“I start over. I find a name for you: María. And then I invent an encounter, always the first, always the same one, where my eyes converse with your fingers and your voice touches me and your laughter undresses me in what you call an exercise in desire and I name the desire of invention.” The woman reread the note the soldier had given her without looking at her or saying a word as she made her way out of the military base. She had just offered her visiting services to General Muñoz. She’d heard someone knocking at the door while his military saurian body snored buried under the sheets, bloated with alcohol and filling the room with a sour fog. She considered for a moment whether to open or not. She decided she was too tired and didn’t want to see anyone. As if they had read her thoughts exactly, someone slid an envelope under the door. María read the instructions: she was to show up to work on a certain day at a certain time at so-and-so’s house on such-and-such street. The note came with a cheque for $1,000 US signed by a vice-minister. She sighed and glared at the piece of paper bearing the emblem of the Ministry of Finance. Then, doing her best not to wake up the slumped air force general, she got up and ran naked to the bathroom, took a quick shower, got dressed, and left the narrow fermenting room at the El Alto garrison. On her way out, a young man in soldier’s clothing handed her a note and, before she could register his features in her memory, he disappeared among hundreds of other soldiers responding to the bugle call for the morning’s first formation.
The old colononel saw her enter the room. He paid little attention to the few vague pleasantries they exchanged, his gaze focused on the woman’s hips as she undressed with no further preamble. The colononel dug in his pocket for his decrepit carnal dagger, which began to awaken at that commotion. He was sitting at an enormous desk covered with a white cotton cloth embroidered with birds and the inscription “From the wives’ club of the Círculo Militar on the first anniversary of the national renovation. August, 1972.” On the middle of the table was a candelabrum with unlit wicks, a bottle of white wine and a tureen full of freshly prepared steaming ají de fideo. On the improvised dinner table were two rock crystal glasses, two flat plates each with a set of silverware, cotton serviettes, a pitcher of water and two glasses waiting for wine.
“I won’t be eating anything,” said the woman. The old colononel, who had been dreaming of his presidential chair since 1977, was clad in his immaculate parade uniform loaded with all the insignia appropriate to an army general, including the secret addition of two additional stars that made him the de facto general of the general of generals.12 He said nothing. Only a veil of dissatisfaction flashed in his eyes when he realized he didn’t even have power of command over his drowsy sexual slug or over the woman, who was standing at the other end of the room and stared at him with the eyes of her breasts, naked and defiant. Former president Hugo Cancer felt all the physical emptiness of no longer having the power in his hands, no longer being called “commander-in-chief of the Bolivian army” or “excelentísimo señor presidente de la república” or “general blah, blah, blah.” He couldn’t help cursing his godson Juan Pereda for screwing everything up. In his remote years as president he’d never needed to pay for a woman. He’d had dozens of them, the most terrified, resigned little women overwhelmed by trends and provincial worries about what-will-people-say, some seeking the security of having a roof over their heads and food on their plates; others, charmed by the ceremonial graduation dagger from Colegio Militar Germán Busch, and later, the flaming promotion stars that gradually crept over his shoulders and his cap like shining golden akatankas. Now the aging dictator had to pay for the disquieting fancies by which he tried to cling to the vestiges of his once-unquestionable power. Fortunately, he still had friends he had placed—in better days—in succulent positions within public institutions, people who owed him favours, active coreligionists in a few ministries. In public they supported his party, Acción Nacionalista, still financed by the United States; in private, it was a nostalgic fauna of old dictatorial glories. What this country needs is a strong hand. Such sombre characters now enabled him to pay for delicate little luxuries such as the woman who was visiting him. All without leaving the slightest compromising trace. “Fuck the newshawks! They’ll get nothing from me!” It’s not that easy for a seventy-year-old to convince a strong, young woman to do a naked “Ritual Fire Dance” and then contort her body into a fakiresque position on an armchair so as to make the most intimate part of her anatomy into a human plate in which to serve fideos that—seasoned only by the emanations and vapours typical of a landlocked country’s submarine zones—would transform in a matter of seconds into a glorious ají de fideos a la marinera. The ancient colononel walked to one side of the room and turned on a sound system. Manuel de Falla rose up in the air in a black frock coat, sucking on a mate de yerba, sheet music under his arm, and gaucho bombachas—the finishing touch. He looked at the woman and raised an amazed eyebrow, then at the ex-dictator sheathed in his star-studded martial whites. The composer frowned in deep repulsion. “What the hell? This is disgusting,” and immediately turned around and disappeared back into the music from which he’d come. The woman abandoned her body to the performance, went to sit at the table and watched herself from a distance executing a slow dance to the beat of the music before the colononel’s clammy eyes. She settled down on the armchair as the ex-dictator tucked his serviette under his collar. Afterwards, she took a shower, lit a cigarette and left.
