The cans sped through my fingers as if everything already existed, in the spirit or the soul of the wall, until I could do no more and I sat down to look at the stars, the lights of the houses. Then, already calmer, I contemplated my drawing, that small piece of my world in a distant street, at the beginning of night, and I felt comforted. I turned and looked at it again from the corner and it filled me with resolve. Suddenly I felt something on my cheeks, what was it? I was crying.
When I told Juana about Edgar, she listened to me calmly, without judging anybody, and in the end repeated her old question, are you still a virgin?
I had turned eighteen and couldn’t even imagine myself seducing women, so I replied, what do you think? when have you ever seen me with a girl?
But you do want to? she asked, and I said, yes, of course, that’s all I ever think about, it’s bubbling up inside me, so she said, come with me to a party next Saturday, a gorgeous friend of mine will show you what to do, all right?
I spent the week thinking, but not only about the party and Juana’s friend. It was the end of the year and school would soon be over. What would happen to my life? What would happen to Juana and me? Painting gave me strength, but reality opened up in front of me more broadly, with vast dark spaces to cover. I thought and thought. I would have liked to be a poet, to direct all that emptiness and those questions forward, project myself into the future, and even have visions. I had read Schelling and wanted to fully understand my own experience, luck, destiny, good and evil. I felt I was outside that reality and needed to understand it, to outline a little theory that would allow me to carry on. What was happening to me and my sister was tiny compared with the great ills of the world, but each person experiences things individually. Hence the absence of enthusiasm, that terrible clash with life, pure and simple. What to think? I liked being alone, going out to the fields, sitting down between the furrows, and waiting to hear the bells ring.
The following Saturday Juana took me to the apartment of a very unusual guy — although these days, Consul, he would only have made me laugh — with earrings, tattoos on his arms, and a sleeveless T-shirt clinging to his body, as if we weren’t in Bogotá but Acapulco. The music playing was Metallica, 80s rock, and Kiss. Juana introduced me and poured me a whiskey. She told me to drink slowly and that if I felt bad I should tell her.
Don’t worry, I’ve been drunk before and even snorted coke, so don’t worry.
She almost fainted, coke? who gave you that crap? Edgar’s sister, I said, but only once. I swear. Typical of those rich kids, she said, then she shrugged and joined in the dancing. She reached out her arms to me and said, come on, dance with me, but I refused, I’d never done it, it wasn’t something I enjoyed. She insisted, you have to learn, when you learn it’s fun, you’ll understand music in a way you can only do by dancing, so I joined her and tried to follow, making clumsy steps as I clung to her waist and looked her in the eyes, and little by little, very slowly, the rhythm appeared and a certain balance I could absorb, and then I danced seven songs in a row and drank two more glasses of whiskey until I felt merry, euphoric, which was something I had never felt in all the times I’d gotten drunk with Edgar.
Then I found out that the hosts were two friends from the university, both homosexuals, one from Sociology, the one who’d opened the door, and the other from History, a professor, a guy of about forty who not only didn’t have tattoos or earrings or anything like that, but in addition was fat, not obese, just reasonably fat, and quite calm and relaxed, who’d seen it all before, all the fights and debates.
What I liked most was his home.
An apartment on Sixth and Fourth full of books and antiques, some pre-Columbian and some brought back from Asia and the South Pacific. The first thing I did when I came in, before greeting the other guests, was to look through the library. Heidegger, Deleuze, Virilio, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization by Richard Sennett, the works of Lacan in French, the works of Michel Foucault in French, Chomsky, the Mahabharata, an edition of Gaddafi’s Green Book, three biographies of Mao, Del Poder y la Gramática by Malcolm Deas, The Intellectuals and the Masses by John Carey, the biography of Che by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen, the collected poems of Rubén Darío, the collected poems of León de Greiff in three volumes, the complete works of Mayakovsky, Rimbaud in French, Baudelaire in French, books that later, as time passed, I sought out and bought, and of course read, you can’t imagine, Consul, how important it was for me, going to that party, especially after Daniela’s fiasco.
In the dining room, around a huge pitcher of pisco sour, there was another group from Philosophy, some postgrads, some from other universities. That was where I met your friend Gustavo Chirolla. I was struck by the way he argued, with his coastal accent and his enormous affection and respect for those who argued with him. That night they talked about various subjects and I stood listening in a corner, hypnotized by what they were saying, I can’t remember it in detail but I’m sure they talked about politics, that was the great topic in those horrible days, local politics, everybody felt concerned, everybody thought they had to make their position clear, do you remember, Consul? it was an implicit duty, we were like Cubans, and out of that emerged loves and hates, something that ended when Uribe went and Colombia became a normal country again, or rather, went back to being a shitty country but a normal one, and people went back to the old grayness and lobotomy, which by comparison seemed like a sign of balance and even of progress.
They talked of all that and also of very specific things, Leibniz, social structures, the new critical thinking. I was dazzled listening to them, especially Gustavo. This man knows about everything, I told myself, and at one point, very shyly, I asked him where he taught, and that was when he told me a couple of things about his work and his classes at the Xavierian University. I told him about my interest in philosophy and in the National University, and he said that he recommended it to me, that we were sure to see each other there.
For some time now I had liked philosophy. It was the only thing that might have an answer for my failed existence, that frustration that only disappeared with painting, books, or movies. Art and its human stories helped me to understand that I was not alone, but studying literature struck me as unnecessary, and the cinema was a utopia. Juana wanted me to make a movie, but I said to her, for that you have to be a millionaire or the son of millionaires, don’t kid yourself. Kubrick had a rich uncle who paid for his first film, don’t you remember? And if we find a producer, which is highly unlikely, we’d have to forget about making art. You can’t make the movie you want if the money isn’t yours.
She believed in me blindly and said that she didn’t mind spending her life working to pay for it. I let her fantasize, but I knew it was impossible, among other things because the movie I carry inside me is so tough that nobody would go to see it.
There remained philosophy: Anaxagoras, Epictetus, Peter Abelard, Saint Anselm, Scottus Eriugena, Emmanuel Kant. They had thought about everything. How to explain that profound sense of rejection? the certainty that something in life was wrong, profoundly wrong? what to call that feeling of insubstantiality, of emptiness? These were the answers I was looking for.