Bolivia was sleeping when Alfredo arrived in his Rue Cartier apartment, north of Boulevard Jean-Talon. He took off his clothes in the dark and slid next to her warm naked body under the covers. After a brief, close skirmish during which he could barely contain the darts shot by Priapus—whose penetrating intentions were awakened by Bolivia’s naked body—Alfredo finally fell asleep. He was dreaming. The dream grew and merged with the walls around him, which vanished and engulfed him in a world impossible to evade or ignore. When he opened his eyes, a soft drizzle of snails and spiders was falling from the spacious night above; every so often he’d have to shake out the covers, and the molluscs and arachnids would go flying into the air, then fall with a soft crackle on the floor faraway from the bed. After some time, the ejected creatures would get back on their feet, extend their antennae, uncurl their legs or ooze their slow slime and make their way back up the dark, invisible walls. Sometimes a sharper, heavier thud would reveal the presence of a spider as big as a hand that, defeated by gravity, landed on the three of us as we tried to sleep while listening to the night and its noises.
How long had we been there, in that place whose shape and boundaries we ignored, ruled by the deepest darkness? Sometimes we felt birdwings whooshing in that imaginary black sky. We could see our eyes and teeth glowing pale and moist in the dark. We were waiting. For what? A ship? For the light to come? For someone to arrive? Sometimes we’d kiss, unconcerned by the spiders or by what her mother may think of me—if she could see us. Bolivia would wrap herself around me, moaning, panting, until we fell asleep, almost sweetly, surrounded by the incessant insects. In silence, our hands had learned to recognize each other in the dark.
Sometimes you could hear a babbling, like a stream running down to the bottom of the space we were in, but none of us dared to dive into that deeper darkness. Once, we tried to calculate distances around us by throwing rocks to try to orient ourselves. We would toss a rock and wait to hear them land. But nothing came back. Only after a while, consumed by frustration and despondency, we would hear the faint echo of an object falling into the dark depths. Gradually we learned to talk less, to say nothing for hours and hours, for days on end. There was only a bed, an improvised mattress placed in what we thought was the middle of dark space. We could feel drafts of air coming from seemingly faraway, bringing smells that made us rejoice: wood and fish, forests and rain and freshly tilled earth.
We were waiting: she, her mother and I, who slept between the two women when I was tired. At the beginning, the mother wouldn’t allow her daughter to sleep next to me. But the cold and loneliness caused them to make gradual, imperceptible movements to be closer to my body. There were days—days?—when we were able to see the snails on the uneven stone walls. Their movement was a strange form of writing in the dark, like slow commas in the space of infinite waiting. They were black like tar, darker than night, and their imperceptible movement drew whimsical, undecipherable phrases. Sometimes spiders would run and chase each other around, stumbling over the snails, which stopped on their tracks and hid under their spiral home or simply dropped to the floor.
We measured the passing nights by the fatigue in our bodies. In my sleep, as I often did, I started searching for the woman’s warmth. She would tenderly welcome my hand between her legs (or at least that was the memory the dream had kept of its own existence). This time I met something unexpected—perhaps I hadn’t paid enough attention, or something had altered the usual order of things. My hand met a hard marine shell crowning a pubis—that was not the daughter—as if a bird had made its nest in a glade. As soon as my touch recognized the rugged seashell surface, a fierce crustacean came out of the shell armed with powerful pincers that locked around my fingers until they bled. Through the silence buzzing in my ears, I could hear the hot liquid pouring out of my wounded fingers, pain numbing my joints. I could see her mother’s pupils shining in the dark, staring with malicious satisfaction. She put the aggressive crustacean back in its place, where it rested standing guard over the bellicose pubis. She went back to sleep.
Later we were awakened by the hum of a distant horn, a ship we imagined filled with people, light and music.
During our long days of waiting, we would recite old stories and plots, or hum soft songs, almost to ourselves, to keep our minds busy and preserve any sanity we had left, until we started to forget all the stories and songs we knew. Our feet occasionally crunched on a snail as lost as we were in the unpredictable, constantly changing terrain.
