Night Prayers

by Santiago Gamboa

  “Anything, especially if it’s classical.”

  I went to a shelf and looked at a few books. “How about Mantegna?” I asked.

  “Yes, perfect.”

  Then I poured myself—I might say: threw myself into—a longed-for gin, a cold glass filled with ice and slices of lemon. I asked her if she’d like one too.

  “Yes, please,” she said. “I haven’t had a damned drink for a year.”

  We drank, then she asked:

  “When are we going to see Manuel?”

  As she asked this, with the book of Mantegna open in front of her, she stroked the image of the dead Christ with the tips of her fingers.

  “We have to wait for the okay from Colombia,” I said, “but it’s a matter of a few days. They’re putting the pressure on from over there too.”

  I told her I would call the lawyer in Bangkok the following day, although the fact there had been no messages suggested nothing had changed. I asked her if there was anything in Delhi she was interested in seeing. We had to spend a few days there before flying to Thailand.

  “Yes,” she said, “a Sai Baba temple. That’s the only thing.”

  “Sai Baba?” I said “There’s one ten blocks from here. It’s like the Vatican of Sai Baba. I’ll take you tomorrow afternoon, so you’re interested in Indian religion?”

  “I think so,” she said, “although in all this time I haven’t managed to believe in anything. At least Sai Baba isn’t a god, just a guru.”

  The following day, at the office, we evaluated the results of the mobile consulate and sent the respective reports to the Consular Department, along with the supporting documents, and travel and other expenses. An exhausting job. Olympia went to the bank and paid in the money taken, the stamp duty, and contributions to the savings fund. But before she left she took me aside and asked: did she come with you? I told her she had, that she was in my apartment with the child. Do you think we’ll have any problems with Iran over this? No, Olympia replied: she’s an adult, she’s a foreigner, and she has a valid passport. She can go anywhere in the world and do whatever she likes. If she does have any problems with Iranian law, it’ll be with the husband, because of the child, but that’s no concern of ours.

  Then I called the lawyer in Bangkok. He told me they hadn’t yet fixed a date for the trial but that he had exerted pressure on them to hurry it up. He added that we needed to think about the guilty plea, which had to be framed in such a way that we could gain time. If it was harrowing and dramatic enough, and displayed heartfelt remorse, we might impress the judges and obtain a shorter sentence. He concluded by saying that Manuel had already been informed about his sister.

  I left the office early and went home. On the way I stopped at the Prya Market and bought a couple of model Ambassador cars for the child: a black taxi with a yellow roof and a white official vehicle with a siren. I was eager to tell Juana the news.

  I found her on the balcony, giving Manuel Sayeq a bottle and watching the eagles circling above the park. As they flew overhead, two green parrots with red beaks hid in the branches of a plane tree. Below, on the street, a knife grinder was pushing a beat-up old cart and shouting something. Three children were playing cricket beside a mountain of garbage.

  “Manuel knows we’re together and that you’re going to Bangkok,” I said. “He must be very happy.”

  She opened her eyes so wide I thought she was going to faint. The emotion made her cry and she hid her face.

  “I’ll have to prepare myself,” she said, recovering, “or I won’t know what to say when I see him.”

  She started crying again and I hugged her. The crying made her body shake. Suddenly she pulled her head away and in between her sobs said:

  “I feel so guilty … !”

  She walked to the rail and stood for a while facing the park: the birds, the clouds of smog and dust covering the sky. I judged it best to leave her alone with her thoughts.

  After a while, she came back into the study, already recovered. We had a quick gin, with a lot of ice, and went out to the temple of Sai Baba, near the India Habitat Center and the Jorbagh district.

  The temple was a strange construction, with a staircase of white tiles and metal bars around the prayer room. From the upper part of the walls hung banners of saffron-colored canvas. The ground was covered with rotten rose petals, paper pennants, incense and aromatic substances, lighted candles, mountains of candle wax hardened and blackened by the dust, garlands of saffron flowers, trodden fruit peel, plastic bags, and outside, on the avenue, an infinity of fried food stands, sellers of pistachios, maize, a thousand kinds of fried and salted grains, chapatis with spicy sauce, and all around, scattered on the dusty ground and the pavement, hundreds of disposable plates with the remains of food, covered in flies, besieged by dogs and crows, generating a smell of decomposing matter that mingled with that of the fried food, the pollution, the kerosene, and the fumes from the buses.

