Return to the Dark Valley

by Santiago Gamboa

  I saw giant waves, unleashed by underwater volcanoes, engulfing hundreds of thousands of people.

  I saw nuclear explosions and the air burning from the combustion of radioactive neutrons, and scientists immolating themselves to save others from a disaster that might have been a thousand times worse.

  I saw a young pilot burned alive in a cage and various others having their throats cut in macabre ceremonies on the seashore or in the desert.

  I saw mutilated and decapitated bodies, corpses of men and women hanging from bridges, abandoned cars filled with heads and mutilated remains.

  I saw thousands of hands cut off with machetes and a field of earth reddened by blood. Beside it passed an army of one-armed men weeping and asking strange things of their god.

  I saw women with faces disfigured by acid that eats away at the skin and the mucous membranes. It was a chorus of live skulls howling with pain.

  All that I saw on television, and suddenly I thought, have I forgotten to take my pill? No, what was happening in the world was much worse than my grimmest hallucinations, so I started to understand what it was all about. My sickness forced me to be clearheaded.

  It was then that I started to sketch, for the first time, my idea of a Universal Republic.

  Latin America wasn’t a nightmare, it was hope. It wasn’t the obsolete past, it was the future. Now I had to use my strength and my ideas and even my sickness to stop it falling into the same hands that made Europe a graveyard of memory, a necropolis populated by ghosts.

  Still in Germany I continued my journey through the parties of virtue and the nation, and I saw that they were opposed to those others that protected the water and the air and the rivers. What do you think of that? How can you claim to save a race of people if you pollute its air and poison its water? That was my first surprise. In Europe, the green parties are on the Left, isn’t that a stupid contradiction? They want clean fields, fertile land, pure air, and for what? to populate it with mutants, humanoids without culture, ghosts without identity.

  Nature and culture can’t be in contradiction, man, how can you say that? It’s fine that at first we were all immigrants, because thirty thousand years ago man came out of Africa, but a little bit of time has passed since then, don’t you think? Every human group has the bones of its dead buried in some specific place in the world, which means that you’re from there and not from farther away, and that, it seems to me, was decided a long time ago, so why change it?

  13

  I opened my eyes in a blurry, unrecognizable world. Everything was very white, as if flooded with painful light. In that strange atmosphere, sounds seemed to move quickly and to be sharper. Where was I? I felt discomfort in several places, especially in the face. My skin stretched and swollen. A tube, stuck to my neck and my cheek with adhesive tape, went inside my mouth and burned my throat. Being conscious, I felt heartburn and the effort I used to contain it caused me more pain in the stomach. I noticed a sharp catheter pinned to my right wrist, joined to another tube that ran up my forearm, also attached with tape. But it was in my head that things were really bad, as if I had an ingot of ice in the middle of my brain. My face was covered in bandages. The pain traveled in rapid impulses between the cells until it became unbearable.

  At last reality came into focus. I realized I was in a hospital. The nurses and the medical staff passed me by, ignoring me. There were police officers, and a lot of noise: telephones ringing, voices, conversations, alarms, footsteps on marble. I was starting to recognize all that when someone noticed that I had opened one eye (the other was covered with a bandage) and said, hey, come here, Rocky’s waking up!

  Three officers came in—they were wearing uniforms similar to nurses—and started asking me routine questions. What’s your name, how do you feel, do you know why you’re here?

  “I was given a beating, and this is a hospital, isn’t it?”

  “That’s one way of putting it,” a black officer said with a smile, “don’t you remember anything else?”

  That this officer was black and spoke Spanish with a strong accent from Spain were two things that my battered brain tried to reconcile.

  “A guy was strangling me and to defend myself I hit him with something,” I said. “My head is going to explode.”

  The officer said:

  “Calm down, try to relax, breathe deeply. I don’t know if I should tell you this, but the person you fought with is in a coma right now, with acute cerebral contusion and an embolism, caused by a heavy blow. This is a high-security hospital, part of the Madrid prison system. Of course, you have a right to a lawyer.”

