Prefiguration of Lalo Cura
It’s hard to believe, but I was born in a neighborhood called Los Empalados: The Impaled. The name glows like the moon. The name opens a way through the dream with its horn and man follows that path. A quaking path. Invariably harsh. The path that leads into or out of hell. That’s what it all comes down to. Getting closer to hell or further away. Me, for example, I’ve had people killed. I’ve given the best birthday presents. I’ve backed projects of epic proportions. I’ve opened my eyes in the dark. Once I opened them by slow degrees in total darkness and all I saw or imagined was that name: Los Empalados, shining like the star of destiny. I’ll tell you everything, naturally. My father was a renegade priest. I don’t know if he was Colombian or came from some other country. But he was Latin American. He turned up one night stone broke in Medellín, preaching sermons in bars and whorehouses. Some people thought he was working for the secret police, but my mother kept him from getting killed and took him to her penthouse in the neighborhood. They lived together for four months, I’ve been told, and then my father vanished into the Gospels. Latin America was calling him, and he kept slipping away into the sacrificial words until he vanished, gone without a trace. Whether he was a Catholic priest or a Protestant minister is something I’ll never find out now. I know that he was alone and that he moved among the masses, fevered and loveless, full of passion and empty of hope. I was named Olegario when I was born, but people have always called me Lalo. My father was known as El Cura, the priest, and that’s what my mother wrote down next to surname at the registry office. It’s my official name. Olegario Cura. I was even baptized into the Catholic faith. She sure was a dreamer, my mother. Connie Sánchez was her name, and if you weren’t so young and innocent, it would ring a bell. She was one of the stars of the Olimpo Movie Production Company. The other two stars were Doris Sánchez, my mother’s younger sister, and Monica Farr, née Leticia Medina, from Valparaíso. Three good friends. The Olimpo Movie Production Company specialized in pornography, and although the business was more or less illegal and operating in a distinctly hostile environment, it didn’t go under until the mid-eighties. The guy in charge was a multi-talented German, Helmut Bittrich, who worked as the company’s manager, director, set designer, composer, publicist and, occasionally, thug. Sometimes he even acted, under the name of Abelardo Bello. He was a weird guy, Bittrich. No one had ever seen him with an erection. He liked to do weights at the Health and Friendship Gym, but he wasn’t gay. It’s just that in the movies he never fucked anyone. Male or female. If you can be bothered, you’ll find him playing a Peeping Tom, a schoolteacher, a spy in a seminary — always a modest, minor role. What he liked best was playing a doctor. A German doctor, of course, although most of the time he didn’t even open his mouth: he was Doctor Silence. The blue-eyed doctor hidden behind a conveniently located velvet curtain. Bittrich had a house on the outskirts of town, where the neighborhood of Los Empalados borders the wasteland, El Gran Baldío. The cottage in the movies. The house of solitude, which was later to become the house of crime, out there on its own, among clumps of trees and blackberry bushes. Connie used to take me. I’d stay in the yard playing with the dogs and the geese, which the German reared there as if they were his children. There were flowers growing wild among the weeds and the dogs’ dirt holes. In the course of a regular morning ten to fifteen people would go into that house. Although the windows were shut you could hear the moans coming from inside. Sometimes there was laughter too. At lunchtime Connie and Doris would take a folding table out into the backyard, under a tree, and the employees of the Olimpo Movie Production Company would hoe into the canned food that Bittrich heated up on a gas ring. They ate directly from the cans or off cardboard plates. Once I went into the kitchen, to help, and when I opened the cupboards all I found were enema tubes, hundreds of enema tubes lined up as if for a military parade. Everything in the kitchen was fake. There were no real plates, no real knives and forks, no real pots and pans. That’s what it’s like in the movies, said Bittrich, watching me with those blue eyes of his — they scared me then, but thinking of them now I just feel sad. The kitchen was fake. Everything in the house was fake. Who sleeps here at night? Sometimes Uncle Helmut does, Connie replied. Uncle Helmut stays here to look after the dogs and the geese and get on with his