When they opened the door for him, he walked right past without saying hello, went up the stairs, reached the room at the far end of the house, collapsed on the bed, and slipped into a coma. Freed from himself in this way, at the edge of the abyss of death that he would soon fall into, he experienced what I think were the first moments of peace he had known since childhood. It was Christmas, the happiest time of year for children in Antioquia. Yet it had been so long since we were kids. Days, years, our entire lives had rushed past us like the Medellín River, which the city had turned into a sewer, so that instead of teeming with the shimmering fish of years past, its raging whirlpools and murky waters could now drain the shit, and nothing but more and more shit, all the way out to sea.

By New Year’s, he had come out of the coma and was faced with both the ineluctable fact of his illness and the dusty asylum of his house, my house, which now lay practically in ruins. But did I just say my house? Christ. How long had it been since it stopped being mine. Ever since Papi had died. Hence the dust, because after he was gone, nobody ever swept. With my father’s passing, the Crazy Bitch had lost not only a husband, but also a servant, the only one who had never quit on her. He lasted her half a century, more or less. Those two were the spitting image of love, the very sun of happiness, the perfect marriage. They produced nine children in the first twenty years of their union, while the machinery still worked, all for the glory of God and country. But what God, what country? What idiots. God does not exist, and if He does, then He is a pig and Colombia a slaughterhouse. And I who swore never to come back. But never say “From this water I shall not drink,” because at the rate things are going, and given our numbers, it’s bound to happen that, on the day we least expect it, all of us will find ourselves drinking from the shitwater of that same river. All for the great glory of the aforementioned, and world without end, amen.

I came back when they told me that my brother Darío—the next in line in the infinite ranks of our siblings—lay dying, though nobody knew from what. But come now, it was from the same disease that is all the rage with queers, and whose latest trend makes them wander the streets looking like cadavers, like translucent ghosts set in motion by the same sort of light that can nudge a butterfly’s wings. What are they calling it? Damned if I know! What with my eternal weakness for women, I know nothing about queers, even though there are plenty of them in this world, and some of them are presidents, some of them popes. (Without having to go farther afield than this country of assassins, couldn’t we say of our most recent head of state that he was really more of a queen?) And these popes are more fluent in the filthy tongues of men than in the fiery tongues of the Holy Spirit, a fact that inspired in Pope Paul VI a certain apostolic weakness for the beauties and hustlers of Rome. The same weakness that came over me when I met him, or rather, when I saw him from a distance, one Sunday morning in St. Peter’s Square. He was standing at his window, blessing the faithful. An unforgettable sight: His Holiness standing above, waving his blessing, and his flock below, all of us corralled meekly in the gloom of the plaza. If you ask me, and this is my own humble opinion, the Pope blessed too much that day. His blessings were mechanical, and they lacked specificity, as if his hand were dangling at a broken angle from his body, as if it were up to us to decipher the vague crosses that he was signing in the air. Like a notary who ruins his signature from sheer overuse, His Holiness had ruined his own papal blessing. Clumsy, haphazard blessings scattering to the four winds. Blessings that fell left and right, this way and that, wherever and for whomever, the devil may care. What a load of blessings he rained down on us. That morning, His Holiness looked more like a doctor prescribing antibiotics, so liberal had he been in doling out those blessings.

I rang the doorbell and who should answer it but the Lazy Jerk himself, the monstrous spawn who had been the runt of the Crazy Bitch’s litter, born when she was long past her prime, when her eggs and genetic material were already riddled with mutations. He opened the door and didn’t even acknowledge me, he simply turned around and went back to his computers, to the Internet. He had gradually taken over the house, this house that our father had left us when he left this world. First, he laid claim to the living room, then the garden; next, he took over the dining room and the patio and the piano room, followed by the library, the kitchen, and the entire second floor, all the bedrooms, without forgetting the roof above each room or the antennas that sat on top. The vines that hung out front over the picture window—even these belonged to him now, as did the poor mice that scurried in at night, though we had just managed to rid our house of them when Papi died.

“Why won’t this malformed fetoid even say hello to me?” I said. “Or was he one of my one-night stands?”

He had not spoken to me in ages, not since the year that our chestnut tree bloomed. A hatred had been fermenting and taking hold in his gut, towards his own brother, towards this love—a hatred towards me, towards this self who says I, the one in charge of this whole enterprise. But there was nothing to be done. As long as Darío was still alive, we were all condemned to live with one another under that same roof, in that same hell, in that little hellhole that the Crazy Bitch herself had created, step by step, day after day, and all so lovingly, over the course of fifty years. Like any successful business, ours was a hell rich in tradition.

I walked in and set my suitcase down in the entrance. This is when I noticed her. Death, that fuck-faced floozy with the ineffable smile, was positioned firmly on the first step of the staircase. She had returned. If only it were me she had come back for. But no chance of that. She seems to hold this humble servant of yours (never hers!) in high regard. Whenever she sees me, she moves aside to let me pass, much as the Haitians used to do for Duvalier when they ran into him in the street.

“No, ma’am,” I said. “I’m not going up. You’re not the one I came to see. Like the Crazy Bitch, I try to avoid taking the stairs. I prefer to walk on level ground at all times. But take care of yourself until I get back, and look out for my suitcase while you’re at it. In this country of robbers, you never know. Anyone can make off with your knickers—or, in your case, your sickle.”

So I left Old Toothless at her post and proceeded to the patio. There I found my brother, lying in a hammock that he had tied to the mango tree on one end and the plum tree on the other. A sheet draped on top of some clotheslines shielded him from the sun.

“Darío, my friend, imagine finding you here in the sheikh’s tent!”

He sat up and smiled, as if the sight of me gave him a glimpse of life itself. But that pleasure at seeing me was the only sign of life in his eyes. The rest of his face was nothing but wrinkled skin, scarred with sarcomas and hanging loosely from the bone.

“What’s been happening?” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me how sick you really were? There I was, calling Bogotá from Mexico City, day after day, and no one ever picked up. I thought your phone was broken again.”

But no, the broken one was my brother. He was the one who had been dying, for months now, of a diarrhea that not even our Heavenly Father, for all His omnipotence and well-documented benevolence towards human beings, had been able to alleviate. The thing with the telephone was a simple matter of connecting two loose wires, but my brother, who had a total disregard for earthly callers, preferred to leave it disconnected on the floor while he nursed a somber cloud of marijuana smoke, letting it feed on itself and billow heavenward until it was intercepted by the ceiling. The telephone could be fixed, but he could not. With or without AIDS, he was a lost cause. And all this coming from the likes of me.

“Open the windows, will you?” I said when I visited his place. “Let this cloud of smoke clear out. It won’t let me think.”

He would not open them, saying that if he did, it would only let a cold draft in. So there he would lie in his indoor hammock, completely unperturbed. What a disaster area that apartment in Bogotá had been. Worse than this house in Medellín, where he now lay dying. A description of the bathroom says it all. For one thing, you had to go up a little step.

“What is this step about?” I said. “Such geniuses of shitty workmanship!”

Who in their right mind would think of making the bathroom a step higher than the rest of that hovel? I tripped whenever I went in and fell headlong into the void on my way out.

“Whoever built it,” I continued, “is a sonofabitch to the second generation. First with regard to his mother, and then to his grandmother.”

There was no light in the bathroom, or rather, there was a light bulb, but it had burned out, and Lord only knows how long it had been since the toilet paper ran out. Since the time of Methuselah, no doubt, or at least since the days of Maricastaña or Her Majesty Gaviria. And watch out if you sat on the toilet, because then you were bound to bump your knees against the wall. How I would love to have seen His Holiness Wojtyla on his haunches there, or maybe standing under that showerhead with its faint stream of cold, cold water, which trickled, drop by drop, at a one-inch angle from those frigid walls. Here the discomfort was no longer confined to your knees. Now you were sure to bang your elbows while trying to lather up. Which also brings up the soap situation.

“Damn it, Darío, where is the soap?”

He said there wasn’t any. It had run out. One more thing that had run out. Everything in this world must come to an end. Now it was his turn, and not even God Himself could prevent it.

In the garden, Darío struggled to get up from the hammock to greet me. When I hugged him, he felt like a thorax of bones pressing against my heart. A bird cut through the dry air with a metallic, cacophonous shriek. Graack! Graack! Graack! Or something like that, like the sound of shredding tin.

“I’ve been trying to spot him for days,” Darío said, “but I don’t know where he goes. He is hiding from me.” The bird cawed its way from the mango to the plum tree, from the plum tree to the vine, and from the vine up to the roof, without ever being seen. “I’ve gotten to know all the birds that come here, except for that one.”

I remember that a year earlier Papi and I had gone up to the brand-new building next door to view the apartment units that had just been put on the market. From up there, I had my first aerial view of the little garden behind our house: a small green square, so full of life, where all kinds of birds liked to gather. It was one of the few gardens left in that part of Laureles. The houses in this neighborhood had been falling to the pickax one by one, all of them bought up and demolished by the mafia in order to erect mafioso buildings in their place.

“Exactly who do they think is going to buy all their apartments?” I said.

“There is nobody who can,” Papi said. “For now, all we have here are the rich, who are very rich, and the poor, who are very poor. And the rich don’t sell, because the poor don’t buy.”

“The poor never buy,” I said. “They steal. The poor steal and they procreate, and this is how they multiply, so that they can go on stealing and procreating. Good thing you are about to die, Papi, so that you don’t have to see them knocking down your own house.”

“That is all nonsense,” he said. “The only one that is about to die is this country. It’s very old already. But I am not. I plan to bury the millennium and live to be a hundred and fifteen, at the very least.”

“One hundred fifteen years old, after drinking all that aguardiente? There is no liver that could resist that.”

“Sure there is! The liver is a noble regenerative organ.”

Three months later, he was laid out on his deathbed, precisely because his noble liver had not regenerated. What was there to renew anyway? Here the only people who obtain renewal are these sonofabitches who hold the Presidency. Poor Papi, whom I loved so much. Eighty-two years properly lived and properly prayed for. A long time, when you look at it from one angle, but nothing to speak of when you look at it any other way. Eighty-two years won’t even give you enough time to memorize an encyclopedia.

“Or am I right, Darío? We have to wait and see if we make it over the hill of this century, which is getting to be so difficult. After the year 2000, everything is going to get easier. It will be downhill for all eternity after that. You have to believe in something, even if it’s only in the force of gravity. You cannot live without faith.”

So, as I watched him roll a joint, he told me the lead-up to the disaster. After only a few days of taking a remedy that I had sent him from Mexico, he suddenly started putting on weight, and his face began to fill out, as if by a miracle. Miracle my foot. What happened is that he had stopped urinating and was retaining fluids. First his face and then his feet swelled up, and after that, everything was a mess for sure, because he couldn’t even walk up the steps to his apartment in Bogotá, which was located at the top of a hill that crowned a mountain that was so– so– so– but sooo very high up that the clouds in the sky got mixed up with the clouds of his pot smoke. Immediately, I knew what had happened. Fluoxymesterone, the stuff I had sent him, was an anabolic steroid that was being used off the market to treat AIDS, because it was supposed to reverse the patient’s fatigue while improving muscle mass. In Darío’s case, it had resulted in an enlarged prostate, and this had blocked his urinary tract, which explained the fluid retention and the so-called miracle of his rejuvenated face.

“For fuck’s sake, Darío, the prostate is such a stupid organ. That is where most cancers begin in men, and if it isn’t used for reproduction, then it isn’t good for anything. It has to be taken out, the sooner the better. Before some kid is born, before the little brat has time to grow and procreate. They should take your appendix and your tonsils out, too, while they’re at it. This way, with less weight to carry, your little angel there can race faster and won’t be able to, say, misbehave.”

As soon as he finished rolling his joint, he started smoking it with all the ease of a nun taking daily Communion, and I began to lay out my plan, which consisted of five brilliant points. One, we had to get the diarrhea to stop, and this could be done with sulfaguanidine, a remedy that I had come across for bovine dysentery. The drug had never been tested on humans, but it had occurred to me to use it on the grounds that humans and ruminants are not so different, if only we put aside the fact that a woman with two teats can produce a lot less than what a cow can yield with five or six. Two, we would have his prostate removed. Three, we would administer another dose of the fluoxymesterone. Four, we would run a time-honored item in El Colombiano, the Medellín paper, that said WITH GRATITUDE TO THE HOLY SPIRIT FOR THE BLESSINGS WE HAVE RECEIVED. And five, we would leave for the Côte d’Azur.

“What do you think?” I said.

It all sounded good to him. As he spoke, he started choking on the smoke from that accursed, blessed weed.

“That marijuana is a godsend, isn’t it, Darío?”

Of course it was. It was the only reason he was still alive. AIDS had robbed him of his appetite, but marijuana had given it right back.

“Then just keep on smoking, my friend.”

Powerful words right there. You didn’t have to tell him twice. My brother had been a self-avowed pothead for over thirty years, ever since I introduced him to that ineffable drug. What with my general inconstancy—or rather, my characteristic volatility—I gave it up not long after that. He did not. Instead, he added it to his regimen of aguardiente, a combination that short-circuited him. The conjunction of these two demons produced a chaos that drove my brother to all kinds of reckless behavior. He broke glasses, he crashed cars, he smashed television sets, he got into altercations with the cops. One day in court, while standing in front of the judge, he knocked the man over the railing and ended up doing a little time for that at Modelo. How he managed to get out of there alive is beyond me. If that place is a “model” for anything, it can only be for a slaughterhouse. He never talked about it, he claimed to have forgotten. He said that the problem ran in the family, that all our wires were crossed.

“Yours maybe,” I said. “Not mine, knock on wood.” Thud thud.

He once wandered through the Amazon jungle, in full-on guerrilla territory, with a little backpack slung over his shoulder that contained his marijuana and aguardiente, but not his voter registration card. Can you imagine? No sentient being in Colombia goes around without this form of identification. Even the dead have one, even they can vote. Leaving your ID at home is like stepping out of the house without your own dick. You could have shit for brains and still never forget that.

“Why the hell would you go around without your card, Darío? It’s not that hard.”

“Don’t have one. It got stolen.”

“You’re an idiot,” I said. Letting someone steal this ID is worse than murdering your own mother. “What if the person who has it goes out and kills some poor soul?”

“Oh please, come on,” he said. “It’s not like anyone is getting killed. Cut the fatalism already.”

Ah, fatalism. This word, which has fallen out of use, is a term that our grandmothers taught us. It comes from the Latin, fatum, meaning “destiny,” which is always for the worse. Ah, Raquelita, dear old gran. It’s a good thing that you are no longer with us to witness your grandson’s collapse.

So off into the Amazon he went, without his ID. Lord knows how he ever managed to get past the military checkpoints to go off and smoke in the heart of the jungle. He never talked about that, either. He never talked about anything. Whatever glass he broke or house he wrecked, whether his own or someone else’s, that glass or house would be erased ipso facto from his brain. There is no denying all the horrible things that he did to me. When the esteemed Dr. Barraquer gave me a new cornea, Darío beat me on the head with a guitar and knocked my retina loose. Who knows how many guitars he had broken that way. A finished jam, a jammed guitar, if you will. The marijuana and the aguardiente were uneasy bedfellows that unleashed a real destructive rage. How did his friends put up with him? I do not know. How did his family put up with him? No idea. How did I put up with him? It’s a mystery. I really do not know how I put up with him for fifty years. And dear God, the neighbors, the poor neighbors. He liked to leave the tap running and triple-bolt his apartment so that he wouldn’t get robbed, then go off into the jungle for fifteen days to meditate. Meanwhile, all the apartments would get flooded: his downstairs neighbor, plus the one below that, and the one on the ground floor. Water dripping everywhere, dribbling down the stairs, step by step, in crystalline rills that went din-dom … din-dom … din-dom … What about his own unit, did it get flooded, too? Sure, he said. The sky flooded it whenever it rained, through leaks in the roof. Anyone could be forgiven for mistaking that building for a gigantic sieve.

“Darío, why don’t you get someone to have a look at those leaks?”

“Nobody can do it!” he said. Whoever climbed up there to fix them would only end up breaking the roof tiles.

“It’s the tiles on your head that are broken, you reckless little shit.”

Darío’s roof—the capital of his building, the ethereal crown of Bogotá skimming the clouds of Monserrate, from where Christ the King presides—did behave more like a sieve. An imposing, godforsaken sieve that collected the rains and the pigeon shit that followed.

And that door, good heavens, the one with the triple bolt. The sun fell on it all afternoon, and even though it was made of metal, it expanded from the heat and then there was no way to pry it open. He had to wait outside for an hour, sometimes two hours, or even three, until it cooled down and regained its proper size. Or else he went down to the little grocery store two blocks away (he couldn’t ask the neighbors, since they refused to speak to him) and asked to borrow a bucket of water. He then went back up the two blocks, lugged the bucket up the five flights, and threw the water against the door to cool it off and bring the swelling down. Then in theory he could open it. But with what key? Because of course he had lost his key chain on the way down.

If the swelling sometimes forced him to wait outside, it could just as easily leave him stranded inside, unable to get out. Then he would misplace his keys somewhere in the apartment and fall into a state of panic.

“Where are my fucking keys?” he shouted one day. “They must’ve been stolen by the little pickpocket who slept with you here last night.”

“He wasn’t with me, he was with you. And here they are!” I pointed to the keychain lying on a pile of papers and junk.

“Aha!” our frantic hero exclaimed with relief.

This is why, whenever I paid him a visit in Bogotá, hoping to check on his recovery, it seemed preferable to find a place to sleep in the sewers or even under a bridge somewhere.

In his final years, I mostly only heard rumors of his feats and antics and usual havoc. Your brother did this and that, or such and such a thing, people said, chuckling all the while so as not to offend me. For a long time now, I tended to make myself scarce whenever I noticed Darío starting up with his nonsense. I could sense that monster, that tornado, approaching—and I’d be damned if it saw my face again! Though what if by leaving him alone in that condition, he got himself killed by pickpockets or the army or the guerrillas or the police?

“So let them kill him. I’ll pay for the funeral.”

That is the conclusion that I reached, that all of us reached, especially poor Papi, who was also his father, and who finally lost his patience and stopped speaking to him.

Darío went off the rails so much that things got really bad for him, until one day, motu proprio, he laid out his great dilemma: Which of his vices should he give up, the aguardiente or the marijuana? His decision? Neither of them. To prove his resolve, he then took up the vice that was all the rage with the kids. Basuco—from the Spanish basura, meaning “trash”—was a kind of smoked cocaine paste mixed with tobacco or weed, which obliterated everything, “all the way down to the whelping box,” as my grandmother might say (though plural boxes, in her case, if we consider her one hundred fifty descendants).

Through the basuco my brother discovered his fellow basuqueritos, enough of them to fill a kindergarten. They offered me some, on one of my visits, but I declined, uh, because I don’t, uh, like to sleep with corpses. Which is a lie. I have nothing against dead corpses per se, so long as they are fresh. They excite me even more than the living ones, who can be so very headstrong. I refused the stuff simply to make a show of integrity, of willpower.

“Brother,” I said, pleading. “In this life, you have to choose what you are going to be, whether that means being a pothead or a drunk or a basuquerito or a homo—whatever it is. But you can’t be all of the above. The body can’t handle it. Neither can this long-suffering society of ours. So choose one, but enough already.”

He never did make up his mind. A vice once gained is a vice retained. He spent everything he had and left nothing behind for the worms. Everything, everything, everything—and nothing, nothing, nothing. When Darío died, Death and her worms had to eat shit, because all that he left them was a miserable sack of bones wrapped in a spattered parchment.

“How nice to see the two little brothers together, loving one another!”

This is what the Crazy Bitch called out to us from an upstairs window. It was her indirect way of saying hello to me, her newly arrived firstborn, who had ignored her. When Papi died, I had mentally buried her alongside of him like a faithful Hindu wife. Little brothers. Loving one another. Ha. As if for half a century, this saintly woman’s divisive spirit had not done everything in her power to separate Darío from me, and me from him, one from the other, all of us from each other, by getting kitchens dirty, misfiling papers, birthing even more children, disordering rooms, sowing discord, lording it over us, fucking us over, all in accordance with the code of chaos established in her own private hell, which she presided over like a languid queen bee gorging on her royal jelly.

Little brothers. Ogre! You meant to say, scrawny old men.

I glanced up at the second floor where the Ogre remained. She was leaning out the library window that gave onto the garden—a personal watchtower from which she could scrutinize the ways of the world. It had been nearly twenty years since she had gone downstairs, so as to avoid the trouble of having to go back up. A few months earlier, from this same lofty vantage point, she had watched the orderlies carrying away her husband’s (I mean, her servant’s) body, which was leaving her to go and count the grains of dust in the hereafter. How much life did she still have left in her? I calculated, then glanced away, because Our Lady Death wasn’t upstairs with the Crazy Bitch. She was downstairs, standing next to my brother’s hammock.

New paragraph, let’s continue. Or, rather, let’s rewind, let’s go back to all the vices, because I have been skipping over the main one, the vice above all other vices, the vitium maximus, that is, the continuous vice of being alive, from which all of us, even the Pope himself, will one day have to recover. Let’s just see, Your Holiness, how many people attend your funeral, how many priests and bishops and cardinals show up, how many Swiss Guards, how many vile people altogether. And I want you to attend my own. I want a flock of parrots to come and pay their respects, so that I can watch them rip the pure, blue sky into a gash of green, as they did over Santa Anita, the finca from my childhood, my grandparents’ finca, chorusing in mocking unison, “Long live the great Liberal Party, and down with all these motherfucking Goths!” Here Goths refers to the Conservatives, of course, those hypocritical, sanctimonious prayer boys. Meanwhile, we were the Liberals, we were the rebels and the whores. How long has it been since all this, since the gunpowder burned? Of the two political parties that took a machete to Colombia and slashed it into blue and red sides, only their countless dead remained, some of them without their heads. The decapitated corpses of Conservatives and Liberals floated down the rivers of this country, patrolled by vultures that, on their own way down into Hell, liked to kill time (there being no other killings to be had) by plucking out the entrails of the reds and the blues alike, with total disregard for party or creed. And there was no living match for those rivers, no one capable of forging into them to salvage the dead. The ones from my childhood, now those were rivers. What a Cauca, what a Magdalena, rivers torrential and full of fury, with transcendent souls that commanded respect. Not like these bent little rivulets of today, with the souls of a sewer. It’s been ages since the Cauca and the Magdalena dried up, ages since they died, since they were stripped away with the trees and wiped off the map. They think that they are going to wipe me off as well, but they are mistaken, for rivers may pass away, but the word remains forever.

So the two little brothers were together again, talking and lying in the hammock that was strung between the mango and the plum trees, under a white sheet that shielded them from the sun. And at their side stood Death, from whom there is no protection. Or is there? A condom, perhaps. Slip it onto your tongue next time you take Communion, so that the priest’s pious fingers don’t infect you with HIV as he goes from mouth to mouth, distributing the host of the Lamb. At Nuestra Señora del Sufragio, the little church from long ago, I remember watching mouths opening and tongues sticking out along the Communion rail. It was like a row of pant legs, with flies unzipping and penises being stuck out, at the urinals of a brothel. Dumb tongues and dumb dicks that would then be put away, satiated, into mouths and flies that then zipped shut. One time, after taking Communion in peace (back in those idyllic times from my distant childhood when there were few of us in this city, and few of us in this world), our neighbor Arturo Morales, a life-insurance salesman at Seguros Patria, was coming out of this little church when he got hit by a drunk driver, who hurled him headlong into a storefront awning.

“Remember that story?”

Of course he remembered. Darío had shared everything with me. Boys, memories—nobody shared more memories with me than he did.

“Life insurance, my friend. When the only thing we can be sure of is Death herself. So, what do you want to eat?”

“I want caviar.”

Caviar. In the tropics.

“Maybe you could go for a little caviar with some smoked salmon?”

Yes, he could go for that.

“Well, we’re all out. We don’t even have beans in this house.”

Towards the end of his life, Darío became like a pregnant woman with his cravings. He wanted this, he wanted that, he wanted the impossible. I think it’s because he knew that he was about to die. I went downtown to see what I could tempt him with. Tamales, buñuelos, any little delicacy. These only made the diarrhea worse. Nothing agreed with him. Darío was dying on me. So instead of putting the matter off any longer, I decided to give him the cow pills, chased with holy water. With this, I thought, I will either kill him or save him. But neither of these things happened. The sulfaguanidine worked for a week, but then the diarrhea came back, the same affliction that God in His eternal goodness had bestowed upon him before.

I based the dose of sulfaguanidine on body weight. If a cow weighing five hundred kilograms is given x amount, how much do you administer to a corpse weighing only thirty? There you have it. That is what I gave him, two to three times a day. The initial results were prodigious. The diarrhea stopped. After months of not being able to hold down anything.

“¡Se los dije, se los dije!” I gloated to the family, stumbling over my Spanish with my triumphant I-told-you-so’s. (It should be lo, not los, because what I was referring to—the remedy—was something in the singular, and it remains singular whether spoken to one person or to many, Colombia being, of course, a country full of grammarians.)

No one could believe it. Was it pure science or sheer witchcraft? In grateful amazement, my brother Carlos convened a team of doctors to come by the house and witness the miracle.

“Esteemed doctors,” I said. “As you know”—though, really, how much could you expect these oafs to know, when they refer to a fetus as the product, as if mothers were nothing but toy factories—“diarrhea seen in AIDS patients is caused by the same virus, for which there is no cure, or otherwise by cryptosporidiosis, one of its potential side effects, which is also incurable. All the antibiotics and antiparasitics designed to fight cryptosporidium in humans have failed. Sulfaguanidine still has not been tested as a possible cure because it is a treatment used for cattle, and man is too superior an animal. Herein lies proof, however, that it also works in humans: three months of endless diarrhea, and look at him now.

“All right, Darío,” I continued. “Raise your arm. Now the other one,” as if he were a Parkinson’s patient. “Now stick out your tongue. And stick it back in.”

The five stunned physicians examining Darío now turned to examine me. Being so accustomed to not healing anybody, to having people die on their watch, they gazed incredulously back and forth between my brother and me, with their tails between their legs. They asked me if I was a medical doctor.

“Might as well be one. It would be very easy to roll out my Persian rug in the street and start doling out prescriptions.”

So, very good then, and who knows, and we will have to wait and see. Healing one patient wasn’t science, they said, it was merely an anecdotal case. Science, for starters, would mean at least a thousand patients with diarrhea and AIDS, all of them enrolled in a double-blind (or doubly blind?) study.

“You want double-blind?” I said. “I’ve got two transplanted corneas, both of them from assassins, which means that I see cops everywhere and have visions about murdering doctors.”

My profound conviction that sulfaguanidine was good for AIDS-related cryptosporidiosis, combined with the runaway success that I had seen in my brother’s case, clashed completely with their cuirass of skepticism and small-mindedness. That pack of medical charlatans could not accept the possibility of being outwitted by a sage without a medical diploma, i.e. myself.

“Ah, so you do set up your rug in the street!” said one of the five bastards, the really funny one.

“That’s right, Doc, you said it yourself. So next time your wife comes down with syphilis or gonorrhea, have her call me, and I’ll give her what she needs.”

Medical doctors despise me for some reason, I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I test them, because I want to make them renew their medical licenses.

“Doctor, about the cryptosporidium,” I then asked slyly, sounding like any good double-blind Christian prepared to take his leaps of faith. “Is it a kind of … bacterium?”

“Of course.”

“No!” I said. “Not of course. It is a protozoan. Maybe a hundred thousand times bigger. So big, in fact, that the little bugger could puncture your stomach like a knife.”

As a child, I also used to like to test Don Roberto Pineda Duque, my music teacher, who was as deaf as Beethoven, as much in his hearing as in his own soul.

“All right, Don Roberto,” I said. “Close your eyes and tell me what note this is.” I played him a D.

“C.”

“No, Don Roberto, it’s a D.”

“Then that instrument is out of tune.”

Really the one out of tune was Don Roberto. In his soul. He had composed ten symphonies, five symphonic poems, a missa solemnis or two, a couple of caprices, a concerto for piano and violin, and various sonatas, toccatas, frittatas, you name it. But his magnum opus was the cantata Oedipus Rex, a supreme work, very summa cum laude, that was unlike anything else. It was set for a Berliozian orchestra facing a one-hundred-fifty-voice choir—the two sides told the story polyphonically and featured an Oedipus whose blindness was a close match for the composer’s own deafness. When Don Roberto died, the community of Santuario held a memorial concert in his honor, and do you know what they played? Mozart’s Requiem! It would be as if burglars broke into the house of José Luis Cuevas, the Ingres of Mexico, and rather than stealing one of his own paintings, they made off with a Botero, instead.

“The way I see it, Darío,” I said (the cadre of wise men having departed, it was now just the two of us again, in the peace and quiet of the hammock), “it’s the priests who gave you the AIDS. Think back. Was there ever a moment when you happened to slip into a church somewhere to take Communion?”

Alas, no, it had been eons since he last set foot inside such a sacred place.

“Then try some of this nice hot broth with little bits of chicken.” I pulled up a bench for him and set a bowl of soup on it, something steaming hot to whet his appetite, and strong enough to wake the dead. He took two, maybe three, spoonfuls, while I held his mouth open like a baby’s, because given his exhaustion, he couldn’t even hold a cup. Three spoonfuls was the most he could take, and that was enough, he said he didn’t want it anymore. I followed this up with vitamins, hormonal supplements, arnica, caffeinated aspirin—you name it, nothing worked. After that, I commended Darío to his Maker and rolled a joint for him as a last resort, hoping that the smoky grass would restore his appetite.

“No, clumsy, not like that,” he said, snatching it away. “Here, do it like this.”

He unrolled my inexpert reefer and redid it his own way, with surprising speed and dexterity, like a bank clerk fanning bills by the thousands. Where did he get that burst of vitality, when only moments before he could barely hold his soup? He took a few drags of the now very fat joint, then offered it to me.

“No, thank you, it will only cloud my conscience, which woke up clear today.”

As clear as a Bogotá sky after it rains. Ah, Darío, remember that? But he would never return to the city. He died soon afterwards, in that house in Medellín, in one of the upstairs rooms above the patio. What I do not know is which of those rooms he actually passed away in, pumped full of morphine. I was already gone by that point, I had already taken my leave of that house, of that city, of that world, to make for the galaxies, never to return.

The marijuana, as I said before, restored his appetite, but less and less effectively as time went on. One day, when things couldn’t get any worse, and the sulfaguanidine had failed (how could it not fail, with all the sodium the doctors throw in?), Darío hit me with the news that he was quitting, that he was never smoking pot again.

“Jesus Christ, Darío,” I said, pleading. “I’ve spent my whole life practically begging you to give up that stupid habit and you never listened. Now that I need you not to give it up, you come to me with this nonsense. There is nothing—you understand?—nothing else that will bring back your appetite, not a single thing!”

Then, with a frustrated grunt, I took the bowl of chicken soup, or whatever it was, and hurled it the hell away from me with one fell swoop. This made Darío laugh, and the laughter lit up his face, or at least what was left of it. It had never occurred to me that Death could laugh. Yet there she was, superimposed with his body, laughing away in his hammock.

My brother was the very essence of contradiction. This tendency is common among human beings, but it is especially prevalent among the Rendón clan that the Crazy Bitch comes from, and in him it expressed itself in all its purity. Imagine a little emerald—a green thing, so green and clear, without a single blemish, the kind that is produced in the land of coca.

“I won’t be pushed around by anyone!” my brother cried, smashing chairs and tables and entire houses in his wake, having gone mad and become possessed by the spirit of a tornado (which we don’t even have in Colombia).

“Nobody wants to push you around, Darío,” the family told him gently, trying to soothe him.

“Or did you think you were some kind of wagon or sled?” I added rashly.

“I’m not a fucking wagon or sled!” he raged. “I’m the fucking shit!”

And as he got himself all wound up, the tornado descended upon him again.

Without the pot and the aguardiente, he was as sweet and pliable as a little palm branch on Palm Sunday. Except that without the pot and the aguardiente, he wasn’t himself, but someone else entirely, like his very own guardian-angel avatar—ephemeral, volatile, and tenuous. He wandered through the Amazon jungle or the Colombian savanna, completely drunk and bloated with smoke, with a little flask of aguardiente—the half-size bottle—tucked into his back pocket and a few spares in his backpack, in case the contents of the one in his pocket should happen to evaporate. He bought the half-sizes with a kind of optimism, so as not to get hooked on the full-size variety. From one bottle to the next, his guardian angel worked his way through the entire stash, so that our own Dr. Jekyll ended up as a Mr. Hyde.

“A little drink?” he asked.

“Not for me. Aguardiente makes me vomit. It’s that little hint of anise. The stuff tastes like drunks, like assassins, it tastes like Colombia itself.”

So I passed. The old complicity that had united us when we were twenty had faded long ago. I don’t even know how that happened. Life is like that, it does away with everything.

