I told him what had happened and he said he would come immediately, that we should wait for him.
I asked to speak with the warden’s secretary, but I was told, which secretary? he didn’t have a secretary, there was a woman who took messages. I asked the warden and he said, no, I already told you, I didn’t get any message. They called the woman and somebody translated: nobody had left her a message like that, when do you say they called? The woman disappeared after a while and it was impossible to get her back.
At last the lawyer arrived and I said to him:
“Nobody received the messages and he never knew anything. It would have saved him.”
The old man chewed something, a leaf similar to a betel, and said, nobody kills themselves for something like that, at least in my country. He must have had his reasons.
“You killed him, you didn’t give him the message that would have saved his life, and you deceived us all.”
The old man spat through the window.
“I understand how upset you are, Consul, but didn’t you tell me the young man was going to plead guilty anyway?”
The blood rose to my head, and I had to make an effort not to hit him. Teresa noticed and came over. She said in my ear: calm down, there’s nothing you can do. He’s a son of a bitch, but you can’t touch him!
I was having difficulty breathing, but I managed to say to her:
“Manuel never knew I’d found Juana, or that she was in Bangkok! He cut his wrists only a short time ago, the blood on the floor was still liquid, do you realize? He killed him!”
“Yes,” Teresa said. “But don’t forget you’re representing your country. Later, you can make an official complaint, or piss in the Chao Phraya, but here you have to keep up appearances. If you touch him you’re going to give them the opportunity to kick up a fuss.”
We spent the rest of the day in Bangkwang, in a funeral chamber that was quite small but air-conditioned. When they brought in the body, in a coffin made of planks, Juana looked at her brother’s livid face for a time that to all of us seemed infinite. It started to get dark and the prosecutor (who had also arrived) said that we had to go, that they would be taking the body to the morgue, where it would be kept while they waited for his sister’s decision and the final legal procedures.
“Do you feel better?” I asked the prosecutor. “You must think your city is cleaner now.”
Teresa squeezed my arm.
“If only our problems were limited to lost and stupid young people,” he said, “although I know I mustn’t judge anyone who has taken his own life.”
“Doesn’t that seem to you sufficient demonstration of innocence?” I said.
He turned and lit a cigarette in a somewhat theatrical manner. “Not really,” he said. “To be honest, his death doesn’t demonstrate anything.”
“The pills weren’t his,” I insisted. “Someone put them in his case and you know it. Everybody knows it!”
Teresa glared at me again. The prosecutor seemed to lose patience.
“Eleven million tourists come here every year,” he said. “Many to have sex and take drugs, others to traffic, and some, simply, on vacation. There are bound to be victims.”
Saying this, he got in his car. But immediately he lowered the window and said:
“I forgot to give my condolences to his sister, please convey them to her from me. And please, let her decide quickly if she wants to repatriate him or bury him here. In this heat, bodies decompose.”
“I’ll tell her, don’t worry,” I said. “For now I trust in the quality of your cold chambers.”
4
When we got home, Teresa opened a bottle of gin and suggested we go out on the terrace and look at the river, the flow of the traffic, the clouds. Night had already fallen. Juana still couldn’t say anything. Around her eyes a purplish ring had settled, as if her eyelids were raw.
The Chao Phraya reflected the hallucinatory lights of the city, its iridescence. Teresa sat down next to me and we drank in silence, one glass after another. When Manuelito Sayeq fell asleep Juana came out again. I put a lot of ice in a glass and offered her a drink.
“I’d like a double, Consul, thank you.”
“It’s the only thing we can do,” I said. “My condolences.”
She thanked me for looking for her and bringing her here from Tehran, allowing her to get to him, even though it was too late.
“I can’t help thinking,” Juana said. “If only we’d come yesterday…”
That was nagging at me too: if only the Consular Department had given a rapid answer, if only I’d taken the decision to travel earlier, if only the Thai legal authorities hadn’t brought the trial forward. If only, if only…
“If only I’d written an e-mail or a Facebook message, or called him on his cell phone,” Juana said, “he’d be alive, it’s all so…”
She started crying again. Teresa hugged her.
“Don’t think anymore, Juana,” I said, “nothing’s going to bring him back. You will have him in your son.”
“I have to decide what to do with the body,” Juana said, “but to be honest it doesn’t really matter. He isn’t there.”
“Are you going to call your family?” I asked.
“I haven’t thought about it,” Juana said. “I suppose they’ll want to bury him in Bogotá. Manuel would prefer not to go back, but the truth is, none of that matters anymore.”
I filled the glasses again and again, until we had to go down to the 7-11 for another bottle. We drank until dawn.
Teresa and Juana went off to their rooms at six and I remained on the couch, near the window, watching the skyscrapers emerge from the darkness into the clear light of morning.
Before going to sleep I grabbed my toiletry bag, took out my toothbrush, and went to the bathroom. I opened the door slowly, so as not to make a noise, and noticed that there was someone inside. It was Juana. She was naked, and was looking at herself in the mirror. I froze. I had never seen a body like that, with strange, enormous tattoos: Japanese ideograms, suns, Buddhist eyes, yins and yangs, and on her belly a genuine painting, what was it? my God, I recognized it: The Great Wave of Kanagawa by Hokusai! I felt an irrational force pushing me towards her, but I restrained myself. Lower down on her right thigh, she had a version of The Raft of the Medusa by Géricault, and on the left a painting that I identified, not then but a few days later, as The Ninth Wave, by the Russian Ivan Aivazovsky, a painting about which the poet Fernando Denis wrote some revealing verses:
It is already almost night in a painting by Ivan Aivazovsky,
the ninth wave,
beneath the magnanimous sky of the world,
beneath the insane light that gives horror and beauty and tarnishes the dream
that cries out in its colors.
Three shipwrecks plus an incredible number of religious or mystic signs. Added to these were scars and circular burns that seemed to convey some message. I looked at her without moving a muscle, without breathing, to avoid her noticing my presence. She was very beautiful. She had the same expression of weariness that I had seen in the prison and was swaying her head from side to side, as if in time to a lullaby. Then she started to move to the sides and slowly caressed her hips, her stomach, her breasts. She raised her hand to her pubis, tracing circles, slowly at first, but then a little faster and finally frenetically. I felt my body collapse, but made an effort and supported myself. Suddenly she grabbed the tube of toothpaste and penetrated herself with it, moving her fingers very quickly. Seconds later she shuddered, but her weary expression did not fade, not even at that moment.