Night Prayers

by Santiago Gamboa

  I hooked up with Andrés Felipe and when we got back to Bogotá we started seeing each other, first in the airport motels and then at motels in La Calera; the ones at the airport were good but the noise of the planes wouldn’t let him talk on his cell phone. One day I was with him and Daniel called him, but he didn’t answer. Another day I got a call from Víctor, the Secret Service guy, and he said to me, where have you been, girl? I have a little gift for you, we’re going to party the whole weekend with my boss, and I said to him, okay, but I can’t talk now, I’ll call you in a little while, it’s great to hear from you; I was dying with fear that I’d be intercepted so I switched off the cell phone and said to Andrés Felipe, I have to go, darling, ciao, and he said, has something happened with Daniel? and I said, look, I don’t know if you know this, but I have a private life and sometimes things crop up, I’ll tell you later, I kissed him on the mouth and ran out in a panic, Víctor had never gotten me so scared before; I went to my friend’s house in Chapinero, changed clothes, oh, I didn’t tell you that I had different clothes for this guy and that guy and couldn’t leave them all at home; those for the advisers were high-class brand-name things that my friend kept for me.

  I put on something simple and provocative, and called Víctor. He answered right away, hi, doll, shall I send someone to pick you up? tell me where you are, and so that he shouldn’t suspect anything I answered, okay, darling, I’m at a girlfriend’s, they can pick me up on Third and 66th, on the steps outside Cinelandia, and he said, okay, Yesid will be there in the black van, and soon afterwards I was with them, Piedrahita drunk with Mireya on his knees, Víctor really stoned, not in a motel but in an apartment in the north of the city, near San Cristóbal, so I said, pretending to be happy, what an elegant party today! you should have told me to wear a long dress, and Piedrahita replied, no, sweetheart, this is a real stroke of luck, we’re going to hand back the apartment later, but for now we can enjoy it, it belongs to a fugitive we caught up with this afternoon, bang, bang! we took him down and found out he was loaded, isn’t that so, Víctor?, yes, boss, he said, really loaded, and he took out a roll of bills and put it in my pocket, four thousand dollars, I counted them later in the bathroom, and we started to drink and do coke and they sent Yesid out to fetch roast chicken with potatoes and melted cheese, which kind do you like, girls, Kokoriko, Cali Mío, or Distraco? Piedrahita asked, and Mireya said, oh, no, they’re rough, I heard Kokoriko gives you colitis, bring me Kentucky Fried Chicken, and with French fries please, and so we were there for three days more or less, Yesid going in and out with rib broth and oatmeal rolls and bringing bottles of aguardiente because, after a couple of days, Piedrahita and Víctor got tired of drinking whiskey and went back to the home-grown stuff, bring us some real hooch, Yesid! they screamed, and another day or two went by, I lost all sense of time, and there was also a jacuzzi and sauna and we’d get in them, all a bit messy with the chicken legs and the guacamole, but in one of our trips to bed I asked Víctor, was it a really good arrest? and he looked down at me and said, we hit it lucky, gorgeous, oh, yes? why’s that? I played dumb while I sucked him off and he kept talking, we caught four of them, all loaded, and we killed two, and you know what? the two we didn’t kill will be useful to us for something else, we have to deal with a journalist who’s making the chief nervous, a man who’s always sticking his nose in everywhere, the order came down from upstairs a while ago, we have to find something on him, but so far we haven’t found a thing, the guy’s cleaner than a nun’s panties. With those two guys we’re going to put something together to make sure he keeps quiet, what they’re going to tell the prosecutor is already being written, anyway, don’t go thinking this is some low-level thing, gorgeous, the orders come from all the way upstairs, that’s why the prize is so good, they left the booty to us, and so I asked him, and the two men who are going to make statements, what will happen to them, will they be sent to prison? and he said, we’ll hide them for a while and then bang bang, that’s the safest way, or rather, that’s what the order is from upstairs, my God, in this country life isn’t worth anything, can you do me a line of coke, doll? and so he continued talking, about this and that, until we heard Piedrahita yelling, and we went out to see what was going on and he was in his underpants, with his gun in his hand, shouting, Yesid! open the other bag, Mireya needs more coke, and then he turned up the volume on the stereo, some horrible reggaeton, the apartment was like a dance hall in La Caracas, and Víctor said to him, turn it down, chief, the neighbors are going to complain, and that only made him worse, let those sons of bitches come and I’ll shoot them in the mouth, or in the ass, don’t be paranoid, Víctor, the walls are soundproof, or do you think these dealers don’t party? Maybe the coke doesn’t agree with you, right? what are you drinking? and he grabbed a bottle of twenty-five-year-old Chivas or one of Blue Seal and filled the glass to the brim, and said to him, go on, chill out, and he went back to the bedroom where we could see Mireya with a very strange thong stuck between her buttocks and with a huge belly in front, and Piedrahita said, wow, what a big black mama, did I tell you we’re trying for a kid? and he went back to the bedroom.

