backlight
There is an architecture, a map of potentialities, to desire -- abstracted plays on malleable weights, the kneading of goose-stipled cold to humming hot, the manipulations of an envisioned anatomy, this cherry pimple on the wing of a shoulder, that arched ridge of ribs, traced with an imaginary finger, recreated, reformed, but tinged (because sensual remembrance is a solitary sport) with cruelty. Desire strays from the chiaroscuro paths of the flesh. I should add that this paragraph has been tacked on at the request of someone else, of which more later.I talked to my double after I dropped out of college and returned to Colombia. The idea was to go back to school in Bogota. Instead, I worked for a small weekly aimed at British and American expatriates.
When the paychecks from the newspaper began to bounce, and squeezing the money out of our boss got harder, I took a job teaching English at a textiles factory. Vera couldn't teach. She worked full time at the paper and, if she were to take something on the side, it would have meant cutting our income by half -- in theory. But we were always in debt by the time the checks, two or three months overdue, would be handed out, and by then it didn't matter, and we'd go out, pay our tab at one of the bars, start a new one, and drink and dance and throw up. I taught at the factory early in the morning. I scribbled and diagrammed in the afternoons. We hustled for our lunch from friends and colleagues. We shared a tin of sardines or a bowl of spaghetti and ketchup for dinner. We drank gallons of weak tea. After living this way for a year, she returned to her ex-boyfriend, and showed up drunk at my house a week later, threw a mirror (hers) at me, drank a shot of gin (mine), slammed the door shut, and I haven't seen her since. I didn't return to the newspaper. They still owe me money. She was Irish. From Belfast. Thirty years old. She was a redhead and ten years older than me.
I thought of Vera when I got news that Tom, my old editor, had passed away. He and his wife died in a car crash near Chiquinquira.
Tom and I would get together for the ex-pat parties at the Canadian embassy on Thursdays (free beer), or drink on the cheap at one of the corner stores. He never brought his wife. On one such store, somebody had scrawled a message on the scratched plastic top of our table with a permanent ink marker. Tom wanted to know what it meant.
"It says," I said, "'Women and fish know how to love.'"
"I don't get it," he said.
"It's a pun," I said, "'Las mujeres y los peces saben amar.' Amar means love, but if you split it up, a mar, it'd mean 'like the sea'. Saben can mean either know or taste."
"I get it," he said. He drank. It was late afternoon and the sun was refracting fiery red through the amber bottles.
Two girls, dark, pretty, in short tight skirts, walked by; they smiled at Tom, the tall Minnesotan with the white hair and the fair, sunburnt face, a blatant gringo. He waved and offered them beers. They giggled. Walked away.
"You have the most beautiful girls here," he said.
"You should know," I said, "you married one."
He was watching the girls' asses as they strutted off. I don't think he heard me.
"You know what I miss?" he said. "Blondes. I'd kill for a blonde, just to see one walk down the street."
I was trying to get the owner of the store to bring us two more bottles of Aguila. He too was watching the girls fading into the Bogota traffic. I was thinking of redheads, but Tom was long tired of me whining about Vera, so I didn't say anything.
I knew what he meant, though.
"Colombia," he said, "Colombia's a place where blondes are a rare treat."
"You see some," I said.
"Yeah, but not many, and not many all that good-looking," he said.
I had just enough on me to buy the next round and bus fare home. The owner of the store brought our beers.
"So you and Vera are back together again?"
I paid the owner in coins, and dropped a few on the floor when I heard Tom. I reached down. The legs of the table framed the sidewalk; in this bent pocket of space the lower half of pedestrians passed by, were replaced by others, legs framing legs.
"No," I said, from under the table. "We haven't."
"Somebody saw you and her last night downtown."
"Who?" I had managed to get up, and to place the coins on the store owner's palm.
"What's it matter?" he said. "It's not true."
"No."
"Is it?" he said.
I shook my head. The sun was too hot. It hung low in the sky. I'd left my sunglasses at the apartment.
That night, a Tuesday, after scrawling tomorrow's lesson plan on the back of a flier for a Mariachi band, I opened the blinds and stared at the city. A prime-time soap opera blared, unnoticed, on the TV. Traffic honked, squealed, moved on, fourteen stories below, invisible---the apartment faced the mountains, not the highway. Bogota is flanked by mountains. A statue of the virgin presided atop the highest perch, a red light blinking in the crown of her halo, warning airplanes. I felt alone, out of place. The anatomy of the city grew alien and distant on the darkened window.
Tom showed up at the Canadian embassy on Thursday. I waved to him. He walked over and punched me in the face, hard.
Iridescent, incandescent stars trickled hotly, ethereally, over the hissing elongated red ridge. I'm mystified by another useless delirium.