Ah, the Rendóns. The things they make us suffer from generation unto generation. The Rendóns are all crazy. Crazy and stupid. Stupid and irascible. In spite of this, they run wild in a lawful country where none of those laws will keep them from reproducing. We prance around like genetic legislators—in our full debauchery, in our diapers. My guess is that of the one hundred thousand genes expressed in Homo sapiens, among the Rendóns at least one thousand five hundred of these amount to loose screws, all of them having to do with the brain. Take, for example, my cousin Gonzalito Rendón Rendón—he was fuming mad, that one. He outgrew the diminutive -ito part of his name a long time ago, but this is how I still remember him, from our childhood, as a creature who would be overcome by a cosmic madness whenever anyone called him “Mayiya.”

“Mayiya!” we yelled. “Mad Mayiya!” And the kid would start barreling down the corridor at Santa Anita, banging his head against the floors of the finca by a patch of astonished azaleas. Bam! Bam! Bam! against the cold, hard tiles.

Why all these paroxysms, why such berserk outbursts over something so little? What was it that bothered him so much about our affectionate nickname? Could it be the feminine –a ending? But “Sasha” is a man’s name in Russian, and it ends in an –a. Calling some little Russian boy “Sasha” isn’t going to make him go and beat his brains out like that.

How about another diminutive? We tested this idea, too.

“Mayiyita! Mad Mayiyita!”

This only increased his anger, by a factor of ten. Bam! went his head. Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! as that infuriated four-year-old resumed those Beethovenian drum rolls, now crescendoing, with his skull. It made the ground rumble.

Since his impotent childish rage couldn’t touch us (say, with a butcher knife to slit our throats), Gonzalito Rendón Rendón split his little cranium, hard, hard, crazy hard, against the hard, cold tiling at Santa Anita, like a scorpion that, seeing himself surrounded by fire, turns his tail against himself and the laws of nature and stabs himself with the poison. So we goaded him even more.

“Mayiyita the Scorpion!”

And now the rumbling encore of Beethovenian kettledrums reached its apotheosis. He looked like a cheated husband with all the enormous bruises that were bulging from his forehead.

“Hornhead Mayiya!”

That’s when greenish ooze began to froth at his mouth. Here now was your portrait of a Rendón in action. As for me, I have never, ever, ever (at least as far as I can tell) beaten my head against the floor. This may be because I bear the Rendón surname in second position, where its impact is diluted.

Another Rendón example: my maternal uncle Argemiro, who sired thirty-nine fertile heirs by a single virtuous missus. Twins, triplets, quadruplets … At every childbirth, he won the progeny lottery in terms of multiples. And why not—on this underpopulated planet of ours, where what we most need is even more humans!

“One, two, three … four … five,” Argemiro counted, as the quints or quintuplets popped out of his wife. Call them what you will, there is still some disagreement among the linguists over the proper clinical classification.

He was one of God’s creatures, one of His most enraged creatures. In the middle of the night, while everyone else was asleep, the monster in him would get out of bed and start kicking in the doors. Bam! Bam! Bam! Like the roll of thunder. And when his poor wife and thirty-odd descendants woke up, terrified, their hearts in their throats, Argemiro would yell at them.

“This is so you all know I’m here!”

Every single door in Argemiro’s house was broken, splintered. Having borne the brunt of his enormous hooves.

A sister to this raging creature is the Crazy Bitch herself, whom we have been discussing. An unpredictable, domineering, and cantankerous woman who liked to insult her children.

“You sonofabitch!” she said to us, at the peak of desperation in her fury. To call one’s own child a son of a bitch—now isn’t that just the very pinnacle of motherhood? Any decent-minded woman would know to beware the boomerang. If only we’d had some of that decent to go around at least—some soothing adjective like that to mind my siblings and me, but oh no, not us.

Let me rewind a little bit now and return to an oasis, to that fleeting week when the sulfaguanidine actually worked and I was going around licking my lips in triumph. This is how my days began: I helped Darío make his way down from his room to the garden, down the back stairs of the house, step by step (very steep), holding him so that he wouldn’t stumble or fall. From there we settled into the calm of the hammock. Well, him in the hammock, me in a chair with a small side table next to it, where he spread out the marijuana leaves. He liked to pick the seeds off and flick them into the grass.

“If the police ever come here looking for us, they’re going to find a real jungle,” I said, as he studiously picked at the seeds. A jungle, indeed, of that impudent little green plant with its jagged, lanceolate leaves. But why would the police come looking for us, he asked.

“Well, I mean, it’s just a saying,” I continued. “Because of this guilt complex I’ve gone around with ever since I came into this world. Because there are no innocents, Darío. Because all of us are guilty.”

And here we can observe a fundamental difference between us. Whereas I felt these vague pangs of conscience, he never did. Because he had no conscience to speak of! You simply cannot have pangs of something when that something doesn’t exist. You need the raw material. Darío’s was an unbridled un-conscience. He had cast any such existential hindrances by the wayside long ago, racing his beat-up Studebaker from one pothole to the next and leaving a cloud of dust in his wake, while broods of chickens and pregnant women scrambled into the gullies on either side of that crooked little road, a road that was as crooked as his own intentions.

“Did we just spill that old woman’s guts out, or what?”

“Think so. Or maybe not? The dust won’t let me see. Let’s just keep going.”

And we continued on as before—flying, flying, flying.

“You remember that, don’t you, Darío?”

Of course he remembered! That is why I can say here that if the dead person had been me, instead of him, none of this would have been lost, because half of all my memories, the best ones, were also his—those were the most beautiful ones. The fixation on pregnant women was mine, but it’s as if it were his as well, because if I spotted one and said, “Speed up, Darío, see if you can overtake her,” he would step on the gas to find out.

Un-conscienceness or non-conscienceness, this is a sine qua non for happiness. You simply cannot be happy while suffering for your neighbor. Let the Pope deal with the suffering. That is what he is there for, all well-fed and well-plumped and well-appointed, protected by beautiful works of art and gorgeous Swiss Guards, with Michelangelo on top of him—I mean, on the ceiling, above the baldachin. Who wouldn’t want to suffer, decked out like that? We should take our national mania for the presidency and channel it into an obsession with attaining the papacy instead.

“Keep smoking, Darío,” I said. “Go harder. Stuff yourself full of smoke and if you want to rave about something, do it knowing that I will follow you wherever you go, as far as I can, down to the very bottom of the abyss, where Hell begins.”

And this much was true. I had already followed him to the bottom of a ravine in that Studebaker one night when his hand got tired while driving around a winding bend. But not to Hell, not yet. He is there now, and I am here, at the blinking cursor on this line, desperately trying to save this miserable web of memories.

We went to get tested together, to see if our bloodstreams, which teemed with so much deviant vitality, could also be carrying the underhanded little germ for AIDS. It was on the day before one of my flights back to Mexico, one of the many trips I have made between the land of coca and the land of lies, where my life has played itself out for such a long time, back and forth, to and fro, like a ping-pong ball, coming and going, my own fate competing against itself. So we got that done and then I left and forgot all about it. But I remember that he went with me to the airport, like many times before.

“Take care of yourself, okay?” he said, or I said, when we were saying goodbye. Him saying it to me or me to him, what difference did it make, when we weren’t going to listen to each other anyway? While one of our furious “beauties” had tried to stab me here, in Mexico, another one would try to stab him there.

The story with my lover went like this. Naked, with a full erection, my so-called little “angel” got out of bed one day and from the backpack he supposedly used for his gym gear, he took out an ugly, sharp, and wrathful butcher’s knife. I bolted for my clothes and hobbled out of the room with them, trying to get dressed (all in a hurry, I wouldn’t want to shock the reader with my appearance), and I sprinted down the stairs. And he went sprinting down behind me, terribly aroused, and brandishing that vulgar knife. We passed the hotel reception, and I went out into the street, still only half-dressed. He paused at the entrance, stopped short by the light of day. I should have taken a photo of him right then and there, in that pose, just like that, with both his weapons at the ready, naked and unsheathed, and sent it to César Gaviria himself at the OAS!

The story with Darío’s “beauty” was a lot more serious, because the knife he intended for my brother had barely missed his heart. The sternum or one of his ribs had gotten in the way. How did I find out? Here’s how. On one of my visits to Bogotá, after the episode I just described, the two of us were walking along the famous Carrera Séptima down towards Terraza Pasteur, a shopping center that served as a meeting place for soldiers and lowlifes alike and that had become an obligatory stop on our daily Via Crucis. That is where we ran into his beauty.

“You nearly killed me, you sonofabitch,” Darío said.

The boy bowed his head and then offered my brother this touching explanation. Apparently the marijuana Darío had given him had messed with his head, because he hadn’t smoked while in the army for an entire year. It’s what they would deem—what I call now—a simple rebound after having withdrawal syndrome.

“Ah,” Darío said simply, and my jaw dropped.

Continuing on our way, Darío told me that the boy used to come over to his apartment sometimes and rise up to heaven with him on a cloud of marijuana smoke, and that everything had been fine until that one occasion, after a year of not seeing each other, after a year of the poor darling not taking a single puff of Mary Jane, when he tried it again and lost his shit and took a knife from his own victim’s kitchen, the intention of our young assassin being to finish my brother off with it just as they happened to be right then, both of them bare naked in body and soul. After the unsuccessful stabbing, Darío, who was going to the gym at the time and was in excellent shape, managed to overpower him and grab the knife from him and throw him out, stark naked, into the stairwell. Afterwards he flung his clothes out the window into the street below. The little angel dressed himself right there in the middle of that street, in the heart of La Perseverancia, and his buzz cut was almost as close as a soldier’s crew cut, a style that I love, or that I used to love, that we both used to love, in illo tempore.

“See that? Right by my heart.”

Darío unbuttoned his shirt and showed me the scar from the knife wound.

“Don’t you worry about that,” I said. “Those things are cosmetic, they don’t mean anything. Forget about it. That’s how life is, it leaves us with nothing but scars.”

And, I would like to add, that’s what a ribcage is for.

On the day after the attack, he got the results of the bloodwork. He had AIDS.

Around five o’clock in the morning, the telephone rang, and I answered from this distant foreign land of mine. It was Darío, calling to explain that they had already given him the results.

“The results of what?” I asked.

“Our AIDS tests, you idiot.”

“Ah, right,” I said, remembering the laboratory in Bogotá that we had visited together, ten days before. “And what do they say?”

“Yours was negative, mine was positive.”

At that moment, I asked God to let it be a mistake, I begged for the lab technician to have switched the vials and reversed the results, making mine positive and Darío’s negative. But no, there is no God, and the proof of that is that my brother is already dead, while I remain alive to remember him. If the AIDS patient had been me, and he the healthy one, I swear to the God above, who hears all this, that my brother would have kicked me in the ass and thrown me out into the street. This is how Darío was, irresponsible to the letter.

Four years since the blood work and here we are, in this garden, in this house, in the calm of this hammock, remembering, wondering who could have infected him. Because we have this very human desire to know, Darío, to know who it was who killed you. Having ruled out Communion as a possible site of contagion, there still remained all the outcasts in front of Terraza Pasteur, on the Carrera Séptima, in the city of Bogotá, in the country of Colombia, on the planet Mars. But which of them had it been? Who among ten, or a thousand, or even ten thousand?

“Who was it, Darío? Think hard.”

“Hmmmm,” he said, with a long m sound, as denoted here, which meant I don’t know.

But how could you even know that, being so irresponsible? As for me, I will not get AIDS, and it will never stick to me, because the virus can’t enter the body through eyesight alone. If it could, humanity would have been done away with already.

Oh, Darío, the things you do to me, to go and die on me at such a critical moment in my life. Couldn’t you have held off on this a little? No, you always wanted everything right now, immediately, ipso facto.

I have begun writing this in such a convoluted way, slashing paragraphs with machetes, splitting sentences. It’s all the fault of José María Vargas Vila, because of the accursed influence of that Colombian writer from the planet Mars, who wrote in psalmody—not so much, oddly enough, to burn incense before the Lord, but rather to incense his neighbor. Vargas Vila was a shameless queer, but even so he only ever wrote books with heterosexual sex scenes. A real trickster, a reverse opportunist. But let’s get back to the garden.

In the garden of my former house, there is a dense vine that extends across two of the walls. When I returned to Colombia as Darío lay dying, I brought him a remedy from Mexico, a miracle plant from Brazil that they sell there—it is very scarce and very expensive, but it gets rid of everything, and they call it “cat’s claw.” It cures cancer and AIDS and systemic lupus erythematosus, as well as government corruption, which has in fact seen a decline. They sell it finely chopped or in little capsules, and it’s worth more by weight than even saffron or cocaine.

“What is this?” Darío asked, when I tried to make him take the first capsule.

“Cat’s claw,” I said, and explained how much it cost and what its healing properties were.

“That right there is cat’s claw.” He pointed at the vine. “It’s useless stuff. Not even good for feeding the mice, and they’re practically dying of starvation in this house.”

“Ah, Darío, it’s funny how things go. So close to Heaven, yet pining for it all the same.”

Then he heard the graack-graack bird again. He asked if I could hear it, too.

“Nope. All I can hear are the cars beeping.”

“Listen carefully.”

But no matter how hard I listened for that invisible bird, I couldn’t hear it. For me the thing was as good as mute.

“There’s no way you can’t hear that. It’s a really shrill sound. Graack-graack, graack-graack … No?”

“I really can’t hear it.”

Then, without any warning, it began to rain. One of those famous Medellín downpours, all very Martian, when it rains stones. It’s like the raindrops are slingshot from Heaven, and the hail breaks the tiles and splits open the head of any devout pilgrim. This is why the houses here used to have eaves. Not anymore, because humanity makes progress, and when progress occurs human beings themselves tend to regress. I helped Darío up from the hammock and quickly began to pack up our little camp. When he took a few steps to seek shelter under the roof, he fell and was unable to get back up. I dropped whatever I held in my hand, some plates maybe, and hurried over to help him. He weighed nothing at all, he was disappearing before my eyes. Of the sibling who had walked beside me for so many years, who had helped me live, all that remained was his spirit, and a confused one at that. And of course his bones.

Four years had passed between the results of those blood tests and our current situation. But, according to my calculations, the infection must have taken place long before that, because he had been losing weight for some time already, and that is why I had made him get tested. Some doctorly friend of his had diagnosed him with hypoglycemia, a word that sounds very impressive, very smart and all, but as a disease there is no such thing. Hypoglycemia is a momentary state. What my brother had was the progression of AIDS, and somebody had given it to him, only God knows when.

“My guess is that it all started when you contracted syphilis.”

“What syphilis?”

“The one I cured you of.”

“I don’t remember.”

“But I do. I’ve got all the files saved up here in the old coconut—your complete medical records, a summary of the whole thing. With the syphilis came the AIDS, and it was a compound infection in your case, a promiscuous case, a case of rampant promiscuity. But look, I’m not reproaching you, I’m simply commenting on it. Purely out of scientific interest.”

That was pure fiction. I couldn’t care less about science. With or without it, we are all going to die anyway … What’s two or three or four more years in light of that? Good for him for dying in time to escape global warming.

If Darío, as I said earlier, was in excellent shape when the boy soldier wanted to kill him, this is only a manner of speaking, an approximation of the real story. He had already begun losing a lot of weight, and this is why he had started going to the gym. And the weight loss wasn’t because of the hypoglycemia, it was because of the AIDS. This was the first sign of the disease in him. After that, whoever stopped seeing him and then ran into him a few months later would notice an indefinable change in his face. An ashen or even coppery color. The dye of death, if you will. There was this fat and mean old woman we knew who ran into us one day in the elevator, when she was stepping in and we were coming out. She greeted him with the following remarks, which will stay with me, word for word, until the day I die:

“Darío, what has happened to you?!”

What had happened to him, you old hag, is that he was dying of AIDS.

And more or less the same words came up in my house.

“What’s wrong with Darío that he’s so skinny?” the Crazy Bitch asked me.

“It’s the marijuana,” I explained. “It won’t let him put on weight.”

“Well, why doesn’t he quit?”

“It would be easier for Papi to leave you. It’s another marriage for life, another kind of hell.”

All this was true. The marriage between my father and the Crazy Bitch was hell, albeit one disguised as heaven. And here I will now say and maintain and repeat what I have been saying and maintaining and repeating all along, that the worst hell is the one that we cannot detect because of the blinders we wear like beasts of burden. Papi wore a thick, black, and heavy blindfold over his eyes, one that I was never able to remove for him.

“Get rid of that old bag and find yourself some nice twenty-year-old,” I advised. “Or even two of them. I’ll marry you to both, I’ll give you my blessing. Here, I bless thee, father, may you be happy—and if those silly sluts don’t work out for you, just exchange them for another pair. Women are what we have most of in this world, and each one is worse than the last.”

But no, he was bound to the Crazy Bitch by the shackles of his own befuddled happiness. The shackles that we call love. As for her, even if she did it silently and with vocabulary different from ours, I know that from the bottom of her poisoned heart—and God knows this, too, because even though He doesn’t hear, He can see, and He saw it—He saw that from the bottom of her poisoned heart she cursed him, she hijueputiaba her own husband. Pardon my language, but the very old Spanish noun hideputa, which we find in Don Quixote—a contraction of hijo de puta, or “son of a bitch”—evolved into hijueputa, and its corresponding verb form, hijueputiar, is the greatest innovation that Colombia has ever achieved for hurling insults, for expressing hate. Such a poor country, but one so rich in hatred.

I am nobody’s son. I do not acknowledge the claims to paternity or maternity of any of these people. I am the son of my self, of my own spirit, but since the spirit is the lucubration of our most confounding philosophers, it’s better if you picture a strong wind instead, a fierce country gale that sweeps the land without rhyme or reason, without direction, disturbing the earth and dust and spooking the hell out of the chickens. Oh Vargas Vila, you ugly and rebellious and lustful old Indian, the good son of your mother, but a creature without a country, how forgotten you are by this forgetful place—and if not by Colombia, then who will ever remember you? When the downpour and the gale-force winds subsided, we reinstalled the hammock and the shade of the bedsheet and resumed our conversation.

But where were we? Ah, yes, syphilis, the biblical syphilis, that noble disease of our grandparents—of Guy de Maupassant and Pioquinto and Charles Baudelaire, and of countless other very illustrious individuals whom a certain Father Acosta discusses so appropriately in his well-researched monograph, The Ravages of the French Disease. Here Pioquinto does not mean Pope Pius V, but rather Pioquinto Rengifo, an ex-governor of Antioquia, and when I say noble, it’s not so much in reference to the personal qualities of those afflicted (since, by and large, those men were scoundrels, as most people in this world tend to be), but rather on account of the behavior of their causative agent, the spirochete itself. Even after half a century of us so-called doctors hitting it upside the head with penicillin, this gentle bacterium continues to respond to it very well, as well as to countless generations of other antibiotics. It’s not like these miserable bacteria that develop resistance. Today, Darío, syphilis can be cured with any antibiotic used to treat influenza. This is how legions of pious Christians, who have never had anything worse than the flu—which they contracted one day at Mass—have managed to go around with syphilis without even knowing it. You were lucky, because at least that little doctor friend of yours, the genius who “diagnosed” you with hypoglycemia, had the good sense to send you for a VDRL test for syphilis, and it came back positive. Otherwise, you would never have had a disease of such fine pedigree. Oh, brilliant ballerina on your dark stage, so slender and so sexy, with your clingy silvery dress and your glorious goddess body, how beautiful you look, you pirouetting spirochete, dancing for me the Dance of the Seven Veils (and an equal number of deadly sins), twisting and twirling like a corkscrew under my microscope! But everything must pass, everything must change, everything must come to an end. Nowadays syphilis is an innocuous disease whose semantic bark is worse than its bite. Like the Crazy Bitch’s hijueputation that I mentioned above. The ferocious dog has lost its fangs.

“And now, please, Darío, have some of this hot broth I brought you. You haven’t had anything to eat today.” A little sip, and that was all, he said he didn’t want any more, he said it tasted strange, he said everything smelled like cow, perhaps because of the medicine I was giving him.

“Where does it smell like cow?”

“Here, in the garden.”

“Unless the smell is coming all the way from upstairs, from the one who sits there and never comes down, there are no other cows in this house.”

These were his olfactory, gustatory hallucinations. The AIDS was affecting his brain. The graack-graack bird was an auditory hallucination. Good thing he wasn’t seeing it as well!

“What do you see here, Darío?”

“One finger.”

“And now?”

“Two.”

“Very good.”

At least his vision was still intact. The Toxoplasma hadn’t destroyed it yet.

Except for his emaciation and the occasional night fever with its so-called “unknown cause,” the first year of my brother’s illness (dated from the positive lab test) went by without any symptoms. It was all very peaceful. Darío had even given up the aguardiente of his own volition, and he had followed my written advice not to return to the jungle or the savanna. Nature, I wrote to him, is full of dangerous germs, against which, sooner or later, you will have no immune protection. Stay in Bogotá in the dry calm of your apartment. The less humid, the better. I congratulated him on having been able to quit the aguardiente, and gave him my blessing. What willpower my brother had! I was beginning to have faith in him! It all had an easy explanation, of course. His willpower was completely intact, if only because it had never been put to use before.

But this intact supply was soon completely depleted—exactly one year later, down to the day, with all the clockwork regularity of the four seasons in Europe. To celebrate this anniversary, this miracle, Darío drank himself an entire half-size bottle of aguardiente, and then it was goodbye Charlie. This was followed by another half-size, whereupon he graduated to one full-size, and then another, and that was the beginning of the end. I like to say that willpower is like the law, it is exercised with authority. This is why we call it willpower. But it has to be exercised from a young age, otherwise the downward slope catches up with you and you wind up at the bottom of some precipice.

So the aguardiente, finding his will so lacking in power, took full advantage of my brother. But weak in body he was not. He was like a dry oak. And this dry oak could climb, all in one go, the four blocks of steep public staircases to the Planetarium in Bogotá, then the hill of Calle 27, and the five floors up to his apartment. And as soon as he got there, without so much as gasping for air, he lit up and took a drag from a joint, what we call a vareto—spelled with either a v or a b, it’s not clear which, as it has yet to be approved by the Royal Spanish Academy.

“So much for this AIDS I’m supposed to have!” the jerk said after smoking the vareto. “What I really have is this enormous thirst.”

So he gulped down an aguardiente.

It was the same thirst that had afflicted Rubén Darío. Papi had named him after the great poet, without ever dreaming of how far the similarities between them would go. When our Darío was young, he traveled to Nicaragua, who knows for what purpose, with a group of Colombian agronomists—that was his profession—and there he had been a resounding success, an altogether ethylic hit, if you will. I mean, in that country? With all that thirst and that name? Nicaragua is all dumb beasts and debauchery, and all things there begin and end with Rubén Darío the Poet. In Nicaragua, Darío is God, like the Pope is for the Vatican. Nicaragua’s beasts of burden plow the cotton fields, or else they lug their carts full of cotton along narrow little roads, where they shed tiny flecks of white fluff everywhere, and this stuff floats to the skies above forever and ever. That is all I know of that beloved country, because that is all that my brother Darío ever told me. Someday I will go to Nicaragua and retrace his footsteps there so that I can die in peace.

When he gave in to those benders again, I backed off a little. Why forbid him from going off into the Amazon? If the jungle creepy-crawlies didn’t kill him first, while he was sober, then the wild beasts of Bogotá would do away with him just as well while he was drunk. Let him smoke, let him drink and fuck and live, because this is what he was here for. Or what, are you going to stop living just so that you can nurse a little bout of AIDS? Life itself is a kind of AIDS. If you don’t agree with me, just look around at the old people, weedy and wobbly and immunosuppressed, with age spots all over their bodies and hairs sticking out of their ears, hairs that get longer and longer the more their dicks continue to shrink. If that isn’t AIDS, then I don’t know what is.

“Live it up, Darío,” I said. “Smoke, drink, fuck—life is short. Life is meant to be wasted in the here and now, as Horace said, as Ovid said, as I say.”

This is how the second year went, me giving advice and him following his own impulses. Totally reckless. And what recklessness it was. All of which is to say that I got worried and spoke to him.

“Little brother,” I said. “Stop this. You’re starting to become more papist than the Pope.”

Stop. How do you tell a hurricane to stop? A hurricane stops when it stops.

And much like the second year came the third, and like the third, the fourth. Like an immense flash, in crescendo. Could we call it the final glow of his flame? Sure, but that would be you talking. I don’t deal in such stupid platitudes. If it’s a simile you’re going for, then get it right, because Darío wasn’t a flame, he was a bonfire.

During the third year, his two closest friends—both of them coreligionists in the Brotherhood of the Sacred Weed—found out he had AIDS because he told them. He admitted to them what only he and I had known before. From that moment on, the three of us became like a tripartite Simon of Cyrene, helping Darío to carry the cross of his secret. Not for long, of course, because as time passed his own appearance betrayed him more and more. The last ones to find out were those who lived in my house, in that final month, when Darío returned to die. A year before that, Papi had died, so he never knew. Of all the terrors and hallucinations that plagued my brother, his greatest fear was that Papi would find out. But he never did. Death got to him before the news could reach him. Which is amazing, considering that Papi started his day by reading El Colombiano and was therefore more up to speed on the news than most. That is often how things go.

“Oh, emerald oil drops and ruby cat’s eyes and sapphires and diamonds—tell me, has our grim Lady been here? Her Everlastingness, from whose silent waters these idiot presidents of the Americas would do well enough to drink? Garrulous parrots, all of them, who talk and talk and talk. No sign of her? Well, then, let’s move on.”

So I continued my hunt for Death in every corner of the house, until I found her in the back, at the bottom of the stairs.

“You old slut, you hook up with everyone—when are you going to take the Pope?”

“Oh, I’ve already bagged at least two hundred and thirty of those. I can’t keep track.”

“But I mean this one, the current one, silly—Wojtyla, alias John Paul II, with his white skullcap and that little anus of his that’s as black as his own soul.”

“I’m working on it,” she said, with an ecumenical smile.

“Well, hurry up already, I can’t stand him anymore. He comes and goes, he goes up, he goes down, he goes in and goes out, he thinks he’s fucking Columbus.”

I gave my unfairy godmother a little pat on the ass and continued following the thin ribbon of smoke that was guiding me forward, until it led me to the garden, to the hammock where Darío lay. He was splayed out with a joint, sending the quavering blue plumes of cannabis smoke up into the warm air. The wisps split and lengthened into insidious little threads that wriggled into the nostrils of Our Lady Death and clouded her excellent judgment.

“I mean, look at her,” I said. “You’ve got her so stoned she can’t do her job. She has no idea what she’s doing. She’s been smiting left and right with that sickle, poor thing. Struck down some old blind guy for no reason. You’ve got her going around beheading Christians and atheists and Muslims, even their Grand Vizier.”

“You’re loco. Who the fuck are you talking about?”

“Nobody, forget it.”

I liked that my brother called me names, projecting his own finer qualities onto me. But in Bogotá, loco was also a term that the basuqueritos used for one another, so it made me wonder if maybe Darío was smoking the stuff again. That hellish thought began to nag me.

“You’re not doing basuco again, are you?”

“What? No way!” he assured me, with the drawl of an innocent pothead.

But a few days later, when the sulfaguanidine was failing again and the diarrhea returning and my life transformed into a living hell, he confessed that yes, in fact, he had been smoking it for the past year.

“You’re screwed,” I said. “No, you’re really fucked. The coke works as an immunosuppressant. All you’ve been doing is adding fuel to the fire.”

That was the first I had heard of the basuco. And by then there was nothing to be done, Death was already lying in wait at his door, sniffing for any change in the air that would give her a chance to slip in.

Towards the end, his friends tell me, he grew selfish, something he had never been before. He even hoarded marijuana, which is worthless stuff. It reminds me of how angry he became one day, in those final years (when the AIDS still hadn’t got the better of him), over the mere mention of an acquaintance of his who had gone off with one of his young lovers.

“Young men,” I scolded, “are a public asset, not private property. They’re there for whoever wants them and can pay. Or are you getting possessive now in your old age?”

He said that both of them, his young man and his ex-friend, were assholes.

“Let the assholes go, Darío. Birds of a feather.”

Over the years his nature had soured. As time passed, the Rendón disposition became more and more pronounced, as if this were really the first, and therefore the more dominant, of his two surnames. And with the foul disposition came the withdrawal. He grew sullen, gloomy. The two kinds of AIDS—the kind from the virus and the kind from old age—had begun to converge in him. But let’s get back to the garden, to those halcyon days when the sulfaguanidine was still working, when I couldn’t fathom the possibility that Darío might really die.

We had been talking about this and that, about the infinite number of things that we had lived through together, and that to recall would require more than one eternity, when suddenly the Lazy Jerk returned from his errands and turned on his sound system to blast the music where it had left off before.

If we look at our family surnames and set aside the first (and the third and the fourth and the fifth and the sixth and the umpteenth and the last), the Lazy Jerk was pure Rendón Rendón Rendón Rendón. All the genes that are responsible for raving stupidity were switched on in him, completely unmitigated, so that no brave little non-Rendón allele could rise up and counteract a single one of them. No. All the non-Rendón alleles were forced into silent submission. The Lazy Jerk was a blunt stone, all-Rendón-all-the-time—a true marvel of modern genetics. And now, with no sympathy for the fact that both Darío and I were dying, he had turned on the rotten LoRo and was blasting samba music from it. The first room he had taken over was the living room, where the piano was, then the little studio with the organ that gave out onto the garden. It was in the studio that he installed the LoRo along with some mysterious contraption called the Internet.

“For fuck’s sake, tell that foul-faced fetoid to at least play something appropriate, like Mozart’s Requiem.”

Fuck Mozart, fuck the Requiem. Asking him only made him crank the volume way up on the thundering speakers. The windows and glasses in the dining room rattled, on the verge of shattering, as if this were La Scala with Caruso center stage.

How I fucking hate samba. Samba is the most disgusting thing to spew from the bowels of the Earth since the birth of Wojtyla, that priestly Pope, that little vermin, that deceitful and slippery and slithering white worm. Ugh! With those little white papal shoes and little white tights and that little white cassock with its little white pluvial cap—that whole white ensemble of his! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, you queer old fuck, for going around cross-dressing like that, like some one-man Pride parade? One of these days, Death is going to track you down when you’re in that getup, just you wait. The sambas of the Lazy Jerk poisoned the air around us and polluted my very soul.

“I’m getting out of here,” I said. “I’ll be back later.”

I left Darío alone in his hammock, as it floated ethereally on its own little cannabis cloud, and went out into the street.

It was like emerging from an internal hell into an external one, into Medellín, that pigsty of Extremadura transplanted to the planet Mars.

Let’s see now, what have we got here. Havoc and more havoc, and in the midst of all that havoc there were those builders, those greedy goats, those monstrosities that had taken over my city. They had left nothing behind, they had knocked down everything—the streets, the squares, the houses—and in their place they had constructed a Metro, an elevated train that traveled the full length of the valley, in a coming and going that was as empty, as aimless, as the fate of the builders themselves. Colombian people, I love you! Oh my fellow citizens, if thou didst not insist on reproducing like beasts, thou wouldst all live in the city center. Such a backward culture, all of you, with your hankering for the hinterland.

Under the elevated stations of the Metro, and among the ruins, the old churches remained standing like little islands of eternal silence. But they were closed. Closed, in case anyone tried to steal the ciborium and the monstrance, and with the monstrance the Blessed Sacrament fully exposed. Exposed to theft, that is. Even these had been taken from me, these oases of peace that were so cool and quiet, where as a boy I used to go and seek refuge from the noise and the heat and listen reverently, in devout recollection, to the silences of God. So I had neither a city nor a house, because these now belonged to others. Through the fault of time, and the proliferation of our species. Time, I can forgive, it heals all things, but not this breeding ground without rhyme or reason, which pushes you out of the bitch’s lair and won’t leave you, faithful pilgrim, with so much as a patch of consecrated ground where you might curl up and die.

They finished the Metro around the time that Darío lay dying, so when I returned, I found that after its ten-year gestation in the belly of the municipal budget, its speedy worm, recently inaugurated, was already flying, elevated, over the ruins of my memories. My brother’s great dream, his final one, had been to ride it. But how was I going to let him go out? How could I allow a corpse, our Fallen Lord, him of the Divine Countenance, to go out and subject himself to the commiseration of the grave?

“It’s not worth it, Darío,” I said, trying to dissuade him. “I promise, it’s just like any other Metro. Fast, ugly. And in the state you’re in, you’re not going to be able to climb its infinite number of steps.”

“You guys could carry me up.”

“I can go on your behalf, if you want. I can ride it for you.”

“No, I want to experience for myself what it’s like to travel by subway in Medellín.”

“It’s the same as in New York. No more, no less. Think the elevated tracks in Queens. Remember the parties we used to throw there with Salvador? In his brothel of boys?”

“Near the Elmhurst Avenue station.”

“Exactly. Near the Elmhurst Avenue stop. We’d come out of those parties at night into a snowstorm.”

“And the other passengers would switch seats to get away from us when they heard us speaking Colombian. Thinking we’d rob them.”

