Anyway, by this point I was heading back downstairs, having witnessed Flores’s patricide, his matricide, his nannycide. I admit I was a little shocked, but I don’t know why I suddenly thought, ‘A bond of death unites us in this and every rumba. I wonder what the others are capable of?’
Oh, I had high hopes for my generation!
Lanky Flores was grooving with a girl dressed in vivid red, but in the end he looked alone and ridiculous in the middle of the dance floor. Misery Guts, convinced I was traumatized by what I’d seen, kept murmuring comforting little words.
‘Can you shut up about it now,’ I snapped, gazing at the serene guitarist on the far side of the dance floor. ‘Do you mind? You’re ruining the rumba for me.’ Ricardito shrivelled with embarrassment and I thought, ‘Why has it taken me so long to realize the only support I’m getting here tonight is from the only guy playing music?’ I didn’t think twice about leaving Ricardito to wallow in his guilt and strode over to the guitarist, feeling a prickle of passion in my hips. ‘He’s the most fascinating guy I’ve ever met,’ I decided, and without a second thought I flung myself into his arms, not caring that I’d forced him to stop mid-song, determined to make him realize how fragile I was, how much in need of consolation. And oh, joy, the first word he spoke to me was in English. Then he stopped himself and apologized. ‘No, no,’ I said, ‘I like it. If you’d speak to me in English all the time … if only you’d teach me …’ And then, my terrible confession. ‘I’m so ignorant.’
He accepted this resignedly. Or was the trade-off he suggested just an act? ‘In that case you can be my guide to the city,’ he said, and I reminded him I’d already offered to help.
By the time we left the rumba, there were only two guys left standing: mine, and the host. After I had left him to his tragic fate, Ricardo behaved like such a prick that within half an hour everyone at the party hated his guts and wanted to punch him. Oblivious to his terrible shortcomings, he kept banging on about how he missed the old days, the proper parties, not this tedious shit, about how no one here, not a single person here, was worthy of him, what with him being – as he put it – a young man with an ‘intellectual background’, and at that point they finally gave him a good kicking while he whimpered about how he was a future poet, how he wished he’d been born back in the days when party guests were judged by their intelligence and not on their … Who knows what bullshit he would have come out with if someone hadn’t knocked him out.
By the time I left, they’d dumped him outside and he was curled up asleep on the ground. ‘He’s probably resting,’ I thought, then said: ‘He hasn’t had a decent night’s sleep in ages.’ Then out of sheer spite, I kicked him in the ribs. He didn’t feel a thing. He protested or apologized to himself, huddling into the ‘classic foetal position’, to quote Mariángela, who’d been disappointed by the lack of charm and stamina displayed by the guys at the party. The girls were desperately trying to revive their boyfriends, fast asleep, their mouths hanging open, defending them by saying they were just big babies.
‘Babies, my ass!’ spat Mariángela. ‘Don’t watch over this sleep of fools. Kick them awake!’
It was a simple fact that, at the end of every rumba, the girls were the only ones left standing, the only ones who managed to stay sane.
And so we stepped out into the new day, the second day of my story. Leopoldo put his arms around me and shivered with cold. Perversely, I decided, ‘There’s no cold. What there is, is a vast immensity.’ I wasn’t wrong. Beyond the park, which like I said was angular (scattered pine trees fashioned into cubes and other geometric forms), stretched a perfect field of colour that began in the mountains, a reflection of the sun rising in the east – somewhere I never look because I know in that direction there’s no end and that terrifies me. Grey as they were, the mountains rose up dark blue and deep red the colour of sapodilla fruit. It took some time to wade through this creeping swathe of colour, through the low mist exhaled by the damp earth, and Leopoldo said, ‘It’s the sort of scene you’d imagine leading into the House of Usher, not away from it.’ Even without music, his words were beguiling. (‘Corpses walled up behind mirrors,’12 I thought). ‘He’s a poet,’ I thought. ‘He’ll write brilliant lyrics.’
Mariángela loped along, bewildered, her hands buried in the pockets of her jacket; I think she felt the glimmering light of the mountains in every fibre of her being. The girl was bizarro. Admitting to being excited by music infuriated her. Recognizing she had more staying power than anyone at a rumba embarrassed her, like it was an unseemly occupation.
‘I don’t understand you any more,’ I told her towards the end of the last days when, frankly, her apathy no longer annoyed me, it bored me, and I’d stopped joining in her insults when some boy insisted she dance with him.
She had a lovely way of walking and as I watched her, arms wrapped around my guitarist, perhaps I understood some small part of her pain: the same vast immensity that made me feel light and lissom completely engulfed her.
I should mention we were walking in the opposite direction from my house. I hadn’t said anything, though I knew Mariángela wanted more music. But where could we go?
‘I don’t live far,’ said Leopoldo. ‘I’m from the heart of El Nortecito.’ Which earned him a grateful smile from me (something that took some effort at this hour of the morning, when a thousand things were flitting through my head), because to me his words meant: ‘He lives alone.’
