Ferryman. From the ruins you might think it’s about life in Latin America after the Third World War. The girls wander through garbage dumps, along deserted paths. Then there’s a broad, gently flowing river. Pajarito Gómez and two other guys play cards by the light of a candle. The girls come to an inn where the men are carrying guns. They make love with them all, one after another. They look out from the bushes at the river and a few pieces of wood tied clumsily together. Pajarito Gómez is the ferryman, at least that’s what everyone calls him, but he doesn’t budge from the table. He holds the best cards. The villains remark on how well he’s playing. What a good player the ferryman is. What good luck the ferryman has. Gradually the supplies begin to run short. The cook and the kitchen hand torture Doris, penetrating her with the handles of enormous butcher’s knives. Hunger reigns over the inn: some stay in bed, others wander through the bushes looking for food. While the men fall ill one by one, the girls scribble in their diaries as if possessed. Desperate pictograms. Images of the river superimposed on images of a never-ending orgy. The end is predictable. The men dress the women up as chickens, make them do their tricks, and then proceed to eat them at a feather-strewn banquet. The bones of Connie, Monica and Doris lie on the diner’s patio. Pajarito Gómez plays another hand of poker. He wears his luck like a close-fitting glove. The camera is behind him and the viewer can see the cards he’s holding. They are blank. The credits appear over the corpses of all the actors. Three seconds before the end of the film, the river changes color, turning jet black. That one was especially deep, Doris used to say, it illustrates the sad fate of artists in the porn industry: first we’re ruthlessly exploited, then we’re devoured by thoughtless strangers. Bittrich seems to have made that movie to compete with the cannibal porn videos that were starting to cause a stir at the time. But it isn’t hard to see that the film’s real center is Pajarito Gómez sitting in the gambling den. Pajarito Gómez, who could generate an inner vibration that planted his image in the viewer’s eyes. A great actor wasted by life, our life, yours and mine, my friends. But the movies Bittrich made live on, unsullied. And so does Pajarito Gómez, holding those cards covered with dust, with his dirty hands and his dirty neck, his eternally half-closed eyelids, vibrating on and on. Pajarito Gómez, an emblematic figure in the pornography of the 1980s. He wasn’t specially well endowed or muscular, he didn’t appeal to the target audience for that kind of movie. He looked like Walter Abel. He had no experience when Bittrich dragged him from the gutter and put him in front of a camera: the rest came so naturally it’s hard to believe. Pajarito had this continuous vibration, and watching him, sooner or later, depending on your powers of resistance, you’d be suddenly transfixed by the energy emanating from that scrap of a man, who looked so feeble. So unprepossessing, so undernourished. So strangely triumphant. The pre-eminent porn actor in Bittrich’s Colombian cycle. The best when it came to playing dead and the best when it came to playing vacant. He was also the only member of the German’s cast who survived: in 1999, the only one still alive was Pajarito Gómez, the rest had been killed or succumbed to disease. Sansón Fernández died of AIDS. Praxíteles Barrionuevo died in the Hole of Bogotá. Ernesto San Román was stabbed to death in the Areanea sauna in Medellín. Alvarito Fuentes died of AIDS in the Cartago jail. All of them young guys with supersize cocks. Frank Moreno, shot to death in Panama. Oscar Guillermo Montes, shot to death in Puerto Berrío. David Salazar, known as the Anteater, shot to death in Palmira. Victims of vendettas or fortuitous brawls. Evelio Latapia, hung in a hotel room in Popayán. Carlos José Santelices, stabbed by strangers in an alley in Maracaibo. Reinaldo Hermosilla, last seen in El Progreso, Honduras. Dionisio Aurelio Pérez, shot to death in a bar in Mexico City. Maximiliano Moret, drowned in the Marañon River. Ten- to twelve-inch cocks, sometimes so long they couldn’t get them up. Young mestizos, blacks, whites, Indians, sons of Latin America, whose only assets were a pair of balls and a member tanned by exposure to the elements or miraculously pink by some weird freak of nature. The sadness of the phallus was something Bittrich understood better than anyone. I mean the sadness of those monumental members against the backdrop of this vast and desolate continent. For example, Oscar Guillermo Montes in a scene from a movie I’ve forgotten the rest of; he’s naked from the waist down, his penis hangs flaccid and dripping. It’s dark and wrinkled and the drops have a milky sheen. Behind the actor a landscape unfolds: mountains, ravines, rivers, forests, ranges, towering clouds, a city perhaps, a volcano, a desert. Oscar Guillermo Montes perched on a high ridge, an icy