The Herd

New York, United States. May 2017.

DAY 1

I walked under a squall from the bus stop in front of Grand Central Station to the address where I was to stay in Midtown West, a place I only later found was a gay-themed hotel, a fact I did not realize during those American days even when repeatedly seeing during the nights that followed that both the jacuzzi and the pool were always occupied by patrons of all colors and sizes, all of them male and only male. I bought a small and black umbrella for ten dollars from a tall black man who was doing his commerce under a golden canopy near Times Square and a pair of white socks and white and grass-green Adidas sneakers for seven times that amount at a Foot Locker nearby in order to change my drenched ones, left my bags with a dyed-blonde Latino receptionist whose name tag on her round and small but firm-looking right breast read Roxy, had two fried eggs with beans and tomato sauce served in a scalding casserole and a cup of coffee with a heart of foam at The Rustic Table, a café next door, and eavesdropped on the empty talk about the hardships of dating life in the city that a gay man wearing a bright white earring on his left ear was having with his blond and obese teenage female friend attired in khaki clothes until my room was ready and collapsed on the soft mattress where hoards of men had slept before, some of them alone, perhaps, but most likely not, as soon as I was granted entry to the musty premises two hours later.

I had left Tokyo that morning, flight NH 110 from Haneda Airport to JFK and here I was, fourteen hours and several airline-size red wine bottles later, sleeping in New York.

In the first dream I had during that first visit to the city, the men of the medieval mounted army I belonged to had been summoned by the village people (the latter unrelated to the North American Disco band whose biggest hit was Y.M.C.A, a song meant to praise the virtues of the Switzerland-based Young Men’s Christian Association) to kill the monster of the mountain and its rider.

We saw the single monstrous silhouette, sinews tensed like bowstrings, strong loins, such power in the muscles of its belly, coming down from the snow-blanketed mountains. Two small white eyes without pupils, like the eyes of the blind, shone through the filthy rope-like strands of hair which concealed its face. The monster was as big as an elephant, was covered with a blanket of black and oily fur, expelled a repulsive stench from its skin and snout and had two short, mustard-colored horns that sprouted like crippled cedar branches from the sides of its head. Its roar sounded like the screech of a convocation of eagles flying over a raging river. The rider of the beast was not a man but just his bluish shadow. A Mamo, said the man standing next to me, a mountain demon. The spirit of a monk who sinned and fell into the pits of hell. We cried our cries of war, tensed our bows and shot hundreds of our sharp and pointed arrows to no effect. Our projectiles disintegrated or collapsed midair. The few that made it to their target bounced or broke against the thick skin of the beast. Push the demon to the edge! I cried to the other warriors. Throw the monster and its rider into the abyss! And so we did.

I took a shower to rid my skin of the filth, the rain, the travel and the dream and walked to visit the famous Times Square at night, that place I had seen, each time in a slightly different version, in innumerable TV shows and movies during my childhood and teenage years. I could not help being disappointed at the sight of this world of metal, glass and concrete. I felt immediately exhausted at the sight and sound of so many human beings, a sight which proved to me that when men are free to roam where they please, they usually follow the herd. These men and women from every corner of the world were encased by neon lights, billboards promoting plays, musicals and clothing brands, the rancid smell of kebab meat and hot-dog sausages, the orange-colored plastic chimneys belching white clouds of vapor, souvenir shops selling keychains, stickers and chocolate bars with the face, and sometimes body, of Mr. Donald Trump on them, fast food restaurants, a gargantuan Starbucks café and dozens of Latino immigrants trying to make a living dressed in cheap Spider-Man, Shrek, Elmo, Minnie Mouse, Cookie-Monster and Batman costumes.

I read a year after that visit that the disguised performers’ situation had taken a turn for the worse. In addition to the task of being trapped inside one of those heavy and undoubtedly hot and aromatic costumes, they had been restricted by the authorities to designated zones, some of them had been fined and even arrested for misconduct and competition had intensified after the arrival of a group of topless women, their curvy, generous bodies covered only by body paint and a thong, much more appealing to the eyes of the male Square’s population than Princess Elsa, Woody the Cowboy or the group of giant Smurfs.

And it was all those men and women in fluffy masks and costumes who brought back memories of the Seven Dwarves, Snow White and the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. I only discovered as an adult that most of the stories I grew up with are nothing but politically correct, sanitized version of their originals. Take Snow White for example. The evil witch was not Snow White’s step mother but her biological parent. Snow White was not a young damsel but a seven-year-old girl. Her mother asked the Hunter to bring not the heart but her daughter’s lungs and liver as proof of her demise. The Hunter took pity of her, not because she was a child and because murdering little girls is considered in most cultures a contemptible act (with notable exceptions like India and China where female infanticide is still widespread and very much the norm) but because she was so beautiful. The evil witch-mother boiled and ate with a pinch of salt what she thought were the lungs and liver of her daughter. Fortunately for the girl, but not for the pig they came from, the organs belonged to a boar the hunter had slaughtered in cold blood minutes earlier. The seven dwarves were not called Doc, Grumpy, Sleepy, Dopey, Sneezy, Bashful and Happy, they were just seven short adult men with neither names nor special personality traits who asked a seven-year-old girl to cook, wash, sew, knit and clean for them in exchange for food and room. The story does not specify if the seven single, little men asked other random or more carnal favors from the girl. The witch-mother found out by the means of an opinionated mirror that the girl, her daughter, was still alive. She found Snow White’s refuge and after three attempts of murder, one by strangulation and two by poisoning, thought her dead at last. The seven little men decided not to bury the girl so that they could preserve and admire her dead body. They were not the only ones with such a deviation, though. A prince who was casually going through the woods found the glass coffin with the girl and offered to give the dwarves anything they wanted in exchange for the crystal box. The dwarves said they would not sell it for all the gold in the world. Moments later, seeing gloom spread like a petrol stain over the man’s face, the tiny men took pity of this foreign gentleman and gave him, we the readers do not know if in exchange for something, the transparent casket. Only days had passed when, tired of carrying the dead body wherever the prince went, one of the prince’s servants stroke the corpse with anger and it was this blow, and not a kiss from the Blue Prince, which dislodged the piece of poisoned apple and brought back the girl from the limbo of the dead. When the prince, age unknown, but most likely a teenager or a young adult, saw the little girl alive he decided to marry the seven-year-old resuscitated by his servant’s act of fury. The tale ends when the witch-mother goes to the wedding party and the couple welcomes her by making her wear scalding iron shoes and forcing her to dance to death.

I tried to have a cup of coffee at the Starbucks of Times Square, until a homeless man of about my age came inside and started screaming insults to all of us present and to no one in particular. I went to the souvenir shop and got some Mr. Donald Trump-themed chocolate bars, not out of admiration for the carrot-looking man, but because I knew they would make good souvenirs for my Japanese office-colleagues. I also bought postcards for my two daughters, a NYC-themed snowball with the Statue of Liberty I was yet to see, a bunch of bananas, crackers, almond butter and some plain yoghurt at a convenience store ran by a gentle Middle-Eastern man who added to my bag two more bananas free of charge and walked back to the carefree hotel.

The time it took me to travel the seven blocks from Times Square to the hotel I counted four more homeless people: a bearded man who could have been from any country in the world at the entrance of the 42nd street metro station, a shoeless white woman under the canopy of a building façade that was either being repaired or remodeled and two black men in front of the Port Authority bus terminal, one of whom stank of urine, was sipping from a can of beer and was merrily singing.

It was Gustave Flaubert, a man who regarded with disgust most activities en masse, but still traveled far and wide, first within the latitudes and longitudes of his country of birth, and later beyond its confines across Europe where he visited Italy, Switzerland, Greece and England, and further away to Jerusalem, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and the North of the African continent, who wrote in his Carnets de Voyage during a journey from Rouen to Paris that when we think of a future event we place it or dream it in the present conditions and when it happens, we can not help feeling disoriented. That discontented vertigo due to unsatisfied anticipation was exactly what my mind was struggling to come to terms with.

I could not sleep till sunrise, first, because I could not find the way to close the room’s ceiling hatch, an upper window into the night sky of Manhattan that was supposed to be an example of tasteful, contemporary design which I found overly vexatious, and because of the maddening side effects of jet-lag, those treacherous ideas and fragmented memories like shards of glass that remain in the head too long and deprive mind and body from calm and slumber. Since I was too tired to read, I turned the television set on and watched a popular travel and food show where the American host goes around the world, meets the locals, shares with them drinks, food and witty conversation, comments on the dynamics and politics of the place to the viewer on the other side of the screen and tastes all the different levels of the local cuisine. Too many chopped animal parts, innards and organs to my taste, but an interesting show nonetheless. Chef, television host and writer Anthony Bourdain, grey-hair, crooked teeth, wiry and handsome frame, a man endowed with a deep, hypnotic voice, reportedly hung himself in Kaysersberg, France a little over a year after my visit to his chaotic city of birth. He left no suicide letter we know of.

In one of the last interviews Bourdain gave, handsomely dressed in light-blue denims, a charcoal-grey shirt and drinking a Tiger beer, he quoted Mark Twain by saying that travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. It is true that, as Twain said, broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the Earth all one’s lifetime.

During the two or three hours I could sleep I saw a lush tree as tall as a three or four-story building. Two or three men were chopping at its trunk with all their might while a curious crowd gathered to enjoy the spectacle. I stood agape next to a parked dark limousine. In my dream someone screamed and people ran and there was a roar like thunder. The giant tree fell and crushed the car and killed dozens of the members of the public.

DAY 2

The next morning, after eating the two free bananas and a spoonful of almond butter, I walked to the subway entrance at 42nd street, dropped a dollar into the open suitcase in front of a young saxophonist dressed in burgundy and olive colors who bore an uncanny resemblance to writer Jonathan Safran Foer, went downstairs and boarded the red line train thinking of what Foer said about eating animals during an interview with journalist Bibi van der Zee. The more we think and talk about this, said Foer, the less likely we are to eat meat. The more you know about it, the less you want to eat it. It is a practice that entirely depends on ignorance or forgetfulness or silence.

People of all skin colors and origins, the complete opposite to Tokyo, the city where I have lived for the past decade and where almost every individual in the wagon, no matter which line, no matter which train, is Japanese, sat in silence. Some looked at maps like I was doing. Others simply stared at the floor or at the person sitting in front of them. It was then that I realized I had never thought about a saxophone before. Antoine-Joseph Sax, who had small rodent eyes, a broad forehead and a face generously bearded, passed to history not only for inventing the sax-horne, the sax-tuba, the saxotromba and of coursed the saxophone, but also for having been one of the unluckiest men alive. As a child, Antoine-Joseph fell down a flight of stairs and hurt his head so seriously that he was presumed dead, he swallowed by mistake a pin or needle and some sulfuric acid, although not both at the same time, toppled onto a burning stove, was struck on the head by a cobblestone, was hurt by a gunpowder explosion, survived poisoning a couple of times and almost drowned. As an adult he struggled to patent his inventions, was attacked in court, went bankrupt more than once, suffered from lip cancer and survived only to die in poverty years later never knowing that his invention would give the world a John Coltrane and a Charlie Parker.

Mother used to tell me how dangerous the New York subway used to be when she lived there with father for almost two years during the early eighties. It was not very bright or clean to begin with. The white and yellow neon lights hurt your eyes, she said. The walls inside the station and the inside and outside of the wagons were covered in graffiti. The floor was littered with torn newspapers and magazine pages and all kind of wrappings and garbage. The windows, at least those which were not broken, were covered with a thick layer of gluey grime. Many of the passengers were either dealers or junkies. You could always find someone playing an accordion, someone homeless, someone drunk and someone begging. It always smelled, and it got worse in summer, like rotten fish, vinegar and recently chopped onions. There were zones of the city where a woman could not ride alone. Now people talk about the Latinos and the Arabs, she said, but at that time the only people we were wary of were the blacks. Stay away from them, your father used to tell us, unless they’re wearing the red beret and uniform of the Guardian Angels and from anyone shirtless or wearing a hooded sweater. Talking about blacks, I know you will not believe my words, she said, but I once saw Michael Jackson and one if his sisters in the metro.

