It terrifies me to remember it, which is why I’m scared of sleeping. I’ve often dreamed about the rape and each time it’s been more blurred. Sometimes, while I was being raped, I would see Mother sitting beside the bed, knitting; other times she was listening to the radio, humming along to the music, while putting something on the stove to boil. And the worst of it was that the guy didn’t rape me once but six times, and I couldn’t say anything because he threatened to kill me and kill her. I didn’t open my mouth, but I’m sure that at least one of those times, Mother realized and did nothing. Instead of protecting her daughter, she kept quiet and was an accomplice, can you imagine what I feel, Doctor? Neither God nor my mother protected me, so I said to myself, I must be a monster, there must be something horrible inside me and that’s why I’m being punished. The two people I loved most in the world, my mother and God, did nothing to protect me, left me alone while I was begging for help.
I’d been ripped apart for life, with my body dirty and broken. So when I saw Mother in the hospital I felt a strong desire to tell her, this is your punishment, it happened to you because you were to blame, because you let something so bad happen to your daughter. I was only a girl, nobody respected me or cared for me.
I swear to you I’m going to kill that man one day, Doctor, not because Mother asked me, but because it’s the only thing that can cleanse me a little. Of course, that afternoon in the hospital I kept silent and told Mother she shouldn’t try to speak anymore, because her lips and part of her tongue were burned, and she could barely move it inside her mouth, which was full of ulcers. The acid had penetrated her cheeks and dissolved the bone and the mucous membranes. She was breathing through a tube, the poor woman, how she was suffering! But I couldn’t stand any more sorrow, so I said, or rather, I thought, I hope she dies soon, I hope she gets a blood clot to the heart and goes from this world where she did so little, and will go without leaving anything good behind her, I hope she dies and stops suffering because it’s a completely futile and pointless kind of suffering, and I swear, Doctor, that I even felt like tearing out the breathing tube, but I didn’t do it, and I thought that now that she was dying I ought to forgive her, but I thought, I can’t, I’m not going to forgive her for being an accomplice, because when I was in hell she didn’t once turn to look at me . . .
I went down to the waiting room and Gloria Isabel stood up to greet me. How is she? Is it serious? I nodded and started crying on her shoulder.
“My poor girl,” she said, pressing me to her chest, and I wept so many tears, I hadn’t even known I had them inside me, old tears that had to come out. That had probably been there since that lost and stolen childhood.
Then three Secret Service officers came and asked me questions. That’s how I found out that the friend who’d been hiding her, a woman named Claudia Ramos, had had an arm, two ribs, and at least half her teeth broken. They didn’t rape the poor woman, but one of the guys did stick a finger in while the others were burning Mother, and they threatened to kill her if she said anything.
I was just signing a statement when the head doctor from Intensive Care came out, looking very nervous, and said, are you Manuela Beltrán? Yes, I replied, holding onto Gloria Isabel’s hand and in the presence of the lawyer, Castillejo, who had just arrived.
“Your mother has just died,” he said, “her breathing stopped and we couldn’t do anything. Please accept my condolences.”
At last, I thought, that cruel God had listened to me.
Gloria Isabel and the lawyer hugged me, condolences, Manuelita, but I didn’t feel any sadness, but something new. I felt free. Her wounds weren’t going to hurt anybody anymore and now only mine remained, those she gave me and those she allowed me to be given. Now everything was different, there was just me and my cruel, stubborn, sometimes dictatorial memory, and I told myself, Freddy is the only remaining witness to all that pain, but not for long, because one day I’m going to track him down and kill him, and I’ll do it in the cruelest way I can think of, he deserves to go to hell howling with pain, shitting himself with fear. That’s how I want him and that’s how I’ll have him one day, I swear it by that god who at last is granting my wishes, a cynical, twisted god, cold-blooded and vengeful, the kind of god I need, the kind I believe in.
I think it was that same savage god who, after Mother’s funeral, put a pencil and a notebook in my hand and whispered in my ear: “Invent another world for yourself, because this one isn’t any good.” And I understood him, and that same night, staying in Gloria Isabel’s house, I wrote the first poem in the book Asuntos pendientes. Although it would be more accurate to say: I vomited or spat and almost shat out my first poem, because I wrote it with hate. After that episode I went back to my new life feeling lighter. As if some conflagration of the air had given me the gift of invisibility. Yes, that’s how I felt and that’s what I wanted to be: the invisible woman.
