You see, Doctor, I was really changing.
I went to the refrigerator and found it full. Meat, vegetables, eggs, drinks. I opened drawers and realized that it had everything. There were drinks in the bar, the bathroom was fully equipped, the towels looked wonderful, so I took off my poor student’s clothes and got into the bath. I had a good bathe and lying there in the steam I imagined how great life would be if you had this in a normal way, because a little worm in my brain kept eating away at me, saying, wake up, Cinderella from the wrong side of the tracks, open your eyes, princess of the orphanage, you think all this comes free? what’s Araceli going to ask of you in return for these luxuries?
I preferred not to think about it and fell asleep, and when I woke it was already dark, so I went to the bedroom and looked for my pajamas. On the night table there were two books, one by Pizarnik and another by a French poet, Arthur Rimbaud: A Season in Hell. I left them there and continued looking in drawers. When I opened the night table I again let out a cry. Cash! A wad of fifty-thousand-peso bills, which is the highest denomination in Colombia, Doctor, but which is like fifteen euros, no more than that, you see how cheap we are, but anyway, it was a whole lot of money. I closed it again without touching anything and went to sleep. How strange it all was, and how generous she was. Remembering my companions in the reform school, a voice whispered in my ear: you won the lottery, this rich old girl has the hots for you.
The next day Araceli came in the evening, we ordered a takeaway and made love until midnight. She was as affectionate as ever, talking about poets and trying to teach me what she knew. She read a poem dedicated to me, which to tell the truth I didn’t like, but obviously I didn’t tell her. Her husband was on their ranch. She enjoyed absolute freedom because he respected her rhythms. He knew that, as the good poet she was, she had phases, just like the moon, as she put it. I would never say something so corny, Doctor, I just looked her in the eyes, and she naturally started to tell me that her relationship with her husband was good, they made love two or even three times a week, she was insatiable and she wanted to try everything, as artists do; she made me laugh saying that she was the chair and founder of a group of veteran but rebellious wives who called themselves Blowjobs Always for the Same Man, and she also said, although I didn’t believe her, that this was her first time with a woman, that before this she had fantasized about the idea but had never done it, that such desires didn’t go down well with any of her friends, let alone with those who were already declared lesbians, but that when she saw me and read my poetry, when she started spending time with me she started having wet dreams and touching herself while she thought about me, and she confessed to me that when she had sex with her husband she imagined that she was her husband and I was her, and so she felt that what he was doing to her she was doing to me, which is quite strange, Doctor, but you probably understand it better than I do, and finally, that same day, before she left, I read her the first drafts of two poems I was working on. When I finished reading and looked up I saw that she was in tears.
I asked her what the matter was and she said it moved her to see that for me it was so easy, what I considered a first draft was already far above what she herself could do, and I told her no, her poems were good, don’t say that, there’s no reason to be sad, and we knocked back another half bottle of whiskey and snorted a little coke, and more, because this time she took some pills from her bag and said to me, look, let’s try this, it’s called ecstasy, half and half? We took those pills, and soon I was high as a kite, feeling as if I wanted to climb the walls, and of course, we fell on the bed and fucked like rabbits, we whipped each other to a frenzy, it was really cool; Araceli screamed so much when she came that the neighbors banged on the wall with a stick, even though the building had thick walls. Before she left, Araceli asked why I hadn’t taken the money she had left on the night table. Then she took out another wad of bills and put it down under the book by Pizarnik.
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.
I realized that my life was going to be that of a kept woman. No nerves, no problems. My secret lover was paying for my life and giving me gifts, whims that were actually hers, because I never had whims. In those days I experienced a change, Doctor, which is that for the first time I thought about beauty. Am I beautiful? Am I sexy? Am I a good lay? Until I met Araceli beauty was something other women had, not me. In the convent I’d been with various guys, but nobody ever talked about beauty. They fucked us because we had everything in the right place, not because we were beautiful. Fat or thin, with big or skinny asses, cross-eyed, busty or flat-chested, we were women and they needed us. The only thing of value was being a virgin, but that didn’t last long.
With Araceli I discovered another dimension because she kept saying to me, what beautiful legs, what a round ass, what pert breasts, what a divine belly, and so smooth; because she’d had a child, she had creases on her belly and stretch marks on her ass and thighs. That struck me as normal, but it mortified her. She would spend hours in the gym trying to get rid of them, but they wouldn’t go. I told her that those stretch marks were signs of a life lived and that she shouldn’t think about erasing them, but Araceli would protest, no, darling, when you’re my age you’ll understand, I’ve never been loved for my beauty, it’s not about other people, it’s about myself, I have an image of myself that’s deteriorating, it has to do with the passing of time, an anxiety about wear and tear, it isn’t vanity but fear of loss, I’m not a Barbie doll, but if I let my body destroy itself it’s as if I was surrendering to the enemy, don’t you understand? I said I did, but in reality I couldn’t. Youth doesn’t understand adulthood and even less when the precipice of the years begins, after forty and edging up to fifty, which is the age that Araceli was, and that, according to her, was why what she loved in me was the unattainable, possessing what she would never have in her own body, although the origin of her attraction, again according to her, was in something intangible that had to do with my silences and my poetry and with something strange that, according to her, emanated from me, a kind of sad beauty.
