oblivionoblivionoblivionoblivionoblivionoblivionobli
vionoblivionoblivionoblivionoblivionoblivionoblivionobliv
ionoblivionoblivionoblivionoblivionoblivionoblivionob
livionoblivionoblivionoblivionoblivionoblivionoblivion
oblivionoblivionoblivionoblivionoblivionoblivionoblivi
onoblivionoblivionoblivionoblivionobliviono.
The infinite circle of circular doors devours us in the end. “Vowel” is the name we have given to those writerly orifices we slip on and fall into, leaping into the fragmentation of time. Time to remember now. And he remembered hearing that first poem in kindergarten in Cochabamba—in an old colonial house with doors so high you could ride a horse through to enter and see all that took place there from that bizarre height, the tiny wooden chairs, the smell of glue, the hiss of their blunt-edged scissors, the round tables where the budding citizens met every day to practise the mysteries of how this world is represented and its language, one block away from the Heroínas de la Coronilla avenue, the same year they killed Che: “Myshoeistootightmysockistoowarmandihaveacrazycrushonthe-
boyfromacrossthestreet.” Little Inés, her eyes fixed on him, swinging her arms while reciting the short composition in civics class. The world was then a collection of faces—teachers, parents and pupils—tenderly captivated hearing her declamation. Inadvertently, Inés tied—inevitably and for ever and ever—the body of diminutive Alfredo to the holy cross of vowels and consonants that, when conjured up, formed words that from then on would never stop devouring him from inside with a gentle tingling sensation that permeated him until even the very heart of his bones had blushed. Twenty years later, Alfredo realized that in those deep civic-minded moments he’d been shot by a first arrow whose initial delights and subsequent mortal wounds he would attribute to various bookish influences flowing in all their variety and manifestations—from Rumi Ñawi’s muted passion to Larisa Fyodorovna’s ardent lips, which lit up the intense and sleepless nights of the innocuous bolshevism of La Paz. It was Inés’s teeth—small kernels of maize and music—that had so deeply moved him all the down to the very root of his hair. It was hot under the wise molle trees in the schoolyard where preschool students had taken out their small chairs for Civics class. He still didn’t get the exact meaning of the ritual he would experience so many more times in his life. He also ignored its bloodier uses and consequences. But, at only five years old, Alfredo Cutipa was perfectly aware of the effervescence that overtook his school on that day and which demanded of him the most circumspect and patriotic behaviour, including properly combed hair and polished shoes. Inés, with short straight hair down to her chin, bangs lining her forehead. Inés, sowing the seeds of vowels with her maize teeth. Alfredo is in Cochabamba, in 1967, “about to enter for the first time that labyrinth of affection, where we are at once Minotaur and Theseus. We die to continue living.”
In late summer of 1993, Alfredo Cutipa set out to write with renewed fervour, trying to draw with each word a trait, a feature of the face that looked him in the mirror, knowing the task was impossible.8 Alfredo wrote knowing that the painful emergence of each word was certain proof that another word had been crushed, stabbed, bled to death in the long, dark tunnel that leads into the page after piercing through feet, chest, sex, eyes, arms and fingers. Each word the denial of another. The other one, the one that isn’t here—the one that will never be here—may have been more effective, more precise, more human than this one here. He gazed for an instant at the foliage outside, the curtains quivering from the open windows in the last heat of summer, realizing that his fate was not any better than that of the curtains fluttering in the wind, or the leaves in the park clutching the branches in anticipation of a winter that was already, gently, beginning to blow on the air at dawn. Three years had passed since he had set out daily to write his long, dense novel in which he would peel, one layer at a time, with the diligence of an ant, the intestines of his patria, which, like Goya’s monstrous, insatiable Saturn at the El Prado Museum, devoured her own children, chewing on them slowly as if they were coca acullicos. He would thus attempt to demonstrate that the main reason for Bolivia’s existence was violence. During every Montreal winter—the sky robed in the bright, light blue of a thin, giant sheet of aluminum—he hadn’t stopped turning the dial on his shortwave radio. All in vain. Eventually, Bolivia started to resemble a sort of Camelot, a mythical kingdom he would never again be allowed to enter. For a long time he collected newspapers and cut out news articles; he tried to rekindle a few friendships by writing letters that were never answered; he became enraged and got drunk uttering curses in three languages and insults in two others after learning about the final results of the 1993 national elections.