breeze playing with a lock of his hair. That’s all. It’s like a poem by Tablada, isn’t it? But you’ve never heard of Tablada. Neither had Bittrich, and it doesn’t matter, really, it’s all there in that image — I must have the tape around somewhere — the loneliness I was talking about. Impossible geography, impossible anatomy. What was Bittrich aiming for with that sequence? Was he trying to justify amnesia, our amnesia? Or portray Oscar Guillermo’s weary eyes? Or did he just want to show us an uncircumcised penis dripping in the continent’s immensity? Or give an impression of useless grandeur: handsome young men without shame, marked out for sacrifice, fated to disappear in the immensity of chaos? Who knows? The only one who always got away was the amateur Pajarito Gómez, whose endowment extended, after plenty of work, to a maximum length of seven inches. The German flirted with death — what the hell did he care about death? — he flirted with solitude and black holes, but he never tried anything with Pajarito. Elusive and uncontrollable, Pajarito came into the camera’s scope as if he just happened to be passing by and had stopped for a look. Then he began to vibrate, full on, and the viewers, whether they were solitary jerk-off artists or businessmen who used the videos to liven up the decor, barely intending to glance at them, were transfixed by that scrawny creature’s moods. Pajarito Gómez gave off prostatic fluid! And that was something different, far exceeding the German’s lucubrations. And Bittrich knew it, so when Pajarito appeared in a scene there were usually no additional effects, no music or sounds of any kind, nothing to distract the viewer from what really mattered: the hieratic Pajarito Gómez, sucked or sucking, fucking or fucked, but always vibrating, as if unawares. The German’s protectors were deeply suspicious of that talent; they’d have preferred to see Pajarito working in the central market unloading trucks, ruthlessly exploited until the day he disappeared. They wouldn’t have been able to explain what it was they didn’t like about him; they just had a vague sense that he was a guy who could attract bad luck and make people feel ill at ease. Sometimes, when I remember my childhood, I wonder how Bittrich must have felt about his protectors. He respected the drug lords; after all they put up the money, and like all good Europeans, he respected money, a point of reference in the midst of chaos. But the corrupt police and army officers, what would he have thought of them, Bittrich, a German, who read history books in his spare time? They must have seemed so ludicrous, he must have had such a good laugh at them, at night, after those unruly meetings. Monkeys in SS uniforms, that’s what they were. Alone in his house, surrounded by his videos and his amazing sounds, he must have laughed and laughed. And they were the ones who wanted to get rid of Pajarito, those monkeys, with their sixth sense. Those pathetic, odious monkeys thought they could tell him, a German director in permanent exile, who he should and shouldn’t be hiring. Imagine Bittrich after one of those meetings, in the dark house in Los Empalados, after everyone else has gone, drinking rum and smoking Mexican Delicados in the biggest room, the one he uses as his study and bedroom. On the table there are paper cups with dregs of whiskey in them. Two or three videotapes sitting on top of the TV, the latest from the Olimpo Movie Production Company. Diaries and torn-out pages covered with figures: salaries, bribes, bonuses. Pocket money. And the words of the police commissioner, the air force lieutenant and the colonel from military intelligence still floating in the air: We don’t want that jinx anywhere near the Company. When people see him in our films, their stomachs turn. It’s bad taste to have that slug fucking the girls. And Bittrich let them speak, he observed them silently, and then he did what he liked. After all, they were only porn videos; it’s not like there were serious profits at stake. And that was how Pajarito got to stay on with us, although the company’s backers found his presence disturbing. Pajarito Gómez. A quiet and pretty reserved sort of guy, but for some mysterious reason the girls were especially fond of him. In the course of their professional duties, they all got to lay him, and it left them with a curious feeling, hard to say just what it was, but they were all ready to do it again. I guess being with Pajarito was like being nowhere. Doris even ended up living with him for a while, but it didn’t work out. Doris and Pajarito: for six months they went back and forth between the Hotel Aurora, which is where he lived, and the apartment on Avenida de los Libertadores. It was too good to last, you know how it is: singular spirits can’t bear so much love, so much perfection stumbled on by chance. Maybe if Doris hadn’t been such a bombshell, and if she’d been mute, and if Pajarito had never vibrated. . Things finally fell apart during the shooting of