My relationship with Araceli grew stronger. She came to see me three or four times a week. But if she had an engagement with her husband and daughter, who I never saw in person, then she’d stay away; I liked these breaks, because although I loved her I still missed what I had known with men, I don’t know what to call it, it’s something to do with the heat of penetration and ejaculation. I longed to feel it, but I longed for it in silence. I never looked for it, and not because Araceli was jealous. She would always say to me, invite friends over, throw parties, enjoy your youth. For me, the best way to enjoy it was to feel protected between four walls, and that’s why I preferred not to invite anyone, let alone throw parties. The few I went to, thrown by my classmates, made me realize that the true purpose of them was to make the hostess feel like a queen for a night, which was silly and superficial, like young people who had never experienced anything profound and believed that life was an endless laugh; I felt embarrassed by the unrestrained egos of these poor girls, and that’s why I never went back.
I preferred to discover the city, to walk through all its neighborhoods, the north and the center, the west and the south. I realized that the rain and the cold were a matter of periods, since later there was lovely sunshine from the mountains, which didn’t give out much heat but stung the skin and you always had the feeling of being cool; the sun came out and the city would shine in a special way, and then I would get on the Transmilenio and go here and there, watching people living, trying to get on the same wavelength as them, having lunch in ordinary eateries, watching. I was amused by the obsession with cell phones: the children carried them in their school uniforms, the assistants in department stores in the south, sitting on stools, or those in the north, behind elegant counters, spent their time texting furiously. The clerks in public offices, too, who you could see from the street, and only waiters in restaurants or bu
s drivers, who have their hands occupied, seemed to be outside this obsession, but the rest, including my classmates, always had their heads down, moving their thumbs frenetically, one half of humanity writing to the other half, and then waiting for the reply. I went for lots of walks and so I gradually learned about the people of each neighborhood, from Usme and Bosa to El Amparo, which was dangerous, and then El Rincón or Suba. I remember some graffiti on the wall of a school that said: “Your T-shirt says I Love New York, but your face says I live in Suba.”
In Cali I’d been a lost little girl, then a lost adolescent who didn’t know anything of the world. It was when I went to Bogotá that I realized what a country is. At the traffic lights, there were displaced people from Urabá, Cauca, and El Llano. You saw peasants, people from Cali and Santander, people from the coast. Indigenous people, people from the islands, from the plains, from the Amazon. The crowd was a portrait of reality, with its injustices and crimes, sure, but also with its joy and colors. And in the center of the city, that symbolic thing called power. The capital of the country! That’s why I liked going to Plaza de Bolívar. There I saw people with banners demanding things from the government or protesting about something, but also there were the inhabitants of the center, the destitute and the disposable (that’s what they’re called, can you imagine, Doctor), people who were very alive and searching for themselves, and also tourists and street vendors, and thieves and robbers, those that Señora Tránsito was so scared of, although I have to say that they never robbed me nor did I ever see them rob anybody, at least not up close, which doesn’t mean anything either, because everyone knows Bogotá is a dangerous city; near there, on Eighth, I saw secondhand bookstores and booksellers out on the streets, and that’s why I grew fond of that area in the center. So I decided to use the money Araceli had left me and most of it I spent on that, on secondhand books. And so December came and Gloria Isabel wrote to ask me if I wanted to go to Cali to spend Christmas with them.
She said that Vanessa was more stable now and they were going to let her leave the clinic for a few days, so I said yes, time’s flying, it’s been months since I last went to my city! I told Araceli and that prompted her, for the first time, to ask me if it was my family, but I told her no, I don’t have a family, my parents are dead, this lady is a friend who’s helping me, and of course, hearing me say that she got ideas and I saw her facial expression turn hard, a friend? what kind of friend? I didn’t want her to get the wrong idea, so I said: she’s the mother of a classmate of mine who got involved with drugs in a very bad way; I helped them and that’s why they’re inviting me, because my classmate is going to leave the clinic for Christmas. And I ended up saying: she’s paying my university fees.
Araceli’s face changed and she said, oh, good, I understand now, she’s someone who helped you, I’m sorry, I’m nervous and I mix everything up, come here, my darling, and we threw ourselves naked on the bed and spent the evening having wild sex, because by now I’d stopped being afraid of Araceli and really liked her, in fact I was even a bit in love with her, although it sounds stupid.
