Night Prayers

by Santiago Gamboa

  In The Last Tycoon, Elia Kazan’s film of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter, the main character, played by Robert De Niro, twice tells the following story: a woman rushes home and empties the contents of her purse on the table in the entrance hall: change purse, glasses, a nickel, a brush, a box of matches, and a lipstick. Cursing, she grabs the nickel and the box of matches, and then nervously takes off her black gloves and throws them angrily into the gas stove. She lights a match and brings it close to the stove, but just as she is about to light it the telephone rings. The woman hesitates, curses again, and finally answers.

  After listening to something she shouts into the receiver:

  “I already told you, I never owned any damned black gloves!”

  She slams the phone down and goes back to the stove, is about to light it, but at that moment realizes that there is someone else in the room, someone who has seen what she has done.

  What’s going to happen next? And above all: what is the nickel for? “To buy a ticket for the movie,” says De Niro, because that’s where the story that has to be told starts.

  I go back to my question: have I, in fact, understood anything? The only answer is to keep searching for Juana, seduce her in the distance, maybe in another book or in another city. As Rimbaud said, pointing with his finger to the future: Et à l’aurore, armés d’une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides villes. The splendid cities. Stories happen there, maybe at dawn or late in the afternoon, in any case far from the blazing noonday sun. Will we reach them? Maybe we will enter that new city at dawn or before nightfall.

  So for now all that is left for me is to take my leave, just as in that old musical: So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen. Goodbye.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Santiago Gamboa’s debut came in 1995 with Páginas de Vuelta, which introduced his unique voice to Colombian readers. His English language debut Necropolis (Europa 2012) was the winner of the Otra Orilla Literary Award.