In Bogotá I got into a really healthy, really cool routine. I would go to classes at the university and when they were over I would stay in the library, reading, until closing time. Then I would go back to my little room. I was allowed to cook and the landlady, Doña Tránsito, was a fantastic old woman. She would give me salt, a spoonful of oil, sometimes even an egg. I liked her. At night I felt cold and I would put on two pairs of stockings and two T-shirts and listen to the rain. The amount of rain in that dark city! I was scared to go out on the street at night. The combination of darkness, cold, and rain was something I was unfamiliar with and it made me feel as if I was in danger. As if there was something unhealthy in the air. That’s why I always stayed in my room, which I gradually made my own. It had a carpet, heavy curtains, and two old beds that, when I first saw them, made me wonder how many people had slept in them. They creaked. People in a cold climate are quiet, there’s no noise. They don’t put on music and they close their doors. They don’t use the street either, or rather, they use it only to go from one side to the other, never to stay on it or listen to music or pay each other visits. At least that’s what it was like in that neighborhood. There was a store nearby and sometimes I’d venture there at night to buy something, almost always a bar of chocolate, because sweet things warm you up. Those deserted streets scared me. By ten at night, there wasn’t a soul about and no sound came from the houses, as if everyone was dead. People in Bogotá are strange, but also friendly in their way. I read and read. The first poem I wrote in Bogotá is about a city inhabited by ghosts where it rains all the time and the sun is like a lightbulb, giving out light but no heat.
One day, I took a bus to the elegant neighborhoods in the north of the city, and it struck me as incredible that people lived like that in a country like ours, where most people were so poor and suffered so much violence. The bright shopping malls, the people in their sweaters and coats. They all carried umbrellas, and it occurred to me that I should buy myself one. I missed the hustle and bustle of Cali, the climate, the people in shorts and sandals. You don’t see anything like that in Bogotá. At least not in the Bogotá I lived in, because I later discovered that Bogotá was like a harlequin’s costume, a patchwork quilt of the country, and in the south of the city, that sinister south where the most tragic things happened and the poor people lived, there were neighborhoods full of blacks from Chocó and displaced people from Los Llanos, and there you’d find noise and music, but if you went there bad things could happen to you.
Señora Tránsito always said to me, you see, my girl, you’re not from here and I’m going to tell you something, from the Javeriana southward you can only go by day, very early, because if you get caught there after dark, they’ll mug you, they’ll steal your cell phone, they’ll kidnap you and put you in a brothel or sell your organs, so don’t even think about it, and I was terrified and took notice of what she said, going just from the university to the library and then back home. Another day she told me that if I went out at night even the police would rob me, they raped women in their patr
ol cars and took their corneas out to sell to foreigners. Something must have happened to the old woman, because although the city was dangerous, it wasn’t as dangerous as all that.
In the university I was getting to know people. They were such children! In order not to waste money in the cafeteria I would take a sandwich and a thermos of juice, and go sit on the lawn way above the university, because I didn’t want anybody to see me. The Javeriana is an expensive university and almost all the students are rich. There were some very beautiful girls who would hang about the walkways, getting the boys hot under the collar, know what I mean? I started to hear gossip about some of these princesses, especially those doing Media Studies. There was a girl from the Caribbean coast they called Puntilla, who always went around in tight pants or very short miniskirts. All they thought about was fucking her. She didn’t seem such a bimbo to me. Showing your body is natural in a hot country, and I thought: these Bogotá guys see a bare navel and immediately think a girl’s a whore.
Time passed and at the end of the semester the students were invited to submit poems for the department magazine. I sent three of the nine I had written in Bogotá, and much to my surprise they were all chosen. One of the girls in my class who kept reading her things to her classmates and telling the teachers that she was a poet didn’t have a single one of her poems chosen and she almost had a nervous breakdown. Her name was Mónica. Her poems were sentimental, magnifying things that when it came down to it were just trifles. That’s the problem with people who haven’t suffered, Doctor, who only know life from the sidelines. What to her seemed a drama of universal proportions was nothing more than a rich girl’s tantrum: my boyfriend has left me, I want to sleep with a boy but he doesn’t love me, I’ve fallen in love with my friend’s boyfriend. Oh, what terrible tragedies! That’s what the poems of most of my classmates were like. The most tragic thing that had happened to them in their poor young lives was losing their cell phones or finding out their boyfriends were fucking other girls. If those were the problems of the world there would be no poetry, and anyway, who said that poetry should be a confessional for their poor childish dramas?
I didn’t tell anyone that my poems had been accepted, and when the magazine came out they caused something of a stir. One of the sentimental female poets came and congratulated me; she said the poems were sad and beautiful. I thanked her. Another asked me if they were really mine. So nice of her. The head of the department, a very nice guy from the Caribbean coast named Cristo Rafael Figueroa, congratulated me in front of everyone and that made me very happy. A cool guy, that Cristo.
It was the first happy day of my life.
Soon afterwards I received a surprising request. The magazine of the University of Antioquia asked me for permission to publish my poems and wanted to know if I had more. I sent another three and they were published in the next issue, and as a result of that I started to receive mail from readers. What a surprise! I never thought that my poems could appeal to people who didn’t know me and hadn’t experienced similar things; just the fact that they understood them surprised me. How strange, I told myself.
