Necropolis

by Santiago Gamboa

  Ramón walked to the door but she rushed to him and fell at his feet, embracing him. When he felt her his body quivered, and in a second she was kissing him and taking out his cock to suck it, saying, let me give you something, like any other whore; let me pay back the hurt I did you even if it’s with this, O.K.? She took off her clothes and lay down on the couch. He lay on top of her and finished in five minutes. He stood up and said, come, I’ll take you to the Carulla, or wherever you want to go, are you going back to the Plains today? No, said Soraya, I’m staying with a friend in La Soledad. Drop me at the Carulla and I’ll take a taxi from there.

  They rode without talking, without touching each other. Halfway, she asked: did you like it, at least? Ramón looked at her and said: yes, just like before, you’re very nice. Soraya smiled. If you like, we can do it again another time, just call me at this number and I’ll come wherever you say. Good, said Ramón, and dropped her at the Carulla. When she got out of the car he felt relieved. Then he said to the bodyguards and the driver: to the airport. That night he was back at home. He rubbed his crotch and lifted his hand to his nose, searching for her smell, and said to himself: the bitch, now she’s cheating on Jacinto because he won’t be out for at least ten years. It’s all backfired on him.

  The following week he called her and said, I want to see you, can you come? Of course, just like I said, tell me where. He sent her instructions and a ticket for Cartagena on Saturday, and that was where they met. They spent the day at the Hilton, hardly going out at all, because Ramón had not hired any security and he was afraid to walk with her on the street. As they lay in bed together, Soraya ventured to ask: why do you have so much money now? did you win the lottery or what? I owe it to my God, he said, who unexpectedly gives and unexpectedly takes away, and apart from that I work. And where do you live now, in Bogotá? Don’t ask me any questions, Soraya, after what they did to me I’ve become paranoid. O.K., Ramón, I’m sorry, I won’t ask you anything else.

  They met almost every weekend for a month, each time in a different city. Sometimes he would ask her to come to Cali, and without leaving the airport they would get on a plane for Pasto, without any warning. Then he would leave without telling her where he was going, leaving her a ticket to get home.

  Ramón continued to keep a close watch on the legal proceedings against Jacinto and Hernán and hired his own lawyer to process his accusation. One day he went to the Public Prosecutor’s Office to make a statement, and submitted to a long interrogation in which he answered questions about what had happened to him. They told him they would give him protection, but he said, I’ll accept it only from the airport to here, I can protect myself. One of the questions had been if he had any links with the FARC, which was what the prisoners, Dagoberto, Jacinto Gómez, and Hernán Mora, were saying, but he said, no, they’re just the same as the paras, why should I be with the FARC, Prosecutor, if I were, what happened wouldn’t have happened! They asked him why he had covered for Dagoberto when the police in Villavicencio had questioned him, and he said, because I was scared, because I was a coward, I had already seen the bodies thrown in ditches along the highway, that was the only reason, Prosecutor. When they asked him to tell them how he had escaped he saw that they did not believe him, it was not a very believable story, but that was how it had been and that was how he told it, and in fact the priest’s disappearance and kidnapping and the discovery of his body were all in the records, so they did not ask him again. What he did not mention to them, because he had realized it was not relevant to what they wanted to know, was Father Cubillos’s treasure in Barranquilla. Nor did he go into detail about his life in Panama, because he had read that the paras were everywhere and he was scared that someone in the Public Prosecutor’s Office would snitch on him.

  Fortunately, the evidence on the computer was irrefutable and the police had gotten to Dagoberto’s house in Lejanías. Of course when they asked him how he had found the computer he told them the truth; he had to give them the name of the agency in Villavicencio. Later he found out that they had summoned the detective to make a statement and that their versions tallied, so nobody ever mentioned it again.

