He recognized a few faces, met familiar eyes. When he finally managed to dance, it was so pathetic everyone around him ended up fleeing the dance floor. At least, he reflected afterwards, a charitable soul had agreed to dance with him. In the midst of his rhythmical efforts, a storm of deep, heavy sound drops began to fall, the notes, synthesizers and mechanical construction of a bad song in English—“Baby, don’t hurt me… no more…” The singer’s voice scribbled sadly in the air and the couples broke up and made their way back to their tables in the dim Latin club.
“Are you all right?” Amelia’s voice asked, reaching across the waters of a long-gone trip to Urmiri. Alfredo turned around feigning calm, barely concealing his shock at the apparition, a dusty echo in the middle of a Montreal bar. He answered with a nod. They didn’t say a word. He kept his gaze soft, avoiding looking straight at Amelia so that her image and voice wouldn’t vanish into the cigarette smoke. The beat of the music that threatened to rupture his eardrums was shaking the ashtray one millimetre at a time towards the edge of the table. A woman at a nearby table lit a match and in the flame’s glow Amelia’s features and voice vanished for an instant. Farther out in the centre of the night, two women had joined in a slow dance, one tongue finding the other, their hips moving back and forth to the beat as they felt and caressed each other. “Would you like to dance?” Alfredo asked the visitor.
“You know I can’t,” Amelia replied in a low voice, “but I can tell you when you’re going to die.”
“I don’t want to know,” he mumbled. “Why did you come here with those funeral words?”
“No, no, I’m not kidding, Alfredo! Just the opposite. You have no idea how much I would have liked to know exactly which day I was going to die. That way I would have been able to come closer to you and prepared myself for this fragility. I could have reciprocated some of your long, quiet devotion. I could have gone to the station that night to find you and say you’d never see me again, to say goodbye and tell you not to waste your time calling me because it was too late for both of us. That way they wouldn’t have beaten you so hard for trying to make a call that was never answered. Because when they were beating you, Alfredo, I was fading away, my body died little by little with every single blow. You’ve been waiting for me for how long, ten, fifteen years?”
“Sixteen years, Amelia, sixteen.”
“How was I supposed to know you’d written all those pages you used to read for me when you came to visit? That you’d created and written them just for me? You never explained. After you let me read them, you’d only say you’d found an interesting book somewhere, or a notebook with no name or address in the back of a bus, stuff like that. You know how much you lie.”
“That’s not true. I’ve never written anything about you before tonight.”
“You’re such a bad liar, Alfredo. Will you ever change?”
He lied to her. How could he tell her he’d always been looking for her, that all he could do to try to remember her was to write, try to build a house of words, a book, a space where he’d always be able to find her after all those years, free from death, free from forgetting and silence?
“You weren’t really looking for me, Alfredo. You’re fine just waiting for me from this side of reality. If you were really looking for me, you would have done something else. You would have come back and looked for me.”
He didn’t know what to say. And she could tell. There was no point hiding the flow of his thoughts. Amelia could sense every image and idea in Alfredo’s mind as if she lived in the centre of his imagination, as if his thoughts, while he sat there in a bar in Montreal, were as sharp as hearing someone scream in the middle of a nave in a colonial church. She continued, “Can’t you see I’ve also been waiting for you in my own way? Keeping you company, watching the way you love, the way you hate, watching you even while you looked for me in other women?”
“Tell me, Amelia, what good is it loving a ghost? Someone who’s not there anymore, who’s just a memory, a dead woman who left without saying a word, without even saying if she ever loved me or not?”