In a stubborn, silent act of protest, Alfredo went to an old liquidations store on Boulevard Saint-Laurent and bought a pair of cotton-polyester socks with the colours of the Bolivian flag: red, yellow and green. He wore them as a provocative act—or at least so he thought, foolishly picturing himself bathed in the perfume of subversion and conspiracy—under a pair of ankle-length pants. He then went to every Latin-American party he learned about on posters copied and taped in corners around the immigrant neighbourhood of Côte-des-Neiges, at cafés on hedonist Rue Saint-Denis, along the cosmopolitan boulevard Saint-Laurent, on bus stops. On a Saturday evening filled with tamales and revelry, at a solidarity event for a group of persecuted aboriginal Guatemalans who had spent centuries dodging the muskets or infrared scopes of soldiers from the imperio, a woman with long black hair and eyes of grey coral thought she had recognized the political manifesto implied by his tricolour socks. She walked up to talk to him, cautiously at first, showing growing interest in him—a man who, rather than reserved, was linguistically shy. She spoke to him in French, with an accent that at times seemed from Marseille. Passionate and spontaneous, she told him about her Kurdish origins, the goals of the Kurdish cause, her experiences in France and Germany where she’d recently been working as a translator, establishing contacts and working for the PKK—Kurdistan Workers’ Party—which was fighting on two fronts against oppression from Turkey and Iraq, and had recently unleashed a mighty wave of bombings against various Turkish embassies and consulates across Europe to highlight the silent complicity between Turkish and Europeans, former rivals now united in the subjugation of the Kurdish people. She didn’t have a patria but dreamed of having one, while Alfredo had one but dreamed of not having it. To make matters worse, both countries, one more imaginary than the other, bore the same three colours on their flags. So Alfredo tried to make himself understood over the trumpeting salsa and merengue and the hypnotic aroma of patacones, tamales and chorizos around them. In his Cochambamba French, he explained the true meaning of his socks, the subversive effect he had intended, his vigorous, categorical rejection of his nation’s flag, that infamous, insignificant, bloodstained rag that to him represented the most primitive nationalism. In that church basement in Côte-des-Neiges, the fire of his rhetoric, all the rivers of his Andean memories, his best French verb conjugations were all useless in convincing her of the real purpose of his tricolour socks. She smiled and stared at him, amused perhaps by the French accent of this man—Alfred cette fois, ou Alfgged, avec un “r” profond et riche—or perhaps by the crude naiveté of his explanations. For her, from the perspective of Komala Karjeren—the Kurdish trade union movement—Alfredo’s socks represented the colours of the great Kurdish patria, and the road to that promised land inexorably passed through the barrel of a rifle and the gunpowder of a bomb. Who knows if it was because they were tired of geopolitical and socio-historical reasoning, or the music that had invaded all their pores, but suddenly they both realized their bodies had begun to dialogue with each other in the oldest, most silent language on earth.