I was supposed to be born in the United States. Mom was five months pregnant when dad and her were forced to flee New York after a group of Jamaicans killed my cousin John. A deal gone wrong. They threw him off a 6th floor balcony somewhere in the Bronx.

I got off the train at 86th Street station. It was my first time in Central Park. I was about to enter the grounds when a pigeon shat some half-digested white and green goo on my shoulder. A lucky charm. A good omen. After the disappointment of the first night, I thought, there was reason to be excited. I walked for about an hour under the enormous forest canopy looking above and around me trying to spot small mammals, birds and insects. The Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis reservoir was dimmed by fog and drizzle. The name evoked the testimony of Mrs. Kennedy before Chief Justice Earl Warren after her husband’s murder. She said the day was very hot. But anyone would have been hot in that pink Chanel suit and pillbox hat made of wool bouclé. She talked about confusion. She said again that in the motorcade it was terribly hot. She saw a tunnel and her first thought was how cool it would be under the tunnel. There was much noise. Motorcycles and things, she said. And then there were terrible noises. She looked at her husband and saw a flesh-colored piece of his skull. No blood or anything, she said. She did not remember climbing out the back of the SS-100-X, the navy-blue Lincoln Continental presidential limousine, the vehicle I stood next to in my earlier dream. President Kennedy’s skull exploded that day like a ripe watermelon. Mrs. Kennedy’s blood-stained pink suit is nowadays stored in the National Archives in a secret location and won’t be shown to the public until at least the year 2103 as per the hard-to-explain wishes of the couple’s daughter, Mrs. Caroline Kennedy.

I walked along the edge of the lake only crossing during the whole time of my tour the path of a young couple and of a man too old to be jogging under the rain. One day before the end of my New York visit I read in the New York Times that two bodies had been found in the waters of the park, one in the swan pond near 59th street and the other one in the Kennedy Reservoir. The journalist referred to the two male bodies, one decomposed and naked, the other better conserved and wearing only trousers, as floaters. Decay is indeed a fascinating process. Floaters, for biological reasons, do not show up in winter. Bacteria in the bowels of the dead grow and multiply only in warm waters. The gas the bacteria make as they eat and excrete pushes the bodies like underwater helium balloons to the surface. Further research told me that it was not unusual to find dead bodies in the wet areas of Central Park. Most floaters had decided to put an aquatic end to their own lives, but there were also murder victims among them.

Central Park, like the city’s metro, used to be an unfriendly place in the eighties. Several of the benches were broken. Monuments and buildings inside the park were ruined, abandoned and covered in graffiti. There were hundreds of cases of assault and robbery. In 1986 eighteen-year-old Jennifer Levin was beaten and strangled to death. In 1989 Trisha Meili, twenty-eight years of age at the time, was bound, gagged, beaten and raped. She survived but was in a coma for twelve days. Both cases caused commotion and gave the park for years a tainted reputation.

I watched a squirrel go up and down a tree trunk for quite some time hypnotized by the rapid movements of the fragile body. The squirrel quickly realized that if I was not a source of food, chances were that I was a deadly menace, looked in my direction once and then again, climbed the trunk and disappeared. I left the park and walked to the MET.

I met black and beautiful Courtney Graham, white teeth, curly hair, generous smile and even more generous breasts, at the information desk of the museum. She showed me the main entrance to the galleries, convinced me to buy a New York Pass voucher book for about a hundred dollars and accepted with a smile the card I handed her with my telephone number.

Courtney, now a professional photographer whose work one can find in the New York Times, told me about her on-going project as we walked under a light rain across Coney Island’s boardwalk two days later, a place that made me think of Italian-American mobsters, men shot through the head and thrown from the pier into the grey waters, hungry and noisy seagulls, cheap rides, freak shows and the memory of my own father.

In These Clasped Hands, which began as hundreds of photographs of Courtney’s little cousin dressed like a superhero, of her wrinkled-like-a-dry-prune but always smiling grandmother, of her obese aunts and uncles dressed in old-fashioned white clothes and wearing tiny white brim hats listening to mass and gospel and the church chorus and of other daily scenes of one of the many numerous black families living in South Carolina, had recently mutated to become her way to testify and document an ongoing crime and tragedy.

Arson of black churches multiplied last year, said Courtney. And then the Charleston Emanuel African Methodist Church shooting happened. My sister and my aunt were there and I swear I thought I had lost them. They made it out alive, but nine people died that day and their loss for all us was way too much to bear. The shooter, a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist, said he hated the black and that his act was meant to start a race war. What if the next one after him succeeds in doing exactly that? We will go back to the times of the Ku Klux Klan and of Jesse Washington and the world as we know it now will be over. Two days after the massacre we visited the memorial. We went there with my sister to pay the dead our respects. On the way back home I had stopped the car to take a photograph of a green street sign carrying our family name when I noticed the white man in his fifties looking at us from the driveway of his home. He was wearing boots and denims, his chest and swollen stomach covered only by a dirty tank top, his straw-yellow beard was long and his eyes were full with hatred. I pushed my sister back in the car. Minutes later the same man and his companion showed up on ATVs behind us. They were both carrying hunting rifles. They zig-zagged behind and next to us, waved their fists and rifles, screamed obscenities and threats at us before they drove off.

Photographs and videos of blacks killed, most of them by police officers, have multiplied. Eric Garner, father of six children and suspected of illegally selling single cigarettes in the street, was choked to death by officer Pantaleo in July 2014. Tamir Rice was only twelve when officer Loehmann, a reportedly emotionally unstable man, shot him dead in November of 2014. The boy was carrying a toy gun. In March 2015 officer Olsen shot Anthony Hill, a U.S. Air Force decorated veteran who suffered from episodes of mental illness and was naked and unarmed when he was killed. The video of officer Slager shooting Walter Scott eight times from behind while the black man tried fleeing after being stopped for a malfunctioning brake light was seen all around the world In April of the same year. Officer Aledda shot behavioral therapist Charles Kinsey while he was trying to retrieve and assist an autistic patient. Kinsey, who survived, was lying on his back on the ground with his hands in the air. Alton Sterling, a street CD vendor, was shot in the chest six times by officers Lake and Salamoni in July 2016. A day after Sterling’s murder Philando Castile, a nutrition services supervisor at a school in Saint Paul, Minnesota was shot seven times at point blank range and killed by officer Yanez after duly informing the officer he had a licensed firearm on him. His girlfriend and his girlfriend’s daughter, a four-year-old child were with him in the vehicle. Over a thousand young black men were killed in 2015 alone.

I fear oblivion, I fear forgetting things, even the small and apparently unimportant details. If anything were to happen to my memories, she said showing me the pictures of her many relatives on her phone screen, I will at least have these pictures left.

She then told me more about Jesse Washington as we shared a bowl of green salad and a pizza Margherita of which she ate more than three quarters.

She described to me how the seventeen-year-old black laborer, accused of the rape and murder of the wife of his employer, was dragged out of the courthouse by some of the members of a white mob of over ten thousand minutes after Judge Richard Munroe had pronounced sentence, how his attackers beat, stripped, chained, stabbed, doused him with oil, hung him from a tree and burnt him. They also amputated his toes and fingers and castrated him, she said. They let the body burn for almost two hours, took photographs of the scene which were later made into and sold as postcards, collected souvenirs amongst which were Washington’s burnt bones, burnt teeth and chain links, tied the charred remains to a horse and made the animal drag them through town and exposed them for a while in the city of Robinson before letting an officer finally bury them.

In one of the many photographs I found of the event, in which curious can be seen climbing onto trees to get a better view of the human bonfire, I found that at least two of the men witnessing the events were smiling.

But let us step back into the hallways of the MET. These were but some of my findings:

Tiepolo’s self-portrait on the left-hand side of Il Trionfo di Mario. The artist looks at us through the centuries, half-concealed and mere steps away from Jugurtha, the vanquished African king. After his fall, the Romans ripped the Numidian king’s earrings from his earlobes, paraded him through the streets of Rome and incarcerated him in the Tullianum, the same prison where the apostles Paul and Peter were confined, and let him starve to death.

Also Tiepolo’s La Presa di Cartagine, showing a scene of the annihilation of the ancient city and its inhabitants, the world’s first genocide in record, by the Roman soldiers led by Scipio Aemilianus. The Romans sold the survivors, some fifty-thousand souls, as slaves, leveled the remains of the city and shared the land between Roman and Italian settlers.

No 16 by Rothko a red, a purple and a rust-colored rectangle on a dark blue background. Rothko committed suicide by cutting and digging into the veins on the inside elbow of both his arms. It is possible that he had painted one dull colored rectangle too many.

Autumn Rhythm: number 30 by Pollock, a painting I disliked almost as much as Rothko’s geometrical shapes. Black, white and ochre paint poured, splashed and splattered over a light brown canvas. Pollock, who shared Rothko’s penchant for heavy drinking, was inebriated when he crashed his mint-green Oldsmobile convertible killing himself and Edith Metzger, the twenty-five year-old friend of Pollock’s mistress who was with the two of them in the car and whom he had just met that morning.

My eyes welled with tears while looking at Monet’s plain and white Glace Flottante, one of his simplest paintings. The reason for my grief was possibly the resemblance of this winter-themed painting with its cold whites, blues and greys with the painting titled Camille Monet sur son Lit de Mort which Monet painted right after his wife died of uterine cancer at the young age of thirty-two, something which I only realized several months later.

La Petite Fille Curieuse by Camille Corot. Corot was born in a house that no longer exists in No 125 of the Rue de Bac in Paris. In this same street lived the musketeer D’Artagnan (No1), entomologists Jean-Baptiste, Achille and Émile Deyrolle, founders of the city’s most glorious wunderkammer (No 46), French writer Romain Gary (No 108) who in this apartment shot himself in the head, American painter James Whistler (No 110), French writer François-René de Chateaubriand (No 120), and even the Virgin Mary (No 140) who, as the story goes, visited more than once Sister Catherine Labouré at the convent now called La Chapelle de Notre-Dame de la Médaille Miraculeuse.

La Classe de Danse and Femme Peignant ses Cheveux by Edgar Degas, who died in Paris poor, deaf, blind and lonely.

La Femme dans les Vagues by Gustave Courbet. The plump, red-haired unidentified beauty also posed for Courbet’s Femme au Perroquet and Jeune Baigneuse. Courbet spent half a year in prison and was condemned to pay the reconstruction of the monument after his inflammatory remarks resulted in the destruction of the original Vendôme Column by members of the Paris Commune.

La Orana Maria, Gauguin’s Tahitian version of the Virgin and Child. Few of Gauguin’s admirers know that the painter’s many mistresses during his years in Tahiti were children aged thirteen and fourteen.

I stood in front of Van Gogh’s Champ de Blé avec Cypress and snapped without shame my own picture. There it was, the falling tree of my dream. That Van Gogh chose a cypress for his painting was certainly not coincidental. The Greeks told us that Cyparissus, a boy beloved by Apollo, accidentally killed his favorite deer companion with a javelin. Cyparissus, consumed by sorrow and remorse by the dead of his beloved animal-friend, transformed into the tree that bears his name to this day. Cypress trees are still considered by many cultures as a symbol of mourning.

Rousseau’s Le Repas du Lion. The simple lion devouring the jaguar, the blotches of bright red paint meant to be a hemorrhage and the geometric plants and foliage can be drawn by a child, but the vibrant painting as a whole can only be Rousseau’s. Henri Rousseau, like King Louis XIV, The King’s Royal composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, Russian Tsar Peter the Great, Yugoslav President Tito and the poet Arthur Rimbaud, died of gangrene. Rousseau was buried in a pauper’s grave with only seven people attending his funeral. His body was moved to a private lot in the Parisian cemetery of Bagneux two years later. Thirty-seven years after this second funeral, when Rousseau and his paintings had gained well-deserved notoriety, his remains were relocated one last time and rest today in the Jardin de la Perrine in the town of Laval.

Meisjeskopje and Vrouw met Waterkan by Vermeer. Vermeer was not a prolific painter. Only around three dozen paintings are attributed to him. He was an active lover and prolific father, though. His wife gave birth to a dozen children and three more.

