Fog at Noon, page 5
Sonia also liked the prefabricated houses for poor families that Raúl designed about two months ago. He decorated the seams of the concrete panels with Guadua bamboo, and some panels are made just of Guadua. They ignored his idea of using palm thatch roofs in the hotter regions. The project was financed by a Belgian organization seeking to assist needy families; it was rather bureaucratic and rigid. They dismissed the thatch idea out of hand; they wanted to use the same model of house in the hotter regions that they did in the uplands, because they’re cheaper to produce that way. So the tenants in hot places could go fuck themselves. Unfortunately, Raúl thinks, those tenants love concrete too and would rather roast on the banks of the Cauca under a ferrocement roof than suffer the seeming humiliation of having a thatch one. It’s some small comfort to know that as long as they’re going to be roasting in his houses, at least the houses are pretty.
Spoons, bridges, schools, chapels. Better to have more than one thing going at once. Raquel calls Raúl the Leonardo da Vinci of vegetable matter. He’d dream up a bamboo helicopter. A war machine made of macana palm and reeds. Raúl’s weak jokes, like this reed one, started grating on Julia’s nerves. He grated on her nerves more and more, and she grated on Raúl’s. They soon got to a point where he had to tread very carefully, tiptoeing around to avoid triggering a fight. He was terrified by the thought of losing her, knowing it might kill him, and he was cautious in everything he said or did, not wanting to set her off. But he always set her off anyway, inadvertently, and in his frustration he would erupt and come very close to slapping her in the face and finally bringing it all crashing down. What an ending, with that kind of suspended torment. Whenever things got to that point, Raúl would stay quiet to keep her from guessing what was going through his mind, and then she’d get upset about his silence.
Julia wasn’t much for jokes, weak or otherwise, unless they were old standards or ones she’d come up with herself. Other people’s humor annoyed her; it made her feel vulnerable.
Deep-thinking poets don’t go around being entertained by dumb bullshit like the helicopter joke. Humorless people are a menace to society, Raúl thinks. He’s happy now to know he will never see her again. The memory of her produces a visceral revulsion, like what some people feel toward particular foods that have made them ill in the past, but her image still haunts him. He knows that tomorrow’s her birthday, for example. The date will always loom over him; it’s a curse. He no longer carries on arguments with her in his head, at least, the way he did day and night for almost a year after she left him, or insult her or berate her.
His grief is over.
Wherever she is, she’s better off, and he hopes she will continue to pull further away, falling deeper and deeper into oblivion.
Aleja
The girl didn’t bring the beggar coffee and pastries, but she did give him some leftover food wrapped in aluminum foil and a little Coca-Cola bottle full of milk. He’s going to keep rummaging in the garbage, but he won’t scatter it around, Katerina says—probably won’t expose himself again, Aleja hopes—and they’re going to give him milk and leftovers every day. He might go along with it. Exhibitionism is an illness. Humberto is going to crack up at this story. And would you look at that, the girl turned out to be pretty smart. The homeless guy’ll end up going vegetarian, since we don’t eat dead things in this house. It’s pelting down rain again—this is the Great Flood. There’s been flooding all over the country; the Cauca and the Magdalena have overspilled their banks, and the hydrologists at IDEAM say it’s going to last a while. Right when we’re supposed to be enjoying summer in all its glory. Not everybody accepts vegetarians. They say they’re tedious, causing problems wherever they go. Not Aleja. She even eats meat if there’s no other option. “You’re the first vegetarian I’ve ever met who eats pork,” Humberto teased her. Diana, Julia’s girl, is vegan. She doesn’t eat cheese or wear leather—and she’s not wrong, since there’s no valid reason to make a calf suffer just so we can have shoes. But we shouldn’t take everything to the extreme either, because then it becomes impossible to live in society with other people. She doesn’t wear wool clothing out of respect for the sheep—now that’s something.