Without saying a word, at the start of a song she gestured, asking him to dance. They were playing “La rosa negra,” a “rhumbasalsa” by a Californian band that played guitar as if the
y were Gypsies, and maybe they were, since Ottmar Liebert, the name of the guitar player, sounded more Gypsy than German. But neither of them knew for sure. Instead, they thought it was a song of Central American influence whose dance style Alfredo felt compelled to explain through movement given his obvious condition of being a Latin American citizen. The guitar trembled in the speakers and the song started softly, its beat leading their feet from side to side with its jingles and drums. Gradually she became an ocean of rhythms of a sweet Oriental similarity. Her body weaved back and forth led by her hips. Alfredo felt in his bones an ache to die next to her, his Andean skin itself eyeing her eagerly. He felt as if his senses had just crossed forty arduous years of chaste, solitary deserts. His pulse discovered a latent, expectant force, a hidden sensuality that through her insinuated the power of all the oceans. Standing close to her he thought of the destruction and decadence caused by time passing, the bombs and gunshots fed by faith, and the hearts that so would have loved the colour of the dawn. He thought of rusted clocks and the silent decay of yellowing letters accumulated over the years. He thought in that instant that all his contact with humanity, with the other, was reduced to that fleeting moment when you touch another person capable of all the affections available at the tip of their fingers, about to cross the threshold of their senses. He quietly sent endless blessings to the breath, sweat and words of the bards of old who thousands of years ago urged in word and deed to seize the present moment with both hands, both eyes, both mouths, both hearts and deeply breathe in life’s fragrance. For an instant, spinning around, standing in that epicentre surrounded by music, arms, spices, tones, accents and sayings of the Latin American tongue, Alfredo felt himself gradually descend to the faraway South: idealized, dusty, sentimental and terribly poor. “Her arms inhabited my back and my hand descended to the swaying port of her waist. Music invaded her eyes, made waves in her hair. For an instant I was fast and moved deftly on my feet, trying to be a seasoned Latin American…” he would write later, knowing that perhaps this way, thanks to the written word, she would remain by his side forever. The fervour of the guitars subsided and a slow cascade of melodies fell. They stopped spinning and their bodies remained close, holding on, and decided to stay together forever.
They took a cab together at the end of the party. The Haitian driver welcomed them with blasting kompa music, his shoulders dancing as he drove his metal ship around Montreal at dawn. Moments later, trying hard to drive away the intrusion of an old, terrible dream, Alfredo turned off the light and plunged into a blissful sea of kisses. He leaned against his bedroom wall and launched his hands, sails in the wind, two boats setting out on a voyage around the world to cross the farthest, most mysterious straits. Smooth, resplendent breasts. Soft hips. A curious navel, forever admiring itself in another. The lower his hand went, the slower his journey became, the more cautious his touch, until he finally reached—eager and relieved—the Ithaca every Ulysses dreams of. His arrival turned the night into a dazzling, erotic ocean of hymens and seashells. Alfredo opened his eyes and with trumpeting fanfare he flamboyantly unfurled his sex, which to her seemed sufficient, if not particularly extraordinary. The next morning he would learn that the woman—who had held him and showered him with love and bites, pushed him off the side of a cliff, and abandoned him in the centre of a now-dead volcano—was gone and had left a brief note on the table: Mon Alfredo: Merci pour tout ton amour. Il est 7 heures du matin et je dois te quitter. Je t’aime bien, mon gauchiste-caviar. À bientôt. Bolivia.9
“No! What the…? This can’t be! For god’s sake! A Kurdish woman named Bolivia… Who the hell would give that name to a woman born in Sulaymaniyah?”
Alfredo buttoned up his shirt, still shocked by his discovery and fatigued in that peculiar way you feel after a long night in bed with a woman. He noticed his subversive tricolour socks had disappeared. He knelt down to look under the bed for the umpteenth time, somewhat surprised by the odd occurrence.
