Señor Porras represented a French oil company, although I never quite understood what exactly his job was. A kind of diplomat in his own country. Edgar’s siblings were older, two brothers and a sister. They were almost never at home, or when they were they almost never left their rooms, I already told you it was a strange house. There was no obligation to be together for meals, so everyone went to the kitchen, served themselves, and went to their rooms to eat as they chatted on Facebook, listened to music, or hung out with other friends. The kitchen was a little restaurant with a bit of everything. The sister’s name was Gladys and she was older than Juana.
As well as being crazy about books, Edgar was also sex-mad and once told me that he knew how to spy on Gladys when she was having a bath. One Sunday he insisted that we go look at her. The bathroom had a high window that looked into a lavatory. If you climbed on the toilet you could see the shower cubicle. I said no but he insisted, saying she was really something, that she had huge tits and a fabulous ass. I found it strange that he should talk like that about his sister, and I told him that, but for him it was normal. Life is life, he would say, you have to take things as they come. He confessed to me that he’d steal her used panties and thongs, smell them, and jerk off. Finally we went to look at her, and to our surprise, she was with a guy and they were fucking like crazy. Standing with her back to him, her hands clutching the faucets, lifting her ass, and then on her knees sucking his cock, which was incredible. Edgar wanted to make a video and ran to his room for his BlackBerry, I’m going to put it on YouTube! he said. I preferred not to look, thinking of my sister.
In that family everything was strange, out of proportion, but I liked him, plus he was very generous. He passed on to me half the things they brought him back from their travels. The only time I ever had a Lacoste T-shirt was thanks to him, also a pair of Adidas and a Nike T-shirt. At that age, things like that are important. Later you forget, but at the age of seventeen they mark you.
His eldest brother, Carlos, would give us matchboxes filled with marijuana and say: take it nice and slowly, don’t overdo it, kids, okay? and if they catch you don’t say a word, if I saw you I’ll say I don’t remember. His father locked the bar, but Edgar knew how to open it by removing a wooden panel, so on Saturdays we’d steal bottles of wine or whiskey, whatever we could find, and take them with us to the parks in Santa Ana and Santa Bárbara, where we’d read poetry, especially Barba Jacob and León de Greiff, and of course, poems by Poe in English that Edgar knew by heart, and would yell at the quarries and the hills, cursing them, challenging Bogotá like a Colombian Rastignac.
Sometimes he’d read me things he’d written himself, and that surprised me. I’d never before met anybody who wanted to be a writer, an idea my father would have thought sinister. Edgar used to say that being a writer was the greatest thing a human being could aspire to. As far as he was concerned, anything in book form was sacred.
He had a text about vocation that he read to me every now and again and which I remember word for word, I don’t know who he copied it from or if it was actually his, but it stayed with me for a long time. It more or less went like this:
You realize you’re a writer when the things that swirl or echo in your head won’t let you concentrate on anything else: neither reading nor watching a movie nor listening to what other people are saying, not even your teacher or your best friend. When your girlfriend yells: you’re not listening to me! and slams the door and takes off, and you exclaim, what a relief, and keep thinking about your things. It’s a relief when our loved ones leave us alone. If what’s happening inside your head is more powerful than what’s outside and can be translated into sentences, you’re a writer. If you don’t write, then you should think about it, it might suit you. If you are a writer, the worst thing is not to write. The bad news, given the times we live in, is that you can also tell yourself you’re really fucked.
I, on the other hand, never told him I painted graffiti. That was a secret world, the one closest to my heart, and I could only share it with Juana. Several times he asked me, what about you, man, don’t you write? how can you not write if you like novels so much? not even poetry? and I’d say, I prefer reading, I’m very passive or very cerebral, I like to contemplate the world from a distance, to see without being seen, it’s an idea of the sublime I read about later, Consul, the sublime as the terrible seen from a safe place, that was the kind of thing I said to Edgar when, guessing that I had secrets, he started asking questions.
When we heard that David Foster Wallace had committed suicide, Edgar dressed all in black and invited me over to his house. He looked pale. We stole a bottle of Martini from his father’s bar, along with four packs of salt and vinegar potato chips imported from England, a jar of high-quality tuna, and a Dutch cheese, and went to Usaquén Cemetery to throw a dinner in his honor. Edgar took with him a couple of original editions. I had managed to get hold of Spanish versions of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which according to Edgar were amazing in the original. As I already said, I had a complex about the fact that I didn’t know English. Or rather: that I didn’t speak it as naturally and resonantly as the people from bilingual schools. I could say everything, using few words, but reading literature was frustrating. On every line I’d find things that I understood well enough from the context, but that left me with the feeling I was missing the most important part.
To get into the cemetery you had to go around the wall and along a side passage until you came to a garage door that was always kept shut. It was a barred door and you could climb over it and jump down on the other side. That’s what we did.
Edgar liked the upper part of the cemetery, toward the hills, adjacent to the parking lot of a supermarket, because there was a series of graves without stones, with names written by hand on fresh cement. One of them said: “My son.” There we sat down and opened the bag of food. We ate and drank toasts to the soul of David Foster Wallace, inviting him to this poor, simple cemetery in a poor, simple country in one of the poorest and simplest regions of the world. We kept passing each other the bottle of Martini until we were drunk. We staggered around, sang, cried out the titles of Wallace’s books, and, incredibly, I felt free, so free it made me dizzy. I would have been capable of anything, however absurd or impossible. I could have run to the top of the hill and left that city forever.
To make things more exciting, Edgar rolled a joint and we took great puffs at it, and when we finished it we read out loud, and at that moment a gust of wind knocked over our plastic cups and Edgar cried, he’s here! it’s Wallace! We welcomed him with a bow and a few more drinks.
My head was spinning and I started throwing up, which forced me to move away; being young, that kind of thing embarrassed me. He was rich, free, brought up to do as he pleased, while I concealed a little hell in my house. I was shy. When he appeared, I told him I’d gone to take a leak and had felt the need to be alone. He said, sure, brother, I understand, but we finished the bottle and the joint, and we went home.