Bouguereau’s Frère et Soeur Bretons was one of the last paintings I saw that afternoon. When cubist, fauvist and post-impressionist art like that of Picasso, Gris, Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse and Braque, not to mention Warhol, De Kooning, Rothko and Pollock captured the herd’s attention, the likes of Alma-Tadema, Godward and Bouguereau, to whom we own some of the most exquisite works ever painted, were promptly forgotten. Godward committed suicide. He reportedly wrote in his suicide note that the world was not big enough for him and a Picasso.

I went down Fifth Avenue wondering what the rich people living and working inside those brownstone, limestone, granite and marble structures made into residential apartment buildings, offices, hotels, galleries, consulates, clubs, museums, temples and department stores thought about the large number of homeless men and women roaming like zombies the streets of the city.

I took 59th street and walked along the Plaza, The Ritz, The Marriott, until I reached Columbus Circle and stood facing the three monoliths erected for the Trump International Hotel and Tower, Time Warner and The Mandarin Oriental hotel. I ran into a smaller version of the monster of my premonitory dream. The dog, a black and grey dreadlocks-coated Bergamasco Shepherd, looked like a mop that had just been used to clean an oil spill. I asked the owner of the dog, a man in his early forties sitting next to a younger, elegantly-dressed woman, if I could take a photograph of his dog. What for? He asked in return. Not the nicest of New Yorkers. It took me a couple of seconds to say that I had never seen a dog like that. Just one, he said. I will charge you 5 dollars for the second. The man did not smile and resumed the conversation with his female friend. Perhaps that’s the New Yorkers’ sense of humor. I snapped the photo and thanked him. He did not answer.

The sky was light pink and purple when I stared walking in the opposite direction. I reached the gilded Trump Tower minutes later. I craned my neck to have a better view, but the carrot-colored building’s owner was nowhere to be seen. Five police officers, a black, a Latino and three white men armed with machine guns and wearing body armors and helmets guarded the entrance. All of them, even the German Shepherd that was with them, looked exceptionally bored.

Pink and purple also were neon lights announcing Radio City Music Hall. A last glance at Times Square and, humming This Time Tomorrow by The Kinks and thinking that in all probability Stanley Kubrick, Bobby Fischer and Herman Melville had walked those same streets, I went back smiling to my room in the gay-themed hotel.

DAY 3

Someone whistling an amplified version of Brahms’ lullaby in the corridor pulled me out from slumber. In that night’s dream I met mother in the middle of a deserted dirt road. She wore a light white dress and was barefoot. Read the book of Job, she said to me, her face a mask of concern, before she turned around and disappeared.

After I took a shower and pondered for a while about Brahms and my own father, I took the train from 42nd Street to the World Trade Center. The German composer and my father were similarly built, sat in the exact same way, legs crossed, a hand resting on the leg on top, and both had died from a scarred liver.

As I stared at the recently built One World Trade Center the following morning, at its top floors and spire wrapped by grey, thin clouds, a commercial plane flew silently near the building. The aircraft approached, recalling the events and all the dead of the year 2001, disappeared behind the building and reemerged in one piece after long, uneasy seconds.

I was still in Bogotá and weeks away from turning nineteen when American Airlines flight 11 and United Airlines flight 175 crashed into the buildings. The towers burnt, tons of debris rained over Manhattan, people jumped to the void and died and the twin skyscrapers collapsed. I used to teach English to a small group of executives in the Colombian branch of Monsanto, the multinational corporation whose main mission is to poison the world. The first grey hairs had shown up days earlier on the left side of my head. I was wearing olive-colored denims and a black cardigan that morning. The class stopped when someone entered the room and announced to us the beginning of the end. We went into a larger meeting room and watched the smoke coming from the north tower, saw the second plane crash into the south one and witnessed how minutes later, one after the other, the buildings crumbled like sandcastles. Black smoke, breathing masks, police officers, firefighters, bright red blood on ash-gray, passersby covered from head to toe in ivory-colored dust.

I had a breakfast of rice crackers with almond butter spread on them, a pot of Greek yoghurt and a banana under the leaves and branches of one of the many sweetgum trees next to the black pools built over the ruins of Ground zero, a name originally used for the place where the B-29 named Enola Gay, after pilot Paul Tibbets’ mother, dropped the atomic bomb named Little Boy that exploded over Hiroshima on August 6th of 1945. Tibbets said during an interview that from the moment the bomb was released until its detonation were the longest fifty-one seconds of his life. My thought was, he said, would the damn thing work? I was perfectly relieved as soon as it exploded. The weight of the world was off of my shoulders. We were successful.

The devastation brought by Little Boy to the people of Hiroshima, not to mention its animals, flora and buildings, came first from the blast, a shock wave faster than the speed of sound, followed by a six-thousand-degree celsius firestorm as well as showers of neutron and gamma radiation. Estimates run in the hundreds of thousands, but in reality no one knows to this day how many people the American bomb killed.

It was almost eight in the morning and apart from an old black man wearing a black jacket and black pants too big for his frame who was busy wiping droplets and dust from the bronze parapets, there was no one there to shatter the silence of the place with the noise of camera shutters or the incessant chatter characteristic of our species. I approached one of the two massive black squares, looked over the border at the smaller square carved in the center of the structure and wondered if that could be one of the many entrances to hell.

It is sad, don’t you think? Said the black old man after quietly materializing behind me. I nodded thinking he was talking about the dead. This is no Gettysburg Memorial. These are no green fields covered with thousands of white crosses like them in Arlington and Normandy, he said. Have you ever heard of Orio Palmer, boy? I bet you have not. NYFD Battalion seven, father of three kids, an athletic man forty-five years of age. Orio Palmer entered the South tower, took the elevator up to the 40th floor and in a matter of minutes went up on foot to the 78th to try and help whoever was stuck there. Palmer reported numerous people injured and as many 10–45 code ones. That means dead people, young man. His last phrase came in at 9:58 in the morning. The tower pancaked on itself at 9:59. The cloud containing the disintegrated bodies of Palmer and hundreds more billowed and surrounded it all until it blocked out the sun. See these here, boy? These are just two black, soulless squares to remember the lives and deaths of the three thousand who died that day and of all those who died of illness and grief the days that followed. One of my sisters, you know, is still coughing out chunks her lungs with her breakfast. No one knows how many more the goddamn dust has killed or made sick. And if someone does he would not tell. It is true what they say, you know, that the thing a man fears comes upon him, and what we always dread befalls us. The man winced as if defeated, shook his head, wished me a nice day and kept on wiping clean the dark and simple monuments to the dead.

Years after the attacks I had a dream. In the dream my ex-wife and I visited the black pools and climbed down one of them. We walked in silence the length of the tunnel underneath until we saw bright light at the end of it. She went in first into the chamber, a chapel filled with white light and thousands of nebulous and frisky souls.

It is hard not to imagine those who jumped off the higher floors when one is standing near the grounds where their bodies hit the pavement. What was going through their heads? When and how does hope come to an end? The videos taken from the ground show them, the jumpers, as the media called them, fall, most of them from the North tower, one after the other, to a certain death. The fall to the ground, depending on the position of the body, the speed and direction of the wind, lasted up to ten seconds. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. John Cerqueira was twenty-two at the time. He made it out of the buildings alive. In an interview he mentioned listening to what he thought were distinctive car crash sounds. He then added, Those car crash sounds, all of them, were people falling off the building.

Doctor Mark Heath, Professor of anesthesiology and physician for the New York Presbyterian, was at the site the day of the attacks. He recorded the moment when one of the towers crumbled meters away from him. I hope I live. I hope I live, are the first words he says as the black cloud of debris, swift and ever expanding, like the one resulting from a bomb or a volcano, like the inside of a chimney or a funeral pyre, comes down at him. Here it comes, says Doctor Heath, before he gets behind a car looking for shelter. What seems to be dozens of PASS devices go off and fill the air with their eerie, high-pitched chirping in unison. A Personal Alert Safety System, PASS, is used by firefighters to alert when he or she is gravely injured, dead or in serious distress. It is incredible, says Doctor Heath, his calm voice still young and energetic, and then, Ok, I have to go find people who need help, because I think I am not one of them. He walks inside the cloud. All around him is dark and grey. What was a common street seconds before is now rubble and everything, specially the floor under his feet, is caked in ashes. There are also thousands of sheets of paper mixed with the dirt. The first live civilians and firefighters, white and grey like tormented souls or ghosts, come into view. Anybody needs a doctor? shouts Doctor Heath. A man leaning against what seems to be a fire truck coughs, retches and vomits. He instructs one of the firefighters to provide oxygen to the man. The firefighter says 10–4, which in Ten Code, the brief codes used until 2006 by American law enforcement and rescue forces to facilitate verbal communication, means acknowledged. Doctor Heath walks next to several parked police patrols and fire trucks covered in dust. A person watching the scene for the first time would think he or she is seeing a man walk through the Tuesday morning fog.

Reaching Battery Park on foot took me the best part of an hour. I learnt that the sculpture of three men saving a fourth one from drowning thought and made by artist Marisol Escobar south of Pier A was based on real events that took place during the Second Great War. A German U-Boat sank an American merchant marine vessel. The victorious German soldiers took a photograph of the men clinging to the sinking boat. Marisol was a contemporary and friend of the famous Andy Warhol. Many know the Campbell Soup Cans, the Double and Triple Elvis and Marilyn’s Diptych. A work which is not as prominent is Warhol’s last serigraph Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster). The serigraph is divided in two parts. On the left side one can see fifteen photographs in black and white of a twisted body inside a wrecked car. The right side of the piece is empty. The photographs of Warhol’s series named Death and Disaster were not even taken by him, but all extracted from magazines and newspapers. An unidentified millionaire, fund, museum or country bought the piece in 2013 for a hundred and five million American dollars during an auction at Sotheby’s. That makes this serigraph much more expensive than most paintings by Titian, Holbein, Rubens and Rembrandt.

In order to board the ferry to Liberty and Ellis Islands I had to wait in line for half an hour and go through a security screening at least as strict as the one at major American Airports. The sky was covered by a thick blanket of grey clouds when we left the Manhattan docks and wide open and colored in a vivid blue, as if God was personally welcoming his children to the island, when the boat docked in front of Lady Liberty fifteen minutes later.

The statue is no longer copper-colored, but green-blue due to oxidation. The accidental color of the monument offered by the French to the the American people resembles closely the unique pigment known as Maya blue. This shade of blue, resistant to inclement weather, the passage of time and even acid and modern solvents, made of a mix of indigo and a rare clay mineral called palygorskite, was for the Mayas the official color of human sacrifice. The victim was either stripped and painted Maya blue, stretched over a stone altar, stabbed in the chest and robbed of his still-beating heart, bound to a stake and shot in the chest with arrows or thrown into the Sacred Cenote of Chichen Itza, a natural sinkhole that the Mayans thought to be an entrance to the Underworld. Apart from a large number of human remains including those of women and children, objects made of obsidian, shell, jade, gold and copal have been recovered through the years from the holy pit.

The crown of Lady Liberty was closed for years after the September Eleven terror attacks. It has now reopened but going up requires a cumbersome in-advance reservation. The torch, on the other hand, has been closed since 1916, when an alleged attack by German terrorists in the nearby Black Tom peninsula damaged the statue’s torch-bearing hand.

I looked at the colossal statue for a few minutes until a flight of migrating birds in a V formation called my attention. Birds can fly from north to south and vice versa, eating and sleeping aloft, for thousands of kilometers and during several days non-stop to reach new feeding and breeding grounds, that is, if our power lines do not electrocute them, if they do not crash against the windows of our shiny buildings, if the massive blades of a wind turbine do not mince them or if an imbecile with a shotgun does not shoot them down first. During her first years in New York, when the Statue was still used as a lighthouse, that same torch attracted thousands of befuddled birds who found their deaths when they crashed and broke their necks against the massive metallic arm.

Most of those visiting the grounds ignore or have forgotten that before the statue came to be, the place was surrounded by oyster beds, an important source of food of the long-gone Lenape natives. European settlers evicted the indians. Land filling in the 1800s obliterated the oysters. The place also was throughout the years the summer retreat of a Scottish noble, a pest house, a refugee camp and a military fort.