  My head seemed like a huge throbbing heart. I tried to figure out what was going on.

  “Am I a prisoner? Is he in a coma? I went to the defense of a woman he was arguing with and the guy started hitting me. There are lots of witnesses.”

  The officer put his hand up in front of him.

  “I’m glad to hear that, it could be crucial to your case. I’m referring to the witnesses. You may be lucky. In any case your being here is equivalent to preventive detention. It isn’t a good thing to get into a fight on the streets, even in a good cause. And believe me, my friend, intervening in a couple’s quarrel isn’t in any way a good cause.”

  He took me to a room that, from what he told me, was also my cell. No television, and cold, rather dirty walls. Someone had written and drawn obscene things in pencil, as well as strange numbers. These totally unadorned walls made the idea of detention very obvious, and then, in putting me in bed, the officer put handcuffs on my arm and my ankle and then on the bars of the bed. Not that I could have gotten up by myself anyway, but I wasn’t given the choice. Soon afterwards a court-appointed lawyer came in, looked at my medical chart, took some notes, and went away again without asking me any questions.

  I thought about my situation, and the likely consequences. Had I really attempted murder? Theoretically, yes. Suddenly it seemed to me as if reality had escaped through a crack. My life, Madrid, Juana, and my incredible doubts about her were now very remote, almost unreal things. Thinking was very painful, so I tried to reduce the pain to short sentences.

  The truth is that I was facing some very serious charges.

  I remembered Manuel Manrique, Juana’s brother, detained in Bangkwang Prison in Bangkok. What a strange symmetry! Then I slept for a while, sedated I assume by one of the countless substances entering my body intravenously. I had severe facial contusions, plus a fractured nose, right eyebrow, and right cheekbone; in addition, three broken fingers and two fractured ribs. The medical report mentioned bruises on my neck. A technical team came and took my fingerprints and opened a file with my details which was sent, or so they told me, to police headquarters, in the hope of confirming whether I had a criminal record. Two inspectors and a lawyer took from me a long statement that I was only able to sign with a great deal of effort. The court would give its opinion and might agree to bail, although since I was a foreigner, it was very likely that they would decide to keep me in custody, to stop me from leaving Spain. How long would depend on the ultimate condition of the man I had hit.

  But was I really the one who’d hit him? All I’d done was protect a woman from danger and defend myself against an attack that looked like being fatal. There were the marks on my neck to prove it! If the man died, the lawyer on the other side could argue something called preter-intentional homicide, where death isn’t the intention, but a fortuitous consequence.

  “The difficult part,” the lawyer continued, “is convincing a judge that you lifted a heavy glass ashtray and brought it down on that man’s head without the intention of killing him; can one hit someone with an ashtray like that without having the intention to kill? Well, there is self-defense. The witnesses confirm that when you struck him you were on the ground with your back to him; we could call it a ‘blind blow,’ with your sole intention being to escape further agg
ression. Another advantage is that there’s no previous connection between you and this man, which rules out intentionality. The best thing we can do is make a countercharge of aggravated bodily harm and, provided the man regains consciousness, look for what we call a restructuring: both bring charges against the other and in the end the law condemns you both for ‘disturbing the peace’ and fines the two of you. That would be the best thing. But the fellow has to regain consciousness, because if he kicks the bucket, as I’m sure you realize, that complicates things.”

  I thought about my meager savings and the expenses that might be incurred in this procedure, and what happened if the man died? My fate hung by a thread. I was also worried about the hotel, my belongings were there, my notebooks, what was going to happen to them? Not to mention that the bill was rising with every day that passed. I asked the officer.

  “Don’t worry. A card from the hotel was in your pocket and they’ve already gone to fetch your things. That’s what I heard. At least here we don’t charge you a cent!”

  The nurse-officer was a friendly man. From the color of his skin, I assumed he was from Equatorial Guinea. A subject of Teodoro Obiang.