Two days later, Alfredo decided to look for Bolivia all over the island of Montreal. He returned to the quiet church basement where he’d met her. He spied from the doors at any Latin American fiesta that popped up. He visited Turkish and Lebanese spice stores. Six months later, his search hadn’t yielded any favourable results. He visited hostels, university dorms and old rooming house buildings. He crossed the patinated iron bridges that lead to Longueil and Laval, returned to his room exhausted and dismayed. He wished he could remember her perfume, retain even a trace of her, but he remembered nothing—that night, the only thing he could sense in the air, on the Kurdish woman’s skin, was the scent of words, that airplane smell, the air suitcases retain when they return from a remote place. One afternoon in those days of endless searching, Alfredo happened upon the Kurdish social club two blocks from Montreal’s Jean Talon Market. It was both a café and a store of sorts, one of those places where somewhat stolid men with nostalgic eyes and proud moustaches gathered around the tables, conversing quietly while drinking coffee or playing chess or reading newspapers whose worn pages showed the transit of thousands of eyes and fingertips—news that may have been as fresh as dried figs, written in a language whose architecture of lines resembled the inscriptions found on ancient mosques. Alfredo stepped inside. He noticed no one wore tricolour socks there. At the counter, a display of banners, t-shirts and even porcelain cups with the three colours of the Bolivian flag—that is, the Kurdish flag. They were focused as they smoked, some with their hands in their pockets, others with komboloi beads sliding slowly through their fingers one after the other, listening attentively as Alfredo described the Kurdish woman who’d recently arrived in Montreal after spending time in France and Germany, and he’d had the pleasure to meet at a solidarity gathering. Alfredo explained all of this to the Kurds at the joint, speaking English at times, at times in French, but always avoiding specific intimate details, naturally. While explaining he came from a country whose flag was the same as Kurdistan, the country they so yearned for, he noticed they were now beginning to exchange short questioning phrases, their looks hesitant and suspicious, maybe thinking he was a spy.
Six months after he’d written, “No! What the…? This can’t be! For god’s sake! A Kurdish woman named Bolivia… Who the hell would give that name to a woman born in Sulaymaniyah?” Alfredo was sitting at his kitchen table in his small Villeray apartment, trying in vain, again, to write, hoping the exercise would finally take that thorn of Puya raimondi that pierced his head from ear to ear, a sensation that had become a flooding feeling of Bolivianity. Winter was being merciful despite the naked outlines of the trees on the street. Why should I feel Bolivian? Why not feel Garcilasian, and say you were born in a place called “Los heraldos negros”? The name even sounds like a place where luscious oaks grow and give good shade. But no. Alfredo Cutipa—whose right ring finger and little finger had almost been bitten off by a monkey at the zoo on the other side of the Rocha River on a remote childhood afternoon—felt irrationally, earthily Bolivian.
Cardán, I’m sure you remember that night, and correct me if I’m wrong, cross out this line, tear up this page, grab a new one and write down what you think really happened. I’m telling you about the night Boxeador died, when we found pieces of his skull embedded in the wooden beams that held up the roof in guard post number eleven—or was it sixteen?—in that vast space at the El Alto Air Base, and we found at our feet brain mass spread in all directions of the highlands, globs of white and greyish gelatinous matter running down the adobe walls, their tiny veins still pulsating. Do you remember? Remember, because the dead only die for real when no one can remember them anymore. Correct me if I’m wrong, Cardán hermano, because I don’t even know if I remember these things. These days people don’t like to remember. People say memory is for old people—when it’s passive—or they’ll say you’re being seditious and dissatisfied if you want to know the how and why of every story. Maybe I remember because it’s a lie that the dead are asleep. It’s a
lie they are only dust. The worms may have feasted on their bodies, hands, tongues and eyes, and there may be no heaven or hell beyond the infinity of those tireless microscopic jaws, but their images remain, their voices remain inside of us. There are those who insist in making us believe everything that happens, life and death, is all due to divine will. That all the misery and atrocities in this life will be rewarded after death with gentle geographies, celestial clouds of milk and manna. They say all of this because they have candles to sell, alms to hand out, believers to domesticate and miseries to justify. Or perhaps it’s because the dead are more rebellious than anyone else. There’s nothing you can do to them. You can’t arrest them, beat them or exile them, and they live and come near us with their restlessness, and they leave whenever they please, they go up and down, go from night to day, from