I abandoned – my God – the idea of abandoning them and going home to my own bed. I don’t know whether this was the moment I decided that never again would I greet the new day through the slats of my venetian blinds.
After the party, Leopoldo didn’t smell of smoke, he smelled of grass from some cold climate. And I thought, ‘He comes from far-off lands, from a northern country where he’s been better fed.’ A stupid thought which only made me hug him harder, behaving like this guy next to me really was my boyfriend.
He never actually invited anyone back to his place, but Mariángela knew the house and led us there. It was on the corner of Avenida Séptima and Veinticinco. As he deftly slipped the key in the lock and opened the door, I thought, ‘His parents’ old house, a Versalles house, but his parents are gone now; they’ve left it to him so he can live here alone. I bet the interior design is acrylic and ultra-modern.’
Just then we heard a terrible wail like the howl of a wounded wolf (who wouldn’t think of a werewolf or a wolf cub as the dawn is breaking?) that came from deep inside the Parque Versalles, which was at least seven blocks away. It was Ricardito opening his eyes and venting his horror, sprawled on the ground, as he faced the new day.
These are just lies, I tell myself, but what if I say that at that moment it was as though dawn was interrupted, as though time ran backwards? My father loved to explain how soundtracks could be added to silent movies filmed in 16fps, by duplicating frames, which produced something like a panning shot, a ‘pan’, to use the technical term. Ricardito’s distant howl of pain that morning produced the same effect. Pain, pan, one short step. The newspaper boy pedalling his bike froze; the baker stood transfixed, hand squeezing a loaf of bread, and later felt no shame about selling the squashed and mangled loaf; even the creeping mist congealed (we risked ending up embedded in glass or ice) and Leopoldo, who’d already waved us inside, turned and looked at me, bewildered, because it was obvious this bloodcurdling howl came from somewhere near the house we’d just left; I think maybe he thought, ‘This city is dangerous, weird shit happens here.’ I brayed and threw my head back as though someone had slapped me. ‘Poor Ricardo,’ I thought. ‘If he’d woken up and found me beside him, he wouldn’t have howled like that.’
And then time returned to normal, especially since, like I said, these are just lies I tell myself. No one else noticed this strange phenomenon; may
be I did only because I had a connection with Ricardito, something that didn’t much matter to me otherwise. Anyway, the howl of some gloomy bastard can’t bring the day to a standstill, not even for two frames, no matter how miserable he is. Mariángela was the only one who didn’t react, for her there was no pause, which makes me think she was the first to hear the cry, she always had unusually keen senses. But maybe she lacked a sixth sense, the one that all women have. She lacked a sixth sense and that’s why she killed herself.
Anyway, she sat back, buried her hands in her pockets right up to the elbows and simply listened to that long terrible wail. All she could think to say was: ‘Well, that should wake up the other pinheads.’
And I said, ‘Ricardito will be insufferable today. He’ll shamble around town like a dead man and, since he always remembers everything, he’ll come looking for us to apologize.’
‘Apologize for what?’
‘For behaving like a dickhead in front of everyone. For nearly shitting himself at the rumba.’ I said this as we climbed stairs carpeted with flowers and little birds and stepped into a hall dominated by a huge poster of people being blown away by the vibes at some concert. While Mariángela, lost in thought, collapsed into the first available inflatable chair, I looked around hungrily. Everywhere there were pictures of idols, a photograph of Salvador Dalí standing next to Alice Cooper, walls painted in rippling waves of startling colours and I thought, maybe I even said aloud, ‘Wow, this is some pad!’
Leopoldo, ever attentive, was already putting on music. A simple action whose effect, though I can explain it, I can’t begin to measure. From the four corners of the vast living room and, as I later discovered, from every corner of the house, poured beauty, perfectly distilled, into precise doses, a guitar gently played, so high, so high. It was the most exquisitely recorded album I’ve ever heard, the most pristine and powerful sound, the most electrifying song, and I confess I didn’t have the strength to give thanks for such exaltation. I stood in the middle of the room, a defenceless witness to this fantasy. I didn’t need to formulate the words to know the tangled skein of music was my destiny.
Each of us is a trajectory, constantly changing course, trying to recover the crumbs of the strength that once was ours and has been shamefully discarded along the way or entrusted to (and never returned by) those who didn’t deserve it. Music is the creation of a generous spirit that (with or without effort) gathers this primeval strength and restores it to us, not so that we might have it, but to prove that strength is still out there somewhere, that the poor thing misses me. I am fragmentation; music is each of the tiny splinters that once were part of me and which I randomly scattered. I can be standing before one thing and thinking of a thousand others. Music is the solution to the problem I cannot see while I’m wasting time looking at things: a book (these days I can’t get beyond two pages), the line of a skirt, of a grille. But music is also time regained that I have wasted.
It’s the musicians who tell me how much time, and how and where. Innocent and naked, I am but a simple, attentive ear. They hold out the reins of the universe. Politely, to me. A song that never grows old is a universal decree that my faults have been forgiven.