Of course he remembered. We remembered. Our memories worked just fine, their locomotives running at full steam ahead, spewing smoke and dragging us along behind them. And we remembered so-and-so and what’s-his-name, the one we called the Bird, and then there was the Cat, the Camel—the entire Colombian menagerie that had been living in Queens at the time.

“Wonder how the Bird is doing.”

“The Bird died, Darío. There’s been moss on his tomb for ages.”

“What do you mean the Bird died? Who told you that?”

“Salvador. He’s dead now, too.”

“I can’t believe Salvador is dead.”

“You mean you didn’t know? What planet are you on? You, living here, and me in a different country, and I’m the one who has to keep you posted on who has died?”

Darío had been living so selfishly that he didn’t give a damn about the living and the dead. And now that he was about to die he had begun to realize that the living, no matter how alive we were, would sooner or later die as well.

“But don’t get all sad now. It’s a beautiful day, the sun is shining, and the birds are singing. There, can you hear him? The graack-graack bird. On that branch over there.”

Now it was my brother who couldn’t hear him.

“Then do you remember how after the last subway stop, where you reach the edge of Queens, there was that Amazonas River Aquarium? Where we sold the little fish?”

“Piranhas.”

“Right. Colombian piranhas, the baddest ones. Imported from the Amazon. Our country produces the bravest fucking piranhas in the world. Colombian piranhas see and kill each other just like their human compatriots. Nobody can beat us when it comes to piranhas, not even Brazil. So you can tell that piranha-faced fool to turn those sambas off.”

“It’s just that he’s learning Portuguese, now that he’s done with learning Greek.”

“Ah, so he’s turned out to be a regular polyglot Saint Paul! He’s learning it to say what, though?”

The real polyglot was our parrot, Fausto, now defunct, who had perched on this very vine in this garden in this house, many years and many centuries ago, and bawled like a universal newborn babe. He had learned to cry from Manuelito, who had learned to read from me. I had taught him, and the Crazy Bitch had taught me. For this she had used a primer full of pointless phrases: “The dwarf drinks,” “I love my mom.” As for Manuelito, my fifteenth sibling (the youngest, because the Lazy Jerk doesn’t count), he was very little when he learned to read, and I was a strapping young man when I taught him. His beauty as a young boy was undeniable, it’s clear from all the photos. Which is to say, that if I were to meet him in the street today, I would invite him in to sin with me. But would he even go for the likes of me? Those encounters with oneself across the breach of time, they always scare me. Anyway, there went Manuelito, with his angelical little voice, reading the assigned phrases that I wrote out for him on a blank and pristine sheet of paper, pronouncing each of them, syllable by syllable, with a level of diligence that breaks my heart:

“God-does-not-ex-ist, stu-pid. The-drag-on-poo-ps-fire.”

Indisputable truths of timeless value.

And herein (given the lack of progress) lies the big secret of all the mothers of Antioquia: they produce their first offspring, they wipe their asses, and then they train them to wipe the ass of the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth and the sixteenth bairn, which they, being wedded exclusively to the task of reproduction, proceed to give birth to. This is how the Crazy Bitch had proceeded, and how I, her firstborn—who was not a woman but rather a man, a man with a dick—ended up babysitting my twenty siblings, while this fervent woman, who was as determined as the little funicular that goes up to Monserrate, gave herself over in body and soul to propagating her sacred genetic mold throughout the galaxies, lest it be lost forever. All one thousand five hundred genes pertaining to the docile sanity of the Rendón name. That’s one thousand five hundred, according to my calculations, because how could there be any fewer than that?

So I washed and ironed and swept and mopped and tidied, as if I had a cunt and not a dick, and whatever I washed or ironed or swept or mopped or tidied, the Crazy Bitch would get dirty and wrinkled and dusty and messy again. Take the closet, for instance, or the wardrobe, where I had been storing the sheets and pants and shirts and pillowcases that I had just washed and pressed. The Crazy Bitch would turn up in a hurry to look for a pair of underwear (for herself) and start taking out the pillowcases and the shirts and the pants and the sheets, which she would throw into the air and leave wherever they fell.

“Damn it, can’t you see I just ironed and folded those?”

“Grrrrrrrrrr!” the tigress growled.

“That does it, you decrepit sonofabitch,” I said, using the lexicon I had learned from her sweet and delicate mouth.

And so it was, because when I say that’s it, I mean it. Though later I regretted having stooped so low, to her level. After all, Raquelita, my grandmother, the mother of the Fury—she was a saint, and I loved her from Medellín to Envigado, and from Envigado to the farthest reaches of the outermost galaxies. In Envigado was her finca, Santa Anita, hence this little stopover in my measurements.

How can an angel give birth to a demon? All right, Sherlock Holmes, why don’t you tell me. Elementary, my dear Watson! It’s all got to do with genetics. It’s because of those Rendón genes! Genes that are sometimes expressed and sometimes remain silenced. Take, for example, my maternal grandfather, Leonidas Rendón, the primary carrier of this whole travesty. He was a good man. Sure, he was raging mad, but on a human scale, and with a little bit of effort one could even come to love him. He, in other words, had parts of the one thousand five hundred Rendón genes switched off. But the Crazy Bitch had most of them switched on, and the Lazy Jerk had all of them, with no exception. Heaven, showing no mercy, had rained both of these plagues upon our house.

I was fourteen years old when the wardrobe episode I just mentioned took place. Fourteen, I’ll never forget it, for what slave could ever forget the day of his own emancipation? Papi, on the other hand, had not been able to gain his freedom even after sixty years. Now he is in Heaven, and I will never see him again, since we free men tend to drop like plumb lines straight into Hell. What about the Crazy Bitch, where will she go when she dies? To Heaven? If so, then Heaven for Papi will be turned into its own inferno. Or will she go to Hell, instead? If that’s the case, Mr. Satan, sir, please show me the courtesy of having me discharged, because I’ll be making my way off to Heaven—after all this, no way would I be able to withstand a Hell II.

Papi was an accomplice in this reproductive madness, of course, since ours is a bisexual species. Without him, the Crazy Bitch would have turned herself into a parthenogenetic machine.

Once old age had rendered her reproductive apparatus inoperative, the Crazy Bitch succumbed to all kinds of bodily complaints, and to the will of doctors, in an effort to call attention to herself and to have other people wait on her hand and foot. And then came the surgeries. On her ankle, on one knee, then on the other knee, on her appendix, her tonsils, her uterus, her cervix, her prostate, her whatever—whether or not she even had the organ in question. She said her tonsils weren’t good for anything and that the things you don’t need will only get in the way. So best to take them out. And so they did. Her appendix, same thing. Ditto, ditto.

“Oh, Doc,” she said, “while you’re at it, could you also maybe take out a piece of my large intestine—or, wait, would the small one be better? To lower my risk of cancer.”

I tallied twenty-five operations before losing count. Her surgeries came to outnumber even her own progeny. She caused her dentist’s teeth to fall out, her psychiatrist to lose his mind, and her cardiologist to develop palpitations. I hate doctors, but not enough to ever dream of sending them such a piece of work.

Ah Doctor! she liked to say, How about another EKG to see if I have a this-or-the-other?

“And what does this little peak here mean?”

“That’s the Q wave.”

“Ahhh,” she said. “It doesn’t look so good.”

She was taking Artensol to lower her blood pressure, but because the Artensol also lowered her potassium levels, she then had to up her potassium intake with orange juice and bananas.

“Since you’re going down, why not go into the kitchen and make me a little orange juice with sliced banana?”

She said this to whoever happened to be around. And when you came up with her juice:

“Take it back and put less sugar in it, remember my diabetes.”

And down you went, then up again with another glass, this time with less sugar for her diabetes.

“It’s too bland now. Damn it, why can’t you people make some poor woman a decent glass of juice? What the hell are you all going to do when I die.”

An empty threat that was really more like an unkept promise. That damn woman was never going to die! One day she started seeing faces.

“I’m going to throw myself over the balcony,” she declared. “That’ll show you.”

“Let her do it,” I said to Papi, who suffered and fretted over this without knowing what to do with himself. “And when she does it, remember not to grab her. Anyway, she’ll just fall and land on both feet.”

But she kept threatening to jump. And she kept seeing faces.

“What are the faces like?” I, her beloved son, inquired.

“Terrifying, horrible.” You’d think she was looking in the mirror.

“So, don’t look at them.”

She explained that she saw them when she closed her eyes.

“Don’t close them, then.”

She said that the light was bad for her, the reflection hurt her eyes.

“Then keep them half-open, that way you won’t see as much light that can hurt you or so many faces that can frighten you. You’ll just see half-faces. And a half-face isn’t a face, it’s a Picasso painting, and Picasso is already so dead that he can’t do you any harm at all.”

“Turn off that damn light, I’m burning up over here.”

“Just reach over and turn it off yourself. Or did you get them to chop your hand off as well?”

Then she would explode with a burst of hatred, and in fulfillment of the only thing she knew how to do, which was to order us around, she ordered me to go rot in fucking hell. She only ever opened her mouth to boss people around, but then again, that trap of hers was always open. Ah, her poor vocal cords, how worn out they must have been! For that alone, just for the exhaustion of that single set of vocal cords, she was going to go to Heaven. And also for the swiftness with which she was going to disinherit me.

“Colombian law forbids you from doing that,” I said. “Parents here have to forcibly bequeath everything to their children, whether the children want it or not. That goes for genes as well as for all the other bits and pieces, like the piano, the organ, and the television set that I’m going to break into a million pieces as soon as you drop dead. And I’m going to throw all of this in with the avalanche of dirt they’re going to heap over your coffin, so that we can plug up your tomb to the very brim.”

This snake-mother of ours slithered through the hoops of her own hate and spewed fire from her eyes (which, anyway, couldn’t reach me). In her impotent rage, in the way she was torn between her threats and imprecations, the Crazy Bitch reminded me of her deranged nephew Gonzalito, alias Mayiya.

So what would happen if we directed that magic word at her?

“Mayiyita?” I ventured.

Her chest heaved to the rhythm of her palpitations, like a stormy ocean with its churning waves. And her heart was like a failing motor, about to stop, to cry out. As for me, I was convulsing, too, but with laughter. Over the power of words—of that single word, Mayiya! Who would’ve guessed it? Linguists, take note.

Oh, the suffering that the Crazy Bitch put Papi through in those horrible final years of his life. Before she killed him, that is! Because she really was the one who killed him, not the liver cancer that the doctors diagnosed. Sure, the cancer may have killed his body, but she killed his spirit. Wise words indeed of that drunk who wandered down the old Camellón de San Juan one night, screaming, his little half-empty bottle of aguardiente held aloft:

“Down with my fucking wife and kiiiids! Long live faggots everywhere!!”

Of the six billion members of our perverse species Homo sapiens that now inhabit the face of the Earth, not one of them was more indebted to me than the Crazy Bitch herself. But she thought it was the other way around. She thought that I was the one indebted to her, that I was the indentured servant. Such a strange sui generis way of thinking. A huge mistake, lady, a truly horrendous error, which will be corrected soon enough when we take the drastic but necessary medical steps that the situation calls for. Like a little orange juice with a pinch of banana and a dusting of love and devotion and powdered sugar, with a bit of soul on the side and an effective dash of cyanide. In the meantime, as we await the dawning of the day for the crowning of the righteous, I propose that we eliminate Mother’s Day altogether and declare a nationwide Children’s Day in its place. Another thing would be to keep stepping on the victims in order to extol the name of the killers.

“I’m dying!” she said, she urged. “Call an ambulance, I need to go to the hospital!”

And so to the hospital she went, to spend a brief spell on a diet of bland, sodium-free food that was billed to us as if it were caviar from the Baltic Sea.

“Your mother,” an idiot internist at Clínica Soma prognosticated, all so that we could continue adding to the mile-long ticker tape of her medical bill, “your mother is going to jump off the balcony. We have to keep her here under medical observation.”

“Doctor, she’ll throw herself off the balcony here, in this house that actually has a balcony. But if she is in the hospital, then she’ll leap from one of your tenth-story windows. Which do you prefer?”

He preferred the hospital, and so did I. Just let her leap from the tenth floor already!

“But Doctor, I’m warning you, if she doesn’t jump, then it is you who will have to foot the bill. We’re not about to squander the inheritance of her twenty-five children, and of her two-hundred-fifty grand-and great-grandchildren, on another week of hospital bills.”

This woman who seemed so unhinged, so touched in the old coconut, as if the screws in her brain had all come loose—this woman was in fact possessed by a particular evil demon that can only be found in Colombia, since only in Colombia have we been able to come up with a scientific name for it: the state of hijueputation. We’ve just never gotten beyond the naming part. It’s like when the mouse discovered that the real trick was to put a collar bell on the cat, as the saying goes. But who was going to get the actual bell on that cat? Among the thirty-million-somethingish Colombomartians out there, there is only one man who will ever pray from the depths of his heart for Colombia to lose the World Cup, for Colombia to fall off the face of the Earth—and that person alone is up to the task. That person is me. I’ll put the bell on the fucking cat. And before I tie the little collar, I’ll brush it with some cyanide, in case the little beast is inspired to lick it clean.

So often was the pitcher brought to the water that the pitcher finally broke, and the Crazy Bitch was delivered of a mutant babe, alias the Lazy Jerk, who is all grown up now, and the age of Jesus Christ, having sprouted the same Jesus beard while in the full bloom of his Rendónness, playing sambas that thunder into the garden, that spook the birds away, and keep me from hearing the shuffling approach of Death.

“Either that sonofabitch turns off those sambas or I kill him—no, either he kills me, or I kill myself.”

“Just ignore him,” Darío said, now more stoned than ever.

“Tell that to my ears.”

Given her insane devotion to procreation, the Crazy Bitch could never accept the fact that space is finite, and that just as you cannot go on indefinitely stuffing an attic with more and more junk, or a can with sardines, so too is it impossible to keep cramming your house with children. The only thing they ever did to our place in Laureles was to build an extension at the back of the house, borrowing land from the garden to build two rooms, with a study in the middle to separate them. I will describe, blow by blow, what they did: first, they added the back room where Darío died, giving it a narrow bathroom and a little raised step, much like for his bathroom in Bogotá; then, they built the other room, where I was dying, and gave it another narrow bathroom, this one properly level with the rest of the floor. Why did the clumsy master builder, who was Papi’s brother-in-law Alfonso (last name García, but as stupid as any Rendón), make the two bathrooms so small when there was plenty of room to spare? And why raise one of them, but not the other, off the floor? Such burning questions can only be properly addressed in Hell. This is how Alfonso had built them, and this is how they remained, and no one ever objected, because Papi (whose idea it had been to enlarge the house) was very busy in Bogotá, managing the economy of his Martian country—pulling its subtle strings, its sticky spider’s web.

In Darío’s room, there was a bed, a closet, and a desk. The closet was full of clothes belonging to Carlos, the fifth child, my fourth brother, who lived hidden away in the mountains with his beloved of the stronger sex. Meanwhile, the desk was cluttered with medicines, the expensive AIDS medications that did work, but only enough to save the AIDSologists from starvation. And then came my room, which contained a single bed, and that was it, end of story. From the library, I had brought in Raquelita’s armchair (the chair where our grandmother, in her final years, sat down to await her death) and another chair for my clothes. As for the study in the middle, there was nothing in there, it was as empty as my own soul.

But hold on. How poor did you have to be not to have any furniture? No, the real issue is that we were ascetics. Besides that, we hadn’t eaten in years, and the clothes we washed in the washing machine were ironed by the very wind that dried them. The dishes stayed dirty for days on end, because the Crazy Bitch liked to save on water and electricity by letting everything pile up in a huge automatic dishwasher, which she would only turn on once the thing was full. But why so many dirty dishes if none of you ate at all? Ah. Herein lies an apparent contradiction. Because the Crazy Bitch was a specialist in getting dishes dirty, without even eating off of them. Such was her knack for chaos.

“What are God’s worms going to feed on when we die?” I asked her, back when we were still on speaking terms, me as faint as a fakir or some AIDS-riddled entelechy.

We are what some might call forerunners, in Medellín and Colombia, of the state of eternally wrinkled clothes as well as of general hunger. Someday they will give us a diploma for this.

There were no sambas playing that day. The messianically bearded spawn was busy with other things. And to think that it was I who chose his name at birth, the most Castilian name of all, the most resounding, the most beautiful, as overpowering as Don Álvaro, or the Force of Fate, by my good old friend and co-host, the esteemed 3rd Duke of Rivas. Why hadn’t it occurred to me to name him Crazy Jesus, instead? In honor of the rabid avenger who took out his whip to banish all the merchants from the Temple, the evil-tempered lord who paid the same wages to those who arrived to work early as to those who showed up late, and especially in honor of the imbecile who, in turning the other cheek, abolished the Code of Hammurabi with a single smack and had it replaced with impunity over the face of the Earth! Crazy Jesus Rendón Rendón is the name he should have received at his christening. Now he was exactly the same age as the Nazarene madman, with that same black, thick, and stupid hippie beard, when He unleashed himself to commit and spew forth all His stupidities. He had agreed to a samba ceasefire and instead had connected his silent ass to the Internet, this thing whose function and delights Darío had begun to describe to me. When they found out that he was so sick in Medellín, his friends in Bogotá had sent him a compact disc through the Internet, through cyberspace. A compact disc, whatever that was. Either I was not up to speed on the latest technologies or else the AIDS was beginning to cloud his thinking.

“I didn’t know you could send a compact anything through the Internet,” I said. “If that’s the case, then tell that Lazy Jerk to use this marvelous contraption of his to send over two boys for us, and to have them be buck naked, to liven up our afternoon.”

No chance of that, because the downpour was over before it started. A sudden cloudburst that mocked me, that made me scurry from one end of the garden to the other, bundling up all the sheets and benches and tables and hammocks and Daríos and plates, but especially the marijuana, because once those leaves get wet they become useless and you have to hang them out to dry, resulting in days of abstinence that my brother wouldn’t have been able to withstand. But no sooner had I finished breaking camp than the rain immediately cleared up, and Darío heard the bird again.

“There! There he goes!” he said, while I was setting up the hammock again and installing my brother in it.

Through the leaves of the mango tree he could apparently see a blurry and furious beating of wings. It was the graack-graack bird, doing battle with the worm, from the delusions of cyberspAIDS. Now he’s really done for, I thought. The AIDS has affected him in the head and now he’s seeing things. Then suddenly I heard a Graack! Graack! behind me, as I set up some plates on a little table. It came from Darío himself, who had gotten up from the hammock and was answering the bird’s call in his very own Turkish-Cypriot argot.

Obsessed with this cacophonous feathered friend that was too elusive to let itself be seen, this bird that spoke to him in what I guessed was one of the Ural-Altaic languages, Darío experienced some of the last peaceful days we would ever have together. After that, the sulfaguanidine stopped working, the diarrhea came back with a vengeance, and the truce that Death had granted us now came to an end. In the hellasylum where the Crazy Bitch presided, all pandemonium was soon let loose.

I consider myself capable of weathering any storm and injecting cyanide and navigating AIDS, but not of coping with AIDS plus a Crazy Bitch. That combination couldn’t even be tolerated by the Great Putas. The Great Putas is a Colombian appellation for the person most capable, for the Real Shit, and that person isn’t me. The Great fucking Putas does not exist. If you do not believe me, then come over to my house and see for yourself. I went up and down and up and down again along those steep back stairs I have already mentioned, where Death would install herself, sometimes at the bottom, sometimes at the top, to shit herself with laughter at the sight of me heading down with soiled sheets to wash in the washing machine and to hang out to dry in the sun and to take back upstairs, only to have them be soiled again by our patient’s unstoppable diarrhea. As for the Pope, who is so good and so useful, and so fucking holy, where was he now to lend us a hand? And I cursed that impostor layabout of a brother, and his mother, too. No matter how much time passes, the peals of laughter coming from Death still resound in the hammer, the anvil, the stirrup, those three tiny bones of my middle ear.

“You in the mood for some of that fish now?” I asked Darío, who was going on three days and three nights of diarrhea, without being able to sleep or eat.

Yes, he said weakly with a tilt of the head, so without missing a beat, I barreled down the stairs and raced over to prepare the fish that I had bought him the night before and had set out to thaw in the kitchen sink that morning. But it wasn’t there, the fish had disappeared.

“Who moved my fish that was here?” I yelled from downstairs. I was almost ballistic.

“I put it away,” the Crazy Bitch called out from upstairs. “It’s in the freezer.”

And sure enough, there it was, completely petrified, like some mammoth from the Ice Age. Without my noticing, she had come down into the kitchen and put the fish in there.

“And who asked you to do that?” I shouted at her from below, completely enraged.

“I put it away so that it wouldn’t go bad,” our resident saint replied from above. “I don’t know what the lot of you will do when I am dead!”

The Crazy Bitch was more malignant than AIDS, her tentacles of chaos were innumerable and reached into the most hidden recesses of the house, like the giant octopus in Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. She was Murphy’s Law incarnate. Everything always went wrong in my house because her uncontrollable presence was always there. So it was that the same hand incapable of hitting the light switch could reach in just fine to put the fish away in the freezer. Her hand was really a hoof. As soon as I finish writing this account, and with the blessings of the theologians Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus as well as the philosopher Immanuel Kant, I am going to write a theological treatise, inspired by her, and call it A Critique of Pure Evil. The Crazy Bitch was the edge of the knife, the pitch blackness of the night, the eye of the hurricane, the incarnation of God the Risen Devil, and she had conspired with her spawn, the Lazy Jerk, to kill my brother. When she wasn’t at it herself, putting the proverbial fish away in the freezer, he was famished from all his weight lifting and busy eating the actual fucking fish himself. And why would our Crazy Jesus bother lifting weights? So he could hit me? As if he would dare! This humble servant of yours was ready with an iron rod that would straighten out all the twisted machinations of that brawny nincompoop whenever and if ever he dared to reveal them.

Any attempt at order on our part, whether in terms of food or cleaning, or at anything halfway civilized in that house that didn’t belong just to her but to all of us, was boycotted by the Crazy Bitch with her chaotic hands and anarchic spirit and her demon-possessed disposition. We tidied? She untidied. We cleaned? She dirtied. We cooked? She ate. And if we found her a maid, she fired her, because whaddaya want a maid for when you already have a husband and children? She did nothing but then wouldn’t let you do it, either. She neither knifed you nor handed you the axe.

And being a bad saint wasn’t enough. If she were to measure her performance in this life, with a maximum score of five, which is the grading system we use in Colombia, she’d award herself a congratulatory five. The grader grading herself, the judge judging herself! Have you ever heard of such indecency? I’d set her dial to five below zero and freeze her ass off.

In this vein, she liked to go to church to take Communion. But since she was always so busy keeping her house in order and educating so many children, she wanted to be done with the eucharistic bits as quickly as possible (without going to confession, of course, because—for what sin?), and this is the dispensation that she would demand of the priest during the introit or the earlier parts of the Mass, when there were barely thirty minutes left until the Eucharist. Asking them to present the Host to her quickly, because she didn’t have time to spare on the liturgy. And since the clergymen, of course, said no, our forgetful protagonist would yell at them from the church atrium, saying, “Flaming priests!” There were many faggots under her own roof, and proud ones to boot. Did our virtuous lady wish for the priests to start proliferating like her? Because if our population is already at capacity with flaming priests, imagine where we would be if they did procreate.

After giving birth to five sons in a row, the Crazy Bitch got it into her frontal cortex to go for a full home-edition set of the twelve Apostles. But then in sixth position came a girl, Gloria, who forced our father to lose the streak that in the olden days would’ve made him an hidalgo de bragueta, a distinction that the Spanish Crown bestowed upon men who fathered seven consecutive sons. If instead of five boys she had borne five girls, she no doubt would’ve started gunning for her own set of eleven-thousand virgins. Let her have as many kids as she wants, I thought, in my position as the firstborn, so long as the resulting multitude will do as I say. Alas, if only the world followed the law. But no. Under the matriarchy, it’s the queen mother, the lazy queen bee, who wears the britches. And in keeping with her role as the usher of all ruckus, the Crazy Bitch of disorder boycotted any and all attempts I made that would have prevented my siblings, her children, from trampling on that most sacred of rights since the world began—the right of primogeniture—which is enshrined in a book as old, as wise, and as incestuous as the Holy Bible. As for my I-don’t-even-know-how-many brothers and sisters, male and female, they all tried, with her consent, to go over me. Over me? Never! “Over my dead body,” as Julio Jaramillo once said in the song. And lo, there was unleashed upon my house many countless internal feuds, which would’ve required the gifts of a certain Titus Livius to chronicle completely, and which earned me three chipped teeth, which have remained chipped to this day. But she did not escape unscathed—she the permissive, the dissolute, the mad queen, the Crazy Anarchist Bitch, the compulsively calving cunt. Because I withheld my respect and my allegiance from her. Oh, does the bossy lady want some milk now? Well, then let her milk her own damn cow. Since it was her fault that her other brats didn’t obey me, I decided not to obey her in return. And since it was her fault that they didn’t respect me, why should I respect her? Life is a mob, what a complete and total mess. Only the stillness of the void is perfection. Woe unto him who sows more discord in this world by sowing his own seed, for it shall perish within him! And that’s not just me, some poor devil, talking. I heard it last night from the Prophet himself.

The chipped teeth I owe to a glass of orange juice, which I had been drinking and which Darío had kicked. His kick broke the glass, and the glass broke my poor teeth. Fucking hell. Wherever you are, brother, whether it’s in the circle with the irascible sinners or somewhere else—from here, I forgive you. Every day, three times a day, I remember you. When I eat. No chewing difficulties can diminish the love I have for you, not by one iota. After all, what are blenders for? Besides, in a theological treatise of this magnitude, I am not going to make a fuss over a few measly teeth. It’s not like we’re talking about two eyes here!

To retire from her official reproductive duties with a flourish, the Virgin Mary gave birth to the Original Crazy Jesus, and a monstrosity eventually came forth from this line: the Lazy Jerk, mentioned so often here, the genius of cyberspAIDS. You nitwit, why didn’t you just send him away to the circus the moment you first set eyes on him? Such a bungling dolt. That’s when you should have acted, right then and there, without a second thought. But alas. The Crazy Bitch, who was not a rational person, and whose judgment—what little she had—was entirely off-kilter, she had been doubly guilty of both a sin in deed and a sin by omission. Women have this tendency to hold on to whatever emerges from their vaginas. And also, down with Spain, land of misers, your stubborn masses kneeling, you who were capable of shouting one day, “Long live our chains!”

A year before she came for Darío, Death, the great extinguisher of all hatred and love, showed up for Papi, and a month later she took him with her. For a month she followed him around with her gallinacean tail and her trailing procession of priests and doctors and vultures, all of whom I managed to shoo away.

“What’s all this?” I said, rebuking her. “You can’t live alone, you always have to be surrounded by this retinue of dirty rats? You’re like my friend Manolo Dueñas, who takes his entourage wherever he goes, like the Holy Father. Learn from me, you loafing crossbones. I’m on my own and doing just fine.”

And all alone, with no amanuensis and no Internet—as soon as I finish this little theological treatise, I’m going to begin writing an important “Detailed Inventory of the Dead,” of my dead, all of them, which you preside over, of course. Oh, baddest and most blooming immortelle, my cunning and compassionate Lady Death, welcome to our house, to my house—your house—in the neighborhood of Laureles, in the city of Medellín, in the department of Antioquia, in the country of Colombia, which is Heaven but in the depths of Hell, and whose doors were flung open one day, or rather, one evening, by my brother Silvio, the night that he shot himself in the head. All of us have followed after him, one by one, like sheep plummeting into the abyss, though, if truth be told, in all this time, and for all that I have witnessed and lived through, I have never actually seen a single sheep fall in.

Silvio, my third brother, was twenty-five when he killed himself. Why did he do it? I mean, I don’t know, I’m not Zola, I wasn’t there at that moment, reading his mind. I’m a novelist of the first-person-singular, and besides, I was in another country at the time, as far as I could get from Colombia, that Heaven that I had left behind, so many centuries ago, the moment I abandoned Paradise. He killed himself because yes, because no, because he was alive, because there was no reason. We never spoke of it again, and if I am mentioning him to you now, Doctor, it’s only because it’s being dragged out by the élan of the spoken word. Me, lying here on your couch, speaking, and you listening, with the meter running. I am the one who speaks, and you are the one who bills me—you bill me to listen to me heal on my own. So, listen to what I am going to tell you now, and bill me. As Papi lay dying, the Crazy Bitch was sprawled out in another room, in front of the television, watching telenovelas, in a folding chair that she had brought in from the library. If you count the five years when they were still dating, they lived together for a total of sixty years, and in at least the final twenty of those years, my father functioned basically as her maid. Yet not once, during that interminable month when her husband was on his deathbed, did Mrs. Crazy Bitch ever take him so much as a glass of water.

Doctor, it’s all very easy to be crazy and let others go fuck themselves. And if you don’t think so, just look at me here right now, sharing, talking nonsense, taking advantage of your time, and you sitting there listening to it all. It’s because I believe in the emancipatory power of words. But I also believe in their destructive capacity, since just as there are emancipatory words, there are destructive ones as well, words that I would call irremediable, because even though they seem to be blowing in the wind, once they are uttered there is no remedy for what they can do. It’s like when someone goes in search of the secret center of your soul and winds up stabbing you in the heart. An example? Why, sure, Doctor, why don’t we start with hijueputa, this gift from the Crazy Bitch, this maternal word, so sweet and so tender that you forget that words, however powerful they may be, can sometimes get so bogged down in semantics, like mud in a ditch, that they lose the ability to express the many nuances of the landscape or to capture the comings and goings of the wind. And I won’t send you the Crazy Bitch as a patient, Doc, because, despite bewaring the boomerang, you might end up going crazy like Dr. Romero did. There is no alienist alive who can put up with her. They all grow exasperated, they lose their balance, they fall to the floor, they crawl onto the doctor’s couch for their own talk cure, and then the tables get turned. Consider the case of Dr. Pedro Justo Botero Restrepo Restrepo Botero, a true antioqueño of the old guard, solid as an ancient oak, a disciple of a disciple of Freud and of another disciple of the wife of Jung, a specialist in traumas from the Second World War and of the First Colombian Drug War (weather-beaten from one thousand and one scenes of combat with just as many patients)—I saw him, I saw him with my very own eyes, ripping out clumps of his own hair and removing the medical diploma from his office wall, all on account of her. Ha! Mental health around the Crazy Bitch? Please excuse me for enjoying a good laugh here, Doctor. Even iron, being so very ironic, still has its melting point, above which the continental shelf that contains it will begin to shift.

As time went on, there were no doctors left who would take her phone calls. She liked to call them at home, at all hours of the night, to ask them questions.

“Hi, Doctor,” she said. “So, you were saying that I should take the Moduretic with water before meals. But can I take it afterwards, and with a little bit of orange juice, instead?”

She had been obsessed with oranges ever since Papi bought La Cascada, a finca that produced nothing but this offensive fruit. This genius mother of ours had gotten it into her head that we should become self-sufficient and learn how to economize by eating oranges for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

“Oranges don’t have any cholesterol,” she intoned. And there you had it, the word of the Lord, thanks be to God.

Loads and loads of oranges were sent from La Cascada down to Medellín, all left to rot at the back of our house.

“Why not just sell them?”

“Oh, Doc, don’t be so naive. Whom could we sell them to? Nobody buys anything in this country. Because everybody steals. In order for some poor guy to agree to take some of your free oranges, you have to deliver them to his house, and while you’re busy unloading them for him, some other scoundrel from the same hovel will make off with your car. Let’s just leave it at that and leave those motherfucking oranges to rot in peace.”

These days I think of Hell as a monotone diet of that infamous fruit, a songless citrus—sans melody or harmony or any orchestral color—as bland as an oboe crying out in the wilderness like a bleating ewe. And I picture Heaven as a pile of cracklings frying in their own fatty juices, spitting with rage and soaked in cholesterol, which will lead to thromboses to clog up my arteries and paralyze my heart.

“But if she was that sick and your father so healthy,” the doctor said, “why did the healthy one die and the sick one survive?”

“It’s because these heinous hags in Antioquia all got it into their heads to bury their husbands. Papi’s buried him while he was still alive. From one bit of economizing to the next, she slowly mined his body until at last she could kill off his corpse. Do you know what our beloved fakir lived on at the end of his life? The smoke from his Pielrojas. She wanted to take those away from him, too. Because cigarettes cause lung cancer, or what have you, but such a lie. When Papi died, his lungs were perfectly clear, I saw the X-rays myself. As spotless as his very soul.”

To economize was the Crazy Bitch’s favorite verb, because this individual, who had shelled out her progeny so generously, was a complete miser in every other respect. Her avarice was in classic Rendón style. This is why she never managed to retain a servant who wasn’t her own husband.

“Turn off the cookstove, hon!” she shouted from upstairs. “And why not warm up some coffee for me while the grill is still hot.”

She knew how to wield all the subtleties of hypocritical despotism. For instance, she would never say Get me a coffee, but rather Why not warm it up for me, which sounded a lot less imperious. And then there was this business of hon. Such a saccharine fib. She hated all of the servants, as much as they hated her back. That insidious bossery of hers was what turned their stomachs, what burst my bile duct.

