Issue 19

Luis Miguel Rivas Granada
Translated by David Feller Pegg

Santa Claus had another shot of aguardiente, then he stood up and staggered to the urinal. Bumps and bulges swayed under his belly as he walked and his disfigured girth began to swell up above his black belt, as if his chest were spilling out. He made his way through the pool tables, joked with a couple of men talking as they chalked the tips of their cues, and slipped in past the door.

Luis watched him go into the bathroom and grabbed the red sack lying on the table amid the stuffed ashtray, the shot glasses, the little dish with pieces of fruit, and the glasses used for water chasers. He rummaged through the bottom of the empty sack, fumbled around a bit, put it back where it had been, called the bartender, and ordered two more shots. Then he looked outside. Across the street, people were strolling through Envigado Park with its trees adorned with colored lights as if they were blinking fruit. In front of the church, whose clock was striking midnight, a gigantic metal structure was being built into the shape of a chubby angel clasping a bucket covered in wrapping paper with a bow on top. Two drunk guys were holding each other up as they walked down the sidewalk singing a ranchera; behind them a young family, a mother and a father immersed in a lively conversation, followed by their two little kids who were kicking along a beer can. Luis watched them for a bit and then, as if coming back to himself, grabbed the bag again. When Santa Claus returned from the bathroom, Luis handed it back to him.

“Are you sure you took out all the presents?”

Santa Claus looked at him with both fear and surprise.

“All of them. I’ve been telling you about this for the last half hour.”

The bartender arrived with the drinks and began to serve them.

“Jorge, put me down for these,” Santa Claus said.

Jorge filled the shots with the firewater, poured some water from a plastic jug into the drinking glasses, and placed a little dish with slices of orange and small cubes of coconut on the table. Then he looked at Santa Claus.

“Bernardo, I’m sorry, but your bill’s getting up there, and Don Álvaro told me to stop giving you a tab until you settle up because it’s getting hard to get you to pay.”

Santa Claus straightened up and stared at him.

“Jorge, do you know how long I’ve been drinking in this place? Since before you started working here. And I’ve never ended up owing even one peso.”

“I know, Bernardo, but this comes from Don Álvaro.”

Santa Claus got on his feet, pulled his belly up with his two hands, and lifted his arm as if he were about to give a speech, but Luis yanked him back into his chair.

“Let it go, it doesn’t matter, I’m treating you today, we’re celebrating.” Then he addressed the bartender. “Bring us a half bottle.” Santa Claus took off his cap and threw it on the lifeless sack. Then he grabbed a slice of orange and sucked on it. A tiny orange teardrop got lodged in his white beard.

“Don’t worry about it,” Luis told him as he batted him a smile. “It’s all good tonight. We’re happy.”

They’d been happy many times at this same bar, El Popular. In the beginning, they only recognized each other after seeing one another so many times drinking aguardiente at different tables. But they never spoke a word until one Sunday morning in February, when Luis went straight to the bar to order a drink, trembling. Bernardo was alone at one of the tables facing the street. He had a shot glass in his hand and was reciting something to someone who wasn’t there. On the other chair, there was a large bag filled with hamburger buns and a leather briefcase. Luis looked at him quickly and leaned over the bar to say something to the owner of the place.

“At least some people are worse off than me.”

“He’s been distraught since last week,” said Álvaro without raising his head, transfixed by the figures he was writing down on the back of a carton of cigarettes.

Bernardo’s long spindly body couldn’t settle into the little chair, even though he seemed to be sitting naturally enough, as if the discomfort were his usual state of being. His taut, boney face, sunken eyes, scrawny frame, and glassy eyes looking off into the distance gave him the respectability of a vampire on a binge. His monologue became more discernible and suddenly he stood up and began to speak in a gravelly voice as he looked at the birdhouses up in the trees over in the park.

“So don’t blame anyone for my death. But for those who may hear me, I wish to give you this advice from a man who was once like you …!”

Luis shrugged his shoulders and ordered another drink. He knew Bernardo wasn’t crazy because he’d seen him at the bar many times. Perhaps a bit of a poet, he thought. A bohemian. He liked him.

