Red, Yellow and Green

by Alejandro Saravia

  In the distance, the city lights roll up the hillsides of the hoyada paceña, the cradle that is La Paz. Up here, on the high plateau between the mountain ranges, there is no light. To see if there are soldiers approaching on their night rounds, you have to lie down and look out level with the ground. In that narrow space between the earth and the darkness you can see a dim trickle of light, a pale halo radiating from the ground. Welterweight stance, fists tight shielding his face, eyes sharp looking for a target—Boxeador moves in, feints and retreats like a tragic dancer. His threatening knuckles pump the air in slow deliberate cycles, facing Vicios, whose sweaty, white-knuckled fists flap randomly, clutching a radio battery in each hand to give his blows more weight. A fist bursts through the shadows, aimed at the other fighter’s face, and then an explosion of enraged bats erupts, fists rise, burst lips, sink into ribs, break teeth, flatten noses and swell eyelids and eyebrows. In one blow, time falls flat and frozen on the ground, its retinas burst. In one blow you fall down, too, blood coming out of your mouth, no idea where it came from or who threw the punch.

  “Bolivia es una patria imaginaria. A territory that doesn’t exist beyond a contradictory geography that contains all the labyrinths and infernos we cling to, desperate to find an end, a meaning, almost two hundred years after its birth and death occurred at the foot of the same mountains, the same jungles and forests, the same doubts and the same tragedies. It is our collective way of imagining ourselves and dying that unite us.”

  He felt as if his blood, the same blood he’d used to write the above lines, had suddenly dried up. Alfredo Cutipa reread the lines he had just so pompously penned. He reflected on his attempt to conjure up the homeland that chased him in his dreams—wrapped in a long white sheet serving as a classical peplos—and he realized it was all a futile contortion aimed at renouncing his origins. And yet he persisted in trying to erase the minuscule channels the tricolour knife had opened on his fingertips. Identity lines the patria had carved on his skin. Fingerprints stamped one day on a Bolivian passport on a one-way journey. That Patria had the sallow face of a woman, flaccid cheeks, one flat breast exposed and completely dried up. The Patria turned up again on the city streets by the deed and grace of little llockallitas wearing ragged shorts and espadrille abarcas on their feet. Officers of the Ministry of Information had paid the children six marraquetas a day to run through the streets of La Paz, paste and brush in hand, to put up posters printed on giant four-colour sheets of paper. The propaganda of then-minister of finance Gonzalo Chanchos de Lodaza (or Pigs-in-the-Mud), declaimed the patriotically unavoidable need to tighten our intestines and accept the new draconian, brutal, efficient, pragmatic, lucid, modern, postmodern and global economic measures they had used to paper the crumbling adobe-and-brick walls of La Paz. A hopeless effort. It would take troops, tanks and three consecutive state-of-siege decrees to convince millions of Bolivians to stay poor and without a passport for the good of the Patria. “Ehs pour ell beeayn day tohdows,” said future president Chanchos de Lodaza smiling for the TV cameras, a few months before he became one of the most important mining exporters in the country after his outrageous appropriation of the nation’s mines.

  In the middle of the night, unable to sleep again, Alfredo thought about the very real possibility that Patria, the woman pictured on the dusty posters of yesteryear, had somehow managed to sneak into his suitcase and travel with him from La Paz to Montreal just to disrupt his sleep. Freshly printed on the walls of the Illimanesque city of his dreams was the image of the Madre Patria, the Motherland, watching over him with that incurable sadness in her eyes from her world of flags and hasty inks. At the bottom of the poster, by way of explanation, an absurd slogan: Bolivia: export or die, or perhaps, Son, help me by paying your taxes, or was it the draft for compulsory military service? In a corner of his memory, he heard “When the Patria calls, even a mother’s cry falls silent”—it was Carlos Paricollo, non-­commissioned officer of the Bolivian Armed Forces, confidently drilling to his soldiers, tying his shiny boots, sharpening his bayonet, always sniffing the air for a chance to shoot in a new fake war. He tried to stop thinking about the woman-symbol of his country, pondering the words he planned to start writing at daybreak, but his brain resembled a Platonic cavern, a remote outside world he had no access to, with voices and shadows projected on the walls from bodies that kept chasing each other around and confusing him. Where were those words coming from, startling him awake for no reason? Lying awake, his light on in his room on the ninth floor of Rue de Maisonneuve near metro Guy, Alfredo again repeated the old words that kept him awake: “…girondinos modernos, ¡oh patriotas!, nunca olvidéis las postreras notas del que al morir se envuelve en su bandera…”7 Words recited in kindergarten during a faraway daily civics ritual now floated to the surface of the early morning hours, a log submerged for a long time, eaten away by microscopic years.