“Anybody there?” she hollered. “We have to take the trash out, the bell just rang.”

By bell she meant the tolling din of the garbage truck. The trash denoted the massive sacks of putrid oranges that had to be dragged out into the street. And anybody referred to whoever chanced into her orbit. Suffice it to say that if the passerby happened to be me, my ear translated this “anybody” into “nobody,” and then there was no one there.

She was definitely her father’s daughter, a man with his very own novel strategy for economizing on fuel. Whenever he drove down from the finca, he liked to shut off the engine of his 1946 Hudson as soon as he reached El Poblado, and then, relying on the residual momentum he had been building up since Envigado, plus the force of gravity, he tried to maneuver through heavy foot and car traffic all of the remaining thirty blocks into downtown Medellín. Was that a pedestrian crossing his path? Poor fool. Papi didn’t brake for anyone, not even for the Great Putas, whom I introduced before. One day his car hit two construction workers and a nun. The nun was profoundly shaken; as for the workers, the hell if I know. That residual momentum of my grandfather’s car was like the residual heat on the Crazy Bitch’s stove.

“But why is everyone in this family so stingy?”

“It’s because they’re all so honorable, Doctor. See, if we had been out stealing from the government, like Ernesto Samper Pizano, there would have been no need for all that economizing. Wait, no, sorry, that’s a lie, the real crook wasn’t Samper, it was another President, Alfonso López Michelsen, who was a specialist in Mexico, a real Jacobin liberal with an ass for a face who maintained that no right is divine but rather springs up in society like a fountain from the bloody earth, and that one needn’t believe in the existence of God.”

“If God doesn’t exist, then who made him?” the Crazy Bitch, our great refuter, demanded.

“A mishmash of chance and semen and slime,” I retorted.

“It’s impossible to say anything to you at all,” she said.

“No,” I agreed. I, her ex-son, had banned theology as a subject of conversation and wound up banning every other subject until we had attained the perfection of silence itself.

If I had told my grandmother that God does not exist, she would have started praying for me. But the Crazy Bitch, she preferred to argue. “Oh Lord,” she liked to complain. “What haven’t I done to enlighten this poor lost soul, to shed a few rays of light upon the darkness of his stubborn brains!” But if her favorite verb was to economize, then her favorite phrase had to be Humanity is evil. So, what did that make her—an innocent little bunny rabbit? Given her ability to multiply, one could argue for yes, though if one considered her four extremities and the particular shape of her ears, the answer would be a resounding no. As a result of this pet phrase, she didn’t trust anybody. In fact, she had no friends. Doctors avoided her, the servants hated her, and all the priests despised her. Outside the house, nobody liked her; as for the inside, who the hell knows.

She had kept the television on for fifteen days straight as Papi lay dying. Fifteen days of me staring at her in disbelief.

“What are you watching?” I finally said.

“This great telenovela with a real great villain in it.”

“The real villain is you,” I said, and got the last word on the matter, because I never spoke to her again. Though I did promptly shut off that horrible device.

For once, she spared me her usual choice epithet and didn’t order anyone else to turn the television back on. I think it finally hit home, in that hollow little head of hers, that her husband—her servant—was about to leave her. I’m no third-person narrator here and therefore do not know what my characters are thinking, but I will make an exception just this once and tell you what went through the mind of that really great villain: “And now, of the ones remaining, who will become my new maid?” This is what the Crazy Bitch pondered in her little black heart, and may God rebuke me if I am mistaken.

The subsequent fifteen days passed by in silence, in a somber procession of children, of daughters-in-law and sons-in-law, of grandchildren. Some came as others were going: Aníbal, Manuel, and Gloria came with their families. Darío came from Bogotá, Marta from Cali. Carlos came down from the mountains where he had hit the button on his great love. And I came in from this country I live in, with my impenetrable mind and my abstruse intentions. But wait, in this hurried roll call I forgot to mention the most important figures of them all, the two pillars without whom this entire edifice would collapse: the Crazy Bitch and her spawn, the Lazy Jerk, who day by day, as Papi lay dying, began laying claim to the house, one room, followed by another, and another, then the second floor, all the way up to the roof, complete with the piano and the television, the Lazy Jerk desecrating this house with his obtuse mind and his humongous feet, with those cloven goat’s hooves of his, and profaning the sacred will of the dead.

When I returned from this country to be with Papi in his final days, it had already become impossible for me to talk with him. A sort of infinite anguish had come over him, a sorrow the size of death itself, and it had reduced him to silence. He seemed alive but was already dead—the little flame that he always kept burning, which was hope, had gone out. But a hope in what? What had he been hoping for? This is what I do not know, because Papi never had any ambitions, neither for politics nor wealth nor anything like that. Was it the hope of returning to his finca, La Cascada, which he hadn’t been to in years, because he didn’t want to run the risk of getting kidnapped, only to have his Jeep demanded as ransom for his body? Perhaps. Or perhaps it was the simple, miserable hope of being able to spend one more day scanning El Colombiano for the obituaries of those who had died the day before. Perhaps, perhaps. There comes a moment in the lifespan of Homo sapiens when this king of all creation begins to wake early, as soon as dawn breaks, in order to pick up the newspaper that has been thrown under his door and open it eagerly to see who has just died. My friend, when you reach that moment, you’re the one who has died.

The last time I ever really spoke with Papi was a few months before his death, on the eve of one of my foolhardy departures that, thanks to one dead person or other, always seemed to require another damn return. Like countless times before, we were sitting out on his balcony (the one that the Crazy Bitch called the overhang) and talking. Papi had enclosed it with glass panes and used it as a second study, where he liked to go and read, the Crazy Bitch’s despotism permitting—and as he read, like a watchman from his watchtower, from out of the corner of his eye, he kept watch over all the activity in the street, and he watched over the plants in the front garden, which we otherwise kept secured by their roots with little electrified underground grilles (a system of our own devising), lest any idle passerby should try to steal them, living, as we do, in the land of Cacus, where they will ransack the entire floor of a house, complete with the floors and the roofs and the toilets, and steal the boat from Charon or the cross from Christ or the thief of Baghdad’s dirty socks. There, installed in our watchtower, we could preside over Colombia and all her miseries. Hours and hours were spent talking about our poor country, about this exhausted homeland that was disappearing before our eyes, between bouts of spilled blood and oil, and being looted by officials and bribed by drug traffickers and dynamited by the guerrillas, and, as if the above weren’t already enough, devastated by a plague of poets who rained down on us by the million, by the trillion, like locusts over the land of Egypt. But this last time that we talked, he changed the subject on me.

“Son, what happens after we die?”

“Nothing, Papi,” I said. “We are nothing but memories to be eaten by worms. When you die, you will live on in me, in my sad memories, because I love you, but then when I die, you will disappear forever.”

“What about God?”

“He doesn’t exist. If you don’t believe me, look around you at all this pain and horror of men and animals killing each other. How could anything so disgusting exist?”

Apart from his Pielrojas and an occasional egg broth that he prepared himself, Papi practically lived on the news in his final years. First, the items in El Colombiano, which he read at dawn, but also the various newscasts on television and the radio, which were on day and night.

“Shhhh, let me hear this,” he said. The two damn devices thundering at full volume were enough to make the windows rattle or to shatter your eardrums, all because this tragedy junkie of ours was going deaf but refused to wear a hearing aid.

And so he would hear things. That they had appointed I-forget-who as I-forget-what. That so-and-so had colluded with somebody-or-other, and what’s-his-name with who-knows-who. That the president had decreed something. That this other official had declared another thing. That the Secretary of Public Works had done some works. And that Fabito Puyo, the son of Gilmíller, who was the darling of the president and of that girl who was the apple of that other ex-president’s eye, he had seized a billion pesos from Empresas Varias and left the company in financial ruin—and Colombia without clean water or electricity—all because he had sold them off to Venezuela and pocketed the money, and at first light on this very morning, they had spotted Puyo in Germany spending the racket on whores and on bribes to Interpol. Ah, and that little what’s-her-name was aspiring to be mayor of Manizales, and what’s-her-face to the governorship of Valle del Cauca, and the polls said that both of them were going to get elected. Because the uninformed must know, after the seven plagues of Egypt, that women in Colombia were rearing to enter the political arena. No longer satisfied to be choking the world with children or the sea with shitty diapers, these dames were taking away the fucking jobs that we men, with such strenuous efforts, with machetes and blood, with sweat and tears, had wrested from the Spanish two hundred years ago. Because if we pissed standing up, they merely pissed sitting down and still had a right to their own political ambitions. They could flush the toilet, pull up their pants, and leave the bathroom, then loot whatever was left of the res publica with as much aplomb as any penis-carrying functionary! Incompetent, incognizant, encroaching, these women were climbing the bureaucratic ladder like cockroaches scurrying up a wall. Already on a top rung, a certain Emma, a government secretary of something or other, was all gloating and mutinous now in her aspirations to the presidency. A vagina in power? He could not believe it.

“Coño!” I swore, fittingly. “Colombia is finished.”

Nonsense, Colombia is not finished. Nowadays we see the country caked in the filth of pettifoggery, worm-eaten by the cancer of clientelism, consumed by the famines of conservatism and liberalism and Catholicism, and dying, prostrate, only to rise from her deathbed the next morning, kick back a shot of aguardiente, then maybe have another, and toast to debauchery, to the slaughterhouse, to the witches’ Sabbath, hear hear! Oh Colombia, my Columba, my Colombina, my Colombelle. Isn’t it true that you shan’t forget me when I die?

“Shhhh!” our radio-listener admonished. He was listening to a recount, to a balance sheet, of all the scandals that had scuttled through Congress in the previous year.

“Starting this year, everything will get decreed,” he informed me. “They drafted this law of decrees themselves, in Ali Baba’s cave.” His venerable presence remains vivid in my memory, him sitting in his chair in front of the radio out on that balcony, listening to those lists of Congressional larcenies.

“Stop listening so much to the news, to so much infamy,” I told him. “It will only poison your soul.”

If only. He tuned in as if the news were a soccer game, he listened with that same gusto. And he held on to his optimism, his faith in life, his good humor to the very end. He was a saint. Twenty-three children begotten by a single woman—all very happily, without giving it much thought—and when he died, he left us a house in Laureles plus a small plot of land with three little cows, and our hearts full of devastated memories.

And he also left us honesty, which is about as useful as breasts on a man. Honesty doesn’t produce milk. Because milk would mean a nice little sinecure in the public sector from which to suck another teat dry. Dear Papi: We have lived and died in error, we have been clean and clear and honest. Our reward for this will be Heaven. It will mean us reclining to hear the songs and the harps of the cherubim. I hope they play for you your favorite pasillo, “Tierra Labrantía,” the one about the arable fields, and for me the Great Satanic Cantata.

My son: Get yourself appointed to something and value that position. Don’t let anything get your signature without demanding a bribe in return, because this world belongs to the smart ones while Heaven is for fools. Do not give unto others unless they also give unto you, and if they don’t give, then make them wait, because they’re the ones in a hurry, they’re the ones who have a steel mill running and cannot wait, while you can afford to do so, because you’re getting paid. As for industries? Crops? Jobs for the unemployed? Let others create them, and cultivate them, and provide them, since they’re the ones doing the exploiting, not you—you are a saint. And keep in mind that once any functionary leaves his post, he no longer is: he was. This is why we say “the ex-minister,” “the ex-president,” with that pitiful little ex–. In that prefix ex– lies the fundamental distinction between being and not-being. This is why you should never let go of one post without first having a better one lined up. Humiliate your subordinates, groom your superiors with a fine brush—and when the latter finally topple, hit them on the head with the same brush, for loyalty is a fault of traitors. Why would you sacrifice your own interests for your boss?! An ex-anything no longer exists. So rise, rise, rise, because the more you rise in rank the further your country will fall. No one can be up if others aren’t down. When you do interviews, don’t let the bastards own you, you’re not some woman in love, and don’t forget that nowadays everything gets recorded; say yes but stick to no, and muddy the waters a bit, because you should never fish in clear rivers. Stroke the cock of the people, fawn over the mighty, wail with the victims, and make promises and promises and ever more promises to all of them, and once you get elected declare your love of country to the four winds, but if they offer to buy it from you, then sell it off, or else mortgage it so that future generations can pay for it. After all, the future belongs to the young. The houses, the streets, the schools, the hospitals, the universities, the highways you promised, leave all of these behind like the bridges: suspended in midair, between the abyss and the brink of nothingness. It would be absurd to squander on sumptuary commonplaces the monies intended for your own expenses: for your mansions, your planes, your palaces, your châteaux, your islands, your beaches, your yachts, your whores, your fucking delicatessens. And when you step down, if you do step down, remember that what you leave behind will be carried away by the next wind. Money in public coffers is volatile, like vapors of turpentine.

All of this, this very thing—this is the advice that I would offer any son of mine, if I had one. But, alas, I don’t practice intercourse with the daughters of Eve, and apparently our existence cannot begin without a causa agente, a prime mover. Honesty? Honesty is for the Pope, His Holiness! And a hard worker he is, too. Toiling away with that staff of his from dawn till dusk.

As an emulator of this indefatigable Vatican staffer, the Crazy Bitch installed herself in the upper reaches of her house to do her work. To work her poor vocal cords, that is.

“Go down and tell your father to start up the washing machine, he knows what to do,” she ordered, as I walked past.

“No, Bossy Nova,” I said, as I turned to leave. “Go down and tell him yourself.”

The subtleties of her demands had reached such a fine pitch that she now dispatched them via personal intermediary so that she wouldn’t have to shout. Where’s your father? Oh, you mean the former Senator and government minister, your saintly husband—that father?

Hitched to the cart of his own fate, our saintly ox plowed on. She bled him dry. She sucked out his spirit, and from one pang of hunger to the next, she left his body in the state we will see in just a bit. That is why when a sociologist from the University of Antioquia explained to me that the only happy families in Colombia were those of politicians, I could only answer with a simple Well …

One day the Crazy Bitch and I were sitting in silence in the library. She was watching television, and I was observing the self-destruction of her intellect, when suddenly, before she could give voice to any more demands, I spoke up.

“Go down and make me some orange juice,” I said.

Her eyes bulged wide open in metaphysical disbelief. So now it was the oppressor being oppressed! It gave her a fit of tachycardia. I recommend that the Cubans deploy a similar tactic when dealing with their own tyrant. An unbreakable will, and determined action.

I had dozed off while meditating on the nature of being, on semblance, counting off the crossbeams on the immense scaffolding of hypocrisy and lies upon which we have founded our human existence. But then I had this beautiful dream. I dreamed that I was in Colombia, where they had given me a nice gig in the Ministry of Foreign Relations, and I had made them a hole the size of a truck through which truckloads of coca could be smuggled into the United States. Coca, which is the apocopated form of cocaine, is a very fine white powder that travels up the nose to tickle the brain, and that, for all its subtleties, packs a bigger punch than coffee. Coffee is really a weed, a parasite, a bane, the tomb of hope itself—and if you don’t believe me, just grow some and see for yourself. Aided and abetted by bureaucracy, this indolent blight of the earth smeared its pestilence across the face of Colombia. Curse whatever brute it was who introduced it. And his mother before him. And Spain and Roman Catholicism, too, while you’re at it. There I was, with weeds extending to the crown of my head, and my nose watering from the bits of mischievous white dust escaping from the cracks in the truck, when lo, the telephone rang and woke me up. It was my sister-in-law Nora, calling from the land of dreams to let me know that Papi, my dear father, the only parent I had or could ever have (because a mother isn’t worth a damn)—Papi had taken ill and now the doctors were fearing the worst. She wanted to see if I would come back or not.

“Of course, I’ll be there right away. But while I’m busy getting dressed and taking a plane, please don’t let those filthy bastards go anywhere near him.”

So I hung up and got dressed and went out and took a taxi to the airport and at the airport took a plane to the country of white powder, ex-coffee, and while I was flying through God’s great expanse, I began cursing those vultures, those ministering doomsayers, who were better forgers and fraudsters than the Pope, and better thieves than Cacus himself. And from all this cursing, a vague and insidious restlessness took hold of my spirit, of this overcrowded upper story of mine that has no more room to spare for the dead. Was Papi really going to die before me? This would be in flagrant violation of Colombia’s new Constitution, which stipulates that the older a citizen is, the greater his chance of survival becomes. And indeed, up in the poorer neighborhoods of Medellín, in the communes—that invasive species that has spread along the slopes of the mountains, and which gazes down upon the city, ready to pounce—up there, we find ourselves at the vanguard of all humanity. The boys of the communes never turn into young men, because they kill each other off when they’re still barely out of diapers. To spot a grown man in those brutal lairs is about as unusual as seeing a cow flaunting her udder down the streets of New York City. On the other hand, there are plenty of old people. Those are the survivors. The old men of the Medellín communes are so hobbled by hatred and resentment that they don’t even have the strength to kill themselves. If one old man sees another, dripping with bitter sweat in the midday sun as he climbs the stairs up the hillside, he feels sorry for him. Poor old bastard, he says to himself. And the other guy is thinking the same about him. If you live long enough in those communes, your hatred turns into compassion. But wait, what was I saying? Where was I going with this? My eggs got all scrambled … Oh right, I was saying that I couldn’t accept the idea of Papi dying before me, because I didn’t have any means to carry on the memory of him. Where did he want me to keep it—in that upper story with the motley crockery and the rest of the old junk? To store his memory up there, in that low-hanging room, I’d first have to clear out at least four other dead people. Besides, a father who dies before his own children has gone without receiving the punishment due. He should die after his offspring, so that he may suffer and bury them, so that he may pay the price, at least the bare minimum, for committing that crime that has no name.

Hematologists, hepatologists, cardiologists, pulmonologists, gastroenterologists, radiologists, the whole team of them dribbling and passing the ball that was our father, back and forth amongst each other—that’s what I was met with when I arrived. The only player missing for them to score a goal was their buddy the gravedigger.

Now Nora was showing me the X-rays, the CT scans, the sonograms, the esophagoscopies, the colonoscopies—the whole scam, the entire disgraceful lot of it.

“What do you see there?” she asked, as I held one of those rubbish X-rays up to the light.

“Little spots,” I said. “Little smudges and more little spots that could be tumors or just some scar tissue. No way to tell. Why did they make him go through all this? He is eighty-two years old, he’s done plenty of living and smoking and drinking, so what more do they want? Or do they think they can cure him now? If he’s sick in the liver, do they think they’re going to get him a transplant? If he has varicose veins along his esophagus, are we going to have them take the whole thing out? We can’t do that. So why all the tests? If what Papi’s got isn’t serious, then he will get better on his own. If it is serious, then there’s nothing we can do.”

We went into the room where Papi lay dying. His glassy eyes watched me from the deep hollows of death. I approached the bedside, kissed him on the forehead, and listened to his heart. It carried on with its stubborn rhythm, marking time. Then I palpated his abdomen and felt a hard, enormous stone there. I left the room and in a low voice declared my diagnosis.

“Just pray that it’s cirrhosis and not a hepatoma.”

But my tottering optimism decided ipso facto that it was cirrhosis, that Papi was going to live for another ten years, and that I would die before he did. With telegraphic concision I drafted a notice for El Colombiano that read: THANK YOU, HOLY SPIRIT, FOR CIRRHOSIS NOT LIVER CANCER. Signed with our family name. And I went back into his room overcome now by a manic happiness.

“Fortunately, Papi, what you’ve got is nothing too serious. It’s just plain old cirrhosis, the kind that anyone can get. You know Dolores del Río, the actress? She had it! She never had so much as a drop of alcohol in her life yet lived to be as old as Methuselah! So no surprise that you should come down with it, too, after your lifelong allegiance to our beloved Rentas Departamentales de Antioquia” —this is our local aguardiente distillery. “But until science figures out how to regenerate the liver, it’d be better to hold off on that licorice-flavored beverage for the next twenty years or so. As for smoking, stick to cigarettes if you want, but all the better for you if it’s marijuana, to see if it restores your appetite. Though really I don’t know why I even have to suggest this, given the natural tendency towards fakirism in this house.”

My view was that we had to wrest him from the clutches of both emaciation and the Crazy Bitch herself—and to make him eat.

“Maybe a little river trout, like the kind we used to fry on the banks of the Cauca, on the way to La Cascada. Would you like something like that?”

Without so much as a word, he shook his head no.

That afternoon, standing on the balcony, I gazed into the void and watched as an idiotic sun set between the mountains, then watched as an idiotic moon rose from behind those same mountains. In the darkness—and suddenly, in unison—the infinite lights of the infinite neighborhoods of the city lit up on the heels of the moonlight, and lending their light to it, they lit up the contours of Death for me in the vast black vault below. Flapping her crumbly wings of ash, our great blind bird descended over Medellín and over my house. Over the neighborhood of Manrique, the neighborhood of Aranjues, the neighborhood of Boston, the neighborhood of Enciso, the neighborhood of Prado, the neighborhood of Laureles, the neighborhood of Buenos Aires, the neighborhood of La América, and the neighborhoods of San Javier and San Joaquín and Santa Cruz and San Benito and Santo Domingo Savio and El Salvador and El Popular and El Granizal and La Esperanza and La Francia, over old neighborhoods and new ones, over my familiar neighborhoods and the unfamiliar ones, over neighborhoods, neighborhoods, upon more neighborhoods that were proliferating, reproducing, in the blindness of a few genetic markers, the great plague of humanity, of human beings convinced that whoever reproduces himself will never die, because he will live on in his descendants. Idiots, all of you. If you die then you are dead, and your descendants are the worms, which eat whatever you leave behind for them. Leave them your debts. Spend all you have on whatever you want, on whores, on yachts, on compact discs, because the memory of you will be eaten up, day by day, by Time, which is the final sepulcher. Expect nothing of posterity, except maybe a few flowers on your coffin to accompany the spadefuls of dirt on the day of your burial, and then the dust-to-dust of oblivion. Leave the worms your shit. Damn it, all these drunks in my lane, dragging me in the opposite direction! All of them, all mistaken. Oh Death most fair, Death the great equalizer, Death my homegirl, my little hot momma—just do away with this entire litter of sonofabitches, don’t leave a single one of them behind, blot them out completely with the beating of your wings.

And how to tell Papi, now as he lay dying, that I loved him—when during the course of an entire lifetime, he had never given me that chance? In the end I spoke to him, but he could not hear me. A mist of sadness enclosed him, and my words could not reach him. The inexorable hourglass was down to its final grains of sand. Soon after that, we connected him to an IV, and then its bag with those droplets of glucose solution became our primary timepiece. Drip … drip … drip, each drop as dubious and as faltering as his own weary heart. This is when I realized that what hadn’t already been, could never, ever be.

It was Nora’s idea to bring in a well-known married couple of her acquaintance, doctors who specialized in helping families experience what they liked to term a good death.

“But with or without that qualifying good, Nora—doesn’t it seem redundant? That’s what doctors have always been there for, to hurl us over the precipice, and with the priest’s final blessing, into the abyss of all eternity.”

No, she protested, because these particular doctors were going to help us accept the unacceptable, that Death would demolish this house.

“Okay, well, if that’s the case, then let me know when they’re coming, so that I won’t be here. I don’t want to set eyes on them.”

Doctors, priests—I can’t stand any of them. The same goes for politicians and bureaucrats and cops, et cetera, et cetera.

Well, she brought them over without telling me, and they caught me off guard, as I sat with my copy of El Colombiano, scanning that rag for the usual published hat-tips addressed to the Holy Spirit. They examined the patient and looked over the profusion of test results, and then they agreed with me that it could be cirrhosis.

Anyone who agrees with me is immediately granted a little corner of my heart along with the title of Undisputed Possessor of the Truth. So it was with them. But two days later, they returned and took it all back. It was a hepatoma, they said. This, of course, would never do. They exited my heart just as they had entered it, through the wide door. After which, I began to imprecate against that pair of raptors.

“Hepatoma! Liver cancer! Have you ever heard anything so stupid? He has varicose veins along the esophagus, so it’s got to be cirrhosis.”

That was my conclusion. Period, end of story.

The Crazy Bitch put on a nice little dress and—oh blessed miracle—descended the stairs into the living room to join the pair of doctoral beasts. To play the role of the charming wife, to give our visitors the impression that even though her husband was dying, she was still the same as always, an oak unscathed, an unforgettable individual. And to talk talk talk talk talk.

“Look at that!” I said to Glorita, who was with me upstairs. “Did they ply the parrot with the Communion wine? How’d they manage to loosen her tongue like that?”

The Crazy Bitch had been let loose, seized by what nowadays is called a “lust for stardom,” the same demon that tickles the Pope’s posterior day in and day out. And that papal peacock will strut out onto his balcony to display his dumb plumed rump before urbi et orbi, while sprinkling his blessings upon the gregarious mob below. Dripping with these blessings, the herd will then go home and plant their reverent rumps in front of the television and watch the World Cup.

“You’re not missing out on anything if you die right now, Papi,” I said. “This disgrace is on a whole new level.”

I went downstairs, opened the front door, and slammed it behind me with enough god-banging force to make the house tremble and to douse the fucking fumes of Death as I hit the street. Just a bit of protagonist action for me, you bastards, it’s my own damn book!

The bus was packed with riffraff, which is what you can expect nowadays from this evil species of ours that lives to breed. Fucking hell, how many specimens do you have to sift through in the monstrous throng before finding yourself a beauty? A thousand? Ten thousand? Maybe a hundred thousand eyesores? For fuck’s sake, maybe look at yourself in the mirror before you decide to rut, to breed, to conceive, and to calve, you bastards. Or are you afraid that your genetic blueprint will be lost? Right then and there is when I spotted him, a brown lad with green eyes, sitting on a bench with his long legs spread wide. It suddenly sweetened my entire morning. Merciful Holy Spirit! Pure sex, the horror! God definitely exists, I thought. And into His hands did I commend my spirit, asking the Supreme Being, imploring Him, in the name of His Holy Mother, and from the most nether regions of my soul, to help me score that beauty. And the Lord God heard me the way a wooden post can hear the rainfall. The lad got off at Calle Carabobo, right in the center of town, and in the midst of that swarm of gangsters and rats, I lost sight of him. The moral of the story here? God does exist, but the guy ain’t good for shit, so no use wasting your time on Him.

At dusk I returned to the asylum, to that death hold, and was met in the living room with the following scene: a dumbfounded lot, all of them stupid, struck dumb—the queen bee and her great hive hanging on to every word from the husband-and-wife thanatophiles as they droned on and on, spinning the sticky thread of their discourse around them, entangling them in its viscous weft of honey. In my brief absence, they had all bought into the idea of Papi’s impending death and of the impending collapse of our house. I dashed furiously up the stairs and went into his bedroom. The last rays of the sun were filtering through the half-open window blinds that gave onto the overhang, as if daylight itself were coming into that insidious gloom to die.

“Papi,” I said. “I’m not going to let you go on suffering. If you want to die now, you can count on me, I’ll help you.”

Idiot, who even said you could speak?! If there was one thing Papi did not want, and had never wanted, it was to die. He preferred to go on shouldering the weight of our asylum, of his Crazy Bitch, than to go and tally the shades of darkness to be found in the hereafter. He replied with a weary Oh, letting me know that he hadn’t heard me. Then, suddenly, as if a stroke of lightning were flashing through the blindness of the night and illuminating the entire landscape of my destiny before me, I understood that I myself had to kill him, without him knowing, and that in order for me to carry this out, my own life had innocently given me the inspiration so many years before, all so that when the day came, I could play the role of silent, noble Death. So that was it! This is why I had been born, this was my reason for living. And to think that I had gone about walking and breathing without so much as suspecting it. On top of that, it was my brother Silvio who had understood this so early on, when one night, ailing from his own lucidity, at the age of twenty-five, and without having ever shouldered the burden of other deaths, he blew his brains out with a single bullet.

To the devil with our beloved dead. Because they won’t let us live! They call out to me relentlessly from the grave.

“Come to us, come,” they say, luring me with their index fingers, dragging me by an invisible little cord of eternities towards the blackness of their night.

“Cut it out!” I say. “Quit nagging me! Can’t you see that I’m busy here, confessing to my psychiatrist?”

Today I plan to bury them all, Doctor, with a few spadefuls of oblivion. Who among us will be like the vulture, who disembowels the dead and then takes off, flying away, erasing with his wings the very sky he left behind? That would be me, leaving this appointment, and I am going to erase the cassette tape on the lot of them. I won’t be leaving behind a single one of these bloody dead men alive.

Then silence took possession of my house and began to weigh on us like a coffin lid. On one of Papi’s final afternoons, it was me, the Crazy Bitch, Darío, and I don’t know who else—we were sitting with him in his study, keeping him company, or rather watching him die. The afternoon was bottlenecked in that silence, at a standstill, and none of us said anything. Not even the Crazy Bitch opened her trap to make her usual demands. I went back to my inner monologue, to that relentless spiel that I’ve been narrating since forever and that never ends, about this and that and the other thing, because yes, because no, because who am I anyway? Nothing, nobody. A little skiff set adrift over a bottomless sea. And lo, from that same pit of calm silence where time lay rotting in its own swampiness, I began to hear, above the purring engine of my own thoughts, the thoughts of all those around me. Here was the Crazy Bitch, saying, “Damn it, what a shame not to be able to boss anyone around!” And Darío telling himself that he, too, was about to die.

“God damn it!” I said. “Could all of you just stop thinking? I can’t concentrate. I’ve lost my train of thought.”

They stared at me in surprise, but they did stop thinking. Then time started up again, and from the outside I could hear what deluded people tend to call reality. The cars passing by on the street, the birds singing in the garden … One more moment of such reality and Death would arrive. That’s how it felt to me. Death, riding in on the afternoon, which had begun to flow forward again. Death, astride that unspeakable passage of time.

“What day is this?” I asked, so as to exorcise her.

“It’s Tuesday,” the Crazy Bitch said.

“You shut up, no one’s asking you.”

“And why should she have to be quiet?” Papi protested, from his immobile spot on the bed, defending her to the end.

“Because she is dead, that’s why. Because in my book she has already died. Now, the Mysteries that we are about to contemplate today are the Sorrowful ones. In the first one, Christ falls down for the first time.”

“No,” Darío said, correcting me. “The First Sorrowful Mystery is the agony of Jesus in the garden.”

“What a great memory you have, brother! Especially for a skeptic.”

“I’m no longer one of those.”

“But I still am. I don’t even believe in the dust of this house that I breathe in. Look at how clean those bookcases are.”

And we descended once again into the well of silence, to suffocate there. Mondays the Joyful, Tuesdays the Sorrowful, Wednesdays the Glorious … Memories are a real foolish burden, Doctor. A stupid load. And the past is a dead weight. If you don’t bury it right away you end up rotting alongside it while you’re still alive. I say this as the inventor of the Memory Eraser, which has been so useful, and which I am demonstrating for you right this very second. See that? Have a look, take note: it sweeps all the garbage out of the old coconut.

Trying not to think and not to hear and not to see, I was on the brink of losing it, when suddenly the ground began to shake, to tremble, as if wanting to get rid of the lot of us by flinging us into eternity.

During an earthquake, the filthy biped that calls itself a human being has a natural tendency to hightail it out into the open on his own two legs, lest the roof should cave in on top of him and crush him and wipe out his miserable memories in a single blow. Well, not one of us budged. In Papi’s condition, there was no way to get him down into the garden, so instead we all just stood still, waiting for the house to collapse and to bury us with him in a single dusty grave.

“This is … really … the last … straw!” I shouted, as the earth lurched beneath us. To let that queer old Sonofabitch from Upstairs come and shake our house like this. Knock it down already then, you old fart, let’s see how clever you really are! Having the same tantrums as the Original Crazy Jesus, are You. Like when He took out his whip and threw the merchants out of the Temple? Well, well, so You’re the Father of that raving lunatic. Big surprise there.

What nonsense, no one was going to knock the house down. The whole thing was an Argemiro-level outburst. The Eternal Father really is a tantrumy Argemiro Rendón, and if you’re dealing with anyone like that, here is what you do: you speak to them harshly, and if they ignore you, then you kick them in the ass. But no kicking was required in this instance. No sooner had I rebuked Him with the trusty sursum corda than the Divine Molder, the Most High, the Great Monster calmed the fuck down, and the wrath of Mr. Eatshit Rendón subsided. Then the storms abated, at least tellurically speaking. A few books had fallen off the shelves, but that was it. Then, to banish the silence, I spoke up.

“I bet you don’t remember what our grandmother used to do whenever there was an earthquake.”

“She prayed the Magnificat,” Darío said.

Ah, my brother, how well you remembered that. I picture the two of you next to me back when we were kids, in the front corridor at Santa Anita, when the finca bloomed with azaleas and geraniums, and the hay in its hanging metal hoops billowed like long, blissful hair along with the earth’s fury, which was nothing more than the insanity of heaven.

“Oh my little ones, stop rocking my chair,” our grandmother said. “You’re going to make me dizzy.”