Bernardo abruptly turned back to the bar and began to speak in front of Luis and Álvaro with such a deep and convincing voice that what he said had to be the absolute truth.

“You should never even ever place your eyes on a girl who has a lot or a little to do with a dietary physique!” he said and remained silent. Then he walked decisively back to his chair.

Even though it all seemed absurd to Luis, it sent shivers down his spine. Glaring images came to him that he only, at times, succeeded in clouding with the vapors from alcohol: the faces of his two children. Although he didn’t comprehend the words, he felt like he understood the deranged fellow who had spoken them. So he offered him a drink, Bernardo returned the favor, and ten minutes later they were sitting at the same table, drinking and talking as if they had known each other their entire lives.

“Where did you get what you were saying from?”

“I’m an actor,” Bernardo told him as he pointed out the bag filled with buns, “and I sell hamburgers. The words come from a story.”

“I see.”

“‘Love Diet’ … That’s the title of the story.”

At this point of time, Bernardo had his hamburger stand on a main corner in Envigado and the business hadn’t gone under yet. Hamburgers and theater were his life. Fast food let him live and acting let him feel as if he were alive. He learned both of these things when he was a young man—and with the best of instructors. The secrets to meat and bread were revealed by a skillful and learned old cook with whom he had worked for more than ten years at a large food franchise; and the passion for acting had been injected by Cristóbal Peláez, a neighbor of his and a brilliant actor who had spent some time in Europe and came back obsessed with the idea of infecting everyone he met on the street with theater. Bernardo ran the hamburger stand with the same mysticism, talent, and dedication as he did his art, but without even the faintest amount of business sense. His conduct seemed to abide by just one rule: “If you wish to be happy, always spend a little more than you earn.”

Those days, Luis had been trying to straighten up after having been reprimanded at the bank due to his late arrivals with liquor breath. He hadn’t stopped drinking but he knew he had to do so now. He had even already gone to some AA meetings. This was also when he wasn’t allowed to see his children and had to stay at least one hundred meters away from Sandra’s residence, where she lived with their children and her new spouse.

After that morning, the two of them kept getting together at El Popular to drink uncontrollably and talk about everything and nothing. Luis, who never in his life had stepped in a theater, went to one of Bernardo’s performances. He ended up engrossed in conversations with his friends from the town—bums, poets, and intellectuals. Despite their circumstances, he also saw an inexplicable vitality in some of them, of which he was deficient. They seemed strange to him, different, maybe too prone to talking nonsense, yet closer to him than his close friends.

The two of them ended up in a tempest of endless drinking binges and over-the-top partying that went on for several months, until Luis saw that he had to give up drinking and Bernardo’s hamburger stand came to a resounding end.

After one of them had an economic disaster and the other a forced sobriety, they stopped seeing each other with the same frequency. Sometimes they would be at El Popular at the same time, Luis with a cup of coffee in his hand and Bernardo with some aguardiente or coffee, depending on how much he might have in his pocket.

At the beginning of December, just when his circumstances barely allowed him to even get coffee, Bernardo got a job as a Santa Claus at a supermarket. By then, Luis hadn’t had a drink for ten months. During his sobriety, his mind cleared up and he seemed to be more at ease, or at least more at peace with his unease. His temperament also changed and he became less talkative and more introverted, but at the same time more rested and less resentful.

On December 16th, they ran into each other at El Popular for the first time in several weeks and Bernardo began to tell him about his new job. Luis, who seemed somewhat distracted since he arrived, remained silent for a little while. Then he looked at Bernardo as if he had just seen him for the first time.

“What do you do with the outfit when you leave work for the night?”

Bernardo answered the question without understanding what it really meant.

“I take it home … Why?”

Luis went on to explain. He had been thinking a lot over the last few months. He wanted to try to make amends for some of the pain he had caused. He was remorseful and humbly accepted the consequences of his acts. But he also wanted to at least imagine the happiness of his children or somehow have a part in giving them a bit of happiness.