Hi there.
When I came to I was slumping in a chair. Tom was sitting next to me, drinking Labatt's Blue.
"You bastard," he said, waving the can in front of my face, "You fucking bastard."
"What?" I said. A crowd of people, sunburnt ex-pats and their Colombian girlfriends or boyfriends, stared at me. Disco violins crackled from a cheap boombox; Aretha Franklin told the world that she was the woman from the future. My stomach hurt.
"I can't," he said, "I can't believe you'd be this evil."
"What?"
He got up and walked away. I tried to maneuver out of the chair. My feet weren't all that trustworthy, so I stayed put. My knees were shaking a bit.
Tom walked back to the table fifteen minutes later.
"Are you OK?" he asked me.
"I'm fine," I said.
"You want a beer?"
"I'm fine."
He walked away again. An hour passed. My knees shook some more. A bus ride, in that beat-up, sorry state, was out of the question, so I sacrificed the next day's pack of Marlboros and hailed a cab. I thought of Vera's dark hair, her brown eyes. Her native Belfast, maybe Bogota.
Actually Vera's hair is a bright and very natural red. Sorry for the slip.
The phone had been ringing at home. I grabbed it. Then jerked it away. The right side of my face was raw. I shifted the phone, got tangled in the cable, and said hello.
"Hi," the other end of the line said. The voice sounded familiar, but shrill.
"Who is this?" I asked, walking to the fridge. There was a half-empty two liter bottle of Coke. I drank a bit and, after screwing the cap back on, pressed it to my right eye.
"I've been fucking her for the past two months," the other end said.
"OK," I said, "who are you?" But I knew.
"I sweet-talked my way back in," the other said.
What made me stay on the line? Nothing. Maybe this: There's an architecture, a map of potentialities, to desire---and blah blah blah. Whatever else this creature was, however bare, crude, and pathetic, it was also myself. Let him talk. He knows you.
"What?" I said. "You told her I couldn't live without her? That I was pining away? That I loved her?"
"It's all true."
"And it sounds corny." I opened the blinds and saw the blinking virgin. The city lights shimmered. Silhouettes moved in the windows that were closer by. More frames. "This is very awkward."
"It's only corny in the movies, in the books," he said. "Not in real life."
"Congrats, Romeo," I said. A few blocks away the backlit figure of a man talked on the telephone. He was toying with the blinds and pressing his cheek against what, I would assume, was a cool window, like mine.
"I tied her to a kitchen chair," he said. "Yesterday."
"I don't want to hear this," I said.
"You do. She wanted me to do it," he said. "By the time we were done, she was black and blue. She cried, called me a bastard, kissed me."
"You're sick," I said.
"Yes," he said. "I wrote on her back. With one of those heavy duty markers. She had passed out already. She didn't notice it when she woke up."
I crawled down a corner of the wall.
"Your farewell message," he said. "Las mujeres y los peces saben amar."
The clock on the kitchen counter said it was close to midnight. I had to get up in five hours. The bus ride to the textiles factory was forty-five minutes long. And why these tears?
"I think it's pretty much over for me," he said. "Just wanted you to know."
He hung up. Last night, while the other had done what he said he had done---and I believed him; it explained Tom's behavior; an ex-pat community is a small affair in any city, and everyone keeps tabs on everyone else, who's sleeping with whom, who's cheating on whom, who's being a brute and so on---but last night, I'd been at dinner with my cousins. I had stayed over there for most of the night. I called to make sure. Yes, I'd been there. Was I feeling OK? I said no, and hung up.
Vera and her boyfriend left three months later.
He was right: It was pretty much over for me.
The week before I left for the US, I was sitting on a bench, in one of those hidden parks that pop in out of nowhere, like Arthur Machen's urban mirages as his characters go about London. Turn a corner and it was another city, another country. I was half a block away from the Avenida Caracas, one of the noisiest, busiest intersections in Bogota, but the park was silent. A few children walked around, short and dark like myself, an old man ate a green mango, skin and all, two secretaries in short skirts smoked cigarettes. The sun was low but not setting. A woman in a gauzy Indian skirt leaned against a tree. She was six foot one or so, and slender. The light shone through the dress; I could make out her legs and a bit of her pubis. She had pale blue eyes and long, blonde hair, luminous with backlight from the sun. Her cheeks and the bridge of her nose were heavily freckled, and lightly sunburnt. The wind lifted her skirt. She smoothed it out, and, looking off to the side, tense, distracted, possibly lost, left her hands on her thighs. She stepped lightly, as if she didn't think she belonged where she was---as if she wasn't sure if it was OK to disturb anything. I watched her walk away into the Avenida Caracas.