“No, this is not a text about dictators. It doesn’t have to be a text about the dictator. This is the last territory I have left in which to reconstruct my affection. Outstanding lines and chapters have already been written in No One Writes to the Colonel, in I, the Supreme, in so many other books. I await the death of dictators with patience because I know on the other bank of the river there are hands and arms and eyes and voices waiting for them that have not forgotten how their final enjoyment of life, their breath was taken away. I also know that inside these lines I could make them die a slow, painful death. Tie them to a tree trunk teeming with carnivorous ants in the style of La danza inmóvil or The Vortex. Shut them up in the Ministry of the Interior cells, on Avenida Arce, make them fast on bread and water guarded by brutes and policemen reeking of booze who never change their socks. Turn them into hunger artists, starve them to emaciation on the bloody mattresses of the Panóptico de San Pedro. Force them to survive on minimum wage and let them sink every month into the dark mineshafts of anxiety. Exile them to Ulan Bator where they will be consumed by nostalgia. Subject them to the fugitive law. Stuff three copies of Awake! and Watchtower magazines in their pockets and drop them from a helicopter into a pack of hungry polar bears. Lose them in Rio’s favelas wearing new shoes and pockets full of dollars. Make them walk a few blocks in the Bronx, Washington Heights or Spanish Harlem shortly before midnight, gold rings shining on their fingers and a kilo of coke tucked under their shirt. All of this is possible. An act of revenge? No. Sometime the staging of exquisite acts of atonement and death are possible in the midst of day-to-day things: Years after shooting down president Isidoro Belzu and displaying his executed body on the Palacio Quemado balcony, ex-General Melgarejo is killed in the dark by two bullets to the back while pounding on a door that remains shut in a small Peruvian town. After ordering the slaughter of dozens of miners and the execution of Ernesto Guevara, ex-general Barrientos climbs into his helicopter boasting of his victory, unaware that the Tío’s fangs will open during his ascent and turn men and machines into a ball of fire, exacting the precise retribution his divinity deserves over the calm red tile roofs of the town of Arque. Following the successful coup d’état of 1980, after congratulating the soldiers at the El Alto Air Base—the launching point for airplanes loaded with bombs and bullets headed to mining centres—in the middle of the night ex-colononel Muñoz feels his heart stop as the Tío’s voice starts to choke him, calling him down to the bottom of the final mineshaft. In the rigour of his dictatorship, mighty ex-general Banzer is
a powerless witness to his son’s death, as tragic as that of many assassinated under his orders. In the parsimony of power, ex-general Luis Arce Gómez had sentenced that, ‘from now on all leftists should walk around with their will and testament under their arm,’ unaware that years later he, too, would fall into gradual decomposition and misery, locked up in a foreign prison, searching in vain for a leftist he could curse for the inexorable weight of oblivion on his ribcage. Persecuted and living on the run years after the overthrow of his government—a regime running high on cafeteria Nazism—ex-General Luis García Mesza is returned to his own country’s prisons, where he watches the days go by in his cell until, one night, he notices a nauseating smell hanging over him, the rotting odour that can only come from decaying flesh. He realizes his cellmate is no ordinary delinquent but a soldier in a ragged blue wool uniform, his face torn up and rotten, dried up shreds of blackened scalp hanging over a single eye socket that stares at him under a military salute, his fingers pointing at the spot where his temple should be but is instead an empty space, a hole in his shattered skull. ‘Buenas noches, mi general!’ The hollow sound of the subterranean salute causes blood to burst in the ex-general’s body: his veins revolt, systoles mix up with diastoles, his pulse begins to fire in all directions, his lung cavities fill with fluid, and his orbits try to hold back the bursting eyeballs as blood starts flowing from his tear ducts. Ex-General Luis García Mesza, crumpled on the floor in a highland prison, bile oozing from his mouth, begins to die a brutal natural death on this page. Boxeador props him up and together they stumble away, walking slowly through the walls and iron fences of the Chonchocoro prison, one hundred fifty kilometres from La Paz, until they fade into the infinite darkness.”