How then could I not be grateful for this grace? Confronted with this wonder, Mariángela stretched her whole body and breathed calmly and deeply. I went over to her, stroked her little head; we looked at each other, saw through each other, our eyes melting into one expression as Leopoldo announced, ‘Quadraphonic sound, speakers in every room.’
I went over to him, to thank him in the name of technology. I kissed him and he wouldn’t let me walk away, he kissed me on the mouth. I turned and looked at Mariángela: her eyes were closed. I turned back and kissed him on the lips.
Lips are flabby flesh, this I know. Sleek worms coiled about teeth which, I also know, are an error of nature. But this was the first kiss I ever enjoyed in my whole life. He hugged me and my hair twined with his hair, which was the colour of ripe hazel. When we tried to pull away so we could see ourselves in this moment of passion, we discovered we couldn’t because our hair was knotted together, and that’s not some kind of literary metaphor, I’m just faithfully describing the abundance of our strength. This mane of hair I flick today for the benefit of some unsuspecting passer-by is not even the shadow of what it once was. Or rather it’s precisely that: a shadow. And yet with this hair I bring light to people in this inky night. What a drag – the moon is full tonight but it’s hidden by treacherous clouds.
Mariángela could see our love, or she could sense it, I know that.
I thought, ‘I’m going to be the first nice middle-class girl in Cali to leave home to go live with her boyfriend. People will realize that in the States everyone does it.’
I collected a couple of my favourite shirts from my house, some pants and nothing else. At first, I missed the mirror with the crack down the middle. I wore his clothes, which were all unisex, my size and my style.
I’d always thought that the sexual act was, how can I put it, a collaborative effort. At noon I always felt an absence, one half of a man out there searching for me, guided by the knowledge that he could not be sure I existed. The guitarist turned out to be that man, but I could not complete him. I’ve thought and thought about this and finally I decided men don’t enjoy sex. In the end I was terrified at the thought that this thing of his, this thing he slipped inside me (if the reader will forgive me), was mine; that without seeing it, almost without touching it, I knew it better than he did. I taught him how to use it, how to let himself go deeper without hurting himself, because I never felt any pain, never felt tired, and they never managed to fill me, the poor guys, no matter how they emptied themselves. They seek us out, but for what? So they can cry afterwards the way he cried? He complained about the ache in his thighs, in his neck, in his head. I’d look at him coolly, bright-eyed as ever, waiting – though I never said this – for him to want to be drained again. Or sucked off? No, I’d never think such a thing. He couldn’t get over the satisfaction of seeing me writhing and moaning and sighing under him or on top of him, but the pain would always curb his arrogance. It never stopped hurting him. I’d tried (a little snobbishly) to get him to explain exactly what sort of pain it was, but he’d just look at me, screw up his mouth and his eyes, then pull away and pick up the guitar. Watching him pull away, already whistling a song that wasn’t his, I thought, ‘It hurts because he knows I could rip his prick out by the roots if I wanted.’ In the brutal moment of passion, obviously. In the end, love’s not that important. Here I’m quoting Mariángela, who waited patiently, listening to heavenly music, while I was losing my virginity and he was whimpering at every vicious scratch, every cruel bite; at least that’s what it felt like I was doing to him on the first waterbed (Made in USA) I’d ever seen in my life.
We listened to music for twelve hours straight, then all three of us went out; him and me with our arms wrapped around each other, Mariángela prodding people with a stick she found. It did not surprise me that when we got to Avenida Sexta, Misery Guts Ricardito arrived; eyes bulging with panic, he said, ‘I’m going round talking to everyone to find out if they’ve forgiven me for my appalling behaviour last night. I need them to understand I wasn’t myself; either that or there’s one last hope: that no one remembers anything. You guys don’t remember seeing me, do you? You’ve no idea what Misery Guts got up to last night, you don’t remember?’
‘We don’t remember,’ I said, just to keep the jerk happy. ‘I don’t remember what you did and I don’t care where you ended up.’
‘I ended up sleeping on the ground like a dog,’ he whimpered as though he was criticizing our poor memories, to boot.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘We don’t all have your memory.’
‘That’s true,’ he nodded, looking touched and quite proud. ‘I have got an ama
zing memory.’
Mariángela burst out laughing and Ricardo was clearly hurt by this, but I think we’d managed to calm him down a bit and he told us he had to get going, his feet marking time. He headed off in search of more rumours of his disgrace, more witnesses to his humiliation. Since there were, like, thirty people at the party, it probably took him quite some time to track them all down and apologize.
At any rate, I never saw him again. I heard he started deliberately disturbing his parents’ sleep, letting out bloodcurdling shrieks in the middle of the night, and in the end they had him sectioned. But not in England’s green and pleasant land, as he would have liked. They had him committed to San Isidro; I mean, he was a local head-case. Other people say he didn’t stay there long, but no one knows exactly where he is now. Nobody knows the whereabouts of poor Misery Guts. There were rumours he and his mother went on some trip incognito and she came back alone, more beautiful than ever. I’m sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye to him. I don’t know whether he lost it first or whether I closed myself off. But one morning, by registered post, I received a piece of paper with the following information:
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