those days, as he came out of a bar in Chapinero where he had been drinking more than usual, that he came across a man who stared at him and made an obscene gesture with his lips. Moy stopped, turned to face him, and felt an urge to hit him, but he stayed still. The man smiled and gave him a cigarette.
“Do you want to come along?” he asked him.
He was a little younger than Moy and had a tattoo on his neck. Moy, feeling dizzy with drunkenness, had the absurd thought that this individual with the sallow face of a hoodlum was the messenger sent by Providence to enable him to satisfy his whims. Without saying a word, he nodded and began to walk behind the man. He was holding the unlit cigarette in his hand. They turned off the avenue on which they had met and wandered for quite a while. The man who was leading the way turned around from time to time to check that Moy was still following him. Finally they arrived at a dingy building with badly worn paintwork. They climbed up to the third floor and went into the man’s apartment. It was clean and tidy. There were curtains on the windows and two abstract paintings hanging on the walls. The man turned on a small lamp that gave off a dim light, and then he looked for something in a drawer. He offered Moy a pill.
“You’ll feel a lot better with this,” he said.
“What is it?” asked Moy, but before the man had time to answer, he whisked it out of his fingers and stuffed it into his mouth.
“Are you foreign?” the man inquired with surprise.
“Give me a whisky,” Moy asked. The man gave him a glass of water.
“Better with this,” he said.
While Moy drank, the man knelt in front of him and undid his fly. Despite his drunkenness, Moy got an erection immediately. Straightaway, he began to confuse the effects of the blow job with those of the drug he had just taken. He felt a strange sensation of pleasure that was slowly turning into revulsion, but he did not move away, instead he continued obeying the obscene instructions he was receiving—he wetted the man’s exposed anus with saliva and straddled him, penetrating him savagely. At the sam
e time as the sexual crescendo was making him dizzy, he could feel nausea in his stomach. He raised his hands squeamishly so as not to touch the man, and after ejaculating, when he withdrew his penis and saw it was dirty with brownish stains, he hurriedly searched for the bathroom in order to vomit. Then he washed himself furiously, as though he were trying to strip off his skin, and went home without saying anything.
The first thing he felt when he got to the street was joy—he had participated in an act that had been thoroughly astonishing and disturbing. It didn’t matter whether it had left him happy or disgusted; it boasted the spirit of exaltation, the intensity of epic deeds, it was the kind of chance happening for which he envied Albert Fergus and all those who, according to his assumptions, had dared to confront life with courage. The main character in my book Woman in Darkness, who only possesses a few vague characteristics of Brandon Moy’s psyche, repeats in one particular chapter something he told me one day: “Life is only worth living to excess.” What took place in Chapinero was exactly that—the very essence of excess that Moy needed in order to continue believing he had done the right thing in leaving New York.
The Same City Page 6