“But we’re not rocking it, gran. It’s the ground that’s shaking!”

“Shaking? Oh my God!” she screamed, as if she had just been stung by a scorpion.

Then, as if propelled by a mattress spring, she leapt out of her rocking chair and in the midst of the tremors she began to recite the Magnificat: My soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior. For he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden. This made us burst out laughing, as we swayed along happily on that cosmic swing. A flock of parrots flew above the palm trees, and then a drove of mules came ambling up the road.

“Giddyup, giddyup!” the muleteer urged. “Move along, you mules!”

That’s right. Move along, you mules. And take away with you the fifteen hundred loads of rubbish that make up all these memories.

The shelter of the Animal Protection Society of Medellín, this capital of all slaughterhouses, is like a black hole in the universe, because the pain that is concentrated here is so great that any light that reaches it must die and won’t come out again. Countless abandoned dogs. The kind that get run over by cars, that my brother Aníbal rescues from the streets, wresting them from human cruelty and the laziness of God, to feed and tend to and love alongside his wife, Nora.

“Aníbal, Nora,” I explained, “even the combined love of two people is reduced to practically nothing when spread out among so many. Every dog in the shelter gets only a very small bit of it, and it’s just not enough. Without a master, a dog’s life has no meaning.”

“What about a man’s life?” Aníbal said in rebuttal.

“Ah, brother,” I said. “That’s something else altogether. We are placed here below to carry out God’s creative plan, or failing that, at least the five-year plan of the Communist Party.”

My theory is that out of mercy, and in order to be freed from their solitude and their pain, the five hundred dogs in the shelter—plus the two hundred cats (because you have to understand that, to make matters worse and worse, Aníbal and Nora also rescue cats)—must all be put to death. Now, if (as always) I’m right about this, then who is going to kill them? Aníbal? Nora? Me? Not on your life! I would gladly impale the Pope on his ass before touching one of God’s little creatures. Even a bad dog, see, because these also exist, just as good people also exist—there are exceptions. For me, dogs are the light of my life, and if anyone tries to be clever by asking my brother and Norita why they don’t also rescue abandoned children, I have the following exact and delicate words for them: “How many have you rescued, you good Christians, you charitable souls, you fucking sonofabitches? Especially when you’re the ones who conceive them and birth them and throw them out into the street!”

And consistent with me and my own dialectical rigor, I distribute poison-laced condoms among the aforementioned, and chocolate-bar equivalents among their abandoned offspring, lest these mini-sonofabitches grow up and kill us all, the little bastards. In every child there exists a potential grownup, an evil being. Men are born evil, and society makes them worse. Out of a love for nature, for the sake of ecological balance, and to save the vast oceans, we have to put an end to this scourge.

Oh, and I almost forgot, while Aníbal and Nora are busy cleaning up the shit of five hundred dogs and two hundred cats, day in and day out, and shouldering the enormous burden of suffering that no one else will help them carry, the transvestite Johanna Paula II is sleeping well and feeding well and fucking well, and so, all with a clear conscience, and all properly rested and properly fed and properly fucked, this unpunished monster will ascend to the celestial realm of the Almighty upon a cloud of little (winged) angels. Oh Mehmet Ali Ağca, you sonofabitch, why weren’t you a better shot?

But come, come, let’s cut the preambles, let’s cut to the chase, and return to the business at hand. I came to the shelter for the Euthanal, that elixir of a good death, to free Papi from his suffering. I knew exactly where they kept it, inside the medicine cabinet in the office by the entrance, because years ago I had been there to help a dying dog to die. I had sworn never again to return to that place of suffering that had so wrecked my soul. But never say “From this water I shall not drink,” living as we do in this swamp, because this is where you would find me now, bearing the unbearable. We had picked up the dog from a sewer that he’d fallen into with a broken spine, after being run over by a car, and where he had been dying for days on end without being able to get out—this, according to some guys from the area—under a raging downpour during a rainy season when the skies of Antioquia seemed to give way.

“But why didn’t you pull him out?”

Because the thought hadn’t occurred to them.

Run over like that, the dog must have wanted to cross the sewer, with its very steep edges, to get back home (did he even have a home?), and from there he hadn’t been able to get out. He had spent many days and nights dying amidst the shit, the human shit that is the shit to end all shit. Lifting him out as best we could, carrying him the best we could, trying not to add to his inconceivable pain, we took him to the shelter in Aníbal’s beat-up truck. And as soon as we injected his veins with the Euthanal, and without a moment’s hesitation, he died. Then I began to curse the Original Crazy Jesus along with His Holy Mother and the Whore of Babylon, His Holy Church, and to curse the hijueputation of God Himself.

Oh gran, if only you could hear me, if only you were still living—if only you knew what has become of my life, and what this country and this house have become. You wouldn’t recognize the lot of us.

In my bare room, where the swampy night was making no forward progress, I stared into the darkness without seeing. I gazed at my grandmother’s empty armchair, the chair where she used to sit and listen to the hours go by, once my grandfather had died and she had lost the incentive—what she called the aliciente—to go on living. And so she passed the time staring at the ceiling. Aliciente. That was her word, the word is very much my grandmother, and it’s dead now as well. The word died, and we didn’t even notice.

“I don’t have any aliciente, either, gran. Don’t know what I’m doing here.”

“You’ve never thought about getting married, my love?” she asked.

“To marry-marry? No, but … anyway, I’ve already got a bunch of women with four or five kids apiece, and they’re all breathing down my neck.”

“I don’t believe a word of it!”

“Will you also not believe me, gran, if I tell you that I love you more than I love anyone else, more than I love God?”

“Now no more blasphemies out of you, young man.”

“Then I’m outta here.”

And our little blasphemer said goodbye, giving his grandmother a peck on the forehead, then headed to Junín, in the city center, to take the pulse of this slaughterhouse.

“What news do you have for me?” she asked eagerly when I got back and came upstairs to greet her.

“Nothing, gran, it’s all the same, the same thing every day: the dead, the dead, the dead. A little while ago, on the bus, the one for Laureles, a guy got beaten up in four blows.”

“No!”

“Yes. And why not? He died. In this country, if you’re alive you’re a target for everything, all the more so if things are going well for you and you go around smiling. Anything that breathes is a nuisance.”

“And why did they kill him, my love?”

“Because he was alive and there are too many of us and we don’t fit anymore. You have to kill to make room for all the ones being born, because space is finite. Besides, who knows how many debts the guy had, how much money he owed. You’re the exception, gran, but there are no innocents in this world. You’re the very last one of them, and you’re not even going to be around for much longer.”

“I don’t believe a word you’re saying, you zumbambico,” she said, using this term which means something like you little menace. “You’re making up this stuff about that man.”

“Wish I were, gran, wish I were! What more could I wish for than a land flowing with milk and honey. But no, this is a real vale of tears we live in, we’re weighed down by suffering.”

When I was a boy, my grandmother used to make up stories about witches for me, but as a young man, the task fell to me to come up with tall tales for her. This wasn’t so difficult, considering the material I had to work with, right outside our door. Against that reality, I always came up short. Sometimes, to give her a break from all the tragedy, to lend her some hope to hold onto, I brought her news about the father of a friend of mine, saying that he had won the lottery.

“Can you believe it? He won one hundred fifty thousand, eight hundred gazillion pesos!”

“I’m happy for him and hope he’ll give a lot to charity.”

“Nah, he’s no idiot! Charity is what poor people do in their dirty little minds, where they hand out plenty of money because they have nothing to give. But rich people? Action speaks louder than words, though not nearly as often. Now I’ve got to run, I’m going to go and read some Heidegger. Later I’ll tell you what happened to me this morning on Junín.”

What else could be happening on Junín besides all the dying? Beauties and more beauties were what walked along that blessed street from those blessed times of my reckless youth. But no more. The beauties have all been snuffed out, their smoke wafting straight up to the heaven of our memories. And it couldn’t have been otherwise, seeing as we are governed by Murphy’s Law and by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which state that whatever is going well will be ruined and that whatever is going badly will only get worse. Oh lads and young men of Junín, you have gone now. Cronus, the beheader of beauties, blotted you out with a single stroke of his wing. And now the only ones who frequent this poor old street of mine are the zombies and the lowlifes, which is what our murderous species has amounted to, growing worse by the day, and uglier by the day, and more stupid and more sonofabitch-like by the day, walking along with its two feet encased in something as common as a stinking pair of tennis shoes. Why should China squander all those precious explosives on underground bomb tests when they could have a fine place to set them off right here, in broad daylight in the warmth of the sun? Oh gran, if only you knew, if only you were still living, but no. Good thing you’re no longer with us.

But let’s put this all behind us. Let’s let the living go on killing the living, and the dead burying their dead, because darkness is now queen of the night. Apart from the bed, and the dining-room chair for my clothes, the only other piece of furniture in my room is the empty armchair that belonged to our grandmother, whom I don’t want to mention here anymore. What I really want is to sleep, without having to listen to myself or think to myself or speak to myself or repeat to myself the same old bloody things while counting sheep (or young men in swimming pools or soldiers in their barracks, or whatever). How fresh and cool was the Medellín of my childhood! The playful breezes wafted over the delicate carbonero trees in my neighborhood, swaying their branches, rustling their leaves, riffing along the pavement in the streets, with a flurry of seventh chords in second inversion and dominant ninth chords, an entire rhapsody of shadows in the key of G. But never again. My neighborhood died, the carboneros were chopped down, the shadows disappeared, the breezes grew tired of stirring, the rhapsody ended, and this entire city went to shit, growing hotter and hotter and hotter, thanks to this and that and the other thing, thanks to all these streets and all these cars and all these people and all this rage. Rising ever higher, for one reason or another, we ended up descending, rung by rung, into the depths of hell. Oh Jorge Manrique, old friend, the past is always cooler, indeed.

With the Euthanal in tow, I went with my brother Carlos to pay a visit to Papi’s only remaining friend, Víctor Carvajal, to let him know that our father was about to die. The Crazy Bitch, with her grubby selfishness, hadn’t wanted anyone to find out, so that she could enjoy Papi’s death all by herself. But what she wants and what I want are two very different things. A few months earlier, Leonel Escobar, who had been Papi’s other remaining close friend, had taken his leave along the well-trod path of death, without managing to get so much as a sip of his farewell aguardiente. As we brooded on our sadness on the way to Víctor’s house, I remember that we were overcome by a momentary happiness, recalling the splendid burial that Leonel’s children had given him, a funeral during which they had managed, with the help of other relatives, and in the interim between the priest’s prayers and the singers’ songs, to polish off one hundred forty bottles of aguardiente, almost a full gross. Those assholes tucked away an entire fucking gross of bottles, in toasts to the health—or rather, the memory—of the deceased. And to think that towards the end, old Leonel hadn’t even been allowed to partake of that ineffable liquor!

“I can take a whiff, at least,” he said, the last time we ever spoke in his house, as we watched that final afternoon drift past us from his balcony. Leonel, who had already suffered three heart attacks, also had diabetes, and with the diabetes his circulation had become a total mess, a series of “clogged pipes.”

“Why don’t you unclog them with some aguardiente? It’s so good for thinning the blood.”

Oh how he’d love that, he said, but the doctor wouldn’t let him.

His spirit, at least, remained intact, with the same happiness as ever and that cheerful optimism of his in the key of C.

“Look, Leonel,” I said. “Pay no attention to the doctors, you already know there’s nothing more they can do for you. Your cause is more lost than the Lindbergh baby. Tomorrow I’ll come by with a bottle of aguardiente and a vial of insulin, and we’ll check your sugar and see if you can have a drink or not. What do you mean the aguardiente raises your blood sugar? Then I’ll give you a jab of insulin and that will bring it right down. Wait, you say the insulin lowers yours too much? Fine, then I’ll give you some more aguardiente and that will make it go back up. This way, like Christ who kept stumbling and staggering, you’ll eventually make your way to Calvary.”

But he never made it, he wasn’t able to. That night he had his fourth heart attack, and my Lady Death took him, leaving him engraved in my cranium’s deepest crevice forever, or at least for as long as my heart keeps pumping me with blood. One December, back in Santa Anita, when we were children, Leonel showed up with a paper balloon, a sky lantern, only this one was enormous and made up of one hundred twenty panels. Immense, immense, immense, it was the most utterly immense balloon my eyes had ever beheld in the skies above Antioquia. A colossal gift. We set it up by the front corridor of the finca, where thirty pairs of hands were required to keep it steady, and it took all twenty wicks it came with to inflate the thing with smoke. When the last wick finally managed to fill the insatiable belly and the balloon began to pull, we lit its fuse and released it into the air. As it left humanity behind amidst the palm trees and the vultures, the balloon flew up, up, and away, and it rose and rose and rose until it reached the heavens of our dear sweet Lord, from where Leonel himself is now looking down on me.

“Leonel,” I’ll say. “It’s hot as hell down here!”

Whereupon Leonel will send me some rain with his blessings. This rain is a naughty little rainfall—mischievous, with a telltale hint of anise, an indeterminate flavor like a cross between the aguardiente from Antioquia and the kind that comes from Caldas.

“Thank you, Leonel. Merci beaucoup.”

When we got to Víctor’s, we rang the doorbell and he let us in, and before he could get over the surprise of seeing me in Medellín, believing I was in Mexico, I gave him the news.

“Papi is practically dead already. The doctors prescribed him some liver cancer, you see, and say there’s nothing more that can be done. They say he’s only got a few hours left, a few days at most. I came by to tell you so that you know what’s going on.”

Like a punch that comes out of nowhere, as categorical as lightning that strikes without warning. This is how you break the news to someone if you were brought up by a Crazy Bitch in a house full of crazies. Nothing you can do about it. This is how we are, this is how we’ve always been and how we will always be. A crooked tree cannot be made straight. Of course, with this style of sharing news comes the risk of possibly killing your listener, but that’s fine, too, because there’s not enough room for all of us and we have to regulate our runaway population in whatever way we can.

Víctor leaned for support against the doorframe (the closest thing available), and I could see the pain and shock on his face. He had been friends with Papi since before I was born, and in the comings and goings of their long lives, their deep friendship had never been dimmed by so much as the shadow of a disagreement. They had shared ownership of a finca, La Solita, and a newspaper, El Poder—both of these had been failures, best explained by remembering that these two were gentlemen, after all, and success is really the prerogative of scoundrels. I don’t know why they chose that name for their paper, since it means power or right and refers to the biggest frippery of whoever has put ideas into man’s dull and opportunistic little head, and being as they were both men of means and that this notorious lure was the furthest thing from their dream, which was to ride over the pastures of La Solita among the calves and the cows, with the sun on their heads and the wind in their faces and a little flask of aguardiente in their saddlebags. Oh such innocents! Power in Colombia is not to be found in its pastures, it’s on the throne of Bolívar, the seat of disgrace in that lost cause of a country, where our presidents, our lazy grime, set their liberal or conservative asses down. El Poder was around for two years, and then it shuttered, quietly, without a single lament or miserable printed death notice appearing in any of the other Medellín papers, I’m talking about El Correo and El Colombiano, these uppity village rags that were its main competitors. In a loft above one of the bathrooms in the house, a space that we called the zarzo, Papi kept a copy of every issue, bound into various volumes, so that in case anyone ever sued him over what he had published, he would have the supporting evidence on hand for his defense.

“Why would anyone ever sue you for that, Papi?”

“Because that’s how things are in this litigious country of ours.”

One day, a particularly idle one, when my brothers and I were fed up with praying the rosary and didn’t know what else to do with ourselves, we climbed up to the zarzo and took down the giant volumes of El Poder, and then in a splendid bonfire we burned the entire lot outside. The flames almost reached the house. With buckets of water we managed to put out the fire, but given an inch and El Poder would’ve left us without a roof over our heads. Ours was an old house made of clay, which burns so well.

In terms of fincas, Papi had owned quite a few, which meant more bad business. My earliest memories involve him fantasizing about one finca or another —about a house of cards, of dreams, of wind. One was called La Esperanza, another La Cascada, yet another La Solita (which I’ve already told you about), and various and sundry that I have already forgotten. He liked to put in the plumbing and electricity, then a stable, maybe a sugar mill if there was a cane field, or a so-called beneficiadero if it grew coffee. He planted bananas, an orange grove, sometimes a lemon tree. He weeded, he fumigated, he fertilized, possessed by this insatiable mania for construction. And as soon as these places were seeded and weeded and fumigated and fertilized and properly set up, and he saw that they were about to yield a crop, he sold them at their original selling price, or even less. A bad business? What bad business was that going to be? These were the business of his life, since they fed that life and, like the candle of the Divine Countenance, burning day and night, without rest, they tended the flame of his hope, of his Esperanza. Here the capitalized word in italics refers to his finca, which was both a namesake of the second theological Virtue as well as its embodiment.

“Papi,” I said. “Have you ever wanted to die?”

He wouldn’t answer. My father didn’t have time to waste on such stupid questions. And off he went to enclose a pasture somewhere, or to fix an irrigation ditch, or to deworm some cows. I followed after him.

“Wow, Papi, what’s the stuff on that chicken feather that you’re rubbing on the cows?”

“It’s called Veterina.”

“Ah.”

This was a remedy he used on the cows for worms. And a golden salvo it was, against the existential anguish that could plague any good soul. Who had time for dying when there were all these smaller tasks to do!

Ah, Papi, that little finca on the way to Caldas that you used to own with Dr. Espinosa, the one where you planted the hydrangeas, those flowers with corymb heads and bluish petals that were so mournful they weren’t even good for cemetery arrangements and so nobody bought them—what was the name of that place, you remember it, don’t you? Of course you do!

I am the one who can’t remember, and now there is no way for him to answer me.

At first, La Esperanza was co-owned with Dr. Espinosa, but my father bought him out, only to wind up trading it in, sight unseen, for another house—though, no sooner had we stepped inside, dying of curiosity to see it, after Papi had struggled for an hour and a half to open the door (that hard and ancient and goddamn door), than the whole place collapsed. The house went poof! and disintegrated into a fantastic cloud of dust. All that remained standing, before our gaping eyes, was the doorframe, holding up the dust.

Through La Esperanza flowed the wildest, most tempestuous river that I have ever known. This was the San Carlos, a Mayiya-esque waterway that, when it swelled, would wash away anything that crossed it, its currents foaming with rage. Cows, banana plantations, entire houses. One day it even swept away our pet anaconda, Martha, a dark-spotted boa half a block long, who answered to my sister’s name and sometimes liked to go out and explore the finca’s little meadow and looked very plump indeed.

Later on in the course of both time and the river, they decided to harness the wayward vitality of the San Carlos and bring it under control to generate energy for a hydroelectric power station. The amount of megawatts they managed to harvest would’ve been enough to light up all of Colombia, a country twice the size of Spain and twice the size of France. Oh the San Carlos, how I loved that river. It was beautiful and bright, and just like us it was a Goth—that is, it belonged to the Conservative Party.

One sulfurous morning when the sun was already very hot, Dr. Espinosa got it into his head to go bathing in the middle of the river. In short, a whirlpool caught him up and made him start spinning like a top. There went Dr. Espinosa, swirling, swirling, swirling, a regular Espinosa-go-round, the river sucking him down, all the way down, until he was forced to touch bottom with his hooves, all for having been so disrespectful. What kind of person even thinks of bathing in the middle of the San Carlos?! A few seconds later, let’s say five or six, Dr. Espinosa bobbed backed up to the surface and shouted for help.

Socorro was the word he used. Then back underwater he went, to touch his hooves against the stony riverbed again.

“Papi, Papi, come quick! That stingy Dr. Espinosa is drowning!”

We shouted while swimming, with exemplary fluvial etiquette, by a shallow bank.

Overcome by the river, which had him by the throat, Dr. Espinosa was dancing a pas de deux with Death. Now he rose to the surface again to repeat himself in a faint voice.

“Socorro!”

Ah, socorro. To my ear this word makes for such a ludicrous plea. Perhaps it’s because Socorro was the name of a maid of ours, a grimy woman who had lost her teeth from so much smoking and who spewed cigarette smoke from the sooty chimney she had for a mouth.

Papi had been working in the banana crop while his greedy and lazy business partner was out enjoying life and all its delights and bathing his Epicurean self in that Heraclitian river. He responded to our cries hauling the reed he had just been using to prop up one of the banana trees. So, what happened? What happened, happened, and it has already been recounted in my book The Blue Days.

The blustery winds of time passed through, knocking over house plants, demolishing houses, taking off with our pies in the sky, with all the delusions of hope. To hell with it and to hell with it and to hell with it all.

But I had begun with La Solita and somehow wound up at La Esperanza, all the while leaving poor Víctor leaning against a doorframe. Sit down and rest, Víctor, it’s all over now. Papi has already died, and even if you think reading me means that I am still alive—ah, if only you knew how long I’ve been dead already, too! Today I am nothing but a few miserable words on a piece of paper. Almighty Time will take care of disintegrating this page and muddling the words until they have lost all meaning. Everything has to die. Our language is no exception. Or did this damn language really think itself so eternal? Oh, you perverse language from this churlish place with its priests and its shysters, herein I will now record your imminent death. Requiescat in pace Hispanica lingua.

For now, while the one who has to die is dying, I wipe my ass with the new Constitution of Colombia, with its one hundred eighty errata, which is how it was issued by our esteemed Constituents, all of them proud motherfucking sonofabitches. Nox tenebrarum, ite missa est. Kneeling before the Lord my God, the Great Almighty who roars and rumbles, I ask You, Oh God of the heavens:

that I may win the lottery;

that love, being so elusive, won’t slip through my fingers like a squirmy fish; and

that I die in a state of unrepentance cursing You and blessing the Devil, my Lord Satan, who rules over the night.

Morning came, and a bank employee arrived to attest that Papi was transferring the money from his account over to us, and that given his current inability to sign, my brother Carlos was doing so on his behalf. As we wrapped up these proceedings and the employee got ready to leave, Víctor arrived. I asked him to come in, and the two of us lingered in silence for a moment in the hall, next to the stairs, not knowing what to do. In the brevity of that devastating moment, I could read Víctor’s thoughts. He was thinking about Papi and all that they had been through together.

“Go up and see him,” I suggested.

But he didn’t respond. To me he seemed lost. In order not to have to go upstairs, he proceeded shyly into the living room, instead. The living room of that unfamiliar house that was still, nonetheless, the house of his closest friend. And why unfamiliar? In all the years of his friendship with Papi, which spanned my entire life, I don’t remember having seen him in my house on more than a few occasions, and then only ever in the living room. The Crazy Bitch had excluded him with her presence. For those who were neither her husband nor her children, she had erected a dusty wall of intimacy around my house that was insurmountable. But did I just say my house? You mean her madhouse, you idiot, the asylum where that deranged woman presided alongside the monstrosity she gave birth to after she had the rest of us! As for that one, he whistled wherever he went, as if he were a fucking bird. It was his way of breathing. Or who knows, maybe he was courting someone. A hen, perhaps.

Víctor entered the living room and sat down in an armchair. That’s when I caught Death looking at us. There she was, the sly thing, with those thousand mocking eyes of a furious omnipresence that can see everything, shrouded in torn, dirty veils and a cloak made of ashes. When I went into the kitchen to make Víctor some coffee, the veils in my path began to fade, as Death stepped aside and then disintegrated.

In the kitchen, I ran into Marta and started smirking, recalling my brother Manuel’s recent verdict. He said that the poor girl was so thin that you could X-ray her with a candle, and this was true. Her distress really was going to kill her. If Papi didn’t die soon from whatever it was that ailed him, then she was going to beat him to it by dying of grief. Which only strengthened my resolve.

“Ah, Martica,” I said to her in the kitchen. “There’s no cure for Papi now, and it makes no sense for him to go on suffering. I am going to help him die.”

I rummaged through pots and glasses and cups and plates, using the ruckus to break the painful silence while I looked for some coffee. Then I started cursing the Crazy Bitch and all her madness. Because we were out of coffee. In a country that had wagered its entire future on that weed and produced a million tons of it, there wasn’t a single miserable packet to be found in that house. Of course, since she didn’t drink the stuff, why should there be any for the rest of us? And, since the Crazy Bitch didn’t eat anything, either, because she had decided to go on a diet … we should all go hungry, too!

“Eat less and you’ll live longer,” she declared, and that was that. The Word of the Lord.

This unhinged woman who thought herself infallible, and a guardian of the truth, like the Pope—she had a selfishness that expanded at such a mad rate, it’s amazing that it hadn’t burst altogether and knocked the house down in an irate explosion.

“Now what are we going to give to Víctor?” I asked Marta, livid.

“The same air we live on, what else?” she quipped, and we laughed.

“What are you two laughing at?” Death asked, very curious.

“At you, you meddlesome, lazy bum,” I said. “Who else? Where were you, anyway, you old layabout? Taking a nap? Now scram, will you? You’re bothering me. Quit getting in my way and let me get by already.”

Offended, she stepped aside, left the kitchen and went outside, then took her leave into the sky above the garden.

“Where are you going, you old skank?” I shouted after her, as she made her exit, leaving shreds of her ashen veil tangled up in the plum tree. “Going to finish off the Pope now, or what? Hurry up and get that queer old fuck already. But don’t be gone too long, because you’ll be really missed around here. We’ve got a surplus of maybe forty million souls in this shit country. Take all of them. Take the beauties, too, if you want. Because in a few years they won’t be able to get it up anyway. They’ve fallen into a raging impotence lately and only fuck in order to reproduce. I can share this stuff with you, m’lady, because I’m intimately acquainted with all of those sonofabitches.”

“Who on earth are you talking to?” Marta asked, perplexed. “You lose some tiles off your roof there?”

Roof tiles? Off of moi? Me? Me, me, on this wretched planet, when we have no more hope of redemption? Dying’s not so grim, ol’ girl. What’s really grim is to go on existing. What a selfish obsession we mortals have, of going against our nature and clinging to life like a bunch of ticks.

I don’t know why I told Marta, and later Carlos and Gloria, that I had decided to hurry up Papi’s death. Maybe because the burden was too great for me to bear alone. I needed accomplices in the horror. Aníbal wasn’t included because he had enough suffering to deal with already, with his five hundred dogs and two hundred cats. And I didn’t tell Manuel or Darío because those two were both so irresponsible. So let them carry on with their irresponsibilities. The former was busy mass-producing offspring with his wives, and the latter had his hands full with his orgies of boys, plus the AIDS and the aguardiente and the marijuana. I’m not even including the basuco on this list, since I only found out about it later, after my poor brother, always a lost cause, was well beyond the reach of salvation.

But let’s get back to things and let’s keep going, towards that designated place where Death awaits us—that enormous void of nothingness, that descent into the abyss that is called eternity.

“Víctor, we’ve got nothing to give you, you know how things go here. We adhere to a permanent rule of fasting in this house, it’s our inveterate fakirism. Did you have breakfast already? Well, then, you lucky, happy man, you’ll just have to stay satisfied with that, since, being so original, we decided long ago that this overused verb to eat had to be excised from the dictionary. And, all modesty aside, in that sense—yes, we can consider ourselves to be pioneers of the human race. Hunger is the condition that we have been enduring in this house ever since that scoundrel Samper sat his infamous ass on the throne of Bolívar, and this is what lies in store for the rest of the world. For now, in this current fucking asylum, if cancer or AIDS won’t kill you, then hunger certainly will.”

Now to fill the silence that threatened to crop up between us, I asked him to tell me about his daughters, his sons, anything. To remember when there were three of them and three of us, and we went for walks together on Sundays, in two little dilapidated cars, to camp on the banks of a brook somewhere and bathe as children in its pools. Later on, more children were born in his house, and also in mine, and then there were a lot of us, and the brooks flowed into the Cauca, that murmuring river—my river—with a u in the middle on its journey out to sea.

Night returned, as it does every day—punctual, exact, at six o’clock, which is when it grows dark in Medellín. The sky lit up with stars and fireflies, and the mountainsides glowed with little dots of light.

“How many sonofabitches are being born at this very moment?” I wondered.

“Millions,” I responded. “Death can’t manage with such a huge litter.”

But as soon as I said it, I noticed that saying that someone could manage wasn’t so much my own expression as something my grandmother would say. Oh darling Raquelita, you hadn’t died after all, you were still alive inside me, lurking around in my mind.

I went into Papi’s room and found Carlos there, hooking him up to a fresh IV bag.

“There’s this one and another one left for tonight,” he informed me. “We’ll have to buy more for tomorrow.”

But he knew perfectly well that, no, in fact, Papi would not have a tomorrow. Carlos had only said it so that Papi would hear him and believe that he was going to keep on living. And he did well to do this. Blessed be Death, so long as you think you’re not dying.

Carlos adjusted the new IV, and the droplets fell quickly at first, then began to drip out more slowly, calmly, like the measured, unending rhythm of rosary beads.

“The Mysteries that we are about to contemplate are the Sorrowful ones, right, gran?”

“Yes, child.”

“In the First Mystery, what is it that we’re contemplating? That they give Christ like one million, one-hundred-fifty thousand, five hundred lashes on his back then leave him for a Nazarene?”

“Don’t mock religion, son. Or you’ll go straight to Hell.”

“Better that way. I’m sick of this boring house where nothing ever happens. The only thing there is to do around here is pray. On Monday the Rosary, on Tuesday the Rosary, on Wednesday the Rosary, on Thursday the Rosary, on Friday the Rosary, on Saturday the Rosary, on Sunday the Rosary! Don’t you get tired of repeating all that?”

“But if this were a movie, then it would be of interest.”

“Sure! Because every movie is different. But the Rosary is always the same. Ave Marías and then more Ave Marías. Haven’t you ever wanted to go to the movies, gran?”

What for, she said. They were nothing but fads.

“So The Red Corsair and The Black Corsair are just fads? Gosh, gran, that’s nuts, you have no idea what you’re talking about. Why say that if you don’t know any better? All you know about is washing, ironing, sweeping, mopping, cooking, tending the chickens and pigs, taking care of the dogs, and cleaning up coffee spills. Oh, and listening to radio dramas. How many of them do you listen to in a day? Five? Ten? Super boring!”

“And what’s this about keeping tabs on me? Are you the one paying my electric bill?”

“No, gran, it’s not about the electricity, and anyway, our grandpa pays it. It’s just that the radio dramas will rot your brain.”

As I said, she tuned in to anywhere between five and ten shows a day and got them all mixed up, confusing the one that aired at eleven in the morning with the one that came on at six in the evening, so that if you asked her anything about either one she thought you meant the other. Her world was an unending struggle between the forces of extreme good and extreme evil.

And where did I fit into all this, gran? With the good guys or the bad guys?

As for television, she never really cared for it, because it contained no power of suggestion. The images, being unambiguous, didn’t light up her imagination the way that words did. With the radio dramas, her mind could gallop over the sound waves across the frozen Russian steppe with the czar’s mail couriers, or with a lance at the ready to defend a medieval castle under siege. On the other hand, a limited budget and tight government purse strings, combined with a general intellectual penury, meant that Colombian soap operas were filmed so that all the action took place in the same damn room, and the actors were so ugly, so hideously ugly, and so bland and soulless, that it was like being with the same, small ordinary people you encountered in real life, the sort you saw in droves day in and day out on the street or urinating against a post or walking upright on their two dumb legs. Television, such a mindless device. But radio was wonderful, its dramas let our grandmother picture herself, if she so desired, on a bed of roses and drinking champagne with her Prince Charming. Though, on second thought, why would she even want to drink champagne when we had plenty of chocolate? And why have a Prince Charming, when she already had our grandfather at her side as her happily-ever-after?

“Gran, do you love Grandpa?”

“Such a silly question, child. Of course I do!”

“Then tell me, who do you love more, me or him?”

“Both of you.”

“No, gran, be serious. No more tangents, just tell me. Him or me?”

“Both of you.”

No one could budge her on that. But I knew very well that the one she loved more was him. After him, of course, there was no question. Let it be known, that of all her hundreds of children and grandchildren, it was me that she loved the best. And I loved her more than I have ever loved anyone else, with a love that knew no limits. What do I care if she didn’t reciprocate to the same degree? Because whatever, this is how love is—unequal, uneven, unbalanced, off-kilter.

And there I was, dragged along by the sluggish night, in that rickety wooden bed that creaked over the slightest thing, even the whims of my own conscience. A bed that I didn’t even fit in, because it had been made for Lilliputian proportions by my uncle Argemiro when he took up carpentry, crafting miniature furniture for grown-ups, and so it forced my feet to dangle in the air, in the air buzzing with mosquitoes, these sonofabitches sawing through the seamlessness of time with their droning, and tracing their little path lines in the dark like razor blades that sheared apart my soul. If only the bed weren’t so short and the night weren’t so long and les musiciens could stop buzzing and be still … But no, because according to Murphy’s Law, which governs the entire Universe, everything in the worst of all worlds simply has to go wrong. So I cursed that President-Hound of Mexico José López Portillo, who had rained down a plague of mosquitoes upon this hapless planet. You vain, arrogant rogue, so bloated with conceit and hot air for your precious PRI, that corrupt party you headed in your six-year term—are you going to get off scot-free as you leave this world? Is that spineless country of yours going to let you off so easy?