Poetry was something I built up little by little, alone. If it wasn’t a bit corny I’d even say that I suffered it, and that’s why I always wrote in silence, without making it a celebration of myself or my life. But now they had seen me. The bad thing about publishing is that you’re out there in the light of day, once and for all, and there’s no turning back.
All this gave me a certain fame and very soon my classmates invited me to a reading at the house of one of them, a young man named Saúl Pérez who always dressed in black and in class had a preference for horror fiction.
He lived in Santa Ana Alta, a very ritzy neighborhood, almost impossible to get to by bus. When I finally rang the doorbell, they greeted me warmly, although they pointed out that I was late and they could have come and picked me up. They were in a lounge that looked out on the garden. On the table were beers, a bottle of whiskey and one of Néctar aguardiente. Being the host, Saúl was the first to read. His story wasn’t badly written, in my opinion, but was completely crazy: after an earthquake, Bogotá fell through a fault into underground caves beneath the mountains and the only humans who were able to survive were some strange inhabitants of the sewers who had to fight giant rats that had grown fat from eating dead bodies.
When Saúl finished there was loud applause and his girlfriend, who also dressed in black, leapt on him and kissed him on the mouth, in front of everyone, the two of them moving about as if they were naked and in bed. The next person to read was Daniela, the oldest of the group. This time it was an erotic poem of which I only remember one line: “Uncover the fruit tree of my breasts.” There was more applause and toasts. Then Verónica read. She was the romantic of the group. Hers was a long poem about the death of her grandmother, whom she had loved a lot, and of course when she read the last two verses she was in tears and her voice cracked. She read nine more poems. The last one was about the death of a strange character who climbed walls and walked on the roofs in the early hours of the morning. It took me a while to realize she was talking about her cat. Then Saúl said, Manuela, will you read? I stepped forward and began with my first poem, then the second. I read five of them, and when I’d finished Saúl said, please repeat the one about the night in the orphanage. I read it again and he said, solemnly, with a glass of whiskey in his hand:
“That’s the best poem we’ve heard tonight.”
His girlfriend looked nervous, which I managed to catch, even though it was a fraction of a second. Then he smiled and gave me a big hug and congratulated me. I thought that was strange. I felt obliged to say something about their work, but nothing came to mind, so I thanked them. Verónica passed me a glass of aguardiente, but just smelling it made me nauseous. No, thanks, I said. Saúl took out a small bag of coke and laid out a few lines on a glass tray. When they passed it to me I again said, no, because I had experienced all that at the age of fourteen. They laughed and Cayetano, another of our classmates, said that maybe I was a poet nun, like Sister Juana or Saint Teresa, so they started calling me Sister Manuela. Another boy, Lucas I think it was, said that maybe I was like the nun of Monza, because of an Italian movie that has a famous sex scene, specifically a blow job. They all laughed, then drank lots of booze and sniffed all the coke their smooth, straight nostrils could take. That was my second nickname after Hypocrite. The theme was the same.
But even though they were rich kids, they treated me very well. They could have asked me tiresome questions about who I was and where I came from, uncomfortable things, but they didn’t do that. They limited themselves to recognizing me for my poetry, which I thought was nice. I wasn’t like them, but they admired me, especially Saúl. They did say I was the most unusual person from Cali they had met because I didn’t dance, and I just laughed and said, yes, I do dance but only when I’m alone.
One day I got an email from a very well-known woman poet in Bogotá called Araceli Cielo, which is a pen name. She said she had read my poems and wanted to meet me. But it gave me a fright and I didn’t reply, because I said to myself, where did she get my e-mail address? who gave it to her? It might be a practical joke by my classmates on their mysterious Nun of Monza, so I didn’t reply. I deleted the e-mail. A week later I received another one in which she asked if I had received the first one, but I deleted that, too, without replying.
Imagine my surprise one afternoon when Cristo himself, the cool dean of the faculty, came looking for me in class and handed me a package. What was it?
“Araceli Cielo, the poet, came to my office and left you this,” Cristo said. “She asked me to make sure I got it to you.”
Then he whispered in my ear, you know what this means for you? Congratulations!
Two of my classmates realized what was going on and their eyes opened like hard-boiled eggs. But I grabbed the package, put it in my satchel, and ran to Seventh to catch a bus
home. I held my breath as I opened it and found her two latest books, dedicated to me, and a long letter. “To Manuela, a talented young poet, with all my admiration . . . ” She had read my poems and wanted to know more about me. She gave me her cell phone number and asked me to call her. I hesitated, I felt uncomfortable with such a well-known and elegant lady from Bogotá. I kept the number on my telephone and several times I had it on the screen, ready to call it, but at the last moment changed my mind. I couldn’t summon up the strength.
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