Julia used to get irritated with Aleja’s vegetarianism, to say nothing of Diana’s veganism. Julia always said vegetarians had papery skin and were pale like vampires. When she got something in her head, there was no getting it out again. She didn’t even notice that Aleja had the opposite problem: she gets as red as a farmhand and has to wear face powder. And Julia was one to talk, with her skin like parchment and cellulitis on her ass! When she woke up in the morning she looked like a witch, a harpy, like her mother without makeup. But men were still attracted to her because of her strong personality. Maybe too strong, Aleja would say. Diana is a pain with that stuff, refusing to eat soup if a bone has been boiled in it for flavor, refusing to sleep under wool blankets …She doesn’t look like a vampire either—she has a healthy glow. When she travels, which she loves to do, she sometimes ends up going hungry and becomes a real grouch. And with all the working out she does, she has to take a lot of supplements to build muscle mass. Bogotá is nice when the sun’s out. When it’s raining day and night, it gets you down. Sometimes it feels like day will never come or that everything is under water. Dawn and dusk indistinguishable. She was arrogant, Aleja thinks. Even the birds don’t sing here. Poor Julia. The beggars must get so cold at night. Maybe the layer of dirt on them keeps them warm.
Raquel
It gets light out and then dark and the snow keeps falling. Last year they had a big snowstorm, not nearly as big as this one, and afterward the temperature went up to almost fifty and then dropped again. The partially melted snow turned to ice, very dangerous. Half of the elderly population in the five boroughs broke their hips, including Albor, Raquel’s neighbor and friend, who isn’t even old yet, though he’s headed there fast.
Julián has poured himself a glass of whiskey on the rocks and fallen asleep in the hammock, with Leaves of Grass on his belly. Translated by Borges, and not such a good translation either, Raquel thinks. Once Julián starts drinking, he can’t stop, and he goes down in flames within an hour, two max, like one of those fireworks stands that used to catch fire outside of Bogotá. As a boy, Raúl blew off two fingertips on his left hand with a bottle rocket.
They hadn’t moved to Bogotá yet. Medellín ended up outlawing fireworks and sky lanterns after that. The sky lanterns looked so beautiful sailing above the mountains and mingling with the stars. During the Giuliani era the city banned the firecrackers traditionally used in Chinatown’s dragon festival. A dragon with no firecrackers is a real bummer. Everything with any life to it ends up getting adjusted to meet stodgy gringo norms. In East River Park the Puerto Ricans had these gorgeous handmade roulettes painted in a primitivist style, just like the ones Raquel and Raúl saw as kids on Colombia’s Atlantic coast. They, too, disappeared, never to be seen again, along with the Bacardi they used to sell in little paper cups. Illegal! Illegal! Illegal! Of course the Boricuas were always making a huge ruckus in the park, Eddie Santiago blasting people’s eardrums, and the trash they left strewn around was even worse. Raquel remembers how excited Raúl got—this was back during his apprenticeship—when she took him to see them. That day (officially a spring day even though there were still clumps of dirty snow in the corners) she first met Julia, who hugged her as if they were the best of friends. It really rubbed Raquel the wrong way, even though she generally likes people on principle. Even when they screw her over and show their true colors, she likes them. Everybody but Julia. A person without true colors would be like a dragon without firecrackers, Raquel thinks. Those lovely lines of poetry—how did they go? With some I feel kinship because of their character qualities and with others I feel kinship because they lack those qualities. One of her students is obsessed with Pessoa and thinks he’s some sort of saint. I feel kinship with superior men because they are superior, and I feel kinship with inferior men because they are superior too. To each their own. Her mother became a saint. But there was something about Julia that Raquel didn’t like—an appalling selfishness concealed behind the childish fawning she occasionally deployed to win people over. In love with herself and herself alone. She would have killed for the sake of her so-called career.
Raúl
After a few hours on the porch watching the rain fall, Raúl is convinced that nothing is solid. Everything is an illusion—a tremendous cliché, but not so easy to actually absorb, since mountains generally seem solid, and rocks, hard. There exists something that had no beginning and will have no end, even though it dwells within the mountains and the rocks and the water and the air and is as insubstantial as all of these. Eventually, that came to be his religion. Nothing of what we see has much reality to it, but some element that does resides in everything we see. “Our volcano,” Julia used to call the Nevado del Tolima, visible in all its imposing perfection from the deck of her house and from the balcony at Raúl’s, as long as it’s not raining or overcast. And that’s how he thought of it too, full of dreams as he was, but the volcano turned to smoke; she herself turned to nothing, turned to water, turned to mud, turned to fog. You have to sit stock-still to see it. You move the slightest bit, and things cling to that illusion of solidity.
