In August 2012, a week or so after a work-related one-week visit to Taipei with my former colleague Yuji U. during which I visited the National Palace Museum, ate dumplings stuffed with the ground meat of pigs and cows who had done nothing to upset me and shared a bottle of pink wine before I slept with my also colleague Nathalie B., I boarded a plane again, this time to visit my Father, the man I had not see in eight years.
We had not seen each other neither in photographs, nor in video, nor even a in a drawing or painting. We had heard each other’s voices a few times over the phone. His, which sounded like wind passing through sandpaper, was the permanent result of an accident or illness and another of those secrets he did not like to talk about. I had to call him from public telephones, always a different one in a different location. If mother had known about those calls she would have shouted and cried, perhaps hit me or throw at me any object at hand and in any case insist in packing all we could in the car and leave, whether day or night, the city we were living in at the time.
Mother feared father like sheep fear the wolf. She had her reasons.
Father broke her nose twice, once after he slammed her face against the door of his car, caused her retina to detach after punching her right eye, her uterus to tear after kicking her in the stomach, bruised her arm and almost broke it when he jammed it in the back door of her car, threatened to burn her face with acid, threatened to kill her more than once.
After their divorce Father had our dogs poisoned, sent men to abduct my Mother’s mother, had our emails hacked, sent mother and Grandmother a box with a piece of human skull, black hair still attached to it, sent men with tanks filled of gasoline who threatened to burn the house we lived in with all of us inside it.
As I said, she had her reasons.
A series of airplanes took me from Tokyo to Seattle, from Seattle to Houston and from there to Bogota. It took me 32 hours to reach Father’s apartment. August is high travel season. Narita airport innards, as neon-bright and sterile as a hospital ward, brimmed with representatives of my own despicable species. After overcoming the check-in counter, the security gates and immigration, I dragged myself to the simple café in front of the designated gate and drank a stout to try and calm my nerves, gave thanks for the summer skies and good weather conditions and murmured a prayer before boarding the first aircraft. The interior of the plane was as monotone and dazzling as the airport hallways. Our race seems to favour worlds made of white neon and plastic. I couldn’t sleep. Voluminous and angry-looking flight attendants in their late forties and early fifties, women who due to the constant nagging of unsatisfied passengers, white artificial lights and lack of oxygen had prematurely aged, served plastic trays with bland food (that tasted like plastic) and which I could only make edible with the individual salt and pepper sachets that came inside the plastic wrapping accompanying the plastic fork and plastic knife and swiped my plastic credit card in exchange for an airline-sized plastic bottle of bad red wine. I watched one bad movie after the next listening to what the actors said through my right ear since the headphone socket was broken. I blew my nose a thousand times trying to relieve my chronic and in extreme annoying for me and those around me sinus allergies. Apart from the infuriating announcements announcing weather conditions, security measures, meal services, miscellaneous instructions and duty-free sales, there was no sign of life inside the machine cruising the skies.
My thoughts wandered away from the small screen and I recalled my only previous visit to the United States of America more than two decades back.
At that time, the most famous man in the country I was born in was neither a scientist nor a writer nor an athlete, not even a politician, but a drug trafficker with a gold chain around his neck, a thick mustache and a protuberant stomach. Drugs, kidnappings, massacres, explosions, car bombs and murder filled the pages of newspapers and the half-hour news shows at noon and seven. Announcers and reporters, their voices and words tainted with gloom, talked of civilians, Judges, lawyers, politicians, journalists, syndicalists, governors, police officers, priests and even soccer referees killed by hit men hired by the mafia or by one of the many guerrilla groups operating in the country. People bought a famous tabloid called El Espacio only to see the gruesome pictures of the latest tragedy in the front cover. The newspaper, to balance the emotions of its many readers, always placed a photograph of a topless woman in the last page.
In that August of 1989 Presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán was about to open his speech in the city of Soacha. Galan’s campaign revolved around putting an end to drug trafficking and the drug cartels and the rivers of blood, orphans and widows that they caused. The leaders of the drug cartels did not share his opinion. A sea of waving hands, red flags and white banners welcomed him. The masses in front Galán looked like a crammed pond of hungry, dirty fish, their toothless mouths wide open, gaping for breadcrumbs. The man seemed to float or to glide through the crowd. People cried, smiled, touched and grabbed him as if he were one of the prophets. A bad omen. Humanity has always chosen to kill its prophets.
Galán, full head of wavy brown hair, chevron mustache, wearing a dark suit, a light blue shirt and a burgundy-colored necktie, climbed the simple wooden stage, raised his arms and, smiling, started waving to the crowd. A man standing in front of him produced a compact machine gun from under his shirt, shot a burst of gunpowder and fire at the body of Galán and escaped during the confusion. Galán bled to death at a hospital named in honor of the also murdered American President John F. Kennedy minutes later. Julio Peñalosa, the city’s alderman, and Santiago Cuervo, one of Galán’s bodyguards, were also mortally wounded that night.
In November, a bomb blew inside a plane mid-air minutes after take-off. The explosion killed everyone on board, all the members of the crew and over a hundred passengers. The mafia wanted to kill César Gaviria, the second strongest presidential candidate after Galán. He did not board that plane. I watched the images of the white and red fragments of fuselage, the men in orange uniforms, the charred seats and suitcases and the rows of black body bags over the green fields over and over again.
In December, just days after the plane exploded, a bus loaded with half a ton of dynamite exploded in front of the headquarters of the National Department of Security, something like the country’s FBI, killing dozens and leaving hundreds injured. The explosion left a smoking crater the size of an asteroid impact. I couldn’t help but wonder when watching the images on TV if there was someone, perhaps a boy or a girl my age, still alive under the tons of gray debris.
