Night Prayers

by Santiago Gamboa

  So great was my revulsion that I frequently had to go to the bathroom to throw up, clinging to the water faucet. It was the only fresh clean thing in that place. The water. I let it run to cleanse my body and especially my soul of that hemlock, and absolutely the worst thing of all was seeing my classmates, children who should have been happy, who should have had the intuition to reject them, jumping all over them, telling them things or asking them questions, or doing that typical childish thing of boasting about what you did at the weekend, we went to and such a restaurant or museum or to the country. I never did anything like that at the weekend, but even so I never understood the desire for other people to know about your life, what was the point? Just telling them about something meant ruining it, contaminating it. And there were my little classmates, the poor dummies, talking over each other to tell the teachers, and the teachers would say, that’s very nice, children, your parents love you very much, you must show your gratitude and the best way is to study, so for your assignment tonight learn about the second liberation campaign, and then they’d grab their chalk and their bags and walk off, clicking their heels, and a little while later you’d see them in the staff room sticking their mouths in cups of coffee, drinking red wine, and smoking, whispering among themselves, telling each other God knows what secrets or gossip, giving each other advice on how to humiliate us even more, how to take even better revenge on life through us happy children, because of all the things they wanted to be and never succeeded in being, having turned instead into what they were, hunchbacked old crows, because, believe me, Consul, the wickedness of the soul clings to the body and deforms it, covers it in calluses and warts and other excrescences, you can see evil and you can also smell it, I experienced it every day of my childhood and adolescence, and it’s why most of my classmates ended up joining that system, that way of living in hatred and resentment, what else could they do when that’s what they saw every day?

  I had to make an effort and resist, since there was something inside me I didn’t want to contaminate, something it cost me a lot to maintain. And how did I manage? Not too badly actually, just by fantasizing, letting my mind escape from that horrible prison, which was much worse than this one, Consul. Everyone thought I was there, sitting at my desk, but in fact I was light-years away, on a beautiful planet that belonged to me, in the foothills of a solitary volcano, surrounded by deep, menacing oceans, and nobody noticed, my mask was perfect because it was constructed in their image and likeness. The mask of an idiot.

  The only moments of peace I had were sometimes at recess, when I went to the sport field to watch my sister play volleyball with her friends. I loved to watch them, they were so beautiful, Juana with her chestnut skin, dancing in the air. A streak of light. That’s where I spent recess, watching the ball come and go, which for them was much more than a diversion or a sport and turned into something like the goal of their young lives. It was something clean and uncontaminated: six young girls playing and believing profoundly in what they were doing. How it hurt me to hear the bell ring! They’d play for another few seconds, waiting for the field to empty, and manage to throw two or three more balls until one of the crows came and said, that’s enough, girls, go back to your classes.

  That’s how I grew up, Consul. That was my world, and the worst of it is that outside school things weren’t any better.

  In the city people talked and talked without stopping, gesticulating madly, expressing stupid and ignorant opinions about everything, yelling banal phrases to make themselves heard, to stand out or get one over on the others. Such vulgarity! Everything was an absurd comedy that seemed designed to grate on your nerves. Around that time I saw two episodes of a TV series called The Twilight Zone. The first was the story of an invisible man. The second was about a young man who found a magic watch that could stop time, not his time but other people’s, so that he could move about as he liked among people who couldn’t move. The invisible man was what I aspired to be and what, deep down, I had already been for a long time, but the idea of a clock that froze other people really grabbed me: to be able to stop reality with a click! People’s breathing, their stupid chatter. To be able to stop all of it!

  What silence, what peace.

  I always hated the things that define life in that place: the social pretentions, the desire to impress, the hatred, the congenital stinginess, the envy, all that could stop! I dreamed of pressing a button and being alone, wiping out that gesticulating verbiage; I don’t know if there’s anywhere else in the world where so much bullshit is said simultaneously, where so much nonsense is spoken at such a frenetic pace, and all the people who believe we speak “the best Spanish in the world,” my God, as if using lots of different words had some value, as if employing a few synonyms that other people, because they’re worse than ignorant, don’t use and probably don’t understand, gives us a right to say we have “the best Spanish in the world.”

