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I was also surprised by the alacrity and dedication we devote to the damaging exercise of remembering, which after all brings nothing good and serves only to hinder our normal functioning, like those bags of sand athletes tie around their calves for training.
Nobody asked why he’d been killed, or by whom, because such questions no longer had any meaning in my city, or they were asked in a mechanical fashion, as the only way to react to the latest shock.
“It’s prison,” he told me, revealing as he spoke the brief sparkle of a gold tooth. “Jail tires a person out.”
A life unlived, a life that runs through one’s fingers, a life one suffers through while knowing it belongs to someone else: to those who don’t have to suffer.
And when “Nocturne” began to play, when a voice I couldn’t identify—a baritone that verged on melodrama—read that first line that every Colombian has pronounced aloud at least once, I noticed that Ricardo Laverde was crying.
Quiero catar silencio. Non curo de compaña, I want to sample silence. I won’t be cured by companionship.
Fear was the main ailment of Bogotanos of my generation, he told me. My situation, he told me, was not at all unusual: it would eventually pass, as it had passed for all the others who had visited his office.
But I’ve learned very well that these subtleties don’t cut any ice in the real world, and must often be sacrificed, tell the other person what the other person wants to hear, don’t get too honest (honesty is inefficient, it gets you nowhere).
Experience, or what we call experience, is not the inventory of our pains, but rather sympathy we learn to feel for the pain of others.
actuary
Right now there is a chain of circumstances, of guilty mistakes or lucky decisions, whose consequences await me around the corner; and even though I know it, although I have the uncomfortable certainty that those things are happening and will affect me, there is no way I can anticipate them.
My contaminated life was mine alone: my family was still safe: safe from the plague of my country, from its afflicted recent history: safe from what had hunted me down along with so many of my generation (and others, too, yes, but most of all mine, the generation that was born with planes, with the flights full of bags and the bags of marijuana, the generation that was born with the War on Drugs and later experienced the consequences).
Our lives were conducted inside houses, remember. We avoided public places. Houses of friends, of friends of friends, distant acquaintances—any house was better than a public place.
anachronism
This was followed by a sort of contained fury, partially caused by the vulnerability of this life in which a mere phone call can topple everything in such a brief space of time: all you have to do is pick up the receiver and a new fact comes through it into the house, something we’ve neither sought nor requested and that sweeps us along like an avalanche.
Did my own life not begin to throw itself to the ground at this very instant, was that sound not the sound of my own downfall, which began there without my knowledge?
That’s what I’d like to know, how many left my city feeling in one way or another that they were saving themselves, and how many felt that by saving themselves they were betraying something, turning into proverbial rats fleeing the proverbial ship by the act of fleeing the city in flames.
Lillian Necakov for her co-translation of Aurelio Arturo’s poem “Dream City.”
Juan Gabriel Vásquez was born in Bogotá in 1973.
