They met in Bogotá, where he had been taking steps through his lawyers to recover the ownership of the auto repair shops — they had put Arnulfo in prison too, but only for three years — and put them on sale. His idea was to take her to the Charleston, and he had called ahead to book a room, but as they were driving along the beltway, coming back from the center, two Silverados blocked the road and opened fire. The escort from the Public Prosecutor’s Office took shelter behind the wall of a building and returned fire. The shootout lasted twenty minutes. Ramón threw himself down on the floor of the car and did not move, because he knew it was armored. When they lifted him out he had a wound in the shoulder, as he had lowered the window a little and had been shot through it. Soraya, on the other hand, was sitting there, bleeding profusely. They changed cars and raced to the Hospital San Ignacio, but she was dead by the time they arrived. She had two bullet wounds in the head and one in the neck. The first shot may well have killed her. That was what the doctors told him. They also told him she was pregnant.
He did not feel like crying, or rather, no tears came, even though he was sad. When you came down to it, they had all been victims.
After he recovered, he had no desire to stay in Bogotá, so he went straight from the hospital to the airport. As the plane taxied to the runway to take off he felt that he was moving away from hell and death, and he said to himself, could they have located me in Panama? It was possible, but it did not worry him. Revenge had been the most important thing in his life; that had been his only reason for living in the last few years, and now it was over, with Soraya dead — even though that had not been his intention — and the others punished. What did it matter if they shot him down now on some street corner? He had accomplished his mission and could leave without remorse, as if he was saying goodbye to a country that had kicked him out, forever, because he also knew that he would never return.
3. THE GARDEN OF RARE FLOWERS (AS TOLD BY SABINA VEDOVELLI)
The life story I am about to relate is a harsh and sometimes even macabre one, so I hope there are no young people in the room. There are situations that the inexperienced or the innocent may find disturbing. I’m not sure of the conference’s policy on this, and I shall certainly go ahead and tell my story anyway, but it might be a good idea to check at the entrance that all members of the audience are of legal age, at least for today. That’s my feeling at least, but of course it’s also possible, indeed quite likely, that these young people may simply find my story highly amusing. The world has changed a great deal and even the most atrocious things don’t seem to bother anybody. They may bother me, but then I’m from another era. Before tackling my life, with a wealth of detail and quite a few surprises, I should like to put paid to an idea I know many of you may have in your minds, which is that, due to the nature of the films I make, I’m nothing but a whore. You must disabuse yourselves of that, my friends, and I’ll tell you why. Sex on the set is a very distinct thing, because for all those involved in it, it’s a paid job. Simple as that. In the best spirit of capitalism, it’s all done for a third party who isn’t there, like a person who cooks delicious dishes for others, or who writes passionate verses for anonymous readers — who will usually reject them — or even the person who invents mortars and grenades that will kill and maim people he can’t see, or even imagine, but which will be real enough when the moment comes. My poet friends may not like to hear this. They’ll say it’s a far-fetched comparison, but then everything that I, Sabina Vedovelli, do is and has always been far-fetched.
I know there are many rumors about me, but what nobody knows is that I myself am the source of them, since they make me seem larger than life, and the idiots who repeat them, thinking they’re hurting me with their vulgar comments, are merely inflating the sails of my ego, pushing the boat that little bit farther out. “When they fly I am the wings,” as Brahma says in that poem by Emerson. The result is that they keep talking about me. They can’t stop talking about me. And that makes me very happy.
But let’s get to the story. I wasn’t always this woman who so many men today would like to have in their beds and who as she walks earns a string of lustful glances and throats being cleared and husbands scolded by their wives. I wasn’t always what I am. I was once a young girl and men scared me. That’s true. They scared me because they were as strange to me as bulls or scorpions, seeing as how I grew up among women, being an only child brought up by my mother and two aunts, all three of them abandoned by feckless men, who had moved from Naples to Rome and settled in a first-floor apartment on Via dei Monti di Creta, on the outskirts of the city, a long way from the center, next to a garden of pine trees called the Pineta Sachetti, where I used to play as a girl, until my mother met a short, stout man who spoke with a strange accent, and we went to Mexico City to live with him, and that’s why, when I speak Spanish, people think I’m Mexican.
We lived in an apartment on Calle Ámsterdam, near the Parque Independencia, and I attended the Sor Juana high school. By the time I finished school, I was a demure young lady, and that was how I stayed, oh yes, I didn’t change until later, in another country, France no less, the land where the storks come from, the land of love, but also the land of the most revolting vice and licentiousness. I should point out that my mother left me to my own devices during vacations, she would give me money and airline tickets to wherever I liked, so as to leave herself free to have a great time in Veracruz or Acapulco with her lover, who was half businessman and half drug trafficker, from what I discovered later, although more the second of those than the first, so I went traveling around the world, almost always with the daughter of one of my aunts from Rome, my cousin Giorgetta, who was crazier than I was and did everything before I did.
When I was eighteen and she was nineteen we went together to Paris, the city of vice and depravity. On the second day, through friends of Giorgetta, we ended up at a party thrown by a group of immigrants in Belleville, a party that lasted three days and where there was a lot of alcohol and drugs right from the start, although not for me, because I was very young and hadn’t yet picked up any bad habits. The group consisted of Jamaicans, Senegalese, and Spaniards who, if I remember correctly, were all studying with a Japanese friend of Giorgetta’s. It was just like a movie, I started seeing all kinds of strange things, a young guy with a hypodermic syringe hanging from his forearm, a woman lifting her miniskirt and injecting herself in the groin, another who was rubbing her nose against a mirror as she danced and crying in French, yes, yes, with the muscles of her face tense as wires, another man biting off half a pill and offering the other half to his girlfriend on his tongue and the girlfriend gobbling it up like a fruit, young girls wetting tampons in gin and sticking them in their bottoms, their faces all shiny with pleasure, people smoking some kind of brown tobacco from silver paper, tobacco that took the brain to another dimension, everything washed down with strong alcohol and, of course, hours later, when all modesty had been thrown out the window, I saw another kind of image, a young Jamaican penetrating a woman on a small table in the dining room, my cousin Giorgetta, behind the bathroom curtain, putting a penis in her mouth, a penis so black it looked like a clarinet, a man stroking another man’s ass as he danced, things like that, but I stayed as I was and only drank beer and a little Coke to keep going, and when I finally made up my mind to leave, and I’m telling you this so you can see the kind of bad influence I had to contend with, I went to look for my cousin and found her naked and bathed in sweat, having sex with her Japanese friend on the same flea-ridden mattress where a Senegalese guy was fucking a Spanish guy in the ass, which was quite a shocking scene for a young girl like me, if you see what I mean.