  After exhausting all possible explanations, Alfredo was convinced that the woman he was seeing emerge stealthily out of the dark and walking towards his bed was indeed Patria. He felt her firm gaze upon him; the figure hardly made a sound. She sat on the edge of the bed and stared at him for a long time. Alfredo felt her body slide underneath the sheets and snuggle up to him, heard her whisper anthems in his ear, her cold stubborn feet seeking the warmth of his bashful Andean body. It was two in the morning. He pinched himself to check if he was actually awake and groped in the dark for the lamp on his bedside table. In the harsh light of truth, Alfredo Cutipa was startled to see the inexplicable flesh-and-blood presence of a body next to his. Regaining his composure, he tried to comfort himself thinking he had somehow entered a deeper phase of sleep and was now in one of those dreams where contours are as clear and sharp as to almost reproduce exactly what we call reality. Sheltered by this thought, he felt daring enough to address the intruder in his bed:

  “Your feet are so cold. Would you like some socks? Someone sent me a pair of wool socks from Bolivia for the winter.”

  He swallowed hard, thinking his offer was out of order. It sounded phony—usually in dreams there are no verbal conversations. The cues of meaning lie in your intuitions, in the mental dialogue found only in the logic of the dream world.

  “No, thanks. I have a tuque,” Patria answered in a low voice, pointing with a look of resignation to the bright red cap on her head.

  “That’s not a sleeping cap. It’s the famous Phrygian cap, isn’t it?”

  “No, no, it’s for the cold. It’s all the same in the end.”

  He thought it was odd to find himself in bed with Patria, the Motherland, although taking a better look, more than mother Patria she looked more like daughter Patria. The dream scene was absurd, even heretical. He thought it wouldn’t be wise to recount the details of the situation to his fellow countrymen on the island where he lived. If the patriotic members of Montreal’s Bolivian Residents’ Association ever found out, they might not even let him back into the bazaar they held every August 6th, day of salteñas, anticuchos and other happy gastronomic nationalisms washed down with generous amounts of Labatt and Molson—which according to experts had nothing on the quality and flavour of the Paceña Blonde that never lies—a day when everyone is everyone else’s brother and people treat each other to food and drinks: “hermanitoy… servite pues, che… un sequito…” Alfredo snapped out of the national feast scene and leaned back more comfortably on his pillow against the headboard. The woman did the same. They stayed there for a while, arms crossed, eyes fixed on an invisible point on the wall in front of them.

  Alfredo looked at the time. The intruder fixed the red hat she was wearing to keep her head warm.

  “You don’t sleep?” Alfredo asked.

  “I’ll go to sleep when you do, che.”

  “I’ll turn the light off if you want.”

  “No! Don’t turn it off! Please leave it on. It looks just like the torch Pedrito Domingo lit for me as his declaration of love befor
e he was hanged the summer of 1810. It was January. The 26th, I think. Or was it in 1985? Hmm. Now that I think about it I don’t really know exactly when it happened. Oh, I do know there’s a lovely painting at the museum on Calle Jaén. Do you remember? It’s a romantic oil painting. Pedro is in it, thinking about me. His moustache is sharp, so elegant and stern. Did you see how they fixed up his house? They did a gorgeous job, with a fountain in the middle of the patio. And the floors! Oh, the floors! Spotless and waxed, just the way I like them. The house would look great in one of those interior design magazines. Ay! You people of the Andes are always so melodramatic about things! You only remember the hanging but not the soirées Pedrito would have at the house on Calle Jaén. We had so much good chicha!”