We were sleeping again. I could hear the two women breathing on either side of me, waiting for something, or someone, or some event that even I couldn’t foresee. After the last time I was savagely bitten, I was paying more attention to what my hands did in sleep. I was sleeping when a hand surprised me, searching for me. It grabbed my hand and placed it slowly on a seashell. I tried to wake up and make my hand flee like a bird from the pain I’d memorized would soon follow such an encounter. But none of that happened. The fingers guided mine lower, into the depths of a moist pubis that throbbed to the touch. My fingertips were soft in their touch, feeling lips that hid another smaller night, allowing themselves to be seduced. Gradually, first my fingers, then my hand, were pulled into a warm, silky ocean. I tried to adjust my position and, without being able to help it, my arm followed my hand, then my head, my shoulders, my torso, until my entire body was submerged.
Exploring that body from inside, I can still hear the distant snapping and crackling the snails make in their endless fall from the ceiling. In here, though, there is only water. There is no wood anywhere. Sometimes you can see rivers of small, brilliant red fish swimming by.
When he woke up he felt as if he’d just run his first marathon, exhausted and sweating from an all-night struggle in which he had to choose between history and oblivion. He looked for Bolivia but she was no longer next to him. She’d left a note: “Mon Alfredo, Merci pour ton accueil et si tant d’affection envers moi. Je suis obligée à te quitter pour quelques jours, peut-être plus. Je ne sais pas. Je t’aime, mon gauchiste-caviar. Bien à toi: Bolivia.”3
It hit him as if he’d been beaten by a soldier, a cop, an Opus Dei priest and a Jehovah’s Witness all at once. No! Not again! Elusive Bolivia had left once more. Maybe it was fear, that nasty, unforgivable fear that had driven her away again. What good does love do in this life anymore? A few sparrows were practising their little hops on the balcony. He stayed there for a moment, stunned. He got up and showered, got dressed. There was a desert of grief in his abdomen, in his throat. Abandoned again, sad, upset, wounded, empty, tearful. He reread the note, tried to smile and cheer up enough to face the day, but all he found was a lump in his throat. He tried to convince himself that she would have never stayed with him anyway, that the fire of her cause and the terrible oppression her people endured would eventually prevent her from being with a man—in this case him. He said to himself over and over that her leaving was inevitable, their roads went in opposite ways, she believed in the construction of a patria while he was trying to free himself from the weight of his own tragic one. He grabbed a pen and meant to write something like: “Mon aimée Bolivia, J’ai peur de te revoir parce que tu me quitteras à nouveau (au fond personne est à nous), et je le souhaite si tant. Dans un tiroir de mon bureau je garde une petite histoire écrite. Je ne sais pas si elle est vraie ou non. Je veux te la montrer. C’est ma façon de vaincre la distance et surmonter les pièges de la nostalgie. C’est une histoire pour nous seuls car maintenant je le sais : ma patrie, ma terre, mes mots, c’est toi, c’est ta voix, tes bras, tes paroles. Alfredo,”4 but he didn’t write anything down because his pen didn’t work, and he couldn’t think of much to say—all he wanted to do was sit down in the corner and cry until he went blind. He walked out of his apartment, went downstairs and out to the street. The cold air dispersed the faint scent of gunpowder that had invaded his apartment—and his nostrils—since Bolivia had opened her suitcase and settled in. On
his way to the metro, Alfredo began to realize he couldn’t live without her. What he needed right then was a quick suicide, to inadvertently be run over by a car, get hit by lightning, be devoured by little birds. After all, he hadn’t forgotten Amelia’s promise that she’d guide his steps after his death. He thought hard about Amelia, but she didn’t appear anywhere. The best thing would be to stop writing for a while, let things calm down somewhat and start writing letters instead of stories—although this whole mess had started precisely when he’d decided to write a letter to Susana, the woman he’d met at the university’s round plaza in La Paz, whose image would never abandon him. He