“And what do you want exactly?” Bernardo asked.

“I need you to be Santa Claus for my kids.”

“You got it,” Bernardo replied without asking anything else, as if it were the most ordinary matter, “but on the twenty-fourth I get off at nine in the evening.”

“Let’s meet here at ten,” Luis said with a smile. Then he got serious. “But I don’t want you to do this as a favor. This is a job I’m paying you to do.”

“You’re out of your mind!” Bernardo raised his forefinger and waved it back and forth.

“Aren’t you always complaining that nobody around here values art?”

Bernardo remained silent. Luis pulled out three bills.

“Here’s the pay for one job,” he repeated, getting closer, and sticking the bills in his right shirt pocket.

“Luis, I don’t need money right now, I got work,” Bernardo replied, motionless.

“A seasonal job … and debts. Get over it.” The tip of the bills started to slip out of the unstitched pocket.

“When have you ever seen a mango tree charge for its mangos?” Bernardo asked.

“But a little bit of water doesn’t hurt every once in a while.” Luis took the bills out of the torn pocket and put them in the left pocket. Then he settled back into his chair.

Bernardo looked at him.

“But you got to tell me what exactly you want me to do.”

“On the day in question I’ll bring the presents and explain everything clearly,” Luis replied.

On December 24 at 9:40 in the evening, Luis walked briskly and nervously into El Popular, while carrying a bulky sack, and he sat in the doorway facing the street. It was his first December without a drink. At the tables next to him people were drinking and laughing. Some people he knew greeted him, holding shots of aguardiente in the air. “Cheers,” he smiled back sincerely, wielding his cup of coffee. As he watched the alcohol go down their throats, he felt the delectable coarseness and immediate transformative power of a drink as it enters the body. He smoked six cigarettes and drank four cups of coffee in half an hour.

Bernardo arrived at 10:15, a little anxious and holding an enormous plastic bag with a piece of red felt poking out of the opening. He said hello, apologized for his tardiness, and ordered a double shot of aguardiente. When they brought it to him, he downed it as if it were water. Luis just stared at his expression of pleasure and relief.

“I want one,” he said.

Bernardo looked at him for a second and replied without any inflection in his voice.

“And why are you telling me? Tell the bartender.”

Luis asked for a drink and downed it in a gulp. He remained silent for a few seconds, keeping his eyes closed shut and rubbing his face in a painful and composed manner, as if he had just been struck with a blow and a caress. Then he laid out the plan, point by point. Bernardo listened to him attentively.

“It seems simple enough, except the part about convincing your ex-wife,” he said once Luis finished.

“Give her this.” Luis handed him a piece of paper with a handwritten note.

Bernardo put the piece of paper in his pants pocket and went to the bathroom, holding the plastic bag with both hands. When he came back ten minutes later, he had turned himself into a bearded, fat old man in a red outfit suitable for winters in the northern hemisphere, but it was suffocating just to look at him here in the tropics. Luis downed a shot, grabbed the sack, and began to take out the contents. The presents had been wrapped by an artist, someone who applied all of their energy to perfecting every fold and smoothing out each and every crease and bow. Each present also had a large card with a name written out by hand. Luis described the contents of every gift and told him what to say for each one. Santa Claus put the presents back into the sack and they walked through Envigado Park to get to Luis’s vehicle.

The white Renault Six made two stops on the way to Sabaneta. First, they stopped at a country diner with a floor covered in sawdust and some holiday music blaring from a luminescent player piano, and they downed a couple of double shots of aguardiente. Later they parked next to a bakery where Bernardo drank a cup of coffee, ate a piece of bread, and sucked on a mint candy, in order to mask the liquor on his breath. Two blocks before Sandra’s house, Luis stopped the car. Bernardo got out with difficulty. Once outside, he threw the sack over his shoulder and started to walk as if he were overweight.

He looked at the front of the house, checked the address, and knocked on the door. A pudgy-faced, chubby kid appeared who was about ninety centimeters tall and had straight black hair and small gleaming eyes, mesmerized by the image before him. Just as Bernardo was about to speak, he slammed the door in his face and screamed to the others in the house.