  It’s getting harder all the time, Víctor said, the chief’s very nervous, they’re putting pressure on him from upstairs, he went crazy again on this operation, he smashed the skull of one of the guys with the butt of his pistol, I had to grab him to stop him still hitting him when he was already dead, chief, chief, the man’s already gone, leave him, because Piedrahita goes crazy sometimes, he acts like a lunatic, and I get scared, because I’m his pupil, anyway, after the thing today they may promote me, the top brass were very pleased and they’re already giving out statements to the press; there’s a guy in the office who’s a champion with stories, we call him the poet: he’s the one who arranges things so that they look good, because in this country you have to fight with everything you have, those terrorists are worse than scorpions and they’ve been really hounding us, just imagine, they got two friends of ours last month, you can’t piss around with these people, you fuck them before they fuck you, you see? my language is getting damaged from going around with Piedrahita, I wasn’t always this way, vulgar like him, a pity he’s my chief because I can’t correct him, and the worst of it is, I come out with these words in front of my wife and children, and so I asked him, for the first time, how old is your wife? and he said, twenty-nine, and the kids seven and five, a boy and a girl, the girl’s the older of the two. He took out a photograph from his billfold and I saw them, two really ugly kids, to tell the truth, because that’s typical of Columbia, Consul, how ugly poor children are, don’t you think, I like them when they’re bigger, and it wasn’t that Víctor was poor, he had bags of money from the seizures, but he was humble, his mother had a grocery store in a little town in Boyacá, anyway, I didn’t tell him what I thought about the children, but the opposite, obviously, how beautiful, the boy looks just like you, and he said, oh, gorgeous, now you really got me, and he took out another roll of dollars and said to me, look, doll, just to show how much I appreciate you, and he gave it to me, another two thousand, he must have been carrying six thousand with him, that was the good thing about big seizures.

  Then I started searching on the Internet to see what had happened. In the case of that party that lasted for four days, plus two for recovery, they had taken out a straw man with money from drug trafficking, but fronting for FARC; not long afterwards it was said that one of the prisoners had accused a journalist, and that everything was corroborated in some e-mails, that he’d been paid I don’t know how many dollars and that the Secret Service was still investigating why that journalist had attacked the government, especially a minister, they suspected that FARC was behind it, a conspiracy, in other words, that was the language they used at the time, do you remember that, Consul?

  In spite of the atrocities, nothing ever happened to Víctor or his chief. They didn’t feel they were in any danger, quite the contrary: they thought they were heroes, and the
worst of it is, they probably were. Heroes of that horrible country. I listened to their stories, they whacked these people, took those out, charged this one, fabricated evidence against another, arrested someone they had previously protected, threatened others, and so on. One day they took me to a party with other people from the Secret Service and there I realized that they were all in the same game. They were playing to kill. They were plainclothes policemen and they felt protected. For the chief they had various nicknames: Big Boss or Chief White Feather.

  Every time I heard of someone they’d killed, I’d tell myself, people like me or my brother, people who remain buried forever on patches of waste ground, abandoned, how solitary that is, dying on a patch of waste ground, without anybody knowing where, don’t you think? That’s what happened to most of those they caught because, according to Víctor, there were a hell of a lot of traitors in the country, and that’s why they had to kill them. And, seeing him with Piedrahita, I’d say to them in my mind, you still think you’re gods, carry on while you can, sons of bitches, because very soon you’ll be singing a different song, and I continued paying attention and preparing my revenge, making accounts and calculations.