  One Saturday he was with Soraya in Cartagena, eating in the restaurant of the Hilton, when he realized that a man he had seen that afternoon at the pool and later in the hotel shop was looking at them out of the corner of his eye. He immediately stood up, went out on the street, and hired a taxi to take them to another part of the city, the old part. From the taxi, he dialed a number they had given him at the Public Prosecutor’s Office, in case of emergency, and said that he was in Cartagena, and he thought he was being followed. They made him wait a while, and then the prosecutor said: don’t worry, Ramón, that person is there for your security, we’re keeping an eye on you. Oh yes? and how did you know I was at the Hilton? Oh, Ramón, said the prosecutor, you have no idea how much I know, just be grateful that we were the ones who tapped Soraya’s telephone.

  He went back to the hotel, got his things, and went to the airport, leaving her in the room. You aren’t in any danger, stay the weekend if you like. And he left.

  One morning he opened the newspaper and was stunned: it was announced that Dagoberto and Hernán Mora were being extradited to the United States, for drug trafficking, and that Jacinto had been sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. Immediately he called Soraya and asked her how she felt. Those bastards ruined my life, even Jacinto, I hope they rot, was what she said, and she added: I hope now you will calm down too, it was what you wanted, wasn’t it? It wasn’t what I wanted, it was what they deserved, Soraya. Don’t confuse the two things. He told her he wanted to see her, to celebrate this victory. She said all right, but that maybe it was the last time, because she had already paid enough.

  They met in Bogotá, where he had been taking steps through his lawyers to recover the ownership of the auto repair shops–they had put Arnulfo in prison too, but only for three years–and put them on sale. His idea was to take her to the Charleston, and he had called ahead to book a room, but as they were driving along the beltway, coming back from the center, two Silverados blocked the road and opened fire. The escort from the Public Prosecutor’s Office took shelter behind the wall of a building and returned fire. The shootout lasted twenty minutes. Ramón threw himself down on the floor of the car and did not move, because he knew it was armored. When they lifted him out he had a wound in the shoulder, as he had lowered the window a little and had been shot through it. Soraya, on the other hand, was sitting there, bleeding profusely. They changed cars and raced to the Hospital San Ignacio, but she was dead by the time they arrived. She had two bullet wounds in the head and one in the neck. The first shot may well have killed her. That was what the doctors told him. They also told him she was pregnant.

  He did not feel like crying, or rather, no tears came, even though he was sad. When you came down to it, they had all been victims.

  After he recovered, he had no desire to stay in Bogotá, so he went straight from the hospital to the airport. As the plane taxied to the runway to take off he felt that he was moving away from hell and death, and he said to himself, could they have located me in Panama? It was possible, but it did not worry him. Revenge had been the most important thing in his life; that had been his only reason for living in the last few years, and now it was over, with Soraya dead–even though that had not been his intention–and the others punished. What did it matter if they shot him down now on some street corner? He had accomplished his mission and could leave without remorse, as if he was saying goodbye to a country that had kicked him out, forever, because he also knew that he would never return.

  3.

  THE GARDEN OF RARE FLOWERS

  (AS TOLD BY SABINA VEDOVELLI)

  The life story I am about to relate is a harsh and sometimes even macabre one, so I hope there are no young people in the room. There are situations that the inexperienced or the innocent may find disturbing. I’m not sure of the conference’s policy on thi
s, and I shall certainly go ahead and tell my story anyway, but it might be a good idea to check at the entrance that all members of the audience are of legal age, at least for today. That’s my feeling at least, but of course it’s also possible, indeed quite likely, that these young people may simply find my story highly amusing. The world has changed a great deal and even the most atrocious things don’t seem to bother anybody. They may bother me, but then I’m from another era. Before tackling my life, with a wealth of detail and quite a few surprises, I should like to put paid to an idea I know many of you may have in your minds, which is that, due to the nature of the films I make, I’m nothing but a whore. You must disabuse yourselves of that, my friends, and I’ll tell you why. Sex on the set is a very distinct thing, because for all those involved in it, it’s a paid job. Simple as that. In the best spirit of capitalism, it’s all done for a third party who isn’t there, like a person who cooks delicious dishes for others, or who writes passionate verses for anonymous readers—who will usually reject them—or even the person who invents mortars and grenades that will kill and maim people he can’t see, or even imagine, but which will be real enough when the moment comes. My poet friends may not like to hear this. They’ll say it’s a far-fetched comparison, but then everything that I, Sabina Vedovelli, do is and has always been far-fetched.

