Olympia came from the Santander region of Colombia and had been raised a Communist. When she talked about Moscow in the seventies, her eyes shone. A city of abundance, culture, art. Delhi was quite the opposite: a vast village crisscrossed by oxcarts and unpaved streets, where people died of scurvy and diarrhea and where diseases that were rare in the Soviet Union, such as leprosy, were still common. This was basically true and is still true. My daily journey from Jangpura to the office took me through an intersection where you could see the following characters: a leper wrapped in a bloodstained tunic with three stumps instead of fingers and a pink orifice where his nose should have been; two eunuchs expelled from their neighborhood who begged for money in return for not cursing you; a woman walking a baby with a burned hand — according to Peter, my driver, the burn was false, made with butter and gelatin, which cheered me — as well as people selling magazines, umbrellas, pirated books, ties, and handkerchiefs.
One of the first images from soon after my arrival in Delhi was of a man in bustling Chandni Chowk Market, a very thin man displaying an elephantine testicle and an enormous rectal prolapse, two melons hanging from a skinny, twisted body, like the cams of a giant clock. Having already seen the human bazaar massed on the steps of the Jama Masjid Mosque, including a dwarf ulcerated and deformed by polio and various lepers in a terminal state, it was obvious that in Delhi, beautiful Delhi, disquieting Delhi, diseases provided those suffering from them with a stable way to earn a living.
But let’s go back to Olympia.
She was the one who, every day, brought me the problems of our community of compatriots, mainly composed of pilots for Kingfisher Airlines, young people who had come to do internships with Indian companies, and, above all, adepts of “spiritual tourism,” most of them rich ladies who found relief in the teachings of Sai Baba, Satyananda, Osho, and other contemporary philosophers who dispensed advice about life and uttered wise sayings about peace and love.
Everything my colleague hated.
On one occasion she came into my office very upset, and said, come and look at this, boss. Don’t call me boss, I begged her, and we went out to the reception room, where a middle-aged Indian was waiting nervously. He had brought with him the passport of a Colombian woman who, according to him, “had problems.” When I asked him what kind, he told me she was a follower of the guru Ravi Ravindra and that, ever since a particular “spiritual seminar,” her mind had been confused, as if she had a screw loose. She was twenty-seven years old. Problems of what kind? I asked again, and the man lowered his eyes and said:
“She wants to go out naked onto the street, she can’t sleep, she’s obsessed with Ravi, she says she’s going to be his wife and wants to go with him to Indonesia.”
“Indonesia?” I said, thinking it was one of the countries whose affairs we dealt with. “Why Indonesia?”
“Ravi is going there today to give some lectures,” he said.
I immediately set off to deal with the case.
They were keeping her in an apartment near Green Park. On seeing me, the young woman said, hello, would you like a drink? something to eat? sit down, how are you? how nice of you to come. This volley of words made it clear how serious things were; when I asked her how she was, she said, I’m fine, how nice to meet you, would you like a drink? something to eat? my taxi will be here soon, I’m going to the airport, I’m going to meet Ravi, we’re going to Indonesia, how nice to meet you, would you like a drink? something to eat? It looked like it could be complicated. I managed to persuade her to come with me to see a doctor. The friend who had been putting her up, Amrita, said she was suffering memory lapses and I wanted her to be checked over. I was afraid that she’d been drugged, maybe even raped.
Talking to her a bit more I found out that she had met the guru in Canada and that this was her third journey with him to India. She also said that she was deeply in love with him. Do you love him in a spiritual way? I asked, and she said, yes, but also as a woman, something very beautiful has grown up between us. Amrita looked at me with eyes popping out of her head and, in an aside, assured me that these were ravings, that it couldn’t be real, it was only her obsession with Ravi. I was even more perplexed. Some gurus are accused of raping Western women, weak-minded women who are easily dominated and give themselves up body and soul. Body above all. Fortunately this wasn’t the case here, at least not according to the doctor in the hospital where she was under observation for a week. Then her mother came and took her back to Tokyo, where she was studying for a doctorate on a scholarship from the Japanese government. When she left, the doctor told me they’d found psychotropic substances in her urine, had she been drugged? I was never able to find out.
Another day I was in my office, I don’t remember if I was reading a visa application or writing a letter to the tax authorities, when Olympia burst in saying, boss, boss, you’re about to get a call from the Ministry, it’s an urgent case!