And lo, no sooner had I left the land of embezzlers and returned to the land of hit men than I heard the shots of a machine gun coming from outside, and the same soul that had been shorn apart by the mosquitoes and their razor blades was now patched together again by a burst of machine-gun fire. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. Murderous Colombia, my terrible homeland, you motherfucking spawn-country of Spain, who are you off killing now, you crazy old bitch? See how far we’ve come after all these years! If once-upon-a-time we bowed our heads before the machete, now we dispatch ourselves with a couple of mini-Uzis. And going up the river of time, against the obstinate currents of the rushing waters that wanted to drag me under to my death, I looked back on my childhood, and the head-rolling ferocity of the nights of my childhood, when Colombia was ruled by machete. Oh, Conservative or Liberal machete, my compatriot, my countryman, my brother, bouncing off the overgrowth at close range to cut down the cold rays of the moon with your blood-red blade—they have already replaced you, they have already forgotten you, but I have not, and here I am, the one who never forgot you, to pray to you and invoke you and remember you, and to remind that forgetful, ungrateful Colombia of yours of that once-upon-a-time when you did exist, when you reigned as king of the night. Listen up, Municipality of Medellín, in the Department of Antioquia, in the Republic of Colombia. Paper with wax seal, signatures, seals and stamps, bureaucracies. And floating down the rivers of the homeland came the decapitated dead, beheaded by the machetes, eviscerated by the vultures, bloated with water—and every single last one of them, Conservatives and Liberals alike, placed on equal footing by Lady Death, my godmother, the badass bitch herself, whose initials appear at the bottom of every notice. So let the green polyglot parrots come with their beefy tongues and tell me yes or tell me no. The little Conservative parrots and the little Liberal parrots, my brothers in this Colombia of hatred—do not delude yourselves with words because they’re no big deal: clumsy and mendicant and imprecise, incapable of grabbing hold of the changing reality that escapes us like a river that we try to grasp in our hands. “Long live the great Liberal Party, and down with those Conservative sonofabitches!” is the message that a flock of parrots shrieked as they passed over Santa Anita, the finca of my childhood. We ran outside to shoot them down with a rifle. Shoot them down? They erupted like a gigantic, green dust cloud, leaving a trail of cackles in the blueness of the sky. Caw-caw, caw-caw, caaaaw! Later, another flock passed by overhead, this one made up of Conservative parrots, from my father’s party, these birds crying, “Long live the great Conservative Party, and down with the Liberal sonofabitches!” So the same thing, only in reverse. And why was this? Why did some parrots say one thing and the others say another? My friend, it’s because the former flock had been indoctrinated by the leadership of the Liberal party in Antioquia, headed by Dr. Alberto Jaramillo Sánchez, while the latter had been schooled by the Conservative counterpart, headed by Dr. Luis Navarro Ospina, a saintly man who styled his hair in a brush cut and rose early every morning for Mass. But who the hell cares about any of this today? Nobody. Conservatives and Liberals alike were a miserable flock of good-for-nothing kiss-ass shysters scavenging for civil posts, and for a century and a half they colluded with the Church and smeared their collective shit across Colombia. There is a remedy for this, of course, I’m not saying there isn’t, though the easier option would be to put Humpty Dumpty together again. A sunrise of mockingbirds and a sunset of parrots—Oh but Colombia, my Colombina, my Colombelle, you’re starting to give out on me. Flocks of happy parrots, mocking parrots, soaring over Puerto Valdivia along the Cauca and over Puerto Berrío along the Magdalena, gashing the lugubrious mourning of my heart with the green and dry and sudden flapping of their wings. And the obsequious river of my own self flowed out in search of the Cauca, which flowed into the Magdalena, which flowed out into the sea. The Magdalena had caimans, but the Cauca did not, being too foul-tempered and too fast-flowing, a real corpse-dredging, caiman-churning lord of a river. Oh gran, the rivers of Colombia have all dried up now and the parrots have all died and the caimans have all gone, and anyone who goes about remembering this is completely fucked, because the past is all smoke and wind and nothingness, and nothing but unfulfilled hopes and elusive longings.

And so, like a lost soul retracing its steps, I wandered back to the front corridor at Santa Anita, to an afternoon blooming with azaleas and geraniums when I had convinced my grandmother to read me some Heidegger (against her will)—and as she read to me resignedly and I rocked placidly in my rocking chair, trying to follow the thread of those tortuous ideas, a hummingbird hovering over the flower pots got tangled up in that thread and wouldn’t let me concentrate. Suddenly the hummingbird landed on a geranium, and time stood still, and the afternoon was eternalized in that one moment. In the dark of night, in the blindness of my life, in the prison of my own self, in the smallness of that room and the narrowness of that bed, and in the midst of the mosquitoes and the bullets, I was able to recoup that moment, and it possessed all the colors of the hummingbird, its reds and blues and greens.

To wit, God does not exist, the current Pope is a pig, and Colombia’s a slaughterhouse, and here I am, rolling about in the darkness astride the stupid Earth. Oh gran, my darling girl, if only you were alive, if only your faded green eyes could light up my soul again … And so I tried to drift off to sleep by counting all the dead. My grandmother? Dead. My grandfather? Dead. My great-aunt Elenita? Dead. My uncle Iván? Dead. My cousin Mario? Dead. My brother Silvio? Dead. And myself? Dead? The dead and the dead and more of the dead, and now Colombia is running loose in the streets, killing even more. Nice, huh? Hang in there, you crafty country. Because here there is absolutely no shortage of schools or universities or hospitals or roads or bridges, though your real surplus is in the number of sonofabitches. So let’s start fumigating. What’s a good musical term for the blast of a submachine gun? A trill? A tremolo? Fellow pigs, you little sows, you dirty swine—forgive my analogy to that vermin from the Vatican, but the globe spun too quickly just now, and my head skidded for a second. In all her five billion years of blindly going round and round, the fucking Earth has never given birth to a more repulsive monster than that.

Morning came, and the idiotic sun filtered into the room through the dusty blinds. I got up, put on my pants and shirt, and went to the bathroom to pee. When I entered the bathroom, I inadvertently caught sight of my reflection in the mirror, which I never look at because mirrors are the gateways to Hell. It was a cheap, tarnished mirror without a frame, brothel-style; it was stuck to the wall above the sink, and it had a crack in its upper-right-hand corner. Then I saw him, floundering up to the gills in his misery and his own deception in the depths of that mirror. I saw an old man with wrinkled skin, bushy brows, and lifeless eyes.

“Who are you, you big old sonofabitch?” I said. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

I recognized him by his brows.

“Ah … ,” I said, taking a step back to distance myself from the mirror.

“Ah … ,” the big old sonofabitch said, taking a step to distance himself from the mirror.

Then he turned towards the toilet, raised the lid, unzipped his fly, pulled out his dumb dick, and started to pee.

Life is one sad business, he thought as he peed. The moments of happiness do not make up for all the misery.

He looked to the shelf on the wall above the toilet and scanned its contents for the Euthanal. There it was, the elixir of a good death, with the syringe lying next to it.

Colombia used to be split between the Conservatives and the Liberals, he thought. Today it’s between the hit men and the corpses.

And so he resumed his main theme, his usual fare, of insulting that poor country for being so silly and so stupid.

“You silly, stupid country!” he declared. “This was your chance to win the World Cup, but you didn’t make it, even though your smarts are all stuck in your feet!”

From the outside, from the street, came a chorus of car horns shrill with hysteria. The inevitable traffic jam that broke out at seven o’clock every morning at the intersection of Nutibara and Jardín, the only two avenues that pass through Laureles—both of them old, old, very old, even older than he was. And the moment he heard that, his cord snapped.

“You know something, Colombia?” I said. “The one thing you really deserve is that fag Gaviria, who, for all the potholes he filled in for you, and the streets he built for you, was responsible for opening up the importation of cars for you, which sealed your fate by leaving it stuck in traffic. How the hell did you get him elected, genius? Who forced your arm? Did someone put a revolver to your head? Now you’re stuck (in case you thought you were heading anywhere), you shithole country.”

Over the din of the car horns came the sudden sound of gunfire, and his face softened.

“Gunshots? Excellent! Make some room there for all those children about to be born.”

Because for him, gunshots meant a party. They reminded him of gunpowder from the Christmas celebrations of his childhood.

The old man finished peeing, flushed the toilet, put away his dumb dick, and zipped his fly. When he came out of the bathroom, he saw the rays of a rabid sun glinting in the dust of the air around him.

“Fucking cunts!” he cried. “Criminal vaginas, the law doesn’t punish them. Are they going to go on giving birth? To bring forth all the future little Gavirias and Sampers and Pastranas, the little senators and governors and ministers and cyclists and soccer players and bishops and priests and capos and gigolos and popes?

This is how it always was, him linking one curse to another, like the Hail Marys on a rosary. He left the room and headed down the steep stairs into the kitchen to make himself some coffee.

“Coffee? What coffee, you idiot! Here in the land of coffee there is no coffee to be found!”

In the absence of coffee, he put the water to boil and when it was ready he added whatever was on hand, which in this case was some vinegar and salt.

“Cancer?” he said. “Cancer is a clingy woman who latches onto you and sucks out your soul for sixty years!”

And he drank from his delicious salty vinegar water, savoring it and refreshing the curses he wanted to level at “that miserable country where a single damn race gives birth and kills.” He was quoting himself.

“You bad seeds of a bad motherland!” he yelled at them. “Keep killing each other and fulfilling your dreams of becoming assassinated assassins. Amen! Ite, missa est.”

Having finished his liturgy, the old sonofabitch climbed the stairs again, entered his room, went into the bathroom, and from the bathroom shelf he took down the Euthanal. And you know what he did? He soaked some cotton in alcohol and used it to disinfect the rubber stopper of the vial. As if Euthanal were a remedy! And as if the dead could get infected!

“Idiot!” he said to himself. “What the hell are you doing?”

Because the old sonofabitch really didn’t know what he was doing anymore. Then, again without meaning to, he glanced at himself in the mirror, and I gazed into his tired eyes as they met mine with a look of infinite exhaustion.

I took the syringe from the shelf, removed the plastic protective cap, and, holding the vial in my left hand and the syringe in my right, I inserted the needle through the rubber stopper, then pulled the plunger and filled the barrel with Euthanal. I recapped the needle so as not to prick myself, placed the loaded syringe in my shirt pocket, went from the bathroom into the bedroom, and from the bedroom into the hall, and then passed through the library. At the door to his room, I paused before entering and peered into the dim light. Carlos, who had spent the night at his side in an armchair, got up when he saw me come in.

“What’s new, brother?” I said.

“What’s new, brother,” he said.

With a sign, I asked him how he was doing, and with another sign, he answered that there was nothing left to be done.

“Go and get some sleep,” I said. “I’ll keep him company.”

When Carlos left the room, I approached the bed, sat down by Papi’s side, and leaned over him. His beseeching eyes met mine one last time. What did he want to tell me? To ask me to help him live? Or to help him die? To help him live, of course, because he had never wanted to die. I glanced away and studied his IV drip, its tentative droplets falling slowly, quietly, through the clear plastic tubing. Drip … drip … drip, marking the end of time.

“If only you knew how much I’ve loved you. I hadn’t told you before, because it was never the right moment. Anyway, why bother, why state the obvious? You will come out of this, you’ll see—you will get better, and you will make it to the year 2000 to celebrate the new millennium with us at La Cascada. And you know how? With a jug of aguardiente, and a shower of shooting stars across the vast night sky. I’m telling you this because I’m a wizard, I know more than the doctors do! So pay no more attention to those fakers.”

I got up from the bed and went over to a corner of the room where he could not see me. There I took the syringe out of my pocket and removed the cap. Then I went over to him and the IV drip that stood at his side. His lost, glassy eyes were staring up at the ceiling. That’s when I sank the needle into the plastic tubing and pressed the plunger. With the most recent droplet from the iv, the Euthanal began to go in.

“Ow!” he cried out in surprise.

Not even a second had passed, and not even a milliliter of Euthanal had entered his bloodstream. The effect was sudden and devastating. The same thing had happened with the dog. I looked at him as his eyes grew fixed on the abyss. Time, that lackey of Death, stood still. Now Papi had left the horrors of this life and entered the horrors of death. He had returned to the void, which he should never have left in the first place. In that instant, I understood why he had unwittingly imposed life on me, I understood why I had been born and why I had lived. It was so that I could help him die. You could reduce my entire life to that.

With the silence of her soft, springy footsteps, and without so much as disturbing the dust that the Crazy Bitch’s apathy had let build up, Death my Timid One, Death my Beloved, Death my Long-Awaited One, Death my Lady, had come into our house once more.

“Very well, Papi,” I said. “This business is all finished. Now you can’t suffer anymore, so go in peace, and don’t worry about this house, because I already know who will be sweeping it from here on out.” By which I meant, the motherfucking wind.

While I was putting the nearly-full syringe back into my pocket, I heard the roar above me of a small-engine plane, the kind that still liked to land in the same old airfield where, years before I was born, Carlos Gardel had died in a crash.

How many planes must be flying through the sky all over the world right now? And how many men, how many animals, are being born? Or dying. And all for what? To fulfill God’s plan? Yes, gran, for that very reason, to fulfill the Monster’s plan.

I was exiting the room when the Lazy Jerk came in. I didn’t even look at him.

“For fuck’s sake, Papi,” I said, to him who could no longer hear me. “The worst mistake of your life was to father this sonofabitch.”

After the Lazy Jerk came the Crazy Bitch who bore him. And after her, in the hours that followed, came others—children, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law, grandchildren—to witness the irremediable fact that our house had collapsed completely and that there was nothing left to be done.

I returned to my room and emptied the syringe into the sink. What a waste! Down the drain went enough Euthanal to dispatch all of Colombia straight to the other side. Why hadn’t I first injected some into myself, whatever bit I could get into my system?

“What for?” I answered myself, as I took the steep back staircase down to the garbage bin. “If one of these days this bloody staircase doesn’t kill me as I go down, then some hit man will kill me the minute I leave this house.”

And why a hit man, a sicario, you ask? Our word sicario refers to someone who kills on behalf of others, who kills on command. But can’t a person kill me, motu proprio, of his own free and sovereign will? Of course he can! What happened is that in the midst of all the immense confusion that overran this lovely country, we ended up labeling any murderer as a sicario. It’s all about semantics. We stopped distinguishing between those who have been hired from those who have not. And none of them suffered the consequences! Chaos leads to more chaos. All you big physicists, you impose this law on me as the supreme law, superior to the laws of creation and the laws of thermodynamics, because all of these laws meekly derive from that one. Order is the mirage of chaos. There’s no way to not be born, no way to prevent life, which, once it’s been given, is as irremediable as death itself. Period, end of story. Dixit.

Also, you’re wrong if you keep thinking you will live on through your children and be fulfilled in them. Ah, yes, “he is so fulfilled!” Such a delicate use of language! What are you going to have fulfilled, you assholes? No one can be fulfilled through another person, and there is no life or death other than your own. As a child you believed that the world belonged to you, but living takes care of that idea soon enough. The young try to unseat the old, and the old will fight to not lose their seats. That’s what this all comes down to.

I threw the syringe and the empty bottle of Euthanal into the trash. The smell of rotten oranges, of fermented happiness, wafted out when I opened the bin. Life continued on its merry way and the sun in its revolutions around the earth—rising and setting and rising and setting, day after day, tracing the same hackneyed arc across the sky as if guided by a compass. How very original.

When I went back into the library, I ran into Manuel’s daughters and Gloria’s sons, who were all coming out of Papi’s room in tears.

“What’s all this? Something upsetting you?” I said, reproaching them. “No more crying! Can’t you see your grandpa can rest now? To rest from the lot of you!”

So I sent them off to the patio to play. How naive of Papi to think that he would go on living through me. That would be like loading your treasure aboard a sinking ship.

Now Darío was floating up the main staircase, all ethereal and translucent, like an apparition, on his cloud of marijuana smoke. I looked at him, he looked at me, and we didn’t say anything at all. Ever since he had taken up drinking again, I had stopped speaking to him, refusing to engage with someone so reckless. If he wanted to kill himself, then be my guest. There are more than enough people in this world. He entered Papi’s room timidly, like a stranger who hadn’t been invited. I remained in the library, in front of this room, watching people—brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, et cetera—milling in and out. Carlos was on the phone with the funeral home. A short time later, a doctor showed up to sign the death certificate. Cause of death: hepatoma. Precisely. A hepatoma, which in plain language means liver cancer, which in Christian terms means death.

Thankfully, when it comes to burial proceedings, Colombia doesn’t do much else to fuck you over. In that regard, the Law there is quite understanding, humane. If the place doesn’t let you live, at least it lets you die. What’s more, if the rats who run the Colombian Congress did decide one day to start regulating burials, this would be at a time when we didn’t have five million unburied corpses on our hands, piling up at different stages of decomposition in people’s houses, some more putrid than others. Imagine how tempting that is for the vultures! It would be like assembling a school’s worth of naked lads in front of me and not letting me so much as touch them.

In Mexico, they screw you over more. There you have to give them a mordida (a bite, a bribe) so that you can go and bury your own father. And you have to buy a coffin even if you opt for cremation. They place the dead man in the coffin, but then after a little while they take him out and cremate him, naked. And the coffin, you ask. What happens to the coffin? My friend, unless you want to take it home with you and use it as a bed, you have to donate the thing to the poor and leave it with the funeral home. Except that as soon as you leave there with your tail between your legs, they turn around and sell it good as new to the next dead guy who shows up. As for the poor? Let the poor eat shit, let their mothers bury them. And what about the government. Doesn’t the government intervene in such abuse? Of course it does! The government sends over a functionary to keep an eye on the undertaker, and then our functionary goes and demands a bribe from the undertaker. In order to be born or to die, to live or to shit, a Mexican citizen is sure to be met by the appropriate functionary with an ungreased palm. The same goes for cops. But the country gets on. A little grease makes everything run more smoothly: car traffic, electrical appliances, your arteries, the President’s whores, the passports they travel with, the burials of those who pass away … A bribe is a brilliant invention. It’s like the wheel.

Another place where it’s a joy to die in is Cuba, here your own little burial is guaranteed. If you remain in Cuba, you can rest assured that Fidel will get you buried, with funds from the Miami worms. As for myself? Who will bury me? Perhaps the current Pope! Whose title I should really write with a lowercase p from now on, since that capital P puts too much junk in the trunk of such an old skunk.

As the doctor was leaving, the undertakers arrived and went up to Papi’s room. Did he have his eyes open? I don’t know. Had the rigor mortis already set in? I don’t know. Was he still in his pajamas? I don’t know. I do know that the funeral-home people asked Carlos if Papi was wearing anything of value.

“The only thing of value is him,” he said.

They placed Papi on the stretcher, covered him with a sheet, exited through the library, and made their way through us as they led him to the stairs. Darío stepped aside to let them pass, holding his head down, as if to apologize for his own existence. Never in this life had he seemed more lost, or so close to my own disaster. His bewilderment compounded with mine, his sense of failure added to my own. At least Papi had died without knowing that my brother had AIDS.

“And so what, if he had known?” I said, reading his mind. “He infected you with the AIDS of living itself.”

Our Lady Death was up on the roof, laughing, enveloping the high walls of the library with her shroud. So I eliminated the ceiling, I eliminated the walls, I eliminated the floor, and then I remained suspended in the dark and infinite nothingness, gazing upon the infinitesimal stars of the Lord. South lay below, at my feet; over my head lay the North; West was at my left, next to my heart; and East was opposite to it, at my right. Rotating my body in this void, I flipped onto my head and then the eternity of the Most High was turned upside down, leaving its legs wiggling up in the air. There is no reference point in space other than myself. A room is a cube full of air, and a bunch of these cubes makes a house.

I went downstairs with Carlos, as we followed the orderlies out. From the top of the stairs, which she never descended so as to avoid the trouble of having to go back up, the Crazy Bitch looked on as her servant took his leave from her forever.

When we came out into the street, the radio from the undertaker’s car was blaring the latest headlines. Little ol’ Gaviria had declared this, little ol’ Samper had decreed that, and little ol’ Pastrana had ordered some other thing. Papi was being bidden farewell with shit. What can you do, though, between the shit that we’re born into and the shit that we live in and the shit that remains when we leave.

At two o’clock in the afternoon, they came back from the funeral home, carrying his ashes in a little urn. God only knows where the urn ended up, what with the chaos of that house. As for the ashes, ever since then, I have carried them in my chest, on the left side, in that cemetery crypt that used to be my heart. Any man who has lived a long time will carry many dead people inside him, it’s only natural. This is established in the First Law of the Living, otherwise known as the Law of Proportions Concerning the Dead, which I discovered, and which stipulates that there is a direct relation between the years that a Christian has lived and the number of the dead that he carries, so that the more he has lived the more he has carried. This can be expressed as:

l = d 2c

where l stands for the living, d denotes the dead, and c is the universal constant for catastrophe—and because it is a constant, it changes constantly, like space in Einstein’s physics: it curves and shrinks, it stretches and lengthens and expands. See, for instance, my treatise on thanatology, Among the Ghosts, where all of this is explained very clearly, in simple language and with many examples taken from daily life. It’s already going on something like a fifteenth edition.

With Papi dead, I went straight to the devil and swore never to come back. But never say “From this water I shall not drink,” because that is exactly the water you probably will be drinking, when it comes to Colombia’s curse. Not even a year had passed since Papi died, yet here I was again already, for yet another death.

The taxi had descended into Medellín along the old and winding, narrow road from Rionegro, where they had gotten it into their heads to build the new airport and turn the landscape to shit. One bend, then another, and another, winding right, winding left, and then the sudden shift in climate, now cool mountain, now hot valley, each swerve rocking me gently in the cradle of my own memories. I had gone up and down this same road countless times with Darío, in our Studebaker full of beauties. How long had it been? Years and years. Nowadays a car like that can be found in a museum, and it costs a fortune. As for the beauties—if they are alive, at least—alas, they wouldn’t be fit to be served to the lions in the zoo or be used for making sausages. That’s how it goes. In the final reckoning, the cars have fared less badly than those good souls. Anyway, enough of that.

The countryside, freshly washed by the rain, was parading its limpid, pale greens outside the windows of the taxi. Now and then, on the side of the road or else standing prominently on a hillside, the old peasant houses came into view, with their whitewashed benches and hanging flowerpots and their colorful corridors lined with filigreed wooden balconies. They saw me go by and they all waved farewell.

“Goodbye, Fernando, goodbye!”

“What, no way!” I said. “You’re still there! They haven’t demolished you already?”

“Not yet! We’re still here, and as pretty as ever.”

And with a heavy heart I realized that the terrible weather had spared them just so that it could make fun of me, reminding me of what I had once been, and with me, all of Colombia—just a bunch of crazy kids who could no longer exist because we had gotten old and lost our innocence forever, and with that innocence had gone our last shred of hope as well. We abandoned our dreams by the wayside, and the few that we had remaining we burned yesterday, in a big bonfire out in the patio.

The taxi kept descending, and already you could feel the heat of downtown Medellín. Behind us lay those bright little country houses, glowing in the depths of my eyes, with their balcony-lined corridors and their flowerpots and their whitewashed walls—bidding me farewell forever because they already knew, before I did, that it was inscribed in the book of fate that we would never see each other again.

“Driver, would you be so kind as to turn that radio off? I’ve had it up to here with Pastrana. I’ll pay double whatever the meter says, just so that I don’t have to listen to that fucker.”

Our assassin must have thought me so old, so pathetic, so defenseless, that instead of killing me, he actually turned the damn radio off. For anyone wanting to commit suicide, here’s a suggestion: Hail a taxi on any street in Colombia—doesn’t matter which one, just the first that passes—and get in. Then, as soon as the driver gets the meter running, ask him what I just asked the one above. That’s a surefire remedy against the ills of this existence, complete with an expedited dispatch into the afterlife. What I have no knowledge of is the method employed, whether it’s with a knife or a machete or a revolver or an iron rod or a piolet. Don’t know what a piolet is? Doesn’t matter! No need to look it up in a dictionary, because you’ll get to see the real thing, I’m sure.

“Thank you. Having the radio off lets me think more clearly.”

Do you remember that Studebaker, Darío? The envy of Medellín. People called it “the bed on wheels,” and it really twisted the bile duct of that poor city, where only the rich had cars.

Fags! they yelled when they saw us cruising by, our prodigious vehicle brimming with its boatload of lads.

Fags, huh? That would be like a starving Cuba hollering Imperialists! over at the United States. We threw a Maggi bouillon cube at them out the window and didn’t bat an eye.

“That’s right, assholes, just keep having more kids. We’re taking inventory of whatever pops out.”

Now, as we made our way into Medellín through Buenos Aires, I thought about all the times we had gone out in this same neighborhood, with our Studebaker bursting with boys. Released from the city and its congenital taste for gossip, we pulled over, and there by the side of the road, beneath the moonlight and the murky gaze of Saturn, and with their first sip of aguardiente, the lads started taking off their clothes. A little stream nearby was singing its tinkly song, and the cows were lowing their mooo, mooo, mooos … Brother, do you remember that? Just you wait, Darío. A hundred years from now (which is no time at all and will be here before you know it), this miserable city is going to put up a statue in our honor.

The taxi pulled up in front of my house, and I paid the assassin for the ride, got out with my suitcase, and rang the doorbell. The door was opened for me by the Lazy Jerk, who didn’t even say hello. He turned around and left me standing there in the entrance, with suitcase in hand and a greeting still on my lips. I set the bag down inside, and this is when I noticed Death standing on the staircase.

“You again?” I said curtly. “How on earth. Here I thought you had made like Dolores del Río and died. Anyway, make yourself useful, woman, and look after my suitcase till I take it up to my room. Right now I’m here to see my brother.”

With a slight shrug of mockery and disdain, she pointed me to the garden.

“Don’t let anyone come in,” I instructed her. “You’re not to open this door for anybody, or they’ll kill us.”

I shut the door and headed out to the garden, my heart trembling. A pair of sheets was draped across the clotheslines to form a makeshift tent, and my brother had set himself up in his hammock beneath it.

“Darío, my friend, imagine finding you here in the sheikh’s tent!”

I held him very tightly against my chest. It felt like we were children again, camping out in the patio like explorers, our tent armed with broomsticks and stocked with blankets and quilts and sheets, the two of us playing make-believe that it was nighttime falling in Africa.

“Graack! Graack!” went a harsh shadow as it flitted from the mango to the plum tree.

“That bird,” Darío explained, “has been around here for days, but no matter how hard I try, I still can’t see him. He slips away, he slips away from me.”

He struggled back into the hammock and picked up where he had left off. He was picking off the seeds and bits of debris from a stash of marijuana leaves, which he had spread out on one of those stupid so-called “Norwegian” tables, with the wobbly, pointy legs, that the genius Argemiro had made in illo tempore. He picked off a little seed here, another one there, then scattered them to the four winds along the grass in the garden.

“Little Aníbal brought it over for me as a present,” he explained. “It’s good stuff. They sold it to him at the police station.”

“Wrapped in newsprint from El Colombiano?”

“Yep.”

“So that shitrag is good for something after all.”

And as his emaciated and ghostly hands continued—meticulously, unhurriedly—to pick clean the holy weed of the hashishin, which he took from the yellow pages of that newspaper, we got to talking, first about one thing, then another, about the progesterone that had caused him to retain fluids, and about all the beauties from the past, before these plagues of AIDS and the Internet even existed and old age had seemed so foreign to us, as remote as the day when the sun was supposed to go dark. Oh let it go dark, for that is why God stirs the boiling cauldron of hell with the Devil’s own hand. Or what, is that old Bastard going to shut the heat off down there as well?

“There are two kinds of illness,” I explained. “The ones that have a cure and those that don’t. The ones that can be cured either get better on their own or else with antibiotics. And those that can’t be cured are cured by Our Blessed Mother Death, the remedy of all remedies.

“That’s right,” he said nonchalantly, as if the matter had nothing to do with him.

Darío rolled a joint with a slip of Pielroja cigarette paper, then licked it tight and lit it and took his first deep drags. And as the mysteries of that smoke began to cloud his soul, he started remembering this wonderful young Black man that we had met one summer night in Central Park, in New York City.

“Now you’re starting to sound like those old men who live for their memories.”

“We took him back to our apartment at the Admiral Jet, where I was the super, and we put him between the two of us in the middle of the bed.”

“And we passed him back and forth between us like a ping-pong ball. What a hot night that was!”

And I began to bless the Lord God for having given us that beauty, and so many others, undeservedly, and then I cursed this sanctimonious pope who claims to be oh-so-fucking ecumenical. That’s when we heard the Crazy Bitch calling out from her upstairs window.

“How nice,” she said, “to see the two little brothers together, loving one another!”

Nice? Can you believe her nerve? Only a troubled, cynical brain could harbor such a lie. Because what hadn’t she done, throughout her entire life, to drive us apart? All while cramming more and more children into the raging asylum of that house, as if space were somehow elastic. How are you going to expand that motherfucking space—that’s nothing but the lunacies of Einstein! Until the day she got her way (like water that drips against a rock until the whole thing cracks) and birthed the Lazy Jerk, that spawn of a Crazy Jesus who in his own personal existence—without any mixing whatsoever, and with the absolute purity that came from turning genetics on its head—had managed to concentrate all the rabid genes that constitute the imbecility of the Rendóns.

“Not a day goes by that I don’t make some discovery, Darío. Take our Crazy Jesus, for example. He’s like Dolly the sheep. A total clone.”

I got up, leaving him in the garden, in his ethereal pot-ridden hammock, and went back to the vestibule for my suitcase. I took it upstairs, looking for a spot in one of the bedrooms where I could get myself settled for the days ahead.

Et Madame la Mort? Est-ce qu’elle était partie? Between the thirty-thousand assassinations a year in that demented country, as well as all the deaths from heart attacks, from tuberculosis, from malaria, from Pablo Escobar, and from the cops, the buses, the cars (with bloodshed, or without), the poor old girl just couldn’t keep up. No matter how hard she worked. Plus there was that whole “lust for stardom” thing, the same demon that tickles the pope’s posterior day in and day out and won’t give him a moment’s peace … She had to show up for every single burial.

But really, what makes you think she’d be gone? When I was going up the stairs with my suitcase, the nasty bitch started laughing at me.

“Dove sei, stronza?”

Where was she? As invisible as the Almighty, Who is everywhere, spinning like a mad electron towards the very heart of an atom.

“Ha, ha, haaaa!” she went, ridiculing me with a cackle more horrific than even the Oedipus Rex cantata by my old deaf music teacher, Roberto Pineda.

“What are you laughing at, stupid?” I rebuked. “You … lackey of God!”

That was enough to shut her up. Nobody since the world began had ever told her a truth more bitter than that.

“There’s a first time for everything, woman. You’ll see.”

In the silence that followed, I went through Papi’s room, the library, the overhang—inspecting everything, and finding everything the same, just as he had left it. Nobody had touched a thing in the meantime, unless you count eternity and its first few layers of dust. There were his books in the library, his papers on the desk in the overhang, and his suits in the closet of his room. Those modest suits of his, made by Everfit, which in the olden days in Colombia was the brand that all decent people used to wear. But how long had it been since that idiotic species had died out around here? This is why nowadays you won’t find anyone in the land of Cacus wearing Everfit suits. Not the thieves inside Congress, nor the ones outside it. My guess is that they closed down the factory.

If memory serves (and it may not), I already told you that at the back of the house, on the land that was part of the garden, a relative of ours, that shoddy Alfonso García, had built us two additional bedrooms, causing space to expand. Meager little rooms, very minimalist, like the dollhouses that Argemiro liked to build, and each with its own tiny bathroom. I settled into one of these to be close to Darío, who occupied the next one over, at least judging by the infinite assortment of medications that was piled up on the desk: antacids, antibiotics, antipyretics, antiparasitics, antimotherfuckeries, anti-inflammatories, antimycotics …

“Trash! Trash! Trash!”

And as I said it, so I did, throwing half a twentieth century’s pharmacopoeia into a trash bin. Scattered on his nightstand, on the chest of drawers, on the floor, here and there and everywhere, were countless indecent butts of marijuana joints, left to God’s mercy, and in full view of everyone else, like flaccid used condoms, freshly disposed of, with their billion potential little motherfuckers inside, all completely dead.

“That’s fine. Marijuana will whet your appetite and numb your spirit.”

Nothing could get me to sleep in the nights that followed. Neither sleeping pills, nor benedictions, nor maledictions, nor Rendonesque headbuttings against the wall. My sleep was simply gone forever. And over this desert of insomnia came that bedeviled sarabande of mosquitoes that our dog López Portillo convened night after night with his own illustriousness. Trying to escape that horror, I liked to travel into the past with Darío, traipsing from one memory to the next. And this, for example, is how I returned with him, hand in hand, to the Admiral Jet on Eightieth Street, on the West Side of Manhattan—this building full of reprobates where we lived, two blocks from Central Park and its endless orgy of queers among the trees, for one summer. What a season that was, Your Holiness. So miserable and yet so glorious. Perhaps every era is better for belonging to the past.

