I did later. I cursed Ricardo Laverde, cursed the moment we met, and didn’t for a second even consider that Laverde might not have been directly responsible for my misfortune. I was glad he’d died: I hoped, as compensation for my own pain, that he’d had a painful death. Between the mists of my faltering consciousness I responded in monosyllables to my parents’ questions. You met him at the billiard club? Yes. You never knew what he did, if he was up to something fishy? No. Why was he killed? Don’t know. Why was he killed, Antonio? I don’t know, I don’t know. Antonio, why was he killed? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. The question was repeated insistently and my answer was always the same, and it soon became obvious that the question didn’t require an answer: it was more like a lament. The same night Ricardo Laverde was gunned down another sixteen murders were committed in diverse parts of the city and using diverse methods, and the ones that have stuck in my mind are that of Neftalí Gutiérrez, a taxi driver, beaten to death with a wheel wrench, and that of Jairo Alejandro Niño, an automotive mechanic, who received nine machete blows in a vacant lot on the west side. The Laverde crime was one of many, and it was almost arrogant or pretentious to believe that we were due the luxury of an answer.
‘But what had he done to get himself killed?’ my father asked me.
‘I don’t know,’ I told him. ‘He hadn’t done anything.’
‘He must’ve done something,’ he’d say.
‘But what does it matter now,’ my mother would say.
‘Well, yes,’ said my father. ‘What does it matter now.’
As I began surfacing, my hatred for Laverde gave way to a hatred for my own body and what my body was feeling. And that hatred that had myself as its object transformed into a hatred for everyone else, and one day I decided I didn’t want to see anybody, and I expelled my family from the hospital and forbade them from coming back to see me until my situation improved. ‘But we worry,’ said my mother, ‘we want to take care of you.’ ‘But I don’t. I don’t want you to take care of me. I don’t want anyone taking care of me. I want you all to go.’ ‘What if you need something? What if we can help you and we’re not here?’ ‘I don’t need anything. I need to be alone. I want to be alone.’ I want to sample silence, I thought then: a line from León de Greiff, another of the poets I used to listen to at Silva’s house (poetry accosts us at the most unexpected moments). Quiero catar silencio, non curo de compaña, I want to sample silence, I won’t be cured by companionship. Leave me alone. Yes, that’s what I said to my parents. Leave me alone.
A doctor came to explain the uses of the trigger I had in my hand: when I felt too much pain, he told me, I could press the button, and a spurt of intravenous morphine would soothe me immediately. But there were limits. The first day I used up my daily dose in a third of the time (I pressed the button like a child with a new video game), and the hours that followed are, in my memory, the closest I’ve been to hell. I’m telling this because that’s how, between the hallucinations of the pain and those of the morphine, the days of my recovery went by. I fell asleep at any moment, without any apparent routine, like prisoners in stories; I opened my eyes to a landscape that was always strange, the most curious characteristic of which was that it never became familiar, I always seemed to be seeing it for the first time. At some moment I can’t manage to pinpoint, Aura appeared in that landscape, sitting there on the brown sofa when I opened my eyes, looking at me with genuine pity. It was a new sensation (or it was new to be looked at and cared for by a woman who was expecting my child), but I don’t recall having thought so at the time.
The nights. I remember the nights. The fear of the darkness began in those last days of my hospitalization, and only disappeared a year later: at six thirty in the evening, when night falls suddenly in Bogotá, my heart began to beat furiously, and at first it took the dialectic efforts of several doctors to convince me that I wasn’t about to die of a heart attack. The long Bogotá night — it always lasts more than eleven hours, no matter the time of year and much less the mental state of those who suffer it — seemed almost unendurable to me in the hospital, with its nocturnal life marked by the permanently illuminated white corridors, by the neon gloom of the white rooms; but in the bedroom of my apartment the darkness was total, for the streetlights didn’t reach my tenth floor, and the terror I felt at just imagining myself waking up in the dark obliged me to sleep with the light on, as I did when I was little. Aura put up with the illuminated nights better than I would have expected, sometimes resorting to those masks they give you on planes to create a personal darkness, sometimes giving up and turning on the television to watch an infomercial and amuse herself with machines that chop all kinds of fruit and lotions that dissolve all body fat. Her own body, of course, was transforming; a little girl called Leticia was growing in there, but I wasn’t capable of giving her the attention she deserved. I was woken up on several nights by an absurd nightmare: I’d gone back to live at my parents’ house, but with Aura, and suddenly the gas stove blew up and the whole family was dying and I realized there was nothing I could do. And, no matter what time it was, I ended up phoning my old house, just to make sure nothing had happened in reality and that the dream was just a dream. Aura tried to calm me down. She stared at me, I could feel her looking at me. ‘It’s nothing,’ I told her. And only at the end of the night would I manage to sleep for a few hours, coiled up like a dog frightened by fireworks, wondering why Leticia wasn’t in the dream, what had Leticia done to be banished from the dream.
In my memory, the months that followed were a time of large fears and small discomforts. On the street I was assailed by the unmistakable certainty I was being watched; the internal injuries caused by the bullet wound forced me to use crutches for several months. A pain I’d never felt before appeared in my left leg, similar to what people feel when they’re about to have an appendicitis attack. The doctors told me how slowly nerves grow and the time it takes to recover a certain degree of autonomy, and I listened to them without understanding, or without understanding that they were talking about me; somewhere else, far from where I was, Aura listened to explanations from other doctors on very different subjects, and took folic acid tablets and received cortisone injections to help the baby’s lungs mature (in Aura’s family there was a history of premature deliveries). Her body was changing, but I didn’t notice. Aura put my hand on one side of her prominent belly button. ‘There, there she is. Did you feel?’ ‘But what does it feel like?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know, like a butterfly, like tiny wings brushing against your skin. I don’t know if you understand.’ And I told her I did, that I understood perfectly, although it was a lie.