After a silence, he said:
“I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about, Consul. The last time I spoke with her you were present… Compensation? For heaven’s sake, don’t make me laugh. You Westerners will never understand anything.”
After a somewhat contemptuous guffaw he said:
“Excuse me, do you have any other questions?”
“No, thank you for your time.”
I called Juana’s Paris number, but there was no answer. I checked on the Internet what district it corresponded to, but didn’t learn much: it was the number of a public telephone in a shopping mall in La Défense.
I searched for her in vain through the Colombian Consulate in Paris, and wrote to her again but never got a reply.
My curiosity aroused, I dialed her parents’ number in Bogotá. It was the only other thing I could think of. The only thing I hadn’t yet done. As the phone started ringing at the other end, I felt my lip trembling slightly. I already feared what I was quite likely to hear. At last a woman’s voice answered. It turned out to be the mother. I introduced myself as the consul who had handled the administrative part of her son’s case. She thanked me and called her husband (“Come, it’s about Manuel, come on!”). The father’s voice sounded older than I had imagined: he said the family would be eternally grateful for everything that had been done, and that he had already written a letter to the Ministry. I said I wanted to personally express my condolences to him and to Manuel’s mother and sister, but he replied:
“We’re very grateful, Consul, although you ought to know that unfortunately his sister also abandoned us.”
“I didn’t know,” I said, “I’m very sorry.”
There was a silence. I could have sworn he was wiping away a tear.
“She disappeared four years ago, Consul, you know, this country is dangerous. There are families nothing ever happens to, and others like ours. Things have gone badly for us.”
I hung up after more condolences and sat there thinking about shipwrecks, about Géricault, Aivazovsky, and Hokusai.
About Juana.
Once again she had disappeared.
9. INTER-NETA’S FINAL MONOLOGUE
They are going around saying that I am the mistress of silence: that I am the prostitute, the fancy woman, the lover. The whore of silence. But what can I do if every time I think, I prefer to keep quiet, to imagine empty spaces, to smile at nothingness. I am about to do it one more time, like my Sleeping Beauty: to go to a place where the grim heartbeat of the world, the mechanism of this weary planet, can’t be heard, to escape to where the air and life are silent matter. I want to absent myself, to leave.
And how is the poem of silence, how can it be?
Oh, it will be a construction of words like zephyrs, a surface made of clouds, a volcano of signs. How do I know?
For a start I have to choose a poem in which to hide myself, a poem whose words will serve as a screen to block the light, its verses like cliffs protecting my little island from disaster and the sadness of the world. I have already lost almost everything. I’m not brave: just a fragile grain of sand.
One day passes, two days, three, and I have decided.
I will hide myself in a poem by Roque Dalton, murdered by his own comrades, his own friends! It’s one of the greatest demonstrations of idiocy in history. Oh, the dreams and the words, how they kill. Roque was free and ethereal, as I wish to be. As was somebody I loved very much and who is no longer with us. So now I leave them, perhaps forever.
I take my leave with my poem-home, my poem-world:
LATE AT NIGHT
When you learn that I have died do not utter my name
because death and repose would be delayed.
Your voice, which is the bell of the five senses,
would be the dim lighthouse sought by my fog.
When you learn that I have died utter strange syllables.
Say flower, be, tear, bread, storm.
Do not let your lips find my eleven letters.
I am tired, I have loved, I have earned silence.
Do not utter my name when you learn that I have died,
from the dark earth it would come through your voice.
Do not utter my name, do not utter my name.
When you learn that I have died do not utter my name.
EPILOGUE
I have already filled six notebooks. I’ve listened, imagined, walked around Bangkok, and revisited a few places. I have fantasized, remembered, and written.
Tomorrow I shall leave without having really seen anybody (Teresa hasn’t lived here for some time now). Nothing except the sound of old words that at the time nobody listened to. Well, only me. Now I have to organize them, reconstruct the story, and try, once again, to give them a meaning.
In The Last Tycoon, Elia Kazan’s film of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter, the main character, played by Robert De Niro, twice tells the following story: a woman rushes home and empties the contents of her purse on the table in the entrance halclass="underline" change purse, glasses, a nickel, a brush, a box of matches, and a lipstick. Cursing, she grabs the nickel and the box of matches, and then nervously takes off her black gloves and throws them angrily into the gas stove. She lights a match and brings it close to the stove, but just as she is about to light it the telephone rings. The woman hesitates, curses again, and finally answers.
After listening to something she shouts into the receiver:
“I already told you, I never owned any damned black gloves!”
She slams the phone down and goes back to the stove, is about to light it, but at that moment realizes that there is someone else in the room, someone who has seen what she has done.
What’s going to happen next? And above alclass="underline" what is the nickel for? “To buy a ticket for the movie,” says De Niro, because that’s where the story that has to be told starts.
I go back to my question: have I, in fact, understood anything? The only answer is to keep searching for Juana, seduce her in the distance, maybe in another book or in another city. As Rimbaud said, pointing with his finger to the future: Et à l’aurore, armés d’une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides villes. The splendid cities. Stories happen there, maybe at dawn or late in the afternoon, in any case far from the blazing noonday sun. Will we reach them? Maybe we will enter that new city at dawn or before nightfall.
So for now all that is left for me is to take my leave, just as in that old musicaclass="underline" So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen. Goodbye.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Santiago Gamboa’s debut came in 1995 with Páginas de Vuelta, which introduced his unique voice to Colombian readers. His English language debut Necropolis (Europa 2012) was the winner of the Otra Orilla Literary Award.