  And besides, you just have to look at the TV news any day to know what such a beautiful use of the language is used for: for cutting each other’s throats, for making rude remarks and jokes and well-planned accusations, have you heard how most of our governors, congressmen, councilmen, and mayors speak? In their defense, they’re drunk most of the time, which may be their most sympathetic characteristic, they drink on public platforms, in Congress, in their trailers, at meetings held in squares filled with paid deaf-mutes, wherever, if it wasn’t so serious you could die laughing. I’m sorry to be so emphatic, Consul, they may be friends of yours and I’m offending them, forgive me, it’s what I think. In any case nobody there realizes, nobody’s bothered by all that buzzing. It’s the noise of insects, all swarming together. Only an image of hell, a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, could account for that horrible sound.

  That’s what my life was like, but one day something happened.

  One night I went out onto the street and walked as far as the open sewer on 106th, a stinking trickle of water that crossed our neighborhood and sometimes, when it rained a lot, turned into a river. I liked to go there to watch the water flow, even though it was dirty water. On one side of the sewer there was a park with a few trees separating it from the houses, and on the other a wall about a hundred feet long and twelve feet high, with bars on the top. For years I’d stopped in that place, attracted by something. The sewer, the wall. I’d pass it and stop there. I’d lean over the bridge and look, I didn’t really know why. In the evenings there were people smoking grass between the trees or couples necking. Garbagemen taking a nap on the lawns. I’d look and look: at the sewer, the wall.

  I only found out by chance. My sister’s class had been making huge cardboard models of mountains, and to paint them they’d used colored spray paints. Days later I found the box of cans in the garage and took it to my room. I looked at them for a while and chose three, one yellow, one black, one red. And I went out onto the street, Consul. There was a cool wind, the air smelled damp, as if it was going to rain, but the sky wasn’t very heavy. I walked as far as the park, jumped over the sewer, and stopped in front of the wall. I looked at it for a second, grabbed the can of black paint, shook it, and heard the little ball in the can, a sound that sent a quiver through me and made me feel dizzy. I looked at the wall and traced a straight line, about twelve feet long, and then a second one parallel to it. With the yellow can I made a thick wave and with the red filled the spaces that were left, like pregnant bellies. I stepped back and contemplated what I’d done. I was moved. I went back to the wall and painted curved arrow tips and a yellow shadow, and the colors, as they were superimposed, gave off a strange glow. I ran back to the house for the green and blue cans and added a kind of bubble to that strange figure, which now looked like a snake slithering through a tunnel, and when I’d finished, moving back to the edge of the sewer to get a good look at it, under the yellowish light of the lamppost, I felt it should be signed, so I wrote MAL in red. I didn’t dare put my full name, I took three letters out. From the L I traced a curved line be
low the word, like a floating ribbon, and felt euphoric, I took a deep breath and said to myself, how will it look in the morning? how will I see it in the morning? I went back home and put the cans away. I washed my hands with soap and got nervously into bed. That night I dreamed about remote desert islands, filled with virgin walls crying out to be painted.

  3

  The story I want to write, the one I’m now about to tell—the one I’m remembering and putting into some kind of shape here in Bangkok—happened at a strange time in my life.

  In those years I was working for the diplomatic service and had recently moved to New Delhi, a city that seemed quite unconventional to a Latin American, which was why, or at least so I believed, it required a somewhat adventurous frame of mind. That’s how I thought in those days. I had spent a lot of time in Europe—twenty-four years!—telling myself that if I’d actually been a daring kind of person—as I wanted and even believed myself to be—I should long ago have moved somewhere tougher and more remote, like Beijing, Jakarta, or Nairobi.