Only his shoes travelled across the night, rivers, seas, tragedies and deaths to look out onto the new landscape from the door of the plane. They imagined before them a vast desolate terrain at the other end of the world. He didn’t know then—nor does he know now—that with his first step off the airplane that arrived in Dorval, Alfredo ratified all his previous deaths, the voyage across ethereal Styx that lies between La Paz and Montreal. During the aircraft’s descent, as his feet felt the hydraulic whirr of the wheels preparing for landing, he saw through the porthole the contours of the land below, vast plains crisscrossed by wide fluvial branches, the wailing waters of all the displaced people in the world running down the Saint Lawrence, a dense carpet of naked tree branches, conifer forests and, every so often, sparse desolate houses anchored in the midst of the grey autumn. At most, there were bears, some Iroquois, and Constable Chrétien, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer who was killing time reading a short story called “The Queen’s Hat.” A stunning giant red pepper on his head, neatly pressed uniform and tall brown boots, holding stamps and forms in hand waiting for the aircraft to finish crossing the fantastic distance and land, exhausted, in that dusty place called Montreal. The eyelets of the travelling shoes blinked for a few moments, waiting to take in the landscape as soon as the door opened. Instead, they found the long boarding chute attached to the plane with Sheriff Chrétien’s inquisitive eyes at the other end. By then he’d finished reading Kinsella’s mimesis and, not finding it amusing at all, was imagining all the various ways in which he could tear the hair out of whoever had written such a detestable story.
“He would thus demonstrate that violence was the primary reason for Bolivia’s existence.” He’d been writing with that goal in mind at the rate of one word per day. He would write entire paragraphs, then erase them, like a Penelope waiting for his Ulisas to bring him the inspiration he needed to finish his crude scaffolding of words. But Ulisas was taking a while to arrive. (The name Ulisas sounds like a disease: “so-and-so got ulisas, they’re like buboes on your lymph nodes…” so let’s write down Elisa instead. By the way, it is very unlikely for a man to be named Penelope, so let’s call him Pepe. Voilà: Pepe is waiting for Elisa who is supposedly coming back from a ten-year trip. Happier than a sperm cell in a broken condom, Pepe finishes his chapbook, neglecting to find a good ending.)
Alfredo realized that what he was actually trying to do was conjure up the obstacles history had placed in his path. The same history that had dropped him in the middle of a labyrinth of the events, verbs and circumstances that prevented him from reconstructing himself, separating him further from Amelia in the other world and from Marcelle Meyer in this one. The only light he had left was Susana San Miguel’s. It was as if he’d been the one who’d lost part of his head, not Boxeador. Alfredo searched in vain for the pupil, the word, the image he was missing along with the rest of a memory that was playing hide-and-seek through these lines. Or was it the opposite, that he was now filled to the brim with other identities and inner symbols? Over the weeks it took him to reach this line, Alfredo had managed to give shape to the main features of a character, María, a woman who within a few paragraphs had felt used and uncomfortable in the role she was supposed to play. She shockingly decided to abandon this story and these pages, while he sweated India ink trying to give more prominence and presence to the female character. Perhaps sensing her imminent departure, Alfredo spent an entire night trying to explain and convince María that the obscene former army officer who wanted to eat ají de fideos between her legs was important to the story because he served as a historical anchor point and mummification of the power and absolute bankruptcy and corruption in Bolivian democracy. María listened with growing impatience until she finally stood up. She brought her fingertips to her thumb to make a small cone or pyramid—gesture with which an easterner says to another, “¡pero che… boludo!”—and spat out:
“Pinche Alfredo, how does history ever serve me? History is always what stays in the past, it’s just dust, it’s nothing. Here the only thing that matters is what keeps moving forward. And we’re the ones that keep moving. I want to keep moving forward, Alfredo, I don’t want to die of nostalgia.” María had started raising her voice, almost at the edge of tears. “I can’t look back! I can’t accept the scene with the fideos with that rotten old man, even if he’s an ex-dictator, no matter how important and metaphorical he is for you! What do you take me for, Alfredo? Just a plate you use and throw away? Is that what women are in Bolivian texts? Los textos bolivianos. And I say bolivianos and not bolivianas, because women have always been invisible to official history. Can’t you see that the way you write makes you as machote as the ex-dictator? Don’t you see? You’re going to end up like the boy in that story whose head is cut off in the middle of the war between Moors and Christians, and when they finally manage to stick it back on, they realize they’ve put it on backwards. You’re just like those coffee-shop socialists. As soon as they get home, they starting bossing their women around and send them to the kitchen with a slap in the face while the pricks just think and discuss about equality and justice. They can’t see beyond the tip of their noses. Why do all the best intentions in this world end up going to shit?”
