Oh, yes? watching over my sleep? said Juana, you’re kidding, and does he watch over the sleep of the murdered trade unionists, does he watch over the sleep of the negro leader in Chocó who was shot by those who helped his campaign? does he watch over the four million displaced persons? or the anonymous corpses in the mass graves this damned country has so many of? No, Daddy, don’t be taken in. The only ones who can sleep easily here are the paramilitaries, and not just sleep: they can continue killing trade unionists and governors, mayors and left-wing students, young unemployed people and drug addicts; they can continue making money and making deals with the State to steal its money; they can continue terrorizing the peasants, taking their lands away from them just by accusing them of being guerrillas, Daddy… The paramilitaries are the only ones who can sleep easily in this country! Not the decent people, not the humble people who, ridiculous as it seems, keep supporting the president out of ignorance or because they’ve been bought off with subsidies, the State money he gives away as if it’s a gift! Because never before has so much been stolen, never before have the paramilitaries been able to speak in Congress, forcing the congressmen to listen to them, have you already forgotten that? do you remember how the security service threw out a representative of the victims who was raising a banner? don’t you remember? well, I do, that happened in this respectable country, the representative of the victims kicked out so that the murderers could speak! what kind of democracy is that? what do you call a government that allows that, eh? The reason I can sleep easily, Daddy, and who knows for how much longer, is because, thank God, there are also decent people in Congress, like Senator Petro, who put their lives on the line to make the country open its eyes.
Father restrained himself from banging his fist on the table or throwing his glass at the wall and said, oh, Juanita, better keep quiet, okay? you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re just repeating what the terrorists at the National teach you, but that’s because you’re very young and you don’t know where everyone comes from, that’s why you don’t know that senator’s a Communist and used to be a guerrilla, a terrorist! he has blood on his hands so he can’t come along now and give lessons to anybody. The president himself has already said that, did you know that? and Juana, who was a student leader in her year, said, Daddy, the M-19 wasn’t communist, because being a Communist, at least in this world, means adhering to the thoughts of Marx or Lenin or even Mao, and the M-19 wasn’t like that, it was a Bolivarian, Latin American socialism, and in any case being a Communist or having been a Communist isn’t a crime, as far as I know, where did you get that from? On the other hand, being a paramilitary, supporting the massacres of peasants and the parapoliticians in Congress is being a decent person, who loves progress, his country, and the Virgin Mary, is that right? That’s the problem, Daddy: everything here is back to front, but if anyone says that the top paramilitary leader is the president, people scream and cross themselves.
No, young lady, Father retorted, if that were true they wouldn’t have been extradited, they wouldn’t be in gringo prisons paying for what they did, how do your teachers at the National explain that? and she said, everyone knows they were sent there to shut their mouths, to stop them accusing him, him and his buddies, basically he betrayed them, because the characteristic of true Mafia bosses, and this is a well-known fact, is the ability to get rid of those who helped them rise to the top, haven’t you seen The Godfather, Daddy? you should watch it again, it’s obvious you didn’t understand it. In Colombia The Godfather is an item on the local news.
They argued and argued, screaming at each other.
Mother kept quiet, watching them angrily. I was analyzing the stains on the ceiling or the tip of my shoe.
You see, Consul, how hellish the days and nights were in that horrendous lunatic asylum.
Apart from books, my sister and I loved the cinema. We dreamed about movies. We’d see them and then go smoke a joint in the park, next to my sewer and my drawings. Or we’d go up on the roof of the house and there we’d comment on them, relive them, bring them into our secret life. The most important thing for us, of course, was auteur cinema: Wong Kar-wai, Fellini, Scorsese, Tarantino, George Cukor, Cassavetes, Kurosawa, Mike Nichols, Tarkovsky. But sometimes, weirdly, the movies that contributed most to our games were the commercial ones, the ones from Hollywood. I’d imagine I was Edward Norton and she was Helen Hunt, for example, or we’d choose characters from other movies. She liked Sabrina, a remake they did with Harrison Ford of a film by Billy Wilder, and I liked Tom Hanks in Charlie Wilson’s War, in which Juana chose to be the character played by Julia Roberts, as long as she could change it and not be a right-wing millionairess but an activist, the leader of an NGO, but I said to her, Juana, if you change it you throw away the story, better to choose another character, but she’d insist, what we have to do is change the bad things, so that the movies are better, and I’d say to her, why are you so radical? not everyone can be good, for there to be goodies there also have to be baddies, and she’d answer, that’s silly, I don’t have to be bad if I don’t want to.
One of our idols was Wong Kar-wai.
In his films we found the sense of abandonment, the terrible need for affection, that was so much ours, and he made us dream of other worlds: Asia! Hong Kong! We knew those cities existed on maps, but when we watched Wong Kar-wai we realized that people like us lived in them: lonely people in phantom cities, fragile people on avenues and in cafés, with an imperious need to invent reasons to carry on and the feeling that they’d lost even before they started, that there was something terribly wrong from the start, anyway, all the things you can see in In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express, 2046, and even My Blueberry Nights; we saw them at the film society and the others we rented or downloaded from the Internet, and it was amazing, a recognition and a pleasure in that recognition that was beyond us, but he wasn’t the only one, we also loved the movies of Cassavetes, Opening Night and Shadows and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, where the characters were even more desperate, and when we saw them we understood that only in the world of art could our lives be transformed into something beautiful, an enormous contradiction, Consul, but that’s how it is: that great frustration we felt could generate something durable, we’d understood that ever since we were very young and that’s why we believed that, deep down, our lives had something of value, provided we could stay together.
Seeing the films of Cassavetes we felt that other people, in the 1970s, had lived through similar things, and as they were New Yorkers they went to theaters and to empty bars, like those in Hopper, where people drink whiskey without ice or soda, late at night, and there are actors, and depressed dramatists, alcoholics, and so, from movie to movie, we went further into that world, and also in Martin Scorsese’s movies about New York, from Mean Streets to Casino, characters who weren’t completely well-adjusted, who had a desire to escape and a great fragility, the uncertainty of having been wounded very early in the ring, of coming out almost mutilated, hiding a blow or a cut that makes us feel ashamed and wretched, as Sartre wrote, that’s how life appeared to us, and when later I read Huis Clos I understood perfectly what it was saying, as if a missing piece, a piece I had longed for, had become part of my cells, a fierce understanding of the ideas, the certainty that something is true, and that’s why one of his phrases echoed for years in my brain, “Hell is other people,” you can’t arrive at such concision without having felt and lived what I did in those years, Consul, I can assure you.