Before I left for Cali, Araceli said she wanted to give me a Christmas present. She came to the apartment, we opened a bottle of wine, we toasted, and I gave her two books I had bought for her, two very beautiful editions of Colombian poetry, Aurelio Arturo and an anthology of Nadaism, which she thanked me for with lots of kisses. But I could see she was nervous and I asked her what was up. She cried a little and finally said, it’s really stupid, just imagine, I suspect my husband has a girlfriend. I looked at her and said, in all innocence, well, you have one, too. Araceli gave a laugh and said, yes, I do! We opened another bottle of white wine, she took out some pills, and we took them. We spent the evening together. Finally I asked her why she thought her husband was cheating on her and she said he’d been acting strange and so she’d looked at his cell phone while he was sleeping. There were some strange messages, from someone without a name, just initials, RM. There had been calls, too, and she saw that they spoke constantly, even when he was traveling. But during the past weekend when he had been at a convention in Lima, there were no calls to RM and that struck her as strange; so she got into his bank account and saw that he had paid for two tickets and a stay at a hotel, the same one, and she realized there hadn’t been any convention, so I said to her, are you sure it isn’t someone from work? And she said, no, wait, there’s more, in his account I saw a series of payments to restaurants, so I said to her, it’s strange to go traveling with a girlfriend to Lima, don’t you think? Generally, guys go to Cancún or Panama, and she said, I know, but here there were payments in bars, and then, terrified by what she was doing, she went to a public phone and dialed the mysterious number, several times, but there was no answer. The recorded message was personalized, and there was a young woman’s voice saying hi, this is Rafaela, leave me a message, bye, a girl’s voice, although she wasn’t a hundred percent sure so she had gone further: taking a risk, she had gotten into his email and there she saw that one of the tickets was for someone named Rafaela Montero, so she searched for her on Facebook and saw her, a young girl, a really good-looking bitch, that’s how Araceli put it, a journalism student at the Javeriana, can you imagine? and I thought, maybe I know her.
I asked her how she felt and she said, I feel insecure and you know something? it isn’t the same, I’m not cheating on him with a man, we’re in a territory that isn’t his anyway and can never be his. I said nothing but I thought that it was the same, two students from the Javeriana, one for each of them. In the end, Araceli got dressed, a little sad, but before leaving she said, oh, how stupid, I almost forgot to give you your gift, here, and she took out a very well-wrapped little box. When I opened it I saw it was a cell phone, a beautiful white BlackBerry, the latest model, that way we’ll be able to keep in touch because I’m going to miss you a lot, she said, and she kissed me on the mouth with a ferocity and a desperation that struck me as strange. I told her I was going to miss her, too, and that I was immediately going to learn to use the cell phone so that we could send each other messages all the time.
The next day I flew to Cali, and when I got to the airport that sensation of fragility came back to me, that feeling of being in danger. It was the city of my childhood, of course, but also of my sorrows. Terrible memories hung in that lovely warm wind, and although Gloria Isabel and Vanessa greeted me with hugs I couldn’t rid myself of the nerves, the hole in the pit of my stomach. On the ride to the house, I recognized buildings, avenues, streets. A certain smell of dampness or chlorophyll. There were the samans, those trees that seemed like the true guardians of the city. And in the middle of the street and the traffic, the motorcyclists zigzagging, and when I saw them I couldn’t help thinking of Freddy and wondering, is he one of them? My anxiety started to grow. Sitting beside me, Vanessa was like a zombie. She smiled all the time, and kept giving a disturbing little laugh that didn’t correspond to anything funny. She was stuffed full of tranquilizers. When we got to the house and I settled into the guest room, Gloria Isabel explained to me that Vanessa was very sedated, because that was the only way she could come home. It was what the doctors recommended.
“Seeing you here makes me incredibly happy, Manuelita,” Gloria Isabel said, “it’s as if you were the recovered half of my daughter.”
I tried to ask Vanessa things, to find out how she was, but she always answered in the same way, I’m fine, it’s all cool, thanks, and you? I asked her about the clinic, if she had friends there. And she replied, yes, lots of friends, it’s really cool, why don’t you come see me one day? I told her of course I would, and suddenly she asked me, and what about you, why are you here? I told her that Gloria Isabel had invited me to spend Christmas, and she said, oh, right, I forgot, that’s cool, and how are you? That night, before switching off the light, I sent Araceli a couple of messages. She was still very bad: she had found a gift hidden in the garage; she opened it carefully, it was a beautiful gold
chain. There was the receipt, three million and something pesos that her husband must have kept. Araceli left everything as it was, but now she was getting worried that this gift wasn’t for her or her daughter, but for the girlfriend, and that’s why she saw Christmas coming like a mule walking to the abyss.
I tried to calm her. I’m sure it’s for you, stop thinking about it, I told her, think about other things, other periods of your life with him, for example. It’s a long relationship and it’s not going to be destroyed over something like that. Araceli replied, saying: oh, my darling, how it pains me that you’re so far away, I’d give anything to have you here in my arms.
The holidays were very lively, although I hardly dared leave the house. Every time I saw a man drive by on a motorcycle, I said to myself, that’s him, that’s Freddy, and I broke out in a cold sweat, what’ll happen if he recognizes me? I realized that while that man was still alive I couldn’t go back to Cali. He’d also stolen my city from me, and I thought: if someday I see him and I’m able to, I’ll kill him. I swear it.
With Vanessa being the way she was, everything was very healthy, with fruit juices and soft drinks. No alcohol. Gloria Isabel told me that if I wanted a glass of wine I should go to the kitchen and ask the maid; she had given instructions to keep the alcohol hidden and serve it only to particular people and in cups, as if it was coffee or tea.
Return to the Dark Valley Page 15