“Mommy, it’s Santa Claus!”

Then the door opened a crack and two gigantic light-colored eyes peeked through and stared at him from under a snarl of curly hair. Bernardo smiled, and the girl, who had just stood there paralyzed for a few seconds, shut the door again and ran back in the house.

“Santa Claus is outside!”

Bernardo raised his hand to knock on the door again when a thin brown-skinned woman came out. She had recently brushed blonde hair, elongated green eyes, a tight-fitting orange shirt, and baggy pleated pants, which somewhere must have still had the store tag on them. Santa Claus didn’t give her a chance to be surprised.

“I’m here on behalf of Luis. He only sent me to ask you to please accept a few gifts,” and he put the sack on the ground.

The woman looked him up and down and then looked behind him as if she were trying to see if anyone else were around.

“Santa Claus is outside!” the children screamed in unison from inside the house.

“We don’t know this man around here,” the woman said sharply.

Bernardo remained silent and then stammered.

“He … he’s changed. He’s not going to come around here, don’t worry … For sure,” he said and handed her Luis’s note.

The woman looked at him warily, but took the piece of paper and began to read it.

“Sandra!” screamed a gravelly voice from the second floor. “Who is it?”

The woman finished reading the note, turned back into the house, and then yelled.

“Honey, come down!”

Behind the woman, a dark-skinned man appeared with a plaid shirt tucked into his pants. He was as tall as Bernardo but much stockier. When he saw Santa Claus, all of his facial muscles flared around his nose. Then he looked at Sandra, who handed him the piece of paper. Santa Claus clung on to the sack. As the man read the note, his face got redder and redder. He gave the note back to his wife and stared stonily at Bernardo. Then he spoke to his wife as if Bernardo weren’t even there.

“And what do you think?”

“Jairo, I don’t think the kids can be blamed for any of this.”

Jairo nodded his head and then pointed his chin at Bernardo.

“And how do we know this guy isn’t a thief?”

“Look, I didn’t come here with anyone. If you want, you can frisk me and check the presents,” Santa Claus said with his arms raised to his sides.

Jairo took a firm step and looked around outside the house. Then he grabbed Santa Claus by the arm and yanked him inside. Bernardo flailed about without knowing what was happening and—since the man didn’t let go of him—started to struggle with all his might until he got his legs tangled up and fell face first, pulling Jairo down with him in a thunderous fall on the living room floor.

Once on the floor, Jairo moved quickly, like an Olympic wrestler, and got on top of Santa Claus. Twisting his arm with a full lock, he managed to grumble: “Get out of this house, you piece of …” when he saw the faces of the two children looking at him without blinking an eye or uttering a word.

“Santa Claus, you’re giving quite a hug!” Sandra screamed. Then she grabbed them by their hands and took them up the stairs. “We’ll be right back because Santa Claus has to ask Jairo how the children have been behaving.”

Santa Claus stood up, shook off his garb, and saw that Jairo had one hand in a fist and the other pointing at the door.

“Ho, ho, ho,” he replied, cupping his hands into a megaphone. “Children! You can come down in a few seconds!”

From upstairs you could hear muffled screams of delight.

“Get moving! Get out of here now!” Jairo said in a stern and low voice.

As he held onto his belly, Bernardo yelled back.

“Children, in ten seconds! … Nine …”

A patter of applause and bouncing could be heard upstairs. Jairo moved his head up and down and looked at Bernardo with beady eyes. Then he came right up to his face and said:

“All right, you piece of shit. You’re going to give them the presents, but first I’m going to frisk you.”

Up against the wall, Santa Claus stretched out his arms and spread his legs, while still counting out loud.

“Eight, seven …”

Jairo quickly and roughly frisked the outline of Santa Claus’s body. Then he grabbed the sack and took out one present after another. He hefted them and held them to his ear to listen inside.

“Three, two …” Santa Claus said out loud.

Jairo finished frisking him, rubbed the palms of his hands, and straightened out his clothes.