“You’re right, Alfredo. I don’t have an answer for you. But you’re here, and you keep looking for me, talking to me, writing to me…”
It was true. He’d continued to look for her even though he knew it was pointless, and impossible. He downed the rest of the lukewarm rum in his glass and ordered a beer—it was Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day in Montreal, a humid summer night, so distant, so different from cold June nights in the Andean winter. The last time he saw her was on a night like that. They were standing near one of thousands of festive bonfires, flowers of light that brightened the nocturnal cradle of La Paz and cast small sparkles on her long dark hair. Wanting to find her now was like trying to write a novel he’d never be able to finish. All he could manage to write in his notebooks was his own doubts, this anguish of those who study the traces of Death, those who search for the roots of their own voice. Now, back in this space for dance and pagan rituals, a woman bloomed into a cumbia—her hips and long hair swaying, her feet moving to the beat. In a final gesture, a reckless seducer waved the banners of his hands towards the woman’s breasts, received in return a majestic smack across the face. The ardent latinillo walked off with his tail between his legs, away from the woman, who remained in possession of the cumbia, of the space and of herself.
He looked around for Amelia so they could keep talking, but she’d vanished. “Even dead people leave me,” he thought to himself. All he had left were the blind workers of his words—ants, unconcerned by any diegetic intentions.
“What good is it to love a dead woman?” Amelia’s voice asked out of nowhere, a sudden whisper in his ear. He looked up from his notebook but couldn’t see her. She was invisible and ethereal, only a whispering voice that would keep him company, then vanish. For an instant he thought he recognized her sitting at a table. Yes, Amelia was there, at the other end of the nightclub—her expression was serene, fine fingers interlaced under her chin, eyes fixed on him, the slightest smile drawn on her face. The woman sitting next to her turned around to look at Alfredo. As soon as his pupils touched her gaze, she averted her eyes and looked towards the other end of the bar. The last he saw of Amelia was her hand waving affectionately while she mouthed a quiet “Chao.” Then her shape and her long, black shiny hair began to vanish little by little, penetrating, inhabiting, merging with the shape, body and features of the woman sitting beside her, who right then looked at Alfredo again, this time straight at him, looking to make eye contact. The eyes of a woman of this world dropped their anchors into the figure of the confused Andean man. He muttered something at the vision—perhaps a “qué jodida la cosa, che” or “chao, Amelia”—and, as if beckoned by a revelation, he ascended into the ether of the night, driven by the blind logic of the ancestral dancer in his blood. He looked one last time at the now empty spot where Amelia had been sitting and talking to him and, feeling intensely Latin, he leapt head first into the dance floor with the unknown woman who was walking towards him. His joints didn’t loosen up. His Andean hips failed to sway. But she—perhaps born from ancient, fertile Irish humus on Canadian land—surrounded him with the cadence of her arms, offered him the bread of her hair, water from her brow, made the earth turn under his feet to allow his ankles and the planets to rotate. The drums played, the rum sang from the ice, and she became pure in her spinning, a waterfall in the night, joyous in her half turn, as if her hips had suddenly learned to speak, testing the limits and possibilities of a body dancing in the night, performing the most remote, most sacred exercise in human memory. She moved closer, leaned rhythmical and vertebral, and turned, a moist river of music. “I’d rather gaze at your arms in flight, how the black wheat fields spin before my eyes, your moist brow upon my shoulder. Water in your waist, water in your knees, and the moons of your chest point with their hidden light at the path that leads to the heart of the drums and the night.”
After dancing and duly conveying his appreciation to the woman, back in his rum-and-glass island refuge, a man looks out on this sea of steps and songs, lumber and certainty, watches a woman seed a cumbia with her fingers, feet and hips. Music has devoured the faces and identities. You can’t see her anymore but you know Amelia is here, spinning around you in the air, to the beat of the drums and maracas in the dome of this heart, beckoning your pupils to imagine the past, inventing this hand whose only territory is now a waist and some music.