And so here you have a verbal portrait of that monstrosity: seven floors with thirty apartments made of cardboard, in constant danger of collapsing and having its embers rise up to heaven with all its occupants in tow, just a handful of Black and Puerto Rican defecators of both sexes, the dregs of our bipedal species whom I don’t know what sort of demagogic municipal bureau had tried to cure of their heroin addiction, by launching a so-called “pilot study,” an experiment for which they had hired Darío, an undocumented immigrant, to work for minimum wage as “the super,” that is, as a kind of doorman, but also floor mopper, trash remover, toilet unblocker, and general keeper of the peace. I, the unemployed brother of our victim, who like him had no resting place to call my own, was there to help him carry out his duties. And so there I was, Your Holiness, sporting a cleaning maid’s bucket and a plumber’s snake to unblock the toilets of Black people. Want to know what those are like? Exactly like the toilets of white people. No difference whatsoever. In their humble excretory functions, white people are no different from Black people, dogs are no different from rats, and unbelievers no different from yourself. God made all mortal creatures equal in that regard.

And so picture your celebrant, plunging the snake into the toilet, turning it, turning it, until with a bit of luck (provided there aren’t any fetuses down there), he manages to undo the blockage. Immediately after that, he pulls the chain and out flows the ineffable, draining towards the belly of the metropolis, carried along on the melody of water, into the deepest hollows of the subsoil, to deliver the light of the Gospel. I believe sincerely that every pope ought to be aware of all these things before speaking. Otherwise, what? Magister dixit urbi et orbi?

One afternoon, while doing my rounds of these pestilential lavatories, I was busy unblocking the toilet of a woman named Evelyn, when suddenly her entire ramshackle room began to shudder all from the pounding that seemed to be coming from some heinous, insane fury, as if the very earth were shaking.

“It’s Dick,” Evelyn informed me, matter-of-factly, as if commenting on the hot weather.

And it was, in fact, Dick, a gross and greasy Black man, an Evangelical Christian whose lechery could be tempered by neither heroin nor the Holy Bible itself—he was banging away from the room on the other side of her bathroom wall, wielding the same tool that our father, Adam Australopithecus, had put to use in his garden four million years before, when he descended from the tree, and thanks to which we found ourselves here, next to this flimsy cardboard excuse for a wall that separated us from Dick’s hovel. The first thing to break through it was a shiny black skull, and this was followed, with a furious onslaught, by that immense and disproportionate and prodigious drill of his, hard as iron, whose exalted thickness extended at least twenty-five centimeters (that’s ten inches, if Your Holiness prefers the Imperial system) from the curly base where the shaft was joined to the body.

“What?!” I said.

“Yes,” came the wretched woman’s reply, her affirmation as obvious as it was inane.

Like a taut and erect arm at a right angle that seemed to curse us, with its arteries and veins swollen and about to burst—pushing and shoving, throbbing and trembling, with its purplish jerks—the portentous tool ejaculated, leaving the filthy bathroom floor doused in its viscous milky fluid.

For fuck’s sake, why does God have to have such shitty design skills? Such a fantastic device, but appended to such a disgusting creature … Inscrutable in His designs, the Almighty can really come across as an Alfonso García-level hack.

“What sign are you, super?” Evelyn asked.

“Scorpio,” I said. “And you?”

“Virgo.”

“Virgo? Ha, ha, ha, haaa!!”

Oh how that damn bitch made me laugh. Black people, they don’t have souls, Your Holiness, so don’t go welcoming them into your fold. Lazy by nature as they are, the only thing they’re good for (and not always, at that) is for sex. Nitrous oxide inflates them in the front, and then they expel it out the back.

But the leading star of the Admiral Jet cast wasn’t Dick, it was Sam. Yet another sonofabitch, a foul-tempered and megalomaniac garbage disposal of a man who had appropriated the basement as his own personal lair. Whatever I hauled down into the dumpsters from all seven floors—syringes without heroin, porn magazines, vaginal wipes, shitty underpants, stinky tennis shoes, greasy leftovers, milk cartons, collapsed boxes, bottles, cans, jars, rags, dead fetuses—he in turn shredded with a hurricane roar and returned it to us all compacted inside little trash bags. But have you any idea how much those fucking little bags weighed? One hundred, two hundred kilos, half a ton, one ton, maybe two. And measuring forty square centimeters, at most … Then I understood what the black holes of the universe are really all about. They are matter, compacted to a demonic density. My friend, it’s like when you buy an apartment, and what you get is nothing but the air inside four walls. Just as the atom is nothing more than a few sighs of electrons revolving around a tiny nucleus and separated from it by nothing, by a nothingness so immense, so gigantic, so monstrous, it’s like the nothingness between the stars, the nothingness of God. Step by step up from the basement, and with great difficulty, Darío and I managed between the two of us to hoist those bags into the street, so that the garbage truck could pick each of them up with a forklift. Exhausted and herniated, our spinal cords about to burst, we went back to our apartment, the super’s unit, on the ground floor, to smoke some weed and to wait and see what young man from Central Park—whether white or Black, yellow or copper—might come our way.

“Super? Hey, super?” they called, knocking urgently at the door.

What, what? A boy, a beauty? Ha! What boy, what beauty! It was the Black guy Dick, Dick the Black guy. His toilet was clogged up again.

“Oh no, not again!” Darío said to me, in English, sounding miserable, livid.

Then he took the iron rod that he always kept on hand for this purpose, just your run-of-the-mill rod, then went and applied it to the repeat offender’s head.

And a terrific cure it was for the Black guy’s erections, too. No more punctured walls with that motherfucking cock of his. He could never get it up again.

I have said, time and time again, that Black men house their sexual member inside their skulls. You have to hammer the thing out of them. Or are we just going to sit there and let these nuts go on desecrating buildings with such impunity? To the tune of what? What are we, Democrats running for office? Down with Christ, long live racism! Death to that procuress called Democracy!

“Darío,” I said, “the next time you hit one of them with the rod, be very careful how you do it. Don’t go too far or you’ll get the electric chair.”

“No chance of that, you can’t get the electric chair in the State of New York. They abolished it ages ago.”

Feeling reassured, I went down to the basement to see what Sam was up to, and also to give my sisters the rats a bite to eat.

“Hello, ladies! Here I am, my lovelies!” I announced, as I entered, holding a giant bowl of rice in both hands. “Come one, come all!”

They emerged from every dark corner of the premises, answering my call. They came from their miserable dwellings, from the humble underground sewers, which are within the reaches of human shit but not of the good Lord’s mercy. What were they coming here for? Well, to see me, to greet me, to love me. Religiously, fairly—and carefully maintaining order so that they couldn’t squabble—I knelt on the ground and distributed the rice grain by grain, bringing the food straight into the mouths (and note that I say mouths, not muzzles) of those that stuck out their tongues, those wet little tongues of my communicants ready to receive the Divine Host. And one night when I was doing this, one of the rats, who stood out for her way of being affectionate, and whom I called Maruquita, came up to eye level by clambering up to a reinforced concrete slab above which Sam lay resting, then started licking my cheek.

“Oh Maruquita, you’re outta your mind. Aren’t you scared you’ll catch something from the humans?”

Then I said to hell with fairness and gave Maruquita an extra serving. Better not go around expecting love to be fair. Because love is blind.

“All right, ladies, I’m heading out. See you later. At ten, there’s a beauty coming over to visit us from Central Park. And by the way, could you rein in the pichadera already? There won’t be room for any more of you, and we’re out of rice!”

I’d start speaking to them in Colombian.

As I was heading out, something fell on top of Sam, and the madman lost it. That crazy, tedious, demented, irate, and compulsive lunatic. Like a rabid dog who starts barking, he started to compactify the trash again. More bags, sweet Jesus, what a nightmare.

I now hereby exercise my sovereign will and fucking whim to leave the Admiral Jet behind and return with Darío to a dark night in the Colombian slaughterhouse. Along one of those phantasmagorical roads in the land of Thanatos, where no living person would ever dare travel at night, for fear of being killed and put out of his misery, we drove our Studebaker, with its boatload of lads, from one winding bend to the next on our way up to Alto de Minas, just your average random little summit in the Andes, tucked away in the vastness of my memory. Our headlights pierced the fog and bored two holes of light into the belly of the ghost, but we could see nothing out the side windows. All we knew is that the abyss was gaping open on both sides of the road, waiting for us. Well, half a century later and its ghastly maw still hadn’t caught us, because the thing is, no matter how much aguardiente he drank, Darío never lost control of the wheel. He drove with a steady hand and solid skill, under the careful watch of the Holy Spirit. He swerved to the right, he swerved to the left, then back to the right, and back to the left, and so, from one bend to the next, we maneuvered our way up the steep ascent. And when we reached the end of the road (phew, finally), we were suddenly at Alto de Minas, having made it to the top, and there we stopped to stretch our legs and have some aguardiente. The bottle passed from mouth to mouth, from one boy to the next, and as the blessed liquor started to run low, it also started to kindle our souls.

“Clothes off!” I said. “Why else do you think we drove all the way up here? To admire the landscape?”

You couldn’t see more than a few inches in front of you. The fog was so thick that you could part it with your hand. As for the cold? What cold! That’s what the aguardiente was for, to warm up our inner motor. Day or night, with or without visibility, there is no better spot on Planet Earth to drink an aguardiente than up at Alto de Minas. To get there, you drive up from Medellín towards Santa Bárbara and then south to La Pintada. I’m telling you this because I’ve been there. Here you will experience the most perfect complement between the setting and the alcohol, and between the alcohol and your soul. That is why these holy spirits have reigned supreme in Colombia for two hundred years—undisputed, unlimited, unchallenged, and unsurpassable. The Conservative Party, the Liberal Party, the Catholic Church, the drug traffickers, the petty crooks, the guerrillas, your hopes, your ambitions, your dreams—they all feed off of it. In this frivolous country, people will someday lose interest in Christ’s deceits, but never in aguardiente. Because Colombia without aguardiente is not Colombia. It’s a kind of hypostatic union, of consubstantiation.

Naked, but cloaked in fog, we were all stunned. What the hell were we doing at the top of that deserted road where no soul would ever dare to venture out at night? My friend, what we were doing is what they call existing, same as we do every day, carrying on with this business as best as we can.

We got back into the Studebaker and began our descent down the other side of the mountain. And there we were, winding our way down that ravine like a bunch of fools, zigzagging, meandering, coiling this way and that upon our bed on wheels. On any one of those turns, let’s go with number ten thousand twenty-one, a faithful pilgrim in Colombia will experience—suddenly and without warning—the shift from cold to hot climate, if he is heading downhill, or vice-versa if he should be going up. And so, to my European friend reading this, if I were to tell you that the people who live along that aforementioned bend (a young married couple with fifteen children crammed into a lone little one-room shack) could immediately pass from winter to summer by traveling a single meter down that road, or from summer to winter if they retraced that step, would you even believe me? That’s how crazy the tropics are. And if you’re traveling by truck or car and some rocks that look like part of a landslide should tumble into the middle of your path, then it’s goodbye Charlie, and you’re done for, because what you’re really seeing is a checkpoint controlled by bandits, and here it’s no longer a question of passing from one little climate to another, but more like crossing over from here into the afterlife. We were born to die, the rest is all bunk. Never forget that, my friend. Memento mori.

And lo, as my memory continued its downhill bent, at full-speed so that it made the tires screech, it was at the umpteenth bend that I began to breathe in that hot-climate smell, and then it struck me, between the effluvia from the hog pens and the horse stalls, like a lightning flash brightening up the night—an aroma that reminded me of Santa Anita, a scent of orange blossoms, of orange trees in bloom.

At Santa Anita, we used to have an orange grove, and in this grove there was a tree that produced the most amazing fruit—they were navel oranges, so called because of the distinctive wrinkly knob on the peel that looks like a belly button. So so so sweet. According to my grandfather, who was stubborn, these oranges could only be cut down with a medialuna (a sharp little cutlass mounted on a pole, which he kept in his room), and only at sunset, not broken off the branch by hand under the blazing sun, which would only make the orange tree dry up. Ah, our grandfather. The anger we made you feel out of love! You got so worked up, so angry, so hot and bothered, and your adrenaline rose and your bilirubin dropped. And when your adrenaline was up and your bilirubin was down and your face all contorted, your forehead dripping, you lost your mind and sparks would leap from your eyes and drool would dribble from the corner of your mouth, and then all the Rendón in you would be unleashed. It was during one of those terrifying tantrums that you developed the embolism that paralyzed your entire left side.

“Grandpa, why do you get so red like that? Who’d you inherit that from? Don’t get so worked up over the little things, it’s not good for you. Anyway, what do you want all those oranges for? Are you gonna eat them all by yourself? Or do you plan to take some with you to the grave? If you get angry again and become paralyzed on both sides, you won’t even be able to go to the bathroom. Think it over, analyze it, use your head, and stop acting so crazy.”

The navel oranges from Santa Anita are very juicy, with a thick rind that is easy to peel. They sweeten my days whenever I need them, and this will be the case until the Day of Judgment, when my Lord Satan will summon me into his kingdom, which is memory.

In La Pintada there are these two peaked crags that look like a pair of tits pointing skyward, as if to tempt the Lord above. The moon appears between them—a mad moon, a reddish moon, red with blood. As the clouds part to let it pass, this demented heavenly sphere rises and lights up the world below. Then the machete and the torch take over the night, they make heads roll, they set the side roads ablaze, they do whatever the hell they want. Colombia, the great madam, lets them get away with it, with finishing off the remains, “all the way down to the whelping box,” as my grandmother liked to say.

Though tempestuous at times, tonight it’s nice and quiet, the hypocrite—I’m talking about the Cauca, heaving its course through La Pintada, its treacherous waters the color of a cliffside. We cross the river via a suspension bridge, which sways as we pass, as wobbly as a drunk. If we fall in, there’s no coming back out. In that sense, this river is like that hound López Portillo. Insatiable, voracious, ravenous. Whatever he grabs onto he won’t let go. And thanks to that old dog—that absolute rascal and sly crook and sneaky scoundrel, that quintessential knave with the lecherous unibrow, that rabid hydrophobe and rapacious ruffian and bottomless pit and cat’s claw and President of México, a model for scoundrels and a prototype for reprobates and a paradigm for rogues—I go back to the room with its sarabande of mosquitoes, which buzz in my ear at a frequency of six hundred hertz. Yes, most definitely, whoever falls into the Cauca will not come out, because that is one perilous river, with as many eddies in its waters as there are bad intentions in its soul. And then I start dreaming that in its wobbling the bridge was throwing us into the river. Flailing around in those roiling, murky waters, my brother and I were desperately trying to get out of the car. I woke up drowning, with the sun in my eyes.

“Darío?” I called out, distressed, but there was no answer.

I ran over to his bedroom, but he wasn’t there. I found him downstairs in the garden, in the morning sun, leafing through an old photo album. Crumpled photos, faded portraits of what we had been at the very dawning of the world. There was Papi and Silvio and Mario and Iván and Elenita, and our grandfather … our grandmother … All gone forever.

“Strolling down cemetery lane?”

“Look at this one.”

And he singled out a picture of two boys, about four and five years old.

“That’s us.” Him with his blond curls and wearing a coat; me, in a striped shirt, hugging him.

“Those right there are us? So much water under the bridge since then.”

“The entire Cauca,” he agreed. “Last night I dreamed that we were in the Studebaker crossing the river over the old bridge in La Pintada, and then the bridge started swaying and it hurled us into the water.”

My friend, this left me speechless. We had had the same dream. Because let me tell you something. Towards the end, Darío’s soul was synchronized with my own, dream after dream, memory after memory. But don’t act so surprised. After all, there was a reason he and I were brothers. We came from the same place, the same orifice, from the same dusky entrails lined with lichen and slime.

From pregnancy to pregnancy, from birth to birth, she was possessed by a reproductive fury that impelled her to cram ever more and more children inside a house whose finite space was governed not so much as if by the marijuana-addled brain of Einstein, but by the inflexible axiom that a body cannot simultaneously occupy the space that is occupied by another, all while trying to attain the tally of the Twelve Apostles and failing at it because she would also give birth to girls, and so between all these boys and girls, the Crazy Bitch surpassed a dozen offspring and charged onwards to attain a tidy score of them. When we hit twelve, my house became an insane asylum; by twenty, the asylum had turned into a hell. A Colombia in miniature. We ended up all hating each other, hating ourselves fraternally until life sent us on our respective ways.

After many years apart, I met up with Darío again in Bogotá, far away from her, and there at last we were able to be brothers. And as proof of my affections, I gave him his first young man, barely sixteen tender years old, with a lock of hair on his forehead and eyes like emeralds. I can close my own eyes, which are a dark brown, and still picture that scene.

“Take off your clothes, kids,” I said. Such was his perfection, his beauty, that I began to believe in the existence of God. His name was Andrés.

“Hey, Darío, do you remember the time in Bogotá when I gave you little Andrés? Back when we had reconciled, and I’d infected you with my vice for boys?

“Which one was he again?”

“What do you mean, which one? The most beautiful of them all, don’t pretend you don’t remember.”

But he wasn’t pretending. The cytomegalovirus had simply wiped his cassette tape clean.

Every time she gave birth, our great matron liked to settle into her white linens for her forty days of rest and tyranny. To bring me this to bring me that to bring me the other thing. To take away this café con leche, it’s cold, and to go and heat it up again.

“Hey! Damn it, you people can’t even heat up a decent cup of coffee. You bring it to me scalding hot. What the hell are you going to do without me when I die?”

But she wouldn’t die. After her forty days of rest, she was back at it again, very much alive, ready to rummage, to pile things up and to wreck the heaps, to mess things up and scatter things everywhere, to disorganize stuff, to turn everything upside down, to undo whatever order we had banded together to establish in the interims between these gales of our mom the simoom. Useless to make any attempt at order in the face of such a dead-set vocation for chaos.

Coming out of one birth, she became committed ipso facto to the next. She had fallen into the habit of going to Mass while pregnant, walking from the house on Calle del Perú, where her first twenty offspring were born, over to Nuestra Señora del Sufragio, the Salesian church four blocks away (where we were later baptized), all the while flaunting her shameless belly to the four winds and the four blocks alike. How it mortified me. A knocked-up woman becomes an object of public concern, a source of family embarrassment. People see her and think, “Well, somebody nailed her.” Which is true. If it weren’t, then where the hell did this blown-up balloon on two legs come from, parading around here like the fucking Mona Lisa? You better not leave this world before breaking the neck of one of her kind.

Rain or shine, come hell or high water, and in perpetuity, she was forever buttressed with some bun in the oven, and the indecency of that crazy belly could only be likened to one other possible thing, to that filthy tongue of hers, which she used to revile her husband and her children and her neighbors with, along with the policemen and the priests and whoever else should happen to cross her path.

“You give me Communion right this second, or I’m leaving,” this multiparous person liked to threaten. “I’ve got fifteen children, I can’t just sit through an entire Mass. You think I’ve got time to spare like you do? Responsibility comes before devotion, you sonofabitch of a priest.”

Blame the snakes and the frogs and the toads inside her that were busy merging with the new son on the way. She told them she could be anything she wanted, except for a whore. And this for her was a source of enormous pride. But as long as they don’t procreate, whores are ladies that I hold in the highest regard, good sir. From here I am sending all of them my best regards.

This professional parturiant, this proliferating primate, this placid Mona Lisa with her bird brain and her mammalian placenta in tow, went on happily giving birth to children, like Saint Peter making it rain and thunder whenever the sky burst open. I swear I will not die before having penned a piece for the Zoological Journal on this specimen of human fauna. Or, if a lightbulb goes on in my head and the light suddenly dawns upstairs, I will write a Treatise on Pure Evil, dedicated to Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, theologians, in memoriam.

The photo of those two children and that shared dream about the river both go to show, with all the profound truths distilled by hindsight, the kind of relationship that I had with Darío. As children, when it was still just the two of us and the others hadn’t been born yet, we were bonded by affection. Later on we were separated by the divisive genius of the Crazy Bitch. Then, after that, life brought us back together again, complete with all those boys. And together we remained until the very end, when we were at last admitted into the retirement home run by the Lady whose name begins with a D.

When it happened, he was in Medellín, in the house in Laureles, pumped full of morphine. For me it was a few hours later, in my apartment in Mexico, when they gave me the news over the phone. They found me with the receiver still in my hand and my skin turned blue—translucent, rigid, like a cooked Saint Joseph, carved in wood. Since I couldn’t hang up the phone, the call from Medellín must have cost the caller, Carlos, the value of his entire house. Well, that’s what they say, anyway—what do I know, I really don’t care. The dead don’t give a shit about property value.

They came from the funeral home and hung up the phone, and after draping me in a sheet and loading me onto a stretcher, they rolled me out feet-first, how original. They had to bribe the Procu (which is short for Procuraduría, the office of Mexico’s Attorney Venal himself) to let them have me cremated. Because, they said, if this really is what I wanted, then why hadn’t I specified it in writing; because that is what notaries were there for, they said, and so on.

Outside they appeased the local beggar’s objections by slipping him a few pesos. They cremated me at the Panteón Civil de Dolores, the large cemetery in Mexico City, in Section Two of the Bosques de Chapultepec of this ineffable City of Palaces, under a smoggy sky. I went into the oven stark naked, advancing inward on a moving mechanical belt. And as soon as I crossed over into the fiery mouth of that monster, the threshold of eternity, I erupted into a show of fireworks—the most spectacular explosion of green and red and purple and yellow sparks.

Tsss! Tsss! Tsss! Long live the party, what a big old sonofabitch! I felt like a Bengal fire sparkler, the kind we used to light at Christmas in Antioquia.

I would never have guessed that such luminous verse as this could be lodged in my own guts. And even though my desire was to wind up in the guts of the vultures so that I could then take flight with them, I never got my way. Because there are no vultures here. What we do have are PRI politicians, birds of prey that wrap themselves in the Mexican flag and feast on the country’s spoils.

I repent, oh Lord, of everything I have ever said and done. Of the hopes I harbored, the dreams I dreamed, and the boys I slept with—not to mention those I didn’t sleep with, for lack of time, because the greatest sin of all is the one you don’t commit. To Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, i.e. Nero, the protector of Seneca and Petronius, a lover of grammar and rhetoric like myself, and the driving force behind a very wise tax reform, who for two thousand years has been slandered by the defaming forces of Christianity—to him I dedicate the following pages of this disjointed account of the truth.

After the week-long truce that Death had granted us, the sulfaguanidine stopped working and Darío’s diarrhea returned, this time forever—it was unending, unstoppable. Either the doctors added too much sodium to the drug or there was something in my brother that made him different from cows.

To top it all off, Darío suddenly decided, with a burst of determination, that he would never smoke marijuana again. And if he couldn’t eat because he wasn’t smoking, then died because he didn’t eat, well then let him die, because he wanted to die sober and lucid with his head completely clear.

“Whatever for, Darío? For God’s sake, are you serious—at this point? Are you going to find out now that the law of gravity is poorly expressed? Because it is, but so what, since we’re all heading headlong into the abyss anyway, in free fall, on our way to Hell. Just smoke that ciggy already. Smoke it, it’s good for you.”

And I started rolling him a vareto myself, like a clumsy novice.

This is what I was doing when news came that my sister-in-law Marta had just been killed. Marta Garzón, who performed good deeds, who gave to charity and fought for the rights of the poor in Envigado, that town of wretches and sonofabitches. Colombia the Generous, who turns up late but will always show her good side in the end, honored Marta with a bullet. The job was done by a hit man.

“When? How? Where?”

At seven o’clock in the morning, as she was heading out to take her little girl to school. By a single bullet. Just one, right here, through the right temple, with no right to appeal.

Later Manuel arrived with his two little girls from his first marriage, and he brought more news. It was about Raquelita, the younger girl, who was six years old—rough and rabid and headstrong as any Rendón, and as dynamic as a weather vane installed in someone’s ass. She had just killed a puppy.

“How on earth?” I asked indignantly.

But it was true. She had hugged the dog so tightly that she smothered him. He had been asphyxiated by love!

“If the girl’s got nothing screwy going on upstairs,” I began, diagnosing her to Manuel, “if her head’s on straight, then she’s got the makings of either a firefighter or a lesbian. But don’t worry about it, brother. If you got yourself a firefighter there, well then, great, let her put out fires. And if she turns out to be a lesbian, then all the better. We’ve already got more than enough breeding women in this country. Twenty-five million. Plus your three wives.”

I comforted my distraught interior over the death of the puppy, telling myself that he no longer had to suffer, that he had been released from the weight of existence.

“Oh, and please don’t tell Aníbal or Nora what happened, because it’ll only make them suffer,” I instructed. “Tell them that the puppy is fine, that he’s very cute and putting on weight. No need to make others suffer more than is necessary.”

“But I never tell lies, Uncle,” Raquelita piped up. “The puppy did die. And he did suffer. But he went up to heaven.”

And then that mini-sonofabitch, that little assassin and cynic, noticed that I was rolling a vareto.

“Are you going to smoke marijuana again?” she asked, and her voice had this little tone to it, this edge, that I couldn’t quite place. Maybe it was interrogation or exclamation, blackmail or reproach. Was that a hint of curiosity, or of mockery?

“Yes, Raquelita,” the man who fathered her said, lovingly. “You uncle Darío needs it so that it will make him want to eat.”

“And how come Uncle doesn’t want to eat? Why is he so ugly and so skinny now with all those awful spots on his skin? Is he going to die?”

Fortunately for us, there came a downpour just then, one of those unexpected storms that you tend to see in those parts and that come upon you suddenly, like a hit man. So quickly now, let’s take the tent and the hammock down! Lightning blew out the transformer at the corner and left us without power for two whole days after that. We couldn’t even make a cup of coffee. Though, considering that there wasn’t any coffee in the house to begin with … Even the cockroaches fell off the walls, wiped out from starvation. It was as if we had spritzed them with Flit spray, but no, this was from actual physical hunger. The poor little things fell to the floor, their spindly legs wiggling in the air, as their slimy little souls escaped from this vale of tears.

The awful spots that our little cherub mentioned were from the Kaposi sarcoma, which had invaded Darío’s body and was now invading his face.

A few minutes later, the rain stopped, and the sun began to slurp up the puddles in the garden, to drink its dirty water. The last few raindrops were dripping from the branches of the mango and the plum trees, as undecided as a tentative hen that takes one little step and then another, and then another, to get inside the house. Should I drip or should I not? Should I drip or should I not?

As I was arranging the tent sheets again and settling my brother back into the hammock, I started to think about Thales, about Anaximander and Zeno and Heraclitus and Democritus—old forgotten friends from the university humanities department of my distant youth—and to wonder about the reality of reality, and whether Darío and I were really alive or merely the mirage of a puddle. In the garden, a dense vapor rose from the paving, it was the breath of the stones. Then, as the mirage from within began to echo the mirage from without, I suddenly believed that I had grasped something that others before me also believed they had understood, in Miletus, in Elea, in Ephesus, in Abdera—like I said, millennia ago. Nothing has its own reality, everything is delirium, a chimera. The wind that blows, the rain that falls, the man who thinks. That morning in the damp garden that lay drying in the sun, I could feel, with the most absolute clarity, in its most vivid truth, the deception. As Darío lay dying, the vapor rose from the stones—vacuous, fallacious, fabricating—and in its ascent towards the deceptive sun, it denied itself, much like any thought.

But then suddenly, boom! A ripe mango fell from the tree and landed on my head. It came like a flash of lightning. Newton had it all wrong! You didn’t have to multiply the masses, each one acted on its own. And you didn’t have to divide them by the square of the distance, just by the distance itself! Or do you think gravity goes back and forth like a Ping-Pong ball? Ah, the English!

And so I started to bicker about Newton and eat my mango. With bad timing, because then Darío wanted one.

“No!” I screamed, terrified.

“And why not?” Gloria, who was visiting, asked in protest. “Why can’t the poor guy just eat a little mango? Eating that wouldn’t hurt a flea!”

“Because fleas do not have AIDS. Besides, when a flea perishes from mango-induced indigestion, you don’t hear about it in the papers. Or did you read a death notice to that effect in El Colombiano?”

And this is why the sulfaguanidine, which works so well in cows, could not help my brother. Because cows, like fleas, do not get AIDS. What fends off the cryptosporidiosis in the consorts of Taurus is a healthy immune system. The sulfaguanidine just gives them a little boost. The best medicine is the kind that you prescribe to someone who is already healthy; the best doctor is the kind who can convince a healthy man that he is sick. To get his cryptosporidiosis-induced diarrhea to stop, you would first have to restore Darío’s immune system, but in order to do this you would first have to reverse the AIDS, and to reverse the AIDS there was nothing available at the time, not even the novena for Saint Rita of Cascia. At that point in his illness, and at that point in the century, my brother could not be saved. He was more dead than the old millennium.

Manuel called home at midnight to tell Lala, his wife (his fifteenth, with whom he has two children), that he was dead. And Lala was so damn stupid that she believed him and called Gloria up in tears.

“Wah, wah, wahhhh!” the distressed widow wailed. “Manuel has died!”

Instead of bursting into tears, Gloria, who is a rational person, like myself, considered the whole matter and asked her a series of questions, like how she knew and who had informed her.

“He told me so himself!” the zombie bawled hysterically. “Called me up from the corner of Calle 80 and Avenida Colombia.”

You could hear her kicking and screaming on the other end of the line.

“I see,” Gloria answered, relieved. “If he called you, then that means he is still alive, and if he is alive, then that means he’s drunk again and probably out with some slut somewhere.”

“But with which oooone??”

“How would I know? Let’s say it’s Irma.”

“And where is he, so that I can go and find him?”

“Well, on the corner of 80th and Colombia, obviously.” And Gloria hung up.

My sister Gloria is a fantastic woman, a real fighter. Her first husband was an out-and-out drunk, a mean asshole with a saggy ass to boot. One night, she grabbed him by the collar, dragged him out onto the balcony of their penthouse, and flung him like a pair of shit-caked knickers over the railing of the seven-story building she owns (and that in a country crawling with indigents will net her millions of pesos a month). Whoosh! His little legs flailed as he fell. Yet the drunk fool survived. He’s still around somewhere, as drunk and shameless as ever, living with some other woman and producing more offspring and drinking more and more aguardiente, which is the kind of thing people do over here. This, apparently, is what they call happiness.

After the episode with the mango tree, the horror only compounded. The candidiasis caused by the immunosuppression had ulcerated Darío’s mouth and prevented him from swallowing anything, even the saline solution that I prepared for him with diluted antifungals. Emaciated, exhausted, dazed, his eyes sunken and his skin withered, he spent hours and hours in the garden, leafing through his old photo album, and talking and talking and talking and raving and mixing up stories of happier days gone by. Then at times he would suddenly grow quiet, his eyes gone vacant, lost in the void, and he’d retreat into a stupor that could last for minutes or hours on end.

But was it really the candidiasis that was causing the ulcerations? Wouldn’t a leukoplakia make more sense? Or a Kaposi sarcoma, which he clearly had, judging by the spots on his body and face. And could I really be so sure that the diarrhea was caused by cryptosporidiosis? Because it could also be from a bacterium … or a fungus … And what could be triggering those episodes of sudden dementia? An encephalitis, most likely, but caused by what? Was it from a protozoan, like Toxoplasma? Or by a virus, like the cytomegalovirus? The cytomegalovirus alone could be giving him the encephalitis, along with the ulcerations and the diarrhea. But the three evils could also very well be produced by three different pathogens. To determine what was causing what in my brother’s body, I’d first have to order him a coprological exam; after that, we’d need to do an aspiration of duodenal fluid, an endoscopic biopsy, and a lumbar puncture of his cerebrospinal fluid … Plus more and more and more, and pay and pay and pay all these sonofabitches. And all for what? If they did detect the cryptosporidium, what could they give him? Why, sulfaguanidine, of course! The trump card I had played already!

Besides, those laboratory charlatans, they’re real sly foxes. In order not to fall headlong into the abyss, to figure out what they will later put down in the chart, they begin to grope and probe, as if not entirely delighted with their task.

“Diarrhea? Night fevers? Perspiration?”

“All of that, Doctor. He’s got everything,” I said on my brother’s behalf, livid with rage. “Sweating, consumption, delirium, diarrhea, fever. Put down anything you want and that still won’t cover it.”

“Is he … high risk?” our sage inquired, with a knowing look.

“The most high, Doctor. He sleeps with slashers.”

“Ahhh,” he said.

And now the truth of my brother’s ailment began to dawn on our Sherlock Holmes. After making us wait for a week, “which is the time we need for the culture,” but without cultivating a single sample or having so much as seen a protozoan in his entire fucking life, he came back with the test results: Cryptosporidium parvum. And who could really argue with these people since that’s probably what it was?

“Okay, then show me the culture,” I demanded of one of them once. Oh how could I even ask such a thing, how could I expect him to keep something so dangerous inside his lab? The very idea! He had already had the sample destroyed.

