His brothers and sister were in their respective rooms, but they gave us more grass and half a bottle of aguardiente, so we started consuming all that while listening to “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen. I loved that song and I confess, Consul, that in those years I thought it had been written for me, just for me.
You remember the bit that says:
Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide
No escape from reality
Open your eyes
Look up to the skies and see,
I’m just a poor boy (Poor boy), I need no sympathy
I never understood why Edgar, who was neither poor nor unhappy, liked it so much. He played at being a tormented, anguished spirit, at odds with the world, but in reality there was nothing to torment him, let alone anything to be at odds with, in the world or anywhere else. Reality was generous to him. When I told my sister, she said: rich people always think up ways to be depressed. They like being unhappy. It’s very elegant to be sad.
To go back to that night: at two in the morning, listening to Queen and reading David Foster Wallace, drinking aguardiente as if it was water, already drunk, until I realized I was about to faint. So I went to the bathroom, turned on the shower, and stuck my head in, hoping the water would cleanse me, and in fact it did me good and I even felt pleasure in those cold drops running over my neck and down my chest. When I finished, I had the shock of my life: there was Gladys, watching me. She was wearing a short T-shirt that left her navel free and a blue Gef thong.
Are you very drunk?
It’s passing, thanks, but she said, come to my room. I repeated that I felt better but she insisted, grabbing my arm and pulling me down the corridor. Her room was bigger than Edgar’s and looked out on the garden; music was playing that I didn’t know, some kind of French rap. With her was a guy, also in underpants, different than the one we had seen in the shower. Gladys told him I wasn’t feeling well, that I was drunk, and the guy took out a little bag of coke, prepared a line on a mirror, and offered it to me. Take this, breathe it in well, he said. Then he prepared four more lines for the two of them. At first I didn’t feel anything, but then a wave of well-being swept over me. I left the room, thanking them, and went back to Edgar’s room, he’d fallen asleep with his flies open, wearing a pair of dark glasses and the headphones from his iPad, connected to the YouJizz porn site, the Asian Amateurs section.
In spite of the fact that, deep down, Edgar and I knew we weren’t equals, it was a respectful friendship. I told him all about my life, and the only thing he said was, shit, if I’d experienced all that I’d be a novelist, and a poet for sure. Basically, you’re very lucky, brother. An unhappy childhood is the best gift a writer can have. I’m going to have to approach it from the other side: either do things in the style of Carlos Fuentes or reject my family and my class, like Bryce Echenique. Those are my two options. Otherwise, I’m fucked, but you’re made for life.
I looked at him sarcastically and said, the problem, brother, is that I’m not a writer.
Because Edgar, Consul, was fully aware of his vocation, even though he hadn’t written a thing yet or only short fragments. He liked to say, quoting Monterroso, “fragment: genre much used in ancient times.” To me, it was all a great mystery: his self-confidence, his amazing cultural knowledge given that he was so young, his extravagant and sometimes brilliant ideas, ideas he didn’t share with anybody but me, which can’t have been very stimulating for him. That’s how he was, Edgar Porras, young millionaire and intellectual who wanted to know a suffering he didn’t have, and maybe that’s why, Consul, he chose me, his exact opposite, as his friend. But I couldn’t choose. A poor person can’t choose to be rich, not even as a game.
I remember one of his stories. He told it to me several times, changing a few details. I don’t know if he wrote it in the end. It went like this: A young man from Bogotá was having a sex chat with a woman named Asaku, presumably Japanese. Asaku put the computer on her windowsill and sat down there, opened her legs and put things inside her, the necks of bottles, cucumbers, plastic dragons. The young man was jerking off like crazy, excited by the fact that Asaku, unlike the girls he knew, had lots of pubic hair, which seems to be a tradition in Japan, or at least that’s what he thought.
Behind her, in the next building, he could see a window that was like Asaku’s backstage area, and which in spite of being lighted had a curtain in front of it. The story really gets going when the young man, still jerking off while Asaku is sticking a Gormiti action figure in her vagina, sees that curtain open; behind it, a man raises his hand, with something sharp in it, and brings it down seven times into the figure of a woman, who’s shorter and frailer than him, until she falls to the floor, clearly dead. Asaku doesn’t see or hear anything, since just at that moment her orgasm starts; the murder is happening behind her back; the young man lets go of his cock and yells into his microphone, but Asaku, drowning in an ocean of endorphins, takes her time in reacting, and when he tells her there has been a murder she laughs and doesn’t even turn around, she tells him he’s drunk or stoned, but he insists and says, you have to report it, where do you live? in what city? She refuses to tell him, saying: you’re making all this up to poke around in my life, don’t even think about it, you’ll never find out.
Edgar’s story began with that murder. He wanted to write it to find out who the murderer was and who the woman was and why he killed her by the window, in full view of anyone who was having virtual sex with a stranger.
I told him I thought it sounded like something by Murakami, and he thought this over for a while and said, it’s possible, but I believe in unconscious influences.
At school our classmates could never understand how Edgar, a guy from a good family, handsome, knowing lots of languages, could be my friend. That’s why they started to spread gossip, people said cruel things, that I was his servant, that his parents paid me to help him with his studies and whisper the answers to him in exams. I heard about all this gossip and never said anything, but Edgar was affected by it. During recess he would say to me, what a bunch of jealous sons of bitches, and the girls? what a herd of loudmouthed bitches.
One of these bitches, Daniela, was about to turn eighteen and was organizing a big party in her house. She lived in a very comfortable apartment near the beltway, and to spice it up announced that her parents weren’t going to be there, which meant it would be a really long party, and that got everybody excited. Of course it didn’t even occur to me that I might go to something as dumb as that, and I kept my distance. Everybody commented on what they would like to do, which girls they’d like to make out with, and what drinks they’d like to get drunk on. The girls wondered what clothes they would wear, and with what shoes, what necklaces and earrings, the kinds of things that get people like that all worked up but just depressed me, so that I sunk into my shell and at recess opted to take shelter in the toilets.
As I’m a polite person, as soon as I received the envelope with the invitation — a ridiculous card, of course, with emoticons dancing under the words “be with me for my eighteenth April”—I hastened to respond with a note in which I thanked her for the invitation but declined it on the grounds that I had a family get-together on the same date.