No one picked up the phone. It rang and rang. No one. No one. Alfredo waited in vain for someone to answer and take him from that phone at the Air Base to Amelia’s mouth, to the full moon of her voice lighting up the night inside his chest. But a stealth serpent emerged from a well of wrath—a low-ranking officer on duty appeared beside him. Thirty years later, Alfredo would think to himself the officer had been without a doubt the kind that believed in monument heroes, in the martial glory shining in Charles Dumoulin’s eyes, in blazing cavalry attacks where ancient combat fencing is still used for a rifle barrel to block a sabre blow from a moustached hussar on horseback—his splendid replica covered in dust and blood sleeps eternal and agitated behind glass at Les Invalides. But the officer knew none of this. His personal taste was dissatisfied with the size of the golden lead stars on his epaulettes, small scatological decorations—like the pigeon droppings on Plaza Murillo’s heroic monuments—that signalled the supreme condition of lieutenant that he had achieved. “Ah! Mono! Monito… At my command! Atten-HUT! Half left, FACE!” ordered the Bolivian Ethereal Farce officer, who had resigned himself to being an army lieutenant, unable to withstand height vertigo and the unsteady flight of the T-33s that had miraculously survived the fire of North Korean anti-aircraft batteries. “So the little monkey’s chatting with his chola! Ah mono, youdumbasslittlemonkey…” In his punishment position, Alfredo knew he couldn’t even look towards the part of the city where even the cobblestones loved the echo of Amelia’s steps. The order was that severe. His obedience was that stupid. The officer grabbed the receiver and waited for someone to pick up. It was his practice to use the soldiers’ women. He would cheat them into bringing them to the station—“You’ll only get liberty if your girlfriend comes to visit you, but you’ll go out on your own, she stays with me.” He would break the soldiers by beating and smearing feces on them, force them bring their girlfriends to the station, introduce them to him freshly showered, perfumed and full of trust and affection. And devoted, they would come to see their men, their little bronze soldiers, bringing them treats, smokes, letters and kisses, unaware of the superiors’ lurid orders, the wooden boards splintering on the backs and buttocks of those who refused to comply. More than a few girlfriends, friends and sisters had ended up with blood running down their legs following a violent, heroic military assault against the red enemy’s trenches in the name of the highest interests of the Motherland. Perhaps that’s why Boxeador’s brains ended up scattered on the beaten earth floors inside a guard post—lost in an Altiplano that slowly lost ground to the city and its noises, which slowly swallowed up the wind that whistled in the rough grass. The officer scratched his crotch. He waited anxiously with the receiver stuck to his ear, growing impatient while waiting, like Alfredo, for someone to answer. The soldier in his punishment position now wished with all his heart for no one to pick up at Amelia’s house. The officer started to swear and yell at the mute receiver. “Pickupthefuckingphonerightnow!” unaware that Amelia was slowly losing consciousness at the other end of the line. Collapsed on the floor, a stroke was quickly draining her last lucid moments. Her breath slowly faded away while a phone rang relentlessly in the next room. “Yourejustfuckingwithme, youmonkeypieceofshit!” the officer threatened him. He slammed the phone down and, out of the dark, sucker-punched Alfredo, who crumpled to the ground, his mouth open, his eyes loaded with constellations. Private Alfredo Cutipa, second company in the air defence battalion, fell, covered in dust and pleased with the pain of knowing no one had picked up the phone, knowing that Amelia was free from the viscous voice, the feverish hands, the greyish fingers and fingernails of the Bolivian army man who was kicking him into the ground.
That 1st day of January 1995, he arrived on the island of Montreal on a snow sled pulled by penguins. He was stealth, like the secrets he was struggling to unravel. By then, Bolivia—the Kurdish woman whose fingers had reached between his ribs and carved a path to his Andean heart—had vanished and left him with an intense thirst to understand the coincidences that tied them together. Perhaps she had gone back to Europe, or crossed the Bosphorus to return to Kurdistan—that imaginary patria her people were trying to rip out of history using bombs and flags. Sometimes he would read news about a Turkish air attack against the Kurdish population, cornered as it was in the dusty regions bordering Iraq. In those early dawns in winter, distance would make a silent film in his imagination: columns of fire and shattered earth rising out of the explosions and bombings, and he tried to remember her enjoying freedom, sheltered from the scythe of repression and death. Alone in his tiny apartment, Alfredo felt as if he were sinking under the long time that absence lasts.
Red, Yellow and Green Page 7