  “Guinean?” I asked him.

  “Yes, from Malabo. We aren’t supposed to give our names to the prisoners, but my name is Pedro Ndongo Ndeme.”

  Equatorial Guinea! I remembered my friend the writer César Mba, author of Malabo Blues. I met him in Puerto Rico and ended up forming a curious triad with him and the Spanish writer José Carlos Somoza. I remember that when we said goodbye I told him: “Get a job in the government, but you have to promise me not to stage a coup.” César, who was very quick and imaginative, retorted: “Go back to Colombia, but keep away from the drug trade.”

  Then I thought again about Juana. When she calls, someone from the hotel will be able to explain to her what happened.

  Perhaps she’d already called.

  In a sudden memory flash I recalled the scene in the bar, and the moment I raised the ashtray. I remembered the touch of the glass, its ripples and edges. By an incredible chance it had landed on the man’s forehead.

  The following day nothing had changed; time passes slowly when you’re detained and are fed only tiny details.

  Now Pedro Ndongo was pushing my gurney along the corridors. They had just given me a CAT scan.

  “Pedro, how is the guy I hit today?”

  “The same,” Pedro said. “Stable.”

  “Who is he?”

  Again that huge smile.

  “I’m not allowed to give you that kind of information, my friend, not even to someone like you, even though I like you. Didn’t your lawyer tell you? His name must be on the charge sheet. It’s Francis Reading, he’s American.”

  “And what does this man do for a living?”

  “He’s fifty-three, married with two children. He teaches literature at Complutense University. He’s from New York.”

  “Literature?”

  I thought it was a joke.

  “And the young woman who was with him?”

  “She’s Colombian, like you. Perhaps she didn’t know that when she hit you. You don’t look as if you come from any particular place.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Well, I could swear you’re not from Malabo!”

  My face stretched with laughter, but the pain returned. We continued advancing down a long passageway.

  “And what was that young woman doing with Mr. Reading? Is she his girlfriend or something like that?”

  “Well, that’s hard to know from reading the statement. She has a student card from the same faculty where he teaches. Maybe he’s her teacher, it’s quite common for a teacher to go out with a student, isn’t it?”

  “One last question, though I don’t know if you can answer it. What’s the Colombian girl’s name?”

  “Oh, that’s impossible, friend. It’s on the charge sheet. Her name’s Manuela Beltrán.”

  “Manuela Beltrán?”

  We reached my room-cell. Before Pedro left I said:

  “Wait, one more thing. Has she been to see Reading?”

  “The first day she was here for a few hours, but left when his wife arrived. Mrs. Reading is American.”

  “If Manuela Beltrán comes back and you see her, can you tell her I’d like to talk to her?”

  “Of course, though I’m not allowed to.”

  Pedro was about to leave, but came back to check my drip.

  “You’re lucky considering how badly you were hurt, believe me.”

  “I haven’t looked in a mirror yet.”

  “Avoid it for now. When I saw you the first time I covered my eyes. I mean it, that level of bruising is more common in the morgue. Your face was green and blood was coming out through your ears.”

  “Thank you, Officer Ndongo. You’re most kind.”

  “I can’t involve myself or have any kind of relations with the prisoners outside the strictly medical sphere. I only do it in extreme cases.”

  “Is mine as serious as that?”

  “The street is full of psychopaths and drug addicts, baptized flesh but in a very bad state. Sometimes already rotten. But you’re a decent person, that’s obvious from miles away. Cities are bad and they lie in wait for people. The world in general is an increasingly inhospitable place. I tell you one thing: if you manage to get out of this, leave immediately and don’t come back. Forget about what happened here.”

  “And what’s happened in the Irish embassy? Are they still inside or have the police gone in?”