Anguished, desperate, not knowing what to do, and trying to clear my head and remain calm as Darío grew further lost in the void, I started going over the list of his possible ailments: histoplasmosis, toxoplasmosis, cryptosporidiosis, cryptococcosis, coccidioidomycosis, blastomycosis, aspergillosis, encephalitis, candidiasis, isosporiasis, leukoplakia … Any of the above, or a combination thereof, or all of them together, plus the bacteria and the viruses and the Kaposi’s sarcoma. The only thing one could say, with any degree of certainty, was that in that imposing medicopathogeniclinical edifice that my brother had become, the foundations contained a case of AIDS. Which would be like explaining away all the mysteries of the Universe by saying that there is a God. And then sending that God to the Devil, to fucking Hell. Or like giving antiparasitics to a dying man or antimycotics to a stone. Which, in turn, was like aiming at a bird with a shotgun, in the dark.

Listening now to the silence before an empty wall, I watch as wisps of smoke drift up to the ceiling from the incense sticks that I’ve been burning somewhat obsessively these past few months, as a way to evoke Darío. I spend hours watching them burn, chasing after their smoke rings in search of his memory. At first I didn’t understand the reason for my obsession. But one day, I finally made the connection between different smoke smells and figured it out. It was because the incense sticks reminded me of the ones that my brother used to burn in his apartment. They were made from a fragrant wood that he used to bring back from the Amazon. Its name was … oh what was it?

“What was it called, Darío?”

“Palo Santo.”

“That’s right, Palo Santo. I’d forgotten.”

Marijuana butts scattered all over the floor, dusty boxes of books piled up in every corner, a canvas hammock in tatters, empty bottles of aguardiente, rickety chairs, broken lamps … From across those stretches of time, and from among the marijuana butts and the dusty boxes and the empty bottles and the rickety chairs and the tattered hammock and the broken lamps, comes the staggering presence of my brother, emerging from the smoke in that insane apartment of his in Bogotá, while his Palo Santo sticks go on burning.

“What do you burn them for?”

“To aromatize the environment.”

Nonsense, they weren’t there to aromatize anything. It was to keep keep him company in the midst of his solitude and to continue burning quietly even as his own life was consumed. Something as subtle as a plume of smoke had arisen to bring us together, in defiance of time. The red tip of an incense stick will begin to glow in the dark, and immediately my brother is brought back to life, by the magic of Aladdin’s lamp.

The nurse had already disinfected his arm with alcohol and filled the syringe with amphotericin, and she was preparing to inject it into his vein.

“Miss,” I warned. “Don’t prick yourself with that needle, because what my brother has is AIDS.”

She turned pale, pale, pale, like the Death of Horace, the pallida Mors.

“Thank you for letting me know,” she said.

“It’s no trouble at all.”

I don’t know how people can be so ashamed of their illnesses but never of their own mothers. Humanity is weird. People say that for mothers we only get one, but there are more than three billion of them! One mother will do just as well as another, end of story. Up or down, forwards or backwards, it’s all one and the same shit.

In the event that Darío had cryptococcosis, I gave him fluconazole; in the event that he had histoplasmosis, I gave him itraconazole; and in the event that he had pneumonia, I gave him trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole. And if it turned out that he didn’t have cryptococcosis or histoplasmosis or pneumonia, then what the hell—what doesn’t kill you makes you fatter. If Darío was only going to get killed by the doctors or the sonofabitch AIDS anyway, then why didn’t I just kill him myself? In short, I was the only one who was grieving.

On this point, I merely defer to the facts. A week before I arrived from Mexico to take care of him, they all went on holiday to the Caribbean coast, leaving him in the hands of the Crazy Bitch. If he died, well, then let him die, he had done a lot of shit to them while he was alive. Were they going to give up a holiday to the coast for the sake of a person dying of AIDS? Go on then. Solidarity? Maybe. But not stupidity. From up in my gallery, I can assure all of Colombia that we had always been a united family. An exemplary one.

He got up with difficulty from the hammock and, by placing one foot in front of the other, he managed to hobble over to the stairs, which he went up slowly, testing each of the steps.

“Let me help you,” I said, taking him by the arm.

“No,” he said. “I’m fine.”

A fine mess, I thought. And completely in the damn bitch’s grip already.

Then, crossing the length of my bedroom, the poor guy went over to his own room, and then to his bathroom, and after taking off his clothes in there, he weighed himself naked on the scale.

“How much?” he asked, because the toxoplasmosis had inflamed his retina and he could no longer see well.

“Fifty kilos.”

After that, it became forty-nine … forty-eight … forty-seven … He wrote down all the weights with a pen on one of the walls.

Measuring what was left of my brother against the cold truth of that bathroom scale, I reached a very interesting conclusion about physics. With every passing day, Death weighs less and less and less. Until, well—there’s a threshold for everything. The same way that, after a certain temperature, any fraction of a degree difference can make a solid turn into a liquid, or a liquid into a gas. In one ten-thousandth of a second, our poor life, which is the most optimistic term we have for Death, can be turned into nothing. To be alive, my friend, means to die bit by bit, with or without the aguardiente.

The amphotericin proved to be useless. Also useless were the fluconazole, the itraconazole, and the trimethoprim sulfamethoxazole. Nothing helped my brother. Included in that nothing was a visitor who showed up one morning to comfort him, a young little priest who seemed to have fallen from the sky like pigeon shit. And I say it because of what you’re about to see. Various epidemiologists in the city had told my brother-in-law Luis Alfonso, who had then told me, that in countless other houses just like ours, countless patients like my brother were all dying of the same thing, of that shameful disease that no one dared to mention. And that there was this one case, in the neighborhood of Boston (my own, alas, the one where I was born under an uncertain sky), where a young and infected high-risk priest had locked himself up to die as soon as he got the diagnosis, feeling repentant and ashamed and wishing to hide from his neighbors. He came down with pneumonia after breathing in some of the excrement of the pigeons that came to coo in the patio, and this is what finally did him in.

“Father,” I asked, after repeating this story to the one who had come to comfort Darío. “Isn’t it possible that your colleague might have inhaled, alongside everything else, a few particles of shit from the Holy Spirit?”

No sooner had the little comforting priest taken his leave (ah, but he was all softness, all sweetness, all Jesuit deviousness), I had a prickly argument with my brother, because by this point I considered it an insult to his intelligence to let ourselves be screwed over by such a trickster, who had an ass for a face, or maybe a face like Pope Paul VI.

“To the devil with these doomy hypocrites! Here’s to not letting any more of them ever come into this house again.”

At that moment, I found out that the year before, as Papi lay dying and in a moment when my back was turned, the Crazy Bitch had called for one of these cassocked raptors to come and administer the sacrament of extreme unction.

“What the hell did Papi need extreme unction for? If, after fifty years of marriage-slash-hell, that poor victim hadn’t paid his dues to Purgatory while he was still alive, then I don’t know what else he needed to do.”

As for the terrible priest-slayer in me—a rabid descendant of the Radical Liberals of nineteenth-century Colombia (think Vargas Vila and Diógenes Arrieta), plus the French Revolution and the Marquis de Sade and Ernest Renan and Voltaire (that godless sectarian and impious heretic, that atheist and apostate and blaspheming Jacobin)—that day he went into a fit of holy rage that nearly killed him. He survived, because it had been inscribed in the book of fate that he was destined to write the present one. So here you have me, looking to see how to land on that magical combination of words that will result in my final short-circuiting, at the end of the world. Full stop, new paragraph, miss. And don’t you go italicizing anything, you know how much I hate that. And by the way, that thing about the “high-risk” priest from over in Boston, how did you enter it back there, just as is, or in quotation marks?”

“In quotation marks.”

“You idiot, get rid of them! You’re either high risk or you’re nothing. And that’s it, end of story.”

Then I returned quickly to my room in that distant house-or-asylum in Laureles, and once again, I saw my Lady Death, observing me with lustful curiosity from the ceiling, which was watermarked from various rain leaks.

“I love you,” she said to me, in English.

“Do you mean it, mommy dearest?”

She nodded and said no more. And yet, after all these years, I can still hear the echo of her hollow, reliquary voice, so calm and so muted, with its soft, velvety tones and then those harsh screeches like the roar of a jack plane. An ineffable voice, but one that reminds me of—Wait now, let me see—hold on a sec there, Alzheimer’s, damn it, whose voice was it—Hitler’s? No … Churchill’s? No … The fucking Pope’s? No … It was Xóchitl’s! Yes, I’m talking about Queen Xóchitl, the queen of queens, the most magnificent trannie I have ever met: Gustavo Something-Something in the civil register and a lion of industry, by day, in the service of the highest-ranking officials of the PRI, for whom he obtained the best whores. He was burly, meaty, greasy, like your standard-issue taco vendor. Pretty ignoble and vile all around, though a job’s a job. But then, what a transformation! At night, Gustavo transformed into Queen Xóchitl, the queen of queens, a giant block the size of Lady Liberty, who dressed in full-length gowns just like her (by turns hope-green or bridal white or mournful black) and to whom a court of other trannies came to pay homage from the four vast corners of Mexico, from Bajío and the Anáhuac Valley and the Lagunera region and the Yucatán Peninsula. I have never met her equal. Xóchitl was the loveliest, because she was the most awful of them all. She died of a stroke, sated with power and sex. The moment she snapped her fingers, five splendid boys (whom I’d love to have had for myself) would come rushing over to serve her. Anyway, as I was saying, while she was still alive, she had a voice like the Grim Reaper—spare and concise, so as not to put her foot in her mouth.

But let me go back a few pages now so that we can move on. Back to the Alto de Minas, which cloaks me in its mists. This is how I proceed, by building on what has already been written, on what has already been lived. Man is nothing but a miserable web of memories, which are what guide his steps. And my apologies for the abuse of speaking on your behalf, because when I so smugly wrote man just now, I humbly should have said myself. My future is in the hands of my past, which dictates it, and in the hands of chance, which is blind. Playing the harpsichord, Bach said, is very easy. You just have to hit the right note at the right time and with the right intensity.

Plunged into the sea of mists atop that cloud-crowned mountaintop, the headlights of the Studebaker bored through the night, scaring away the ghosts. Below us, in the darkness, Colombia opened up in its immensity, and though we could not see her we could feel the pulse, the safe and warm and cozy pulse of her beating heart. Safe even unto the inevitable moment of our death, that’s my guess.

We pulled up to the highest point of a little deserted street and got out of the Studebaker. The aguardiente was making the rounds from one young man to another, mouth to mouth. When we finished the bottle, Darío hurled it against a rockface, where it smashed into smithereens, the same way that our hypocritical morality had shattered so long ago.

“Women,” I said to my brother, “they’re all laying hens. And whether they’re pretty or not (it doesn’t really matter, when the need arises any one of them will do), it’s the young men who are the loveliest part of the excursion. Lovelier than Mozart, lovelier than Gluck. Open your eyes, and don’t let them close, because no one can see with their eyes shut.”

My thesis statement is this: between the presidents and the popes and every other rascal of their ilk, whether elected by conclave or not, they are all guiding humanity like it’s a blindfolded mule, ever closer to the abyss.

“Come on, stupid mule, giddy up, you blind little neddy! Just one more step, you’re just about to fall in.”

In fact, the mule is already falling, and has been falling for some time now. The problem is that the creature won’t stop falling. We are a stubborn dying species that insists that it won’t die.

Very well then, in the midst of these young men with their long-forgotten faces erased by time, and up on that mountaintop on that very dark night, Darío was closer to me than ever before. That which the Crazy Bitch had torn asunder, life itself had joined together. All the disputes and dissents of childhood lay behind us forever, while ahead of us beckoned something broad and vast and immense, a panorama of splendid miseries.

From time to time, I still get visits from the rats of the Admiral Jet, where my brother once worked as the super. And I don’t mean different rats. Not the daughters of the daughters of the daughters of the ones we encountered in the basement. I mean the very same ones, preserved from Death and oblivion by virtue of my own memory.

“Hello, ladies, here I am! In another country and in another time, defying time itself. I’m more fucked up than usual and am now an old man, but loving you as much as ever. I have never betrayed the ones I love.”

Lying on the cold cement floor, I let the darkness wash over me. And immediately, converging in that blind cellar, in the heart of the Earth, my little sisters begin to emerge from their humble sinkholes in the subsoil. The rats, coming out to sniff me, to lick me with their moist little tongues—and in the waft of their slow little breaths I can feel the gift of their souls. We love each other, whether it pleases the Pope or not. May this Polish trannie and all his henchmen from Opus Dei and the Society of Jesus be welcomed by Our Lord Satan into his boiling cauldron, and without delay. Or did you think that this idiot Devil was going to let such an international gang of mobsters get off so easy? If there is a God, then there’s also got to be a Devil to charge the dirty accounts of this world and, while he’s at it, to audit the Vatican banks on our behalf, to see just how Catholic they really are. God does exist, but He is busy colluding with every white-collar crook on the planet. The old Bastard is like any Colombian president: an accessory to the crime, a shameless and despicable fool. Or you could say that He is like Luxembourg, like Liechtenstein or the Cayman Islands or Switzerland. A tax haven for money laundering. Here below, in this unfortunate vale of tears, we will always suffer from ecumenicalism and globalization and corruption and impunity and bribery, so long as He exists. The only one who can defeat the Four Horses of the Apocalypse is the Devil himself.

Outside now it is snowing, and the little snowflakes are drifting in their silent softness over the Upper West Side, onto the gloomy street where Darío and I live. The residents of the Admiral Jet are Blacks and Puerto Ricans, all of them coddled by Social Security payments and egged on by the Democratic Party. At night they settle onto the porch to drink their beer and smoke, though later on they will retreat to the dingy sadness of their respective hovels to shoot up heroin. When I come up from the basement onto the sidewalk, the snow is scattering them from their posts and making them go inside.

“Hey, super!” the Black men say, confusing me with my brother.

“How many toilets did you clog up today, you fucking sonofabitches?” I tell them in Spanish, with an enormous smile on my face, while they of course think that I’m calling them very handsome fellows.

They smile back from the black depths of their black little souls and go into the building, doing me the favor of clearing the entryway of their human refuse. Tonight my most fervent wish is for this entire dilapidated cardboard box to go up in flames, complete with its human trash inside. Just as soon as the snow lets up, so that there won’t be anything around to douse the fire. Let the building burn, along with all the fornicators inside its walls. Odio, ergo sum? No. Hatred in me is erased by love. I love animals. Dogs, horses, cows, the rats. The cold sheen of serpents when I touch them always warms my soul. In terms of those who call themselves “rational” beings—white people, Black people, green people, yellow. Hell, that right there is already another matter, let’s just leave it at that.

Darío never understood my love for animals. He didn’t have the time. His competing devotions got in the way. The young men, the aguardiente, the basuco, the marijuana. Even one of those on its own would be enough for a lifetime. This, spoken by someone who has tried all four of them and left them behind in favor of this love that I’ve been talking about. And let me be clear, as we wrap up this awful matter, which the muddled demagogues will chalk up to “racism,” that I do not hate the heroin-addled Black people of New York City for being Black or for their heroin habit or for being from New York. No, I hate them for being human. Creatures like that have no right to exist. Or, at least, they have no right to continue being supported by Social Security, while we Colombians, by virtue of the generous Colombian nation that expelled us, have to go around cleaning all the toilets of that aforementioned excrement of a city. That’s a full stop, miss, and remember that Christ died for telling the truth, so don’t you be going around removing a single word from this paragraph.

While struggling to break free from the viscous gloom of her blind uterus (that site where the gestation of all human misfortune takes place), it’s a wonder that the great incompatibility of our temperaments didn’t cause the Crazy Bitch to go into anaphylactic shock. I finally came out, into the sun, into the fresh air, into the world, and I arrived at the house on Calle del Perú, that future asylum, where they welcomed me like a king. A king without a kingdom. I was the first of a score-and-something scions that this pig-headed woman gave birth to, we the innocent victims of an unbridled reproductive mania that was without rhyme or reason, without reason or end, by virtue of which we would have to occupy, in strict turn, the same muddy, slimy, mucky black hole, that hollow vial-shaped offal, that scum of the quagmire. Darío was the second of these, he was my first sibling. There is a photo of the two of us, as children, that was taken by my uncle Argemiro. Darío, with his blond curls and wearing a coat; me, in a striped shirt, with straight hair falling across my forehead, hugging him. At that time, Argemiro fancied himself a photographer. Later, he started manufacturing toy houses and, as one would expect from his witless lineage, he became a breeding machine in his own right. His wife had children by the twos and threes and fours and fives … For years, he had played the lottery and won, but in offspring.

Years of rain have fallen on that photograph, and now my brother is dying. We were brothers, not by virtue of sharing the crazy genes of the same crazy bitch, but by virtue of having shared in the pain of living. The best thing that could happen to him was to die. The best thing that could happen to me was for him to go on living. I couldn’t imagine the possibility of living without him.

When the sulfaguanidine failed and the diarrhea started up again, I went with my sister-in-law Nora to a veterinary pharmacy and bought some amprolium, a drug used to treat cholera in poultry. This I administered one teaspoon at a time, diluting it for him in a glass of water.

“Boiled water?”

“Yes, doctor,” I said. “Boiled, but not holy. The water you find in church fonts may be blessed, but it’s teeming with all the germs that ever were and with all that will ever be. May God free us and defend us from it. There is no blessing in a bishop’s arsenal that could kill a microbe.”

That first dose of amprolium was all I ever managed to give him. It worked like gasoline sprayed on a fire. His diarrhea only worsened, and his exhaustion got to the point where he could no longer get out of bed, not even to go to the toilet. Nothing to be done. Darío was dying, and it was hopeless.

My impotence before the horrors of the inside was only compounded by my impotence before the horrors of the outside. The world, in the hands of all those delinquent vaginas, determined to give birth and give birth and give birth, disrupting the peace of matter itself and filling the entrance, the hallway, the bedrooms, the living room, the kitchen, the dining room, the patios, crowding them all with children, by the millions, by the billions, by the trillions. Ah, and then, you know, there’s the idea that if women don’t have any, then they can’t fulfill themselves as women! Why don’t they compose an opera, instead, and fulfill themselves as composers? Bloated with raw animality, stuffed with their own blind wantonness, they go on inflating for nine months, looking like misshapen balloons that fail to take off, to take flight. And so, stranded by the force of gravity, gravid and heavy with child, they go out into the street, in broad daylight, to waddle around like barrels atop two legs. Maybe they’ll pause by a flowering hedge. A blackbird is warbling, a mockingbird is soaring, a botfly zings by. They say that this is what life is, and happiness, and bliss. A bird eating a worm. Then, as if the supreme crime were in fact the supreme virtue, they glance down into the void with their enigmatic little smiles, with their faces like the fucking Mona Lisa. Oh those cynical cows, those mad and filthy cows! Those rotund and depraved and degenerate assholes! Let me pull a revolver away from my head and shoot at those fucking bellies until they all deflate completely.

I came, I went, going up, going down, from Darío’s room into the kitchen, from the kitchen into the laundry room, from the laundry room out to the clothesline, to make him some tea with lemon that he couldn’t drink, and the saline solution same thing, and to put the dirty bedsheets into the washing machine, to later hang them out to dry, by the raging light of the sun or the demented light of the moon, on the clothesline. The same thing that Papi had done for years: to wash, with the patience of a Benedictine monk and the humility of a Franciscan one, all the dirty laundry in the house. And meanwhile, there’s our magnanimous Pope, who has frittered away his pontificate in canonizing all and sundry and leaving sainthood about as devalued as the Colombian peso, which is worth nothing but dust and shit—and nobody has yet become a saint! What is he waiting for? Didn’t he just canonize like three hundred Mexicans with a single stroke of his pen? All in a flash, signed sealed, and sainted. Makes sense! In Mexico City, the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe alone produces more dough than all of Colombia combined. That’s why today, in terms of saints, we are where we are. Poor, miserable, bedraggled. Listen up, Colombians. Either they beatify a bunch of us soon or else we’re not giving a single cent more to that Church! We’ll cut off the supply of alms to these beggars.

And once again down the stairs to the kitchen I went, to bring the sick man another lemon tea, which he couldn’t swallow anyway on account of the ulcerations in his throat, and to find that the bedsheets that had just been changed were soiled already. Then I went over to the closet of the large bedroom where Crazy Jesus slept, in search of fresh linens. And so it went, back and forth, up and down, and I found myself cursing that damned little staircase from the very depths of my soul.

On my last day in that house, the Crazy Bitch woke up sulking and in a bad mood, as if she had just had a nightmare about herself. As she emerged from her bedroom and made her way to the library, she started speaking—to the air, to the walls, so that any one of them might obey.

“Oh hell! Isn’t there a single person here who can bring me a goddamn cup of coffee?”

As if this female tetrapod didn’t have feet and hands of her own to go and get it herself. Two feet with five toes apiece, and two hands with just as many fingers. Toes and fingers she had aplenty, and in the proper quantity stipulated by our wise Mother Nature since the dawning of the Paleozoic era. What was missing was a screw from her head. The inevitable Rendón screw. And I say inevitable the way you might say dark sun, that is, as an oxymoron, because it’s not that they have the screw to begin with, it’s that they don’t. That is why the Rendóns cannot go up and down the stairs. But they do drink coffee.

“Still waiting for my coffee, damn it,” said the crabby one. “And add some milk!”

I wasn’t going to do it, of course. I’m the wall that doesn’t have ears, that has never heard a thing. And so I went to take a shower in the large bathroom, which had an electric heater. But as I was standing under the stream of water, suddenly, just like that, the power went out and the heater shut off. I had to finish bathing under cold water. But as soon as I got out of the shower, the lights came back on. Then I spotted Crazy Jesus coming out of the garage, which is where the fuse box was, and I immediately understood what had happened. He had turned the electric switches off so that I’d have to bathe in cold water. Here we were with Darío about to die, and the only thing that this miserable sonofarendón could do was to annoy me by shutting off the heater. The sheer pettiness of his soul, of his Rendonesque infantilism, made me laugh so hard that I decided then and there to dispatch him to the other side with a blow to the forehead. For this I would need a rod that I’d seen in the crockery closet. The blow would be calculated, brotherly, affectionate. Not so hard as to stain the floor with the labyrinth of brains that harbored his crazy grudges, but not so soft, either, that it turned the victim into a vegetable that we would then have to look after for life, feeding him through a tube and cleaning his ass with warm sitz baths and all that. A huge burden, to be saddled with something like that. A real encarto, as we say in this highly expressive country of ours. No. Not too hard and too soft. Just a matter of hitting the right note at the right time and with the right intensity, which is how I have always approached my harpsichord playing. So I went back to the big bathroom, where I shaved and brushed my hair, then right away, with unstoppable determination, I went down to the closet to look for the rod. There it was, in its corner, waiting for me with its adamant iron hardness. I took hold of the thing and brandished it like a machete.

“What are you going to do?” Death said, sounding fearful.

“Nothing, sweetheart, just wait and see.”

Then, possessed with all the madness of a mad Colombia, the madness of all the mad Rendóns dredged up from the dawn of our mad species, when in a rapture of the most humane humanity, a luminous Cain had murdered a dumb-as-fuck Abel, I raced off in search of him. Nulla! Niente! Sparito! Upstairs, downstairs, no sign of him anywhere. The bastard had evaporated, like pure vapors of turpentine.

“Where’s Crazy Jesus?” I demanded, hell-bent.

“He went out,” the Crazy Bitch answered from above, as if nothing had ever happened between her and me.

I stopped dead in my tracks. How did she even know whom I was talking about? How did she guess that I was looking for her youngest, for that invasive spawn who had put so much strain on her rickety uterus that he had to miscarry his way out? Had our resident lunatic gained the power to read the thoughts of others, like some nineteenth-century novelist? Was she as bonkers as old Balzac?

I had been busy shaving and searching the crockery closet for the rod, and that is when the motherfucker had slipped out. This explains why my conscience carries the weight of only two dead people—a very pretty little gringo I once crossed paths with, in Spain, and a certain concierge in Paris. (It adds a nice touch of Christian charity to my novel The Roads to Rome.)

Years later, I can sit in the present, with a cooler head on my shoulders, and wonder at how the Crazy Bitch managed to stir up such a roiling mother lode of rage in moments like that. I thought of Papi turning into her servant, and realized that I had come this close to becoming one for Death myself. Twice already, I had done her dirty work, and now Our Lady Laziness had the nerve to ask for more.

That night, I welcomed back les musiciens, those mosquitoes of insomnia that came to buzz above the narrow toy bed that mad Argemiro had made for me. In the next room, a delirious Darío was mumbling in his sleep with one of his basuqueritos from the streets of Bogotá. To drown him out, I took out my mental ledgers and began to assess our state of ruin. All things considered, this whole thing was a sinister mirage, a crude tall tale of liquidated dreams—one that was coming to an end, at least—in a business that was falling to pieces in the midst of broken shadows. I rose, disembodied, and went up to the roof. There, peering down into the darkness like a little barn owl with my big owl eyes, I saw that poor guy on my narrow toy bed, swirling down the drain of the sea of time. The guy got up and took a few steps towards an empty armchair, the same one that his grandmother had used during those final years when she sat around waiting for Death to come. And so the night unraveled like this, in a series of discrete moments. Each one carried the weight of the ages.

Stalking in ever tighter concentric circles, in corkscrews, the vultures are beginning their descent from the sky, from the good Lord’s cerulean roof, over Playa del Carmen, the Mexican beach that has become all the rage. Whom have they spotted now who is about to die? Why, it’s my friend R.M., whose name I keep to myself out of that code of discretion that characterizes the dead when we speak of others dearly departed—a very distinguished sort, a knight of the Holy Sepulcher and an ambassador to the Holy See, who, having transformed overnight into an ambulant cadaver due to that disease that cannot be named, had decided to leave Rome and return to Mexico to die, though not before going out to enjoy life for a bit on the aforementioned beach. That is where the vultures spotted him—a wake of Mexican vultures, that is, his fellow true believers in our PRIposterous government, descending, as I said, in that concentric flight, until they were level with him and began to hunt him, to salivate in eager anticipation of the banquet that lay in store, venturing happy little hops along the sands and the rocks of the beach. Vultures are like that, they know who is about to die. Like priests or like doctors, they can sniff out death inside the living. Whenever the boldest vultures got too close to R.M. and flitted in front of his face, my poor friend liked to shoo them away with his Panama hat.

That night happened to be my last. Early the next morning, I left the house for good. I left Medellín for good—and Antioquia and Colombia, and also this life. Well, not this life. That final part didn’t happen until later, when my brother Carlos called me in Mexico to let me know that they had sped up Darío’s death when he began to suffocate, because he couldn’t take it anymore and had been begging them to let him die. At that very moment, with the phone receiver still in my hand, I was the one who died. This fact alone makes Colombia one lucky country, because now it can boast of having a unique author, one who can go on writing even after his own demise.

So I died without ever hanging up the phone. Now, from my corner of this black void, where I hope to spend the rest of eternity observing the cares of the world and poking fun at all its foibles, I am curious to know how much the phone company actually billed Carlos because I didn’t hang up. Was the call disconnected automatically? Are these things even possible in the realm of the living? Who knows anymore. I don’t even care.

At five the next morning, I woke up and got dressed, then packed my things and called for a taxi to take me to the airport. I was leaving without seeing Darío, without saying a final goodbye. A God-be-with-you. Though what God would that be, you idiot. God does not exist. Why would that ancient Sonofabitch even bother to exist?

As I opened the front door, I noticed that someone had left it unlocked. But how? An unlocked door all night long in the heart of Colombia. Were they crazy? Of course they were, with Papi no longer around. They had been crazy ever since losing their guardorderlymaid who cooked and cleaned and washed the dishes and did the laundry and who every night before bed, without fail, checked to make sure they had turned off the stove burners and double-bolted the front door … How innocent you were, Papi, how naive. As if our countrymen had any trouble opening a door merely because it was double-or triple-bolted. Here, if they want to open your door and it won’t budge, they just hurl a bomb at it. And if they want to kill you and you don’t come out, they set the whole damn place on fire. A fire can coax out the most reluctant dweller, who comes out because he must, dragging his scorched ass behind him into the crisp Colombian air.

Now, at the risk of being turned into a pillar of salt, I glanced back as I was heading out and saw the Crazy Bitch standing at the top of the staircase, watching my departure. I walked out, and as I closed the door of my former home behind me, a pale sun rose up over the mountains and the taxi pulled up to the curb. The radio was blaring. We loaded my suitcase and were on our way.

“Sir,” I said to the driver. “I’ll pay you double the fare if you turn that damn radio off.”

Our villain complied.

The rain started coming down as we began our ascent along the steep Rionegro road. A thick, forbidding rain that blotted out the landscape. What this means is that the last time I would ever see Antioquia had really been on the day of my arrival, several weeks before, while descending into Medellín from the airport along that same road. Who would have guessed it? Who could have known?

Darío’s dying wish had been for me to make peace with the Crazy Bitch and Crazy Jesus, and to forgive whatever needed forgiving. But how, I asked indignantly. Since when do the dead make any decisions for the living? Was there a clause to that effect in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? The dying should die and just leave the rest of us alone. After all, I pointed out, had he ever paid any attention to me? Not that I could recall.

“No,” I told him, as firm in my refusal as the Earth itself.

As the taxi drove along the Rionegro road, taking me farther and farther away from Darío, I pictured my brother the way I had found him when I returned, lying in his makeshift tent, and waiting for the horror of Death to come and rescue him from the horror of living. Murky images of him kept floating up from the waterlogged mess of my memory.

At the entrance to San Pedro, the cemetery in downtown Medellín, there is a marble pedestal where the Angel of Silence stands guard. The angel’s index finger is raised to his lips as if to remind us that we are the vassals of Death and may only enter her kingdom if we grow quiet. All ye denizens of Death, it says, be silent. You have crossed over into the darkness of her realm.

Death? But what sort of an idea is Death, anyway? Brainless sentinel. I’ll have you know that, back when I was alive, Death always ran errands for me. And if you were thinking of having me buried in those hallowed grounds, where so many of my illustrious compatriots now lie rotting, you should know that this is impossible, because they have already cremated my body in Mexico, and you have no idea what a fortune that cost me in government bribes alone.

The tires of the taxi slid through deep puddles, so that fans of water trailed behind us, and I knew already that I would never return, that this had been my final homecoming.

Like a dog pissing at the corner to mark his presence, the Crazy Bitch had spent her entire life giving birth. Her progeny emerged from her entrails, from the darkest depths of her, which is like Hell itself—each of us marked with the indelible genes of the Rendón clan. I say indelible, because as far as I know, for all of humanity’s so-called progress, we still have not come up with a way to delete our genes. For now, at least, I can take a pair of scissors and cut her out of my photo album, from the daguerreotypes or wherever it is she turns up: in pictures of baptisms, First Communions, weddings, burials. She was everywhere, as prolific as God the Father or even Balzac himself. At baptisms, she wanted to be the one being baptized; at First Communions, the communicant; at weddings, the bride; and at funerals, the deceased! All that I am left with now is an album full of mutilated photographs, a real massacre of sheared memories.

Raging currents were coursing down the mountainside and emptying into the road. A roaring, motherfucking wind drove the rain against us like a barrage of glassy beads. Thac-tuc, thac-tuc, thac-tuc, thac-tuc went the plumes of water rushing from the windshield wipers. I wondered what had become of our Vatican capo, of that fraudster Wojtyła, that saintly whited sepulcher and Polish trannie, whom I have yet to spot here now, singing in these azure heights among the cherubic orders of God’s elect. Did he die in the end? If he is dead, then he must be in the darkest circle of Hell.

Now you couldn’t even make out a palm tree. From one bend in the road to the next, we felt ourselves ascending against the currents of an impromptu river. The rain, like a heavy liturgy, fell against the taxi, against the capota—what is this, you ask?—that’s the term we always used for the roof of our father’s car when we were little. Yet everything changes, everything runs out, everything ends, until even our languages, our words, must pass away.

Good that they found some rest!

This was the Crazy Bitch’s go-to phrase whenever she heard of someone’s death. Why then had she brought such a torrent of offspring into this world? Why yank them out of the peace of that other world, from the imperturbability of non-time, that is also called eternity? Just so that they could revolve with our stupid planet for three hundred sixty-five days a year, and year after year, until it brought them back to their point of origin, to their mother—herself lying exhausted and exasperated, her own machinery broken—only to be consumed by fire and worms? She should have left them alone, and enough already.

On the road, we were approaching an esplanade. Llano Grande, I thought. The taxi tires sloshed through more puddles and the droning rain continued its plainsong. Then the phone rang, and I answered. It was Carlos, calling to say that Darío had just died. And that is when I knew that any remaining ties to the living had now been cut. The car kept on drifting and drifting and drifting, leaving everything further behind, a forgotten past, a wasted life, a country in pieces, a world gone mad, driving through zero visibility, with nothing ahead of us and nothing behind us and nothing beside us, all towards nothingness, towards senselessness, along that invisible landscape and the sobbing of that thing that we call the soul, the heart—the sobs of that heavy rainfall.