The New York Herald reported that on the 14th July, 1860, ten thousand people, attracted by the smell of someone else’s imminent death, witnessed the execution by hanging of murderer Albert Hicks. The crew of a the schooner named telegraph found an Oyster sloop adrift. A Tugboat named after a Roman Goddess towed the abandoned sloop up to the Fulton Market slip. Captain Weed and Coroner Schirmer boarded the damaged vessel. Everything denoted confusion and violence, wrote the journalist. The cabin was first examined and the floor, ceiling, benches and furniture were found stained with blood. A coffee-pot covered with blood and human hair was found near the stove. Upon the floor was a large quantity of blood. The rail and the side of the vessel were also smeared with blood, showing that the assassin had concluded his work by throwing his victims overboard. Hicks said during his confession that the devil had possessed him. Hicks, one of the four men on board of the A.E. Johnson attacked Smith Watts and pushed him overboard. Oliver Watts confronted the killer, but Hicks struck him in the head with the axe he had just used to cut his brother’s fingers off when he was holding from the side of the sloop before his fall. Hicks then fought and beat captain George Burr and sliced his throat. He stole the money on board, the captain’s watch and one of the brother’s coats and escaped in a yawl.

The morbid pleasure of public executions seems to be a part of human nature. Charles I of England was beheaded in 1649 in front of thousands in London. Karl Hermann Frank, Nazi Reich minister for Bohemia and Moravia, was executed in the courtyard of Prague’s Pankrac prison in front of more than five thousand curious. It is said that when the executioner Sanson cut Marie Antoinette’s head on October 16th 1793, after he had cut the Queen’s hair with shears to expose the pale neck and kept some locks of the strawberry-blond hair prematurely gone white-grey for himself, some amongst the crowds of thousands who had shouted, pointed, laughed and spat at her chanted in elation Vive la République! Marie Antoinette was beheaded at the Place de la Révolution in front of the large statue designed by French sculptor François-Frédéric Lemot which had replaced the demolished monument to Louis XV in 1792. This monument was also called the Statue of Liberty.

The ferry took us in less than fifteen minutes to Ellis Island. The brick-red and light grey French renaissance style building of the former immigration station now serves as the National Museum of Immigration.

The photographs on the walls of the exhibition showed well-dressed men and women waiting for their turn, evidently tired and offended by the cameraman, children with big eyes, the white beds of the sick and elder, a nurse holding a baby, girls making dolls with rags, dozens of women and kids, none of whom was smiling, an old, thin man with a top black hat and white mustache at a dining table surrounded by children and rows of exhausted men resting on uncomfortable wire hammocks. I also saw the photograph of five Japanese agricultural laborers on top and in front of an intricate machine that looked like a small locomotive in a Hawaian field, of three blond and white and elegantly attired Austro-Hungarian brothers probably aged eight, six and four who traveled with their mother to meet their father in Illinois and of two Japanese sisters who were forever separated when Machi stayed behind with her husband and Chiyoto sailed to California to meet her parents. Every room and floor smelled like disinfectant.

I read with care the copy of the S.S. Mauretania, which sailed from Liverpool and arrived in New York on March 18th 1910. Most of the passengers were young, between nineteen and thirty years old according to the register. Among them also were two infants of three and four years of age. Apart from gender, age and given name, the checklist evaluated the immigrant in terms of occupation, ability to write and read, race or people, host or sponsor, amount of cash in hand, height, complexion, color of hair and eyes, mental and physical health and asked if the person was a polygamist, an anarchist or a cripple. The cursive handwriting was impossible to read. The typed manifest of Italian vessel Giuseppe Verdi, which sailed from Genova the last day of January of 1920 was much easier to decipher. The Italians were aged between six, the age of Antonetta, daughter of Caterina Collabolletta, and forty-two, which was how old Giustine Tannesi was or declared to be. They came from villages and cities with lyric names like Trapani, Aragona, Morlupo, Santa Flavia, Tortoreto and Rome and were headed to Milwaukee, Boston, Pittsburg, Syracuse, Orange and New York. Only the names of Giovanni Simonelli and Francesca Pier Domenico were highlighted.

I asked a member of the staff why. Roger Parson, as the balding man who helped me was called, took me without too many words to a small office in the first floor of the museum. You have another visitor, Danelle, said the man addressing one of the Ellis Island rangers who with her robust arms, short white hair and small spectacles could have played the role of the main character’s mother in any Italian movie. Danelle Simonelli stood up and shook my hand and asked me what she could do to help. She then told me that Giovanni and Francesca, her grandparents, were twenty-six and twenty-four years of age when they arrived on board of the Giuseppe Verdi in the United States. The baby growing inside Francesca’s body was Filippo, Danelle’s father, who would spend most of the years of his new life playing the clarinet for the New York City Opera.

I took a walk after the ferry took us back to Battery Park. I ate a falafel sandwich drenched in white sauce on my way back to the World Trade Center. Hundreds of people of all ages, many of them black, wore purple t-shirts and purple caps and walked or ran past me going up Battery Place and South End Avenue. All of them were part of The Walk to End Lupus, the illness that, as I recalled at that moment, had killed Liliana, my friend’s Adal older sister, with whom he had not the best relation, almost twenty years back. Adal is father of two girls, none of them named after his long gone sister.

The admission to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, usually a steep twenty-six American dollars fee, was by fortune included in the New York Pass that Courtney had sold me the day before. The memorial museum smelled and was as cold as a cave. In the center of the underground main hall stands the last fragment of one of the columns removed from the ruins of the South Tower’s core covered with graffiti code-like inscriptions. From top to bottom one can read on one of its faces PAPD 37, NYPD 23, FDNY 343 and on the other side on bright red letters CIVS 2427. A black and surprisingly short guardian told me that the inscriptions represented the number of dead who belonged to the Port Authority Police Department, the New York Police Department, the Fire Department of New York and the number of dead civilians. On one of its sides there is a wall painted in blue tones on which center one can read NO DAY SHALL ERASE YOU FROM THE MEMORY OF TIME, a quotation from the Aeneid, the epic written by the Roman poet Virgil. Behind the wall allegedly rest more than eight thousand unidentified human remains.

I found more about the phrase on the wall later that night. Trojan homosexual lover-warriors Nisus and Euryalus ambushed the Rutui enemy camp at night. Nisus first beheaded Remus, his gasping head flew off, a purple flood flowed from the trunk, and slaughtered his men, Lamus the bold, Lamyrus the strong and Serranus the fair and young. Euryalus took care in the same way of Fadus and Hebesus. A man called Rhoetus was hiding behind a large jar when Euryalus pierced his naked flank, from which poured a stream of wine and blood and Rhoetus purple soul came floating in the flood. The Trojans went into the woods. Nisus stopped, turned around and realized that his lover and accomplice was nowhere to be seen. Going back he found that Euryalus was surrounded by the men led by the warrior Volscens. From afar, Nisus threw his spear and drove it into the back of the warrior named Sulmo. A second spear he sent through the skull and brain of the soldier Tagus. Volscens could not contain his rage and lift his sword. Nisus charged, Volscens stabbed and killed Euryalus, Nisus pierced Volscen head through his open mouth and fell dead seconds later under the sword of Volscen’s remaining warriors. It is after this passage describing the Trojan couple’s demise that Virgil wrote the controversial quotation. Turnus, king of the Rutuli, ordered the severed heads of Nisus and Euryalus to be impaled and paraded on pointed spears the following day.

I met my former girlfriend Lina and her sister Ana in front of The White Oculus designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. They were in the city visiting their mother, a resident of Queens for over a decade. Lina’s hair was cropped close to her scalp and she was wearing a rose-red coat. Her sister’s hair was curled and chestnut-colored and her silken scarf was violet and olive-green. They hugged before I took their photograph. Only later, when I saw the photograph again, did I realize that there was a homeless man of at least sixty years of age sleeping on the sidewalk behind them. The first structure imagined by Calatrava that I saw was the also white and UFO-like Montjuïc Communications Tower during a short visit, also coincidentally with Lina, to the city of Barcelona in 2005. It was built for the Barcelona Olympic games and it is said to represent an athlete holding the olympic flame. The Oculus shares color, material and shape but in much large proportions. When I entered the precinct and saw the white floor and the rows of all white beams and columns I felt like the prophet Jonah or the wooden-boy Pinocchio after they were swallowed by the whale.

After sunset and as the neons were turned on all across the city in a blinding unison, we went for diner at a Greek restaurant not far from the hotel. We sat and ordered dolmades, bread, Greek salad and Greek wine and talked first and foremost about Lina’s cancer, therapy, convalescence and remission. Lina had discovered a lump in her right breast months after returning to Colombia from a five-year exile in France. Surgery in both breasts and chemotherapy ensued. Lina told me her life had been spared by intercession of Agatha of Sicily, the patron saint of rape victims and breast cancer patients. The photograph she had in her phone, a painting by American artist Caitlin Karolczak, erupted from the screen.

In the painting, a young and emaciated Saint Agatha, her skin the color of stagnant water in a rotten swamp, looks straight at the viewer, like a morbid version of the Mona Lisa. Her hands hold a white ceramic bowl adorned with indigo birds that look like mating sparrows and indigo flowers that are, without a doubt, chrysanthemums. The bowl contains the remains of both of her maimed breasts, ripped with pincers by men under the orders of Roman prefect Quintianus after twenty-year-old Agatha rejected his salacious advances, the pale pink nipples pointing straight to the skies, like shooting stars of rose flesh that have not taken off yet. One can see a layer of fat, bright orange muscle, three of the ivory-colored ribs, like the tusks of a pygmy elephant living inside her chest, and a lung the color of mud through the gaping hole where her right breast should have been. Her left breast, or what is left of it, is covered by a shawl of what seems to be purple-gray silk.

We then ate a salad with feta cheese which we washed with red wine and talked about all those other things that are the blocks that build our daily lives.

We said our goodbyes after dessert. Once again during my walk back I ran first into a man and then into a woman sleeping in the streets. The woman, blond and young, was talking and shaking in her sleep as if she was having a seizure or the most frightening nightmare. I took my sneakers off, placed them next to the woman’s body and returned to my hotel room in my socks.

My daughter Sola, six or seven at the time, once asked me, while we walked through an underground passage in Osaka, to stop and give her some change. I asked her in return what she needed change for and she pointed to an old homeless man we had just walked past. She went by herself and handed the man the coins and came back to where I waited for her in silence. I washed my hands and then my dirty socks in the sink wondering for a while what could have been going through her young mind at the time.

While I brushed my teeth I read from the screen of my phone Kafka’s A Report to an Academy, a short tale narrated by an ape who to regain his freedom adopts the ways of men. The storm which blew me out of my past eased off today, reports the chimpanzee to the members of an unnamed scientific academy to explain his change of nature. Today is only a gentle breeze which cools my heels. I felt akin to this close relative of ours when he comments his being the member of a foreign species and a devote student of men. The chimpanzee narrator, though, had evidently made much more progress than me in the intricate study of such bizarre and violent species. Imitating human beings, adds the well-versed chimpanzee, was not something which pleased me. I imitated them because I was looking for a way out, for no other reason.

I went to bed soon after taking a long shower.

DAY 4

My ex-wife and I were in a train sitting next to each other in absolute silence. Nothing strange up to that point. I looked out the window and on the surface of a brilliant sea was the Yamato, the lead ship of the Imperial Japanese Navy being readied to cross a narrow canal just ahead. Our train stopped and we got off minutes later at the next station. A group of approximately a hundred primates among which I recognized chimpanzees, baboons, agile gibbons, long-tailed lemurs and an orangutan or two also alighted from the train. A tall and well-built ape surrounded by other smaller monkeys was waiting for the group in the well-lit anteroom of the station. The apes who had recently arrived were given a warm welcoming speech and dark and elegant blue uniforms. Before the crew boarded the battleship, docked meters away from the train station, the tall ape dipped his right index and middle finger into a golden aspersorium filled with water and touched the forehead of each monkey, placed both of his hands over the departing monkey’s shoulders, looked at him in the eyes and wished him strength, honor, courage and wisdom.