  I know there are many rumors about me, but what nobody knows is that I myself am the source of them, since they make me seem larger than life, and the idiots who repeat them, thinking they’re hurting me with their vulgar comments, are merely inflating the sails of my ego, pushing the boat that little bit farther out. “When they fly I am the wings,” as Brahma says in that poem by Emerson. The result is that they keep talking about me. They can’t stop talking about me. And that makes me very happy.

  But let’s get to the story. I wasn’t always this woman who so many men today would like to have in their beds and who as she walks earns a string of lustful glances and throats being cleared and husbands scolded by their wives. I wasn’t always what I am. I was once a young girl and men scared me. That’s true. They scared me because they were as strange to me as bulls or scorpions, seeing as how I grew up among women, being an only child brought up by my mother and two aunts, all three of them abandoned by feckless men, who had moved from Naples to Rome and settled in a first-floor apartment on Via dei Monti di Creta, on the outskirts of the city, a long way from the center, next to a garden of pine trees called the Pineta Sachetti, where I used to play as a girl, until my mother met a short, stout man who spoke with a strange accent, and we went to Mexico City to live with him, and that’s why, when I speak Spanish, people think I’m Mexican.

  We lived in an apartment on Calle Ámsterdam, near the Parque Independencia, and I attended the Sor Juana high school. By the time I finished school, I was a demure young lady, and that was how I stayed, oh yes, I didn’t change until later, in another country, France no less, the land where the storks come from, the land of love, but also the land of the most revolting vice and licentiousness. I should point out that my mother left me to my own devices during vacations, she would give me money and airline tickets to wherever I liked, so as to leave herself free to have a great time in Veracruz or Acapulco with her lover, who was half businessman and half drug trafficker, from what I discovered later, although more the second of those than the first, so I went traveling around the world, almost always with the daughter of one of my aunts from Rome, my cousin Giorgetta, who was crazier than I was and did everything before I did.

  When I was eighteen and she was nineteen we went together to Paris, the city of vice and depravity. On the second day, through friends of Giorgetta, we ended up at a party thrown by a group of immigrants in Belleville, a party that lasted three days and where there was a lot of alcohol and drugs right from the start, although not for me, because I was very young and hadn’t yet picked up any bad habits. The group consisted of Jamaicans, Senegalese, and Spaniards who, if I remember correctly, were all studying with a Japanese friend of Giorgetta’s. It was just like a movie, I started seeing all kinds of strange things, a young guy with a hypodermic syringe hanging from his forearm, a woman lifting her miniskirt and injecting herself in the groin, another who was rubbing her nose against a mirror as she danced and crying in French, yes, yes, with the muscles of her face tense as wires, another man biting off half a pill and offering the other half to his girlfriend on his tongue and the girlfriend gobbling it up like a fruit, young girls wetting tampons in gin and sticking them in their bottoms, their faces all shiny with pleasure, people smoking some kind of brown tobacco from silver paper, tobacco that took the brain to another dimension, everything washed down with strong alcohol and, of course, hours later, when all modesty had been thrown out the window, I saw another kind of image, a young Jamaican penetrating a woman on a small table in the dining room, my cousin Giorgetta, behind the bathroom curtain, putting a penis in her mouth, a penis so black it looked like a clarinet, a man stroking another man’s ass as he danced, things like that, but I stayed as I was and only drank beer and a little Coke to keep going, and when I finally made up my mind to leave, and I’m telling you this so you can see the kind of bad influence I had to contend with, I went to look for my cousin and found her naked and bathed in sweat, having sex with her Japanese friend on the same flea-ridden mattress where a Senegalese guy was fucking a Spanish guy in the ass, which was quite a shocking scene for a young girl like me, if you see what I mean.

