When he was very young Manuel started to read and to watch movies, thanks to a friend on the block. Later, much to my surprise, he started to paint graffiti. Beautiful things, islands, seas, storms. He had a beautiful world inside him that I wanted to know, to touch. That was why I had to get hold of money to buy him cans of spray paint, books, and DVDs, in other words, everything an elevated soul needs, so I started to look for little jobs at school. I did my rich classmates’ assignments, whispered the answers to them in exams, or did their exams myself, putting their names on the papers. They paid me and I went off happily to look for the best for him; while my classmates looked at shopwindows full of clothes and asked the prices, I would stroll along rows of books, touching the spines, following the alphabetical order, discovering the immense pleasure of buying books, the smell of the shelves, that silence charged with wisdom that exists between books and the people who buy them, a dense atmosphere, and so I’d return home with two new ones, sometimes three, knowing that with them I was giving Manuel something of the life he didn’t have, which was the space in which both of us would later be happy.
I need to tell you some intimate things, Consul, for which I apologize. At the age of seventeen one of my classmates told me on the bus: I’ve lost my virginity. It was a Monday. She’d been to a party with her boyfriend the previous Saturday and they’d gone on to a motel. These things matter to a young girl. To me, at least. An army of ants ran through my veins, and I asked, what did you feel? and she said, I almost died, I think I fainted. And I said, inquisitively, but did it hurt? A bit at the beginning, she said, but it’s so nice that it passes. From that moment on, it turned into an obsession, but I didn’t have a boyfriend and didn’t want one. At parties I danced and hugged boys, but they didn’t take me seriously. I met one in the end, not long afterwards. He was from a foreign school and had money. When he asked me for my phone number, I said to him: call me, if you like. In the middle of the week he called and to tell the truth I really couldn’t be bothered with him, because he was quite stupid, but on Saturday, when he picked me up from home to go out for an ice cream, I said to him, look, can I make another suggestion, let’s go to a motel and you can deflower me, okay? The guy was surprised and said, you bet! he accelerated and we drove along the freeway to La Calera, and there, in a room with a jacuzzi and a disc player and a view of Bogotá, I lost my virginity, which was nothing special, or rather not very intense, but at least it was done, so the following week I said to my classmate, that’s it, I also lost my virginity, and we started comparing notes, how big was it? what did it smell of? how long did it take him to come? did he wear a condom? that kind of thing.
In the middle of the week the guy called to invite me to a party, but I said to him, forget about parties, I’m not your girlfriend, if you want to fuck let’s go and fuck, but don’t talk crap, and the guy, who was sweet but a complete dickhead, said, all right, Juana, that’s cool, we’ll do what you want, and so I had a lover, but because he never listened he fell head over heels in love with me, guys are all the same, so he’d call me and say, hey, Juanita, I want to see you, can I come to your house? and I’d say, over my dead body, call me on Saturday, and don’t be so mushy, and on Saturday he’d call and I’d say, no, I’m going to the movies with my brother, and he’d say, and what movie are you going to see? and I’d say, what nerve, the kind you don’t like, and he’d go, no, Juana, on the contrary, I’m crazy about Fellini and Pasolini and all those Italian surnames, seriously, and I’d say, thanks a lot but no thanks, call me next Saturday, and then the guy would try to get to me through my friends, but since none of them knew where I lived, there was no way, and he’d call like crazy, send text messages and crap like that, and go on Facebook, until he really drove me crazy, saying that he was dying, that he needed to see me, that he couldn’t stop crying, so I sent him a message saying, right, this bullshit is over, ciao, ciao, I’m going to block you out and I’m going to take you off my Facebook contacts and all that, okay? so it’s best if you don’t insist, thank you, and of course, the guy didn’t take any notice and through friends sent me messages and gifts, and I sent everything back, marked him as spam, until he turned up at my school, crying, and got down on his knees, so I said to him, all right, stop, that’s enough, let’s talk on Saturday, and the guy left, and on Saturday he called and I said, pick me up at the Pomona and we’ll go to a motel, but on the condition that you don’t talk to me or tell me any more of that bullshit you’ve been telling me, and that’s how it was, we fucked and the guy didn’t say a word, which was how I liked him, so I continued seeing him, although one day I said to him, look, it’ll be better if you find yourself another girlfriend, if you like we can carry on fucking until you get one, but I can tell you now it’s not going to last because I’m going to university to study sociology and I don’t want to go around anymore with spoiled brats like you or have anything more to do with people like you, do you understand me? I like you, I prefer not to be a bitch, and that’s why I’m telling you right now not to start throwing tantrums like the other time, okay?
I got him out of my hair when I started at the National, where I met really fantastic people and found my world. In my school there had been rich people and middle-class people, like me, but the rules of what was good, what was cool, were dictated by the rich, whereas at the National it wasn’t like that, there were other values. Being cultured, having courage or nobility, was much more important than a shirt or a pair of shoes. The opposite of the horrible world I had just left and had never belonged to.
My place was the National, with its lawns and its white buildings covered with graffiti, and its brick constructions, its middle-class and lower-class people preparing to go out into life like lions or crocodiles, with their stomachs to the ground, all equal in that enormous larder, a gnoseological throng, as a Cuban poet said, and that was why when I found out that they’d accepted me I felt my cheeks burn with pride, Colombia’s in my image now, I said to myself, walking along the path that led across the lawn to the sociology department, and when they called out the names of those enrolled in the first semester my eyes started watering, I thrust my hand in the air when I heard my name, yes, here I am, so overcome with emotion that they looked at me, and I thought, this is my patch, I wanted to meet everybody, to love everybody, to tell them how long I had waited for them, it was wonderful, but of course, at home it was quite the opposite, the atmosphere was grim, to avoid problems I’d told Father that I was going to enroll in law or engineering, so I said that sociology was my third option and that was the one I’d been accepted for. They didn’t believe me, but it was too late to do anything about it.
Father and Mother were conservatives, but not part of an erudite, aristocratic right wing; they belonged to that cheap, mean, jingoistic right wing that was so common there, people filled with hate and resentment who look for something or someone with whom (or through whom) to express that hate and resentment; with their admiration for the upper classes and their social aspirations; with their classism and racism. That was why Marx said that the middle class was the class least prepared for a revolution. He was only partly wrong, but if we’re talking about my parents, he was right.
As I’m sure you remember, Consul, Uribe won those elections using words that got people heated up, words like motherland, everyone wearing wristbands with the colors of the flag and talking about one thing and one thing only: “security.” The people wanted war and he promised them war. The people wanted deaths and he promised them many dead. The people wanted a patriarch, a sovereign, a satrap, and he promised them he would be a patriarch, a sovereign, a satrap. His victory was celebrated with shots fired in the air and chain saws roaring, do you remember? The paramilitaries celebrated and the left said: now we really are fucked. FARC greeted the news with a shower of grenades in Bogotá that killed a couple of junkies in a crack house near the Palacio de Nariño. FARC said, war is war, and Uribe replied, bring it on, let’s see who has more guts.