By John Better Armella
Translated by George Bert Henson
I may be a black sheep, but my hooves are made of gold.
—P.B. Jones (while under the influence)
Whether it’s a transvestite taking a drag on her damp Pielroja on some corner of barrio Santa Fe, a middle manager asking with feigned dignity, “Marlboro, please,” or a precocious little girl smoking her punk brother’s butts in secret, cigarettes possess the brevity necessary to tell a story, not in the style of Jim Jarmusch, where they accompany an espresso, and the black-and-white screen accentuates a bitter encounter between Tom Waits and Iggy Pop. Instead, this is a strange and even brief story, the story of someone who asks, Do you smoke?, a question that conceals a dark motive.
Once upon a time there was a hotel in the center of Bogotá; but also a public library and a museum, which I frequented in the early days after my arrival in a city that resembled an architect’s mockup: a lawn and glass on one side and, on the other, an alley infested with the urine and feces of a multitude that survives beneath air ducts and in the skid-row rooms of the metropolis.
“Do you smoke?” says the guy who’s been following me since I left the Museum of Modern Art, where I saw a precarious exhibit of David Hockney. A slight nod of my head accepting his invitation is all it takes, and next I’m sitting in one of those downtown cafés with immense panoramic windows, through which the urban pastiche can be seen on parade, at once severe and solicitous. Where are they going? I wonder.
When one talks to a stranger, one always begins with a lie:
“My name is Alejandro … Yes, I just arrived in the city … No, I don’t know anyone … House? No, amigo, a hotel a few blocks from here … Umm … it’s called La Cuna de Venus … How much do I pay? Fifteen thousand pesos a day.”
The La Normanda café is one of the places downtown where you can talk and, more importantly, smoke without worry after the passage of the smoking ban in public spaces. I feel very comfortable, and the guy is nice; he’s dressed in a nice suit, without loose threads or obvious signs of repair, with an attractive copper tie and gold cufflinks; his face is healthy; and he looks like he just had a hot shower. He’s around forty years old; he says he works for important people, that his car is parked nearby, that he likes coming downtown, the people, blah blah blah, that he likes to make friends, blah blah blah, that he’s been looking for I don’t know what for years, blah blah blah.
“Well, amigo, I’ve got what you’ve been looking for,” I tell him. My comment solicits a brief smile that allows me to catch a glimpse of his teeth, long and pointed, slightly stained but not unattractive.
“A drink?” he asks.
The taste of vodka in this climate is always welcome, even more as it begins to get dark and the hills become covered in a thick gauze, a frozen curtain that descends on Bogotá’s streets, which causes them to seem sadder than usual.
After a couple of drinks, I start to enjoy the conversation more, to the point of sharing certain confidences. W is a really fascinating guy, with a keen sense of humor. On the other side of the glass, we watch a strange-looking character walk quickly by, a has-been of Colombian boxing, a black man dressed in a leather jacket that hangs slightly below his waist, faded jeans, and an umbrella that hovers strangely above him.
“That guy had the world in his hands,” W comments, “and there’s nothing more dangerous than a boxer with the world in his hands. At any minute, he might start punching you, until there’s nothing left.”
“You have to punch something in this life,” I say.
“Tell me, Alejandro, when did you arrive in Bogotá?”
“June 9, 2004,” my answer comes, like I’m an automaton, as if repeating a sentence that’s been recorded a thousand times on tape, as if reciting my full name or my ID number or my date of birth. I think that a person shouldn’t keep an exact record of anything, except perhaps a fond memory from childhood or adolescence. But the act of recalling X date, being able to reproduce it with such exactness to the point of revealing its most intimate details, the methodical description of the day, the weather, the names of buildings seen, cold voices spoken through intercoms that say “We’re sorry, we can’t help you,” “Go away, please, or we’ll call the police,” “Mr. Hat has left on a trip this very afternoon, leave your name, and I’ll give him your message,” makes us feel safe.
All those voices and images are proof that something happened, that the tape hasn’t been erased, that something deep down went bang!, and its echo still reverberates, that life branded you with an iron like livestock so that you never forget, and my brand says: “09-June-2004.”
“Is anything wrong? Would you like another cigarette, Alejandro?” W says.