  It seemed to him that Patria’s view of national history was somewhat unhinged, so he thought it wiser not to ask any more questions. He looked on his nightstand for something to read. He found a thin copy of Serpent Exercises, a manual to improve your breathing from A to Z, with guaranteed results. He realized right away there was no way he could practise all those exercises to stay in shape. He sighed and noticed the woman’s eyes still fixed on him. They stared at each other for a long time, not knowing what to say to each other, keeping to themselves, until Alfredo Cutipa started babbling like a nervous wind-up monkey with cymbals and all:

  “I would like to kindly say, I mean, well, let’s just drop all formalities, I just want to say, and it’s not because of a thorn on my side or anything, but I’m up to here with that whole thing about you being my mother, doña Patria. I’m fucking done with it. I want you to get this once and for all: you’re not my mother and I’m not your son. I hope I’m not offending you or making you feel like your life is worthless or anything.”

  “I know,” she replied with a look of indifference that Alfredo mistook for resignation, “and that doesn’t make me more or less worthy. I am la Patria. Period. And I could be your grandmother, your lover, your friend, your great-grandmother, your sister-in-law, your employee, your enemy, your wife, your sister, your daughter, your mother, your death, your granddaughter, your daughter-in-law, your cousin, your whore, your secretary, your niece, your mother-in-law, your aunt or even your cat or your dog if you want. It’s all the same to me.”

  Hearing her response, Alfredo Cutipa sat up on the bed, embarrassed and shocked, and stared at her in disbelief.

  “Tell me,” she went on, “do you have any cigarettes in this inn?”

  “No, I don’t have any. But wait, weren’t you raped by colonels and generals every time there was a coup? Didn’t you suffer beyond words at the hands of that pack of kleptomaniacs, dipsomaniacs, megalomaniacs and coke dealers that were the Barrientos, Banzer, Natusch, García Meza, Chanchos de Lodaza and Paz Zamora, not to name the ones who keep sucking your blood and the ones waiting for their turn? Hadn’t the entire middle class waited in line to take turns on top of you, like that woman in Last Exit to Brooklyn? Didn’t you almost starve to death in the Llallagua and Siglo XX mineshafts? Isn’t the massacre still continuing today thanks to the gringos in the Yungas and Chapare?”

  The words kept pouring out, tripping over each other like moviegoers leaving a theatre in flames. He would have kept talking but she cut him off and articulated every single cold, brutal word:

  “You know nothing! You have no idea what you’re talking about, you runaway piece of shit! Just shut up and go to sleep! Men tend to be more tolerable when they’re asleep and not snoring or bugging anyone…”

  He felt as if he’d just been hit by a brick, so he just listened, stunned.

  “Don’t you know that there are as many Bolivias as there are Bolivians? There are seven, eight, ten, twenty millions of patrias and more. Everyone has their own, imaginary or real, thin or fat, young or old, male or female, and they are all called Bolivia but they’re not the same. Only naïve people like you who swallowed up all the stories told in Civics class actually think there is only one single Patria. Besides, what’s the difference between patria and country?”

  “Well, they’re also names of newspapers, right?”

  She shot him a sour look. Alfredo saw it wouldn’t help him much to try to be funny. It wouldn’t make a difference at all. Would he need to give a structural answer? (And here the two scribes in charge of editing and proofreading this text couldn’t agree on the proper term. While eating Lebanese olives, they shot suggestions back and forth as if they were discussing a delectable dessert—a ping-pong game of rich signifiers like post-structuralist, neostructuralist, generativegrammarborealtransformational, etc. They finally settled for sociocritical as the most suitable theoretical framework to explain the difference between patria and country, even though, considering the oneiric aspects of the situation, a psychoanalytical approach could be more fruitful, both semantically and ideologically. To celebrate their choice, the scribes mutually pledged, if they ever had the chance in the next world, they would do their best and their worst to devour—properly seasoned and charcoal-grilled—anyone who dares try to interpret this cannibalistic passage. Happy as lambs, they laughed and laughed throwing theoretical fragments and pits at each other.) Impassive, she waited for an answer. He looked at her again, not knowing what to say, until Patria spoke again in a softer tone:

  “To begin with, Alfredo, tell me, my sweet Alfredito, are you sure I am a woman? A patria can be so many things, even a chair, a typewriter, a computer, an immigrant’s suitcase under the bed, a photo from kindergarten…”