  The first thing was to get Manuel out of the country and send him to Europe to study film. My dream was to pay for the education he wanted, not philosophy anymore but film, I wanted him to become a great director, and to make that possible I’d put myself through hell. I saved and saved, but of course, I also had expenses. I set myself the target of a hundred thousand dollars; I even thought to ask Víctor, telling him it was to help my brother to study, but then I had second thoughts: best not to tell him anything about myself or talk to him about our plans, which were the one beautiful thing in my life.

  At home, I kept lying: that I’d been on a field trip to study a native community in the Montes de María, where there was still an ongoing situation with the guerrillas and the paramilitaries, and Mother would cry, oh, my God, Juana, and did you see terrorists from FARC? and I’d say, to pull her leg, of course, Mother, the work was with them, and Mother would lose her temper, and say, oh, daughter, you’re proving me right, I said it from the first day you went to that training camp they call a university, didn’t I? But Father would defend me, calm down, Bertha, can’t you see the girl’s pulling your leg? And then it was time to go to bed, and when there were no more sounds in the house I’d go to Manuel’s bedroom and say to him, what do you think? what do you see? tell me those beautiful things you have in your head, and then he’d hug me and cover my eyes with his divine hands and say: there’s a new constellation, a different sky where there are no stars, only volcanoes, and you and I are sitting on the edge of one of those volcanoes watching the others spit out lava, that’s what I see; the lava looks like liquid gold; there’s a terrible silence in the constellation and the eruptions boom, but we’re calm, there’s a refreshing wind and what reaches us is the echo, an echo that comes from a long way away, and then, Consul, I’d close my eyes and listen to him talking, and Manuel’s words, those worlds he had inside him, existed because he existed, and I’d fall asleep, dreaming of those skies and those volcanoes, he and I in each other’s arms. I could see him not only through his words, but because he painted them on the local walls, floating in the air, or in the water of the sea, solitary planets filled with volcanoes, that was his beautiful world. On those nights I was very happy, you can’t imagine how happy, but it made me anxious, being so happy, so terrifyingly happy. That’s why when I say that he liked movies I thought: finally I’ll be able to see our story, more of what he has inside, and I’ll be able to protect him, I was strengthened in the thought of making all these sacrifices, I’d do whatever it took to get there, even rob a bank.

  I saw myself going with Manuel to the premiere of his first film, in Cannes or Venice or San Sebastian, and then I fell asleep, cradled by these fantasies, and the following week I continued with renewed strength, in order to save money, to live without fear, and I answered the calls from Andrés Felipe, who always came back on the attack when I was with Víctor, as if he had radar, and I’d arrange to see him and we’d fuck like crazy and I’d listen to his stories about his frigid wife, just so that he would trust me, because I couldn’t forget the face of that woman in Soacha and the promise I made her, you know? I’m a person with fixed ideas and if I tell someone I’m going to do something I do it, that poor woman and her son, I could imagine all too well where he might be, or rather his bones, because that damned country is built over a grave, wherever you dig you find bones, we’ve spent years digging up bones and looking for their names, and even now they keep coming out, it’s horrible, but you know what I’m talking about, don’t you?

