First Round
The two bodies showed up in front of the building, close together, like they were asleep inside the blue car: lips pale and parted, jaws rigid. Donizetti imagined wax figures wouldn’t be much different. But that smell, he thought uncomfortably, covering his nose, detecting a hint of fetid water in the air.
He called Verónica to warn her: “Don’t bring Amanda down through the main door, take her to school through the parking garage exit. They’ve killed a woman and her son.”
He looked at his watch. A mechanical gesture. Seconds later, he’d already forgotten if it was early or late, if he could get to work, collect his travel allowance, and still pick up the briefcase at the right time. He asked a neighbor if she knew what time the shots were fired, and the lady answered in endless detail. Donizetti watched her out of the corner of his eye as she babbled on. She just couldn’t believe such a thing could have happened without her knowing.
He stepped forward a few feet, stretching his neck out to see better. Donizetti never understood why he stayed by the corpses or why, when the reporters got there, he just stood around between two elderly people waiting for information of no use to him. His coworkers at the agency wouldn’t cover the story. They all had instructions not to report on too many murders and the night before, during his shift, he’d done a story about a triple homicide in La Vega. Five sloppy paragraphs he ended up not sending in because a bus flipped over near San Cristóbal. Enough blood for a Sunday.
Donizetti felt the murky morning air from far away. But the moment the young photographer got there and shoved the child with his foot to get a better photo, a very present shiver ran from the nape of his neck down his spine.
The child remained nuzzled against the woman’s body. Donizetti could count the eight bullet holes that ran up his little belly toward his face, as if somebody had started sketching a tree on his skin.
Light rolled down the avenue like a ball of fire. The sun rose above the buildings. Donizetti backed up a bit to put a little distance between himself and the car. The woman was pale as parchment, the tip of her tongue stuck out between her teeth, and in the middle of
her face the reddish eye of a bullet hole flared.
He moved to the left because the reflection of the sun in the windows hurt his eyes. Something clenched in his stomach. He turned back to look at the child. He saw the small hand so clearly, a chubby little hand with chewed-off fingernails. That detail made him wince.
He quickly hailed a cab. As he got in, he had a coughing fit; it felt like a bug had jumped into his throat. The briefcase, I have to get the briefcase, he muttered to himself, and gradually sensed this routine of his filling him with a thick tranquility, a sweet somnolence.
Manuel and the River
I read it in a tweet: The Guaire is a lousy excuse for a river.
That sounded about right.
But maybe not exactly right. I was thinking about it this morning when I went to get some merchandise. In the middle of a traffic jam on the highway, I contemplated the Guaire’s molasses-like water, its stench and incandescent foam. Two or three very white egrets jumped as rats passed by in their search of scant morsels of food.
And why was I thinking about that river today?
No idea.
I thought about the Guaire like I sometimes thought about the Boxer, or about that radio series my sisters and I listened to a long time ago—Martin Valiente: The Godson of Death—or about the first time Aunt Felipa took me to Mount Sorte, or about the afternoons I spent studying with Donizetti and Reig, or more than anything else about the first full boxing match I got to see: an impotent Betulio González beating Miguel Canto, that strange boxer who attacked and attacked even as he backed up and gave the impression of running away.
Setbacks. Survival. Canto’s way of fighting. Going backwards but hitting hard.
But I was also thinking about the Guaire because a little while ago, as I was ordering display cases for the shoes that arrived that week, I had another one of my vivid daydreams. I found myself on a mountain and I could see a group of men who were redirecting the course of a river with a rock wall. I watched them as they were burying a person they’d put on top of a shining, solid gold table. Then the wall that had been holding the river back collapsed and the water returned to its course.
The vision continued, for how long I can’t be sure because I started hearing noises. My father was shouting furiously. A skinny guy with snakelike lips had just run out of the store after stealing a pair of shoes. I walked over to the register to get the 9mm, but then I realized that the guy had made off with a mismatched pair.
“If you ever come back to get the match, I will crack your head open,” I screamed loud enough for my father to hear as he huffed away with contempt.
A few days later I’d forgotten about the Guaire and the daydreams and I got to thinking about how friendship is always an unfinished project. I found the horrible jacket that Donizetti had given me years earlier. And then, just like that, I remembered Carlito Gutiérrez—a fighter who swore that one day he would be world champion. He sure fought like it was a foregone conclusion, but he never even made it to a title match. He just started shrinking. Bit by bit. Like great friendships. Without fanfare.