kept walking towards Jean-Talon metro, became one more of the many passengers in a lifelong journey from the Ogowe Basin to the neighbours in Cochabamba, Pompeii and Marrakesh who travel through the underground bowels of this entire city riding its blue metal train. Doors open. Eyes, coats, daytime and evening hairstyles, mouths, trousers, Turkish tongues, shared air, sweat, and lotions. Shoes, sandals, winter boots. Someone is singing with an awful Neruda complex. You watch the travellers’ eyes cross the air. They sense the presence of your pirate eye and take flight, rise above people’s faces, lose themselves in the depths of ads for creams, cigarettes, baseball games, sanitary cloths and wines. Your voice attracts the attention of other metro riders, if not because of its tone, at least because of your tongue: Bolivia! Bolivia! Her absence is now a fierce ringing in your ears, a clamp around your throat, silvery fish fleeing from your tearful eyes in her search. Even if they don’t understand you’re calling out someone’s name, they can at least tell you’re looking for someone from one car to the next. You approach faces, features, familiar skin tones. Your nose searches for her scent. But your one good eye doesn’t lie. It wants to be helpful and creates illusions that do nothing more than feed your despair. Bolivia is not in the metro. Bolivia is no longer in Montreal. You walk through doors from one car to the next through de Castelneau, du Parc, Outremont. You are Kurdish, Cochabambino, Montréalais. You are African, Arab, Vietnamese. You are everything and nothing. You are a tongue, a voice, a question that will never find an answer. “Chunquituy palomitay... kolila!” Montréal est la première ville nord-américaine avec la plus grande population trilingue. The olive-skinned ears of Tamils—escaped from Jaffna’s fire and ambush—seek familiar phonemes. A Hindu thinks he hears verses in ancient Sanskrit as he drifts in a drowsy dream towards the west end of the city after washing dishes, pots, and floors at the Bombay Palace—the palace of succulent tandoori chicken and curry sauce—with soap and scrubber in his raw hands from one in the afternoon until five in the morning at a Sainte-Catherine Street restaurant. Dictionaries and history books no longer help. History doesn’t exist beyond these pages. This is the history you breathe and sweat and weep biting your tongue in your hopeless search for Bolivia, crying out her name in vain, a name that means nothing to the people on the metro. Forgetting is a useless resource. The metro keeps moving. It pulls out of Université de Montréal station. You walk through another door, searching for a potential reader, someone whose firm fingers will know how to tie your personal history to the collective history, condemn the pragmatism of political convenience. You hate volibia. But volibia is in your tongue, your skin, your bones, your way of being and suffering and loving. You love Bolivia but she’s no longer with you. You only have memories of being together on certain corners, walking certain streets with her, words in other tongues, memories of kissing, so many nights together. That Bolivia is no longer with you. The passengers feign indifference, pupils conceal their own curiosity, perhaps restrained reproach, disdain. Who are you? Something forgotten? No, I am laughter, a dog writing to the moon on a corner on Avenue Duluth. But even mongrels have a memory, don’t they? No, señora, yo soy boliviano. Boliviano...boliviano, volibiano…ah! you’re just another one of her lovers! Does it even matter if there are many of us who love you? An old song, a guitar tuning its strings in his imagination. Exhausted, he got off at Côte-des-Neiges station. No one had detained him. No one had asked for explanations or accused him of remaining silent in the past twenty, thirty years, of not telling anyone that the magazine in Boxeador’s rifle had been full, not one cartridge was missing when you picked up his flaccid body, his soft brains under the stars in El Alto. You didn’t say anything about that Mamani, either, or how they dislocated every single one of his bones. Or anything about Julián Calahumana or about Genoveva Ríos. They’re not characters from our official history or from civics class. Over there, an impoverished man, the same one that appeared in the first pages of this book, recycles himself again as a recycler at the end of a story that has