  Having spent a lot of time completing my education, then searching for stability and reaching a certain level, I was now ready to go out and lose myself, lose what I had acquired or swap it for new experiences. That’s why, when I was offered the post of consul in my country’s embassy in India, I didn’t hesitate for a second, but got ready to abandon sad old Europe.

  Arriving in Delhi and seeing the comfort in which foreigners lived—including the diplomats of our neighboring countries—I had high hopes, but the illusion only lasted until I found out what my salary amounted to, a figure that tact forbids me from specifying, as Julio Ramón Ribeyro would say, and one that didn’t even allow me to dream of the traditional areas where expatriates lived, like Vasant Vihar, Sundar Nagar, or Nizzamudin East. Instead, I had to go somewhere cheaper, a middle-class area called Jangpura Extension, which struck me at first as dusty and a bit terrifying but which in the end, as often happens, I grew to love. A person can get used to anything, even the fact that two hundred yards from his home there’s a corner filled with noisy rickshaws, sleeping dogs, clapped-out taxis, a foul urinal swarming with mosquitoes, and fried food stands that are like factories for typhoid or dysentery.

  The offices of the embassy were in Vasant Vihar, a rich neighborhood, although one filled with dust and having the disadvantage of being just below the flight path of planes coming in to land at Indira Gandhi International Airport, which meant that every three minutes you had to shout in order to be heard indoors.

  And that wasn’t all: the front of the building faced Olof Palme Marg, where bulldozers and cranes spent an absurdly long time building an overpass—a flyover in Indian English—producing mountains of dust, the noise of pneumatic drills, and the horrific smells of drains, not to mention the traffic jams. It reached a peak one afternoon when, perhaps because of all the digging to lay the concrete, a snake some seven feet in diameter crossed Olof Palme Marg and reached the doors of the embassy, where it died, crushed by the wheels of a truck, whose driver, of course, stopped, took his head in both hands, and wept, since in India all life is sacred.

  My office was on the second floor, with a view of the gardens of a dusty residence that was the embassy of the Arab Emirate of Bahrain; every time I looked through the window or went out onto my magnificent balcony I would see two guards and a dog snoozing in the sentry boxes, and a bit farther on, out on the street, groups of women in saris carrying bricks in baskets on their heads to a nearby site where their husbands were working and their children were playing amid the rubble and earth.

  The principal task of the consular office was to issue visas, to Indian businessmen going to Colombia to make deals, to technicians, to students, and—rarely—to tourists. We also had to process documents from the National Tax Office legalizing the invoices of companies from India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, and even from Iran, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, countries where we had no diplomatic representation but whose affairs we handled. On request, the companies had to send the originals of the documents and their registration by a chamber of commerce, everything duly authenticated and translated before a notary.

  And naturally there were problems and requests involving our compatriots, of whom there were only a hundred and twenty in the whole country—one for every ten million Indians—plus visitors, those who came to India and got into all kinds of trouble, most of them through having a romantic and distorted image of the country.

  My colleague, Olympia León de Singh, was a woman in her early fifties who had been working there for more than ten years and knew the ins and outs of the “consular function” as nobody else did. In addition, she was the only Colombian in the mission who spoke Hindi, since she was married to a Sikh and had lived in Delhi for more than twenty years. When I asked her, she told me she had met her husband in Moscow in the 1970s, at Patrice Lumumba University, where both were studying international relations. Her stories, which she kept feeding me in snippets and only when she was in a good mood, were amazing. She told me that at the beginning of the 1980s the embassies brought in toilet paper in diplomatic bags, since you couldn’t get hold of it in India, and that at the airport, during stopovers, crowds of cripples and sick people would invade the runway and get on the planes to beg!

  Olympia came from the Santander region of Colombia and had been raised a Communist. When she talked about Moscow in the seventies, her eyes shone. A city of abundance, culture, art. Delhi was quite the opposite: a vast village crisscrossed by oxcarts and unpaved streets, where people died of scurvy and diarrhea and where diseases that were rare in the Soviet Union, such as leprosy, were still common. This was basically true and is still true. My daily journey from Jangpura to the office took me through an intersection where you could see the following characters: a leper wrapped in a bloodstained tunic with three stumps instead of fingers and a pink orifice where his nose should have been; two eunuchs expelled from their neighborhood who begged for money in return for not cursing you; a woman walking a baby with a burned hand—according to Peter, my driver, the burn was false, made with butter and gelatin, which cheered me—as well as people selling magazines, umbrellas, pirated books, ties, and handkerchiefs.

  One of the first images from soon after my arrival in Delhi was of a man in bustling Chandni Chowk Market, a very thin man displaying an elephantine testicle and an enormous rectal prolapse, two melons hanging from a skinny, twisted body, like the cams of a giant clock. Having already seen the human bazaar massed on the steps of the Jama Masjid Mosque, including a dwarf ulcerated and deformed by polio and various lepers in a terminal state, it was obvious that in Delhi, beautiful Delhi, disquieting Delhi, diseases provided those suffering from them with a stable way to earn a living.

  But let’s go back to Olympia.

  She was the one who, every day, brought me the problems of our community of compatriots, mainly composed of pilots for Kingfisher Airlines, young people who had come to do internships with Indian companies, and, above all, adepts of “spiritual tourism,” most of them rich ladies who found relief in the teachings of Sai Baba, Satyananda, Osho, and other contemporary philosophers who dispensed advice about life and uttered wise sayings about peace and love.

  Everything my colleague hated.

  On one occasion she came into my office very upset, and said, come and look at this, boss. Don’t call me boss, I begged her, and we went out to the reception room, where a middle-aged Indian was waiting nervously. He had brought with him the passport of a Colombian woman who, according to him, “had problems.” When I asked him what kind, he told me she was a follower of the guru Ravi Ravindra and that, ever since a particular “spiritual seminar,” her mind had been confused, as if she had a screw loose. She was twenty-seven years old. Problems of what kind? I asked again, and the man lowered his eyes and said:

  “She wants to go out naked onto the street, she can’t sleep, she’s obsessed with Ravi, she says she’s going to be his wife and wants to go with him to Indonesia
.”

  “Indonesia?” I said, thinking it was one of the countries whose affairs we dealt with. “Why Indonesia?”

  “Ravi is going there today to give some lectures,” he said.

  I immediately set off to deal with the case.

  They were keeping her in an apartment near Green Park. On seeing me, the young woman said, hello, would you like a drink? something to eat? sit down, how are you? how nice of you to come. This volley of words made it clear how serious things were; when I asked her how she was, she said, I’m fine, how nice to meet you, would you like a drink? something to eat? my taxi will be here soon, I’m going to the airport, I’m going to meet Ravi, we’re going to Indonesia, how nice to meet you, would you like a drink? something to eat? It looked like it could be complicated. I managed to persuade her to come with me to see a doctor. The friend who had been putting her up, Amrita, said she was suffering memory lapses and I wanted her to be checked over. I was afraid that she’d been drugged, maybe even raped.

  Talking to her a bit more I found out that she had met the guru in Canada and that this was her third journey with him to India. She also said that she was deeply in love with him. Do you love him in a spiritual way? I asked, and she said, yes, but also as a woman, something very beautiful has grown up between us. Amrita looked at me with eyes popping out of her head and, in an aside, assured me that these were ravings, that it couldn’t be real, it was only her obsession with Ravi. I was even more perplexed. Some gurus are accused of raping Western women, weak-minded women who are easily dominated and give themselves up body and soul. Body above all. Fortunately this wasn’t the case here, at least not according to the doctor in the hospital where she was under observation for a week. Then her mother came and took her back to Tokyo, where she was studying for a doctorate on a scholarship from the Japanese government. When she left, the doctor told me they’d found psychotropic substances in her urine, had she been drugged? I was never able to find out.