My friends: Donizetti, Reig, a few others, they all eventually got erased from my life like Carlito Gutiérrez’s hopes. Without any decisive moments.
I eventually started to dress more carefully, get better haircuts, and spend hours in the gym, where my body began to transform itself into the precise hardness of one of Praxiteles’s statues.
That’s what Félix saw in me.
We were together for fifteen years. We lived marvelously. He is in his house, with his family: wife, three kids, Christmas cards with a lit-up tree behind them. And me here. Alone. And whenever we could, we got together.
Until something happened.
Félix was making a big Greek salad when we heard seven gunshots go off in front of the building. I threw myself to the floor and kept on reading the newspaper as he crouched down with a hunk of feta cheese in his hand while pots and pans fell around him. Black eyeballs rained down on his back—the super expensive olives we’d gotten a friend to bring us back from Europe had fallen on the floor, he told me, and now we wouldn’t be able to eat them.
A few seconds later Félix leaned into the hall and asked emphatically for my binoculars. He spotted a wounded teenager next to the tire shop, a wine-colored pool seeping out of his back. I said they’d probably wanted to steal his shoes.
When I asked him if he’d finish making the salad, he threw the plates in the sink and rushed out.
He called two days later. He said he was going to come out of the closet, that he’d leave his family behind, and live with me. We could move to some inland city: Mérida, Coro, Porlamar. I hung up on him. I hoped it was a passing phase.
The next day he kept on insisting. I told him gently that I would never move out of Caracas.
And I had even less desire to have my picture taken beside a manger made in Taiwan and gold-foil-wrapped presents, or to see myself in poster-sized pictures of our vacation to Ibiza. Furious, he asked me how I could keep on living so peacefully in the wild west.
I didn’t want to talk to him anymore.
And it was around then that the daydreaming started up again—when the shoes in the store seemed to grow like monsters, when charmless encounters happened like the one with my old friend Donizetti, when I started to ask myself what had become of the Boxer or what space the Guaire River really occupied in my life. It was as if all the good times—working at the radio station, parties with beautiful people, once-in-a-lifetime vacations to distant cities, and my years with Félix—had vanished in just seven gunshots.
Thirtieth
The next morning, as Donizetti was taking Amanda to school, he started whistling a Paganini piece he’d heard earlier on the radio. Some of the measures sounded like tango to him. He smiled at the thought that music could have its own future without ever knowing it. He was moving along, distracted by these thoughts of musical passages and whether or not he should call Manuel, when a big, chubby guy came up beside him.
“Donizetti, my man, what are you doing here? It’s been a long time. Twenty years, at least.”
He stopped walking. He dredged up several names from back then, to see if one of them
would remind him of something familiar, but he stopped the moment he heard another voice behind him ordering him to walk toward a small Volkswagen parked to his right.
There were three of them. The one he supposedly knew sat down beside him in the back seat and the other two were up front; one of them was carrying a QSZ-92 and chewing mint-flavored gum. Donizetti half-closed his eyes. He prepared himself for another round of punches, but none of these guys seemed interested in assaulting him.
“Donizetti, my man,” the chubby guy to his right finally said, “You don’t know your way around here. Let us take you somewhere. We’ll drink some tamarind juice and you can tell us about a few things of interest.”
When they got to a narrow street and he saw a huge mural painted with the faces of Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, Sabino Arana, Jesus Christ and their own comandante, he understood that he was in the hands of the paramilitary group that controlled the area.
He felt a chill. No one in the government claimed control over these groups. First, because they were the comandante’s most fierce supporters. And then there was their firepower. They were the shock force that finished the jobs the National Guard couldn’t on its own.
Donizetti saw cameras on every corner. When they got to a plaza decorated with the statue of a Colombian guerilla fighter, they told him to get out of the car. He recognized the men he’d seen a few days earlier at the Casa Urrutia, and Dayana, the head of the International Desk at the agency.
“This way, compañero,” said one of the men. Donizetti sensed two others behind his back.
“You’re pale, Doni,” Dayana said.
“Don’t be afraid,” a bald guy with her told him. “We only want to have a little talk. You don’t interest us.
“Whatever you need…” Donizetti said quietly.
“Since when do you work for the Major?” the bald guy asked.
“I don’t work for him. I work for the news agency, as our friend Dayana well knows.”
The woman smiled fiercely and took out a cigarette, but the bald man gestured with his hand and she quickly put it back in a silver case.
“But you’re one of the Major’s people,” she said with a sweet voice.
“The Major’s people?” Donizetti repeated, and he stretched out each word trying to make his brain move faster than his speech so that he could choose the least compromising response. “We’re all the same people. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The bald man nodded.
“Of course, of course, but there are always diversions, pet projects, misunderstandings. They assigned a series of Cuban operatives to the Major that were under his command. It turns out three of them have escaped to Colombia, and the word is now they have an import business.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Donizetti cut him off.
“Of course. I thought as much,” Dayana responded, “but have you happened to see quantities of money being handled… that is… rather large quantities?”
“Again, no idea. The Major works at the agency, and I can’t tell you much more about his life. Maybe the Colonel can tell you, since he’s the director.”
“So you work for the Colonel?” the bald guy asked before taking a big swallow of tamarind juice.
“Well, like everyone at the agency, like Dayana here, like the Major himself, I suppose.”
“Don’t be a dickhead, Doni,” said Dayana impatiently, “You know very well that the Major is not below the director in the organizational flow chart.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s not in the organizational flow chart at all, nor is he part of a parallel organizational structure… or maybe he is above all of it, or below… It’s not our problem,” muttered Dayana. “But I do have the impression that he wasn’t pleased with you.”
“I cleared all that up.”
“And he didn’t ask you anything about some trucks filled with food?”
Donizetti breathed out sharply. Where was this coming from? What were they talking about now? “No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. This is the first time I’m hearing anyone mention food. I’ve been trying to buy a few pounds of cheese for weeks now and I still haven’t managed to.”
“And neither the Colonel nor Gonzalejo have talked to you about this?”
“Never.”
“If they were to do so sometime,” the bald guy intervened, “our lady friend here would be delighted to hear about it. Talk to her and tell her all about it… Oh, but ask the Major for your cheese, he can get it for sure, but I wouldn’t recommend eating it.”
The bald guy stood up. Behind him three men appeared, armed to the teeth. Donizetti felt his stomach lurch and a cold dampness spread down his back. He looked at one of the walls: The May 8th Collective. He supposed it was one of the groups that swarmed through the neighborhoods. He couldn’t tell them apart. They had a similar way of talking, but they all had different territories and wore distinct kinds of clothing. These guys wore black shirts with red bandanas and they looked like aged, obese boy scouts.
“I suppose you wouldn’t have any information about some Russian friends of the Major either, would you?”
“Nope.”
“Okay. We’ll take you home now. And not one word to anyone at the agency, or anywhere,” Dayana wrapped up.
He nodded his head and felt pins and needles in his feet. They pointed him to a motorcycle and a young man with an olive face ordered him to get on the back. He was about to tell them that he was afraid of motorcycles, but when he opened his mouth only a burp came out.
Maieutics
I think that’s what it’s called. Maieutics. A way of leading someone in such a way that they come up with answers on their own. And I did something like that with Donizetti. I pointed him in the right direction so that he could decode what I’d figured out the day before, when I’d been looking at the photos. A very simple clue that was hiding there among the beating wings of the bright butterflies that took me far too long to figure out.
…
“Come here for a minute. Let’s go to the altar,” I told him. “I know you don’t believe in these things, but it won’t do you any harm.” He followed me, looking exhausted. I pulled out some citrus tree branches. They were very dry. They must have been my Aunt Felipa’s. I closed my eyes. I asked him to stand up straight and put his arms out. I gave him several passes over with the branches and then prayed for him. “May la reina María Lionza clear the paths for you; may she poison the footsteps of those who wish evil upon you; may nothing harmful touch you,” I said loudly.
He thanked me. I saw the gray shadow over his brow dissipate a little.
It did him good.
He’d never admit it, but I’m sure that’s what saved him the next day.
My branches saved him. They protected him at the very moment the Reaper who runs loose in this city went at him, swiping furiously.
Translated by Barbara Riess
Original text from Los maletines (Ediciones Siruela, 2014)