  One day I called Andrés Felipe on his cell phone and said, what’s up, are you getting bored with me? Quite the contrary, darling, he said, I was just thinking to call you and ask you to go with me to a convention in Cartagena, do you like Cartagena? and I said, oh, how wonderful, I have a new bathing suit, and he said, bring it with you because we’re going to the Santa Clara, the most beautiful hotel, and so we went, what kind of convention? I asked, and he said, what do you think, darling, a convention of advisers, and I said to him, hell, it’s pretty good being an adviser, but when we got there I realized that it was much more about security, a private thing, not open to the public, they were meeting with gringos, security advisers, and I almost had a heart attack when I heard Andrés Felipe say that the head of the Secret Service was with them, because the president was going to be there on the third day, he himself had called the meeting, that’s why I had to stay in the hotel, a bit hidden, the meetings were in private places and it wasn’t good for him to be seen with a strange girl, he explained to me, but I said to him, it’s your loss, and I’d go for walks and buy crafts, although feeling anxious, hell, if the head of the Secret Service was coming, there must be a whole security setup, and what if Víctor and Piedrahita came there and saw me? No, no, I told myself, they’re in Narcotics, but I was scared all the same, I wasn’t doing anything bad but they were law enforcers and saw the bad in everything, it was best to be careful, so I spent the afternoon walking around and at night I went to the hotel to wait for Andrés Felipe, and when I asked him how it had gone he was angry, angry with the gringos who were giving them lessons and angry with the guy from the Secret Service, who said the problem was that they had to respect the rights of the people, and in a country like ours, a country at war, either you fought to win or you protected rights, and of course, Andrés Felipe, who had done courses at Princeton, felt bad, he didn’t like that way of thinking, but he had to swallow it, because the order was to follow the instructions of the gringos, but then, when the gringos left, the very same chief had said to them, well, boys, now you know what you have to do, the terrorists are among us, not only in the mountains, if only they’d stayed there to be machine-gunned, but no, now they go around in ties in the corridors and offices of the Supreme Court, in the newsrooms of the press, in the universities, in the trade unions and NGOs, and there we can’t machine-gun them, the war consists in bringing them out into the light, so we’re going to spy on them, listen to what they say on the telephone, and since this struggle is relentless and has to be won quickly, it’s important to hurry things along with witnesses and testimonies, we can’t wait for the terrorists to fall by themselves, it’s a way to save the lives of our countrymen, are you listening to me? does anyone disagree? And everyone said, no, no! dying of fear, that’s what Andrés Felipe told me, because according to him that’s what they felt when faced with the Supremo, fear, a guy so cold and authoritarian, with that icy look, devoid of scruples, like that of a snake about to bite, and they all went out to obey him. Nobody can say a word against it, he said, but later, with a few drinks in him, smoking a joint after we’d had an amazing fuck on the terrace, Andrés Felipe told me that the chief was a hard person, true, but he was also intelligent and loyal, and sometimes he made people do ugly things but the result in the end was good,
what’s that phrase? oh, darling, you must know it, for sure, the end what? and I said, the end justifies the means, hell, don’t you know something as simple as that? God knows what the advice you give must be like …

  Then, in his doped-up soliloquy, Andrés Felipe told me that his family had been friendly with the president for several generations, and that in spite of that there were things he didn’t agree with, although he knew they were necessary, especially when it came to contacts with the people in blue, that was what he called them, and I asked, and who are the people in blue, darling? and he rolled another joint and took a slug of whiskey and said, who do you think, precious, do I need to draw you a picture? of course every time someone is denounced we put him under surveillance, we dig up what we can about him, because I do think there are moments in history, History with a capital “H,” when you have to choose sides and take risks, you have to stand up and be counted, do you understand me? and like a submissive girl, bowing down before him, I said, of course, and I asked him how about you, what risks are you taking in this war? and he answered, well … do you think what I do is nothing? standing side by side with the chief, advising him about things I myself don’t agree with, carrying messages, exchanging information, protecting the cause, all the things I wouldn’t do, for example, if we lived in Switzerland or Costa Rica or the United States, countries that don’t put you up against the ropes, but what can we do, we live in Colombia and this brave little country we like so much forces us to do complicated things, do you understand me? And I said, yes, of course I understand, I have a friend who says the same, and why do you like this country so much? I asked, and he said, well, because it’s mine, why else do you think? I love this fucking country, or rather, if you cut one of my veins what would come out is … Colombia! no more, no less, isn’t it the same with you? and I said, no, what comes out of me is blood, but I understand you, and to stop him looking at me suspiciously I lit his joint and slid over him and started fucking him again until he looked me in the eyes and said, all romantic, or rather all mushy, oh, Juana, you’re the bright star of my soul, the light of my life, what do you call what we’re doing? and I answered, fucking, and he said, oh no, that’s vulgar, this is making love! really, don’t you feel the same or what? and I said, of course I feel the same, we both have genital corpuscles in our mucous membranes, and he said, no, come on, are you giving me a college lecture or what? and he kissed me, and said, come here, my beautiful genius, if I didn’t have those three kids I swear I’d leave my wife and I said to him, don’t leave your wife, don’t even think about it, those kids deserve everything.