work. Editing his homemade movies. Homemade, but the business was booming: the films went out to Germany, Holland and Switzerland. Some copies stayed in Latin America and others were sold in the United States, but most of them went to Europe, which is where Bittrich had his main client base. Maybe that’s why he did a voice-over in German, narrating the various scenes. Like a travel journal for sleepwalkers. And the obsession with mother’s milk, another European peculiarity. When Connie was pregnant with me, she went on working. And Bittrich made lacto-porn. Along the lines of Milch and Pregnant Fantasies, aimed at men who believe or make believe that women lactate during pregnancy. With her eight-month bulge, Connie squeezed her breasts and the milk flowed like lava. She leaned over Pajarito Gómez or Sansón Fernández or both of them and gave them a good swig of milk. That was one of the German’s tricks; Connie never had milk. Or only a little bit, for two weeks, maybe three, just enough to give me a taste. But that was all. Actually the movies were like Pregnant Fantasies, not so much like Milch. There’s Connie, big and blonde, with me curled up inside her, laughing as she lubricates Pajarito Gómez’s asshole with Vaseline. She already has the sure, delicate movements of a mother. My moron of a father has left her and there she is, with Doris and Monica Farr, and the three of them are smiling on and off, exchanging looks and subtle signals or secrets among themselves, while Pajarito stares at her belly as if in a hypnotic trance. The mystery of life in Latin America. Like a little bird charmed by the gaze of a snake. The Force is with me, I thought, the first time I saw that movie, at the age of nineteen, crying my eyes out, grinding my teeth, pinching the sides of my head, the Force is with me. All dreams are real. I wanted to believe that when those cocks had gone as far into my mother as they could, they came up against my eyes. I often dreamed about that: my sealed, translucent eyes swimming in the black soup of life. Life? No: the dealing that imitates life. My squinting eyes, like the snake hypnotizing the little bird. You get the picture: a kid’s silly celluloid fantasies. All fake, as Bittrich used to say. And he was right, as he almost always was. That’s why the girls adored him. They were glad to have the German around; they could always count on him for friendly advice and comfort. The girls: Connie, Doris and Monica. Three good friends lost in the mists of time. Connie tried to make it on Broadway. Even in the hardest years, I don’t think she ever gave up on the possibility of happiness. There, in New York, she met Monica Farr and they shared their hardships and hopes. They cleaned hotel rooms, sold their blood, turned tricks. Always looking for a break, walking around the city hooked up to the same Walkman, typical dancers, a little bit thinner and closer together with every passing day. Chorus girls. Looking for Bob Fosse. At a party thrown by some Colombians they met Bittrich, who was passing through New York with a batch of his merchandise. They talked until dawn. No sex, just music and words. They cast their dice that night on Seventh Avenue, the Prussian artist and the Latin American whores. It was all decided then and there. In some of my nightmares I see myself resting in limbo again and then I hear, distantly at first, the sound of the dice on the pavement. I open my eyes and I scream. Something changed forever that morning. The bond of friendship took hold, like the plague. Then Connie and Monica Farr got an acting job in Panama, where they were thoroughly exploited. The German paid for their tickets to Medellín, which was home to Connie and as good a place as any for Monica. There are photos of them descending the steps from the plane, taken by Doris, the only person who went to meet them at the airport. Connie and Monica are wearing sunglasses and tight pants. They’re not very tall, but they’re well proportioned. The Medellín sun is casting long shadows across an airstrip devoid of planes, except for one in the background, emerging from a hangar. There are no clouds in the sky. Connie and Monica displaying their teeth. Drinking Coca-Cola in the taxi line and striking provocative, turbulent poses. Atmospheric and terrestrial turbulence. Their attitude suggests that they have come straight from New York, surrounded by mystery. Then a very young Doris appears beside them. The three of them hugging each other, photographed by an obliging stranger leaning against the taxi’s bumper, while the driver inside looks on, so old and worn it’s hard to believe he’s real. So begin the most passionate adventures. A month later they are already shooting the first movie: