Outwardly the ceremony is like a Latin American pilgrimage, but perhaps more joyful, more turbulent, and for the participants, those who know what they're participating in, the experience is probably more intense. But there is one major difference. A few days before the festivities begin, they castrate the boy. The god whose incarnation he is to be during the festival requires a male body-although the boys are usually no more than seven years old — purified of male sexual organs. So the parents hand him over to the festival doctors, or barbers, or priests, and they emasculate him, and when the boy has recovered from the operation, the festival begins. Weeks or months later, when it is all over, the boy goes home, but now he is a eunuch and his parents reject him. So he ends up in a brothel. These brothels vary; there are all sorts, said The Eye with a sigh. That night, they took me to the worst one of all.
For a while we said nothing. I lit a cigarette. Then The Eye described the brothel for me and it was as if he were describing a church. Covered interior courtyards. Open galleries. Cells from which hidden eyes watch your every move. They brought him a eunuch who couldn't have been more than ten years old. He looked like a terrified little girl, said The Eye. Terrified and taunting at the same time. Do you understand what I'm saying? Sort of, I said. We fell silent again. When I was finally able to speak I said, No, I have no idea. Neither do I, said The Eye. No one can have any idea. Not the victim. Not the people who did it to him. Not the people who watched. Only a photo.
You took a photo of him? I asked. A shiver seemed to run down The Eye's spine. I got out my camera, he said, and I took a photo of him. I knew I was damning myself for all eternity, but I did it.
I don't know how long we sat there in silence after that. I know it was cold and at one point I began to shiver. Once or twice I heard The Eye sob beside me, but I didn't want to look at him. I saw the headlights of a car driving down one side of the square. Through the foliage I saw a light come on in a window.
Then The Eye went on with his story. He said the boy smiled, then quietly slipped away down one of the passages of that baffling edifice. At some point a pimp suggested that if none of the boys took his fancy, they should go. But the Eye said no. He couldn't leave. That's what he said to him: I can't leave yet. And it was true, though he didn't know what was stopping him from walking straight out of that lair. The pimp, however, seemed to understand and ordered tea or some such beverage. The Eye remembers that they sat down on the floor, on mats or worn-out rugs. The room was lit by a pair of candles. A poster of the god hung on a wall.
For a while The Eye looked at the god and at first he felt fear, but then he felt something like rage, or perhaps hate.
I have never hated anyone, he said, lighting a cigarette and blowing the first breath of smoke out into the Berlin night.
At one point, while The Eye was staring at the image of the god, the others disappeared, leaving him alone with a male prostitute about twenty years old, who spoke English. Then, summoned by a couple of claps, the eunuch reappeared. I was crying, or thought I was, said The Eye, or maybe that's what the prostitute thought, poor kid, but none of it was true. I tried to keep a smile on my face (although it wasn't my face anymore, I could feel it drifting away from me like a leaf on the wind), and all this time, underneath, I was scheming. Not that I had a plan, or any idea of redress, just a blind determination.
The Eye, the prostitute, and the eunuch stood up and walked down a dimly lit corridor, then another more dimly lit still (the eunuch at The Eye's side, watching him and smiling, the prostitute smiling at him too, as The Eye nodded and emptied the money from his pockets into their hands) until they reached a room in which the doctor was dozing beside a boy who was younger than the eunuch, maybe six or seven years old, and had darker skin, and The Eye listened to the doctor's long-winded explanations, invoking tradition, ritual, privilege, communion, elation, and saintliness, and he could see the surgical instruments with which the child would be castrated the following morning or the morning after; in any case the child had come to the temple or the brothel that day, he gathered — a preventive or hygienic measure — and had eaten well, as if he were already the god's incarnation, although what The Eye saw was a drowsy, tearful child; the eunuch was still at his side, with a half-amused half-terrified look on his face. Then The. Eye was transformed into something else, although the expression he used was not "something else" but "mother."
Mother, he said and sighed. At last. Mother.
What happened next is all too familiar: the violence that will not let us be. The lot of Latin Americans born in the fifties. Naturally, The Eye tried to negotiate, bribe, and threaten, without much hope of success. All I know for certain is that there was violence and soon he was out of there, leaving the streets of that district behind, as if in a dream, drenched with sweat. He vividly remembers the feeling of exaltation welling up inside him, stronger and stronger, a joy that felt dangerously like lucidity, but wasn't (couldn't have been). Also, the shadows they cast onto the peeling walls, he and the two boys he was leading by the hand. Anywhere else he would have attracted attention. There, at that time of night, no one took any notice of him.
The rest is more an itinerary than a story or a plot. The Eye went back to the hotel, packed his suitcase and left with the boys. First they took a taxi to a town or to its outskirts. Then a bus to another town, where they caught a second bus that took them to yet another town. At some point in their flight they boarded a train and traveled all night and part of the following day. The Eye remembered the faces of the boys looking out at a landscape frayed by the morning light, as if all that had ever really existed were the stately and humble scenes framed by the window of that mysterious train.
Then they took another bus, a taxi, a bus again, another train; they even hitchhiked, said The Eye, gazing at the silhouettes of the German trees but seeing, beyond them, the silhouettes of other trees, countless and incomprehensible. Finally they came to rest in a village somewhere in India, where they rented a house.
After two months The Eye's money ran out and he walked to a neighboring village, where he sent a letter to the friend he had left behind in Paris. A fortnight later he received a bank draft. To cash it he had to go to a town bigger than the village where he had gone to send the letter and much bigger than the one where he lived. The boys were well. They played with other children but did not go to school, and sometimes they came back to the house with food: vegetables the neighbors had given them. Instead of calling him father, he had the boys call him The Eye, as we used to; he thought it safer, less likely to attract the attention of the curious. He did, however, tell the villagers that they were his sons. His story was that the boy's mother, an Indian woman, had recently died, and he didn't want to go back to Europe. It was believable. Yet The Eye had nightmares about the Indian police coming to arrest him, making shameful accusations. He would wake up trembling. He would go over to the mats where they boys were sleeping and the sight of them gave him the strength to carry on, to sleep, get up, and face another day.