  Alfredo hesitated at the question, trying to understand what she meant. As he searched for the answer, and unaware of where his eyes wandered, he suddenly found himself staring at Patria’s breasts through her peplum. They now seemed more—how shall we put it—more convincing than before. Looking at Patria’s body, Alfredo gradually and unwittingly forgot every search, answer and argument he’d had, and reached out his hand towards her breasts, feeling as if he were crossing an odd border through the sheets. A buzzing sensation ran through his body, a slow electric current reaching higher and higher voltage. He turned towards her and started caressing her soft skin under the thin cloth. His hand slowly reached the glorious summit of a nipple, which upon contact with his fingers awoke and stood up, curious to know whether the forecast called for snow that day. Alfredo couldn’t help thinking about Freud’s theories, about Oedipus tearing out his bleeding eyes in an extreme gesture of shame and acceptance of the fate assigned to him by the Moiras. He shook his head to rid himself of the portentous image that hovered over his brow like a ravenous crow staring into his Bolivian pupils. His hand glided down, a ship across the warm, smooth skin of Patria’s belly. He continued downward towards the depths of Patria’s body, she welcomed his caress—eyes half-closed, Phrygian cap off to the side on the nightstand, pink tongue moistening plump, half-open lips, letting gentle moans escape every now and then. Alfredo had closed his eyes in total surrender to his expedition, seeing everything with his fingertips, already imagining that first contact with the soft Venusian pubis that would lead to a concave seascape hidden between the warmest, moistest lips in the world. But in a shooting second—perhaps the longest—his fingers catastrophically ran aground in an unexpected geography, something different, more like a small fish in repose, a warm langoustine next to two round shapes—well, two oval-shaped testicles. Alfredo leaped out of the bed as if he’d just been electrocuted. He sprang up in the air, establishing a new world record in the high jump. He was an Olympian spring, repulsed and offended, a blinded, deceived seducer. He looked at his hands in disbelief, wanting to wash them, and then back up at Patria, searching for an explanation. Stunned, he found himself alone. He looked under the bed, in the closet, walked all around the bed, checked that his head was still where it should be. He needed a drink, a beer, a sip of wine, rum, something. But he remembered he rarely drank so he just sat still by the window and waited for morning to arrive.

  He woke up with a pounding headache, ea
ch brain hemisphere turned into a pile of wet fortune cookies that were filled, not with a future prediction on a slip of paper, but with an entire roll of 16-millimetre film with a stereo track. He remembered a passage in one of the chapters of Arturo Borda’s novel—novel?—El loco in which one of the characters plays football with a human head. That’s what his head felt like. He couldn’t quite remember the passage. Maybe it came from the second book of three thick volumes published by the mayor’s office in La Paz to commemorate the painter’s birth or death, more likely his death. After all, the painter had always been too scandalous—and alcoholic—a figure to be officially celebrated in life. To local sanctimonious critics, one day Jaime Sáenz turned his wide-brim hat around and said, “He drank simply because he felt like it.” Feeling the scalpel of each word right between their eyes, his students heard his explanation and jealously guarded each word in their memory like rare coins.

  Alfredo felt dry. Dry as the dry riverbeds where the only thing that runs is the wind of the Altiplano. His heart was an abandoned riverbank full of stones, the dusty river that splits the region of El Alto. Stuck in fragmented stories, hazy as if he were sitting flipping channels on the TV, zipping from one image to the next without knowing which horizon to hold on to, absolved of the task of having to imagine anything—that’s how Alfredo felt. “I need to develop my characters,” he said out loud, “and abandon the mimetic ground. Descriptions must transgress the boundaries of geography and reason. They must describe the words themselves.” The vowels of oblivion. Without them, the void. Oblivion: the odour of mothballs, smoke and gunshots. Soiled spots on chairs no one sits on anymore. Oblivion, capital orb, endless tunnel, a bottomless hole, a well strung with the long rope of fate. A body falling inside rolled up into a ball, its foetal back plunging down in an infinite descent. The fall. The “i,” the second vowel of oblivion, the most desperate one, most suitable for misery, shrieks and piss. At the end of the word, the ultimate, profound projection of the “o,” the vocal one, an infinite mouth swallowing time itself. We approach the word, get close, walk up to it with our feet and our socks and the gravity of our everyday gestures. We observe it, pronounce it, devour, jot it down: “oblivion,” ­theinfinitepossibilitiesofoblivion… oblivionoblivionoblivion