Father thought it then a good idea to send me along with Carolina, the 11-year-old daughter of John, one of father’s associates, and the badly dressed, plump and brown guide name Leticia to spend a week of holidays in the cities of Miami and Orlando.
Carolina, who had long, brown hair and the pale face of a cherub, offered me my first sexual experience. We spent a single night at a small hotel with a gilded reception in Miami. A bus took us to Orlando the following morning. Those were the days when I still had time to stare at the light blue sky for a long time trying to figure out the curious shapes that the clouds made. We visited the main attractions in Orlando. Epcot’s ( Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, just a section of the utopian city imagined by Walt Disney) Spaceship Earth ride was a disappointment. There was just a slow train and a group of wax figures inside the colossal silver-colored Geodesic sphere.
It was American architect and writer Buckminster Fuller who reinvented and popularized Geodesic domes and spheres. Only years later, in January 2018, a day after visiting the Taj Mahal in Agra, did I read his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, published in 1969, a year by all means eventful. From Mister Fuller I learned with pleasure that the word Consideration meant the act of putting stars together.
Disney Land and Universal Studios, on the other hand, kept their promise for excitement. Fast rides, sugar soda highs and fireworks in the warm evenings. I bought a bright yellow autograph book in which I preciously collected the signatures of men or women wearing costumes and masks of characters who had only existed in the imagination of an adult man. The son of a neighbor stole the book from my bedroom only days after my return.
I robbed a 5-dollar green and silver ring from one of the many souvenir stores we visited. Once we were outside, the guide, horrified by my petty crime, asked: What have you got there? A ring, I said. Why did you steal a ring? she asked. It’s for my mother. What would your mother say if she found the ring was stolen? She would probably laugh, I said. And how about your father? He would pat me on the head and tell me to be more careful and discrete the next time.
I presumed that the killer whales, the belugas, the dolphins, the seals and all the other animals in the pools and enclosures of Sea World were happy to be there. They seemed well-fed, taken care of, playing everyday with their peers and with their gentle human trainers. No one mentioned, and I don’t recall reading anywhere inside the compound, about animals being captured from the wild and enslaved for the profit of the shareholders of the park and for our evermore ravenous appetite for thrills and entertainment.
That special evening, Carolina and I sat next to each other drinking soda and eating slices of pepperoni pizza. None of us knew that the red slices on top of the crust of our Italian-inspired pie were fermented, air-dried chunks of cattle and pig’s flesh cured with artificial nitrates. That would have made our time together less romantic. We played some rounds of arcade games to allow our innards some time to digest the heavy meal. Mario, the heroic Italian plumber, saved Princess Pauline from the paws of the brown gorilla a couple of times. Then a wooden barrel hit Mario on the head and knocked him out and we knew it was time for us to go upstairs. After our guide fell asleep in the bed next to ours, Carolina, helped by the light of a Mickey Mouse-shaped penlight I had stolen for her in one of the souvenir shops earlier during the day, played with my hard sex, rolled the foreskin down and caressed its head, held the glans with her thumb and index grabbed my testicles, asked me how I felt and masturbated me under the sheets of the bed we shared. Seeing nothing else happening apart from the erection and nothing liquid coming out of it, she promptly lost interest and went to sleep.
How was last night? Asked our our guide next morning, a broad suspicious smile hanging from her swollen face. Carolina and I exchanged swift, guilt-tainted glances. She had been awake the whole time. We had some cereal with milk inside the room. Carolina had Lucky Charms, I had Honey Nut Cheerios. While we ate breakfast, the reporter of the morning TV show told us that the remains of a missing Japanese woman and her dog, a small chocolate-colored French Poodle, had been found inside an alligator near the Everglades. I changed the channel. Four raisins that allegedly came from California were dancing and singing. We all agreed that this was better.
On the seventh day, while Carolina and the guide went to the beach, I met Aunt Victoria, father’s youngest sister. Victoria picked me up at our hotel in Miami, greeted me with a handshake and took me to have breakfast at the Dunkin’ Donuts in front of the hotel. An old, bearded homeless man stood in front of the door asking for change. He held a sign that read “Beware of the false prophets”. I thanked him with a jelly donut and some coins for his words of wisdom.
Aunt Victoria drove us to Toy World for a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-themed Christmas shopping spree. She spent 181 American Dollars in toy-related merchandise. Victoria almost lost her mind after the death of her husband Guillermo, a handsome Argentinian who looked much like actor Tom Selleck. I only saw Guillermo once. He was sitting in the balcony of their apartment, tanned and shirtless, surrounded by a cloud of haze. Guillermo was a chain smoker. He died to lung cancer a year or two after my visit.
That same year in China, the Chinese army retook with blood and fire the Tiananmen Square from the hands and hearts of thousands of protesters. Until recently, I thought that the famous tank-man had been squashed by the tanks he had stood in front of, asking for democracy. Tank-Man was quite young the year of the massacre. I have often wondered where he is, what he is doing. I can easily imagine him at a small restaurant in Beijing, Shanghai or Hong Kong, slurping from a bowl of giblets and chicken feet soup, old, tired and disappointed at how things worked out in his country.
In Germany, the wall erected by the winners of the war fell with a a thump of broken brick and concrete. The scream of joy from all the present and the millions watching history in the making through their television screens was heard for days. I could not imagine then that I would touch the remains of that same wall 17 years later.
I went back to school the following week. When my classmates asked me what was the most amazing thing I’d seen during my trip, I replied without hesitation: The rockets, the rockets taking off from Cape Canaveral and going into space. The fire, the noise, the screams of all the present, it’s something hard to believe. I had seen a brochure of the Kennedy Space Center at the reception desk of our hotel the morning of our departure from Orlando. It was not part of the tour and I was never there. I figured that one more lie about our species interplanetary exploration would not hurt my gullible peers.