  “Exactly as I imagined it,” Juana said.

  She walked up very slowly, with Manuelito in her arms. When she reached the prayer room she knelt and remained like that for a long time, not changing place, only making slow movements from side to side, as if she were calming the child’s tears, whispering the words of consolation and love that I imagined she herself would have liked to hear. She seemed more like a goddess in her own temple than someone who was praying.

  Suddenly I remembered my conversation with Manuel:

  “What makes me a fragile person is having been unhappy in my childhood,” he had said.

  I recalled that I had looked at him in silence and said nothing, but had thought: what made me fragile was the opposite, having been happy. What of it? Then Manuel had thought for a moment and added: Life, when you come down to it, always presents you with an unusual bill to pay. That’s why Marx said that in history, events happen first as tragedy and then are repeated as comedy.

  By the time Juana left the temple, she seemed transformed. Her smile was clearer, and you had less sense of storms inside her. It may have been an effect of the light or my own nervousness. I don’t know. Then we went for a walk. I showed her a number of places: India Gate, Connaught Place, Gandhi’s house, Indira’s house, the mansions of Golf Links and the architecture of Sundar Nagar. That night we had dinner at the Balluchi, in Hauz Khas Village, because apart from Punjabi food they had Kingfisher beer in green bottles, the ones with the highest alcohol content.

  I didn’t want to pressure her, but I was intrigued to hear about her life, what had led her to leave everything so drastically, her adventures in Japan, her relationship with Jaburi, who by now must have been desperate, hitting the walls and howling with anger. Had she left him a note? had she promised him she would come back after seeing her brother? what were her plans?

  “When you feel up to it, you could tell me something about your life,” I said to her, “whatever you like. I’m curious. Manuel told me a few things.”

  A shadow passed over her face. It only lasted a second, but it was noticeable. Her eyes were no longer at peace.

  “Does he know I went to Tokyo to … ?”

  I didn’t see any point in hiding it. “He knows everything,” I said, “that’s why he went looking for you.”

  There was a grave look on her face now. She seemed about to say something, but no words came out.

  “You decide, if you like,” I said. “When it comes down to it, you don’t have to tell me anything.”

  She looked at me. Her eyes were like rays.

  “It’s all right, Consul, but for now, do you mind if we sit for a while in silence?”

  A couple of days went by. In the office I was still waiting for news from Bangkok that would make it possible for me to go back and deal with the case again. But everything seemed frozen.

  The Consular Department continued its contacts with the Thai embassy in Bogotá, sending them a memorandum in which they asked if Manuel Manrique could be allowed to stand trial in Colombia. The embass
y transmitted it to its ministry in Bangkok and we were still waiting for a reply, even if just a comment, anything that might allow negotiations to start. For the moment it was pointless to do anything, what with the travel expenses involved.

  All I could do was wait.

  The women servants in my apartment became fond of the child and one of them started taking him to the park in the afternoons so that he could play and see other children, thus giving Juana a bit of free time. She took the opportunity to read Vislumbres de la India by Octavio Paz. I would get home around seven-thirty, sometimes a little later, and we’d have a couple of gins until it was time for dinner. Then she’d lock herself in her room and I’d sit and read.

  A week went by.

  The following Thursday they were showing a Spanish film, Carlos Saura’s Cría Cuervos, at the Cervantes Institute. I suggested it to her and we went. She liked it. Another day she went with me to a book presentation at the India Habitat Center. Then to a literature event at the Alliance Française. There is a great deal of cultural life in Delhi. The Italo-Indian cultural center offered a program linking literature and food, and invited a group of people to sample dishes that had a connection with some of their most famous films. Juana was starting to feel at ease, or at least that’s what I thought. I was curious to know how she would justify having abandoned first her home, then Manuel, then her Iranian husband. How had her life in Tehran been? what was Jaburi like? would he put pressure on her about the child? would it be something like that sentimental film Not Without My Daughter, in which Iranian men were depicted as monsters? I had no idea. She still hadn’t made up her mind to tell me anything.