“Give ‘em the presents, but I still don’t trust you. I’ll be watching your every move.”

“Ho, ho, ho,” Bernardo thundered in a thick wooly voice. “Merry, merry Christmas!”

The children came running down the stairs, then paused, bewildered as they took in everything. The living room was large. The stairs to the second floor were on the far wall and there were some Christmas lights blinking in the corner. To one side, there was a nativity scene with aluminum foil rivers, small round mirrors for lakes, waterfalls made out of cellophane, and meadows made of green poster board with horses, sheep, ducks, shepherds, camels, toy cars, and cardboard houses—of all different shapes and sizes. Along the wall to the right, there was a brown couch with thick cushions covered in green cloth. On the other side, there were two armchairs just like the couch.

In the middle of all this, Santa Claus called the two children by their names and with difficulty lifted both of them up into his arms. Standing next to the couch, Sandra looked on with a deadpan expression.

Sprawled out in one of the armchairs in front of her, Jairo watched every one of Bernardo’s movements with furious attention.

“Let’s see.” Santa Claus leaned forward, put his hands in the sack, and pulled out one of the boxes. “This is for Melisa.”

The girl accepted the package as if she were drowning and hugged Santa Claus’s leg, then focused on opening the present. The boy took his gift and savagely opened what had been wrapped with such care. When the children saw what was in the boxes, they looked at their mother with surprise and showed her the gifts with glowing expressions that didn’t seem to fit in their faces. Santa Claus looked at them, looked at Jairo, and then figured his job was done. He said good-bye to the children, making them promise to behave the coming year, took his empty sack, and headed to the door. Jairo followed him, breathing down the back of his neck, and Sandra came out right after them. When they were outside Sandra grabbed Jairo’s arm and squeezed it.

“Jairo, this man doesn’t have anything to do with it. He’s just a friend of his.”

Jairo remained silent, turned around, and went back into the house, slamming the door shut.

“Thank you, sir,” Sandra said.

Santa Claus, who by then had gotten to the sidewalk, paused, and turned around.

“You’re welcome,” he said with a bow.

“Thank him for me … But also tell him he shouldn’t think this fixes anything.”

“No, he’s not hoping to fix anything,” Bernardo said, then walked off as if he were overweight.

“How did it go?” Luis asked anxiously.

“It made them happy.”

They stopped at several bars on their way back to Envigado. Every time Santa Claus told him about one of the gestures or expressions the children made, Luis grasped the steering wheel and his eyes lit up the entire vehicle for a few seconds.

Back at El Popular, they sat at the same table as always and kept talking until Santa Claus stood up, staggering, then made his way through the pool tables, joked with a couple of men talking as they chalked the tip of their cues, and slipped in past the door. When he got back, Luis ordered another half bottle of aguardiente and asked Bernardo again what seemed foolish to him.

“Are you sure you took all the presents out of the sack?”

In order to move past this issue once and for all, Bernardo turned the sack inside out. On the bottom there was an envelope that he hadn’t seen before stuck to the fabric with some clear tape. It had the same handwriting as the presents, with the following message: “For Santa Claus.” There were four 50,000 peso bills in the envelope. Bernardo looked at them deadpan.

“Look what baby Jesus brought Santa Claus,” Luis said with a smile.

Bernardo looked at him silently for a few seconds. Luis feared he would take it the wrong way. Bernardo closed and then opened his eyes, nodded his head, smiled slightly, looked to the back of the bar, and yelled out as he raised the bills:

“Jorge!!!”

Jorge was in the back by the pool tables, emptying a tray.

“I’ll be there, Bernardo. I’m busy right now!”

Bernardo kept waving the bills in the air and stood up. He spoke intensely, decisively, with his chest out, and with the same gravelly voice he had when he was reciting to the pigeons.

“Let me pay what I owe you right now so we can be even! And please bring me a bottle of aguardiente, water, and some oranges and coconuts as chasers!”

 

¿Nos vamos a ir como estamos pasando de bueno? Bogotá, Colombia: Seix Barral (2015).