  “That’s not going to end so quickly. After the first throat cutting they changed their tune: now they want to show their good side and make the world feel sorry for them. Last night they let a cardiac patient go, in return for the woman reading a press release in which they asked all decent people in Europe to understand their struggle and not allow them to be branded as terrorists, but as fighters. They’re screwing us around! But between you and me, the text was very well written. It was all about the dignity of Africa, about history and colonialism. They say that Africa only matters when there are coups, wars, epidemics, or famines, and that in doing this what they hope is to obtain a little attention without having to wait for the next tragedy.”

  “What about religion? What about ISIS?”

  “For them, religion is a way of finding the purity of the world, and I confess, that speech was very strange. For a moment I thought they were thinking of moving away from the precepts of holy war.”

  Pedro went to the window and raised the blind. Light flooded into the room.

  “Do you believe in any god?” he asked. “No? Make an effort anyway and pray that Professor Reading doesn’t die, because everything will be longer and more complicated. The truth is, I don’t wish that for either of you. You were unlucky enough to meet at a very bad moment. That’s life: one small slip of fate and bang! A person can fall. Aristotle called it hubris, an excess that brings about the fall of the hero. Have you already thought about the millions of chances that it might not have happened? Best not to do that, you’ll only torment yourself and it won’t be any use. It happened, and things that happen can’t be wiped out, however innocent we are, however much of a victim. Strange thing, life, don’t you think?”

  I looked at him appreciatively through my bandages.

  “Did you study philosophy, Pedro?”

  “No, not at all.” He laughed again with his broad mouth. “I’m just an amateur. I’m not gifted for abstract thought and can only handle basic concepts. A small oversight on the part of the gods who created me. In every other respect, they gave me everything.”

  He closed the blinds, because night was falling, leaving us floating in the cold light of the low-energy lamps. With my good eye, I could see the bare walls, a rail with a plastic curtain that was drawn back because there was no
body in the other beds.

  Before Pedro went out, I said to him:

  “I’d like to ask you one last favor. It’s a notebook with a brown cover, I had it on me when this incident happened. It’s full of writings and notes. On the cover it says ‘Rimbaud.’”

  “Oh, what a great poet,” Pedro exclaimed, and then recited in very good French:

  “Ô les enormes avenues du pays saint, les terrasses du temple!

  Qu’a-t-on fait du brahmane qui m’expliqua les Proverbes?

  “He’s one of my favorite poets, do you recognize that passage?”

  “Yes,” I said, “it’s from the Illuminations. It’s the first part of Lives.”

  “That’s right! Dammit, I like you more every time. The woman who works in the registration office is a good friend of mine. I’ll have a word with her and see what we can do.”

  14

  A few days later, Araceli came in her car—a elegant SUV—collected my things, and drove me to an apartment of hers on 67th Street, near Seventh. When we arrived, she introduced me to the doorman, she told him I was a niece from Cali who had come to study in Bogotá and was going to stay there for an indefinite time. This is where I lived when I was single, she said to me, here are the keys. It’s all yours. Then she gave me a kiss and walked to the door. Aren’t you coming up with me? I asked.

  “Discover it for yourself, that way you’ll feel freer. I’ve left a few things so that you won’t be caught short for anything. Go on, I think you’re going to like it.”

  I went up to the fourth floor and opened the door. I was dazed. It was a very nice place, small but cozy, with some incredible furniture, carpeted floors, decorations. The bed was like something out of a movie. I felt strange, like a maid pretending for a while that all this is hers but then continuing with the broom and the brush. Thinking this, I started laughing. The maid who thinks she’s a lady, I told myself, and went dancing and laughing from one bedroom to the other, letting myself fall on the cushions and on the bed and into the armchairs. I laughed and laughed until I saw my face reflected in one of the mirrors in the bathroom, and then I felt ashamed, because my grandmother and my mother were maids and deep down so was I. We would always be maids, coming into houses like this. But then I told myself: I earned this by writing and having sex, so it’s well earned. Others get much more doing the same, and without writing. I’m going to enjoy myself while I can.