Bangkok, capital of paid sex in all its forms, even the most despicable or circus-like. Sex in all its cruelty and misery. The district of Patpong is the brothel of the European middle classes. Here, a modest waiter from Berlin or Madrid becomes The Mambo King! For very little (coming from his paradise of the euro) he can buy himself a wife-lover-masseuse-slave who knows the Kama Sutra back to front, who can cook and agrees to play the game, who kisses him on the mouth and says, darling, I’ve missed you, will you take me with you next time? The fiction of love (but isn’t love always a fiction? Oh, Mr. Ambrossía, don’t read this). The European male looks for sexual tourism in Thailand, Oriental punctiliousness, while the European woman goes to the Caribbean, to Cuba and Jamaica (some to Colombia), where she finds the anthropomorphic intensity of the black man without having to go to Africa, which is less amusing than the Caribbean and has malaria.
But attention, future customers! The Thai sex industry involves twenty-five percent of the women between fifteen and forty, and there are boys too. It’s the paradise of novices and virgins, but can lead to unpleasant surprises: gonorrhea, hepatitis, herpes, AIDS. Many of the young girls (even virgins) are heroin addicts. They inject themselves in the knuckles or in the groin so that the marks can’t be seen.
Smokers of heroin are called moo, which means pig, because when they smoke it they grunt. Those who use syringes are pei, in other words, ducks, “because they live in stagnant water.” The white man is farang, a word that has traveled through several continents, all in the southern part of the world, and which basically, in its origin, means “Frenchman,” and by extension “European” or even “Western Christian” (al-Faranj in Arabic, farangi in Farsi and Urdu and even in Amharic, the language of Ethiopia).
An old Thai chronicle gives the following description of the farang: “They are excessively tall, hairy, and dirty. They educate their children for a long time and devote their lives to accumulating wealth. Their women are tall, sturdy, and very beautiful. They do not grow rice.”
8
My passion for walls continued and one day, I don’t know as a result of what, I summoned up the courage to tell Juana. We went to the sewer and she stood there for a while in silence, a few paces ahead of me, facing the images. My islands and volcanoes glittered; my igneous snakes, my red crocodiles and dinosaurs, everything that I felt in my stomach and in my soul. She gazed at them in silence and I left her quietly meditating, not daring to breathe in order not to disturb her. After a while I put my hand on her arm and she turned.
She was weeping with joy.
You’re an artist, she said, moved. She gave me a hug, clinging to me with her whole body, and I could feel her trembling. Then she looked me in the eyes and said: from now on, I’m going to work so that you have what you need.
Juana did her classmates’ assignments for them, earned money for it, and began to bring me cans of spray paint. Montana Gold were the best, although Belton were cheap, and easier to get hold of. Ten thousand pesos per can, depending on the dollar exchange rate. Of course, Consul, the revaluation of the peso during those years helped me a lot and I never knew what it was due to, but anyway, I mustn’t be distracted from the story. I liked the Montana for the way they penetrated the wall. As if the concrete, the brick, or the stucco had been created out of that color. You have no idea how it felt, shaking the can and hearing the little ball, and then, when I had the image clear, pressing the valve and almost touching the color expelled by the spray.
I started to look at Keith Haring’s lonely and slightly hysterical dolls, and the designs of an Englishman named Banksy, a pioneer, someone who simply wanted to put on the street what he thought that street lacked, police officers kissing one another, windows in industrial walls with a view of the sea, playful rats, anyway, my work wasn’t like that, I dreamed of other things, not populating the city but giving a little reality to what I had inside me. As I’ve already said, mine was an art of escape. Everything in me tended toward flight. I wanted to leave, I hated my life.
My sister started studying sociology at the National University. She had been given a scholarship because of her average grade in the high school diploma and the SAT tests, and because she did well in the entrance exam. That was the only reason my parents let her study that subject, because for them, as for most Colombians, studying sociology was like studying to become a member of FARC, a kind of apprenticeship, especially at the National. We were deep into the government of Uribe and anyone who wasn’t a fascist and a patriot was suspect, all kinds of people were accused of being with the guerrillas, you just had to defend human rights or the Constitution to be considered a terrorist.
Every time Juana brought her university friends home Mother would say, are they guerrillas? are they all like that in your class? Father would barely greet them, he would put the newspaper in front of his face so as not to see them. Once he said to Juana, you see, princess, I can’t pay for you to go to a university like the Rosario or Los Andes or the Xavierian, but at least try to change to economics and in the meantime I’ll save, and then, when you graduate, I’ll pay for you to do a decent doctorate in Argentina, okay? It’s just that with these hippies you’re going to give your mother a heart attack, do it for her sake. He told her he was going to ask for a loan to send her to Europe, or the United States. Once he went into debt to buy her an iPod and a new cell phone. He loved her but didn’t understand her.
From that time I remember another argument at the dinner table.
It was very violent, and left me breathless for several days. Mother said something about the pre-Independence period, known as the Foolish Fatherland, and Juana, who already felt stronger for being at the university, said, well, it can’t ever have been more foolish than this, we live in a country of fools right now, a really dangerous and corrupt country.
Father looked at Mother and felt obliged to respond. This country may be foolish now, he said, but it’s the safest and the best we’ve had in all the time I can remember, with more security and peace and with more well-being. At least since I was born and since the two of you were born.
The best? Juana retorted, oh, Daddy, what are you, one of those snakes in Congress? it’s a horrible time! A Mafioso president, an army that murders and tortures, half the Congress in jail for complicity with the paramilitaries, more displaced people than Liberia or Zaire, millions of acres stolen at gunpoint, shall I go on? This country maintains itself on massacres and mass graves. You dig in the ground and you find bones. What can be more foolish than this brainless and insane little republic?
Of course, my parents jumped on her, gesticulating like wild animals, is that what they teach you at university? to insult authority and order? what side are the professors who say these things to you on? who’s giving you these analyses of what’s happening in the country? do the rector and the Ministry of Education know you’re being taught this? do the professors go around in uniforms and boots? how many have warrants out against them for capture and extradition? do they sit down with weapons on their desks? do they demand ransoms from the cafeteria or the Plaza del Che? do they give their classes with Venezuelan or Cuban accents? or in Russian? or directly in Arabic? Show some respect to our president, young lady, who’s the first Colombian to get up and go to work! do you hear? when you’re relaxing from your evenings out or from reading anti-Colombian texts with those aspiring terrorists you go around with, or when you’re fast asleep, he’s already in his office, studying and making decisions, giving orders and analyzing what’s best for this country, and I tell you one thing: you may not like it but the reason you can sleep easily and continue going to study in that nest of idlers is because he’s there, watching over your sleep, and not only you but forty-five million Colombians, do you hear me, young lady?