That’s the thing about bamboo. It does not seek solidity; on the contrary, it wants to be air. The nothingness of reeds waving in the breeze, Raúl thinks. Air within, air without. Thickset though Raúl may be, practically his entire body, if not all of it, is empty, like a stalk of bamboo. He is only noise. The booming void. The flatulent void. The nice thing about living alone is you’re free to let them rip and shake the windowpanes. With Sonia around, he has to be careful and make sure she isn’t nearby; given the age difference, there’s no room for him to let his guard down. Luckily, she spends all her time out in the grove. One day she heard him and started laughing. “The three indispensable accessories of old codgers,” Sonia said. “Farts, house slippers, and the daily paper.” Raúl likes slippers, though he hasn’t had any since he was a boy. There are some shaped like animals. He can just see himself sitting there with two huge bunnies on his feet—Flemish giants, given how big his feet are, and fuchsia-colored to cheer him up and bring some light to the darkness of the endless rain. And he hasn’t read a newspaper in ages, or listened to the news. Reporters are always trying to make you believe a million things are happening, when in fact nothing at all is happening. There’s this one radio station where the presenter announces the time every minute, in a tone of extreme urgency, and then comes some huge piece of news or the huge continuation of huge news. Time, news, time, news…That’s the format. The listener ends up exasperated, enervated. History rockets away, impelled to unnatural speeds by those hooligans. As Raúl sees it, the last news worth mentioning was the end of the Second World War. Or the death of Christ, if you want to get picky about it. “Five p.m.: News alert! Jesus of Nazareth has died. Soldiers who had been guarding him stated that the alleged savior died after uttering a few incoherent words…Five-oh-one p.m.: Breaking! Pilate denies responsibility for the unfortunate events. In a press release, the civil servant claimed…Five-oh-two: The two thieves who accompanied him in his suffering…”
Julia
I have to stay so still! I had my faults, like anyone, I accept that, but I didn’t do anything to deserve this. It is peaceful, though—I’d be lying if I said otherwise. At least I can console myself that I knew love and I knew triumph, and even though I ended up drowned, they had to work hard for it, manhandling me and avoiding my gnashing teeth—I was never a coward. I never liked weaklings, and though I sometimes melted, like I was a little girl again, it was always out of tenderness or compassion. Out of my own humanity. Like with those animals, poor things. The skinny horses pulling carts in Bogotá. Poor widdle fings! I had to get out and hug them. So saaaad! They destroyed me. I had to snap Manuela out of it, my own daughter, to make her cast off the feminine fragility that used to drive me nuts sometimes. The girl was born that way—nothing to be done about it. When she was six, Manuela hated the sand at the beach. She would run away shrieking from crickets and even butterflies. Ha, ha, ha. And while Diana was leaping around dressed any old way, Manuela was always neat as a pin—she couldn’t stand feeling disheveled. It’s in a person’s DNA. Her paternal grandmother was exactly the same. Diana did start taking more care with her appearance, and dressing well—she had good taste, after all—but only as a teenager. I don’t resent her even if she resents me. Anyone who saw us together would have thought we loved each other, and maybe we did, but it was a complicated love, full of anger and jealousy. Like a plant covered in those little lice they get. My love for Manuela was very intense, and maybe Diana was bitter about that, even though she loved her as much I did. I thought she was beautiful, Manuela was, and my eyes would glow when I looked at her, even after she was all grown. I wrote a poem. So delicate and moving! Why was everything so prickly and full of thorns? Why is my voice today the voice of nobody, the voice of water? My poor father has been running all over the place because people claim to have seen me in one city or another, and since he refuses to give up on finding me, he keeps traveling, searching for me and paying private eyes and informants full of malice or greed. Why has everything suddenly lost its color?
From: Raquel
Date: Tuesday, January 10, 6:32 p.m.
To: Adela
Subject: Assorted bullshit
Attachment: Photo
Impressive! The same thing just happened to me! That photo of my mom turned up in a trunk where it had no business being. It’s a little scary, even if it has to do with her, right? Raúl says the two of us like to pretend we’re witches and imagine things, but I think it happens to other people too and they simply don’t notice.
