He stood up, answered a call on his cell phone, and after a while came back. Don’t worry, I’m going to protect you. If you don’t have a safe place stay here, does your family know I exist? do you want to call them? No, I said, that’s no problem, they’re used to my being away. I heard my cell phone vibrate and when I looked at the screen my chest contracted. It was Víctor. I said to Alfredo, should I answer? No, he said, better switch off the phone so they can’t trace you.
I spent the night in a guest room, looking at the lights of Bogotá and feeling scared. All I could do was wait. There was no mention of the case on the news, but I was sure the whole thing was about to blow up. Three days later, Alfredo arranged for me to travel overland to Quito. He had a friend, a magistrate of the Ecuadorian court, who could put me up until things calmed down. In the end I made up my mind to go home, invent an excuse, and pick up my passport, but when I got there nobody was in, only the maid. Mother had gone out and Manuel, who had no classes that day, had gone to the Luis Ángel Arango Library. It hurt me not to be able to say goodbye to him, but I told myself, it isn’t for very long. I left a note saying I was going to Los Llanos, and would call as soon as I could. I took out the money Andrés Felipe had given me. I should go to the apartment in Chapinero for my other savings, I thought. I caught a taxi and went, but as I got closer I saw two vans similar to Víctor’s on the corner of the street. I went back to the Nogal building, shaken, but from Seventh I saw more Secret Service vans in the parking lot of the building. What was going on? had they tracked me down? I stayed hidden for a while on the other side of the avenue, but nothing happened, so I decided to go.
I rushed back to the city center. Now I had nowhere to go, but luckily everything was ready for me to travel to Ecuador. From a phone booth I called my university friends. Tamara reassured me, saying nobody had come looking for me in the faculty. She didn’t ask me for any details, she was a good friend. Then I called Jaime, the Aesculapian priest, and said, look, I need you to help me, it’s a matter of life and death, I have to hide for a few hours, maybe until tomorrow, but it’s very dangerous, are you up for it? and he said, of course, we’ll protect you here in the community. I went there, and I think that saved my life, Consul. I was there the whole of the following day, worrying my head off, until in the end I decided that there was no other way out and from a pay phone called Alfredo’s friend, the one who was going to get me out of the country. He was anxious, and insisted we should go that same night. I was picked up two hours later and we began the journey. He told me they had arrested Alfredo and put together a charge thanks to some cleverly edited recordings. We crossed Rumichaca Bridge on a false passport.
The following day I bought the newspaper and saw the news: former magistrate Alfredo Conde, arrested in his house. Then I went on the Internet and saw all the news bulletins. A spokesman made a public statement, saying that they would do everything they could to clarify the relationship between the lawyer and terrorism. Behind him, next to the chief of police, I noticed Piedrahita’s thin, Indian-looking face, and I thought: they know I was there, they’ve charged him, and now they’re looking for me. I also saw that Andrés Felipe was being kept in detention in a house in La Picota belonging to the prosecutor’s department, that they had grabbed him trying to leave the country.
From Quito I called the former Miss Colombia and said, I agree about Japan, but I need you to get me a ticket leaving from Ecuador, and so it was, they sent me on a route that was like a country bus, with stops in São Paulo, Dubai, Bangkok, and finally Tokyo. Five days’ traveling.
In Tokyo everything seemed phantasmagorical. I had read Murakami and imagined the city as a combination of cold, sometimes icy sentences that spoke of lonely people, all-night cafeterias, and young people who couldn’t find a place in the world and isolated themselves in little towns in the mountains, that’s how I imagined it, a place in which everyone lived submerged in his obsessions, and when I arrived, going from the airport to the center in a van, I looked through the window and said to myself, I’m alone and I’m far away, I’ve left Manuel but I’ll go back for him, I couldn’t do anything but escape to save myself, to save the two of us, because if I’m in danger then he’s in danger too, and my joints and my love lobes hurt at the thought that I couldn’t write to him or call him, what could I say to him? what explanation could I give? The best thing was to live through this time as quickly as possible and then look him in the eyes and tell him the truth. It would be painful to be separated from him, but the day would come, I just had to be strong.
Suddenly, in the middle of the city, the van turned in at an underground garage: this was my final destination. We took out the things and went up to an apartment on an upper floor, with a view of rooftops. Then I sat down to wait for things to pass, for the time to go by, that was all I wanted. I asked the woman who received me what was going to happen, but all she said was, rest, girl, you must be dead, do nothing but sleep for at least three days, the first week is for you to get used to it and the jetlag to pass and the bags under your eyes to go. So I was shut in for a week. I wanted to go out but they wouldn’t let me, and when at last I went out they gave me an escort. I don’t want to tell you names or many details of what I lived through in Tokyo, as I’m sure you’ll understand, it’s dangerous and there are people who could spend their whole lives tracking you down.
I worked with a group of Japanese who were the clients of the organization of my mamiya, a Colombian friend of the former Miss Colombia. It wasn’t a traumatic experience, but it was hard. After a while I found the lack of freedom stifling. I couldn’t go out on the street alone. I was earning good money but from it they kept deducting the costs of the journey, the costs of bringing me there, arranging my papers, and I don’t know what else. Every time I asked, my debt had increased. One day I asked a Japanese for accounts and the guy, a horrible dwarf, gave me a slap and threw me to the ground. I learned that I had to prepare myself for a new transformation: to be the submissive woman, ready to hit back when the enemy lowered his guard. I vowed that that Japanese dwarf would end up with his brain split open, and I began a tactic of seduction. Monsieur Echenoz was right again, and a month later I had him in front of me, naked. I knew what I wanted to do as soon as he forced me to kneel and suck his cock. The killer whale. I clasped him between my teeth but something strange happened: as I was about to cut into his skin the guy moaned with pleasure and ejaculated like crazy. Then he asked me to stand up straight on his back with my high heels on and walk all over him. Strange. Then he grabbed a lighter and held out his arm, which was covered in keloidal scars. I burned him and he ejaculated again, screaming with pain.
I soon realized that he was the local boss, so it struck me as a good idea to go along with him. His name was Junichiro, but I called him Juni. He knew English, although he didn’t speak much in general. He was thirty-four years old. One night he told me that, as a boy, starting at the military school in the province where he was born, his comrades forced him to lick the asses of the ten dormitory heads. For a year they gave him beatings in the toilets, urinated in his face, and of course fucked him thousands of times. From what I understood he felt guilty for having felt pleasure and that was why he liked to be punished. It purified him and excited him. I was with him for about a year. One night I heard noises in one of the rooms in the apartment and when I went to see I found him lying there almost unconscious. He was bleeding from the anus. I asked him what had happened but he said nothing, and a second later I saw Tarek, an Iranian bodyguard, come in with a towel and some drugs to cauterize him. I thought it was horrible and I walked out. I didn’t want to see him again and, fortunately, he respected me.