no head or tail. Like a country. Now the pauper is smoking part of a cigarette, a butt he found on the ground. Alfredo thought at least someone out there would understand the search behind all his words if not their purpose, which he had been unable to access despite the blood that ran through the underground tunnels under his skin. He imagined running into Bolivia, his Bolivia. If only to hear her voice again, her Marseille accent. To be Bolivian. To have a heart that beats to the rhythm of a national anthem set in a never-ending cumbia beat. To hell with volibia, the other one, over there in the south, governed by pirates armed with computers, learned thieves trained in foreign universities, inflated egos. Alfredo walked out of the metro and sat on a stone bench; memories of a movie he’d once imagined came rushing back. Right away his good eye threw its hands up in the air and went to sit on the substitutes’ bench while the other eye socket, the empty one, turned on its invisible projectors. Sitting alone on the metro platform, Alfredo saw in his blind eye a woman walking out of a small apartment near the Jean-Talon metro. She boards the train and gets off at Sherbrooke station. She walks towards a café near the Carré St-Louis, the Café des Virtuels. She merges with pedestrians along Rue Saint-Denis—their way of walking, speaking and dressing hints at summer’s imminent arrival. Colours are bright: It’s around eleven on a sunny May morning. She walks across the Carré Saint-Louis to boulevard Saint-Laurent. Near the Musée Juste pour rire, the camera rises above the pedestrians in a wide-angle shot à la Nuit américaine, then stops facing the bar in a café packed with Internet surfers from around the world who drink coffee while typing hurried letters demanding explanations from the infinite memory. The woman notices she is being followed by the hero of the movie, a man who looks like he’s from Cochabamba and stands there, stuck between hesitating and going for it, then finally sits next to her and asks the waitress for the same thing she’s having, a Colombian coffee—the kind that reaches Canada despite the deaths and gunfire. Moments later our hero succeeds in promising the woman a century of love in a nearby room. She looks at the only spectator in the theatre as if asking him for advice. The camera lifts us in the air for an instant and then draws in for a close-up: a key to a lost paradise being handed over. The room is ready for the original sin. Bolivia’s face looks at him from the screen and whispers only one name: “Alfgedó….” Frame by frame, the denouement fades out. Will they live thirty-three years of love? On the screen, as it slowly fades to black: “Prochainement dans cette salle de cinéma.” His right eye goes dark. He can hear the metro roar as it approaches in the tunnel from the Siglo XX mineshaft. He opens his good eye, notices he’s still in the Côte-des-Neiges metro, sitting on a polished black stone bench. Sitting next to him, a woman tilts her head sideways, struggling to read the title of the little book Alfredo Cutipa is holding: Red, Yellow, Green written by a certain Alejandro Saravia. When Alfredo catches her staring at him, she doesn’t look away. Instead, she meets his eyes and asks him point-blank: “Est-ce que vous avez fini votre livre?”5
the end
* * *
1 “Dark days in the mineshaft, tragic nights of despair and hopelessness in my soul…”
2 “But I must suffer so much ingratitude, my great tragedy will end far from here…”
3 “My Alfredo, Thank you for taking me in and showing me so much affection. I
have to leave you for a few days, perhaps longer. I don’t know. I love you, my poutine leftist. All the best, Bolivia.”
4 “My beloved Bolivia, I’m afraid of seeing you again because you’ll leave again (in the end no one belongs to us), and I want so much to see you. In a drawer of my desk I keep a little story I wrote. I don’t know whether or not it’s true. I want to show it to you. It’s my way of overcoming distance and getting the better of the nostalgia trap. It’s a story just for us because I know now that my patria, my earth, the words I write, are you, your voice, your arms, the words you speak. Alfredo.”
5 “Have you finished your book?”
BIBA VOLIBIA!
(Twelve pseudo-poetic attempts)
POEMS BY ALFREDO CUTIPA
Mr. Ricardo Jaimes Freyre, please come to the phone. You have a long-distance call:
Ricardo, you brought me axes and horses
Red, Yellow and Green Page 16