sleep to wakefulness, and sometimes they whisper stories in our ear while we sleep, without us noticing that their bones become the roots that guide our very steps, nimble bones moving underground the way a pianist’s fingers would accompany us, guide us until the moment comes when we, too, will whisper our last words before plunging into the same silence with our mouth full of dirt. Then, with that same dirt filling our eye sockets, kneecaps and ribcages, we will speak sweetly with the living, telling them about the things we’ve seen and how the double edge of dust and oblivion is killing us little by little. I don’t know who ended up picking up the bloody body of that soldier of the second company of Air Base fusiliers. I don’t even know if they took what was left of him in a stretcher. I don’t remember if his body exhaled a something, a soul, as it was lifted. I don’t know if his body was rigid and resisting death, or was a flaccid empty costume discarded on the floor after a sad party. I knew Boxeador had come to the city from somewhere in the Altiplano, stubbornly set on enduring one year in the Army. Just like him, every year hundreds, thousands of indigenous youth left the deepest regions of the Andean lands and headed to the barracks to meet the violent rite of passage. They arrived at the doors in silence. They arrived after days of anticipation. They spent their hours and their nights waiting for the regiment doors to open—artillery, motorized cavalry, infantry—waiting for their sergeants to take their name and last name, to examine their teeth, waiting for the army physicians to mark their chests with odd numbers written in iodine on their skin, waiting for the armed doctors to spread their butt cheeks to check for haemorrhoids. There were always extras—too many boys begging in Aymara, “Let me join up, sergeant, don’t be mean, I don’t have enough money for the bus back to my community. I can’t go back until I’m a veteran.” The first month of military service, Boxeador was an extra, wasn’t needed in the company and in the battalion. But he insisted in staying and began as a supernumerary. He made it work, slept on the cement floor with no mattress and only one blanket, he was stubborn against the cold and lack of food, and he endured every single insult and humiliation, for better or for worse. Supernumeraries like him didn’t have access to a sleeping cot, supplies or anything else. But he’d decided to stay no matter what and endure anything that came his way. On his first day off, the first break for conscripts to return to old civilian life, Boxeador finally managed to secure a sleeping cot for himself. This, because many of the new recruits never returned to the barracks, possessed by the frenzy of prisoners who have just been released, burdened by the language, hygiene, elegant manners and finesse of Bolivia’s military world. It was mostly those lucky enough to have family in La Paz who could free themselves from having to return to the filthy military barracks. City dwellers were spared having to step back into reeking, tattered uniforms inherited from other bodies and miseries. The families of those who ignored the motherland’s call would later take care of bribing the appropriate military authorities and obtain the military service card that opened doors to higher education, employment and the right to vote. Others, like Boxeador, whose Native families lacked the necessary funds and language, who’d come from lost places on the republic’s map, had to stick it out because they couldn’t show their face in their hometowns, where many of their relatives, with an absurd dose of pride, were already spreading the news that their sons were serving the nation to become real men—able to get drunk, build a hut and choose a woman they would hit every once in a while following the military style they’d learned. The sacred vulture perched on the oval in the national coat of arms presaged the fundamental notions of the Bolivian nation. God, patria, home. Perhaps Boxeador thought that’s what it meant to be a Bolivian Native or mestizo: to be capable of absolute stoicism and resistance, capable of being a heroic wall that could stop the machinegun fire of the enemy, be they rotos, pilas or Red, and do anything to serve the great Bolivian Patria. To embody the myth of the bronze race, that which dies at the base of the cannon, that which endures everything. But that bronze race doesn’t exist, it never existed because behind that imaginary Andean stoicism there is nothing but infinite, exhausted resignation, even greater than Illimani itself. The bronze race was invented to legitimize violence: the Andean can endure anything, suffer through anything. Ponguito who never complains. Little miner who thinks he’ll be rewarded in heaven after singing about his sombre mineshaft days and tragic nights. Sardine-eating little worker. Little builder made of bread, banana and papaya. Indiecito, campesino buenagente. Little thief with no bad intentions. He’s just drunk, leave him alone. He’ll take it, he’ll just take it because a good Bolivian, because he’s made of bronze. Metal doesn’t talk or suffer or feel, and it bends only in the fire. Bronze race for the Palacio Quemado condors to defecate on.
Red, Yellow and Green Page 5