  When the party was over, we went back to the Japanese guy’s apartment and Giorgetta slept for something like a hundred hours in a row, and when she woke up she spent another three hours in the shower and then she came out and said, Sabina, let’s do something really crazy, and I said, crazier than that party? She looked at me pityingly and said, don’t worry, I’m older than you but I began at the age of thirteen, you’re too quiet, you know, you need taking out of yourself, come on, let me take care of it. We went to the house of another friend of hers, a Norwegian who was about ten feet tall, and he and Giorgetta talked for a while and he asked her, are you sure? and Giorgetta said, very sure, it’s what I want now, so the guy tied a rubber band around her forearm, burned a liquid in a spoon, put it in a syringe and injected her.

  Immediately, Giorgetta’s eyes rolled back and she started shaking, which got me quite nervous, but the Norwegian, whose name was Kay, said to me, don’t worry, she’s shaking with pleasure, it’s like having a hundred orgasms at the same time, do you want to try? I said no, I can’t feel a thousand orgasms because I still haven’t had my first, I’m a virgin. He opened his eyes wide and cried, really? and added, please don’t move, I want to take a photograph, you’re the first virgin I’ve met since I came to Paris, and then I asked, and what do you do? and he said, I’m a photographer, let’s see, stand over there. I heard the click of the camera and then a second click and a third, and then lots more, as many as the orgasms my cousin Giorgetta must have been having—by now she’d slipped off the couch and was lying on the carpet—thousands of clicks from a camera focused on my body, and I knew he desired me, and I started taking off my clothes, first my sweater, then my skirt, my blouse and my bra, and lastly my panties, my white virgin’s panties, and when I was naked Kay kept saying in French, parfait! parfait! and I could see the bulge in his pants getting bigger, so I said, take that off and let me see what you’re hiding there, and he showed it to me, and it was all pink and as big as an elephant’s trunk, with yellow hairs, and he said, you should suck it, it doesn’t taste bad, so I went to him and sucked it and it wasn’t too unpleasant, it tasted like rust or wet wood, so I carried on sucking and feeling his veins swelling until he said, open those thighs, I want to see what you’ve got, and he opened me with his tongue and I saw stars, he explored me with his finger and finally he put his penis in, which hurt me at first, but was quite nice after that and moved inside me very smoothly. Just as I was about to have my first orgasm he took it out and moved it up to my mouth and said, swallow
it, you’ll like it, and so I did, and he spurted a bitter liquid that burned my throat.

  When he withdrew, I grabbed his arm and said, where are you going? you haven’t finished with me, and I put his mouth back in my cunt and said, now suck and lick until I tell you, and he did as he was told, and one or two minutes later I felt a ray of light split my body in two and I screamed as much if not more than the girl in the movie Carrie when they tip the bucket of blood over her, and I lost consciousness, and when that huge volcano had stopped erupting and I returned to reality I saw Giorgetta looking at me through half-open eyes, and saying, did he fuck you or did he give you a fix? and I replied, the first, how are you? and she said, with her cheeks covered in drool, this is too much, it’s really intense, I can’t speak, I’m sorry, and she lay down on the carpet again and as she did so I noticed she was giving off a disgusting smell. I looked at Kay, who was just emerging from between my legs, and he said, don’t make that face, it’s normal to shit and pee when you shoot up for the first time, you’ll have to get used to it.

  I stood up and went to the shower and stayed there for nearly an hour, letting the hot water run over my shoulders, directing the jet of water at my pubis and hearing distant drums, everything was very new and the desire I felt for that man was irrational and probably unhealthy, what others call love at first sight or—which comes to the same thing—the intuition that somebody can destroy us, and so I said to myself, Sabina, when you finish your shower you have to get dressed, walk past Kay and take Giorgetta outside, take her away from Paris and back to Rome, where your aunts are; I felt I was on the edge of something very dangerous and on the verge of falling.

  But when I came out of the bathroom, what I saw made things even more complicated, because I saw Kay lying beside Giorgetta with the syringe in his forearm. They had both just injected themselves. From her position, it was obvious my cousin had taken another fix, so I went to the kitchen, made myself a chicken sandwich, had a Diet Coke and waited, how long would it last? After a while, I went to Kay’s room, which was filthy and was where he kept his rolls of film and developing equipment, and lay down facing an old TV set which was switched on but with the screen blank. I looked for the remote and when I pressed the button saw it wasn’t switched to a TV channel but to a movie.