  Faced with the absence of news from the Consular Department, I had to write to the Indian embassy in Bogotá asking for an extension of Juana’s visa and her child’s, which fortunately was conceded without their having to leave the country. After the attacks on the Oberoi and Taj hotels in Mumbai, which the Indians, imitating the Americans, call 26/11, India had modified the legislation concerning foreigners, introducing more requirements for obtaining or extending visas. Those who had six-month visas could no longer simply go to Nepal and stamp their passports, but had to wait two months to reenter India. Fortunately, this was not the case with Juana, thanks to the recommendation of the Indian embassy in Bogotá.

  One day, in the middle of breakfast, she asked if her parents had been informed.

  “Manuel asked me not to,” I said. “I passed that on to the legal department of our Foreign Ministry. Frankly, I don’t know.”

  She was lost in thought, so I picked up the phone and offered it to her.

  “Do you want to call them? Call them, you could talk for as long as you like.”

  She looked at the phone, but immediately put it back on the table.

  “No, thanks, I only wanted to know. When I see Manuel we’ll decide together what to do.”

  Two more weeks passed and Juana started to get impatient. That was understandable. According to the lawyer in Bangkok, things were going well and we would soon have news. His friend in the police had assured him that they were about to make a big arrest of drug traffickers. We just had to be patient.

  Juana bought a sari at Fabindia, a shop selling traditional clothes, with good bargains, and one night my Nepalese maid showed her how to put it on. What a curious and beautiful garment: twenty feet of brightly colored cloth, folded until it covers the body, leaving the midriff free, which is a matter of comfort and at the same time provocative. In their saris, all Indian women looked like princesses. The men, in their common drill trousers or jeans, were more like third-class servants, except when they wore kurtas or Punjabi-style vests.

  When I got back from the office, I found Juana waiting for me in her sari. I praised her fulsomely, we drank a toast, then we got ready to go out. First to look at books at Full Circle, in the Khan Market, where you could drink tea on a terrace over which crows and vultures flew; Juana looked at everything with a certain casualness, as if she didn’t want to establish a close relationship with anything that she saw, or be too startled. Like a butterfly that flits from spot to spot. Later, we ate in the restaurant in Lodhi Gardens, which had good Indian lobster dishes.

  Although her sari was compact, I thought I caught a glimpse of strange signs and images beneath it. Were they tattoos, I wondered, or a printed T-shirt?

  Another day I invited some friends to the house. Among them was an unusual, very pleasant Colombian, Alexis von Hildebrand, who worked for Unicef, and who had lived in Madagascar for ten years. He was the only person I had ever met who had been to the islands of Tonga. His grandfather was a Catholic philosopher, a German, a friend of Nicolás Gómez Dávila. I also invited Sudeep Sen, poet and editor of a literary review in Delhi, the aspiring guru and my collaborator at the embassy, Madhuván “Rishiraj” Sharma, who was preparing himself by interpreting the Mahabharata, and of course my friend Professor Chattopadhyay. The group was completed by a Spanish-Indian couple, Lola McDougall and Nikhil Padgaonkar, poets and photographers, and the Catalan Óscar Pujol, director of the Cervantes Institute in Delhi and professor of Sanskrit at the University of Varanasi.

  I introduced Juana to them as a sociologist passing through Delhi, and the evening was unforgettable. Von Hildebrand told us of a strange tradition in the islands of Tonga: once a year the king has to go into the sea and offer a roast pig over to the king of the sharks. If the shark bites the king, it’s a sign that he has been a bad ruler.

  Then Von Hildebrand went into the kitchen and came back with a half-gallon pitcher of pisco sour, his specialty, which accompanied most of the meal.

  Later, as we opened the third bottle of Bombay gin, between travelers’ tales and literary quotations, Lola MacDougall suggested an amusing game: the construction of pagodas and ziggurats with books by favorite authors.