My sleep was still disrupted. The dream and the urgency of my bladder woke me ten minutes before six. I met Courtney at Central Station three hours later. I tried to absorb as much of the scene and to record the sensations I experienced during my first time inside the famous transportation hub. I did not look up once and completely missed the blue-green and gold constellation ceiling. American muralist James Hewlett, father-in-law of inventor Buckminster Fuller, French artist Paul Helleu, friend of John Singer Sargent, Coco Chanel and Marcel Proust, and American painter Charles Basing, who died of Sepsis after a camel stepped on his foot in Marrakech, were the three painters in charge. The trio based the zodiac design on German celestial cartographer Johann Bayer’s star atlas named Uranometria, the measurement of Heavens. The Water Carrier, the Fish, the Ram, the Bull, the Twins, the Crab, half of the zodiac signs, as well as the great animal hunter and slayer Orion, Pegasus, a fly and a triangle are all there. No one knows why Leo, virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius and Capricorn were ignored. The original vault of heavens was damaged beyond repair from roof leaks in the following decades and covered by fiberboards on which an approximate and much less detailed version was replicated.

In the seat in front of ours sat an old black gentleman wearing dark glasses who looked to me like an apparition of the resurrected Ray Charles. He spoke to himself or to the invisible spectrums riding along with all us for most of the journey from Manhattan to Coney Island.

Coney Island was not like in the movies. It was many times better. The air smelled of sea salt and inevitable rain. The sky was dark grey and threatened to break apart and release a new biblical flood over our heads. Not a single person was well-dressed, there seemed to be Police cars on every corner and even the seagulls seemed to be depressed. There was no doubt that a storm was coming.

The first thing I noticed was the white and yellow billboards over Nathan’s Famous, the shop that has been selling sausages of ground cow’s flesh, skin and cartilages inside the section of an emptied-of-excrement sheep intestine for over a century at the corner of Stillwell and Surf Avenues. The branch of Nathan’s Famous in the 107th floor of the South Twin Tower also vanished after the attacks. The building of the Coney Island Circus Side and Freak Show can undoubtedly compete for a place in the podium of the scariest places on Earth. A lean and haggard man whose job was either to be a sad clown or to swallow swords and other sharp objects depending on the weather and the number of patrons came to the door to welcome us. We smiled, politely declined and kept walking. Laffin Sal, a doll shaped as an unattractive woman with an enormous gap in her front teeth, the ghost of a young girl dressed in white riding a swing, Felix the Cat, Pin-up models, gypsies, Spongebob and Betty Boop watched us from behind disorderly displays. Betty, as I was told, was based on a Jazz Age flapper.

Zelda Sayre, writer Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, is still referred by many as the first American Flapper. Zelda, a white girl with a round face and a button for a nose who was named by her parents after a gypsy in a novel, drank and smoked heavily, danced without rest, bobbed the waves of her smooth and shiny hair, wore flashy jewelry, short dresses and elaborate make up. Zelda was unconventional, eccentric, despised Ernest Hemingway, her husband’s good friend, and Hemingway reciprocated. Zelda wanted to become first a ballet dancer, then a writer and finally a painter. Zelda had a mental breakdown when she was thirty, survived an overdose on sleeping pills and also came out unharmed after she threw herself down a flight of stairs during one of the many socialite parties her husband and she attended. Zelda ended up her days in a mental house after being diagnosed with schizophrenia. On March 10th 1948 a fire started in the Asheville sanitarium, where Zelda had been locked and was receiving insulin shock treatments. Flames spread like yellow wolves through all the floors and consumed the beautiful flapper and eight other patients.

I must admit I share Zelda’s dislike for Ernest Hemingway. About his work I can not say much, I read the Old Man and the Sea when I was young and remember close to nothing. What I know, though, is that the mythical Hemingway was as flawed as your average man next door. He was an avid drinker, not to say an alcoholic. Hemingway’s liver was diagnosed as damaged in 1937 but he did not stop his binges. Mary Welsh, his fourth wife, told Hemingway’s publisher, probably trying to sound optimistic during a casual conversation, that her husband had not hit her for over a year. She wrote in her journal that her husband had spat on her face and as an apology had given her two-hundred dollars the next day.

Hemingway was also an avid murderer of aquatic, terrestrial and aerial animals. Legend says he shot sharks with a Thomson sub-machine gun, a much less romantic way of killing animals at sea than in the story which won him a Pulitzer and secured his place in the list of Nobel-prize receivers.

In 1933, inspired by President Theodore Roosevelt’s hunting expedition, Hemingway went to Africa for the first time on borrowed money and killed as many animals as he could through Tanzania and Kenya. His second visit twenty years later expanded the scope of his killing to Congo and Rwanda and was at least as murderous as the first. His guide was tall and wiry English hunter Philip Hope Percival, the same who had accompanied President Roosevelt in his personal killing spree. Roosevelt and his son Kermit, named like the famous television frog, killed two-hundred and ninety-six and two-hundred and sixteen animals each, amongst which were seventeen lions, three leopards, seven cheetahs, nine hyenas, eleven elephants, nine rhinoceros, eight hippopotami, nine giraffes, twenty-nine zebras, ten buffalos, one eagle, two vultures, three baboons, eleven monkeys, four crocodiles, four pythons and dozens of oribis, gazelles, roans, topis, impalas, kobs, oryxes, buck and elands. Kermit, who knows why, even killed two porcupines and four innocuous flamingoes.

Hemingway was also obsessed with bullfighting, having seen, according to his own words the death of at least a thousand and five-hundred animals in the bullring. Hemingway went to declare that he considered the killing of bulls in front of an audience for entertainment and profit an art and wrote a full five-hundred-page-long book about it.

The same year hitmen killed Minister of Justice Rodrigo Lara Bonilla in my country of birth, a bull called Avispado killed famous bullfighter Francisco Rivera, Paquirri, the day of my second birthday. Father enjoyed watching the young matadores dressed in flamboyant mauve, fuchsia, pastel blue, burgundy, ivory and golden suits slaughter several bulls, animals who had asked nothing from nobody and had not the slightest clue why they were there being tortured and murdered, one after the other, in front of an audience aroused by sweat, adrenaline and blood. This singular form of entertainment in three acts, still quite popular in Spain, France, Portugal and several countries of latin america, starts when the bull enters the arena. The matador tries the animal’s will first for a couple of minutes with a cape colored gold and magenta. One or two picadores come right after, horse-riding men whose job is to pierce the back muscles of the bull with lances. The hemorrhage weakens the animal and begins the public slaying. It is the turn of the three banderilleros on foot. They run around the bull, like golden harlequins around a dying king, and plunge the banderillas, barbed harpoon-like sticks, into its shoulders. The blood that spurts from the gaping wounds paints colored wings that will carry the bull after his death into new horizons. The matador makes his triumphant second entrance in front of an exhausted, weakened and dying bull. He makes some passes, the audience shouts Ole, Ole, Ole, as the bull makes its way under the blood-red cape. The Grand finale comes when the matador pierces the bull’s heart through his back with a sword made of steel. Since the Matador often fails to kill the animal on his first attempt, he has to stab him over and over again until the animal finally vomits blood and drops dead. If the public liked the show, the ears and tail of the bull are severed and offered to the Matador as trophy.

American soldiers did the same to their Japanese and Vietnamese counterparts during the wars. Teeth, ears, bones and skulls were often taken home as medals or souvenirs. Former soldier James Weingartner wrote the following in his essay titled Trophies of War: U.S. Troops and the Mutilation of Japanese War Dead, 1941–1945: To a much greater degree than Germans (and certainly Italians), Japanese became dehumanized in the minds of American combatants and civilians, a process facilitated by the greater cultural and physical differences between white Americans and Japanese than between the former and their European foes. How much more dehumanized is then to our eyes, I wondered, a fish or any other creature living underwater, a bird, or any other creature soaring the skies, a dog, a cow, a calf, a pig, a sheep, or any other creature walking on its four legs?

Dave Stancliff, a former american newspaper editor and publisher and a veteran of the Vietnam War wrote: I served in Vietnam and Cambodia, in 1970. As part of a demolition squad (31st Eng Battalion), Bravo Company, we were attached to numerous other units on various missions ranging from mine sweeping roads to clearing out dense areas of forest to construct fire bases. One of the guys in my squad collected enemy fingers. Another proudly wore a necklace of ears taken from VC and NVA soldiers. There is no excuse for this kind of thing in any war. But it happens. While I did not approve of it, I never turned anyone in for it because I did not trust officers and I knew someone would probably “cap my ass” if I did. I admit that I did not have much sympathy for the victims, but my brain was in a survival mode and they were, after all, people who would have killed me if they had the chance.

Paquirri fell in a warm day, the culmination of a pleasant summer. The horn pierced the skin and sliced through the flesh and muscles of the soft thigh like a hot knife through butter. The man flew through the airs, was carried left and right, up and down, a final ride in life’s merry-go-round before he closed his eyes and went to sleep forever. Paquirri clung to the bull’s head with all the might he had left. He knew that letting go would have given freedom to the horn to explore further inside his innards. Cádiz would cry, Andalusia would dress in black for months to come. A girl in the audience said, The man looked like a rag doll. The bull shook him as if he were nothing but a rag doll. Silence came and took sit among the viewers. Women stood agape. Men covered the shame and sorrow of their faces with both hands. But Paquirri did not know, or did not want to know, that he was about to die. So he stood up from the sand and limped out of the arena leaving behind him a trail of blood and life behind. There was a deep black slash on the handsome thigh. The muscle and arteries of the leg were in tatters. The banderilleros came to the rescue of the matador herido. The bull puffed and trotted, looking confused, not knowing what else he was supposed to do. Doctor, said Paquirri lying on a bed in the corridors of the plaza surrounded by at least half a dozen men, there was no tremble in his voice. I want to talk to you because, if I do not, I will not be at ease. The wound is serious. It goes in at least in two different directions. One like this and the other like that. Open all you have to open, and the rest is in your hands. Paquirri bled to death on the way to the nearest hospital.

The decaying mental state that drove Hemingway to blow his head with a double-barreled shotgun in July 1961 was perhaps the reason for his unstoppable thirst for blood. The last year of his life he was medicated, hospitalized and went through electroconvulsive shock treatment. Or maybe he just spread his brains all over the walls of his house out of remorse for all the animals he had killed.

Hemingway had three kids. Like father, like son, as they say. Mariel, third daughter of Hemingway’s first son John, said that her father had sexually abused her two older sisters. Mariel’s sister Margaux killed herself with an overdose of barbiturates. Patrick Hemingway spent a quarter of a century hunting animals in Africa and went to have his own safari business. The United nations appointed the hunter son as teacher of conservation in the Wildlife Management College in Tanzania. Something like naming a serial rapist as headmaster of an all-girls school. Gregory, who came later to be known as Gloria Hemingway, was, like his father, an alcoholic, a hunter, had four wives and also underwent shock therapy. Surgeons changed his sex in 1995. Gregory died in October 2001 in the Miami-Dade Women’s Detention Center after being arrested near Key Biscayne for indecent exposure.

Courtney and I went from one end of the boardwalk to the other. The wind blew hard on our faces and it started to rain. I asked her about the wooden structures along the beach that looked like UFOs abandoned after an alien invasion. Most of them are public toilets, she said, some of them are lifeguard stations.

The lavatories from outer space brought to mind H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, a story Wells wrote after a discussion he and his brother had about the disastrous effects of the British invasion on the indigenous Tasmanians. What would happen, asked Wells to his brother, if Martians were to do to Britain what we have done to the Tasmanians? With infinite complacency, one can read in the first paragraph of the book, men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. And then the unnamed narrator says about the extraterrestrial invaders, And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the martians warred in the same spirit?

If you like these ones, she said, you should have seen what stood here a century earlier. The Elephantine Colossus, a seven story building shaped like an elephant carrying a howdah on his back, served as a hotel, brothel and tourist attraction. Patrons used to enter through and up the hind legs into the elephant’s stomach to discover a world of awe and pleasure. The shoulder, the cheek and the liver rooms, and the women who inhabited them, were said to be among the most popular. The eyes, of course, were windows that looked out on to the never ending ocean. The manager, a tiny man called Charles Alexis Bradenburgh, used to call the elephant hotel the eight wonder of the world. It was abandoned for a while before someone set it on fire and it burnt down to the floor, she said, when I asked her what had happened to such an interesting structure.

