I did not set foot on 14th Street again, much less in the billiard club (I stopped playing entirely: standing up for too long exacerbated the pain in my leg to the point of making it unbearable). So I lost one part of the city; or, to put it a better way, a part of my city was stolen from me. I imagined a city in which the streets, the pavements gradually closed themselves off to us, like the rooms of the house in Julio Cortázar’s story, until eventually expelling us. ‘We were fine, and little by little we began to live unthinkingly,’ says the brother in that story after a mysterious presence has taken over another part of the house. And he adds, ‘You can live without thinking.’ It’s true: you can. After 14th Street was stolen from me — and after months of physiotherapy, of enduring light-headedness and my stomach destroyed by medication — I began to despise the city, to fear it, to feel threatened by it. The world seemed to me a closed place, or my life a walled-in life; the doctor talked to me about my fear of going out on the street, he proffered the word agoraphobia as if it were a delicate object that mustn’t be allowed to fall, and it was hard for me to explain that it was just the opposite, a violent claustrophobia was what was tormenting me. One day, during a session I don’t remember anything else about, that doctor recommended I try a kind of personal therapy that, according to him, had worked well for several of his patients.
‘Do you keep a diary, Antonio?’
I said no, that diaries had always seemed ridiculous to me, a vanity or an anachronism: the fiction that our life matters.
He replied, ‘Well start one. I’m not suggesting a diary-diary, but a notebook to ask yourself questions.’
‘Questions,’ I repeated. ‘Like what?’
‘Like, for example: what dangers are real in Bogotá? What are the chances of what happened to you happening again? If you want I could pass you some statistics. Questions, Antonio, questions. Why what happened to you happened to you, and whose fault it was, if it was yours or not. If this would have happened to you in another country. If this would have happened to you in another time. If these questions have any pertinence. It’s important to distinguish the pertinent questions from the ones that are not, Antonio, and one way to do that is to put them down in writing. When you’ve decided which ones are pertinent and which are silly attempts to find an explanation for what can’t be explained, ask yourself other questions: how to get better, how to forget without kidding yourself, how to go back to having a life, to be good to the people who love you. What to do to not be afraid, or to have a reasonable amount of fear, like everyone has. What to do to carry on, Antonio. Lots of them will be things that have occurred to you before, sure, but a person sees the questions on paper and it’s quite different. A diary. Keep one for the next two weeks and then we’ll talk.’
It seemed an inane recommendation to me, more suited to a self-help book than to a professional with grey hair at his temples, headed notepaper on his desk and diplomas in several languages on his wall. I didn’t say so to him, of course, nor was it necessary, because I soon saw him stand up and walk over to his bookshelves (the books leather-bound and homogeneous, the family photos, a childish drawing framed and signed illegibly). ‘You’re not going to do any such thing, I can see that,’ he said as he opened a drawer. ‘You think all these things I’m saying are stupid. Well, I suppose they might be. But do me a favour, take this.’ He pulled a spiral notebook out of the drawer, like the ones I’d used in college, with those ridiculous covers that looked like denim; he tore four, five or six pages out of the front and looked at the last page, to make sure there weren’t any notes there; he handed it to me, or rather he put it on the desk, in front of me. I picked it up and, for something to do, opened it and flipped through it as if it were a novel. The paper in the notebook was squared: I always hated grid-ruled notebooks. On the first page I could make out the pressure of the writing from the torn-out page, those phantom words. A date, an underlined word, the letter Y. ‘Thanks,’ I said, and left. That very night, in spite of my initial scepticism at the strategy, I locked the door to my room (an absurd security measure), opened the notebook and wrote: Dear diary. My sarcasm fell into the void. I turned the page and tried to begin:
What
Why
But that was it. And so, with my pen in mid-air and my gaze sunk in the isolated words, I remained for a few long seconds. Aura, who had been suffering from a slight but annoying cold all week, was sleeping with her mouth open. I looked at her, tried to make a sketch of her features and failed. I ran through a mental inventory of the next day’s obligations, which included a vaccination for Leticia, who was sleeping quietly beside us in her cot. Then I closed the notebook, put it away in the nightstand and turned off the light.
Outside, in the depths of the night, a dog barked.
One day in 1998, shortly after the World Cup finished in France and shortly before Leticia’s second birthday, I was waiting for a taxi somewhere around Parque Nacional. I don’t remember where I was coming from but I know I was heading north, to one of those endless check-ups with which the doctors tried to reassure me, to tell me that my recovery was proceeding at a normal pace, that soon my leg would be what it used to be. No northbound taxis went by, but lots went by heading for the city centre. I had nothing to do in the centre, I thought absurdly, I hadn’t lost anything down there. And then I thought: I’d lost everything there. So, without thinking too much about it, as an act of private courage that no one not in my situation would understand, I crossed the street and got into the first taxi that came by. A few minutes later I found myself, more than two years after the event, walking towards Plaza Rosario, entering the Café Pasaje, finding a free table and from there looking towards the corner where the attack happened, like a little boy peeking with as much fascination as prudence into the dark field where a bull is grazing at night.
My table, a brown disc with a single metal leg, was at the front: just a hand-span separated it from the window. I couldn’t see the door of the billiard club from there, but I could see the route the murderers on the motorbike had taken. The sounds of the aluminium coffee machine blended with the traffic noise of the nearby avenue, with the clicking heels of passers-by; the aroma of the ground beans blended with the smell that emerged from the toilets every time someone pushed the swinging door. People inhabited the sad square of the plaza, crossing the avenues that framed it, skirted round the statue of the city’s founder (his dark cuirass always spattered with white pigeon shit). The shoeshiners stationed in front of the university with their wooden crates, the huddles of emerald vendors: I looked at them and marvelled that they didn’t know what had happened there, so close to that pavement where their footsteps resounded right now. It was maybe while looking at them that I thought of Laverde and realized I was doing so without anxiety or fear.
I ordered a coffee, then I ordered another. The woman who brought my second one wiped the table with a melancholy, stinking rag and then put the new cup on top of a new saucer. ‘Anything else, sir?’ she asked. I saw her dry knuckles, crisscrossed by gritty lines; a spectre of steam rose from the blackish liquid. ‘No thanks,’ I said, and tried to find a name in my memory, unsuccessfully. All my student days coming to this café, and I was unable to remember the name of the woman who, in turn, had spent her whole life serving these tables. ‘Can I ask you something?’