  Juana, without calling attention to herself, built a simple one-story house using the poetry of E. E. Cummings, and roofed it with Rudolf Otto. I tried to build a Japanese temple out of Houellebecq (Nikhil told me, in French, tu te houellebecquises!). We all did our work and ended up with a number of concepts: an art nouveau house made of aphorisms by Lichtenberg and prose by Edmond Jarrès, an Islamic temple shared between Raymond Roussel and Vikram Seth, a Hindu temple made out of Malcolm Lowry, and a great ziggurat of confessional works: the Journal Intime of Benjamin Constant, the diaries of Ernst Jünger, La Tentación del Fracaso by Julio Ramón Ribeyro, two volumes of Anaïs Nin, and the Journal Littéraire of Paul Léautaud.

  Sudeep read some poems by Dylan Thomas, to whom we raised a toast, in memory of his untimely death at the age of thirty-nine, in New York, after a series of successful recitals. In connection with that, I presented (and maintained) my theory of an apoplectic seizure brought on by hypercholesterolemia: a sedentary life, alcohol, obesity, excessive smoking, hypertension, high cerebral irrigation, and insomnia. A hundred milligrams of losartan, taken on an empty stomach, and five of amlodipine at night, plus a diet of unsaturated fats, would have prolonged his life and his work for at least twenty years. Twenty-five if he had added thirty minutes walking a day. Dommage!

  Chattopadhyay, remembering his days as a Naxalite guerrilla, instructed us in how to leave my apartment in case of a police raid and where to go, and then recited various poems by Neruda, his specialty (especially “Tango del viudo”). We talked about Malraux in India (Antimémoires), Roberto Rossellini in India (he married an Indian woman), and Romain Rolland in India (he was the French ambassador there in 1921, it’s in his Diaries). Starting from there, the list of visitors became interminable: Paz (Vislumbres de la India), Pasolini (L’Odore dell’India), Herman Hesse (Aus Indien), E.M. Forster (A Passage to India), Alberto Moravia (Una Idea de la India), Michaux (Un Barbare en Asie), a long list of authors I have investigated and read for a book to which I am, of course, still hesitating whether to give the title India: A Passionate Human Family or the simpler one Masala Tea.

  At four in the morning, after saying goo
dbye to the guests, and being reasonably drunk (“each person drinks what he needs,” as Teresa said), Juana and I bade each other good night, but then, from my room, I heard her returning to the living room to collect glasses and empty bottles, arrange the chairs, and tidy up the books. Clearly, she felt at home.

  The weekend came and I suggested that she and I and the child go for a walk in Nehru Park. I had been lent a stroller for Manuel Sayeq and it was the perfect opportunity. The park was crisscrossed by paths, between gardens and groves, a cool, clean place, ideal for a Saturday. As a memory of other times, it had a statue of Lenin.

  Walking between flowers and shrubs, Juana suddenly said:

  “Would it bother you if I told you something about my life?”

  ”On the contrary,” I said. “I’ve been waiting for it for some time now.”

  She gave me an affectionate look, was silent for a few more steps as she pushed Manuel Sayeq’s stroller along a path, and at last began speaking.

  5

  INTER-NETA’S MONOLOGUES

  Some nights, when the sky was ablaze with distance storms, the Virgin Mary appeared to me. My room lit up and at the same time filled with dense shadows. Of course, she was quite different than the Virgin Mary who appeared to the three shepherd children of Fatima. Judge for yourselves.

  Mine arrived with a weary air and lay down on the couch in my bedroom. Pour me a whiskey, or whatever you have, Inter-Neta, hopefully above forty proof, which is the liquid temperature best adapted to my spirit. You know what I mean.

  She drank slowly, looking up at the ceiling, as if making a complicated mental calculation. The last time, she said to me: 11,186,986 girls stopped being virgins today, oh, if only you’d seen it … The youngest was seven years old and was raped by a priest, a filthy fellow who first stuck his finger in, made her suck it, then penetrated her. Don’t ask me for any more details, priests disgust me, they’re reptiles in human skin, like that Dickens character, I don’t know if you’ve read him, Uriah Heep, who always has cold hands.