The grounds around the rollercoaster and the Ferris wheel were almost silent. Civil Engineer George Washington Ferris could indeed have based his famous Chicago World’s Fair Wheel, an event to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of mass murderer Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the American continent, on William Somers’ Observation Roundabout. Somers unsuccessfully filed a patent infringement lawsuit against the elegant engineer. The engineer followed Somers example and filed a lawsuit against the managers of the Chicago World’s Fair on the basis of unpaid profit. Litigation lasted until Ferris died of typhoid fever three years after he gave his wheel to the world practically for free. He was thirty-seven years old.

Five or six men wearing heavy jackets were fishing in the brown-grey waters around the Steeplechase pier. There were small poodles of fish guts and fish blood here and there along the boards. A tall white man with a yellowing mustache under his nose, a blue icebox laying next to his right foot, was telling his neighbor, a black man wearing a blue cap of the St. Louis Cardinals, about the species he usually caught. Blues, he said, of course, but also bonito, bass, black fish, herring, sea robins, fluke and weakfish. And that is during the colder months. Wait until it is warmer, he said, and you can see snappers, amberjacks, yellow jacks, big eye jacks and even ray fish. How do you cook them? asked the black man. Cook? Said the white fisherman, Are you insane? You eat a bite of one of these and if you are lucky not to die you will at least spend some days in the hospital. I just chop them in little chunks and use them as bait, give them to the dogs or let them die and throw them back into the water.

DAY 5

I could see from left to right the black and white 1 New York Plaza, the dull 55 Water Street building, the grey and yellow William Beaver House, the 120 dwarfish Wall Street, the intergalactic blue 180 Maiden Lane, the green roof of the 40 Wall Street Building, The One World Trade Center, part of the Woolworth building and the New York by Gehry tower from the Brooklyn Bridge Park, the first place I visited during my fourth day in the city. I ate a tomato and eggplant sandwich served with french fries and ketchup at a Bistro named Marseilles, washed it all down with a glass of red wine and with a warm and contented stomach crossed the Brooklyn Bridge back to Manhattan on foot.

Prussian-born Johann Augustus Röbling arrived in the United States in May 1831 aged twenty-five accompanied by his brother Karl and their friend and Utopian John Etzler. The trio planned to form an American utopia, but disagreement flourished and father and son left the recently formed community. Two years later Etzler published his most important work, The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labour, by the Powers of Nature and Machinery, a book in which he pronounces a superabundance of powers at our disposal to ensure a paradise for men, where every thing desirable for human life may be had for every man in superabundance, without labour, if only we are able to invent adapted tools or machines for application. He goes to write in detail about the powers of the wind, the sun, the oceans’ tides, about elevators like the ones we all take for granted now transporting people up and down in every building, of air conditioning and water heating in every apartment. Etzler also commented in his book on how dull and tedious it was to pass the best part of one’s life in the same ever repeating mechanical motions or labors, and after they are ten thousand times repeated, he wrote, they are ten thousand times again and again to be done over. What is the mighty object of leading such a life? He wonders. To get money, in order to buy what one wants. Is this the most exalted virtue, the highest destination of man’s life that can be thought of in this world? It may be a virtue, he writes, or a necessary evil in a state of general ignorance and prejudices, but it is no virtue founded in nature. Etzler predicted his forthcoming failure when he wrote that Individuals who attempted sometimes to disperse new valuable truths, were not listened to, and considered insane in proportion their truths deviated from the common track of the unthinking or unreasoning multitude. No one knows to this day neither what happened to John Etzler after the publication of his last book in 1847, The Emigration to the Tropical World, nor how his life ended.

Karl and Johann, accompanied by a thousand and three hundred settlers, founded Saxonburg, still a town in Pennsylvania. On December 4th 1980 criminal and impersonator Donald Webb, a man with deep, dark eyes, bushy black brows and hair, pistol-whipped and murdered Saxonburg’s young Police Chief Gregory Adams, a man whose naivety can be almost felt when looking at his portrait. It was the first murder in the town’s history. The case was only solved in 2017 when FBI and police officers found Webb’s remains buried in the yard of his wife’s house in Massachusetts. Webb, having spent not a single day in prison, had died of a stroke eighteen years earlier.

Johann Röbling, whose scarce hair, large ears, light eyes, thick mustache and beard gave him the appearance of an exhausted prophet, was obsessed by bridges. First came the Allegheny Aqueduct followed by a bridge over the Monongahela River, four more over the Delaware and Hudson Canal, a suspension one in Pittsburgh and another over the Ohio River, a railroad bridge over the Niagara River and another over the Kentucky River.

But Röbling’s Moby Dick, his all-consuming obsession, was the one that would connect Manhattan with Brooklyn. And this bridge to end all bridges costed the Prussian engineer his life. On one of the last days of June 1869 a ferry crushed his foot while he stood at the edge of a dock examining the bridge’s site. His mangled toes were amputated. Röbling refused conventional medical treatment and tried to heal his wounds by the means of hydrotherapy. The bacteria responsible for tetanus is often found in dust, soil, saliva and manure, in other words, everywhere. It produces a toxin that harms the brain and nervous system causing muscle stiffness and spasms that can be intense enough to fracture bones. It killed Röbling mere three weeks after the accident.

Washington Augustus, who saw action as a private in numerous battles of the American Civil War and bore an uncanny resemblance to his old man, took over as Chief Engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge following his father’s death. He was thirty-two.

Decompression disease, also known as The bends, occurs mostly in scuba divers. When a scuba diver ascends too rapidly the nitrogen in the air inhaled leaves millions of bubbles in the blood. Some compare it to opening a shaken can of soda. The nitrogen bubbles block blood vessels and can cause anything from joint pain to strokes and heart attacks. During the peak years of the Australian pearling boom, for example, from 1912 to 1915, before the first World War put a stop to it all, ninety-three divers, mostly aboriginal Australian, Japanese, Filipino, Malaysian, Makassar, Amborese and Koepanger, died of The bends.

The towers of the Brooklyn bridge were built over two massive yellow pine caissons. Workers took turns to enter the compressed air-filled caissons to remove the sediment and allow the wooden bases to sink. In 1872 Washington once spent half a day inside one of the underwater caissons and had to be carried out of it after he fainted. His body was forever crippled by the bends. He spent the next decade confined to his home, supervising the construction from the window of his room. It was his wife Emily, a simple beauty with a moon-shaped face, who became Washington’s mouth, feet, hands, eyes and ears, who relayed his instructions to the workers on site, who dealt with laborers, engineers, politicians and skeptics and who rode next to Chester Arthur, President of the United States, when the bridge was inaugurated in 1883.

One of the first things I noticed was that only people in their youth were crossing. It was as if their elders had been outcasted or pushed over the edge of the bridge. As I looked down, I imagined a rain of old people, some of them holding canes or still in their wheelchairs, silently sinking in the grey-blue waters of the East River. People sat on the rails, posed, smiled, pretended to be immersed in thought or grimaced trying to be amusing, all for the sake of a good picture. Young couples snapped photographs of themselves and stopped to make sure that their best faces had been captured in the screen. A lone woman wearing a neon pink jacket took pictures of herself by the means of an extendable metallic pole attached to her photographic device. The woman blushed when she saw me staring in awe at the amount of vanity, resourcefulness and commitment needed to register the events of her own life. The few who were not taking photos of themselves were capturing the breathtaking skyline.

The first person to cross the bridge was not Emily Röbling, though, but master Mechanic Frank Farrington who went from side to side of the unfinished bridge not on foot but sitting on a Bosun’s chair hanging from a rope attached to the anchorages set on both sides of the river. It took Farrington twenty-two minutes to zip-line from Brooklyn to Manhattan. He even had time to take his felt hat off and wave it to greet the audience.

Late that afternoon, Garrett Robinson, a blond and plump poet, author and performance artist who spends his days in front of the New York Public Library at Bryant Park greeting visitors with songs, poems, gentle smiles and conversation, said, Young man, what are you reading there? I showed him the orange-colored cover of the book I was reading. You should read Von Horvath then, he said. It was through the author of the book you are reading that I found out that von Horvath, the young and handsome Hungarian who wrote in German and who moved to Paris escaping from the Nazis, was walking on the Champs Elysées when the sturdy branch of a cypress tree fell on his head and killed him. He had just visited a clairvoyant who had told him to avoid tramways, lifts and the whole city of Amsterdam, but told him not a thing about Parisian trees.

After I shared with him my plan to visit the American Museum of Natural History the following morning, Garett hesitated for a second before telling me the story that ended with the dead of millions of bison, thousands of Indians and some white men, among whom was Private Charles Squier, another victim of gangrene.

Throughout the lands of what is now called Canada, the United States and Mexico, said Garrett, from the Great Slave Lake to the banks of the Rio Grande, an estimated sixty million bison roamed. So large used to be their number that the Native Americans, who use the dead bison body to eat its meat, cook soups and make paint and pudding with its blood, craft arrowheads, toys and medicine with its horns, necklaces with its teeth, hair combs with its tongue, soap and hair wax with its fat, jewelry, knives, spades and other tools with its bones, containers with its emptied and dried stomachs, bracelets, ornaments, blankets and pillows with its hair, bow-strings with its tendons, pigments with its bile, gloves, shawls, beds and teepees with its skin, whips with its tail and fuel and talc with its feces, thought that the bison sprouted from the soil from an inexhaustible spring.

The massacre accelerated in the 1830s. First came Ohio, then Idaho, Texas and New Mexico. The bison vanished form the earth one state at a time. The railways built in the 1860s split the massive herd in two, one to the north, another to the south, making their species even weaker. To accelerate construction and avoid delays caused by the herds, marksmen hired by the railroad authorities shot thousands of bison from the windows of the trains in movement. It is said that just during the twelve months of 1870 two million animals were killed. Tons of fresh bison meat fed the railway employees, but most of it went rotten on the carcasses which covered the American plains. The largest cemetery on earth, said Garrett. Profit, revenue and gain were the name of the game. The skin was used for expensive leather products. The bones for fertilizer, cheap china and sugar refining. The recorded amount of bones sold between 1868 and 1881 tells us, and I am sure you can find all that I am telling you in the museum you will soon visit and inside the walls of the literary sanctuary behind us, that the number of bison killed in those thirteen years was close to thirty million. The southern herd disappeared in 1876. The northern one followed six years later. In 1884, according to registered numbers, there were only three-hundred and twenty-five bison in the United States, a country each time larger thanks to the forceful appropriation of the lands of the also endangered Native Americans.

To eliminate the bison, source of livelihood of the Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Lakota, Ojibwe, Comanche, Tonkawa, Arikara, Kansa, Mandan, Dakota, Omaha, Pawnee, Missouria, Yanktonai and Wichita was just one of the steps taken. Cold and hunger helped to reduce the numbers of the Native American. Epidemics, war and fear of the white man took care of the rest of them.

In November 29th 1864, close to seven-hundred Americans under the lead of master mason and Methodist pastor John Milton Chivington, a man with a plump body, a broad forehead and a minuscule piercing gaze, attacked, maimed and killed over a hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho during the Sand Creek massacre in Kiowa, Colorado.

Silas Soule, a Young handsome man who looks afraid or undecided in the few pictures left of him, friend of poet Walter Whitman (I am large, I contain multitudes, muttered Garrett under his breath), abolitionist and captain of the Union army, was present that day. While most of Chivington’s men followed without a moment’s hesitation the orders of the murderous pastor, Silas Soule and Lieutenant Joseph Cramer asked their men to stand still.

In December 14th of the same year Silas Soule wrote a letter to his friend, Major Edward Wanshear Wynkoop, founder of Denver, Colorado, in which he explained his view of the events. In the letter one can find a passage that reads: The massacre lasted six or eight hours, and a good many Indians escaped. I tell you Ned it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brain beat out by men professing to be civilized. One squaw was wounded and a fellow took a hatchet to finish her, and he cut one arm off, and held the other with one hand and dashed the hatchet through her brain. One squaw with her two children were on their knees begging for their lives to a dozen soldiers, within ten feet of them all firing, when one succeeded in hitting the squaw in the thigh. She took a knife and cut the throats of both children and then killed herself. One old squaw hung herself in the lodge, there was not enough room for her to hang and she held up her knees and choked herself to death.