Alfredo said nothing while she spoke. She sat back down and smoothed her skirt down over her knees. What did she mean, he was being machete? And that thing about the boy with his head cut off? The last thing he felt like doing right then was to start doing bibliographical research and have to use footnotes on every page. A beheaded boy whose head is stuck to his trunk in a version of the Fierabras mess. Now they were both sitting on the edge of the bed in Alfredo’s tiny room, saying nothing. It was snowing. He thought if he’d had a couple of candles to brighten the space as darkness fell, he could have perhaps recovered the magic he’d felt when he’d first imagined her. I start over. I find a name for you: María. And then I invent an encounter, always the first, always the same one, where my eyes talk to your fingers and your voice touches me and your laughter undresses me. He put his hand on her shoulder. She accepted it, a gesture of both acceptance and faith that things could be different even though they were both condemned to sail in the same ship. He brought her closer and embraced her, as resigned and hop
eful as she was, searching for a solution inside his sigh. We turn serious, take some distance, know ourselves to be secret accomplices in what you call an exercise in desire and I name the desire of invention. How many times had he imagined her before using adjectives to delineate each one of her features, describe the sensuality of forms capable of all the verbs? María, María, our voices touch, caress, recognize each other across the night and the distance, play and chase and own each other and make promises. My voice sleeps with you, your hair shows me the way into the night that sleeps upon your breasts, I drink the primeval waters of yourpubwhydothingsneedtoendthiswaywhileitrytoseduceyouusingwordsborrowedfromoldtextslikethatpassageinLopedeVegathatreads “Wishing to be inside you, my lady, to learn whether I am loved…” The sudden phrase shocked and upset María. She recognized the words Alfredo was repeating like a parrot came from an old letter, and she jumped to her feet and told him to go to hell with no qualms or hesitation, told him to stick his letter wherever he wished because there was nothing in the world that could make her change her mind. She was officially abandoning this paltry novel. Alfredo begged, even offered to use her name as the title of his humble work, even if it meant plagiarizing a Colombian author in the process and inflicting deathly jealousy on the other María—María of the long dresses and even longer sighs. She’d stopped screaming despite his protests and complaints, but she kept shaking him and pelting his ears with even more fragrant, indigestible adjectives about the value of history and about how men were only good for looking back on and looking at from behind. Not necessarily good Christian words, but they worked. Alfredo stopped insisting, then suddenly leaned over and bit her on the thigh. Upon feeling Alfredo’s moist teeth, her rage began to fade away. She started laughing under her breath while holding his author’s head against her and moving it up closer, keeping it in contact with her skin, still laughing under her breath. Alfredo looked up for a moment and saw the flame of two candles appear out of nowhere. María’s shoulders revealed themselves in the soft glow as she slowly unbuttoned her blouse, and Alfredo’s lips set off in a long caravan of kisses through her body’s sweet endless paths. Alfredo and María finally came out three days later—two sore tired bats emerging into the morning daylight. They had breakfast together at Café Le Damier at Bélanger and Saint-Denis and kissed each other goodbye on both cheeks, their faces saturated with the smell of coffee and fried eggs. A few hours later, she took her treasure chests full of words and set off with a theatre company that had offered her a more significant and dignified role than to serve as sexual object for a decrepit army scoundrel, all because of a tightly wound Scribe. A week later, she began rehearsals for a role in Amerika, a play based on the work of a Czech writer who falls in love with his translator, Milena Jezenska. Outside, the snow turned Montreal into a vast white page in which all stories were possible.
Red, Yellow and Green Page 9
