When the old man, whose name was Monsieur Echenoz, was better, we started talking. I asked him why he had chosen to stay in a backward, violent country like Colombia, a country everyone wanted to leave, and he said, not necessarily, would you leave? I told him I would, if I could I’d go that very moment, with my brother, and he asked, where would you go? and I said anywhere, any corner of the world must be better than this, I’d like to go to Europe, to a civilized country, and he’d look at me without judging me, the sheet covering half his chest, with white hairs coming out through the buttonholes of his pajamas, and he said, a civilized country? you don’t want to leave Colombia, what you want is to get away from something you don’t like but which you could find in lots of places, and he said, I know a lot of the world, especially Africa, when I was young I worked for French petroleum companies in Zaire and Rwanda, countries full of awful things, but beautiful, too. I could say the same about Asia. In spite of the difficulties, life is much more beautiful there than in “civilized” places, what does civilization mean? There’s no future in Europe. A tired, bad-tempered continent that tries to teach other people how to live, but that’s become frozen from looking at itself so much in the mirror. You’re studying sociology, aren’t you? Italy and France governed by clowns, what does it mean to be on the left in a place like that? not much, reading the left-wing press, owning an old Manu Chao CD and T-shirts of Che Guevara and Subcomandante Marcos, worrying about the environment, about human rights in some distant country, not much more; like any affluent society, Europe is going downhill. Just like a person who has everything, who’s in love with himself and full of self-admiration, that’s what’s happening there, but what the Europeans don’t know is that they aren’t anybody’s future. The opposite is true: the future is on the margins. How can you say that this country is backward and violent, as if that were a basic racial or cultural value of one nation and not of another? What’s happening here is that it’s a young country, a very young country, and is still looking for a language. What you see in Europe, the peace they have today, cost two thousand years of war, of blood, torture, and cruelty. When the nations of Europe were the same age as Colombia they were mutual enemies and every time they met rivers of blood flowed, lagoons and estuaries of blood. The last European war left fifty-four million dead. Do you think that isn’t violence? Never forget it. Just in the capture of Berlin by the Russian troops, which only lasted a couple of weeks, more people died than in a whole century of conflict in Colombia, so get the idea out of your head that this is a particularly violent country, because it isn’t. But it is very complex and has been beaten down, and worse still, armed. It has riches and a wonderful location, and that always ends up exploding. Violence is part of the culture, the history, the life of nations. Out of violence, societies are born and so are periods of peace, it’s been like that since the dawn of time and Colombia is in the middle of this process; I assure you it will achieve it more rapidly and with less blood than Europe.
I listened to Monsieur Echenoz with skepticism and said, but in European wars people killed each other for an ideal, not here, here it’s pure barbarism, it’s money or land or cocaine, but he said, it’s the same thing, the reasons someone who’s about to shoot another man thinks he has may vary, but the deed is the same, someone will press the trigger, and when the lead breaks the skin and drills into the cranium and damages a lobe and perforates it and opens a path in the brain, a life with a history and past will be cut short and a body transformed into a bloodstained mass that will fall to the ground, and that fact, which is horrible in itself and can’t in any way be explained or justified, makes all the reasons equivalent; in the middle of the twentieth century it was ideologies, then it was land or the control of resources, reserves of hydrocarbons. Politics isn’t the reason, just the way politics represents a need to take the next step, which is to go on the attack. Ideologies are merely self-fulfilling prophecies. Force is the argument most often used by man in his history, whatever culture he belongs to, so don’t worry, nothing is being done here that hasn’t been done before in other places, and for the same reasons. What’s happening today in Colombia, deep down, is the result of an imposed formula. Do you know the contemporary name for perversity? It’s democracy. If a chimpanzee with a drum becomes popular and amusing, he could be elected president. Why are the votes of those who don’t have standards or education or culture worth the same as the votes of people who do have them? Why is a vote obtained with a revolver to the head or by brainwashing people with advertising or buying them off with fifty thousand pesos worth the same as a vote expressed freely? Ask the defenders of democracy. That’s the great perversity, but we’re not allowed to say that. If everybody had education and the variations between high and low, in terms of culture, were smaller, democracy would be universal and we’d be in Sweden, but that’s not the way it is. In Africa people vote for those in their own tribe and that’s why the party of the biggest tribe always wins, and you know the only way a tribe has to reduce the number of voters for another tribe? The machete. In many countries in Africa, it isn’t dictatorship that’s led to civil war, but democracy. The small tribes hate the system that gives power to the biggest clan, and what is power? The right to take control of a country. Here, it’s different because there are no tribes, but there are clans and, lately, tyrants. How, in an environment like this, can a candidate of the left, or an ecologist, for example, win? The one who wins is the one who has most money, like in Italy, or the one who has most arms and is stronger. The alpha male wins, because democracy, in terms of sexuality, is a masochistic relationship: power is given to the strong man so that he can exercise it over the weak man, who adopts an attitude of submission that consists of turning his back, lifting his hip, and offering his anus in order to avoid confrontation.
Monsieur Echenoz’s reactionary opinions made me jump out of my seat, and, at first, I argued with him, but then I realized there was no point. In any case, it was more stimulating to disagree with him than to talk for hours and hours with my fellow students, who thought the same way I did. Maybe because his ideas came from his experience, not just from books or from political ideologies. He said what came into his head. His notion of utopia was a system in which the dignitaries of a society, the aristocracy of thought, took the reins of power. An old-established aristocracy guaranteed to avoid the one thing that seemed to him a real sin, which was to hand the land over to foreign countries or powers.
When I asked him about the advanced democracies of Sweden and Norway, he’d say: I don’t know them, and they don’t interest me. I’m not attracted by countries where life is quiet and fair, where everybody has levels of protection and stipulated good health and happiness. I’m not interested in perfect societies; I only deigned to look at them when I discovered, through mystery novels, that horrible crimes and tragedies happened there too, which gave them a touch of humanity. Those men of ice all have some kind of hell in their brains. But I prefer life in places where, from time to time, the streets are running with blood. That’s why I’ve stayed in Colombia.