I have read the letter so many times, said Garrett, that it is now imprinted in my memory. And Silas Soule goes like this for a while telling in his letter to Wynkoop of natives chased, shot, scalped, mutilated, ears and privates cut off, bodies butchered and cut open. Silas Soule formally testified against Chivington in January 1865. He married Theresa Coberly, the pale and plane-looking daughter of a Colorado Pioneer on April 1st. the 23rd of the same month, private Charles Squier and William Monrow shot Silas dead in the streets of Denver. There was a lot of speculation regarding Chivington’s involvement, but nothing could be proved. Squier was tracked and caught, but managed to escape days before his trial. In 1869 Squier suffered a railway accident which crushed both his legs. Gangrene killed him. Chivington went to the grave unrepentant after cancer ate his innards thirty years later.

I bought two of Garrett’s books, Nunatak and Zoë, for ten American dollars each, and asked him to sign them for me. He seemed happy to oblige.

I ordered a cup of coffee at a kiosk and watched a large and black young man wearing a white t-shirt and long dreadlocks play the French game of pétanque against an old white gentleman who was covering his head with an elegant brown hat. As I watched the odd couple play the ancient French Provençal game, I did a quick search about Garret on my phone. The first article I found talked about the Homeless Playwright who had brought his work to a Manhattan stage. Garrett, age forty-six, spent his days in front of New York’s Public Library promoting his books, reciting poetry and singing for strangers and his nights in a two-star hotel near Baisley Pond Park in Jamaica, Queens, where he shared a room with another tenant, a dwelling subsidized by the Department of Homeless Services. His routine consisted in an open air morning rehearsal of his poetry and plays, a ride in train E to Manhattan, a stop by a public locker where he kept his sign and books and a walk to his troubadour stage in the park.

Reading about Garret brought to mind a dream in which I saw a troubadour dressed in azure blue silk, much like famous Perdigon and his celebrated fiddle, chanting songs of hope to a majestic tree whose branches ended in the heads of wild beasts, a Javan rhino, a Sumatran tiger, a Barbary lion, a Bornean Orangutan, an Indian elephant and a Malayan Sun bear who were all singing back to him.

I met Lina and Ana again under the undulating facade of the mirage-like skyscraper now commonly known as New York by Gehry. The eight-hundred and seventy foot-tall building looks as a long blue bar of butter that its melting. I had read the night before that Gehry’s inspiration for the facade’s undulation were the folds of the clothes of the statues carved in marble by Neapolitan sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s. I had been lucky to see Bernini’s work in 2004 during a trip to Rome. Despite finding out that Luigi, Bernini’s brother and right-hand man, not only infuriated Bernini by sleeping with his lover Costanza, but also raped and sodomized one of his brother’s young assistants at the site of the Constantine Memorial in San Pietro’s Basilica, I cannot forget what I felt when I stood in front of La Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi and Il Baldacchino di San Pietro. How dared Mr. Gehry tell such a thing to the reporter? I wondered.

We walked to the ever-shrinking Little Italy, predated through the decades by the growth of the neighboring, prosper and curiously blood-smelling streets of Chinatown. As we walked in front of the Chinese-themed shops, I wondered if the buyer could there find powdered rhino horns, elephant tusks, monkey heads, shark fins, the paws, bones, teeth and penises of tigers, bear bile, turtle shells, snake oil, deer musk, swallow’s nests, handfuls of dried sea horses and even human placenta to balance his or her yin and yang, enhance the flow of his or her qi and believe that by rubbing on his skin, eating, drinking or inhaling the remains of these practically-wiped-from-the-wild-animals he could cure his headaches, fevers, skin infections, warts, joint ailments, circulatory problems, hemorrhoids and even sexual impotence.

A young Colombian man named Sebastien tried to persuade us to enter the restaurant he had been paid to endorse. I peeked through the window. There was not a soul inside, not even a waiter. We declined with a smile. He asked us to at least stay and chat for a while, the night is slow, he said, and I am bored.

Sebastien had left the city of Ibagué a year before. I dealt with emeralds before, he said, and it was good and I was rich, at least for a while. But in that land of ours good things are never meant to last. I spent two years in prison, you want to know why? We once again refused as politely as we could. You are right, it does not matter anyway. The dead are dead and there is nothing one can do about them. Now I am free and I am in New York and I should be getting my residence papers any time now. We wished him a good night and went to the eatery across the street.

I tried to use the little Italian I could speak when in the restaurant. The mustachioed waiter replied to me in fluent Latin American Spanish. He and the other three waiters in the room were all Ecuadorians. The kitchen staff are also all Latin Americans, he said. We have two Mexicans, a Peruvian and a gentleman from Venezuela. Their red wine and cannelloni, I must say, were of the highest standards.

James, a portly and welcoming African-American friend of Lina, picked us up in his white SUV after dinner with the intention to show us around the city at night, stopped to buy us ill-smelling hot dogs from a cart not far from the Yankee Stadium, a culinary offer which I politely declined on the basis of having just dined, and offered us a beer at a hotel bar before dropping me in front of the hotel with an ample smile and driving the girls back to their maternal residence.

DAY 6

The morning started with a new episode of hearing voices in my head. The voice, which is neither male nor female said: I will try to avoid being judgmental, but then, I am only God, which means I am also human, falcon, jellyfish, spider and bacteria. Go ahead and ask for knowledge. It will be given. You and I are members of the same team, like a squad of cheerleaders. The voice did not say much the rest of the day.

After being welcomed at the entrance hall of the museum, conveniently named the Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda, by the skeleton of an Allosaurus attacking the fossil remains of a colossal Barosaurus, I had to go to the lower levels of the Museum of Natural History to find the Diorama that confirmed what Garrett had told me about the American Bison the previous day. The exhibition text read, This diorama is set in the mid-1800s, when the prairies teemed with tens of millions of bison. A few decades later fewer than a thousand remained. The species was nearly exterminated for hides and sport, and to subdue Native Americans who relied on bison for food and livelihood. This “great slaughter” ignited the first effort to save a mammal from extinction. As the bison dwindled, ranchers began to breed them, and some of them were transferred to sanctuaries.

Today, this North American icon is numerous again, but nearly all bison are raised for meat and spend their days inside fenced ranches. Domestication and inbreeding means that true wild bison are still quite rare.

NOT SINCE THE END OF THE AGE OF DINOSAURS — THE GREAT EXTINCTION AT THE END OF THE MESOZOIC ERA — HAVE SPECIES DISAPPEARED AT SUCH A RAPID RATE, read the red letters on a black screen in one of the last rooms I visited in the Museum. And most of it, if not all, because of us humans. Interested in the subject of our self-inflicted demise, I finished reading The Sixth Extinction by journalist and writer Elizabeth Kolbert in May 2018. Kolbert visited San Diego, Paris, the Amazon rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef, among other locations, to, as another journalist noted, report from the front lines of a dying world. Does it have to end this way? Kolbert asks the reader and herself in the last pages. She writes halfheartedly that humans can be destructive and shortsighted but also forward-thinking and altruistic and illustrates her affirmation by mentioning Alfred Newton, John Muir and Rachel Carson, whose books resulted in the Act for the Preservation of Sea Birds in the United Kingdom, the creation of Yosemite National Park and the prohibition of most uses of the infamous DDT as a pesticide. Still, the fact that we need Acts for Preservation of wildlife, transformation of nature into parks and enforced prohibition of poisonous chemicals shall be strong enough reasons to feel concerned about our moral and intellectual capabilities as species. The video loop in another of the screens showed that by the year 2100 the projected human population is eleven billion. I was in the darkest of moods when I left the museum grounds.

I went to Kinokuniya next to Bryant Park to look for something new to read in order to placate that feeling of impending doom before meeting Courtney again that afternoon in front of the Empire State. I had neither heard nor read about Ted Chiang before that day and I must say how blessed I was to find him. I had time to read a few pages of Tower of Babylon, the first story in Arrival, Chiang’s first published work. The last phrase I read that afternoon said: Yahweh may not punish us, but Yahweh may allow us to bring our judgement upon ourselves.

I had a salad and a cup of black coffee at the window counter of a Pret a Manger near the famous building. A bearded man aged between twenty and twenty-five was seated against a light pole in front of the restaurant asking for change to the passersby. I counted seventeen men and women who ignored him before I finished my salad and my coffee. He mumbled some words of either sorrow or desperation to himself after each failed attempt. I bought the same salad, a sandwich and a cup of coffee and handed the paper bag with the contents to him and he said thank you without looking at me. I wished to know more about the distribution of wealth in the city after the incident. The internet browser answered my question by saying that New York City is home to nearly a million millionaires, more than any other city in the world and that the city has the largest population of super-rich, each having at least $30 million in net assets, on the planet. New York-super rich spend $1.1 million a year each on luxury goods and services. New York City also has the largest homeless population for any major city in the United states. In recent years homelessness in New York City has reached the highest levels since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Courtney and I spent about twenty minutes on the observation deck. Images of a massive Gorilla holding Ann Darrow on the tip of the building, of a giant marshmallow monster wearing a sailor cap, a sailor’s collar and and a bright red neckerchief and of an Alien invasion averted by a courageous black pilot, an alcoholic Vietnam War veteran, an MIT technician and a handful of other men during the commemoration day of the American Declaration of Independence went though my head. It was not long before Native Americans, Bisons and the homeless took back their place.

You know what I was thinking while I watched the city and all the millions of souls in it? She asked me as the elevator took us back down to the building’s entrance. I confessed I did not. That one of our biggest mistakes, among so many, characteristic to our nature, is this naïve idea that we are all born equal. You are white and I am black. You are a man and I am a woman. I was born here and you were not. Some people are tall and stupid. Others are short, clever and bald. Why do they want to make us equal by force? The idea is nothing but a house of cards built on sand. Collapse it will, I tell you. The Land of Equal Opportunity, they always say. Perhaps for the rich and white, but by no means for the black and the poor. It is either lunacy or blindness. When circumstances are not the same, opportunities will differ. Equality is nothing but a convenient idea superimposed by a godfather in Washington DC. People are different, what is so wrong about that?

We went down to the street level once again and ate some mushy, lukewarm Thai food that the short and seemingly obfuscated South East Asian waitress served to us in black, disposable plastic containers. I still suspect that Courtney expected me to kiss her before we parted ways that day.

DAY 7

I opted to spend the morning hours of my last day in New York by having a second dose of Central Park in different weather conditions, in a different state of mind and all in all under a different set of circumstances. I went up a mound and tried, as I watched them skip and sing around my body pecking at the breadcrumbs I fed them, to speak the language of the birds. If King Sulayman, Siegfried the Hero, Odin the God and the blind prophet Tiresias could communicate with the little, feathery creatures, why would I not be able replicate their feat? Know, my people, said the wise Sulayman, the same who ordered for a baby to be cut in half to find the infant’s real mother amongst two claimants, that we have been taught the speech of birds and endowed with all good things. Surely this is God’s manifest grace.

After a few minutes, I changed plans. I could not understand a word of what the birds were saying. I was steps away from the Guggenheim Museum and still had an entry ticket included in the Voucher book. Trying to find more about the inspiration behind the giant toilet-shaped building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright led me to the story of Julian Carlton’s killing spree. On Saturday August 15th, 1914, the same day the Panama Canal was inaugurated, Carlton, a young servant native of Barbados, murdered Martha Borthwick Cheney, the architect’s mistress, and her two children with a hatchet, locked the rest of the workmen inside Taliesin, the house Lloyd Wright had built in Wisconsin for his new romantic companion, and set the place on fire. Carlton murdered seven people by axe and flames that day. He drank acid in an attempt to kill himself, ravaged his insides and died of starvation almost two months later. He never confessed the reason for his murderous rage.

I only remember two pieces of the strange and bleak museum. The first was Henri Rousseau’s cheerful Joueurs de Football which made me wholeheartedly smile.