As I listen to him talk, hearing the tone of concern in his voice, the way he offers to light my cigarette, as if saying, “Warm up a little,” makes me wonder whether I’d met him by accident that day, if maybe … No! Bogotá had already prepared an unforgettable welcome, but now’s not the time to tell that story; I’ll need a whole pack of really strong cigarettes, longs, so I can blow puffs of black smoke, like a fireplace where you burn letters and photos of someone you truly hate, and my hate has a name, the name of a respectable señor of Colombian literature, a son-of-a-bitch who abandoned me to the jaws of a city that wasn’t able to swallow me completely, a city that bestowed on me the dark credentials necessary to write a book that I will call: “THE DIRTY MR. HAT.”
“Love, you said you were going to tell me a story, and you’ve barely said a word since we got here,” W says.
The motels in Bogotá, at least the ones downtown, are filthy rat holes. Through the room’s tiny window, I can see Seventh Street clearly, packed as usual. It’s funny, but among the mass of people, I’m able to distinguish a pair of familiar faces. Unlike other people I’ve bumped into on a rainy afternoon, W is the only one I’ve told that I write. He’s a sensitive sort of guy, who lacks the smell of wet rags that men in Bogotá have, tightfisted sonsabitches who spend all day on the prowl, moving from one side of downtown to the other, catching whatever they can for a few coins.
“Why did you want to come to this place? We could have gone somewhere nicer,” W says.
With the same regularity I used to frequent museums, churches, or parks, my curiosity has led me to every kind of dive: bathhouses, massage parlors, discos, and the infamous and not-so-pleasant bookstores in the city’s core, rooms that reek of disinfectant, small booths that play porn videos where someone services you for twenty thousand pesos: damp labyrinths as dark as a wolf’s mouth, temples of fast sex in a fast, merciless city. And in that terrycloth darkness, the crouched murmur of a presence: some fag panting like an out-of-breath animal whispers “Come ’ere”; that’s what the bookstores are for, to “go” when someone says “come,” without exchanging names, saying absolutely nothing, because within seconds your mouth is being pumped by his package at a pulsating rhythm. “Ay, amor, but I want to see your face,” but why a face in a place like this, in a city like this, because ever since you arrived in Bogotá your name has been Efraín, Alejandro, Fernando, and you’ve never bothered to say thank you when they hand you a twenty-thousand-peso bill, and you muster the nerve to swipe the last bill from their pocket.
“Come over here to me, Alejandro,” W motions, patting the bed.
Fifteen minutes later:
“You haven’t said anything, was I that bad?”
“You did fine, W, don’t worry, I was just thinking,” I said, rubbing a wet semen spot on the sheet.
“What were you thinking about?”
“About the time I was in prison, a disgusting shithole called the URI. I’m wondering if you would have gone to look for me, if you would have taken me something to eat, if suddenly …”
Within minutes W has dressed rather nervously and says goodbye, claiming he has a pending matter. I could see him, through the room’s tiny window, walking up the street, more at ease. I suppose I shouldn’t have mentioned the jail thing, but it was too late—it was really too late! So I went downstairs and rang the exit buzzer. The woman in charge of the motel, a husky woman whose face is wrapped in a thick wool scarf, says to me in a muffled voice:
“Your friend paid the room until tomorrow at noon, but just until noon.” As I opened the gate, she continued to mumble something I didn’t understand.
“That’s okay,” I said, “I’m just going for cigarettes. I’ll be right back.”
But I wasn’t.
(2009)
John Better Armella (Barranquilla, Colombia, 1978). His books include the poetry collection China White (2006), Locas de felicidad: crónicas travestis y otros relatos (2009), which carries a prologue by Pedro Lemebel, and the novel A la caza del chico espantapájaros (Planeta 2016). He is a frequent contributor to the newspaper El Heraldo as well as the magazines Credencial, Arcadia, Diners, Soho, Carrusel, and Página 12. He has interviewed some of Latin America’s most important intellectual and artistic figures, including Carlos Monsiváis, Carmen Berenguer, Piero, Francisco Zumaqué, Ramón Illán Bacca, Fabiana Cantilo, Álvaro Barrios, Harold Alvarado Tenorio, and others.
George Henson is a literary translator and assistant professor of Spanish Translation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. He is the translator of Cervantes Prize laureate Sergio Pitol’s The Art of Flight, The Journey, and The Magician of Vienna, as well as fellow Cervantes recipient Elena Poniatowska’s The Heart of the Artichoke. His translations have appeared previously in Your Impossible Voice as well as other literary venues, including The Literary Review, Bomb, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Words Without Borders, and World Literature Today, where he is a contributing editor. He is also the Translation Editor for Latin American Literature Today. His translation of Pitol’s Mephisto’s Waltz: Selected Stories is due out on the fall.