As for the other thing you were asking about…The girlfriend’s a stewardess, or was. Flight attendant. Very pretty, yes, much prettier than that poet who’s nowhere to be found. I’m attaching the girl’s photo, which I got from Raúl.
The poet was arrogant, an awful poet, and she practically killed him. It was just Raúl’s luck—bad luck, as it turned out—to fall in love with a wannabe poet, social climber, and underachiever par excellence. He thought she was beautiful, but she wasn’t, not in the way people mean when they say beautiful. A common wildflower rather than a rose. But anyway, given what happened, that doesn’t matter now—it’s the least of our worries.
I’ve got a feeling something really terrible happened. It’s been almost a month, and nothing. There aren’t any guerrillas in that area, Raúl said, since for a while there were rumors that her last husband—her sixth, apparently, if you can believe it—a dirtbag from a good family, the kind of playboy you see splashed across the tabloids, had sold her to the guerillas. The guerrillas are blamed for everything in this country, and people who are guilty of so many things deflect responsibility. The embezzlers would point their fingers at the guerrillas if they could.
Sold her, my ass! He’s the one who did something to her, I say. The guerrillas would rather have gone after that daddy’s boy instead. The police have been questioning him, anyway—how could they not? He’s the husband. But you know what the police are like down there. There were some ransom demands, all fake, Raúl said. They also think it’s possible she’s hiding out somewhere, the way people with severe depression sometimes take off and start a new life really far away—Buenos Aires, Boca Raton, Manizales—with a new identity. Seriously, though. Somebody claimed to have seen a woman who looked a lot like her, only unkempt and filthy, who was sitting in a pew in the Manizales cathedral, singing beautifully. But Julia didn’t strike me as depressed. I get the impression that…I don’t even know how to describe it. You know what I mean. And what’s rough is I’m hardly ever wrong about these things. Just now as I was staring at the cushion of snow piled up on the fire escape, something came over me. The snow gleams as if it were alive. Cold and alive, know what I mean? Scary. It’s like we don’t know anything about the world, don’t have any idea what this place is that we inhabit—we’re as defenseless as children. And suddenly there are things like the snow on the rusty fire escape or a gust of wind and rain against the windowpane, and you have to keep it together not to feel panic—or terror, really.
What was the other thing you were asking? Oh, right. Here’s how to make mofongo: Take six plantains, still really green. They’re probably not easy to find in Saskatoon, but at this point you can get them pretty much anywhere in the world…
Aleja
You shouldn’t open just one additional academy, Aleja, Humberto told her, you should think about building out an entire chain. He’d be willing to invest, and now Aleja has to pump the brakes on him, because he’s all hyped up and going to see locations downtown and up north in Suba, and recruiting additional investors from among his marketing buddies. Aleja tells him not to even dream about expanding that fast, since Diana’s their only qualified yoga instructor—she despises him, by the way, just like Manuela does—and Humberto says that’s never been a problem, they’ll just train some more. They can find women to run the new locations among their own clientele. Aleja would rather take things slow, and she doesn’t want to mix friendship and work, emotions and work, sex and work, but everything Humberto’s saying is so sensible, so well considered. And it’s also true that things have always worked out well for him, thanks to his business instinct, and that’s why he’s so wealthy today, despite what wagging tongues may say. Because envy is always in plentiful supply. Of course Aleja would prefer he didn’t meddle so much, but she can’t figure out how to tell him that, and the fact that his ideas are so fantastic makes it even more difficult. The thirty million pesos Aleja lent him are another matter. That’s personal, nothing to do with his professional undertakings. It’s always best to keep things separate—otherwise it’s chaos and you can’t figure out what the hell is going on. And Humberto himself was the one who insisted on paying that high interest rate. He’s so lovely. So handsome. With that deep voice that caresses your ear. Yesterday he asked her to please lend him another ten million, since he was still a bit illiquid, just temporarily, and Aleja had to lie and say she didn’t have it. He can’t be short on cash, given he has all those CDs Julia left him. It’s not that Aleja is worried about the thirty million—no, she knows he’s good for it, it’s chump change to him.