The other, a letter Vincent van Gogh wrote to John Peter Russell, an Australian friend and painter, almost brought me to tears. Rusell’s name, for a reason I ignore to this day, was covered by a blotch of black ink. The letter reads: My dear Russell. For ever so long I have been wanting to write to you — but then the work has so taken me up. We have harvest time here at present and I am always in the fields. And when I sit down to write I am so abstracted by recollections of what I have seen that I leave the letter. For instance, at the present occasion I was writing to you and going to say something about Arles as it is — and as it was in the old days of Bocaccio. Well, instead of continuing the letter I began to draw on the very paper the head of a dirty little girl I saw this afternoon whilst I was painting a view of the river with a greenish yellow sky. This dirty “mudlark”, I thought, had a vague florentine sort of figure like the heads in the Monticelli pictures, and reasoning and drawing this I worked on the letter I was writing to you. I enclose the slip of scribbling, that you may judge of my abstractions and forgive my not writing before as such. Do not however imagine I am painting old florentine scenery — no, I may dream of such — but I spend my time in painting and drawing landscapes or rather studies of colour. The actual inhabitants of this country often remind me of the figures we see in Zola’s work. And Manet would like them as they are and the city as it is. Bernard is still in Brittany and I believe he’s working hard and doing well. Gauguin is in Brittany too but has again suffered of an attack of his liver complaint. I wished I were in the same place with him or he here with me. My brother has an exhibition of ten new pictures by Claude Monet, his latest works, for instance a landscape with red sun set and a group of dark fir trees by the seaside. The red sun casts an orange or blood-red reflection on the blue green trees and the ground. I wished I could see them. How is your house in Brittany getting on — and have you been working in the country? I believe my brother has also another picture by Gauguin which is as I heard say very fine, two negro women talking. It is one of those he did at Martinique. Macknight told me he had seen a picture by Monticelli in Marseille, flower-piece. Very soon I intend sending over some studies to Paris and then you can, if you like, choose one for our exchange. I must hurry off this letter for I feel some more abstractions coming on and if I did not quickly fill up my paper I would again set to drawing and you would not have your letter. I heard Rodin had a beautiful head at the Salon. I have been to the seaside for a week and very likely am going thither again soon. Flat shore sands — fine figures there like Cimabue — straight, stylish. I am working at a Sower. The great field all violet, the sky and sun very yellow. It is a hard subject to treat. Please remember me very kindly to Mrs Russell — and in thought I heartily shake hands. Yours very truly, Vincent.

How I envy the men who had a brother or a friend like Vincent van Gogh.

I took the train in the wrong direction trying to find a supermarket and ended up in a busy street in East Harlem. A black man whose face I could not see was sleeping on the stairs of the Metro Exit. I went for a short walk. Half a dozen men, five black and a brown one, were sleeping on the doorsteps of different brick apartment buildings. Latino women speaking in Spanish were selling catchpenny paraphernalia, fast food and flowers. Pizza parlors, fried foods restaurants, hamburger and tacos shops, a bakery, a Deli, a Subway sandwich shop and an AppleBee’s Grill Bar. No wonder so many of the men and women I saw were obese. A couple composed of a caucasian man wearing a grey hoodie and a latino woman told me that if I walked straight for fifteen minutes I would find a Target supermarket next to the Harlem River. I gave up and went back to the metro station.

My next and final stop before going back to the hotel to pick up my luggage and take the bus in front of the Port Authority Bus Terminal back to JFK airport was the Strand. I walked from Union Square station and spent two hours of frustration inside the famous bookstore. I have yet to find less helpful staff inside a place of commerce. Most of the young men and women working in the store were young and unbathed, wore dirty and eccentric clothes and hairstyles, tattooed skins and pierced brows, ears, lips and noses, and most likely genitals too, although the latter I cannot tell for sure, and seemed to have been instructed to never look a potential buyer in the eye and to excel at ignoring the voices and requests of all suspected customers.

I was about to leave the place when the bright red cover of a slim book caught my attention. The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and Elwyn Brooks White, illustrated by Maira Kalman.

William Strunk, who seemed to enjoy experimenting with the design of his mustache, first a student of morphology and Philology and later a professor of English and Mathematics, suffered a mental collapse, was confined and died in the Hudson River Psychiatric Hospital on September 26th, the date of my birthday, at the age of seventy-seven.

E.B.White’s summed up this impossible city in a passage of his essay Here is New York. By rights, he wrote, New York should have destroyed itself long ago, he wrote, from panic or fire or rioting or failure of some vital supply line in its circulatory system or from some deep labyrinthine short circuit. Long ago the city should have experienced an insoluble traffic snarl at some impossible bottleneck. It should have perished of hunger when food lines failed for a few days. It should have been wiped out by a plague starting in its slums or carried in by ships’ rats. It should have been overwhelmed by the sea that licks at it on every side. The workers in its myriad cells should have succumbed to nerves, from the fearful pall of smoke-fog that drifts over every few days from Jersey, blotting out all light at noon and leaving the high offices suspended, men groping and depressed, and the sense of world’s end. It should have been touched in the head by the August heat and gone off its rocker.

E.B. White went off his rocker before the city he so much loved ever did. Alzheimer’s disease invaded and feasted on his brain some years before his death.

At one of the restaurants inside the buildings of JFK International Airport I sat down to wait for my flight and read Hell is the Absence of God, another of the stories included in Arrival, while having a glass of red wine. My mind went back to Central Station and I saw myself as if from way up high, as if seen by a bird in flight, standing under the Pershing Square Viaduct bridge and across Jules-Félix Coutan’s monument baptized Glory of Commerce, the statues of Mercury, Minerva and Vulcan, symbols of travel, trade and progress, that stand atop the station facade’s carmine, gold and turquoise clock. A voice like a storm came down from the white and blue skies and clamored, Everything under heaven, morning and night, the Orion stars, the storm clouds, the sea waves, eternal darkness and the abodes of light, deserts, wastelands, springs and grass, the ibis, the rooster, the raven, the lions and the bears, the donkey, the horse and the mighty ox, the mountain goat, the wise an the wicked and even the Leviathan and the Behemoth, belongs to me. The voice then roared, From where have you come? And a different voice, the voice of human man replied, From going to and fro on the Earth, and from walking up and down on it. I watched in horror as the pavement of East 42nd Street become as transparent as crystal as the block turned into Hell manifested. The lost souls look no different than the living, writes Chiang, their eternal bodies resembling mortal ones. The living could not communicate with the damned, the exiled from God, but I could hear them chatter, tell each other jokes, some of them cried, but most of them were as silent as my dead father always is in when he visits me in dreams.

I felt the intense regard of the person across my the table and when I looked up I found the pale face of a beautiful woman smiling at me. Gabrielle Bartlett, as the gracious Australian was called, asked me with her hand to join her table. It is my seventh visit to New York, she said, I love the energy of this city. Being a flight attendant has its perks, you see? I go around the world practically for nothing. We ordered more glasses of wine and as the warm words flowed from her full, rose lips I fantasized with asking her to join me in the nearby toilets. I stayed in the Shangri-La, she said as she showed me a photograph of her and a supposedly renowned African-American rapper she had run into in the hallways of the luxurious hotel and whose name she mentioned a couple times but I made no effort to remember. The man I stay with in this city, she said, a powerful American businessman whose name I have sworn not to disclose, always takes care of my needs and I take care of his. It is the best kind of agreement. You know, she said after looking at me in silence for some seconds, talking to you made me recall the dream I saw two nights back. I was in the north Parisian suburbs, going up the stairs of one of the many naked grey and white-washed towers omnipresent in the French banlieue. Out in the balconies the inhabitants of the building, some of them children, some of them men and a multitude of women, all of them black-skinned without exception, listened and danced to fast-paced African rhythms emanating from strong palms beating drums and the chant of remote, foreign voices, cooked, served and ate fragrant and colorful dishes and were engaged in the most joyful conversations. The air smelled sweetly of cardamom, cilantro, cumin, sweat and happiness. They stopped their vigorous activities in unison, like a perfectly harmonized orchestra, when the skies opened and the iridescent orb of the sun fell unhurriedly and in absolute quiet, so slowly that at some points it looked as if it hovered, until its white and golden body settled in the courtyard in front of us. Only then did life retake its course. Visit me in Melbourne some day, she said while she wrote her name, electronic mail address and telephone number in the first page of my book, first with an orange highlighter and then over the first set of letters and numbers with a blue-ink pen. I would be delighted to spend some time with you. I paid for our drinks, pushed my chair back, stood up and kissed her on the lips. Gabrielle was surprised for a second, smiled, blushed and wished me safe travels.

A month after my visit to New York, and not really expecting an answer, I wrote an email titled Greetings and thanks and a bit of serendipity to Maira Kalman. It went like this:

Dear Maira.

During my first trip ever to the city of New York, I happened to spend two hours in The Strand bookstore looking for something good to read. After I had almost given up, due mainly to the chaotic excess of choice, and was on my way out, a solitary red cover volume caught my eye.

The Elements of Style, by William Strunk and E.B White, authors who, I am ashamed to say, were not familiar to me until that day. I paid the ten American dollars with pleasure and left the store. Weeks later, minutes before the Shinto ceremony of engagement with my second wife in Kyoto, I read a post in Brain Picks by Maria Popova where she mentioned the name of E.B. White. It rang a bell. I ordered a copy of Here is New York and read it in thirty minutes after it was delivered at my doorstep. White’s Twin Towers prophecy in the last two pages left me speechless. E.B. White, attired in his costume and hat, makes me think of Robert Walser. I read about him in the pages of Sebald’s A Place in the Country, and only days later did I find the beautiful photograph of his inert body lying on the snow. I read his Jakob Von Gunten with a constant smile and started working on a short story about the children who found the corpse. In order to gather more material, I read a couple of his stories, Basta made me loudly laugh, and looked and ordered a copy of his mysterious microscripts. What a delightful surprise when I received the copy today and recognized the style of the illustrations in the last pages, and the phrase: Maira Kalman is an author/illustrator who fell in love with Robert Walser after receiving the photo of him lying in the snow. New York, The Elements of Style, E.B. White, W.G. Sebald, Robert Walser, his photograph, Maria Popova (I just saw that she has written several articles about you and your art) and Maira Kalman. As Quantum entanglement and W.G. Sebald both said, everything is indeed connected through time and space. Thanks for doing the beautiful work you do. Her answer came the same day at midnight:

Dear Basteph.

Mysterious and welcome serendipities all around. Thank you for writing. You have found me traveling in France in search of Gertrude Stein. With some detours.

All best

Regards,

Maira.

ADDENDUM

December 1989

Miami & Orlando, United States

I was seven.

At that time, the most famous man in the country I was born in was not a scientist nor a writer nor an athlete, but a drug trafficker with a thick mustache and a protuberant belly. Drugs, kidnappings, massacres, explosions, car bombs and murder filled the pages of newspapers and the half-hour news shows at noon and seven in the evening. 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 August, Presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán was about to open his speech in the city of Soacha. Galán’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 the chosen one, the son of God. 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. Gaviria changed his schedule at the last minute and 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 aerial massacre, 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 could not 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 grey debris.

Father thought it then a good idea to send me along with Carolina, the eleven-year-old daughter of John, one of father’s associates, and a badly dressed travel guide, a plump, brown woman whose name I can not remember, to spend a week of holidays in the United States.

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 was a disappointment. Nothing but a slow train and a bunch 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 many years later did I read his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.

Disney Land and Universal Studios, on the other hand, kept their promise for excitement. Fast rides, sugary soda highs and fireworks in the evening. I even 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 other adult men and women. The son of a neighbor took the book from my bedroom only days after my return.

I stole a five-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 me: What have you got there? A ring, I said. Why did you steal a ring? she asked. It is a present for my mother, I replied. 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 answered.

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, well-taken care of, playing everyday with their peers and with their gentle human trainers. No one mentioned, and I do not 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 Donkey Kong 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, 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 anticipated erection and nothing viscous 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. She had been awake the whole time. We had some cereal with milk inside the room. Carolina had colorful Lucky Charms and 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 and God rested, 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 took me to Toy World for a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-themed Christmas shopping spree. I recall she spent a hundred and eighty-one American dollars in reptilian 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, had he not been arrested or killed by the Chinese army after the events, 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 spite of his inspiring efforts.

In Germany, the wall erected by the winners of the war fell with a a thump of broken brick and concrete. The screams of joy from all the present and the millions watching history in the making through their television screens were heard for days. I could not imagine then that I would touch the remains of that same wall seventeen years later.

I went back to school the following week. When my classmates asked me what was the most amazing thing I had 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 is 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’ supposed interplanetary exploration would not really hurt anyone.