When I looked at her inquisitively, wanting to know what it was about, she whispered: get ready to go to Bangkok, boss.
“Don’t call me boss,” I said, lifting the receiver.
4. INTER-NETA’S MONOLOGUES
Where I’m from is the least of my concerns, because people are born a number of times in the course of their lives. I might have read that somewhere, but I can’t remember where. If anyone knows, please tell me. When it comes down to it, I don’t really care. I’ve learned to live in front of my screen, traveling the world. This is my true home. Sometimes I get fits of nervous laughter, but that just indicates that I haven’t taken my pill. I have problems with recent memory, like the little blue fish in the movie Finding Nemo. The doctor who’s been treating me since my illness started tries to scare me, saying: you’ll lose consciousness, fall off your chair, and you won’t be able to get up. One day you’ll find yourself in a world you don’t know and you’ll have no idea where to go, so you have to look after yourself. But I don’t take anything. I’m anorexic about food and pills and things that have come through the thick, filthy air of cities.
My best friend, or rather, my man, lives in a blog called Sensations. His name, or the name he calls himself, is Ferenck Ambrossía. It may be a false name. It almost certainly is a false name, he wouldn’t be so silly as to put his body into the scrapyard of this topsy-turvy world. I don’t know where he’s from or what he looks like. I don’t care. Is he black, yellow, white? Is he a humanoid like those in the movie Blade Runner? Is he “Jewish, quechua, orangutanic, Aryan,” to quote León de Greiff? Is he one man, or many men? Is he a woman, or many women? Is he a group of convicts with time off for good behavior in the penitentiary of Moundsville, now exclusively inhabited by ghosts? Is he a mental patient with access to the Internet in some Scandinavian sanatorium, who dreams of living on the same bridge along which the character in Munch’s The Scream is walking? Or a conclave of pederast novice monks who exchange photographs of Burmese and Kenyan children on the net? Or a nervous lawyer in Edinburgh afraid of meeting the specter of Robert Louis Stevenson in the doorway of his house? Or two hysterical sisters born on Rhode Island who want to emulate Lovecraft and are getting ready to kill their parents with an ax, burn their house down, and flee north, to the country of ice? Or maybe a seller of secondhand Bibles on eBay, the pages of which are ideal for rolling joints in prison? Or a Russian porn star, who, in her free time, masturbates with an old Soviet TYPNCT-3 telescope, while weeping for her lost youth and lost empires? Is he maybe a sad young Latin American poet postponing his suicide in the hope of an unlikely signal from Rubén Darío? Or a Cameroon Airlines stewardess disappointed and angry over a French passenger on whom she performed fellatio in the toilet while the plane was flying over Chad, who promised her the earth then abandoned her? Or an Adventist priest, a follower of Lewis Carroll’s brother E. H. Dodgson, who, like him, lives in the community of Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, on the fearsome island of Tristan da Cunha? Or a young Spanish teacher at the Cervantes Institute in New Delhi, born in Bihar, who reads Lope de Vega on the Internet? Or a Norwegian assistant at Río Piedras University in Puerto Rico, unwittingly made pregnant by a Ponce taxi driver, who’s hesitating between calling her future child Grunewald or Hectorlavó? Is he perhaps a group of Chilean transvestites who escaped with their lives from Pinochet’s dictatorship and are now composing their memoirs in verse and pursuing their apocalypse in the faculties of letters? Is he a great Mexican novelist of the post-boom generation who includes dwarves, bicycles, and Leonardo da Vinci in his books, and who could well be the author of this crazy list? Is he a young Romanian female psychologist working in the psychiatric emergency department of the Hôpital de Marne-la-Vallée, who reads Cioran surrounded by the screams of the inmates in the high-security cells? Is he the illegitimate son of a chambermaid on the seventy-eighth floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York, where nine years ago a German rock star left syringes filled with blood in the washbowl? Is he the enemies of a dramatist raised in Salzburg whose memories are of bombing raids, floors collapsing, and cities in flames? Is he all of the previous, united in a transitory Confederation of the Stateless, chaired by the switchboard operator of a five-star hotel in Jerusalem the name of which we omit for security reasons? Or simply a novelist writing alone and against all hope, his one desire being to hide his face and be forgotten?